5 easy ways to winterize your home

Seal up those hidden leaks
One of the simplest ways to retain heat and reduce energy costs this winter is by installing proper weather-stripping and caulking around the house. According to Hydro One, up to 40 per cent of home heat loss in winter is due to air leakage, and if you added up all the cracks and leaks in the average Canadian home it would be like having a hole in your wall the size of a basketball. 
Invest in a programmable thermostat
It's wasteful to heat an empty house, so why not take advantage of a programmable thermostat? The David Suzuki Foundation recommends automatically lowering your household temperature while you sleep or are away at work, and bringing the heat back up when you wake or arrive home.
Add insulation
Adding extra insulation into your attic and crawl-spaces is another simple and effective way to reduce heating needs by up to 30 per cent
Tune-up your furnace and water heater
Now is also the time to check your furnace and water heater to make sure they are working at peak efficiency.
Mind your pipes and gutters
By making sure that your gutters are clean and pipes are protected, you can save yourself some major repair headaches down the road. Keeping your gutters free of leaves, sticks and other debris will help melting snow and ice to flow freely, and prevent ice dams that can cause water damage to your home's roof and walls.

free things to do and get, in Canada!

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1) Family golfing 
Kids golf for free during Take a Kid to the Course week in July, when 675 courses across Canada offer free golf and junior club rentals to children under 16 when they are accompanied by a paying adult.

2) Museum passes
You can borrow more than books from the library. In Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver, a valid library card allows patrons to take out a weeklong family pass for free admission to museums and other local attractions.

3) Home improvement workshop
Learn how to tackle your next DIY project—whether it's installing a faucet or building a wooden fence—at The Home Depots workshops. Kids aged four to 12 can also get in on the DIY fun with a monthly in-store craft activity. Register at homedepot.ca/workshops.

4) Run and walk club 
Keep up with the pace or set your own at Running Rooms free weekly Run Club, which offers practice walks and runs on Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings.
5) Fitness sessions 
Try a free one-hour yoga class (also available online), running club or other fitness program at Lululemon stores across the country.

6) Start stargazing 
Take advantage of free public telescope viewing nights at select observatories across Canada. Visit the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada website for more details.

7) Coin counters 
Don't pay to have your change counted by machines at the supermarket! Personal-banking customers at TD Canada Trust and Bank of Montreal can cash in using the free self-service coin counters at select locations.

8) Nutrition advice 
Improve your diet with the help of in-house dietitians at all Loblaws and Zehrslocations and select Real Canadian Superstore. Complimentary services include menu-planning advice, cooking demos and hands-on label-reading store tours.

9) Cooking class
Improve your culinary skills with free one-hour lessons at Williams-Sonoma. Bonus: You get to sample the dish you prepared in class!

10) DIY fun for kids
During Lowes Build and Grow Clinics, kids aged six to 10 can take home their own do-it-yourself woodworking project, a certificate, an apron and goggles. Clinics are held every other Saturday at 10 a.m. Register in store or at lowes.ca.

11) Family Bowling
Register at kidsbowlfree.com and your kids will receive two free games a day, all summer long, courtesy of participating bowling centres. Purchase of a family pass (for parents) is optional. Use the Canadian search feature on the site to find age restrictions and a participating alley near you.

12) Lego lesson
Free Lego! Yes, you read that right: Kids can take home a free mini model constructed during monthly builds at Lego stores or during Make n Take events at Toys "R" Us Canada across the country.

13) Outdoor tutorials 
Outdoor-recreation retailers MEC, Cabelas and Bass Pro Shops provide a variety of free in-store tutorials. Events are listed online.

14) Park visits 
Celebrate Canada Day (July 1) with free admission to the more than 200 national history sites, marine conservations areas and parks administered by Parks Canada.

15) Pet freebies
Register at mypuppy.ca or mykitten.ca to receive a free bag of Purina puppy or kitten food.

16) Tea-steep deal
Become a Frequent Steeper at Davids Tea to receive a free cup of tea at sign-up and on your birthday.

17) Slurpee special 
Celebrate 7-Eleven Day on July 11 with a free 12-ounce slurp. Participating stores across Canada serve the treat in special birthday cups while supplies last.

18) Coffee reward
Register a Starbucks card at starbucks.ca and receive a free birthday drink or treat.

19) Smoothie certificate
Join Booster Juice's Booster Nation 24 hours prior to your birthday for a free smoothie.

20) Language lessons  
Take "classes" whenever you choose by downloading audio lessons in more than 40 languages at openculture.com, or study grammar in 16 languages at duolingo.com.

21) Kids' eyeglasses
Each August, Loblaw Optical offers a free pair of eyeglasses (frames valued up to $29, with single-vision lenses) to children aged four to 10 with a prescription from within the past 90 days. Some restrictions apply. Visit loblaws.ca to find an optical location near you.

22) Creative inspiration
Want to try your hand at jewellery making or fine-tune your scrapbooking skills? Michaels two-hour intro classes provide expert instruction. (You provide your own supplies.)

23) Makeup samples
Become a Beauty Insider at Sephora to receive a birthday cosmetics gift—available any time during your birthday month—every year.

24) University education
Coursera.org offers 871 free online classes from top universities in dozens of disciplines, including law, art, biology and social sciences.

25) Birthday breakfast
Show a valid ID on your birthday and Dennys will treat you to a Grand Slam breakfast.

26) Tech tutorials
Both Apple and Microsoft stores offer free programming and workshops. Or keep the kids (aged 8 to 12) busy this summer at Apple Camp, a series of three-day workshops held in July at Apple store locations.

27) Family fishing 
Kids can fish without a licence, and adults can, too, during Family Fishing weekends (catchfishing.com) held in June and July. Beginners can download the free Catch Fishing booklet for tips.

28) Swim pass
Tim Hortons sponsors free swimming at pools in participating communities during March and summer breaks. Check timhortons.com for dates and locations.

29) Car seat installation
Receive hands-on instruction on how to properly install a childs car seat—from infant to booster—at Chevrolet Safe and Sure workshops offered in partnership with Parachute Canada. Check safeandsure.ca for courses in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, or find a free St. John Ambulance Car Seat Safety Clinic near you at sja.ca.

30) Favourite freebie sites
The best freebies go fast. These Canadian sites track the hottest offers so you dont miss out:

Current Issue of Sunday Times Canada

Current Issue of Sunday Times Canada Available!! Local Canadian News,Views,Local Columnist,Sports,Showbiz,Fashion,Politics and much more . Get your copy from neighbourhood community Store or visit www.sundaytimescanada.com

5 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Mississauga

Here are some random things about Mississauga that you probably didn't know 

Colonel Sanders (KFC) lived in MississaugaIn 1965, Sanders moved to Mississauga, Ontario to oversee his Canadian franchises and continue collecting franchise and appearance fees both in Canada and the U.S. Sanders bought and lived in a bungalow at Melton Drive in the Lakeview area of Mississauga from 1965 to 1980. The Colonel would often visit the KFC location at the bottom of Tomken and just sort of hang around.

TL Kennedy Secondary School Has Bomb Shelter

TL Kennedy was built right after the World War 2 in 1953. During that era it was mandatory for high school constructed in that time to have a bomb shelter which TLK rumoured to have had. The bomb shelter was told to be located in the basement by the office. This room was then became a rifle range in the late 50's and then an equipment and storage room for the defunded football team in the late 80’s.

There is an Elephant buried in Mississauga

There may be a forgotten story buried in a park in Mississauga. There is a simple note in a file that alludes to the remarkable story of Miles Park Farm, near Erindale. A.W. Miles, a Toronto undertaker, established a country home and private zoo in Mimico in 1912. In 1936, due to pressure from Mimico council, Miles sold his property and purchased over 200 acres in Toronto Township (northwest of the intersection of Fifth Line West and Dundas Street, just west of Erindale Village). By far the most popular tenant at the farm was Tootsie the elephant who originally came from Burma, and was very tame. Sadly, fire struck Miles Park Farm on Sunday, February 14, 1943 and 70 animals were lost, including Tootsie. But back to the note in the file: it recalls that Tootsie’s bones were buried on the property, and her "funeral" was attended by many saddened children from the area. Miles Park Farm remained in operation into the early 1950s. After it closed, the property was sold for development. Although we do not know where for certain, somewhere on the property the bones of Tootsie the elephant lie buried, possibly in modern Brookmede Park which is located on part of what was Miles Park Farm. Modern Dunwin Drive, as it leads north from Dundas Street, follows part of the former Miles Park Farm laneway.

Mississaugua Golf and Country Club spelled Mississauga wrong and kept itWhen the club was incorporated in 1906, its name was spelled “Mississauga” to reflect the Indian heritage associated with the property.  In 1913, the name was legally changed to “Mississaugua,” with a “u” inserted before the last letter, but for some unknown reason apart from one recorded instance, the original spelling continued.  In the late 1940s, the board resolved the apparent spelling conflict by directing that the 1913 spelling was correct.  

Mississauga is bigger than Vancouver, Detroit, Denver, Washington and BostonIt's common for cities to incorporate surrounding suburbs (much like Toronto does) to make their population sound bigger. The real population of a city is simple. It's the population of a city within its own borders. If that is the case, Mississauga (713,443) has a larger population than Vancouver (603, 502), Detroit (688,701), Denver (649.495), Washington (646,449) and Boston (645,966).

What's happening in real estate markets outside of Toronto and Vancouver?

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THE OTHER MARKETS

While most of the attention paid to house prices focuses on the big markets of Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary, there are other cities in Canada. Real estate reporter Tamsin McMahon looks at six smaller markets across the country that are being affected by changing economic conditions

St. John’s

It may come as a surprise to many Canadians that for several years the hottest resource economy in the country wasn’t Calgary, but St. John’s. Propelled by a boom in offshore oil development and billions in mining and infrastructure investments, the economy of Newfoundland and Labrador has grown roughly 50 per cent since 2000. Jobs and wage hikes quickly followed. Investors from other provinces and as far away as Ireland poured into the market, buying up dozens of homes at a time for rentals. Home prices boomed, more than doubling since 2000 and rising 25 per cent in one year through 2007 and 2008.

“It’s like Newfoundland had to catch up to the rest of Canada, but they did it in just 10 years,” says St. John’s real-estate broker Teri-Lynn Jones.

Such furious growth was bound to come to an end eventually. Softening prices for oil and other commodities has slowed the province’s economic growth. Rural areas outside St. John’s have seen the return of workers from Alberta. Economists are calling for the province to slip into recession this year. Unemployment hit 13.8 per cent in May, the highest level since 2010. Mines have closed, while the bulk of construction has finished on several major infrastructure projects, meaning less demand for construction workers. Several restaurants have shut down and the closure of Target and Future Shop have left an abundance of retail space.

Data are Newfoundland and Labrador.

The slowdown has effectively cooled the city’s overheated housing market. The volume of resale home sales across Newfoundland fell 5 per cent in May compared to a year earlier, while average prices dropped 4.6 per cent.

“The heat went out of the market,” says realtor Glenn Larkin. “Multiple offers have slowed down. We were down to where homes were selling in a week. Now we’ve gone back to a normal market, where you put a house for sale and 60-90 days later it sells.”

The resale market is being supported by first-time buyers, who make up about half of the St. John’s market, Ms. Jones said. Many have been able to find good jobs after graduating from university, helping to slow the outflow of young workers to other parts of Canada.

But the market is also grappling with a surplus of expensive, newly built homes aimed at move-up buyers, many started when property values were soaring. Builders have begun offering incentives to move a glut of new supply. “If you need to sell your current home first, don’t worry about it – the builder will buy it,” reads an ad for Southlands, a new development of executive homes.

Street scenes on Wyandotte Street in Windsor, Ont. Feb. 8, 2012. (Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail)

Windsor, Ont.

If Calgary’s housing market serves as a proxy for the health of the country’s resource industry, then Windsor’s real-estate market is perhaps the best gauge of the strength of Canadian manufacturing.

The Southwestern Ontario city’s workforce was hard-hit by the global financial crisis, which sent North American automakers scrambling for government bailouts. The economic downturn came on top of a steadily appreciating Canadian dollar that helped to bleed jobs to cheaper markets to the south. Windsor’s home prices took a similar beating, falling more than 6 per cent from 2006 to 2009, in what was already among the country’s cheapest housing markets.

These days Windsor appears to be in the midst of a remarkable turnaround. Home sales were up nearly 30 per cent in the first quarter of the year. Average resale prices are up 5 per cent from last June, making the city one of Canada’s hottest markets.

“Any decent home is selling fairly quickly and is getting multiple offers,” says Windsor real-estate broker Gary Barbesin. “A lot of them are going over the asking price.”

Windsor’s housing market is being helped by a trifecta of favourable economic developments: lower interest rates, cheaper oil prices and a falling loonie. The resurgent North American automotive market has also helped. Tool-and-die shops are staffing up and the local Chrysler assembly plant recently reopened after a major retooling.

Many of the workers in the skilled trades who had been sitting on the fence over fears their jobs could be cut or hours scaled back are starting to return to the market. “My clients that are working in the factories, it seems like they can get all the overtime they want,” says Windsor mortgage broker Brad Carr. “If you’ve got a skill or you’re an engineer, you can kind of write your own ticket right now.”

Mr. Carr has also seen an increase in out-of-town investors looking to buy property in what remains one of Canada’s most affordable urban markets.

Yet there are plenty of reasons to be cautious about whether the jump in home sales in Windsor is really a sign that the city’s economy is in the midst of a resurgence. The housing market has seen its share of false starts in the past. Commercial and industrial real-estate sales have picked up, Mr. Barbesin says, but not nearly at the same pace as the housing market, and the city still faces a glut of vacant office space. “It’s certainly not that more jobs have come into town,” he says.

Bank of Montreal senior economist Robert Kavcic points out that home listings have fallen to among the lowest in a decade. The shortage of homes for sale is helping to drive up resale prices.

Still, Mr. Carr thinks this time the housing market may have finally started to turn a corner. “Windsor went through its real-estate correction years ago and now I think we’re one of the safer markets in Canada,” he says.

A motorist passes houses in Squamish, B.C., on Sunday July 19, 2015.

Squamish, B.C.

When Matthew Spitzer bought his two-bedroom condo in Squamish, B.C., three years ago, the home had been in foreclosure for months and Mr. Spitzer snapped it up for a bargain. But as he found out when he sold his condo last month just days after putting it on the market, Squamish is quickly losing its reputation as the small, sleepy pit stop on the road between Vancouver and Whistler.

As detached homes in Vancouver skyrocket out of reach of most buyers, young families are venturing further afield in search of affordable housing. Many are making the drive north along the Sea to Sky Highway to Squamish.

Home sales in the community of nearly 18,000 were up 58 per cent in May compared to last year, the local real-estate board reported. Average resale prices in the community have jumped 10 per cent to nearly $450,000, while detached homes have soared more than 20 per cent. Much of that growth is being fuelled by buyers trading their condos in Vancouver for detached homes in Squamish.

In Valleycliffe, a family-friendly neighbourhood that’s at the first highway exit toward Vancouver, prices have soared by $100,000 in the last two months alone, says Squamish realtor Brian Loverin.

For an extra $40,000, Aaron Hall and his young family traded a townhouse in Burnaby for a 2,200-square-foot, four-bedroom house in Squamish with a view of the mountains and a swimming hole in the backyard. “It’s still affordable for a young family who doesn’t own anything to try to get into the market,” said Mr. Hall, whose children are 1 and 3.

His commute to Vancouver, where Mr. Hall works in the film industry and his wife Beki is a pharmacy technician, takes 40 minutes and is traffic-free. “It’s probably one of the nicest commutes in the world,” he says. “I literally get goosebumps driving home, with the sun setting over the islands and ocean.”

Upgrades to the Sea to Sky Highway for the 2010 Olympics and a new gondola that opened last year are attracting both commuters and tourists. Proposals for a new liquefied natural gas terminal and a four-season resort, while controversial, bring the promise of new jobs and more visitors.

Already the community is experiencing a building boom, including homes with Vancouver-style prices. In Crumpit Woods, a new subdivision marketed toward high-end buyers, builders are marketing homes with $1-million price tags.

All that change, coupled with a hot real-estate market, convinced Mr. Spitzer, 28, that it was time to move on. He recently bought a house in Agassiz, B.C., nearly three hours away. “I was able to get a three-bedroom with a yard for $300,000, and you really can’t find that here any more.”

Construction worker George Stanley lays down floors on a new condo development in Edmonton, Alberta, on Wednesday May 23, 2007. (John Ulan for The Globe and Mail)

Edmonton

Unlike its sister city, Calgary, Edmonton’s housing market hasn’t felt quite the same pinch from falling oil prices. Sales rose 2.4 per cent in June and prices were up 2 per cent from a year earlier.

Yet while home prices have so far avoided a crash, Edmonton has witnessed a different type of housing-market phenomenon this year: a boom in rental-apartment construction.

Developers began construction on nearly 4,300 multifamily homes in the first three months of the year, almost three times more than during the same period last year. By April, there were more than 2,600 rental apartments under construction in Edmonton. In total, the city is expected to see 10,000 new rental apartments and condos built this year and last.

Many were conceived years ago, when oil prices were high and Edmonton had one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country.

Between 2009 and 2014 the vacancy rate plunged from 4.9 per cent to just 1.7 per cent. That pushed up rents in Edmonton faster than any other city in Canada last year, real-estate brokerage Colliers International said, with average rents rising $89 each month. By late last year, the city was tied with Toronto as the country’s second-most expensive housing market, behind only Calgary and Vancouver.

“Last year I’d personally get phone calls from high-school [friends] I haven’t seen for over 30 some years, panicking to find apartments for their children in Calgary and Edmonton going into university,” Sam Kolias, CEO of Boardwalk Real Estate Investment Trust, a major Alberta landlord, told analysts in May.

Soaring rents caught the attention of institutional investors, particularly pension funds, many of whom were looking to bulk-up their rental portfolios. Land was cheaper in Edmonton than in Calgary and new developers rushed into the market, while others shelved plans to build condos and partnered with investors to build rentals instead.

There were nearly more than 2,200 new rentals built in the city last year, higher than in previous years but a small drop in the bucket of the city’s 67,000-unit rental-apartment universe, said Boardwalk president Rob Geremia. Rental construction can take decades before it turns a profit, so most landlords are in the market for the long-term, he says.

Still, the surge of new supply, coupled with the province’s economic slowdown, have taken the steam out of Edmonton’s rental market. The vacancy rate rose from 1.7 per cent last fall to 2.4 per cent today. Rental growth has slowed down and apartments are taking longer to fill. Boardwalk has begun offering incentives such as smaller security deposits and discounts off rent to attract new tenants, which has helped keep its occupancy rate in the city at 98 per cent.

“It’s real tough right now, but that’s life,” Mr. Geremia says. “You have to develop and you can’t always have a good time. The real question that we need to answer – and no one can – is how long oil prices will stay where they are.”

Ottawa

When Finance Minister Joe Oliver announced that the Harper Conservatives had balanced the federal budget for the first time in eight years, many economists and voters cheered. But budget cuts have been bad news for those looking to sell their homes in the national capital’s moribund housing market.

“It’s actually a bit of a conundrum,” Brian Johnston, chief operating officer of Mattamy Homes, one of the city’s biggest home builders, said in a May interview. “I think Ottawa is very much a one-horse town, the federal government, and the federal government is basically taking the view that we’re not going to allow government to grow.”

The federal public sector shed nearly 25,000 jobs between 2011 and April of last year, Treasury Board records show. The office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer has estimated Ottawa is poised to shed another 9,000 public-service jobs by 2017.

Many of those job cuts have been centred in Ottawa, helping to put a chill over the city’s housing market. New home sales plunged 25 per cent in May compared to a year earlier, according to building-industry analyst PMA Brethour Realty Group. Resale home prices have fallen more than 6 per cent since last August, although the market rebounded in May and June.

Public-sector relocations, which account for roughly 10 per cent of the city’s home-sales transactions, dried up last year, driven by fewer transfers in and out of the city for National Defence and RCMP employees, says realtor Gord McCormick. “Last year was a very tough year for the government relocation market and that definitely had an impact on us,” he says.

The city is also grappling with a surge in newly built condos that have been flooding the market, which has kept condo prices flat over the past year. Mr. McCormick estimates it would take more than a year to sell off all the condos now listed on the market.

Ottawa has witnessed the same condo boom being felt in cities like Toronto and Vancouver, but without the high levels of immigration to support it. Developers have since shifted plans to build smaller in order to appeal to a more price-conscious buyer.

Regina

When federal housing watchdog Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. warned that several Canadian housing markets were at risk of a correction, Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary weren’t on the list. But Regina was.

The city’s housing market has benefited enormously from soaring prices for oil, potash and other commodities, sailing through the global financial crisis comparatively unscathed. Prices leapt more than 50 per cent between October, 2006, and June, 2008, alone. Real-estate speculators moved in, snapping up derelict buildings in the city’s impoverished North Central neighbourhood by the dozen, often leaving them vacant while waiting for prices to keep on soaring. “I remember thinking at the time that these aren’t going to come back on the market at the same price,” says Regina real-estate broker Mike Duggleby.

That fuelled a spike in new construction, particularly among condos aimed at first-time buyers, many of which were originally planned during the boom years but came onto the market just as prices began slowing over the past few years.

The number of homes listed for sale has hit a 20-year high, says Gord Archibald, chief executive officer of the Association of Regina Realtors. Average home prices are around 10-per-cent lower than peak levels and have fallen 3 per cent since last June.

Regina’s economy has been hit by slumping prices for oil and potash. The city is home to a large refinery and international oilfield-services giant Halliburton Co. announced in February it was closing its Regina office.

That has hit the rental market particularly hard. Vacancy rates have jumped across Saskatchewan from 3.3 per cent last year to 5.6 per cent this year. For rental landlord Boardwalk Real Estate Investment Trust, first-quarter results in Regina “weren’t pretty,” said president Rob Geremia. “We’re now seeing pretty major corrections in Regina.”

Some think the market reaction is overwrought. Regina still boasts an enviable 4.6-per-cent unemployment rate, higher than in previous years but still stronger than many other Canadian markets.

Realtor James Wruth figures buyers have been scared off by the swift change in the market from bidding wars to a surplus of unsold listings. “The fact that buyers have plenty of homes to choose from, lower interest rates and lower prices, but still aren’t making an offer, makes me scratch my head sometimes,” he says.

Chart data sources: Canadian Real Estate Association, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver