A few weeks ago I kicked off our cross-Canada blog tour with B.C. blogs. This week I'm heading north to the Yukon. Now, as you may or may not know, in addition to ten provinces Canada also has three territories (if you thought there was only two, you were right until 1999 - I'll get to that in another post). For a primer on the Yukon territory check out Wikipedia or the Government of Yukon website. You can find such interesting tidbits of information such as the fact that while Yukon is the smallest of the three Canadian territories it's still larger than California! But who wants stats when there are Yukon bloggers to explore?

This week an article I wrote about the observations on the Democratic Presidential election among Black Canadians was published in my hometown newspaper, the Toronto Star. As any freelance journalist knows, you have to adhere to a rigorous word count and I really wanted to post some of the perspectives from the interviewees that didn't make the cut, here.

If you are a Canadian there are certain terms you've likely known since infancy and no I'm not talking about "eh". I'm talking about "double double" and "timbit". For the uninitiated a "double double" is a coffee (two cream, two sugar) and a "timbit" is a doughnut hole that is sold at that Canadian institution Tim Horton's (aka Tim's, Timmy's, Timmy Ho's, etc). A teeny-tiny $0.16 doughnut hole. And giving away a single timbit got one single mom fired.

After a year of record snowfalls it shouldn't be a surprise that rivers are now flooding but I don't think that seeing river waters run over their banks and into cities and towns will ever cease to be a shock. I hadn't been following the news as closely as I usually do for the last couple of days because I was out of town so I was stunned when I saw the flood footage of Fredericton, New Brunswick this morning.

Right now, there is a six-year waiting time and almost 900,000 applicants who are hoping to immigrate to Canada. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has stated that if something isn't done soon, the backlog will soon increase to 1.5 million people waiting to enter Canada with an average wait time of 10 years.

I remember being 14 years old and preparing for an upcoming school trip that was stopping in Montreal. It was exciting but it was also June 1993 and one week before my trip the Montreal Canadians won the Stanley Cup. A cause of excitement for sure but Montreal took it one step forward and had a full out riot. For a small town girl this was more than a little intimidating. We toured the city and had a guided tour of the Forum (alas, missed Lord Stanley's Mug by a day). My 14 year old self had no idea that I'd return to Montreal to live on two occasions (so far). I've come to appreciate many things about this city since that first trip, including that it knows how to throw one heck of a party. The problem is the line between reveling and rioting seems to be fuzzy for some people and this week my city exploded after the Montreal Canadians won their first round in the Stanley Cup playoffs.