Occupying a wonderfully strange place on the Canadian metal landscape, one that combines great technical dexterity with the deep emotional reverberations of sludge (the band lovingly refer to this micro-genre as “swamp trench arithmetic”), The Great Sabatini have dropped a new mountain on their particular musical skyline with Matterhorn. “City Limits” is the opening track off of the album, and starts the record with a cacophonous frenzy, shaking with aggression and drenched in feedback. The chaos gradually resolves into sharp, spiny riffs that seem to claw upwards, bleeding fingertips clinging to the sheer rock wall of some miserable peak. The pace lurches and then slows. The that begins with a stinging attack coagulates into a long, drawn out ache. With a murmur, a soft voice sample, and finally an eerie digital buzz, “City Limits” ends on a note that is at once soothing and unsettling.

One of the many independent tow trucks on hand at Queen's Park.

One of the best ways to get noticed is to disrupt the morning commute. That is exactly what a convoy of independent tow truck drivers did this morning as part of a protest against the Ontario Provincial Police’s proposal to contact its use of tow truck companies to a selected few. Together, those 50 plus drivers from in and around the GTA, slowed the morning commute to a crawl on the 401, 427, Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway. It didn’t stop there.

At about 10 a.m. a mass of tow trucks arrived at Queen’s Park and turned the street into a parking lot. When I arrived, at 11:30 am, the sides of the streets on the walk toward Queen’s Park were still lined with large diesel trucks, all with their orange and red lights flashing atop their idle ride. Many of the motorists in the area had no idea what was going on or why traffic had halted. ”

Currently tow truck drivers work on a first come first serve basis. This system essentially gives truck owners a level playing field and what many independent drivers see as fair competition. The new proposal would abandon this practice and give contracts to a few larger companies. As a result, these companies would have claim over all tows the OPP orders because of driving infractions. This is bad news for independent companies because OPP tows make up the majority of their business.

The argument for contracting out to larger firms is for “consumer protection”. Base pricing would be set to expel the claims of over pricing.

Allen Yeldea works for Discount Towing and doesn’t believe this to be a rational system. “The OPP would basically call whoever they want which is not fair,” said Yeldea. “We’re sitting out there putting in diesel every day, pulling in ridiculous hours, 15 to 16 to 17 hours and if they do a contract we are all getting screwed.”

Yeldea believes that larger companies such as Abrams Towing Services and CAA would likely be awarded the contracts. This move would likely see independent tow truck operators driven off the map.

Roy Loveless, another independent tow truck operator from Fergus, ON, came down to Toronto to voice his concerns. “I’m here to protest against the request for a proposal that the government put out to have 56 box store towing companies take care of all impoundment tows for the province of Ontario.”

Roy's Towing and Recovery, an independent business, sits idle out front of Queen's Park.

Loveless is the sole owner of the company which bares his own name, Roy’s Towing and Recovery.  Parked out front of the Provincial Legislature, he hopes to generate some awareness. Part of the problem at hand according to Loveless, is that the majority of population have no idea about what’s going on.

“There was actually a media ban on the contract and on the proposal. They didn’t want anybody speaking about it. They didn’t want any of the companies talking about it,” said Loveless, who is also the treasurer of the Ontario Federation of Independent Towers (OFIT). Independent operators, he said, have worked overtime and doubletime to prevent the move, and to bring the deal into the public eye. “Now the only option we have is to come down here and make our horns be heard.”

It’s always a tough call in determining the success of a protest.  Loveless has heard a lot of mixed feeling around the success of the event. “I would say it was successful but maybe others would disagree,” he said. “Obviously the motoring public would disagree a little bit, but unfortunately they don’t know about what’s going on in our industry and we have to do what we have to do to makes ends meet.”

Many of the independent tow truck operators are planning to come back down to Queen’s Park on May 24^th for another similar event.

The recent uproar over the provocative (dare I say titillating) May 2012 Time magazine cover on attachment parenting has got me thinking again about local food. The old joke among lactating mothers is that breast milk is the most local you can get.

The other thing about the article that made me think was Nathan Thornburgh’s sidebar “The Detached Dad’s Manifesto: How fathers can contribute by just chilling out” in which he frames mothers as organic-food and baby-Einstein-obsessed and praises himself for being so relaxed by suggesting that his form of “detachment fathering” includes “not feeling a twinge of guilt if you don’t want to splurge on organic vegetables.”

It’s true that the upper-middle class has a complex relationship to guilt in which food purity—especially for helpless babes—figures highly.  But our obsession with purity, sadly, doesn’t even find its end in natural breast milk.  Breast milk can contain bioconcentrated pesticides that are stored in the fat of mothers’ milk and passed on to little ones (though it is reported that vegetarians and vegans, because they are lower on the food chain, tend to store and pass on less pesticides).

When I think of “pure” foods, in addition to breast milk I think of brown rice—though not in the same bowl. But the CBC recently reported that even organic, whole grain brown rice syrup has been shown to contain traces of arsenic, sapped up from fields formerly used as cotton plantations (and this is foreign arsenic, not naturally occurring arsenic sometimes found in soil).

So we might as well admit it:  no food is ever going to be totally pure.  Even if those foods were available, they would only be affordable to an elite few.

Some health-conscious consumers, acknowledging this fact, have turned to the Environmental Working Groups’ (EWG) annual report on the “dirty dozen” to assuage their fears.  With the aim of “reducing your exposure [to pesticides] as much as possible” the EWG offers a list of the twelve most pesticide-laden fruits and veggies (you can find them here if you haven’t already) as well as the “clean fifteen” (fruits and veggies with the lowest concentrations of pesticides) in order to help consumers spend their pennies (nickels) wisely.  So (guacamole-types rejoice!) don’t bother spending your hard-earned cash on organic avocadoes or mangoes (of the clean fifteen) but instead, suggests the EWG, go ahead and splurge on organic strawberries, potatoes, and blueberries, since these are where the real damage is. No surprise that obsessed consumers can, of course, download a free iphone app at whatsonmyfood.org to help them navigate produce aisles that potentially include pesticides that boast carcinogens, hormone disruptors, neurotoxins, developmental or reproductive toxins, and bee toxins.

But back up just a second here.  Why is the so-called dirty dozen just about us?  Aren’t our pesticide-packed bodies part of a greater system of consumption, with both environmental and social implications? Leafy greans, for example, are part of the dirty dozen but actually require a minimal amount of pesticide per acre and so rate highest among earth-friendly produce, reported Slate.

Besides the old dirty twelve, a rule of thumb for eating “green” includes buying thin-skinned produce like lettuce, strawberries, and apples organic, whereas thick-skinned produce like oranges and avocados are a go-ahead because the thick skin is where the pesticide residues hang out.  Bananas have a thick skin, which means that whether the plantation they came from is causing workers to become ill from pesticides and affecting the land for future use, the inner fruit will be acceptable to organic-minded upper-middle class folks.  (In 2002, a Human Rights Watch report examined both child labor practices as well as pesticide effects on workers in banana plantations in Ecuador and condemned the industry for both hiring underage workers and exposing these more vulnerable children to pesticides).

A 2008 New York Times article reported on a study which explored whether local food was actually good for your health:  “so far, there’s not real evidence that eating locally farmed food is better for you.”  Regardless of the outcome of the study, dividing our focus into health issues versus environmental issues misses the point.  We are a part of a flawed system in which even strawberries, breast milk, and brown rice carry the signs of a short-sighted approach to food and the environment. The question isn’t whether eating locally farmed food is better for you; the question is whether it’s good for everyone.

Woodworth, a Conservative backbencher, recently proposed a private members motion to reopen the conversation on Section 223(1) of the Criminal Code, which states a child does not become a human being until it has “completely proceeded” from the mother’s body. The motion was quickly denounced by the opposition as well as the Prime Minister.

Stephen Harper said in a recent question period that he does not want the abortion debate reopened and he would vote against any move to do so. Many of Harper’s supporters at the rally were frustrated with his recent remarks and disappointed that a Conservative PM supposedly has no intention of supporting a bill that would restrict abortions.

Any time the word abortion enters into conversation in the media, or really anywhere, very strong public opinions—both for and against—come along with it.

I am not pro-abortion, but I am pro-choice. The anti-abortion rhetoric, to me, is a violation against women’s rights. If this country were ever to allow restrictions to be implemented on a women’s choice over her own body, we would be taking one giant leap backwards.

However, debate today is greatly different than in 1988, when the Supreme Court ruled to not put any legal restrictions on abortions. At that time, the Supreme Court’s ruling of Regina v. Morgentaler, found the Criminal Code of Canada was unconstitutional, because it violated women’s rights under section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. With advancements in medical screenings the debate is no longer just a yay or nay discussion; it has become much more complex.

Major advances in science and maternal healthcare means genetic counselling is now a growing medical field. Through screening and family history, doctors are more capable than ever when it comes to determining if a child may be born with Down syndrome or have a predisposition to a variety of illnesses. What happens when we reach the point when we can find out with certainty that a child will grow up to have Parkinson, ALS or Alzheimer’s? Is it humane to let the fetus survive only to live a life of unspeakable pain and suffering? Female feticide is a regular occurrence in  China and India where boys are the preferred sex—and is now occurring in North America. Should parents be allowed to choose the sex of their child?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. Nobody does. But based on our advances in science and technology the abortion debate will only become more difficult as we move forward—new science-made options in family planning have generated a whole new avenue for heated argument.

The ongoing debate around not having the abortion debate within the House of Commons only confuses matters. The conversation needs to be reborn. We currently have no laws around abortions and it’s about time we enacted policy to officially protect women’s rights.

As Andrew Coyne wrote in his April 27th column for the National Post: “Possibly, after a full and open debate, we might decide we wished to continue to have no abortion law—by policy, rather than by default. That is how a democracy decides such questions. It does not leave them to a tie vote of the Senate.”

We live in a democratic society where issues are openly discussed and voted on by the individuals we have elected into power. Would it be wrong or dangerous to reopen the discussion? I strongly doubt it.  It would be wrong and dangerous not to reopen the debate in a democratic nation. By not allowing this to be discussed within the House of Commons, it would sent a precedent that could prevent other major issues from seeing the floor. We live in a progressive country, a country where church and state are separated, and I think there are enough sound minded individuals who can make the right decision.

Tim Hetherington, Kelso, 2007 - 2008, © Tim Hetherington / Magnum Photos

While waiting for a bus on Lansdowne Avenue, a gritty strip in Toronto’s west end, I was struck by an image on a billboard (no small feat considering how often my nose is in the position of downward-facing iPhone). The photo was of a shirtless young man, his body curled up in what appeared to be a deep sleep.

There were no logos or messages attached to the image, although the warm light and raw wood-panelling on the wall behind him reminded me of vintage Calvin Klein ads. Whatever this photo was selling, there was something provocative, almost sensuous, about the relationship between the photographer and their slumbering subject.

It wasn’t until I was home that I connected the billboard to the work of Tim Hetherington, the British-American photojournalist who was killed in 2011 while covering the Libyan civil war. As part of the Contact Photography Festival, several of Hetherington’s Sleeping Soldiers photos appear on Toronto billboards, as well as ones in Vancouver, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Montreal and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, where they can be seen until June 3.

The Sleeping Soldier series was originally presented as a multi-channel video installation, which juxtaposed the photos with video footage of their day-to-day combat work (a single-screen version of the video is available here). But by detaching the photos from the original installation, we’re left with only the soldiers’ vulnerability staring down at us.

Hetherington was one of those rare talents who had a successful artistic practice that co-existed with his journalism (a foundation has been set up in his name to assist struggling students and artists). After spending a year embedded with a U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan, he turned his experience into several gallery exhibitions (including Sleeping Soldiers), co-wrote a book (Infidel) and directed the Oscar-nominated documentary Restrepo with U.S. journalist Sebastian Junger.

“The book and film are about the intimacy of war, and that’s what I see when I see the photographs of these guys sleeping,” he told the Independent in 2010. “We are used to seeing soldiers as cardboard cutouts. We dehumanize them, but war is a very intimate act. All of those soldiers would die for each other. We’re not talking about friendship. We’re talking about brotherhood.”

Protesters gather outside the Enbridge annual general meeting. Photo by Jen Chow.

About 200 protesters gathered on King Street today as Enbridge held their annual general meeting inside the King Edward Hotel.

The mass of protesters had congregated on the street to voice their opinions on the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, which would stretch 1,172 kilometres from Bruderheim, Alta., to the port of Kitimat, B.C. The proposed cost of this venture is in the range of $5.5 billion dollars. The pipeline would transport oil from the tar sands to the west coast for export to a growing Asian market as well as the western United States.

The pipeline would also move through lands which belong to dozens of First Nations groups. A group known as Yinka Dene Alliance, made up of B.C. First Nations, traveled by train across the country for eight long days to arrived in Toronto yesterday. Their goal is to inform people and raise awareness about the damages the Northern Gateway pipeline could cause to the environment and to their homes.

I arrived at the protest, a little damp from the light rain, to see a wide variety of signs and banners raised above the crowed. People were gathered in the middle of the street, chanting “No pipeline, no tankers,” along to the loud beating of drums.

Signs in all capital letters read “SHAME ON ENBRIDGE” and “WATER NOT OIL”—among various other anti-Enbridge slogans. Natalie Guttormsson, who was holding a large yellow sign with the red lettering “RESPECT INDIGENOUS PEOPLES RIGHTS,” said her sign means,  “recognizing that we are living on their land and when they say no to a project it means no.”

Natalie Guttormsson (far right) hold a banner in protest. Photo by Jen Chow.

As it began to rain down harder, the people only became louder. “NO TANKERS, NO PIPELINE, NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE,” rose loud above the sounds of the lunch hour traffic. They came to inform and raise awareness and that’s what they did.

I continued to scour the crowd for someone from the Yinka Dene Allience who was able to answer some of my questions. After asking several different people for an interview I met with Ted White, a councillor for the Aamjiwnaang First Nation. “I’m here to support the people in B.C. about the pipeline going through there,” he said.  “We’ve had problems (in Sarnia) with this company there alone.”

Standing with White was Al (who didn’t give his last name) also from the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, a strong silent type, wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and a camo hat. He joined in our conversation: “The problem there hasn’t even been solved yet and they’re starting more problems on the other side of the country” he said. “They have to deal with these problems first.”

Many people at the protest were there to show their support for the Indigenous people in western Canada. A large number of those  I spoke with at the protest were from the Sarnia area, where another Enbridge project is located. According to Toban Black, Enbridge Line 9 crosses water sheds in the area and is connected to industries in Sarnia and Sarnia Lambton. Black is concerned because tar sands bitumen is processed there. “There is a bigger picture that the Northern Gateway struggle is part of,” he said.

Zack Nicholls, who was taking shelter from the rain, stood inside a bus shelter with his four year old son seated in a stroller is also from Sarnia. “I got the four year old with me,” he said. “Generally, I wouldn’t bring him all this way out but I felt it was important to get out and just be part of something big.” There was a real sense of frustration deep within the calming demeanor of his voice.

The Conservative government’s decision to get rid of the environmental assessment will pave the way for a lot more problems to occur, Nicholls added, especially with the Enbridge pipelines.

“In Sarnia there is just a constant barrage of releases from all the different refineries and the government does nothing. Every single time they do nothing,” said Nicholls. “We do stuff in Sarnia but they’re always just such tiny little events. I needed a pick me up. To be here with hundreds of other like minded people.”

In my quest to follow the Occupy movement this summer, I realized it’s imperative to first understand what Occupy is and who it represents. We have all seen the signs and heard the slogans about the 99 percent, but is everyone involved and do they even care? Given, it’s rather a complicated task—defining a movement of this magnitude—but I’m willing to give it a shot.

Looking in from the outside at the Occupy movement, I can see a few distinct characteristics of those involved. Take the May Day rally, which marked the resurgence of Occupy  in Toronto: attendees were a combination of young, twenty-to-thirty somethings, members of the working class, students, activists, and the obviously left-wing.

That does not fully represent the 99 percent. Really, it’s only a small slice of the percentage pie. For something of this magnitude to work, everyone must be involved. I look at the Occupy, a group brave enough to stand up for the 99 percent, and I can’t help but notice a substantial segment is missing. I think it’s fair to say that almost everyone involved would fall on the left of the political spectrum. What I don’t see is the right. Don’t they also need to be part of the conversation?

When I mention the right-wing I’m not speaking of the radical, extreme right card carrying, pro-abortion, anti-immigration type, I’m talking about regular people, business owners, your neighbour, and your co-worker. The big problem is convincing those who have yet to stand up and join in the fight. We need to show them the Occupy movement can—and should—represent all of us.

I’ve talked with a lot of people recently; it’s apparent some people feel under-represented by the movement. They sympathise with Occupy and all it represents, but don’t feel their voice is being heard. Sure, it could partly be their own fault—they may be intimidated by a movement of this size and find it difficult to find their place. Even so, there has to be away for everyone to get involved. People need to see themselves within a movement to consider taking part. To get more people involved we need something everyone can latch onto. In short, we need a definition.

Throughout the summer I plan to talk with  those fully engaged in the movement’s activities, but also with the rest of 99 percent—the entirety of people this movement was designed to represent. A lot of people have a hard time trying to find some form of cohesion, that ah ha moment when everything finally makes sense. Occupy has, in some ways, garnered itself a bad name due to the lack of public understanding and public connectedness to the movement. While there is some beauty in an one-size-fits-all movement, many activists and observers (myself included) believe that if this is something that is going to work there needs to be some type of goal. And for a goal to be achieved there needs to be an agreement of direction.

The first question I asked myself is: how do you find out what the people want? My answer: just talk to them. I know it’s not that cut and dry. There are a hell of a lot of people out there and how do you know you’re talking to the right ones? Well, the odds are in my favour. I have a 99 percent chance of asking the right person. They are everywhere: They are walking to work, having lunch, at the soup kitchen, on the subway and your next door neighbour. They are you and me.

My plan this summer is to talk to as many people as possible and report my findings. This isn’t something I can accomplish in one fowl swoop; it will take a copious amount of time and energy. Time more than anything because if I just go wandering outside my office building (401 Richmond Street West) for one day, my data pool will be flawed.

With that said, my plan will be to have my recorder and or cell phone, with me at all times and asks the various people I meet throughout the city the same three questions:

1. What does the occupy movement mean to you?

2. Who is the 99 percent?

3. What do think needs to happen for positive change?

I will also offer up my email address and twitter handle so if you would like to help in this crazy plan of mine, feel free to drop me a line answering the questions stated above.

I hope people understand what I am saying and trying to do. I want to help unite the 99 percent by showing both sides of the political spectrum that there is a common bond, and that to attain a goal there must be cooperation and communication.

Email – kyle@thismagazine.ca                                                                                                                                       Twitter – @kylejdupont

Honestly, I expected to feel nothing but creeped out by these doll-owners. Instead, I felt moved by the old man who bought a used doll after his wife died, strangely compelled by the young man who took his doll out on sushi dates. Other men played video games with their dolls. One, a military man, wanted to marry his doll and carry her over the threshold before he married his real life fiancée and had to box his doll forever. The men even became angry when they heard, or saw, other men mistreat their dolls—tearing holes through the doll’s very lifelike vaginas, or even breaking fingers. Men like that, they thought, shouldn’t be able to own dolls. These men’s dolls had likes and dislikes, they had personalities, they had souls.

I almost forgot why I didn’t like the idea of life-sized, over-sexualized dolls in the first place.

Almost.

But at the very end, one of the men—very articulate, very young—says something along the lines of, “If I ever date an organic woman, she will have to accept my doll. If I’m lucky she’ll like her. If I’m really lucky, she’ll like-like her.” Chances of that happening aside, there is just something so ick about the term organic woman. It sets us on the same playing field as dolls—our differences are a matter of material, organic versus plastic—when we aren’t even in the same stadium.

No matter how tender the doll owners are, or how closely their relationship incorporates companion, not just sexual, aspects, there is no getting around the power imbalance: any interests the doll has are those her male owner wants her to have, she goes wherever he takes her, projects whatever image he wants her to, exists solely in the boundaries he’s given her. They are all constructs of him; he is an absolute god. Indeed, as one manufacturer says when explaining the dolls’ popularity, it’s all a little bit caveman. The owner can essentially act out the ultimate power fantasy: drag woman by hair to cave, satisfy natural instincts, never hear a word. This is, by all accounts, refreshing and a welcome break from today’s feminist-beholden woman.

It’s not and it’s not. While the reasons for owning dolls are complex, so are women. We are not dolls. We are loud, and difficult, and smart, opinionated, sometimes logical, sometimes not, and about a hundred thousand other, different adjectives, words, personality traits, and interests we define and give ourselves. As long as that list is, however, organic is not on it.

Students protest against tuition hikes in Quebec on April 14th. Photo by Jean Gagnon.

The student strike in Quebec does not look to be ending anytime soon. While a tentative agreement was struck on May 6, following a 22-hour negotiation between the students and the Quebec government, it will likely be annulled after the 150,000 students around the province vote this week.

If the agreement is passed, it would maintain the proposed tuition hikes of $254 a year, over the next seven years. In return, the government offered an equivalent reduction in the mandatory university surcharges and administration fees. These fees cover non-academic services.

In other words, the cost for attending post secondary in Quebec would not change—some numbers will go up and others will go down under the proposed agreement, but the sum total students will pay for their education post-hike will be equivalent to the current cost. It’s hard to say if there is a clear winner in the end.

As the student strike lingers into its third month, the end date is still unclear.  Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, who has become the face of the protest and leader of the Coalilition Large d’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (better known to the public as CLASSE), spoke with the Globe and Mail (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/face-of-quebecs-student-protest-surprised-by-its-power/article2425572/) Monday regarding the tentative agreement. “The trend seems to indicate that it will be rejected. We will have to evaluate the situation after all the votes are taken,” said the 21 year-old history major at the University of Quebec in Montreal. “What is clear is that the strike would continue and we would return to the bargaining table to discuss the central issue, which is the tuition fee hikes.”

At this point only one school, CEGEP de Gaspésie, has accepted the offer. Five Collèges d’Enseignement Général et Professionnel (CEGEP) have voted against it and seven university departments.

The ongoing protest has seen its scope broaden in recent weeks. “The tuition fee hikes have quickly channeled a great deal of satisfaction towards the government, about accessibility to higher education and other social issues,” Nadeau-Dubois told Rheal Seguin.

This past weekend 3000 protesters ascended on a Liberal Party meeting in Victoriaville. The protest turned violent and sent three students to the hospital with serious injuries. To me, it seems students are becoming more unruly and it is imperative that some kind of resolution is found—or there is potential for the violence to escalate even further.

Within all of the madness which surrounds any type of protest of this magnitude there is one group which is routinely ignored by both sides. André Poulin, executive director for a group of about 800 downtown businesses in Montreal, spoke with a National Post (http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/05/07/graeme-hamilton-quebec-student-deal-is-far-from-settled/) reporter about the problems they are facing.

“They don’t realize the damage they are causing to people who earn a living operating these businesses,” Poulin told the Post. “Even if there is no violence businesses are affected.”

This is probably the part that most infuriates me: The innocent people caught in the middle. I’m all for a civilized peaceful protest, but when individuals start destroying store fronts, it hurts everyone. Many people have been avoiding the central area of the protest, resulting in loss of business and tourism. Like most downtown cores throughout Canada, many of the businesses are independently owned and operated. Also if these tuition hikes are implemented, many of these students will likely turn to these exact businesses for employment, to help pay for the rising tuition costs.  It essentially gives the whole movement a bad rap; people start talking about the way protesters are acting instead of the issues they are protesting around. If we want to gain the support of people outside of universities and colleges, it’s important to consider public image. And it seems as though it has been tarnished.

I think this whole movement will have implications beyond the educational realm. One interesting fact to note is that the idea for the current tentative agreement was initially proposed by former leader of the Bloc, Giles Duceppe. On top of this, the Bloc has claimed they would abolish tuition hikes if elected.  With the next provincial election slated to happen by the end of the year, quite possibly this summer, the youth vote could actually help slide the Bloc back into the forefront of Quebec politics, a position which has diminished over the past few elections.

Because I enjoy frustration and really bad customer service, I called Rogers. They informed me they could fix it, but not for six days. Six days! But, I was missing Gossip Girl! Panic set in. I worried about what kind of trouble the Real Housewives would get into without me. I imagined the anxiety caused by  being the only person on Twitter on a Sunday night not in on the Mad Men jokes or snark about Girls. What if some racial diversity suddenly showed up on Girls and I missed it? What about the dreaded plot spoilers? Rogers didn’t care.

I curled up on my living room floor and threw the best only-child in-a-world-that-is-unfair-woe-is-me- temper tantrum I could muster. I sulked and imagined my life without TV. Would I have to read books? Enjoy nature? Get a hobby? Interact with humanity? Screw that.

My life wasn’t always this way. There was a time when I often chose not to join a regularly scheduled program already in progress. As an avid consumer of pop culture, I sometimes find myself exhausted and overcome with the need to disengage. This has resulted in me avoiding: competitive cake baking shows, Brangelina, Glee, people trying to make Channing Tatum happen for me, and anything to do with the Hunger Games. I also refuse to make macaroons the new cupcake and, no, I haven’t seen the new Avengers movie. Leave me alone!

But when the fatigue really sets in and this pop culture junkie needs rehab, I often take my frustration out on my television. It’s not that I have high viewing standards. Not at all. I’ll watch and hate watch—sadly I’ve kept up with the Kardashians more than I would like to admit—pretty much anything. Except televised talent competitions. I have never watched an episode of American Idol. The terrifying combination of Ryan Seacrest, people breaking into song, and live studio audiences is too much for me.

But Lost was Seacrest free and I still managed to avoid it until season two. I knew it was about an island and a plane crash, but that was about it. Mad Men suffered the same fate. I felt like a feminist fraud when a friend and I were discussing pop culture heroines and Buffy made the list. I had to confess I’d never seen an episode. Battlestar Galactica. Whatever. Space sucks.

Eventually, I come around though. Resistance is futile. I finally started watching Lost and managed to annoy my friends—who were wondering why they were stuck in 2005 all of a sudden—with incessant questions about the hatch and the polar bears. I recently watched the first two seasons of Buffy and wish I hadn’t come late to her vampire slaying party. I now host Mad Men viewings on Sunday nights. No themed cocktails though. I’m far too lazy for that.

When faced with pop culture overload we sometimes just need to regain control and consume things on our own terms. I’ll care about Don Draper when I’m good and ready, thank you very much. It’s not just the watching of the TV. It’s the TV-related tweets. It’s the endless online recaps and media analysis. I had reached my saturation point with Girls before I even started watching it. It’s the friends who make you feel like a total loser if you’re not watching Game of Thrones. I am not watching Game of Thrones, by the way.

While laying on my floor post-Rogers temper tantrum I considered becoming one of those people who doesn’t watch TV. Those smug people I avoid at parties cause they think they’re better than me. You read The Economist instead of watching Jersey Shore. Hooray for you, here’s a smarty pants medal!

Lucky for me I didn’t have to ponder this long cause my cable ended up returning after four hours. Turns out it was just a service problem in my area. I did miss Chuck Bass that night, but made it in time for Shameless. It’s a great show. You should totally watch it.

**Yes, I realize this is a very first world problem. I also realize I could watch these shows online, but really that’s not my preferred method of TV delivery.

Lisa Whittington-Hill is the publisher of This Magazine. Her blog on pop culture will appear every second Tuesday.

This Magazine's May/June 2012 cover story

The meat counter at the Cambie Street Whole Foods in Vancouver is thirty feet long, filled with choice cuts of beef, lamb, chicken, pork, and at least 20 different kinds of sausages. Two clerks, dressed in white smocks, black aprons, and Whole Foods caps, hustle around behind the counter, making sure everything looks just right. One of them wraps up an antibiotic-free chicken breast; the other offers instructions on how to grill a $33/pound cut of tenderloin to a young, attentive shopper.

Philip Dunlop used to be one of these workers. From October 2009 to April 2010, he spent forty hours a week slicing meat, making sausages, and serving customers, all in workplace conditions he found increasingly depressing. The sturdy, dark-haired 30-year old recites the list: lack of respect, uneven  wages, uncertain pay bumps, short staffing, inability to rectify grievances, low job security—it goes on and on. He lodged complaints about these issues to store managers in letter after letter. Each time he did, the managers spoke to him, placated him, assured him things would change. Only they didn’t. Dunlop felt more and more like he was being handled—that he had no real voice in his workplace. After less than two months of working at what Dunlop calls “The Meat Pit,” he started thinking about unionizing the store.

Labour in the retail sector is notoriously difficult to organize. The position of retail clerk is now the most common job in the country, at over 1.8 million workers. Yet, the field remains one of the least unionized. In Canada, nearly 30 percent of all workers are union members; less than 11 percent of workers in the retail sector are unionized. Membership is particularly low among young workers. Just under 15 percent of those aged 15-24 are union members, half the rate of workers in any other age bracket. Even worse, labour organizers are grappling with a concerted effort among companies to change corporate culture—an insidious new way to convince workers that labour and management are playing for the same team. With such stacked odds, the future of unions in retail looks increasingly grim.

Dunlop lives in an old white house in the affluent Point Grey neighbourhood in Vancouver. It’s one of the few run-down homes. He shares the space with six roommates, all of whom are students or recent graduates like Dunlop, who has a Master’s degree in history. It’s a February afternoon and Dunlop is making everyone sandwiches with clearance deli meat. He’s dressed in old cargo pants and a much-too-large black sweater with rips along the seams, supporting his claim that he gets all of his clothes second-hand. The toonie-sized red sale sticker is conspicuous as he pulls slices of salami from the package. This is what he could afford to buy on his $11/hour wage at Whole Foods and it’s the kind of meat he still buys now that he’s unemployed and living off a combination of EI and meagre savings.

Dunlop was finishing up his Master’s degree when he landed the job at Whole Foods in late 2009. His thesis was an exploration of the Sino-American influence on the Cambodian genocide. There wasn’t much of a market for that slice of knowledge; he wound up working as a meat clerk instead. Dunlop had also studied labour history in school and had developed a sense of class consciousness. When he arrived at Whole Foods, he both was surprised and dismayed with working conditions.

Dunlop was impelled to act. He tried to build relationships with his coworkers and strengthen bonds with informal gatherings outside of the store. In conversations with his fellow employees, Dunlop suggested the possibility of alternative dynamics between labour and management. He outlined a place where workers weren’t obliged to accept everything they were told without question. He was in small ways trying to break the illusion that labour and management are always playing for the same team. Months later in his kitchen, Dunlop recounts the obstacles and feelings of impossibility in between bites of the salami sandwich he’s filled out with mustard, mayonnaise, tomato and a slice of Kraft singles cheese.

In January, Dunlop began to look for allies in an organizing drive. He started with his coworkers in the Meat Pit, but soon branched out into other departments, striking up conversations with grocery clerks, workers at the specialty foods counter, and a few cashiers. All of the workers he approached were under 30. The longest any of them had been at Whole Foods was a year and a half. As Dunlop flitted about the store, he sought to get a sense of workers’ attitudes toward their jobs and workplace conditions, as well as their feelings about organized labour. He was discouraged by the response. “Far from having an opinion,” he says, “some didn’t know what a union was.”

Canada’s early trade unions were established in the second half of the19th century in response to the spread of industrial capitalism. As production accelerated in the early 20th century, so did labour activity. Escalating tensions between wealthy employers and workers facing high unemployment and inflation led to the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919, the largest general strike in Canadian labour history. In the 1930s, the Depression helped boost union appeal and by the end of World War II, workers were organized enough and militant enough to demand better wages, hours, and conditions. Strike activity surged. Unions continued to fight for rights and to gain strength, with union density (the proportion of unionized workers in the workforce) peaking in the 1980s. Since then, however, union activity has been on the decline.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to see how some workers, and particularly young workers, have become less aware of unions and the role they played in shaping the 20th century. Unions aren’t in the media as much as they once were—and labour news isn’t exactly a hot topic on social media. There is the sense that unions are a thing of the past, unnecessary now that Canada has labour laws and minimum wages. Corporations have capitalized on this sentiment, suggesting that unionized workplaces are inefficient and outdated, and that unions just get in the way of healthy, fluid relationships between workers and management.

Just as discouraging, the Conservative government is now encroaching on workers’ hard-won right to strike. In June 2011, the Harper government enacted back-to-work legislation after postal workers went on a rotating strike and were subsequently locked out of work by Canada Post. The Canadian Postal Workers Union is challenging the legality of this legislation. In March 2012, similar legislation was used to prevent Air Canada workers from striking. Without the right to strike—or even to present a legitimate threat of strike action—unions lose one of their key bargaining chips.

“The influence of unions has slowly been diminishing,” says Andy Neufeld, director of communications and education at United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1518, which, along with UFCW local 247, represents most of the unionized supermarket workers in B.C. (As the largest retail union in Canada, UFCW would have been the most likely union for Dunlop and his coworkers to join.) Flagging awareness is exacerbated in the retail sector by the huge number of young workers with no previous union experience, he says. About 65 percent of workers in his local are under the age of 30. Many have little or no previous experience with unions.

Neufeld makes an extra effort to capture the enthusiasm of these workers, many of whom are disinclined to pay union dues and don’t see the benefit of membership—proven wage premiums, increased job security, better benefits, and a chance to have a stronger voice in the workplace. Neufeld says the union is trying to get this message out there, but is sending information into a glutted market. “We’re competing for people’s attention,” he adds, “just like everybody else.”

Young workers also have a high turnover rate (the turnover rate in Canada’s retail sector is 25 percent), making it difficult to keep a strong, stable core of workers in place long enough to push an organizing drive through to success. Dunlop has firsthand experience with this phenomenon: During the course of his rabble rousing, half a dozen potential allies quit or were fired. Neufeld says high turnover is the number one cause for stagnating unionization rates in retail. It’s no happy accident, either. “Employers can rely on this churn in the base of the workforce,” Neufeld says.

In fact, at Whole Foods many of those interested in the idea of collective bargaining were afraid of reprisal to the point of inaction. Even Dunlop worried his union talk would find its way to management before he was ready—lest he prematurely land in hot water. As Dunlop puts it: “Nobody likes to stick their neck out.”

Kyle Attwaters and Jillian Brooks were fellow meat clerks at the Whole Foods in Vancouver. (Brooks was employed from April 2009 to October 2009; Attwaters from January 2010 to May 2010.) Both are in their mid-twenties and both say they would have signed union cards despite their fear of being fired at a time when unemployment was high. When asked how they perceived the store’s attitude toward unions, their responses are unqualified.  “It was very frowned upon,” Attwaters says. “They told us that right off the bat.” Brooks is more frank: “The mention of unionizing would piss so many people off.”

Attwaters says that when he first started at Whole Foods, he had to watch an introductory video with a segment on unions. Although the video didn’t expressly forbid workers from unionizing or engaging in organizing activity, he says message was clear that workers didn’t need a union—Whole Foods’ employment system worked fine without one. That system, it turns out, is to dictate the terms of employment and working conditions, leaving workers to accept them or find another job. Neufeld explains that employers are able to exploit their daily interaction with workers to influence opinion: “They’re able to convince employees that they’re better off without unions,” he says. “Employees are very quick to pick up on those cues.”

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has been infamously outspoken in his contempt for unions. He once told a reporter in the ’80s: “The union is like having herpes. It doesn’t kill you, but it’s unpleasant and inconvenient and stops a lot of people from  becoming your lover.” This strong anti-union sentiment is woven into the ethos of his 300-plus stores. (As of press time, Whole Foods had seven stores across British Columbia and Ontario, six in the UK, with the rest in the States.) Like many corporate retail stores, Whole Foods carries its fight against unions—and its own boosterism for the company—right down to the language workers are required to use. Whole Foods doesn’t have employees or workers or clerks; it has “team members.” And, despite clear distinctions in authority, there are no bosses or managers, only “team leaders.”

In December, for instance, Dunlop submitted a long list of grievances to store team leaders. Among his complaints was unpaid overtime. At closing time, he’d observed workers clocking out and then returning to finish tidying up the area, readying it for the next day. Dunlop participated in this process once, on his first day. But when he realized nobody was getting paid for this extra work, he raised the matter with his superiors. Dunlop says that in the resulting conference between himself and an assistant store team leader, the team leader insisted on stressing the distinction in terminology—namely, Dunlop’s use of the word manager—before addressing any of his actual complaints.

Such workplace jargon exists to influence the way employees perceive their relationship to the store—and it works. The idea is to create a feeling of allegiance to the company and not to fellow workers. “It was extremely difficult to convince people that workers and management have mutually antagonistic interests,” says Dunlop.

In a list of things to expect during an organizing drive, the UFCW cites the “We’re a family, we’re a team” line as a likely scare tactic employed by companies. In some cases, as at Whole Foods, this team approach is undertaken pre-emptively to stop workers from even considering an organizing initiative, as it might be seen as playing for the other side. But capitalism by nature pits labour and management against each other. Management is interested in minimizing costs, which means keeping wages low; labour is interested in maximizing wages. These fundamental differences in interest make it impossible to be part of the same team.

Once obtained union certification is a challenge to maintain. Wal-Mart shut down its Jonquière, six months Quebec store in 2005 after workers voted to unionize (and failed to reach a collective agreement). More recently, in 2011, Target expanded into Canada, buying out over a hundred Zellers stores, including a handful of unionized locations. It refuses to honour any union contracts and is planning to fire all current Zellers employees. Instead, Target welcomes employees to reapply for non-union positions, foregoing any accumulated wage increases or benefits they may have earned over years of work. Whole Foods biggest push to unionize a store was in Madison, Wisconsin in the early 2000s. Although workers voted for union certification, contract negotiations were drawn out for years and the union effort eventually ran out of worker support—especially after Mackey showed up at the store to hand out pamphlets titled “Beyond Unions.” When Madison decertified in 2004, Mackey went on a nine-month “Beyond Unions” tour of his stores.

If unions are to stay relevant, they have to adapt. In some ways, they seem to be trying. The UFCW now requires every one of its locals to devote 10 percent of resources to organizing initiatives, leading to some positive results. Earlier this year, a Future Shop in Montreal gained union certification. And in late 2011, an H&M store in Mississauga became the first in Canada to unionize, prompting organizing activities in many other locations. Notably, the campaign used social media to keep young workers interested in the drive. The UFCW has also launched a campaign to fight the anti-union Target takeover of Zellers. The “Target for Fairness” campaign raises awareness of Target’s plans for Zellers workers and awareness billboards have been erected in cities across the country.

More innovation is still key. Unions need to be more creative in their organizing approaches, says University of Manitoba labour studies professor David Camfield. One of the best ways for unions to increase appeal, he adds, is to engage in significant action—something they’ve been doing less and less. This may mean more strike action, more political action, or even stronger responses to concession demands by employers. “It’s not a question of sticking with the tried and true,” Camfield says. “There’s a lot of room for experimentation.”

Part of this experimentation has to include greater democracy within unions, allowing for an increase in both worker participation and worker control. Enduring change must come from the bottom up. Currently, most unions are controlled by a small number of officials, who dictate how the organization will run. “Unions need to become more worker-driven, worker-run,” says Camfield, “and that will only happen when workers themselves make it happen.”

Unfortunately, current economic conditions aren’t exactly encouraging workers to engage in union activity. Camfield says that higher unemployment and low job security have contributed to an environment in which workers are encouraged to compete amongst themselves. Such a situation is disastrous for the idea of solidarity, but it’s terrific for employers, who constantly promote it, even with initiatives as seemingly harmless as Employee of the Month awards. In the difficulties and discouragements, though, Camfield also sees opportunities for workers to find commonalities with each other, to identify and work with each other rather than submit to competition. “There are all sorts of ways,” he says, “in which people could see that collective action would be a much better way to solve our problems than by being pitted against each other.”

Recent activism have proven the power of solidarity and collective action. The Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, the student protests in Quebec have all brought huge masses of people together to resonating effect. Camfield says that these examples of effective collective action outside of the workplace can serve as inspiration; they could have the potential to feed into the workplace by influencing the way workers think about what they can achieve and how they can achieve it.

Had Dunlop stayed at Whole Foods longer, he might have been able to do more—of course, that’s largely the point. Dunlop was fired after six months. He says he arrived to work one day in April, was allowed to work for one hour, then told to go home. He adds a store manager alleged he’d uttered a threat of physical harm against his immediate supervisor, a claim Dunlop disputes. Whole Foods has faced previous allegations of firing pro-union employees on trumped-up charges. During the campaign in Madison, two of the workers involved in the organizing activity were reportedly fired for dubious reasons. One of them made a latte the wrong way and gave this defective beverage to her co-worker instead of throwing it out. Both were let go for their parts in this breach of store policy.

Dunlop filed a claim with the labour board in November 2010 for having been fired without cause or notice. He says although Whole Foods maintained that they had sufficient grounds for dismissal, they decided to settle the matter without litigation. Dunlop was paid the week’s worth of wages to which workers are entitled when fired without notice. He is now using his knowledge of labour law to help former coworkers challenge the power of the corporation. He has written a letter to the store managers offering his experience free of charge to anyone who’s been fired from Whole Foods. It’s a small, but cheeky contribution that helps him feel like he and his fellow workers haven’t been pushed to resignation.

As Dunlop sits in his kitchen, finishing his budget salami sandwich, he says he’s not surprised by his lack of success—he feels the deck was stacked against him. He doesn’t regret the effort, though. “We have to try to stand together,” he says. “If we don’t at least try, where are we?”

Illustration by Dave Donald

In some circles these days, talking about reading is tantamount to announcing you have leprosy. Once, I was greeted by plaintive laments and guilty, apologetic admissions: I wish I had time to read or I honestly can’t remember the last time I read a book. Now, my mentions of books are more often met by defensive, self-affirming declarations: Who in the world has time to read! These rhetorical questions seem to imply a reader’s contribution to society decreases with every page he or she turns. Increasingly, it feels like the fact of taking the time to read a book is no longer coveted, it’s under attack.

Imagine, then, the kind of vitriol the act of rereading might inspire. To take the time not only to read a book once, but to pick it up a second time and read the exact same pages over again. Should you even admit to something like that in public? What possible argument could be made for re-reading a book when so many more out there yearn to be read? Few things—creating a brand new Friendster page, maybe, or making your own wallpaper—seem less productive.

Yet in the tireless thrust forward, there have recently been a few voices earnestly—though not unapologetically—praising the act of re-reading. The scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks recently published an entire book about rereading called On Rereading, in which she captures the pleasure of rereading by she revisiting everything from children’s tales to Jane Austen and Doris Lessing. In an essay on the literary website The Millions, Lisa Levy explored the different reasons people have for returning to familiar books. Contributors to the Rereading column in the Guardian and its now-defunct sibling in The American Scholar are well-versed in rereading as an act of criticism and memoir, the latter a genre that continues to experience a popularity breakaway right now.

I got to thinking about the strangeness of rereading while reading (for the first time) Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, a novella driven wholly by the unreliability and selectiveness of memory in which rereading plays a central role. In many ways, the fallibility of memory is precisely what makes rereading books so viscerally pleasurable. At first glance, rereading is revisiting a familiar and comforting conversation. But it is so much more than that. Rereading is time-travel, putting the pieces of a conversation with a former self back together in a different yet familiar context. People talk about books being staid, immutable artifacts, but they are nothing of the sort.

I recently reread Michael Redhill’s Martin Sloane, a graceful novel about a love affair between a self-destructive older artist and a younger woman that I spent a long and intimate afternoon with a few years ago, shortly after the break-up of a relationship. I’ve carried the story and its rhythms with me ever since, and I decided to go back to the novel to find those comforts again. But what I discovered on rereading was that I was a liar. While the tone was as I remembered, the scenes I loved were not scenes in the book. I had made them up. I’d also taken the liberty of jettisoning characters, as well as most of the plot. For years I have felt an affinity with something that never existed. But somehow, finding that out didn’t make it any less real. The book I remember and the book I reread exist separately in my imagination now, linked by a liminal space.

The inaugural issue of the Edmonton-based literary journal Eighteen Bridges featured an essay on rereading by American novelist Richard Ford in which he described the act as “what we originally meant by reading—an achieved intimacy  …  the chance of glimpsing (but not quite possessing) the heart of something grand and beautiful we might’ve believed we already knew well enough.” That something grand is the story, of course, and all of its implications, but also the knowledge of ourselves or, more aptly, the knowledge that we cannot know ourselves at all.

That’s maybe a bit harsh. Perhaps William Hazlitt, incorrigible rereader, had it right. In his essay “On Reading Old Books,” he explains that he values re-reading both for the comfort of knowing what to expect and for “the pleasures of [having] memory added” to the experience. For Hazlitt, rereading was less about the act of reading, and more about the act of remembering, of exercising the faculty of memory through the lens of the text.

Maybe the popularity of the personal memoir and the ease with which e-readers allow us to search out favourite passages or chapters will lead to a more established subgenre of rereading memoirs. Maybe rereading book clubs will become a trend. Maybe our culture’s obsession with confession could be the thing to get people talking about reading again.

THE INVESTIGATION: Bioplastics present a number of complex challenges. “There is a risk that a rather complicated issue is being oversimplified,” says Scott McDougall, president and CEO of TerraChoice, an Ottawa-based environmental marketing and consulting agency. In 2010 the company released a report called The Sins of Greenwashing: Home and Family Edition. McDougall says many bioplastics commit at least two of the seven sins.

First, the sin of the hidden trade-off: suggesting a product is green based on one set of attributes, while ignoring its wider—and possibly negative—effects. Take the ongoing “food vs. fuel” debate. Critics argue that bioplastics are contributing to the global food crisis by taking over large areas of land previously used to grow crops for food—raising the question of whether their potential damage outweighs their potential benefit.

Then, there’s the end-of-life issue. Many people assume a “biodegradable” product will break down no matter where it ends up. This is known as the sin of vagueness: a claim so poorly defined or so broad that its real meaning is likely to be misunderstood. In truth, most biodegradable plastics won’t decompose in landfills because the artificial environment lacks the light, water and air required for the decay process to begin. Even worse, bioplastics can contaminate the recycling stream if mixed with other recycled plastic.

Biodegradable plastic that carries the “Compostable Label” created by the New York City-based not-for-profit Biodegradable Products Institute are the exception. The logo identifies products that will perform satisfactorily in well-managed municipal and commercial facilities; home composts don’t generate the high temperatures needed for proper biodegradation.

THE VERDICT: Bioplastic packaging may seem like a magic solution, but it’s still an imperfect technology. While the demand for renewable materials, such as PLA, is a move in the right direction, these products can’t make a real difference until waste management systems are in place to support them. If you really want to reduce your carbon footprint, forget the plastic and try a reusable container instead.

The left-leaning Glavin notes that the historical role of the left has been to combat fascism and feels it has abdicated its responsibility in the case of Afghanistan and the Taliban. The source of this failure he feels is the creation of a fictional state of mind called “Absurdistan”, shaped by a compliant media happy to rely on repetition of untruths about Afghanistan and its reliance on a select few experts on that country, such as Malalai Joya, whose viewpoint Glavin clearly loathes. Taking on Joya—author of the “polemical hagiography” A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice—is a bit like taking a swipe at Mother Teresa in some circles, but Glavin astutely and intelligently challenges perceived wisdom on Afghanistan on many fronts.

Ultimately it is Glavin’s recounting of the history of Afghanistan and its people—an opportunity for him to show us more of his heart than his head—that moved me, and reminds us as Canadians what we are doing in Afghanistan—and why we should be there.

Orange shows oil and gas licences granted under the New Brunswick government. Illustration by Dave Donald

Yes, natural gas development is good for New Brunswick’s flagging economy

When the New Brunswick government granted Southwestern Energy its first natural gas exploration permit in March 2010 hundreds of angry citizens set up blockades and held rallies on the lawn of the Legislative Assembly. Two years later, the debate is just as explosive. In fact, a survey released in December by Corporate Research Associates shows a province in complete divide. Of the 400 New Brunswickers surveyed, 45 per cent are in favour of natural gas exploration, and 45 per cent are opposed. The remaining 10 per cent are not sure what the government should do.

The New Brunswick government, meanwhile, continues to heavily support the industry. There are already 71 oil and natural gas agreements in place, spread between nine companies who pay rental fees totalling more than $1 million annually for their piece of the more than 1.4 million hectares allocated for exploration. The government predicts annual royalties will reach $225 million once the wells are fully functional – and the province’s proximity to the United States suggests promise for exportation. All that, it argues, will help pay for numerous social programs and to create new jobs in side industries from construction to accounting—a persuasive argument considering the December 2011 unemployment rate of 9.4 percent.

No, we need to know more about what fracking can do to the environment

In December, the New Brunswick government voted to move forward with “responsible” and regulated development of natural gas. It did little to dampen the furor. That same month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a high-profile report that found hydraulic fracking had severely contaminated water at an Encana company site in Wyoming. While the Calgary-based natural gas giant has angrily disputed the findings, the study cast even deeper doubt on whether the industry was being properly regulated—or honest about fracking’s potential to damage the environment.

Currently, about five per cent of natural gas wells in Alberta are leaking—and there is potential that number could grow to 15 percent in the coming years. This has convinced many anti-fracking advocates that more non-industry research is vital before the province reaches a full boom. As program coordinator for the Shale Gas Alert Campaign, Stephanie Merrill educates New Brunswickers about the industry’s dangers. There are guaranteed negative effects, she says, such as rural industrialization and threatened water sustainability. But there are also risks: contamination of drinking and ground water,  respiratory illness—it’s hard to say how far the list goes on without the right research. “We really need to know a lot more,” says Merrill. “We’re not willing … to be the guinea pigs for this experiment.”

Photo by Jill Kitchener

Imagine 60,000 Band-Aids stuck together in small wagon-wheel patterns, draped over a mannequin in an art gallery. Now, imagine a person wearing this cloak in the middle of a downtown street, who if feeling confrontational, sticks Band-Aids on passersby.

Hamilton-based artist Andrew McPhail’s installation and performance all my little failures explores obsession, humour and disease. Most recently presented at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto, his Band-Aid cloak was included as part of Veiled, a group show that examined the act of covering the body.

“In a gallery there’s a level of distancing, you know how you are supposed to respond,” says McPhail. “When you are confronted on the street wearing it, you don’t have any context for it. I get a lot of very different kinds of reactions.”

McPhail says strangers often mistake him for a woman because of his diminutive height, but his hairy legs draw suspicion. “I don’t speak when I am wearing it. No voice cues,” he says. “This unbalances people.”

For the past four years, McPhail has purchased all his Band-Aids at the local drugstore. Cashiers rarely question why he requires so many peel-and-stick patches; they just keep replenishing stock. “Band-Aids are about healing and also covering up, covering the wound,” he says. “Covering it ineffectively. People use ‘Band-Aid solution’ for the short term, for a solution that doesn’t really solve anything.”

McPhail’s obsessive assemblage of first-aid staples creates an almost flesh-like veil. Part manifestation, part conversation, all of my little failures is also a point of entry into the artist’s struggle with HIV, which he’s been living with since 1993.

“It’s so overwhelmingly sad that it’s funny, I thought,” he says. “Without seeing the piece in action it’s harder. Just seeing it as an artifact it’s hard to get the weird humour of it.”

Textile Museum of Canada curator Sarah Quinton views the piece as a balance of humours, straddling both the nature of veiling and unveiling.

“The flesh-like physicality of the Band-Aids suggests matters of healing, touch, protection and futility,” says Quinton. “The labour-intensive patchwork of this veil or shroud, consumed with precious and limited time, forms a protective space for the wearer. The lacy perforations, however, render it permeable to the outside world, displaying the impossibility of separating public and private realities.”

When he’s not stringing Band-Aids together, McPhail’s working on Cry Baby, a piece made of over 2,000 hand-stitched Kleenex, inspired by when he was on a flight and the passenger beside him died of a heart attack. McPhail folded an airplane out of snot-rags he wet with artificial tears to suspend over a pile of fluffy tissues on the gallery floor.

“It’s about the overwhelming nature of grief,” he says. “There is the flip side to dealing with really overwhelming emotions without blame or self-shame, they are so hard to face. If it takes 60,000 Band-Aids, I’ll keep it together.”

Illustration by Nick Craine

For the past three years urban gardener and author (City Farmer: Adventures in Urban Food Growing) Lorraine Johnson has kept chickens in her Toronto west-end backyard. As Toronto considers ending its current ban on urban fowl, Johnson, 51, serves up her reasons for overturning the bylaw.

THIS: What inspired you to get chickens?

LJ: I had been visiting my sister in Australia and I encountered a lot of people in the city who had chickens. It seemed normal. Nobody commented on it. It occurred to me that I wanted chickens too, for the eggs. The fact it was illegal in Toronto seemed (she pauses for a moment) surmountable.

THIS: Where did you get them?

LJ: I got three from a farmer outside the city. She has Heritage breeds, which means they aren’t raised commercially very much. It’s small-scale, usually organic folks, who are keeping these breeds going.

THIS: What do they cost?

LJ: I have a feeling—and I’m not referring to my farmer friend—that a lot of farmers who live in the country are sort of scratching their heads at the ridiculous amount of money urban chicken keepers are willing to pay. Because you can go to a farm coop or auction and get a chick for 10 or 25 cents. I paid $10 to $25 [each] for Heritage hens that were just at the point of laying eggs.

THIS: How many eggs do they lay?

LJ: From three chickens I get roughly 18 eggs a week. That kind of production is when the hens are in their prime. It’s pretty well that much from spring to fall. The production lowers in response to light levels. Some people put lights in their coops but I don’t.

THIS: What do the eggs taste like?

LJ: It’s hard to describe. Because the chickens are eating worms and lots of greenery and are running around, their yolks are a brilliant, brilliant orange and the whites are firmer. For me, it’s also that I know I’m getting the freshest, most
delicious, organic eggs that are humanely raised. These chickens have a great life. I have no kind of doubts about their happiness.

THIS: Are they outside 24/7?

LJ: Yeah, in something called an eglu. It’s made by a UK-based company called Omlet. There are so many bad puns in the chicken world; it’s so tempting.

THIS: The eglus are not cheap.

LJ: It cost me about $600 plus $80 duty when I brought it into Canada from Buffalo, where I had picked it up. Again, I think it makes any farmers living in the country shake their heads. They would just build one themselves.

THIS: The hens are OK in the winter?

LJ: It’s not a problem. I put bubble wrap around the coop and bought a reptile light for inside but I never even had to use it.

THIS: How do your neighbours react?

LJ: I’m lucky in that the two places I’ve lived I’ve had great neighbours who love the eggs.

THIS: So you bribe them.

LJ: Totally.

THIS: But you have been busted.

LJ: It’s quite ironic because it was the day I was moving [about a year and a half ago, to my present address]. I wasn’t ratted out, which is how most bylaw infractions are triggered. No one complained. It was likely because a chapter in my book dealing with chickens had been excerpted in The Star, and there was an article about me and a picture of the chickens in the Globe. So I think it was someone within enforcement saying I’ve been too brazen about it.

THIS: What happened?

LJ: I was given 30 days to get them out of the city. I was going away for a while soon after I moved so let’s just say they went on a vacation and when I came back I got more chickens.

THIS: Why is it illegal in Toronto? It’s not in many other places.

LJ: It’s not in Brampton, Niagara Falls, Vancouver. Or in almost any major US city. I think it goes back to the ’80s when there were concerns about the health of chickens in Kensington Market. To deal with the problem the city just banned all of them.

THIS: But that might change?

LJ: Yes. There’s a motion going before the Licensing and Standards Committee that, if passed, would have city staff write a report on how Toronto could accommodate backyard chickens. If that report is written then it would likely go before council for debate.

THIS: What if the bylaw isn’t changed?

LJ: That would be sad and tragic. A group of us are working to make sure that doesn’t happen. We’ve invited politicians and bureaucrats to come and visit us to see what it’s like for themselves. So far I’ve had senior public health and animal services people come and I’ve met with four politicians.

THIS: The concern, I guess, is noise, smell, things like that.

LJ: But they are misconceptions! They’re quieter than dogs. You don’t need a rooster, so that problem isn’t there. And, yes, if you have 5,000 chickens in a commercial building it will smell. But not three or four in your yard. The feces decompose quickly. And as long as you take care of the coop, as you need to take care of any pet, there’s no problem with smell at all.

THIS: Will you continue to have chickens no matter what?

LJ: Yes.

THIS: You’ll be a scofflaw?

LJ: Yes, me and many, many others, from all walks of life and backgrounds and motivations [for having chickens]. There is no stereotypical person.

THIS: How many of you are there?

LJ: No one is able to estimate accurately because it’s such a hidden activity. But you don’t have to scratch very deep to find a chicken in the city.

In January 2012, Toronto’s Licensing and Standards Committee voted to indefinitely defer the motion to commission a report on the feasibility of legalizing backyard chickens.

Organic regulations give value to everything from animal welfare, soil systems, and biodiversity to watersheds and air quality—concepts of sustainability focused almost exclusively on the physical environment. Farms go to extreme lengths to close the gap between farmer and eater: consumers are invited to open farm days for tours, food is meticulously labeled and sourced, and farm owners are no longer faceless, appearing on websites, packaging and TV commercials. In all this effort to exist outside conventional food practices and eat guilt-free, however, there is one link in the food chain consumers know shockingly little about: the migrant worker producing all this wonderful food.

The myth of the family run, locally staffed farm has somehow remained despite fundamental changes to both the scale and style of organic agricultural production in Canada. While many farms are still family owned and operated, the labour usage line is blurring between large-scale organics and conventional agriculture. Some of the country’s largest organic farm operations already employ migrant labourers—and many farmers and workers believe migrant labour will become necessary to churn out organic food at a production scale that meets growing consumer demand and allows farm owners to make a profit.

Short of visiting every organic farm in Canada, there is currently no way of knowing how many migrant workers are on organic farms, or how they’re all treated. Migrant labour employment numbers for organic farms are undocumented—partially because labour isn’t regulated under organic certification standards. The best that can be said of organic farms is that some migrant workers have good working conditions and relations with their employers, and many do not. Mistreatment ranges from discrimination, to the inability to form unions, poor safety training, and, in some cases, negligence so extreme it results in death. With little recourse for even the most severe violations, bad behaviour is often ignored, if not actively covered up. If such bungles are discussed at all, the conversation is often automatically centered  on conventional agriculture—and many proponents of organic farming are happy to remain silent.

Farming in Canada is in a crisis. A 2011 brief released by the National Farmers Union (NFU), one of the major lobbying organizations for farmers in Canada, lays out a perfect storm of social, cultural and political factors. The trend across Canada, is towards larger farms, operated by an aging, farmer-operator (2011 statistics Canada pegs the average at 51). At the same time, profit margins have been narrowing for farmers across Canada–and many farmers are under the pressure to scale up and take on more debt. While the gross revenue, or total amount a farm takes in a year, has increased the net income, the amount the farmer realizes as profit, has decreased. This can be partially explained by the instability of farm product prices versus stable (and increasing) farm expenses like seeds, machinery, and labour. As Canadian farming has become increasingly competitive and financially focused, there is a growing demand for reliable, available and affordable farm labour—especially as more rural Canadians move to cities.

Organic farms are no exception. In fact, thanks to its growing popularity and labour-intensive production process–workers can’t use chemicals to spray weeds and must pick out weeds by hand–organic farming often needs more human power than conventional farming. Good agricultural workers that won’t skip town to ditch farm life are a must. “We need a reliable source of labour. Canadian labour is unreliable,” say Colleen Ross, NFU vice president and co-owner of Waratah Downs, an organic farm located in the Ottawa area, “We’ve also had people flake out on us during the middle of the season. We really can’t have [that] as an organic production farm.” Short season fruit and vegetable crops, in other words, do not stop or slow down for the whims of a worker.

The first government-initiated response to the growing demand for farm labour came in 1966 with the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). SAWP was originally a bilateral (country to country) agreement with Jamaica to employ workers on up to eight month contracts to work for a single farm. The program is still under the federal provision of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) and has expanded to include new participant countries, most notably Mexico. The HRSDC has also expanded the use of migrant farm labour through the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP), which is designed to fill in the gaps of SAWP by including more participant countries and requiring less education, training, and monetary investment, making the TFWP a more flexible labour source for farmer-owners.

A farmer-owner looking for SAWP participants applies through the HRSDC, which ensures that the farmer tried to use local labour before using SAWP. Once approved by the HRSDC, the provincial government regulates the working, living and processing of foreign workers to Canada. In Ontario, this is through a third party organization called Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services (FARMS), which acts on behalf of the employers. FARMS works with foreign recruiters, based in host countries to bring migrant labourers to Canada as well as coordinate transfers and terminations during their contract periods.

Originally conceived as a Band-Aid solution to shortages in farm labour, the migrant labour pool in Canada has grown to over 28,000 migrant workers through SAWP and TFWP across Canada. Estimates for Ontario, the largest participant, are roughly 18,000 with the majority, half of which hail from Mexico. Most workers are employed at fruit, vegetable and tobacco farms that range in size from small family run teams of four employees to large multi-million dollar operations employing more then one hundred migrant labourers. As Rachel Currie, a migrant labourer advocate and researcher with Wilfred Laurier University points out: “There is no typical farm that employs migrant labour.” SAWP and TFWP participants are responsible for growing food throughout Canada, from large-scale mono-crop conventional farms to small- to mid-scale organic vegetable farms.

Organic and alternative food systems are presented and defined as separate from conventional agriculture. Organic farming’s biggest goal—to push Canada’s food system toward a more sustainable framework— is commendable. So are its principles of equity and justice. Unfortunately, these things are exactly what makes the silence surrounding farm labour and migrant workers most troubling. As it stands, SWAP has remained largely unchanged since 1966. Talking with agricultural workers, migrant labourer rights advocates and support workers across Ontario, the consensus is that the system is broken, allowing for stunning human rights violations.

Under organic production methods, there’s a fundamental need for labouring bodies—the usual figure cited is one person per acre. Small to mid-sized organic vegetable farms often use a combination of volunteers, interns, apprentices, local labour and on-farm help. With organic farm expansion and increased demand there’s now a more pressure for labour then ever before. With the overall farm labour shortage in Canada, and declining rural population, more and more farmers are turning to migrant labour, including organic ones.  While Ross does not currently use migrant labour, she says she would definitely consider it–and makes no apologies for saying so. “We are a production farm. We need to be able to scale up and make money in order to have a life and raise a family,” she says, “Migrant labour is not hands down bad—it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Ross has hit on a growing split in the organic farming community. Some farmers see the migrant labour system as flawed and not one they would even consider participating in—opting to meet their growing production goals with apprenticeship programs that pay lower wages in exchange for housing and learning experience. Other farmers, like Ross, are willing to employ SWAP and TFWP participants and feel, as Ross puts it, that they should not be judged harshly for it. She thinks of it this way: She would rather migrant labourers work with good quality organic farms than on a conventional farm with chemicals. “People working on the land is one of the oldest parts of human history,” says Ross, “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your career being farm work.”

Unfortunately, there is something wrong with the way migrant labour is used in much of Canada’s organic agricultural sector. There are a number of large scale systemic and structural issues embedded in seasonal migrant labour that perpetuate an unbalanced and inequitable labour system. To start with, workers have no way to obtain status in Canada. Participants of both migrant programs pay into the Canadian pension plan, employment insurance and may rack up years of living experience in Canada. However, because workers are categorized as ‘unskilled labour’ by the federal government, and required to return to their home country at the end of their contracts, they cannot gain status in Canada.

This lack of recognized status is often (but not always) compounded by the social exclusion many labourers experience in Canada. Selena Zhang who worked on an asparagus farm alongside a number of migrant labourers in Leamington, Ontario during 2009. In Leamington, the population is about 35,000, with roughly 5,000 – 6,000 migrant workers in town each year. This makes for a big racial divide, says Zhang. Many locals won’t go to banks or grocery stores on Fridays, when the thousands of migrant workers had their days off and travelled to town. “Most Canadians, weren’t very accepting,” says Zhang, “[Workers] often get called names and aren’t welcomed in certain areas.” This tense dynamic is unlikely to change just because the workers are coming from an organic farm.

Under Ontario law, agricultural workers are not allowed to unionize or collectively bargain. In late 2010, the United Nation’s International Labour Organization (ILO) criticized Ontario’s Agricultural Employees Act, 2002 which makes collectively bargaining illegal for agricultural workers. The ILO said both Ontario and Canada as a whole were guilty of a discriminatory attack on human rights. Its comments reinforced a 2008 Ontario Court of Appeal ruling that found the Act in violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That ruling was overturned in April 2011 by the Supreme Court of Canada. Questions on the usefulness of unions for migrant labourers aside, not having a unified voice makes it difficult for labourers to advocate for their rights and communicate within their home countries and in Canada. “Ontario must end its blatant abuse of the rights of the workers who grow and harvest our food,” said Wayne Hanley, president of Canada’s United Food Commercial Workers Union, at the time, “These are farm workers, not farm animals, and people have human rights.”

Perhaps the most glaring gap, however, is the lack of protection for migrant labourers at their work places. It was not until 2006 that agricultural work was incorporated under the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA), and the industry standards are still vague. In Alberta agricultural work is still not under OSHA. The result is little to no training, protocol, or safety precautions for workers who are often using equipment and chemicals that are dangerous and toxic. When provided, instructions and training are often inappropriate as most workers do not speak or read English. One worker in Leamington, who was not trained properly on using a power-washer accidentally blew a dime-sized hole in his leg. When he went to get health services, his employer had him sent back to Mexico.

Being sent back, or the practice of repatriation, is all too common for SAWP and TFWP participants. Without providing reason or excuse, an employer can send a labourer back to their home country, terminating their contract immediately. Repatriation leaves the workers in a legal grey area as they are denied pursuing their case under federal or provincial law, as workers are not considered permanent residents. They are often sent home fast, too, leaving no way for many activist to contact them in time to intervene on the worker’s behalf. Even if never used, the stories and threat of being ‘sent back’ hangs over the work environment on many farms; the attitude is work hard, do not rock the boat and you can stay.

With no set standards, the resulting accidents and incidents only become visible in the courts. Take the death of two Jamaican workers at Filsinger’s Organic Food and Orchards in Ayton Ontario. Paul Roach, 44, and Ralston White, 36, suffered from environmental asphyxiation (fumes) trying to fix a vinegar tank pump in September 2010. This particular case was investigated by the Ontario Ministry of Labour, who eventually laid multiple charges on the farm’s three owners and a supervisor, including failure to provide training, equipment, and a rescue plan for working in a dangerous, confined space. The day before the case was supposed to go to trial this January, the Crown agreed to drop all but one charge. The farm supervisor, stuck with the last charge, pleaded guilty and was fined $22,500 for not preventing the workers from entering the vinegar tank where they became trapped and eventually died.

The case is one of the first ever related to migrant labour brought before the Labour Ministry and the $22,500 fine is the lowest ever given. Since the charges were dropped, the case will not be subject to a full criminal investigation, leaving many details surrounding the conditions Roach and White worked under unknown and even more questions about what precautions and training were provided to the workers to ensure their safety. It’s tough to believe much was: According to reports, the workers weren’t removed from the vats until they’d already lost vital signs–and even though they were revived, both died at the hospital. This case is also one of the first migrant labour legal actions taken against an organic farm, forcing organic farming to acknowledge its position in the nation-wide migrant farm labour system.

What this case also indicates is that the working conditions and culture of silence on many Canadian farms will continue without change. The low fine and the lack of policy or law change for the agricultural industry suggests that the crown is willing to let the program stay as it stands: as a piecemeal and reactionary system that hopes to do better next time. At the time of the decision Tzazna Miranda Leal, an organizer with Justicia for Migrant Workers, told the Toronto Star: “This decision implies that employers have carte blanche to engage in health and safety violations, and that the legal mechanisms meant to protect workers in fact shield employers from any form of accountability for deaths of their employees.”

The silence and invisibility of migrant labourers is partially due to the power imbalance in the way the program is set out and their precarious citizenship and employment status. “It’s vulnerable for any of the stakeholders to speak up,” says Currie, pointing to farmers, workers, host countries, and the Canadian government, “There’s a big question mark as to who defines the rules of the program. The whole [Seasonal Agricultural Workers] program is enshrined in fear. Everyone has such a big stake.”

It’s debatable, however, how much the different stakeholders have their hands tied—especially when the Canadian government has only moved to protect migrant labourers in the face of legal action. The silence and lack of accountability perpetuates a broken, unmonitored system—especially considering workers’ legal and social vulnerability. Many have not been given any tools to form a voice and are treated as if they used to handling tough, post-plantation work climates. “Migrant labourers are indentured. They are tied to one employer and one site,” says Chris Ramsaroop from Justicia for Migrant Workers, “They have no labour or social mobility.”

Using migrant labour should not be immediately viewed as a black spot on a farm’s record. While SAWP and TFWP are fundamentally flawed and implicated in problematic global structures, the programs have the potential to benefit all of the stakeholders—if they’re used with better protection for workers. For organics, the contradiction lies in not addressing migrant labour rights and farm labour issues, while concurrently claiming sustainability and justice as food system virtues. Part of the silence, can be explained by the fairly recent boom: Canadian labour—whether through volunteer and intern programs or the local rural population—can no longer meet demands.

As for the rest? Ramsaroop admits there haven’t been many attempts to work with food justice and local food organizations, but adds that there is potential. “A lot of it is about challenging peoples assumptions,” he says, “and highlighting why it’s important to talk about migrant workers in the context of local food.” Current attitudes aren’t enough to bring about real change to the Canadian food system. By not acknowledging the use of migrant labour in producing food, organic and alternative agriculture advocates are arguably in complicit agreement with the exploitative status quo maintenance of SAWP and TFWP.

“There needs to be rules and regulations that ensure that people are being treated with dignity and respect,” says Ross. Groups and stakeholders in relative positions of power, like the Canadian Organic Growers and more localized groups like the Toronto Food Policy Council, need to take an active stance. A lack of knowledge or ignorance is only excusable to a point. Propping up a localized food system with a broken, exploitative and imbalanced labour system is simply not sustainable, nor is it just.

B.C. Environmental iconoclast Tzeporah Berman. Photo by Dina Goldstein

Canadians who care about climate change have good reason to be depressed about our history of climate change politics, which goes something like this: Jean Chrétien promises a lot, does little; Paul Martin promises more, does a bit, but not much; Stephen Harper promises nothing, and delivers.

What explains this pattern? The answer has a lot to do with a woman from Vancouver named Tzeporah Berman, and her spectacular failure to make a good idea succeed.

Tzeporah Berman is probably Canada’s third most famous environmentalist, trailing only grandfatherly CBC host David Suzuki and Green Party leader Elizabeth May. She made her name in the early 1990s during the Clayoquot Sound anti-logging protests in British Columbia. She was such an effective organizer and gadfly that the then Premier branded her “an enemy of the state.” She was instrumental in convincing 86 per cent of Canadians that logging in Clayoquot should be stopped. An irritated Crown prosecutor charged her with 857 counts of criminal aiding and abetting (all dismissed by a judge shortly thereafter). After a few years working for Greenpeace in Europe, Berman returned to B.C. to found ForestEthics, a group committed to pressuring businesses to reduce their impact on forests by alerting consumers to dubious corporate supply chains. For example, in 2005, she became appalled by the environmental impact of millions of Victoria’s Secret catalogues made from rare boreal forests—tiny pieces of lacy underwear printed on huge numbers of dead trees. Berman launched a campaign called Victoria’s Dirty Secret with a full page ad in the New York Times featuring a scantily clad blonde bombshell toting a chainsaw. Berman emerged, as usual, with concessions from a contrite corporate giant.

An epiphany in late 2007 convinced Berman to switch her focus from forestry to climate change. “I realized fighting for forests without taking on climate change was like repainting the Titanic after hitting the iceberg,” she said. Loggers were less of a threat to Canadian trees than rising temperatures and a resultant onslaught of ravenous pine beetles.

Berman watched Canada’s 2008 federal election in horror. Liberal leader Stéphane Dion proposed a carbon tax, the most fervent wish of climate change activists. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives savaged the “Green Shift” plan, and Dion’s salesmanship flopped. When Dion talked policy, Harper talked price. Dion reassured voters the plan was “revenue neutral,” discouraged pollution, gave tax breaks to low-income families, and so on, in an incomprehensible wonkish muddle. Harper said: Liberals want to tax everything, “screw everybody,” and raise gas prices. Harper won the debate.

While Dion flailed, the champions of environmentalism stood on the sidelines. Some of the larger non-governmental organizations issued press releases to tepidly commend the Green Shift platform, but nothing more. Said a former senior advisor to Dion: “We certainly expected more from environmentalists.”

Berman imagined an alternate future. Her diagnosis was simple: environmentalists were failing to organize themselves in a politically effective way. “We have never had a politically relevant infrastructure,” she says. “We need people who are trained as organizers, with coordinators in critical ridings. We need money for polling and focus groups. And we need volunteers trained to do electoral gruntwork.”

Canadians consistently prioritize climate change in poll after poll, but this concern has not been harvested and channeled in the right way and in the right electoral ridings to impact elections. Environmentalists have succeeded in raising awareness, but failed at changing votes. The best-resourced organizations spend much of their time and resources researching and writing policy reports, advising conscientious citizens on how to green their lifestyles, and jockeying for visibility in major news outlets. They are non-partisan, and don’t address Canadians as voters—which is why they are ineffective at affecting elections, and therefore politicians. So Berman decided to create a climate lobby with enough electoral muscle to force politicians to listen.

Her plan was simple but ambitious: pick 40 swing ridings with small margins of victory in the most recent federal election, and doggedly target them with polling, volunteers and advertising. Berman wanted a whole new political infrastructure to mobilize Canadians around climate change, built to reward green politicians and punish dirty ones. Organizers would be trained to make calls, knock on doors, produce intelligible materials and learn to talk to such constituencies as the God-fearing Tim Hortons-drinking suburban soccer moms.

In the United States, this kind of on-the-ground in-your face organizing is a proven model, for good (the League of Conservation Voters) and ill (the National Rifle Association).

Berman also drew lessons from Australia’s 2007 election, in which an environmental group called the Climate Institute raised gobs of money to help defeat the incumbent, carbon-loving John Howard. To do this, they sponsored the political campaign of a grade 4 student, Jack Simmons, who took some time off school to run for Prime Minister. He coiffed his hair just so, donned his first suit, filmed some advertisements, and hit the road to meet voters. His novelty—and the free ice cream he gave out everywhere he went—attracted voters and media alike. Of course, he couldn’t get his name on the official ballot, or even vote himself. But it didn’t matter much, because he was the perfect spokesman for climate change politics, a vehicle for present concern for future consequences. “I can’t vote, but you can. Vote climate,” he squeaked. His ice cream truck carried a sign rating the party platforms, signaling clearly to voters that the ruling Liberal Party had an abysmal climate change record. All told, picking a cute kid to talk about environmental apocalypse was a slick move. It also helped that the cherubic set piece was backed by a savvy media campaign sitting on a war chest of a few hundred thousand dollars.

It was the kind of campaign Berman thought Canada desperately needed. In 2008, the Conservatives won 143 seats, the Liberals 77, the NDP 37. Even as a minority government, it looked like a solid Conservative victory.

Or was it? Guess how many votes separated the Conservatives from a Liberal-NDP coalition? 7,189. Yes, if a mere 7,189 Conservative voters had changed their minds in fifteen key ridings, a Liberal-NDP caucus would have had 129 seats, and the Conservatives 128. This calculation is part hocus-pocus—it assumes a coalition and 29 ridings with one-vote victories. The point is that winning margins in certain ridings are consistently small, and political organizers could target a relatively small number of voters to have a large electoral impact.

Berman vowed next time would be different. She founded a new advocacy group, PowerUp Canada, and set out looking for funding to enact her vision. She projected it would take $3.7 million across 40 ridings to prepare the ground for the next federal election. It was a big idea, big enough to transform Canadian environmental politics.

Perhaps at this point you are wondering why you have never heard of PowerUp Canada. That is, quite simply, because it was a dismal failure. Over time, as it failed to attract donors and support, its ambitions receded. Berman stopped talking about 40 ridings. They would target just 10. Later, they abandoned the federal scene altogether, and focused on promoting the carbon tax and renewable energy policy in the 2009 B.C. provincial election. After that, they settled for a blog, ZeroCarbonCanada.ca. Some high profile endorsers signed a pledge. A handful of people wrote policy-focused blog posts, but the grassroots never showed up. PowerUp Canada became exactly the kind of toothless think-tank it had criticized, and then it folded altogether shortly thereafter. What went wrong?

For starters, Berman’s timing was impeccably bad. She launched her fundraising drive as the markets crashed in 2008. But more than that, and more frustratingly, PowerUp received lukewarm support from Canada’s other established environmental groups. There was little willingness to pool resources around a new political campaign. As Berman says, “the sad fact of the matter is that we couldn’t get environmental groups to invest in it and set aside their own brands.” This is a troubling explanation, though unsurprising. Canada’s environmental NGOs compete for limited resources, defend issue turf and hoard donors. Most were cautious when faced with Berman’s ambition. They adopted a wait-and-see attitude, and as they watched PowerUp shriveled up and died.

Chris Hatch, PowerUp’s onetime organizational mastermind (and Berman’s husband—they met in 1993, protesting in the woods of B.C.), gives a more expansive diagnosis of the failure, and a damning one: “Environmental groups are staffed by do-gooders, and political operatives are a different breed of people. This means there are very few people in the environmental movement who have experience in politics, and those that do get a hard time from the rest.”  Asking environmentalists to electioneer is like asking stones to swim. The notable and major exception is the Green Party, though what Hatch and Berman have in mind is creating a political force with the flexibility to support any party at a given time.

Hatch observed that the environmental movement exists largely as a subset of the political left. “If becoming politically relevant means becoming relevant to parties across the spectrum, there is almost no interest,” Hatch says. “Every group says they want to be politically relevant, but they don’t take the necessary steps to achieve this.”

Pragmatism is a defining feature of Berman’s career—much to the chagrin of some of her purist colleagues. During her time at Forest Ethics, she engaged with major corporations and earned a reputation as a realist negotiator who helped businesses choose lesser evils. On the eve of the 2009 B.C. provincial election, Berman publicly criticized the NDP, and praised Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell for his carbon tax and renewable energy policies. Later, at the 2009 UN climate talks in Copenhagen, Berman presented Campbell with an award.

The response from within the environmental movement was swift and vitriolic. After all, B.C.’s carbon emissions had risen in 2009, carbon tax or not. Campbell was building more highways for carbon-spewing cars for the 2010 Olympics, investing in more oil and gas extraction, and, expanding hydropower development. Campbell was no ecological saint, and didn’t his plan for more river hydropower disrupt the wildlife and forests Berman supposedly cared so much about? Berman was called a co-opted naïf, a shameless sellout, and worse.

“I am not saying that I agree with everything that the Liberal government is doing,” she said in an interview at the time. “I’m saying that we need to prioritize leadership on climate change, because we’re racing against the clock…the greatest threat to British Columbia’s biodiversity and wilderness today and our kids is climate change. I think that the time for purely oppositional politics is over. We need to look for climate leadership and support it when we see it…And there is no perfect party.”

She concluded with an uppercut to her critics: “I thought I was part of a movement, not a cult.”

Lacking the resources—and, increasingly, the goodwill of her former comrades-in-arms—to continue operating PowerUp Canada, Berman shuttered the group in summer 2010 and left for Amsterdam to work for Greenpeace International as their chief climate change campaigner. When she left, Canada arguably lost its most promising visionary for a new approach to climate change advocacy. It seems Canadian environmentalists weren’t ready to embrace Berman’s style of environmentalism, or her embrace of politics.

“Tzeporah raised a lot questions that haven’t been answered,” says a senior environmentalist from a respected climate think tank, who requested anonymity because she was not authorized to comment. “When we talk about what’s the problem with climate change, why our government is so timid on this issue, fundamentally it is a lack of political will. We all know that what motivates politicians is votes. If you have the ability to move votes in ridings, if political candidates hear about the environment on people’s doorsteps, then you can be influential.” Some environmental problems do not require broad-based popular support, and savvy lobbying and media work can suffice to make a minor regulatory change. Climate change is not one of those problems.

Graham Saul, the Ottawa-based head of the Climate Action Network, a sprawling coalition of environmental NGOs, notes the same basic problem that Berman built PowerUp to address: “Canadian environmentalism has developed a base in places that are not political battlegrounds. These people are mostly urban, wealthy, and white—most of the voters in Canada’s swing ridings are not.”

Karel Mayrand, the Quebec director of the David Suzuki Foundation, echoes Saul’s observation. “Basically, we recruit at university campuses and at Starbucks.” He adds that the basic challenge with climate change politics is that its primary political constituency is the unborn, the people who will suffer the future (and worse) consequences of climate change. In the meantime, environmentalists struggle to figure out a way to build political clout.

The failure to do so is producing mounting disappointments and embarrassments. In December 2009, the David Suzuki Foundation persuaded 10,000 Canadians to contact the Prime Minister urging action on climate change, but to little effect: this convinced Harper to “take three days out of a busy schedule to go to Copenhagen to appear to do something,” says Mayrand, “though he did nothing.” Copenhagen was widely regarded as a failure; the following year’s summit in Cancun barely drew notice. In December 2011, Canada announced it would become the first country to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol. That decision took a lot of the shine off an admittedly timid global climate plan, agreed just days earlier at another UN summit in Durban, South Africa.

How do Canadian environmentalists plan to turn the tide? “We have no real game plan,” says Mayrand. “It really bothers me. We are weak.” He adds, “When environmentalists win a battle in Quebec, it’s because the artists or the unions join us.” If it were up to him, “my goal would be to reach out to the people in the suburbs, where elections are won and lost. We need to go to work on the ground to reach the people who don’t follow us yet. In the medium term, in a couple years, like bodybuilders, we will build our muscles.”

Desiree McGraw, co-founder of Climate Reality Canada, a group that trains speakers to deliver Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth talk, shares the feeling that something is amiss with the Canadian environmental movement. “We have failed to translate enormous concern for the environment into action,” she says. “We, as environmentalists, have to assume some responsibility for the fact that our climate change policy and our emissions are a mess. We have failed to hold our governments to account in a way that translates into Canadians making this vote-worthy.”

Last spring and summer I spoke to a number of other senior Canadian environmentalists, and all agreed that building some political infrastructure like what Berman had envisioned would be helpful. And yet none had any plans to do much about it. The lone exception was a commendable campaign during the fall 2011 provincial election in Ontario, which featured a young girl named Penelope campaigning in the mould of the young Jack Simmons in Australia.

What explains the seemingly gaping hole in environmental strategy Berman failed to correct? A want of imagination and ambition is certainly part of the problem, but there are significant financial, legal and regulatory hurdles as well.

Professional political organizing is expensive. As one veteran political organizer from Ontario estimated, a local campaign intending to “move a few hundred votes” in a relatively compact urban riding can cost upwards of $25,000 over the course of a few months. Leaflets, staffing, databasing and, yes, robocalling (at 2 cents per call) cost money. And that doesn’t include the capacity to “buy eyeballs,” through television or newspaper advertising.

Even with a treasure chest on hand, there are limits on how to spend money in politics. Most Canadian environmental organizations are charities, and charities must abide by rules: they are legally bound to restrict “advocacy” to 10 percent of their spending, and strictly barred from any partisan activities. This is why the Pembina Institute, though it craves a national carbon tax, could offer only vague support for the ideas in the 2008 Liberal “Green Shift” platform, and certainly couldn’t instruct voters to support the Liberals. It’s also why the David Suzuki Foundation can ask people to call the Prime Minister demanding leadership in UN talks at Copenhagen, but falls silent during elections. A group like Greenpeace does not register as a charity precisely for the political latitude this affords.

There are further legal limits to what “third parties” (that is, groups not registered as official political parties) can do during elections. During a federal election, a third party is not allowed to spend more than $150,000 nationally and no more than $3,000 per riding on “election advertising”—a loosely defined term. There are also restrictions on spending during provincial elections, though these tend to be far less strict.  Of course, organizing, advertising, and door-to-door campaigning can happen outside of the election cycle (and they do), but the bottom line is that Tzeporah Berman could not buy an election, even if she wanted to.

The regulations exist for good reason: they are intended to stop deep-pocketed groups and individuals from exercising undue influence. In theory, this is a good thing. In practice, it means burnt-out activist volunteers lurch from one campaign to the next, while corporate giants smoothly and continuously leverage political power in less overt ways.

Perhaps the greatest barrier of all lies in the nature of the Canadian political system, which, by design, is insulated from grassroots lobbying. Even if a determined environmental group could muster the clout to swing a few dozen ridings and elect suitably carbon unfriendly Parliamentarians—itself a herculean task—ultimately most political power would remain with the Prime Minister. Leverage over local candidates translates into remarkably little influence over the all-important Prime Minister’s Office. This equation changes somewhat in minority Parliaments, but only to a degree. In this respect Canada differs markedly from our Southern neighbour, where grassroots organizing proliferates precisely because individual members of Congress wield far more power and independence than Canadian MPs.

Finally, Canadian environmentalists simply don’t agree that climate change should be their top priority, and different environmental priorities conflict. To take the most obvious example: nuclear power is carbon free, but nuclear waste is toxic. What’s the virtuous environmentalist to think? People like Tzeporah Berman argue that climate change is the mother of all environmental problems, worthy of prioritization, focus, and pragmatic sacrifice. Some of them, notably British firebrand George Monbiot, are willing to hold their noses and accept nuclear as a necessary evil. But far more disagree. What is the way forward? An expansive environmental agenda remains contradictory. Rallying environmentalists around climate change is like rallying the righteous with realpolitik.

Of course, even if Berman created her green political machine, it may still fail spectacularly. It would still face the entrenched political and economic interests of Canada’s growing fossil fuel juggernaut.  Perhaps Canadians cannot be persuaded to care enough about climate change to put their votes where polls say their hearts are. The consequences may still seem too remote, the sacrifices too large. Perhaps we need an environmental catastrophe of sufficient calamity at home to capture our attention—the rampaging pine beetle and the melting of the far North being inadequate, obviously—like a ragtag flotillas carrying climate refugees reaching our shores.

Then again, according to the most recent serious poll on Canadians and climate change by Sustainable Prosperity, 80 percent of Canadians believe climate change is real, 73 percent think it is a “serious” problem, 65 percent think the federal government has “a great deal of responsibility” addressing it, and 55 percent support a carbon tax, and the majority are willing to pay $50 each month in increased energy expenses. This should not be a lost cause. But without political influence—at the ballot box, in the House of Commons, and at the climate negotiation table—failure is likely.

Rick Smith, head of Environmental Defense Canada and one of Berman’s former co-conspirators, acknowledged the many explanations that might explain the failure of PowerUp, but added: “Those are all excuses. We desperately need more organizations working in a politically relevant way, period. We’re activists. If something doesn’t work, we have to try to find another way around. It couldn’t be clearer that climate change is the challenge of our generation. We need to find another way to win.”

El Mal author Miguel Bonasso, pictured in the 1970s. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

The book El Mal introduces Argentinians to the man who controls much of their freshwater: Barrick founder and chair Peter Munk. Recently published in Spanish, the book’s full title roughly translates as “The Evil.” The book describes Canadian mining company Barrick Gold as a “virtual third country” that laws created at its behest and pays little in the way of taxes, all while destroying glaciers to obtain water and leaving cyanide in its wake.

Its author, Miguel Bonasso, is a journalist and a congressman.  Formerly part of the inner circle of the current president, Cristina Fernández Kirchner Kirchner and Bonasso eventually had a falling out when, in 2008, Bonasso introduced a bill, the “Glacier Law,” that would have put a damper on mining projects such as Barrick’s Pascua Lama. The Senate unanimously approved the bill; Cristina Kirchner subsequently vetoed it. It eventually passed in 2010 but has yet to be enforced.

Bonasso recreates scenes from Peter Munk’s life as though they were  part of a narrative, and frames Toronto as an exotic locale. He makes much of the fact that Munk’s father escaped Hungary by bribing Adolph Eichmann, which becomes a metaphor in the book for the corruption of politicians and mining companies. Bonasso’s central thesis is that even progressive politicians can be corrupt, and that Cristina Kirchner’s vetoing of the Glacier Law shows that she is no exception, but he does not offer proof of this.

Bonasso relies partly on first-hand accounts from environmental activists, and he also draws on Noir Canada, a book on Barrick’s activities in Tanzania that was published by Les Éditions Écosociété in 2008 and then pulled by its English- and French-language publishers after Barrick threatened a lawsuit. El Mal’s publication means that Argentine readers will have access to material that has been effectively censored in Canada.

Throughout the book, Bonasso uses the term “Canadian morality” ironically, as if it were an oxymoron. Given the high profile of the author and the amount of press his book received in Argentina, Canadians should be dismayed by this depiction.

Glen McGregor, Parliament Hill reporter for the Ottawa Citizen

In Listen to This #020, This Magazine associate editor Nick Taylor-Vaisey talks with Ottawa Citizen Parliament Hill reporter Glen McGregor about the effect that social media like Twitter and Facebook are having on the news cycle, for readers and consumers, reporters, and politicians alike — but why social media is still no way to attract younger audiences.

Nick and Glen talk about why McGregor likes using Twitter as a breaking-news platform and the epiphany he had about how the Citizen could use it. But most importantly, instead of talking in grand abstract terms about How Twitter Is Changing Everything, they discuss how McGregor actually uses the web to do more reporting, faster. For instance, he employs a small army of robotic Twitter accounts such as Lobby Watcher, an automated Twitter account that sends out an alert every time a lobbyist meets with an MP or minister, or Restowatch, another robot that Tweets whenever an Ottawa restaurant is written up for food safety violations.

Tomee Sojourner. Photo by Anne de Haas.

Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami leader Mary Simon

In today’s episode of Listen to This, associate editor Nick Taylor-Vaisey brings us the second in his three part series of interviews with Canada’s top aboriginal leaders. In Podcast #017, Nick talked with Clément Chartier, president of the Metis National Council.

Today, Nick talks — by a crackly phone connection — with Mary Simon, leader of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national organization of Inuit people, about the issues that are most pressing for the approximately 55,000 Inuit people that ITK represents, including education, mental health, the massive threat of climate change, a landmark lawsuit against the European Union’s ban on seal products, and more.

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.

Crisis Commons is holding a global CrisisCamp day on September 25, with events happening in London (UK), Washington, D.C., Toronto, and Calgary. The events are free and open to all. If you’re not in Toronto or Calgary, it’s still possible to participate online. You can sign up through EventBrite for Toronto and Calgary.

Eternia. T-shirt reads: "My Favourite Rapper Wears a Skirt"

In this edition of Listen to This, Associate Editor Natalie Samson talks with Eternia, the Canadian rapper whose music and volunteer work aim to challenge gender-based stereotypes and injustices such as sexism in the music industry, violence against women, and rape. Eternia was in Toronto two weeks ago for the People’s Summit, the alternative gathering to the G20 leaders’ conference, where she performed for a rapturous crowd. Be sure to stay for the end of the podcast, where you can hear a song off of Eternia’s 2005 album, It’s Called Life. Be sure to keep an eye out for Eternia’s newest album, At Last. The album is a collaboration with Canadian producer MoSS and it’s set to release on June 29, 2010.

Included in the podcast is this 2005 Eternia track, Love, which was used to promote Amnesty International’s “Stop Violence Against Women” campaign.

Mike Leitold

In this episode of Listen to This, This Magazine editor Graham F. Scott talks with Mike Leitold of the Summit Legal Support Project, part of the Movement Defence Committee of the Law Union of Ontario. Leitold talks about what activists need to know before taking to the streets to protest the G20 summit, as well as some of the other legal issues brought up by the presence of so many law enforcement officials on Canadian streets. Please note that none of this conversation should be construed as “legal advice”; everything we discuss here falls under the category of “legal information,” i.e., you should know it but don’t sue anyone because you listened to the stuff we say here. If you are a protester or other individual in need of the services the Summit Legal Defence Project provides—listen to the interview to determine if that is the case—then you can get in touch with the project at this number: 416-273-6761.

Duff Conacher, coordinator of Democracy Watch.

In this edition of Listen to This, Nick Taylor-Vaisey interviews Duff Conacher, coordinator of Democracy Watch, a non-partisan advocacy group that lobbies for greater government transparency, accountability, and democratic reform. Conacher is one of the best-known media personalities in the field, constantly called on by media outlets to talk about what really goes on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill. With their slogan “the system is the scandal,” Democracy Watch aims to identify, publicize, and pressure for the closure of legislative loopholes that allow waste, corruption, and abuse of power by elected officials and civil servants. He talks about the dynamics of the cozy relationship between lobbyists and politicians, Democracy Watch’s aggressive media strategy, the key role that Ralph Nader played in the founding of the group, and why he’s not a political junkie.

[Note: we're posting this podcast a week earlier than scheduled because the issues that Conacher addresses are so much in the news at the moment, with the Guergis/Jaffer affair making daily headlines. Because of that change, the next podcast will be up in three weeks, not two.]