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 »

Every day a member of the Kinonjeoshtegon First Nation drives 70 kilometres from Lake Winnipeg’s western shore to a store in Dallas/Red Rose, Man. to buy 40 20-litre jugs of drinking water. That water is intended for elders and single mothers on the Jackhead Reserve, as Kinonjeoshtegon is also known, who don’t have access to […] More »

On a mild February afternoon in 2014, a pastor named Chris from the Maritimes sat outside his Jeep in a park near his home by the water, and smoked a joint. There was a sense of experimentation, curiosity even. Having never smoked weed as a teenager, Chris barely knew what he was doing. He got […] More »

One Friday in late January, a photo on Facebook had Debra Selkirk in tears. Weeks earlier, she’d received a desperate email from a woman in the U.S. The woman’s 30-year-old sister needed a new liver, but she had to be alcohol-free for six months before she could get a transplant. The question was: Did she […] More »

In the winter of 2011 in the small town of Watson Lake, a popular tourist destination near the B.C. border known as the gateway to the Yukon, an arrest warrant was issued for a 27-year-old Tahltan man. He had previous brushes with the law, mainly assault charges. This time, the man was wanted on eight […] More »