A rendering of the proposed shelter. Photo courtesy of the Salvation Army.

The Salvation Army is proposing an 892-square-metre “mega-shelter” in Ottawa’s Vanier neighbourhood that would provide temporary shelter beds for up to 350 people. The shelter would be the biggest in North America, featuring a special health care unit, a space for addictions recovery, permanent housing referrals, a dining facility, counselling, employment skills training, and more. The Salvation Army says the plan is an innovative and ambitious way to provide a safe space for Ottawa’s homeless. But housing advocates are skeptical.

THE LOGISTICS
It’ll cost the taxpayers of Ottawa $50 million and the city will have to rezone the property in question before any construction can begin. Currently, the space is zoned for residential and “traditional mainstreet”—a pedestrian-friendly strip of shops, restaurants, and services. But the Salvation Army is seeking an exemption, arguing that the shelter is only a small element of the facility.

THE STATE OF HOMELESSNESS IN OTTAWA
An estimated 7,200 people in Ottawa are homeless and/or living in shelters. Several of the city’s shelters are located in the Byward Market, a popular tourist destination.

THE CITY’S PLANS
The key component of Ottawa’s 10-year housing and homelessness plan, launched in 2014, is to use a housing-first approach to manage homelessness. According to the city’s website, “providing a person who is homeless with housing and the necessary supports to stay housed leads to a better quality of life and is far less costly than staying at an emergency shelter.” By 2024, the city plans to eliminate chronic homelessness and minimize emergency shelter stays to less than 30 days.

A “TREATMENT-FIRST” APPROACH
The Salvation Army’s proposed shelter ignores the city’s anti-poverty strategy. “What it communicates to me is [the Salvation Army] is still anchored in a treatment-first approach,” says Tim Aubry, a housing and homelessness researcher from Ottawa.

Research shows housing-first is twice as effective as treatment-first at helping people get out of homelessness. And with housing-first, “not surprisingly,” says Aubry, “individuals show improvement in functioning and quality of life associated with their exits from homelessness.”

A BAND-AID SOLUTION
San Diego tried a similar approach where charitable organizations ran large emergency shelters, and found it didn’t work. “We saw a nearly 19-percent increase of unsheltered homeless in the county,” wrote Michael McConnell for the San Diego City Beat. “It’s clear this model that focuses funding on the front-end, clogging our system with temporary shelters, has failed to resolve homelessness in our city.”

With evidence and political rhetoric backing housing-first, Aubry is perplexed as to why the city is potentially investing in more shelter beds. “If somebody’s homeless,” he says, “why wouldn’t you start with giving them a home?”

The store has now moved to an all-ages format, eliminating the sexually explicit videos and magazines, says Taylor in an e-mail to This.

Venus Envy has locations in Ottawa and Halifax. The shops are trans-affirming. The stores also sell books and health products around safer sex, in addition to toys, and also offerworkshops on sex education. As its website says, “Anyone who’s turned off by traditional sex shops will find us a welcoming and informative place to get cool and sexy stuff.” On October 9 Venus Envy started a Pay it Forward Campaign, offering free binders and gaffs (similar to a jock strap) through their shops. This is possible through donations (which you can make here). “We’ve had a lot of interest in our new Pay It Forward campaign that was sparked by this whole kerfuffle,” says Taylor.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her second year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

It was his first act of reinventing himself. He’s been doing it ever since, to the benefit of us all.

A college student in 1967, he participated in a mass resistance to the draft in the Vietnam War, and fled to Canada like so many other good Americans did. It wasn’t easy to be a teenager alone in a new country, but he never regretted what he’d done. A few years later, when he could have returned to the U.S., he didn’t. He moved to the Ottawa Valley and reinvented himself as a Canadian.

Faithful to his anti-war roots, he was president of Operation Dismantle, with the awesome task of dismantling the nuclear arms machine. Good Canadian that he became, he won the prize for sheer progressive persistence by running four times as an NDP candidate in the barren ground of rural eastern Ontario.

He plays the fiddle like he was Valley-born and, a non-stop learner, he is currently studying jazz piano. He started writing musical plays and that is how he was to find his two present-day vocations, as a summer theatre director and as a writer and publisher. He is a left entrepreneur par excellence.

Theilheimer is a self-taught journalist with an easy style. He became a stringer for the Ottawa Citizen. He was the editor of the Ontario New Democratic newspaper.

A decade ago, at the turn of the millennium, he founded Straight Goods, the alternative online news source. (Full disclosure: I’ve been involved myself from the outset, on the board of directors and as a columnist.) A good name: the key to good writing, the great Gabriel García Márquez says somewhere, is to tell it straight—the way country folk do.

Straight Goods is a meat-and-potatoes, trade-union–sponsored venture. A for-profit business that has yet to make a real profit but has had and is having a real impact on left activism.

In a parallel universe, there’s Stone Fence Theatre, dedicated to the heritage of the Valley, where he writes lyrics, composes, and runs the business. The long and the short of it is that Ish Theilheimer is a person of the people. In everything he writes and creates, he tells us about the lives of those extraordinary ordinary Canadians who did, and do, the heavy lifting in this country he chose.

Ottawa's South March Highlands at sunset. Photo courtesy Ottawa's Great Forest.

Imagine a major Canadian city fortunate enough to have both an old-growth forest and wetlands, rich in biodiversity and rare habitats, covering an area almost three times larger than Vancouver’s Stanley Park. Now picture chunks of it bulldozed for subdivisions and a highway. Unthinkable? Welcome to Ottawa’s South March Highlands, an estimated 1,100 hectares of ecologically significant land, home to hundreds of species—almost 20 at risk of extinction—and believed to be the site of ancient Aboriginal artifacts. But only 40 percent of it is protected by the city as conservation land—and developers are moving in.

“It’s one of the most biodiverse areas in Canada,” says Ottawa resident and environmentalist Paul Renaud, “and it’s 15 minutes from the centre of the nation’s capital.” Perhaps that’s why, in 1981, when developer Campeau Corp. purchased 550 hectares there, it agreed to keep 40 percent as “open space”—a contingency that carried over to subsequent landowners. But this open space isn’t exclusively environmentally significant land, as the area’s biodiversity wasn’t fully understood at the time of the purchase. Meanwhile, developers have capitalized on the agreement’s consent to build sports fields, storm management areas and an 18-hole golf course.

Several new residential subdivisions in the South March Highlands are currently planned or under construction. There’s the 269-hectare Kanata Lakes development being built by KNL Developments, a partnership of Ottawa builders Urbandale and Richcraft. There’s also the 84-hectare Richardson Ridge subdivision planned by the Ottawa-based Regional Group of Companies. Clearcutting of the popular Beaver Pond Forest began in January as part of KNL’s hotly contested plan to build 3,200 homes in the area. In 2009 the city approved an extension of Terry Fox Drive, a major arterial road that will bisect conservation land.

Unsurprisingly, local environmental groups and residents, including Renaud, have rallied against the area’s destruction. In early 2010 they formed the Coalition to Protect the South March Highlands. It has thousands of members locally and nationally, and Sierra Club Canada, the David Suzuki Foundation, and the Algonquin First Nations have joined the cause. “We need to do a better job of protecting the rights of indigenous people and the natural environment,” says Renaud. “It’s not too late to do the right thing.”

In the meantime, development continues to move forward. In December 2010, city council gave up an attempt to acquire 29 hectares of the Beaver Pond Forest from KNL, citing lack of funds and failure to agree with KNL on the land’s price. “The city can put new conditions on [KNL’s subdivision approval] if we have reason to do so,” says city councillor Marianne Wilkinson. “But if we try to do it, they can appeal it to the Ontario Municipal Board.” That’s one battle council wants to avoid. UPDATE: clearcutting of the Beaver Pond development site KNL Developments began in late January. The Coalition to Protect the South March Highlands says it is “not backing down” and encourages supporters to call city councillors and the Ottawa mayors’ office.

Residents have asked the provincial and federal governments—who hold responsibility for species at risk, areas of significant biodiversity, and the capital region greenbelt—to step in. Without the political will to protect the wilderness, the South March Highlands may become a case of not knowing what we’ve got until it’s gone.

Parliament reflected in a skyscraper. Creative Commons photo by Vince Alongi.

The governing Conservatives are about to table a budget that spends many billions of dollars. It sets the agenda of virtually every government department and it means a lot to anyone who pays taxes in Canada. But when the budget is introduced by the finance minister tomorrow, the prevailing Ottawa groupthink says it’s not about the money.

Instead, we all wonder: will the budget trigger an election?

That the next few days will have nothing to do with the details of the budget and everything to do with an election that seems inevitable when a minority parliament makes the decisions. The spring session, much like the fall session on the other side of the parliamentary calendar, presents a window of opportunity for opposition parties in the mood for an election. It might well be impossible to avoid those twice-annual tugs of war, where jockeying and horse trading rule the day, until one party leads a majority government—or, as we call it in Canada, a friendly dictatorship.

Indeed, during the majority governments of not so long ago, elections happened when the government wanted them to happen, or when it ran out of time and had no other choice.

But now, parliament revolves around potential election triggers, and Budget Day is like a gold rush for election speculators.

Not long after the crack of dawn tomorrow, hundreds of journalists will enter an hours-long lockup at Ottawa’s grand old train station and study the details of the budget documents. They’ll pen their first stories while cooped up, and no doubt place final bets on the big question: election or not? None will emerge until the finance minister rises in the House of Commons to detail the government’s plans.

When he rises to speak, that first raft of budget stories will hit the wires and the secret will be out.

Meanwhile, outside of the House of Commons, the finance minister’s opposition critics and their leaders will already have reporters badgering them for their comment—not on the details of the budget, of course, but on whether or not it’s enough to postpone an election.

It all happens so fast. So are those questions, asked so soon and with such demand, fair to politicians who have a huge federal budget sitting in front of them?

“It’s completely unfair,” says David Akin, Sun Media’s national bureau chief. “I suppose you have to ask. But [politicians] seem to be punished for not having a decent answer.”

Don Newman, on the other hand, says those questions are unavoidable these days.

“When the embargo is lifted, political parties flood the foyer,” says Newman, the chair of Canada 2020 and erstwhile dean of budget reporting—he covered 30 throughout his career. “And government ministers do the same.”

It’s a race to get the message out, and there’s only time for basic talking points.

And then, Akin says, finance minister Jim Flaherty becomes chief budget salesman. “The government will put an immediate sell on the budget,” Akin says. “The finance minister will do the rounds on the television networks, and he’ll do op-eds the next day.”

The Big Thing

Akin defends Ottawa’s focus on the budget.

“The budget document itself is, I would say, the most important document a government will produce in a given year—money makes things happen,” he says. And that importance is confirmed by local papers, Akin says, the editors of which decide which story their readers should see on the front page.

“Those editors, who are very closely connected to their local communities, are making that decision,” Akin says. “Editors vote with their front pages, and they think it’s the most important story year in and year out, just based on the play it gets.”

It wasn’t always like that, says Toronto Star senior political writer Susan Delacourt. In years past, she never had time to cover budgets. That’s because there were larger stories in the nation’s capital.

“It’s my overall impression that budget lockups have become such large affairs because everything else is not,” she wrote in an email. “The only big things the federal government does these days is either spend money or cut taxes.”

Delacourt said the “big things” of the past included national debates around the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords—governance based on ideas, not just money. But now, Delacourt says, the budget is just about “the only show in town.”

Whither long-term planning?

Newman says the current government would do well to avoid planning budgets around potential elections, since it leads to short-term planning.

“I’m a little disappointed that politicians and journalists have disregarded fixed election date laws,” he says, adding that governments “would have to have more far-reaching plans.”

The current government passed fixed-date legislation in 2006, and it didn’t last a single election cycle before Prime Minister Stephen Harper called an election in September 2008. If he were to follow that law to the letter, Harper could work toward a four-year plan where each budget was but one part of the longer-term whole that he could present to parliament on an annual basis.

But even that scenario might not silence all the election talk, because the fixed election date law cannot overrule a vote of non-confidence in the House of Commons. And since none of the opposition parties would likely buy in to Harper’s four-year plan without conditions, elections would always be just on the other side of a Commons vote.

Horse races as shiny objects

No matter what, the budget usually finds support in one corner of parliament or another, and election speculation is put off for another year—as is much of the reporting about the budget itself. And that’s the annoying part, according to Maclean’s columnist Aaron Wherry.

“You could do weeks of stories about what’s in the budget. It’s insane to think that all that can be covered in a day,” says Wherry, who recently wrote about the declining relevance of the House of Commons. “It should be the start of the coverage, but we all shrug our shoulders and walk away.”

That’s because more incisive reporting is relatively rare in the world of minority government, which is very much a zero-sum game where every story has a winner and loser.

“Most stories are ‘X’ versus ‘Y’. It’s entertaining, but I don’t know what people are supposed to take away from that,” Wherry says. “We don’t spend a lot of time explaining what’s going on.”

Finally, we suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, and following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and tasty links.

The cover story this issue is Elizabeth Wright‘s look at Canada’s broken drug approval process. The way that pharmaceuticals in this country get approved for medical use is needlessly secretive, rushed, and inefficient, many experts say, and its dysfunction puts everyone’s health at risk. And with Big Pharma in the driver’s seat—from the doctor’s office to the federal research labs, it’s increasingly clear that a more accountable, transparent, and independent drug approval process is necessary.

Also in this issue: Brad Badelt reports on the mystery of B.C.’s 2010 salmon run, which saw record-breaking numbers of fish returning to west-coast rivers. The fish-farming industry said it proved that Pacific salmon stocks are perfectly healthy and there’s no need to worry. But was last year’s boom a sign of resurgence—or a last gasp? Plus we bring you a special eight-page photo essay by Ian Willms from the dark heart of the tar sands. In Fort Chipewyan, 300 kilometres downstream from the world’s most environmentally destructive project, residents are living—and dying—amidst a skyrocketing cancer rate and deteriorating ecosystem.

And there’s plenty more: Paul McLaughlin interviews Silicone Diaries playwright-performer Nina Arsenault; Jason Brown explains how Canada is losing the global race for geothermal energy; Ellen Russell asks why we can’t have more muscular banking reforms; Lisa Xing sends a postcard from Jeju Island, South Korea, where the last of the pacific “mermaids” live; Dylan C. Robertson explains how the Canada-European Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement will change our world; Kapil Khatter shows why that “organic farmed fish” you buy may be anything but; Daniel Wilson untangles the right wing’s curious fixation on aboriginal tax exemptions; and Emily Landau sneaks a peek at the next genre-bending project from KENK publisher Pop Sandbox.

PLUS: Christina Palassio on poetry in schools; Navneet Alang on Wikileaks; Jackie Wong on painter Michael Lewis; Flavie Halais on the West Coast’s greenest city; Victoria Salvas on criminalizing HIV-AIDS; Denise Deby on the fight to save Ottawa’s South March Highlands; and reviews of new books by Renee Rodin, Lorna Goodison, David Collier, and David Lester.

This issue also includes debut fiction by Christine Miscione and new poetry by Jim Smith.

Chances are, even if you did happen to be in Toronto last week for Canadian Music Week, you still probably missed the opportunity to see Ottawa’s The White Wires. Their lone set, at 3 a.m. on a Saturday night, made them an easy act to miss.

It’s unfortunate, because The White Wires are a gritty three-chord beach blanket punk band that is, along with a handful of others, making Ottawa cool.

But don’t fret if you did miss them, either due to their unfortunate time slot or mere proximity, because the sound and energy of their live set is captured almost perfectly on their latest album WWII and one of its many stand-out tracks, “Be True To Your School (Till You Get Kicked Out).”

Despite the unfortunately long title (mostly just a pain for rock journalists who have to type it out), BTTYS(TYGKO) is a refreshingly fun song. It sounds like high school, summer, and good times. It’s a song that begs to be danced to, or at least jumped around to in wild abandon.

The White Wires craft songs in the vein of early punk rockers. Not the safety pinned junkie romantics, but the kind of three-chord enthusiasm that comes from a group of people who are just excited to write songs. The beauty of punk rock, and what made it so wonderful in its infancy, is that anyone can do it. Bands like the Ramones proved that you didn’t need years of practice to write great pop music and as such, you didn’t really need a message either. “Be True To Your School” isn’t weighed down by heady politics or stubborn vitriol and it’s not confessional, but celebrational.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what “Be True To Your School” is about; I imagine it’s something to do with loyalty. But loyalty to one’s self—I think it’s about the fickleness of youth and chasing aspirations and nonsense like that. Things suited to silly teenage dreams. But that’s cool, and the thing is, maybe that’s a good thing to keep close, even when the sun sets on those teenage years.

Maybe we should continue to be true to our school, ourselves, and our principals/principles. It’s easy when you’re young, but it doesn’t hurt to look back every now and then either.

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.

the delectable year of ear nips
replacing gum. you keep
the crisp crunch of sugar intact.
I suction out a tug of self-esteem.
rubbery, it fit inside a jelly bean

that summer I spent calling
every porsche funny-bum
and laughing on a loop.

that time when the throat
sprouted spontaneous
salivary glands at the scent
of just picked strawberries. we,
pocket empty, kissing instead.

The First Mother’s Day After Dad’s Death

damn you autopilot. mom got out
four plates too. I set out cutlery
at his place. setting weepy against
will, we avert our gazes from how she
covers her mistake, serving her food
on two stacked plates. I re-drawer
his fork and spoon. his knife’s
serrations groove the softened
butter as we make do. lower case
talk’s punctuation’s pauses disarrayed.
she brags of brush clearing, root balls
yanked, the downbeatnik neighbours
their oil tank foibles, their new lemon.
the angles, silverware to clay, are all wrong.
damn you bodies, thinking you own us.

She Dangles a Red Mouse

from her question mark
and the balding hairy stem
swings the plump body,
its red seeds. it shifts its
shiny strawberry hips
to nose, tries to make itself look
casual upside down, as if
it intended to be suspended
like this, wriggling.
it blinks. he blinks.

he realizes he hasn’t
answered, hasn’t been
blamed in her cleavage.
want one? she repeats.
he realizes that her eyes,
their deep deltas have
flattened and her one
sweaty palm cups his
forearm, asks if he’s
all right, but the hand
is a chemo patient
ferret, each finger
with an eye, each nail
missing its eyelashes.

one eyestalk taps, turns
to look at other tables
their sun-glinting cutlery
and animated conversations.
the ferret’s eyestalk grows
long impatient with him
sighs, resigns itself
with a flop across his wrist.
the other nine sag, fidget.

Metis National Council president Clément Chartier

In this edition of Listen to This, associate editor Nick Taylor-Vaisey brings us the first in a three part series we’ll be running throughout this fall, talking with the leaders of Canada’s First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples about the current political environment and their relationship with the government. With a new Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, John Duncan, taking over the portfolio over the summer, we thought it was time to look at where Canada’s aboriginal people stand, and the path forward from here.

Today, Nick talks with Clément Chartier, president of the Metis National Council, about the MNC’s relationship with the federal government, the legislative successes it has forged, what still needs to be done, and how the Metis nation’s interests coincide with First Nations and Inuit constitutencies.