FEBRUARY 15, 2025

Dear reader,

I didn’t grow up in a Tim Hortons family. We were figure skaters, not hockey players, and our small town was too small for a franchise anyhow. My post-rink treat—watery hot chocolate—was courtesy of the arena snack bar. While I have no emotional or cultural attachment to Tims, Timmies or Timmy Ho’s, I have come to accept, as an adult who regularly travels the length of the 401, that the company and its roadside injection of caffeine and carbs are inescapable.

Mentions of “double double” and “roll up the rim” may not get my blood pumping, but they’re enough to inspire a swell of patriotism in many Canadian hearts, especially in the era of Trump tariffs. As the Buy Canadian movement has gained momentum, so have Google searches about Tim Hortons’ ownership (it’s complicated: Canada, the US and Brazil all have their fingers in the cruller) and the company’s race to switch to Canadian suppliers for its US-sourced items.

The current frenzy might have been unimaginable to the chain’s co-founders, Ron Joyce and Tim Horton, when they launched their business in Hamilton in 1964, but the men were no strangers to controversy. As Stephen Brunt wrote in his 2007 deep dive, “The Untold Tim Hortons Story,” the company has always been about a lot more than maple leafs and maple doughnuts.

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—Stéphanie Verge, features editor

The dead hockey player, his drugged-out wife, their disenfranchised children and the ex-cop who made
$700 million

BY STEPHEN BRUNT | MAY 1, 2007

Picking up Tims on a cold winter morning is for many Canadians an act of self-definition. But the story of how a humble doughnut shop became a touchstone of Canadian identity is far from simple. Its founders—Ron Joyce, a Nova Scotia boy turned Hamilton cop, and Tim Horton, a famous hockey player who grew up dirt poor in northern Ontario—were friends and partners, their families so close that two of their children married each other. Three decades after Horton’s death in a car crash, those left—the fabulously rich Joyce, the four Horton daughters fighting their own personal and financial battles, and the ghosts of the hockey player and his wife who haunted them still—were the dysfunctional dynasty behind the familiar marquee. As journalist Stephen Brunt wrote so eloquently, what’s comfort food for the rest of us was torment for them, a reminder of what was and, worst of all, a suggestion of what might have been.

In the latest issue: what it’s like to be Scottie Barnes, the face of the Raptors—and the team’s best chance of salvation. Plus, the scandal that tore the equestrian world apart, the battle over the Bloor Street bike lanes, a ranking of the city’s best new pasta dishes, and more. Still not receiving Toronto Life at home? Subscribe today.

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