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Summer 2024

Creating community care

London, Ontario's chapter of Food Not Bombs reawakens amidst rising homelessness and food insecurity

Kendra Seguin

Allyson Proulx wants people to know that she and Andy Cadotte do not speak for all of the volunteers in Forest City Food Not Bombs. They are just two people in a collective looking to create change in London, Ontario. Forest City Food Not Bombs is a volunteer collective addressing food insecurity, poverty, and homelessness […]

Save the children

What progressive Albertans can do in the face of the province's proposed gender policies

Natasha Chiam

On a cloudy February day in Edmonton, Alberta, a giant trans pride flag flies over Dr. Wilbert McIntyre Park, marking the meeting place for a rally in support of the trans community. It’s days after Premier Danielle Smith, in a seven-minute video posted online, announced the most restrictive gender policies in Canada under the guise […]

Breaking barriers

A landmark move to combat caste discrimination in Canadian academia

Shilpashree Jagannathan

In the heart of the city, while more than 385,000 South Asians go about their lives, the University of Toronto (U of T) has quietly set a precedent. Amid the clamour for social justice and equality, U of T’s teaching assistants have negotiated with their union to include caste as a discriminatory practice—a move that […]

The birds and the UCPs

Youth see comprehensive sex education as a human right, and they're not giving up

Aubrianna Snow

Isabella Calahoo-Zeller was attending eighth grade in Alberta when she received sex education for the first time. It consisted of a YouTube video about consent, and not much else. “We didn’t really get much on what a penis looks like, or what a vulva looks like,” Calahoo-Zeller says. “We never got the birth video that […]

A love letter to Brown people in Vancouver

During this spike in racism, I hope we look out for each other

Shanai Tanwar

Dear Brown people in Vancouver, Do you feel it too? The way those who don’t look like us seem to slip their distaste for us “subtly” between sentences? The fact that irrespective of our immigration status, fluent English, accomplishments, education, upbringing and value systems, we are still… unwanted? The barely concealed microaggressions and scarily racist […]

The Gala Date

Michelle Poirier Brown

We met them first near the hot food. The catering staff were serving a dim sum shrimp dumpling on a bed of rice at the near end of the table. The caterers must have brought hundreds of ramekins to the venue that night, there was an endless stream of them, a new one for each […]

On the plus side

Rather than relying on fast fashion, fat folks are creating their own clothing economies

Megan Hunt

In the summer of 2020, for all the obvious reasons, I didn’t have much to look forward to—aside from the packages of clothes. Online shopping was a popular crutch during the harsh days of COVID-19 restrictions, but I felt adamant that my situation was different. I was nothing like the social media influencers showing off […]

Muscling through

Invasive mussels could soon enter B.C.'s waterways. If they do, it would be a disaster

Neha Chollangi

Merely the size of a fingernail, with a striped pattern on their shells, zebra and quagga mussels have a powerful grip. They make their way into new bodies of water by clinging to the hulls of boats and ships. Once they invade a water body, they attach themselves to native mussels, causing them to suffocate. […]

Skate culture

How one collective is empowering Indigenous youth

Ayesha Habib

Rosie Archie knew she wanted to be a skater when she was 12 years old. Her older sister Charmie was already good enough to land tricks, and Archie was not far behind. There were no skate parks in Canim Lake, a Tsq̓éscen̓ First Nation reserve in interior B.C., so the sisters would travel to nearby […]

Liar

Waseem Haja

When I was eight years old, my parents entrusted me with $16 in the form of eight $2 coins, an allowance for a school field trip to La Ronde, Montreal’s amusement park. Until 1996, the year during which the $2 tender in Canada was converted from a paper bill to a coin, my parents would […]

Rebranding the ring

Pro-wrestling lays the smackdown on bigotry

Jamie Burke

Let’s start with acknowledging the obvious: pro-wrestling is “fake.” I know. The storylines are scripted. The costumes are as beautifully designed as any Broadway production’s. The match outcomes are predetermined. But that doesn’t make what happens any less real for the people who step into the ring. Some of that realness is compounded for wrestlers […]