Allyson Proulx wants people to know that she and Andy Cadotte do not speak for all of the volunteers in Forest City Food Not Bombs. They are just two people in a collective looking to create change in London, Ontario.

Forest City Food Not Bombs is a volunteer collective addressing food insecurity, poverty, and homelessness by providing free meals to those in need. On the last Saturday of every month, the group shares free soup with the London community. All of the soup is handmade by volunteers, using food that would otherwise be thrown out or freshly grown vegetables donated by Urban Roots London. Initially, they set up a table at London’s downtown Victoria Park for people to pick up their meals. But when volunteers saw how few people showed up in the winter, they started going mobile, hand-delivering food to encampments along the Deshkan Ziibi.

“Food Not Bombs, for me, is mutual aid…We’re not a charity,” says Proulx, who has volunteered with the group since the summer of 2023. “We’re not just ‘going to feed homeless people’, it’s ‘how do we work with people who are unhoused?’”

The Forest City group is one of many Food Not Bombs chapters worldwide. The U.S.-born collective was started in 1980 by a group of anti-nuclear activists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Each Food Not Bombs group is a completely independent organization that operates according to their community’s needs. The groups are non-hierarchical, meaning that there are no leaders—everybody is a volunteer.

Previous iterations of London Food Not Bombs groups existed in 2008 and 2012, but fizzled out due to activists moving cities and pursuing different projects over the years. The current London chapter started in June 2023 by a crew of activists who were interested in seeing a movement like this come back to the city. “It’s such a powerful, beautiful thing to feed one another on multiple levels, like spiritually, emotionally, intellectually,” Proulx says.

In 2023, between 1,700 to 2,100 people were unhoused in London, according to a “snapshot” published by the city earlier this year. The data comes from the City of London’s “By-Name List,” which allows them to track the changing size and composition of their unhoused population. Over 350 people lived completely unsheltered, meaning they never stayed in emergency housing. In November 2023, there were 103 active encampments. This was the highest number of active encampments during the year, though it does not reflect the total number of tents in 2023.

“The thing about London is that everybody knows everybody,” says Cadotte, a current volunteer who was also part of the 2008 group. “There’s a real opportunity to come together as a community and decide a different path to take in our lives, rather than keep pursuing this path of capitalism.”

Cadotte and Proulx both say that the size of London and its geographic layout helps activism thrive. People live and work in close proximity with each other—plus, they are sharing similar lived experiences as working Canadians. “We’re all together in the sandbox,” says Cadotte.

Proulx also points to the land which London’s activism happens on. “The land itself dictates the activism on the land,” they say. “[There is] Deshkan Ziibi—the river that we live along—the nations that are here, the knowledge that we gained from them about what it means to decolonize and what it means to be in relationship with the food that grows from the land.”

On top of end-of-month meal services, Forest City Food Not Bombs has become a mainstay at advocacy events in the city, standing in solidarity and providing food in the process. As crowds filled the steps outside London City Hall to protest a proposed police budget increase in February or took to the streets of downtown London as part of ongoing Palestinian resistance, Forest City Food Not Bombs set up a plastic folding table with a cardboard sign advertising “free soup.”

Most recently, Food Not Bombs volunteers stood at the front gates of London’s Western University alongside striking graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). GTAs, represented by the Public Service Alliance of Canada Local 610, are seeking a livable wage in the context of the maximum 10 hours per week they are allowed to work. “If you’re going to have collective resistance ongoing, you need to feed people so that they can continue to show up to these protests,” says Proulx.

Coming up on the group’s one year anniversary, Cadotte and Proulx both said they want Forest City Food Not Bombs to be sustainable as it continues to make change in the London community. “I don’t want to see the standards of success, like exponential growth—it’s not a stock market,” Proulx says. “I want it to grow into the ground.”

As Forest City Food Not Bombs moves into its second year, the group hopes to build its volunteer team and increase its activism, using the present to make change in London.

Photo by Katie Rainbow via Pexels

On a cloudy February day in Edmonton, Alberta, a giant trans pride flag flies over Dr. Wilbert McIntyre Park, marking the meeting place for a rally in support of the trans community. It’s days after Premier Danielle Smith, in a seven-minute video posted online, announced the most restrictive gender policies in Canada under the guise of “preserving choice for children and youth.” Alongside my 15-year-old daughter, who has many non-binary friends at school, and my best friend, whose child is gender diverse, I join the growing stream of people heading to the gazebo at the centre of the park.

The crowd eventually balloons to over 1,000 people as we wait to hear from the speakers—politicians, Two Spirit Elders, and organizations fighting for trans rights and reminding us to celebrate trans joy. Everywhere are Pride and trans colours and handmade cardboard signs. Some are cheekier than others, like the one that says, Someone come get your ‘Auntie’ Marlaina, she’s harassing the youth again. Marlaina is the premier’s given first name, but she prefers to go by Danielle—an irony she failed to appreciate while telling Alberta’s youth that all name and pronoun changes at school need to be approved by their parents.

While it’s a scary time for young trans and gender-diverse kids and their families, protests like the one happening today show how much solidarity there is in the community, letting these students know they’re not alone. There’s also a clear message that, no matter what policy the province tries to implement, those who know and love them will not stop seeing them for who they are. All around us, clusters of teachers hold signs saying they will never out their students. We run into the parents of a trans kid who lives in our neighbourhood and have a big group hug.

We’re all in need of comfort. At their AGM in November 2023, the United Conservative Party (UCP) overwhelmingly adopted three policies all related to “parental choice.” An opt-in consent for “any subjects of a religious or sexual nature,” including enrolment in extracurriculars or distribution of instructional materials relating to them; one supporting parents’ rights to be informed of and in charge of all decisions to do with all services paid for by the province; and the requirement for parental consent for name or pronoun changes for anyone under 16.

The UCP government wants to take things even further. They are proposing legislation to restrict gender-affirming healthcare for minors—no puberty blockers for anyone under 15 years of age and no gender-affirming surgeries for anyone under 18.

In her video, Smith said that gender-affirming care “poses a risk to [children’s] futures that I, as premier, am not comfortable permitting in our province.” It’s horrifying to know that Smith believes her feelings override actual medical evidence and best practices, or that parents, doctors and minor patients need her permission to choose the right treatment plan for any health concern.

There is a real fear, echoed by many health-care associations and gender-supportive services across Canada, that these policies will result in more harm to this vulnerable and at-risk community. In the Canadian Paediatric Society’s position statement on caring for trans and gender-diverse youth, they clearly state that adolescents who have access to gender-affirming medications have “lower odds of suicidal ideation over the life course.” Denying trans and gender-diverse youth access to the care they need when they need it is the real risk to these children’s futures.

Regardless of Smith’s position on the matter, many caring adults know this, and are fighting for students’ rights to be themselves. In a powerful member statement on the first day of the spring legislature session, Brooks Arcand-Paul, Alberta New Democrat MLA for Edmonton-West Henday and a Two Spirit person, stood proudly, wearing a floral and rainbow ribbon skirt gifted to him by his community, and condemned these policies and the divisiveness they are stoking.

Arcand-Paul says he’s pleased that many Albertans and organizations like labour unions are coming together to support the trans community. The vice president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association spoke at the rally in February, and the United Steelworkers, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees and the Canadian Union of Public Employees all came out with strongly worded statements denouncing the proposed policies.

But Arcand-Paul also warns, “if this government intends to take rights away from one group, it’s certainly not going to stop there.” He says Albertans need to continue to contact their MLAs and voice their concerns about the proposed policies. “Sometimes we say something once and think it’s good enough, but we have to keep pushing the gas on this one and we can’t lose steam.” Arcand-Paul suggests people donate to organizations like Skipping Stone and Egale Canada, who are establishing legal advocacy funds and gearing up to challenge these policies in the courts if necessary.

As we left the rally, I still had the progressive Pride flag pinned to my jacket. We headed to the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market for a pre departure coffee. Within minutes, three people stopped me, curious about the flag and the rally. I gladly answered their questions. It made me realize how powerful the simple act of showing up can be—and that we can’t assume everyone knows what’s happening in Alberta politics, or that they don’t care.

The queer and trans community have been fighting for their rights for a long time, but for some of us, this is new territory. It’s imperative that progressive Albertans continue to show up and commit to defending the Charter and human rights of all people, and to keep the pressure on this government with individual calls and letters, attendance at rallies and protests, and donations to the grassroots organizations leading these actions.

Given their track record, it’s hard to say if these actions will be enough to force the UCP government to change its course. But we have to try.

Image by Paul Loh via Pexels

In the heart of the city, while more than 385,000 South Asians go about their lives, the University of Toronto (U of T) has quietly set a precedent. Amid the clamour for social justice and equality, U of T’s teaching assistants have negotiated with their union to include caste as a discriminatory practice—a move that has slipped under the radar of mainstream Canadian discourse.

Along with U of T, the Canadian Union of Public Employees – 3902 Unit 1 also became the first union in North America to add caste as a protected category, according to organizers. Caste is a traditional social hierarchy and restrictive practice based on birth or traditional occupation, ingrained in some societies, particularly in South Asia, that dictates a person’s social status and opportunities. With 2.6 million people comprising 7.1 percent of the population, South Asians represent the largest visible minority in Canada, according to Statistics Canada.

U of T’s decision sets a precedent for other institutions to follow suit, marking a significant moment in Canadian anti-caste activists’ ongoing struggle for inclusivity. “Your proposed amendment to Article 4 of your Collective Agreement includes caste as a category to be protected from workplace discrimination, harassment, coercion, interference, restriction, or any other practices prohibited by law,” said a bulletin from CUPE during the negotiation phase. “This demonstrates your ongoing commitment to fighting against oppression and recognizes that many students and education workers within the University of Toronto are impacted by caste politics and caste-based discrimination in their workplaces, classrooms, and communities.”

“This creates an inclusive and equitable environment and campus for all; that is our larger goal,” said Shibi Laxman Kumaraperumal, a fourth-year PhD scholar at U of T’s History department,teacher’s assistant, and union-side bargaining committee member who pushed for the amendment. “By doing this, we are actually beginning anti-caste conversations in the university environments in Canada. We encourage other trade unions to take it up as well.”

While many in the community are pleased with this step to curtail discrimination, that doesn’t hold true for everyone. Efforts to incorporate anti-caste measures in various North American jurisdictions have faced opposition from some Hindu organizations, which argue that such measures could lead to Hinduphobia. The term “Hinduphobia,” as outlined in petition E-4507, tabled at the House of Commons in December 2023 and meant to specifically address and define the discrimination faced by Hindus in Canada, refers to prejudice, discrimination, or hostility toward Hindu people, culture, or religion, including the association of casteism with Hinduism.

The U.S. has seen initiatives to combat caste discrimination, notably in Seattle, Washington, which became the first U.S. city to prohibit caste discrimination in 2023. Some members of the diaspora resisted, though, and they also resisted the introduction of an anti-caste discrimination bill in California, expressing concerns about the implications for the Hindu community.

Similarly, in Canada, some Hindu groups have called for a Hinduphobia bill, arguing that caste discrimination is not prevalent and that legislation against caste discrimination could unfairly target the Hindu community. Still, across the country, jurisdictions are taking steps to combat caste-based discrimination. The Ontario Human Rights Commission recognizes it now. Similarly, the city of Burnaby, B.C. voted unanimously to include caste as a protected category in its code of conduct, and Brampton, Ontario’s city council voted unanimously to take steps to add caste-based discrimination to its anti-discrimination policy.

It’s a more complex issue than it seems, and initiatives to combat anti-caste discrimination in Canada and the U.S. are in the early stages. But the efforts being made at U of T point to the need to unpack it, and to implement change at an institutional level.

Collage by Valerie Thai

Isabella Calahoo-Zeller was attending eighth grade in Alberta when she received sex education for the first time. It consisted of a YouTube video about consent, and not much else. “We didn’t really get much on what a penis looks like, or what a vulva looks like,” Calahoo-Zeller says. “We never got the birth video that you hear so much about. So for me, I was like, what is this?”

Calahoo-Zeller is one of many young people in Alberta, and across Canada, who have been left wanting more from the sex ed experience offered in schools. Research by the Sex Information & Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN) has shown that 82.5 percent of young people across Canada see sex ed as a basic right for all.

These results come at a time when political and popular support for sex education seems to be shifting. Across the country, some parents, who claim to be advocating for parental rights, have been extremely vocal in their distaste for comprehensive sex ed, especially content focused on 2SLGBTQIA+ identities. According to Statistics Canada, about four percent of the population identifies as 2SLGBTQIA+. This means that if queer and trans-related content is left out of sex ed, many young Canadians won’t be receiving essential information about their health.

In Alberta, Saskatchewan, and New Brunswick, trans and nonbinary young people’s rights in the education space are on a backslide. New policies by the United Conservative Party, the Saskatchewan Party, and the Progressive Conservative Party respectively around the use of changed names and pronouns, as well as sex-ed access, are increasing the number of hoops through which young people have to jump to be recognized as their authentic selves and access resources made to support them.

“You’re already struggling in surviving to be yourself. How can you ask for help when the help doesn’t want to help you, right? I think it’s really a struggle right now being a trans person,” says Calahoo-Zeller, who is Two Spirit.

The benefits of receiving comprehensive sexuality education have been proven by science, and they’re not just about healthy and safe sex. From a violence prevention perspective, sex ed is key because it builds knowledge and understanding of bodily autonomy. It can be the first place children who are being abused learn that what’s happening to them is not okay. The health and safety aspect of sexuality education is essential, but that’s no less true of learning about gender identity, self-expression, and the full spectrum of human relationships.

“Historically, sexual health education focused on issues related to problem prevention. It has been focused on the needs of heterosexual, cisgender, white youth primarily, and focused on preventing unwanted pregnancies and preventing sexually transmitted infections,” says Jessica Wood, research and project development lead at SIECCAN. “It’s really important to understand that sexual education is not just learning about safer sex and reproduction, but should be a comprehensive approach to learning about sexuality and bodies and relationships, personal and interpersonal well-being, gender and sexual diversity, and values and rights.”

Because education falls under provincial jurisdiction, sex ed experiences are known to vary widely across Canada. Approaches can differ even between classrooms in the same school, as educators have different levels of comfort and training in delivering this knowledge. This means some students get all of the details, while others are left in an unfortunate state of ignorance. And it’s not just their own openness to the topic that educators must negotiate with: the volume of anti-trans rights rhetoric can also affect the classroom.

But, according to Janani Suthan, the comprehensive sexuality education program coordinator at the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the perception that support for comprehensive sex ed is decreasing isn’t always rooted in reality. “The majority of parents, in the grand scheme of things in Canada, are supportive of their children learning about their sexual health in schools, and learning it holistically and comprehensively,” they say. “But the people that are against this are very loud and very proud about it, and are mobilizing.”

Wood also says it’s a small minority of people who are actually against students learning this critical information. Advocacy against comprehensive sex ed, led by groups like 1 Million March 4 Children and Parents for Choice in Education, are often well organized and well funded. Religious and political interest groups have a strong hand in the work of such organizations.

The spread of misinformation and disinformation about sex ed on social media has contributed to the movement. “And so when we hear about this often, it may seem as if more people are not supportive of comprehensive sex ed,” Wood explains. “We find that a lot of people actually are, but we just don’t hear that coverage as much.”

This disproportionate coverage of dissenting voices leads to the spread of myths about sexual health, sex education, and queer and trans experiences. “They don’t want youth to know about gender, [or] sex,” says Suthan. “They are fearful of youth having knowledge, of youth having skills to understand themselves better.”

If queer and trans experiences aren’t taught as part of sex ed curriculum, that leaves young people vulnerable. Since sex ed is a health and safety issue, it is reasonable to expect that all students should have equal access to it. “It’s suicide prevention, it’s mental health care. It’s everything, because a lot of issues end up linking to sexuality and relationships,” Suthan says. “It’s very much necessary for everybody.”

For those who are supportive of sex ed in the classroom, it has never been more important to speak up for young people’s right to access information. “If you can advocate, advocate. If you can’t, that’s okay,” says Suthan. “Show up for your kid.”

Sharing knowledge with young people can help to build acceptance and understanding, some of the most important parts of living a fulfilled life. “Community is where I found more information on being Two Spirit,” says Calahoo-Zeller. “You get to understand yourself and also other people… we don’t have secrets. There’s nothing to hide.”

Photo by VV Nincic

Dear Brown people in Vancouver,

Do you feel it too? The way those who don’t look like us seem to slip their distaste for us “subtly” between sentences? The fact that irrespective of our immigration status, fluent English, accomplishments, education, upbringing and value systems, we are still… unwanted? The barely concealed microaggressions and scarily racist behaviour of the people in this city have frankly tired me out.

I’ve lived here since 2018, but I felt it first in January 2023, at the No Frills closest to the University of British Columbia, of all places. While loading our groceries onto the checkout counter, I realized I forgot to pick up the key ingredient of the week—pasta. I brushed past the middle-aged white couple behind me in a dash to grab the crucial item, squeezing past them to load it onto the counter and help my boyfriend avoid the embarrassment he might face if I didn’t make it back in time. “When we walk past people, we say excuse me,” said the man behind me. “It’s in our culture.”

I was reminded of my otherness in a city I had worked so hard to create a home in. Never mind the fact that this man didn’t know a thing about me or my culture—which is known for its humility and hospitality—but he had successfully made not just one, but three people uncomfortable with his comment all at once. Me, my Brown boyfriend, and the cashier at our counter, whose skin tone betrayed her South Asianness. Imagine not even being able to work or grocery shop in peace!

Since then, an underlying, parasitic feeling of alienation has followed me everywhere, and I began to notice instances of othering all around me. Suddenly, it became salient how our language, culture and colour is used to mimic and mock us—“butter chicken” and “namaste” are just a few names I’ve been called by literal strangers on the street, and that’s just in the past four months alone.

Every once in a while, a racist housing ad like the one that went viral in March 2023—“No Indian,” it read—will circulate again, and we will be reminded of our otherness in this city. We’ll share the post with each other, leave comments in frustration, talk about it when we see each other next, and swallow the silent resignation that things just are this way.

Last summer, a third body was found in addition to Irshaad Ikbal and Suleiman Khawar’s bodies on the shores of False Creek. Ikbal and Khawar were both presumed to be returning from a night out. This means that three men were found dead in the same place, just a few weeks separated from each other. This spring, less than a year later, Chirag Antil, an international student from India, was shot dead in south Vancouver. Police said he had no connections to criminal activity of any kind. They were also quick to note that the first two deaths were “unrelated” to each other, but to my community, it doesn’t look like a bizarre coincidence. This is all to say, there is no one looking out for us except each other.

My queer and trans Brown friends felt the fear first. They ask to be picked up by a trusted someone after a night out now, feeling afraid to take transit home alone. They ask to stay on the line with friends while out for a walk, and the areas around False Creek and Granville Island became deserts for us. We hold onto each other fiercely.

From hearing fragments of Punjabi on the bus to chatting with Uber drivers who settled in Canada three decades ago, stories about Brownness and Brown people permeate throughout Vancouver. It’s lovely to look at my world and see others who look like me, but I worry about us, too. I hope we keep listening to and believing each other’s stories and caring for each other, all while navigating this strange city with caution.

Love,

Shanai Tanwar

Illustration by Paige Jung

We met them first near the hot food. The catering staff were serving a dim sum shrimp dumpling on a bed of rice at the near end of the table. The caterers must have brought hundreds of ramekins to the venue that night, there was an endless stream of them, a new one for each portion.

Her eyes widened with a light of familiarity as she took me in, then gave me a smile. “You’re wearing my outfit!”

I was in a jumpsuit, sleeveless, black, a deep plunge of a neckline, a long string of pearls, black patent open toe pumps. She wore a short black skirt, pleated like a kilt, her legs in black lace stockings, her feet in heavily buckled boots. Her arms, like mine, were bare skinned, but not unadorned—elaborately tattooed. Her hair was stylish in an unkempt, flattering way.

He was in a tailored jacket, slacks a close enough match to suggest a suit, with a dress shirt and blue plaid bow tie, his own nod to the dress code.

He stood by her, encouraging her, enjoying her.

“I’m wearing your outfit?” I responded, puzzled.

“I looked for something exactly like that all day, all over town. You are wearing exactly what I pictured myself in. But I could find nothing. Where did you get that?”

“Eileen Fisher,” I laughed. “Last year’s season.”

“You bought it here?”

“Not here, dear. Your first mistake is to try shopping here.”

The two of us laughed together, discussed the difficulties of getting off the island, eventually parting company after exclaiming over the shrimp, my helpful husband steering me expertly away and back into the crowd.

We didn’t see them again for a while. The room was full, and there was another room besides, with the same food and another bar—a quieter setting, decorated with photos from the 40 years of theatre we were celebrating.

“Remember? We took your dad to see Putnam County Spelling Bee when he was here.”

“Oh, god, and then we got home to find the dog had eaten the chocolate he’d hidden in his suitcase!”

We lingered awhile and then returned to the lobby where things were noisier, gayer, brighter.

We stood at a long, bar-height table, the one nearest the entrance, at the edge of the nucleus of the crowd. Servers and other attendants orbited behind and around us as they found their way with trays, serving food, collecting glassware.

Then we heard it.

“Fuck you, you bitch.”

I turned to look as the two separated. He strode out the door. She circled past me, found an unoccupied length of table a little ways away and took out her phone. She began texting.

I stayed in my place for a few moments, absorbing. It was then that I noticed how young she was. Not yet 30, I would guess.

There I was, nearly 60, a steadfast man at my side, the calm waters of my marriage keeping me buoyant, making my own enjoyment possible. This wasn’t my crowd, either. She bit her lip, then glanced up and around and recomposed her face. I could imagine her heart pounding, her eyes stinging.

No one else had noticed. She was alone and I wished she could know that the room was not staring at her, that if she needed a safe way out, one was at hand. It was the kind of thing I would have wanted at her age. Someone to step up and say, “I’ve noticed you. I’ve chosen your side.”

I moved next to her and when she looked up, I smiled, put my fingertips on her forearm, and asked, “Will you be okay?”

“You heard that?” she asked.

“Yes, we did. But don’t worry. No one else heard.”

“I can’t believe he did that. It’s humiliating.”

I agreed that she was right to be offended. “It was a childish way to speak—and unacceptable.”

“Childish. I know. Can you believe it? He’s in his forties. But what can I do?”

“Do not date children. Of any age. I think you know enough about this man to make a good decision.”

She looked at me. “He’s moved in.”

I held her eye.

She inhaled. Sighed.

“What matters now is only this party, whether you can still enjoy yourself, whether you’ll be safe when you go home.”

She assured me he would not be violent. But he would be hard to get rid of.

“What you do after tonight is up to you. My intent is only to help you stay in this room, if you want, to confirm your right to enjoy yourself and not have someone take this away from you by being vulgar in public.”

She worked for a property manager and had come with tickets the office had purchased. She was texting to see if she could find a friend who might want to come see the show. I looked at her tickets.

“These are some of the best seats in the house. You’re right to want to share them. But if no one can come on such short notice, you will still enjoy the show. It will be fun. Entertaining.”

Her boyfriend approached and I stepped away. Everyone has the right to a little time to apologize.

He didn’t.

I glanced at my husband. We were now some distance from each other, the feuding couple between us. I didn’t look at the couple directly, but I think they felt our fleeting observation. The boyfriend walked out of the theatre.

Moments later, my husband and I and the young woman reassembled. We smiled at the other guests nearby, engaged them in light, brief, cheerful remarks.

Whenever the young woman would start to rail about her boyfriend’s misdeeds, I would let her finish her sentence and then change the subject. I was not there to be her advocate in a bad relationship. I felt she should have no time for him and tried to demonstrate this by having no time for him, or even accounts of him, myself. The path forward lay in choosing a state of mind that excluded him.

The lights dimmed a warning. We were called to the theatre.

I took my seat without optimism and let the entertainment absorb me.

Photo by Knape

In the summer of 2020, for all the obvious reasons, I didn’t have much to look forward to—aside from the packages of clothes.

Online shopping was a popular crutch during the harsh days of COVID-19 restrictions, but I felt adamant that my situation was different. I was nothing like the social media influencers showing off their massive hauls to impressionable followers. These women were ordering much more clothing than I was, much more often. They were rich, they were excessive—and they were skinny.

After being what clothing companies nonsensically refer to as straight sized during my youth, I had gained weight in my late teens, and spent years grappling with the reality that this was my new body. I clung to my old wardrobe until the buttons on my blouses popped off and my leggings were worn out to the point I had to keep my legs crossed to hide the bare skin of my thighs peeking through. Most of the stores within my budget went up to only an extra large; and on the rare occasion a piece fit me, it would come with the condition that I refrain from lifting my arms above my head, bending down, or zipping it all the way up. Every single shopping trip involved crying tears of embarrassment in the privacy of the dressing room.

My first foray into the world of ecommerce fast fashion started early on in the pandemic with the long overdue acknowledgement that my body needed plus-size clothing, but quickly snowballed to replacing my entire wardrobe within the course of a few months. It’s impossible to look back at my fast-fashion era as anything more than a cringey, isolation-induced abandonment of my personal values, but it didn’t feel that way in the moment. I knew that buying fast fashion was wrong, but the packages arriving at my door every few weeks offered me respite from the shame I felt shopping in person. For a while, that felt something like empowerment.

*

Corporate propaganda videos are rarely as memeable as Dani Carbonari’s. Known to her hundreds of thousands of TikTok followers as Dani DMC, Carbonari is a self-proclaimed “confidence activist” whose online identity strongly hinges upon her status as a fat woman. In 2023, her posts about a sponsored trip to China to explore the facilities of the fast-fashion retailer Shein made her the main character of the Internet, prompting her fervent defence of the company.

In a now-deleted video, Carbonari claimed that the company’s detractors were motivated by xenophobia, as Shein is a Chinese-owned corporation. This claim completely ignores two very important points. As of 2022, the company outsells brick-and-mortar fast-fashion empires like Zara, Old Navy and H&M, and makes up nearly one-fifth of the global fast-fashion market, according to one analysis. If Shein is being targeted, it’s for their objectively singular impact, not their country of origin. Secondly, many, if not most, of Shein’s exploited workers are also Chinese, meaning criticisms of the company’s labour practices are in defence of Chinese workers, rather than xenophobically targeting them.

Carbonari’s co-opting of social justice language didn’t stop there. In another video defending her choice to partner with the company, she described the challenges she had faced as a plus-size content creator, and credited Shein for valuing their partnership and offering a wide range of plus sizes, admittedly a rarity in the fashion industry.

When Teresa Giudice of The Real Housewives of New Jersey fame and three of her daughters received backlash for partnering with Shein on a curated collection, a representative of the family told media an eerily similar narrative, calling the collaboration “size-inclusive” and “made to amplify the voices and creativity of young women.” (Teresa is also a convicted fraudster who has been criticized for marketing weight loss pills, although that’s beside the point).

It’s easy to see how this messaging appeals to plus-size shoppers, who have dealt with a lifetime of being publicly shunned by fashion’s most powerful voices, from Karl Lagerfeld to former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries to Lululemon founder Chip Wilson. The majority of women in Canada are not so-called straight sized, and most U.S. women wear at least a size 16 (although the arbitrary sizing of clothing is often its own headache for shoppers to navigate), and fast-fashion brands have taken note of this underserved demographic.

At the same time, it can’t be ignored that fast fashion is responsible for up to 10 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the United Nations, and generally fails to pay its factory workforce a living wage. From top to bottom, Shein (and other fast fashion brands such as ASOS, Zaful, Temu and Fashion Nova) is built on exploitation. The evidence that the industry exploits garment workers, our environment, and independent designers is insurmountable.

When influencers and celebrities jump to defend these brands in the name of body inclusion, they exploit plus-size customers too. They essentially use us, a genuinely marginalized demographic, as a shield from criticism, not unlike the practice of pinkwashing. If the term fatwashing takes off in the next few years (in relation to clothing, not the niche cocktail-making technique), remember you heard it here first.

*

According to Heather Govender, an environmental educator with the Hamilton-based non-profit Green Venture, the low-quality nature of fast fashion is about more than cutting corners—it’s also about maximizing profit in the long run. “They’re made quickly and cheaply so that people will buy lots and then throw them out and buy more and more,” she explains.

Govender says that fast-fashion items continue to cause environmental damage throughout their life cycle, even if they don’t end up in a landfill. Due to the plastic fibres used in most fast-fashion clothing, every laundry day produces microplastics that end up being released into the ocean.

If you struggle to find clothes for any reason—whether it be your size, location, budget or anything else—it can be easy to tell yourself that fast fashion is complicated. The more I learned about the industry, however, the more it feels like the only complicated thing about it is how layered and multifaceted its societal harms are. Its entire business model requires a detached, nihilistic worldview—a belief that the planet is melting and there’s nothing we can do to stop it; that every piece of clothing everywhere involved exploitation, so it doesn’t really matter where you shop; that the best you can do in this broken world is find a little bit of happiness in poorly stitched polyester and free shipping.

While fully acknowledging that I once bought into this nonsense, I know now that everyone, including the plus-size community, deserves better than clothes that contain lead and other toxins. We deserve better than to be “included” while simultaneously being othered—log onto any major fast fashion retailer and you’ll find the plus-size section is neatly separated from “Women” and “Men,” insinuating that our size somehow sets us apart from everyone else. We deserve better than fast fashion, and fortunately for us, fat organizers already know this, and are creating budget-friendly, community oriented alternatives to the status quo.

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It’s estimated that at least 80 billion garments are produced each year, yet any fat person can tell you how difficult it is to find clothing that fits. Eco-conscious influencers are quick to recommend thrifting as a way to save money and be gentle to the environment, but for larger people, the pickings are slim. To make matters worse, evidence indicates that weight bias can sharpen the already steep wage gap that women experience in the workplace, leaving shoppers desperate for both options that fit and that they can afford. In my experience, the plus-size selection in thrift stores is particularly minimal, which has always struck me as odd considering the sheer volume of clothing that already exists. This may be changing, though.

Brenna Strohschein, a co-owner of Fat Sisters Vintage, a plus-size consignment shop that recently opened in Victoria, B.C., shares some of her insights into the fraught relationship between plus-size people and donating clothes. “Plus-size folks are hoarding [clothes], because we have a scarcity mentality that we will never find it again,” Strohschein says. “It’s so hard to find a quality piece, so we can never let it go.”

According to Strohschein, creating a safe, welcoming space for plus-size shoppers has helped encourage consignments. To say the least, opening the store has been an emotional process. Every day, customers cry when they discover the abundance of plus-size options. Some tell Strohschein that they finally have the opportunity to explore their personal style, rather than taking a “whatever fits me” approach to shopping.

This hit home for me. I had gone from wearing threadbare clothes from my high school Tumblr era to having infinite options available at my fingertips, and my strategy was to try anything and everything. Instead of allowing me to discover my own style, fast fashion had only encouraged me to chase microtrends and, for the first time in years, fit in with the crowd. The truth is, I still don’t know how to tell the clothes I love from the clothes I’m just relieved to know fit me.

Strohschein’s shop is no accident: she, too, has struggled to find professionally appropriate clothing in her size, leading to fears that any perceived sloppiness would be attributed to her weight. Stories like these are why even well-educated, socially conscious fat people find the allure of fast fashion hard to resist. Nobody likes to wear ill-fitting or unstylish clothes, but the stakes are different for fat people. Too many people already assume that fat people are lazy and unprofessional, leaving many looking to the massive inventories of fast-fashion retailers for a wardrobe that will challenge rather than reaffirm these preconceived notions. The cruel irony is that, while fast-fashion giants might have office-friendly blazers and slacks, the poor quality often leaves many people unable to truly look and feel put together, and in a constant cycle of trying to shop their way out of fat discrimination.

The community efforts to combat fast fashion don’t stop at thrifting, though. Isobel Bemrose-Fetter and Heather Glasgow are the co-founders of the YVR Fat Clothing Swap in Vancouver, a sustainable initiative that aims to dismantle the shame that often comes with occupying a fat body. “We’re about bodies, and seeing bodies and normalizing them—let’s have them be seen,” Bemrose-Fetter said of the swap’s efforts to normalize fatness. “Bodies are inherently neutral.”

Of course, meeting a community’s needs is always an ongoing process. Both the YVR Fat Clothing Swap and Fat Sisters Vintage are actively involved in expanding the options for superfat people, who often face additional barriers when searching for clothing. Govender, who works on a twice-yearly clothing swap for all sizes, says that her organization is also continually looking for new ways to encourage plus-size participation.

Sustainable fashion brands are also slowly catching up and increasing their plus-size offerings. As budget is still a top concern for me, my primary strategy to curb consumption has been to take care of my current wardrobe rather than search for ethical options, but I’ve still stumbled upon resources that can help people of all sizes shop according to their own values. For example, a $2 (U.S.) digital guide from L.A.-based stylist Lakyn has helped me find sustainable brands that cater to a diverse range of sizes and budgets.

Clearly, the fat community has been hard at work to find ethical alternatives to fast fashion. That makes it all the more disgusting to hear the language of fat liberation being twisted by influencers and B-list celebrities to defend multibillion-dollar companies. Fatphobia has shaped my life in so many ways, and I’m still on a journey to get out from under its grip. I can confidently say, however, that indulging in fast fashion hauls won’t be a part of this journey—even if the alternatives do require a little more work.

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While consignment and clothing swaps might not be accessible for everyone, there are plenty of small acts we can take to get us on the right path. For those still looking for a fat community, Glasgow says that there can be power in starting small. “Even if it’s you and two other people and you’re like, let’s swap clothes and be fat together … that’s really all you need. You don’t really need a lot of pre-established community to start building.”

When I think back to the days I spent in my room, trying on clothes all alone, I realize that the only thing fast fashion ever offered me was another form of isolation, a new way to hide from a world that didn’t want me.

Rejecting fast fashion can be scary as a fat person. It means rejecting a scarcity mentality that tells us we need as much as possible, whenever possible, because our resources are finite. But it also means embracing a community that’s eager to support us in finding what we need. It means remembering that our liberation is all tangled up with everyone else’s—we can never achieve fat liberation at the expense of environmental justice or the dignity of garment workers. It means deciding that we all deserve better.

Photo by SCUBALUNA

Merely the size of a fingernail, with a striped pattern on their shells, zebra and quagga mussels have a powerful grip. They make their way into new bodies of water by clinging to the hulls of boats and ships. Once they invade a water body, they attach themselves to native mussels, causing them to suffocate. They can also cause diseases for other aquatic life that may eat them, decrease water quality, and clog any infrastructure they come across, like pipes and docks.

All invasive species are a kind of poison. But zebra and quagga mussels are particularly dangerous. These mussels, which are native to Eurasia, encrust everythng they come in contact with. They filter algae out of water that local species depend on for food, devouring it all for themselves. They can completely kill off native mussel species. And now, it seems to be an inevitable reality that they’ll soon colonize British Columbia’s freshwaters.

When quagga mussels were found in the Idaho Snake River last fall, the Idaho State Department of Agriculture had to block off over 25 kilometers of the river from the public and dump 116,000 liters of Natrix, a copper-based pesticide, in an effort to eradicate them. The whole procedure cost $3 million and ended up killing six to seven tonnes of fish. Whether or not they were actually able to rid themselves of the unwelcome molluscs remains an open question.

With the Idaho Snake River a mere 10 hour drive from B.C., and connecting to the province’s bodies of water, conservation groups are ringing their alarm bells. “The threat is closer than ever,” says James Littley, deputy administrator of the Okanagan Basin Water Board (OBWB), an organization that identifies and resolves critical water issues in the Okanagan Valley.

More funding to combat this problem is needed immediately. Yet each government agency that used to provide financial assistance to infestation prevention has slashed their contributions over the past few years, leaving very little to protect B.C. wildlife and ecosystems from this now-imminent threat. Without the necessary funding, B.C.’s freshwater ecosystems could face drastic changes, impacting aquatic life and water quality, and costing the province millions.

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Research by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in the Hudson River showed that zebra and quagga mussels which invaded the waters in 1991 and 2008 respectively had caused environmental damage in a magnitude similar to acid rain. In both cases, phytoplankton populations decline. This can cause a ripple effect, lowering populations of other aquatic life, too.

In Michigan, the mussels were responsible for the deaths of thousands of migratory birds through a cascading food chain issue. These mussels accumulate toxins in their body up to 300,000 times greater than what’s in the surrounding water. As a result, the birds died from a particularly deadly type of botulism that worked its way up the food chain from the mussels to fish. When this happens, birds, including endangered species like loons, are unable to fly and often wash up dead on shores. Scavengers that may feed on them could also ingest the toxins and die. Even after the mussels die, their razor-sharp shells wash up on beaches, making it impossible for people to walk barefoot or go swimming.

Invasive mussels were found in the Great Lakes in the 1980s after ballast water was discharged into them from European ships, and they’ve spread through parts of Eastern Canada and the U.S. since then. Just last year, they were found in New Brunswick and Manitoba. While Manitoba has used a chlorine treatment to control growth in hydroelectric generating stations, New Brunswick is focusing on doing more boat and watercraft cleanings.

B.C. shouldn’t feel safe from this issue, and neither should other provinces and territories. In B.C., there are two lines of defence around mussel infestation: prevention and monitoring. Prevention is accomplished by careful inspections of any vessels coming into the province that are deemed to be high risk. In 2023, the province’s Invasive Mussel Defence

Program (IMDP) included six inspection stations and two roving inspection crews that checked watercrafts entering the province that could potentially be transporting the creatures. Many factors can contribute to a watercraft being high risk. For example, if a boat was in a state or province that has a known or suspected case of zebra or quagga mussels, or if it’s dirty or slimy, it is high risk. In these cases, the boat is thoroughly cleaned, drained, and dried at the inspection station, and then it’s quarantined for 30 days. While this program sees high compliance, the current inspection stations do not cover every border crossing, and they do not operate 24 hours per day.

The 2023 provincial watercraft inspection station report, released annually by B.C.’s Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, stated that “155 watercraft were identified as high risk, 66 decontamination orders were issued, and 36 watercraft were issued quarantine periods to meet the required drying time.” The ministry estimated in 2023 that if these mussels were to invade the province’s water bodies, it would cost anywhere from $64 to $129 million annually to manage the impacts. And Littley says that number is grossly underestimated.

Despite this, funding from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) for invasive mussels prevention in the province dropped from $475,000 in 2022 to nothing in 2023/24. Fortis BC, a provincial utilities provider, dropped their funding from $250,000 per year from 2017-2021 to a $50,000 donation in December 2023, and nothing yet in 2024. And B.C. Hydro, which gave $1.25 million in 2020, also dropped their funding to $350,000. Reduced funding will likely mean significantly reduced protection for the province’s waterways.

None of these government agencies made someone available for an interview. In an email to This Magazine, the DFO cited that they have allocated $43.8 million over five years and $10.8 million ongoing for aquatic invasive species management. However, these funds are for aquatic invasive species management all across Canada and for every type of aquatic invasive species, not just invasive mussels. They also stated that the $475,000 in the 2022-23 fiscal year was “an additional one-time investment” and that the province is “fully responsible for decisions on how to direct this funding.”

As a response to the calls to action from many local conservation groups, the DFO announced in February that they will commit $8.75 million to the national Aquatic Invasive Species Prevention Fund over five years and up to $540,000 over three years from 2023 ($180,000 per year) to the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation (HCTF), a conservation-focused provincial nonprofit. But these are not new funds; they are merely re-announcements of previous funding.

Littley says that this amount of funding is insufficient and just another funding opportunity that conservation groups have to apply to. “It would take at least $4 million just to get back to where we were in 2019, just for invasive mussels defence,” says Littley. “So for the feds to come to the table with $180,000 is just a pittance compared to what’s needed.”

Further, this funding is intended for lake monitoring through water sampling in the province to check if invasive mussels are detected—it won’t help to prevent the mussels from entering the province in the first place. The monitoring efforts are done partly by the province through the IMDP as well as local conservation groups like the Columbia Shuswap Invasive Species Society (CSISS), a non-profit that prevents the spread of aquatic invasive species in the Columbia Shuswap region. The society has been doing monitoring work for almost a decade, reporting their findings to the province’s defence program, and also educating the public about the risks of invasive species.

According to Robyn Hooper, executive director of the CSISS, a focus on monitoring alone is not good enough. “When it comes to invasive mussels, yes, we can do monitoring, but that’s kind of a later step. Really, the most important facet of this is inspecting boats before they come into the province,” she says, adding that that’s where funding is needed most. “All it takes,” she says, “is one watercraft.”

B.C. is still an invasive mussels-free province, and it’s not too late to save the freshwater bodies and the species who live there. But in order for that to happen, different levels of government and local conservation groups need to coordinate to work efficiently at prevention. And the DFO needs to provide consistent and sufficient funding to the province’s defence program, which is its main preventative tool.

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Not everyone is relying on the government to come up with solutions in its own time. Alongside CSISS’s efforts, conservation groups like the OBWB have been advocating to senior levels of government to address gaps in invasive mussel prevention in B.C for over 10 years. They also run public outreach campaigns to educate the public on the risks.

Still, there is a gap in public understanding of the real threat of invasive mussels, and the threat is bigger than many of us realize. Unfortunately, Anna Warwick Sears, executive director at the OBWB, says that communication with the feds has been mostly one-sided. “It feels like they’ve completely given up on Western Canada,” she says, adding that she feels there’s a level of magical thinking in the federal government, and perhaps they think invasive mussels will simply decide not to visit the region.

“It’s a national issue,” says Hooper. “We have invasive mussels in the East and they’re spreading West, and so it’s not all about B.C. and protecting our water bodies. It’s the work of Canada to prevent the spread.”

The threat of invasive species can often be easily overlooked, especially when it’s a problem that’s not quite visible. But we need to understand their pervasive impact. Their presence means environmental devastation, huge economic costs, and underlying social impacts to recreation and tourism.

Though Canada is a large country, its lakes, rivers, and freshwater bodies are all connected. Their health is vital for the well-being of the surrounding ecosystems, and for life itself. As cases of invasive species and aquatic diseases are popping up across the country, there is a real need for well-funded prevention programs that can detect a potential threat and push it out before it wreaks havoc.

Our water depends on it.

Photo by TJ Rak

Rosie Archie knew she wanted to be a skater when she was 12 years old. Her older sister Charmie was already good enough to land tricks, and Archie was not far behind. There were no skate parks in Canim Lake, a Tsq̓éscen̓ First Nation reserve in interior B.C., so the sisters would travel to nearby towns to skate, where they were often the only girls—and always the only Indigenous girls.

Skateboarding became an escape of sorts for Archie. “There was funeral after funeral on my reserve when I was a kid. I was always surrounded by sadness and alcoholism and suicides. I would just go pick up my skateboard because it got me away from what was going on around me, and it made me focus on me, what my body was doing, how my board was flipping,” Archie says. “It calmed down my nervous system, just gliding down the road, listening to my wheels.”

In late 2019, after her sister’s passing, Archie had a vision: she wanted to use skateboarding as a way to reach youth in remote Indigenous communities and talk about mental health and their culture.

Nations Skate Youth was born in her living room, after a conversation with fellow skaters and co-founders Joe Buffalo, Dustin Henry, and Tristan Henry. The organization is based on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples–Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Nations. Its mission is “to give kids hope, and to remind them that they’re loved, and to remind them that they matter,” says Archie. “To tell them to be proud of who they are and where they come from.”

In the four years since, Nations Skate Youth has done just that, hosting skating events and donating skating equipment across Canada, and more recently, the U.S. As a non-profit, the organization is supported by donations and sponsorships from skateboarding brands, such as Dime and Vans. Using skateboarding as a conduit for connection, Archie and her co-founders set the stage of vulnerability by sharing their own stories with youth, who are anywhere from toddler age to teenagers. “It has to come from the heart,” says Archie. “Kids see the truth.”

According to the 2021 census, more than 1.8 million people in Canada identify themselves as Indigenous, making up about five percent of the total population. It’s the fastest-growing and youngest population in Canada. For Nations Skate Youth, sharing stories and lessons can empower and set a positive example of what Indigeneity looks like for these young people.

“The work that we do with the youth is giving our time and listening to them,” Archie says. “And they will often tell you stories that will make you cry on the spot or will inspire you to change how you think.”

Nations Skate Youth also uses skateboarding as a way to build self-esteem and leadership skills. Recent research indicates that there’s something to this: a 2020 study by the University of Southern California (funded by Tony Hawk’s The Skatepark Project) found that skateboarding improves mental health, helps people build community, and promotes resilience. It also found that racialized skaters felt safer in skateboarding communities than they did in other contexts. The sport has a unique ability to channel complex emotions. There’s a certain sense of infallible perseverance required when it comes to learning how to land a trick—fall down five times, get back up six. And for young people, working at something over and over again until you get it right builds an unshakable sort of confidence.

“A lot of kids say that, ‘I’m usually pretty angry. But when I’m skateboarding, I don’t feel like that,’” says Archie, who now gets regular requests from communities across North America to come visit. This year, members of the organization plan to travel to Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and for the first time, Kansas City. Archie has her eye farther afield too: her dream is to bring Nations Skate Youth to visit Indigenous communities in Australia and New Zealand.

Archie feels a connection to colonized spaces around the world, where Indigenous communities are collectively learning to re-embrace their cultures amidst the aftershocks of intergenerational trauma. When working with Nations Skate Youth in places like Hawaii or the Yukon, Archie gets to observe kids relearn their languages, their dances, or even be proud of their braids and names. It’s something special.

“The effects of colonization are still happening,” Archie says. “The intergenerational trauma is still going on. And that’s reminding us [that] there’s no right or wrong [time to] learn your language, learn your culture.”

Illustration by Jenny Bien-Aimé

When I was eight years old, my parents entrusted me with $16 in the form of eight $2 coins, an allowance for a school field trip to La Ronde, Montreal’s amusement park. Until 1996, the year during which the $2 tender in Canada was converted from a paper bill to a coin, my parents would have never, not in a million years, given me $16 to take along with me on a field trip, or anywhere else for that matter. As far as my mother was concerned, I had no business with paper money. However, on this particular morning in 1997, my father, quite uncharacteristically, reached into his pockets and offered me eight toonies.

“Why are you giving the boy all that money?” asked my mother, who had been eyeing the transaction discontentedly.

“Oh, it’s just some spare change,” my father replied. “In case of emergency.”

My mother grumbled an unintelligible response, but let me have the coins; whereas only a year ago, if my father had reached into his wallet and pulled out eight $2 bills and handed them over to me, she would have exploded savagely. She would have either thrown whatever she might be holding at my father’s head or reached for the nearest available object that could be thrown at my father’s head and, having thrown it, would have walked over to him, ripped the $16 out of his hands, and shoved them back into his wallet or into her own pocket. In fact, my father would never have offered me $16 in paper currency in front of my mother as it was so obviously an act that would have aggravated her.

My father’s unprecedented offer, as well as my mother’s tolerance, was intriguing. It seemed as if my parents’ emotions about money could be manipulated by something as simple as a change in its appearance.

While this was the first time that I had observed this behaviour toward money manifest itself in my parents, I was already intimately familiar with the ways in which money aroused different emotions depending on its appearance. I had this sneaky habit of roaming around our house for coins like a scavenger. During these hunts, I felt luckiest when I found coins in or under the couch, in the car, anywhere in our laundry room, or anywhere in our garage. I believed the coins I discovered in these circumstances were discovered honestly. The coins I found in drawers (in the kitchen, in the laundry room, in the wall unit that housed our sound system and television) were a morally grey area. I would try to ascertain whether these coins had been forgotten in their drawers, perhaps for weeks or months, or if they had been intentionally left there for safekeeping. If it was clear they had been forgotten, then I was happy to discover these coins and claim them; but if something intangible about their appearance, about the way they were lying in the drawer, told me that my parents knew of their presence, even if their knowledge of the coins might have been broad and abstract—even if I was confident that they would never notice if one of them went missing—then I felt guilty if I took any of them. I felt guilty for even considering whether or not to take a coin. I also felt guilty if I took a coin, any coin, that I discovered in my parents’ bedroom. Even if the coin was jammed under the base of my parents’ bedframe, and had obviously been lost, its location in my parents’ bedroom did not feel neutral. Such a coin had not been thrown in my path through the ordinary twists and turns of fate. I felt like a villainous thief if I pocketed these coins, like a person without a conscience or a moral compass.

In addition to the money’s location, there was also the issue of denomination to consider. I usually scooped up and pocketed pennies without a second thought. Nickels were small in surface area and value, but also thicker and more robust than all the other coins. A nickel weighed 4.6 grams, almost as much as a quarter, which weighed 5.05 grams, and more than twice as much as a dime, which weighed 2.07 grams (measurements which I conducted assiduously on the electronic scale in our kitchen). I always found it difficult to pocket nickels, as their weight was problematic, disproportionate in appearance to their five-cent essence. I usually ignored them in favour of pennies and dimes.

Dimes were the smallest, daintiest, and thinnest of all the coins. You could balance them easily on your smallest fingernail. I would often chew on dimes because I liked their metallic taste and the feeling of the thin, serrated edge lodging itself into different crevices between my teeth. In fact, I liked dimes so much and had such good feelings toward them that I almost never spent the ones I found, preferring to hoard them instead. I would occasionally take all the dimes I had accumulated out of their secret hiding place in my closet and lay them on the ground to examine them joyously, before chewing on them absentmindedly for hours on end. It was a minor miracle that I didn’t swallow about a dozen of them during the course of my childhood.

Quarters tugged at my heartstrings in both directions, almost equally. Quarters were not as thick and unpleasant as nickels, but they were unwieldy in size, and cumbersome to flip and play with. Additionally, the quarter’s purchasing power was 25 times that of a penny, and two-and-a-half times that of a dime. This purchasing power was a double-edged sword. I felt luckier when I found a quarter than when I found a penny, at least 25 times luckier, but I also felt 25 times guiltier. It was at least 25 times more important that I establish and reason through the circumstances of its discovery, to be certain that I was finding it and pocketing it in an appropriate and conscionable manner. This moral standard almost always proved to be one I could not satisfy for myself internally. I always felt a little wretched when I picked up a quarter, even if I picked it up from a sidewalk or from a trail in the woods. Then again, there was the superstitious delight of finding a quarter, which was a rare occurrence, and therefore accompanied by the feeling that fortune was smiling upon me.

Finally, the loonie. It was pure evil. I wanted as little to do with it as possible. I would rather have found four different quarters (for all the moral quandaries that all four findings might have presented). I hated the loonie’s eleven-sided polygon shape, how its edges were often blunted and beaten from use, instead of smooth and circular like all the other coins. I hated the loonie’s bronze plating (that would later become brass plating) to which dirt adhered, tarnishing it, rendering its golden hue murky and anemic.

If I pocketed a loonie, against my better judgment, I needed to be rid of it as quickly as possible. But disposing of a loonie was easier said than done. I usually spent my coins at the dépanneur. As I didn’t like to accumulate coins (dimes excepted), and wanted to leave the dépanneur with fewer of them than when I had entered it, spending a loonie (or even worse, two loonies) usually meant buying more items than I knew what to do with. Those items (gum, chips, candy, flimsy trinkets) would fill my pockets uncomfortably, or give me a stomach ache if I ate them all at once, making me feel nauseous and guilty.

Enter into this hierarchy of coins the toonie, eight of which my father would hand over to me on the morning before my school trip to La Ronde. The toonie was a void, like the vacuum of space. It meant nothing to me. For a person who had such strong and complex feelings toward all other coins, this feeling, or absence of feeling, was peculiar and bewildering. I would often ponder the toonie, while it sat in the upturned palm of my right hand, gently shifting my palm so that it might catch the light at different angles. The more I thought about it, the more the toonie seemed unreal, manufactured. Well, all coins were manufactured. What I mean to say is that it seemed fake, inauthentic. It had a nickel outer ring, a bronze inner core, and a polar bear on an ice floe embossed on its reverse side. These elements coalesced to form a coin which seemed excessively novel. I had the disconcerting impression that I was holding a knockoff, an imitation of money, and not actual money. I hoped that if I exposed the toonie to the right light, I might form a unique attachment to it, but the toonie remained silent, inscrutable.

Given my indifference toward the toonie coin, my behaviour during the field trip to La Ronde was predictable.

During lunch, as my classmates and I sat on picnic tables, eating hot dogs, burgers, and French fries, one of my classmates took three quarters out of his pocket and used them to play an arcade game that was beside the food stall where we had just purchased our lunches. The object of the game was to fish out various toys or stuffed animals from a large bin while operating, with a joystick and a button, a robotic arm and hand that was perched above the bin. When the player thought they had maneuvered the arm into a good position with the joystick, they would bash the button, and the hand would close in what looked like an attempt to secure whatever toy or stuffed animal the player hoped to acquire.

My classmate played three turns with his three quarters, and lost all three. The game was rigged against the player. Once a quarter was introduced, the whole machine began vibrating like it was experiencing an earthquake, making the robotic arm and hand more difficult to operate. Additionally, the hand and arm seemed at times intentionally unresponsive (often these were crucial times, when a toy or object seemed just within the player’s grasp).

I was sorry to see my classmate lose. Before he could walk away from the game, I approached him and offered him a toonie to let him keep playing. After all, it cost me nothing, emotionally at least. This precipitated a frenzy amongst my classmates. Where had I gotten this money? Did I have more of this money, of these toonies, wherever they had come from?!?! About 12 to 15 of my classmates congregated around me and rattled off inquiries about my toonies and whether I might give them a turn, and in that moment, I took all of my remaining coins from my pocket and slammed them onto the dashboard of the console, gifting them to my classmates.

My offering was applauded, but once I relinquished the money, no one paid any further attention to me. I didn’t even attempt to play the game once. I had no desire to play the game. I enjoyed quests for objects that were solitary, undertaken for private, personally significant reasons. The communal endeavour of this arcade, the pursuit of the toys my classmates hoped to snatch from it, was public, almost lurid, and antithetical to my introverted nature. Anyways, it didn’t seem like my classmates would have let me play even if I had wanted to. No one seemed inclined to offer me a place in line, or a turn at the arcade, though they were constantly trading and offering places in line to each other.

Three of my classmates won at the arcade and brought a toy or stuffed animal home with them. On the bus ride back to school, as I watched those three classmates with their toys and stuffed animals, and listened to my other classmates who couldn’t stop talking about the thrills and frustrations of their various turns at the arcade, I starting feeling a bit like a fool. When I returned home that afternoon, my mother asked me where the hell the $16 my father had given me that morning had gone, and why the hell I didn’t have anything to show for it.

“You don’t even have five or ten or 25 cents in change?” my mother yelled at me indignantly. “What could you possibly have done with all that money?”

I lied. Like many liars, I based my lie in truth. I told my mother about the arcade game, but said that I was the one who had spent all of my money on it. I told her that I hadn’t won a single one of my 64 turns, and as each turn had cost a quarter, I didn’t have any money left. My mother was irate. She would relate this story 10 to 30 times a year, whenever she wanted to reiterate how spoiled I was, how unappreciative I was of the value of money.

Despite my mother’s ridicule, I still thought it better to disappoint her in this way. I preferred that she think that I had wasted all that money chasing my silly and childish dreams, than to tell her that I had simply given the money away, given it away for everyone else to take a turn at the arcade, while not even playing a turn myself.

This realization had come to me on the bus ride back from La Ronde. As I contemplated the eight toonies I had lost that day in my mind’s eye, I experienced deep shame and embarrassment. I knew that I had behaved inappropriately, in a manner that was not in keeping with the unwritten rules which governed almost everyone’s emotional conduct toward money. What kind of a fool had I been to surrender $16 so amenably, so accommodatingly, without even being coerced or influenced? What kind of a fool had I been not to value, not just one or two, but all eight of my toonies, all $16 worth of them, when my classmates had spent the remainder of the afternoon obsessed with creating a system to allocate and trade different portions and values of my $16 amongst themselves, a miniature economy from which they had excluded me entirely. I had been a mighty fool, a mighty fool indeed.

Suddenly, the toonie coin, which had for so long remained inert, took on life and meaning. Over the coming days, months, and years, the two-toned coin’s allure would become so powerful that it would subsume my desires and disdains for all other coins. It was impossible for me to refuse the gaze of the toonie coin’s eye. The command of the stern bronze pupil and its scintillating nickel iris was absolute. I abandoned my pursuit of all other coins, and yearned only for the toonie.