For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

Jostling academics, lawyers, reporters, coalitions, and religious groups who identify as anti-poverty fighters have not come up with anything substantive or evolutionary in decades. We are treated to the same tired approaches: demonstrations and denunciations; op-eds that vault the writer’s ego but quickly disappear from public consciousness; political parties that “own” the issue castigating their rivals; and obligatory feature articles on sympathetic poor people, but not too poor, not too facially marred by their lived reality—it must be inoffensive and calculated to spark pity, if not action.

And those who work at agencies that “serve” those in need? They feel good at intervening in the latest crisis, unaware that their clients experience a 24/7 crisis, impacting their health and hearts as their lives are wasting away or brutally ending. Staff police crowded spaces, dirty, chaotic, and grim, where hope and change never enter. They need to feel they do right by their clients, postponing evictions or handing out TTC tokens, although, at the end of the day, only they have their lives enhanced by salaries and offices and cars to whisk them out of bleak communities to more middle-class living.

Staff and experts don’t really know the entrenched poor. They certainly don’t socialize or spend any time with them outside work hours. We can see this in their asks: a bit more food, a few more dollars, and more and more social supports that infantilize, control, and maintain people in poverty. To justify this usurpation of voice it is often said that the poor have no time or energy to spend on their own liberation.

But in the end the question is: Whose poverty is it? It belongs to those who live it, know it, and struggle to survive it.

We have stumbled on a way to eliminate the class ceiling, and have found support from foundations and government to do so. But experts seem never to have thought about actually paying people to participate—relieving them of the burden of poverty for the time they spend learning from each other. Experts haven’t thought about letting them get used to having more, being more than simply a problem.

Those of us with lived experience of poverty, mental illness, single parents, refugees, homeless folks, people with addictions or physical disabilities are stepping out of our separate silos, re-integrating ourselves, telling each other our stories, and understanding through the process that poverty is the overriding issue—but poverty can be fought. The separate labels we carry serve only to keep us apart and in thrall to agencies. Yet once people start talking to each other about their experience of poverty, its shattering effects, how hard it is to escape, they can see how the agencies set them up to fail, and how they don’t see their potential, their ability. It’s not simply about complaining; it’s about identifying systemic issues and proposing solutions. It’s learning to speak in ways that those in power can hear and respond to. It’s recognizing that change has to start in our own lives, and that taking responsibility for mistakes made is part of that change. It’s about caring for the communities we come from, and working for all our benefit.

We need to start doing this in ways that are constructive in tone and substance. Let’s start fighting for ourselves and for lives that are worth living—a hearts-and-minds approach that takes us to tables around the city and circumvents both the experts and external advocates who would rather we simply attend and validate their events, cynically offering lures of watery soup, T-shirts, and stale sandwiches.

We must speak for ourselves and to policy makers, politicians, businesspeople, police, doctors, and funders—people who are affected by our presence, who have to revise their view of who the poor are, what they want, and how effectively they self-represent. We must ensure we take a holistic view of those living in poverty, no longer dividing them up according to funding mechanisms, but bringing people together so that we can support each other moving forward.

In my future Canada, we will talk about opportunity, whether in education, or employment; we will talk about wanting to work side-by-side with those with paper credentials to improve what is a failing system; and we will be welcomed. Already, we are building allies, people outside systems, who ensure we have doors opened that previously were closed. We are believing again in our own potential.

This is seismic change, not welcome everywhere, but change that will revolutionize how we see and treat the poor. Maybe, within the next decades, we can show that the poor will not always be with us, but will move up and out of what was thought to be forever.

Illustration by Danielle Krysa

Independence has never come easy for me—but it’s always been vital. I was born premature in 1989 with undiagnosed dyspraxia, a neurological disorder that permanently affects memory, coordination, and processing speed. Because my development was delayed and I was held back in kindergarten, I heavily relied on my classmates throughout school. I nodded my head to fake that I understood, but wondered why I felt slower than everyone else. My conservative, Catholic parents called me demanding and needy, encouraging me to settle for whatever nice guy I could find to support me one day—but I was adamant that I would take care of myself when I got older.

I was finally diagnosed with dyspraxia in my early twenties. I’d sought a psychological evaluation because I didn’t understand why I couldn’t keep a job. I was tired of failing to make it on my own and going back to live with my parents. Their look-the-other-way approach, frustrated name-calling, and refusal to acknowledge my struggles only made me feel worse. I used alcohol and sex to cope with the abuse. I felt like an outcast—it seemed like my own family didn’t even love me. My older brother committed suicide when I was 11, and I often felt like he was the only one who would have understood what I was going through. Like him, I was an artist who dropped out of school and was struggling to find my place in life.

Before all this, I’d dreamed of being a writer, graduating with a degree in communications, and getting a job at a well-paying magazine. I knew I was talented, and my teachers agreed, but my highly-graded essays couldn’t make up for the fact that I had trouble retaining information. Tests were difficult and held me back, forcing me to drop out of university. But I was determined to not give up. Even as I was failing classes I had already repeated, I decided to become a freelance writer and start my own magazine. I hoped it would allow me to work in my chosen field, use my talent, and become a better route toward achieving financial independence. After all, if I couldn’t hold a job, what good was a degree and thousands more dollars in debt? So, in 2010, I started FLURT, a socially-conscious magazine for young people who wanted to create a better future. I honestly believed that if I worked hard enough I would get it off the ground and would be able to support myself.

But as most entrepreneurs know, success doesn’t happen overnight. I didn’t have any form of stability to fall back on and the stress of living in poverty pushed my health to its breaking point. I moved constantly as I tried and failed to hold the most basic of jobs. As I strived to balance it all, my freelance writing and my magazine were both pushed to the side. In 2010, at age 21, I successfully applied for income support—a shallow safety net for those who are struggling to support themselves—to help me get on my feet. After a few years, I applied for Alberta provincial disability benefits. It’s a more sustainable program for those who are with living with a permanent disability, but also it’s incredibly difficult to get accepted.

The first time I applied for disability benefits, I was rejected. Unfortunately, it was a year before I received my dyspraxia diagnosis and without it I didn’t know—and couldn’t explain—why I couldn’t keep a job. For the following year, I continued to scrape by on income support, feeling hopeless. I felt trapped in the welfare system, scrolling through online “gigs” as a potential long-term way to get out of the hole.

Finally, in 2014, I made it off the waiting list for a $200 psychological evaluation. After two days of cognitive tests, a doctor said that I met the criteria for dyspraxia. It immediately made sense to me. I recognized many symptoms as part of my everyday life: poor visual perception, difficulty remembering things, bad motor skills, and trouble with speech. This lengthy report became the key ingredient to the collection of letters from doctors, social workers and previous employers—as well as the entire contents of my years in therapy—that I would need to get accepted into the disability benefits program. In 2015, at 26, I finally felt I had the support I needed to achieve independence.

After six years of renting rooms in houses where I felt like I had to walk on eggshells, I was able to rent my own apartment long-term. The amount of anxiety I’d felt these past years began to slowly lift, and I started believing that I would be able to feel happy and safe in the years to come. Instead of constantly being worried about how I was going to support myself, where I was going to live, and what I was going to eat, I could focus instead on my getting my freelance career and magazine on track in a peaceful environment that felt like home.

It was this entrepreneurial spirit that brought my partner and me together last year when he struck up a conversation about my magazine. We were instantly attracted to the other’s drive to be independent and fulfil their career goals—me in the magazine industry and him in tech. We agreed early on that we didn’t want to get married or have children, and that work would take the full centre of our lives. Because of this we talked about long-distance possibilities if he had to move for work, and agreed I’d stay here since starting the process of applying for social assistance somewhere else would be both exhausting and difficult. If we wanted to be together, we decided, we would make it work.

But I struggled internally with the difference in our bank accounts. Even though he made five times more than I received from social assistance, I still wanted to pay for myself on dates and occasionally take him out as well. Even though he would cook for me when I ran out of food and let me borrow money until my next pay cheque (which just put me behind the next month), I always found myself in the same position: broke and feeling like our relationship wasn’t on even ground. He’s the most supportive man I’ve ever met, but he didn’t sign up for this and I didn’t want him to.

I was also shocked to learn that if we were to move in together and become common law, I would lose my financial independence. Since my partner earns more than $3,812 a month—the household income limit for a person on disability benefits—I would be forced to give up my social assistance. It doesn’t matter than I earn nowhere near that amount, benefits or not. His income, in the government’s eyes, would count towards my own. Like many people who’ve applied for disability benefits in Canada, trying to find out information like this was difficult and confusing. When I was finally able to meet with my caseworker and sign the papers a few months after getting accepted, I asked for her to explain the cut-off system to me. She responded with a joke about how if I ever met a rich man—well, she didn’t need to finish her sentence.

I was angry. After six years of commuting to meet with countless doctors, therapists, psychologists, and social workers, filling out piles of paperwork, the stress of an appeal, and the damaging effect it had on my mental health, I was now faced with the unfair, impossible choice of financial independence or living with the person I loved. I felt like I’d rewound to the 1950s. I imagined myself at a top-level university that promised a stable, prestigious career, only to have a university professor tell me that once I graduated I needed to decide between a husband and the field I worked in.

Today, all but the most conservative would call that ultimatum outrageous. We understand, as a society, that women have careers not just because they need the money but because having financial independence gives them a sense of purpose and control in their lives. Why did the government assume that, just because I had a disability that affected my ability to work, I’d jump at the chance for a man to take care of me? As much as I tried, I couldn’t shake the question: Can you truly be a modern woman with a disability?

What the government is telling people who are on disability benefits, especially women, is that instead of seeking independence, the better choice would be to find a rich man—or, really, just any man. The Institute of Women’s Policy Research has, after all, declared that women in North America potentially won’t have an equal wage for another 50 years or so—a man doesn’t have to be rich to out-earn us. And, if women without disabilities have a hard enough time making it in a man’s world, I wondered, where does that leave those on disability benefits? I knew there must be more women out there, like me, who imagined a life with someone—only to face a threat to the financial independence they’d worked so hard to achieve. Because having your benefits yanked from under you and then having to rely solely on your partner for your basic needs doesn’t just curb your independence—it destroys it.

As I contemplated the consequences of my relationship, I couldn’t help but think of those women who had forgone their benefits. What happened if they wanted to leave their relationship?

Lola is a 20-something woman living in Alberta with Hashimoto’s Disease, an autoimmune disease that attacks a person’s thyroid. Like all of the women I interviewed, she asked that I give her a pseudonym because of the stigma associated with living with a disability. I can relate. Since I’ve been on social assistance family and friends alike have felt the need to tell me how I’m just not trying hard enough. Because Lola is in a common-law relationship with her partner, she hasn’t applied for disability benefits because he makes too much money for her to qualify. But that doesn’t mean she’s financially stable.

Instead, she works as a server despite “feeling like death” and “starting her day with an arsenal of medications.” Lola has expressed concern about how her partner treats her and her pets—mishandling both when he gets
upset. She’s wanted to leave the relationship multiple times, but she says she keeps forgiving him because he does a lot to help her. When it comes down to it, she believes that her hands are tied and she needs to keep pushing for survival.

Like Lola, Marci (who also asked that her name not be used) is a 20-something woman living in Alberta who has been common-law with her partner for 10 years. Even though she struggles to support herself and lives with bipolar disorder, Marci hasn’t been able to apply for disability benefits because her partner earns over the threshold. While she appreciates her partner’s support, this dependence has taken a toll on their relationship. She says she’s been forced to confront the terrible reality of feeling trapped because there’s no better alternative. When I last spoke to Marci, she and her partner had taken a step back from their relationship. She’s now in the process of looking into reapplying for disability. Like Lola, Marci finds surviving day-to-day hard enough—never mind jumping through the hoops of applying for disability benefits. It took me six years to successfully navigate the system, find the courage to contact doctors, and then to get all the paperwork I needed (and even then I had to appeal because the language in the paperwork wasn’t clear).

I can relate to Marci and Lola, who, despite desperately wanting financial independence, know that sometimes the most viable option is the one that gives you your best shot at survival. Even though I knew living with my parents hurt my confidence and mental health, I didn’t have the resources to leave. Income support allowed me to distance myself from my parents, and disability benefits let me cut them off completely. Having the latter gives me a sense of freedom. I don’t have to worry about relying on anyone else for survival; I can make decisions based on what I truly want. But for those who are still in vulnerable situations, other options are often homelessness—something I’ve experienced as well. And believe me, after a week of sleeping on a gym mat and wandering the street, a warm place to live, even somewhere that’s abusive—well, it isn’t even a question. This makes me sure that fewer women would find themselves in shelters if they were able to have social assistance regardless of their relationship status.

“The government expects people who are common-law to share incomes,” a social worker told me over the phone. And while this sounds like a fine deal if you’re in a relationship where you’re okay with that dynamic, it’s a poor one overall. Many women also want to share a house and start a family, and these extra expenses on one person’s salary exponentially raise the likelihood of living paycheque-to-paycheque—or make such goals simply impossible. Not only does this put all of the pressure on the breadwinner, but it can create a dynamic in which the person with a disability feels like a burden—an awful place to be in a relationship that’s supposed to be based on love and support, and when the rest of the world already underestimates those with disabilities. Even worse, if the relationship doesn’t work out, they’ll have to apply for disability benefits all over again after giving them up.

Of course, I could lie to the government. Like many couples who live together and aren’t on disability benefits, I could say I’m living with a roommate or have my partner take over the lease to avoid tax deductions. But I’m not going to do that. Lying to the government just adds to the stigma that people on social assistance are lazy and misusing people’s tax dollars. After all the work I’ve done to get to where I am, I’m not going to risk having my financial independence taken away. Instead of the Alberta government giving people no other option than to try to get around the system, it should take a hard look at its old-school views and remember that women are equal to men. Women with disabilities shouldn’t have to worry about losing their benefits because of how much their common-law or married partners earn.

Marci says that she has no idea what the future holds. She’s scared, and like me, the lack of stability and support has only made her mental health worse. She believes she’ll either get some kind of support and be able to finally focus on her needs—or she won’t. It feels like a gamble, and if she loses, she’ll have to continue to struggle with part-time work and stay in her relationship for survival instead of love. “Not every couple shares money,” she says. “The people applying for disability are not the ones living in mansions with happy, healthy marriages. The people applying are the ones who need it. The government shouldn’t be able to say some disabilities and living situations are more or less valid than others.”

I’m not sure what the future holds for me either. I currently live a life full of purpose while working on my freelance writing and magazine, and my partner and I are happy living separately for now. But maybe one day we’ll get tired of making the trek to and from each other’s apartments and decide we want to share the same space. Whether or not he takes a job outside Alberta, we’ll always have to live knowing there’s going to be distance between us. It’s true that respecting the others’ need for independence is a key component in what makes our relationship so great, yet having that independence forced on us isn’t what I expected when I told myself that I would one day take care of myself.

As a woman with a disability, I acknowledge that I’m lucky to have disability benefits in the first place; it’s incredibly difficult to qualify. Speaking out about the flaws within the system comes with a fear of biting the hand that feeds me. But progress has been made to increase disability benefit amounts and to raise awareness of how a person can afford to eat on social assistance. More and more women are writing about what it’s like to live with a disability to break the stigma that we’re lazy and misusing tax dollars. I’m happy to be one of them, and I feel confident that if we keep working to tell our stories we’ll come to create change. We need to keep fighting for our rights as citizens—and we can do it. After all, we’ve felt what it takes to overcome so many obstacles already.

OCAP image for the July 16 rally and march.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) led a rally and march last weekend in protest of Toronto’s Pan Am Games. As the event page description reads, “If there is money to spend on circuses, then the resources can be found to end the need for food banks, tackle the mounting problem of homelessness and ensure that everyone has decent, affordable and accessible housing.”

It’s a reasonable point—especially considering whenever there is a demand for shelter and livable wages, the counter argument is always the excuse that there isn’t enough money. Yet, more than $700 million was spent on the athlete’s village and another $10 million was allotted for the province’s Pan Am secretariat. Neither of these costs are included in the games’ $1.4-billion budget.

So, just so we’re clear: Our governments didn’t have enough money to put services in place to mitigate against 18 reported deaths from amongst Toronto’s homeless population, but Pan Am execs will receives $7 million in bonuses. (But hey, they have to split it.) Oh, and let’s not forget the unnecessary infrastructure added to the public’s bill, or the $3.8 million that was spent on lighting up a bridge.

Photo taken at the rally and march July 16.

In Toronto, insufficient shelter, unlivable wages, and empty food bank shelves are all issues that have been shoved under the rug during the games. Instead, we get the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) working alongside Pan Am games security to protect tourists from, well, the homeless, apparently. The attack on the poor—like dislocating low-income families and the homeless or making arrests for petty crimes—happens years in advance. “People don’t want to see unsightly people on the streets when they’re trying to sell an event,” as Sophy Chan, an activist and community engagement co-ordinator at SPORT4ONTARIO told Now in March.

And yet, all this is not what city officials see as embarrassing. Concerns are directed on more important matters, like pretty floors for the housing in athlete’s village. “Unfinished floors and ragged walls without baseboards would reflect poorly on our region’s reputation as hosts. Quite simply, the village wouldn’t look finished,” TO2015 spokesperson Teddy Katz tells The Star.  And here was me thinking that an embarrassing host was someone who couldn’t take care of their own residents. But, Ontario is “helping” students who volunteer for the games—the population who the province makes poor. So that makes up for it (but not really).

My daughter attends a city-run daycare which received an overabundance in free tickets for the games. When I attended an event I saw overpaid security (police are making $80 an hour) thoroughly check daycare children, in unorganized line-ups, leading to under-attended games. Public money could have been spent better elsewhere, but that’s just my hunch.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her second year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

Illustration by Nick Craine

Dedicated anti-poverty activist and doctor Ryan Meili tackles the root causes of illness and addiction

IN 2010, RYAN MEILI STOOD in the medical clinic where he worked, on the west side of Saskatoon. A girl named Maxine walked in. She was a 20-year-old from the streets who moved as if she were 91. She wanted antibiotics, but really needed a hospital. With a case of full-blown AIDS and a drug addiction, she was getting weaker. Meili remembers the sound of her lungs through his stethoscope, like a rubber boot being pulled from the mud. There was only so much he could do—the damage was done. Maxine’s life had been tragic, full of poverty, dysfunction, and abuse of all sorts. He finally got her to a hospital, where he visited twice a day, but she came and went, often scoring drugs in between.

Meili says stories like Maxine’s are much too common in Canada, and the 39-year-old Saskatchewan-based family doctor is fiercely determined to break the pattern. “What we can do in response as health care providers is really limited,” he says, “because we’re not really able to impact the root cause of illness.” But Meili decided to try anyway and in 2013, he created Upstream, an organization that seeks to address the social determinants of health, such as poverty, nutrition, education, and housing.

In just a few short years, the movement is already making strides: sparking conversations on social media via Facebook, writing blogs and articles for national news outlets, and creating partnerships to deliver awareness on determinants in powerful ways. In 2013, Meili learned that Saskatchewan and B.C. were the only two provinces in Canada without a poverty reduction strategy, so Upstream helped spearhead the recent Poverty Costs campaign, working with the Saskatoon Anti-Poverty Coalition, Saskatoon Food Bank, Saskatoon Health Region and other groups keen to implement a plan.

Through sharing hard facts (the economic cost of poverty in Saskatchewan is $3.8 billion due to increased health and social services), a fierce letter-writing campaign, and asking disadvantaged men and women to share their stories online, Poverty Costs turned out to be a big win, with the Saskatchewan government committing to a poverty reduction strategy in October 2014.

“It’s about taking what we know, getting people aware of it, turning that awareness into real policy change and, ultimately, improving the health of Canadians,” says Meili, who realized he wanted to work with under-served communities when he started practicing medicine. He felt it mattered more to service patients most in need. Then, during his first year of medical school in 2002, he met Dr. William Albritton, professor of pediatrics and then dean of the College of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, who further inspired him with the idea of social accountability—that doctors should be mindful of growing social concerns.

The following year, Meili and two friends approached Albritton with the idea to start a student-run clinic in Saskatoon’s inner city. “When he first got started, I told him the problem is not going to be setting up the clinic, because you’re committed and have that ambition,” remembers Albritton. “The success of the clinic will depend upon attracting people who will follow you, who will maintain that same degree of commitment. And he’s tenacious; he’s done a very good job of finding
people with those same world views.”

Eleven years later, Meili is now a supervisor at the Student Wellness Initiative Towards Community Health (SWITCH) clinic that sees about 50-plus clients every shift, three times per week. “Some days are tougher than others. Some days you take a story home, you get touched by people. It’s really hard,” he says. “But it’s even tougher to not be there. It’s tougher to walk away. Once you’re aware that there are these injustices and people who are struggling, you want to be there to help.”

Meili would surprise a lot of people if he ever did walk away. “He’s always had this intense, clear vision of the world that he believes we could have, with no sense of exhaustion in pursuing that,” says Liz James, a longtime friend who met Meili while the two were involved with the student activist network at the University of Saskatchewan. “Things seem possible to Ryan that not everybody believes are possible.”

Take, for instance, the time he was living in Halifax in 1999. He was working at the Big Life Café as a cook and server and heard about an initiative out of the Falls Brook Centre, a local community hub. People were casually tossing around the idea of delivering prosthetic limbs to poor communities in Central America as part of the Limbs to Light campaign. That summer, Meili tore out the seats of an old yellow school bus he rented, strapped himself in and drove from Saskatoon to Halifax, collecting unwanted limbs along the way. Loaded to the roof with arms and legs, he drove down the east coast of the U.S., until he reached Nicaragua. In local villages, victims of landmines had been fashioning scraps of homemade material into limbs. Meili dropped off his stash to the Red Cross and, one month later, headed back home.

Travelling back and forth between run-down areas of Central America, and disadvantaged communities in Saskatchewan, Meili witnessed the same kinds of injustice, gaps between rich and poor. So began the shift from a direct hands-on, people-helping person (which he still is) to thinking more in terms of the system as a whole, rethinking not only about health care, but how we make decisions as a society.

In his early days with the SWITCH clinic, in 2006, Meili was invited to speak at a New Democratic Party (NDP) Convention where he challenged the ruling government to do a better job of balancing resources. “I think from that experience, I realized if I wanted politics to work that way, I needed to get more involved.”

So he did. He ran twice for leadership of the Saskatchewan NDP, first in 2009 when he finished a close second, and then in 2013 when he lost by 44 votes. He’s not sure he’ll run again, but it’s possible. “It would have been an excellent place to bring these ideas forward, but right now, what I’m able to do with Upstream in practice and research is valuable,” he says. “The challenge now is to try and accomplish something dramatic. What we’re really trying to do is apply a new lens to our political decision-making and to do that is pretty ambitious.”

Meili hopes to steer what he calls “an issue that cuts across political lines” and move away from a system that “flounders from crisis to crisis” to one that presses societal concerns—such as the life circumstances of young girls like Maxine.
Maxine never had chances, and her fate isn’t difficult to predict; it’s right there in the first chapter of Meili’s book, A Healthy Society, published prior to his second political run. Meili had been working with a First Nations community in rural Saskatchewan when he got the news. Maxine ran back to the streets she’d known since she was 13 and was hit by a car that shattered her pelvis. Back in the hospital, she contracted pneumonia. She never recovered and died just before her 22nd birthday.

“What often escapes our attention when considering the tragic story of one individual is how intimately it is connected to all of us, to the collective decision-making process that is electoral politics,” says Meili. “It is politics that decides whether young women like Maxine live or die.”

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Null Value.

“We do not use statistics as an excuse not to get tough on criminals.” That was federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson’s astonishing response to Statistics Canada’s finding in July that crime rates in Canada now stand at the same level they did in 1973. Don’t bother us with the facts, was Nicholson’s meaning, our minds are made up. We’re going to get tough on crime—despite the fact that the criminals have gone soft on us.

Stephen Harper’s new majority government vowed last spring to pass an omnibus crime bill during the first 100 sitting days of the new parliament, a deadline that is fast approaching. The bulk of the bill is dedicated to introducing new mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offences. For instance, the last incarnation of the bill (it was never voted on before the last election and could change) specified a minimum one-year sentence for any drug crime on behalf of a gang or involving a weapon. The minimum raised to two years if the crime was committed near a school. Producing a drug nets a mandatory three years if the production posed a threat to minors or public health.

You don’t have to condone criminality to see that mandatory minimums, especially for drug-related crime, are the kind of cynical laws that play well on voter doorsteps and fail miserably in almost every other context. They don’t make the general public any safer; they harden minor criminals in the crucible of prison; and they cost a fortune.

Judges don’t like them, since they tie their hands and leave no room for context or, well, judgment (Justice John Gomery calls such legislation “a slap in the face” to judges). Prosecutors seldom like them, since they provide defendants no incentive to plead guilty in exchange for a lesser punishment. Corrections officials’ feelings are mixed at best; their budgets inevitably swell, but overcrowding causes greater problems.

Even the United States—the world capital of magical thinking on drug crime—is backpedalling on mandatory minimums for drug cases. A CBC report found a dozen states— Republican- and Democrat-run—that are repealing mandatory minimums. They cite a comprehensive array of complaints, from abstract doubts about the constitutionality of the practice, to practical, bottom-line problems with out-of-control policing and corrections costs.

The facts show that Canadians are safer than they have been in two generations, yet the Harper government is plunging ahead anyway. This policy will inflate the government’s corrections budget to $3.1 billion in 2012–2013 (including $466 million just to build new prisons). For that price tag you’d hope to bag the kingpins—but of course, that’s not what this is about. Instead we will victimize and incarcerate the most impoverished and desperate small time crooks and call it justice. If you believe that poverty reduction, alternative sentencing, addiction counselling, and evidence-based policymaking are better ideas, this government has one word for you: tough.

Catalyst carries on a rich heritage in popular education—one that almost vanished when many great popular-education organizations disappeared (or were disappeared by funders).

I have a soft spot for popular education. Instead of relying on “experts” to tell us what to think, popular education draws on everyone’s expertise to create critical analysis and programs for action.

As far as I know, Catalyst is the only place in English-speaking Canada devoted to using popular education as a vehicle to take the smarts of social justice groups and weave their insight and know-how into vibrant political movements. When you go into a Catalyst Centre teaching event, you learn from others while others learn from you. Everyone’s preconceptions get shaken up. And that shaking up unleashes new possibilities for action.

Take the provincial anti-poverty project that Catalyst assisted with recently. I’ve been to a lot of dry meetings with talking heads discussing poverty. Sometimes a person actually living in poverty will even be invited to say a few words. But Catalyst’s approach is different. It creates a platform to encourage folks living in poverty to understand themselves as a political force. By tapping into our collective expertise, we are poised to build the movements that fight for change. Catalyst generates those glorious political moments when we actually experience the potential that solidarity has to move ourselves and the world.

Another thing I love about Catalyst is that it pays serious attention to activist burn-out. Too many seasoned activists exhaust themselves over divisive tensions amongst social justice movements. To be sustainable for the long haul, social justice activists need to develop better skills to help navigate the tough spots. Catalyst has some great tools that help us transcend difficult interpersonal dynamics and keep activists focused on what strengthens our movements.

Perhaps most importantly, everyone has a lot of fun when Catalyst does its magic. Social justice work should also be about having a good time. Catalyst keeps my eyes on the prize, but I always come out of a Catalyst event with a smile on my face.

You can contact Catalyst to build an event or a curriculum so that your group can go further to build movements around any social justice issue you care about. You can also attend its activist school, hang out with like-minded folks, and get a hand with your own approach to inclusive movement building. Catalyst also has a charitable organization that funnels donations into helping groups that don’t have the resources to commission their own popular education activities.

Peter Victor. Photo by Molly Crealock.

Could you live on $14,000 a year? Could everyone in Canada? And could we live on $14,000 a year for the rest of history?

That’s the sort of uncomfortable, prickly question Peter Victor likes to ask. And the way you answer might say a lot about the future of the planet.

That’s because Victor is an economist at York University who is a leading pioneer in “no-growth” economics, a field that tries to figure out whether it’s possible to create an economy that stops growing—yet doesn’t collapse.

Environmentalists, of course, have long warned that humanity is chewing through the world’s natural resources— land, trees, minerals—at an unsustainable locust’s pace. But every country’s prosperity currently depends on constant growth: more people, more consumption, more stuff.

A few years ago, Victor wondered: Could an economy stop growing but still remain prosperous?

To find out, he began working on a computer model that replicated the Canadian economy. Once he’d built a model approximating reality, he began tweaking some of the major variables to cut growth: He lowered consumption, tweaked productivity, and halted the increase of population. He imposed a slew of government policies aimed at increasing taxes for the wealthy and reducing the use of fossil fuels. Then he extrapolated forward to see what would happen.

The upshot? Victor’s virtual Canada slowly stopped growing after 2010, and after a few turbulent decades, unemployment dwindled to just four percent. Greenhouse gases went down to Kyoto levels. And then…things just stayed the same. Ecological catastrophe was averted. In 2008, he published Managing Without Growth, and became the first economist to prove—virtually, anyway—that a steady-state economy is possible.

“I’m trying to the plant the seeds of this idea,” he tells me. “The climate is changing things rapidly, and people think, ‘Well, what are we going to do?’ They need ideas.” In the wake of his book, Victor has become something of a rock star amongst environmental economists, travelling the world to explain his ideas at conferences, and even meeting with the curious finance minister of Finland. People, he tells me, are fascinated by the details: What would it be like to live in a non-growing world? Could we handle it?

Could you? Well, there’d be one big upside: We would all work less—a lot less. That’s because technology naturally reduces workforces: say it takes 100 people to make one airplane this year. Next year, technological improvements will mean it only takes 90. Soon after, just 80; in a decade, perhaps as few as 50.

Currently, such rising productivity—the amount of work one person can do—creates unemployment, so governments push policies that grow the economy and create jobs for those 50 people who are no longer building airplanes.

Victor’s plan works differently. Instead of firing workers as we become more productive, we just share an ever-decreasing pile of work. Keep employed, but work fewer hours. In Victor’s computer model, Canadians gradually work their way down to a four-day workweek, perhaps even less. (“When I mention this to people,” Victor says, “you can hear their sigh of relief.”)

Working less would transform society in many ways: Imagine the spectacular upsides for health care and education if Canadians had more time to spend caring for themselves and teaching their children.

Sounds great—but it wouldn’t be easy. To achieve zero growth, Canadians would need to seriously curtail their consumption. In a recent paper, Victor plotted out a global nongrowing economy—the whole planet this time—then ran the numbers and found Canadians would need to decrease their average income to around $14,000—roughly our prosperity from the ’70s. Granted, the rest the world would see its income rise dramatically from hundreds of dollars to thousands: We go down, but Bangladesh shoots up. (Victor’s no-growth vision is decidedly in favor of more economic equality.) And since technology increases productivity, that $14,000 buys a lot more quality of life than it did in the ’70s. But it would still be a hard sell on most Canadians.

Even bleaker, though, is the challenge of stabilizing population. Victor’s model requires a flat population curve, and it’s hard to figure out how to achieve that without some pretty authoritarian family-planning policies (à la China’s one-child rule). Victor is well aware of how crazily difficult it would be to craft a no-growth world. For a guy with some of the most radical ideas around, he’s an unassuming, avuncular sort — more tweedy professor than ideological bomb-thrower.

“I know that these ideas are almost impossible for politicians to embrace now,” he says matter-of-factly. But as resources dwindle, Victor is starting a difficult and crucial conversation—one that we may soon have no choice but to join.

One curious gap in this mosaic became clear as the final list emerged: not one of our alumni had chosen a politician or elected official—and that says something troubling about the state of Canadian civil society. Political cynicism, never in short supply at the best of times, appears to have reached a crisis point. When even highly engaged, enfranchised, politically aware and active people turn their backs on the formal legislative process—believing it to be futile, vulgar, idiotic, glacial, all common gripes—there is danger. We need bright and hard-working people tending the grassroots, marching the streets, and storming the gates (many appear in this special issue); but we need them inside the House of Commons, too— writing the laws, holding the government to account, and yes, even engaging in a little partisan sniping from time to time.

Megan Leslie, member of parliament for Halifax. Photo by Robin Hart Hiltz.

So I would like to start this list with a brief nod to a young MP who looks poised for an important career as a real, honest-to-goodness elected legislator.

Megan Leslie was first elected as the member of parliament for Halifax in 2008, aged 35, and has quickly emerged as a respected, diligent, and charismatic force for good in the House. As the NDP health critic, she’s used her prior years of experience as an anti-poverty activist to articulately critique Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, and connects the dots between disenfranchisement, poverty, and health in a way that the government has never adequately grasped. She is the chief architect of the NDP’s national pharmacare proposal, which would bring some badly needed coherence to a health care sector that will be increasingly important in the coming years.

Leslie’s peers have taken notice: she was named the top “Up and Comer” by a large margin in a Hill Times survey of all MPs. Even on that honour, however, she had an incisive comment for the Times, remarking: “we have always seen women in up-and-coming categories because women who are up-and-comers are not threatening, right? So I think we still need to have a gendered lens when we’re looking at these kinds of polls. It doesn’t mean we’ve broken through.”

No it doesn’t. But having an elected MP in office who not only has a nuanced view of gender privilege, but also rejects the trite girl-power bromides that politicians and media alike love giving lip service to, is exactly the kind of politician we need now. We need more like Megan Leslie. And we need to find a way to make capital-P Politics—the difficult and crucial exercise of democratic franchise—hospitable to smart, industrious, and compassionate people who otherwise turn away.

We believe this list of 45 people and organizations represents an exciting portrait of the Canada of tomorrow. We hope you’ll enjoy reading about these rebels, visionaries, troublemakers, and world-changers, and share your thoughts with us. Enjoy.

The fight against poverty in Canada recently added a new weapon to its arsenal: the living wage bylaw. While only one Canadian city, New Westminster, B.C., currently implements the practice, the push is on to make it the norm.

Living wage bylaws require that workers employed directly or indirectly by a municipal government be paid a wage that enables them to comfortably meet their basic needs. The current movement has existed in the United States for about 15 years, resulting in over 140 living-wage ordinances, but it only gained a foothold in Canada on April 26, when New Westminster city councillors unanimously passed a motion mandating that anyone working on city property receive at least $18.17 per hour. This market-based rate is meant to reflect the actual income required for working families to pay for necessities, support the healthy development of their children, and participate in social and civic life.

Living wage proponents are confident that the victory in New Westminster will spur or embolden similar movements across the country. In Ottawa, street demonstrations and presentations to municipal councillors and staff led to the living wage being included within the city’s Poverty Reduction Strategy, which city council endorsed last February. This December council will make their final decision when they decide whether to commit financial resources to the plan. Initiatives are also underway in places such as Victoria and Surrey, British Columbia, and Kingston, Ontario.

Many anti-poverty activists believe that living wages are the key to addressing the plight of Canada’s “working poor.” While provincial minimum-wage rates vary, the lowest paid workers in Canada now earn an average of 20 percent less in real dollars than in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the cost of living has steadily climbed. As a consequence, even full-time employment is not enough to keep some Canadians out of poverty.

The New Westminster proposal was promoted by a diverse amalgamation of groups, including the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Hospital Employees’ Union, and First Call: BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition. A similar coalition in Ottawa is looking to build upon this example. In September, ACORN Canada brought in speakers from New Westminster to help educate the people of Ottawa on how higher wages can benefit workers and the economy without burdening taxpayers.

Of course, the living wage does have its opponents. Free-market thinkers have criticized the policy as a bureaucratic intrusion that reduces profits and flexibility, and in 2009, they helped ward off what had been a promising campaign in Calgary.

However, with the evidence on their side, a growing number of Canadians are working hard to make living wages the law. Now that the breakthrough has been made in New Westminster, they might soon be able to concentrate on their real jobs.