There are bed bugs in my apartment building, so we have to flee, fucking posthaste. I pack my roommate’s cat up in her little crate and hop into my inheritance from old Auntie Doreen, a blue ‘98 Chevy Lumina. We barely make it out before they have the white and blue bubble wrap covering the […] More »

“When are they taking me away?” This was a question I frequently asked my mom throughout my childhood. The first time I wondered this aloud I was three years old. My foster brother and sister had lived with us on and off for two years by then and I didn’t remember life without them. The […] More »

Breonna Taylor. I’m tired of hearing her name, I’m tired of seeing her face everywhere. It seems like 2020 has been the year for everything and everyone to break down. The complete isolation that so many of us have been forced into has destroyed any semblance of the old selves that were left. With numerous […] More »

When George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered by police in the United States, sparking protests across the world, Avnish Nanda, an Edmonton lawyer, approached Bashir Mohamed and Oumar Salifou with an idea for a podcast investigating anti-Black racism and policing in Edmonton. Within a week of launching in June, Is This For Real? had […] More »

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 »

  A few years ago, Kisa MacIsaac, an early childhood educator (ECE) and mother of three in Winnipeg, tried to calculate the feasibility of putting three children in childcare for the summer. At 70 dollars per day, she “would have been working for nothing, anyways,” she says. She ended up taking the summer off while […] More »

Catherine was in her mid-forties when she began looking for sexual assault centres (SACs) in Oshawa, Ontario. (Her name has been changed to protect her identity.) She was in panic mode as she combed through search results on the web. “I felt like my reality was crashing around me,” she said. She was at a […] More »

“I remember thinking to myself: if this is the future of work, then the future is going to be hell,” recounts bike courier Brice Sopher. Sopher began working for Toronto food delivery startup Hurrier in 2015 after getting laid off from his office job. As an event promoter and DJ, he was attracted to the […] More »

I am writing this days after the world learned that the officers who murdered Breonna Taylor would not be charged. People have noted that this was announced on the exact date Emmett Till’s killers were cleared of charges 65 years earlier. We’ve long been relying on systems meant to do exactly what they’ve been doing. […] More »

It was with heavy hearts that we learned of the passing of our long-time friend RM Vaughan this week. Over the course of many years RM was involved with This in various capacities: as the magazine’s Literary Editor, as a columnist, as a contributing editor, and as a writer—writing features, arts pieces, and more. Many […] More »

It’s a wild time to be writing about fashion and beauty, given people on social media have taken to referring to jeans as “hard pants,” while most of us continue to shelter in place in some variation of comfortable clothing (occasionally dressing up from the waist up for Zoom meetings and events). But fashion and […] More »