“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.

After the break-up, I walked Yonge St. at night.

I didn’t understand this compulsion, but the circuit remained the same: a few drinks at a village bar and I would wander the corridor between Bloor and Dundas, peering into closed stores or sleepy bars, stopping in at a late-night bookshop to peruse the dusty shelves and eavesdrop on the surly owner’s conversations with customers, habitually thumbing through texts on my phone.

The segment of Yonge I’d chosen was unremarkable—a mishmash of architectural styles, occupied by chain restaurants and convenience stores, seedy enough to attract unsavoury characters and containing a fraction of the nightlife of hipper sections of town. But I liked it—it felt lived-in, like neighbourhoods in Montreal or New York, where converted spaces and faded signage were a source of pride, evidence of civic durability. Nearby businesses like the House of Lords salon had catered to generations of shaggy, misguided teens, while strip clubs Zanzibar and the Brass Rail stood on either end of the street, like neon bookends.

And in the middle of all of this was the decaying clock tower of St. Charles Tavern, one of the city’s earliest and most notorious gay bars, where drag queens paraded on Halloween night in the 1970s, pelted with eggs by jeering crowds. Once a fire hall, it was now a games store with bright yellow signs advertising discount prices on superhero figurines.

I would go as far as my feet would take me, then head home, only to return a few nights later to do it all over again. A comforting cycle. A routine, of sorts.

My ex-partner Mark and I also had routines, when things were working. If the weather was nice, we would climb the steep stairs of his old-but-affordable Chinatown brownstone and take his dog through the university campus, stopping for a quick drink at a pub we liked because it was queer-friendly and staffed mostly by artists. It was there, under the smoky red lanterns, that he had grasped my hands when I received word of my mother’s heart attack, tucking himself into me. He told me he wasn’t going anywhere. His words buoyed me.

On the weekends, we made our pilgrimage to Honest Ed’s, all labyrinthine stairwells and tacky signage. Filling our baskets with vitamins and tchotchkes, we’d pose for playful photographs in front of the dated theatre posters or mirrored displays, one of them with massive pink text: welcome to yesterday. Mark made obscene gestures I’d only discover later while swiping through my phone. “That was the whole point of the photo,” he’d tease.

At night, when the spirit would take us, we’d head to Zipperz, a gay piano bar with a club tucked behind a velvet curtain. It was like something out of a David Lynch film, with its cheap drinks, show tunes, and a large plaster torso and buttocks on either side of the entrance. The bar attracted a clientele older than us by a generation, but one that was more mixed and less pretentious than at other village haunts. Mark loved it and the owner loved him. There, dancing on a chrome floor that was often slick from beer, we’d tangle together, between the bodies and beneath the lights, three decades of music washing over us.

On our way home, we’d stumble drunkenly past that same clock tower above the old St. Charles, trying to imagine walking the circuit as those brave queens all those years before. I’d threaten to scale the building and climb inside the tower. “One day, I’ll get inside that thing.” He’d laugh, “I look forward to seeing it.”

But within a year, Mark was gone. So, too, the Chinatown brownstone, the pub, Honest Ed’s, and Zipperz. And in their places, cavernous pits, large cranes and empty storefronts. The markers of progress in a city with a red-hot real estate market, but also indicators of loss, of absence. Yellowing teeth needlessly tugged from a smile, soon to be replaced with expensive titanium implants, good as new.

There’s something to be said for the challenge of recording memories in a city that rewrites itself, of processing trauma while navigating a backdrop of urban amnesia. In the aftermath of loss, you desperately try to grasp for the concrete, the tangible, to orient you. You retrace your steps, revisit important places, attempt to solidify past experiences or maybe even exorcise them by confronting whatever residue is left behind.

But in the absence of the familiar, there is only the unknown.

All living cities evolve and transform, but our city is different. A metropolis without a guiding mythology, Toronto has been shaped almost entirely by economic whims, political resentments, and slash-and-burn epochs. Sometimes literal fires, as in the Great Fire of 1904, and other times surges of re-development, like the unceremonious destruction of Victorian architecture in the 1970s or the condo craze of the present, with large swaths of the city razed and rebuilt without much thought to history. A city with a comforting blankness, with each successive generation erasing the remnants of the previous one, a civic character defined by willful forgetfulness and in the interest of a certain type of progress.

For some, this progress is a move toward the antiseptic, expensive, and decidedly conservative. A notorious strip club like Jilly’s becomes a boutique hotel, the heritage plaque out front conveniently ignoring the more sordid chapters in the history of the building and the cash-strapped tenants re-homed to less trendy neighbourhoods. Some facades are maintained, but grafted off of historic buildings and then mounted onto glass boxes, the architectural version of a killer wearing their victim’s face. Mark’s old brownstone, populated mostly by queers and artists, is demolished and replaced by an expensive condo marketed on a bohemian brand; an old family-run restaurant is transformed into a hip new brunch spot for new, more monied neighbours.

The city’s edges are sanded down and its darkest corners brightly lit. Organic spaces, sprung from human needs and messy excesses become a marketing tool for real estate agents, but are never an imperative for preservation. Raze and rebuild.

The places we inhabit disappear and the spaces that replace them leave no room for us. The city, a draw for marginalized queer people with an assurance of community and infrastructure, is also increasingly unaffordable, pushing many into outlying suburbs and smaller towns—cheaper places where safety is less certain and visibility is non-existent, and where a lack of density prevents proper community organizing or easy access to progressive workplaces. An economic closeting in a way, where the golden handcuffs that enable you to rent affordably or possibly own property also prevent you from holding your partner’s hand in public.

Memories get written on the margins because there is no space on the page, but soon there is no place in the book.

I think of this during one of my last nights on Yonge, as I climb the clock tower. I’ve gained access to the old St. Charles building as part of a creative project, an attempt to document the space and its history before it is torn down and replaced by an expensive condo. Little remains from that grubby tavern, thirty years on, but I attempt to record it all—the abandoned keg room, the sealed dumbwaiters, even the massive furnace. No drag queens.

Inside, I climb a narrow wooden staircase to the first platform, a filthy room with four windows in each direction. Above me are the cracked iron bell, green from moisture, and a ladder leading to the inner mechanisms of the clock, frozen in time.

Staring up, I feel history wash over me. The firefighters scrambling up and down these wooden stairs, and the queer men on barstools, hunched over cheap beers, desperate for connection, terrified of the world beyond. I feel compelled to contact Mark, to send him a message to let him know that I’ve made it, that I’ve found my way into this hallowed space. That I’m a part of history.

But as I fumble with my phone in gloved hands, I look out onto Yonge, at the strip I’d walked night after night. From this vantage point, I can see the House of Lords and the old bookshop, now both shuttered, large “For Lease” signs looming in empty storefronts. Beyond that, condos and cranes, many rising around the clock tower itself, dwarfing it on the street.

And below me, an uncharacteristic silence.

I put my phone away.

The fight against poverty in Canada recently added a new weapon to its arsenal: the living wage bylaw. While only one Canadian city, New Westminster, B.C., currently implements the practice, the push is on to make it the norm.

Living wage bylaws require that workers employed directly or indirectly by a municipal government be paid a wage that enables them to comfortably meet their basic needs. The current movement has existed in the United States for about 15 years, resulting in over 140 living-wage ordinances, but it only gained a foothold in Canada on April 26, when New Westminster city councillors unanimously passed a motion mandating that anyone working on city property receive at least $18.17 per hour. This market-based rate is meant to reflect the actual income required for working families to pay for necessities, support the healthy development of their children, and participate in social and civic life.

Living wage proponents are confident that the victory in New Westminster will spur or embolden similar movements across the country. In Ottawa, street demonstrations and presentations to municipal councillors and staff led to the living wage being included within the city’s Poverty Reduction Strategy, which city council endorsed last February. This December council will make their final decision when they decide whether to commit financial resources to the plan. Initiatives are also underway in places such as Victoria and Surrey, British Columbia, and Kingston, Ontario.

Many anti-poverty activists believe that living wages are the key to addressing the plight of Canada’s “working poor.” While provincial minimum-wage rates vary, the lowest paid workers in Canada now earn an average of 20 percent less in real dollars than in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the cost of living has steadily climbed. As a consequence, even full-time employment is not enough to keep some Canadians out of poverty.

The New Westminster proposal was promoted by a diverse amalgamation of groups, including the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Hospital Employees’ Union, and First Call: BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition. A similar coalition in Ottawa is looking to build upon this example. In September, ACORN Canada brought in speakers from New Westminster to help educate the people of Ottawa on how higher wages can benefit workers and the economy without burdening taxpayers.

Of course, the living wage does have its opponents. Free-market thinkers have criticized the policy as a bureaucratic intrusion that reduces profits and flexibility, and in 2009, they helped ward off what had been a promising campaign in Calgary.

However, with the evidence on their side, a growing number of Canadians are working hard to make living wages the law. Now that the breakthrough has been made in New Westminster, they might soon be able to concentrate on their real jobs.

Eric Deis's large-scale photographic installation of Last Chance. Image courtesy the artist.

Even after all its Olympic-related world-class-city posturing, Vancouver remains very much at odds with itself. At once a bedroom community, a wannabe metropolis, and the centre of a long-running real-estate boom, the city is like a teenager who keeps changing her clothes, says visual artist Eric Deis. “Kids grow up, they push boundaries, they try different things. I think that’s what’s happening with this city,” he says.

We’re leafing through a collection of Deis’s photographs at his studio in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, a few blocks from his home. It’s a Friday morning in May, and the first signs of summer have cast a new optimism over the city like they always do at this time of year, as if challenging more restless residents to tough it out and stay. But if the 30-year-old Deis has his way, this could be his last year in Vancouver. Like any serious artist, he wants to go where the opportunity lies. Despite years of photographic work documenting the city, plus a large-scale public installation and a well-received gallery show this year, it’s just not here.

“I’ve explored all my opportunities in Vancouver, and I’ve kind of maxed out,” Deis explains. “Vancouver’s cost of living is so high, but I don’t think the return of what you’re getting out of living in the city is on par. Sure, it has mountains, you can go skiing, you can take your yacht for a spin. But as far as cultural stuff, it kind of pales in comparison to other places.”

Deis’s complaints are common. Provincial government cuts to arts funding in the last year have left British Columbia’s arts and culture sectors reeling, and an unstable real-estate market creates increasingly prohibitive conditions for young people to live affordably in the city. Deis’s work—mostly large-format photography of architecture and urban spaces—depicts Vancouver in the midst of this transition. His focus on construction sites, homes on the cusp of demolition, and tensions surrounding gentrification and real estate development also capture the conditions that compel people like him to leave town. His images often take on the character of dioramas in their forfeiture of single-subject focus for wide-ranging narrative studies of streetscapes and inbetween spaces.

In Last Chance, Deis captures a new condominium development on Richards Street. The street sits on the boundary of Yaletown, an upscale downtown neighbourhood that has grown rapidly over the last 15 years into a forest of high-rise condo properties. A small green bungalow stands beside the banners advertising the condominiums. The house, affectionately known by locals as “the little green house,” was eventually demolished in the condo construction process. Last Chance was installed as a large-format photograph on the wall of Vancouver’s CBC building in April, where it stayed for five months. Deis’s other works, such as the luminous Hipsters and Drug Dealer, inhabit similar moods of loss and transformation. Seen together, Deis’s photographs comprise an intriguing series that deftly captures urban history in a seemingly ageless and perpetually adolescent city.

Eric Deis. Photographed by Tomas Svab.

Deis is no stranger to transition himself. Born on a military base on B.C.’s Queen Charlotte Islands, he was raised in Red Deer, Alberta, attended art school in Vancouver, completed an MFA in San Diego, and returned to Vancouver in 2004. He’s not sure where he’ll move next, but like many emerging artists his age, survival as an artist in Vancouver isn’t likely. “They haven’t built an office tower [in Vancouver] in the last 20 years, because it’s three times more profitable to build a condo tower. That changes the dynamic of the city,” he says. “Vancouver, instead of becoming an economic or business hub, becomes a sleepy suburb.” Downtown’s suburban turn is rooted in condo marketing to baby boomers in search of a second mortgage, Deis says, not a first home.

Deis’s sharp eye and idiosyncratic photography—at once self-aware and critical of its surroundings—presents a brilliant reflection of a changing city at the end of a decade. Too bad he’s so eager to leave.

In ways large and small, having the internet in your pocket changes the urban experience. Illustration by Matt Daley.

I stood there on the street, squinting into my phone, needing to double check. Could the nondescript restaurant before me really have, as the anonymous web commenter put it, “the. best. hot sauce. ever.”? It didn’t seem likely. But sure enough, after popping inside, the fiery, garlicky concoction was a revelation. Later that day, when I stepped into a seedy bar I’d walked by a hundred times before, it turned out that my phone was right again: there was a poetry slam going on inside. Suddenly, this neighbourhood I thought I knew well was full of surprises.

This is part of the charm of a new wave of mobile web applications—best publicized by the ubiquitous iPhone, but available on dozens of commonly available smartphones—that tell us more about our neighbourhoods than ever before, simply by relying on the people who live there. These applications promise to take previously scattered, separated bits of information and put them all in one easy-to-access place as they become more widespread. When you can walk down the street, quite literally holding the voices of a city in your hand, you get a step closer to realizing the elusive dream of urban diversity.

With web access and GPS now standard on most smartphones, there has been a torrent of location-based applications that tell you something about where you are right now. Among the most recent and talked-about arrivals is Foursquare (currently available for use in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal). Partly a game meant to encourage urban exploration and socializing, Foursquare users “check-in” with their smartphones upon arriving at places like a coffee shop or a bar and accumulate points for doing so.

It’s all admittedly a little silly, but each location in Foursquare also includes suggested to-do lists. When you settle into a new spot you’re able to see other users’ recommendations. Though these recommendations are usually pretty straightforward, at other times you’ll find things you may not have even heard of. My favourite tip so far suggested that you ask your server for “the secret pink menu” at a certain restaurant. You could call it a new approach to urban discovery, one that takes the online mantra of “by the people, for the people” and mixes it with happenstance.

Or take Yelp, another popular application, which lists user reviews of everything from restaurants to dentists. It’s even more futuristic, in that it actually puts a layer of information atop the street image on your phone’s camera—listing prices, opinions and directions to similar establishments just by having you hold up your phone. It’s as if you were suddenly given a pair of glasses from the future. More importantly, services like Yelp provide something its print progenitors could not: serendipity. In the past, anyone with enough time and interest could tease out the secrets of a city’s hidden corners through alt-weeklies, travel guides, or ethnic newspapers. While those outlets are still great for providing alternative takes on urban life, they aren’t very good at aggregating all that difference.

After all, it hardly makes sense to write up the newest mainstream dance club in a small immigrant newspaper—not because readers wouldn’t be interested, but because too few would care enough to make it worthwhile. The economics of print means you have to cater to a very specific audience with very specific information.

In a way, those silos of knowledge help divide cities into disconnected parts by separating people into demographic groups and then only telling these groups about themselves. By instead relying on users of all stripes to share their own, unique knowledge, urban mobile web apps put far more of a city’s voices and perspectives on the same page.

Part of being a truly diverse city means allowing all citizens the potential to break out of their silos and experience the new. One way of going about this—maybe the best way—is simply to stumble upon new things; the mobile web does a much better job of allowing for serendipity because all the information is, well, there in your hand, waiting to nudge you at just the right time. The mobile web creates a kind of equity by aggregating information in one, more neutral place.

Sure, this is a little utopian right now. There is, after all, the minor problem of needing to have that fancy phone with a $900per-month bill (give or take). Never mind the fact that, just because these services exist, it doesn’t mean anyone has figured out how to encourage a truly representative sample of people to use them.

But what it does mean is that the potential is there. I’m finding things I never knew existed by wandering around my hometown with my face glued to my phone. So far, my discoveries have been relatively mundane—some hot sauce here, an unannounced event there.

But I also feel as if I’m being encouraged to move out of my comfort zone. Each time I timidly head into somewhere new, I’m running into both experiences and crowds that I haven’t before. If fostering true diversity is about allowing real cultural exchange, then maybe peering into our smartphones is actually a decent place to start.

Slumdog Millionaire Child star Azharuddin Ismail plays in his shanty on May 30, 2009 in Mumbai, India. Ismail's family faced evicition from their dwelling in spring 2009. Photo by Getty.

It can be an eye-opening experience that helps everyone involved move towards greater understanding….

It’s been happening in Rio’s famous favelas for some time. Now slum tourism—which turns a real-life ghetto into a “hot” tourist destination—has spread to Johannesburg, Manila, Cairo, and, in the wake of the blistering success of Slumdog Millionaire, Mumbai. But it’s controversial wherever it goes.

Shelley Seale, author of The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India, thinks slum tourism (also known as “poorism”) can be positive for both visitors and locals, but only if it’s done right. Seale toured the Dharavi slum in Mumbai, Asia’s largest slum and the setting for Slumdog, with Deepa Krishnan of Mumbai Magic, a socially responsible tour operator who donates a portion of her profits to local NGOs.

“Dharavi gave me a resounding rebuttal to the myth that poverty is the result of laziness,” Seale says. “I have never seen people work so hard. The place abounded with an industry and entrepreneurship such as I have not ever witnessed anywhere else. “It was an amazing experience, and I believe that things like this can do a lot to eradicate cultural bias and misunderstandings, and also the images of poverty that many of us have.”

…but it can also be exploitative and tarnishing to India’s global image

Indians tend to be very sensitive about their country’s identity. Many didn’t embrace the feel-goodism of Slumdog because they felt the film portrayed their country in a negative light, without offering explanations or solutions for the living conditions in the slum.

Likewise, Indian tourism professionals tend to be wary of slum tourism. They feel it can be exploitative, turning people’s lives into sideshow spectacle and obliterating both the slum dwellers’ humanity and the underlying issues, like India’s unrelenting rural to urban migration.

There are also justifiable concerns about who conducts the tours, and how. Ronjon Lahiri, director of India Tourism in Toronto, says that many of the so-called slum tourism operators are only looking to make a buck and don’t educate tourists on Dharavi and its residents.

He says that many people live there because Mumbai’s property prices are among the highest in the world. Even when residents make money, many don’t leave because Dharavi has become their home, their community.

For Lahiri, “Slum tourism is not to be encouraged. It is not good for India and not good for the people living there.”

The first step to getting help, they say, is admitting you have a problem. That part took me years of halting, painful introspection and self-doubt.

Later, I told friends—just a handful at first. They weren’t surprised; some of them even admitted to the same problem.

Finally, I decided it was time to get serious, and that I needed to call in the professionals.

Nervous, faintly humiliated, I dialed the number to the National Anti-Racism Council of Canada and explained myself. I think I might be a little bit racist, I said. And I’d like to change.

If this story were scripted in Hollywood, it would end with a scene of me dancing at a great big crazy ethnic wedding—my own. If there’s adversity at the beginning, you know how it’s going to end.

But the truth is, this story will always be unfinished. I can’t prove that I’ve kicked the habit, and any transgressions will never be known outside the privacy of my own brain. I’m not sure whether this is comforting or alarming, but I know I’m not alone in my feelings. In a 2007 poll on racial tolerance, almost half of Canadians were honest enough to admit to being at least “slightly racist.” Tempting as it is to despair about this number, I felt that it was, in a way, also hopeful. An admission of prejudice is not necessarily a proud admission. In my case, it sure as shit wasn’t—it was a problem in need of a solution. If the next question in the poll had been “Would you like to be less racist?” I would have answered with an unqualified “yes!” and, again, I would not be alone.

Canada talks a good game on acceptance and diversity: our official bilingualism, our policy of multiculturalism, the crazy-quilt ethnic jumble of our big cities, the throat-singers and tango-dancers and tabla-players who share the stage at Parliament Hill each Canada Day. But I came to feel a strange disconnect between this image of a national rainbow-coloured paradise and my daily reality, which featured a grim mixture of resentment, misunderstanding, and petty grievance. I liked the idea of the paradise, but I couldn’t live up to it. I began to wonder if the failing was mine or theirs.

Now, it wasn’t anything nutso. I was never proud of my feelings. I didn’t believe that I was right in any absolute sense. I was a liberal, tolerant person by and large, and I loved living in a city where so many different ethnic groups rubbed elbows. But, ironically enough, it was moving into one such community that started me off on my path to intolerance.

I had been warned. A friend of mine moved to the neighbourhood several years earlier. He was quite vocal about his dislike of his neighbours, who I’ll call the Quiddinese*. He described them as “rude” and “insular.” His friends were shocked at his blunt appraisal, and I secretly judged him for it. Hmm, I thought. Xenophobic. It must be because he’s Québécois.

A few years later, the turn was mine.

Oh, the Quiddinese. Time and again, these people refused, it seemed to me, to give me a reason to like them. They were grouchy when I visited their shops—grouchier, I thought, with me than with each other. The men appeared to spend all their days smoking and kibitzing. The women looked to me hunched and joyless from years of hard work. Their children seemed to specialize in noisemaking: blatting, thumping cars, shouted conversations. I tried to make nice at first, but was soon defeated by their surliness and gave up. My dislike metastasized: I began to project it onto the peculiarities of Quiddinese home decor: Ugly people, I thought. Ugly dwellings. I dismissed the entire culture.

For years I lived like this, grumpy in a grumpy land. I narrowed my eyes when I passed their houses. I resigned myself to the most perfunctory transactions with them riding on the bus, passing on the sidewalk, in the local stores. A sense of home and belonging should not stop once you’ve left the house, yet I felt rejected in my own city, in my own neighbourhood. I tried to get used to living in a cloud of vague hostility, like background radiation. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t submit to it. It wasn’t just that I was mad at my Quiddinese neighbours; I was mad at myself. I had failed. I had surrendered to intolerance.

And so my quest began to unbias myself. In doing this, I knew I would be putting Canada to the test as well as myself. We all know the rhetoric: as Ayman Al-Yassini of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation told me, “As a country we are committed to multiculturalism.” Well, okay, I thought. But how committed? Enough to help out the almost 50 per cent who admitted to being racist?

The CRRF was, Al-Yassini said, in the business of dealing with “situations of racism and discrimination, or how to deal with it if you are the one having these thoughts or tendencies … and how to work on addressing it.” Perfect, I thought: maybe there’ll be a support group I can join, Racists Anonymous or something. Bring on the 12 steps.

That’s not quite how it works, as it turns out. The CRRF has a few different initiatives, mostly bureaucratic in nature, but “we don’t deal with individuals,” Al-Yassini told me.

I began scouring the web for someone else who might be able to help. Eventually I found a local woman whose website described her as being “trained in the areas of diversity leadership, equity, education, and workplace issues.” I decided to give her a call.

As soon as I explained myself (“Hi, I’m just wondering what kind of resources you might have for someone who believes themselves to be racist. I think I might be a little bit racist”) she was, it seemed to me, sternly vigilant. She wanted the full spelling of my name, where I worked, my phone number. (In my paranoid fantasies, she was preparing to file a police report.) She said she didn’t like to use the word “racism,” because people recoiled from it; instead, she preferred to talk about “anti-racism.” This sounded like crazy talk, but I was too cowed to argue. She said she would consider the project and call me back. She never did.

I supposed a moral climate checkered with both judgment and sympathy was all anyone in the process of reforming could expect. But it was humiliating, and not for the faint of heart. I took a perverse kind of solace in the thought that plenty of people might harbour dark feelings, but I was actually woman enough to dredge them up and examine them. “I think the numbers are probably higher than 50 percent of Canadians who are racist,” said Tina Lopes, a Toronto-based race-relations educator. “I would be surprised if it was not closer to 80 percent of people who learn to be racist and sexist and homophobic.”

Nor would I. But what, then, were we supposed to do about it? Anorexics, alcoholics, people with anger management problems, sex addicts—all of them can find treatment in any mid-size city. The prejudiced? That’s another story. No wonder we tamp our feelings down, will them not to exist, and hope for the best.

Denial might work in the short term—it always does—but as any dime-store psychologist will tell you, trying to ignore something pretty much guarantees it will surface later. If we don’t admit to “owning” our own prejudice, as the shrinks say, we are certain to express it in oblique ways, ignorant to any harm we may be causing.

When Suaad Hagi Mohamud—a black woman whose identity was questioned by the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi—was detained there for three months, no one involved in the incident dared to suggest that cultural bias played into it, when how could it not? She was a) dark-skinned, b) a woman, and c) veiled: three traits that, whether or not they should, carry a certain baggage. Yet no one in a position of authority was willing to say, “Yes, we were wrong, because we were ignorant and prejudiced.” That would belie our national mythos.

Probably because the United States’s identity is so tied up with a history of stunningly obvious racial inequity that has forced blacks and whites into contact—and conflict—with each other, Americans seem more fluent in race relations—and more inclined to wear their biases on their sleeve. But racism in Canada, as author Pasha Malla wrote in an insightful Globe and Mail article in 2008, is the province exclusively of others. When it manifests in unseemly outbursts, we’re quick to judge, and seldom ask ourselves if we might harbour similar feelings.

As a muslim in the post 9-11 world, Nouman Ashraf is better qualified than many to talk about the discrepancy between what values Canadians say they hold and what they actually do. “Preferences and biases always exist,” he told me. We were chatting in a café on the campus of the University of Toronto, where he was head of the department of anti-racism and cultural diversity. “The question isn’t to illegalize them. The question is to ask people about how this affects our behaviour as individuals, as organizations, and broadly as a nation.”

A big man with a salt-and-pepper beard, he’s fast-talking and approachable, verging on cuddly. As we spoke, he scribbled organizational charts—reflecting his background in management studies—on paper napkins.

There are, he said, espoused theories—“the theory to which you give allegiance in your mind, and sincerely believe,” he explained—and theories-in-action, which are reflected in what we actually do.

“Our espoused theory,” said Ashraf, “is one of a multicultural nation.” Our theories-in-action, individually and collectively, are another story. Established Canadians may think they are generous, but newcomers arouse their baser instincts, according to Ashraf. All of us are reduced, by perceived threats to shared resources—such as jobs or spots in university—to the level of wildebeests locking tusks over a watering hole.

Professionally, Ashraf dealt with these conflicts by holding panel discussions at the university “on everything from religion and sexuality to race and culture.

“I think that we are a microcosm of the most diverse city on the planet.” He gestured at the lineup at the café counter, where students of all stripes stood gabbing as they waited to be served. “And one of my core beliefs is, if we don’t allow opportunities for our students to engage with this difference … we will have failed them.”

Yes! I thought. I wanted to high-five him. Engagement: that’s what I, in my clumsy way, was striving for. Someone who could talk to me on the level, who could challenge me without tipping into defensiveness. What I needed to do, suggested Ashraf, was seek out young Quiddinese who were, in his words, my “peeps.” The obvious retort was that they weren’t my peeps and that was the problem. Then I remembered Avery.

Avery (not his real name) was a former co-worker of mine, a Quiddinese guy who was so witty and sharp that I didn’t trust myself not to try to impress him, so I just stayed out of his way. What better way to impress someone than to tell them that you hated their ethnic heritage? I sent off an email explaining my project and hoped for the best.

Like al-Yassini, Estella Muyinda ran an organization—the National Anti-Racism Council of Canada—that was committed to fighting racism. And, like him, when I spoke to her on the phone, she had no resources for me. “If you’re talking about programs, we’re not hands-on, give-you-thisprogram-to-do, because no government organization is funding anything of that nature,” she told me. What NARCC does, she said, is support grassroots organizations that act on a local scale, by providing them with

educational materials. Although it was not within her purview, professionally, she did try to take on my problem. “What triggered it? Where is this coming from? These are the questions that you have to answer first because there’s no panacea to this,” she told me. “If you don’t get to the root of your bias,” she said, “you’ll have a lot of problems accepting any solutions that are out there.”

Well, I knew what triggered it: feeling like I was constantly being treated poorly in my own neighbourhood was one part of it. The other part was daily coming up against what I saw as conflicting values. Muyinda told me I should stop thinking of the difference in our values as a barrier. I knew I was being difficult, but really: wasn’t that advice a kind of a panacea? What if I really was getting secondary treatment from my Quiddinese neighbours because I was different from them? Was I supposed to continue trying to be friendly or patronizing their shops anyway, even though they might be discriminating against me just as much as the reverse?

And then there were deeper issues than social niceties: one of the problems I had with Quiddinese culture was that homosexuality was not accepted, but littering apparently was. What was I supposed to do, try to reframe these behaviours as merely “colourful” even though I found them untenable?

It didn’t help that the more I talked to people about my project, the more grumblings I heard from every direction.

“It isn’t the [Quiddinese], is it?” said Pasha Malla. “A friend of mine…called this morning and was like, ‘Ah, fuck, these [Quiddinese] people are driving me crazy!’”

My friends—who I had thought a pretty tolerant and broadminded group of people—began to tell me their stories. One had dated a Quiddinese guy. “His family didn’t like me one bit,” she said. “They would have rather he married his second cousin.”

Another had fallen off his bike on an icy street, in front of a group of five or so Quiddinese men. “They didn’t say anything,” he said. “They didn’t ask if I was alright or help me up. They just stared at me.”

“This sums up the [Quiddinese] community for me,” said Peter. He had been watching a sports game on TV but he missed the end. So, later, passing by a Quiddinese bar, he stopped to ask a small group of men how the game ended. “They looked at me,” said Peter, his voice hushed with remembered shock, “like I’d just asked them for money. They had these … dark looks, and they were like”—Peter made his voice gruff—“‘Two to one.’ And I was like, ‘Oh really, who scored?’… and I thought to myself, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?!’ Anybody else would have been like, ‘Yeah! Right on! We won! Okay!’… They had this look of complete distrust and I walked away, and I was disappointed and furious.” Doubly disappointed and furious, perhaps, because Peter himself is Quiddinese-Canadian. “The people certainly aren’t friendly,” he said.

Having this company was sort of comforting—but only in the way that being part of a mob is comforting.

The problem with this scenario, of course, was that it relieved me of any responsibility. In this version of events, I was an innocent who had stumbled into a snakepit of malice. There had to be more to it than that. For one thing, I was wildly generalizing. As Pasha Malla said to his incensed friend, “It’s not all the [Quiddinese] people in the world that are driving you crazy.”

Ascribing a bunch of traits to a people in the name of culture was a crude but tempting tool that robbed people of their individuality. Yet it wasn’t baseless, exactly—the quality of the exchanges I had in Japan, for example, were different from exchanges I had elsewhere. It was like a pointillist painting: up close, each person retained his or her particular qualities, but when you stepped back, the sum total made a distinct picture.

Yet ascribing certain qualities to any group of people—cheerful, spontaneous, family-oriented, devout, say—opens the door for others to call them childlike, chaotic, lazy, superstitious. Straightforward becomes rude, politeness seems remote or chilly. Still, we apparently need the idea of a shared culture and shared values: this is what makes us a nation, instead of just a bunch of random people on a big patch of land. That shared culture is what causes us to root for our countrymen and -women at the Olympics, or to stitch the flag on our backpacks when we travel.

So, yes, I was allowing for the fact that this was a group of individuals I was dealing with, but that they also existed within a cultural matrix. And some of those broad cultural traits aligned with my neuroses like a key in a lock.

After all, while there are, as Ashraf pointed out, some general conditions that can lead to discrimination, our targets are not arbitrary. If I was to take on the full responsibility for my problem, I was going to have to look into the murky depths of my own psyche.

Some schools of analysis suggest that we revile in others traits that are unrealized aspects of ourselves. According to Sylvia Brinton Perera, a Jungian psychoanalyst I spoke to who wrote a book on the topic of scapegoating, the revulsion I felt for the Quiddinese swagger and machismo (among other qualities) was, according to this theory, a result of having been taught not to externalize emotions, not to indulge in noisy selfglorification, not to be exhibitionistic.

This felt truer to me than anything I’d yet heard. At the same time, nothing in me particularly wanted to nurture those qualities in myself. The resistance went deep, and for good reason: “You probably internalized [your family’s values] before you were five,” she said. Overcoming deeply learned things was a life’s work. I needed something a little more immediate.

“How many individuals do you know?” Perera asked me. “Because as long as it’s collective it’s harder to manage.”

Which brought me back to Avery. Incredibly, he had responded to my email. “I’m not sure I’ll be much help,” he wrote back. “We may end up drawing up the blueprints for the internment camp together.”

Needless to say, Avery had a complicated relationship to his heritage. Both his parents were Quiddinese but he grew up immersed in mainstream Canadian culture. Rather than thinking of himself as having a foot in both camps, he thought of himself as having a foot in neither. “I always think of this James Branch Cabell thing,” he said, “where he’s like, ‘Patriotism is the religion of hell’—because it is.” What most irked him, it seemed, was the obsession many Quiddinese had with defining themselves by their patrimony, to the exclusion of other cultures and influences.

To some extent, Avery felt Canada’s ethos of multiculturalism was to blame. “You tell people to celebrate diversity. So … what you eventually build is a street lined with [Quiddinese] flags, a street of people speaking their own language.”

It wasn’t just the Quiddinese though. He disliked any cultural hegemony.

After I moaned about the Quiddinese being so loud, he asked me this: “What if you were living in the Gay Village?” he said. “That’s pretty loud. You walked into a bakery and you were holding hands with your boyfriend, you might not get the nicest service … Do you think after a year you’d be like, ‘Those fucking gays,’ or anything like that?”

“I might be,” I said. “It’s possible. But I’m not such an idiot that I would cluster all gays together.” I was, apparently, idiot enough to cluster all Quiddinese together. But it was a question of exposure, as well. I’d grown up isolated from the Quiddinese. They stayed among their kind and I with mine. “The celebration of diversity,” Avery said, “is also really a cause of ghettoization.” Although our conversation was full of such textbook phrases and lofty ideas, it also acted as a kind of confessional. No matter how stupid or offensive my questions, Avery was gracious and forgiving. I came away feeling kind of … melty inside. If, as Joni Mitchell says, “Love is touching souls,” so is this kind of open, unafraid dialogue.

Later, riding my bike home, I passed a few older Quiddinese men shooting the breeze on the street corner, and I had this thought: Hey, one of those guys could be Avery’s father. It was ludicrous in its simplicity, not to mention deeply corny, but it was also refreshingly effective. For the first time since beginning my project, I had softened.

Of course, all that sympathy evaporated the next time I passed a group of Quiddinese men who stared at me as they threw their cigarette butts on the sidewalk. Or the next time I was given the cold shoulder at a shop where they clearly knew me.

Given all the conversations I’d had, I felt safe in saying that it wasn’t my imagination or some cultural misunderstanding: I really was getting a frosty reception. In that case, all I could do was hope to understand why.

“I personally think the distrust comes from a lack of confidence,” said Peter, who had recently moved into the neighbourhood and found himself troubled by the same questions I was. “Like, ‘Why do you care about us? Why do you want to know about us?’”

Like Avery, he implicated multiculturalism. “In a community like Toronto’s, where it’s big enough that you can be selfsufficient, it becomes ignorant and mistrustful.

“What I would love to come to an end,” he said, “is, when you arrive in Canada, the sense that you keep doing whatever you’re doing.”

But was integration that easy? In addition to being cut off from their own culture when they moved, said Avery, the community is “also refused access to being Canadian.”

And this, according to Tina Lopes, was at the heart of the matter.

The Quiddinese were and are underdogs, both in the city and on a global scale. They come from a region of the world that gets little respect, and when they moved here, their status didn’t change—except now they’re out of their element, too. So they created a safe haven, a defensive perimeter.

“The unfortunate thing,” said Lopes, “is that I sometimes see that when someone who’s part of the dominant society … comes into their neighbourhood, there’s a bit of ‘We’re going to give you a taste of what I get.’”

What they got? In all the service jobs I ever worked, I was patient with people who struggled with English. I even got selfcongratulatory goosebumps from successful transactions.

But then I remembered Avery telling me how, after high school, he had changed his name. He was brilliant and articulate, but his Quiddinese name alone was enough to discourage employers. In school fights, he said, it was always the Quiddinese kids who took the blame. And at work, his boss once suggested he was absent because he’d been napping in the stock room; it was half-joking—but half-not.

The whole thing was much bigger than me. Each of us was, in the eyes of the other, accountable for transactions involving the worst of our ilk. Mutual mistrust flavoured every meeting, with the result that both parties ended up acting edgy and unfriendly. “I don’t think it’s a good human response,” said Lopes, “but I have some compassion for what is behind it.”

It was weird, but I didn’t want to hear what Lopes was saying. “How much out of your 24 hours do you experience that ‘you’re not welcome’ vibe?” she asked me. “And then think about if you were in their shoes and you were experiencing that eight hours—more!—how much it would eat away at you.”

Basically, I didn’t want to hear about anything that pointed up my own privilege. The slightly insane reality was that I worried it threatened to delegitimize my unhappiness. I wanted the occasional right to wallow in self-pity without having to think, “But then, in absolute terms, my life doesn’t suck as much as my Quiddinese neighbour’s.” But the fact remained: I moved through society more easily than they did, enjoying successes—professional, social—that weren’t available to them. Which was another troubling matter for me. Was my success at the cost of theirs, somehow? If they were oppressed, was I therefore the oppressor? I (somewhat guiltily) doubted it: humanity has an unmerited love affair with absolutes. Most of us are made up of more complex matter. After all, as Peter told me, the Quiddinese can be racist themselves. No one has a monopoly on tolerance.

While it would be tempting to conclude that, at the end of this process, I’ve “crossed over to the other side”—racist no more!—the pat answer is not the honest one. It may not even be fair for us to ask such radical transformations of ourselves—do we really need the burden of another expectation we can’t live up to? Aside from a commitment to a complete psychic overhaul, the best we can do is exercise an honest awareness of our own shortcomings.

I’m still petty sometimes, still cursing Quiddinese choices in home decor, still mad that some of the men seem to spend their days loafing while the women do the work. But I also look at each person and try to imagine a world of alienation, of being second class wherever I go.

As for me and Avery? Well, maybe I’ll get that big ethnic wedding yet.

How to get local produce in the city? Look up. Illustration by Peter Mitchell.

Canadian architecture student Gordon Graff attracted worldwide interest when he designed SkyFarm, a 59-storey farm for downtown Toronto.

What inspired you to design a vertical farm?

Sometime in 2006, when I was first working on my masters at the University of Waterloo, I knew I wanted to focus on how to turn a city like Toronto into a truly ecologically sustainable city. What frustrated me was that food was rarely in the discussion. It was all about reducing energy use and other fantastic things, but a big issue like the security of the food source of a city and the negative ecological impact of agriculture on the earth never came into the discussion. So I just sort of drifted toward the notion that it would be great if somehow we could actually produce food within cities.

What happened next?

In 2006 I was researching hydroponic configurations, and I came across a website for Dr. Dickson Despommier [a professor of environmental health science at Columbia University] called verticalfarm.com. Here was a professor not connected to architecture who was pushing for skyscraper farms. It was another actual voice out there, giving an academic basis to what I was doing. Around the same time I saw there was a competition to design skyscrapers, and everything just clicked.

You called your design SkyFarm.

I did it rather hastily, and it didn’t win. But Dickson put my drawing on his website and there was an incredible viral spreading of the design. BCME, an Australian publication, put it in their magazine. Global TV interviewed me. When the architecture magazine Azure said it wanted to do a story featuring the design, I figured I should put something better forward, and that led to the current iteration of the design.

This is the 60-storey building you proposed for downtown Toronto.

Yeah. It would have 2.7 million square feet of floor area and 9.5 million square feet of growing area and could feed about 40,000 people a year.

What are the main features of the building?

It’s really just a high-density hydroponic farm that has food growing on different floors. The building’s structure would be similar to that of a commercial or residential high-rise except for some small details. It would be a lot like a conventional greenhouse except the lighting would be artificial instead of sunlight.

What kind of lighting would you use?

LCD grow lights. Some would be on 24 hours a day, so the building would glow at night.

So it would use an awful lot of energy—

—and a lot of water.

How would you compensate for those requirements?

The building would have two key components: a small biogas plant and a “living machine.” The biogas plant would collect methane (natural gas) from the farm’s abundant plant waste, the grass “silage” growing on the south-facing wall, as well as the city’s sewers. The methane would be used to power a generator to deliver electricity to the building. The living machine would filter the farm’s water, recycling it back into the farm rather than into the city’s waste water system. With these two components in place, the SkyFarm would be extremely resource efficient.

What could be grown?

Technically any crop, but a few like rice, which requires a lot of water, are probably too costly to grow.

Is there any reason a vertical farm wouldn’t work?

There are definitely hurdles to overcome, but technologically and economically, vertical farms are viable. They just need the first investments by investors and/or governments to become a reality.

What’s the next step for you with this project?

After my master’s thesis is finished later this summer I plan to formalize a business plan for my design of a vertical farm embedded within a condo—an “agro-arcology.” I’ve been approached by a few developers about the concept, so the logical next step is to create a proper cost analysis.

They say—they would, wouldn’t they, since admittedly they want you to buy one?—that the Beehaus is perfect for backyard and rooftop hobbyists, who would like to do their bit to stave off the scary Colony Collapse Disorder in their area. Honeybee populations are crashing everywhere, putting plant populations at risk too, since those plants rely on the busy bees to pollinate.

Bees are a bit tricker than chickens, however, with the risk of their whole rampaging-swarm-of-stinging-death problem. But the £495 Beehaus starter kit comes with the hive, an anti-sting bee suit, heavy-duty rubber gloves, and liquid smoke to keep the bees mellowed out while you steal the sweet, sweet product of their toil. For those brave souls who want to take their urban agriculture to the next level, it’s nice that there are easy ways of getting into local environmental stewardship with one layout of cash and lifetime of free honey.

1. Look before you leap. Make sure you have the time, space, and cash to care for your feathered friends; 10 minutes a day, 10 square feet per bird, and about $5 per bird per month is recommended. And remember, they’re not just a sustainable source of eggs; they’re pets. Grab some face time with a real, live chicken before you decide to take one on.

Eggs and the city. Illustration by Dave Donald.

2. Learn the law. Residents of Victoria, Niagara Falls, Ont., Brampton, Ont., and, in a few months, Vancouver, can legally keep hens (though not roosters) in their backyards, but most Canadian cities outlaw them. If your local bylaws ban backyard flocks, you might consider joining the ranks of renegade chicken-keepers in Canada. Most bylaw enforcement is complaint-driven, so start with getting your neighbours on side (think free, fresh eggs).

3. Baby chicks or laying hens? Silver Spangled Spitzhauben or Egyptian Fayoumi? Ask around at your local farmers’ market for advice on where to get chicks or hens and what breed is best for you and your region. You can order live chickens online, but why miss an opportunity to meet someone with real-life chicken experience to share?

4. Get cooped up. Your chickens need a place off the ground to roost, a cozy spot to lay eggs, and room to run around, all safe from predators like raccoons, rats, and neighbourhood pets. Until prefab coops like the stylish eglu or the Stealth Coop (designed to avoid detection by nosy neighbours and/or bylaw officers) are available in Canada, you’ll likely be building your own with some plywood, chicken wire, and insulation for the winter months.

5. Educate yourself. Sites like backyardchickens.com and urbanchickens.org are packed with advice on everything from wing clipping to lobbying your local city council to legalize your backyard birds.