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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.

Nisha never doubted her family’s faith in her. Growing up as the youngest child in a big family in India’s Punjab state, Nisha—who agreed to speak with me if I didn’t use her last name—always had her sights set on bigger things. After she graduated high school, her family championed her decision to get a bachelor’s degree in education at a nearby university. They were proud when she found a job in a local school teaching English and social studies. Despite the low pay—10,000 rupees per month, or about $150—Nisha cherished the opportunity to educate her young students, who ranged in age from 10 to 18 years old.

In 2020, when Nisha was 26, she floated the idea of returning to school for a diploma in early childhood education. Her family kept an open mind—even though she wanted to study in Canada, 11,000 kilometres away. The field was in her wheelhouse, and she was confident that if she enrolled in a program with an internship, the practical experience would put her in high demand as a skilled educator in Canada, the United States or Europe. An international education was key to those opportunities. Canada was a no-brainer: it had a reputation as safe and welcoming, and most of Nisha’s acquaintances who studied abroad went there. 

Because she didn’t know much about the country, she approached one of the countless local education agents whose job it was to advise prospective students on international schools, steer them to the appropriate programs and help them with the application process. Nisha’s agent worked with IDP, a well-known global student recruitment outfit. He recommended M College, a small private institution in Montreal. Nisha had never heard of it, but the recruiter assured her it was the best fit—it had the right classes, would provide her with a laptop and, importantly, refund her fees if her Canadian study permit was denied.

The problem was the tuition: $14,852, roughly six times the average annual salary in India. After thinking it over, one of Nisha’s brothers decided he would remortgage the apartment where Nisha lived with 11 family members. If her brother had any doubts, he didn’t let on. Nisha wanted this more than anything.

First she had to satisfy the multitude of bureaucratic requirements that Canada asks of international students, beginning with an acceptance letter from M College, her “designated learning institution.” (Every province and territory except Nunavut maintains a list of schools it has approved to accept international students.) Then she had to apply for a Quebec Acceptance Certificate, required to study in the province. She had to demonstrate that she had $10,000 available to cover living expenses. Her federal study permit application demanded a passport, biometric information (fingerprints), a clean bill of health, a passing grade on an English proficiency test and a clear criminal background check. Finally, she had to write a statement of purpose to convince the federal government she wasn’t using her studies as a back door into Canada—that she wouldn’t stay illegally after she finished.

Nisha jumped diligently through each hoop, hoping to arrive and start studying in May of 2020. After COVID-19 halted international travel, she set her sights on the fall semester instead and took advantage of a government program called the Student Direct Stream. In exchange for paying her entire tuition up front—an enormous sum for her family—the government would expedite her study permit. Then, in July, the government announced a new program: a two-stage approval process. If Nisha’s application passed muster at first glance, she’d get an “approval in principle,” allowing her to begin studying online while the rest of the application was assessed.

In September, Nisha received that critical approval in principle, clearing her to study. Two months later, she started a fast-tracked program in early childhood education: one year, three semesters. She was still hopeful she’d complete most of it in Canada, where she’d meet new people and have new experiences that might help pave the way for a Canadian work permit after graduation. She was acing her courses, and soon the life she’d imagined no longer seemed so far away.

That was more than two years ago. Today, Nisha has still not set foot in Canada—and she probably never will. In January of 2022, M College filed for creditor protection. Months later, it shut down permanently, along with two other private colleges operated by the same scandal-plagued Montreal family. Instead of completing a work placement in a Quebec school or daycare, Nisha is still living in Punjab, one of hundreds of students whose big dreams imploded along with the colleges they’d trusted. “Some families had to sell their land to pay for college,” says Nisha. “Some students were on the edge of suicide. Many of us felt ashamed, helpless, wondering how we could have let this happen.”

***

For more than a decade, the feds have been pitching the world’s young people on a pie-in-the-sky vision of the Canadian Dream, branding the country as a land of tolerance, opportunity and first-rate education.

In 2012, the federal government declared its intention to double the number of international students to 450,000 within the next decade. The following year, the government committed to an ongoing annual expenditure of $5 million, largely to be spent on advertising and promotion: glossy promotional videos, higher-ed fairs and online marketing. In 2016 it launched the EduCanada website and brand (tagline: “A world of possibilities”), plastered with feel-good messaging about Canada’s cultural diversity and welcoming nature. And in 2019, the government announced nearly $150 million in spending over five years, including $29.5 million for targeted digital advertising alone. 

These efforts have paid off enormously. The federal government estimated that in 2018, international students spent $21.6 billion on tuition, accommodation and other expenses—an economic infusion supporting 170,000 domestic jobs and exceeding the impact of major exports like lumber, auto parts and aircraft. At that point, foreign students contributed nearly 40 per cent of tuition revenues at Canadian universities. Those numbers may well be higher now; as of 2022, international student enrolments in Canada surpassed 600,000, far exceeding the government’s 2012 targets.

And well-known public institutions aren’t the only schools benefiting from the boom. As the cohort of students travelling to Canada has swelled, so has the number of small, private-sector colleges emerging to capitalize on them. Many operate out of inauspicious-looking storefronts, strip malls and office parks, where they specialize in short-term programs with clear paths to the workforce: accounting, secretarial studies, IT support, truck driving.

And their numbers are growing fast. In Quebec, those include 48 non-subsidized private colleges in 2022, up from 28 in 2015. (Non-subsidized schools are similar to for-profit career colleges found in other provinces.) The number of study permits issued to international students in the province has more than doubled from 4,900 between 2016 and 2018 to 11,500 between 2019 and 2021.

The international student explosion of the past decade has created fertile ground for shoddy schools and fraud artists. “Money drives these schools, not education,” says immigration lawyer Ho Sung Kim.

Meanwhile, education agents—like the one who recommended M College to Nisha—are funnelling students straight into these schools. According to global education organization ICEF Monitor, as many as half of international applicants to Canadian schools use recruiters. Universities and colleges pay recruiters a commission for each student, typically 10 or 15 per cent of first-year tuition, and sometimes more. (Students themselves generally don’t pay recruiters directly.) Yet the industry remains essentially unregulated, as do recruiters’ relationships with the fast-growing private college sector. According to Montreal immigration lawyer Ho Sung Kim, this is why so many business people are interested in the industry: “Money drives these schools, not education.”

Will Tao, an immigration and refugee lawyer in Vancouver with a special interest in international students, says agents and recruiters often peddle misinformation about the quality of schools. While there are respectable private colleges across Canada, he says, the international student explosion of the past decade has created fertile ground for shoddy schools and exploitative operators.

And when things go awry, students pay the price. In 2015, provincial regulators shut down Fraser Valley Community College, a private college in a strip mall in Surrey, B.C. The government had received dozens of complaints from students about misleading promotions that guaranteed jobs after graduation, plus promises of high-quality facilities the school didn’t have and tuition refunds the college allegedly refused. The government decided the institution could no longer be trusted to comply with regulations and revoked its registration. 

In 2020, the Ontario Provincial Police charged owners and employees at the Royal Institute of Science and Management in Markham, Ontario—another storefront career college—with fraud, forgery and other offences. Police allege that the college recruited students to apply for a government funding program to help pay for tuition. The students then simply handed the money to the college and received a diploma without attending any classes. 

But little in recent years can match the debacle that Nisha—and hundreds of other students—endured. The story of M College isn’t just about one failed school. It’s about a booming international education machine that’s commodified the hopes and dreams of young people, mostly from the Global South. It’s an industry that has been aggressively stoked by Canadian governments—which have done little to protect students when things go terribly wrong.

***

Caroline Mastantuono is a woman with a knack for both the slow burn and the big swing. In 2004, Mastantuono, then 41, was a support staffer in Montreal’s sprawling Lester B. Pearson School Board, which serves students in grade schools, high schools, adult education centres and adult vocational schools throughout the city. It’s the vocational programs—like auto mechanics, hairdressing and accounting—that are the board’s biggest money-makers, with tuition in some cases topping $18,000.

In 2004, Mastantuono—who did not respond to interview requests sent to her lawyer—received a promotion from the board, putting her in charge of a new international student department. Her mandate was to boost international admissions to those vocational and adult education programs. In 2012, she partnered with a Toronto businessman named Naveen Kolan, who ran a student recruiting company called Edu Edge Inc., which focused on students from India. The partnership soon bore fruit: between 2010 and 2016, the number of international students enrolled in the board jumped from seven to 777, supercharging the department’s revenue from $91,000 to $5.5 million.

 “What happened with the students in India is a tragedy. I spoke with one girl who tried to end her life twice in January of 2022,” says Alain Tardif of the law firm McCarthy Tétrault.

Then, in the spring of 2014, Mastantuono’s daughter Christina, who worked on her staff, came to her with a problem: some students were being denied Quebec Acceptance Certificates because they didn’t have enough money to cover tuition. In June, Mastantuono and Kolan allegedly gathered the department’s staff and laid out a creative solution: they would create false receipts of tuition payment. The false receipts were kept secret from students and submitted to the provincial government. Edu Edge then billed the board a recruiter’s fee for 81 forged chits, representing a total of $1.65 million in tuition.

Soon, another alleged scheme came to light. Two staffers in the department began noticing that a numbered company in British Columbia was being credited for recruiting students who the employees knew had applied independently. The pair started digging and found that the company was registered to Kolan’s wife. In total, 25 students were falsely linked to the B.C. firm, which received $119,000 in fees from the school board between 2014 and 2016.

By then, the board’s finance department, as well as its chair and its assistant director, were asking questions. An internal investigation, which concluded in 2016, found that Mastantuono “lacked transparency” in regards to her department’s activities and its financial arrangement with Edu Edge. She and her daughter were both fired, and the minister of education and higher education ordered an audit of the board’s international program. That December, the Quebec government’s anti-corruption squad launched a parallel investigation that found evidence of fraud, fabrications, use of forged documents and abuse of power at the Pearson board. The investigation was code-named “Projet Pandore.” 

Canadians abroad Justin Trudeau and Caroline Mastantuono met at the Canada-India Business Forum in 2018

For the Mastantuonos, this was just a temporary setback. By March of 2017, Caroline had leveraged her knowledge of the international student market to launch a new recruiting firm: Rising Phoenix International, or RPI. She hired her son, Joseph, along with Christina. The new RPI team travelled to China, the Philippines and Mexico on recruitment trips and signed deals with private and public colleges in Quebec, Ontario, B.C. and New Brunswick. In 2018, as president and CEO of RPI, Caroline took part in the Canada-India Business Forum in Mumbai as a member of the Canadian delegation, a trip that included photo ops with Justin Trudeau, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau and celebrity chef Vikram Vij.

By 2020, the Mastantuonos had also taken over operations of three private colleges. There was M College, Nisha’s would-
be alma mater, which the family itself founded. It was licensed by Quebec’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education in 2019. The family purchased two other schools: CCSQ, with one campus in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil and another in Sherbrooke. And there was CDE College, also in Sherbrooke. RPI had already served as the schools’ recruiters, drawing the vast majority of students from abroad, almost exclusively from India. There were well over 1,000 students at the colleges, and only six were Canadian. Joseph Mastantuono was named president of all three schools.

***

In January of 2020, Ravneet Kaur Mand stepped off a city bus on Curé-Poirier Boulevard West in Longueuil, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, across from Montreal. It was her first day of classes at CCSQ—and immediately, she was confused. The neighbourhood was mostly residential, and the building at the college’s address looked like a plain three-storey walk-up. My apartment building is bigger than this, she thought. Ravneet checked Google Maps on her phone again.

It was no mistake. She made her way inside, which was just as dispiriting. With the exception of a cafeteria in the basement, there was nothing more to the school than bathrooms and a few classrooms with desks, chairs and laptops. Her family was paying $30,000 for her to attend the college’s two-year medical office specialist program, which Ravneet found through a recruiter in her small hometown in Punjab. Once she saw what the college had to offer—an unresponsive administration, mediocre facilities and an educational experience generally unworthy of her steep tuition—she became convinced that her recruiter was financially incentivized to get her to enrol by exaggerating its prestige and the quality of its facilities.

(Photo illustration by Lauren Cattermole; photographs by Alexi Hobbs)

Each year, Quebec’s advisory commission on private education releases a report that evaluates conditions at private colleges across the province. According to its 2020–21 report, only three of the 14 teachers at CCSQ in Longueuil were technically qualified to teach, and turnover was extremely high—the average level of seniority was one year. At CCSQ in Sherbrooke, only one teacher was qualified. Both colleges were warned to stop overcharging for tuition or other services. A provincial inspection at CDE in 2021, meanwhile, revealed that several classrooms were overcrowded. By most accounts, CCSQ’s sister school, M College—the one Nisha virtually attended—wasn’t much better. Located on a busy thoroughfare in the borough of LaSalle in Montreal, it was housed in a nondescript office building nestled among a rotisserie chicken joint, a mattress store and a pair of car dealerships.

Even as students like Ravneet and Nisha were plowing through their underwhelming studies at the RPI schools, the alleged schemes and frauds at the Pearson board were about to come roaring back for the Mastantuonos. After nearly four years of digging, the Projet Pandore investigators concluded their work. In late November of 2020, Caroline and Christina Mastantuono were arrested and charged with fraud. The pair stepped aside from their RPI roles and pleaded not guilty. (Kolan, who’d seemingly vanished, turned himself in two months later. He also faces fraud charges and has pleaded not guilty, and did not respond to a request for comment sent to his lawyer.) That was just the beginning of what would turn out to be a very bad 12 months for the family—though most RPI students were completely unaware of the mounting troubles.

When Caroline and Christina were arrested, RPI was still expecting $10.6 million in financing from TD and the Business Development Bank of Canada to cover the purchases of CDE and CCSQ. After the arrest, the financing was cancelled. Then, during the first two weeks of 2021, the province’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education stopped processing study permit applications from M College and CDE (along with eight other Quebec colleges, unrelated to RPI) while it investigated questionable recruitment practices, among other problems. In retrospect, the family appears to have been aware of a looming financial reckoning: in March of 2021, Caroline Mastantuono gifted a lakefront house she owned in the Laurentians, valued at $750,000, to a family trust—a move that protected it from creditors.

In November of 2021, Caroline came back aboard as RPI president. At the end of that month, students received emails insisting that they had to pay their fees by early December—not January, as they’d previously been told.

Ravneet, who’d already paid her tuition, watched as stressed-out classmates and friends scrambled to secure funds and navigate bank limits on transfers. “I still don’t know how they managed,” she says. The students were perplexed by the colleges’ sudden need for immediate tuition payments.

Things became clear in early January of 2022, when Joseph Mastantuono, president of the colleges, emailed students to inform them that they had filed for creditor protection. (CDE and M College filed the previous day.) He blamed the financial troubles squarely on the pandemic: the cost of delivering new laptops to students abroad, getting the campuses COVID-safe and a drop in enrolment due to travel delays. He said the college would work with a court-appointed monitor, which would oversee the finances. Students close to graduating would continue. Everyone else would be on “extended pause.”

***

After 10 months of studying day and night, sometimes 12 hours straight, Nisha wrapped up her final exam in August of 2021 at home in India. All that was left was to get her study permit, still only approved in principle, and travel to Canada to complete an internship.

Only moments after finishing the exam, an email popped into her inbox from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. Her heart sank: her permit had been rejected. The agent who reviewed her application wasn’t satisfied that she’d leave Canada at the end of her stay and didn’t think that the proposed studies—now nearly completed—were consistent with her previous education and qualifications.

Nisha was beyond confused. Neither of these problems were raised in the first stage of the process, when she received her approval in principle. How could the same country that accepted her, and took her money, refuse her almost a year later?

Her first priority was to get a refund from M College, which had previously told students that even in the event of a study permit rejection, they could get their money back, minus administrative fees. Through the summer and fall, the college put her off, citing COVID-related processing delays. When RPI applied for creditor protection, she finally realized that her money was gone for good unless the schools could find a new buyer willing to refund her.

More than 500 other students in India were in a similar situation: their tuition was paid but their study permits or visas had been rejected. About 125 of those had received an approval in principle for their study permit, just like Nisha, and had been studying online for more than a year, with every expectation that their permits would be approved.

Hundreds more were still waiting on their paperwork, or were already studying in Canada, only to find those studies indefinitely paused. All told, approximately 2,000 current or prospective students were affected. Panicked and angry, the RPI students organized protests in Canada and India to raise awareness. They wrote to MPs across the country, especially those with Punjabi backgrounds, like Jagmeet Singh, MP Anju Dhillon from LaSalle, and MP Sukh Dhaliwal from Surrey, B.C. 

In February of 2022, they met with the law firm McCarthy Tétrault, which the court had appointed to represent them in the insolvency proceedings. The lawyers’ goal: to ensure affected students got their study permits or visas extended or approved, or received a refund of their fees.

McCarthy Tétrault reached out to the federal government. When no answer came by mid-March, the firm petitioned the Superior Court of Quebec to extend the students’ Quebec Acceptance Certificates and study permits and reconsider student visas for students still in India who had been rejected. The application was dismissed in mid-April; the judge ruled that he couldn’t compel the provincial and federal governments to do what McCarthy Tétrault was asking. Instead, the firm would need to apply to the federal court. According to Alain N. Tardif, a partner at McCarthy Tétrault, that’s a much more complex and expensive undertaking.

To Tardif, Nisha’s case was among the most critical of all. The government had granted her permission to study, only to snatch it away after she’d paid tuition and almost entirely finished her studies. She and her family stood on the precipice of financial catastrophe due to the failure of the RPI schools. According to the McCarthy Tétrault team, the federal and provincial governments were partly responsible for the financial fallout.

“What happened with the students in India is a tragedy,” says Tardif. “I spoke with one girl who tried to end her life twice in January of 2022. Victims of fraud always believe that it’s their fault, but there’s nothing they could have done. The federal government told them to pay those fees in advance. The students keep telling us to get a court order so they can be reimbursed, but what they don’t understand is the money is gone.” 

The province’s responsibility—and its culpability—began long before students even paid their fees, adds Tardif. Quebec’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education signs off on which colleges become designated learning institutions, which are approved to enrol international students. The ministry signed off on CCSQ and CDE after the Mastantuonos acquired them—despite a 2020–21 report by Quebec’s advisory commission on private education that flagged financial problems, such as the family’s inability to demonstrate that the colleges had sufficient funds for adequate operations.

But there was another clear red flag the government overlooked, adds Tardif. If one of the permit holders or directors has a judicial record that demonstrates issues that could impede their ability to run an educational institution, he says, the ministry can revoke their permit. That didn’t happen after Caroline and Christina Mastantuono were charged with fraud.

“The first shortcoming is the Quebec government allowing these colleges on that list,” he says. “They had warning that there were issues with the ownership, there were issues with insolvency. Those colleges should not have been on that list.”

***

Today, Ravneet lives with three roommates in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood. After struggling to land the internship she needed to complete her program, she found a placement as a technician at a pharmacy. She’s now been approved for a post-graduation work permit, allowing her to stay in Canada for the time being.

Despite everything, she doesn’t have a problem with recruitment agents in general. “Recruiters translate all this English information into Hindi and Punjabi, which is especially helpful for the parents, who often aren’t very educated,” she says. But she does have a problem with agents getting big commissions for pushing certain schools, and students paying the price.

(Photograph by Alexi Hobbs)

Manitoba is the only province to regulate recruiters. In 2016, it introduced legislation requiring schools to properly train recruiters and review the information they provide to students. It outlines ethical standards for recruiters and requires schools to terminate partnerships with recruiters when those standards are breached. In 2017, the provincial audit on the Mastantuono situation made 15 recommendations to improve the way international student programs conduct business, including accrediting recruiters. No action was taken. Then, last February, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration made a similar recommendation, suggesting that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada introduce new regulations to govern recruiters, working with provinces, territories and schools to enforce ethical behaviour. 

Last June, CDE, CCSQ and M College were transferred to the privately owned Cestar College of Business, Health and Technology. Cestar has operated in Ontario since 2007 without incident, and the acquisition allowed enrolled RPI students, like Ravneet, to finish their studies. Still, the collapse of the schools made many students skittish—about Montreal, about Canada and about private colleges.

Varun Khanna, who’s 32, moved to Canada from India in 2015 to attend a private college. Today, when he’s not busy running the small trucking company he owns, or studying mobile application development at one of Montreal’s public colleges, he volunteers with the Montreal Youth Student Organization. He co-founded the organization in response to the RPI collapse, advocating for South Asian students. 

 “The headlines in Punjab right now are discouraging people from applying to Canada, because they’re going to be defrauded. That’s very, very bad publicity.”

He says that he’s heard many stories of recruiters telling students they won’t be able to get into a particular well-known college or university and directing them to private institutions instead. Some may be good, but others turn out to be little more than a few floors, or a few rooms in a cheap office building, with underpaid teaching staff. The RPI colleges fit that bill. After the disaster there, he says his organization is recommending students go to public colleges and universities—“just to be safe.”

Caroline and Christina Mastantuono, and Naveen Kolan, are standing trial early this year on charges of fraud stemming from the Pearson school board case, but the outcome will have no bearing on the fate of the RPI students.

Tardif would like the federal government to contribute to a fund for them—it would be the right thing to do, as well as a small step toward rehabilitating Canada’s image abroad. “Our reputation in India is damaged by this,” he says. “The headlines in Punjab right now are discouraging people from applying to Canada because they’re going to be defrauded. That’s very, very bad publicity.”

Nisha wishes someone had given her that kind of warning. “It was my dream to come to Canada, to become something,” she says. “But it would have been better if I’d never applied.” For a while, Nisha just wanted a resolution, in the form of a refund, or entry to Canada. If the school won’t pay us back, then it is the responsibility of the Canadian government to allow us to complete our education, she would tell herself. We’re not criminals; we’re students. Even months after the Superior Court of Quebec dismissed McCarthy Tétrault’s application, she retained some hope.

Now she knows there will be no Canada and no money. Some other Indian students who’d been in similar situations have since managed to gain entry to Canada. Others have found the money to start over again in a new program, at a new school in a new country. There are few people left who truly understand everything she’s gone through.

Nisha’s family doesn’t speak of the financial strain of remortgaging the family home; they want to protect her, and they want her to forget her terrible luck. Their faith in her remains unshakable.

She’s doing her best to turn a profoundly negative experience into something positive—not just for her, but for others. She’s tutoring friends, and friends of friends, in English, on a volunteer basis. At any time, she has 10 or so students between the ages of 18 and 30, across India, taking her classes online, all people who can’t afford the cost of traditional language classes. She wants to help them improve their English and pass their language proficiency exams so they can eventually do what she couldn’t: study abroad and build a new future for themselves.

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 How fraud artists are exploiting Canada’s international education boom appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In order to protect his identity and his family’s, Maclean’s has only included Mohammadreza’s first name in this piece.

It was seven in the evening late last September, just after sunset. I was getting ready for my last two patients of the day when my assistant walked into my office. “Doctor,” she said, “Can you come to the laser room? It’s better if you hurry.”

I worked at a small clinic in Karaj, a city west of Tehran, where we performed simple cosmetic procedures like Botox and lip injections. It wasn’t the kind of place where we saw a lot of emergencies, but I could tell from my assistant’s tone that something was amiss. She led me to the little room where we performed laser hair removal. There I found a boy, about 10 or 11 years old, and his father, who had draped a coat over the child. When he removed it, I could see the boy’s back was covered in blood, his shirt riddled with bullet holes. My heart began to beat faster, and I could feel my muscles tighten. 

“What happened?” I asked. But I already knew. For days, protests had raged through the city and the country over the death of a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini. On September 13, Amini and her family were visiting Tehran when they were stopped by the country’s Guidance Patrol—the government’s morality police, who enforce public behaviour in compliance with ultra-strict Islamic orthodoxy. They arrested Amini on the grounds that she was wearing her hijab improperly, and witnesses said they beat her before dragging her into a van. Hours after her arrest, she was taken to hospital, where she fell into a coma. On September 16, she died. Police said it was a heart attack. 

Anger at Iran’s repressive, theocratic government has been simmering, and boiling over in protest, for years. But Amini’s death—its brutality and ugliness and pointlessness—touched a raw nerve. The day after she died, the funeral in her hometown of Saqqez attracted protesters who removed their own hijabs in solidarity. At some point, police fired on them—an early volley of violence in a standoff between regime forces and citizens. In the months since, countless Iranians have marched in the streets, and hundreds have lost their lives in clashes with government forces.

This boy and his father hadn’t been taking part in the protest. “We were just there to see what was going on,” said the father. “We were only curious.” But when the police began shooting, everyone was caught in the line of fire. 

Our clinic was the furthest thing from a trauma centre, but it was clear why this pair had stumbled through our door as they fled: the hospitals weren’t safe, packed with officers from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, who arrested people showing up with protest-related injuries. Witnesses were describing these “hospital kidnappings” on social media. Last October, IRGC officers opened fire on a crowd of physicians in Tehran who were protesting these kinds of arrests, killing a young surgeon named Parisa Bahmani. Our location might also have provided a sense of refuge—on the seventh floor of a building on a busy boulevard, a 15-minute walk from the protests and high above the marauding police below. 

We had two patients in the clinic—one who was already lying down for her lip injection. We quickly and quietly sent them home. The boy’s wounds had been inflicted by small crowd-control pellets, and my assistant readied the basic surgical tools we had on hand—forceps, scissors, gauze—to extract them. I could see the fear in the boy’s eyes, and I hoped he didn’t see the same in mine. I knew the situation could get critical fast. His blood pressure was low and his pulse barely detectable. Some of the fragments were buried in his flesh, and I knew I’d have to avoid pushing them in even deeper—it wouldn’t take much to penetrate the chest cavity. I was afraid of accidentally puncturing and depressurizing his lungs.

We gave him a saline IV drip to raise his blood pressure and injected him with lidocaine, a local anaesthetic, at the site of the injuries, where I had to dig further into his wounds to extract the shards. During the injections, he kicked against the procedure table, moaning in pain. It took more than two hours to remove two dozen fragments. When we finished, I wiped him down with antibacterial cream and told his father to keep watch for a fever caused by infection. 

I never saw the boy again, but he was just the beginning. For the next two weeks, our small cosmetic clinic became an intermittent, ad hoc emergency room as anti-regime protests—and the ranks of the injured—kept growing. Along with other doctors in small practices nationwide, I established contact with the wounded through social media, friends and friends of friends. I knew I was making myself an enemy of the regime, that I was putting my life in danger. But after so much pain inflicted on my people, I was one of countless Iranians ready to take almost any chance for a better future. 

***

I was born in Gholhak, an upper-middle-class Tehran neighbourhood, in 1988. My father was an interior designer, and my mother was a singer and musician with an extraordinary talent on the piano and the tar, a traditional Iranian string instrument. I was their third and youngest child, and they named me Mohammadreza, after Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the deposed shah of Iran.

My namesake was the last ruler of the 53-year Pahlavi royal dynasty. During his reign, Iran was a constitutional monarchy, in which political power was heavily concentrated in the shah’s hands. But many Iranians nonetheless remember this time as a golden age, during which our rural, conservative society transformed into a sophisticated, urban one. The economy was booming, religious freedom was on the rise and women’s rights were expanding. All of this modernization, of course, was anathema to Iran’s most fundamentalist Islamic voices—including one of its clerics, the Ayatollah Khomeini. 

In 1979, the ayatollah led a revolution to depose the shah. It didn’t begin as a strictly religious movement. Instead it brought together a variety of dissidents, including those on the left, who sought to overthrow the monarchy. Once the ayatollah came to power, he purged those other voices and imposed a brutal, repressive theocracy, with himself as head of state. Many Iranians, my family included, came to yearn for the comparatively enlightened, liberal years before the revolution. It was in this world of repression and nostalgia that I grew up. 

The boy’s back was covered in blood, his shirt riddled with bullet holes. I felt my muscles tighten. “What happened?” I asked. But I already knew.

As a child and a teenager, I loved to draw, invent gadgets and devise new ways to solve problems. But my interests were scattershot, and it took a tragedy to focus my ambitions. When I was 12, a cousin of mine, nearly the same age, died after a years-long battle with cancer. He had planned to one day become a doctor and help find a cure for his disease. Years later, my mother helped me connect the dots between my still-raw heartbreak and my budding talents. “You have a good heart,” my mother told me when I was 16. “You can do the most to help people with your creativity and innovation as a doctor.” 

I enrolled in medical school at age 20, planning to become a neurosurgeon. I was inspired by Madjid Samii, an Iranian who moved to Germany in the 1950s and became one of the most accomplished and revered neurosurgeons in the world. 

In 2009, during my second year of university, enthusiasm began to build around the presidential election to be held that June. It was a small window of hope, half open, but it was more than we were used to. Iranian elections are usually little more than rigged contests, designed to legitimize candidates approved by the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader. That spring, opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi began generating serious buzz, even stoking hopes of an upset. Iranians turned out in record numbers, with millions casting votes for Mousavi. But the election was rife with allegations of voter interference and vote-rigging, and when the government announced the results—only three hours after polls closed—the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was declared the winner with 62 per cent of the vote. 

Hundreds of thousands of people staged protests that lasted for months, and dozens died at the hands of government forces. At the time, I was part of a student centre that operated as a campaign office for Mousavi. After the election, the university shut it down, and the senior students in charge were exiled to southeastern Iran. As a junior member, I was only suspended for a semester. But I was suspended again in 2013, after university security guards discovered that I’d spent time with a female classmate—Iranian law strictly limits interactions between unrelated men and women. We’d made a snowman together on campus and, on top of that unlawful interaction, I was accused of public nudity (I’d removed my jacket to dress the snowman). 

A woman holds up her ponytail after cutting it off during a protest outside the Iranian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in September of 2022 (Photography by Yasin Akgul/Getty Images)

During my fourth year, my mother also felt the sting of the regime. She played regularly in a band—a mixed group of men and women—that rented out small performance venues in Tehran. One evening, they were performing in an event room on the top floor of a hospital. The audience was small, mostly friends and devoted fans. The regime already looked on this kind of event with suspicion, with its secular music and mingling of men and women. At one point, the band played Iran’s unofficial anthem, “Ey Iran,” a patriotic song dating back to the Second World War, which pays homage to the land, culture and history of the country—and is pointedly free of religious references. The regime can’t abide a celebration of Iran that isn’t also a celebration of Islamic fundamentalism, and singing this old song is considered a subtly subversive act. About 30 minutes later, plainclothes IRGC officers stormed the little room, cut the amplifiers and shut the entire thing down. We’re still not sure how they caught wind of it; we think a hospital security guard alerted them.

The IRGC forced my mother to sign a document stating she would never again act against the government. That night was the last time she ever played in public—a kind of death for a musician. For years afterwards, the memories were traumatic for her. She experienced something like PTSD, with flashbacks, weeping fits and bouts of arrhythmia from the stress of it all. My sisters had married and moved away, and she was alone. I began taking time off from university to be with her. 

In time, I decided not to pursue neurosurgery. The time commitment was enormous: medical school, seven years of residency, then two years at the country’s neurological institute. Between my suspensions and caring for my mother—cooking, accompanying her on errands and to doctor appointments—I was already behind. 

Late one night in 2018, during a hospital internship, I was making rounds to check on patients. I entered one room to find a young woman who hid her face as we spoke. She suffered from Bell’s palsy, which affected her facial symmetry. Her shame and sorrow over her condition left a deep impression on me. I told her there may be treatments for her condition, and that I’d like to return the next day to discuss them. By the time I did, she had already been discharged. It was then that I started to think seriously about becoming a cosmetic specialist. I finished medical school in 2020 and soon joined the cosmetic clinic, dividing my hours between Tehran, where I lived with my parents, and nearby Karaj. 

I loved it. The work was a dream: financially rewarding and flexible enough that I could enjoy a rich personal and family life. We served wealthy Tehranis as well as clients with lesser means—in a country where women must cover nearly everything else, the face takes on an outsized importance. I even treated patients affected by Bell’s palsy, the same condition that affected the woman in that hospital room during my internship. In 2022 I was 33, with a tight circle of friends, a lively social life, trips to vacation villas and a budding career I’d spent years training for. Life was good.

One night last September, before the injured boy came to my clinic, I was at home after work, watching the satellite news. Most official news in Iran is simply regime propaganda, but millions of households use black-market satellite dishes to access international channels aimed at Iranians and broadcast from North America, Europe and the Middle East. I was watching Manoto, a U.K. channel, when the newscaster began telling Mahsa Amini’s story. I clenched my hands in rage. My older sisters had both had similar encounters with the Guidance Patrol when they were younger—pulled off the street and into vans, interrogated over unsuitable clothing, threatened, and accused of causing all the evils of the world with their loose morals. 

Over the next week, as the uprisings swelled, the atmosphere in Tehran and Karaj grew tense. New protests popped up every day. In the evenings, when the staff and I left the clinic in Karaj, we saw a dramatic change in the neighbourhood. Shops and restaurants that used to stay open late into the night were closed, and the usually jubilant evening crowds were instead hurrying, heads down, to wherever they needed to be. Plainclothes IRGC officers, distinguished by pale shirts, loose pants and athletic shoes, clustered on street corners. They were pretending—unconvincingly—to be casual bystanders. In reality they were watching everything. 

Even as the protests spread to every corner of the country, I remained unsure about my next move. “If you get taken away,” my mother said, “I will already be dead.” I promised I’d be cautious, as I considered how I could play a part in what I hoped would become a genuine revolution. Then the revolution came to me.

***

I hardly remember the drive home from work the night after we treated that first boy. I was enraged at the injury and cruelty. 

I arrived home late and wrestled with whether I should become involved, and if so, what I could possibly do. But of course I was already a part of it. I’d chosen to become a doctor years before, and I couldn’t turn away when people needed me most. Before I went to bed that night, I posted a picture to my Instagram account, an image used by doctors across Iran to show their willingness to help people injured in clashes with regime forces. It was a simple illustration of a silhouetted doctor and two nurses, with a caption reading, “Count on me. I’m a doctor and I’m ready to help.” A little bit cryptic, but clear to those who needed it.

Mohammadreza and his mother at his grandfather’s house in the late ’80s

A pouch of soil from Pasargad, the burial site of Cyrus the Great—one of the few mementoes of home Mohammadreza was able to bring to Canada

During the next two weeks, we cancelled most of our regular appointments and turned the Karaj clinic into a makeshift emergency centre. Fortunately we already had the basics: oxygen tanks, resuscitation devices and a stock of staple medications and antibiotics. Our new patients found us one at a time—they were ex-clients, friends of my staff and family members, people removed by a few degrees of separation. Across the country, doctors in clinics large and small were doing the same. 

In early October, a friend of a staff member came in with crowd-control projectiles lodged in his chest. He’d tried to remove them at home, but instead pushed some in deeper, where one had become infected. By the look of the infection, the wounds were probably about a week old, and though he’d already found antibiotics, he needed the pellets removed—he feared going to the hospital, where people were being arrested, then subsequently tortured and raped.

A few days later a teenage girl came in heaving, her eyes wide with panic, choking with each breath. She could hardly speak, and her skin was a sickly pale colour. She told me she’d been exposed the previous day to tear gas seeping through her apartment windows. The story sounded implausible to me—her symptoms seemed much too severe for such casual exposure. But I couldn’t blame her if she was using a cover story to hide her attendance at a protest. It was also hard to believe she’d only been exposed to tear gas, rather than something much worse, like chlorine gas. She was wheezing and nauseated, her heartbeat was over 100 beats per minute and her oxygen levels were low. Tear gas doesn’t produce those kinds of symptoms, and certainly not a full day later. I placed an oxygen mask over her face to help her breathing. I gave her saline to raise her blood pressure, corticosteroids for her breathing, benzodiazepine for anxiety, and anti-nausea medication. Soon she fell asleep. She woke half an hour later, flush with colour and breathing normally. I remembered what my mother had told me about becoming a doctor, about using my abilities to help others. It was an incredible moment, a rush of pure joy. Nothing in the world could match the feeling I had. This was why I’d become a doctor.

I wrote her a prescription for an inhaler using the name of my secretary’s asthmatic father, since a prescription like that for someone without a history of asthma might arouse suspicion. My secretary herself picked it up.

Soon, I was receiving requests to treat people in their own homes or in safe houses where they’d holed up. These were far more dangerous, requiring travel throughout Tehran and Karaj, past protest zones and police checkpoints. I got the first call for a house visit while eating with a friend at a pizzeria. A woman’s voice said, “You remember those dark spots on my skin you removed? My friend’s son has the same; can you look at him?”

I was baffled—what spots? Who was this? Then I recognized the voice as someone I knew, and the subterfuge clicked. I began driving to the address she gave me, until she called back: don’t bother. Police had raided the home and taken the boy away. I deleted the address immediately from my phone. Police had begun searching citizens’ cell phones at checkpoints.

I made—or at least attempted—10 house calls in the next two weeks. One of the first was in Punak, a neighbourhood in Tehran, to treat a man who’d been shot in the chest with crowd-control projectiles. The address I needed to reach was on the other side of an expressway, and the only road access was through a major crossroads called Punak Square. As I approached, I could see and hear crowds of protesters from blocks away. Traffic was already snarled to a standstill. As I pulled over to consider my next move, 30 or 40 motorcycles roared by—each had two riders mounted on it, some brandishing guns, others an arsenal of medieval-looking weapons: stakes, machetes, chains, blunt objects. They wove their way through the traffic jam, shouting, swearing and revving their engines, scattering the protesters and taking control of the square.

It’s hard to know who these people were, but everything about them bore the hallmarks of the lebas shakhsi—plainclothes goons, widely believed to be affiliated with the IRGC, their members often drawn from the ranks of violent criminals. 

There was one other route, a small pedestrian bridge a few blocks north of Punak Square that I could use to cross the expressway and enter the neighbourhood on foot. I parked my car, gathered my instruments and set out. But when I got close, I could see the Basij militia at the other end of the bridge. I had to retreat and call the patients from my car, administering help as best I could over the phone. 

Another house call, in early October, was at a friend’s home in Sattarkhan, a bustling, densely packed neighbourhood in western Tehran, close to major protest sites including Sharif University and Sadeghieh Square. It was just after sunset as I drove into the neighbourhood, and I found the streets full of people and cars, horns blaring ceaselessly and deafeningly. From streets, rooftops and windows came the cries: “Death to the dictator, don’t be afraid, we are all together!” Closer to the square, police vehicles were parked by the roadside. As I passed, officers looked me in the eye, sizing me up. A few hundred metres down, protesters were huddled around fires lit in rubbish bins.

Dozens of motorcycles roared by, their riders brandishing an arsenal of guns and medieval-looking weapons: stakes, machetes, chains, blunt objects. They wove into the traffic jam and took over the square.

I wove into a narrow alley toward my friend’s first-floor apartment. Inside was a woman in her 20s. Her arms, shoulders, face and back were covered in deep purple bruises. Injuries from a police baton or the butt of a gun, my friend said. The woman had a crushing headache, a likely sign of concussion, but there was little I could do besides diagnose her. She eventually decided to go to a hospital, despite the risk. She needed her injuries assessed in case it was something worse than a concussion—a skull fracture, or bleeding on the brain. I waited in the apartment with my friend until 4 a.m., but the woman never returned. 

I drove home through streets cluttered with broken stones and discarded waste bins. The tire fires protesters lit hours before had died, but the pungent, toxic smoke was still drifting in the air. When I reached the highway the air cleared, and the chaos fell away. For a few minutes, I felt almost normal. I got home and closed the door, and after a few moments noticed a dull, throbbing pain in my palms. I had gripped them so tightly on the steering wheel I’d bruised my own hands. 

I never spoke to my friend again, nor learned what happened to that woman with the concussion. Even a phone call to find out would have been too dangerous. 

In early October, I got a text message from an unlisted number, asking me to come to a particular address for questioning. Another friend of mine, also a doctor, had received a similar message a few days prior. He had gone and never returned. I ignored the message. A week later, my secretary called me from her private cell phone. She sounded nervous, and asked if I’d made an appointment with two large, tough-looking men: “They insist that you’ve personally booked with them.” I told her I wouldn’t be in that day, and they should return on Saturday. 

I don’t know what happened after I hung up. I don’t know if they left quietly or peacefully. I can only pray they did. I never spoke to my secretary again. That was the moment I knew my life in Iran was over.

***

I went straight home and dug a small backpack out of the closet. I packed a few changes of clothes, my medical school papers and a visitor visa to Canada I’d never used. I’d gotten it for a conference in Vancouver months prior, but hadn’t gone due to a scheduling conflict. Now it saved me. 

I took my guitar—a graduation gift from my mother—and a small plastic pouch that I’d carried with me for years. It contains a few pinches of soil taken from Pasargad, the site in southern Iran where Cyrus the Great, the founder of the first Persian empire, is buried. Years before, I’d asked a friend of mine who was visiting the area to pick it up. She was a little perplexed by the request, but to me, the figure of Cyrus, and the landscape of Pasargad, symbolized so much of what was great about my nation: its glorious history, its beautiful landscapes, its extraordinary people. Now this tiny piece of home would be with me in exile.

I was blessed with few goodbyes; both my sisters live in Europe with their husbands. My parents drove me to the airport, and my father and I both cried. We had no idea when we’d see each other again. 

The airport was crammed, and when I approached the gate to board the flight, the border officer asked me to wait. He took my passport into another room, emerging minutes later to tell me I was missing a necessary stamp. “You can’t leave,” he said. I begged, tried to convince him that I was needed on an urgent professional trip. Another man arrived and said their computer system was down, and I would have to wait until it was repaired before they could do anything more.

I waited for half an hour at a self-serve counter in the business lounge, eating tomato soup and gheymeh, an Iranian dish of meat and rice. Eventually the officer waved me back. He told me to fill out a long, detailed form about my previous travel and attest that I was leaving on a work trip. He asked for my home and work addresses, and made me sign my name more than a dozen times, attesting to various details, before finally pressing my finger into an inkpad. I printed it on the document everywhere I had signed my name. 

The IRGC have been to my parents’ house. They know I’ve left, and I expect they’ll keep harassing my family. I’m afraid for them and for my country. But I’m hopeful as well.

I flew first to Istanbul, lying low at a friend’s house for five days while waiting for a cheap, direct flight to Canada. Turkey is full of Iranian espionage agents; I felt barely safer there than I had in Tehran. After I finally boarded the plane to Toronto, I spent the flight in something close to disbelief. When the wheels skidded onto the runway at Pearson airport, my only thought was, I’m alive. 

In my first months in Canada, I stayed in Airbnbs in Vancouver and Toronto, living as cheaply as possible. I only brought $5,000 from Iran, and the money didn’t go far. I’m currently staying near Toronto. An immigration lawyer has taken my case and filed for refugee status on my behalf. 

I spend my days walking—it’s free, and it gets me out in the sunshine and fresh air. I save money by cooking for myself; sometimes I’ll treat myself to an apple pie and coffee at McDonald’s, where I take advantage of the Wi-Fi. 

In Iran, I was successful, happy in my job and living with a family who loved me. In Canada, I’m jobless and nearly penniless, trying to start over from zero. But I don’t regret what I did: my name will now stand alongside all those others who fought. The night that boy and his father found me, I discovered my role in the world, forging a better future for my nation. Since I left, I’ve been following the news from Iran every day, every hour. I haven’t been able to contact colleagues or friends, and I’ve only spoken to my parents briefly. I don’t know what will come next. I hope to work again as a doctor here in Canada.

Whatever happens, I can’t go back to Iran—not now, and maybe never. The IRGC have been to my parents’ house. They know I’ve left, and I expect they’ll keep harassing my family. I’m afraid for them and for my country, but I’m hopeful as well. There are times when I think I should have stayed to fight, especially when I see the Iranians who are suffering and dying at the regime’s hands, their incredible bravery an example to us all. 

Iranians are peaceful people. But we’re out of patience. We’ve allowed lunatics to lead us, and we’ve paid the price for four decades. It’s no longer a protest in Iran; it’s a revolution. It’s not only about women’s rights, nor is it limited, as regime propagandists have declared, to unruly young people or to just a few parts of the country. It’s an entire nation fighting for its values, history and freedom, and for a modern, secular and democratic political system. When these dark clouds pass, a bright sun will shine upon Iran and the world will see its real face: gorgeous, peaceful, rich and thriving.

— As told to Maria Calleja

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 My Escape From Iran appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Abby Spadafora was two years old when she joined the Bluewater Gymnastics Club in Sarnia, Ontario. Her mother thought the sport would make a good outlet for her daughter’s abundant energy. Spadafora loved everything about the gym, especially flipping her little body into the foam training pit. By the time she was seven, in 1990, Spadafora was accepted into Bluewater’s competitive program and began training with the gym’s esteemed husband-and-wife coaching team, Dave and Elizabeth Brubaker. 

Most days, she would wake up at six so she could practise for two hours before school, then leave class early so she could train for several hours more. The Brubakers told her she was on the path to a gymnastics career—and maybe, one day, the Olympics.

Spadafora craved the Brubakers’ approval, but it was hard to come by. They would yell at her if she didn’t master a skill or hesitated in a routine. As part of her training, the coaches measured Spadafora’s height once a week and her weight twice a day. Sometimes they used calipers to gauge her body fat. She learned to hang her heels off the scale to dip the numbers and hide the granola bars her mother packed as a snack. 

When she was 11, Spadafora became the first Canadian to perform a difficult maneuver called a Rulfova—in which a gymnast launches herself backward from a standing position, twists in the air and lands seated in a straddle on the balance beam. But the Brubakers always asked for more. One time, when Spadafora couldn’t nail her routine the way Dave wanted, he became enraged and repeatedly pushed her from a handstand position off a five-foot-high bar. Each time she crashed headfirst to the ground.

Spadafora believed that the yelling and the fixation on her weight were normal parts of the coaching. She learned never to complain about her frequent injuries (the list included a dislocated finger, a broken foot and torn shoulder cartilage). Even as she feared the Brubakers, she also saw them as parental figures. If they pushed her, it was so she could be better. In 2000, when Spadafora was 17, Dave and Elizabeth relocated for two years to a gym with better facilities in Burlington, Ontario. Spadafora followed, boarding at their house.

Soon Dave Brubaker’s attention took on sexual overtones. According to Spadafora, Brubaker expected her and the other girls to greet him with a kiss. At training sessions, he would snap Spadafora’s sports bra. During a team trip to Taiwan when she was 17, he pulled her onto his lap while they were in the pool, placing her buttocks directly over his crotch, and tickled her. On the same trip, he entered her hotel room at 2 a.m., claiming that his roommate was drunk and he needed a place to sleep, then climbed into her bed and spooned her.

Spadafora knew what was happening made her feel awful and that it wasn’t right, but she couldn’t process it as abuse. She loved being a gymnast, loved being a competitor. Then at night she would cry herself to sleep, thinking she’d done something wrong, dreaming of escape from the gym. “Looking back,” she says now, “I was in complete survival mode.”

Abby Spadafora, now 39, began training at Bluewater at age two. Here, she’s pictured at a competition in 1997 (right), stretching with Elizabeth (far left) and with Dave in 1997 (bottom). (Portraits by John Kealey & Jackie Dives.)

In 2002, she left Bluewater to join the gymnastics team at the University of Arizona, where she had an athletics scholarship. Three years later, after suffering a back injury, she dropped out, returned to Sarnia and got married. She tried working as a coach at Bluewater, but left because she couldn’t bear being so close to Dave Brubaker. As an adult, she rarely spoke about what she refers to as her “gym days.” She told her husband, her sister and a therapist only the barest details. Then, in October of 2017, she received a call from the Sarnia police. Melanie Hunt, a 35-year-old health-care worker and a former Bluewater athlete, had filed a complaint about Brubaker. She had named Spadafora as a possible fellow victim. Spadafora told the officer that he was “opening a can of worms.” Abuse was so endemic within gymnastics, she felt, that one case would unearth countless others.

She was right. Eleven women, including Spadafora and Hunt, came forward to share similar stories of abuse at Bluewater. Women alleged Dave Brubaker kissed and fondled them, some when they were as young as 12. They say he screamed at them, repeatedly called them fat, and forced them to perform dangerous moves that resulted in injuries. They say they were manhandled into painful positions—their bodies stretched, yanked and pushed beyond what they could endure. The Brubakers denied any wrongdoing.

The case is one of many prompting a widespread reckoning within gymnastics, as parents and athletes question why this notoriously high-pressure sport attracts and tolerates abusive coaches. The crisis was a long time coming and, by many measures, inevitable. Gymnastics’ problems don’t end with a pair of coaches or a single gym—it’s infused into the DNA of the sport itself. The question now is not simply whether it can be made safe for thousands of young girls, but whether it deserves to be saved at all.

Perhaps more than any other sport, gymnastics burdens children with expectations of extreme excellence. Many kids begin as young as 18 months and, like Spadafora, start training competitively by age seven. A coach can have an overpowering influence on how a young athlete views herself and her self-worth. This dynamic leaves kids in an impossible position: even if they’re being mistreated, speaking up could risk everything they’ve worked for, including an identity formed around the sport.

The notion that ideal female gymnasts should be young, thin and lithe took hold in 1976, when the tiny 14-year-old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci scored a perfect 10 on the uneven bars at the Montreal Summer Olympics. The feat—something no Western gymnast had done—ushered in what one journalist at the time called the “attack of the mini-monsters.” Gymnasts in North America and Western Europe started competing at much younger ages and attempting infinitely more daring handsprings and mid-air twists. Soon, girl gymnasts were idealized as the perfect mix of precious and powerful, feminine and determined. They wanted to be the next Comaneci or Mary Lou Retton or Natalia Yurchenko. In competition, they sparkled and shone and, as they performed incredible athletic accomplishments, they always smiled.

In Canada, more than 250,000 gymnasts are registered with the national athletic body, Gymnastics Canada. The organization was established in 1969 with the express purpose of advancing the sport and putting Canadian gymnasts on the world podium. Based in Ottawa, it has a board of directors, 13 staff and, in 2022, a $5.6-million annual budget. Ian Moss, its CEO since 2018, previously held management and leadership roles at Rowing Canada, Speed Skating Canada and the Canadian Olympic Committee.

Throughout the criminal trial, the Brubakers stood by their training methods. (Photograph courtesy The Canadian Press/Mark Spowart)

GymCan, like so many athletic organizations, exists to train athletes for the podium. Winning means more fame and funding for the sport. This comes with a potential conflict: an organization incentivized to pressure kids to perform better, higher, faster is also responsible for their well-being and policing its own glory-seeking coaches.

While preparing athletes for the Olympics, GymCan, in partnership with its regional partners, directs education and training for coaches and judges, shapes its gymnastic programs, and manages any complaints brought forward by gymnasts in the country. Athletes and GymCan-accredited coaches must sign a code of ethics that covers anti-doping rules and anti-racism policies and prohibits abusive and sexual behaviours. If anyone is reported to have violated the code, it’s up to GymCan to decide whether to investigate or dismiss the accusations, and what punishment to dole out if it determines they’re substantiated. In other words, GymCan has historically had complete power to make, arbitrate and then enforce the rules.

Moss estimates that the organization vets two or three complaints about safe sport violations per month. In the four years that he has been CEO, 13 complaints have triggered a full investigation and disciplinary process. Some of those involved sexual assault and misconduct charges against underage gymnasts. On its website, the organization discloses basic details about disciplinary decisions and a list of suspended or expelled coaches (a total of 31 since 1996, the year GymCan started collecting such data).

Along with gymnastics, several other sports are facing a wave of abuse allegations. Last March, bobsled and skeleton athletes wrote a public letter calling for the resignation of their national federation’s president and of its high-performance director, citing a culture of fear. Two months later, more than 100 boxers signed their own letter, calling for the resignation of Boxing Canada’s director. They wrote, in part, that any athlete or coach who spoke out against physical and psychological abuse often found themselves sidelined from competitions. And in October, the CEO and entire board of Hockey Canada resigned after allegations of sexual assault surfaced against members of the World Junior team—and complaints of a corresponding culture of silence and cover-ups.

Last October, following the public furor over both gymnastics and hockey, federal sport minister Pascale St-Onge began toying with the idea of a full public inquiry into the country’s sporting organizations. She also catalogued accusations of mistreatment, sexual abuse or misuses of funds directed at eight national sports bodies, including rugby and rowing. Until now, abuse was tolerated as the price of victory.

***

The barn-like main facility at Bluewater Gymnastics is lined wall-to-wall with blue gymnastics mats and training equipment. Over the years, it’s been decorated with mementoes from the Brubakers’ triumphs: flags from the 2007 Pan American Games in Rio, the 2011 Japan Cup, the 2012 Olympics. For 34 years, Bluewater was the Brubakers’ second home.

Dave and Elizabeth met in the 1980s as students in the gymnastics coaching program at Toronto’s Seneca College. Dave, a sporty teen, had started coaching part time at a local club in Waterloo during high school, mostly because he needed a job. He fell in love with gymnastics and, soon after, with Elizabeth—a gymnast since age 10 who grew up in Scarborough and had also coached in her teens. After the new couple graduated, they searched for a club where they could coach together. In 1984, they landed jobs at Bluewater Gymnastics, which is run as a non-profit. Dave soon became the head coach.

After his arrest, Dave Brubaker wrote an apology letter to his wife and the complainants. “I am guilty of crossing the line,” he stated. “But I want you to know that my intentions weren’t sexual or premeditated.”

Next came marriage and two sons. Both Brubakers were well-liked, thought to be trustworthy and committed. While they were busy shuttling their athletes to competitions across the province, their athletes’ parents babysat the Brubakers’ kids, creating a close-knit gym community. When the two left town for Burlington in 2000, Bluewater secured funding from the city to upgrade the facilities and woo them back in 2002, offering Dave a job as gym director and Elizabeth the role of program director.

Their gymnasts placed consistently on the podium at provincial and national events, and there were some, like Spadafora, who performed notably difficult skills. In 2012, 18-year-old gymnast Dominique Pegg, under Dave’s coaching, made the national team and competed at the Summer Games in London—the first Bluewater athlete to make it to the Olympics.

Before the 2012 Games, Canada’s gymnastics team was never on the level of major players like the U.S., China, Romania and Russia. That year, however, Team Canada finished a historic fifth in the all-around competition, only four points behind China. Not only was it Canada’s best-ever showing at women’s gymnastics, it was the first time the team had made it to the finals since the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, when the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc sat out the competition. To the team, and to a thoroughly charmed Canada, the fifth-place finish was as good as gold. Pegg herself finished 17th—the fourth-highest ever by a Canadian gymnast in a non-boycotted Games. Justin Bieber congratulated her on Twitter.

In 2014, GymCan gave Dave Brubaker an award to honour his long-time service and recent success. That same year, it named him the national director of the women’s artistic gymnastics team, officially handing him power over female Canadian gymnasts’ Olympic dreams. Brubaker told the Sarnia Observer that he had hesitated to take the influential position because he didn’t want to spend so much time away from Bluewater and the kids he loved. Still, he added, “I think I’m the right guy for this job.”

In 2015, under Brubaker, Canada placed sixth at the women’s team finals at the World Gymnastics Championships in Glasgow. “People said it would never happen again,” Brubaker said. “Never say never.” At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, Team Canada’s Ellie Black finished fifth in the all-around category. It was the country’s best-ever showing by an individual gymnast. Brubaker told reporters he was already looking for athletes to compete in the 2020 and 2024 games.

He wouldn’t have the chance. In late 2017, based on reports made by Hunt and Spadafora, Sarnia police charged Brubaker with one count of invitation to sexual touching, three counts of sexual interference, three counts of sexual exploitation and three counts of sexual assault, dating back to a period between 2000 and 2007.

Shortly after Brubaker was arrested, he wrote an apology letter addressed to the complainants, as well as to his wife. In it, he stated: “I am guilty of crossing the line, but I want you all to know that my intentions were not sexual or premeditated.” (He later said the investigating officer pressured him to write the letter and told him what to write.)

Bluewater placed Brubaker on unpaid leave and banned him from the premises. GymCan followed suit, putting him on administrative leave pending the outcome of the criminal investigation. And yet Brubaker still had his supporters in Sarnia and the national gymnastics community. Elizabeth stuck by him, while continuing to train gymnasts at Bluewater.

Brubaker’s trial was scheduled for October of 2018 in a Sarnia courthouse. The judge, Deborah Austin, had 30 years behind the bench and a reputation for compassion and efficiency. By the start of the trial, the Crown had reduced the charges to one count each of sexual assault and sexual exploitation involving Hunt. Brubaker pleaded not guilty to both charges.

In the courtroom, Brubaker wore a suit jacket and tie, his short, greying hair styled into spikes. On the stand, Hunt described incidents that echoed Spadafora’s own experiences. She testified that from the time she was 12, Brubaker made her kiss him hello and goodbye on the lips. She also said that he would pick her up from school and take her to his house before practice, sometimes proposing that they take naps together, then spoon her in bed and tickle her belly. She alleged that he touched her inappropriately during massages.

In response, Brubaker’s defence team argued that Hunt was “bitter” she was not named to the Olympics team, unlike others he had trained. On the stand, Brubaker said Hunt had initiated the kissing out of “habit.” He added: “I don’t come from a kissy family, so to me it’s just part of the gymnast culture. It’s not something I need as a man.” He admitted that he had massaged Hunt, including touching her pubic area and around her breasts, but said it was only to improve her performance in the sport. As for the spooning and tickling, he said, “It never happened.”

The case against Brubaker began to fall apart mid-trial, when the Crown learned, then shared with the defence team and Justice Austin, that the investigating officer was in fact related by marriage to Hunt and had shared with her details of Brubaker’s interview with police. Brubaker’s defence lawyer, Patrick Ducharme, argued that the officer’s investigation lacked professional distance and that he had “cajoled a favourable statement out of her.” Justice Austin agreed and acquitted Brubaker. The Crown’s case, she wrote, was fatally compromised when the investigating officer abandoned both his oath of impartiality and his oath of secrecy. Austin stressed that none of her criticism of the officer should be taken as an indictment of the complainant: “She was forthright and appeared to be doing her best.” Her testimony, the judge said, was sincere and genuine.

With his case dismissed, Brubaker hugged his wife, and his supporters applauded. Ducharme told reporters that they would soon restore his client’s good name. The celebration was short-lived. Minutes after the judge read her decision, GymCan CEO Ian Moss stood outside the same Sarnia courthouse. He announced that during the trial, GymCan had received nearly a dozen written complaints about Dave and Elizabeth Brubaker from former Bluewater athletes, including Spadafora and Hunt, spanning from 1996 to 2017. The allegations were familiar: groping and fondling, pushing athletes to perform dangerous skills, belittling their weight and appearance, forcing them to train through injury. In response, GymCan was launching its own investigation. “We want to maintain the sanctity, the beauty of the sport,” Moss said. “We know we have work to do. Every sport has work to do.”

***

To investigate complaints against its own members, sports organizations like GymCan typically set up their own judicial systems. An internal investigation is meant to guarantee a fair process for the complainants and the accused, but it also helps protect GymCan from getting sued for erroneously dismissing or banning anyone. 

Brubaker’s defence team argued that the complainant was “bitter” she wasn’t named to the Olympics team. Brubaker said she initiated the kissing out of “habit”: “It’s just part of gymnast culture. It’s not something I need as a man.”

To lead the investigation, GymCan hires an independent case manager who usually has a background in labour law, workplace investigations or human rights. The case manager weighs whether to refer the case to the authorities, to recommend a mediation process facilitated by GymCan or to begin their own investigation. 

At the end of an internal investigation, the case manager presents a report and GymCan decides if a full disciplinary hearing is warranted. The case manager recommends the disciplinary panel members—usually two lawyers (one of which is named chair of the panel), and one sport or subject expert. Both GymCan and respondents like the Brubakers have a chance to either accept or reject the recommendations of the hearing panel. The closed procedure is at once a mock trial and an event that can destroy lives.

In September of 2020, more than a year after Brubaker was acquitted by the province, his GymCan hearing commenced. Similar to court proceedings on sexual assault and misconduct, GymCan’s process requires complainants to recount their allegations at the hearing—where the accused has a right to be present, and often is. And so the Brubakers, their lawyers, Moss, the three discipline panel members, GymCan’s lawyers and the case manager, plus 11 Bluewater gymnasts, all gathered over Zoom (the pandemic prevented them from meeting in person).

Spadafora spoke from a lawyer’s conference room in London, Ontario. The Brubakers’ counsel, civil litigation lawyer Tanya Pagliaroli, cross-examined her for over three hours. Spadafora remembers repeated questions about her hotel room in Taiwan. Next, Pagliaroli asked her about a photograph which showed her sitting on Dave’s lap in a pool, suggesting Spadafora wasn’t really on his lap at all but merely floating above it.

Spadafora found the experience traumatizing. Afterward, she had nightmares. “This is not a matter of a victim just explaining their story,” she says. “You have to prove this happened to you—time and time and time again, you have to prove it.” Spadafora and the other complainants told me how the hearing was the first time most of them learned about the extent of the Brubakers’ abuse. Hunt was deeply disturbed by how close her fellow gymnasts’ experiences matched her own.

Melanie Hunt testified that the Brubakers’ harsh methods gave her an eating disorder and that Dave touched her inappropriately. Here, she’s shown practising at ages nine (top left) and five (right), and at age 16 (bottom), sharing a hotel room with Dave during a competition in Ukraine.

During her testimony, she went into greater detail than she had at the trial, telling the disciplinary panel that, like Spadafora, she joined gymnastics as a young kid, at age four. Her parents wanted a safe place for her to do the kinds of things she was already doing, like flipping off swing sets. To Hunt, gymnastics was the closest she could get to flying. By age seven, she was part of the elite program, and the sport became her life. She convinced herself from an early age that the sport required a mindset of “no guts, no glory.” If she died attempting a cool gymnastics move, well, it would be an honourable death.

Hunt felt the harder she worked, the more likely she was to please Dave. The coach-athlete relationship became more toxic when she moved in with the Brubakers at age 12, a year after Spadafora. At the coaches’ home, milk and carbohydrates of any kind were forbidden. Thinking back to that time, she only remembers hunger. She developed a bingeing disorder and, after moving back home, quickly gained 10 pounds. She tried everything to lose weight, including taking diet pills and laxatives without her parents’ knowledge. Dave enrolled her in spin classes for extra exercise.

At 12, she says, the abuse turned sexual. First, Dave told her to kiss him in the morning when she arrived at the gym and in the evening when she left. He gave her massages and ran his fingers under her panty line. She recounted how he made her nap with him, putting his hand under her shirt and playing with her stomach. “I was living with Dave’s voice in my head and I didn’t know how to make a decision,” she told me. “I turned to him for everything.”

Imogen Paterson—shown at competitions at ages 12 (top) and eight (bottom right), and at age 14 at the Pacific Rim Championships in 2018 (bottom left)—says an uncomfortable encounter with Dave Brubaker, then in charge of Canada’s women’s national team, eventually led to her quitting the sport

One former gymnast who testified wasn’t a Bluewater athlete. In 2017, when she was 14, Imogen Paterson, who lived in Vancouver, desperately wanted to make the national team. That year, she had a chance to impress Dave Brubaker when they both attended an international competition in France. She remembers walking by him during warm-up, on her way to get some water, proudly wearing a Team Canada leotard she’d been given for the competition. When she was about 10 feet away from her coaches, Dave slapped her on the bum and remarked, “You look good in that suit.” She remembers the exact way he said “good,” the word drawn out, elastic. She forced herself to push it to the back of her mind so she could compete. Paterson told her mom what had happened on the ride home from the airport. With her Olympic dreams on the line, Paterson begged her mom not to make an issue of it. Three weeks later, after Dave was arrested, her mom told her coaches everything.

Paterson made the national team. But within a year, one of her coaches in B.C.—who Paterson says constantly demeaned, berated and gaslighted her—kicked her out of the gym, allegedly because Paterson’s parents were too demanding. Paterson found another gym and kept competing for Team Canada. Still, her experiences took a cumulative toll: shortly after testifying against Brubaker, Paterson realized gymnastics was destroying her mental and physical health. She let go of her Olympic dreams and quit the sport.

In March of 2021, after hearing testimony from Hunt, Spadafora, Paterson and eight other athletes, the discipline panel released its decision. It ruled in favour of the complainants. In total, the panel found 54 counts of misconduct and ethics code violations, including physical abuse, sexual harassment, child abuse and neglect, and discriminatory and unethical behaviour. “The Brubakers demonstrated a willful and persistent disregard for the ethical principles that governed their conduct and their obligations as coaches of child and young athletes,” the panel wrote. GymCan permanently banned Dave from gymnastics in Canada and suspended Elizabeth for five years. A year later, in April of 2022, having spent $300,000 in legal fees and believing the process was stacked against them, the Brubakers abruptly withdrew an appeal of the panel’s decision.

The Brubakers told me they were scapegoats—the first Canadian coaches to fall on the wrong side of #MeToo. They insist they never heard any accusations of mistreatment until Dave’s criminal trial. But how could 11 women get it wrong?

GymCan’s hearings and the reasoning behind its decisions aren’t public—sometimes not even to those directly involved. The Bluewater athletes I spoke to have GymCan’s final report on their case, but have collectively agreed not to share it as some athletes are not ready to have their stories heard.

The women who testified against their former coaches are now campaigning for greater changes in gymnastics. In response to the panel’s decision, they released a collective statement as the Bluewater Survivors. They commended the ban on Brubaker, but criticized the way GymCan handled their complaints. “It compounded the trauma of survivors and prolonged what had already been an open-ended nightmare,” they wrote in an open letter. “That process cannot be allowed to continue as is.”

***

Last October I interviewed the Brubakers, at first over email—while they wanted to ensure their voices were heard, and that the reporting was “balanced,” they were also nervous to meet with a journalist. Later, we spoke over the phone. Throughout our conversation they finished each other’s sentences, speaking warmly about their marriage and family and wistfully about their time as coaches. That demeanour shifted, however, when the conversation turned to the allegations against them, the GymCan investigation and Dave’s ban.

The Brubakers feel they are scapegoats—the first coaches to take the fall in GymCan’s quest to be on the right side of #MeToo, and the international backlash against gymnastics culture. To them, GymCan was forced into a difficult situation and acted with the intent of kicking the Brubakers out of the sport; they were never going to triumph at the hearing, let alone at an appeal. They insist that they had never heard any accusations of mistreatment until Dave’s criminal trial and are angry that GymCan seemed to suddenly change the rules on them after 40 years of coaching, during which they only received praise and success. They asked me, without really expecting an answer: if there are issues around the treatment of athletes, why was that treatment accepted for so long, only to change without GymCan communicating it to the coaches?

We talked about their coaching history and philosophy. In response to questions about the trial and the complainants’ experiences, the Brubakers were often evasive, explaining why they believe themselves to be the bigger victims. But if the allegations are false, I asked them, where did they come from? How could 11 women get it wrong? The Brubakers said they don’t know. In general, they tend to look away from the sexual misconduct allegations, preferring to frame the complaints as both historical and centred on alleged too-tough coaching. They say they love the sport and they want to help fix what they see as the “problem”—not an abusive culture, but rather a gap between how coaches do their jobs and how today’s athletes, who they consider overly sensitive, want them to do their jobs. “Gymnastics in Canada is being destroyed, and coaches are fleeing the country,” Dave said. “Coaches call us every week. They’re afraid. They’re saying, ‘If this can happen to the Brubakers, then it can happen to anyone.’ ”

***

Late last summer, I met Ian Moss and GymCan board chair Jeffrey Thomson over Zoom. Moss was at a cottage, and Thomson was in the middle of a long period of travelling, first to the U.K. for the Commonwealth Games and then to Turkey for the Islamic Games. Both men were eager for a chance to acknowledge GymCan isn’t perfect. “We know in gymnastics that we need to change. We all accept that. We’re not hiding behind some sort of rock,” said Moss. “We all believe that this sport cannot survive in a moribund state. It has to evolve.”

He added that national sport organizations like GymCan were traditionally set up to guide their sports on technical matters—how to reach the podium, how to excel, how to dominate—and that their staff usually don’t have expertise in dealing with abuse. Questions about whether, and how, organizations influence the outcome of complaints against their own members‚ the coaches, are fair, he allowed. He also pointed out that sports bodies have argued for years that it’s difficult for them to police themselves. That statement is true of any organization: everyone is biased toward their friends, their colleagues, themselves.

Thomson believes the criminal justice system failed the Bluewater athletes during Brubaker’s trial. He’s proud that GymCan did not let the couple go back to coaching without its own investigation. “It was a lot of money, a lot of time and a lot of resources to make sure that they never coached again. We went hard and it was not easy,” he said. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like for those girls and those women, but, you know, we got ’em in the end.”

To date, more than 100 athletes have signed onto a class action suit against Gymnastics Canada and several provincial federations, saying they contributed to their abuse by creating a toxic culture and failing to protect them

Last June, GymCan hired the consulting firm McLaren Global Sports Solutions to conduct a study of the organization’s culture. The firm will analyze GymCan’s safe sport policies, compile international findings of similar investigations across the world and interview athletes and members of the GymCan community. The company only takes on such work for a body like GymCan if the organization agrees to make the findings public.

The firm has completed investigations into abuse for several international and Canadian sports federations. Many gymnasts have said there’s no guarantee from McLaren that the process will avoid making them relive traumas—or that it’s meant to help them at all. After all, McLaren’s stated mission is to help its clients—in this case, GymCan—“protect and enhance their brand” and to “navigate difficult organizational issues.” It wasn’t hired to rewrite an entire sport’s culture. By the end of 2022, McLaren had collected hundreds of surveys and interviewed dozens of GymCan stakeholders, including a number of athletes who described being abused and wanted future kids to be protected.

For many gymnasts, the McLaren study is a half measure. Last spring, a former B.C. gymnast named Amelia Cline filed a class-action lawsuit against GymCan and several provincial gymnastics federations. The lawsuit states that the sport’s governing bodies contributed to the abuse of athletes by creating a toxic culture and failing to protect athletes in their care, many of whom were children. To date, more than 100 former athletes, including Spadafora and Hunt, have signed on to the lawsuit. Some of those athletes are pushing for a third-party investigation into both the sport and GymCan itself. An independent review, they argue, is the only way to ensure that, if needed, the harshest recommendations will be made: tear it all down, fire everybody, start over.

This past July, a possible saviour for gymnastics arrived in the form of a new federal office dedicated to sports integrity. Pascale St-Onge, the sports minister, modelled the commission on a similar body in the U.S., which was swamped with reports of abuse from the moment it was founded in 2017. In the 2022 federal budget, the government granted $16 million to the office over three years and appointed Sarah-Eve Pelletier, a lawyer and former national competitor in artistic swimming, as commissioner. The idea is for the office to operate as an independent, third-party investigator into any complaints received from athletes, parents or coaches.

The federal government isn’t giving sports organizations any choice but to change. In July, it suspended GymCan’s annual $2.9-million funding. The freeze was to last until GymCan became a signatory to the sports integrity office. If it signed on, GymCan would no longer receive abuse reports, investigate its own coaches or decide on disciplinary action; a case like the Brubaker one would be completely out of its hands. Sport organizations still have questions about how exactly the office will operate, how it will collect complaints, whether there will be a public database of sanctioned coaches and what support will be offered to athletes who complain of abuse.

Three national organizations initially signed on: Volleyball Canada, Weightlifting Canada and Hockey Canada. Then, in December, GymCan finally agreed to participate. It will still be responsible for keeping athletes safe, but it will no longer be the body that gets to decide how adequately it does that job.

***

It took a criminal trial and the Gymnastics Canada investigation, plus years of therapy, for Spadafora to fully confront what she had endured at Bluewater—that it wasn’t just tough coaching and inappropriate moments, but grooming and deep, constant abuse. Today, she feels closer to healing, and she’s also aware of how her experiences continue to affect her. She suffers from anxiety and panic attacks and was recently diagnosed with obsessive-
compulsive disorder.

In November, Spadafora met with eight former gymnasts for another round of testifying—this time in Ottawa, speaking at the Status of Women’s hearings on the safety of women and girls in sport. She’s joined dozens of other athletes organizing under Gymnasts for Change Canada. Together, they’re lobbying the government for a federal inquiry into Canadian sport. It can be exhausting to push for change, to share your deepest trauma, only to see the needle move the smallest bit. It can be frustrating to feel like too few care about the vulnerability of young athletes. But she’s determined to keep going. There’s too much at stake: the well-being of every athlete and the future of the sport she’s always loved, even when it didn’t love her back. She still believes it can change for the better. No kid should suffer abuse to taste victory.

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 Harder They Fall: Inside Canada’s gymnastics abuse scandal appeared first on Macleans.ca.

A few months ago, a middle-aged woman in seemingly fine health came to my ER, feeling under the weather. She had called her family doctor, but he was booked up and couldn’t see her for six weeks. I treated her instead, and when I pulled up her records, I saw a recent scan ordered by that same doctor, the results of which she hadn’t yet learned: cancer, already too advanced to cure. It wasn’t just one tumour; they were everywhere. It was up to me to tell her she had a handful of months, at most, and she should start getting her affairs in order.

There was nothing else to do but hold her as she cried. She asked me what would happen to her spouse—who is older than her and dependent on her—when she was gone. More than anything, I wanted to say I could get her another year, or two or five. Instead, she heard the hardest news of her life from a stranger wearing a mask and a shield, in an exam room steps from the noise of gridlocked hallways and a packed waiting room.

For 39 years, I’ve worked as an ER physician at Great War Memorial hospital in Perth, Ontario, part of the Perth and Smiths Falls District Hospital. After all that time, I’ve become intimately acquainted with life’s fragility—how any of us can be here one moment and gone the next. That’s part of the job. But medicine shouldn’t be so ugly and upfront and harsh. Patients shouldn’t have this kind of news delivered in an overcrowded, underfunded emergency department by a person they’ve never met. More and more often, however, these heartbreaking, infuriating scenes are playing out in my hospital and in countless others across the country. Why? In part because the pandemic delayed checkups and put routine scans on the backburner. More patients discovered how sick they were, or that they were sick at all, during visits to ERs that were already struggling and in no condition to substitute for day-to-day health-care providers.

Yet we can’t simply blame this crisis on COVID—that’s the easy way out. Canadian health care, both primary and emergency, has been buckling for decades, and I’ve had a front-row seat to its slow collapse. For the past 21 years, I’ve been public affairs co-chair of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, the professional association for Canada’s emergency doctors. I’ve always seen our emergency department in Perth as a microcosm of Canada. Everything that happens here is also happening in the roughly 850 emergency departments nationwide: overcrowding, staff shortages, violence, abuse, burnout, patients warehoused in the ER because they can’t get a bed. What happens in Perth happens everywhere, and what’s happening in Perth has never been as bad as it is today.

Wait times for non-admitted patients to see a doctor have shot from one hour to five. Patients who need a bed might wait 24 hours or more (the provincial average for emergency patients is 21 hours). Sometimes it’s even longer: early in October, I came in for a shift to find five patients waiting for admission. When I came back the next day, they were all still there. Admissions take longer, which means treatment takes longer, which leads to more complications and higher mortality. 

Under these conditions, it can be nearly impossible to maintain the compassion and care that should be intrinsic to our profession—the humanity and decency that good doctors bring to their work. A humane ER is not one in which patients are dying in the halls, as we’ve seen in Canada these past two years. It’s not one where seemingly healthy people learn of terminal diagnoses in exam rooms commandeered for brief moments of privacy, or where violence and abuse have become run-of-the-mill. 

Our lowest point in Perth—so far—came in July, when our ER shut down for nearly four weeks. The closure left a town of 6,500 people, and the tourists who flock here in the summer, with only bare-bones access to emergency services. Our closure was unprecedented in its length and severity, but predictable in hindsight. In province after province, reduced hours and shutdowns have become distressingly common. And while the pandemic accelerated the decline, the rot was evident decades ago, in the form of neglect, under-investment and the devaluing of the doctors and nurses who keep our emergency departments running day to day. The decline of the primary-care system has only put more strain on us. For those paying attention, the origins of today’s crisis were visible years ago—even in a little ER like mine.

(Photograph by Johnny C.Y. Lam)

***

I’ve always loved emergency medicine. There’s a wild, satisfying, anarchic breadth to the work. Since 1983, I’ve been a family physician in Perth, serving around 1,500 patients, and I’ve worked as a coroner as well. But emergency is my true passion—I’m hooked on the anticipation and adrenalin, on never knowing what will come rolling through the door. In the ER, you have to master the art of turning chaos into calm, of moving from the tragic to the mundane in the blink of an eye. You may need to leave the weeping family of a cardiac-arrest victim to attend to someone with back pain, or go from a man with terminal liver disease to a guy calling you a “COVID Nazi.” You need to appreciate the good and the bad in humanity and maintain a sense of humour (preferably a dark one) about it all. Rural emergency medicine requires even deeper commitment. Small-town physicians live where we work—our patients are often our neighbours, and we’re personally invested in our hospitals. 

With 49 beds, Great War Memorial is small but mighty, covering a vast rural area and treating 25,000 emergency patients each year. When I got to Perth as a young doctor, after internships and residencies in Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver, emergency medicine in Canada was barely considered a specialty. Instead, it was something of a dumping ground for old surgeons, or new immigrants who faced barriers to setting up practices. This lack of interest in emerg was especially prevalent in rural hospitals. By the late 1970s and early ’80s, it was becoming clear that it would be beneficial to have physicians who specialized in cardiac and other trauma emergencies. The focus became on educating and training staff to identify and treat life- and limb-threatening crises. 

That’s what we did in Perth, where I made it my life’s work to transform our emergency department. In 1988, I became the department’s medical director, a job I held until 2012. I started by bringing in trauma surgeons and emergency doctors from Ottawa and Kingston to tell us what happened to patients we’d sent to hospitals there, and to help us break down to the minute what we could have done differently with them. Our doctors and nurses took emergency certification courses, and we set up study programs and performance reviews. We did away with onerous 24-hour shifts to make sure doctors and nurses were well rested rather than exhausted and crabby. We committed, in tangible ways, to transforming the department for the sake of our patients. 

I worried our staff would get sick of it and quit; for a small-town ER, this kind of levelling up was unusual. But it paid off. In 2013, CBC’s The Fifth Estate did a special report on Canadian hospitals and gave ours an A+ rating. I was incredibly proud to know that our hard work was being recognized. Patients knew that when they got here, they’d be treated by people who truly cared. 

In ERs from St. John’s to Victoria to Iqaluit, life-threatening emergencies requiring immediate attention make up only a tiny part of the patient load, maybe two per cent. Other patients, who need to be seen within an hour—heart attacks, pneumonia, appendicitis—represent another 20 per cent or so. Then there’s everything else: vague pains, broken bones, wasp stings. One major difference between a rural ER and an urban one is that we see more cases that would otherwise go to a walk-in clinic. Part of our mission is to be there as a stopgap. In recent years, though, that stopgap has been stretched far beyond reasonable limits. 

There wasn’t a single free bed, but patients kept coming. On days like that, there’s no privacy, no confidentiality, no dignity.

The number-one issue today in Perth, as in most ERs in Canada, is overcrowding, and all the knock-on effects that follow from it. Overcrowding—loosely defined as being unable to care for patients within a maximum of four hours—was first identified as a problem in Ontario in the late 1980s. It became so severe in Toronto that in the 1990s, the Ontario Hospital Association launched a task force to tackle it. One major problem identified was a lack of beds. In the last half of the ’90s, the number of acute-care beds in the province fell by 22 per cent, even as demand rose thanks to a growing and aging population. In 1995, the occupancy rate for those beds was 85.6 per cent. That’s not bad—a safe hospital is defined as one with 85 per cent occupancy or less. By 2000 it had climbed to 96 per cent. Some hospitals in Canada now exceed 100 per cent, with patients spilling into any hallway or exam room or other corner that can accommodate them. One Wednesday evening this past July, the Lanaudière Hospital in Saint-Charles-Borromée, Quebec, peaked at 191 per cent capacity. In 2021, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ranked Canada 31st among 34 countries for acute-care capacity, with 1.97 beds per 1,000 people. (Japan, at the top of the list, had 7.74.) 

We can see the effects of this over-crowding every day. One afternoon this past summer, I came in for my shift and found every treatment stretcher occupied by admitted patients, with more in the OR recovery room. Because the recovery room was full, elective surgeries, for people who’d been waiting months for a knee or shoulder replacement, were cancelled. There wasn’t a single free bed in the building—and still people kept coming. The only place we could see patients was on chairs in the hallways. On days like that, there’s no safe space to assess a patient. There’s no privacy, no confidentiality, no dignity. 

It’s no surprise our ERs have become full of tension, anger and violence, nor that ER staff have been on the receiving end of it, from raised fists and raised voices to streams of expletives to containers of bodily fluids tossed across the room. One patient’s irate husband stomped on, and broke, a doctor’s leg. Another patient reached for a cop’s gun. I once kicked someone out of the emergency department for yelling at a nurse, after I decided he didn’t need further attention. He later stalked my private office. Five years ago, a staff member at our sister site in Smiths Falls was stabbed in the head with a pair of scissors. That same year, a nurse was nearly strangled at a hospital in Montreal. 

The effect of all this is devastating on patients and staff alike. If you’re sitting in the waiting room with a sick child who has an ear infection, you don’t want a guy dropping F-bombs and making racist comments. If you’re lying on a stretcher in pain, it’s exhausting to also deal with somebody screaming beside you.

In 2015, health-care workers had more than twice the number of violence-related lost-time injuries that police and correctional officers had combined. And half of all attacks on health-care workers occur in emergency departments. Nurses, who spend the most time with the public, bear the brunt of it. That drives absenteeism among nurses higher and higher—nine per cent for full-time public-sector nurses in 2016, costing taxpayers an estimated $989 million. 

In spite of it all, Canadians haven’t been deterred from visiting ERs. A 2016 analysis by the Canadian Institute for Health Information found that 41 per cent of the population had used an ER within the previous two years, more than citizens of other Western countries including the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and Switzerland. Often this is because people can’t get appointments with their family doctor, or they don’t have one. And so the furious cycle continues.

***

COVID devastated our ERs. When it struck ours, we had 15 nurses working full time and part time hours in Perth. They were wonderful people who understood emerg, who were as addicted to it as I am. Nurses are the ER’s lifeblood: they triage, do assessments and exams, assist with dressing changes, coordinate with labs for tests, help patients get home when they’re discharged and much more.

Our nurses had been voicing their concerns about overcrowding and other issues for years with hospital administration and the province, and were often dismissed out of hand. So it wasn’t surprising when, in the first six months of the pandemic, they began leaving for other jobs in health care, like working as a nurse in light industry or at a family clinic—jobs where they don’t work weekends and nights, where they aren’t faced with abuse and threats, where they aren’t in a constant state of burnout. We dropped from 15 nurses to seven, then to five. A couple left on maternity leave, but most left for other, less taxing health care jobs. I can’t blame them. The ones who remained were deeply demoralized. 

They also felt terribly betrayed during COVID. For more than a year, they had come to work, putting themselves in just about the highest-risk place you could find yourself during a viral pandemic. They saw what had happened in New York City and in Italy: doctors and nurses dying, patients’ beds overflowing into parking garages. They stayed anyway. When vaccines finally became available, the province’s chaotic, disorganized rollout meant that front-line workers weren’t necessarily the first to get them. We often saw people doing virtual medicine, and other low-risk professionals, getting shots ahead of ER staff. 

This May, for National Nursing Week, our hospital administration gave each nurse a cookie as a thank-you. All I could think was: These people have been running around in gowns and gloves and masks and shields for two and a half years. And you give them a fucking cookie?

(Photograph by Rodolphe Beaulieu)

***

Once our ER dropped to five nurses in June of 2022, I knew that was it—it’s impossible to run a department with such a small staff. Our nurses were already working a shift, going home, having supper and playing with their kid or dog before coming right back. It was unsustainable. We were doomed. The hospital administration met on a Friday at the end of June to discuss the possibility of short-term closures. One idea was to close overnight through the summer. By Monday, this had leaked to the press. The emergency staff were stunned. Administration simply expected us to accept the idea. 

Then, within days, we lost two more nurses to COVID absences. Suddenly we were at three, a perfect scapegoat for a full ER closure. One staffer reached out to our malpractice association to ask about the repercussions and risks to community members, and to our patients in ICU and the rehab ward, if we closed. What if someone had an embolism after an orthopedic surgery and all the ER doctors were at home on the couch?

The administration agreed to keep one ER doctor in the hospital 24/7, in case someone came in with a real emergency or an issue that was quick and easy to treat, or in case something happened on one of the floors. It felt like a tiny win. 

Beginning on July 2, the ER shut down, a closure that stretched from one week to two to most of the month, until July 24. Those were quiet shifts for me. I treated one guy who came in with an allergic reaction to bee stings. I watched the maintenance crew polish the floors and patch up the walls. I literally watched paint dry. I continued working in my family practice nearby while the ER was closed, and one day, a woman came in alarmingly short of breath. Normally, help would have been 100 metres away in the ER. Her situation was potentially life-threatening, and I had to send her 20 kilometres down the road, to Smiths Falls. She survived, but it could have been much worse.

The nurses who quit didn't disappear into some cosmic black hole. But we're going to have to work very hard to regain their trust.

Politicians still insist the ER crisis is not so dire. In August, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said, “Ontarians continue to have access to the care they need, when they need it.” This was days after approximately two dozen Ontario hospitals reduced service over a long weekend. In Nova Scotia that same month, Premier Tim Houston said, “If you get sick in this province, you will get extremely good care. Shame on anyone who suggests otherwise.” In July, the Nova Scotia NDP obtained freedom-of-
information data showing that 43,000 people left that province’s ERs in 2021 without receiving treatment, presumably due to interminable wait times.

Across the country, more closures are piling up, too many to count. In British Columbia, the Dr. Helmcken Memorial Hospital in the town of Clearwater—one of the only hospitals in a vast rural area—has been closed more than 60 times this year. In Alberta, small-town ERs have been closed, or left with only nurses, dozens of times. Ontario has had more than 80 ER closures so far in 2022, including the shuttering of the ER in the little town of Chesley, which closed in early October due to a shortage of nurses. It’s not scheduled to reopen until the beginning of December. This fall, a leaked report on ER statistics obtained by the province’s opposition Liberals showed that on any given day in 2022, the average number of patients waiting in emergency departments for an inpatient bed was 884—a 53 per cent increase over 2021. 

People’s lives are hanging in the balance here. At Great War Memorial, we’ll never know exactly what patients or problems would have come through our doors if we hadn’t been closed. We’ve since hired a few new nurses, but we’re still relying on agency nurses—temporary workers provided by private staffing agencies. As good as they are, they’re not a lasting solution. The provinces love to talk about tight budgets and yet, across the country, they’re paying agency nurses double what their union counterparts make. 

Even with better pay, nurses aren’t going to come back unless there’s a firm commitment to mitigating violence and burnout and improving patient safety. The nurses who left Great War Memorial haven’t been raptured; they didn’t disappear into some cosmic black hole. They’re out there, and they’re addicted to emergency medicine, same as me. But we’re going to have to work very, very hard to regain their trust.

***

I’ve seen firsthand what it looks like when structural failures strip medicine of its patience, compassion and humanity. In 2010, one of my three children, Hilary, found a lump in her breast. I told her it was probably a cyst, nothing to worry about. I was wrong. Weeks before she graduated from university, she was diagnosed with stage-four metastatic cancer.

I knew Hilary was going to die, but I wanted her to have as full a life as possible. When she was diagnosed, her oncologist in Kingston said, “Don’t treat her, she’ll be dead in six months.” I was so incredibly angry. We found another oncologist, who was very kind, and we got more time together. For six years, Hilary was in and out of hospitals and doctors’ offices, and so was I, beside her. There was chemotherapy, radiation, multiple surgeries. We encountered wonderful doctors and awful ones.

Through my daughter’s experience, I saw medicine from a different angle, and I was shocked. After meeting some of her doctors, I thought, Why are you even here? You’re in the wrong profession. But now I think that maybe they weren’t simply bad doctors—maybe they too were burned out, at the end of their rope, having given all they could. Either way, they shouldn’t be looking after vulnerable people. My wife and I came away wondering what it must be like for patients who don’t know how to advocate for themselves or their families. Our daughter, had she been on her own, would have been lost. 

Hilary’s illness and death in 2016 had a profound impact on the way I treat people. I’ve recommitted myself to being as caring as I can. No matter the day, I try to make every patient encounter meaningful. It’s not just “Here’s the literature, here are your pills, get out.” It’s “How are your kids, your cows, the family dog?” I try to get patients to see me as a navigator through a health system that is extremely complex and often unfriendly. Ideally, I’d give people as much attention as they need, but there is so rarely the time to be as decent as we should be.

I am only one person, one doctor, in one town. We need a systemic transformation to restore a health system in which doctors and nurses have enough time, energy and empathy, where people aren’t learning of terminal illnesses in the ER, where desperately ill people are not warehoused in hallways. 

Governments across the country are putting on a brave face. But there needs to be real talk among the premiers and the federal minister of health, Jean-Yves Duclos, about what is going wrong. I’m hoping for a national study, a forensic audit—efforts with teeth. If you’re going to avoid crowding in emergency departments, you need to avoid crowded hospitals. That means more funding and more beds. It means improved access to home care and long-term care, so patients have places to go besides the ER and don’t spend three months in the hospital after fracturing their hip.

After decades in emergency medicine, I’m still passionate about what I do. At our hospital, we have a great foundation to build on: community support, committed physicians and nurses, and hopefully, leaders who recognize the jewel that they have. If we get through this winter and further COVID waves intact, we can become whole again. The people I’ve met over the decades in emergency represent the very best of what medicine is, and they try extraordinarily hard to make a flawed system work. That’s why the best of us do what we do, and why it’s been so painful to see some of the best of us leave.

This article appears in print in the December 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $8.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post State of Emergency: Inside Canada’s ER Crisis appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The first time Bilal Baig discussed gender with their parents was last fall, a week before the premiere of Sort Of, the CBC series inspired in part by Baig’s life. Yes, they know they should have done it earlier. Or at least before network promos began beaming Baig’s face into homes across the country. But for most of their adult life, the 27-year-old actor and writer—who uses they/them pronouns, and identifies as queer and transfemme—hasn’t had much to do with their parents. Not only did they not know Baig was transgender, they didn’t even know their child had become a celebrated writer and actor whose first show was about to debut on national television.

Baig had a feeling that coming out to these two first-generation Pakistani immigrants would go badly. It had to be done, though, so they sent a separate email to each parent, titled “My TV Show and Truth.” Baig described who they were now and outlined their show, in which they play Sabi Mehboob, a gender-fluid, twentysomething Pakistani-Canadian whose life, friends, family and gender journey are drawn partly from Baig’s own experience. And they explained that they were willing to have a relationship, if their parents were. The letter to their father was in English, and short. The letter to their mother took more time. Because their mom’s English isn’t great, Baig asked a friend in Pakistan to help translate her letter into Urdu; Baig can’t even read it in its current form. Their mom didn’t respond, but their dad did: I love you no matter what, he wrote. Baig was surprised, thinking it would be the opposite. A week later, all three met in a spacious coffee shop in Toronto’s Liberty Village. “It was a complicated moment,” Baig says. “And it was a complicated conversation.”

Baig’s mom was concerned about their safety. In Pakistan, transness is associated with the khawaja sira, the “third gender” community, which has been part of South Asian culture for centuries, and has long faced discrimination and violence. Beyond that, the reaction was strangely muted. “I’d have a more interesting story to tell if they freaked out,” says Baig. “But they had kind of a non-reaction that upset me even more. No one was really trying to make a deep connection.”

In retrospect, it wasn’t that surprising. Baig had spent much of their childhood feeling overlooked, the forgotten child of a harried couple too busy keeping their household afloat to bring much warmth to it. The underwhelming response to Baig’s monumental disclosure seemed like that past repeating itself. Baig has only sent their parents a handful of texts since that meeting, and the relationship remains unsettled. But Baig is at ease with that ambiguity—and their ease speaks to why Sort Of, and its creator, are so compelling. Actor and playwright Damien Atkins, a former mentor of Baig’s, says that even the show’s title is imbued with ambivalence. “It offers the notion of actually sitting in a question,” he says, “and understanding that one does not have to rush to an answer.”

Sort Of, which returns this November for a second season, doesn’t rush at all. The first season’s eight episodes have meandering titles like “Sort of Gone” and “Sort of Back.” This is mindfulness television, as impressionistic as a mainstream series gets. Co-created by Baig and actor-director-writer Fab Filippo, and loosely based on both of their lives, the show doesn’t pummel you with plot. Instead, it lets its characters breathe. Foremost among them is Sabi, the protagonist played by Baig, who balances various roles: second-generation Pakistani-Canadian, bartender, nanny, child, friend. There’s also Sabi’s mother, Raffo; their best friend, 7ven; and the family they nanny for.

Each character is in a state of flux, and Baig is a natural at capturing characters in the midst of transformation. They’ve spent the past decade navigating their own gender transition, as well as a multiplicity of identities: queer, Muslim, person of colour, child of immigrants. Their ability to weave that unique experience into such absorbing, relatable television makes Baig one of Canada’s most hypnotic writers and performers.

Sort Of has already won three Canadian Screen Awards (though Baig refused to submit themself for an acting nomination due to the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television’s gender-binary classification system). HBO Max aired the show to critical adulation in the U.S., where it won a Peabody Award and landed Baig on Time magazine’s list of “next generation leaders.” Baig has received personal messages from people who have, thanks to Sort Of, been able to talk to their parents about gender—and others who have become more certain about who they are after watching it. The latter is ironic, considering that Baig, like their show, is so hard to define.

This is what I know about Baig: they are soft spoken and not overly emotive. I know they are deeply shy, because they told me, and everyone else did too. I spoke to them over the phone and via video chat, and during the latter conversation, they wore black hornrims, yellow and pink nails, bangles, big dangly earrings and a sheer dark evening top. Their conspicuous style was at odds with their reserved demeanour. For most of our video call, when they answered questions, they looked out the window to the left of the screen. You get the impression, from how quietly they speak and how little space they occupy, that Baig would be happy to disappear. They understand how odd it is to lead a television show while being, as they say, deeply terrified of the attention it brings, but the rare chance to represent an identity and a body like theirs outweighs those fears. There’s even a 12-page guide, written by a trans psychotherapist, distributed to media covering Sort Of, addressing everything from gender terminology to journalistic accountability. As Baig told the CBC, “I don’t know that I can do press if I’m going to get misgendered every other word.” Yet their hesitations about being the centre of attention run deeper than concerns about pronouns. “I just love not being referred to at all,” they say. “That’s the dream.”

***

Baig was born in Toronto’s east end, at Michael Garron Hospital, and grew up in Mississauga, the third of four kids. “Most of the ’90s for me,” they say, “is candy.” When Baig was very young, their parents co-owned a candy-filled convenience store, and Baig often played with their siblings—younger and older brothers, and an older sister—in the playground nearby. That was as idyllic as things got. The business went south, and Baig’s parents scrambled for work, moving often, which meant the kids’ schools changed too. Baig’s mom eventually found stability at Baskin-Robbins, while their dad worked his way up the ranks at a Whirlpool appliance factory. He might still be there; Baig isn’t sure.

With their parents consumed by work, the kids made their own fun. Baig would often take on girly roles during games of pretend; if their parents noticed, they never said anything. Baig was the quiet one, watching and listening as everyone else in this family of big personalities got loud. Sometimes too loud.

The scene made Baig sad, angry, horny, amazed: “I didn’t realize writing could make you feel, like, five different things at once. That was such a queer kind of feeling.”

Baig found their voice at school. In Grade 9 drama class, they were browsing the small library in the corner of the classroom when one vivid title jumped out: White Biting Dog. They didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded cool. The 1984 Governor General’s Award–winning play by Judith Thompson, set in Toronto’s Rosedale neighborhood and strongly infused with elements of magical realism, tells the story of a young man whose suicide attempt is halted by a talking dog, who enlists the man in a mission to save his own dying father. A note prefacing the play advises, “This play must SPIN, not just turn around.” What do you mean? Baig thought. How can words spin?

Then they read it, and the words were spinning—the accents, the voices, the abbreviations. Baig’s exposure to drama had previously been what they call “proper English reading,” along the lines of Shakespeare, and they’d had trouble connecting to it. With White Biting Dog, they could feel the words. In one scene, a fight between the young man and his mother’s boyfriend morphs into a romantic embrace. It made Baig sad and angry, horny and amazed—and scared that their own emerging teenage sexuality was playing out in front of them. “I didn’t realize writing could make you feel, like, five different things at once,” says Baig. “That was such a queer kind of feeling.”

From then on, Baig wrote a play a year, enthralled by the possibilities of drama. “Prose feels deeply intellectual to me,” they say. “But human speech feels completely emotional, and I just wanted to offer that to myself and the world.”

In the fall of 2012, they enrolled in the theatre program at the University of Guelph, specifically because Thompson taught there. Guelph was very white, and to Baig it seemed like they were the first person of colour some students had seen in the flesh. Then there was Baig’s obvious queerness—the green pants, the tight shirts. They constantly felt eyes on them. And the classes were huge, hundreds of people, a lecturer at the front, Baig’s brain shutting off. But they stuck around for Thompson, who invited her students to look deep inside themselves. That’s when Baig started writing South Asian characters for the first time, even submitting work in Urdu.

For Thompson’s final assignment, she instructed students to “write the story you need to tell.” It was the word “need” that got to Baig. The story they needed to tell was about their mother—how Baig felt she was slipping away because they were queer, because they weren’t religious enough, because they weren’t good enough. What would happen, Baig wondered, if they asked her straight up, “Do you think I’m a good person?” That question shaped the play, though the answer wasn’t the point. It was to relieve Baig of its weight, and let the characters grapple with it instead. That, Baig says, felt like the start of a real career in writing.

The result was Acha Bacha (“Good Kid”). It’s about a Pakistani-Canadian man, Zaya, confronting possible sexual abuse by his imam, while attempting to balance his Muslim background and queerness by (unsuccessfully) hiding his non-binary lover, Salim, from his devout mother, whom he calls Ma. “YOU DID NOT TAKE CARE OF ME,” Zaya berates her, which reads pointedly once you know Baig’s history. As does the last line, in which Salim expresses love to Zaya and says, in Urdu, “Tell me everything.”

Acha Bacha, which debuted in February of 2018 at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille, is not funny like Sort Of, but it contains Baig’s trademarks: casual dialogue (“you’re being weird”), gender fluidity, a rambling plot, thorny family dynamics. There’s enfant terrible–style confrontation (the play opens on a blow job). Much of the dialogue is in Urdu, which gives the play the effect of inhabiting two different worlds. Damien Atkins, who met the 18-year-old Baig at a summer workshop at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre in 2013, advised Baig to make the language more accessible to English speakers. In retrospect, he’s glad they didn’t take the advice. Instead, the Urdu-speaking audience had uniquely deep access to the play, uncommon in Canadian theatre.

Acha Bacha’s most significant connection to Sort Of is Ellora Patnaik, who played Ma, and now plays Baig’s character’s mother on the show. Baig met Patnaik at Acha Bacha’s first workshop in 2014, after they had transferred to Humber College in Etobicoke, in Toronto’s suburban west end. Baig recalls racing across town to get to the workshop’s downtown venue in time, arriving with minutes to spare. And there she was: Ma. “There was something kind of instant and right about her,” says Baig, “the way she looked at me and the way I looked at her.” Patnaik calls herself Baig’s “mini mom”—she even went to their Humber graduation in 2016.

Baig remembers driving home with Patnaik from a pool party this past summer, talking about the “hybrid relationships” they have with certain women in their lives, who occupy multiple roles, as mothers, sisters, children, friends or even lovers. Baig didn’t realize one relationship could manifest in so many ways. In the pool that day, they’d looked at Patnaik and thought, I’d love to feel this with my actual mom.

***

You don’t do Canadian theatre for the money. Even after celebrating the well-reviewed premiere of their first major play, Baig was still living above a roti shop, with a bank account in overdraft while working as a nanny. (“Imagine me and two little white girls walking down Roncesvalles Avenue.”) Several months after Acha Bacha’s debut, when they were cast in a play called Theory, they were excited. They could stop nannying and start saving.

The play was about a professor who encourages unmoderated discussions among students as a free-speech experiment. Baig played a student, and actor and writer Fab Filippo played a professor. Neither was the lead, so in their free time between scenes, they worked on their own writing projects in the dressing room, laptops open opposite one another. Every night, Filippo heard the laughs Baig got. He recognized their dry sense of humour. Several weeks into the play, he asked Baig if they were interested in making television.

The thought hadn’t occurred to Baig, but they have a twisted attraction to things that terrified them. What could be more terrifying than what Filippo intended—a show based on Baig’s own life? “You know when you see somebody,” he says, “and you go: them.” It was unclear to Baig where Filippo would fit into a story about a queer, young, non-binary person of colour, but as a recently divorced dad, he was in transition too. This would be a show about how everyone is, in their own way. His alter ego would be Paul (played in the show by actor Gray Powell), the dad whose kids Baig’s character nannies, and whose wife ends up in a coma. Once that was decided, says Filippo, it was simple: “The story fell from the sky.” Sort Of’s main character, Sabi, did not. Baig had never appeared on screen, but they had seen actresses who made it seem doable—like Maggie Gyllenhaal. “I always feel like she’s playing against the words,” says Baig. That’s what Baig eventually did too.

Filippo and Baig created a sizzle reel, which is a kind of trailer pitched to executives who can greenlight a series. Filippo encouraged them to smile if something seemed funny, even if the scene didn’t require it—like a commentary on their own dialogue. That smirk became a Sabi signature, unlocking the character. Filippo further encouraged Baig to perform the least of all the actors, to be the calm in the storm, the way they always were. It fit Sabi’s introversion, and Baig’s.

Television hadn’t occurred to Baig, but they had a twisted attraction to things that terrified them. What could be more terrifying than a show about their life?

The pair pitched Sort Of as a cross between the handheld wit of Fleabag and the queer warmth of Please Like Me. It ended up at Sphere Media (then Sienna Films) because of Filippo. “I know the person who won’t crush us,” he told Baig. It was Jennifer Kawaja, who had supported his work in the past. She ensured Sort Of’s original tone was preserved—some scenes from the sizzle reel were even recreated in the pilot.

Being more familiar with theatre, Baig had to get used to how visual television is. They spent a lot of time in the writers’ room, observing. “I don’t remember being a very useful presence,” they say. Sometimes Baig’s ideas were too subtle for the camera, like an emotion too difficult to capture on an actor’s face. But Baig took note of pitches that moved the story forward, and of how to be quippier. Watching Filippo in particular, they learned how to exit a scene and land a joke. According to Filippo, he and Baig never argue, and neither is driven by ego. If they fight for anything, it’s honesty. Baig feels most comfortable sharing observations around race, gender and sexuality, because they live it every day.

Ultimately, Sort Of’s momentum is not provided by outlandish characters and dialogue, but by the navigation of normal events: a breakup, a friend moving, a job lost. Baig is attracted to contrasts, confronting the somewhat disengaged Sabi with a barrage of crises—all that high-stakes drama knocking against all that low-key comedy. The juxtaposition echoes Sabi’s incongruity in this genre, as well as Baig’s, who doesn’t really like acting in the first place, or is at least ambivalent about it. Atkins once praised their performance, and their response was, “I’m not sure I should do it anymore.” They do it because they have to, because they know their appearance on screen is more important than their discomfort. Before a shoot, they go into what Filippo calls their “cocoon phase,” spending time alone, recharging. I watched them do that on set the day I visited. Between takes, in their clementine tank and turquoise cowboy boots, they leaned quietly against a doorway, alone, appearing to centre themself. To look at them, you wouldn’t know they were the star of the show. There wasn’t a magnetic field around them. It was the opposite. There was space.

***

What makes Sort Of so revolutionary is how little it cares about being revolutionary. While it is unapologetically queer, it never relies on exaggerated tropes. Sabi isn’t out and proud (though their best friend, 7ven, is). Raffo is not solely a disapproving immigrant mother, but one trying to understand (“If you’re not a girl, what are you?”). There’s no big coming-out moment. Nor is Sabi’s identity particularly clear, even to them. There’s no spectacle, no stacked witticisms or overbearing music or frenetic editing. Sabi always looks stylish, but in a realistic, DIY way. And Baig’s deadpan delivery makes the show’s subtle humour that much funnier. “I’m glad our kids have been exposed to you,” Paul tells Sabi. They respond, “I’m glad I exposed myself to them.”

Despite Sort Of’s brevity—eight episodes in the first season, 20 minutes each—themes recur, threaded throughout like in a rich novella. Of particular importance is the idea of listening to and seeing others. The last scene of the first season shows Sabi alone, eating their mom’s leftovers. It’s a callback to the first episode, in which their mom showed up on their doorstep with leftovers and saw them in full femme for the first time—a symbol of the two finally connecting.

Bilal Baig as Sabi Mehboob and Grey Powell as Paul, a character based in part on series co-creator Fab Filippo.

Sort Of is not a term paper. Identity politics can even be the butt of jokes (“White-saviour it,” Sabi directs Paul). Because of its light touch, the show’s wisdom hits that much harder as it pops up in passing dialogue. And trying is valued. Not understanding and expressing contradiction is allowed, which is as fundamental to Baig as to their work. “What the world needs more of is understanding how to sit with our discomfort,” says Filippo. He describes “the Baig pause,” which evokes this idea perfectly. It would come up in meetings with executives when they were pitching the show. The suits would ask a question, and Baig would say nothing for as long as it took to formulate an answer they believed in. The discomfort of that silence made everyone listen much more intently when Baig finally spoke.

I’ve even experienced my own Baig pause. A month before we met for this story, I was in the café at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, having tea with a friend. Baig had just arrived with Raymond Cham Jr. (a Sort Of cast member) and they were facing me. At that moment, I gesticulated widely and knocked a full cup of tea dramatically onto the ground. I stopped and considered it, agog, before looking up to see who had noticed. I believe Cham Jr. displayed that mildly shocked smile bystanders have when something embarrassing happens to someone else. But Baig caught my eye because of what they weren’t doing—their expression remained completely unchanged, refusing to fill the moment with artifice.

“I remember that moment really clearly,” Baig told me on the phone a month later. “I thought it was amazing.”

Their reaction made me feel like I had given them a gift. This is a particular talent Baig has: to make you feel valuable. It is something extraordinary that a person made to feel overlooked as a child can grow into someone who strives to ensure that everyone they meet feels the opposite. As Patnaik puts it: “When I’m with Bilal, I feel like I am their whole world.”

***

Before Sort Of, before Acha Bacha, Baig volunteered with Story Planet, a not-for-profit offering creative-writing workshops to kids in disadvantaged communities. Like many people, the first thing executive director Liz Haines noticed about Baig was their shyness. But she later reconsidered it as an “intentional hesitancy,” a way of holding themself back to give room to others, which served Baig well when working with kids. One of the big discussions at Story Planet was about gender. Baig’s approach was that learning never ends—and not just for kids, as Baig’s own gender expression transformed through the years.

In theatre school, they shaved their head as a form of resistance against the stuffy environment. “It was all about, like, Chekhov and breathing,” Baig explains. “I was like, ‘That’s not the world I want to be in.’ ” Then came the odd bangle, then longer hair, then a full beard plus makeup, and now today: no beard, hair down, makeup and dresses. They weren’t trying to make any political statements. They were just trying to do what felt right, though they often struggled with the attention it brought. Baig still doesn’t see gender in a linear way: “I’m not fussy about it and I really wish the world would move in that direction.”

This is Baig sitting in the question, as always. And it helps explain why they prefer not to be an overnight success. The slow spread of Sort Of—most people I mention it to haven’t heard of it—allows for time to reflect, and to change.

“There are just so many routes available, and that makes me really happy,” they say. Maybe, Baig suggests, they’ll disappear from the spotlight altogether and work with kids for the rest of their life. It would make sense. As Sabi says, “I like how they process stuff. They don’t rush to put things in boxes.”

This article appears in print in the November 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $8.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post The Uncertain Stardom of Bilal Baig appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Early on a Sunday morning in June of 2021, Nathaniel Veltman told a co-worker he expected to have a rough day on the job. Veltman worked at an egg-processing plant in the town of Strathroy, Ontario, where his duties involved loading 20-pound crates of eggs onto skids, then loading the skids onto trucks, and he wasn’t feeling up to hours of manual labour. “Yeah, man, just so many shrooms last night,” he said. “I went to hell and I saw Satan.”

The co-worker was used to Veltman saying odd things and didn’t pay it much mind. “I was just like, ‘Yeah. Take it easy today, man, like maybe don’t go on any power equipment.’ ” Veltman chuckled and looked away. “Nothing really seemed that off to me,” the colleague says.

The next morning, Veltman, who was 20 at the time, wasn’t at work at all. Another person broke the news: “You’re probably never gonna see Nate ever again.”

Neither colleague is likely to, unless they attend Veltman’s murder trial next fall. After the Sunday shift, Veltman got into his Ram pickup, which he had recently equipped with a bull bar on the front bumper, and drove to London, Ontario, 35 kilometres away. A little past 8:30 p.m., he proceeded down Hyde Park Road, a broad suburban avenue on the edge of the city. Arriving at the intersection with South Carriage Road, he accelerated and jumped the curb. Police allege that he then intentionally struck down five members of the Afzaal family, who were out for an after-dinner stroll not far from their home.

Four of them died: 44-year-old Madiha, who was working on a Ph.D. in environmental engineering; her 46-year-old husband, Salman, a physiotherapist; their 15-year-old daughter, Yumnah, a Grade 9 student; and her 74-year-old grandmother, Talat Afzaal, an artist and teacher. Madiha and Salman’s nine-year-old son was badly hurt. Now an orphan, he is living with extended family members.

While bystanders rushed to tend to the Afzaals, Veltman drove to Cherryhill Village Mall, seven kilometres away, where he stopped in a parking lot. The front of his truck was damaged, streaked with blood. He wore a helmet and body armour, and a T-shirt bearing what some witnesses described as a cross, though that hasn’t been confirmed. He spoke to a shocked taxi driver, who was parked in the lot as well. He reportedly told the driver to call police, and that he’d killed someone.

The driver said Veltman was laughing.

***

In London, Ali Chahbar is the kind of local character who seems to know everyone. He grew up in the city, the son of the first Muslim to serve on city council, and he loves his hometown. Today he’s a lawyer who works with the Thames Valley District School Board. When he first heard of the incident on Hyde Park Road, he thought it was probably a tragic accident, and imagined it might have been caused by a drunk driver. Within hours, though, a London police officer he’d known for years paid him a visit. When his friend arrived in his civvies, visibly distraught, Chahbar knew something worse had happened. The two men sat in Chahbar’s backyard together—his friend wanted to tell Chahbar what he knew, or at least as much as he was permitted to share.

“He said that as they were getting preliminary information, it looked like it might have been a targeted thing,” Chahbar recalls. “He said, ‘I can’t share much with you at this point, but there was a family, and it looks like they might have been targeted because of their identity.’ ”

The Afzaals are Muslim, with roots in Pakistan. Some women in the family typically wore hijabs, which the driver would have seen from inside his truck. The news hit Chahbar hard. He didn’t know the name of the family yet, but he knew they likely attended the same mosque he did and walked the same streets in the community where he grew up. And he was, of course, aware of the mass shootings that had struck mosques and synagogues in recent years in Pittsburgh, Christchurch, Quebec City and elsewhere. But this was different. This was in his town. “I didn’t think that these types of things happened in London,” he says. “I took some measure of comfort from the fact that they took place in other parts of the world, other parts of the country. You know, it’s London.”

When Chahbar’s friend told him the news, that the suspect was a local guy, born and raised nearby, it shattered his sense of his city. “It took some time,” he says, “to come to grips with the fact that it happened here.”

The Afzaal family’s nine-year-old son was the only survivor of the attack.

John Brennan and his wife, Charlene Pratt, heard the news the next day while listening to CBC Radio in their suburban Strathroy home. As the day went on, the news got worse. “You hear ‘four people,’ ” Brennan recalls. “And then the report clarifies a little bit more, you know, it’s a family. And then the next reporting cycle, suddenly it’s an Islamic family.”

When they heard Veltman’s name, it rang a bell. The Brennans are both retired, after long careers teaching at Strathroy District Collegiate Institute, a local high school. Brennan got out a yearbook. “Flip, flip, flip, and you go, ‘Oh my God, it’s Nathaniel Veltman.’ ” Brennan had coached Veltman on the cross-country running team, and taught both of his parents as well. After teaching 5,000 kids over 32 years, he had learned to spot troubled ones, but Veltman never registered. “No red flags,” he says.

As a student, Veltman had been easy to deal with, pleasant and friendly, and he seemed to enjoy the runs that Brennan organized in the woodlands around Strathroy. “The idea that a gentle, happy, 15-year-old boy who appears to be fine could morph in five years into an agitated, angry killer. This is where I start to wonder if there’s such a thing as an active force called evil in the universe.”

Brennan found himself asking a version of the same awful question that so many have asked, but which has remained unanswered since that truck mounted the curb and destroyed a family: could an apparently normal Canadian boy—who grew up with so many advantages in a prosperous, safe place—end up turning a truck into a weapon of mass murder?

The day after the incident, police laid four counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. Within days, they also laid terrorism charges, which suggests the Crown believes he was motivated by hatred.

In the meantime, there’s a mountain of evidence in court files pertaining to Veltman’s past—much of which I’m unable to report directly because a judge has sealed it under a publication ban, intended to give Veltman the best possible chance at a fair trial. Veltman’s parents did not respond to interview requests, and his legal representatives declined comment. But the clues available to us, and the evidence I was able to gather during months of reporting in Strathroy and London, point to a combination of psychological struggles and family crisis—and a hateful ideology that may have offered a sense of meaning and direction to a young man more deeply disturbed than anyone around him realized.

***

Mark Veltman and Alysia Bisset were married in the Bethel Baptist Church in Strathroy in April of 1997. Bisset was 19; Veltman, 23. They bought a comfortable four-bedroom ranch house on the outskirts of town, down a lane set back from the road. Behind the house, on a half-acre lot bordering farm fields, there is today an above-ground pool, a basketball pad, a fire pit and a little red barn. Mark worked at Lambton College, in an administrative job in the information technology department, where, tax records show, he was earning $92,000 a year by 2017.

On December 20, 2000, Nathaniel Veltman was born, along with a twin sister. Mark and Alysia had four more children, one every two years, until 2010. People who knew Nathaniel as a child describe a sweet-natured boy who loved animals. Alysia homeschooled the kids in what was, by all accounts, a deeply devout household in a part of small-town southwestern Ontario sometimes described as a Canadian Bible belt.

The family attended the same Baptist church in Strathroy where Mark and Alysia had wed. According to tax records, Mark Veltman donated to several evangelical missions, to an anti-abortion group and to Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based fundamentalist Christian organization that advocates for socially conservative policies. He also donated to the Peoples Church of Sarnia-Lambton, a literalist congregation that believes the Bible is the unerring, verbatim word of God. (One of its recent pastors studied at Liberty University, the private U.S. evangelical university co-founded by conservative Christian icon Jerry Falwell.)

In September of 2016, after a lifetime of homeschooling, Nathaniel Veltman enrolled in Strathroy District Collegiate Institute for his last two years of high school. Students who knew him there say he was a quiet and agreeable kid, though he had a reputation for eccentricity. One student said he seemed closed off, keeping mostly to himself. A female classmate said there was something off about him, that he was odd. He appears to have been studious, graduating from high school with a scholarship intended to help deserving Strathroy students afford post-secondary education. But at home, things were going badly. Mark and Alysia separated in February of 2016, and three months after Veltman enrolled at Strathroy Collegiate, his mother filed for divorce.

There are 570 pages in the divorce file at the courthouse in London. A judge has ordered significant sections redacted in response to a motion from Mark Veltman, but the information that is accessible indicates that the family had long been dealing with strife and conflict. It shows growing discord, with Alysia on one side and her oldest son and his father on the other. In the divorce application, Alysia alleged that Mark’s infidelity had ended the marriage, and repeatedly complained that her husband was working to turn the children against her. In a separation agreement reached in March of 2016, she won sole custody of the six children, with only supervised access for Mark—which he didn’t honour, often arranging to see them alone.

Veltman’s alleged crime and victims fit a terrible pattern that has occurred over and over, in killings in Norway, New Zealand, Quebec City and Buffalo.

The file also contains complaints by Alysia that Mark often sent messages to the children, especially Nathaniel, blaming her for the breakdown of the marriage. He texted another child, “I’m sorry I can’t see you tonight. I am not feeling well. Being on the receiving end of your mother’s relentless mission to utterly destroy me has that effect.”

Mark sent angry messages to Alysia, calling her in one “the most wicked human being” he had ever known. According to his mother, Nathaniel became difficult and argumentative, complaining about the child support his father had to pay. At times, the file says, Alysia locked herself in her bedroom to avoid her son. Nathaniel complained that his mother should quit homeschooling the other children so she could get a job and stop using his father’s money. He began objecting to long-standing household rules, encouraged by his father.

Alysia and Mark disagreed on parenting matters as well. “The ridiculous restrictions that you want to impose on Nate I don’t agree with and you know I never did,” he wrote to her in August of 2016, predicting that her approach to raising the children would create “six bitter children,” and leave Nathaniel “emasculated.” Two days later, in a second email, he wrote: “Your [sic] going to have a disaster on your hands. Clearly my input is meaningless. You need help.”

With his father’s encouragement, and against his mother’s wishes, Nathaniel moved out on his own. The file says that in January of 2017, a month after his 16th birthday, he withdrew from parental control, which teenagers in Ontario are permitted to do when they reach that age.

The troubled loners who commit mass murder for ideological or religious reasons frequently have difficult family lives, says Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor of religion and political science at Queen’s University who specializes in terrorism and radicalization. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a radicalized case,” he says, “where there wasn’t some sort of family turmoil.”

Amarasingam suggests that the painful divorce, and the struggle between Veltman’s parents, may have created what is known as a “cognitive opening,” into which new ideas and new ways of thinking might make inroads. That can take the form of an ideology, or an online community that seems to offer support and understanding, especially during times of heightened crisis.

Veltman may have found just such a community online. During their investigation, police were looking for evidence of the installation and use of a specialized browser for accessing the dark web, where extremists share hateful messages in chat rooms that leave no electronic trail. A search warrant seeking access to his laptop and other devices said that they appeared to contain “hate-related material and [were] relevant to the listed offences.”

Amarasingam also speculates that Veltman was inspired by other mass killings, such as those committed by white supremacists in Norway in 2011, in Quebec City in 2017, in New Zealand in 2019, and in Buffalo in 2022. All followed a similar, terrible pattern, and most of the killers subscribed to the “great replacement” theory. These terrorists see themselves as soldiers in a war to defend white culture against an invasion of brown-skinned invaders, orchestrated by a Jewish-led conspiracy to destroy white communities.

So far, there is no clear indication that Veltman left a manifesto, as these killers sometimes do, but his alleged crime and victims otherwise fit a pattern that has recurred with depressing regularity: troubled young men, radicalized online, committing mass murders and leaving terrible suffering in their wake.

Thousands gather for a vigil at the London mosque the Afzaal family attended

***

In 2018, Veltman moved in with a friendin a basement apartment in Strathroy. By then, he was already working at the egg plant, mostly with other young men from the area.

His co-workers found him pleasant and helpful, always willing to finish others’ tasks so they could leave early. He made friends—after the attack, his co-workers tried to square their memories of a quirky but likable guy with the murderer he’s now alleged to be. Two employees, including one who was raised Muslim, told reporters that it must have been an accident, because Veltman never showed any sign of hatred. But once they started trading stories, a different picture took shape.

One person remembered him saying explicitly, viciously racist things about Black people, for instance. (The colleague says he replied with: “That’s really fucked up. Don’t say that, man.”) Veltman also talked about outlandish conspiracy theories, including the flat Earth theory, and the “lizard people” theory—an idea, often linked to anti-Semitism, that a group of reptilian humanoids is secretly controlling human affairs. He also often spoke about religion, and appeared to be struggling with his sexual desires. He would use his phone to look at pornography, become disgusted with himself and break the device. He lost several phones that way. “One time he actually tried to cut off his own testicles,” recalls a co-worker. “He had to go to the hospital.”

Veltman often joined other employees at a riverside pub for karaoke nights. Patrons remember him as shy, just another young guy drinking beer—but he would sometimes get extremely drunk. A friend recalls that one night he was “slamming drinks” before disappearing from the pub. The friend went outside to look for him but lost him in the rain. The next time the two men saw each other, Veltman said he had gone down to the trails along the Sydenham River. “He said he went in there,” says the friend, “and was fighting demons.”

Another night, Veltman drank too much and walked home. He later told a co-worker he was arrested for breaking into someone else’s house, thinking it was his own. In May of 2019, Strathroy police ticketed Veltman for public intoxication several blocks from his home, fining him $50. A police source says there were 13 “occurrences” mentioning Veltman in their files—minor incidents that didn’t result in police action. Things were about to get much worse.

***

That summer, Veltman moved out of the basement unit in Strathroy and rented a bachelor apartment in downtown London, near Covent Garden Market. In many ways it’s a charming neighbourhood, full of restaurants, pubs and shops, though nearby Dundas Street has a gritty edge, with open drug use and a large population of unhoused people frequenting nearby shelters and services. Veltman’s apartment was across the street from the downtown campus of Fanshawe College, where in September of 2018 he started studying architectural drafting.

Even between school and two jobs—one at the egg plant, the other a work placement at a local engineering company—Veltman found time to get involved in fringe political movements, such as anti-lockdown rallies. He volunteered for the Christian Heritage Party candidate in Elgin—Middlesex—London. Elections Canada records show he donated $20 to the campaign in October of 2019.

He’d called them out of the blue to volunteer, and another campaign volunteer, a farmer who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, had him over for dinner with his family. (“You could just tell he hadn’t had a home-cooked meal for a while.”)

The farmer, a devout Christian, could see that Veltman needed guidance, and they stayed in touch after the campaign. At some point after his divorce, Veltman’s father had left the Christian church, which pained Veltman. The farmer, whose faith is rock-solid, was there to help. Veltman considered becoming a Mormon, and several times attended a London evangelical church whose congregation is made up mostly of first-generation immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. He even exchanged text messages about scriptural matters with the Black pastor, who told me he had no idea that the young man harboured racist views.

As the pandemic continued, Veltman became much more isolated, the farmer says. He tried to arrange for the young man to live with a family he knew, but it didn’t work out. Veltman came over for dinner a few more times, and cancelled once, saying he was hungover. In November of 2020, Veltman wrote a long email to the farmer, detailing his psychological struggles.

“I have been blessed beyond belief, I have a place of my own, a car, a job to go back to, friends, school, and yet, I still have been losing my ability to even feel happy about life. I can never get enough of just laying in my bed … I feel so isolated from my family and my soul doesn’t even seem to understand the reason why I am on this earth. I feel full of resentment, anger, hatred, and rage against this world and some people. I got on my knees in the bathroom today and asked God to save me from myself … I told him that I knew my heart was filled with pride and asked him to take it away from me. Walking away I feel empowered and I feel like God is lifting me out of my mental torment. After praying I felt reminded that I was on this earth to serve God, and not myself.”

A friend recalls that one night he was “slamming drinks,” before disappearing from the pub. Veltman had gone down to the trails along the Sydenham River. “He said he went in there and was fighting demons.”

The farmer sent him emails encouraging him to listen to Christian music and establish better routines, although he doesn’t believe Veltman followed his advice. They planned to get together over Christmas that year, but Veltman cancelled because he was broke—he said his credit card was maxed out, and he couldn’t afford to buy windshield-washer fluid, so he couldn’t drive. In April, he dropped out of school. The next month, he bought a 2016 Ram from a dealership in London and had it fitted with a bull bar: a rigid barrier designed to push aside brush or animals, which also makes a vehicle more dangerous in a head-on collision, especially with pedestrians.

Veltman joked that he’d bought the bar to “ram the cops.” One of his friends chalked it up as one of Veltman’s strange jokes, but also wondered how he’d come up with the money for such an expensive truck. Used Rams of that vintage sell for $15,000 to $45,000. Given that Veltman had recently been too broke to buy windshield-washer fluid, it’s hard to imagine how he qualified for a big loan. One co-worker wonders if someone he met online helped.

Search warrants in Veltman’s case include documents pertaining to the purchase of the truck. Michael Arntfield, a University of Western Ontario criminology professor and former London police officer, suggests the purchase may well speak to preplanning, and the Crown will likely allege that Veltman acquired the large vehicle for the purposes of maximizing the casualties. “The defence is going to say he’s a blue-collar guy who wants a truck,” says Arntfield. “But clearly you can see the prosecution forming the case that he acquired this as a weapon.”

***

A few days after the Afzaals were struck down, Ali Chahbar—the lawyer with the love for all things London—got a call from the principal at Oakridge Secondary School, where 15-year-old Yumnah, the youngest of the slain Afzaals, had been attending Grade 9. At the beginning of the year, every student in her grade had been assigned to write a letter to their future selves outlining their aspirations. The principal had Yumnah’s handwritten letter, and he didn’t know what to do with it.

“You need a reservoir of hate,” says one of the Afzaals’ relatives. “You need to have a mode of transmission, and most times now it’s the internet. And you need to have a vulnerable individual. You need all three to exist before someone actually commits a crime.”

“Mom’s gone. Dad’s gone. Grandma’s gone,” the principal said to Chahbar. He hoped that because Chahbar was so well connected in the city, particularly in the Muslim community, he may be able to find a home for the letter. “I have this thing I think is of value,” he said. “I think it’s a keepsake, and you’re the only person I know who might have a potential connection to somebody.” Chahbar agreed to see if he could get the letter to the family. “It fucking wrecked me, man,” he says of its contents. “This girl in there, she was just snuffed out.”

The Afzaal family’s nine-year-old son was the only survivor of the attack, which claimed the lives of Yumnah, Madiha, Talat and Salman

Chahbar reached out to community members, who found names and addresses of surviving relatives—one of whom lived in the same neighbourhood as him. Chahbar walked down the street, letter in hand, and knocked on the door. Yumnah’s great-aunt answered. Chahbar explained who he was and what he was doing. He handed her the letter and she read it on the spot. The woman, whose two eldest children were close to Yumnah, was overcome; she couldn’t finish the letter until later, when her family had gathered with her. This is what it said:

“Dear me, 

Coming into high school, there was a lot that I was expecting. There was also so much I was completely unsure about. I knew which classes I had, but I didn’t know with whom. I knew COVID-19 was going to change things, but I didn’t know how.”

As she got to know her school, however, she became more confident: “I’ve been successful in working my way towards the goals that I have set for myself. I would describe myself as an ambitious person, so the eagerness and dedication I put into my goals is what drives me to reach them. Although it sounds heavily generic, I have learned that there isn’t anything that isn’t within our grasp.”

She describes her passion for art, her pleasure in painting a mural in elementary school, her love of R&B and hip hop, and her favourite classes (English and history). And she spoke of her devotion to family.

“I would describe myself as an introverted person that has a small circle. My family consists of me, my brother and my parents. I’m close with my cousins, too, and I enjoy getting on their nerves and hanging out with them. Overall, I’m someone that values people, their time and the things I’m passionate about.”

Yumnah’s great-uncle, a London doctor who asked us not to use his name out of concern for his safety, says the letter from Yumnah is “very precious to us.” He and Yumnah’s great-aunt keep it in a binder with her artwork, each page covered in plastic film. They treasure their memories of the optimistic, hopeful, energetic girl who has been taken from them.

In Islam, the formal grieving period is three days. “But you can grieve your whole life,” says Yumnah’s great-uncle. “And we will.”

***

In the London courthouse, there are hundreds of pages of search warrantsfrom the London Police Service’s investigation into Veltman, including documents for warrants to search his truck, apartment and electronic devices.

There is nothing in the file to definitively indicate that Veltman had the active assistance of far-right groups, or anyone else. But as the terror charges against him indicate, police believe he was motivated by hate, given his suspected activity on the dark web and other material found on his laptop.

After the attack, Veltman was locked up in London’s Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre, where he’s been ever since, and where he turned 21 last December. It is a 450-bed maximum-security jail, and a rough place—there have been 19 inmate deaths there since 2009. Veltman has appeared at several hearings by video linkup from jail, looking young and frail in an orange prison-issued T-shirt and blue face mask.

When Veltman stands trial, he will be represented by Christopher Hicks, a veteran Toronto defence attorney who has handled many high-profile criminal cases, representing bikers and killers. He often does legal analysis on CTV News, breaking down arguments in a concise, matter-of-fact manner, and has argued more than a dozen times before the Supreme Court of Canada. In June, Hicks successfully brought a motion seeking a change of venue, convincing Superior Court Justice Renee Pomerance that Veltman should be tried outside of London. The reasons for the decision are under a publication ban, but such rulings are sometimes made when intense media coverage of a crime, or local reputation, could make it hard for a suspect to get a fair trial.

Veltman made a virtual court appearance in October of 2021, as Justice of the Peace Robert Seneshen (top left) and lawyer Alayna Jay look on. (Sketch courtesy of Alexandra Newbould/The Canadian Press)

If Hicks seeks a not-guilty plea on the basis that Veltman was mentally ill, he will have to convince Justice Pomerance that the young man didn’t understand his actions. Defence lawyers for the man who drove a rented van onto a Toronto sidewalk in 2018, killing 11 people (including one who died in 2021, after more than three years in hospital), tried a similar argument, which was rejected by the judge in that case.

Michael Spratt is an Ottawa defence lawyer, a criminal law specialist and a frequent legal commentator (he is not involved in this case). “Running that sort of defence can be an uphill battle for an accused,” says Spratt. “It’s Hicks’s onus to show that Veltman suffered from a psychiatric illness that prevented him from understanding the nature and consequences of actions. That he was not able, essentially, to tell right from wrong.”

***

The day after the attack, Ali Chahbar went to the place where the Ram with the bull bar struck the Afzaal family. Londoners had gathered, many bearing flowers to express their sorrow. Chahbar recalls a white woman, probably in her 60s, who came with a bouquet. “She was crying and she started to apologize to me,” he says. “And before I could even say something to her, another random Londoner who was at the scene gave her a hug, and he started to cry as well. And so we have three strangers on the corner.” Chahbar chokes up a year later as he recalls the scene.

Although Londoners rallied immediately and forcefully around Muslims in the community, the attack on the Afzaals has made many fearful. When Chahbar enters his mosque to worship on Fridays, the thought of something terrible happening sometimes enters his mind. He thinks about the possibility of being carried out on a stretcher. Yet he doesn’t stay away. “It’s almost an act of defiance now to say, ‘You’re not going to scare us. If your objective, Veltman, was to instill fear in the hearts and minds of the community, you failed miserably.’ ”

Mourners pray during the public funeral for the Afzaal family in June of 2021

In fact, he says, the attack has had the opposite effect—it’s brought people together. On the anniversary of the killing, thousands of Londoners gathered at the sports field next to the school that Yumnah attended. Her cousin spoke, and a friend, as did religious leaders from many faiths, plus Mayor Ed Holder and Justin Trudeau, who later walked with young Muslims at the head of a march opposing Islamophobia.

Relatives of the Afzaals have tried to stay out of the public eye, though they have supported scholarships in Madiha and Salman’s names, and there are plans in the works for one to honour Talat, who was a talented artist.

Yumnah’s great-aunt, who received the letter from Ali Chahbar, says the Afzaals were extremely private, and their relatives have tried to respect that privacy even now. “After the attack, people didn’t know their names,” she says. “But when they saw the pictures, they said, ‘I know that person, I had met them at the mosque,’ or ‘he had helped me with such and such.’”

Shaukat Rizvi, a relative of the Afzaals, said the killing has deepened the understanding between different communities. But he also suspects that anti-Muslim feeling may be growing in the area as the Muslim population grows. London police reported a recent increase in hate crimes in 2021, with Muslims among the most targeted groups.

Strathroy still looks much like the place it was when the Veltmans got married, and like countless other small Canadian communities. It has a small, historic downtown, full of handsome brick buildings that date from the era when the railway was the main source of economic activity. There’s a newer commercial area on the outskirts, packed with chain restaurants and big-box stores.

But like the larger city to the east, its population is changing. Long dominated by white English Canadians, Strathroy experienced a postwar wave of Dutch immigration, and a later wave of Portuguese immigration. Today, its proximity to London is driving more rapid population growth, with thousands of new residents in the past several years. Among them is a small but growing Muslim community.

Brennan, who coached Veltman in high school and sits on the Strathroy-Caradoc municipal council, says most people in town are welcoming—although there have always been those who resist change. “People feel threatened,” he says. “We’re talking about a very small minority of people, but that’s all it takes. It only takes one person out of a hundred.”

Yumnah’s great-uncle agrees. “You just need to find the most vulnerable individual,” he says. “The weakest link is going to go down a rabbit hole. It just takes one.” A doctor by profession, he sees this kind of crime as a public-health problem that can only be tackled systemically, as if stamping out a virus. “To do something like this, you need to have a reservoir of hate,” he says. “You need to have a mode of transmission, and most times now it’s the internet. And you need to have a vulnerable individual. You need all three to exist before someone commits a crime.”

The farmer who tried to help Veltman thinks about it in more personal terms—he wishes he had been there, and is haunted by what-ifs. “I don’t know if I would’ve had the courage to do it,” he says. “But I wish I could have stepped in front of the Afzaal family. Because that might have stopped him. Because he probably wouldn’t have run me over. That’s still in my mind.”

This article appears in print in the November 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $8.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $29.99.

The post An Act of Evil appeared first on Macleans.ca.

This story originally appeared in the June 2022 issue of Maclean’s.

Félix Auger-Aliassime was seven years old the first time he caught a tennis coach’s eye. It was 2007, and Sylvain Bruneau, who was working with Équipes du Québec, saw hundreds of seven- to 10-year-olds take the court at the Montreal academy every other Saturday to play with friends. One day, among the mass of bright yellow balls ricocheting around the courts, Bruneau noticed a spindly kid who burned a hole with his eyes through each ball that came his way. It was hard to miss him. The child would bring his racquet back, line up his shot and, like clockwork, power the ball across the net, releasing a guttural grunt with each stroke—the kind of sound that a human can only produce when they’re pushing their body to its limit. Bruneau was absolutely floored. “Who is this?” he wondered.

While most kids were goofing around, Auger-Aliassime was preparing for a career. “He was serious,” says Bruneau, who has since worked with some of the top stars in the country. “He was able to concentrate in a way you don’t see from kids that age. It was…” he pauses. “Different.” The average kid doesn’t have his career mapped out at seven years old. Then again, Auger-Aliassime has never been average.

From the time his father first told him it was possible to make a profession out of playing the game he loved, Auger-Aliassime developed a one-track mind. “From that point on I was on a mission,” he says. “What never changed was my desire to make it and do this as my career. It’s pretty wild that at that age I knew what I wanted to do in life.”

Auger-Aliassime’s rise in tennis is no Cinderella story. He’s earned it. He has blazing speed to cover the court, serves like a rocket launcher and, at six-foot-four, the length to reach any ball. It’s all combined with a mind that’s as finely tuned as the engine of a luxury sports car. Now, Auger-Aliassime leads a deep and talented crop of young Canadian players making a name for themselves—and their country—on the global stage.

“Since he was young, he wanted to go to the top,” says his coach Frédéric Fontang. “In order to do that, you need to eat tennis. You need to sleep tennis. It becomes an obsession.” So far, the results speak for themselves. Last year, Auger-Aliassime made his Olympic debut, led Canada to an ATP Cup victory and became the youngest player since 2009 to play in the semifinals of the U.S. Open, the final grand slam of the calendar year. In the first half of 2022, he won his first major tournament and smashed his way into the top-10 world rankings, reaching number nine and entering this summer as the top Canadian men’s player on tour.

For this year’s grand slam season, the stakes have never been higher. “I like to be in this position,” he says. “When you’re on top of Mount Everest, the air becomes thinner. The question is: Are you going to survive?”

***

Tennis was inevitable in the Auger- Aliassime household. Félix’s father, Sam Aliassime, was born and raised in Togo, a small French-speaking nation in West Africa with no real tennis system in place, which has produced only a handful of pro players in its history. Sam, despite talent and a passion for the game, was not one of them. But he grew up admiring the tennis stars of the ’80s and ’90s, flipping through whatever magazines he could get his hands on and transfixed by the few matches he could find on TV.

In 1999, Sam emigrated to Montreal and settled down with his wife, Marie Auger, a teacher. Their daughter, Malika, was born in 1998 and, shortly after Félix came along in 2000, the family moved to Quebec City, where Sam got a job coaching tennis at Club Avantage, a large indoor rec centre in the quiet suburb of L’Ancienne-Lorette.

As a strict rule, Sam and Marie limited screen time for Félix and Malika, who were encouraged to play outdoors. They would explore nearby parks, inventing games and playing sports. Whether it was badminton or Ping-Pong, the rules were always the same: the first to reach 100 points wins.

They also inherited Sam’s love for tennis. “I picked it up quickly,” Auger-Aliassime says, with a hint of a French-Canadian accent. “It was always tennis, tennis, tennis.” After school, the siblings would accompany their father to the courts. Some days, Sam would give them lessons; other times, Félix and Malika would hit the ball for hours on end.

Félix was a natural at any sport he picked up. When he wasn’t immediately great at other pursuits, like piano, it drove him mad. The screen-time rule was relaxed when it came to tennis, and Félix was glued to players like Rafael Nadal, whose poster was on his bedroom wall. The siblings pushed each other to get better. Malika—who reached a junior ranking of 554 before turning her attention toward her education—admits she was rarely able to beat her baby bro after he started to outgrow her.

'When you're on top of Mount Everest, the air becomes thinner,' says Auger-Aliassime. "The question is: are you going to survive?'

At 10 years old, Félix won the Canadian under-12 indoor nationals. At 11, he won an international tournament for 12-year-olds held in Auray, France. He began travelling more, preparing for a life on the road. “He was never missing home or calling in tears,” says Malika. “He had this air of independence to him and carried himself like he knew this was what he needed to do in order to be where he wanted to be.”

Had Auger-Aliassime been born a decade earlier, he likely would have relocated to somewhere like Florida, where he’d have access to top-tier coaching and world-class competition. But by the time of Auger- Aliassime’s rise, Canada had its own world-class system to develop elite young players at home.

And so instead, he moved to Montreal at age 14 to join Tennis Canada’s National Tennis Centre, the high-performance factory established in 2007 by former French Tennis Federation coach Louis Borfiga. There, Auger-Aliassime began working with his first coach, Guillaume Marx, and Tennis Canada’s stable of instructors. He quickly earned a reputation for his intense practices, his determined grunts once again echoing through the facility—just like when he was a child.

In 2015, he won four junior tournaments and dipped his toes into professional waters. At a tournament in Granby, Quebec, at age 15, he became the youngest men’s player ever to win an ATP Challenger match. Even some seasoned pros took notice. “He is one of the players the future of men’s tennis belongs to,” noted Roger Federer, the game’s all-time great. “He is a very complete, elegant player.”

Frédéric Fontang was working as a freelance coach for Canadian star Vasek Pospisil when he was contacted by Borfiga, who told him to check out the rising star. From his home in Bradenton, Florida, Fontang watched one set of a match against an opponent ranked inside the top 150. On the tiny screen of his cellphone, Fontang observed the teenage Auger-Aliassime push far more experienced players to the edge. “It was not usual to see that kind of intensity,” he says.

***

Within two years of arriving in Montreal, Auger-Aliassime had gone from promising prospect to the number-two-ranked junior singles player in the world. But despite his unusual work ethic, there was still much to learn when it came to the inner game.

Tennis is a lonely sport. In singles, players are out on the court by themselves; they aren’t allowed to communicate with coaches during matches. It forces them to cope on their own. “You prepare with your coaches, but when it comes down to the court, it’s really a one-on-one challenge between you and your opponent. Nothing else matters,” says Auger-Aliassime. “You learn a lot about yourself.”

The isolation of tennis can make or break players. And one day in 2016, it nearly broke Auger-Aliassime. At 16, he’d entered the U.S. Open Juniors as one of the favourites to win it all. But he kept seizing up. In the second round against Australian Alexei Popyrin, Auger-Aliassime lost the first set in the best-of-three match. Exasperation set in. “As a kid I would get frustrated, and I’d show it. I used to get angry when a match wasn’t going well.”

In the second set, he missed a shot wide. Dejected and desperate for help, he looked toward Guillaume Marx in the grandstands. The coach turned away. After another error, he set his gaze on Marx again, who looked away once more. “At first, I was confused,” recalls Auger-Aliassime. “I felt abandoned. But I got the message: I guess I’m supposed to figure this out myself.”

Auger-Aliassime roared back to win the second and third sets and clinch the match. Afterwards, Marx pulled him aside. “There comes a time when you can’t play like that anymore,” he told his protege. “You can’t be looking at me—or anyone else—for answers.” At that moment, Auger-Aliassime says, his mindset shifted. “Eventually you learn that, if you really want to make a difference—not just in my sport but in life—you are the main actor. Only you are responsible. After that day, I was a different player.” A week later, after defeating number-five seed Miomir Kecmanović from Serbia, Auger-Aliassime was crowned the U.S. Open junior champion.

(Photo courtesy of Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

When Auger-Aliassime is on top of his game, he’s playing chess and moving the pieces on both sides. Nowhere was this more evident than in July of 2021, on the iconic No. 1 Court at the All England club at Wimbledon. Auger-Aliassime showcased the evolution of his game in a four-hour-and-seven-minute battle against Alexander Zverev of Germany—whom he had never beaten despite three previous tries. During the milliseconds it took for the ball to reach him, Auger-Aliassime calculated his options. His eyes narrowed, each blade of freshly cut grass magnified as he zeroed in on a sliver of open court. “You have to decide: do I make him move once more?” he says. “Do I go behind his back? Do I take a drop shot? A ton of decisions in a split second.”

He opted for a booming forehand that sent Zverev to the corner, then positioned himself for his next salvo. A smashing volley at the net secured him the upset win and booked his ticket to the next round. “It was a big match and a turning point,” says Fontang. Two months later, Auger-Aliassime reached the semifinals of the U.S. Open. He had arrived.

Auger-Aliassime thrives in a sport built on swift decision-making. “I’m the type of person who, once I make my decision, I rarely second-guess it,” he says. “It’s like that when I buy things in a store or order at a restaurant. I don’t hesitate.” But some decisions require more time. Take, for example, the months-long process of choosing a new coach. Entering this year, Auger-Aliassime reached eight tournament finals—a huge achievement at such a young age. But he lost each time. His 0-8 finals record was the second-worst in tennis history. “At least one of us won’t have baggage weight issues at the airport,” he tweeted, clocking the size of his opponent’s massive trophy after losing the finals of a tournament in Marseille in February. He didn’t get angry; he isn’t one to smash his racquet. But he knew it was time for a change. “Arguably it’s a selfish decision,” he says. “But in an individual sport, sometimes you need to make a selfish decision.”

Auger-Aliassime moved on from Marx, who had been coaching him in tandem with Fontang, to bring somebody new on board in an adviser role—someone who had won grand slams and reached the pinnacle. He made a list of dream candidates. At the top of the list was Toni Nadal, the uncle and former coach of tennis icon Rafael Nadal, winner of a record 21 grand slams.

Auger-Aliassime reached out and, to his delight, Nadal agreed to work with him. They spent two weeks training at Nadal’s facility in Mallorca, where they hit it off immediately. “We talked about the values of excellence and work ethic—things that are so, so important to me that society tends to forget these days,” says Auger-Aliassime. “Like the value of repetition.” (Nadal has remained a part of Auger-Aliassime’s team, though Fontang continues to handle primary on-court coaching duties.)

Six months later, at the Rotterdam Open in January, Auger-Aliassime finally broke the losing streak, defeating Stefanos Tsitsipas, ranked number three in the world, in the final. “The player has to stay in the present moment, in the action. It was a big release, beating Tsitsipas. But I was already thinking about the following week,” says Fontang. “That’s the challenge.”

***

Auger-Aliassime’s rise coincides with an explosion of talent across Canada. Since the development of the National Tennis Centre in 2007, and Tennis Canada’s ambitious goal to have multiple Canadians placed among the top ranks of the sport, Canada has gone from tennis afterthought to budding powerhouse. With access to high-level coaching and training resources, we’re producing more elite talent than ever before. In 2019, Canada reached the finals at the Davis Cup—a tournament that pits nation against nation— for the first time in the event’s 122-year history. Auger-Aliassime was on Canada’s roster. Two years later, he led the country to victory this past February at the ATP Cup world event.

Today’s young stars have witnessed Canadians like Auger-Aliassime succeed on the global stage and are eager to make their own mark. It’s helped breed a confident and electric playing style—a new calling card of Canadian tennis.

After joining the professional ranks full time, Auger-Aliassime plotted his next move. Barcelona was an option and so was the south of France—both popular destinations for tennis pros. In the end, he chose Monte Carlo, a haven for many of the game’s elite players. Tsitsipas, Daniil Medvedev, Stan Wawrinka and others reside in Monaco, often training together between tournaments.

Each morning, the sun rises above the Mediterranean outside Auger-Aliassime’s window. For the first two years, his studio apartment was mostly barren, but now there’s art on the walls—mostly landscape paintings from local artists—along with framed photos of his family and girlfriend taken back home in Quebec.

Auger-Aliassime’s apartment is near the Monte Carlo Country Club, whose picturesque red-clay courts overlook the sea. It is the same club where Louis Borfiga, the man credited with turning around Tennis Canada, got his start. The club, which hosts a prestigious annual tournament, has become Auger-Aliassime’s home court and de facto training centre.

Playing a sport with virtually no off-season, Auger-Aliassime is on the road for most of the year competing in tournaments around the world. All told, he spends anywhere from 15 to 20 weeks in a given year at home. “I’m not meant to be stuck in Canada forever if I think it’s the best for my career to move abroad. Monaco was the best place for me. Even though it was a big move, I have zero regrets about it.”

Since he’s left his nest, Auger-Aliassime makes a point of getting his family together whenever possible. Each year during the tournament held at Indian Wells in California, the Auger-Aliassime clan rent a house in the city. Félix, Malika, Sam and Marie are there, along with Auger-Aliassime’s coaching staff. It’s an important chance to reconnect as a family. Sam, who ran a restaurant in Togo before moving to Canada, helps with the cooking. Marie brings maple syrup from Quebec. They gather around the table, discussing things like art and politics. (The war in Ukraine was a big topic this year.) But everyone keeps an eye on the tennis match on TV in the background.

While most young people chase a sense of freedom, Auger-Aliassime craves discipline. Every day is regimented, and that’s how he prefers it. “I’m not somebody who wakes up and says, ‘Okay, let’s see where the day goes,’ ” he says. “I like things in order. I like to have a plan, a vision. I’m a bit of a perfectionist.”

When he’s in Monaco, he’ll head to the country club each morning, drop off his bag in the mahogany-clad locker room and make his way to the red clay for two hours of on-court training. Then he’ll hit the gym for sport-specific fitness, followed by lunch and a nap. If there’s an imbalance between the game and down time, that is by design. “I know where I want to go. The way I see it, tennis is always my first priority,” he says. “I have high ambitions in my sport and want to do as well as possible.” Fitting, then, that he’s built a home in an environment where tennis comes first, second and third. “Things are not complicated,” Auger-Aliassime says. “I love what I do. I try to do it in the best way.”

Auger-Aliassime has gone from an up-and-coming teenager to a top-10 player with a target on his back.

After capturing the Rotterdam title in January and reaching the finals in his next tourney in Marseille, Auger-Aliassime was on a roll. By March, he’d defeated Andy Murray, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Andrey Rublev, and expectations for his 2022 season grew. Things have changed in a hurry for Auger-Aliassime. This year at Wimbledon, which begins at the end of June, he’s expected to make a deep run. As a junior, that weight of expectation made him nervous. Now he seeks it out.

In a few short years, Auger-Aliassime has gone from an up-and-coming teenager to a top-10 player with lucrative sponsorship deals with Adidas and Tag Heuer—and a target on his back. Naturally, his ascent to tennis’s top tier came with challenges. But none compare to the demands that come with staying there, and justifying the attention from tennis fans around the world. “I’ve always put a lot of pressure on myself in this sport,” he says. “But pressure makes diamonds. I want to be in a position where people are demanding a lot from me.”

Auger-Aliassime knows how far he’s come and how much further he still has to go. “How good I can be will depend on myself: how focused my work is, how hard I’ll compete and how resilient I’ll be over the coming years,” he says. “If I do these things well, I can go as far as I want. And yeah, sometimes I’ll lose. But always with a fight.”

This story originally appeared in the June 2022 issue of Maclean’s.

The post The rise of Félix Auger-Aliassime appeared first on Macleans.ca.

When people talk about Alphonso Davies as a soccer player, the first thing they mention is his speed. It’s his superpower, his cheat code, his magic trick. It’s the thing that, along with relentless hard work, self-belief and a rocket-launching left foot, has made him the best soccer player in Canadian history. In a now-famous World Cup qualifying match against Panama last October, Davies sprinted 40 yards up the sideline, gently plucked the ball from the foot of a dawdling Panamanian, took it inside the penalty area, and then, outfoxing both defender and keeper, promptly put the ball in the back of the net. His top speed during that run was 37.1 kilometres an hour, a pace mere mortals would be lucky to reach on a bicycle. In the Bundesliga, the German football league where Davies plays for the titanic FC Bayern Munich, he’s set a league record of an equally astonishing 36.51 kilometres an hour.

But when people talk about Alphonso Davies as a person, the first thing they bring up is his decency. This is somehow even more magical, more impossible, than his game. A lot of people—maybe most people—when bestowed with the superhuman ability that Davies possesses, might become arrogant, or complacent, or just plain entitled. If anything, Davies has gone in the opposite direction. As his career has unfolded—from his first professional game, at age 15 with the Vancouver Whitecaps, to now, as starting left back for Bayern—he has conducted himself with uncommon humility and grace. At press conferences, he apologizes for getting yellow cards. When he learned that Canada’s men’s team had qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 36 years, he cried openly on his Twitch stream. His agent is the same guy who coached him when he was 11.

And then there’s all his humanitarian work. Now just 21, Davies has already used his growing stardom to draw attention and money to a cause that he has a deep personal connection to: the global refugee crisis. In 2020, he started working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and in March of 2021 he became the first soccer player and the first Canadian to be appointed as a Global Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR. This past August, he announced that he will donate all of his World Cup earnings to charity.

Everybody loves Phonzie. In a sport with no small number of prima donnas and frustratingly persistent corruption, it’s quite possible that he has zero haters. His fans include, but are certainly not limited to, Justin Trudeau, Drake, Neymar and the entire countries of Liberia, Ghana and Canada. On the pitch, he’s the picture of focus and determination. In real life and online (and Phonzie is very much online), he’s a beloved celebrity: goofy, generous, exuberant. He has, naturally, leveraged all that affection into lucrative endorsement deals with, among others, Nike and EA Sports. He’s now considered the most marketable Canadian athlete in the world, ranking well above NHL legends Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid, and tennis star Eugenie Bouchard.

Davies’s story is exactly the one that Canadians love to tell about ourselves. Refugee family finds sanctuary here, works hard to make a life, and their child grows up to excel and prosper. It’s also the story of the evolution of soccer in this country. And it’s one that’s really just beginning.

***

Few could have predicted such a remarkable future for Davies. His parents, Debeah and Victoria, lived through two horrific civil wars in Liberia before fleeing for the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana. There, they were relatively safe, but daily life was still chaotic and grim. The family lived in a cramped, tin-roof shack, with clothing and food in short supply. Davies was born in the camp in 2000, the third of the five children his parents would eventually have. “Refugee life is like if they put you in a container and lock you up,” Victoria said years later. “No way to get out.”

And yet, eventually, miraculously, they did. Five years after Davies was born, the family made their way to Windsor, Ontario, through a resettlement program. They spent a year there before moving to Edmonton, where Debeah found work in a poultry plant and Victoria as a university janitor. They lived in Boyle Street, an older, low-income neighbourhood east of the core, where Davies attended Mother Teresa Catholic school. Debeah and Victoria adjusted slowly, gradually learning English. Debeah also played a little soccer, eventually joining a local rec team, and watched games on TV, cheering on Chelsea, his favourite English club.

Davies, a quiet and self-contained kid, found a similar way to settle in. As a young boy, he was unbelievably athletic, preternaturally good at basketball, soccer and track, picked first for almost every team. Soccer quickly became his favourite of these sports—he had an instinctive head for the game—and after excelling in Free Footie, an after-school program, he moved into more competitive leagues. By the age of 11, he was enrolled in Edmonton’s St. Nicholas Soccer Academy, where director Marco Bossio immediately recognized his talent and potential. “He showed up ready for what we had to offer,” Bossio tells me, “and just took it by storm.” Where other kids his age were still learning the basic techniques of efficient running, Davies had already moved on to another dimension, where gravity and windspeed were all but non-existent. “I don’t know where he picked that up,” Bossio says. “Whether it was god-given or genetics or what, his athleticism was off the charts.” Bossio played him in midfield or up front and always on the right side, so he could cut inside and use his already powerful left foot to shoot.

Davies wasn’t just quick on the field; his ascent through various soccer leagues was similarly prodigious. While at St. Nick’s, he played with the community club, Edmonton’s Internazionale Soccer Club, and later with its rival, the Edmonton Strikers. He told his coaches and teachers, with great solemnity, that he was going to become a pro, and there were few who doubted it. Davies’s parents were encouraging—sports keep kids out of trouble, of course—but they were also concerned. They wanted him to focus on school, to make sure he had the opportunities they didn’t. They also needed him at home. With Debeah and Victoria both working and unable to afford child care, Davies often had to look after his younger siblings, starting when he was just 10. He cooked meals, changed diapers and fit in football when he could.

With the Strikers, everything changed. His coach was Nick Huoseh, an electrical engineer by trade, who loved soccer and the kids who played it. He helped cover registration fees for some of his players, bought them cleats if they couldn’t afford them and ferried them to games. His own son Adam played with Davies, and the two became close friends. Like everyone, Huoseh was dazzled by Davies, and he offered to help take care of him, too. Huoseh’s father was also a refugee—the family is Palestinian—and he recognized the struggle and need. Soon, Davies was coming over for barbecues, and the Huosehs became his second family.

Huoseh was the Alphonso Davies whisperer. He was generous and protective, but also extremely keen on discipline and character. He’d seen how some other coaches behaved—insulting other teams and players, swearing, being quick to anger—and was always careful to set a good example. “I was pretty straight to the point,” he says. “You gotta be respectful, you gotta be humble. Don’t think you’re better than anybody else, because there’s always somebody better, bigger, faster.” He quickly reoriented the basic mechanics of Davies’s game. While other coaches would instruct their players to kick the ball ahead of Davies, whose speed meant he’d always get to it, Huoseh knew that this trick wouldn’t always work—there would be other quick players, and bigger ones, too, who would bump him off the ball. “He would get upset, and I would have to bench him,” Huoseh says. “Other coaches had taught him to play on his own. I had to teach him to play with his team.”

***

Between 2012 and 2014, Craig Dalrymple, then technical director for MLS’s Vancouver Whitecaps, travelled to Edmonton several times to see Davies play. He was impressed, of course, with Davies’s pace and dexterity, and that crazy left foot, but he was most captivated by the kid’s energy. “He played with a tremendous smile on his face,” Dalrymple told me. “He was this larger-than-life personality.” The player Bossi and Huoseh knew—a leader, for sure, but a reserved one—was morphing. His self-assurance had grown along with his skills. Dalrymple wanted him for the Whitecaps.

That would take some persuasion. His mother, in particular, had reservations. “I don’t want a full-grown man living on my couch and not working in five or six years,” Huoseh remembers Victoria saying, “because of some football fantasy.” Davies promised her he would finish high school, and at 14, he joined the Whitecaps’ academy residency team. He progressed from the under-16 team to the first team in just 18 months. When he signed a multi-year professional contract with the team at 15, he was the third-youngest player in MLS history to do so, and, at the time, the youngest player in the league.

With the Whitecaps, too, he displayed a tremendous capacity for work. After his debut with the first team, he returned to the academy the next morning and said he wanted to train with his buddies on the under-16 team that afternoon. Dalrymple told him no—he was on the first team now and he needed a recovery day. Davies deflated. Fine, Dalrymple said, you can hang out, fill water bottles, serve as a linesman. “I expected him to walk off home,” Dalrymple remembered. “But he didn’t. He stayed, ran the line, helped the guys with their water. That’s who he is as a person.” In 2016, he was named the club’s most promising player. The following year, he received his Canadian citizenship and, a week later, was called up to the Canadian senior national team. A month later, in the CONCACAF Gold Cup—CONCACAF is the FIFA group for countries in North and Central America and the Caribbean—he became the youngest goal scorer in the history of both the men’s national team and the tournament.

Nick Huoseh was still in Davies’s life—he handled all the admin with the Whitecaps and regularly reported back to Davies’s parents. When agents began circling the phenom, Huoseh told Victoria and Debeah that their son needed representation. Victoria asked if Huoseh would do it. “We don’t know these people,” she said. “You’re a smart guy and you’re doing everything anyway.” Davies agreed, and urged him to take on the role. All Huoseh really knew about being a sports agent was from Jerry Maguire, but he talked to a few friends who were scouts for big clubs, thought about it for a minute, and finally said yes. “I didn’t wake up and say, ‘I’m gonna be this guy’s agent,’ ” he says. “Then, six or seven months later, I find myself at a negotiating table with Bayern Munich.”

Bayern Munich is one of the top five football clubs in the world. The German powerhouse has won 10 consecutive Bundesliga titles, and in recent years, its roster has included dozens of iconic players, most notably Arjen Robben, whom Davies has long adored. Davies had always fantasized of playing for such a club; MLS was great, but Europe was the dream. Huoseh started sniffing around, focusing on half a dozen European teams who would fit well (and pay out accordingly). Manchester United was one possibility—an international scout sent the team at least 40 different reports about Davies—but Bayern was the most persistent. In July of 2018, the club signed Davies in a US$22-million transfer deal, an MLS record at the time.

Davies was in Munich when he learned that Canada had qualified for the World Cup. A viral clip shows him going through three stages of elation: hoots, tears and unfurling the Canadian flag.

Davies wasn’t quite 18, however, so to finalize the deal, he and Huoseh flew from Vancouver to Edmonton, along with Bayern’s leadership, where they met Victoria and Debeah at the airport to sign the paperwork. They got on another plane to Toronto, then drove to Philadelphia, where Bayern was playing a pre-season friendly. Davies and Huoseh arrived at the Ritz-Carlton just in time to see the team bus pull up. As Davies and Huoseh got out of their cab, they watched the players file out. Huoseh recalls the moment with awe: “It was like, you see all these big-name players come off, and you go, ‘Man, I’m gonna be part of this.’”

***

In Germany, they called Davies Kid Canada. And he was still a kid. He sat on the bench for most of his first few months. He struggled, made mistakes. After spending the first part of his career as an attacker, he was moved to left back, and had to learn to become a defender.

It was a smart move, instantly proving how versatile Davies could be. From the back, he had more control of the field, could set up plays, could change the pace of the game. By 2019–20, his first full season, he had found his footing. He was named Bundesliga Rookie of the Season, and Bayern won the Bundesliga, the UEFA Champions League and the DFB-Pokal, Germany’s annual cup competition. The pandemic temporarily scuttled his progress, but in April of 2020, Bayern extended Davies’s contract to 2025. He was routinely called the best left back in the world. By the time he was 21, he’d won 12 major trophies, including four Bundesliga titles.

With superhuman speed, an explosive left foot and unflagging enthusiasm, Davies can take control of the field and change the pace of a game. (Photo courtesy of Canada Soccer)

He complemented all this with some of the best social media in sports. On TikTok, Davies shows off both pre-season workouts and late-night dance moves. His Instagram account is a case study in FIFA drip. He streams his FIFA 22 games on Twitch. While he was dating fellow Canadian soccer star Jordyn Huitema, the couple started a YouTube channel that chronicled their romance with detail that was both endearing and cringe. Together for four years, they broke up in May. Davies confirmed the news on Twitter, of course, where he said of Huitema, “She is a good person I have a lot of respect for her.”

Back home, Davies would be unsurprisingly instrumental to Canada’s long-awaited return to the World Cup (see the aforementioned game with Panama). Coach John Herdman, who had taken over the men’s team after winning back-to-back Olympic bronze medals with Canada’s women’s team, compared him to that side’s low-key captain, Christine Sinclair. Describing Davies as a “caged animal” when on defence, Herdman returned him to the attack. But in January of 2021, while on a break from Bayern, Davies contracted COVID. Even worse, he also developed symptoms of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that can reduce its ability to pump blood. For a moment, Davies was terrified—was his career ending just as it had begun?—but, ultimately, it wasn’t that bad. He rested for several weeks and was unable to play in Canada’s final six qualifying matches. But the team already had the momentum it needed. On March 27, on a snowy afternoon in Toronto, they beat Jamaica 4-0 and qualified for the first time in 36 years. Davies was at home in Munich, gaming and streaming, when he got the news. A clip, which went viral, captured him going through at least three different stages of elation: hoots, tears, the unfurling of the Canadian flag.

If possible, the illness seemed to focus him even more. When he returned to the pitch with Bayern nearly four months later, he worked harder and appeared to have more energy. As a younger player, he had struggled a bit with nerves and was occasionally afraid to make the wrong move or decision. After being out with COVID, he played with fresh confidence. Huoseh recalled him taking a penalty kick in a recent game, a task he previously would have handed over to an older, more experienced teammate. “I think he’s matured as an athlete and as a person,” Huoseh says. “To say, ‘Okay, you know what, I’ve earned this.’ ”

The World Cup is a different kind of pressure, however. In a way, the national team has to do very little. Even scoring just one goal would put them ahead of the performance Canada managed in 1986. But for Herdman and Phonzie, there’s more at stake. Davies has said in the past that it bugs him a bit when his Bayern teammates make jokes about Canadian soccer. “Every time I go home, I just want to prove to them that we’re getting better and better,” he’s said. He, of course, is the prime example of that. But he’s not alone. The national team won a lot of games without him, thanks to players like Jonathan David, who plays for Lille in France’s top division, and rising star Tajon Buchanan. Davies’s old coach at St. Nick’s, Marco Bossi, has watched with admiration and pride as Canadian soccer infrastructure has evolved over the decades, creating exactly the right conditions for a player like Alphonso Davies to thrive—the youth academies, the growth of MLS, the formation of the Canadian Premier League in 2017. Enrolment in Free Footie, the program where Davies got his start as a boy, has increased by over 500 per cent in the last decade.

“I see young players now, and their aspiration is to be the next Alphonso Davies,” Bossi tells me. “There was none of that when he was a kid. It was all about maybe going to play for their home country back in Africa. Now they’re striving to be on the Canadian national team. I strongly feel that over the next five or 10 years we’re going to see many more Phonzies.” He paused. “Or close to it.”

This article appears in print in the November 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $8.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $29.99.

The post Everybody Loves Alphonso Davies appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In the 1970s, my dad, Jean Claude Garofoli, was a local celebrity businessman in Hamilton, Ontario. He had long, black, permed hair, and while the other dads wore brown suits and striped ties, mine rocked bell-bottom jeans and T-shirts and rode a motorcycle. He was an alchemist who could turn nothing into something with clever storytelling and slick salesmanship. His personality was captivating, like Kevin Kline meets Eugene Levy.

Dad owned a shopping plaza with a car dealership and a furniture store, where he financed colour televisions, stereo equipment and appliances with 10 cents down. This was unheard of at the time. Somewhere along the way, he became a gemologist, selling jewellery for cash as a side hustle. He had a certificate from the Gemological Institute of America on the wall behind his desk.

He went by the moniker “Funky Garfunkle” in his advertising campaigns. In addition to running his businesses, he worked as a concert promoter. He brought acts like Pink Floyd, Johnny Mathis, Paul Anka and Bob Hope to town. He was the only person in the area to drive a Rolls-Royce, and famous people often stopped by our house.

I grew up with my parents, my older sister and my older brother in the picturesque town of Grimsby, Ontario, just east of Hamilton. I thought we were a nice, normal family: my mom worked at the furniture store, and her stern Ukrainian mother, who we called Baba, commanded us like an army general. I didn’t know the difference between a Rolls-Royce and an Oldsmobile. Our home was filled with museum pieces—shrunken heads and Egyptian artifacts. My dad once casually noted, “If you need to hide money, put it in art, jewels or antiques. Cops don’t know the difference between a child’s finger painting and a Van Gogh. You can cross the border with a mil in jewels. Just wear them on your neck.” My schoolmates’ fathers clock-punched at steel mills or worked in offices. Mine came and went with the predictability of a sycamore seed helicoptering in the wind.

Garofoli was the first person in their hometown of Grimsby, Ontario, to drive a Rolls-Royce.

Most of my early memories of Dad are of watching him cook dinner on Sundays. While other families ate ham or roast beef, he cooked seafood and made homemade pasta. He had a twisted sense of humour: once, he put a live lobster in my bed. (I don’t eat seafood to this day.) Still, I learned that dinnertime was a golden opportunity to snag Dad’s attention. “I’m going to be a writer and a pilot someday,” I told him. “You’re not smart enough to make money writing, and girls don’t fly planes,” he replied, a cigarette hanging from his mouth as he stirred a pot of his famous Italian sauce. “Your goals are too lofty—just marry rich.” I knew one day I would prove him wrong.

I was a gawky introvert who often ran away from school to read books in the town library. On my walks home from school, I regularly passed a small log house that I’d fondly nicknamed the Writer’s Cabin. I dreamed of living there one day. I planned to fly commercial jets to exotic places and write about my adventures in novels. My older brother, Brad, was my only ally. He and I would disappear on epic adventures, riding our bikes 44 kilometres round-trip to Balls Falls. We’d sustain ourselves with Popsicles and chocolate bars along the way, paid for with silver dollars we’d lifted from Baba’s security box. Brad and I understood each other. We both had undiagnosed learning disabilities, and we never felt stupid in each other’s company, as we did with the rest of the world.

By the time I was 12, my father was running for the position of city controller on Hamilton’s city council, claiming that he wanted to “clean up” the city’s mass corruption. He believed the RCMP and Hamilton Police were targeting him for this, and that the lead detective, Ken Robertson, was jealous of his success.

The tension came to a head in 1977. One day, when I was 12, I stepped off my school bus in Grimsby for the last time. When I approached our home, I saw police officers and movers hauling furniture onto a truck. My mother and Baba stood on the lawn next to a few suitcases and our toy poodle, Bijou. “Get in the car. We’re taking a trip,” my mom said. We quickly piled into Baba’s brown Pontiac LeMans and headed to the U.S. border. My mom said my father and brother were at my aunt’s, and my sister was staying at boarding school. I didn’t ask any questions.

There’s only one problem with this indelible memory. It probably never happened. Not the way I remember it. Everyone I’ve spoken to—my family, my dad’s friends—remembers the story differently. Throughout my life, I hung my childhood history on this pivotal, life-changing moment like an IV bag on a coma patient. I would find out decades later that the film in my head was some kind of trauma stew—bits of truth melded with fiction, fused by the repeated fallout of my father’s bad decisions.

***

That summer, my mom, Baba, and I lived in a Travelodge motel near Fort Lauderdale. Our room smelled like mildew, commercial cleanser and stale cigarette smoke. I entertained myself with a skateboard we found at a yard sale.

By fall, my father showed up and moved us to a beautiful home across the street from the beach. They registered me at a small private school. My sister was still in boarding school, and Brad had dropped out of high school and was working as a roadie for a travelling carnival in Canada.

When I was 13, he quit the carnival and arrived in Florida. He had sprouted more than two feet, and our three-year age gap seemed much wider. I was old enough to start paying attention to the grown-ups in my life and began twigging onto the fact that my dad had one too many hush-hush meetings. The idea that we were a normal family was slipping away like a wet fish.

The author (bottom right) grew up with her parents, siblings and grand-mother.

My dad was an entrepreneur before anyone knew what that meant. He claimed he could set up a business in any city with $50, a phone and a classified ad, and he was right. “America’s where it’s at, man. Those socialist Canadians are taxing businesses to death.” He was always an early adopter. One day, he came home with a Commodore 64, the world’s first home computer. “This is the future,” he said. “Wait and see. Soon there will be one of these in every home. People will shop on it, date on it and work from home on it.” He started a new furniture business in Fort Lauderdale called Model Home Furniture. After spotting a hole in the marine market, he bought my brother scuba gear, then set him up in a business servicing the bottoms of boats. Brad took to diving like a dolphin to a bucket of minnows.

By the time I was in high school, I’d developed meaningful friendships and settled into a routine. My sister was enrolled in law school, and she and my brother lived in a condo they purchased together. Father and son spent much time at marinas and hung out on gleaming yachts with high-flyers like oil tycoons, art dealers and sheiks. Occasionally, I’d tag along while they drank martinis and smoked Cubans.

Dad began to offer private jewellery showings to his new friends. Sometimes he’d take me to Miami to see where he did business. We’d walk the streets with a brown paper lunch bag filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in jewels, stopping in at the International Building. He’d always treat me to a Cuban coffee and a guava pastry, then buy a sandwich to give to a homeless person. These were the rare moments I felt a connection to my dad, where snippets of humanity peeked through his shady varnish.

Somewhere, deep down, I knew something suspicious was going on. Our gated neighbourhood had 24-hour security and a guard house, and yet I found handguns strategically placed in planters in every room of our house. Dad had a man purse, fat with hundred-dollar bills, and he filled the garage with antique sports cars. As he carelessly built his house of cards, my adolescent mind began to puzzle at the abnormality of it all. A parade of men would come and go from our house at all hours. Dad had me call them all “uncle.” “Business associates. Don’t worry about it,” he’d tell my mom, who was working at a medical office. She had no idea he was getting up to anything illegal.

Sometimes my dad would take me to Miami. We would walk the streets with a brown paper lunch bag filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in jewels.

One day, my dad asked me to meet a client on Las Olas Boulevard to exchange a diamond for a $10,000 cash payment. I had no idea why he was sending me on the errand, but when I arrived at the appointed spot, the man who climbed into my car pulled out a gun and took the diamond from me.

When I got home, I screamed at my father, demanding to know why he’d put me in danger. At that moment, he was laying a record of one of his favourite opera arias on the turntable. He turned to me and said, “If you don’t like living under my roof, then you can get the fuck out.”

So I did. I was only in Grade 10, but I had a car and a waitress job at a diner. I dropped out of school and took a second job in a jewellery kiosk at the mall, and I rented a room in my co-worker’s apartment for $150 a month. After a few months, my dad sent my brother to talk me into coming home. I was furious he was siding with our father. I yelled, “If you aren’t going to support me, you can go fuck yourself,” and slammed the door in his face.

That night, at 4 a.m., I was roused by fists pounding on my apartment door. I looked through the peephole and saw my father, sheet white and shaking. “Get in the car,” he said. “Your brother’s been in an accident.”

Garofoli swimming with his son Brad.

Brad had borrowed my dad’s Mercedes convertible to go out on a date. On the way home, someone ran a red light, pinning the car against a transport truck in front of the Dunkin’ Donuts where I used to work. His head had slammed against the windshield.

In the ICU, Brad looked nothing like himself, his head wrapped in bandages and his face swollen. He wasn’t my brother. By the time the on-call neurologist got to the hospital, it was too late to save my brother from the swelling in his brain. He was 19 when he died.

I moved back home and lived in a haze of confusion for the next nine months. My mom and dad rarely left their bed. One day, someone robbed our home and stole my mom and brother’s jewellery collections, including a couple of Rolexes. And so I launched my own investigation. We had deadbolts on our doors and 24-hour security with a guard: I suspected it must have been one of my dad’s sketchy contacts taking advantage of my parents’ grief.

I asked to see the visitor logs and found out that one of my father’s associates had visited when we were out of the house. I knew where he lived and took one of my dad’s guns to confront him. When I pulled up and pointed the gun at him, he was getting into his car. “I know it was you. I want everything back, or I’ll shoot you.” He sped off.

When I got home, my father was furious. He took the gun out of my purse and screamed, “Are you fucking crazy?” I told him to call the police on the guy, but he insisted his friend was innocent. I later discovered that my father was behind the ordeal. He was tight on cash because he hadn’t worked since Brad died and staged the robbery to make a claim against his homeowner’s insurance.

Desperate to escape my toxic home life, I joined the U.S. Coast Guard and devote my life to chasing drug runners and rescuing people at sea. In my third year with the Coast Guard, I met and married a Special Forces soldier. My parents had moved back home to Canada. Then I received a phone call from my dad. “My life is in danger. I need your help. Some bad people are after me. Don’t tell anyone I called. Not even your mother.”

My husband and I left the Coast Guard base in Miami in a rental car and drove non-stop to meet my dad in Montreal. His essence looked like it had been sucked away by vampires. “You’re going to take me to the border and drop me off, and I’ll meet you on the other side tomorrow morning.” We left him in the woods, then found a room in a Vermont inn.

Garofoli pictured in Canada, right before his arrest.

We awoke to a SWAT team surrounding our hotel. They seized our rental car, but by some dumb luck, the fellow interrogating my husband used to be in his military unit. They shared a brotherly bond and, as a result, he released us.

After returning to my base, I learned from my mother that Dad had absconded after being charged in an organized crime bust. Specifically, for conspiracy to import three kilos of cocaine from Florida to Canada. The evidence against him was derived from wiretaps and involved five other men, one of whom was a member of the Hamilton branch of the Buffalo mafia. My parents did a masterful job of keeping his arrest from me. The RCMP extradited Dad to Canada, and he was sentenced to 15 years in prison, which he served at Millhaven Institution near Kingston, Ontario. At long last, all the bits and pieces of my dad’s shadowy existence began to line up.

***

Over the next few years, my sister stayed in the U.S. My mom remained loyal to my father throughout his time in prison. Meanwhile, I was forced to rebuild my life. In 1987, I was called into my commander’s office and given an honourable discharge. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said. “How a Canadian managed to enlist is beyond me, but it must have been a clerical mistake.” I shrugged it off as sloppy paperwork.

My then-husband and I moved back to Canada and eventually landed in London, Ontario. When we divorced in 2001, I found myself with two young daughters, a shaggy dog, an outdated resumé and $20 to my name. I took a job selling cars to put food on the table. It was still a male-dominated, shark-infested industry, but there was good money to be made, and soon I was earning more than $120,000 each year. Salesmanship was a valuable skill I learned from watching dear old Dad.

My father was released on early parole in 1992 and immediately started a new business. He sold computer systems, financed on low monthly payments. As per his usual method of operation, he also started brokering gems again. Within a few years, he began an affair, and Mom finally left him. He and I were estranged for a long while, but reunited a few years before he died of cancer in 2013.

In the meantime, I moved to northern Ontario and got a job at a boat and ATV dealership. I met my second husband after I hitched a ride on his floatplane to Killarney Provincial Park for a solo hiking trip. We moved to a farm on a lake, and I started a business in my laundry room, making natural care products. I had spent five years scaling my company, Walton Wood Farm, even landing a stint on Dragon’s Den. Running an international company was far more complex than selling cars on 100 per cent commission. But I soon realized that car sales training was the key to my success. I applied everything I learned at wholesale trade shows and worked the circuit across the U.S. and Canada twice a year.

In 2019, my mom dropped in for a visit and unloaded a trunk full of treasures into my foyer. She heaved a giant binder onto my hall table. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, it’s the manuscript your dad wrote in prison,” she said as plainly as “pass the salt.” Only the salt, in this case, was 550 pages of 30-year-old typed sheets.

I did the only thing you can do when receiving an unwanted gift from beyond the grave: I shoved the manuscript into my hat and mitts drawer, where it lay dormant for the next five months. It surfaced again when the first sugary snowflakes sifted down onto our farm fields and I needed a hat and mitts. “Oh, hello there, dead Father,” I said.

I cracked open the autobiography and broke down into a blubbering mess upon reading the dedication.

To Bradley,
May you find peace. There is none here.
Love, Dad.

With all the bravery I could muster, I gathered my broken self and curled into a chair with the binder, an emotional support blankie and a cup of tea. The introduction began: “He had it all—a loving family. Influential friends. His business interests were extensive. One day, he decided to run for political office in his hometown…That brought him to an underworld few knew existed. A dirty world run by legitimate agencies, the CIA, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Naturalization Services, and more. He learned the U.S. and Canada were full of snitches doing these agencies’ dirty business on a clean front.”

Wait, what?

***

After her father’s death, the author discovered a 550-page manuscript confessing his many years of covert criminal activity. (Photo by Markian Lozowchuk).

I learned a lot about my dad by reading his manuscript. For example, that he spent his elementary school years with his sidekick and brother—my Uncle Tony—gambling on street corners to earn money for food. In 1958, when my dad was 18, his family arrived in Hamilton.

I found out what happened to my uncle, too. My parents always told me Uncle Tony died in his sleep of unknown causes when he was 32. But in the book, Dad confessed he’d fired Tony from his car lot, and he believed his brother had killed himself. My father never forgave himself.

I also learned about how he first got involved with drug trafficking. On one hand, he claimed the concert-promoting culture at Hamilton Place was an excruciating game of bribes and interference by management, unions and politicians. Yet he admits he also learned how to get cocaine for Pink Floyd, who he says refused to perform without the drug.

His decision to run for city controller in Hamilton was his downfall. He lost to the incumbent, who he says tried to bribe him to drop his candidacy. At this point, the running narrative in my father’s story was that of an honest businessman trying to right the wrongs of corrupt politicians and police. “He was framed for fraud,” he wrote about himself in the third person.

I could see the manuscript was an inky smudge of truth and lies. If I was going to get close to the truth, I’d have to deconstruct my memories against Dad’s version of events and hunt down as many of the people from our lives as I could find.

***

I decided to turn the project into a podcast, which I called Rewriting Dad. I enlisted the help of a business acquaintance, a writer and actor named Meg Murphy. She quickly tracked down Ken Robertson, the detective who had led the charge against my dad. Robertson’s name had regularly come up in our home, even as I held my father’s hand on his deathbed. Dad blamed all his troubles on him. “Robertson is the devil himself,” he said. Robertson had retired as Hamilton’s police chief in 2003. He had moved to a small town in Ontario and was enjoying life as a father and grandfather. He responded to my email: “Jean Claude Garofoli? Yes, I remember.” Then he allowed me to phone him.

He was very kind, and at first he said he barely remembered the guy. But as he kept talking, it seemed he knew a lot more than he thought he did. Robertson said that in 1976, he was assigned to investigate a case involving Samsung, a major supplier to Dad’s furniture store. They claimed they weren’t getting paid, and initially, Robertson thought it was theft by conversion. They claimed they were owed around $400,000.

After taking a closer look and wondering what my dad did with all the money, he witnessed the members of Hamilton mafia families, the Luppinos and Musitanos, showing up at the store. At the time, the police were trying to get to the bottom of the so-called “bakery bombings,” a series of attacks on Italian bakeries by the Musitano family. The bombings instilled fear in the community, helping the Musitanos extort protection money from small business owners like my father. The Samsung investigation at my dad’s store offered the cops an opportunity. It became a springboard to examine the Luppino and Musitano crime families, and Hamilton city council approved its first-ever organized crime Joint Task Force, with Robertson as administrator. With evidence from this Joint Task Force case, Tony Musitano, the boss of the family, was convicted of conspiracy to possess explosive substances with intent to cause explosions. Pat, Tony’s nephew, took over the family in 1992. Their era of dominance ended in July of 2020, when he was gunned down at midday at a Burlington strip mall.

Dad absconded after being charged with conspiracy to import three kilos of cocaine from Florida into Canada.

Through my conversations with Robertson, I learned that when we fled for Florida, my dad was facing fraud charges for the Samsung conspiracy, though they were dismissed a few years later. Robertson told me that my dad’s connections to organized crime and illegally living in Florida likely made him vulnerable and ripe to recruit as an informant. Dad claims he was recruited to work with the Montreal branch of the RCMP, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services, the CIA, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency. He did not want to return to Canada. Jail was certainly not an option.

In his book, he says the feds used his boat business to suss out drug runners, who were all over marinas back then. Another assignment, he writes, was to get intel on a well-known Montreal criminal who kept an 80-foot yacht on the New River. Dad took my brother and me along for a viewing of the yacht, pretending to be interested in buying it. My brother and I were supposed to distract the owner with questions out on the deck as my dad had a look at the interior. He says he stole some of the notes out of the garbage and managed to grab the fella’s Rolodex, which he turned in to the police.

Thanks to his jewellery background, he writes, his role expanded to fencing jewels acquired by foreign governments to fund the Contras, the rebel groups fighting the Nicaraguan government. He says the agencies also had him buying and selling weapons. Those trips Dad and I took to the International Building in Miami? Apparently, that’s where he would pick up illegally smuggled jewels and drop off cash. “I sold arms to the U.S. government. Arms that would be used to kill people in some foreign country,” he writes. “I did undercover work for surreptitious agencies. I sold jewellery belonging to the people of South and Central America that their government stole to raise money so they could undermine and destabilize their systems,” my dad writes in his book.

Around the same time, I learned, one of my dad’s friends got me into the Coast Guard illegally. It was a dream for me to enlist, and he knew his friend could get me in under the radar as a favour. After I read this, I went rifling through my mom’s treasure trove for evidence. I found my recruitment papers, which his friend had signed. It all made sense—he and my recruiter came to my bon voyage dinner. Recruiters didn’t go to family dinners with their newbies.

According to a friend, after Brad died and when I was in the Coast Guard, Dad’s business model shifted to much darker activities, which led to his downfall. I think he stopped caring altogether. There was nothing to live for. When his private jewellery clients would pay cash for their purchase, he would note the location of the safe. A few weeks later, he’d send two thugs dressed as cops to rob them at gunpoint. One of those fake cops was a friend of my dad’s, who I learned had staged the robbery of our home—when Brad’s jewellery was stolen—so my dad could collect the insurance.

In his book, my dad insists he was innocent of the armed robbery scheme, but Florida law enforcement almost caught up with him. To escape them he fled out the back door. That’s how he and my mom ended up back in Canada.

Jean Claude Garofoli and his wife in Florida.

As soon as they arrived in Hamilton, the RCMP wiretapped our home, investigating him as part of a conspiracy to traffic cocaine with members of the mafia. When they stormed into their bedroom to make the arrest, my long-suffering mother was in bed with a bad back and couldn’t even get up.

When my father later appealed his conviction and 15-year sentence, his lawyers applied to challenge the admissability of the wiretapping evidence, setting a precedent now known as a Garofoli Application, which is still used today, mostly in terrorism and money laundering cases. A Garofoli Application is a motion to exclude intercepted communications based on a client’s Charter rights, and to ensure the evidence was obtained legally.

While interviewing my father’s friends, lawyers, and acquaintances, the most shocking thing I heard was from a close friend of my dad. It was about my brother, Brad. “Your dad told me it wasn’t an accident,” my friend told me, though he didn’t know any more than that. The idea that Brad’s death might have been a revenge murder was a battering ram to my heart.

As I investigated my dad, I was struck by the notion that he could have easily been successful without committing crimes, but he was drawn to the underworld like a hermit crab to a shell. It was also evident that working the system and being “connected” in his community of immigrants was a badge of honour—the “I got a guy” culture. My dad was “the guy.”

Most of all, I was surprised by how much I was like my father—minus the criminal activity. I was rewriting Dad, and he was rewriting me. We both lay awake many nights, worried about cash flow, supply chain issues, staffing, sales and taxes. We never confided in anyone. We both always thought we could handle things ourselves. It was consoling to know Dad went through precisely the same things I did.

Both of us were prone to chase the next shiny thing, but I learned restraint from my dad’s lack of discipline and inability to control his impulses. I learned to cage those squirrels, set a course and stay true to it.

Like my dad, I could find holes in the market and fill them. This was my inheritance. When I started a personal care company, I targeted the gift market. The world was full of lavender and vanilla, but I knew people would pay for story over utility. I wrote funny copy on the packaging: Winter’s a B*tch, Week from Hell, and Better B’ver were some of my product names. My collections became the perfect, practical gift.

Nearly everyone I interviewed deeply missed my father. He inspired and pushed them to seize the day, pursue their dreams and live fully. To eat well, drink well and find laughter in the mundane. My dad was a wine enthusiast, and when he died, we placed his ashes in a crate that had contained his favourite vintage, which he sipped as he took his last breath—a $5,000 bottle of 1989 Petrus.

I’ve learned much about my memories and how flawed they can be. Time erodes the truth of what we experience and replaces it with an imperfect web of stories that we may never fully untangle.

Today, I am both a pilot and a writer, despite what my father said. If he were alive today to read this article, I know he wouldn’t say, “Well done.” His reaction would be, “Where’s my cut?”

This article appears in print in the October 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $8.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $29.99.

The post My father was a criminal. Here’s how I found out. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The first time I spoke with Changpeng Zhao, he was explaining the intricacies of Chinese martial arts. It was March of 2021, and I had joined the Vancouver billionaire and CEO of Binance—the world’s largest platform for buying and selling cryptocurrency—on a group audio call on Clubhouse, then an exclusive chat app. “A junior kung fu student will have a plan,” said Zhao, who is a fan of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. For Zhao, that kind of thinking is entirely too rigid. “If the opponent is dynamic,” he said, “a preset of moves does not work very well.”

Rich, successful men tend to see everything as an analogy for business. Zhao has developed an opposing tack to those newbie kung fu students, a decide-and-execute strategy that’s been an integral part of Binance’s operating model from its startup days in 2017 to now. That approach has proved profitable: last year, the exchange had 80 million users and processed nearly US$34.2 trillion in trades. This past January, Bloomberg added Zhao to its Billionaires Index in a blazing debut, with an estimated net worth of US$96 billion. A spartan man with few possessions, Zhao has disputed Bloomberg’s calculation, but it’s hard not to marvel at the number. Zhao was the richest Canadian: richer than the storied Thomson family, nearly as rich as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and richer than many small countries. He was the wealthiest man few Canadians had ever heard of.

READ: The Curious Case of Gina Adams: A “Pretendian” investigation

In the crypto world, however, fortunes can be fleeting. By the time Zhao and I spoke again in July, Bitcoin, a de facto index for the wider industry, had tumbled by almost two-thirds to a low of US$20,000, marking the onset of a so-called crypto winter. Zhao’s net worth had tumbled, too—by a reported US$85 billion. And while his company was spared from the layoffs and bankruptcies that swept the landscape, its business practices have attracted scrutiny. Binance, along with a slew of American crypto exchanges, is reportedly under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, and has otherwise tangled with authorities across the globe, including in Canada. The company vehemently insists that it runs a clean shop, but for Binance and Zhao—a man who went from virtual unknown to elusive billionaire in less than a decade—the bigger the success, the bigger the troubles.

***

Zhao, bespectacled and slender, was born in 1977 in China’s Jiangsu province, north of Shanghai. The Cultural Revolution ended following the death of Mao Zedong, and the country was mired in poverty and famine. Everyday citizens were regularly punished for perceived ideological crimes. Zhao’s university-instructor father, Shengkai, was branded a pro-bourgeois intellectual and exiled to a rural area. Shengkai left China to pursue a doctorate at the University of British Columbia in 1984; the rest of the family joined him in Vancouver in 1989, after the protests in Tiananmen Square. Zhao says that it was only after he arrived in Canada, at the age of 12, that he first drank fresh milk, then a rare commodity in China. During his teen years, the future billionaire took on a variety of part-time jobs—at a Chevron gas station, at McDonald’s and as a referee at volleyball games. Shengkai, a math whiz and programmer, splurged on a 286 DOS computer priced at $7,000, the equivalent of $14,000 today. The technology, cutting-edge for its time, made an impression on his son. Zhao soon enrolled in programming courses in high school and later majored in computer science at McGill University, where his father was once a visiting scholar.

Zhao’s trajectory started to crystallize in the early 2000s, after graduation: he interned for a subcontractor of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and developed trading software for Bloomberg Tradebook. As Zhao matured, so did China, which in the years since his family’s departure had welcomed economic reform. In 2005, Zhao joined other “sea turtles”—people of Chinese descent educated elsewhere—and moved back to the bustling motherland. “A couple of guys said, ‘Let’s do a startup in Shanghai,’ ” Zhao says. “So I just went.” Zhao founded Fusion Systems, an IT and business consultancy that went on to count Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse as clients.

Zhao doesn’t have any old-fashioned political affiliations, although he does align himself with one side along a newer fault line: the “Anywheres” versus the “Somewheres.” The terms were first coined for the opposing sides of the Brexit debate, capturing the conflict between mobile globalists and those with roots in a particular local identity. “I’m definitely an Anywhere guy,” Zhao says. “Borders are just conceptual things that some people made up.”

Bitcoin was a natural fit for a man who sees himself as living and thinking beyond conventional national boundaries. Created in 2009 by an unknown entity by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto, the currency can be transferred from user to user without the involvement of financial intermediaries. Bitcoin’s community jokingly dubbed it “magic internet money,” as its underlying blockchain technology facilitated transactions as easily as sending an instant message. “We are in a much less geographically constrained world,” Zhao says. “A blockchain also doesn’t have the concept of borders, right?”

Zhao first learned about crypto during poker games with friends. According to one finance professional who explained the concept to him, Zhao’s interest went beyond simple curiosity. “He took action, you know?” says his friend, who asked to remain anonymous. “He really studied it and started looking for opportunities in that area, as far back as 2013.” By then, Bitcoin and the wider cryptocurrency universe had grown into a billion-dollar industry, much of it concentrated in Shanghai, the booming tech capital of China. Zhao attended crypto conferences and found work at emerging firms like Blockchain.com and Okcoin. He sold his apartment in Shanghai and dropped roughly US$1 million to buy Bitcoin at US$600 per unit. Zhao maintained his conviction even as property in Shanghai doubled in value and crypto’s fell by half—his first winter.

In 2017, he founded his own exchange platform in Hong Kong. Its name, Binance, was a combination of two words: “binary,” as in the ones and zeros of computer code, and “finance.” Like many other crypto businesses, it functioned like a stock exchange, matching buyers and sellers and taking a cut of every trade. Zhao seemed to have a grander vision in mind, suggested by Binance’s early motto: “exchange the world.”

***

When Bitcoin was invented, naturally, there were no specific laws in place for it. Authorities weren’t sure whether or how to apply existing financial regulations. Nobody said you couldn’t build a platform around magic internet money, or even make and sell your own coin. In the eyes of crypto entrepreneurs, they were free to build a new world without the usual institutional constraints. “My worldview, in most places I’ve lived, has been: if there’s no law against it, it is legal,” Zhao says. Binance’s founding was fortuitously timed: in 2017, Bitcoin surged 20-fold to US$20,000 a unit. Binance sold its own token, BNB, to raise funds for its launch, and became the go-to market for every crypto coin imaginable. But soon, China, which had so readily welcomed Zhao back, became more risk-averse. The country cracked down hard, banning some crypto fundraising and shutting down domestic exchanges. Hong Kong was only nominally a separate jurisdiction, and Binance still served users in the mainland. Zhao, who seemed preternaturally sensitive to the way the wind blew, plotted a move next-door, to Japan.

Aided by the sheer number of coins it listed—and the roadblocks now in the way of its Chinese competitors—Binance experienced an overwhelming surge in popularity. Half a year after its launch, the platform had to suspend the creation of new accounts, updating its infrastructure to accommodate the influx of traffic. Existing Binance accounts were being sold for a premium online. In January of 2018, US$6 billion flowed through the exchange in a single day. The next month, Forbes, notable for its rich lists, crowned Zhao its cover star. China wasn’t the only country trying to bring order to the field, however, and Zhao and Binance quickly outstayed their welcome in Japan. This pattern of closing up shop, setting up shop and closing shop again would repeat in places like Malta and Singapore. “Before, there was no regulation, and now there is—it happens all the time,” Zhao says. “When that happens, you’ve just got to comply. When you think it’s too strict, and there’s no business to do, you leave.”

“My worldview, in most places I’ve lived, has been: if there’s no law against it, it is legal”

The constant wandering of Binance, led by its nomadic CEO, known by the moniker “CZ” in crypto circles, became central to its identity. As early as 2019, the company claimed to have no headquarters. There were various Binance entities around the world—Binance Holdings Ltd. in the Cayman Islands, Binance Capital Management in the British Virgin Islands—whose individual functions were a mystery to outside observers. This untethered framework was convenient. It presented Binance as a modern firm, with staff all over the globe; it fit with the borderless nature of crypto; and in the view of Zhao’s critics, it made Binance harder to hold accountable. A 2020 Forbes article reported on the existence of a leaked tai chi–inspired strategy document allegedly crafted for Binance, aimed at thwarting U.S. regulations through a complex bait-and-switch process using various entities. (In a statement, a rep for Binance called the article’s contents “false and misleading,” and denied that the alleged third-party document was produced for or by a current or former Binance employee.)

As the company grew, it became the place to buy, sell, borrow and lend coins, and to execute particularly risky trades. Like in many other sectors, Binance’s revenues rose in the aftermath of the pandemic. Government stimulus ushered in a renewed enthusiasm for investing, and the exchange’s trading volume surpassed an astonishing US$100 billion. Earlier this year, Binance pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in two wildly expensive deals that signalled its hungry ambitions, even though they ultimately fell apart: participating in Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter and, separately, pursuing a stake in Forbes, the very publication that had covered Binance’s alleged plan to tiptoe, tai chi–style, around regulations.

Zhao—still not a household name—saw his net worth cross into mind-boggling territory, to the tune of US$96 billion. The amount encompassed his stake in Binance, but not his undisclosed personal crypto holdings. In other words, he was likely worth far more.

Photograph by Virgile Simon Bertrand

Many people became spectacularly rich in the crypto world at the time, albeit not to Zhao’s level. At its peak, near the end of 2021, the value of all cryptocurrencies ballooned to US$3 trillion. One of Binance’s rivals, the Singapore-based exchange Crypto.com, spent roughly US$700 million to rename the Staples Center in L.A. after itself. Research by the U.S. investment firm Jefferies showed that American adults under 35 were using their new cryptocurrency profits to buy art, jewellery and other luxury goods.

Zhao, on the other hand, didn’t own a house or even a car. For a man who had publicly rebuffed the notion of a fixed address, material possessions seemed to be a burden—never mind, as he put it, “parties, boats, champagne—all of that stuff.” When I asked about Zhao’s life outside crypto, his financier friend came up with nothing beyond the fact that Zhao had been excited to see Top Gun: Maverick. To Zhao, true wealth seemed to be the ability to have nothing.

***

In recent months, as governments increased borrowing costs to deal with inflation, all manner of investments faced decline. Bitcoin went into free fall, and crypto firms went from spending millions on Super Bowl ads and celebrity endorsements to rescinding job offers amid waves of layoffs. But Zhao didn’t flinch; he’d lived through winter before. “It wasn’t a surprise,” Zhao says. “And when it’s not a surprise, you’re slightly better prepared.”

A young, hard-to-police industry, full of riches and potential, had initially attracted the adventurous, but crypto’s volatility has a way of beating a certain humility into them. In a move that flew in the face of his supposed no-strategy strategy, Zhao had, during boom times, instructed Binance’s team to maintain a decade’s worth of operating reserves—an amount in the area of 10 figures. This rainy-day fund enabled Binance to brave this spring’s downturn better than many of its competitors; in fact, the company spent untold sums bailing out some of its troubled peers.

Zhao’s personal net worth, however, took the kind of hit that is, for some, difficult to fathom, sinking to approximately US$11 billion per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index—a US$85 billion loss. Because Zhao’s billions are largely attributable to his sizable stake in Binance, his everyday life was largely unaffected. In mid-May, after Binance’s investment in Terraform Labs’ ill-fated Luna token plummeted from a value of US$1.6 billion to less than US$3,000, Zhao took to Twitter: “Poor again,” he joked.

Binance’s ongoing regulatory tussles, though, were more serious. Within the cryptosphere, the firm had generally enjoyed a good reputation. It reimbursed users after a 2019 hack siphoned funds off the platform. (As a comparison, after the Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX collapsed in 2019, clients were out more than $200 million in crypto assets. Its co-founder and CEO, Gerald Cotten, was reported dead, and, allegedly, he alone held the passwords.)

Most of Binance’s issues were the run-of-the-mill, red-tape sort, easily kept at bay by expensive lawyers; but lately, they have been escalating

Most of Binance’s issues were the run-of-the-mill, red-tape sort, easily kept at bay by expensive lawyers; but lately, they have been escalating. After the Ontario Securities Commission instructed crypto-trading platforms to register paperwork by June of 2021, Binance left the province. In April of this year, the Dutch central bank slapped Binance with a €3.3-million fine for failing to register, after issuing a public warning to the company just under a year prior. SEC investigators are reportedly examining whether Binance’s initial coin offering in 2017 amounted to the sale of a security, one that should have been registered with the agency. And a Reuters investigation from June alleged that Binance processed at least US$2.35 billion in transactions stemming from hacks, investment frauds and illegal drug sales between 2017 and 2021. (A rep for Binance said Reuters’ report used outdated information to establish a false narrative, and that the company has some of the strictest anti–money laundering policies in the fintech industry.)

In May of last year, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. Department of Justice and the IRS had launched probes into whether Binance had acted as a conduit for tax evasion and money laundering. There is speculation that Zhao has been avoiding the U.S. due to possible arrest—which he dismissed as “bullshit” to me. “Google, Facebook—they’re still working with regulators on data, privacy issues, different things,” he said. “It’s just very normal.” Of the more than 40 cryptocurrency exchanges that currently exist in the U.S., every one is reportedly at varying stages of being investigated.

In a case with considerable parallels to Binance’s, the crypto company Block.one had its own run-in with the SEC. It raised funds by selling its own coin, EOS, between 2017 and 2018. Despite racking up US$4 billion in sales, Block.one ended up shelling out a mere US$24 million in a settlement—without admitting or denying wrongdoing. When I asked Zhao if he sees a similar outcome for Binance, he declined to comment, though he did chuckle at Block.one’s relatively small fine. “I guess that’s a good thing,” he said.

***

While Binance distinguished itself in the beginning with no plan, no headquarters and no borders, Zhao now seems to understand that there are certain forces you cannot avoid, only endure. When we spoke in July, he had been spending time in Paris. Binance’s team was meeting with officials from Europe and Asia. “Today, the regulators are looking at centralized exchanges,” he said. “Once we settle that, there’s decentralized finance. What are we going to do for NFTs? Then there’s the metaverse. Even if you look at banking regulations, there are still new rules being introduced.” In the end, it was easier for him to change than the institutions. CZ has been swapping his black Binance tees for a suit, covering up the Binance logo tattoo on his forearm and drinking $14 orange juice at the Four Seasons.

Binance set up an office in Calgary toward the end of 2021, with the goal of hiring up to 75 people. Zhao also recently brought on Lawrence Truong as the new vice-president and general manager of Binance’s Canadian operations. Truong previously held positions at TD Bank and the Alberta Securities Commission, and was tapped to turn around the beleaguered Toronto exchange Coinsquare as its former chief compliance officer. “He was 100 per cent adamant that Binance was going to get licensed in every jurisdiction,” Truong says of Zhao, who has, so far, landed licences for the company in France, Italy, Sweden and Lithuania. Zhao has also obtained a residency card in Dubai, the “somewhere” where he’s decided to buy an apartment and a minivan. As for his plans to settle on a headquarters for Binance, Zhao has said that will happen very soon.

MORE: How three sisters (and their mom) tried to swindle the CRA out of millions

Some ask whether crypto is dead with the recent crash, or if it will ever be less mercurial. To Zhao, a man well used to winter, those questions aren’t of real concern. “I don’t care what the price of crypto is,” he says. “The internet is a technology for transferring information. The blockchain is a technology for transferring value.” Crypto will change our lives just as the internet did, he believes. Sure, he told me that he’s not as smart as Steve Jobs, but he also made a comparison to the iconic Apple co-founder unprompted. It’s a subconscious recognition, perhaps, of the niche that Binance occupies in the crypto world: not hugely popular among regulators, but beloved by fans with a tolerance for flux. By August, just two months after Zhao’s net worth had fallen nearly 90 per cent, Bloomberg estimated that it had more than doubled to roughly US$25 billion. In crypto, the only predictability seems to be the lack of it. “It takes a certain type of personality to deal with a lot of uncertainty,” Zhao says.

In the latter half of 2021, Shengkai died of leukemia near Toronto. Zhao didn’t return to Canada for the funeral, citing COVID restrictions. Plus, he says that the formality wasn’t all that important to the elder Zhao. “My father was the kind of person who says, ‘When I die, just take the ashes and spread them over the sea,’ ” Zhao says. He was not someone who believed in xingshizhuyi—who cared about rituals and ceremony. It was the only time during our conversations that Zhao lapsed into Mandarin.

This article appears in print in the October 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $8.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $29.99.

The post Who is Changpeng Zhao, Canada’s crypto king? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

On a sunny afternoon in June of 2018, artist Gina Adams took the stage at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She wore a large medallion of colourful beads, which caught the light and glittered as she spoke.

Adams, who was in her early 50s at the time, talked nervously but with evident delight as she expressed her gratitude for being selected as summer artist-in-residence for the department of studio art. She took a deep breath and greeted the audience in Anishinaabemowin, her voice and manner relaxing momentarily as she spoke: “Boozhoo, aaniin.”

Adams began by talking about her Ojibwe grandfather. “As a young child, I spent time with him, walking through the woods, talking about plants and spirit medicine. My grandfather is of Midewiwin descent, and I am of Midewiwin descent from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota,” she said. “My grandfather, however, was removed at age eight. He was sent to the Carlisle School.” The Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded in 1879 in Pennsylvania, was the model institution for the 367 federally run residential schools in the United States, which sought to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children.

Adams was born in Connecticut and grew up in York, Maine, a seaside town two hours’ drive from Dartmouth. Her artwork is heavily influenced by the crafting traditions of her Lithuanian and Irish-American ancestors, and by the history of violent displacement and cultural fracturing of Indigenous communities. According to Adams, her great-great-grandfather was the Ojibwe chief Wabanquot, signatory to the Treaty with the Chippewa of the Mississippi. She is often pictured wrapped in one of her pieces from the Broken Treaty Quilts series, in which she embroiders the text of 19th-century treaties on vintage quilts.

In a 2020 interview with Public Radio Tulsa, she explained that the inspiration for the series came to her in a dream. “My Anishinaabeg ancestors are very tied and connected to our dreams, and with the medicine that can come from our dreams,” she said. “I’m very directed intuitively that way.” As a child, she told the interviewer, she was haunted by recurring nightmares of Indigenous people being massacred; her grandfather would take her for walks and calm her by speaking Ojibwe.

A year after her residency at Dartmouth, Adams joined the faculty at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, a small, public post-secondary institution in Vancouver. She was one of four new Indigenous faculty members recruited as part of a targeted cluster hire, which brought the number of Indigenous faculty to nine and increased the faculty body to 74. In a press release, Gillian Siddall, the university’s president and vice-chancellor, wrote that the cluster hire signalled “our genuine commitment to Indigenization and creating a safe cultural space for Indigenous students.”

The moment of triumph did not last. Soon after the hire, doubts about Adams’s identity cast a shadow on the school, and led to conflict among faculty, staff and students. The allegations raised serious questions about how universities hire Indigenous people—and what administrators should do if a professor is not who she claims to be.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada made 94 calls to action, among them that the federal government must eliminate the education gap between Indigenous people and other Canadians. Many universities have embraced that call (and the federal funding that accompanies it) by increasing Indigenous representation in their institutions. This practice of “Indigenizing” includes increasing the number of Indigenous students, faculty and administrators, often through targeted enrolment or hiring. Though nearly five per cent of Canadians identify as First Nations, Métis or Inuit, only 1.3 per cent of full-time university faculty members are Indigenous, according to a 2019 report by Universities Canada. Increasing this percentage isn’t easy, since Indigenous people are also underrepresented in graduate programs, which produce faculty members.

“Adams did not resign or apologize, nor did she respond publicly with an explanation. My doubts about her identity deepened.”

The result is fierce competition among universities, who seek to attract Indigenous candidates by decreasing barriers, such as academic qualifications or prior teaching experience, and increasing opportunities. Cluster hiring—the process of recruiting multiple faculty members at the same time—is a popular strategy among universities eager to demonstrate their commitment to reconciliation. In 2017, McGill University resolved to hire up to 10 faculty who, the university said: “have lived experience and expertise in Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies, methodologies, histories, traditions, languages, or systems of laws and governance.” The following year, the University of Guelph made a cluster hire of six Indigenous faculty members. Between 2020 and 2021, OCAD University, Memorial University and the University of Waterloo announced Indigenous cluster hiring initiatives.

Emily Carr posted five positions in February of 2019. By the glacial standards of the academic job market, the cluster hire moved swiftly. By August, the school had hired four new faculty members. Among them was Adams, who’d been teaching at Naropa University, a private college in Boulder, Colorado. In the university’s announcement, Adams was described as “a contemporary Indigenous hybrid artist of Ojibwa Anishinaabe and Lakota descent of Waabonaquot of White Earth Reservation in Minnesota.” Adams began teaching in the first-year undergraduate program called Foundation, which all Emily Carr undergraduates take, that September, including a course called Aboriginal Material Practice, introducing students to traditional and contemporary Indigenous art and design techniques.

When Adams began teaching at Emily Carr, I was working at the school as a communications officer. I had been in my job for 14 months and I was excited about the new faculty members. For my job, I wrote stories about the powerful artwork created by our Indigenous students and alumni. Many of them spoke about the importance of their Indigenous teachers, like Xwalacktun (born Rick Harry), an Emily Carr alumnus and master carver of Squamish and Kwakwaka’wakw ancestry, and Mimi Gellman, a long-time professor and interdisciplinary artist. I, too, had been deeply affected by the Indigenous mentorship and support I received as a student.

Though I’m a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, I grew up in Vancouver. With my fair skin and auburn hair, people never guessed I was Indigenous, and I preferred it that way. (My mom is of northern European ancestry.) I wasn’t ashamed of being Cree, but I was uncomfortable talking about it. Mentioning my identity often led to questions about “how much” Indigenous blood I had or demands to see my status card, which made me defensive, as if I had to prove who I was. Even well-meaning questions about Cree culture or language were painful, because I never knew how to answer.

My paternal grandmother, Mary, was born on Muskeg Lake Cree Nation reserve in Saskatchewan but my father was born in British Columbia, and so was I. My grandmother was a fixture in my childhood, but she didn’t teach us Cree—when she was just five years old, she went to residential school, where speaking her language was forbidden—and we had grown up far away from our culture. I remember her as strict, yet gentle. She never raised her voice, but expected me to clean my plate before I got dessert. She was hard-working and precise, braiding my hair into tight plaits, rising early in the morning to garden, knitting a sweater while watching Days of Our Lives. She developed dementia in her late 70s and moved to a care home in Vancouver’s West End. By the time I was old enough to be curious about where our family came from, I had lost the chance to ask her.

RELATED: I’ve been battling Indigenous art fraud for 30 years. It’s only getting worse.

I didn’t recognize the gaps in my knowledge as the inevitable product of forcible assimilation. I saw them as a personal failing, a sign that I wasn’t Indigenous enough. If I protested a racist comment about how Indigenous people never paid taxes or drank too much, I’d often hear, “Oh, I’m not talking about people like you.” The message was clear: being Indigenous was tragic or shameful. Or it was mystical and noble, a warrior on a horse, somehow untouched by colonization. Middle-class and easily sunburned, I didn’t fit with any of the stereotypes I saw or heard.  I didn’t know any Cree people in Vancouver apart from my family.

I might have continued feeling lonely in my Indigeneity for the rest of my life, but something transformative happened in my second year at the University of Victoria. In 2005, the school invited me to participate in a four-year pilot program called LE,NONET (a Senćoten word that refers to success after prolonged hardship). UVic created it for Indigenous students, who had historically been more likely to withdraw from their programs than graduate.

The program was designed to foster community, support academic success and reinforce Indigenous identity. I said yes without thinking much about it, figuring that peer mentoring and community participation would look good on my resumé.

When I walked into the LE,NONET office, I braced myself for the familiar discomfort of feeling like an imposter. Instead, I met a diverse group of Indigenous students, many of whom had personal stories that echoed my own. Others had arrived at university from close-knit Indigenous communities and were grappling with culture shock. Throughout the four years of the program, I forged friendships and connections over lunches and movie nights, beading workshops and talking circles. For the first time, I heard others describing experiences I’d been having my whole life: sitting through classroom conversations about Indigenous people feeling invisible, overhearing racist comments and wondering whether to speak up or stay silent, fielding disappointment from white people who expect you to teach them about your culture. I realized that other Indigenous people had never made me feel inadequate. When we visited Muskeg Lake, I’d always been embraced as family. It was only among non-Indigenous people that I felt like the wrong kind of Indian.

The program was a success: compared to those of Indigenous students who didn’t participate, graduation rates among LE,NONET members were 20 per cent higher and withdrawal rates were 67 per cent lower. These results demonstrated the powerful impact of Indigenous community, particularly for those who grow up without it.

Through LE,NONET, I felt not just accepted but seen, a recognition that allowed me to begin unknotting the complex sense of shame I had been carrying. The program also showed me that Indigeneity is not an ancestral or biological detail. It’s an active, dynamic process of connection and affirmation that exists in relation to others, equally a gift and a responsibility. The people I met through LE,NONET helped me see what it meant to belong.

My participation in LE,NONET also made me valuable to the university. I became a poster child, photographed and profiled in an annual review, my experience featured on the university website. Years later, at Emily Carr, I would write similar reports and stories, celebrating Indigenous individuals whose accomplishments and triumphs reflected well on the school. It was important for institutions not only to help Indigenous people but to be seen as helping them, to be recognized as the benefactors of their success.

***

In March of 2021, 19 months after Adams took the job at Emily Carr, an anonymous Twitter account called NoMoreRed­Face posted a tweet that read: “Would you FAKE a residential school survivor backstory to sell $35,000 quilts and land a tenure track professorship in Aboriginal art?” The tweet then named Gina Adams, saying that “research suggests” she had done “just that.”

The NoMoreRedFace account had begun posting in late 2020, sharing detailed and deeply researched threads investigating the claims of individuals who had leveraged their Indigenous identities for prestige and profit. No one knew who was behind it, and not everyone liked it: many Indigenous people were adamant that anonymous accusations were not the right way to deal with identity fraud.

Just days before calling out Adams, NoMoreRedFace posted a thread about the SFU Galleries curator cheyanne turions, who had accepted more than $100,000 in grants intended for Indigenous curators. turions subsequently admitted in a blog post that she could not substantiate her claims to Indigenous ancestry. (She eventually resigned in November of last year.)

SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY | SFU Galleries curator cheyanne turions admitted in a blog post that she could not substantiate her claims to Indigenous ancestry and resigned last fall. (Photo by Pardeep Singh)

In its 13-tweet thread on Adams, NoMoreRedFace documented her ancestry claims, along with a family tree that disputed them. According to the thread, Adams’s grandfather was not Ojibwe at all; he was a white man named Albert Theriault, who was born in Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents.

By the time the thread was posted, Adams had been appointed as an assistant dean, featured by the Wall Street Journal and included in an exhibition of Indigenous artists at the Brooklyn Museum. Her career, which was inexorably tied to her Indigenous identity, was on the rise.

The allegations against Adams were only the latest in a series of shocking stories about public figures who had built successful careers on their claims to Indigeneity. In December of 2020, CBC revealed that filmmaker Michelle Latimer had been called out by members of Kitigan Zibi First Nation, who accused her of exaggerating her connections to the community. Latimer stepped down from her role as director of the acclaimed television series Trickster, which was swiftly cancelled. (To this day, she maintains she has Algonquin and French-Canadian heritage.) The following February, Amie Wolf, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, was fired amid speculation about her Mi’kmaw identity claims. (Wolf maintains that her grandparents were Indigenous but has not provided any supporting evidence.)

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA | Early last year, UBC adjunct professor Amie Wolf was fired amid speculation about her Mi'kmaw identity claims. Wolf maintains that her grandparents were Indigenous but has not provided any supporting evidence. (Photo courtesy of Gudrun Wai-Gunnarsson / The Peak_photos)

When I saw the Adams tweets, I felt a jolt of anticipation, exchanging frenzied messages with colleagues, certain something was about to happen. Either Adams would clear up the misconceptions, or she would admit that, like turions, she could not provide evidence of her claims. If she couldn’t, I thought, then surely she would have to resign.

As a member of the Emily Carr communications team, I was on high alert. I monitored notifications on social media accounts and received emails forwarded by concerned colleagues about the allegations. I wished I could respond with a clear answer: these allegations were false, or we were addressing the issue internally. There was no clarity in the days and weeks that followed. Adams did not resign or apologize, nor did she respond publicly with an explanation. My doubts about her identity deepened.

A few days after the tweets were posted, Adams began circulating a lengthy statement about her ancestry to select members of the Emily Carr community. It began: “My name is Gina Adams and I am the granddaughter of Albert Edmund Theriault and this is my family genealogy.” According to my research, this was the first time she had referred to her grandfather by name in any type of statement. She continued, “When I was a young girl, my grandfather told me that he was of Chippewa: Ojibwe-Lakota descent and that he was born and raised as a young boy on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. He related to me that when he was eight years old, he was removed from White Earth by a man named Charles Wright and sent to the Carlisle School.”

Her 1,500-word statement was impassioned and detailed, chronicling her grandparents’ marriage, her early childhood and her journey to becoming an artist. But it was vague on the facts of her ancestry. She wrote that her grandfather Albert had no birth certificate and changed his surname to Theriault when he married her Lithuanian grandmother to “evade and thwart the serious miscegenation laws.” Afterwards, he passed as white. As a result, there was nothing to link their family to the White Earth Nation or the Carlisle School, to the ancestors she had claimed, whose images appear in her work. Still, she insisted her story was true. “To those people on social media who have questioned my legitimate heritage, I say nothing,” she wrote. “To my gallerists, my university and my wider Indigenous communities whom I deeply respect, I am happy to share my family lineage.”

When I read her statement, I heard my heart pounding in my ears, as if I were anxiously watching someone attempt a death-defying stunt. It struck me as highly unlikely that an Indigenous boy, born on reserve and sent to residential school, could remain completely undocumented despite the extensive records of Indigenous people the government kept at the time.

The university did not react to any of this. Adams continued her role as a faculty member and assistant dean, though she stopped teaching the Aboriginal Material Practice course. In late March of 2021, I emailed senior administrators at Emily Carr, outlining the doubts I had about Adams’s statement. “If this is a terrible misunderstanding, I can only imagine how painful and upsetting this is for Gina,” I wrote. “But the possibility that this accusation is true is also painful for Indigenous people at Emily Carr. And I don’t know that accountability and reconciliation is possible in an institution that can’t confront that harm.” By Zoom, I met with the president and vice-president academic, who were sympathetic but non-committal. They informed me that Professor Mimi Gellman, who identifies as Anishinaabe, Ashkenazi Jewish and Métis, and Brenda Crabtree, a Nlaka’pamux and Sto:lo staff member who serves as the Aboriginal program manager and special advisor to the president on Indigenous initiatives, had spoken with Adams and believed her to be truthful. Their endorsement of Adams was apparently enough for the administration to consider the case closed.

I found this baffling. Crabtree and Gellman, though respected and thoughtful Indigenous leaders on campus, are not part of the Ojibwe community that Adams had claimed; they could not confirm Adams’s relations or connections. Crabtree declined my interview request. In an email, Gellman described Adams as a generous colleague and a highly skilled and committed faculty member. She denied vouching for Adams’s identity claims but said she believes Adams should have time to gather information and documentation that may corroborate her ancestry, community relations and kinships.

Although the administration seemed content to move on, other Indigenous members of the community continued asking questions that hadn’t been answered. If there was nothing to hide, why the secrecy? At various points over the last few months, while researching this article, I reached out to Adams and her gallery by phone and email. I outlined my concerns about her story in detail. She did not respond to any of my inquiries.

Raymond Boisjoly, a Haida artist and former assistant professor at Emily Carr who participated in the cluster hiring process, was perturbed by Adams’s silence. After he read the Twitter thread, Boisjoly emailed Adams, suggesting that he connect her with an Indigenous colleague skilled at genealogy. “She offered to help Gina if she wanted help to affirm her identity through genealogical research,” Boisjoly told me. “I was not accusing her of anything, but just saying, ‘I know someone who can help, if you want.’ ” Adams never replied. “The absence of a response felt like an admission,” Boisjoly said.

***

In the early 20th century, a binge-drinking British man named Archibald Belaney began calling himself Grey Owl, dying his hair black and going around in moccasins. Since then, countless people have made similar transformations. Some might yearn for sympathy and attention—what Atlantic writer Helen Lewis called “social Munchausen syndrome”—while others are just looking for an interesting detail to ornament their mundane biographies. These Pretendians, as they’re now known, speculate about their “Indian blood” or pass down family stories about a distant Lakota ancestor. They haunt genealogy forums, looking for Indigenous ancestors, and sometimes they even find one. That the ancestor in question lived hundreds of years ago hardly matters; what matters to them is that, like Grey Owl, they feel themselves to be authentically Indigenous.

I have heard dozens of stories over the years from people who were eager to tell me that they’re probably just as Native as I am—that their great-grandmother was, in fact, a Cherokee princess, or that, just before he died, their grandfather told them he was descended from a famous Mohawk warrior. For most of my life, I saw these claims as harmless. Who am I to burst someone’s bubble if they want to believe that some unknown ancestor has imbued them with high cheekbones or a special connection to the land? As long as they weren’t wearing a headdress, it was none of my business.

But in recent years, people who are self-Indigenizing—claiming an identity based on distant or specious connections—can profit from their fantasies by capitalizing on a slew of opportunities meant for Indigenous people. Overwhelmingly, these have been open to anyone who self-identifies as Indigenous.

Veldon Coburn, who is Anishinaabe from the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation, witnessed this shift during his graduate studies. “When I was starting my Ph.D., nobody was interested in Indigenous politics in Canada,” said Coburn, now a professor at the University of Ottawa. “By the time I was finishing in 2018, I was getting recruited everywhere. And so people are like, ‘Well, if I self-identify, I can get that coveted job.’”

The number of Indigenous faculty has gradually risen as a result of concerted diversity efforts by universities, as well as the increasing number of self-identified Indigenous people applying for them. In 2006, 210 professors in Canada self-identified as Métis; by 2016, that number was 410. When Coburn decided to attend graduate school in 2007, he wanted to study with an Indigenous faculty member, which limited his options. “There were a handful across the country,” he said. “Fast-forward 10 years, and they’re everywhere—­and it seems like many of them have a shady story.”

Many universities now find themselves grappling with identity fraud. In June of 2021, an anonymous report alleged that six faculty and administrators at Queen’s University had made false claims to Indigenous identity; three of them are members of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, a group founded in the 1980s that is not recognized by the federal government, the Algonquins of Ontario or the Algonquin Anishinabeg Nation Tribal Council. Last October, an investigation by the CBC found no evidence that the respected health researcher and University of Saskatchewan faculty member Carrie Bourassa had connections to the Métis, Tlingit and Anishinaabe communities she had claimed at various times. Though the university initially came to her defence, releasing a statement from the provost that “the quality of Professor Bourassa’s scholarly work speaks for itself,” she was later placed on leave and resigned in June. (Bourassa has changed her story and now says she was adopted by a Métis friend of her grandfather when she was in her early 20s. She continues to assert her right to self-identify as Indigenous.)

THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN | Last fall, the respected health researcher and University of Saskatchewan faculty member Carrie Bourassa was revealed to have no identifiable connections to the Métis, Tlingit and Anishinaabe communities she had claimed at various times. She resigned in June. Bourassa now says that she was adopted by a Métis friend of her grandfather when she was in her 20s and asserts her right to self-identify as Indigenous. (Photo courtesy of David Stobbe/University of Saskatchewan)

Like the Pretendians who have emerged in recent years, Grey Owl fooled countless white people, who saw in his performance a version of Indigeneity that reflected their assumptions and stereotypes back at them. Indigenous people recognized him for the fraud that he was. Though he lived and lied nearly a century ago, his story carries an unsettlingly contemporary lesson: some people still prefer a fake Indian to a real one.

***

Gina Adams described herself as an unenrolled descendant of the White Earth Nation, which means she did not have tribal membership or identification. In Canada, the approximate equivalent to tribal membership is Indian status, which denotes Indigenous people who are registered under the Indian Act and entitled to specific rights. About one-quarter of self-identified First Nations people are non-status. Some Indigenous people reject Indian status as an explicitly colonial tool, while others lack the documentation to register. Many First Nations in Canada have their own membership criteria and processes, separate from the Act. When Indigenous people meet one another, we tend not to place emphasis on status versus non-status; instead, we ask about relationships.

Jacqueline Ottmann, the president of First Nations University of Canada, told me: “A typical exchange in our communities is asking who you are and where you come from. Where are your roots? Where is your territory? Indigenous people have navigated relationality for centuries by asking these questions.” I knew exactly what she meant. There are a handful of common last names from my nation, and if I meet a Greyeyes, Lafond or Arcand, we can usually figure out if we’re related in a few brief questions.

As the Twitter thread by NoMoreRedFace was being retweeted and shared, the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts, was preparing for an exhibition co-curated by Adams that would be showing her work as well. The exhibit, entitled Echoes in Time, featured the work of 16 Native American artists, part of a months-long effort by the museum to uplift Native voices.

One of those artists, who asked to remain anonymous in this story, had heard rumours about Adams’s identity and approached the museum curator to ask if she had verified Adams’s claims. The curator was receptive at first, but soon became defensive. “She told me that she accepted Gina’s statement and that she supported her.”

READ: Inside UBC’s Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre

The artist contacted the Fruitlands Native advisory group, who hadn’t been consulted about the exhibition and didn’t even know it was taking place. Members of the board, including the Aquinnah Wampanoag artist Elizabeth James-Perry, were concerned. The show’s opening was delayed by two weeks, and Adams removed her work from the exhibit. While the exhibiting artists were listed with their tribal affiliations on the museum’s website, Adams was listed as a co-curator by name only. James-Perry described the situation to me as “a mess.”

In May of 2021, the Boston Globe published a story about the exhibit controversy, calling the issue “profoundly divisive.” According to the Globe, Fruitlands’ managing director of art and exhibitions, Jessica May, admitted she did not check Adams’s claims. “I expect that if they claim that identity as their own, they are doing so truthfully,” she said.

As a staff member at Emily Carr, I believed that although I could voice my concerns in private emails and conversations, I would almost certainly lose my job if I were to join my Indigenous community in publicly calling on Adams to explain herself. Despite their promises to Indigenize, universities require their Indigenous staff and students to comply with the institutional ways of doing things. Our inclusion is always on their terms. And their reluctance to act in the face of widespread identity fraud suggests that their primary concern is always for themselves: their reputations, their rankings, their finances. After all, it’s difficult to fire professors, particularly when they’re tenured. So far, no permanent faculty member who has been accused of or admitted to Indigenous identity fraud has been fired outright. The lack of precedent is paralyzing. Universities are like herds of nervous antelope. They all want to run from danger at the same time, in the same direction, and none of them want to be the first to break away from the group.

At Emily Carr, the unanswered questions about Adams’s identity felt like a rotten floorboard that everyone had to step carefully around. Questions and comments about Adams regularly popped up on the social media accounts that I monitored as part of my job in communications, and I dutifully declined to answer them. Like Adams, the university would not acknowledge the issue. When I wrote statements for National Indigenous Peoples Day and Orange Shirt Day on behalf of the university, emphasizing our ongoing commitment to decolonization and reconciliation, I felt complicit. When I ensured our land acknowledgement was formatted correctly on our website, I thought about how much easier it is for institutions to say the right words than to take the right actions.

Privately, I agonized. “I am still spiralling over the fact that ECU is just sweeping the Gina Adams thing under the rug and hoping no one brings it up, I guess,” I texted to an Indigenous friend around that time. “omg yeah I can’t believe they’re not doing anything!” she wrote back. “and how awful for Indigenous students—like how are they supposed to navigate their dealings with her?” I felt sick when I thought about it.

In September, demoralized and defeated, I resigned. I didn’t look for another job. I just wanted out. Our president, a woman I like and respect who has been unfailingly kind to me, invited me to a meeting to talk about my departure. In her warm, sunlit office, surrounded by Indigenous artwork on the shelves and walls, I surprised myself by starting to cry. “I don’t feel like I’m doing good work anymore,” I told her. I didn’t mention Adams in that meeting. I had already asked multiple times if anything would be done, and nothing had happened. I saw no point in asking again for something they were not prepared to offer.

“In less than an hour, I had found dozens of documents, including a First World War draft card and census records for Adams’s great-grandfather Henry Theriault, listing his race as white.”

Even after I left Emily Carr, I couldn’t stop thinking about Adams. I wanted to know why the person behind NoMoreRed-Face had suspected her in the first place. Though the account had been deleted a few months earlier, I sent a message to the email address associated with it in June. To my surprise, I received a reply immediately. A few days later, a person phoned me from an anonymous number and wouldn’t reveal their name. For the purposes of this article, I’ll call them Taylor.

Taylor explained that they had stumbled across Adams while investigating another potential fraud. “Something just felt wrong,” they told me. “The way she was interacting with the trauma felt performative.” On Adams’s social media, they saw she had posted an old newspaper photo about her mother, Elaine, who had been a teenage pageant queen in her hometown of York, Maine. That supplied a name and location, enough to start putting together a family tree. Taylor then combed the Carlisle School records, which are public, and called up people who knew Adams personally, including members of her family.

Weeks of research failed to produce any proof of Adams’s claims. Taylor reached out to her directly. “My policy was to give people a heads-up,” they said. “I’m not a journalist, but it seemed ethical.” Taylor offered Adams the chance to respond before posting on Twitter. She declined.

Was it really that easy to research a person’s background? I decided to retrace the research myself. I made an account on Ancestry.com. I had Adams’s grandfather’s name, his place of residence, and the year of his death. In less than an hour, I had found dozens of documents: census and Social Security records, obituaries, birth and marriage certificates, and news clippings. I found a First World War draft card for Albert’s father, Henry Theriault, which lists Henry’s race as “white”; I found census records from 1900, 1920, 1930 and 1940, which give Henry’s race as white. I also found an account registered to someone named Gina Adams, created in 2015, which included one item: a “Theriault Family Tree,” with five members, including her grandfather Albert. I wondered if Adams had done the same research as me, and arrived at the same inescapable facts: that her grandfather was born in 1906 in Conway, Massachusetts, to white parents, Rose (neé Jarvis) and Henry Theriault.

Adams’s story was built around a convincingly traumatic event: her grandfather’s supposed abduction to residential school, and the cultural displacement that followed. She used photos of children from the Carlisle School in her presentations, claiming their tragedies as her own. Because many Indigenous families, including mine, have been impacted by residential schools, her narrative was persuasively familiar. In the personal statement she had selectively circulated, she wrote, “My research and academic journey has been focused on how I can tell this American tragedy of disconnection from one’s cultures.” That tragedy is real. I just couldn’t find any evidence that it belonged to Adams.

I was curious about Adams’s more contemporary family members—her siblings, mother, aunts and uncles. Did any of them identify as Indigenous? By phone, I reached two of her sisters. Misty Ellis confirmed she was related to Adams, but told me she didn’t want to comment, then hung up. Teresa Lever asked me to send her an email, so I wrote to her and explained that I was following up on questions regarding their family’s claims to Ojibwe heritage. She wrote back: “I have no direct knowledge to provide regarding this inquiry.” Both had the wary, guarded tones of people who had been contacted with these questions before.

Unlike Carrie Bourassa or novelist Joseph Boyden, who aroused suspicion through shifting and non-specific claims, Adams was specific about the ancestors and nation she was claiming. Early this past summer, I reached out to the enrolment office at the White Earth Nation to ask if they had any record of Gina Adams or her grandfather. In July, I got a terse reply from Shannon Heisler, the enrolments director for the tribe, who wrote, “Yes, I know all about Ms. Adams and the situation.” Intrigued, I called and asked what she meant by “the situation”? She gave a long laugh before she answered. Heisler told me she had never heard of Adams until she was contacted early last year by NoMoreRedFace. Heisler looked into Adams afterward. “We don’t have her, or her parent or grandparent, with any links to this tribe,” Heisler told me.

White Earth, like other American tribes, allow non-enrolled descendants to apply for a certificate of Indian blood, a letter verifying that the applicant is a child or grandchild of an enrolled member. Heisler, who has been the director of enrolments for White Earth for seven years, said Adams had not contacted her or the tribe. “People are upset because she’s been claiming she’s a descendant,” Heisler told me. “I can’t find any documentation that would link her or her family to White Earth.”

In August, a fact checker for Maclean’s reached out to Heisler to confirm all this and learned something interesting: after my original call with Heisler, Adams did submit an application. It was rejected. The White Earth Nation couldn’t find any of Adams’s relatives in their database.

***

By making Indigenous identity a qualification on a job description, institutions—including universities—have turned it into a credential. But credentials demand a degree of accountability, particularly when you’re talking about restricted opportunities meant for a designated group. If you were hired as a veterinarian, it would be relevant whether you did indeed graduate from vet school. If others raised questions about the veracity of your qualifications, it would be reasonable for your employer to expect you to produce your degree.

Jean Teillet, a Métis lawyer, has given this matter considerable thought. Teillet was retained by the University of Saskatchewan to investigate Indigenous identity fraud after Carrie Bourassa’s claims were called into question. I reached out to Teillet to ask her about the role universities should play in investigating identity fraud allegations. “A university’s responsibility is different now than it was a couple years ago,” said Teillet. “The difference is that universities are well aware that they have Pretendians in their midst. A few years ago, universities could still claim ignorance and that they were acting in good faith. Now they can’t say that.”

And who has the right to know the details of someone’s Indigeneity? Adams shared a statement about her story selectively, suggesting the specifics of her Indigenous identity are private. Latimer made a similar claim to privacy when she filed a lawsuit in April of 2021 against the CBC for investigating questions about her ancestry (she dropped the case in October). “You can’t put that horse back in the barn,” said Teillet with a laugh. “I don’t know how you can have a reasonable expectation of privacy when you’re all over the map, talking about your Indigenous identity.”

Universities are understandably squeamish about asking for proof of Indigenous identity, in part because they wouldn’t know what to ask for. Indigenous identities aren’t about racial or biological characteristics that can be reduced to a 23andMe result. They’re nationalities, which exist only in relation to specific communities. Just as one is Canadian because Canada claims them as a citizen, I am only Cree because my kin from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation claim me.

However, asking for proof of those nationalities is also complex. Status cards are regulated by the federal Indian Act and not Indigenous communities themselves. And relying on a piece of government ID rather than a self-declaration merely substitutes one oversimplified process for another. While status cards will filter out people who are claiming an Indigenous identity based on distant or speculative ancestors, they also exclude Indigenous people with active, living connections to their communities who are not registered under the Act. The University of Saskatchewan, shortly after announcing in May that they would implement an “Indigenous verification policy,” faced criticism for demanding that a prospective faculty member, the Cree-Métis scholar Réal Carrière, present “written documentation” despite his deep familial and cultural ties. Winona Wheeler, an associate professor of Indigenous studies at the University of Saskatchewan, told CBC that the university’s actions were “bordering on the paranoid.” The university has since confirmed that it will require those applying for positions meant for Indigenous candidates to present proof of citizenship in the form of a Métis citizenship or First Nations status card.

Another concern is that the spotlight on identity fraud will cultivate an atmosphere of suspicion, leading to false accusations. In a blog post about Adams in June of 2021, Jacqueline Keeler, a Navajo–Yankton Dakota journalist and author of an “Alleged Pretendians List,” also took aim at Emily Carr professor Mimi Gellman. In her post, Keeler wrote, “Mimi Gellman is a 5th generation descendant of a Native woman of an unknown tribe. The rest of her mother’s family tree is French Canadian.” A few days later, Gellman replied to Keeler by email and posted her response in its entirety in a public Facebook post. She listed six generations of her ancestors by name and community, adding, “These records can all be found in the Métis Scrip Records, in the Volumes of Métis Families, Government of Canada Files Data Base, in the Libraries and Archives of Canada.”

Not every Indigenous person has access to such impeccable records. The relationships that constitute Indigenous identity have been deliberately fractured across generations, through residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, and the ongoing overrepresentation of Indigenous children in foster care. As a result, many Indigenous people don’t know where or who they come from, and they deserve respect and care as they navigate their journeys of reconnection. But finding one’s way back to a community is very different from using an identity claim as currency to buy one’s way into a prestigious job. And anyone in a position of power should be held to a high standard of transparency and truthfulness.

In March, more than 400 Indigenous people gathered for an invitation-only virtual conference called the National Indigenous Identity Forum to discuss the widespread problem of Indigenous identity fraud. Jacqueline Ottmann, the president of First Nations University, helped organize it. In June, First Nations University released a report recommending that institutions end the practice of self-identification when hiring new scholars. “Self-identification no longer has a place in these spaces,” Ottmann told me. “The focus is now on citizenship, membership and relationality to community and lived experiences.”

The harder question is what to do about people who are already embedded in institutions. So far, universities have only taken action on identity fraud once the issue has become too public to ignore. Institutions that have not received the same degree of media attention have been much slower to act. Ottmann believes they must, particularly when one of their members is under suspicion, and that universities need to create new policies for how such cases will be handled. A second forum, planned for October, will advance an Indigenous-led conversation on how universities and other sectors should respond.

“I think that university leaders believe themselves to be allies of Indigenous people, and they can’t confront the truth that their efforts may have done more harm than good.”

Queen’s University, after a review into their hiring practices, announced in July that they would set up an Indigenous Oversight Committee to advise them on how to validate the Indigenous identities of their faculty and staff. Such committees are not without risk. Teillet told me of a university that tried to appoint an Indigenous advisory committee to help them tackle the issue of identity fraud, but ended up appointing a faculty member suspected of making a fraudulent claim to the committee. “So you can see the tangled procedural problems that they’re all running up against,” she said. Universities have created this mess, and it’s hard to imagine how they can solve it from within.

Perhaps the solution should come from somewhere else. Teillet said one idea that came out of the National Indigenous Identity Forum was the establishment of a national body. Such an organization might be useful because there are hundreds of Indigenous communities in Canada, and the faculty at a particular university may not be familiar with the nation that an applicant is claiming. “So you could contact the national body and they could say, ‘Oh, this individual says they’re Mi’kmaw? Okay, you can talk to this person who is Mi’kmaw.’ ” This body would ensure that Indigenous people, not universities, retain authority over who is affirmed as a member of their communities. “The university’s role is not to determine if someone is Indigenous,” Teillet said. “It’s to determine if they are being honest in whatever they are claiming.”

Before the 2019 cluster hire at Emily Carr, there were five Indigenous faculty members; three have since left the university, including Raymond Boisjoly. That means there are now six Indigenous faculty members, if you count Adams. Depending on how you look at it, the university is right back where it started.

Over the summer, Maclean’s reached out to Emily Carr for comment about the allegations outlined in this article. The communications department sent a lengthy statement, which emphasized its general commitment to “reconciliation, Indigenization and decolonization.” As for Adams, the statement described how back in 2019, Emily Carr was “confident this hiring process followed best practice at the time” but that “Maclean’s magazine has brought forward new information that we are carefully considering as we determine how to move forward.” They did not say what information was new. Many of the points I’ve made in this article were raised in the NoMoreRed-Face Twitter thread from March last year.

Emily Carr, and other universities across the country, will hopefully take something away from this experience. The statement from the school says: “We are actively engaged in a learning process to review and revise our criteria for assessing identity when hiring for positions designated for Indigenous candidates.”

Creating new hiring policies is a start. But universities must also examine their pasts, and not only after they are prompted by a media investigation. I don’t think their reluctance to do so stems from indifference. I think that university leaders believe themselves to be allies of Indigenous people, and can’t confront the truth that their efforts may have done more harm than good.

Back in 2018, while speaking from the stage of Dartmouth College, Adams paused her presentation on an image of one of her pieces, which featured a photograph of a nameless Indigenous person, their features obscured by layers of encaustic beeswax. Her own face was lit by the lights of the theatre as she looked out at the crowd, her voice solemn. “Appropriating is something that you should really be careful with, with any Indigenous culture,” she said. “You’re really robbing a culture, you’re really robbing an identity. You’re really just trying to own something that’s not yours.”

This article appears in print in the October 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $8.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $29.99.

The post The Curious Case of Gina Adams: A “Pretendian” investigation appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Drip, drip, drip. I watch the saline flow through the plastic tubing into my arm. The baby gives a reassuring kick just before another contraction hits. There is concern for possible placenta accreta, a condition where the placenta, instead of implanting nicely against the uterine wall, sends its tendrils deep into the uterus like a murderous weed. My C-section is scheduled for tomorrow morning, but this baby—my fourth—clearly wants to put its own stamp of approval on its birthday, which has fallen in January of 2022, in the middle of British Columbia’s first Omicron surge. 

I don’t deliver babies myself, but as a family doctor, I learned how to do it in medical school and residency. I know that things don’t always turn out well. I glance at my husband, who’s catching a brief nap on the chair beside me. It’s been a tough few years, and the thought of something going wrong today, leaving him to explain things to our three little girls, makes me swallow hard before the next contraction comes. 

I work in a small town in British Columbia, the same town where I was born and grew up, where my dad was born, and where my mom’s dad was born, in a tent, before his family’s homesteader cabin was built almost a century ago. My two younger sisters and I grew up in a three-room cabin with no electricity or phone, as it was far too expensive to get hydro poles up the old logging road that was our driveway. We turned on the generator to operate our tiny black-and-white TV only on important occasions, like when the Canucks made a run for the Stanley Cup in ’94. Otherwise, we had books and the forest to keep us busy. My parents worked hard as a shipwright and a bookkeeper, but our weekends were always full of camping and hiking in the backcountry.

I applied to medical school after becoming interested in Médecins sans Frontières but I quickly realized that there was great need right here in British Columbia, and that family medicine was where I could make a real impact. Family medicine is the work of the generalist; the breadth of knowledge is wide, and the relationships run deep. One of the best things about my practice is that it can be anything, and it changes every day. You never know what will walk through the door next: a deep laceration from a hand vs. tool conflict, an insect in someone’s ear, or a person having a heart attack who needs stabilization until the ambulance arrives. In the span of a few hours, we may treat strep throat and tick bites, do flu shots and COVID swabs, diagnose cancer and heart failure, perform excisions and biopsies, and support a patient who is near the end of life or one struggling with thoughts of ending their life.

I love practising here. I love that I’m the doctor for the wonderful elementary school teacher who taught me, my sisters and my dad. I love to see the kids from my practice running around the schoolyard and soccer field when I’m there with my own family, and it makes me smile when a dad watching his children from the sideline shouts, “Hey, doc!” and shows me how much the baby strapped to his chest has grown. When I’m doing a home visit, a dying man pats my hand and tells me he worked with my grandpa 60 years ago. These relationships are what being a small-town family doctor is really about.

Herrling suffered two miscarriages during the pandemic. Then she got pregnant again. She gave birth to her fourth child in January.

But things have changed, a lot. Nearly one in five British Columbians—close to a million people—are now without a family doctor. Some walk-in clinics, which previously provided a safety net to people who didn’t have a family doctor, have been shuttered, in part because there aren’t enough physicians to staff them, and also due to rising costs and a lack of government support. British Columbia’s descent into a primary care crisis is part of a larger trend across Canada; in 2019 there were approximately 4.6 million Canadians without regular health care providers. Although family medicine is the bedrock of our health care system, family doctors are among the lowest-paid physicians, and with the rapidly increasing costs of education and running a family practice, fewer and fewer can afford to choose this specialty.  

***

Drip, drip, drip. Raindrops slide down the hospital window, and the snow outside is turning to slush. If I were at home right now, I’d be catching a bit of sleep between logging off my work computer for the night and heading back to it in the morning.

A typical day for me starts around 6 a.m. My husband and I make lunches, and get our three daughters dressed, fed and through the daily battles of teeth and hair brushing. We give them goodbye kisses and eventually get them out the door for preschool and elementary school drop-offs. I’ll start seeing patients at 7:30 and continue until two or 2:30 p.m., sometimes making a quick run to the bathroom. I rarely have time to eat or to drink more than a sip or two of cold coffee. I see 30 to 40 patients a day. There are nearly always “fit-ins”—maybe a wound that requires immediate repair, a feverish toddler who really needs to be checked out, a mom with a UTI who is wrangling three kids, a patient with a mental health crisis who cannot wait. These are people I can help now and keep out of the emergency room. After I finish seeing patients, both virtually and in person, I start slogging through paperwork. 

Paperwork is the bane of family doctors’ existence, slowly crushing us as it fills our inboxes day in and day out. This part of the workload disproportionately affects female physicians. American research analyzing the time spent by doctors on electronic medical records found that, regardless of the number of patients in their practices, female physicians receive approximately 25 per cent more messages from staff and patients, and have to spend at least 20 per cent more time dealing with their inboxes and notes. Most paperwork is uncompensated and includes all manner of tasks: charting patient visits, checking labs, reviewing imaging, requesting consults, reading specialist reports, filling out forms, researching unusual presentations, advocating for patients, answering pharmacist queries, speaking to home care nurses, and discussing cases that can’t wait with specialists. After two or three hours of paperwork, I wedge my family into my day. Dinner, bath time, brushing little teeth, a story, a lullaby, bed. Then it’s back to the computer at around 8 p.m. for another three to five hours. I know family doctors who are up until two or three in the morning or pulling all-nighters to deal with paperwork. 

In the span of a few hours, we may treat strep throat and tick bites, do flu shots and COVID swabs, and diagnose cancer and heart failure.

I’d rather have more time to spend with my patients, but it’s not really possible. I’d rather have more time to spend with my family, but it’s not really possible. The B.C. government pays family doctors $31.62 for the average visit. Depending on the practice, approximately one-third goes to overhead and one-third to deductions. The third that is left for us is the same whether we spend 10 minutes checking blood pressure and renewing prescriptions, or 45 minutes managing complex issues for a patient who has debilitating chronic pain, cancer and depression, as well as many medication interactions and tenuous housing. Again, this affects female family doctors even more: research published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020 found that female primary care physicians spend more than 15 per cent more time with their patients than their male counterparts do. While multiple studies have shown that patients of female doctors may have better outcomes, the extra time spent means female primary care physicians earn less. We all, female and male doctors alike, want to spend this time with our patients—these are our patients, we know them, we care about them, and our life’s work is helping them. And our patients deserve this time; they deserve our care. But our payment system—our government—does not prioritize spending time with patients; family doctors are working flat out not by choice, but by necessity. There just aren’t enough of us in family medicine, and there are always more patients than we can see. As it is, most family physicians care for at least 1,000 patients.

Fifty-two per cent of physicians in Canada are family doctors. But the vast majority of unfilled residency spots are in family medicine—of the 115 empty positions that weren’t taken by eligible new doctors in 2022, 86 per cent were in family medicine. B.C. graduates the most family doctors in Canada, and is tied with Alberta for having the third-highest number of family doctors per capita. And yet many of these family physicians are no longer choosing to work in traditional family practice.

Renée Fernandez, the executive director of BC Family Doctors, reports the concerning math that although British Columbia has 6,943 registered family doctors, only 3,145 are working in traditional family practice settings, providing ongoing care through all stages of life. Many family doctors pivot to paths that provide better compensation and allow them to put in their time and go home at the end of their shift, such as working as a hospitalist or in corporate telemedicine. Many family doctors go back to school to train in emergency medicine, addiction medicine or palliative care. They wanted to work in family practice—they trained and sacrificed for it—but they graduated to the stark realization that they simply can’t afford to.

There is also debt to be paid off—many doctors graduate with hundreds of thousands of dollars hanging over them. For doctors who take time out from their training to start a family, this debt can be truly staggering. Medical school and residency often conflict with one’s fertile years, and there is no easy choice—the practicalities of family life can be difficult to reconcile with the demands of medical training, and the evidence shows that many female physicians delay having children. Doctors don’t get medical or dental benefits, paid sick days, pensions or employment insurance, and when you take into consideration these expenses, plus huge debt, plus the minimum 10 years of post-secondary training required of all physicians before entering the workforce, managing on the remnants of that $31.62 for an average visit becomes a real crunch. The problem isn’t the fee-for-service system—the majority of doctors in B.C. are paid this way. The issue is the size of the fees paid to family doctors. Not all provinces publish these figures, but based on those that are available, it appears that family doctors in British Columbia have the second-lowest pay of all physicians across the country, and the gap between family doctors and specialists in B.C. is one of the widest, despite the high cost of living in the province. 

Recently, the B.C. government came forward with a contract offer to new medical school graduates. It provides a $25,000 signing bonus if they agree to work as family doctors in B.C., and includes debt forgiveness of up to $130,000. But the new contract misses the mark widely. It does not address the high costs of overhead or the reasons for burnout in family medicine, and it neglects those physicians already in practice. Attracting a small number of new doctors while losing those already here makes little sense. There is no single solution for this increasingly dangerous primary care crisis; the problem needs to be dealt with thoughtfully, rapidly, and in close consultation with family physicians who are on the front lines. The government should look at raising family doctors’ fees, subsidizing our overhead expenses and paying us for the many parts of the job that occur outside the exam room.

MORE: I’m a veteran ER doctor. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

There is a lot of frustration among family doctors. We save the system a great deal of money. There is no comparison between the cost of seeing a family doctor—even if we were appropriately paid—and the cost of a patient ending up in the emergency room or a hospital bed, needing specialist care or far more intensive treatment. The data across many countries reveal that all these outcomes occur much more frequently among people without family doctors; a study in Hong Kong showed that these patients end up in the emergency room and are admitted to hospital at more than twice the rate of patients who have their own family physician. An American study showed that patients who have a family doctor rather than a non-physician primary care provider (such as a nurse practitioner) make fewer trips to the emergency room, are more satisfied with their care and incur much less cost to taxpayers, with fewer unnecessary tests or referrals to specialists.

Not only do family doctors save taxpayers money, they also save their lives. Canadian evidence shows that cancer screening occurs more frequently among people who have a family doctor. A lack of family physicians can negatively impact the care specialists provide. Daisy Dulay, a cardiologist in Victoria, has spoken about how the primary care crisis is affecting specialist physicians; for example, they must try to manage medical issues outside of their expertise when their patients don’t have a family physician. Family doctors feel terrible frustration at not being able to take on ill patients—our practices are full and there are no other family doctors to send patients to. It is morally injurious to have to turn away babies whose growth and development won’t otherwise be followed, dads who are suffering from depression that keeps them from playing with their children, isolated elders who have few points of contact, and people with serious illness who don’t know how to navigate the system. 

***

Drip, drip, drip. I think back to the delivery of my first baby, in 2012. I was in medical school, clerking at the same hospital I lie in now, pregnant through most of my third year. That’s when medical students leave the lecture halls and spend most of their time in the hospital. The family doctor who took care of me during that period was one of the people who made me want to be a family physician in the first place; I’d been placed with her for a rotation in my second year of medical school. Dr. M is the kind of doctor who hugs her patients warmly, jokes with them easily and makes her job look like the best in the world. She reassured me through my pregnancy—medical students can think of a lot of things that could go wrong!—and interrupted Thanksgiving dinner with her family to come and assess my labour when the baby was taking too long to arrive.

I trusted her and I knew I could depend on her. That’s a big part of being a family doctor. We see our patients for years and build up relationships. It’s terrifying to talk about the bleeding you’re worried might be the harbinger of cancer, but it’s a little easier to open up to someone you’ve spoken to many times before. It’s hard to finally share that your partner is abusing you, but if you trust your doctor, you may find yourself able to ask for help. You may be able to admit to your doctor that no, you haven’t been taking your medication—not because you can’t be bothered, but because you can’t afford it. As family doctors, we work with our patients to find solutions and support them through the difficult times.

Drip, drip, drip. These contractions don’t seem to be getting anywhere. The anesthetist comes in and tells me I’ll need an arterial line, which is a thin, flexible tube that’s threaded into an artery, usually in the wrist or groin. That is not at all a typical part of a C-section, but the possibility of accreta has the anesthetist worried about a catastrophic hemorrhage. I think about my daughters waiting at home with my parents. I can tell he’s trying to hide it, but my husband looks nervous.

When I was in medical school, after our first daughter was born, my husband worked at the airport, on the ground crew. He’d go to work in the afternoon and come home an hour or so after the last flight arrived. Depending on weather and delays, sometimes that would be 3:30 or four in the morning. I’d be up at six, getting ready to head to the hospital, and our little girl would be up soon after, smothering my husband in toddler kisses and crawling all over him. He would try to stay awake until my mom arrived to watch our daughter, and then he’d go back to work. I’d come home and put our little girl to bed before hitting the textbooks. It was an exhausting time, but it was a means to an end. We thought that one day, when medical school and residency were over, there would be balance, and we would have time for our family and each other.

The year that my first daughter was born, we lost my grandmother and two of my uncles. They all died at home and they all received palliative care from family doctors. Caring for patients at the end of life is another part of family medicine that I love—the relief on a husband’s face when we get his wife’s nausea under control; the way breathing settles and tension eases from a person’s face when their pain is treated properly. We help people stay in their homes, with their families, until the end. We understand the challenges patients face, and we know which supports they need, because we’ve been with them along the way. But now, as family medicine itself struggles to stay alive, who will be there to take this journey with them?

When I finished medical school, we moved to a new town for my residency. When our second daughter arrived in 2015, at the start of my second year of residency, we were overjoyed. Despite pressure to take a shorter leave, I returned to work when my baby was 10 months old. After that, my husband left his job and stayed home with our girls.

It was the only option. Call shifts are unpredictable, ER shifts are late, it is a rare daycare that does evenings, weekends or overnights, and we had no family nearby. 

Medical culture still excretes toxicity toward trainees and women: sexual harassment, comments like “This is why women shouldn’t be in medicine” and expectations that maternity leave be limited to weeks or a few months. Camaraderie with your fellow residents can help, but when you’ve got small children and a partner waiting at home, you can’t easily justify heading out for a drink or meeting up for a hike. I was fortunate to find strong mentors in other doctors who are also moms, but without my husband at home, my training would have been impossible.

I completed my residency in 2017 and became an independent family doctor, starting my own practice a few weeks after finding out that we were expecting a third baby. When you have your own practice, there are huge overhead costs. Many people don’t realize that everything in a family doctor’s office comes out of the doctor’s pocket. They pay for the rent, the staff, the exam beds, the hand sanitizer and the toilet paper. They pay for the computers, the needles, the anesthetic, the sutures, the scissors and the gloves. These costs add up to many thousands of dollars each month—and the doctor must pay whether they are working or not. And when the doctor isn’t seeing a patient, the doctor isn’t being paid.

It can be overwhelming—the conflict between filling out reams of forms and soothing a feverish toddler.

The solution to this problem is a locum—a doctor who sees your patients when you’re unable to, and who pays a portion of their earnings to cover your overhead. When my third daughter was born, I was able to cobble together four months of coverage between three different locums. Unfortunately, family medicine locums are a dying breed, for the same reason that family doctors are. I know multiple family doctors who have been left with no alternative but to close their practices because they couldn’t find locums for their maternity leaves. One colleague is reconsidering having a second child because she knows she has very little chance of finding any maternity coverage. Without locums, already-burned-out family doctors have no respite from the emotional and physical exhaustion that weighs heavier every day. Sometimes the burden is too heavy; female physicians take their own lives at a rate of nearly one-and-a-half times that of other employed women. 

It can be overwhelming—the conflict between spending time with patients and being able to pay your staff; the conflict between filling out reams of forms and soothing your toddler who has woken with a fever. I have been fully qualified and working independently for just under five years, but already these conflicts have sometimes felt like too much. Still, like most of us, I care so much about my patients that it is hard to leave, and I hope, perhaps naively, that the value of family medicine will be recognized before we’ve been bled completely dry. So, for now, I stay.

***

Drip, drip, drip. It’s winter in British Columbia, very wet and very grey outside, and the night is slowly receding. Only a few more hours until I meet this baby, the baby who will complete our family. It has been a different pregnancy. This baby kicks like it’s already a soccer player, and I’m more tired, more sore and more worried. Part of it is that each pregnancy is a bit more uncomfortable. Part of it is being pregnant through the pandemic. Part of it is losing other babies.

A few months into the pandemic, I was pregnant—this baby would make us a family of six, just as we’d always hoped. My sister was due a few weeks before me, and we were delighted to expect our babies together. There was fear, working through the pandemic; pregnancy increased the risk of severe outcomes, and there was risk to the baby as well. Back then, we didn’t have enough PPE, but you can’t stop seeing your patients, especially in the middle of a pandemic. Doctors and some of our moms sewed shower curtains into isolation gowns. Fabric scraps became surgical caps. A local dentist and some community members dropped off masks. Several times a day, I would meticulously arrange my MacGyvered PPE, put my hand on my abdomen for a moment, pick up my stethoscope and a COVID swab, and head in to examine another scared patient.

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

My first-trimester ultrasound was delayed, and it wasn’t until I was getting close to my second trimester that I lay on the exam table, waiting to see the little heartbeat. It’s never a good sign when the tech says they’re going to go speak with the radiologist. The heartbeat wasn’t there. I started to miscarry on my birthday, in September of 2020. 

When there are no locums to be had, you keep seeing patients, you keep breaking bad news as gently as you can, you keep examining rashes, and you keep diagnosing other people’s pregnancies. When there is no space for your loss, you take some comfort in the fact that the face shield makes your eyes look a bit blurry anyway and you keep going. 

Then, a new hope: a positive pregnancy test soon after the miscarriage. This baby would be born in the summer. We didn’t tell our girls right away, but two ultrasounds confirmed that all was well, and on Christmas morning we shared the happy news. 

And then, two weeks later, another ultrasound tech went to get another radiologist. “I’m sorry,” the radiologist said, confirming our worst fear. “Your baby is exactly the right size for gestational age. It must have stopped growing yesterday, or maybe this morning.”  

I went back to work the next morning and found myself fighting back tears a few days later as I worried with a patient who was facing a possible pregnancy loss herself. Later, there was relief when it turned out her baby would live. Then I was fighting back tears as I talked to a young parent about their serious illness; fighting back tears as I watched a dying grandma say goodbye to her grandchild who wasn’t yet crawling. Sometimes the tears won.

And then, suddenly, there was concern that I may have cancer. Instead of hoping for a positive pregnancy test, we were hoping for negative results. Tests, scans, biopsies—not only was this scary, but I couldn’t take a break. My patients didn’t stop getting ill just because I got sick, too. Sometimes I had to reschedule half a day of appointments, or take care of patients over the phone when I got home from the hospital in the evening. I held my girls close when I read them their bedtime stories and tried not to let them see if a tear escaped. My parents helped out, as they always do, and I tried not to show them I was scared. Thankfully, the cancer investigations were negative and we could draw a breath of relief.

We found ourselves expecting again in the summer of 2021. We didn’t tell the girls for a long time. I searched for locums in every spare moment, but there were none to be found; I wouldn’t be able to afford more than a few weeks with my baby, maybe a month or two, and this meant asking the other doctors at my clinic, who were already overworked, to take on more work. There is no coverage from our government, our college or our health authorities when a doctor has a baby, or is seriously ill, or bereaved. The phone rang one night, a few weeks before Christmas; it was another doctor mom, calling with devastating news. A colleague’s perfect little baby had passed away during labour. I felt racked with terrible guilt that her locum could now give me some months at home with my baby.

***

Drip, drip, drip. A cup of ice melts on the hospital tray beside me. I’m out of the OR, and a brand-new baby snuggles cozily on my chest, a surprise boy. Everything went well; my excellent OB/GYN, the caring anesthetist and my lovely midwife brought us through. We take him home and show him to his excited sisters. They cuddle up, and one of them whispers, “Mommy, I’m so glad we have a new baby. Because now you will be home with us for a little while.” 

This article appears in print in the September 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here, or buy the issue online here. 

The post A doctor’s dilemma appeared first on Macleans.ca.

A lot of queer people think 2SLGBTQ+ history is limited to metropolitan areas like New York or San Francisco, Toronto or Montreal. I came of age in rural New Brunswick, where my lack of exposure to anything queer—especially queer history—led me to believe that those stories weren’t there. I’ve since learned how naive that notion is, and that queer history exists, in some form or another, in every community across Canada.

Growing up, I never saw myself represented in my surroundings. All I heard about gay people was that they were sissies, freaks, diseased, predatory. The last thing I wanted was to be queer. And yet I couldn’t hide it. I developed a deep-rooted self-hatred and internalized homophobia that took years to shake off. Even after coming out at age 16, I was still alone. I didn’t know it at the time, but this lack of representation created a void in my identity. Enduring homophobia without seeing queer love is an incredibly isolating experience.

In 2014, I was attending the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design and completing a summer internship at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick. A colleague who knew about my interest in queer history introduced me to some photos donated by John Corey, an artist, community historian and general collector of things. His donation included a number of photo albums that had belonged to Leonard Olive Keith, an amateur photographer, entrepreneur and veteran of the First World War, affectionately known as “Len.” He’d grown up in Havelock, New Brunswick. Impossible to ignore among the hundreds of photos was the presence of Joseph Austin “Cub” Coates. Corey, whose father was a friend of Len’s, noted during the donation process that Len and Cub were “boyfriends.”

In 1918, Len was happy in Havelock, running his own garage and enjoying his time with Cub. In April, he received his call-up papers, and was forced to enlist. Cub was old enough to enlist on his own, but young enough to avoid conscription.

Two weeks after Len was drafted, Cub enlisted and followed Len to Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu for training. They didn’t fight in any battles (the war was winding down by the time they arrived overseas) but they worked as engineers, doing cleanup and repairs.

I had 15 albums, a few thousand loose photos and a few dozen glass negatives. I began poring over them, searching for Len and Cub. I found photos of the men embracing in the wilds of New Brunswick, Cub with his hand curled around Len’s inner thigh, and the pair of them shirtless, sitting in each other’s laps with their pants undone, hands clasped, making eye contact with the camera. These photos brought me to tears. They transcended time and showed me a love like mine, shared by people like me, in the place where I lived, one hundred years ago. I saw myself in Len and Cub. It was an incredibly validating and exciting discovery for a young queer person like me. The photos were a testament to the often-touted phrase in queer circles: “We have always been here.” This time, “here” was the tiny, rural village of Havelock.

The boys began appearing in photos together in 1915, after Len returned from a stint at Tilton School in New Hampshire.

I became enamoured with the collection. In 2015, I founded the Queer Heritage Initiative of New Brunswick, or QHINB, a community archive that began as a cardboard box in my home office and is now a permanent collection at the provincial archives. Three years later I met Meredith J. Batt, a young queer archivist recently hired at the provincial archives, who is now the president of QHINB. The two of us were spurred on by our mentor, John Leroux, manager of collections and exhibitions at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, who encouraged us to meet with Goose Lane Editions about developing a manuscript that would explore the lives of Len and Cub, and how their relationship unfolded in the time and place that it did. This is when the real research for our book Len & Cub: A Queer History began.

Len and Cub are a testament to the often-touted phrase “We have always been here.” This time, “here” was the tiny rural village of Havelock.

Meredith and I worked through the pandemic, meticulously viewing and reviewing the photos, looking for traces of the boys in Canadian census records, war records and local newspapers. We pieced together their lives: their travels, employment, military service, personalities. We also spent a lot of time researching cultural shifts and attitudes around sex, gender and same-sex experiences during the first half of the 20th century. To simply call Len and Cub “gay” and move on with it ignores a mountain of nuance around how they would have understood their relationship. What is undeniable is that their love, however they would have described it, is beautiful to see, and that we’re all lucky that these photos have survived as long as they have.

Now, more than ever, New Brunswick is ready to have conversations about the place of queer people in this province, our history, our lived realities and our future. Since the launch of our book this year, Meredith and I have received messages from folks across the country, queer and straight alike, who are taking heart in the boys’ story and in how they too can see themselves in Len and Cub. I’m proud that this little queer love story from rural New Brunswick has spread as far as it has, and that people find comfort in Len and Cub’s photos. They remind us all that same-sex love has always been a part of our country, that queer people have always existed and that we belong wherever we choose to call home.

***

Cub and Len resting in a hammock outside the Keith family home

Havelock, New Brunswick, circa 1915 to 1916

This is one of the earliest photos of the boys together. A second photo taken shortly after shows Cub and Len huddled together on the hammock lighting two cigarettes. Some of their later photos were taken with a self-timer, but it’s more likely that a friend or family member took this shot.

Len and Cub on an outing

Near Jemseg, New Brunswick, circa 1916

Len’s father, Hilyard Keith, had enough disposable income to buy the first automobile in Havelock— a Ford, which Len drove more than anyone else. The family also bought a Kodak camera in the early 1910s (Len’s images make up the bulk of the Keith family albums). Thanks to these purchases, the boys could travel out of town to be alone together and capture their adventures.

Len and Cub outside Len’s garage

Circa 1919

In 1931, Len was outed for his sexuality and driven out of town. By August of that year he had signed over control and ownership of his business to his sister, Lucy. We lose track of Len until his mother’s death in 1948, when her obituary notes that he is living in Longueuil, Quebec. Cub, meanwhile, continued to live in Havelock, seemingly untainted by the scandal. In 1940, he moved to Moncton to marry Rita Cameron, a nurse.

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This article appears in print in the August 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here, or buy the issue online here. 

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About 40 years ago, the story goes, several Tibetan Buddhist monks declared that they had discovered the centre of the universe in the mountains north of Kamloops, British Columbia. The monks, who visited several times, were reportedly able to identify the spot—a grassy knoll near Deadman River—by its distinctive volcanic topography and through a series of numinous tests, one of which was the ability to start a fire in the area without an ignition source.

In 2016, Marshall Potts bought 160 acres of land about an hour’s drive from the centre of the universe. Like the monks, Potts—a 54-year-old country-rock musician and self-described “spiritual guy” who’d previously lived in the Lower Mainland—found the landscape magical. There were soul-stirring groves of Douglas fir, verdant grasslands, and unspoiled lakes and creeks. Mule deer, black bears and bighorn sheep roamed the woods and cliffsides. Potts and his partner, Jo-Anne Beharrell, an accountant who moonlights as Potts’s manager, wanted to turn the property into an off-grid hobby farm and live self-sufficiently. They cut and milled trees to build a house, grew their own vegetables, and acquired chickens and a small herd of cattle. They set about installing solar panels. It was undeniably remote—Kamloops was a two-hour round-trip drive along a narrow, sometimes treacherous, gravel road—but that was part of the attraction. “You learn to drink your coffee black,” Beharrell told me, “because there’s no corner store to run to when you’re out of cream.” They christened the place Seven Sparks Ranch, named in part for a nearby body of water, Sparks Lake.

It can get hot on the ranch in summer, but the summer of 2021 in the south-central part of B.C.’s Interior was mind-bendingly hot. On June 28, the temperature in Kamloops hit a high of 44 degrees Celsius, almost 20 degrees above average. Potts and Beharrell went down to Criss Creek, a half-hour’s drive from their house, to cool off and have a picnic lunch. When they returned home a couple of hours later, they noticed a plume of smoke above the trees to the south of their property. The smoke was pale grey, the plume still small. They raced over to a neighbour’s place a few kilometres away and saw a grass fire spreading. It was so hot, and the wind so fierce, that the fire was already moving very quickly. “We just heard a roar, and then the flames started coming toward us,” Potts said. Back home, Beharrell called 911, who transferred her to the BC Wildfire Service, the province’s wildfire-fighting corps. “We thought the fire was significant,” Potts said, “but we figured they’d be able to put it out.” 

They didn’t. Or at least not right away. An hour passed, then another. From their home, Potts and Beharrell watched with mounting anxiety as the plume became a column and its smoke got blacker, indicating that it was burning more vegetation. After four or five hours, BC Wildfire flew planes overhead, observing the fire. By the next morning, as firefighters arrived by helicopter and began to strategize, the blaze had already spread. Potts and Beharrell had lost power by then, and started moving farm equipment onto the grass away from trees. The fire crews told the couple that by the time the fire hit a nearby ridge, they’d have to evacuate. It hit the ridge later that day. “It was a monster,” Potts said. They grabbed what they could: a couple of Potts’s favourite guitars and an amp, a laptop and a hard drive, some photos, their two dogs (one of whom was pregnant). They took a forest service road out of the back of their property and drove to Kamloops. 

Even in town they couldn’t get away from fire. They ended up in a motel near the neighbourhood of Juniper Ridge. Before the night was over, a different, smaller wildfire broke out just behind the motel. After about a week, they went to stay at Potts’s brother’s place at Pinantan Lake, 20 kilometres away. Soon after they arrived, another fire was menacing that community, and it was eventually put on evacuation alert, too.

The Sparks Lake fire was the largest of the season, a conflagration that raged for more than two months, devouring 95,980 hectares of land and trees and destroying or damaging more than 35 buildings. Hundreds of people were forced to evacuate; countless animals and birds were killed or displaced. The fire cut a broad swath through the region, from the Deadman River valley, across the territory of the Skeetchestn Indian Band, and up north into Bonaparte Provincial Park.

There were few places anybody could go in B.C. that summer. In terms of area burned, 2021 was the third-worst fire season on record in the province’s history. In terms of its broad impact, however, the 2021 fire season was the most devastating B.C. had ever experienced. Between April 1, 2021, and March 28, 2022, there were 1,642 wildfires, 67 of which were bad enough to be classified as “wildfires of note” by BC Wildfire. Then there was the disorienting drought and blistering heat waves of late June and early July that made the fires so much worse—the “heat dome” that settled over the Pacific Northwest and immediately transformed a normally temperate climate into one better approximating Death Valley. 

A home in ruins: Jo-Anne Beharrell and Marshall Potts loved the woodland landscape where they built their house. Today, half the trees are gone.

On June 29, Lytton broke the record for the all-time highest temperature in Canada—49.5 degrees Celsius—and the next day, the entire village was wiped out by yet another wildfire. Two people died in the Lytton fire, and the heat would kill more than 600 across the province. Just a few months later, with the charred terrain stripped of water-absorbing vegetation, extreme rainfall in mid-November flooded homes, swept away highways and forced the evacuations of thousands more across the southern part of the province. Like so many people, Marshall Potts and Jo-Anne Beharrell were cut off from their family in the Lower Mainland. They were able to get back into their house by Christmas—firefighters had ultimately prevented its destruction—but they spent the holiday alone.

There had been disastrous fire seasons before. Potts and Beharrell had previously been evacuated, during 2017’s Elephant Hill fire, another monster that destroyed a good chunk of the area’s forest. Experts argued that such megafires were a harbinger of climate change, and a sign of environmental catastrophe to come. But the cascade of natural disasters in 2021 made it clearer than ever that a climate emergency is irrevocably upon us. Mike Flannigan, the British Columbia research chair in predictive services, emergency management and fire science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops—he calls himself a “fire guy” on Twitter—told me that he hadn’t expected climate events like those in B.C. last summer to occur for another 15 or 20 years, and yet there they were. Last year, it seemed, was a terrible tipping point. “You think things are crazy now,” Flannigan said, “but it’s only going to get crazier.” 

And if Flannigan wasn’t prepared for what had already happened, how will the rest of us fare? Residents of B.C., at least outside densely populated Vancouver and its expanding suburbs, have always proudly accepted the risks that come with living in or near the bush. That was part of the deal—like living with the chance of hurricanes in Florida or earthquakes (and wildfires, for that matter) in California. Now things are different. What was once incomprehensible today feels inevitable. It’s one thing to understand risk as an occasional and distant possibility. Now your brain has to accept that life, going forward, will be even more frequently marred by displacement, loss and death. You have to completely recalibrate your ideas of safety and vulnerability. Enormous changes are going to come at the last minute. And simple, age-old questions about the weather—“Hot enough for you?” “Which way is the wind blowing?”—are going to be freighted with existential dread.

***

In early May, I travelled from Abbotsford up through the Kamloops Fire Centre to see the ravages of last year’s fires, what the recovery looked like and how people were coping. 

I spent a fair bit of time in the region as a kid, learning to tack and ride horses. It is achingly beautiful, physically imposing. In the space of an hour, you can travel through snow-capped mountains and desert mesas, coniferous trees giving way to sagebrush. There are long stretches of empty highway, interrupted by somewhat drab, ramshackle villages and hamlets, as if the architects of these developments saw no point in competing with the natural beauty surrounding them. The people who live here are, generally speaking, people who make their living from the land—farmers, miners, ranchers, loggers—and who also spend most of their free time out in it, fishing and hunting, swimming and skiing. For someone like me, who now spends about 99 per cent of his life in cities, the membrane between the human and natural world in this country feels unusually thin.

“You think things are crazy now,” one fire expert said, “but it’s only going to get crazier”

As I drove into the mountains on the Coquihalla Highway, I passed dozens of work crews cleaning up debris from last year’s mudslides—immense tangles of rock, branches and other vegetation—and repairing chunks of road that had been melted by the heat or ripped apart by floodwater. Each site was marked by long strings of orange safety flags that fluttered overhead, lending an almost festive air to what still seemed like a disaster zone. The first dead trees I saw were near the Coldwater Indian Band Reserve, south of Merritt. Suddenly, the landscape was drained of colour. All I could see were grim groves of black pines and firs, stripped of needle and cone. Over the next few days, I’d encounter many other such stands, and each time was a fresh shock, like discovering new tumours in a body that was supposed to be cancer-free.

Then there was the other destruction, still also visible, of human settlement—of family homes, of small businesses, of carefully tended gardens and trusty vehicles. Lytton, whose cleanup and recovery has been plagued by inexplicable bureaucratic delay, was still, almost a year later, closed to the public. An opaque barrier had been placed up on the highway to deter gawkers, but a narrow gap below that barrier still permitted a glimpse of the devastation: block after block of levelled structures, dunes of ash, hollowed-out lives. 

All over the world, the recipe for wildfire is the same, requiring just three basic ingredients: vegetation (what forestry and fire people call fuel), ignition and conducive weather—hot, dry, windy. In B.C., particularly in the last five years, all of these elements have taken on extreme dimensions. The first ingredient is the most easily—but also the most contentiously—addressed. Long before settlers arrived in the province, Indigenous peoples kept wildfire in check through prescribed and cultural burns; that is, intentionally setting highly controlled fires at low-risk times of year. The practice was designed to thin out forests, render the bark of old-growth trees more fire-resistant, remove dead grass and encourage the growth of beneficial plants. These burns would occur every five to 25 years and essentially rebalance the ecosystem.

Such maintenance was more or less outlawed in the late 19th century by colonial governments, which viewed any kind of fire as destructive to valuable timber. Several decades of commercial logging made the landscape even more vulnerable to fire, with diverse woodlands largely replaced by tree farms consisting almost entirely of conifers. The region’s pine, notoriously, has been ravaged by the mountain pine beetle, with dead and weakened trees becoming highly flammable fuel on the forest floor. Other sloppy and short-sighted practices—not removing scrap wood left behind by loggers, as well as a policy of reflexively, blindly stamping out all wildfire—turned the province’s forests, over time, into tinderboxes. “We’re up against a major issue, which is a hundred years of fuel loading,” says Kira Hoffman, a Smithers-based fire ecologist who is in training to be a burn boss (someone who plans and implements prescribed burns). “We’ve become really, really good at putting out fires.” While prescribed fires are again a part of fire management, both by Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups, the province needs to clean up all the fuel from forest floors at a much larger scale before those burns can be effective. 

Human-caused wildfires—ignited by stray cigarette butts, downed power lines or arson—account for about half of all fires, on average, across the entire country. Thanks to fire prevention education and vigilance, the number of human-caused fires has actually been declining. In B.C.’s 2021 fire season, just 35 per cent of fires were attributed to people. At the same time, thanks to a warming planet, lightning strikes, which account for the other half of Canada’s fires, have increased exponentially. During last summer’s heat wave, more than 710,000 lightning strikes were recorded in B.C. and western Alberta, up from a five-year average of 8,300 during the same time of year. The wildfires themselves, now so notoriously aggressive and unpredictable, can create their own firestorms and yet more lightning—a terrifying feedback loop. 

Dead wood: The trees around the community of Logan Lake were scorched in last summer’s wildfires. Thanks to careful preparation and a shift in the wind, the town itself was spared. (Photographs by Troy Moth)

Since the early 1970s, the amount of forest that burns every year in Canada has doubled to about 2.5 million hectares—about half the size of Nova Scotia. In the 1980s, as more people moved into or near wilderness, and built homes and businesses there, so-called interface fires became more common. (“Wildland-urban interface” is the firefighting term used to describe the transition zone where human development brushes up against the natural world.) In B.C., in 2003, the Okanagan suffered the largest interface wildfire event in the province’s history. More than 25,000 hectares burned, 238 homes were destroyed or damaged, and more than 33,000 people evacuated from Kelowna and the community of Naramata. Then came the horrific fire seasons of 2017 and 2018. Over the course of the summer of 2017, more than 65,000 people were evacuated province-wide, and 1.2 million hectares burned. In 2018, there were over 2,000 fires and 1.35 million hectares burned. “Growth into the wildland-urban interface increases every year,” Ian Meier, executive director of the BC Wildfire Service, told me. “So the challenge increases every year.” There are about 1.1 million high-risk hectares in B.C. 

In 2017, the worst fire season to date, the province spent $649 million fighting fires; it spent another $565 million last year. The insurance payouts from just two of 2021’s megafires—Lytton Creek and White Rock Lake—came to $179 million. If wildfires have been made worse by climate change, climate change has also been made worse by wildfires: Elephant Hill, for example, spewed 38 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And while it’s impossible to pinpoint exactly how much harm the smoke from last summer’s wildfires caused, a report in the Lancet published in September of 2021 estimated that short-term exposure to wildfire smoke causes 440 deaths in Canada every year.

On an average summer’s day, most fire management agencies can put out wildfires without too much trouble or damage. That can completely change when the heat is extreme—days, even weeks, of extreme weather are now, of course, increasingly common. The heat dome, once considered a thousand-year event, is now expected to recur as frequently as every 25 years. By 2050, average temperatures are expected to be higher, with daytime highs in Vancouver as much as 3.7 degrees Celsius warmer than they are now. Under such conditions, another diabolical cycle is set in motion—a warming atmosphere sucks more moisture from vegetation, essentially baking that fuel, resulting in overwhelmingly intense fires that are difficult, if not impossible, to extinguish. Those fires are the biggest threat. “It’s just a few really large fires that are responsible for most of our problems,” Mike Flannigan told me. “Three per cent of the fires burn 97 per cent of the area burned. And these often happen on a few critical days—the extremes of the extremes.”

***

As I made my way across the fire centre, I occasionally smelled smoke. I saw it, too, from time to time, and once, on a ridge just outside of Kamloops, the flicker of flames. Someone’s burn pile? A pulp mill? It was nothing threatening, ultimately, but it gave me just the smallest hint of the fear that many locals live with.

I was in a particularly fretful frame of mind that day. I had just been visiting with Kody and Ashlynn Kruesel, a couple in their early 30s. Last August, the Kruesels’ tiny village of Monte Lake, a half-hour drive east of Kamloops, was engulfed by the White Rock Lake fire, one of those few really large fires that Flannigan mentioned. In a matter of eight hours, its flames travelled 18 kilometres and consumed at least 28 homes and one business. The Kruesels were able to evacuate in time, but just barely. After driving for 45 minutes, glowing embers from the fire were still floating down onto their truck. When they returned home the next day, they discovered that every one of their outbuildings—including a garage, a garden shed, a workshop and an old sauna—had been destroyed. The A-frame house they’d bought two years earlier had been spared. Their neighbours’ homes on either side, however, were completely gutted. Almost a year later, the fire’s unbearable caprice was still evident—I saw a scorched hand cart lying in the mud, one rubber wheel intact and the other, just inches away, completely melted.

While the Kruesels fled the fire at first, they returned to help fight it. For several days after the fire blew through Monte Lake, they told me, the BC Wildfire Service was nowhere to be seen. Kody, a former CN heavy equipment operator whose father had been a volunteer fireman, quickly joined forces with some neighbours, taking up hoses, pumps and buckets. The fire front had come and gone, but there were still numerous spot fires that needed to be put out. A change in the wind could have been lethal, but there were homes to salvage, animals to save. Days later, Solicitor General Mike Farnworth publicly excoriated Monte Lake residents who defied the evacuation order, saying they were putting themselves and firefighters at risk. “We didn’t want to be here,” Kody said. “It wasn’t fun. But this is my home—I’m not going anywhere if nobody else is taking care of it.” When firefighters showed up in Monte Lake, the Kruesels said they were apologetic. “ ‘We’re super embarrassed we weren’t allowed up here,’ ” Kody remembered BC Wildfire firefighters telling him. “ ‘This is our job. We should have been up here.’ ” 

On edge: Kody and Ashlynn Kruesel fled a big fire in their tiny village of Monte Lake with little time to spare. They returned soon after to help fight it.

I talked with the Kruesels on their front porch, as their ducks gurgled nearby and their black cat, Robin, nuzzled my leg. All around us, the devastation of last summer was still on full display. Houses reduced to cinder-block foundations, pooling with brackish water. Mounds of scrap and brush being belatedly burned. Further down the road, the charred, flattened husks of cars piled up against each other. The horizon was dominated by now-familiar dead, black trees—silent, skeletal sentries at a crime scene.

But it was a crime scene in which the survivors, broken and sad, kept living, reminded daily of their trauma. The Kruesels had moved to Monte Lake because it was one of the few places where they could afford to buy a house, but also because they loved the hiking and kayaking that were literally in their backyard. After the fire, the local roads they used for camping and fishing were all closed, choked off by fallen and dead trees that still hadn’t been removed. With the woodlands decimated, there was nothing to break the wind that frequently whipped through the community. There was an arsonist in the area, too, Kody said, who had, incredibly, started 18 fires in a single day. It was drizzling as we talked, but Kody was nervous about the coming fire season. “We’re going to have a week, maybe two, of rain,” he said. “And then we’re going to hit another dry summer again. So we’re a little on edge.” 

When I asked what they could do to prepare for future fires, Kody shrugged. “You go slowly,” he said. “You try to purchase some sprinklers and generators and pumps. But it all costs money. And what do you pick as a priority?” Ashlynn works as an office manager at Kamloops Alarm, a security company, but Kody is currently unemployed, nursing some bad tendinitis. Their insurance had expired before the fire hit. Aside from a tiny GoFundMe that a friend had set up—it raised a few hundred dollars—they had received no financial assistance. Thanks to the fire, though, they’ve become much closer to their neighbours, solidarity bred of tragedy. They’ve formed a private Facebook group, making sure everybody has each other’s phone numbers, knows exactly how many people live in each home, how many animals they have, and what kind of equipment they can offer in case of another fire. Everyone has an escape route planned. There’s a rough chain of command. There are plans to co-purchase a large truck outfitted with a big water tank and pump. If someone sees a fire anywhere, they immediately inform the group. It’s all improvisatory—“half-assed,” in Kody’s words—but at least it provides some security. “We’ve learned we can’t rely on our own government,” Kody said, “so we’ve come together as a community.”

***

The Kruesels are angry at a lot of people: the Red Cross, the logging companies, the media, the looters and the looky-loos—tourists who still occasionally pass through Monte Lake, snapping pics of the ruins. But it is BC Wildfire that draws their greatest ire.

The BC Wildfire Service is a division of the B.C. Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development. Its basic job is to manage and mitigate wildfires on behalf of the provincial government, and to protect lives and values (the agency’s word). The agency has about 1,700 firefighters and support staff and works with many other organizations: the First Nations’ Emergency Services Society of B.C. and the Forest Enhancement Society of B.C., as well as local fire departments and private firefighting companies. It provides equipment, personnel and strategy during the fire season and is also responsible, alongside private landowners, for the maintenance and mitigation of forests and grasslands, including the use of prescribed burns. Like organizations in comparable fire zones—California’s Cal Fire and Quebec’s SOPFEU—BC Wildfire works with firefighters from other places, who are able to parachute in when their own regions are not experiencing overwhelming threats. After the 2021 season, the provincial government made BC Wildfire expand its year-round operations. It also provided its biggest budget to date. Of $600 million earmarked for climate-related disasters, prevention and recovery, the agency received $453 million that would be spent on mitigation and risk-reduction, various preparedness initiatives, forest road maintenance and better public alert systems.

The money was welcome, for sure, with some of it going toward more prescribed burns in an attempt to correct decades of poor forest management. But it wasn’t enough, according to many residents I spoke with. There are deeper, more intractable problems within the organization. Ranchers, farmers and foresters, people who have lived and worked on the land their entire lives, say they are repeatedly ignored when wildfires break out, or their equipment—CATs that could be used to dig fire breaks, say—goes unused. After the 2003 and 2017 fire seasons, reports were commissioned to determine what went wrong, with both strongly recommending the same thing: that BC Wildfire make better use of local knowledge. Now, years later, this remains an issue. “It’s still very much an agency-led approach,” Kira Hoffman, the fire ecologist, said of BC Wildfire. “If someone hasn’t gone through their accreditation or certification process, BC Wildfire doesn’t think that person knows what they’re doing.”

“The Sparks Lake fire—last summer’s largest—devoured nearly 96,000 hectares of land and trees”

Eighty per cent of all Indigenous communities live in forested areas, and the hunters and gatherers in those communities, in particular, know best the roads, the water sources, the wind patterns and which parts of the woods are heaviest with fuel—in short, all the things you need to know to put out a fire. At the same time, and crucially, because of a lack of money and decent infrastructure, wildfire disproportionately affects those communities. 

Mike Anderson, a 72-year-old professional forester who runs the Skeetchestn Natural Resources Corporation, watched the Sparks Lake fire build for two weeks. While the Skeetchestn Indian Band was forced to evacuate, scattering band members for a month, Anderson’s crew of about 15 stayed behind to fight the fire. They set up a command centre where firefighters and volunteers could be fed, dug large firebreaks to guide flames into prescribed burn areas and put out spot fires. When BC Wildfire showed up a few days later, Anderson and his crew repeatedly offered advice and guidance, but were frequently ignored or told to get out of the way. They were told they didn’t have the right equipment or training, Anderson said, or that they weren’t properly registered. “What I witnessed was mismanagement and ignorance by BC Wildfire Service,” Anderson told me, adding that the agency was “arrogant” and “territorial.” Hoffman argues that the root issue is both obvious and complex—colonialism itself. “The thing about fire is that it is so embedded in Indigenous sovereignty,” she said. “It becomes this huge issue with Crown land, and who owns what.” 

By the time the Sparks Lake fire had been put out—as had another one that followed on its heels—Anderson had watched, heartbroken, as two-thirds of his woodlot, which he’d grown, tended and selectively logged for 35 years, went up in smoke. So had one hundred per cent of Skeetchestn’s woodlots. Darrel Draney, the band’s Kukpi7, or chief, was furious and saddened by it all. His community included generations of firekeepers, experts in the ways fire behaves and should be treated. Draney insisted that future fires could largely be prevented if his territorial patrol, and the patrols of other Indigenous communities, had sufficient funds and the proper equipment to fight them. “If we were resourced properly,” he told the CBC last year, “there wouldn’t be 300 big fires in B.C.; there’d be 20, maybe 30.” While no Skeetchestn structures were ultimately harmed, much of the land surrounding the community was burned, damaging valuable hunting grounds and watersheds for decades. 

Anderson and Draney later proposed to BC Wildfire that every rural band’s natural resources centre be staffed with firekeepers and people who know the land, whom the agency could officially train to serve as an initial attack crew on fires. “Any fire, if you get on it right away, is not much of a fire,” Anderson said. “If you’re there when the fire’s an acre, and you have the right equipment, it’s not much of an issue.” When I spoke to Anderson, he and Draney were still waiting for their proposal to be taken up.

Communication and clarity seemed to be a problem in general for BC Wildfire. A number of people I spoke with were unclear about why the agency set particular back burns—a controlled burn to direct the fire—or why it wasn’t fighting fires at night, when it was cooler. Most significantly, there was confusion about why firefighters were in one place and not another, or why it took them so long to get to certain fires. 

BC Wildfire’s general policy is to put out a fire wherever and whenever it starts, no matter how close it is to human development. This is largely because in B.C., almost every square foot of land is valuable—as timber, as a pipeline route, for housing or highways. Ontario, by contrast, has a policy of letting a fire take its course unless it directly threatens a community. The point, says Mike Flannigan, is twofold: one, fire is natural and can often be beneficial. Two, trying to always fight fire, especially now, is both counterproductive and a waste of resources. Even with firefighters working all year and around the clock, there are just too many fires for them to keep up. “Canadian fire management agencies are among the best in the world,” Flannigan told me. “They’re well-trained and professional. But they can’t put out all the fires all the time.”

In 2021, BC Wildfire couldn’t count on assistance from other jurisdictions because so many places were dealing with the same problem (and the pandemic made travel challenging). Firefighters were completely overwhelmed, constantly endangered and separated from their families for weeks on end. Ian Meier, the executive director of BC Wildfire, told me there were periods last summer with 80 new fires a day,  and it was just too much. “The system gets overloaded,” he said. “There’s more fire than resources.” 

When I spoke with Meier in May, he still sounded exhausted. He’s been with the agency for 25 years, and none of the criticism that I passed along was news to him, especially after last year, when a number of people—Kamloops-South Thompson Liberal MLA Todd Stone, Thompson-Nicola Regional District chair Ken Gillis, every surviving Lyttonite—expressed their disappointment and anger with the government’s response. Meier acknowledged, wearily, that the complaints—about the poor communication, the insufficient cooperation with Indigenous and local communities—were things that the agency was working on and slowly getting better at. “We’re using a year-round workforce to connect to those communities to do cross-training,” he said. “We work together so when it’s time to hit the ground running, we’re ready to go. Each year we make incremental change and we’ll continue to do that.” He talked about forging better relationships with First Nations leaders. Last summer, for example, through an agreement with BC Wildfire, the Simpcw First Nation established an Indigenous initial attack team that will fight fires in Simpcw territory. “We’re committed to learning and changing,” Meier said. “In some people’s eyes, we’re probably not changing quick enough.”

***

Is anybody changing quickly enough? BC Wildfire was created as a response to emergency. But wildfire is now a permanent emergency, an emergency that exceeds our imagination. This is the story of our entire lurching response to the climate crisis, one that’s been ad hoc, fragmentary, too-little-too-late. It’s not just B.C., and it’s not just wildfire. It’s drought in the Prairies, floods in Ontario, killer heat waves across Quebec.

You can’t hold climate change accountable. You can’t get mad at it, you can’t point a finger at it, you can’t sue it. It’s so big, and so frightening, you can barely get your mind around it. So, in the face of that helplessness, you take a hard look at the human stuff, the fixable stuff. You make sacrifices and changes. That doesn’t mean giving up, but it means giving up certain things and adding others. You don’t go to the beach when the smoke’s too bad. You don’t let your kids ride their dirt bikes because an errant spark might ignite a fire. 

FireSmart is a national organization dedicated to reducing losses from wildfire. All across B.C., communities as diverse as Whistler, Coquitlam, Belcarra and Slocan have developed community wildfire resiliency plans that incorporate a number of FireSmart mitigation principles and programs. Such plans include figuring out a community’s best evacuation routes, clearing nearby forest fuel, hardening homes (i.e., ditching cedar hedges, installing fire-resistant siding, cleaning gutters of pine needles). Common-sense stuff, really, but not top of mind when you think of wildfires as a once-in-a-lifetime event rather than something that’s now likely to happen every few years at least. 

Other more challenging and expensive measures are starting to be implemented. Like including lessons on Indigenous fire practices in the elementary school curriculum and spending more on mental health supports for burnt-out firefighters. Like updating the emergency alert system to include extreme heat, fire and flood. Like turning hockey arenas into fireproof permanent evacuation centres.

What people aren’t doing, usually, is moving. I asked everyone I met in B.C. who’d been affected by the fires if they’d considered going somewhere else. Most said no—this was their home, and besides, where would they go? In West Kelowna, some insurance companies now refuse to insure new homes that are being built too close to fire zones. Even wealthy Vancouver, surrounded by Stanley Park and Grouse Mountain, is susceptible to wildfire. Then there are Indigenous communities whose people have lived in their territory for thousands of years. Having had their homes stolen at least twice—once by the Canadian government, and then by fire exacerbated by that government’s policies—they remain defiantly rooted. 

During their evacuation, Marshall Potts and Jo-Anne Beharrell were allowed to come back every other day to check on their property and the animals they had to leave behind. These so-called wellness checks were encouraging on one hand—firefighters fed their cats, their house was still standing—but also, increasingly, depressing. Though their house survived, their furniture and mattresses and clothes were all black with soot. A sprinkler had shot up under their roof, and water had poured in through the ceiling, wrecking the insulation. All their fencing was destroyed, so other ranchers’ cattle had wandered onto their land, devouring their grass. They had lost one of their cats. And, of course, all the beauty—one of the reasons that they had moved to the area to begin with—was transformed. Half of the trees on their property were gone, and the view from their living room would now be one of stump-strewn grass instead of woodland. Other ranchers, they heard, had to put down several dozen cows, some of which were burning alive, others half-dead from smoke inhalation. One day, down by the creek where they had enjoyed that picnic lunch the day the fire started, they found the rotting corpse of a cow. One of the cow’s calves had made it up to their property, terrified, and when Potts tried to rope it, it ran off and disappeared.

Ten months later, when I visited the couple in their living room, they seemed tired and demoralized. They were fighting with the insurance company, which had misplaced their claim for several months. It was difficult to get tradespeople and materials up for repairs. A friend was installing drywall—so much for the wood walls they planned to build themselves. “I kind of wish it had all burned down,” Beharrell said. “Because the cleanup and the fix-up is harder than a rebuild.”

Because of the lack of green trees, it’s highly unlikely that their particular corner of the world will burn again. Or at least not for a few decades, anyway. The couple will, with time, adjust to the new landscape and eventually get new cattle that will have new land to graze on. They will keep rebuilding, and add a new recording studio. They’re even considering hosting a music festival on their property. “This was a bit of an ego punch,” Potts said of the fire. “But you want to find something good in the problem, in the chaos.”

During their evacuation and the months after, Potts recorded an album titled The Storm. It was inspired, naturally, by the cataclysm of the previous summer. But Potts, a surprising and resolute optimist, didn’t want to dwell on the misery in his lyrics. “When the wind comes it brings change,” he sings on the title track. “And only truth alone remains. ’Cause it reveals your pain, that’s why the storm came.” He realized that he had taken the beauty for granted for so long, had always assumed that it, and the land, and his home, would be here forever, unchanged.

This article appears in print in the August 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here, or buy the issue online here. Click here to subscribe to our e-mail newsletter to receive the best of Maclean’s directly in your inbox. 

The post The Age of Wildfires appeared first on Macleans.ca.

When Angela MacDonald self-published Juliette & John: The Perfect Recipe in 2014, she marketed the cookbook as a delightful slice of culturally diverse Cape Breton. Angela was inspired by the culinary traditions of her Lebanese and Italian grandparents (the titular Juliette and John) as well as her Irish husband, weaving her recipes into an eclectic collection that includes both tabbouleh and Cape Breton Irish chowder.

In her author photo, Angela has olive skin and long dark hair, and wears a fitted long-sleeve black shirt and large pearl earrings. She has the perky confidence of someone who was popular in high school. The book, she says in the forward, is meant to demystify gourmet cooking. “If you take the recipe and break it down into parts, you will see that the foundations of even the most intricate meals are based on just a few elements,” she writes. “My sisters and I call these the Elements of Cooking.” Angela reassures readers that anyone can whip up a béchamel sauce or blend a pistachio pesto until it has “a damp sandy texture.” Her recipe for fresh shrimp and spinach ravioli with brown-butter sage isn’t exactly daunting; the first step involves plating store-bought ravioli. 

Angela was a member of the Saker family, who were well-known in Cape Breton for the Spaghetti Benders, the restaurant the three daughters—Angela and her sisters, Nadia Saker and Georgette Young—ran near Bras d’Or Lake, in a quiet, forested section of the Trans-Canada Highway about 30 minutes northwest of Sydney. The restaurant closed in 2010, and the sisters later opened an ambitious food boutique on the same site, stocking a range of their own products, including salad dressings, pesto and preserves. They offered cooking classes and catered events and proudly displayed Angela’s cookbook.

The Saker sisters seemed to be the model of rural ingenuity. In this small, economically depressed island at the far eastern edge of the country, they had identified a need for diverse food and dining options and then rolled up their sleeves to make it happen. In the introduction to her cookbook, Angela notes that running Spaghetti Benders with her sisters served as a crash course for the many companies they later started. “We created a wonderful clientele, met many interesting travellers and learned a lot about life, ourselves and the concepts of business and entrepreneurship,” she writes.

And so it might have been particularly heartwarming for an agent with the Canada Revenue Agency, when reviewing the Sakers’ tax returns in 2015, to observe that Angela’s company, which sold salad dressings and her cookbook, had done a whopping $1.5 million in sales in a single month. Perhaps even more inspiring, the sisters were moving whole pallets of their salad dressings and sauces; their catering company was booming, yielding millions in sales. The Sakers had opened several more businesses, closing gaps in the Cape Breton market for things like artisan wigs and children’s fur coats.

The sisters seemed to be setting themselves up for generational prosperity, trying to fashion a mini-empire

But the most impressive feat of all? Their restaurant, the Spaghetti Benders, reported over $400,000 in sales—in the three years after the sisters shut it down. 

***

Angela’s cookbook is full of memories that portray a warm, close-knit family. The girls started cooking when they were kids, and by age 10 Angela was making pizzas and roasting chickens. When the sisters were young adults, their friends would often crash at their parents’ house after a night of drinking and dancing. The Sakers’ mother, Lydia, would gather up the girls’ smoky clothing and wash it, then cook a duck with potatoes for dinner. On Christmas and Easter, their father would roast a leg of lamb and serve it with Lebanese flatbreads.

The Ballerina Birthday Cake recipe is accompanied by a 40-year-old picture of the Saker women: Lydia, her dark hair short and her smile muted, has all three girls bundled in an embrace. “Our mother always made our birthday cakes at home,” writes Angela. “A fluffy white cake recipe, pink icing and the same ballerina birthday candles. After years and years of the same cake, we eventually burned the arms off the ballerina in protest, and I believe we got a store-bought cake after that.”

The sisters—Georgette the eldest, Angela, the middle daughter, and Nadia, the baby, all two or three years apart—were popular in school, but not everyone liked them. One former classmate at Memorial High School in Sydney Mines, whom I’ll call Melissa to protect her privacy, sent me several DMs on Facebook where she described the sisters as snobby and said she’d heard that their mother made them learn how to walk and sit properly, “like a lady.” “They were in a very different class than the rest of us,” she says.

The Saker sisters had plenty of ambition. In the mid-’90s, they decided to capitalize on their love of the culinary arts and open Spaghetti Benders. (“Spaghetti bender” is a derogatory term for an Italian person.) The restaurant served classic Italian recipes with the occasional Lebanese dish. The Sakers did it all: cooking, baking, waiting tables, managing the books and paying the bills. One Twitter user reminisced about the “amazing” white lasagna he was served at Spaghetti Benders, even though his “well-travelled aunt labelled it horrible.”

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In the coming years, Angela got married and had a daughter. Her family lived in a large and handsome beige-shingled home in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. Georgette married and had a son, settling in North Sydney in a white house with a gable roof and well-worn chairs on the sprawling front porch. Nadia lives close by, on a country road just south of North Sydney.

In 2013, three years after closing the restaurant, the sisters announced their intentions to convert it into a boutique and event space, where they could expand their entrepreneurship in several directions. They opened a catering business under the name Housewives in Heels and decided to use the on-site kitchen for cooking classes. They planned to design jewellery and accessories and to introduce a kids’ clothing line called Maddie & Bella, which would offer pricey fur coats. They
reserved part of their large space to display local artisan wares, such as driftwood lamps and homemade soaps. Georgette told a local newspaper that she and her sisters were combining all of their business interests to create something “like meatballs and a side order of earrings.” Even Lydia Saker, their mother, got involved in this entrepreneurial bonanza; she started up a company that sold hairpieces.

They were also cementing their role in the community, registering a charity called Cooking with the Saker Sisters Society, also known as Lemon 77, which they described as having a focus on education and healthy eating. In January of 2013, Georgette and Nadia judged a playful beauty pageant to raise funds for a long-term care facility. The Saker sisters seemed to be setting themselves up for generational prosperity, combining business acumen with social responsibility. They were trying to fashion a mini empire, all at once. 

I tried to reach the Sakers numerous times, with no response. But according to court documents, all was not well behind the scenes. Around the time the Sakers announced their new ventures, the Royal Gazette—Nova Scotia’s official weekly government record of legal notices—included the Spaghetti Benders on a list of businesses that had defaulted on payment of their annual registration fee. I spoke to a woman I’ll call Meghan, a single mother who lived in the Spaghetti Benders building when it was briefly converted to rentals. She told me Georgette stiffed her on a deposit and she had to take her to court to get her money back. In messages exchanged between the two, Meghan refers to the fact that she repeatedly paid her rent early every month because Georgette kept telling her how broke she was. “I got the sense that she would lie for a dollar,” says Meghan.

***

In 2015, Carol Power was working as an auditor with the CRA in the tax services office in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Her job was to ensure companies were complying with tax laws, reviewing their records to make sure they had properly reported the taxes collected from sales and input tax credits, or ITCs, spent on expenses. When businesses in Canada file their tax returns, they note how much sales tax they’ve collected from customers; this amount is balanced against credits for taxes paid out in the course of operations. If the amount paid out is larger than the amount collected, businesses are entitled to a refund. The refundable amount is an ITC. These returns are typically filed electronically, and businesses are not asked to submit supporting documentation at that time.

In April of 2015, Power’s team leader referred a file to her for audit: Housewives in Heels. Power reached out to Nadia, who was listed as the company director, to ask about the company books and records; Nadia told her they had been destroyed in a flood. Power advised her to go back to customers and suppliers for duplicate invoices that clearly outlined the business’s sales and purchases. She asked about the vehicle Nadia used for the business and whether she kept a log to distinguish between personal and professional use. Nadia seemed hesitant to answer.

Soon, Power’s purview expanded to include nine additional businesses related to Housewives in Heels, including New & Chic, Inc., a marketing and design company; Artisan Hair Loss Therapy; Kishk Inc., which made kishk (a traditional Lebanese food) and dressings; Latatia Advertising, Inc.; Maddie & Bella’s Children’s Clothing; Juliette & John Inc.; the Spaghetti Benders, Ltd.; and two numbered companies. Nadia, Georgette, Angela and their mother, Lydia, were each listed as principals for one or more companies. Collectively, on tax returns filed between 2011 and 2015, the Saker companies claimed $5,579,806.30 in ITCs and reported $2,572,419.90 in HST collected through sales of their products and services—suggesting they were owed a refund in excess of $3 million. Before the audit was triggered, the Sakers and their businesses had collected $239,069.34 in GST/HST refunds from the government via previous tax returns.

The CRA has increasingly become concerned about abusive GST/HST filings that fabricate businesses with the sole purpose of extracting unlawful refunds from the government. Etienne Biram, a representative from the CRA, declined to comment on the Saker case. He did, however, note that the federal government has made significant investments since 2015 to strengthen the CRA’s ability to crack down on complex tax schemes, and that the 2021 budget allocated additional funding to hire auditors and data scientists, and to modernize the CRA’s risk assessment systems to better detect GST/HST fraud. “Each year, the CRA effectively reduces the amount paid out by over $1.7 billion through examinations and audits, preventing the payout of unwarranted and fraudulent GST/HST refunds,” says Biram. “It is anticipated that the amount of recoveries and the average audit yield will increase over the next five years.”

By July of 2015, Power still hadn’t heard back about the requested invoices, so she nudged both Nadia and Georgette. Within days, several boxes arrived at the St. John’s office. Most of the documents were handwritten and separated into Ziploc bags. As Power examined the materials, she noticed two things: their sales were very high, and they had a collection of related companies that appeared to be buying and selling goods to each other. 

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She noted something else, too. While Angela, Nadia and Lydia were associated with one or two of the businesses, Georgette acted as bookkeeper for all the companies under audit. When questioned, Georgette presented herself as the family caretaker—she was helping her mother with Artisan Hair Loss Therapy, and she helped Nadia’s and Angela’s businesses with invoicing. When Power asked about banking records, Georgette indicated that most of the transactions were done in cash. Power asked how it was possible that hundreds of thousands of dollars were going back and forth in cash. “I keep it in my house,” Georgette said.

By September, the scope of Power’s inquiry had expanded considerably. She was on the cusp of retirement and working part time, and the audit of the Saker family businesses was eating up most of her hours. Communication with the Sakers was, at times, frustrating. As Power pressed Georgette on audit questions, Georgette consistently asked to amend the returns, as if she could turn back the clock and make the investigation go away. Power decided a field visit was necessary so she could observe the Saker sisters’ operations firsthand.

***

In October of 2015, Power travelled to Cape Breton, where she met the Saker sisters at the old Spaghetti Benders location and interviewed them about their businesses. She asked about major customers, vehicle purchases, product storage, inter-company sales and bottling facilities. When she requested purchase invoices, the Sakers told her their goods were from Chinese suppliers and customs didn’t provide any import documentation. When she asked for sales invoices supporting a $270,000 sale of wigs and hairpieces, Power received invoices for seafood lasagna. Georgette offered invoices for the sale of meatballs, but when Power asked if she had a permit for the sale of meat, Georgette indicated they were “meatless meatballs.” Some of the invoices appeared to have White-Out on certain lines. When Power met with Lydia to discuss Artisan Hair Loss Therapy, Lydia appeared to be reading off of prepared notes. Power asked about one $10,000 invoice for wigs, and Lydia suggested it might be human hair from Italy, which was expensive.

By this point, Power harboured doubts that the former Spaghetti Benders served as headquarters for a multi-million-dollar conglomerate. Inside the small, single-storey building was a stand-up deep freeze and a couple of tables with articles of clothing for sale, including three children’s fur coats, priced at $1,000 a piece; Georgette explained they came from China, and she didn’t have any invoices. Power asked where the rest of the equipment was, and was told much of it had been hauled to the dump.

“In general, there was a lot of laughing between the sisters,” Power wrote in her notes. “I directed my questions to Angela MacDonald; however, she always laughed when I asked a question, looked to Georgette before she answered or said she did not know; I would have to ask Georgette. She said Georgette took care of things.”

In the report she filed upon her return, Power recommended denying all unsupported or questionable ITCs requested by the Sakers. From her perspective, the scheme was becoming clear: the GST returns filed by the Sakers claimed they were entitled to refunds on the basis that their ITCs exceeded their tax liability—in other words, they were paying out more GST to suppliers than they were taking in, and they were asking the government for a correction. 

In order to inflate their ITCs, the Sakers created a number of companies that existed almost exclusively on paper. Through these companies, they became their own suppliers, sellers and purchasers, and they tinkered with the GST collected versus GST paid to maximize their potential government refund. The Sakers invented a huge volume of sales and purchases to justify their claims—in one case, New & Chic provided design consulting to Kishk for $500,000. They mixed in personal expenses, created invoices in the name of customers and small businesses that didn’t really exist and implicated real local businesses, many of which had never even heard of the Sakers and their many companies. In reality, there were no fur coats for the children of Cape Breton.

Whatever small amount of legitimate business the Sakers were doing was dwarfed by the fraud, and the scheme could only work if the sisters worked in concert; Georgette appeared to be the ringleader. Power suggested referring the Saker case to the CRA Criminal Investigation Directorate, or CID, which pursues suspected cases of significant tax evasion. Michael Boudreau, lead investigator for the CID, obtained search warrants for properties belonging to Nadia, Angela and Georgette.

On the morning of November 22, 2017, Angela arrived at her home in Kentville, Nova Scotia, to find CRA investigators in dark clothing milling around her yard. A woman named Jennifer Jones, who works for the CRA, introduced herself to Angela and explained why the searchers were there. Angela told them they weren’t going to find anything. The neighbours were watching and she was embarrassed. 

In Angela’s telling, as laid out in court documents, the CRA team pushed their way into her home and stomped around her house; they asked her about firearms and computer passwords and at one point they shoved her, causing her to fall. She says Constable Kevin Lutz, a police officer who accompanied the investigators, put his hand on his gun and told her if she didn’t behave, he would return with the media. (Lutz denied these allegations, saying if Angela had tripped, his first instinct would have been to help her up.) The team looked through Angela’s husband’s car and the couple’s young daughter’s closet; they removed light bulbs and light switch plates. When Angela asked permission to go to the bathroom, she says the investigators made her keep the door open. She later described the search as “very abusive.” 

Georgette says she was paying bills in her kitchen when the CRA investigators arrived at her home. They showed her a business card that she thought looked funny, and she “felt she was being conned.” She says she tried to push the door closed, but three investigators pushed back. Georgette claims they put so much pressure on the door that it caused her to urinate. Her husband was dispatched to get the mop and bucket. Once the investigators were inside, Georgette told them they could find her receipts in the laundry room. She says they deployed stethoscopes to listen to her walls, combed through her flour and sugar jars and followed her to her bedroom and bathroom. CRA investigator Mike Lemmon would later testify that the search was normal other than Georgette “peeing herself.”

During the trial, Georgette told one witness she looked nice and then said she had no further questions 

Nadia, who was drinking coffee in her kitchen when the action started, first called one of her sisters and then tried to contact a lawyer. She says the CRA investigators did not show her any identification. In the house, they flipped her mattress, unzipped her couch cushions and intimidated her.

Lydia Saker, their mother, who was shuttling between two of the locations, says she also saw police with hands on guns during the search. She said she was approached by investigators in dark jackets who came at her “like terrorists.” On the verge of a panic attack, she had to go out to her car to calm down.

In reality, the search was standard procedure. The CRA investigators were looking for books, records, documentation, and electronic hardware and storage devices. They subsequently spent nearly three years combing through the Saker family bank records, sales receipts and invoices and searching for T4 slips, trying to track the Sakers’ behaviour and establish their patterns. Boudreau learned that many of the businesses had been operating largely without bank accounts, and most appeared to have no employees, supplier contracts or even production expenses. When CRA investigators asked the Sakers to provide supporting documentation to prove they were entitled to the refund amounts they claimed, the Sakers produced a huge volume of vendor invoices and sales receipts.

In all, the seized documentation suggested in excess of $80 million in sales invoices; $55.7 million (before HST) were sales between the companies controlled by the four women. The Sakers claimed that a grocery store in North Sydney had purchased $1 million worth of Artisan Hair Loss Therapy’s wigs. There were 68 Housewives in Heels catering invoices, each in the amount of $50,000 for events of 500 people, for total sales of $3.4 million in just three months. Boudreau realized the sisters were suggesting they had fed 34,000 people in that period—which is just about the population of Sydney. One of the many vendors listed by the Sakers was Vandalee Industries, a name nearly identical to that of George Costanza’s fake employer on Seinfeld. It was almost like the Sakers were having a good time.

One morning in the fall of 2018, Ron Marks was at Italian Market, a specialty store and restaurant he owns in the north end of Halifax. Two government agents walked in, flashed their badges and said they’d be back to interview him. On the arranged day, the agents sat a nervous Marks down next to a tape recorder and asked him about a series of transactions. Did he sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of olive oils and Parmesan cheese to the Sakers? Did he buy 200 cases (or $578,750 worth) of Angela’s cookbook? Marks, despite the apparent gravity of the situation, found himself suppressing a chuckle. “It’s just so unrealistic that this amount of product would ever be sold on the East Coast,” he says. “It would barely be sold in Toronto or Montreal retail markets.” When the police showed him some of the invoices they were referencing—all related to the Saker family businesses—Marks noted that one was for $300,000 worth of “high-end” balsamic. “That’s not the way balsamic is sold,” he says. “We call it a 12-year or five-year balsamic blend. To think that anyone would believe this . . . They really aren’t great thieves.” 

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By 2019, Georgette was trying to maintain a business she had been running out of her home for years, offering cooking classes for kids. On January 31, 2019, she posted a message to her Facebook followers that classes were still on: “The cost for feb is $60 and don’t believe one word!!!!!!”

The next day, the Sakers were collectively charged—along with their 10 companies—with a total of 60 counts under the Criminal Code of Canada and the Excise Tax Act related to defrauding the government, making false statements and obtaining or attempting to obtain refunds they were not entitled to. The offences were alleged to have taken place over a four-and-a-half-year period, from January 1, 2011, to July 31, 2015, ending at about the time that Carol Power started poking around.

The fraud case was heard in the Sydney courthouse in June and July of 2021, and the Sakers chose to represent themselves. Uniformly dressed like it was casual Friday, they called no witnesses and offered no evidence. When the president of a Cape Breton distillery testified that the invoices produced by the Saker sisters were fraudulent, Georgette told him she was a big fan of his whiskey. When Marks got on the stand, she said she enjoyed shopping in his store. She told another witness she looked nice and then said she had no further questions. 

The Saker family’s position was that not only were they upstanding community members and principled entrepreneurs, but they were also the victims of a vast CRA conspiracy. Georgette said Carol Power and Michael Boudreau lacked credibility and worked together to “make up this fictional event that never happened” and that there is “no proof, just a story.” She also noted that the GST returns cashed by the Saker family could have been filed by anyone who stole their CRA Netfile access codes out of their mailboxes. In her closing argument, Georgette reiterated that she and her family did not knowingly participate in a scheme to defraud the government of millions of dollars. “We are people with integrity and pride,” she told the court. “Housewives who make cupcakes. Certainly not gangsters or fraudsters.”

In the end, the Sakers’ stab at a charm-offensive-meets-­conspiracy-theory proved no match for the Crown’s case. The women—and the companies—were found guilty of all charges on February 24, 2022. Each of the women was found culpable of 10 counts of fraud. In laying out her judgment, Justice Robin Gogan wrote: “The magnitude of the fiction in this case is breathtaking. The hubris of it is shocking.” And it wasn’t just the crime, she noted, but the cover-up. When the CRA began its audit, she said the defendants doubled down by creating additional fictitious invoices and amending claims to hide their original deception. “The vulnerability of our tax system was exposed,” she wrote.

The temptation to buy into the pure ham of the proceedings proved irresistible, even for the judge. In her ruling, she said it was clear there were, in fact, no cupcakes being made by the Saker sisters and their mother. “What was being baked here was a scam of epic portions, made with equal measure of deceit, arrogance, gall and massively misguided creativity,” she wrote. “It is my hope that the Canadian public will never be subjected to this kind of recipe ever again.”

Immediately following the judgment, the Sakers announced their intention to appeal, but the 30-day period elapsed with no such filing. They’re expected to be sentenced in June, and the government has recommended federal prison sentences for each of them: two to three years for Nadia, Angela and Lydia; three to four-and-a-half years for Georgette. “Georgette Young was the ringleader of this scheme and was the driving force behind its continuation in the face of the CRA audit,” wrote Crown counsels Mark Donohue and Constantin Draghici-Vasilescu. The CRA has yet to recover any of the refunds paid out to the Sakers. 

The Sakers’ crimes were ludicrous, but they were also a massive breach of public trust. Ron Marks, owner of Halifax’s Italian Market, is only half-laughing at their escapades. “The story is absurd,” he says. “But the part that bothers me is that once the government has your name, you’re on their little list,” says Marks. “I worry this might affect me down the road, with my taxes or whatever. It’s very unfair these people put us in this situation.”

Meanwhile, the remnants of their empire have dissolved. The old Spaghetti Benders location is now part of a Travels Inn motel, which has the modest ambitions of offering reasonable weekly rates and free Wi-Fi.

This article appears in print in the July 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here, or buy the issue online here. 

The post How three sisters (and their mom) tried to swindle the CRA out of millions appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In early 2019, John Davies and his wife, Li Guo, bought a house in Kleinburg, Ontario—a new build with enough space that they invited Guo’s parents to come live with them. That left the Guo family home in nearby Thornhill empty. Guo’s parents had owned the brick-front house on Brookshire Circle for almost a decade, so rather than selling it, Davies, a 70-year-old University of Toronto professor, and Guo, a homemaker, decided to help the couple rent it out. They hired a real estate broker, who by summer thought he’d found the ideal tenant. 

Arif Adnan Syed depicted himself as an ordinary family man. It was easy to picture him, his wife and their two young children sharing dinners in the house’s spacious dining room, watching Disney movies in the family room or playing in the tree-shaded backyard. At 2,750 square feet, the house had four bedrooms—enough for the parents, both children and a room left over for in-laws, who Syed suggested would be moving in. It was close to several schools and a swath of walkable green space. 

Davies had never met Syed or the family he talked about, but saw no reason to doubt his broker’s assessment of them. On June 13, 2019, Davies and his wife signed a one-year, $3,300-per-month lease with Syed. They expected him and his family to move into the house that July.

Davies didn’t hear from Syed that summer, but he was too busy to notice. He and Guo were settling into their new house with his in-laws, and—he thought—Syed and his family were settling into theirs. It was November before Davies realized he hadn’t spoken to his new tenant. Syed had promised to collect any mail that slipped through to the Guos’ old address. Surely, Davies thought, there would be some by this point. So he phoned Syed. And phoned. With no answer, he eventually decided to go knock on the door. He was startled when a woman he didn’t recognize answered. She let him in, pointing to a mountain of mail on the kitchen table. Davies picked it up, shuffled through the envelopes and quickly realized none of them were addressed to his in-laws. 

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Then, with a slow-moving sense of horror, he noticed the striped brown-and-beige curtain separating the hallway from the living room. A few more steps took him to another drab curtain cordoning off the dining room. Davies’ emotions oscillated between shock, anger and confusion as he toured the rest of the once-pristine house. Syed had transformed at least 11 rooms into makeshift individual units. One couple lived in what had once been the house’s office; another occupied the dining room. There was a man inhabiting the family room. Several rooms had entire families with children living in them, their doors secured by newly installed, double-sided locks.

In the basement, Davies found pillows and blankets stuffed against the wall of a small storage space. There was similar evidence that somebody had been sleeping in the narrow furnace room. The main-floor living room had been outfitted as a hair salon, complete with a leather-and-chrome barber chair where, to Davies’ astonishment, a man sat getting a haircut. Blooms of black mould spread across the ceilings in the basement, damage from an unrepaired kitchen sink leak. 

Mind whirling, he phoned Syed again, as a group of tenants—some of them surprised to discover Syed was not the owner of the house—hovered nearby, listening in. This time, Syed answered. 

Davies angrily confronted his tenant, demanding to know what was going on. He threatened eviction. Yet, through it all, Syed seemed remarkably calm. There was no denial, no anxious backpedalling, not so much as a hurried excuse. In fact, he seemed downright arrogant. He responded to Davies with an unapologetic invitation, repeated over and over: “Take me to court. I’ll see you in court.” 

Davies agreed to the showdown, expecting a quick and clear-cut path to an eviction order. He didn’t yet realize Syed had good reason to believe himself untouchable. “He knew what he was doing, and I didn’t,” says Davies. “I’d never experienced anything like this before and he was an expert. He knew every conceivable loophole.” 

Davies wasn’t Syed’s only victim. Over the next few months, he’d learn his tenant had charmed and swindled at least a dozen landlords across the Greater Toronto Area. Most, like Davies, had used real estate brokers to find people to lease their luxury homes. Syed declined to be interviewed for this story, but he appeared during this period to focus his efforts on the toniest neighbourhoods of Richmond Hill, Thornhill and Markham, divvying up the rooms in each house into individual units and posting them for rent on Kijiji at a supposed bargain—anywhere from $500 to $975 a month. Under the name “Jay” he’d lured desperate, vulnerable renters with promises of no last-month’s rent deposit and no credit checks. 

At the height of his operation, he had more than 100 tenants, and was raking in tens of thousands of dollars every month. For Syed, everything was going to plan. For Davies, the nightmare was only beginning.

***

It is mind-bogglingly expensive to live in Canada’s big cities. In April, Vancouver ranked as the country’s priciest place to rent a one-bedroom apartment at an average of $2,280 per month. Toronto was not far behind, at $2,023. Students, new Canadians, older and racialized renters, people on disability support and those simply down on their luck struggle to find affordable housing. That’s where rooming houses, or multi-tenant homes as they’re officially dubbed, come in. In such houses, the average rent is often more attainable; the monthly range in Toronto, for instance, is between $400 and $700. Across Canada, some jurisdictions have made multi-tenant homes a part of their affordable housing plans. In the Greater Toronto Area, however, things are more complicated. 

Certain areas, like Toronto and Etobicoke, license and regulate multi-tenant homes. Toronto is estimated to have about 350 legal rooming houses operating within its limits (along with an unknown multitude of illegal ones). The landlords of these licensed buildings are required to meet fire, property and safety standards and submit to regular inspections. In other areas, including Scarborough and North York, such homes are both illegal and unregulated. They do, of course, still exist, but without mandated measures to keep tenants safe. 

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The consequences of this regulatory gap can be devastating. In Toronto, there were 14 fire-related deaths in unlicensed rooming houses between 2010 and 2020. In 2018, 18-year-old University of Toronto student Helen Guo (no relation to Davies’ wife, Li) died in an early-morning fire at her Scarborough rooming house. Three other students who lived there managed to escape, one by jumping out of a second-storey window. In Moncton, New Brunswick, about 20 people in one rooming house were recently evicted after the city’s fire department declared the building uninhabitable. Fire officials estimate Moncton’s downtown has several hundred unregistered rooming houses; dozens have been deemed unsafe and shut down over the past decade.

Most tenants are aware when their living conditions are dangerous, but are reluctant to demand better because of their precarious positions. Dania Majid, a staff lawyer at the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, is trying to change this. “There are people who will try to take a predatory approach, trying to capitalize on the high rent and the desperation for low-income housing,” she says.  

Majid’s organization is part of a decade-long push to standardize multi-tenant housing across the boroughs of Toronto. After punting the issue a couple of times, city council is expected to vote this year on a proposal to legalize and regulate rooming houses throughout the city. If it passes without change, it will limit the number of rooms in multi-tenant houses to six in most neighbourhoods, and up to 25 in more densely populated areas. Crucially, homes with more than 10 rooms will require an electrical evaluation. To ensure landlords follow the new rules, the city also plans to beef up its enforcement and inspection staff.

At the height of his operation, Syed had more than 100 tenants and was raking in tens of thousands of dollars every month

In the meantime, scammers and slum lords proliferate, taking advantage of cracks in the system. Some, like Syed, are extreme opportunists, duping both homeowners and tenants. Others own their own properties, yet seem to care little about what happens at the houses so long as they bring in rent. Even a cramped, dirty or unsafe room might appeal to someone with limited options. It’s better than a shelter, or the street. 

***

If Syed thought he could run a grift in plain sight, it was because he’d done it so many times in the past. In 2010, he faced one of his first arrests in Project Overhaul, a Toronto police investigation into a ring of fraudulent moving companies, all connected to Syed and members of his family. Police alleged Syed’s stepfather, Syed Altaf Hussain, had trained Arif and his brother, Syed Amit Monwar Hussain, to set up a numbered company and develop several moving businesses under different names. They would advertise each with too-good-to-be-true rates. Then, once a customer’s possessions were loaded into their truck, they would hold the belongings hostage until the victim agreed to pay a jacked-up price. If a customer looked too intimidating to swindle, the team would simply get its moving deposit up front, then jump into their truck and drive away without loading anything. 

Syed registered his numbered company in 2006, and over the years the brothers formed 19 bogus moving businesses—13 of which belonged to Syed, the stepfather’s apparent protege. 

By June 2008, the Better Business Bureau had received nearly 30 complaints about several of Syed’s corporate aliases. One customer, who spoke to the Toronto Star, hired Syed’s Scarborough-based company Dynamic Movers, who quoted him less than $500 to move his stuff from an old apartment to a new one about 200 metres away. The movers showed up in a truck branded with the name of another of Syed’s businesses, Desi Movers, and, after loading everything, charged $1,497.50 in fees for having to move heavy items and use stairs. If the client didn’t pay, they said, they’d throw his stuff in storage. 

The man called the police, but the officer who arrived decided not to intervene because of a small-print warning in the moving contract stating extra charges may apply—a loophole that helped Syed operate for years without criminal sanction. If scammed customers wanted to pursue him, they’d likely have to go to civil court. Meanwhile, the movers added more fees to the bill to cover their time spent talking to the police. The customer coughed up the money: “All of my worldly possessions were on their truck, right down to my toothbrush. I felt I was being ransomed just to get it all back.” 

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After receiving 17 complaints, police finally issued a public warning about two of the Syed family’s business aliases, Desi Movers and Indo-Pak Movers, in November of 2009. Syed seemed unfazed: “The main problem isn’t me; it’s the public,” he told the Star at the time. “People are so cheap. If I change my name today and put $2 less on the hourly rate, they will still come to me.” 

Sure enough, by May of 2010, the police had received another 15 complaints. That month, they raided the Scarborough building from which the family ran its scam. They seized 13 moving trucks, $20,000 in cash and two cars, an Audi and a Mercedes-Benz. Syed initially faced 50 charges, including 11 counts of fraud under $5,000 and nine counts of extortion. He was just 27. His mug shot shows a square-faced man with his head slightly cocked and green shirt collar popped, staring at the camera with an expression of indifference.  

In the fallout, Ontario’s attorney general moved under civil forfeiture laws to seize Syed’s cars, his moving trucks, his bank accounts and the five-bedroom Markham home he shared with his wife, Sanjida, and their two sons, aged four and two. His brush with the law didn’t seem to scare him. He continued his moving-business scam through a corporate entity registered to Sanjida—until they were caught and she also had her assets frozen. In 2012 they unsuccessfully petitioned the court to free up some of the family’s money for debts and living expenses. 

They claimed to owe creditors more than $100,000 and said the mortgage on their 4,200-square-foot home had just matured. Syed said his main income came from an auto repair shop and car sales business, which he claimed brought in as much as $2,000 per month in the winter and $3,000 per month in the summer. He and Sanjida said they had been buying and flipping used cars, selling them overseas or stripping them for parts. But mostly they lived on tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt, they said, something they’d been doing for years. 

It was around this time that Syed embarked on his first scam as an illegal, unlicensed car dealer, otherwise known as a curbsider. He would buy used cars on the cheap, roll back the odometers to make the clunkers more attractive to buyers, and then sell them for more than he paid. In 2015, the Ontario Motor Vehicle Industry Council, or OMVIC, convicted him of curbsiding and fined him $5,000. Two of his companies were also found guilty and fined a total of $25,000. 

In late 2018, Syed was caught running another alleged curbsiding operation and slapped by OMVIC with an additional 34 charges. The investigation in that case continues, but it was by no means the last into Syed’s auto sales hustles. Weeks after filing the charges, the council got yet another tip—this time from a customer who’d responded to an ad for a 2010 Toyota Camry, whose odometer had been rolled back from 217,000 kilometres to 155,000. OMVIC dispatched an undercover shopper to check out vehicles Syed had stored for sale behind an apartment complex in Scarborough. There, he told the shopper he had five more cars parked behind another apartment building. OMVIC released its own public warning about Syed, and handed down still more charges. 

***

Through all of this, Syed was operating his most lucrative scam of all: the rooming houses. A fudged name here, a few fake documents there, police say, and he could evade anyone who checked up on him online. As usual, he was anything but contrite. Syed later told media he didn’t feel remorse because he never intended to damage his landlords’ houses (never mind that his lease stated the houses would remain single-family dwellings). Sure, he wanted to make money, he said, but he also wanted to help people; his tenants were like his family. He insisted he was housing those in need. “To get a place is so difficult,” he later told the Toronto Star. “They need a credit check, a job.” When asked if he saw himself as a Robin Hood figure, he shucked off the comparison. “I wouldn’t think of myself as that. I don’t want to give myself a character. I am who I am.”

He did have one thing in common with Robin Hood: he was exceedingly hard to stop. Larry Swanton, who lived on a normally quiet street in Unionville, northeast of Toronto, learned that the hard way. He had moved to his affluent neighbourhood in 1984, enjoying three decades of placid suburban life. Then, in October of 2018, Syed signed a lease for the house across the street. It didn’t take long for Swanton to realize something was wrong with his new neighbour. On a warm night early that month, Swanton and his wife, Christina, were sleeping with the windows open. Around 2 a.m., he heard an engine revving. He looked outside to see the driver of a red Corvette, who he later learned was Syed, exchange a wad of cash with another man. 

Less than a week later, he saw a white cube van pull up to the house, and watched someone unload one mattress after another, lugging them into the home. It seemed like new people were moving in every day. At the same time, cars clogged the driveway, spilling onto the street. Swanton quickly realized many of them didn’t belong to the house’s growing tenant population. Syed was selling them, or trying to. His preferred model seemed to be the Honda Civic, and Swanton, a car enthusiast, thought they all looked like junkers. Plus, he saw none that had legitimate dealer plates. He immediately reported Syed as a curbsider to OMVIC, who in turn opened an investigation. But Syed couldn’t be spooked.

Swanton, a pilot, was on seasonal hiatus from work at the time. So over the next several months, he turned monitoring and reporting Syed into a full-time job. He also rallied his distressed neighbours, about 20 of whom started an email chain to keep tabs on Syed and his many tenants. They had a lot to complain about. Syed’s curbsider business was bustling, with both cars and potential buyers filling the street. And the new tenants of his rooming house were loud. Night after night, the Swantons woke to startling noises: angry shouting, revving engines, blasting music. Cars idled for hours in the driveway.

In Unionville, as in other places Syed ran his rooming houses, the scene devolved from nuisance into public safety hazard. While many of Syed’s tenants were peaceful, others were violent. Some abused alcohol and drugs, and a few appeared to have untreated mental illness. It made for a tense, chaotic atmosphere that spilled into the surrounding neighbourhood. More than once, Swanton witnessed clandestine exchanges of what he suspected was money for drugs. Sometimes, he walked by the house and saw condoms, foil wrappers and other paraphernalia littering the driveway and grass.

Swanton snapped photos of it all, gathering evidence. A few times, Syed caught him and confronted him. During one fraught exchange, Syed told him he couldn’t do a thing to stop him—he had been operating like this for years. Swanton scoffed at the challenge, telling Syed they’d both find out soon enough. “But I had to eat my words,” he acknowledges, “because nobody could do anything.”

By Swanton’s count, police visited the house nearly 50 times in less than three months, responding mostly to complaints from upset neighbours. Yet Syed’s scams continued to flourish. He always seemed to know just what to say, just how far to cross the line. Ubers showed up constantly with people looking to rent rooms. More and more tenants filed in. Swanton, meanwhile, wasn’t ready to give up. He kept calling OMVIC to report curbsiding, and the city to report the illegal rooming house. He took hundreds of photos. The due diligence felt necessary, if ineffective. Swanton and his neighbours didn’t just want Syed punished; they wanted him out. 

Then they caught a break. Swanton knew Syed’s rooming house was owned by a man living in China at the time. So he set out to track down the owner, gathering the names of local real estate agencies and calling them one by one until he found the broker who had rented to Syed. It turned out the homeowner’s son-in-law lived nearby. Swanton reached out and told him everything. The son-in-law came by and, shocked by what he saw, promised to start the eviction process. Swanton, meanwhile, gathered enough information to determine Syed’s real name and googled him, finding out about his past curbsiding convictions. He grew so angry that he took to warning potential customers away from Syed. The instant a family arrived to look at a car, a watchful Swanton ran out his front door to tell them Syed had rolled back the odometer. If he thwarted a sale, Syed grew furious. When Swanton wasn’t around, though, he kept selling. 

In November of 2018, under the guise of a fake dealership, Euro Premium Auto Ltd., Syed bought a 2007 Toyota Camry with 295,807 kilometres on it and, four days later, posted a Kijiji ad for the car saying it had clocked only 166,000 kilometres. He wanted $5,000. Another time, he tried to sell a 2006 Honda to a young woman; the car had driven 421,000 kilometres, but he’d rolled back the odometer to just 165,000. Each time, he made the car sound like a bargain. In 2018, Syed sold 26 cars.

Swanton says the antagonism between them came to a head late that year when Syed twice threatened to “put him in the hospital.” Swanton reported it to the police, who brought him into a small room he says made him feel like he was on a TV cop show. He answered questions about the incident and the feud for over an hour—long enough that Swanton wondered whether he was being interviewed or interrogated. Ultimately, his complaint went nowhere. 

Swanton doesn’t know whether Syed would have followed through on the threats. But afterward, his wife worried constantly that something would happen, either to her husband or their house. Swanton was more concerned that nothing was happening to Syed, no matter how many times people on the street called the police. 

Compared to others affected by Syed’s scams, though, he got off lucky. In January of 2019, four months after Syed had moved in, the landlord’s son-in-law successfully evicted him. Within a couple of weeks, the only evidence he’d ever been there were dirty mattresses piled on the front lawn. While Swanton and the rest of the street cheered, Syed was hardly bothered; he’d already moved on to his next mark: the house on Brookshire Circle.

For John Davies and Li Guo, the miseries inflicted by Syed quickly mounted. Not long after Davies discovered their tenant’s rooming house scheme, Syed stopped paying them rent. They weren’t the only owners he shortchanged. By August of 2020, he collectively owed $123,030 to landlords of a dozen properties. Bank statements, meanwhile, show he was regularly depositing monthly sums upwards of $81,000 in one account, and $35,000 in another. His lifestyle certainly wasn’t one of somebody in a financial jam. By the time he moved on from the house across from Swanton, he’d traded in his Corvette for a silver Lamborghini, which he leased for $5,123 a month and emblazoned with custom plates reading “Jayman.” 

It took Davies five months, until March of 2020, to get his case before the Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board. After three hours of listening to other cases, his proceeding started—and was over, as he puts it, “before we had a chance to say boo to a goose.” The member set to hear the matter briefly opened the file, then dismissed it on a technicality: Davies had delivered his eviction notice by email, rather than in person as required. He was devastated.

Determined to try again, he hired a paralegal to do the paperwork and, later that year, went back before the tribunal. Again, Davies presented photographs showing the state of his house. He had letters from the fire department confirming that the changes to the Brookshire Circle property violated safety regulations, and from the municipality affirming that rooming houses weren’t allowed in the neighbourhood. But the case was dismissed again; this time the tribunal found the fire department’s letter lacked specifics about fire- and safety-code violations in the house. “At that point, I gave up hope,” says Davies. “I thought, ‘We’ll never win.’ ”

Swanton witnessed clandestine exchanges of what he suspected was money for drugs. Condoms, small foil wrappers and other paraphernalia littered the driveway and grass

Syed was only growing bolder—and his rooming house scheme wilder. Beyond hoodwinking his landlords, he appeared to be duping some prospective tenants. One man who rented space at a Markham home run by Syed told a local newspaper that he’d lasted only a month; if he’d stayed longer, he said, he would be dead. The clean bedroom in Syed’s Kijiji ad looked nothing like the trashed one he found in real life. There were holes in his walls, and blood and bodily fluid stains on the sheets supplied as part of his deal for the furnished room. He had between 15 and 20 roommates at any given time, and mostly avoided them. A 20-year-old tenant of another home, also located in Markham, said: “I think we have enough people to have a party every day.” In March of 2020, a 22-year-old man living in that house was arrested for assaulting another tenant who’d asked to borrow $4. Infuriated, he’d thrown the man to the ground, kicking him in the head and neck. The next day, after being released on bail, he attacked a police officer, nearly beating him to death. (He was charged with aggravated assault but found not criminally responsible due to mental illness.) 

In July, Davies invited Syed’s other landlords and a few city officials to meet in a park around the corner from Brookshire Circle. One horrified neighbour, an ex-judge, suggested that a civil lawsuit sounded like their last option. Davies and the others agreed, and in August of 2020, he and the owners of 11 other properties retained Garfinkle Biderman LLP. As the court date approached, there were more delays—Syed always seemed to be asking for time, at one point alleging the plaintiffs broke into his office, located in one of the houses, and stole evidence. In September of 2020, Justice Mark Edwards finally heard the civil case, more than a year after Syed began renting the home on Brookshire Circle. 

He ruled that only the Landlord and Tenant Board had the jurisdiction to evict Syed from any of the properties. He was, however, able to declare the leases void. He ordered Syed to restore the houses to single-family residences, giving him a week to comply. Two weeks later, Syed asked for the order to be set aside. Edwards didn’t budge, but did extend the comply-by date to October 13. Meanwhile, Syed kept on renting.

By early November, he was back in court, this time to determine whether he was in contempt for not shutting down his rooming houses. Syed admitted only three properties had been emptied of tenants, and another 78 renters remained in the other nine houses. He was given two more weeks to get the rest out. During Syed’s next appearance, for the contempt proceeding, his lawyer, David Marcovitch, said that his client had reduced his roster of tenants to nine people by “working like a dog for 10 days.” Syed opted to testify at that hearing, which was held over Zoom. (To the judge’s dismay, he tried to do so while driving, though he eventually parked.) In his testimony, he kept deflecting blame, while trying to paint himself as a misunderstood victim. He said that he had done what he could to keep the rooming houses in good order, and had barely profited from the scheme. “The fact is,” he said, “I am struggling.”

During cross-examination, Syed proved slippery on questions big and small. When Ronald Birken, the lawyer representing the group of landlords, confronted Syed over a demand that Davies return a $300 key deposit, Syed calmly claimed that he’d asked in a polite text if he could have the money back. When asked why he still hadn’t provided all his bank statements, showing rent deposits, he said he’d been too busy getting tenants out. He also denied raking in as much money as the plaintiffs claimed, complaining that not all tenants paid their rent. 

At one of the houses, he said, the tenants had taken control of the property and had refused to pay him. While he didn’t dispute the houses were damaged during his scam—“you have the pictures”—he denied it was his fault, saying the occupants had caused the damage. 

At one house, somebody had blocked the bathroom tup and sink and left the water running; the entire ceiling underneath the floor collapsed

To buttress his claim that he didn’t get rich from the operation, Syed said most of his expenses were paid not by his scam but by his wife, through money she received from Bangladesh. “I accepted my mistake,” he told the court. “I apologized for what I did, and I’m doing the best that I can.” Marcovitch told the court that Syed was no longer disrespectful or brazen—that he had learned his lesson. If police responding to calls to the properties couldn’t control the tenants, the lawyer asked, how could Syed, just one man, be expected to do more? 

In his decision in December of 2020, Edwards wrote that Syed’s claim that he is struggling did not line up with inescapable mathematics: if the rooming houses were still operating, Syed was still making money. Davies and the other landlords, he added, would not be dealing with trashed houses and multiple mystery tenants if Syed had been honest with them from day one. Instead, the judge noted, he had consistently lied—to owners about who he was and why he wanted to rent the homes; and to prospective tenants, the landlords and the court about the state of those homes. And he had lied to everyone about how lucrative his whole operation was. 

Still, Edwards stopped short of sending Syed to jail, so long as he paid a restitution of $36,000. The money was to be divided among the plaintiffs within 10 days of the decision. Davies received his small share on time: just $3,000. The court had intended the money to go toward fixing the immense damage done to all the houses. Instead, it went to the plaintiffs’ legal counsel, covering a fraction of their estimated $100,000 bill. “We didn’t see a penny of that money,” says Davies. 

***

That month, Davies finally got the house on Brookshire Circle back. It was a bittersweet victory. While many of the tenants he’d met back in November of 2019 had been pleasant, those occupants had left once they realized Syed was running an illegal venture. Conditions had worsened over the course of Davies’ 13-month battle. When he did an inspection of the house in late November, he learned that one tenant, a 27-year-old man, had viciously stabbed another, sending the victim to hospital with serious but non-life-threatening injuries. The assailant then locked himself and his tiny dog in his room, the primary bedroom, and refused to let police in. Police surrounded the house for hours before arresting the man and seizing a knife. Later, after the last rooming house tenant had been evicted, Davies found the stabbing suspect had knocked a huge hole in the wall so his dog could move freely between rooms. 

No part of the house had been spared. Someone had ripped the vent pipe from the hot water system out of the wall. The stove in the basement kitchen was broken beyond repair. Door frames were bent, liquor bottles lined the mantel, and windows were either shattered or papered over with cardboard. A large wooden dining room table, which Davies had restored himself, had disappeared along with some chairs. (Davies also found appliances and furniture stolen from the other houses stuffed in his garage.) Garbage littered the floors, and the house reeked. In one room, someone had scrawled the words “PAY ME” across the wall. 

All told, the damage was estimated at $170,000. Davies didn’t have the money left to hire a contractor, so he fixed most of it himself, enlisting friends for the bigger tasks. Other landlords found their houses in even worse shape. In one, somebody had stopped up the tub and sink drains in an upper-floor bathroom and left the water running; the ceiling of the room below had collapsed. Discarded needles mingled with piles of trash, and dresser drawers filled with marijuana were strewn haphazardly on the floor. The house’s washer and dryer were missing, and Syed had left $2,000 in unpaid water bills. “To be honest, we cannot afford this mentally, financially, physically,” the landlord told the court. “This is out of control.”

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Syed’s so-called lesson didn’t stick. In 2021, police received reports that he was running three more rooming house scams in Richmond Hill and Vaughan. In March of that year, a man helping his family friend rent out her four-bedroom Richmond Hill home fell into the same trap as Davies, choosing a seemingly above-board tenant who provided the standard credit report, references and pay stubs. Of course, it was Syed, allegedly using phony background information. The owner later claimed that Syed had divided the house into eight units, seven of which he’d rented out. When the landlord reported Syed to police, he learned that his tenant was already facing 17 fraud-related criminal charges related to rooming house operations. Twelve more counts were laid in October of 2021, and Syed was arrested. It wasn’t enough to get him immediately evicted, or to stop him. That month, he still had the last vacant room of the Richmond Hill house listed on Kijiji for $975 per month, advertising the usual “no last month.” He may have been risking jail, but he still had money to make. And, thanks to COVID, prospective tenants were more desperate than ever.

At least a few landlords have managed to boot Syed. In May of 2021, he was evicted from a home after he was caught running his usual scam: the Landlord and Tenant Board didn’t buy his testimony that he actually lived in the house, that his tenants were his roommates, that he needed two houses because, as he put it, he had “so much going on.” The following month, he was caught once more, at a different house, and evicted. 

In late April of this year, Syed was still facing 31 fraud-related criminal charges related to his rooming house operations and more than 30 curbsiding-related charges from OMVIC. Both sets of offences come with potential jail time. I tried to reach Syed for an interview through his lawyer but was refused. In a short email, Marcovitch declined to comment on any of the allegations before the courts but did say: “We expect Mr. Syed to be fully exonerated.” Meanwhile, a defiant Syed has told local media that he never lied and doesn’t have any fraudulent documents. He has promised to present evidence at his trial that will clear his name. Everyone else has it wrong. They always do.

This article appears in print in the July 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here, or buy the issue online here. 

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The post A homeowner’s worst nightmare appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In press conferences, Anita Anand presents like the law professor she was for more than two decades: crisp, careful, occasionally prone to using obscure words that her staff are not above mocking. But the minister of national defence arrives at those press conferences like an ice cream truck approaching from the next block. She is usually travelling at a purposeful scurry with a clutch of young staffers in tow, and you can track how close she is by the music blasting from the phone in her hand. In mid-April, at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, the song of choice is Take My Breath by the Weeknd; before that, it was Higher Love by Kygo and Whitney Houston. The job can be heavy, and the music lightens things up.

Anand has made her first visit to Trenton, about 170 kilometres east of Toronto, to announce the imminent deployment of 100 military personnel to Poland to provide humanitarian help to Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian onslaught. She spends the half-hour before the announcement preparing with her staff in the “green room”—a cinder-block meeting space containing the kind of indestructible furniture you might find in a university dorm, with grocery-store pastries and neon-hued Easter-egg napkins arrayed on the tables. Anand hunches over a printout of her remarks, making changes on the fly while questioning her staff: has the Russian invasion been going for months or weeks? Is assister or aider a better French verb here? Who’s providing spiritual support to the refugees? The department’s speechwriters have by now figured out that she likes listing things in threes and hacks out any rhetorical preamble. “Tell them they’re right!” she crows to her staff. “Tell them: exactly, no fluff.”

When she’s had her way with the speech, she and her team rehearse media questions. Her press secretary, Daniel Minden, does an eerily perfect imitation of the default journalist tone of a snotty teenager who’s just caught you sneaking into the house drunk. In response, Anand rhymes off the talking points and line items from the week-old budget that she’s still committing to memory. “Follow-up! Follow-up! Hard follow-up!” she says. Anand is one of a very few in this government with an instinct for transparency and normal human communication, but that’s not the gear in use at the moment.

Then they’re out of time. “Should we have a little song here?” she asks, then cranks up Take My Breath before heading across the tarmac to the TV cameras.

Anand, shown here with her parents and cousins in the backyard of her childhood home, grew up in Kentville, Nova Scotia. She appears third from left, seated next to her father.

It’s easy to forget now that she’s a senior minister, but Anand is still a newcomer who’s only been in federal politics for three years. She is no stranger to holding a cabinet portfolio that suddenly bursts into flames. She was procurement minister when the pandemic arrived, and that file—normally important but dull—turned into a frantic global shopping spree for protective equipment, rapid tests and vaccines. Looming over her job as defence minister is no less than the existential global threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s unhinged savagery in Ukraine and its upending of the post-Cold War world order. As Anand told a conference of defence experts in early May, with lawyerly circumspection, “We do live in a world at the present time that appears to be growing darker.”

Canada has long been accused—by former U.S. president Donald Trump and more lucid observers—of complacent mooching on defence. We are geographically fortunate. Defence and the military don’t excite the Canadian public, so there’s no political sugar high to be had from prioritizing them. And the world’s toughest big brother lives right below us, affording a sense of smugness that surely no one will mess with us. Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska succinctly laid out the criticism in May when he told a congressional hearing, “We still have NATO allies—Canada one—who just freeload.”

Now, the world is threatened by a marauding Russian bear, in a conflict whose worst possible escalation is nuclear war. The least appalling outcome is the horror that is already known: thousands of Ukrainian civilians dead, thousands more raped or forcibly relocated, millions displaced. It’s become clear that the peaceful global balance was never as stable or certain as we blithely assumed it to be.

Canada’s response to all of this sits on Anand’s desk, plunked on top of the file that was supposed to be the thorniest aspect of her portfolio: reforming and renewing a Canadian Armed Forces jolted by widespread allegations of sexual misconduct over the last few years. 

Even on a good day, when there isn’t war raging in Europe and a morale crisis within, defence is unlike any other cabinet job. The minister sits atop two separate hierarchies: the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces, a sprawling institution with its own education, health-care, housing and justice systems. The budgets are huge, the process of buying anything notoriously slow and the potential for political bombshells large, on top of an intimidating military culture that is usually foreign to the minister. “It’s not a job that anybody ever wants,” says Guy Thibault, former vice-chief of the defence staff and chair of the Conference of Defence Associations Institute. 

Right now, though, the job is Anand’s to do. She comes to it with a deep belief in doing the best you can, not to seek out a prize, but because there is virtue in good work. It’s a belief rooted in her Hindu faith and instilled in her by her late mother, and those values reside in her as deeply as her mother’s voice still resonates in her head. 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is nearing his 10th year as Liberal leader, and his party its seventh in power. Succession planning is inevitable, and Anand is one of the obvious possible leadership contenders. Her move to defence reads as a clear statement of trust from Trudeau that she can navigate this post under urgent circumstances as well as she did the last one. It could also end up being a poisoned chalice handed over with a smile of gratitude and apology. In cabinet, there is a fine line between a difficult but important task and an impossible and thankless one. Anand’s success in this job—and Canada’s reputation and safety in a world gone dark—might rest on that knife’s edge. 

In the early 1960s, Anand’s mother and father, Saroj Daulat Ram and Sundaram Vivek Anand—an anaesthetist and general surgeon—were living in Nigeria with their preschool-aged daughter, Gita, when Sundaram travelled to investigate the possibility of immigrating to Canada or the United States. The first place he landed was Halifax. He rented a car, drove to Nova Scotia’s bucolic Annapolis Valley and discovered the right place for his family. They settled in Kentville, a picturesque town of 6,000, where Anita was born in 1967 and her sister Sonia in 1968. They were one of the few South Asian families around at the time, and with no relatives in Canada, they grew up knit tightly to each other and their hometown. “We were definitely distinct,” Anand says. “But by the same token, we were one of the community.”

The Anand kids were always “Gita and the girls,” with Gita six years older and Anita and Sonia 16 months apart. When their parents worked long hours, they would go next door to the Clevelands’ house, where Anita’s best friend, Debbie, lived. If it was dinnertime and their parents weren’t home yet, they simply stayed for supper. 

One day, when Sonia and Anita were about four and five years old, Ram drove them to the military base in Greenwood, Nova Scotia, where they watched Pierre Elliot Trudeau disembark from a helicopter. Trudeau noticed Ram’s sari immediately and came over, bowing to her with the Indian greeting of namaste. On the way home in the car, as the family lore goes, their mother told them, “You girls need to serve your country. Your country needs you.”

Ram devoured news, politics and the biographies and speeches of great leaders from Roosevelt to Gandhi and all the Canadian prime ministers. “She didn’t necessarily use the word ‘leadership,’ but she wanted us to strive,” Anand says. If she got 99 on a test, Ram’s response was, “Why not 100?” If they were discussing her career prospects after law school, her mother would float the idea of the Supreme Court. It never felt like a burden to Anand, only loving ambition. Her mother died of cancer in 2014. “Even when she was really sick, she would say, ‘Just keep going. Just keep going,’ ” Anand recalls. Here, her voice shifts, and she punctuates the exhortation with one delicately folded fist. And for a moment, it’s clear her mother is right there in the room. “That’s kind of inside of me, in a way that a mother’s voice is,” she says. 

Ram’s daughters did indeed strive: Gita became a labour lawyer and Sonia a vascular specialist and professor of medicine. Anita, meanwhile, completed degrees at Queen’s University and the University of Oxford before returning to the East Coast to get her Canadian law degree at Dalhousie University in 1992. She articled at the Toronto office of Torys, the prominent corporate firm, arriving with a bunch of theoretical courses under her belt, while her fellow articling students had all taken corporate commercial law, securities and insolvency. The learning curve felt vertical to her. 

They were one of the few South Asian families in Kentville. ‘But we were part of the community,’ says Anand.

At a firm lunch one day, she met John Knowlton, another of the articling students. She told him she was having car trouble, and Knowlton said the estimate she’d gotten from one garage was too high. He found a better quote, and then he just kept helping: moving her into her sister’s basement, driving her home from late nights at the office. They started dating around the time they did their bar admission courses. Anand was called to the bar in 1994 and got hired back at Torys, and she and Knowlton married the following year. 

She loved practising corporate law, but knew academia was where she belonged, because writing and teaching lit her up in a way the idea of making partner did not. Anand took a leave from Torys for her master of laws at the University of Toronto, and the following year, went on maternity leave with her first child, a son. There followed stints teaching at the University of Western Ontario and Queen’s, as well as a sabbatical year as a Fulbright Scholar and visiting lecturer in law and economics at Yale Law School. In between, she and Knowlton had three more children, including a set of twins, winding up with a son and three daughters within five years of each other in age. 

In 2006, she returned to U of T, serving as associate dean of law and later as the J.R. Kimber Chair in Investor Protection and Corporate Governance. Her fellowships, awards, cross-appointments and publications fill a 19-page CV. At this point, with Anand’s academic career in full swing, she and Knowlton settled in Oakville, where they built an archetypal upper middle-class life. Their kids took piano lessons and played hockey. Knowlton coached their teams.

The idea Anand’s mother had planted of serving her country by running for office surfaced in her mind from time to time, but it ran up against her sense that politics was a very difficult life. She was approached more than once to run—she won’t say by whom—and kept saying no. After two decades as a professor, though, she began to feel like she’d given all she could to academia and was ready for a new challenge. By late 2018, she had an application to join the bench of the Ontario Superior Court ready to go on her desk. She never sent it, and the next time someone asked about politics, she didn’t say no. Anand loved being a professor, and it was hard to contemplate leaving that behind, but that notion of service instilled in her family had a deep pull, and she felt like she had something to contribute in politics.

She first kicked tires on a couple of ridings nearby, because Oakville didn’t seem to be up for grabs; everyone assumed that John Oliver, the MP first elected in the Liberal wave in 2015, would run again. But in the lead-up to the fall 2019 election, he announced he was leaving politics. Suddenly Oakville was open, though Anand would have to beat Kevin Flynn, a former provincial MPP and better-known local commodity, to get the nomination. 

Oakville sits southwest of Toronto and is still technically a “town” even though its population exceeds 200,000. It is whiter and wealthier than the GTA average, and inevitably described as a “leafy enclave” when anyone writes about it. “Many people told me that a visible minority woman could not get elected in Oakville,” Anand says. 

But when Oakville Liberals gathered at a local banquet hall that June to vote, Anand emerged as the nominee. The general election was in mid-October, so that summer and fall were a blur of maps, driveways and doors to be knocked. Because Anand is a talker, canvassing became a delicate ballet, as aides tried to move her along at the doors while the rest of the team was waiting halfway down the street. She ended up beating the Conservative candidate by seven percentage points. 

Soon after the election, she was summoned to a meeting with some of the transition team advising the second-term Trudeau government. They wanted to know about any skeletons lurking in closets, so she knew they were vetting her for something. A week later, she pulled into a parking garage at Toronto Pearson International Airport in her husband’s pickup truck, a coat thrown hastily over the dishevelled clothes she’d been wearing at home when her son called to say his car battery had died. They’d connected the jumper cables and she was sitting in the truck, with her son hollering at her to start the engine, when her phone rang with a call from the PMO switchboard. First she screamed, then she answered. They told her to be in Ottawa to meet with the Prime Minister the next morning. 

Anand walked into the room a jangle of nerves; she had met Trudeau a few times, but didn’t know him in any real way. When he told her he wanted her to be the minister of public services and procurement, she gathered herself and responded, “I would be so honoured,” just as she’d rehearsed in case she was rattled in the moment. “On my way out I shed a little tear,” she says. “And then I had to go find out what public services and procurement was.”

The portfolio is the supply closet of government, responsible for buying fighter jets, navy ships and software like the cursed Phoenix pay system for federal employees. The only spotlight that usually shines on the file is the glare of an expensive, headline-making screw-up. On the day they were sworn in, one of Anand’s cabinet colleagues soothingly assured her that she wouldn’t have to do press conferences and no one would even know her name while she learned how to be a rookie MP and cabinet minister at once. Not even close. By the time they were reading their oaths at Rideau Hall in November of 2019, the first cases of COVID-19 were almost certainly circulating in China.

Months later, when the full scope of the pandemic was becoming apparent, and the federal government started doing regular COVID updates, Anand would watch her cabinet colleagues speak alongside Trudeau every day. The first time she joined them in front of the cameras to talk about the desperate global scavenger hunt for personal protective equipment, it had an out-of-body quality. “There was a part of me that was watching the press conference,” she says. Knowlton was on an elevator one day when his wife suddenly appeared on the little wall screen unfurling the news of the day. “It was weird, quite frankly, at the beginning, just seeing her face all over the place,” he says. 

The next phase was trying to reserve vaccines, instantly the most precious commodity on earth, for a country with no domestic vaccine manufacturing. There was no way to know which one would cross the clinical-trial finish line first and which would fail, so the COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force, a panel of experts advising the government, told Anand that Canada’s best plan was to hedge its bets and sign contracts with all seven of the leading candidates. She and her team did that within about six weeks in the late summer of 2020. To Anand, it seems like people forgot the intensity of that task once it became accepted fact that Canada had signed a raft of vaccine contracts. “We were competing with the leading countries, many of whom had domestic production capabilities,” she says. “I just was a dog with a bone: We. Are. Going. To. Do. This.” At first, Anand brushes aside the emotional toll and says it was simply her job. But then she concedes, in a voice that gets smaller with each word, “It was very stressful. Very, very stressful.”

Pfizer was the first vaccine approved by Health Canada in mid-December 2020, and the first shipment was due to arrive on Canadian soil a few days later. Standing on the tarmac in the early winter darkness at Hamilton International Airport, Anand was overwhelmed by how much it had taken to get the little glass vials on that plane, and the many ways in which it might not have happened. “I was moved to tears,” she says simply. “It was a moment I’ll never forget.” She was with her father when he got his vaccine from local paramedics visiting his seniors’ residence. In that moment, she was exactly like every other Canadian floating with relief once they knew their parent or loved one at risk was finally a little safer.

Canada’s inoculation campaign, however, got off to a slow start. Other countries zoomed ahead in vaccinating their citizens, and every delay or smaller-than-expected shipment to Canada became the screaming headline of the day. This was exacerbated by Anand’s refusal to discuss what was in the contracts; she said they contained confidentiality clauses and violating them would jeopardize Canada’s negotiating position. The closest thing to a price tag eventually made public was a $9-billion budget figure for vaccines and COVID treatments, the majority of which was for vaccines. Through the winter and spring, there was a pervasive sense among the public and media, fuelled by the grinding anxiety of the moment, that Canadians were screwed and the federal government simply wouldn’t admit it.

Then the vaccine deliveries evened out and eventually piled up, and by late summer, pretty much any Canadian who wanted it had been double-vaccinated. What had once looked like a fumble of catastrophic proportions ended with Canada having one of the most vaccinated populations in the world.

Anand has made an early impression within the military as a quick study who is willing to make difficult decisions without hesitation. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

Trudeau called a snap election in August of 2021, and this time around, Anand didn’t need to introduce herself when she knocked on the doors of Oakville in order to win re-election. Afterward, the usual cabinet punditry revved up, and the consensus was that Anand was the obvious choice to become minister of national defence, given her successful handling of the tricky vaccine file and the fact that defence was in its own state of crisis. Over the previous year, a series of sexual misconduct allegations had surfaced in the Canadian Armed Forces, or CAF, that were so widespread and reached so far up the hierarchy that they rocked the military and the public’s perception of the institution. The previous defence minister, Harjit Sajjan, became involved when the military ombudsman reported that he tried to alert him to sexual misconduct allegations against the chief of the defence staff, Jonathan Vance, and Sajjan refused to hear the information. 

Anand started preparing in case the predictions about her new assignment were right. She read the landmark reports by former Supreme Court justices Marie Deschamps and Morris Fish examining sexual misconduct and the military justice system, and wrote up a list of questions for her deputy minister if it turned out the job was hers. When she was indeed sworn in as minister of national defence, some Oakville Liberals joked that the Prime Minister had rewarded her deft handling of one tough job by giving her an even harder one. “I think Minister Anand just caught a little bit of the tiger by the tail,” says Thibault, the former vice-chief of the defence staff. 

Then Putin attacked Ukraine, and the tiger turned out to have two heads. It was General Wayne Eyre, the chief of the defence staff, who called Anand in the middle of the night on February 24 to tell her the invasion had begun. Canada’s intelligence had been pointing to this outcome for months, and Anand had been expecting the call, but she was devastated nonetheless. They agreed to talk again first thing in the morning about expanding Canada’s support for Ukraine. The global balance that had allowed Canada the luxury of its complacency on defence imploded. It was replaced by urgent pressure to increase military spending, provide adequate help to Ukraine and for Canada to pull its weight alongside its NATO allies.

In the 2017 budget, the Trudeau government announced it would increase defence spending from $18.9 billion to $32.7 billion by 2026–27, which amounted to a 70 per cent bump over 10 years. But in the run-up to the 2022 budget, there were heightened expectations of another substantial boost given the profound global instability. Anand said she presented “aggressive options” to cabinet, including one that would have exceeded the NATO target of spending two per cent of GDP on defence. The parliamentary budget officer has estimated that Canada would need to spend at least $20 billion more annually to reach the NATO benchmark.

Andrew Leslie, a former army commander and ex-Liberal MP, sees the Trudeau government as self-absorbed and lacking any interest in defence

Senior military leadership developed several scenarios for increased spending, but what the new budget ultimately contained—
$8 billion over five years—was lower than even their least ambitious option. All of this is complicated by the fact that the defence department routinely underspends the budget it does have because of torturously slow procurement.

In response to pressure to step up defence spending, Anand has emphasized Canada’s broader support for Ukraine, including weapons, armoured vehicles and training for 33,000 Ukrainian soldiers who denied Putin the quick victory he expected. But Andrew Leslie, a former commander of the Canadian Army who was a Liberal MP from 2015 until 2019, sees the Trudeau government as fundamentally “self-absorbed,” fixated on social programs and lacking any interest in foreign affairs or the defence sphere. He thinks in terms of big-picture numbers and the potential for collateral damage: the government spent hundreds of billions on the pandemic, which killed 38,000 Canadians. Yet they are, in his estimation, reluctant to spend big on a Canadian military suffering from years of equipment neglect, low morale and sluggish decision-making—right when Canada and the world at large are facing an existential threat of escalation with Putin that could wipe out everyone. “If you’re not going to spend lots of money on defence now, when would you?” he asks. “And the answer is the Liberal government doesn’t want to.” 

Back at Trenton, in her hastily arranged visit before the Easter long weekend, Anand announces the deployment of armed forces members to Poland before touring the two hulking, matte-grey military planes that were parked on the tarmac at a perfect angle for the TV cameras. The larger of the planes, a Globemaster, can carry a tank or three Griffon helicopters in its enormous belly. Anand climbs the ramp leading to the gaping maw of the aircraft, working her way along a receiving line of CAF personnel, asking about everyone’s job and background. She gets excited when she hears one guy is from Oakville, and jokes that the soldiers’ stories about their military careers and deployments are so good, it’s almost like they were planted. “Ma’am, I found out I was going to be here with you this morning about a half an hour before, so they were not planted,” one soldier deadpans. “You found out only a little later than me,” she shoots back. The commander of the base, Colonel Ryan Deming, thanks Anand for throwing him under the bus, and everyone cracks up. 

A mechanical lift sits just outside the rear of the plane, its 15-metre platform loaded with plastic-wrapped pallets containing meal packs bound for Ukraine. Anand is giddily transfixed by them: she’s been reciting in interviews for months that Canada is sending 400,000 meal packs, and now here they are, waiting to be fed to the Globemaster and carried across the Atlantic. 

So far, Anand has made a good impression within the CAF and among defence experts. She’s perceived as thoughtful; she takes briefs well, asks smart questions and can quickly drill down to the essence of an issue. It’s easy to sit on files at defence, because it’s a big, cumbersome machine where many of the gears can’t grind into motion until the minister gives the word. It requires a person willing to make a call rather than dithering about media coverage, polls and political calculations. 

Anand has demonstrated an early willingness to do so. When she was sworn in, another former Supreme Court justice, Louise Arbour, was deep into a year-long review on sexual misconduct, and had already recommended to Sajjan that criminal cases be transferred to civilian authorities rather than continuing to let the military police itself. As defence minister, Sajjan was viewed as detached, overly deferential to the chief of the defence staff and prone to hoping issues would go away rather than dealing with them. A week into the job, Anand announced she was accepting Arbour’s recommendations immediately.

Anand attended the University of Oxford before returning to Canada and building a career as a lawyer and academic.

Anand still misses hashing out intricate concepts with academic colleagues. That may be why she is more open by default than other prominent members of a government that has made a maddening art of centralized control and message management. The hitch comes when Anand talks about her current portfolio. On the topic of defence, she frequently slips into talking-point mode, suddenly less frank or willing to acknowledge uncertainty or conflict, falling back on a canned phrase or fact. The shift is stark, as though someone rolled down metal shutters over a storefront. When it happens, it feels disappointing, like a tiny betrayal in an otherwise real conversation with an intelligent and dialled-in person.

Asked how she’ll define success in this file, she says she wants to put structures in place that will outlast her and—straight from the talking-point songbook—make sure CAF members are protected and respected every day when they put on the uniform in service of this country. “In addition to that, I hope to ensure that we do reach tangible results relating to minimizing, to the extent possible, all forms of discrimination in the Canadian Armed Forces,” she says.

It’s hard to tell whether Anand’s internal switch flips to talking-point mode because she’s treading carefully around a live file, or because it occurs to her that defence might present a very difficult set of problems to solve in this darker world. There are moments when she does a pretty good imitation of the most frustrating tendencies of this government, but many more where she sounds capable of the thoughtful honesty that could undo some of it.

When she wanders in conversation, she comes back again and again to academia. She gets both fired up and starry-eyed talking about her research, or the joy of gathering with academic colleagues, tossing someone’s draft paper on the table between them and then working through a careful critique without accusing anyone of being a terrible human being. Politics does not offer that. Sometimes she feels nostalgic for her past life. 

Looming over Anand’s job is no less than the existential global threat posed by Putin’s savagery in Ukraine

The Justin Trudeau era has been an exceptionally fortunate one for the Liberal Party of Canada, and they know it. Even when their apparently Teflon leader seemed certain to lose—even when he deserved to—somehow they kept winning. But the reign of Trudeau fils cannot last forever, even if Liberals seem offended by the very idea, no matter how delicately you bring it up.

Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland is such an obvious frontrunner to succeed Trudeau that it seems unsophisticated to mention her. Mélanie Joly’s promotion to foreign minister was reputed to be about giving a range of potential leadership candidates solid footing. Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos would be a cerebral, understated option for a government that could do with more of both. Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne is clever, genial and ambitious; it would be a surprise if he didn’t throw his dapper hat into the ring. 

It’s impossible, though, to round up the potential contenders without putting Anand on that list. She was highly regarded enough to go straight into cabinet as a rookie MP, and while procurement was an accidentally critical file, she got the job done in the crucible of a generational crisis. Now, she’s in charge of a file that was always going to be an uphill climb but has been elevated to emergency status by world events. Inquire directly about any eventual leadership ambitions, though, and she offers the expected response about being honoured to have the trust of the Prime Minister and solely focused on her job. Frankly, “Smart, well-intentioned person does decent job in tough spot” is a strange and vaguely unseemly type of political story. Journalists who cover politics are not often in the business of good-news stories, and the people we write about generally don’t inspire them. So this makes me feel as odd to write as it might make you feel to read.

Canadian politics at the moment seems built to reward two very different types: the bomb-throwing disrupter who carves a cult of personality in their own likeness, or the human talking point who runs from anything resembling a normal thought or sentence. Anand is not wired to be either of those. Is there a path for someone like that to ascend, even if someone exactly like that seems needed? 

Then there is the question more than one person bluntly asked Anand when she decided to leave academia and pursue politics. Why would you abandon a dignified, successful career as a law professor to volunteer for this sideshow?

To some extent, the answer is a very simple one: because that’s what her mother told her to do, in a voice she can still hear.

This article appears in print in the July 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here, or buy the issue online here. 

The post How Anita Anand became the Trudeau government’s all-round fixer appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Midway through Georgia Toews’s debut novel, Hey, Good Luck Out There, the protagonist, Bobbi, has just finished a gruelling stint in rehab for alcohol addiction. Kicked out of her bedbug-infested apartment, she ends up wandering through the streets of Toronto dragging along a small carry-on suitcase. In a moment of desperation, she calls an old flame who might offer her a place to sleep for the night, even though she is uncomfortable with what such an arrangement might cost her. As she makes her way to the rendezvous, she considers the impression she might give to passersby: “I hoped that I looked like a young traveller heading off purposefully, on her way to the airport, on an adventure.”

The first half of Luck is set in a downtown Toronto facility where Bobbi spends 30 days trying to work the program and fit in with the other participants. In the second half, she turns her attention to maintaining a facade of well-adjusted sobriety for her co-workers and family members while fending off homelessness. Bobbi’s neurotically obsessive scrutiny of how others perceive her is a recurring concern in the novel, but what she tries to hide on the outside comes pouring out on the page in such frank and alarming detail—vicious inner monologues, hallucinatory memories of past traumas—that readers may wonder how the writer managed to capture such nuance in the first place.

Born in 1990, Georgia is the daughter of internationally feted Canadian novelist Miriam Toews, author of A Complicated Kindness, All My Puny Sorrows and, most recently, the Scotiabank Giller Prize–nominated Fight Night. Later this year, Sarah Polley’s film adaptation of Miriam’s 2018 novel, Women Talking, starring Frances McDormand, Rooney Mara and Jessie Buckley, will be released by Orion Pictures and Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B.

All of this means that Georgia’s burgeoning literary career will likely attract more attention than most young writers are accustomed to receiving. This is always the case when the child of someone famous ventures into their parent’s field, but Georgia isn’t looking to hide or revel in her family ties; she knows she will be dogged with questions about the connection when it comes time to promote Luck, which comes out May 31. She speaks of her relationship with her mother matter-of-factly: Miriam is available for advice and mentorship, and undoubtedly has influenced Georgia’s writing in myriad ways, but she does not give detailed notes or discuss technical writing techniques. Her feedback to Georgia is impressionistic, intuitive and honest. “We really don’t talk about writing,” Georgia says, “other than confirming that yes, it’s hard work, and it’s important work.”

Georgia grew up in Winnipeg and moved to Toronto in 2009; I met her five years ago through my partner, who knew Georgia’s brother, Owen, through the activist community in Winnipeg. I visited Georgia and Miriam in their elegant downtown Toronto home in the winter of 2022, a few months before Luck launched. We all sat in a high-ceilinged, wainscotted living room, Miriam in a plush recliner to my left, Georgia across from me on a couch with baby books strewn over it. The Toewses live in a multi-generational household: Georgia and her partner, Mark Boucher, occupy the top two floors of the house with their children, while Georgia’s octogenarian grandmother, Elvira Toews, has the main floor of the home (it was Elvira’s space we were sitting in). Miriam and her partner, Erik Rutherford, live in a laneway home at the back of the property.

Georgia and Miriam have a similar self-deprecating sense of humour, marked by the same deadpan delivery. Their dynamic is a casual yet attentive one; they never speak over one another and each listens intently to what the other is saying. They seem to build on each other’s ideas as easily as they trade off looking after Georgia’s infant son. When the conversation shifts to either of their respective careers, the other will instinctively reach for a soother or a board book to occupy the baby.

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Writing runs long and deep in this family. Miriam’s late sister Marjorie wrote poetry and fiction, and their father wrote about Canadian politics and history, self-publishing a textbook called Classroom Comment. He also created placemats for children covered in historical facts and cartoons. Miriam remembers driving around Manitoba with him when she was a child, dropping off boxes of placemats to various restaurants.

She wasn’t surprised when Georgia began writing at a young age. “She had an older friend who knew how to write cursive really quickly,” Miriam says. “They’d be in Georgia’s bedroom and she’d be walking around, dictating stories to her friend—these long, epic stories, going back in time, with changes in tense and tone. There was horror and humour, and they’d fill notebooks. I thought, ‘Hey, she’s a writer. Good luck with that.’ ”

After high school, Georgia studied comedy writing and performance at Humber College in Toronto, and tried to become a stand-up comedian. The first piece of writing Georgia presented to her mother for input was a sketch about a foley artist using household items to record sound effects for an experimental film. In her early 20s, she worked as a writing assistant on the Canadian police drama Rookie Blue, although none of her pitches got past the development stage.

Miriam knew when her daughter was trying to write like someone else. ‘She was very kind,’ Georgia says. ‘I had a rough first draft.’ 

Her first serious foray into fiction came after a momentous event occurred in her life: she checked herself into rehab for alcohol addiction. In Luck, Georgia set out to take a fresh approach to the recovery narrative. She sees film and literature where troubled characters ultimately find salvation as a hollow form of writing meant to coddle readers rather than address some fundamental truth about existence. “A lot of the traditional stories involve addicts suffering, going through detox, violence, that kind of sensationalized thing. I wanted to show where the work really is.” Her novel chronicles the mundanity of life in a 30-day program: the timed outings to off-site counselling groups; the strictly enforced curfews; the reprimands for possession of contraband (one character is rapped over the knuckles when found with craft scissors for a late-night haircut).

In writing the book, Georgia followed advice Miriam had previously given her: to write about what was most familiar. Miriam is known for novels that blur the distinction between reality and artifice, including books inspired by the suicides of her father and sister, and the Manitoban Mennonite community where she grew up. “For me, it’s not a conscious choice to write autobiographical fiction,” Miriam says. “You just begin to write. That’s the craft—you take the raw material and you shape it into a world. It’s always with the reader in mind. It’s this act of friendship, of reaching out and feeling less alone.”

It strikes me that this type of wisdom about writing from the heart might only be passed on in a relationship as close as mother and daughter. Mentorship between unrelated writers often proves elusive or inconstant. Mentors get busy and mentees struggle to ask for help. What is often an informal relationship can have trouble standing up to the pressures of day-to-day life. Perhaps the kinship between Georgia and Miriam has safeguarded them against these stumbling blocks. It seems a more indirect form of mentorship has developed between them—one born of mutual taste and connection, rather than professional urgency.

“We’ve never had that relationship where we’ve sat down and worked on my writing,” Georgia reiterates. Instead, Miriam offers a perspective no one else can: she’s known Georgia all her life. She knew, for example, when her daughter was trying to write like someone else. “She was very kind,” Georgia says, “because I had a really rough first draft.”

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Miriam fell into a similar trap early in her own career, trying to write like Toni Morrison, whose books she consumed voraciously. She realized quickly that attempting to write in another voice was not only a career-jeopardizing mistake but also a futile endeavour. Miriam also cautioned her daughter not to write around things in an effort to protect herself. “Suffering can be horrifyingly beautiful,” Miriam says, especially when paired with a “shadow of hope.”

Much of Miriam’s literary output has grappled with dark and difficult subjects. In her most recent novel, Fight Night, she took a lighter touch. The book is a celebration of her mother, Elvira, the most hopeful, resilient person she has ever known. “The things that happened in our family’s lives—mental illness, suicide, addiction—my grandchildren will learn of these things,” she says. “I wanted to provide them with another narrative, so they wouldn’t feel a curse of heredity. There are other things going on in our family as well.”

There are rumours that Fight Night will be Miriam’s final novel. In a recent New Yorker piece, she described a fantasy of leaving writing behind her for good. When we met, she seemed to have settled on a decision to retire from publishing and focus on being a full-time grandmother to Georgia’s two children, as well as Owen’s two kids in Winnipeg, where she regularly travels for weeks at a time. “It’s such a great time in my life,” she says, as she bounces her grandson on her knee.

Miriam launched her career while in the throes of raising young children. She would sneak away to write a fragment of a thought on a piece of paper whenever she could and found a laser focus when her children were at daycare, eschewing the dishes, the laundry and the phone to work on the world she was bringing to life. “I’ve never got as much work done as I did when my kids were young,” she says.

READ: Is it ethical to have kids in the climate crisis?

Georgia, meanwhile, wrote and edited Luck over the course of two pregnancies and credits her husband, a filmmaker, for taking care of the children after his workday and validating the time she needed to meet deadlines. The pressures of domestic life seemed to help Georgia just as they did her mom. “Fear of losing time was a great motivator to finish,” she says.

While writing Luck, Georgia was briefly worried that people might use the stark subject material to criticize her parenting. “I didn’t want people to think I was an alcoholic mother,” Georgia says. In the end, she decided to follow Miriam’s lead and lean into the idea that writing is an act of friendship. “I trust that there’s this relationship with the reader where they understand that it’s not me telling my story,” she says.

In a scene near the end of the book, Bobbi retreats to the shower when unwanted guests crash her room in the hostel where she is staying. She imagines being attacked with a knife, as though she were in a horror movie. “Getting gutted didn’t scare me as much as what my obituary would say. Or the eulogy my family would give at my funeral,” she says. “Everyone would assume my death was connected to my seedy past, and I would die an addict in everyone’s minds, despite being stone-cold sober.”

The passage is a window into Bobbi’s fragile state of mind, leading a person to spiral down winding paths of doubt and anxiety. Georgia describes writing the novel as therapeutic, a second step to her own recovery. “I took inspiration from my mother because she’s fearless,” she says. “She is always telling the truth through fiction, and I think the world is better for her novels. Writing is how she is surviving, and writing is how I can survive.”

This article appears in print in the June 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here, or buy the issue online here. 

The post What do you do when your mother is Miriam Toews? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Svyatik Artemenko travelled from Guelph, Ontario, to Ukraine at the end of January to play professional soccer. A few weeks later, he found himself at the frontlines of Europe’s most brutal war in decades. His life’s journey—from Odesa on the Black Sea coast, to Winnipeg as an immigrant, then back to Odesa as a soldier—is quintessentially Canadian. Artemenko, who is 22, has come of age with his feet firmly planted in two national identities, standing at the hyphen in the middle of “Ukrainian-Canadian” for all of his young life. When Russia invaded, he transformed himself from a Canadian soccer recruit to a Ukrainian fighting for the future of his homeland.

Now back in Canada, Artemenko is coming to grips with the trauma of war, even as he resumes his soccer career. During his time in Ukraine, he spoke regularly with Maclean’s contributing editor Adnan R. Khan, documenting his experiences in a conflict of global consequence, and the events that led him to come back.

This memoir by Svyatik Artmenko was told to Adnan R. Khan.

***

When I arrived in Odesa at the end of January, more than 100,000 Russian troops had already gathered around Ukraine’s borders. The world was watching for an invasion that could pull Europe into its first war in decades. 

In Ukraine, though, there was only distant talk of war. No one I met thought it was a realistic possibility. Vladimir Putin was acting tough, but ever since the Russians had invaded the east of the country in 2014, he had been the butt of jokes—a puny, wannabe dictator who spent more time getting his picture taken trying to look tough than actually being tough.

So even as Russian troops were mobilizing, Ukrainians shrugged and went on living their lives. It was peaceful and carefree, with cafés full of people, couples taking long walks on Odesa’s beaches and bars pumping bass late into the night. War was the furthest thing from my mind, too. The only thing I was thinking about was proving to the soccer club that had invited me to Ukraine that I was good enough to play for them.

Podillya FC is a team based in Khmelnytskyi, around 500 kilometres northwest of Odesa. To be candid, it wasn’t my first choice. I would have loved to play for Chornomorets FC, Odesa’s home team, or Dynamo in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Both are in Ukraine’s Premier League, and I’ve always dreamed of playing at the top level in the country where I was born.

But I wasn’t complaining. Podillya was a first-division club, one level down from the Premier League. More importantly, it was a team on the rise, with hopes of breaking into Ukraine’s elite league within a few years. I had the chance to be a part of that. 

So when I took the train from Odesa to Khmelnytskyi, I was barely paying attention to the news. Podillya’s management put me up in a beautiful apartment not far from their stadium, and my days and nights were quickly consumed with one goal: impressing the team’s coaches. It was going better than I could have hoped. On February 23, I was invited to the team’s office, where there was a contract waiting for me. My dream was coming true. Everything was happening as I imagined: putting pen to paper, pulling on the team jersey for photos. I was so proud. 

MORE: My escape from Ukraine to Canada

That night, I had a hard time falling asleep. When I finally did, it didn’t last long. At about five in the morning, I woke to the sound of distant thuds. I would find out later that these were missile strikes hitting a military base not far from Khmelnytskyi. At the time, though, I had no idea what was going on. I immediately checked my phone and saw that I had a bunch of missed calls from my parents and friends in Canada. When I called home, my mom picked up the phone. “Have you seen the news?” she said. “Russia just invaded Ukraine.” 

It was like someone had popped a balloon. I could feel all of the excitement deflating inside of me. As ridiculous as it sounds, my first thought was that this would postpone the second half of the soccer season, which was scheduled to start in mid-March. If I wanted to play soccer in Europe, I thought, I would have to help find a way to end this war. Just 12 hours earlier I’d been sitting in the bleachers at Podillya’s stadium daydreaming about being in goal against Dynamo Kyiv. I imagined myself making an impossible save to win the match. I could almost hear the fans screaming and clapping.

I tried to push that idea out of my mind. My country was being invaded, and there I was thinking about soccer. It was stupid. As I looked out my window into the darkness, I thought about my friends in Odesa and the summers I’d spent there as a child. All of it was under threat. I was stunned, and angry. I decided at that moment that I would join the fight for Ukraine.

***

To my parents,  Odesa is the most beautiful place in the world, a city of more than a million people that feels like a seaside town. Even in the middle of this war, I can see it through their eyes: the restaurants, the Mediterranean architecture, the views of the Black Sea. Ukraine is smaller than Manitoba, and every inch of it is precious to the people who live there. My parents left only because of me. They wanted a better life for their son.

My father, Vladyslav, was a cardiologist; my mother, Lidiya, an English teacher. They were living a relatively comfortable life. But in 1991, after Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union, the country’s economy collapsed. By the time I was born in February of 1998, conditions had gone from bad to worse. My parents had lost hope of ever building the kind of life they wanted for their children.  

They arrived in Winnipeg when I was two, with almost nothing. My dad’s medical qualifications weren’t recognized in Manitoba, so the best he could do was find a job as a janitor at a hospital. My mom was luckier: her English skills helped her land a job at Carpathia Credit Union, a bank set up by Ukrainian-Canadians to provide financial opportunity to the Ukrainian community.

‘I counted more than 100 dead, both foreigners and Ukrainians, while I was collecting bodies from the attack on Yavoriv’

Over the next years they worked hard to build a middle-class life. They had two more kids—my sister, Nika, and brother, Glev—bought a house just north of the city centre and settled into a working-class routine. It wasn’t perfect, of course. My parents missed their homeland, their family and their friends. When I was a kid, we would go back to Odesa every summer. For my parents, it was like refilling their energy tanks before heading back to the freezing Canadian prairie. 

For me, those trips were pure magic. I became fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian. I would spend long summer days with my uncle, a sea-traffic controller at one of Odesa’s ports, watching the huge freighters coming and going. The seaside was my favourite place, especially the stretches lined with cliffs. I used to love standing there, looking out and dreaming about sea monsters and adventures on sailing ships.

I also loved playing soccer with my friends. For Ukrainians, soccer is a religion. I developed a passion for the game during my visits to Odesa, and I was good at it. Back in Winnipeg, I was recruited at the age of 16 to an advanced soccer program at Glenlawn Collegiate. That was the same year I signed up for the Canadian Forces reserves—a decision I had no idea would serve me well later in my life. I spent a year training, including a summer at CFB Shilo in Brandon, Manitoba, earning my basic military qualification. In the end, I dropped out and focused on soccer.  

When I was 19, the Winnipeg Valour recruited me as their backup goalkeeper for the inaugural season of the Canadian Premier League, a pro circuit just below Major League Soccer. From there, I went to the University of Guelph and played for their varsity team and eventually signed with Guelph United FC, a semi-pro club competing in Ontario’s premier league. In 2021, we won the league championship and qualified for the 2022 Canadian Championship. But the big highlight came near the end of the year, when I received a call from Podillya asking if I wanted to try out for them. It was the opportunity I’d been waiting for. I bought a one-way ticket to Odesa, packed my bags and left for Ukraine.

***

 On February 24,  almost exactly a month after I arrived in Khmelnytskyi, the sun rose over a changed country. Russian forces were advancing quickly from Crimea, which they already occupied, toward Kherson, a city on the Dnieper River not far from Odesa. The shock of the invasion was rippling throughout Ukraine. 

I talked to some of my new Ukrainian teammates with Podillya, who told me they were all enlisting in the country’s military. A few hours later I was lining up at the army recruitment office in Khmelnytskyi. The queue was longer than I’d expected, stretching a block down the street before doubling back to the entrance. The Ukrainian military was already drafting men between 18 and 60 years old before the invasion started, but as soon as the war was on, people were rushing to volunteer. One of the men in line—a tall, bulky guy who seemed to have some military experience—was telling his friend that he thought the Russians would move on to Mykolaiv, east of Odesa, because that’s where the main highway crosses the Pivdennyi Buh River. They would need to take the bridge there before they could begin an assault on Odesa.

READ: ‘Anybody want to drive this ambulance to Ukraine?’

I waited more than two hours before I learned I couldn’t enlist because the regular army was only accepting Ukrainian citizens. I was surprised. I knew that Ukraine doesn’t recognize dual citizenship—when I’m there, I’m technically considered a Canadian visitor. But all my life I’ve felt as much Ukrainian as I have Canadian. I worried I might not get a chance to defend the country of my birth. The recruiting officials could see how disappointed I was. They assured me there were plans to establish some kind of force for international volunteers.

I left Khmelnytskyi that day and headed back to Odesa, disappointed but still holding out hope that I would be able to contribute to the fight. The next day, I received a call from a Ukrainian military official who told me there would be an International Legion, and I should prepare to leave for training at any moment. In the meantime, I signed up to local neighbourhood patrols, which had been quickly assembled to watch for saboteurs and spies.

These kinds of covert operations were a real fear in Odesa, where many residents are native Russian speakers: in early January, Ukraine’s intelligence service, the SBU, arrested a Russian agent who was recruiting people to carry out attacks in Odesa. As the war started, the government was concerned that sleeper cells were preparing to sabotage Ukrainian defensive positions, or were sending information back to Russia about the city’s defences.

Artemenko in Odesa in mid-March, when he was assigned to a unit operating behind Russian lines. (Photograph by Valeria Ferraro)

The patrols were tasked with looking for suspicious activities and reporting them to the authorities. When I signed up, they asked if I had any military training and if I could handle a gun. I showed them a photograph of my basic military qualification certificate from Canada. That was enough for them to assign me to the patrols and issue me a nine-millimetre pistol, which I kept tucked into my pants, under my jacket. Working in groups of three or four, dressed in civilian clothes so we could blend in with the local population, we walked the streets in downtown Odesa, sometimes during the day and other times at night, when the city was under a curfew.

Once, during a daytime patrol, we saw a guy walking around taking pictures. It was weird because he wasn’t taking pictures of anything that would make a nice photo—just random street shots. We went up to him and told him this wasn’t the time to be taking pictures. He tried to walk away, but we followed him and called in the police. They stopped him, and when they checked his documents, they found a Russian passport and a notebook listing locations around Odesa. He was arrested.

I never found out whether he was a spy. If not, it was stupid of him to be acting suspiciously when things were so tense. Odesa wasn’t being bombed in the same way as other cities, but everyone was preparing for the worst. Occasionally one of the Russian warships lined up on the Black Sea would launch a missile. One hit the airport. The Russians had even tried to deploy a landing party in Koblevo, just east of Odesa, but were repelled by Ukrainian forces. 

The Russians were finding it hard to get to the city. The Ukrainian military and volunteers were fighting heroically to hold off any advancements from the east, and Odesa’s cliffs provided natural protection against an amphibious assault. For extra protection, the Ukrainian navy had set naval mines in the sea. 

Sometimes I would take a walk down to the beach, or along the clifftops I had loved so much as a kid. I could see the Russian warships lining the horizon, these ominous black shadows. It felt like something could happen at any moment. 

One cold morning at the beginning of March, the beach was empty and the water was dark grey, under a cloudy sky. I was frustrated: it had been nearly a week since the Russians had invaded and I felt like I was wasting my time with these city patrols. Nothing had happened since we’d stopped that guy taking photos a few days earlier.

I spoke to my parents every day and told them how discouraged I was watching the war without being able to contribute. They worried about me, of course, but they were also proud of my decision to stay and fight. The Ukrainian military had surprised everyone with its resistance against the much bigger Russian army. My parents understood why I wanted to be a part of that.

Two days later, I received an order from Ukrainian military officials to report to the Yavoriv training centre, near Lviv, the main city in western Ukraine, where the International Legion was based. I was finally going to get my chance.

***

 When I arrived  at Odesa’s central station to catch the train, officials were only allowing women and children to board. Most Ukrainians fleeing the country were heading to Lviv, and then on from there to Poland. Men of fighting age were prohibited from leaving, but I had papers from the Ukrainian military that identified me as a recruit. 

At first, the women on the train car I boarded didn’t realize I had volunteered to fight. I was the only man and I didn’t have any military equipment. I looked like a civilian and, in their eyes, like a coward on the run.

There’s this trick Ukrainian grandmothers have to make a person feel guilty without saying a word. It’s this look of pure disgust, and if you ever experience it, you don’t easily forget it. On the train, I got so many of those grandmother looks that I almost started to believe I’d done something wrong. A few women came up and asked why I wasn’t fighting to defend Ukraine. When I explained I was on my way to Yavoriv for training, their attitudes completely changed. Word got around the car that I was a volunteer, and everyone started offering me food, water and anything else they thought I needed.

One elderly lady came up and gave me some prosphora, the holy bread handed out at orthodox services. She told me she’d been at church in Odesa not too long before evacuating to the train station. She wanted me to have it as a blessing. I was deeply moved. I’ve always had a strong faith in God. Standing in that crowded railway car for the nearly eight-hour journey to Lviv, surrounded by terrified women and children fleeing their homes, I knew the best I could do to ensure they returned was train hard, do my duty and pray to God for a quick end to the war.

Yavoriv certainly had the facilities to provide excellent training. It was a massive base, spread over thousands of acres with lots of forest. There were tactical training areas; artillery, tank and shooting ranges; and long, two-storey barracks. The commanders could have really put these guys through their paces, weeding out those who didn’t have what it takes. 

I hadn’t been at the Yavoriv base long, though, when I realized the International Legion wasn’t all it was hyped up to be. A lot of people had taken up President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call for help, but that didn’t translate into a capable fighting force. Some of the guys lacked the mental discipline to be soldiers. There would be a drill, for instance, and they would take their time putting on their shoes and getting dressed. At a boot camp for Canadian reserves, they would have been punished for that. 

They weren’t receiving the kind of training—the yelling and breaking people down—that scares away people who lack the mental toughness to operate in a war zone. This training seemed designed to give them just enough basic skill that commanders could throw them into the fight. We did some physical training and some offensive and defensive tactical manoeuvres, and that was about it. Most of the volunteers seemed to think they were there on some kind of adventure vacation. I was skeptical they would ever be ready.

RELATED: Scenes from the war in Ukraine

Because of my previous training, my commanding officer put me in charge of teaching people how to load their magazines. One guy was trying to load the bullets backwards. When I pointed out the mistake, he shrugged and said he’d never held a weapon before. I asked what he had been assigned to do, and he said he was going to be a sniper. It was unbelievable.

That’s not to say everyone was incompetent. There were some experienced foreign volunteers, including my commanding officer, a 20-year veteran of war zones. I stuck close to him because I knew he would be able to improve my skill set. I don’t know what it was—maybe the discipline I’d learned from playing soccer—but this officer seemed to trust me. 

Still, I wondered why they weren’t kicking some of these people out and telling them to go home. There were plenty of volunteers; they had set up a tent camp to house the overflow. Did the commanders believe they could just throw bodies at the Russians and win the war that way? I was uneasy. I knew that most of these guys would be ill-equipped to handle a life-threatening situation. They might very well get me killed.

***

 On my ninth day  at Yavoriv, we were awoken by an air-raid siren and left the barracks to take cover. No bombs had fallen, and we went back to bed a little pissed off, only vaguely aware that what had probably been a Russian reconnaissance plane flying overhead could mean trouble later. 

By 5:30 in the morning, I was in a deep sleep, so I didn’t hear the first missile. But it must have been close to my barrack, because the explosion nearly threw me out of bed. There was no warning—no siren, no announcement over the loudspeakers. Immediately after the blast, there were a few seconds of eerie silence, as if everyone was too shocked to react. Then chaos: people shouting, boots stomping on the concrete floor. I don’t remember getting dressed, but I must have done, because I had my uniform and boots on when a second rocket tore overhead. It’s a sound I will never forget, like a giant sheet of paper being ripped in two, accompanied by that high-pitched whistling noise you hear bombs making in war films. Then the explosion, the ground shaking, the windows shattering. 

I stood dazed in the dark for a few seconds as my fellow soldiers ran for the exits, some with cuts on their faces from shards of broken glass. I saw one of my friends sitting on his bed. He had been next to a window and looked like he was in shock. I threw him over my shoulder and ran. 

Outside it was freezing cold, but with so much adrenalin pumping through me, I barely felt it. Another rocket shredded the air and slammed down somewhere in the direction of the shooting range. Someone was barking orders to take cover in the forest, so I ran in that direction, my friend dangling from my shoulder.

I stumbled over frozen ground for what felt like an hour but was probably no more than a few minutes, getting clear of the buildings. Rockets were raining down almost non-stop. I would later learn the enemy had launched more than two dozen cruise missiles toward the base from bombers flying in Russian airspace.

This was my first taste of the Russian way of war. I’d decided to join this fight almost without thinking. Watching the Russians lay waste to the place where I’d been living for the past nine days was the first time I’d felt fear since signing up. I was facing an enemy that had no problem killing indiscriminately from a distance. What would it be like on the frontline? If I was killed, would I be looking into the eyes of a human being who fired a gun? Or would my killer be some far-off grunt in Russia pressing a button? Or someone well behind the frontline loading artillery shells? 

As the sun rose and the missiles stopped, some of my fear melted away. But for many of the foreign volunteers, this first taste of war was a reality check. It woke them up to the fact that this wasn’t some kind of Hollywood movie where they were the heroes dodging every bullet. Many, including the guy who’d been loading ammunition backward into his magazine, decided to go home. 

I didn’t blame them. These guys demonstrated pure heart for coming in the first place. Their departure was probably for the best, though. It’s better they were put through the experience of war on the training base than on the frontline, where their inexperience would have put other lives at risk.

The attack on Yavoriv strengthened my resolve. The base was badly damaged, and from the looks of it, the Russians knew exactly where to hit it to cause the most carnage. Anyone who had been on the second floor of a barrack was either dead or badly injured. Anyone in the tent camp had been blown to pieces.

We dug in for a few days in the forest, with little more than our clothes and blankets to keep us warm, eating military rations that we retrieved from the base. We built fires during the day, but at night we weren’t allowed to because they would make us an easy target for Russian attacks. 

A few of us dug a ditch where we slept in case the Russians did bomb us, huddling together for warmth. I used some of the skills I’d acquired in a Grade 10 outdoor education class back in Manitoba, where we learned wilderness survival. I knew how to build a lean-to over the ditch, so we had some cover from the elements. Funny, because I’m not much of a camper. I’m not even sure why I took that class. I guess growing up in Canada, where the wilderness is such a big part of our lives, it was just a normal thing to do. 

We spent most of our days digging through the rubble and recovering the remains of the dead. There were no survivors; gathering up the dead mostly meant collecting body parts and reassembling them into whole human beings so they could be identified. 

‘You don’t see the things I’ve seen and not change in some basic ways’

It was gruesome work. I try not to think about it, but sometimes those images pop into my head. I guess they’ll haunt me for the rest of my life. While I was doing it, I kept thinking about all those terrified people in Ukraine’s cities hiding in bomb shelters. After the missiles hit, would there be anyone to dig them out of the rubble?

***

 Over the three days I spent at Yavoriv after the attack, I counted more than 100 dead, both foreigners and Ukrainians. There must have been more buried under all that rubble. When I left for Odesa, the recovery teams were still digging.

The devastation created some uncertainty about the future of the International Legion. The more experienced volunteers were becoming frustrated even before the bombing. Some, including my commanding officer, felt like the Legion had been a publicity stunt to show that most of the world was on Ukraine’s side. After the attack, he gathered some of the guys he thought were ready to fight and told us if we wanted to leave, we were free to do so. There were other volunteer brigades operating in Ukraine that would give us the chance to contribute. He could put us in touch with them.

I was willing to be deployed anywhere in Ukraine, of course. But after the missile attack, returning to the familiar surroundings of Odesa felt right. My commanding officer linked me up with a volunteer battalion attached to the SBU. He told me they could use my language skills, and my steadiness in times of crisis. 

At the SBU base, I was assigned to a group of volunteers who were tasked with supporting Ukrainian special forces operations. It wasn’t what I’d expected to be doing. All of my training in Canada, and the little I’d received in Ukraine, was geared toward the infantry. I was expecting to go to the frontlines and shoot at Russians.

Maybe that kind of thinking was simplistic. By mid-March, the frontline around Mykolaiv was shifting. Ukrainian counterattacks and Moscow’s changing strategy had allowed us to push Russian forces back toward Kherson. Ukrainian forces had prevented enemy troops from crossing the Pivdennyi Buh River, sparing Odesa. After that, the frontline was less about infantry engagements than artillery and air strikes, with special forces conducting covert, pinpoint hits as the Russians retreated. 

My unit’s job was to infiltrate the frontline, come in behind the Russians and set traps—IEDs and land mines—to make their withdrawal more painful. On one mission, we might be sent to get close to the enemy, disguised as civilians, and radio back their positions. On another, we might be told to disrupt a retreating column by neutralizing a key armoured vehicle so Ukrainian special forces could then go in and take out the whole group.

MORE: Canada’s government is sending body armour to support Ukraine. So is this group of activist fundraisers.

It was nerve-racking work. The thinking was that if we looked like civilians, the Russians wouldn’t target us. But as we knew from the scenes in Bucha and Irpin, where hundreds of bodies and mass graves have been found, many Russian soldiers have no qualms about killing civilians. During our first mission behind enemy lines—it would end up being our only one—we were shot at and nearly hit by artillery as we drove around Russian positions in a civilian car. One of the men in my unit took a piece of shrapnel in the arm from an artillery round that landed some 10 feet from our vehicle. 

That was the worst period of my life. Being killed worried me less than being captured. The Russians had made it clear they didn’t consider foreign volunteers to be covered under the laws of war. I knew how they would treat me—like a mercenary, or a terrorist. I would likely disappear into their prisons forever. When I went out on that mission, I told myself: Putting a bullet in my own head is better than being caught. I know it sounds gruesome, and it wasn’t something I dwelled on. It was just a reminder of how high the stakes were before we headed out. 

The scenes of devastation I witnessed were another stark reminder. I saw the bodies of civilians, left in ditches on the side of the road, some scorched black as if someone had tried to burn them.  

There were forced relocations, too. On my one mission behind Russian lines near the end of March, I witnessed Russian-speaking Ukrainians in a village near Mykolaiv being forced to board military trucks heading east, either into Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine or on to Russia itself. When we told our commanders what we’d seen, they said there was little that could be done. I can’t imagine what those people must have gone through, or what they might still be enduring.

By early April, Putin’s new plan for Ukraine was obvious. He had failed to take over the entire country, so his forces were limping out of Kyiv and Kharkiv and redeploying to the east, with the goal of taking the entire Donbas region. In the south, they had retreated to the outskirts of Kherson, the first city in Ukraine they’d taken control of, and dug into defensive positions, setting up tanks and artillery in populated areas so we couldn’t shell them. Playing defence in a war takes fewer resources than going on the offensive, especially if you’re using human shields.

(Photograph by Valeria Ferraro)

Once the Russians had dug into populated areas, my commanders decided it wasn’t worth the risk for my unit to repeat our trip behind enemy lines. The new worry was that Russia would restock its forces and make a new push on Odesa, potentially using Transnistria, a Russian-controlled territory in Moldova, to launch a two-pronged ground assault on the city. 

My unit was retasked with capturing Russian agents, identified by the SBU, who were operating all around the Odesa region, sending information back to Russia about Ukrainian troop deployments or weak points in our defences, anything the Russians could use to plan a new offensive. We would be given targets who we would then track down and arrest. 

The work was less stressful than missions behind enemy lines: with no Russian troops in the area at the time, there was no risk of capture. But it came with its own risks. Sometimes, our targets were armed, or they would run away, forcing us to open fire on them. Once, we were assigned to pick up a suspected saboteur who was sheltering with a family. When we broke through the door to raid the apartment, everyone inside panicked, and we couldn’t be sure which of the adults was our target. We just started screaming, fingers on our triggers, for everyone to get on the ground. Fortunately, no one got shot.

My time fighting in the war had, in a way, come full circle. My first contribution was helping arrest a suspicious person taking pictures and notes on Odesa’s streets; my last missions involved chasing down and capturing spies and saboteurs.

I was a different person, though, than I had been during those early days in Odesa. You don’t see the things I’ve seen and not change in some basic ways. It was hard, much harder than I’d expected. I’d never been in a war zone, but other people who have told me this was the worst they had ever seen. The level of devastation is terrifying.

***

After a month and a half, a part of me just wanted to go home. When I had some time off and spoke to my friends back in Canada, they asked me about my experiences. I described the things I’d seen matter-of-factly, and they responded with shock. “That’s so messed up,” they said. But for me, it just felt kind of normal. I really didn’t feel any emotions about it anymore.

I realized this shouldn’t be normal—that it wasn’t good to be so numb to these experiences. I wasn’t sleeping well. I was having doubts. But I was also torn. I had become extremely close to the people I met during my time as a soldier, the men and women who sacrificed everything to defend their country. I didn’t want to abandon them. 

My time off—a couple of days every week or so—was difficult. I was allowed to leave the SBU base, but after the intensity of my missions, going back to regular life in Odesa was unsettling. The rhythm of the city was returning to some kind of normal. It was early April and spring had arrived. Cafés and restaurants were open. People were still tense, but they were going about their daily routines. And yet for me, the war was never far away.

The Russian warships on the Black Sea had disappeared beyond the horizon, but we knew they were still there. Warning sirens would ring out regularly because of the threat of missile attacks. From time to time, one would land, almost randomly, hitting a street here or a building there. It was as if the Russians were reminding us that they were still out there, that we weren’t safe, that the war was not over.

By the middle of April, I desperately needed a break. I’d come to realize over my six weeks or so in the war that I didn’t want to be a soldier, though I was definitely good at it. I had volunteered so I could help my people live free from Putin’s tyranny. But I’d come to Ukraine to play soccer. 

READ: What it takes to truly fight for freedom in Ukraine

It looked almost certain that the whole season would be cancelled. Podillya’s officials had told all of its foreign players they were free to sign with other teams temporarily if they wanted to keep playing. I was the only one who had volunteered to fight, but I was considering my options. My coach at Guelph United had offered me a contract for the upcoming season. The Canadian Championship was scheduled to start in early May, with Guelph United playing the Halifax Wanderers, a Canadian Premier League team, in its first match. My coach said if I was back in Canada, I could be in the lineup.

If we won, we would be up against Toronto FC, a Major League Soccer club that includes players who will be representing Canada next fall at the World Cup in Qatar. Just to be on the pitch playing against them would be a highlight of my career. 

I felt guilty for wanting this opportunity as much as I did. The war was still raging in Ukraine’s east. By the third week of April, the Russians had launched a fresh offensive to take the entire Donbas region. But I decided to complete one last set of missions and then return to Canada. My commanders told me the Russians were also preparing for another assault on Mykolaiv from Kherson, while building up troops in Transnistria. Then, on April 22, a Russian general admitted on state television what most people suspected: Russia intended to take all of southern Ukraine, including Odesa, cutting off Ukrainians from the Black Sea.  

When I got that news, I was in a car on my way to the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, where I was booked to fly to Toronto. I had long feared that Russia planned to invade my hometown, but the confirmation felt like a punch in the gut. I pictured all those old ladies when I’d boarded the train to Yavoriv back in early March, fixing me with their looks of disgust as I left the country.

I knew, though, that I was not running away. In the weeks that had passed since then, I’d survived missiles and mortars; I’d gone undercover and infiltrated the frontlines of one of the world’s most powerful armies. I’d witnessed death on a scale no one should ever have to see. I’d fought for my people.

It was time to go back to my other home, where there was no war, and where I could be the person I dream of being. It was the right choice, if a painful one. As I approached the border with Moldova, I thought of my beautiful Odesa—miraculously intact despite the war—and wondered if I had set eyes on it for the last time. The Russian war machine was coming. Wherever it went, death and destruction would follow. 

This article appears in print in the June 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “A soldier’s story.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here, or buy the issue online here. 

The post A Soldier’s Story: From Canada to Ukraine appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Before the war, I lived with my husband, Yasser, and our sons, 27-year-old Amir and 11-year-old Nazar, in a neighbourhood near Kyiv called Kriukivshchyna. We had a beautiful house with a backyard where I kept a Japanese-style garden with plants and trees. I work as an educator. I own four private schools, and we have 210 students and more than 50 teachers and administrators on staff. I would usually start my day by greeting the students. We’d sing the national anthem and our school anthem and then I’d share some words of inspiration. From there, I would go back and forth between the schools for meetings with teachers and administrators. I really loved what I did. I had a great career, a loving family and a beautiful home.

I grew up in Makariv, a small town 50 kilometres west of Kyiv, with my parents and younger sister, Iryna. At that time, Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union. I moved to Kyiv in 1990 when I was 16 to study economics at the National University of Food Technologies. A year later I met Yasser, who was studying civil engineering. We were in university when the Soviet Union broke apart. I was happy to see Ukraine become a free country. It was a meaningful moment for all Ukrainians.

Yasser’s brother and sister had immigrated to Canada, and we moved there for a few years in 2001. I worked at the post office and studied at Mohawk College and McMaster University, while Yasser worked with his brother at a convenience store that he owned. We were happy in Canada and became Canadian citizens, but in 2006 we decided to move back to Ukraine. 

In 2014, the year I opened my first school, Russia invaded Crimea. There was a big protest in Kyiv’s city square—the Revolution of Dignity—against Russia’s influence on Ukraine. The government was overthrown and the president at the time, Viktor Yanukovych, fled to Russia. A lot of people lost their lives in demonstrations and during the Crimean invasion. I had never been a very political person, but I am patriotic and passionate about Ukraine. After 2014, I started to take more of an interest in politics. As a new business owner, I also felt more responsibility to understand what was going on.

MORE: Scenes from the war in Ukraine

At the beginning of this year, when there was talk of a Russian invasion, our students were coming to school scared and upset. We told them a bit about the political situation, encouraging them to think critically and not believe everything they saw in the news. We said if they had questions, they could ask us, but meanwhile, we should all stay strong and continue with our daily routines. It was heartbreaking to see the kids come to school so anxious. I was concerned about their mental health and well-being. 

At the beginning of February, a few students withdrew from our schools because their families decided to leave Ukraine. Two of my English teachers, who are American, had received letters from the American Embassy advising them to leave the country. I told them, “Don’t worry, nothing will happen in Ukraine. Don’t believe in these rumours.” My colleagues and I didn’t think a war could start. We just didn’t think it was possible.  

Life continued normally for a few weeks. On February 22, my sister, Iryna, and my brother-in-law travelled out of the country for work, and my parents came from Makariv to take care of my sister’s four- and five-year-old daughters. The same day, my older son, Amir, flew to Georgia with his girlfriend, Natasha, for a short vacation to celebrate his birthday. Then, on February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine.

In the early morning, around 4:35 a.m., I woke to a loud sound, like fireworks. It sounded like it was very close to our house, but when I looked outside, I didn’t see anything. I went on Facebook and read posts in my newsfeed about people seeing smoke and broken glass. I realized then that the sounds I’d heard were bombs. The war had started. Later, I learned that Russia had bombed a military base in a small town called Vasylkiv about 30 kilometres away. I was in shock. I’m usually able to keep a clear mind at times of stress, but this was too much. My body started shaking. I understood that I was in danger. 

I woke my husband and told him what I’d seen on Facebook. He was calmer than I was. He had lived through civil unrest in Lebanon, so he was familiar with war. My younger son, Nazar, didn’t understand what was going on, but he wasn’t scared. I don’t think he knew what to expect. I asked him to put some clothes on and stay calm while we figured out what was going on. 

"When I opened my eyes, I saw buildings destroyed, smoke and fires. I heard planes flying above us."

My parents and nieces were staying at Iryna’s house in a nearby apartment building, and Yasser and I decided they should all come to our house because we had a basement where everyone would be safer. I called my parents, waking them up. They were worried—they were responsible for two little girls. They didn’t expect the war to happen either. They didn’t even have their passports with them. What would happen if they had to leave the country? 

I phoned Amir in Georgia and told him that the war had started. He was silent on the phone for several moments. He couldn’t come back to Ukraine because the airports were closed, so he decided he and his girlfriend would fly to Beirut, where my mother-in-law lives.

I’m quite close with one of the principals at our schools, Marichka. She lives alone, so I asked my husband to pick her up with her dog, a Yorkshire terrier named Lola, and bring them to our house. When Marichka arrived, she and I prepared a letter to the parents saying that schools would go virtual. At nine o’clock, we went online with our students. Almost everyone was there for the call. We explained to the students that something bad had happened, and that we still didn’t know how to react. We encouraged them to be strong and listen to their parents. We said we would meet the next day and every day after that. Some of the kids were frightened, but being online and participating in the routine calmed them a little bit. I tried to keep a smile on my face and stay positive for the students. 

During the day, Marichka and Nazar sat on the floor with computers, doing virtual classes. My nieces also participated in lessons at our school. The older one was distressed, and I spent a lot of time reading to the girls and playing with them. The rest of the adults were in the kitchen watching news clips on YouTube. We learned that Russia had invaded Ukraine and parts of Kyiv had been heavily bombed. We were all worried, but we didn’t consider leaving—at least, not yet. My dad was watching TV. My mom was making cakes and soup. Cooking calms her down. I understood how important it was for everybody in the house, and also for my staff and students, that I stayed calm. The responsibility kept me grounded. 

Dib and Nazar, April 10th, 2022.

That first day of the war, my father had the idea to move our mattresses to the basement. We would all sleep there in case there was a bombing overnight. He gave everyone jobs. He and my husband went to the hardware store to buy an axe and shovels in case the house was bombed and we needed to dig ourselves out of the basement. Marichka and I drove to one of our schools. It was eerie; there was nobody outside and the streets were empty. We looked through the entire building to make sure nothing was looted or damaged, and we made a video to reassure the kids that everything was fine. We retrieved some gas masks and fire extinguishers from the school, and I distributed them to my neighbours. Back at home, we filled containers and bathtubs with water. We put together first aid kits. My husband drove to the grocery store to get food and passed by a gas station, but there were huge lines, so he couldn’t fill up the tank. 

The first two days were scary. Every time we heard loud noises and planes flying overhead, we ran down to the basement for safety. That happened a few times a day. We quickly got used to the sounds and realized we weren’t in immediate danger. Nazar said: “I will never leave my house. I will stay here. I’m brave. I’m not afraid.” He always told us, “Don’t worry, everything will be fine.” It’s part of his personality to be brave. If he falls down or fights with other boys, he’s always strong and calm and doesn’t cry. 

By then, Iryna and her husband had flown to Hungary. She begged my parents to bring the two girls out of Ukraine, but we didn’t know how to do it safely. It was too dangerous to drive and the rail stations were crowded with people fleeing the country. And so my sister came up with a plan. My brother-in-law has a relative who is in the army. On the fifth day of the war, he armed himself with a weapon and drove my parents and nieces to the train station. They waited for hours in the station and finally the four of them were able to board an evacuation train to Lviv. There were 14 people jammed in a car that normally seats four. For some reason, the train stopped for three or four hours in the middle of the journey. Nobody explained what was happening, which was very distressing. One of my nieces cried a lot; it was hard for my parents to calm her down. When they arrived in Lviv, a friend of my parents was able to drive everyone to Hungary, where they reunited with Iryna and her husband. Thankfully, the customs officers in Hungary allowed my parents to enter the country temporarily without their passports.

RELATED: ‘Anybody want to drive this ambulance to Ukraine?’

Once they left, it was just Nazar, Yasser, Marichka, Lola and me at our house. As the days passed, our courage was depleting. I remember waking up early on March 1, the sixth day of the war, and going outside. It was cold and the sky was still dark. The pain of the past few days was weighing me down. I had been thinking a lot about a cousin of mine who was trapped in Makariv with her husband and son. We had lost contact with them and I was worried. I imagined what it would be like if our house was bombed or if my family was hurt. In my mind, these possibilities didn’t seem realistic. Somewhere deep inside, I believed everything would be fine. But I also realized that I was a mother first. I had to think not only about my home and my work but my own child as well. 

Nearly all of my husband’s friends had left. This convinced him that we should go, too. The roads surrounding Kyiv were becoming dangerous. A Russian military convoy was 25 to 30 kilometres from the city’s centre. We needed to leave immediately or we could be trapped. We didn’t know where we were going to go, but we knew we had to get out and we had to do it that day.  

Dib with her mother and sister on vacation in Cyprus. (Photograph provided by Yaroslava)

My husband said I had 15 minutes to pack a bag. I went to my room and gathered some documents: our passports, my diplomas, our birth certificates and our marriage certificate. I packed one extra pair of jeans, one coat and two T-shirts. Then I packed some clothes for Nazar. 

We were still out of gas, but thankfully, my dad had left his car at our house and his tank was full. My husband learned that one of his friends from Lebanon was still in Ukraine and wanted to get out, so we picked him up as we left the city. Our journey began around 8 a.m. My husband’s friend drove. Yasser was in the passenger seat and I rode in the back with Marichka, Nazar and Lola.

We had to pass through many checkpoints in Kyiv. There were civilian forces protecting the roads of the city. They asked us for our names and where we were going and if we were carrying any weapons. I was so scared that I kept my eyes closed the entire time, praying for our safety. I held Nazar’s hand tightly. He was very calm, though I think even he was a little afraid; he was shaking a bit. I told him that everything would be fine and to think about positive things. When I opened my eyes, I saw buildings destroyed, smoke and fires. I heard planes flying above us. 

"My colleagues and I didn’t think a war could start. We just didn’t think it was possible."

Once we got out of the city, my husband phoned a friend and learned about a rehabilitation clinic in a town called Khmilnyk, about 250 kilometres from Kyiv, where we could stay overnight. That friend had just driven to the clinic a few hours earlier and said the route was safe. 

We arrived at the rehab centre around 9 p.m. They offered us a meal of chicken and rice in the cafeteria. I should have been hungry—I hadn’t eaten all day. But the stress destroyed my appetite. I had a few bites and didn’t even think about the taste of the food. I’m a vegetarian and this was the first time I had eaten meat in 15 years. 

At the clinic, we all relaxed a little bit. We stayed in two rooms that had two beds each—my husband and his friend in one room, and me, Nazar and Marichka in the other. It was the first time since the invasion that I wasn’t woken up by bombing or planes flying overhead in the middle of the night. I slept very well. 

The next morning, we got back in the car and drove south to Moldova. The roads were practically empty, and we made it to the border in three hours. The guards were kind to us. They gave us some food and water. 

I felt safe after crossing into Moldova, but I also felt deep sorrow about the situation in Ukraine. I had tears in my eyes whenever I thought about my homeland: the people who were still there and the ones who had died, the buildings being destroyed and what my future would look like. I didn’t know when I would come back.

READ: My love for the giant that is Ukraine

At this point, we still didn’t have a solid plan. We drove through Moldova and into Romania. While driving, we decided we should go to Beirut, where Amir and his girlfriend were. After a night in Romania, we drove for another full day to Debrecen, a town just over the border in Hungary, where we were reunited with my parents, Iryna, her husband and their daughters.

Seeing my family again was incredibly emotional. There were many tears. We didn’t say anything for a long time; we just hugged and held each other. My mom and Iryna cried; my dad was silent. The two little girls were jumping up and down and hugging me and Nazar. I was so relieved to see everyone again and to know we were safe. 

We all stayed in an Airbnb in Debrecen for a night, and then my dad drove my sister and her family to Italy, where they had a friend from Makariv. I didn’t know when we would see each other again. 

Yaroslava and Nazar, April 10th, 2022.

My son, my husband, Marichka and I took the train to Budapest, where we bought tickets to fly to Beirut the next day. Unfortunately, we couldn’t bring Lola, but we found an animal shelter in Budapest that was able to look after her. There were lots of tears when Marichka said goodbye to Lola.

We arrived in Beirut around 3 a.m. Amir and Natasha came to pick us up. When he saw us coming out of the airport, Amir started waving and calling, “Mom, mom!” We were overwhelmed to see each other after so much trauma and separation. I hugged him and told him how much I had missed him. The next day, in the excitement of the family reunion, Amir proposed to Natasha. We were thrilled to celebrate their engagement. 

My husband’s friend went to stay with his family and the rest of us slept at Yasser’s mother’s apartment. She only gets about two hours of electricity a day and no internet. So on our first morning in Beirut, Marichka and I went to Starbucks to join our school meetings. Most students and teachers were still in Western Ukraine, but some were in places like Poland, Germany, France, Cyprus or Greece. Marichka and I prepared for this day carefully. We wrote a speech to tell our staff and students how happy we were to see them and how much we missed them.

It was very cold in Beirut, only five or six degrees Celsius indoors, and the apartment had no heating. We slept in our pyjamas and coats under three blankets. After six nights, we realized Beirut wasn’t the best place for us to stay long-term. It was intolerably cold, and the limited electricity and internet in the house made it difficult for me to do my job. Yasser and I decided that Nazar and I, who both have Canadian citizenship, would fly to Toronto, where Yasser’s brother lives. Yasser would stay in Beirut and Marichka, Amir and Natasha would go back to Budapest, where Natasha’s mother was staying. It was difficult for me to leave my family again, but it helped knowing that Marichka, Amir and Natasha would stay together. They are now sharing a two-bedroom apartment, and Marichka was able to reunite with Lola. 

Nazar and I arrived in Toronto on March 23. A friend picked me up from the airport. She’s Ukrainian-Canadian and had visited my schools in Kyiv a few years ago. Her son is the same age as Nazar, and they used to talk to each other on FaceTime. It was nice to see them, but I felt depressed. When we landed, all I could see were grey skies, yellow grass and empty streets. My friend drove us to an apartment in Mississauga, which my brother-in-law owns and usually rents out. He had set up some basic furniture for us, and my friend went and got us groceries. 

Dib with her father, Amir, Iryna and nieces in her backyard garden at home in Kyiv.

For the first several days, Nazar told me every hour that he wanted to go home. He said, “I want my brother and my father. I want to be with my family again.” It helped him that we had my friend and her son for support. Nazar now attends a school 10 minutes away from the apartment where there are many other students from Ukraine. People from the area donated school uniforms, stationery, backpacks and school supplies for the kids who had fled the war. It was heartwarming to see the community come together for us.

On Friday, March 25, two days after we arrived in Toronto, I went back online for our school’s morning meeting. Because of the time difference with Ukraine, I had to be up at 3 a.m. It became hard to wake up so early every day, so now I only make it to the morning meeting twice a week. I still see Marichka online, which helps me feel less alone. We meet for two or three hours every day. 

It’s been reassuring for our students to have some routine and familiarity by continuing their lessons online and seeing their teachers and friends, even though everyone is still scared about the war. Several schools in my hometown, Makariv, have been destroyed, so we’re connecting with students there and including them in our online lessons. In between classes, our teachers are making meals for soldiers and sewing camouflage netting for the army. This is a big strength of our nation. We have big hearts and we always want to help. We like to give more than we take. 

My days are now full of meetings and organizing humanitarian aid. I have close friends who are doctors and nurses at hospitals in Ukraine that are running out of medical supplies. I’m coordinating with teachers in Western Ukraine to purchase supplies and ship them to the hospitals through the postal service, which is thankfully still running. Parents from my schools in Ukraine are sending donations for medical supplies, and I’m contributing what I can from my savings. 

MORE: What it takes to truly fight for freedom in Ukraine

Nazar is doing well at his new school, but he’s still struggling. The other day, while he was putting on his new school uniform, he told me with tears in his eyes how much he wished he was putting on his old Ukrainian school uniform and going back to his old school. It was painful to see—he usually doesn’t cry. Every day he asks me when we can go back home. He says he is saving his money, and when we get back to Ukraine he is going to buy flowers for President Zelensky as a thank you for his bravery.  

Our move to Canada isn’t permanent. We’ll stay here until the end of Nazar’s school year and hopefully return in the summer if things are better in Ukraine. Neighbours often send me photos of my house and every time I see it, I cry. I talk to my house and say, “Please, just wait until I’m back.” Soon I will go to my backyard and I will water the plants and trees in my garden.

Before the war, I was a strong, happy, enthusiastic person. I never cried. Now, I cry every day. I feel sorrow and sadness in a way I’ve never felt before. The other day, I went to a Ukrainian store and bought some Ukrainian chocolates and sweets. I ate them and wept. It’s as if these sweets are a part of my land. I miss it so much, this feeling of home.

This article appears in print in the June 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Worlds away from home.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post My escape from Ukraine to Canada appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Fully stocked, service-ready ambulances are among the most-needed items on the frontlines of the war in Ukraine. In early April, Andrew Mills, 36, and Melissa Sims, 38—two advanced-care paramedics who work on the same platoon in Victoria, B.C.—launched an ambitious fundraising campaign to raise $20,000, fly to Poland, buy an ambulance and drive it across the Ukrainian border. On a three-day journey, with the sounds of shelling in the background, their initial goal transformed into a much greater mission. This is their story:

ANDREW MILLS: Watching from afar, we saw the war shift quickly from a military war to one focused on targeting civilians, paramedics and other responders on the frontlines. The shelling of ambulances hit home for us. There was a plea from volunteer paramedic organizations in Ukraine saying: please, please send us ambulances.

One night, over a glass of red wine, I googled “used ambulances in Europe.” I found one in Poland and sent a message to a group chat of colleagues: “Anybody want to drive this ambulance to Ukraine with me?” Within 30 seconds, Melissa replied with a simple, “I’m in!”

MELISSA SIMS: I never had any real doubts or reservations. After talking to Andrew, I found an NGO called the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital (PFVMH)—a group of medics on the frontlines of the war who work with the Ukrainian state—and asked them if they could use another ambulance. They got back to us by the morning with an overwhelming “Yes, please.”

ANDREW: That turned my vague idea into something tangible. But we were unsure if we could come up with that much money. The timeline was tight, because the need was so pressing. We decided we were going to get them an ambulance no matter what.

We set up a fundraiser on Donately and it exploded, in large part because our paramedic colleagues took it to heart and shared it with their family and friends. I think they were similarly inspired by seeing not only the plight of everyday Ukrainians but paramedics and first responders. They got on board in a really big way. We went from an aspirational goal of $20,000 to raising over $120,000 over the course of two and a half weeks, which meant we could afford to get three ambulances and a bunch of supplies.

MELISSA: Finding the ambulances was no small feat. We did our best to source used ambulances in advance, with the help of a Polish colleague in Vancouver, Magda Wegner-Powala, who called dealers throughout Poland. The day before we were set to leave, we found out they had been sold.

***

ANDREW: On Sunday, April 17, we got on the plane to Warsaw with more than a hundred thousand dollars raised—and zero ambulances secured. The pressure was enormous, the stress was immense, and the logistical challenge was very real. Thankfully, while we were flying, Magda and her friend, Lukasz (who ended up being our interpreter, driver and overall fixer) had found multiple excellent options. Meanwhile, we were coordinating two other B.C. paramedics on the ground in Poland—Jeff Burko and his son, Max, who had been working to obtain medical supplies. A new plan was hatched to fill the ambulances with medical gear and deliver them to Ukraine fully stocked.

Inspecting the fleet in Chomeranice, Poland.

MELISSA: On Tuesday morning, we picked up Lukasz at the train station and went to see our very first ambulance in Plonsk, about an hour’s drive north of Warsaw. We were a little concerned because the tires looked bald and we thought there might be a small oil leak. We took it to a heavy-duty mechanic and transmission service nearby. When we asked how much we owed them, they said, “Nothing, thank you for what you’re doing,” and refused to take payment.

On the way to the mechanic, we’d had a long chat with Lukasz, who explained that paramedics were facing shortages of everything from food and water to basic feminine hygiene supplies. We realized that had to be a part of our mission. You can provide an ambulance, but if the paramedics can’t take care of themselves then the ambulance is useless. We spent the rest of Tuesday searching Warsaw for supplies, from water purification tablets and dehydrated meals to portable stoves.

ANDREW: Later that day, we drove south to Krakow, where we picked up Rick, a retired fire captain from the Victoria area on his way to volunteer on the frontlines. He donated some defibrillators to our cause and offered to drive one of the ambulances.

We drove to a small lakeside town in southern Poland called Chomeranice to see our second and third ambulances. We drove our second ambulance to our hotel, but the third one had a mechanical problem with the stretcher.

MELISSA: Unfortunately, they couldn’t fix the stretcher. But amazingly, Lukasz came through and arranged with the seller to purchase a like-new ambulance later in the week after we had left. (Editor’s note: After this interview, Mills and Sims confirmed that Lukasz delivered the third ambulance later that week and made it safely home to Poland.)

As we headed towards the Ukraine border, Lukasz got a message from Centrum Pomocy Humanitarnej w Szegini, the humanitarian organization he had been working with—the only one on the Ukrainian side of the border between Medya (Poland) and Shehyni (Ukraine). They were entirely out of food and sanitary supplies. So we made a stop at a grocery store and stocked four giant carts full of food and sanitary supplies.

(l to r) Rick, Andrew, and Melissa.

ANDREW: It took five hours to cross the border, even taking the humanitarian route. We started handing out chocolate bars to border guards. Guys with big guns were stuffing four bars into their pockets and thanking us in broken English. It was very powerful. When you’re hungry, stressed and tired, a chocolate bar goes a long way.

MELISSA: We were overwhelmed. Lukasz was driving a nine-passenger rental van loaded with supplies, but it wasn’t allowed into Ukraine. So we had to stuff all these supplies into the ambulances, and Lukasz had to turn around and drive our rental vehicle back to Poland. Andrew and Rick the fire captain made it through customs first—I sent them ahead and said I’d meet them on the other side. But when I finally made it through, suddenly my cellphone data failed and I lost the map I’d been using. So now I was driving around the border of Ukraine trying to figure out what to do. I tried calling Andrew, but without data we had no way to get in touch with each other.

It was so chaotic and crowded with people trying to make it into Poland. I was making U-turn after U-turn trying to figure out where to go. Andrew finally found me parked on the side of the road.

ANDREW: Dropping off the ambulances was hurried. We were on the side of the road, exhausted and starving. The PFVMH volunteers had been waiting hours for us at the border. Nobody spoke each other’s languages. We knew that we had to get all the food out of the ambulance, and then they wanted to start driving because there are curfews and nightfall was nearing. They were all wearing army uniforms. One guy gave us both hugs. We were using Google Translate to try to thank them but they just want to get going because, well, there’s a war on and they have things to do. The rest of them gave us quick handshakes and drove off into the sunset, taking Rick with them, who was heading onwards to volunteer with firefighters on the frontlines.

PFVMH volunteers loading supplies in Shehyni, Ukraine.

At this point, having unloaded the food from the ambulances, Melissa and I were standing in the pouring rain on the side of a Ukrainian highway with thousands of dollars worth of food supplies. Our phones weren’t working properly, but I finally managed to get a hold of the humanitarian organization. They sent a car, but it only had two seats. They took all the food, quickly did a U-turn and drove away. Okay, I guess we’re walking back to Poland now.

We were about a kilometre from the border. We had our stuff, including a backpack with about $30,000 in it, because we still had to give the money to Lukasz for that third ambulance. We were carrying cash because there was no time to wait for bank transfers. It was getting dark and we were feeling vulnerable; we knew that paramedics and other responders are actively being kidnapped in Ukraine.

We were just about to walk into the borderline when Lukasz appeared out of nowhere, having finally crossed back into Ukraine from Poland. He gave us both enormous hugs and said, “Come come, you have to meet my friends.” So he took us back into the humanitarian area and introduced us to everybody, including his good friend Roman, a barista from southern Ukraine.

They had set up a makeshift coffee shop in this little shack on the border, with a four-head Italian espresso maker. He had craft beans from all the hipster coffee shops in Ukraine, and homemade baked goods from Ukrainian babushkas. “Do you want a ristretto, cappuccino, cortado, flat white, latte?” Roman asked. It was incredibly surreal. And of course, we were hungry and tired, so coffee and homemade snacks were amazing. He gave us each a bag of coffee from what he says is the best coffee shop in Kyiv. And then he insisted on recording a thank you video to us in Ukrainian, which Lukasz translated live. I’m choking up again just thinking about it.

There was something so human and familiar about being given a bag of coffee in a war zone of all places. This hint of normalcy, and the commonality of humanity. Before we knew it, Lukasz said, “We have to go. It’s getting dark.”

MELISSA: We were at customs waiting in a queue on the Ukraine side when all of a sudden in the distance we heard: Boom! Boom! Boom! In Victoria, we often hear booms like that, but it’s just construction. But it was the shelling. No one seemed phased by it except us. That was the first time I truly felt nervous about our safety. We went in very aware of the dangers, but hearing the sounds of war that close, that’s when it hit home.

By the time we got through the border, it was pitch black and pouring rain. We went with a stream of Ukrainian refugees. Grandmas with endless bags, young children crying and being carried. There was a boy just in front of us who had just turned 18 and was turned away from leaving since adult men can’t leave the country right now. He looked so sad and dejected. The rest of his family had to carry on without him.

We made it through and began the six-hour drive back to Warsaw to get on our flights back home.

Re-entering Poland at the Medya-Shehyni border.

ANDREW: In total, we spent $70,000 on ambulances, $30,000 on trauma and medical gear, $5,000 on personal survival kits for the paramedics—all of those donations were to go to the PFVMH—and $10,000 in food and sanitary supplies to the humanitarian group on the Ukrainian side.

Now that we’re home, we’re still pressing on with our fundraiser. As the PFVMH’s operations shift eastward, where the road network isn’t as developed, they’re doubling down on their appeal for armoured and all-terrain ambulances. Phase two will be trying to cover the cost of one, which is more than $50,000.

The plan is to either do the delivery ourselves again or send someone we trust. This trip underscored the need for people invested in the mission to be present and figure things out on the fly, because there are so many things that can go wrong along the way.

Looking back on the experience, it feels dreamlike. Like, did any of this actually happen? We were running on so little sleep that we were in almost this delirious, intoxicated mindset. We were so fatigued. Yet there was no choice but to press on.

To donate to Ambulances for Ukraine, click here.

The post ‘Anybody want to drive this ambulance to Ukraine?’ appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The planet is, quite literally, on fire: a third of humanity is now exposed to deadly heat stress. Nearly a million species are facing extinction, and a global pandemic still lingers. Extreme weather is increasing in frequency and intensity, and the future is looking even more dire: UN Secretary-General António Guterres calls the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.

Small wonder, then, that eco-anxiety is on the rise, particularly among those young enough to know that they—and their children—are heirs to a damaged and diminished world. Last year, Caroline Hickman, a specialist in the burgeoning field of climate psychology at the University of Bath in the U.K., reported on a study she co-authored that surveyed 10,000 youths aged 16 to 25 across 10 countries. Half reported feelings of anger, helplessness and shame—emotions exacerbated by the belief that their governments were lying to them about delivering on green and humane policies. Some are outright refusing to plan for a future preordained to be nasty, brutish and short. As for their so-called “eco-­reproductive concerns,” the results were jarring: 40 per cent of respondents expressed a reluctance to have children.

At 35, Britt Wray, author of the new book Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis, falls outside of Hickman’s respondent pool, but she, too, has heard the warnings and witnessed inaction her whole life. Wray’s book is an extraordinary exploration of the emotional and psychological toll environmental chaos is already exacting. It’s also a road map out from under that burden, made all the more compelling by the way it tracks her own journey. Born and raised in Toronto, Wray earned a Ph.D. in science communication at the University of Copenhagen. She is now a cross-appointed postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Stanford University in California, studying the implications of the climate crisis on mental health. She knows the existential angst—and its corrosive effects—intimately.

These fears once buffeted Wray badly, leaving her feeling isolated, despairing and uncertain of the wisdom and morality of bringing children into the world. Now, she’s realized that there is still an opportunity to mitigate the worst outcomes. She’s able to visualize a better future for herself and, above all, for her seven-month-old son, Atlas—a child of our times in every conceivable way. “Researching and writing this book brought me to a position where I could have him,” says Wray. “There is a direct line from the radical hope my findings gave me to Atlas. If I were left up to my own ruminations, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to dig myself out of that hole and see having him.”

***

Growing up, Wray was as attuned to climate crisis projections as any millennial, but far from obsessed. That changed rapidly after she enrolled at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in 2004, majoring in biology. The sixth mass extinction, the ongoing annihilation of habitats and wildlife—whose populations have dropped by more than two-thirds since 1970—is inextricably linked to human resource extraction. It was a crisis impossible for a biology student to ignore. “A lot of my courses were focused on conservation biology and ecology,” she recalls. “Through it all, I was constantly bearing witness to more data about population decline, species decline, anthropogenic effects on wildlands—these were my first environmental stressors.” Wray was soon fixated on climate change, immersing herself in the literature and becoming less interested in doing science than developing innovative ways of spreading news of its discoveries. “I wanted to bring a creative storytelling angle to what I was learning,” she says.

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In 2015, during her doctoral studies in Copenhagen, she met her future husband, Sebastian Damm Wray—not through her climate activism but in an equally modern way: on Tinder. Denmark, of course, was particularly attuned to the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit to effect meaningful reductions in carbon emissions. As a result, Wray moved ever deeper into climate worry. She read one IPCC report after another: most were concerned with the planet reaching tipping points that would destroy food and water supplies. All of them insisted that humanity was running out of time to avoid the worst outcomes.

In 2017, when she and Sebastian first started talking about having a child, Wray’s response was a visceral one. “A deep sense of grief and despair came crashing over me when I considered what it would mean to deliver a child into this world,” she writes in Generation Dread. Desperate to see what her peers felt, Wray started reaching out to experts and, via social media, to ordinary people, parents and non-parents alike. There, she found a well-established—if largely underground—river of thought on human conception, one that was rapidly devolving under the pressure of eco-anxiety.

This kind of anti-natalist thinking isn’t new: there is a long-running tradition of it, found as far back as Ancient Greek philosophy and early Christianity. It argues that life always ends badly and should be stopped from even beginning. (Babies, as the second-century Christian Encratites put it, were merely “fresh fodder for death.”) Since the 1990s, proponents of voluntary human extinction have proclaimed that the only way humanity can save life on this planet is by a slow-motion mass suicide, protecting the biosphere by ceasing to procreate. Academics have pointed to the effects environmental degradation is already having on involuntary human infertility: sperm counts in Western countries have dropped by half since 1973, which correlates with rising pollution and heat levels.

More pertinent to Wray were the women of childbearing age who delayed having children due to contemporary socioeconomic factors: the end of job security, high housing costs and lengthy educations. All of these markers of adulthood were being affected by climate change. Wray took note of how the label “selfish”—once levelled at adults who didn’t have children—was beginning to apply to those who did. There was one main consideration upholding child hesitation among the climate-aware: the pressure every new child puts on the environment. In the emissions-pumping Americas, the answer is, a lot—the average American child adds more than 9,000 cubic metric tonnes of carbon to their parents’ carbon footprint, while a Bangladeshi child adds only 56 tonnes to theirs.

Wray, meanwhile, was considering a different question: what havoc would a deteriorating world wreak on the health, happiness and security of a child? During her research, she found many who shared that fear. She spoke with a young mother who had waking nightmares the whole time she was pregnant with her son. “I had all these catastrophic images in my head,” she said. “Of me running with my child and having nowhere to sleep, or of us starving, or him experiencing his parents dying.” Wray also spoke with teenagers who were angry that their parents had brought them into a world spiralling downward. “What haunted me was the possibility that if we had a kid, they’d grow up and become aware of what’s happening. That they’d turn to us one day, understanding that we knew all of this was coming, and yet still chose to put them here . . .” says Wray, trailing off. “Would the situation ever become so oppressive that they would really rather not have been born?”

The contemporary, climate-driven movement broke into popular consciousness when BirthStrike was founded in Britain in 2018. Its founders were a group of millennials who, as much as they wanted children of their own, believed reproduction was both dangerous for children and immoral given our collective environmental situation. A year later, BirthStrike changed its name to Grieving Parenthood in the Climate Crisis, or GPCC, in order to distance itself from “populationism,” the belief that too many people were the root cause of climate deterioration. The GPCC wanted to be clear that its members’ child-bearing hesitation is linked not to the size of the world’s population, but to individual carbon footprints. In that way of thinking, they were not alone: a more amorphous school of thought known as GINK (Green Inclination, No Kids) is now flourishing. Even prominent politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have gone on record asking, “Is it okay still to have children?”

Britt Wray.

Wray says she was particularly affected by perspectives of people from historically marginalized groups—populations who are already on the front lines, whose lives and culture are intimately linked to land and water. Indigenous peoples around the world are disproportionately threatened by climate change. Yet Anishinaabe author Waubgeshig Rice, author of the climate-crisis thriller Moon of the Crusted Snow, told Wray he didn’t know of anyone from his Wasauksing First Nation, 250 kilometres north of Toronto, who’d decided against having kids for environmental reasons. In his community, Rice explained, children are essential, both as a means and living symbol of cultural continuity. It’s being able to say, “We are still here—the future includes us.” It was a message echoed by Black women Wray interviewed, including her friend, the anti-racism activist Rachel Ricketts. While expressing compassion for Wray’s personal dilemma, Ricketts pointed out that anxiety was nothing new for her people. “Welcome to having to worry about the livelihood of your children,” she said. “My mother had to do it, my mother’s mother had to do it. My ancestors had their children stolen from them and sold.”

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Hearing that message of certainty from communities whose children have been taken from them—in living memory, no less—and who are still seeking their unmarked and lost graves, had a powerful effect on Wray. She realized how much of her fear arose from a place of privilege. “Those who have had secure, comfortable lives, it forms their benchmark for existence. That can be very fundamentally shaken by climate awareness,” Wray says. “So, okay, middle-class white girl is afraid because the world doesn’t feel safe anymore. It is good to realize that many people—people who have not had the luxury of feeling secure, who know the world is full of tears—they find ways of cultivating joy amidst the tragedy.”

***

Wray still wasn’t sure. At first, her conversations with other climate-aware people—and the hope they provided—barely balanced out the emotional toll of her everyday communications work: “It was eight-plus hours a day of paying attention to new reports on the climate crisis and to the lack of effective action.” Her eco-anxiety remained high and, at times, crippling. She was beginning to realize she couldn’t even talk about a shared future with Sebastian, the person she loved most, without applying what she calls “a filter of apocalyptic possibility.”

In one intense 24-hour period in Denmark, Wray engaged in an emotional late-night talk with friends about the magnitude of the climate crisis, burst into tears with another friend at breakfast the next morning, and dined with her father-in-law as he made polite but insistent inquiries about grandchildren. She followed that with even more tears on the train ride home. When Wray read Caroline Hickman’s four-stage “eco-anxiety conceptual framework”—a list of increasingly intense symptoms that allows therapists to place patients along a spectrum—she easily saw herself in the “Significant” group, the last stage before “Severe,” and the first where people choose to forgo having children.

And yet Wray’s longing for a child grew over the years, even as her existential dread remained immovable. Almost all the pressure she felt was on the pro-child side: her own desire; Sebastian’s desire; the expectations of both families; helplessly watching two clocks simultaneously tick toward midnight (the entire planetary ecosystem and her own fertility). She came to believe that a child represented “skin in the game,” providing an ever-urgent incentive to fight for a better world.

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In 2018, the Wrays moved to the U.S., first to New York and then later to California, when Sebastian, a diplomat, took a role as the chief strategic advisor to Denmark’s tech ambassador to Silicon Valley. Wray took up the Stanford portion of her fellowship. The biggest shift, though, was in her consciousness, prompted by the research she gathered and internalized while writing Generation Dread between 2017 and 2020. Gone are the breakdown crying fits she once had. “I found not only the coping tools,” she says, “but just as importantly, others who mirror my feelings and validate them, when once I thought I was really alone. That’s what makes you feel like you’re crazy.”

In the end, there was no eureka moment that pushed her toward motherhood. Wray’s mindset changed as she researched, gleaning insights and advice from climate therapists, and full of admiration for the hard-won resilience of the historically marginalized. Eco-anxiety is more than understandable: it is justified, she writes. We ought to mourn the coming losses to the natural order—and to human civilization. At the same time, we should do what we can to save what’s left: by 2020, she and Sebastian simply decided to have a child, and in January 2021, they laughed and cried over a positive pregnancy test.

If Generation Dread has one overriding theme, it’s that community saves, and that trust and mutual care are its foundations. “I learned to get a grip on my own emotions and develop much more flexible thinking around my child-bearing dilemma,” says Wray. “The basic question changed from, ‘Is it okay to have a child?’ to ‘What’s required when one decides to have a child today?’ How do we parent in the climate crisis?” Now that her book is done, there is time for Wray to probe that question in day-to-day life. “We’re sleep training,” she says. “Atlas is smiling and laughing and bringing a lot of joy.” Good news for our turbulent world.

This article appears in print in the May 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Earth mother.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post Is it ethical to have kids in the climate crisis? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

It was supposed to be just another climbing day. On a windless, warm Saturday in September of 2003, Sandy Fransham, her partner, John Ionescu, and their friend Gerry Drotar headed into the mountains west of Calgary. They weren’t planning to push the limits of their capabilities, or to court danger. All three were experienced recreational rock climbers and the route they had selected, a climb called Bonanza, was moderate for their skills.

It was remote, though, in a wilderness area north of Banff and Canmore that was not accessible by car. And it was long: 260 metres high, or seven pitches to a climber—roughly speaking, seven lengths of the long rope they had carried with them on the short hike from the trailhead.

Ionescu, a 35-year-old engineer, grew up leading an adventurous life in his native Romania. His approach had been DIY by necessity: climbing with friends on homemade gear and sewing his own down clothing for expeditions. Fransham, a 30-year-old high school math teacher, had come to climbing in her 20s. The pair met through the Calgary chapter of the Alpine Club of Canada, a national group that connects like-minded outdoors lovers for events and excursions. They had met Drotar, who worked for Greyhound, through the group, too.

In traditional rock climbing, members of a group take turns as the lead climber, ascending using their hands and feet to find leverage on the irregularities in the rock and inserting specialized gear into the cracks they find along the way. They clip their rope into each piece of gear as they climb, and when they fall, they count on the gear to catch them.

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Fransham and Drotar led the way up the first two pitches of the route, and then it was Ionescu’s turn to climb first. He went up and to the left of the other two, who waited and watched on a small ledge below. He was working his way through a particularly smooth, flat section of rock. Fransham could see that he was struggling. As his position became tenuous, and he looked around for somewhere to place another piece of gear, she whispered: “He’s going to fall.” Moments later, Ionescu came unstuck from the rock wall and plummeted.

When his weight hit his highest piece of gear, it ripped out from the crack where he’d placed it. He fell further, tumbling and slamming against the wall’s rough edges, and when the next piece of gear finally caught him, he was dangling below the ledge where Fransham and Drotar stood. He was semi-conscious and bleeding from his nose, but he was breathing.

They were high enough up on the rock face that Fransham’s phone found a couple of bars of service. She called 911 for help, and then Drotar secured her rope while she climbed down to where Ionescu hung in his harness. He was tall, and she was only five foot two, but she was fit and strong. “It’s amazing what you can do, physically, when you’re trying to save the life of the man you love,” she says.

She slung Ionescu’s dead weight across her back and climbed laterally, hauling him to another ledge below the one where Drotar stood. Soon, he stopped breathing. She began CPR and waited for the helicopter to arrive.

It took two different attempts with two different helicopters before rescuers were able to reach them on the steep terrain. During that time, another pair of climbers came over to help. At first, Ionescu occasionally stirred and tried to speak in Romanian, but as time passed he faded further. Fransham estimates that she performed CPR on Ionescu for two hours—too long to have any real hope of a good outcome, as she and anyone else with first-responder training knows. But neither Drotar nor the other climbers were going to tell her to stop.

When the helicopter lifted Ionescu away into the evening light and Fransham prepared herself to rappel down and follow him to the hospital, she shoved down any thoughts about the time that had passed, or his deteriorating condition. It was only when she arrived at the hospital in Banff and his two best friends met her at the front doors that the shock hit her. John was gone.

In the months that followed, Fransham moved through a fog of grief. At school, she found that speaking in front of the class forced her to focus her mind, but lesson planning and marking were hopeless. Eventually she took a stress leave and saw a series of counsellors. There were painful tasks to work through, like arranging for travel visas for Ionescu’s family in Romania so they could attend the funeral. And then there were the unexpected jabs of hurt, like the day his certificate of Canadian citizenship came in the mail. He had passed his test and completed the process not long before he died.

Fransham calls Mountain Muskox a gift that’s allowed her to help others and share her experiences. (Photograph by Allison Seto)

She returned to climbing quickly, but carefully, choosing companions who would understand if she became emotional. She struggled to explain her choice to head back into the mountains to her family. She had sympathy and support from the people around her, but sympathy, she found, didn’t teach her how to get through the fog. “I was so scared of being so damaged emotionally that I might as well just be dead,” she says. She was terrified of remaining stuck in grief—stuck, in a way, on that rock ledge.

Every year in Canada’s vast wild spaces, people out having fun or seeking adventure are killed or seriously injured. Those who survive these events are left with a particular flavour of trauma, one that is often mingled with feelings of guilt and shame. Some have been able to access traditional counselling or try out the various new therapies that are being developed for post-traumatic stress disorder. But many, suspecting that no one would understand their situation, have tried to move forward alone.

A new group based out of Canmore, Alberta, is trying to bridge that gap. They call themselves Mountain Muskox, referencing the shaggy Arctic herd animals that protect themselves by forming a tight defensive circle. The idea is to provide a peer support group for people who’ve experienced trauma while they work or play in the mountains: guides, first responders, athletes and anyone else in need. Mixing weekend warriors with some of Canada’s most accomplished mountaineers and climbers, the group is tearing down the silence that has traditionally shrouded trauma in outdoor sports.

***

There are a lot of ways to be hurt or killed in the outdoors. Hikers drown, climbers fall, skiers hit trees or are buried in avalanches. Rock climbing, ice climbing and mountaineering generate enough dangerous events that the American Alpine Club has published a book, Accidents in North American Climbing, every year since 1948, analyzing each disaster. Avalanches alone have killed more than 500 Canadians since 1970. There are risks from rockfall and snow slides, the adrenalin rush of whitewater and the slow creep of hypothermia.

There are also rich rewards. For many people, there’s no substitute for the sensory experience they find in the mountains: the crisp quality of the air, the way light plays on a snow-covered slope in the distance, the distinctly satisfying full-body exhaustion of a big day out. Adventurers thrive on the closeness of the bonds formed between climbing or hiking partners, and the way the physical and technical demands of mountain sports can clear and concentrate their minds. The inherent risks are often connected to all these things that make outdoor sports so appealing—and this can complicate a person’s recovery when things go wrong.

Geoff Powter is a veteran climber who was also a practising psychologist in Canmore for many years. “When I was counselling, I heard time and time again that people coming in were thankful they had a climber-therapist who they could talk to because they hadn’t had so much luck with ‘civilian’ counsellors,” he says. “Why? Because in their minds, the people they were talking to were criticizing mountain sports and trying to get them to explore things like leaving the sport, or questioning the community’s cultural norms around death as part of the game.”

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That disconnect is part of the reason therapy hasn’t traditionally been part of the culture of mountain sports, even though the risk of loss and trauma is baked in. Barry Blanchard, a climber and long-time professional mountain guide in the Canadian Rockies who’s one of the co-founders of Mountain Muskox, never heard about mental health care from the older mountain guides who mentored him. Blanchard, now 63, first found his way to therapy in 1986, after an accident killed two of his clients on a guided trip. The anchor holding him and his group on a steep snow slope sheared through the snow, sending them sliding. Their long fall brought an avalanche down with them. “I was probably one of the first mountain guides to be involved in therapy,” he says. He only wound up in counselling because a close friend connected him to a psychiatrist who had been a climber himself.

More than 35 years later, Blanchard is still working through the things he’s witnessed and experienced in the mountains. In 2019, he was seeing Janet McLeod, a Canmore-based psychologist, when he learned he was just one of a handful of her regular clients with similar stories: professional guides who had suffered losses in their work. McLeod suggested they get a group together. Initially it was just the four of them: McLeod, Blanchard, the accomplished ice climber and guide Sarah Hueniken, and another veteran mountain guide, Todd Guyn. “We’d meet every couple weeks and just talk,” says Blanchard. Speaking to people who shared similar experiences helped break through the isolation that can build up, and McLeod was able to help them process their emotions. “It was definitely something that helped us all, and we thought, ‘Yeah, it would be great if we can formalize this and bring it to a larger group of people,’ ” says Blanchard.

With logistical support from the Alpine Club of Canada, which signed on as a partner, they prepared a pilot program. They started with a dozen people from various backgrounds, gathered through their networks, along with two facilitators with experience leading sessions for each group meeting. The idea wasn’t to dwell on the details of the losses that had brought each person to the group. Instead it was about looking forward. What happens after the incident? What’s next?

***

After trying a few different therapists in the wake of John’s death, Sandy Fransham eventually joined a support program for people who’d lost their spouses, which included one-on-one sessions and group work. “That is where I finally felt like, okay, I got the help I needed,” she says. Even though most of the people in the group were much older—she was only 30 when John died—and most had lost their partners under very different circumstances, they still understood her situation, her moods, her sense of alienation. One day, she was in the grocery store, surrounded by people picking up milk or bread, and was filled with the urge to puncture the normalcy, to scream into the quiet aisles: “My boyfriend just died!” She didn’t, of course, but she did tell the group about it later. There was nothing that felt better, she says, than sharing a thought or feeling that might have seemed strange or inappropriate to someone outside their group and having the people in the circle around her nod their heads.

Thanks to the support program, Fransham found her way out of the fog. She stayed in Calgary, kept on climbing, continued to be an active volunteer in the Alpine Club of Canada chapter where she had first met John. Eventually she married another man she met through the Alpine Club—he was more of a skier than a climber, so they had things to teach each other—and they had two children, in 2008 and 2011.

Her kids grew, and soon they were able to participate in more and bigger outdoor adventures with her—and learn to climb. Wanting to refresh her old skills, she signed up for an ice climbing course, and that’s where she met Sarah Hueniken. She had heard about Hueniken’s recent loss: in March 2019, during a women’s climbing camp, two guides and their clients were finishing their day when an avalanche descended. One of the guides, a close friend of Hueniken’s and her camp manager, was killed. When Fransham approached Hueniken, asked about her loss and shared her own story, Hueniken told her about Mountain Muskox.

“This is a gift being given to me, right?” Fransham remembers thinking. “This was a perfect fit for me, to be able to help others and share my experience.” She had long wanted to find a way to pay forward what she’d learned, and here was the best opportunity she could have imagined. In early 2021, along with Blanchard and Hueniken, she became a member of the first Mountain Muskox circle. At a ranch on the outskirts of Canmore, they would meet biweekly for three-hour sessions.

Sandy Fransham, a high school math teacher, met John Ioneescu, an engineer who grew up clibing in his native Romania using homemade gear, through the Calgary chapter of the Alpine Club of Canada. (Courtesy of Sandy Fransham)

Their experiences spanned decades, from Blanchard’s accident in 1986 to much rawer, more recent pain. Some members of the group, like Fransham, were dealing with a singular, catastrophic event; others had faced a more gradual accumulation of trauma in the mountains. Marc Lomas was one of them. He’d moved to Banff soon after high school and worked his way up from washing dishes in a local restaurant to working on the ski patrol at a major resort. In 2005, on the opening day of his second season on patrol, he high-fived a buddy at the top of a run. They skied off in separate directions, but a short while later, Lomas was called to an accident site. The patient was his friend, who had fallen and hit his head. He didn’t make it. It was the first of many fatalities and serious injuries he would respond to.

He spent another decade as a ski patroller, and eventually as an avalanche forecaster, but increasingly, he struggled to force himself to take calls he’d once jumped at. He experienced panic attacks, nightmares and flashbacks. Eventually he was diagnosed with PTSD and realized he could no longer function effectively as a first responder. “Even in 2015,” he says, “the attitude was still very much, ‘You cry into your corn flakes and go to work.’ You didn’t talk about it.” He didn’t know anyone else who had taken time off to recover from trauma, and he felt cut off from the community that had been his world since high school.

After several years of working with a few therapists and struggling to return to work as a fully functioning ski patroller—or even to return to skiing at all—Lomas found his way to Janet McLeod’s practice. He’d been seeing her for a year when she introduced him to Mountain Muskox. He describes his work with the group as life-changing. The power was in the group members’ shared experiences—there was no need to dwell on the worst moments, or explain himself. Lomas doesn’t even know the details of some of the other members’ accidents or losses. The fact of their similar backgrounds provided a baseline of trust and understanding. “Anybody who’s been in a good friendship or relationship or therapy knows that the ability to be vulnerable is when some of the real magic happens,” he says. Opening up about his present and his future, without wallowing in the past, helped him work through his symptoms. “I don’t go out and ski crazy couloirs or anything like that anymore,” he says, “but I can go out for a day of ski touring and enjoy it, and not just be in a state of panic the whole time.” There are still hard times, but he has the tools to enjoy the good moments, and to sit with the discomfort when it comes. Now, at 38, he’s retraining as an electrician.

Aline Garant, who has volunteered on a search-and-rescue team near Calgary for a decade and, as a result, witnessed some hard scenes, calls the group a lifeline. Every member has already attended one-on-one counselling—that’s a prerequisite for joining—and Garant says that kind of individual therapy has a crucial role in the early stages of trauma. “And then what?” she says. Months pass, years pass. The crisis is behind you, but healing from trauma is not as simple as getting the cast off a broken leg. “That support becomes so sporadic that you can easily fall down the crevice again and lose your bearing.” The group serves as a bridge that carries its members back into everyday life.

One thing each Muskox member agrees on: the group works in part because it offers them the chance to help each other, not just themselves. Oakley Werenka is a 29-year-old recreational climber who joined the group after witnessing fatal climbing accidents in two consecutive summers. “Initially, I was reaching out more for myself,” he says. “But as it progressed, it changed into something more than that.” He found satisfaction in being able to help the other members of the group, answering their questions or simply offering support and solidarity, and that in turn helped him. That effect was intentional. “Part of the recovery process is this transcendent experience of being able to give back to other people in the community,” says McLeod.

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That was what Sandy Fransham was seeking when she joined the group. It’s now been 19 years since Ionescu’s death, and she feels she has something to offer others who were newer to their losses. Sometimes the group’s work is hard on her—a reminder that nobody is ever fully healed from these sorts of events. “My heart hurts, my chest physically hurts, when I see other people hurting,” she says. Still, it feels good to talk openly about the terrain she’s already covered, to be able to answer hard questions like: What was it like for you to enter into a new relationship? How does your grief for John live alongside your love for your husband and your kids?

The first cohort still gathers when they can. At one recent meeting, their first informal one without a therapist present, Fransham stepped into the lead as a facilitator for the first time. It was a subtle shift from her role as a group member—their approach has always been collaborative, rather than top-down, but this time she found herself tracking the conversation, and the emotions flowing below it, more closely. Was anyone in particular struggling? Was there something they hadn’t quite managed to say that she should bring up again at a better moment?

The group’s work emphasizes emotional self-awareness: participants learn to observe their feelings, their trauma responses, and to manage their capacity in their daily lives accordingly. Fransham has come a long way and it is empowering to realize that she now has the capacity, the emotional space, to focus on other people’s grief, and to give back.

She hopes to keep serving as a facilitator as Mountain Muskox welcomes new cohorts and launches regional circles in other mountain towns, as do other members of the pilot group. The plan is for each group to provide the seeds for the next. Trauma can ripple outward from its initial source, touching people in a spreading ring of pain, but so too can healing.

This article appears in print in the May 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “The hardest climb.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post The hardest climb appeared first on Macleans.ca.

There are too many patients: too many people with COVID, people who can’t breathe, people who are in psychiatric crises or feel chest pain or have overdosed or fallen or crashed their cars. They want nurses, family doctors, home care, psychiatrists and social workers. They need hospital beds, long-term care homes and affordable mental health programs—all of which are in short supply. But there is 911; there is always 911. The problem is there are not enough paramedics to answer the call.

Emergency medical services across the country are in serious trouble. One COVID surge after another piled even more stress onto a system that was riddled with cracks long before the pandemic began. The number of 911 calls has been rising for at least a decade. At the same time, rampant overcrowding in emergency departments means paramedics get backed up in hospitals, where doctors and nurses are already swamped. During these periods, known as offload delays, they care for patients in hallways and ambulance bays, unable to move on to the next person in need.

A 2017 report commissioned by Defence Research and Development Canada’s Centre for Security Science identified approximately 38,000 paramedics across the country. One-third of respondents said they’d taken a medical leave in the two years leading up to the survey; just over 10 per cent said they’d taken one for their mental health.

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The instability in EMS has roots in a system dating back nearly 200 years. In 1832, a cholera outbreak in the town of York—now Toronto—led to the creation of the first known ambulance service in what would become Canada. The town approved a wooden “cholera cart” to tow sick patients away from crowded areas, sometimes straight to funeral homes. These carters, as they were called, did not provide medical care. They simply carried the dead and dying away from the living. Modern paramedics aren’t just ambulance drivers; the scope of their practice has broadened. In a single shift, they might pull someone out of a wrecked car, lift someone else off the floor and find a social worker for an unhoused person.

Lindsey Boechler, a former advanced care paramedic and a researcher at the Centre for Health Research, Improvement and Scholarship at Saskatchewan Polytechnic, studied paramedics across Canada in the early months of the pandemic. She hadn’t planned on doing a mental health study, but that’s what her research became. Paramedics told her that they anguished over how to care for patients in uncertain times. The rules changed from shift to shift, they said. One participant described a chaotic scene: “Four paramedics showed up and everybody had a different care plan. That’s how many times policies have changed.”

Many EMS services told their paramedics to stop intubating patients or using airway tools during COVID’s first wave, when PPE supplies were in question and the virus was poorly understood. To some, this seemed like a violation of their obligation to patients. “They believed they were inflicting harm and holding that burden on themselves,” says Boechler. EMS workers told her that they turned to alcohol. They missed going to the gym to blow off steam. Some separated themselves from their kids for months, uncertain of what they might bring home. One paramedic said she cried in her truck, undone because she couldn’t find a place to pee. All the public bathrooms were closed.

In the past 12 months, cities all over Canada have reported code reds, meaning there are no ambulances or paramedics available to help—no matter how critical the emergency. Toronto called one in January, and Waterloo, Ontario, called 11 in December alone. Between August 1 and December 6, 2021, Calgary and Edmonton were issuing red alerts every 90 minutes. Out east, Nova Scotia’s Standing Committee on Health heard the same story. The business manager of the local paramedics’ union said, “Today, the system is nearing the point of failure.”

The Canadian Occupational Projection System has estimated the need for another 4,000 paramedics by 2028. In addition to more personnel, experts and workers on the ground have proposed intuitive solutions to the EMS crisis: more trucks; more hospital beds; more of everything. Other ideas, like investments in community paramedics—those who provide care on a regular, non-emergency basis—are gaining traction. Mostly, paramedics seem to want recognition that they are skilled health care professionals, not carters, and that their work is a matter of life and death.

In January, a 95-year-old Vancouver man spent six hours on the floor of his apartment and survived. The next month, an elderly Québécois man died in an ambulance in a hospital garage as he waited to be tended to by staff. Each paramedic has a life, too, full of stories of resilience, coping and, sometimes, barely that. Here, they share their own.

(Photograph by Grady Mitchell)

Dave Deines

Vancouver, B.C.

I always knew I wanted to be a paramedic. I loved watching old episodes of Emergency! on TV when I was growing up. I joined the Canadian Forces as a medic in 1990. I was never deployed overseas with the military, but I’ve been deployed five times as a volunteer with the NGO Canadian Medical Assistance Teams. I went to Indonesia after the tsunami, then Pakistan, Bangladesh and China. I also went to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit.

When I started working in Victoria in 1995, if I did more than eight calls in a 12-hour shift, that would be extremely busy. Now, in Vancouver, crews regularly do 10, 12 or 14 calls every shift. The skills we have today are light years ahead of what we did when I was starting out. In some cases, we’re doing procedures that were historically reserved for physicians—like intubating a patient, or putting a needle into someone’s chest to relieve pressure in their lungs.

I’m the president of the Paramedic Association of Canada, and the provincial vice-president of the Ambulance Paramedics of B.C. I still get out and ride with crews, and I’m part of the urban search-and-rescue team here in Vancouver—that’s when I can just be a paramedic. My stress is different now than it was when I didn’t have these leadership roles. Back then, it was focused on individual patients or catastrophic calls. Now, my stress is more about trying to advance the entire profession.

We’ve seen a dramatic increase in the volume and complexity of the calls. That drives the frustration that front-line paramedics feel on a daily basis. For instance, we’ve been dealing with overdoses forever. What’s new is the substances we’re encountering. We see more potent drugs on the street. Toxic opioids are going around. Drug dealers don’t subscribe to quality control. In B.C., we’re seeing a trend in poly-overdoses, which involve opioids mixed with illicit drugs or other substances. Those patients are difficult to treat, because the respiratory depression can be more profound.

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What makes the current moment unique is a combination of the last three years: not just the opioid crisis, not just COVID, but climate disasters, too. We had the heat dome at the end of June. More than 800 people died, putting a huge strain on the paramedic service. In November, we had flooding and rainstorms. Any external factor that increases call volume puts additional demands on a service that’s operating at close to 100 per cent most of the time.

It’s exhausting to continually operate at those levels. Five years ago, you’d have time after a call to sit down and talk with your partner. We refer to them as “bumper chats,” conversations that allow you to physically, emotionally, psychologically place that call behind you and get ready for the next one. Now, those aren’t there.

Paramedics are resilient. We’re used to working in stressful situations. But from a national perspective, we need more boots on the ground. If you were to ask paramedics, “What’s the number-one thing that can be done?” it would be to recognize what we do, and provide support to help them do their job. It doesn’t matter where you go in Canada. The issues are generally the same. There are too many calls and not enough ambulances.

(Photograph by Erin Leydon)

Natalia Marijke Bourdages

Brampton, Ontario

I was born and raised outside of Tkarōn:to, and I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Guelph in biological sciences. I was thinking about medical school when I noticed an application deadline for a paramedic program at Humber College. I got in and instantly loved it. The job is fast-paced and unpredictable. I now work for Peel Regional Paramedic Services, covering the area where I grew up. Sometimes I even see someone I know during a shift.

For me, the most rewarding calls are the ones where I can get somebody access to the help they need. Before the pandemic, I went to a call for a trans woman who was having a mental health crisis and couldn’t reach her usual support people. She didn’t know what to do but knew she didn’t want to go to the hospital. I sat with her and listened. I opened up about also being a member of the queer community. I asked what helped with her anxiety and she said music, so we found some songs on her phone.

That’s the kind of call where someone is lost in the system. Those calls also put the paramedic in a weird place, because bringing someone to the hospital is what we are trained to do—but maybe that’s not always the best thing. It is an extreme balancing act to sit and listen to a patient when there are so many calls coming in. Of course, that’s not how paramedicine is taught: you learn what medications to administer and how to perform CPR, but the reality is more like community care. And you’re still needed out on the road. There’s no easy answer.

READ: The pandemic is breaking parents

When the pandemic began, I jumped at the opportunity to go into nursing homes to do testing. At the same time, as an Afro-Caribbean person, I was dealing with the anti-Black racism that became more visible after the murder of George Floyd. It was an extremely hard time to be a racialized person on the front lines. I had to take a mental health leave from work and was later diagnosed with PTSD.

I’m married, and my partner is an Indigenous birth worker. It was scary, trying not to bring the virus home. We’re lucky in that we have similar realms of work and a similar likelihood of exposure during the pandemic. We have been able to lean on each other during the difficult times.

After returning from my leave, I had the opportunity to do some shifts in the vaccine clinics. We were in the middle of the Delta surge, when Peel was hit hard. We were getting calls for people who had oxygen saturations lower than anything I’d ever seen before. Young people were dying. By the time Omicron arrived, all the paramedics were catching COVID. Many of us were already feeling extremely burnt out, and then we started losing our people. It’s a tough time, but I don’t want to make it sound like we’re not here. We are here. You can call 911 and we will be there to help.

(Photograph by Dustin Veitch)

Paul Hills

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

I’ve been doing this work for about 22 years now. When I started, I didn’t fully understand the gravity of what it would be like to deal with people in their most difficult hours. The idea was: This is a tough job, but you suck it up and do it. We didn’t talk about PTSD back then. It was just like, “Oh, he’s stressed.”

I joined the union leadership 15 years ago and became president about eight years ago. I began advocating for mental health awareness and provisions for our workers. We knew paramedics were struggling with stress, but I didn’t realize the stress going on inside me until it hit a crisis point. In 2016, I was called to the scene of a serious accident. After that, I started having short-term memory problems: I couldn’t even remember the name of my son’s school. My wife is a counsellor, and she’s been an amazing advocate for me, but I felt like I couldn’t even tell her. I was making plans for how to kill myself. I knew who I was going to text so they could come find me, instead of my family. I realized I needed help. I reached out to my family doctor for treatment. Four years later, I found myself in that position again, and got back into treatment. My faith helped me get through it all, too.

Right now, paramedics aren’t getting breaks. The added pressure of COVID is exposing cracks—lack of staff, lack of trucks, lack of adequate mental health treatment within a helpful timeline. It also added time on calls for PPE and decontamination.

Anytime the phone rings, it’s an emergency. And that person’s emergency might trump the ability of the paramedic to do something as basic as eat a meal. It affects our sleep. It affects our home lives. I see ephedrine abuse. I see caffeine pill abuse. If I’d invested in energy drinks 15 years ago, I would be retired by now; first responders drink those like water. These are things that people are using to cope.

It’s common for my dispatchers to call patients every 20 minutes when they’re waiting for an ambulance to say, “How are you doing? We’re really sorry. We’ll get you an ambulance as soon as we can.” Before COVID, we received about 30,000 calls annually. As of late 2021, we were at 38,000.

Some paramedics are working in the back hallways of hospitals, which is a band-aid on a system that’s broken. If we are backed up like that, the emergency department is flooded. If that’s happening, it’s because the hospital wards are full. It was going on before the pandemic, but COVID exacerbated all the existing problems. Hallway medicine is the canary in the coal mine.

(Photograph by Grady Mitchell)

Terrilyn Good

North Delta, British Columbia

When I was little, my dream was to be a doctor. Things panned out differently. I did a course in emergency childcare first aid in 2013, after my baby son had a seizure. After that, I worked as a youth-program coordinator in my home community of Gitanyow, a First Nations reserve along the Skeena River in northwestern British Columbia. I pushed for my employer to get me more first aid training because I spent so much time with kids. I kept thinking, “What if something happens?” My community is a long distance from help.

One evening, I was eating dinner with my kids and I got a call that someone had fainted. I did everything I could with my basic training, and stayed for 45 minutes until the ambulance came. The patient lived, and as the truck drove away, I realized that’s what I wanted to do. I started working with BC Ambulance in Kitwanga in December of 2016, and now I live and work in Delta.

I love not having a set script when I go to work. I see something different every day. It could be an elderly person who needs a lift off the floor or somebody in a life-or-death situation. Most of the time, people really appreciate what we’ve done, and they understand how challenging the job can be. I can see their relief when I walk in the door. Thank you. You’re here.

It’s hard to even remember what work was like before COVID—half of my career has taken place during the pandemic. When it started, I was just a baby medic trying to find my legs. Since then, I’ve visited hundreds of patients with COVID or COVID-like symptoms. Often, they’re very scared of the virus. Sometimes they don’t even want to go to the hospital. They just want reassurance, and someone to check that their vital signs are normal.

One of the first questions we ask now is, “Are you vaccinated?” Most people are, but people who aren’t can get very defensive. I’m not there to question somebody’s reasons for being unvaccinated; I’m there to help. We’re just required to ask so we can protect ourselves with proper PPE.

Everybody I work with seems like they’re one step away from taking leave. It’s not really an option for me because I’m a single mom. I’m proud to be a role model for First Nations women. I’m good at what I do, and I have some seniority in my job, even if it’s organized chaos. I want to do advanced life support training, but I’ll do that once my kids are older.

(Photograph by Ebti Nabag)

Patrick Suthers

Kingston, Ontario

I watched members of my family deal with cancer and chronic disease growing up, so I always wanted to work in health care. I stumbled across EMS through a friend who worked as a critical care paramedic. Five years ago, I decided to take the course at CTS Canadian Career College in Barrie, Ontario. I fell in love instantly. There aren’t many jobs where people willingly invite you into their houses, at any time of day. You meet them at their most vulnerable. It’s a huge privilege to do that.

I was primed to deal with high-acuity 911 calls, like car crashes, but it’s been much more of a social work job. We often deal with people who have fallen through the cracks, so to speak—people who regularly interact with the health care system, like the elderly and the marginalized. A small segment of the population makes up 90 per cent of our calls.

I was interested in why that was happening, so, about a year into my job, I decided to pursue an undergraduate degree in health sciences at Queen’s University. Currently, I’m doing a research project on community paramedicine. Plus, I work as a paramedic on the weekends.

At the beginning of the pandemic, there were so many unknowns, like, “Am I supposed to treat everyone as if they have COVID?” I understood the need for masks, but they made my work more difficult. I’m hearing-impaired and masks hamper my ability to communicate with patients and colleagues. I found that morally distressing. Early on, some services worried about PPE shortages and opted to use P100s, which look like construction masks. I worked on a resuscitation and I couldn’t hear a thing my partner was saying to me. It wasn’t the time to ask, “Can you repeat that?”

There’s not enough staff, not enough trucks, staff burnout and backlogs. The hardest calls now are probably the “VSAs,” which stands for vital signs absent. We tend to spend time with families in the aftermath, getting them a cup of coffee and easing them into the grieving process. Masks make it so much harder for us to be there for them in a non-clinical capacity—as people. We wonder whether we’d be putting people at risk by spending that time with them.

A big issue is that the public perceives us to be a scoop-and-go service, which our education prepares us for. Most calls are lower acuity—falls, mental health crises or the decline of the elderly. Some people are living in terrible conditions: I visited a man in his 80s who was waitlisted for long-term care. He called 911 because he fell off his couch, and it looked like he’d been sleeping there. Food was everywhere. School doesn’t prepare us for those challenges—and I’ve seen more of them as COVID has progressed.

(Photograph by Stephen Harris)

Noor Karfoul

Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island

I moved from Damascus, Syria, to Charlottetown in 2011 with my parents and younger brother. I was 15. My parents brought us here for more opportunity and a better education.

When I was in high school, my grandfather needed an emergency medical rescue back in Syria. He lived in the rural mountainside and got caught in an orchard fire. Military medics were able to stabilize him and get him to hospital. That opened my eyes to the value of EMS. My grandfather needed those medics to stay alive. He made it, but he has long-term health effects from smoke inhalation.

I wanted to go into EMS right after high school, but first I needed money. I worked as a culinary apprentice for a few years, and then went to Holland College to become a paramedic.

COVID started during the last months of my schooling. The day it was declared a pandemic, I was on a truck doing on-the-job training in Nova Scotia. There was so much uncertainty. The school had to reassess the liability of having students on the truck. There were initial concerns about a shortage of PPE and the likelihood of exposures. In the end, we came back to P.E.I. to do schooling online for the last month. I graduated in May of 2020.

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In school, we heard stories about how there was the occasional hard-earned slow day. I missed out on that. Our generation never had those. We work in pairs, mostly doing 12-hour shifts. If you’re lucky, you get to go home after that; most of the time, you stick around a bit longer to help out.

P.E.I. is an interesting situation for paramedics because we send patients to neighbouring provinces for specialized services, like neurosurgery or cardiology. We handle a lot of care for the aging population on the island. For me, the most rewarding aspect is our palliative patient program. We help with symptom management—pain, lightheadedness, nausea. You can’t rush those calls. It’s about bedside manner and patience. Sometimes you find yourself supporting the family, too, because there is a lot of stress involved in caring for a loved one at home.

The nature of the work makes it easy to get drawn in and not see how much it’s drawing out of you. My friends and family are there to say, “You need to take a step back. Take a breath.” I think about my grandfathers a lot lately. One passed away a few months ago; I really wanted to see him before he died. The other, who survived the fire, is sick again, too. I hope I get to see him soon, but I don’t know how to make that happen.

(Photograph by Lindsay J Ralph)

Josh Fisher

Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador

 I grew up in the United States. I did my paramedic training at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. After I graduated, I went to work in the middle of the state, which is basically the middle of nowhere.

I later ended up moving to Florida for work, where I met Jessica, a woman from Newfoundland who was visiting for holidays. That was that. We knew we wanted to get married, so I decided to move to Canada. I can work 40 hours here and make the same money as I made working 90 to 120 hours in the U.S.  I arrived in Newfoundland in September 2010, the same night that Hurricane Igor landed here. It’s fitting: I’ve been working around the weather ever since

I now work for the air ambulance program based out of Happy Valley-Goose Bay. My job is to serve the north coast and south coast of Labrador and get patients to hospitals—either Labrador Health Centre, which is in Goose Bay, or hospitals out of province. One of the quirks of Newfoundland is that, in the rural areas, they’re just starting to get around to naming streets. In some remote communities, homes have no address. It’s more like, Go to the white house and turn left and go three more houses and turn right and somebody will wave you down in the street.

Most hospitals in Newfoundland and Labrador don’t have intensive care units, and they’re not staffed to handle critical patients. For most of the pandemic, Newfoundland had a low COVID caseload, but the vrisu still affected us. Because there are so few facilities, the backlog and wait lists of patients built up quickly. We noticed our patients becoming sicker—much sicker than what we’re used to. The patients themselves didn’t think their complaints were severe enough to inundate the health system.

I hate having to say no to patients’ family members who want to travel with us. We move people over long distances, heading to hospitals that might be a full-day’s drive on remote roads, plus a ferry ride. We try to tell families that their loved one is in good hands. We call these separations “see ya laters” rather than “goodbyes.”

Paramedicine is kind of an offshoot of the healthcare system, yet never considered an integral part. So our workload has dramatically increased, but our resources have not. The stress is palpable. The quality of life isn’t great. We can’t keep staff. The turnover in the last two to three years is unprecedented. Schools are churning out paramedics as fast as they can but it’s not enough. You would think that as the pandemic winds down, things would ease up. In reality, it has gotten worse.

(Photograph by Colin Way)

Jessica Frith

Baker Lake, Nunavut 

I have been in EMS for almost 10 years and I’m not even 30 yet. I started working in very rural areas in Alberta and Northwest Saskatchewan, and then moved to the city for my Advanced Care Paramedic training in 2018. I ended up liking city life, even though I’m from a Saskatchewan town of 1200 people.

 The shortage of resources has become very noticeable in the last five years. Calgary and Edmonton make a lot of noise about red alerts—that’s when there are no ambulances available to respond to emergency calls—but other places are experiencing the same thing. They just don’t get as much attention. Offload delays are happening everywhere—not just Alberta, but across Canada and internationally, in the U.K. and Australia. It’s been like that for a long time, but it’s only been talked about by the public in the last six to nine months.

For paramedics [in general], there’s the obvious physical exhaustion, but I know so many personally who are off on mental-health leaves or are leaving ground ambulance altogether.

One of the straws that broke the camel’s back for me was hearing about a crew having to respond to a call in the very opposite end of Calgary— and it was for a cardiac arrest. There was desperation in their voices when asking dispatch if they were really the closest. A lot of people don’t move over, even when you’re coming with lights and sirens. 

I’d work overtime almost daily. I could be done work at 6:00 p.m., and if a call came in at 5:58 p.m. that was 45 minutes away, I would still do it. I’d often get into my vehicle at the end of a shift and, the next thing I knew, it had been 10 minutes and I’d still be sitting there, too dazed and tired to drive home. I’m incredibly fortunate that I don’t have a family at home waiting for me to pay them attention because at the end of a shift, I’m a zombie. I dissociate by watching reality TV.

During the pandemic, I responded to a fellow first responder’s suicide. That made me start thinking about my job and my mortality—like, Is this all worth it? It amplified everything that I had already been suppressing. I never had nightmares, but when I was awake, I would think about it a lot. Even now that I’m talking about it, my head is going through the entire scene walking through the building.

I took mental-health leave and worked hard to be able to go back to work. I saw an occupational therapist and psychologist—three appointments every week for about 12 weeks. I have a different job now. I needed a change of pace. I work in a health center in Nunavut. Last night, the entire sky was full of the northern lights. It’s been one of the greatest changes I’ve made.

(Photograph by Colin Way)

Heather Cook

Calgary, Alberta 

When I was a kid, my mom and her then-boyfriend started a private EMS service called Aeromedical. It’s still operating in northern Alberta. We would attend the rodeo and watch it sitting on top of the ambulance. When I got older, I did my own thing for a while: I trained horses. I lived in Europe. I had my kids. But I wanted a job with meaning. At 34, I trained as a primary care paramedic, while working full-time in an office as supervisor of a sales team. I later upgraded to advanced care paramedic in 2018, while working full-time as a paramedic. I took a short mental-health leave in late 2019. I’d been working non-stop. I think the skills I learned helped prepare me for the pandemic.

I don’t know how much more ‘frontline’ you can get than being in someone’s home during COVID. The hardest experience for me was at long-term care facilities. Pre-pandemic, you’d walk in and some resident would be playing a piano, and people would be watching TV together or walking the halls. They were small communities. Early on, I visited a home that experienced one of the first big outbreaks of the virus in Alberta. When I walked down the hall, I saw patients lying in their beds or sitting in wheelchairs. They couldn’t see their neighbours. It felt like they were just waiting to be ghosts. When I got to the hospital, I took off my PPE and sat down. A hospital pharmacist walked by and asked if I was okay. I shook my head and started to cry. I think that, as a society but also as a profession, we’re grieving our past lives. 

I will never forget my first COVID patient who died. He and his wife had COVID very early on, before there was any lockdown. They were married for more than 60 years. As we were getting him onto the stretcher, he said to his wife, “Don’t think you’re going to get rid of me this easy!” I already knew he was going to be intubated. I was literally fogging up my glasses with tears. He kissed his wife, and that turned out to be the last time they interacted. Visitors weren’t allowed in hospitals.

Even though we’re essentially a small emergency department that comes to your house, paramedics weren’t included in the first wave of vaccines in Alberta; I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because we are in an area of healthcare that isn’t thought about until we’re needed.

This article appears in print in the May 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Distress call.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post Canadian paramedics are in crisis appeared first on Macleans.ca.

After struggling with painful endometriosis for much of her life, Kayla was scheduled for surgery to remove endometrial tissue at BC Women’s Hospital in Vancouver in May of 2021. (Kayla is not her real name; I agreed to use pseudonyms for her and some other sources in this story to protect their privacy.) The attending nurse was a woman named Melanie. She was around 50, loud and boisterous, with clumpy mascara and frizzy black hair. Wearing a hospital gown, an already-anxious Kayla was disturbed when Melanie couldn’t insert an IV. The nurse tried and failed repeatedly, moving the needle around on Kayla’s arm. Eventually, she had to call a colleague over to help.

During one of Melanie’s attempts, Kayla turned and then felt her arm brush the nurse’s breast. She quickly stammered an apology. Melanie let out a booming laugh. She grabbed Kayla’s hand and used it to cup the breast Kayla had inadvertently grazed. Kayla was shocked. “I figured she didn’t have the best bedside manner,” she says.

Stranger still, Kayla was unconscious for 12 hours following the procedure, and then slept for another 18 after she got home. She was covered in large marks and bruises—something the hospital has not been able to explain.

Her disconcerting experiences took on new meaning several months later, when she received a letter from the Provincial Health Services Authority, or PHSA, dated November 26, 2021. “We are writing today to inform you that we recently learned an individual who had been hired to provide perioperative nursing care at BC Women’s Hospital & Health Centre’s Gynecology Surgical Program did not have a valid licence with the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives,” wrote Cheryl Davies, CEO of BC Women’s Hospital & Health Centre. (When I requested an interview with Davies, a representative for BC Women’s Hospital declined on her behalf.) “This individual is no longer employed in the Gynecological Surgical Program,” the letter continued, “and BC Women’s/PHSA is reviewing this matter comprehensively to determine how it occurred, any internal processes that may have contributed, and potential impact to patients.” The letter notes that Vancouver police were conducting an investigation, and concludes with an apology for any distress the letter might have caused.

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The letter did cause distress. Kayla’s anxiety went into high gear, and she immediately did a Google search, turning up a picture of the nurse who’d used Kayla’s hand to cup her breast. “I was like, okay, that makes sense,” says Kayla. She was more alarmed when she received her medical records and, in reviewing them with her primary physician, discovered she had been administered a bizarre cocktail of drugs, including fentanyl. “My doctor told me I absolutely should not have been given a lot of the things the nurse gave me,” says Kayla. “It’s a gynecological thing; you’re in stirrups and you’re sedated. You’re supposed to have people you can trust to take care of you.” For Kayla, the sense of violation was immediate and intense. “I kind of spiralled,” she says. She couldn’t stop thinking about what the fake nurse might have done to her while she was unconscious.

The woman who treated Kayla at BC Women’s Hospital went by many names over the years, including Brigitte Marier, Brigitte Fournier, Bridget Clairemont, Melanie Cleroux, Melanie Gauthier, Melanie Thompson and Melanie Smith. Her real name is Brigitte Cleroux.

In a mugshot taken last summer in Ottawa, Cleroux appears under bad lighting with her thick black hair pulled back, her eyebrows unevenly pencilled in, the corners of her mouth turned down and her eyes crowded by enormous fake eyelashes. She has the dejected look of someone who knows the jig is finally up. For 30 years, Cleroux had been criss-crossing the country in a game of identity-shifting catch-me-if-you-can, slipping through the cracks of provincial regulatory bodies and leaving behind a long rap sheet, frustrated victims and falsified documents that consistently fooled employers.

Cleroux started getting into trouble when she was still a teenager in Gatineau, Quebec. Her mother, who she was close with, always bailed her out; she never really knew her father. Cleroux’s lawyer declined an interview request on her behalf, but a family friend, who I’ll call Tanya, agreed to speak with me on the condition of anonymity. Tanya told me Cleroux has a good heart and can be kind to those she cares about. “She has had a problem with fraud ever since she was young,” Tanya says. According to CBC reports, Cleroux was first charged with impersonation and forgery in 1991 at the age of 19; she pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one month in prison. Tanya says Cleroux spent most of the next decade working as an exotic dancer and engaging in credit card and cheque fraud. She also spent some time in Florida.

By 2001, Cleroux was living in Colorado, where she attended nursing school for two years. “She always had a passion for nursing but never finished school,” Tanya says. “Easy way out, I guess.” Cleroux told people she was forced out of her nursing program when it was discovered she had a criminal record. Her career aspirations dashed, she tried to build a life. She fell in love and was soon pregnant. And, despite her lack of credentials, she got a job as a nurse in Colorado Springs, but was busted and subsequently charged with forgery and impersonation; she appears to have skipped out on those charges. She was also wanted on charges in Florida. As of 2010, Cleroux still had outstanding warrants in both states for fraud, theft, using a false ID, forgery and a host of other charges. Florida’s department of corrections lists 11 aliases for Cleroux.

Cleroux fled from the U.S. back to Canada, where she gave birth to a daughter in March of 2002. In Rockland, Ontario, she married a man named Mario Marier. They seemed happy. Tanya says Marier was unaware of Cleroux’s past. Still unlicensed, Cleroux began working as a nurse at a small Ontario hospital. Once again, she was arrested. This time she was charged with falsifying a legitimate nurse’s credentials and sentenced to six months in prison followed by two years’ probation. She was fined $60,000.

At Philemon Wright High School in Gatineau, 2006 was a strange year. After a revolving door of French teachers, Madame Marier arrived in October and immediately made an impression on her young charges—but not in a good way. They had no idea that Madame Marier was Brigitte Cleroux, and that she was not qualified to teach high school French or anything else.

One student I interviewed—I’ll call her Rachel—was in Grade 10 that year. She remembers Cleroux for her heavy makeup, tight jeans and low-cut leopard-print tops. She says Cleroux would tell students stories about parties she attended on the weekend and intimated that she had both a husband and a boyfriend. As for her work, she didn’t seem to know what she was doing, teaching her students the kind of simplistic verb conjugation they had already covered in grade school. But one lesson stood out: movie day. “The only way I can describe the film is as a porn,” says Rachel. “It was a literal orgy.” It wasn’t even in French.

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“We were confused and just kept looking at each other, but we were awkward high school students and none of us really knew what to do,” says Rachel. “She was laughing at all of us. She was like, ‘Why are you so uncomfortable? I know you’re all having sex.’ Most of us were like, please let me die in this chair.” Rachel recalls one student even left the room to look for another teacher.

A former student named Cameron Mousseau remembers the cruelty Cleroux inflicted on him and his friends as she tried to curry favour with the more popular students. “She noticed the weaker kids in the class and picked on them,” he says. “She was horrible to me.”

Mousseau was bullied in high school and says Cleroux encouraged it. “She was condescending and mean, a nasty person. It made things difficult, like I had a target on my back,” he says. She accused Mousseau of plagiarism and teased him about his weight. Then, one day in December, she was just gone, and no one knew what had happened to her. In Mousseau’s yearbook, Madame Marier’s name is listed but there’s no picture; in the faculty photo, she’s simply marked as “missing.”

Mike Dubeau, director general of the Western Québec School Board, wasn’t in his current position when Cleroux was hired, but he did inherit a slim personnel file that includes a falsified teaching certificate and CV. While Dubeau can’t speak to hiring practices in 2006, he says it is now standard when hiring new teachers to perform criminal background checks and send any certifications to the Ministry of Education for confirmation. “I’m confident this would be picked up immediately within our present system,” he says.

At some point after leaving the Gatineau school, Cleroux picked up and moved again—this time to Calgary. She followed Joele Pharand Fournier, a friend and neighbour from the Ottawa area. It was, for a while, a cozy arrangement, with the two families—four adults and four kids, including Cleroux’s husband and five-year-old daughter—sharing a rental house. Fournier told the Calgary Herald that Cleroux was a caring friend, someone who would babysit and help make ends meet, someone who was always there. And Cleroux was attentive, too. She showed particular interest in Fournier’s work as a nurse, asking a lot of questions and posing hypotheticals. “She would tell me things and then just double-check everything by me to make sure she was right,” Fournier said.

Fournier and her family moved back to Ontario in 2008, and Cleroux resumed her old habits of falsifying documents, sometimes using the names of convenient strangers and sometimes exploiting her relationships. She used a false name to create an Alberta identification card and then forged a nurse’s permit. Her forgeries were good enough to land her a nursing job at Calgary’s Properties Medical Clinic in 2008, but a colleague there became suspicious of her and she was laid off after two months. She then ran into trouble when facial recognition software pinged a problem with her ID. She was charged with defrauding Service Alberta, as well as forging a nurse’s permit. The identity Cleroux had assumed? Her dear friend, Joele Pharand Fournier.

Cleroux was released on bail, but when she failed to show up for a court appearance, a warrant was issued for her arrest. That triggered a public safety alert from the College and Association of Registered Nurses of Alberta in July 2010, which noted that Cleroux had engaged in acts “considered dangerous,” including administering injections. She was quickly arrested in Ontario and sent back to Alberta, where she eventually admitted to forging documents, including references.

Cleroux was already two decades into a life of pervasive dishonesty, one that had repeatedly resulted in punishment and humiliation. And yet she continued along her path, perpetually moving on to the next con. She had been both charged and sanctioned, but nothing seemed to stop her.

Why did she keep going? Perhaps her trajectory seemed like the path of least resistance; it might be easier to continue with an old habit than work on establishing new ones. Maybe there was a thrill for her in pulling a fast one on the unsuspecting—what psychiatrists call the “duping delight.” N.G. Berrill, executive director of the New York Center for Neuropsychology and Forensic Behavioral Science, studies the behaviour of imposters. “There’s a thrill in breaking rules and manipulating others that gives them a sense of power,” Berrill says. He speculates that Cleroux’s track record has likely emboldened her. “She’s been doing this for 30 years and she’s only been to court a handful of times. So she’s probably been gratified more often than she’s been punished.”

In the summer of 2013, when Lucas Nault was looking for a new stylist for his salon in Ottawa, a woman named Bridget Clairemont applied for the position. Her resumé looked good. She said she had owned salons in Edmonton and won multiple awards, and she had all the requisite licensing documentation. Bridget Clairemont was, of course, Brigitte Cleroux.
While many people who have been conned by Cleroux describe her as arrogant, rude and outrageous, Nault’s experience is a testament to her shapeshifting abilities. He found Cleroux pleasant. She had a sense of humour and a sweetness—shaded by some rough edges—that made her a good fit for the small salon. She talked about her young daughter and how hard it was to make ends meet. Nault’s mother had cancer and Cleroux was gentle with him when he confided in her. And she was also knowledgeable about the trade. “She pulled out some very complicated hair colours,” he says.

Looking back now, Nault realizes there were some signs of her deception. Cleroux arrived with her own styling supplies, but she lacked knowledge about mixing ratios for hair colour and how to use certain tools. “She asked odd questions every so often that should have been a no-brainer for someone with that much experience,” says Nault. “But there was never a complaint, never an issue. Every client liked her hair.”

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About three months into Cleroux’s employment, Nault received an email from an anonymous source. It also included a rap sheet and mugshot of Cleroux, indicating she had been jailed for impersonating a nurse and a teacher. It included links to testimonials from shocked nurses who had worked with Cleroux.

Nault was conflicted. He wanted to give Cleroux the benefit of the doubt, and he could understand why someone might try to cover up an off-colour past to avoid being pigeonholed. “Just because someone’s been in jail doesn’t mean they’re a bad person,” he says. “I wanted to have an open, real conversation with her.” He invited Cleroux for coffee at the café next to the salon.

As Cleroux sat across the table, Nault slid the printed-out email toward her. He told her he wasn’t firing her and that he was willing to work things out. Cleroux burst into tears. “She was like, ‘No, I can’t do this anymore,’ ” says Nault. “ ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said, ‘but none of this is true.’ ” She got up from the table and walked away forever, leaving behind hundreds of dollars’ worth of equipment, including flat irons, scissors and a blow dryer. Nault was stunned. “I was like, well, that was weird,” he says. It was the last he heard of Cleroux. He now wonders if she learned to cut and colour hair when she was in prison.

A decade later, Nault remains somewhat awed by Cleroux’s ability to deceive. “She aced her interview with me and I’m sure she aced it with others, too,” says Nault. “I know it’s not right, but I wonder if she had wanted these things for herself and she just wasn’t in the financial situation to do it. Or maybe she really believes it to the point where it’s true.”

After walking away from Nault in the café that day, Cleroux carried on with her itinerant lifestyle. From 2015 to 2018, she bounced between Ontario and Quebec. By spring 2020, Cleroux had headed west, where she got a job at Royal Arch Masonic Home, a long-term care facility in Vancouver. Rupi Cheema, a registered nurse who worked there at the time, remembers a nurse named Melanie who took constant smoke breaks and had “ridiculously long eyelashes.” She had a superior attitude, repeatedly referencing her impressive credentials, including her education in the U.S. and work in both long-term care and the ICU. “That seemed really important for her to communicate,” says Cheema. Cleroux, she recalls, had the attitude of “I can do whatever I want.”

Cleroux’s nursing didn’t raise any red flags. She appeared to have some familiarity with palliative care, checking vital signs and administering medication. Cheema says she never suspected that this was a person pretending to be a nurse—but not just because Cleroux seemed competent. “I would have thought the employer would have done that, would have looked at her background,” she says.

A representative from Royal Arch told me that Cleroux had been working for a third-party contractor when Royal Arch was informed she was not a registered nurse. The representative says Royal Arch hired an external nurse consultant to conduct an investigation, which ultimately determined there were no incidents involving resident care that violated B.C.’s Community Care and Assisted Living Act, and its Residential Care Regulation, beyond the provision of nursing services by a person who did not hold the required licensed professional qualification. Royal Arch also says recommendations have been sent to a quality assurance committee, which will make changes to prevent a similar occurrence in the future.

In June of 2020, Cleroux moved on to BC Women’s Hospital, where, in July, she accompanied a woman I’ll call Sharon to the operating room for a hysteroscopy and biopsy related to endometriosis. The procedure had to be done under sedation, and Sharon was nervous; she knew she would be awake for the procedure and that it would cause her to bleed. Cleroux, who said her name was Melanie, sat by Sharon as she nervously asked questions. Cleroux kindly tried to put Sharon at ease, telling her not to worry because she had taken additional training in order to administer sedation.

As soon as the procedure started, Sharon felt like something was very wrong. It was not simply an unpleasant feeling, as the nurse had promised, but an intense biting pain—suggesting to Sharon that she had not been properly anaesthetized. “I was in tears, and I looked at her and she just looked right back at me,” says Sharon. After the procedure, Sharon was wheeled back to recover in the day surgery area, but Melanie didn’t give her any sanitary items and Sharon was soon sitting in her own blood. She explained the situation to another nurse, who appeared shocked. “I went home and said to my husband, ‘I really don’t think my pain was well managed today.’ And to be sent back to just bleed on myself—there’s a loss of dignity associated with that.”

By spring of 2021, the hospital somehow realized Cleroux was a fraud. Her employment there triggered another public safety alert in June of 2021, this time by the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives. It warned that Melanie Smith, who also used the names Melanie Thompson and Melanie Cleroux, was not and had never been entitled to practise as a nurse in B.C.

And yet, even after the alert, Cleroux soon found other nursing jobs. She moved back to Ottawa, where she again used the name Melanie Smith. She forged an impressive resumé, gaining employment at a fertility clinic and a dental surgery clinic. At the fertility clinic, Cleroux often monitored blood pressure and heart rates. She was present during egg retrievals and administered fentanyl. In late July of 2021, Cleroux tried multiple times to draw blood from a patient. She was ultimately successful on her final attempt, but the patient described pain and loss of movement in both hands for almost two weeks.
Cleroux’s conduct raised concerns for at least one of her fellow nurses at the fertility clinic, who found Cleroux aggressive and dismissive, a bad fit in an otherwise collegial environment. In early August, a patient at the clinic approached this nurse, shaking and crying after her interaction with Cleroux. She begged to be handled by anyone else. The incident seemed to enrage Cleroux, and she confronted both the nurse and the attending doctor, stating that she was “done with this place.” She then shoved the patient’s chart into the doctor’s hands.

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The nurse was sufficiently concerned about Cleroux’s lack of professionalism that she decided to file a complaint with the College of Nurses of Ontario. When she searched in the Ontario database, there was no registration for a Melanie Smith in Ottawa. She did a search in British Columbia, where Cleroux had mentioned having previously worked, and the B.C. college alert about an imposter popped up. Less than two weeks later, Cleroux was arrested in Ottawa when she went to pick up her last cheque at the fertility clinic.

In August of 2021, Brigitte Cleroux was charged with impersonating a nurse at both the fertility and dental clinics in Ottawa, as well as assault with a weapon (brandishing a needle) and criminal negligence causing bodily harm. In November, Vancouver police also busted Cleroux, announcing she had used the name of a real nurse while working at BC Women’s Hospital from June of 2020 to June of 2021. She was charged with several offences, including fraud over $5,000 and personation with intent. In January, she pleaded guilty to charges in Ottawa, including one count of assault with a weapon, and several counts of collecting money under false pretense with an intent to defraud. Cleroux is expected to be sentenced in Ottawa in the spring; after that, she will face charges in Vancouver.

Somehow, Cleroux was able to slip past not one, not two, but at least three provincial nursing regulatory systems—and not just once but multiple times. In the aftermath of her arrests, Cleroux’s employers have remained largely silent. When I reached out to the College of Registered Nurses of Alberta, a spokesperson explained that the organization governs health officials who wish to practise under a certain professional designation, and that they have a mechanism for reporting and investigating concerns about practitioners. They stopped short of providing details of any specific investigation into Cleroux.
In Ontario, where Cleroux worked several times as a nurse, a valid certificate of registration from the College of Nurses of Ontario is required of all nurses who wish to perform procedures authorized to nursing in legislation, says Kristi Green, a spokesperson for the college. Green also tells me that employers are expected to cross-reference potential hires with both the college’s Find a Nurse online directory and its online list of unregistered practitioners. (Cleroux—and several of her aliases—appears on this latter list.)

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When I reached out to B.C.’s Provincial Health Services Authority for comment, they sent me a boilerplate statement that had been posted online. Referring to Cleroux, the statement says: “This individual has built a career on deception and impersonating licensed professionals. We are using this incident as an opportunity to strengthen system processes to the fullest extent possible.”

In December, a class-action lawsuit was launched against the PHSA regarding the crimes of Brigitte Cleroux. Murphy Battista, a litigation firm with offices in British Columbia and Ontario, alleges that the PHSA was negligent in allowing Cleroux to work at BC Women’s Hospital, and that any nursing services were performed without lawful consent. J. Scott Stanley, the lead lawyer, says his office has already heard from more than 100 women interested in joining the suit, which he estimates is about 10 per cent of the potential class members. Their complaints range from distasteful unprofessionalism to physical harm. According to the civil claim, Cleroux “battered” the members of the class by administering treatments in the absence of lawful consent.

Stanley finds it troubling that, for a full year, Cleroux’s questionable conduct at BC Women’s Hospital didn’t appear to prompt any alarm among hospital staff or management. “I’m very confident this lawsuit will demonstrate that Ms. Cleroux demonstrated an utter lack of competency that should have caused people to review this,” says Stanley. “To me, that’s more concerning than her fraudulently defeating the barriers to acquire the employment.”

Still, he hopes the class action will force the PHSA to assess exactly what went wrong when it hired her in the first place. “Whenever someone presents as a professional, you have to provide proof of certification or licensure,” he says. “You want to see verification documents so you know who they are. And the PHSA just never bothered to get that level of detail.” The claim alleges the PHSA should have known Cleroux was using falsified documents and credentials, which could have been easily discovered if it had confirmed her information with the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives.

While systemic failures are being tallied, Cleroux remains in custody in Ottawa, awaiting sentencing. Tanya, her family friend, told me Cleroux’s transgressions have long been a source of frustration. “I just don’t understand why she never finished her nursing schooling if she wanted to be a nurse so much,” Tanya says. “I’m sure with the proper education and training, she could have changed her life and become a great nurse.” She wonders if Cleroux was too impatient, too impulsive to go straight. “Maybe education takes too long for her, and when she wants something, she wants it now,” she says. “Maybe fraud is easy for her and that’s all she knows.” She describes criminality as a path Cleroux got on when she was too young to know better. Now, perhaps, there’s no way to get off.

Sharon and Kayla, the women who had negative experiences while being treated for endometriosis at BC Women’s Hospital, have both signed on to Murphy Battista’s lawsuit, which they see as an opportunity for accountability and a way to ensure that what happened to them doesn’t happen to anyone else.

For Sharon, moving on has been hard. But the news of her interaction with a fake nurse has also been surprisingly validating. After the procedure at BC Women’s Hospital, she was plagued by self-doubt. She wondered if she had somehow misunderstood things and if she should have asked more questions. “I chalked it up to a bad experience and my own unfamiliarity with the medical system and moved on,” she says. “But this wasn’t okay. She was in a position of trust, and women suffered unnecessarily. This is a terrible breakdown in patient safety. It’s very distressing. How did she go undetected?”

This article appears in print in the May 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline “The many faces of Brigitte Cleroux.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post The nurse imposter appeared first on Macleans.ca.

A few years ago, Kathy Collins was running her own art supply store and art school in Calgary when she began to experience troubling symptoms. She had always been a workaholic, capable and driven, but suddenly, in her early 50s, she was having cognitive glitches, like forgetting to place orders for the store. Her older sister Jean Collins noticed that when they spoke on the phone, she was forgetful and uncharacteristically weepy. While Kathy at first hid her struggles, she eventually admitted that things had gotten so difficult that she couldn’t run the business and was filing for bankruptcy.

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Jean, who was living on Vancouver Island at the time, went to Calgary to help Kathy through the process. Once she was with her sister in person, the scale of Kathy’s difficulties became clear. She had lost weight because she wasn’t cooking or eating, and she was neglecting personal care and housekeeping, while fixating on repetitive activities like playing mah-jong. Alzheimer’s didn’t occur to them at the time, but it was clear that something was very wrong. Initially, Kathy’s doctor tried medication to treat depression, but she continued to struggle. A few months later, Jean persuaded her sister to visit Vancouver Island for a week. She never left.

It took months of medical visits to get answers, and when Kathy finally learned she had early-onset Alzheimer’s, the devastation of the diagnosis was eased by the relief that she finally knew what was going on. First, the sisters lived together in Jean’s home, and Jean even hired Kathy to work at the residence for adults with disabilities where she was a manager. But as the disease progressed, they both stopped working and moved in with their octogenarian parents in Cobble Hill, a farming village in the Cowichan Valley just north of Victoria.

By the spring of 2020, Kathy had established a routine of swimming and attending a day program on a farm caring for horses once a week, getting around using a transportation service for people with disabilities. But then the pandemic hit. The life they had built was wiped out, and they both suddenly had a lot of time on their hands. One day about two months in, Jean, otherwise a Twitter addict, downloaded the TikTok app out of sheer boredom. They were immediately hooked. “It’s just bursting with creativity, and it’s funny and moving,” Jean says. “So we were just in our rooms scrolling.”

Straight tok

The Kathy Project’s look at life with Alzheimer’s can be moving, or unapologetically funny. A sampling:

August 2020 25,200 views Kathy and Jean do a quiz: who’s had the most success with men (Kathy), who talks the most (Jean) and who is physically strongest (Kathy).

June 2020 90,200 views Kathy talks about her transformation, from not wanting anyone to know she has Alzheimer’s to sharing the experience with the world.

January 2022 51,900 views Kathy and Jean stage a comedic recreation of life with Alzheimer’s, complete with repetitive questions and bloopers.

PreviousNext

After a couple of weeks as admiring viewers, they decided to make their own TikTok. In it, “Jeanie behind the camera,” as she introduces herself, interviews Kathy briefly about having dementia. Kathy explains the sticky notes on her bedroom wall that serve as reminders. She describes the worst part of dementia—no longer being able to drive—and the best: “I can rewatch movies all day long and say, ‘Jean, this is a great movie!’ ” They both crack up at that.

It was their third video that made them bona fide TikTok stars. In it, Kathy stands outside their parents’ house, wearing a long denim jacket, with a bird chirping somewhere in the background like it’s been hired for an idyllic spa soundtrack. Jean holds the camera and offers interview prompts, asking about the big decision they recently made. “We moved into our parents’ basement,” Kathy replies, her eyes widening in comic horror. But while things are hard, they are also great, Jean says, panning to show Mill Bay sprawling below the backyard of their house.

When Jean swings the camera back to her, Kathy leans in conspiratorially. “Living with the parents at this age is just highly unusual,” she says. They explode in more uproarious laughter, and instantly, you understand why 1.6 million people watched this video and 138,000 love the sisters enough to follow them on TikTok now.

As with all of the videos that would follow, it’s matter-of-fact, even buoyant, smart-assed and empowered. As a snapshot of life with disability and serious illness, Kathy and Jean’s TikTok account has little of the treacle or tragedy usually associated with the subject. “My gig is that, yes, I have Alzheimer’s, but there’s more things to it,” Kathy says in an interview.

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On TikTok, they are known as the Kathy Project, which aims simply to spread comfort and love to people with Alzheimer’s and their families. That, and comedy. “Kathy always says those are our stripper names,” says Jean. “She’s Comfort, I’m Love.”
An entire community has grown among the other disability- and dementia-focused TikTokkers they chat with and follow. In comments, a parade of people wish them well, asking nervously for advice about their own dementia worries, or admonishing Jean to talk less and let Kathy talk more. She knows, she’s working on it, it’s been this way all of their lives. People recognize Kathy when they go out shopping, a TikTok celebrity in their midst.

They know there will come a time when the videos will have to stop, to safeguard Kathy’s dignity. But she trusts Jean to know where that line is, and it’s still a long way off. For now, there are their hundreds of thousands of viewers, a steady stream of viral hits and a community where you own your dementia, but it doesn’t own you.

The appeal of the Kathy Project is simple and obvious to Jean: it’s Kathy, and it always has been. “It’s been like that for your life. People have always liked you,” she says to her sister. “Thank you,” Kathy exclaims, as though she has just won an unexpected Oscar. They double over laughing, side by side on the bed like teenagers.

This article appears in print in the May 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Sister act.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post After an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, these sisters became Tiktok stars appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Like the rest of the world, the Canadian photographer Philip Cheung spent weeks anxiously watching the events leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Seeing the relentless barrage of cities and the bombing of innocent civilians made me want to document the reality on the ground. This could be one of the most important conflicts of our generation,” he says. On March 4, he left his home in Los Angeles in a blur. He packed lightly, save for a helmet and body armour. Cheung flew to Krakow, then hitched a ride with a volunteer who was shuttling refugees back and forth from the Ukrainian border. By March 6, he was crossing into a war zone on foot.

This wasn’t Cheung’s first time shooting in a war: he’s photographed the Israel-Palestine conflict, and gone twice to Afghanistan, embedding with Canadian troops in Kandahar in 2009 and the Americans in 2010. Ricocheting between Kyiv, Lviv and smaller neighbouring towns this spring, Cheung saw, and captured, a lot. Devastation, certainly, but it was the solidarity of citizens that sticks with him. “This war has brought people closer together,” he says. “I met people who were turned away from the army, so they joined the Red Cross, volunteered at field kitchens, made Molotov cocktails, dug trenches and filled sandbags.” Cheung says the overnight trains he took on his journey were often packed with Ukrainians returning home from abroad, ready to fight. “It’s difficult seeing all the senseless violence, these lives displaced and destroyed,” Cheung says. “But it’s important to document and inform people with our photographs.”

Here are some of the powerful scenes he captured.

(Photograph by Philip Cheung)

Irpin, March 12.

“I noticed about 15 people gathered around a campfire while I was walking through this residential neighbourhood. You could hear gunfire, and there was still smoke in the air from exploded artillery rounds, but here they were, cooking dinner. I told one woman I was a photographer, and she walked me down into a bomb shelter to show me her living situation: a cooking area, supplies and no light, except for a flashlight and candles. This gentleman, Vasiliy, had just woken up from a nap. They’d been living there for two weeks or so.” (Photograph by Philip Cheung)

(Photograph by Philip Cheung)

Bilohorodka, March 19.

“A group of evacuation buses arrived from Bucha. There were about seven in total, and 10 per cent of the passengers were children. Before they disembarked, each person had their papers checked by police officers to make sure they weren’t spies. There have been a lot of problems with Russian saboteurs posing as internally displaced persons, getting into the cities and causing havoc. After they were cleared, passengers could get hot meals and warm clothes in the parking lot, then board buses to cities where their families lived.”

(Photograph by Philip Cheung)

Kyiv, March 17.

“People on the ground said they saw an aircraft or a drone dropping munitions moments before an explosion. I visited the site to shoot the effects of the bomb blast up close. I didn’t notice the heat, but that could have been the adrenaline. The fire was in a warehouse, and it lasted for a couple of days before it was finally put out. It left behind a huge black cloud that stretched across a large part of the city.”

(Photograph by Philip Cheung)

Kyiv, March 14.

“The shockwave and shrapnel from the bombing of a nearby apartment complex destroyed this cafe. The media were looking at the apartment building, but I was watching this mother and son. Nobody else was taking photos of them. They were just casually inspecting the contents of the fridge. The civilian population has sort of normalized the constant bombardment. During the day, you see people shopping or enjoying a sunny day in a park while air-raid sirens are going off.”

(Photograph by Philip Cheung)

Irpin, March 12.

“This was one of my first stops. In the early days of the war, Russian forces were advancing so quickly that the Ukrainian engineers responsible for planting explosives on the bridge didn’t even have enough time to detonate them remotely. A young Ukrainian soldier sacrificed himself, blowing up the bridge while he was on it to save his unit and the city.”

(Photograph by Philip Cheung)

Kyiv-Pasazhyrski Railway Station, March 10.

“This man was boarding an evacuation train headed for Lviv. He appeared to be of military age, so I assumed he was going to join the police or the Territorial Defence Forces. I found it odd that his mother was staying in Kyiv. They were the only two people left on the platform after everyone else had boarded. After this shot, he climbed onto the train and cried and waved to her until the doors closed.”

(Photograph by Philip Cheung)

Irpin, March 10.

Civilians evacuate Irpin by crossing the deliberately destroyed bridge over the Irpin river.

(Photograph by Philip Cheung)

Vasylkiv, March 8.

The interior of an apartment building that was hit by a Russian missile during the initial days of the invasion in Ukraine. Three civilians died in the blast.

(Photograph by Philip Cheung)

Lyiv Train Station, March 7.

“There’s an area in the Lviv train station reserved for mothers and children so they can relax while waiting for their evacuation trains to Poland. That’s where I met Anna and her four-year-old son, Herman. They’d fled Brovary, a town just east of Kyiv. I spoke to Anna briefly through a translator. She explained that she was scared and just wanted to make sure that she and Herman would be safe. He was watching a cartoon on her cellphone.”

(Photograph by Philip Cheung)

Lyiv Train Station, March 7.

“In such a hectic, sad time, I’m drawn to the quieter moments. This window looked out on thousands of refugees, lining up to wait for a train. Inside, there was a child in the shadows, screaming for his mother. But the girl on the right was just blowing her breath against the window, making hearts on the glass.”

(Photograph by Zach Lowry)

Irpin, March 13.

“My photography partner, Zach Lowry, took this photo. I’m in a flak vest and helmet standing in front of a Russian armoured vehicle. A Ukrainian soldier told us it was one of the first Russian vehicles that came into Irpin, but the military destroyed it before it reached the bridge to Kyiv.”

This article appears in print in the May 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Days of destruction.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post Scenes from the war in Ukraine appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Kirsten Hillman was appointed Canada’s ambassador to the United States during a strikingly different time. It was March 2020. Donald Trump was still the U.S. president, and we were only two weeks into the coronavirus pandemic as declared by the World Health Organization. Two years later, Hillman is cultivating relationships with a very different administration under Joe Biden, and though a path out of the pandemic is still top of mind, new cross-border trade irritants and global threats have emerged. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Marie-Danielle Smith: You’ve been in Washington for a long time, including pre-pandemic, under the Trump administration. How have things changed since Biden became president?

Kirsten Hillman: I think the first thing to say is that President Biden and his administration and our Prime Minister and his government have a deep alignment from a policy perspective . . . whether it’s climate change, whether it’s how they wanted to manage COVID in terms of vaccinations and listening to and promoting the advice of scientists, whether it’s economic recovery that focuses on those who have been hardest hit by the pandemic. That is a significant change [from] the last administration.

MDS: It seems like a friendlier relationship.

KH: The Prime Minister and the president have a very close relationship. They get along very well. The fact that they have similar policies, I think, contributes to that.

MDS: We recently passed the first anniversary of the events of Jan. 6 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol. What was that day like for you and the embassy staff?

KH: At the time, we were in a work-from-home posture. But we always had about 20 per cent of our staff who had to come in, because they work on systems that only exist here in the embassy. We knew the night before that the crowd that was going to gather was going to be really quite large. So our security officers advised, and I agreed, that we should ask those who normally would come in to work from home. I believe there were three people in the embassy, and there was security. I watched those events unfold from my residence.

MDS: The embassy has a view on the U.S. Capitol building. What was it like for you to watch it being overrun on TV?

KH: It was very disturbing, and very upsetting. And I think probably for many people here in the U.S. and in Canada, almost unreal. Hard to believe it was real. As I was watching it—and reporting back to Ottawa on what I was seeing, what we were hearing from our contacts within the U.S. system—I was also working with my security staff to make sure that all our staff were safe and accounted for. It took a little while to confirm that. And that was also very difficult.

MDS: There has been a lot of discussion about the idea that American democracy is fracturing, and that its institutions are under a lot of pressure. People wonder what that devolution could mean for Canada and our relationship. Is that something you worry about?

KH: Clearly, this is a challenging time here in the United States. As you say, the divisions in U.S. society are not new. I think that they have been exacerbated by COVID, by economic instability, by certain political agendas. But what I see here is a recognition that U.S. citizens and U.S. lawmakers can’t take their democracy for granted. If we want a vibrant democracy, we have to work at it, we have to fight for it. And that’s happening here in the U.S. They are fighting for their democracy. That is the reason why Americans are feeling anxious. It is precisely because they take their democracy very, very seriously.

MDS: So when you see the doom-and-gloom interpretations of Jan. 6 and of the discourse around the last election, do I take it that you’re a bit more optimistic?

KH: Well, I think that it’s important to think about what happened. In the last election, there was a challenge to that election, but 50 states and the District of Columbia certified the results. There were a number of court challenges, but the election results were validated across the board by more than 60 federal and state courts. They all rejected every claim of fraud and corruption. So I think we can’t lose sight of that. These institutions are strong. Does it mean that it’s not important to continue to ensure that they remain strong? Of course not. But the institutions that underpinned the last presidential election did what they were meant to do. Those who feel that those institutions are under threat, they’re fighting hard for them.

MDS: As much as the Canada-U.S. relationship is under scrutiny right now, it’s easy to forget how fraught things felt not so long ago when NAFTA was getting renegotiated. You were in the room for those talks. Were there times when it felt like it wasn’t going to come together?

KH: For me, yes, probably. Is that unusual? I can’t think of a single negotiation I’ve been in where I didn’t think at one point or another, and sometimes several times, “I don’t think this thing’s going to make it over.” The one difference with the USMCA negotiation, though, is it was, in some respects, a no-fail operation. By the time we were deep into those negotiations, Canadians and Americans—and I’m sure this is also true in Mexico—realized that this arrangement that underpinned our economic success was vital to all three countries.

MDS: Given some of the rhetoric around trade in the Democratic Party, do you think it would have been even harder to negotiate an agreement with a Democratic administration?

KH: Well, the Democrats were deeply involved in the final agreement. Here in the United States, an international trade agreement must then pass through Congress. It was an agreement that benefited from more bipartisan support in this country than the original, or almost any other trade agreement they’ve ever passed.

MDS: But there are major areas of disagreement that are being litigated now under the rules of the treaty. The U.S. recently won a dispute against Canadian dairy measures, and Canada and Mexico are disputing the U.S. interpretation of auto rules. Why does it seem like these irritants are happening with more frequency?

KH: Dairy and autos are both processes under the new NAFTA. And there’s another one on solar panels that has taken place. This, from my perspective, is a good thing. I mean, ideally, it would be better not to have trade disagreements.

MDS: So it’s evidence of a functioning system?

KH: Right. What is important is that we follow the rules and processes that we have put in place to solve those disagreements. The reason that we negotiate trade agreements is to open up our economies to each other, but also to provide predictability and stability.

MDS: One issue that has maybe been put to bed for now is the electric vehicle tax credit that was in the Build Back Better bill. It was blocked by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin and talks have stalled. Do you think that Canada’s efforts to lobby against the provision have factored in?

KH: We certainly talked to Senator Manchin about our concerns. I’d spoken to him myself a few times about it. And he was pretty much of the view that it was important to maintain a strong and vibrant auto sector and auto trade with Canada. So I assume that he was bringing those views forward. But there are also many other components of that agreement that he had problems with.

MDS: Some U.S. lawmakers literally tell reporters that they “don’t care” what Canada thinks about any given issue. In practice, is it difficult to get legislators to listen to Canadian priorities?

KH: Almost without exception, I reach any lawmaker that I need to. Even if they don’t agree with us, they will take the call, because they value that Canadian relationship. When the Prime Minister was here in D.C. recently, I hosted a small get-together at my residence where the Prime Minister was able to have in-depth conversations with all the key and most senior White House decision-makers who worked with the president, as well as cabinet ministers and some of our closest Senate allies. The president had been out of town that evening. He said, more than once, that he was sorry to admit that he felt somewhat left out.

MDS: Do those sorts of gatherings come more easily in the Biden era than they would’ve under Trump?

KH: You know, I have to say no. We had very close access to [Trump’s] team. I met with their national security adviser several times. When we were working on the USMCA, I had the cellphone numbers of several senior advisers in the White House, and we talked regularly. This isn’t something that is personal, you know. It’s my job to build those contacts and relationships and networks. But it’s also indicative of the importance of the Canada-U.S. relationship.

MDS: Nonetheless, you have opposition politicians in Canada right now who are claiming that we are at a low point in the Canada-U.S. relationship. How do you respond to that accusation?

KH: I disagree with that. I believe I have experienced other points in the Canada-U.S. relationship that were lower than this one.

MDS: What’s an example of a time when things were worse?

KH: Maybe the better way to respond to that question is this: we have this enormous relationship with the Americans. And we are privileged to have them as neighbours, and as trading partners, and as defence allies and as friends. But sometimes they make decisions that are really challenging for us. This is a particular moment in time with COVID and economic challenges. We are facing a protectionist trend here in the United States.

But I think that what’s really important is that we can have these frank and respectful conversations that allow us to work through the issues. And with this administration, that is possible.

MDS: That instinct toward protectionism can be really tempting for American politicians. What’s the best argument against it?

KH: We see time and time again, when those relationships are disrupted, when those supply chains are disrupted, when the efficiencies that we have created over generations are affected, then American jobs are lost. American businesses suffer. We get very granular [in our response]. We’ll go to specific communities. And we describe what will happen in specific communities to specific industries to specific regions of the country.

MDS: Does it feel like the question of what to do about China hangs over the Canada-U.S. relationship?

KH: We talk with the Americans about the Indo-Pacific and China on a regular basis. We talk with their experts, and then when members of the Canadian government come to town, we also have opportunities to try and work with the Americans on how we can best manage our relationship with China, which is such a complex and significant country. I think that our approach toward China has to recognize that complexity, and has to recognize the significance of China. We want to be informed in the choices that we make by how our key allies are thinking about these things as well, and the U.S. is of course chief among our key allies.

Hillman’s library

The ambassador’s book recommendations, from comedy to authoritarian history. (Click through this gallery. Interview continues below.)

Talking to Canadians by Rick Mercer: “I’m a huge fan of Rick’s and the book brought back so many memories, not just of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, but of other iconic experiences of our generation, like his hilarious portrayal of the Canada Fitness Awards Program.”

Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum: “Applebaum explores events in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere to explain how autocrats take hold, and how democracies decline.”

A Knock on the Door: The Essential History of Residential Schools: “This abridged version of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada should be read by every Canadian.”

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MDS: What would you say is your biggest priority as ambassador over the coming year?

KH: The number one priority is keeping the [Canada-U.S.] relationship strong so that we can be effective in rising to whatever challenge a particular moment in time will bring to us. In the last week and a bit, the moment in time has been about these protests across the border and the binational implications. Three weeks ago, I might’ve said to you it’s demonstrating the vitality and the importance of cross-border investment and supply chains, and making sure that we can come out of the pandemic in a way that makes our two nations stronger. It is also sometimes going to be a defence or a security question.

MDS: Things can change quickly. What kinds of things are you doing to prepare for the possibility that Trump will be the Republican nominee and could be president again?

KH: We are always maintaining our relationships on both sides of the aisle. I’ll be honest with you, sometimes it’s bipartisan. I had dinner here with about 20 senators and it was a bipartisan dinner. I spend time consciously making sure that ties with the Republican leadership and influencers who were important to us during the Trump administration . . . remain, [that] the lines of communication remain open. That’s the number one thing that we do.

This interview appears in print in the April 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post Kirsten Hillman on U.S. protectionism and the possible return of Donald Trump appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The bellowing honks of freedom nearly drowned out Pierre Poilievre’s voice as he stood on a frigid overpass in late January, cheering the truck convoy on its way to lay siege to downtown Ottawa. Wearing a Canada Goose parka and aviator sunglasses, with his normally shellacked side-part blustered into an unrecognizable tuft by the wind, he grinned into a video camera. Poilievre rhymed off an expansive array of grievances he said the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protesters were battling, in addition to vaccine mandates: high grocery prices, small businesses in peril, depressed and isolated teenagers, a political and media elite that ignores anyone they don’t like. Poilievre, a long-time Conservative MP, wore a pair of puffy, red-and-white maple leaf mittens that gave him a soft cartoon quality weirdly at odds with his hard-edged talking points. It was like watching Mickey Mouse shout angry populist slogans.

Nearly every one of the affronts to freedom that Poilievre listed came from pandemic restrictions enacted by the provinces and not Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberal government, but that was very much beside the point. “Freedom, not fear. Truckers, not Trudeau,” he hollered over the horns that would soon torment Ottawa residents for days and sleepless nights.

The line of trucks Poilievre was applauding would, over the coming weeks, be joined by thousands of others. Some would come and go as weekend warriors, while others would shut down international border crossings across the country, hamstringing massive sectors of the economy. But the most zealous protesters would occupy a sprawling territory surrounding Parliament Hill for weeks before a massive police operation finally forced them out.

MORE: Poilievre, in his own words

Still, Poilievre refused to condemn the protest as a whole, slicing and dicing his argument to maintain that he supported anyone fighting for their rights and freedoms peacefully, while anyone who engaged in violence, vandalism or obstruction should be punished. “I’m proud of the truckers and I stand with them,” he said two weeks into the occupation.

The convoy arrived in town with a ludicrous plan to remove Trudeau from office but it was Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole who got ousted, after his tepid response to the protesters sharpened the knife that a large faction of the Tory caucus already had at the ready. And so, in the midst of the protest mayhem, Poilievre released a video announcing “I’m running for prime minister,” immediately becoming the candidate to beat in the sudden leadership race-—the party’s third in five years. “Together, we will make Canadians the freest people on earth,” he said. “With freedom to build a business without red tape or heavy tax; freedom to keep the fruits of your labour and share them with loved ones and neighbours; freedom from the invisible thief of inflation; freedom to raise your kids with your values; freedom to make your own health and vaccine choices; freedom to speak without fear; and freedom to worship God in your own way.”

Poilievre speaks during question period in the House of Commons in May 2018 (Chris Wattie/Reuters)

Poilievre—“Skippy” to fans and foes alike, after he was assigned the nickname as a very young MP—has been one of the main characters in the House of Commons since he was elected in 2004, largely thanks to his rhetorical skills and his gleeful compulsion to take up absolutely any partisan fight and go to the wall with it. He has been described in media stories over the years as “probably one of the more generally infuriating individuals on Parliament Hill” and someone who “savagely attack[s] opponents without regard to nuance, or even the basic facts.”

He’s also a confounding cipher. He is highly intelligent, insightful and reflective when not on display, but snide and reductive when he is. He is a workhorse who has stuffed his brain with knowledge that is almost old-fashioned in its intricacy; but he is also a corrosively of-the-moment politician dedicated to the meme-worthy partisan kick in the teeth. He didn’t have to be the internet troll of Canadian politics, because he had ample other capabilities at his disposal, but here we are. Poilievre has been the spiritual leader of the Canadian conservative movement, if not the party’s leader, for some time. Now he’s looking to make it official.

***

Poilievre (he pronounces it “paul-ee-EV”) was born in 1979 and grew up in Preston Manning’s Calgary Southwest riding, later represented by Stephen Harper. As a kid, he was a competitive diver, wrestler and hockey player. Early in his life, he developed political beliefs in personal responsibility and small government that remained almost eerily consistent for decades. “I had a teenage unwed mother who had just lost her mother when I was born, and it was two schoolteachers from Saskatchewan who adopted me and raised me and basically gave me a life,” he says. “So I have always believed that it is voluntary generosity among family and community that are the greatest social safety net that we can ever have. That’s kind of my starting point.”

(Photograph by Blair Gable)

He grew up in an Alberta he saw as ravaged by Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program. Created in the early 1980s in response to oil shocks that drove prices through the roof in the previous decade, the program aimed to regulate oil and gas prices and free Canada from dependence on foreign oil while increasing federal revenues. But it enraged oil-rich Alberta and Saskatchewan, seeding Western alienation and the political awakening of more than one generation of Canadian conservatives. Poilievre’s parents didn’t lose their teaching jobs, but he says his family had to move because they couldn’t hold onto their house amid the sky-high interest rates of the era. “I didn’t understand politics or anything, I just remember it being a really stressful time for a lot of people,” he says. “And as I grew older and I’ve learned more about how that happened and why, it left a mark on me.” These experiences and the beliefs they instilled found political shape in the Reform Party values that reverberated through Alberta in his formative years, bringing Poilievre to partisan politics at a preternaturally young age.

READ: Kathleen Wynne on her political downfall and the private advice she gave Doug Ford

At 17, he attended the 1996 Reform convention, where he proved to be irresistible journalistic catnip: an eager partisan not yet old enough to vote. “I’m very concerned about the financial state of the country and think they’re the only ones who can fix it,” he told the local paper. While still in high school, he wrote a letter to the Calgary Herald eviscerating the Liberal government’s hike of Canada Pension Plan premiums.

It was a couple of years later that Rob Huebert, an associate professor of political science, encountered Poilievre in a third-year strategic studies class he was teaching at the University of Calgary, where Poilievre was studying international relations. Poilievre finished fourth in a class of 60. “He’s the type of student that stands out,” Huebert says. “They have that essence about them: ‘I don’t quite know where you’re going to end up, but you’re gonna end up somewhere and people are gonna notice you.’ ” He recalls Poilievre as courteous, never showy or combative, generous with his time and short on ego. Huebert sees Poilievre’s political career as a continuation of the undergrad he knew: not a partisan pit bull, but the kid who always knew how to ask the questions that got to the heart of the issue.

While he was in university, Poilievre was one of 10 finalists to win $10,000 in an “As Prime Minister” essay contest. He told the student newspaper that he cranked out the 2,500-word essay, entitled “Building Canada through freedom,” in a single all-nighter and mailed it off right before the deadline. “Although we Canadians seldom recognize it, the most important guardian of our living standards is freedom,” he wrote. “The freedom to earn a living and share the fruits of our labour with loved ones, the freedom to build personal prosperity through risk taking and a strong work ethic, the freedom of thought and speech, the freedom to make personal choices, and the collective freedom of citizens to govern their own affairs democratically.” That argument is nearly identical to the pitch Poilievre would make more than 20 years later when he announced he was running for real-life prime minister.

In his early 20s, Poilievre was one of the key young activists running Stockwell Day’s campaign to lead the Reform Party’s successor, the Canadian Alliance, and working the phones to drum up donations. They dubbed themselves “Fight Club,” and Poilievre described their phone bank data as their “ammunition” and the phones as “our guns.” A couple of years later, when Day offered him a job as an assistant in his Ottawa office, Poilievre asked his mother, Marlene, for advice. “You better go there and get this out of your system,” she told him. “After the next election, come back here.” But Ottawa proved to be a one-way ticket out of Calgary. In the 2004 federal election, he ran in Nepean-Carleton (since renamed Carleton), a sprawling suburban and rural riding southwest of Ottawa, under the newly united Conservative banner that Stephen Harper knitted together out of the Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives. Poilievre was running against the Liberal defence minister, David Pratt, and he’d figured he stood a chance, but told his parents he expected to lose so they wouldn’t be disappointed. He ended up besting Pratt by 3,700 votes, thanks to the combined Alliance and PC vote.

As the candidate for Carleton in Ottawa, Poilievre talks with residents ahead of the 2019 federal election (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

The day after the election, with Paul Martin’s Liberal government reduced to a minority and Poilievre’s newborn party holding the balance of power, CPAC convened a TV panel to unpack the still-cooling election results. It included Ed Broadbent, former leader of the federal NDP, just returned as an MP after 15 years of political retirement; David McGuinty, a new Liberal MP from what passes for a dynastic Ontario political family; and Poilievre, the youngest member of the House of Commons. He was 25 years old, still padded about the jaw with baby fat, wearing a slightly too-big suit jacket; if you ever wanted to see a politician Cabbage Patch Kid, there he was.

“Pierre Poilievre is being painted as a bit of a giant killer,” the CPAC host said by way of introduction, owing to his defeat of a sitting cabinet minister. Poilievre sailed in, cheerfully chippy, but nervous too. He laid out the metrics by which his party was the true winner, if you really thought about it, and the many ways in which the Liberals were corrupt and ruinous. We’ll play ball if the government behaves better, he allowed, “but you’ll also see a vigorous defender of taxpayers in the Conservative party.” He punctuated the statement with a gavel-on-a-table gesture that was touchingly hammy.

“Well, who’s against that?” Broadbent said with an incredulous grin, before vilifying the Tories’ spendy campaign. Poilievre instantly pivoted to accusing the former NDP leader of propping up the Liberals. “I wonder if some of the machinations are already working, because it looks as though Ed Broadbent, a great hero of the Parliamentary tradition, is already stepping up to the plate to defend the Prime Minister,” he purred. Broadbent’s eyes widened ever so slightly. Poilievre no longer looked nervous; he was smiling like someone having an absolutely fantastic time.

This primordial version of Poilievre is as remarkable for the elements that haven’t changed at all as for the things that have. There he was already fully formed as the Skippy everyone would come to know and love/hate, stamping every square on his partisan talking-point bingo card, crediting his opponents with not one ounce of sense or decency, crafting every exchange as an invitation to sort it out behind the bike racks after class. But that chubby-cheeked Poilievre was different too, his goofy lack of polish sanding off some of the sharper edges. It was like he was wearing a Halloween mask of his own face, with his future self behind the eye holes.

RELATED: Autumn Peltier on youth activism, challenging Trudeau, and a future in politics

In the House of Commons, Poilievre accumulated a string of controversies that hinged on youthful and partisan intemperance. A mic picked him up hissing “f–k you guys” in a committee meeting; he blamed an “extremist element in the Liberal party” for opposition to extending post-9/11 anti-terror measures; he accused the chief electoral office of being power-hungry. “Are we really getting value for all of this money, and is more money really going to solve the problem?” he asked of compensation for residential school survivors, just hours before Harper was set to deliver a formal apology for the schools.

The impulse running through all of this was that anyone who attempted to thwart the Conservatives was an enemy who must be hacked off at the knees. And if Poilievre had simply toiled away earnestly as a young backbencher, it’s unlikely he would have carved out a name for himself as early or enduringly as he did. Harper offered a tacit benediction of his attack-dog talents when he named him parliamentary secretary to the Treasury Board president and then to the Prime Minister, before appointing him to cabinet as minister of state for democratic reform and, eventually, minister of employment and social development.

John Baird was Treasury Board president and Poilievre his parliamentary secretary when they worked together to shepherd through the Federal Accountability Act to protect civil servant whistleblowers. Baird was impressed by his younger colleague’s ability to negotiate dozens of compromises to win NDP support and pass the legislation. “He showed a real willingness to work across the aisle and get things done,” he says.

Poilievre arrives for a Conservative caucus meeting in Ottawa last November (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

Baird was also responsible for Poilievre acquiring the nickname “Skippy.” In 2006, the Harper government was being grilled about a homeless support program called the Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative, which was known by the acronym SCPI, pronounced “Skippy.” Baird stood up one day in question period and barked, “Mr. Speaker, I want to be very clear . . . this government has no intention of cutting SCPI.” With Poilievre sitting directly behind him in the House, Baird says that somehow the quotable quote turned into an inside joke that landed Poilievre the nickname. The funny thing is that, if you watch the tape of the exchange, it’s obvious that Baird, Poilievre and other colleagues nearby are killing themselves laughing before Baird even delivers the line. The origins remain mysterious, but Skippy abides.

When the Trudeau Liberals swept to power and the Conservatives moved into opposition, Poilievre became a smaller presence in caucus, quieter and more isolated, deploying his carefully rehearsed blows in QP and then hustling out. He edged his Liberal challenger by just 1,800 votes in that 2015 election. “One could say he had a near-death experience,” says one Conservative source who spoke on background. “And he just dedicated himself to going door-to-door every single day.”

Poilievre is known as an active constituent MP and a willing guest at fundraising events for other MPs, which is key to cultivating the support that wins you the leadership. He also treats door-knocking—usually the onerous, shoe-leather drudge work of politics—as a free instant focus group where he can hone his messages to see what fires people up or makes eyes glaze over. Poilievre adores language. He is often at his most engaging and insightful when rifling through the great speeches of history for the bits he most admires: Churchill’s choice of language you can see and feel; Lincoln’s logical and orderly structure. In this mode, Poilievre can be astonishingly bookish and thoughtful—or in his other gear, he can sneer “Justinflation” so many times across the aisle that everyone within earshot mourns the day they were born.

There was a time when ordinary citizens would comb Hansard—the complete oral record of the House of Commons—or wade through a big political speech for their own education, Poilievre’s caucus colleague Mark Strahl says. But that is not who we are now. “We’re in an Instagram—instant—generation and moment in politics, where it doesn’t matter what you say if no one’s listening. And Pierre gets people to listen,” he says. “I know his critics will point out that sometimes when you do things that way, maybe the sound bite sacrifices some of the nuance of the conversation, but at least the conversation is being had with Pierre.” Strahl depicts his colleague as a sort of Don Draper of conservative politics, preternaturally gifted at finding just the right catchy phrase to lob: carbon tax cover-up, vaccine vendetta, trust fund twins.

***

Now, Poilievre seeks to lead a party that is at war with itself. In order for the Conservatives to dethrone Trudeau and his Liberal government, they have to broaden their appeal to win over swing voters and suburbanites, and they cannot turn off Canada’s big cities. All of that means edging toward the centre, or at least not constantly peacocking their right flank. But the most motivated faction of the Tory voting base and party membership—and a large chunk of the caucus that turfed O’Toole—finds that unsatisfying. Poilievre, on the other hand, is the walking, talking partisan itch that feels so good to scratch. For every moment when O’Toole equivocated on an issue or displayed centrist inclinations, enraging the “true blue” base that propelled him to the leadership, Poilievre was out there snarling exactly what they wanted to hear. But Poilievre is the dessert that is so delicious in the moment, not the vegetables that will help the party grow.

He had a campaign ready to go for the 2020 Conservative leadership race that ultimately crowned O’Toole, but backed out right before he was to make his official launch, citing family considerations. (In 2017, he married Anaida Galindo, a former Senate staffer; they now have a three-year-old daughter named Valentina, and their son, Cruz, was born in September.) Baird was set to chair that campaign, and Jenni Byrne, a stalwart Conservative operative—and Poilievre’s long-ago girlfriend—would also hold a senior role. Both will now work on this campaign.

READ: Jagmeet Singh on relentless optimism and what’s next for the NDP

The Conservative base—and its rightmost flank at that—is clearly where Poilievre has decided his political bread is buttered now. “I think he’s become the voice of the base,” says Strahl. But for a clever, strategic thinker like him, it’s a significant shift in his assessment of the landscape. In 2006, talking to Paul Wells for his book Right Side Up, Poilievre argued that people misunderstood the strategy of Stephen Harper. “Everyone thinks he seduced the centre,” Poilievre said. “It’s actually the way he tamed the right.” Harper’s true victory was moving the party to a centrist position that was “acceptable to mainstream people” without raising “a peep” of dissatisfaction from the right, he said.

This is not the project Poilievre is working on. His belief in small government, fiscal restraint and personal responsibility is clearly bone-deep. But he’s now fixated on an edgily populist approach that revolves around dismantling the “elites” gobbling up the money and liberty of ordinary Canadians, the powerful who “clamp down” on anyone who disagrees with them, and governments using the permission slip of the pandemic to satisfy their lust to control citizens. Asked about the sorcerer’s apprentice problem—what if you conjure something dark that you can’t control, like people who decide to take real-world action on the things that anger them?—Poilievre bristles. “You seem to be suggesting that I shouldn’t be criticizing the government because someone else might get angry about that and do something that I don’t want them to do,” he says.

Poilievre strenuously disputes being especially combative or partisan—a case he buttresses by taking swipes at his opponents like someone struck his knee with a rubber hammer. He portrays himself in question period like a meticulous lawyer building up a case, slicing through the rhetorical posturing and partisan barbs in a relentless attempt to pry pure, simple facts out of a government that refuses to relinquish them. “The reason that some people find it so devastating is because the facts are devastating,” he says.

Accompanied by his wife, Anaida, and daughter, Valentina, Poilievre attends the Parliamentarian of the Year awards in 2018 (Photograph by Blair Gable)

He maintains that his best moments, and the ones that draw the most interest and eyeballs on his busy social media channels (Twitter: 314,000 followers; Facebook: 499,000 followers; YouTube: 205,000 subscribers), are his long, intricate treatises on, say, the history of money or whether we are still capable of the sprawling national ambition that built the Canadian Pacific Railway. Poilievre is skilled at deep musings—he once single-handedly filibustered a budget debate for four days by expounding on the various clauses of the Magna Carta, the proud inheritance of the British judicial system and that time Lord Halifax almost became Britain’s wartime prime minister. But if you mentioned his name to 100 people, chances are 99 of them would identify the hard partisan right hook as his calling card, rather than the learned dissertation.

In the House, debate etiquette functions a bit like a hockey game, in that people volunteer if they’re prepared to fight, and it’s considered gauche to go after a rookie or anyone who keeps their head down and their nose clean. As much as Poilievre can drive people around the bend, heavy hitters from the other parties seem to genuinely enjoy watching the master s–t disturber at work. “For as much as he is always putting the elbow in your face, he can be likable and charming,” says the NDP’s Charlie Angus. Everything Poilievre does comes with a self-aware wink and a nudge, and he can be genuinely funny. During that four-day filibuster, the purpose of which was to badger Trudeau into appearing before the justice committee to answer questions about the SNC-Lavalin scandal, Poilievre at one point smirked, “I know there have been many times when the Prime Minister would have given a great fortune to make me stop speaking. I am offering him the chance right now to do that for free, in the sense that the truth will set him free.” Liberal Kevin Lamoureux, another MP who loves partisan fisticuffs, coaches his colleagues to simply ignore Poilievre because heckling only winds him up.

However, there is a strange void beneath Poilievre’s gamesmanship. It’s not about his sincerity of belief—he could hardly be accused of not really meaning the things he’s been hollering in letters to the editor since he was a teenager—but rather the bigger picture. For someone who is so skilled and devoted to winning every single partisan battle, what is the war for? Angus finds this aspect of Poilievre confounding: he’s so good at the game of politics, but to what end? “Pierre just never seems to want to go there,” he says. “He prefers lighting a house on fire and seeing what happens.” Poilievre, for his part, explains his role in politics in near-mythological terms. “To keep the commoners the masters and the crown the servant,” he says. “That is the only purpose of Parliament.”

Poilievre’s partisan instincts are part of the problem: his reflexive defensiveness of anything that lines up with the home team or his own political advantage, and his equally knee-jerk denunciation of anything associated with the enemy creates an essential hollowness, if not outright hypocrisy.

At the height of the Freedom Convoy, when Poilievre was steadfastly refusing to acknowledge that the whole project was inherently destructive or unlawful, a clip suddenly made the rounds that was almost too perfectly symmetrical to be believed. Two years earlier, when activists blocked railways and pipelines to protest a natural gas pipeline running across Indigenous territory in British Columbia, Poilievre appeared on CBC and applied his trademark rhetorical gifts to arguing that the blockaders were impeding other people’s lives and needed to be dealt with by the law. “You have the right to swing your fist, but that freedom stops at the tip of someone else’s nose,” he said. That’s an entirely reasonable proposition, and it somehow stopped being true when the blockaders were in downtown Ottawa blasting their horns against vaccine mandates and assorted other Liberal-related injuries, because that served the purposes of Poilievre and his party.

MORE: Jason Kenney is sinking. How it all went wrong for him.

Talking to this would-be prime minister at length instead of watching him on the political stage is compelling and disorienting at the same time. Poilievre’s answers are slow and deliberative, and there’s a depth of insight that’s uncommon on Parliament Hill. You get the sense of a human being in there who really believes many of the ideas he advances. He’s funny, occasionally self-deprecating. He is, in short, impressive and likable.

But if you even brush up against the electrified buzzer of a partisan issue, a trapdoor opens in the floor, plunging you into Skippyland. Here, the intelligence becomes a switchblade, the complexity of thought a dust storm in which you can’t find the point you were sure you had. The Pavlovian partisan thing is frustrating because nothing useful or new is going to come from that conversation. What really stings is the gap between the two, the what-might-have-been quality to it all.

It’s hard to imagine a facet of Canadian politics and public life that would not benefit from having Poilievre’s straight-up smarts applied constructively to it, instead of wielded like a belt sander. He could be the leader of the Opposition forcing an increasingly insular and incoherent Liberal government to answer for itself, with all of the incisiveness he could bring to the task, but one-third of the amped-up “No, eff you” partisan spite. Instead, the Poilievre who is available to us is the one who snarls ceaselessly about Justinflation, lobs bombs just to bask in the glow of the blast and throws in his lot with protesters terrorizing ordinary citizens because—well, frankly, it’s hard to fathom why.

Poilievre is very, very bright, a clever strategic thinker, and at some point he decided to bury one of those versions of himself and make the other his ride-or-die, because that seemed like a more certain path to political success. Maybe he was right. And that is all of our loss.

This profile appears in print in the April 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “The ringleader.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post Why is Pierre Poilievre so angry? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Things were going great for Zarqa Nawaz. Little Mosque on the Prairie, the trailblazing CBC series she created and the first Muslim-centric sitcom on western TV, was a hit for six seasons, airing its finale in 2012. Two years later, her light-hearted memoir, Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, was released to critical acclaim, cementing her reputation as one of Canada’s most beloved comedians. Then Zarqa Nawaz’s phone stopped ringing as much it used to. For almost a decade, she lived through a period of professional uncertainty that felt like a test of faith.

She chipped away at a provocative satirical novel—a comedic spin on ISIS, and America’s policy in the Middle East—but had trouble selling it to publishers, who were concerned about its risky subject matter. She tried her hand at advice columns and radio hosting, but ultimately had trouble selling those jobs to herself. She felt like she’d given up.

In 2019, she was the television anchor for the six o’clock news on CBC Saskatchewan. During that time, at a social gathering, a close friend sidled up beside her and said something that hit her deep in her gut: “You know you’re throwing your life away, right?”

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Soon, Nawaz found the gumption to quit her CBC job and turned back to her creative projects. She started performing a stand-up act about generational differences in dating. She was headlining shows within six months, and hoping she could Jerry Seinfeld her way back onto television. Then the pandemic hit. Under lockdown, she came up with an idea for another TV show, this time about a divorced Muslim woman trying to get back at her ex. At the same time, she devoted herself to refining the novel.

It’s hard not to interpret what happened next as an act of fate. On Sept. 21, 2021, Nawaz received an offer from Simon & Schuster to buy her novel. Hours later, she got a deal with CBC Gem to produce her series. “I felt this wave of joy,” she says. “Now I tell myself, ‘Remember that day. The next time you go through a dry spell, remember that day when everything worked out. That day will happen again.’ ”

Nawaz’s new novel ‘Jameela Green Ruins Everything.’

Nawaz, 54, is now experiencing a career renaissance: her novel Jameela Green Ruins Everything lands on bookshelves on March 8, and her six-episode series Zarqa debuts on May 13. Both feature middle-aged Muslim women who blossom into funny, flawed heroines.

On the small screen, Nawaz has pioneered the art of creating stereotype-defying Muslim characters. Now a new cast of writers and filmmakers is building on that success, rising up through the hole she made in the glass ceiling. Muslim heroines in pop culture are finally starting to take control of their own destinies—and so is Nawaz.

***

Nawaz’s family moved from the U.K. to Canada in 1972, when she was five years old. Her parents settled in Brampton, Ont., and she grew up attending camps with the Muslim Youth of North America, an experience that planted the seeds for her later work.

She earned a journalism degree from Ryerson and got a job at CBC Radio. In 1994, she moved with her husband and their first child to Saskatchewan, where he would practise medicine. Soon after, Nawaz decided she wanted to be a filmmaker and, in 1995, took a three-week course at the Ontario College of Art and Design. There she produced her first film, BBQ Muslims.

In the five-minute short, a pair of innocent Muslim brothers (played by her own brother and his friend) get locked up for bombing someone’s backyard barbecue in Oakville, Ont. Meanwhile, the real perpetrators, white members of an anti-barbecue group, are disappointed not to get credit for the attack and capitalize on the publicity.

To Nawaz’s surprise, the short was selected to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1996. “I sat in the audience and watched people watch the film, and they were laughing,” she says. “That’s when I realized I could make comedies about political issues.”

BBQ Muslims was one of the first times Nawaz used zany plots to bust stereotypes about Muslim people. Whenever we see Muslims in film, she says, we only see stereotypical stories. “It’s always the life of a refugee, a terrorist, an oppressed woman,” she says. “And you don’t see the ordinary.”

In 2005, Nawaz created a National Film Board (NFB) documentary called Me and the Mosque, on the subject of male-female segregation and the influence of conservative Saudi Arabian ideals on North American mosques. The NFB screened the film at a festival in Banff, Alta., where she met someone from the Saskatchewan production company WestWind Pictures and pitched a TV comedy that played on the same themes. “I thought to myself, ‘What if the imam wasn’t from a culturally conservative country? What if he was born and raised in Canada? What if he came from a different profession, like law, and like me, left Ontario to live in Saskatchewan?’ ” Within months, the CBC had picked up the show.

Little Mosque, set in the small, fictional town of Mercy, Sask., was groundbreaking for its ensemble cast of Muslim characters. It dealt with the dynamics between Christian and Muslim neighbours and how Muslim people were treated post-9/11—but it always had a light touch.

For example, in the pilot, an airport passenger misinterprets the new imam’s phone conversation with his mom: “No, don’t put Dad on. I’ve been planning this for months, it’s not like I dropped a bomb on him,” he says in the call. “If Dad thinks it’s suicide, so be it. This is Allah’s plan for me.” Of course, he’s referring to his dad’s misgivings about the new job, but it takes a while to convince airport security. Nawaz’s favourite episode, “Eid’s a Wonderful Life,” from Season 2, depicts the mayhem of having Christmas and Eid ul-Adha scheduled a few days apart (they only fall during the same month once every 33 years). It ends on a montage of neighbours from competing holiday parties breaking bread together, set to a cover of Peace Train by Yusuf/Cat Stevens. “That year Christmas and Eid ul-Adha were within days of each other, and I remember going shopping and there wasn’t any butter left. The grocery stores couldn’t handle Christians, Muslims and Jews fighting over crucial ingredients,” she says. In the episode, she delighted in that absurd chaos.

Nawaz, shown here with co-stars Rob van Meenen and Bonnie Senger, produces and stars in the new series 'Zarqa' on CBC Gem (Courtesy of Peter Scoulard and CBC Gem)

Although these plots were radical for the time, the show was still a traditional sitcom, formulaic and safe enough that some critics wanted to see more aggressive social commentary. Looking back now, Nawaz wishes she’d pushed things a little farther, like in an episode called “Ban the Burka,” inspired by niqab bans in Europe: “I regret not making the niqabi character more prominent. There are so few opportunities for women in niqab to speak for themselves.”

Over its six seasons, the show was a ratings hit and earned international attention. “It proved to networks that you don’t need to have white leads in order to have a white audience,” Nawaz says. “People are willing to watch good television.”

Claire Ross Dunn wrote for the show for two seasons. It was a big writers’ room, but by coincidence, she ended up sitting next to Nawaz. “To be honest, she always seemed a bit like a Muslim Mary Tyler Moore,” Dunn says.

The two would laugh about their lives and their day-to-day peccadilloes, like the insanity of trying to get their kids to soccer on time (Nawaz is a mother of four), or getting one of their sons to do his math homework when he didn’t want to. They figured out how much they had in common, just as the show was trying to do for a Canadian audience of Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

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Dunn found it thrilling to be a part of something that had the potential to make society better. It wasn’t just fluffy TV. “I had watched a lot of Homeland. I had watched a lot of those American procedurals where Muslims are constantly the villain. It was a radical to make a light-hearted comedy about Muslims.”

Representation and diversity change the way viewers think about other people, Nawaz says. “If you’re never going to meet someone outside of your cultural bubble, then television might be the place you meet people.” A 2017 study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found viewers had “lower scores on implicit and explicit measures of prejudice” after watching Little Mosque, compared to a second group that watched an all-white sitcom. “It matters,” Nawaz says. “TV shows matter to how we humanize people.”

***

Jameela Green, the protagonist of Nawaz’s new novel, is an everyday middle-aged Muslim woman who has just written a memoir about being an everyday middle-aged Muslim woman, but she’s losing hope that it will ever top the New York Times bestseller list. Nawaz admits there’s some autobiography in the character. “To write a satire about Muslims, terrorism and ISIS was not easy or necessarily advisable,” Nawaz writes in the author’s note for Jameela Green Ruins Everything. It’s a comedy of errors about an ordinary Muslim woman thrust into a high-stakes international crisis. It’s also a tale of internal struggle, interspersed with characters’ private prayers to God. Throughout, Jameela struggles with keeping her faith and believing that things will work out, no matter what. “If I look back on the book now, those are the things I was trying to convince myself while I was writing it,” Nawaz says.

The novel is provocative and cheeky: the fictionalized ISIS group is called the Dominion of the Islamic Caliphate and Kingdom, and the original title of the book was The Rise and Fall of DICK. Nawaz knows that some scenes—especially when characters find themselves overseas in the grips of a murderous terror group—might push the limits of what an audience wants to experience, or what they find funny. She heard plenty about it from the publishers and editors who read her drafts.

“At a certain point, I gave up thinking that it would ever get sold because too many people were saying, ‘This book is just too much, over the top, wacky, crazy.’ They’re like, ‘Can you bring it down?’ And I’m like, ‘No,’ ” she says. “These things happen in the world. I’m not making this stuff up.”

She asked Omar Majeed, a filmmaker and editor, to read the book. Majeed met Nawaz in the mid-2000s, when he participated in a National Film Board fellowship program and she was assigned as his mentor. He was impressed by her devotion to Islam on the one hand and her casual unflappability on the other: “I’ve never met someone who is that by-the-book in regards to religion, but extraordinarily open-minded in every other way.”

'Americanish' director Zawahry (left), shown here with Nawaz, directed the first two episodes of 'Zarqa' (Courtesy of Peter Scoulard and CBC Gem)

He applauded the book for its bravery, and for addressing difficult subject matter, but predicted it could be a challenging read for many in their community: “Because Muslims and other Brown folks in western society still are feeling the immediate effects of their marginalization,” Majeed says. “And there are still deep, deep scars. There’s a sensitivity in our community. I understand it, but I know that we have to work through it.”

The needle Nawaz is trying to thread reminds Majeed of The Producers, Mel Brooks’s 1967 black comedy about playwrights who create a musical about Adolf Hitler. The film was controversial, criticized by the Jewish community for seeming to make light of the Holocaust. Later, in a 1978 interview in Maclean’s, Brooks said: “I think you can bring down totalitarian governments faster by using ridicule than you can with invective.”

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Nawaz says she’s facing criticism that she’s reinforcing stereotypes, and that Muslims don’t want to talk about the post-9/11 time period. “But it did happen,” she says. “Just because things are better for us in the media doesn’t mean there still isn’t suffering going on. Those terrorists did exist in the world, but I’m trying to put a different spin on it.”

***

Little Mosque paved the way for more diverse Canadian TV series, like Kim’s Convenience. And yet for a long time it was still an outlier, a unique flashpoint in pop culture’s portrayal of Muslim characters. Iman Zawahry, a University of Florida lecturer and director of the 2021 feature film Americanish, about a group of young Pakistani-American women in New York, says all that changed with the election of Donald Trump and his decision to target Muslim-majority countries with a travel ban. “That was the moment that a bunch of white male executives were like, ‘Hey, it’s time for us to tell stories about Muslims,’ ” says Zawahry. “The hijab became the new black. There was a hijabi in every single commercial.” In its 14th season in 2017, for example, Grey’s Anatomy introduced a hijabi doctor for the first time.

Meanwhile, the political atmosphere also made executives more receptive to ideas from Muslim creators. In the U.S., Ramy Youssef’s dramedy Ramy, which debuted in 2019, gave audiences new insights into the male Muslim-American experience. In the United Kingdom, Nida Manzoor’s We Are Lady Parts, whose first season aired in 2021, features a group of young Muslim women, including a niqabi, trying to make it as an eponymous punk-rock outfit. In Canada, CBC Gem’s 2021 Sort Of, from Bilal Baig and Fab Filippo, explores the life of the non-binary millennial child of Pakistani immigrants. Ms. Marvel, scheduled for release this summer, will feature the blockbuster Marvel franchise’s first Muslim superhero character, played by Markham, Ont., actor Iman Vellani. And the second novel from Toronto author Uzma Jalaluddin, Hana Khan Carries On, is being adapted for the silver screen by Mindy Kaling and Amazon Studios.

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Zawahry says she cried while watching We Are Lady Parts, and not because of the plot: “I cried because what I’ve been trying to do my entire career is actually happening.” Nawaz tapped her to direct the first two episodes of Zarqa, a comedy series about a character rarely (perhaps never) explored on screen: a middle-aged, divorced Muslim woman. The plot follows Zarqa, played by Nawaz herself, as she learns her ex is marrying a young, white yoga instructor, and reacts in all kinds of imperfect ways—starting with a promise to find a white surgeon named Brian to bring as her plus-one to the wedding. In the trailer, she asks Siri for the “No. 1 dating app for people over 50,” whispering into her iPhone, “white people only.”

When Nawaz’s career seemed stalled during recent years, she felt at times like she was drowning. She would pray to God: “Hey, man, what gives?” But she kept her faith. “As a Muslim, we are to be tested, and you are tested by loss. The whole purpose of it is to become stronger, to learn how to trust and not give up.”

Now she has passed the test, and she has a new appreciation for the power of patience. “You should never say never. You should always trust and have faith,” she says. “That’s what all this meant: be patient, even if it means waiting a decade.”

This article appears in print in the April 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Zarqa Nawaz’s leap of faith.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post Zarqa Nawaz had a hit show, then a decade-long dry spell. She’s ready for her second act. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

I grew up in Montreal in the ’80s, without cable TV. My dad and I did everything we could to occasionally pick up the PBS channel from Vermont. This involved a small Brechtian production. We put piles of old Yellow Pages on the radiator to lower and raise the television to a spot where the reception was clearer. Then there was a whole to-do with the antennae, which often involved sticking it out the window and using masking tape to hold it in place. Sometimes it would find a lucky spot where it could sit for a week or two. No one dared touch it.

The rest of the time we watched CBC television. And those shows were part of who we were. The first time we saw Sarah Polley was in the TV series Road to Avonlea, which was based on characters and stories from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s books. Polley was playing the lead role, Sara Stanley, a wise, orphaned child who is sent to live in a rural Prince Edward Island town. She is more erudite and sophisticated than the town’s people, and she ends up enrapturing them all. At the time, in the 1980s, there was nothing more wholesome than Montgomery. I read every book of hers I could get my hands on, convinced this was the life I should be living.

My father thought Sarah Polley was the most beautiful child he had ever seen. He couldn’t stop raving about her performance, about how adorable and intelligent she was. He would sit on the edge of the couch, eating leftover spaghetti and grinning at her proudly. He once said, “I think of her as my own little girl.” My father was always bizarrely charmed by child actors. They represented a sort of innocence that he loved.

Child actress Sarah Polley playing flute in her room. (Steve Liss/Getty Images)

In her new memoir, Run Towards the Danger, Polley puts the lie to the notion that she was experiencing anything like the wholesome L.M. Montgomery life I loved. In the book, she writes that she now sees much of Montgomery’s work as creating a nostalgia for a time that never existed. (In one of our conversations for this piece, Polley describes Montgomery as “problematic on so many levels” because of this nostalgia, but acknowledges the fierce grip of her romanticism on lonely children.)

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Back then, even when she was out of character, Sarah Polley seemed to be living in a kind of idyll. In interviews at the time, she appeared before the cameras, speaking like a polite, poised adult about her role on the show. Polley thinks of these interviews as performances. When I am surprised to hear this, she leaps forward and exclaims her distaste and shock that anyone would be foolish enough to regard the precociousness of child actors as anything other than a performance. “I find it a betrayal,” she says, “that it would be taken at face value, that people are buying it. It’s so insulting. If people cared, they would notice the way I’m behaving is for them and not me.”

Oh dear, I thought. Good thing my father isn’t around to hear that.

Sarah Polley and I were meant to meet in Toronto, but the Omicron variant nixed everyone in the country’s plans. We arranged to speak over Zoom. I sat in front of the computer 10 minutes ahead of time, just staring at my face in anticipation of the call. Then Polley popped on, also early. She has described herself as excessively punctual, and so am I. “I suppose you’ve heard from mutual friends how much I love your writing,” she said near the start of our call. “Yes,” I answered, although I had no idea. She was acting as though we had known each other for years. Then I realized she has been engaging with my thoughts for years. So how could she not feel like an old friend to me, since we had met in our fictions?

Of course, Polley feels like an old friend to many of us. She was the darling of Canadian film and television for decades and went on to become an acclaimed director. Her first film, Away From Her, was nominated for two Oscars, including best adapted screenplay. When it was announced last year that Polley was attached to the adaptation of the Miriam Toews novel Women Talking, a flurry of enthusiasm erupted on social media. There is continual interest in Polley as an artist and public figure.

Polley, however, has spent much of her career ducking from the expectations of the public and media. Along the way, she has grappled with questions about the things that were in her control and the things that weren’t. In her memoir, Polley has crafted six brilliant essays to capture the nuances of her own life story. There is a sense reading the book that Polley wants to get it right, to reclaim the narrative. She knows it is a delicate, tricky thing. We never truly understand our childhoods and who we were as children. But we can revisit those moments, trying to decide over and over again what they mean.

Each essay in the collection reveals something “behind the scenes” about Sarah Polley, something different from what she showed the audience. And each essay challenges what we think we know about her. The first piece centres around her role as Alice in the Stratford Festival’s 1994 production of Alice Through the Looking Glass. She presents a spectacularly vivid view of the backstage at a theatrical production. There is the seasoned Canadian stage actor Douglas Rain dressed as Humpty Dumpty, wearing a giant egg costume with tiny legs jutting out, yelling at other actors for laughing at him. There is a visceral account of the intense stage fright that left Polley in terror during the days leading up to a performance. There is a description of the immediacy of performing to an engaged and rapturous audience. There’s a lovely moment where she shows too much pathos for the White Knight and receives a note from stage management telling her to tone it down.

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The essay also examines Polley’s relationship with Lewis Carroll’s original text. Even at a young age, she understood the text as having problematic undercurrents. It is interesting to read what Polley thinks about Alice in Wonderland because there are so many links between her and the titular character. Like Polley, Alice engages with creatures who all treat her as an adult. They expect her to understand the world on her own. And, like Polley, Alice becomes curious and petulant and righteous as she looks for answers. One of the reasons Polley was so successful as a child actress was that she embodied the Victorian ideal of a child who is at once sophisticated, highly intelligent and delightfully naive.

The most peculiar aspect of Polley’s childhood was the consistent lack of parents. Her parents were both actors themselves, and her mother, Diane Polley, appeared on the Canadian TV drama Street Legal from 1987-90. When Polley was eight, her parents were overjoyed she won the part of Sally Salt in Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. They were with her on the set of that film, but she was often on her own while filming Avonlea. “They were almost never there,” she says. “I usually had an on-site guardian.”

Polley takes a breather between acting jobs with mother; Diane; and dad; Michael; at home in North York. (Jim Russell/Toronto Star/Getty Images)

Polley’s mother died when Polley was 11. In another essay, she writes that she was only given a week off from the set of Road to Avonlea after this loss, and that she was then asked to perform a scene in which her character describes how she felt about her own mother’s death. Following his wife’s death, Polley’s father was bereft and unable to clean up after himself; they discussed Ulysses and smoked together, but their relationship was more one of peers than parent-child. This lack of adult supervision led Polley to leave home at 14. She and her boyfriend lived in an apartment with no furniture and a mattress on the floor. She joined activist groups, read voraciously and kept working as an actor.

In the ’90s, she was one of the most recognizable actresses in Canadian film. If she was in a movie, it signalled that the movie was going to be cool. She was like the person who makes any party they show up at into a happening. She featured prominently in the brief but glorious period of the Toronto New Wave, in which filmmakers like Patricia Rozema, Atom Egoyan and Don McKellar made low-budget, edgy, absurdist portraits of Canadian identity.

There was something elusive about her. She would occasionally disappear from acting and devote herself to activism. In 1995, she helped organize a protest against Mike Harris’s Conservative government’s austerity measures. With her body crushed in a crowd, yelling out, she lost two teeth. She was trying to see where she fit in the world, to squeeze herself into ordinary human experience and have a meaningful impact on it.

Then she was offered Hollywood fame. She was recruited for the star-making role of a groupie, Penny Lane, in the 2000 movie Almost Famous. “There was a very clear sense with that part that whoever was going to play it was going to be a huge star. Nobody made any secret of that,” Polley tells me.

She went as far as being fitted for costumes, and then she dropped out. “I didn’t design this life,” she says. “I didn’t want it. I didn’t seek out to be a famous actress. This notion of some big career, of being famous—it wasn’t my agenda. I wanted to write. I wanted to go to Oxford. I was interested in politics. And it seemed like something I hadn’t even wanted for myself could potentially take over my entire existence.”

Although she was ambivalent about acting, Polley was increasingly focused on the goal of becoming a director herself. When she was 17 years old, she came across Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace. It was a reimagining of an actual 19th-century Canadian murderess, Grace Marks. Polley tells me she doesn’t remember a thing about that year other than reading Alias Grace.

So the 17-year-old Polley approached Margaret Atwood in her prime and asked for the film rights for Alias Grace. Atwood, sensibly, refused. It took 20 years for Polley to obtain the rights and turn the book into a Netflix series. In an interview in the New York Times, Polley said of Alias Grace, “The idea of having more than one identity, the face you show to the world and the face that’s deep within, captivated me.”

One of the most powerful essays in the memoir is called “The Woman Who Stayed Silent.” It is Polley’s reckoning with the fact that she did not come forward during the Jian Ghomeshi trial. It begins with a post Polley found on Twitter:

“Wonder why Sarah Polley never spoke out about being assaulted by Jian Ghomeshi. #HerToo. She was the woman who stayed silent. Ask her.”

The memoir is Polley’s answer. She lays out every detail of her encounter with Jian Ghomeshi. Once again she was incongruously young. She was 16 years old and Ghomeshi was in his late 20s. Polley describes how she went on a date with Ghomeshi and went back to his house. She says they had sex, and he put his hands around her neck. When she said she didn’t like it and she didn’t want him to do it again, he did it again. She says that her body was contorted in a painful position, and that he ignored her when she said she wanted him to stop. (Ghomeshi did not respond to a request for comment sent to Roqe Media, a digital broadcast network that he co-founded.)

Polley is photographed for Talk magazine on May 27, 1999 in New York City. (Michael Birt/Contour/Getty Images)

Polley chose not to come forward and testify with the three other women who did. As a mother of two young children, she felt she was not in a place in her life where she could withstand the exposure that would come with the trial. The women’s credibility was challenged ruthlessly on the stand. The legal system makes it incredibly difficult for a woman to prove she was sexually assaulted, and forces her instead to be scrutinized and humiliated and accused of the vile crime of perjury herself.

The chapter in Polley’s memoir about Ghomeshi is carefully written, and relentlessly examines and dissects the alleged assault and her own reactions to it. She subjects herself to the same scourge of questions she would have been asked, in all probability, by a trial lawyer. She is her own prosecutor. She is her own jury. She is her own Twitter troll. “It is such a hard time to talk about because I spent so many years finding the exact words I wanted to use and felt comfortable using,” Polley tells me. “What I will say is, for however many years since the trial, I have not carried it lightly. I carry around really heavily not having said anything that may or may not have lent legitimacy.”

Some of the main evidence used to disprove the women’s allegations was their own behaviour following their encounters with Ghomeshi, such as writing him friendly or flirty texts. In the essay, Polley recounts her own similar actions and behaviour toward Ghomeshi after her alleged assault. She describes an interview she did with him in 2012 on his hugely popular radio show Q for her film Take This Waltz. The interview seemed awkward at the time, because Ghomeshi kept circling back to questions about whether monogamy was possible. Polley recalls her squeamish attempts to act normal on the show. “I hate these questions and I am deeply uncomfortable having this conversation with him,” she writes. “But I am good-natured, almost flirty, and happily diminish myself.”

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Polley has spoken about sexual predators in the film industry before. In 2017, she published an essay in the New York Times about her encounter with Harvey Weinstein in a hotel room. Weinstein described having a “close relationship” with a famous actress and said that if he and Polley developed the same kind of relationship, she would have a similar career to the famous actress. Polley let Weinstein know she wasn’t interested. She acted in the manner of the so-called “perfect victim,” one who protests and refuses the perpetrator. But she didn’t have as much to lose as many of the women Weinstein abused. As she wrote in the Times piece, she was no longer interested in acting. But avoiding Jian Ghomeshi in the Canadian media landscape at the time was impossible.

A still from the 1988 film 'The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,' starring a young Polley (Columbia/Everett Collection/CP)

Polley is worried about being judged for not coming forward previously. She reminds me that the Ghomeshi trial happened before the #MeToo movement. Now, there are a lot more resources for and a much better awareness of trauma and the complicated ways women process and cope with abuse. We didn’t know how to listen to women. We didn’t understand how to believe women. Most of all, we had a major blind spot when it came to the way women reacted to and lived with trauma. I circle back to Polley’s interview with Ghomeshi and ask whether she is worried about people watching this video and looking for her unease and discomfort. “Oh no!” she says. “I want them to see it. I want them to see how awkward I am.”

About 10 years ago, I was having lunch with my friend Marie. She worked at SODEC, a government agency that promotes and funds Quebec-made films. I was looking at my plate, confused by my decision to order escargots as a main course. Marie began telling me about her colleague Harry Gulkin, who we both knew. A director and producer known for his 1975 film Lies My Father Told Me, Gulkin was a short and charismatic man with a shock of white hair that curled wildly above his head.

Marie said Harry was taking time off work to spend with a daughter he had just found out about. She was grown and he had missed out on her youth. He was desperate to spend more time with her and get to know her.

I stared at the escargot dripping with butter at the end of my fork, and asked what Harry’s daughter did for a living.

“Oh, she’s Sarah Polley,” she answered.

“Wait, what? Sarah Polley is Harry’s daughter! That’s totally crazy!”

“Mmmm,” Marie said.

“Marie,” I said, matter-of-factly, before eating my snail, “you do not know how to tell a story.”

But how in the world does one tell such a story? Polley thought up her own unique way, creating a documentary called Stories We Tell that eschews the boundaries of the form.

Nine months prior to Polley’s birth, Diane Polley had taken a role in a Montreal play and was away from the family. Throughout her life, Polley’s siblings would joke that she looked nothing like her father, and that perhaps she was the result of an affair. Polley begins the documentary looking for the answer herself. She interviews her siblings and father. They suspect the handsome leading man in the play is her biological father. When Polley interviews Harry Gulkin, a friend and colleague of Diane’s, thinking he can provide some light on her mother’s time in Montreal, he reveals he had a romance with Diane Polley at the time. To everyone’s surprise, the DNA tests conclude he is her biological father.

Polley created fake Super 8 films of her mother, played by Rebecca Jenkins. The Diane Polley who appears in these half-real films is effervescent, always in motion, always smoking, laughing, talking on the telephone or serving dinner. She is a typical 1980s supermom, devoting herself to work and her family in a frenetic, hysterical existence. I, like many viewers, did not realize at first these were not authentic home videos but dramatizations. This aspect of the film caused people to question whether it was truly a documentary. But what are memories? They change. They become small films we direct and edit and play in the cinema of our minds to determine who we are.

Polley’s approach to her essays is much the same as her documentary. There is a sense that, going into them, she did not know exactly what they would say. But that was the point. While Polley was getting dressed after a swim at a local community centre in 2015, a fire extinguisher fell on her head. She suffered a concussion that rendered her thought process foggy and made it difficult for her to even get out of bed. She travelled to the United States to visit an eccentric doctor with a cult-like following, who instructed her to “run towards the danger.” In other words, if there was a thought or event that seemed difficult to her, she was to encounter it head-on. She was to pursue it instead of retreating from it.

This cured Polley. It helped her confront the things in her life that have haunted her the most. These essays are the result—portraits of a mind trying to make sense of an unusual life, trying to figure out how to believe in your own sense of self and your own desires in a patriarchal world.

AWAY FROM HERE, Director Sarah Polley (right), on set, 2006. (Everett Collection/CP)

This year marks the release of the first film Polley has directed in 10 years, Women Talking, which stars Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand and Claire Foy. The book by Miriam Toews, from which the film was adapted, was inspired by a case of widespread and shocking abuse in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. Between 2005 and 2009, more than 130 women were drugged and raped by men in their colony. The community’s elders and the women’s fathers and husbands dismissed their complaints as “wild female imagination.” Toews’s book examines not the horrific rapes these women suffer, but the aftermath. The women assemble in a barn and talk for three days about how to move forward. Will they be able to be strong enough to flee the community? What will their lives look like? What does it mean to begin their own story? They have no tools to survive. They have only been thwarted. But they feel that if they can articulate what they want—if they can conceive of it, imagine it—they will be able to follow that intellectual idea and find independence.

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Women Talking mirrors Polley’s own exercise. She had to make sense of the pieces and episodes of her life in order to move forward, to know this was the path she willingly chose, and that whatever it is she is doing with her one wild life, it is on her own terms.

She tells me that when she began shooting Women Talking, she felt as though she were suddenly home: “This is where I grew up. There is nowhere I am going to feel more at home than at 4 a.m. in the dark, in a minivan, going to a film set, going home for the holidays. I grew up in this circus. I tried to shift my identity so I wasn’t a circus animal. But part of me grew up there and feels a sense of belonging there. This time I felt a joy I hadn’t noticed before, because I was choosing it.”

A previous version of this story contained several errors. It incorrectly stated that Polley’s parents hadn’t come with her to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen set. We also incorrectly stated that she asked for the rights to Alias Grace when she was 19. In addition, the order of events during Polley’s date with Jian Ghomeshi were incorrectly described, as were some of the comments in her New York Times story about her encounter with Harvey Weinstein. Contrary to our original description, she did speak with him many times following this encounter. Maclean’s regrets the errors.

This article appears in print in the April 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “What Sarah Polley wants you to  know.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post Heather O’Neill on Sarah Polley appeared first on Macleans.ca.

There’s a scene in Turning Red, the upcoming Pixar movie directed by Canadian wunderkind Domee Shi, that had me guffawing in bed. Mei, the 13-year-old protagonist, begins sketching a boy on the pages of her math homework when she realizes she’s drawing the likeness of Devon, a 17-year-old boy who works at the local Daisy Mart in Toronto’s Chinatown, where she lives.

Mei’s right brain takes over, her hand unable to pull away from the paper—Devon’s got chiselled shoulders; Devon winks at her and a heart floats from his eye; he’s embracing her now. Mei realizes what she’s drawing, and she’s giddy. Her eyes grow wide and her cheeks flush red. Then Mei’s mom, Ming, voiced by Canadian actress Sandra Oh, walks into her room. Mei shoves the sketchpad under her bed, but the corner of it pokes out. It’s a matter of seconds before her mom opens the book and sees the drawings inside.

This is my life, I think, recalling a time in high school when my mom went through my backpack and found condoms inside. “I got them for free! At a clinic!” I yelled as she grabbed a handful and threw them in the bin.

Like Mei, whose story is loosely based on Shi’s family, I’m the only daughter of immigrant Asian parents. I grew up in Toronto, in an apartment just walking distance from where Shi lived. I was born two years ahead of her, in 1987, but we lived somewhat parallel lives, taking the TTC to school and asserting our tween independence while trying to pacify our overly concerned mothers.

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Mei, who turns into a giant red panda every time she experiences intense emotion, might feel familiar to millennials who came of age in the early 2000s; it’s a film that brings us back to the days when we belted Britney Spears’s lyrics “Hit me baby one more time” and plastered Justin Timberlake’s bleached, spiky hair-framed face across our bedroom walls.

But there’s another layer to the movie that makes it feel like it’s mine. Shi doesn’t just create a story about parental expectation as it conflicts with the child’s own wants and dreams, a stereotype reverted to by many Western films depicting Chinese families (think Crazy Rich Asians). Instead, by drawing on her own life, and her own relationship with her parents, she portrays a family dynamic that isn’t “Asian,” per se, but ordinary: challenging, rewarding, messy and full of both tenderness and regret.

“Did you ever think that your relationship with your parents would be . . . ” I ask the first time I speak with Shi over Zoom, in late December. “My life’s work?” Shi says, smiling.

***

In many ways, Mei’s mother, Ming, is your typical “tiger mom”: she expects excellence from Mei across academics, extracurriculars and at home; she’s not afraid to tell Mei if she thinks one of her friends is “odd”; and she has no problem showing up at Mei’s school unannounced, regardless of how that might make Mei feel.

Tiger moms, who adopt a style of parenting that’s generally authoritarian—demanding, overprotective, emotionally unsupportive—were first so called by Chinese-American law professor and author Amy Chua, who wrote the 2011 memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The expression has since been adopted by the American Psychological Association and referenced widely across North American media and pop culture.

“There’s a sense from the trailer that [Ming] is a tiger mom, but I’m also just like, she’s a pretty nice mom,” says Adrian De Leon, a Filipino professor from Toronto who teaches American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. “There is going to be a lot of temptation, especially from audiences, to try to fit [this movie] into an Orientalist perspective to figure out what is quintessentially Asian about it, when actually what is so quintessentially Asian about the story is that it is so normal.”

Becky Neiman-Cobb, left, and Domee Shi, Oscar winners of the best animated short, "Bao," during the Governors Ball Oscars after-party in Los Angeles, Feb. 24, 2019. (Patrick T. Fallon/The New York Times/Redux)

Shi reflected on the relationship with her own mother, Ningsha, through the eight-minute short Bao; Shi’s directorial debut for Pixar, it won the 2019 Academy Award for best animated short film. The plot line centres on a Chinese mother who grieves her only son’s departure from home. As the mother grapples with the concept of an empty nest, one of her handmade dumplings comes to life and becomes her fantasy son, until he grows up too. In the end, the mother swallows her dumpling so he’ll never have the chance to leave.

Turning Red looks at the parent-child relationship from the kid’s point of view. “When I was younger, I was like, ‘Why are my parents so unfair? Why are they so crazy and overprotective?’ ” Shi says. “It just comes from wanting to protect your kid and the experiences my mom went through when she was younger in coming to a new country, and having this only child who could be taken away at any moment by the forces of the universe.”

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In 1990, when Shi was just one, Ningsha left Chongqing, a city in China’s Sichuan province, to pursue a master’s in humanities at Memorial University in Newfoundland. Shi and her dad, Le, followed a year later and the family lived in St. John’s before moving to Toronto in 1993, when Ningsha was offered a spot in the Ph.D. program in education at the University of Toronto.

Ningsha says Shi was a quiet child who loved eating home-cooked pork, chive and cabbage dumplings, and Sichuan staples like mapo tofu and Chongqing hot pot. She also loved sketching. At night, she’d spend three or four hours lying on her stomach and drawing, with reruns of CSI or The Simpsons on in the background. Le, a landscape painter and fine art teacher, taught Shi basic technique and scale early on “for fun,” he says. When he’d nudge her to go to bed, she’d say “I’m just finishing this one, Dad.”

Ningsha says she was a “strict” mother, ceaselessly concerned about her only daughter’s safety and progress. She needed to be physically close to Shi most of the time, even if that meant transferring Shi from a middle school close to their home in East York to one that was right across the street from her office downtown.

A scene in Turning Red, where Ming shows up at the window outside of Mei’s math class and gets into a fight with the school’s security guard, is based on Shi’s first day of middle school: “[My mother] was hiding behind a tree with sunglasses on when I came out of school with my new friends,” Shi remembers. “I was mortified.”

Shi took it all in stride and never lashed out, even when the pressures of toggling between extracurriculars—like practising the flute for at least seven hours a week (she completed her Grade 10 Royal Conservatory of Music exams), academics, art—and just being a teen began to collide. Shi thought of quitting music “all the time,” she says. And Ningsha could see that her daughter was close to the breaking point, but never said a word. “We don’t talk,” Ningsha says . “We just feel.”

***

Ningsha and Le shuffle around to try and get both their faces in the frame. They’re in the kitchen, talking to me on Zoom from their bungalow in Scarborough, Ont., where the family has lived since 2003.

Le lifts a stack of at least six sketchbooks so I can see them. Ningsha, who has a round face and kind eyes, looks eerily similar to the mother in Bao. Le is quiet, and chooses his words carefully, similar to Mei’s father in Turning Red. As parents, they never pushed Shi toward a specific profession, he says, but he did warn about the financial pitfalls of art as a career: “If you choose art,” he said to her, “that means you’re poor.” So if she was going to do it, she’d better be exceptional.

After high school, Shi pitched Sheridan College’s world-renowned animation program to her parents as the perfect mix of art and commercialism. Nancy Beiman, Shi’s second-year storyboard teacher and a Disney animation vet who has worked on characters like Bugs Bunny, Goofy and Hercules, says that Shi displayed film sensibility early on.

A storyboard is like a comic strip, but for a movie. “You are portraying the performance of the character,” says Beiman. “You are not doing all the animation, you’re only doing the important acting bits—a visual shorthand for a script.”

Shi’s very first assignment was to create a storyboard to match “Hector Protector,” a children’s nursery rhyme. “[Shi] did an arrow shooting off of different parts of the castle, taking off people’s wigs and knocking them off their thrones,” Beiman says. “Whereas a lot of people would stage it flat, she had all sorts of camera angles.”

Shi’s love of reading comics—Garfield, Betty and Veronica and One Piece, a Japanese manga series by Eiichiro Oda—gave her an edge, along with her ability to inject dark elements into what would be considered lighthearted themes. In 2018, she told the Los Angeles Times that Bao’s macabre ending came from “that primal feeling of just wanting to love something so much that you’re willing to destroy it.”

Ayan Sengupta, a television animator and Shi’s former classmate at Sheridan, recalls a third-year group film project for which Shi pitched and boarded the entire film in two days, a process that would normally take over a month. And when they were asked to make a film by themselves as a final project in fourth year, Shi’s boards were the movie: “Like, you could just play her drawings on the screen, and you wouldn’t even have to animate or add colour or anything—the board would look like a film,” he says.

In January, Disney, which owns Pixar, held a virtual press event ahead of Turning Red’s March release. One of the film’s animators, Aaron Hartline, showed a few slides of Shi’s black-and-white hand-drawn boards depicting Panda Mei’s expressions beside stills of Panda Mei from the film: “I myself witnessed how Domee carefully figured out the entire film down to just the right expression,” he said. “So whenever possible, we follow those specific quirky poses and put them into our characters . . . those drawings are gold for the animators to follow.”

***

In 2021, when North Americans once again encountered a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes as a repercussion of the global COVID-19 pandemic, celebrities, artists and activists rallied around the campaign #StopAsianHate, which snowballed on social media. Asians across North America reckoned with the reality that the violence was only one manifestation of anti-Asian racism.

The “model minority” narrative, which surfaced after the Second World War, stemmed from the belief that Asians were the ideal people of colour to emigrate to the United States due to their potential economic success. The outcome has been a prejudice that’s reverberated in everything from the way Asians are hired in the workforce (tokenism) to the way we are portrayed in film and television.

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“So much of racism, especially in the arts, is that stories about us are imagined by other people,” De Leon says,“that we do not have the agency and the capacity to not only imagine stories and be storytellers in our own right, but for that work to be considered on its own terms.”

De Leon refers to Bling Empire, a Netflix series that follows the life and friendships of Kevin Kreider, a Korean-American model who lives in Los Angeles, as one of his favourite “himbo”—slang for an attractive but not necessarily intellectual dude—stories. “There’s a certain power in not having to be this . . . ultra-smart, ultra-wealthy, ultra-hard-working Asian person,” he says. “We do have the right to just lounge around, work out and look hot.”

At the virtual publicity event for Turning Red, Shi was asked about the school security guard in the film, apparently Pixar’s first-ever turban-wearing Sikh character. “There’s quite a prominent Sikh population in Canada . . . the leader of the NDP Party, he’s Sikh,” Shi said. “And growing up, I was exposed to a lot of Sikh people in my classroom . . . the specific Sikh security guard was inspired by [Baltej Singh Dhillon] the first [turban-wearing] Royal [Canadian] Mounted Police officer.”

Sengupta, who is originally from India, is elated to see different Asian cultures interacting in film and television exactly the way they would in a city like Toronto. He believes that Canadians are leading the charge—with shows like Kim’s Convenience and Run the Burbs—in giving audiences a glimpse of the diaspora here, where Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Japanese, Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Tamils, Vietnamese and Indonesians are friends, neighbours, classmates and co-workers. “Representation is key,” he says. “The only thing [that] represent[ed] [me] were the brown villains in movies, like Raza in the original Iron Man.”

When I ask Shi whether she thinks Mei could be viewed as a model minority, she shakes her head. “I don’t think so,” she says. “She’s so funny and dorky,” as if to say, can’t Mei be just that?

Spot the Canadiana

(Click through this gallery. Story continues below.)

The maple leaf abounds in Mei’s world. (Check out the “logo” on Ming’s car, in another slide)

Mei attends Lester B. Pearson Middle School, named for Canada’s 14th prime minister. About a dozen Canadian schools (and at least one school board) have the same namesake.

In this scene, Mei is freaked out because she has just changed from girl to panda and back. Ming thinks Mei is going through another big life change. Meanwhile, the bobblehead moose on the dash—repping Canada’s boreal forest—is just chillin’.

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***

Ningsha and Le haven’t seen Turning Red yet, but they both smile when I tell them their daughter credits her relationship with her parents as the throughline of her work.

I ask them to think about how she got there; what defined her as a child. Art, music and friends, they say. “Hard work” is a term Le uses often. Ningsha, on the other hand, has an urge to express regret. She remembers the time in middle school when Shi flunked her Grade 10 flute exam and had to take it a second time. “If she said, ‘I quit,’ I think about how that would have been okay. But she never said, ‘I’ll stop,’ and I never said, ‘You can stop now.’ ”

Turns out Shi always wants to finish what she starts: “I’m a completionist,” she says. “I think my mom is too.” When I ask how her relationship with her mom is reflected in Turning Red, she offers up a spoiler: “The red panda magic is actually something that Mei inherited from her mom, and the way that her mom has handled [it] is very different than how Mei wants to handle it. You see the difference between the two generations and how they deal with all of the messiness that’s inside of them.”

The Shi family is like most; there are things you don’t reveal to each other. At the press event, Shi tells the media there’s definitely a secret notebook somewhere in her room back in Canada, which she hopes her parents never see. In our interview, she tells me about asking a cousin who was visiting her parents in Toronto: “Can you take it and just burn it? Throw it away?”

Over Zoom, Le quickly flips through one of Shi’s sketchbooks and stops to show me a drawing. “Handsome boy,” he points out, as I take in the big, star-like anime eyes. The sketchbooks aren’t secret—her parents have seen them all.

This article appears in print in the March 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “The magic of Domee Shi.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post With ‘Turning Red,’ Domee Shi wants to tell the story of your childhood appeared first on Macleans.ca.

When a visitor pulls into his long driveway, Charles Fipke steps onto his porch, large food-storage container in hand. He reaches in and tosses fistfuls of birdseed off the stoop and around the rental car. “There’s a quail’s nest nearby,” Fipke explains. He steps inside, setting down the birdseed bin, not minding that some spills on his rug and tile floor. He invites his guest inside his 6,250-sq.-foot Kelowna, B.C., abode.

Picture windows showcase his outdoor pool, the beach and Okanagan Lake—Fipke calls this his “front yard,” and complains about beach-walkers occasionally trespassing on the area he’s roped off as his. Within minutes of plunking down on his white leather sofa to chat, he’s up toward the window to show off his two favourite parts of lakefront living. There’s the towering willow that convinced him to buy this property on Capozzi Road. Its falling leaves require a pool cleaner to come several times a week, but it’s worth it. The winged wildlife is his other love. No birds are out on this chilly, bleak-sky day, but there are photos of plenty in albums stacked on his window ledge. His professional-grade long lenses have captured images of great blue herons, swans, cedar waxwings, nesting ospreys and more near his private boat dock.

In a fast-growing city full of affluent retirees and businessfolk from Alberta and the Lower Mainland seeking sun, golf and wine, Fipke is in a class of his own. He’s the geologist who discovered diamonds in Canada’s North and amassed a mining fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars. He believed he’d found his treed and avian paradise when he paid $6.3 million for the property, among a tidy clutch of lakefront family homes in Kelowna’s Mission Creek district, in 2006. But now it’s a lonely place to own a standalone house. Across the street, five- and six-storey condo buildings stand on land once occupied by single-family homes. The house next door and four adjacent ones have been razed to make way for Aqua Waterfront Village: 344 luxury condos and townhouses, including a 13-storey tower metres from his property line. In a few years, his house will likely be the last among a sea of lake-view condos and vacation rentals.

The rock hunter who beat the world to where diamonds slept in the Arctic has found himself, without initially realizing it, smack in the middle of the area his city had long pegged as its new tourist district. Most of Kelowna’s lakeshore is lined with private houses much like Fipke’s. He just happens to live on a slab of waterfront that planners and developers want to carve up for the countless newcomers yearning for a small slice of one of the country’s premier summer destinations.

Many people in his predicament would’ve sold out and moved by now—especially those with the means to buy nice houses (or a few lots) anywhere else. Not this 75-year-old. Fipke has launched a lawsuit against Aqua’s developer and the City of Kelowna, mounting technical objections in hopes of quashing permits for the massive project. The result is one of Canada’s most unique and intractable not-in-my-backyard battles in recent memory: a lone centimillionaire pitted against one of the region’s most powerful condo builders and a city hall that has embraced rapid growth; a man who got rich opening up the earth to extract its goodies and now wants to safeguard his neighbourhood’s wildlife.

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“It’s like the unstoppable force meets the immovable object,” remarks Al Janusas, a Kelowna resident and development watcher. “I can’t say I blame him. When he moved in there, it was a quiet little enclave. And it’s not anymore. But that’s the story of Kelowna, and especially that area.”

***

It’s unclear what a legend of the diamond-mining world is supposed to look like, but this one is rather unassuming. Short but sturdily built—years ago, some co-workers nicknamed him Stumpy—Fipke is known to bicycle in good weather to his mineral research lab. His demeanour is casual and self-effacing, verging on uncertain, with a halting speech pattern that has him ending almost every sentence with a “hey?” Chuck (nobody calls him Charles) is bald but for an unexpected patch of short, grey-black hair on the back of his head. In lieu of a computer or his own email address, his kitchen table is strewn with a mess of documents about his Aqua lawsuit, mixed among notes on precious metal samples. Photo albums of birds spotted in his “front yard” and on travels abroad are stacked next to a bulge of binders with info about thoroughbred stallions, alphabetized by horse name. More than a hobby, racing and breeding horses has become his other multi-million-dollar venture. And, he admits, an addiction. He owns a farm in Kentucky and has enjoyed success at big races: second place at the 2013 Kentucky Derby, first at the 2008 Queen’s Plate.

Fipke was passionate about wildlife before he was shiny rocks. Growing up on Edmonton’s outskirts in the 1950s, he began breeding and selling pigeons and doves, earning his own money while classmates were on allowances. His dad moved the family to the Okanagan in Chuck’s teens.

As he was finishing high school, Fipke dreamed of majoring in ornithology, the study of birds. But his father urged him to pursue a field that would make money, and he enrolled in geology at the University of British Columbia. Degree in hand, he took on a series of mining contracts in Australia, Papua New Guinea, Brazil and Africa—sometimes with his wife Marlene, whom he met during university, and their son Mark in tow. His adventures in the 1970s, chronicled in a later biography, sound like rejected bits from Indiana Jones screenplays: wading through crocodile-infested waters for a copper sample; fleeing charging rhinos; bartering away his clothes to evade hostile locals; surviving cerebral malaria and a helicopter crash.

In his early 30s, Fipke realized he could work for himself and set his own destiny. He returned to Kelowna and founded C.F. Mineral Research and Dia Met Minerals, and devised methods of finding diamonds in the Northwest Territories. He set up a clapboard shack in the wilderness, and in September 1991, Fipke and his partner Stewart Blusson found a core sample containing 81 diamonds at a site 300 km north of Yellowknife. The Canadian diamond age had begun, with Fipke and Dia Met at the forefront. The Ekati Diamond Mine opened in 1998, pushing its Kelowna-based founder’s personal wealth as high as $842 million, according to Canadian Business magazine. By that time, however, key figures in Fipke’s orbit had exited, by lawsuit or falling-out: diamond-hunting partner Blusson; brother and Dia Met executive Wayne; eldest son and work-camp pal Mark; and Marlene, who’d discovered he’d had a son—his sixth child—with a younger woman. “In order to do something like [build a successful company] you have to be a hundred per cent committed—something gives, hey?” the geologist wistfully told the Edmonton Journal in 1997. “Every person without exception that was close to me has turned on me—everyone. Everyone.”

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His wife’s divorce settlement in 2000 was Fipke’s $120-million stake in Dia Met, and remains one of Canada’s largest post-marriage agreements. Fipke stepped back from mine operations but continued hunting internationally for gems and precious metals. And he decamped to the sort of condo he now dreads: a 16th-floor penthouse in downtown Kelowna. Eventually, as his youngest son Tayler grew up, Fipke decided a penthouse wouldn’t do. He found that willow tree on Capozzi, and moved into a quiet house on what was then a quiet little street.

***

Fipke’s neighbourhood, five kilometres south of downtown Kelowna, was once the quiet refuge of the area’s pioneers. Harold Truswell, the region’s first Ford dealership owner and namesake of adjacent Truswell Road, first settled where Mission Creek empties into Okanagan Lake in 1941. Later came the Capozzi family, on what is now Fipke’s lot: they founded Calona, the original Okanagan Valley winery. Next door to the Capozzis was J.W. Hughes, the first planter of commercial grapes in the region. Over time, the lakefront lots in what was then called Okanagan Mission filled up, bracketed by the relocated and classy Hotel Eldorado and the more affordable Walnut Grove Motel. By the time Fipke bought in 2006, the first few houses had been bulldozed for resort-style villas: the 54-unit Mission Shores, built by a company that would eventually rebrand as Mission Group. But that development didn’t much bother Fipke. It was at the end of the block. He was enamoured by the birds, trees and water.

By this point, Kelowna, and the Okanagan Valley around it, was established as the closest thing Canada has to a sun belt. Reliably warm weather, boating, golf and wine have made the region one of Canada’s fastest-growing for several decades, and a magnet particularly for retirees. More than two million summer tourists per year come to play, among them a cadre of off-season NHL stars. Provincial statistics show the city grew by 28,000 people (23 per cent) in the last decade, edging close to a total of 150,000 (having only hit six digits in 2001). It expects to gain another 45,000 by 2040, all of which drives demand for real-estate developers and their construction cranes to keep pace with.

In the late 1990s, Kelowna city council realized they couldn’t pack every condo into the city core and declared the area around Capozzi Road a tourism and commercial district in its development plans. That made it much easier to rezone single-family lots and obtain permits to convert lakeside bungalows into condo blocks. More recently, the rules have evolved to make this neighbourhood Kelowna’s most amenable to Airbnb-style short-term rentals.

Over the years after Fipke moved in, the houses across the street from him were bulldozed, becoming Water’s Edge condos and Essence Condominiums. A bit more traffic, a bit less tranquility. Meanwhile, the development of the massive Aqua project took its first steps in 2007. A real estate agent approached the five homeowners north of Fipke, saying a developer wanted the land. “They gave us a good offer, which we liked. We all agreed to sell,” recalls Sue Randhawa, who lived two doors down from Fipke for 13 years but hardly knew him.

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The residents trickled away—Randhawa stayed right until 2019—leaving Fipke unprepared for the big shift to come. Mission Group, which had become a condo powerhouse in Kelowna, spent years planning, then paused a while after the 2008 market crash before re-emerging with Aqua in 2016. It featured three towers, a multi-storey boat parkade, a public beach, a rooftop pool and a two-storey gym. Company CEO Jonathan Friesen has likened it to the terraced, marina-facing modern hotels of Monte Carlo; a promo video says Aqua sits in Kelowna’s “sought-after resort district.” Fipke would complain that the city wanted to turn that area into Hawaii’s resort-mad Waikiki, and he’s more or less correct, judging by publicly available plans the geologist didn’t know about when he staked this claim.

***

The beloved willow tree that stretches far over Fipke’s house would be itself dwarfed, in time, by the 42-metre, 13-storey condo tower planned right next to it. At the edge of his property, a public walkway would take beachgoers to the lake. The path would be lined by three-level townhouses, also looming above the geologist’s home.

Before Fipke hired lawyers to fight the project, he tried persuasion. When Aqua went to city council for formal rezoning in 2017, Kelowna’s wealthiest man was among several area residents who spoke at the public hearing, objecting to the traffic and noise the development would bring, and to its sheer scale. Fipke lives mostly out of the local spotlight, except for his philanthropy: $6 million for a UBC Okanagan research building in his name; donations for a trauma room at Kelowna General Hospital; and a fundraiser at his home for animal protection charity WildAid Canada starring actor Bo Derek, a regular travel companion of Fipke’s whom he considers a close friend. So his appearance at council turned heads: “That was actually one for the books,” recalls Councillor Ryan Donn.

Any resident, centimillionaire or otherwise, gets five minutes to speak at a Kelowna council hearing. Fipke started his with a slide show: belted kingfisher, trumpeter swan, waxwing and other birds he’s photographed in his yard. “Right next to me there’s going to be another 1,200 people and all that wildlife is going to go, and I’m not going to have this nice place to come home anymore,” he said. He tried to stress his local bona fides: “I can assure you that I’ve done a heck of a lot more for the community than Mission Group has since 2001, since they’ve been here.” (The developer’s charitable activities include support for Kelowna’s homeless shelter, the YMCA and a youth sport group).

Council members seemed unmoved. After Fipke’s five minutes, they asked him whether he’d attended Mission Group’s open houses on the project (yes, once, but he’s very busy); and whether he’d accept any development next door (did not answer directly answer). Mayor Colin Basran asked if Fipke knew the official community plan had long envisioned his block as part of a tourist district. “I didn’t know that at all,” Fipke admitted. Council voted to grant Mission Group the rezoning.

When the project came back in 2018 for another hearing on a development permit, Fipke was back, too. “I really don’t think anything I’m going to say is going to change the council’s mind,” he said, before launching into complaints about traffic, beach-walkers and flood risk: “Because I’ve been treated so poorly by the council, hey, I’ll never sell my place.” There were no questions.

The discernible frustration in Fipke’s voice during that appearance may have had something to do with a letter of support for the project a Mission Group official had read out earlier in the hearing. It was penned by Mark Fipke, the geologist’s eldest son, who lives six kilometres south of the house on Capozzi Road. In it, Mark praised the “well thought-out” development, and dismissed worries about the towers’ height and traffic. “It is also a beautiful design which enhances the Mission Creek neighbourhood,” the letter added. The father rebutted to council: “I’m not my son.” In November, Chuck Fipke told Maclean’s he’d forgotten about that incident, but adds that, since the marital breakup, Mark has tended to side with his mother. (Mark Fipke did not respond to a request for comment.)

Once again, in 2018, council voted to approve the project. Then, in a near-unanimous vote last June, it approved a slightly tweaked version—with still more condos. Aqua’s 344 new dwellings would be part of a massive development spree green-lit for that area: 1,100 more units are slated for the former site of a former trailer park less than a half-kilometre north of Fipke, and hundreds more at major condo projects a few blocks north of that. “There’s extremely large demand for all that stuff,” says Nate Cassie, a real estate agent. Aqua’s first tower sold out almost instantaneously, with more than 1,200 requests for its 154 homes.

All of this has fed criticism that council is too amenable to developers—a view Mission Group CEO Friesen unintentionally reinforced with some unguarded comments last spring. Speaking to a Vancouver real estate podcast, he ticked off reasons for Kelowna’s real estate boom: “All of the components were already there: a progressive city council that was developer-friendly, a location that I think is so beautiful . . . and in terms of quality of life, I think that Kelowna has it in ways that few other places do.”

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Asked what Friesen meant by “developer-friendly,” a company spokeswoman told Maclean’s in an email that he was referring to the “welcoming of property development that fosters strong communities, neighbourhoods and public amenities.”

Fipke, living next door to a row of razed lots hosting motorboats as they await construction of the boat parkade, has had enough. “I’m not the type—I don’t like, you know, being pushed out of my own house and home,” he says.

***

At times in Fipke’s conversations with Maclean’s, this is a fight for his “front yard” tranquility. Other times, he’s the environmentalist, worried about wildlife and the lake ecosystem. “I understand that Kelowna needs development. A lot of people want to live here,” he reasons. “The only thing I’m against, hey, is ruining the waterfront.”

His legal bid to kill Aqua’s permits is rooted in neither of those causes. Rather, it is based on a density calculation—namely, that Mission Group included a large swath of land that is underwater to obtain the right to build its project at more than 400,000 square feet, at a permittable density rate of 1.5 square feet of floor space per one square foot of bare land. Fipke’s petition, filed in B.C. Supreme Court in July, argues that the land swallowed by Okanagan Lake, which has reverted to the Crown, shouldn’t figure in the calculation of the project’s maximum density. The city and Mission Group’s subsidiary, Aqua Resort Ltd., counter in their filings that the city had granted well-documented assurances that land does count toward Aqua’s lot size because it was submerged during one major flood in the late 1940s; unlike shoreline lost to gradual erosion, they say, land swallowed in a single event like that isn’t excluded from such calculations. (The city’s court filings even note that the mayor and a planning official discussed this during a hearing that Fipke attended.) Fipke has hired his own geotechnical experts to counter the lake-flood theory.

Representatives of the city and Mission Group declined to be interviewed about the lawsuit, though the firm’s executive vice-president says, in a statement, “Mission Group has completed all necessary due diligence on Aqua Waterfront Village and the project has been approved by the appropriate regulatory bodies in order to move forward.” In legal filings, the developer notes that Fipke is bringing forth his lawsuit years after the initial permit he’d opposed was granted, and this late fight is “extremely prejudicial” to the company. “If the development and development variance permits are quashed, Mission Group will be at risk of losing its sales contracts, and there is a strong likelihood that the development would be no longer feasible with a reduced FAR [floor area ratio] density, resulting in multi-million dollar losses,” vice-president of development Lisa Lock says in an affidavit.

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A hearing was scheduled for mid–February. It’s unclear what Fipke’s chances are in this rare and highly technical legal bid, but Kelowna’s exuberant real estate market seems to be betting against him. The first Aqua tower’s largest penthouse sold on a $3.25-million listing in November, months after the project hit the courts. Mission Group intends to market the project’s second tower in the spring.

***

Fipke acknowledges that condos could rise next door to him even if he wins his lawsuit. “All that’ll happen is they’ll rezone it and they’ll have to redo their plans and they’ll be probably shorter, up to six or eight storeys,” he says. He insists he’ll stay no matter what.

For now, his block includes 149 condos or villas and four standalone homes. But in a few years, Fipke’s house may be the only single-family dwelling in his vicinity. The two aging homeowners directly south of him sold to a local developer about four years ago, aware where the neighbourhood was heading. “Once they went in and bought up the properties on the other side of Chuck, it was just destined,” says former neighbour Maryanne Bishop. Vancouver-based Minglian Group now owns the lots, and plans 15 storeys of luxury condominiums. The old Walnut Grove Motel site is also destined to become condos and vacation rentals; it was listed last fall for $12 million.

That leaves Fipke and a house owned by the family of Bud Truswell, the son of the pioneering Ford dealer. Bud has long since decamped to Washington state to run a mining venture of his own but he has returned to Kelowna often in the summer, and has resisted developers’ offers to buy the property. He says that within a couple years he’ll unload the place—to the city, which has long tabbed his lot as a park. Fipke’s refusal to move on puzzles Truswell. “I don’t know why he’s staying there. He can afford to buy half of Okanagan Mission out, go somewhere and just be private if he wanted to be,” Truswell says. “I can’t see why he wants to fight it.”

Fipke had to be dogged to thrive in mining. He sold his last stake in the N.W.T. diamond business years ago. His companies now explore for gold in Quebec claims and silver and zinc in the Yukon, while his thoroughbreds chase glory around the world. A man who moils for diamonds, and succeeds, is a man with the determination and money required to simultaneously take on city hall and a major developer—then appeal to higher courts, if necessary. “Yeah. I won’t give up, hey?” he says. “You don’t find mines by giving up.”

This article appears in print in the March 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Kelowna showdown.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post A developer is building condos in a Kelowna millionaire’s front yard. Let the battle begin. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Xiangguo Qiu would seem an unlikely character in a tale of international intrigue. A mild-mannered scientist who won accolades for her work fighting the deadly Ebola virus inside Canada’s most secure laboratory, her career was cut short in July 2019, when she and her husband were escorted out of her Winnipeg lab by the RCMP. Since then, she has become a central figure in a major political battle in Ottawa and the star of international conspiracy theories. She has been accused of selling state secrets, contributing to a clandestine Chinese bioweapons program, and even of helping to create COVID-19.

The story of Xiangguo Qiu is still shrouded in mystery, but former colleagues have told Maclean’s her case has more to do with tensions and warring priorities inside the lab than with anything more nefarious. Qiu’s own signature accomplishment, they say, offers some clues as to exactly where it all went wrong.

A medical doctor and biologist, Qiu joined the National Microbiology Lab (NML)—run by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC)—in 2003. Much of her work at NML focused on Ebola. There, she led a project that hoped to prove that lab-grown “monoclonal” antibodies could stop the virus from infecting healthy cells—if their strategy worked, it could be a huge breakthrough in treating other viral infections, from HIV to other coronaviruses to who knows what else. (Her husband, Keding Cheng, also a biologist at the lab, helped the project on occasion.)

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In 2005, Qiu and her colleagues in NML’s Special Pathogen program published a paper outlining how these monoclonal antibodies could work, but their promise was still hypothetical. They had been used to treat cancer and other illnesses for years, but the problem was that viruses like Ebola overran their targets’ immune systems incredibly quickly, and the antibodies just couldn’t act fast enough.

While many of Qiu’s colleagues went off to work on the lab’s more promising Ebola vaccine, she plugged away. “Despite the fact that everybody was saying that it will never work,” says Dr. Gary Kobinger, then the head of the program, “she kept going.”

(Illustration by Ben Shmulevitch)

The NML is Canada’s only biosafety level (BSL) 4 facility—level 4 is the world’s most secure classification, which means the NML can handle the most deadly and dangerous pathogens. The lab exists to pursue research that’s impossible for smaller labs, or unprofitable for private facilities. But being government-run comes with its own drawbacks: in 2010, the NML faced significant budget cuts. Kobinger had to put a number of projects on ice, but he gave Qiu a deadline: “I said, ‘Listen, we’re going to design experiments and we have six months,’ ” he recalls.

With the clock running out, something clicked: Qiu tried introducing three different monoclonal antibodies at the same time, which rapidly flooded the immune system of the lab animal. Monkeys infected with Ebola, on death’s door, staged miraculous recoveries. She called the cocktail of those three antibodies ZMAb.

The relief almost jumps off the page in a paper her team published in 2013: “The results reported here demonstrate for the first time complete protection against lethal [Ebola] infection when treatment is initiated as late as [three days post-infection].” ZMAb was quickly patented by the lab and licensed to a Canadian company.

When an Ebola epidemic began in West Africa in 2014, Health Canada ordered a small batch of ZMAb to be made. Partnering with two Canadian biomanufacturing companies, they produced a small run of antibodies, enough to give frontline medical workers who had been infected on the frontlines. It was the first time the antibodies had been given to a patient infected with Ebola, and it worked. (Years later, one doctor who received ZMAb would visit the lab to thank Qiu and Kobinger for saving his life.)

The government scientists weren’t in it for money or glory: when an American company, Mapp Biopharmaceutical, came forward with their own antibody cocktail, the Winnipeg lab offered to combine the two. They called the resulting treatment ZMapp. Ottawa drew up plans to mass-­produce the cocktail and ship it to West Africa: for $60 million, the Canadian government could have domestically produced enough antibodies—either ZMAb or ZMapp—to treat 40,000 people suffering from Ebola.

But it never happened. Instead of investing in two Canadian companies that were well-placed to manufacture the antibodies, which would have set Canada up as a more serious biomanufacturing hub, Ottawa instead tried to outsource the work to an American company. Canada never acquired a significant amount of the Winnipeg-designed therapy.

The idea lived on, however. The American company Regeneron developed a three-antibody cocktail that has proven remarkably effective in treating Ebola patients. Others have also built on the breakthrough. Monoclonal antibodies used to treat COVID-19 have cut the risk of death by as much as 70 per cent, while the first monoclonal antibody therapy was recently approved to treat and prevent HIV infection. The possibilities are endless.

In 2018, Qiu was awarded a Governor General’s Innovation Award, alongside Kobinger, for developing ZMAb, and heralded for her commitment to “unorthodox, cutting-edge technologies that went against prevailing scientific opinion.”

“So many labs are developing antibody therapies for other diseases,” she said after receiving her award. “I’m very happy. It’s not just that we found a cure for Ebola, but our work is having an impact on the whole scientific community. It has become a blueprint for treating those other infectious diseases.”

“This is what I’m the most excited about,” Kobinger told me in 2019, not long after Qiu was removed from the lab. “I think, to just have had a little contribution to this, was my career.”

Inside the lab, however, there was frustration. A number of those who worked there told Maclean’s that many felt the Special Pathogens program had discovered a way to save tens of thousands of lives, and could have been a world leader in these versatile therapeutics. Instead, the government squandered the opportunity by taking a short-sighted commercial approach.

***

Most Canadians weren’t familiar with Qiu or the NML—not until her 2019 removal from the lab set off a political firestorm.

Details on what, exactly, Qiu is alleged to have done remain murky. PHAC would say only that she was removed from the lab pending an “administrative investigation,” with the department vowing it was “taking steps to resolve it expeditiously.” The RCMP launched its own investigation in 2020, but it remains unclear what, exactly, they are investigating. CSIS confirms they have been contacted by the RCMP, but insists the investigation belongs to the police, not the intelligence agency.

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In the 2½ years since, no charges have been laid. In the absence of any explanation, reporting around the case has focused on Qiu’s connections to China. News outlets fixated on her work with scientists from the Academy of Military Science of the People’s Liberation Army, which does a significant amount of work researching infectious diseases and vaccines. Some reporting focused on the fact that graduate students from the University of Manitoba whose research was supervised by Qiu were also removed from the lab—the university declined to comment on those students, but previously told the CBC they had been “reassigned” to other professors.

There was breathless reporting that she had shipped dangerous viruses, including Ebola, to a BSL-4 lab in Wuhan, China, and ample speculation that she may have handed off Canadian intellectual property to contacts in China.

In Ottawa, opposition parties characterized the firings as a national security crisis and evidence of the Trudeau government’s too-cozy relationship with China. When they demanded documents from PHAC, the attorney general intervened to block their release—doing so, the government argued, could jeopardize future, still hypothetical, court proceedings. As of early 2022, that fight remains unresolved. The parties continue to wrangle over how those records could be released, and who should decide what information to disclose, redact or withhold entirely.

Conspiracy theories percolated on disreputable blogs and disinformation portals—after all, they argued, hadn’t COVID leaked out of that very same Wuhan lab Qiu had collaborated with? Other tenuous allegations were advanced by Erin O’Toole, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, who demanded to know how she got clearance to work at the “secret facility” in Winnipeg in the first place.

It remains an open question: what happened to Dr. Qiu?

***

Former colleagues see clues to Qiu and Cheng’s forced exit in the story of ZMAb.

Under the then-Conservative government, Qiu’s former colleagues say, Ottawa became “obsessed with intellectual property.” That meant research facilities like the NML were pressed to focus on research that could be readily patented, passed off to private companies and commercialized. This led to tensions in the lab between scientists hoping for life-saving breakthroughs and administrators, who were tasked with reducing costs and generating licensing revenue. (Most former colleagues would only speak off the record, so as not to jeopardize their jobs or professional relationships. Qiu herself did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story.)

ZMAb was emblematic of that shift. Plans to continue producing the treatment at home in Canada, with taxpayer money, were abandoned in favour of leaving the project to Mapp Biopharmaceutical, even though Mapp had yet to make any significant quantity of the treatment. A similar fate nearly befell the Ebola vaccine developed by the NML: a 2020 report from researchers at Dalhousie University found “the private sector was not only unnecessary to its development, but also likely slowed it down.”

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In tightly controlled labs like the NML, there is a byzantine set of procedures, protocols and paperwork at the best of times. Some of that is related to safety, given the dangerous materials being handled. Guarding against theft and espionage is also a key concern—it’s why employees at the lab had to be vetted by CSIS for their security clearance before working at the NML.

But the new emphasis on commercialization meant a renewed focus on intellectual property. Scientists, however, felt like they were being asked to draw blood from a stone: researching rare infectious diseases, scientists explained to me, simply isn’t very lucrative or attractive to the private sector. Therapies and vaccines are really only useful during an outbreak, and during a pandemic they are often sold at cost or given away. There was a feeling that this new focus was hobbling what scientists saw as their humanitarian mandate.

“We were so ahead, so ahead on all fronts, to have lost all this advantage,” Kobinger says, is “unfortunate.” It wasn’t long after ZMAb that Kobinger sat down with Qiu to tell her he was quitting the NML. “I said, ‘Qiu, listen, we will lose all this ground,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘If I want to continue to have a chance to contribute, [I need to] just leave and go into academia.’ ” Kobinger left for the Université Laval in 2016. Last year, he was appointed director of the prestigious Galveston National Laboratory, a BSL-4 facility in Texas.

Qiu stayed. And, thanks to her breakthrough on ZMAb, she was receiving calls from around the world, looking to collaborate. There was particular interest from China, which had recently completed work on its first level-4 lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A mix of global ambition and domestic concerns, following the 2003 SARS outbreak, meant Beijing was looking to beef up its domestic virology research.

Canada was bullish on the idea of deeper ties with China. The National Research Council, for example, was happy to provide one of its proprietary cell lines to help Chinese researchers develop new vaccine platforms—even heralding a breakthrough Ebola vaccine in 2018 as a prime example of “strategic R&D collaboration.” (Ottawa would later try to partner with that manufacturer, CanSino, on a COVID-19 vaccine, only to see the deal fall apart when China froze shipments of the vaccine amid political tensions.)

Qiu was an asset in building scientific relationships. She had been in Canada since the mid-’90s, but hailed from Tianjin, China—just south of Beijing—and had obtained her medical degree and master’s of immunology in China. When the World Health Organization asked Canada for personnel to help prepare for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Qiu was chosen to go. Over her years in the lab, she regularly partnered with researchers in China on strategies to beat viral epidemics caused by Ebola and coronaviruses.

One colleague told Maclean’s that Qiu recognized her identity might be a complicating factor—especially in a lab where a security clearance was a must. She worked harder and was especially cautious, the colleague says, “because she was a woman. Because she was Chinese.”

Some of that caution would prove to be warranted. Ottawa’s relationship with China cooled significantly in 2018 with the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, followed by the retaliatory and arbitrary arrests of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig. Long-simmering concerns about Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft suddenly rocketed to the forefront.

(Illustration by Ben Shmulevitch)

Qiu wasn’t oblivious. When her name appeared on patents submitted to the China National Intellectual Property Administration—two breakthroughs in treating Ebola and the related Marburg virus, which built on her published work—she quickly informed her bosses to say it was done without her knowledge or permission, a former colleague says. It was a recognition of her contribution to the field of research, Qiu explained, not evidence of her clandestine cooperation with a foreign lab. (Indeed, Qiu regularly collaborated with researchers in China on Ebola countermeasures, as did others in the lab.)

But the focus on commercialization and intellectual property meant another layer of scrutiny: making sure that Canada retained ownership and credit for everything it reasonably could claim ownership and credit for. A former colleague says Qiu, and some of her colleagues, sometimes found themselves at odds with the intellectual property office. While Qiu was “extremely hardworking,” they say she was sometimes guilty of “playing a little bit fast and loose with the rules.” But, they stress, Qiu wasn’t the only one who bristled at the idea of worrying about paperwork and intellectual property rules, as scientists tried to make breakthroughs that promised to save thousands, maybe millions, of lives. “Scientists are a weird bunch,” the former colleague says. “They’re willing to take the [funding] . . . but don’t like the idea of following all the rules.”

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The sudden shift in relations with China likely increased the scrutiny on Qiu’s work, they say. They posit that a combination of an “arrogant attitude toward rule following” and her “not understanding the geopolitical ramifications of cooperating with your home country” may have gotten her into this mess.

Qiu’s former colleagues say the Ebola shipment was, indeed, what got Qiu in trouble with her bosses—not because she secretly collaborated with Beijing, but because she finally ran afoul of the lab’s obsession with intellectual property.

In May 2018, Qiu wrote an email to David Safronetz, head of the Special Pathogens program at the lab. A colleague at a government-run lab in Wuhan, she wrote, “has contacted me for possibility to receive [Nipah] and Ebola viruses from us. If possible, what paper work needs to be done beside the import permit from them and export permit from us? MTA?”

An MTA, or Material Transfer Agreement, governs the terms under which one lab might share a sample with another: it can dictate, for example, that the lab providing the sample owns the material in perpetuity. It could also require that any innovations or discoveries that come as a result of the sample must also be owned by the lab that provided the sample, and set terms on what kind of research could be forbidden.

“I don’t understand why MTA [has to be] in place in this case if PHAC doesn’t request it?” Qiu wrote. Given that the viruses were collected from outbreaks in West Africa, she posited, “no one owns the IP.”

There was a debate in the lab about whether the agreement was necessary. “Personally I don’t believe in MTAs for these materials,” Safronetz wrote. Matthew Gilmour, then head of the NML, weighed in some months later: “[MTAs] would be required, not generic ‘guarantees’ on their storage and usage.” Yet, far from being skeptical or hostile toward the Chinese lab, Qui’s bosses seemed excited by the prospect of building better ties with the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan. “Are there materials that [the Wuhan Institute of Virology] have that we would benefit from receiving? Other [viral hemorrhagic fevers]? High path flu?” Gilmour wrote.

Safronetz assured his boss that the transfer agreements, and all other paperwork, would be filled out. The shipment left Toronto in late March 2019. “We can confirm that we have all records pertaining to the shipment, and that all protocols were followed,” one email reads. The virus sample arrived without serious incident.

The MTA, however, was never signed. That is likely where things went off the rails for Qiu. While she may have believed that no one can own a naturally occurring virus, and one that was collected in West Africa, that is not Canada’s position. Ottawa believes if it comes from a government freezer, it belongs to the government. By not signing an MTA, Canada would likely not be able to lay claim to whatever discoveries the Chinese researchers made using the NML’s sample.

When Iain Stewart, the then-head of PHAC, was called before a parliamentary committee in May 2021 to shed light on the investigation, he stressed that “the fact that the transfer of the viruses took place—which, again, was done in compliance with internal policies and proper approvals—is not connected to the departure of the two employees.” An MTA, he explained, was not explicitly required, as it “is not a safety requirement but a document that provides a mechanism for transferring controlled materials from one party to another, primarily to safeguard intellectual property rights.”

Talking points developed by PHAC, written after Qiu was removed from the lab, read that an MTA was not required, as the agency was looking to promote “relationship building with [the Wuhan Institute of Virology], sharing done to foster robust global health agenda by enabling scientific advancements on pathogens with potentially significant societal consequences.” (Those media lines also tried to downplay Qiu’s work on ZMAb, reading: “PHAC’s contribution to addressing Ebola goes beyond any one individual.”)

The transfer of the virus itself may not have been the reason for their departure, but just four months after the virus was sent to Wuhan, Qiu and Cheng were escorted out of the lab.

Not long after their removal, in 2020, the government began requiring MTAs for all sample transfers, “for clarity to employees and safeguards for our science.”

At least some colleagues inside the lab believe that reasoning, despite PHAC’s carefully worded denial that the firings were not related to the shipment itself, Qiu’s position that Canada had no intellectual property claim to its viral samples is what got her in trouble. One of Qiu’s former colleagues, who spoke to Qiu in the weeks after her removal from the lab, says paperwork for the shipment “not done the right way” was the catalyst for her removal. From there, things “snowballed.”

***

The removal of Qiu and Cheng from the NML could not have come at a worse time. Less than a year later, the Wuhan lab became the centre of suspicions that the COVID-19 virus had originated there and leaked out. Investigations by the World Health Organization and the United States intelligence community have failed to turn up any concrete proof and both concluded that, barring new evidence, the theory that COVID-19 emerged from nature without human involvement is the right one. That did little to assuage skeptics.

At ZeroHedge, a conspiracy website known to peddle Russian government misinformation, Qiu’s removal from the lab became evidence of a broader plot: “Did China Steal Coronavirus From Canada and Weaponize It?” one headline asked.

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Project Evidence, an oft-cited open source repository of supposed proof for the theory that COVID-19 escaped from the lab, devotes an entire page to Qiu. “We ask you, the reader, to use your best judgment to determine if an investigation into a minor clerical or bureacratic [sic] error, such as a misplaced form, would take nearly a year to conclude,” the anonymous authors write, concluding: “We believe it is far more likely that this investigation involves matters of national security.”

In the House of Commons, the Conservative Party has seized on Qiu’s background and links to China as evidence of something nefarious. “Can the Prime Minister tell this House how a person with deep connections to the Chinese military obtained a high-level Canadian security clearance?” Conservative leader Erin O’Toole asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in May 2021.

But the accusations smacked of a conclusion in search of evidence. Qiu’s “deep connections” to the Chinese military consist of a handful of academic papers, published in reputable journals, that she co-authored with scientists working at the Chinese government’s Academy of Military Science.

That sort of cooperation was hardly uncommon prior to the chilling of relations in 2018. According to a document tabled in the House of Commons, there were six different papers published in recent years as collaborations between the Chinese military lab and the NML. There are more than a half-dozen authors listed on those papers, apart from Qiu, who continue to work inside the Government of Canada. One paper does not bear her name at all. (And collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Military Science goes back to before 2015, under the Conservative government in which O’Toole was a minister.)

Conservative members of Parliament have further called Qiu’s removal an “odd coincidence” in light of the COVID-19 outbreak, winking to the theory that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab, and accusing the Trudeau government of a “cover up” and “corruption” in the case.

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Information may continue to trickle out about Qiu’s case and how Canadian intelligence agencies have probed her possible ties to Beijing. But given how fiercely the Liberal government is fighting to withhold this information, which includes classified material, the full story likely won’t be known for some time. The Conservatives seem determined to weaponize the case to prove the Trudeau government’s alleged inaction in tackling Chinese espionage—the lack of solid evidence is an asset in that effort.

It’s been 2½ years since Qiu and Cheng were removed from the lab. It’s been a year since they were actually fired, in January 2021. And yet they have yet to be formally accused of anything, and it’s not known if they have retained legal counsel. Maclean’s made repeated entreaties to the federal government to discuss Qiu and Cheng’s firing but was refused. It’s not clear whether the couple is still in Canada or whether they have decamped to China, where they still have family.

In Winnipeg, their home stands testament to the limbo the couple have been caught in. Their combined six-figure salaries went toward two things, a former colleague says: their children, and purchasing their dream home. The couple took possession not long before they were escorted from the lab by the RCMP. Sitting in their home after being suspended from the lab, they fretted about making mortgage payments on the $1.2-million property. Qiu told their former coworker: “We have worked all our lives for the house you’re in.”

Qiu’s former colleagues continue to believe that this was a bureaucratic snafu that was allowed to spiral into international imbroglio. As one colleague puts it, laughing: “I never got the impression she was a sleeper agent.” Other observers see the hallmarks of China’s dogged efforts to build its own scientific expertise by stealing others’ work. Whatever the explanation, it’s high time for Ottawa and the RCMP to clarify what, exactly, Qiu is alleged to have done. At a time when Canada sorely needs to maintain trust in its scientists, the mystery of the fired biologists has only allowed conspiracy and suspicion to fester.

This article appears in print in the March 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “The Qiu files.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post A brilliant scientist was mysteriously fired from a Winnipeg virus lab. No one knows why. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

It’s one of the last warm nights in October. I meet Sheila Heti at Bar Mordecai in Toronto for a drink before our recorded interview over dinner. She orders a gin and tonic and I have a dirty martini. It’s early, and the bar is empty apart from us, though the music is a touch too loud. Heti wants to know what’s been going on. I tell her that I’m still recovering from my U.S. book tour, which had me hiding in my New York hotel room and practising breathing exercises. After I flew home, I sent Heti an email saying, “The past few weeks have definitely been a challenge . . . quite an adjustment. I don’t know how you did it the first time around. I had the worst dread every day new press came out.”

I had wanted Heti’s advice on how to approach being thrust into the public sphere, which felt like being captain of a ship that steered itself with no input from me. The culture around books tends to conflate a novel with the author’s biography, persona and morals, which can be dizzying, especially when you suddenly find yourself the subject. Though I understand this is a covetable position, the attention feels adverse to the actual writing—the production of art. Heti is no stranger to this phenomenon in the press, and has playfully courted its mechanics for two decades. Already established in Canada, she gained international prominence after publishing How Should a Person Be? in the U.S. in 2012, and has been touted as a leading writer of “autofiction,” which is often defined as fictionalized autobiography. In How Should a Person Be? the characters keep the names of their real-life counterparts while the novel makes use of conversations drawn from audio recordings of Heti and artist Margaux Williamson.

As we sip our drinks, Heti and I laugh about having to distinguish ourselves from our characters. Even though we share similar biographies with our respective protagonists, they are still fictional creations. Before we head off to dinner, Heti insists on paying the tab. I insist back, saying I have allocated funds for this night in particular, and I want to take her out. She refuses and says that it’s just what older writers should do.

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Our correspondence began thanks to publisher Martha Sharpe, who released my novel, Happy Hour, at her independent press, Flying Books, in 2020. Sharpe acquired Heti’s first two books, The Middle Stories (2001) and Ticknor (2005), during her time as publisher at House of Anansi. Later, while at Simon & Schuster, Sharpe acquired Motherhood, which was published in 2018. Over the years, the two have stayed close, with Heti sending early drafts of whatever she’s working on to Sharpe. It was Heti’s ability to be both “wise and wide-eyed” that caught Sharpe’s attention early on. “Her writing is so alert,” Sharpe tells me.

Four years on from Motherhood, Heti returns with Pure Colour. “For me, the frustration with publishing Motherhood was that everyone was like, ‘Oh, it’s a book about whether or not she wants a baby,’ ” says Heti. “It’s much more than that.” She didn’t want a subject that people could easily reduce by hanging a neat tagline on it. “I was like, ‘I’m going to write a book that no one can say what it’s about.’ ” Heti laughs mischievously.

When I first heard whispers about the novel, I was of the mind that this would be a new turn for Heti, a new era, something that flirted with genre or at least the surreal. A father and daughter become a leaf—how else could you describe it? Upon reading the book, I was struck by the gentle, tender philosophies it holds. It is a novel, yes, but it is also poetry, and a treatise on grief, art, criticism and love. It moves Heti away from any preconceived notions of what a new novel from her might look like. “Somebody spoke about writing as a spiritual autobiography. [They said] a whole career is like a spiritual biography, and it’s true,” she reflects. The term was used to describe a genre popular in 17th-century memoirs, which followed the author’s spiritual journey and how they came to espouse new ideas over time. Heti’s journey now comprises several works. Pure Colour is her fourth novel and 10th book (her second children’s book, A Garden of Creatures, is coming in May).

I ask if there’s a sense of freedom that comes with a sustained amount of success. “I can’t go back into the world and be like, ‘You should buy this book,’ ” she says. “This is just where I was.” Heti describes having been in the mindset that led to Pure Colour for the last three years. She takes a moment before saying, “With every book, I’m like, ‘I believe in it.’ I think it’s the best thing I could do, and I think it has artistic merit, but I don’t know how the world is going to receive it. I care, unfortunately. But I care less with this book, because it was something from deep within.”

(Photograph by Carmen Cheung)

We are now settled into the back patio of Bernhardt’s. Away from the street, the only noise is the pleasant chatter of people dining. There is a quiet atmosphere that feels provincial, like we are in a small town. We continue with another round of the same drinks we had earlier in the evening—Heti decided before meeting me that she would only have gin and tonics tonight. We order half a roast chicken, burrata and some greens to share. Heti goes back and forth about ordering the carrots, to which I say, “Why not?” There’s a sense of occasion to being able to freely discuss the intricacies of our craft.

Writing novels is an artistic practice, but in this particular moment, there is a tendency to mistake the novelist for the media. “We’re thought of as journalists,” says Heti. “Writers are not given the same freedom as visual artists, and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because people want language to tell them something concrete; they want writers to have a moral or political clarity.” The public becomes fixated on what is true to the writer’s beliefs and whether they can judge them for it.

RELATED: I embrace the term ‘Black writer’ but racism is rarely at the heart of my work

Most good writing survives in murkier waters that require a keen eye for subtlety; the reader feels drawn to the work enough to come back to it and find something they previously overlooked, and it isn’t necessarily something concrete. To understand truth in storytelling is to take the art as a question, rather than as an answer. Sharpe tells me that the through line in Heti’s novels is her curiosity. She later adds, via text, “Sheila’s an insatiable questioner.”

Experiencing the loss of a parent is something Heti and I share, and we have both tried to grapple with grief in our fiction. “You just feel like the world is suddenly a different place,” says Heti. “If you love your parents, you dread them dying, and I’d anticipated it so much.” In the middle of the novel, protagonist Mira loses her father. She poses the question, “Who would save the dead from oblivion, if not we, the living?” His spirit attaches to her and together they enter a leaf, where he rests. Mira stays suspended in the leaf in order to postpone the realities of life without him. Heti describes this experience of grief as the only thing that made sense. “I just couldn’t write in the same way,” she says. “But I feel like what I wrote is realism because that’s really what it felt like, and what it was like. It is another dimension, and you do go into a leaf with a person who died, and you are somewhere else.” For the artist, the only way to save the dead from oblivion is to bring them back into your work.

“When I was writing How Should a Person Be? I had this sentence in my head—‘God is three art critics in the sky’—and I wrote it down,” Heti says. This idea evolves in Pure Colour, where there are three types of people: the birds, who are the artists; the bears, who lovingly nurture a select few; and the fish, who are concerned for the well-being of many. To describe it outside the context of the novel is to ask someone to take a leap of imagination, but the structure of this world is not so different from that of star signs or even professions. Mira is a bird, her father is a bear and Mira’s love interest, Annie, is a fish. The world they are living in is God’s “first draft,” an impermanent stage set up to make room for a second draft that God will revise, using the mistakes from the first. It is the combined realities of a mythical structure and Mira’s more recognizable life (school, jobs) that reminds me of another work that defies description, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. It is difficult to describe Pure Colour without feeling like you do a disservice to the text. If Autobiography of Red’s subtitle is “A Novel in Verse,” perhaps a subtitle of some kind would similarly help orient readers’ approaches to Pure Colour.

As the main course arrives, our conversation moves to Impressionism. Heti admits to being fond of Édouard Manet’s work since studying art history in university, and Pure Colour pays close attention to his painting A Sprig of Asparagus. In the novel, the painting is described as “the perfect balance between carefulness and carelessness, and the delicate and unassuming heart he put into every line.” By chance, I have been writing an essay on 17th-century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, whom many Impressionists considered their forebear, with Manet calling him “a painter of painters.” What Impressionists took from Velázquez was the idea of the work disappearing the closer you get to the brushstrokes. To take in an Impressionist painting at its most impactful, you must step back and view the work as a whole. The paintings create a feeling much like the hazy edges of memory. It’s not exact, but it is evocative.

Heti on three paintings:

(Click through this gallery. Story continues below.)

Portrait of Dr. Heinrich Stadelmann, by Otto Dix (Courtesy of AGO).

“Even when I was a child, this was my favourite painting at the AGO. I still always look for it when I go. The eyes are painted over and over so that they bulge out from the canvas. It’s terrifying, and funny, and sad.”

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter by Johannes Vermeer.

“I was lucky enough to see this painting in person at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It’s so small and subtle and quiet, and it has this perplexing power. I think I looked at it for an hour, and not till I discussed it with someone later did they point out that the woman is pregnant.”

Fire by Margaux Williamson (Courtesy of Margaux Williamson/White Cube).

“My closest friend and long-time collaborator is having her first museum show at the McMichael gallery (it’s on until May 9). It’s an incredible show. This is a painting of the fire we sat around, in her front yard, all winter long, during the pandemic.”

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One of Heti’s favourite books is Manet and His Critics. She describes it as a book about all the critics who wrote negatively about the artist in his lifetime. “People don’t find anything beautiful unless it’s familiar, for the most part. Beauty is what we’ve learned is beautiful, so his stuff was so strange to them, and it couldn’t be beautiful because it was just too new,” Heti says. “I liked that he was hurt by it. He wasn’t so immune to being human.” Her interest in criticism was piqued when she knew she understood the significance of art, but was curious about the value of criticism. “Was it as important as the art itself, or not?” she says. Heti describes trying to answer this question in Pure Colour. “The best explanation I could think of is we’re living in the first draft of the world and we have to be critics,” she says.

READ: The search for Anne Frank’s betrayer

She tells me that unlike other writers, she reads all her reviews (I tend to skim those that are filtered to me). In a 2018 episode of the Longform podcast, Heti says, “There’s something about being reviewed where you feel really . . . you just feel really alone in it. You feel like they’re talking about my book, and I’m the only one who’s having an emotional reaction to the review. Everyone else just reads it and it’s a review, but for the writer it can hurt.” Like Manet, she is not immune, but this does not dissuade Heti from trying to grapple with criticism’s significance on a larger scale. “Criticism is necessary for progress, and criticism is necessary for a better future,” she says.

In the same Longform episode, Heti explains her process of writing a book. “I have to see the beginning, the middle, the end and all the scenes, [like] looking at a painting. You sort of want to glance at it and see everything . . . and that’s really hard to do with a novel.” Only after hearing Heti’s words from four years ago do I understand that Pure Colour is a “Novel as Painting.” At dinner that night, as I explained Velázquez’s spare use of pigment, I could see a correspondence forming between Pure Colour and the Impressionists. Pure Colour resists cerebral analysis because the basis of it is in the feelings it evokes. In its totality, grief is often indescribable and unique to the individual’s experience; to create a novel of otherworldly scenes and images makes it feel closer to its emotional reality.

Later, via text, Heti agrees with my assessment. “I’ve never had so many people reading a book of mine say that they want to reread it. I think it’s because they want to hold the whole thing in their head, like a painting.” You forget a work of art’s magnitude; you need to be in its presence or else your memory doesn’t give justice to its impact. As I revisit the novel over the course of writing this profile, my own grief surfaces each time I encounter the text. It compels me to be soft and open, after moving through the world with hardened skin. Toward the end of the novel, there’s a tender missive: “Sometimes it is the orphans, the fish—who were sent off to swim alone in the world’s waters—who see the whole picture most clearly. They have no parents blocking their sight, and swimming as they do, under the water, if they are not afraid to open their eyes, everything becomes incredibly clear.”

This article appears in print in the February 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “How should an Artist be?” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post Sheila Heti redefines what a novel can be appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Like so many conversations in this era, my talk with former Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz happened on a Zoom call. Mostly, we discussed his upcoming book, The Next Age of Uncertainty, a primer on the economic volatility ahead. But we also talked about lessons from the pandemic, the political discourse on inflation, the reasons for his optimism and how two TV characters informed his leadership style. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Tell me about how your pandemic has been going.

A: It coincided with when I stepped down from work. You visualize yourself doing all kinds of travelling, going to places you always wanted to spend two weeks at instead of a few days. None of that has happened. I worked a lot, and it’s amazing how productive you can be just by hardly moving from your chair.

Q: You earned the nickname “Sunny Steve” as bank governor. That’s him talking, isn’t it?

A: Yes, that’s looking on the bright side. Of course it’s been dreadful for many people and it’s been hard family-wise. I had two grandchildren come along during that period of time. I’ve seen them only a little. It makes me wonder what we have to get used to, long term.

READ: Kathleen Wynne on her political downfall and the private advice she gave Doug Ford

Q: You’ve written about what uncertainty is going to look like in the future. What was the genesis of this idea?

A: As governor, it was very apparent that people had a very short-term horizon when thinking about what’s going to happen in the economy. I was invited to speak at Spruce Meadows by Nancy Southern [the CEO of Atco]. It was a real corporate crowd, and they’re exactly the culprits I’m talking about—they think one quarter ahead. That’s where I first broached the idea that longer-term trends could interact and cause unpredictable outcomes.

Q: You don’t see a lot of macroeconomics books targeting a household audience, a government audience and a business audience all at once. You’re trying to do a lot with it.

A: I started to think about how I could help people. Especially decision-makers, whether they’re households deciding their mortgage or companies deciding their plan. What are the big issues they’re thinking about that could affect those decisions over a five- or 10-year horizon? Which we hardly ever think about, but it matters.

Q: You point to a number of “tectonic forces”—population aging, technological progress, growing inequality and climate change—and argue they will cause greater uncertainty and volatility overall.

A: With businesses, there’s such a complex planning environment. [They] will claim to their board that they’re looking at the long term, and if the world turns out really badly, this is what it’s going to look like. Or if the world turns out really good. But I think they spend less time than they should exploring what they will do when those good or bad things happen, because they’re more likely now.

Q: You explain this as if a bell curve is becoming more of a straight line.

A: What you think of as your main scenario has lower probability associated with it, and there are many more possibilities spread out there. So you need to be more prepared for those possibilities.

(Photograph by Jessica Deeks)

Q: The pandemic was a rare scenario. What did we learn from how the economy handled it?

A: This episode taught us some new things. First of all, the starting point matters a great deal. Canada was in the best shape it’d been in for 40 years. Inflation was exactly on target for the first time in a long time. Unemployment was at a 40-year low. It’s like when the Ferrari of athletes gets a cold. It lasts two days because they’re in such great condition. You can see the differences around the world. Economies that weren’t in that situation suffered more. The second important lesson was fiscal policy [like CERB] can do a really good job of stabilizing the economy. A third one is collaborating with the banks. They played a really important stabilizing role.

Q: What are your thoughts on the inflation debate that is happening in Canadian politics right now?

A: It runs the gamut from plain wrong to just unthoughtful. What I like to do is measure inflation based on February 2020, before the pandemic. You’ll find that, sure enough, overall the price level is up by 4.9 per cent over 21 months. Well, that’s quite a lot. But if you translate that into what would be the equivalent 12-month average rate, it’s about 2.8 per cent. And we know underneath that it’s all about oil. If you take food and energy out, which economists often do, it’s 2.1 per cent.

Could it still be picking up? Yes, I’d say that’s a risk. But people aren’t doing a very careful job of understanding what prices have done. Supply chain issues will also get worked out—there’s too much money at stake for companies to not figure those things out. And the big counterargument, which I want to remind people of, is that the fourth industrial revolution [driven by artificial intelligence and biotech] will cause a lot of prices to fall.

READ: Inflation is about to get way worse in 2022

Q: But it’s politically advantageous, especially with food and gas prices on the rise, for politicians to lean on messaging about what or who is causing inflation.

A: Politics is rarely clarifying. But I do think that with something as important to people as the prices they face every day, all parliamentarians have a job to do, which is help people understand what they’re seeing, rather than just pointing fingers.

Q: In the book you also criticize the political debate around globalization for ignoring the benefits of trade liberalization.

I’ve been in the policy-maker game for, like, 40 years. And I feel like, almost every week, I need to explain yet again what you’re talking about. If I say trade deglobalization is going to raise the prices of all these things you buy from Costco or Walmart or Canadian Tire, you’re going to pay more for them and you’re going to have less money in your pocket. You’re going to try to conserve—like when the price of gasoline goes up, you try to drive less. And since you’re spending less money, there’s going to be fewer jobs in the rest of the economy, because there’s less money being spent. I don’t know how it can be any more obvious.

Q: People have a hard time applying that logic when their domestic industries are losing out.

A: Maybe we just have to go through a phase of deglobalization to prove it. I sincerely hope not. Especially since trade-dependent economies like Canada stand to lose the most from that trend.

READ: 23 charts to watch on inflation and the economy in 2022

Q: You extol the potential virtues of big policy shifts that are sometimes considered “politically impossible,” like introducing a guaranteed basic income.

A: When governments had the ability to take a longer-term view, such as the Mulroney government, they said, “Well, we’re going to do tax reform because that was in the Macdonald Commission, and free trade.” These kinds of things that were only going to have long-term payoffs, but very fundamental ones.

Efforts today to draw a similar consensus often founder on the debates—if not genuine economic debates. I’m a little pessimistic about the ability for politics to deliver. This world is going to be riskier and governments won’t be capable of buttressing us.

Q: One outcome you’ve floated is that companies will start taking on more of the heavy lifting even when it comes to social policy, whether that is childcare or housing co-ownership or mortgages.

A: The number one driver is the demographic shift [with baby boomers leaving the labour force]. From a workforce point of view, the next five years are quite critical. The fourth industrial revolution will be having its peak effect. That will be a window in which we have a growing shortage of workers with the skills we need at the same time that we’re disrupting a lot of other people through the development of technology.

One outlet would be a renaissance of labour unions. People could invest more in organizing themselves in order to defend or protect themselves. Most companies would say, “What can we do to avoid this?” You begin to accommodate the workers more in advance. The stresses are likely to lead to more and more solutions coming from companies.

Q: When it comes to climate change, you also seem more optimistic that investors will lead the way, rather than governments.

A: Probably only 30 or 40 per cent of emissions come from companies that are traded on the stock exchange, so the investor enforcement mechanism can’t cover everybody. But it’s very likely to through the competition effect. People are expecting it not just as investors, but as consumers.

Governments will have sporadic mandates—like you can only have this many emissions, or you can only have this many internal combustion engines—without actually optimizing what could be the most efficient and least costly route to net zero. What is more likely is that the investors will figure it out.

Q: In the book, you touch on the future geopolitics of fresh water. I would guess that that’s not top of mind for Canadian policy-makers right now, but should it be?

A: That’s a big, hard-to-put-your-arms-around risk. There’s no question that this issue will become more existential than energy. Who’s got water? You look that up and right away you come up with some key players that have a lot of water, and we’re one. A little bit of arithmetic really puts it in perspective. If you can satisfy the entire world’s daily needs from this one outflow [out of the St. Lawrence River into the Atlantic Ocean], that is an incredible endowment. That is something that, if you think strategically about it, Canada could make use of.

Poloz’s picks

His favourite books are those he fell in love with in 1967, the summer before eighth grade, when he found the sci-fi shelf at an Oshawa public library. (Click through this gallery. Interview continues below.)

What he’s reading:
Indian in the Cabinet by Jody Wilson-Raybould, Principles for Dealing With the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio, The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield, Denial by Beverley McLachlin

What he’s reading again: Tai-Pan and Noble House by James Clavell (“my all-time favourite books”), the Dune series by Frank Herbert and the Space Odyssey series by Arthur C. Clarke

What he’s watching: This Is Us (“best show currently on television”), Yellowstone and Star Trek: Discovery

What he’s watching again: The Handmaid’s Tale (“a highly feasible view of the future”), Downton Abbey (“a great lens on the past”) and The West Wing (“demonstrates masterful leadership and risk management”)

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Q: Speaking again about your optimism: you had a near-death experience in 2004. While on a golf course, you collapsed due to a congenital heart defect and needed to undergo major surgery. How did that change your thinking?

A: The phrase “life is short” becomes even less trite when something like that happens. I was 48 years old. I had not had a balanced life. I was very driven. Hard-working. Too hard-working. That experience definitely gave me a more balanced sense of life and it made me feel profoundly optimistic about how the world will turn out.

Your outlook should never be long-term gloomy, because, look at history. How could you be gloomy about the next 30 years when you look at the past 30 years? You could be concerned about volatility and that’s what I want people to understand better. But that’s not the same as being sad about the future. It’s just about being prepared and capitalizing on the good things.

Q: What about those first few chaotic months of 2020, before your term as Bank of Canada governor ended in June? It must have been incredibly stressful in your position, the stakes being as high as they were.

A: It was. They were. Day and night for those couple of months, there was no respite. The international meetings were at all hours of the day. I was living in our basement because I’d been going downtown to Parliament Hill and didn’t want to run the risk of exposing my spouse. It was just around-the-clock stuff.

READ: Mark Messier on leadership, trust and magic mushrooms

Q: You write about taking leadership lessons from fictional characters—Jed Bartlet, the president in The West Wing, and Jean-Luc Picard, from Star Trek. What do you admire about them?

A: Writers have been quite judicious in their development of those characters, demonstrating not just how they excel but also their failings. You can watch them and think, “Oh, man, that’s a real human moment. Oh my gosh, that’s probably what I would do.”

Then you see how the team is down in the trench with the boss. Whether the world is going to end or the black hole is going to swallow the Enterprise, somebody on the team says: “Wait a minute. What if…?” And there’s Picard saying “Make it so,” relying on the team, making sure they’re in it with him all the way. They share the glory. They realize that the key is you wear your values on your sleeve.

When I did leadership work with my executive team, I asked them all to watch the first season of The West Wing and I gave them a copy of the book Make It So: Leadership Lessons From Star Trek: The Next Generation, by Wess Roberts and Bill Ross.

Q: You decided very early that you wanted to be governor of the Bank of Canada someday. What would you tell a young economist who has the same ambition today?

A: What I think helped get me here was I was always preoccupied with the real economy—people, whether they’re employees or employers, making decisions every day. That is what makes the economy what it is. So my advice to a young person would be, of course, you need to learn as much economics as you can. But you also need to save time every day just to read the news. You have this sense of constant applied economics. And it grounds you in what’s real.

This interview appears in print in the March 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post Stephen Poloz on economic dangers ahead, staying positive and lessons from Star Trek appeared first on Macleans.ca.

A few months ago, Alex Fecioru was working two jobs, both of which aligned with his long term goals. He spent half his time mixing live music at a local Eastern European music venue, and the rest freelance sound editing on the side. That he was working only two jobs, and that both involved sound production, was a welcome change. Fecioru, 25, graduated four years ago with a degree in sound design with dreams to work full-time in the music business. For most of his adult life, he’s supplemented his music and editing work by hopping from food-service job to food-service job, toiling in kitchens, scraping by on minimum wage while striving to make the leap to his chosen vocation.

The last few months were supposed to be a pivotal stretch in that transition. Instead, they’ve turned into some of the hungriest of Fecioru’s young life. The monthly rent at his small Toronto apartment is $820, a small sum by the standards of his city, but enough to consume the lion’s share of his income. It leaves him with little to spend on other essentials—like food. 

Worse, the pandemic abruptly closed off his other employment options, including his beloved sound work. He’d no sooner found a position in November as a coat-check attendant at a major art gallery than renewed COVID restrictions forced the museum to lay him off. Even the kitchen jobs dried up, as restaurants closed to in-person dining.

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The result has landed Fecioru within a troubled and growing demographic: young, educated, working Canadians who sacrifice food to meet their other financial obligations. Even when he’s had restaurant jobs, Fecoriu has made tough calls at the grocery store, surviving for weeks at a time on pita bread and peanut butter. 

As the Omicron wave lingers on, his crisis has deepened. To keep a roof over his head and the heat on, he has reduced every cost in his life that is not fixed, including what he eats. He tries not to spend more than $5 a day on food—an extreme measure that saps him of energy he needs to do the work that pays his rent. Sometimes, when he’s desperate, he’ll steal away to his parents’ house for a day, Fecioru says. There, at least, he can get precious, nutritious vegetables for free.

Emotionally and physically, it’s a taxing existence. “I’ve been pushed to a point where I’ve broken down mentally,” Fecioru says, referring to times when he’s worked two and even three jobs at once. He pauses, picking his words. “There have been times where it’s hour 14 of a 16-hour day and I just break down in front of customers.”

Fecioru is far from alone. As the pandemic enters its third year, low-income workers across the country are getting caught in a pincer, with the cost of living escalating rapidly and the labour market thrown into flux. Even as employers report a desperate need for workers, repeated lockdowns, and the increased threat of contracting the virus, have made in-person service work more precarious, forcing workers like Fecioru into long stretches without paycheques. 

On top of these myriad obstacles, many workers are no longer able to rely on the COVID income supports that kept many of them afloat for the first year-and-a-half of the pandemic.

 The effects have rattled down to kitchen tables with alarming speed. In a recent countrywide poll, nearly 60 per cent of respondents—including half of 18-24 year-olds—told the Angus Reid Institute that they’re having trouble feeding their families. That’s an increase from 36 per cent when the question was last asked in 2019.

Even before the pandemic, millions of Canadians were struggling to keep food on the table. A 2020 StatsCan report found that one in seven lived in food-insecure households, up from one in eight Canadians in 2018—a difference of nearly 700,000 people, and the highest rate since StatsCan began recording the information. The food-stressed do not fit tired stereotypes of people who’d rather collect welfare than take a job: at last count, 65 per cent of food insecure Canadians were in the workforce. 

Alex at home in Toronto (Photograph by Lucy Lu)

The problem, says Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, is that the cost of food is far outpacing the money people are making. The “inflation sweet spot” for food prices, he says, is about 1.5 to 2.5 per cent. Food prices are supposed to increase at about that rate every year to keep up with the usual level of inflation of the rest of the economy. If they do, groceries should remain affordable.

But in 2022, food is expected to cost anywhere from five to seven per cent more that it did the year earlier, according to the latest edition of Canada’s Food Price Report, an annual look at the year ahead in food security published by Charlebois and his colleagues at Dalhousie. He attributes this increase mainly to the state of supply chains in Canada: food is moving around the country at a much slower pace due to COVID restrictions. As a result, manufacturers and transporters are incurring greater costs, escalating the overall price of the food they’re delivering. 

But grocery prices, Charlebois stresses, are not at the root of the longer-term crunch. “The real problem,” he says, “is affordability.” And he’s quick to offer up what he sees as the solution: “I think it’s high time for our country to have a conversation about a guaranteed minimum income.”

A guaranteed minimum income involves the government paying a liveable wage to those who don’t have the means to survive financially. It is distinct from a universal basic income, where all Canadians periodically receive a cheque from the government regardless of their economic standing. Guaranteed minimum income would, in practice, look a whole lot like the earliest iterations of federal pandemic income supports.

READ: Has enthusiasm for the CERB paved the way for a universal basic income?

The Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), and its successor the Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB), were vital lifelines to low-income workers during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. They provided $500 per week to workers who had lost their jobs or significant chunks of their income for COVID-related reasons, allowing people to focus on staying home and reducing the spread of the virus instead of working dangerous, contagious jobs so they could pay their rents.

They also allowed people to get back on their feet after being knocked down, financially speaking. But the CRB was replaced in late October with the scaled-down CWLB, which is available to workers who have lost work due to regional lockdowns. The federal benefit has been pared back 40 per cent, to $300 per week before taxes. Many people lurching in and out of work don’t meet the eligibility requirements, and if they find employment while receiving the benefit, they might have to pay the money back.

Regardless, the $300 hardly makes a dent in most people’s expenses, and is a far cry from the much more robust programs that preceded it.

Two federal parties, the NDP and the Greens, support a basic income, pointing to CERB as proof that a government-funded income program is both possible to implement and highly effective in fending off poverty. Delegates to a Liberal policy convention last year also overwhelmingly endorsed a basic income program. But the Trudeau government didn’t include it in its summer election platform, and seems focused on other priorities.

“Frankly, in light of our debts and ongoing deficits,” acknowledges Charlebois, “I think it’s going to be a hard conversation to have with Canadians.”

***

Perhaps, but it’s a conversation that could change the course of Rachel McDonald’s life. The 23-year-old works at a small café in Charlottetown, where she was recently promoted from barista to supervisor. For McDonald, the barista job was working just fine—she didn’t go to college or university and only has experience in customer service, so when she was offered a job at the café working for $14 an hour, she took it. 

Then came COVID. It’s cheaper to live in P.E.I. than many places in the country, but the pandemic has hobbled McDonald’s efforts to keep a roof over her head and food on her table. The island’s isolation has spared its residents of the lockdowns plaguing some of the country’s metropolitan areas. But its economy relies heavily on tourism, an industry that effectively came to a standstill when the pandemic began.

McDonald’s hours were scaled back, forcing her to move out of her bachelor pad and into a house with several other roommates. She pays half the rent she did before, but she’s still barely scraping by, unable to squirrel away any money and just making enough to survive. About half her money goes to rent and the rest of it is split between groceries, bills, and minor purchases. 

“A person working minimum wage cannot support themselves living alone,” says McDonald, sighing. “I feel like I have to go out and face the fire just so I can continue to survive.”

This permanent state of fragility carries both economic and human costs, says Frances Woolley, a professor of economics at Carleton University. “We have an economy where things are precarious,” says Woolley, “and when things are precarious and something goes wrong, you may not have the resilience to recover.”

The $2,000 a month that CERB and CRB provided was just around the average living wage for a Canadian, an amount understood to comfortably pay for an individual’s basic needs—food, housing, and child care. But minimum wages in many provinces fall short of living wages for many Canadians, and the gap between what people are able make and what they need to buy food and other essentials has been widening.

Woolley sees the challenge of securing decent wages for all workers as the greatest obstacle in the Canadian economy—one that seems simple to overcome, yet hard to get powerful people to face. “Wages are really sticky,” says Woolley. “As an economist, one of the things that I find the most puzzling about our economy is that when people find it hard to hire workers, they don’t think, ‘Oh, maybe we should be paying people more.’

“It seems to be something about human psychology.”

***

For workers struggling to keep food in their refrigerators, the economic forces Woolley describes—combined with the disruptions of the pandemic—can be crushing. 

Fecioru, for one, thought he’d turned a corner when he landed the coat-check job last December. It wasn’t flashy—a temporary contract at the Art Gallery of Ontario with no guarantee of extension. But it was unionized, and paid a few dollars an hour more than minimum wage. He could pursue his sound-production work free of financial unease, and without gnawing hunger.

The reprieve lasted about a month. In December, as the Omicron variant seeped into Toronto, Fecioru tested positive for COVID. He was forced to isolate just a month after starting his job, and lost two crucial weeks of income. A week after his isolation period ended, Ontario locked down yet again. All of his work ceased. Again.

The day before we spoke, Fecioru received an email from his employers at the gallery. It said if the lockdown in Ontario extended beyond its currently scheduled end date of Jan. 25 then they would be terminating his contract. This was money and work that Fecioru was depending on to survive post-pandemic. As he finished reading the email, he violently paced around his apartment. His anxiety spiked, and at 25 years of age, his heart began to palpitate. 

Mercifully, that worst-case scenario did not come to pass. After Ontario eased restrictions on Jan. 31, the gallery brought him back, and even paid him for the shifts he lost during the lockdown. Still, his hours have been significantly reduced, and COVID still looms, poised to strike as it sees fit.  

“It feels like there’s moments where you can poke your head up above the surface of the water, but then the water keeps rising and you’ve got to keep persevering,” says Fecioru. “There’s not enough time to catch your breath.”

The post Young, working Canadians face a dilemma: eat, or pay the bills? appeared first on Macleans.ca.