Illustration by Matthew Daley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustration by Hanna Barczyk

About five years ago, a rumour began circulating in South Korea that Indian and Filipino nationals might become eligible for E-2 English teaching visas. At this time, I had already been teaching in Korea for eight years on and off. It had been a wonderful resource for paying for backpacking trips through Asia and boozy Saturday nights out—never mind food, shelter, and clothing. Yet, while I knew there were likely millions of Asian teachers equally or better qualified than me, I feared an influx of new teachers would probably result in significant pay cuts and fewer job vacancies.

I needn’t have worried. In the end, as a long-time Korean friend casually told me, “Korean mothers want white teachers.” As a white Canadian it meant my job was safe—an uncomfortable relief, if there ever was one. Today, E-2 visas for Native Speaking English Teachers (NSETs) are still confined to Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. No matter how fluent your English, if you are not a national of those seven countries (or a Korean) you may not legally teach English in South Korea. Of the seven countries, Canada is the second most well-represented, after the U.S. In 2012 , 17.5 percent of E-2 visas were stamped in Canadian passports, representing about 3,500 individuals—the vast majority of them white.

Besides the right visa, the only requirement for potential hires is to have a four-year university degree in any subject. Though the market has tightened in recent years, jobs are still plentiful compared to home, with between 20,000–25,000 positions opening every year. Some teachers who travel to Korea are placed in public schools, but most—about two-thirds, according to a 2012 article in the Korea Times newspaper—teach at private, for-profit after-school academies called hagwons. They are usually placed there by recruiters, who work freelance and are paid by schools to find them teachers.

By far, the vast majority of those hired are white. It is Korean custom to include photos with resumes, making it easy to screen out non-whites—not to mention anyone who might be considered too old, too big, or insufficiently attractive. Education-obsessed Korean parents pay an average of $200 per month per student for English lessons at hagwons, though the fee often tops $400 , about the same as my share of the monthly rent and bills, or two weeks’ worth of groceries for a family of four. NSETs usually earn between $2,400-$2,800 per month, usually with free housing. Combined with low taxes and a marginally lower cost of living, it’s easy for a teacher to save up to $1,000 per month, plus a mandatory bonus, equivalent to one month’s salary, paid at the end of the contract—a tempting offer for any young graduate drowning in debt.

According to BBC News, in 2013 there were just under 100,000 hagwons in the country, with over three-quarters of Korean children reportedly attending one—not just for English, but for math, Korean, science, as well as non-academic subjects like martial arts, swimming, and piano. The best hagwons (meaning the ones with the most graduates attending top universities) are located in rich neighbourhoods like Gangnam, where real estate prices are through the roof. NSETs are hired because it’s felt their pronunciation is superior to Koreans’, but also because it’s prestigious to have a foreign teacher for your child—even more so if that teacher is white.

Like everywhere else, whiteness has a pedigree in Korea. I have never had to dig deep to explain “white privilege” to my students—they immediately understand what I mean. In 2009, for instance, a study at Ehwa Women’s University in Seoul (a university set up by American missionaries), detailed how Korean students were more likely to want to make friends with whites than blacks or Southeast Asians. And in 2009, Lee Incho, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, published an article in the journal Language & Literacy, analyzing Korean English textbooks. He found the vast majority of artists profiled in the texts were white and Western, and only white and Western authors, in particular, were profiled.

Profiles of non-Western arts and artists included value neutral descriptions, rather than the glorious descriptions paid to Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and the ballet. “In addition to the continued recognition of education as a means for gaining more power, Koreans eagerly search for role models who have already achieved what they perceive to be global power,” Incho writes. “Koreans are eager to position themselves closer to these groups, as opposed to the non-West, the Periphery, or non-Whites.”

Nadia Kim, a Canadian-born academic at Loyola University in Los Angeles, argues in her book Imperial Citizens that it’s white North Americans who most convey the concept of advanced, global society to South Korea —Koreans who, only 60 years ago, were some of the poorest people in the world. Blacks, Asians, and others are perceived to represent the “backward” Third World. Kim writes that Koreans “have been profoundly affected by U.S. mass-media saturation, whether in the form of pro-military programs on American Forces Korea Network, Gone with the Wind, commercials for Uncle Ben’s rice, Mission Impossible III, Peyton Place, or CNN’s coverage of the 1992 LA unrest.” She adds that when mixed with Korea’s national myth of a single bloodline, many Koreans’ erroneous conclusion is that “real” Americans and Canadians are white.

Jenny Jackson-Smith, 40, is from Ottawa and black. She has always loved travel, and after completing a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages certificate, she decided to try her hand at teaching in South Korea. When dealing with recruiters, she was often asked to hide her race—or otherwise be told she couldn’t get the job she wanted. Recruiters weren’t happy when they discovered she was born in Bermuda, she says, and at least three asked, “Oh my goodness, are you a black person?” She could tell then that the interview was not going anywhere good.

Jackson-Smith did get a job (she doesn’t remember how long it took) but her first day at school was brutal. She’s not sure whether the school’s director knew she was black, or whether he thought she may be light-skinned enough to pass as white. Either way, when Jackson-Smith arrived, the director, as she puts it, “freaked out.” He commanded she not tell the children she was black, hoping apparently, that they wouldn’t notice. “I pretended that I didn’t understand him,” she says. “It pissed me off so much.”

A few months later, Jackson-Smith, returned from a vacation in the Philippines with braids and a dark tan. Even if she wanted to, she could not longer hide her blackness and phones at the hagwon were ringing off the hook. Parents wanted to know why they weren’t told earlier the teacher was “an African.”

Genny Vu, 24, a Vietnamese-Canadian from Montreal, estimates that for every job offer she received, her similarly qualified, white boyfriend would get at least three. “It usually started with one of us sending the recruiter an email with our information and it ended when we sent them our pictures,” says Vu.

It was once common to see recruiters advertising “whites only” jobs, but these are becoming scarcer, not least because the newest recruitment tool of choice, Craigslist, won’t allow them, per its terms of use. But recruiters say most schools privately ask for white teachers only. For the past four years, Jay Ahn has worked for a large recruiting firm, dealing with many of the large hagwon chains in Korea. He says most hagwons “pretty much demand North American, white-looking females, who are somewhat attractive.” If those requirements are met, often the hagwons won’t even ask for an interview. They will simply hand him a contract and say, “proceed.”

In the case of white males, he adds, a school will usually wait a few days, and then ask for an interview. If he sends an Asian or a black teacher’s resume, “most times they just ignore me.” He says hagwon directors twice questioned his abilities as a recruiter when he sent nonwhite teachers, asking “is this all you’ve got?” In one instance, Ahn sent a hagwon director a non-white teacher’s resume, and received no call back. Ahn then sent a white male’s name, and was told he would get a call back later. Then he sent a white female’s name and was called back in 30 minutes, with a request for an interview. It’s a common pattern, he says.

He says it’s the biggest hagwon chains that want the whitest teachers, because parents pay the most money to send their kids to those hagwons. While Ahn refuses to do so, he also says many recruiters will charge hagwons $1,300 for placing a white, North American female, but only $800 for a visible minority. Ben Glickman, CEO of Vancouver-based Footprints Recruiting, adds there are jobs for non-white teachers, if they are persistent. He says potential teachers should consider working at public schools instead of hagwons, since there is no profit motive at the public schools.

I repeatedly contacted five of the largest hagwon chains for comment: YBM/ECC, Jeongsang Language School (JLS), GnB, Avalon, and Chungdahm. All are household names in Korea, and together they run hundreds of hagwons throughout the country. I received no reply from any of them. However, the manager at one branch of Chungdahm was quoted in the Korea Observer, an internet newspaper, about a “whites-only” ad posted in March this year. “John,” who wouldn’t give his real name to the paper, confessed: “I am acutely aware of discrimination as I am a Canadian citizen. We cannot hire non-white teachers because we get too many complaints from parents.” He continued, “Hiring only Caucasians is not a rule but a common practice in Chungdahms as well as other language academies.”

Though it’s easy to simply categorize Korea as a virulently racist nation—as newspaper polls, dozens of academics, and even I have done—the racism reflects back on us, in Canada and the West. Koreans are acutely aware that whites continue to dominate top jobs in Canada and the U.S. They see minorities represented in the Western media as gangsters, pizza delivery boys, befuddled immigrants, or nothing at all. If Korean mainstream society embraces racism, it picked up on these racist cues from the West.

“I have a lot more forgiveness towards Korean racism than towards Canadian racism,” says Jackson-Smith. “The racism in Canada—Canadians often times don’t want to admit that it’s racism.” Just like in Korea, in Canada Jackson-Smith feels she’s black first and an individual second. Ziem Phala, a black Canadian who has taught in Korea for four years, agrees that in Canada, Canadian-ness often equals whiteness. “When people ask, ‘Where are you from?’ and I say I’m from Ottawa, the second question is, ‘No, where are you really from?’ Whereas no one is going to ask that of another white person, even if they’re straight off the boat from Italy.”

While looking for a new job, a black American friend of mine complained that he had never had to deal with discrimination like this ever before—and he’s from Los Angeles. But he admits that race is a tricky thing, and told me what is said out-loud in Korea is simply said under a person’s breath back home—or just shown on TV. Korea, a nation sealed off from the world only 120 years ago, did not develop its racism in a vacuum. It was imported, just like its English teachers.

Illustration by Miki Sato

The months leading up to my graduation this spring were a mix of excitement and desperation. Excitement, because after four years of journalism school at Ryerson University my love for academia had turned sour—I was aching to be done. Desperation, because I knew once I was done, my unemployment would be more apparent and stark than ever. I pored through job listings for hours on end, constantly tweaking my resumé, hitting the “apply” button so many times I started to forget which jobs I had actually applied for.

No emails back. No phone calls. Not a single interview. And all of this was made worse by headlines reminding me just how completely screwed I was. “Indisputable Evidence That Millennials Have It Worse Than Any
Generation in 50 Years,” read the Atlantic in February 2014. “Ontario youth unemployment among the worst in Canada,” from CTV in September 2013. “Why are so many of Canada’s young people out of work?” CBC in June 2013. “Recent university grads increasingly jobless, study shows,” Globe and Mail, September 2014.

The statistics were muddled. While one mid-2013 article on the CBC claimed that youth unemployment was at 14.5 percent, another, in Maclean’s, asserted serious youth unemployment was simply a myth, citing a Statistics Canada study that put unemployment in Canada for 25-29-year-olds at 7.4 percent in 2012. “[The] stagnation in the quality of jobs may explain some of the frustration,” the Maclean’s article allows. “Some university graduates are likely settling for lower-rung jobs that they would have avoided in the past.” (Perhaps true—but perhaps also this means that we’re so desperate to avoid unemployment, we’ll take anything.)

But beyond the headlines, there are the actual people of this highly discussed and debated generation—and, speaking as one of them, the employment drought sure feels real. Every time I read one of these articles, mostly written by someone who isn’t a part of my generation, it’s like we’re mice in a lab. We are the Boomers’ and Generation X’s greatest sociological experiment: scurrying through preset conditions, our achievements and pitfalls analyzed by people who are utterly detached.

“I think a lot of older generations are out of touch with the way that education and professional fields have changed,” says 23-year-old Kelsey Leung, “especially those who are comfortably collecting paycheques for jobs that they have had for quite some time.” Leung has a bachelor of arts with honours in history from Queen’s University, and a bachelor of education from University of Toronto. Currently, she’s a barista—a job that doesn’t require two expensive degrees.

Like myself, Leung has been told millennials are simply entitled and lazy. Apparently, our desire for meaningful work after grueling, expensive, and mental-illness inducing degrees means that we are spoiled, ungrateful children. These criticisms, more often than not, come from middle-aged suburbanites who seem to have scored jobs straight out of school in the 1980s and never had to contemplate the possibility of being in their 30s and making minimum wage.

“I think that if being entitled means that I feel upset that I put in thousands of dollars of my own money and in scholarships towards my education,” says Leung, “and have been told that it will be at least four to six years before I get a full-time contract position—minimum—then I am absolutely entitled.” If anything, my generation is not entitled enough: We willingly scrape through terrible jobs, and work for free after years of education. Most of us feel like we can’t afford a sense of entitlement. Pride is expensive. And though we deserve to have some, we know that pride means no exposure, no paycheque, no chance.

I certainly didn’t feel entitled when, after graduation, I was eager to take on a part-time babysitting gig. I never even asked how much it paid. All I saw was a job. Despite receiving my pricey degree, I was in the exact position as I was before I earned it. I was still writing for free, and, eventually, months after graduation, only making a little money for articles. And I was still spending way too much time on job search websites like Indeed and Monster, cursing at the computer screen every time I came across the dreaded “five years experience necessary.” Amidst pages of job postings that, according to the requirements, I was not qualified for, I felt like Major Tom lost in space.

I started to think the only people landing decent jobs were people who were privileged enough to have the right connections. Some of my fellow graduates had connections within their family, others came from wealthy enough backgrounds to not have to worry about unpaid work. My parents immigrated here with my sister and me in 1996 and, because of that, despite their successes, they haven’t been established here long enough to be able to provide those connections for me.

In the end, my babysitting job fell through. Without full access to a car, it was another job that couldn’t work out. And so by July, I fantasized about just packing up and leaving. There had to be a job for me somewhere in this world; and not just any job, one that would actually make me happy.

That’s exactly what 29-year-oldDavid Matijasevich was thinking in June 2013 while he was working on his Ph.D. in political science at Carleton University. In his fourth year, Matijasevich was, financially, on his own. Not wanting to take on more debt, and knowing that the teaching assistant position provided by the school wouldn’t be sufficient enough to pay rent, he made the move to Singapore. He worked on his Ph.D. from there, where he was able to find work as an associate lecturer in social sciences, and an instructor and academic manager at an adult education centre. Matijasevich just finished his Ph.D. in September.

Matijasevich says that it disappoints him to hear Generation Y labeled as entitled. “Entitlement means expecting something without working for it,” says Matijasevich. “Yet young people, particularly during their school days, seem to be working harder than ever.” Matijasevich recalls his days as a teaching assistant at Carleton University, in which all 15 of the students in his class were working part-time jobs during their studies. Some of them were working more than 20 hours a week, on top of schoolwork.

There are more young people pursuing higher education than ever before. In 1980, there were 550,000 fulltime university students and 218,000 part-time university students. Now, there are 979,000 full-time university students, and 312,000 part time students. This is a huge feat, considering tuition fees have tripled over the last 20 years, and are expected to continue rising, especially in Ontario. In 1975, the average tuition in Canada was $551. In 2013 it was $5,772. In 2017, it is expected to be, on average, around $9,483 in Ontario.

Matijasevich’s solution, however, is not for everyone. Despite my fantasizing, I know I’m not ready for a move like that. Going to an entirely different country, let alone a different continent, is an extreme solution to paying the bills. It means leaving behind the comfort of home, loved ones, and security—just to not become trapped in the exploitative monotony of minimum wage service industry jobs. Getting a job isn’t necessarily the tricky part, it’s getting a job that doesn’t make you hate yourself for ending up in the place that you swore you wouldn’t. The hard part is getting a job that makes you feel proud, that allows you to comfortably move out of your parents’ house, that makes it possible to pay off your Visa bill without your chequing account looking like a wasteland.

I’ve been told I ought to go back to my old jobs—I worked as a cashier at Indigo for two years, and then worked four semesters and one summer as a part-time shelver at the Ryerson University library. (My last job ended when the library no longer had enough work for part-timers.) I wonder if I should. After all, is working for free any better than my days of asking people whether they wanted their receipt in the bag? Yet, it pains me to think I might have to stand behind the same cash register I stood behind when I was 17. “But I have a degree now!” I think to myself.

I sometimes feel like my resumé is one giant “but I have a degree now!”

At family functions, I seek out any distraction and avoid all relatives so I won’t be asked that dreaded question, “What are your plans now?” If caught, I mumble the usual “Looking for better work; freelancing; doing my best.” This answer has never impressed any of my relatives.

But is it even polite to ask that question anymore? It’s hard to chew my food when I’m thinking about how much money is in my bank account, and whether there was a typo in the last resumé I sent out. There should be a new rule that you should never ask a young adult in a terrible economy what their plans are. It’s just bad etiquette. I see the generation gap present in the apathetic nods of my relatives when I explain my mish-mash of ways to make some money, practically pocket change compared to their salaries. They seem painfully out of touch when they declare I ought to go to New York; I’ll get a job right away. If only it were that easy.

I don’t regret going to university. And I don’t feel like it’s useless. Education is important and it does make a difference—my career in journalism would not be even close to where it is now without my degree—but it would be disingenuous to say the strenuous journey to find good work hasn’t made me question whether it was all worth it. I can’t be the only one. Now that university degrees are the norm, I bet many have trouble seeing the value in a bachelor’s degree. There are so many of us with degrees, after all—currently, 1.7 million students are enrolled in degree programs across Canada. Degrees are something you have to acquire to get ahead, yet getting one doesn’t guarantee that you will.

For now, Matijasevich, Leung, and I are all doing the same thing. There’s one common thread between going to Singapore, working as a barista, and picking up odd freelancing jobs: we’re all doing what we feel we have to do to make it to the place where we are financially stable and happy. Say what you will about the flaws of my generation, but there is no doubting that we are a perseverant one. Maybe I’m entitled, stubborn, or just another foolish kid part of an underemployment statistic. Maybe I am the quintessential millennial being analyzed in some think piece written by a Generation Xer with a good salary. Maybe. But mostly I like to think of myself as just another person who works hard and wants the best for themselves. I’m one of the mice in the social experiment that older generations have subjected me too, hoping to escape the maze.

Illustration by Dave Donald.

Of all the arts, dance is arguably the most physically and emotionally exhausting, and with an average annual income of a professional dancer sitting at $18,000, the real-life Natalie Portmans live way under Canada’s poverty line. And the crippling anxiety that might overtake an almost-30 dancer who fears his or her career is ending is very real, because more than likely it is. Dance is such a physical art that while some can go on for decades, many work injured until they’re forced to stop.

“The thing about dance is that for most people, it’s not a job; it’s who they are,” says Amanda Hancox, executive director of the Dancer Transition Resource Centre. “And when the job ends, by choice or by necessity, there’s a lot of emotional trauma that comes along with that loss.”

The DTRC was started in 1983 by Joysanne Sidimus, who had recently returned to Canada from travelling throughout the U.S. with the National Ballet of Canada. She looked up some of her old dance colleagues and, according to Hancox, found them “just looking at blank walls” with no support, no money, and no idea what to do next. She partnered with the Dance in Canada Association and the Canadian Association of Professional Dance Organizations to research and understand the issues facing dancers in Canada, and the DTRC officially opened its doors in September 1985.

Since then, the DTRC has helped more than 10,000 dancers at all stages of their careers, and offers professional counselling, mentoring, workshops, and conferences. The DTRC has offices in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal and regional representatives in Calgary, Winnipeg, and Atlantic Canada.

One of the main functions of the DTRC is to offer scholarships and career counseling for current and former dancers trying to figure out what their next moves should be and assistance in training for a “parallel career,” as Hancox calls it. This often comes in the form of a part-time job to pay the bills, since there are few full-time jobs in the industry. Dancers, like actors, need more flexible schedules to allow for classes and rehearsals, which means they often end up in minimum-wage service jobs (while it’s not uncommon for writers, visual artists, or musicians to hold down nine-to-five jobs, and practise their craft outside of business hours).

Career changes are not uncommon for young Canadians, but what makes an organization like the DTRC so crucial to Canadian dancers is the young age at which many start, says Hancox. They start training at the age of eight or nine, sometimes five days a week or more, become a hired performer by 19 or 20, and then by the time they retire at 35 or 40—often due to chronic injury—they have made so little money that they have to start all over from nothing, and many don’t even know what their interests and passions are outside the world of dance, says Hancox. “It’s not like they went to university and chose a career.”

Day 14 of the Occupy Wall Street protest. Photo by David Shankbone.

[Note: this editorial appears in the November-December 2011 edition of This Magazine, which will be on newsstands and in subscribers’ mailboxes in early November.] 

Looking back on autumn 2011, it seems increasingly clear that the movement known as “Occupy Wall Street” will be viewed as a genuinely important historical moment for the West. The idea, first floated by the contemporary masters of agitprop Adbusters in July, quickly developed a life of its own, attracting thousands of people to a makeshift encampment in New York’s Liberty Square. They came for a variety of reasons, but their slogan was, and is, a simple and powerful fact: “We are the 99 percent.” As in: regardless of political affiliation, personal attributes, or occupation (or lack thereof), we are united by our opposition to the predatory economic behaviour of the top-earning one percent.

The “Occupy” meme spread quickly, with new demonstrations popping up across the United States and Canada. The language explicitly drew parallels with the Arab Spring revolutions still roiling the Middle East; the selection of Liberty Square, an echo of Egypt’s Tahrir, or Liberation Square, was no accident. (It should be noted that some fairly objected to the militarist and colonialist overtones of “occupying” anything.) This being the internet age, variants and jokes swarmed around the event too, with “Occupy Sesame Street” casting the Muppets as revolutionaries, and “Occupy Occupy Wall Street” satirically imagining hedge fund managers and investment bankers sitting in on the sit-in.

Many observers, particularly reporters from larger media outlets, were either openly scornful or simply missed the point. They got their footage of some “anarchists”—one of the laziest catchalls in contemporary journalism—looking angry or shouting slogans, and spoke in ominous tones about arrests and scuffles with the police, frequently omitting the fact that the police were the aggressors.

In fairness, Occupy Wall Street, for all its catchy slogans, actually is hard to summarize in a 60-second slot on the evening news, and thank goodness. People showed up for all kinds of reasons: jobs lost to globalization, homes lost to foreclosure, health lost to the U.S.’s senseless farce of a health care system (here in Canada, where unemployment is lower, banks more regulated, and health care still mostly public, the list of grievances was slightly different but still passionately felt). The point was never to hammer out a unified, focus-grouped electoral platform; it was to finally articulate a widespread anger and dissatisfaction with the status quo. Reporters asked “Why are you here?” as if they expected a camera-ready soundbite. But many of us asked, “What took you so long?”

The latest economic crisis had its roots in the investment bank collapses of 2008, and the last three years or so have inflicted a series of indignities on millions of people around the world. Most of them bore their burdens in silence, working- and middle-class citizens feeling shame for suffering the effects of an economic calamity they didn’t cause. Crucially, they are the constituency who are now shrugging off that humiliation and focusing their anger on the ones who are truly to blame. Critiques of globalized capitalism are nothing new; thousands of previously unradicalized protesters in the street certainly is. They’re mad as hell—you know the rest. What will come of it, no one can say conclusively. But naming the problem is the first step, and the Occupy protests have done an admirable and necessary job.

Site of the now-rejected Kanata gravel mine on land owned by the Elizabeth Metis Nation. Satellite imagery via Google.

A project that would have provided hundreds of Metis with jobs and affordable housing was quashed on Tuesday, with a 7-6 vote by the Edmonton City Council. And though it may not seem so at first glance, that decision was likely for the best. While the project’s benefits were appealing, there were some deeper problems with the proposal, especially its environmental toll. But whether you agree with the Edmonton councillors’ decision or not, the case raises a host of important questions: how to address the pressing social and economic needs of Canada’s aboriginal communities, for instance, and how to balance economic prosperity with environmental sustainability. These are thorny, complicated, politically charged issues, so it’s important to pay attention to decisions like this and how they’re getting made.

Here’s the background: Kanata Metis Cultural Enterprises Ltd., which is owned by the Elizabeth Metis community, proposed a gravel mining operation to be started up on land it bought in 2009.  According to  the  corporation’s proposal, the mine would have been operated for three to five years, created up to 300 jobs for members of the Metis nation, and yielded 1.7 million tonnes of gravel, the profits of which would have been used to fund Metis-focused social programs such as building affordable housing.

Opposition to the mine sprung up because the proposed site was right beside the North Saskatchewan River and, according to local conservationists, better left untouched. The North Saskatchewan River Valley Conservation Society posited that a gravel mine in the river valley could damage nearby wetlands and kick up large amounts of dust, harmful to area residents.

The argument against the mine was bolstered by the fact that the Edmonton Municipal Development Plan of 2010 specifically prohibits the harvesting of resources in the North Saskatchewan River Valley.

The task of the Edmonton City Council was to determine whether an exception could be made to the prohibition. Normally such a decision would be based on the potential value of the proposed project. But this particular case gave councillors much more to think about, as it raised questions about environmental protection, self-government, and aboriginal land rights (The Kanata Metis appeared to have taken on the role of standing in for Metis people across Canada, the term “our people” having been used frequently by proponents of the mine).

At a very basic level, the case could be made that Kanata Metis Cultural Enterprises should be allowed to mine the land because they own it. And although the city has prohibited activities such as mining in that area, the question of land ownership and use is complicated when it involves Aboriginal groups, self-governance being a stated priority of the Canadian government’s relationship with Aboriginal peoples. Although the mining proposal isn’t a cut and dried analogue, aboriginal communities’ autonomy is part of the mix of issues here.

Another major argument in favour of granting the Kanata Metis corporation exclusive mining rights to the area, was that the Metis nation, like many Aboriginals in Canada, are in need of assistance, and owed some form of compensation.

The 2006 census reported that the Metis employment rate amongst adults was 74.6 percent. Although this was a four percent improvement over 2001’s figures, it still placed Metis behind the non-Aboriginal population, whose employment rate was 81.6 percent. The 2006 census also reported that, as of the previous year, the median income for Metis was $5,000 lower than it was for non-Aboriginals. This inequity was even greater in Alberta, where the median Metis income was $6,600 lower than non-Aboriginals’.

Evidently a job-creation project with a focus on Albertan Metis deserves some thought, especially if it is also going to contribute funding to housing and training programs, as the Kanata Metis corporation said the mine would have.

But while the local Metis population would have benefited from the gravel mine, how should that be weighed against the environmental costs?

While campaigning in favour of the mine, Archie Collins, a councillor of the Elizabeth Metis settlement, described the Metis people as “stewards of the land,” a cliché about indigenous peoples often invoked by interested parties, aboriginal or otherwise, that portrays aboriginals as inherently protective and understanding of the earth and environment.

There are already conservation laws to which aboriginals are exempt because of their cultures’ unique relationships to nature. Hunting and fishing regulations, for example, do not apply to aboriginal Canadians, on the grounds that their cultural traditions, which include hunting and fishing, supersede Canadian laws.

Gravel mining, however, is not part of the Metis cultural tradition. It would have been undertaken only as a commercial opportunity, which makes it quite different from the hunting and fishing examples. Collins’s “stewards of the land” image, while romantic, does not exactly jibe with digging up a river’s watershed in search of gravel.

There is no doubt that the Kanata Metis Cultural Enterprises mine would have brought some needed material prosperity for Edmonton-area Metis. There is even less doubt that the Metis — like all Canadian aboriginal peoples — are owed some manner of reparations after a long history of oppression and marginalization. But there are better ways to help than the North Saskatchewan River gravel mine. There are definitely less environmentally damaging options. In the end Edmonton City Council made a tough choice, but it was the right one.

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.

The article goes in depth, examining jury absence rates and penalties by province. Only three of the provinces and territories track jury attendance, but those who do have relatively low penalties.

There are many reasons to avoid jury duty: it’s long, often unpleasant, and “sucks so bad.” The internet is abound with suggestions on how to get out of jury duty, with everything from feigning racism to being gay. Even if you do serve on a jury, you could cause a mistrial by being “dumb”.

In Canada, it is a civic duty to respond to a jury summons, either by showing up for the jury selection panel or providing a sufficient reason not to partake as a juror.

While some of the commentators on the Star article gladly participated in a lawyer hate-on, many spoke out about the very real barriers to participating as a juror.

Employers are legally obligated to grant employees leave for jury duty. Although jury duty remuneration vary by country and jurisdiction — in Phoenix you get free wi-fi, in L.A., free art gallery admission — it’s almost universal that employers have no requirement to pay salaries while you do your civic duty.

If approved at a jury panel, jurors in Ontario aren’t compensated until after 10 days of service (day 11 to 49: $40.00 per day, day 50 onwards: $100.00). This scheme is replicated across the country. In our (maybe post-)recession economy, many have less job security. With little to no stipend for lost work days, especially for the rising number of self-employed and those in precarious work, it’s no wonder many opt out.

There’s also the issue of transportation. When called to jury, citizens in most provinces have to get to the trial — or a jury panel, where they might be declined — on their own dime. A daily travel expense is issued to those approved for jury service living outside the city where the courthouse is.

As the Ontario government says, “parking facilities vary from courthouse to courthouse, and public transportation is strongly recommended if available. If you attend the courthouse as a member of the jury panel, you will be responsible for paying your own parking fees.” Nice.

While justice systems make allowances for certain hardships — medical conditions, school, vacations — being among the working poor isn’t one of them. In Ontario, there is no allowance issued for childcare expenses, so if you have to take time off from your minimum-wage hourly-paid job to attend jury duty, you’re left holding the bag for daycare or babysitting costs, without any income to offset it. The increasing number of people in that situation literally cannot afford to serve on a jury.

What results is a socially unrepresentative pool of potential jurors who are likely to be more economically privileged than the defendants they sit in judgment on. Much research has been published on jury biases based on economic background.

It’s reasonable to hypothesize that socio-economic status shapes verdicts. A jury’s perspective is shaped by the jurors themselves. If only those of a certain class or salary are able to afford the luxury of jury duty, they will deliberate on a very specific set of principles—especially in cases where poverty or race is involved.

Justice is costly. Fair trials require time, professionals, and lots of documentation. But just as underpaying prosecutors threatens the pursuit of justice, perpetuating barriers to jury duty compromises the integrity of a fair trial.

That wild bolshevik magazine Time has had the gall to question the notion that America is the best country in the world. The March 14th cover story, by Fareed Zakaria displays a red foam finger the reads “We’re #1” pointing downwards. “Yes, America is in decline,” reads the caption.

Some could argue that the U.S really hasn’t been in the best shape for a while now. In Canada, we have this crazy notion that Americans—occasionally—look at things from a different angle. Speaking of backwards, turn that Time cover upside down and there is a caption that reads “Yes, America is still No. 1.”

Of course the statistics say that over a year ago the unemployment rate was the worst it has been since 1983, with 15.7 million Americans out of work. Also, the U.S. is starting to fall behind other nations in terms of life expectancy, infrastructure, and is now only the 4th strongest economy in the world.

CNN specials airing this past weekend tried to advise the discouraged and unemployed with strategies on how pull themselves up by their boot straps and get back to work.

Of course this might require learning some Mandarin and having your evening news read by—gasp—a Muslim. Shockingly, some Americans aren’t too happy about this, because while millions have been out of work they have also been living under a rock. The comments on the CNN web page describing Fareed Zakaria’s feature story and his TV special “Restoring the American Dream: Getting Back to #1″ show how truly excited and open American audiences are to inform themselves and discuss change. The comment section is a swamp of racist horror that you do not need to read in full. But a few choice excerpts illustrates the point.

One commenter asks “Why is CNN/Time giving this MUSLIM a platform to trash America?” Then he/she proceeds to tell Zakaria (degrees from Yale and Harvard in hand, presumably) that he should go back to where he came from: his “shit-hole birth place INDIA.” Another asks: “Is he even American? It seems he would more likely be worried about where he is from. We don’t need some Indian telling us what we should be doing.”

Yes, America, though your economy is teetering, your political system dysfunctional, and your populace increasingly unhealthy, when it comes to weird xenophobic internet trolls, you truly are a city on a hill.

On February 8, roughly 1,500 Quebec crown prosecutors and lawyers went on strike in frustration over being the country’s most overworked and underpaid public lawyers.

The strike is believed to be the first in Canada. Prosecutors were given the right to strike in 2003 by the provincial government, who opted for contracts and incremental raises instead of binding arbitration. The aim of the strike was to close a 40 percent income gap separating Quebec from the national average.

An episode of CBC’s The Current examined the pay discrepancy and resulting backlog of cases. Lawyers discussed the low morale that comes with insufficient time to do justice. Decrying an understaffed system, one guest spoke of rape victims only getting 90 seconds to speak with a prosecutor.

A group representing the striking prosecutors says low salaries prevent the province from retaining the most competent lawyers, who must challenge the arguments of well-paid defence lawyers. Lawyers have left the provincial system, lured by competitive salaries in the private sector and other provinces. The result is a high rate of turnaround, with younger, less experienced prosecutors filling spaces left by those seeking greener pastures.

After the two weeks of picket lines, Quebec Premier Jean Charest legislated provincial prosecutors and lawyers back to work. The strike threatened provincial legislation, as state lawyers write the laws passed by the National Assembly.

As part of its back-to-work legislation, the province implemented a pay rise of 6 per cent over five years. It also announced plans to hire 80 new prosecutors and 65 related staff. The group that mobilized the strike estimates that Quebec lacks 200 crown prosecutors — 45 percent of its current workforce.

The resulting outcry is affecting the provincial government on multiple fronts. Not enough prosecutors have stepped forward for an upcoming biker-gang trial implicating 155 Hell’s Angels members. The government created an anti-corruption unit to prosecute those allegedly involved in organized crime in Quebec’s construction industry; crown prosecutors have boycotted the project. Last week, half the province’s top prosecutors asked to be reassigned, citing precarious working conditions.

Quebec’s current predicament is similar to the 2009 Legal Aid Ontario lawyers’ boycott. Legal aid lawyers refused to participate in long-term trials involving violent crime, saying they lacked sufficient pay and resources to provide a fair defence. Yet again, provincial lawyers were underfunded, threatening the pursuit of justice.

With a federal election looming, Stephen Harper is pursuing a tough-on-crime agenda, with stiffer penalties for young offenders, more prisons and fewer programs like prison farms. Toronto mayor Rob Ford wants more cops — something even the police union disagrees with — in an effort to grab the public safety vote.

All these proposals are empty hypocrisy without more crown prosecutors and lawyers, and adequate funding to pay them. They’d have to be well-paid to avoid the precarious conditions now experienced in Quebec. Otherwise, we risk undermining one of society’s most crucial institutions.