Photo Courtesy Studio ZX

The graffiti-covered Van Horne skatepark on the edge of Montreal’s Mile End is usually dotted with boys in beanies and sneakers, launching themselves into the rink with the cracking sound of skateboard wheels hitting concrete. But, every Thursday night for a brief stint during the summer of 2021, they were replaced with a different crowd: femme, queer, and trans people, speeding by on skateboards or rollerskates as their friends cheered them on.

As the sky darkened, more people arrived. They came dressed to impress and eager to be with others who understood queer joy. When Vicky B. Ouellette, a trans woman and community activist, looked down into the skatepark the first time she attended “Tran Horne Take-Over,” she couldn’t hold back tears. “I’d never seen something quite like [it]. It was so precious and so exclusively queer, and it was really important.”

“There’s a lack of understanding that we create these spaces out of necessity, not out of entertainment,” Ouellette explains as she recalls the weekly event, which was intended to unite femme, queer, and trans people during Montreal’s COVID-19 lockdown. However, with each passing week, Ouellette noticed a shift: slowly, more straight, cisgender people who seemed like observers rather than participants started to attend, recording videos and taking photos. By August, the event was shut down. She believes that the police discovered it as a result of these people broadcasting the event online.

Despite knowing that the events broke the city’s stringent rules against gathering at the time, Ouellette also knows they were deeply necessary. She cites this saga as an example of how there is a widespread absence of awareness around the importance of nightlife for queer Montrealers. For many, coming together with their community is more than just a hangout; it’s seeing their self-made family.

Ouellette is the founder of Studio ZX and the president of MTL 24/24’s advisory council, two organizations driving nightlife activism for marginalized communities. To her and many others, the act of nighttime entertainment and gathering is sacred. If an event or venue is expressly queer-friendly, it becomes a haven for people to let loose without the fear of being misgendered, harassed, or othered. However, as city officials place greater scrutiny on the nightlife sector, the underground scenes that the community has built may be pushed further to the fringes.

In April 2024, Montreal’s Commission on Economic and Urban Development and Housing presented its final nightlife policy recommendations in a public assembly meeting. It was a step toward the city’s intention to spend $2.1 million to create a 24-hour nightlife zone, likely in the Latin Quarter, as well as “nocturnal vitality zoning” throughout the city. The details of the latter are still vague, with a sense that this zoning would permit alcohol sales after 3 a.m. (the city’s current cutoff). These developments may pad the city’s bottom line, but the policy lacks clear details on how it will include or protect the main drivers of Montreal’s local nightlife scenes and its most vulnerable populations: queer and racialized artists, patrons, and workers.

For those who are not within these minority groups, it can be difficult to understand the constant feeling of unease and danger in nightlife. When asked if she feels unwelcome in nightlife spaces that are not expressly queer-friendly, Ouellette was quick to answer: “Absolutely. It’s just so easy to be objectified, or fetishized, or harassed, or screamed at, or [looked at] cross-eyed. Stuff like that is so common.”

Maintaining physical safety is also a factor. For racialized people and those who are both queer and racialized, some of the peril in nightlife is not overtly violent, but stems from a sense of otherness in some of the city’s scenes. “Being hit on by cishet men not knowing that I’m trans is a situation that is extremely uncomfortable, and can be dangerous,” Amai Doucet, Studio ZX’s media relations and communities manager, explains.

For too many people, discomfort, and sometimes violence, is the status quo in nightlife. Canada’s Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces found that sexual minorities are nearly three times more likely to experience violent victimization and more than twice as likely to experience inappropriate sexual behaviours than heterosexual people. Studies have also shown that racialized women who report violence are often taken less seriously than white women, leaving them at further risk.

The document outlining the city’s most recent recommendations for the nightlife policy includes a section titled Safety & Security, which emphasizes a need to increase funding for NGOs that work to decrease night-based sexual violence and collaboration between these groups, the city, and Quebec’s Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Solidarity. Although these recommendations are a starting point, they are so general that it is difficult to glean any concrete plans.

Queer and racialized groups, and the threat of danger they face, are mentioned in the published recommendations, but the details are scant. One recommendation is to “support the creation and maintenance of inclusive nighttime community spaces for marginalized communities, such as LGBTQ2+ people, racialized communities, and people with disabilities.” Although marginalized communities and safety issues are both mentioned broadly, the document does not link the two. (This Magazine contacted several city officials who were part of the policy’s creation for comment, but none were willing to speak about the policy directly.)

As Montreal prepares to invest millions into nightlife, there is no better time for the city to improve its relationship with some of its more important players. Montreal cannot continue to undervalue the voices of marginalized groups as it enacts policies that directly affect these communities.

Last year, FANTOM, a non-profit that serves as a voice for queer and racialized people in Montreal nightlife, conducted a survey to assess its community’s needs. By far, the top concerns were safety and security, with 61 percent of queer and 58 percent of racialized surveyees mentioning it in their responses. FANTOM’s co-founder, Oliver Philbin-Briscoe, was pleasantly surprised to see that the new recommendations mentioned safety for marginalized groups at all—it’s the first time the city has done so in writing, as far as he remembers.

FANTOM envisions several projects that may help address queer and racialized people’s safety concerns, like an app to search for, review, and share venue information and the creation of more local, community-owned and operated event spaces. Still, many activists have more expansive ideas that require significant funding, resources, and collaboration with local officials.

For example, Philbin-Briscoe says it’s important to expand public transit hours to match the proposed 24-hour zones, ensuring that after-hours patrons and workers would have affordable and reliable methods to return home safely. This idea is proposed in the document, but Philbin-Briscoe is reluctant to celebrate it as a win before further steps are taken. Ouellette suggests a more qualitative path forward: a widespread education campaign illustrating the realities of marginalized communities.

Another key solution that activists emphasize is well-trained security personnel. Doucet believes that good security must hold a deep understanding of the needs of marginalized communities and be sensitive to the existing tensions between these groups and law enforcement. Several of FANTOM’s survey respondents felt that overly aggressive and poorly trained security are a central problem for marginalized communities in the underground and after-hours nightlife scene. Doucet suggests mandatory training that focuses on harm reduction and de-escalation rather than the use of violence.

Ouellette says that she believes the city’s lack of consideration for marginalized communities is not ill-intentioned, but rather, stems from a lack of knowledge and resources. However, Doucet thinks there is a relatively simple way to address this problem: to put more marginalized people in decision-making roles. “This would make sure we don’t get to a point where we’re asked our opinion after 95 percent of the work is done and most of it can’t even be changed,” she says.

Doucet suggests a council of queer and racialized people that can advocate for themselves in the city’s policymaking, in nightlife and beyond. Sometimes, she says, policymakers may not consider what Black and Brown folks, women, and queer people need because they don’t know their life experiences. That’s why Montreal needs these groups to be involved in making decisions about this city’s future.

Queer and racialized nightlife activists are cautiously optimistic, but wary of what is to come. To ensure that their hope is not misplaced, marginalized people’s concerns, solutions, and voices must be a central and meaningful part of Montreal’s nightlife policy.

Image by Paul Loh via Pexels

In the heart of the city, while more than 385,000 South Asians go about their lives, the University of Toronto (U of T) has quietly set a precedent. Amid the clamour for social justice and equality, U of T’s teaching assistants have negotiated with their union to include caste as a discriminatory practice—a move that has slipped under the radar of mainstream Canadian discourse.

Along with U of T, the Canadian Union of Public Employees – 3902 Unit 1 also became the first union in North America to add caste as a protected category, according to organizers. Caste is a traditional social hierarchy and restrictive practice based on birth or traditional occupation, ingrained in some societies, particularly in South Asia, that dictates a person’s social status and opportunities. With 2.6 million people comprising 7.1 percent of the population, South Asians represent the largest visible minority in Canada, according to Statistics Canada.

U of T’s decision sets a precedent for other institutions to follow suit, marking a significant moment in Canadian anti-caste activists’ ongoing struggle for inclusivity. “Your proposed amendment to Article 4 of your Collective Agreement includes caste as a category to be protected from workplace discrimination, harassment, coercion, interference, restriction, or any other practices prohibited by law,” said a bulletin from CUPE during the negotiation phase. “This demonstrates your ongoing commitment to fighting against oppression and recognizes that many students and education workers within the University of Toronto are impacted by caste politics and caste-based discrimination in their workplaces, classrooms, and communities.”

“This creates an inclusive and equitable environment and campus for all; that is our larger goal,” said Shibi Laxman Kumaraperumal, a fourth-year PhD scholar at U of T’s History department,teacher’s assistant, and union-side bargaining committee member who pushed for the amendment. “By doing this, we are actually beginning anti-caste conversations in the university environments in Canada. We encourage other trade unions to take it up as well.”

While many in the community are pleased with this step to curtail discrimination, that doesn’t hold true for everyone. Efforts to incorporate anti-caste measures in various North American jurisdictions have faced opposition from some Hindu organizations, which argue that such measures could lead to Hinduphobia. The term “Hinduphobia,” as outlined in petition E-4507, tabled at the House of Commons in December 2023 and meant to specifically address and define the discrimination faced by Hindus in Canada, refers to prejudice, discrimination, or hostility toward Hindu people, culture, or religion, including the association of casteism with Hinduism.

The U.S. has seen initiatives to combat caste discrimination, notably in Seattle, Washington, which became the first U.S. city to prohibit caste discrimination in 2023. Some members of the diaspora resisted, though, and they also resisted the introduction of an anti-caste discrimination bill in California, expressing concerns about the implications for the Hindu community.

Similarly, in Canada, some Hindu groups have called for a Hinduphobia bill, arguing that caste discrimination is not prevalent and that legislation against caste discrimination could unfairly target the Hindu community. Still, across the country, jurisdictions are taking steps to combat caste-based discrimination. The Ontario Human Rights Commission recognizes it now. Similarly, the city of Burnaby, B.C. voted unanimously to include caste as a protected category in its code of conduct, and Brampton, Ontario’s city council voted unanimously to take steps to add caste-based discrimination to its anti-discrimination policy.

It’s a more complex issue than it seems, and initiatives to combat anti-caste discrimination in Canada and the U.S. are in the early stages. But the efforts being made at U of T point to the need to unpack it, and to implement change at an institutional level.

Collage by Valerie Thai

Isabella Calahoo-Zeller was attending eighth grade in Alberta when she received sex education for the first time. It consisted of a YouTube video about consent, and not much else. “We didn’t really get much on what a penis looks like, or what a vulva looks like,” Calahoo-Zeller says. “We never got the birth video that you hear so much about. So for me, I was like, what is this?”

Calahoo-Zeller is one of many young people in Alberta, and across Canada, who have been left wanting more from the sex ed experience offered in schools. Research by the Sex Information & Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN) has shown that 82.5 percent of young people across Canada see sex ed as a basic right for all.

These results come at a time when political and popular support for sex education seems to be shifting. Across the country, some parents, who claim to be advocating for parental rights, have been extremely vocal in their distaste for comprehensive sex ed, especially content focused on 2SLGBTQIA+ identities. According to Statistics Canada, about four percent of the population identifies as 2SLGBTQIA+. This means that if queer and trans-related content is left out of sex ed, many young Canadians won’t be receiving essential information about their health.

In Alberta, Saskatchewan, and New Brunswick, trans and nonbinary young people’s rights in the education space are on a backslide. New policies by the United Conservative Party, the Saskatchewan Party, and the Progressive Conservative Party respectively around the use of changed names and pronouns, as well as sex-ed access, are increasing the number of hoops through which young people have to jump to be recognized as their authentic selves and access resources made to support them.

“You’re already struggling in surviving to be yourself. How can you ask for help when the help doesn’t want to help you, right? I think it’s really a struggle right now being a trans person,” says Calahoo-Zeller, who is Two Spirit.

The benefits of receiving comprehensive sexuality education have been proven by science, and they’re not just about healthy and safe sex. From a violence prevention perspective, sex ed is key because it builds knowledge and understanding of bodily autonomy. It can be the first place children who are being abused learn that what’s happening to them is not okay. The health and safety aspect of sexuality education is essential, but that’s no less true of learning about gender identity, self-expression, and the full spectrum of human relationships.

“Historically, sexual health education focused on issues related to problem prevention. It has been focused on the needs of heterosexual, cisgender, white youth primarily, and focused on preventing unwanted pregnancies and preventing sexually transmitted infections,” says Jessica Wood, research and project development lead at SIECCAN. “It’s really important to understand that sexual education is not just learning about safer sex and reproduction, but should be a comprehensive approach to learning about sexuality and bodies and relationships, personal and interpersonal well-being, gender and sexual diversity, and values and rights.”

Because education falls under provincial jurisdiction, sex ed experiences are known to vary widely across Canada. Approaches can differ even between classrooms in the same school, as educators have different levels of comfort and training in delivering this knowledge. This means some students get all of the details, while others are left in an unfortunate state of ignorance. And it’s not just their own openness to the topic that educators must negotiate with: the volume of anti-trans rights rhetoric can also affect the classroom.

But, according to Janani Suthan, the comprehensive sexuality education program coordinator at the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the perception that support for comprehensive sex ed is decreasing isn’t always rooted in reality. “The majority of parents, in the grand scheme of things in Canada, are supportive of their children learning about their sexual health in schools, and learning it holistically and comprehensively,” they say. “But the people that are against this are very loud and very proud about it, and are mobilizing.”

Wood also says it’s a small minority of people who are actually against students learning this critical information. Advocacy against comprehensive sex ed, led by groups like 1 Million March 4 Children and Parents for Choice in Education, are often well organized and well funded. Religious and political interest groups have a strong hand in the work of such organizations.

The spread of misinformation and disinformation about sex ed on social media has contributed to the movement. “And so when we hear about this often, it may seem as if more people are not supportive of comprehensive sex ed,” Wood explains. “We find that a lot of people actually are, but we just don’t hear that coverage as much.”

This disproportionate coverage of dissenting voices leads to the spread of myths about sexual health, sex education, and queer and trans experiences. “They don’t want youth to know about gender, [or] sex,” says Suthan. “They are fearful of youth having knowledge, of youth having skills to understand themselves better.”

If queer and trans experiences aren’t taught as part of sex ed curriculum, that leaves young people vulnerable. Since sex ed is a health and safety issue, it is reasonable to expect that all students should have equal access to it. “It’s suicide prevention, it’s mental health care. It’s everything, because a lot of issues end up linking to sexuality and relationships,” Suthan says. “It’s very much necessary for everybody.”

For those who are supportive of sex ed in the classroom, it has never been more important to speak up for young people’s right to access information. “If you can advocate, advocate. If you can’t, that’s okay,” says Suthan. “Show up for your kid.”

Sharing knowledge with young people can help to build acceptance and understanding, some of the most important parts of living a fulfilled life. “Community is where I found more information on being Two Spirit,” says Calahoo-Zeller. “You get to understand yourself and also other people… we don’t have secrets. There’s nothing to hide.”

Photo by sakarin14 via Adobe Stock

Arctic Canada is filling with puddles.

Springtime in the Yukon looks astonishingly similar to June in Ontario. The days are long. Deer bite the heads off flowers deep in the forest. Icy mountains still loom in the distance, but here in the city of Whitehorse, wet mud squishes with every step. People wear shorts and t-shirts. Trucks are parked in nearly every driveway, dried clay caked onto their tires. Spring in Whitehorse is beautiful, if you forget that it comes at the cost of a forever-changed climate.

Annual mean temperatures in northern Canada have increased by 2.3 C from 1948 to 2016, with temperatures rising most rapidly in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. By 2019, a new report from Environment and Climate Change Canada revealed that northern Canada, specifically the Yukon, is warming three times faster than anywhere else because of Arctic amplification.

Arctic amplification is like a magnifying glass reflecting off a mirror: heat from the sun bounces off the bright landscape, which then mixes with warm water vapour in the atmosphere. This heat isn’t being absorbed in the ground because of the ice, so it has nowhere to go: heat rises, but it becomes trapped in the atmosphere. As more ice melts, more vapour is created, which then causes the ice to melt even further. Essentially, Arctic amplification means that the region is caught in an intense greenhouse gas effect leading to biodiversity loss, habitat degradation, and mudslides.

For residents of northern Canada, the effects of the climate crisis are being felt faster and more aggressively than any policy can take effect. They’re threatening Indigenous ways of life that have been in place for thousands of years, making it increasingly difficult to pass down spiritual and cultural customs to young people. They’re also threatening the very ground the North is built on. But the climate crisis isn’t exclusive to the Yukon—if the oldest (and coldest) parts of the Earth are heating up, it signifies a dangerous warning to the rest of the world.

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Indigenous communities throughout the Yukon and Alaska regions have depended on Chinook salmon as a key food source for millennia, moving along the 3,190 kilometre-long Yukon River to fish. Brooke Woods, a Koyukon Dene woman, is a tribal citizen of Rampart Village and grew up on the Alaska side of the Yukon River. She spent six years as executive chair for the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and currently works for the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Alaska, focusing on climate policy and fisheries management. She stresses that the salmon aren’t just food for her community; salmon fishing is also a livelihood with a deep spiritual connection. It’s important to people to use all parts of the fish, and it’s common to find salmon skeletons mounted above Dene doorways. “[Our] communities are along the Yukon River for a reason. We are salmon-dependant people,” she says.

But now, climate change is leading to the continued loss of the salmon: an essential part of the Yukon River’s ecosystem that was once abundant along its stretch. And Indigenous people in the area have largely resorted to buying salmon from other areas or trying to harvest other fish due to the decline. “So many parts of our life have changed because of the salmon declines…impacting us mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually and culturally,” Woods says.

Chinook salmon differ from Atlantic salmon on the other side of the country because of one key factor: they die less than a month after spawning. They also take up to eight years to reach maturity and reproduce. Though salmon live most of their life in saltwater, their eggs need freshwater to hatch. Because of this, the adult salmon usually return to their own birthplace to release the next generation of spawn, with females laying between 2,000 to 10,000 eggs. However, climate change is altering these freshwater rivers quickly, and the salmon eggs are soft and highly sensitive to temperature and environment. When the water is too warm, too polluted, too salty, or just too different from what it used to be, the hatchlings can’t survive. Right now, only about one percent of chinook salmon eggs survive to adulthood. In other words, climate change is a factor in degrading the salmon’s habitat beyond survivability.

Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S. believe warmer waters make it harder for Chinook salmon in the river to keep a healthy diet and stabilize their metabolism. According to the NOAA, salmon grow faster in warmer water but struggle to find prey—like other small fish or invertebrates—meaning they will lay fewer eggs and have a lower chance of survival. Warmer rivers are also causing salmon to die from heat stress, according to a study from the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also reports that as temperatures rise, it’s harder for water to retain its oxygen levels. Salmon—like all forms of aquatic life—need stable oxygen levels to survive. When the water gets too warm and the oxygen levels deplete too much, salmon suffocate and die.

In April 2024, the U.S. and Canadian federal governments teamed up to create a historic—yet controversial—agreement: ban all Chinook salmon fishing in the Yukon and Alaska for seven years in an effort to grow the population. According to the ban, both First Nation and Tribal subsistence fisheries—the method of harvesting fish specifically involving Indigenous knowledge and traditions—is prohibited “when there are fewer than 71,000 adult Chinook salmon.” Once this number is met, limited commercial, personal, and sport fishing could begin again. The salmon are counted by sonar at several sites in the region, and in 2023, only around 14,000 Chinook were counted at the Eagle sonar site near the Canadian border.

Detailed tracking of the Chinook salmon population began in the 1980s. According to the EPA, in 1984, around 1.2 million Chinook were tracked at the southernmost part of their migration—the Salish Sea region of the Pacific Ocean. With over 3,000 kilometres of migration from the Yukon River, through the Bering Sea, down to the Salish Sea before coming back up the Yukon River again, Chinook salmon have some of the largest migration patterns in the world. But fewer and fewer Chinook are surviving this migration for long enough to make it to their spawning grounds.

The 2024 Yukon River Chinook salmon run—the annual migration of salmon along the river to spawn—was the third-lowest in history, with fewer than 65,000 salmon making the voyage to the Pilot Station—the closest sonar site to the mouth of the river. Of those fish, an estimated 24,112 passed through the Eagle Sonar site near the Yukon border. The worst year on record was 2022, when an astonishing total of 12,025 Chinook salmon were counted for the season through the Eagle sonar site. This number is 80 percent lower than the historical average; some previous years have seen up to 500,000.

At the heart of the salmon run is Whitehorse. Whitehorse holds the world’s longest wooden fish ladder, a structure crucial for letting salmon pass through to their spawning grounds. It looks like a winding staircase filled with flowing water: salmon instinctively migrate and seek out changing currents. The water attracts the salmon, who swim upstream, jumping from step to step. Just like a staircase, these ladders have steps that allow the fish to “climb” upwards: this is especially helpful if parts of the river are blocked by dams or other predators waiting for their next meal. Conservation groups monitor the Whitehorse fish ladder yearly and use sonars to track how many fish pass through.

Jordan Blay has lived in the Yukon since 1985, and grew up fishing in Annie Lake 50 kilometres outside Whitehorse. He notes salmon, halibut and several types of trout among the fish he could catch around the Yukon and Alaska. “The record was 18 castes, 18 fish,” he says. However, in recent years, he says there are considerably fewer fish in large bodies of water, like the Yukon River.

Blay describes the spring of 2022 as “abysmal” for salmon. “If I remember right, it was something like six fish went through the ladder,” he says. Hardly any fish were seen on some days. Blay’s estimation isn’t far off: fish ladder supervisor Amy Jacobsen told the CBC that only 13 salmon passed through by August 10, 2023. More fish passed through after this, but August is the height of their travels.

When numbers are low, Fisheries and Oceans Canada prohibits sport fishing. Depending on the numbers and body of water, a prohibition can affect both personal fishing and Indigenous subsistence fishing. However, even if not explicitly stated by Canadian or Alaskan governments, First Nations leaders often voluntarily ask their citizens to refrain from fishing when the populations are in decline.

Historically, Indigenous-operated fisheries have had more robust fish populations than modern commercial fisheries due to longstanding practices of environmental reciprocity and continued traditions surrounding the Earth’s seasonal cycles. Woods explains that the salmon decline is a relatively new phenomenon. “We do have 10,000 years of relationship with salmon, and we have always maintained our cultural values when it comes to harvesting king [Chinook] salmon,” she says. “That has been successful, that has kept salmon runs alive and well.”

Woods says the low salmon population could have disastrous effects on future generations, noting that cultural traditions and education are passed down from older family members, and how she learned from her mother and grandmother when fishing. “Growing up, we had multi-generational family members coming together to harvest, process and share salmon,” she says. She’s concerned younger community members won’t be able to learn in the same way she did, which will pose serious challenges to their health and culture.

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Apart from warming the Yukon River, climate change means the physical landscape of the Yukon is shifting. Deep below the surface of the Earth in northern Canada is permafrost: permanently frozen soil and sediment held together by ice. The Yukon has some of the oldest pieces of permafrost in the world, with scientists estimating it’s been in place for three million years. In Whitehorse, permafrost accounts for up to 50 percent of the ground’s surface, according to Yukon University. Because of climate change, the permafrost is now melting.

“One of the biggest ways we see issues with permafrost in our human environment is probably through infrastructure and the highways,” says Alison Perrin, a senior research professional at Yukon University’s Research Centre. Perrin has been researching climate change and climate change policy in the North for the last 10 years. “It’s kind of like the supporting foundation of the North.”

In the same way a foundation provides stability for a house, permafrost creates stability on the ground in northern Canada. The crumbling permafrost threatens the livelihood of the communities—like the Kluane First Nation—that have existed in these remote areas for thousands of years before Canada was colonized.

Shirley Smith is an Indigenous Elder from the Kwanlin Dün First Nation. Their traditional land is located in what’s alsoknown as Whitehorse. One of her biggest worries is how the next generation will be able to learn about cultural traditions and living off the land sustainably. Warmer winters with increased precipitation meant that one winter, she had six feet of snow alongside her house, making it difficult to get to cultural and sacred sites.

Climate change presents a real threat to Indigenous communities’ abilities to pass their cultures and spiritual practices on to next generations. Smith says that the best place to teach younger generations about climate change is on the land, recalling that some of her traditional knowledge about hunting and fishing sustainably was passed down by her father on trips. But these lessons aren’t being taught as much anymore, she says. Still, any time at all learning from older people is deeply valuable for younger ones. “Even if they just go for two days, three days, teach them or show them how to live off the land,” she says.

Alongside threatening Indigenous ways of life and knowing, warming ice can also mean physical danger. Communities in northern Canada are remote and far between, leaving people with few options when it comes to emergency evacuations. Perrin uses Nunavut as an example of one place in the North where people’s ability to survive in the winter depends on stability below them in the forms of ice and permafrost. Communities in the North are mobile, moving to different locations to fish, trap, hunt. It’s about survival, tradition, spirituality, culture and lineage all at once. But this mobility isn’t possible when the ice cracks: suddenly, a longstanding tradition of walking across a frozen river doesn’t guarantee safety. And yet, “their lives depend on going out on the ice,” she says.

Only 30 kilometres outside of Whitehorse, reports have been made about tears in the Earth from the permafrost melting, causing trees to collapse as the dirt breaks open. These physical changes can mean less stability on the Alaska Highway, a 2,400-kilometre road that runs through B.C., the Yukon and Alaska. The highway is an essential method of transportation connecting remote First Nations communities and importing goods to northern areas. If parts of it become unusable, it could seriously threaten these communities’ health and wellbeing.

Further, melting permafrost can cause other issues: methane, carbon dioxide or potentially toxic microbes are often found within the sediment, furthering the overall problem of climate change, Perrin explains. “As permafrost thaws, it contributes to greenhouse gas effect,” she says.

Part of Perrin’s research investigates how climate change affects the Yukon over long periods. One report she coauthored, titled “Yukon climate change indicators and key findings,” published in 2022 by Yukon University’s Research Centre, looks at how the volume of Arctic sea ice has decreased since 1979. With a melting rate of about 300 cubic kilometres per year, the report estimates that most ice that was there in total has melted within the past decade.

Permafrost thaw, warmer temperatures and wildfires can cause extreme events like the landslides in Whitehorse, something that would have been unheard of until just a few years ago. For residents, the North is quickly becoming unrecognizable. Willow Brewster, a paramedic who’s lived in Whitehorse since she was a toddler in the 1990s, says she remembers long, frigid days too cold to hold a snowball. Now, she says, there’s sometimes slush in December and landslides by spring. In July 2024, a landslide caused by massive amounts of rain—another symptom of climate change—caused an 82-kilometre highway closure. While no one was hurt, it left people unable to travel between Carcross, Yukon and Fraser, B.C. Landslides are one result of climate-change related permafrost melting, according to a 2023 Simon Fraser University and Yukon Geological Survey report.

“I was driving through puddles in December because all of the snow was melting because it was plus five [degrees],” Brewster says. “It’s [an] eerie kind of feeling where it just feels kind of wrong.”

Brewster also sees injuries becoming more frequent. Her grandmother, who has lived in the Yukon for several decades, fell in the ice in 2016. In 2022, two people fell into icy water when crossing a seemingly frozen river near Pilot Station, Alaska, resulting in one death. Brewster describes freezing temperatures as “sporadic,” and says you can’t always expect the ice to be consistently frozen anymore. Routine ice trips are increasingly deadly in February, when the ice should be sturdiest.

In December 2023, the Yukon government’s official response to climate change noted 42 new actions to fight it, specifically noting green energy, wildfire protections, and smart electric heating systems. There is no mention of salmon specifically, but there is an action saying the government will “work with First Nations and communities to address a gap in lake-monitoring to capture changes in water in order to support fish habitat protection and community safety.” While permafrost is not mentioned either, there is a promise to undertake “flood risk hazard assessments for Yukon campgrounds and other key public infrastructure in territorial parks.”

When it comes to climate change, even a two-degree temperature increase can have significant overall effects. It can be the difference between freezing and melting; an animal living or dying. Canada is currently a part of the Paris Agreement—the international treaty created by the United Nations wherein countries pledge to limit their emissions to avoid a two-degree increase. Yet the Yukon’s average temperature is three degrees warmer than it’s ever been.

Both our shared physical environment and entire ways of being that have been in place since time immemorial are under threat. Bans on salmon fishing and government incentives on green tech will not solve this in and of themselves. Instead, there needs to be a priority on centring the skills passed down through generations from Indigenous knowledge-keepers, living in balance with the land, and a focus on sustainability as a continuous way of life. There is irrefutable evidence that global warming changes every part of the world: from the tiniest oxygen molecules in the water to the vast permafrost in the Earth. And what’s happening in the Yukon is foreshadowing for everywhere else: the climate can’t change so drastically while everything else stays the same.

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Indigenous communities have long been crucial to climate protection. According to the United Nations, Indigenous people have prioritized the environment for generations, meaning their contributions to the scientific community cannot be ignored. A pivot to two-eyed seeing is deeply necessary.

There are over a dozen First Nations in the Yukon, each with its own distinct cultural practices and communities. One initiative, called the Yukon First Nations Climate Action Fellowship, is trying to combine cultural traditions across the different nations with the fight against climate change by teaching young adults about biodiversity and living in harmony with the land. Dustin McKenzie-Hubbard, a member of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, loves being one of the 13 fellows because it inspires him to make the world better for his daughter.

McKenzie-Hubbard says the fellowship has focused on turning away from a colonialist and consumerist mindset and that a strong sense of community is essential in dealing with these problems. Addressing climate change means centring Indigenous people’s calls for climate protection and understanding. “Everything you do affects someone else and everything,” he says. “We have to be mindful of what our impacts will do for ourselves in the next seven generations.”

Woods stresses the importance of incorporating Indigenous knowledge into conservation efforts, something she says is “disregarded in so many management spaces.”

“We do have 10,000 years of stewardship that is not incorporated into the current Western science and governance structure,” she says, describing how important it is for knowledge to be passed down from Elders to the younger generations, especially when it comes to the salmon. “I want to be able to fish the same way my grandmother taught my mom, and the way that I’ll teach my children.”

“The conversation on the picket line was frankly, ‘what the fuck?’” recalls Jason Laurendeau, a sociology professor who was among the strikers. It seemed surreal that relations between faculty and the university had deteriorated to this point, but Lethbridge isn’t an anomaly. Over the past year, Canada has seen a wave of post-secondary faculty strikes amid rising tensions.

From Acadia University to Ontario Tech, to the University of Manitoba and the University of Lethbridge, and even smaller universities like Concordia University of Edmonton and Université Sainte-Anne, strikes broke out. The wave began on November 2 with the University of Manitoba strike and dwindled by April 25 with the end of the strike at Université Sainte-Anne.

In Canada, tenured university faculty have a reputation for rarely striking. But harsh austerity measures and the COVID-19 pandemic have been exacerbating the existing workplace injustices they faced. “We haven’t seen any type of strike activity at this kind of intensity in the past—it’s just never happened,” says Peter McInnis, president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, an association of faculty unions. McInnis notes that the significance of this wave goes beyond the number of strikes; it is also that they are nationwide.

Before the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan, which made the right to strike a Charter right, the ability for faculty to strike varied from province to province—and sometimes even university to university. In Alberta, there had been no faculty strikes, legal or otherwise, until faculty at Concordia University of Edmonton went on strike for 11 days in January for better working conditions, pay, and job security.

SLASHED BUDGETS
Since the 1990s, the funding provincial and federal governments have invested into post-secondary education has dwindled. Ontario Progressive Conservative Mike Harris’s government slashed operating grants and deregulated tuition fees as part of his “Common Sense Revolution.” Today, Alberta’s United Conservatives are following in a similar neoliberal mould. With these cuts, post-secondary institutions are under pressure to do more with less. Instead of hiring tenure-track faculty, many are relying on precariously employed contract faculty and graduate students to teach. This scenario comes with a lack of job security, reduced academic freedom, and lower wages.

A study conducted by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that in the 2016/2017 year, 53.6 percent of all faculty positions in the country were contract instructors, versus tenure-track positions.
Before the 1990s, contract appointments were comparatively rare, though it’s hard to quantify exactly how big this shift is, due to the lack of data and comprehensive study. Nevertheless, the current moment of precarity and austerity has implications for any sort of labour action.

“The trend that we’re concerned with is that because they are precarious workers, they are hard to mobilize and organize,” says Orvie Dingwall, president of the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA), which went on strike in late 2021. For example, many contract instructors commute from university to university, teaching classes here and there to eke out a living. As more academic positions shift from well-paid tenure-track to poorly compensated instructors, the landscape of faculty associations changes and the needs of staff are fragmented.

“There’s a clear hierarchy within [the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association] … that can manifest as this sort of deep-seated solidarity … But it also can result in this kind of tension,” says Tanner Layton, a sociology instructor at the University of Lethbridge. He recalls a professor telling him that they were not striking for their own job, but rather his, because he and other contract workers are “exploited and exploitable.”

COVID AND CONTRACTS
In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into collective bargaining. The very nature of higher education changed, as classes went online. Faculty and students had to figure out how to teach and learn in a completely new setting. In many cases, the pandemic exacerbated existing issues. While the specific issues being negotiated varied from university to university, there are clear throughlines in terms of pay, job security, equity measures for marginalized workers, and working conditions.

Going into a strike or lockout during the grievous early stages of the pandemic was not an attractive prospect to the UMFA. Instead, in October 2020, UMFA negotiated a onetime payment from the university for overwork brought on by COVID-19, and renewed the existing contract from the past round of bargaining until March 2021. Dingwall believes reluctance to strike during the early months of the pandemic ultimately created the strike wave, with multiple unions moving into protest mode, when the pandemic seemed less chaotic. “I think us going on strike when we did demonstrated to others that ‘Yes, you can go on strike in a pandemic. If you need to, then you can.’”

BARGAINING INTERFERENCE
In Canada, workers have a constitutional right to free and fair collective bargaining with their employer. This means it is illegal for governments to interfere in the process of collective bargaining in ways that significantly override the relationship between employer and employee.

With universities, what constitutes interference can be complicated. Universities are largely publicly funded, so governments have a stake in their finances and operations. But legally speaking, universities are separate entities from the government, to ensure academic freedom and independence—cornerstone principles of academia. So what happens when provincial governments attempt to interfere in the collective bargaining process to keep wages down? And what happens when university administrations go along with it?

In the case of the University of Manitoba, a $19.3 million settlement happened. After a protracted legal battle, in 2022 the court found the Manitoba government had interfered illegally in the 2016 round of collective bargaining between the university and the UMFA. It had set hard limits on what could be offered and compromised upon, including a one-year wage freeze, rather than letting the university bargain independently. The provincial government is in the process of appealing this judgement. Some faculty members at the University of Lethbridge, like Laurendeau, fear something similar happened there. “We knew that there was this secret directive,” said Laurendeau. “We didn’t know what it was, but when you look at the opening offers of institutions throughout the province, it was pretty clear what it was because there’s an extraordinary degree of consistency.”

The United Conservative Party government elected in 2019 took an austerity approach to higher education. They lifted the tuition freeze instated by the NDP government and cut operating grants, and they intend to impose a performance-based-funding framework. This would tie government funding to certain metrics, such as how quickly a student was employed after graduation, what their salary was, and how many work-integrated learning opportunities were offered.

Critics argue that tying funding to these metrics will force universities to direct more funding towards programs offering immediate returns in the workforce, like business and engineering, and perhaps take away funding from programs in fields such as the humanities or social sciences. Laurendeau believes the provincial government mandated what universities could offer on monetary issues, but that does not explain the university’s reticence to bargain on other issues.

TAKING TO THE PICKET LINES
Strikes are often referred to as the muscle of the labour movement. Like muscles, strikes are more effective the longer you use and develop them. They can mobilize workers in ways that might have been impossible before, and rally workers behind the union flag.

“There was an excitement—not an excitement to go on strike, I want to be clear about that, but an excitement that we were finally doing something,” says Laurendeau. The University of Lethbridge Faculty Association (ULFA) had been without a contract for 629 days by the end of the 40-day strike in March 2021. For ULFA, this was a big moment. It was not just the first strike that ULFA had ever undertaken, but also the second faculty strike in Alberta. In a previous round of bargaining in 2013, ULFA took a one-percent pay cut to help with the university’s budget deficit, which makes this push for better pay, among other things, even
more significant.

The fact these strikes happened in close proximity to one another gave faculty associations some advantages.
Dingwall noted how faculty associations were able to share information, everything from strategic advice to
simple logistical things—like making sure to have a COVID-19 plan and washrooms near the picket lines.

STUDENTS CHOOSING SIDES
The point of a strike is to be disruptive. That’s what makes strikes effective. This disruption of students’ routine was met with conflicting information from the university and the union, leaving some students at the University of Lethbridge in the lurch. For example, the university’s FAQ for students stated that ending the strike was at the sole discretion of ULFA, neglecting to mention that the university had locked out faculty simultaneously. “It almost felt as if we were with divorced parents and we were being forced to pick a side,” says Lauryn Evans, an Addictions Counselling student at the University of Lethbridge.

In some cases, neither union nor university communication made its way effectively to students. Evans found out about the impending strike from the ULethwildin Instagram account, which posts mainly memes and videos of student parties. Angie Nikoleychuk, a fourth-year psychology and computer science student at U of L, is a member of the Student Solidarity and Action Council, which worked to help students sort out conflicting communication through posting on social media. Professors like Jason Laurendeau set up Discord channels of their own for students to ask questions about the strike.

The council worked with another student group, the Student Action Assembly, to stand in solidarity with faculty, organizing a sit-in protest by administration offices. For Nikoleychuk, working to make sure students were informed and walking the picket line with her professors was a balm. To her, walking the line was “a way to see each other [students and faculty] as human.”

Similar student activist groups emerged at other universities, like Students Supporting UMFA at the University of Manitoba and Students Supporting the CUE Faculty Association at Concordia University of Edmonton. Students Supporting UMFA took action by blocking doors to the administration building, in an attempt to pressure the Board of Governors into settling. Strikes can be moments of politicization; they can forge new connections for social movements. “As academics we can be kind of isolated, and as students we can be isolated. And this [strike] was a moment of inspiration, to put it kind of cheesily,” says Layton.

WHAT NOW?
While the strike wave has subsided, many of the issues that precipitated it remain, from COVID-19 to the shift to precarious academic labour. While faculty unions across the country have won victories large and small, much remains to be done for justice in the academic workplace. However, the key problem of structural precarity remains not fully addressed. Student groups like the Student Solidarity and Action Council and Students Supporting UMFA (renamed Student Solidarity Collective) still remain post-strike, only they are refocused to different causes. McInnis points out these strikes are another “warning that governments have a role to play and that you can’t sustain the system with private donors or really high tuition rates.”

If ongoing labour strife is to be avoided, governments and universities must address the underlying injustices. This begins with provincial governments letting universities bargain freely with unions, and investing in well-paid and secure jobs in the academy. Then, unions and universities can exercise their rights to bargain in good faith and get back to the essential work of teaching and research. Until then, the signs indicate that unions will keep returning to the front lines in a long battle for justice in the workplace.

It’s not the first time Stewart has interacted with paramedics this year and it won’t be the last. But she can’t stop replaying the image of the student being dragged limp across the floor. She lies awake in bed, thinking about her resident in the hospital. Worrying. She gets up the next day at 5 a.m. to walk them home.

Now, five years later, as Alanna Stewart talks about her experience as a resident assistant (RA) at Mount Allison University (Mt. A), she keeps coming back to that night, even though it was just one tough night in a year of tough nights. She also remembers things like sleeping on a resident’s floor to monitor them after recurring medical episodes and breaking up physical fights. Dealing regularly with drunk, disorderly, or angry students, and with toxic roommate drama, eventually took its toll.

RAs at post-secondary institutions are expected to take on the roles of caregiver, rule-enforcer, and counsellor for other students. They are overworked, underpaid, and always on the clock. Although they are the first line of defence against the mental-health crisis affecting students, their stories of shouldering the trauma of their peers are rarely told.

RAs are live-in “paraprofessionals.” They are usually in their second year of university or beyond and, in most cases, in their late teens or early 20s. While small differences exist in their role from school to school, their job typically involves doing rounds on weekends, keeping residents safe, enforcing rules, and making new students comfortable in their transition away from home.

“I WANT TO BE YOU NEXT YEAR”
Mt. A is a university in Sackville, New Brunswick, with a student population of approximately 2,300 and eight on campus residences. When Stewart and I attended, the smaller residences had four RAs each, and five other student leaders, all of whom were tasked with helping first-year students adapt to their new homes.

“On my very first day as a first year at Mount Allison, I remember saying to [the head RA], ‘I want to be you next year,’” Stewart says. She started Mt. A at 21 years old, a little older than most first-year students coming fresh out of high school. “I felt like if I had to live with younger people, I wanted to have a purpose.”

Stewart was my first-year roommate. From the get-go she was deeply attuned to people’s feelings. A natural helper and fierce advocate for mental health, she spoke openly about her own experiences with bipolar disorder. Stewart was the model candidate for a Mt. A Resident Assistant, which the school website describes as someone who is “caring, has a desire to help others and an interest in building strong residence communities.”

In her first year, Stewart successfully intervened in a fellow student’s crisis, making her the top choice for assistant don (senior RA) in her second year. But she and the RA team that ended up being hired could’ve had no idea just how challenging and exhausting the year ahead would be. For many people with serious mental-health conditions, between the ages of 18 and 21 is when symptoms first appear. It’s a phase when the brain is developing rapidly. Combined with the massive transition of moving away from home, exposure to alcohol for the first time (for some), culture clashes, and even just learning to live with a roommate, it’s generally a chaotic time.

In recent years, directors of university counselling services have seen higher numbers of students seeking help with more severe concerns. A 2019 survey of over 55,000 students at 58 campuses across Canada found nearly a quarter of students surveyed were diagnosed with anxiety and nearly one-fifth with depression that year. Approximately 11 percent of students reported intentional self-harm and 16.4 percent considered suicide, while 2.8 percent attempted it at some point that year.

Meanwhile, studies of RAs found those with residents who disclose self-harm experience higher levels of burnout and compassion fatigue. The mental-health crisis is escalating at post-secondary institutions, with added stressors and isolation resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic being linked to poorer mental-health outcomes for students, including higher levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness among students, with potential long-term effects. This means more high-stakes responsibility is being laid at the feet of young-adult RAs, who may be just as vulnerable to stress-related mental-health disorders as the peers in their charge.

ALWAYS ON
Back in 2017, burnout on the RA team at our residence was already prevalent. By the end of the first semester, one RA had stepped back because of the pressure. Another, who remained on the team, needed regular breaks from the role to keep up with school work and protect their mental health. The remaining team members became overextended, and many seemed close to breaking point.

Morgan Kelter was hired to fill in for the second semester. She went into the role with enthusiasm, “I got a fanny pack and painted it with sparkles … and I remember I got a T-shirt.” It meant a lot to her to be making a difference for younger students as part of the residence team.

During her first week on the job, there were three campus parties, which meant three consecutive late nights and dozens of intoxicated residents. “I had done all three because everyone else was burnt out,” Kelter explains. By the end of that week, she, too, already felt worn down. It was obvious her colleagues were struggling. “People that I had known for two years that I had never seen cry, I saw cry for the first time. [There were] trips to the hospital for mental health reasons. Therapy,” says Kelter.

Kelter recalls one instance clearly. “There was drama going on in residence that we were dealing with that we probably shouldn’t have been dealing with. It probably should have been in someone else’s hands instead of some 19-year-old,” she says. Her colleague became overwhelmed and didn’t shower for days. There wasn’t time to shower, they argued, teary-eyed. The former RA says it wasn’t the volume of hours, but the hypervigilance, that made the role exhausting. “When you’re needed, you’re needed. And you have to make yourself available all the time.”

The school administration would tell them they were students first, RAs second, but if someone was hurting themselves, in danger, or suicidal, it wasn’t something you could ignore just because you had an assignment due the next day. And students develop a special relationship of trust with their RA, which adds to the weight of the responsibilities of the role. “We do find that for some of the most traumatic or difficult issues our students are dealing with, it is peers that they are most likely to go to,” explains Chad Johnstone, director of Residence and Student Life at Acadia University in Nova Scotia.

Kelter’s mental, academic, and emotional life were ultimately affected by the job. “I was just like ‘I need to stay in my bed, where I’m not accessible to anyone.’” Kelter says she had to go into counselling after her first week on the job. She started missing classes for the first time. She stocked her room with granola bars to avoid sitting with friends at the meal hall, just to get a break from other people’s problems.

One weekend, when Stewart’s stress levels approached crisis point, she booked a hotel in town just to get away. “You’re so immersed in it…. It’s definitely a mind-blowing experience. You can never escape … you never really truly get a full break.”

COMPENSATION GAPS
The number of hours on paper does not adequately reflect the time and emotional investment required of RAs. It makes fair compensation hard to calculate. On top of that, there’s a lack of standardization in RA pay, even in geographically close schools of comparable size.

At Acadia, RAs get a deluxe single room covered, as well as $1,500 toward their meal plan, compensation in kind of an approximate $10,000 value. At St. Francis Xavier (St. FX), community assistants (their title for RAs) receive a salary of approximately $8,800. Mt. A does not publish RA compensation rates, but administration shared that compensation has increased 36 percent in the last five years, though they also reduced the number of RAs, which consequently increased the workload. Based on Stewart’s stipend in 2016 to 2017, compensation for senior RAs today is likely around $4,800, with non-senior RAs making less. RAs’ room fees at Mt. A and St. FX are not covered, despite the fact students in these roles need a more expensive single room to carry out their duties.

Such significant disparities across schools for the same work reflect the different value institutions place on the contributions of their student leaders. It was the student union at Mt. A that was instrumental in bringing attention to the pay disparities between RAs at Atlantic universities, pushing administration to increase pay. Being transparent about RA compensation across schools gives students the power to recognize when they’re being underpaid, so they can organize to have their invaluable contributions better compensated.

IN MISERY TOGETHER
Stewart says that while she had some supportive conversations with supervisors and school administrators about the overwhelming pressures she was experiencing, the RA team was her biggest support. “We went through so many intense moments together, and we collaborated and pulled together when we were all burnt out,” she says. “We were in misery together. I don’t know if we helped each other, but we always had each other,” Kelter adds.

While RAs had priority access to counselling at the school wellness centre, which many members of the team used, both Kelter and Stewart felt largely unsupported in the role. Having more RAs to share the workload, and opportunities to debrief more regularly with a professional facilitator, would have been helpful, Stewart says. Instead, the RAs had informal offloading sessions, “hanging out in my room all laying in bed, talking and venting.” Kelter suggested RAs could live in different residences from where they work, while still being accessible if needed, though she recognizes the drawbacks of that approach.

Mt. A has made changes since Kelter and Stewart were RAs. Residence Life has added a coordinator position, dealing specifically with student health and wellness. They say they’ve also expanded counselling services, adding mental-health, harm-reduction education, and social worker positions at the school for all students. RA training continues to evolve, too, and now includes crisis intervention and self-care programming. But, in the smaller residences there are now fewer RAs, and the ratio of RAs to students has gone from one RA for every 14 to 20 residents, to one for every 24, meaning RAs are taking on a higher workload in exchange.

Acadia now has a team of residence life coordinators on call to support RAs in crisis 24/7. They also run debriefs to help prevent overwhelm. There are more counselling services available now than there were five years ago, and there are programs specific to RAs from marginalized backgrounds to address additional stressors that they may be experiencing, says Johnstone.

But in light of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, which has amplified stress in students’ lives, it’s still not enough to ensure a new generation of RAs can fare better than their predecessors, the likes of Alanna Stewart and her fellow RAs. Jennifer Hamilton, executive director of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services says, “When it comes to health and mental health, this is not a university and college issue. The increase in mental-health issues is a societal concern.” She acknowledges that while schools are stepping up their efforts to support students, without a coordinated approach addressing the gaps in mental health care outside of the post-secondary environment, not much will change.

Ultimately, addressing poor mental health at universities means addressing it in all areas of life, through government policy that prioritizes mental health. The unmanageable load for RAs won’t stop until we tackle the mental-health crisis among young Canadians on all fronts.

Photo courtesy Police Free Schools Winnipeg

In the summer of 2020, the group Justice 4 Black Lives Winnipeg (J4BLW) sparked a wave of abolitionist organizing in the city after collecting over 120,000 signatures on a petition calling for the defunding and eventual end to the Winnipeg Police Service. Inspired and called to action by the demands of J4BLW, a group of parents, teachers, and students came together to form Police-Free Schools Winnipeg (PFSW). Their goal is to get school resource officers (SROs) out of schools and transform the resources available at schools so that no student ever has a cop called on them.

In Canada, the first SRO program was implemented in 1979, without prior consultation with students or parents. SRO programs were soon being implemented across the country and expanded significantly in the following decades. PFSW’s first campaign extensively documented the negative effects of SROs, which are particularly egregious for racialized and disabled students. The group collected and shared anonymous stories of student experiences with SROs, and the data gathered is harrowing.

According to Irene Bindi, a parent and organizer with PFSW, instances of “outright violence and arrests; entry into the school-to-prison pipeline; monitoring and surveillance; and school absenteeism, via the pushing out of school of students who are afraid to encounter police [due to] sexual harassment” were all reported by students.

PFSW has also organized phone zaps, email campaigns, and a public discussion featuring Toronto-based scholar and author of Policing Black Lives, Robyn Maynard. Since the group was formed, half a million dollars have been cut from the Winnipeg School Division’s annual SRO budget, and Louis Riel School Division (LRSD) has terminated their one SRO position. In a statement made October 2021, LRSD superintendent Christian Michalik said, “Feedback from our community, specifically those who are Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC), illuminated issues of ongoing inequity and systemic racism in LRSD.”

The problem of policing in schools goes deeper than SROs. Bindi explains, “The protocols in place for staff to pick up the phone and call police [on students] are very lax in all provinces.” This results in police being called on students rather than connecting students with community support and resources.

While a number of SRO programs across Canada have been ended after facing pushback from community groups, some school districts have tried to improve their optics rather than address fundamental issues. “What we’ve noticed as programs are cut is that police departments and school divisions will look for ways to rename those programs or reinvolve police under different guises, and the end result is the same,” Bindi explains.

Bindi emphasizes the need to view abolition work in schools within a broader context, saying, “I feel that it’s also very important to look at this as a local, national, and international movement.” PFSW emphasizes the need for non-carceral community support to replace policing. “There’s [a] high risk of negative outcomes due to police offering the wrong advice to kids on a variety of issues that should instead be handled by counsellors, teachers, nurses, and […] more integrated community supports, including Indigenous Elders, and trusted community organizations.”

Inside Vernal Small’s tailor shop, Jamall Caribbean Custom Tailor, near Eglinton and Oakwood. Photos by Sharine Taylor

Living in Toronto means I’m not too far from Jamaica. Not because geography affords proximity, but because the presence of the diaspora has made itself known. Over 200,330 people of Jamaican descent reside in Toronto alone, and that’s evident by the countless restaurants, small businesses, specialty shops, and grocery stores that populate the city. Though people who have migrated from the island have settled all over the country, in the 1970s during a heavy period of migration from the Caribbean, select pockets of neighbourhoods in Toronto were concentrated with people from the region. One of those neighbourhoods was Little Jamaica.

For a few months, when I was around seven years old, I lived right off Trethewey Drive, a street in Toronto’s west end, inside a low-rise, yellow-brick apartment with my mom, aunt, and cousin. Every other weekend, my aunt would drag us to Eglington Avenue West to get her nails and hair done, and over time it became my favourite spot to grab pan chicken cooked in the recognizable repurposed oil drums just like back home. The Little Jamaica community, which stretches from Eglinton Avenue West and Keele Street to Eglinton Avenue West and Marlee Avenue, was known for its vibrant Caribbean community and the proudly Black-owned businesses that once lined its streets. However, due to the almost eight-year, ongoing construction of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, with aims to make travelling between the east and west end of the city easier, the area has been subject to a decline in business, and questions about the preservation of cultural heritage and legacy are being raised.

I began thinking about preservation and archiving. How many first-gens who share complicated hyphenated identities have to explore the histories of where they come from outside our home and native land, have to do so of their own accord, even if those seemingly distant histories are deeply bound up in the Canadian experience. Canada’s 1955 West Indian Domestic Scheme? The Jamaican Maroons in Nova Scotia during 1796? Those histories exist outside of our educational curriculums, and if we’re not aware of our own stories, whose job will it be to pass these narratives on to the generations that come after us?

Last summer, I was granted an opportunity to add to the ways we chronicle our histories. Fabienne Colas, a Montreal-based Haitian actress, asked, “What does it mean to be Black in Canada?” Through the Being Black in Canada program, run through her self-titled foundation, she gave emerging and first-time film directors an opportunity to explore what those answers could be. There was an unshakeable sense of urgency that made me want to focus on Little Jamaica, which had rapidly turned into a neighbourhood that was in a perpetual state of uneasiness and erasure.

I didn’t anticipate my film, Tallawah Abroad: Remembering Little Jamaica, becoming a project that consumed me in the ways that it did. Not because filmmaking was a daunting and challenging feat, but because I knew that, beyond filming, the people who lived, worked, had families, and were part of this community still had to contend with their realities. Despite documenting what this neighbourhood looked like two summers away from its scheduled completion date, people still had rent to pay, people still had mouths to feed, people still needed to survive. The almost eight-year task that has been creating an extended LRT line has entirely depleted the character of a community. What will be left of what we’d made of that space beyond a mural, a stationary roadside plaque, and the renaming of a back alley to Reggae Lane? In the eight months since I’ve filmed, shops have closed, lives have changed, and an important pillar of the community—Ronald “Jimmy” Ashford Wisdom—has died.

This all made me begin to think more about who gets archived in the collective Canadian, or even Toronto, memory. Whose cultural legacy and heritage are etched into our public and national consciousness? Canada touts diversity, by virtue of its immigration policies and the many Black people and people of colour who benefit from them, as its biggest asset. But it simply sees diversity as something to be achieved, a checkmark made to signify completion—and little thought is reserved for thinking about how and what diversity looks like in practice, beyond nation building or adding onto the national mythology. When we’re no longer of use for domestic labour, seasonal agricultural work, or any other surface reasons, are we not still worthy of being remembered?

I’ve discerned that much of the Black experience historically has been living in transit. We were kidnapped from the continent and brought to foreign land by force, through blood, and over hills and valleys too. We seem to be forever engaged in a never ending race towards freedom both literally and metaphorically. And this hasn’t changed from our contemporary realities as we come to know them through the plights and familiar stories of our migration. Though we may leave any area we’re in for an array of reasons, we seem to be a restless people, always running towards or away from something, but always with the ability to recreate home in the most innovative ways. Is it cruel irony that in the case of Little Jamaica, a transit line largely for other people is prioritized over our own sense of belonging? Perhaps.

I realized the process of etching who we are and what we’ve done into a collective national imagination is a bank of knowledge that is to be created by our own hands and powered by our own voices. I mean, who can tell the story of the paradoxical Black experience better than us? We’re made to feel both hyper visible and invisible. Our community is everywhere, but nowhere. We are known and unknown, and maybe that aspect of our identity makes us unique.

Perhaps Canada shouldn’t rest on its diversity and multicultural laurels too much if it means we don’t actively preserve the cultural legacies of the people who colour the nation. When the people who have been responsible for documenting the history of this nation are not intent on honouring the lives of people who have contributed to its tapestry, they take away from the possibilities and power of what could become should those stories be heard. The table’s big enough, and we should have a seat too.

PHOTO BY KAREN MILLS

The Premier of Alberta is a Conservative. Every single seat in the province bar one went blue in the last federal election. Despite the severe lack of representation in government, those with leftward ideologies still exist in Alberta. Where can they turn to hear friendly voices? The Alberta Advantage podcast.

The bi-monthly podcast was born in 2017 out of a local Jacobin magazine reading group’s desire for political representation at home.

“We found there was a real lack of any kind of conversation about topics from a left-wing perspective,” says Joël Laforest, producer and panelist with the Alberta Advantage. “We figured we could use the ability to have discussions that we built up as a reading group and try our hand at putting it into a podcast.”

Since then, Alberta Advantage, whose name is a play on a 1990s Tory moniker for the province’s unique tax structure and non-renewable resource-derived revenue, has been lauded as Calgary’s best podcast and now receives over $1,700 a month through Patreon.

It isn’t all awards and donations, however.

“Being left-wing in Alberta has real challenges and material consequences,” says host and sound engineer Kate Jacobson. “We face real risks to our employment and our physical safety…. The right in this province is very organized.”

Jacobson says she’s fortunate enough to have secure employment outside the podcast, but others on their team of about 20 volunteers have to be more clandestine about their work on the Advantage.

“Sometimes it can feel very difficult to live here,” she says. “You’re basically swimming against a tide. There are all these ideas that people have been trained to believe about the oil industry, trade unions, socialism, and the government. You have to counter those at every level.”

Jacobson and Laforest say they’re both particularly proud of a November episode that tackles an advertisement they refer to as “oil propaganda.” Presented by representatives from the Birchcliff Energy and Tourmaline Oil companies, published by a group called Canadians for Canada’s Future and endorsed online by premier Jason Kenney, the ad in question says oil companies have been taken for granted for too long by “all too many people who vigorously condemn what we do while relishing in the fruits of our labour.”

The ad goes on to marry the narrative that oil companies keep the country running with emotionally arresting imagery, such as workers embracing their children.

For nearly an hour, Advantage dissects the ad, which they refer to as a “crypto-fascist piece of media” and part of a concerted effort to make the rest of Canada feel a protective, nationalist pride for the oil industry, as they say Albertans have been trained to do.

Looking forward, Jacobson and Laforest say the Advantage plans to begin producing video and text content for their online audience. They say the latter is particularly important after the folding of StarMetro, Calgary’s only liberal-leaning daily newspaper.

James Vlahos can no longer sit across from his father, hold his hand or give him a hug. But he can ask him for advice when he’s feeling blue and let his children ask questions about his family’s life in Greece or listen to him sing “Me and My Shadow.”

When his father, John James Vlahos, was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, at the age of 80, James began racing to record his life stories. For months, he sat across from his dad with an audio recorder, asking questions and recording long answers and jokes he’d heard “a hundred times.” In the end, he recorded 91,970 words.

What began as an oral-history project quickly evolved into a quest to give his dad virtual immortality. Vlahos, a journalist and author, had long been interested in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and voice applications. Shortly after his father’s cancer diagnosis, he learned the company PullString was releasing a software that would allow the public to create what are called conversational agents—like messenger chatbots. He wondered: What if he took the thousands of words and audio clips he’d collected and built a virtual replica—a Facebook Messenger chatbot—of his dad, with whom he could converse?

With his father’s and family’s blessings, Vlahos began building the Dadbot. His parents had never interacted with a chatbot before, but they liked the idea of being able to pass on his father’s stories in an interactive way.

“He had a way of sassing people in the friendliest kind of way, like if he thought you were getting a little too high on your horse, he had sayings like, ‘well, hot dribbling spit!’” Vlahos says. “I love hearing those words but I like when they come out at a surprising time. That is one thing I am proud of with the programming—that I got him.”

The Dadbot is designed to respond to questions driven by the people interacting with it, such as “What was your favourite class in college?” And every so often, the bot will decide to tell a story or joke.

Vlahos says building the Dadbot was part of his grieving process, and he still enjoys interacting with the bot.

“It’s comforting for me to talk to the Dadbot…It was neat to kind of step through his life, chapter by chapter, but then also to step into his mind, to a degree. How would he respond if somebody sort of teased him in this sort of situation?”

Digital avatars of the deceased are a rising trend, and go by different names, such as memorial bots or griefbots. When Vlahos detailed his experiences in a 2017 article for Wired magazine, he unintentionally positioned himself as a leader in this virtual immortality space.

“A lot of people wanted to talk about it,” he says. “One man, he was dying, and he wanted to create something for his kids to have, another woman had lost her son in an automobile accident and she wanted something to help remember him. It really resonated with people in a way that no project that I’ve been involved with before has.”

THE QUEST FOR IMMORTALITY IS nothing new but the ways we live and die have changed dramatically. In the 2018 version of the Vanier Institute report, Family Perspectives: Death and Dying in Canada, the first desire listed is “We want to live forever.” As the report points out, contemporary Canadian culture is death defying and death denying. We seek out anti-aging products and praise those who make it to the senior years with youthful lifestyles still blazing.

In Canada, sudden deaths are rare—the majority of Canadians get a heads-up that they, or their loved one, is dying. But in general, we are living longer than ever before. According to the 2016 census, the fastest-growing age group in Canada is actually “centenarians,” those aged 100 or older. The number of Canadians aged 85 and older now represents 2.2 percent of the total population (Japan, the country with the highest, is at just 4 percent).

Could this culmination of longer lives and deaths be making us think more about our personal legacies? Could it be driving our desire to achieve immortality in the most likely way we can—in the virtual world?

ANDREW LOUIS, A TORONTO computer scientist, has accumulated a lot of data. As a Millennial and tech entrepreneur, you’d expect his digital footprint to be large but it’s Louis’ personal archiving project, “Building a Memex,” that takes it to the next level.

For more than 15 years, Louis has programmed the devices in his life to track, record and store his digital footprint, resulting in a massive database that includes everything from what he’s typed and tweeted to the websites he’s browsed and what he’s eaten. He’s created a digital time capsule that can be searched, curated and, potentially, gifted to his children some day. In theory, someone could recreate a day in his life—or even recreate him.

“Pretty much every email or chat message I’ve ever sent is in there,” he says, joking that most of it “isn’t worth ever reading again.”

Last year, Louis decided to put his database to the test. He took the extensive MSN chat logs he’d saved as a teenager and resurrected his teenage self into a chatbot, using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), a class of AI that creates vocabulary and speech recognition patterns. RNNs process all words in a text database, then develop a sequence or speech pattern based on those words.

This is no easy process. Chatbots require training to work and can require months of tweaking and training to create ever more complex and original sentences. The more times they run through a database of conversations, the more words can be stored for future retrieval. It’s also not a flawless process. As Louis points out, “All your typos and autocorrects will come back to haunt you.”

After 10 training sessions, a conversational structure emerged but it was only after 100 training sessions that his teenage replica started to sound more human and was able to understand and ask basic questions. Louis demonstrated the chatbot during a conference in New York City last year.

“Hello, are you there?” types the real Louis.

“Ya,” replies his teenage replica.

“Do you know how to use words?” asks the real Louis.

“Ya.”

After more training sessions, the common “ya” responses became a series of “lol” answers, even when inappropriate. Louis explains that without extensive training, bots choose the safest and easiest routes.

“There’s no general, structured knowledge that a bot can rely on,” he added. “Stuff like short-term memory is really difficult so if I say ‘I’m feeling sad’ and then continue on with the conversation, there’s no way for the bot to remember and work it into a future chat.”

Louis had high hopes going into the experiment but came away feeling decades away from realistic, human-like interaction with bots.

“Even if we can get a chatbot that has really good conversations, I don’t think there’s enough history yet that a single person has typed into a computer to really make a replica of a person that sounds like them and has all the general knowledge,” he says. “My dataset would be a best-case scenario and it’s minuscule compared to the amount of data you would probably need to do this properly.”

He also points out that who we are and how we speak isn’t always best captured in our correspondence.

“If a bot is just being trained on things I’ve said, there’s a whole set of experiences that have never made their way into text messages,” he explains. “At some point, you’re going to be really disappointed or frustrated by something the bot doesn’t remember.”

SCI-FI MOVIES AND LITERATURE have long inspired real-life tech innovation. A 2013 episode of the Netflix series Black Mirror, titled “Be Right Back,” is often referenced in articles and debates about digital immortality. When character Martha loses her partner Ash in an accident, her friend signs her up for a service to turn his digital life into a bot. She quickly becomes dependent on virtual Ash, alienating herself from the real people in her life. But as she trains the bot version and upgrades her account to phone conversations with his voice, then a life-sized robot replica of him that lives alongside her, things become too real—and unrealistic. The more he fails to remember important details about their life or react in the exact way Ash would have, the more he disappoints her.

“You’re just a few ripples of you. There’s no history to you,” she tells the bot. “You’re just a performance of stuff that he performed without thinking, and it’s not enough.”

Several start-ups are experimenting with memorial bots. One of the more well-known companies, Eternime, touts itself as “an artificial intelligence platform that collects your thoughts, stories and memories and stores them forever into an intelligent digital avatar that looks and talks like you.” It’s still in private beta but the company says more than 40,000 users have signed up for access when it’s available. The current version tracks daily personal habits, social media interactions and even physical movements to create an automated biography and generate an AI avatar.

But with bots still far from feeling emotions, and replicating personalities, are we limited to building griefbots that are more reminiscent of bodies without souls?

For Vlahos, the Dadbot fulfilled his needs. He hadn’t hoped for a virtual copy of his dad, but rather a storytelling device to help serve up his voice and stories. But Vlahos had a lifetime of knowledge about his dad to draw from. Companies are only as good as the data their users contribute.

“Imagine being a company, and they have never met the person and they are trying to create something that captures the essence—that’s hard to do,” Vlahos says. “Despite what you might see in the movies, there’s no just ‘oh, we’ll dump all the emails and text messages into a computer program and the computer magically recreates the persona—that tech is not actually here yet. And even if it were, it would be a very distorted and incomplete replica of a person. Think of what you put in text messages—there’s a lot of ‘I’ll be home at six, can you pick up some milk?’”

Toronto grief counsellor Lysa Toye says it is important to keep in mind people present different facets of themselves in online environments, and some of them aren’t necessarily meant to be public.

“Depending on where information is culled from, it can be really problematic,” she says. “We have different identities that we share with different people in our lives, strategically sometimes. There are reasons why my romantic or sexual relationship is a different kind of relationship then the relationship I have with my kids, which is different from the ones I have with my friends or my parents. I don’t know how you navigate those different kinds of identities and self-states in one glommed-together version of a person.”

Dr. Hossein Rahnama envisions a future where we are not trying to replicate entire beings, but rather memorializing and “borrowing” parts of people’s identities—specifically, their knowledge. Rahnama is a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto and CEO of Flybits, a company that uses AI to create micro-personalized experiences.

His Augmented Eternity project is making waves in the digital identity space. He has spent the past few years researching what he calls “swappable identities” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Rahnama and his team of computer scientists are working on ways to use digital tools to democratize and socialize philanthropy.

Rahnama thinks the future of digital immortality is in allowing people to preserve and gift specific parts of their identities, like an entire body of professional knowledge, in the form of a digital avatar—or some other digital representation—that can be activated and accessed by communities. Similar to how chatbots create vocabulary and learn to interact by drawing on massive databases of previous text conversations, Augmented Eternity could mine someone’s body of knowledge and then create patterns and predict what advice they would give. Instead of paying a human big bucks for their expertise, someone could activate their digital avatar for free or a low cost. This could help people in sectors where knowledge is pattern-based, like medicine or law, ensure their professional legacies outlive them.

“When we started this project about three years ago, the first use cases we were hearing from our focus groups were very much around ‘I want to stay in touch with my loved ones, I want to leverage their expertise and I want to remember them,’” he says. “As we continued, one thing we noticed was there’s a philanthropist in every single individual. Everyone wants to leave a legacy behind, but based on the physical world and what we have seen so far, philanthropy is very limited for certain groups of people, based on their wealth or their ability.”

Rahnama believes society is tracking toward a more decentralized data economy, where our digital lives are not all stored by Google or Facebook, but housed in decentralized systems like the blockchain, allowing people to maintain more control over their digital footprints and decide how it’s used—or what it becomes—in life and the afterlife.

“[Millennials] are generating gigabytes of data on a very regular basis,” he says. “We said, what if we can allow them to own that data and turn that into an expertise? Let’s say after about 50 or 60 years worth of developing insights and gathering knowledge, they can now pass their expertise to a loved one or family member, and be able to kind of make their digital identity more sentient.”

But if we’re closer to being able to borrow someone’s identity and could turn their correspondence into a service or product, it raises the question: Can your identity or brainpower not just be borrowed, but stolen if in the wrong hands? Who owns your digital footprint when you die?

“That question is a very new question, even for the legal system. If you look at the terms and conditions that you find with Facebook, it’s very scary. They basically own all of your data, like whatever footprint you leave there is owned by them,” Rahnama says.

Ann Cavoukian is one of the world’s leading privacy experts and the former Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. Cavoukian says she isn’t aware of any concrete ethical or legal guidelines around who can own and use your data after you die, and she has “been in this area a long time.”

“There’s a hope that the family members, etc. will honour the wishes of the individual, assuming that they had any wishes declared to their family relating to their personal information, but it’s really soft.”

And, she adds, “How do you ensure that the control you want or your expectations are met?”

For now, it seems the virtual afterlife remains as mysterious as the physical one.