Anglais
Finding Tino: After decades of searching, a sister pays tribute to the brother she never met

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“I was right behind him all the time,” she says. “But I could never grasp onto him.”
Crivellaro was just a few months old when she was adopted in 1959, growing up in a large and loving Italian family in Toronto. Her mother ran the household while her father, who spoke little English, held a steady if gruelling job at the Southam printing press on Weston Rd.
“When he was breathing at night, mom could smell the ink,” Crivellaro recalls. “We got the fruits of his labour. He was a wonderful, quiet, gentle man.” He died in 1997.
Crivellaro says the only thing driving her search for her birth family was innate curiosity. At 19, she secretly drove herself to the Catholic Children’s Aid Society on Maitland St.
She remembers feeling excited to learn more about her background, but not anxious: whatever happened, she already had an adoring family. She listened politely to the case worker rattle off nonidentifying information about her birth mother — that she had been Catholic, of Irish and Ukrainian heritage, and liked dancing.
As she got up to leave, the case worker stopped her.
“One more thing,” she said. “You have a brother.”
“I just sat back down,” Crivellaro says. “That was the biggest shocker.”
But it wasn’t until 1995 that the children’s aid society connected Crivellaro to her birth mother, Janet, who had given birth to Tino at 17 and to Crivellaro 16 months later. By then, a tumultuous relationship with Tino and Crivellaro’s father was collapsing. While pregnant, she decided to give Crivellaro up for adoption.
Before she did, she named her Tina — hoping it might provide her daughter a clue to one day find her brother. Crivellaro’s family later named her Joanne.
Tino remained with his birth family, first with his uncle and later with his father, who declined to speak to the Star when reached by phone. Tino’s childhood, according to family and an ex-wife tracked down by Crivellaro, was an unhappy and difficult one.
“He had always said, why did I get this life,” Crivellaro says they told her.
At 21, Crivellaro learned, Tino left home for the United States and from there, his life moved increasingly off grid. The only trail Crivellaro could follow was a sprinkling of arrest warrants for minor offences. A search of U.S. public records places Tino in Texas and Florida; in a homeless shelter in Utah; a trailer park in Las Vegas; of no fixed address in North Carolina.
That knowledge changed nothing for Crivellaro.
“So what if he was a drifter,” she says. “He was a human being.”
As she searched, she pieced together a picture of a “wonderful, kind” person who went to church regularly and loved helping the elderly.
One of the few traces of Tino is a 2005 USA Today article that describes him as a “thin but muscular man with a bushy moustache and calloused palms” who hitchhiked for nine days to do construction work in storm-swept Louisiana, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Crivellaro tracked down the contractor who hired him.
“He came, he helped, and he left,” the contractor told her. “Let me tell you, he was a hell of a guy. He was honest, he just wanted to get work.”
Around the same time, Crivellaro also found some Berlingieris on Facebook, leading her to Tino’s uncle Enzo, who had briefly taken care of him as a child. The family had strained relations with Crivellaro’s birth father, but had never given up looking for Tino — or their long-lost niece.
“He was at the end of the street in his scooter waiting for me to come around the corner,” says Crivellaro of the first time she met Enzo.
The family “just wanted crumbs, whatever we could have,” of Tino, Crivellaro says.
Enzo and his family saw Tino in 1995, when he had briefly returned to Canada to get dental work done. On the trip, he gave his Aunt Nina a gold bracelet with his name engraved on it and asked her to keep it for him until he came home again.
He never did.
In 2013, Tino’s arrest records suddenly vanished online and a scant obituary popped up on a website in Nevada.
Unsure the information was accurate, his uncle’s family went looking for his death certificate. The documents they found showed Tino died a ward of the state in Pittsfield, Mass., that year on May 27 of respiratory arrest and renal failure. He was 55.
Crivellaro called the funeral home, desperate for anything her brother may have left behind.
“They said, ‘he was just a street guy,’ ” she recalls. “I said, ‘you know what, he had a loving family in Canada.’”
“I just felt heartbroken because I never got to meet him.”
The family didn’t tell Enzo, who died in 2014, about Tino’s death.
“It would have just broke his heart,” says Crivellaro.
An adopted child’s search for their birth family can be a “can of worms,” Crivellaro says, a journey that can be many times diverted and cut short by dead ends. Her own journey has left her marvelling at her good fortune at being placed in a warm and stable home.
“I got really lucky. Tino not so much,” she says. “I had more guidance. I had a lot more love.”
She finds herself wondering what the scanty details she’s learned about Tino mean, like the barbed wire he had tattooed around his wrists.
“Was he in prison, or was he in prison,” she says. “Is that how he felt?”
But the ties forged with Tino’s family have also been a joyful novelty.
“I look at my husband and he has five sisters and a brother,” Crivellaro says. “I always say, ‘look at you guys, your feet are all the same.’ It’s so interesting to me because I’ve never had that.”
Until now.
“When we get together and start talking, we start saying the same things,” she says of the Berlingieris. She keeps in regular contact with her “salt of the earth” four cousins and aunt, who gave her Tino’s gold bracelet to remember him by.
“Just the other night I was over and I’m staring at (my cousin) saying, ‘you have the same teeth as me!’ ”
Crivellaro also stays in touch with Janet, who she says has “always been wonderful” to her and supportive of her adoptive family.
“She’s always said, ‘your mother is your mother.’ ”
For years, Crivellaro kept this new layer of her life from her parents, not wanting them to feel that she loved them “any less by doing this.”
But when her mother died earlier this year, the time seemed right for a more public homage to Tino.
Crivellaro’s birth family called the funeral home in Pittsfield and found that, by chance, his ashes were still there — even though they are usually only kept for a year when unclaimed by loved ones.
This fall, the family repatriated them to Canada and buried them in the same plot as Tino’s uncle Enzo at Bathurst St. and Finch Ave.
“We got a beautiful urn,” Crivellaro says. “There’s a beautiful picture of him when he was 21, the year he started looking for me.”
It’s the same photo used in Tino’s full obituary, finally published this year to pay tribute to a “kind and spiritual man.”
“Tino, you talked about one day finding your sister Joanne and although you never got to meet her, she found us and so began a beautiful connection,” the obituary reads.
“Life came around full circle.”
Sara Mojtehedzadeh is a Toronto-based reporter covering labour issues. Follow her on Twitter: @saramojtehedz
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Anglais
‘Business as usual’ for Dorel Industries after terminating go-private deal

MONTREAL — Dorel Industries Inc. says it will continue to pursue its business strategy going forward after terminating an agreement to go private after discussions with shareholders.
« Moving ahead. Business as usual, » a spokesman for the company said in an email on Monday.
A group led by Cerberus Capital Management had previously agreed to buy outstanding shares of Dorel for $16 apiece, except for shares owned by the family that controls the company’s multiple-voting shares.
But Dorel chief executive Martin Schwartz said the Montreal-based maker of car seats, strollers, bicycles and home furniture pulled the plug on a deal on the eve of Tuesday’s special meeting after reviewing votes from shareholders.
“Independent shareholders have clearly expressed their confidence in Dorel’s future and the greater potential for Dorel as a public entity, » he said in a news release.
Dorel’s board of directors, with Martin Schwartz, Alan Schwartz, Jeffrey Schwartz and Jeff Segel recused, unanimously approved the deal’s termination upon the recommendation of a special committee.
The transaction required approval by two-thirds of the votes cast, and more than 50 per cent of the votes cast by non-family shareholders.
Schwartz said enhancing shareholder value remains a top priority while it stays focused on growing its brands, which include Schwinn and Mongoose bikes, Safety 1st-brand car seats and DHP Furniture.
Dorel said the move to end the go-private deal was mutual, despite the funds’ increased purchase price offer earlier this year.
It said there is no break fee applicable in this case.
Montreal-based investment firm Letko, Brosseau & Associates Inc. and San Diego’s Brandes Investment Partners LP, which together control more than 19 per cent of Dorel’s outstanding class B subordinate shares voiced their opposition to the amended offer, which was increased from the initial Nov. 2 offer of $14.50 per share.
« We believe that several minority shareholders shared our opinion, » said Letko vice-president Stephane Lebrun, during a phone interview.
« We are confident of the long-term potential of the company and we have confidence in the managers in place.”

Anglais
Pandemic funds helping Montreal businesses build for a better tomorrow

Many entrepreneurs have had to tap into government loans during the pandemic, at first just to survive, but now some are using the money to better prepare their businesses for the post-COVID future.
One of those businesses is Del Friscos, a popular family restaurant in Dollard-des-Ormeaux that, like many Montreal-area restaurants, has had to adapt from a sit-down establishment to one that takes orders online for takeout or delivery.
“It was hard going from totally in-house seating,” said Del Friscos co-owner Terry Konstas. “We didn’t have an in-house delivery system, which we quickly added. There were so many of our employees that were laid off that wanted to work so we adapted to a delivery system and added platforms like Uber and DoorDash.”
Helping them through the transition were emergency grants and low-interest loans from the federal and provincial governments, some of which are directly administered by PME MTL, a non-profit business-development organization established to assist the island’s small and medium-sized businesses.
Konstas said he had never even heard of PME MTL until a customer told him about them and when he got in touch, he discovered there were many government programs available to help his business get through the downturn and build for the future. “They’ve been very helpful right from day one,” said Konstas.
“We used some of the funds to catch up on our suppliers and our rents, the part that wasn’t covered from the federal side, and we used some of it for our new virtual concepts,” he said, referring to a virtual kitchen model which the restaurant has since adopted.
The virtual kitchen lets them create completely different menu items from the casual American Italian dishes that Del Friscos is known for and market them under different restaurant brand names. Under the Prasinó Soup & Salad banner, they sell healthy Greek options and their Stallone’s Sub Shop brand offers hearty sandwiches, yet the food from both is created in the same Del Friscos kitchen.

Anglais
Downtown Montreal office, retail vacancies continue to rise

Some of downtown Montreal’s key economic indicators are heading in the wrong direction.
Office and retail vacancies in the city’s central core continued to climb in the fourth quarter of 2020, according to a quarterly report released Thursday by the Urban Development Institute of Quebec and the Montréal Centre-Ville merchants association. The report, whose first edition was published in October, aims to paint a socio-economic picture of the downtown area.
The survey also found office space available for sublet had increased during the fourth quarter, which may foreshadow even more vacancies when leases expire. On the residential front, condo sales fell as new listings soared — a sign that the downtown area may be losing some of its appeal to homeowners.
“It’s impossible not to be preoccupied by the rapid increase in office vacancies,” Jean-Marc Fournier, the former Quebec politician who now heads the UDI, said Thursday in an interview.
Still, with COVID-19 vaccinations set to accelerate in the coming months, “the economic picture is bound to improve,” he said. “People will start returning downtown. It’s much too early to say the office market is going to disappear.”
Public health measures implemented since the start of the pandemic almost a year ago — such as caps on office capacity — have deprived downtown Montreal of more than 500,000 workers and students. A mere 4,163 university and CEGEP students attended in-person classes in the second quarter, the most recent period for which figures are available. Border closures and travel restrictions have also brought tourism to a standstill, hurting hotels and thousands of local businesses.
Seventy per cent of downtown workers carried out their professional activities at home more than three days a week during the fourth quarter, the report said, citing an online survey of 1,000 Montreal-area residents conducted last month.

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