We look at policing in Canada’s eastern Arctic. What does safety look like for Inuit? And how do communities feel justice is being served?

The criminal justice system—the courts, the prison system, the police—is designed to protect Canadians and distribute justice fairly. But your interactions with the system have a lot to do with who and where you are in Canada. According to data reporting from CBC, Inuit are dying during interactions with police at a significantly higher rate in Nunavut and Nunavik than elsewhere in the Arctic. Meanwhile, a number of elected officials and Inuit leaders have been calling for a full-systematic review of policing in Nunavut. 

Last year, as the world faced a reckoning with police violence, a video surfaced. It shows a man in Kinngait, Nunavut, walking on the side of the road, when an officer in an RCMP vehicle suddenly pulls up behind him, opens his side door and knocks the man to the ground. According to Nunatsiaq News, this was the sixth incidence of police violence to be investigated externally in 2020. More than 200 marched in downtown Iqaluit in protest. And in this episode of No Little Plans, we look at Sustainable Development Goal #16: peace, justice and strong institutions. 

“There's so much trauma, both lived and remembered, and then intergenerational. That's usually the first thing that people point to, to help explain how things have gotten the way that they have”  –Thomas Rohner

Thomas Rohner is a CBC investigative journalist based in Iqaluit who reports on criminal justice in the Arctic. After a few years, he noticed that the number of police-related deaths reported in the area seemed disproportionate to the population. So he collected data from Nunavut’s coroner dating back to 1999, as well as data from Ontario for comparison. “In 21 years of data that we looked at, Nunavut’s rate of police-related deaths was more than nine times higher than Ontario's. In just the last decade, that number was more than 14 times higher,” he says. (For Rohner’s purposes, police-related deaths refers to any deaths that occurred during, after or in police custody.) 

He spoke to Inuit leaders who attributed the problems to the troubled historical relationship between police and Inuit communities. “The elected leader of a large Inuit organization told me that when she was a kid growing up, she would see police cars,” he says. “They didn't inspire a sense of safety. It was the opposite—where memories were triggered of how police treated her family members.” 

From the RCMP perspective, he says, community officers are never off duty. If they’re sleeping, they’re on call, and there’s little to no backup available. “It’s the logistical thing that comes up on a regular basis that leaves the police saying, ‘Well, Nunavut’s a special case. And in Nunavut saying, ’Don't we deserve the same as everyone else?’” In response to recent public scrutiny, the RCMP launched a body-cam project in Iqaluit last November, aiming to get all officers on shift setup with body-worn-cameras. The promise is big: rebuild public confidence. But who will gain access to the video? How will it be stored? And when will officers be able to turn their own cameras on and off?

We reached out to the RCMP for comment on this episode, but they said they couldn't respond in time for our deadline. Since we recorded our interviews, the RCMP released a statement about the second run of a program to get more Inuit into basic training. And that they’ve signed a working agreement with Pauktuutit, the organization that represents Inuit women.

“Justice is about a community of people who feel like they belong in their community...If people genuinely feel like they are safe, they are loved, they belong, then things would be a lot better” —Joseph Murdoch-Flowers

Later in the episode, we hear from Curtis Mesher, a Jane Glassgo policy fellow at the Gordon Foundation, where he’s researching criminal justice reform and police oversight in the north. While the RCMP police most of the Canadian north, Nunavik—where Mesher lives—is served by the Kativik Regional Police Force. Although the KRPF is an Indigenous police force on paper, they have trouble recruiting Indigenous officers, so they’re forced to mostly hire French-speaking officers from southern Quebec. Mesher says this creates a culture clash between the officers and the community they’re serving. “They're quite literally outsiders in most senses of the term, be it language, culture, understanding of the region,” he says, suggesting they might be instilling values that are at odds with the community.

Joseph Murdoch-Flowers, a legal aid lawyer in Iqaluit, meanwhile, argues that colonial law doesn’t always reflect Inuit values. In the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for example, citizens are guaranteed the right to remain silent. “For many Inuit, it's counterproductive to take that route because bottling it up inside and holding onto their own knowledge of their own offending behavior is unhealthy,” he says. “An important part of healing and moving on in a healthy way is admitting to a mistake and seeking forgiveness.” 

He echoes Mesher’s concerns about the lack of Indigenous representation in the criminal justice system up north. “The way I see it now is... it’s the colonial law that prevails,” he says. “Any iindigenous way of dealing with any sort of conflict is marginalized. But it is meaningful and valuable—especially to indigenous people.”

We do everything online—shopping, school, health care. So what happens when our communities don’t have reliable internet? In Episode 13 of No Little Plans, we look at the rapidly evolving digital divide in Canada’s north.

The pandemic has made it clear that access to a reliable internet connection is necessary to live, work and engage meaningfully in civic life. But for many remote communities, internet isn’t a reliable resource. Canada has pledged to provide high-speed internet access to its hardest-to-reach areas by 2030. But the way we engage online is quickly evolving, along with our networks—and the chasm between the digital haves and have-nots is only growing wider. 

According to the Canadian Radio-Television & Communications Commission, less than half of rural households have the internet speed required for online learning tools. Meanwhile, the majority of Canada’s north depends on satellite internet, which can be unreliable (the service is slow and spotty) and expensive (monthly bills can soar up to $1,200). Bad weather can put a community out of service completely. This presents a huge challenge for northern communities who need to access education, conduct business and stay connected to friends and family.

“It's the total loss of connection, which can last several hours or, or even several days. And you never really know when this is going to happen” —Mark Brazeau

In this episode, host Tokunbo Adegbuyi interviews Andrea Brazeau, a fourth-year student at McGill University’s Faculty of Education. Andrea is originally from Kangiqsualujjuaq, in Nunavik, Quebec, and last fall she wrote an open letter to the premier of Quebec to draw attention to the internet gaps her northern community faces. Unlike some of her classmates, Andrea stayed in Montreal for the fall semester because she knew she wouldn’t be able to access online learning from her home in northern Quebec. “It was difficult because Montreal is the coronavirus hotspot. The one thing I thought about was my mental health—being alone,” she says. “My family is up north and I thought, how am I going to do this? How am I going to make it through the semester? 

In Kangiqsualujjuaq, connectivity is so unreliable that sometimes Andrea’s family loses internet for days at a time. While making the episode, Andrea asks her dad, Mark, to send a voice memo to the podcast team, and they discover that he’s working with a download speed of 91 kilobytes per second. For context: the government considers 1 megabit per second insufficient for meaningful online engagement; Mark Brazeau—who works as a school principal—is dealing with less than one hundredth that speed. And, looking beyond the bare minimum of being able to work and learn online, Andrea wonders what else might be possible with better connectivity: “There's this big Indigenous community online,” she says. “Imagine how much more connected we could be as Indigenous peoples across Canada if we had a high functioning internet in the north?

“It opens up a world of opportunity for youth in the north to be able to access the same services that we all take for granted in the south” —Mark Buell

Later in the episode, we hear from Mark Buell, the regional vice-president for North America at the Internet Society, a non-profit with the goal of securing access to safe and secure internet for everyone in the world. There’s a lot of discussion around how to improve telecommunications in the north. Low-earth-orbit satellites, or LEOS, are one option that shows promise, delivering up to 50 megabits per second. But, according to Buell, the gold standard of connectivity is fibre-optic internet, which delivers 20 times that speed. The problem? Fibre needs infrastructure to operate, and if the infrastructure doesn’t exist, it can cost millions of dollars to build from scratch. 

“We tended to rely on the private sector to deploy internet access for the first 20 years of the internet. We did a really good job connecting a lot of people to the internet, but it was based on market forces,” he explains. “Canada has some of the highest internet penetration rates in the world. But that's simply because of our geography. The vast majority of Canadians live within 100 kilometres of the U.S. border. Where the market-based approach fails is in those communities where there may not be a return on investment for the private sector to deploy access.”

Buell speaks about community-led solutions that could help bridge the gap for northern Indigenous populations. He organizes the Indigenous Connectivity Summit, which works to empower Indigenous networkers. After the annual summit, they publish a set of key policy recommendations on how to undertake connectivity projects with Indigenous communities. They argue, "Indigenous voices are critical to conversations about connectivity, especially when the policy outcomes of those conversations will affect Indigenous communities.”

In our interview, Buell describes how Ulukhaktok, a small community in the Northwest Territories, is on their way to building their own internet network. Residents completed the Internet Society’s training program and plan to launch their internet service provider as a non-profit. “Indigenous people around the globe have all suffered from the effects of colonialism,” he says. “By connecting to each other via the internet, you create this global community of support to share knowledge and stories.”

In the Arctic, warming temperatures are threatening Inuit communities’ food security, health and livelihoods.In the latest episode of No Little Plans, we spoke to Inuit climate leader Siila Watt-Cloutier about how to correct Canada’s course. 

Show Notes

When it comes to climate change, Canada has a colossal role to play: among G20 countries, we’re one of the largest producers of greenhouse gas emissions per capita. At the same time, we’re home to some of the people most affected by the Earth’s warming climate. In Canada’s Arctic, temperatures are heating up at twice the global rate, thinning the sea ice that Inuit communities use for transportation and hunting. Permafrost is rapidly thawing, transforming the northern ecosystem and threatening infrastructure. And last year, Canada’s last fully intact sea-ice shelf collapsed, losing more than 40 per cent of its area in two days. 

“These toxins, a by-product of industry and pesticides, were showing up in our food chain and in our bodies and in our nursing milk” —Siila Watt-Cloutier

Siila Watt-Cloutier is a respected Inuit leader and the author of the bestselling memoir The Right to Be Cold, which was shortlisted for Canada Reads in 2017. In this episode, No Little Plans host Tokunbo Adegbuyi speaks to Watt-Cloutier about why we need to look at the Arctic’s past to create a path toward a sustainable future. She describes her early life in a former Hudson’s Bay trading post in Kuujjuaq. “[It was a] very traditional way of life, travelling only by dog team for the first 10 years. We were hunting and fishing and gathering,” she says. 

Environmental changes in the south have long affected the ecosystem in Canada’s Arctic. In the 1970s and ’80s, animals like seal, caribou and Arctic char were ingesting high levels of persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, commonly used in pesticides. Because Inuit rely on these animals for sustenance, the same toxins were showing up in their bodies and nursing milk. As chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council—which now represents some 180,000 Inuit in Canada, the U.S., Greenland and Russia—Watt-Cloutier was able to negotiate at five UN conventions. These led to the signing of the Stockholm Convention in 2001, an agreement that restricted the use of POPs in pesticides. “This issue was a daunting task because it was a chemical story and environmental story. For us, it was first and foremost a health story….a human issue,” she says. “And so we were able to get people to see it from that perspective.”

“This isn't just about polar bears. This is about our families and our children who we're trying to keep strong so they can embrace life and not take it.” —Siila Watt-Cloutier

In Watt-Cloutier’s book, The Right to Be Cold, she describes how the traditional Inuit way of life gave way to modernity in a single generation. In the mid-20th century, the government encroached on Inuit land, forcing communities to resettle and sending children to residential schools. “It was about trying to get us off the land and into communities so that [they could have] better control over our lives,” she says.

This was the first time their access to transportation and hunting was curtailed. Siila describes the killing of Qimmit, or Inuit sled dogs, by the RCMP and other government officials, known as the “dog slaughter.” This was all revealed in the early 2000s, when 350 Inuit who survived the traumas of the 1950s and ’60s testified before the Qikiqtani Truth Commission. As a child, Watt-Cloutier herself spent several years in residential school in southern Canada. “When I arrived home after five years for Christmas, the dogs were gone and in their place were these noisy machines,” she says, referring to the trucks and snowmobiles that replaced the sled dogs. “I was quite terrified of them, to be honest.” 

Generations after the calamities that transformed their way of life, Watt-Cloutier says, Inuit are now experiencing a new seismic threat in the form of climate change. “It’s because we are a people who still depend upon the healthiness of our climate and our environment for our food sources and for teaching our young people the remarkable life skills out on the land,” she says.

“We have to go back to the basics and reconnect. Indigenous wisdom is the medicine we seek in healing our planet.” —Siila Watt Cloutier

Toward the end of the interview, Adegbuyi and Watt-Cloutier discuss the power of traditional Inuit knowledge in the battle against climate change. Watt-Cloutier describes, for example, what young Inuit learn from hunting:  “As a young person, you're waiting for the animals to surface and the winds to die and the snow to fall and the ice to form—you're being taught patience. You're being taught insurance and courage, and how to be bold under pressure, how to build resiliency in your coping skills,” she says. “And you're ultimately developing your sound judgment and your wisdom. And wisdom is the hallmark of Inuit teachings and culture.”

One way to combat climate change, she suggests, is building conservation economies, in which the community gets the jobs and resources they need to invest in the environment and build local wealth. “There would be no disconnect between their culture and the way in which they would work every day—and they'd be paid for it,” she explains. Watt-Cloutier points to a recent agreement negotiated by P.J. Akeeagok, leader of the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, to protect more than 427,000 square kilometres on Baffin Island—a deal that will help preserve the area’s sea ice, waters and marine mammal populations. Not only will this kind of Indigenous-led conservation help protect Arctic ecosystems, but it will also give Inuit agency over their land and livelihood. “In terms of our economies, we're not just victims of globalization, nor do we wish to be,” Watt-Cloutier says. “We want to be at the same tables—equal tables with those who are trying to negotiate a new world order of doing things differently.”

No Little Plans is hosted by Tokunbo Adegbuyi and produced by Vocal Fry Studios. This podcast was created by Strategic Content Labs for Community Foundations of Canada. Subscribe or listen to us via the outlets above, and follow us at @nolittlepodcast on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

CREDITS:

Host: Tokunbo Adegbuyi 

Producer: Ellen Payne Smith

Associate Producer: Sabrina Brathwaite

Executive Producer: Katie Jensen

Music: L CON

In our last episode, we discussed how biases in elementary and high school are a barrier to equity for Black students—but the conversation doesn’t end there. Hannan Mohamud is a law student at the University of Ottawa involved in anti-racist activism on campus, and the co-host of Is This For Real. In October 2020, Hannan spoke out against 34 professors who wrote an open letter in support of a colleague who had used the n-word in class. We reached Hannan to discuss how anti-racism in education is a key part of Canada's commitment to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal Agenda of "Leaving No One Behind."

CREDITS:

Host: Tokunbo Adegbuyi 

Producer: Ellen Payne Smith

Associate Producer: Sabrina Brathwaite

Executive Producer: Katie Jensen

Music: L CON

Black students in Canada have higher dropout rates, suspensions and expulsions than their peers. In the latest episode of No Little Plans, we’re asking: how can we make education in Canada more equitable?

Show Notes

The killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked a worldwide movement in 2020, inspiring millions to take to the streets to protest the scourge of anti-Black racism. And yet many Canadians still see anti-Black racism as solely an American concern. But make no mistake: it’s deeply ingrained in our society, too. And for many Black Canadians, institutional racism starts in the classroom. According to a UN report, Black students in Canada have disproportionately high dropout, expulsion and suspension rates, and they’re more likely to be streamed out of academic programs.

The quality of education received by Black students has an impact on their access to future employment and income reports the UN’s Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent.

Racism isn’t explicitly mentioned in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, but equitable education is—and you can’t talk about that subject without first looking racial discrimination. In this episode, No Little Plans’ new host Tokunbo Adegbuyi examines the barriers that Black students face in education. Adegbuyi, who lives in Edmonton, has spent the past several years working children and youth in the social sector, mostly in public schools. “Seeing this issue from both sides, as a Black kid who grew up in Edmonton, and then as a pseudo-authority figure in a school,” he says, “students of colour have a different, often tougher, experience in these spaces. And they need advocates.”

“It takes a toll on you to always hear, ‘Prove it, prove it, prove it…’ We don't get justice. We have to fight for it.”

- Charline Grant

In the episode, we interview Charline Grant, a Black mother of three from Woodbridge, Ontario. Grant describes how she first became involved in advocacy when her eldest son, Ziphion, began experiencing unfair treatment from teachers as early as Grade 2. “When white kids do it, we hear they're articulate. They’re assertive,” she says. When Black kids do, they're aggressive.” 

By the time he’d entered high school, Grant says, Ziphion was being over-policed by authority figures. One time, he and his friends were approached by a staff member and chided for not wearing the school uniform. His white friends got off easy, she says, while Ziphion, who wasn’t given the opportunity to tell his version of events, was suspended for two days  After much lobbying from Grant and other parents, the suspension was expunged from Ziphion’s record and the school board issued a letter of apology. “We still went through that trauma. We still had an experience. And other students are going through it,” she says.

“There are assumptions teachers make about the capacity of some students to do work in particular subject areas. [As a society,] we build these stereotypes and teachers will teach to the stereotypes,” 

- Dr. Carl James

Dr. Carl Everton James, a professor of education and the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community and Diaspora at York University, has been studying the inequity in Canada’s education system for many years. We spoke to him about his landmark 2017 research study, in which he consulted with 374 parents, teachers and administrators—80 per cent of them Black—and collected Toronto District School Board data on suspension rates, post-secondary acceptance, special education needs, and what sort of classes Black students are attending in high school. In the end, he discovered that Black students were twice as likely as white students to be enrolled in non-academic programs—the ones that don’t lead to college or university.

This is due to a system called streaming, in which the school decides which stream of courses a student should take. Different streams lead to different post-secondary paths, which in turn lead to different income-earning opportunities. “We're talking about a society that reproduces these kinds of stereotypes. The idea of who is going to be good at math versus who's going to be good at science,” James says. “We can officially do away with streaming, but if stereotypes of certain groups exist in our society, they're going to be streamed.” He describes an incident he heard during his study in which a Black student and Asian student were chatting during math class, and the teacher immediately assumed the Black student was asking the Asian student for help. In fact, it was the other way around.

“[The Ottawa Catholic District School Board] approved a huge, huge budget to purchase diverse resources for our schools to reflect the diverse racial identities of students and staff within our board. This is really critical to fostering anti-racist education."

- Mante Molepo

Throughout the episode, the subject of bias keeps coming up—how it acts as a filter through which we see the world, through which an educator might see their students. How does a student succeed if they’re not expected to succeed? To navigate those questions, Adegbuyi speaks to Mante Molepo, a lawyer and the equity and diversity advisor for the Ottawa Catholic District School Board.

One of the main problems she identifies is the relative lack of Black representation among educators and administrators in many Canadian school boards. She points out that, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, a Black student is more likely to graduate high school or go on to post-secondary education when they’ve had Black teachers—when they’ve seen themselves reflected in authority figures. “When you have Black administrators and system leaders, they’re able to implement an education system that is more likely to be anti-racist,” she says.

And that representation in leadership, she argues, needs to start not just with the people implementing those systems, but with the ones creating them. “Who gets to write [anti-racism] policies? Who gets to interpret them?...When we look at how policies are being developed, do we have Black communities consulting and providing their input?” she asks. As for representation, she points out that one way communities can help ensure equity at their institutions is to elect Black trustees to the school board. These are people who approve multi-million-dollar budgets, who guide the direction of schools, who work closely with superintendents and education directors. “School board trustees, by acknowledging anti-Black racism and really being intentional about addressing it, they can really give direction to the school board to implement an anti-racist education.”

CREDITS:

Host: Tokunbo Adegbuyi 

Producer: Ellen Payne Smith

Associate Producer: Sabrina Brathwaite

Executive Producer: Katie Jensen

Music: L CON

No Little Plans is back with a brand new host, Tokunbo Adegbuyi.  Produced in full during the COVID 19 pandemic, the podcast is back and ready to explore what it means to plan for an equitable future, but this time from a safe distance. We'll look into issues like anti-Black racism in Canadian schools, digital connectivity gaps, how climate warming is a human rights issue, and what the high rate of police-related deaths in parts of Canada's north means for access to justice. Listen here to meet the new voice behind the mic this season. Brand new episode drops Jan 13th, 2021.

In recent years—and especially during the Covid pandemic—lots of people have touted the benefits of Canada’s universal health care system. But how universal is it?

In Canada, the umbrella of universal health care excludes many services that are essential to Canadians. This includes dentistry, the bulk of mental health services and, most crucially, pharmaceuticals. Even before the pandemic hit in March 2020, Canadians were having trouble paying for their prescription drugs. According to a report from the Canadian Nurses’ Union, one in 10 Canadians don’t take their medications regularly because they can’t afford the out-of-pocket costs. 

Most health care workers have been aware of our system’s shortcomings for some time. In this episode of No Little Plans, host Vicky Mochama speaks with Danyaal Raza, a primary care physician at the Department of Family & Community Medicine at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. He’s also the Board Chair of Canadian Doctors for Medicare, an organization of physicians who’ve banded together to close the gaps in the publicly funded system. 

In Ontario, where Dr. Raza works, there is a publicly funded pharmacare system, but people only qualify for it if they’re young enough, old enough or poor enough. Others get coverage from their jobs, if they’re lucky to have a job with benefits. 

According to Dr. Raza:

“There's this huge gap right in the middle. People who are working part-time, precarious work, freelancers, people who are in the working poor, who are having to make some very significant decisions about what to pay for.” 

As of 2018, 2.1 million Canadians were working contract—and therefore non-benefit—jobs, and Dr. Raza cites a study from the Canadian Medical Association Journal reporting that many Canadians are cutting down on utilities and groceries in order to afford their prescriptions. 

When patients can’t pay for their medications, Dr. Raza says, doctors often dip into their own supplies to help them get the drugs they need. At his own clinic at St. Michael’s Hospital, they have what they call a “comfort fund” to help needy patients, and they regularly fundraise to help fill that gap. And the problem is only getting worse in the Covid era, as thousands of Canadians are losing their jobs and drug plans.

“The beautiful thing about hospital and physician care is that you just need your health card, and you get the care that you need. That's what we need for prescription drugs, particularly in times where we're facing such a high degree of economic uncertainty and of uncertainty with respect to our health”

When a patient is dealing with chronic health problems, the inability to afford their prescriptions adds a significant mental burden on top of their existing illness. In this episode, Mochama spoke to Rowan Burdge, a patient advocate who lives with Type 1 diabetes on the west coast and requires multiple daily injections of insulin. The Nurses’ Union estimates that “57 per cent of Canadians with diabetes reported failing to adhere to their prescribed therapies due to affordability issues related to medications, devices and supplies.” Burdge says that in her own experience, access and costs of medication vary wildly depending on where you live—when she moved to Saskatchewan for a year and a half, the same medications that cost her $300 in B.C. suddenly cost her $700. She is currently covered by a provincial drug plan, her work benefits and private insurance, and she still often has to pay out of pocket to cover her insulin. Her private insurance, for example, has a cap of $5,000 per year. Last year, she went so far as to crowdfund coverage on GoFundMe.

“I've spent upwards of $100,000 of my personal money on medication—on fair pharmacare copays, on prescription co-pays, on deductibles and limits and things like that. It's been a very expensive ride”

Toward the end of the episode, Mochama spoke to Dr. Jacalyn Duffin, a medical historian and retired hematologist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She also runs a website devoted to the issue of drug shortages in Canada. She first became interested in the subject about a decade ago, when a patient with metastatic breast cancer could not obtain a drug to control the nausea caused by her chemotherapy. On any given day, there are more than 1,500 drugs in short supply in Canada, she says—often, these shortages are due to problems with pricing, sourcing and manufacturing. Dr. Duffin wants Canada to create an “essential medicines” list, which would require the government to ensure the availability of certain drugs. 

Dr. Nav Persaud, who works in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at St. Michael’s Hospital, has created a prototype of this list. In a study, he found that distributing these essential medicines for free leads to a 44-per-cent increase in adherence, as well as improved health outcomes.

Says Dr. Duffin:

“A lot of Canadians don't know that there is a drug shortage until they're affected by it. We need to maintain a concerted effort to get to the bottom of the drug shortages and find out the cause.”

CREDITS: No Little Plans is hosted by Vicky Mochama. This episode was produced by Ellen Payne Smith  with executive production by Katie Jensen. This podcast was created by Strategic Content Labs by Vocal Fry Studios for Community Foundations of Canada. Subscribe or listen to us via the outlets above, and follow us at @nolittlepodcast on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Meanwhile, like Daniel Burnham said: “Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.”

By 2030, those over 65 will account for 23 percent of the population. The Covid-19 pandemic has put the lives of seniors under a spotlight. Getting online - especially right now - can mean the difference between getting food to your house, connecting with family, and getting the vital information you need to protect yourself. When digital literacy isn't promoted across all ages of society, what do we risk losing?

For most of us, Zoom calls with family members, online exercise classes, ordering food for delivery and any manner of Google-able things have been mandatory to our mental and physical health during the pandemic. But for older Canadians, it’s different. Many seniors lack a basic access to these lifelines. Researchers put it down to “digital ageism”—the subject of this episode of No Little Plans.

Canada is aging. By 2030, 23 per cent of the population will consist of Canadians over 65, a cohort that we’ve been hearing will live longer than ever before. All of our assumptions on healthy ageing, however, have been overshadowed in the last few months by Covid-19. The crisis has made us examine how much the systems we have in place in society are failing older people, how ill-prepared we are to protect the spread of the virus in assisted living facilities—and how far we have yet to come in improving seniors’ capacity to stay informed, safe and cared for in an increasingly networked world.

As Concordia University’s Kim Sawchuk explains in this episode, digital ageism is fundamentally about the denial of services to older people. Sawchuk is a professor of Communication Studies at the university. She’s written on age, ageing and its cultural impact since 1996. She is also a principal investigator Ageing + Communication + Technologies (ACT), a project that brings together researchers and partners to address how new forms of communication affect the experience of ageing. Sawchuk argues:

“We need to provide access to people in their post-retirement years to devices and services. We do not need to blame older people for not knowing.”

Instead of the bias directed at seniors—that they’re somehow unable to learn new skills—Sawchuk makes the case for more access to digital literacy programs, plus a policy shift that make the internet and data in general more affordable to those on fixed incomes. 

“We need to lower the cost of access. We need to get rid of exorbitant punitive fees for data overages. If we value universal health care and citizenship, we have to think about the universal right to access in this country.”

To find out more about the relationship of seniors to digital literacy, we spoke with Craig Silverman, the media editor of BuzzFeed. His team recently published a series of stories on the website under the banner “Protect Your Parents from the Internet Week.”

Silverman recalls the idea took root in early 2019, when he read independent research about Twitter and Facebook that noted people over 65 were struggling to distinguish between credible news and false claims online. He also points to “a generational susceptibility to the role algorithms play” in targeting content to demographics and user types. “All of us to some extent can fall to disinformation or misinformation,” Silverman notes, but his research discovered senior citizens were particularly prone to believing the misinformation, and to falling prey to malware and to online scams.

One of his takeaways for how to fix this problem goes back to the idea of broader education: Silverman points out that we have a wide array of digital literacy programs for school-aged students, but not nearly the same for those over 65. Filling that gap, he says, are public libraries with their roster of digital literacy programs tailored to various age groups and communities. Still, more needs to be done.

The way Kim Sawchuk sees it, everyone, no matter their age, should be able to engage in using technology “with joy and not stress.” In making this episode, we discovered a perfect example of this principle. We dropped in on a virtual gathering of members of RECAA, an organization in Montreal that advocates for senior communities. (The full name is Respecting Elder Communities Against Abuse.) The Zoom call was a rehearsal for members of an elder choir and their choir master—pure joy hearing and seeing those voices lift each other up.

Seventy-seven year old Anne Caines, a volunteer coordinator at RECAA, spoke to us about how members of the organization call each other elders instead of seniors. According to Caines:

“Elders, for us, denotes a relationship rather than a category or demographic group.”

When the conversation turned to the pandemic, Caines made a point of touching on the invaluable nature of digital literacy and how her peers lack the technology to stay in touch with their community. Asks Caines:

“Why can’t we see our loved ones? Why can’t we get more older Canadians connected to the people they need most—at a time when they need it most of all?

CREDITS: No Little Plans is hosted by Vicky Mochama. This episode was produced by Ellen Payne Smith and Jay Cockburn, with executive production by Katie Jensen. This podcast was created by Strategic Content Labs by Vocal Fry Studios for Community Foundations of Canada. Subscribe or listen to us via the outlets above, and follow us at @nolittlepodcast on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Meanwhile, like Daniel Burnham said: “Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.”

The term ecological grief captures the profound sense of loss, dread and fear people feel when trying to cope with climate change. We talk about this new mental-health paradigm, how acute it is in endangered communities in the North, as well as its unexpected companion—hope. 

In late 2019, New York Times journalist Cara Buckley wrote one of the first mainstream news stories about struggling with a little-discussed form of mental-health crisis. 

“Have you ever known someone who cited the Anthropocene in a dating profile? Who doled out carbon offset gift certificates at the holidays? Who sees new babies and immediately flashes to the approximately 15 tons of carbon emissions the average American emits per year? Who walks around shops thinking about where all the packaging ends up? You do now.” 

Perplexed about how to cope, she went about “searching for a cure” for a knot of emotions—including anger, frustration, sadness and fear—brought on by thinking about the future of the planet. (That search included attending a workshop in Brooklyn called  “Cultivating Active Hope: Living With Joy Amidst the Climate Crisis.”) 

Like countless others, Buckley was suffering from ecological grief. 

It’s not technically new. For arguably hundreds of years, people with a connection to the environment and its well-being have suffered in the face of its destruction. But the term ecological grief was coined in 2018 by authors of a research publication, including Ashlee Cunsolo, director of the Labrador Institute of Memorial University. 

In this episode of No Little Plans, Cunsolo talks at length with host Vicky Mochama about her experience, starting with a definition: 

“Ecological grief is the pain that people feel in connection to the loss of something that isn’t human. It can be as a species. It can be a body of water. It can be a singular animal. It can be a beloved place.” 

That pain is particularly acute with those who live or work in endangered communities. Cunsolo is one of them. The Labrador Institute is a leading centre of research, education, outreach and policy, by and for the North. Cunsolo and her small team spent two years investigating one of the hardest hit areas, Northern Labrador, which included hundreds of conversations with residents and elders. There, mourning losses due to climate change was described to her as a 'grief without end.' 

“It’s not like when you lose a loved one. Societies have structures around that. We have rituals. We have funerals. You can take bereavement leave. People come around you…. When it was around ecological grief and loss, people almost felt alone. They felt sometimes embarrassed, sometimes ashamed to talk about it.” 

Preventing that isolation—by taking about eco grief as a real, scientific issue—is one of the key factors that motivates Cunsolo’s research. In fact, the field some now call “ecopsychology” is enabling a more widespread acknowledgment of the psychological and emotional connections that people have to the natural world, whether they’re bearing day-to-day witness to loss in the North or dealing with the anxiety from a distance, like Cara Buckley describes in her New York Times story. 

One of the most prominent voices of eco grief is also one of the most visible leaders of the climate movement. Greta Thunberg and her family have spoken often about her personal struggles. 

For Thunberg and for other young leaders, such as Indigenous water activist Autumn Peltier, the personal is the political. Their work starts with acknowledging the very presence of a physical and emotional environment-to-human bond. 

During this podcast episode, Vicky talks to Hillary McGregor, a 22-year-old coordinator at Indigenous Sport and Wellness in Ontario who helped develop a leadership program for Indigenous youth in Canada called the Standing Bear Program. Many youth, he says, have seen first-hand the effects of the climate crisis on their communities. This underscores a disconnect between their front-line experience and the more existential climate change debates among politicians and policymakers. 

“[The youth] are not really questioning whether or not climate change is happening. They want to know: What are the solutions going to be? How can I contribute now to make things better for my community?” 

That pivot from experiencing loss to being proactive is key to carving out space for hope—that unexpected but necessary companion to eco grief. 

Near the end of the episode, we hear from Hillary’s mother, Deborah McGregor, an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Environmental Justice at York University’s Osgoode Hall. Professor McGregor acknowledges that eco grief is real, but not new, and that pain of this kind has been a fact of life across hundreds of years for Indigenous communities. She tracks the progression of grief to panic about the annihilation of the planet and, in turn, to a scaling up of measures by front-liners to demand change. 

“It's been a crisis for a long time. But Indigenous peoples have managed to survive and been resilient and adapted over that. So maybe there’s something that we can offer other people about how to survive, how to work through this and the kind of knowledge and skills that you need to be able to do that.” 

This includes better governance that enlists people witnessing climate-change first hand in leadership roles. It includes pressuring world leaders to move past the high-level discussions about, for instance, whether carbon tax is a good idea. As host Vicky Mochama concludes: 

“Maybe it’s time we took a step back and listened to the people that climate change is affecting directly and learn from them. We are past the point of figuring it out as we go. But there’s also hope and resilience: Youth have come out all over to address climate change. We’re grieving together. It’s time to act together.” 

CREDITS: No Little Plans is hosted by Vicky Mochama. This episode was produced by Dorsa Eslami, Ellen Payne Smith and Matthew McKinnon, with executive production by Katie Jensen. This podcast was created by Strategic Content Labs by Vocal Fry Studios for Community Foundations of Canada. Subscribe or listen to us via the outlets above, and follow us at @nolittlepodcast on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Meanwhile, like Daniel Burnham said: “Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.”

The Sustainable Development Goals aim to improve the most important things about life on Earth. The prevention and treatment of substance abuse is targeted by SDG 3, Health and Wellbeing—but drug use is a shadow that cuts across the path of so many others, and therefore merits special attention. We talk about that. 

In the early 1990s, someone thought this public service announcement was a good idea. Thirty years later, the accidental anthem has become a bemusing relic of the war on drugs—which was already decades old, and had proven itself interminable, when this first aired on Canadian television. 

Two years ago, the Government of Canada ended almost a century of marijuana prohibition by passing Bill C-45, or the Cannabis Act. So far, the rollout of legal pot from coast to coast to coast has had its highs and lows. Most pointedly, the black market is still thriving, with Statistics Canada estimating that about three quarters of the country’s cannabis users are still getting high on an illegal supply. 

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health’s earnest Cannabis in Canada website is chock full of educational resources, health information, travel tips, business requirements and more—including PSAs for the modern era. 

In 1993, British Columbia’s chief coroner investigated an “inordinately high number” of drug-related deaths within the context of a “very real and very serious” problem with illegal drug use. At the time, there had been 330 such deaths in the province. That was the highest number B.C. had ever experienced, and the event is widely remembered as the country’s first overdose epidemic. 

By three years ago, that same statistic had soared to 1,473 lives lost annually—an increase of more than 400 percent in a generation’s time. 

All the while, considerable attention has focused on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), a neighbourhood with inordinately high rates of mental illness and drug addiction among its homeless and housing insecure populations. 

Across the country, other urban centres have similarly troubled communities, but the current opioid crisis does not discriminate. Overdose deaths are unquestionably a national happening, with a body count of almost 14,000 between January 2016 to June 2019. Drug overdoses are currently claiming more Canadian lives than motor vehicle accidents and homicides combined. Today’s street drugs are incredibly strong, with scores of addicts at daily risk of their next shot being the one that will end them. 

Last December, the Public Health Agency of Canada released this statement: 

Many of these deaths are a result of the contamination of the illegal drug supply with toxic substances. Fentanyl and other illegal and highly toxic synthetic opioids continue to be a major driver of this crisis… 

The opioid overdose crisis is a complex problem that we know will take time to turn around. To have a significant and lasting impact, we need to continue working together on whole-of-society changes. This includes addressing the stigma that surrounds substance use, implementing further harm reduction measures and reducing barriers to treatment. It also means continuing to work together to better understand and address the drivers of this crisis, such as mental illness, and social and economic factors that put Canadians at increased risk. 

Crackdown is a podcast about “the drug war, covered by drug users as war correspondents.” Host and executive producer Garth Mullins is a journalist and radio producer who survived the DTES of the early ’90s, back when B.C. experienced that first wave of alarming deaths. He is a careful, empathetic interviewer who is wide open about sharing his own history of drug use. 

We recommend a visit to Crackdown’s website to hear the dozen episodes that they have made so far. Or just find and follow the show on iTunes, Spotify or another podcast provider. It tells stories you will not hear elsewhere, from a perspective you might not think to consider. 

Marilou Gagnon (RN, PhD) is president of the Harm Reduction Nurses Association (hrna-aiirm.ca), a professional organization with a national mission to “promote the advancement of harm reduction nursing through practice, education, research and advocacy.” 

In practice, this results in actions including: 

• “Serving as a national voice for harm reduction and related nursing issues” 
• “Creating a dynamic network to support and mentor nurses across the country” 
• “Advocating for the rights and dignity of people who use drugs and their families” 

Last summer, acting in a direct response to the opioid crisis, HRNA called for the decriminalization of people who use drugs in B.C.—which, notice, is different than the decriminalization of drugs. 

“This is a critical way forward to address the overdose crisis and to promote greater health, wellbeing, justice, and equity at an individual and population level,” the group’s statement concluded. “Additional steps include ensuring access to a safer supply of substances, housing, mental health services, treatment, support, and harm reduction services.” 

Nicole Kief, formerly of the ACLU, is a legal advocate for Prisoners’ Legal Services in B.C. This role puts her near another front line of the current crisis: federal and provincial prisons. 

According to the Correction Service of Canada, overdoses and overdose deaths among prisoners more than doubled within a five-year period spanning 2012 to 2017. The Office of the Correctional Investigator’s 2017–2018 annual report includes the remarkable fact that there are now “more drug detector dogs working in federal penitentiaries than in the entire Canada Border Services Agency.” 

During the past several years, Kief and her colleagues have fielded a growing number of pleas for assistance with a pair of drug-related issues: one, unbearably long waiting lists for Methadose and other “opioid agonist” treatments; and two, forced cold-turkey withdrawals from high-dose addictions. 

Prisoners’ Legal Services appealed to the Correction Service on both fronts—and got nowhere. In June 2018, the group filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission. That did something. Since then, Kief says there’s been a noticeable drop in prisoner reports about both issues. 

Near the end of this episode, host Vicky Mochama reads the following quotation from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes: 

Many of the communities and people caught up in the drugs trade, whether users, small-scale traffickers, producers or cultivators, often constitute the most vulnerable and marginalised segments of society, the “further behind” which the SDGs have endeavoured to reach first. 

This, in a nutshell, is why we’ve made this episode. 

And below, in six minutes, is how to administer a potentially life-saving shot of Naxolone to a person who is overdosing on opioids. These injection kits are widely—and freely—available in Canadian pharmacies, and offered with hands-on training similar to what’s depicted in this video.

CREDITS: No Little Plans is hosted by Vicky Mochama. This episode was produced by Dorsa Eslami, Ellen Payne Smith, Jay Cockburn, and Matthew McKinnon, with executive production by Katie Jensen. This podcast was created by Strategic Content Labs by Vocal Fry Studios for Community Foundations of Canada. Subscribe or listen to us via the outlets above, and follow us at @nolittlepodcast on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Meanwhile, like Daniel Burnham said: “Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.”

Rihanna sang it and we are going to talk about it: work work work. The good news is that lots of people in Canada are working. In December , we hit a record low in unemployment, and it’s stayed low. As for the economy, there are lots of ways to measure that, but suffice it to say, it’s growing. Here’s the catch though: the figures are good, but the work? Not necessarily. From the rise of apps like Uber, Fiverr and Foodora to the increase in AI and automation, workers in 2019 are dealing with a totally new landscape. 

This statistic has been flirting with historic lows since last autumn, as the number of jobless Canadian adults has ranged between 5.4 and 5.8 percent over the past 12 months. 

However, much of the change has been attributed to increases in self-employment—a trend that economists tend to regard with skepticism. 

“Meh. Looking past the new record low in the unemployment rate, this report was a bit on the soft side,” TD Bank senior economist Brian DePratto told CBC News in May, as the jobless rate dipped to 5.4. “All of the job gains (and then some) are down to self-employment, and the drop in the unemployment rate was driven by fewer Canadians engaging with labour markets, notably among the under-55 population.” 

The Workers Action Centre, a labour organization that supports non-union workers, helps Ontario employees know their rights in English, Chinese, Spanish, Tamil, Somali, Punjabi and Bengali. 

In 2015, a consortium of poverty advocates, healthcare researchers and community groups launched the Ontario chapter of what’s become a North American movement: the fight for a minimum wage of $15/hour and “fair” working conditions for all. 

So far, Alberta is the lone Canadian province or territory to reach that payment threshold. (Follow this link for more information about Alberta’s official wage standards.) Saskatchewan has the country’s lowest minimum wage, clocking in at $11.32/hour. 

However, there’s more to it than just money. At 15andfairness.org, the full list of demands for workers includes: 

• Equal pay for equal work 
• Decent hours 
• Paid leave 
• Protections for migrant workers 
• Rules that protect everyone 
• Job security and respect at work 
• Right to organize and unionize 

The precarious employment conditions described in this episode are not limited to just Toronto’s Pearson Airport—although Canada’s largest airport, with its legions of food service workers, is an unsurprising place for “contract flipping” to happen on a massive scale. 

“It’s an issue for thousands of workers not just at airports, but at colleges, universities and corporations where outside contractors provide food services,” _The Tyee_’s Andrew MacLeod reported earlier this year. 

Flips commonly happen after contracted workers pull together and unionize. Employers respond by replacing their service providers’ contracts with rival, cheaper—and non-unionized—alternatives. Sometimes, the new provider will hire the same workers back to fulfill their same duties (absent union protections). Most times, if not all, any benefits accrued during the previous contract are stopped, and do not carry over to the new deal. 

“It gets brutal,” is how one unnamed Amazon worker describes the global retailer’s labour conditions in this sprawling exposé by Business Insider. None of the 20-plus anonymous employees who went on record for this piece is located in Canada—but there is no shortage of Canadian concerns about how Amazon and its subsidiaries treat their employees. For example, this past January, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Canada Local 175 filed a complaint against Amazon Canada Fulfillment Services Inc. for creating a “chilling effect” that stymied worker efforts to unionize. 

Sara Mojtehezadeh, the Toronto Star’s award-winning work and wealth reporter, has written extensively about “precarious work, labour issues, migrant workers, workplace health and safety, workers’ compensation and inequality.” Recent clippings from her beat include: 

• Protesters charged after occupying Doug Ford’s constituency office to demand stronger protections for temp workers (October 16, 2019) 
• The life and death of Fiera Foods temp worker Enrico Miranda (October 4, 2019) 
• Future of gig economy workers at stake in Foodora couriers’ unionization battle (September 10, 2019) 
• Labour ministry to reduce number of inspectors probing workplace abuse, union memo reveals (June 6, 2019) 

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) tracks standards of employment protection—”synthetic indicators of the strictness of regulation on dismissals and the use of temporary contracts”—for its dozens of member countries, including Canada. Here is its overview of Canadian statistics; here is its dataset specific to temporary contracts. And below is a video that defines what OECD considers decent work. 

“Foodora workers say they’re not robots” (August 18, 2019): In which one of Canada’s few remaining alt-weeklies, Toronto’s NOW Magazine, spells out the pertinent details of what figures to become a common labour fight, particularly within the so-called gig economy: non-unionized delivery workers vs. service industry disruptors. 

“You see some crazy shit everyday, and the way the actual wage structure is set up, you are incentivized to [ride] way faster than you should,” Christopher Williams tells NOW. The Foodora rider is an organizer of Foodsters United, an offshoot of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. This summer, CUPW filed an unfair labour practice complaint on Foodsters’ behalf. Meanwhile, Foodora’s position is that the union effort failed to reach a threshold of 40 percent participation, and therefore cannot be considered valid. 

CREDITS: No Little Plans is hosted by Vicky Mochama. This episode was produced by Dorsa Eslami, Jay Cockburn, and Matthew McKinnon, with executive production by Katie Jensen. Special thanks to Ausma Malik and the Atkinson Foundation. This podcast was created by Strategic Content Labs by Vocal Fry Studios for Community Foundations of Canada. Subscribe or listen to us via the outlets above, and follow us at @nolittlepodcast on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Meanwhile, like Daniel Burnham said: “Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.”