Find what people wrote and said. Follow the evidence, connect the history, and bring it into your own work.
On Tuesday evening Green Party leadership candidate Meryam Haddad announced that she had been expelled from the contest. By Thursday morning, facing widespread backlash from party members, the party’s appeal body overturned the expulsion and reinstated Haddad. Haddad, a 32-year-old immigration lawyer from Montreal, has run an insurgent campaign for the leade…
The first time Carlos Hewitson spent the night in a homeless shelter, he was awoken by the sound of a man getting beaten in his sleep. “This guy, he just got up from his bed and started wailing on another man,” said Hewitson. “It was terrifying. It was more than terrifying. How do you dare close your eyes after that?” Hewitson didn’t stick around the shelter…
Refugees come here having survived trauma most Canadians can barely imagine. After arriving in the country, they face a myriad of stressors that make settlement challenging. That’s why specialized services such as the New Beginnings Clinic for Refugees at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health are needed — but due to overwhelming need, the clinic h…
Late Tuesday night Meryam Haddad, a candidate for the leadership of the Green Party of Canada, released a statement that she had been expelled from the leadership contest. Party members are set to begin voting in three days on Sept. 26. According to Haddad’s statement, the Green Party alleges that she violated a section of the party’s rules that forbids memb…
Police are investigating at least two credible threats made against Anishnaabe land defenders at blockades on their territory over the weekend. Officers removed one sport hunter from a camp north of Mont Laurier, Quebec, after he confronted a group defending their traditional territory against the moose hunt. Another hunter was warned to stay away from the c…
On the 40th anniversary of the Marathon of Hope, Canada could do a huge service by speaking out for a disabled scholar incarcerated in an Indian jail for merely advocating for the rights of poor and marginalized people. This weekend we remember our hero Terry Fox, a resident of Port Coquitlam, B.C., who started a cross-Canada marathon to raise funds for canc…
On a weekday morning at Toronto’s Grange Park, damp clothes dry on improvised laundry lines outside half a dozen tents while city workers rake the playground and seniors assemble for tai chi on the lawn. The encampment fluctuates in size from day to day but has steady access to multiple sources of running water. Later in the day children will run through a s…
The top 20 richest billionaires in Canada have amassed $37 billion in collective wealth increases since March, when COVID-related lockdowns and closures began across Canada, according to a new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. This revelation about the scale of wealth gains for the country’s most affluent over the past six months comes…
Charles Ratt was 10 years old when he learned to field dress a moose. His father, Abraham, handed him a knife and the boy got to work, sawing through bone and sinew, parsing fur from muscle and removing the animal’s warm, blood-soaked bowels to prevent the meat from spoiling. It took him almost two hours to finish the job, and he hadn’t even shot the moose. …
Private U.S. companies are part of drone strike “kill chains” in East Africa, revealed an investigation published last month by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global collaborative network of investigative journalists. Their report described how civilian contractors are operating armed drones, and in some cases intelligence collected …
We are trespassers. That fact dawns on us as we crouch in the bushes, waiting to sneak onto a landfill in Mohawk territory. When we hear the last car leave the property, “Dave” motions to us and we set out for the dump at the edge of the woods. support the project. This article was produced through a collaboration between Ricochet Media and The Eastern Door,…
I think about death. I pedal furiously into the night, until lactic acid burns my quads, until the trailer parks and pizza parlours by the lake give way to the hills outside Oka. I pedal beyond the streetlights and the steel towers sending radio waves across the valley. I pedal until only stars light the summer sky. And I think about death. Maybe a sleepy tr…
My mother holds her grandson more tightly and for a few moments longer than usual, reminding him she won’t be able to do this once he’s returned to school. My partner, a teacher, worries that it will be months before she can be in the same room as her own family, fearing she’ll expose them to something contracted from students. These are very different back-…
On an average summer Saturday in Victoria, B.C., Beacon Hill Park’s 200-acre grounds play host to games of pickup volleyball, mothers with strollers visiting while maintaining physical distance, and picnics on the green. But tucked between trees, often in groups of two or five, are tents of unhoused Victorians. These encampments provide a place to shelter of…
In a decision recognizing migrant farm workers as “exceptionally vulnerable” and a priority population, the Ontario divisional court has restored an order that caps the number of migrant farm workers isolating in a bunkhouse at three people during the 14-day quarantine period required of all travellers arriving in Canada. Dr. Shanker Nesathurai, Haldimand-No…
“Injustice is fatal.” This was the message Karen Ward began sharing in 2017, around the time her friend Tracey Morrison, a warm and dedicated housing and drug-policy activist, passed away. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the injustices faced by those suffering from poverty, systemic oppression, and what Ward calls “excess mortality.” On paper, Mor…
“I get up at 4 o’clock every morning, make a tea, and rush to Dollarama,” says Gaurav Sharma, a worker at the company’s warehouse and distribution centre in northwest Montreal. “I’ve worked at Dollarama for one year, as a pallet builder. It’s a hard job.” “If I make one pallet, it takes 45 minutes. How can I make 15 pallets in 8 hours? We just have to work, …
Watching the WE Charity saga unfold since early July, it’s clear that a well-synchronized team legitimized the organization’s actions well before the $912-million scandal involving the current administration. Complicity is found at multiple levels, from elected officials to individual corporate partners and players, from media institutions to the charitable …
Every political project needs a good slogan. Yes, We Can. Real Change. Make America Great Again. Not Me, Us. With the right campaign, the right messaging, the right context, otherwise empty words become prompts for target audiences to recall — or even piece together — complex political narratives. A good slogan, in other words, elicits a story. Canada’s oil …
To usher in its upcoming 200th birthday, McGill University launched an initiative called The Road to 200 to research some of the world’s “grand challenges” and “strive to be a model for how universities can meet the challenges of a future that defies imagination.” Along with planning a year of festivities, it also embarked on an ambitious fundraising campaig…