Bill S-210 has an arresting title compared to the majority of those passing through the various levels of government in order to become law: “Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act.”

“The title of the legislation sends a fairly powerful message. There is absolutely no doubt about that,” said Kevin Lamoureux, parliamentary secretary to the leader of the government, in the House of Commons during a reading of the bill.

Bill S-210 is a federal, private member’s bill. As of June 2024, the bill has passed second reading and is in the report stage. It is meant to protect children and teenagers from exposure to age-inappropriate content. On paper, that seems like a good idea that most people would support. Protecting children is important, and much of the discussion during the House of Commons readings focused mainly on that—not the issues with privacy the bill poses. The details surrounding how age verification would work are nebulous, and the ones that are known raise privacy concerns.

During the readings, Liberal and NDP members of parliament mentioned some of those concerns alongside the ones about children. Conservative and Bloc Québécois representatives mainly focused on controlling who is able to watch pornography.

“Canadians want their children to be protected, but they are also wary about invasions of their privacy. Canadians have very little trust in the ability of the web giants to manage their information and private data,” said Anju Dhillon, a Liberal MP who represents Dorval-Lachine-LaSalle, in November 2023 when the bill was being discussed in its second reading, a rare stage to reach for a private member’s bill. People are also fearful, she said, of deliberate violations of privacy and data security breaches.

The Privacy & Access Council of Canada has pointed out that the sweeping provisions in the bill could endanger all Canadians’ privacy, not just underaged people. Currently, age verification could entail forcing people to upload pictures of their faces and government-issued IDs to watch porn online. Some of that data could be stored long term, creating easily found trails online. The bill does not set out clear terms to prevent this from happening.

Age verification technology has been criticized as immature and not adequately developed at a technological level. A recent report from France’s National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties found that six of the leading age verification solutions did not respect users’ rights.

This is a particular stress on members of the 2SLBGTQIA+ community, who could face exposure and/or blackmail for their browsing history. Not everyone in the community is out, and the ability for others to access intimate data puts already marginalized people at further risk. For 2SLBGTQIA+ Canadians who live in rural areas, this can be especially scary as the online world is sometimes their only way to connect with queer culture.

There is not a lot of data specific to the porn-viewing habits of Canadian youth, with researchers denoting a need for more studies. A 2023 report from Common Sense Media found that around 73 percent of U.S. teens aged 13-17 had watched porn online. The same study found differences in the porn consumption of 2SLBGTQIA+ youth compared to their hetero peers—the former group was more likely to seek out porn intentionally, in an effort to explore and affirm their sexuality. Yet this bill and its sweeping provisions seems based on the idea that all youth engage in the same habits online (watching violent pornography where a woman is subjugated by a man; the concern being its influence) when that is simply not accurate.

Another critique of the bill has been that a VPN, which many youth know how to use, could be a way to get around age verification. The bill is meant to protect those under 18. They are arguably also the most internet and tech-savvy generation to exist and the bill is being created by people who have not grown up online in the same way, and may not be able to anticipate how young people will subvert provisions.

Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne is the chief architect and lead defender of the bill. A former Radio-Canada broadcaster who was appointed to the Senate in 2018, she was a guest on the “Law Bytes” podcast to debate it. In a January 2024 episode, she provided her rationale and defence against the criticism and concerns it has sparked. She explained to host Michael Geist that she has worked carefully on drafting the legislation and adding amendments for three years.

Miville-Dechêne responded to the issues Geist raised around privacy by saying that the bill had not specifically mandated exactly what age verification system would be used at this point, noting that technology evolves constantly. “No method is absolutely zero risk…we can erase the data. We can make sure that it is a mechanism that doesn’t go too far. But frankly, this is not in the bill. This is to be discussed afterwards. So how can you say the bill is dangerous?” Mivelle-Dechêne said.

“In some ways, it seems to me, that makes it even more dangerous,” Geist retorted.

A bill meant to protect vulnerable members of our society should not further marginalize others. If there are not sweeping reforms to this bill, particularly the technological aspects, it could easily become one of the biggest national threats to privacy in recent history.

Photo by Vince LaConte

In Toronto’s Chinatown, an average morning goes on as usual, with longtime business owners setting up shop and elderly residents chatting loudly in local bakeries. But underneath the mundanity lies change. When onlookers enter the Chinatown landmark, the famous Dragon City Mall, the sight of its empty shops and corridors with the occasional elderly passersby may be a surprise. Dragon City Mall’s plight is representative of the larger trend that Chinatown is facing: one of demographic decline.

According to the 2021 Neighbourhood Profile, the number of ethnically Chinese people living in Chinatown was the lowest it had been in over a decade, dropping by almost 25 percent since 2011. This means that, after years of being a deeply entrenched and treasured enclave in the city’s downtown, the neighbourhood may be on the verge of a major shift. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Chinatown hasn’t always stood where it is today. It used to be located on York Street before growing larger and spreading north to Elizabeth Street. Later, two thirds of it were razed to make way for Nathan Phillips Square and a new City Hall. Chinese Canadian community leader and restaurateur Jean Lumb campaigned to preserve the remaining third of the neighborhood, which eventually moved to where it is today. Many of the old signs of the Chinatown on Elizabeth Street are still there if you look carefully. Lumb would go on to travel to Vancouver and Calgary to aid in efforts to save Chinatowns there too, the only woman organizer to do so.

And now, after surviving a forced relocation to its current home at Dundas Street and Spadina Avenue in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Chinatown’s Chinese population is not a majority in the neighbourhood. While there are a number of reasons for this, the trend is partially due to the decline of new immigrants moving to the area. When many Chinese immigrants moved to Canada in the late 19th century, most were poor workers from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong seeking new opportunities. The picture today is undoubtedly different. Many new immigrants are students or people coming from upper-class backgrounds. The change in demographic wealth also led to more Chinese immigrants favouring suburban towns over downtown enclaves. Although household income is on the rise in Chinatown, some residents see this as a bittersweet outcome.

Donna, the owner of a local salon called Hair Magic Cut located in the ageing Chinatown Centre mall, has operated her shop for 23 years, raising her kids in the neighbourhood. When asked about the statistical change in Chinatown, she said that while she welcomes any new arrivals to the neighbourhood, the hub of Asian culture that the neighbourhood represents is still deeply important to her.

In an herb shop right across from the salon, the owner, Ms. Zhou, gave another perspective on Chinatown’s past and future. “When I first started up shop in Chinatown 20 years ago, the leading population was the Vietnamese. Once they gained wealth they went north to the suburbs. Now it’s the Fujianese population’s turn. The supermarkets you see around here are all owned by them,” she says. The current demographic decline can be seen as a part of Chinatown’s larger story, one of immigration for opportunity before ultimately graduating to what’s often regarded as a higher status in Toronto society. The changing conditions in Chinatown are partially due to the success of the suburban Chinatowns that arose in the ’90s, namely the City of Markham. In contrast to Toronto’s Chinatown, the amount of Markham residents who identified as Chinese in a survey of visible minorities grew by roughly 40 percent throughout the 2010s, while the facilities and restaurants catering to this population are far newer and greater in number.

However, moving from Chinatown to the suburbs has gotten harder. Due to the rising cost of living, and with it, rising rent over the past decade, Ms. Zhou says fewer young people are inclined to run small businesses like hers.

Still, Chinatown is falling behind its suburban counterparts. Although this can be chalked up as the result of the declining Chinese population in the area, the issue runs deeper than a natural pattern of migration. The rising cost of living is making it harder for the neighbourhood to attract young families. Recent threats of gentrification to its long-standing businesses and restaurants worsen the situation.

Community members are still determined to preserve what’s left of Chinatown. Around the same time developers bought and razed the longstanding Chinatown dim sum restaurant Rol San in 2023, a group of organizers formed a land trust to protect the neighbourhood from further gentrification. To improve business and prioritize the neighbourhood’s culture, the Toronto Chinatown Business Improvement Area (CBIA), formed in 2007, hosts many events and festivals. The CBIA’s annual Toronto Chinatown Festival typically draws over 250,000 visitors, according to their website. (CBIA representatives did not respond to This Magazine’s requests for comment.)

It is clear that Chinatown may never return to its previous status as the city’s pre-eminent centre of Chinese culture. Many different groups have come and gone after successfully searching for opportunity and wealth. Still, Chinatown is losing its ability to sustain working-class people seeking opportunity. The decline of the Chinese population is not the cause of the neighbourhood’s decline; it’s a result of gentrification and the rising cost of living. These issues are causing the neighbourhood to lose its accessibility to newcomers.

A common sentiment organizers working to save Chinatown share is their pride and happiness in the neighbourhood; not only for its prime real estate, or convenience, but for its community. Even now, with the emptying malls and a gradual loss of traditional businesses, there is hope that a piece of Chinatown’s unique history and spirit can still be preserved through the change.

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 RDNE Stock project via Pexels

In 2021, the Kensington Market Community Land Trust (KMCLT) did an astonishing thing. After a protracted renoviction battle over the Toronto neighbourhood’s iconic Mona Lisa building, the KMCLT bought it from the would-be evictors. The rumoured plan to turn it into a cannabis hotel was foiled and the tenants of the 12 residential and five commercial units—including our beloved corner store, barbershop, and hat store—got to stay.

As KMCLT’s co-chair, I helped organize the community around the tenants, and it was satisfying to see the building go into communal hands. For months I’d walk past Kensington Avenue’s vintage shops and fruit stand with a feeling of elation. We bought the building!

KMCLT’s bold move is part of a burgeoning movement of community land trusts (CLTs) across Canada. CLTs are community-led organizations who remove land from the speculative real estate market and keep it affordable forever. They revive the idea of the commons and collective stewardship, and help governments fulfill their responsibility to house their citizens. They’re quickly emerging as one of the only reliable workarounds for people to find affordable housing—and to keep their neighbourhoods alive.

Like most CLT purchases, KMCLT, which is made up of tenants, neighbourhood residents, and other supporters, bought our building with a mix of government funding and a regular mortgage. The mortgage is taken out by the land trust, which uses the rents to pay it off. It’s the government funding that allows us to keep those rents affordable. As we pay off the mortgage, rents can even go down.

Despite attempts at a second acquisition, KMCLT still owns only one building. But the plan is to use equity to purchase other buildings, as fast as we can. The urgency reflects the housing emergency in Canada: for every new unit of affordable housing built, we lose 11. Those lost affordable homes put people on the street.

Still, from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust (DTES CLT), co-led by Indigenous and Japanese Canadian organizations, to Black-led CLTs in Nova Scotia, people are coming together to find solutions to the housing crisis. They are now bolstered by the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts, established in 2017. The group has over 40 member CLTs and four staff to support CLT development across Canada. “Urban, suburban, and rural communities reach out to the network regularly for guidance on developing a land trust,” director Nat Pace says.

The first meeting of Canadian CLTs on Canadian soil took place in Montreal in 2018, at a conference organized by the Milton Parc Citizens’ Committee. We toured Milton Parc and heard about the decades-long battle between the community and developers that led to the entire neighbourhood being cooperatively owned under the umbrella of a CLT. The key moment of that conference, however, was when we were challenged by an Indigenous activist to put land back at the core of the movement.

Collective stewardship requires releasing the death-grip private property has on our imaginations. Thinking about land, settlers must necessarily grapple with the fact that it’s stolen. If at that meeting in Montreal we were mainly white settlers talking about CLTs, that is no longer the case. In Northeastern Ontario, the Temiskaming District Community Land Trust is creating an Indigenous women-led CLT to provide Indigenous-designed affordable housing, while in Toronto and B.C., Indigenous land trusts are also taking shape.

The modern CLT movement began with New Communities Inc., an agricultural community formed in Albany, Georgia in 1969 by civil rights activists who believed that secure land tenure was key to Black liberation. Tapping into this idea, African Nova Scotian CLTs, such as Upper Hammonds Plains just outside Halifax and Down the Marsh in Truro, have formed to secure historic land claims. In Vancouver, Hogan’s Alley land trust honours the legacy of Strathcona’s Black community, displaced through racist city planning.

CLTs can encompass so many forms of land use. Cultural land trusts in Toronto and Vancouver have formed to preserve space for artists; The Northern Community Land Trust is creating affordable home ownership in Whitehorse; and, also in Toronto, the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (PNLT)—the first of the resurgence of CLTs in Canada, having started in 2012—is saving rooming houses from renoviction. PNLT’s first acquisition in 2017 was the Milky Way Garden, which is stewarded by Tibetan refugees.

I’m inspired by the opportunity to rethink not only our relationship to land, but also the extractive capitalism that mines bonds between people. There’s a deep camaraderie between Canadian CLTs, which come out of neighbourhood battles against gentrification, displacement, and erasure of working-class immigrant communities. We learn about community—both its challenges and opportunities—and in turn we create a community for ourselves.

Governments are starting to listen: the recent federal announcement of a $1.5 billion Rental Protection Fund, designed for the acquisition of at-risk residential buildings, is a recognition that we can’t build our way out of the housing crisis, and that non-market housing is essential to keep housing affordable.

It remains to be seen how the Canadian movement will sustain itself over the long term. For now, CLTs offer communities a rare source of optimism in the ever-deepening housing crisis. It’s exciting to be part of it, and to know that anyone who wants to effect change in our relationship to land and community can be part of it, too.

Image by brotiN biswaS via Pexels

Journalism students across Canada are learning to share stories that are rooted in reciprocity with Indigenous communities in new ways.

Created by Indigenous faculty and designed in partnership with local communities, students in journalism programs at Carleton University, the University of King’s College and others are taking experiential learning courses that involve spending time with Indigenous people and reporting stories that are important to them.

At Carleton, the Reporting in Indigenous Communities course, created by Anishinaabe journalist and professor Duncan McCue, was offered for the first time in winter 2024. While new to Carleton, McCue is building on his work at the University of British Columbia, where he launched his course in 2011 in collaboration with the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, the Tsawwassen First Nation, the Squamish First Nation, and others. The goal was to teach students about the unique cultures that are thriving in each First Nation today, and how to respect and prioritize them in their reporting.

In McCue’s course at Carleton, students worked with the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation, the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne, and the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, learning about the stories that matter most to these communities. The theme for stories this year was Adaawe: Stories of Indigenous Economy, with students learning about the spirit of Indigenous entrepreneurship and business innovation.

McCue says the course was also an opportunity for students to learn more about the diversity within and between First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities. “Indigenous people are not homogenous…A Dene is not a Cree is not a Mi’kmaw, and they certainly have very different lived experiences if they grew up in the city versus growing up on the reserve versus growing up in a hamlet. It’s really important for students to understand that.”

At King’s, the Reporting in Mi’kma’ki course, co-created and taught by Miʹkmaw professor Trina Roache, introduces journalism students to the depth and diversity within local Miʹkmaq communities. Miʹkma’ki is the ancestral and unceded land of the Mi’kmaq, colonially known as most of Atlantic Canada and parts of Quebec.

Launched in 2021, the course aims to encourage students to go from reporting stories about the trauma experienced by Mi’kmaq communities to sharing stories that reflect their resilience instead. “Stories are a way of building that relationship and focusing on things that the community wants to celebrate and wants to put out there about how they see themselves,” Roache says of this approach. “It doesn’t mean you don’t do other stories. But you have to do all the stories—you can’t just do the negative ones.”

McCue says these courses are especially important for non-Indigenous students, who continue to be a majority within both programs. “I think it’s important that non-Indigenous journalism students learn and have a baseline of cultural competency when it comes to reporting in Indigenous communities [because] if you are a journalist in Canada, you are going to, at some point in your career, be reporting on Indigenous issues,” McCue says. “I think it is important that non-Indigenous students are exposed to this in a safe setting of a classroom where they can get feedback, and not under the pressure of a deadline in a massive newsroom.”

However, McCue and Roache also acknowledged other barriers, such as funding support, that make their reporting courses—and, in a larger sense, journalism programs—inaccessible to young Indigenous people. “The challenge is that Miʹkmaq, and I think other Indigenous young people, don’t see themselves in journalism [and] that’s something we’re working hard to change,” Roache says. “It’s going to take time and we have to play the long game.”

For both McCue and Roache, an important next step is ensuring the journalism programs they are part of actively recruit and train the next generation of Indigenous journalists. At Carleton, McCue says the work looks like hosting a video and audio course for Indigenous storytellers over the summer in partnership with local First Nations colleges and institutes. At King’s, Roache says the journalism program has created three fully funded scholarships for Miʹkmaq students, the first cohort of which will begin their studies this fall. It was created in partnership with Ann Sylliboy of the Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey, the educational authority for 12 of Nova Scotia’s 13 Mi’kmaq First Nations. The university also pledged a $600,000 investment to support Indigenous students.

According to Roache, the increased funding and scholarships are but one step in King’s University’s approach to holding space at the urging of journalism students, who have been demanding diversity in faculty, staff and curriculum in the journalism program since 2015.

For Catriona Koenig, a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation who grew up in Ottawa and a former Carleton student who took McCue’s course, it’s important to make courses on responsibly reporting about Indigenous communities mandatory for journalism students. Taking experiential learning courses created and taught by Indigenous faculty, she says, is an opportunity to learn how to be a “storyteller and not a story-taker.”

“For so long, journalists would go into Indigenous communities and tell their story, and then just leave and burn bridges and not continue relationships and not strengthen partnerships,” she says. “[It’s important] to make sure to continue these partnerships with communities, keep in touch, and maintain the relationship.”

Illustration by Jasmine Lesperance

For us acrobats, it was a circus rule to choose our primary apparatus at the age of thirteen. The doors opened to the Big Top and I entered alone. The leftover sawdust on the floor stuck between my toes, the air scented with rain, instead of the usual smells of animal dung and stale popcorn. Each piece of equipment was illuminated with the magic of the Circus—the only spots of light in the dark space: trapeze, tightrope, hoop, silks, chains. The darkness filling the rest of the tent felt tangible, as if all that existed in the world was me and my choice.

Each apparatus had served me well during my training, suspending me high in the air as I contorted my body. The choice was easy—I wanted the hoop. The perfect circle that supported me, spinning high above the crowds, the comfort in knowing I was the same through and through, no matter how many times I rotated. My hand landed on the hoop and I pulled myself up, settling my body against the wrapped steel. It fit in the curve behind my thighs as if I was born to have it there. A spotlight snapped on, focusing on me, and the light from the other apparatuses extinguished. I rose into the air, and my Circus family streamed in to celebrate. I thought my mom would be the most excited by her only child making the biggest decision of her life; instead, she looked frozen, her brown eyes wide and unseeing, her face pale. She was in stark contrast to the others as they ooh-ed and ahh-ed at my tricks. I didn’t think much of it—tonight was about me and the hoop.

Grasping it with both hands, I flipped upside down and stretched my legs into a front split. Long ago, my body registered this as pain, blooming bruises wherever the metal contacted my golden skin. Eventually, the hoop became an extension of me. I hooked the back of my left ankle onto the bottom curve and released my hands; I released everything, letting the single point of contact hold my weight as my right leg floated back behind my head and into my grasp. I smiled into the warmth of the spotlight, my skin glittering as it did when I was in the air.

The Circus had its own magic system, but there was a different magic that bound us Blackbirds to our art. It made us stand out from the other acrobats. We were unafraid, as if the air would never drop us, as if gravity didn’t affect us. If we fell, maybe we wouldn’t even get hurt, but I didn’t know because I never fell. I was born in the Circus and I would die in the Circus; this was where I belonged.

When my performance finished and I dismounted, my mom was in the same spot. As I approached, a mask came up so quick and convincing that I wondered if I’d only imagined the strange expression on her face. She hugged me. “Congratulations, Althea. Wonderful choice.”

*

It wasn’t until five years later that I thought of my mom’s reaction that night. I was watching Vesper train his new hippogriff, creatively named Griffy. An annoyed flick of Griffy’s tail sent the metal trash can skating across the centre ring, scattering its contents all over. While helping to clean up the mess, I uncovered an amber glass bottle hidden amongst the greasy popcorn bags and peanut shells. My name was emblazoned on the peeling label: Althea Blackbird. The instructions read, Administer three drops once daily to maintain memory suppression. I knew this bottle—I’d seen it on the top shelf of my mom’s belongings, higher than I could reach in our shared trailer. The faded text was too small and faint for me to read from the floor so I never suspected that I was its intended recipient.

“Thea—” said Vesper. His cloven feet sent up little puffs of dust as he tapped them nervously.

“Did you know about this?”

“Um.” Vesper was born into the Circus a few years before me, to the family of Fauns that had existed as the Circus’s animal tamers for as long as my family had been aerialists. Griffy lay down at his feet with an audible sigh.

“What memory is she suppressing?”

“Um,” he said again. “Maybe you should ask your mom.”

*

I didn’t ask her, but it wasn’t difficult to figure out how she was drugging me. Besides the occasional snacks from our vendors, all my meals were prepared by the staff in the Dining Car. The only refreshment my mom ever offered me was a steaming mug of peppermint tea that she brewed nightly. I valued our bedtime tea session, usually on the steps outside our trailer if the weather was nice. Besides this ritual, I hardly saw her—she organized the acts and travel schedule, while I trained or helped the others with their shows. She was once an acrobat too, but she quit long ago, something I could never fathom. Sometimes, she trailed her gloved fingers over the seat of the trapeze, closing her hand around it as if she could feel it through the velvet.

After that, I stopped drinking her tea. I’d cradle the mug in my hands, warming my callused skin and taking small sips to appease her, but I’d spit it into a handkerchief hidden in my sleeve when she wasn’t looking. The remainder was discretely poured on the ground between my shoes.

Memory was an odd thing. The smell came first—I woke with the echo of perfume in my nose, like a word on the tip of my tongue. There should have been this scent in our trailer, honey-sweet and floral, swirled in with sandalwood from Mom’s soap and the mothball musk of our costumes. I found the broken bottle in the back of a cabinet full of old cosmetics. The aroma of osmanthus flowers filled me, and I cradled the etched glass, wondering how a smell could make me feel so safe.

That same day, as I inspected the carabiners of the outdoor rigs, I remembered a slender hand, callused and long-fingered, directing mine over the metal links. A female voice said, “Don’t forget—always screw them downwards, never up.”

A shiver travelled down my spine, and my hands shook too much to continue the task. I didn’t know what to expect when I stopped taking that potion, but it wasn’t this sense of emptiness, of missing.

The next morning, I watched the trapeze artists from the bleachers. Across the tent, the movement of air sent an empty hoop swaying, and my mind supplied the vision of a girl in that clear black circle. She could have been me with her long black hair and shimmering skin, dancing effortlessly high above. The differences were subtle—a heart-shaped face instead of my oval one, thinner eyebrows, and a single freckle on her cheek that she absolutely hated. I knew those details were there without seeing them. A wave of nausea hit me, and I keeled over, vomiting into the space between the seats. I yelled an apology before dashing to the cleaning closet and locking myself inside to be alone. Part of me rejected the memory of her, because there was no remembering without hurting. But I couldn’t fight it; the floodgates were open.

Her name was Elyse, and she was my sister. Once the Circus’s star performer, Elyse was one with the hoop. Her skin sparkled as she flipped and hung and twisted, sometimes with other acrobats, suspending each other in ways that made the audience hold their collective breath. She was weightless when she flew through the air; I wanted to be just like her. I thought the aerial hoop was my autonomous decision, but maybe deep down I remembered.

I didn’t notice when it first started—Elyse always looked dreamy when she was performing, but one night she held a particularly ethereal quality. It took me a moment to realize she was translucent. It wasn’t an illusion; the spotlights refracted through her like foggy glass.

She was Fading—something else my mom made me forget, something she herself suffered from, hiding her see-through fingers inside her ever-present velvet gloves. The first night when it was clear Elyse was Fading, she and my mom had a vicious argument. I was outside our trailer, watching their quivering silhouettes scream at each other through the thin curtain, Elyse’s shadow fainter than Mom’s. Their heated words were muffled through the wall, but I heard a smash, the sound of glass breaking. I didn’t dare go in, so I sat under the window with my knees tucked beneath my chin until their voices ceased with one final shout. Elyse ran out, slamming the door behind her, and I followed.

She climbed to the tightrope platform where she curled up and sobbed. She was seven years older than me, and I thought she knew everything. I didn’t think her self-assuredness and calmness could give way to a sadness so profound. She startled when I wrapped my arms around her trembling form. She still felt solid.

“Thea.” She held me tight, and I buried my nose in her hair, breathing in sweet osmanthus. “Mom wants me to quit before I fully Fade.”

“Why do we Fade?” I asked, examining the shape of my hand through hers.

“Humans weren’t meant to surpass gravity.”

Back then, I didn’t understand what she meant. Now I knew that magic was a changing quality that grew the more we mastered it, the closer we got to true weightlessness. But our mortal bodies weren’t made to hold a magic so strong.

“Are you going to quit?” The tears that collected in the corners of my eyes spilled over; I knew her answer.

“I can’t.” She sobbed and I wished my grasp on her could be enough to hold her in my life forever.

*

Once I remembered Elyse, the looks my mom gave me made sense: the expression on her face the day of my thirteenth birthday when the hoop carried me high into the air, the way her gaze blurred every time she watched me until she stopped coming to my shows entirely. I looked too much like Elyse on the hoop, tan skin sparkling, black hair plaited into endless loops behind my head, a mirror image of the daughter she’d lost.

*

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know what was coming. The first day I noticed the tips of my toes were faint, I cancelled my show. The Circus was unhappy with me—I could tell from the way my trailer lights flickered and how the animals walked wide circles around me like I repelled them. A knock sounded at my trailer door after the show, and I prayed that it wasn’t my mom.

Vesper stood in the doorway with two candy apples, an offering I couldn’t refuse. We sat on the floor, eating our treats in silence. Once we were half done, he asked, “Are you going to quit?”

I can’t, was Elyse’s answer when I had asked her the same question. The ghost of her words hung on my lips. Instead, I said, “I don’t know.”

This was why my mom made me forget—so I could enjoy the art for as long as possible before I faced this turmoil. I could take the route that she took, hanging up her invisible wings to continue on in this world and start a family, or I could take the route of Elyse.

True to her word, Elyse never quit. She kept spinning that endless circle night after night until I could make out the striped inside of the Big Top through her. I watched her until one night, she was so transparent that I could see everything behind her with perfect clarity. It was then I realized she was no longer there. She was gone, and that hoop continued to spin without her. Murmurs rippled across the audience and then they stood, thrilled by the seamless vanishing act, their deafening applause drowning out my sobs.

“If I quit,” I twirled the stick of the apple between my palms, “would I stay here or would I leave the Circus?”

“Where would you go if you left the Circus?” The Circus was the only life we ever knew.

I shrugged. “Where would I go if I disappeared?”

Vesper chewed, cleverly waiting for the moment to pass, then he changed the subject and gave me his take on tonight’s show, the first I’d ever missed, and it was a welcome distraction from the inevitable choice that awaited me.

*

If I said aloud that I was quitting, the circus would write me out forever. I told my mom it was a break, and she nodded knowingly. When I watched the other aerialists, my heart folded in half. The idea that my mom turned her back on her trapeze and stayed here, watching them every night for years, was unfathomable to me.

The acrobats danced above me while I set up the magician’s equipment on the ground below. Even though I kept my eyes downcast, their shadows taunted me with their tricks.

One night, Vesper approached me with a furrowed brow. He said, “You’re fading.”

“What?” I dropped the cables I was carrying to look down at my body. My toes hadn’t reverted to opacity but there were no new signs of Fading since I stopped doing hoop.

“You never smile anymore.”

“Oh,” I said. “Don’t scare me like that.”

“Well, it is scary, isn’t it? To think that you would live the rest of your life like this?”

Like this. Flightless. I felt heavier lately, the pull of gravity stronger than ever before. Maybe it would get so strong that I’d be dragged into the earth as I continued to reach for the sky.

“I don’t want to Fade,” I whispered.

Vesper folded his goat legs beneath him and sat down. “I was glad when you said that you’d stop, because I didn’t want you to disappear, but this is worse. You’re fading on the inside. You were meant to be up there.”

I followed his gaze. An acrobat launched himself from the platform, sailing through the air until he grasped the metal chains waiting for him, and my heart ached to watch. My hoop hung empty, the tape wrapping around steel worn from my frequent use. It grew closer and closer until I realized that I was walking toward it. My feet carried me to the ladder’s base. I climbed rung after rung until I was on the platform, level with the hoop.

Without thinking, I discarded my shoes and leapt. The distance was farther than usual, and I doubted myself for a moment. Did I still have my magic? Or was I earthbound now? I missed my catch, fingers grazing the base of the ring. Gravity was a force that I underestimated.

As I started to fall, I remembered Elyse’s last show. The thought of her spinning, bound by the love of her art until the very end, slowed my descent, and I stretched one inch higher to grab the bottom curve. I steadied my hold and pulled myself up. Everything was right. My skin glittered. I was grounded, as the circle reminded me that with every rotation: I’m still here. I’m still here. 

One day I wouldn’t be, but for now, I kept spinning.

Art by Valerie Thai

Aaron Campbell was 37 when he walked away from his world. For 27 years he had been told that leaving would jeopardize the chance of eternal salvation for him, his wife, and their four children. Yet salvation was just what he needed, and immediately. “Ultimately, I said, ‘If I don’t [leave], my mental health is going to continue to suffer to a degree where I don’t know what I’ll do,’” he recalls. “That was very scary for me.”

Campbell grew up in 1980s Wainwright, Alberta, a farming town of about 5,000 southeast of Edmonton. Until age 10 his community consisted of his mother, his brother and sister, and a handful of neighbours. Then, his single mom’s search for social support and spiritual direction led her to the Mormon Church (officially called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 2018, after God urged a “correction” to the abbreviated LDS in a revelation received by church president Russell M. Nelson).

In many ways Campbell, whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, was raised by the Wainwright branch of the LDS, amid tight community and tighter programming. Monday was Family Home Evening: a religious lesson and activity for family completion. A weekly schedule of age-specific meetups, seminary sessions, and miscellaneous social gatherings followed, culminating with a three-hour church service on the Sunday Sabbath.

The church provided friends and support, but prescriptions and proscriptions cast a shadow. “The messaging was subtle: that if you do these things it will enrich your family, it will bring you blessings,” says Campbell. “But the implication was: if you don’t do these things, bad stuff will happen to you.” Family reputation was paramount, and meant prioritizing the programme. “It required me to basically put my authentic self to the side,” Campbell recalls. “To be accepted into the community, in order to be accepted into my family, I felt I needed to perform and have a mask on.” There was, he says, “very consistent, daily reinforcement of: the person you are is not acceptable.”

Rural, pre-internet life meant that Campbell knew no different, and his mental health suffered. At 15 he was put on SSRIs, and enrolled in a national health system with scant appreciation for therapy or supplementary practices. Only after 20 years of futile treatment did he identify his relationship with the church, invisible in its ubiquity, as the root of his suffering. “When I left, it was like putting a tourniquet on a wound,” he says. “The wound had stopped bleeding, but I’ve still got a wound. Now I got to deal with this.”

Angry and confused, disillusionment with the medical system led him elsewhere in search of remedies. He went “all in” on exercise, cannabis, and keto dieting to little avail. Then, in 2017, he came across Johns Hopkins University research documenting the alleviating effect of psilocybin on end-of-life anxiety and depression in terminal cancer patients—an early harbinger of the so-called psychedelic renaissance, which started to go mainstream with Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind. Inspired, Campbell contacted a fledgling psychedelic group in Calgary. Little did he know, he was initiating a journey into a community that would change, and possibly even save, his life.

*

Mormonism was founded by Joseph Smith in New York State, amidst the fervent Protestant revivalism of the Second Great Awakening. On April 6, 1830, 11 days after the Book of Mormon was published, about 55 people gathered on Whitmer Farm near Fayette for the first Mormon congregation.

At first glance, tripping on psychedelics seems a sinful departure from Mormon tenets. The Word of Wisdom, a revelation Smith said he received from God in 1833, commands Mormons to refrain from alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee. Church prophets have since added substances that “impair judgement or are harmful or highly addictive.” But did the first prophet do as later prophets have preached? Convincing evidence suggests that psychedelics were in fact integral to Mormonism’s visionary beginnings.

In 1820 or 1821, a teenaged Smith experienced his First Vision after entering a grove of trees near Manchester, New York, seeking wisdom. “I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me,” he later reported. Heavenly “personages” then told him of the imminent Second Coming, and condemned all existing Christian churches for teaching incorrect doctrine. Smith experienced a string of such visions, from which several cardinal Mormon doctrines emerged.

A 2019 paper by Robert Beckstead, Bryce Blankenagel, Cody Noconi, and Michael Winkelman presents compelling evidence that these visions came from entheogens (chemical substances that produce altered states of consciousness when ingested). During his First Vision, Smith experienced mouth dryness, paranoia, and vivid hallucinations: symptoms consistent with entheogens—including two psychedelic mushrooms, psilocybe ovoideocystidiata and amanita muscaria—either scientifically documented to have grown in every area Smith lived, or almost certainly available through established trade networks.

It’s highly likely that Smith was familiar with these substances. His mentors, including his father, were enmeshed in folk magic, the occult, and esoteric Christian practices, some with entheogen links. His family possessed a panoply of magic-adjacent artifacts, from astrological charts to an alchemical amulet. His visions echoed those experienced by both of his parents and foreshadowed those of many early Mormon converts. Multiple eyewitness accounts describe the unusually intense visionary nature of early Mormon congregations, with symptoms seemingly manifesting on demand after drinking Smith’s wine sacrament. There was widespread suspicion that the wine was spiked.

Smith was shot dead by a mob in 1844 while awaiting trial in Carthage Jail, Illinois, after causing uproar by destroying a Mormon-critical press and, according to some reports, imposing martial law while mayor of the city of Nauvoo. Brigham Young became the new Mormon prophet. He shepherded the church to Utah and away from its probable, or at least possible, psychedelic genesis, which for nearly two centuries has been forgotten or denied.

But modern Mormons and ex-Mormons are returning to these visionary roots. The “Mormons on Mushrooms” podcast is dedicated to “alternative methods for healing from trauma” and “exploring higher consciousness while healing from toxic religious shame.” Since launching in 2020 it has grown a monthly listenership of over 10,000. Divine Assembly, a Utah-based “magic mushroom church,” was founded in the same year by ex-Mormon and former Republican state Senator Steve Urquhart and his wife Sara. Though not all of its roughly 5,000 members are ex-Mormons, the church was founded in large part to help people leaving religious environments find healing through psychedelics. These congregations contain clues about the power of collective psychedelic practice to help people find new ways forward and process past pain.

*

Campbell’s first psychedelic journey came courtesy of five grams of psilocybin mushrooms. Sitting in a circle of 15 fellow trippers and six sober space holders, he became the universe. He recalls creating stars and planets and music as scattered parts of himself. He felt giggly and joyous. “It was just a magical experience,” he says.

Campbell emerged from his trip feeling more connected to everything around him. He had felt a radically new sense of perception, free from hierarchy and suppression—a mode he still feels able to slip into to view situations differently, even though no experience since has recaptured that first sense of interconnection.

The decision to contact that Calgary psychedelic community started a chain of small events that, Campbell says, have “fundamentally changed the course of my life and, frankly, probably saved me from a trajectory that was going to end up in suicide.” Much of this stemmed from feeling like he was spending time with people who understood him, who saw him for who he was rather than how well he followed the rules. The Mormon church doesn’t exactly encourage experimentation and self-exploration.

On the “Mormons on Mushrooms” podcast, two ex-Mormon friends, Mike and Doug, have languid conversations about psychedelics and related matters. It sounds like Seth Rogen and his best pals running a The Kardashians-style show. In a June, 2024 episode, they talk about basic milestones in their lives their religious loved ones may not necessarily condone, like the times when they each had their first drink.

Mike and his wife were travelling, and one day he just looked at her and asked if they should share a drink. “Then we were like, ‘fuck it! Let’s just each order one drink! Let’s order our own drink!’” Doug laughs uproariously. “What a decision-making process that was, though, right? Like so scary, so terrifying to wade into those waters, right.”

“Yeah…” and the conversation sobers.

*

From 2001 to 2021, the number of people in Canada reporting no religious affiliation doubled. In the U.S., church membership dipped below 50 percent for the first time in 2020. Canadian census data contains 87,725 self-identifying Mormons in 2021, down from 105,365 in 2011. Even official LDS data, which includes inactive former members, shows Canadian membership growing slowly in absolute terms, but shrinking as a proportion of the population.

The ex-Mormon community, on the other hand, is growing—and connecting. The r/ExMormon subreddit, with 302,000 members, is the headline example, but Campbell says there are countless other ex-Mormon pockets of society. “There is something about the Mormon experience that teaches people to organize really well,” he says. The internet fundamentally changed things, and those who leave the church are now better able to connect again outside of it. Campbell says this means the church no longer controls their narrative.

Meanwhile, the psychedelic renaissance has bloomed. Psychedelic practice has a long history, from ayahuasca use across the Amazon Basin to iboga ceremonies among West African Bwiti communities and peyote usage among North American Indigenous peoples. But prohibition has reigned in the contemporary West, with promising medical research suppressed through the war on drugs. Until recently.

Research increasingly points to the potential of psychedelics in treating mental-health issues (despite serious methodological challenges, like ensuring double-blind trials with mind-altering substances and navigating the complex knot of possible mechanisms). Tectonic legal shifts are nudging countries, including Canada, toward clinical trials, medical use, and decriminalization debates. Stores selling psychedelics are semi-tolerated across Canada. Investment has boomed with the hype. And facilitated psychedelic experiences are accessible through an underground network of practitioners.

This renaissance holds growing appeal for religious communities, as evidenced by an emerging network of psychedelic chaplains integrating psychedelics into spiritual thought systems, as well as people processing the psychological challenges of leaving totalizing religions like Mormonism. Campbell is careful to stress that every experience of apostasy is unique, but there are patterns. Abandoning Mormonism generally means relinquishing a moral and spiritual worldview, which often creates a deep need for sensemaking. “You just need something to matter again,” an ex-Mormon Divine Assembly member and psychedelics user told Rolling Stone. Leaving can mean losing a tight-knit community of friends and family, plus the navigational framework of a familiar culture. This, in turn, can trigger the task of discovering your authentic self, which may contain characteristics long repressed through shame, like sexual desire or identity. For many, it can feel like being fully alive for the first time.

Powerful psychedelic experiences are inspiring some ex- Mormons to facilitate those experiences for others. Campbell now guides people through psychedelic journeys, from pre-trip preparation to in-trip support and post-trip integration. He isn’t formally trained or licensed, and doesn’t stick to a particular modality, but adapts his approach to individual clients. He works underground, mostly with ex-Mormons new to psychedelics and looking to make sense of life after leaving. They are typically middle-aged, well resourced, and curious.

Psychedelics are pattern disruptors, Campbell says. He believes the reason there’s so much research into how they can help people trying to break addictions is that they make people question their reasons for doing what they do. He helps people deconstruct these patterns as a precursor to long-term change. He typically works with somebody once, either recommending practical next steps or referring them to a medical professional with relevant expertise.

Campbell’s understanding of his work highlights what seems obvious, but is often effaced by psychedelic discourse focused on individual treatments and miracle trips: that our psychology is shaped by the systems we live within. “Any system that is well established basically tricks people into thinking that it’s not alive,” Campbell says. “It hides, and the more it can hide, the longer it will last.” This can lead ex-Mormons and others to mistake mental-health challenges for personal failings, or scapegoat leaders without recognizing how systems also enclose those scapegoats.

Community is a powerful vehicle for identifying and understanding systemic patterns. Psychedelics are often most effective as deconstructive tools when used with others who understand and can help process that deconstruction.

Later in the “Mormons on Mushrooms” podcast, Doug talks about a recent trip he took that felt different. He was contemplating what makes him feel fear and anxiety, and thinking about how, once the thing he thought was causing those feelings dissipates, something else comes and takes its spot. He and Mike agree that being afraid of death is the same as being afraid to live. They talk about overcoming shame in the way we can only do with someone who really gets us. Doug talks about this moment he always has when he’s high and feels super dirty, but says it’s the grounding part of the trip for him. It reminds him, “Ya popped up from the earth, big dog! And yer going back down.” Mike murmurs understanding.

Campbell experiences similar seamless conversations now, too. “I don’t have to explain the acronyms, I don’t have to explain the backstory of any of this stuff,” he says of his experiences in ex-Mormon psychedelic circles. “People are like, ‘Yep, I get it,’ right away. That feeling of being understood, being heard, being validated, is huge —huge.” Psychedelics alone didn’t save Campbell; psychedelics plus finding community did.

*

This insistence on collective psychedelic practice resonates beyond the ex-Mormon community, and represents a broader call for a different psychedelic renaissance. Writing in Jacobin, Benjamin Fong identifies two possible renaissances. The “psychiatric paradigm” sees government institutions and psychedelic companies administering psychedelics in tightly regulated medical settings to alleviate specific mental-health symptoms. Critical psychedelics podcast “Psymposia” dubs this corporadelia: psychedelics as commercial service and psychological adaptation.

The collective paradigm envisions an alternative renaissance, rooted in a systemic understanding of psychedelic possibilities and what conditions our mental health. This paradigm proposes supplementing psychiatric services with decentralized, community-centred psychedelic practices, and connects individual healing with the need to acknowledge and even reimagine the social, economic, and political systems that shape mental health. Whereas the psychiatric paradigm reduces psychedelics to “just another little pill for skull-bound ailments,” in the words of Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri Mugianis, co-founders of psychedelic-assisted therapy organization Cardea, the collective paradigm is more radical. “When used correctly, these substances are not quick-fix cures for illness but consciousness raisers,” they write. “And raised consciousnesses tend to find the public causes for personal pain.”

The collective paradigm heeds what we know about how psychedelics work. One of the few concrete research findings is that the context around a psychedelic experience— set and setting—affects its outcomes. The systems that shape us are the bedrock of that context. Proponents also cite the array of Indigenous psychedelic practices—encompassing religious, social, medicinal, creative, and warfaring rituals—as evidence of collective psychedelic possibility. Another touchstone is Mark Fisher’s “acid communism,” which holds that the psychedelia of postwar New Left counterculture helped people transgress boundaries, generate new artistic forms, and bolster new social relations capable of undermining “capitalist realism:” the seeming impossibility of imagining beyond capitalism.

What the collective paradigm should look like in practice is a complex, contested question. But experimental answers are sprouting in Canada and beyond, like mushrooms after rain. Motivated by the exclusion of racialized communities and issues from existing research, professor and clinical psychologist Monnica Williams is pioneering research exploring psychedelics as a tool for processing intergenerational racial trauma. “When people are traumatized, usually it’s of an interpersonal nature,” she recently told The Conversation Canada. “But also we find that people heal through connecting with other people.”

Williams has been involved in research documenting the impact of naturalistic (non-experimental) psychedelic use on racial-discrimination symptoms among Indigenous, Asian, and non-white people in North America. Her ketamine-assisted psychotherapy work has alleviated PTSD associated with racial trauma. Through both individual therapy and group sessions for specific communities, like Black women, she applies psychedelics to historic, cultural forces impacting mental health at systemic scales. Her work gestures toward the possibility of improving mental-health outcomes and raising consciousness around collective issues in therapeutic settings.

There is growing experimentation around collective psychedelic care. Daan Keiman is a psychedelic practitioner and Buddhist psychedelic chaplain. Formerly through The Synthesis Institute, and now through The Communitas Collective, he is at the forefront of work to develop holistic models of psychedelic care, including training for potential psychedelic practitioners, that integrate systemic, spiritual, somatic, and relational dimensions. Keiman sees systemic issues and collective experiences as integral to healthy, transformative psychedelic practices. “Psychedelics can offer us these experiences in which we feel part of something bigger again,” he says, because they help dissolve boundaries. “It becomes so incredibly important to make sure that the model of offering psychedelic care to someone can address both these experiences: of communitas, and underlying problems of alienation and belonging.” Research shows that systems shape mental-health outcomes like alienation and loneliness, he continues. Who and how we are changes with social setting, and a sense of belonging guards our mental health. Collective psychedelic practices can not only demonstrate these findings and cultivate empathy, but can also prove more accessible and cost-effective than individual services.

Another example of collective psychedelic activity is the patchwork of Canadian associations offering psychedelic advocacy, education, and experiences, from the Psychedelic Association of Canada down to local communities like Vancouver’s The Flying Sage. Empowered by creeping psychedelic permissibility, Michael Oliver started The Flying Sage after working for the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies Canada, which has been instrumental in enabling psychedelic medical research. While he recognizes the health benefits and trojan-horse strategic value of medical trials, Oliver imagines broader cultural possibilities. So The Flying Sage aims to destigmatize psychedelics by pairing them with activities like cold plunges, breath work, and dance.

“Psychedelics are really great at tapping into this collective unconscious,” Oliver says. “It’s a very powerful aspect of psychedelics which at the moment isn’t really being talked about at all in the mainstream narrative.” As a meeting space for underground and overground practitioners to connect, The Flying Sage is one example of how hidden collective-paradigm psychedelic communities are underpinning the ostensibly individualistic psychiatric paradigm.

*

Campbell has learned that people are finding value not only in psychedelic trials or miraculous doses, but by combining psychedelic experiences and time spent with others. His ultimate goal is for psychedelic practice to be integrated into communities. The point isn’t that all communities must use psychedelics, but that normalizing safe, connected psychedelic experiences can help more people.

Campbell says he is struck by “just how not unique the work is that I do,” meaning it isn’t so different from the many forms of care that sustain healthy people and communities. He cites American spiritual leader Ram Dass’s culturally integrated conception of care, and his notion that “we’re all just walking each other home.” Thanks to finding both psychedelics and deep connections, Campbell has made it back to a home in which he knows himself better than ever before. He’s more present; a better parent. Regardless of faith, he hopes and thinks more people will soon be served by collective psychedelic guidance.

Art by Valerie Thai

Ronnie Riley learned through social media that their first novel was facing censorship. Riley was scrolling late one evening when they saw what appeared to be a leaked school memo. Their middle-grade book about a non-binary pre-teen named Jude was one of four 2SLGBTQIA+ books that Ontario’s Waterloo Catholic District School Board was trying to get out of students’ hands.

The book wasn’t explicitly banned, but there were enough hurdles for kids to access the novel that Danny Ramadan, the chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada, called the decision a “shadow ban” in an interview with the Toronto Star. (Ramadan’s book Salma Writes a Book, part of his children’s series about a young immigrant, was also challenged by the school board.)

Riley, whose work so far is most prominent in the Canadian children’s literary scene, says that while they anticipated having some issues in the U.S., it’s difficult to acknowledge that Canada is not immune to book bans. “In the States…they’re more vocal,” Riley says. “But I do believe that it’s happening in Canada, just very quietly.”

Advocacy groups in the U.S.—Parents’ Rights in Education, Citizens Defending Freedom and Moms for Liberty are three of the most vocal organizations—represent a growing trend of censorship there. By re-framing language as advocating for parental rights rather than literary censorship, groups like these have been able to successfully ban books. This harms children by suppressing their ability to access information, though advocacy groups often claim that they’re trying to protect children from explicit and inappropriate materials. And, though in its characteristically slower, slightly quieter way, the same has been happening in Canada, with an increase in book ban requests here in recent years.

It’s not just these authors’ books that are at risk. Without them, children have fewer opportunities to learn about other people and customs, and about themselves. Children’s education and exposure to different ways of life are under threat, and public libraries may be, too.

*

In the U.S., recent data from the American Library Association (ALA) found that “[books] targeted for censorship at public libraries grew by 92 percent from 2022 to 2023,” and “47 percent of challenged materials represent the voices and experiences of those in the LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC community.” In Texas, 578 books were banned in the 2021-22 school year, 424 in Pennsylvania, and 401 in Florida.

Moms For Liberty, a so-called parental rights group that reports having over 130,000 members, has often made the news due to its continuous calls to ban children’s books in libraries and schools across the country. In July 2023, they were successful in getting five books banned across Leon County schools in Tallahassee, Florida. The books had characters dealing with HIV, sexual assault, leukemia, and life after death.

While parental calls to ban books aren’t always successful, the ones that are can set off a political ripple effect for other parts of the country. “What we know to be true in several states is that they’ve been following each other in a race to the bottom about how many books you can ban in how many different ways,” says John Chrastka, executive director and founder of EveryLibrary, a non-profit political action organization focused on fighting book bans in the U.S.

Chrastka references data from the Unpacking 2023 Legislation of Concern for Libraries report, created by EveryLibrary to examine the status of bills in the U.S. aiming to censor access to books in both school and public libraries. Chrastka says that EveryLibrary was able to track that some bills, despite being in different states, were using the same language as one another to ban books. “That cut and paste job—that copycat—is sometimes very explicit,” he says. “And sometimes it’s based on the intent of the law: how can we make it easier to call a book criminal, call a book obscene, call a book harmful?”

There’s a clear “feedback loop,” Chrastka says, between groups like Moms For Liberty and politicians when it comes to banning books, meaning that citizen organizations and political leaders are influencing each other. “It is a witch’s brew of interest groups that are utilizing a fairly soft target—public libraries—which are intended to be, under law, under Supreme Court precedent, public forums, and the materials are available for all—as long as they’re legal,” he says. “If you can say that those books about those human beings are obscene or criminal or harmful, you can make an attack on those populations by proxy, whether it’s LGBTQ or Black and Brown communities.”

When libraries refuse to remove books from their shelves, parents sometimes push to remove their funding altogether in retaliation. Chrastka says that while not every library will lose funding from continuing to stock challenged books, there have been and continue to be states where this is the case. In Alabama, a legislative code change, enacted this past May, made $6.6 million in state funding for public libraries contingent on their compliance with the Alabama Public Library Service Board’s guidelines about restricting access to books deemed inappropriate for certain ages.

This isn’t just happening in southern states. In Michigan, the Patmos Library nearly lost 84 percent of its funding after the town’s residents voted twice that taxpayer money shouldn’t support the library as long as it continued to supply 2SLGBTQIA+ books. But library staff would not remove the books, and after a third vote, the library will remain open.

When asked whether parental requests for libraries to censor 2SLGBTQIA+ materials could lead to budget concerns, the ALA told This Magazine in a written statement that while they don’t have national data to validate this correlation, they felt this outcome was unlikely: “Although it is challenging to quantify, these incidents emphasize the ongoing importance of defending libraries as vital community resources,” the statement reads.

As Chrastka says, though, “This is not a casual social interaction. This is a political movement.” It’s a movement that’s travelling north of the border, and in an unprecedented way.

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Fully banning a book in Canada is a tough task, and it’s not always clear how it can be done. Public libraries, though funded by municipalities, are run by independent boards which have jurisdiction over the contents of their shelves. Libraries usually respond to disputes by following their challenge policies or request for reconsideration policies. In Canadian schools, the process for vetting books often involves the board developing selection methods through training with librarians, and then trusting librarians to implement those methods. Curricula are set by provinces, and teachers decide how best to meet the curricula. It’s not the role of school boards to police individual books, though parents sometimes appeal to them in attempts to bypass any formal selection and reconsideration processes that boards entrust librarians to follow. When these policies do not exist—and they often don’t—it’s often board members and administrators who end up handling the issue and responding to parental pressures.

Shadowbanning, though, is easier to accomplish. It can include what happened to Riley, where their book was moved to a shelf inaccessible by students and “a teacher must provide the Catholic context” before students are allowed to borrow the book. Basically, citizens and school districts are finding other ways to get books out of people’s hands rather than outright banning them. In the words of Fin Leary, the program manager at We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit organization focused on making the publishing industry more diverse, the goal is to “not have them seen as often.” He says it’s much harder to fight this kind of censorship.

Regardless of whether or not a book is challenged in a public library or a school, book bans affect both readers and authors. A November 2023 statement from the Ontario Library Association said that a diverse representation of books helps students “learn how to navigate differences and develop critical awareness of their environments.” The largest worry, according to Canadian School Libraries, is that groups calling for censorship in the U.S. will continue to inspire Canadians to use similar organization tactics.

According to data from the Canadian Library Challenges Database (CLCD), Canadian libraries facing the most calls for censorship are the Edmonton Public Library (143 requests), the Ottawa Public Library (127 requests) and the Toronto Public Library (101 requests). While the database has information from as early as 1998, some libraries have only reported censorship requests from recent years.

Michael Nyby, the chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations, said in an article published on Freedom To Read’s website that library challenges from September 2002 to August 2023 represent the highest number ever recorded in Canada in a twelve-month period. According to data from the CLCD, books and events with 2SLGBTQIA+ content made up 38 percent of all challenges in 2022. (Between 2015 to 2021, less than 10 percent of all challenges were connected to 2SLGBTQIA+ matters.) Books surrounding sexual content (19 percent) and racism (16 percent) made up the next highest percentages. The influence of library censorship in the U.S. also extends to books on drug use, abuse, violence, grief, and death.

Though Riley’s novel’s shadow ban was overturned after public outcry, concerns about a rise in book censorship in Canada, and calls to defund in the event that it doesn’t happen, aren’t without reason. At the Prairie Rose School Division (PRSD), a Manitoba-based school board, 11 requests for books to be banned were made in just 2023. Among them were 2SLGBTQIA+ books like Juno Dawson’s This Book is Gay. Dawson, who spent seven years working as a sex-ed teacher, described the nonfiction book as “essentially a textbook.” Each chapter of the book focuses on a different aspect of queer life, including definitions of 2SLGBTQIA+ identities, the history of HIV/AIDS, and sex. The book also addresses the importance of queer dating apps and using sexual protection. According to the PRSD, parents proposed banning this book (among multiple others) for reasons of pornography— though the book teaches children about bodies, and is not pornography. The school board said there was “some connection with the Concerned Citizens Canada Twitter account,” but not whether the parents proposing the ban were part of the group, which self-describes as “addressing sexually explicit materials being made available to children in our public libraries.” Still, the group’s account falsely tweeted that This Book is Gay was encouraging minors to solicit sex from adults on Grindr. The school board did not end up removing Dawson’s book (or the others proposed in the ban), but Concerned Citizens Canada is just one of many social and political groups that continue to advocate for book censorship.

In the summer of 2022, Manitoba’s South Central Regional Library was also pressured to remove three books about puberty and consent from shelves. Residents protested a library board meeting, flooded city council meetings, and said public library funding should be removed if the books weren’t, calling them “child pornography.” However, both Cathy Ching, the library services director, and local city councillor Marvin Plett both denied these claims. “Calling books pornographic does not make it so,” Plett said at a Winkler council meeting in July 2023. “Censuring books based on content that some find objectionable can have far-reaching and unintended implications.”

Around the same time, in Chilliwack, B.C., the RCMP were called to investigate after books there were reported for alleged child pornography in schools, too. Also in 2023, library picture books about gender in Red Deer, Alberta were vandalized. A page about using a singular “they” pronoun for nonbinary people was ripped out, according to a news report from the Red Deer Advocate.

Though the case in Chilliwack was dismissed and the books in Red Deer were replaced, parents’ calls to defund the Manitoba library if certain books aren’t removed echoes bills proposed by American lawmakers stressing that libraries should lose funding if bans aren’t enacted. And while books aren’t being overtly removed from shelves in Canada very often, there are other, sometimes more insidious impacts this attitude is having on queer and racialized youth.

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The Toronto Public Library (TPL) is Canada’s largest public library system. When asked about whether groups like those in the U.S. seeking to defund libraries for not removing 2SLGBTQIA+ material could affect what happens in Toronto, the media team at TPL said in an emailed statement that its budget is not affected by these groups. “We are governed by a library board and while our budget is ultimately approved by City Council, our materials selection is governed by our Board policies,” the email reads.

TPL’s Intellectual Freedom Challenges – 2023 Annual Report states that none of the requests to remove books from its shelves were successful that year. However, the same report also acknowledges that there are other issues at play. “TPL has experienced objections to 2SLGBTQ+ content outside of the formal request for reconsideration process, with opposition to Drag Queen Story Time programs at five branches and protests at three of them; damage to Progress Pride decals at eight branches; vandalized Pride Celebration displays at two branches; and vandalized 2SLGBTQ+ books at one branch.”

Historical book banning represents violence and censorship. Current book bans, though they may be disguised as parental rights, are more of the same. Vandalism of Pride displays at TPL is another form of violence, and while it may not be physical in nature, it has lasting effects that can harm queer youth for years beyond the act itself.

Banning queer and trans people’s books sends the message that these folks shouldn’t exist, at least not publicly. Ideas like these contribute to the state of widespread violence against them. Recent data from Statistics Canada found that around two thirds of 2SLGBTQIA+ Canadians had experienced physical or sexual violence. However, this number could be much higher: data from the same report found that around 80 percent of physical assaults against this group within the year prior to the survey didn’t “[come] to the attention of the police.”

Many 2SLGBTQIA+ people also struggle with feelings of suicidality. In the U.S., data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that 29 percent of trans youth have attempted suicide. In Canada, researchers at the University of Montreal and Egale Canada reported that 36 percent of trans people in Ontario experience feelings of suicidal ideation. Systemic discrimination, erasure, and invalidation contributes to this, and book banning is part of this wider package of behaviours that harms the community.

Canadian author Robin Stevenson was interviewed for PEN Canada about her children’s rhyming picture books, Pride Colors and Pride Puppy!, being targeted by the recent wave of book censorship in the U.S. and Canada. “Book banners say that they want to protect children, but they are doing real harm to the very children they claim to protect,” Stevenson said, explaining that “learning to hate yourself was far more dangerous than any book could ever be.”

Leary says that removing these types of books from libraries can send a message to publishers: if they notice that titles aren’t making it to school libraries or are banned, it could discourage them from publishing and promoting them. “As much as the book bans are horrifying, they also are so much scarier when you consider the larger context of why they’re happening—because it’s to legislate folks out of existence, or to legislate folks out of having an education about these topics.”

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Representation matters because it helps reduce stereotypes. Books with diverse representation are vital. They can help teach empathy and understanding, while also showing readers that they aren’t alone in their experiences. Diverse books also teach a fuller picture of history, sharing stories previously overlooked. They are a key aspect of a well-rounded education.

While it is a terrifying moment for queer and racialized writers, authors are not silencing themselves as a result of the pushback. Protecting their work from the possibility of being banned, though, will take a concerted effort on the part of anyone hoping to support them.

Riley believes that the shadow ban of their novel at the Waterloo Catholic District School Board was only overturned because of statements from not only their publisher, but other authors as well. They say they had a sound support system, and that helped.

That kind of unified support is crucial to fostering an environment that permits the continuation of freedom in publishing. Leary says that from an advocacy standpoint, parents opposing book censorship have the most power when they stick together. “Our voices are stronger when we are collectively organizing, and it also kind of allows parents to have each other to lean on,” he says. One way to do this is by communicating with school board members and going to community meetings that include opportunities to speak to these issues.

Riley keeps their final advice to anyone passionate about this issue simple and blunt. “Keep speaking out,” they say. “Keep making sure that books get into the hands of kids—especially queer books.”

Photo by Becky Fantham

A pharmaceutical company reportedly linked to tax evasion to the tune of over $4 million through offshore Cyprian accounts gathers for a lunch and cocktail at Montreal’s Old Port. Initiation into the event is coat check, where a cascade of rented racks too janky for winter coats topples over to the sound of a shrieking manager. This is the first day of a thoroughly Aquarian season of freelance catering.

This industry has everything. Ornate cups of burrata and wasabi cephalopods. Details of your colleague’s trip to the gynecologist over 45 bowls of Caesar salad. Shuffling through your 14th hour in borrowed shoes. Someone shouting about Peruvian droughts over a platter of dirty napkins and champagne flutes. Wafting vetiver incense and Persian rugs. Conceptual acrobatics. French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal. Snipers. That one guy in a trench coat from Bloomberg. And when you’ve paid $2,000 for your pair of tickets to step through the steel doors to New City Gas, Montreal’s historical gas-lighting warehouse, you’ll be greeted by a vaguely “Oriental” dance-off meant to bewitch the city’s fanciest philanthropic donors.

For those whose livelihoods depend on the flexibility of catering work, there is also a price for this view into an often inaccessible world. While catering is the quintessential gig economy, temp-worker agencies and the informalization of labour in the sector pose new challenges for workers’ rights in a precarious industry—one that has long lacked many vital labour protections that are considered basic rights for other classifications of workers. The repercussions are vast, threatening the victories achieved by unionized hospitality workers, including hotel banquet caterers, and revealing the ways in which employers continue to exploit loopholes that put profit over people. Increasing informalization, both through temp-work agencies and the classification of workers as self-employed contractors, is exacerbating precarity and abusive labour conditions.

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When caterers show up for their shifts, it’s next to impossible to predict who employs the coworkers beside them. A venue may have a few of their own staff, say at the bar. And then they’ll hire caterers, too. But these workers, rather than being employed directly by the catering company, are hired on a freelance basis. Before COVID-19, catering companies had staff on payroll, but now, people compete for shifts on an app.

To make it more confusing, any gaps in staffing are filled in by temp-agency workers, who also get their shifts through apps—sometimes picking up shifts through the same app as the one used by the catering company itself. While they’re said to be filling in gaps, they’re always there. Workers may look like a unified front, all employed by the same company, but behind this image is a hot mess. Servers, bartenders, kitchen staff, the maître d’hôtel: from the kitchen to the floor, freelancers from temp-work agencies hustle alongside catering company staff who are deemed “self-employed”—in other words, freelancers.

While there’s a particular satisfaction to the adrenaline-fuelled endurance race of working heated 10-plus hour shifts and pulling doubles, workers classified as self-employed don’t receive some of the basic benefits, like time-and-a-half pay legislated for working holidays, that would be afforded to a venue or company’s permanent staff. They are also without job security, access to legal recourse if something goes wrong at work, and, though rare for the hospitality industry, health benefits.

Wage inequity in the same workplace is routine. An agency worker can earn $23 or $24 per hour before tax doing the same work as someone staffed by a catering company but classified as self-employed and paid $20 per hour. Some workers pulling multiple contracts between different companies and agencies might be demoted from a higher-paying agency wage to a lower catering company wage when an agency works the same event.

By keeping workers in the ambiguity of freelance contracts while exploiting all the power of a regular employer, catering companies and agencies revoke responsibility for the rights and well-being of their workers, and renounce accountability for damages through their own management practices, short-staffing, equipment and material deficiency, and health and safety practices—keeping the profits while passing on the risks to disposable catering “consultants.”

Once the purview of Uber, DoorDash and its many doppelgangers, aspects of this informal economy are spreading in an already precarious sector. Since 2019, temp-work agencies that used to be in the minority have become normalized. Rather than fixing a labour shortage by integrating temporary workers into workplaces, the ubiquity of temp work and defaulting to classifying workers as self-employed contractors is being practiced in other sectors. Exploiting a similar model, temp-work agencies have also become prevalent in Quebec’s public health-care system. Four years since their explosion during COVID-19, private nursing agencies are entrenched in the province, with hospitals continuing to rely on temp workers amid pushback to reduce dependency and eventually ban the use of these agencies in public health care.

Despite the ubiquity of precarious labour, workers who have been siloed into self-employed classifications while being functionally dependent on employers, agencies and digital platforms are not taking the transgressions on their rights lightly. In 2020, Foodora couriers in Ontario won their right to unionize under CUPW, a crucial precedent for recognizing gig workers as dependent workers rather than self-employed contractors. Similarly, Uber drivers represented by UFCW Canada have organized grassroots protests to advocate for a baseline minimum wage and more regulation on how many Uber drivers can operate within a city.

Governments, too, have been urged to address the issue, and legislation is beginning to catch up amid mounting pressure. Companies in Montreal, however, continue to exploit loopholes for precarious labour as Quebec falls behind the rest of Canada, and contractors seeking flexibility have few means to fight back.

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A desperate flurry of applications to Montreal’s premiere catering companies lands a gig at the historic Marché Bonsecours. The mid-19th century stone is cast in a romantic light as a murder of black-clad servers perches on windows, hidden behind curtains for propriety as diamonds, flight simulations, and luxe meals are auctioned off to the tune of Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers.”

Workers aren’t only hidden behind curtains, however. Once they are accepted onto the nebulous team, their profile is added to an app that sends notifications when shifts become available. Those shifts are claimed within seconds.

The app of choice, be it New York-based Nowsta or Montreal-based Workstaff, is an opaque space of privilege. Shifts are shared by catering companies or temp agencies on a first-come, first-served basis—but not always. Sometimes it’s based on seniority. Sometimes it’s based on whether you’re an anglophone. Most of the time, it’s not clear. Nothing is guaranteed, but the draw is unavoidable: the addictive nature of gamified earnings and the momentary thrill of being “accepted.” Shifts are available tomorrow!

Your shift starts once you’ve checked in and accepted the app’s request to access your geolocation. Dress code is nearly universal, but you’d better bring your own food-grade cleaner, wet floor sign, and maybe even defibrillator. You might be bestowed with an apron or a bowtie. You’ll quickly realize there is no training amid an endless stream of what kitchen staff call “so many new faces.”

Some of these new faces might be from the event and hospitality temp-staffing agencies that have bloomed across Montreal, including but not limited to SALIN, Sacrée Soirée, VS Event Staffing, and Agence First Round. Sleek company branding on catering companies’ social media and staffing agencies’ websites obfuscates workers’ precarity in an already gig-based industry.

Salin refers to catering workers as “consultants,” even though workers are functionally dependent on the agency providing and approving shift work. Agence First Round refers to workers for big-ticket clients like the CF Montréal soccer club and Stade Saputo, Centre Bell, and Complexe Desjardins as “fast, market-driven staff replacements.” Sacrée Soirée brands temp workers as “free spirits” and markets their labour as a cost-cutting solution for hospitality management expenditures, of which around 75 percent are “recruitment, turnover, benefits, and absenteeism,” according to their website.

This may sound like a modern problem. But years before the likes of Uber normalized gig work, labour activists saw the dangers of employers shifting costs and liability onto sub-contractors and independent workers amid a wider deregulation of labour markets. The scale of precarity in the hospitality industry in Montreal today, however, is staggering considering it is one of the world’s cultural capitals and host to major international conferences, festivals and sporting events. While this brings millions of tourists to the city each year, the boon hospitality jobs are said to bring to the city’s precariat is a thing of the imagination in the current climate.

As Montreal continues to recover economically from COVID-19, tourism profits are on the upswing. Last summer’s in-person business convention attendance rebounded to 72 percent, which is 12 percent higher than in 2022. The Palais des congrès convention centre alone held 288 events in 2023, hosting over 870,000 delegates which, according to the Palais, has contributed “substantial economic spinoffs of around 425 million dollars for Montreal and Quebec.” Some of Montreal’s most profitable sporting events, like the Formula One Canadian Grand Prix and Tennis Canada’s National Bank Open, rake in millions of dollars in profits and public subsidies.

In such a profitable sector, why are there not enough resources to retain permanent staff on livable incomes, regularize seasonal and temp workers as company employees, and provide dignified benefits, protections and wages to flex-workers whose labour runs the show? While there are regulations in Quebec stipulating that temp workers cannot be paid less than directly employed staffers, other contractors can earn less than temp workers. It’s this loophole companies are using to save a buck by shaving it off someone’s salary.

The problem, though, persists across Canada. According to Samia Hashi, Ontario Regional Director for Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, the misclassification of employees has only grown in magnitude as employers exploit regulatory loopholes to tap into cheap sources of labour. “The much-touted ‘flexibility’ of gig and temp work only benefits the bottom line of employers,” Hashi says, adding that this allows employers to avoid extending statutory protections under employment standards codes.

Collective organization likely has something to do with why working conditions in Quebec are so poor right now. For things to change, people usually have to put themselves on the line by agitating for it. Many self-employed contract workers and temp-workers aren’t able to exercise collective action and draw attention to the growing precarity impacting the hospitality industry, and the inherent unpredictability in the sector contributes to the unique challenges of organizing unions or strikes with fellow freelance caterers. Raising your voice simply means you’ve worked your last shift. Catering workers may not even be given the courtesy of dismissal: they’ll just have to read the subtext around their lack of notifications.

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Collective action by contract workers in other sectors has drawn harsh blowback, but it’s also shown possibilities. In February 2024, temp agency workers at the Del Monte plant in Oshawa—represented by Unifor Local 222 and employed by Premier, a third-party temp-staffing agency owned by swipejobs—were fired while on strike against long-standing conditions of precarity. Their employer was able to terminate all 71 workers’ employments at once by ending their contract with Premier. Many were on temporary contracts with Del Monte for over five years, in what the union described as “poor and dangerous working conditions.” Showing that it’s possible for contractors to advocate for more robust workers’ rights, Unifor has called for stronger regulation of temp-worker agencies, and for new legislation from the Ontario government that would ensure temp workers are hired after a certain period of time with just cause protection from being unfairly terminated.

In an industry where the customer is always right, there can be little sympathy for noisy striking workers ruining weddings. Having the audacity to drop the “nice” façade of customer service, however, is exactly what has effectively implemented change. In February 2022, 159 hospitality workers employed at the Palais des congrès convention centre—and unionized under the Fédération des employeés et employés de services publics—were prepared to go on strike until their union reached an agreement on fair wages.

Not all workers in the city’s most prestigious venues have been as lucky, however, to bargain or even retain their permanent jobs—flexible and event-based as they are. In January 2020, about 20 employees working in security, housekeeping and event organization at the Marché Bonsecours were laid off to be replaced by contract workers.

Elsewhere, contract labour has threatened to weaken the negotiating power of unionized workers as employers find loopholes to continue generating profits amid strikes. Workers at B.C.’s Radisson Blu Vancouver Airport hotel have been on strike for three years. Last year, their union filed complaints with the B.C. Labour Relations Board for alleged scabbing— crossing the picket line to work despite the strike—by third party caterers at the hotel restaurant. Workers brought attention to the hotel’s rental of its restaurant for private use, allowing it to profit while skirting the economic impacts of striking workers by using private contractors. (Later, a labour arbitrator ruled against the union’s argument in the absence of sufficient proof that hotel workers would have otherwise been responsible for the labour at the hotel restaurant.)

In light of weaknesses and inconsistencies in provincial anti-scab legislation across Canada, CUPE called for federal legislation last year. On June 20, 2024, the historic federal anti-scab law (Bill C-58) was passed, banning the use of temporary replacement workers if there is a strike in a federally regulated workplace.

And despite the pressures of corporate lobbying against tighter regulations, recent laws being adopted across Canada are starting to address inequities and set precedents for broader federal and provincial legislation. In federally regulated workplaces, amendments to the Canada Labour Code proposed in 2019 prohibit wage disparities between temporary workers and permanent staff doing the same work, in the same conditions. Self-employed classifications, however, allow employers to skirt these protections.

Wage transparency laws are also coming into effect across the country, along with anti-reprisal protections that prohibit employers “from asking applicants about their past salaries and from penalizing employees for disclosing their wages amongst themselves,” CTV News reports. These regulations, however, are not universal; they have only come into force in B.C., Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Changes to B.C.’s legislation proposed last fall and coming into effect this fall are more comprehensive than just protecting the right to discuss wages. They formally recognize gig workers as employees, establishing a minimum wage, covering essential expenses, offering compensation benefits for workplace injuries, and providing other bare minimum standards like wage statements and notice of termination. But these changes do not go far enough. Gig workers are still exempt from rights extended to regular employees including paid sick days, overtime pay and statutory holiday pay, and the legislative changes only apply to food delivery and ride-hail platform-based workers.

Quebec’s legislation is lagging behind the rest of the country as temp-work agencies, platform-based employment, and misclassification of workers as self-employed become normalized. There are currently no laws, for example, that mandate wage transparency or provide anti-reprisal protections to workers who share information on wages with each other.

Regulations for temp-work agencies that took effect in 2020 have tightened restrictions on some ambiguous working conditions and the lack of employer accountability. Similar to restaurant operating permits, agencies must now be licensed with Quebec’s Commission des normes, de la santé et de la sécurité du travail (CNESST) to operate legally. (As of July 2024, SALIN, VS Event Staffing, and Agence First Round did not appear in the CNESST’s licence database for placement agencies.) They are also banned from charging workers recruitment fees.

Other gains appear progressive, but have actually resulted in different forms of inequities. Agencies can no longer prohibit clients from recruiting temp workers as regular employees after a six-month period. Within seasonal work like catering, however, this still effectively keeps workers in a dependent relationship with a third-party service provider for the entire season.

Frédérique Verreault, a media relations person for the Quebec Labour Ministry, emphasized that temp-workers in Quebec cannot earn a lower wage than salaried employees simply because they are agency employees or they work fewer hours per week. But this does not address earning higher wages on a shift with a catering company’s freelance staff in an environment where salaried employees are almost non-existent.

According to Verreault, temp workers have the same rights and obligations as regular employees regarding labour standards, pay equity, and the province’s Occupational Health and Safety Act. They also have the same recourse as regular employees in case of unjustified dismissal, harassment, or a hostile work environment. These protections, however, only refer to Quebec’s existing laws. Temp agency and seasonal workers also have to go to the CNESST in case of unfair dismissal, or for workplace accidents or illness, so that issues are treated individually rather than through collective action against systemic inequities.

Verreault says the Quebec government is closely following the normalization of temp-work agencies and will be holding a consultation on the impacts of new technologies on the labour market, like app-based gig work. Verreault did not provide further information on this consultation.

Dependent contractor provisions could provide access to meaningful labour protections and recognize the independent contractors’ rights to unionize and take collective action. A wage floor and wage transparency measures could also provide workers with some level of accountability.

“Governments across the country can do more on effective implementation of laws that are already on the books,” Hashi says. Many of the new labour protections for temp agency and gig workers at the federal and provincial levels have yet to be implemented, including federal provisions prohibiting wage differences between temporary staffers and employees from 2018. After claiming it would implement these provisions in 2022, Hashi explained, the federal government has again missed its spring 2024 deadline.

Employment and Social Development Canada did not respond to a request for comment.

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Temp agencies and employers cast a patronizing veneer over the self-employed classification by defending freelancers’ rights to be freelancers. Gig-workers, however, have shown that we are not willing to accept the depreciation of our labour, and that the flexibility of gig work should not come at the cost of dignified working conditions, labour protections, and workplace equity—or to the detriment of permanent employees.

The hospitality industry is at times a place of catharsis, at times an addiction. It is certainly a place of contrasts, full of both absolute precarity and the certainty of there always being work, somewhere. The seduction of fast money and the trap of poverty. The dance between hyper-vigilance and blasé detachment. Where intimacy is created over secret cups of coffee and leftover baklava, trails of gossip with people you will never see again, and urgently whispered plans to escape to Bali, Bangkok, Berlin—anywhere but here, in the kitchen where there are no more baskets for bread.

A shift pops up on my screen with an “URGENT” need for staff. A dopamine rush, or that mid-afternoon coffee, hits before tapping: “Skip.” For a second, I’ve won the game.

Illustration by Valerie Thai

Bob’s Burgers keeps getting better. Loren Bouchard’s animated sitcom, now in its 15th season on FOX, is bigger-hearted and far more ambitious than when it first aired in 2011. It has the kind of confidence that can only emerge, I imagine, when a project that starts out with tepid-to-terrible reviews goes on to receive years of critical praise and multi-season renewals. A critic at the Washington Post once dismissed Bob’s Burgers as “derivatively dull,” and wrote that “somewhere, once again, Fred Flintstone weeps.” The show has since inspired a film, a cookbook, a comic book series, and perhaps inevitably, the porn parody Bob’s Boners (2014).

For the uninitiated: Bob’s Burgers is about a family running a struggling burger restaurant in a fictional New Jersey beach town. The Belchers are an eccentric bunch. There’s deadpan, pessimistic Bob (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin); his spirited wife Linda (John Roberts); Tina, their nerdy teen, obsessed with boys and horses (Dan Mintz); Gene, the flamboyant middle child (Eugene Mirman); and mischievous nine-year-old Louise (Kristen Schaal). The characters dive into all sorts of hijinks and adventures to keep their restaurant afloat— like participating in a water balloon battle to counter a neighbourhood rent hike—and always return to the status quo in the well-loved tradition of long-running, episodic adult animation.

Except Bob’s Burgers isn’t The Simpsons or South Park. Yes, the writing can be gross and edgy—the pilot includes a recurring bit about Tina’s itchy crotch—but it softens. Below the toilet humour lies a tender heart. It’s what makes Bob’s Burgers spark: its ability to balance absurdity with genuine emotion, and to explore existential questions, like what we owe the dead, with tremendous wit and pathos. “I am a terrible son and a terrible person,” Bob says in season 13, after spending a day trying to find his mother’s grave, which he hasn’t visited in two decades. (Meanwhile, Tina wonders whether it’s rude to pick a wedgie in a cemetery. Gene’s reply: “I think it’s rude not to.”) But in the episode’s emotional climax, Linda tells Bob that his mother would be proud of him. “Look what you’ve done with the restaurant, with this family,” she says, then adds, quickly: “Tina, take your hand out of your butt.”

Like the Simpsons, the Belchers are frozen in time—a fate that’s particularly brutal for 13-year-old Tina, forever trapped in puberty—even as the sitcom clearly cycles through the seasons, marked by holiday-centric episodes. Still, the characters evolve. Socially awkward Tina becomes more confident in her budding sexuality. When a classmate threatens to share her “erotic friend fiction” (secret, sexy stories she writes about her peers) with the whole school, Tina decides to read it to everyone herself. (Her motto: “I’m a smart, strong, sensual woman.”) Early Louise is almost demonic—in season one’s “Sexy Dance Fighting,” she tells Tina she should kill herself. Gleefully, no less! But over a dozen seasons later, we see a more vulnerable side to her character. In season 13’s “What About Job?” Louise spirals out about her future: “What if I grow up and I just am not really anything cool or exciting? What if I’m just a boring-life person?” It’s a gut-punch of an episode. Silly and resonant in equal parts, it marks the series’ gradual shift from a darker, more abrasive tone to something heartfelt and oddly profound. Over time, Bob’s Burgers has positioned itself in a realm that many critics take for granted: the airy, earnest, slice-of-life comedy. TV that is far removed from the stream of reboots, tense dramas, and dramedies that still command the most cultural authority.

Season 14’s standout, “The Amazing Rudy,” pivots away from the Belcher family for the first time. The story follows Louise’s classmate, a recurring character known as Regular- Sized Rudy (Brian Huskey), as he attends a “we’re-still-a-family dinner” with his divorced parents and their new partners. It casts the Belchers as minor characters—they first appear a quarter of the way through, in the background, bickering about whether to steal coins from a mall fountain, while Rudy tries on hats at a kiosk called “Better Off Head.” (Bob’s Burgers is reliably—and delightfully—heavy on wordplay.) The episode is funny and melancholic, scored to wistful piano melodies and Stevie Wonder, like a less-cynical BoJack Horseman. There’s a montage of past family dinners, each one showing Rudy’s parents sitting farther apart. There’s a tragicomic scene in a carwash, where Rudy’s father can’t tell Rudy he loves him without the whirring machines drowning him out. And there are moments that align us with Rudy, like when he watches the Belchers from a distance, drawn to their supportive, close-knit dynamic—a nod to Bob’s Burgers’ secret sauce, the key to its enduring charm.

“The Amazing Rudy” proves that after 262 episodes, Bob’s Burgers can do whatever the hell it wants. It can experiment with tone and perspective. It can arrange a Philip Glass song for Gene’s all-xylophone band in a way that brings me to tears. It can cast comedy superstars, from Paul Rudd to Patti Harrison. And it can channel the quiet, emotional ambition of children’s television, where animated shows like Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Hilda, Dead End, The Owl House, Summer Camp Island, and Infinity Train have often delivered more affecting and complex storytelling than adult animation over the last decade. (A few exceptions: BoJack Horseman, of course; Pantheon; A24’s Hazbin Hotel, and HBO’s terrific Harley Quinn.)

Among that company, Bob’s Burgers stands out for its remarkable longevity. Television has long been a cutthroat arena. The landscape has felt especially unstable since the Great Streaming Panic of 2022—courtesy of Wall Street—when services like Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max became more selective about renewals, and less willing to nurture shows finding their groove. (Many also removed media from their libraries to cut costs, making a casualty of animated gems like Infinity Train and Summer Camp Island.) A new kind of Comfort Show has emerged: the rare series that gets regular renewals in a painfully commercialized industry. The survival of Bob’s Burgers is a small marvel; that the series continues to surprise and delight viewers, year after year, is an argument for patience. For giving writers time to experiment. For sticking with a TV world as it unfolds and evolves. For playing the long game—despite all the odds.

In the season six episode “Sliding Bobs,” Tina, Gene, and Louise imagine how different life would be if Bob didn’t have a moustache when he first met Linda. Would Bob and Linda have ended up together? Would their family still exist? When Tina panics at the thought that life is ruled by chaos and randomness, not fate, Linda tries to comfort her: “Everything is random, but that’s what makes life so wonderful. Sometimes, all the crap in the universe lines up—like that night I met your father. Everything lined up, and it came out Belcher.” We’re so lucky it did.