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March-April 2019

Will Our Data Lead Us To The Virtual Afterlife?

As Canadians live longer and amass more personal data than ever, we could be getting closer to living forever in bot form

Stacey McLeod

Hayley Atwell as Martha in Black Mirror James Vlahos can no longer sit across from his father, hold his hand or give him a hug. But he can ask him for advice when he’s feeling blue and let his children ask questions about his family’s life in Greece or listen to him sing “Me and […] More »
January-February 2019

Gene machine

I spit in a tube and uncovered secrets about my family long held under wraps by the government. My case for consumer DNA kits

Adam Elliott Segal

Illustration by CSA Images IN THE WINTER OF 2018, like millions of others across the world, I ordered a DNA test. For $99, Ancestry.com promised me a look into my family roots, using just my saliva. The kit arrived in Toronto late last winter from Utah, Ancestry’s home base. I took the collection tube out […] More »
September-October 2018

Why did a young mother die in an alley after she was admitted to hospital? Her family says it’s because she was Indigenous

Windy Sinclair went to a Winnipeg ER. Three hours later, she went missing. Her body was found frozen in an alleyway three days after.

Ryan Thorpe

It was freezing in Winnipeg, cold enough that frostbite threatened to set in minutes; the kind of cold that sets deep in the bones, down to the marrow. Unforgiving wind ripped through flat, icy streets, and snowdrifts piled along sidewalks. A frigid, stainless steel sky descended on the prairie capital. By the time Windy Sinclair, […] More »
September-October 2018

When it comes to new treatments for addiction that rely on medication, Canadians need to have an open mind

Echoing failed policies of the drug war, calls for banning all pharmaceuticals are counter-productive and even dangerous

Tracy Giesz-Ramsay

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 »
September-October 2018

Meet the woman lighting up the way for cannabis justice

She’s been part of Canada’s cannabis community as long as we’ve had one. Now, Hilary Black is an integral member of one of Canada's biggest cannabis companies

Kieran Delamont

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 »
July-August 2018

Inside the battle to modernize 1960s-era mental health housing in Ontario

They're home to Canada's most vulnerable. They want change, but many decision makers are fighting it

Megan Marrelli

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 »
July-August 2018

I tried to kill myself. I survived. When Canada’s health care system failed me, I tried again, and again

What needs to change in our country's suicide crisis intervention system

Sarah Mann

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 »

What it was like to fight at an illegal abortion clinic in Toronto during the 1980s

Excerpted from Judy Rebick's new book, Heroes in my Head

Judy Rebick

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 »
May-June 2018

For Canadians with disabilities, accessibility is still a recurring issue

What still needs to change in even our biggest cities across the country

Susan Mockler

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 »
March-April 2018

Why can’t Canadians afford long-term sick leave?

Erica Mojzes found herself in trouble when she needed to take time off work for an illness. She's not alone—and many Canadians are sick, tired, and struggling just to get by

Erica Mojzes

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 »
March-April 2018

Taking stock of naloxone across Canada

We pinpoint the availability of the life-saving opioid antidote across the country

Anwar Ali

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 »