ILLUSTRATION BY VALÉRY GOULET

Dear (thankfully defunct) Canada Fitness Test,

It’s been exactly 30 years since since you last subjected me to evaluation, but your quartet of badges still populates my worst nightmares. In the name of promoting healthier attitudes toward personal fitness, you terrorized an entire generation from 1970 to 1992. Your arrival every May coincided with nothing but dread: I lived in fear of the flexed arm hang, meant to measure upper body strength, which I never managed to exhibit since I lacked the bicep force to lift myself above the bar. Even when my gym teacher hoisted me up, my muscles held me up for a humiliating grand total of two seconds, before I plummeted to the floor with my entire class watching.

It took me decades to recover from the shame of my fitness test performances. Excellence, gold, and silver badges, remained squarely beyond my capabilities, but in my wildest childhood fantasies I longed for scores that would at least earn me a bronze. Instead, I received a hideous participation pin. I’ll never forget my endurance run in Grade 8, where the gym teacher didn’t even wait for me to finish; apparently my score put me right on par with seven-year-olds.

The final year I endured the traumatic test, either the powers-that-be abolished the plastic participation pin, or someone fudged my results enough for me to finally qualify for a bronze badge. But by that point, I was done with fitness for life and tossed the badge in the garbage instead of asking my mom to sew it onto my winter coat.

You didn’t just make me feel bad about my body, but I developed an antipathy to the word “fitness.” For years, your test convinced me I was weak and unathletic, and made me fear that exerting myself outdoors would result in yet another failed attempt at a high-intensity sit-up marathon or an embarrassingly short long jump performance. Everything I learned about grit and perseverance, I learned through encouragement and positive reinforcement, not through a test that reinforced the fact that I was uncoordinated and didn’t have a competitive bone in my body. For a bookish kid who excelled at learning languages and playing the piano, you made me fear my body by constantly reminding me it wasn’t fast enough, strong enough, agile enough, good enough.

The first time I was scheduled to hike a mountain at an artist residency in New Hampshire, I nearly cancelled on my friend at the last minute. Who was I to think I could finish a seven-mile largely-uphill loop when I barely qualified for a bronze Canada fitness test badge? I showed up at the foot of Mt. Monadnock because my friend promised that if it was too hard for me, we’d stop. “But you’re strong,” she said. “I’ve seen you bike up and down the rolling hills. You’ve got this.” I’d never heard the word “strong” applied to me and stared at her with a mixture of shock and gratitude. I spent much of the seven miles panting, but I refused to stop. This wasn’t me aching for a senseless metric that had little to do with my body’s ability and potential; this time, I felt the real strength of my body when I put one foot in front of the other, felt my legs hold me up and carry me with purpose, determination, and—dare I say—grace, all so I could see the stunning view from the top.

Now that’s the magic of a body’s fitness. And it has nothing to do with your cheap embroidered badge.

Yours truly in strength-and-grace-without-badges,

Julia Zarankin

Simone Elizabeth Saunders’ work is remarkable. She uses tufting—a traditional rug-making technique—to bring fabric to life by mixing fibres, colour, and portraiture. The Calgary-based artist creates scaled-up artwork averaging 70 inches squared, equipped with what is called a tufting gun, which is an automatic hand-held device. “It is such a beautiful process to have this tool that feels so powerful to hold and use,” says Saunders. For the viewer, that power is felt when witnessing the intricate technique in action, the noticeable subject matter and the lively result.

Saunders began her artistic career in theatre. An interest for set and surface design led her to pursue a degree at the Alberta University of the Arts, where she majored in fibres and graduated last spring. However, tufting, which requires a specific skill set, is something the prolific artist taught herself a little over a year ago. To begin the creation, a cloth is stretched onto a frame so the yarn can pierce the fabric. “I describe it as painting with thread,” explains Saunders. “I use a lot of play, I like to approach the loom with whatever mood I’m in, and that informs what pattern and colour I choose.”

The fibres artist is intentional with the representation her pieces offer. Blackness is depicted in its complexity and diversity, through the vibrant hues and intricate patterns assembled into faces, bodies, and backgrounds. “Portraiture spans back to a sense of dramatism and storytelling,” Saunders says. “I’m stepping into a role and thinking about this woman or person, what life they are inhabiting, the emotions they are going through.” While inhabiting these characters, the artist also examines the intersection of race and gender. “I am diving into my Black history and creating strong narratives of Black womanhood and Black excellence,” she highlights.

These artworks are the result of a labour of love. Each piece takes 200 hours to complete from start to finish; the process is tedious and lengthy. While Saunders is currently a one-woman operation, she is gearing up for her first solo show in New York, to be revealed in 2021. “It’s exciting since I’m still a beginner,” she mentions. “There is still a lot of growth for me as an artist using my gun.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY LAURENCE PHILOMÈNE

In the opening letter of their debut poetry collection, knot body, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch writes: “The days get brighter but somehow I don’t. A dilemma, right? I thought I was swayed by the light, moods lifting as the clouds lift, yet this pain is fingers deep.”

El Bechelany-Lynch’s writing is at once an intimate inventory and a daring confession of what it means to listen to one’s body—all the ways that capitalism and ableism marginalize and dismiss queerness, chronic pain, invisible disability, and race. Their collection hugs the line between non-fiction and poetry. “I wanted to move past a disabled body as one that is to be understood, and rather as one that can be experienced—like a person who can be experienced,” they say.

Many poems in knot body take the form of letters addressed to “Dear friends, lovers, and in-betweens,” conveying an intimacy which urges us to consider the specificity of their pain, but also to examine our own relationships with our bodies. El Bechelany-Lynch began writing to the people around them as a way of thinking about their queer friendships and as a way of creating intimacy, but the poems have found a wider resonance.

“A lot of my work and anything that I do is really trying to reach other POC, any BIPOC who are interested in reading my work, like other people with chronic pain, other disabled people,” says El Bechelany-Lynch. A few people who had chronic pain didn’t realize they did—until they read knot body—and messaged El Bechelany-Lynch to share words of appreciation. “It was so touching. It was just really nice to be like, ‘Okay cool, it can function that way too, it can be a way to validate someone’s experience’ … that’s probably one of the best things I could hear.”

Though knot body offers consolation, the author says it was not easy to write. The process was draining and breaks were necessary. “Writing about chronic pain is difficult because it brings me to a space where I’m recognizing my pain and I think a lot of the ways people cope with chronic pain is that your body does the work of dissociating,” says El Bechelany-Lynch. “When I was writing about it specifically, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, my neck pain, my leg hurts’—all these ways I was being constantly confronted with the physicality of my body.”

While knot body (released in fall 2020 with Metatron Press) is El Bechelany-Lynch’s first book to be published, their second book of poems, The Good Arabs (forthcoming with Metonymy Press in fall 2021) has been six years in the making. The Good Arabs tackles the complexity of the Arab diaspora and its complicated colonial histories. El Bechelany-Lynch was born in Montreal and has lived there for almost a decade, but spent a part of their childhood in Lebanon.

Although The Good Arabs differs formally from knot body’s hybrid epistolary poems, poetry is still the ultimate vehicle for all of El Bechelany-Lynch’s work. “I wouldn’t say it’s standard or traditional poetry, because I don’t know that I write that, but it’s more recognizable as poetry,” they say. “I think poetry allows for complication … I feel like with an essay I would be able to be like, ‘This happened and this happened and, oh yes, we contend with this.’ But what does it mean to intersplice everything in a poem where everything is juxtaposed?”

ILLUSTRATION BY MATHIAS BALL

There are bed bugs in my apartment building, so we have to flee, fucking posthaste. I pack my roommate’s cat up in her little crate and hop into my inheritance from old Auntie Doreen, a blue ‘98 Chevy Lumina. We barely make it out before they have the white and blue bubble wrap covering the building and the chemicals pumping in. The landlords told us about five minutes before all these exterminators arrived looking like astronauts and stomping around in the building. Push everything out from the walls, they kept yelling, like we had all the time in the world.

I think the plumber yelled the same thing last time the building flooded out. We’re ground floor, too, so all the shit from the three stories above us floods in. I told the landlords to call a fucking plumber a few days beforehand when the sink was gurgling and spitting, but, nope, they couldn’t understand what I was saying. Wasn’t speaking in dollars. But shit, what can you do, it’s all slumlords everywhere. An English prof told me once that Thomas King wrote about stories and it’s all turtles, all the way down. Well this is slumlords. It’s fucking slumlords all the way down.

I drive my car from the Avenue of Champs down to the university area. Thank god I put some change in the gas tank on Monday, discount day at the Domo. It’s cold, like my balls have gone back inside my stomach cold. The cat’s purring away in her little crate.

Prairie and I make it to campus and people are looking at me like, what the fuck, why is this guy walking through the Humanities building carrying a cat? And I see them snickering. All the other students without cats in crates. And it occurs to me for the first time that this may have been a bad idea but I didn’t think about it, I never think about it, unfortunately, until it’s too late. But fuck it, I smile back. I got nowhere else to go and I don’t want this cat to get fumigated or freeze to death in my car, so we’re both gonna hit up my Indigenous Literatures class. The cat might get more out of it than I will. Because right now I don’t know where those turtles are.

“Why do you have a cat with you?” Professor Gladue asks me.

“Why wouldn’t I have a cat with me?” is what I wish I had the confidence to say. Instead I mumble something along the lines of, “I’m sorry, I can leave if you want.”

“No, it’s fine, just sit in the back, ugh,” she replies. I head to the back as she instructs, and take a seat. Professor Gladue is very intimidating. Knows a lot about everything related to Natives and, I assume, everything else. She’s from out east, some ‘Nish rez, I think. Though there are Gladues all over this area. Part of me wishes—okay, all of me wishes—that I had my shit together and could impress her with a story or a poem or something. Instead I got a cat and half a pack of Canada Goose smokes.

No one sits by me. But no one ever does. I’m straight up that kid. I used to be popular back in our ghetto-ass high school and during summers back at Buffalo Pound. That kind of popularity doesn’t translate to the university, though. Here, it’s all about the money and not being the smelly guy, reeking like old cigarettes, plastic bottle whiskey and Old Milwaukee’s, and carrying a cat. Who’s thinking, that dude’s the shit, when I’m carrying a fucking cat around. Prairie’s cool with no one hanging by us, though. She just chills, purrs a bit, then goes to sleep. Makes me wish someone was carrying me around. I’d reverse our roles in a heartbeat. Then I think, shit, I just wish I had somewhere or someone to go to right now. But I don’t.

Class goes by slow. I can barely concentrate on the best of days. Today is not one of them and I spend most of the class sticking my fingers through the crate door trying to pet Prairie. She’s having a great time, all snuggled up and purring away in her sleep, just out of reach of my flailing fingers. I want to open the cage up and pull her into my lap, but I think that might be the last straw with the prof and that would be it for my university experience. The other students in the class ignore me and I watch as they put up their hands and answer question after question.

Professor Gladue watches the students as they drone on. I watch her watch the students. She ignores me. The cat continues to do a combined snore-purr, ignoring everyone.

Class ends and I have nothing else for the day. I step outside the Humanities building for my after class smoke, just to feel that the sun hasn’t warmed anything up and it’s still biting cold. I had been entertaining the idea of sleeping in my car but, in this temperature, we’d be dead before morning. The cat wakes up and I let her out of her crate to run around on the frozen ground. The cement freezes her paws and she darts back into the crate. I realize that I forgot to grab cat food in the mad dash. My bank account is reading really low, so I’m hoping that the cat will eat some leftovers I can scrounge up from the garbage cans around the university. I guess if worse comes to worst I can try and steal some food for the cat from the grocery store down the block. I’ll be fine. It isn’t my first time going without for a few days and I’m not above my classmates’ leftovers. Never have been, not going to start now. Last time the building was getting fumigated, they made us stay out for three days. I’m assuming that’s our timeline this round, too. No one mentioned otherwise, not that they would—those shady fucks, they don’t give a shit. They would probably prefer if none of us ever came back to the building so they could just live in this weird little fumigated slumlord kingdom with no slummies to worry about.

Prairie and I find some food, then we set up shop down in the library computer area. I don’t have my own computer, so I use this forced time at the university to actually do some homework for once. It’s getting late and the library is getting down to the weirdos. There’s some old guy watching dude-on-dude porn in the corner. His computer screen is just one big cock with another guy’s hand stroking it. A crew of Korean kids are playing video games a couple computers away from him. I’m sitting here with a cat. We’re a motley crew. Each time the cat shifts in her crate, I start thinking she’s going to start losing it, since she’s been in this box for most of the day. And I want to lose it and I haven’t even been in a box, at least not one this confining. There’s an offset room, one of those study ones that students can use. I roll in there with Prairie and let her out again. First thing, I turn off the lights. Hopefully security will be lazy tonight and not do proper rounds. It’s so fucking cold outside. I really don’t want to sleep in the car. If you sleep in the car, you wake up just fucking frozen. I don’t have enough gas to run the car all night to keep the heat going either.

Prairie scurries around a bit checking out the new digs. It’s a small room. Just a round table and six chairs. I push one of the chairs up against the door handle. A little security in case someone does try and get in here. Maybe they’ll get the hint if the door doesn’t open. I stretch out under the table and start cruising through my textbook from Professor Gladue’s class looking for examples of conflict between Tricksters and the characters.

The door slams open and the chair goes flying against the side of the wall with a crash. There’s a flashlight on my face and the lights scream on.

“Is that a fucking cat?” I hear a voice yell. Some dude jumps on me and presses his knee into my throat.

“What are you doing in here?” the knee asks.

“I’m a student, shit, I just fell asleep.”

“Do you have identification?” Knee presses harder into me.

“Relax. Fuck. It’s in my pocket. Can you get the fuck off of me?” The knee presses up but he keeps a lock on me. There’s a second security guard in the doorway blocking any chance for a run. They both look like cop school dropouts but are still trying to play the game, moustaches and the whole nine yards. I see Prairie in the corner checking it all out. She’s got her hackles up. What if she jumps up and scratches the shit out of this security bro. What would he do? It would be funny as hell, but he’d probably smash her. I didn’t want that at all. I reach in my back pocket and pull out my student I.D. card.

“See, I’m a fucking student.”

“Well, you can’t be sleeping here.”

“Where the hell else am I going to go? It’s fucking cold out there, man.”

“A lot of people sleep in that Tim Hortons/Wendy’s by the hospital.”

The security guard releases his grip on me. I walk over and grab Prairie and put her in the kennel.

“Either way. You can’t be in here anymore. You need to
leave campus.”

“What if I start studying or something?”

“No, you need to leave now.”

I grab my backpack and the kennel and start walking out of the library. There are still a few students at the 24-hour computers. They’ve all turned to look at me. The old dude and his porn are long gone. I should have just fucking sat at one of those computers, I think to myself. A couple students are sleeping on couches toward the entrance.

“What about those guys?” I ask security.

“They’re studying.”

Security walks me off campus.

Inside the Tim Hortons/Wendy’s, a cat is the last of anyone’s worries. It’s packed in there. One side of the eating area has been completely taken over by homeless people. They’re spread out on the benches and on the floor, under tables and in the lanes. Prairie and I find a spot under one of the only free tables and settle in. I use my backpack as a pillow. It’s uncomfortable as fuck and the floor is sticky, covered in something that’s definitely not double double. But, shit, it could be, too. At this point, I’m tired and my mind is clogged from eating only scraps and smoking cigarettes all day. I put Prairie right next to me. I’m not worried about anyone taking her since everyone here has their own problems to deal with. At this moment, we all just want to get through the night and this cat is the only thing bringing me any sort of comfort.

I never truly sleep in a situation like this. I’ll get a bit of rest and then I’m awake again, constant vigilance, you know. Never comfortable, cold and sticky, fluorescent lights burning down, and a stream of people from the university hospital and kids from the residence buildings coming in for coffees and Timbits. They all avoid looking at our little camp. Which is probably for the best, as I don’t want to see anyone I might be in a class with. It’s already embarrassing enough having a cat in class. Now I have a cat and I’m sleeping on the floor of the Tim Hortons/Wendy’s. Classic fuck-up right here.

One of the boys sleeping on the bench above me rolls over and belches. His breath is full of old nicotine and cold French fries and goes right into my nose.

“Rest up kid, they’re gonna come in and boot us out of here at six,” he says to me.

I roll over and face the other way, but it’s more uncomfortable on my side so I’m back on my back in a second, staring at the underside of the table. We’ve got a few hours at least, I think to myself. French fry breath starts snoring above me.

“Daniel, is that you?”

I close my eyes tighter. It’s just a dream. It’s just Prairie talking to me.

“Daniel. What are you doing?”

I know the voice: it’s Professor Gladue from Indigenous Lit. I open my eyes. She’s standing there a good ten feet away from the homeless area. With her are two guys and a lady. They all look fancy and clean, even though they’re just wearing winter coats and wool toques. But they’re those coats that are brown wool and have nice collars. None of them are doubling up on hoodies and wearing beer box freebie toques. They all just look clean, clean beards, clean hair, clean. I don’t think they have bed bugs or lice or fleas or meth-heads running around in their buildings.

“Hey,” I say.

“Are you okay? Do you need anything?” she asks. Her voice sounds different than it does in class. Less authoritative, friendlier, not hollow.

“Nah, I’m good.” Her crew are all staring at me. Their eyes are pitiful. “I’ll see you in class, thanks.”

“Is the cat with you?” she asks.

“Oh, yeah, right here.” I pat the hoodie draped over Prairie’s crate.

“Okay,” she says. Her crew starts walking toward the door. She follows them and at the last minute turns around and looks back at me. I’m trying to pretend I’m already asleep but I notice. And I’m thinking how fucked I am for next class now. She’s going to think I’m a real piece of shit. She’s not going to take a word that I write for the essay seriously. This is done. It’s too late in the semester to drop though, so I’ll have to take the F. With the academic probation shit, that’ll boot me out of school. But hell, it was never meant to be anyway. I close my eyes. Six a.m. comes too early in the winter. I can hear Prairie softly purring from inside her crate. She seems comfy, carefree, cozy. I would give anything to be able to crawl inside that crate with her and cuddle up.

ILLUSTRATION BY JESSIE BOULARD

“When are they taking me away?” This was a question I frequently asked my mom throughout my childhood. The first time I wondered this aloud I was three years old. My foster brother and sister had lived with us on and off for two years by then and I didn’t remember life without them. The three of us, close in age, were never apart. They were also Metis but, unlike me, knew their biological family. They spent the first years of their lives with their family and only came to live with us when Manitoba Child and Family Services (CFS) deemed it necessary. They were more than foster siblings. They were my family.

At that age, my world was limited to my parents, foster siblings, stuffed animals, real animals, and extended family. I never fully understood why my foster siblings were able to reunite with their biological family, but I couldn’t. I spent years being told I was special, that I was able to stay with my adoptive family because my first mother loved me so much she gave me to them. Silly girl, I thought, thinking that the parents who wanted their children back were the ones who must have loved them the most. But still, my young mind had a hard time making sense of this. Was I special because another family wanted to raise me? Or was there something wrong with me that made my first family never even want me back for a weekend or a few hours twice a month?

My birth mother relinquished me to the care of CFS as an infant, and I spent the first few weeks of my life with a foster family while my mother was given time to decide if she wanted me back. My birth mother has told me she contemplated taking me back but had been told I would be placed with my new family immediately. She didn’t want to interfere with what she assumed was an already bonded parent-child relationship between the three of us. After this period, my potential new parents, a Mennonite couple from southeastern Manitoba next on the long list of couples registered with CFS, were notified of me, now an adoptable child. They picked me up after having the weekend to decide and I was welcomed by a small party of people revelling in the excitement of a new baby. My new father had 12 siblings, and by that time his parents had dozens of grandchildren and a few great grandchildren. To this day I have no idea where I would fall if we grandchildren lined up by age. Even more, I have no idea where I would fall if those of us adopted into the family, over 30 of us altogether, did the same.

I was the first grandchild on my new mom’s side. They surprised her parents when they brought me home, and I’m told they were elated. Given I was adopted through CFS, they were surprised to find I didn’t even look Metis.

I grew up with foster siblings until I was eight years old. I also grew up with fostered and adopted cousins, aunts, and uncles. All Indigenous, we were raised by our Mennonite adoptive and foster parents. This was my childhood and, in some ways, I considered myself the luckiest child in the world. Surrounded by so many other children like me, I rarely felt alone. We lived within the shelter of our own little community, separated from the rest of the world where children somehow managed to stay with their original families. In our world, no brown child was raised permanently, if at all, by their biological parents. Life was simple. Until it wasn’t. After all, no one is exposed to CFS and simultaneously claims a simple life. I have struggled making sense of a system responsible for introducing much of the pain and trauma my foster siblings and I faced while simultaneously creating such a sense of distorted normalcy in our childhoods. I still cannot decide whether this is something for which I am grateful or something, which utterly breaks my heart. Perhaps it will always be both.

I remember the losses of my foster siblings well, some more vividly than others. I remember sitting at the top of our staircase at five years old, devastated upon realizing I could no longer recall the sound of my one foster brother’s voice and how he pronounced “fries” as “flies.” Fries were his favourite food and he ate them every chance he had. My questioning of when I would ultimately be taken away persisted until I was eight years old. My parents often viewed me as an extension of themselves, a reflection of their achieved goal to ultimately become parents. They were unable to see my adoption as part of how I filtered the world around me, which, I suspect, is partly why they dismissed my fears. This is perhaps also the reason they have never understood my struggle with my identity.

My adoptive cousin, born and adopted 10 months earlier than I was, also grew up with foster siblings. Our siblings came and went, but we remained. He was a constant in my life, a steady presence with whom I searched for toads on my driveway and caught fireflies in mason jars on dark summer nights while our parents played Canasta inside. Afterwards, we would run inside and devour the schnetki our mothers made, delighting in the way the butter melted on the Mennonite biscuit and how it crumbled so easily in our mouths.

When I was seven years old, we dressed up as “nerdy twins” for Halloween. Wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses from the dollar store, we matched our jeans with red t-shirts and baseball caps. (I took the glasses off after 30 minutes when they started giving me a headache.) I had more fun with him than I recall ever having with another living soul. He was the love of my young life. He felt like a part of me, a part of a childhood I always struggled to fully understand.

Something deep in my spirit shattered when we were around eight or nine years old and he was taken back into CFS. By then, I naively thought being adopted meant we wouldn’t be taken away. My parents had stopped fostering children by then, but I spent every night for weeks praying he could live with us. For reasons I still don’t fully grasp, he didn’t. He went into foster care, but even when he returned home years later, our relationship was never the same. We didn’t have our once closeness nor our ability to joke back and forth as we once had. Life was no longer so simple. We never caught fireflies again.

I have faced various losses in my life, including two suicides of loved ones, but the loss of my cousin shaped my life most profoundly. At the same time, there wasn’t the shock that I hear others describe when they encounter similar situations. There was no outrage or confusion at the fact that someone in my life could be taken away so swiftly. I knew by then that this just happened to children like us. There was something about us that seemingly prevented our families, biological or adoptive, from knowing how to care for us. Love alone couldn’t offer us complete protection.

During the Sixties Scoop, from the mid-to-late 1950s to mid-1980s, an estimated 20,000 Indigenous children were displaced from their families. Many of my aunts, uncles, and older cousins were adopted during this time. Both my cousin and I were adopted in the late ’80s, when the system still consisted of closed adoptions and sealed records. It has since progressed to open records, but there is still an overrepresentation of Indigenous children, accounting for 90 percent of the children in care in Manitoba.

My entire life, I’ve heard I should just be thankful. I’ve been told by complete strangers that I must have been adopted into a loving family who spared me the abuse I surely would have encountered had I stayed with my birth family. I’ve been told my experience would be no different if I was Caucasian and that it has “nothing to do with being Native,” although with the overrepresentation of our children within the system, I know being Indigenous has everything to do with it.

Almost immediately after my 18th birthday, the age at which you could apply to unseal your adoption records in Manitoba, I completed the required forms to discover as much of my history as possible. My adoption papers provided basic information about my family, but I had long memorized it all. I wanted more. It took until after my 20th birthday to learn what my name had originally been. It has taken even longer to process and start integrating the complicated layers of my identity. At times, it feels like I am slowly piecing together the broken fragments of a vase without knowing what it looked
like when it was whole.

Recently, I’ve begun sharing my experiences with those closest to me. As a result, my cousin and I have reconnected.
It has been over two decades since we were lost to each other, our relationship forever marred.

I was shocked upon hearing how he related to my struggles with identity. His skin is much darker than mine, his hair much straighter. A near professional at climbing trees and navigating our wooded backyard, he possessed an intuition I never quite had. As a child, I envied him. As an adult, I was surprised to hear of his struggle with identity as an Indigenous man. I’ve now practiced medicine for several years and have encountered many others with similar experiences. I should have known not to be surprised.

He tells me how reconnecting with the land has been invaluable in reconnecting with his Cree culture. I can’t say I’ve found a single entity bridging that gap for me. I’ve reconnected with my birth mother and her family. I was finally able to apply for my Metis card after attaining a copy of my birth records—and although a simple laminated card should not be a factor that confirms a piece of my identity, it did help a little. I found a video of local Metis elders making traditional bannock while speaking Michif and followed along, adding the ingredients to a large mixing bowl. Although similar in taste to schnetki, I have come to prefer bannock. I’m slowly expanding my beaded earring collection, although I still sometimes feel like an imposter when I wear them, regardless of how beautiful they make me feel. I wore a pair of black, red, and purple beaded earrings the day of my graduation from medical school and it helped me feel more grounded as I accepted my degree. My hair hung past my shoulders and no one could see the earrings, but I knew they were there.

My cousin and I continue to walk our paths of integrating our identities, though the feeling of being outsiders remains. At the same time, we both have an unquestionable connection to our adoptive Mennonite culture and are unable to abandon it. I laugh at the irony that I, a Metis woman, continually educate my Mennonite husband around his own traditions and foods. I tell him about schnetki as I shape the bannock dough into a ball on my kitchen counter. I was dumbfounded when he had no idea what I was talking about. I laughed and assured him I would make a few just so he could taste them. It will probably come after a few more rounds of bannock, however.

]]> https://this.org/2021/01/07/i-cant-say-her-name/ Thu, 07 Jan 2021 21:08:03 +0000 https://this.org/?p=19543

ILLUSTRATION BY MOE PRAMANICK

Breonna Taylor.

I’m tired of hearing her name, I’m tired of seeing her face everywhere.

It seems like 2020 has been the year for everything and everyone to break down. The complete isolation that so many of us have been forced into has destroyed any semblance of the old selves that were left. With numerous murders of Black bodies on my timeline, I had no choice but to contemplate my own life as a Black, queer woman and the space that I occupy in this body.

Breonna Taylor was on the cover of what seemed like every magazine in the spring and summer of last year. Many hashtags were created, remembering her name and violent death, across all social media platforms. The trendiest political accessory since BLM. A fat, dark skinned Black Woman was on the cover of Vanity Fair and it wasn’t a stock photo used to depict the “average African-America woman” in what would be a story lightly coated in Misogynoir (according to Wikipedia, misogynoir is misogyny directed toward Black women where race and gender both play roles in bias). What may have looked like an allyship on the outside to some, seemed like just another poser looking to be on the right side of history by making a few coins along the way to me. The world only seemed to care about her now that she was dead, but why was no one around to protect her and others who looked like her while she was alive?

Her name triggers deep feelings of sadness and loneliness, but mostly anger.

I’ll be the first to admit that most of my insecurities stem from being fat and Black. I’m not sure if one insecurity was ever bigger than the other, but I remember in kindergarten when  another kid, Veronique, told me that my hair would never be as long and flowing as hers because, as she put it, “Black people don’t have long hair.” I’ve heard comments about my skin colour my entire life from family members, mainly because my younger sister is a lot lighter than I am. Kids made comments about how fat I was every chance they got. As a child, I didn’t understand these feelings of unworthiness and some of the ways they manifested. But I knew that these feelings were a reflection of how the world saw me, even at five years old.
I understood that I would always be different and that there would always be a person or situation to remind me of that.

I’m angry because no one wants to protect Black Women until there’s a video or a hashtag.

Reading about the terrifying account of Breonna Taylor’s death, even now, makes me profoundly angry. Angry because someone determined that her life meant so little that her safety wasn’t even an afterthought. I’m unbelievably broken because I know what it’s like to be a Black Woman who no one believes; to have people have misconceptions about who you are based solely on the colour of your skin, the size of your jeans, and the people you know. It absolutely reminded me that no matter what, many won’t see past my skin, size, and gender enough to view me with an ounce of humanity. I wept not only for her, but for the others whose deaths are forever memorialized on the internet for their families to relive. I knew the pain I felt connected me to so many others who know how easily it could’ve been them, who are also praying that this never happens to them or their loved ones.

I wanna cry with my community, I wanna hug my people and tell them I love them with all my heart, but COVID…

The truth is Breonna Taylor looks a lot like me, but I live in a community where practically no one looks like me. I’m forced into isolation, like most people in the world, and I can’t even reach out to my family, my people. There’s a certain naiveté that comes from living in Canada, especially in Victoria, B.C., where I am surrounded by white people all the time. The assumption is that racism is some ancient concept that has been resolved. Microaggressions are almost a daily part of my life, so much so that often I don’t even realize it until I’m in the tub reflecting on that weird conversation on the bus. It’s almost as if I’ve become desensitized to them. I know it’s coming, so I don’t bother reacting, or sometimes, I don’t want to be seen as an angry Black woman.

People who understood the emotional gravity of the situation checked up on me and made sure I was taking care of my feelings. People who didn’t understand wanted me to either help them come up with a slogan for the designated BLM protest they were attending or to basically have me show up to the protest as their token Black friend. The internet has ruined many things, but it has also created lifelines for those struggling. It would take too many pages to detail the level of loneliness I felt. To be so cut off from everyone, but more so from the people who look like me. Grieving virtually is not ideal but, like I said, a small lifeline was created. So many Black Women made it a point to create safe spaces where Black Women could grieve and comfort each other. A beautiful way of coming together and loving women you’ve never met, but instantly bonded to. A bond that was missing in my current life, due to this pandemic.

Here come the lows again, with a splash of a global pandemic…

I’ve struggled with mental illness my entire life. Depression, anxiety, mania, drugs, alcohol: you name it and I’ve probably struggled with some of it at some point in my life. These have been coping mechanisms, especially for my anxiety, since I was 16. But during this pandemic, my mind reached its maximum threshold for all the pain I was masking. There were days of sitting in the tub, crying for hours. They were also days of blacking out and staying up for days. I just could not pull myself from this hole, feeling like I would never push through this self-hate and disgust that I had for the world.

As a fat, dark skinned Black Woman, the death of Breonna Taylor was not only an incredibly violent murder, but a reminder that the world doesn’t care about Black Women.

We are the mules, mammies, caretakers of the world. We’re strong, but we’re never allowed to be vulnerable or seen as weak. We’ve had to fight for every single thing we’ve ever had, which only reinforces the dated and misogynistic trope that we can fight for everyone, including for those who don’t want to fight for our survival. Black Women are often viewed as superhuman beings because no matter what is thrown our way, we find a way to manage it, somehow. It’s not because we want to, but because we have to. We’re tired of seeing yet another one of us forgotten and discarded until the next victim is dead. We just want to feel protected and loved. It’s time to uplift Black Women, considering we’ve been uplifting the world since slavery. This was yet another way to remind me that the world didn’t always care about Breonna Taylor. Why would anyone ever care about me? Why would anyone want to protect me?

PHOTO BY NICHOLAS YEE

When George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered by police in the United States, sparking protests across the world, Avnish Nanda, an Edmonton lawyer, approached Bashir Mohamed and Oumar Salifou with an idea for a podcast investigating anti-Black racism and policing in Edmonton. Within a week of launching in June, Is This For Real? had raised over $4,000 (U.S.) per month on Patreon.

“We wanted to take the social issues that were happening in the moment and then make them relevant in a local context,” Salifou says. “I think there’s a big misconception that racism is an American problem and that police brutality and racism, and anti-Black racism, is an American problem. And I think that Canada has its unique problems when it comes to having systemically racist institutions that exclude and actively hurt Black and Indigenous people and all people of colour.”

In episodes released about twice a month, Salifou and his co-host, Hannan Mohamud, investigate topics ranging from police mistreatment to School Resource Officers (armed police officers stationed in Edmonton schools) to Canadian media’s coverage of racism and police violence.

“We have to make people understand that when the police say that they’re being criticized for a problem that happened very far away, they’re ignoring the fact that there’s a long history of really bad things that have happened to people—violence inflicted on people, murders, different systems of oppression that have kept people down—that are unique to our context,” Salifou says.

Threaded throughout the investigations is an emphasis on the personal—Salifou and Mohamud ground the podcast in their experiences growing up Black in Edmonton and interviewees are given ample space to share their stories without interruption. In ep. 4 of the podcast, titled “Protect Our Children,” Mohamud says, “We want other people to take a step back and—rather than just feeling shock and shame and these emotions that would limit them from learning—to kind of hesitate and just take it all in and process it slowly as we go.”

In future seasons, the Is This For Real? team plans to investigate anti-Black racism in other institutions. “Knowing the fact that in most mainstream newsrooms there are very few Black people, it’s amazing to have the opportunity to do a project that’s getting the support that it’s been getting, and being able to have the editorial control to actually tell the stories how I think they should be told,” Salifou says.

“Stock Photography – Canadian Money” by Katherine Ridgley is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Midwifery as a profession has been heavily dominated by women, and in Ontario, it’s the most exclusively woman-dominated profession in the province. Despite using similar skills and performing similar tasks to family physicians, since their official establishment as a health profession in Ontario, midwives have been fighting for pay equity. Here’s a look at the timeline of that fight, leading up to a landmark win in June 2020

1993

The Association of Midwives (AOM) and Ministry of Health (MOH) reach an agreement on compensation through a joint working group process. They agree that compensation for midwives would align with senior nurses and Community Health Centre (CHC) family physicians, who share similar practices.

1994

Midwives are established as a regulated health profession under the Ontario healthcare system and the government determines a compensation level for the midwifery field. The Pay Equity Act is already in force, so the government is required to assess their salary by looking at comparative male-dominated jobs. Midwives are set to earn, at the highest level, around 90 percent of the base entry level salary for a CHC family physician, and at entry level, just above the salary of a senior nurse. However, over the following 25 years, the salary gap between CHC family physicians and midwives widened further and further. Today, midwives earn between around $80,000 and $100,000, while CHC family physicians earn around $190,000 to $220,000.

1994-2005

The government freezes the compensation of midwives, allowing for no compensation increases. CHC family physicians dealt with compensation freezes for part of that time as well, but they received a wage increase in 2003.

2004

AOM, after being denied compensation increases by the MOH in 2000, initiates a “Because Storks Don’t Deliver Babies” campaign and threatens to march on Queen’s Park. In response, the MOH agrees to engage in negotiations.

2004

CHC physicians, represented by the Ontario Medical Association (OMA), set an agreement for compensation increases from 2004 onward. The agreements resulted in accelerated compensation increases for CHC physicians.

2005

The MOH and the AOM reach an agreement on compensation increases, establishing first year increases of 20 to 29 percent for midwives depending on experience level and subsequent small increases of one to two percent.

2008

The OMA reaches a four-year agreement for a compensation increase for CHC family physicians. Meanwhile, during the AOM’s 2008 negotiations, the MOH would not agree to more significant increases. The AOM tables other negotiations in order to agree on a joint compensation study.

2010

A compensation review prompted by the AOM, funded by the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, is conducted by the Courtyard Group, a healthcare system management company. The report recommends a one-time equity adjustment to midwifery compensation that would raise income by 20 percent for all experience levels. This would bring the salary back up to their original position between nurse practitioners and CHC family physicians. However, after publication of the report, the government decides to reject the recommendations, saying the Courtyard report is “flawed” and that CHC physicians aren’t relevant anymore for setting compensation levels for midwives.

2013

The AOM files an application with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO). The application argues that the Ministry set a discriminatory compensation structure for midwives over the past 20 years.

2018

The HRTO delivers an Interim Decision to the AOM, concluding that there is “sufficient evidence” that midwives experienced “adverse treatment” and that gender discrimination is likely a factor. The decision dismissed any allegations of discrimination between 1993 and 2005, but found evidence of discrimination after the 2005 agreement.

February 2020

The HRTO determines in a Remedy Decision (compensation or other solutions ordered by the tribunal that must be followed) that the government should implement the adjustment recommended in the 2010 Courtyard report, including retroactive compensation back to that date. The decision also ordered $7,500 compensation for “injury to dignity” for each eligible midwife. The MOH is ordered to consider in future negotiations the impacts of gender on compensation for midwives based on them being “sex-segregated workers.”

April 2020

The Ontario government files for a judicial review of the HRTO rulings, and the review is heard in the Divisional Court.

June 2020

The Divisional Court dismisses the application for the judicial review and rules to uphold the HRTO rulings. The decision notes that the MOH failed to engage with the allegations of adverse gender impacts on midwives and ignored the systemic issues behind the claim.

PHOTO COURTESY CHILDCARE IS ESSENTIAL

A few years ago, Kisa MacIsaac, an early childhood educator (ECE) and mother of three in Winnipeg, tried to calculate the feasibility of putting three children in childcare for the summer. At 70 dollars per day, she “would have been working for nothing, anyways,” she says.

She ended up taking the summer off while her husband’s salary carried them through, but she knows that many others aren’t as lucky. Although Manitoba’s childcare fees are the second lowest in the country, “for many it’s still very, very expensive, especially if you have two or three children,” she says.

The lack of access to affordable childcare, especially during a global pandemic, when many people around the country have lost their jobs, was striking to MacIsaac. As government leaders began discussing what school would look like in the time of COVID-19, MacIsaac heard no mention of childcare. That’s why she joined a group of parents, ECEs, and community members to form Childcare is Essential, a Manitoba-based group advocating for publicly funded, high-quality daycare in the province.

When brainstorming a name, MacIsaac says, “The messaging that kept coming through is the words ‘childcare is essential.’” So, they went with it. Through weekly Zoom meetings, they planned campaigns and activities, ultimately mobilizing community members at a rally in late August in front of the Minister of Families, Heather Stefanson’s, office.

Members aren’t sure why affordable childcare isn’t on the provincial government’s priority list. Studies show that for every dollar invested in early childhood education, the payback is anywhere from six to 12 dollars. An investment in childcare, then, is an investment in an entire community.

There’s on-the-ground evidence to suggest this, too. In 2012, the provincial government added an early child development centre, Lord Selkirk Park Child Care Centre, and family resource centre in a social housing complex in northern Winnipeg. Using a learning approach specialized for under-resourced families, Healthy Child Manitoba, Manidoo Gi-Miini Gonaan, and Red River College studied the centre and found that children in the program made considerable gains in language development. Parents also reported multiple benefits, from financial security, to having time to work or go back to school, to developing trusting relationships with ECEs.

“If it wasn’t for the daycare, I wouldn’t have made it … I wouldn’t have gone to school. I wouldn’t have been working; I would still be on welfare,” one participant wrote online.

MacIsaac says she sees similar cases at the non-profit early learning and childcare program where she works. Families living below the poverty line receive a subsidy—a two-parent family with two preschool-aged children needs to make below $22,504 to receive the maximum subsidy. The extra time and money can give them opportunities to find new jobs or start saving to pay off loans or move into a nicer home. But as soon as they’re making a little more money, “their childcare subsidy gets clawed back and suddenly they can’t afford their childcare anymore,” she says.

In March, the government of Manitoba set aside $18 million to help ECEs open their own childcare centres at home or in the community in response to the COVID-19 childcare centre closures. But, MacIsaac says, “That’s not an exciting opportunity for me at all. I work in an extremely high-quality program with an amazing team.” It makes sense—evidence shows that on average, in North America, quality of care is higher in non-profit childcare centres.

And that’s what Childcare is Essential is fighting for. MacIsaac says success for the group looks like high-quality, universally accessible childcare with trained ECEs for anyone who needs—or wants—a space for their child.

“It sounds cheesy to be like ‘the children are our future,’ but they literally are, and anything we can do to help children in their early years is going to help everyone in the long term.”

Art by Valerie Thai

Catherine was in her mid-forties when she began looking for sexual assault centres (SACs) in Oshawa, Ontario. (Her name has been changed to protect her identity.) She was in panic mode as she combed through search results on the web. “I felt like my reality was crashing around me,” she said. She was at a point in her life when she dreaded acts of intimacy with her current partner. “As I get to that spot and think, ‘let’s go forward, let’s be intimate,’ I stop myself, and end up with all these triggers,” said Catherine. When aroused, her body would freeze with tremors and spasms. The voice and words of an abusive ex-fiancé kept popping into her brain.

During a previous three-year relationship, she’d caught her ex-fiancé engaging in sexual acts, like the time she caught him sniffing her underwear in the laundry room, and the time she found him “humping the mattress.”  When she questioned him about it, he’d deny what she’d seen or get violent. Other times in their relationship, he would force her to have sex with him.

“I wouldn’t fight him…. I’d just lay there. My M.O. was to freeze. I would let them do whatever. Sometimes, I would yell at them. And they would just leave or something,” she said, struggling to remember if that something was when the rapes occurred. She cited multiple rapes she’d endured as a nine-year-old, when Catherine was habitually sexually abused by her babysitter’s father.

“Those tapes were constantly playing in my head,” she said. When the abuse was too painful to bear, her brain would shut down and stop recording.  But her body remembered that she had been raped by her ex-fiancé, even though she didn’t think so at the time of the relationship.  Her body remembered the abuse she faced as a child.

Catherine often questioned the veracity of her truncated memories of the abuse she experienced as a child and adult. Avoidance was her only way to cope with her crippling flashbacks. She devoted herself as a full-time caregiver to her ailing dad and support for her daughter and granddaughter.

Frustrated, she reflected, “It took me 28 years to understand what the hell I went through.” She needed help to fill the blanks in her fragmented memory.

In 2016, when Catherine found the Durham Rape Crisis Centre’s (DRCC) services during one of her online searches, she decided to call them. On her 15- to 20-minute intake call, she was told that the centre had a waitlist of six to seven months for its free abuse and trauma counselling.

After 30 years of waiting, “I was frustrated that it would take another six to seven months for me to come in and see someone. What else is new? It’s a government-run thing,” said Catherine.

Lack of annualized funding, limited resources, high staff turnover due to long hours and low pay, and increasing demands on service delivery have become endemic to SACs in Canada. In the wake of the Jian Ghomeshi case, #MeToo, and the Time’s Up movement, agencies across the country have been recording an alarming surge in reported rapes and disclosures of historic sexual assaults. The pandemic has seen those cases grow exponentially. Agencies have not been able to keep up and meet the demand.

In December 2019, Regina, Saskatchewan, reported a wait of up to nine months. In Halifax, the Avalon Sexual Assault Centre froze its waitlist when cases reached about 100. The average wait list in Alberta is between four and nine months. As of writing this article, on November 11, the Ottawa Rape Crisis Centre terminated all staff and temporarily shut down, according to reports. After delivering services for 46 years, the centre’s five-member board vaguely cited IT challenges and need for structural refurbishments to the building as reasons for closure. While they hope to reopen next spring, 45 survivors remain on their waitlist, and existing clients are left feeling “sad and confused.”

Canada does not have a unified system tasked with recording and compiling nation-wide waitlists for sexual assault centres. “Each individual agency compiles their own waitlist and service delivery statistics,” said Nicole Pietsch, of the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres (OCRCC), which advocates for 31 English-language rape crisis centres in the province. “Agencies provide it voluntarily,” she said.

Desperate to talk to a therapist, Catherine used up her yearly employment benefits to pay $150 per session with a psychotherapist while awaiting her turn at the DRCC. During the first six months of waiting, the DRCC offered her four walk-in sessions as a “stopgap” solution, so they could keep her file open.

But, she says,“my psychotherapist wasn’t somebody who could deal with me the way I needed him to. He’s not there for me. And that’s fine. He can deal with everything else outside of the abuse. I go to DRCC for the abuse.” However, the DRCC’s shortage of resources pushed Catherine further down the waitlist—from six months to a year. Counsellors, she said, were taking extended leaves. Replacements were hard to find.

Counselling trauma is hard work, according to Mary Jane James, CEO of the Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton (SACE). Psychologists are trying to heal survivors, mostly children and women, who’ve faced extreme violation of their human rights. “There’s a very high turnover of staff, not because they don’t like the work, or they didn’t like their boss. It’s because they need to make more money,” said James.

DRCC has an annual staff turnover rate of 30 percent. An ideal fix, said DRCC’s Executive Director, Gemma Broderick, is to be able to hire more staff. “Even with just one full-time counsellor, we would see the impact on a community with a waitlist,” said Broderick.

In her more than 20-year career working with sexual assault survivors, Debra Tomlinson, CEO of the Association of Alberta Sexual Assault Services (AASAS), knows that “if you go to a private practitioner, they may not have that expertise.” Most survivors cannot afford it, said Tomlinson, even with insurance, because insurance coverage does not carry beyond four or five counselling sessions. “If you have been sexually assaulted, you need more than that,” she said.

What Tomlinson and counsellors across the country have not seen change over the past couple of decades is the conviction rate for sexual offenders. 95 percent of sexual assault crimes go unpunished, according to a 2017 AASAS business case report. “Our criminal justice system has a lot of work to do,” said Tomlinson.

Between 2009 and 2014, there were 117,238 police-reported sexual assaults in Canada “where sexual assault was the most serious violation in the incident,” according to a Statistics Canada report. These figures make up only five percent of police-reported sexual assault cases in Canada, according to a five-year General Social Survey.

In 2016, Ontario centres responded to 50,000 crisis calls, an increase from 30,000 in 2009, according to reports. Statistics Canada found that sexual assault in the province increased from “7,434 police-reported incidences in 2016 and 8,782 in 2017 to 10,634 in 2018—revealing a year over year increase of almost 19 percent.”

After a year of waiting, Catherine was finally taken off the waitlist and assigned to Lynn Cohen, the centre’s counsellor and public education coordinator, to begin her 16-session counselling at the DRCC. “Sixteen sessions are a drop in the bucket for so many of these folks. It’s not nearly going to address the years and years of historical abuse and violence,” said Cohen.

Cohen says she feels their service capacities are being stretched with an increasing demand to assist survivors in navigating the meandering and often conflicting paths of the criminal justice, mental health, medical, and psychiatric systems. “All of those different systems can often have a negative impact on the folks that we’re working with,” she said.

“The reality is that if we had more counselling staff, our waitlist would move more quickly. But our funding is only willing to give us a certain amount of money,” said Cohen. With 189 clients and 1,025 individual appointments in 2019/2020 alone, DRCC’s annual report listed six counsellors on staff, one of whom was on extended leave.

Funded primarily by Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General, the DRCC, like most SACs, has had to get creative with finding funding from private donors and competitive grant programs to mitigate their wait times and increase their program offerings.

A Justice Canada study highlighted that sexual violence and other sexual offences cost Canada $4.8 billion per year. However, on March 9, 2020, the OCRCC released a statement calling upon the Ministry of the Attorney General’s decision to not renew a “one-time” funding of $1 million, agencies received in spring 2019 to reduce wait times. The statement highlighted that “The One-time Funding Resources to reduce services wait-times did not eliminate any waitlist for sexual violence support services across the province.”

Facing backlash, the Progressive Conservative government quickly announced a $2 million boost to Ontario SACs “working with survivors of sexual violence impacted by human trafficking.” While a step in the right direction, it still does not reduce wait times for victims of marital rape, intimate partner violence, childhood sexual abuse, and other sexual offences that do not qualify as human trafficking.

Centres in underserved rural and remote communities face greater barriers to service delivery. Jenna Van Hoek serves as an Aboriginal sexual assault/abuse crisis counsellor at the Women in Crisis shelter in Algoma, Ontario, where Sarah Paciocco is also a counsellor. They said that with a three- to six-month waitlist, they have seen 352 sessions between April and September 30th, 2020. Housed within a shelter, the centre struggles with space and accessibility issues. Its staff of three counselors and a family court support worker conduct one-on-one sessions with clients, in person and by phone, out of two rooms. “One of those rooms is a rec room for women that are staying in the shelter. This takes the space away from the women that are in the shelter,” said Van Hoek. Sometimes, their counselling sessions are held in a big board room with a table that seats 12. Other times, they rent banquet rooms in hotels for their one-on-one sessions with clients. “It’s just not a conducive and appropriate space to see the amount of [sexual abuse] clients we see in a day,” she added. The centre also offers at-home counselling to victims who cannot drive to the centre.

The need to move toward a trauma-informed approach to dealing with sexual assaults in Canada is dire. Certainly, Cheralee von Gunten’s experience with the RCMP bears testament to that fact.

From 2014 to 2019, von Gunten endured five years of domestic and sexual violence in her marriage. In August of 2019, after being sexually assaulted by her husband twice within a week, von Gunten finally decided to seek medical intervention without reporting to the police. The sexual assault nurse found visible signs of vaginal abrasions and bruising on her cervix and encouraged her to consider a forensic rape kit. This meant reporting to the RCMP. The constable who came to the hospital decided that the kit would not be completed. He said it would have no evidentiary value because the perpetrator of the sexual assaults was her husband.

“To come forward and ask for a sexual assault kit to be completed, and then be denied by the responding officer, is an injustice that cuts deeper than I could ever convey. His attitude and actions caused an immense harm that I think is difficult to define,” said von Gunten.

Eventually, Charity Hamm, her counsellor at the Central Alberta Sexual Assault Support Centre (CASASC) in Red Deer, arranged for von Gunten to speak with a female constable in the domestic violence unit, who believed her and administered the kit.

Von Gunten’s journey with SACs began back in May 2006. Then a 26-year-old single mother, von Gunten was raped by one of two men she and a friend had met at a pub in Edmonton. She only knew her rapist’s first name. With no family support, she wasn’t sure if she’d be believed by the police. She was convinced that going to the police with this information would not bring her justice. Back then, crisis lines at the CASASC didn’t exist. The pain, isolation, and desperation brought on by her rape finally made her go to the CASASC without an appointment, two weeks after the rape.

After first speaking about her assault to the executive director, von Gunten was “shuffled around” before being assigned to Hamm, with whom she has maintained on and off sessions since 2006. Von Gunten said it was hard for her to keep counselling appointments without being able to afford child care. Over the 14 years, von Gunten feels that the biggest barrier in the CASASC’s service delivery for victims is the shortage of counsellors to meet the demand.

“They do have a couple of weeks or longer wait time, which maybe isn’t that bad compared to other places. I’ve heard, over the years, that bigger centres might have longer wait times to get in, which is horrible because you need to see somebody right away [after a sexual assault]. Everything’s just turned upside down for you to try and have to handle that alone for days, weeks, months on end, depending on how long the wait is to get in,” she said.

With three counsellors on staff, between 2017 and 2018, the CASASC’s new client intake grew from 405 to 504, an increase of 24 percent in one year. In 2018 alone, the centre clocked in 3,438 client sessions.

Tomlinson says that the root of the problems facing Canada’s SACs goes back to how law, policy makers and the public, at large, addresses sexual assault. It stems, she says, from a victim-blaming society and myths about rape.

“There seems to be this common misperception that [a victim of sexual assault] must have done something to contribute to the harm caused to them,” agreed James. “That it couldn’t possibly be committed by a family member or someone that’s held in higher esteem [like a husband].”

When in fact, 80 percent of sexual assault survivors know their assailant, according to the Canadian Women’s Foundation.

“No one is immune to those myths,” said Tomlinson.

Not even Catherine. It took a 40-minute solitary car drive to work for her to realize that her ex-fiancé had raped her.
“I remember screaming in my car. ‘This was fucking rape.’ I actually had to say this to myself over and over, almost like a mantra,” before she believed it, she said.

An AASAS report clearly states that “immediately following a sexual assault, survivors face the betrayal that someone they know (and often someone they know and care for) chose to sexually assault them. Next, they must acknowledge that they live in a world where many people will not believe them—yet another betrayal. It is unacceptable, therefore, and yet unavoidable in the current funding climate, that when survivors finally build the courage to reach out for help—they are told they have to wait—sometimes for as long as 9 months. This is the ultimate betrayal.”

Until we can change those perspectives, there’s not going to be any change in terms of survivors entering the criminal justice system, choosing to report, and survivors getting a fair deal in the criminal justice system, according to Tomlinson.