Nicole died on April 5th 2024. This is a copy of the words I spoke at her Celebration of Life on April 13th.

If you or anyone you know struggle with mental health issues, I strongly encourage you to reach out to a mental health professional in your region or contact a service like better help. If you are having suicidal thoughts, there is help available, including calling or texting 988 in Canada and the US.

For those who don’t know me, I’m Stéphane Boisvert. I was Nicole’s ex-husband.

We are here to celebrate and remember Nicole’s life. I want to share some pieces of her life with you so that you may also remember them. Remembering her is how we will ensure her spirit lives on in our hearts.

The first time I met Nicole, I introduced myself. Hey I’m Stéphane. She replied: “I know.” I thought my reputation preceded me. She continued: “We went skiing together last week”.
I tried to backpedal, I mentioned she looked different without the snowsuit… She eventually forgave me.

Folks often say variety is the spice of life. But, Nicole, she was more of a salt and pepper kinda gal. She knew what she liked. She knew which video games she liked. She played thousands of hours of Civilization 4, a game that we started playing together in 2006 and that she never stopped playing.

She loved Ice Caps made with Chocolate milk, a good steak, a very specific can of Cambell’s soup when she was sick, and crispy bacon. Bacon so crispy in fact, that you’d need to ask for it “nearly burnt” at a restaurant for them to get it just right. 

I once bought 50 packs of bacon when they were on clearance for a dollar each. We put them in the freezer and we ate 2 to 3 of them a week. That is until one day her doctor asked her if she had any idea why her cholesterol had jumped so much. The doctor didn’t understand why. Nicole exercised so much. So we had to cut it down to one pack a week going forward.

But beneath Nicole’s wit, her charm, her authenticity and her love of life’s simple pleasures, and board game abilities, Nicole was fighting battles of her own.

Her journey on this earth was marked by profound struggles with depression and PTSD. She was often in pain. A pain, she faced courageously, tenaciously, but one that she rarely showed to the world. 

Some got a glimpse of it, one time at one of our monthly friend gatherings, we were answering deep questions picked randomly. The one she received said “What would you go back and tell your 15 year old self”. She replied, “It never get better”. 

She was in pain, but she often used that pain to help others. 

She would often encourage and support others on their mental health journeys. Giving them hope, even when she may not have had some herself. 

She would take on a part of their pain, she would take it on herself. So that their load was lighter. 

She is now free of her pain. But her pain, it is now our pain to carry. 

All of us here, we now carry her pain, so that she may be freed of it. 

I’ll be honest, I hate fucking this pain. I wish we didn’t have to carry it. But we must. We must and we will.

Nicole loved children. Especially Mika and her nieces and nephews Marco, Mila, Lily, Robert, and Cedric. And so people were often surprised she didn’t want children. And while the excuses of wanting to be able to sleep in, have a social life, or how diapers were really gross were the usual answers she gave. In truth, she knew the risks. She knew that if a parent has chronic depression, there is an over 40% chance that their child would also have it. 

She feared most being asked “Does it ever get better” and having to answer “it never gets better”. She feared most that other kids would have to carry that same pain that she carried. She wanted to spare as many children as possible from enduring that pain.

Nicole is no longer here to do this. 

In her absence, it is up to us to take this on. 

Let us honour her memory, by not only carrying her pain, but carrying that of others. By continuing to advocate for mental health awareness and support, by reaching out to those in need, particularly youth and kids. By sharing our personal stories of struggle, by acknowledging that sometimes the battles we wage within ourselves are too overwhelming to bear alone, and advocating so that everyone can have access to professional help. 

We can carry this pain by being the kind of people that kids can turn to, and by supporting Kids Help Phone, as Nicole did every year, so that they may have a guiding light, illuminating their paths when the road ahead is dark, just as Nicole illuminated our paths.

As we say goodbye to Nicole today, let us carry forward her legacy. In doing so, we will ensure that while Nicole, Nicole, you will be deeply missed, but your impact, your impact on all of us here today and all those you touched, directly and indirectly, that impact, it will always be remembered.

Thank you

I just had my first winter with a heat pump, I saved ~$2800 and reduced my houses’s green house gas emissions by over 85%

Last year I paid 3281$ for heating oil.

This year I paid 427$ more than last year for electricity during the winter months.

Last year I created 4.6 Tonnes of GHG. This year I created 0.6 Tonne of GHG.

I did this with the Canada Greener Homes Grant and loans. You basically get an audit and a follow up that you get back on your taxes. The audit tells you what you should do to improve the house. I got a heat pump, I might get solar panels. You can also apply for a loan, from 5k to 40k over 10 years at 0% interest to pay for the upgrades. On top of that, you get up to 5k$ straight-up cash in grants for your improvements.

A good heat pump and installation will cost you from ~$6 000-$20 000. As a sidenote, a heat pump also acts as an AC during the summer. So it replaces your furnace and your AC.

If you do the math. You can pretty much make money in the first year by switching to a heat pump. Different heat pumps are eligible for different grant levels, I’d strongly recommend you only get the ones that are eligible for the $5000 grant. Those will start at around $9000. If you do, and you’re using oil like me, you’ll have the system paid out and you’ll be making a profit starting year 2. That’s pretty good considering you’re also having a huge impact on your greenhouse gas emissions.

I got mine from Ray at Ross Heating and Cooling. And despite them not having a web site (seriously they should get on that) he was really great. No BS salesperson shit. He knew his stuff and he did the install himself. Great work and the results speak for themselves.

Ross Heating and Cooling.
(613) 203-3778
https://www.facebook.com/people/Ross-Heating-Cooling-Solutions/100076444361031/

This relates to my previous post: The Bureaucracy Will Learn the Wrong Lesson – Why Government Digital is still so shitty in Canada.

So the question now really is, “how to respond to this problem”, or sadly, “how to respond to this news article”. The problem is that there’s the easy way and the hard way. And the hard way would mean prioritizing this issue. Something no one really wants to do right now, I mean, honestly ask yourself if (as of right now, January 2021) you want the gov to be spending time fixing it’s problems with bureaucracy or would you rather they just focus 100% on COVID and COVID related stuff. Even someone as passionate about “Digital Transformation” as myself doesn’t really think it’s the best of times to address this. All that to say, I won’t judge people for taking the easy way out, you could even say I’ll try to have compassion.

The easy way out is basically to just do nothing. Not a real nothing, regardless there will be dozens’ of meetings, probably memo’s going out to Assistant Deputy Minister’s and what not, heck the union might get involved in the HR meetings about the implications of various headers in the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector. But in the end, nothing will be done, except maybe having an all staff meeting where folks are reminded of their obligations and how their actions outside of their work may have an impact on the goals they are trying to achieve, etc etc.

Like most other things in government and in many other institutions with a high percentage of Bullshit Jobs, a lot of time will be spent but nothing real or tangible will come of it.

And now, since it’s very easy to give out advice when you have little to no context and also have no accountability for what you post because you’re a random person on the internet, I’m going to do just that and give my unsolicited advice.

Take the punch.

That’s it. Just take responsibility and ownership for it and explain how you’re going to fix it.

It’s easy to say, and theoretically, it would be easy to do. If there was someone there to take the punch. But that’s one of the biggest problem with digital government, there’s no one ministry and now it’s only made much worse without a Minister for Digital Government. There’s no one where the buck stops.

Taking a punch isn’t all that bad.

No one, ever

There are so many disparate departments, each with their own “mandate”, each with their own problems and there isn’t a single authority who can take, or more accurately, demand accountability on these things.

Whatever department this site was for (I’m guessing ESDC since it’s Service Canada related) won’t want to take any responsibility for it. They may say they are following the guidelines put in place by another department (Probably finger pointing at TBS who would in turn point to many disparate documents on “digital first”). A whole bunch of people will chime in to say that they are working on a “Center for Excellence” on Digital Innovation that would solve this. Folks will argue and point fingers, but no one will, or even can, take responsibility and then actually go thru with it to make concrete change.

So what’s left? The only thing that’s left to fight for if you can’t have accountability, is protect visibility.

The only way that there will be real accountability and visibility is if these things stay in the open and are talked about openly. So in a sense, you may not be able to take responsibility and accountability for changing everything since no one has that power. But many people have the power to stand up to keep even a slight glimmer of visibility and transparency protected. For many folks, that’s the only real way they can follow the guidelines of the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector of Respect for Democracy, Respect for People, Integrity, Stewardship, and Excellence.

You may not be able to take the punch and take ownership of fixing the problem, but you can probably take the punch for supporting visibility into the problem.

An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, And Silence