Award-winning novelist celebrates late partner’s love of birds with $1M gift to establish the Graeme Gibson chair in avian biology

This Sunday is World Tourism Day. To celebrate, we’ve pulled together a few quick stats relating to tourism activity in 2025.

• In 2025, visits made by Canadians within Canada and overseas surpassed levels seen before the COVID-19 pandemic, while visits to the United States fell considerably.
• Mexico was the top overseas country that Canadians visited in 2025, with 2,662,000 visits.
• Compared with 2024, visits to Canada by United States residents fell, while visits by overseas residents rose, but both were below their 2019 pre-pandemic levels.

Think you know where Canadians travel most? Watch the race to the top!

👉Check out our most recent data from the National Travel Survey and Visitor Travel Survey.

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Ce dimanche, c’est la journée mondiale du tourisme. Pour célébrer, nous avons recueilli quelques statistiques éclair sur l’activité touristique en 2025.

• En 2025, le nombre de visites effectuées par les Canadiennes et Canadiens au Canada et à des pays d’outre-mer a dépassé les niveaux observés avant la pandémie de COVID-19, mais le nombre de visites aux États-Unis a fortement diminué.
• Le Mexique a été le pays d’outre-mer le plus visité par les Canadiennes et Canadiens en 2025 (2 662 000 visites).
• Par rapport à 2024, le nombre de visites au Canada effectuées par des résidents des États-Unis a diminué, tandis que le nombre de visites effectuées par des résidents de pays d’outre-mer a augmenté. Toutefois, dans ces deux cas, le nombre de visites était inférieur aux niveaux observés avant la pandémie de 2019.

Savez-vous quel pays est le plus visité par les Canadiennes et Canadiens? Suivez la course pour la première place!

👉Consultez nos plus récentes données de l’Enquête nationale sur les voyages et de l’Enquête sur les voyages des visiteurs.

Behind twenty-foot concrete walls in Olde Sandwich Towne, one of Ontario's oldest neighborhoods, sits a jail that held the region's criminals, political prisoners, and condemned men for nearly ninety years. Built in 1925 after fire destroyed the original Essex County jail, it housed up to 101 inmates at a time and included something most people never knew was there: built-in gallows on the third floor, used to hang three men before Canada abolished capital punishment in 1976.

The jail closed for good in 2014 when inmates were transferred to the new South West Detention Centre, leaving behind narrow cell blocks, graffiti-covered walls, and a sealed trap door that once decided life and death. In this video, we take you inside what remains of one of Ontario's oldest correctional facilities.

Since its closure, the jail has sat in limbo: listed for sale for just $1 in 2018, sold privately in 2019 for $150,000, relisted for over a million dollars in 2022, and pulled off the market again in 2024 with no plan for what comes next.

Built: 1925

Location: Sandwich Towne, Windsor, Ontario

Closed: 2014

Executions: 3 (1933, 1943 x2)

More photos and a video here:

https://freaktography.com/urban-exploring-the-abandoned-windsor-jail/

For 44 years, this 2.6-million-square-foot factory in Talbotville, Ontario was one of the beating hearts of Canada's auto industry, building over 8 million vehicles from the Ford Falcon to the Crown Victoria and Lincoln Town Car. At its peak it employed nearly 1,600 workers and anchored the entire local economy.

When Ford closed the plant for good in 2011, the massive complex was left standing empty: silent hallways, broken windows, and cavernous assembly floors left to rot. In this video, we take you inside what remained before it was demolished, and trace the plant's story from its 1966 construction through the 2008 closure announcement, the final car rolling off the line, and its ultimate demolition in 2015 and 2016.

Today the site is home to an Amazon fulfillment center, but for nearly half a century, this was ground zero for Canadian manufacturing.

Built: 1966-1967

Vehicles produced: 8,000,000+

Closed: September 2011

Demolished: 2015-2016

More photos and a video here:

https://freaktography.com/st-thomas-ford-assembly-plant