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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For years, Ontario’s long-haul truck drivers have decried their unsafe labour conditions, among them the inadequate number of rest stops off of Southern Ontario highways. A petition for more truck parking in Ontario created by private policy group SPR Associates of Toronto aims to improve working environments and safety for the long-haul drivers on the road.

SPR’s 2018 study—No Place to Sleep, No Place to Rest—as well as its 2021 critique of the Ministry of Transportation’s (MTO) response, Asleep at the Wheel, noted a shortage of anywhere between 1,200 to 2,600 parking spots in Southern Ontario, with more needed in Northern Ontario as well. The study itself surveyed 2,300 North American truck drivers who used Southern Ontario highways. Since 2018, the provincial Ministry of Transportation has created an additional 13 overnight spots, with plans for 200 more over the next five years.

Aside from materially improving the conditions of labour for truck drivers, more rest spots mean less danger for everyone on the road. According to the Ontario Provincial Police, fatalities from truck collisions rose by approximately 40 percent from July 2020

to July 2021.

The petition is asking the province to commit to 350 more parking spots annually. For Gary Hazlitt, a semi-retired long-hauler with about 35 years of experience, even though the quality of the stops has improved with the decades, their quantity remains far too low.

“I can remember on more than one occasion after struggling with weather and road conditions, being extremely tired, coming back across the bridge into Canada, knowing that the first rest stop is Tilbury, which is 63 kilometers east of the Windsor bridge crossing,” he says. “All I was doing was fighting to keep alert enough to get to that truck stop rest area, only to get there and find there was no parking.”

His next option was West Lorne, about another 80 kilometres up the road. That, or to pull into the shoulder to try to catch some sleep. Hazlitt considers the latter option extremely dangerous.

“When you’re laying in that bunk and you hear trucks going by you at 65, 70 miles an hour, never mind the cars,” he said. “No matter how tired you are, you’re not going to sleep because every time they go by your truck is rocking.”

Just how far apart are some of these stops? Hazlitt notes that if one was driving into Toronto from Windsor, the last rest area is in Cambridge—which he estimates has around 50 spots for drivers all coming into the metropolitan city.

At this point, you don’t really have any options. You’re already fatigued and, according to Hazlitt, many of the smaller towns and villages that dot Southern Ontario are hostile to truck parking. “No overnight parking” and “no truck parking” signs are seen “all the time.”

“So if the drivers aren’t familiar with the area, getting off the highway means you can get lost, you can get on a road that perhaps you can’t turn around, you can run into clearance restrictions,” he says.

According to the Toronto Star, 54 percent of truck drivers in Toronto are of South Asian descent; another Star article states that 72 percent of the trucking workforce in the Greater Toronto Area are immigrants.

The petition was made in collaboration with the Sikh and Gurudwara Council of Ontario, as well as the NDP Transportation Critic, Oshawa MPP Jennifer French. It also aims to introduce provincial and regional-level task forces, as well as other legislation for improving truck drivers’ labour conditions, like access to bathrooms.

“Overall, MTO’s limited response to the findings from the 2018 truck parking study is consistent with more than a decade of Ministry inaction,” SPR’s 2021 response reads.

The cancellation of Ontario’s basic income project not only violates our obligation as a society to ensure economic security for all. It also breaches the ethical obligations we have to those participating in research, and underscores the need for a multi-faceted research methodology in designing better income security programs.

The new Conservative government in Ontario led by Doug Ford has cancelled the Ontario Basic Income Pilot—an initiative of the former Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne.

The pilot promised a comparison of those receiving a monthly basic income in test sites in three areas of Ontario with those who did not. The research was aimed at ascertaining “whether a basic income helps people living on low incomes better meet their basic needs and improve their education, housing, employment and health.”

The Liberals put their faith in an evaluation design that approximated a randomized controlled trial. In research like this, a discrete variable (the basic income payment) is received only by those in an “experimental” group, and a comparison is done with a similar “control” group (who do not get the payment) to see if different, and potentially better, outcomes accrue to the experimental group.

My colleague at the University of Manitoba, Prof. Gregory Mason, recently made the made the case that it was time to abandon the project.

He argued that because the basic income pilot encountered several practical problems when setting up its evaluation methods as a more or less “pure” randomized controlled trial, there was scant valid and useful data to be garnered from the project.

Moral, ethical consequences

But, respectfully, I believe that a great deal was lost with the cancellation of the project. The moral and ethical implications of scrapping the program must not be ignored.

Some 4,000 recipients of benefits in the pilot—the members of the “experimental” group—are now without the financial support that was promised to them.

This abrupt and unexpected cancellation of the pilot by the Ford government amounts to a profound moral violation of the responsibility we have towards those who participate in research. This obligation is consistent with, but also goes beyond, the responsibility of narrow ethical research techniques as approved by research ethics boards.

The negative impact on those people has been extensively reported in the media, including in the pilot sites of Hamilton, Thunder Bay and Lindsay.On the campaign trail in the spring of 2018, Ford committed to allowing the three-year basic income pilot run its course. But Ford broke the promise less than two months after he was elected. The cancellation was an act of bad faith on the part of the new government to Ontario voters, and more importantly to the individuals already receiving basic income payments.

While these stories may be anecdotal, they describe real and significant hardships for those who had been promised a chance for a better life. The cancellation of both the pilot project, and of data collection and analysis from the three pilot communities, is a profound failure to uphold an ethical and moral obligation to research participants.

This ethical breach is not the fault of the team of academics and program evaluators who were in place to carry out the research. The blame must be assigned to their new political masters.

More than one tool in research toolkits

Prof. Mason’s argument suggests that the only worthwhile research design for the Ontario basic income pilot was a randomized controlled trial (RCT). But there are several tools in the research methodology toolkit besides a RCT design. Other methods could have been used to gather meaningful and useful data on the Ontario basic income pilot.

For instance, researchers might have amassed systematic data from those receiving a basic income payment in order to better understand the advantages and disadvantages, from the recipients’ point of view, of this new design for income assistance.

Quantitative techniques such as surveys, and qualitative techniques like interviews and focus groups, could have provided in-depth and nuanced evidence directly from the research participants themselves, even in the absence of a control group.

Comparative research could have also been done on the costs and benefits of a basic income payment compared to existing social assistance and disability support benefits using aggregate program, administrative and financial data.

All research methods have advantages and disadvantages. In certain contexts (for example, pharmaceutical testing), RCTs might be seen as the most rigorous and desirable methodology. But when tackling social scientific questions that are inherently complex and in constant flux, RCTs may not only be impractical, they may also have inherent drawbacks.

Alan E. Kazdin is a past president of the American Psychological Association, and (as quoted by Rebecca Clay in 2010) cautions that “overreliance on RCTs means missing out on all sorts of valuable information.” A 2016 study delved into the difficulty of applying the RCT method specifically to economic questions, making the point that “an RCT cannot simply be a matter of simple extrapolation from the experiment to another context.”

We need new approaches

One thing seems clear—the dysfunctional and oppressive nature of our current “last resort” income assistance system makes research into better approaches absolutely imperative.

Not proceeding with the basic income project, and not collecting available data from it, means that we are passing up a golden research opportunity.

Even if it were possible to run a highly rigorous RCT research design in a basic income project, there’s one big problem.

Research subjects in a pilot know that their benefit will cease when the research project ends. The recipients of an actual, operational basic income program, however, would know that there is no end date for the benefit—they will receive it for as long as they’re eligible.

So it would be reasonable to assume that the economic and social choices of basic income recipients (on questions such as employment, education, accommodation and fixed household expenditures) would differ between these two conditions.

Those with long-term assurance that their financial safety net is in place might take more risks and make longer-term plans to improve their economic situations. Thus, extrapolating from a time-limited basic income experiment run as a RCT to a real-world scenario seems an artificial and potentially misleading exercise.

Ways forward

While it’s important to make the case for a variety of methods (beyond just RCTs) in basic income research, this may be a moot point in regard to Ontario’s pilot. Despite national and worldwide dismay that the project is being cancelled, Ford seems committed on ideological grounds to stop the payments and halt the related research.

It can only be hoped that those who have been receiving basic income payments in the project will be given “a lengthy runway” to adjust to their new circumstances. Ontario’s minister of Children, Community and Social Services has given, so far, only a vague commitment that this will be the case.

Hopefully the project’s participants can also continue to tell their stories in the media and to academic researchers. We researchers need to gather evidence in a variety of ways if we are to contribute to the design and delivery of better income security programs.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Illustration by Erin McCluskey

On a rainy Thursday in April, I arrive at a yellow brick, split-level house in London, Ont. People are doing word searches at a large dining table. Some help themselves to a container of freshly baked peanut butter cookies, and CBC News is playing on a television in the living room. This house, tucked away in a quiet, tree-lined neighbourhood a few kilometres from London’s gritty city centre, feels almost like a family home. “You’ve come right in time for morning break,” says Sarah Dutsch, the homeowner, as I take off my shoes. This is one of Ontario’s Homes for Special Care: a controversial custodial housing program for people living with severe psychiatric challenges. Sarah and dozens of other Homes for Special Care operators are now in talks with the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care about the future of mental health housing in Ontario.

At first I am surprised by the peaceful, if static energy at Sarah’s place this morning. In the weeks leading up to the visit, mental health experts expressed to me major concerns about Homes for Special Care. They are government-funded, for-profit operations, born in the 1960s as a place to live for those discharged from psychiatric hospitals. Today, they are criticized for offering outdated and misguided support to vulnerable people. Sarah and her staff spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week caring for eight tenants living with mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and bipolar disorder.

She bought the Home for Special Care and renamed it the Dutsch Residence six and a half years ago, leaving behind a travel and tourism career in British Columbia because she wanted to do something “more meaningful” with her life.

In her kitchen she points to a row of colour-coded cups, one for each tenant, on a windowsill. There is also a code of ethics on the fridge, sign-up sheets for activities, and a list of tenants’ initials on the wall so Sarah can keep track of who is around for mealtimes. Residents can take out money from their monthly allowance from the Ministry of Health and LongTerm Care three days a week; Sarah goes to the bank to do the withdrawals. With the help of staff members, she cooks three meals a day (plus snacks), cleans, does laundry, shops, and supplies personal items like soap, shampoo, and diapers.

Outsiders may criticize the Homes for Special Care program, but it doesn’t change Sarah’s perspective on them. “We can’t lose the reason why these homes exist in the first place: to provide a safe, directed program, based on the needs of the tenant,” she says. “Sometimes the supports need to be pretty active, and that’s okay.”

Research, however, shows that the unconditional and mandatory support in place in Homes for Special Care operations could be hindering some residents from building the skills they need to reintegrate into the world around them. The program “meets almost no best practice criteria, and this has been known for 35 years, at least,” says John Trainor, former director of the Community Support and Research Unit at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). At one time Trainor was in charge of inspecting some Homes for Special Care operations in Toronto, and for decades he tried to close the program down. “It’s a scandal, really,” he says. “It shouldn’t be there. It’s worse than many models in countries with fewer resources.” In the 1990s, Trainor says he was pulled into a meeting with senior Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care officials who told him that the program was, in fact, slated for closure. But those plans never went through. “We never got called back to another meeting,” he says.

Founded at the start of de-institutionalization, in 1964, and despite the Ministry’s apparent efforts to shut the program down, Homes for Special Care endures. Now, the program that houses some of the province’s most mentally ill citizens is slated for modernization, to be completed by 2020. Homes for Special Care operators and the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care agree that the program needs to change, but the two sides are at odds about what, exactly, to improve. Talks are stop-and-go. Outside experts, including Trainor, question if the 50-year-old custodial housing program should exist at all.

***

In Sarah’s dining room she begins to introduce me to some of her tenants—eight people who are part of a group of hundreds in Ontario whose lives and homes are at the centre of this debate. A woman named Carol (whose name has been changed to protect her identity) with grey hair and a stable, intense gaze appears from the kitchen. As I turn around to greet her, she immediately asks to speak with me in private. Sarah grows tense as Carol leads me into the living room.

We sit side-by-side on a couch. Carol wears a pink, flowery shirt and though she has asked to talk in private, she speaks loudly enough that Sarah can hear her from the adjoining dining room. “I don’t like the atmosphere here, it has a very negative impact on me,” says Carol. Years ago, Carol lived in a supportive housing apartment for individuals with disabilities with her boyfriend, James. After more than one fire started in the apartment and bed bugs were found, Carol and James were evicted, and Carol found herself living in Sarah’s residence. Her niece now picks her up and drives her for weekly visits to see James who, following the eviction, was placed in a tightly controlled long-term care home. “It was hard for me to adjust, because of not having the nurturing relationship [with him],” says Carol. She says she wants to live independently again, to be with James; she feels restless and isolated. I ask what she likes to do for fun. “I go to the variety store quite a lot,” she says. Sometimes, she stays in her bedroom. “I have my TV in there and I like the solitude.”

As Carol and I talk I can feel Sarah’s presence in the next room. She sighs audibly and then appears in the doorway: “Should we set a time limit on this?” This was not how she expected the visit to start, she admits. Later, she tells me Carol has “stuff on the go” almost every day—community programs three days a week and visits with her niece and James on Tuesdays. Still, Carol maintains that she wants more. “I call Carol my Eeyore, lovingly, because everything is always dark even though she has the most supports,” says Sarah.

In a series of meetings conducted by the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care for the modernization of the Homes for Special Care program, many residents echo Carol’s sentiment: They want more independence. The Ministry did not agree to multiple requests for interviews, and they would not provide me with the raw data from the survey they conducted, or the interview notes.

But other research shows similar findings. In a 2017 meta analysis of housing choice for people with mental disorders, published in the journal Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, researchers’ pooled analysis showed that 84 percent of study subjects preferred to live in their own apartment, with family, or with people with whom they’ve had a choice in selecting.

However, Homes for Special Care operators argue that some tenants would struggle to live without the constant and custodial support that they provide. “I invite [critics] to come for a weekend. Because this type of program, as much as they disagree with it, it works,” says Lisa Zavitz, an energetic, self-effacing woman who runs another eight-bedroom home down the street from Sarah. For some, she says, “if someone is not there cooking them a meal, they don’t eat. If I don’t remind them to put on deodorant and change their underwear, some of them won’t. This is the reason we’re here.” Jim Akey, who owns one home in St. Marys, Ont., and another in St. Thomas, Ont., had similar concerns about independent living: “Some people might function fine with it, but I think they would be the exception, rather than the rule.”

When I posed this idea to Geoffrey Nelson, a psychology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University whose research focuses on community mental health programs, including Homes for Special Care, he disagreed. “That’s the kind of mindset that makes people stay where they’re at,” he says. “Some operators don’t believe that people have the potential for recovery, but we know from research that a substantial number of people with mental illness do get better.” Nelson conducted a study of mental health housing in London, Ont., in 2003 for the Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health. The study found that while 79.3 percent of subjects said they preferred independent living, 76 percent were not living in independent housing. Also, with the exception of only two people in the study, subjects who said they preferred to live in Homes for Special Care were already living in one. “When you start saying people can’t survive outside these walls, you might get a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Nelson says.

John Sylvestre, vice-dean of research at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Social Sciences, is the co-editor of a textbook on mental health housing. When I called him at his office on campus, he agreed. “If people want to try, let them try. Who am I to say that a fellow citizen has gone far enough?”

At the Dutsch Residence, Sarah and Carol lead me to the basement to see Carol’s bedroom. Full of books, photographs, and art, Carol’s room is small and lived in, and she appears proud of it. She is one tenant in the house with her own bedroom. In two other bedrooms, Sarah has created privacy barriers using various objects. For one tenant, a sizeable sheet of plywood from Home Depot and a dark wood dresser that’s taller than his bed separates him from his two roommates. “In a perfect world would he benefit from a single room? Probably,” Sarah says. In another room, she’s separated two beds using a room divider from Jysk, an affordable furniture store.

“We still see that people are sharing rooms with unrelated adults,” says Sylvestre. “They don’t get to choose who [their roommates] are. That’s not accepted in any other part of the specialized housing system. We’re in 2018 and to still see a form of housing that isn’t in its basic form or shape changed since the [1970s], I find it disappointing.” Some homeowners, including Sarah, say some tenants like sharing rooms. Plus, at the current level of funding, she says the only way she can operate this business is by housing eight tenants in a four-bedroom house. Long-term care homes in Ontario, and prisons and hospitals across Canada all get more per diem funding than Homes for Special Care. To keep a resident in hospital costs the province between $700 to $1,400 per day, according to the 2018-19 Ontario hospitals’ interprovincial per diem rates for inpatient services. In Homes for Special Care, a resident costs the province $51 per day.

In Sarah’s kitchen, jazz plays on the radio as Sarah puts together chicken salad sandwiches with the help of one of her tenants. “At first I was worried about you talking to Carol,” she confesses. “But really, she’s the perfect one for you to talk to. She indicates what the struggle is. Somewhere in her mind, she wants more independence, but in the day-to-day realities of how her life trajectory has gone…”

She trails off, but doesn’t need to finish. The mental illnesses that tenants in Homes for Special Care deal with are not minor by any measure. Operators regularly struggle with where to draw the line when it comes to providing support for their tenants—when to let them live their own lives and make their own choices, and when to intervene because those choices are against the best interests and sometimes safety of the tenant.

Every month, tenants get about $140 from the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care for personal spending. According to homeowners, many spend the allowance immediately. “It’s gone within 24 hours,” says Lisa Zavitz. Often, she says, she finds tenants lying on the sidewalk near their home, having defecated in the street after trips to Valu-mart on payday. “They eat so much their bodies can’t break it down.” Increased appetite is a common side effect of medication for schizophrenia, and “the medication pushes their addiction button.” She says one of her tenants drinks oil. “Within human rights, I can’t physically stop them from that, so I clean up the messes, I make sure they get bathed, I make sure the whole place has been bleached, and then I sit down and have the same conversation with them: ‘I’m here if you need help budgeting money. You can’t do this, this is bad for your system.’”

The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care plans to increase tenants’ spending allowance to $500 per month, a move that every operator I spoke with opposes. Sarah put her stance on it simply: “Sometimes, them not having money can be one of their only controls.”

***

The homeowners and operators I spoke with are open, even enthusiastic, about giving more individualized care and independence to tenants, but they say they need more funding to do so safely and effectively. Many of the homes are now closing down—smaller ones have become too expensive to run, owners say.

“We’re not like small businesses, we can’t just increase our costs,” says Connie Evans, an owner and president of the Ontario Homes for Special Needs Association. “Empower the homeowner” is a maxim used by several Homes for Special Care operators who say they need more money from the province to survive. “The small homeowners have been struggling, they are not making any money,” says Rahim Charania, another operator.

Policy experts argue that the for-profit model of Homes for Special Care is one of its most fundamental flaws. “It provides an incentive for people making money to keep a stable pool in their house and to have attitudes to say that they can’t do any better,” says Nelson.

Sarah’s Home for Special Care is perhaps one of the best in the business, and not all homes are run like hers. “The one-on-one care, the home-like setting, making sure that they matter and are part of the family. We’re a family, and we’ll argue and bicker and everyone is entitled to that,” says Lisa, who guesses that 50 percent of homes could use significant improvements.

***

On a warm day in May I pull up to a building tucked away on a side street in downtown Toronto. This residence, which opened in 1994, is inconspicuously large with high ceilings and 20 private bedrooms each equipped with an ensuite four-piece bathroom. “This is the Cadillac of mental health housing,” says Janet Huang, the executive director of the non-profit housing program Pilot Place Society, who welcomes me at the door.

With just slightly more staffing than Homes for Special Care, this non-profit is known as one of the best ways to house people with mental illness. “Homes for Special Care went out of fashion, although they were the answer to a lot of things,” Janet says.

The program should not be abolished entirely, Janet says. “There are people who could do well there,” though, she says, it certainly shouldn’t be the only option.

At Pilot Place Society’s three Ontario residences, the philosophy is recovery. “We are re-training people for community living,” Janet explains. They’re taught the basics, like how to bathe and pick out an outfit. Some tenants are employed by alternative businesses as mail couriers and others as helpers in a cafe in the city. There is a Tenant Council run and led by the residents.

Even in this type of housing, where increased independence is an explicit, mandated goal, getting people to recover is difficult. Janet and her staff took at least a year to successfully train residents to go to the corner store next door unsupervised. One Pilot Place Society resident named Ivan showed up in 2009 from CAMH’s inpatient unit, where he says employees told him he could not cross the street because he’d previously been hit by a car. At Pilot Place Society, Janet pairs Ivan up with other residents to go on walks around the neighbourhood. “Here, we’re part of a society,” Ivan says, adding that he’s much happier than his days in the hospital. “I have freedom here.”

Perhaps Carol, the woman in Sarah’s house with the stable, intense gaze, would fare better living somewhere like Pilot Place Society. Or perhaps Sarah and the Homes for Special Care program are offering Carol just what she needs for her specific challenges and abilities.

Carol’s niece, one of her only surviving family members, is happy with the care her aunt gets at the Dutsch Residence. “Sarah has a routine, a grasp on these guys. Carol doesn’t seem happy there, but it’s a wonderful place,” she says. Is the embattled custodial housing program fundamentally and philosophically flawed, or is it in need of a serious fix? Sarah doesn’t know what, exactly, the Ministry’s modernization and the plans to change the program will ultimately mean for tenants.

“We’re all kind of scratching our heads going, are they losing something, or are they gaining something? I’m just anxious about caring for these people.”

Johnson chose to fight back. In September 2011, he showed up at Cedar Centre and begged them to take him in. Over its 31-year history, the Newmarket, Ont.-based non-profit has helped save many lives like Johnson’s. The centre provides intense, personalized trauma therapy to those who have suffered childhood sexual abuse or other forms of interpersonal violence. It’s run by a staff of therapists, counsellors, volunteers, and Alison Peck, the centre’s executive director, who work to ensure victims of trauma get the help they need.

When the centre was nearing its 30th anniversary in 2016, it underwent a rebrand. Called the York Region Abuse Program at the time, the centre had long been considered the region’s best kept secret. Successful as it was, Peck wanted more people to know about it, and she wanted its name to reflect their doors-open philosophy.

“Abuse is a big word,” says Peck. Switching to “Cedar Centre” has not only de-limited the organization’s reach and work in trauma, but also conveyed that, like the cedar tree, the centre is that place where the fragile can gather for shelter during difficult times of the year. “This is where they can find safety and security, and learn to seed, nest, and fly back into nature,” she says.

Cedar Centre’s trauma therapists are a mix of psychotherapists and social workers practicing psychotherapy. While she is not a trained psychologist herself, Peck provides support to those dealing with secondary trauma or compassion fatigue through her own private practice.

Operating Cedar Centre is at once the most difficult and rewarding work of Peck’s career. Certainly, it’s invaluable. The most recent Statistics Canada numbers show that 33 percent of Canadian adults experienced childhood trauma. Of them, 67 percent never told friends or family about it and 93 percent didn’t report the incidents to authorities. The impacts on a person’s life are severe and long-lasting. Adults who experienced physical or sexual abuse are more than twice as likely to have psychological limitations and to experience violence as adults, and nearly twice as likely to use illegal substances than those who had not experienced childhood trauma, even with similar education, employment, and income levels.

Meanwhile, a 2012 study measured the economic impact of not treating childhood trauma at about $270,000 over the course of a victim’s life, to say nothing of the immeasurable social and emotional impacts.

After three years of therapy and group sessions at the centre, Johnson, the paramedic from York Region, felt empowered to take his abuser to court, with his Cedar Centre therapist at his side for some appearances. “Their therapists are very supportive and nonjudgmental,” says Johnson. “They allow you to have your voice and they validate what’s being said.” Today, Johnson is an advocate for Cedar Centre’s work, and a member of its Speakers Bureau, which allows former adult patients of the centre to share their lived experiences of trauma and stories of recovery.

Delivering these services isn’t easy for many reasons. But Peck says the biggest challenge is funding. Despite raising about $100,000 per year through their annual fundraising activities, plus support from the United Way, the centre’s resources are tapped. For clients 18 years and older, there’s a year-and-a-half to two-year wait-list, which is expected to grow by half a year every quarter. The wait-list is merely to receive the basic services patients need before they’re moved onto more intensive therapy.

This is significant for someone who has, after much consideration, committed to a trauma program. “Trauma work is tough work, and to ask people to wait for that long is difficult,” she says.

According to Peck, those who come through Cedar Centre’s doors to use its services “are probably the most resilient people I know because they have survived terrible things that have happened to them. They’ve been able to draw on their inner resources to make it to our door. If they can show up, I can show up too.”

The Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) faced a monumental task: Not only did it need to build a credible recreational cannabis business to manage consumer demand, but it had to outflank the drug’s illicit market, all while undercutting head shops. In figuring out how to balance it all, the LCBO turned to its control-centric history of alcohol management and adopted an approach generously described as happily repressive.

Gone are the resistant values of 1960s counterculture, along with any notion that marijuana was a key element of the era’s mind expansion and generational definition—not to mention a statement of alienation, especially by minority youth, facing police and an unforgiving justice and legal system.

Counterculture, with cannabis at or near its core, was always about experimentation with consciousness. But with the advent of Ontario Cannabis Stores, the arms-length agency created by the LCBO to oversee legal weed sales, any liberatory value that marijuana once had to challenge mainstream culture is gone. Come July 1, there will be nothing left of the subversiveness of pot.

More than 50 years ago, critical theorist Herbert Marcuse described how the loss of antagonism and an undercutting of subversion leads to an indifference to all things under a system of consumerism run amok. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse dubbed this “repressive desublimation.” While sublimation reroutes our impulses toward expressions of different realities, desublimation strips creativity of its inherent resistance, offering instead promises of immediate gratification.

And in Ontario, what restrictive pleasure it is! In historic LCBO fashion, whereas bottles of booze were fetched in brown paper bags, provincial Cannabis Stores won’t even permit self-service. There will be no open, well-stocked shelves of little green bags with unique, outward-facing branding. Virtual interfaces with products will abound, augmented by samples hoarded by sales consultants for smelling purposes only. Crowd management will begin at the door.

But will it end at the door? For its first five decades of operation after its founding in 1927, the LCBO kept records on every drinker, every purchase made, every employee, every drinking establishment and bottle of alcohol. The mandate of control was applied to sales and sites of consumption, with the agency deploying permits, order forms, region-specific stamps, interdiction lists, purchase reviews, and consumer investigations. Purchase privileges were cancelled for those deemed undesirable.

This is our predicament: anti-establishment values have given way to social permissiveness on pot, albeit tightly controlled

Government agencies cooperated fully in the passage of personal information during the LCBO’s early years, creating a kind of social sorting system. Membership in a First Nation, being a woman, or any application initiated by police and judges were met with more severe restrictions. Although this invasive and consequential surveillance system slowly disappeared in the 1970s, the LCBO occasionally still finds itself scrutinized by the province’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner for overextending its gathering of unnecessary personal information, as was the case with intelligence assembled on wine club members circa 2013. Not for nothing did the LCBO pay $250,000 in legal fees to fight scrutiny of its data collection practices.

With Ontario Cannabis Stores, history looks to be repeating itself. Will the LCBO trace every gram of cannabis sold? Can Shopify, the Ottawa-based online retail company hand-picked to run Ontario’s online and in-store cannabis sales, guarantee that consumer purchase data will not end up on U.S. servers? Can the LCBO?

The cannabis retail experience will confirm that a properly calibrated and carefully controlled effort to make marijuana mainstream will bring quick satisfaction in the form of easy-to-purchase legal weed. Yet it may come at the cost of relinquishing personal and purchase information, which could be consequential for already marginalized groups, those at border crossings, or anyone applying for jobs or insurance.

Flashback to 1970. John Munro, Canada’s then-minister of national health and welfare in the government of Pierre Trudeau, was promising to legalize cannabis when conditions were right. They never were. In the intervening 50 years, we’ve ditched what marijuana meant to those negating the mainstream but kept the cannabis. The open road to decriminalization beckons but still has not been taken, despite high use rates and normalized status among cannabis’ many champions.

This is our predicament: anti-establishment values have given way to social permissiveness on pot, albeit tightly controlled. “Pleasure, thus adjusted,” wrote Marcuse, “generates submission.” If estimates about the magnitude of the cannabis market are accurate, submission to one-dimensionality will be massive. And what comes after dashed counterculture promises?

Assurances that the system of control will evolve are hollow. It’s not the system that needs to evolve, but the mental, social, and environmental ecologies of cannabis culture that must find new paths in a radically altered landscape.

Macdonald Scott’s client called him on October 17, 2016 to tell him that he, along with the other detainees at the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ont., had stopped eating again. It was the third hunger strike in less than a year—an act of defiance that both encouraged Scott, an immigration lawyer, and worried him.

“I was excited to know they were still fighting,” says Scott, whose client, a Nigerian man, has been detained since 2005. “But scared because the government has been ignoring them, and hunger strikes can lead to serious medical issues.”

Scott has been battling what he calls unjust immigration policies for decades. Before becoming a lawyer, he volunteered at the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty in 1998. It was there that he began doing casework with migrants, which inspired him to become a lawyer. “I thought legal training might point me forward as how to deal with these forms of oppression,” says Scott. “I haven’t looked back.”

Currently a lawyer at Carranza LLP in Toronto, Scott frequently does pro-bono work for detainees. “I am driven by love for my comrades, who organize and fight and are so brilliant, and for my clients, who are so resilient and so smart,” says Scott, who’s also an integral voice of migrants rights group No One Is Illegal.

According to the government, migrants are detained when deemed a “flight risk” or “danger to the public,” or when their identity cannot be confirmed by border agents. Often they are plucked from the street for small offences—such as speeding or minor drug possession—and kept jailed indefinitely for violating immigration policy.

In 2013, more than 7,300 migrants were detained in Canada without charges or trial. In Ontario, where the majority of undocumented migrants are held in Canada, only nine percent of detainees are ever released.

In August, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale announced a $138-million investment for Canada’s immigration detention centres in response to the recurring hunger strikes. Goodale expressed hopes for making detention a last resort. But critics are calling for more, including capping detention periods at 90 days, a standard practice in many developed countries. Ultimately, Scott wants to see an end to immigration detention, which he says simply doesn’t make sense.

“Technically it’s administrative, not a punishment,” says Scott. “Why would you put someone in jail if not as punishment? Incarceration tears apart families, communities, and partners.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Macdonald Scott as an immigration consultant. This regrets the error.

This policy will prevent doctors from providing or denying health care, “on the on the grounds of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status or disability.” (In further it’s-about-time-news, gender identity and gender expression are newly protected grounds of discrimination under the Ontario Human Rights Code.)

In addition to having to refer patients elsewhere (in other words, to doctors who don’t decide who is and isn’t morally worthy of care), doctors will have to explain to their patients, directly and with sensitivity, why they are not willing to recognize things like women’s reproductive rights.

The policy reads: “While the Charter entitles physicians to limit the health services they provide on moral or religious grounds, this cannot impede, either directly or indirectly, access to care for existing patients, or those seeking to become patients.”

Um, how has this not happened yet? How is this even a thing?

I was naive enough to think the primary concern of health care professionals was the health of their patients. But this is clearly not the case—and some medical professionals appear upset their personal beliefs can no longer trump proper care.

Take, for instance, the Christian Medical and Dental Society of Canada. The organization, whose members take pride in what they believe to be moral integrity, held a press conference on the March 25 to announce it has filed an application asking the court to realize this new policy breaches sections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As reported by the Toronto Star, Health Minister Eric Hoskins recently told reporters: “They’ve been given an alternative. None of this is forcing anything . . . all that’s required of them is providing timely access to another health care professional.”

But to provide such access would be to value reproductive rights—and that’s always been a scary thing for some people, and too often it’s those same people who are in power.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her first 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.

Ontario hasn’t had a minimum wage increase since 2010, when the per hour wage rose from $9.50 to $10.25. The wage freeze in the three intervening years means that while the cost of living continues to rise, wages stagnate, and those costs of living cut into already modest wages.

The Campaign to Raise the Minimum Wage calls for an increase to 10 percent above the poverty line in Canada, or $14, which would make Ontario’s hourly wage the highest in Canada.

Currently, Nunavut sits in first place, at $11/hr, with the Yukon a close second at $10.54. Ontario and B.C. come in just under Manitoba and Nova Scotia, and are closely followed by Quebec. Saskatchewan and four other provinces and territories come in at $10, with Alberta a dismal $9.75 in last place. In contrast, the American federal minimum wage is $7.25, and has been since 2009.

While there are arguments against a wage increase from many factions, it is possible, and even likely, for full-time workers in this country to remain below the poverty line.

The proposed $14 would ricochet Ontario to the top of the provincial pile, and would likely pull the wages of many provinces up with it.

WAC and the Campaign to Raise the Minimum Wage will be holding their next day of action in Ontario on September 14.

sweetclipart.com

Canada now has a working group dedicated to figuring out bee mortality. On July 9, environmental group Sierra Club Canada shared a press release announcing the group’s formation, which is made up of beekeepers, farmers, scientists and others in agri-business. The press release mentions the recent loss of 27 million bees near Elwood, Ont. In the release, Sierra Club Canada’s executive director John Bennett says, “This working group is the first real recognition of the impact of neonictinoid on bees,” referring to a pesticide still used in Canada, though banned by the European Union.

According to the Canadian Honey Council website, Canada’s bee population has dropped by 30 percent in the past year. Globally, bees are disappearing by the millions; detrimental news for our food supply—pollination is responsible for 70 percent of plants grown for produce—and agricultural business. A brochure from the council states, “In Canada it is estimated that the value of honeybees to agriculture is $1.3 billion.”

Both Ontario and New Brunswick have seen a decline in their bee populations, as have Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba – the provinces responsible for 80 percent of the country’s honey production. Both honeybees and native bumblebee populations have been affected.

Hives have been found near void of working bees, leaving only the queen and immature bees. Though bees are social creatures that stay near their hives – the workers’ bodies are not found near the homes. Predators of abandoned hives, like hive beetles and wax moths, will not even enter the affected hives. This strange phenomenon has been dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Since 2006, different theories have circulated regarding the cause of CCD. They range from viruses, such as the Israeli acute paralysis virus and the nosema virus, to cell phones and even Osama bin Laden (yup).

Now, neonictinoid pesticides are being looked at. Used for corn and soybeans, the pesticide was authorized for commercial use by Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency in 2004. It replaced lindane, which was taken off the Canadian market after it harmed bees, birds, and other wildlife. Research published in the online journal Nature Communications says neonictinoid blocks a part of the bee brain, disabling them from linking floral scents to nectar. This research contributed to the EU ban, which upset neonictinoid companies Syngenta and Bayer. In a company statement, Syngenta disputed research findings: “The proposal is based on poor science and ignores a wealth of evidence from the field that these pesticides do not damage the health of bees.” Both companies warn the ban will cost billions of euros.

And now, we’ll get to see what Canada’s new working group determines in regards to this controversial pesticide.