It was the second day of the Calgary Stampede, a 10-day bonanza of cowboy-themed festivities in the Canadian province most stereotyped by its beef, oil, and country music. Nearly every local business had shut down for the week. “It’s our biggest holiday. You just don’t mess with the Stampede,” Calgary-born Mandy Alston tells me nearly […] More »

Hilary Black is tired. “Really fucking tired,” actually, she says. She’s been doing this—fighting prohibition, advocating for the rights of medical cannabis patients—for 21 years. And now she’s at the outset of an entirely new chapter: She is in charge of the social responsibility and patient advocacy arm of Canopy Growth Corporation, one of the […] More »

When Krista Dale was 11 years old, she awoke from a sleepwalking episode to find her stepfather on the couch next to her. “He was trying to have sex with me,” she remembers, 18 years after the incident. “I freaked out.” She ran to the bathroom, locked herself in, and began yelling for her mother, […] More »

For the first time in the history of Canadian mental health, in 2017, the federal government announced an investment of $5 billion to improve access to nationwide services. The lump sum, which is part of the government’s Health Accord with the provinces and territories, is slated to roll out over the next 10 years. Mental […] More »

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 […] More »

As a child, Tim Johnson was sexually abused by multiple adults. Brief therapy sessions then didn’t help him. “I wasn’t ready for it,” says Johnson, who’s now a paramedic in York Region, Ont. As an adult, memories of his abuse started creeping back until he hit rock bottom. “One day I left work with the […] More »

For more than half my life, someone has been trying to kill me. That someone is me. The first time I considered ending my life, I was eight or nine years old, living in a rented house with my father and brother in Owen Sound, Ont. My mother had moved out years earlier, after my […] More »

On June 15, 1983, Dr. Henry Morgentaler opened an illegal abortion clinic in Toronto. The Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics (OCAC) had chosen a spot on the second floor of a lovely Victorian house on Harbord Street, a quiet downtown thoroughfare lined with bookstores and cafés near the University of Toronto. With the Toronto Women’s […] More »

On August 20, 1995, I slipped into the passenger seat of my friend’s rusty old hatchback. It was nine o’clock at night. As we pulled onto the highway, heading from Ottawa toward Montreal, I wriggled to get comfortable on the vinyl seat, smooth against my bare legs. Fastening the seatbelt, I settled in. By ten […] More »

I used to dream about owning a house someday. Nothing extravagant, just a roof over my head that belongs only to me—a millennial’s dream of a room of my own. In 2012, that dream was on the horizon. I had finished my education and was living at home with my mother. She owns a modest […] More »

As fentanyl rears its ugly head across Canadian communities, the country is trying to mount a counterattack against the deadly opioid. And while cities beyond Vancouver and Toronto wait for government approval to open supervised injection sites, naloxone—the lone antidote in the battle against the ubiquitous street drug—remains scarce, according to a recent Canadian Medical […] More »