Crystal lakes, snow-capped mountains, hockey, Mounties, bilingual traffic signs…and some really, really weird news stories.
AN “A+” FOR CREATIVE THINKING
In January 2006, history professor David Weale of the University of Prince Edward Island had a severely overcrowded
class, with 95 students. His solution: He offered a work-free B-minus to any student who agreed not to show up for the rest of the semester. Twenty accepted. When administrators found out, Weale, who had come out of retirement to teach the class, was asked to re-retire.
NAME GAME
James Clifford Hanna, a resident of the Yukon Territory, argued before a court that he didn’t have to pay his taxes. Reason: “James Clifford Hanna” was a name given to him involuntarily. Since he never asked for nor accepted the name, he wasn’t legally responsible for paying the taxes of anyone named James Clifford Hanna. Whatever his name is, he lost the case.
A BIRD IN THE HEAD
Shawn Hacking, 13, of Winnipeg, suffered scraped knees, a sprained wrist, and a bruise on his face when a Canada goose landed on the boy’s head and slapped a wing into his face at the same time. The force knocked Hacking off his skateboard. Hacking’s friend Brent Bruchanski, who witnessed the event, said, “It was so funny…but I felt sorry for him at the same time.”
HOW MUCH FOR NOT ROBBING SOMEONE?
Over the 2000 holiday season, officials in Edmonton tried to encourage motorists to obey the rules of the road by having police officers in unmarked cars find and reward the safest drivers in town. Traffic officers tailed drivers for as long as half an hour to determine if they were truly law-abiding, then pulled the puzzled motorists over and offered them a free steak dinner for two at “Tom Goodchild’s Moose Factory.”
It’s illegal to threaten a bird in Canada.
After winning a $1.2 million lottery jackpot in 1989, Barbara Bailey of Montreal enjoyed her windfall modestly, buying a house for about $200,000 and loaning money to friends and relatives. Then she started blowing it on extravagances, and within two years she was broke and living on welfare. Desperate to recapture her millionaire lifestyle, Bailey got her niece, a bank teller, to divert $500,000 from other peoples’ accounts into Bailey’s. The bank quickly caught on. She was sentenced to a two-year jail term.
THE REAL POOP
Bill Sewepagaham, a leader of the Cree tribe in northern Alberta, offered a good luck charm to the Edmonton Oilers during the 2006 National Hockey League playoffs: a necklace made of lacquered deer and moose feces. Sewepagaham claimed it was based on an ancient Cree tradition in which hunters who’d had a fruitless day would smear their weapons in animal droppings and the next day they’d have better luck. Unfortunately, the charm didn’t work—the Oilers lost in the Stanley Cup finals.
TOKEN OF OUR APPRECIATION
Over a period of 13 years, Edmonton transit worker Salim Kara patiently built a fortune of $2.3 million (Canadian) by stealing coins from fare machines using a rod with a magnetized tip. No one suspected the 44-year-old delinquent until he purchased an $800,000 house on a yearly salary of $38,000. He was sentenced to four years in prison in 1996.
STICKS AND STONES
In 1991, a GM assembly line foreman in Ontario, reprimanded a worker for having bad body odor. The worker complained to the Workers Compensation Tribunal about loss of appetite, lack of sleep, and sexual dysfunctions brought on by the foreman’s insensitive remarks. The Tribunal awarded him $3,000 for “job stress.”
A QUICK STOP
In October 2012, a city bus driver stopped the bus and gave the shoes off his feet to a homeless man who had no shoes on that freezing morning.
Vancouver is tied with Zurich, Switzerland for highest quality of life of any city in the world.