Dark Poutine - True Crime and Dark History

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 BiographyFrancis Rattenbury — Biographical Dictionary of Architects in CanadaFrancis Rattenbury — WikipediaAlma Rattenbury — WikipediaNewspapers.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 TorontoThe Hoggs Hollow Disaster | definingmomentscanada.caThe Hogg’s Hollow Disaster | Canadian Labour CongressHogg's Hollow Disaster National Historic EventHoggs Hollow | cobtrades.comRemembering the Hoggs Hollow disaster | spacing.caDisaster at Hogg’s Hollow | jamiebradburnwriting.wordpress.comThe Hogg’s Hollow Disaster | unionsong.comBreaking Ground The Hogg's Hollow Memorial 40 th Anniversary Project | costi.orgHogg's Hollow Tragedy (1960) | Toronto Workers' History ProjectBASTA! NO MORE FEAR! Remembering the Hoggs Hollow Disaster of 1960The Hogg’s Hollow Disaster of 1960 | dresden1957.comHoggs Hollow Disaster | wikipediahttps://www.newspapers.com/image/1001301968/?match=1&terms=%22Hogg%27s%20Hollow%22%20tunnelhttps://www.newspapers.com/image/950111466/?match=1&clipping_id=newhttps://www.newspapers.com/image/1324439704/?match=1&clipping_id=newhttps://www.newspapers.com/image/1227727450/?match=1&clipping_id=newhttps://www.newspapers.com/image/1226718453/?match=1&clipping_id=newhttps://www.newspapers.com/image/941541607/?match=1&clipping_id=newhttps://www.newspapers.com/image/941541580/?match=1&terms=%22Hogg%27s%20Hollow%22%20tunnel
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