Photo by Daniel Thomas

Marcia Bryan knows firsthand the damage that can be wrought by a payday loan cycle.

Bryan moved from Jamaica to Canada with her mother in 1981, when she was 18. Her mom thought it would be a better place for them to make a life. Years later, at a time when Bryan was helping her teenage sister back in Jamaica pay for school, the Mississauga resident found herself short of funds required for basic necessities like rent and utilities. Despite having a job running a food catering business, there was no way she could see to make it work. Due to a lack of options, Bryan ended up taking out a payday loan.

She lives at Dundas and Hurontario, right across the street from a payday loan business. Her neighbourhood is full of them. What started as an initial loan of $2,700 to cover some business expenses quickly ballooned to over $12,000 as she took out subsequent loans to help with servicing the high repayment costs of her first. One loan turned into two, which eventually turned into seven.

“You don’t read the fine print when you are desperate,” Bryan, a mom of two adult daughters and grandmother to two children, says. “And these agencies can sense your desperation. I was paying over $700 per month for several months and was barely making a dent against the loan.”

Bryan is not alone. Rising interest rates have dominated Canadian headlines for months now. But the five to 6.5 percent rate that the average consumer is now paying on their mortgage is tiny compared to the exorbitant 35 percent interest rate that the two million people who take out payday loans in Canada each year are currently paying.

A payday loan is a short-term, high-interest, unsecured loan that is intended to bridge the borrower’s gap between paycheques. These loans are usually for small amounts, and the repayment is expected to be made in full on the borrower’s next payday.

Without credit history, and often without adequate supports, newcomers can be especially vulnerable to payday lenders. A positive credit history, of course, is a prerequisite for obtaining credit cards, loans, and mortgages. Without a credit score, newcomers may face challenges in accessing these essential financial tools, making goals like home ownership and basic needs like renting a place next to impossible. People rebuilding their lives need cash to do so, and often, there’s no other choice.

*

The payday loan industry is relatively new when compared to traditional lending institutions, having only emerged in Canada in the mid-1990s. Today there are about 1,400 payday loan locations across Canada. Big players in the industry include Money Mart, iCash, and Cash Money. For a sector that has only been in operation for 30 years, it has wreaked significant havoc. A study of 2,700 Ontarians who declared bankruptcy in 2022, conducted by Hoyes, Michalos and Associates, showed that over half of insolvencies involved payday loans. Just 10 years earlier, in 2012, only 21 percent of insolvencies included these loans.

Payday lenders would have us believe that they are filling a need in the market by providing loans to Canadians who otherwise wouldn’t be able to access those funds. The reality is that the very nature of payday loans, with their high rates and fee structure, often leads borrowers to being trapped in what has been coined as a payday loan cycle. In that same 2022 study, only a quarter of those loan recipients stopped at one transaction; 74 percent took out at least two loans, with seven percent taking out more than 10 loans.

Stats on how many newcomers seek these loans aren’t easily available, but it stands to reason that anyone without a strong credit score is susceptible to these predatory lending practices. Studies have shown that these loans are most common among vulnerable communities, and that includes newcomers, according to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

In 2022, a record-breaking year for Canadian immigration, 437, 180 people made Canada their new home, and levels are going to continue to be strong for the foreseeable future. This means something needs to be done now to correct this problem before it inevitably gets worse.

Elizabeth Mulholland, CEO of Prosper Canada, a national charity dedicated to expanding economic opportunity for financially vulnerable Canadians, speaks to some of the unique challenges facing newcomers as they create new lives in Canada. She says that while many newcomers are savvy with money in their country of origin, the fact that Canada’s financial landscape is often so different makes it challenging to navigate. “Lack of a Canadian credit score, language barriers, the absence of mainstream lending alternatives in their communities—all of these factors may lead newcomers to opt for payday loans due to the perceived simplicity and accessibility of these services,” Mulholland says.

Payday loan providers know that new immigrants may have limited options in securing credit and are quite strategic in their outreach efforts with this demographic. Key tactics include an emphasis on promoting their services as inclusive and accessible to everyone, regardless of credit history or immigration status. Advertisements often highlight the speed at which borrowers can access funds. For newcomers facing immediate needs, the promise of quick cash is an attractive selling point. And these funds are often only a click away.

“Payday lenders are incredibly savvy with their marketing, and they can get a significant foothold in lower-income communities where mainstream lenders and credit unions have pulled out,” Mulholland says. She says people in these communities often have bad experiences with bigger lenders. Once, a woman told her that when she went to the bank to cash a government subsidy cheque, she overheard the teller say, “It must be nice to collect welfare all day while the rest of us work.” In comparison, payday loan providers are generally fast, discreet, polite, and treat their customers with dignity. “It’s incumbent on financial institutions to demonstrate this same level of respect,” Mulholland says.

While payday loan providers often make their clientele feel respected in the beginning, when it comes to collecting on their loans, the kid gloves come off. In the event of a missed payment, loan providers will attempt to withdraw the funds directly from the person’s bank account. If there are not sufficient funds to cover the payment, they will try again with a smaller amount. This can result in incurring additional NSF fees. If they fail to recoup their loan by garnishing someone’s bank account, the next steps escalate to include engaging a collection agency (which will have a negative effect on their credit score) or potentially going to small claims court to garnish their wages. This means any efforts newcomers with payday loans make to get ahead and build stable lives can be easily and repeatedly thwarted, keeping them trapped in a cycle that compounds other barriers they may face.

*

After months of consistent loan payments that failed to make any real progress on her overall amount owing, Bryan knew it was time to make a change. Between 2018 and 2022, she worked on repaying her loans and never missed a payment. Still, due to the loans’ high interest rates and short repayment periods, the principal remained pretty much the same.

“It was such a stressful time,” Bryan says. “I was paying $575 every month for a $400 payday loan, and then would end up borrowing more because I was always short of money. It was truly a vicious cycle.” She eventually connected with a debt consolidation agency that was able to work with her on combining her loans into a more manageable payment cadence. Doing so helped to bring her monthly payments from $575 per month down to $145 per month—and she is actually making progress now and will be free of this debt in the next two years. Credit Counselling Canada is one such agency that has helped hundreds of thousands of Canadians to pay off their debt.

Payday loans may be quick and easy, but given the high costs and risks associated with them, it is advisable to explore other options. Or, as Bryan advises, “Run. Don’t do it. It’s a trap.”

There are various alternatives to payday loans, offering more sustainable and affordable solutions. Credit unions, with their community focused initiatives, may be more willing to work with newcomers. Microfinance institutions, such as Windmill Microlending, specialize in offering small loans to people with low or no credit history. These loans are designed to help people build credit responsibly. Several banks, including TD, RBC, and CIBC, now provide newcomer-specific financing options, too.

Government assistance programs and social services also offer financial support or resources. These programs may include income support, housing assistance, and employment services. Some employers may provide salary advances or assistance programs to help employees facing unexpected expenses also.

For those looking to establish or rebuild their credit history, secured credit cards can be a valuable option. Making timely payments on these cards allows newcomers to build a positive credit record, paving the way for more affordable credit options in the future. Another option to consider is exploring credit-builder loans. With these loans, borrowers make small monthly payments, and the loan amount is typically held in a savings account until the loan is fully repaid. Considering these alternatives ensures a more secure path than relying on payday loans.

Though it can feel like a lot to ask, prompt payments of bills like rent and utilities also have a significant positive impact on one’s credit score—but only if the landlord or utility company reports it to a credit bureau. For those who already have a credit card, keeping balances low relative to the credit limit helps, too. High credit card balances can have a detrimental effect on credit scores. By incorporating these practices, newcomers can steadily build a credit history in Canada.

Financial literacy is a critical component of building a new life in Canada. It enhances a newcomer’s ability to participate in the economy, contribute to their communities, and build a stable and fulfilling life. New immigrants may be unfamiliar with the Canadian financial system, including banking procedures, credit systems, and regulations. Financial literacy education helps people navigate and understand these aspects, empowering them to make informed decisions in Canada. Prosper Canada has several good resources, including My Money in Canada, which provides plain-language information and online modules. The Government of Canada has free financial literacy programming, and the Centre for Newcomers in Calgary also provides free financial coaching for new Canadians.

Some of the key demands that ACORN is championing include the creation of a federally funded Fair Credit Benefit, which would be a grant or emergency fund available from the government, and supporting the provision of basic banking services at post offices.

Financial literacy training and coaching services can go far toward helping newcomers to make informed decisions with their money in a Canadian context. As Canada makes plans to boost immigration numbers in the coming years, it is important for newcomers, and those working with them, to consider these options. For a group already grappling with the challenges of resettlement, falling prey to the payday loan cycle can be particularly detrimental, jeopardizing their well-being and ultimately, their ability to build a better life in Canada.

*

While the rising inflation that was widely reported in the past year is finally cooling, the bottom line is that the cost of living in Canada is high, and ways to build credit aren’t equally accessible to all. Payday lenders assert their role in addressing a gap in the market by offering financial assistance to people encountering systemic barriers to fair credit access. However, their approach is ineffective, exacerbating challenges for the vulnerable people they purport to aid. These systemic barriers are the real root issue.

“Some people turn to payday loans because they have a temporary income-expense gap that they need to address,” Mulholland says. “However, for people who are turning to payday loan providers for basic recurring expenses, like buying groceries or paying rent, the fact that they are placed in this no-win situation means we need to better look at our welfare and disability support programs.” These income support programs should be adequate to an individual’s basic needs, she says. “If not, we’re forcing people into the wide-open arms of these payday loan predators.”

Having learned about the dark side of the payday loan industry the hard way, Bryan has since joined ACORN to fight for change. She is eager to see further government intervention in the industry. “My experience opened my eyes to the incredible injustice out there,” she says. “People need a voice, and ACORN is that voice.”

Thanks in part to the efforts of organizations like Prosper Canada and ACORN, the federal government has recently introduced some new measures to address these lending practices, including reducing the “criminal” rate of interest from 47 percent to 35 percent annual percentage rate (APR) and capping lending fees at $14 per $100 borrowed. Despite this, there is still a long way to go toward providing Canadians with a fair alternative to payday loan providers.

As Canada continues to welcome newcomers, it is essential to empower them with the knowledge and resources necessary for financial well-being. Payday loan providers’ destructive practices highlight the urgent need for comprehensive solutions, involving collaboration between government agencies, financial institutions, and nonprofit organizations. Regulating bodies, and the financial services industry at large, both have significant roles to play in levelling the playing field. By understanding the challenges faced by newcomers, addressing systemic issues, and promoting financial education, Canada can pave the way for a more inclusive and equitable future for all.

Graphic by Valerie Thai

Canada is in the midst of a housing crisis, and one perpetuating factor is the skyrocketing cost of rent. Rent control is a type of provincial rent regulation law that limits rent increases. While every province and territory restricts the frequency of rent increases, only four provinces have some sort of policy that caps the percentage by which rent can increase. Although some provinces enacted a freeze on rent increases at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, only a couple extended the freeze as the pandemic continues. Here is a closer look at rent control policies across the country.

British Columbia

The B.C. government enacted a rent increase freeze at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Although the rent freeze came to an end on January 1, 2022, the Vancouver Tenants Union has advocated to reinstate the freeze since many tenants remain in precarious conditions due to the ongoing pandemic.

Manitoba

The Manitoba government’s rent freeze, a temporary measure first enacted in April 2020, has been extended until the end of 2023, but critics have concerns over the actual implications of this policy. The province’s Residential Tenancies Branch has the authority to approve ad hoc requests to increase rent—a power which they exercised 100 percent of the time during the 2019–2020 fiscal year, according to a document obtained by the Opposition NDP through a freedom of information request.

Ontario

Much like B.C. and Manitoba, the Ontario government passed legislation in October 2020 to freeze rent until the end of 2021. Organizations such as the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario and the East York chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) have noted the importance of reinstating the rent freeze.

Quebec

Although the Tribunal administratif du logement has a system for landlords and tenants to agree on a rent increase, the process is not legally required. Moreover, tenant advocates, including the Regroupement des comités logement et associations de locataires du Québec and the Comité d’action de Parc-Extension, note that the power imbalance between tenant and landlord can result in inequitable rent increases, and are lobbying for better laws to protect tenants in Quebec.

Nova Scotia

In November 2020, the government of Nova Scotia passed rent control legislation due to the state of emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a temporary measure though: it first expired in late 2021, but the two percent annual cap has been extended until the end of 2023 as a result of the work of community organizers, housing advocates, and tenants.

Prince Edward Island

P.E.I.’s unit-based, rather than tenant-based, rent control means that the amount of rent increase should be the same regardless of whether the property changes hands. But housing advocates, such as the P.E.I. Fight for Affordable Housing, note a lack of systemic accountability that can result in unlawful rent increases. Moreover, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation found that average rent hikes in 2020 were well above the rent increase guideline.

Photo by Jim Feng; Design by Valerie Thai

Severe and increasingly regular hurricanes, increased temperatures altering fishing grounds and crop development, drastic shoreline erosion, and the destruction of vulnerable ecosystems. These are all climate change impacts that are already happening on Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.) and will only get worse in the future without immediate climate action.

As a low-lying island province nestled in the Atlantic, P.E.I. is heavily romanticized in pop culture and tourism ads as an idyllic, pastoral province. With a major housing crisis, an underfunded healthcare system, high levels of poverty and food insecurity, and a fragile economy that is very vulnerable to climate change, the reality for most islanders is very different from this romanticized picture.

P.E.I., also known as Epekwitk by the Mi’kmaq, is a largely agricultural province, with almost half of the island used as farmland. Agriculture as a sector is highly susceptible to climate change due to unpredictable weather and rainfall patterns and increasing temperatures. According to Sally Bernard, a certified organic grain farmer on P.E.I., “climate change is just like this concrete umbrella that we’re carrying around. It’s just looming at all times.”

Agriculture on P.E.I., and most of Canada for that matter, is largely industrial and conventional agriculture, which is characterized by the heavy application of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, intensive irrigation practices, and the use of monocropping, which is the practice of planting a single crop on vast areas of farmland year after year. Farms on P.E.I. are shrinking in number but growing in size, and this consolidation of farmland has been ongoing for decades. The local agricultural sector is dominated by agribusinesses, which are corporations that produce or distribute goods and services related to farming and the farming itself. While P.E.I. has several main crops, these agribusinesses have entrenched the monocropping of potatoes into P.E.I.’s land use patterns with devastating environmental consequences. In recent years, the island has borne witness to a drastic reduction in soil health, a significant loss of crop diversity, and many fish kills (which result when fertilizer or pesticide runoff creates an anoxic event in local waterways, thus destroying an aquatic ecosystem including fish and other organisms). When farmers work under a contract with these agribusinesses, they are generally expected to yield a certain amount of crop. This is not to say that local potato farmers disregard the environment, but rather that they face many external pressures and often work within tight profit margins. There are many local environmental organizations, including watershed groups whose mandates are to help manage and restore a local ecosystem, working with farmers to improve environmental outcomes. According to a representative of a local watershed group who wishes to remain anonymous, “[Farmers] are often very willing to work for [environmental] groups or with groups. They don’t want fish kills. They’re community-minded…. But there’s also a lot on a farmer’s radar.”

While industrial agriculture is the dominant form of agriculture on P.E.I., monocropped agriculture is not economically or environmentally resilient and small shocks can disrupt the sector. This vulnerability is evident in the current potato export crisis on P.E.I., as millions of pounds of potatoes are unable to be shipped to the U.S. due to the discovery of a contagious crop disease on a local farm. Crop diseases are often associated with industrial agriculture through poor soil quality and a lack of crop diversity. Despite high rates of food insecurity on P.E.I., these farmers have been forced to destroy over 136 million kilograms of edible potatoes.

The dominance of industrial agriculture on P.E.I. is being challenged by local agroecological farmers. Agroecology is a social movement, body of knowledge, and agricultural mode developed in concert with the transnational peasants movement La Via Campesina and their mission to empower small farmers, fishers, and Indigenous land protectors globally. This style of farming prioritizes on-farm biodiversity, livable wages for farmers, and respect for the non-human environment.

In short, agroecology is the practice of ecological farming while working within the confines of one’s natural ecosystem, thus promoting resiliency through biodiversity. Agroecology can be thought of as a large umbrella term that many farming methods could fall under, including intercropping (growing multiple crops together to promote soil health), agroforestry (growing crops in cultivated forests to promote carbon capture in soil), planting trees near bodies of water to prevent fertilizer runoff, crop rotation, utilizing cover crops to prevent soil degradation in the winter, rotational grazing of livestock, using organic manures, and many more. Nancy Sanderson is a small-scale farmer who grew up on a conventional farm in Saskatchewan and began farming agroecologically with her partner after moving to P.E.I. She describes agroecology as “trying to work with nature rather [than] fight against it wherever possible.” These farming methods create vibrant agro-ecosystems and provide natural ecosystem services including pollination, pest control, and nutrient cycling.

Agroecological farming can also sequester carbon through improved soil health, making it a powerful tool in the fight against further climate change. Methods such as no-till or low-till farming, planting cover crops to prevent soil erosion, and rotational grazing of livestock have all been demonstrated to capture atmospheric carbon and store it in soils, similar to the way that trees store carbon during their life cycles. Adam MacLean is a sheep farmer from central P.E.I. “My role as a farmer is to harness as efficiently as possible the sun and the rain and sequester a … ton of carbon,” says MacLean. Genuine resilience to climate change does not just mean the ability to weather vulnerabilities, it also means removing or mitigating the root stressors causing harm in the first place.

Agroecology shares some methods with Certified Organic farming in Canada, a system where farmers are certified by an outside body as using certain environmental practices on their farm, including forgoing non-organic pesticides. Agroecology takes additional steps toward promoting ecosystem health, however, and encourages community-based agricultural values like collective land ownership, respect for Indigenous knowledge systems, and achieving gender and racial equity within agriculture and beyond.

From an economic perspective, agricultural research also indicates that agroecology can be far more productive per hectare than conventional monoculture methods. Agroecological farming is also greatly resilient to economic and environmental disasters. Multiple studies and surveys conducted across South and Central America, where agroecology is more common than it is in Canada, found that agroecological farming is much more resilient to hurricanes and other “natural” disasters that are becoming more frequent and severe in the ongoing climate crisis.

This resilience is noteworthy for agriculture on P.E.I., as weather variations that impact crops are becoming much more regular. In early September of 2019, Hurricane Dorian made landfall in the Canadian Maritimes, causing widespread devastation and crop loss. With sustained winds of over 155 km/h and heavy rainfall, many Maritime farmers reported major crop damage.

From a climate justice perspective, P.E.I.’s total greenhouse gas emissions are negligible compared to the rest of Canada, but P.E.I. will be disproportionately impacted as a geographically and economically vulnerable province, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. Resilience is an increasingly relevant concept to conversations on climate change. While neoliberal governments and corporations attempt to individualize the concept of resilience and make it a matter of personal responsibility to prepare oneself for the climate crisis, climate change is a systemic problem that requires increased system resilience. While individual agroecologists are making meaningful efforts to improve their on-farm environmental outcomes, they often lack governmental support and are also frustrated by governmental inaction on climate change in Canada and beyond.

Despite the clear benefits of agroecology, various levels of government have failed to provide enough support for the growth of agroecology as a movement on P.E.I. due to the disproportionate power of the agribusiness sector and the Canadian export model of agriculture. There are many powerful agribusinesses on the island, and a few are vertically integrated, meaning that they control all stages of the production process including seed development, agro-chemical application, packaging, shipping, and processing.

Many agroecological farmers and environmental groups believe that the provincial and federal governments favour local agribusinesses and their contracted growers over agroecologists. During the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, little relief was offered to smaller-scale and agroecological farmers who also could not access many federal or provincial supports designed to support industrial-scale farms and agribusinesses. Many local agroecologists found this hard to swallow, as they believe that subsidizing larger-scale producers allows those producers to maintain artificially low commodity prices that make agroecological goods seem highly priced in comparison to consumers.

Agriculture in Canada, including in P.E.I., is largely export-oriented, meaning that the majority of food produced in Canada is produced for export to other countries while we also import a great deal of food. Canada is the fifth largest agricultural exporter in the world and is the dominant exporter of common crops such as durum wheat, soy, canola, and oats. This export orientation means that government subsidization tends to prioritize monocropping these cash crops over more environmentally sound methods.

Jordan MacPhee is an agroecological vegetable farmer from central P.E.I. who farms with carbon sequestration in mind. According to MacPhee, agroecological farming produces many positive externalities for the environment and the broader community: “You’re … rehabilitating [the land] and you’re bringing carbon in from [the] atmosphere, you’re … not leaching [contaminated water] out into the waterways, you’re not poisoning … the lungs and the intestines of your neighbours by putting nitrates into the groundwater and air … there’s so many side benefits that are invisible in the short term.” However, these benefits often do not result in financial gains for those agroecologists, especially in the early years of farming. “When you get home from the market, and you’ve worked 80 hours that week, and you only make 200 bucks, and you do the math and you made $2.50 an hour. That’s when it’s like, what am I doing?” he says. MacPhee mentioned that with experience and shared knowledge, agroecological farming can provide a livable income even in the current economic system. However, many individuals who are willing to provide their communities with environmental and social benefits through agroecology do not survive the initial startup phase of farming due to a lack of financial support and the exceedingly low number of agriculture schools in Canada that teach agroecological methods.

There are certainly local and federal government programs aimed to support the growth of smaller-scale agroecological farming, including small grant programs, a provincially funded mental health program for island farmers, and bureaucratic positions to oversee the growth of agroecology on P.E.I. However, many farmers view them as inconsequential and piecemeal strategies relative to the resources and financial support received by industrial-scale farms. Many local agroecologists believe that helping to provide farmers with a livable income whether through a universal basic income, direct farmer subsidization, or better grant programs is a way to support community resilience in the fight against climate change. Financial security allows farmers to weather the impacts of climate change, invest in mitigation strategies, and choose farming methods that sequester carbon over conventional farming methods that often provide a steadier income.

While the provincial government of P.E.I. has adopted some of the most ambitious emissions reductions and climate change mitigation targets in the country, with commitments to reach net zero energy consumption by 2030 and net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, 25 percent of provincial carbon emissions come directly from the agricultural industry. Instead of adopting agroecology as a climate change mitigation strategy or compensating agroecologists for their positive environmental externalities, the provincial government continues to subsidize a style of agriculture that degrades soil quality, releases significant greenhouse gas emissions, and often harms local biodiversity.

Agroecology is certainly not a silver bullet to climate change, but its burgeoning success can provide hope amidst a time of converging climate, economic, and health crises born of the capitalist world order. While we should hold our governments to account and expect them to support drastic climate change mitigation policies, including the pursuit of agroecology, the past several years have shown that we cannot wait for colonial, capitalist governments to set the pace of change required to combat these converging crises. Agroecology in Canada as a movement still has not reckoned with its role in the climate justice movement, how agroecologists can support Land Back and Indigenous sovereignty while farming in a colonial country, and how to adopt food justice frameworks that prioritize the food needs of marginalized communities. To spread the seeds of agroecology further, agroecologists and their allies can work in concert with the climate justice and Indigenous sovereignty movements to promote and adopt food systems that are rooted in community, equity, and food justice instead of the environmental and labour exploitation borne under the industrial international food system.

Graphic by Valerie Thai

The average grocery bill for Canadians has increased by 170 percent over the last two decades, according to Canada’s Food Price Report 2021. This is especially so over the last two years—since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in March 2020, Canadians have seen a major bump in their grocery bills.

Food production issues resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic have touched every province and territory in Canada. The pandemic caused border and facility closures, labour shortages (including brief restrictions on temporary foreign workers), and shifted consumer demand from foodservice to food retail as restaurants grappled with shutdowns. New safety measures and procedures, such as physical distancing, meant processing plants were operating below capacity and efficiency.

Meanwhile, the price of oil was down in 2020, in turn lowering energy and distribution costs for food products. However, this weakened the Canadian dollar, shooting import costs up.

Atlantic Canada

Provinces on the Atlantic coast are highly vulnerable to systemic variables, as most food production and processing is done outside the region. It’s expected that the Atlantic region will continue to see costs rising above the national average. One food bank in Charlottetown, P.E.I., reported a 10 percent user increase in May 2021, up from the previous year, due to swelling food and gas prices.

British Columbia

B.C. agricultural producers have suffered from severe drought and wildfires over the past two years. BC Cattlemen’s Association estimated that the province lost approximately 3.5 million hectares of land to forest fires in the last five years, meaning cattle had less green space to graze. While B.C. farmers would typically purchase feed from the Prairies to compensate, those provinces, too, were experiencing dry conditions. It could be three to five years before the beef industry sees some resolution.

The Prairies

Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba all saw record heat levels and little rain in 2021. While some droughts are cyclical, last year’s dry conditions were particularly unusual, exacerbated by climate change. With less supply, processors must pay more for their inputs, especially wheat and canola—an expense destined to catch up with consumers.

Ontario and Quebec

Despite the hefty price of meat, residents in Ontario and Quebec have decreased their meat budget the least among Canadians at 46 percent compared to Albertans’ 57 percent. Ahead of Thanksgiving 2021, a Toronto butcher estimated turkey was up a dollar per pound compared to 2020. A CTV news report said retailers are taking the brunt of consumers’ frustrations. In Montreal, the two-dollar increase of a six-pack of yogurt ($5.99 to $7.99) has forced some customers to skip the product altogether.

The North

Food prices in the North are so high that one Inuk woman, Kyra Flaherty, started using TikTok to bring awareness to the exorbitant costs and their impact. Despite a federal food subsidy program, northerners still face food insecurity every day, owing to long-distance shipping expenses. This issue existed long before the pandemic.

In addition, traditional food sources are threatened by climate change: animals’ migration patterns are changing; travel required for hunting, trapping, and fishing are limited because of ice made unstable by warming temperatures; and low water levels make canoe trips difficult.

Photo by Michelle Spollen

Back in April, a friend and I had met up to grab smoothies at a café before going on a lockdown walk.

We each ordered, and I pulled out my debit card to pay. “Sorry, cash only,” said the woman behind the counter. I stared blankly at her, then my friend. “I don’t have any cash,” I said; my friend confirmed that she didn’t either. We apologized to the woman, then made our way to another café that took cards.

Even before the pandemic, Canada had been trending toward becoming a cash-free society: cash transactions have been declining steadily since 2011, when contactless debit and credit (i.e. tap) first gained popularity. While two-thirds of Canadians reported using contactless credit or debit in 2018, 90 percent of unbanked people (meaning those who have no relationship to a bank) report using cash.

Since the start of the pandemic, many businesses started banning cash transactions due to concerns about it being a nesting ground for the COVID-19 virus. A new report by FIS Global, an international FinTech company that uses technology to better engage in financial markets, states that since the COVID-19 pandemic began, cash transactions have declined by more than half. It also states that FIS Global expects cash to be used for only four percent of in-store payments by 2024.

It seems like very few banked people I know use cash these days. The friend that I had been walking with said she hadn’t taken cash out of an ATM since March 2020, before the pandemic—something I realized was true for me too, after thinking about it.

With what seems like the imminent death of cash, sped up by the COVID-19 pandemic, I wonder if the things we give cash to, being mainly small businesses and each other, will also disappear. As some of us adapt, who might get left behind?

The history of widespread cash use is a relatively short one. Standardized currency was first implemented in some regions of the world in the Axial Age, from 800 to 300 BCE, then again after periods of disuse in East Asia and Europe during the 15th century. Before its employment, people would use whatever was relatively abundant around them as a surrogate, like metal nails or cod, or would run up personal credits with each other’s businesses.

The second attempt to introduce a mass standardized currency coincided with the advent of capitalism in the 16th century. Adam Smith, a prominent economist of the 18th century, believed that it would be advantageous for a country to bring everyday transactions into a uniform currency, and to abandon the practice of mercantilism, which involved the crown accumulating as much bullion (gold or silver, before coining) as it could.

As the colonial exploits of Spain and Portugal brought massive amounts of silver into the European economy, it became more possible to regulate currency, and to remunerate everyone with the same reward. Near the same time, standardized paper money, backed by bullion, became more common, and was another means to regulate transactions.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, central banks increasingly assumed control of printing paper money.
In Canada, Indigenous people had longstanding practices of trading, using items of copper, precious metals, and furs as the basis of a currency. Early settlers used a variety of items as currency, including playing cards with royal stamps, French and Spanish silver coins, the British pound, Nova Scotian money (a currency used in Nova Scotia until 1871), American money and “army bills,” before a standardized Canadian currency eventually became more circulated in the decades after confederation.

The many types of currencies meant that money had many forms up until the 20th century. Money then became pretty standardized, with cash as the main method of payment, until two new forms of payment were introduced in Canada: credit in 1968 and debit in 1988. It took a while for debit to catch on, though, and it wasn’t until 1994 that it was offered by all banks and accepted by retailers in every province.
By 2009, however, cash accounted for only 54 percent of transactions, and this dropped to 33 percent by 2017.

The question then is, who uses cash these days? In the U.S., 55 percent of small businesses don’t accept credit cards. In a study conducted in Canada in 2008, 93 percent of businesses accepted debit, while 92 percent accepted credit, and all accepted cash.

Many small businesses prefer cash because they don’t incur processing surcharges. Salon SLiJ, a longtime hairdressing salon in Montreal, used to accept cash and e-transfers but began accepting only e-transfers during the waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Oleg, the manager of the salon, who prefers to go by first name only, says that, like many salons through the pandemic, “our sales were down more than fifty percent.”

Nikhil Tangirala, an urban planner who lives in Montreal, says that he stopped using cash during the pandemic due to hygiene reasons. “I don’t use much cash anyway, but I definitely began using less during COVID,” he says. “I stopped going to my local depanneur,” which is cash-predominant and accepts debit with surcharges, he adds.

Beyond small businesses, those who predominantly use cash tend to be those on the lower end of the socio-economic scale. In Canada, three percent of Canadians, the equivalent of over one million people, are unbanked and 15 percent of Canadians, or nearly five million people, are underbanked, meaning that they have no or limited access to credit and debit for a variety of reasons, such as having a poor credit score or living in a location underserviced by banks. Correspondingly, proportional to those who are unbanked or underbanked, 15 percent of Canadians report being heavy cash users.

Étienne, who prefers to go by first name only, is an unbanked person living in Montreal who is also unhoused. His primary income is obtained through asking people on the streets for money. “It was tough, it was really tough,” Étienne says, in reference to his income during the pandemic. “It’s been tough now too, but it’s been better since COVID … More and more people use debit cards now instead of cash … they say ‘sorry, I only have debit.’”

As of 2019, cash transactions accounted for 21 percent of all transaction volume, and 80 percent of Canadians reported making at least one cash transaction per week. Of those 80 percent, over half reported giving cash to people (rather than using it for purchases) through the week.

As cash is increasingly fading out, a new player in the game, cryptocurrency, has been entering circulation, digital coin by digital coin. Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, have no physical form at all and can only be used for online transactions, which are processed in a decentralized fashion by brokers who cash in on every trade. Cryptocurrencies typically have finite quantities of money which ensures that the currency doesn’t lose value. This differs from physical currencies, which are protected by interest rates.

The latest figures available on cryptocurrency usage in Canada are from 2019, when it was reported that nearly four percent of Canadians were using bitcoin, and close to one percent were using the next most popular cryptocurrency, Ethereum. In 2016, 64 percent of Canadians were aware of Bitcoin, and this percentage jumped to 85 percent in 2017.

While cryptocurrency circulation is growing, increasing pressure on central banks to create their own digital currencies to facilitate transactions, in their current private form they present significant barriers to access. For one, the limited quantity of cryptocurrencies mean that they are very expensive; at the time of writing, for example, one bitcoin is equivalent to $47,784 CAD. Another major issue is that cryptocurrency transactions are expensive, with bitcoin transactions costing nearly $60 in April 2021.

Cryptocurrencies also are also uniquely digital currencies, meaning that they are again reserved for those who choose or are able to process electronic payments. Even though there were nearly 900 Bitcoin ATMs in Canada as of 2020, these only service people who want to trade in physical currency for bitcoin, not the other way around.

Professor Matt Tiessen researches digital economy at Ryerson University. He thinks that cryptocurrencies are on the rise because they can potentially circulate money quicker. “Money likes to move,” he says, “and the liquidity of cryptocurrencies permits that.” At the same time, he agrees that the cost and means of processing private cryptocurrencies present significant barriers of access. “It’s prohibitive,” he says.
Tiessen is wary, however, of the concept of a central bank-produced digital currency, thinking that it could create significant and novel annexations of economic control. “[A national cryptocurrency] would create a system of surveillance and power,” Tiessen says. “Cash just sits around.”

“Part of the allure for government in creating a national cryptocurrency would be that it could be quickly distributed, and then also expire, which would ensure that it was always being spent.” (This comes up while he is speaking about a potential Universal Basic Income issued by the government.) A national digital currency could then side-step some of the barriers to access of private cryptocurrencies, but could also reduce autonomy. “It could limit your financial freedom,” Tiessen says.

As we slowly transition out of the COVID-19 pandemic, into a version of life that involves touching, hugging, filtering between stores and homes, and feeling near to the people and things we care about, where will we go with cash? Back before the loonie, we had lots of different forms of money, but these had widespread circulation within localized communities, and, within these communities, had relative accessibility, despite general inequality.

Contactless tap might run in the same vein of magic as buying physical goods with invisible currency, or of “mining” intangible bounty. Cash, though, links us to a current, a common denominator, of which we are all a part.

“Stock Photography – Canadian Money” by Katherine Ridgley is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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 timeline of that fight, leading up to a landmark win in June 2020

1993

The Association of Midwives (AOM) and Ministry of Health (MOH) reach an agreement on compensation through a joint working group process. They agree that compensation for midwives would align with senior nurses and Community Health Centre (CHC) family physicians, who share similar practices.

1994

Midwives are established as a regulated health profession under the Ontario healthcare system and the government determines a compensation level for the midwifery field. The Pay Equity Act is already in force, so the government is required to assess their salary by looking at comparative male-dominated jobs. Midwives are set to earn, at the highest level, around 90 percent of the base entry level salary for a CHC family physician, and at entry level, just above the salary of a senior nurse. However, over the following 25 years, the salary gap between CHC family physicians and midwives widened further and further. Today, midwives earn between around $80,000 and $100,000, while CHC family physicians earn around $190,000 to $220,000.

1994-2005

The government freezes the compensation of midwives, allowing for no compensation increases. CHC family physicians dealt with compensation freezes for part of that time as well, but they received a wage increase in 2003.

2004

AOM, after being denied compensation increases by the MOH in 2000, initiates a “Because Storks Don’t Deliver Babies” campaign and threatens to march on Queen’s Park. In response, the MOH agrees to engage in negotiations.

2004

CHC physicians, represented by the Ontario Medical Association (OMA), set an agreement for compensation increases from 2004 onward. The agreements resulted in accelerated compensation increases for CHC physicians.

2005

The MOH and the AOM reach an agreement on compensation increases, establishing first year increases of 20 to 29 percent for midwives depending on experience level and subsequent small increases of one to two percent.

2008

The OMA reaches a four-year agreement for a compensation increase for CHC family physicians. Meanwhile, during the AOM’s 2008 negotiations, the MOH would not agree to more significant increases. The AOM tables other negotiations in order to agree on a joint compensation study.

2010

A compensation review prompted by the AOM, funded by the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, is conducted by the Courtyard Group, a healthcare system management company. The report recommends a one-time equity adjustment to midwifery compensation that would raise income by 20 percent for all experience levels. This would bring the salary back up to their original position between nurse practitioners and CHC family physicians. However, after publication of the report, the government decides to reject the recommendations, saying the Courtyard report is “flawed” and that CHC physicians aren’t relevant anymore for setting compensation levels for midwives.

2013

The AOM files an application with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO). The application argues that the Ministry set a discriminatory compensation structure for midwives over the past 20 years.

2018

The HRTO delivers an Interim Decision to the AOM, concluding that there is “sufficient evidence” that midwives experienced “adverse treatment” and that gender discrimination is likely a factor. The decision dismissed any allegations of discrimination between 1993 and 2005, but found evidence of discrimination after the 2005 agreement.

February 2020

The HRTO determines in a Remedy Decision (compensation or other solutions ordered by the tribunal that must be followed) that the government should implement the adjustment recommended in the 2010 Courtyard report, including retroactive compensation back to that date. The decision also ordered $7,500 compensation for “injury to dignity” for each eligible midwife. The MOH is ordered to consider in future negotiations the impacts of gender on compensation for midwives based on them being “sex-segregated workers.”

April 2020

The Ontario government files for a judicial review of the HRTO rulings, and the review is heard in the Divisional Court.

June 2020

The Divisional Court dismisses the application for the judicial review and rules to uphold the HRTO rulings. The decision notes that the MOH failed to engage with the allegations of adverse gender impacts on midwives and ignored the systemic issues behind the claim.

Simon Black was watching the news on television with his one-month-old daughter on his lap. A report came on—a bombing of a school bus in Yemen by coalition forces led by Saudi Arabia, which killed dozens of children and injured dozens more.

Black had one of those moments that sometimes happen to new parents, a sort of breath-snatching awareness of the harm that the world holds. “Just by luck, it’s not my daughter who’s been born into a conflict zone, a war zone,” he said. This was swiftly followed by a conviction that he had to do something.

As a long-time trade unionist and a labour studies scholar at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, it was only natural for Black to start thinking about how to do this in a way that puts workers at the centre. It is a piece of labour movement wisdom, after all, that workers make the world and so it is they who ultimately have the power to change it.

But what could he and other workers do?

The bombing that so grabbed Black’s attention in August 2018 was just one moment in a long and devastating conflict in Yemen that continues to this day. Shireen Al-Adeimi is a Yemeni-Canadian academic who currently lives and works in the United States; she has been a vocal opponent of Canadian and U.S. support for the war. She describes the impacts of the Saudi-led military intervention into Yemen as “highly devastating” and the death tolls as “horrifying.” When she names it as the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” she is echoing language that the United Nations and international aid agencies have been using for several years. According to UN reports, the war had caused more than 230,000 deaths as of 2019, and relief organizations have said that 80 percent of the Yemeni population, or around 24 million people, require humanitarian assistance.

Though the lead role played by Saudi Arabia on the ground in this intervention is often emphasized, a number of Western countries are actively complicit, including the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. “We’re part of the problem in that sense,” Al-Adeimi says. “We’re not innocent bystanders. All of these countries have blood on their hands.”

In Canada’s case, complicity with the Saudi regime happens most prominently through supplying Saudi Arabia with military equipment. In 2014, the Canadian government, under then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, signed a deal to sell them approximately $15 billion of light armoured vehicles (LAVs). After the deal was approved the next year, by the newly elected Liberals under Justin Trudeau, Canada became the second biggest arms exporter to the Middle East. The LAVs were to be manufactured by General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada (GDLS) in London, Ontario.

According to Anthony Fenton, a PhD candidate at York University in Toronto whose work focuses on the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Canada, it is really only the size of the deal that is new. Major Canadian business interests have had lucrative relationships with Saudi Arabia for a long time, and the kingdom has purchased military equipment made in Canada, including LAVs, since at least the 1990s.

Despite this long relationship, the period since this deal was signed has been a relatively rocky one between the two countries—including human rights criticisms and a recently ended hold on new export permits by Canada, and delayed payments and an expelled Canadian ambassador by the Saudis. But the commitment of both sides to the massive LAV deal
has remained unshaken.

As soon as this deal became public knowledge, human rights organizations in Canada started to campaign against it. In 2016, an open letter from Amnesty International, Project Ploughshares, and many other organizations expressed “profound concerns” about the deal and argued that “to provide such a large supply of lethal weapons to a regime with such an appalling record of human rights abuses is immoral and unethical.”

As far as Black is concerned, “it doesn’t matter” whether these new LAVs have themselves appeared yet in Yemen—given what Saudi Arabia is doing in that conflict, and given its overall human rights record, he sees arming the country to be a problem. As a trade unionist, he is particularly concerned that Saudi Arabia has been named as one of the 10 worst countries in the world for workers’ rights by the International Trade Union Confederation. He describes the deal as “morally repugnant” and says there is a “moral imperative” to cancel it.

Early on, Black was inspired by reports that dock workers in a few European ports had declared arms destined for Saudi Arabia to be “hot cargo” and had refused to load them onto ships. At the time, the LAVs manufactured in London were being shipped through Saint John, New Brunswick, and in December 2018 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 273 respected a picket by peace activists at the port, delaying delivery of a shipment of LAVs by one day.

Black reached out to other trade unionists and to peace activists that he knew and in mid-2019, they released an open letter aimed at the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and its president, Hassan Yussuff, calling on them
“to demand Prime Minister Trudeau immediately cancel the Government of Canada’s arms deal with Saudi Arabia” and “to declare military goods destined for Saudi Arabia as ‘hot cargo’ and use its considerable resources to coordinate labour movement opposition to this arms deal.” Eventual signatories included a number of labour councils, a couple of public sector unions, and some NDP MPs and MPPs. Out of that letter, this collection of unionists and activists founded a group called Labour Against the Arms Trade.

As of May 2020, the CLC had not acted on these demands. Both the CLC and Unifor, the union that represents the workers at the GDLS plant in London, declined to comment on the demands of Labour Against the Arms Trade for this article, though just as it went to press Labour Against the Arms Trade announced that the CLC had endorsed a day of action organized by multiple groups to oppose the deal.

Jim Reid is the president of Unifor Local 27, which represents the GDLS workers. His comments in a 2018 report from the Canadian Press may help explain why the CLC and Unifor have been relatively quiet on the issue, despite their long histories of concern for human rights. Reid expressed support for Canadian government criticisms of the Saudi human rights record. However, he also hoped the deal would not be threatened by those criticisms, and identified it as the basis for 500 jobs at GDLS and more than 7,000 spin-off jobs in the community. Given other factory closures in recent years, like the shut-down of Caterpillar’s Electo-Motive Canada plant in 2012, he said it is “now the largest employer in the London region…. It’s basically the last big show we’ve got.”

Black agrees that “there’s no way that you can ask workers to support a cause like this … if you cannot first guarantee that workers are going to not lose their livelihoods.” So, from the very start, the goal of Labour Against the Arms Trade has been not just an end to the deal but “conversion”—that is, intervention by the government to shift the GDLS plant, and eventually other factories in Canada, away from making arms and towards making other things.

“Those same skills … could be put to use and applied to the production of socially useful products like renewable energy sources,” Black said.

It is, moreover, a demand with a long history. Black says he takes great inspiration from U.K. workers and trade unionists at a company called Lucas Aerospace who, in the 1970s, used their intimate knowledge of their own skills and the production processes to develop a detailed plan to reorient production to avoid job losses and move from making arms to making products that they felt would benefit society. The plan was ultimately rejected, in part because of the election of a Conservative government, but its vision of worker-driven conversion has remained an inspiration for activists.

It was not an unfamiliar demand in Canada, either, though it has more often come from peace activists than workers themselves. Conversion was the focus of one of the most visible peace campaigns in the country in the 1980s, in which the Cruise Missile Conversion Project and other groups demanded that a Litton Industries plant in Toronto shift away from manufacturing components for the cruise missile.

Richard Sanders got involved in the peace movement in 1983, and published the grassroots magazine Press for Conversion, which still occasionally publishes today. It now has a broader peace focus, but in the 1990s it was focused exclusively on questions of conversion. The impetus, Sanders says, was the hope that after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western countries would divert money from military budgets to other purposes. He says, “you’re not going to need all these weapons industries anymore, so start converting them.”

Those hopes were dashed, and Sanders says that in the last 20 years or so, conversion has not seemed like a winnable demand. It also doesn’t help that in the 1970s, labour movements were at the peak of their power and at least some mainstream political parties were open to talk of public ownership, while those kinds of interventions into the economy have largely fallen out of favour in mainstream circles in the decades since.

And yet, demands that bear a striking resemblance to conversion have been gaining momentum in recent years, just from a different source and using different language. These days, it has most often been groups responding to the climate crisis that have been leading the charge. They have looked at the stark science around the impacts of climate change and at the role of how we produce things in creating that crisis, and have called for a “just transition” in which governments act to shift production away from fossil fuels and towards greener alternatives in a way that prioritizes the wellbeing of the most impacted communities and workers.

Perhaps the most concrete expression of the push for a just transition in a Canadian context has come from Oshawa, Ontario. In the wake of the devastating announcement that General Motors would be closing its automobile assembly
plant in the city at the end of 2019, a group called Green Jobs Oshawa emerged. It is a joint labour and community campaign that is demanding that the plant be nationalized and retooled for environmentally sustainable and socially conscious production.

Tiffany Balducci, president of the Durham Region Labour Council and member of Green Jobs Oshawa, admits that
“it hasn’t gained traction with people who can actually make this happen.” And Rebecca Keetch, who is also a member of the group and who worked at the plant, attributes this to a general “lack of urgency” about the climate crisis as well as “resistance to the idea of public ownership.”

And yet tireless organizing on the ground and a favourable feasibility study have resulted in a solid base of support in their local community, as well as a positive reception in at least some spaces within the broader labour movement, and considerable interest in the campaign beyond Oshawa. While it has not yet been enough, there seems to have been more support than these kinds of demands have received in Canada for a long time.

As with so much else, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the plans that Labour Against the Arms Trade had for taking action in 2020, and they are hard at work figuring out how they can move forward under the new circumstances.

One glimmer of hope is that the urgent needs created by the pandemic have opened space for governments to act in ways that seemed impossible just a couple of months ago. Black sees a “little window of opportunity” to press demands “that would involve government investment in arms conversion.” Both Labour Against the Arms Trade and Green Jobs Oshawa have been arguing that the respective plants could be used to manufacture goods that would be “socially useful” in the current context, whether that is personal protective equipment, ventilator components, or other things. And in late April 2020, GM announced the Oshawa plant would be employing about 50 workers to manufacture a million masks per month for the Canadian government.

However they decide to proceed, Black thinks that winning a better world for workers, for people in Yemen, and for his daughter requires being bold. We are in “the context of a labour movement that’s been on the back foot, in which a neoliberal capitalism has really weakened the capacity … of the labour movement to organize and mobilize around big projects, around big ideas about transformative solutions,” he says. “But really, those are the only solutions that are going to save our movement, are going to save working people right now. So we need to think big.”

In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Year of the Flood, an outcast religious group called God’s Gardeners prepares for a pandemic by following a belief system based on pared-down consumerism coupled with kindness toward both human and non-human life. “They view us as twisted fanatics who combine food extremism with bad fashion sense and a puritanical attitude toward shopping,” their leader tells a newcomer.

A utopian response to impending doom is not so strange; choices forced upon us by extreme situations might be bolder than what we’d consider in calmer times.

Of course, these are not calmer times. The start of our own pandemic, COVID-19, forced us to curtail consumerism, travel, work, and socializing in ways we’d never imagined. Some of us had more free time than usual to spend with family and on passion projects, even as we mourned the loss of time spent with friends, neighbours, and people we’ve yet to meet. Closed factories and work-from-home imperatives led to cleaner skies and braver wildlife, even as essential workers sacrificed their own health to keep us fed and comfortable.

The pandemic lockdown has taught us about the parts of our society we’d give up willingly and the parts that are more difficult to have taken away. The confused urgency of it has been more catastrophic than Eden. It’s certainly not what the advocates of degrowth have in mind, though many degrowthers have seen our current crisis as an ideal time to start the conversation about what exactly we can live without.

The degrowth movement, which has been picking up steam over the past decade, is based on the belief that the earth cannot support infinite growth, no matter how clever humans show themselves to be. Though it’s been around since the 1970s as a concept, and since the 2000s as a movement, it’s still a bit ragtag and abstract. Its most compelling trait might be its knack for seeing, beyond our efforts to prevent environmental collapse, a way to reinvent civilization as healthier, more inclusive, and more pleasant. Examine the stick in the right way and you can see a carrot.

An English translation of the French word décroissance, “degrowth” isn’t an ideal brand for a progressive social movement; it seems to emphasize loss. That’s why some proponents will talk about “post-growth,” “frugal abundance,” and “voluntary simplicity.” Sometimes, it’s called “convivial degrowth” to add a sense of joy and affirmation. Indeed, proponents of the movement—a wide range of academics, environmentalists, feminists, and social justice advocates—describe how degrowth could bring us more leisure time, less stress, greater equality, a closer connection with nature, and stronger bonds with family and community. For some, degrowth is a personal decision about consuming less and more thoughtfully.

Yet degrowth has a sharp edge. Most degrowthers reject mainstream notions of sustainable development, where increased efficiency, better regulations and a transition to green energy can mitigate human impact on the environment. It can be decidedly anti-capitalist, sometimes sounding a little communist, or a little anarchist, depending on who’s doing
the talking.

“It’s about dethroning the idea of growth as the main societal objective, which has been missing in the debates around sustainability,” says Bengi Akbulut, an assistant professor in geography, planning and environment at Concordia University. Originally from Istanbul, Akbulut spent summers studying at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (while she was completing a PhD at University of Massachusetts Amherst), which is considered to be the epicentre of the degrowth movement. “Degrowth is often set against sustainable development, because degrowthers would say that no development can be sustainable.”

While mainstream climate-change activists have for years been stuck with the task of explaining why humans need to shrink our carbon footprint, arguing over and over again with nitpickers about how we can have tough winters as the earth gets warmer, the degrowth conversation takes their “why” as a given. In the words of Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus in the faculty of environment at the University of Manitoba and one of the leading thinkers on degrowth, “Nothing this civilization does is sustainable, that is kindergarten physics.” If you have to ask why degrowth is necessary, you’re not paying attention. The movement’s biggest challenge, then, is figuring out how to degrow, and how to make it speak to our craving for joy. And how to do it before nature gives up on us.

Though there have been growth skeptics dating back centuries, the term décroissance was coined in 1972 by André Gorz, a French-Austrian social philosopher and writer. But the first international degrowth conference wasn’t held until 2008 in Paris. That first Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity issued a declaration calling for a “right-sizing” of the human footprint. That means reducing the footprint in richer countries and, in poorer countries, increasing consumption “to a level adequate for a decent life.” Once right-sizing has been achieved, “the aim should be to maintain a ‘steady state economy’ with a relatively stable, mildly fluctuating level of consumption.” Since that first conference there has been an increasing focus on quality of consumption over quantity of consumption, just as advocates have shifted emphasis from degrowth’s sacrifices to its potential benefits.

Bob Thomson was one of the Canadian volunteers at the inaugural conference. A former born-again Christian
and founder of TransFair Canada (now FairTrade Canada, a fair-trade certification system), Thomson was eager to apply his organizational and evangelical skills to the cause. He helped organize a Montreal Degrowth in the America conference in 2012 and established the not-for-profit group Degrowth Canada.

“Degrowth in some ways is a political suicide term. The idea of growth is so inculcated into economics and everything else that nobody even questions it,” says Thomson, who lives in a condo on the edge of the Ottawa River.

On the simplest level, degrowthers reject the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a useful measure of human happiness, and certainly not an indicator of the health of the planet. GDP fails to capture how wealth is unequally distributed across a society, and prioritizes the production and consumption of material goods, while ignoring unpaid work and the importance of leisure and the environment. Also untenable is the mainstream economic belief that a country in the global north should, ideally, be aiming for annual GDP growth of two to three percent, doubling the size of the economy every 25 years or so.

“Our economy needs to give priority to climate change and the loss of biodiversity,” says Peter Victor, professor emeritus at the faculty of environmental studies at York University and author of the book Managing Without Growth. Although Victor doesn’t call himself a degrowther, his work also challenges our GDP-obsessed way of looking at things. “If we focus on what contributes to well-being—health, education, security—and then put viable limits on material and energy throughput, and limits on land conversion, then GDP growth becomes of secondary significance. It shouldn’t be there as an objective.”

In the global north, we’d have to learn to live with less than we have now. Though there are many different visions of what degrowth would look like, most large-scale infrastructure and resource-extraction projects would not likely make the cut, says Akbulut. Smartphones and other tech may not disappear entirely, but many degrowthers envision disincentives to building things with planned obsolescence—products would have to last and justify the resource and energy extraction needed to produce them. There would have to be increased consensus and planning about what’s essential and what’s a frill. Both supply side and demand side would see controls to limit production and consumption; our economy would be less driven by market demands.

“Determining biophysical limits, the ‘right size’ of the biophysical footprint, is not a technocratic decision, it’s not something that will be decided for us by a bureaucratic institution. It needs to be decided democratically,” says Akbulut.

Addressing income equality would be an essential part of the degrowth recipe, not only on its own merits, but because it would discourage wasteful consumption driven by social status, says Akbulut. The lure of fast fashion and fast cars, for example, would be pointless if we all had the same clothing and transportation budget. We might find ourselves signalling status by other means, like artistic creativity or generosity.

National fiscal policies would have to fundamentally change: taxation, of course, and our social programs. Thomson says many products and services currently supplied by the global marketplace could be provided by local and regional co-ops or through peer-to-peer networks. “How do we take capital from transnational corporations and turn them into co-ops?
As you can well imagine, there’s a certain amount of resistance,” says Thomson with a chuckle. “You have to have examples on the ground of people working together at a smaller scale, along with people linked in at a more macro policy level.”

Degrowth’s emphasis on shared resources, rather than private wealth, could challenge the laws we have around intellectual property (IP) and how IP drives our economy by constantly emphasizing “newer is better.” The IP that has made so many global corporations rich could become part of the collective commons. “The private sector is always trying to find ways of excluding people from things that should be free so they can make money out of it,” says Victor. “But information ought to be a public good.”

Degrowth does offer something more than martyrdom. Greater income equality, and restricted availability of material goods and the energy needed to make and consume them, would diminish the stress of “keeping up with the Joneses.” Without the growth imperative, people would spend less time at paid work, freeing up time to be more connected to home and community.

“Most people aren’t really that happy under the current system…. Most workers are not necessarily that happy in their jobs. There’s a huge drug problem, depression problem,” says Leah Temper. An ecological economist, scholar, activist, and filmmaker based at McGill University, Temper encountered the idea of degrowth while studying economic history at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and eventually co-organized the second world conference on degrowth there. One of her goals has been to bring a feminist perspective to a school of thought that’s been traditionally dominated by European male scholars. “We have to look at what types of work people value, what are the outputs we value and what are the jobs that people enjoy doing and ask how do we restructure the system so we have more of what we enjoy.”

While many degrowth advocates propose a complete upheaval of capitalism and market-driven economies, skepticism of GDP and growth has become increasingly common among non-revolutionaries. Last year New Zealand, for example, introduced its first well-being national budget. Deemphasizing short-term outputs—growth numbers—the country created a system to evaluate success according to five priorities, including, among other goals, transitioning to a sustainable and low-emissions economy and reducing child poverty. Scotland and Iceland have also begun to include measures of well-being in their budgeting processes to counterbalance the traditional emphasis on growth. In Canada, the University of Waterloo has established the Canadian Index of Wellbeing to complement the GDP for measuring quality of life. In one of its studies, for example, researchers found that while Canada’s GDP did gradually bounce back after the 2008 recession, people’s living standards did not recover as quickly because there had been a shift to precarious and part-time work.

“The perpetual linear upward growth in economic productivity isn’t necessarily resulting in a higher quality of life,” says Bryan Smale, director of the index and professor in Waterloo’s department of recreation and leisure studies. When Smale was getting his undergraduate degree back in the 1970s, he learned that academics were predicting, as far back as the 1960s, the coming of a leisure age: shorter work weeks and a better quality of life though technology and increased industrial productivity. It never happened. “There’s been a growing acknowledgement about the degree to which the marketplace and the economy have been dominating the narrative,” he says.

Mainstream environmental organizations like the David Suzuki Foundation tend to have a higher tolerance than degrowthers for, say, large-scale green energy projects that could feed our craving for more and more energy. But even here, there is growth skepticism. Yannick Beaudoin, the foundation’s director general for Ontario and Northern Canada, says the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a disruption on such a scale that people are more willing to question their assumptions about what our economy is for. “If you have to pause the system to deliver well-being, isn’t that a bit of a problem? There’s something there that’s not working right. You have to ask:
What does it take to deliver well-being for people and planet, what does it take to thrive, what is essential and meaningful, and how do you shift the purpose of the Canadian economy from its old purpose?” Beaudoin says.

Our livelihoods and mindsets have been shaped by the global growth-oriented economy. People measure their lives in how much materially better off they are this year than last. Neither employees nor corporations want to be told that no cheque will ever be bigger than the one they have now. Governments, which spend based on expected increases in future revenue in a growing national economy, will be reluctant to give up their grand promises.

Yet because degrowth is still mostly an idea-in-progress, it has the advantage of being able to tuck itself into other movements and institutions. Even if it fails to vanquish capitalism, it can infiltrate it. “One of the weaknesses of degrowth thinking is that there is no grand vision, no blueprint,” says Akbulut. “That’s also its strength.”

That may set it apart from other revolutionary ideas. It has an ability, as God’s Gardeners in The Year of the Flood might say, to “use what’s to hand.”

Illustration by Marcia Diaz

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 local” while travelling. Many vacation hotspots, such as Prague, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Berlin, and New York were already accommodating a steady stream of tourists, and with the introduction of Airbnb tourists could stay in properties usually reserved for locals. At the beginning, it seemed like Airbnb units were a harmless addition to the hotel supply, but property owners realized they could charge tourists more money per month than a local would be willing to pay in rent. Seizing the opportunity to make some extra cash, property owners start to replace longer-term tenants with vacationers, turning their properties into what are now ominously referred to as “ghost hotels.” But what happens to a neighbourhood when the neighbours are tourists?

Moving away from guided tours and itineraries, tourists are now seeking out travel experiences that are considered “authentic,” made possible by staying at an Airbnb in a neighbourhood not typically visited by tourists. However, neighbourhoods that have seen a growth in tourists have also seen detrimental changes as the tourists start shopping alongside the locals. Because tourists have higher purchasing power and different sleeping hours, businesses start to cater to the tourists over time. Soon local businesses like mom-and-pop grocery stores and pubs shutter their doors and are replaced with chain restaurants, expensive coffee shops, and high-end bars that can afford to pay higher rent for their storefronts.

The residents left behind in Barcelona, in neighbourhoods affected by the changes, have reported feeling like their city was “up for sale,” and that they felt unwelcome in their own neighbourhoods. Particularly, the working class residents who work and live in the area are no longer able to afford expensive rent and the cost of goods.

I saw a glimpse of this phenomenon when I travelled to Barcelona in 2016. Although the city has charm and breathtaking sites, I had the underlying feeling that I was visiting a theme park. I spent a few days wading through large crowds, floating from attraction to attraction with nothing but bars, restaurants, and souvenir stands along the way. My favourite part of my stay was a midnight stroll, where I retraced the steps of a tour I had taken of the Gothic Quarter earlier that day, without the effort of peeking at attractions through groups of other tourists. Wandering the quiet, darkened streets, away from the crowds, I couldn’t help but wonder if living like a local in the most beautiful part of the city was even possible anymore.

Just as tourism has taken a toll on Machu Picchu and the beaches of Thailand, tourist desire to live like locals, made possible by Airbnb, is destroying the very soul that made these urban gems such desirable places to visit in the first place. Our quest for authenticity leaves the locals we seek to become left without the very thing that makes their neighbourhoods vibrant—a community, and a place to call home.

Airbnb cannot be directly blamed for this problem, but the platform aggravates the impacts tourists already have on neighbourhoods. Airbnb is not the only vacation rental platform, but it is by far the most significant, operating in 220 countries and regions, with a company valuation of $38 billion in 2018. In Canada, they bring in over $2 billion each year in guest stays and grew in use by 940 percent between 2015 and 2018. Alongside Airbnb’s growth, Canada, for the third year in a row, broke its record of tourist visits, with an estimated 22.1 million visitors last year.

How long will it be before Canada faces an Airbnb-fuelled crisis in our cities’ neighbourhoods? It feels like it’s just a matter of time.

According to Airbnb, the boom in use of the platform has brought economic activity along with the tourists, upwards of $5.6 billion. From a survey conducted by the company of 10,000 users in 2019, 20 percent said that the platform offered them the opportunity to stay in specific neighbourhoods they wouldn’t normally stay in. More than 20 percent stayed on average five days longer because of the cost savings from Airbnb’s lower rates, spending their savings on food and shopping in the destination, all of which Airbnb said pumps more money into the local economy.

Thorben Wieditz is a researcher with Fairbnb, a “national coalition of homeowners, tenants, tourism businesses, and labour organizations.” Fairbnb’s research has found that instead of the tourist dollars supporting areas not traditionally visited by tourists, Airbnb is mostly operating in already tourist-heavy areas, “using housing stock as quasi-hotel inventory.” Although this can be beneficial for other local businesses, like restaurants and retailers, Wieditz said that Airbnbs are not contributing as much economic activity as they claim, by preventing investments in the hotel industry, creating tax avoidance opportunities, and reducing the benefits that come from unionized hotel workers.

But regardless of whether the money is going to hotels or local hosts, Airbnb is favourable because it brings revenues in non-traditional areas instead of hotel conglomerates, right? McGill University released an analysis on Airbnb across Canada in June 2019 and found that 10 percent of Airbnb hosts earn half the revenue from all Airbnb stays and more than 50 percent of all Airbnb revenue last year was generated by people who rent out multiple listings, rather than individuals renting out their private residences.

When digging a bit deeper, there is also a racial element to who makes money on this platform. From their data-combing research, Inside Airbnb, a website acting as ” an independent, non-commercial set of tools and data that allows you to explore how Airbnb is really being used in cities around the world,” found that in predominantly Black neighbourhoods in the United States, the majority of hosts are white, and Black hosts make 530 percent less on the platform than white hosts. As the Airbnb trend continues to grow, it’s starting to look like Airbnb has developed a tool for increasing the wealth of mostly white property managers, while operating as another hotel conglomerate—unregulated and untaxed.

Ryan (who prefers to be identified by first name only) is a photographer for the Instagram account @augustaandbaldwin and has been a merchant in Kensington Market since 2010. Located in Toronto’s Chinatown, Kensington Market is a pedestrian and artist-centred, multicultural neighbourhood with 240 businesses such as vintage stores, butcher shops, and international food shops. Ryan has noticed people who live in the market have been pushed out due to vacation rentals and says “the market has visitors from across the city and around the world. A one-night visitor won’t be shopping the same as a resident, so there will be an effect on buying patterns.” As commercial rent in Kensington Market is tripling, forcing businesses out in favour of those catering to a wealthier clientele, Ryan says he is hopeful a balance can be struck between tourism and the locals, because “the neighbourhood is nothing without the people that live here every day.”

In Ottawa, city councillor Catherine McKenney (Ward 14–Somerset) is concerned about the effects an Airbnb increase will have on residents, expressing that “if a whole area of the city is converted into short term rentals, businesses will suffer” due to disruptions that occur when neighbours are no longer neighbours, but tourists. As the ward starts to see more issues arise from short term rentals, “that has an impact across the whole neighbourhood, including businesses.”

In the Maritimes, Charlottetown has seen up to one in 50 private dwellings listed on Airbnb, the second highest per property list rate of Airbnbs in Canada. Despite the increase in listings, when questioned, there doesn’t seem to be impacts facing business owners yet. However, in a survey conducted by city planners, 213 residents answered that they are concerned vacation rentals will “threaten the character” of their neighbourhoods. One person even commented that “seasonal short-term rentals means that renters have to move in order for tourists to have a convenient place to stay. It is detrimental to the health of our communities.” With an extremely low rate of empty housing across the province, a boom of ghost hotels, and tourism continuing to grow for the sixth year in a row, how much longer will it be until Charlottetown residents feel the effects?

With the flock of tourists sharing close quarters with residents, aside from the effects on retail, there are some accompanying nightmare scenarios taking place across the country. For example, Ottawa, Newmarket, and Toronto have recently suffered deadly shootings at parties hosted in Airbnb rentals; Prince Edward County residents have found themselves surrounded by dark empty houses in low tourist seasons, and two Calgary homeowners were forced to leave their home for months after guests trashed the place and left it “covered in biohazards.” These types of scenarios make living difficult and uncomfortable, and leave locals no choice but to move elsewhere.

But there is hope: Canadian municipalities and provinces are recognizing the potential problems that Airbnb is bringing with it and are taking action. To target property owners who have multiple listings in vacant homes or units, cities like Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, and Oakville—as well as the province of Quebec—are requiring hosts to obtain a business license in order to list their place on the website. Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, and the province of Alberta are taxing the hosts, guests, or both.

Kathryn Holm, the director of licensing and community standards at the City of Vancouver, who worked on the local regulations, said the city wanted to find a way of “allowing folks to run a short-term rental business out of the place that they call home.” The policy supports tourism by providing accommodation options in neighbourhoods that aren’t serviced by hotels, so the rentals will disperse more evenly across the city, something Holm is already seeing after one year of the policy being in place. Airbnb supports the policy by requiring a business license on all listings in Vancouver and passing that information to the city on a regular basis.

With Ottawa regulations on the way, McKenney is hopeful. They said the Ottawa bylaws are some of the strongest they’ve seen to protect neighbourhoods. The “local hotel industry will be healthier, and so will our entire neighbourhoods—parking, recycling, and garbage—the things in residential neighbourhoods we count on to keep our neighbourhood healthy and sustainable.”

As with most other so-called “disruptive technologies,” Airbnb was fully embraced by users, praised for providing an opportunity for anyone to rent out their home and earn extra cash, free from the restrictions of hotel-like regulations—a true capitalist dream. The purpose of this platform, and the purpose that Airbnb espouses still, is that it brings tourists to “off-the-beaten-path” locales and boosts tourism revenue in Canadian cities. But it may be that if left unregulated, Airbnb will transform neighbourhoods and cities right before our eyes. Yes, Airbnb’s platform brings money into neighbourhoods across Canada, but we also need to protect existing businesses and the unique neighbourhoods that make our cities some of the most livable places in the world. There are valuable lessons that Canada can learn from the Airbnb crises in international tourist hubs like Barcelona and Berlin. With a little smart policy and planning, Canada’s municipalities may be stepping in to address Canada’s looming Airbnb-fuelled crisis just in the nick of time.

Photo by Anshu A on Unsplash

Lately, all of my labour—domestic, creative, and income-earning—has shrunk to the space of a studio apartment. My office now doubles as my kitchen table, my gym, and my sick bed. It is a home which felt small even when I had access to third spaces for work, leisure, and exercise (such as cafes, parks, libraries and other shared public and commercial spaces). Now—under quarantine—it feels like a science fiction outpost somewhere with an unbreathable atmosphere.

For those who can work remotely, the pandemic has shifted our labour out of the workplace and into our homes. At the same time, the value, visibility, and risk of social reproduction work is rising: the labour that feeds, clothes, cleans, and cares for us. This includes nurses, doctors, and other healthcare workers; janitors and cleaners; agricultural and food processing workers; grocery store workers and food delivery drivers; laundromat staff and garbage collectors, as well as the construction workers, transit drivers, hardware store employees and others deemed “essential” and still obliged to be out in the world. Faced with increased demand, union and labour activist pressure, and the risk of workers quitting, a number of provinces have raised pay for health care and long-term care workers. This has included harmonizing pay in public and private sector facilities, and least four major grocery store companies have raised cashier and stock clerk wages. Under a state of emergency, we are learning what kinds of work are actually necessary to sustain us, much of which is work that has historically been undervalued and underpaid. In a pandemic that has disrupted work and life and emphasized the irreplaceability and vulnerability of in-person essential labour, invisible and home-bound labour has the privilege of reducing exposure, and working visibly and outside of the home comes with substantially higher risks.

I am lucky enough to be working from home, to still be employed, and have access to paid sick days and a flexible schedule, but this is very much not the norm. Statistics Canada reports that more than one million workers (5.3 percent of the workforce) became unemployed in March alone, bringing the country to the lowest employment rate since 1997. Many more remained employed but worked less than half or none of their usual hours, numbers that are expected to increase as the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy rolls out. Early statistics suggest that total applicants for EI and the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) are already as high as 6 million. The biggest employment decreases have been for youth aged 15 to 24, women, and workers in less secure jobs, including temporary, contract, and seasonal workers. Income support ranges from up to $847 per week for workers who remain employed but are not being paid, $500 for those who have been laid off or fired due to the pandemic or who are sick or need to isolate, and $312.50 for students and recent graduates whose summer jobs have disappeared. Advocates have flagged that, under the current program design, whole segments of the population are not yet covered. This could include sex workers, migrant workers, undocumented workers, artists, those already receiving social or disability assistance, anyone who was unemployed prior to mid-March, and anyone still earning over $1000 per month through part-time work or other income sources. Everyone—unless they still have stable, secure employment they can do from home—has been financially shaken or put at risk, but not all of our precarity is valued the same.

As a researcher, I feel like I should be commenting on this situation: I research labour, technology, and inequality for a research institute at Ryerson University. But I have been sick—as so many of us are and will be in the coming months—and overwhelmed with the need to rest and the labour of caring for myself while living alone; managing a virus that neither my body, my bloodline, or the collective body politic has ever experienced. As Dr. Hannah MacGregor, a professor of publishing at Simon Fraser University, described in a recent  episode of Secret Feminist Agenda, her podcast about how we enact feminism in our daily lives: “those of us whose jobs are to be observers and commentators on the contemporary moment are finding that this contemporary moment is wildly defying any of the critical skillsets that we have.” She says,  it is difficult to reconcile “the higher level information (the statistics, the charts, the infection rates, the policies, the border closures)…. with a personal embodied experience of what is happening right now, which seem so wildly out of sync with each other.”

The pressure to work through a global crisis can manifest as pressure to show up to an essential job that might be increasingly unsafe, for wages that may be less than the emergency response benefit. It can feel like pressure to stay online and available, or to analyze every drop of new information from every daily press conference, policy change, and publication. It can emerge as the pressure of life-optimization and improvement, to wrangle our domestic labour into something photographable and our bodies into shape, to perfect our schedules or to turn our missing commute times into longer work days. In illness, this pressure can take the form of a list of get-well tasks, symptom management, and transmission prevention, labour that is imperative when the virus is this deadly, and the transmission rates so high.

Living alone, I have been graphing my fevers, my oxygen levels, the intervals between medication and hydration, and intensity of my cough, building up a visible record of invisible symptoms to report back on tele-appointments with doctors and calls from concerned family and friends. In a recent column for Wired Magazine, journalist Laurie Penny, described this approach to working through the pandemic as “processing immense, unknowable collective catastrophe by escaping into smaller everyday emergencies.” Inside, my body is doing the work of fighting off the infection and the infection is doing the work of trying to kill me, or rather of using me to replicate and spread, were I to go out in the world and touch loved ones and surfaces. This fight is too small for the human eye to document or the market to value, and goes uncounted in public health data, which in my province is limited to select high-risk groups, healthcare workers, and frontline social services. It is an invisible and intangible infection, with the potential to be both personally and economically costly.

The “intangible shift” is an economic trend in which growth and prosperity are driven by intangible assets, such as data, expertise, branding, and marketing, instead of traditional tangible assets such as buildings, equipment, and product inventories. The equipment needed to design, test, produce, and distribute a vaccine are tangible; the patent for it and the research and ideas behind it, are not. At the time of writing this, our global economy rests either on the development of a vaccine, reliable and widespread testing and treatment, or on creating safe physical distances in public and private space, such as spreading out passengers on transit and in planes, and limiting customers in restaurants and shops. In brick-and-mortar commerce and services whose business models previously relied on operating as close to capacity and full productivity as possible, we may need to slow things down.

Beyond layoffs and furloughs, the main dividing line in our labour market right now is whether your work can be done online or still needs to be done in person. It is intangible assets—in particular software, websites, and data, and the tangible hardware and infrastructure that support them—that are helping many workers continue to work from home, pay their rent, and stay housed. They are helping businesses reach customers without violating business closure rules, helping students to stay in touch with their classmates and teachers; helping doctors, nurses, and public health staff check on remote patients; and helping us all stay connected with family and friends, and stay updated on public health announcements and policy changes. It is also what enables contact tracing apps and other tech-based surveillance approaches to contain the virus. However, as work, education, and civic and social life move online, those without home internet, the now vital personal assets of home computers or smartphones, and the digital literacy to use them, are at risk of being sidelined or shut out entirely.

In Canada we do not know yet, and may never know, the full demographics of who gets sick, who is diagnosed, and who survives COVID-19. Public health authorities have released limited case data, despite calls for demographic, and in particular race-based breakdowns, and testing eligibility varies between each province and territory. But we know that there will be stark inequalities in who holds on to their employment and shelters in place to limit their exposure, who has lost work, and who is still working outside of the home.

According to mobile device location data released by Google, movement to and from workplaces has dropped 44 percent nationally. New York Times analysis found that nineteen of the 20 neighbourhoods with the lowest percentage of positive tests have been in wealthy ZIP codes. In Canadian prisons, where inmate wages are as low as $5.25 per day, advocates and the media are sounding the alarm on the lack of soap, hand sanitizer, and other basic supplies to comply with public health protocols.

At my day job, we recently looked at which occupations were at high risk of disease exposure and required working in close proximity to other people. Many of the high-risk non-healthcare jobs that are still deemed essential and require in-person labour are low income, including store clerks, delivery drivers, and other services and trades. Many are in precarious or low-wage employment situations, which puts pressure on workers who may not be able to afford to quit, and who would not be eligible for income support if they walked off the job. Today, less than half of renters have a month of savings or assets to cover rent and living expenses, a state that is particularly concerning at a time when public health guidelines strongly encourage people to stay in their homes and many advocates are calling for a rental freeze or suspension alongside the suspension of provincial eviction hearings.

The concept of “intangible assets” looks at firms in a digitizing economy, but I cannot stop thinking about the impacts on workers. Even prior to the pandemic, much of the labour of producing “intangible assets” was invisible, not in the feminist theory sense of un(der) valued care work, domestic, and emotional labour, but through technology, business, and employment practices that hide or downplay paid labor from the consumer, the client, the investor, and the public.

Labour is hidden behind an illusion of play or passion, such as devotion to the cause, passion for a product or service, or the playful, misleading job titles of the 2010s, such as Customer Success Gurus, Innovation Sherpas, and Brand Warriors. Labour is hidden by the shift to contracts, gig work, and outsourcing companies shed functions and employees, and in the bifurcated pay scales and working conditions of tech companies  and their outsourced cleaning staff, chefs, security guards, and content moderators. Labour is hidden by layers of globalization that separate the production and  extraction of resources from a product’s sale or use, such as the billions of gallons of water needed to cool data centres or the mined metals and elements that make a smartphone. Labour is hidden in the supposed effortlessness of modern viral marketing, the labour of influencers and employees encouraged to “live the brand”. Labour is hidden in dropshipping business models, such as mattress companies that deliver directly to your door in a box, and food delivery services that hide the labour of cooking and running a restaurant. Labour is hidden through buzzwords that turn work into a lifestyle, in which Airbnb is “house-sharing” and Uber is “car-sharing”, underpinned by economic trends that make owning assets out of reach for many.

In the pandemic, most of the white-collar workers whose labour used to be hidden as devotion, passion, or play are secluded in our houses, producing virtual outputs such as software or knowledge. Barring technical difficulties or lack of internet access, this work can easily be done remotely. Our labour shifts online and outside of the public sphere, empty of the rituals of dressing for work, commuting, and the public display of effort and workism in the office.

Outside, many workers are still going to work, either because their jobs are frontline crisis support for the pandemic (healthcare workers, pharmacists, etc.), because their workplaces are deemed essential services—an evolving list that varies provincially and can include food production and delivery, car rentals, dry cleaners, pet stores, mining, and construction—or because they cannot afford to lose income or quit and lose their toehold in a collapsing labour market. In a 2015 lecture at the Croatian Academy of Fine Arts, Dr. Ursula Huws, a Professor of Labour and Globalisation at the University of Hertfordshire, described this as a contingent workforce “managed by global companies to provide the social reproductive labour for the slightly more privileged members of the working class in order to enable them to work longer hours”. Grocery delivery services are overwhelmed, scheduling weeks in advance, and small business owners are doing the work of converting their once in-person services online or by delivery, including cafes converting to take-out meals, virtual physiotherapy and exercise, guided bang trims, and alcohol and coffee deliveries. In the early days of this illness and recovery, while I was under strict isolation, this network of gig work and low-wage work kept me fed and well-supplied, along with help from friends and family.

It is work that has become increasingly imperative to feed and supply the large number of people in self-isolation, quarantine, or caregiving, or with the luxury to shelter in place and disposable income to spend. It has become increasingly invisible as a significant chunk of the population stays in their homes, serviced remotely and through contactless delivery. There is a real risk that, hidden from the public and the media eye, working conditions in these frontline jobs may decline as the risk of being at work rises, and that those of us who rely on it will lose touch even further with the working conditions of our neighbours and service providers. To help address this, a number of labour advocacy groups and unions have called for improved workplace health and safety practices, including access to personal protective equipment, reducing customer crowding, alternating shifts, and other operational changes.

Everywhere, care work and social reproduction labour happens mainly behind closed doors, much of it unpaid. It happens in the single and multi-person households under quarantine or recovering at home; in contactless deliveries between friends, neighbours, and mutual aid groups; online among loved ones and new open forums such as choirs, virtual club nights, and conferences; and in long-term care facilities, shelters, and in the hospitals where, in some countries, families are no longer allowed to visit, even for births or deaths. Some of it is virtual and remote, invisible except to the recipient and the companies that build the software we use to video into each other’s lives. Some of it is in person and in close quarters; care work that spills out from our homes and into our makeshift offices: intergenerational households trying to keep each other healthy, children interrupting video calls with toys scattered in the background, the labour of education now somehow happening at the same time and in the same space as our paid jobs.

First used by Dr. Kathleen Kuehn and Dr. Thomas F. Corrigan (professors at the Victoria University of Wellington and California State University, San Bernardino), the term “hope labour” describes labour that is uncompensated and done in the hopes of future payoffs or opportunities. It is with hope labour that I have been taking care of myself in isolation, hopeful of a quick, or at least successful recovery. All of us, if we are lucky enough to have homes and clean running water, do the hope labour of washing our hands and keeping our distance to prevent the disease from spreading to our neighbours and overwhelming our healthcare system, as much as our jobs and our health will allow.