Giving Lifts

Retired trucker Margaret Foster Hyde pairs long-haul drivers with dogs in need of a ride.

- Katherine Laidlaw

WHEN CHRISTA PARE’S father, Jim, died of cancer in November 2017, finding a home for Tundra became a priority. The five-year-old dog, a husky-Lab mix with boundless enthusiasm and a thick coat of white fur speckled with auburn, had been Jim’s constant companion. Pare had arranged for two of Jim’s good friends to adopt the dog, but there was a snag: the couple lived in Thunder Bay, a 13-hour drive from the Pare home in Renfrew, Ont., 95 kilometres outside of Ottawa. It would cost more than $800 to fly Tundra north, and Pare, a radio host, was already logging extra time in the booth to pay for funeral costs. “Tundra’s future was weighing heavily on my shoulders,” she says now.