Bill S-210 has an arresting title compared to the majority of those passing through the various levels of government in order to become law: “Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act.”

“The title of the legislation sends a fairly powerful message. There is absolutely no doubt about that,” said Kevin Lamoureux, parliamentary secretary to the leader of the government, in the House of Commons during a reading of the bill.

Bill S-210 is a federal, private member’s bill. As of June 2024, the bill has passed second reading and is in the report stage. It is meant to protect children and teenagers from exposure to age-inappropriate content. On paper, that seems like a good idea that most people would support. Protecting children is important, and much of the discussion during the House of Commons readings focused mainly on that—not the issues with privacy the bill poses. The details surrounding how age verification would work are nebulous, and the ones that are known raise privacy concerns.

During the readings, Liberal and NDP members of parliament mentioned some of those concerns alongside the ones about children. Conservative and Bloc Québécois representatives mainly focused on controlling who is able to watch pornography.

“Canadians want their children to be protected, but they are also wary about invasions of their privacy. Canadians have very little trust in the ability of the web giants to manage their information and private data,” said Anju Dhillon, a Liberal MP who represents Dorval-Lachine-LaSalle, in November 2023 when the bill was being discussed in its second reading, a rare stage to reach for a private member’s bill. People are also fearful, she said, of deliberate violations of privacy and data security breaches.

The Privacy & Access Council of Canada has pointed out that the sweeping provisions in the bill could endanger all Canadians’ privacy, not just underaged people. Currently, age verification could entail forcing people to upload pictures of their faces and government-issued IDs to watch porn online. Some of that data could be stored long term, creating easily found trails online. The bill does not set out clear terms to prevent this from happening.

Age verification technology has been criticized as immature and not adequately developed at a technological level. A recent report from France’s National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties found that six of the leading age verification solutions did not respect users’ rights.

This is a particular stress on members of the 2SLBGTQIA+ community, who could face exposure and/or blackmail for their browsing history. Not everyone in the community is out, and the ability for others to access intimate data puts already marginalized people at further risk. For 2SLBGTQIA+ Canadians who live in rural areas, this can be especially scary as the online world is sometimes their only way to connect with queer culture.

There is not a lot of data specific to the porn-viewing habits of Canadian youth, with researchers denoting a need for more studies. A 2023 report from Common Sense Media found that around 73 percent of U.S. teens aged 13-17 had watched porn online. The same study found differences in the porn consumption of 2SLBGTQIA+ youth compared to their hetero peers—the former group was more likely to seek out porn intentionally, in an effort to explore and affirm their sexuality. Yet this bill and its sweeping provisions seems based on the idea that all youth engage in the same habits online (watching violent pornography where a woman is subjugated by a man; the concern being its influence) when that is simply not accurate.

Another critique of the bill has been that a VPN, which many youth know how to use, could be a way to get around age verification. The bill is meant to protect those under 18. They are arguably also the most internet and tech-savvy generation to exist and the bill is being created by people who have not grown up online in the same way, and may not be able to anticipate how young people will subvert provisions.

Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne is the chief architect and lead defender of the bill. A former Radio-Canada broadcaster who was appointed to the Senate in 2018, she was a guest on the “Law Bytes” podcast to debate it. In a January 2024 episode, she provided her rationale and defence against the criticism and concerns it has sparked. She explained to host Michael Geist that she has worked carefully on drafting the legislation and adding amendments for three years.

Miville-Dechêne responded to the issues Geist raised around privacy by saying that the bill had not specifically mandated exactly what age verification system would be used at this point, noting that technology evolves constantly. “No method is absolutely zero risk…we can erase the data. We can make sure that it is a mechanism that doesn’t go too far. But frankly, this is not in the bill. This is to be discussed afterwards. So how can you say the bill is dangerous?” Mivelle-Dechêne said.

“In some ways, it seems to me, that makes it even more dangerous,” Geist retorted.

A bill meant to protect vulnerable members of our society should not further marginalize others. If there are not sweeping reforms to this bill, particularly the technological aspects, it could easily become one of the biggest national threats to privacy in recent history.

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.”

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.

Illustration by Awispa

When my daughter was born, I would place tiny dots of sandalwood oil behind her perfect little ears and in the folds of her delicate neck. She was the best smelling baby around; the combination of the natural scent of infant and sandalwood was heady, divine, something you could live in forever. It’s an unusual thing, to perfume babies, something that runs counter to today’s heightened wariness of unnecessary exposure to chemicals (though the perfume oil I used was natural, with no additives or preservatives).

I was born in Khartoum, Sudan, in the late seventies. Almost 20 years later, I landed in Thorncliffe Park, a Toronto neighbourhood. My daughter had the most Toronto birth imaginable, early morning at St. Michael’s Hospital under the pulsating glow of Dundas Square’s neon lights. Sandalwood is ubiquitous in Sudanese culture, used as oil and incense to perfume women’s bodies and homes. Perfuming my daughter was a way to ensure her connection with my cultural heritage and home. I wear sandalwood oil or perfumes with prominent notes of sandalwood, and I imagined that early introduction to these scents would forge a strong bond between my daughter and her maternal heritage.

Smell is one of our strongest senses; it is processed by the part of the brain associated with memory and emotions, as well as the cerebral cortex. Smell memories are more powerful than other types of memories, and perfume marketing capitalizes both on this relationship and our need to be desired. Research has shown that smell is an important part of mother-child bond formation: “Olfactory recognition may be implicated in the early stages of the mother-infant attachment process, when the newborns learn to recognize their own mother’s unique odo[u]r signature.” With the sandalwood that I would place on my daughter and wear myself as I held her, I was intervening in this attachment—consciously choosing to complicate it with my own olfactory memories, my own need for belonging performed and reciprocated within our dyad.

Sudanese culture is profoundly aromatic, with ways and traditions informed by and centred around perfumery. Scent is used to cleanse, maintain health, welcome guests, celebrate, mourn, purify, conjure, and banish spirits. Smells are produced for the home by burning resins (mostly frankincense and mastic) and bakhoor (wood chips that are soaked in scented oil mélanges and then burned in traditional incense holders called mabkharas), and for the body by using oil blends and perfumes. The smells are very strong and very distinct, and back when I lived on a multicultural campus in Muscat, Oman, you could identify the Sudanese houses by smell on celebration days.

I had received the sandalwood oil that I used on my daughter as a gift from a family friend who at the time lived in Mississauga. She had just come back from a trip to Sudan, and I had visited her upon her return. At the time, I was pregnant and as I was leaving her home, she secretively placed the tiny 30 millilitre vial in my hand and whispered: “This is the good stuff, from India. It’s not watered down or artificial.”

Sudanese scent culture is a container for various histories and geographies, with the country’s location and Red Sea ports making it a gateway to north, west, and south Africa. The trade routes are centuries-old, with destinations and origins from India via the Arabian peninsula, up and down the eastern coast of Africa, the entry point to the Saharan caravan routes, connected to the Mediterranean and Europe by the Nile.

Traditional Sudanese products are coveted differently when they come from different places, as the possibility of their acquisition used to mean foreign connections or the money for imports: silks from Japan and Switzerland used for traditional toabs; the red and gold striped fabric from Jordan specifically used during wedding rituals; the Parisienne perfumes of Piver’s Rêve d’or or Roger & Gallet’s Fleurs d’Amour (the latter was discontinued, but bottles can still be found online); and sandalwood from India.

Sometimes, when we leave where we come from, we choose and then exaggerate the rituals that remind us of a romanticized and idealized version of our origins. Smelling of sandalwood was something I associated as being intrinsically Sudanese, and belonging to nowhere else, despite the product’s origins.

And so, I was surprised when, one day, I met up with a South Indian friend for lunch and as she held my baby she proclaimed: “Your daughter smells like home!”

This triggered an exploration into the origins of sandalwood in Sudan, and what this home-connection was for two people from different parts of the world connected through this scent (we also both happen to be geography scholars).

The most desired and expensive form of sandalwood is Santalum album, or white sandalwood, a dry, deciduous forest tree native to southern India. Rising demand for sandalwood led to overharvesting and, in response, the Indian state government started controlling the planting and harvesting of sandalwood. In 2001, the Indian Sandal Act was passed to deregulate planting sandalwood in an attempt to curb the out-of-control smuggling; growers still had to seek permission from the state before harvesting. This again led to an overharvesting of sandalwood and did not resolve the smuggling, so in 2017 the Indian government enforced a prohibition on the export of sandalwood (with the exception of the oil and finished handicraft products made from sandalwood, which are unrestricted). This was mildly enforced until October 2018, when Santalum album was categorised as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

In 2019, Indian customs officials stepped up their vigilance related to the export of sandalwood, which led to the stopping of several Sudanese individuals from leaving India when attempting to board planes with sandalwood. In most cases, the sandalwood had been obtained legally, and the Indian government refers to the problematic demand produced by the grey market in sandalwood trade.

I’ve been collecting these news stories of Sudanese individuals with their kilograms of sandalwood, heading back home. Their names are frighteningly ordinary, strangely familiar. When I was my seven, the age my daughter is at writing, I would watch as my aunts would prepare wood chips to make bakhoor and imagine that any of the women stopped by Indian customs officials could have planned to do the same thing, using the bakhoor to scent their homes in preparation for a wedding or Eid.

We’ve long since run out of that precious white sandalwood oil, and anyway, she now prefers scents that contain lighter florals like orange blossom and rose. I’m curious to see what happens as she grows older, if she’ll continue to associate the smell of sandalwood with her mother and what emotions that may trigger for her.

I’ve spent most of my life living outside of Sudan. Like many others who have grown up away from the countries of their heritage, I spend a lot of time thinking about what my cultural identity means, how and where I perform it. Learning about sandalwood’s Indian origins revealed connections with ritual, tradition, home, and belonging. It also provided an awareness of Sudan’s place in the world that wasn’t western focused. Learning about centuries-old trade routes and cross-cultural pollination helped develop an understanding of the ways in which traditions evolve over place and time. And more recently, how the unintended consequences of human activities threaten ancient rituals as well as ecological diversity.

I haven’t been able to find out when white sandalwood started being traded in Sudan, or how it became a crucial part of our aromatic identity. But its presence in Sudanese culture remains a testament to cross-cultural dialogue and exchange. Through following the ways in which white sandalwood is harvested, cultivated, processed, and transported, new ways of understanding the connections between us unfold.

PHOTO BY KAREN MILLS

The Premier of Alberta is a Conservative. Every single seat in the province bar one went blue in the last federal election. Despite the severe lack of representation in government, those with leftward ideologies still exist in Alberta. Where can they turn to hear friendly voices? The Alberta Advantage podcast.

The bi-monthly podcast was born in 2017 out of a local Jacobin magazine reading group’s desire for political representation at home.

“We found there was a real lack of any kind of conversation about topics from a left-wing perspective,” says Joël Laforest, producer and panelist with the Alberta Advantage. “We figured we could use the ability to have discussions that we built up as a reading group and try our hand at putting it into a podcast.”

Since then, Alberta Advantage, whose name is a play on a 1990s Tory moniker for the province’s unique tax structure and non-renewable resource-derived revenue, has been lauded as Calgary’s best podcast and now receives over $1,700 a month through Patreon.

It isn’t all awards and donations, however.

“Being left-wing in Alberta has real challenges and material consequences,” says host and sound engineer Kate Jacobson. “We face real risks to our employment and our physical safety…. The right in this province is very organized.”

Jacobson says she’s fortunate enough to have secure employment outside the podcast, but others on their team of about 20 volunteers have to be more clandestine about their work on the Advantage.

“Sometimes it can feel very difficult to live here,” she says. “You’re basically swimming against a tide. There are all these ideas that people have been trained to believe about the oil industry, trade unions, socialism, and the government. You have to counter those at every level.”

Jacobson and Laforest say they’re both particularly proud of a November episode that tackles an advertisement they refer to as “oil propaganda.” Presented by representatives from the Birchcliff Energy and Tourmaline Oil companies, published by a group called Canadians for Canada’s Future and endorsed online by premier Jason Kenney, the ad in question says oil companies have been taken for granted for too long by “all too many people who vigorously condemn what we do while relishing in the fruits of our labour.”

The ad goes on to marry the narrative that oil companies keep the country running with emotionally arresting imagery, such as workers embracing their children.

For nearly an hour, Advantage dissects the ad, which they refer to as a “crypto-fascist piece of media” and part of a concerted effort to make the rest of Canada feel a protective, nationalist pride for the oil industry, as they say Albertans have been trained to do.

Looking forward, Jacobson and Laforest say the Advantage plans to begin producing video and text content for their online audience. They say the latter is particularly important after the folding of StarMetro, Calgary’s only liberal-leaning daily newspaper.

“Smile! You’re on fare evader camera.” Such is the message of the Toronto Transit Commission’s (TTC) ad campaign, which was rolled out in May 2019. The campaign follows a scandal that broke a few months earlier, when Toronto’s auditor general released a report estimating that the TTC had lost upwards of $60 million from fare evasion. It inspired an entire genre of articles that focus on describing the different ways that people manage to skip fares, often including photos and videos as public shaming. The bottom line is: your fellow riders, unlike you, are riding for free— and you’re paying the price.

Both the report and the ad campaign sparked their own iterations of an age-old debate: whose fault is it when public transit fails? The question pokes at a bruise: transit has long been a comically sore spot for Torontonians, who’ve been waiting for a much-promised relief line, intended to provide an alternative to the city’s overflowing Yonge line, since before the city’s first subway route was built in 1954. The transit system is so bad and frequently delayed that transit delays have practically become a part of Torontonian identity—but Canada’s largest metropolis isn’t alone in the issue.

As it turns out, Torontonians’ transit grievances are not only older than transit itself, but also endemic to Canada’s national approach to public transit. Overcrowded trains, late buses, crumbling infrastructure, and infinitely delayed construction projects seem to be recurring problems for Canadian cities. Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Winnipeg all have the same symptoms—and the fare-evasion rhetoric to go with it.

What Canadian transit woes have in common is a substantial lack of federal funding and supervision. When funding is earmarked for public transit, it is usually earmarked for the broader issue of infrastructure—a term which means the money may go toward public transit, but may also go toward building or maintaining highways, meaning that local transit commissions still have to fight for their share of the funding. Cities throughout Canada are facing the same problems and symptoms, because they are facing the systematic issue that Canada’s transit economy is built for cars and private transportation—but they are having to face it alone. That leaves transit planning to municipal and provincial governments, making transit funding a deeply partisan issue that depends on the election cycle.

Toronto’s relief line has been the subject of so many different proposals, many of them tied to elections, that they’ve been compiled into a book. The most recent iteration of these antics is Premier Doug Ford’s decision to shelve the line altogether in favour of a different route that would conveniently take riders all the way to a casino he would build in an already accessible and scarcely populated neighbourhood. (The casino plan has since been scrapped.)

There have been additions, even in recent years, like the UP Express connecting Toronto’s downtown to the airport, which originally flopped and then became a commuter success after slashing its fare in half. But even so, the system is failing to keep up with the city’s rapid population growth, leaving large areas sorely underserved. Poorer neighbourhoods receive substantially less service, leading to substantially longer, more stressful, and overcrowded commutes. This substantial burden makes transit least accessible to those who need it the most. When Presto, the Greater Toronto Area’s (GTA) universal transit access card that the province began rolling out in 2007 in an effort to make public transit more seamless, first started selling discounted fares for low-income people tied to Ontario’s disability programme, they found that half of those passes went entirely unused because it was very difficult to access.

Inaccessibility is perhaps theTTC’s most important problem, but it’s not its only one. Public transit advocates like TTC riders point towards aging infrastructure as one of many causes of the system’s frequent and long delays, which have been estimated to cost the city between $7 and $11 billion in productivity—including wages for people who weren’t able to work as many hours as they had planned. New infrastructure is also a problem: the Presto card is now infamously prone to glitches. The cards frequently fail to function, leaving riders no choice but to evade fares or let their bus leave without them. The system continues to grow more expensive to the province, which has now spent well upwards of $1 billion trying to implement it.

Despite these issues, the public service has only become more expensive: the monthly metropass was among the five most expensive in the world as of 2017, and its cost has only gone up since then. As the cost of transit becomes accessible to fewer and fewer people, the TTC ad campaign pulls on a lot of heartstrings: the TTC runs mostly on fare collection, and so the $60 million loss is an important cause of the system’s shortcomings. “I hear from residents daily who are frustrated by the cost of fare evasion,” TTC Chair Jaye Robinson says on the TTC website. “Riders who choose not to pay their fares are impacting our ability to deliver transit service to the entire city.”

But Robinson’s approach, which is endlessly recycled for clickbait articles, individualizes a systemic problem. TheTTC has the third biggest ridership of any North American transit system, yet it receives the least amount of subsidies, relying almost entirely on fares to continue functioning. Experts have for years pointed to this fact as the starting point for the vicious cycle by which low-quality service begets increased fare and vice-versa.

To say that these frustrations have gone entirely unanswered would be wrong: many transit systems have responded to the increasingly popular gripes with fare evasions through increased penalties. Toronto has recently hired more fare inspectors. Montreal is seeing widespread calls for a comprehensive audit and an increase in fare inspectors to go along with it. Transit coverage in Vancouver frequently follows the same path.

This goes hand-in-hand with coverage of the transit crisis that puts the blame on fare evasions, like an article on CityNews Calgary that points towards fare evaders “cheating” the transit system. With this kind of coverage, the blame for a systemic issue on a national scale that has been shifted onto provincial and municipal governments gets shifted even further onto individuals.

It also ignores a core purpose of public transit: to provide mobility, and thus access to healthcare, work, education, and other facets of life, to those who don’t use private transportation.

Advocates oppose raising fares and resent the increased funding allocated to fare inspection. A fine in Toronto can cost a whopping $425; in Vancouver, where fare evasion fines have been found to put youth in debt, you’d be looking at $173. In both cases, critics have pointed out, fare evasion will cost you more than a parking violation.

Increased policing in transit has been a controversial move, as it also increases opportunities for police brutality. This was the subject of the mass transit protest in New York in October 2019. It puts people of colour at a higher risk of encountering police brutality; it actively punishes people who can’t afford the fare but need to commute, thus making medical appointments, work, and other necessities even less accessible. At the same time, it spends money on fare inspectors’ salaries that could instead be put toward making the system more accessible.

And this is if the fare collection system works: for Canada’s showy but often-glitchy fare cards, that’s not a guarantee, and people throughout the country often find themselves facing fines after having already paid the fare.

“Municipalities don’t have that many options for [public transit] funding, unfortunately, under our system,” former Vancouver chief planner Brent Toderian told the Globe and Mail about the city’s 2015 vote on a 0.5 percent increase in tax sales to cover transportation infrastructure renewal. This “last-ditch attempt,” as the Globe and Mail called it, at giving TransLink, the authority responsible for transportation in Metro Vancouver, a functioning budget, was overwhelmingly rejected. The only other option to provide more funding, a hike in property taxes, was, again in the Globe and Mail’s words, “politically unsavoury” for the incumbent mayor.

In 2015, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities requested that Ottawa grant Canadian cities at least $1 billion in the yearly budget earmarked for new infrastructure spending. In 2017, their request was granted— a sure victory for city mayors, but not necessarily for transit advocates.

“There was this consensus that the majority of transportation planning and funding should be oriented toward accommodating more cars,” Victoria Transport Policy Institute director Todd Litman told the cbc. “What it boils down to is that it’s much easier for local governments to get funding for a highway improvement or new bridge than it is for a public transit project, even if public transit is the more rational investment.”

Public transportation is an investment that often requires a lot of money up front, and a lot of time to build before people can see the results—less traffic, faster and less stressful commutes, easier access to neighbourhoods throughout the city. What Canada’s lack of a federal public transportation policy does is pin this deeply necessary but controversial issue on municipal and provincial governments, allowing for it to be taken hostage by local party politics.

The poverty-shaming rhetoric that a lot of fare evasion clickbait adopts feeds into this. It pits people who use public transit and those whose interest it is to improve public transit and make it more accessible to all against each other. It makes the failure of public transit systems seem like an individual failure, a moral failure on the part of those who can’t pay their way. It ensures that Canadians continue dealing with chronic public transit underfunding simply by isolating cities and people from one another and pretending the shortcoming is personal rather than systemic.

Image: iStock/Inna Sinano; design: Valerie Thai

In the spring of 2019, Newfoundlanders Adam Denny and Jonathon Brown came together after learning they both had a similar vision in mind: a provincial Green party.
Their province, which was hit hard by the cod fishery collapse in 1992, has increasingly been focused on developing an offshore oil industry. Even though that too has faced troubles, it still brings in big bucks—about 25 percent of the province’s GDP.

In Denny’s view, the provincial Conservatives, Liberals, and even the NDP consider the expansion of the oil and gas industry non-negotiable—an important economic engine, despite the province’s commitment to lowering carbon emissions. When Denny couldn’t accept the expansion as necessary or appropriate, he and Brown began corralling others via Facebook and taking modest steps with the goal of running Green candidates in the next provincial election, likely to take place in 2023. “There’s not a single party out there that’s truly taking climate change as the crisis that it is,” Denny says.

At the time Denny and Brown started taking steps towards formally founding a party, Newfoundland and Labrador was the only province in the country that did not have a provincial Green party. On top of that, only 1.1 percent of voters—the lowest rate in the nation—selected the Greens in the last federal election. But the recent election in Prince Edward Island, which bolted the Greens from relative obscurity to the official opposition, was inspiring to Denny. “That was a light bulb moment,” he says. “Not just in Newfoundland, but I suspect across the country.”

With climate crisis a top voting issue, the Greens have found new footing. A recent government study found that Canada’s climate is warming twice as fast as the global average. And as of June 2019, the Climate Action Tracker found that Canada’s efforts to fulfil the goals of the Paris Agreement—limiting global average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius—were “insufficient.”

Over the last two calendar years, in addition to their historic showing in P.E.I., provincial Green parties have gained seats in British Columbia, New Brunswick, and Ontario. Federally, a second Green MP, Paul Manly of Nanaimo–Ladysmith, was elected in a May 2019 by-election and joined Elizabeth May in Ottawa.

For the first time since their 1983 founding, federal Greens have the opportunity to make their biggest move yet nationally, drawing from their experiences on smaller stages. Jo-Ann Roberts, deputy leader of the federal Greens, says the biggest change she’s noticed is a shift in voter attitudes.
“I can tell you as a candidate in Atlantic Canada who’s going door to door, the biggest impact the win on P.E.I. is having on the doorstep is Greens are seen as first of all winnable,” she says.

The collaboration seen between P.E.I. Greens and other parties helps too, she says. For instance, in July, P.E.I.’s MLAs, including Conservatives and Liberals, voted in favour of stronger provincial emissions targets. “Those are things that people see as real action,” Roberts says, adding that it’s translating to voters asking if the Greens could achieve something similar at the federal level.

But as the party looms larger, so does criticism of their policy points; their non-environmental platform, for example, doesn’t always stack up. During the lead-up to the 2015 election, the Greens were criticized for not budgeting enough for early childhood education or at all for a Guaranteed Livable Income plan. The party also courted controversy this summer after contracting the political strategist Warren Kinsella to build a party war room to defend against political attacks. Both the symbolism and the choice of Kinsella were widely considered at odds with Green values.

Moreover, some of the party’s environmental policy planks—like ensuring all new cars are electric and retrofitting “every building in Canada” to be carbon neutral by 2030—could be considered naive. The International Energy Agency estimates around a 30 percent adoption rate for electric vehicles in Canada by 2030 in one of their scenarios; even an ambitious proposal from the Canada Green Building Council only identifies retrofitting a strategic percentage
of buildings.

The Greens have also been experiencing internal growing pains that have come as a result of their expansion. Don Desserud, a University of Prince Edward Island political science professor, pinpoints criticism in P.E.I. about how the candidate nomination process ran prior to the last provincial election as an example of this. Some Greens, he says, were concerned with “selling out” by moving towards the centre from the party’s previous, more strident leadership—for instance, when it came to critiquing agricultural polluters. Though Desserud also says that some of the “moderating” in P.E.I. was of tone more than anything else—they changed gears from criticizing farmers for pesticide use, focusing instead on encouraging individual responsibility rather than strictly increasing governmental regulations. Desserud describes the change as “a compromise in methods but not in principle.”

“That sort of fringe—if it’s a fringe—of the Green Party that’s there probably saw quite rightly that their party was not [as ‘pure’ a party as] they thought, but this is the nature of our electoral system for good or for bad.”

In a proportional representation system, Desserud says, there wouldn’t be a need to moderate to increase electability. The Greens, he says, are not the only party that needs to confront this issue—it’s a regular and cyclical conundrum for the NDP that plays out every few elections. “Every time [the NDP] got a bit of success nationally, they’d move their party a little more to the right and then they’d get hammered the next election because they looked too much like the Liberals,” he says. “And so then they’d rush back to the left and talk about restoring themselves to their first principles and start the process over again.”

Over email, Alex Tyrrell, leader of Quebec’s Green Party, says that in his view Green voters aren’t looking for the party to become more moderate. “With this newfound success the Canadian Green movement is at a crossroads; should we stick to our principles and continue our work to transform Canadian society or should we advocate for some practical first steps in an effort to attract centrist voters?” he writes. “In my opinion, if people are voting Green they are doing so because they want to see a radical change; not just to change the name of the governing party.”

As the party courts new potential Green voters, though, they’ll need to address the harsh reality that new voters don’t necessarily have the same desires as the party faithful. A June 2019 Abacus Data report found that while 35 percent of Green voters want to see a Green government, only 10 percent of those who would consider voting for the Greens but currently don’t—“Green accessible” voters—want the same. “It is very hard for a party that has two MPs and won 3.5 percent of the vote in the last election to imagine that they can form government,” says Abacus CEO David Coletto.

Even though Newfoundland and Labrador’s Greens are the last to start, Denny says he is hopeful they will benefit from building upon the knowledge and experience of other Green parties.
They have a base of support that has been developing for several years, he says; his and Brown’s work to mobilize potential party members means this largely silent, disparate support will finally have an outlet.

Despite climate concerns and recent wins offering tailwinds to the Greens, though, their future isn’t certain. While voters want to see changes in climate policy, they may not want to see the Greens—with their broad-strokes, big-picture ideas—form government.

But even if the Greens don’t form government, a larger slate of their MPs could make a positive difference; they have so far in P.E.I. even without a plurality of seats. There’s a place for environment-focused thinking in parliament, and the Greens may just be what the country needs right now.

Design by Valerie Thai

1. The Rise of the Alt-Right

Andrew Scheer formally addressed the United We Roll convoy in February, a protest that began as a pro-pipeline demonstration and grew to represent racism and xenophobia characteristic of the worldwide yellow vest movement. In May, Conservative MP Michael Cooper read a passage from the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto into parliamentary record, though his comments were later purged. In June, the RCMP launched a hate speech investigation into the Canadian Nationalist Party, an extremist far-right group that failed to gain federal status in the 2019 election. The party’s leader, Travis Patron, posted a video calling for the removal of the “parasitic tribe,” a not-so-subtle dog-whistle for Jewish people.

Far-right hate groups aren’t new in Canada, but they’re getting louder and some of their rhetoric is starting to seep into mainstream politics. Not challenging this rise in the upcoming election would send a clear message to these groups that there’s room in the political mainstream for the hateful views characteristic of the alt-right. “If you don’t condemn that kind of activity, you’re actually giving it oxygen,” says Barbara Perry, the director of the Centre on Hate, Bias, and Extremism. She says the number of far-right extremist groups in Canada is closing in on 300. Around the time of the 2015 election, she says that number was more like 100. This movement to the right, she says, is being called something of a “perfect storm.”

“We often like to blame Trump for … normalizing hatred,” Perry says. “But you know, we had our own patterns of a movement to the right, some of which predated Trump,” like the increase in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment in the 2015 federal election.This “perfect storm” has emboldened far-right hate groups and people who have ties to them in Canada. In the 2018 Toronto municipal election, Faith Goldy, a former correspondent for Rebel media, ran for mayor. She’s been widely criticized for her association with white nationalism, especially after her reporting at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and her appearance on The Krypto Report, a podcast from the neo-Nazi blog The Daily Stormer. She garnered over 25,000 votes in her run for mayor. “There is that political normalization of hate and hostility I think that we’ve seen now modelled in Europe, modelled in the U.S.and then our own brand as well,” Perry says.

Coverage of the alt-right and far-right hate groups can have massive implications in public understanding. There’s a risk that taking fringe groups too seriously can give them too much oxygen, but ignoring them means these groups can continue to operate unchecked. The often ironic rhetoric of alt-right fringe groups does require extra analysis, and there’s work to be done in debunking their claims.

“So much of [the work] around anti-immigrant sentiment is taking down those myths, taking down those stereotypes that they associate with it,” Perry says.

—Michal Stein

2. Foreign policy

On February 28, 2019, the New Democratic Party published a statement urging the Trudeau government to cease arms exports to Saudi Arabia: “As Canada joins the international community to provide desperately needed assistance in Yemen, it continues to export arms to Saudi Arabia, the chief instigator of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” says the NDP International Development Critic, Linda Duncan.

The Saudi arms deal—and other, similar policies—tell the true story of Canadian politics. During elections, domestic issues tend to dominate the agenda. What we fail to realize is how seriously Canadian foreign policy impacts the world beyond our borders; it stimulates famine, refugee crises, environmental destruction, and political repression.

As an example: we often discuss immigration without recognizing Canada’s role in creating refugee crises in Latin America and the Caribbean. Forced migration is the product of sustained, racist intervention in those regions, like Canada’s armed support for the 2004 Haiti coup. Canada has interfered in Haitian elections, destabilized its institutions, and supported right-wing politicians, all in an effort to reduce wages and open up Haiti’s gold reserves to Canadian mining companies. These actions create economic conditions that force Haitians to flee and seek asylum—only to be met with anti-Blackness and unjust detention.

Canadian policy is regularly determined by the interests of mining companies. As a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canadian mining companies contracted paramilitary security teams in Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru that are accused of kidnapping workers, protestors, and their families. The Liberals promised to regulate the industry in 2015. Yet, as the group MiningWatch Canada notes, the government never committed to legislating the international operations of Canadian mining companies, despite ongoing protest against abuse. Broken promises and willful ignorance are Canada’s de facto foreign policy, in part due to the connections between corporations and politicians. The mining industry and the political class share financiers, investments, and economic interests.

The failure to ensure livable wages at home is directly reflected in the coercion of cheap labour abroad, in defiance of human rights and international law. Canadian free trade with Israel, for example, relies on and benefits from the economic and political repression of Palestinians. Still, as the government of Canada website boasts, “Since CIFTA [Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement] first came into effect over two decades ago, Canada’s two-way merchandise trade with Israel has more than tripled, totalling $1.9 billion in 2018.”

Canada’s close relationship with Israel has wider international consequences. While Canadian relations with Iran have improved in recent years, the Canadian government still views Iran as inherently threatening, and continues to find new reasons to halt diplomatic relations and impose sanctions—including those instituted in 2006 and 2010 in the wake of the Iran nuclear deal, at the urging of Israeli government officials and pro-Israel lobby organizations. It is worth recognizing that Canadian hostility towards Iran does not happen in a vacuum, but comes partly as a result of extensive lobbying by officials and organizations that perceive Iran to be a threat to Israel, and have thus made it a priority to characterize every action by the Iranian state as a violation punishable by a regime of coordinated isolation, marginalization, and sanction.

The sanctions, imposed by Canada and the U.S. among others, are monstrous; they directly endanger Iran’s most vulnerable communities. Sanctions disproportionately impact women, as over 170 Iranian women artists and activists argued in an open letter opposing American sanctions. Iran also holds a substantial refugee population, most of whom will go without vital services and will be instead pushed to deportation due to the sanctions. Canada’s bellicose policies against Iran—integral to its support for Israel—contradict our leaders’ “pro-woman” or “pro-refugee” public image.

It is necessary to draw links between these destabilizing economies of extraction and the waves of forced migration, income inequality, and climate crisis that have shaped the 2019 election. The same global capitalist system that makes rich Canadians richer and poor Canadians poorer relies upon state-sanctioned violence abroad. It succeeds by deflating wages, repressing protests, and killing local economies. Canada’s foreign policy agenda is deeply enmeshed with its domestic policy choices. This election, Canadian voters must recognize the global stakes.

—Alex V. Green

3. Artificial Intelligence

Since March 2017, Justin Trudeau has been hyping the federal government’s investments in AI. At every budget announcement, ribbon cutting, and international panel, he has talked up responsible adoption of AI that is human-centric and grounded in human rights. The initial investment of $125 million was topped up with another $230 million in 2018. In the meantime, dozens of jobs for AI researchers, and graduate student positions have been created in computer science and engineering schools.

As a job creation and innovation strategy, it seems to be doing well—there’s been a boom in tech startups in Toronto and Montreal—but there’s been a conspicuous lack of investment on the human rights side. Of the hundreds of millions of dollars being invested in AI research, exactly $0 of that is going to hire or train people with the expertise necessary to make sure the results won’t be a dumpster fire. While deep-learning experts are getting cushy jobs, experts in the social and ethical implications of AI are only getting a couple of workshops.

It’s unclear whether the strategy is that the people with the training needed to stop the ascendancy of our AI overlords should volunteer their time, or that the AI geniuses should do this work themselves, because after all, they’re geniuses. But letting AI geniuses take care of human rights issues would be as reckless as letting artists perform brain surgery. There is a long history of people in AI being blissfully unaware that other kinds of expertise exist, and this attitude is exactly why companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are now mired in controversy over their ethical blunders.

Some of the not-so-genius ideas AI workers have come up with recently are algorithms that recommend home movies of kids running through sprinklers or doing gymnastics to people who watch child pornography, selling facial recognition software that barely works to cops who don’t know how to use it, but are making false arrests with it anyway, and pretending to sell music players or thermostats that actually conceal hidden microphones that monitor your conversations.

The average doomsday naysayer may think they have nothing to hide, but stalkerware is enabling disgruntled exes, incels and other trolls to track, harass, and potentially kill people. Cell phone tracking data is being sold to bounty hunters, resulting in Coen brothers-esque shootouts, and hundreds of millions of social media users were unknowingly exposed to fake news stories during recent election campaigns.

Trudeau has a mediocre track record for keeping his promises about protecting digital rights. He campaigned on the promise to repeal Bill C-51, which allows CSIS to spy on Canadians without cause in the name of anti-terrorism, but he only rolled back select parts of it. That said, Trudeau is the only official party leader who seems to have a policy on tech innovation at all. Andrew Scheer only cares about innovation when it comes to oil. While Jagmeet Singh’s commitments don’t mention the tech sector, other NDP members, in partnership with the Green Party’s Elizabeth May, have been vocal in advocating for a stronger Digital Privacy Act, and giving the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada more enforcement power.

AI and commercial surveillance are going in directions far worse than even the most paranoid imagination could cook up. This is not a field that is capable of regulating itself, and empty rhetoric about human-centred AI isn’t doing anything to hold beneficiaries of AI investment, like the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, to their promises. The money is there. If even a small fraction of the investment in AI were directed toward protecting rights, we might have a chance at avoiding creating our own homegrown AI dystopia. So far none of the official party leaders seem up to the task.

—Catherine Stinson

4. The opioid crisis

Since 2016, more than 10,000 people have died of an opioid-related overdose in Canada. After years of headlines, such a number can seem abstract, or even worse, desensitizing. These are more than statistics though; each one of those numbers represents a void: someone who will not be at a birthday party, at a graduation, at a wedding, at the dinner table. From January to September of 2018 alone, 3,286 Canadians died and of this 73 percent of deaths were attributed to fentanyl.

Things have changed in the past three years. Safe injection sites, once limited to a section of Vancouver, are now opening up across the country—thanks to the dedicated work of frontline workers, who initially risked arrest by opening up unsanctioned sites. Once scoffed at by politicians, local mayors are now accepting that these sites save lives. Still, the death toll continues to rise. Safe injection sites are not a panacea, nor can overworked frontline workers be everywhere at once to stop an overdose. As the federal election looms and the opioid crisis rages on, one has to ask: are our representatives doing anything?

No party has thus far put forward a comprehensive plan to tackle the opioid crisis beyond vague platitudes. Even the NDP plan, which promises to expand treatment and decriminalize drugs, in the same vein, proposes going after “the real criminals—those who traffic in and profit from the sale of illegal drugs” with harsh and strict penalties, betraying the entire point and purpose of decriminalization. Meanwhile, Liberal party officials keep tweeting about how the overdose crisis is a crisis, while ignoring the fact that they currently have the power to do something about it. 

The solutions to the overdose crisis are clear: while we need more safe injection sites and we need those sites to be supported by federal funding—and harm reduction workers need supports too—these sites do not actually stem the rate of overdose.
They do however, prevent overdose deaths—a key distinction.

In order to stem overdoses, people need access to a clean supply of drugs. Advocates are calling upon the government to allow prescription heroin, and some doctors have taken it upon themselves to start prescribing another opioid, hydromorphone.

Treatment also needs to be made easier. Typically, drugs like methadone or buprenorphine are used in treatment, weaker opioids that reduce withdrawal symptoms while a person is in recovery. Two years ago, British Columbia switched the medication used for treatment from methadone to methadose, a drug that is even weaker than the former. As a result, the B.C. Association of People on Methadone says that switch resulted in people resorting to using heroin. The College of Pharmacists of B.C. says the switch was made to reduce the tendency of “abuse,” a false idea that reaffirms stigma against drug users and reinforces the moral panic around drug use.

One last piece of advice to politicians as they hit the campaign trail is this: listen to people who use drugs and those on the front lines. Go to an overdose prevention site without cameras, meet with members of drug users unions across the country—learn about their experiences and use those to shape policy.

There are deeper conversations to be had about addiction in Canada. How the lack of housing, financial support, and health care among other things are feeding the overdose crisis; but for now, a safe supply of drugs, better access to treatment and more safe injection sites make up a good plan to stop the deaths and stem the rate of overdose. People who use drugs, harm reduction workers, doctors, and public health professionals have been saying this all along; let’s hope our leaders listen for once.

—Abdullah Shihipar

5. Climate justice

We’ve got a problem. The climate crisis is on our doorstep, but instead of looking to scientific data and ongoing evidence, the issue has been divided along political lines. Ideologies about trade and taxation have become the test-pieces about whether one is actively working to limit climate change, recognizing it as a concern, or remaining, still, a skeptic.

Fortunately, international science shows that it’s not too late to keep global warming below the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming—a level that will not halt climatic change, but will significantly temper the impacts. However, instead of hunkering down and working to a) keep the warming to 1.5 degrees, and b) put measures in place to deal with the impacts we know are coming, political parties—and much of the media around them—are mired in discussions that would have been outdated a decade ago.

In Canada, two of the most public climate conversations are around the carbon tax and the Trans Mountain Pipeline. These are certainly not insignificant issues, but the laser focus on them obscures the bigger picture. There is a solution to the climate crisis, but only one: we have to radically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. At this point, neither the Liberals’ nor Conservatives’ climate plans are sufficient to keep global warming to the threshold 1.5 degrees Celsius. To meet that target, there can be absolutely no new carbon infrastructure, never mind a project like the Trans Mountain Pipeline that is the equivalent of putting two million more cars on the road.

Here’s a broader slice of the picture: a 2019 report using government data and approved by independent scientists, states that Canada is heating up twice as fast as the average rate of the planet—twice as fast.

Global warming causes major events, including melting permafrost, loss of ice caps, rising seas, record high temperatures, severe flooding, and droughts. In turn, those events can lead to further impacts: loss of income, loss of housing, food insecurity, tainted water supplies, and so on. Much of Canada has already experienced at least some of these effects and the magnitude and frequency of impacts are projected to increase over time.

On June 17th, Canada declared a national climate emergency which was, in a weird way, heartening. Except the meaning of it was lost the next day when they also re-(re)approved a significant expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure. The longer we dither, the less likely our solutions will be robust or equitable. And we only have just over a decade before we’ve stalled so long there is no way to limit climate impacts to a reasonable level. This is a crisis. But, unlike many crises, we know how to stop this one. We need politicians to recognize this as a fact, not an opinion, and face this issue head on. We can still keep the ship afloat, but to do so we’re going to need all hands on deck.

—Nola Poirier

Photo courtesy of Shake Up The Establishment

What happens when two bio-medical science graduates, a philosophy PhD candidate, and an arts major commiserate over climate change in Canada? Positive activism is born.

In April 2019, a group of University of Guelph students and recent graduates, Manvi Bhalla, Janaya Campbell, Taro Halfnight, and Cameron Fioret, were commiserating over Canada’s response to climate change. Disheartened by misinformation in the political sphere, they wanted to make information available and accurate; they decided to act.

“We wanted to make climate change more of a priority in the Canadian federal election and noticed a media frenzy in America on party platform issues a year in advance of their 2020 election,” says Bhalla, an award-winning activist and leader with numerous NGOs. “Yet Canada had not really announced anything despite our election being six months away.”

Shake Up The Establishment, or SUTE for short, was born that evening. “We wanted to shake up the establishment, shake up how we do politics; shake it up with information, positive change and power to the people,” says Fioret.

SUTE’s objective is to increase informed voting and voter turnout regarding the fight against climate change while maintaining positive government relations. The group decided to make all information on their website non-partisan, up-to-date, and fact-checked, citing credible sources, such as academic papers and links to party platforms. It is entirely volunteer-run and currently receives no funding. They may seek out funding in the future, they say, but will never accept partisan funding.

“SUTE is a one-stop hub for up-to-date federal party platform information, not a regulatory body,” explains Fioret. The website’s content is updated weekly with new announcements or party corrections via politician speeches or MP’s offices. “The goal was to encourage people to obtain accurate, up-to-date information [through] a lay summary of climate change, how it works, and how it affects people. We try to add information [to the website] that is as specific as possible [to counter any bias in the media].”

In the week after launching, the four millennials contacted MP offices and the party profiles poured in. Bhalla created a simple, straightforward chart to compare each federal party’s policies and promises on this hot-button issue, which they have categorized by different types of emissions.

“We wanted to provide reputable information from reputable sources to encourage positive activism,” says Bhalla, noting 300 people contacted their MPs within two days after SUTE posted a “how-to reach your local MP” social media post. Another highlight Bhalla shares is when their post, “Breaking news: Canada has declared a climate emergency,” received close to 1,000 likes in one day.

The group has also received kudos from leading climate scientists, 1960s environmental activists and some high-profile media coverage, including a CBC interview, print media features and being featured on a podcast that also included Catherine McKenna, Environment and Climate Change Minister, and Ed Fast, Official Opposition Critic for the Environment. But their most important audience is their growing social media following. On Instagram, for example, hundreds of people tune into SUTE’s weekly Q&A each Monday.

“Youth are very excited and energized. We’ve seen them mobilize [on social media and through letter campaigns], so that’s very exciting,” says Bhalla, noting that SUTE’s most active followers are the 18 to 25 millennial cohort. (Their target audience is 18 to 34 because that is the highest percent of electorate this election.) Bhalla also points out that many of their followers message regularly for updates on certain climate emergencies when the media does not cover it.

“People want to help,” Campbell acknowledges, citing SUTE’s success with shareable social media alerts and campaigns. “But if it’s too hard, it will deter people.”

Armed with easy-to-use letter campaigns and MP contact information, SUTE has provided effective tools for the public to mobilize, speak up and challenge Canadian federal government parties who are not living up to election party promises.

“Climate change definitely isn’t going to go away, even after the election. Our organization is about giving power to the people to hold their leaders accountable in an accessible way,” says Fioret.