Illustration by Dave Donald

The importance of thinking before you click

Online media has monetized humanity’s rubbernecking reflex like never before. “Clickbait,” as defined by Urban Dictionary, is an “eye-catching link on a website which encourages people to read on. It is often paid for by the advertiser or generates income on the number of clicks.” Clickbait is now a widespread phenomenon. These highly clickable links to videos, articles or images thrive on the lowest forms of controversy and intrigue, attracting an audience in the same manner as a bar fight or a car accident.

Back in September of 2013, a viral image spread across the internet: Miley Cyrus in a leather bikini, with knobby pigtails and lascivious red lips, twerking into Robin Thicke’s black-and-white Beetlejuice pants. I saw it paired with an ostensibly feminist headline drubbing the performer. Eager to hear what new lows Cyrus had sunk to, I clicked.

Days later, it seemed, I emerged from the haze of Cyrusbait now repulsed by the image, much the way you might react to the sight of tequila the morning after a binge. Had I learned anything new about the exploitation of female performers? No, I’d gorged on sugary listicles like “22 Things That Miley Cyrus Looked Like at the 2013 VMAs.” Had I ruminated on contemporary approaches to feminism? No, I’d watched as discussion devolved into mud-slinging between Miley Cyrus, Sinead O’Connor, and Amanda Palmer. And I was primed for the new Miley Cyrus video “Wrecking Ball” when it came out—with artful timing—just a few days after the controversy. I clicked, yet again, along with millions of other viewers.

Once we were through with Miley, more highly clickable stories arose in her wake: David Gilmour teaching only “serious heterosexual guys”; the Rob Ford crack circus; Brazilian prostitutes taping Justin Bieber sleeping; a toy company suing the Beastie Boys—to name just a few.

Some of these stories touch on important issues—the pervasive power of straight white men in the literary world, dangerously irresponsible civil servants—but mainly it’s a bunch of people doing stupid shit. Why are we giving them so much attention?

The answer, of course, is money. Websites like BuzzFeed, Upworthy, and Huffington Post are figuring out the best way to pair journalism with ads that are designed so that you can barely distinguish the two. BuzzFeed uses an algorithm to determine what people click on, and then marries successful campaigns with “BuzzFeed Partners” like Virgin Mobile. New York magazine estimates this new “advertorial” approach to journalism nets BuzzFeed around $40 million a year in ad revenue (BuzzFeed does not release official numbers). Jonah Perretti, BuzzFeed’s founder, described the relationship between his company and Facebook by saying, “They own the railroad tracks, we drive the trains.”

Upworthy employs a team to run randomized tests and determine the most clickable headlines. The formulaic nature of these headlines has spawned imitators and parodies, but remains shockingly effective. Before the site was two years old, it had 22 million visitors a month and had raised $8 million from investors—cash that these investors want to see returned. Naturally, Upworthy is trying out its own forays in sponsored stories. Unlike BuzzFeed, Upworthy produces no original content at all; it functions through aggregation and reframing, and as of March, partnerships with hard-news sites like ProPublica. Huffington Post uses the same mixed editorial/advertorial approach—also called “native advertising”—as Upworthy and BuzzFeed, and was sold to AOL for $300 million in cash.

We may think we’re getting a great deal with all this free and fun clickbait, but we’re paying for it dearly in other ways. Tech start-ups and advertising companies are colluding to turn us into a bunch of rats in Skinner boxes, primed to click for the next sugary reward, while they make big bucks off “sponsored content” stories about the new Xbox or Chevy Corvette. In a world of narcissistic articles like, “23 Signs You’re Secretly an Introvert,” hard-hitting journalism becomes an endangered species. War reporters in Aleppo can’t afford health insurance and are paid $70 per article—barely enough for a night’s room and board in the war-torn region.

You can fight back by doing one simple thing: think before you click. Don’t click or share what will only make you or others uselessly angry. (No more Margaret Wente columns—we only have ourselves to blame for her continued career.) You can employ online tools, like Rather (GetRather.com), which allow you to filter out clickbait generators and stories. You can follow Twitter feeds like @Huffpospoilers and @Upworthyspoilers which skewer leading tweets and reveal the banal answers behind mysterious headlines. You can support quality journalism. You can choose not to stop and gawk at the spectacle.

Laura Trethewey lives in Vancouver, where she writes fiction and non-fiction for Geist, the National Post and other publications. Her work has been nominated for a National Magazine Award and a Western Magazine Award.

Illustration by Dave Donald

Thoughts on the creative value of taking a break

“MY LIFE IN MONTREAL WAS SO GOOD,” said the songwriter Sean Nicholas Savage in a recent interview for Bad Day magazine. “We did so many projects. We made tons of albums and we were making movies and just doing tons of shit all the time.” Savage worked at a call centre a couple of days a week between playing music and, like Grimes and Mac DeMarco and any number of Montrealers now doing good in the world, creating a body of work.

Montreal, or rather Anglo Montreal as seen by outsiders, is a Bum City. And Bum Cities are incredibly important: places where you can go and live cheaply and do your work (like, your “Work”), ideally well enough that you’ll get to schlep it to a bigger, more expensive city if you choose to. From what I gather, Savage now lives in Brooklyn.

In Toronto and, I imagine, New York, devoting yourself to art is a form of idleness, and idleness is not a virtue. This is largely because of the cost of living, but also, Toronto and New York are places where, in theory, you could get a paying job in a creative field—you just have to work really hard to get it, and once you get it you have to work twice as hard not to lose it, because there will always be people who haven’t gotten it yet and are willing to work harder than you. In Toronto and cities like it, indolence is a vice. All the best people are busy.

I was born and raised in Toronto, which is probably why I so admire and mythologize the Bum Life. I’m also tired of hearing people boast about how busy they are, tired of hearing myself boast about how busy I am, tired of being busy. So early this spring, I stopped hustling for freelance work on top of my full-time gig and gave myself a month or two to “do my thing.”

I started a new skin care regimen. I planned outfits and took long walks just to “air” them. I worked eight-hour days, started drinking at 5:30 p.m., read music biographies for kicks and bad short fiction for the hell of it. I relaxed. And I was lonely, very lonely, because my friends all have jobs and freelance gigs on top of their jobs. And I was miserable, so very miserable, because for the first time in years I considered my personal life, and the kind of person I wanted to be, and saw that I was coming up real short.

Mostly, I felt guilty. I had a sense of wastefulness: leisure seemed like a frivolous indulgence, especially in a city where no one else could afford it. Also worthless, because the thing about being at leisure among the busy is that it’s not a good look. Being busy is as much a privilege as being not busy, so I don’t say any of this to complain. Only to praise Bum Cities, those little pockets in which leisure is valued.

Then again, “bum” is a misnomer. And maybe I’ve internalized the hard-work ideology more than my Jimmy Buffett/Kevin Ayers fantasies suggest. Being a bum, in the Montreal-musician-as-seen-by-Torontonian sense, is actually very labour intensive. The success of a Savage or a Grimes abides the 10,000 hours rule: they worked really, really hard on their own stuff, stuff no one valued outside of a like minded community, stuff that the world is now starting to appraise. Meanwhile, 10,000 ad copywriters and magazine hacks and radio producers are chipping away idly at the novels they’d have finished if they weren’t paying for condos or Brockton Village apartments.

These days I am busy again, and feeling all the time like something is wrong: there is something I forgot to do, something I have to do that I don’t know whether I’m capable of, something I have to do that I’m capable of and dreading severely. These are good, familiar feelings compared to the one that marked my not-busy time. There is something wrong with me. There is. But I don’t have time to think about that now.

Alexandra Molotkow has written for the Walrus, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, Maisonneuve, and the New York Times Magazine.

Illustration by Matt Daley

Why the Canadian government needs to hit refresh on its digital strategies

When former Public Safety Minister Vic Toews stood in the House of Commons and proclaimed that anyone who didn’t support the government’s new Lawful Access legislation was standing with the child pornographers, the Internet collectively decided he was being ridiculous. When MP Dean Del Mastro compared ripping a CD to buying socks and then stealing shoes (because, you know, feet), the Internet collectively decided he was being profoundly stupid.

The Internet wasn’t wrong.

And it’s not that Toews is a ridiculous guy or that Del Mastro is actually stupid, but there’s a disconnect between the digital policies they’re advocating and the way people actually use digital technology. Wanting privacy doesn’t mean you support molesting children and converting your music collection doesn’t make you a thief. Obviously.

This isn’t strictly an attack on the current Conservative government. Previous governments didn’t really have to deal with these issues. Consider how far we’ve come since Stephen Harper first came to power in 2006, before the iPhone was a thing or the words “big” and “data” had collided in a sentence. But newness doesn’t excuse the tenuous grasp elected officials like Toews and Del Mastro have on both the technical and cultural aspects of modern technology. Either they aren’t the right people to be working on these policies or, more frightening, it’s a problem that permeates the entire House of Commons—a group whose average age is 53, with only a handful of millennials (the only generation with the opportunity to have internalized so many digital issues) who all belong to the minority opposition.

Whether it’s age or politics, the sitting government has already repeatedly whiffed on digital policy. Most disappointing was when Industry Minister James Moore introduced Digital Canada 150 in April, a strategy document designed to put digital priorities front and centre, but was  panned for lacking any sort of real vision or concrete plans (Michael Geist called it a strategy document lacking much in way of actual strategy). It was a document that took a staggering four years to produce, which means much of the data used pre-dates the iPad and Netflix streaming and a lot of other things we take for granted today.

The shortcomings of Digital Canada 150 became apparent with subsequent legislation. Bill C-13, officially the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, was supposed to be a huge step toward combatting cyberbullying. Unfortunately, it also includes a pile of provisions that have nothing to do with cyberbullying, and has been strongly criticized for allowing investigative overreach without judicial oversight, while stripping away the privacy protections many Canadians assume they have. It’s a wide-reaching bill that was heavily scrutinized by a small group of people who enjoy heavily scrutinizing these things, but was largely sold to the general public as something that would save our kids from the scourge of bullies on the Internet. In short, C-13 has never received the public discussion it deserves and, while not straight out of 1984, does have an Orwellian feel to it.

More curious than sinister was Bill C-23, the much discussed Fair Elections Act. In a world where we can pay bills, buy groceries, and file taxes online, C-23 offers substantial electoral reform without ever broaching the subject of online voting. In fact, the infrastructure needed to make online voting a reality isn’t really on anyone’s roadmap, which is crazy if you really think about it. (This isn’t just a Canadian problem and, oddly, it’s Estonia that leads the way with a comprehensive digital identification program that’s required at every level of government.)

Technology touches everything—justice, privacy, resources, copyright, access to information, entertainment, democracy itself—so robust and complex digital policies are necessary. It’s not just enough that our politicians understand this stuff, which they mostly don’t (if you don’t believe me, you haven’t listened to an MP try to clearly and accurately define “metadata” or “net neutrality”), they need to ensure we understand it, too. Balance on these issues is important: balance between companies and consumers, law enforcement and citizens, government and taxpayers. But keep in mind that half of all of those equations is people—we are the consumers and citizens and taxpayers. And, generally speaking, when an issue isn’t being widely discussed and properly understood, it’s the people that are getting screwed.

In the late ’90s, the Canadian government debuted what was supposed to be a new, golden era of rehabilitation in women’s prisons. Yet, less than two decades later, the dream has failed. What one former inmate’s struggles and successes tell us about a broken system

RIGHT BEFORE WE MEET FOR THE FIRST TIME, AVA* SENDS A TEXT. “I got here early.” She includes a description: the blonde woman wearing black. My bike bumps along Toronto’s Dundas Street bringing me closer to the café where we’ve agreed to meet. It’s an airy café, fairly full. Neatly framed artwork has been arranged, carefully decorating its walls. On this late October 2013 evening, it’s about a half hour until sunset. Nearly golden light streams in and coffee cups clink on saucers as I walk down the row of tables looking for Ava. A blonde woman sits alone. I see her from the back first. She’s wearing black. It’s her.

We introduce ourselves politely. When Ava smiles the corners of her eyes crinkle a little. Her blonde hair falls in soft waves just past her shoulders. She wears a freshly scented fragrance and subtle makeup. At 41, she wouldn’t look out of place lecturing behind a university podium, dashing down Bay Street in the morning, or picking a child up from school. Ava starts our conversation with, “I like your nail polish,” and in the same girlish raspy voice she says, “My story is complicated.” For the past several years, Ava has been a prisoner inside Grand Valley Institute, a Kitchener, Ont.-based federal institute for women. She began serving her sentence in 2007, and was released on early parole in 2008; by 2009, she’d re-offended and was back in prison. In May 2013 she was released on parole again, a series of drug trafficking and fraud charges behind her—or at least starting to be.

While at Grand Valley, Ava earned a degree from Laurentian University. She is now going to college, planning a career helping women who have been abused. On the surface, it all sounds good, but as Ava has told me, her story is complicated. While she’s believes she held privileges in prison—being white-skinned and educated— in many ways, she also thrived despite the criminal justice system. She’s a rare success story born from a poorly-run prison, where the system is anything but conducive to rebuilding women’s lives—even though, as a rethink of the punitive model, it was designed to do exactly that. In a very real sense, she is one of the lucky unlucky ones. Ava tells me she recently moved out of the halfway house, where, as part of her parole, she was mandated to live from May until October. The server brings her a mug of chai tea and almond milk as I do the math: This is her fifth day of complete independence in years. Ava looks up at the server. “Can I have two sugars, too?”

A CANADIAN WOMAN with a sentence of two years or more serves her time in federal prison. Orange is the New Black may have viewers captivated by the idea of what serving time is like but there’s more going on between scenes—in the Canadian system and at Grand Valley in particular. Between March 2010– March 2012, the population of federally sentenced women topped 600 for the first time, representing a 21 percent increase in just two years. Inside the grey of Grand Valley, women live packed like maraschino cherries in a jar. There, the population is about 180, or three times what the institution was originally designed to accommodate. Gymnasiums, visiting units, and the interview room of the maximum security unit have become makeshift cells. The max unit, where high-security offenders stay, now has two beds in cells that were only designed to hold one.

On top of this, Canada’s prison ombudsperson, Howard Sapers, is concerned about violence in Canada’s women’s institutions. Inmate fights, use-of-force interventions, self-harm, and charges during prison stays and are all trending in the wrong direction. About 69 percent of women offenders also needed mental-health treatment in 2010–2011. Most of the women, 85 percent, have physical abuse in their past and 68 percent have been sexually abused. Family visits are rare—there are only five female-only prisons in Canada (plus a healing lodge) and many incarcerated women have been transported great distances. Sometimes prisoners’ families are even blocked from getting inside.

Grand Valley wasn’t supposed to be like this. Opened in 1997, the prison was designed to be an alternative to the Kingston Prison for Women’s (P4W) rigid and inhospitable environment. Until its closure in 2000, the Kingston prison housed every woman convicted of a federal offence in the country, no matter which corner of Canada she came from. During its 66 years, the prison was under constant scrutiny. From its opening until 1993, it faced 13 investigations commissioned by the government, many of which suggested the prison be shut down. Lack of programming, education, and therapy combined with distance from family lead to inmate despair, depression, claustrophobia, self-harming, and suicide. Between 1977–1991, at least 12 women committed suicide while incarcerated.

In response, the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women, including members of the government and advocacy groups such as the Elizabeth Fry Society and the Native Women’s Association of Canada, released a report called “Creating Choices” in April 1990. It outlined areas that needed to be improved for women serving their sentences. After its release, it was decided the Kingston Prison for Women was unfit and would close (at least in theory) in 1994. Then, in the year it was supposed to have closed, a video surfaced, showing an April incident in which male guards brought eight inmates out of their cells for strip searches; they cavity searched seven of the eight the following day. At one point, inmates were also left in empty cells wearing nothing but paper gowns, and in restraints and leg irons. It was a pivotal point in garnering media attention—and even more criticism. It took from 1990–2000 for every single woman to be moved out of the prison and then it finally shut its doors for good on May 8, 2000, when the last woman left.

Kingston’s closure was meant to mark a move toward the new values outlined by the “Creating Choices” document. As the title suggests, it said new values would help create choices for women inmates, operating under the premise they would then be better functioning members in the community upon their release. “Creating Choices” identified key problems facing federally-sentenced women: they were among those who had most suffered from sexism, racism, physical, and sexual abuse, plus poor education and employment. The report’s authors concluded these women didn’t need more punitive measures, but empowerment, programs, and work options to take responsibility for their lives inside prison—positive behaviour that would
ideally extend beyond prison life. In addition to promoting rehabilitative-focused programming, the report declared women were housed with little access to fresh air, light, and social interaction, all detrimental factors to healthy rehabilitation.

When Grand Valley first opened, things were optimistic. It embodied the five principles of “Creating Choices” (empowerment, meaningful and responsible choices, respect and dignity, a supportive environment, and shared responsibility), right down to the cottage-style buildings, where a woman’s children and family could come and live for
extended visits. Back then, it only housed 64 women. For incarcerated women’s advocates, it was a much needed change for Canada. “It opened under a whole new vision for how correction for women in Canada was going to operate,” says Father Con O’Mahony, a former Grand Valley chaplain. “It was geared towards a much more
integrated experience for the woman.” One, he adds, that worked well for the first few years.

O’Mahony finally left Grand Valley in 2009, after spending 13 years watching its once great plans disintegrate. He first began to see things change after the federal Conservative government began to implement the first wave of “tough on crime” policies in the mid-2000s. O’Mahony became further disquieted when he noticed inmates’ mental health issues had began to largely be addressed through medication, and nothing else. Then, there was the overcrowding—and worse. Programming was cut. In 2010, the inmates at Grand Valley filed over 120 formal complaints with the Official of the Correctional Investigator, more than any other women’s prison in Canada. In 2012, the Conservative government sliced $295 million from CSC’s overall budget over a two year period. But, there were little things, too.

Guards who once wore casual clothes came dressed in dark navy uniforms. They began to carry what O’Mahony says looked like tasers. Before things started to change, he was buzzed through only one door before entering a main area where women would approach to talk. “I think it encouraged adults to be adults and it encouraged adult conversation,” he says. Now though, there are two levels of security before reaching the entry area. Everybody gets screened. When he went in for mass, often his Bible or his identification were swabbed for drugs. “It was a very different feel,” he says. Now, a disoriented Grand Valley has lost its sense of direction and is heading backwards, fast—taking most of its female inmates along with it.

BEFORE SHE WAS AN INMATE, Ava cross-country skied along Sudbury trails. She studied religious studies at Laurentian University. She made gift baskets to sell in the café she coowned with her boyfriend. But these are the highlights. When I first met her in October, Ava described her life as “dark and bleak” but left it there. Seven months later, she fills in her story. “I had several experiences of sexual abuse starting from the age of four.” She notes that the majority of incarcerated women have been sexually abused—that’s a common theme. “To be brutally honest, yes I mean rape.”

Her relationship with the boyfriend who she owned the café with started in her mid-20s and lasted roughly five years. It became violent in the early stages. Ava’s mother was also abused. So was her grandmother. Still, Ava says she found her place in the café, and loved it. She got along well with the customers and liked making their gift baskets. But slowly, the abuse became too much. She left the relationship and, shortly after,
her northern Ontario town, heading to Toronto for a fresh start. But things continued to go in the same direction. “I’d escape from one abusive relationship to another and leave with nothing but the clothes on my back and try to start over,” she says. “Eventually I just kind of gave up.” In one of our interviews, she tells me it feels like it was inevitable for her life to go in the direction it did, but then adds: “what’s different for me is that I was able to move past it.”

In Toronto, Ava got a reputation for being impulsive. She moved to the city at age 30. There were times when she abandoned her apartment, not giving her lease a second thought. She got involved in another abusive relationship. She kicked him out; he stole everything from her. He was a con man and had ripped off a lot of people already. “They came looking for him and raped and beat me. I got evicted from my apartment.”

From there, Ava turned to crime for the first time. In 2001, she started selling cocaine, then got into sex work, then started using the cocaine to recover from the sex work, then made her way to heroin which she both used and sold. At one point, right before she got arrested, she tried to pull away from her lifestyle and had even started making gift baskets again. But just a few months after she was arrested for selling drugs to an undercover police officer and possessing firearms. Found guilty, she was sentenced to five years in prison. After a year, she was released on early parole. She returned to crime and violated her order within days. “I was like, ‘I don’t give a shit,’” she says. “Everyone’s told me I’m a piece of shit so that’s what I am and that’s what I’ll continue to be.’” After her parole violation, she was sentenced to an additional three years and four months.

“I work hard to achieve things and then I just fuck them up,” Ava says. “While I’ve been impulsive, I’ve also been the kind who likes to lay down roots and build things. I’m self-destructive and destroy them, which probably led to the impulsivity … That’s why I have this tattoo.” She rolls up her sleeve and inscribed in cursive is a message about not tearing down what you’ve built for yourself. She got it in Grand Valley.

AVA’S FIRST STOP ON THE WAY to Grand Valley was the Vanier Centre for Women, a provincial jail in Milton, Ont. If a sentence is less than two years, a person stays in a provincial jail, but many women are also held in custody in a provincial jail as they await their sentence. Ava lived in the high security area of Vanier from March 2009–March 2011 before being transferred.

“It’s actually so scary,” she says. The first time she entered the doors of Vanier she says, women were in her face: “What have you got? Do you have a package?” They meant drugs. In provincial jail, there’s no methadone treatment. You wait until you get out or get to federal prison. On her first stay, Ava walked past plenty of women who were throwing up or had diarrhea. Withdrawal. It’s a dirty place. There is no soap for your hands. When someone left the bathroom, someone else would say, “so and- so’s been smoking crack again.” Some women tucked drugs into their bodies; other women knocked them out in the shower to get them. One day, while being escorted out of the high security range to visit a social worker, a guard looked at her and said, “She’s a fucking waste of time.”

Every day for every meal, she would line up for a spoon. She lined up to give it back. She usually didn’t hand it back. Instead, she stuck it through a hatch. Most guards wouldn’t touch it, but some would take it from her with a glare. At night, she would go back her cell, back to her mattress on the floor. Clean laundry was still dirty. Sometimes, there would be no socks for a week. The metal door with the slot for meals stayed shut. “It’s a relief when you get to Grand Valley,” she says. “Believe it or not.”

IN GRAND VALLEY, Ava lived in a unit with 10 women. Everyone at the prison receives a food budget of $35.56 per week. While there, Ava would make her list and then another woman picked up the items at the prison’s industrial food area. On a typical day, she would wake-up at 5:30 or 6 a.m., make breakfast, and go to work. During her time there, she filled a number of positions—librarian, photographer, and member of the inmate committee. She received a release to work at the Humane Society. The highest a woman can earn at Grand Valley is just shy of $7 per day, a
wage that has been static since 1981. Pay is situation-dependent and can be as low as $1 per day. Women use the wages to buy basic hygiene needs and pay phone fees to call family. (Just this past fall though, a new rule was established requiring inmates to give 30 percent of their pay back for room and board.) Ava likes buying shoes. She would save her $6 daily wage for months and months, eventually picking the exact right pair from the prison’s Nike catalogue.

While many women at Grand Valley worked, others slept away their sentences, she says. At Grand Valley, there is a 90-day evaluation period before an inmate can be entered in core programming. Oftentimes, though, there’s a waiting list for programming as well, and there is no guarantee a woman will start programming after the evaluation period. Inmates cannot apply for parole until the programming is complete. Ava has seen women begin their mandatory programming so late, they miss their chance to do so. “The beds are staying full,” she says, “and nobody’s moving.”

The work day for inmates lasts the full morning. After work, Ava would head back to her unit in time for the guards’ regular 11:15 a.m. headcount. Ava’s clearance came each day at about 12:30 p.m. From there, she went to programs until 4 p.m. Then,
another count. It cleared at 5:30 p.m. After that, free time until 9 p.m. Ava would usually head to the gym. “That was my sanity place,” she says. “That’s what I loved to do.” In the beginning they had a weight room, but it was later turned into a guard’s office. At one point, there was a step aerobics class. The steps broke, but they used them that way anyway—until they got taken away. Eventually the women received a new shipment of cardio equipment: one elliptical, two treadmills, and two bikes. Ava says the women fought over them constantly. Sometimes Ava would watch TV after. Inmates are allowed 15-inch sets in their cells. They have to pay for cable, whether they have a TV or not.

At Grand Valley, there was one thing that Ava could use to move herself forward. Ava had started a degree in 1992, but says she quit one credit short of graduating. Initially, she just wanted to finish that credit, and decided to take a women’s studies course through correspondence. “Then I was like, ‘Hey, I would really like to continue studying this.’ So I had to do 36 credits in women’s studies.” While many of Grand Valley’s once-big ambitions have shrunk, it still offers post-secondary correspondence courses through Laurentian University, as well as the Inside-Out program. Facilitated by Wilfrid Laurier University in the case of Grand Valley, the program trains professors from across Canada to go into institutions to teach a class that is a mixture of students from the university and students from the prison.

Inside-Out started in the U.S. in 1997 and runs in 25 states. It started in Grand Valley in 2011 with 10 “outside” students and seven “inside” students. The program offers courses through the faculty of social work and the faculty of arts at Wilfrid Laurier and receives funding from the Lyle S. Hallman Foundation, which gives grants to support education and children’s initiatives in the Waterloo region. Wilfrid Laurier University provides texts and bursaries for incarcerated students. For Ava, it was intimidating, especially her first day of class. “On our end,” she says, “we’re like ‘Oh my God these are university students, they are going to think we’re dumb.’”

She also worried the students would notice she only had blue, stained institute T-shirts to wear. What about her pants? Would these students judge her for wearing the same ones every week? “Sometimes it sounds really vain, my worries in there,” she says. “It makes you feel like you stand out and all you want to do is just blend in.” Her worries didn’t turn into reality. She began to look forward to her Inside-Out classes every week. Inmate students didn’t want class to end and for the outside students to leave. “It was really over and above anything we had hoped for,” she says. And between those classes and her correspondence courses, she managed to finish her degree and graduate on June 8, 2013. “It felt absolutely amazing,” she says. “I am the only woman in the history of GVI to have completed a degree while being there.”

AVA WAS RELEASED from Grand Valley on May 22, 2013. She went into prison with few chances for a successful future—and doesn’t downplay her degree. “Unless you’re released from prison and learn something new, you’re exactly where you started,” she says. “The fact that I was able to work on my degree, get involved in Inside-Out, I’m now in college full-time— that’s given me all the direction I needed to try and change. If none of that happened, I don’t know what I’d be doing right now. I really don’t know.” That might make it seem like Creating Choices is still alive. Not quite.

“The GVI that opened in 1997 is not the GVI we have today,” says O’Mahony. Ava points to one, big roadblock on the way to education: If women at Grand Valley want to take university correspondence courses, they have to find a way to finance them— something that’s incredibly difficult to do on a salary of less than $7 a day. At one point, inmates could get an Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) bursary called Ontario Special Bursaries which awarded a student up to $2,500. Those were last offered for the 2010- 2011 year though before they were cut from the Ontario budget. Before the bursaries were cancelled, says Ava, 30 women were studying post-secondary inside Grand Valley via correspondence. The next year, that number dropped to two. Ava paid for school through scholarships, a $500 grant from the Elizabeth Fry Association (a group that helps incarcerated women) and a different grant from OSAP.

Outside of Grand Valley, Ava says she’s lonely, that she has no friends, and has only been to the movies once. She’s not allowed to talk to anyone from prison because
she’s on parole. She feels displaced. Prices have changed. Muffins used to be $1, now they are $2. She took a trip to Shoppers Drug Mart recently, but left. The tattoo underneath her sleeve is a reminder to stay on course. She talks about these things and about her life of abuse and drugs and her women’s studies degree that she had to fight so hard for inside a penitentiary that has become hardened and strict. Somewhere on a bridge above the Don Valley River on our way to her boxing class, she stops and says “I like walking across bridges.”

Before we walk through the gym’s doors, she stops again and tells me she’s wearing two pairs of pants. She says quickly, her tone hushed: “It’s a habit from prison,” where the cells were cold and an extra pair of pants meant an extra layer of protection between her skin and filth. Months later, she tells me she’s always worried that something will send her back to Grand Valley—that everything she’s worked for is all hanging together by a string and that it could snap so easily. Sometimes in the city, she comes face-to-face with women from her prison days, still stuck in the cycle.

The other boxers don’t know about Grand Valley yet (although, tired of living a double life, she will later tell them).During the workout she’s smiling, making wisecracks. “It looks easier than it is,” she says, even though she jumps at the chance to use the weighted ball. With every exercise she adds a twist making it more challenging. The gym blasts OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” and has a brown-haired, freckle-faced coach who says that every woman needs a heavy bag to punch. “Better out than in,” she says. Throughout the gym the sound of gloves hitting and bouncing off punching bags echo. Here, at least, Ava moves with ease.

 *name changed to protect privacy

What would happen if housing were enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms? One activist’s inside account of the radical new fight to end homelessness

In 1996, fresh out of high school, I co-founded the Calgary chapter of the anti-poverty activist group Food Not Bombs, together with a group of youth active in the local punk music scene. We collected donations of food and served vegetarian meals to the hungry and homeless in front of City Hall, an outdoor soup-kitchen and weekly protest rolled into one.

We couldn’t stand by as the number of people without homes in boomtown Calgary continued to rise; by 1999 estimates put the number of homeless at almost 4,000 people.We sent letters to politicians, held rallies, and spoke to the press. No one should go hungry, we argued—after all, food did grow on trees. And we knew without a shadow of a doubt that housing was a human right.

Canada prides itself as “a consistently strong voice for the protection of human rights,” and has signed onto many international human rights covenants. It was a Canadian, John Peters Humphrey, who was the principal drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Together with the UN General Assembly, Canada adopted the historic document in 1948, which guarantees everyone the right to “a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.”

Despite this guarantee, the numbers of homeless people in Calgary has remained largely unchanged; in 2008, the city counted 3,601 people without a home. In 2014, that number sits at 3,533—and many other Canadian cities face the same high, stagnant rates.

Almost 15 years after those first small actions, I was privileged to stand outside a courthouse in downtown Toronto as four individuals and the Centre for Equality Rights in Accommodation (CERA) filed a historic legal challenge against the Canadian and Ontario governments. The housing and homelessness crisis had only deepened over the years, and these activists intended to hold Canada to its 1948 promise. They wanted the Court to declare homelessness itself a human rights violation and to rule that under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the government had a responsibility to end it.

“Across the county and in Toronto, various activities have been employed to end homelessness, from research on the health effects of homelessness to meetings with politicians and protests,” says Cathy Crowe, a street nurse and voluntary executive director of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee. “It’s hard to imagine one thing that hasn’t been tried, and done really well, by groups across the country.” Crowe is one of 12 expert witnesses who provided evidence in support of the legal challenge. “It felt to us way back, that we should go to court.”

The legal system isn’t the only avenue for marginalized people to seek justice. But, after years of organizing to end homelessness with few victories to celebrate, the possibility of a court ruling that would force the government to act was an exciting prospect.

Supporters have since dubbed the CERA-led case the “Right to Housing” challenge. Unlike past legal skirmishes led by anti-poverty activists, which targeted specific laws—such as those that banned panhandling or sleeping in parks—it is a broad, all-encompassing challenge to government policy. A shared experience of living without adequate, affordable housing brought the applicants together. They deeply wanted to help prevent others from facing the same challenges. Together with the non-profit organization CERA, they argued that the federal and provincial government had failed to implement effective strategies to address homelessness and inadequate housing. As a result, the applicants argued, the governments had deprived them, and others, of “life, liberty, and security of person”—a violation of section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

The case also relies on the rights to equality found in section 15 of the Charter. Women, people with disabilities, aboriginal people, new immigrants, youth, and people from racialized communities experience inadequate housing and homelessness at greater rates than the general population. The applicants argued that by failing to effectively address the housing crisis, Canada and Ontario were “creating and sustaining conditions of inequality.”

“I lost my husband, my children, my home,” says Janice Arsenault, one of the four applicants involved in the legal case. In 2003, her husband, who owned their Pickering, Ont., house together with his mother, died during a routine operation. Heartsick and homeless, she was forced to relinquish custody of her children to her parents. Arsenault ended up living on the street, and then in a series of poorly maintained apartments where she faced abusive roommates and drug-dealing neighbours. “I’m 45 years old. I don’t want to wait ten years to live in a safe place,” says Arsenault, who has struggled to find a decent apartment that she can afford with the money she receives in provincial disability benefits.

In Canada, 200,000 people experience homelessness each year, and at least 1.3 million have experienced homelessness or extremely insecure housing in the past five years. People without adequate housing suffer from a range of health problems, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, tuberculosis, skin and foot problems, and others. These conditions are a direct result of, or made worse, by their housing experience. They also face increased risk of violence: a 2007 Toronto-based survey found that 35 percent of homeless individuals experienced physical assault and 21 percent of women experienced sexual assault in the previous 12 months.

Without stable housing, life expectancy is significantly reduced. A 25-year-old woman living in shelters, rooming houses or hotels has a 60 percent chance of living to 75. For men, that chance drops to 32 percent. Even those who have a place to call home face serious challenges. Finding a good, affordable apartment is difficult. Forty percent of renters in Canada spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent; over 400,000 tenant households are living in overcrowded conditions; and at least 370,000 rented homes are in need of major repairs. People wait years to access affordable housing: In Ontario there are 158,445 households on the social housing wait list.

The housing crisis in Ontario hasn’t always been this bad. “Canada has always had many people living in poverty,” University of Toronto researchers noted in their 2009 book Finding Home: Policy Options for Addressing Homelessness in Canada. “But it was only in the 1980s that more and more people found themselves not only poor, but unhoused.”

This trend, caused by the erosion of social programs, grew more exaggerated when the Liberals withdrew all permanent federal funding for social housing in the early ’90s. Since then, successive governments have granted ad hoc funding for programs and new social housing, but none have re-established an ongoing program to support social housing.  “There’s a sort of collective amnesia among people about the loss of the national housing program in 1993,” says Crowe. “The current reliance on the charitable sector is problematic, and it’s a result of the underfunding of social services.”

But, there are others, like Crowe, who haven’t forgotten. In 2010, supporters of the legal case formed the Right to Housing (R2H) Coalition of Ontario. The R2H Coalition included individuals with lived experience of homelessness, as well as academics, workers, and community activists from over a dozen organizations and agencies. In the long periods between court appearances, we organized workshops and rallies to build awareness of Canada’s housing and human rights obligations. On November 22, 2011, R2H joined with the Occupy movement in Toronto to mark National Housing Day. The mood was sombre— the Occupy encampment had recently been served with an eviction notice by Toronto Police, but spirits lifted as the crowd grew in St. James Park. It was clear to me and many of the young activists sleeping in the park that homelessness was one of the starkest examples of the increasing inequality in our society which had sparked the Occupy movement. This event was one of many organized by anti-poverty activists, social service agencies, and tenant groups over the years of the housing crisis.

This sustained advocacy has not gone unnoticed by politicians, both within and outside the governing parties. In May of 2012, members of all federal parties voted in favour of a non-binding motion that acknowledged that the government has an obligation to “respect, protect and fulfill the right to housing.” A few months prior, in February, the federal NDP had introduced the Act to Secure Adequate, Accessible and Affordable Housing for Canadians to create a national housing strategy to fulfill that obligation. Members of the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois vowed to support the bill when it came time for its second reading vote on February 27, 2013. In the lead-up to the vote, advocates called and wrote to backbencher Conservative MPs from across the country, who were free to vote with their conscience. There was hope that a few MPs, seeing the problems that lack of affordable housing were causing in their ridings, might vote in favour of the bill.

Yet, on the morning of the vote, Conservative MP Tony Clement, president of the treasury board, held a press conference and characterized the private member’s bill as a “dangerous and risky NDP spending scheme.” This statement was intentionally misleading, as private members’ bills cannot allocate funds without government approval. In the end, Clement’s message found its mark, the bill was defeated 153 to 129, with all Conservative MPs voting against it.

Housing advocates have long argued the idea that it is too expensive to end homelessness is a red herring. Take, for instance, a 2008 Government of Alberta study that concluded it would cost twice as much to maintain homelessness as it would to end it by building affordable housing and providing social/health supports to those who needed them.“Moving 11,000 individuals and families out of homelessness will require investments of $3.316 billion,” reads “A Plan for Alberta: Ending Homelessness In 10 Years.” “This is far lower than the cost of simply managing them.”

Outside of Canada, there are examples of countries addressing homelessness and the right to housing. Decades of organizing and public education in Scotland paid off when the government passed a law in 2003 ensuring that anyone who is unintentionally homeless has a right to settled accommodation. Individuals without housing can apply to a regional council which has a legal duty to provide them with permanent housing. If there aren’t any units available at the time, the council must provide them with temporary housing—a bed in a shelter is not enough. France passed a similar piece of legislation in 2007. Section 26 of the South African Bill of Rights declares: “Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s precisely the kind of legal obligation seen in other countries that the governments of Canada and Ontario oppose. This attitude has made the Right to Housing case a hard fight. In 2012, the governments brought forward a motion to strike the case before it began. Rather than debate the evidence and present their own counter-arguments, they wanted the case to be thrown out without any of the evidence being heard by the Court.

“The use of a motion to strike by the government in an important Charter case like this is deeply troubling,” explains Tracy Heffernan, from the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, one of three lawyers who represented the applicants. “It can serve to quell dissent and prevent the voices of marginalized groups asserting Charter violations from being heard before the courts on a full evidentiary record.”

On May 27, 2013, three years after the case was filed, I sat in a packed courtroom watching Superior Court Justice Thomas R. Lederer preside over the motion. At the end of the three-day hearing, the Justice reserved judgment. He needed time to carefully consider the arguments put forward by both sides.

The judgment arrived four months later, on a Friday afternoon in September. The Ontario Superior Court of Justice agreed with the government. Lederer ruled that it was “plain and obvious” that the case could not succeed, and struck the case. Contrary to Canada’s pledge under the Declaration of Human Rights, it seemed, this decision made it plain that there is no right to housing in Canada. “This will come as a shock to those in Canada and the international community who have been assured that Canada recognizes access to adequate housing as a fundamental human right and that the most marginalized are protected under the Charter,” Leilani Farha of CERA said at the time.

The ruling was a clear setback, but we refused to mourn. The court is one venue to assert the right to housing, the streets another. In November 2013, the R2H Coalition helped organize a week of actions from Victoria to St. John’s in support of social housing funding and a strategy to end homelessness. In Toronto, over a 100 people gathered in the rain at Yonge-Dundas square, and our cries of “housing is a right, we won’t give up the fight” echoed off the buildings around us.

The Right to Housing applicants appealed Lederer’s decision and the Ontario Court of Appeal heard the case at the end of May 2014. In addition to arguments from the applicants and the governments, a panel of three judges considered submissions from eight intervenor groups who supported the case, including Amnesty International, the Ontario Human Rights Commission and the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund. “The proper role of the Court in this case,” wrote the Charter Committee Coalition in its intervention factum. “[Is] to provide the ‘last line of defense’ for some of the most marginalized and powerless members of Canadian society.”

As of June, there’s no way to know how long we will have to wait for the Court of Appeal decision. A positive Appeal ruling would mean that the case could continue, and Arsenault and the other applicants could finally present evidence that shows the depth of the housing crisis and its impact on human rights. It could be years before we see a final ruling, unless the applicants lose at the Court of Appeal. A negative appeal decision could mean the end of the case; the applicants would pursue a Supreme Court of Canada appeal, but there is no guarantee such an appeal would be allowed, let alone successful.

Regardless of the final outcome of the legal case, Arsenault remains steadfast in her conviction that no one in Canada should be without a safe, affordable place to live. “As a human being, I have a right to adequate housing,” says Arsenault. “It’s not just for myself. I want to fight for everyone.”

Yutaka Dirks lives in Toronto. His writing has been long-listed for the CBC Literary Prize for Creative Non-Fiction and his fiction and non-fiction work has appeared in Briarpatch, Ricepaper Magazine, and Rhubarb Magazine. A long-time social justice activist and community organizer, he contributed essays to Beautiful Trouble: A toolbox for revolution, published by O/R Books in 2012.

Illustration by Jeff Kulak

1.
What on earth did she want from him? From them? Approval? She
was embarrassed by how little she knew, or would own, of her own
motivations.

She was also too hot in her heavy wool coat, and damp, wet really,
hair like feathers stuck to her brow. Add frustrated to the list. After a
decade of intense discipline she found herself suddenly wanting to
smoke, to have random sex, or at least to have distracting fantasies
about these things: she had drifted off into trysts on the airplane, at
the hotel, in the rental car below deck.

The ferry entered Active Pass, a moment of transition she always
loved, and she stepped out onto the deck. Turbulent water churned
cutlery, dinner plates, champagne glasses and bottles tossed off of
boats, tumbling and softening them so they foamed up decades later
on beaches, common as periwinkle and sand dollars.

Shorelines sliced through the fog like cream. She scratched notes in a
hand-sized journal. Tiny illuminations like the lit cabins on the treed
shores where some old part of her still longed to live.

2.
Harlequin ducks carved in Thailand or Bangladesh lined the gift
shop shelves. Local books in racks. The clink of teapots, a cash register.
Horn blast. All the old comforts laced with their irritations. She
recalled hearing Aritha Van Herk read a story set on a ferry years ago
when she was a creative writing student at the university. The local. It
was crass in fiction. Stories were supposed to be set in New York, or
London, or at the very least, in a suspended non-descript place that
resembled the interior of an Alice Munro character.

That week someone had stolen her backpack and she found it hours
later stuffed in a garbage bin on campus with nothing but a personal
letter, her diary, and a packet of photographs taken.

That was the sort of thing that happened in Victoria.

3.
There had been a pod of whales on the previous crossing. People
stared out hopefully even after they left the strait. She stood next to
a Kurt Cobain look-a-like on his way to Botanical Beach. He was a
baker he said, lighting a cigarette for her, he liked to bake scones, she
inhaled deeply, but she did not smoke and quickly felt light-headed.

She left the baker to a rack of younger lambs and sunk into a deep
blue chair, thinking of her stolen diary. How numb she had been. Later,
when he chastised her for being so elusive, so withholding in class,
she knew he had taken it.

As painful as it had been, that loss had been a blessing. She had not yet
understood that she had been lying to herself, even in her own diary.

4.
Gulls hung ghost-like in the air. Another horn blasted. The fog refused
to lift. A woman, tall and sweet as meringue, moved past her, so slow
and heavy that she followed her up to the observation deck. Safe up
here, she thought, six stories off the water, but the plywood-covered
window reminded what a rogue wave could do. She considered pushing
the woman against the door and biting the back of her neck, but
her cell phone rang and she was momentarily jolted back to Toronto.

5.
When she lived in Victoria those many years ago, she lived in a house
on Meares. Her flat was on the second floor, a corner unit with a
large south-facing window. She used to listen to soundtracks—The
Mission, Room With a View—far too loud, and Ellen Smythe, author of
several unpublished Harlequins that needed proofreading, was often
up to complain. She was big bosomed, sixtyish (though it occurred to
her that she was probably only 40), short, hair dyed blond, face like
powdered linen, and very, very hungry. She had been there that first,
exhilarating, day, knocking quickly.

A laugh, unexpected, set off car alarms three blocks down. Her landlady
blushed at her standing in a T-shirt and turned without asking
whatever it was she wanted to ask. She went back to her bedroom and
there they were, like hungry, doting parents, urging her back to bed.

6.
He suggests they walk to Cadboro Bay, and so they do. The air was
warm, but it was windy and they were almost sideways, against it.
Everyone talked about the weather in Victoria, but no one mentioned
the persistent wind. He loped ahead of her like a much younger man,
slipping down a trail with too many logs, round and slippery as oil
drums. She was wearing the wrong coat. The wrong shoes. Staying
upright demanded all of her attention. They had two children, he said,
rolling his eyes, and yes, he had published several books since. She
had noticed, she said, waiting for a comment on her own work. He
took his binoculars out from under his jacket.

You see, he said, the Harlequins are there. And they were, chestnut
and slate, the male a slightly off Tao. They roiled in the rockiest point
in the bay; tumbling where the waves crashed and currents shifted
quickly. They mate high in swift mountain streams, he said. They nest
in crevices. From where they stood they could not hear the squeaks
and whistles of joy as they wrenched mussels and barnacles, crabs
and crustaceans.

7.
It would have been better to meet indoors, she thought. Here it was
though he was made of rubber and feathers, drifting on stilts, absolutely
free of any memory of her body, any obligation of mind. And
yet he was the one that started it with her. He, who on one of their
post workshop outings, had slipped his hand between her legs under
the table as he regaled the class with having met Carver. She found
his audacity, his control, thrilling. You have to meet my wife, he said,
brushing her breast with his arm, she will love you.

8.
He asked how she was, and he listened and nodded. He kept his body
at an angle, an elbow between them.

She knew by then that she had been one of many. Everyone knew:
each year a new affair proceeded in a startlingly similar fashion. She
had merely been a sheet of excitement, a shimmer of lubricant they
penetrated each other through. That’s what mentorship looks like for
women, someone said.

The day, drawing to a close around them, felt as turbulent as it was
the day she left well over a decade ago. She had not told anyone she
was applying to another program and this turned out to be a great
convenience.

9.
And how is Di, she asked finally. He pointed to another cluster of
ducks as if he couldn’t quite hear her, and it occurred to her that he
hadn’t told Di that she had contacted him. Triumph is overrated, she
thought. That she had moved so far along in her career, that she had a
partner, that she was happy, successful, none of this shielded her from
the stab of this omission.

He stopped suddenly, facing her directly. Were you always a lesbian,
or did you just not know at the time?

Why, she said, would that be breaking the rules? She stopped herself
from saying something cruel about how she had never cared what he
thought of her. That it had always been about his wife. That Di was
delicious, like trying to find a single strawberry in a bowl of whipped
cream. Surely he must know that.

There will be a small gathering after the reading, he said. Come. He
walked on, binoculars at the ready, sure and quiet, as if he was leaving
a trail of crumbs.

SINA QUEYRAS is the author of MxT and Autobiography of Childhood,
both from Coach House.

screams the advent of written history
at those of us who think we’ve never said

a word before. At all. When no one
listens he curls into a basketball.

His bee-loud glade’s a sling of mud,
he digs for clues, unlucky grubs.

He digs, and digs, and reads the soil
conditions for paraphrases of the stuff

that’s best remembered with a nose supple
as a fine-tipped pen. When? Always.

He’s rough-hewn, but excuse him, he’s sorry,
oh there!, that shrub’s a fine adornment

for a burrow’s roof. It’s his job. To find
some retro-fitted fern, suburban,

to dwell under, like a rooted ballast in case
it takes the notion to doff its cap, fly away.

He can’t see us coming and tries not to care.
Besides, we smell like coffee mugs a mile off.

He plays at night. Inhales our molecules,
jostles nature’s volume, and toys with carnivores,

lending his luxury to teach each of us in turn
that life’s impending sport. He’s got time, do we?

Please don’t try to touch him, nervous as he gets
when you approach, or talk. He’ll moralize.

David Seymour’s first book, Inter Alia, published by Brick Books in 2005, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. His second book, For Display Purposes Only, was published in 2013 by Coach House Books. David currently lives in Toronto where he works in the film industry.

In the dark blue future I will
quiet. I have
no idea about anything.

I suppose
I’ll know what I know or I can wait—
and be really & sunnishly in the knowledge
(being whole limber accomplished jazzy “didn’t/did” “come around”
“wish list” “look hard” here I am—

You wanted so you walked.
You walked, you spoke, you cropped,
it’s tall, it’s heard, we’re alone – all the right
stops eeny meeny, I know
do you know?).

I saw what happened on the blue night
and I felt winely
and I loss the judge.
I can’t be smart for everyone.
I can’t be smart for myself even.
It’s thick and alone
those times I believed in us.

I can feel you not calling me.
You’re not just not
calling me: you’re Not Calling Me.
I recorded
a song about it and still no call, so
apparently I can’t
weep
the future into
a look I like I’m
32.

Aisha Sasha John is a dance improviser and author of THOU (BookThug 2014) and The Shining Material (BookThug 2011). Find her online at aishasashajohn.tumblr.com.