Mount Sinai Hospital (Toronto)
Mount Sinai Hospital is a hospital in Toronto, Canada. Mount Sinai is the main hospital of the Sinai Health System, although it is linked by bridges and tunnels to three adjacent hospitals of the University Health Network. During the 2005 annual charity, the hospital reported to the Canada Revenue Agency as having assets of C$520 million. Mount Sinai Hospital has existed in Toronto since 1923 under various names. In the fiscal year ending March 2013, Mount Sinai Hospital cared for 128,714 inpatients days, delivered 7000 babies and performed 20,000 surgeries. Toronto and area residents made more than half a million ambulatory clinic visits to Mount Sinai. In that same year, the hospital’s Schwartz/Reisman Emergency Department saw 56,080 visits and that number is expected to increase to 80,000 per year over the next few years. More than 600 staff work at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai's research facility; the Institute was established in 1985 as the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute.
On June 24, 2013 it became the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute. Many of its researchers hold faculty appointments at the University of Toronto. In October 2010, Mount Sinai Hospital was named one of Greater Toronto's Top Employers by Mediacorp Canada Inc. Dr. Gary Newton was appointed President and CEO of Mount Sinai Hospital, Sinai Health System in October 2016. In 1913, the Ezras Noshem Society was founded by Slova Greenberg. During the August of that year, the Society began a fundraising campaign to establish a hospital, spearheaded by four immigrant women: Mrs. Cohn, Mrs. Miller, Mrs. Spiegel and Mrs. Adler. In 1922, a location at 100 Yorkville Avenue was purchased with $12,000; the two-story building was built as a private residence in 1871 by James D. Bridgland - the Crown's Inspector of Roads. In 1923, the hospital opened and was named "The Hebrew Maternity and Convalescent Hospital". Dorothy Dworkin, who helped in the fundraising campaign, became president of the institution; the first list of permanent staff included: a nursing superintendent, four graduate and two undergraduate nurses, a cook, a laundress, a housemaid and a janitor, while the 33 Jewish doctors in the city all volunteered some time.
In 1924, the name was changed to Mount Sinai Hospital. In 1930, a new surgical wing was begun by Kaminker & Richmond; the original designs were drawn up in 1928 by Benjamin Swartz. The project was only completed in 1934. In 1943, a new site was purchased on University Avenue at the corner of Gerrard Street. In 1953, it opened. In the same year, the original Mount Sinai Hospital became the St. Raphael's Nursing Home. In 1985, the original property was designated as a site of historical significance by the Toronto Historical Board Despite this, the 1930 wing was demolished in 1988.. In 2015, Mount Sinai Hospital, Bridgepoint Health, Circle of Care joined in a voluntary amalgamation to create the Sinai Health System, which has the goal of creating an integrated health system that provides more efficient, coordinated care for patients. At the time of its founding, Mount Sinai Hospital was the only hospital to offer kosher food in Canada. Indeed, it was an institution where Jewish patients could communicate in Yiddish, be able to observe their religious practices.
The hospital has continued to be an institution to provide culturally appropriate services to the Jewish community alongside other immigrant and non-English speaking communities. Today, Mount Sinai has one of the most vibrant volunteer programs in Canada. There are over 1,000 active volunteers in over 80 programs, it is affiliated including University of Toronto. Dorothy Dworkin Allan S. Detsky Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute Media related to Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto at Wikimedia Commons Mount Sinai Hospital The Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute Mount Sinai Hospital Foundation
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian poet, literary critic, inventor and environmental activist. She has published seventeen books of poetry, sixteen novels, ten books of non-fiction, eight collections of short fiction, eight children's books, one graphic novel, as well as a number of small press editions in poetry and fiction. Atwood and her writing have won numerous awards and honors including the Man Booker Prize, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Governor General's Award, Franz Kafka Prize, the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. Atwood is the inventor and developer of the LongPen and associated technologies that facilitate the remote robotic writing of documents; as a novelist and poet, Atwood's works encompass a variety of themes including the power of language and identity, religion and myth, climate change, "power politics." Many of her poems are inspired by myths and fairy tales which interested her from a early age. Among her contributions to Canadian literature, Atwood is a founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Writers' Trust of Canada.
Atwood was born in Ottawa, Canada, as the second of three children of Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist and Margaret Dorothy, a former dietitian and nutritionist from Woodville, Nova Scotia. Because of her father's ongoing research in forest entomology, Atwood spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of northern Quebec and travelling back and forth between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie, Toronto, she did not attend school full-time. She became a voracious reader of literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimms' Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories and comic books, she attended Leaside High School in Leaside and graduated in 1957. Atwood began writing poems at the age of six. Atwood realized. In 1957, she began studying at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where she published poems and articles in Acta Victoriana, the college literary journal, participated in the sophomore theatrical tradition of The Bob Comedy Revue, her professors included Northrop Frye. She graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of minors in philosophy and French.
In 1961 Atwood began graduate studies at Radcliffe College of Harvard University, with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She obtained a master's degree from Radcliffe in 1962 and pursued doctoral studies for two years, but did not finish her dissertation, "The English Metaphysical Romance". In 1968, Atwood married an American writer, she formed a relationship with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon afterward and moved to a farm near Alliston, where their daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born in 1976. The family returned to Toronto in 1980. Although she is an accomplished writer, Margaret Atwood claims to be a terrible speller. Atwood's first book of poetry, Double Persephone, was published as a pamphlet by Hawskhead Press in 1961, winning the E. J. Pratt Medal. While continuing to write, Atwood was a lecturer in English at the University of British Columbia, from 1964 to 1965, Instructor in English at the Sir George Williams University in Montreal from 1967 to 1968, taught at the University of Alberta from 1969 to 1970.
In 1966, The Circle Game was published. This collection was followed by three other small press collections of poetry: Kaleidoscopes Baroque: a poem, Cranbrook Academy of Art. Atwood's first novel, The Edible Woman, was published in 1969; as a social satire of North American consumerism, many critics have cited the novel as an early example of the feminist concerns found in many of Atwood's works. Atwood taught at York University in Toronto from 1971 to 1972 and was a writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto during the 1972/1973 academic year. A prolific period for her poetry, Atwood published six collections over the course of the decade: The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Procedures for Underground, Power Politics, You Are Happy, Selected Poems 1965–1975, Two-Headed Poems. Atwood published three novels during this time: Surfacing. Surfacing, Lady Oracle, Life Before Man, like The Edible Woman, explore identity and social constructions of gender as they relate to topics such as nationhood and sexual politics.
In particular, along with her first non-fiction monograph, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, helped establish Atwood as an important and emerging voice in Canadian literature. In 1977 Atwood published her first short story collection, Dancing Girls, the winner of the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction and the award of The Periodical Distributors of Canada for Short Fiction. By 1976 interest in Atwood, her works, her life were high enough that Maclean's declared her to be "Canada's most gossiped-about writer." Atwood's literary reputation continued to rise in the 1980s with the publication of Bodily Harm. Despite her distaste for literary labels, Atwood has since conceded to referring to The Handmaid's Tale as a work of science fiction or, more spec
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle in the company of like-minded people and with few permanent ties. It involves musical, literary or spiritual pursuits. In this context, Bohemians may or may not be wanderers, adventurers, or vagabonds; this use of the word bohemian first appeared in the English language in the 19th century to describe the non-traditional lifestyles of marginalized and impoverished artists, journalists and actors in major European cities. Bohemians were associated with unorthodox or anti-establishment political or social viewpoints, which were expressed through free love, and—in some cases—voluntary poverty. A more economically privileged, wealthy, or aristocratic bohemian circle is sometimes referred to as haute bohème; the term bohemianism emerged in France in the early 19th century when artists and creators began to concentrate in the lower-rent, lower class, Romani neighborhoods. Bohémien was a common term for the Romani people of France, who were mistakenly thought to have reached France in the 15th century via Bohemia.
Literary bohemians were associated in the French imagination with roving Romani people, outsiders apart from conventional society and untroubled by its disapproval. The term carries a connotation of arcane enlightenment, carries a less intended, pejorative connotation of carelessness about personal hygiene and marital fidelity; the title character in Carmen, a French opera set in the Spanish city of Seville, is referred to as a "bohémienne" in Meilhac and Halévy's libretto. Her signature aria declares love itself to be a "gypsy child", going where it pleases and obeying no laws; the term bohemian has come to be commonly accepted in our day as the description of a certain kind of literary gypsy, no matter in what language he speaks, or what city he inhabits.... A Bohemian is an artist or "littérateur" who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in art. Henri Murger's collection of short stories "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème", published in 1845, was written to glorify and legitimize Bohemia.
Murger's collection formed the basis of Giacomo Puccini's opera La bohème. In England, bohemian in this sense was popularised in William Makepeace Thackeray's novel, Vanity Fair, published in 1848. Public perceptions of the alternative lifestyles led by artists were further molded by George du Maurier's romanticized best-selling novel of Bohemian culture Trilby; the novel outlines the fortunes of three expatriate English artists, their Irish model, two colourful Central European musicians, in the artist quarter of Paris. In Spanish literature, the Bohemian impulse can be seen in Ramón del Valle-Inclán's play Luces de Bohemia, published in 1920. In his song La Bohème, Charles Aznavour described the Bohemian lifestyle in Montmartre; the film Moulin Rouge! reflects the Bohemian lifestyle in Montmartre at the turn of the 20th century. In the 1850s, aesthetic bohemians began arriving in the United States. In New York City in 1857, a group of 15 to 20 young, cultured journalists flourished as self-described bohemians until the American Civil War began in 1861.
This group gathered at a German bar on Broadway called Pfaff's beer cellar. Members included their leader Henry Clapp, Jr. Ada Clare, Walt Whitman, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, actress Adah Isaacs Menken. Similar groups in other cities were broken up as well by the Civil War and reporters spread out to report on the conflict. During the war, correspondents began to assume the title bohemian, newspapermen in general took up the moniker. Bohemian became synonymous with newspaper writer. In 1866, war correspondent Junius Henri Browne, who wrote for the New York Tribune and Harper's Magazine, described bohemian journalists such as he was, as well as the few carefree women and lighthearted men he encountered during the war years. San Francisco journalist Bret Harte first wrote as "The Bohemian" in The Golden Era in 1861, with this persona taking part in many satirical doings, the lot published in his book Bohemian Papers in 1867. Harte wrote, "Bohemia has never been located geographically, but any clear day when the sun is going down, if you mount Telegraph Hill, you shall see its pleasant valleys and cloud-capped hills glittering in the West..."Mark Twain included himself and Charles Warren Stoddard in the bohemian category in 1867.
By 1872, when a group of journalists and artists who gathered for cultural pursuits in San Francisco were casting about for a name, the term bohemian became the main choice, the Bohemian Club was born. Club members who were established and successful, pillars of their community, respectable family men, redefined their own form of bohemianism to include people like them who were bons vivants and appreciators of the fine arts. Club member and poet George Sterling responded to this redefinition: Any good mixer of convivial habits considers he has a right to be called a bohemian. But, not a valid claim. There are two elements, at least; the first is addiction to one or more of the Seven Arts. Other factors suggest themselves: for instance, I like to think of my Bohemians as young, as radical in their outlook on art and life. Despite his views, Sterling associated with the Bohemian Club, caroused with artist and industrialist alike at the B
Yonge Street
Yonge Street is a major arterial route in the Canadian province of Ontario connecting the shores of Lake Ontario in Toronto to Lake Simcoe, a gateway to the Upper Great Lakes. Until 1999, the Guinness Book of World Records repeated the popular misconception it was 1,896 km long, thus the longest street in the world. Yonge Street is 56 kilometres long; the construction of Yonge Street is designated an Event of National Historic Significance in Canada. Yonge Street was fundamental in the original planning and settlement of western Upper Canada in the 1790s, forming the basis of the concession roads in Ontario today. Once the southernmost leg of Highway 11, linking the capital with northern Ontario, Yonge Street has been referred to as "Main Street Ontario". Today, no section of Yonge Street is a provincial highway; the street was named by Ontario's first colonial administrator, John Graves Simcoe, for his friend Sir George Yonge, an expert on ancient Roman roads. Yonge Street is a commercial main thoroughfare rather than a ceremonial one, with landmarks such as the Eaton Centre, Yonge-Dundas Square and the Hockey Hall of Fame along its length—and lends its name to the Downtown Yonge shopping and entertainment district.
In Toronto and York Region, Yonge Street is the north-south baseline from which street numbering is reckoned east and west. The eastern branch of Line 1 Yonge–University serves nearly the entire length of the street in Toronto and acts as the spine of the Toronto subway system, linking to suburban commuter systems such as the Viva Blue BRT. See the'Public Transit' section below. Yonge Street originates on the northern shore of Toronto Bay at Queens Quay as a four-lane arterial road proceeding north by north-west. Toronto's Harbourfront is built on landfill extended into the bay, with the former industrial area now converted from port and industrial uses to a dense residential high-rise community; the street passes under the elevated Gardiner Expressway and the congested rail lines of the Toronto viaduct on their approach to Union Station. The road rises near Front Street, marking the pre-landfill shoreline. Here, at the southern edge of the central business district, is the Dominion Public Building, the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts and the Hockey Hall of Fame, the latter housed in an imposing former Bank of Montreal office, once Canada's largest bank branch.
Beyond Front Street the road passes through the east side of the Financial District, within sight of many of Canada's tallest buildings, fronting an entrance to the Allen Lambert Galleria. Between Front Street and Queen Street, Yonge Street is bounded by historic and commercial buildings, many serving the large weekday workforce concentrated here. Yonge Street's entire west side, from Queen Street to Dundas Street, is occupied by the Eaton Centre, an indoor mall featuring shops along its Yonge Street frontage and a Nordstrom anchor store at the corner of Dundas Street; the east side has two historic performance venues, the Ed Mirvish Theatre and the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres. In addition, Massey Hall is just to the east on Shuter Street. Opposite the Eaton Centre lies Yonge-Dundas Square; the area now comprising the square was cleared of several small commercial buildings and redeveloped in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with large video screens, retail shopping arcades and seating in a bid to become "Toronto's Times Square".
It is used for numerous public events. Another stretch of busy retail lines both sides of Yonge Street north of Dundas Street, including Sam the Record Man until its closure on June 30, 2007; the density of businesses diminishes north of Gerrard Street. The Art Deco College Park building, a former shopping complex of the T. Eaton Company, occupies most of the west side of Yonge Street from Gerrard Street north to College Street, it was converted into a commercial complex after the building of the Eaton Centre. From College Street north to Bloor Street, Yonge Street serves smaller street-level retail in two- to three-storey buildings of a hundred years' vintage; the businesses here, unlike the large chains which dominate south of Gerrard Street, are small independent shops and serve a dense residential community on either side of Yonge Street with amenities such as convenience stores. The intersection of Yonge and Bloor Streets is a major crossroads of Toronto, informally considered the northern edge of the downtown core.
Subway Line 2 Bloor–Danforth intersects the Yonge line here, with the resulting transfers between lines making Bloor-Yonge Station the busiest in the city. The Hudson's Bay Centre and Two Bloor West office towers dominate the corner, visible both from downtown and beyond, with the south-east corner earmarked for a major condominium development; the Mink Mile's borders extend from Yonge to Avenue Road along Bloor. The intersection of Yonge and Bloor Streets is itself a "scramble"-type intersection allowing pedestrians to cross from any corner to any other corner. North of Bloor, the street is part of the old town of Yorkville, today a major shopping district extending west of Yonge Street along Cumberland and Bloor Streets. North of Yorkville and traffic decrease somewhat and the speed limit increases as Yonge Street forms the main street of Summerhill, which together with Rosedale to the east is noted for its opulent residences; the area is marked by the historic North Toronto railway station served by the Canadian Pacific
Davenport Road
Davenport Road is an east–west arterial road in Toronto, Canada. It is believed to follow an old native trail along the foot of the scarp of the old shoreline of glacial Lake Iroquois, it runs from Yonge Street in the east to Old Weston Road in the west. The road is believed to follow the longest First Nations trail to exist in Ontario, it was known as "Gete-Onigaming," Ojibwe for "at the old portage." The trail, which continued along the modern route of Kingston Road east of the Don River, what is now Dundas Street west of the Humber River. The Toronto portion of the trail had several earlier names, including "Plank Road", "Bull Road", "the new road to Niagara"—but by 1797, it was known as Davenport Road; the section east of Bathurst Street was a part of Vaughan Road. The road was paved outside of York, Upper Canada in 1833, with the improvements to be paid for by tolls. Tollkeepers' cottages were constructed every few kilometres, the cottage near what is now the intersection of Bathurst Street and Davenport Road surviving to the present day.
During the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion rebel leader William Lyon Mackenzie burned the home of Dr. R. C. Horne a prominent Tory, at the corner of Davenport Road and Yonge Street. On April 20, 1891 the newly incorporated Davenport Street Railway Company was awarded rights to operate a streetcar by West Toronto Junction; when the route began operation on September 6, 1892, it was the second electrified streetcar line in the Toronto area—earlier routes being horse-drawn. The route ran from Dundas streets to Bathurst and Dupont streets. In 1894, the Davenport Street Railway Company was purchased by the Toronto Suburban Street Railway Company, in turn acquired by the owners of the Canadian Northern Railway; the line had used a broad gauge, like Toronto's other streetcar lines—so railway companies couldn't run freight on ordinary streets. Although it was changed to standard gauge no freight was carried. In 1896, The Daily Mail and Empire published a letter from a reader responding to recent article on roads requiring repair in Toronto described Davenport as being in "simply disgraceful condition".
The reader described Davenport Road, several other roads, as being "block paved", complained "this kind of pavement is anything but durable"—due either to Toronto's climate, or poor construction. In 1994, bicycle lanes were added to Davenport Road. List of east–west roads in Toronto
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech" featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction. Released in 1984, William Gibson's influential debut novel Neuromancer would help solidify cyberpunk as a genre, drawing influence from punk subculture and early hacker culture. Other influential cyberpunk writers included Rudy Rucker; the Japanese cyberpunk subgenre began in 1982 with the debut of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga series Akira, with its 1988 anime film adaptation popularizing the subgenre.
Early films in the genre include Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, one of several of Philip K. Dick's works that have been adapted into films; the films Johnny Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel, both based upon short stories by William Gibson, flopped commercially and critically. The Matrix trilogy were some of the most successful cyberpunk films. More recent additions to this genre of filmmaking include Blade Runner 2049, sequel to the original 1982 film, as well as Upgrade, Alita: Battle Angel based on the 1990s Japanese manga Battle Angel Alita, the 2018 Netflix TV series Altered Carbon. Lawrence Person has attempted to define the content and ethos of the cyberpunk literary movement stating: Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, invasive modification of the human body. Cyberpunk plots center on conflict among artificial intelligences and megacorporations, tend to be set in a near-future Earth, rather than in the far-future settings or galactic vistas found in novels such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune.
The settings are post-industrial dystopias but tend to feature extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its original inventors. Much of the genre's atmosphere echoes film noir, written works in the genre use techniques from detective fiction. There are sources who view that cyberpunk has shifted from a literary movement to a mode of science fiction due to the limited number of writers and its transition to a more generalized cultural formation; the origins of cyberpunk are rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 70s, where New Worlds, under the editorship of Michael Moorcock, began inviting and encouraging stories that examined new writing styles and archetypes. Reacting to conventional storytelling, New Wave authors attempted to present a world where society coped with a constant upheaval of new technology and culture with dystopian outcomes. Writers like Roger Zelazny, J. G. Ballard, Philip Jose Farmer, Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture and the sexual revolution with an avant-garde style influenced by the Beat Generation and their own ideas.
Ballard attacked the idea that stories should follow the "archetypes" popular since the time of Ancient Greece, the assumption that these would somehow be the same ones that would call to modern readers, as Joseph Campbell argued in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Instead, Ballard wanted to write a new myth for the modern reader, a style with "more psycho-literary ideas, more meta-biological and meta-chemical concepts, private time systems, synthetic psychologies and space-times, more of the sombre half-worlds one glimpses in the paintings of schizophrenics."This had a profound influence on a new generation of writers, some of whom would come to call their movement "Cyberpunk". One, Bruce Sterling said: In the circle of American science fiction writers of my generation — cyberpunks and humanists and so forth — was a towering figure. We used to have bitter struggles over, more Ballardian than whom. We knew we were not fit to polish the man’s boots, we were scarcely able to understand how we could get to a position to do work which he might respect or stand, but at least we were able to see the peak of achievement that he had reached.
Ballard and the rest of New Wave was seen by the subsequent generation as delivering more "realism" to science fiction, they attempted to build on this. Influential, cited as proto-cyberpunk, is the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, first published in 1968. Presenting the general feeling of dystopian post-economic-apocalyptic future as Gibson and Sterling deliver, it examines ethical and moral problems with cybernetic, artificial intelligence in a way more "realist" than the Isaac Asimov Robot series that laid its philosophical foundation; this novel was made into the seminal movie Blade Runner, released in 1982. This was one year after another story, "Johnny Mnemonic" helped move proto-cyberpunk concepts into the mainstream; this story, which became a film years involves another dystopian future, where human couriers deliver computer data, stored cybernetically in their own minds. In 1983 a short story written by Bruce Bethke, called Cyberpunk, was published in Amazing Stories.
The term was picked up
William Lyon Mackenzie
William Lyon Mackenzie was a Scottish–born Canadian–American journalist and politician. His strong views on political equality and clean government drove him to outright rebellion in 1837 after a career as mayor of Toronto and in the colonial legislative assembly of Upper Canada, he led the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion and during its bitter end he set up a small rebel enclave named "Republic of Canada," where he served as president December 13, 1837 to January 14, 1838. After a period of exile in the U. S. he returned to Canada and served as elected member of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada from 1851-1858. William Lyon Mackenzie was born on March 1795, in Scotland in the Dundee suburb Springfield, his mother Elizabeth of Kirkmichael was a widow seventeen years older than his father, weaver Daniel Mackenzie. Daniel died three weeks after William's birth, his 45-year-old mother raised him alone. Elizabeth Mackenzie was a religious woman, a proponent of the Secession, a branch of Scottish Presbyterianism committed to the separation of church and state.
While Mackenzie was not a religious man himself. Mackenzie entered a parish grammar school at Dundee at age 5, thanks to a bursary, moved on to a Mr Addie's school, he was a voracious reader, keeping a list of the 958 books he read between 1806 and 1820. By 1810 he was writing for a local newspaper. During this time he joined an early Mechanics Institute, it was there that he met Edward Lesslie and his sons James and John, who played a large role in his life. They would all be key to establishing a Mechanics Institute in Toronto. Mackenzie's mother arranged for him to apprentice with tradesmen in Dundee, but in 1814, he secured financial backing from Edward Lesslie to open a general store and circulating library in Alyth. During this period Mackenzie had a relationship with Isabel Reid, of whom nothing is known except that she gave birth to Mackenzie's illegitimate son on July 17, 1814; the boy was raised by Mackenzie's mother. During the recession which followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Mackenzie's store in Dundee went bankrupt and he travelled to seek work in Dundee and Wiltshire in 1818 to work for a canal company.
He travelled to France and worked for a newspaper in London. Lacking stable employment, at age 25 Mackenzie emigrated to British North America with John Lesslie. Mackenzie found a job working on the Lachine Canal in Lower Canada wrote for the Montreal Herald. John Lesslie settled in Upper Canada. Mackenzie was soon employed at Lesslie's bookselling/drugstore business. Mackenzie began to write for the York Observer. In 1822, Edward Lesslie and the rest of his family, along with Elizabeth Mackenzie, joined Mackenzie and John Lesslie in Upper Canada. Elizabeth brought along Isabel Baxter, whom she had chosen for Mackenzie to marry; the couple were wed July 1822 in Montreal. Isabel had 14 children with Mackenzie, including Isabel Grace Mackenzie, the mother of William Lyon Mackenzie King. Edward and John Lesslie opened a branch of their business in Dundas, entering into a partnership with Mackenzie who moved to Dundas to be the store's manager; the store sold drugs and general merchandise. Mackenzie operated a circulating library.
However, his relationship with the Lesslies soured and the partnership was dissolved in 1823. He established a business there. While there, he established a relationship with Robert Randal, one of four members representing Lincoln County in the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada. In 1824, Mackenzie established the Colonial Advocate, it was established to influence voters in the elections for the 9th Parliament of Upper Canada. Mackenzie supported some characteristically British institutions, notably the British Empire and the clergy reserves, but he praised American institutions in the paper; the Colonial Advocate had financial difficulties, in November 1824, Mackenzie relocated the paper to York. There, he advocated in favour of the Reform cause and became an outspoken critic of the Family Compact, an upper-class clique which dominated the government of Upper Canada. However, the newspaper continued to face financial pressures: it had only 825 subscribers by the beginning of 1825, faced stiff competition from another Reform newspaper, the Canadian Freeman.
As a result, Mackenzie had to suspend publishing the Colonial Advocate from July to December 1825. He purchased a new printing press in fall 1825 and resumed publication in 1826, now engaging in more scurrilous attacks on leading Tory politicians such as William Allan, G. D'Arcy Boulton, Henry John Boulton, George Gurnett. However, Mackenzie continued to amass debts, in May 1826, he fled across the American border to Lewiston, New York to evade his creditors. A mob of 11 young Tories, led by Samuel Jarvis, took advantage of Mackenzie's absence to exact revenge for the attacks on the Tories printed in the Colonial Advocate. Thinly disguising themselves as "Indigenous peoples of the Americas", they broke into the Colonial Advocate's office in broad daylight, smashed the printing press, threw the type into Lake Ontario; the Tory magistrates did not prosecute them afterwards. Mackenzie took full advantage of the incident, returning to York and suing the perpetrators in a sensational trial, which propelled Mackenzie into the ranks of martyrs of Upper Canadian liberty, alongside Robert Thorpe and Robert Fleming Gourlay
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![Coat of Arms[1]](/wiki/File:Yorkville_Village_Coat_of_Arms.jpg)
Canada
Ontario
Toronto
Yorkville, Toronto
