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May-June 2020

Not silent all these years

How '90s icon Tori Amos helped me through a troubling time

Adele Barclay

She dives for shells With her nautical nuns And thoughts you thought You’d never tell – “Pandora’s Aquarium,” Tori Amos I carried Tori Amos’s From the Choirgirl Hotel with me everywhere in eighth grade even though I didn’t have a Discman. I’d stick the album into the CD-ROM of my desktop during computer lab and […]

On thin ice

A trip to the Athabasca Glacier puts climate change front and centre

Sara King-Abadi

Standing at the toe of the Athabasca Glacier in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, the six-kilometre long swerve of thick ice—about the length of 65 football fields—opens up in a slow incline above you. It reveals crevasses and streaks of sediment framed by textured, scarred rock that rises over the sides of the ice expanse. These […]

Travel reservations

On travelling with chronic illness

melannie monoceros

I have travelled to the U.K. twice in my life. The first time I went was with my then-partner in 2009 and the second was on my own, in the summer of 2019. We (my now ex-partner and I) went to Brighton, Cambridge, and London. We walked for hours on cobblestone. I ran up and […]

Between two worlds

The ethics of travelling "back where you came from"

Barâa Arar

I am trying to get my grandfather’s attention at a busy intersection in Tunis, Tunisia. It is 36 degrees and dusty. He is old and frail and has outgrown his home country since he left for Canada 20 years ago. My grandfather once had every winding alley of the downtown core memorized, but he’s unfamiliar […]

I’m not a fake Canadian

Thoughts on travelling as a person of colour

Li Charmaine Anne

I often think of myself as a proud Canadian. Of course, Canada is by no means a perfect—or even racism-free—country, but as a Chinese-Canadian who has had the privilege of travelling widely, Canada remains one of my favourite places. But I’ve learned that introducing myself as Canadian in a foreign country can be surprising to […]

The band van goes green

Touring musicians and sustainability

Rosie Long Decter

Tamara Lindeman, also known as Toronto singer-songwriter The Weather Station, doesn’t mince words when it comes to climate change. Asked whether she thinks the music industry is finally waking up to the global crisis, her answer is a swift no. “People talk about feeling guilty more,” she says. “This doesn’t mean anything is changing.” Lindeman […]

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 […]

Talking travel, staying home

Our May/June editor's letter

Tara-Michelle Ziniuk

Months ago, before 2020 started, when we set out to come up with themes for the year, we could never have expected how the coming stretch of time would unfold. Travel, at the time, seemed like a theme that could affect just about anyone: people who had access to it, people who did not (and […]