Photo by Timothy Vollmer

“This industry is corrupt,” Lisa Milne, owner of The Royal Theatre in Trail, B.C. (population 7,920), told me, referring to the film exhibition industry in Canada, before I’d even been able to start recording our interview. She was, seemingly, dying to say it.

“The studios don’t listen to us,” she continued. “In the 15 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve had many conversations with [the studios] as high up as I can go, and they basically say, ‘Well, Lisa, that’s the way it is.’ There’s no reason why. There’s no discussion about doing anything different.”

Independent movie theatres in Canada are struggling. It may seem like common sense given streaming convenience, but the problems go much deeper than competition from Netflix. It’s in the frustrating DNA of Canada’s unique, and uniquely constricting, film exhibition ecosystem.

In March, the Network of Independent Canadian Exhibitors (NICE), a new alliance of cinemas, festivals, programmers, and other advocates, released a stunning report on the state of film exhibition in the country. After surveying 67 NICE members across Canada, the report concluded that about 60 percent were operating at a loss at the end of their most recent fiscal year. At a moment when roughly 34 percent of the report’s respondents say their theatre is the only cultural option in their community, the threat of closures is stark. But the story runs deeper: from the domination of Cineplex to changing audience habits, small theatres across Canada are struggling to survive.

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Theatres book studios’ films through distributors, and bookers at those distributors let theatres know if the films are available. It’s at this stage that troubles for indie theatres can start. For owners like Milne, particularly those whose theatres have just a single screen, studio mandates called clean runs present serious problems. This means a theatre must dedicate their screen to only one film, to the exclusion of all others, every single showtime. For a large multiplex with 10 or more screens, dedicating a screen to a single film is no big deal. Theatres with one screen, though, “can’t serve their community the way that they would like to,” says NICE secretary Sonya William.

A recent example, Deadpool & Wolverine, took the problem to new heights for Milne. She says Disney demanded, as is typical, an exclusive run for three weeks, followed by a fourth week that would be determined according to metrics unknown to Milne but communicated via her booker—if it did “well enough,” she would be forced to show it another week. “Not only do they not tell you what [well enough] is, they block you from booking a movie on that held fourth week,” she says.

In a new twist, however, her booker told her that the same would now hold true for a fifth week. Essentially, Disney demanded all future weeks be held for them “until they determine if their film comes off my screen,” Milne says. “I’ve never had this happen.”

While it’s intensified lately, this is a long-standing practice that not only hurts single-screen cinemas, but, as William put it, Canadian culture as a whole, including opportunities for domestic artists. “If a cinema has to show the same film over and over and over again, most likely not a Canadian film, that means there’s not a single showtime that can go to this local filmmaker with a smaller title,” she says. These may not sell as many tickets, but would nevertheless bring out an audience and be able to build recognition and growth.

The other major obstacle for smaller theatres is zoning. In practical terms, Cineplex instructs distributors not to send films to nearby independent theatres until Cineplex is done showing them. Even if the closest Cineplex is several kilometres away, a small theatre may still be considered to be within a Cineplex zone. As a result, local independent theatres can’t show new releases until months later. What may seem like bad programming is, in fact, due to zoning policies, sometimes called the radius clause, that lack transparency but are nevertheless aggressively enforced. It’s not clear how far the radius extends. These are unwritten rules about unseen and always-shifting zone maps that get unilaterally imposed on these theatres by Cineplex and by distributors. The rules can change at any time, and theatre owners don’t have paper trails. Several small theatre owners who spoke to This Magazine drew attention to this problem, and so did NICE.

Cineplex’s role in Canada is, without a doubt, a monopoly. It runs 158 theatres with over 1,630 screens, and it controls approximately 75 percent of domestic box office. By contrast, no one company in the U.S., the UK, or Australia controls more than 30 percent, and they have all had organizations like NICE for many years. William says the length of time it took for NICE to be created signifies just how tough the Canadian indie film scene is. It began in a grassroots way in 2018 via an online discussion board, and the group intensified their efforts during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Once they started seriously organizing in 2020, though, Cineplex was squarely in their crosshairs, and zoning is a key reason—even though it’s no longer necessary.

Zones originated with the production of 35 millimetre film prints, which were expensive and resource-heavy, and were introduced as a way to control production and maintain competition between cinemas within a geographic region. Two things have happened: digital prints negate most of the practical challenges, and Cineplex came to completely dominate the theatrical landscape, which, William told me, “really means that the competition originally suggested with the zoning rule is now gone.” Kiana Reeves, manager at The Vic Theatre in Victoria, B.C., says that because of the radius clause, they would never know week-to-week what they’d be able to show. The uncertainty can cause distrust from customers, who are left unsure of what the theatre can or will offer. Instead, it’s always promising an amorphous “coming soon.” As a result, she says, “by the time we do get it, it might be six weeks later, and everyone that meant to see it already has.”

Fatima Allie Dobrowolski, owner of the Plaza Theatre in Calgary, has the same problem. To the confusion of many at the time, she purchased the Plaza in 2021 during lockdowns, after scrolling on Instagram while in London, England and seeing it was for sale. She became determined to make sure the space would continue to exist as intended, confident that theatres would reopen and thrive again. One first step, after admitting to some naïveté, was confronting the radius clause. She built a cafe in the theatre, so the establishment doesn’t have to rely on selling tickets. While the Plaza does have many loyal customers who prefer to watch movies in the historic and newly renovated space, it still bewilders Dobrowolski “why there isn’t room for Cineplex and this little independent with one screen to also show [a film].”

Dobrowolski’s sentiment is widespread. “You’re not going to find anyone who works on this level of cinema who has much of a kind word to say about how we are all waiting in line behind them and how we’re treated as a result,” Scott Hamilton, programmer at The Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon, says. Many referred to Cineplex as a “bully,” strong-arming audiences and smaller theatres alike just because they can. In early 2023, an episode of Canadaland “Commons” featured an executive from a movie distribution company who commented anonymously about how Cineplex exerts its power, stating, “because of Cineplex’s enormous market share, no independent film distribution company can afford to do anything that Cineplex might perceive as going against its interests” out of fear that Cineplex would decide to simply stop screening that distributor’s films, a risk these companies cannot take.

Cineplex refused This Magazine’s request for an interview, and did not speak to the zoning or exclusivity policies. In a statement to This Magazine, Cineplex’s vice president of communications Michelle Saba said: “Cineplex does not own the rights to the movies that appear on our screens – we license them from distributors to play in our theatres. It is up to film distributors to decide where they play their films.” According to NICE and theatre owners, this is the company’s typical line of defence: putting blame on the distributors, while obfuscating the reality that the company’s market dominance essentially means that the distributors have no choice but to play by their rules.

Some theatres have resolved to work around the issue by almost entirely avoiding new releases. Hamilton told me about their chaotic programming, as the space also regularly hosts music and other events, which means “I am never able to offer an entire week’s run unbroken to any title no matter what the title is.” Instead, they show all kinds of older or repertory films, and the diversity of options seems to be working. “Our film numbers are actually going up,” he says, “and we’re doing that with less screening time, and that’s from more dynamic programming.” This means selecting unexpected films and turning them into an event worth leaving the house for—just one way small theatres are getting creative to try to survive.

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It’s Friday night, and you want to relax after a tough week with a movie—are you going to the theatre, or staying in the comfort of your own living room? Debates about theatres have tended to centre on the threat posed by streaming. Surprisingly, every theatre owner I spoke to says this is hardly their main concern, and a problem somewhat straightforwardly answered through better programming.

For Hamilton, even keeping his loyal audience coming back is a challenge. Like others, he’s doing this by eventizing screenings like never before—coming up with added value to turn the movie into an event, as in the case of always-raucous The Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings. Other strategies programmers use include inviting filmmakers, creating a specialty cocktail inspired by the film, or in a recent example to accompany a screening of Napoleon Dynamite, selling fresh tater tots.

Corinne Lea, owner of the Rio Theatre in Vancouver, acknowledges that at the very least, “the one byproduct that’s been good is that Cineplex has kind of forced us to be really creative.”

Eventizing, alongside expanding how we think of theatre spaces, has come naturally to some and less so to others. “We’re a very busy rental hall: weddings, live events, we’ve done wakes,” Hamilton says. “Other people are [becoming] multi-use venues by way of trying to stay open, and we were doing this before we had to.” That scrappiness and community spirit is a common characteristic, though. “It’s the volunteers and the patrons who come through when we need them,” Reeves says about the Vic diehards, “helping me paint, giving us supplies. They feel a real ownership over the space.”

Still, it’s a struggle to make ends meet. So what’s the solution? NICE and theatre owners have advocated for increases in public funding for small theatres. But even this would be welcome if insufficient, many theatre owners say, a short term band-aid for a long-term problem. Instead, they argued, governments must get more aggressive. “The government is the one that needs to stop Cineplex,” Lea says. “You can’t expect a for-profit monopoly to police themselves; you need government regulations in place.”

Unfortunately, the government thus far seems unwilling. Lea says the Rio went to the Competition Bureau, who told her they “don’t see an issue here,” in her words, and dismissed the case. In a statement, Sarah Brown, the Bureau’s senior communications advisor, says: “As the Bureau is obligated by law to conduct its work confidentially, it would be inappropriate to comment on specific issues in the marketplace. I am also unable confirm [sic] whether or not we are or will be investigating this matter or to speculate whether the conduct you described contravenes the Competition Act.”

William points out that the impact of this apparent governmental passivity is especially harsh for rural communities, whose theatres are nevertheless beholden to the same rules as those in cities. “What really breaks my heart,” she says, “is we will probably see closures the most in the rural area cinemas and the communities who really need these places”— not only to see movies, but as multi-use community spaces and cultural hubs. Not having the ability to compete means indie theatres may start disappearing at an alarming rate, leaving cultural gaps in the places they used to call home.

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Smaller theatres, of course, will keep up the pressure, with a commitment to meet the moment. While the specifics vary somewhat according to region (Benjamin Pelletier, programmer at Cinéma Moderne in Montreal, laments that few distributors in North America provide French subtitles, limiting their offerings, while B.C. theatres have been battling for fewer restrictions on serving liquor), there is consensus that things must evolve. “I have to feel like we’re doing something that’s helping grow the community,” Hamilton says, “or else I wouldn’t be interested in doing this. It’s too much stress.”

“Imagine there’s no independent theatres left, and there’s only the monopolies, what does that look like? How is that going to change film?” Lea asks, noting how industrial norms impact the medium itself. Milne, the Royal owner, puts it even more bluntly. “What hurts me as a human and as a business is not being able to cater to everybody in my community, how I know that they deserve to be catered to,” she says. “We need help fixing this broken system.”

Photo by Hayden Petrie

“This is not a scam,” I read the email aloud to my partner. “We are seniors looking to move to Nova Scotia and have a 2-bedroom plus den.”

The sender had reached out after reading an opinion piece I wrote for Family Day, responding to headlines about Canada’s declining birth rate. In the article, I shared our situation: we’re a couple in our mid-thirties postponing having children because… money, with housing costs—particularly rent—being the main concern. We currently live in a one-bedroom apartment and are searching for an affordable two-bedroom, admittedly an oxymoron in Toronto.

The couple who emailed lived in Oakville and offered a lease takeover, one of the few remaining ways to find relatively affordable rent, in early 2024. Their place was perfect on paper: 1,200 square feet with a dishwasher, parking space, and storage unit for $2,400 per month. However, it was on the side of a highway, with a 30-minute walk to the GO train for an hour’s commute into the city.

I was relieved when they emailed a few weeks later to say their daughter was moving in. Even though we won’t find anything like it in Toronto for the price, for us, the savings weren’t worth a two-to-three hour commute or being disconnected from our friends, community, and a walkable neighbourhood.

My partner and I don’t belong to the work-from-home pyjama class; we’re part of what political economist Ricardo Tranjan calls the “tenant class,” also the title of his 2023 book. Tranjan aims to re-politicize housing in Canada, questioning whether it should serve profit and wealth or provide homes for people. His thesis is clear: we can’t have it both ways.

Tranjan likens the power dynamics between landlords and tenants to those between bosses and workers. Just as workers must sell their labour to survive, tenants must pay whatever rent a landlord demands to secure a place to live. Landlords, who can evict tenants and raise prices, wield a similar power to bosses.

The financialization of housing is a key driver of rising rents in Canada. In 2020, more than one in five houses in B.C., Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia were used as investment properties. Ontario is at the forefront of this trend, with investors owning 56.7 percent of newly constructed condos in Toronto and nearly 40 percent of all properties built after 2016.

Tranjan’s most radical argument is that, despite popular discourse, there is no housing crisis. He rejects the term because it suggests the system once worked but is now failing everyone. “We have a housing system that is structured around profit creation and wealth accumulation,” Tranjan tells This Magazine, “and it’s working really well for people who are very influential and really close to power, to make sure nothing that we do changes that.” Simply put, real estate in Canada is treated as an asset to make money, and not for housing actual people, which can lead to higher rates of evictions, unreasonable rent hikes, poor building maintenance and other problems.

Although Canada officially recognizes housing as a human right—we even signed a fancy United Nations paper saying so—housing is increasingly becoming a privilege, and it seems tenants are the only ones working to correct that in a meaningful way.

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In April, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, where Tranjan is a senior researcher, released a report calling for rent control across Canada, using Ontario as a case study. The report shows that rents in Ontario are increasing at a rate three times higher than the province’s 2.5 percent cap. Landlords exploit loopholes like Above Guideline Increases (AGIs) to raise rents beyond standard limits, passing the costs of property improvements onto tenants. New units are exempt from rent control, as are vacant units, which had an average rent increase of 36 percent in 2023.

This isn’t just an Ontario story. From 2022 to 2023, rents across Canada surged by 22 percent, resulting in the lowest national vacancy rate since 1988. Only five provinces and one territory have rent controls on occupied units, and just two have controls on vacant units. Alberta, where there is no rent control, has seen the fastest-growing rents. PEI is the exception, having imposed a temporary rent freeze last year.

In May, I wrote another opinion piece about renting, responding to the federal budget’s purported focus on supporting Canadians, especially younger generations facing unattainable homeownership. The budget allocates $15 billion to the Apartment Construction Loan Program, an initiative that has mostly produced above-market rentals for seven years. Instead of addressing rising rents, the government proposed a renters’ Bill of Rights that would allow tenants to see a unit’s previous price and have rent payments count toward credit scores. While seemingly progressive, advocates argue it would penalize low-income renters struggling with rising costs. As a renter who’s never missed a payment, the proposal feels like a hollow gesture—good credit won’t help me pay for a mortgage I can’t afford. Meanwhile, measures like increasing borrowing limits from RRSPs and extending first-time mortgage amortization periods favour lenders and developers, cost individuals more, and conveniently leave a crucial question unanswered: How can we save for a down payment when our rents are skyrocketing?

This time I received an email from a landlord: “Please do your research better before misleading readers. Your actions and wishes [for rent control] will only force small landlords to sell their rental properties, decreasing the number of rental units.” My knee-jerk reaction was to thank this reader for affirming my opinion: meaningful protections for renters could free up supply by disincentivizing multiple property ownership. Despite our antithetical positions, this interaction reflects a broader conflict: the false equivalency between tenants’ and landlords’ financial security.

For landlords, a house is an investment; for tenants, it’s shelter. Comparing renters’ basic needs to landlords’ financial interests is misleading. Why does this landlord feel deserving of high returns but immune to market risks and regulation? Rent control is essential to keep the housing market fair and accessible. This emailer might argue that rent control disrupts the free market, but the current system forces even high earners to compete with middle and low-income renters, driving inflation and interest rate hikes that hurt everyone. It’s also reducing access to affordable housing, and leaving little social housing for the unhoused. Large and small-scale investment strategies fuel this cycle, worsening unaffordability, rental scarcity, and growing homelessness.

With 66.5 percent of Canadians owning homes and 40 percent of federal MPs invested in real estate, the landowning and landlord class wields formidable economic and political power, holding 90 percent of the country’s wealth. By failing to intervene in this so-called crisis, governments have left renters to fend for themselves.

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In some places, tenants are succeeding in taking matters into their own hands. Ontario’s first anti-renoviction law came into effect in Hamilton over the summer. If a landlord wants to renovict, they have to apply for a construction licence within seven days, a contractor needs to sign off saying the renos require tenants to move, and then, once changes are made, landlords have to let the same tenants move back in, and at no added rental cost. They may also have to help them find somewhere else to live while the reno happens.

Hamilton’s new renter protections were partially due to work by ACORN, the nationwide tenant advocacy group, and inspired by a similar policy established in Burnaby, B.C., which has gained recognition as one of the strongest tenant protections in Canada. This success in Burnaby, also championed by ACORN, includes vital components such as financial support during temporary relocations, compensation for moving costs, and protections against unjust evictions. These victories show that tenant organizing has the power to push political leaders to protect affordable housing.

Tenant organizing is building momentum across Canada. Rent strikes in Toronto have challenged some of the largest corporate landlords, while the Vancouver Tenants Union has protected renters from unfair eviction. In Quebec, one of the largest and longest-operating tenant associations is fighting for robust rent control and a ban on Airbnb. In Ottawa, tenants in the Herongate neighbourhood have filed a human rights case against “demovictions.” ACORN has secured hundreds of millions in repairs, prevented displacement, and achieved protections like landlord licensing and stricter rent controls.

People are also adapting to rising rents by seeking shared accommodations and connecting online to find housemates. The Instagram account @coolpeoplehouses lets users share sublets, rooms for rent, and lease transfers, and helps people bypass the hell that is navigating ever-tightening listings by passing along below-market rents. The page resembles a patchwork of ISO (in search of ) posts—a collage of kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms from across the GTA. While a room can still occasionally be found for under $1,000, the average price for September listings was just below $1,200.

The Instagram account works in tandem with the app Housemate Space to help people find compatible roommates, similar to online dating. The founder, who prefers to remain anonymous, launched the app in 2020 after a co-living relationship turned sour. “I wanted to create a solution that made it easier. I saw an opportunity to create a community-based platform where people could connect and find compatible housemates, not just housing,” they explain.

In 2023, Rentals.ca reported a 27 percent rise in shared listings, with a 78 percent spike in Ontario alone. Housemate Space allows users to create profiles, which are then matched with potential housemates based on compatibility factors, while @coolpeoplehouses serves as a marketing page for sharing listings. The founder spends about 20 (unpaid) hours per week managing both platforms and believes it’s worth the effort. “People are looking to save on rent while also seeking more meaningful connections with their housemates,” they say. Feedback from users has shaped the platform’s evolution: “Initially, we focused on helping individuals find places, but as we listened to the community, it became clear there’s a bigger need in the multi-tenant housing sector.”

Interest in shared living extends beyond grassroots efforts. On a larger scale, organizations like Youthful Cities, a think tank, envisions co-living as an alternative for young renters. Their Toboggan Flats project aims to convert vacant office spaces into affordable communal apartments for young professionals in Canada, inspired by successful European co-living models. With office vacancy rates rising in cities— Toronto’s reached 18 percent this year, the highest since the 1990s—they aim to create as many units as possible across the country and are currently scouting for buildings in major cities like Calgary and Ottawa. Once secured, the first co-living space is expected to be ready within 10 to 14 months, much faster than usual office-to-residential conversions, as they can retain the existing mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, thanks to shared kitchens and bathrooms.

People are also, of course, connecting through groups like Montreal’s Chez Queer on Facebook, as they have been for years, to find the right housemates. And, anecdotally, in Toronto at least, more people seem to be hiring real estate agents to find them a place that may not be easily found otherwise. In these cases, the onus to pay the agent is on the landlord, not the prospective tenant.

While these strategies offer creative ways to navigate the housing market, they individualize the problem, leaving renters to find personal fixes without addressing the systemic forces driving up prices. My partner and I don’t want to live with roommates as we raise a child, and even for young professionals who might benefit from co-living initiatives, what awaits them when they outgrow shared living arrangements if housing costs keep rising as they have for decades?

What’s needed is collective action. In his book, Tranjan mentions how the labour movement historically offered essential support and solidarity for tenant organizing, but that this has diminished over time. He noted in an interview that in Latin America, in Portuguese, Spanish, and French, the term “housing movement” is as familiar as the labour movement. Barcelona plans to ban short-term tourist rentals by 2028, and France and Spain have implemented rent caps. These examples show that change hasn’t resulted from benevolent governments acting out of goodwill, but from being pushed by organized political pressure.

Rising rents are often attributed to market forces and low supply, overlooking how landlords profit from the housing shortage. The notion that we can build our way out of the housing crisis is repeated endlessly—and likely will continue to be—but it only preserves the status quo for property owners. Simply adding more housing won’t fix an unfair system. Without widespread, organized challenging of harmful policies and financial incentives that favour developers, the divide between renters and owners will keep growing, no matter how much new housing is built.

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Last summer, my partner and I went to view a two-bedroom in our neighbourhood, where we hope to stay, close to our work, friends, and daily routines. The middle-aged couple who owned it seemed like “good landlords.” The unit was listed just under $3,000, slightly below the average for a two-bedroom. The previous tenants had just bought their first home (perhaps helped by paying lower rent). The other two units in the house had been occupied for over 10 years. They told us they’d received 4,000 inquiries, and we joined a line that stretched down the block.

While we waited, I thought about those two emails: a landlord’s entitlement to profit at our expense and fellow tenants offering solidarity. Their need to clarify “This is not a scam” reflects the inherent exploitation of our current system. As the line grew behind us with other couples our age looking for a two-bedroom—for more space, an office, or, like us, a room for a child—I turned to my partner and said, “This is a scam.”

Photo courtesy Rana Abdulla

Razan Samara is a longtime Palestinian activist. She’s volunteered with the Toronto chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement. She’s made banners and fundraised for Palestinians in the homelands. But in 2021, when Palestinians were expelled from their homes in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah, she began to feel that she needed to do more for her community. As a way to cope with the expulsion of her people and reconnect with her ancestral land, Samara started holding tatreez, or embroidery, circles with her mom.

Their circles are held at a cafe in Mississauga and include 15 to 20 people, usually from Palestinian and Arab diaspora, as well as a few urban Indigenous people. Sometimes people bring their relatives, but often they are alone, sitting next to a stranger with the knowledge that they, too, have been displaced from their homeland.

“So suddenly we’re back to our villages,” Samara says. She opens each tatreez circle by tossing a thread ball while everyone in the circle names the places they hail from. As they do so, they hold onto a section of the thread and then toss the ball to the next person, which forms a web. By tossing the ball and speaking their truth, grief, and hopes, the thread connects everyone both physically and emotionally.

Samara says tatreez has always been a part of her household as an aesthetic article. But it was more recently that she learned about its historical significance. “The tatreez patterns are so rooted in the landscape and architecture of Palestine; and having been displaced from that, it was a way of being one with [the land].”

The 3,000-year-old art form and its current resurgence represents Palestinian women’s defiance of their oppressors. Palestinian women weaved tatreez to archive the story of Palestine through displacement dating back to the 1948 Nakba (the catastrophe) and 1967 Naksa (the setback), times when Israel forcibly took over Palestinian territories and expelled over 750,000 Palestinians from their lands. The tatreez thobes, or dresses, following that era, notably after the First Intifada, a six-year Palestinian uprising from 1987 to 1993, depict Palestinian flags, the Qubbat aṣ–Ṣaḵra (Dome of the Rock), doves, rifles, and other motifs. Embroidery artists also hide secrets in tiny stitches depicting trees and birds, at times appearing in clusters of fives and sevens to ward off the evil eye.

Palestinian embroiderers in the diaspora in Canada, in refugee camps in Lebanon, and under Israeli military occupation in Palestine are constantly adding to their motifs. The triangle, the cypress tree, and the kite are now common alongside the watermelon slice and the fishnet pattern.

Rana Abdulla, founder of the Canadian Palestinian Association of Manitoba, collects vintage tatreez dresses. Earlier this year, her collection was displayed at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to commemorate the Palestinian lives lost during ongoing Israeli atrocities in Gaza. As of publication, that number stands at over 43,391. Abdulla says tatreez is nuanced, as it preserves the story of the artist. “It is a form of resistance and the story of each dress is a story of each woman. The colours of the embroidery express the national allegiance as Palestinians and are attributable to each village in Palestine,” she says. In Tulkarm, the town her family is from, the tatreez is rich with pomegranates and leaves embroidered on white fabric.

Tatreez, Samara says, is a living document that archives what the Palestinian people have endured and continue to withstand in their anticipation of a liberated Palestine.

“We’re sitting together and having very open and candid conversations about the occupation and exile. As we tatreez together, we are connecting with it as a practice, creating a pathway back and thinking about the future—in a liberated Palestine where we would invite our friends and allies to our houses for tea.”

With rampant censorship on the expression of Palestinian identity in North America, Samara said that there’s a sense of pride attached to wearing a Palestinian tatreez thobe in a very explicit way. “Every single stitch is in defiance to whatever false narratives that may exist.”

Photo courtesy Free Palestine Halifax

Yara Jamal rarely heard anyone mention Palestine in Halifax, and it made her feel lonely. “Being Palestinian is such a controversial thing,” she says. “I felt like there was genuinely no representation of Palestine or presence of Palestine in the Maritimes at all.”

Jamal was born and raised in Kuwait and is a first-generation Canadian who works as a journalist covering Palestine and the Middle East. She’s lived in Halifax since 2017, but years passed before she found a community who cared about her people.

But then, in 2020, Jamal met Katerina Nikas. Nikas had printed dozens of stickers featuring art by Montreal-based street artist Zola and Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, depicting a person wrapped in a keffiyeh with the words “Settlers Fuck Off” in bold print, and plastered them around town. The stickers quickly caught Jamal’s attention, and soon the two were covering the walls of the city together.

For Nikas, the story of Palestine was relatively new. Born in Canada to Greek immigrant parents, she was aware of what had been happening in Palestine but learned more about the history from a Palestinian friend. In 2018, Nikas joined her on a trip to the West Bank to visit her family. “I left feeling the most heavy hearted I had felt in my whole life,” she says, describing intimidation by soldiers and the constant need to stay vigilant. Upon her return, Nikas quickly found herself compelled to do something. “I think when you read about it, it’s very different. Sometimes you can become desensitized in a way. But when you see it, it’s much more real. When I got back home, I just couldn’t remain silent,” she explains.

The two were onto something, but couldn’t yet know how meaningful their actions would prove to be—or that they’d be able to provide a sense of belonging where one was sorely lacking.

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Anti-Palestinian racism is a problem in Canada, and likely a much bigger one than anyone realizes. In a (non-exhaustive) 2022 report trying to get a sense of the issue, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) found over 500 examples of it in written online content alone, mostly from non-profit organizations and right-leaning media outlets. Yet anti-Palestinian racism is not recognized by the federal government, which the CJPME says is contributing to Palestinian erasure. The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association says institutions in Canada are either not acknowledging this form of racism, framing it as a political issue, or lumping it in with Islamophobia. Ignorance at the institutional level is contributing to daily experiences of racism and othering for Palestinian Canadians, leaving them feeling isolated, much like Jamal.

However, protesters for the Palestinian cause are working to make sure people feel supported. They’ve made themselves heard by taking over campuses to speak out against Canada’s complicity in the genocide; they flood the streets from coast to coast in regular weekend protests.

Part of what makes protests so effective has always been art. Right now, street art is one of what feels like few things validating Palestinians in large and small communities alike in a time when they may feel alone and threatened. It’s also morphing into bigger actions providing more tangible support.

For the past year, people in Saskatoon have shown unwavering commitment to Palestinian freedom through weekly rallies. Attendees bring posters and banners, and wear their prolific buttons. People of all ages and backgrounds come with their placards and signs calling for action. The Saskatoon chapter of the CJPME formed over two years ago, and they say they’ve seen a significant increase in community support as rally attendance grows. They’ve collaborated with other groups on high visibility banner drops over freeways, calling for solidarity with Palestine. Group members note that these banners usually only last a few hours at most before they are removed, but feel they still bring awareness to their city.

Said Abdelhadi is a member of the CJPME – Saskatoon Chapter and a Palestinian who has lived in Saskatoon for the last 11 years with his wife and son. He loves it there and explains that though the Palestinian community in Saskatoon is small, they appreciate the group’s work. “We’re trying to change things around the city…it’s all about education,” Abdelhadi explains.

Group members say support is growing each week. The chapter is inspiring its neighbours to speak out. A local mom and her children were writing messages of support for Palestine with chalk on the sidewalk in front of their house when an angry woman washed it away. She accused the homeowner of sharing messages of hate despite it being quite the opposite. The homeowner continued to chalk the sidewalks in front of her house and has even added a small basket of chalk for others to contribute.

The Saskatoon Chapter of the CJPME has also hosted film nights and a play about Rachel Corrie, a young American woman who was run over by an Israeli bulldozer as she protected Palestinian houses from demolition in 2003.They have not, however, received support from their local Members of Parliament, noting they have consistently denied their requests to meet. They addressed a petition with over 2,000 signatures to Premier Scott Moe, and did not receive any response or acknowledgment. (Moe did not respond to This Magazine’s request for comment.) Yet the group is not discouraged, and they don’t plan to slow down. Neither do others like them—and their actions are making powerful change.

*

A mural reading Palestine Libre has stretched over Park Avenue in Montreal for a decade. In larger cities, street art blends into the background. But in smaller cities and towns, where political actions and diasporas are smaller, street art affirming Palestinian life and resistance can send an even more powerful message. These visual displays of solidarity are critical. Street art is a reflection of the pulse of a city. It communicates what’s important, what drives people, what’s just under the surface. Its messages confront us. Sometimes they force a reaction where we didn’t expect one. Street art is a form of empowerment; it conveys knowledge without discriminating. It’s also a form of protest.

In Halifax, what started with just two people stickering, postering, and chalking the streets is now a movement of over 10,000 Instagram followers and over 250 regular supporters attending rallies, marches, vigils, and webinars. Jamal and Nikas founded Free Palestine Halifax in 2020 and have been working tirelessly since. Jamal essentially created the community she, and so many others, have always needed. “We started our organization to create a safe space for the community and to start the conversation about Palestine and educate the public,” she says. Jamal recalls that not long ago, she and Nikas stood out wearing keffiyehs around town, but now it’s common. She says this movement has brought her a sense of peace and she no longer feels alone.

Free Palestine Halifax is a grassroots movement, using street art to bring awareness to the Palestinian genocide and what has been happening in the region since 1948, when Palestinians were first expelled from their lands. Nikas and Jamal have spent countless hours walking the city, often through the night, spray painting walls, postering, chalking sidewalks, and stickering posts. They’ve created banners to drop in high visibility areas and developed pamphlets to leave on cars and in mailboxes.

In a city like Halifax, street art can be jarring. And that is exactly the point. Without the marks they leave on the city, they wouldn’t have been able to make such a strong impact. “Art plays a huge role,” Jamal says. “That’s how we got our support.”

The group has encountered some resistance from local businesses and the odd resident. They say they’ve been physically assaulted and continue to receive death threats since October 7, 2023. This has not deterred them, though. Community support helps. So does collaborating with other communities, like the local Indigenous people who were some of the first to show their solidarity.

Palestinians, and the Middle Eastern community in general, have welcomed the art around the city and the movement as a whole. Nikas recalls a vigil they held for Shireen Abu Akleh, the beloved Palestinian American journalist who was killed in 2022 while on the job. “This Palestinian girl came up to us, and she’s like, ‘I just didn’t realize like how much I needed this.’”

Street art is special because of its impermanence. It reflects a specific moment in time, and then, like the moment, it vanishes. Street art about Palestine can offer a small comfort to Palestinians, and for the rest of us, it’s a wake-up call. It’s incumbent on us, the viewer, to take lasting action.

*

Earlier this year in Vancouver, I was waiting for the bus when I noticed small blue printing on the plexiglass of the shelter that stated, “Free Palestine, Free Congo, Free Sudan.” Simple. Subtle. Visible. And I couldn’t just keep scrolling past. Instead, I was forced to stop and confront my own ideas about freedom and collective liberation. Street art is there whether you want to see it or not.

These installations offer viewers a moment to pause, reflect, and educate ourselves on the gravity of what’s been happening. They make me feel hopeful about the power of even the smallest action. Free Palestine Halifax started with a sticker. Now it’s thousands of people strong, and it’s helping people on a collective and individual scale. Street art about Palestine is more than a moment of resistance; it’s offering healing and ways supporters can take actionable steps, too.

In 2021, Jamal and Nikas were chalking some statistics in downtown Halifax about civilian casualties in Palestine. They caught the attention of a woman passing by who knew nothing about what was happening there. Curious, she asked more, and the two explained. Moved, she laid down a rose she was holding on the chalked statistics. “We will never forget that,” Jamal says.

It’s moments like this that drive Jamal and Nikas to continue to spread the word on Palestinian resistance in the Maritimes. “Being ignorant,” Jamal says, “is one of the most dangerous things a human being could be.”

I am a professional writer and spoken word artist. I’ve been sharing my work—and making space for other artists to create and share their work—in Toronto for nearly 20 years. I am of East African descent, with a heritage and history rooted in oral traditions. Toronto is where I was born, and it’s where I call home.

While I’ve written five poetry books, my greatest “publication” to date would have to be my poem, “Song of Sheba,” which was featured on Toronto Transit Commission vehicles alongside such poets as Toronto’s Poet Laureate, legend Lillian Allen. I am who I am because of Black creators who built pathways for the discovery and claiming of my voice. I asked Lillian earlier this year: What am I living for, but to see artists thrive in our city, be given the space to continue our demanding and necessary work? A poem is a verdict, a political act.

On the subway, I see my poem next to a life insurance ad. But no one is reading. I get it; we are all busy, bombarded with information overload. And poems are difficult to read, even when they’re short. “Song of Sheba” is about war and violence in the East African context. A hard-to-absorb poem, perhaps, when life is already hard, maybe even terrifying, and frankly you just need to get from point A to point B because you’re tired.

Meanwhile, artists like myself are being pushed to the margins, and don’t know where to go: how to get from A to B. Whether to flee the city or stay and fight. For Black artists specifically, the challenges of a fluctuating income and an always-worsening housing crisis are compounded by pervasive anti-Black racism, which makes it a struggle to find a place to call home both literally and in the art world. The city needs a strategy to ensure we can access housing—and keep making art.

I don’t see myself being able to live in Toronto securely or long term. Budgeting doesn’t help when nothing is affordable. I entertain the idea of living elsewhere every single day. Of saving money for travel. I fear where Toronto is going and that I will have to go, too, leaving the bulk of my kin behind. The crux is that staying and leaving both feel risky—and somewhat punishing.

Earlier this year, I applied to a housing initiative (a joint effort of Blackhurst Cultural Centre and Westbank Corporation) with 12 units reserved for artists of African and/ or Caribbean descent in Toronto. I felt I had another chance at making a life here. A few mentors read my application, complimenting me on my accolades. I felt the heavy cloud of the contradictory phrase Toronto housing lift.

My application didn’t even make it to the interview stage. Perhaps to be expected; there is so much Black talent in the city and not enough space. The question is, who gets to decide on the contours of that space? Who gets to choose the Black artists worthy of subsidized housing—and what would it mean to “strengthen” my application, should a similar opportunity later arise? I am hoping it does: a dozen housing units for Black artists in a city of three million is direly inadequate.

The lack of artist housing in Toronto is, of course, part of the larger housing crisis—the city ranked 11th on a recent global housing unaffordability list. I know several people, from artists to teachers to doctors, leaving the city for sanity’s sake. Some have been renovicted and left with no other choice.

More Torontonians need to admit that our rental rates amount to robbery. Prices are oppressive and the poor are being removed from belonging right before our eyes. Meanwhile, the city is full of empty condos—an injustice the mayor should be ashamed of.

In the U.S., Elaine Brown, former chair of the Black Panther Party and the only woman to hold that position, is one beacon of light. At age 81, she is on a mission to create affordable housing in West Oakland, California for low-income Black folks. Her 79-unit housing project is called The Black Panther. Her reason for building, she told The Guardian, is simple: “I want us, Black people, to have economic power.”

We need to demand that politicians move tangible resources into Black communities in a public and transparent way. Toronto could learn from Oakland, and the revolutionary tenets of the Panthers, which included affordable housing and breakfast programs for underserved kids. In other words, looking at the roots of the problem, and considering possible solutions rooted in the politics of who has a right to a roof. 

While artist grants, including some for Black artists, do exist in Canada, we can’t rely on them to make ends meet in a city like Toronto—let alone coordinate the time, space, and energy to make things of lasting artistic and cultural value. Grants should account for the reality of inflation, the fact that most artists can work and gig incessantly and still not have enough for a rainy day, let alone retirement. Grants should counteract the need to turn to other work to earn a living. But without family support, this is wishful thinking.

And without access to safe and affordable housing, creating is impossible. For this reason, we’ll likely see artists leaving the city in droves. A 2023 Toronto Arts Council report noted about 26 percent of artists the Council surveyed who hadn’t moved in the past three years were considering leaving their homes because of financial constraints. I can only imagine what this means for the city’s Black artists. Rather, I imagine what it removes. A lack of housing for Black artists results in erasure: nullification of our efforts to make art meant to change minds and even lives. A missed opportunity to create spaces for Black creators to feel safe, supported, and empowered to self-advocate. Our lives matter, and so does leaving behind an archive of works future Black artists can learn from. We need housing that can preserve, expand, and protect the Black arts community, and artists for whom the frequency of the city or their particular neighbourhood is central to their output. To prioritize us in the way that’s needed, and begin to correct the current situation, all levels of government need to work together to be sure we are all safely housed. Otherwise, our future in Toronto will be inevitably dim.

Ultimately, I refuse erasure the same way I refuse to leave the city. Because artists are the soul of this city. Perhaps all cities. But Toronto is home to some of the best artists in the world. To leave Toronto would be to leave behind my soul.

Staying here isn’t my final answer, but I’d like it to be. I wanted this to be a love (not goodbye) letter to artists. Now, I am deliberately trying to leave it incomplete. I don’t want to turn the page on this city just yet.

That said, if you’ve seen my poem on the Toronto subway, take its lines in memory of me. Of Toronto artists who tried to make their mark and move the culture, hoping to survive. Some of us will not. In the end, the artist exists diffusely, but ideas need a place to grow. Being able to thrive in Toronto as a creative is a dream I hope I don’t have to shelve away—nor my own future books, for lack of a room of my own in which to realize them.

Illustration by Blair Kelly

During my second year of college, we killed our father. It was his own idea, but it was Charlie’s idea to do it the week before Christmas. Later, I would regret that we hadn’t waited until afterward. Charlie said that Christmas would have depressed the hell out of us regardless and anyway, it was too late to do anything different.

The night before we did it, Charlie was late to pick me up. I stood on the train platform alone, shivering in the cold, cursing his name. The man in the ticket booth peered pityingly at me through the frosted window and didn’t offer to let me stand inside, although I wished desperately that he would. The benches were far too cold and snow-covered to make comfortable seats, so I remained standing, hopping from one foot to the other.

I sighed in relief and pent-up irritation when a familiar station wagon finally swerved into the parking lot, the bright yellow headlights cutting through the dark. I set off toward the car, suitcase nipping at my heels. Charlie parked and opened the door on the driver’s side, poking his head out. He wore a deep green handknit scarf wrapped around his neck, and a matching hat pulled low over his eyebrows. He waved me over, as if there was anyone else at the station he could have been there to pick up. I could see, as I got closer, that his mittens were deep green as well, made from the same yarn. The set was a gift from our mother; a similar one—made from blue yarn—had arrived for me at the dorms in early November. As twins, everything we had was doubled—life, love, death, and everything in between.

The package had come with a note that read only For Carmen, Love, Mom. When I phoned her to say thank you, I got her answering machine.

“Sorry I was late,” Charlie said breathlessly, as if he had been running and not driving.

“It’s alright,” I found myself saying, and was surprised by how much I meant it, how quickly my vexation had dissipated. I was glad to be there with him. “It’s nice to see you.”

He didn’t reciprocate. I didn’t take offence. My presence was a reminder of what lay before us.

Again, it was Dad’s idea. Because he was sick. Months earlier, doctors had told us that he didn’t have much time left, but what that meant, exactly, they couldn’t say. Mom fled to Florida rather than dealing with it, and Charlie and I couldn’t afford to hire anyone to take care of Dad. Charlie dropped out of school and moved back home. We’d argued about it back and forth and ultimately Charlie had won, or lost, depending on which way you looked at it.

The city was empty without him. When I wasn’t in class, I spent most of my time back at the dorms, sitting by the phone, fearing the worst. Not just about Dad’s condition but about other, selfish things; I worried that Charlie’s sacrifice made me look like the lesser twin, a bad daughter. Like a petulant child, I felt left out.

Charlie called to inform me of Dad’s wishes a month before we fulfilled them. I had just come in from class and only had time to take off Mom’s scarf and one of the gloves. I picked up the phone and was brushing snowflakes from the lapel of my coat and there was his voice on the other end of the line, telling me that Dad wanted to go. That we had to help him go. He was in too much pain to bear, Charlie said.

“Did you tell him we’re not doing it?”

“We have to. Dad and I already talked about it. It’s what he wants, for us to do this together.”

“‘Dad and I?’” I was getting warm. I threw off my coat, the second glove. “What about what I think? What if I say no?”

“It’s not about you,” Charlie bit back.

“If I was there, this never would have happened.”

“Well, you’re not here.”

I slammed the phone down, then laid down on my bed and stared at the ceiling. After an hour, I called Charlie back.

“Look,” he said. “When has Dad ever asked us for anything?”

“Okay,” I said. More than anything, I didn’t want to argue with him. Charlie doing it alone was worse than the alternative. “How soon should I come home?”

Dad wanted me to finish my exams, Charlie relayed, so I should keep the train tickets I already had for Christmas break. He wrote down the date I’d be arriving, and promised to pick me up from the station. When we finally hung up, my index finger was bruised purple from where I’d wound the telephone cord around it.

*

The ride home from the train station was shorter than I remembered. The driveway had been shovelled on only one side, into which Charlie pulled the car. He retrieved my suitcase from the trunk and I stalled, my hand hovering over the door handle. Charlie came around to my side and knocked on the window, startling me.

“You coming?” he called, his voice muffled through the glass and the vicious winter winds.

I stepped out of the car, momentarily plunged back into the biting cold. The house was dark and quiet when we entered—the only sound came from our father’s bedroom, his deep snores coming in fits and starts. Charlie had left the door slightly ajar, and through the crack I could see Dad’s limbs splayed this way and that, detangled from the sheets he had kicked off in his sleep. I watched the silhouette of his back heave up and down with each breath. Charlie had warned me that he spent most of his days sleeping, emerging from the dimly lit bedroom only to use the bathroom or for meals. It pained him to do much else, and even trips to the bathroom were assisted by Charlie and took twice as long as they used to.

“There’s leftover pizza in the fridge, if you want,” Charlie jostled me with his shoulder on his way up the stairs, my suitcase in his hands. I tore my gaze away from the dark bedroom. “Not sure how long it’s been there though.”

I wrinkled my nose. I didn’t think I could stomach any food. “I’ll pass.”

I followed him up the stairs and into my old bedroom. It was even more foreign to me than the last time I was there—the walls seemed to creep closer together with each passing year, compressing the room into a small box painted pale pink and filled with the remnants of some other life. Charlie dumped my suitcase next to the double bed and I cast a cursory glance around the room. There was a pang in my chest when I clocked the thin layer of dust that covered everything from the dresser to the bookshelf. The room was barely touched in my absence, it existed only in tandem with me. I swallowed the panic that threatened to rise about how little time I had spent with Dad in his last days.

Charlie looked at me. “It wasn’t any easier for me here, you know.”

Quietly, I said, “I know.”

“Goodnight then,” Charlie said finally, clearing his throat to dispel the silence that had settled between us like the dust that surrounded us. Our souls were equally burdened with the weight of actions we hadn’t yet taken. He shut the door softly behind him when he left.

*

Charlie woke before me and hogged the bathroom. The second floor of the house was small; there was only mine and Charlie’s bedrooms and our shared bathroom, which had remained an area of contention even into our young adulthood.

I banged on the door and it rattled on its old hinges. “Get out of there, would you?”

I didn’t even care about using the bathroom. It was just that hounding Charlie for it felt natural, normal. Upon waking, a feeling of dread had crept into my stomach and wouldn’t leave.

“I’m almost done,” came the reply through the door. The faucet in the bath was running and I figured he was washing his hair, holding his head upside down under the stream like Mom had taught us when she’d grown tired of washing our hair for us as kids. When the door finally opened ten minutes later, the hem and shoulders of his t-shirt were wet and his brown hair dripped all over the floor at our feet. Behind him the bathroom was full of steam, the mirror was more of an opaque wall than a reflective surface.

“Morning,” the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. I grimaced. We were going through the motions.

“I’ll only be a moment. Wait for me?”

It wasn’t a real question. Of course he would. We were fated to do everything together, especially this. Life, love, death.

Charlie sat on the floor outside the bathroom until I was ready. When we finally went downstairs, he said he would go get Dad. I wrung my hands together and paced the tiled kitchen floor. My back ached and my feet hurt from invisible pressures, and I wanted to sit down but I remained standing. I kept pacing. I could hear their conversation faintly—Charlie’s soft voice and Dad’s sleepy mumbles. Then there was the shuffling, the heavy tread on the wooden floor. They came around the corner and into the kitchen, Charlie’s arm looped through Dad’s, Dad leaning heavily on Charlie. Charlie’s steps were deliberately slowed, and Dad’s, I could tell, were as fast as they could be. He looked up at where I stood by the counter.

“Carmen.”

I almost started to cry, right then and there. Charlie looked away and told me to take Dad to the living room while he prepared breakfast, so I replaced Charlie’s arm with my own and directed Dad toward the couch. I sat next to him, holding his hands in between mine, trying not to think about how this was it.

Dad asked me about school so I told him about my classes and the horrible food they served in the dining hall. (Also: Charlie pulled a bottle of pills from the cupboard and they rattled furiously as he dumped them all into a small ceramic bowl). I told Dad about the knitwear from Mom, how they kept me warm on the frigid walks to the school library during final exams. (Charlie crushed the pills beneath the backside of a spoon. This took a while).

I reminded Dad about the time he took Charlie and I fishing, how he stuck bait on each of our hooks because we were too scared to touch the worms, how he purchased the three measly fish we’d caught and cooked them for dinner. We’d been violently ill that night but the next weekend, we asked to go fishing again. He squeezed my hand, resting on top of his. I think it hurt him to say anything, but there was so much that I wanted to ask. I wanted to know who he was. I had all these memories of him strung together like Polaroids on twine, the gaps between them were palpable and incorrigible. Has anybody ever managed to be more than their father’s child?

(Charlie poured a glass of orange juice and tipped the contents of the ceramic bowl inside. He mixed them with the same spoon and the metal clinked against the glass with each turn).

I told Dad that I loved him.

Charlie put his hand on my shoulder. He handed me the glass, and I gave it to Dad. In this way, it felt like all of us, together. But in the end Dad was alone. Charlie and I stood on the front porch and waited longer, surely, than we needed to. It was all much quieter than I was expecting.

We crossed the street and called the ambulance from the neighbours’. The trucks arrived within a few minutes and washed the whole street in red and blue. Charlie and I stood in the road and held hands without speaking. We didn’t have to. Everything we felt was doubled. Life, love, death.

Photo courtesy Levant (not) Pizza

When Samer Alghosain first immigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1999, a tradition was born that paved his way to becoming a restaurateur. Every Friday, he and his family would pile dishes on the table that smelled, tasted, and felt like home, crafted with love from recipes that were handed down generation after generation. Samer’s falafel and home-made hummus became family favourites—so much so that he and his wife now run the beloved Yaffa Cafe in Abbotsford, B.C.

It just opened a few years ago, but Yaffa Cafe was named People’s Choice of Abby at Abbotsford’s Food & Farm Awards in 2024. Although there are few Palestinians in the city, visitors come from Vancouver and across the border to try Yaffa Cafe’s specialties and to show their solidarity. “It’s actually really cute,” says Samer’s daughter Nada Samer Alghosain, who does marketing and social media for the cafe. “People will come by with their keffiyehs and let us know they’re in support.”

Samer’s parents fled Yaffa, a port city in the south of Palestine, on foot during the Nakba of 1948 when native Palestinians were first driven from their land. For Palestinians in the diaspora, food is more than just a means to fill the stomach. It is a ritual to keep traditions alive, to recall and reclaim narratives, and is simultaneously a means to resist. With Israeli settler colonialism uprooting historically significant olive groves and wrongly co-opting Arab delicacies, selling them for profit under Israeli brand names, food continues to be irrevocably tied to the Palestinian cultural revolution.

Like many Palestinian businesses, the call for liberation is at the forefront of Yaffa Cafe’s identity. They display posters each week about relevant protests happening in Abbotsford. They stay in touch with local organizers, especially with the Fraser Valley branch of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), and host protesters for meals.

Across the country in Toronto’s west end is Levant (not) Pizza, a restaurant that infuses Italian flavours into Palestinian and Lebanese classics. Owned by Nader Qawasmi, whose parents hail from Nablus and Hebron in the West Bank, the restaurant opened three years ago and has been a hotspot ever since.

“It’s always rich flavours, a lot of stews and spices, that resonate with me when it comes to Palestinian foods—things like mulukhiya, bamia that I grew up eating,” Qawasmi says. “My dad owned a restaurant, so I took after him.”

With its goal to amplify and highlight the diversity of their cuisine, Levant (not) Pizza is advocating for and supporting Palestinian justice initiatives through food. They’ve hosted two charity dinners, the second of which raised $12,000, with funds going to Islamic Relief Canada, Defense for Children International – Palestine, and locals’ efforts to bring their family from Gaza to Canada. They’ve also donated to student encampments. When Uber Eats wrongly listed Palestinian restaurants as “Israeli” cuisine in December 2023, Levant was one of the foremost establishments to call for a boycott of the delivery provider.

For both families, words are also a crucial part of reclaiming Palestinian identity. The “not” in Levant Pizza signifies its departure from a conventional understanding of pizza, and challenges assumptions about both Levantine and Italian cuisine. And for the owners of Yaffa Cafe, invoking the name of their historic homeland is a means of bringing it alive several continents over in Canada.

“I think that’s the boldest move we could’ve done, is to represent where we come from,” Nada says. “I wanted to let people know we were Palestinian, one way or another.”

Illustration by Jessica Bromer

My friend Lou is visiting from Australia. We do silly things together, like watch Love Island and listen to music. Lou shows me the video for Chappell Roan’s “Casual,” which follows a girl and a mermaid in a situationship. I’m fascinated. The song is good, too: the slow pumping synth and zesty lyrics contrast with the video’s overall sense of campiness.

I laugh it off, thinking this is another artist my friends and I will talk about but who will remain coded in proximity to community, a secret, a love language for what we love together like girl in red or Rina Sawayama. Someone I can ask new friends about, a question inside a question about who they might be as well as what they love.

And then I hear another Roan song (“Good Luck, Babe!”), and another (“Pink Pony Club”). They get poppier and poppier, reminiscent of ’80s pop ballads I love because of my mother but also somehow the feeling I had when I first began loving Taylor Swift in 2008. Something maybe about the storytelling and the texture of feeling for women who are “different.” I have the feeling that I’m sure everyone has when they start to like an artist, a sense of discovering something both about yourself and in them.

It seems that sense of discovery is viral. I am one of many who fell in love with Roan’s music. By the middle of summer, she’d garnered hundreds of millions of streams. She’s performed at Coachella and Lollapalooza. What’s catching traction online, though, isn’t just her fame but her reaction to it. Roan has stated bluntly, “I told myself, if this ever gets dangerous, I might quit. It’s dangerous now, and I’m still going. But that part is not what I signed up for.”

Roan is being praised for setting a precedent for a new generation of artists and celebrities. She talks about having worked at a drive-thru and scoffs at the media for their surprised or sympathetic reactions. “Most people work horrible jobs.” Commenters cherish the rise of a queer working-class artist—but I wonder about the continual obfuscation of her whiteness, which prevents a certain honesty about her impact and how she’s able to make it.

Roan’s fame picks up pace, and so does her reaction. In August, she releases a series of TikToks. She speaks directly into camera, her iconic curly red hair up in a messy bun. “Would you go up to a random lady and say, ‘Can I get a photo with you?’ And she’s like, ‘no, what the fuck?’ and then you get mad at this random lady?” Should we expect a smile from celebrities and a customer service voice, or should we stay away—knowing that certain actions are expected in the workplace and certain boundaries are in place outside of it?

The celebrity as worker and fame as abuse are interesting arguments to make. When I ask Toronto-based producer Anupa Mistry, who also worked as a culture writer and editor, what she thinks, she says: “…[Roan’s] rancor is valid, but it’s ultimately focused on individual behaviour change on the part of fans and photographers, rather than a condemnation of the institutions of power that fund and amplify and set the terms of fame. She’s young and trying to work out if it’s possible to have an encounter with the music industry on her own terms. But even her ‘controversies’ generate value for her label.”

The idea that Roan’s candor is commodifying feels oddly manipulative. Mistry names what has been on my mind too: race and gender. Privilege, even when it seems absent or well-accounted for. “Do we read Roan’s demands and boundaries as more valid because she is white and cisgender? Her queerness suggests transgression only in its continued association with the American heartland, [the Midwest]. I’ll always think of Thelonious Monk or Lauryn Hill when I think about the costs of pushing back. What about Doja Cat’s shenanigans? When it got to be too much she pushed back and people didn’t like the way she did it.” But Roan’s pushback is applauded.

This brings me back to an original instinct I had ignored. As my enamourment with Roan begins to fray, I scroll her YouTube Shorts. In one, she says: “I wanted to be a cheerleader in high school. But I just never felt like I was that kind of girl. I don’t know. I am, now.” It reminds me of Swift’s rise to fame and her beloved video for “You Belong With Me.” Roan makes people feel seen in a similar way: you’re different, but all the things you want can happen to you too. The really distinct marker here, the key to their mass marketability, is that they’re both white American women.

My friend reposts Roan’s recent photo in Interview magazine on her close friend story, wild-clown themed of course. She writes: If I got straight famous, I’d unravel too. There is a point in math where a limit approaches infinity and cannot be quantified further. There is a point in fame where you simply cannot get more famous than you already are. Did Chappell Roan set out to become Mitski famous and ended up Taylor Swift famous instead? Did she strive toward success, the way any artist does, only to accidentally strive too far, primed by her personal privilege and positionality?

I can’t imagine how disconcerting it must be to be in Roan’s position. When talking about her with writer and poet Victoria Mbabazi, they say: “As a Black femme I understand what it is like for people to look at you as a shiny object and think that your existence giving them life means that’s where your life ends. Usually this ends in a disillusionment for both me and the person who dehumanized me into a fictional version of myself.” The parasocial toxicity artists endure is inexcusable and should be checked.

Yet the question I’m interested in when it comes to Roan is not whether fame is good or bad, whether she’s right or wrong, but of what she makes visible in the culture of celebrity, the purpose behind her commodification. And to me, that’s the power that white women have had and will always have. White women’s palatability imbues their art with the power of “relatability” even as it appropriates from communities, cultures and precedents that are usually created by Black and brown people who are then excluded from the material success of their own legacies. Roan’s drag persona and her lineage with activist, drag queen and queer icon Sasha Colby, a trans woman of Native Hawaiian and Irish descent, is a key example. Roan’s slogan, “your favourite artist’s favourite artist,” comes from Colby’s own tagline: “your favourite drag queen’s favourite drag queen.” This is indicative of the ecosystems of cultural transmission and inspiration, which can be appropriative and can not; which can be racist and can not, but which are undergirded by the uncontrollable, uncontrivable machinery of white supremacy. Intentionally or otherwise, Roan’s inspiration and interpretations in this lineage suffers from a sore reality: when white cis people do it, it suddenly just makes sense to a mass audience.

Don’t get me wrong though: Roan and her team are using Roan’s privilege to do good work. They’re against ticket resellers. She pushes back against rude photographers and makes clear contributions to queering pop. In the fall, she made a political stand by refusing to endorse either U.S. presidential candidate and by invoking Palestine.

But I believe it works against her when she refuses to own her success in all of its complexities. Part of me remains suspicious, reluctant as a fan, unable to fully trust or believe her when she has not once acknowledged her own positionality. It’s a place I’ve been before—with friends, coworkers, lovers—why does privilege do what it does and how do we make sense of the discomfort we are left with? How does this affect our ability to make sense of each other, to feel seen and heard?

I guess it just reminds me of the limits. Both for Roan and for myself and for celebrities like Kehlani, Janelle Monáe, and Victoria Monét, who have done similar work as Roan but were not afforded the same understanding: on the toxicity of the industry, on queerness, on politics, in terms of Palestine. What can celebrities offer us and what we can offer them? What are we owed and what do we owe each other?

My original instinct plateaus. I’m left with an old feeling, despite and maybe because of its flattening effect, a feeling like the popping of a balloon at the end of a party, sad and stalwart in its reminders. Clichés that are cliché as pop music itself, maybe because they stick around in the same way.

Sometimes you get where you’re going only by going too far. Sometimes what we think of someone has nothing to do with who they actually are.