- [Announcer] Tonight on WPBS Weekly Inside the Stories.

A new show is on its way to WPBS.

The creators hail from Canada.

Learn more about this unique documentary series that peers into small unknown museums on our back roads.

And we take you inside the news room of the Hill Times for update on Parliament Hill, with journalist Charelle Evelyn and Peter Mazereeuw.

Also, have you seen this piece of history?

Discover its origins that date back to 1847.

Your stories, your region coming up right now on WPBS Weekly Inside the Stories.

(bright music) - [Announcer] WPBS Weekly Inside the Stories is brought to you by the Daisy Marquis Jones Foundation.

The Watertown Oswego Small Business Development Center.

Carthage Savings.

CSX.

The Oswego County Community Foundation at the Central New York Community Foundation.

The Richard S. Shineman Foundation.

And the Badenhausen Legacy Fund at the Northern New York Community Foundation.

- Good Tuesday evening, everyone, and welcome to this edition of WPBS Weekly Inside the Stories.

I'm Stephfond Brunson.

Every good show on television has to start somewhere.

Tonight, we give you a sneak peak of Back Road Museums.

A brand new concept slated to air next month on WPBS.

The title tells its tale, but here to tell you more about Back Road museums is the show's executive producer and our very own Joleene DesRosiers.

(bright music) (people talk indistinctly) - [Joleene] The making of a new television concept takes months, sometimes years, of pre-production prep work that most viewers aren't aware of.

Such is the case for the creators of a fresh idea coming to WPBS.

It's called Back Road Museums.

The concept.

- Our job is to kind of identify smaller museums that are off the beaten path that are... People are gonna find interesting.

Our elevator pitch is it's diners, drive-ins and dives for people who like museums and history.

- [Joleene] So museums on the back roads, the little guys, the ones that miss the spotlight, but deserve it as much as the big guys.

It was an idea that was borne during a trip Tim and his wife took to a back road museum a few years back.

We were in Kingston, Ontario and there was a prison museum in Kingston.

It was just a small house, and it had a lot of really interesting displays and I was there for, at least about a good 45 minutes to an hour in this museum and I felt I got more out of that museum than I did the other ones because it was more intimate, the subject was a little bit more focused.

I took my time reading kind of like the little stories that were in the exhibits and stuff like that and I thought, you know, I got just as much enjoyment out of this little museum, which was free, than I did at the MET.

I mean, you know, they both have separate meanings of what they're supposed to be and I thought this would be a really great show.

Again, it popped into my mind like a diners, drive-ins and dives where, you know, people who are interested in museums or history would drive by this museum and never give it another look.

And so that's how I kind of came to be.

- [Producer] Copy.

- [Male Producer] Okay, that's good, I can hear you.

- [Joleene] And so the journey began.

Tim, together with producers Ed Blomley and Michael Walker, began scouting, writing and building the concept of a potential series.

- We usually go in and we do... We do a pre-scout and we talk to the curators and the curators kind of give us a tour and then we specifically want one or two items that have unique backstory to either the artist or the area or you know, the specific museum and tell that story.

So we get... Like, we were at the Frederic Remington Museum in Ogdensburg, New York, and there's a little known painting that he has and there's this giant moose head in the hall, and there was a connection between that painting and the moose head and that's the story that we told.

- How does this program differ from other programs that feature museums like this?

- Well, again, I think we're kinda focusing on the smaller museums, and giving them, you know, their day in the spotlight.

There are a lot of very good museum shows out there.

Mysteries of the Museums and stuff like that, but they tend to be at the major museums.

They tend to be at the MET or the Lourve, or the Guggenheim, wherever.

And this one is... You know, this show's kind of like if you're driving down the road and you see that road sign, you know, Ontario Regiment Museum on the 401 and you're always wondering like, I wonder what that museum's about.

And that's what we're trying to do.

We're trying to get the museums that are, I think, interesting, that are important to local history.

That are important to the country's history but just seem to get lost because they're off the beaten path.

They're on some of the back roads of Canada and America.

- [Joleene] By focusing on one or two unique pieces with interesting back stories, the team helps to shed light on overlooked bits of history and art, ultimately pulling in more folks to the small iconic galleries.

- We're looking to do a pilot for WPBS in Watertown, probably in the next month or so, and then we're shopping it around to TV Ontario and places like that, and some streaming services.

So you know, it's just one of those...

I think we're a victim of COVID where we were moving along, had some good momentum, people were interested and then everything shut down, so we're pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps and starting over again.

- [Joleene] The first episode of Back Road Museums featuring the Frederic Remington Museum in Ogdensburg, is slated to air this June.

In this mean time, keep your eyes peeled on all back roads.

For WPBS Weekly, I'm Joleene DesRosiers.

- Tonight, we take you inside the news room of the Hill Times on Parliament Hill.

WPBS is proud to partner with this prestigious publication so that we can bring you the latest information from the national capital.

Here are Hill Times journalists, Peter Mazereeuw and Charelle Evelyn, with the latest.

(bright music) - Hello, everyone.

I'm Peter Mazereeuw.

- And I'm Charelle Evelyn.

Welcome back to the Hill Times office here in Ottawa.

So it is a busy season in Canadian federal politics right now.

There is a brand new budget to implement, and vicious greenhouse gas emissions reduction plan to roll out, and a wild legislative season ahead.

Peter, where should we begin?

- Let's start with the budget.

Finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, released the government's annual budget back on April 7th.

Now this included about $60 billion in new spending over the next five years.

That money is going towards housing, dental care, helping indigenous people, the military, attracting investment, and a new carbon capture tax credit.

We'll come back to that later.

It also included about $25 billion in projected new government revenues over the next five years, so that includes phasing out the government's spending plans on COVID release faster than anticipated, a new tax on banks, as well as closing commonly exploited tax loopholes.

But releasing a budget is one thing.

Implementing it is another.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So the budget bill itself won't be so difficult to get, you know, over and done with because of a deal that the liberals forged with the NBP back in March, a supply in confidence agreement.

This means that the next four budgets are going to pass without the government falling, but actually selling the budget is gonna be something else because there's a lot of spending, as Peter just laid out.

But there isn't a lot of short-term relief for people amid high inflation.

Now the Bank of Canada, it's going to keep raising the key interest rate over the course of the year, but economists say that that's not necessarily enough to cool things down, not when we are still dealing with global supply chain issues caused by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

And speaking of the war, $8 billion in new money for our military in this budget.

But the National Defense doesn't necessarily have the greatest track record in getting this money out the door.

Not when there is a less than efficient procurement system and a long-standing culture crisis within the institution that is making it really difficult for people to want to join up.

Finally, jurisdiction, health care, housing, infrastructure.

These are things that the feds can do by themselves.

The province is not necessarily inclined to help, not when they have their own election seasons around the corner, like in Ontario and Quebec.

So that's a lot of things for a government to deal with, just the budget.

- That's right and that's not the only one.

It also has an ambitious plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 40% by year 2030.

This is the first of the government's climate targets on the way to 2050, when it says it wants Canada to have a net zero emissions economy.

Now to say that this is ambitious is an understatement.

Canada has never really counted its emissions before and it's not really good at meetings its climate targets if you look back at history either, so to get there, the government is betting big on a transition to electric vehicles across the country, on that carbon capture tax credit that I mentioned before, helping to reduce emissions of the oil and gas sector, and on its carbon pricing system.

The price of carbon emissions under that system is said to more than triple by the year 2030.

So to help things along, the government has attached more than $9 billion to this plan that's due to roll out sometime between now and 2030.

To get the emissions down in time though, the private sector has to start moving fast, getting some of these projects started so that they'll be done early enough to make a difference.

And the governments gotta help with that.

- Yeah, and while all that's going on, we're also entering what's called Silly Season here in Parliament Hill.

That means it is the legislative crunch time.

So the government has proposed or already tabled a suite of legislation, and some of this will do things like bring online streaming services like Netflix and Disney Plus under the Broadcasting Act, and have them be regulated by the CRTC.

There's another set of proposals that would make tech giants like Google and Facebook and they would have to pony up and pay news publishers for distributing and sharing their content on their platforms.

Speaking of the environmental plans, there's the long promised Just Transition Bill.

This was supposed to materialize in the last parliament and it's supposed to help workers adapt to this new Net Zero Emissions Economy.

There's also the bills that would do things like keep Quebec rioting static while the rioting boundaries are redrawn.

There's changes to the official languages act, changes to the criminal code to scrap a bunch of mandatory minimum sentences, and another set of rules that would set up standards for when order guards can search through your cellphone or your laptop when you're crossing the border.

So there's only so much cooperation that the liberals are gonna have with the NDP for all the things that are not budget bills, and the conservatives, they're always foiling for a fight, so debates and committee meetings throughout the spring session are going to be not necessarily smooth sailing, as the government tries to get all of these bills through and done before both the House and Senate rise in June.

- Yeah, and that's more than enough to keep decision makers in Ottawa busy for the next few months.

Until next time, I'm Peter Mazereeuw.

- And I'm Charelle Evelyn.

See you then.

- Rock Island Lighthouse sits atop the Saint Lawrence River in the Thousand Islands.

At 50 feet high, this short but mighty historic beacon is highlighted by other historic structures.

Its story begins in 1847.

(bright music) (horn honks) (light piano music) - [Narrator] Rock Island Lighthouse was built to mark one of the narrowest and most dangerous points on the Saint Lawrence River.

The first lighthouse on the island was constructed in 1847 and was a combination keepers' house and tower.

In 1882, the combination building was replaced by two separate structures.

A conical iron tower was erected at the center of the island.

This lighthouse in the middle of the island was sometimes difficult to see.

When a three-masted schooner and a large steamboat sank within a year of each other after hitting the shoal off Rock Island, the tower was raised five feet.

Eventually, a new lighthouse was constructed in 1903.

This time at the end of the pier stretching into the river.

The iron lantern rim of the old light was moved to the new one.

- The tower is approximately 40 feet from the walkway to the platform.

There's three landings, roughly 15 stairs to each landing, a spiral staircase.

Now the upper half or the very top of the lighthouse, there's a small ladder that has about eight steps to take you into that, up into the very top.

There's a light still in the tower, it works very much like a street light.

At home, it comes on at dark and goes off during the day.

- [Narrator] In 1853, former pirate Bill Johnston was appointed Keeper.

Johnston was on the losing side during the 1838 Patriot War, an unsuccessful four-day attempt by a group of Canadians and Americans to take over Fort Wellington near Prescott, Ontario from the British.

Johnston led a raiding party that burned the ship Sir Robert Peel just off the shore of Rock Island.

As a result, Johnston was convicted, but later pardoned by President Harrison.

He kept the light until 1861.

- Not only did the keeper maintain the lighthouse, which was a full-time job in itself.

This was always, also, excuse me, a buoy station.

The buoys were pulled out of the river every year, but the buoys would be brought here and that was part of the keeper's duties as he would clean them, repair them, paint them and prepare them for next season.

And they'd be maintained, they'd be stored here on the island until the following spring when the buoys were picked up again and put back in place.

- [Narrator] Rock Island Light is only light on Saint Lawrence seaway that retains the tower and all of its auxiliary structures.

The fieldstone smokehouse is from the 1847 lighthouse period.

The generator house was built in 1900 and the boat house built in 1920.

These buildings along with the carpenter shop and the keeper's house built in 1882 are an accurate picture of maritime life on the river during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The lighthouse was decommissioned in 1955.

New York state took ownership of the island in 1977 and after an intensive restoration project, the Thousand Islands region of the office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation opened the lighthouse to the public as a state park in June of 2013.

The park is open during daylight hours and docking is available.

- We are opened from Memorial Day 'til mid-September.

And when you come visit the lighthouse, you can actually go into the keeper's house and see where the people had lived when they lived here and you can actually go into the top of the lighthouse and see what it was like to be in the top of the lighthouse.

I hope to see people visiting my Rock Island.

We enjoy it out here and we'd love to have you.

- [Narrator] Today, Rock Island Light is still operational, guiding ships along the seaway.

- Next up, music.

This week, as part of a special series funded by Brasher Falls' Dr. Dorothea Susan Badenhausen's legacy, we introduce you to classical guitarist Douglas Rubio.

This talented musician and professor is a solo recitalist and chamber musician.

He is also a massive fan of the Beatles and teaches a class on their style of music.

Produced by WPBS director of production, Tracy Duflo, here's more on this eclectic guitarist.

- I grew up in Southern California, but where people think of it as being sunshine and beach, I grew up in a mountain resort, and so there was a lot more snow than we get in the north country there, and went to college at the University of California-Irvine and then grad school for my masters and doctorate at the University of Southern California.

The first time I ever saw a classical guitar was on television, I think on the Ed Sullivan Show, and there was just something about it that just captivated me and at the time, my parents were thinking of moving to Spain for a few years so my father could take a job and they said I could take classical guitar lessons if we moved to Spain.

But even before I started taking lessons, it was just a real puzzle.

I remember once sitting in my uncle's small bedroom while he was away one day, and he had a guitar he said I could play and I picked it up and here was this mystery of strings and notes and things, and I didn't know a thing about it but I thought one of these days, I'm going to unlock this mystery, and has it quite happened totally yet, because it's a very complex instrument, but I think I'm well on my way by now (laughs).

I love teaching.

I love working with students at this age group, young adults, and to see them come into the program as freshmen where they're just really, even though they're technically adults, they're still boys and girls, and then in those four years to see their development, not just musical development of course but just their personal development to graduate and now they're men and women and I really love that about my job.

So I think I have the perfect job.

I get to deal with the greatest music ever written.

I get to deal with guitar.

And they also let me teach courses in the music of the Beatles, which is my second love after the guitar.

There are many students these days who are very excited to find out that we have a course on the Beatles, and sometimes I teach it for non-music majors as a general education course and other times I teach it for music majors as an upper division music history course.

So they can take a class in Beethoven or Bach or the Beatles.

- And these guys up here now are... Have their arms out.

Does that mean anything to you guys?

And if I find when I teach this online, students will often tell me that their parents are sneaking onto the website that we use and reading all of my materials and kinda watching the class over their kids' shoulders 'cause they're so interested also.

Only now that I've gotten older at this, sometimes they tell me it's the grandparents who are doing that further than the parents.

I perform in a number of different ways.

A lot of what I do is just solo classical guitar.

I suppose people think of classical guitar and they think of it mostly as a solo, unaccompanied instrument.

Kind of like a piano soloist or something, but I happen to play a lot of chamber music as well with other instruments.

Oh, like last semester, I played a recital of clarinet and guitar music with one of my colleagues here at Crane.

And my wife is an outstanding flutist and so we play a lot of flute and guitar music and we're known as the Rubio Duo.

We've been playing together since before we got married, so.

But also with a lot of other instrumentalists and singers as well.

Classical guitar is one of the great instruments in terms of repertoire because we have repertoire going all the way back from the Renaissance up to the present day.

So some of my composers that I like, the English Elizabethan composer, John Dowland, is outstanding, but of course the biggest of all is Bach.

He composed for an instrument called the lute, which is very similar to the guitar and so, of all the real major composers in classical music, he's the one who has composed music that we can legitimately call our own.

The piece I'll be playing today is not actually a guitar piece.

It's a piano piece by a Spanish composer named Issac Albeniz.

And Albeniz was a huge fan of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, and so tried to write in that very European style, but there was another Spanish musicologist who convinced him to try to write music that was more Spanish and so he switched and started writing very Spanish music, primarily for unaccompanied piano.

But if you're going to write Spanish music, you're going to be incorporating the sounds of Spain, which is the sounds of the guitars.

So much of his music is very guitar-like, and when we take it from piano and arrange it for the guitar, it sounds very much like it was intended for that instrument.

("Asturias (Leyenda)") - That does it for us this Tuesday evening.

Join us next week for a fresh look inside the stories.

We'll take you to Downtown Kingston, where one non-profit is spooning up goodness for communities in need.

And meet flutist Brian Dubar.

This SUNY Postdam assistant professor is breaking barriers with his latest project that includes a solo flute concerto by a Black composer.

Also, we continue to take you on a virtual tour of the iconic lighthouses in the region.

Tune in next week for a peak at Sister Island and the Galloo Island Lighthouse.

Meantime, if you have a story idea you'd like to see us explore or you're a poet or a musician and would like to be featured, email us at WPBS Weekly at wpbsweekly@wpbstv.org.

Until then, goodnight.

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("Asturias (Leyenda)")