This Magazine

Progressive politics, ideas & culture

Menu

Economics

Spring 2024

The payday loan predicament

Newcomers to Canada are being forced to navigate predatory debt cycles

Erika Holter

Marcia Bryan knows firsthand the damage that can be wrought by a payday loan cycle. Bryan moved from Jamaica to Canada with her mother in 1981, when she was 18. Her mom thought it would be a better place for them to make a life. Years later, at a time when Bryan was helping her […] More »
May-June 2022

Out of control

A look at pandemic-driven rent policies across Canada

Khadija Alam

Graphic by Valerie Thai Canada is in the midst of a housing crisis, and one perpetuating factor is the skyrocketing cost of rent. Rent control is a type of provincial rent regulation law that limits rent increases. While every province and territory restricts the frequency of rent increases, only four provinces have some sort of […] More »
May-June 2022

Farming for the future

Conventional farming on P.E.I. is being challenged by a new approach to agriculture

Jill MacIntyre

Photo by Jim Feng; Design by Valerie Thai Severe and increasingly regular hurricanes, increased temperatures altering fishing grounds and crop development, drastic shoreline erosion, and the destruction of vulnerable ecosystems. These are all climate change impacts that are already happening on Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.) and will only get worse in the future without immediate […] More »
January-February 2022

Food for thought

Rising grocery prices across the country

Sydney Hildebrandt

The average grocery bill for Canadians has increased by 170 percent over the last two decades, according to Canada’s Food Price Report 2021. This is especially so over the last two years—since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in March 2020, Canadians have seen a major bump in their grocery bills. Food production issues resulting from […] More »
September-October 2021

Cash after COVID

Is money as we know it becoming extinct?

Keah Hansen

Back in April, a friend and I had met up to grab smoothies at a café before going on a lockdown walk. We each ordered, and I pulled out my debit card to pay. “Sorry, cash only,” said the woman behind the counter. I stared blankly at her, then my friend. “I don’t have any […] More »
January-February 2021

Equal work, equal pay

A timeline of how midwives in Ontario fought a 30-year battle against gender discrimination to earn back pay equity

Julia Mastroianni

Midwifery as a profession has been heavily dominated by women, and in Ontario, it’s the most exclusively woman-dominated profession in the province. Despite using similar skills and performing similar tasks to family physicians, since their official establishment as a health profession in Ontario, midwives have been fighting for pay equity. Here’s a look at the […] More »
July-August 2020

Labour opposes the arms trade

Trade unionists, workers, and peace activists unite against humanitarian crisis

Scott Neigh

Simon Black was watching the news on television with his one-month-old daughter on his lap. A report came on—a bombing of a school bus in Yemen by coalition forces led by Saudi Arabia, which killed dozens of children and injured dozens more. Black had one of those moments that sometimes happen to new parents, a […] More »
July-August 2020

Deliberate degrowth

Have we arrived at the moment when we need to seriously consider deceleration?

Paul Gallant

In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Year of the Flood, an outcast religious group called God’s Gardeners prepares for a pandemic by following a belief system based on pared-down consumerism coupled with kindness toward both human and non-human life. “They view us as twisted fanatics who combine food extremism with bad fashion sense and a puritanical […] More »
May-June 2020

Inside Canada’s Airbnb crisis

First, it came for our housing, now it's coming for our neighbourhoods

Nicole Beier

Just this past year, Canadian news was constantly covering stories of vacation rentals, made possible by platforms such as Airbnb, taking the housing supply hostage. When Airbnb first launched its platform in 2008, allowing anyone to rent out their home to tourists, they unleashed a swarm of people who were desperate to “live like a […] More »

Invisible labour and tangible risk

On working through a pandemic

Nisa Malli

Lately, all of my labour—domestic, creative, and income-earning—has shrunk to the space of a studio apartment. My office now doubles as my kitchen table, my gym, and my sick bed. It is a home which felt small even when I had access to third spaces for work, leisure, and exercise (such as cafes, parks, libraries […] More »
January-February 2020

The fare evasion blame game

How talking about skipping turnstiles keeps transit commissions unaccountable

Anna Bianca Roach

“Smile! You’re on fare evader camera.” Such is the message of the Toronto Transit Commission’s (TTC) ad campaign, which was rolled out in May 2019. The campaign follows a scandal that broke a few months earlier, when Toronto’s auditor general released a report estimating that the TTC had lost upwards of $60 million from fare […] More »