The archivist at the museum had no idea it was there. In fact, when Jean-Phillippe Stienne applied for and landed the job as new archivist and collections manager of the museum, archives and art gallery in Nelson, B.C., back in 2017, he knew nothing about the explosive history buried beneath his new office.

“I came here because it’s a beautiful part of the world,” Steinne, 43, told me during a speaking stop I made in British Columbia last week. “I’d actually been working here a few years before I knew about the mystery under the museum.”

When I asked what he was talking about, Stienne, or “J.P.” as everybody calls him, walked me out the front door of his museum (formerly the Nelson post office) and down a back alley to an adjacent building. He unlocked an exterior door, which revealed an inner door with a thick circular porthole window and a black-lettered sign that read, “Nelson’s Cold War Bunker.” (more…)

Geoffrey_Chaucer — Geoffrey Chaucer wrote "let sleeping dogs lie" in the 17th century with implications for 21st century politicians.

When my younger sister and I were growing up, our Greek-born American grandparents visited our home once a year. They came from the U.S. to stay during warm Canadian summer months. While visiting, my grandfather generally tolerated anything my sister and I did or said, with a few exceptions. We could never swear in front of him. We were never to call wrestling a “fixed” sport. And under no circumstances were we to criticize the U.S. president – in those years Richard Nixon – or the U.S. Vice-President (of Greek origin), Spiro Agnew.

“Let sleeping dogs lie,” my mother would warn us. By that, she meant that unless we really wanted to face my grandfather’s wrath, we should just avoid any discussion of Nixon’s near impeachment and Agnew’s resignation over tax evasion.

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Ted Barris

author | journalist

Posts with the CARP tag

Canada’s nuclear legacy

Maybe Chaucer was right