Two years ago, Hassan Rasouli checked into Sunnybrook hospital to have a brain tumour removed, fell into a coma, and provoked a Supreme Court battle over who decides to pull the plug. Then, one day, he awoke
For the past two years, the Rasouli family has visited Hassan daily at the Sunnybrook ICU (Image: Christopher Wahl)
Early in the summer of 2010, Hassan Rasouli, a 59-year-old engineer, had a problem with his right ear. He noticed sounds were coming in muffled and indistinct, as if through a ball of cotton. By August, his hearing loss was getting worse. The ear was slightly numb, too, and at times Rasouli caught himself feeling dizzy. He didn’t think much of it. He had moved from Ishfahan, Iran, to Toronto just four months earlier with his wife, Parichehr Salasel, a family doctor, their 27-year-old daughter, Mojgan, and their 22-year-old son, Mehran. They’d come to Canada with the capacity for risk particular to the new immigrant, the kind that leads someone to abandon a life of familiar comforts for an uncertain world where the possibilities might open up a little wider. They were excited about creating a new life.
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The day after George W. Bush was re-elected president, the American novelist Richard Ford got in his car and drove across the border to Saskatchewan from Montana. He did not come in search of political asylum—something many American liberal intellectuals loudly and half-jokingly yearned for that day—but for a flu shot, which his U.S. health care provider had deemed him “not old enough or sick enough to merit.”
Six months ago, Ontarians had barely heard of Tim Hudak. Now he’s roaring toward victory. How do you plan to overcome his lead in the polls?
In this election campaign, some things are a lot easier for the Conservatives than for the Liberals—not the least of which being that they don’t have to worry about surrounding Harper with previous Tory prime ministers for campaign help. Brian Mulroney is still thought to be 
