She dives for shells

With her nautical nuns

And thoughts you thought

You’d never tell

– “Pandora’s Aquarium,” Tori Amos

I carried Tori Amos’s From the Choirgirl Hotel with me everywhere in eighth grade even though I didn’t have a Discman. I’d stick the album into the CD-ROM of my desktop during computer lab and dive into Amos’s opaque lyrics (“6:58 do you know where my spark is”) and virtuosic piano while posting tween poetry and wavy banners to my GeoCities website. I had taken the CD from my older sister Elissa and I held it close like a talisman until the plastic case cracked and unhinged.

In the early 2000s I listened to Tori Amos obsessively whenever my 13-year-old heart burned. I honed my knowledge of the musician by poring over message boards where Ears with Feet (Tori’s pet name for her fans) recounted concert set lists and uploaded iconic magazine articles from the early 1990s when weird girl alt-rock reigned.

The many threads and members greeted me after school on my family’s PC with the aid of a screeching dial-up connection that clogged the phone line. Online, I learned Amos lore, discovering that many of the songs on Choirgirl were about miscarriage, loss, and motherhood, and the a capella “Me and a Gun” sprang from Amos’s own first-hand experience with sexual violence.

At the same time as I was taking my daily plunges into Amos’s music, I was dealing with surfacing realizations of my experience with early childhood sexual abuse. The memories were sparse and repressed—I’d recall flashes only to forget. And then, some months later, I’d remember it all over again as if I hadn’t recalled it before.

I was triggered by the ambient harassment from men that accompanies the onset of puberty which, in turn, pulled these memories to the forefront. A giant frozen blanket enveloped me as construction workers outside my middle school cat-called me as I walked my family’s dog. My bodily sensations dissolved as a henna tattooist placed my hand on his inner thigh while dyeing flowers onto my upper-arm. A young girl is a public garden everyone feels entitled to parade through. I navigated these half-memories while surviving ongoing domestic abuse in my parents’ home and dodging attention from older men. Amos’s fierce music and fervent online community comforted me.

In the Tori forums, users created signatures for their posts, badges marking other online habitats and allegiances. I kept encountering links to Pandora’s Aquarium, a Tori Amos-inspired forum with chat rooms for survivors of sexual abuse. Eventually, I clicked through and entered a portal where survivors gathered to tell their stories and chat. Users drew strength from Amos’s outspokenness about sexual assault and wrapped themselves in her lyrics as if they were armour. I read accounts of violent and incestuous rapes that made me feel ill, voyeuristic, and like I didn’t belong. But, I was also welcome in this strange corner of the internet. Chatting with a fellow member assuaged me—my insomnia and bedwetting made sense in light of my experiences.

Tori Amos was synonymous with survivorship through her activism. In 1994, Amos helped with the founding of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), the largest anti-sexual assault non-profit in the United States, which boasts a 24/7 hotline, resources, educational programs, and policy advocacy. Amos was their first spokesperson, answering the inaugural ceremonial call for the hotline when it launched and connecting her fans to the organization at concerts. Decades before movements like #MeToo, Amos made the taboo topic of sexual assault a priority, interweaving it into her music and public persona.

Amos’s music speaks directly to survivors. Her soaring voice revived my numbed senses and invited me to feel what I had shut down in order to survive. Even further, her eccentric, logic-defying metaphors layered over chaotic piano riffs made intuitive sense to my young survivor’s worldview—trauma breeds absurdity and breaks down linear storytelling. I suspect my own proclivity for mysterious lyric poetry is a result of my trauma as well as sitting at the altar of Amos’s bizarre imagery. She taught me I could create my own internal mythologies to tell the erratic, non-linear stories I needed to tell without resolution.

Illustration by Marcia Diaz

Standing at the toe of the Athabasca Glacier in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, the six-kilometre long swerve of thick ice—about the length of 65 football fields—opens up in a slow incline above you. It reveals crevasses and streaks of sediment framed by textured, scarred rock that rises over the sides of the ice expanse. These rocks underfoot and on the sides of the glacier are called moraines, rock that has been deposited or formed by the moving glacier.

Because glaciers move. Like a living being who, even in stillness, you can sense the gentle rise and fall of their chest with each breath. Then, when a glacier becomes too thin to move, it passes away. In August, Iceland commemorated the death of the Okjökull glacier, declared dead after it had become too thin to move. The plaque, a public death certificate, made international headlines before it was even erected.

“But what are we going to do with the 300 glaciers we lost between 1920 and 2005?” Robert Sandford, chair in water and climate security at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, asks me. “Do we issue death certificates for them? Most people have never seen them.”

Sandford is referring to research from the Western Canadian Cryospheric Network, a research project whose aim was to determine the fate of Western Canadian glaciers, that points to the Canadian Rockies having lost in the area of 300 glaciers in that 85-year span. Those roughly 300 esoteric glaciers are gone forever—half believed to have perished in the first 65 years, the other half in the remaining 20, pointing to markedly accelerated loss over time.

“Most people have never seen them.” It’s a statement that many people could relate to when it comes to a glacier. I certainly don’t know the numbers of people who have encountered one. What I do know is that for nearly 30 years I lived in Montreal, a bona fide city kid. I camped every summer in Vermont with my family and jogged by the St. Lawrence River. I was used to marshy cattails and the occasional heron sighting.

The first time someone pointed out a glacier to me, I was on a hike in Kananaskis, a wilderness area about an hour’s drive from Calgary, after having moved across the country to Banff, Alberta. I looked up at the pile of snow near the mountain top and followed it down to a brownish hammock of ice. “That’s a glacier? It just looks like… a bunch of dirty snow.” I didn’t get what the big deal was.

When I first visited the Athabasca Glacier in the Columbia Icefields, it was completely by accident. Hungover and sleepy, my friend Allison and I lay down on a set of dusty old couches at a Canmore, Alberta thrift shop. We were torn up inside—the remnants of too much fun—but also torn up that we were wasting such a beautiful day in the Canadian Rockies. Sure, Banff was our home, but that didn’t mean we wanted to take it for granted. We went back and forth about what we could do and realized that neither of us had been down the Icefields Parkway, a drive known as one of the most beautiful in the world.

For 185 kilometres we were blown away by the parkway’s endless beauty. The snowy peaks and turquoise lakes were just like what you’ve probably seen in postcards (and there are, as a result, actual postcards of it). It’s enough to make you question your place in the world but also, more importantly, to make you frequently remind yourself to pay attention to the road, lest the vistas distract you from your driving.

At this point in my life I had knocked quite a few hikes off of my list. Living in the mountains and working, at the time, where you could summit a mountain on your lunch break will do that to you. So, when Allison and I reached the parking lot for the glacier, I was surprised—and not entirely impressed—to realize that there was actually a hike to the glacier. From the Parks Canada website: “Toe of the Athabasca Glacier Trail 52 (moderate); 1.8 km return; 60 m elevation gain/loss; 1 hour.”

Hikes often have signage at their trailhead, a map, warnings about bears and other wildlife—sometimes even warnings about abandoned bombshells. When you reach the parking lot of this particular hike, you’re greeted with a simple sign emboldened with large numbers. “The glacier was here in 1844,” the first sign reads. From the moment you leave the car your guilt trip has begun.

1908, 1925 (you come to a road), 1948 … onwards to 2006. Every sign you pass is a chance for the reality of every headline about glaciers dying, and arctic ice caps to sink in just a little bit more. By the time you’ve reached the toe you no longer need a sign. Except to warn you about the dangers of walking onto the glacier without a guide (more adventurous visitors with the financial means can hire a guide to take them on the glacier). It’s a serious warning, as exploring the surface of the glacier without a professional could be—and has been—fatal, with the real possibility of falling into a crevasse.

“People are confronted with landscapes that are changing so quickly that it becomes a moral issue,” Sandford told me over a beer in Canmore, Alberta. “It becomes an ethical issue … because to ignore this is to condemn future generations to unspeakable possibilities in terms of climate disruption.” Every summer, the Athabasca Glacier retreats between five and 25 metres, and has retreated about two kilometres since 1844.

Parks Canada has been installing the signs to publicly mark the glacier’s decline for over 50 years. By email, they told me that, beyond the parking lot, the glacier used to reach to where the visitors centre, which houses a gallery they hope visitors will stop by to further inform themselves, now stands. “Parks Canada realizes this may be the first glacier experience for many visitors,” a spokesperson wrote. “The signs at the top of the glacier provide a tangible connection for visitors to the landscape they are experiencing. The signs help visitors understand the dynamic movement of ice over time.”

When you reach the toe of the Athabasca, the whitish-blue landscape (the colour of glacial ice that’s taken on when snow falls, is compressed, and becomes part of the glacier) framed by mountains that maintain snow on their peaks even in the height of summer should be inspiring. It should be like the moment when you’ve summited a mountain: small, at peace, inspired by the nature around you. Instead, you feel dread. Your stomach sinks in the same way as when you’re standing on that mountain top and look down, realizing that one slip on your tired, shaky legs could send you tumbling critically off the edge of a cliff.

“A visit to the glacier should give you both awe, complete reverence, and it should also make you very deeply thoughtful about what this loss might mean if projected over a long period of time,” says Sandford who has dedicated his career to water, and reminds me that ice is just frozen water. It’s something that sounds extremely basic but is at the heart of everything, including a marker of the climate crisis. Glaciers are the pulse of global hydrology.

“We’re not just losing glaciers,” Sandford explained. “Warming is causing melting and it’s a symptom of a much, much more serious problem.” As temperatures continue to rise and we see less snowpack and snow cover. It becomes a matter of water security, as the traditional stability of the hydrological cycle (water passing into the atmosphere as vapour) is lost, he explains. A warmer atmosphere carries seven percent more water vapour for every degree Celsius of warming. That heat melts more ice, sending more vapour into the atmosphere, creating more serious storms, and the disruption of historical weather patterns.

The accessibility of this glacier struck me in the same way it must have struck Sandford, who wrote The Columbia Icefield, a guidebook to the area. He’s written over 30 titles, many of which focus on glaciers, climate change, and water security. “As I’ve written in that book,” Sandford points to my copy of the guide on the table, “there is something deeply moving about that place. Deeply—I would go so far as to say, powerfully spiritual—about that place. I mean, you can get out of your car, close the door, and walk into the Pleistocene.” That’s the epoch that encompassed the most recent Ice Age.

There is an undeniable force that hits you, like the ice-cold wind off of the glacier when you realize that you’ve never actually seen one. Because glaciers actually produce their own weather. Cold air, that’s heavier and denser than warm air, is pulled downwind by gravity. You’re no longer in the same world that you were when you stepped out of your car.

Reverence is what Sandford called it. For myself, it’s a moment of clarity. The cold wind hits you; your eyes take in the cracks, scratches, and crevices the glacier has clawed through time and you breathe in knowledge. Or a thirst for more.

Not long before writing this, I was on the phone making plans to meet a friend who would be visiting from Montreal in Jasper, about 100 kilometres from the glacier. “While you’re up there you should drive down and see the Athabasca Glacier,” I told him.

“You know, I’ve never seen one,” he said.

Illustration by Marcia Diaz

I have travelled to the U.K. twice in my life. The first time I went was with my then-partner in 2009 and the second was on my own, in the summer of 2019. We (my now ex-partner and I) went to Brighton, Cambridge, and London. We walked for hours on cobblestone. I ran up and down relic staircases to catch trains that would spit us out at the top or bottom of another tower of stairs. During our final few days, we went on a hike that resulted in what I would later understand as my first fibromyalgia flare. Everything I thought I knew about moving my body became unrecognizable after that.

As a then mostly able-bodied younger adult living and working in a major metropolitan city, travel was limited only by cost and time off of work. I travelled by stuffing huge camping backpacks, wearing one on my front and back. I would book accommodations without paying much attention to proximity to food or transit. I would agree to go on an eight-hour downhill mountain hike. I would turn my phone off more than I kept it on. As long as I had my antidepressants, passport, and a journal, I was good.

Ten years and some 10,000-odd kilometres of travel later, the considerations I have to make are a universe apart from the days of booking a journey with four stops plus two nights spent sleeping in an airport because that’s what was the cheapest. As a chronically ill and disabled person in their mid-30s, and as someone who has been living with some iteration of chronic pain since adolescence, I now know to try and minimize the inevitably negative impact travel will have on my body and symptoms.

In 2019, I found a direct flight from Manitoba to London and one with just one stop on the return. Once I’d landed and was in my ride from the airport to the apartment I was visiting—one, I might add, that had a full kitchen—I downloaded the other local rideshare option to the one I was currently in. I downloaded the food delivery apps a pal suggested and scanned and noted which ones were safe for me to try given my food restrictions. I rarely took public transit that whole visit. When I wasn’t at home with my friend or alone in their place, I was cabbing to and from various boroughs after street-mapping the area to see how many steps there were to get to the gallery, museum, or shop I wanted to go to. I can’t think of more than one meal we ate out, but I do remember all of the gluten-free, dairy-free, no nightshade and allium meals we made and ordered in and composed of a mix of both. Instead of wandering up and down London streets, playing with alley cats and slowing my breath to the rhythm of snoring yard dogs, I peeled my eyes during every ride and asked drivers questions about each neighbourhood and landmark we passed through. I sat on any bench I could find in between slow cane-supported jaunts, watching the vibration of a city ripple around me.

There is so much risk and worry in leaving my home base. Like most things in the life of a chronically ill person, moving my body from one place to the other—be that from couch to kitchen sink or front door to Flin Flon (which is at the Saskatchewan–Manitoba border, for those unfamiliar)—takes considerable planning, compromise, anticipation, and discomfort. I live with chronic pain and fatigue, which for me means that no matter how much I sleep, there are days when my exhaustion weighs every cell and fibre down. At home, this looks like limiting the number of trips I make from one room to another. Either piling my arms full of what I’ll possibly need when I finally sit down, or spending too long fussing in one room, trying to get everything done in there before moving on.

I haven’t felt ease of movement, comfort, security, or reliability in or from my body in decades. Over time I have learned, often painstakingly, how to ask for help. And yet I still struggle to ask, because what I truly need feels like more than I have the right or resources to ask for. So when I have the opportunity to receive support from a service designed to provide just that, I (metaphorically) jump at the chance.

One of the services I make most use of in my various jaunts from home, and one offered at all airports I’ve intersected with in the last year, is the in-airport wheelchair. The first time I used an airport wheelchair to get from check-in to the gate was in 2015 in Detroit after the Allied Media Conference. I was with another spoonie friend and cane user who travelled frequently for work. (A spoonie is a person living with chronic illness, who uses the metaphor of spoons to describe or quantify levels of energy and capacity. This comes from “the Spoon Theory” by Christine Miserandino which is definitely worth looking into.)

It always seems a little bit softer in the world, a little bit safer, when I’m moving about an unfamiliar space with another chronically ill person. Once I am on my own in the airport, I feel hyper-conspicuous as a Black, gender-nonconforming, chubby, and seemingly able-bodied adult being wheeled through packed corridors and security by an attendant. Without a cast or any easily digestible marker of temporary disability there is an incredulous texture to the unabashed looks and stares that I receive.

Most Canadian airports that I have flown through use standard folding manual chairs to transport passengers throughout the terminals. These chairs are not designed for a fat body in pain carrying bags and using a cane.

If I am carrying on my luggage, even if I manage to get my piles contained into acceptable carry-on and one-personal-item size, most chairs I’ve been provided with are not equipped to hold anything other than me. There are a select few airlines and airports (e.g. Swoop in Edmonton) that have the kind of chairs with an underneath carriage for suitcases or bags to go (something worth looking into if this affects you, and if you can find this info). Otherwise, and especially as a younger person who is assumed to be more capable of doing this, the attendants will stack whatever bags, coats, canes, and suitcases on my lap and between my knees. With an instruction to hold on with my leg muscles, I have to squeeze together from thighs to ankles, lest my suitcase spill out and skid across the floor. (Because my hands are busy trying to hold onto my I.D. and boarding pass, I can’t use them to help hold things together.) The ride from desk to security is uncomfortable to say the least. After security, when everything has been taken out and moved around and coats are off, etc., the pile becomes more aggressive and unruly. At that point, I just hope the gate is not too far away so I only have to feel this way briefly.

Temporarily able-bodied (a term I prefer because most people will experience some element of disability in their lives) people take for granted how much the autonomy and agency available to them in an airport influences their experience. For example, the saunter to the gate where you can stop in at the snack cart or magazine shop to pick up that last minute thing you forgot. Under the charge of an attendant, unless it is a very slow hour at the airport, you can’t stop until parked at the gate. If there’s time between arriving at the gate and boarding, I might be able to reorganize my piles into something more comfortable. With a bit of extra time I can try affixing my bags to the chair itself to push along the hallways.

So much of what accessibility looks like in airports and other places where access is mandated is shaped around the presumption that the passenger with a disability will not be travelling alone. If there is no one to push you in a chair, if there is no one to hold your bags, if there is no one to help you get your luggage off of the carousel, you have to rely on the staff.

When I arrive at the airport and inform the check-in clerk that I require a wheelchair, I’m almost always met with some flash of concern passing across their face. There are often not enough staff scheduled and so they know that I’ll have to wait. I have lost count of the hours I have spent sitting uncomfortably in a hallway or behind a partition waiting for an attendant to wheel me to my next destination. I came close to missing two flights last year alone because I sat waiting for over 40 minutes for someone to come get me. I am usually scolded or shamed for not arriving hours earlier than other passengers. Being told that if I need help, I’d better be willing to wait for it or compromise by walking myself to the gate is never how I want to start a trip.

It’s impossible not to feel like a burden on these people that you don’t even know because of their reaction to the request for support. Most often, staff will talk with other staff along the way, sometimes about the task of transporting me. As a passenger under attendant charge, I am one of the first to board the plane, along with anyone else “that needs a little extra time to board.”

On landing, I am among the last to leave. That’s because we must all wait until every other passenger departs and they send enough attendants with chairs to get myself and others off the plane. I try not to book flights with short connections because of this. If I want the chair, I have to wait.

Packing and deciding between checked bags and carry-ons is a heightened challenge when one is trying to balance not being able to carry heavy things with not wanting to risk losing essential items. When there are medications and back up medications (extras packed in case something happens to carry-on stash), cozy clothes for sensory sensitive skin, at least a small amount of my own food for the first day, physio balls and foam rollers, ice packs and heat bags, orthopedic pillows and unscented linens, and more I have to find a way to fit, the anxiety of lost luggage grows. That anxiety, which many air travellers share, rattles differently when what’s inside determines whether my body is going to be baseline comfortable and relatively asymptomatic, or not.

A decade into this chronically ill orbit and I am still learning how to offer moments of care and comfort to my jagged-edged self. Such a shift can take years, seasons, generations to feel smooth again. Every journey I ask of myself is an exercise in care, access, and danger. As I reflect on the ways I inhabit the role of passenger and visitor, I think of the privilege of movement that state-approved citizenship provides. (This while simultaneously reaffirming colonial structures and employing surveillance tactics under the guise of border security.) Moving my Black, queer, sick, body from place to place is a risk as much as it is a right.

Illustration by Marcia Diaz

I am trying to get my grandfather’s attention at a busy intersection in Tunis, Tunisia. It is 36 degrees and dusty. He is old and frail and has outgrown his home country since he left for Canada 20 years ago. My grandfather once had every winding alley of the downtown core memorized, but he’s unfamiliar with this particular suburban neighbourhood that sprouted in the 1990s. Since his immigration to Canada, I’ve been back to Tunisia more than him. My ability to navigate the now hyper-urbanized city makes it look like I belong here more than he does. I wave my hands frantically to catch his eyes but to no avail. Cabs and motorcycles and crowds rush past me. A man two times my stature leans into traffic to help call him. He yells, “Sir, sir, your granddaughter!” The man’s unruly technique works; I raise my hand in gratitude. My grandfather and I are reunited.

In my experience of Tunisia, there is no such thing as bystander effect. Strangers are almost always in your business. Shopkeepers, servers, and cashiers all ask me borderline intrusive questions in our few moments of shared exchange. I have visited Tunisia, my mother’s home country, with my family many times, but the summer of 2019 was the first time I went alone. These unsolicited interferences by strangers were at times useful to get directions, but many times they exposed my privilege and guilt. Every time I got into a taxi, the driver would ask where I am from. I didn’t have to say anything for him to guess I was not from there. They noticed from my clothes, my demeanour, even the way I hailed the cab. (Tunisians use their index finger, pointing outwards at hip level, as opposed to the North American arm-up flagging technique.)

I had thought I hid my foreigner status well. Ironically, I had decades of training back in Canada. I was born here but I was still not considered “from here.” Since I started attending public school as a 10-year-old, I learned how to camouflage different parts of my visible Muslim identity. I found myself using all sorts of similar tricks to hide my relatively privileged status in Tunisia. There were some basics: never, under any circumstance, speak English—especially not “perfect English”—in public. Sometimes, when we travelled together, my brother would slip up, blurt out an English word, and I would nudge him with my elbow to remind him to lock down his Canadian accent. Do not wear clothing from well-known North American brands like the Gap, Roots, or American Eagle. Regardless of what I did, I always got caught. I reeked of being from somewhere else. From customs officers to cab drivers, almost every person I spoke to was curious (read: suspicious) of my background.

I always met their suspicion with my own. Why is the cab driver asking me so many questions? Is he going to take a longer route and charge me more because he knows I am an outsider? Is he going to ask me how to immigrate to Canada? When I entered Tunisia, I presented my Canadian passport. I had no other, but the customs agent questioned why I did not have a Tunisian one. I pretended not to know the laws have changed and that I am now eligible, even as a half-Tunisian. I lied because it was easier than explaining that a Tunisian passport seems like a hassle, if not a liability, as a Canadian Muslim. Then, I felt guilty for all my disproportionate distrust of strangers.

I always offer vague answers; I was scared earnest responses would reveal my privilege. I was scared of the relative social power I yielded there. I had done nothing to deserve it. I had this power because I carried a certain passport and spoke a certain colonial language. But the Canada that my family and friends in Tunisia think they know is incongruent with the one that I live in. Their notion of Canada is of opulence and opportunity. They are surprised to hear how much I pay for my Toronto apartment and that during my short walk to work I meet half-a-dozen people living on the streets. Every criticism of Canada I offer surprises my Tunisian family and friends. It is my way of absolving responsibility. As if to say, “I promise it’s not as good as you think.” In a series of events beyond my control, my parents emigrated and landed in Canada. Now I reap those benefits. My very ability to say I live here and hold that passport places me in a class unattainable for most people.

To a non-Tunisian, my hijab and dialect, albeit broken, mean I superficially blend in. But the people who breathe in the polluted urban air of Tunis as residents there know that this is a veneer. How am I any different than other “Westerners” who travel to the global south? I have an intimate entry point to Tunisian culture because of my family and friends, yet I will always stand outside of their structures; I do not have unjust run-ins with the police or corrupt public officials. I can slip away from most sticky situations because of my nationality. In Canada I am an outsider with less privilege than, say, a cis white male, and yet here in Tunisia I am an outsider with plenty of privilege.

What does it mean that I have intimate access to the lives of ordinary families there? I feel like an intruder. I am identified as a foreigner, and sometimes I let myself fall into that category. I tip cab drivers 30 or even 50 percent, even though tip culture basically does not exist in Tunisia.

It will mark me as an outsider, but it is part of me acting on my guilt.

I wonder about my responsibility as a Canadian in Tunisia, travelling to what some might think is my “back home.” From my initial interactions at the border, I know Tunisia cannot ever fully be my home. Yet, my extended family and close family friends welcome me into their lives and I feel an emotional proximity to them I don’t experience in Canada. How do I reconcile that?

I think it is precisely the ambiguity of my belonging that demonstrates the hybridity and shifting natures of my identities. When I am in Canada I struggle between my identity as a settler and the daughter of immigrants, who themselves were displaced due to colonialism. I constantly ask myself how I should engage with the struggles of Indigenous nations and marginalized groups. In Tunisia, to many of my extended family members I represent the children of a generation who escaped from some miserable fate. I am bound between these two parts of myself. I must couple the acknowledgment of my privilege with the readiness to listen to other people’s stories.

On my last Friday night in Tunisia, I frantically try to get a cab to go to a family friend’s house in an upper middle-class neighbourhood, considered a lively area of town. I spend 40 minutes trying to hail a cab unsuccessfully. I realize that to find a cab, I have to notice one that was slowing down to drop people off, run alongside it, and then slip in as the last customers are paying. (Like I said, you learn tricks.) When I finally secure a cab, the driver runs through the usual “you aren’t from here” conversation, and asks for my destination. He wants a more precise location than I can provide him with and asks me to call my friend and hand him the phone.

He snuggles my phone between his collarbone and neck. As he shifts gears, he smokes a cigarette with the other hand. Occasionally, he picks up a glass of hot tea from his dashboard. We are going at least 60 kilometres an hour. My heart is beating fast. His unsafe driving is unsettling, but he continues to laugh into the phone with my friend as if they were catching up after years apart. When he hands me my phone back, I finally manage to sink back into the seat; I let out a giggle. Much like this cab driver, Tunis is chaotic; it is a metropolitan city suspended between its French colonial past and its American capitalist present. My inclination is to make sense of it, to order it. But refining my ambiguous position there isn’t my purpose. My adventures in Tunisia teach me to accept the uncertainty of my roles there and here, to accept the disarray, and to know that I am fortunate enough to collect these experiences across borders.

ILLUSTRATION BY NING YANG

I often think of myself as a proud Canadian. Of course, Canada is by no means a perfect—or even racism-free—country, but as a Chinese-Canadian who has had the privilege of travelling widely, Canada remains one of my favourite places.

But I’ve learned that introducing myself as Canadian in a foreign country can be surprising to locals. On a high school trip to Spain, a waiter was almost speechless with surprise when my East Asian classmates and I identified ourselves as Canadian. When he left, my classmate scoffed, “Yeah, we’re ‘fake Canadians.’” The waiter was obviously operating on the assumption that all Canadians are white, and this was one of the first experiences I had with having my Canadianness questioned. From then on, I began to meditate on what it means to be Canadian—a very complex subject to me as a descendant of immigrants. But I suspect it is not an uncommon challenge to many Canadians of colour and Indigenous peoples who identify as Canadian, albeit with different nuances. I can only imagine the frustration a Canadian-identifying Indigenous traveller may feel at being implied as fake.

But things seem to have changed somewhat since that Europe trip. When I was in the U.K. as an exchange student, my British flatmates accepted my Canadianness with no question. Yet, another international student asked if I was “half-Canadian” because, apparently, I “don’t look Canadian.”

Several years later, an Indo-Canadian friend and I trekked through Southeast Asia, doing the cliché hostel-hopping thing. We stood out everywhere as a Chinese- and Indo-Canadian pair speaking North American English. (Interesting side note: a Welsh traveller distinguished our British Columbian and Ontarian accents, which we couldn’t distinguish ourselves!) Rarely did we see non-white people in hostels, and rarely did we see anyone else travelling in polyethnic groups. The locals were, not surprisingly, quite bemused at our Canadianness. “Really? You look Japanese,” one Cambodian hostel worker said incredulously.

I sometimes wonder if I would have been treated differently if I weren’t Asian. My travel partner, for one, claims she was ignored by a hostel worker who seemed more interested in flirting with white female guests. The same person also made fun of Chinese tourists who couldn’t speak English.

Canadians are often stereotyped as being nice and polite. And while stereotyping is problematic, I can’t help but wonder if being stereotyped this way might have granted us better service. For example, at the start of the coronavirus outbreak, some businesses and restaurants erected “No Chinese” signs. I wonder what the reaction would be if I walked into these establishments. Would I have to “prove” my Canadianness by brandishing my passport? Show that I had no recent Chinese visas?

In other words, Canadians experience some privilege, but only some Canadians get to enjoy it.

Having my nationality questioned is frustrating. Quite frankly, I identify more with the word “Canadian” than with the word “Chinese.” I am proud of my Chinese heritage, yes, but when asked where I am from, I say Canada because I grew up, went to school, and pay taxes in Canada; I have not had the same experience with China. I want to make it clear that I do not— cannot in any way—speak for all Canadians of colour. What I can say is that I’ve met many people of colour with similar ways of identifying and like experiences.

When I’m frustrated, it’s easy to blame the locals elsewhere for being ignorant and uneducated, but it’s also important to ask why these assumptions happen, and whether we Canadians are somehow complicit. After all, most famous Canadians—celebrities, Olympians, politicians, etc.—are white. And the locals I met may have never met a single non-white Canadian or have any framework for our existence.

The hostels I visited were also overwhelmingly white—something I’ve come to expect in backpacking culture. Christopher Kevin Oldfield of the ethically conscious travelling blog Lessons Learned Abroad, found writers of colour only comprised 18 percent of top travel blogs in 2015. “The overwhelming majority of people on this planet can’t just quit their shitty job(s) and buy a plane ticket to some remote destination,” writes Oldfield. “Being able to do that shit is a privilege, and one that is decidedly white.” (Full disclosure: this was just a casual survey that doesn’t take into account non-English blogs, but my personal experience aligns with the findings. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find reliable statistics on backpacker ethnicities.)

Admittedly, the millennial trend of travelling and “finding yourself” is dependent on many factors: money, education, and membership in a highly individualized Western society where “finding yourself” is deemed a worthwhile pursuit.

Your looks also matter. Just ask Muslim travellers who get profiled at airports. Darker-skinned travellers don’t only face discrimination in Western countries. Across Southeast Asia, it was a struggle to find sunscreen that doesn’t contain “whitener.” (I ended up buying “sunscreen for men” because for some reason they didn’t contain whitener.) My Indo-Canadian travel partner recalls being stared at and even avoided during her travels in Taiwan. While she reckons her blue-dyed hair may have contributed to the poor service she experienced, she believes she was treated differently due to her ethnicity. In one restaurant, she tells me, she was seated at the far back and ignored to the extent that she just left.

Thankfully, the “Canada is white” myth is waning. We are seeing more non-white faces in popular culture—shows like Kim’s Convenience come to mind. I write this column to highlight how important it is to keep doing this, to keep upholding diversity in Canadian media and among the Canadian representatives (again, be they authors, politicians, athletes, etc.) we export to the world stage. This work that we do at home is more than a PR stunt; it carries to other corners of the world in the knapsacks of everyday Canadians like you and me. Racism is something I rarely experience at home, but how I’m perceived can be a big deal when I am abroad.

Canada is one of the few places in the world built by a whole rainbow of people. I once heard someone say that non-white people have no right to be Australian because it was white people who “built Australia” as we know it. The same argument could be extrapolated to Canada and the U.S. But Indigenous civilization existed in North America long before the arrival of Europeans. And if it wasn’t for Indigenous peoples, the Europeans would not have survived to build modern-day North America. Likewise, the American economy depended heavily on Black slave labour. And Chinese people literally built Canada by building a sea-to-sea railway for lower wages than their white peers and, in some cases, losing their lives.

My parents often tell the same story when discussing their arrival in Canada as new immigrants: “Never had we seen so many different people, people of different colours, all in one elevator.” I look forward to a day when this will become the default picture of Canada around the world, and for us to truly live up to it at home.

“Chevrolet Van” by dave_7 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Tamara Lindeman, also known as Toronto singer-songwriter The Weather Station, doesn’t mince words when it comes to climate change. Asked whether she thinks the music industry is finally waking up to the global crisis, her answer is a swift no. “People talk about feeling guilty more,” she says. “This doesn’t mean anything is changing.” Lindeman is one of many Canadian musicians speaking out on the climate crisis, but talk is one thing; impact is another—and it’s hard to have in an industry where artists depend on emissions-heavy touring to make money.

The carbon impact of the music industry, and touring in particular, is enormous. A study conducted by the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute estimated that for every ticket purchased to a standard show (for venues with a capacity lower than 2,000 people), five kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent are generated, thanks to the combination of venue emissions and the travel required by artists and attendees to get there. Every 300-person show, then, generates roughly the same emissions as a one-way flight from New York to Berlin. Many major acts like Radiohead and Coldplay have started scaling back their tours until “carbon neutral tours” are achievable through implementing comprehensive carbon-reduction strategies. Mid-sized artists don’t necessarily have the resources or the cultural capital to do the same.

There are always measures musicians can take, though. “Talk it through with your booking agents to try and cut back on flights and make your trips count more,” Lindeman says. “Think twice about tours and ask yourself whether they’ll be truly impactful, or if you’re just touring for the sake of touring.” The easiest concrete steps she points to are buying carbon offsets and taking plastic off of tour riders (the document that tells a venue what to provide for the artist, like bottled water or cases of beer). “That should be a no brainer,” she says.

Other Canadian artists are making an effort, too: East Coast singer-songwriter Tara MacLean works with Bullfrog Power to power her tours using green energy sources, and electronic musician Caribou has partnered with PLUS1, a non-profit founded by Arcade Fire that donates extra concert proceeds to causes including climate justice.

Ultimately, Lindeman stresses, the reason touring is unsustainable is because our transportation systems are unsustainable. To really have an impact, the music industry should be advocating for a renewable travel grid, which would enable touring without carbon emissions. “There is nothing inherently wrong with travelling or playing music,” Lindeman explains. And it should be possible to do both without emitting greenhouse gases.

Though she hasn’t seen a major shift within the industry, there are bright spots. Lindeman mentions Music Declares Emergency, a U.K. organization demanding governmental response to the climate crisis. In Canada, artists like Tanya Tagaq have made climate change a central theme in their work, as on her 2016 album Retribution, while also emphasizing the inextricable connection between environmental destruction and the theft of Indigenous land. In January 2019, over 160 members of the Canadian music industry signed a statement of solidarity with Wet’suwet’en land defenders and benefit concerts have since been held across the country.

“The music industry faces the same issue every other industry does; scratch the surface of anything you do, and you find oil and gas,” Lindeman says. Carbon offsets and other greener touring measures reduce the harm these industries cause, but they don’t get at the root of the problem. “We have to fundamentally alter our infrastructure so that it does not run on oil and gas,” she says. “Then we can do what we do, and not have blood on our hands.”

Illustration by Marcia Diaz

Just this past year, Canadian news was constantly covering stories of vacation rentals, made possible by platforms such as Airbnb, taking the housing supply hostage. When Airbnb first launched its platform in 2008, allowing anyone to rent out their home to tourists, they unleashed a swarm of people who were desperate to “live like a local” while travelling. Many vacation hotspots, such as Prague, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Berlin, and New York were already accommodating a steady stream of tourists, and with the introduction of Airbnb tourists could stay in properties usually reserved for locals. At the beginning, it seemed like Airbnb units were a harmless addition to the hotel supply, but property owners realized they could charge tourists more money per month than a local would be willing to pay in rent. Seizing the opportunity to make some extra cash, property owners start to replace longer-term tenants with vacationers, turning their properties into what are now ominously referred to as “ghost hotels.” But what happens to a neighbourhood when the neighbours are tourists?

Moving away from guided tours and itineraries, tourists are now seeking out travel experiences that are considered “authentic,” made possible by staying at an Airbnb in a neighbourhood not typically visited by tourists. However, neighbourhoods that have seen a growth in tourists have also seen detrimental changes as the tourists start shopping alongside the locals. Because tourists have higher purchasing power and different sleeping hours, businesses start to cater to the tourists over time. Soon local businesses like mom-and-pop grocery stores and pubs shutter their doors and are replaced with chain restaurants, expensive coffee shops, and high-end bars that can afford to pay higher rent for their storefronts.

The residents left behind in Barcelona, in neighbourhoods affected by the changes, have reported feeling like their city was “up for sale,” and that they felt unwelcome in their own neighbourhoods. Particularly, the working class residents who work and live in the area are no longer able to afford expensive rent and the cost of goods.

I saw a glimpse of this phenomenon when I travelled to Barcelona in 2016. Although the city has charm and breathtaking sites, I had the underlying feeling that I was visiting a theme park. I spent a few days wading through large crowds, floating from attraction to attraction with nothing but bars, restaurants, and souvenir stands along the way. My favourite part of my stay was a midnight stroll, where I retraced the steps of a tour I had taken of the Gothic Quarter earlier that day, without the effort of peeking at attractions through groups of other tourists. Wandering the quiet, darkened streets, away from the crowds, I couldn’t help but wonder if living like a local in the most beautiful part of the city was even possible anymore.

Just as tourism has taken a toll on Machu Picchu and the beaches of Thailand, tourist desire to live like locals, made possible by Airbnb, is destroying the very soul that made these urban gems such desirable places to visit in the first place. Our quest for authenticity leaves the locals we seek to become left without the very thing that makes their neighbourhoods vibrant—a community, and a place to call home.

Airbnb cannot be directly blamed for this problem, but the platform aggravates the impacts tourists already have on neighbourhoods. Airbnb is not the only vacation rental platform, but it is by far the most significant, operating in 220 countries and regions, with a company valuation of $38 billion in 2018. In Canada, they bring in over $2 billion each year in guest stays and grew in use by 940 percent between 2015 and 2018. Alongside Airbnb’s growth, Canada, for the third year in a row, broke its record of tourist visits, with an estimated 22.1 million visitors last year.

How long will it be before Canada faces an Airbnb-fuelled crisis in our cities’ neighbourhoods? It feels like it’s just a matter of time.

According to Airbnb, the boom in use of the platform has brought economic activity along with the tourists, upwards of $5.6 billion. From a survey conducted by the company of 10,000 users in 2019, 20 percent said that the platform offered them the opportunity to stay in specific neighbourhoods they wouldn’t normally stay in. More than 20 percent stayed on average five days longer because of the cost savings from Airbnb’s lower rates, spending their savings on food and shopping in the destination, all of which Airbnb said pumps more money into the local economy.

Thorben Wieditz is a researcher with Fairbnb, a “national coalition of homeowners, tenants, tourism businesses, and labour organizations.” Fairbnb’s research has found that instead of the tourist dollars supporting areas not traditionally visited by tourists, Airbnb is mostly operating in already tourist-heavy areas, “using housing stock as quasi-hotel inventory.” Although this can be beneficial for other local businesses, like restaurants and retailers, Wieditz said that Airbnbs are not contributing as much economic activity as they claim, by preventing investments in the hotel industry, creating tax avoidance opportunities, and reducing the benefits that come from unionized hotel workers.

But regardless of whether the money is going to hotels or local hosts, Airbnb is favourable because it brings revenues in non-traditional areas instead of hotel conglomerates, right? McGill University released an analysis on Airbnb across Canada in June 2019 and found that 10 percent of Airbnb hosts earn half the revenue from all Airbnb stays and more than 50 percent of all Airbnb revenue last year was generated by people who rent out multiple listings, rather than individuals renting out their private residences.

When digging a bit deeper, there is also a racial element to who makes money on this platform. From their data-combing research, Inside Airbnb, a website acting as ” an independent, non-commercial set of tools and data that allows you to explore how Airbnb is really being used in cities around the world,” found that in predominantly Black neighbourhoods in the United States, the majority of hosts are white, and Black hosts make 530 percent less on the platform than white hosts. As the Airbnb trend continues to grow, it’s starting to look like Airbnb has developed a tool for increasing the wealth of mostly white property managers, while operating as another hotel conglomerate—unregulated and untaxed.

Ryan (who prefers to be identified by first name only) is a photographer for the Instagram account @augustaandbaldwin and has been a merchant in Kensington Market since 2010. Located in Toronto’s Chinatown, Kensington Market is a pedestrian and artist-centred, multicultural neighbourhood with 240 businesses such as vintage stores, butcher shops, and international food shops. Ryan has noticed people who live in the market have been pushed out due to vacation rentals and says “the market has visitors from across the city and around the world. A one-night visitor won’t be shopping the same as a resident, so there will be an effect on buying patterns.” As commercial rent in Kensington Market is tripling, forcing businesses out in favour of those catering to a wealthier clientele, Ryan says he is hopeful a balance can be struck between tourism and the locals, because “the neighbourhood is nothing without the people that live here every day.”

In Ottawa, city councillor Catherine McKenney (Ward 14–Somerset) is concerned about the effects an Airbnb increase will have on residents, expressing that “if a whole area of the city is converted into short term rentals, businesses will suffer” due to disruptions that occur when neighbours are no longer neighbours, but tourists. As the ward starts to see more issues arise from short term rentals, “that has an impact across the whole neighbourhood, including businesses.”

In the Maritimes, Charlottetown has seen up to one in 50 private dwellings listed on Airbnb, the second highest per property list rate of Airbnbs in Canada. Despite the increase in listings, when questioned, there doesn’t seem to be impacts facing business owners yet. However, in a survey conducted by city planners, 213 residents answered that they are concerned vacation rentals will “threaten the character” of their neighbourhoods. One person even commented that “seasonal short-term rentals means that renters have to move in order for tourists to have a convenient place to stay. It is detrimental to the health of our communities.” With an extremely low rate of empty housing across the province, a boom of ghost hotels, and tourism continuing to grow for the sixth year in a row, how much longer will it be until Charlottetown residents feel the effects?

With the flock of tourists sharing close quarters with residents, aside from the effects on retail, there are some accompanying nightmare scenarios taking place across the country. For example, Ottawa, Newmarket, and Toronto have recently suffered deadly shootings at parties hosted in Airbnb rentals; Prince Edward County residents have found themselves surrounded by dark empty houses in low tourist seasons, and two Calgary homeowners were forced to leave their home for months after guests trashed the place and left it “covered in biohazards.” These types of scenarios make living difficult and uncomfortable, and leave locals no choice but to move elsewhere.

But there is hope: Canadian municipalities and provinces are recognizing the potential problems that Airbnb is bringing with it and are taking action. To target property owners who have multiple listings in vacant homes or units, cities like Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, and Oakville—as well as the province of Quebec—are requiring hosts to obtain a business license in order to list their place on the website. Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, and the province of Alberta are taxing the hosts, guests, or both.

Kathryn Holm, the director of licensing and community standards at the City of Vancouver, who worked on the local regulations, said the city wanted to find a way of “allowing folks to run a short-term rental business out of the place that they call home.” The policy supports tourism by providing accommodation options in neighbourhoods that aren’t serviced by hotels, so the rentals will disperse more evenly across the city, something Holm is already seeing after one year of the policy being in place. Airbnb supports the policy by requiring a business license on all listings in Vancouver and passing that information to the city on a regular basis.

With Ottawa regulations on the way, McKenney is hopeful. They said the Ottawa bylaws are some of the strongest they’ve seen to protect neighbourhoods. The “local hotel industry will be healthier, and so will our entire neighbourhoods—parking, recycling, and garbage—the things in residential neighbourhoods we count on to keep our neighbourhood healthy and sustainable.”

As with most other so-called “disruptive technologies,” Airbnb was fully embraced by users, praised for providing an opportunity for anyone to rent out their home and earn extra cash, free from the restrictions of hotel-like regulations—a true capitalist dream. The purpose of this platform, and the purpose that Airbnb espouses still, is that it brings tourists to “off-the-beaten-path” locales and boosts tourism revenue in Canadian cities. But it may be that if left unregulated, Airbnb will transform neighbourhoods and cities right before our eyes. Yes, Airbnb’s platform brings money into neighbourhoods across Canada, but we also need to protect existing businesses and the unique neighbourhoods that make our cities some of the most livable places in the world. There are valuable lessons that Canada can learn from the Airbnb crises in international tourist hubs like Barcelona and Berlin. With a little smart policy and planning, Canada’s municipalities may be stepping in to address Canada’s looming Airbnb-fuelled crisis just in the nick of time.

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY MARCIA DIAZ

Months ago, before 2020 started, when we set out to come up with themes for the year, we could never have expected how the coming stretch of time would unfold. Travel, at the time, seemed like a theme that could affect just about anyone: people who had access to it, people who did not (and the barriers involved with that). We were thinking about how travel interacted with various identities. We were thinking about the environmental impacts of it. We were thinking about how economics intersected with travel. We put out a call for submissions outlining these ideas and more, and the response was overwhelming. By and large people who knew the magazine understood what we were getting at—the ethics of travel, and how the ethics of travel impact us all.

I am writing this from my living room. I am sitting at my (yellow, vintage, corner) desk—one I was fortunate enough to find on the curb years ago. My daughter is playing video games behind me (or baking bread and sewing her own clothes—if you’d prefer to imagine me a successful homeschooler). Canadians abroad have been ordered to return home. Borders have been closed to non-essential travel. Worries are flying about migrant farm workers, domestic workers, and asylum seekers, amongst others, as we deal with unprecedented uncertainty. We are also seeing posts about reduced air pollution, the crumbling of corporate airlines, and so on. Many of us are wondering what long-term impacts these changes will have, for better and worse.

In this issue Nicole Beier dives deep into the impact Airbnb is having on neighbourhoods—it’s not a good one, and some are left feeling like their cities are for sale. Sara King-Abadi brings us to the Athabasca Glacier in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and gives us a first-hand look at experiencing the effects of climate change there. Things get personal as melannie monoceros walks us through the realities of travelling with chronic illness. Barâa Arar finds herself split between two homes and two countries and examines privilege and guilt through that lens.

In all honesty, it’s hard to know what to write here because it’s hard to know what will have changed between this writing and when the magazine hits (mostly virtual) stands. But we send this one out into the world as a reminder of yesterday, and a hope for tomorrow—knowing that the moment we’re in is a temporary one, and the world, however changed it will be, will continue on after it.

]]>