Peter Rukavina's Podcast

I’ll be voting for Amir Zuccolo for Mayor of Charlottetown in the November 2, 2026 municipal election.

Of the seven candidates on the ballot, Amir has the best combination of intelligence, experience, creativity, consensus building, and compassion. She will be an excellent mayor, and her election will mark an important inflection point for the city.

In the 171 years since its incorporation in 1855, Charlottetown has seen a woman in the mayor’s office for only four years. While that alone is not enough reason to elect Amir, the only woman on the ballot, to the position, it’s high time we concern ourselves with electing officials who reflect the diversity of the community they represent. Electing Amir will help do that.

She brings the skills and approach (and humility) of a scientist, the concision of an educator, the patience and compassion of a parent, broad experience in community engagement, including experience in municipal government: we will have a capable, experienced woman in the role, ready to lead.

I sat down with Amir this morning in her campaign office to talk about what motivated her to run, what her approach to the mayoralty will be, how she will use the work to right an often-fractious council, and her positions on issues like public transit, planning and development, and how we can come to regard all residents as being worthy of support, services, and empathy.

Amir impressed me. She’s quick on her feet, thoughtful, generous, and has clearly spent the four years since she decided to run for the position deeply immersing herself in the issues council confronts.

I really feel like this election for Charlottetown is a change election. We have three open wards, as well as the opportunity to elect our second female mayor. And it’s really not just about the next four years. I see that what’s going to happen in Charlottetown in the next four years, and eight years, is going to set us on a trajectory going well into the future, possibly for the next fifty years. So we really need to have good, smart, compassionate leadership at the table to make the decisions, knowing the context of where we are with AI, with climate change, with a trade war, with economic instability going forward, so the city can be prosperous.

I encourage you to learn more about Amir, and to join me in supporting her. 

An unexpected delight at last night’s True Mountain Laurel gig at Trailside Music Hall was opening act Lia Pappas-Kemps. This is her song A Thousand Times Over, recorded from too far away; go find the real deal online for full fidelity.

Her opening few songs were reserved, but as she got going she opened right up, and by the time she joined True Mountain Laurel on stage for her new single I Want It Easy, she was there.

We were pleasantly surprised to hear the musical stylings of the incomparable Nick Doneff during lunch on the MV Northumberland crossing from Wood Islands to Caribou this morning. He really is a musical treasure.

“It’s times like this that I’m proud to be an Islander,” Lisa said. Agreed.

I received the sad news this morning that my friend Allan Rankin has died.

I was introduced to Allan many years ago: he and Roy Johnstone and I got together to see about having me make websites for them. Both had just released albums, and there was a sense in the air—a tentative, early, faint sense—that musicians should have websites. And so was hatched AllanRankin.com. In the process I became a fan of Allan’s music: rich, evocative, well-crafted songs about the Island he loved so dearly.

Over the years since, our paths crossed innumerable times, personally and professionally. Allan was one of my mentors in how to live a good life in my adopted province, and he bestowed a great compliment on me by calling me a “new growth Islander.”

Allan was witty, creative, contrarian, and wickedly smart. 

While he was a political candidate–he ran for the NDP against then-Premier Alex Campbell in 1974–Allan excelled at being just out of view. He was instrumental in nurturing the careers of many worthy public servants over his years in government. 

He was an incisive writer, both as a songwriter and in the column he wrote for several years for The Eastern Graphic.

By times a New Democrat and a Liberal, Allan ended as a fervant supporter of the Green Party, support that advanced the party’s cause greatly.

My favourite times spent with Allan, though, were at the movies. 

Both fans of action-adventure films, with partners who weren’t, Allan I would meet for late nite showings of the films of Tom Cruise at the Cineplex in Charlottetown, the hour and the circumstance giving an air of international mystery to the affair.

My favourite song of Allan’s is Raise the Dead of Wintertime, a song that only Allan could write, and a song that so-captures a slice of Prince Edward Island. From Allan’s notes about the song:

One perfectly still and beautiful winter’s morning at Christophers Cross, in western Prince Edward Island, Vincent Handrahan hitched up his little morgan horse and we took a ride over the back fields, surveying the supply of fire wood that had been cut and still needed hauling. That sleigh ride, and the hardworking and resourceful people of West Prince, inspired ‘Raise the Dead of Wintertime.’

I cannot help but have a tear come to my eye when I listen to him singing this line:

And when at night we’re by the stove
Our bellies full and our stories told
The winds of winter might blow cold
But none of us will feel it

Goodbye, old friend. I will miss you.

In the season 7 episode of Billions, Original Sin, political consultant Bradford Luke walks into (billionaire and possible presidential candidate) Mike Prince’s office:

Prince: How do you have Leo McGarry-like walk in privileges before you’ve even taken the job? 

Luke: Walk with a true sense of purpose. No one ever stops you. 

The Leo McGarry reference is, of course, to The West Wing—another fictional universe—where Leo McGarry was President Bartlett’s Chief of Staff, and often walked in with exactly the same demeanour:

I love the fiction-to-fiction reference; Billions is rife with pop culture references, to an often absurd extend, but this one I love.

From a conversation between Rick Rubin of the poet David Whyte on Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast:

And then the last step I call harvest, and that’s the ability to bring in the harvest of everything you’ve been working towards.

Both in the sense of, it might be harvesting a profit, but harvest in the sense of when you’ve produced a piece, it’s making sure it gets out in the world, and that you’re there with it when it’s out. So that’s another kind of harvest. Then there’s the celebration which is associated with harvest.

So many places you’ve just achieved something really marvelous together, and a split second later the next day you’re on to something else. There’s no celebration, there’s no saying, let’s go out to dinner, let’s look at what we’ve done, let’s slap each other on the back, let’s just go out on the river on a boat for a day, and just say we did that, and we’re quite remarkable, and let’s just give it a rest for a moment before we turn our face enthusiastically to the next sowing. Then the real corollary of harvest though is, are you harvesting in the hours of the day in which you’re working, or are you working in a dynamic of conditionality?”

“I’ll get to my happiness when I’ve done this project. I’ll do what I really want when the kids are through school, when the house is paid off, when I’m in a better relationship, when I’ve got this amount of money in the bank, when I’m retired, and the ultimate conditionality is I’ll get to it when I’m dead. When all the responsibilities have gone.

So are you harvesting in the hours of the day in which you’re dedicating yourself? Because it’s not a passive process to work. You’re shaping an identity.

It’s like practicing. You think of most people in what we call ordinary jobs. There are no real ordinary jobs, but you’re working eight, nine, if you’re in leadership, 10, 11 hours a day.

Imagine if you practiced a musical instrument for eight, nine, 10 or 11 hours a day. Wouldn’t matter if you had any musical proclivity at all. You would become incredibly good at the clarinet, at the piano, at the saxophone.

So you’re becoming incredibly good at whoever you’re practicing at being in the hours of the day. So Harvest asks you to say, by the way I am in my every day, who am I practicing at becoming? Do I actually want to become that person?

(via SIX at 6).

The awards for the 2024 edition of Island Fringe were presented last night, and among them was The Oscar Wilde Award, which I sponsor every year, presented to the show that “most effectively celebrates non-conformity.” 

This year the jury selected the show So an Autistic Priest and Dog Walk into a Bar…, written and presented by Jean-Daniel O’Donncada, described in the program as a “storytelling emotional comedy about autism, religion, and love, with a dog,” and with this “accessibility note”:

The show is 60 minutes long. It is sensory sensitive with no loud surprises, and no dramatic or changing lights. There is a live dog present throughout the show. Attendees with service dogs are encouraged to come a bit early so all dogs may be aware of each other’s presence before the show begins.

In previous years I’ve prided myself—and benefited greatly—from seeing all, or almost all, of the shows at each year’s Fringe; this year, however, circumstances meant that I saw only a single show, After the Chorus Line.

Olivia, however, did see O’Donncada’s show, and spoke highly of it, and the reaction to the award from the audience last night (and for both the Patrons’ Pick and Artists’ Pick awards that followed, both of which also went to O’Donncada), suggests it was a deserving recipient. As does his biography:

I’m openly, and sometimes unashamedly, Christian, Québécois, Canadian, queer, autistic, and awkward. I get particularly passionate about making sure church and society do better at welcoming those who speak minority languages and those who think in marginalised, neurodiverse ways.

I wrote in my note to the award winner:

The world needs—demands—more of the non-conforming, and that’s why I sponsor this award. Please continue. And, when you are able, pay if forward.

I have every reason to believe that Jean-Daniel O’Donncada will do exactly that.

We’re posted up 50 m from the Adriatic, in Numana.

About 280 km across the water in Croatia is where my grandfather was born.

It is warm and, at least today, gloriously sunny.

While the La Festa dei Ceri on May 15 has a well-documented program, figuring out the timing and route of today’s first-Sunday-in-May repositioning event was more challenging, and involved piecing together bits of information from the web and Google Translated conversations.

As it happens, we need not have worried, as it all played out on our doorstep on the Via dei Consoli.

Anything we might have imagined this might have been was an underestimate by a factor of ten: hundreds and hundreds of people jamming the streets, a drum corps, a brass band, singing, and small children riding the ceri bareback up steep cobblestones streets.

We jammed ourselves right into the middle of it, joining the claustrophobic procession up the street to the Piazza Grande where everything culminated in a cacophony, with the ceri being raced around in circles by their bearers and then up the stairs of the Palazzo dei Consoli where they will spend the ten days leading up to the 15th.

It was all, to say the least, an experience.

Sunday morning in Serrazzano.