Shaun Newman Podcast - #1109 - Marcel Rainville

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Marcel Rainville is the co-owner and hands-on operator of Dinosaur Valley Mini Golf & Josephine’s Vegetables in the Chelmsford area of Greater Sudbury, Ontario. Together with his wife Josephine (Josee), he designed, financed, and built the unique attraction from scratch, opening it in 1998 with seven creative steel-based mini-golf courses featuring large dinosaur and dragon sculptures. The site is dedicated to the memory of their son and to cancer families, and it earned Ontario’s inaugural Tourism Innovation Award in 2003.Cornerstone Forum 26’https://shaunnewmanpodcast.substack.com/Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

This is Brett Weinstein. This is Tom Lomago. This is Bruce Party. This is Alex Krenner. Hey, this is Brad Wall. This is Dr. Pierre-Core. Hi, this is Frank Paredi. This is Daniel Smith.

This is James Lindsay. This is Vance Crow and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy, what are we at? The Wednesday. So happy hump day. Well, oh, goodness. Now Faisal knows how the sausage you made.

It's tomorrow's Wednesday's episode, Faisal. Come on. Happy Wednesday. Don't listen to Faisal in the background, folks. When it comes to things going on today in society, and I always turn you back to precious metals. I'm talking silver-gold bull. Common friend of mine and Faisal's. I'm sitting in Fisles' house if you hadn't caught on to that here near Toronto.

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They ship right to your doorstep. and Faisal was just telling me he is in the Bitcoin guy. He's firmly in the camp of precious metals. So maybe we'll get into that when I sit with him. That'll be a couple days from now when you get to finally hear it. Bow Valley Credit Union, I was just talking to not only Brett but Nick. And of course, when those two are in the same room, Cornerstone Forum comes up because they're both back title sponsors of the Cornerstone Forum 27, May, to be exact.

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Zane and Brian. And, well, one of the things that's, they do is performance upgrades and the suburban that I'm driving is loud. You see it coming from a mile away. Who am I kidding? You hear it coming from a mile away, maybe 10 miles away. And one of the things Zane and Brian can do for you is, of course, exhaust upgrades. They can also make you more fuel efficient in times like today where gas is just a touch expensive. You can find them at Zeebs, ZEEBS.ca. That's zeebs.ca. Now let's get on to that Tale of the tape. Today's guest is the owner of Dinosaur Valley mini golf.

I'm talking about Marcel Rainville. So buckle up. Here we go. Where are we even at? My wife told us we're going for a little pit stop with the kids and somehow we roll into your mini golf and it's been a treat. So for the audience back in Alberta but elsewhere, where exactly are you located? Okay, I'm located.

It's actually the way they're. Amalgamated Greater Sudbury. It's the geographic center of, it's a rural area, but it's a geographic center of a city. The city has 330 lakes, so it's very

widespread. It takes two hours to cross one way and an hour and a half to cross the other way, and we're pretty well in the center of it. Okay. And yeah, so my wife and I designed And a mini-golf, it was, we had four children at the time, but if we took them out for mini-golf, it was boring because it was all made for kids.

So we decided to design a mini-golf that was, yeah, we designed it for adults. It's the only one of its kind ever built, okay? So we incorporated art. It's all made out of steel. And, yeah, people, adults. and you're at even playing field, even though with your children. And you have 63 holes here? Yeah, 63 holes, yeah.

So 45 are mini golf and 18 are pool putt. It's something else we invented. Pool putt. So like pool tables? Yeah, you play nine tables rather than nine balls. And you play with a pool tube, but with a golf ball. And you hit each other. and yeah, so it's a race to the whole,

but you hit each other to stop everybody from getting in first. Sounds like a fun game. Yeah, it is, yeah, yeah. But most people have never heard of it. It doesn't exist anywhere in the world. So you are a creative man then, or your wife is? Oh, my wife, yeah, my wife had ideas right out of it. In fact, she started the relief carving on pumpkins

before we ever built the mini-golf. we took a wood carving course and it was pumpkin time. We used to do like 20 pumpkins in our driveway and she said, oh, don't cut right through. Use the carving knives and you can get a lot more detail. And if you clean it, go inside it'll show through. So that was her idea. And we did that.

I opened the door 11 at night and my, there was neighbors in the driveway taking pictures. after the kids were all done Halloween. And they shared that, and this went through half the world now. This relief carving of pumpkins. Relief carving. Yeah, I'll show you pictures after. I'll show you what it looks like.

Sure. How did you meet your wife? When I took my pilot's license up in London, Ontario. Okay. She was one of the students there. And we had a... second date, Valentine's Day, we were engaged in April Fool's and married in September. And she was an industrial design student. So in fact, she came up with the idea of open concept

housing. And it was rejected at the time. First, they didn't want women in the, in the, they didn't want women in architecture and also the idea was too wild open concept housing. So if you look at our house here that we built back in 82, it was, it's the upstairs and downstairs, more than half the houses one room. So, yeah, that's where we met and we, yeah, so we didn't date very long and we're engaged, six weeks. I feel like you got customers, Marcel. I'll pause for a second so you can help.

Okay. All right, we only finished nine holes, but we lost our ball. Yes, yes. You grab other balls and you go down. Yeah, yeah. So that way, yeah, just grab a new ball. Let's fine. You're a first I've done it.

I've been having a lot of fun on this road trip by doing interviews. As people are, well, I got to walk a mine, and now I'm sitting here in a mini-putt golf shop, although different than any mini-putt I've ever been to. And so regardless, for the audience, you're along for a journey here. You said something to me when I was walking, when I first came in, you asked how far I'd come from. I said, Alberta, and you said, we're with you. And I chuckled because I've been going across all of Northern Ontario, and I haven't found that sentiment.

I thought I would, it being rural Ontario for the most part. I've found a lot more liberal, probably voting people than I thought. And when I heard it here, I was like, that's interesting because I've been waiting for somebody to go, oh, Alberta. Yeah, we're with you. Because one of the questions I've been asking everybody is, what do you think about Alberta independence? I didn't grow up in the time of knowing a whole lot about Quebec and their independence bids. Now as I get older, I started to do a little research. I've interviewed people from Quebec who have been around that time.

So now with Alberta doing it and having a referendum, I'm curious what other provinces, other people think. And you're the first person to go on my entire journey so far, go, Alberta, we're with you. And I thought I would see that a few more times than I have. Yes, well, the trouble is our democracy used to work because what we got, basically the United States was the first real democracy ever to exist. and they gave us a watered-down version just so that the people way back 100 some years ago would not go and join to the States.

So they gave us a watered-down version, and it used to work because Canada was half-rule and half-urban. Now they've done away, basically done away with democracy, because what's happening now is that we have, have almost no representation because we have no Senate. Okay, our Senate is elected by the majority. There's a lot of land in Canada, and we need representation for right now what we have in Canada, our democracy, they've done away with it. What they've done is now we have urban rule. Okay, so for all of Ontario, we have 11 representatives. There's like 80 in greater Toronto. You're talking MPs?

MPs, yes. Yes, MPs. And now, well, what they did is they, that's why they let so many people in Canada come in just before the census. Yeah, that's okay. So what they did is they packed as many people in Canada raising the price of housing, causing a problem for people who want to buy housing. They packed them in there because the Prime Minister knew that the census was just coming. So then he can put, because the way Canada works is, suppose I build a city. And as soon as I have 100,000 people, even if there's only 10,000 Canadian citizens, I get an MP.

So as many people, that's why I answered the census there and it was saying, oh, if there's anybody visiting, anybody in your house, mention them in there. Because the more people that you can mention, the more MPs they get. And that's where their vote is on the liberal side. How do you fix Canada? Well, we need an elected Senate and we need so many per province or territory. and that will equalize the urban rule that so if they want to pass something that just has something to do with Toronto well it has to go through the Senate and it will be a real Senate. Let me ask you a better question. Can we fix Canada? Because I hear, well, this is how you do it.

But every time I search out away Marcel, it's like that's almost next to impossible. I don't believe in impossible. but it feels like it's next to impossible. Is there a way to fix Canada? Well, we have to change the system, but right now we can't do it because the liberals are in power and they're control of the Senate because whoever's in power

puts the people that they want in the Senate. So we don't have a... We have more customers coming and I'm going to lose you all over again to more people coming in. Are lots of rural Ontarians think like you or are you an anomaly? More so of anomaly,

but this year, I guess people are getting fed up. So in, I'm in a nickel belt ward and we elected the first conservative in 158 years. We had never had one before. Okay?

So this is, yeah, so this is hopefully it'll have a change with most likely not because a lot of people don't want to be citizens. They just like even if they are citizens

we have a lot of people that are just I can't think of the word they're sorry. They're not participating in their dependents and not citizens. They just think that the government is going to provide everything

and that's been tried in countries for years and like for and it's never worked once. Where did you learn all this? Are you a student of history or did something happen in life where you started paying attention? Oh, no, I've had a lot of problem. And when we built this place, we had political interference

because they think government should own everything. Even a mini-putt? Yes, yes, yes. We had, and I've got it on paper, so if it ever came to the problem. So along the process of trying to open something that's, you know, A ton of fun for adults, kids. The government, open your eyes of what they're capable of doing. Yes, yes, that's right.

And I've also seen, also, we, back in 1982, we decided to go no herbicide. So we got political interference for that. You're talking about, sorry, I brought up your mini putt and you're talking about your vegetables? Well, yeah, my wife had started that because she was raised in the city and she didn't know. yeah she didn't know what was involved in that so eventually I closed my welding business

to help her so we could have more children because she says I was gone too much I ran the business on the fourth year it just got too busy and I didn't want to start expanding it was mobile welding and it's hard to

train people for that and yeah so yeah she talked me into to just helping her. And we had three more children in the next three years. Well, congrats on that. Before, like, I don't want to hold your customers out. So I guess my one final question for you,

if you had a message for Albertans, what would you say to Albertans who are listening? We love you. Or I do. Okay, we, we, it's hard to say. It's discouraging for them. But, you know, it's refreshing when we go there that people understand common sense.

Right. So I enjoyed my time there when I did go visit. I was there for three weeks, three years ago. And it was nice talking. Do you with Alberta independence, are you like they should do it or are you against it? Well, for my benefit, I don't want them to go. For their benefit, I'm sure somebody would want them. Do you think it might be a way to reconfigure the structure of Canada if Alberta left, them leaving, they could still come back in at some point?

Well, because I've got drip. No, I think it would, it would collapse, but we'd be stuck in very hard socialism here. In Ontario. Yeah, yeah. I think that because like the states they

yeah well like the reason the reason Donald Trump says the things he says is because even if I was an MP it would and I'd have to be high up there to be an MP and I'd have to like I'd have to be

eye up in in so long as to change anything and it would still take 20 years So the reason Donald Trump says the things he does is because he scares them and then they move. That's the only way to get them to do anything, right? It's even like the Greenland issue. If he didn't do something,

like if it takes 20 years, China will own that way before that. Okay, so that's what he does. Now, if he doesn't want Canada, if he had Canada, So it would be, he would never get another Republican elected in the United States. Well, I keep talking to you all day long. But, Marce, you got more customers again. So I'll let you go back to the customers. Thanks for doing this.

Okay. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Because now we're back and I'm just going to let Marcel explain it as he goes. Because I'm like, you might as well, I'm like, I feel bad because you have, you're so busy in there. And I can see customers coming. You have a unique sense about you. where it's like nothing else matters in the world but what's going on right here.

So I appreciate that. Thank you. Yes. Thank you very much. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm just taking you through the dinosaurs here. Yeah. Yeah.

So that one's a big dragonfly and then there's a... But you were explaining how your wife went in and didn't have a name for it. Oh, yes. And she goes, well, could you make me... Yeah. And so we welded all these giant dinosaurs that look unreal. Yeah. And, you know, like you have this giant dinosaurs.

course. And I haven't built one since she passed away because I used to build them for her. Yes. Oh, no, she did too bad. Yeah. Oh, sorry to hear that. So we were married for 44 years. Okay. And in 44 years of marriage, what's the best piece of advice you can give a married man? Oh, you have a best of a, well, you've got to be first thing, you've got to be authentic and you've got to be honest with each other. And it's more than that. Like there's something that is unique about marriage that is not with any other relationship. And that is what is important, what you gotta keep.

Because marriage now they've lost, there's also a responsibility. And I'd have to get into something more detail Okay, I could get, yeah, so you have to first do the things that are unique to marriage. Okay, that is the most thing, most important thing about marriage, because if the person, the other person is not doing their responsibility, well, then you don't have anyone to, anyone else to go through if you have good values. Okay, so you got to keep that first, and then you've got to do your other responsibilities.

And always remember, the borrower is slave to the lender. So there's a lot of relationships that die that way. Okay. Man, it has been really nice to meet you. I'd be to you, too. I appreciate you. I don't know. You're a unique individual, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Okay, thank you. Thank you. I was always a bit eccentric. That's okay. Yeah, yeah. The best people are, you know? Yeah, yeah. I'll take this back.

You can go back to your job. Okay, thank you. That, folks, is Marcel Rainville. I cannot explain to you how unique of a man that is. And everybody's probably laughing at me. they go, why did you stop an interview that guy? It's like nothing else in the world is going

on as he has like a hundred people trying to ask him for mini put this, mini put that, buying beans. He's going in a thousand different directions and he can care less it seems and I don't mean that in a rude way. Just like, nope, we're going to shut the world off. And

that is a crazy interaction and I'm glad I pulled out the mics and seen if he wanted to talk for a few minutes. I hope enjoyed.