Episode 427: In the summer of 1934, John Sackville Labatt was one of the most recognizable names in Canada. The fifty-three-year-old president of John Labatt Limited had spent nearly two decades running one of the country's largest and oldest breweries, a family business built across three generations and tested by Prohibition, the Depression, and the rum-running trade that kept it alive through both. On the morning of August 14, he left his Lake Huron summer home running late for a meeting and took a shortcut through the forest on a little-used dirt road outside Sarnia. What happened on that road set off the largest manhunt in Canadian history, triggered Canada's first kidnapping trial, and sent an innocent man to prison for a crime he had nothing to do with.

Sources:
John Sackville Labatt | The Canadian Encyclopedia
John Labatt’s 1934 kidnap | The Star
John Sackville Labatt | Wikipedia
Labatt Brewing Company | Wikipedia
Prohibition in Canada | Wikipedia
Labatt Brewing | Company Site
Lambton County's Infamous Abduction: The John S. Labatt Kidnapping - Archived
Lambton County's Infamous Abduction: The John S. Labatt Kidnapping - New
Snatched! by Susan Goldenberg - Ebook | Scribd
The Courier-News • Fri, Aug 17, 1934 • Page 10 • (Bridgewater, New Jersey)
The Courier-News • Fri, Aug 17, 1934 • Page 1 • (Bridgewater, New Jersey)
The Windsor Star • Fri, Aug 17, 1934 • Page 1 • (Windsor, Ontario, Canada)
The Windsor Star • Sat, Sep 08, 1934 • Page 9 • (Windsor, Ontario, Canada)
The Windsor Star • Sat, Feb 01, 1936 • Page 11 • (Windsor, Ontario, Canada)
The Hamilton Spectator • Tue, Sep 11, 1906 • Page 9 • (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada)
The Molsons, The Labatts and The St.Johns | StJohnsWort.ca

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Episode 426: On June 29th, 2021, Lytton, British Columbia, recorded the highest air temperature in Canadian history: 49.6 degrees Celsius. The next day, the town burned to the ground in under two hours, killing two people and destroying more than 150 homes and businesses across the Village of Lytton and the neighbouring Lytton First Nation reserves. Nearly four years later, the cause of the fire remains officially undetermined, the recovery has become its own bureaucratic disaster, and a class-action lawsuit against Canada's two largest railways is still working its way through the BC Supreme Court. This episode tells the story of the heat, the fire, the two people who didn't make it out, and the years-long collapse of the rebuild that followed. Later in the episode, Mike sits down with Tim Conrad of Butterfly Effect Communications to talk crisis communications — what the first hours of a disaster like Lytton demand, and what it takes to keep a fractured, grieving community informed years into a recovery that never seems to end.

Sources:

• An Examination of the Lytton, British Columbia Wildland-Urban Fire Destruction
• Provincial Support for the Village of Lytton's Wildfire Recovery
• Lytton Wildfire | Wikipedia
• B.C. Man Says He Watched in Horror as Lytton Wildfire Claimed the Lives of His Parents | CBC News
• BC Coroners Service Confirms 2 Deaths in Lytton Wildfire | CBC News
• Man Who Lost His Parents in Lytton, B.C., Fire Wants to Go Home | CTV News
• RCMP Investigation Unable to Determine Cause of 2021 Wildfire That Destroyed Most of Lytton, B.C. | CBC News
• Track Cleared for Class-Action Suit 4.5 Years After Wildfire Swallows Most of Lytton | Williams Lake Tribune
• Remembering Lytton, the Town Wiped Out by Wildfire | The Walrus

⠀Guest:

• Butterfly Effect Communications Company Website
• Wildfires, Floods, and Chaos Communications Tim’s Podcast
• Inside an Emergency Operations Centre | Butterfly Effect Communications Video

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Episode 425: In May 1934, five identical girls were born in a farmhouse outside Corbeil, Ontario. They were the first quintuplets known to survive infancy anywhere in the world. Within weeks, the Province of Ontario had taken them from their parents. What followed was nine years inside a government-run compound called Quintland, where millions of tourists paid to watch the Dionne sisters play through one-way glass, twice a day, while their faces sold soap, cereal, and corn syrup across North America. The girls went home in 1943. The horror of what happened next took decades to come to light.

Sources:

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Dionne Quintuplets | (Canadian Encyclopedia)
• Dionne Quintuplets: The Miracle Babies | (Canadian Encyclopedia)
• Dionne quintuplets | (Wikipedia)
• Dionne quintuplets | Deaths, Parents, Names, & Facts | (Britannica)
• The Birth of the Dionne Quintuplets | (Government of Canada)
• The Dionne Quintuplets National Historic Event | (Parks Canada)
• Dionne Quintuplets (1934—) | (Encyclopedia.com)
• Dionne Quintuplets (b. 1934) | (Encyclopedia.com)
• The Miracle and Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets by Sarah Miller (Scholastic Focus, 2017) | (Book)
• We Were Five: The Dionne Quintuplets' Story from Birth through Girlhood to Womanhood by James Brough with Annette, Cécile, Marie, and Yvonne Dionne (1965) | (Book)
• Family Secrets: The Dionne Quintuplets' Own Story by Jean-Yves Soucy with Annette, Cécile, and Yvonne Dionne (1997) | (Book)
• The Dionne Years: A Thirties Melodrama by Pierre Berton (1977) | (Book)

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Episode 424: Between 1928 and 1972, the Alberta government authorized the forced sterilization of nearly 3,000 Albertans deemed "unfit" to reproduce. They were told they were having their appendix removed. Many were children. Most had no idea what was being done to them. The targets were the poor, the mentally ill, Indigenous people, immigrants — anyone who didn't fit the province's vision of a productive society. This wasn't a fringe movement. It was backed by doctors, politicians, newspapers, and some of the most celebrated figures in Canadian history.

Sources:

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Eugenics
• History of Rights Canada — Eugenics
• Prairie History Journal, University of Alberta
• Gladue / University of Saskatchewan — Eugenics Resource
• Eugenics Archive Canada — Timeline
• Eugenics Archive Canada — Our Stories
• City Museum Edmonton — Leilani Muir and Eugenics in Alberta
• National Post — When Canada Lost Its Mind Over Eugenics
• CBC News — Leilani Muir, Advocate for Alberta's Sterilization Victims, Dies
• CBC News — Cash Settlement for Sterilized Women (BC)
• Alberta Law Review — Mikkel Dack
• Toronto Sun — The Controversial Beliefs of Canada's Famous Five
• Wired — CRISPR Babies and Human Genome Editing
• Scientific American — The Dark Side of CRISPR
• NFB — The Sterilization of Leilani Muir
• The Guardian — What Is Pronatalism?
  

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Episode 423: Francis Mawson Rattenbury designed the BC Parliament Buildings, the Empress Hotel, and the building that now houses the Vancouver Art Gallery, as well as many others. He was the most celebrated architect in the province for thirty years. In 1935, he was beaten to death in his armchair in a rented house in Bournemouth, England, by his wife Alma’s teenage lover, a chauffeur named George Percy Stoner. Both Alma Rattenbury and Stoner confessed. The trial at the Old Bailey gripped the English-speaking world. What happened after the trial was even more shocking than the murder.

Sources:
Sean O'Connor, The Fatal Passion of Alma Rattenbury (Simon & Schuster, 2019)
Anthony A. Barrett & Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, Francis Rattenbury and British Columbia: Architecture and Challenge in the Imperial Age (UBC Press, 1983)
Terry Reksten, Rattenbury (Sono Nis Press, 1978; revised 1998)
Francis Mawson Rattenbury — Dictionary of Canadian Biography
Francis Rattenbury — Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada
Francis Rattenbury — Wikipedia
Alma Rattenbury — Wikipedia
Newspapers.com | Search: Francis Rattenbury

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Episode 422: On St. Patrick's Day, 1960, five Italian immigrant construction workers — Pasquale Allegrezza, Giovanni Carriglio, Giovanni Fusillo, and brothers Alessandro and Guido Mantella — died beneath the Don River in Toronto's Hogg's Hollow neighbourhood. They were trapped in a tunnel less than two metres wide with no fire extinguishers, no hard hats, and no way out. The fire was preventable. The violations were known. A foreman had been fired for raising them. No one was ever charged. This is the story of five men whose names were nearly forgotten — and the laws that exist today because they died.

Sources:
The history of the Hoggs Hollow neighbourhood in Toronto
The Hoggs Hollow Disaster | definingmomentscanada.ca
The Hogg’s Hollow Disaster | Canadian Labour Congress
Hogg's Hollow Disaster National Historic Event
Hoggs Hollow | cobtrades.com
Remembering the Hoggs Hollow disaster | spacing.ca
Disaster at Hogg’s Hollow | jamiebradburnwriting.wordpress.com
The Hogg’s Hollow Disaster | unionsong.com
Breaking Ground The Hogg's Hollow Memorial 40 th Anniversary Project | costi.org
Hogg's Hollow Tragedy (1960) | Toronto Workers' History Project
BASTA! NO MORE FEAR! Remembering the Hoggs Hollow Disaster of 1960
The Hogg’s Hollow Disaster of 1960 | dresden1957.com
Hoggs Hollow Disaster | wikipedia
https://www.newspapers.com/image/1001301968/?match=1&terms=%22Hogg%27s%20Hollow%22%20tunnel
https://www.newspapers.com/image/950111466/?match=1&clipping_id=new
https://www.newspapers.com/image/1324439704/?match=1&clipping_id=new
https://www.newspapers.com/image/1227727450/?match=1&clipping_id=new
https://www.newspapers.com/image/1226718453/?match=1&clipping_id=new
https://www.newspapers.com/image/941541607/?match=1&clipping_id=new
https://www.newspapers.com/image/941541580/?match=1&terms=%22Hogg%27s%20Hollow%22%20tunnel

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Episode 421: On July 28, 1996, a fisherman hauling nets off the coast of Devon, England pulled up a body. The dead man had no wallet, no identification — nothing but a Rolex watch still ticking on his wrist. When British police traced the watch, it gave them a name: Ronald Joseph Platt, 51, of Essex.

When they went looking for him, they found him — apparently alive.

The trail led back across the Atlantic to Ayr, a small town in southwestern Ontario, where roughly seventy people had spent years trusting the wrong man with everything they had. By the time anyone understood what he'd done, he was already gone, and Ronald Platt was dead in the English Channel.

Sources:
Walker, Re, 1998 CanLII 14906 (ON SC)
A Hand in the Water: The Many Lies of Albert Walker — Bill Schiller (HarperCollins, 1998)
Nothing Sacred: The Many Lives and Betrayals of Albert Walker — Alan Cairns (McClelland-Bantam, 1998)
Walker's Trail of Pain — Maclean's (July 6, 1998)
Walker Money Hunt — Maclean's (July 20, 1998)
Walker Faces Daughter at First Day of Trial — CBC News (June 1998)
Mysterious Mr. Walker Sentenced for Fraud — The Globe and Mail (July 2007)
Fugitive Financier Sentenced to Four Years for Fraud — CBC News (July 2007)
Rolex Killer Denied Day Parole from B.C. Prison — Vancouver Sun (February 2024)
Albert Johnson Walker — Wikipedia
The Rolex Murder — therolexmurder.com (Elaine Boyes's site)
The Rolex Killer - True Crime
Explore topics about albert-johnson-walker | Crime and Investigation UK

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Episode 420: On the night of March 1st, 1895, in the paymaster's office of the Montreal Cotton Company in Valleyfield, Quebec, a twenty-year-old Irish immigrant named Francis Valentine Cuthbert Shortis shot three men — killing two of them and leaving the third for dead in the darkness of the mill floor. What followed was the longest murder trial in Canadian history, a psychiatric battle that divided the country's leading medical minds, and a political crisis that reached the cabinet of Prime Minister Mackenzie Bowell and the desk of the Governor General himself. The victims were John Loy, twenty-four years old, and night watchman Maxime Leboeuf, who left behind a widow and five children. The survivor was Hugh Wilson, who carried the consequences for the rest of his life.

Sources:
Valentine Shortis Case | thecanadianencyclopedia.ca
The Queen vs. F.V.C. Shortis (microform)| Internet Archive
The Case of Valentine Shortis — University of Toronto Press / Amazon.ca
Valentine Shortis Case — The Canadian Encyclopedia
The Canadian Trial of the Century: The Story of 'Cracked Shortis' — History Ireland
The Case of Valentine Shortis — Yesterday and Today — PubMed
Forensic Psychiatry in Canada — Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
Montreal Gazette Trial Coverage, October 25, 1895 — Newspapers.com
Profile: Author-Professor Martin Friedland — Bill Gladstone Genealogy
Montreal Cotton Company — History of the Mill at Valleyfield — MUSO Virtual Museum
Manitoba Schools Question — Dictionary of Canadian Biography
Montreal Cotton Company Mills — Library and Archives Canada
Sir Donald Macmaster, Crown Prosecutor — Wikipedia
J.N. Greenshields, Lead Defence Counsel — Americana Aristocracy
Henri St. Pierre, Defence Counsel — 76th New York State Volunteers

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Episode 419: On the night of October 1, 2017, a gunman opened fire on more than 22,000 concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on the Las Vegas Strip. In eleven minutes, 58 people were killed and hundreds more wounded — the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in American history. Among the dead were four Canadians: Jordan McIldoon, 23, of Maple Ridge, British Columbia; Jessica Klymchuk, 34, a mother of four and beloved school librarian and bus driver from Valleyview, Alberta; Calla Medig, 28, of Jasper, Alberta, days away from a promotion she had earned; and Tara Roe Smith, 34, of Okotoks, Alberta, who became separated from her husband in the chaos — her family spending the next day searching. At least six more Canadians were wounded. Hundreds of others came home carrying something that doesn't show up in any injury count.

Sources:
LVMPD Criminal Investigative Report — October 1, 2017
LVMPD Final Force Investigation Team Report (Internet Archive)
FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit — Key Findings, Las Vegas Review Panel (2019)
CSIS Public Report 2025 — Nihilistic Violent Extremism
What is Nihilistic Violent Extremism? — Global News
Jordan McIldoon — CBC News
Jessica Klymchuk — CBC News
Calla Medig — CBC News
Tara Roe Smith — CBC News

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On June 2nd, 1983, Air Canada Flight 797 departed Dallas, Texas, bound for Montreal, Quebec, with a stop in Toronto. Forty-one passengers and five crew were on board. Shortly before 7 pm Eastern time, a fire broke out inside the rear lavatory wall and burned, hidden and undetected, for nearly fifteen minutes before anyone smelled smoke.

The crew declared an emergency and landed safely at Greater Cincinnati International Airport in Covington, Kentucky. The airplane touched down intact. Sixty to ninety seconds after the cabin doors opened, a flashfire rolled through the interior. Twenty-three passengers did not get out.
Among the dead was Stan Rogers, folk musician, husband, father, born in Hamilton, Ontario. He was thirty-three years old, returning home after performing at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas.

The investigation that followed reshaped aviation safety standards worldwide.

Sources:
Air Canada Flight 797
Aviation Safety Network | Transcript of Air Canada Flight 797 - 02 JUN 1983
Stan Rogers | Spotify
Fogarty's Cove Music
Stan Rogers Folk Festival
Stan Rogers intros & sings "Barrett's Privateers" in One Warm Line documentary

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Episode 417: In the early hours of November 23, 2013, 18-year-old Lukas Strasser-Hird was violently beaten behind the Vinyl nightclub in Calgary, in an alley off 10th Avenue Southwest. He was rushed to the hospital, but the injuries were too severe, and he died later that morning from multiple stab wounds and massive blood loss. Walk with us through the events that led from a night out at the club to one of Calgary’s most closely watched murder cases, and examine how the chaos in that alley would ripple through the city, the courtroom, and the lives left behind.

Sources:

Lukas Strasser-Hird | Global News, Videos & Articles
R.I.P Austin Lukas Strasser-Hird | Facebook
R v Cabrera, 2019 ABCA 184 (CanLII)
R v Cabrera, 2021 ABCA 291 (CanLII)
R v Gervais, 2019 ABQB 344 (CanLII)
R. v. Shlah, 2019 SCC 56 (CanLII), [2019] 4 SCR 136
FM010_Appellant_Franz-Emir-Cabrera SCC File No.: 38677
Lukas Strasser-Hird - Obituary | Calgary Herald
The final homecoming of Lukas Strasser-Hird - National | Global News
1st-degree murder conviction upheld for Calgary man in swarming death - Calgary
Nathan Gervais sentenced to life with no parole for 25 years in Lukas Strasser-Hird swarming death - Calgary

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