CLOYNE, Ont.—The term “prepper” is not in every Canadian’s vocabulary. But when you pair it with “doomsday,” many people picture bomb shelters, canned goods, and post-apocalyptic fiction.
“I’m not a doomsday, apocalypse-type prepper,” said David Arama, as he sat in his lodge in Cloyne, a small village about three hours north of Toronto. A few paces away was the door to his concrete cellar stocked with food and water. He’s ready for almost anything, but not everything.
“To what level can I actually prepare and predict something that big?” Arama said. He and many other preppers are thinking more along the lines of extreme weather events, like the tornado that left a path of destruction in Tweed (about 40 minutes south of his home) two years ago.
“You’ve got to think of being prepared as just a common-sense thing,” Blackmore told The Epoch Times in an interview.
“If you’ve got insurance in case your house burns down, you’ve got insurance in case your car crashes, or you’ve got CAA in case your car breaks down. Well, having a little bit of extra stuff on hand is your insurance in case the power goes out for a week,” he said.
Blackmore lives in the rural town of Kawartha Lakes, Ont., and is prepared to be self-sufficient for about six months, he said.
Arama said he keeps enough food on hand for two years, and he’s set up to live off-grid.
Boris Milinkovich, who lives in downtown Toronto, told The Epoch Times he’s prepared to be self-sufficient for a week. He has a battery bank that can be recharged using solar power, has water stored up, and has the tools to capture rainwater and purify it.
Recent uncertainties in Canada and globally have driven more people to the Annual Prepper Meet in recent years, Blackmore said. The pandemic was the biggest driver.
“I make a point of asking people ‘what brought you here?’” he said. The typical answer, he said, is “COVID and the things that are going on. I don’t like what’s going on.”
“A lot of them are a broad cross-section of society too—fairly well-off executive-type people all the way down to, you know, your basic guy on the street,” Blackmore said.
Why People Prep
The specific unexpected events each prepper is most worried about differ. During the pandemic, some saw the empty store shelves and supply chain disruptions as a bad omen. Some lost trust in the government and the stability of society, Blackmore said.Blackmore himself got more serious about prepping after the Great Recession of 2008. He had already long maintained some level of preparedness; growing up in the Cold War era instilled in him a sense of pending doom, he said. And being raised in a rural area, loss of power or getting the car stuck in the snow were common occurrences.
“As young people, we always brought a little extra stuff, a blanket, extra boots, and maybe a little bit of something to eat, just in case,” he said. “I’m just kind of carrying it on in a little bit more depth.”
A potential economic collapse and a general sense of decline were common answers.
Some mentioned the Y2K scare, when people feared the digital world would collapse as computer time-counters turned from 1999 to the year 2000.
Some are worried about a nuclear attack, or nuclear plant accident if they live near one. Extreme weather events, wildfires, power outages, terrorist attacks, and electro-magnetic pulse attacks were other possibilities mentioned.
Some cited a traditional ethos of self-sufficiency. “I prepped before I got concerned. We call it homesteading,” one respondent said.
For Arama, it grew naturally out of an outdoorsy lifestyle. Being ready to camp in any weather isn’t so different from being a prepper, he said.
The trunk of his car is always packed with all the gear one might take on a long back-country camping trip. But the satellite phone and some other items give him away as someone a little more prepared than your average camper.
He pulled out his “bug out bag”—a term for a sort of survival kit with everything needed to make a rapid evacuation—and other supplies stashed in his car. Wool blankets and clothing, first aid supplies including antibiotics, fishing line, bear mace, tarps (a lighter-weight option for shelter than a full tent), heat packs, a compass, a tin can for boiling water to purify it, and more.
Arama grew up in Toronto, in a rough neighbourhood in North York. “Pretty much everything I saw was negative,” he said. “Rather than go and become a drug dealer … I kind of had a dream that someday I might do something better.”
Gordon Lightfoot’s music inspired in him an appreciation of Canada’s natural beauty. A Lightfoot CD sits at the top of a bin of discs in the passenger side of his car, beside the tangle of communications gear always at hand. “That'll keep me alive too during a worldwide apocalypse. Got to try to be happy,” he said.
He worked as a tree-planter in the 1980s—a job that includes living in a tent, working in all kinds of weather, and traversing rough terrain. That’s when the seeds of his future as a survivalist were planted.
“I can survive for a long time. I did a lot of survival training where I spent up to 60 days with nothing, just a knife and a tin can,” he said.
It takes a little suffering for people to realize how important it is to prepare, Arama said. When you experience a disaster, when you see what it’s like to go a couple days without water, you’re more likely to think prepping is a good idea, he said.
What to Have at the Ready
The preppers have some advice for Canadians who may not wish to become full-on preppers, but who would like to be more resilient if the power goes out for an extended time or some unexpected event happens.Arama and Milinkovich have both written books on the topic. Arama’s is titled “How to Start a Fire With Water.” Milinkovich operates a personal security consulting firm called True North Tradecraft and his book is titled “True North Tradecraft’s Disaster Preparedness Guide.”
“You can go from stuff that you can get at the dollar store to extreme levels costing millions of dollars,” Milinkovich said. “I mean, there’s no real ceiling for it.”
A good place to start is with extra blankets or sleeping bags, he said. Many people already have those, but warmer materials, such as wool, are best.
“We base everything in survival on what we call the rule of threes,” Arama said. “You can survive for three weeks without food, generally speaking. You can survive for three days without water, and three hours if your body temperature is compromised with hypothermia or heat stroke.”
Shelter, heating, and water are thus key, while food is further down the list, though obviously it becomes critical at some point.
Wood or pellet stoves are good alternative heat sources, where possible. Propane heaters and the like need to be used with caution, Arama said, because people have been known to suffer from carbon monoxide poisoning by using them indoors.
It’s easier for people in rural areas to get water if the town water is cut off for some reason, Arama said. They can likely get water from a natural body and purify it using standard methods campers use, he said, whereas purifying water from some canal or other source in the city is more complicated given additional contaminants. Having a stock of drinking water is a good idea.
Milinkovich suggests having a way to collect rainwater from a balcony or elsewhere, which can then be more easily purified.
Arama suggests having a plan for escape from the city, such as an RV, cottage, or the home of a friend or relative.
‘Just a Little Bit More’
While some preppers have whole communities with livestock and crops ready to be self-sufficient, even having a little more of your usual food helps. A barbecue in the backyard or a camping stove are good things to have on hand, Milinkovich said.For Blackmore, it’s about having “just a little bit more of everything.” He has his extra rice, powdered milk, a freezer stocked with meat, and more.
Blackmore noted that a local prepper group uses the emblem of the ant and the grasshopper.
One of Aesop’s Fables, it’s the story of an ant that spends the summer storing away food for the winter while the grasshopper stores none. When winter comes, the grasshopper is left hungry.
Preppers are sometimes stereotyped as being “loonies” obsessed with the apocalypse, Blackmore said, but noted that in most cases it’s people simply wanting to be prepared for any eventuality.
“Most of us are just normal folks that just have a little bit of extra stuff kicking around and think about things a little more,” he said. “You know the saying, ‘hope for the best, prepare for the worst,’ right?”
