Across Canada, communities will vie for the title of “Kilt Skate Capital of Canada” awarded by the website www.kiltskate.com.  Last year, the laurels went to Glengarry – two townships in Eastern Ontario that worked together to host a skate in the village of Maxville.  In the summer, that town is noted for its annual Highland Games and North American Pipe Band Championships, estimated to be one of the largest Highland games in the world.

For some parishioners, the Church is a faith community; for others, it’s a social justice action group. By now, few are surprised to find that, for some others, the Church is a real estate development organization with certain tax advantages. But as some at the Sunday gathering pointed out: the church is not a building. The church is the people who gather to worship and to serve God through their works.

When Canada purchased the HBC’s western territories in 1870, the firm’s vaccination efforts had slackened considerably and Gimli, Man., suffered a smallpox outbreak in 1876 among Icelandic settlers and nearby natives. This reappearance posed an existential threat to plans for opening the West to widespread settlement, and Ottawa swiftly appointed Dr. D.W.J. Hagarty as medical superintendent for the region with the monumental task of vaccinating the entire Indigenous population. Annual Indian Affairs reports describe in detail the seriousness with which this task was engaged, as some communities actually achieved the desired 100 per cent vaccination rate.