(Photograph courtesy of Ricardo Tranjan; illustration by Maclean’s)

Ricardo Tranjan wants Canadians to rethink what we call our national housing crisis. Tranjan, a researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, says what we’re experiencing can’t even be called a crisis—our housing system hasn’t suddenly failed. Instead it’s working exactly as designed, enriching property owners at the expense of everyone else. The problem is that it’s gone into sudden overdrive.

That’s why he thinks the fixes espoused by government and industry—more supply, for the most part—aren’t going to get us where we need to be. Instead, he wants to inject politics back into the housing discussion, framing the problem as an issue of class, with tenants on one side and landowners on the other.

Tranjan describes his ideas in-depth in his new book, The Tenant Class. We asked him about how he believes the problem is misunderstood and how he thinks tenant activism can go mainstream, drawing lessons from Canada’s own past housing crises, and the labour movement.

In The Tenant Class, you argue that there’s not really a housing crisis in Canada. That would probably surprise a lot of people. If it’s not a crisis, what is it?

We have a housing market that allows certain segments of the population to benefit enormously from real estate transactions and accumulate wealth. Homeowners, for example, are seeing their house prices increase. Even if they’re tied down with a mortgage, they’re still benefiting. And landlords—who are operating in a mostly unregulated market, where rent controls are becoming weaker and weaker—are also benefiting.

Meanwhile, another segment of the population has a really hard time achieving housing security. To call it a housing crisis is politically naïve; when we talk about a crisis, we refer to something unexpected and unavoidable. But our housing market is set up to work this way. The crisis framing prevents us from having serious conversations about how to find a solution.

This framing also gives us a sense that most people are interested in solving the problem, willing to sit around a table and find a solution. But that’s not true. There are folks, particularly in the real estate industry, actively lobbying for things to stay the same. An unregulated housing market benefits them enormously. Profit margins are high, and investors are building wealth quickly. They like the way things are.

So why is the crisis framing so common?

Governments have invested very little in non-market housing for the past 30 years, and a smaller and smaller percentage of the population has been able to access housing, which has put pressure on the market. Provincial governments have also been weakening rent controls, notably in Ontario, enabling the predatory practices of landlords. At some point, this all started catching up with us. Mostly, it started catching up with the 30 per cent of the population who are renting or trying to rent. Those are the people experiencing a crisis.

Meanwhile, we talk about housing as if it’s only a matter of supply and demand. The logic goes that if we build more housing units, housing will become more affordable. The answer is always to build more housing, and the corporate developers become the solution. So, the government drops regulations and provide more subsidies to the developers. But we’ve built more housing and prices continue to rise.

An economist might argue that we’re still not building enough houses to keep pace with population growth.

I agree that building more houses is necessary, especially purpose-built apartment buildings and non-market housing. It’s necessary, but not sufficient. We also need to regulate what we’re building, and how much it costs to live there. Otherwise, we’ll be talking about this again in 10 years.

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How do we shift the conversation away from those simple fixes?

We need to politicize the housing debate in Canada; the tenant class needs to organize, accumulate power and force the government to make change. We’ve seen examples of this throughout Canadian history. In Vancouver, starting in the early 1960s, at the local level, tenant unions started fighting landlords about rent increases. They eventually connected with other groups in the city, before moving up to city councillors and the provincial government. They fought the war on two fronts: making specific demands to the landlords, and liaising with government.

What’s your take on the rent strikes we’ve seen in Toronto, with tenant groups withholding rent to protest rent increases? Could they point to the beginnings of this kind of movement?

Yes, you see it happening again, right now. The Ontario’s Federation of Labour’s “Enough is Enough” campaign brought a lot of people together. Their five demands included things like protecting public health care, and wage increases for workers. But they also included rent controls. The tenant movement is strong enough to make its voice heard. And if you look at the political platforms of a bunch of the mayoral candidates in the upcoming Toronto election, a lot of them are mentioning rent controls. We hadn’t seen that in the past few elections.

It’s understandable that politicians are hesitant to take actions that might lower voters’ property values.

I think governments have to be cautious about measures that impact the current value of homes owned by individuals as their primary residence. You don’t want to throw the entire middle class under the bus, because the situation is not their fault. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t move in the direction of doing something that might lower property values, but we should be cautious, targeting only those who are using housing as an investment. For example, in Toronto, 40 per cent of condos are investment properties. It’s fair to push back against that.

This points to a growing tension we all probably feel, between housing as shelter, as a basic right and as an economic asset. Can these things be reconciled?

There are working-class families who get married, buy a house, raise their families and grow old. Their house is an asset, at the individual level, to provide housing and financial security. That’s absolutely fine. Then there are investors, purely seeking profit, who purchase several properties, leveraging the bank, letting working-class families rent units and pay it down. In the latter case, the investor has wealth and a few properties by the time they retire, while the working-class family has nothing. We need to put in restrictions and increase taxation on folks using the real estate market as a way to create quick wealth, instead of as a place to live.

What can the government do?

One obvious solution is regulating rent, though in Ontario, we’re moving in the exact opposite direction. In 2018, the Ontario government passed a law stating that all new units occupied as of November 15 of that year were exempt from rent control. Even if we build more units, they go into the rental market with no controls whatsoever. So, if a family moves in, the landlord can increase rent by however much they want, regardless of inflation or minimum wage. How do we pretend to care about the tenant class if we removed rent controls on new units? That’s the most basic security you can provide a family.

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What kind of role should the government have in building housing itself?

The government at all levels needs to come in and participate more directly, through funding and sometimes even managing not-for-profit housing. The public seems to deprioritize profit in so many sectors. In health care, early education and public transit we removed profit because we wanted everyone to have access. Same with water, sewage, garbage and electricity. The essentials for life should not be left to the private sector. When it comes to housing security, we should also want everyone to have access.

With that model of housing, profit is not part of the equation. We used to do this; the government in Canada used to play a much larger role in non-market housing. But in the 1990s, the federal government put the onus of providing non-market housing on the provinces. Ontario delegated that down to the municipal level. It was at the peak of neoliberalism, when governments worldwide were withdrawing from the direct provision of public services.

All of that is going to cost money. So, is it just a matter of raising taxes? People might be inclined to push back against that.

We’re a rich country. Government, at all levels, has shown it’s capable of mobilizing massive amounts of resources when the political will is there. When we decide a project is of national importance, we’ll buy a pipeline, we’ll create CERB overnight, we’ll fund the development and deployment of a vaccine. Despite all of the rhetoric about the so-called housing crisis, the government has not really allocated resources toward it or implemented policy changes.

Obviously, a tenant social movement would require a lot of time, resources and organization. Where will that come from?

The labour movement provides a good example, both in terms of what can be achieved and how to achieve it. The protections unionized workers have today—in terms of wages, benefits and workplace safety—those didn’t come about because some enlightened politician woke up one day and decided to defend worker’s rights. Workers had to organize at a factory level and build city-wide organizations. Slowly but surely the labour movement grew. Nowadays, we could follow in the footsteps of the labour movement. Organizing at the factory-floor level, building broader political influence and fighting the fight on two levels: versus the landlords directly, and in government. We have civic and political rights in this country. We can organize. We can fight back.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Why Canada might just need a tenant revolution  appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“I realized I had multiple roles: a child, a caretaker, a friend, and, in some ways, a therapist. I didn’t realize how much responsibility I had placed on my shoulders.” (Photography by Jackie Dives)

I was born in Taipei in 1986. Although I was an only child, I never felt alone: at school, I was surrounded by friends and, on the weekends, I spent time with first cousins from my mom’s side who were my age. My parents didn’t plan on immigrating until they visited my uncle and his family who moved to Vancouver in 1994. They were drawn to the greenery in Vancouver—urban construction was booming in Taipei at the time, and my parents wanted me to be closer to nature. 

In 1995, when I was nine years old, we packed up our lives in Taiwan and moved into my uncle’s Vancouver home. My dad, who worked as an art teacher and filmmaker in Taiwan, opened a printing shop in Canada. My mom stayed at home with me and occasionally helped out at the shop. 

My dad learned the little English he knew from listening to Beatles songs and watching Hollywood movies. Neither my mom nor I knew any English. When I started Grade 3 near the end of the school year, I didn’t have any friends because I couldn’t talk to the other students. I was put in an ESL class, and occasionally spoke to the one or two students who could also speak Mandarin. I spent lunch and recess alone, reading Mandarin novels in the bathroom. I once got in trouble from my teacher, who said I couldn’t bring Chinese books to school because I had to learn English instead. I never told my parents about this. 

As I started learning English, I would help my parents translate a word or two. In 1996, a year and half into school, I was fluent enough to translate entire conversations. When I was 12 years old, I graduated out of ESL. I was proud to be able to read, write, and speak fluent English. At that point, it was easier to make friends. I understood jokes, made pop culture references, and carried conversations about things like TV and music. 

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In 1999, when I was 13, my dad’s printing business wasn’t doing well so he decided to go back to Taiwan to look for more job opportunities. With just my mom and me at home, I became her main translator. I dealt with bank statements and insurance papers, paid for hydro bills, helped her take phone calls and translated for her during doctor visits. I initially felt a lot of pride being able to contribute to the family. It gave me a great sense of responsibility. My mom enrolled in ESL classes, but she found it difficult to learn English and form new connections as an adult. She became isolated—I was one of the only friends she had. After a few months, my dad returned to Canada to take care of us and he found work at a non-profit. 

I was grateful that my dad chose a permanent job in Canada rather than a potentially better paying job in Taiwan, all so he could support me and my mom. Although my dad was sufficiently fluent in English, he still leaned on me to pitch in and help with the family. I didn’t know the term at the time, but I was a language broker, a bridge between my parents and a new culture, an invisible responsibility I carried all my life. I learned later that I’m not alone: it’s an experience shared among children of immigrants who’ve not only had to translate for their parents, but also navigate new cultures themselves. 

Although my dad’s English was better than my mom’s, there was still a cultural barrier. You can’t just Google Translate Mandarin to English—there are cultural nuances that make it difficult to switch directly back and forth between the two. I became more involved with his work, translating phone calls and business emails. Taking phone calls was the most daunting—it was scary to talk to a complete stranger who was also an authority figure. My heart would pound whenever I heard the phone ring; I would write down notes and prompts to prepare myself. Once, my mom was having difficulty speaking to a service provider, so she handed me the phone to translate. They were asking me questions I didn’t understand while at the same time I was translating and asking questions that my mom was feeding me. I was worried about mistranslating and I could tell the person on the other end was annoyed they were speaking to a child. It was incredibly frustrating, even though I tried my hardest to sound mature and professional during these conversations. 

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By the time I was 16, my parents relied on me to translate for them every day. It was partly out of convenience, but also because they were more confident in my linguistic abilities than their own. If they needed me to translate or proofread an email correspondence or bank document, I would have to drop whatever I was doing and prioritize it. Helping them renew their driver’s licences and passports, buy car insurance, and translate visa terms became regular responsibilities. As a teenager, sometimes I resented them for not being more self-sufficient like my friends’ families. I wanted to be a normal kid who didn’t have to worry about the well-being of their parents. But in Taiwan, older generations believe that children should place family needs above their own—and that was what I felt my parents expected of me.

In 2004, I began studying general science at the University of British Columbia. I was still living at home and juggling a part-time job, extracurriculars and volunteer work. I often got home late, and that’s when my parents would ask me to help them translate: some of their requests were timely, such as reviewing tax forms. As they got older, I attended more doctor visits with them and helped them navigate new technology, like Netflix and iPhones. Despite my frustrations, I understood the stigma around people who cannot speak English well. There was an instance when my mother and I went to an insurance company’s office, when the front-desk person got frustrated with my mom because she was struggling to put her thoughts into words. It wasn’t until I stepped in to translate for her that the staff relaxed.

I graduated university in 2010, and got married in 2015. I had my first child three years later, and becoming a new parent revived old childhood memories and unresolved feelings. I came to terms with the huge responsibility I had taken on at a young age. I realized I had multiple roles: a child, a caretaker, a friend, and, in some ways, a therapist. I didn’t realize how much responsibility I had placed on my shoulders. My mother began spending more time with me to help with childcare, and I began opening up to her about my frustrations. Over time, she began to understand how much I had taken on, and I heard from her how hard it was to assimilate into a new culture as an adult. I’ve developed more empathy towards my parents, and that’s helped us become closer. 

I now have two beautiful children, and want my childhood to influence how I raise them. If I hadn’t translated for my parents, they wouldn’t have involved me in their business and family decisions. Unlike the traditional parent-child model, where children follow what their parents do, I was directly involved in the family unit. I want to be intentional about how I raise my children and involve them in family affairs. Helping my parents gave me a sense of pride, and I want my kids to feel the same way. Learning from my experience, I hope to communicate with my children so they can feel like a valued member of the family, but also have the space to pursue their interests.

—As told to Prarthana Pathak 

The post As a kid, I was the main translator for my immigrant parents. It wasn’t easy.  appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“We can clearly see the negative effects of wildfire smoke on the lungs, but there was some hope that it wouldn’t be as severe as the impact of urban air pollution.” (Photograph by iStock.)

Looking at pictures of wildfires wreaking havoc across Canada is enough to make the average person feel a bit sick: the haze; the blood-orange sun; the gargantuan plumes of smoke. For those who do venture outdoors, there’s a general sense of unease, provoked by a faint, unsettlingly sweet smell in the air. The reason behind it all is an unusually early and out-of-control start to fire season, which many experts expect could be the country’s most devastating to date. Environment Canada has already issued “high risk” air quality warnings from coast to coast, and Canadians from B.C. to Halifax are breathing it all in.

Even if we can intuitively understand that all this smoke is bad for our health, it’s too early to tell just how bad the long-term effects will be. Michael Brauer, a researcher with the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health, has been studying the health impact of environmental phenomena for more than 25 years. And though the data on wildfires is sparse, it’s growing—and the prognosis is not good. For Canadians with pre-existing conditions, he says, living alongside frequent fires could be its own catastrophe. Here, Brauer explains what, exactly, everyone’s inhaling, how it’s affecting Canadians (physically and mentally) and how to stay healthy in a burning world.

You’ve been studying wildfires for a long time. How has the uptick in frequency changed the scope of your work in the last few years?

I was studying wildfires in Southeast Asia 25 years ago. At that time, wildfires weren’t really affecting any of our major cities in North America. It wasn’t until the early aughts that we started seeing bigger fires outside of rural areas in Canada, and in B.C. at least, we started seeing their health consequences on local communities. Now, most of Canada’s major cities are hit with the impacts of fire once or twice a year, if not multiple times. Even when things are relatively good fire-wise in B.C. and Alberta, we’d still be getting hit with smoke from California or Oregon. It’s just everywhere.

Another concerning issue is that Canada’s fire season has lengthened. Out west, it used to be July and August. But last year, there were fires in April. Vancouver now has smoke lingering in October, which is unprecedented. All of this means that the average person is experiencing greater levels of smoke exposure. And you don’t even need to be that close to a fire for that to happen; smoke can affect people thousands of kilometres away. I was talking to someone today from New York City, and the air was polluted there from a fire up here.

So it’s a good time for research, but a bad time in every other respect?

We don’t have a lot of data for how wildfire smoke affects us yet. When I started researching fires, we used to have to chase the smoke. Recently, it’s become relatively easy to study it.

What do we know about what happens inside the human body when someone inhales wildfire smoke?

Our bodies try to fight these airborne particles by mounting an inflammatory response, where our lungs call in all sorts of cells to try to digest these foreign materials. We’re evolutionarily designed to fight bacteria and viruses. We can’t do smoke particles. Our immune systems just keep working overtime, which can start to affect other organs, like the heart, brain and kidneys. It’s similar to gum disease, that long-term level of inflammation. The same thing happens when we’re exposed to this smoke.

So what you’re saying is that our bodies have evolved to respond to our environment—just not this level of environmental ruin.

It’s one thing to stand near a campfire every so often and get smoke in your eyes, which is very irritating. We can walk away from that; we can’t walk away from these fires. It’s getting to the point where you’re only going to be able to avoid them if you move somewhere else.

Is inhaling wildfire smoke somehow worse for the body than breathing in garden-variety summer smog?

It’s not clear that it’s worse than smog, but it’s just as bad. One of the main things I study is the impact of air quality on the body, and wildfire smoke is the main issue contributing to levels of air pollution in Canada right now. We can clearly see the negative effects of wildfire smoke on the lungs, but there was some hope that it wouldn’t be as severe as the impact of urban air pollution. More and more, the evidence is showing that it’s just as hazardous as pollution from traffic or industrial sources. 

The difference between the types of smoke exists at the particle level. If we burn coal, it has a certain chemical signature. With wildfire smoke, the particles contain much more organic material, which is due to all the vegetation that’s being burned. The chemical makeup then reacts with the atmosphere, so the smoke composition changes the further it is from the fire source. When fires are smouldering, we actually tend to see more particles than if it’s burning very, very hot. It’s hard to generalize, but the real problem seems to be the intensity of the fires. In a typical polluted city, air quality doesn’t vary that much from one day to the next. In the case of wildfires, we get this sudden massive amount of smoke, with levels 50 or 100 times higher than what we’re used to. 

Can you give me a real-life example of how this quick-onset intensity can be dangerous?

We know that air pollution can have effects on pregnancy, like lower birth weight and a greater likelihood of premature births. If a pregnant person is living in a city, they’re exposed to that every day. Now imagine that they’re living in a city that experiences a massive smoke episode because of a wildfire. If the smoke coincides with a critical window in that fetus’s development, that could be devastating.

Who else is especially vulnerable to a sudden smoke episode?

People with pre-existing conditions. A smoke episode can be a tipping point for people with a baseline level of sensitivity. For people with asthma, it can trigger an attack. Smoke can worsen the severity of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and can set off heart attacks and strokes. It can throw the bodies of diabetes patients out of whack. It can also worsen ear infections and cases of COVID and the flu. We know that generic forms of air pollution can lead to the development of these diseases, but we never used to worry about fires, which used to be a one-week event once a year. It’s not clear yet whether someone who lives in a place where they’re exposed to wildfire smoke every single year will have their life shortened.

I’d imagine that, as these fires approach major cities, there will be an issue with human-made structures burning—and the chemicals that they give off. Is that accurate?

At this point, it’s not a huge concern. By the time houses are burning, there are usually no people around to inhale that smoke. When it does become a concern is when people re-enter affected communities. Materials from burnt structures leave deposits in the ground. A few years ago, when the fire went through Fort McMurray, there was a lot of attention given to the soil—specifically, the heavy metals and plastics and electronics that were deposited in it. In these cases, it’s standard to do a lot of testing and remove about a foot of soil off the top as a precaution.

Aside from the physical effects, I’m sure all the scary visuals we’re seeing outside and on the news—the hazy skies, blurred sun—and general disaster-movie feel of things can’t be having a positive effect on Canadians’ mental and emotional wellbeing, right?

So far, the immediate effects of the fire are hurting a small number of people, but evacuations are a growing concern, especially among Indigenous communities. Evacuations can be very disruptive and cause long-standing mental-health issues—that upending of social structures, and having to stay stuck in a motel in Winnipeg for two months while homes are rebuilt. This is just anecdotal, but when we have major smoke events in Vancouver, you hear people talking about the apocalyptic feeling: of the orange clouds, of not being able to see the sun. It’s certainly not something that makes people happy, and I don’t want to say they’re complacent, but there’s less of a mental-health hit as people get used to the new reality—which is a sad thing. That said, there’s definitely a new uptick in climate anxiety, where people are not having children for fear of what kind of world they’d be bringing them into. We’ve also seen an increase in anxiety and exhaustion in health care workers because of fire events.

Even if we won’t understand the true damage of these smoke episodes on our bodies for a long time, what do you expect the toll will be on the health care system in the interim?

We’re already seeing that. During a smoke event, we experience increases in visits to ERs and family doctors, more hospitalizations and more prescriptions being filled. We’ve seen pharmacies in smaller communities run out of medications during smoke events. One of the things public-health organizations are really trying to communicate is how much of that is avoidable if people with pre-existing conditions manage their diseases in advance. Every spring, before fire season, we put out public service announcements that say things like, “Make sure you have enough medication on hand!” A lot still needs to be done in terms of just increasing public education so that people are prepared. But individuals can also take precautions in their own homes.

So it’s not a matter of learning to live with it—people can actually make moves to protect themselves?

Yes. We strongly recommend that people who have pre-existing conditions, are pregnant or have kids (and can afford it) get an air cleaner or better filtration system for their homes. If they can’t afford it, many cities have clean air shelters, which are usually community spaces where people can go to experience better air quality. These are mostly located out west, but I think people are going to become more aware of them in eastern parts of Canada soon.

That just goes to show that you really can’t escape the effects of a fire, even if you’re inside.

Being indoors helps, but closing up your windows without air conditioning, in a fire zone, can obviously be really hot.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post How the wildfires are already affecting our health appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Too often, dementia patients are treated as a collection of needs and symptoms to manage, rather than real people with unique life stories, preferences and habits. (Photograph by iStock)

I didn’t exactly have a normal home life growing up. My parents ran a foster home in Alberta and provided kids who had difficult childhoods with a loving home. There were often 30 to 50 kids living with us. This taught me to value connection and community. 

I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in community recreation in 1975 and worked for several years in the recreation department in Richmond. In 1989, an opportunity came up to work as the general manager for a new senior residence in Richmond with a senior living company called Verve. I initially managed existing senior homes, and later had a hand in designing new ones. I wanted seniors to have a sense of community, so I designed solo living units with shared spaces where people could interact and form connections. But we struggled to provide an enriching environment for people living with dementia. The standard approach was to designate a wing or floor of a given building to dementia patients, with locked doors on either end. When the doors wouldn’t open, they would get frustrated and agitated. I’d panic if I couldn’t move about freely—wouldn’t anyone? Newer facilities have doors that open into a fenced-off courtyard instead, but people still feel trapped. The focus was always on their safety; their freedom and connection with others took a back seat. This approach didn’t sit right with me: life should be about more than just safety. 

In 2015, my wife’s aunt developed dementia and could no longer live alone. We moved her into a retirement community near her home. She didn’t adjust well to it: she loved walking outdoors but didn’t have the support to do so safely. She would wander out of the facility, get lost, and then get frustrated and distressed when she was put behind another locked door. In an attempt to provide her with more support and freedom, we relocated her to a care community that I managed near our home. She died six months later, in spring of 2016. Seeing her struggle broke my heart. I knew I needed to do something to help those with dementia live more fulfilling lives. 

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I attended conferences and workshops in the United States, where I heard about innovative models of care for people with dementia. I was particularly intrigued by the Hogeweyk Dementia Village in the Netherlands, where people with dementia live in a real community—complete with a grocery store, movie theatre and barber shop—where they can roam free with minimal supervision. They share houses with other residents, build relationships and live some semblance of a normal life. I wondered why we couldn’t implement a similar approach in Canada.

When I started workshopping the idea of a similar dementia village, I was Verve’s VP of operations for Western Canada. I pitched the idea to my bosses, and Verve became one of the owners (and now day-to-day operations manager) of the project, along with a handful of private investors, which were mostly family trusts. One of the biggest challenges was finding the right location: I needed enough land to create a village-like setting, but rising prices made it almost impossible. Then I came across a newspaper ad about B.C.’s Langley School district selling four unused schools. There was no sale price listed, so we knew it would be a bidding process. The site was perfect—seven acres of land, complete with trees, greenery and real potential to build something remarkable.

We bought the land for $5 million and started building in early 2017. As part of the development, we had to bring in all the infrastructure, including routing the buildings to a sewer from three blocks away. By the time we were done with construction, the project cost just under $30 million. 

In the summer of 2019, we opened the doors to the Village Langley. The site features six houses with 12 to 13 rooms each, accommodating up to 75 residents total. Four houses offer assisted living with some support, and two are designated complex-care environments, which means they’re for villagers with advanced dementia who require more support. The idea is for villagers to move in when they’re mobile, and as their dementia progresses, they move into complex care, where they can hopefully stay for the rest of their lives.

Too often, dementia patients are treated as a collection of needs and symptoms to manage, rather than real people with unique life stories, preferences and habits. One of our residents is a former professor named Peter. One day, I ran into him at reception. He had a piece of paper in his hand, and he seemed quite agitated. It was a letter from the dean of education at UBC commemorating his 25 years as a professor. He wanted to get it copied. When I asked him why, he said: “I need to show copies to the ladies in my house because they don’t know who I am.” 

Another resident was a Japanese-Canadian woman who, in the later stages of her dementia, felt a strong pull to return to Japan. That wasn’t an option for her, and in a traditional setting, staff might tell her so and leave it at that. But in the Village, something different happened. When asked how she would get to the airport, she said she would take a bus. And so outside her house, staff put up a bus stop sign near a bench. She would pack her bag, sit on the bench, and wait. After a while, someone would walk by and chat with her. She would eventually forget that she was waiting to go to Japan, talk to them and get back to village life.

Identity is so important for people, and that doesn’t change if you have dementia. When I went to see Peter in his home, he asked if I wanted to come see a picture book about his life his family made for him. I learned that when he was younger, he and his wife were attacked by a grizzly bear on a hike. He took on the grizzly bear, scared it away and saved them both. Peter was much more than a professor, a runner and a good man—he was a hero. At the Village Langley, we take the time to learn about people. 

The village was designed to feel like a real community with homes that don’t look like assisted living facilities. Each home has big windows, a living room, dining room, kitchen, family room and sunroom. The houses also have double rooms where we can house couples, even if only one of them has dementia. At traditional dementia care institutions, couples are often split up at a vulnerable time in their lives. 

A community centre serves as a gathering place for villagers. There’s also a general store, a café and bistro, a woodworking shop and a beauty salon. There are beautiful landscaped gardens, and even a barn with chickens and goats. Community activities like exercise programs, crafts and book clubs are organized throughout the day. The goal is to engage each person based on their unique abilities and preferences. Depending on the time of day and the residents’ care needs, there are usually two to four facilitators—nurses, PSWs, recreation facilitators or other professionals—present. They’re dedicated to specific houses, which allows them to develop strong connections with the villagers.  

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Our approach to daily life in the village revolves around villager-directed living. We recognize that each person has different interests, abilities and preferences. Some residents rise early and have breakfast, while others have a more relaxed morning routine. Many villagers enjoy taking walks outside, and we’ve designed the village to minimize barriers and restrictions, promoting a sense of freedom. Yes, there’s an eight-foot fence around the facility, but it’s mostly hidden by trees and flowers, so it doesn’t look or feel like a barrier. I’ve only ever heard of one villager attempting to climb the fence. Generally, they don’t encounter physical barriers, and are free to roam as they please, which improves their emotional well-being. 

We want villagers to make their own choices, learn and grow, and be of service to their community. One day, I met a former lawyer named Don who was a new resident at the village. His family had enrolled him when his dementia became too advanced for him to live without assistance. He wasn’t too pleased to be there and had various delusions accompanying his dementia, which added another layer of difficulty. But with time, he settled in. I’m not sure Don had built anything in his life before coming to the village, but he loved our crafts workshop. He built a big clock out of wood, and he was so proud of it. Don would often stop by the village’s grocery store to grab litres of chocolate milk, and eventually, staff asked him to come along on grocery runs. He would push a big cart around, delivering groceries to homes. The team found out what he wanted to do, allowed him to do it himself, and helped him be of service to his community. He now has purpose and joy—a reason to get up in the morning. 

This model of care works, but it’s not for everyone. Since we’re not government-funded, all of our operational costs come out of residents’ pockets. Monthly fees range between $8,000 and $10,000, which is a tremendous amount of money and not affordable for many people who would benefit from living at the Village. But the hope is that with time, organizations or government agencies will recognize what we’re doing is a better model of care for people with dementia. 

We can treat people with dementia like the unique individuals they are, instead of collections of symptoms and risks to manage. We can set up facilities that give them joy and purpose. When you get to know people on a deeper level, you can help make their lives worth living. 

—As told to Liza Agrba 

The post I opened Canada’s first dementia village. Here’s how it works.  appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“With an increase in inflation and a lack of affordable housing across the country, we need to address homelessness as quickly and efficiently as possible” (illustration by Maclean’s)

Last year, I met a 73-year-old woman who became homeless for the first time in her life after a family breakdown. She came to the Lighthouse—the emergency shelter in Orillia, Ontario, where I work as an executive director—with just her walker and a bag of clothes.

She lived at the Lighthouse for the next four months. Housing workers helped increase her pension, and on-site medical staff connected her with family doctors. Now, she lives in an affordable retirement home in Orillia. She no longer uses a walker and comes back to the Lighthouse to volunteer. We offer more than just emergency shelter: we’re a not-for-profit that provides supportive housing and other services to people experiencing homelessness.

For years, the government and homeless shelters have adopted a treatment-first approach to the problem, trying to solve the issues that lead to homelessness—like alcoholism, drug dependency, mental health struggles or family crises—before helping people find housing.

RELATED: How Canada’s housing crisis is fuelling violence on our public-transit systems

There’s a better alternative. With somewhere to live, eat, shower and sleep, it’s easier for people to get their lives back on track. The Lighthouse uses a housing-first approach that provides people with short-term housing and gives them the support they need to find a permanent place to live. Some people stay for a week in our emergency shelter, while others stay for up to four years in supportive housing. In that time, we’re able to offer all kinds of support in partnership with government and non-profit organizations. We work with the Canadian Mental Health Association, for example, to help people with mental illness. We provide healthy food and cooking classes. Our team helps people apply for identification, find jobs, increase their social support and ultimately find affordable permanent housing.

We know the housing-first model works. A recent study by the Mental Health Commission of Canada looked at 2,000 Canadians experiencing homelessness in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal and Moncton. Over a five-year period, roughly half were given the typical treatment-first approach, while the rest were housed first. By the end of the five years, only 31 per cent of the treatment-first participants were housed full time, while 62 per cent of the housing-first participants were housed full time. The housing-first approach was twice as effective in keeping people off the streets.

When I first joined the Lighthouse back in 2015, it was only a men’s shelter with 14 beds, five staff and a soup kitchen working out of a small Orillia home. We wanted to help more people, and between 2019 to 2021, we raised $14.5 million to expand our services. The Lighthouse now sits on a three-acre property in Orillia. We have a 20,000-square-foot emergency shelter, with 50 beds for men and women, eight beds for youth, and a cafeteria. Our annual budget is $2.2 million, up from just $140,000.

READ: My mortgage is about to go up by at least $1,000 a month

We’ve been using the housing-first approach for the past six years. Last year, we had a 50-year-old gentleman struggling with an addiction who was homeless for 18 months; we moved him into supportive housing. He connected with the Canadian Mental Health Association and they helped him become substance-free for the first time in a while. He did so well that we hired him as a janitor for our community services building.

At our shelter, participants can stay for as long as they want. We usually have a wait list of 10 to 15 people for our emergency shelter, and we prioritize those with the greatest need. There’s a large café where everyone receives breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus a couple of snacks. Last year, we served 71,000 meals. Breakfast is hot or cold—bacon and eggs, cereal and muffins. Lunch is usually a soup, sandwich and salad, and dinners are heartier beef stews, pork roasts or chicken breast with vegetables. We also have an atrium with a TV, couches, chairs and a few computers, which participants can use to find jobs or housing and connect with family members.

Our supportive housing program has 20 bachelor units, where participants can stay for up to four years. To access the program, participants call 211 and apply for housing through the County of Simcoe. If they’ve been homeless for more than six months, they receive placement. Participants pay roughly $500 a month, depending on their income and whether they’re supported by Ontario Works or the Ontario Disability Support program. This gets them a 400-square-foot unit with a full kitchen, double bed, washroom, tables and chairs—similar to a comfortable and clean hotel suite. In 2022, our supportive housing program ran 148 educational sessions on life skills: budgeting, cooking, anger management classes and more. This support is key—it provides our participants with skills to bridge the gap from homelessness to permanent housing.

MORE: Our mortgage payments went up to more than $3,300 a month

Staff are on site 24/7 and are trained in social work or have other relevant life experience. They’re there to keep participants safe and can respond to overdoses or mental health crises. We don’t have any security guards—our staff are trained in de-escalation and crisis intervention. It’s not a fit for everyone: if participants come into the building and they’re a danger to themselves or others, they’re discharged from the program.

We’ve been seeing more and more families experiencing homelessness, whether it’s because of unemployment or rising rent and living costs. We saw record-high demand for our motel voucher program last year, which is provided to families experiencing homelessness. With an increase in inflation and a lack of affordable housing across the country, we need to address homelessness as quickly and efficiently as possible. And that means exploring the housing-first model as a solution.

—As told to Mathew Silver 

The post Why a housing-first model is the only way to solve the homelessness crisis appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“The Eaton Centre was the first place I visited in Toronto” (illustration by Victor Kerlow)

I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My dad operates a shipping company in Nigeria, and my mother has worked as a baker and a retail store owner. I was always a creative kid. My brothers and I used to make sculptures out of gum; we called them chewing gum men. As a teen, I got into music and fashion and used Photoshop to design cover art for friends’ albums.

I was 14 when I first considered moving to Canada. I had just entered a private British high school in Lagos. Most of the students go to the U.K. for their A-levels, which are equivalent to the last two years of high school. But I wanted to try something new. I knew Canada’s arts scene wasn’t as developed as those in the U.S. or Europe, so I thought it would be a good place to introduce new ideas.

As luck would have it, Trinity College School was recruiting at my Lagos high school. Trinity is a private boarding school in Port Hope, about 100 kilometres east of Toronto. I was excited by the possibility of adventure. Canada is 10,000 kilometres from Nigeria. I thought, What could be waiting for me on the other side of the world?

It was September of 2017 when I arrived in Canada. I was 16 years old. The Trinity campus was massive, with lots of beautiful historic buildings. The school was filled with international students from places like the Caribbean, France, India and Japan. That was exciting.

READ: As a woman, I had no opportunities in Japan. My world opened up when I got to Canada.

I moved into the dorms, where my roommate was a student from China named Stephen. We used to talk in our dorm room late at night, sharing stories about our lives back home. There weren’t many Black students, but I befriended a few guys from Nigeria and Kenya. My closest friend, a Russian student named Amir, lived across the hall from me. We connected over our love of music, sneakers and streetwear.

I loved going to Toronto on weekends and holidays. The Eaton Centre was the first place I visited. It seemed like the businesses and products in Canada were more experimental than the ones in Nigeria, and I loved the street art and skateboarding subcultures.

I got pretty homesick when winter came. I missed the sun. I missed Saturdays with my family. We’d always wake up and clean the house together. We’d have a meal—usually white rice and chicken stew or egusi soup, made of pumpkin seeds and meat—then go play soccer in the park. We have a WhatsApp group chat, so I could message my family whenever I missed them. I sent them pictures of my school activities or the first time it snowed. And every weekend, we’d talk on the phone for hours.

After Trinity, I enrolled in economics at Ryerson, now Toronto Metropolitan University. I moved to Toronto in September of 2019 and lived in a dorm near campus. After a year, I switched to OCAD University’s digital futures program, which is a mix of arts, design and technology. It was better suited to my creative interests.

I loved exploring new places in Toronto. I remember the first time I went ice skating at Nathan Phillips Square at Christmastime. The Toronto sign was lit up and it was snowing. It was freezing, but my friends and I took videos and had fun. I also loved my first time at Nuit Blanche, which is a free outdoor nighttime art festival in Toronto. It was like fantasyland. Every corner of the city had art. I felt like a kid, revelling in all the lights and installations.

RELATED: My family and I fled gang violence in Mexico and made a home in Canada

For my graduate project, I designed a video game called Black Future, set in futuristic Egypt. To develop the game, I interviewed people from the Black community in Toronto to learn about their experiences. Growing up in Africa, I wasn’t aware of race, because everyone looked like me. In Toronto, I met Black Canadians who told me how they were treated differently, like being followed in stores. These conversations helped me realize that in Canada, I could also be treated differently for being Black.

I now live in Chinatown in a shared apartment with some friends from OCAD U. I like going to the gaming arcades in the neighbourhood, and there are lots of places to buy tech gadgets. And it’s close to Kensington Market. I love the bohemian lifestyle there. Everyone is carefree. I go shopping there from time to time. I like picking up items from the vintage stores.

The people here are open-minded. I’m always going to cultural events, like art and fashion shows and concerts. There’s always something fun happening in the city. I love immersing myself in different cultures and learning from them.

The post I left Nigeria as a teenager. Toronto was the perfect place to launch my career. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Illustration by Maclean’s, iStock.)

Every few years, the phrase “birth tourism” seems to re-emerge in the news cycle. It refers to non-residents giving birth outside of their home country to gain citizenship and, occasionally, health care for their newborns. Birth tourism isn’t illegal in Canada, but it’s a fraught issue that tends to kick up discussions about who deserves access to the country’s health care system, especially in times of low bandwidth. Like now.

Simrit Brar, an OB-GYN at Calgary’s Foothills Medical Centre, is one of many Canadian doctors who claim to have noticed a recent spike in the number of birth tourists arriving out west. But because that data isn’t routinely collected by hospitals, it’s been impossible to understand the real scope of the issue. Last year, Brar was part of a research team that conducted the country’s first in-depth study on birth tourism in Alberta, and this year—for the first time—the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada is forming a working group to study its impact country-wide. Here, Brar reveals what we know so far.

What prompted you to study birth tourism?

Anecdotally, my colleagues and I noticed an increase in the number of cases we were seeing in Calgary hospitals over the past decade or so, but it’s been difficult to draw any real conclusions about the motivations, health outcomes or financial situations of birth tourists. We know they don’t have Canadian health coverage, but sometimes they have their own private insurance plans that reimburse their care costs. Canadian doctors were struggling to provide timely care for our baseline population even before the pandemic. Birth tourism is far from the only factor straining the health care system, but we knew it was an additional cost, and that we didn’t have the data to understand it. We saw an opportunity.

So how do birth tourists differ from other uninsured pre-natal patients in Canada?

Based on our research, birth tourists are typically middle to upper-middle class, with the means to support themselves while in Canada. The people we looked at weren’t necessarily disadvantaged. I want to be clear: refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants and those in similarly precarious situations—like patients whose provincial health insurance has lapsed, for whatever reason—are not birth tourists. A birth tourist makes the conscious decision to travel and give birth here, and generally they have no intention to stay. Piling everyone under the same umbrella misses those crucial nuances and prevents us from making informed decisions, both at the policy level and in day-to-day care.

If you’re right that there’s been an uptick in birth tourism, what do you think is causing it?

It’s hard to say. We saw it slow a bit during the pandemic, given travel restrictions, and now it seems to be picking up again. I think the availability of information via social media is one factor; that spreads awareness that this is even an option. There are also companies that specialize in facilitating the birth-tourism process. They seem to market themselves online and through word-of-mouth.

What did your study reveal about why birth tourists are coming to Alberta? And where are they typically coming from?

About a quarter came from Nigeria, probably because there’s an established Nigerian community in the Calgary region. Birth tourists tend to go where they have friends or family. Smaller portions came from the Middle East, China, India and Mexico. The vast majority arrived with tourist visas, and based on our interviews, they weren’t facing particularly precarious situations back home. Again, I can only speak to the population we studied, but in general, these are women with resources.

What were they seeking?

That majority said their goal was to get Canadian citizenship for their newborns. Many saw it as an easier route to citizenship for their kids than applying through the typical process. Others either wouldn’t tell us their motivations or said they wanted to somehow benefit from quality Canadian health care.

When birth tourists get off their flights, what is the extent of their health needs?

Many travel here late in their pregnancies and arrive close to 38 weeks, which can lead to complications. I’ve seen patients with pre-existing high blood pressure get off a plane with numbers that are through the roof. Often, they’ll show up at a family doctor’s office, who sends an urgent hospital referral. I’ve also seen patients with pre-term twins literally get off a plane and go straight to an emergency room to deliver. Even somebody who might be otherwise low risk but shows up with no medical imaging or other records of pre-natal testing can have adverse birth outcomes, like unchecked pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes. These aren’t isolated incidents, either.

When you crunched the numbers, what was the total cost incurred by the province to take care of these people?

For the 102 people we studied, the total amount owed to Alberta’s health care system was $649,000. That may not sound like a lot, but this is just one small study. If you were to add up the costs across Canada, you would end up with a significant amount. I also want to emphasize that this is not just about money. Canada’s health care system isn’t like the States’, which is not only fee-for-service but has a much larger population—and accordingly a larger number of health care providers. Our public system has a finite number of doctors, nurses, and anesthetists. Every province has a lengthy surgical waitlist, and we’re struggling to care for insured patients. So even if a birth tourist does pay their bill, if we allow people who have the opportunity to pay to preferentially access beds (and finite human resources), that displaces people here.

Have any solutions been proposed? If birth tourism isn’t illegal, but it is draining resources, how do we move forward?

We’ve discussed developing a standard charge and different systems for collecting it. In Calgary, we’ve established a central triage system, where patients identified as birth tourists are charged an upfront deposit of $15,000 to cover physicians’ fees. They’re refunded whatever part of that doesn’t end up being used. It’s the only measure of its kind in Canada. Transparently, that number is meant to be a deterrent.

Conversations on this topic occasionally lean toward a xenophobic—and even racist—lens, particularly in the States. Media coverage can sometimes paint pregnant women of colour as a national security threat. What are the biggest misconceptions about this issue?

I say this as a woman of colour: in my opinion, this is not a race issue. It’s a social-structure issue. It’s about access to care. When you have money and you have the ability to get on a plane and choose where to go, your options are different. The issue here is the use of a limited public health care resource. It’s about what it means for patients in disadvantaged communities here. Birth tourists have the ability to choose where they want to go, whereas somebody in a marginalized community may not have that ability. If we open the floodgates, we are further limiting people with very limited options.

Birth tourism highlights some really interesting philosophical tension around the Canadian health care system, the spirit of which is to make sure everyone is taken care of. Here, we see the limits of that thinking. Has studying birth tourism changed your perspective?

You hit the nail on the head. I would love nothing more than to have unlimited resources and help anyone and everyone. That would be dreamland. I would love to not have to fight to get things done. And to be clear, I would never deny care to a patient. But the reality is that we operate within a finite system, and even though the conversations around the allocation of those resources are difficult and complex, we have to have them. I would identify wanting to help as many people as possible, and in the best way possible, as a fundamentally Canadian value. But the system is too strained for us to ignore these questions.

The post Canadian doctors say birth tourism is on the rise. It could hurt the health care system. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“Parents tell me that after watching my videos, they feel reassured about sending their kids to study in Canada.” (Illustration by Victor Kerlow)

In 2015, I lived in New Delhi, running a product development company with two friends. But soon we realized we had different goals, and we parted ways. I didn’t know what to do next, so I talked to my uncle, who had moved to Brampton, Ontario, to chase better job opportunities. “Give Canada a try,” he said.

After a couple of years, I finally saved up enough money to pay for my first year of tuition at Confederation College in Thunder Bay, where I would study engineering technology. Although my parents weren’t thrilled about me moving 3,000 kilometres away, when I left for Canada in August of 2018, there weren’t any tears at the airport when I walked through the gate.

I had arranged to rent a room in Thunder Bay through Facebook Marketplace, but after the landlord met me, he said there were no rooms available. I was shocked and scared, and I eventually convinced him to let me sleep on the living room floor for four days until I could secure new accommodations. From then on, I had trouble finding housing. Many landlords said they weren’t comfortable with immigrants living at their home. I persisted and eventually found a house to rent with two other international students from India; our total rent was $1,300.

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To pay for the rest of my degree, I juggled three jobs at a grocery store, a gas station and a convenience store. In 2019, I reunited with my girlfriend, Jasmine, who came to Canada to study at a university in St. Catharines. Around the same time, I started applying for jobs so I could start working as soon as I finished my degree. After a year and almost 100 rejections, I finally landed a product development position in London, Ontario.

I used to watch videos about immigration on social media, and one day, I emailed a YouTuber to ask him a question. After we talked, he invited me to go on his channel and explain how I came to Canada as a student and landed a job in my field. The video got over 40,000 views, and I received a deluge of requests on LinkedIn and Facebook from people living in India who wanted to know more about my college studies and the job application process.

I used to host workshops with students back in India, so I knew how to communicate with people and what questions they might have. Jasmine encouraged me to start my own YouTube channel, @GursahibSinghCanada, which I launched in July of 2021. I took a free, online video-editing course, and my initial goal was to post 50 times on my channel by the end of the year. My first video only got 72 views in a week, but I kept creating content, sharing information I wish I’d had before, like how to find a part-time job and secure housing.

MORE: I saw the devastation of climate change in Pakistan. Something needed to be done here too.

In October of 2021, I posted a video about the three intake periods in Canada for international students—January, May and September. Few other YouTubers had offered advice on this topic, and the video went viral with over 600,000 views. In the coming months, subscribers also asked about other matters, including pathways to permanent residency and Canadian food prices. Sometimes international students recognized me at the mall; they told me that my videos saved them from falling for scams or abusing their credit. One follower even said I felt like their big brother, advising them on a big life change.

Over the past four years, my life has changed too. Jasmine and I got married in July—my uncle performed the cultural rituals. My parents secured visitor visas and will visit Ontario later this year; I hope they will move here permanently. Jasmine and I are also saving up for a house, and we plan to have kids soon. In the meantime, my channel keeps growing. I now have over 260,000 subscribers, mostly based in India. Parents tell me that after watching my videos, they feel reassured about sending their kids to study in Canada. It’s fulfilling work. With my channel, I can use my experiences to help other immigrants plan for their new lives.

The post I struggled as an international student. My YouTube channel helps others avoid the same fate appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photography by Stephanie Foden)

I’m a commercial photographer based in Disraeli, a small town in Quebec. In 2020, I drove my Ford F150 pick-up from Quebec to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to shoot some resorts for a client—a 5,000-kilometre, seven-day drive. My wife and three kids flew down to meet me there for vacation. When COVID struck and international air travel shut down, we piled everyone into the truck and made the return drive all the way from Mexico back to rural Quebec. It wasn’t the most relaxing road trip. Worried about border closures, we rushed home, only stopping to sleep at night. But once we were back, I started kicking around a new idea: could I recreate that three-country, transcontinental road trip in an electric vehicle? 

I’ve wanted to get an electric vehicle ever since Tesla introduced its first model back in 2008. But I held off: few electric models had enough space for a family of five and two car seats in the back. I made the jump in April of 2022, purchasing a roomy, five-seater Hyundai Ioniq 5 Long Range for $52,000. It has a 77-kilowatt battery and can travel up to 488 kilometres on a single charge. 

In those first few months, I drove my EV almost 20,000 kilometres in Quebec in those first few months. I knew it could make a longer trek—it drove as smoothly as my pick-up truck and I could sleep comfortably across its backseat in a sleeping bag. With an adapter, I could use electricity from the vehicle to charge my computer and edit videos during long road trips. 

READ: A Toronto couple ditched their condo for a 260-square-foot custom RV

And so I decided to drive alone from Quebec to Puerto Vallarta in the fall, camping out at national parks in Utah and Arizona along the way to film VR footage for my business. My wife and kids would fly to and from Puerto Vallarta, while I would take a straight shot back to Quebec. 

Driving an EV on such a long trip required a lot of planning. It takes nine hours to charge the car from 10 to 85 per cent on a Level 2 charger, which you can find at public charging stations, shopping centres, hotels, airports and restaurants. But with a Level 3 charger—available at some highway rest stops, public parking lots, city centres and commercial areas—I could charge it the same amount in just 25 minutes. I just needed to plan my trip to hit Level 3 charging stations, which I found using a route-planning app called ABRP that showed me all of the charging stations along my route. I realized I could drive up to 1,100 kilometres a day, gassing up around mid-day when I stopped to stretch my legs or get food. There would be one near-dead-zone on the 400-kilometre stretch between Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon, but I was able to find a Level 2 charging station about 40 kilometres off the main route. It would be an inefficient detour, but I had no other choice. 

I kicked off my trip in early October of 2022, with an eight-hour drive from Disraeli to the outskirts of Hamilton, Ontario. At night, I camped along the 401. On these kinds of long road trips, I do a type of camping called “boondocking,” which involves parking the car in an open space and either setting up a tent or sleeping inside the car. I brought a V2L—or “vehicle to load”—adapter that let me use the car battery’s electricity to power my computer and electric stove. If it got too cold at night, I put the car in utility mode and raised the temperature up to 20 degrees—a nice perk of driving a non-ICE. It only uses about 10 per cent of the car battery without turning on the engine. 

Over the course of the trip, I set a goal to drive roughly 900 kilometres a day. I usually left around 7:30 a.m. and drove until about 4:30 p.m. I stopped roughly every 320 kilometres to walk around, grab some food or use the restroom, and I had to charge the EV up to two to three times a day. An average charge cost me between $15 to $20 at Circuit Electrique ports in Quebec and Petro Canada stations in Ontario. In the U.S., charging cost between US$25 to $35 to get to full battery, usually at Electrify America and Charge Point charging stations. I often stopped at Walmart, most of which have super-fast 350 kilowatt chargers that can juice the vehicle up from 15 to 85 per cent in just 20 minutes. They were never hard to find. 

READ: As a woman, I had no opportunities in Japan. My world opened up when I got to Canada.

I spent the five days driving through Indiana, Iowa and Nebraska before arriving at Arches National Park in Moab, Utah. I visited other national parks—Bryce Canyon, Zion, the Grand Canyon—over the next few weeks, stopping to sleep in full-service campgrounds with electric charging ports. I filmed VR content during the day and edited at a picnic table at my campsite in the evening, drawing power from an extension cord connected to my vehicle. I was able to plug my equipment in at night to get a bit of energy for the next day. On October 31, after 27 days on the trip, I set out for Puerto Vallarta.

I drove from the Grand Canyon to Nogales, a city near the Mexico-U.S. border. After crossing into Mexico, I drove south to Hermosillo, then Los Mochis, then Mazatlán. Driving an EV in Mexico is harder—charging stations are far and few in between, so I could only travel up to 450 kilometres a day. I found an app called Plugshare, which showed me charging ports at car dealerships and hotels like the Fiesta Inn and City Express where I stayed. It’s too dangerous to boondock in Mexico because of high crime rates, so I slept in hotels. 

On November 3, after 31 days on the road, I finally met my family in Puerto Vallarta. We rented a condo for a couple of months, where I plugged my car into a 110-volt wall outlet. It was more than enough for enjoying the city. The following January, my family flew home and I started the drive back north. I drove from Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara, then Guadalajara to San Potosi, all in two days. That’s when I ran into a bit of trouble.

During the 460-kilometre leg from San Luis Potosi to Monterrey, I had mapped out two spots to charge along the route. Both were close to El Leon, a small town about an hour’s drive outside of San Luis Potosi. The first was a Tesla Level 2 charger, which didn’t work with my adapter. I drove a little further to a nearby car dealership. But it was a Sunday, and the dealership was closed. That’s the danger of driving an EV: finding yourself in a remote location, with no charging stations in sight. 

I still had 250 kilometres to get to Monterrey, with only 260 kilometres of range left on the battery and no L2 or L3 charging points in-between. In a worst-case scenario, I knew I could find a home and hook up to their 110 kW charger—a common outlet found in homes. It would take up to four days to fully charge my car using one of those, but just a few hours of charging could get me out of a jam. 

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I had no choice but to try and make it. If I drove too aggressively, or faced a steep incline on the way, I ran the risk of draining my battery in the middle of nowhere. So, I got creative: I knew I could save on fuel if I drove behind a big truck. It’s a trick used by bikers in the Tour de France: following another biker reduces headwind and limits the energy needed to move forward.  I drove my EV right behind a semi-trailer, trying to do the same thing. It worked: I made it to Monterrey with about seven per cent of my battery left. After another charge, I drove to Dallas, then Springfield, Illinois, before crossing the border into London, Ontario, staying in hotels along the way because it was too cold to boondock in January. My charging stops were more frequent this time around because of the cold: in warm weather, I was using 16 kilowatts per hour, but when I approached Detroit, in January, I was averaging around 22 kilowatts per hour. I finally made it home on January 19, completing my 15,700-kilometre trip. 

There’s a lot of misinformation around EVs. People think they take a lot of time to recharge, but you can get a full charge in 20 to 25 minutes with a Level 3 charger. And taking an EV on a road trip makes financial sense too. When I drove my pick-up to and from Mexico in 2020, I spent roughly $2,000 on gas. Charging up my EV cost $630 both ways. That’s big-time savings. Driving an EV also limits your ecological footprint, which feels good. 

Drivers might have a bit of anxiety about getting stuck in the middle of nowhere, but the cost and environmental benefits of driving an EV outweigh the risks. I’m already looking forward to my next trip.

—As told to Mathew Silver 

The post I took my EV out on a 15,000-kilometre transcontinental road trip.  appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photography by Carey Shaw)

I’ve always been a farmer. I grew up steps away from where I live now, near the village of Fillmore in southeastern Saskatchewan. My grandparents acquired a 640-acre property in 1956, and I helped harvest crops and raise livestock on those fields. I didn’t spend days off from school sitting on the couch and watching TV—there was always something to do. When I was young, my dad farmed 1,500 acres, and I helped feed our 80 cows and ensured they had bedding. As I grew older, he trusted me to harrow and flatten the ground for low-growing crops like peas and lentils.

Most days, I’d ride with my dad in the cab of his tractor while he worked the fields. As a young boy, there was nothing more exciting than being on a large piece of machinery. I’d lie on a ledge behind the seat, holding my little lunch kit, just like him. Sometimes he’d let me take the wheel. Other times, I’d doze off on the cab floor.

In 2006, I left the farm to get a degree in agriculture, specializing in agronomy and crop science at the University of Saskatchewan, and then returned home to join the family farm. We faced exceptional challenges during my first two years back. The spring of 2011 was so rainy that we could only seed a quarter of our farm, and that quarter wasn’t growing well at all. After an infestation tore through our crops, I sprayed pesticide in the fields and wondered why I even bothered when we wouldn’t get much of a yield. But after my family and I persevered and our luck turned around, I realized that the unpredictable ebbs and flows of farming are part of the package.

Today, our third-generation farm employs seven people and grows wheat, canola, lentils and flax on 15,000 acres of Saskatchewan prairie. We sell to grain companies and specialty buyers that export our commodities around the world. My dad is still involved in the business, but I’ve taken on a bigger role over the past 13 years. I have three sons with my wife, Stephanie, plus two nephews and a niece, and our vision is to grow an enduring farm for the fourth generation. Someday, all six of them may want to farm, but it won’t be easy if they choose that path. As my dad’s generation moves into retirement, we face a growing threat: reduced access to skilled labour.

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(Photography by Carey Shaw)

According to a recent RBC report, 40 per cent of Canadian farm operators will retire in the next decade. That will coincide with a shortfall of 24,000 workers on farms, nurseries and greenhouses. Even though retired workers sometimes come back to help during harvest season, they’re reaching a point in their lives where back-to-back 12-to-15-hour days are no longer pleasant, or even possible. When they’re gone, we’ll have a significant gap. The report found that our country has one of the worst skills shortages in food production compared to other major food-exporting nations, and finding people to fill seasonal roles has become all but impossible. Worse still, roughly two out of three Canadian farmers do not have a succession plan in place.

I’m already seeing this problem play out. Last December, one of our full-time employees retired. He operated equipment, worked in our shop and made sure everything was well maintained. That kind of dedication is hard to replace, especially as we enter our first growing season without him in more than three years. Finding someone to take over his position became a five-month ordeal, involving multiple job board posts and an application to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, which connects people around the world with short-term job opportunities in Canada. It’s often a last resort for farmers here. The application, which is long and detailed, took many hours to complete, and there’s no guarantee that applicants will find a new employee. (In our case, we finally found somebody who responded to our post on Indeed.)

There’s plenty of problems to fix with the TFW program. Applicants have to prove there’s adequate housing for the worker in advance, and sometimes that means renting a place that’s going to sit empty for months before they arrive. The application also asked me repeatedly to explain why I was unable to hire a Canadian worker, but farm owners know that there simply aren’t any Canadians willing to take these jobs.

That’s the fundamental problem with our worker shortage: since birth rates have collapsed over the last couple of decades, our available workforce is shrinking, and those able to work aren’t working for us. My job posting offered competitive pay and benefits, but I found that prospective qualified employees weren’t interested in manual labour and long hours. Urbanization is another issue: major cities welcome immigrants by the thousands, but rural areas don’t get the same influx of newcomers.

If we do end up with a farming crisis because of this labour shortage, the effects will be far-reaching. We currently export the vast majority of what we produce in Saskatchewan, so we’re not going to run out of food in Canada any time soon. But if we want to keep food prices down around the world, we need greater agricultural production, which relies on farms meeting their labour needs.

One in eight Canadian jobs are related to agriculture—whether that’s primary production, transportation or food sales. Since Canada is a major food-exporting nation, agriculture is one of our most profitable sectors and part of our country’s economic backbone. A labour shortage will harm that sector, increase unemployment and drastically reduce government revenue. That may lead to fewer government services, which will hurt all Canadians, whether they’re involved in farming or not.

It’s high time the government recognizes the danger our industry faces. We need to enact change through policy and bring more skilled agricultural labourers to Canada; they can come from the pool of international workers who have experience in this sector. The Dutch government, for example, recently announced misguided plans to buy out and close up to 3,000 farms in an attempt to reduce emissions, and those are workers looking for an opportunity to stay in the business they know and love.

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We also need to prioritize investment in agriculture, both public and private. According to RBC’s report, every dollar invested in agricultural research and development generates $10 to $20 in Canada’s GDP. But one of the biggest investments we need to make is in our classrooms. If we want to grow this industry and transform Canada into a world leader in agricultural technology and food production, we need our young generation to consider this sector as a viable and competitive place to build a career. There are Canadian organizations like Agriculture in the Classroom working to fill in this educational gap, teaching students to care about how and where we get our food.

I’m optimistic about the future of farming in our country. The rate of retirement over the next decade will likely generate enormous opportunities, and agricultural technology is innovating fast. On our farm, we monitor field operations data, which tracks our machines and any potential mechanical problems. We also own several weather stations with sensors that help us observe our crops’ conditions. Companies like John Deere have even created fully autonomous tractors for certain field applications, and someday, perhaps within the decade, they can help stem the bleeding rate of farmers.

In the meantime, we’ll work with what we have. Owning a farm means operating on hope and resilience. There’s a lot out of our control—the weather, the workforce—and we must learn to bear those trials well.

So on the days my wife needs a break, I’ll grab our kids and take them out on my tractor, just like my dad did all those years ago. Since cabs are bigger now, there’s enough room for all of them to be buckled in next to me. My boys are just as fascinated with farm machinery as I was at their age, and those rides are the highlight of our day. Once my time to retire comes along, all I want is to leave behind a family farm strong enough to survive for future generations. I don’t know if my boys will grow up to choose these fields over a career in a big city, but at least they can have greater opportunities than what my dad gave me.

—As told to Ali Amad

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“I love spending time at the beach with a view of the mountains” (Illustration by Lauren Tamaki)

I was born and raised in Kathmandu, where one of Nepal’s biggest religious festivals, Indra Jātrā, takes place. A chariot carrying the Kumari, the Living Goddess, tours through the streets accompanied by dancing and music. Traditional festivals are some of my fondest childhood memories. I’ve always loved the way holidays bring people together.

In 2001, I went to Kathmandu Engineering College to study computer engineering. Around the same time, I started dating Pukar. We were good friends from middle school, and I realized he could be a good boyfriend, too. We complemented each other—he studied sculpture, and I enjoyed fiction and poetry. We got married in 2012. Two months after the wedding, I moved to Bangkok to do an MBA, while Pukar stayed in Kathmandu to establish his career as an interior designer. In between visits, we’d talk on the phone every evening. Sometimes I would surprise him with a delivery, like a package of doughnuts from our favourite bakery in Kathmandu. I graduated and found work at a fintech company in Bangkok. Pukar eventually joined me there in 2017, but it was hard for him to get a job because he didn’t speak Thai.

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We started thinking about where we could both advance our careers. We had read that Canada was positive, welcoming and safe, so we applied for permanent residency, and Pukar moved to Ottawa in April of 2018. I stayed behind because my mother was suffering from kidney failure and on dialysis. I wanted to be nearby to support her. By this point, Pukar and I had spent much of our relationship apart, so we were used to frequent Skype calls. The time difference made it challenging, but we loved each other and didn’t want to drift. By June of 2020, my mother was really sick, so I quit my job and moved back to Nepal to be with her.

That November, I made the difficult decision to leave my mom and move to Canada. I was reaching the maximum number of months I could stay outside the country after getting permanent residency. Pukar had landed a job as a designer in Haliburton, a small town about three hours’ drive north of Toronto, so I reunited with him there. It was a tough transition—I was used to big cities, and our rental home was in the middle of the woods. I felt isolated. To get groceries, I had to walk for 30 minutes through the snow along a busy highway. I found myself making small talk with cashiers just to feel some connection. Making matters worse, my mother passed away two weeks after I arrived. It was a very sad time.

In 2021, we moved to Vancouver. I instantly felt at home. Seeing the water and mountains reminded me of the valley and hills near Kathmandu. The weather wasn’t as cold as it was in Haliburton, so I could go out and walk along the seawall. I would listen to podcasts about Buddhism and grief.

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Everything was still closed because of the pandemic, and I couldn’t meet new people, so I joined a group called Immigrant Networks. We’d meet online with other newcomers. They made me feel like I wasn’t alone in trying to restart my life. I could do things on my own again, like walk to a café. Recently I discovered a great Nepali restaurant in Surrey, the Kathmandu Bar and Grill, which serves momos—a kind of Nepali dumpling.

I now work as a project manager at a software company. Pukar is an interior designer. We’re renting an apartment in Kitsilano. I love spending time at the beach with a view of the mountains. Through friends of friends back home, we’ve been able to connect with the Nepali community here. We celebrate festivals together. At Dashain, to honour the goddess Durga, we eat savoury fried lentil doughnuts called bara, and at Tihar, the festival of lights, we eat a rice dish called bhoe, with bamboo shoots, potatoes, beans, tomatoes and tofu. We celebrate Canadian holidays, too, like Thanksgiving. Our friends hosted us for a feast with turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. It’s nice to enjoy holidays with loved ones again. Pukar and I are still establishing our lives in Canada, but we’re glad we moved. This is our new home. I have a purpose here. I know my mom would be happy for us.

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(Photography by Richmond Lam, hair and makeup by Catherine Laniel)

Sarah-Ève Pelletier has no bad memories. The pool-deck hijinks, the contagious pre-performance euphoria, the sequins—that’s what she recalls about her decorated five-year artistic swimming stint with Canada’s national team. That golden time left such a mark, in fact, that every one of Pelletier’s career moves since has allowed her to keep a toe in the world of sports. After retiring in 2007, Pelletier, a Quebec City native, earned back-to-back law degrees, eventually working as in-house counsel for the Canadian and international Olympic committees.

Now, Pelletier is nearly a year into a role that’s forced her to confront the ugly underbelly of Canadian athletics. Last June, she was appointed the country’s first sport integrity commissioner, leading a new federally funded office meant to manage complaints about alleged abuses and institutional rot within the country’s national sporting organizations. (In mid-May, Sports Canada announced the creation of another oversight body to ensure the commissioner’s recommendations—and any sanctions—are carried out.)Horror stories have come in waves, recounted by athletes from sports as varied as soccer, gymnastics, water polo and bobsleigh. Pelletier’s less focused on restoring their glory than their humanity. Until then, she says, she can’t stop.

I think you said you wanted to go for a walk while we were talking.

Yes, I’m ready for you. I’m outside. I’m not going to walk too far—just in a circle, in the roundabout in front of my house.

Are you one of those people who can’t stop moving?

Yeah. If we were on Zoom, you’d see a lot of me using my hands and jiggling in my seat. My team would tell you that I’m constantly snacking. That probably comes from my old life.

In your new life, you’re Canada’s first sport integrity commissioner. What exactly does that mean?

I oversee the office of the sport integrity commissioner, or OSIC, which is sort of the central hub of Canada’s Abuse-Free Sport program, created last year. We handle complaint management. If an allegation is made against an individual, that could trigger an investigation and sanctions. If the issue is a sports organization, we can initiate an independent evaluation that results in recommendations and so on.

As we’ve seen, these organizations sometimes go to great lengths to protect themselves. (I’m thinking of Hockey Canada’s alleged sexual assault slush funds.) How is your office going to make sure complaints don’t fall through the cracks?

One of the reasons that OSIC was created was to take the management of complaints outside of the organizations so they can be addressed without interference or stalling. Certain issues seem to repeat in these organizations over time—sometimes decades. Now we’re asking, “How are these things still happening when it’s not even the same people who are involved?”

Pascale St-Onge, Canada’s minister of sport, condemned the focus on winning and medals to the detriment of athletes themselves. Remember when Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles very publicly opted out of major tournaments for mental health reasons? That came with a lot of praise, but also a huge uproar.

There’s been a tendency to see athletic performance and self-care as opposites, and I think people are starting to reject that idea. I’m a mother now, so I’m observing sport through a very different lens than I used to. We can learn from how kids approach it all—the joy is in being able to do something that, maybe a day prior, you weren’t. Not because there’s money at the end of the line.

Are your kids swimmers?

They’re both under seven, so a bit too young. The older one is into the uniforms and the making friends aspect of sports. I think that’s universal.

Do you have reservations about putting them in sports, given the risks?

With everything going on in the world, we need sports more than ever. Athletics can have an amazing effect on children and a rallying effect on communities. I still remember watching Sidney Crosby score the winning goal in the men’s hockey final at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games. I was finishing my master’s degree in Los Angeles, so I was on the way to the airport to pick up my mom. I watched the game on my cellphone, which took a lot of bandwidth back then.

But what about now?

The ability to mentally prepare for a big presentation, to let go of what’s not in my control—the benefits of sport still affect me today. The flip side is that those who have been hurt feel it long after they stop playing. The current context hasn’t scared me off; I want to make sure sports offer the good they’re meant to.

You clearly had a really positive experience in swimming—nothing like the kinds of mistreatment you’re untangling now. Any favourite memories?

I was involved in probably 11 different activities outside of school: figure skating, diving, gymnastics, tennis, music, dance. Synchro was a combination of all of those things. I remember the big wins, but more so the inside jokes. Some gags have made it to our team reunions 20 years later. We still use the nicknames.

I’m going to need your nickname.

It’s “Poppy.” It came out of nowhere when we were brainstorming choreography in the shallow end. It has no link to my flower preferences. It just stuck.

In retrospect, you probably mostly remember the competition—but maybe also that one really tacky pink costume?

At the high-performance level, the costumes are like pieces of art. My mom and I also sewed some—even during the holidays. I have pictures of us with the Christmas tree. There we are, putting sequins on a bathing suit.

Did you grow up in an athletic family?

My parents were definitely not teaching me technical tricks, if I can put it that way. My mom was an extremely hard worker. She raised me on her own, but she was in the stands at almost every single practice. Sometimes knitting.

What did the do-or-die pressure of elite sports feel like? Have you always had a for-the-love-of-the-game mindset? Were you ever more cutthroat?

I loved to push my own limits, and also the buildup of intensity before a swim. You’re all looking into each other’s eyes, wanting to perform—not just for yourself but for each other. That energy.

So why did you give it all up?

I was in a car accident in 2007, the year before the Beijing Games. Doctors put me on concussion protocols. Was it heartbreaking? Yes. Depending on the circumstances, you can recover from an injury, but it can also be devastating. I think there’s a parallel to be made with people who’ve experienced harm in sport. Sometimes they can continue, but sometimes that journey is altered forever. It’s hard to speak in generalities here.

What does your off-hours engagement with sports look like now?

I was recently reading a book about ikigai, which is a Japanese philosophy that explains longevity. Movement: that’s how I get into flow. I’ll chase my kids around, ski—anything that connects me to the outdoors. The sensation of being in the water will never be lost on me.

Indoor pools can be nice.

They smell too much like chlorine. That’s one thing I don’t miss.

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“This country has so many natural wonders we need to protect.” (Illustration by Victor Kerlow)

I send my mother so many videos of the snow in Canada. I never saw it back home in Pakistan, where even the coldest days are 15 to 20 degrees Celsius. I was born in a small rural village in a region called Arif Wala. My father worked as a mechanical engineer in textile factories, and we moved around for his job every two or three years. But we never left the country, and I never saw snow.

When it was time to choose my university program, I took a practical approach. My dad heard from his colleagues that electrical engineers were in demand, so that’s what I studied at the Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences in Islamabad. In 2018, I took a semester abroad at the University of Arkansas, where I spent every weekend travelling to different parts of the U.S. I visited 18 states, and in Breckenridge, a ski town in Colorado, I finally saw snow for the first time.

When I came back to Pakistan, I started researching ways to emigrate to a Western country permanently. My time in the U.S. had shown me that a better quality of life was possible. In Pakistan, electricity is spotty. Even now, in 2023, the country frequently experiences blackouts. Climate change has ravaged our lives too. Floods and earthquakes kill hundreds and displace thousands every year. In 2022, the flooding was the worst it’s ever been, injuring almost 13,000 people—the result of stronger monsoons and melting glaciers. Millions lost their homes and access to clean drinking water, and more than 1,700 people were killed.

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I knew I wanted to move to the West, but I wasn’t sure where. I ended up choosing Canada because it had a more welcoming immigration system than the U.S.—and I was excited to live somewhere cold. I applied for research master’s programs in electrical engineering and got into Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland. I didn’t know anything about Newfoundland, but it didn’t matter. I was finally moving to Canada.

My flight to St. John’s was in August of 2021, two weeks before my first semester. As our plane broke through the clouds, I saw the shoreline appear below us, dotted with jellybean houses. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. At the airport, someone from the university’s Pakistani Students’ Association picked me up and took me to the apartment I’d share with other association members.

As I got to know St. John’s better, I noticed that climate change was affecting my new home too. Summers in Newfoundland had become much warmer, just as they had back in Pakistan. Locals told me that 10 years ago, icebergs floated up to the shores of St. John’s, but that’s almost impossible at the rate ice is melting now. After witnessing the destructive power of climate change at home, I knew something needed to be done. I only became more convinced of that once I moved here.

In my studies, I learned more about green-energy initiatives, working on small wind turbine and solar panel models. In January of 2022, I started looking for work. I got a job as an engineer-in-training at Growler Energy, a renewable resources and clean-energy company based in St. John’s. I manage two projects, assessing the risk of icebergs hitting power cables at sea and studying the feasibility of green energy technologies in remote communities in Nunavut. I see Canada as a leader in climate change efforts. There’s a huge amount of funding available for renewable energy research and new sustainable projects throughout the country.

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The sector is expanding and requires more skilled workers. There’s so much potential for other international engineers to move here and help Canada make the transition to clean energy.

This country has so many natural wonders we need to protect. During the past year, I’ve hiked national parks and gone on a whale-watching tour in the Atlantic Ocean (some of the whales even came close to the shore). When winter arrives in St. John’s, I get a coffee and go up Signal Hill, which overlooks the city. From there, I can admire the snow-covered beauty of my new home.

The post I saw the devastation of climate change in Pakistan. Something needed to be done here too. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

For the past 20 years, I’ve been a public bus driver in Ottawa. I’ve seen a lot of change during that time: new highrises in the downtown core, big-box stores dotting the suburbs, rail transit emerging above and below ground. To me, though, the biggest change has been the rise of sports betting ads. Ever since the federal government legalized single-game sports betting in 2021, flashy advertisements for gambling sites have popped up everywhere. On billboards towering over roadways. On posters plastered to the sides of buildings. On the backs of other buses. On sports radio. During my shifts, I hear teens and twentysomethings discuss their bets as they board the bus.

I’m a recovering gambling addict, abstinent since 2018. Over the past few decades, I’ve played through more than $1 million, betting on games like house poker and virtual blackjack—even gas station scratcher cards. Of that total, more than $600,000 went to sports gambling. I’ve laid down wagers on hockey, football, horse racing, even cricket, even though I don’t know a damn thing about cricket. I did most of it illegally, placing bets with bookies or foreign sports gambling sites.

When I see the new ads around Ottawa, I get angry. I know that recovering addicts like me are going to struggle with temptation. I’ve experienced first-hand how sports betting can ruin a life. I’ve lied to family members, compromised marriages, missed mortgage payments, contemplated suicide, all because of my addiction. I’ve lost a hell of a lot more than money.

***

Growing up, I lived with my parents in Lower Town, just outside of Ottawa’s downtown core. My mother handled most of the parenting while working full time for the government. My father was the sales director at a big printing company. I idolized him. He lived like a rock star, staying out late, treating his clients to dinners at Al’s Steakhouse or the Keg, driving fancy cars, walking around in tailored Harry Rosen suits. People were drawn to him.

During those dinners at the Keg, the wine was always flowing. Everyone ordered three courses, starters, appetizers, desserts, racking up a bill of at least $1,000. My father always picked up the cheque, typically for up to 10 people. He never flinched when it came time to pay. He also had a 28-foot Chris-Craft boat that he docked in Westport, a village on the banks of Upper Rideau Lake. The boat slept eight people and had its own kitchen and bathroom. On weekends, my father hosted big parties on the lake, tying six boats together. They were filled with friends, family and work associates. He always stopped at the LCBO first to stock up on booze for everyone.

My dad’s swaggering lifestyle came at a cost for our family. He was always away on work trips. He regularly had affairs. How do I know? Well, starting from when I was eight, he brought me along. At least a couple of times a year, we hopped in the car and visited his girlfriends around the city. When we arrived, he would turn to me and say, “Noah, go downstairs and play with her kids, distract them.” So that’s what I did. On the drive home, he told me to keep everything to myself. “Make sure you never tell Mom; otherwise we’ll have to split up. Tell her we went to the movies.”

By 2018, I owed $49,000 to my bookie and $26,000 on credit cards. We had to refinance our house to cover the debt.

I kept his secrets. In exchange, he rewarded me with money and gifts. It was an unwritten contract: if my mother never found out, I got pretty much whatever I wanted. Among my friends, I was considered the spoiled one. I always had the latest and greatest toys, goalie equipment and video game consoles. I usually received $20 a day for lunch, a lot for a kid in the ’70s and ’80s. The meal only cost $5, leaving me with a tidy surplus. I liked walking around with a wad of cash in my pocket. Young men can learn a lot from their fathers. Unfortunately, I got an education in selfish, deceptive behaviour.

As a little kid, I was obsessed with sports. I played road hockey into the wee hours of the night with my friends. I watched Sportsline and The George Michael Sports Machine obsessively. I rooted for the Chicago Blackhawks in hockey and the Minnesota Vikings in football. My love of sports was a gateway to sports betting. And I caught that bug early. Like, really early: by Grade 3, in 1984, I was running fantasy hockey pools for my classmates, setting up a draft, creating brackets and tracking statistics. For a $10 buy-in, everyone picked a handful of NHL players and earned points based on their performance throughout the season. The winner took home the pot at the end of the year. Remember, this was the pre-internet era, before up-to-the-second phone updates were the norm. So I regularly woke up early to get the newspaper and look at the scores from the night before. Sports gambling gave me a social advantage, a way to create relationships, a consistent topic to discuss with friends. I even bet on the lunchtime schoolyard football games.

The same year, my parents divorced and my father moved out. He married a younger woman and bought a house across town. I did the back-and-forth thing for a little while, spending every second weekend at my father’s place, but as I got older, the arrangement changed. I saw him less and less. Eventually, I was only going over to his place for an occasional dinner. In 1989, when I was 15, my dad left again—this time for Costa Rica. He planned to retire down there. I knew he would never live in Ottawa again.

I attended St. Matthew High School in Orléans, a suburb just east of the city. By then, I lived nearby with my mother and her new partner. I skipped class most of the time. In the mornings, I forged my mother’s signature during home room and signed out for the day. Then I took the 10-minute bus ride to Place d’Orléans, a shopping mall that had an OLG lottery kiosk where I could buy Pro-Line tickets. At the time, there were only two legal forms of sports betting in Canada: horse racing and Pro-Line. Most people are familiar with the former. Pro-Line, however, is more complex. It’s parlay-style gambling, which involves accurately predicting the outcome of anywhere from three to 10 sporting events. I grabbed tickets off the counter and ticked off my picks. All of it happened on paper. For example, I might bet on the Leafs to beat the Flames in hockey, the Bills to beat the Giants in football and the Blue Jays to beat the Mariners in baseball. The more games I picked, the higher the payout. And I only won if all my predictions were correct.

I spent anywhere from $50 to $150 a day on Pro-Line tickets, using my daily allowance or money I made running the salad bar at the Keg, which paid $13 an hour and up to $300 in tips on a good night. It left me with more than enough cash to support my burgeoning habit. I don’t think my mom ever suspected anything—at least not until later in life. There wasn’t a day that went by where I didn’t place at least one bet. The legal gambling age was 18, but back then, the tellers never asked for ID. If I was lucky, I won once every few weeks. One time, I put down $100 and accurately picked the outcome of all 10 games, which resulted in an $11,000 payout. I was never smart enough to save the money from my wins, though. I usually dumped it right back into more bets.

Whenever I bought Pro-Line tickets at Place d’Orléans, I’d walk five minutes to the Broken Cue, a pool hall and arcade. That’s where I hung out for the day. I never cared about school because I was always finding a way to make money, working odd jobs or placing bets—and I figured I would eventually get rich gambling. I was arrogant. I had friends do homework and take tests for me. The Broken Cue was a big, brightly lit place with at least 15 pool tables and 30-odd video game machines. I liked to play pool against the regulars, but I was lousy at the game and I usually lost. Otherwise, I hung out at the counter, poring over the newspaper, looking at the betting odds. I placed wagers with a big Lebanese bookie named George, who took action on major sporting events like the Super Bowl.

I loved the waiting that came with gambling: those final, dramatic moments of uncertainty, when a last-minute field goal or three-point shot could alter the result of the game. The feeling of anticipation— that’s where I got the high. And when I had several bets going on at once, it felt like my brain was on fire, the ultimate stimulation. Nothing else mattered in those moments. Even if I lost, I never let on that I cared. That was part of the appeal, too. People never knew if I had $100 or $10,000 in the bank. I felt like I was bulletproof, like no matter how it turned out, everything would be all right.

In 1993, I graduated from St. Matthew—just barely, after wasting a couple of years in the Broken Cue. I was 19 at the time, a year and a half older than my peers. Right away, I married my high school sweetheart. By 1996, I was working two minimum-wage jobs. In the mornings, from 2:30 a.m. to 7:30 a.m., I loaded trucks for UPS. Then, during the day, I worked in shipping and receiving for Addition Elle, a women’s clothing store. My wife and I were living in an apartment in the suburbs, and I needed both jobs to pay for our expenses and my habit.

I gambled whenever I could, spending a couple hundred bucks a day. I played poker with my buddies, plugged away at Pro-Line and bought lottery tickets just to look at numbers. I was stuck in married life at a relatively young age, and gambling made me feel alive with possibility. Things quickly spiralled out of control. This was near the beginning of Money Mart, the chain of cash-advance spots that allow customers to borrow up to 60 per cent against their next paycheques. I would bring my pay stubs from UPS and Addition Elle, usually totalling about $6,000 with overtime, to several Money Mart locations, taking out as much as I could. But the interest was roughly 40 per cent. Eventually, I owed $60,000. I’d maxed out credit cards and a line of credit. In 1999, I had to file for bankruptcy.

My wife and I decided to divorce the following year. We realized we weren’t a good fit, and I wasn’t ready to accept responsibility for my actions. I stayed in denial, happily blaming my ex if anyone asked why the marriage ended. It took me a couple of years to pay off my debt to creditors after that.

In 2002, I started driving a bus for the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Transit Commission. By then, I had a new girlfriend, and we’d recently had a child. For a little while, we all lived in a three-bedroom apartment, paying $1,250 a month, but eventually, we wanted a bigger house. In 2003, I went down to Costa Rica and borrowed around $70,000 from my father, no strings attached. With $40,000 of that loan, I made a down payment on a four-bedroom semi-detached in the Ottawa suburb of Beacon Hill. The rest went toward gambling.

At the time, poker was surging in popularity. A boom in online poker sites helped fuel that craze, as did ESPN, which aired the World Series of Poker, showcasing the game for a mainstream audience, turning players into celebrities. I started playing a lot. I had a mortgage to pay off. I convinced myself that if I could get good at poker, I could help my family get ahead. Sometimes, I won big. There were weekends when I entered PokerStars tournaments, winning $80,000 on a $50 buy-in. Hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed in and out of my virtual accounts in those years, but I never cashed out. I just kept betting more.

***

By the time I was 35, I had spent roughly $20,000 a year on gambling, starting from the age of 10—I had lost more than $500,000, including the money I’d made from my wins. I was still gambling late into the night, playing at underground poker halls around town, sometimes coming home as late as sunrise the next day. I was about $35,000 in debt and was forced to ask my mom to help me pay it off. Gambling was affecting my work. It was affecting my relationship. I wasn’t there for my son. Before long, I started missing mortgage payments. One day, my secret was out: the mortgage company contacted my girlfriend, letting her know we’d missed three payments. She was furious, wondering where all the money had gone. How could I have let things get so far out of control?

We split up in 2005. Our relationship had been rocky over the years, and it hit a breaking point when she found out about the gambling debt. I had become the only thing I didn’t want to become—a bad partner, an absentee partner, just like my father. That’s when I realized I needed help. I finally acknowledged that my gambling had ended the relationship and created severe financial issues. So I agreed to attend Gamblers Anonymous. I wanted to show both my ex and my mom that I was willing to get help. The program was once a week—a couple of hours of individual therapy combined with an hour of group.

I went cold turkey, and I hated it. I didn’t really want to stop gambling. Every time I walked past a lottery machine, I thought to myself, Maybe this time I can win millions and solve all my problems. That’s the thing about gambling. With other addictions, like alcohol and tobacco, using only causes harm. But gambling always presents an opportunity to reverse course, save yourself, get out of the hole.

I didn’t gamble for a year. It was the first time I had practised any sort of abstinence. My debts were all settled. And in December of 2006, while on vacation with my buddies in Cuba, I met Julie, the woman who would become my second wife. I told her everything about my past. It was a huge relief to not hide anything. Julie and I got married in April of 2008 and had our first child later that year.

I stayed clean for the next three years, but I struggled. I didn’t spend enough time with my son from my previous relationship. Then things went downhill. In 2010, my ex-girlfriend wanted to change the custody arrangement. Up until that point, we were doing a week on, a week off, splitting things 50-50. But my son wanted to live full time with his mother because I wasn’t giving him enough attention.

One day, before work, I was at the station, waiting for my bus to arrive, when I got a message from an old buddy in the gambling world. He had just started a sports gambling website in the U.K. and wanted me to test it out. The online betting industry was worth some $15 billion by this point, with sites based all over the world, like PartyGaming in Gibraltar, Sportsbet in Australia and Betandwin in Austria.

MORE: Ontario’s online betting boom makes it hard to be a recovered gambling addict

The account came loaded with a $2,500 credit. I figured I was playing with house money—sort of. I only had to pay anything back if my losses took me below $2,500, which seemed like a good deal. But within two hours of getting the text, I had already bet the entire $2,500 credit, with 10 bets going on at the same time. As I waited on the outcomes, neurons firing in my brain, I momentarily forgot about the pain in my life. It was a fantastic, familiar feeling. By the next day, I had negative $500 in the account. I’d lost everything and then some.

That was my first taste of virtual sports betting, and I was hooked. With a virtual bankroll, it seemed like the money didn’t even exist. It was just a number on a website. I didn’t have to go to a bank to deposit cash. I didn’t need to take out loans. I could just link up my credit card and pay for bets. Most importantly, I could hide everything from Julie, who works in banking and would be able to track any other gambling activity. Just like that, I blew three and a half years of abstinence.

My deceptive behaviour started up again. I siphoned off a percentage of my paycheque into a separate bank account, which I used to apply for credit cards and lines of credit. I went to a payday loan place, taking out as much as they would give me, which ended up being $600. Instead of putting that toward paying off my debt, I tried to double it, making bets to try to break even.

I managed to hide my gambling for another three years. All that time, I was under phenomenal stress. Everything became darker. My brain was always preoccupied, never present in the moment. I was always trying to figure out the next bet. People would talk to me, but I was never engaged in the conversation. I missed my kids growing up around me, which was heartbreaking.

In those years, I went on a few road trips to the States to see football games with a friend. Once, near Boston, during a game between the New England Patriots and Houston Texans, I bet $750 on Aaron Hernandez, one of the Patriots players, to score the first touchdown of the game. He did, running into the endzone about 40 feet from where we were sitting. The payout—more than $10,000—was one of the biggest rushes of my life. I got swept up in the moment, celebrating the windfall among the frenzied Patriots fans. But the losses outweighed the wins, of course. My debt had slowly been building, and I was in the pit for $17,500.

At that point, all I wanted was to break even, so in 2012 I put down a wager for US$17,500 on Super Bowl XLVII, between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers. I figured I would stop after that. Well, I lost, sinking deeper into the hole for a total of US$35,000. I tried to keep it a secret from Julie, but she figured it out. On far too many family outings, I would be looking down at my phone, distracted, checking bets. The fact that everything was online made the problem worse. I could look down at my phone and disappear into another world.

When Julie caught on, I agreed to go to Rideauwood, an outpatient addiction treatment centre in Ottawa.We made a deal: she would get control of all our money, with full transparency, and I would go to Gamblers Anonymous once a week. I also saw a therapist. At Rideauwood, I met Jane, the head of the gambling program. She had blondish-white hair and a soft-spokenness that put everyone at ease. She was my saviour. She thought I had a “provider complex,” that I felt like I had to drive a nice car, have a big house, live a fancy lifestyle, much like my father. Apparently, I also had “champagne taste on a beer budget.” I just kept pissing that budget away, trying to make myself forget how shitty I was feeling, about my father leaving, about my relationships, about my addiction. We made some progress, and Jane suggested that I also check into Problem Gambling Services, an in-
patient program in Windsor. I brushed her off. I thought I would be fine on my own.

***

By 2017, Julie and I had three kids. I had built up some trust. She let me have a credit card again. Things were slowly going back to normal. That July, I received a panicked call in the middle of the night from one of my father’s many girlfriends. She said my father was in critical condition at a hospital in Puntarenas, Costa Rica, about a three-hour drive up the coast from where he lived in Manuel Antonio. He had a perforated bowel. The next morning, I flew down and went to see him in the hospital. We’d never had a great relationship and had barely even spoken in the last six years. And from what I could tell, he was going to die. He told me that I needed to take care of his house and a couple of rental properties in and around Manuel Antonio. Collect rent, get rid of squatters, stuff like that.

Every day, I saw my father during visiting hours at the hospital, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., then, in the afternoons, drove back to his properties in Manuel Antonio. During the drive back and forth, I stopped in Jaco, a little Atlantic City–style resort town with casinos and hotels. Overcome with grief and anger at my father’s situation, I started gambling again, playing poker at one of the hotels with a buy-in of $300. I blew $5,000 like it was nothing. After a few days, my father was discharged, and we took him back to his place. Within five hours of leaving the hospital, he died in my arms, just a couple of weeks before his 70th birthday. We held a memorial for him down there.

When I came back to Ottawa, I struggled with the mourning process. I had a lot of resentment toward my father, and once again, I felt like he’d left me. When he died, I lost any hope of resolving our issues. I started drinking more, going to the bar near my house a couple of nights a week. Before long, I entered the bar’s football pool, which I won a couple of times, earning a couple hundred bucks a pop. Not much, but it was enough to draw me back in.

Sports betting is more accessible than ever, seamlessly connected to phones and credit cards. Gamblers can lose their life savings without even getting out of bed.

One of the bartenders introduced me to a bookie. When my inheritance started trickling in from my father’s estate, about $90,000 in total, I used some of it to gamble. I also asked my mother for about $25,000, telling her I needed it to cover my kid’s hockey fees, replace a car tire. I kept these things a secret from Julie. I always told the bookie not to let me get deeper than $1,500.

Of course, I was being naive. Bookies, casinos and gambling sites never tell bettors to stop. Instead, they prey on the vulnerable, their most reliable clients. I knew that if I continued gambling, I would lose my family, my house, everything. I contemplated suicide, thinking it was the only way to stop my gambling and that the life-insurance payout would support my family down the line. But I couldn’t cause so much trouble for them. Julie noticed a change in my behaviour. I was going to the bar three, four times a week. I was angry. I had no patience with my kids, lost interest in stuff I would usually enjoy, like playing men’s league hockey.

That’s when I made a big mistake—or maybe it was a cry for help. One day, in 2018, I was texting Julie and my bookie at the same time, dealing with multiple chats, when I accidentally texted Julie a list of my bets for that day. She wrote back angrily, asking what was happening. At first, I got defensive and proclaimed my innocence. But I knew the jig was up when she asked to come to my therapist appointment shortly after. I decided to come clean.

At that point, I owed $49,000 to the bookie, $26,000 on credit cards. Julie settled up with the bookie and told him never to contact me again. The whole thing put a big strain on our finances—we had to refinance our house to cover the debts—and I had to borrow money from my mom. In September of 2018, I finally admitted myself to the three-week in-patient gambling treatment program in Windsor that Jane had suggested, which thankfully was covered by OHIP. When I arrived, they put all my clothing into a dryer to make sure I didn’t bring in any contraband or electronics. There was no access to the outside world—no phones, no TVs. We had to be at the table when meals were served, promptly at 7 a.m., 11:45 a.m. and 6:45 p.m.

During my time there, I had one-on-ones with therapists and group sessions. The program saved me. It forced me to take a three-week break from my life: no bills, no bookies, no nothing, just dealing with myself. The staff there taught us that it takes time to break a habit, to rewire the neural pathways that control our behaviour. We learned about dopamine spikes and subconscious triggers, including big swings of emotion. I came to realize that when I had thoughts of abandonment related to my father, I used gambling to distract from those feelings. Armed with a better understanding of the addiction, and deprived of access to cash, bookies and sports betting sites, it was relatively easy to get control of my habit.

***

I haven’t gambled since August of 2018. I won’t flip a coin, play rock-paper-scissors. If there’s a 50-50 draw at work, I politely decline to participate. When I feel an urge to gamble, I text Julie to let her know I’m thinking of her. It helps keep me accountable. But it’s getting harder and harder, especially with so many enticing advertisements. One campaign for BetMGM features hockey greats like Connor McDavid and Wayne Gretzky. The ads target broad swaths of hockey fans, making betting seem cool, fun, heroic. Everyone is a winner. The truth is that these places only exist because the gamblers aren’t winning. The money is flowing in one direction.

Before 2021, when Pro-Line and horse racing were the only two legal forms of sports betting in Canada, placing single-game bets was a bit more difficult. I had to either find a bookie and pay them off in cash or register with a foreign sports betting site. At the time, Canadians were spending $14 billion annually on illegal gambling operations and offshore betting websites, playing through sportsbooks.

The Canadian government wanted a piece of the action. So, in 2021, it passed Bill C-218, removing the ban on single-game sports betting, allowing provinces to create their own regulatory authorities. Ontario didn’t waste any time. The province set up a regulatory authority, iGaming Ontario, to oversee the burgeoning industry. By the spring of 2022, there were dozens of sportsbooks registered in the province—big-name international players like Bet365, PointsBet and DraftKings, along with new Ontario-based companies like theScore Bet and BetRivers.

Business was decent at the start. Naturally, professional sports franchises and broadcasters leapt into bed with betting companies. Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, which owns the Maple Leafs and Raptors, inked a multi-year deal with PointsBet Canada. And TSN, one of Canada’s biggest sports broadcasters, partnered with the U.S.-based FanDuel. From that point forward, it was virtually impossible to watch a sporting event in Ontario without being inundated by sports betting propaganda. The industry produced $162 million in revenues in Ontario in its first three months of operation.

It could get much bigger. Alberta, which has been fairly cautious in its approach to sports betting, announced that it will allow two companies to enter the industry. Deloitte Canada estimates that the market resulting from single-event sports betting in Canada could grow close to $28 billion within five years. A lot of gamblers will be able to stay within their limits. But what about the people like me, who struggle with gambling addiction? In Canada, more than 300,000 people are at severe or moderate risk of gambling-related problems, according to a recent study by Statistics Canada.

In the digital age, sports betting is more accessible than ever. It’s in the palm of your hand, seamlessly connected to your phone and credit cards. Gamblers can bet—and lose—their life savings without even getting out of bed. Canadians need to be aware of the consequences. I would like to see more contrast advertising, like the kind that exists for the alcohol and tobacco industries. Cigarette cartons are covered in disturbing images of people with cancer. MADD had those macabre commercials dramatizing the results of drinking and driving. The sports betting industry needs something similar—in particular, showing how compulsive gambling can lead to suicide: problem gamblers are more likely to attempt suicide than people with other addictions, at a rate of one in five.

In the U.K., they’re already trying to curtail sports betting advertising. A recent Public Health England study estimated that more than 409 suicides a year in England were associated with problem gambling. The nation’s biggest gambling companies have also agreed to ban betting commercials during sporting events. Ads featuring athletes are prohibited. Other countries, like Spain and Italy, have banned nearly all gambling ads. Canada should follow the leads of our friends across the Atlantic—before it’s too late.

I have four kids in total. My oldest, who’s 21, recently started helping me coach my daughter’s basketball team. The rest of my kids, from my second marriage, are 14, 12 and 10. We live in a nice house in Orléans, with a pool and a hot tub, not far from my mother’s place. I’m the goalie coach and statistician for my 14-year-old son’s hockey team. My relationship with Julie is great. Last year, we spent two weeks in Italy, something I could never have imagined doing while I was in the throes of my addiction, with my finances and focus channelled elsewhere.

Recently, my 14-year-old son asked whether he could place a $5 bet on the Super Bowl, in a pool with his friends from school. I thought about it for a moment. Then I said yes. I told him if it ever got to the point where he couldn’t stop, he could always come talk to me. I want to keep our communication open. I guess, in that way, I’m nothing like my father.

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The post I placed my first wager when I was 10. I’ve gambled more than $1 million since. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“You hear about Islamophobia on the news, but seeing that hate in your own community shakes you” (photography by Brett Gundlock)

Ramadan, the month of fasting for Muslims that ended in late April, is a time of community. Families gather to break fast together, and the mosque is always full for night prayers. But there was a rise in hate crimes against Muslims in Canada this past month. A man attempted to run over congregants at the Islamic Society of Markham. At another Markham mosque, a man yelled slurs at worshippers and was charged with three counts of assault. Yet another man broke into a Montreal mosque, shattering its glass doors while worshippers prayed inside. In New Jersey, an imam was stabbed while leading morning prayer. Mosques are spaces of peace and sanctuary. Watching these attacks has been terrifying. 

This kind of hate isn’t new. I’m a chaplain at Western University but I was imam of the London Muslim Mosque for two years, between 2020 and 2022. I used to receive all sorts of vile anonymous letters and voicemails attacking Muslims and peddling Islamophobic stereotypes. Muslims would tell me about their own experiences with hate. These are stories that don’t leave you: one woman said that shortly after 9/11, when she was still in school, a classmate approached her in the cafeteria and told her that “her people” had attacked “us.” Mosque shootings at home in Quebec and abroad in Christchurch made us question if we’re even safe in our own communities. 

It was an early Monday morning in June of 2021 when the president of the London Muslim Mosque called me. He told me that the night before, a man drove into a Muslim family out for a walk on a busy London street. Maybe no one died, I thought. Maybe they were just injured. I rushed to the mosque. Our tight-knit Muslim community was already talking about what had happened—I needed to find out for myself. 

I found the other imams in the mosque’s foyer, next to London’s deputy police chief and another constable. He confirmed our worst fear: the van attack was a targeted hate crime. We were in shock and, for a long time, no one spoke. We were scared and angry: how could this have happened? When it finally sank in, some people started crying. I didn’t realize who the victims were until our custodian showed me a WhatsApp picture of Salman Afzaal, whose smiling face I often saw in the congregation. 

I taught Yumnah Afzaal, Salman’s daughter, Islamic studies at a local Islamic school when she was in Grade 8. She was smart and studious, always at the top of her class. She handed in her assignments on time and did her work diligently. As a teacher, you’d be lucky to have a student like that. She was quiet and so talented: Yumnah once painted a mural for the school of a crescent moon with a star shooting out of Earth, next to the words “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” It was beautiful and I was amazed by her creativity. 

Losing Yumnah and her family was devastating. There’s no other way to describe it. You hear about Islamophobia on the news, but seeing that hate in your own community shakes you. 

Yumnah Afzaal’s mural

It was hard to find time to grieve. There was so much happening. Two days after the attack, on Tuesday, we hosted a vigil with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. On Friday, there was an interfaith march. The day after that was the Afzaals’ funeral service. These events were nationally broadcast, and friends and family of the victims shared their stories with the media. We offered counselling to community members who needed it. There was an outpouring of support from the non-Muslim community too: people laid flowers at the mosque and where the Afzaal family was struck, wrote messages of support and walked with us while we grieved. 

The attack changed so much. We wondered if we were safe in the streets we grew up in. Muslim women told me they were scared of wearing their hijabs outside, afraid it would make them a visible target for hate. The mosque hired a security guard for daily prayers and at night during Ramadan. There are surveillance cameras and gates and extra security for Friday prayers when a lot of Muslims come to the mosque. But there’s only so much we can do, and only so many times we can ask police to patrol the area. Hearing about hate crimes now opens up the grief of losing the Afzaal family all over again. It’s unnerving to feel like we’re always looking over our shoulder.

A couple of weeks ago, during Ramadan, there was a person sitting in their car in the mosque parking lot. Everybody else was rushing into the mosque for night prayers, but this person looked like they were about to drive off. I stopped and stared at them, wondering what they were thinking and why they were just sitting there. I hate that I was suspicious of them. 

In the end, nothing happened. But the terror we’ve lived through stays with you. 

—As told to Sabra Ismath 

The post The rise in hate crimes has left Muslims terrified appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photograph by Stephanie Foden)

I’m an associate professor at the University of Montreal and a psychiatrist and bioethics researcher at the Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal. I’ve been involved in conversations about medical assistance in dying since 2015, when Quebec’s Act Respecting End-of-Life Care came into force. That act legalized medical assistance in dying (MAID) for adults with a serious and incurable disease who were at the end of their lives, provided they met certain criteria—among others, being able to give informed consent, being in an advanced state of irreversible decline, and experiencing intolerable physical or mental suffering. Around that time, I joined a hospital committee tasked with implementing the law, which meant thinking about how to assess mental suffering. As a psychiatrist, this caught my attention because assessing suffering is something we do every day. 

My initial work wasn’t related to MAID for people solely with mental disorders, because the eligibility criteria in Quebec—i.e., that a person be near the end of life—made it extremely unlikely that someone with a mental disorder as their sole condition would even be eligible. This was still the case in 2016, when the federal MAID law passed, legalizing it for people whose natural deaths were “reasonably foreseeable.”

That all changed in 2019. Two Quebecers —Jean Truchon and Nicole Gladu—argued before the province’s superior court that restricting MAID to people at the end-of-life violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Justice Christine Baudouin agreed, ruling that the law was a violation of the “right to life, liberty and security of the person.”  The federal government amended its MAID law in 2021 to fall in line with the Truchon-Gladu decision, but it included a two-year exclusion for people whose sole condition is a mental disorder. Much of our national discussion since then has focused on whether we should extend MAID to people solely affected by mental disorders. But that word misrepresents the situation.  People with mental disorders were never excluded from these laws, so what we’re really talking about is ending their exclusion.

But this February, the government extended that exclusion for another year, until 2024, saying the extension was needed to ensure that provinces, territories and clinicians are ready. What this means is that a small number of Canadians who are suffering intolerably and want to apply for MAID must wait even longer, while their Charter rights continue to be violated. 

I’m concerned about something beyond legal arguments, though—I’m worried about the message this sends about the status of people with mental disorders in our society. In essence, that they can’t be trusted to make their own decisions, and they require the state to exercise control over their lives, an idea we’ve been moving away from in psychiatric care over the past several decades. Quebec has now gone even further, introducing a bill with a permanent exclusion from MAID for people with mental disorders. Rather than trying to figure out an approach to handling the complexity related to these MAID requests, our solution as a society is to take away people’s rights. 

READ: This Toronto social worker is seeing a surge of anxiety and depression in kids post-pandemic

That’s despite all the work that has gone into grappling with this complexity—work that I’ve been part of. One of the government’s tasks during the two-year exclusion period was to strike an expert panel on MAID for people with mental illness (the government used the expression “mental illness,” though the clinical language is “mental disorder”). I chaired that panel, which brought together people with different perspectives—experts in law and in ethics, MAID providers, psychiatrists, social workers and people with lived experience. We met every two weeks for almost six months, exploring the kinds of complex cases being seen in practice and how they were being handled.  We discussed relevant court decisions, assessment practices and access to resources for people with mental disorders. We talked to experienced colleagues in the Netherlands, one of the small number of countries that permits assisted dying for people with mental disorders. Finally, we discussed the different mechanisms that exist to change and improve MAID practice, and what bodies and levels of government have the power to make such changes.

We delivered a final report last May, outlining 19 recommendations to ensure that complex MAID requests, including those by people with mental disorders, are appropriately assessed. For some, our recommendations weren’t stringent enough, because we did not recommend that the law be changed. 

So why didn’t we? Most of the concerns raised about MAID and mental disorders have focused on how to assess those requests. But the clinicians who perform those assessments work under provincial jurisdiction, even though Canada’s MAID law is under federal jurisdiction. If we want to ensure requests are handled responsibly, changes to federal law aren’t going to get us there. Besides, an entirely new legal structure, applying only to people with mental disorders, would not cover all the kinds of complex cases that are out there. What we need is extra guidance and rules to help clinicians handle all kinds of complex cases. Within our health care system, provincial and territorial regulatory bodies are the ones with the authority to develop rules that practitioners will follow. Most already had a set of rules about MAID—so the panel recommended they develop additional rules for complex MAID requests, including MAID for mental disorders. This was our very first recommendation. Here are some examples:

Canada’s MAID law requires that a person requesting it is affected by an incurable illness, disease, or disability and be in an irreversible state of decline in capability. People often ask how “incurable” or “irreversible” can be defined when talking about mental disorders. And yes, this is difficult, because these terms suggest certainty, and the evolution of many mental disorders is hard to predict. But that’s also true of other chronic conditions. What we do in those cases is evaluate how well someone has responded to past treatment. Unfortunately, some people don’t respond to treatment, no matter how extensive.  This is true in all areas of medicine, and psychiatry is no different. That’s why we recommended that a person has to have had an extensive treatment history before they could be considered eligible for MAID on the basis of a mental disorder. 

This makes clear that the kind of person who could be eligible is not someone simply going through a tough time. The vast majority of Canadians, including politicians and even most clinicians, will never meet a person with the type of severe disorder that could make them eligible for assisted dying. These folks are often well-known to the psychiatric system, and have endured years of mental suffering, attempting all kinds of treatment—medications, neuromodulation techniques, therapy, social supports. Still, they can’t function in their lives. They can’t work or have relationships or engage meaningfully in their communities. Think about what it would be like to be so severely afflicted that you spend most of your life watching it pass you by, and to have its end be your only goal. 

What about questions of consent? Assessing someone’s capacity to give informed consent can be difficult, especially when the symptoms of a condition—like a mental disorder—could affect how they understand the decision. We recommended that assessors undertake thorough capacity assessments—over multiple visits, if necessary. All MAID requests made outside a person’s end-of-life require a minimum of 90 days to elapse between a request and an eventual provision. But it could take longer than that to come to a decision about whether someone is eligible, and we recommended that practitioners take the time they need even if that goes well beyond 90 days.

RELATED: Students are lonelier than ever

The issue of suicidality has also been raised often. The panel looked at the current practice of suicide prevention to inform its recommendation—what we said was that clinicians should continue to use all appropriate suicide prevention efforts, just as they do now. At the same time, it’s important to note that every day, people with and without mental disorders make decisions that could lead to their deaths. They refuse chemotherapy. They stop dialysis. They continue to engage in behaviours—like severe substance use—that are potentially lethal. Do we prevent people from making those decisions, saying they are suicidal? No. We work with them to understand why they make those choices, and we try to help them arrive at the best decision for them, consistent with their own values and beliefs. In some cases we can establish that the person does not have what we call decision-making capacity.  In those cases, a person is legally not entitled to make their own decisions. We can do the same thing with a MAID request. If you are in a mental health crisis, that is not the time to be having conversations about MAID, as the panel made clear.

Over the past few years, the public discourse about mental health has exploded—and that’s a good thing. We want people to be able to feel comfortable seeking help for mental disorders, and to not fear stigma if they do. But we can’t say on one hand how important it is to destigmatize mental disorders, and on the other hand pass laws that single out people with those disorders, portraying them as unable to make their own decisions. It’s important not to underestimate the stigma that already exists: some people our panel heard from—people with lived experience—were worried that even if MAID was allowed for people with mental disorders, their requests wouldn’t be taken seriously. They were concerned that assessors might wrongly assume that they can’t consent, or might underestimate the severity of their suffering. And since the announcement of the recent delay, I’ve heard of patients with potentially qualifying physical conditions who say that they’re going to hide their history of mental disorder because they’re worried it will be used to exclude them. 

The irony is that under the current regime, people with mental disorders already have access to MAID. They just need to have some qualifying physical condition. Imagine someone who has a severe mental disorder who says they want to apply for MAID. They can’t. The very next day they’re diagnosed with a serious cancer. Suddenly all the things that were too difficult and too complex to sort out yesterday–whether the person is suicidal, whether they have capacity to consent, whether the request is a result of unmet social needs–can be figured out today. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. 

I never expected to spend so much time thinking about and working on MAID. But as a psychiatrist, I think it is important that those individuals who, tragically, have experienced severe, lifelong suffering due to mental disorder have the same options as all other Canadians. 

—As told to Caitlin Walsh Miller

The post Canadians with mental disorders shouldn’t be excluded from requesting MAID appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Illustration by Lauren Tamaki)

In my senior year of high school in my hometown of Quito, Ecuador, I fell in love with computer science. It was like a puzzle. For each assignment, I had to look at the different pieces and use my creativity to figure out how they fit together. My mentor said I should study computer programming at university, and my boyfriend, who was at the University of Toronto, encouraged me to apply to Canadian universities. When I was accepted by the University of Waterloo, I had no idea what to expect from Canada.

I flew to Toronto in August of 2016 with my mom, two weeks before the beginning of my first semester. When we passed by the suburbs, I thought they looked so safe, just like the movies. My roommate was a Canadian whose parents were from India. She asked me about Ecuador, our food and how long the flight was. We bonded over a shared love of pop music.

A few days after I moved in, my mom went back to Ecuador. “You’re going to be fine. It’s going to be okay,” she kept telling me. It felt more like she was saying it to herself.

I didn’t feel homesick until two weeks later. I missed the mountains of Ecuador. Ontario is so flat. And I missed the food, too, especially green plantains and seafood, like ceviche. Some days I’d go to the cafeteria and couldn’t find anything I wanted to eat. I called my family every other day to ease my homesickness. My brother’s baby teeth were falling out, and he sent me a Snapchat about his front tooth being loose. I felt sad that I was missing it.

READ: As a woman, I had no opportunities in Japan. My world opened up when I got to Canada. 

I struggled at first, juggling my classes with extracurriculars, like the university tennis team. After I failed a math course, I realized I needed to focus on my studies, so I quit tennis. My grades improved soon after.

To settle in at Waterloo, I found friends from Colombia. I wasn’t able to express myself as well in English, so it was comforting to connect with them in Spanish. I joined a salsa dancing club and became more involved with the Latin American community. You can never be sad or mad when you’re dancing.

I never had to look at the weather report when I was living in Ecuador. I didn’t know what a windchill was or that it could make the temperature feel colder. My first Canadian winter was pretty awful, but the snow was beautiful. I remember, after the first heavy snowfall, I looked out the window and everything was covered in white. I also started spending more time in Toronto over weekends and school breaks, where there was a bigger Latin community. We’d make food together, like ceviche, and play Latin music.

When the pandemic hit, I was living in New York City, doing a co-op placement with a tech company. The borders to Ecuador were closing, so I booked a flight home and finished my co-op and university studies remotely. It was comforting to spend time with my family again. My brother, father and I would play tennis, and I taught them how to salsa. My mom cooked a lot. She’d make green plantains, crab and locro—a cheese and potato soup.

I stayed in Ecuador from March of 2020 until April of this year. I found a job in Toronto as a software engineer with a tech company called Intuit, and rented an apartment near the office.

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I’m a big city person. I love living in Toronto. There are always so many events happening like the Caribbean Festival, Salsa on St. Clair and picnics by the harbourfront. While exploring the different neighbourhoods, I even found places in Kensington Market that sell Latino food, like chilaquiles, and a grocery store with staples from back home. Seeing the CN Tower, especially when the lights change colour, feels symbolic of everything I like about Canada. When there was a big earthquake in Ecuador, they lit the tower with the colours of our flag. They’ve done it with the Ukrainian flag, too. It says to me, “We care for you.”

It’s hard to say whether I’ll stay in Canada forever. But I’m focused on building my career, and Toronto is a great place to work in tech. With so many new companies and investments in the industry, I know this is where I want to be right now.

The post I moved from Ecuador to Canada for a tech career—and found community in salsa dancing appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In 2015, my husband and I moved from Ottawa to Vancouver, where he’d landed his dream job with the federal government. We loved the weather and the mountains and ocean, and we wanted to raise our future kids in B.C. I got a job at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and about a year after we moved, our first child was born and I went on maternity leave.

I managed to get my son into a home daycare when he was about a year old. We were paying $1,850 a month—it was expensive, but we managed to make it work thanks to savings we had from Ottawa, where the cost of living is much cheaper than in Vancouver. With my son in daycare, I was able to return to work after my maternity leave ended.

In August of 2019, my husband was transferred to Squamish, a small town north of Vancouver. I was working remotely for the government while doing public relations consulting on the side, so I didn’t have to find a new job once we moved. We found a preschool for my then-three-year-old son close to our new home, which cost us $1,150 a month. We were one of the lucky ones: I heard from other preschool parents and through Facebook groups that there were long wait lists and few daycare spots in Squamish.

During the pandemic, my husband and I decided to have another baby. The day I got a positive pregnancy test, I requested a list of every daycare in Squamish from a local community services group. I received a list with around 20 daycares, including home daycares and registered ones. I put my son—who I didn’t even know was a son at the time—on every single wait list he was eligible for. Once I gave birth in March of 2021, I sent emails to make sure all the daycares I had approached had his updated name and date of birth. We wanted to put him into daycare when he turned one, so I could return to work. Every few months, I would call and email these daycares for an update, but they wouldn’t tell me how long their wait lists were or when I could expect my son to get a spot. We even offered one daycare $10,000—a year’s worth of fees up front—to secure a place. They told me they didn’t have spots for kids my son’s age.

Once my maternity leave ended, I thought my youngest would go into full-time care and I would go back to work. That never happened. We couldn’t afford to live in Squamish on one salary, so in March of 2022, I took an unpaid leave of absence and worked on growing my public relations agency, Coldwater Communications. It was definitely a financial risk, with a mortgage and two kids, but I didn’t have a choice. I scoured Facebook groups to find babysitters and part-time nannies. For the next nine months, I had a chaotic and unpredictable childcare schedule. One part-time nanny would watch my son at home for three hours in the morning. When she left, I would put him down for a nap, then squeeze in another hour or two of work. After he woke up, a second nanny would watch him for another hour or two in the afternoon. When she couldn’t come in, I would walk him to a third nanny’s house for a nap, set up his crib, and then come back to pick him up. We were spending roughly $1,200 a month on childcare at that point.

It was a lot to juggle: I had to pay three different caregivers on time and keep track of their changing schedules, vacations and illnesses. If they needed time off, I had to find a replacement: hiring a new nanny required an extensive interview, background check, references and onboarding that was stressful and time-consuming. I couldn’t plan personal events or business meetings more than a few weeks in advance in case I didn’t have childcare. In between naps, drop-offs and pick-ups, I could only work around 20 hours a week.

In November of 2022, one of our part-time nannies quit, and I had to scramble to find her replacement. We found a family living outside our neighbourhood who we could share a nanny with—the nanny comes to their house and watches both kids, and we split her fees. I drop off my two-year-old to their house on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and he’s there from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. For the days he isn’t there, another caregiver watches him for three hours in the morning at my home. Since January, we’ve been spending around $2,200 a month on childcare alone. It’s not financially sustainable: outside our mortgage, childcare is our biggest cost. We’ve had to pull money from our retirement savings to pay for it.

There’s an end in sight: in September, my son will start full-time daycare at the same preschool my older son attends. Our costs will drop to $790 a month, because of the Child Care Fee Reduction Initiative—a government program that subsidizes childcare costs for parents. If this hadn’t worked out, we probably would have had to move and my husband would have lost his job. Having another baby is completely off the table, in part because of the childcare crunch.

Parents have to either claw for a daycare spot or uproot their lives because they can’t afford alternatives. These aren’t viable solutions. While there’s talk of building a nationally subsidized childcare system, I wonder if it will increase the number of daycare spots available. Affordable childcare is only useful as long as you can actually use it.

—As told to Adrienne Matei 

The post I had to go back to work. Finding childcare for my son in B.C. was a nightmare appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“I rarely saw strong-willed women like myself with thriving careers in Japan, but it seemed possible in Canada” (photography by Brent Gooden)

When I was a kid in Japan in the early ’90s, my kindergarten teacher asked my class what we wanted to be when we grew up. I told her I wanted to be a bride. I don’t remember what the other girls said, but I can guarantee that none of the five-year-old boys pronounced their dreams of becoming a groom.

I grew up with my parents and two brothers in a suburb about an hour outside of Tokyo. My mom was warm and loving and worked part-time jobs while we were young so she could take care of us. My father, an engineer, was strict with us and rarely home: he left for work around 6 a.m. and came home after 10 p.m. My mom would often ask me to help her with the cooking and cleaning, but my brothers weren’t expected to lift a finger. They did chores when I asked them to, but I never understood why I had to ask in the first place.

When I was in Grade 4, my parents wanted to enrol my older brother in a prestigious private school, which offered a better education than the public schools we attended. My brother didn’t want to switch schools, so I volunteered instead, which surprised my parents. I now wonder if they ever would’ve offered me the same opportunity if I didn’t ask for it. Private school gave me new opportunities: at 15, I stayed with a host family in Canada for two weeks, immersing myself in a new language and culture. I discovered a society where it was acceptable to be yourself and voice your opinions, and I became obsessed with learning English so I could return.

In Japan, there’s a strong emphasis on maintaining “social harmony”: you’re expected to be agreeable and never express a differing opinion. Women and girls especially are expected to be quiet and submissive. I never fit that mould. In school, I was a “class leader”—it was my job to enforce the rules if a teacher had to step out. I stood out and spoke up, which made me a target for bullies. I wondered if things would’ve been different if I was a boy. Another time, in Grade 5, I called out my teacher in front of the whole class for handing out scissors blade-first. I didn’t understand that as a Japanese girl, I was supposed to keep my mouth shut. I’ll always remember the shocked, horrified look on his face when I corrected him.

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By my early 20s, I was eager to see what opportunities a new country could offer. In 2008, I was studying English communications at a Japanese university when I decided to participate in an eight-month exchange program in Canada. I had wanted to return since high school, and this was the perfect opportunity.

Back in Japan, classroom discussions were rare, even in university-level courses. Teachers lectured theories and facts at us that we were told to memorize, not discuss or question. We could either be right or wrong—there was no in between. In my classes here, I was shocked to learn that professors encouraged discussion and debate, even among female students. My opinions were valued and people treated me as an equal. In my business strategy class, I wrote a report on a magazine marketing technique popular in Japan but uncommon in Canada. My professor was impressed by the idea and encouraged the Canadian students to learn from international students in class.

I rarely saw strong-willed women like myself with thriving careers in Japan, where women occupy less than 15 per cent of senior management roles; our current government only has two female ministers. Living here, I saw female politicians and women in management positions wherever I turned. I saw working moms and older women with thriving careers. Women were free to voice their opinions in university classes and their ideas were heard and valued.

In 2009, I returned to Japan for a year to finish my final semester of university. I was on the train one day when I saw a man groping a woman’s breasts while she was asleep. This often happens on crowded trains, but women don’t speak up out of fear and the pressure to stay silent. I wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words in Japanese. Instead, I took a picture on my phone, leaving the shutter on loud so the man would know he was being watched. When the woman woke up, I showed the photos to her and told her what had happened. She was upset, but decided not to press charges. I realized then how hard it was to speak up for yourself as a woman in Japanese society. If I stayed, I knew I would be forever confined to these gender norms.

MORE: My family and I fled gang violence in Mexico and made a home in Canada

After I graduated, I wanted to build a career and a family, and I felt I couldn’t have both in Japan. People work until 10 or 11 p.m.—an impossible schedule for working mothers. My father regularly worked these demanding hours, and little has changed since his day. Many of my female childhood friends stopped working as soon as they had children. They didn’t have a choice: if you take sick days or leave work early to pick up your child, you’re passed up for promotions and considered unambitious. Childcare and household responsibilities are still seen as women’s tasks, so mothers can’t work jobs that require long hours—basically any full-time permanent job—and instead opt for part-time or contract work.

In 2010, I returned to Canada to complete a second bachelor’s degree in business administration at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. An international student adviser helped me find my footing: I’d ask for help when I didn’t understand what courses I needed to take or when I needed help finding a doctor. He helped me connect with other international students and I quickly found a community of friends. I decided to become an international student adviser myself so I could help other students in the same way he helped me. I received a postgraduate work permit in 2013, and officially became a Canadian permanent resident in 2016. I now manage a team of student advisers at Algoma University’s Brampton campus.

Yuka with her husband and two kids

In 2018, I married Vinay, an international student from India who I met in university. We had our daughter in 2019 and our son in 2021. Being a working mom is hard, but I have much more flexibility than I would have had in Japan. I often finish work at 4:30 p.m., and can always leave earlier or come in later if my kids are sick or I need to pick them up from daycare. My husband and I are home for dinner and to put the kids to bed. I can be a mother while still enjoying a meaningful career that I’m proud of.

In March, I was a panellist for an International Women’s Day event at work when an audience member asked how our cultures celebrated women. I didn’t have an answer. Japan is progressive in so many ways, but we’re behind when it comes to gender equality, diversity and embracing who you truly are. I take pride in my culture and heritage, but I never once felt celebrated as a  woman in Japan.

I hope that as my daughter becomes a woman, she feels empowered and celebrated. I’m raising her to know she can be whatever she sets her mind to—a beautiful bride, if that’s what she chooses, and so much more.

—As told to Mira Miller

The post As a woman, I had no opportunities in Japan. My world opened up when I got to Canada. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Illustration by Maclean’s)

For 25 years, I worked as a municipal administrator in Clarington, a small town an hour’s drive east of Toronto. In 2002, I moved 100 kilometres east to my hometown of Marmora to retire at my cottage. When our mayor’s term ended in 2018, I saw an opportunity to give back to the community I grew up in. I came out of retirement at 68, and have been mayor of the town since.

Marmora is a bustling little community of 5,000 residents that combines a tight-knit local population with a growing demographic of newcomers of all ages. People came during the pandemic for our recreational land, lakes, walking trails and bustling fishing and hunting scene. We’re a town filled with history, with a developing downtown scene. It’s a beautiful place but, with 40 per cent of our population being 65 or older, we desperately need more doctors.

Ten years ago, we only had two physicians. Wait times to see a family doctor were increasing, because our population was steadily aging and needed more care. So we developed an incentive-based program to entice newly minted doctors to come work in Marmora: we offer a $100,000 signing bonus, funded by our tax revenue, and a fully-paid-for and furnished apartment attached to our medical clinic. We’re the only municipality in Hastings County that offers living accommodations, and I’m told by provincial policymakers that we have one of the best incentive packages in the country.

READ: Thousands of patients. No help. Meet the lone family doctor of Verona, Ontario.

These bonuses helped attract two more physicians straight out of medical school, and by 2018, our medical team doubled in size. But our recruiting stalled at two as nearby communities matched our incentives. In 2019, we lost one of our doctors to retirement, and the other chose to relocate and work elsewhere. Now we’re back down to two family doctors, each of whom is responsible for 1,200 to 1,800 patients. Their patients are often long-time residents who joined their roster when demand for family doctors was low. These patients can count on immediate or same-day medical care.

But the other 1,000 Marmora residents who don’t have a family doctor have to travel to get medical attention. They see one of three physicians in the Hastings County clinic 20 minutes down the road, or travel 40 minutes south to Belleville or west to Peterborough, or even 90 minutes east to Kingston General Hospital if they need cancer treatment, surgeries, dialysis, MRIs or X-rays. The closest emergency room is 20 kilometres away in Campbellford. The dearth of medical services in Marmora is frustrating residents: their taxes fund the health care system, but they can’t access care when they need it. Our physicians want to take on more patients, but they’re already overworked.

There is hope. News stories helped advertise that rural communities like ours need doctors and are offering good benefits. We’ve had about a dozen inquiries from medical students and physicians who are practising elsewhere but are looking to move to a remote town after living through years of pandemic restrictions in big cities. One medical student even visited Marmora, but he still has a few years of medical school left. The renewed interest is unheard of, but we’re still waiting to sign that third doctor. Our challenge is finding graduating doctors who are the right fit: people who like Marmora’s rural lifestyle so much that they come with the intention to stay for their entire careers, not just for a few years to pocket the money and perks. This is also why we disburse the $100,000 signing bonus over five years instead of all at once. Meanwhile, we miss out on doctors who opt to set up their practice in busy cities, often because their partners work in tech, finance and law. Belleville is the closest city to Marmora, but it’s 45 kilometres away, and Ottawa and Toronto are more than a two-hour drive away.

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We’ve spent a lot of time at city council meetings thinking about how we could sweeten the pot to attract new physicians. The community can’t afford to throw more money at doctors, and I don’t think that’s what we need anyway. On top of the $100,000 we offer, doctors who sign in Marmora also qualify for rural signing bonuses of $150,000 from Hastings County and $81,000 from the province of Ontario. So a doctor would already gain an additional $331,000 over five years to come and practise in Marmora. But nearby, larger rural municipalities with few family doctors also qualify for these stipends, and they’re offering signing bonuses similar to ours. Quinte West is a larger community of 45,000 people and also offers a $100,000 incentive. The right people are out there, and maybe it’s up to us to find new, creative ways to recruit them. Nearby communities like Belleville have created a recruiting department dedicated to connecting with young physicians and attracting medical talent. We might eventually have to resort to that strategy, too.

Residents want to know they’ll be supported if they or their family get sick, and some people worry we don’t have the resources to promise that. It’s not a problem we can solve on our own—I’m anxious to see how provincial and national leaders will address the nationwide doctor shortage. I think a good start would be to ease the rules around licensing across provinces, which could potentially attract doctors to our rural communities. There is also a huge talent pool in foreign trained doctors who come to Canada as immigrants—we need to make it easier for them to retrain. But these measures are beyond my control. My goal right now is to see everyone in Marmora have access to primary health care.

— As told to Alex Cyr 

The post My small Ontario town is offering $100,000 to attract family doctors. It’s not working. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The futuristic $23-million structure sits in Toronto’s Canary district. (Photography by Adrian Ozenik)

Every time it rains, excess water rushes through the streets of Toronto’s downtown eastern core and pours into the city’s sewer system. Its endpoint: the Cherry Street Stormwater Management Facility, where all manner of detritus—backpacks, cigarettes and, occasionally, a sneaker or two—is filtered out of the water at 385 gallons per second before the torrent rushes down into Lake Ontario.

The futuristic $23-million structure sits at the southernmost edge of Toronto’s Canary District, a formerly industrial area that, in recent years, has experienced a surge in modern developments as part of the city’s lakeshore revitalization program. Waterfront Toronto commissioned the stormwater facility for practical purposes, like removing pollutants and preventing flooding. On the aesthetic side, local architecture firm gh3* envisioned a chic inverted well. The result is an attention-grabbing, slate-grey prism with a stern diagonal ridge.

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The plant’s creatively angled skylight functions as a bright beacon in the evening hours, visible from the wall of condo towers to the west and north

Much like the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant, its art deco counterpart to the east, the Cherry Street site proves that utilitarian city structures need not be pedestrian in their presentation. The plant’s exterior walls and roof are composed of concrete, which allows the building to blend seamlessly into its surroundings. (Those include a hydro corridor, a GO Transit heavy-rail yard and the Gardiner Expressway.) A dearth of windows adds to its mysterious feel, though daylight floods in through a single triangular skylight overhead.

As for how it works: the stormwater undergoes multiple treatment processes, which remove debris and oil and disinfect the water with UV light before discharging it into the lake. But a quarter of the water meets an eye-catching end at nearby Sherbourne Commons: it’s funnelled through Jill Anholt’s Light Showers, a series of public art sculptures resembling giant metal diving boards. As extreme weather events, like flash floods, become more common in urban environments, the Cherry Street facility will play a crucial role in keeping Torontonians safe. And, for a city that’s not exactly known for its architectural prowess, Cherry Street is inspiring a renewed sense of artistry. In 2022, the building was awarded a Governor General’s Medal in Architecture. To the jury, it was a pop of beauty in unexpected conditions. Rain or shine, but, in this case, mostly rain.

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From the outside, the Cherry Street complex appears to have no clear entrances or exits. In reality, the doors are sneakily concealed by vertical steel screens on the north side.

A single window on the south end will double as an educational tool when the site opens to the public in the coming years. It’ll show off the ins and outs of urban water treatment and answer, finally, “What goes on in there?”

The post The Building: Inside Toronto’s beautiful, hyper-modern stormwater processing plant appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“I want to help other lawyers who were stuck in the cycle I was in” (Photograph by Yasin Osman)

I didn’t have much direction when I graduated from the University of Guelph with an economics degree in 1995. I come from a family of lawyers—my dad and sister worked in criminal law and my brother and sister-in-law are lawyers in Toronto—so I decided to write the LSAT. I didn’t score particularly well, but somehow I still received offers from several law schools.

I graduated from Western Law in 2000 and kicked off my career as a junior litigator at a major Bay Street firm. I worked upward of 100 hours a week carrying the bags—sometimes literally—of several big-shot lawyers. Junior litigators do a lot of the work of senior lawyers, without the credit. I was juggling 40 to 50 cases at the time and felt like I needed to achieve perfection in everything I did if I wanted to climb the legal ladder. Technology wasn’t as advanced back then, so I had to be at the office most, if not all, of the time I wasn’t sleeping. I would be in the office by 8 a.m, and wouldn’t leave until 9 p.m. or later. If I couldn’t work from home, I’d spend my weekends there too. If I wanted to be assigned to the biggest cases with the most senior litigators, I couldn’t complain about the workload.

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When my first child was born in 2002, I realized how crushing that culture was. For the first six months of his life, I spent more time at work than at home. This wasn’t uncommon: senior lawyers at the firm had been divorced two or three times. Often their identities were almost entirely consumed by their profession.

Looking for an escape, in 2003, I started my own litigation firm in my hometown of Lindsay, Ontario. At first, I had no cases. I went from representing some of the country’s biggest brands to working with regular people on defamation cases, or protecting lottery winners from former spouses who wanted a cut of the prize money. I turned out to be an effective self-promoter: one year into running the business, I was handling more cases than I did on Bay Street.

I was never able to fully shed the industry’s conflict culture. From the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep, you’re constantly bombarded by conflict. As a lawyer, you spend most of your time arguing with people who are smarter than you, or have greater resources, and who are always expected to come out on top. When I was starting out, I could come home and detach from all of that conflict for a little while, even after late nights in the office. But with the advent of email and cell phones, work followed me home and wherever else I went.

I had a personal rule that if someone sent me an email, they’d hear back from me within two minutes, no matter the time of day or day of the week. I didn’t leave work until my inbox was completely empty. At least once a week, I would fall asleep in the office and wake up at my desk. Other days I would leave at 6 p.m. and continue working from home well into the night. I often spent entire weekends working. Periodically, I would ask my wife to take the kids to her parents’ so I could work without interruptions.

I hated this cycle, but saw no other choice. Litigation is a unique area of law—you can’t ignore emails or you risk jeopardizing your client’s case. I had high aspirations: I wanted to become a household name, to be respected by judges. I worked with 10 other lawyers, and I pushed them just as hard as I did myself. That was part of my brand, and part of the reason why my firm was so successful. It was also turning me into someone I didn’t recognize. I had to get my way with other lawyers, and I would litigate aggressively in court until I won my cases. I became increasingly annoyed with my kids and wife when I was at home. I was driven by anxiety, depressed and resentful of my job.

We travelled often as a family—twice a year, always somewhere tropical. I checked my phone incessantly and would wake up early to go to the hotel’s business centre, where I could get online and answer emails. I tried to be online before the kids woke up or after they went to bed, but I checked my phone all day and often excused myself from family dinners or activities to deal with work emails. We were on vacation together, but I wasn’t really there. Everything had to run smoothly, or I became even more agitated.

In 2018, I was sitting poolside with my family on vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, playing euchre with my kids, when my wife ordered a Bacardi and Coke. I ordered one too. Then another. And another. I only drank a couple of times a year, but at this point, alcohol seemed like a miracle cure for a severe case of burnout. I no longer cared about keeping my inbox empty or impressing my clients—it was a guilt-free escape. I had about 10 Bacardi and Cokes that day, ending the night vomiting in the hotel lobby’s bathroom. My wife later told me that she carried me back to the room, careful not to let the kids see me. It wasn’t long before the habit followed me home.

A small Italian restaurant in Lindsay delivered 24 bottles of cabernet sauvignon to my home every Monday. I didn’t want anyone to know how much I was drinking, or even that I had booze delivered, so I hid the wine around the house. My wife knew that I was drinking, but she didn’t know how much—by the next Monday, I would be out of stock. That’s on top of the Bacardi and Cokes that I started drinking every evening after work. Those nights often ended with me lying on my marble kitchen countertop, sobbing and listening to ’80s hair-metal ballads. I wondered how I had let things get so out of control. I needed to get to the feeling of 10 drinks all the time.

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I would start my mornings sitting in my truck for an hour, staring at the big glass doors with my name on them, trying to muster whatever I needed to go into the office. It was usually the thought of drinking at the end of the day that got me through it. I had thrived on managing conflict for 20 years, but by that point, I would get physically ill when I received emails about problems clients needed me to solve. I would vomit two to three times a day because of work-related emails. If I was checking emails at home, I would get frustrated and angry at my wife, gaslighting her or dismissing her questions. She learned how to navigate my moods and would talk me down almost every evening. She wanted to believe I had things under control, and I took advantage of that. It’s something I regret to this day.

I became an expert in hiding my addiction and mental health struggles from co-workers. I dressed impeccably and portrayed myself as a strong, organized and ambitious lawyer. I was razor focused at work, and initially, my work didn’t suffer. But eventually, I started showing up to the office drunk for our weekly evening meetings. Other nights, I would go into the office to “catch up” on work. Instead, I would sit alone, drinking in my office. If someone suspected I was drinking more than I should, they never let on. At home, I hid my alcohol in travel mugs. My kids could soon tell between “sober Dad” and “drunk Dad”—and more often than not, I was the latter. One day, my wife patiently told me that if I didn’t get help, she would leave me.

In 2020, I hired a sobriety coach who I spoke to daily, and I began seeing a therapist three times a week, in hopes of salvaging what I’d built. With their help, I went sober later that year, but continued to self-medicate with THC. Most people who take cannabis consume five to 10 milligrams of THC to get high for an evening; I was taking anywhere from 75 to 100 milligrams a day. I couldn’t physically go into work if I wasn’t on mind-altering substances, and I knew I had no choice but to quit my job. I retired from law in December of 2021. It wasn’t until the following March that I took my addiction seriously and spent 30 days in a rehabilitation centre in Montreal. I saw it as war in the trenches: I had to do everything to win.

I can’t help but feel like my industry has failed to address what is widely considered an open secret. Heavy drinking affects anywhere from one in five to one in three lawyers, compared to just 12 per cent of other professionals. Alcohol is as much a part of the legal industry as overwork.

From the educational institutions that train us to the firms that employ us, there is nothing built into our industry to prepare us for the conflict culture, demanding hours and competitiveness that pushes lawyers toward unhealthy and unsustainable lifestyles. On the contrary, I received the most praise and admiration when I sacrificed my mental health to excel at work.

My career in law is now over. I still own the firm, but I can hardly muster the strength to attend meetings—going back there induces PTSD-like symptoms. My head hurts, my stomach churns and I get the same panic attacks I used to get sitting in my truck the morning before work. For now, I’m just trying to take it day by day. I’m a much more involved husband and father, but I’m still making amends for the hurt I caused my family and friends. I want to help other lawyers stuck in the cycle I was in: I’ve launched my own website where I share my story in the hopes that others might learn from it.

—As told to Jared Lindzon and Prarthana Pathak 

The post My career as a lawyer almost destroyed me appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Illustration by Maclean’s)

As an internal medicine and obesity physician, I’ve been prescribing Ozempic to my patients since 2018. Lately, influencers and celebrities as well-known as Elon Musk have touted it as a weight-loss method on social media. Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel joked about the drug’s rumoured use among A-listers at this year’s ceremony, and in March, ads for Ozempic casually showed up in the New York subway system. It’s a classic diet craze: Hollywood adopts a certain technique and then it trickles down to the general public. As a result, Ozempic is gaining popularity as a get-thin-quick hack. This is a problem. 

For those who don’t know, Ozempic is one of the brand names for semaglutide, a drug whose core molecule, GLP-1, has been used to treat type-2 diabetes for more than a decade. (Another well-known brand is Wegovy.) In many countries, semaglutide medications have also been approved as treatments for obesity because they imitate one of the body’s naturally occurring satiety hormones, limiting patients’ appetites. When prescribing these drugs, doctors require patients to meet specific criteria: a BMI greater than 30‚ or greater than 27 with one weight-related condition, like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease or obstructive sleep apnea. The benefits of semaglutide can be huge—improved blood sugar control, a reduced risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and a better quality of life. 

READ MORE: What is xylazine, the dangerous new drug fuelling Canada’s opioid crisis?

The worst part of this new fad is that it could create shortages that affect people who actually need these drugs. When Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company that makes Wegovy, launched the drug in the U.S. in 2021, uptake was so high that they quickly ran out of product. In Canada, Ozempic was unavailable in some Canadian pharmacies late last year due to similar shortages. And less than a month ago, British Columbia moved to restrict sale of Ozempic to Americans who were buying the drug from the province’s pharmacies. Then there’s the impact of the Ozempic obsession on my own practice: in addition to my work as a physician, I post educational content about obesity on TikTok. Recently, people with neither diabetes nor obesity have been messaging me to ask if I’d prescribe them the drug to “kickstart” their weight loss. I always respond by saying they should consult their own health care professional. 

RELATED: The Big Idea: Stockpile Canada’s Drugs

Ozempic isn’t intended to help you go from a size six to a size two. Using it in the short term to achieve thinness could lead to serious health issues. Semaglutide is a relatively safe compound, with some known gut-related side effects, like nausea and reflux. But when these drugs are used inappropriately, those gastrointestinal issues can be more severe. Plus, when people stop taking them, they tend not to maintain their new weight—and then they say the drugs were the problem. Weight cycling can have a negative effect on cardiovascular health, not to mention the huge psychological impact. When they’re prescribed for obesity, semaglutide meds should be paired with behavioural supports, like nutrition counselling and cognitive behavioural therapy, so patients can achieve and maintain a healthy lifestyle that’s realistic for them.

Sasha High (photograph courtesy of the subject)

Another problem with the Ozempic craze is that it perpetuates unrealistic expectations about how body shape and weight are viewed in broader society. I understand why the idea of taking an injection and losing five pounds appeals to so many. We live in a culture that glorifies thinness, so we are always going to have people who rely on easy fixes. We may think that members of Gen Z—who have grown up in an era of more body positivity—are not as susceptible to weight-loss messaging, but that isn’t true for everyone. And so many people who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s had Kate Moss–covered magazines by their bedside. Some still really struggle with not meeting that aesthetic. 

MORE: This Toronto social worker is seeing a surge of anxiety and depression in kids post-pandemic

I’ve had many discussions with colleagues about what the ubiquity of Ozempic will mean for our patients. First, more and more people will likely request it for non-medical reasons. (At the moment, this appears to be more common in the United States, where Ozempic is offered by some practices specializing in aesthetic medicine, like botox clinics and plastic surgery centres.) A second, more positive effect is that Canadians with obesity will become more aware of available medical treatments for their disease.  There are still so many missed opportunities to prescribe these medications appropriately. Physicians often tell patients with obesity to “try harder” or eat less and exercise more, then withhold potentially helpful drugs due to stigma and a lack of education. Semaglutide can be the right treatment for the right patient. For everyone else, there is no quick fix.

–As told to Alex Cyr

The post Here’s why Ozempic is popular for the wrong reasons appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“In the past five years, I’ve saved tens of thousands of dollars on groceries, and racked up millions of loyalty points” (illustration by Maclean’s)

I remember the first time I saw a coupon. It was 2005, and I was 15 years old, stocking shelves and ringing up purchases at a grocery store on the U.S. naval base in Iceland, where my dad was a sailor. I almost couldn’t believe they were free—I was immediately drawn to the little graphics and the bright colours. I started to keep them beside my till and hand them out: here’s 50 cents off Vaseline. I wasn’t supposed to, but I loved to help people.

That sense of thrift comes from my background. My parents grew up in modest circumstances in the Philippines (as a kid, my mom used her finger and some salt to brush her teeth). They immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s, where my dad joined the navy. We were always moving from base to base—California, the Philippines, Japan, Iceland—but wherever we went, my parents worked overtime to save or make money for us. In California, after my dad got home, he’d go to his second job: delivering pizzas. In Japan, my mom sold Filipino dishes like lumpias and pancit to other families on the base. We shopped at thrift stores, never ate out and sold our used toys and clothes.

In 2008, I was living in the Philippines, studying for a bachelor of science in nursing, when I met the man who would become my husband. We married in 2011 and moved to Canada, where he took a job as a hotel housekeeper in Regina. We were happy here, but it was a shock in one big way—food was really, really expensive, especially compared to the subsidized groceries on U.S. navy bases.

READ: Why food is so pricey

My son Isaac was born in 2015, and our finances got even tighter. One day I was complaining to a friend from church about the high cost of food, and she told me about an app that shows users digital flyers for grocery stores—she used it to price-match, which is when you find the cheapest price in the city for an item, and when you go shopping, you ask the cashier to match it. I thought there was no way I could do it; I was too shy to stand in line and delay everyone to request a price change. Then I thought about my parents: moving to a new country, learning a new language, always striving to make a better life for our family. I felt a sense of urgency—I should be saving as much money as I can!

I downloaded the app (it’s called Flipp) and saw all the flyers for my postal code. It seemed very fancy—I would see seniors in checkout lines clutching flyers from grocery stores all over town, and the app was obviously way easier. The first time I did it, I was hooked: I price-matched a toothbrush down to $1, then used a $1 coupon, so it was free. The possibilities felt endless, but it was intimidating at first. I met cashiers who weren’t familiar with the policy, and once a woman in line even threw a $5 bill at me, angry with the delay. It reminded me of the racism my family faced when I was growing up.

But most of the time, onlookers were amazed to see my bill drop. Instead of $5.99 for a pineapple, I’d pay another store’s price: only $1.99. Or a three-pack of lettuce for $5.99 would drop to $2.88. Just like in Iceland, I wanted to share what I was learning with others, so in 2018 I started a Facebook page where I posted about the savings I was making on my grocery hauls.

For the most part, I used—and combined—three main techniques: price matching, coupons and loyalty points. Grocery shopping became my cardio, as I hustled around stores noting new coupons and taking photos of clearance shelves. At first, I started my page to reach other Filipino immigrants. It’s a tradition to send Balikbayan boxes—big packages stuffed with toiletries, toys, clothing and appliances—back home to loved ones, and I posted deals so Filipinos could fill up their boxes more cheaply.

Slowly, my Facebook posts gained traction, and the community grew beyond that first audience. My content made couponing feel accessible because people can relate to me—I’m just a normal person looking to save money. I use tools that appeal to the digital age, and people tend to follow my page when they’re going through life circumstances and changes. Some people say they lost their job, or have moved to a different province, or they’re new immigrants. But in the past year, my social feeds—on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok—have reached a much bigger audience, because we’re all going through some big changes: food is more expensive than ever.

RELATED: Groceries on a budget in Edmonton

The Consumer Price Index for food—the measure the federal government uses to track food inflation—has increased by nearly 20 per cent in the past two years alone. Almost any item you can think of has gotten pricier. Nationwide, the average per-kilogram price of chicken breasts has gone from just over $12 to $14. A rib cut of beef has jumped from $23 to $31. Four litres of milk used to be $5.50, now it’s $6.50; a dozen eggs was $3.90, now $4.50; a kilo of apples has gone from $4.50 to $5.60. A dollar here and a dollar there, but it all adds up fast.

For my own shopping, I browse digital flyers for 15 minutes every Wednesday, tagging the items I want. I keep my coupons in a small pocket binder with plastic dividers: household products, toiletries, beverages and pantry items. It’s always in my purse, ready to use. (Coupons are usually in front of the product in store and most of them expire, so I only take a couple when I see them. I’ve noticed they’re harder to come by now, with more people using them.)

Another great technique is to stack promotions—that’s where the real magic happens. On a recent grocery trip, I picked up milk, cheese, bread, frozen potatoes, chicken broth and lots more. My total was $95. I cashed in $15 worth of coupons, price matched, and earned back $25 in PC Optimum points, plus $8 cashback on another app I use, bringing my total to only $21. I’m getting a typical grocery order for 50 per cent off now, and in the past five years, I’ve saved tens of thousands of dollars on groceries, and racked up millions of loyalty points.

And I’ll go to great lengths to cash in on coupons—some might say extreme lengths. Last year, I was on a staycation at a hotel in Saskatoon when a really great coupon dropped online: buy one, get one off Wonder Bread products. The hotel room didn’t have a printer, so I went to the front desk and asked to use the staff computer to print it. Online coupons can run out quickly, so I had to act while the link was live. Thankfully they said yes, but I don’t know where I would have gone if they didn’t.

I really believe that couponing isn’t just about saving money. It helps communities. I donate extra food to my city’s food drive. I take my seven-year-old with me to meet people who need food but can’t afford it. I always think about my mom back in the day. She would come home from grocery shopping and lay our food on the table. Item by item, she checked over the receipt to make sure she hadn’t overpaid. There was lots of budgeting behind the scenes, but my parents made their purchases straight up and never used coupons. I wish my mom knew how to do this back then, and that’s what really drives me today.

— As told to Emily Latimer

The post I’m fighting food inflation with extreme couponing appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“Mental health services are woefully underfunded and it’s worse for children’s mental health” (photograph by iStock)

After working as a social worker in the public sector for 15 years, Jessica Diamond saw a need to offer timely services to children struggling with mental illness. Depression, anxiety and behavioural disorders skyrocketed in children under 12 during the pandemic, and the public health system didn’t have the resources to help them all. In 2021, Diamond opened a private social work clinic for children in Toronto. Diamond now works with 25 kids struggling with mental illness brought on by years of pandemic-restricted social contact.

You worked in children’s mental health for more than a decade before opening your private practice. Why did you make the switch?

In 2018, my then-eight-year-old child was having mental health difficulties, and I thought I knew how to help: I had spent more than a decade as a policymaker in the child welfare sector. But even if you know where to look, mental health services are hard to come by. Parents can wait as long as two years to get off Ontario’s free wait list and see a children’s social worker or psychotherapist—that’s a long time in a kid’s life. So, in 2018, I got my master’s in social work, and in 2021 I opened The Help Hub. We offer therapy for children, youth and families, as well as parent coaching. My opening coincided with an especially tough two years for kids during the pandemic, and my roster of patients grew very quickly. I hired three associates—a social worker, clinical psychologist and an early-childhood family and support specialist—to keep up with the demand.

Who are your patients?

I work with children under 12 and their parents for family counselling. I also have a colleague who works solely with teenagers. For kids under 12, appointments are a mixture of talking and playing: cognitive behavioural therapy with a jar of play-doh.

How has the pandemic impacted children’s mental health?

During the pandemic, these kids’ worlds shrank considerably, and with fewer opportunities to socialize or play outdoors, their screen time rose exponentially. This led to lifestyle changes impacting children’s development, and resulted in social anxiety, depression, weight gain and interrupted sleep. It didn’t help that parents were (understandably) not at their best: their work lives were shifting and they lost relationships of their own. Many experienced burnout, which meant they had less compassion and energy for their kids at home.

RELATED: Inside the mental health crisis at Canadian universities 

Are there groups of kids with specific conditions who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic?

Kids or teenagers with neurodevelopmental disorders like autism or ADHD suffered because of limited in-person services like therapy and social skills groups that are essential for their socialization and development. Some of those kids are now years behind in their development. One of my patients with a neurodevelopmental disorder now finds it hard to make friends and play with others during recess, despite being able to do so pre-pandemic—they’re out of practice.

Kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds are also disproportionately affected, because they were more likely to lose relatives during the pandemic and likely had limited professional support to cope.

We’re no longer in lockdown. How are kids still feeling the effects of the pandemic?

Children are experiencing an epidemic of anxiety, depression and low self-esteem unseen before the pandemic. I see more and more kids as young as eight in my practice who self-harm or are experiencing suicidal thoughts. Anxiety has peaked as kids have re-entered the world: they’re thrown into social situations without knowing how to play with others, or even read facial expressions because we’ve been masking for so long. We think humans are just born with those skills, but that’s not true. When a kid realizes they aren’t good at socializing or making friends, it can lead to frustration, which can contribute to depression. It’s a vicious cycle that needs to be treated in childhood: the faster we can help these kids, the more downstream issues we can prevent as they age. But we don’t have the resources to help all these kids in the public system, and things are getting worse.

Parents of a five-year-old told me their child began self-harming while they were waiting for an assessment on Ontario’s public wait list. I saw another seven-year-old who’s been on the wait list for seven months, despite a worsening mental health condition. Initially, the child was struggling with some anxiety but was still able to go to school and socialize with others. By the time they contacted me, the child had become disruptive in class and at home, avoiding school altogether some days.

Is our health care system equipped to offer mental health services to kids?

Mental health services are woefully underfunded, and it’s worse for children’s mental health. In Toronto, only two hospitals serve kids under 12 in their mental health units. That’s roughly 20 beds for a city with approximately 450,000 kids. It leads to outlandish wait times: in 2022, Children’s Mental Health Ontario noted that wait times for public mental health services for children range from nine months to two and a half years depending on where you live. Children and families are suffering as a result. Schools are no better. The Toronto District School Board has one social worker per five schools—that’s barely enough to handle the most extreme cases. Other kids fall through the cracks.

Just before the pandemic, I encountered a child who was younger than 12 who needed immediate mental health care. His family doctor didn’t have the training to address mental health issues in children, and his only option—other than a one-off conversation with a stranger on a helpline—was the emergency room. He waited eight hours before seeing a mental health specialist, and then had to wait another five weeks for a follow-up appointment with a child psychiatrist. That’s a common case: family doctors are rarely equipped to help children with mental health issues, meaning kids face long wait times to see professionals in the public care system. It’s a bit of a circus.

READ: The cruel, ridiculous reality of ‘virtual learning’

What needs to change?

We have to fund the public sector, where wages are so low that they can’t attract and retain mental health professionals. Starting salaries for social workers in Toronto hover around $30 an hour. That’s not a livable wage. Coupled with a demanding workload due to staffing shortages, it leads to burnout. That was part of the reason I started a private practice. While my services are more expensive because it’s a private clinic, I offer a reduced fee to families who can’t afford them.

What can parents who can’t afford therapy do?

We’re recovering from years of depleted social contact. I recommend parents spend five to 10 minutes every day connecting with their kid: have a conversation with them, read with them, play outside together. After-school activities or clubs are also a good opportunity for kids to socialize.

Parents should also prioritize their own mental health. It can be as simple as picking up that book you stopped reading or going for that walk after dinner. These small actions will improve your mood and are a good start toward reclaiming a normal family life.

The post This Toronto social worker is seeing a surge of anxiety and depression in kids appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“What if you just moved anywhere in the world and worked online and lived like a king, instead of living like a schmuck somewhere like New York?” asks Jordan Bishop (Photographs by Adnan Khan)

Like most young Canadians, my dream has always been to find a career that makes me happy and gives me the financial freedom to live my best life. There was a time when that was possible in Canada, but it doesn’t feel like that anymore, with the cost of living skyrocketing and salaries stagnant. For a lot of Canadians, the magic combination of a job you love and a lifestyle you love is the kind of fiction you see on TV.

That’s especially true if you love city life. I grew up in Blackstock, Ontario, a small town of fewer than 800 people, an hour’s drive northeast of Toronto, but my heart has always been in big cities, and I had no problem sacrificing to live in them. In Toronto, while trying to get an online business off the ground, I rented university dorms to live in. During an internship in New York, I shared a 250-square-foot apartment with a depressed, out-of-work roommate addicted to video games. During the days, I went to my internship at a career-coaching company, earning less than minimum wage. At nights I wandered the city, reading and contemplating what I wanted out of life.

It was then that I read a book by Timothy Ferris called The 4-Hour Workweek. It shattered everything I thought I knew about work, lifestyle and how to live. What if you just moved anywhere in the world and worked online and lived like a king instead of living like a schmuck somewhere like New York? In my last year at Wilfrid Laurier University, I got a job with a local tech startup that operated totally online, and decided to try it myself. I left Canada for good in 2014, when I was 22 years old, to become a digital nomad—someone who takes advantage of modern communications technology to work from anywhere with a decent internet connection.

When I first started out, I was travelling around the world, living out of my backpack and running a travel blog that made me just enough money to buy my next plane ticket. I supplemented that with travel writing, which didn’t pay much, but it gave me enough to live. I would spend summers in Berlin and winters in Buenos Aires or Chiang Mai. I met the most amazing young people from around the world, who inspired me with their global perspectives.

But that’s backpacker life—kid stuff. In 2018, at the age of 26, I decided to settle down and build a business. Not by going back home, but by relocating to Istanbul, Turkey, where I could live in one of the world’s great metropolises without breaking the bank. The cost of living in Istanbul is cheaper than in Toronto or Vancouver—or, for that matter, Edmonton, Winnipeg or London, Ontario. How could Canada compete?

Today, I live in Istanbul’s historic Galata district, a short walk from the ancient Galata Tower. My apartment is a beautiful one-bedroom with high ceilings, which costs a fraction of what it would be in most cities in Canada. It isn’t palatial, but it’s not a shoebox either. I can walk out my front door and be at Istanbul’s seaside in five minutes. Or in a rooftop bar with stunning sea views in two minutes. Or in Cihangir, Istanbul’s hipster central, teeming with bars, cafés and restaurants frequented by other remote workers, in 10 minutes.

The low cost of living in Istanbul meant I could take the next step and expand my business, a personal finance blog that provides financial guidance to readers, mostly Canadians. The site generates revenues in dollars and euros, while my expenses are mostly in Turkish liras. That’s allowed me to hire staff who provide content, and it’s helped me build my business to the point where I’m not just living month to month, but putting money aside and planning for the future, while still enjoying a lifestyle that makes me happy. I’ve even finally been able to write the book I’d been meaning to write, about innovative problem solvers and the creative techniques they use, which I self-published in 2021. Doing any of this in Canada would have been nearly impossible—I almost certainly would have instead followed a safer and more traditional corporate path to a nine-to-five office job.

It may sound decadent, like having my cake and eating it too, but most people living like this are from relatively humble backgrounds, not privileged children of wealth traipsing around the world. We’re young people just starting out on our career journeys, who do it not only because it buys us a better lifestyle, but because it gives us freedom to take the kinds of risks I did. I think of it as a more respectable—and exciting—version of living in your parents’ basement: you lower your cost of living, which increases your risk tolerance significantly. You can be creative, and you can pursue your passion projects without the fear of falling behind financially.

In Canada, I would be paying three times as much for the same standard of living, and there wouldn’t be much left for risk-taking. I certainly wouldn’t be able to afford to rent yachts with friends, or take full-day cruises up the Bosphorus Strait, or travel for weeks to exotic places (I’m planning a five-week motorcycling adventure in Vietnam). Instead I can live a dream life with an incredibly diverse group of friends, a Turkish girlfriend and a rhythm in my daily routine that isn’t soul-crushing.

In the past couple of years, the post-pandemic proliferation of remote working opportunities, plus the spiralling cost of living in Canada, have made this kind of lifestyle even more popular—but even though it benefits people like me, I know, it’s not all upside, especially for the locals. Digital nomads tend to congregate in specific neighbourhoods, like Istanbul’s Galata, Mexico City’s Roma Norte or Lisbon’s Alfama. These are usually the nicer, more historic areas, and in my case, the charm of my neighbourhood has begun to wear off. It used to be full of regular Turkish people, living their lives. The gentrification that’s come with people like me moving in has changed that, partly thanks to the pandemic, and also partly thanks to the war in Ukraine. Young, educated Russians, especially tech workers, who were worried about being drafted into the Russian military, have flooded into the city. Housing prices have spiked as apartments have been converted into Airbnbs. Local businesses have started to cater to foreigners.

Within just a few years, Galata has become mostly tourists and remote workers, and lost some of its charm. I could just say: “Okay, I’m out of here,” and go live somewhere else, somewhere that feels more authentic. But that would just be spreading the problem: when people chase after authenticity, they end up destroying it. I’m already seeing this in Turkey. Parts of Istanbul are becoming too expensive and too gentrified. In some ways, you could say the affordability crises in countries like Canada, which have pushed so many digital nomads abroad, have followed them to their new homes as well.

Last month’s earthquake in Syria and Turkey really brought home how devastating this can all be for poorer people. As housing prices go up, the poor—and even the middle class—find themselves displaced to cheaper housing, which is often poorly constructed, or hasn’t been upgraded to be earthquake resistant. When an earthquake hits, those are the most dangerous places to be.

I’m not sure what can be done about it, especially because some governments are jumping on the trend. Spain just passed a law that offers remote workers a two-year residency permit. Other countries are making similar moves, capitalizing on an easy way to inject their economies with dollars and euros. But how do we minimize the costs to local economies? I don’t believe in government intervention, myself—I think the free hand of the market can ultimately fix this. My hope is that over time, the negative impacts will diminish as market forces find an equilibrium between the cost of living and wages. I’m not an economist, but this is my hope.

In the meantime, my plan is to stick it out in Istanbul and see where things go, but I’m also not sure if Istanbul will become my permanent home. That’s the thing: there’s no such thing as permanence when the whole world is open to you. Wherever I go, I know it won’t be back to Canada.

— As told to Adnan Khan

The post I left Canada to live as a digital nomad in Istanbul. Here’s why. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Xylazine is known by some users as “tranq” or “zombie drug” for its powerful sedative effects (photograph by iStock)

Last year, there was an average of 20 opioid-related deaths in Canada each day. This year, a dangerous new substance, xylazine, has been further amplifying the toxicity of Canada’s drug supply, concerning first responders and public-health experts who work on the front lines.

Xylazine, known by some users as “tranq” or “zombie drug” for its powerful sedative effects, is a tranquilizer typically administered to large animals (like horses) in veterinary settings, and is not approved for use in humans. According to a recent report from Health Canada, xylazine was found in 1,350 samples of drug seizures, most commonly in Ontario and British Columbia. Perhaps most alarmingly, the sedative is sometimes combined with fentanyl. But unlike fentanyl, whose overdoses are treated with naloxone (or Narcan), xylazine currently has no antidote.

READ: I’m a family doctor in Halifax. Here’s why pay-for-service clinics will burden the public system.

To find out more about xylazine, its devastating effects on users and what can be done to mitigate them (if anything), we spoke to Kali Sedgemore, a long-time harm-reduction expert in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside who also works with Vancouver Coastal Health, a regional health authority that provides addictions outreach in British Columbia.

How did you get involved with harm-reduction work? 

I grew up surrounded by substance use. At 11, I started using cocaine and alcohol, which turned into a habit as I entered high school. It progressed to crack and, later, meth. Now, I’m a daily intravenous meth user. I’ve also watched family members use. I know the importance of having clean supplies and treating drug users with respect, knowing they need help. For the past 10 years, I’ve been working to prevent people from overdosing. Right now, I work at three safe-injection sites in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.   

What’s a typical work day like for you?

I usually work from noon to 8 p.m. I arrive at the site, which is usually a big room with a bunch of different stations where people can use. We see anywhere from 40 to 100 people a day, and all types: construction workers, unhoused people, lawyers. I sign them in, witness their consumption of drugs—including fentanyl, crystal meth, hydromorphone, cocaine, ritalin, dexedrine—and try to help them as best I can. Some users have seizures, or they black out or fall asleep. Some act erratically. Some stop breathing, because opiates tell the body to slow down, reducing their oxygen supply. If this happens, two or three workers will offer them oxygen. If someone “goes down,” which is the term we use for overdosing, we give them naloxone, which reduces the effects of opioids and restores breathing. We’ll call 911 if we do that.  

Vancouver-based harm-reduction worker Kali Sedgemore (photograph courtesy of Sedgemore, illustration by Maclean’s)

How have you seen the opioid crisis evolve over the years? 

When I started working in harm reduction back in 2011, drug dealers were mixing fentanyl with other drugs—like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine—because it’s a cheap way to get high. I wasn’t really seeing any overdoses until 2015, when fentanyl fully entered the drug supply. We didn’t know what was going on at first. By the winter of 2022, we were seeing one or two overdoses a day at the clinic. And by early 2023, we were seeing between five to seven overdoses a day, which we attribute to an increased presence of xylazine and benzodiazepines like Xanax, Ativan and Valium.

So xylazine really emerged earlier this year?

In January, I started hearing about xylazine through drug warnings on social media. One Instagram account, Harm Reduction Saves Lives, posts regular updates on the province’s supply. Then outreach workers end up discussing it at testing sites. We don’t see xylazine as the new fentanyl, exactly; it’s just another example of how the drug supply is being contaminated. We know that xylazine is a veterinary tranquilizer, but we’re not sure how the drug dealers are getting it from clinics.

How does xylazine enter the drug supply?

It’s used as a filler to create more product and increase its potency, which jacks up the price of the drugs. This is a process called “cutting.” Often, the presence of xylazine isn’t the fault of individual dealers, because the drugs have usually switched hands a few times before they get them. Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of long-time users overdose. These are people who have a high tolerance and a lot of experience using, which is a sign that the drugs are getting more toxic. 

READ: An impossible job: What it’s like to work in a pediatric ICU

What about xylazine makes it particularly dangerous?

First, it’s meant for animals. It’s also difficult to tell whether someone has taken drugs cut with xylazine, which is usually injected or smoked with tin foil or a bubble pipe. We’ve seen different physical responses to it; sometimes it just looks like someone is heavily sedated. Because xylazine is a tranquilizer, though, it can cause some people to black out for 12 hours. It’s also a vasoconstrictor, meaning it causes a narrowing of the blood vessels, which can cause really bad skin abscesses and leads to amputation in some instances. Most of all, we have no readily available way to test the drugs and find out what’s in them—unless we send them in for testing, which we don’t have the time or resources to do.

In your opinion, does xylazine have the potential to wreak as much havoc as fentanyl? 

It’s hard to say. Nobody knows what to do at this point. 

Is there any action that policymakers can take?

We need a regulated, safe supply of drugs—as in, we need dealers to be handing out drugs that are tested properly. Right now, dealers can get their supply tested at sites in the Downtown Eastside. The machine used in testing is the Fourier-transform infrared spectrometer, and it can detect multiple substances in minutes. We need more people who are trained to operate these machines. We also need to hire more drug users in harm-prevention roles, because they understand the impact of opioids.

How are you coping with the onslaught of another new drug?
I’m really numb to it now, because I’ve dealt with this so many times during my career. We constantly lose members of our community, people we care about. Most recently, I lost my older brother, who died from smoking contaminated crack. It really takes a toll on my mental health, so I spend time with friends, go for hikes and talk with a counsellor. I also run a drug-user group called the Coalition of Peers Dismantling the Drug War. We have to fight hard every day, because things are getting worse.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post What is xylazine, the dangerous new drug fuelling Canada’s opioid crisis? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“After living in this granny flat for over a year and spending time with my children, there is nothing more I could have asked for.” (Photography by Rémi Thériault)

In April of 2020, my daughter, Caitlyn, was thinking about selling her home. She’s a teacher who lived in Smiths Falls with her three dogs; she wanted to get away and settle down on a larger rural property with some acreage. My husband, Gord, and I have lived on a 50-acre property in Lombardy, Ontario, for the past 40 years. Jokingly, Caitlyn suggested that Gord and I could apply for a land severance to create a separate lot for her to purchase. To her surprise, we were both on board.

Our initial plan was to sever the two acres of property that included our home and allow Caitlyn to build her own house on the remaining 48 acres, but after much correspondence with the Ministry of Transportation, we discovered that we couldn’t get a land severance. They suggested that we look into a garden suite or granny flat: a small home typically built in a backyard adjacent to the main home. At first, I wasn’t thrilled with the idea. I was under the impression—like a lot of people—that a granny flat is one step up from a trailer.

READ: Why I gave up my condo and moved in with my best friend and her family

But within a few weeks, we started seeing the upsides. Gord and I were ready to downsize from our home on the property, which had become more laborious to maintain over the years. If Caitlyn took over our house, we could keep it in the family, and living in a granny flat near her also meant she could help us as we aged. We decided to sell her the house below market value for around $300,000. I looked into granny flat companies and connected with Roger Robertson from South Shore Homes, a Perth-based retailer selling modular homes manufactured in New Brunswick. They were similar to a luxury apartment, with amenities like laundry rooms and walk-in closets. Robertson’s office was built like one of the models so prospective buyers could see what it would look like. We fell in love with a model two-bedroom, 900-square-foot space with an open-concept kitchen and living room. Gord and I were sold before we even left that day.

Our customization plan included the addition of ten feet to accommodate a second bathroom and walk-in closet. We converted one of the bedrooms into my art studio and added a three-season sunroom and deck, which gave us a bit more space. We ended up spending roughly $275,000 on the home and renovations. The process of ordering and delivering a home usually takes five months, but a combination of COVID and supply chain issues delayed our move-in date from September of 2021 to January of 2022. Along the way, we discovered that our home would be considered “temporary” and can only be on the property for 20 years, so we built it on blocks rather than on a foundation. Our children can decide what to do with the land later on.

We have the benefits of living in a luxury apartment while enjoying our outdoor space. Our son, Douglas, works in Ottawa and lives ten minutes away with his wife and two young children. We usually see them on the weekends for our family tradition of Sunday dinners, which we rotate cooking. We love to eat on our beautiful deck—weather permitting. As for upkeep and chore division, Caitlyn and her dad share dog-walking duties, and Gord plows the snow or mows the grass in the winter. Caitlyn says he’s the best property manager she could ask for.

MORE: The Big Idea: Help seniors age at home

During the day, when Caitlyn isn’t working, she and I will cook our favourite meals together, relax outside with the dogs or occasionally work on joint home improvement projects. If I need help with my devices, she’s a doorstep away. She sometimes jokes that when she lived in Smiths Falls, I would call her every day, but now, not so much. Caitlyn’s friends wondered if moving so close to her parents was a good idea, but we’ve been able to give each other privacy and communicate whenever either side oversteps. After living in this granny flat for over a year and spending time with my children, there is nothing more I could have asked for.

I’ve always known there was something special about this land since the day we purchased these 50 acres. It means a lot to me that my daughter has planted her roots in this space, too. We’ve made decades’ worth of memories as a family here, and now, there will be decades more to come.

— As told to Ann Elpa

The post We’re retirees who bought a granny flat to live near our daughter and save money appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“A renewed interest in pay-for-service clinics creates a huge risk,” says Dr. Leisha Hawker, who has worked in Nova Scotia’s public health-care sector for over a decade (Photography by Matt Madden, Illustration by Maclean’s)

I’ve worked as a family doctor in Nova Scotia’s public health sector for a decade. These days, I’m at a collaborative health centre in Halifax that offers primary care, dental care, mental-health support and other services. I’ve been watching our provincial system inch closer and closer to collapse since I became a physician back in 2013. It’s a story that’s now common to most other provinces, but Nova Scotia has its own specific problems: 14 per cent of the people who live here have no family doctor and, worse, a quarter of our working physicians are older than 60. When they retire, our system will be even more strained. 

READ: Thousands of patients. No help. Meet the lone family doctor of Verona, Ontario.

The sentiment that public health care is failing Canadians has led to the creation of many private health care clinics, which have popped up around the country within the last year, including one in Nova Scotia. I suspect that the idea behind them is to provide patients with more timely care. But, in my opinion, a renewed interest in pay-for-service clinics creates a huge risk—and could potentially restrict health care access for those who need it most. 

Private clinics that are run by nurse practitioners and require Canadians to pay out of pocket for services, while not in contravention of the Canada Health Act, flirt with the spirit of that legislation, which states that patients can’t be charged for medically necessary care. These clinics are still allowed to exist because, when the Act was written in 1984, care from a nurse was not considered medically necessary (and therefore covered under provincial insurance plans), nor was treatment from professionals like psychologists, physiotherapists and dentists. This language should be revised, because the more that professionals in those “non-necessary” categories privatize, the more we risk creating an even greater rift, a two-tiered system that could leave the most vulnerable members of our population behind.

RELATED: An impossible job: What it’s like to work in a pediatric ICU

What’s happening in Canadian health care right now is not dissimilar to how the customs queues work at airports. There’s a priority line for experienced, affluent travellers who are willing to pay for a Nexus card. That line moves quickly, but it still requires personnel to manage it. This pulls workers from the regular line, which jacks up wait times for travellers who are unwilling or unable to pay a premium. There are also two lines in a two-tiered health care system: a private route for those who will pay and a free route for everyone else. Patients in the free line are, on average, less healthy, as low socioeconomic status is tied to worse health outcomes. The effort of treating more complex conditions slows down the queue. As more private-care facilities crop up, many medical professionals may prefer to work in those spaces, with patients who are healthier. Those clinics may also offer more flexible shifts, a real boon for providers burnt out after years of working overtime. But where does that leave the public patients?

At our clinic in Halifax, we work with patients on long-term disability, newly arrived refugees, people struggling with addictions and others who are insecurely housed. They are already at a disadvantage, because the wait for services like public physiotherapy and dental care is very long. In fact, I often find myself treating dental abscesses because of that lack of access. Those disadvantages will only compound if medical professionals abandon the public system for private options. 

(Photograph by MaddenVallis Photography)

Studies have repeatedly shown that not only does a parallel private health care stream not reduce the burdens on the public one, it can actually increase them by reducing the number of doctors available, funding and overall public support. As an example, earlier this month, the federal government clawed back a total of $82 million in health care funding for provinces who were allowing private providers to charge patients for MRIs, CT scans and other tests. That included the $1.2 million that was taken from Nova Scotia. 

MORE: The Big Idea: Stockpile Canada’s Drugs

The worry that the public system cannot care for everyone is definitely out there. I’ve spoken with physicians who say their patients, faced with long delays, feel pushed to resort to private options. This is exactly why it’s crucial to focus on and bolster retention within the public system. One way to do that is to fund more spots in local medical schools and find ways to train and license more professionals. In Nova Scotia, we’ve already begun doing the latter: as of early March, U.S.–certified doctors can practise here without having to first pass a licensing exam. The province also recently announced a $10,000 retention bonus for nurses in the public system, and extended offers to 65 Kenyan refugees, who will begin working as continuing-care assistants as of this summer. All of this is a good start, but our dearth of medical professionals is the result of decades of under-resourcing. It will take years to get out of this hole.

One of the most impactful solutions we should be funding is more of what we in Nova Scotia call “medical homes,” or health centres with a range of medical professionals under one roof. (These are known as family health teams in Ontario, and have other names in other provinces.) These models relieve the workload of overburdened nurses and doctors and ER workers whose job is to focus on treating time-sensitive, life-threatening illnesses, and they offer patients many more options than waiting to see their GP or going to the ER. At our clinic, they can consult with a family doctor, a social worker, a dental hygienist, a psychiatrist, an OB-GYN and more. Together, we collaborate on care strategies for patients whose health problems are multi-faceted. Some of our patients access four or more different services at our centre within a month. That wouldn’t be possible if each service was separate and privatized. 

To be clear, I see the appeal of publicly funded, private health care establishments, like walk-in clinics, for example. Those are important services that alleviate the public system without charging patients. In fact, that’s how the relationship should remain: private as a complement to public, not costing patients money and not exacerbating human resource shortages. It’s worth remembering that health care is not a commodity; it’s a public good.

–As told to Alex Cyr

The post I’m a family doctor in Halifax. Pay-for-service clinics will burden the public system. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Andrea Loewen moved in with her best friend’s family in Vancouver (Photography by Jackie Dives)

I’m one of those millennials who’s always trying to convince my friends to join a commune and live with me. I’m a a social person, and building community is important to me. My dream is that one day we’ll all buy a plot of land together, build our own small homes and gather outdoors for bonfires. Of course, none of us has the money for that right now.

When the pandemic hit in March of 2020, I was living alone in an apartment in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, which I bought in 2015 for $230,000. I’m an extrovert, so it was hard to be isolated away from friends and family, and after three or four months of living alone, I hit a wall. I decided to temporarily move into my parents’ home in Abbotsford, where my uncle and brother were also staying. I felt almost a physical relief to be back in a full house with others. Throughout the pandemic, I would go back and forth between my apartment and my parents’ home. It became clear that living alone was overrated. 

RELATED: This realtor created a Tinder for property co-ownership

I started talking to other friends about my co-living dreams. Soon I learned that my best friend of 12 years and her husband were feeling the same way. They were living in a nice but cramped two-bedroom condo in Vancouver’s West Side, and isolating had been hard on them, too. At the end of 2021, we started talking about potentially moving in together. It just felt right: we had all been friends for so long, and I was even the emcee at their wedding. We started a group chat called “Modern Fam Jam” to coordinate everything. We were like, “Let’s do this!”

“I’m an extrovert, so it was hard to be isolated away from friends and family”

At the beginning, it seemed like we agreed on everything. Privacy was important, so we looked for a place with at least three bedrooms and outdoor space. My friends had a toddler (they now  also have a newborn), so we wanted a space that was big enough for the kids to run around. The only thing we really differed on was location: I wanted to live in East Vancouver and they preferred the West Side. In the end, they won out—the only places big enough for the five of us were on the West Side.

We only viewed three homes before finding one we loved. My friend is really good at the whole Craigslist hunt thing, and she found a four-bedroom house for rent for $5,000 a month. By mid-March of 2022, we were moving. It was a whirlwind. As for the costs: both me and my friend already owned condos, and we didn’t want to sell them in case co-living didn’t work out for us. So we rented out our places; the rent we received was enough to cover the costs of renting our new home. I pay $1,500 in rent, and my friends pay $3,500 a month.

READ: Habitat: A former New York Times journalist built this beachside fortress in P.E.I.

The house is glorious. There’s one bedroom and a bathroom downstairs, where I live. My friend and her family are upstairs, where there are another two bedrooms and a master bedroom with an ensuite bathroom. When you walk in the front door, there’s a small living room on one side and a larger family and dining room on the other, which is attached to the kitchen. These separate living areas mean we can all be on the main floor but not necessarily feel like we’re in each other’s faces.

MORE: My mortgage payments rose by almost $2,000 in a year

Most days we’re all just doing our own thing: I work as a managing director at a theatre, so my schedule changes a lot. I usually leave for work before they’re even awake and often have plans in the evening. If I’m home at night, we’ll hang out together while I make dinner. My friend has a pretty consistent routine of dinner, toddler bedtime, and exhausted parents’ bedtime, but most days we cross paths after work. We also do family movie nights when we can. Our last one was about a month ago; we watched Sing 2 and ordered pizza. Afterwards, my friend’s toddler put on a performance for us. It was super cute.

For chores, we have a “do them if you see them” policy. I’m intentional about vacuuming downstairs to manage my cat’s shedding. My friend and I alternate taking out the recycling, compost and garbage on a weekly basis, and her husband mostly does outdoor chores like cleaning up the yard and gardening. We clean our own bathrooms, and we split monthly “deep cleans” to get the kitchen and floors done. We divide household finances in a similar way, picking stuff up for each other as we need it. Little issues come up, like who’s shovelling the snow on what day. But we’ve been able to talk everything through.

We’ve traded some freedom for this family style of living: I can have a romantic partner or friend over whenever, for example, but neither of us can just plan a party without checking in on the other first. That tradeoff is worth it: I have a loving chosen family I come home to every day.

—As told to Adrienne Matei

The post Why I gave up my condo and moved in with my best friend and her family appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Filament founder Ben Lightburn saw an opportunity to leverage his team’s botanical extraction expertise to bring the first pharmaceutical-grade, naturally extracted psychedelics into the market. (Photos courtesy Filament)

Entrepreneur Ben Lightburn became interested in psychedelics in 2018, when he read about the promising results emerging from clinical trials. He had just sold his company, Mazza Innovation, which developed botanical extraction technologies for companies producing cosmetics and dietary supplements. The psychedelics industry, he realized, mostly produced synthetically manufactured psilocybin for research and development: it’s incredibly difficult to extract psilocybin from mushrooms in a way that’s standardized and stable. 

Lightburn saw an opportunity to leverage his team’s botanical extraction expertise to bring the first pharmaceutical-grade, naturally extracted psychedelics into the market. His company, Filament Health, extracts drugs like psilocybin, psilocyn, ayahuasca, mescaline and salvia primarily for research and development purposes. Psilocybin can be delivered to patients via Health Canada’s Special Access Program—physicians for seriously or terminally ill patients can use the program to request treatments that Health Canada hasn’t yet approved. Filament Health currently supplies about 70 patients across the country, most of whom are dealing with serious depression or terminal cancer.

Inside Filament’s lab, four scientists grow a variety of mushrooms, including Psilocybe tampanensis and Psilocybe cubensis (their nicknames are a bit more playful, like Jack Frost, Albino Penis Envy and Blue Meanie). Then they dry the mushrooms and mill them into a powder. After that, the active ingredients are extracted, purified, mixed with different excipients and preserved. Finally, they’re poured into capsules, packaged and sent around the globe. We took a look inside their lab to see how it all goes down. 

Filament moved into their Vancouver lab in 2020 and employ four full-time staff there, including their chief science officer, a mycologist, an analytical chemist and a quality control specialist. The rest of the team works remotely, and Lightburn splits his time between the lab and home. 

The mushrooms grow in these containers, which provide a controlled environment that optimizes humidity and minimizes contamination. The growing medium is made of organic Canadian rye grain and coconut coir. They harvest approximately 10 to 50 kilograms of mushrooms every month. 

Here, lab workers are harvesting a strain of mushroom called Psilocybe cubensis. One of the reasons Lightburn thinks consumers will want naturally extracted psilocybin over synthetic is because of something called the “entourage effect,” which is the idea that a natural plant has more than just one active ingredient. “When you make a natural extract, you’re also preserving all the other compounds that are present in the mushroom,” says Lightburn. “For example, wine is more than just alcohol, and coffee is more than just caffeine.” Mushrooms also contain compounds like psilocyn, norpsilocin, baeocystin and norbaeocystin. 

The harvester must delicately cut the mushroom at the base to minimize bruising. 

Here, mushrooms are placed in a dehydrator before processing (Psilocybe cubensis is over 90 per cent water).

Psilocybe cubensis are grown in many substances, depending on the desired properties. These ones grow in rye grain and Coco peat fibre.  

Filament grows their mushrooms for two purposes. For their own research and development, they evaluate the different strains for their potency, growth speed and resistance to contamination. For production, they go to the manufacturing side of the lab.  

These solutions are used to test the compounds in the mushrooms.

This is called a rotary evaporator, used to remove a solvent or water from an extract.

These plates contain a growth medium used for germinating and propagating mycelium (the fungal threads from which mushrooms are grown). 

Here are their Soxhlet extractors, which extract the active components from the mushrooms. 

As for the future of legal psychedelics for all, Lightburn is hopeful. “In Vancouver, there are magic mushroom stores operating openly,” he says. “Not long before cannabis was legalized, we had cannabis stores openly operating.”

The post Inside the Vancouver lab where scientists (legally) grow magic mushrooms  appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Illustration by Pete Ryan)

Shoo Lee is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and former pediatrician-in-chief at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. He was named to the Order of Canada in 2019.

Last summer, my colleagues and I published a paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, insisting that pharmaceutical security needed to become a national priority. Months later, we saw why: in the midst of a “tripledemic” of COVID, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, panicked parents scoured pharmacies for children’s Tylenol and found only empty shelves. Sick adults couldn’t get their hands on over-the-counter cold medicines. Out west, the antibiotic amoxicillin was scarce.

As Canadian health-care professionals know, this was an extreme example of an old issue. One quarter of all Canadian drugs (over-the-counter and otherwise) were running short well before the pandemic, but there’s nothing quite like a global health crisis to expose a country’s weak points. To make sure shortages like this don’t keep happening, we need a plan—and the political will—to keep at least six months’ worth of critical drugs stocked on home soil at all times.

Canada’s fundamental problem, for a ​​long time, has been one of foreign depen​dence. The world of pharmaceuticals is attached to a hugely complex supply chain, one that’s easily disrupted by geopolitical problems (like wars), shipping issues (like high fuel costs) and, of course, viral outbreaks (like COVID-19). On top of that, the majority of the active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs, needed to make drugs are produced in India and China. And many brands are only supplied by one or two companies. One such drug is Clavulin, an oral antibiotic for children that was recently in short supply. 

In the past decade, the percentage of Canada’s drug spending allocated to imports rose from 74 to 93 per cent, making us especially vulnerable to supply cut-offs. As we saw with COVID vaccines, countries with their own production facilities will always prioritize getting treatments to their own citizens. If your drug-acquisition strategy relies heavily on imports, as ours does, you need mechanisms in place to protect yourself.

The good news is that Canada has run into this problem—and solved it—before. In the 1940s, most of our drugs were sourced from outside of the country. (For a while, we also paid some of the highest drug costs in the OECD.) To fix this issue, in 1969, the federal government amended the Patent Act to allow Canadian companies to manufacture patented drugs by paying royalties to brand-name pharmaceutical companies. This resulted in huge growth in Canada’s own pharmaceutical industry. But with the rise of free-trade agreements, like NAFTA, we buckled under external pressure to reverse that policy. Our companies could no longer compete; many of them went bankrupt or were bought out by overseas firms. To this day, Apotex is the only remaining large manufacturer of generic drugs in Canada. 

The best short-term solution Canada has for its current drug-supply problem is one we can copy from our neighbours. At the outset of the pandemic, the World Health Organization called on all countries to create a list of essential medicines—one that would ensure citizen access to critical drugs. Down south, the Trump administration issued an executive order to the FDA to compile a list of 227 must-have medicines, like aspirin and morphine, as well as their proper dosage methods. 

In Canada, we have no such list, aside from the 12 medicines declared critical by Health Canada during COVID, which include epinephrine and fentanyl. Drawing up our own list isn’t exactly rocket science: Health Canada simply needs to convene a panel of experts—pharmacists, doctors and representatives from the various provincial ministries of health—to decide which drugs should make the cut. For the most part, running out of something like cold medicine is an inconvenience. But people with more serious illnesses, like cancer, can’t afford to wait six months for a restock of oncology drugs. I’d also add things like anesthetics, epidurals, antibiotics and drugs used for diagnostic imaging to the list. Canadians and Americans have similar medical needs; we could very well use the FDA’s template as a starting point.

Once we know which drugs to prioritize, we need a more efficient way of stockpiling them. Like us, the European Union was crippled by a surge in sickness last winter; they began drawing up its own stockpiling plans back in January. Canada already has its own National Emergency Strategic Stockpile, or NESS, which is managed by the Public Health Agency of Canada. It’s available for the provinces and territories to dip into during emergencies. Unfortunately, it’s also riddled with problems. Back in 2010, an audit revealed that many of the NESS’s supplies were expired—some dating as far back as the 1960s. NESS was also short on much of the personal protective equipment we needed at the height of COVID. This cannot happen again.

A six-month stockpile of critical medicines should be readily available for distribution. To keep track of it, Health Canada (or some related federal department) needs to create a more rigorous internal inventory, one that’s digitized and updated in real time with every replenishing shipment or change in drug quantity. Another idea is to store the medicines in warehouses owned by the drug manufacturers themselves. The downside of this is that, in order to pay for the extra space, the government may have to allow producers to increase their drug costs. (To me, this provision is worth the price—especially in a resource-rich country like Canada.) To ensure the stockpile is always full, the federal government could establish a Crown corporation to manufacture these essential drugs. In the event of a national shortage—which, sadly is certain to occur again—production can be ramped up to meet demand. 

The long-term strategy is to create a thriving pharmaceutical industry at home. There are reasons to be hopeful: Moderna planted roots in Quebec back in 2020, with the eventual goal of producing 100 million mRNA vaccine doses every year. Last winter, Quebec’s Mantra Pharma distributed its first domestic shipment of M-Amoxi Clav—a generic of Clavulin. And researchers at the Université de Montréal are pioneering new technologies that could streamline the output of APIs, allowing manufacturers to more efficiently scale up production when our drug supply runs too low. Some people will say that Canada is simply too small a market to compete internationally, but we’ve done it once before. 

Canada again has some of the highest drug costs in the OECD, third behind the U.S. and Switzerland. We need to stop paying through our noses—and looking elsewhere—for medications that are essential to Canadians’ livelihoods. Young children shouldn’t be running fevers because we can’t secure something as simple as children’s Tylenol, and our solution can’t be to order two million bottles to get parents to stop complaining. We can’t wait for the next war—or pandemic-sized meltdown—to motivate us. We should always be prepared.

The post The Big Idea: Stockpile Canada’s Drugs appeared first on Macleans.ca.

For Lindsay Clarke, travel nursing was a means to an end (photograph courtesy of Clarke)

I’ve always wanted to be a nurse, but it was a long road to get here. In 2004, I started working for the Canadian Pacific Railway—on the “gangs,” as they call them. I built and fixed railroad tracks between Port Coquitlam, B.C. and Swift Current, Saskatchewan. I did that for six years, and met my future husband, Ryan, on the job. I told him that nursing was my real dream career. I was in and out of the hospital a lot as a kid, and I still remembered all the wonderful nurses who took care of me. Ryan told me he’d heard good things about the nursing school at Memorial University in Newfoundland, where he was from. In 2008, I applied and got in.

In 2015, two years after I graduated, Ryan and I moved to Calgary in search of more sprinkler-fitting jobs for him. I took RN jobs all over the province, and in many different practice areas: long-term care, dialysis, acute care, and emergency rooms. ERs were my favourite because I got to interact with patients of all ages. At one point, I managed a roster of travel nurses, ones who are employed by private companies and contracted out to medical facilities that are experiencing staff shortages. (They’re sometimes called “agency” or “locum” staff.) I was privy to their hourly rate, which was nearly double my wage—and sometimes more.

READ: State of Emergency: Inside Canada’s ER Crisis

Last spring, after almost a decade in the profession, I started to realize that my full-time nursing job wasn’t enough to sustain our family’s lifestyle and pay off my $55,000 student-loan debt. At that point, I was making $52 an hour working in a hospital in Edmonton. Remembering how lucrative travel nursing could be, I quit my job and, for the last year, I’ve worked with Athabasca Workforce Solutions, a travel-nursing company based in Fort McMurray. I’m licensed to practise in Alberta, Newfoundland, Saskatchewan and even Texas, working on contracts that last an average of six weeks.

RELATED: I began my ER nursing career in Ontario. Burnout and low pay led me to leave for the U.S.

When I arrive on-site, the hospital staff usually greet me with an exasperated “thank you so much for coming,” especially in rural communities. By now, everyone knows about the conditions in Canadian ERs: recently, two people died while awaiting care in ERs in Nova Scotia and in Alberta. Last October, wait times in Red Deer reached 19 hours. I’ve worked with travel nurses from all over Canada, and I’ve spoken with many that weren’t allowed to take breaks. I can remember one particular job where I had 13 high-acuity (or very sick) patients to myself; that’s triple the normal patient-to-nurse ratio. But if we stick to hospitals in our home communities, there’s no one to take care of those people.

MORE: An impossible job: What it’s like to work in a pediatric ICU

To deal with the staff shortages, some provincial health authorities are now paying huge sums to hire travel nurses, rather than renegotiating contracts with local nursing unions to offer them more money. Last year, Nova Scotia’s health authority spent $16 million on travel nurses in just nine months. Since 2020, Alberta Health Services has spent $10 million on travel nurses, and walked back an attempt to slash general RN wages by three per cent in 2021. We worked so hard throughout COVID, so that was a slap in the face. Many Canadian nurses, including me, have come to the same realization: there’s nothing keeping us here. Why would I stay? 

For me, travel nursing was a means to an end: to get caught up on our family’s debts. Gabriel, our eight-year-old son, has autism and ADHD, and I’ve often had to leave him for weeks at a time—most recently, for a contract in Peace River, which is five hours north of where my family lives. My husband is basically a single dad when I’m not there.
I would have preferred to work full-time at a hospital near my home, where I’d be paid appropriately, but that wasn’t possible. 

READ: Thousands of patients. No help. Meet the lone family doctor of Verona, Ontario.

Recently, I took a job even further afield—a permanent one, in the United States. As of June, I’ll be working full-time as a registered nurse in a private hospital in South Carolina. This time, my husband and son will be moving with me. I found the position while searching the hiring platform Indeed for travel-nursing jobs in the States. I got in touch with an American recruiter who was specifically advertising for Canadian nurses, and they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: a yearly base salary of US$100,000, plus a sign-on bonus of $20,000. I’ll also receive a shift differential, which means that, on weekend nights, I will earn an extra eight dollars per hour. Most importantly, the company is paying for three years’ worth of housing. We can’t afford to own a place in Canada, let alone afford a decent rental. The price of heating my Alberta home tripled last month. Soon, we’ll have our green cards and be American citizens with a home of our own. 

I’m not alone in my decision to move: I know of a few nurses who are leaving the Canadian public system for the American one. Prior to securing the South Carolina job, I applied for a job in Texas. The interviewers were Canadians who moved south for temporary work and never came back. The South Carolina recruiters told me there are 11 Canadians working at the hospital I’m about to join. 

It hurts me to leave Canada. I love the idea of everybody being able to get the health care they need—and not having to pay for it—but our system is broken and needs to change. Sometimes, I feel like I’m abandoning our country right when it’s in a crisis, but I have to look out for my family. In South Carolina, I’ll be able to come home to my husband and son every single night and give them big hugs and kisses after a bad day. And when I log on to the website of my new hospital to check the emergency room’s current wait time, it doesn’t say 19 hours. It says 12 minutes.

–As told to Emily Latimer 

The post I’m a Canadian ER nurse who took a job in the U.S. so my family can survive appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Transit union president John Di Nino sees a link between rising violence and worsening societal conditions throughout Canada (photo by Getty Images. Illustration by Maclean’s.)

I started my career in public transit when I was 19 years old, in 1986. I mostly worked as a mechanic in Toronto’s subway stations, far from the public, so I didn’t have to worry about my own safety on the job the way bus drivers and train operators sometimes do. That same year, I became a steward with the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents more than 200,000 members working in transit systems across Canada and the U.S. In 2018, I ran to become the union’s president, hoping to take what I’d learned through decades of training and advocacy in my own city and make change on a national level. I didn’t know then that a big part of my job would be to grapple with a nationwide crisis of crime and violence on public transit.

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The number of violent incidents had been on a slow increase for years, but just before I became president, it felt like something really changed. In February of 2017, Winnipeg bus operator Irvine Fraser was stabbed to death by an unruly passenger he removed from his bus. The news landed like a gut punch for me, and for every transit operator who’d ever dealt with a troublesome passenger. 

Around that time, there were about 2,000 operator assaults annually in Canada. When the pandemic hit, it looked at first like those numbers were dropping—but that was just an illusion caused by plunging ridership. The number of assaults relative to ridership was actually trending upward. Then, as things started to reopen and riders returned to transit, the number of violent incidents grew dramatically across the country, in communities big and small. It didn’t matter where you were. Transit union representatives in Saskatoon recently reported a huge jump in driver assaults—38 last year alone, more than in the preceding four years combined. In Canada’s biggest city, the Toronto Transit Commission logged 1,068 violent incidents against riders in 2022, a 46 per cent increase compared to 2021. 

John Di Nino (photo by Patrick Marcoux)

The assaults range from relatively minor, like verbal abuse and spitting, to the headline-making ones. Last February, two TTC employees—a bus driver and a subway operator—were stabbed in separate incidents in the span of a week. In Edmonton last April, a man punched an elderly woman at a light-rail station, causing her to fall onto the tracks. In January, two bus drivers were threatened with guns in separate incidents. In Calgary last November, a woman was injured in a hatchet attack at a train station. Days later, a man was shot by a flare gun and set on fire at the same station. A few months ago in London, a man tried to stab a bus driver on the job. The perpetrator was released, and every day since, that operator has been worried about going to work. Is that person going to get back on my bus? Is that going to happen to me again? Is it going to be worse this time? 

A few of these assaults have been tragedies. Two passengers were murdered in the Toronto transit system last year; one was a woman set on fire on a subway platform in June, and the other was a woman stabbed in a random incident in December. 

Why have things become so bad, so fast? Ultimately, it’s because this isn’t a transit issue—it’s connected to much deeper social stresses. The transit-violence epidemic is an offshoot of other problems that have gone unaddressed, in particular our growing national housing crisis. 

READ: How Toronto’s housing market is transforming the rest of Canada

Many of these assaults have been committed by vulnerable or troubled people—people with mental-health issues, people on the edges of society. And as housing affordability has rapidly worsened throughout the pandemic, there are more and more people in this kind of distress on our streets and taking shelter in our transit systems—people who have nowhere else to go. There are no statistics or hard numbers on this, unfortunately, but many of those who work with the most vulnerable in our society have noticed the same pattern: people finding refuge in bus shelters, train stations and transit vehicles. 

The response by governments and employers has been overwhelmingly reactive, not proactive. In January, the City of Toronto announced it would deploy 80 additional officers throughout the TTC in an effort to address violence. Six weeks later, the city announced the end of those measures. They only responded once the crisis was in full swing, without funding in place to support it, and then it was over. Like the crisis itself, this weak response isn’t just a Toronto problem. I have yet to see any level of government, anywhere, make any concrete plans to address the issue, meaning short-term security fixes, plus long-term investments in housing and health care. These are discussions that need to happen—lives are literally on the line.

So is the future of our transit systems. Public transit is a mobility right for all Canadians, and if we’re really a society that’s concerned about climate change, then we need to put our best foot forward with public transit. But people will stay away if they fear for their safety. As for operators, I’ve never seen morale as low as it is now. Our co-workers are being threatened, punched, knifed and shot. 

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And there’s a lack of accountability and transparency from transit agencies themselves. For example, when the TTC recently released data on assaults, it focused on passengers only, and didn’t say how many attacks were against staff. We also need a better reporting mechanism for specific incidents so we can more accurately identify the underlying causes. What are the triggers for these incidents? How are we gauging homelessness? How are we gauging addiction issues? If we’re going to understand the true scope of this problem—as well as the real risks to our members—we need agencies to do a better job of reporting the circumstances surrounding violent crimes.

This is personal to me in multiple ways. My wife was critically injured in a mass shooting last December that killed five residents of our condo building. The perpetrator was dealing with mental-health issues and fell through the cracks—and then tragedy struck. My personal experience with violence reinforces my view that we have to do better in terms of the social services we provide, the tools we use to mitigate threats of violence, and in making sure people with mental-health issues can access the care they need. They can’t do it when they’re living on the streets or seeking refuge in train stations and bus shelters, pushed into ever-more desperate living situations. 

I did a press conference on transit assaults last month at Vaughan Metropolitan Centre Station. As I entered the station, there was a person there who was obviously in some kind of crisis. I asked one of the TTC workers to call for assistance, and two York Regional Police officers were dispatched. They took the man, put him back on the subway and moved him back into the system—back to Toronto. That’s not support. That’s not dealing with the problem. That’s getting the problem out of your jurisdiction.

That’s why I have called for a national task force to address the violence. We need to bring all the stakeholders together—the unions, transit employers, municipalities, police, transportation ministers—to hear directly from front-line staff. We need to figure out how to mitigate the risks, then use that as a template to better protect staff and riders across the country. We need the Canadian Urban Transit Association to facilitate these discussions and the ensuing next steps. We need the Federation of Canadian Municipalities to understand the necessity of what we’re trying to do to rebuild public transit in their sectors. We need the provincial and federal governments to assist us with operational dollars to implement the practices, training and supports we identify. And we need to talk about the housing crisis, and the mental-health crisis and all the ways they intersect with public transit.

—As told to Caitlin Walsh Miller

The post How Canada’s housing crisis is fuelling violence on our public-transit systems appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Six years ago, my partner Corey Siemens and I were living in Edmonton and working as servers at a restaurant. Corey grew up on a farm in a small town in Alberta and I’ve always loved animals, so when we heard about a city-wide pilot project that would let us raise chickens in our backyard, we were intrigued. After finding out how complicated the process was, we decided to get our own acreage where we could have animals. In the fall of 2017, I found the perfect listing: a house on four acres of land with a forest and small lake. It was listed for $599,000. With the sale of our house in Edmonton, we had enough for a down payment, and on February 1, 2018, we moved into the Rylee Ranch.

We wasted no time finding animals to live with us. Corey came across a Kijiji ad from a woman who was giving away a llama because she didn’t want to take care of it any more. He reached out to her and she dropped him off the day we moved in. She backed up her trailer, opened the door and said, “He’s your problem now.” We chased the llama, who we later named Fernando, around for hours in four feet of snow. Fernando is now well behaved and follows us everywhere, but that’s how it started. On the farm today, we have Fernando, five pigs, one cow, one alpaca, 11 goats and more than 30 different birds (including turkeys, ostriches, chickens, peacocks, emus and a parrot)—about 50 animals in total. Corey and I also live with our three poodles and Bernese mountain dog, and the lake on our property has ducks and fish.

We don’t usually buy our animals, but we’ve purchased some rescues. Others were given to us. Abigail the cow came from an industrial dairy farm near Red Deer, Alberta, when she was just two weeks old. The farmer thought she would be sterile, so he put her up for sale for $50. Merida the pig, who now weighs 917 pounds, came to us when she was only three days old and eight pounds, after a woman in Edmonton realized she wouldn’t make a small pet. Our four ostriches came from an ostrich meat farm in southern Alberta. Many of our goats came from farmers in Alberta who couldn’t take care of them or didn’t want them anymore. People who want to give up their animals often find us through Instagram and TikTok.

With so many animals, it wasn’t long before we needed more land. Last year, we bought a neighbour’s property for $230,000 (with the help of financing) and doubled our acreage. We now have a nice big pasture waiting to be developed. Corey and I don’t make any money from the farm: we work at local restaurants in the evenings, and last year, Corey started grooming dogs from the garage, too.

There are so many things to do on a farm. I have lists everywhere with every animal’s birthday, piles of chores to do and things to buy. We wake up around 8 a.m. and go outside to feed, water and clean up after the animals, making sure they get enough exercise and stimulation. We have a list of tasks that takes us the majority of the day to complete and includes cleaning the animals’ stalls and enclosures, working on our compost pile and handling repairs and maintenance around the farm. By the time we’re done with everything, it’s usually around 4:30 p.m., and that’s when we head to work. Friends always ask to come over and visit, but we’re so busy that we don’t even have half an hour to sit down during the day.

About two years ago, in March 2021, we started posting short videos on TikTok so our friends and family could see what was happening behind the scenes at the farm. I posted a video where our dog was rolling in on our mowed lawn and she turned green. That video got 30,000 views and that was really cool. We also started posting videos of what the goats eat in a day, and those videos would get hundreds of thousands of views. By April, we had 100,000 followers, and our videos began trending in different countries.

@ryleeranch♬ original sound – RyleeRanch

Last month, I got a giant load of tomatoes and posted a TikTok of the goats eating out of a barrel about 10 minutes before I went into work. When I first checked, it had 100 views. That video now has over 20 million views. It was even featured on Global News Edmonton. Countless people have messaged me to say there are no tomatoes available in the U.K. right now, so we think that’s why it’s trending in Europe. There’s also a whole ASMR angle that people love. Plus, I don’t think people see farm animals as companions, so to see a guy feeding apples to a pig or bell peppers to a cow can be mesmerizing.

I’ve posted on TikTok every day since I launched the account and we’re now at 253,700 followers. It can be hard to come up with video ideas—we don’t always have 3,000 cucumbers to feed 11 hungry goats. We’ve gotten creative, sharing videos of us celebrating the animals’ birthdays and cleaning out their living spaces.

Despite our success on TikTok, I still have to work to financially sustain the farm. The cost of taking care of the animals is usually $1,000 to $2,000 monthly. The biggest expense is spaying and neutering, which is a one-time cost of up to $900 per animal. Hopefully, a brand will want to sponsor us one day. The goal is to make enough money doing social media that we could hire people to help clean and take care of the animals, but right now, Corey and I share those responsibilities.

We get some negative comments from people who think it’s wasteful for that much produce to go to animals. We don’t buy food for the animals—it’s donated from grocery stores as part of a food recycling program called Loop Resource. Stores donate produce that’s past its prime to 3,000 farms across the country: on Mondays, we go to a local Save-On-Foods grocery store and on Thursdays, we go to Real Canadian Superstore to pick up our haul for the week. We usually get between 100 boxes and an entire truckload of food—which includes apples, bananas, grapes, celery and okra—that we keep in a huge outdoor storage space on the farm. We go through all that food in about a week: what looks like a lot of apples disappears in seconds when 11 goats, seven turkeys and four emus come together. There are certain foods the animals can’t eat, like lemons, mushrooms and eggplants, so we have a compost pile that turns them into soil. The goats, cow, llama and alpaca mostly eat hay, which is not always readily available or affordable. We also buy a lot of other types of food for certain animals to ensure they’re getting the proper nutrition.

People have messaged me to say our videos put a smile on their face. Everything on our page is feel-good and wholesome—it’s just the animals living their best lives. I know what we’re doing is making people happy and that’s the biggest motivation to keep going.

— As Told To Lora Grady

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(Photo courtesy of Ashna Mankotia)

My parents immigrated to Canada from New Delhi in 1997, when I was just four years old. We moved around Ontario as my dad looked for work, living in Hamilton, Waterloo, London and the Greater Toronto Area. My dad was a tool and die maker in New Delhi and he continued to work in manufacturing for a while after we came to Canada. He wanted to try new things, too: he dabbled in car sales for a while and bought a gas station in a small Ontario town where we lived. My mom helped out with the gas station and took on a few side jobs: she passed out chocolate milk samples at a grocery store and worked at a call centre.

One Halloween, when I was 11, my mom sat down with my brother and me and told us we would have to be creative with our costumes. My dad had just bought the gas station, so money was tight. I realized then that my parents struggled to provide our family with financial stability.

As I got older, I noticed there were things other kids had that we didn’t, like yearly family vacations. But my parents made our childhood special anyway: my mom was great at finding free activities when we were little. We enjoyed hanging out at the library and doing summer reading programs.

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Although I realized as a kid that my parents were struggling with money, I didn’t think seriously about my own financial future. By my mid-20s, I was a student at the University of Waterloo and had already held several jobs: I worked at a McDonald’s for $9.60 an hour, at a bubble tea shop where I was paid about $11 an hour, and as a research assistant while I studied. Even though I was earning money, I wasn’t saving much: I spent a lot of it on clothes and going out to restaurants and bars.

I graduated university in 2017 with $35,000 in student debt. A good friend of mine, who is also an accountant, looked at my student loan payments and spending. I wasn’t spending extravagantly, but he encouraged me to be more mindful with my money and asked why I was only making minimum payments toward my loans. I became more serious about paying off my debt—I saved bonuses from work, for example, and put them toward my loan. After university, I got a job as a product manager at an education start-up and lived in a basement studio apartment in Toronto’s Little Italy.

When the pandemic hit, I had about $14,000 left in student loans. I paid it off in one lump-sum payment and moved back in with my parents. I suddenly had a lot more disposable income and fewer expenses, so I started looking into investing. The ability to build long-term wealth was a luxury my parents didn’t have. They taught me the basics, like saving and how credit works, but investing was something I had to teach myself.

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I wanted to share what I was learning with other first-generation immigrants and young people online, so I turned to TikTok in 2020. (Plus I had more free time than ever before and was looking for a distraction.) I started my TikTok account in March and posted a few videos about my daily life. It wasn’t until October of 2020 that I started posting regularly. In December, I went viral for the first time after posting a video of my fiancé playing tabla, a traditional hand drum, for my parents.

I didn’t gain a significant following until November 2021, when I posted a TikTok of a budgeting tool I had created for myself. Most spending trackers divide your spending into categories like “entertainment” and “groceries.” My tracker was structured as a calendar on a spreadsheet that allowed me to track how much I spent each day. It’s easy to ignore your spending by putting off looking at your credit card statement, but the ritual of writing it down forced me to be mindful of where my money was going. I made it available online as a free template for others and gained 50,000 followers in one week from that video. I now have over 100,000 followers, which I’ve gained by posting consistently over the last two years.

@ohmygoshnaJust like last year the template is free, all I ask is that you follow me I would suggest opening the link on desktop. Please let me know if you have any questions!♬ original sound – Ashna

I make educational finance videos, like talking about what a Tax-Free Savings Account is, what an investing account looks like and the importance of letting your investments grow over time. My finance knowledge is self-taught—I watch a lot of YouTube videos and learn from the Wealthsimple blog—and I don’t claim to be an expert. I also try not to give prescriptive cookie-cutter advice because I know everyone’s financial situation is different. I’ve also monetized my TikTok through brand deals with Secret, Food Basics and KitchenAid. I usually make a few thousand dollars per deal, but it varies.

It’s been meaningful for me to share financial advice that helped me with other young women in their 20s. I post videos about my everyday life too—what I’m doing, eating and wearing—and I do it because I want to share my life with others. But seeing a South Asian woman living a full life, where she’s happy and trying to have it all, resonates with people. One woman messaged me saying that she and her husband moved to Canada from Sri Lanka, and that she hoped her children could live like me one day. I know a lot of South Asian women didn’t grow up with someone they could look up to and take advice from. If my viewers benefit from my videos, whether that’s learning something that helps them take control of their finances or gives them a sense of community, then that’s good enough for me.

—As told to Leila El Shennawy

The post I share financial advice with my 100,000 TikTok followers appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Illustration by Maclean’s)

For West Coasters, it’s hard to ignore the threat of the Big One—especially in Victoria, the city where I live, and which is probably at greater risk of major devastation due to an earthquake than any other Canadian city. Every time an earth-shaking tragedy happens somewhere else, that risk is brought into sharp relief, because we know one day it will happen here—and “one day” may not be that far into the future. 

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A report commissioned by the city of Victoria in 2017 looked at different types of earthquakes that could shake the city, including two worst-case scenarios: an offshore, magnitude-9 subduction quake, or a magnitude-7 crustal quake, closer to the city. The first would be caused by the massive undersea fault stretching all the way from northern California to the north tip of Vancouver Island. Scientists know that it produces massive quakes every few hundred years. There are records in Indigenous oral history of a huge earthquake around the year 1700, as well as written records from Japan of an “orphan tsunami” that year, which suggest Cascadia last ripped open 323 years ago. Scientists estimate the Cascadia subduction zone produces a quake every 200 to 800 years, so we’re within the window, with an estimated 10 per cent chance during the next 50 years. Add to that the risk of other tremors, including a crustal quake, and there may be a one-in-three chance of the city being violently shaken in the next 50 years.

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The city’s report painted a bleak picture of what would happen: hundreds of buildings could collapse, and thousands more would be damaged beyond repair. The study estimated the city could lose nearly two-thirds of its entire building stock in either kind of quake—a civic disaster unmatched in modern Canadian history.

I’ve long assumed that the odds of my old house being one of the survivors of a quake like this are slim. The 111-year-old wood frame house is long on charm but short on modern seismic innovations. So in 2018, I hired a seismic engineer. Graham Taylor is an expert in the field, who’s worked on British Columbia’s school seismic renovation efforts. (His predictions are as bleak as the province’s—he’s estimated up to 2,000 people in the Victoria area could be killed in a big quake.) Taylor inspected my walls, the basement, the ground beneath my house and a few other important factors, and confirmed my suspicions: my house wasn’t likely to make it. After a few minutes of side-to-side shaking, the nails in the old boards on my basement walls will probably work themselves loose, at which point the boards will fall off the vertical two-by-four wall studs that support the house on top of the concrete foundation. Once those boards fly off, it will only take a bit more shaking before the wall studs succumb to the horizontal motion and topple over sideways, bringing the top two floors crashing down on the basement. Anyone in the top two floors would probably not be crushed, but the house would be destroyed. 

Gregor Craigie has spent years preparing for an eventual earthquake (Photos courtesy Craigie)

On hearing that kind of news, Taylor says, some homeowners simply decide to leave. He’s seen some people move thousands of kilometres away—both because the thought of the earthquake terrified them, and due to the unsettling questions about what life would be like after the event, when food and shelter could be in extremely short supply. But I’ve got a job and a life here, so I decided I would make my house stronger.

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I had, in fact, already done a fair bit of work the year before I hired Taylor. I’d nailed steel reinforcement plates to the junctions between the vertical support posts and the horizontal ceiling beams in my basement—the beams simply rest on the posts, which has been fine during the past century, because the ground hasn’t moved, and the weight of an entire house on top keeps things firmly in place. In a big quake, though, basement posts often shake loose from the beams they’re supporting. I also bolted the hot water tank to the wall, so we wouldn’t have a flooded basement—and we have a big container full of clean water, even if all the water lines ruptured. I even screwed my bookshelves to the walls with steel L-brackets to make sure no one in my family got knocked out by our home library. 

But the basement walls were key to keeping the house standing. I could hire a contractor to do the work—but Taylor suggested I could do the work myself to save money. It’s expensive, time-consuming and laborious, but it’s pretty straightforward, too. Since my mortgage doesn’t pay itself and our grocery bill gets bigger monthly, I took a deep breath and got to work, beginning on the outside. 

The house was covered in old cedar shakes that needed replacing anyway, so I pried them off, then proceeded to pry off the old boards underneath, nailed sideways onto the vertical studs. I found a lot of spiders, mouse droppings and dust along the way, but following the relatively straightforward plans, I methodically nailed new, three-quarter inch plywood to the wall studs, where the old boards had been. The new plywood is far stronger, and the plans call for a lot more nails, in a specific nailing pattern. I also cut the plywood in half before nailing it to the wall, so it has a built-in break to absorb some of the side-to-side motion when the shaking starts. 

A lot of seismic retrofits like this also call for steel bolts, to attach the wood frame of the house to concrete foundations, but Taylor told me it wasn’t necessary, and would probably just give me a leaky basement because of potential holes and cracks in the old concrete. 

All of these engineering fixes are based on real-world observations of how wooden houses have responded to real earthquakes, in California and elsewhere. They’re also based on earthquake simulations, like those performed on the giant “shake table” earthquake simulator at the University of British Columbia. I visited the simulator once, with Taylor, and watched it shake a large plywood room, the size of a school classroom. It had giant steel plates resting on top of it, and the engineers had programmed the table to replicate the exact shaking pattern from the deadly 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan. When the plywood classroom shook for more than two minutes, the nails holding the plywood to the wall studs hardly moved. But similar simulations with walls like my basement—with narrower boards and fewer nails—showed the nails popping out under sustained shaking, eventually collapsing the walls.

That was a vivid reminder of what is not only possible, but eventually, guaranteed to hit my house—unless I finish the work in time. But after countless weekend hours of prying, measuring, cutting, and hammering away, I’m still only a quarter done. Life keeps getting in the way. First came the pandemic. Then the price of lumber tripled. There’s my regular job, my side gig writing a second book—my first one, about Canada’s under-recognized earthquake risk, was published in 2021—and family life. Taking a glance at the calendar on the fridge as I write this, I see all three kids are playing in a water polo tournament this weekend. So all in all, I’m about two years behind schedule. Realistically, I hope to finish the basement walls in the fall of 2024.

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And even then, the seismic retrofit won’t be done. After that I’ll have to figure out what to do with the two old chimneys, one on either side of the house, that could become a hail of deadly bricks in a big quake. It’s happened before that people run out of buildings which end up remaining standing, only to be killed by raining bricks. There’s a solid argument for getting rid of most, if not all, brick chimneys in a seismic zone, but mine still tower above my old house. Most of the other houses in my neighbourhood have similar chimneys, and one day, some of them will surely come tumbling down.

I’m not happy to be behind schedule, but I’m trying to go easy on myself. After all, there are a lot of other things to worry about in life, and money and time are hard to come by. Maybe that’s why so many thousands of buildings in Victoria, Vancouver and beyond are still as vulnerable as my house—including plenty of publicly owned buildings. Half of British Columbia’s vulnerable public schools, for example, have been given seismic retrofits, at a cost of more than $2 billion—but that also means half have not. 

And while the chances of a catastrophic earthquake in our lifetime are highest on the West Coast, this isn’t the only part of the country at risk. Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City all lie in seismic zones that have produced major events in the past. They’re full of older, unreinforced masonry and wood-framed buildings, and newer buildings are no better off, since they’re not constructed in those areas with seismic risk in mind. The east coast isn’t entirely safe either; the ocean floor off Newfoundland could rumble once again like it did in 1929, when it triggered the deadly Burin Peninsula tsunami, which devastated fishing villages in that province, and claimed 28 lives. The truth is that the clock keeps ticking for many Canadian communities—and millions of us who live in active seismic zones had better hope we still have enough time to get ready.

The post I’ve spent six years earthquake-proofing my house in anticipation of B.C.’s Big One appeared first on Macleans.ca.

UofT biochemistry professor Boris Steipe witnessed ChatGPT go from a curiosity to a phenomenon among students in a matter of weeks (Photos by Brent Gooden)

I’ve been a professor in the University of Toronto’s biochemistry department since 2001. Last fall, I taught a first-year course on the foundations of computational biology, a field that applies computer-science principles to the study of biological processes. For the final assignment, I asked each of my 16 students to examine data on some genes involved in damage repair in human cells and write a short report on their findings. There was something off about two or three of the responses I received. They read like they’d been written by students who were sleep-deprived: a mix of credible English prose and non-sequiturs that missed the point of what I was asking. A few weeks earlier, the AI chatbot ChatGPT became available to the public, but it was so new that it never occurred to me that a student could be using it to help them with an assignment. I marked the reports and moved on. 

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In the following weeks, I saw ChatGPT change from a curiosity into a phenomenon. It came up in every discussion I had with fellow faculty members, across all disciplines—from the humanities to data sciences. My colleagues wondered how one could tell whether a student used the AI to answer questions, and many were concerned with how it might enable plagiarism. What if a professor suspected a student had used ChatGPT but couldn’t prove it? A plagiarism allegation is no small thing: you can’t risk ruining a student’s academic career on a hunch. I thought again about that December assignment and realized those off-putting answers might have been my first brush with ChatGPT. 

I directed the university’s bioinformatics and computational biology program for 15 years, and often wrote programs for my own lab, so I had been learning to “talk” to computers for years. I signed up for a ChatGPT account and became intensely interested in finding solutions to this new problem. I figured it made no sense to ban ChatGPT within the university; it was already being used by 100 million people. Over the Christmas break, it hit me: as professors, we shouldn’t be focusing our energy on punishing students who use ChatGPT, but instead reconfiguring our lesson plans to work on critical-thinking skills that can’t be outsourced to an AI. The ball is in our court: if an algorithm can pass our tests, what value are we providing?

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 I became so consumed by the ChatGPT issue that I decided to spend the next semester pouring all of my energy into what I’ve called the “Sentient Syllabus Project.” With the help of colleagues across the world—a philosopher in Tokyo and a historian at Yale—I am creating a publicly available resource that will help educators teach students to use ChatGPT to expedite academic grunt work, like formatting an Excel spreadsheet or summarizing literature that exists on a topic, and focus on higher-level reasoning. The syllabus includes principles like, Create a course that an AI cannot pass, as well as practical advice on how to normalize honesty around AI use.

“As professors, we shouldn’t be focusing our energy on punishing students who use ChatGPT”

Instead of grading for skills an AI can manage, like eloquent language, we could grade on the quality of a student’s questions; how they weigh two sides of an issue and form an opinion; and, if they use ChatGPT, how they improve on the algorithm’s answer. This framework would change how I would have designed the assignment in December. Instead of asking students to read data and tell me what they see, I would say: tell me what you see, but also tell me how you came up with that answer. That type of question encourages a student to creatively engage with the facts—whether they receive them from ChatGPT or not.

ChatGPT offers many possibilities: this technology could help non-native English speakers put their ideas into coherent prose, or help people with atypical needs converse with a platform that won’t ever become impatient. It also opens up the option for personalized tutoring and customized assignments—education that would only have been available to the wealthiest few in the past. In general, this invention allows us to spend more time and energy on developing students’ critical-thinking abilities, which is a wonderful thing. However, this is not just about better teaching. Generative AI can already do so many things, all day long, without overtime, benefits or maternity leave. Our students must learn how to be better, how to create additional value for themselves and for others. They have to learn how to surpass the AI. And they’ll have to use the AI to do that.  

We are entering a fascinating time in the history of AI, but I have two fears: one is that the adaptation moves so fast that it creates enormous economic disruption, which could cause people across industries—including some professors—to lose their jobs. The other fear is, of course, that we are not even sure what the adaptation could look like, or what new skills that we should be teaching in the meantime. For now, we need to accept that ChatGPT is part of our set of tools, kind of like the calculator and auto-correct, and encourage students to be open about its use. Then, it’s up to us as professors to provide an education that remains relevant as technology around us evolves at an alarming rate. If we outsource all our knowledge and thinking to algorithms, that might lead to an unfortunate poverty in our curiosity and creativity. We have to be wary of that.

—As told to Alex Cyr

The post My students are using ChatGPT to write papers and exams—and I support it appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Isaac Maker, a.k.a. Betty Baker, waves to the crowd following last weekend’s Drag Queen Story Time in Peterborough, Ontario (Photo by Erika Mark)

I’ve loved the arts since I was kid—piano lessons, painting and drawing, trips to the theatre in Peterborough with my mom. When I was four, we went to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. We were up in the mezzanine and, apparently, during the intermission I went up to the barrier and asked “How do I get down there, to the stage?” It’s unclear whether I was just asking for better tickets, but my mom likes to say that I knew I was destined to be a performer.

I found drag when I was fourteen, watching seasons 8 and 9 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. There was such a huge focus on creativity, comedy and costume. I was so inspired by Bob the Drag Queen’s ability to come up with non-stop quips or Sasha Velour and Shea Coulée creating the most stunning conceptual looks on the runway. And the divas—they were similar to me, but they were elevated versions of me. Queer people who were not just creative geniuses, but also kind, caring, compassionate and funny.

READ: How drag is revitalizing queer culture in rural Canada and smaller cities like Kingston

In February of 2019, when I was 15, I performed as Betty Baker for the first time at a charity bingo event at Trent University. That’s where I met my drag mother—my mentor—Sahira Q. She’s taught me a lot of dance, shared wigs and jewelry with me and helped me with the business side of drag—producing shows and making sure they’re accessible, booking other performers, making posters. I look up to her not just as a performer but also a person. 

From that point on, I had one or two monthly gigs—then Covid hit. Doing drag over the pandemic was interesting. It lacked the performance and audience interaction, but I got to work on my sewing and content creation. My mom and I did a four-part livestream series, Baking with Betty Baker, where we made cookies and muffins and raised $1,000 for Kawartha Food Share, which distributes food to food banks. I did online drag competitions, like Drag Rodeo. Every month, there’d be a challenge, like making a music video. I did “Babooshka” by Kate Bush and hand-painted clouds on grey fabric to make it look like the cover of her album Never for Ever. I’m still friends with some of the divas I competed against—online drag gave a lot of young performers the chance to curate community throughout the pandemic.

Storytime also started online. It was my mom’s idea—she’s a retired teacher—and she thought it would be great if I could just read books over the internet. My mom has always been supportive of me as a queer person. When I wanted to try makeup, we went right to Shoppers Drug Market. My stepdad is phenomenal too. He organizes all my shows and sets up the sound equipment and he’s an absolute business mastermind. And, honestly, he has great drag ideas. My 90-year-old grandma taught me to sew and comes to all my shows. Everyone in Peterborough has always been so supportive, too.

(Photo by Chris Coghill)

I worked with Lavender and Play, a local pregnancy and children’s store, to make some storytime videos, and then they had me in-person last year. We had a packed house. It was so much fun.

Last September—Pride month in Peterborough—someone from our local library reached out. They’d been receiving a lot of requests for more content catering to queer families and their allies, and they wanted me to do storytime. Not just for Pride, but all year long. They believe things like drag storytime that should be a regular part of their programming. September was our kick-off event.

Betty Baker will share some of her favourite stories exploring diversity, inclusion & respect during Drag Queen Story Time at the @ptbolibrary this Saturday. “The City of Peterborough supports providing an inclusive, safe community for all residents,” stated Mayor Jeff Leal. pic.twitter.com/ZOurXi8Zf7

— City of Peterborough (@CityPtbo) February 22, 2023

I’ve been lucky. Until last September, I’d never really faced any adversity or harassment as a drag queen. 

A few weeks ahead of storytime, someone sent me a blog post by Hill City Baptist Church. It talked about grooming, and the sexualization of children, and how drag queens are evil because they’re men wearing women’s clothing. (I mean, I don’t identify as a man, but I guess that’s beside the point.) I felt sick to my stomach.

I was at Sahira’s house when I first saw the post. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d been alone. I was scrolling through the comments, and one stuck with me. I still think about it sometimes. It said “A psychologically distraught pedo turned up to storytime expecting a crowd of children and instead there were 50 dads waiting to beat Dorothy within an inch of her life.”

I had never received a death threat before. (And to have the first one be so creative…) There were so many other comments on the post that were just like that one. It hurts so much. That’s not what drag is, that’s not what I’m doing. Betty has become an extension of me. She’s bubbly, optimistic, happy, fun, and she just wants to make people smile. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my drag. Sahira just said “It’s okay. We’re going to get through this.”

MORE: Len and Cub: A Secret Love Story

We found out they were planning on protesting the September storytime. My mom and I worked with PFLAG to put a call out for community support and a kind of counter-protest. It was the first in-person Peterborough Pride since before Covid, so we got some good traction: 150 people came to storytime, and there were about 100 counter-protesters. There were maybe 30 protestors.

I’m the only drag queen on the planet that’s early to things, so I didn’t see anyone on my way in. But after the event was over, I knew I wanted to address the crowd. I was scared—shaking like a leaf on a windy fall day—until I saw all the people with rainbow flags. I had just moved to Toronto to study performance production, but I love Peterborough so much. To come back and receive that kind of outpouring of support made me feel so good. I thanked them for being there, and I cried.

Betty Baker addresses a supportive crowd outside the library, following a successful drag storytime.

191 people attended to enjoy her show about friendship. #cdnpoli #Peterborough pic.twitter.com/UX8tdVk6pi

— Caryma Sa'd – Lawyer + Political Satirist (@CarymaRules) February 25, 2023

Drag storytime is pure joy. My mom and I workshop everything together. She’s got a puppet, Butch—he’s the star of the show, if I’m being honest—and we sing songs, do call and response and chat about issues that Butch might be having, like how to deal with frustration. And we read happy, meaningful books like My Many Coloured Days by Dr. Seuss and Annie’s Cat Is Sad by Heather Smith and Stick and Stone by Beth Ferry. Then, outside there are people shaming fathers for bring their kids to the event and holding up signs that say “Stop grooming children.” It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Our most recent event was this past weekend, and I had been hoping it would be, well, uneventful. The theme was friendship. But about a week before, I heard that Save Canada, a far-right Christian youth group, was planning a protest. Once again, PFLAG rallied about 100 counter-protesters. There were 15 from Save Canada and the adjacent groups.

A lot of families have come to every event since we started. Many of them come because they like seeing Betty Baker—and the makeup and the huge dress and the big ol’ wig—read stories. But many come because they are queer families and they know how important this is, how important it is for kids to have queer role models.

(Photo by Luke Best)

On Saturday, there was a kiddo in the audience who was just so excited to be there. They were wearing all camo with a bright pink purse and it was awesome. It wasn’t their parent who brought them, it was someone from the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. And after the show, the kid showed me everything inside their purse—tiny hairbrushes, so many mini makeup kits—and played with my fan. (Being in drag is hot work, and every queen needs a clacking fan.) They told me that kids at school were making fun of them, and we talked about different ways to deal with that. And they just had the biggest smile on their face.

I saw the kid’s friend from Big Brothers Big Sisters the next day at a drag brunch I hosted. They told me that the kiddo’s mom isn’t as supportive of her child as she could be, and they thanked me for putting on storytime. I thanked them for bringing the kid. They’re going to change that kid’s life. It’s so important to be able to thank the parents and families and guardians who are bringing kids to these events. It’s going to change their worlds. 

I hadn’t really been aware of the rise of anti-drag protests until last year. A storytime I had planned at Lavender and Play had to be cancelled because they were receiving threatening, violent phone messages. Around the same time, a protester at a Brockville storytime tried to set fire to the library’s roof in order to set off the sprinkler system and ruin all the books inside. It clicked then in my head that these protests weren’t about drag or storytime. They’re about power and control of knowledge. 

Being out there like this is not always easy. It’s not easy to see people call you a groomer and a pedophile all day. I know I could stop, but I would feel like I was letting myself down and letting down the kids and families who need to see themselves represented. To have a voice from the future saying “It’s going to be okay!” You can be weird and wacky and different and you can be a successful human. It’s okay to be queer. It’s crazy that we still have to say that kind of thing in 2023. 

What’s happening now is scary for queer people and people of colour—people the far right doesn’t see as people. I think a lot of it’s down to misinformation. But drag storytime is all about education. It’s reading books and singing songs and learning and teaching. So if we’re able to educate some people who don’t understand, then we’ve done something right.

—As told to Caitlin Walsh Miller

The post Far-right religious groups protest my drag storytime events. Here’s why I won’t stop. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

A journey from downtown St. John’s to the Flemish Pass will take a traveller nearly 500 kilometres into the North Atlantic—one-sixth of the way to the shores of Ireland. Along the way they’ll pass through ruthless storms, towering waves and the paths of massive icebergs drifting from the Arctic Circle. Plunge below the surface, however, and there’s a bounty to be found. 

The Pass is a deep basin carved into the ocean floor, under which lies at least 500 million barrels of recoverable oil, first discovered in 2013 by the Norwegian oil and gas firm Equinor. Today, the company plans to open this inhospitable seascape to the most ambitious offshore-oil undertaking in Canadian history. 

In the expedition-heavy language of the oil industry, Equinor has dubbed the Flemish Pass a “new frontier” in deepwater oil, farther to sea than any prior offshore project in Canada. Workers will live and work here on a platform floating above open-ocean waves, above a production area spanning nearly 5,000 square kilometres. They’ll extract oil from wells more than a kilometre below the water’s surface. The $16-billion project, to be called Bay du Nord, will be majority-owned by Equinor, with BP holding a smaller stake. It comes loaded with superlatives: deepest, farthest and, as Equinor is keen to claim, cleanest. The company estimates that extracting a barrel’s worth of oil from Bay du Nord will produce eight kilograms of carbon dioxide. That’s far less than the bitumen produced in Alberta’s oilsands, some of which comes with a per-barrel footprint of more than 100 kilograms, thanks to the energy-intensive extraction and refining it requires. 

Bay du Nord’s reservoirs of light crude are also part of a development tradition older than Canada itself, one the country was built on: step far into nature, fell this timber, fish these waters, extract this oil and there will be prosperity. There are few places in Canada where that economic dependence on the natural world is still as starkly pronounced as in Newfoundland. Largely rural, surrounded on all sides by the sea, this is a place where many of the mainstays of 21st-century economies have been slow to take root. The only real flash of wealth in Newfoundland’s modern history was the brief, oil-fuelled boom of the late 2000s. That’s why, in a world increasingly moving toward decarbonization, Newfoundland is beating an opposite path. In 2018, the province pledged to double oil production within a decade. Two years later, after a rally in support of the oil industry in St. John’s, Premier Andrew Furey bluntly told reporters, “There is no future here without it.”

For Bay du Nord’s opponents, including environmental activists and Indigenous communities who’ve spent years fighting the project, the future is exactly the point. Ian Miron is a lawyer with the environmental group Ecojustice, which has lobbied against Bay du Nord. “Our federal government says that it understands climate science,” he says. “So it should understand that Canada can’t be a climate leader and approve fossil-fuel infrastructure projects like this one.” 

That’s to say nothing of the more localized hazards. In lockstep with Equinor’s language of frontiers and discovery is a language of danger: of unpredictable conditions at sea, chemical waste, spills, leaks and blowouts. The history of Newfoundland’s offshore is littered with accidents, tragedies and disasters. As recently as 2018, Husky Energy’s SeaRose project spilled 250,000 litres of oil into the Atlantic—the largest such incident in the province’s history.

For most Newfoundlanders, however, the environmental risks and threats to life and limb pale in comparison to other risks: of poverty, crumbling infrastructure, outmigration. To them, Bay du Nord represents a promise—that this is a place where the good life is still possible.

***

It was the good life that drew Amanda Young offshore. Young, who’s 40, grew up in Corner Brook, in western Newfoundland, where her father was a fisher and lobsterman. During her childhood, in the 1980s, Newfoundland had yet to produce a drop of commercially viable oil. Instead, companies from Canada and abroad, including Mobil, Chevron, Husky and Petro-Canada, were jockeying to drill exploration wells, especially in the basins of the eastern Grand Banks, the vast chain of underwater plateaus known for centuries as one of the planet’s richest fishing grounds.

The province’s economy was stable but sluggish, with unemployment rates that hovered above 15 per cent, around double the numbers nationwide. The province’s economic identity was still rooted in the fishery that had sustained it for centuries—until 1992, when Young was nine. That year, the federal government imposed a moratorium on the province’s cod fishery, to preserve fish stocks that had become dangerously depleted thanks to a variety of factors: bigger and faster fishing vessels, new technologies that allowed more fish to be caught at once, and an influx of international fishing off the Grand Banks. The moratorium created a sharp dividing line in Newfoundland’s modern history. It put more than 30,000 people out of work, ended a way of life rooted in five centuries of history and rendered centuries-old communities economically obsolete. 

In the next decade, the province experienced a net loss of nearly 60,000 people to other provinces—more than 10 per cent of the total population, which was then fewer than 600,000 people. Young’s father was nearly one of them. He even bought a plane ticket to Alberta, before getting hired at the last minute onto a boat fishing for herring and mackerel.

But even as the province wrestled with the economic disaster unfolding on land, something else was happening offshore. In 1997, the first commercial oil trickled in from the Hibernia fields on the Grand Banks, where Chevron had discovered promising deposits in the ’70s. The trickle soon became a torrent. In 2002, the province produced, for the first time, more than 100 million barrels in a single year. As global crude prices soared from barely $20 a barrel in 1998 to more than $120 in 2008, oil royalties helped wean the province off the equalization payments—federal transfers intended to reduce fiscal disparities between provinces—that had sustained it for years. In 2008, unemployment reached a 30-year low. For the first time since the ’70s, the province was growing, welcoming newcomers and its own expats, many returning home from Alberta’s oil fields.

St. John’s Harbour was busier than ever with drill ships and supply boats. High-end restaurants filled vacant storefronts downtown. The median house price in the province shot from under $100,000 in 2000 to nearly $300,000 a decade later, sparking big-city-style bidding wars. 

Around this time, Young returned from culinary school in Prince Edward Island. She spent the next few years working at a restaurant in St. John’s, making $14 an hour and sharing an apartment with four roommates. In her off-hours, she started researching nursing school—Newfoundland’s population, the oldest in Canada, made elder care a likely growth industry. But talk of oil soon drowned that out. One day at work, a colleague mentioned the money to be made offshore. Young investigated the qualifications she’d need: first aid, safety courses, helicopter safety training for journeys to and from rigs.

She knew working offshore had its risks. In 2009, she witnessed a co-worker’s grief after a family member was one of 18 people killed when a helicopter, en route to a production platform on the Grand Banks, malfunctioned and plunged into the ocean. Still, in 2012 she walked into the offices of the catering company that contracted to oil companies and said she was a chef, ready to work. She was offshore two days later.

Amanda Young is a cook on the Terra Nova offshore platform. For her, Bay du Nord represents a future for an industry that’s given her economic independence

Young worked on the Terra Nova and SeaRose platforms on three-week rotations. She cooked and baked, and the relationships she formed with colleagues were nearly familial. She spent more time with them than with many family and friends, day in and day out. 

And she was flabbergasted by the money. “It changed my life, drastically,” she says. She got her own apartment, paid off her student loans and then bought her own house in St. John’s, without a partner or family help. “The offshore provided me a great sense of independence.”

In a province that’s faced chronic underdevelopment, where the trappings and comforts of modern consumer life have been harder to come by than almost anywhere else in Canada, oil has changed lives. Robert Greenwood is director of the Leslie Harris Centre of Regional Policy and Development at Memorial University, which researches economic and social policy in Newfoundland. “Based on what people want, oil has been an unmitigated benefit for Newfoundlanders,” he says.

Greenwood can speak to that from personal experience. In the 1970s and ’80s—years before the offshore was producing commercial oil, when oil companies were still drilling exploratory wells—he worked on rigs to support his mother after his parents divorced. In 1982, Greenwood was on the Ocean Ranger, a platform on the Grand Banks owned by Texas-based Mobil Oil. That February, he was sent to Texas for training. On the way to the St. John’s airport, his taxi driver said something about a rig in trouble. When the plane landed in Houston, another passenger, also an oil worker, called home on a payphone. He hung up, called Greenwood over and broke the news: caught in a cyclone, the rig had been battered by 110-foot waves and 100-knot winds. All 84 crew members died in the sinking or after their lifeboats capsized in the frigid North Atlantic. In the heat and humidity of the Texan airport, the news of their deaths felt almost unreal. After his training, Greenwood went to New Orleans and drank for three days. Then he went home, and soon was offshore again.

“You do what you’ve got to do,” he says. “I went back to the platforms because I needed the money. Oil has been an inextricable part of my life.”

To environmental activist Kerri Neil, expanding the oil industry is both a failure to confront the reality of climate change and a refusal to reckon with an economic transition the province must make regardless

***

In 2014, an oversupply of oil on world markets sent prices plummeting. Canada’s energy sector was in crisis, and investment in both Alberta’s oilsands and Newfoundland’s offshore slowed dramatically. The following year, Newfoundland’s population hit a 21st-century peak of 528,000—then began to drift downward again. Again, the spectre of outmigration hovered like a dark cloud over the province.

Conor Curtis was born in 1992, the year the cod moratorium was implemented. He grew up in Corner Brook, Newfoundland’s second-largest city, with a population of 20,000 people, and saw the moratorium’s impact throughout his childhood. Today, as head of communications with Sierra Club Canada, he’s an adamant opponent of Bay du Nord on environmental grounds—but he understands why that feeling isn’t commonly shared in his home province. “The trauma of something like the moratorium, it continues on in communities, across generations,” he says. “It’s a feeling that things could fall out from under your feet at any moment.” 

The oil boom rescued many from that feeling, only to plunge them back into it when it came crashing down. But even today, in its diminished state, the industry remains a behemoth. In 2021, it accounted for nearly one-third of Newfoundland’s GDP, more than four times as much as real estate and health care, the next largest industries. It employs 3,000 people directly and 20,000 indirectly. And it is, in Greenwood’s words, “the crack cocaine” of government revenue. 

In 2012, when Amanda Young first ventured offshore, oil royalties accounted for nearly 40 per cent of the province’s $8.6-billion revenues. By last year, in which the province posted a $400-million deficit, oil accounted for a still-considerable 10 per cent. To cut oil out of the provincial budget, says Greenwood, is a non-starter: “It’s like, what part of the children’s hospital would you like to close?”

Then came Bay du Nord. In 2018, the province announced plans to develop the reserves that Equinor and its then-partner, Husky Oil, first found in 2013. Expectations were big: the provincial government estimated the project would create more than $14 billion in economic activity, ensure 22 million work hours and provide $3.5 billion in government revenues. That, in turn, would set Newfoundland apart as what the provincial government calls a “deepwater centre of excellence,” thanks to the sophisticated engineering and technical requirements of the project.

Equinor has a long history with dangerous, difficult offshore conditions. It was formed in 2007 from the merger of Norway’s state-owned Statoil and the oil and gas division of energy company Norsk Hydro. Statoil helped open Norway to exploration in the ’70s, where severe and unpredictable weather posed many of the same challenges found in the Flemish Pass. 

Should Bay du Nord go forward, some of its roughly 40 wells will be drilled to 1,170 metres below the waves—almost 10 times the depth of the province’s second-deepest project, the SeaRose, which sits at a comparatively shallow 120 metres over the Grand Banks, west of Bay du Nord. Drilling into the seabed will require workers to connect steel pipes, each about 30 feet long and weighing 600 pounds, into a column known as a “drill string,” descending all the way to the ocean floor. At the bottom, a boring device will cut into the seabed, pushing deeper as the string grows. On the ocean floor will be a “blowout preventer,” a series of clamps that closes the pipe to prevent explosions of oil that can occur when pressure builds too high.

Bay du Nord is part of a tradition older than Canada itself, one the country was built on: step far into nature, fell this timber, fish these waters, extract this oil and there will be prosperity 

A blowout is only one of the environmental hazards at play with a project as large and remote as Bay du Nord—there are also risks of leaks, disturbances to underwater ecosystems and collisions between supply ships and marine life. In 2019, Equinor submitted its environmental impact study to the federal government, outlining those potential risks and mishaps, along with its plans to prevent them and deal with spills or other problems should they occur. Two years passed as analysts with the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada parsed Equinor’s submission, returning to the company to ask for new information and amendments. In July of 2020, Equinor submitted a revised, 434-page report. It concluded neatly: routine operations will be unlikely to result in adverse environmental impacts. The federal government’s decision—to approve or not—was expected that same year.

The province and trade unions lobbied government hard for approval, waging a PR campaign to win over Ottawa. For them, Newfoundland’s very future hinged on a green light. There was risk in a long delay—that investors could get cold feet and think Canada’s regulatory atmosphere inhospitable, leaving the development unviable even if it was approved.

In September of 2020, with the Impact Assessment Agency still deliberating, Bay du Nord proponents organized a rally in support of the oil industry on the steps of St. John’s Confederation Building. Dave Mercer, then-president of Unifor chapter 2121, gave a speech to the hundreds-strong crowd about his time working on the Hibernia rig. Mercer is a material controller, who assists in loading and unloading materials on production platforms. He spoke not only about Bay du Nord, but about the oil bust and pandemic stresses that had cost thousands of jobs in Newfoundland since 2015. He listed offshore projects that had experienced layoffs: Hibernia, Terra Nova, SeaRose, Hebron. In the preceding five years, more than 6,000 oil-industry employees lost their jobs. “The financial burden is overwhelming for so many,” he said. “House payments, car payments, childcare, after-school activities, college, university, are now on hold.”

Amanda Young spoke next. “We’re asking our government for a hand up, to work with us, listen to us,” she said. “Sit down with the companies and negotiate a deal. Most importantly, figure out a solution that keeps the people of Newfoundland and Labrador working in this province.”

Privately, Young had grown pessimistic. She had been laid off from Terra Nova and didn’t know when or if she would be going back to work. She had opened her nursing school application again, and thought she might have to sell her house and start again in a new career—then with a partner and two stepchildren—right as she was about to turn 40. It was a terrifying prospect.

As the federal government deliberated, the context around the project, and Canada’s oil and gas future, kept shifting. In the fall of 2020, oil prices began rallying from the steep drop at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, improving the economic outlook for the industry. At the same time, talk of more rapid transitions away from fossil fuels entered the mainstream. In May 2021, the International Energy Agency—the Paris-based advisory organization that produces forecasts and reports relied on by the global energy industry—issued a special report stating that developing new oil and gas deposits was incompatible with keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, as advocated by the Paris Agreement, to which Canada is a signatory. “If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now, from this year,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol told media.

The report sparked new debate about the future of Canada’s oil and gas assets. “It’s always been bizarre logic to me, the idea that because Newfoundland is so dependent on oil and gas, it should take the longest to transition,” says Conor Curtis. It’s exactly those economies and communities most dependent, he says, that should be moving faster than everyone else to change.

***

Meanwhile, the federal government’s decision kept getting pushed—first to December of 2021, and then again to March of 2022. Final approval for Bay du Nord lay, ultimately, with Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault, once nicknamed the “Green Jesus of Montreal” for his uncompromising environmental activism. In 1993, in his early 20s, he co-founded environment and agriculture non-profit Équiterre. He later joined Greenpeace, heading its climate change division. In 2001, he climbed 340 metres up steel maintenance cables hanging from the CN Tower to hang a banner reading “Canada and Bush climate killers.” His appointment in 2021 as environment minister was poorly received by many in the energy sector—as well as by politicians who had appointed themselves the industry’s defenders. “His own personal background and track record on these issues suggest somebody who is more of an absolutist than a pragmatist,” said Jason Kenney, then premier of Alberta. “I hope I’m wrong about that.”

As it turns out, he was. When Guilbeault took office, his official biography dubbed him “a pragmatist who works to make a difference by building bridges”—quite a pivot from his days as an environmental radical. Still, given his history, opponents of Bay du Nord hoped he would make a stand and reject the project, regardless of the Impact Assessment Agency’s recommendation. Guilbeault has the power to exercise what is known as ministerial discretion, to overturn any recommendation if he desires, even if it contravenes broader consensus.

That hope was bolstered in January of 2022, two months before the decision was due, when the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat—a group of federal scientists who provide advice and peer review to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, or DFO—released its own independent review of Equinor’s environmental submission to the federal government. Its takeaways were damning.

The report outlined what it characterized as omissions and mischaracterizations in Equinor’s submission. It said the company had downplayed the potential for ship strikes with marine animals. It said the possibility of an “extremely large spill” was 16 per cent over the project’s lifetime, despite Equinor’s impact statement referring to it as “extremely unlikely.” It oversimplified the effects of a blowout, failing to heed the lessons of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010 that killed 11 workers and spilled 134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Spawning grounds for capelin, an important Newfoundland fish species, would be threatened, which would have knock-on effects on endangered species including American plaice and killer whales, which feed on them. A blowout could lead to slicks of oil spreading across sensitive areas of coral and sponges and damage shrimp and cod habitats.

The review ultimately concluded that Equinor’s submission wasn’t a credible source of information. Though the report for the DFO was responding to Equinor’s 2019 environmental impact statement, not the revised 2020 version, Curtis and other critics say Equinor’s revisions still didn’t come close to addressing the concerns outlined.

Montreal-based environmental lawyer Shelley Kath—who did consulting work with Steven Guilbeault in his Équiterre days—was commissioned last year by an environmental organization called stand.earth to analyze the report’s findings. She concluded that Equinor’s revised impact statement, used as the basis for the federal approval, failed to address many of the DFO scientists’ critiques. It continued to underestimate the potential for ship strikes with marine mammals (like whales), mischaracterized the effects of oil spills on marine life and, perhaps most significantly, downplayed the potential for a major oil spill. Equinor’s final revised impact statement continued to refer to a large spill as “extremely unlikely,” despite that 16 per cent likelihood.

“That just on its face gives one a queasy feeling,” says Kath. “A sense of the proponent not taking the criticisms seriously.” Kath points out that a spill in the Flemish Pass, in the inner branch of the Labrador Current, could rapidly spread oil southward through waters rich with marine life.

In March of 2022, more than 200 environmental groups across Canada and worldwide jointly called on Guilbeault to reject the project. That same month, Sierra Club Canada held a media briefing on Bay du Nord. “The world is changing, and climate change is already here,” said Amy Norman, an Inuk environmental activist from Labrador, during the event. “Already we’re seeing impacts here in Labrador and in Newfoundland. Unreliable sea ice, warming temperatures, more frequent storms, unpredictable weather. It’s already impacting our ways of life, and it’s already changing how we live on these lands.”

That reality was thrown into relief last fall, when Hurricane Fiona hit Atlantic Canada. The storm caused more than $800 million in damage, washing away buildings and killing a woman from the town of Port aux Basques, who was swept out to sea along with the contents of her home. The damage, of course, was to be repaired with money from the same provincial coffers to which Bay du Nord is to contribute.

On April 6, the decision finally came down: a green light. Guilbeault declined interview requests for this piece, but in a press release, he implied that this project would be different, held to a laundry list of 137 binding conditions—the strongest ever, he claimed. The government touted its relative greenness, which went beyond its low per-barrel emissions. As a condition of approval, the project will have to achieve net-zero status by 2050, meaning that all of the planet-warming greenhouse gases produced in its operations will have to be offset or captured by carbon-capture technology. On the same day Bay du Nord was approved, the federal government announced that every future fossil-fuel project approved in Canada will also need to achieve net-zero emissions. That makes Bay du Nord not just the next big thing for Newfoundland and Labrador, but a turning point for Canada’s fossil-fuel business—an attempt to position it as a sustainable industry fit for a greening world. 

To the project’s opponents, that’s a very, very small victory. The emissions to be offset are what are called upstream emissions, produced during the extraction process itself. But the vast majority of a barrel’s carbon footprint comes from downstream emissions, when the oil is burned in a car or a power plant. Those emissions don’t count against the net-zero designation.

“There’s a patriotism wrapped up in oil and gas,” says environmental activist Kerri Neil. “The idea that if you don’t support it, then you don’t support Newfoundland.”

A month after approval, the group Ecojustice, on behalf of Équiterre and Sierra Club Canada, filed a lawsuit against the federal government, arguing it had failed to consider how downstream emissions will contribute to Bay du Nord’s environmental impact. If it had, the suit alleges, the project would contravene Canada’s international obligations to fight climate change. Eight Atlantic Canadian Mi’kmaw communities later joined the suit.

“It’s great to reduce emissions,” says Sierra Club’s Conor Curtis, “but reducing upstream doesn’t do much. Basically, it means we’re not talking about a net-zero project.” Instead, he suggests, the stringent conditions on Bay du Nord are an attempt to reconcile Canada’s self-image as an environmental leader with its economic interest in a project that will pump hundreds of millions of barrels’ worth of oil into the atmosphere. It’s “an act of extreme climate hypocrisy,” he says.

Of course the same could be said of any oil and gas project. The argument made for Bay du Nord is about relative impact: oil and gas won’t disappear overnight, so steps in the right direction, like those 137 binding conditions placed on Equinor, are better than nothing at all. Ken McDonald, Liberal MP for Newfoundland’s Avalon riding, made clear the stakes of the federal decision last March, when speaking to the CBC about the project. “If this doesn’t go ahead,” he asked, “what does?”

***

Scott Penney is CEO of the Port of Argentia. “As a Newfoundlander,” he says, “when you talk about the impact of these industries, and changing the generational outlook, you get almost blurry-eyed.”

Last April, Scott Penney was filling up his truck near the town of Deer Lake, in western Newfoundland, on his way to his daughter’s volleyball tournament, when a social media ping on his phone alerted him that Bay du Nord was approved. As Penney stepped inside to buy snacks and pay for his fuel, he heard the manager and another customer already talking about the news, moments after it dropped.

Penney is CEO of the Port of Argentia, on the western side of the Avalon Peninsula in eastern Newfoundland, home to about half of the province’s population and the city of St. John’s. The port is part of a vast network of businesses that will benefit from Bay du Nord—Penney expects at least 1,000 jobs in construction, fabrication, transport, docking, security and even local hotels, which often let out blocks of rooms to workers coming off weeks-long shifts. The port will be a transit and construction hub for the project. “As a Newfoundlander,” says Penney, “when you talk about the impact of these industries, and changing the generational outlook, you get almost blurry-eyed.”

Work on Bay du Nord hasn’t started yet; the province is still negotiating the project’s benefits agreement with Equinor, including parameters around how much manufacturing and construction will take place in Newfoundland. But the industry has begun to pick up again.

Amanda Young recently shelved her nursing school application—though she was accepted—when work started again on the Terra Nova platform. She’s optimistic now there will be work for years to come on Bay du Nord. So are most Newfoundlanders. 

Bay du Nord’s opponents aren’t blind to this enthusiasm. They see it among friends and family, in their own communities. “There’s a patriotism wrapped up in oil and gas,” says Kerri Neil, co-chair of the Social Justice Co-operative of Newfoundland and Labrador, which has organized protests against the project. “There’s a perspective that if you don’t support it, then you don’t support Newfoundland.”

Robert Greenwood occupies a middle ground. He’d like to see oil revenues used to help transition the province to a new economic footing. “Our oil and gas is produced in an environment with safeguards for workers and environmental regulations,” he says. “Shouldn’t we continue to provide it? And use those crack-cocaine revenues to invest in hydrogen or wind power?”

This is roughly the perspective put forth in “The Big Reset,” a 2021 report commissioned by Newfoundland’s provincial government on the province’s economic future. “There are no short-term, realistic scenarios to replace petroleum royalty revenues necessary to provide public services,” it concluded. It advocated putting up to 50 per cent of oil revenues into a “future fund” to be used for debt repayment and the transition to a green economy. Last year, the province created a fund with that name, though it appears to be mostly intended to pay down debt. The legislation establishing it makes no mention of a green transition.

Today, the booms and busts of the past two decades are apparent everywhere in Newfoundland. Every time Kerri Neil drives from St. John’s to her home in Spaniard’s Bay, a small community about an hour out of the city, she sees the houses that started construction during boom years, later abandoned when their owners could no longer make mortgage payments. Newfoundland today has Canada’s second-highest consumer debt rate, and the third-highest debt delinquency rate.

There’s a cruel optimism surrounding any fossil-fuel project. Here’s one more chance for wealth—for a while. If the story of Bay du Nord is a patchwork of work and risk, it is threaded by the memory of loss. Young knows that the industry is not forever. But transitioning as quickly as Bay du Nord’s opponents hope, she feels, would be an impossible task. “We’d have to change our whole economy and how we think about living here.” For Curtis and Neil, that’s exactly the point.

Since Bay du Nord was approved, Scott Penney has noticed a change in his employees at the Port of Argentia. “There’s a pop in their step,” he says. “They know there’s work. A lot of times in the last number of years, there’s been this fear of when the shoe is going to drop.” Today, that question has an answer: not yet. 

This article appears in print in the March 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post Bay du Nord: The $16-billion oil project that could make or break Newfoundland appeared first on Macleans.ca.