“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. 

RELATED: I struggled as an international student. My YouTube channel helps others avoid the same fate

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. 

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

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.

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. 

READ: Why a housing-first model is the only way to solve the homelessness crisis

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.  

MORE: Canadian doctors say birth tourism is on the rise. It could hurt the health care system.

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 Pete Ryan)

Valérie Pisano is the president and CEO of Mila, a non-profit artificial intelligence research institute based in Montreal.

It used to be fairly easy to tell when a machine had a hand in creating something. Picture borders were visibly pixelated, the voice was slightly choppy or the whole thing just seemed robotic. OpenAI’s rollout of ChatGPT last fall pushed us past a point of no return: artificially intelligent tools had mastered human language. Within weeks, the chatbot amassed 100 million users and spawned competitors like Google’s Bard. All of a sudden, these applications are co-writing our emails, mimicking our speech and helping users create fake (but funny) photos. Soon, they will help Canadian workers in almost every sector summarize, organize and brainstorm. This tech doesn’t just allow people to communicate with each other, either. It communicates with us and, sometimes, better than us. Just as criminals counterfeit money, it’s now possible for generative AI tools to counterfeit people.

Mila, where I work, is a research institute that regularly convenes AI experts and specialists from different disciplines, particularly on the topic of governance. Even we didn’t expect this innovation to reach our everyday lives this quickly. At the moment, most countries don’t have any AI-focused regulations in place—no best practices for use and no clear penalties to prevent bad actors from using these tools to do harm. Lawmakers all over the world are scrambling. Earlier this year, ChatGPT was temporarily banned in Italy over privacy concerns. And China recently drafted regulations to mandate security assessments for any AI tool that generates text, images or code.

Here at home, scientists and corporate stakeholders have called for the federal government to expedite the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act, or AIDA, which was tabled by the Liberals in June of 2022. The Act, which is part of Bill C-27—a consumer privacy and data-protection law—includes guidelines for rollout of AI tools and fines for misuse. There’s just one problem: AIDA may not be in force until 2025. Legislation usually doesn’t move as fast as innovation. In this case, it needs to catch up quickly.

MORE: Ivan Zhang, Aidan Gomez & Nick Frosst are creating a smarter, friendlier chatbot

The European Union has taken the lead with its AI Act, the first AI-specific rules in the Western world, which it began drafting two years ago. Canada should consider adopting one of the EU’s key measures as soon as possible: that developers and companies must disclose when they use or promote content made by AI. Any photos produced using the text-to-image generator DALL-E 2 could come with watermarks, while audio files could come with a disclaimer from a chatbot—whatever makes it immediately clear to anyone seeing, hearing or otherwise engaging with the content that it was made with an assist from machines. As an example, a professor we work with at Mila lets his students use ChatGPT to compile literature reviews at the start of their papers—provided they make note of which parts are bot-generated. They’re also responsible for fact-checking the AI to make sure it didn’t cite any non-existent (or completely wacko) sources.

The EU’s AI Act includes a similar clause. Any company deploying generative AI tools like ChatGPT, in any capacity, will have to publish a summary of the copyrighted data used to train it. Say you’re using a bank’s financial planning service: in a properly labelled world, its bot would say, “I’ve looked at these specific sources. Based on that information, my program suggests three courses of action…” In the creative sector, artists have already filed copyright lawsuits alleging that their images have been lifted by bots. With mandatory labelling, it would be easier to run a check on what “inspired” those creations.

One of the main dangers of ChatGPT specifically is that it says incorrect things in such an authoritative way that it confuses us into thinking it’s smarter than it is. (A tweet from Sam Altman, OpenAI’s own CEO: “fun creative inspiration; great! reliance for factual queries; not such a good idea.”) The tool was trained on a massive body of information including books, articles and Wikipedia, and recent upgrades have allowed it to access the internet. That gives it the impression of having a kind of super-intelligence. And though the program generates its responses almost instantly, it blurts them out one sentence at a time, with a human-like cadence. Even people with highly developed intuition could be fooled; ChatGPT is designed to make us trust it.

What it’s not designed to do is find correct answers. ChatGPT isn’t a search engine, whose algorithms prioritize more credible websites. It’s common to ask generative AI questions and have it spit out errors or “hallucinations”—the tech term for the AI’s confidently delivered mistakes. On a recent 60 Minutes episode, James Manyika, a senior executive at Google, asked Bard to recommend books about inflation. Not one of its suggestions exists. If you type in “Valérie Pisano, AI, Montreal,” ChatGPT won’t offer a summary of my real bio, but an invented one. It’s already so easy to create fake news. Generative AI tools will be able to supply infinite amounts of disinformation.

RELATED: My students are using ChatGPT to write papers and answer exam questions—and I support it

In the absence of any meaningful guardrails, we’re having to rely on the judgment and good faith of regular internet users and businesses. This isn’t enough. Canada can’t leave oversight of this technology exclusively to the companies that are building it, which is essentially what happened with social media platforms like Facebook. (I’m no historian, but I recall that having some negative impacts on fair elections.) At some point, governments will either need to make it legal or illegal to pass off AI-generated content as human-created—at both the national and international levels.

We’ll also need to agree on penalties. Not every misapplication of generative AI carries the same level of risk. Using the art generator Midjourney to make a fake picture of Pope Francis in a puffy winter coat isn’t really a threat to anyone. That could easily be managed by a simple in-platform “report” button on Instagram. In areas like journalism and politics, however, using AI to mislead could be disastrous.

Labels also force a certain amount of AI literacy on the average person. We’re past the point of being able to say, “But I’m not a tech-y person!” Going forward, all internet users are going to be encountering AI on a daily basis, not just reading articles about it. It will inevitably change how everyone creates, competes, works, learns, governs, cheats and chats. Seeing (or hearing) a “machine-made” disclaimer presents us with the opportunity to choose how we allow its output to permeate our personal lives.

Of all the new tools, chatbots seem to have impressed the scientific community the most—specifically, because of how human they feel. (I actually find it difficult not to say “please” and “thank you” when I’m interacting with them, even though I know a bot won’t judge my manners.) So it’s easy to imagine using generative AI for tasks that are more emotional. But while I might ask Google Chrome’s new Compose AI extension to “write email requesting refund” to my airline, I probably wouldn’t use it to pen notes to my close friends. I can also see the upsides of Snapchat’s new My AI bot, which now greets millions of teens with a friendly “Hi, what’s up?” while understanding that a machine will never replace the deeper kind of support we need to grieve a difficult loss. Some things might be better left to humans. I guess we’ll see.

The post How can we tell whether content is made by AI or a human? Label it. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photography by Claudine Baltazar)

In 1975, at the age of 21, I moved from California to North York. My parents had grown up in Toronto and wanted me to experience the city too. I took some advertising and business courses at Seneca College, but never graduated with a degree or diploma. I had a few jobs over the years, mostly in sales: I worked in cosmetic sales at the Bay, wrote call scripts for telemarketing companies and did fundraising for not-for-profits. I never made a lot of money—my savings always hovered around $2,000. 

The cost of living was much cheaper back then so I never had to worry about finding affordable food or housing. My first apartment, in 1990, was a one-bedroom in North York that I rented for just $300 a month. My next place, in 1993, was a $700 two-bedroom that I shared with a friend. On the weekends, I took out a $20 bill from the ATM, which covered both groceries and entertainment. I could buy bread, cheese, bologna slices and pasta all for $10, with a lot left over to hang out at the local bar. 

In 2009, at the age of 55, I moved into a rent-controlled condo in North York, at Marlee and Eglinton. The rent was $900 a month, and I split the cost with my partner, who is an independent filmmaker. We were lucky to find such an affordable living situation—market rent at the time was $1,100. I was working in sales for a vitamin company, earning minimum wage and bringing home $400 a week; my partner was earning about $1,000 a month. 

MORE: The Food Diaries: The cost of getting by in Vancouver

At 58, I was diagnosed with osteoporosis, high blood pressure and a thyroid condition. My doctor told me to think about slowing down and I retired in 2012. I didn’t have much money to fall back on, with no savings and only $3,000 in my chequing account, but I figured I could pick up some part-time work if I needed to. I looked for office jobs—telemarketing, customer service, filing—but I couldn’t find anything. So, I went on welfare for about six years, bringing in around $345 a month. Nowadays, at 69, I receive $1,700 a month from government assistance, $232 from the Canada pension and $1,500 from old-age security. My partner, brings in about $1,200 a month. We still can’t afford to buy food. 

I live right across from an Urban Fresh, but it’s too expensive for me. Instead, once a month, I go to No Frills or FreshCo, which are relatively cheap. I buy vegetables to make a big salad—lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, red peppers. That lasts me about a week. That’s what I usually eat, because I can’t afford to buy other groceries. Sometimes I’ll splurge and buy almond milk (it helps wth my osteoporosis), pita bread and cheese slices, or fresh fruit, like apples and strawberries, if they’re on sale. It all costs about $60—the maximum we can afford to spend on groceries. The rest of our income covers our phone and internet bills and the fare for public transit, which we use to travel to community food programs and food banks around the city. 

We go to food programs about six times a week—in North York at a food truck run by Ve’ahavta, a Jewish non-profit; in midtown at St. Clement’s Church; and downtown at Toronto Lawyers Feed the Hungry. They serve lasagna, salads, rice, meatballs and tuna sandwiches—meals that I can’t afford to make at home. From the North York Harvest food bank, where we go twice a month, I can get Campbell’s soup, zucchini, Kraft macaroni and eggs, which I wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise. If I didn’t have access to these programs, I would starve. But I worry whether I’m getting all the nutrients I need, especially with my osteoporosis.

We spend our free time talking to the people we meet at these food programs. It’s nice to stay connected to our community and socialize with others. At the same time, it’s frustrating to realize that I’ve worked hard my whole life and still can’t afford to buy food. 

RELATED: The Food Diaries: Groceries on a budget in Edmonton

We don’t have much housing security either. Our rent has risen to $1,100 a month, which my partner and I split. Our landlord is in his 70s. He could sell our unit at any moment—there’s no protection or guarantees. I’m only 69, mobile and otherwise healthy. But what will happen as I get older and need care? This month, I only have $1,500 in my savings account—and I haven’t even paid my rent. If we want to treat ourselves, we’ll go to Tim Hortons and get a doughnut. There are no fancy dinners or trips. I try to stay positive amid everything. I volunteer with community programs that help students and new immigrants. I make collage art. I write stories about my life. 

Food banks aren’t the answer—the government needs to do more to help feed people. We need affordable supermarkets with affordable groceries, where people pay what they can. There should be more affordable land, where people can grow their own food gardens, as a way to save money and become self-sustainable. You shouldn’t have to choose between paying rent and eating dinner, but with rising rental costs and unaffordable food pricing, that’s the choice we face. 

—As told to Mathew Silver 

The post I’ve worked hard my whole life and I can’t afford food 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.

RELATED: I felt at home in Vancouver. Seeing the water and mountains reminded me of Kathmandu.

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. 

MORE: People are planning their dream vacations—for whenever it’s finally safe

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.

RELATED: Why we need to embrace the future of farm tech

(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.

RELATED: Our farm’s rescue animals have become TikTok stars

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

The post I’m a third-generation farmer. This industry needs more skilled labour to survive. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“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.

MORE: I escaped Mexico’s cartels. Fourteen years later, the only work I can find is as a janitor.

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.

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

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.

Buy the latest issue of Maclean’s magazine for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

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

(Photography by Erin Leydon)

Jay Baruchel is everywhere: in slashers, sex farces and sports movies; opposite mythical lizards in Disney’s How to Train Your Dragon franchise; and he’s worked with directors as varied as David Cronenberg, Judd Apatow and even himself. If you’re wondering how an Ottawa-born, Montreal-raised kid with a Gumby body and a voice like a twisted balloon has been working steadily since 1995 (he’s now 40 and busier than ever), the answer is simple: Jay Baruchel loves movies—loves them.

Baruchel loved his BlackBerry, too. He hung on to it until 2019. It makes sense, then, that his next movie is, well, BlackBerry. The film, out this month, chronicles the rise and fall of Research in Motion, the Waterloo moonshot whose founders had the zany idea to merge computers with cellphones. Baruchel plays Mike Lazaridis, the engineering student turned RIM co-founder who watched his dreams get gobbled up by the iPhone, but not before they made him a billionaire. Playing the more level-headed partner gives Baruchel a chance to showcase his dramatic chops. It also demonstrates why, unlike the now-obsolete gadget, his success continues.

It’s rare for someone who’s made it in Hollywood to be as proudly Canadian as you.

It’s a function of Canadianness to second guess ourselves, but I was raised to believe this is the best country in the world, warts and all. Part of it is that my maternal granddad was a career soldier, and I have cousins and uncles who are, too. I hope that, one day, it’s not so rare for Canadians who love movies to make them here.

What interested you most about the BlackBerry story?

It’s a definitively Canadian story, something we can claim. It’s also a road map to how we got to this—let’s be honest—loathsome modern world we live in. It’s Canadian in another way, too, in that a lot of people don’t realize BlackBerry is Canadian.

Have you heard from any of the real-life RIM figures?

Not yet, even though we shot in Waterloo, where it all happened. I’m interested to see what those guys think—RIM’s co-CEO Jim Balsillie in particular, given his temperament.

. . . which, in the film, is fractious. Yours, however, is collaborative. You act, write screenplays and direct. When did you first have artistic ambitions?

I don’t remember not having them. My first word was a sentence, a slogan from a 1982 commercial: “Come on, Canada! Meet you at the Bay!” When I was seven, my mom filmed me saying, “I want to write stories that scare Stephen King out of his underwear.” At nine, I realized: No, I want to make movies. So, from 1991 on, that’s been my defining ambition. That, and being as good a person as I can be.

Were your parents artistic?

They were huge movie and TV nerds. We didn’t have a ton of money, so we didn’t go to the cinema a lot. But every weekend, my dad would rent two movies. If they were still in the VCR the next morning, I was allowed to watch them. If they were back in the case, my parents had deemed them too racy. And when I watched something with them, it was Film 101. They paused Monty Python and the Holy Grail 100 times to explain to me why what had just happened was funny.

I read somewhere that your father worked as an antiques dealer.

Antiques dealer, hah! That’s the simplest way to describe him. In the 1970s, he was a drug dealer who went to prison. When he got out, he sold antiques as his legit, going-straight job.

Whoa. Was he a drug dealer before or after you were born?

They overlapped.

How did that affect you?

In a profound way. Dad was a hard dude. He lived to get into fist fights, and he always had a buzz on. Most people had no idea. I can’t say, “I am this specific way because of that.” I just know you take that shit with you.

Did that feel scary?

The opposite: safe as hell. It was only after my parents divorced—and Dad was out of the house—that I felt fear for the first time. When I hit 14 or 15, he became a source of embarrassment. But now, I’m super-proud that I have some of Dad in me. If you have the gawky mannerisms I do—and if, like me, you’re a keener who’s always polite—people mistake those things for weakness. I channel my dad in those moments.

Which moments?

Every audition, and every time someone tried to muscle me. My father would’ve burned the whole city down before he let anybody fuck with me.

You’ve played your share of awkward sidekicks, as in Almost Famous and Knocked Up. How did you avoid being pigeonholed?

I’m reverent of the craft, but I’d be lying if I said I think about acting all the time. I think about stories I want to tell, and scenes I want to direct.

Did directing feel like you thought it would?

I was more assured than I thought I would be. As an actor, I’ve suffered far too many directors who were mushing through fog. I never wanted anyone on my set to not know what the hell we were doing.

What’s your director superpower?

I have a vibe: I want filming to feel as close to a backyard game of cops and robbers as possible—like when you were a kid, making up stories with your friends, fully committed. Filmmaking is the greatest job in the world; it should never feel miserable. You know your favourite movie moments? We’re in the business of creating them. What a cool thing.

Clint Eastwood directed you (playing a wannabe boxer) in Million Dollar Baby. What was that like?

I was scared shitless. Eastwood is the only guy I’ve worked with who my granddad would have been remotely impressed by. At that time, I had a masochistic approach to acting. I had to suffer to be good. I’d ask Clint after every take, “Was that all right?” and he’d say, “It was fine.” In my head, I’d hear, “He hates me!”

Well, did he?

Morgan Freeman saw me freaking out and said, “If he doesn’t say anything, it means he likes it.” I can’t overstate what an epiphany that was. As an actor, you’re always trying to get quote-unquote there. Well, there doesn’t actually exist. From that point on, I could show up on set and not torture myself.

Who else taught you something important?

Cameron Crowe on the set of Almost Famous, the first movie I made in the States. He took time out of his day to play frisbee with me in the parking lot. I was an awkward grade 11 kid from Montreal, and he’d talk to me about Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock. Now, he’s like an uncle I hear from every year or two. 

Let’s talk about screenwriting. Does that come easily to you?

I’m spoiled because the first thing I got paid to write—Goon—was a thing everyone loved. It just flowed. Evan Goldberg and I came up with the initial idea in about 10 minutes, on a phone call. I wrote the first pass in two weeks. And it was number one in English Canada, nominated for awards. So, in that one case, screenwriting felt exactly how I hoped it would.

We know from Goon that you’re a hockey fanatic. Tell me everything you love about it in one minute.

It’s the most beautiful and most brutal game in the world. You’ve got huge guys moving at very high speeds, yet it all comes down to millimetre shifts in the wrist. And the gap between observation, decision and execution is a second. It’s like watching a comic book come to life.

Alright, you’ve earned another minute.

I’m going to get super hokey: it’s ours. Hockey is one area where Canadians are sure-footed and definitively proud of who we are. We know this is our gift to the world. It’s an art form we’ve created and exported across the world. We’re so scared of becoming anything close to American in terms of ambition or lauding ourselves—except in hockey.

You also host Highly Legal (a podcast about marijuana) and We’re All Gonna Die, (Even Jay Baruchel), a docuseries about existential threats like climate change. Are these projects opportunities to expand your reach?

I’m in my Michael Palin travel-doc era. If, because I swore a bunch in Goon, or had a semen stain on my pants in She’s Out of My League, I can drive audiences toward stuff I care about, that’s a cool thing.

So legalized marijuana is a subject that’s dear to your heart?

Whatever gave you that impression? Yes. I’m normally a rule follower. In my younger days, I found myself consorting with characters I’d never have had anything to do with if I didn’t have to buy weed from them. So, when the clock struck 12:01 on October 17, 2018, I went onto the Ontario Cannabis Store’s website. By 12:02, I was checking out.

Let’s finish with a big question. What have you learned about people or yourself from all those films?

Not much is sacred in the 21st century. Sincere love between people—romantic, familial, platonic—is one sacred thing. The only other, in my heart of hearts, is the relationship between artist and audience. All I want is to fall head over heels in love with the book I’m reading, the movie I’m watching or the song I’m listening to. I want to think I’ve learned everything I can, then have something blow my head wide open. If I can create half of that experience for someone else, that’s a life worth living. I don’t hate-watch or hate-read. What a silly waste of time.

The post Q&A: BlackBerry’s Jay Baruchel loves movies, weed and his now-obsolete phone 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.

MORE: I escaped Mexico’s cartels. Fourteen years later, the only work I can find is as a janitor.

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.

RELATED: When I moved to Canada from Syria, I could finally be myself

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.

“I’d love it if these bubbles started popping up across the country, in drag capitals like Toronto and in small towns alike. I’d love it even more if we didn’t need to use them.” (Illustration by Pete Ryan)

Kristyn Wong-Tam is a member of provincial parliament and the critic on 2SLGBTQ+ issues for the Ontario New Democratic Party.

I don’t do heels very well. I never have. I came out when I was a teenager, and my introduction to the world of drag largely happened in nightclubs and at parties in downtown Toronto. There I was, an awkward kid with limited life experience, watching queens like Michelle Ross entertain their admirers at Komrads dance club, strutting like Amazons across a shining floor to the tunes of Donna Summer. One of my most powerful drag memories is of watching RuPaul perform at the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in 1993. I was in a 10-person lineup for the porta-potty when the early beats of “Supermodel (You Better Work)” came on; everyone deserted the queue to watch Ru own the stage in her wig, American flag–inspired bodysuit and sky-high boots. Back on earth—and in runners—I was giddy.

LGBTQ+ rights have come a long way since then. (RuPaul’s Drag Race just finished its 15th season.) But certain folks want us to go back to the Dark Ages. In recent years, trans and non-binary individuals—who make up a tiny fraction of the population—have found themselves the targets of a ramped-up global disinformation campaign by conservative religious fundamentalists to sway public opinion toward hatred. Not all drag artists are trans, but their joyful, gender-blurring acts have nonetheless become a wedge issue, and the performers themselves have been wrongly vilified as “groomers.”

Canadians sometimes like to think of ourselves as different from our American neighbours, but the anti-trans sentiment flying around state senates has germinated here all on its own. Between 2020 and 2021, Statistics Canada documented a 64 per cent increase in reported hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community—and those are just the ones we know about. Attacks on drag performers and events have also swept the country: a Calgary drag-on-ice event scheduled for February was shut down over safety concerns. Drag storytimes in Peterborough, Ontario, and Coquitlam, B.C., received torrents of online backlash, as did a recent “Winter’s A Drag” event hosted by a distillery in Elora, Ontario.

RELATED: Far-right religious groups protest my drag storytime events. Here’s why I won’t stop.

A performer named Crystal Quartz, who is based in Guelph, Ontario, opened my eyes to how these protests unfold in real life. Not only was she being doxxed—her home address was published online—Crystal had to contact the police in every jurisdiction where she’d booked shows to make sure she’d be protected. Venue owners often had to call in extra security. Last winter, I travelled to Hamilton for one of Crystal’s performances and saw the reason for myself: a dozen angry protesters, clad in balaclavas and army fatigues, yelling and waving upside-down Canada flags a few metres away from young families heading into a restaurant for a fun, glittery lunch. I’ve seen a lot of protests in my life, but that experience was entirely jarring.

In early April, I introduced a private member’s bill, the Keeping 2SLGBTQI+ Communities Safe Act, in the Ontario legislature as a way to protect this community. One clause would set up an advisory committee to establish a long-term strategy to deal with anti-LGBTQ+ hate. Until this bill, there was nothing on the books that covered sporadic, one-off events—like drag brunches and storytimes—which typically move between venues. So the bill’s other, shorter-term clause would allow “community safety zones” to protect drag performances across the province. Ontarians might recognize this term from traffic signage that threatens to double their speeding fines in school zones. But in the past, this provision has also been used to establish safe perimeters around abortion facilities and vaccine clinics, which drew protests during the pandemic. We’d essentially be borrowing this old tool for a new purpose.

In the interest of preventing any more vitriol from reaching patrons, the act (if passed) would give Ontario’s attorney general the power to establish temporary community safety zones 100 metres in front of and around the venue doors. Anyone who commits anti-LGBTQ+ intimidation, harassment or hate speech within that bubble would be subject to a fine of up to $25,000. (The upper limit of that penalty would likely be applied in cases of criminal assault, not the simple honking of horns.)

The attorney general could work with emergency services and local law enforcement—who are used to monitoring potential public disturbances online—to set the address and timelines for the bubbles and announce them via media advisories that cost taxpayers nothing. There would be no burden on business owners to call in extra police services, which pulls resources from nearby cities. When the performance is over, the bubble zone would be lifted. At the very least, the mere existence of these zones could act as a deterrent.

MORE: A rainbow house beaming with Pride in the face of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes

I also want to make one thing clear: this legislation would not stop Canadians from exercising their right to free speech. In the days following the bill’s announcement, my staff told me it was covered by Fox News and Breitbart. (My team acted as a buffer between me and the backlash for a few days.) Online commenters did not seem particularly interested in an important nuance of the bill, which is that it protects citizens’ rights to congregate and to protest. Basically, bring your signs (within reason) and MAGA swag, but if this bill passes, you’re not crossing that invisible line.

Private member’s bills don’t typically pass because many are tabled by opposition or independent MPPs. If the attorney general pushes it through, however, the Keeping 2SLGBTQI+ Communities Safe Act could pass within weeks. If he doesn’t, it could take years. As scary as things are out there, government officials are looking for solutions on how to keep LGBTQ+ people safe. In fact, some cities already have their own community safety zones, just under a different name. I’d love it if these bubbles started popping up across the country, in drag capitals like Toronto and in small towns alike. I’d love it even more if we didn’t need to use them.

Drag means different things to different people. To bachelorette parties, it’s a fun evening-ender. To chain restaurants, it’s a novel way to fill seats outside of peak service times. A lot of drag performers will tell you that they’re just entertainers looking to make a living; others see themselves as cultural storykeepers for the queer community, peppering their routines with political commentary. Some parents aren’t into the idea of drag storytime. They’re welcome to stay home for that hour or two.

The point of these safety zones isn’t to force people to embrace drag. It’s to show that these events, and the people who run them, deserve safety—even if the pastime isn’t for everyone. Take my four-year-old son, for example. Right now, he can’t sit through a full meal, and mascots in Paw Patrol costumes scare him, so drag brunch isn’t his scene. But my wife and I are both queer, and soon we’ll bring him to one, as we’ve done with Pride events since he was born. We want him to know we live in a beautiful, diverse world. I hope one day he leaves a drag event thinking the same thing I did after seeing RuPaul in Washington all those years ago: There are so many of us. They can’t do anything to stop us.

The post The Big Idea: Defend Drag Shows appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photo by iStock, Illustration by Maclean’s)

In the summer of 2020, I was living in a three-bedroom house in Coquitlam, B.C., with my parents, my brother and my partner, Curtis. The rent was $3,000 a month, and split between all of us, it was affordable: Curtis and I only paid $250 each. It was nice living with family, but by that point, we’d done it for three years and were nearing the end of our 20s. In August, Curtis and I started to think about buying a place of our own. We wanted to start a family and adopt a dog, which we couldn’t do as renters.

We started saving up for a down payment, with a goal of setting aside $50,000. Curtis is a heavy-duty mechanic and I work as a coordinator at a university. Together, we earn a combined $165,000—a solid income for a young couple. Luckily, Curtis had been putting away money in his RRSPs for about a decade—a total of $40,000—which gave us a good head start.

In January of 2021, we started house-hunting in suburbs east of Vancouver. Our budget was around $550,000 and our bank approved us for a $700,000 mortgage. We were looking for a spacious apartment or townhouse between Burnaby and Langley where Curtis and I work, respectively. We hoped the extra bedrooms could be used to host family and guests, and one day, serve as our kids’ bedrooms.

In August 2021, after seeing more than 20 homes, we bought a three-bed, three-bath townhouse in Pitt Meadows for $631,000. We could either go with a variable mortgage at 1.35 per cent or a fixed mortgage at 2.1 per cent. Our mortgage broker and financial adviser both suggested we go with the variable rate. They were convinced that interest rates would stay low: they hadn’t spiked in 25 years, and Tiff Macklem, the governor of the Bank of Canada, said himself that interest rates would stay low for “a long time.” We decided on a variable mortgage at 1.35 per cent, which started at $2,421 a month.

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

Things started off well for us. To save money, we did home renovations ourselves: we replaced carpets with vinyl; painted the ceilings, stairs, window frames, doors and cabinets; replaced the lights; installed new baseboards, fire detectors and a kitchen backsplash. The renovations cost us less than $10,000—Curtis got a discount on paint and other supplies through work. When it came to daily spending, we didn’t track our expenses or set a budget. We ate out a couple of times a week. We took our family out to the movies once a month, which usually cost $150, between dinner, tickets and snacks. Curtis and I both played in a spring hockey league, paying $500 each, and Curtis regularly brewed beer, spending about $50 a month on supplies.

In June of 2022, Curtis and I took a trip to Greece, where he proposed. It felt like our lives were moving in the right direction, but back home, interest rates were rising. We were told by our financial adviser that rates would go up by 0.25 per cent, but the jumps were much higher—by June, rates were already up by one per cent. We were frustrated with our advisers and terrified that our mortgage would spiral out of control.

By October, our payments rose to $3,229 a month. Curtis and I worried about our financial future. We travelled a lot in our 20s, backpacking in Europe, attending a wedding in Australia, watching Cirque du Soleil in Vegas. But now we had to question whether we could even afford to travel, given how much of our paycheque was going toward the mortgage. What if this gets out of control and we lose the house? We were on our own—our family couldn’t afford to bail us out if we needed it. We started wondering what our lives would be like as house-poor parents, unable to afford sports or extracurriculars for future kids. We wanted to start a family, but spending an extra $800 a month—or $9,600 a year—on mortgage payments was pretty much obliterating those plans. It was a tough pill to swallow.

I wasn’t eating or sleeping properly. I constantly checked the mortgage rates, read financial news and listened to podcasts on Canadian economics. It was all I could talk about with friends and family. Curtis was a lot more laid-back than me. If it came down to it, he figured he could use his handyman skills—operating heavy-duty machinery or painting homes—to earn some extra cash.

In December, Curtis and I decided to switch to a fixed rate, at 5.14 per cent, for about $3,340 a month for the next five years. We needed to put a stop to the anxiousness we felt, even if rates began to drop the next day. In early 2022, the Bank of Canada held the interest rate steady at 4.5 per cent, pretty much right after we switched to a fixed rate. Either way, we were happy to have a bit of stability.

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

We’ve had to curb our spending significantly. We buy our groceries wholesale and often in bulk, and try to buy used clothes and furniture. I used to drive to work three days a week but it was costing me $500 a month on gas and insurance, so now I take two buses and a Skytrain. A friend moved into one of our extra bedrooms and pays us $550 a month. We’re much stricter about our budgeting. At the start of the month, we use our first paycheques to pay off our property tax, internet, electricity and other bills along with half of our mortgage. Our second paycheques go toward the rest of the mortgage, savings and a little bit of personal spending. We each spend about $150 a month, which I normally put toward home appliances, gifts or leisure activities. Before, we spent between $300 and $400 a month each on ourselves. Instead of jetting off to Greece, we’ll be doing a lot more camping in B.C., at sites like Cultus Lake and Porteau Cove, this year. My father renovated an old sailboat, which we’ll take over to Victoria and up around Vancouver Island this summer.

Our goal is to save $20,000 before starting a family, to supplement my maternity leave and Curtis’s paternity leave. But because so much of our money goes toward our mortgage, we’ve only saved about $5,000. It’ll take another year of saving to get to our mark. We wanted to get married in 2024, but those plans have been pushed back indefinitely.

It feels like we did everything right—saved up for a down payment, pursued stable careers, purchased a home, did the renovations ourselves. And yet we can barely afford to start a family. Our lives completely revolve around our mortgage.

—As told to Mathew Silver

The post Our mortgage payments went up to more than $3,300 a month 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.

RELATED: I was a nurse for 10 years in Scotland. So why can’t I get certified in Canada?

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.

“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.

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.

(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.

READ: See who made the 2023 Maclean’s Power List

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. 

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

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

The post Our farm’s rescue animals have become TikTok stars appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(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.

READ: I’m a 19-year-old barber with 6.7 million TikTok followers. Celebs pay me $1,000 for a haircut.

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.

MORE: I started skateboarding in a sari at 43. Then I went viral on TikTok.

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. 

READ: The Big Burn: How B.C. is learning to live with wildfires

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.

RELATED: An Edmonton couple refitted their home to be completely net zero

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.

READ: Why I’m suing the Ontario government over its climate change inaction

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.

MORE: How 16-year-old Naila Moloo is making waves as an environmental innovator

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. 

READ: This U of T professor created an entire course on the Netflix mega-hit Squid Game

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?

MORE: How fraud artists are exploiting Canada’s international education boom

 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.

Jen Recknagel is the director of innovation and design at the University Health Network’s NORC Innovation Centre in Toronto.

My grandmother lived in the same house in Cleveland for 50 years. After my grandfather died, she spent 11 of those years alone. Eventually, she developed dementia and had her driver’s licence taken away, which upset her. She soon went to live in Cape Cod with my aunt, who had offered to take care of her. Moving is hard enough, but imagine migrating to a different state in your 80s. Her health declined quickly after that. I knew there had to be a better way to support people at this stage of life. 

Right now, if you’re a senior living in Canada who can no longer live independently, there are two main paths. For those who require around-the-clock medical supervision, there are highly regulated, government-funded long-term care facilities. The other option is retirement homes, which are seniors-only private residences with set meal plans and regularly scheduled activities. But what about seniors who’d prefer to live out their days in the comfort of their own homes? At the University Health Network in Toronto, where I work, we’re exploring another avenue: bringing support directly into areas where high numbers of seniors already live. There’s even a name for these places: naturally occurring retirement communities, or NORCs. 

NORCs might be regular residential apartments, condos, co-ops or even entire neighbourhoods—geographic areas that weren’t specifically designed with older adults in mind, but which have a lot of them regardless. Many seniors who have decided to age in place might not require the intensive support of long-term care. Perhaps they cannot afford retirement homes. What my team at UHN proposes is to bring programming to them, right where they live. This could involve connecting them to health services, organizing community dinner parties or even using space in a condo building’s rec room to set up a wellness hub. NORC programs are tailored to what residents need (and want).

The NORC movement isn’t new. Programs started popping up in buildings around New York City as early as the 1980s. By 1994, New York State had passed legislation to subsidize 10 NORC programs; today, it funds 41, which serve thousands of clients. The concept has been much slower to catch on in Canadian cities, which offer no funding for NORC programs. But currently, in Ontario alone, there are more older adults living in NORCs than in long-term care and retirement homes combined. Almost 2,000 buildings across the province qualify as NORCs. Together, they house more than 200,000 seniors.

While studying NORCs, my team came across a program called Oasis Senior Supportive Living in Kingston, Ontario. Back in 2009, a forward-looking community leader named Christine McMillan—then president of the Frontenac Kingston Council on Aging—got together with residents of the city’s Bowling Green II apartment complex to discuss how to improve their living conditions. They were tired of feeling disconnected from their community, spending days in their houseclothes, and eating tea and toast for dinner because they were too tired to cook. 

With the help of McMillan and her team, the seniors paid a local community college to bring in three-course meals three times a week. Later, they convinced their landlord to let them convert an unused space in the building’s basement into a seniors’ lounge. People living at Oasis were less likely to experience emergency department visits, hospital admissions and falls. Now, Oasis operates similar programs in NORCs in London and Hamilton, Ontario, through a mix of donations and grants. There’s no reason why this kind of customized programming couldn’t be adopted (and funded) by the Canadian health care system at large.

More than ever, Canadians are keen to explore alternative models of senior care. By 2051, one in four of us will be 65 or older. Institutionalizing a quarter of the population isn’t feasible or affordable—for the government, for taxpayers or for families. The pandemic only further strained our already understaffed and overcrowded long-term care facilities. And then there are the demographic shifts: recent data from Statistics Canada shows that more adults over 65 are moving to urban areas than ever before, choosing to live in high-rises instead of detached homes. 

The NORC model addresses some of the most common issues with senior care, the first being financial. The average cost of a hospital bed is $842 per day, while care at home costs the government $42 a day, on average. Spots at retirement homes, on the other hand, can run up to $6,000 a month. If programming comes directly into NORCs, many seniors could delay going into long-term care—or possibly even avoid it altogether. They could continue to pay their own utilities and rent, and the government wouldn’t need to build as many new facilities. Most importantly, all the NORC services—from the flu clinics to the group exercise classes—could be offered at no cost to residents. 

Another good thing about the NORC model is that it allows older adults to maintain their autonomy. We’ve heard from front-desk staff in senior-heavy buildings who say they regularly get calls like, “I can still cook, but can you open this jar for me?” These are small tasks, but ones that usually fall to adult children or neighbours. A well-funded NORC might employ on-site staff to help out with the little things, particularly for adults whose mobility is challenged but not altogether gone. In buildings where higher levels of support are needed, we’re looking into connecting residents with experts who can address issues like hearing loss, fall risks or even mental health. 

Most importantly, NORC programming is driven by seniors themselves. In many cultures, elders are seen as wisdom keepers, but in North America, we ignore them. It’s almost like, “You’re obsolete now.” The NORC model recognizes that seniors have great ideas worth listening to­­­­—that they are the experts when it comes to understanding their own quality of life. 

NORCs aren’t communes, where people are always in your business. Residents can opt in and out of programming. That said, there’s an even greater need for connection as spouses and friends pass away; NORC programs can offer that. We hear from many seniors that they want to continue to live among young people and families—not just play golf or be entertained to death in seniors-only communities. Because NORCs are regular residential areas, they are inherently intergenerational. We’ve seen younger seniors—those who might have recently retired—pitching in to help those who are less mobile. NORC programs can also be customized to suit a building’s age breakdown and evolve over time. What people need between 65 and 75 is very different from what they need (and want) in their 80s.

As it stands, there is no public funding for NORC programming, but we’ve been championing the model at all levels of government. It’s been encouraging to see that, more and more, everyday Canadians are hearing about NORCs. Seniors have told us how programs have transformed their cold high-rises into real communities, and about how their neighbours stop them in the hallway to excitedly grill them about upcoming events. As you age, your world doesn’t have to get smaller. In fact, a lot of fun could be happening right downstairs.

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 $29.99.

The post The Big Idea: Help seniors age at home appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In 2020, I graduated from nursing school in Quebec. Just a couple of weeks later, I found myself working in a hospital in the middle of a global pandemic. I had so much to learn: the proper ways of administering medication and wound dressing, department-specific routines and, on top of that, all the new COVID-specific safety regulations that were being introduced every day. I was also helping extremely sick patients communicate with their loved ones via phone or video chat because, at that time, many hospitals weren’t accepting visitors. On several occasions, I had to give bad news to tearful, devastated families through a screen and say, “I’m so sorry that you can’t be here right now.” I kept asking myself: Am I capable of carrying the lives of multiple people in my hands? Am I really made for this?

It pained me to see patients confined to their rooms. I tried to cheer them up by making them laugh, but I still felt their sadness deep within me. I was also exhausted from working long hours in a short-staffed hospital; I was in desperate need of a distraction. Around that time, TikTok was getting really popular. Watching people dance on reels became a way of escaping reality. I came across a video of a guy asking his viewers to reply with a job that was undervalued and underpaid. I filmed my own video during a break in my shift. I held up my badge, which read: RN. I didn’t actually mean to post the video; I did it by accident. Then I went back to work. 

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

When I got home the next day—it was a super-long shift—my friends and family told me I had gone viral. I didn’t know what that meant. The only definition of “viral” I knew was illness-related. When I logged into my TikTok account, I saw that my accidental video had garnered more than a million views and upwards of 100,000 likes. Part of me was in shock; the other part of me was excited to be getting my 15 minutes of fame, despite my usual introversion. I assumed it was a one-time thing.

I didn’t post another video until five or six months later, after a really rough shift. I was still juggling too many patients and still questioning whether I was really cut out to be a nurse. I went to the unit’s bathroom and cried, trying to calm my heart rate with breathing exercises. I thought about how many people could probably relate to the on-the-job breakdown I’d just experienced and decided to film a video about it when I got home—a funny one. I re-enacted my tears and deep breathing, but in an over-the-top ridiculous way. Within hours, that video had a million views and a ton of supportive comments. I wondered whether people were just watching to make fun of me, but there were enough positive and encouraging comments that I figured I might as well keep doing it.

I started posting a video a week after that. (I didn’t have time to do more.) All of them went viral: the one about how everything seems to go wrong just minutes before a shift is about to end; the one about how desperately nurses need a glass of wine; all the ones of me crying. There is so much suffering in my profession right now, so I try to keep things lighthearted—even if the topics themselves are heavy. I recently made a video about how nurses are constantly asked to work extra hours. In it, I sang Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You, but changed the original words to “I refuse this OT.” We could all use a good laugh.

RELATED: I was a nurse for 10 years in Scotland. So why can’t I get certified in Canada?

I’ve gotten so many amazing messages from followers. I once received an Instagram message from someone who’d spent months in the hospital undergoing chemotherapy. They said my content was showing that hospitals don’t always have to be scary places, because nurses become like a family to you. Another follower, a nurse, told me I had described their entire day in my video. Like me, they had a stressful workday and cried. My video made them realize they weren’t alone. In fact, my videos have created a community of 3.7 million people—the kind of community I’ve been searching for since I started nursing.

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

Last July, I transferred to my hospital’s emergency department after two years spent working on a surgical floor. I was completely run down and thought moving to a different environment might help me get back on track. The new job was exciting, but I was still exhausted. I told my manager I thought I should see a professional. The doctor I saw explained that my symptoms were clear signs of burnout, and that I needed to take some time away from work to take care of myself. In December, I went on mental-health leave. 

Nursing is still my greatest passion, and I will go back to work, when I’m ready. In the meantime, I’m more active on TikTok than ever. I try to post as consistently as possible—about the perils of night shifts, working on a full moon and the bonus of work besties. I don’t consider TikTok a job; it’s more like therapy than work. (In fact, my therapist encourages me to post.) When people leave comments saying, “Hey John, I’ve been through this. Be strong!” it helps me come to terms with what I’ve been through. In a way, I love TikTok for the same reason I love nursing. Being part of someone else’s healing makes me feel better. On TikTok, it feels like I’m nursing all these different people around the world, in a way. I’m so thankful for them.

The post When nursing burned me out, TikTok became a lifeline appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“Tell me about yourself.” 

Whenever I hear those four words, my brain flatlines. I scramble for an answer and wonder if there’s anything interesting to say at all. Without exception, my response is the same: every time I’m asked to describe my life, I describe my job.

Work has always anchored my identity. It was the engine that propelled my family from China to Canada in 1998, two years before I was born, and tales of my father’s heroic work ethic and self-sacrifice have played for years like a movie montage in my mind. There he is, waiting at a bus stop in suburban Toronto, starting his 90-minute commute to an IT job downtown. There he is, hunched in a chair at the Chapters bookstore near our home, poring over volumes about computer coding. There he is in our living room, where I’m lying on the couch as he paces with a book in hand, mumbling new English words to himself. “Dexterity,” he says. “Dexterity, dexterity, dexterity.” 

His life advice has always been simple: “Don’t be stupid. Work hard.” That maxim catapulted him to a successful IT career, in Canada and in the American financial services industry. I’ve always tried to follow his example—and in trying, I had my first anxiety attack in middle school. The night before a Grade 7 history test, I sat hyperventilating on my bedroom floor, my looseleaf notes on the Roman Empire fanned around me. My hands trembled and my heart flopped in my throat as I tried to steady myself. I was certain that the consequences of success or failure would reverberate far into my future. If I did well, I could be enrolled in honours classes in high school. That could mean a higher GPA, boosting my chances of getting into a great university. Then I’d have better job prospects—provided I completed enough internships, participated in extracurricular activities and networked. But first I needed to know the difference between Augustus Caesar and Marcus Aurelius, who was not Mark Antony, who was related to Julius Caesar, but not to Marc Jacobs. Looking to my One Direction poster for strength, I gulped down a few big breaths, dug my nails into my palm and kept studying late into the night.

My university years, from 2018 to 2022, were illuminated by the glow of my desk lamp. I’d work for days on end, throwing myself into classes, clubs and writing for the university newspaper, where I was also a managing online editor. I would spend days barely sleeping, hopped up on caffeine and adrenaline. My roommate got used to seeing me emerge from my room at odd hours in a long white robe, hair swept into a bun, laptop in hand. I would lie down on her bed and tell her I was on my sixth cup of black tea, or that after I finished a newspaper assignment at 10 p.m., I had another to write until 3 a.m., then an in-person class at 8 a.m. Once the buzz wore off, the feeling of hollow exhaustion crept back in. I’d lie under the covers, unable to move. I knew there was more to do, but it was impossible to muster the energy to put my brain and body back into action. Sometimes I would cry for hours; sometimes I felt too immobilized to cry at all. 

“Work was the centre of my life, and everything else too often slipped into a distant orbit: friends, family, a love life, hobbies, health.” (Photograph by Ebti Nabag)

Work was the centre of my life, and everything else too often slipped into a distant orbit: friends, family, a love life, hobbies, health. What work consumed above all else was time.

Then came the pandemic. My world shrunk to an 11-by-10-foot apartment, and the newspaper work slowed. During that downtime, I went on walks with my roommate, thought about graduation and what would come next. But I was nagged by the idea that even as the world was shut down, I should be working harder and longer, being more productive.

I’m a member of Generation Z, the cohort of young adults born between 1997 and 2012. I came into the world in the year of Y2K and Bush v. Gore, and I was a toddler when the twin towers fell and the iPod launched. As a teenager, I watched the world (and my dad) worship tech giants like Steve Jobs, who bragged about their 80-hour workweeks. I witnessed the gig economy replace nine-to-five work, and saw millennials fall sway to startup culture’s 24/7 grind.

Work was the centre of my life, and everything else too often slipped into a distant orbit: friends, family, a love life, hobbies, health

It’s no wonder I nearly burned out before high school. But if you’ve heard anything about Gen Z, it’s probably the opposite: we’re rejecting traditional workplace norms and refusing to work 12-hour days or glue ourselves to our mobile phones all weekend in case the boss emails. Instead we’re prioritizing mental health, time off and work-life balance. We want clear boundaries, better working conditions and higher pay. In return, we’ve been derided as coddled, lazy and unwilling—or unable—to work hard. 

Jonathan Haidt is a 59-year-old social psychologist and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, a book decrying young people’s supposed obsession with victimhood. Last December, he told the Wall Street Journal that Gen Z’s bad attitude to work constitutes a “national crisis” that could “undermine American capitalism.” (His thoughts were shared on Twitter by right-wing culture warrior Jordan Peterson, age 60.) Everywhere I turn, I see similar critiques of my generation—that we’re entitled snowflakes more concerned with self-care than rebuilding the post-pandemic economy. My dad would probably agree. Though he’s not nearly as alarmist as Haidt, he’s always been worried that my generation is too soft, too ready to surrender to hardship. 

We aren’t the first generation to earn this kind of ire. Thirty years ago, Generation X were branded “slackers.” Fifteen years ago, millennials entered the workforce amid talk of balance and work-life flexibility. In the end, that flexibility turned into an always-on hustle.

In 2022, I graduated university. The pandemic’s mandatory slowdown already had me thinking about my relationship to work. Even in my university circles, I’d heard friends exhorting one another to be more mindful with their time, to check in on burnout. I began noticing how those ideas were playing out among my generation. Last fall, when I took my first full-time job after graduating from university, as an associate editor at Maclean’s, I wanted to wrap my head around what was happening. Were we really any different from generations before us?

I spoke to dozens of people, including other Gen Z workers, economists, HR experts and business owners. What I found is that the Gen Z revolt isn’t just media froth—it’s real, widespread and formidable. And more than in previous eras, conditions today are uniquely ripe for lasting change. 

Employees hold power today in a way they haven’t in decades. COVID-19 sped up the retirement of Canada’s baby boomers. Unemployment, including youth unemployment, is at near-historic lows. Job vacancies throughout 2022 sat at long-time highs (they’ve fallen somewhat since, though still sit well above normal). The labour market is in dire need of more workers, and job seekers have leverage to extract real concessions. At the same time, new technology is enabling unparalleled flexibility as to how and where work gets done. And for people of all ages, the pandemic instigated a major reconsideration of what they want out of their jobs and lives.

The Gen Z revolt is here, but it doesn’t look like Haidt’s panicky description of a generation that’s lost its way. If we can seize this moment in time, we have the power to change the world of work for the better—for ourselves and for everyone else. 

***

"At the job I took after university, the mentality was that time off is for the weak," says Batool Khozema, a 25-year-old civil engineer living in Toronto. "Switching jobs has taught me what I want out of my career: mentorship, a work-life balance and an opportunity to change and improve the status quo.” (Photograph by Kristina Dittmar)

Like me, Batool Khozema is no stranger to hard work. When she was eight years old, her family moved from Pakistan to Markham, Ontario, where her father worked as a security guard. He’d been an electrical engineer in Pakistan, but his credentials weren’t valid in Canada. After about a year, he returned to Pakistan and found better work. Khozema and her two older sisters stayed with their mother, who worked night shifts at a manufacturing company. She clocked out just in time to take the kids to school.

Khozema always knew she wanted to make her parents’ sacrifices worth something. She graduated as high school valedictorian and studied civil engineering at the University of Ottawa. In August of 2021, she was hired by a construction company as a quality inspector on job sites. As a young woman in an industry still rife with old-school, tough-guy thinking, she’d frequently hear older men complain about her generation’s insistence on setting boundaries between work and the rest of their lives. It soon became obvious that she was expected to prove herself—and she did. In February of 2022, a co-worker left on paternity leave, and her managers asked her to take on his duties at no extra pay, framing it as a trial run for a promotion.

She’d arrive at 6:45 every morning and spend the day travelling between job sites. She’d often skip lunch and stay later than most of her co-workers, finally arriving home around 6:30, often to collapse on her apartment floor. “I didn’t want to wake up the next morning,” she says, “because I’d have to do all of it again.”

She began experiencing stress-related pain in her lower back. When she moved, even to relax her shoulders, she was sore. The bags under her eyes sagged, her acne flared and she was plagued by sleeplessness. One Sunday morning in March, it all caught up to her. Exhausted and wrung out, she couldn’t stop heaving and sobbing on her bedroom floor long enough to stand up. She spoke to a friend on the phone, and said, “I can’t do this anymore.” She hadn’t let herself say it out loud before. Her friend told her to quit. “I can’t do that either,” she said. Quitting was antithetical to everything she had worked for her entire life. It felt like failure. But after talking to an older colleague who coached her on the perils of burnout, she gave her HR team a list of demands—among them, a different role and a change of job location to be closer to family. If those demands weren’t met within six months, she’d be out.

Khozema was moved to a project in Kingston, somewhat closer to family in the Toronto area, for five weeks, but talk of promotions came with a multi-year timeline. She asked herself what she wanted: better hours, better location, more growth opportunity. After starting therapy and taking time off, it was obvious that wasn’t going to happen. So in September she started a job hunt, and three weeks later had a new position lined up, with better hours and stronger prospects for advancement. “I was in a battle, and I won,” she says. “And it feels great.” 

“I’ll be looking for my first teaching job this fall, and the two main things I want are permanence and opportunities for extra work,” says Brendan Simone, a 23-year-old elementary school teacher in Edmonton. “I care about work-life balance, but a lot of teachers have side hustles now because life is getting more expensive.” (Photograph by Paul Swanson)

That battle is spreading. Online, young users are racking up hundreds of millions of views on TikTok and other platforms, posting skits and advice with hashtags like #IDontDreamofLabour, #WorkYourWage and #QuietQuitting—refusing to go above and beyond one’s job description without compensation.

Offline, the fight is taking the form of individual actions like Khozema’s, as well as more organized efforts. In 2021, Gen Z employees organized a successful unionization drive at a Starbucks in Buffalo, New York. That kickstarted a wave of unionizations at more than 250 U.S. locations. During last year’s Labour Day parade in Toronto, Unifor national president Lana Payne told media that Gen Z was revitalizing the labour movement. 

When they can’t improve their jobs, many young people are simply leaving them. Statistics Canada uses a metric called “job tenure” to track the average amount of time Canadian workers stay in their jobs. It ticked down between 2020 and 2022, from an average of 106 months to 101—a modest four per cent decline. But for workers under 25, the drop has been steeper, from 19.5 months to 17—a 12 per cent decline, the biggest since the late ’80s, and a strong indication that young people are walking from jobs that don’t offer what they want.

At the same time, a related phenomenon known as “the Great Rethink” is forcing employees and employers to reconsider their relationship to work, and to one another. The power to redefine those relationships is increasingly in employees’ hands. 

Cassidy Mercier, now 25, was working as a project coordinator when she says her workload quadrupled. Even after a raise, she discovered she was making less than the starting salary of a new co-worker with the same position. She quit for a new job as a project manager at a marketing agency. But four months into that job, a senior colleague quit, and Mercier took on most of their workload as well as her own without a clear idea of when somebody new would be hired to help. Essentially working two jobs for a modest $53,000 salary, she requested a meeting with the company’s owner to present what she felt was reasonable compensation: a $5,000 raise. The response was deflating. She was told she needed to prove she deserved it, and her performance over the coming months might help show that. Mercier had seen the toll over-the-top workloads had taken on her older family members: deteriorating mental health, general unhappiness. She quit this new job too—the conversation with her boss made it clear that she simply wasn’t valued. Today she works remotely in Ottawa for the Winnipeg-based Brandish Agency, where she has flex time and unlimited vacation and sick days.

As I reached out to more and more young workers, similar stories piled up. Elias Saab is a 21-year-old civil engineering student in Ottawa whose revelation about the value of his own time came early, at age 17. He was making minimum wage at a major pharmacy chain, working the Friday overnight shift from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., sometimes staying until 6 a.m. It was the first time he realized the money doesn’t always match the labour. He didn’t think he was above hard work, but he found the constant 12-hour red-eye shifts to be borderline exploitative. Like Mercier and Khozema, he quit.

In Stouffville, Ontario, I found Sakina Hussain, a 23-year-old clinical researcher who logs off from her job as soon as the clock strikes 5 p.m. She had always been militant about working hard in school, especially after seeing her immigrant parents sacrifice so much to give her financial support and stability. But in September of 2021, while she was still in university, her grandfather died from COVID-19, and so did her grandmother shortly after from unrelated causes. The sudden experience of death spurred the kind of epiphany typically reserved for mid-life crises. She vowed to spend her time with intention—which didn’t mean long, uncompensated hours in front of a computer.

My cohort’s refusal to give our all to work may stem from a recognition that our lives, and our futures, don’t look like those of past generations. The classic milestones of adulthood—home ownership, financial stability, a comfortable retirement—all seem wildly out of reach. I don’t anticipate I’ll be able to afford a home in Toronto, or in any Canadian city, any time soon. When my dad lived in Toronto 24 years ago, his salary was $15,000 less than mine. But renting an apartment in the building he lived in would be way beyond my budget today. 

What we want from work is intimately tied to what we want for our lives. If the financial rewards of our work won’t open the same doors for us, if we don’t have the opportunities that generations before us had, why should we work the way they did?

***

“I felt a bit greedy asking for $80,000 right out of school, but I need it to pay my student loans, buy groceries and cover rent and a car payment,” says Jacob Halloran, a 25-year-old physiotherapist in Halifax. (Photograph by Riley Smith)

As workers become more protective of their time, companies are racing to adapt and get ahead of competitors when attracting and hanging on to young talent. At Toronto-based Fresh Squeezed Ideas, a boutique research and strategy consultancy company, founder and CEO Karen McCauley knew her workplace had to change. The company, which currently has 20 employees, lost a third of its team in early 2021. Most of the departures were from the younger portion of the workforce, older Gen Zs and millennials. “The feedback we were getting from people was that they just couldn’t handle the stress of the work anymore,” McCauley says. “It was sobering.”

She had to re-evaluate how her workplace, well, worked. Makail Johannesson, a 27-year-old employee, pitched an idea long on the fringes of workplace development: the four-day week. He gave a PowerPoint presentation explaining to McCauley just how long the idea had been bouncing around. In 1933, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would have limited the workweek to 30 hours, but it was vetoed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the 1950s, vice-president Richard Nixon declared that a four-day workweek and a “fuller family life” were on the horizon. Of course, they weren’t.

What Gen Z want from work is intimately tied to what we want for our lives. If we don’t have the opportunities that generations before us had, why should we work the way they did?

Johannesson was passionate, but McCauley remained skeptical. “It didn’t make sense to me that you could take away a day of work, and people could still be as productive,” she says. But she dove into the research, which showed that other workplaces participating in similar overhauls didn’t see any hits to productivity. In 2022, Fresh Squeezed Ideas became one of 10 Canadian companies openly participating in a six-month pilot program led by 4-Day Work Week Global, a non-profit that helps companies with the shift. 

“The philosophy is that it’s 100 per cent pay, 80 per cent time and 100 per cent productivity,” McCauley says. Workers take Fridays off without any change in salary, though they still have to check email twice a day in case of urgent client needs. Clients have been almost universally receptive to the change, and all prospective ones are briefed about the shorter workweek. 

In the latest results released by 4-Day Work Week Global, all the companies that joined the pilot program continued their new schedule after the six months ended. When compared with the same period in the previous year, revenue for participating companies rose an average of 38 per cent. Ninety-seven per cent of employees said they wanted to continue the shorter weeks.

The response from McCauley’s team was overwhelming. The additional personal day had a direct, positive impact on the quality of work employees produced. Staff were re-energized by the new schedule and kept hitting deadlines just as they did before. The younger members of her team were especially enthusiastic in their support.

At Uber Canada, head of public policy and communications Laura Miller has found that her Gen Z employees have shifted her own relationship to work. Miller—on the younger side of Gen X at age 44—admires the way young workers practise work-life separation, setting strict boundaries for their personal time without sacrificing job performance (and jumping back online when needed). Miller was used to working through weekends, glued to her array of devices, waiting for the next ping or beep. Now, if she works weekends, she’s better at blocking out a contained chunk of time and not letting work bleed into her other priorities. While Miller was scrolling on Twitter recently, she stumbled on a viral post, written in January by a New York–based startup founder, that read: “Work-life balance in your 20s is an easy way to guarantee a mediocre career.” She couldn’t disagree more. When she thinks about the people she’s seen excel the most, she remembers the quality of their work and their effective, efficient use of time.

Not every employer is as receptive, of course. As Gen Z pushes, some are pushing back. The costs of what we want don’t always go over well in the C-suite. 

When Gen Xer Elon Musk took over Twitter last October, he quickly ended the company’s remote-work policies. He demanded that employees—even those living in different cities and states—come to the office at least 40 hours a week and commit, in his words, to an “extremely hard-core” work culture. Last fall, RBC chief executive and baby boomer Dave McKay mandated that the company’s 89,000 employees had to return to the office for at least two days a week beginning in September. He said that technology couldn’t recreate the in-person “energy, spontaneity, big ideas or true sense of belonging.” And in January of this year, Disney CEO Bob Iger, another boomer, told employees they would have to return in person for at least four days a week, starting this March. 

“Earlier in my career, I looked for stability and big names. Now I appreciate work-life balance and a sense of purpose,” says Tanya Sharma, a 25-year-old environmental, social and governance specialist living in Toronto. (Photograph by Kristina Dittmar)

Gen Z’s demands are also tangible and expensive, even if they do result in greater productivity and less turnover. Those funds will have to come from somewhere. Tom Collver is co-founder of PB+J, an e-commerce creative agency that also participated in the four-day workweek pilot program. Gen Z candidates flock to his company, making up roughly 50 per cent of all applicants. PB+J has always had mental-health benefits in place, and they’ve swapped out certain benefits for others, depending on employee usage and feedback. Collver acknowledges that it all costs money, but maintains that the investment in the workforce is well worth it. When his company goes into discussions about the next fiscal year, he says that benefits are never on the chopping block. “We haven’t faced any tough decisions to provide one over the other, because we believe that benefits need to be part of the equation,” he says. When the company relinquished office spaces during the pandemic, the leadership team looked into reinvesting that money in their benefits budget. 

Of course, if 2023 brings with it a recession, and unemployment rises, some of the power currently in employees’ hands may shift back to employers. Widespread layoffs in the tech sector early this year have already sparked concern that the tide may be turning. On the other hand, Gen Z is not alone in wanting a different relationship to work. Seventy-six per cent of Canadian workers aged 54 to 72 want a flexible schedule, for example, according to a study by marketing consultancy Harris Insights & Analytics. And pressure can still be applied from the bottom up. After hundreds of Twitter employees chose to quit rather than participate in Musk’s newly hard-core office culture, the company’s stance softened—Musk instead declared that employees should have in-person meetings with their managers regularly.

As Gen Z pushes, some employers are pushing back. Flexible work arrangements, generous benefits and work-life balance don’t always go over well in the C-suite.

Musk’s backtracking speaks to the strength Gen Z may be able to wield as its numbers grow. In 2021, in the midst of the most acute phase of the pandemic, I began actively trying to figure out how to disconnect my sense of self from my productivity. There wasn’t a notable moment when I looked around and said, “Hey, maybe I’ve got it all wrong!” It took time—and my friends made it happen. They texted me to ask how much sleep I’d gotten during finals season. They reminded me to drink water and get fresh air, they dissected burnout over FaceTime calls and meandered with me across the city during long walks. Together, we worked to forge a new path forward.

***

My parents always told me that everything they sacrificed, they sacrificed for their kids. I feel guilty that, after all my dad has done for our family, my own pursuit of balance between work and life might mean losing my drive—the trait that tethers us. He taught me to work hard because he wanted to teach me to survive. When we lived in Illinois for eight years, my parents were always concerned about whether they’d be able to stay in the country if they lost their jobs. They shielded me from this fear, but they walked on shifting ground. All they could do was work their hardest to give me stability, without the luxury of considering the balance in their own lives. It was an act of love and selflessness. They’ve seen the world in all its bitter forms, lived for years with lumps in their throats because they didn’t know if they could make it in North America. When I talked to my dad about it years later, he said he would never forget the precarity. He knew he could lose everything he had. 

Today I’m trying to pry myself loose from the fear he felt. When I start to feel like I’m falling behind, I think about a story Khozema told me. Last summer, a few months before she quit her job, she was planning to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. The trip had been in the works for around two years; she was inspired by a friend who had reached the summit in 2020. She had it all planned out. Khozema, who is an experienced mountain climber and hiker, spent the summer training. She would fly to Tanzania in mid-August and stay with her friend in Moshi, the gateway city to Mount Kilimanjaro. Five days later, she would summit Africa’s tallest mountain alone. 

Then, in the first week of August, she got sick—a sore throat, a fever, a cough. Her rapid tests came back negative for COVID-19, and she took some cold meds to recover. By the time she arrived in Moshi, she felt mostly recovered but anxious. 

Three days later, Khozema started her first day of hiking. It was cold and windy as she trekked eight kilometres with a guide through dense forest, where tree roots curled on the ground and monkeys ambled between green vines thickly draped from branches. “Just stay strong,” she kept telling herself. “You’ll survive this—you’ve done a lot worse.” After a cold and restless night at camp, she continued her climb. The terrain flattened, and white tufts of clouds hovered over the rocks. Eleven kilometres later, she felt healthy and energetic, ready to summit the next day. 

On the third day, she woke with a fever. She walked out of her hut and vomited on the ground. Her head was spinning and she couldn’t finish breakfast. Her blood oxygen had dropped from a healthy level, above 95 per cent, to the low 80s. At that point, a person can begin to hallucinate, and organ damage becomes a possibility. “This is bad,” her guide told her. “Your body’s not absorbing oxygen as much as it should be.” 

Khozema hiked up a little further, to a lookout point. Her breath was short, and she stopped to vomit beside the trail, but she wanted to know that she’d tried. Half a kilometre later, she looked past the rocks and shrubbery to the arc of the summit she knew she wouldn’t reach, and she was proud.

Even though everyone at home was waiting for a picture of her at the peak, ruddy-faced and grinning, she knew she risked permanent injury if she ascended to where the air was too thin, the pressures on her body too high. So she turned around and began her descent. “Tough times should not break you,” she says. She knew she would come back to the mountain one day.

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 $29.99.

The post You’re Wrong About Gen Z appeared first on Macleans.ca.

When Rebecca Hay was a teenager in Calgary, her father gave her his 2007 Canon Rebel camera and taught her everything he knew about photography. She took photos of the people she saw and the places she went, and fell in love with the art form, fascinated by its ability to help her see the world from different perspectives.

After moving to Ottawa to attend university, Hay began working as a wedding photographer on the side to help pay her tuition. She contributed to a travel photography book on the city and shot portraits in her spare time. But photography was a hobby, not a career: after graduating university, Hay returned to Calgary to attend medical school.

In 2019, during her first year of residency in pediatrics, she was required to work about seven 26-hour shifts per month, along with regular day shifts, all of which left her with little time for rest or photography. She was exhausted, sleep-deprived and constantly on her feet. During rare moments of quiet in the hospital, Hay brought her camera to work. She sat down with friends and colleagues to photograph them and hear about their experiences in health care, sharing their stories on Instagram as part of a series called “26 hr.” It gave her a chance to talk to co-workers about what they were seeing in hospitals, and to share those stories with a wider audience.

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

In November of 2020, during an interview with pediatric resident Caitlin Marchak, the series took on a different meaning for Hay. After caring for her patients and seeing them on their worst days, Marchak said, she left the hospital feeling burnt out with little left to give to friends, family or herself. It was a feeling Hay had long struggled with herself but never talked about openly. “I knew then that I wanted to keep sharing these stories,” says Hay. “If someone could feel less alone because of them, then that would be worth it.”

Hay now lives in Ottawa, where she works as a fellow in pediatric critical care at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, or CHEO. She continues to document her colleagues’ experiences, including in a miniseries titled “Invisible Pandemic,” which is about the pediatric crisis in hospitals caused by the surge in respiratory viruses this past fall and early winter.

We spoke to some of the health-care workers Hay has photographed.

Janet Morrison, PICU charge nurse, Ottawa

“For a few months this past fall and early winter, we went from caring for seven patients to 20. We’re only staffed to take care of seven. It was chaos. We overflowed into a second ICU, opened a third, and eventually transferred patients from our ICU to other hospitals. We were constantly waiting for free beds to admit people who needed care and had been waiting in emergency for 24 hours or longer. I worried that I wasn’t supporting my staff the way I should. It was such a busy few months. We’re coming out of it now, but we still don’t have enough nurses to care for the seven patients we’re responsible for. I think you have to be a little bit crazy to work in the ICU. There are easier jobs, but there are none more rewarding.”

Gunjan Mhapankar, pediatric resident, Ottawa

“The surge of pediatric flu, RSV and COVID-19 cases tested the limits of our emergency room and the entire pediatric public health-care system. It also affected our mental health. It seemed like the rest of the world had moved on from the pandemic, but we were in this chaotic situation with more hospitalizations and fewer beds than in the peak of adult COVID-19 cases. No child should be denied a ventilator or a bed or respiratory support, yet these are the kind of decisions we had to make. We had to triage who most needed respiratory support, while watching other kids and waiting.

MORE: I was a nurse for 10 years in Scotland. So why can’t I get certified in Canada?

So many of our ICU staff were burnt out. Many people quit, and others went on extended leave to take care of their mental health. It’s not fair to rely on the altruism and resilience of these wonderful, generous people to compensate for a lack of government planning. That burden is something that every health-care worker carries with them: if I don’t show up to work tomorrow, the sick baby in the ICU is not going to get respiratory care. I remember having to say to a family, ‘I’m sorry. Two months ago your child would have met the criteria for an ICU bed, but now we just don’t have enough beds for them.’ It felt so ethically wrong. It was heartbreaking. You live with a very direct sense of responsibility. But it shouldn’t be up to good people to go above and beyond every day. It’s not a sustainable way to deliver care.”

Chelsea Cadieux, PICU nurse, Ottawa

“Late last year, I admitted a young girl after a bad car accident. Her younger brother had passed away in the same accident. Her mother was at the bedside with me, and she had to call her extended family to let them know what had happened. I remember hearing the screams that came through the phone. They replayed in my head for a long time after.

As a nurse, you try to be strong for your patients. I wanted to cry with them and hug them and let myself feel what they were feeling, but I couldn’t crumble on the ground. I had a job to do. That was the day I realized I needed to talk to someone about all the things I’d seen working in the hospital. But the problem with therapy is that even when you realize you need help, the benefits we have barely cover it. It’s really a pitfall in nursing. You’re expected to deal with all this trauma, but you’re not given the tools to cope with it.”

Christa Ramsay, PICU senior respiratory therapist, Ottawa

“I’ve been working at CHEO in the ICU for 23 years. Before the viral surge, whenever a child died, I always felt like my team and I had done everything we could to save their life. And if it was a life that couldn’t be saved, we hopefully made the dying process as painless and peaceful as possible.

During the surge, we were stretched so thin that it felt like we were never doing excellent work. We had dozens of kids, and we had to choose which ones we were going to treat first, knowing that prioritizing one might be detrimental to others. We just couldn’t do it all. And so rather than providing excellent, timely, thorough care, we were running around putting out fires constantly. I used to dread going into work. When I left, I would get in my car, cry the whole way home, pull into my garage and just sit there, crying some more. It was days upon days and weeks upon weeks of never feeling like I’d done a good job.”

Zoya Thawer, pediatric endocrinologist, Calgary

“The other day was really challenging. I got up at 5 a.m. to catch a ferry, then started my day in a busy clinic where I was helping out a colleague, and I was also on call for inpatients at the hospital. In the afternoon we had a lunch-and-learn, and it was the first time I’d sat down all day. Just as I was about to eat, I got a phone call about an urgent patient. By the time I attended to them and I was done sorting everything out, the afternoon clinic had started and I was back to work. Not only are you physically depleted when you’re working, but there’s also the mental burden of being on call—something could happen anytime that you have to respond to immediately. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t had my lunch or a proper break.

It can be really frustrating when people say, ‘Self-care is really important,’ but then when you actually look at your day, you’re like, ‘There’s nowhere I could have really taken any time for myself.’ And it’s because of how the system is structured and how much we’re expected to work. We talk a lot about burnout and how we can make people more resilient, but it’s really challenging when the system isn’t set up to support you. We’re overworked and understaffed with no time to take care of ourselves. If the system is failing us, there are very limited things the individual can do to make that better.”

The post An impossible job: What it’s like to work in a pediatric ICU appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Soon after I entered medicine in 2005, I realized that I was more interested in the human experience of illness than the illness itself. I completed a rotation in medical oncology while doing a combined MD and PhD in cancer research at the University of Toronto. The oncologist would talk to the patient about their cancer, their chances with treatment and so on—and then they would leave. It was the nurses and social workers who would stay to deal with questions like: “Oh my goodness, what am I going to tell my children?” I wanted to stay around for those conversations. I ended up specializing in cancer psychiatry at the University Health Network, or UHN, where most of my patients are dealing with cancer. What I find most engaging and meaningful is helping people deal with questions of life and death. 

RELATED: Most Canadians support medical assistance in dying. So why is it considered controversial?

When MAID became legal in Canada in 2016, hospitals scrambled, trying to figure out how to respond. I’m in the division of psychosocial oncology at UHN, and our department head, Gary Rodin, stepped up and said we would take on designing MAID protocols. His reasoning was that our department is used to helping people grapple with death—that’s our specialty. He asked if I would volunteer to head up UHN’s MAID framework, and I jumped at the chance.

As the head of UHN’S MAID program, I oversaw hundreds of cases. I also personally provided MAID numerous times. I can’t tell you how many, because I don’t keep track. They’re not trophies—this is usual care. I see a lot of death: 60 per cent of my patient population in routine clinical care die. I don’t keep track of how I help them die, whether by MAID or my regular psychosocial care. 

Being a MAID provider requires what I call exquisite professionalism: my personal values shouldn’t matter when it comes to how I assess a patient for MAID. Having said that, my opinion is that we shouldn’t be providing MAID for mental disorders—and more broadly than that, for chronic illness. I don’t think death should be society’s solution for all forms of suffering. Society needs to agree on what types of suffering are appropriate to respond to with MAID. If someone is suffering primarily because they can’t afford housing rather than directly from a qualifying medical condition, do we think that death is the appropriate solution for that? If your suffering is because you can’t afford your medication, or other structural vulnerabilities only indirectly related to a medical condition, is that a good reason for MAID? I personally think this is the medicalization of suffering, but I’m a servant of my country, and I will do what the public mandate demands. I’m just not sure we have that mandate.

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

I also find it maddening that the law itself is missing crucial safeguards for patients. The original MAID law stipulated, among other requirements, that a patient’s natural death has to be “reasonably foreseeable.” In 2021, this condition was successfully challenged in a court case, which created a second MAID track for people with serious and chronic (but not life-threatening) illness. This year, the law was set to expand to include patients whose sole reason for seeking MAID is mental illness. The government just announced that it would seek a one-year delay in the expansion to allow more time to prepare the health-care system. The delay was the right move. I’m part of a team developing guidelines and training for practitioners, and we need the time to finalize and disseminate this. This information and training wasn’t available in 2021, and I think this is the reason there have been some problematic cases.

The stakes are higher when you give MAID to someone who wouldn’t otherwise die. I was on call recently and was consulted to see a patient admitted to the hospital for chronic pain. This patient has a complex medical and psychiatric history, significant trauma and a lot of psychosocial vulnerability. They are lonely. The patient was told there is nothing further that could be done for their pain, and so they asked to apply for MAID.

I was not their MAID assessor, but I was asked to consult as a psychiatrist for depression and suicidality. The patient told me that if they didn’t feel quite as lonely, if they felt that anyone cared about them at all, they probably could tolerate their pain better. I expressed to this patient that I thought it would be a great loss to society if they died because they had contributed and still had a lot to offer. In other words, I expressed caring, which seemed to mean everything to this person. 

“I expressed caring, which seemed to mean everything.”

I did my best to advocate for getting this person into a study for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which I thought could be very helpful, but I wasn’t successful. There was no way they could afford it privately, since it costs thousands of dollars. This was so morally distressing to me. This person was willing to have the treatment, but couldn’t access it. I think it would be a tragedy if this lovely person went ahead with MAID. As far as I know, this person is now applying for MAID. I have no doubt in my mind that when they apply, they could be found eligible and receive it.

That case gives me so much distress. I have to fight with myself not to follow that patient and counsel them: hold on, a study might open, just give it a little more time. But I can’t take on every patient, and I don’t think society will ever be able to completely fill the gaps in access and resources. The law desperately needs a greater role for clinical perspective. Right now, MAID assessment is a checklist of legal requirements: you have to be considered capable of making your own decisions, be above 18 years of age and have a “grievous and irremediable” condition, among other stipulations. It’s about checking boxes. More than that, MAID assessors typically parachute into a patient’s life: they don’t typically have a long-term relationship with them. 

Crucially, the law does not require a clinician to sit with the patient and have a meaningful discussion about their desire for death—and what social and societal factors might be playing a part. I’m trying to put that lens into the education curriculum we’re developing for clinicians, but it needs to be written into the law to have the weight of a legal requirement. 

The MAID track for people without a terminal illness stipulates that the clinician must have “discussed with the person the reasonable and available means to relieve the person’s suffering, and agree that the person has given serious consideration to those means.” I don’t think that’s sufficient. It should say something like “the clinician has to agree that there have been reasonable attempts at treatment.” The practice guidelines and training will suggest this, but they are optional recommendations, and different jurisdictions and providers will adopt them unevenly.

Early on, I had a young patient who had cancer with a 65 per cent chance of cure. This person refused any treatment, and two other MAID assessors agreed they met all the eligibility criteria, in that they had a grievous and irremediable condition—it was irremediable because they didn’t want the treatments available. That’s what the law currently states: as long as the patient doesn’t want the treatment, their condition is considered irremediable—even if there are effective treatments.

But not treating a cancer with such a high chance of cure goes against medical practice standards. The doctors involved had a lot of moral distress about this person’s request for MAID. This person signed consent for me to share their story, but I feel differently about it than they did. They saw it as an expression of their autonomy; I saw it as dystopian.

This person organized a goodbye party. They invited all their friends to the hospital atrium and ordered pizza, calling it a reverse birthday party. It was a large gathering of friends. They had about eight people in the room where I was going to administer MAID. They got into a hospital bed, and everyone in the room laid a hand on them. There was so much crying in the room, including from their parents. 

The IV was set up and prepared. “This is the very last time I’ll ask you this,” I said. “Are you sure?” They looked at me and said yes. And then the syringes went in, one after the other. The whole thing usually takes about five minutes, although it took longer than usual in this case because the patient was otherwise young and healthy. Eventually their heart stopped, I left the room and did my usual post-MAID routine: called the coroner, reported the death and filled out the paperwork. We always have social workers and spiritual care available for the family and friends, but this time no one asked for additional support. After the coroner cleared everything, they started drifting off one by one.

I didn’t regret it at first. But when I started thinking deeply about how to better safeguard this process, I regretted ending this young person’s life. I just parachuted in, I didn’t know this patient. And I didn’t take the time to have a meaningful discussion with them. I didn’t sit down and say, “Why don’t you just try this treatment? If it’s as bad as you think it’s going to be, MAID will be available.” MAID was so new then, and we were all so focused on patient autonomy. The current law has no place for clinical judgement, and no stipulation for meaningful conversation. If it did, this person may be alive today.

MORE: Inside Canada’s gymnastics abuse scandal

Gaps in the law become a bigger problem with mental disorders. It’s not at all clear, even for a practising psychiatrist like me, what to do for a patient with a mental illness who asks to die. I recently had a patient with chronic depression who was planning to apply for MAID until we finally found an effective treatment. They asked me how requests in patients with depression would eventually be assessed. I said we’d have to distinguish a rational desire to die from one driven by depression, and they replied, “But why would I want to die if it wasn’t because of the depression?” That gave me pause. At the very least, I think we need to prompt clinicians to exercise clinical judgment—both the clinician and the patient should feel that there have been reasonable attempts at treatment. And rather than just checking boxes, we should have to sit down and have a meaningful conversation about the desire for death. 

Finally, there needs to be a clear temporal timeframe in the law assigned to the phrase “reasonably foreseeable natural death.” This was part of the original law, which was very Canadian—it was purposefully vague so as not to upset anybody. But in practice, providers have interpreted this to mean anything from a few months for terminal illness to several years for chronic illness. The MAID track for people who don’t have a reasonably foreseeable natural death is more safeguarded, including a 90-day waiting period and required expertise on the condition underlying the request. It’s not safe clinical practice for people who potentially have years to live to bypass these safeguards.

I think we have forgotten, over the past several years, that our roles as health care providers is to help patients make the best decisions for themselves. I’m not trying to deny patient autonomy—it’s their decision—but I don’t think I should blindly defer to autonomy. It’s so nuanced, because again, I have to keep my personal value system out of it. Helping someone die, especially when they wouldn’t otherwise, shouldn’t be a matter of checking things off a list. 

The post I am a MAID provider. It’s the most meaningful—and maddening—work I do. Here’s why. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

I got into family medicine in a roundabout way. In my 20s, I did my graduate studies in philosophy in the United States, and after that, I spent nine years working in management and software consulting, which had me on the road nearly 50 weeks out of the year. In 2002, my husband accepted a teaching position at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, so we decided to move to nearby South Frontenac township. At that point, I was 39 years old and had grown disenchanted with my career. I wanted to travel less and make more of a difference in my community. Even back then, I was reading stories about a shortage of family doctors, so in 2009, I enrolled in Queen’s School of Medicine.

I was the only first-year student with kids: ours were five and one, and our third came along in year two. Motherhood forced me to become really good at time management. For four years, I diligently chipped away at my assignments, forgoing most parties and social events in favour of time with my young family. After another two years of residency, I completed my studies in 2015. After graduation, I was recruited by a medical clinic in Verona, a 2,000-person town a half-hour north of Kingston. I was replacing an older woman who was retiring. Despite being one of just two family doctors on staff caring for 1,200 patients, it sounded like a dream job. Early on, it was.

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

Verona is a tight-knit community. Soon after I started working, patients began approaching me in public places, like the grocery store, stopping to say hello and, sometimes, asking me about x-ray results. Things got complicated when the clinic’s only other physician decided to return to residency. We had nobody in the pipeline to take his place. Suddenly, I found myself responsible for his patients in addition to my own—2,500 people in total. The workload was daunting, but what other choice did I have? I couldn’t leave Verona’s community without a family doctor, many of whom are elderly and couldn’t commute to Kingston for appointments. If I left, I’d also be putting our staff—a registered nurse, an officer manager, nurse practitioner and four others—in a tight financial spot. We need patient fees to pay our lease, salaries and equipment. In the end, I doubled my roster and promised myself I’d recruit a second doctor as soon as I could.

My first year as a solo doctor was particularly brutal: I worked 80 hours or more every week. I went months without taking a single day off. I enjoyed one weekday supper with my family during that entire year, and I rarely saw my own kids. I’d usually get home after they went to sleep. It’s been seven years and I’m still the only family doctor in Verona, though, now that I know my patients (and their charts) so well, I’ve gotten my weekly commitment down to roughly 65 hours. I see patients in-person (or online). I file paperwork, read bloodwork and analyze reports from specialists. On top of that, there’s the administrative work of managing office supplies, troubleshooting IT issues, shovelling snow, coordinating vaccine clinics and trying to find back-up when staff members (or their children) are sick. I have no choice but to wear a lot of hats. 

RELATED: I was a nurse for 10 years in Scotland. So why can’t I get certified in Canada?

At this point, I’m stretched too thin to be the kind of doctor I want to be; I have to sacrifice quality for the sake of quantity. I receive periodic reports on how I stack up to other family doctors, in my region and across Ontario, on delivery of colon-cancer screening, mammograms, flu shots and other services. I’m below average on a few of them. I’m often too busy reacting to problems to be proactive with preventative measures—and I hate that. It pains me to know that there are likely patients out there with cancers going undetected, ones that could be caught and treated early, because I have no time to reach out.

What hurts the most is that we’ve seen how much of a positive impact our clinic has when we have the bandwidth. About a year ago, a patient came in who had been having difficulty swallowing for months. They had risk factors for cancers of the gastrointestinal tract, so we immediately ordered tests and sent off a referral for an endoscopy. We were able to get them in to see a specialist right away—a good thing because there was, in fact, a problem. Since treatment, that patient is doing incredibly well. But for these seven years, our clinic has failed to provide timely care more than it’s succeeded.

Our phones ring non-stop, and it breaks my heart. Some calls fall through, and we often have no choice but to refer some of our patients to the ER in Kingston. Some patients have become so frustrated with our wait times that they have gotten snarky and abusive with our staff. I’ve started writing letters to them, trying to help them understand the stress we’re under. I sometimes tell them that they’re welcome to seek out primary care elsewhere if they are tired of waiting. Sometimes, I lose my cool, too. I like to think those moments are rare, but the truth is that, most days, I have to psych myself up to work because my tank is empty.

I’ve tried all kinds of ways to recruit a second family physician. I’ve published advertisements on HealthforceOntario and posted on online forums. I’ve even invited medical students to stay at my house to see if working in a small town is a good choice for them. There were a few close calls: one visiting doctor entertained us, but then chose a more urban hospital. Another eventually decided to specialize in obstetrics. A lot of new doctors in Canada are realizing that the family-doctor path often comes with a 2,000-patient roster, so they decide to specialize in something else.

Recruiting people to Verona, specifically, is an uphill battle. Nearby cities like Kingston can afford to offer six-figure signing bonuses, and communities more rural than ours (like Northbrook and Sharbot Lake) can do the same because they qualify for provincial rurality funding. Verona is in the middle—not big or small enough to do either. Why would a medical student who is probably $200,000 in debt come work with me if they can make much more money anywhere else? I sometimes think I’ll be stuck with this unsustainable burden forever.

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

I say “forever” because, if things stay the way they are, I don’t see how I could ever quit or retire. If I did that, I’d be leaving 2,500 patients without care. That’s a huge responsibility, one I cannot convince myself to shirk. The same could be said if I suffered an accident. For now, all I can do is continue my recruitment efforts, and hope that more family doctors enter the workforce. For that to happen, we need a better funding structure and more encouragement towards family medicine within Canadian medical schools. I’ve noticed that much of the med-school curriculum is taught by specialists, some of whom disparage—implicitly or explicitly—physicians who are just GPs. Instead, we need to communicate to students that family doctors are essential. And that, without more physicians entering longitudinal primary care in the coming years, we will face the complete collapse of our health care system— undetected heart attacks, strokes and cancers; a profound deterioration of Canadians’ mental health; and an angry, sick population looking for someone to blame for their misery.  

I often think of what would happen to Verona if it had no clinic. Recently, a woman came into my office with a sore chest and a heavy left arm. She was not feeling well, but she didn’t want to bother anyone—or drive all the way to Kingston, for that matter. We did an electrocardiogram because I was concerned she was having a heart attack. I was right; she was. Because we called an ambulance to get her to Kingston, she was treated on time. I don’t know if that woman would have survived had we not been close by.

It’s those moments that remind me of the satisfaction and joys of family medicine. I hope new doctors can find that same value in it. Canada’s family doctors are drinking from a fire hydrant right now, but we still have good days—days when patients come to our clinic with an issue, when I can see them immediately and I get to say: Yes! That’s how it’s supposed to work. In those rare instances, I remember that this is my dream job, even seven hard years in. I’m trying to be optimistic that, 10 or 15 years from now, the situation will be different, and that I will be able to retire, knowing that when I leave my patients, they’ll be in good hands.

—As told to Alex Cyr

The post Thousands of patients. No help. Meet the lone family doctor of Verona, Ontario. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Before the pandemic, my 74-year-old husband, Wayne, was dealing with some health issues. He was in the early stages of kidney failure and was wheelchair-bound due to severe spinal stenosis. He had a personal support worker to help with his care, but was otherwise active, meeting up with friends or tinkering with his 1940s Ford car with a friend’s son. His immune system was compromised, like anyone with a chronic illness, but we were able to maintain a social life as long as we were careful.

Wayne is a retired millwright machinist, and his favourite hobby is restoring antique cars. If I left him in his garage all day with food and coffee, he’d be quite content. I’m a retired nurse and, unlike Wayne, I’m fairly social: pre-pandemic, I’d go on day trips with friends to theatres, galleries, wineries and gardening centres. When I wasn’t day-tripping, I was exploring other interests—taking art classes and doing yoga. Together, Wayne and I enjoyed nights out to the movies or dinner. Our home in Georgina, Ontario, was often filled with laughter and the sounds of clinking glasses over meals and celebrations. We regularly travelled to Nova Scotia—both of our families are from Cape Breton—and I stayed at a rented cottage with our grandkids north of Huntsville each summer. While Wayne wasn’t as busy as I was, he found time to visit flea markets and meet up with his car buddies.

When COVID hit, our lives changed like everyone else’s. I ordered groceries online instead of heading to the store. We skipped Christmas in 2020 and, the following year, we exchanged gifts in our garage with our two adult sons, their spouses and our five grandkids. Like most people, we stayed six feet apart, waving to our kids and grandkids in the driveway. That was tough. It’s great to see family, but it’s hard not to be able to hug them. We missed having the grandkids over for sleepovers and taking trips to the zoo. The closest interaction I had with them was collecting dishes and exchanging empty casserole pans for filled ones at the end of the driveway.

We knew the isolation was temporary so we pushed through. We all got our vaccinations when they became available. As COVID cases finally dropped in early to mid 2022, we began inviting family and a small number of friends back into our home. I started attending physically distanced fitness classes, and Wayne went out for breakfast with friends, eating at restaurants that had outdoor seating.

That changed last September. During a visit, our PSW noticed that Wayne seemed confused and had developed a facial droop. He was hospitalized that day for acute kidney failure, a stroke and septicemia (a bacterial infection in the bloodstream). If septicemia progresses to septic shock, it has a mortality rate of about 50 per cent. In the hospital, he contracted COVID-19 and became severely ill. We were terrified.

After two hospital transfers and some rehabilitation, Wayne was discharged at the end of December. It felt like a miracle, but he wasn’t in the clear. He left the hospital significantly immunocompromised, with end-stage kidney failure, and has yet to regain his strength or energy. The doctors advised us to be extremely vigilant with our isolation and disease prevention protocols. If he catches something, his condition could become critical instantly.

Everyone around us has moved on, but for us it feels like March of 2020 all over again. Once again, I’m ordering groceries online to limit my chances of bringing an infection home. I don’t attend fitness or online cooking classes anymore and have stopped gardening to make more time to care for Wayne. Our only outings together are to his dialysis appointments, which can take up to eight hours. I leave the house alone to go to the pharmacy to get Wayne’s medication. Occasionally I venture out for a walk in our neighbourhood.

Aside from visits from our vaccinated sons, their families and the PSWs who help with Wayne’s care, we’re almost fully isolated from the outside world. The risk of infection is simply too high. I know it’s hard for Wayne. Friends want to visit, but they’re afraid of passing something along to him, and we respect that.

The isolation is tiresome and frustrating. One day, I realized all I had consumed was a bag of cookies and a cup of tea. It’s not that I wasn’t hungry—I just forgot to eat. My sleep is interrupted most nights, and I wake up often. I’m cranky the next day because of it. I noticed Wayne has gone from being relatively quiet to almost silent. He has some cognitive loss from a previous stroke, but when he’s asked questions, he often doesn’t respond. His sleep is broken too, and sometimes he wakes up three times a night. Other than watching TV all day—from 6 a.m. to after midnight—he has little to no interest in developing new hobbies. Recently, after lots of nudging, he began reading e-books online. But otherwise, he seems apathetic to trying anything new.

I sometimes wonder if Wayne’s disease weighs heavier on him because of the isolation. We isolate to maintain his physical health, and that’s a choice we’ve made together: getting sick when you’re already immunocompromised is a terrifying thought. But I’d bet that older adults who are immunocompromised would risk getting sick from a careful social interaction over the safety of strict isolation. Wayne never loved socializing, and he’s no different now—but I see him light up when our family visits and the grandkids tell him about their hockey games, or when he chats with the PSWs who help with his care. We’re social beings. We need those interactions to survive. What quality of life is offered to those who are completely shut out from the rest of the world?

Wayne and I are still trying to figure that out. We could put our masks on and take other precautions, but where could we go? None of our family or friends have wheelchair-accessible homes, so we’re left with public places like malls and restaurants, which are out of the question because of the high infection risks they pose. Our only option is to cautiously welcome vaccinated and healthy friends and family into our home. And we would. But between friends cancelling because they’ve gotten sick and others too afraid of getting Wayne sick, our social circle has slowly grown smaller.

We have found ways to cope. I make a plan at the beginning of each day, organizing things like meals and activities. On our dialysis days, for example, I try to get three meals in before we leave in the afternoon to ensure Wayne gets his protein for the day. In between, I pack a comfort bag for us: tea, snacks, a blanket, a book and some items to mend. We’ve taken up birdwatching together, which is quite fun. Wayne’s room has a panoramic view of the outdoors, and we’ve seen everything from cardinals on our feeder to a hawk enjoying a meal of finches.

I still crave that social interaction with our friends and family, though. I miss spontaneous phone calls from them: “We’re coming over for dinner on Friday, coffee on Tuesday.” I miss fitness classes with friends, where we motivate one another when all we want to do is quit: “Hold that pose!” “One more rep!” “Keep pedalling!” I hope in some way or another, we can get back to all that. But for now, we’ll continue on with our isolation, pushing safely against its boundaries every now and then to maintain some sense of normalcy.

—As told to Arisa Valyear 

The post My husband is immunocompromised—and we’re still quarantining. Here’s what it’s like. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In 2008, the border town of Ciudad Juarez, where I lived with my wife and three children, was the epicentre of Mexico’s war on drugs. Each month, people were slaughtered by the hundreds. At the time, I worked as a senior correspondent for Grupo Reforma, an influential media company. In August of 2008, a reliable source warned me that I was on a cartel’s hit list in retaliation for exposing the corrupt relationships between government officials and criminal organizations. I’d spent many years as a reporter in a dangerous region; these threats were common.

Things escalated one September afternoon. I heard the front door slam and my wife yell for me to come downstairs quickly. I found her pale and shaking, pointing toward the street. She told me she’d been followed by two men in a minivan, who threatened her outside our house. The target on my back had finally moved to my wife and children.

We needed to escape as soon as possible. I didn’t want to go to the U.S. because I knew the cartel had tentacles there. Instead, we fled to Canada and claimed refugee status. During our first week in this country, we stayed in a hotel in the suburbs of Langley, B.C. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints helped us move into an old semi-detached house in Delta and covered two months’ rent, also supplying some furniture and clothes. Every month, my wife and I left our home at 5:30 a.m. to secure a spot in line at the local food bank. We identified the best thrift stores in the area and which neighbourhoods left out furniture in good condition. My children received donated Christmas gifts. 

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

As refugee claimants, we spent our early months navigating provincial and federal offices, constantly relying on charity and governmental assistance to stay afloat. It took five years for us to transition from protected persons to permanent residents to Canadian citizens. Our temporary social security during the early years restricted our work options and left us taking survival jobs, like janitorial work. Back in Ciudad Juárez, my wife held a managerial position; in Vancouver, she worked as a housekeeper from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. while I took care of our children and prepared the evidence file for our immigration hearings. We also worked together as janitors. Every night, we ate a quick meal before cleaning buildings across the city, often returning home at 2 a.m. While we were out, my eldest son put his siblings to bed. He was 17 years old at the time. 

In 2011, my family and I moved to Toronto, where I completed two master’s degrees in the hope that they’d help me succeed in Canada’s workforce. After accumulating considerable student-loan debt, I was quickly disillusioned, one rejection email at a time. In 2015, the Toronto Star hired me as a content editor for the Star Touch app. After the project failed, I was among the first to be laid off. From there, another fellowship and casual gigs helped cover some of our family’s bills.

Things were hard. They got harder one cold morning in November of 2016, when my world stopped on the 12th floor of Mount Sinai Hospital. A doctor’s soft voice informed me that my wife had cancer, a rare type of sarcoma on her left leg. My children grew up knowing my work was dangerous. Suddenly, we had a new threat to our family. Eleven rounds of chemo, 22 sessions of radiation and two major surgeries later, my wife was in remission. At last, a triumph. 

MORE: When I moved to Canada from Syria, I could finally be myself

Last September, I signed a contract to work as a part-time weekend janitor at a Toronto supermarket. I was thought to be too unqualified to work for the government and too unskilled to join a private company, even with my master’s degrees. The circle came to a close—another painful reminder of time spent looking, unsuccessfully, for a better future. 

Fourteen years after moving to Canada, I’m still trying to find work that makes use of my education. I’ve published a book about organized crime and continued to write dozens of cover letters and resumés, though I’m always rejected. I keep searching for a way to repay this country as an educated immigrant, experienced professional and grateful refugee. All I ask is to be allowed to give back with all that I am.

This article appears in print in the February 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 I escaped Mexico’s cartels. Fourteen years later, the only work I can find is as a janitor. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

David Novog is the director of the Institute for Energy Studies and a professor of engineering physics at McMaster University.

As a teenager in the ’80s, long before anyone cared much about climate change, I did a science project that showed the tremendous amount of power that could be produced from just a tiny amount of uranium. Even then, I knew fossil fuels were finite and that we would one day need an alternative source of energy. Renewables like hydro, wind and solar are great, but we shouldn’t forget the reliable, low-emissions standby that is nuclear power. People have plenty of reservations about nuclear: it’s scary, it’s costly and what to do with all that waste? And yet there’s no path to net zero by 2050 without it. Excitement is building around one model of reactor in particular. It just might require Canadians to think smaller.

Small modular reactors, also known as SMRs, function in much the same way as larger reactors—but at a fraction of the size. The science remains the same: an atom-​splitting process, known as nuclear fission, generates a huge amount of heat, which is then converted into steam that drives turbines that electrify our cities. But where traditional reactors can generate between 600 and 1,000 megawatts of electrical energy, SMRs generate less than 300—still enough to power communities of up to 10,000 people for a decade. The “modular” part means that SMRs can be made in factories and transported by truck, train or barge and assembled wherever they’re needed. The cores of many SMR reactors aren’t much bigger than the average office desk.

Military aircraft carriers and submarines have been using SMRs for more than 50 years. The new idea is to deploy them for commercial electricity production. Canada’s grids are fairly green already, depending on where you live. (Ontario, B.C. and Quebec, for example, are abundant in hydro and other forms of low-carbon electricity.) But we need to cut fossil fuels in many other areas immediately—especially in high-emissions industries like transportation, agriculture and heating, which accounts for two-thirds of Canada’s carbon footprint. To do so, we’ll need to double or triple our electricity generation in the next 20 to 30 years. Right now, we don’t have the ability to swiftly double Canada’s hydro capacity. That’s where SMRs come in.

READ: Why we need to embrace the future of farm-tech

New SMR-centric projects are popping up all over the place. In the States, Portland’s NuScale Power recently got the green light from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build its own model, a billion-dollar design. In the U.K., Rolls-Royce has designed an SMR that could power a city the size of Leeds. 

The Canadian government is also investing in SMRs: in 2020, it released Canada’s SMR Action Plan, which outlined recommendations for nuclear-waste disposal, regulation and partnerships with Indigenous communities. The Canada Infrastructure Bank recently struck a $970-million deal with Ontario Power Generation, or OPG—which is responsible for more than half of the province’s power generation—to build the country’s first SMR right next door to the existing 3,500-megawatt Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Clarington, Ontario. (OPG estimates that its new reactor will produce 740,000 fewer tons of greenhouse gas every year than existing reactor models, a figure equivalent to the emissions of nearly 160,000 gas cars.) The site is large enough to eventually house four SMRs of a similar size. Provinces like New Brunswick are already busy conducting their own impact assessments. 

There are no silver bullets in the energy world. In large economies with extensive resource and manufacturing sectors, like Canada, you need a mix of power sources. This is how I explain it to my students: you need a fossil-fuel-free backbone of energy that can be your go-to when other sources aren’t available, like solar panels on a cloudy day. In many countries, nuclear power serves as that backbone, and does so with one tenth of the emissions of fossil fuels.

For all of its benefits, nuclear is still a divisive topic. Whenever I speak on the subject, the same two flags get raised: cost and safety. The cost issue isn’t unique to nuclear reactors; many large construction projects are just as expensive and often go off the rails. SMRs on the smaller side could cost anywhere from $300 million to $500 million, but the price tag could drop as low as $150 million for subsequent reactors—especially as production becomes more streamlined. Because SMRs can be fabricated in factories, they won’t be delayed or run over budget to the same extent as other outdoor builds. On the safety side, people are well aware of the devastating impacts of Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. These were tragedies, full stop. But SMR reactors are much more compact, and therefore contain much less radioactive material, so there’s less potential for widespread contamination in the unlikely event of an accident. Put simply: an SMR’s core could never melt in the way Fukushima’s did.

Lots of people have an image in their minds of unsightly reactors protected by barbed wire and armed guards. At McMaster University, where I work, we have a five-megawatt research reactor on campus, which is used to produce radioisotopes for use in hospitals in Canada and abroad. The building is windowless and half of it is underground, so every day, students walk right by it as though it were a city-owned swimming pool. There’s no barbed wire; there are no guards. If more Canadians could experience that small footprint for themselves, they might be more willing to embrace reactors, minuscule or large. In fact, communities with existing reactors tend to be the most supportive of nuclear technology.

MORE: The Big Idea: Treat employees like people

I don’t believe that SMRs should be installed in every single Canadian town. Lots of grids across the country are already well-served by hydro, but SMRs could fill existing hydro gaps in, say, remote northern communities. Whether or not an SMR is deployed depends on what communities want to do with them: one SMR could heat a group of greenhouses to grow food; a larger one could power a fleet of buses, purify water or sell excess steam and hydrogen for industrial use (and extra income).

It’s estimated that the global nuclear industry could gross $150 billion annually by 2040. The first SMRs may be operable within the next five to 10 years, but it will take some time to produce them in quantities large enough to make a dent in Canada’s emissions. To those who argue that the environment will be in much worse shape by the time we’re able to roll out these mini reactors en masse, I would say it’s nonsense to discount any workable technology, especially now. I would have liked to have seen this swell of enthusiasm 20 years ago, but maybe it took widespread acknowledgment of the seriousness of the climate crisis for us to recognize that we need all power sources on deck. 

The government is listening: in June, I spoke about SMRs at a parliamentary committee on nuclear energy innovations. As engineers, we’re not often called to give input directly to politicians, but these tiny reactors have the potential to influence environmental outcomes for the next 30 years. Small, yes, but mighty.

This article appears in print in the February 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 The Big Idea: Bring Back Nuclear Power appeared first on Macleans.ca.

When I was growing up in Edinburgh, Scotland, my parents bought me a toy nursing kit with a plastic stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff. I would press the stethoscope to my friends’ chests and listening to their heartbeats. At just five years old, I was obsessed with becoming a nurse.

After high school, I enrolled in a three-year nursing program at Edinburgh Napier University. I already knew I wanted to work with kids and did a placement in a pediatric surgical ward, where I changed diapers and recorded heart rates. I enjoyed the work, but it was challenging: some shifts we had to work 12 hours straight.

When I graduated in October 2007, I got my first job in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of a general hospital. I looked after three babies each shift and was responsible for administering medications, monitoring vitals and communicating with parents and doctors. It was daunting to work with such small and fragile babies, but as I gained more experience, I became better at my job. In the second NICU that I worked at, there was a baby girl born premature at just 24 weeks. She needed machines to help her breathe and antibiotics to prevent infection because her immune system wasn’t strong. She would thrive one day and get worse the next. Most babies with complex needs age out of the NICU after a few months, but she never grew enough to be transferred to a children’s hospital. I did everything for her, from administering her medications to updating her care plan to monitoring her oxygen levels. After six months, she was finally well enough to go home and it was an incredible and rewarding feeling to see her healthy again.

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

There are few general hospitals in Scotland that have NICUs offering the kind of complex care I wanted to provide. By 2016, I had already worked at two of them and was promoted to senior nurse. Advancing higher would have meant more paperwork and less time spent with patients, and I wasn’t interested in management positions. Where do I go now? I asked myself. Ten years into my career, I was at the top of the pay scale, yet I was only making $57,000 a year.

Over the years, I had heard countless colleagues describe their experiences working abroad in New Zealand, Australia, and the Middle East. I wanted to leave Scotland, but I couldn’t muster the courage to do it until I met my now-husband, Max McCoy, in 2013. He shared my dream to explore other countries, so in 2016, we decided to immigrate to Canada. My father-in-law lives in Philadelphia, and we had friends in Chicago and Sault Ste. Marie, so we settled on Ontario.

Through my research, I’d discovered that nurses in Canada are better paid than they are in Scotland. There are many hospitals with NICUs across the country, and the idea of practising in different provinces, in a vast and diverse country, appealed to me. I realized I would have to complete some retraining, but I thought, given my experience, it would be relatively easy to get certified. I had no idea how hard it would be until I got here.

First, I submitted an application to the National Nursing Assessment Service, or NNAS, a not-for-profit that processes the documents internationally trained nurses need to submit in order to practise in Canada. The NNAS evaluates your documents, including your education and employment history. Then it sends your file to the nursing regulation body in your province—in my case, the College of Nurses of Ontario—which decides what further education or training you’ll need on a case-by-case basis, if any, before you’re able to write the national nursing exam. I spent hours scouring online websites, forums, and social media, but couldn’t find any consistent information about the process for internationally trained nurses to become licensed in Canada.

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

We started our application for a permanent residency visa in early 2017. Most of the points on our visa application came from my nursing qualifications as an RN with 10 years of NICU experience. We landed in the summer of 2018 at Toronto Pearson Airport and for the first four months here, we lived all over Ontario. We earned a living by house-sitting for people we connected with online who were going on on holiday and needed someone to look after their pets. We bought a truck and a trailer to sleep in when we weren’t house-sitting and drove to Port Elgin, Fort Erie and Sault Ste. Marie. Exploring Ontario felt like a dream. We eventually rented a room in a house in London, Ontario. To pay the bills, my husband and I got jobs at a sales company in May of 2019—he started as a marketing manager and I worked as a customer service representative.

For a year and a half after I arrived, I received no update on my application to the College of Nurses of Ontario. In the summer of 2019, the college finally called. The nurse on the line admitted she didn’t know how to upskill me or what I would need to become a qualified nurse. She told me I could start by taking four courses, each 10 weeks long, costing about $1,100 per course. The deadline for the semester starting that fall had already passed, so I waited to apply the following year. I pooled together CERB payments and savings and was able to register for the courses in September of 2020. I completed them the following summer.

MORE: I’ve only been a nurse for eight months. The chaos is killing me.

The next step to getting licensed was passing the NCLEX-RN exam, which nursing students trained in North America and internationally trained nurses are required to write. Each attempt cost $400. Since I specialized in paediatrics—choosing your specialty early is standard in Scotland—my knowledge wasn’t broad enough for the test. I had to teach myself four years’ worth of adult nursing education in a matter of months. After failing my first attempt, I hired a tutor. I did better on my second try, but still failed. I stopped seeing my friends and spent every weekend studying. The test asked about drugs I had never heard of, signs and symptoms for diseases common in adults, and the disease process in adult patients.

After I failed the test for a third time, I felt like asking, “What do you want from me?” I was mentally exhausted and financially drained. Between multiple exams, registration and application fees, I spent about $7,000 trying to get licensed. I’ve since given up on nursing—it’s the only career I’ve ever wanted but I just don’t have any fight left in me. I watched from the sidelines as doctors and nurses experienced staffing shortages during the pandemic. I heard them cry out for more nurses and saw how surgery backlogs and long ER wait times hurt patients. I was scared of contracting COVID-19, but it was frustrating to only watch when I knew I could help.

I’m now a full-time dog trainer at Doggo Den, a dog-training company I started with my husband in 2021. We’ve always loved dogs and hope to expand our business to work with rescues and open a private dog park. In the process of building our business, we’ve also built a community of friends in London. I wish I could have continued my nursing career, but if I knew then what I know now, I still would have come to Canada.

Reading a book and answering multiple-choice questions correctly doesn’t make you a competent nurse. You learn that on the job, and I have plenty of experience on that front. If Canada wants internationally trained nurses to help alleviate the shortage, it needs to revise its licensing system and take their experience into consideration. It shouldn’t be this hard.

—As Told To Leila El Shennawy

The post I was a nurse for 10 years in Scotland. So why can’t I get certified in Canada? appeared first on Macleans.ca.