“Sharps container” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

New Brunswick’s Health Minister, Dorothy Shephard, announced in February 2021 that the provincial government plans to implement overdose prevention sites this year.

But Debby Warren, executive director at Ensemble Greater Moncton, wants the government to work toward a robust set-up that allows people dealing with addiction to leave with more than just a surface-level solution.

Ensemble Greater Moncton is an organization that seeks to alleviate social challenges by reducing harm in relation to drug use.

“Unless we address their past trauma, it’s just a Band-Aid,” says Warren. “We really have to get to the root.”

The community stakeholders committee Warren is part of has been trying to open an overdose prevention site during their two active years but had to stop because they lacked funding. She says because of the funding from the government’s initiative, the committee can continue their project, but it needs to be done right.

She hopes that one day there will be nurse practitioners or primary care providers at the sites which could allow people dealing with addiction to access health care they wouldn’t normally have access to, such as having someone who could understand their past trauma.

Warren does not want the overdose prevention sites to be done on a shoestring budget. Prevention is key. If someone with an addiction delays getting health care for serious infections or abscesses, they can turn into something more critical later on. According to Warren, it costs taxpayers $55,000 to treat endocarditis (an infection of the heart valve) or $35,000 for skin or bacterial infections, but if someone goes to the overdose prevention site for a clean needle, which could prevent infection, it’s only 14 cents.

“[The government] is planning on opening sites around the province,” says Warren. “Sometimes we try to skimp, and this is a population who have been skimped [on] all along.”

People with addictions face discrimination in the healthcare system where they are not always treated respectfully because they’re often flagged as “seeking drugs,” she says.
An overdose prevention site is a place for people to use substances where there are new and sterile resources for them. Warren says that while a lot of the work is harm reduction, it’s also about preventing HIV, Hepatitis C, and other blood-borne infections.

In the beginning, the sites will be basic and not have “all the bells and whistles.” But once the need is demonstrated, the end goal would be to have a centre where people with addictions can get counselling and health care, as well as stabilization and a better quality of life.

PHOTO BY ROB MOSES PHOTOGRAPHY

Jason Kenney, the United Conservative Party (UCP) premier of Alberta, is the best thing to happen to The Sprawl, says Jeremy Klaszus, the publication’s editor-in-chief.

Under Kenney’s leadership, the UCP’s approach to controversial issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate action has divided Albertans. Polarization is especially evident between rural and urban residents.

Individuals who have resisted the premier have found comfort in The Sprawl, which offers a progressive perspective and in-depth analysis on social issues that’s hard to find in the publication’s competitors.
“A lot of people support The Sprawl because they feel alienated here in Alberta,” Klaszus says. “People tell us over and over again … ‘It gives me hope. It helps me feel a little bit better about living here.’”

Klaszus founded The Sprawl in 2017, two years after Fast Forward Weekly—Calgary’s alternative weekly newspaper—shut down. Klaszus, a graduate of Mount Royal University in Calgary and two-time National Magazine Award winner, was a staff writer at the weekly several years before it closed.

“After Fast Forward folded, there was basically a gap in news coverage in the city … lots of people who went to Fast Forward for the non-mainstream news and analysis now didn’t have that anymore,” he says.

Working solo, Klaszus covered Calgary’s 2017 municipal election on Facebook. He continued this pop-up journalism model, reporting on one issue at a time, such as city hall’s budget and Calgary’s bid to host the 2026 Winter Olympics.

Now, The Sprawl relies on crowd-sourced funding instead of ads or a paywall. As of March 2021, it has gained more than 2,100 paying members across Canada since its inception; membership more than doubled in 2020 alone.

The rising membership has allowed the outlet to grow its staff and content. Although the publication has a Calgary focus, the number of supporters in Edmonton has grown considerably, which is why The Sprawl is adding an Edmonton-based editor to expand province-wide coverage.

“We’ve evolved out of this pop-up model to be more ongoing,” Klaszus says. “But the idea is … slow journalism, not the daily news grind. We don’t try and keep up with whatever is in the news that day; we intentionally leave all that and step back, and then do more in-depth stories that people aren’t going to find elsewhere.”

Slow, constructive, and solutions-oriented journalism is emphasized in the outlet’s manifesto, which guides the publication’s coverage and allows readers to hold it accountable, Klaszus says.

This strategy is showcased in stories about for-profit care homes ravaged by COVID-19 and the barriers immigrants face when searching for employment in their profession, for example.

“Focusing on doing a few things well can be quite powerful,” Klaszus says. “That’s really where we’ve been able to connect with our audience, is through quality over quantity.”

One benefit of being a new arrival in Canada’s news media industry is having the opportunity to learn from the industry’s mistakes, including the systemic racism that continues to impede journalists of colour.

The Sprawl publicly endorses the seven calls to action on media diversity from the Canadian Association of Black Journalists and Canadian Journalists of Colour, and will also start collecting information on the demographics of its staff and editorial contributors. The results will be published in an annual transparency report.

“At The Sprawl, we recognize that systemic racism and discrimination have created a society where the voices of many Albertans aren’t uplifted. We are committed to amplifying these voices by publishing the work of journalists and writers from a variety of underrepresented backgrounds,” the publication’s website says.

While already unique in its ad-free, curiosity-driven approach to journalism, Klaszus says The Sprawl also offers its audience a taste of playfulness with the use of comics.

“We try to carve that out too, where we’re doing some playful stuff, amid the more serious and weighty coverage that we do.”

Even as the publication grows beyond Calgary, Klaszus says he doesn’t see it leaving the province any time soon—if ever.

“I think part of what works about The Sprawl is that it is local, and that people … identify with it and are proud of it.”

PHOTO BY TALHAMUJAHID

“You’re from Scarborough!?”

Scarborough rolled off his tongue like a bitter taste he was trying to get rid of, almost as soon as the word left his mouth. This is one of my first memories of someone’s reaction to where I lived. It sounded heavy with the weight of negative stereotypes. I didn’t know I should’ve hated living here until someone told me to. When I moved to Canada almost a decade ago, I knew nothing about my soon-to-be neighbourhood. But as the day disappeared in the rearview mirror and we drove further down the highway towards our apartment, I noticed how the sparkly downtown Toronto skyline slowly transformed into Scarborough’s brown mid- and low-rise apartment buildings. Initially, the sparkle wasn’t alluring. But slowly, I started seeing Scarborough through the eyes of others, both the media and Torontonians’ perspectives. To some (like wealthy, white people) it was a dangerous crime-ridden wasteland, home to mainly BIPOC folks who lived in Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) buildings. I started internalizing the negative messaging about my community. But with the 10-year anniversary of my move to Scarborough approaching, I’ve done years of internal work to examine the racist, classist, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant notions that altered my perception over time.

Scarborough is located in the east end of Toronto, home to over 600,000 people as of 2016, people from places such as the Caribbean, the Philippines, Africa, China, and South Asia. Before Scarborough became part of the City of Toronto in 1998, it was its own municipality. Advocates such as the Free Scarborough movement have argued that its amalgamation into the “megacity” hasn’t improved life for local residents. Over the last decade, I’ve slowly seen a shift in portrayals of the neighbourhood.

Mornelle Court is a small, vibrant community in Scarborough, spanning seven apartment buildings—two of which are owned by TCHC. I lived and attended school in the area. Words like “dangerous” and “crime” were often thrown around when people spoke about the neighbourhood. Curious about where the community’s reputation came from, I found a string of mid- to late-2000s news stories focusing on its history of gun violence. A connection is often made between TCHC buildings and crime without recognizing the ways a historically underfunded housing system and lack of resources, including access to non-precarious work in Scarborough, reinforces this cyclical relationship. Poverty is criminalized. The Toronto Public Service’s 2020 data shows Scarborough is no more likely to have crime than other parts of the city. But the stereotypes say otherwise. Despite these negative portrayals, people have been actively working on taking back the community by creating initiatives like homework clubs and after-school programs for children to reclaim the narrative.

Last year, I noticed a sign during one of my neighbourhood walks. “Condo luxury without the commitment,” read the tagline for a newly painted and remodelled building in Mornelle Court, owned by MetCap, a management company that has gained a reputation for their ill treatment of tenants. The juxtaposition of 110 Mornelle Court, one of the TCHC buildings undergoing external and structural repairs, being a few steps away from the newly rebranded “condo luxury” building was laughable and insulting. The developers were cashing in on the labour of community leaders to reclaim the neighbourhood, using it as an opportunity to reinvent their apartment building. Despite the freshly painted exteriors and shiny new glass buildings in the neighbourhood, these changes haven’t improved the quality of life for existing residents. Attempts to usher in new wealthy, white residents with promises of luxury and affordability do nothing to address the longstanding issues Scarborough residents face. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, Scarborough is facing its own pandemic with a COVID-19 test positivity rate of 24 percent in April 2021, one of the highest in Ontario, as well as vaccine shortages. The new mirrored apartment buildings will only continue to act as reflectors for the community’s issues.

Witnessing “Scarberia,” or “Scarlem,” undergo a rebranding by developers to become The Borough, appealing to middle-class white people seeking luxurious amenities—is infuriating. “This is Scarborough and it’s Yours to Own,” reads the sign of another new development at Lawrence Avenue and Birchmount Road. East Scarborough has the highest concentration of social housing buildings in Ontario. Residents have poor mobility because of transit deserts. In addition, Scarborough has one of the highest rates of working poor people in Toronto. Homeownership is not accessible for them in this space where they’ve been historically marginalized.

I’ve heard “beautification” and “revitalization” thrown around, which just feels like veiled or coded language. Call it what it is: gentrification. It means creating space for privileged white people to “discover” the value of a neighbourhood I loved before it was trendy or cool. Revitalization is code for gentrification because it never involves the residents who live there. It means fixing up the space, so it meets the standards of new, often white, residents.

Malvern is a northeast Scarborough neighbourhood that is often misrepresented as a crime hotspot, while community members struggle to receive more City of Toronto funding to support the area. Reading articles describing Malvern as a “cultural hotspot”—as one in NOW Magazine did, because the proposed Scarborough LRT (a light rail train that will connect communities in Scarborough to Toronto’s downtown core) will stop there, is baffling. Is this the same Malvern that only a couple of years ago was ranked in the top 10 most dangerous neighbourhoods in the city?

The first year Nuit Blanche, an all-night art festival with installations across the city, came to Scarborough, I overheard a few white people on the Scarborough RT talking about it being their first time in the area. They were “shocked” and “surprised” that the expansive wasteland they thought extended after Kennedy Station was in fact a vibrant and fruitful community. They treated Scarborough like an exotic vacation spot that they “discovered,” or a hidden gem they were uncovering. They ignored how decades before their arrival, Scarborough and its racialized communities deemed it worthy.

There’s an abundance of greenery, like Rouge Park, and beauty beyond the limited possibilities developers see here. Every time I walk into Aunt Elsie’s Caribbean Kitchen, the owners always have a kind word while I check out my box of patties and coco bread.

The cooks at Food Kulture Bistro know my family’s usual Friday night order. The grocery clerks at Food Basics are well acquainted with my shopping habits, often commenting when I’ve gotten a good deal on my produce. This is more than a place to live—I’ve been adopted into a community of people who hold me up. And the more white gentrifiers have access to my safe space, the less safe it feels for me.

Living in Scarborough has truly made me a better person, and I am deeply protective of it. I’ve always loved how I could hear and see home in the faces of people in my neighbourhood. No one did a double take when they heard my accent, or asked me to say certain words like a parrot for their entertainment. It was a place I could just be. I didn’t have to perform my Jamaican identity for anyone. It isn’t uncommon to meet people who are familiar with my hometown in Jamaica, rather than introduced to it through appropriation. In my neighbourhood, there is this unspoken bond where I am my neighbours’ keepers, and they are mine. We are bound by so much more than our postal codes. People whose names I don’t even know look out for me. It is a place I’d like to continue to call home, but with the looming threat of increased rent and invitations extended to outsiders, I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to take up space here. Outside of Jamaica, Scarborough is the only place I’ve called home because the community here claimed me. Not because I tried to possess it. Scarborough is not yours to own, gentrifiers.

Panoramic Aerial View of Deforestation Area in Boreal Forest, Quebec · Photo by Onfokus

Huge trucks loaded with wood climb the steep slopes at a slug’s pace before hurtling down at breakneck speed across the Gaspé Peninsula in southeastern Quebec. On weekdays, any driver who finds themselves ahead of these motorized ogres will vividly relive the nightmarish journey of salesman Dennis Weaver chased by a mad trucker in Steven Spielberg’s 1971 film, Duel (think Jaws on wheels, with a tanker truck instead of a shark—in which you feel you are going to need a bigger car).

But on quiet weekend days, one feels completely immersed in nature, driving on the road meandering through thick evergreen woods. Yet, the hustle and bustle of the trucks suggest another story behind the green curtain.

In May 2020, I flew from Gaspé to Montreal. It was a painful experience. As the plane was reaching altitude, I was stunned by the scale of broad patches of cleared areas crisscrossed by dirt roads. I felt fooled by the thin wooded layer bordering the highway I’d used so many times, hiding the interior of a forest that no longer exists.

“Only space visible from road corridors and selected visually sensitive areas are protected by the Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks,” says Marie-Ève Desmarais, forest engineer and member of La Commission Forêt at Nature Québec, or the Forest Commission. “All the rest is ignored.”

This way of preserving visually sensitive areas of the forest environment from the public eye first appeared over 20 years ago, following a shocking documentary denouncing logging practices destroying Quebec forests for the benefit of wood companies.

Richard Desjardins’ L’erreur boréale (Forest Alert), winner of eight prizes in Quebec and France, including the 1999 Jutra Award for Best Documentary, provoked a province-wide movement for the reappropriation of public forests by concerned citizens.

An author, composer, performer, and documentary filmmaker from Rouyn-Noranda, a small town located in the heart of the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region in northwestern Quebec, Desjardins showed the public forest treated as a big pile of wood by industrialists and denounced the clearcutting practiced on vast expanses of the boreal forest.

The overview of massive clearcuts—the archetype of industrial horror in forests—completely transformed the social perception of the forest in Quebec. The provincial government reacted to the shift in public perception by creating a new Forest Management Plan in 2010 where timber companies would no longer be the only players in the forest. Instead, plans would be drawn up by the Ministry’s regional offices to meet the aspirations of the local population.

The film was a real eye-opener stirring up public outrage, forcing the Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks to improve their methods by taking inspiration from natural forests, creating a landscape closer to nature, and engaging in more sustainable forestry practices. Their approach, tempered by social considerations, recognized that a way to maintain socially acceptable forestry was to mimic natural spatial patterns in managed public forests by replicating physical constraints, disturbances, and biological processes naturally present in the forest environment.

With public perception at stake, the concept of social acceptability, based on landscape ecology principles, emerged with the era of new sustainable forest practices. Visual quality assessment methods, inspired by 1960s American landscape architects, were integrated to determine, classify and map areas of significant interest with a high degree of visual sensitivity.

“If recent cuts occupy more than 40 percent of a landscape that you see, it falls below the threshold of social acceptability,” explains Louis Bélanger, a retired professor and researcher at the Faculty of Forestry, Geography and Geomatics at Laval University, Quebec.

Landscape ecology is the science behind understanding the interactions between ecosystems within a region and the environment’s ecological processes. In the forestry world, this translates into the imitation of natural patterns of ecosystem disturbance by recreating natural cut shapes, preventing straight lines, and waiting for the first cut to regenerate to a height of four metres before starting a second. It also means avoiding scattered trees on peaks and ensuring that logging does not dominate the visible landscape in distant perception areas.

“This is called ecosystem-based management,” says Pier-Olivier Boudreault, a conservation biologist at the Société pour la nature et les parcs (SNAP) Québec. “The goal is to reproduce the disturbances of nature, like a big forest fire or an insect outbreak.”

The Ministry must follow two steps to get a new cutting project accepted. First, landscape planners map sensitive areas to minimize visual impacts, using a series of criteria based on social values such as the attendance and the attractiveness of the area, the number and expectations of users, the duration of use and observation, the importance of infrastructure and equipment, and the diversity of services.

“When we’ve done that, we’ve already found the problems. We know what will be visible and what will be hidden,” says Desmarais. “But we have to validate in the field if what we’ve planned meets the needs of the population.”

To validate their maps, the Ministry is required to hold a public consultation process which can include 3D virtual models of cutting patterns to be shown to citizens and committee members such as Indigenous communities, town officials, outfitters, and recreational and environmental associations. Those who live in an area where a logging project is planned have to be given the opportunity to express their concerns about how the project could affect their quality of life and livelihood. This step suggests public participation has become essential over the years, strongly influencing forest management.

“It is a process of trying to make forestry visually acceptable in places people think are sensitive. But it does not work all the time,” says Bélanger. “If we did a survey to find out the level of satisfaction, I suspect we would get a C-minus. We don’t fail like we used to, but there aren’t a lot of As.”

The Ministry’s attempt to change in the decade following the scandal surrounding forestry management, thanks to Desjardins’ documentary, showed that they could easily take the preservation of forest landscapes’ visual quality into account in the calculation of authorized cuts.

As of April 1, 2013, the Quebec Sustainable Forest Development Act states that, while promoting the use of wood to create economic wealth, the Ministry is responsible, through protecting ecosystems and preserving biodiversity, for ensuring the perpetuity of the public forest for all users. But despite the progress made to implement an ecosystem-based approach over the past two decades, a conflict persists between recognizing the needs of industry and recognizing the landscape as a resource that must be valued.

“There are still no chapters in the strategic plan of the Ministry that take into account the landscape,” says Bélanger. “The aesthetics of the public forest is still not protected.”

Already at a strict minimum to meet a threshold of social acceptability, the public forest landscapes will continue to decline in the coming decades. In 2018, the new Quebec provincial government’s goal of reaching a 30 percent increase in harvested timber supply over the next 20 years might make it challenging for the Ministry to respond fairly to all the needs provided by a territory they define as a multi-use forest.

“They want to double the wood production targets. It’s scary,” says Desmarais. “The new harvest quotas are so high, I don’t know if there will be much room for ecological and landscape issues.”

This current large-scale depletion of the forest cover is due to the new 2018 Québec Wood Production Strategy, which seems to have supplanted the emerging visual trends established in the 2015 Sustainable Forest Management Strategy.

“The lobbying of multinational forestry companies in Quebec is powerful, and they have the attention of the provincial government,” says Desmarais. “And clearcutting is more profitable than adopting an ecosystem-based approach.”

Unfortunately, the Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Since 2016, little account has been taken of citizens’ demand to protect a forest landscape against industrial logging’s visual impacts if it jeopardizes cuts already guaranteed to multinational wood industries. As a result, despite high expectations raised by the sustainable harvesting methods introduced in the 2010 Forest Management Plan, communities are still faced with a worsening of their living environment due to the Quebec provincial government’s unwillingness to concretely apply its own ecosystem-based approach.
“The current forest management plan is very good, and the sustainable forest development law is excellent,” says Desmarais. “But in reality, it is not applied in the field. Any cutting plan that could satisfy everyone but would have an impact on timber harvesting possibilities is systematically rejected.”

The awareness of the desolation left by large cut areas on the forest landscape is mostly felt for now by those who venture into the woods outside the main sensitive areas identified by landscape planners. This planned visual framing can be seen negatively by communities strongly connected to the forest, as it can be perceived as being deceived by concealing measures.

“The wooded layer, it’s cosmetic,” says Henri Jacob, ecologist and president at Action Boréale in Abitibi-Témiscamingue. “It does nothing for the decrease in biodiversity and fauna habitats caused by large-scale industrial logging. We cut faster than the forest can regenerate.”

The less well-informed citizens driving to national parks, main towns, and busy tourist areas are still spared the disturbing views and kept in some form of ignorance by being locked in these green buffer zones. However, the projected increase in wood harvesting might put in plain sight what is going on behind the visual barriers. No longer able to hold some shield if quotas have to be honoured, the Ministry may start playing in visually sensitive areas secured in the past.

“The Ministry is in a bind. It seems like they can’t keep the promises they made to the population. They have to deliver the timber to the industries,” says Boudreault.

On my next road trip through the peninsula, I got out of the car on a quiet Sunday morning and walked through the dense strip of evergreen trees lining the road. Coming out on the other side, the smell of fresh, damp moss shaded by the trees had disappeared, giving way to the hot, dry earth of a devastated field.
“The new forestry plan was supposed to put the citizen back at the heart of forest management,” says Boudreault. “Twenty years after L’erreur boréale, this is something that has not been achieved.”

Illustration by Matthew Daley

My first grown-up job paid $33 an hour, in 1987. It didn’t truly pay $33 an hour, because it was a teaching job, and the rate didn’t include lesson planning. It was also very part-time. But fresh out of university, I thought this was astonishingly generous compensation. I got the job through the (former) Labour Council of Metropolitan Toronto because I was an exuberant leftist with impeccable grammar. I have never earned that much since, with the exception of the odd consulting gig.

That very cool job teaching workplace ESL and literacy started me down a path that led to some very interesting places. I was an educated white woman with choices, so I chose jobs that I felt had the greatest impact on the issues and communities I cared about. I had the luxury of being able to uphold my political ideals in the workplace. I got involved in popular education and theatre, grassroots storytelling, museum accessibility, and feminist history, moving laterally with the winds of policy change. But I had an unerring ability to take on positions that would cease to exist after the next federal or provincial election.

Until the turn of the millennium, I got every job I really wanted. Not-for-profit jobs were plentiful back then, when governments of different levels and leanings took their responsibilities to their citizens more seriously. Public money was available to at least plug some of the gaps between the rich and the poor, if not address systemic inequality. But these jobs were never secure, because they always depended on project grants. I was naively shocked by my first layoff. I was the sole employee of a unique little nonprofit that had developed practical and successful training tools for adult basic education. I was travelling around the country delivering workshops for which demand was steadily growing. The work was fully funded through a cost-share agreement between the province and the feds (incredible but true), and after four years, they simply cut it off. It sounds absurd now, but the organization’s board and I hadn’t needed supplemental funds from other sources, so we’d put all our energy into programming rather than fundraising. When the work came to a complete stop, I boxed everything up and sent it to an archive.

I was deeply disappointed, but I was young and rolled with it. Within a few months, I was offered my dream job as executive director of a workers’ arts and heritage centre.

Then Mike Harris and his cronies began the task of obliterating every last shred of humanity from Ontario’s arts, education, health, and social service sectors. I hung on for five years before being laid off a second time. It took dozens of interviews during the summer of 2000 before I landed my next job. I had the misfortune of being laid off twice more before I was 40, at which point I was burned out and, in a curious career non sequitur, took up teaching Pilates.

Soon bored with abdominal curls, I was lured back into a not-for-profit job that was so useful to Canadian women, I thought it would surely last me until retirement. Its mandate was to raise funds on behalf of more than a dozen national feminist organizations doing work ranging from prison reform to apprenticeship training, saving each the time and effort of going after the same pool of donors. Then Stephen Harper took office and reduced Status of Women Canada to rubble, closing regional offices, slashing research and support for women’s equality, and even erasing the word “equality” from its mandate. Hello, layoff number five.

I decided to go into business for myself, reasoning that the precarity couldn’t be any worse. For five years, I sank all of my resources—financial, mental, and emotional—into selling locally, sustainably handmade goods and offering craft workshops. I brought in artists to teach everything from bookbinding and screenprinting to spinning and weaving. It fulfilled my own lifelong passion for hand-making. I was surrounded by beauty and creativity every day. The business was a joy and it made a difference to some of my artists’ bottom line, but left me with more capital losses than I’ll ever be able to claim on my taxes. A lot of people treated my place like a public art gallery, while continuing to shop online or at chain stores. When I had a mediocre holiday season in 2013, I had to concede defeat and close my studio and shop. I came away rich in human assets, but entirely unencumbered by investments or real estate.

My peers warned me that being over 50 would render me unemployable, but I didn’t believe it until 200 resumes garnered me two or three interviews during all of 2014. Nobody wanted an executive director of my age, and nobody believed I’d happily settle for any role beneath that. It didn’t help that the kind of work I’d been doing in the 1980s and 1990s barely existed anymore, social services and the arts having gradually fallen victim to leaner and meaner governments. Few of the organizations I’d been involved with had survived. It felt like the fruits of all my labour had vanished without a trace.

For the past seven years, I’ve done an array of random jobs, from writing mercilessly upbeat schlock for a local paper to selling cheese at farmers’ markets. At one point, I had to go on welfare, which covered less than half of my Toronto rent. The other half, and groceries, came from my credit cards—a situation which inevitably came back to bite me. When I remarked to my Service Ontario rep that the positions I had previously held all required a master’s degree now, she cheerfully suggested I accrue massive debt to go back to university, as if this would make me more employable at 60.

The only position for which I was highly desirable was a nanny. Turns out everybody wants a mature, progressive, lesbian to mind their kids. It started accidentally, when I agreed to look after the children of friends. I was good at it. How would I describe my qualifications for this role? I’m nurturing, gentle, and squishy for cuddling. With age, I’ve become patient and unflappable. Once, I would have said my top skills were leadership and efficiency. Now I can boast about perfect playdough and aesthetically pleasing snow castles.

Childcare is an unhappy combination of exhausting and boring. But toddlers are super weird, so I found it entertaining enough to keep me going until COVID-19 hit. I did pretty well for an old broad, sustaining only one injury when I collided with a bus … of the Fisher-Price variety. Luckily, I was working above board and paying into EI, which I can now collect. But I am actively plotting a post-pandemic career change, because my body is eventually going to limit my schlepping and hoisting of children. I’ve got my first book coming out this fall, and am pinning my hopes on some modest arts council grants, so I can eke out a living as a somewhat aged emerging writer.

During the large swaths of time I have had to let my mind wander during the past year, I have thought about how I was part of the gig economy before it even had a name. I had health benefits for much of my career, which was a lifesaver when I was a single parent, but I never had a pension, so I am facing an austere lifestyle in my dotage. I’m accustomed to impecunity, so I expect the transition will not be too jarring. Fortunately, I’ve got a grown daughter who likes me, so I will never be left out in the cold. I expect I’ll be at the forefront of co-housing innovations with family or single friends, just as I was ahead of the precarity curve.

Many in my circle share my circumstances. A few friends are among what might be the last of the career civil servants, so they’ll retire comfortably. A handful have pensions from other public sector or union jobs. But most are artists of one kind or another. For us, 65 will be just another birthday, retirement a meaningless concept from a recent but bygone era. It’s scary, but at least we’ll be dead before old age security runs dry. A lot of us were temporarily rescued by the federal coronavirus relief benefits; it was a comfort to know for certain where our next 2,000 dollars were coming from.

Gigging uncertainly toward my golden years, it’s hard to resist regret. I always maintained the illusion that I was contributing to something bigger, even if it felt like I was pushing a boulder uphill much of the time.

In retrospect, I know I had an impact on some individual people, if not the systems that held them back. I was born with a great deal of race and class privilege, and my goal was to spread it around, not to squander it. I could have had one of those jobs-for-life before they went extinct, if I had just been less political and impatient, and more risk-averse and compromising. On the other hand, I recently reconnected with a friend I hadn’t seen in over 20 years. She said, “You never sold out!” That and a toonie will get me a cup of coffee, but it means a lot, just the same.

ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN GARCIA

Jerry waited beneath the underpass for Tre, away from the streetlamp’s light.

Not many people were about in that part of the city, but he could always take out his phone and pretend to chat if anyone got close. It was cold, really cold, and under any other circumstance, Jerry would have gone down to Tre’s apartment in the Junction, but Tre insisted that he pick Jerry up, promised a free dinner for his time—even a ride part of the way to his house.

Jerry had agreed, but he was regretting it now. Nina was home alone, and it was getting dark.

Headlights turned the corner. Tre’s beat-up Corolla swerved slightly as it headed towards Jerry. It jerked when it stopped.
Jerry opened the passenger door and got in. “You’re late.”
“There was a bomb ting by the Tim’s, bro,” Tre said as he turned onto Eglinton.
Jerry rolled his eyes, but his lips twitched in a smile. Tre
was his most loyal customer. “Really. Did she tell you how cold it is outside?”
Tre kissed his teeth. “You would’ve forgotten. Don’ even lie.”
They passed a first, and then a second, set of stoplights. “McDonald’s is fine,” Jerry said.
“… don’t know how she be wearing yoga pants in November.”
“Right there.” Jerry pointed to the golden arch, shining over a near-empty parking lot.
“She probably has a man, still,” Tre said, pulling into the plaza. He opened the driver’s door. “You want the usual?”
“Yeah.”
Tre left and headed into McDonald’s. Jerry scanned the parking lot slowly. There was an older man coming out of a convenience store with a lottery ticket in his hand. He got to his car, lit a cigarette and drove away.
Jerry reached into his backpack and pulled out a small pouch of white powder. Digging around in the backseat of the car, he found Tre’s gym bag. He removed one of Tre’s socks and slipped the pouch inside the sock, before returning it to the bag. Jerry looked around the parking lot again—empty this time—and waited for Tre to return. It was Charles’s idea to do the exchanges that way: surreptitiously. Jerry thought it trivial, but it wasn’t as if he could complain.
A few minutes later, he heard Tre’s footsteps approach, and the car door opened, briefly letting in the cold and the sounds of late-night millings about.
Tre handed Jerry a McDonald’s bag.
Jerry buckled his seat belt. “Let me out at Jane.”
“All right. Make sure you sit at the back of the bus, eh?”
Jerry looked at his friend, was about to say he knew that already, but decided against it. Tre returned Jerry’s gaze, and Jerry could see an opening behind the man’s bloodshot eyes, through which something soft and resilient passed.
“Tell Nina I said hi.”
Jerry nodded. He got out at Jane and Eglinton and waited for the westbound bus. When it arrived, he sat at the back and ate his meal. At the bottom of the bag, was a small wad of cash covered in plastic wrap, which he didn’t take out. Not all of it belonged to him.

Their street was quiet. Most homes were sleeping, but a few saw people on their front porches, chatting discreetly, smoke from cigarettes and joints fading into the dark above. Jerry walked up the steps to his duplex, checking the frequently empty mail slot on the side of their dark red front door. He fumbled with his keys—chilled fingers—before letting himself in. Nina was lying on the couch, wearing his old painting T-shirt and basketball shorts. The television was on, but she wasn’t watching it.
“Where’s Mom?” Jerry asked.
“Working,” said Nina.
Jerry kicked off his shoes, placed the McDonald’s bag on
the side table by the door, and headed into the kitchen to wash his hands. A large, covered platter of Swiss Chalet take-out sat on the counter, untouched, not a hint of condensation on the plastic.
“What’s all this for?”
Nina sat up from the couch. “Mom’s celebrating. Results came this morning.”
Jerry knew she’d been stressing about the blood test for days, wondering how a diagnosis would affect her livelihood, even if it was curable.
“And she’s out again?” Jerry said. “Shouldn’t she be resting?”
“I know, right?”
“Where’s Will?”
“Man, I dunno!” But she was right, no one knew where their stepfather was.
As long as he paid the rent. “Did you do your homework?”
“Of course.” She sounded offended.
“Did you eat?”
“Yeah…”
“You know you lying. Come eat.”
Her face twisted into that scowl of hers, whenever she was about to fight with words. Her moaning always worked on their mom and Will, since she was little, but it didn’t work on Jerry. He pushed back. Nina finally stood and walked to the dining room. Jerry opened the container of fries and asked how
much she wanted. When she didn’t answer, he doled out the food based on how little he thought she’d eaten over the course of the day.
While Nina’s food warmed in the microwave, he brought the McDonald’s bag downstairs to his low-ceilinged bedroom in the basement. He opened the small wad of cash and peeled off two fifty-dollar bills to keep in his wallet. The rest he put in a locked metal container underneath his unkempt bed.
When Jerry returned, he set Nina’s food in front of her, took the bread rolls for himself. While he chewed, he cast eyes around the room, to see if, somehow, anything had changed in the ten hours he’d been out of the house. The potted plant in the corner needed watering. Too many shoes littered the front of the sliding doors. Will’s ashtray, normally on the dining table, was nowhere to be seen.
Jerry turned to Nina. She hadn’t moved. “What, you not hungry?”
Nina didn’t say anything. She picked up her fork and set it down again.
“Mom’ll be fine. She makes good money.”
“That’s not what I’m concerned about.”
“What is it, then?”
She looked away and pursed her lips. Jerry knew she always did that when she was planning her response.
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll take your fries,” Jerry said.
He brought his hand close to her plate, and she slapped it away.
“I got a scholarship,” she finally told him.
Jerry’s eyes grew wide. “What?” he yelled. “Oh, my God, that’s amazing!”
Nina’s lips twitched. “I know that.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, you know that! Gimme some.” He held his palm out and she slapped it halfheartedly. “That’s my girl!”
Nina picked up a fry and bit into it.
“We need to celebrate. We need something fancy. Like an
ice cream cake.”
“Mom’s lactose intolerant.”
“Good. It’s not for her anyway.”
They laughed.
“How much?” he asked.
“Ten thousand.”
Jerry mimed falling off his chair. He pressed his hand against his chest, took exaggerated breaths.
They laughed some more.
Nina’s smile disappeared first. She took another fry.
Jerry picked at the bread. “Do you not see that this is good news?”
“I guess.”
“What?”
Nina looked at her plate. “I don’t want to use it.”
“What do you mean, you don’t want to use it? You’re just going to hold on to it?”
Nina looked up at him. “Charles called.”
Jerry froze.
“I want to pay him back.”
Jerry frowned. “No.”
“But it’s my fault!”
“Nina, I swear to Christ, we are not having this conversation again.” He cursed Charles for calling the house. He knew Jerry’s cellphone number. “Just eat your damn fries and pay the school.” Why was she like this?
“You won’t have to work for him anymore!”
“Don’t worry about who I work for. I worked for all kinds
of folks, people you don’t even know about.”
“What if I got a job?”
“You have a job,” Jerry said. “Being a student.”
Nina pushed her plate aside. It scraped loudly across the wooden table. She didn’t meet his gaze.
Jerry stared. “You already got a job, didn’t you?”
“I figured you would be mad.”
He raised his hands and stared skyward for a moment, before leaning forward. “Do you not hear me when I talk, girl? Am I talking to a wall?”
Nina’s voice grew high. “It’s small. Tutoring. Six hours a week.”
“Six hours where you could be studying.”
She leaned back, face disgusted. “Excuse me, I just got a huge-ass scholarship. I think my studying habits are fine.”
Jerry wiped his face with his hand. “Look…” He didn’t know what to add. “Just. Don’t.”
“It’s my life.”
“Exactly. Don’t screw it up with your running around trying to be like all your friends.”
She glared at him. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Fine. Let me handle the money,” Jerry said. “I’m almost a quarter of the way there anyway.” He looked at her. “Just … just let me take care of you, okay? Let me take care of you.”
She stared at him, her eyes darting around his face, as if searching for something. The clock ticked loudly in the living room.
After a while, she said, “A quarter, huh? That’s a lot.”
He scoffed. “Yeah.” He smiled at her. “But don’t worry about it. I’ll get you whatever you need. Just ask.”
She pursed her lips again. This time, she looked out the sliding doors to the yard. But it was dark outside, and Jerry could see his sister’s reflection perfectly in the glass.
“You can ask, you know,” he ventured. “And you don’t have to hide shit. Especially shit like a whole-ass scholarship.”
“I don’t know.”
Jerry shook his head, reining in his frustration at the last second. “You’re in my business too much.”
“You’re in my business, too!”
He smiled, and she smiled back, just a little.
She rubbed her temples, running her fingers against the wispy hairs along the perimeter of her forehead. “I just … I feel bad.”
“Don’t. Feel determined. Feel special.”
“It’s hard. Knowing what happened.”
Jerry shrugged. “I saw an opportunity. And if I’m working for Charles for the rest of my life, it doesn’t matter. Not as long as you’re something.”
Nina shifted in her chair.
“Hey,” he said. He reached for her hand and held it. She squeezed it. “You can’t stay here, you know. I’ll be damned if you’re my age and still living here. You gotta have that … that inter … something. That thing where you save money for your kids.”
“Intergenerational growth?”
He pointed. “Yeah, yeah, that.”
Nina opened her mouth to respond, but he held a finger up. “You don’t owe me anything.”
She nodded, swallowed hard. After a few seconds, she said, almost hopefully, “But you’ll come to me if you need anything, though, right?”
Jerry smirked. “Um. No. If anyone gives you shit, I’mma have Charles call them. You know.”
“Like he would!”
He threw a bun at her. “Well, if not him, me.”
They looked at each other some moments. Long enough for understanding to pass through them like smoke, but not too long.
“You don’t need to,” Nina said. “What with my recent endowment.” She picked up a napkin and fanned herself like a Southern belle. “I’ll get you an Xbox for all your hard work.”
He kissed his teeth. “Xbox? Get outta here. PS4.”
They laughed.

Charles texted Jerry later that evening. Jerry held his phone tightly in his hand as it buzzed. Once, twice, three times, before it settled. He lay on his back, across the surface of his bed, staring at the popcorn ceiling.
In his mind, he pictured Nina, half a lifetime ago, her hands wrapped around a medal she won for a chess tournament, the only girl among a sea of her lighter-skinned peers. The closer he approached adulthood, the more iridescent she became, and he felt light and heavy at once.
He headed upstairs, the metal lockbox of cash at the bottom of his backpack. Charles was always out somewhere at an ungodly hour, waiting. As Jerry passed the living room, he saw Nina sprawled on the couch, asleep, two textbooks open on the coffee table in front of her. The bright dead colours of the aquarium channel splashed onto her face, her slightly parted lips.
He touched his sister’s cheek. Her face was warm, her breath warm. And her body rose purposefully and safely as she breathed in sleep, in future. He stared at her some time.
His phone buzzed again.
Before he left, he spotted his jacket folded over the top of a closet door, and put it on over his hoodie as he jogged down the front steps. There. Better. A buffer against the wind, which had picked up, it seemed, in the absence of bodies. It was as if the world around him misunderstood its relationship with its inhabitants, and Jerry felt something he couldn’t quite articulate. At the end of the street, near the intersection,
he could see the familiar blue-and-yellow lights of the bus, and headed toward them.

Image courtesy Jonah Bayley, Vancouver Queer Skateboard Collective

Keen to learn how to skateboard, Vancouver resident Jonah Bayley looked for online groups that could connect them with other queer skaters. Realizing that no such group existed in Vancouver, they started Vancouver Queer Skate (VQS) in 2019, a non-hierarchical, community-led collective that fosters allyship and inclusivity at skateparks.

“Honestly, it was really surprising to me, when I started it, that it wasn’t a thing already,” Bayley said. “I started it because I really [wanted] to join this group, but it [wasn’t] there. I just wanted to be skating with other queer people.”

Bayley says that traditionally the skateboarding scene has been dominated by white, cishet men. It can be an intimidating space for beginners, especially for LGBTQ2S+, women, and BIPOC skaters, but Bayley says they have felt a shift in the skateboarding community. With other community-driven groups in Vancouver like Takeover Skateboarding and Late Bloomers Skate Club, the culture is beginning to focus more on allyship and positivity.

“We could create a safe bubble for each other to skate, learn, and be supportive, instead of having someone who’s really good talk down to you,” Bayley said. “It was all of us holding each other’s hands and trying to bring each other up.”

VQS has become integral for many in the community. It’s given members a way to meet other queer skaters while allowing folks to be themselves at the skatepark. Bayley knows that the growth of this community-driven organization wouldn’t be possible without the support and advocacy of passionate community members in the collective.

“It’s a community-run initiative,” Bayley said. “It’s not just me running it.”

Larger community skate meet-ups, like the All-Aboard event in Granville Island, have become staples for VQS members. Since COVID-19, VQS has had to put its large meet-ups on hold. However, Bayley is optimistic that they can host events again this summer. In the meantime, VQS has opened a Discord server (a free online chat and video platform) to plan safe skate hangs with other members.

“It’s not just about skateboarding, it’s so much about the culture too,” Bayley said. “There’s so much more depth to that culture when it includes not just one type of person.”

Image by hanspetermeyer.com; marked with a CC BY-SA 2.0 license

Dear new Canadian immigrants,

The multicultural Canada you imagined does not exist. There, I said it.

When I came to this country in 2006 at the age of nine, I, like you, had hoped for a better life than what a mismanaged Nigerian government promised. Canada seemed to have a steady flow of electricity, free education, and great health care. Most importantly—and proudly advertised—was a promise of multiculturalism, which I learned in elementary school meant that people of all cultures are considered equal here.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the mirage of a multicultural paradise faded away, but I do know that its disappearance was the beginning of creating a home here. The realization may have started among the shadows of the portable classrooms parked next to my elementary school building. This was the place students went to speak freely, away from adults, and it was here that I heard racist jokes about African people for the first time.

My Nigerian pride brushed off their words as nothing more than the ignorance of children who knew nothing. But even then, I realized that life in Canada is not like the newcomer brochures made it seem. Fifteen years later, I’m more disillusioned than ever at the promise of multiculturalism as it was advertised.
I know that the Canadian Multiculturalism Act does, in fact, exist. It was one of those things teachers would talk about in social studies class. What they didn’t tell me, and what they won’t tell you, is that this act is a superficial promise. It was introduced by Pierre Trudeau to “break down discriminatory attitudes and cultural jealousies.” In response, the Progressive Conservative opposition leader, Robert Stanfield, said, “the emphasis we have given to multiculturalism in no way constitutes an attack on the basic duality
of our country.”

It’s not often that I agree with a PC leader, but I have to say, Stanfield was right. The Multiculturalism Act in no way challenges how Canada has always operated. From its beginnings, people of different cultures gave Canada its economic foundation.

The genocide of Indigenous people made the land available to European settlers; the forced labour of Chinese immigrants built the railroad, and the enslavement of Black people provided the labour to work the land. See, multiculturalism is tradition—it’s quintessentially Canadian.

So, there it is. Now you know the truth. Multiculturalism does exist here, just not in the way it’s advertised. It may take some time, but the sooner you adjust, the sooner you can start to build a home here. One that honours your dreams for this new life. For me, building a home here went beyond cooking Nigerian food and listening to Wizkid’s discography on repeat. As cheesy as it sounds, my home here was built through friendships. One good thing that Canada’s multiculturalism campaign has done is attract different people from different corners of the earth to one place. Connecting with my fellow Bramptonians has been so valuable. As I face a system that’s built on oppressing people of colour, the support of friends who have been here, done that, helps me find my way through. They are the good part of the multicultural promise. In some ways building a home here means creating the multicultural dream yourself, one friendship at a time. As I navigate the hidden contradictions of Canada’s systems, having people along for the ride makes it much better. Don’t be afraid to reach out—as the stereotype suggests, we are nice people after all.

Wishing you all the best,
Oyindamola Esho

Photo and book cover courtesy of Anstruther Press

Black lesbian poet Victoria Mbabazi’s poetry collection, chapbook, was published by Anstruther Press in January 2021 and is now in its third printing. Their poetry’s No Name Brand design and style was inspired by the advertisements they saw commuting to the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus last summer, a time when they were also searching for direction with their project for a year-long independent study with creative writing professor Daniel Scott Tysdal.

The No Name Brand style has become a signature visual for Canadians. Drawn from Loblaws’ signage for generic grocery and household products, the packaging is characterized by the combination of an uncomplicated bright yellow background and a Helvetica font. While the phrase “no name brand item” has colloquially described inexpensive yet sturdy alternatives that were outliers to leading brands, Loblaws has ironically reassociated the phrase in consumer consciousness to refer to their specific line of no-nonsense yellow packaging, which Mbabazi adapts stylistically.

“I liked the way [No Name] branding works because I think it’s hilarious. [I thought] it’d be really interesting to do that format as a book … honesty and parody mixed together. Everything is a show when you’re writing, and all of the poems are expectations,” they say.

With poems titled “trauma poem,” “diaspora poem,” and “fat girl poem,” Mbabazi takes sharp aim at the tropes that primarily white audiences celebrate and expect from work created by marginalized artists. Pigeonholing writers into pain-filled community representatives—a pressure applied
by a predominately white publishing industry—is akin to No Name brand packaging, as it confines an individual’s experience into a generic product.

“The only way that people will listen [to people of colour] is if they write in a way that is digestible to white people. There’s an expectation of when I give you this book that I’m going to have to say something intelligent about what’s going on. And I don’t really have anything to say other than I’m upset. And that’s what I wanted to write.”

Although the parodic poems were submitted in jest, Mbabazi found themselves taking on a bigger project following positive feedback from their professor. “I was just going to hand [my professor] six poems, all in No Name brand format, as a joke. And then he was like, ‘No, this is good. Can you write 10 more poems?’”
Addressing the events surrounding the death of George Floyd, including lynchings and burning fast food chains, they confront the expectation to produce eloquent, breakthrough insight to articulate a movement. Regarding a four-poem series that sews a narrative thread through chapbook, Mbabazi’s speaker accepts words are inadequate in “no name: final draft,” the last in the series.

“I was feeling suffocated by the financial disparities, the police brutality, and race and white supremacy in North America in general. And then I was thinking about how people keep trying to capitalize off that. People are trying to emote about how they feel, and then they also need to make money.”

In “no name: final draft,” Mbabazi takes a different approach. “The evolution comes in choosing not to say anything about what’s happening,” they say. “I don’t actually have anything to say, and there’s an emotional truth to [‘no name: final draft’] … It’s giving up on trying to say something important, and just feeling your feelings.”

After finishing at U of T and completing chapbook, Mbabazi sought to further their writing craft and began the first semester of their MFA at NYU last fall over Zoom. There, they’ve felt free to explore their own themes and ideas in a way that feels authentic to them, while also paying close attention to a poetic structure.

“I just really loved my workshop class a lot. My professor was Alex Dimitrov, and he was so funny. He was just like, ‘I just care if the poem is good. I don’t really care what it’s trying to say … I just want it to be beautiful.’ He cares about beats and how it sounds and it’s liberating for not everything needing to be aboutisms.”

Over the past two years, Mbabazi has written a series of vignettes that are short profiles of their friends, detailing past conversations. Teaming up with their friend and photographer Noor Gatih, the two are co-creating a scrapbook-style prose collection.

“I feel like my writing is … very casual, like you’re listening to a friend tell you something stupid.”

Their self-aware, tongue-in-cheek style allows for a fluid and purposeful transition from hilarity to sobering seriousness.

“For me, humour has always been a really big coping mechanism. The funnier my writing gets …. the more upset I am. The serious and the funny are always going to be together.”