A Canadian judge recently canceled a marriage annulment after discovering that the “wife” who testified during court proceedings had been an imposter.

Warren and Gina Zant married in the tropical Cook Islands on Nov. 27, 1999, but split two decades later, filing a separation agreement that stated that the ex-wife would receive survivor benefits under Warren Zant’s Operating Engineers’ Pension Plan. However, last year, the husband filed a bizarre case with the British Columbia Supreme Court in Kamloops seeking the annulment of his former marriage, based on a testimony of his ex-wife, who claimed that she had been fully aware that their marriage had not been legally binding. Only the woman claiming to be Gina Zant was apparently an imposter.

Almost a year ago, Justice Dennis Hori approved Warren Zant’s request to have the marriage annulled, which meant the loss of his ex-wife’s interest in the man’s pension plan, after hearing the testimonies of two people who identified themselves via “remote audio connection” as Warren and Gina Zant. However, the court would later hear from Gina Zant, who appeared distraught with the annulment, claiming to have never been involved with the case at all.

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A 21-year-old woman has lost mobility in her right arm following a botched blood donation in which a nurse allegedly drew blood from one of her arteries instead of a vein.

Gabriela Ekman, of Ontario, Canada, had just turned 17 when she decided to donate blood for the first time in her life. She hoped it would make a difference, maybe even save someone’s life, but she had no idea it would actually change her life for the worse. When she went to a blood drive hosted by Canadian Blood Services four years ago, she didn’t know what to expect, but when the the phlebotomist who drew her blood let out a “whoops” when she stung her arm with a needle, she knew something wasn’t right. But she didn’t say anything, not even when the staff commented on how oxygenated her blood seemed, an indication that it may have come from an artery, instead of a vein. By the time she realized something was definitely wrong, it was too late…

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Two Canadian men wagered a whopping $517,000 on three simple games of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Now a court ruled that the loser doesn’t have to pay up.

It’s unclear how Edmund Mark Hooper and Michel Primeau ended up playing a simple hand game for over half a million dollars in January 2011, but what we do know is that the former lost at least two of the three games they played, and had to take out a mortgage on his house to pay off the debt.  Can you imagine telling your wife you have to mortgage the house because you lost over $500,000 at rock, paper, scissors? Luckily for him, a court cancelled the mortgage contract in 2017, on grounds that the amount wagered was excessive.

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When riding an escalator, it’s recommended that you keep a tight grip on the handrail, just to be safe. But what if you choose to disregard that advice? Well, one Canadian woman has been fighting a 10-year-long court battle for her right to ride escalators hands-free.

In 2009, Bela Kosoian was riding an escalator at a subway station in the city of Laval when a police officer told her to respect a pictogram on the escalator that said “Caution, hold the handrail”, in French. The Montreal-area woman refused to obey the officer’s command and instead started arguing with him. She ended up being detained and getting a $100 ticket for refusing to hold the rail and another $320 for failing to identify herself. She was also handcuffed and detained for 30 minutes.

Kosoian was acquitted of her “crimes” in municipal court in 2012, and then filed her own lawsuit against the city, arguing that she was not obligated to hold the escalator handrail or identify herself in front of the police officer. She has so far lost twice in Quebec courts, but refused to give up, and this Tuesday her unique case was heard by the Supreme Court of Canada.

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For the past 17 years, the people of St. Mary’s, a small town in Canada’s Newfoundland, have had to put up with the pungent smell of fermented seafood sauce at an abandoned nearby factory. In the summer, the stench gets so bad that some residents bar their homes and leave to stay with their relative, because it’s so hard to breathe.

In 1990, a Vietnamese immigrant opened the Atlantic Seafood Sauce factory near St. Mary’s, with the goal of producing a kind of fermented seafood sauce that is very popular in Vietnamese cuisine. Things were off to a good start, but just 4 years down the line, the owner, a man named Sanh Go, started complaining that Canadian regulations were killing his business. In the year 2000, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency inspected the factory and concluded that the sauce was produced in unsanitary conditions. Two years later, the Atlantic Seafood Sauce factory closed for good, but its giant vats of fermenting fish parts and seafood sauce have remained there ever since, causing a big stink.

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After waiting for local authorities to fix a massive pothole for several months, residents of  Poplar Plain Crescent, in Toronto, decided to make the best of it by transforming the hole into a community tomato garden.

It’s unclear who came up with the idea of plating tomato seeds into the neglected pothole earlier this summer, but as the plants sprouted and flourished, neighborhood residents started caring for them, even installing stakes to keep them from falling over. Photos of the fully grown tomato plants featuring dozens of juicy green tomatoes are a testament to both the locals care and sense of humour, but also of the indifference of local authorities.

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A Canadian man who claims he identifies as 100% male legally changed the gender on his identification documents to female in order to save over $1,000 on car insurance.

The Alberta man, identified only as David to protect him against possible legal consequences, wanted to buy a brand new car and knew that his insurance costs would be high, due to his age (early 20s) as well as a collision and a ticket or two he had on his record. Still, the $4,500 a year quotation he got from an insurance company was even higher than he had anticipated, so he started thinking of ways of bringing the costs down. At one point, he asked the insurer what the cost would be for a woman in his exact situation and learned that his annual bill would be about $1,100 lower. That got him thinking…

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A 19-year-old French woman visiting her mother in British Columbia, Canada, learned the hard way that going for a jog near the Canadian-US border is not a very good idea.

Cedella Roman, who lives in France, was visiting her mother in North Delta, British Columbia, last month, when she decided to go for an evening run on the coast of White Rock, in Western Canada. Cedella was admiring the breathtaking scenery, so even though she knew she was close to the border with the United States, she claims she didn’t realize that she accidentally crossed into the neighboring country. The young jogger only realized her mistake when she was stopped by a couple of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, shortly after unknowingly  crossing the border.

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A Canadian man has been involved in a legal battle with the Nova Scotia Department of Transportation after having his vanity license plate revoked for featuring a “socially unacceptable slogan”. The problem is that that slogan is also the man’s family name.

In December of 2016, Lorne Grabher, of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, was informed that his license plate – which read ‘GRABHER’ – would be canceled because people could “misinterpret it as a socially unacceptable slogan”. The Department of Transportation had apparently received complaints from “some individuals” who considered the plate “misogynistic and promoting violence against women”, and had decided to revoke it. At the time, the phrase “grab her” had taken a political significance, following the leak of a 2005 tape of US President Donald Trump making his now famous statement about grabbing women by the… Well, you know.

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A family in Forest Hill, Toronto, has taken their neighbors to court for copying the design of their multi-million dollar house when renovating their property, thus decreasing the value of their own home. They are asking for $2.5 million in damages.

It turns out you can’t just copy design elements of a house you like without suffering the consequences. Barbara Ann and Eric Kirshenblatt learned that the hard way three years ago, when they were taken to court by their neighbors, Jason and Jodi Chapnick, whose home they had allegedly used as inspiration when renovating their own property. The Chapnicks claimed that the defendants had fixed up their house to look “strikingly similar” to theirs, including using matching stonework the same shade of blue. They were asking for $1.5 million in damages, $20,000 in statutory copyright damages, $1 million in punitive damages, and for the defendants to change the look of their house.

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It was September of 2004, when Mary Grams, of Alberta, Canada, lost her diamond-encrusted engagement ring, while working on her family farm. She spent days looking for it, but to no avail. Last week, nearly 13 years later, her daughter in law plucked a weird-looking carrot from the garden, with a diamond ring tightly wrapped around it.

“I went to the garden for something and I saw this long weed. For some reason, I picked it up and it must have caught on something and pulled [the ring] off,” 84-year-old Mary Grams recalls about the day she lost her engagement ring, in 2004. She had worn it on her finger since 1951, a year before she married her husband, Norman. “We looked high and low on our hands and knees. We couldn’t find it. I thought for sure either they rototilled it or something happened to it.”

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A number of people looking to buy hairless Sphynx cats for cheap fell victim to a scammer who meticulously shaves regular kittens to make them look exactly like the exotic breed.

Genuine Sphynx cats usually sell for $1,000 or more, so when Shayla Bastarache, from Alberta, Canada, saw an ad for a Sphynx kitten for just $650, last month, she thought it was too good a deal to pass up. There was no photo attached to the ad, but the price was so enticing that she agreed to meet the seller in a gas station parking lot an hour north of Calgary, at night. She handed him the money and received two hairless kittens, one for herself and one for a friend. Bastarache says she only realized that she had been scammed two weeks later, when both felines grew a thick coat and were revealed to be regular house cats. The cat lover, who owns two genuine Sphynx cats – for one of which she had paid $1,500 – said she was amazed by how thoroughly the animals had been shaved. “I don’t know how she did it,” Bastarche told reporters.

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A group of Buddhist monks from the Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society, on Prince Edward Island, recently bought around 600 pounds of live lobsters from various restaurants and released them into the ocean.

600 pounds of lucky lobsters were spared the boiling cooking pot last Saturday when Buddhist monks in Little Sands bought as many of them as they could find around Prince Edward island with the purpose of setting them free. Enlightened Dan, of the Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society, said the purpose of this unique mission was not to challenge people’s dietary options, but merely to send a message of compassion. “We respect everyone’s dietary choice, so we’re not doing this to convert everybody to be vegetarians or vegans,” he said. This whole purpose for us is to cultivate this compassion toward others. It doesn’t have to be lobsters, it can be worms, flies, any animals, drive slower so we don’t run over little critters on the street.”

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Fed up of DIY haircuts, the residents of Norman Wells, an isolated town in northern Canada, are desperately looking for a professional hairdresser. They’ve been cutting their own hair for the past two years and frankly, they’ve had enough of it.

Located near the southern edge of the Arctic Circle, with a population of about 800 people, Norman Wells has always been a small community with more pressing small-town problems. Food products need to be flown in, prices are higher, and sometimes the residents need to go without supplies because the planes don’t come in.

But they never realised that something like the lack of professional hairdressing could be a nightmare until their hairstylist moved out due to the lack of housing in town. “It’s been a long struggle for us,” Nicky Richards, the town’s economic development officer in charge of the hairdresser recruitment effort, told The Guardian. “We just don’t have anyone. It’s something that people down south don’t ever think about because they don’t have to worry about it.”

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In a bid to find a remedy for bedbugs, Canadian scientist Regine Gries has spent nearly a decade studying the parasitic creatures. In fact, she is so dedicated to the project that she actually allows thousands of hungry bedbugs feast off her own blood! Thankfully, her efforts have paid off – she and her husband Gerhard have perfected a chemical that is capable of luring bedbugs away from mattresses.

Regine and Gerhard are both biologists at Simon Fraser University, just outside of Vancouver, in British Columbia. Their lab features a Plexiglass-walled colony with about 5,000 bedbug residents. The bugs live inside glass jars – about 200 to a jar – each covered with a fine mesh that’s held in place using rubber bands. And once a month for the past nine years, Regine has rolled up her sleeves, inverted the jars on to her arms, and allowed the bedbugs to reach through the mesh to bite into her skin!

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