ILLUSTRATION BY PATERSON HODGSON

Dear She-Ra (Princess of Power), Glimmer, and Bow,

Hi, She-Ra. I’m a long-time fan of your work, but this is my first time writing to you and the Best Friend Squad. There’s been a reboot on Netflix which seems laser-focused on my child-of-the-1980s demographic (the fact that I have a six-year-old daughter who also loves She-Ra is a bonus). We know that you, She-Ra (like your twin brother He-Man), are all about the fight for justice against oppression. I’m specifically writing to you because I noticed a subtext: that of intergenerational conflict in social justice activism. And, I have to say, that gives me all the feels.

The new She-Ra appeals to six-year-old girls and young queer adults, but also to feminist moms with small princess-obsessed daughters, like myself and mine. I dressed as She-Ra for Halloween in senior kindergarten and 30 years later so did my daughter.

Your planet is really far from ours. But in your brave struggle as teens fighting an army invading from space, I see Greta Thunberg’s call for intergenerational organizing to prevent the destruction of our planet; I see the youth in the streets for the climate strike being dismissed by their elders. I see my generation of intersectional feminists struggling against the TERF-y, racist and classist tendencies hidden within feminism’s third wave. Establishment journalists write endless op-eds about millennials killing things, we are stuck in a terrible housing market and crushed with student debt and all we can come up with is “OK Boomer” to start to address inequality between generations.

I do know that the three of you were totally right that reforming the Princess Alliance is completely critical to fighting the invading Horde army. It’s been so hard for you to organize in the shadow of the failure of the last Princess Alliance, which failed to halt the invasion of the Horde, but you are slowly building up a team of alliances across the different parts of your planet. Are we not all bound by the success and failure of past generations? We lose again and again but keep trying, hopefully learning from the past, but not getting caught in their defeats.

Glimmer, I feel for you so much. Dealing with the intergenerational trauma of your father being killed in the resistance, which also kind of ruined your relationship with your mom. That alternative timeline moment where you got to experience a whole family before it was torn apart is heartbreaking. But you are so strong. It seems like your mother keeps trying to hold you back and telling you your efforts are doomed to fail, but she is also a voice of wisdom and measured response. She was trying to keep you safe but she was also trapped by her own failure to fight the Horde. I see your determination to try again, to learn, and to do better this time.

And Bow. Your gay dads want so badly for you to take over their library, but one of your dads is a veteran of the struggle and you feel compelled to follow that legacy, not the researcher/librarian/historian one they have charted out for you.

And, of course, you, She-Ra/Adora. Raised by the Horde and imbued with their ideology, you nonetheless opened your eyes to the settler-colonist invasion you were a part of. You carry the legacy, not only of the last generation of resistance to the Horde, but also the heavy burden of all the She-Ras in the past.

Thanks, She-Ra and friends, for giving ways to think about overcoming intergenerational tensions in organizing to accomplish the things we all really need, like keeping the whole planet from burning up. It’s going to be complicated and we will have a lot of stuff to work out, but having some fabulous sci-fi cartoons to help us think with will only help us in the very real struggles we have ahead.

Love, your forever-fan,

Megan Kinch

ILLUSTRATION BY MIKI SATO

Sometimes Sam got words stuck in her head. Tonight she was repeating to herself the phrase, unwaxed thread—unwaxed thread—…

The on-call room smelled like two decades of coffee breath. She slipped past its heavy door, her eyes protesting the quick adjustment from the bright fluorescent of the hospital corridor to the on-call room’s dim bulb, which protruded nakedly from the wall above the bed in the corner. She sat on the mattress—covered with some kind of crinkly plastic to shield it from the parade of different residents on overnight shifts, a new body every night—and slowly flexed the fingers of her right hand, splaying them apart and then curling them into a tight fist. A cold hard ache was beginning to bud in her joints.

Her head buzzed, and she counted, 27 hours since she had last slept. The ancient clock radio on the nightstand said 13:00, so, five hours to rest. She sighed, slipped under the covers, itchy cotton sheets rubbing unpleasantly against her scrubs, and clicked off the light above her head. In the dark, the coffee breath seemed even more oppressive.

Unwaxed thread…

One week last semester, in the evening after lectures, Sam had sat at the kitchen table with her roommate, drinking beer and stitching up a chicken. It was good to practise on raw chicken, which had a similar consistency to human muscle. They would don their surgical gloves with great ceremony and begin, punching the needle through the meat and tucking it in and out, pulling the sutures tight.

Sam had a head start because Mom had taught her some of the stitches when she was younger. Blanket stitch and mattress stitch. Also the ornamental ones, the ones Mom used when embroidering fussy little flowers onto the corners of handkerchiefs and the hems of baby gowns and little wall tapestries with kitschy sayings on them. Seed stitch, long and short stitch, running stitch, and backstitch, and whipstitch, and French knots.

Sam found embroidery frustrating. It took too long, and she got impatient if her stitches weren’t even or didn’t turn out right or the hoop slipped. Mom didn’t care about that sort of thing. Her favourite part was picking out the colours. She’d pull out the little box: thick licks of thread twisted around spare bits of cardboard cut from cereal boxes, mixed in with a few bundles freshly purchased from the fabric store, still coiled neatly in their paper bands.

The box was an explosion of rainbows from which she would carefully select, drifting her twitching fingers over the surface until they shot down like a bird spying something on the ground. She’d lay out the strips, push them together in different combinations, delighting in the way things could morph and change so easily.

When she stitched, it was quick but not frenetic, smooth, even motions that put in Sam’s mind the word deftness. The pads of Mom’s fingers seemed to have extra nerve endings. Her hands danced across and around and beneath the hoop, facilitating the steady dipping of the needle, in and out, through and back. Punching through the weave of the cotton, proving its permeability.

The chicken was also permeable, though it didn’t look it. But stitching a chicken didn’t require the same tenderness as Mom’s shreds of cotton. There was no need to scrabble the tips of the fingers over the surface, quickly searching for the perfect spot, the certain looseness, where a network of threads would part to let you pass through. The chicken was a smooth mass; it was one thing, and one only, to be cut and rejoined cleanly. It needed to be spoken, not listened, to; touched firmly with a steady hand.

Charlotte, Sam’s roommate, threw it down on the table with a wet slap of frustration. “Yours is so perfect,” she moaned, and took a swig of beer.

“I think my stitches are too tight.”

“They’re so even.” Charlotte rolled her eyes. “How did you do that?”

Later, Sam dug a pillow out from the bottom of her closet. It didn’t match anything else she owned. It wore an embroidered cover: a garish sunflower crawling up from the bottom left corner.

She sat on her bed and traced her fingers slowly over the stitches. It seemed that what Sam lacked was a certain calm. Her mother’s carefree floatiness had birthed this sunny burst, which lay there gently, as it was meant to. Sam’s own tight stitches would have warped and pulled the fabric. It was the same with the chicken—it had puckered. The flesh squeezed together too tight, straining against the unwaxed thread.

Earlier tonight, when Sam hadn’t slept in only 25 hours, she’d watched Dr. Carrero sew the forehead of a little girl, thinking of chicken and sunflowers. Blood pooled everywhere, garish against the girl’s paleness, and the buzzing feeling growing at the base of Sam’s skull shifted something. Dr. Carrero’s hands were her mother’s hands. She saw that same flick of the wrist, the businesslike way fingers curled to draw thread through, quickly. She heard the muffled pop of needle through cotton, stretched tight as a drum. The needle pushed and then released, soft fingers with their crescent-moon nails reaching around to grasp it anew and gather it through the other side, more leading, guiding, than pulling.

Deftness, she thought.

But these fingers were large and round, straining against the surgical gloves. Not her mother’s hand, no. Dr. Carrero had hairy arms and a big gold watch that slid against his glove. He poked himself with the needle.

“Shit,” he muttered.

The illusion was broken, her mother’s phantom gone. Sam mopped some of the blood away so that Dr. Carrero could see where he was stitching.

It was different than chicken.

The first time Charlotte saw a resuscitation, she came home crying, shocked by the full-strength pounding of the chest, the rib-cracking, the sternum-snapping bluntness of it. She couldn’t stop looking at the patient’s face, she said. Char wanted to be a doctor because she was smart and she was sweet and kind. She wasn’t prepared for the violence of this type of kindness, the way saving a life sometimes looked like ending it until the very last second.

Sam, on the other hand, knew that details were the important part. In patients’ faces she saw their composite parts. The cuts and the clots and the areas of swelling and her mind began focusing in on each in turn. If you made sure the details were right, you could step back and see everything falling into place.

But the back of Mom’s embroidery had always been a mess, a vibrant tangle of knots and frayed threads looped around each other. Sam’s, in contrast, was a reverse image of the front of the hoop, like a photo negative, almost but not quite right.

If a stray knot appeared in the embroidery floss, clogging up the backside in a tangle of forest green, Sam threw the hoop with a yell, and then later, picked it back up and spent 20 minutes cutting and retying and unpicking thread. All the while, Mom, who at the time still had enough mobility to be languidly stitching a pink and orange calla lily into the corner of a pillowcase, kept telling her, “The back doesn’t need to look good.”

“I want it to be right,” Sam said.

Mom shook her head with a faint air of bewilderment, knotting a hot-pink strand of floss. She patted around the bed for her scissors and failing to find them, put the thread in her mouth and snapped it in two with her teeth. “It’s just there to hold everything together.”

Now, in the dark of the on-call room, Sam stretched her aching fingers against the coolness of the pillowcase, feeling for her mom’s handwork as though it might appear. What was it that Charlotte had said to her this morning, in that cloying voice that Sam recognized as pity? Don’t push yourself too much. People were always saying that to her, but look, here she was in a coffee-smelling tiny room in an underfunded hospital, and outside were hallways stacked on hallways, all leading to people who needed something. In a few hours, Sam knew, she would have to get up and splash cold water over her puffy eyes and go visit the girl with the forehead wound, the man whose appendix had ruptured on the operating table, the woman with the tumour throbbing deep in her abdomen.

She sighed and pulled the covers up to her chin, refusing to check the clock and confirm how few hours she had left to rest. Instead, she tried to remember what she had been stitching with her forest green thread that day when she’d been so frustrated by the knots. But the more she tried, the further the memory floated from her. All she remembered was that mess of threads, and the way it was all bound together: the tension of the hoop, the weave of the fabric, the taut loops of thread.

“Horror Movie Illustration” by Kaitlyn Haddlesey (Creative Commons)

Horror has always been a marginalized genre, a misunderstood, even reviled vehicle dismissed as a disgusting, juvenile playpen for amateur talents. When it does become popular—such as during the post-Hiroshima years, or Nixon’s tenure in the early seventies—it has a brief moment in the limelight before being relegated back to the shadows.

So why has horror become so popular in the last three years?

The real question is what are we currently scared of?

Some of horror’s current popularity comes from remakes and continuing franchises, such as It, The Conjuring, and Halloween; some of it comes from the emergence of fresh, effervescent voices that speak to our current reality. The scarier reality gets, the scarier our stories become, and our current political and social climate has conjured grim horrors, including racism, white nationalism, misogyny, greed, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, environmental destruction, Islamophobia, child abuse, and xenophobia.

In response to these fears, filmmakers such as Jordan Peele, Jeff Barnaby, and Issa López have produced excellent, stunningly crafted films. Peele’s Get Out brilliantly satirizes racist white liberals, while his second film Us underscores the plight of the disenfranchised in America. Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, the follow-up to his exquisite Rhymes for Young Ghouls, uses a zombie narrative to attack Canada’s devastating colonial structures. López’s gorgeous fable Tigers Are Not Afraid follows a group of young orphans in Mexico who face brutal treatment after their parents are murdered; the cruelty the children face echoes the horrifying treatment that immigrant children have endured at the hands of ice in the U.S.

These and other films not only frighten us; they enlighten us by giving us a vocabulary that allows us to articulate—and therefore confront—our fears. Naming the monsters is half the battle in defeating them. As an example, the Sunken Place from Get Out has become an ominous symbol for the oppression of Black people.

These films also comfort us. They dissect the horrors so we can safely study them through the comforting distance of the screen. To paraphrase Stephen King, we know that a movie will end, which gives us hope that the pain we experience in real life will end, too.

Mainstream movie studios such as Universal, Warner Bros., and New Line Cinema have been producing big-budget horror films with increasing regularity over the last few years. While horror has always been a stronghold for independent filmmakers—The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and The Blair Witch Project are but three prominent examples—seeing big studios take notice is encouraging. According to The Numbers, horror films have generated over $3 billion at the domestic box office between 2016 and 2019; 2017’s Get Out took in over $176 million alone. Many popular television shows, including American Horror Story, The Twilight Zone, The Walking Dead, and The Haunting of Hill House, also focus on scaring audiences.

While horror has always featured outcasts, such as Frankenstein’s monster and Jason Voorhees, these outcasts and the people telling their stories have predominately been white men. Horror stories have been around since the beginning of humankind, but mainstream films and television shows have only recently begun to feature racialized, LGBTQQAI2+, and Deaf and disabled artists.

The true purpose of horror is connection, the community we feel after sharing and working through our mutual fears. Horror is not just an entertaining means of dealing with what scares us; it provides the perfect vehicle for marginalized voices to tell their stories with all their visceral truth. There are no limits to a horror film, so there are no limits to the storytelling possibilities.

There is no guarantee that horror and the voices it promotes will permanently become prominent parts of our cultural landscape. But if we keep buying movie tickets and supporting these filmmakers, then maybe, at the very least, the conversations we have may shift just enough for our fears to diminish a little. We will always be afraid of something, but maybe we won’t be deathly, constantly, apocalyptically afraid.

“I had a flavour that was Fruit Loops in a gold and matte black carbon vape, and I was in Grade 9,” says Zach Samson (who asked that we use a pseudonym), a 19-year-old student at the University of Guelph. By Grade 10, Samson was a part of a group chat called “e-cigarettes” with over 100 other students in his high school in Oakville, Ontario. “We’d text: Hey, anybody going to the washroom now? And we’d all be linking up, vaping,” he says.

In 2003, pharmacist—and smoker—Hon Lik created the first commercially successful vape. Popular vape brand JUUL traces its origins back to two smokers who were seeking an alternative to cigarettes in 2005. Vape products have been in Canada since at least 2004, but e-cigarettes containing nicotine were only legalized and regulated at the federal level in May 2018.

Roughly 4.9 million Canadians are smokers and vape companies position themselves as a safer alternative to cigarettes. “JUUL is for adult smokers only who are looking to switch off combustible cigarettes,” says Lisa Hutniak, director of communications, JUUL Labs Canada. “Vaping products, including JUUL, are not intended for youth or non-smokers.” While the World Health Organization stated in 2008 that it does not consider e-cigarettes a legitimate smoking cessation aid, the federal government is considering letting e-cigarette companies promote the health benefits of their products.

Dr. David Hammond at the University of Waterloo led a study of vaping habits amongst Canadians 16 to 19 years old. Alarmingly, from 2017 to 2018, the rate of teen vaping shot up by 74 percent. If vape products are designed to help smokers quit cigarettes, how is it that the rates of vaping among youth are increasing? Let’s start with a little history.

When asked just how young a customer the tobacco company R.J. Reynolds was prepared to target, an executive is known to have said, “They got lips? We want them.”

Big tobacco companies are the old guard in the nicotine market. Joe Camel, Popeye’s pipe, even candy cigarettes. It’s easy to argue the tobacco industry was blatant in making their products appeal to children. In one study from 1991, six-year-olds were as familiar with Joe Camel as they were Mickey Mouse. The tobacco industry aided in the design of cigarette candy products.

Tobacco companies marketed smoking to teenagers as an illicit pleasure, a rite of passage. “A cigarette for the beginner is a symbolic act. I am no longer my mother’s child, I’m tough, I am an adventurer, I’m not square…” a 1969 draft report to the board of directors of Philip Morris stated.

For decades, the industry understood “if our company is to survive and prosper, over the long term we must get our share of the youth market…” And tobacco companies, like R. J. Reynolds, profiled their young adult franchise as being as young as 14 years old. Tobacco companies knew that “today’s teenager is tomorrow’s potential regular customer.”

“These guys have been in the drug business for a couple of hundred years now and they’re pretty good at it,” says Damian O’Hara, a smoking cessation specialist from Ontario.

Samson says, “You could be the biggest loser, but if you had a really nice vape, filled with good juice, and one of the popular kids was out of vape, they’d be hanging out with you.” Samson was just 12 when he tried vaping for the first time and says by the age of 14, he was addicted. “Vaping came out of nowhere,” says Samson. “Your parents didn’t know any better because it’s not like you’re smoking a cigarette in bed.” Eliza Balkwill, an occasional vape user, echoes this. “It was huge when I was in high school,” says the 19-year-old student at Mount Royal University in Calgary. “[People vaped] in class, the parking lot, bathroom, parties—pretty much everywhere.” She says the teens were addicted to high-nicotine vapes (like JUUL), as they produced little smoke and were discrete. “Vaping is associated with the party lifestyle,” says Balkwill.

But according to O’Hara, who is a former heavy smoker, marketing addictive drugs to young people is a long-worn path for the tobacco industry. “To position vaping in any other way than a very deliberate ploy to get young people addicted to nicotine is incredibly naive,” he says. He adds the caveat that vape companies do promote vaping as a way for cigarette smokers to stop smoking tobacco.

It’s not a hard leap to make when you realize how much the tobacco industry has invested in vape companies. Altria Group, one of the world’s largest producers and marketers of tobacco and tobacco-related products acquired a 35 percent stake in JUUL. vuse is owned by R.J. Reynolds Vapor Company. Another popular brand, Vype, is owned by British American Tobacco (bat). After all, this is an industry that has long understood what they’re really selling. In 1971, a scientist at Philip Morris stated, “The product is nicotine … think of the cigarette pack as a storage container for a day’s supply of nicotine.”

“The same [tobacco industry] who brought you doctors in the ‘50s telling you smoking was good for you, are now promoting e-cigarettes as a way to quit smoking,” says Marvin Krank, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. In the early days of JUUL a lot of the marketing was nakedly targeted to young people in the U.S., O’Hara explains. “Not just with the flavours, but the specific imagery they were using in their Instagram posts.” JUUL’s early advertising featured bold colours and youthful models. A white paper by the Stanford University School of Medicine from January 2019 studied JUUL’s marketing campaign from 2015 to 2018. It concluded JUUL “has achieved a cult level of popularity among school-aged adolescents.”

In Canada, the federal government allows for the promotion of vaping products on TV, radio, billboards, in newspapers, on social media, and other mainstream media, according to Heart & Stroke Canada. Recently, however, the Ontario government proposed to ban the promotion of vaping products in gas stations and convenience stores. JUUL didn’t hit the Canadian market until September 2018 and Hutniak says their company has only run two marketing campaigns since then. But it was already a fait accompli. In a short time, according to the CBC, JUUL has captured a staggering 78 percent of the Canadian market.

“Despite the fact that smoking would be uncool, vaping can be Vype or Vuse,” says O’Hara. “It’s about the semiotics as well as the look and feel of the products.” The look includes huge, remote-controlled, hand-held vapes. “All this cool technology— they were clearly hitting our demographic,” says Samson.

“Vape stores aren’t full of old smokers looking to quit, they’re full of young kids looking for new flavours and new experiences,” says O’Hara. At 180 Smoke Vape Store on Queen Street West in Toronto, vape products are displayed like products would be in an Apple Store. The VOOPOO Drag is one product that looks more like a work of art than an e-cigarette— and with a price to match. Each vape product is uniquely decorated with a marbled effect reminiscent of a petrol slick. VOOPOO’s selling feature is no two are the same, and there’s even a side panel where you can program your vape with a ticker-tape message. “Vaping is a whole bougie thing,” says Samson. “It’s the new generation of wanting to flash money and that was part of it.”

But vape companies aren’t containing themselves to brick-and-mortar stores. Vype teamed up with British rapper Tinie Tempah for their pop-up in London in 2016 and the company attempted a pop-up operation in Toronto’s Dundas Square in April 2019 before it was shut down by Health Canada for contravening the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act. Vype also had a free-standing display on King Street West in Toronto. With its black frame filled in with large green plants and roped-off entrance, it looked more like the entry point to an art installation.

Vape companies have also been called out for creating e-juice flavours that blatantly appeal to teens. Vype’s display in the Queen Street West store (180 Smoke) could be mistaken for a Nespresso display and their flavours include dark cherry, ripe mango, classic peach, and fresh apple. Further in the vape store are a collection of flavours to sample—including Sparkling Blueberry Lemonade and Banana Oatmeal. Heart & Stroke Canada points the finger at federal law, which not only allows for the promotion of vaping products, but also allows the manufacturing of attractive flavours that entice youth. “We did some research with Grade 9 and 10 students,” explains Krank, “and when you asked what flavours they’re using, the vast majority are fruit or candy flavours.” Online, teenagers are being seduced with packaging. The branding on some e-juice containers, which contain nicotine and flavourings mixed with propylene glycol, resembles Sour Patch Kids or Warheads’ design. And some of the e-juice flavours will literally make you feel like a kid in a candy store: caramel apple, Sweet-ish Berries, cotton candy, blue freezie, glazed donuts.

Colorado-based Vaprwear markets its “gear—with a higher purpose” with young models who look more like they’re heading to their Grade 11 chemistry class than the office. “They’re selling a hoodie now,” says Krank. “The string is connected to an e-cigarette which can be sucked through what looks like a string—making it easily hidden.”

It’s self-evident that teenagers now live their lives online in a way previous generations didn’t. “The beauty of tobacco marketing or guerilla marketing to young people is once you have seeded the thought and encouraged others to share it, it can run out of control really fast,” O’Hara explains.

Look up #vapetricks and you’ll see more than five million posts on Instagram and a staggering 200 million views on TikTok, a social media app for creating short lip-sync or talent videos that is especially popular with teenagers. “Vape culture is undeniable,” says Samson. Instead of practising smoke rings in front of the bedroom mirror with a Benson & Hedges cigarette, on YouTube you’ll find tutorials on how to perfect the ghost, the dragon, and the vape bubble—where the vapour is literally trapped inside a soap bubble.

Online, vape culture is badass, rebellious, cool. It’s also virtually impossible to monitor. There isn’t much to stop a 12- or 13-year-old from following these influencers on social media. JUUL shut down their social media accounts at the end of 2018, following an fda announcement that it would investigate vape companies, and JUUL Labs Canada say they have no social media presence in Canada. But other vape companies do. Vype Canada has an Instagram account that largely markets their products. VOOPOO has over 420,000 followers on their Instagram account, and their most recent posts include a vaping elephant, guys flexing their guns (and their vapes), and a vape duel between two young men for the affections of a girl.

Samson says Supreme Patty and the Nelk Boys from Canada are influential online channels. On the Nelk Boys’ Instagram account there are pranks where they aggressively vape in peoples’ faces or vape to impress a girl in front of her boyfriend. “Everybody my age follows them, and they’ll promote the vape culture in general.” But not all vape influencers are male. Zophie Vapes has 106,000 followers on Instagram, where she reviews products and hosts giveaways. O’Hara points out in the past tobacco companies like Philip Morris once had huge marketing budgets. “But now your customers advertise for you. It’s cheap as chips,” he says.

“It got so bad that I’d leave my vape charging overnight and turn my head over in the morning to take a hit, so my muscles would instantly feel better,” says Samson. “In the area of research, we talk about nicotine being as hard a drug to get off as heroin,” explains Krank. “It might have started as a trend, but now people are addicted.”

With professional help, Samson was able to break up with nicotine. “It was so crazy to think I was that addicted as a 40-a-day smoker at such a young age,” he says.

But there could be a whole generation of Canadian teens who won’t be so lucky. “There is a robust association between vaping and smoking,” says Hammond. “Kids who vape first are more likely to smoke.” However, Hammond explains the association isn’t causal: kids who engage in one form of risky behaviour are more likely to engage in another.

At the time of writing, four vaping-related illnesses have been reported in Canada, three in Quebec and another in Ontario, while according to Reuters, there have been more than 2,290 vaping-related illnesses and 47 related deaths in the U.S. “This is only the acute effects,” says Krank. “No one has studied the long-term effects.” “Kids were oblivious to the effects of vaping and used it because it was fun,” says Balkwill. However, the Calgary student has noticed friends cutting back or getting rid of their vapes following the reported health issues.

Make no mistake, vaping is big business. At the time of writing, according to the Financial Post sales from industry in Canada were projected to hit $895 million in 2019. “If you’re in a business where six million customers around the world are dying every year, you need fresh meat,” says O’Hara. “And that comes via vaping.” It would be highly beneficial for these companies if their customers started smoking, because smoking is staggeringly more profitable. Vaping has been referred to as “cigarettes on training wheels,” and it seems there could be some legitimacy to O’Hara’s prediction. Hammond says the prevalence of cigarette smoking has been declining among Canadian youth for several decades, but his study found that cigarette smoking among 16- to 19-year-olds has already increased by 45 percent from 2017 to 2018.

Which is ironic, given Lik, who has been called “the Godfather of Vape” created the first e-cigarette so he wouldn’t die from a smoking-related disease like his father and then sold his patent off to Imperial Tobacco.

Updates:

In December, Health Canada announced plans to ban all forms of e-cigarette advertising that could be seen by young people, including in public and on social media.

In January 2020, Juul Labs Canada announced it will temporarily stop producing some of their flavoured e-cigarette pods, including mango, vanilla, fruit, and cucumber flavoured e-cigarette pods. The company will continue to produce mint and tobacco flavoured pods, but could reintroduce the other flavoured pods under the guidance of Health Canada. On April 1, 2020, Nova Scotia will become the first province to ban the sale of all flavoured e-cigarette products.

The first vaping-associated lung illness was reported in Alberta in January 2020. As of February 11, 2020, 17 cases of vaping-associated lung illness have now been reported to the Public Health Agency of Canada.

I am tired of the narrative of the Empowered Muslim Woman. I find it exhausting.

As a visibly Muslim woman, a large portion of my daily life involves attending to a strange kind of image management. I’m aware of the stereotypes that might fill the air when I walk into a room, so I take it upon myself to disprove them. Stereotype-disproving is an undercurrent of my day, embedded in my way of thinking. It’s almost like I work as an unpaid PR agent for my community as I interact with the “outside world.” Through my work, activism, and persona, I demonstrate that Muslim women are not oppressed—that we are, in fact, empowered.

This work is never-ending, but that is not why I am exhausted by it. What has drained me to the point of despair is the feeling of being trapped in a black-and-white conversation that doesn’t ring true. The binary of “Muslim women are strong and empowered” versus “Muslim women are weak and oppressed” doesn’t reflect the nuance or complexity of real women’s lives. Of course it doesn’t. And yet these two opposing narratives about Muslim women are cycled back and forth in a never-ending stream of simplistic sound bites. I, too, have offered these kinds of sound bites in response to harmful stereotypes and far-right rhetoric I’ve encountered, as if I am reading off talking points provided to me by an anti- Islamophobia marketing team designed to improve the brand of Muslim Women and Girls.

And I am tired of it.

My stereotype-busting-Muslim-girl PR job started in 1995. My first day of Grade 6 was also my first day wearing hijab to school, and I was the only kid in my central Toronto elementary school who did so at the time. When I walked into the classroom with my head covered that day, my teacher asked me to stand up and explain my hijab to the rest of the class. I remember sweating as I described the meaning of hijab to my classmates to the best of my 12-year-old ability, trying to ensure that they all understood that wearing hijab was my choice—that I was empowered. By that age, I knew all too well the stereotypes that circulated about Muslims: that we were terrorists, that we were backwards, and—the gendered stereotype most relevant to me—that Muslim women and girls were oppressed, helpless, victims.

It was my job to disprove those ideas—and disprove I did, for many years.

Throughout middle school and high school, disproving gendered Islamophobic stereotypes was easy for me, because my natural interests and passions went against dominant expectations for Muslim women and girls. I was loud and outspoken in my classes, sharing many opinions about the books we were assigned and engaging in fiery debates about current events. I played basketball and soccer with the boys at lunch and after school, and joined the girls’ rugby team, relishing rolling around in the dirt and fighting hard to score a try (the rugby term for “touchdown”) in tournaments. Yet although I presented an assertive, athletic image, there were nonetheless areas of my life where I didn’t feel strength; where I felt frightened, vulnerable and—dare I say—disempowered. But I couldn’t share those feelings. There was no space for them. They were stuffed down for the sake of maintaining the strong image I felt compelled to uphold. The task of shattering Islamophobic stereotypes felt most urgent to me, and so it took priority.

I was not alone in choosing this priority. Muslim communities in Canada, and in the West in general, have a lot invested in challenging the stereotype of the “oppressed Muslim woman”—a figure that haunts the colonial imagination and fuels immeasurable harm against Muslim communities. Indeed, the single, stereotyped story about Muslim women isn’t just personally hurtful; it is weaponized against Muslim communities across the globe. The image of the “oppressed Muslim woman” has been used to justify the colonization of Muslim-majority countries and even to justify imperial wars. For example, the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was in large part justified to the public through the idea of liberating the Muslim women who lived there. Yet more than 38,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion, including the very same Muslim women that the invasion was promising to save.

In addition to these global impacts, the stereotype of the “oppressed Muslim woman” also fuels violence against Muslim women living here in Canada. In 2016, I carried out a study with Muslim women survivors of Islamophobic violence for my master’s thesis. In this study, I spoke with 21 Muslim women across the Greater Toronto Area. Collectively, these women told me about over 30 incidents of violence they were targeted for because of their Muslim identity. These incidents included attempted murder, physical assault, sexual assault, and verbal harassment. Several participants told me that they believed they were targeted for this hate-motivated violence because of the stereotype that Muslim women are passive, demure, and oppressed. As one participant said, “the idea that Muslim women are weak, they can’t speak up, they’re subdued, they’re scared, they’re oppressed, and somehow we have to liberate them, makes us ‘easy targets.’” Many other participants echoed similar sentiments: they believed that their attackers were motivated by the belief that Muslim women are oppressed; in their minds, since Muslim women were already “damaged goods,” this made it okay to perpetrate violence against them.

In light of how central the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman is to Islamophobia, and how it fuels violence against Muslims, it makes sense that I, and so many others, set ourselves about the task of disproving this harmful narrative. Progressive media outlets trying to support this cause sometimes try to rehabilitate the image of Muslim women by featuring triumphant stories about Muslim women athletes, politicians, engineers, scientists, activists, and soldiers; these articles are then shared by well-intentioned people in the hopes of poking holes in what sometimes feels like an immutable and fixed story about Muslim women’s helplessness.

See? We collectively declare through these stereotype-shattering stories. Muslim women are not oppressed. They are empowered!

Don’t get me wrong: these kinds of stories are vital, and myth-busting is important work. After all, we are living in a time of rampant and growing Islamophobia in Canada and across the globe. It has been troubling to witness how the spread of white supremacist ideologies and the political scapegoating of Muslims and refugees have whipped up a new far-right white nationalist identity in Canada. Indeed, the far-right uses talking points regarding Muslim women’s oppression to argue that Muslims don’t belong in the West, and to push for closing our borders to refugees and immigrants. And as this kind of anti-Muslim rhetoric has been spreading, there has been a parallel precipitous rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes, not the least of which was the massacre at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City on January 29, 2017, which left six Muslim men dead and injured 19 others. We’ve also seen Bill 21 pass in Quebec, which targets Muslim women (and other religious minorities) by banning people from wearing religious symbols if they want to be hired to teach in a classroom or engage in other public service jobs.

In this hostile social and political environment, it is vital to dismantle the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman. But in doing so, we risk erasing and dismissing Muslim women and girls who don’t serve this goal: those who aren’t breaking barriers and whose lives don’t provide a compelling counterpoint to the far right’s rhetoric. What’s more, by fixating on shattering stereotypes, we can get stuck in a reactionary and defensive mode, clinging to slogans instead of responding to nuance and complexity. We risk becoming PR agents when what is needed is thoughtful conversation and truth.

The truth is that Muslim women in Canada are neither inherently oppressed nor empowered, whatever each of those terms mean. Just like everyone else, Muslim women’s lives are full of both good and bad, and contain messy contradictions. Some are survivors of Islamophobic hate crimes. Others are survivors of abuse within their families and communities. Some fall in love with the hijab and wear it out of choice. Others are pressured or coerced to do so. Some grow up to become doctors or political leaders and are celebrated by their communities. Others struggle with addictions and need support. I personally know Muslim women who have been through all of these things at different points in their lives. Just like any other real, three-dimensional human beings, our lives are not caricatures that fit into neat boxes, whether those boxes be far-right stereotypes or progressive stereotype-disproving. Yet as Muslim women live out their real, multi-faceted lives, many still feel the pressure to tell a single, hyper-empowered story about themselves in order to keep up appearances and combat Islamophobia.

Perhaps the most significant tension lies in situations of gender-based violence and abuse. Abuse happens across all communities, and Muslim communities are no exception—we are no more prone to abuse than other communities, nor are we immune to it. Yet when Muslim women survivors of abuse come forward, and if the perpetrator is also Muslim, the entire community is stigmatized as barbaric and the survivors’ stories risk being co-opted to fuel racist agendas. Muslim women survivors aren’t afforded the benefit of being seen as individual women who were targeted by violent men; instead, their abuse story is racialized and generalized to the entire community. See? They’re all like that.

In this way, Islamophobia makes talking about abuse harder for Muslim women. Because of this fraught dynamic, many Muslim women who are survivors of abuse choose to remain silent. Those who do come forward often have to walk a tightrope: they face the prospect of their abuse story being used to demonize their entire community and further Islamophobic policies and violence against Muslims. At the same time, they face potential backlash from abusers and enablers within the Muslim community, who may accuse them of bringing further stigma to the community by coming forward with their truth.

Muslim women survivors of violence are not alone in feeling silenced because of systemic discrimination. Last January, jaye simpson, an Oji-Cree Saulteaux non-binary Two-Spirit trans woman, wrote in GUTS magazine that they would not name abusers within Indigenous communities because they are “not willing to provide a blade for non-Indigenous people to use to cut us.” Similarly, Lindsay Nixon, a Cree-Métis-Saulteaux writer, wrote in the Walrus in December 2018 that they have “held secrets for Indigenous men for years, fearful of the repercussions that might result if I told those truths.” For Nixon, those potential repercussions include Canadian settlers and administrators painting their whole community as “corrupt Indians with troubled communities who can’t, and don’t deserve the right to, manage our resources.” These are high stakes, placing enormous pressure on survivors to keep secrets. Nixon and simpson’s pieces demonstrate that a broader conversation needs to happen in Canada around how colonialism and racism contribute to silencing Indigenous survivors of abuse.

Survivors from Muslim communities are also speaking out and writing about the impossible dilemma that systemic racism and discrimination places them in. In February 2018, Nour Naas, a Muslim American woman whose mother was killed by her father after years of domestic abuse, wrote a personal essay for The Establishment in February 2018, in which she shared that “Islamophobia informed my mother’s silence, and mine.” She drew a clear link to Islamophobia as a barrier for Muslim women who want to speak up about abuse they are living with. “If Muslim women are to be vocal about their abuse,” Naas wrote, “the inimical culture of Islamophobia cannot exist.”

Thanks to the voices of Naas and others, I believe that the tide is turning within Muslim communities in North America. Last August, in a landmark case in the U.S., Imam Zia ul-Haque Sheikh of the Islamic Center of Irving was ordered to pay $2.5 million to Jane Doe, whom he groomed through a counselling relationship from the age of 13 and allegedly sexually coerced after she turned 18. Facing Abuse in Community Environments, a Muslim women-led non-profit organization aimed at holding abusive Muslim religious leaders accountable, discovered that prior to this incident, Zia ul-Haque Sheikh had been fired from other mosques due to his inappropriate conduct with Muslim women. Jane Doe’s fight demonstrates that powerful members of the community can be held accountable and that religiosity should not be used as a shield for abusers.

In light of Nour Naas and Jane Doe’s stories, I hope that a new narrative of Muslim women’s empowerment will emerge: one that doesn’t require hiding or denying abuse that occurs in Muslim families and communities in order to break stereotypes and combat far-right propaganda. I hope that leaders and influencers within Muslim communities in Canada and the U.S. will realize that we can hold abusers in our communities accountable, while fighting systemic Islamophobia. We don’t need to respond to far-right sound bites with oversimplified sound bites of our own. Indeed, putting the onus on Muslim women and girls to disprove stereotypes by insisting that they are Empowered has consequences. It subtly tells Muslim women and girls who are living with abuse or oppression that their stories are not welcome.

I hope that one day, Muslim women and girls who are living with abuse can come forward without fearing how their story will be used, or what the impact will be on their already-targeted community. I also hope that our society at large will begin to see through the tactics of the far-right when they co-opt Muslim women’s stories of abuse in order to fuel racist and xenophobic agendas.

Most of all, I hope that the day arrives where Muslim women and girls don’t have to prove that we are Empowered at all. That we can all resign from the job of PR agents, and just live out our regular lives, with all of their messy contradictions, and figure things out for ourselves.

PHOTO BY KAREN MILLS

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

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

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

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

It isn’t all awards and donations, however.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Smile! You’re on fare evader camera.” Such is the message of the Toronto Transit Commission’s (TTC) ad campaign, which was rolled out in May 2019. The campaign follows a scandal that broke a few months earlier, when Toronto’s auditor general released a report estimating that the TTC had lost upwards of $60 million from fare evasion. It inspired an entire genre of articles that focus on describing the different ways that people manage to skip fares, often including photos and videos as public shaming. The bottom line is: your fellow riders, unlike you, are riding for free— and you’re paying the price.

Both the report and the ad campaign sparked their own iterations of an age-old debate: whose fault is it when public transit fails? The question pokes at a bruise: transit has long been a comically sore spot for Torontonians, who’ve been waiting for a much-promised relief line, intended to provide an alternative to the city’s overflowing Yonge line, since before the city’s first subway route was built in 1954. The transit system is so bad and frequently delayed that transit delays have practically become a part of Torontonian identity—but Canada’s largest metropolis isn’t alone in the issue.

As it turns out, Torontonians’ transit grievances are not only older than transit itself, but also endemic to Canada’s national approach to public transit. Overcrowded trains, late buses, crumbling infrastructure, and infinitely delayed construction projects seem to be recurring problems for Canadian cities. Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Winnipeg all have the same symptoms—and the fare-evasion rhetoric to go with it.

What Canadian transit woes have in common is a substantial lack of federal funding and supervision. When funding is earmarked for public transit, it is usually earmarked for the broader issue of infrastructure—a term which means the money may go toward public transit, but may also go toward building or maintaining highways, meaning that local transit commissions still have to fight for their share of the funding. Cities throughout Canada are facing the same problems and symptoms, because they are facing the systematic issue that Canada’s transit economy is built for cars and private transportation—but they are having to face it alone. That leaves transit planning to municipal and provincial governments, making transit funding a deeply partisan issue that depends on the election cycle.

Toronto’s relief line has been the subject of so many different proposals, many of them tied to elections, that they’ve been compiled into a book. The most recent iteration of these antics is Premier Doug Ford’s decision to shelve the line altogether in favour of a different route that would conveniently take riders all the way to a casino he would build in an already accessible and scarcely populated neighbourhood. (The casino plan has since been scrapped.)

There have been additions, even in recent years, like the UP Express connecting Toronto’s downtown to the airport, which originally flopped and then became a commuter success after slashing its fare in half. But even so, the system is failing to keep up with the city’s rapid population growth, leaving large areas sorely underserved. Poorer neighbourhoods receive substantially less service, leading to substantially longer, more stressful, and overcrowded commutes. This substantial burden makes transit least accessible to those who need it the most. When Presto, the Greater Toronto Area’s (GTA) universal transit access card that the province began rolling out in 2007 in an effort to make public transit more seamless, first started selling discounted fares for low-income people tied to Ontario’s disability programme, they found that half of those passes went entirely unused because it was very difficult to access.

Inaccessibility is perhaps theTTC’s most important problem, but it’s not its only one. Public transit advocates like TTC riders point towards aging infrastructure as one of many causes of the system’s frequent and long delays, which have been estimated to cost the city between $7 and $11 billion in productivity—including wages for people who weren’t able to work as many hours as they had planned. New infrastructure is also a problem: the Presto card is now infamously prone to glitches. The cards frequently fail to function, leaving riders no choice but to evade fares or let their bus leave without them. The system continues to grow more expensive to the province, which has now spent well upwards of $1 billion trying to implement it.

Despite these issues, the public service has only become more expensive: the monthly metropass was among the five most expensive in the world as of 2017, and its cost has only gone up since then. As the cost of transit becomes accessible to fewer and fewer people, the TTC ad campaign pulls on a lot of heartstrings: the TTC runs mostly on fare collection, and so the $60 million loss is an important cause of the system’s shortcomings. “I hear from residents daily who are frustrated by the cost of fare evasion,” TTC Chair Jaye Robinson says on the TTC website. “Riders who choose not to pay their fares are impacting our ability to deliver transit service to the entire city.”

But Robinson’s approach, which is endlessly recycled for clickbait articles, individualizes a systemic problem. TheTTC has the third biggest ridership of any North American transit system, yet it receives the least amount of subsidies, relying almost entirely on fares to continue functioning. Experts have for years pointed to this fact as the starting point for the vicious cycle by which low-quality service begets increased fare and vice-versa.

To say that these frustrations have gone entirely unanswered would be wrong: many transit systems have responded to the increasingly popular gripes with fare evasions through increased penalties. Toronto has recently hired more fare inspectors. Montreal is seeing widespread calls for a comprehensive audit and an increase in fare inspectors to go along with it. Transit coverage in Vancouver frequently follows the same path.

This goes hand-in-hand with coverage of the transit crisis that puts the blame on fare evasions, like an article on CityNews Calgary that points towards fare evaders “cheating” the transit system. With this kind of coverage, the blame for a systemic issue on a national scale that has been shifted onto provincial and municipal governments gets shifted even further onto individuals.

It also ignores a core purpose of public transit: to provide mobility, and thus access to healthcare, work, education, and other facets of life, to those who don’t use private transportation.

Advocates oppose raising fares and resent the increased funding allocated to fare inspection. A fine in Toronto can cost a whopping $425; in Vancouver, where fare evasion fines have been found to put youth in debt, you’d be looking at $173. In both cases, critics have pointed out, fare evasion will cost you more than a parking violation.

Increased policing in transit has been a controversial move, as it also increases opportunities for police brutality. This was the subject of the mass transit protest in New York in October 2019. It puts people of colour at a higher risk of encountering police brutality; it actively punishes people who can’t afford the fare but need to commute, thus making medical appointments, work, and other necessities even less accessible. At the same time, it spends money on fare inspectors’ salaries that could instead be put toward making the system more accessible.

And this is if the fare collection system works: for Canada’s showy but often-glitchy fare cards, that’s not a guarantee, and people throughout the country often find themselves facing fines after having already paid the fare.

“Municipalities don’t have that many options for [public transit] funding, unfortunately, under our system,” former Vancouver chief planner Brent Toderian told the Globe and Mail about the city’s 2015 vote on a 0.5 percent increase in tax sales to cover transportation infrastructure renewal. This “last-ditch attempt,” as the Globe and Mail called it, at giving TransLink, the authority responsible for transportation in Metro Vancouver, a functioning budget, was overwhelmingly rejected. The only other option to provide more funding, a hike in property taxes, was, again in the Globe and Mail’s words, “politically unsavoury” for the incumbent mayor.

In 2015, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities requested that Ottawa grant Canadian cities at least $1 billion in the yearly budget earmarked for new infrastructure spending. In 2017, their request was granted— a sure victory for city mayors, but not necessarily for transit advocates.

“There was this consensus that the majority of transportation planning and funding should be oriented toward accommodating more cars,” Victoria Transport Policy Institute director Todd Litman told the cbc. “What it boils down to is that it’s much easier for local governments to get funding for a highway improvement or new bridge than it is for a public transit project, even if public transit is the more rational investment.”

Public transportation is an investment that often requires a lot of money up front, and a lot of time to build before people can see the results—less traffic, faster and less stressful commutes, easier access to neighbourhoods throughout the city. What Canada’s lack of a federal public transportation policy does is pin this deeply necessary but controversial issue on municipal and provincial governments, allowing for it to be taken hostage by local party politics.

The poverty-shaming rhetoric that a lot of fare evasion clickbait adopts feeds into this. It pits people who use public transit and those whose interest it is to improve public transit and make it more accessible to all against each other. It makes the failure of public transit systems seem like an individual failure, a moral failure on the part of those who can’t pay their way. It ensures that Canadians continue dealing with chronic public transit underfunding simply by isolating cities and people from one another and pretending the shortcoming is personal rather than systemic.

Illustration by Roger Allen

My first restaurant job was also my last. It was a three-month stint that passed by in a blur of cutlery roll ups, tedious small-talk, and barely-there tips.

Like many jobs in the food service sector, my shifts were long and ran late, and my hourly pay was well below minimum wage. Breaks were unheard of, but alcohol was free flowing, which contributed to a volatility that was heavily ingrained amongst the male-dominated management and kitchen staff. It was your run-of-the-mill misogyny: crass comments about the attractiveness of the servers, tales of sexual exploits relayed with bravado, and compliments about my performance, which felt more like unwelcome advances. I quit before realizing how normalized my experience was.

The reputation of the restaurant industry precedes it. In 2000 American chef Anthony Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, giving readers a glimpse into the chaotic, charged, and oftentimes unsavoury inner workings of his world. In addition to likening his work to military combat, Bourdain describes the heavy drinking, casual drugs, and even more casual sex that punctuated his career. Following Bourdain’s memoir, the insidious nature of restaurant work entered into the public eye in no uncertain terms.

According to information released by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration in 2015, the restaurant industry in the U.S. ranks third highest for heavy alcohol consumption and highest for rates of illicit drug use and substance use disorders, compared to all other industries surveyed. A 2018 study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology indicates that tipped workers are more vulnerable to depression, insomnia, and stress, compared to their untipped and non-service counterparts. Analysis via the National Women’s Law Center reveals that sexual-harassment complaints filed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by accommodation and food services workers outnumber all other industries.

There are a number of factors at play here: the precarity, the fast pace, and the hierarchical nature of service work can contribute to poor work-life balance, sometimes leading to burnout and high turnover. For women employed in the male-dominated industry, the status quo yields cautionary tales in droves.

In 2015, Toronto restaurateur Jen Agg spoke out on social media about the problematic patriarchy in the restaurant business. She was spurred by the story of Toronto pastry chef Kate Burnham, who filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal following allegations that she experienced daily and unrelenting sexual harassment in the kitchen of the restaurant Weslodge. The allegations inspired Agg to create a conference called Kitchen Bitches: Smashing the Patriarchy One Plate at a Time. In 2016, Agg published a book, I Hear She’s a Real Bitch, and in 2017 a scathing op-ed for the New Yorker, both of which called out the rampant misogyny in the restaurant industry.

Mental health in the restaurant industry has long since reached a crisis point—and though evidence to this end is largely anecdotal, Canada is not exempt. According to Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey, Canada’s restaurant industry employs 1.2 million people. Of that, 42 percent are aged 24 and under. Statistics Canada’s most recent Mental Health Survey reveals that young Canadians between the ages of 15 and 24 are the most vulnerable to mental health or addiction issues.

In 2016, Edmonton chefs Cory Rakowski, Dan Letourneau, and Stuart Whyte inaugurated Food for Thoughts, an event meant to promote awareness about mental health in the hospitality sector. Food for Thoughts has since become a free monthly support group for hospitality workers. And it’s in good company. In 2017, restaurant veterans Hassel Aviles and Ariel Coplan co-founded Not 9 to 5: a Canadian organization focused on mental health and addiction in the hospitality, food, and beverage industry.

More recently, the #FairKitchens movement has garnered momentum in America and Canada. Launched in 2018, #FairKitchens provides training kits across North America and encourages restaurant leadership to talk to employees about depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. 2018 also marked the establishment of In The Weeds, a movement that supports positive mental health in Edmonton’s hospitality community, and Order’s Up, which was launched in Ottawa to provide local food and beverage workers an anonymous avenue to report sexual intimidation, harassment, and assault.

The restaurant industry is in the thick of its bad rap. To its credit, it’s more inclusive than most, accepting everyone from people who have been incarcerated to students to fledgling creatives, like I was. Working in the industry may not have been a positive experience for me, but it did afford me the financial freedom to pursue my creative career. I wish the tradeoff hadn’t been my mental well-being.

Mental health in the industry has been something of an elephant in the room, but the more it’s talked about, the more it can be addressed. I hope, as the industry continues to grow, awareness, education, and formalized protocols will give way to a safer space for the millions who work hard and deserve better.

THIS & THAT

After the break-up, I walked Yonge St. at night.

I didn’t understand this compulsion, but the circuit remained the same: a few drinks at a village bar and I would wander the corridor between Bloor and Dundas, peering into closed stores or sleepy bars, stopping in at a late-night bookshop to peruse the dusty shelves and eavesdrop on the surly owner’s conversations with customers, habitually thumbing through texts on my phone.

The segment of Yonge I’d chosen was unremarkable—a mishmash of architectural styles, occupied by chain restaurants and convenience stores, seedy enough to attract unsavoury characters and containing a fraction of the nightlife of hipper sections of town. But I liked it—it felt lived-in, like neighbourhoods in Montreal or New York, where converted spaces and faded signage were a source of pride, evidence of civic durability. Nearby businesses like the House of Lords salon had catered to generations of shaggy, misguided teens, while strip clubs Zanzibar and the Brass Rail stood on either end of the street, like neon bookends.

And in the middle of all of this was the decaying clock tower of St. Charles Tavern, one of the city’s earliest and most notorious gay bars, where drag queens paraded on Halloween night in the 1970s, pelted with eggs by jeering crowds. Once a fire hall, it was now a games store with bright yellow signs advertising discount prices on superhero figurines.

I would go as far as my feet would take me, then head home, only to return a few nights later to do it all over again. A comforting cycle. A routine, of sorts.

My ex-partner Mark and I also had routines, when things were working. If the weather was nice, we would climb the steep stairs of his old-but-affordable Chinatown brownstone and take his dog through the university campus, stopping for a quick drink at a pub we liked because it was queer-friendly and staffed mostly by artists. It was there, under the smoky red lanterns, that he had grasped my hands when I received word of my mother’s heart attack, tucking himself into me. He told me he wasn’t going anywhere. His words buoyed me.

On the weekends, we made our pilgrimage to Honest Ed’s, all labyrinthine stairwells and tacky signage. Filling our baskets with vitamins and tchotchkes, we’d pose for playful photographs in front of the dated theatre posters or mirrored displays, one of them with massive pink text: welcome to yesterday. Mark made obscene gestures I’d only discover later while swiping through my phone. “That was the whole point of the photo,” he’d tease.

At night, when the spirit would take us, we’d head to Zipperz, a gay piano bar with a club tucked behind a velvet curtain. It was like something out of a David Lynch film, with its cheap drinks, show tunes, and a large plaster torso and buttocks on either side of the entrance. The bar attracted a clientele older than us by a generation, but one that was more mixed and less pretentious than at other village haunts. Mark loved it and the owner loved him. There, dancing on a chrome floor that was often slick from beer, we’d tangle together, between the bodies and beneath the lights, three decades of music washing over us.

On our way home, we’d stumble drunkenly past that same clock tower above the old St. Charles, trying to imagine walking the circuit as those brave queens all those years before. I’d threaten to scale the building and climb inside the tower. “One day, I’ll get inside that thing.” He’d laugh, “I look forward to seeing it.”

But within a year, Mark was gone. So, too, the Chinatown brownstone, the pub, Honest Ed’s, and Zipperz. And in their places, cavernous pits, large cranes and empty storefronts. The markers of progress in a city with a red-hot real estate market, but also indicators of loss, of absence. Yellowing teeth needlessly tugged from a smile, soon to be replaced with expensive titanium implants, good as new.

There’s something to be said for the challenge of recording memories in a city that rewrites itself, of processing trauma while navigating a backdrop of urban amnesia. In the aftermath of loss, you desperately try to grasp for the concrete, the tangible, to orient you. You retrace your steps, revisit important places, attempt to solidify past experiences or maybe even exorcise them by confronting whatever residue is left behind.

But in the absence of the familiar, there is only the unknown.

All living cities evolve and transform, but our city is different. A metropolis without a guiding mythology, Toronto has been shaped almost entirely by economic whims, political resentments, and slash-and-burn epochs. Sometimes literal fires, as in the Great Fire of 1904, and other times surges of re-development, like the unceremonious destruction of Victorian architecture in the 1970s or the condo craze of the present, with large swaths of the city razed and rebuilt without much thought to history. A city with a comforting blankness, with each successive generation erasing the remnants of the previous one, a civic character defined by willful forgetfulness and in the interest of a certain type of progress.

For some, this progress is a move toward the antiseptic, expensive, and decidedly conservative. A notorious strip club like Jilly’s becomes a boutique hotel, the heritage plaque out front conveniently ignoring the more sordid chapters in the history of the building and the cash-strapped tenants re-homed to less trendy neighbourhoods. Some facades are maintained, but grafted off of historic buildings and then mounted onto glass boxes, the architectural version of a killer wearing their victim’s face. Mark’s old brownstone, populated mostly by queers and artists, is demolished and replaced by an expensive condo marketed on a bohemian brand; an old family-run restaurant is transformed into a hip new brunch spot for new, more monied neighbours.

The city’s edges are sanded down and its darkest corners brightly lit. Organic spaces, sprung from human needs and messy excesses become a marketing tool for real estate agents, but are never an imperative for preservation. Raze and rebuild.

The places we inhabit disappear and the spaces that replace them leave no room for us. The city, a draw for marginalized queer people with an assurance of community and infrastructure, is also increasingly unaffordable, pushing many into outlying suburbs and smaller towns—cheaper places where safety is less certain and visibility is non-existent, and where a lack of density prevents proper community organizing or easy access to progressive workplaces. An economic closeting in a way, where the golden handcuffs that enable you to rent affordably or possibly own property also prevent you from holding your partner’s hand in public.

Memories get written on the margins because there is no space on the page, but soon there is no place in the book.

I think of this during one of my last nights on Yonge, as I climb the clock tower. I’ve gained access to the old St. Charles building as part of a creative project, an attempt to document the space and its history before it is torn down and replaced by an expensive condo. Little remains from that grubby tavern, thirty years on, but I attempt to record it all—the abandoned keg room, the sealed dumbwaiters, even the massive furnace. No drag queens.

Inside, I climb a narrow wooden staircase to the first platform, a filthy room with four windows in each direction. Above me are the cracked iron bell, green from moisture, and a ladder leading to the inner mechanisms of the clock, frozen in time.

Staring up, I feel history wash over me. The firefighters scrambling up and down these wooden stairs, and the queer men on barstools, hunched over cheap beers, desperate for connection, terrified of the world beyond. I feel compelled to contact Mark, to send him a message to let him know that I’ve made it, that I’ve found my way into this hallowed space. That I’m a part of history.

But as I fumble with my phone in gloved hands, I look out onto Yonge, at the strip I’d walked night after night. From this vantage point, I can see the House of Lords and the old bookshop, now both shuttered, large “For Lease” signs looming in empty storefronts. Beyond that, condos and cranes, many rising around the clock tower itself, dwarfing it on the street.

And below me, an uncharacteristic silence.

I put my phone away.