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30 Articles

EDITOR’S NOTE

A surprising number of my friends now live in St. Catharines, Ontario—a small city in the Niagara wine region, about a two hours’ drive south of Toronto. It’s a classic rust-belt town: the car-manufacturing business flourished in the early 20th century, then the city hollowed out in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s now experiencing a renaissance. The historic downtown has come back to life, the population is growing and the newly diversified economy is prospering again. My St. Catharines community started growing a few years ago when a friend moved there with her family for a professorship at Brock. Another friend left Toronto for St. Catharines with her husband and son during the COVID lockdown to work remotely, live close to extended family and enjoy the region’s parks and nature…

SLOWING THE FLOW Readers, unsurprisingly, had some pretty strong opinions about our special immigration issue in July. Most of them agreed that the Liberals have let in too many people, too fast. No matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on, this is THE issue of the day. Whether you look at housing, infrastructure, cost of living, government services or health care from a left or right stance, lowering immigration and temporary residence is the fastest, highest-impact and most achievable lever that can be pulled. VitaCrudo, Reddit “Indian students came to Canada for the same reasons as the ancestors of those who are now hostile toward us: to seek better opportunities”PUJA DAS Toronto I’m a card-carrying Liberal and I am enraged. You can’t treat people the way this government is…

THE INTERVIEW CONVERSATIONS WITH THE NATION’S NEWSMAKERS

DURING BEVERLEY MCLACHLIN’S 28 historymaking years on Canada’s Supreme Court bench, she ruled on laws that created a quantum forward leap in the state of human rights in Canada—for Indigenous people, for sex workers, for same-sex couples and for citizens seeking assisted suicide, pre-MAID. After her 2018 retirement, she turned her mighty pen to the fictional kind of legal drama: her latest thriller, Proof, hits shelves on September 17. McLachlin devoted her remaining time to arbitration work. She also served two terms as an overseas judge on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal, a recently wrapped tenure that drew criticism from pro-democracy activists who argued that the 2020 passage of Hong Kong’s National Security Law by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress jeopardized civil liberties within the region.…

THE INTERVIEW CONVERSATIONS WITH THE NATION’S NEWSMAKERS

Log Off To Find Love

IN 2017, AFTER BEING SINGLE for a few years, I wanted to get back into the dating game. I was newly sober at the time, so I wasn’t super-confident about venturing into my local bar scene in London, Ontario. Instead, I leapt into the world of digital dating via Bumble, which, back then, required women to send the first message. I thought, That’s feminist. I’m a feminist. Let’s try it! My first few months online provided me with an emotionally exhausting education. I learned that a man who says he’s five foot six could be five foot four; that it’s entirely common for people to use ridiculously old photos to make themselves seem younger; and that catfishing, the practice of using fake photos, is alive and well. I was once catfished…

Log Off To Find Love

The Internet Oddball

GROWING UP IN BARRIE, ONTARIO, in the early 2000s, Veronika Slowikowska shared a sense of humour with era-defining weirdo comedies like Napoleon Dynamite: her jokes were painfully awkward and without any obvious punchline. She earned the lead in her high school’s production of Spring Awakening, but Slowikowska wasn’t a cookie-cutter thespian. “The thing that separated me from all the other girls with long, blond hair who wanted stage careers was that I was funny,” she says. After graduation, Slowikowska was accepted to the Second City’s conservatory program in Toronto. She hustled her way through nightly sketch shows and booked the odd TV part, like a 2017 episode of Degrassi: Next Class. Her big break came in 2018, when she landed a bit part on What We Do in the Shadows,…

The Internet Oddball

THÉÂTRE DE VERDURE is a setting straight out of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: a thespian’s paradise in the middle of a lush woodland. Since 1956, the open-air stage has occupied an island in the middle of Montreal’s Parc La Fontaine, exposing park-goers to regular, accessible (read: free) and dazzling productions. In 2000, a much-needed reno replaced the original modernist set with a bare-bones structure, more scaffolding than stage, but soon that too got covered in graffiti. By 2014, the venue had fallen into disrepair and was forced to close down. Three years passed before the City decided the Verdure’s shows must go on—without interfering with the park’s natural beauty. They tapped local architecture firm Lemay for a redesign. Lemay’s architects, whose past projects include the Espace 67 historic site…

How Much Is Too Much? Making Informed Choices About Alcohol and Cannabis

For both alcohol and cannabis, the health risks involved go up the more you consume. For example, consuming more than six standard drinks per week puts you at increasingly high risk of developing heart disease and stroke. Even drinking more than two per week starts to increase the risk of developing cancer. Drinking alcohol also increases risks related to impaired driving collisions, hospitalization, alcohol use disorder, and mortality. Regular cannabis use, meanwhile, can impair memory, disrupt work or school, exacerbate mental health issues, and heighten the risk of psychosis. How much is too much? First, it’s important to keep track of how much you use. The Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA) offers practical guides like Knowing Your Limits with Alcohol and Knowing Your Limits with Cannabis for…

How Much Is Too Much? Making Informed Choices About Alcohol and Cannabis

Unaware and Underserved: The Silence Behind Substance Use Health Harms Us All

In Canada, we have a collective aversion to talking about alcohol and other substances when it comes to our health. It’s a curious aversion given that many of us use them so regularly. We scrutinize anything that comes close to our bodies, so why are substances any different? Perhaps more curious is the blame or pity we feel toward people who experience declining health because of their substance use — as if they should have known better when, in fact, most of us don’t know any better either. Systemic stigma and silence around substance use continue to have significant consequences on our health — regardless of how much or what type we use. Understanding Substance Use Health in Canada Three quarters of the population (23.7 million people) uses substances in…

Unaware and Underserved: The Silence Behind Substance Use Health Harms Us All

MY HIP PAIN STARTED AROUND 2015, when I was in my mid-30s. It began as stiffness, then the odd pinch or tweak. I live with my wife, Barbara, and our three kids on an acreage in Sturgeon County, Alberta, where we raise a handful of cows and some chickens. Our lives are very active. I’m also a maintenance supervisor at a nearby provincial park. That’s a physical job, too—overseeing buildings, outhouses and campsites. I’m not exactly used to sitting still, so when my hip started to hurt, I pushed through it. I figured it was something minor and did some extra stretches. Instead, it got worse. I tried acupuncture, physiotherapy and even turmeric tea, which is supposed to help with inflammation. None of it worked. After a few years, even…

BEST Affordable PLACES TO LIVE

THE BAD NEWS: OWNING A HOME in one of Canada’s marquee cities is now largely the purview of millionaires. In Toronto, a typical home goes for nearly $1.1 million, while the price of admission in Greater Vancouver is even higher at $1.2 million (and a house in West Vancouver has the vertigo-inducing sticker shock of $2.6 million). The good news is that for many people, homeownership is still possible—if they’re willing to explore new terrain. In the following pages, we present 10 Canadian cities where the benchmark home price still falls under the national average of $700,000. And these aren’t boring backwaters: each city we’re featuring is buzzing with economic activity, innovative new businesses, delicious dining options and cultural touchstones. Among them are Windsor, Ontario, which has transformed from a…

BEST Affordable PLACES TO LIVE

The Seaside Charmer

BENCHMARK HOUSING PRICE: $364,800 POPULATION: 38,809 CHARLOTTETOWN, ONE OF THE FASTEST-GROWING cities in the country, is getting a makeover in real time. An unprecedented influx of immigrants and urbanites escaping larger hubs has helped P.E.I.’s population grow more in the last three years than it did between 1995 and 2010. The result is a rejuvenated capital city, supercharged with new talent, business and a transformed real estate market. The newcomer wave has made Charlottetown’s vacancy rates some of the lowest in the country, but the benchmark home price is still less than a third that of Toronto and Vancouver—and nearly half of those properties are detached homes with yards. The most affordable options are sprouting in East Royalty, a collection of one-and two-bedroom condos, townhouses and duplexes in the city’s…

The Seaside Charmer

The Eastern Tech Hub

BENCHMARK HOUSING PRICE: $539,200 POPULATION: 439,819 LET’S FACE IT: Halifax is no longer Canada’s best-kept real estate secret. Five years ago, only the super-savvy knew to trade their Toronto condos for detached homes in the Maritimes’ largest economic and cultural hub. Although the buy-in price has ballooned from the low $300,000s to the mid-$500,000s over the past few years, high interest rates are causing that number to plateau, making home prices feel palatable again. The Halifax market also remains accessible because of the growth and development of the neighbourhoods on its fringes. Clayton Park, a suburban enclave of brick multiunit buildings and walking trails, just eclipsed 5,000 residents. Cole Harbour, a leafy suburb on the Atlantic shoreline (and the birthplace of Sidney Crosby) is becoming a popular landing spot for…

The Eastern Tech Hub

The Riverside Rebound

BENCHMARK HOUSING PRICE: $598,800 POPULATION: 136,803 LIKE MANY A MID-SIZED CANADIAN CITY, St. Catharines slumped through the last half-century. General Motors, the biggest employer, scaled back operations, the downtown hollowed out and the city’s brightest saw opportunities elsewhere. But now there’s reason for a reverse migration. There will be new jobs, especially in the agri-tourism industry (all those Niagara wineries), in construction (emerging neighbourhoods and office-to-condo conversions) and in education (the new entrepreneurial and science-driven university rising in nearby Niagara Falls). All this action means the historic main drag, St. Paul Street, has come back to life, sprouting restaurants like retro pizza shop Di’s, butcher-centric Fat Rabbit and, that ultimate proof that a city is a happening place, artisanal vegan doughnut bakery Beechwood, site of a daily queue out the…

The Riverside Rebound

The French Connection

BENCHMARK HOUSING PRICE: $380,000 POPULATION: 549,459 TO THE NAKED EYE, QUEBEC IS AN OLD-WORLD CITY, packed with neoclassical design, grand monuments and cobblestone streets. But in the last few decades, it’s taken a turn toward the ultra-modern. Quebec City has blossomed into an unlikely tech hub, with more than 500 startups, many fuelled by the tech accelerator and incubator Le Camp in downtown’s Saint-Roch neighbourhood. The city is also home to a host of video game studios, and tech conferences regularly descend on its downtown convention centre. The city’s manufacturing sector has gone high-tech too, investing in sectors like industrial lasers and fibre optics: the $75-million Coractive fibre optics factory opened its doors just last year. Houses are still shockingly affordable, with a median price of $380,000 for a single-family…

The French Connection

The Northern Exposure

BENCHMARK HOUSING PRICE: $392,700 POPULATION: 1,010,899 IN 2020, EDMONTON’S POPULATION officially crossed the million-person mark, making it the northernmost city of that population in North America. It now sits at 1.14 million residents—more than 10 per cent of whom arrived since 2021—and it’s about to grow even more as the city prepares for another 100,000 new arrivals by 2027. One of the biggest reasons? Cheap housing. Real estate prices in Alberta’s capital remain well below the national average, with a benchmark sale price of $392,700. Affordable detached homes in the city’s deep southwest are magnets for young families, while those without kids tend to be drawn to the condo market in livelier areas like downtown and Oliver. And recent zoning changes mean that just about any residential area can soon…

The Northern Exposure

The Quantum Capital

MEDIAN DETACHED HOME PRICE: $392,000 POPULATION: 172,950 SURROUNDED BY THE QUAINT VILLAGES of Quebec’s Eastern Townships, this picturesque spot at the confluence of the Magog and Saint-François rivers gives New England a run for its money. There are 110 kilometres of bike paths snaking around the waterways, two public beaches and the 200-hectare Parc du Mont Bellevue, a pristine nature reserve with its own mountain. Sherbrooke is a Goldilocks pick for buyers seeking a city with a small-town vibe. The median price for a singlefamily home is $392,000, or just over half the national figure. In neighbourhoods like Jacques-Cartier, these properties often come equipped with finished basements, verdant backyards and occasionally an inground swimming pool. The area is popular with families looking for historic homes, sprawling parks and views of…

The Quantum Capital

The Renaissance City

BENCHMARK HOUSING PRICE: $559,000 POPULATION: 132,485 IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, Kingston has been on the kind of epic building spree that puts other mid-sized Canadian cities to shame: in 2023, it began construction on more than 1,400 homes, more than doubling the municipal target set by the province. There’s more to come, like the landmark nine-floor downtown Crown condo, a whack of residential towers in the city’s Williamsville area, five proposed buildings on Queen Street, and a six-storey development on the site of the former Frontenac Mall. It’s a ground-breaking disruption to the city’s low-rise, old-world aesthetic. Plenty of Kingston’s most affordable gems are nestled in the city’s upper end. Northwest neighbourhoods like Polson Park and Hillendale are packed with ’50sand ’60s-era bungalows priced below $600,000 with good bones and…

The Renaissance City

The Maritime Bargain

BENCHMARK HOUSING PRICE: $304,500 POPULATION: 63,116 HOMES ON THE EAST COAST are generally cheaper than in Canada’s largest urban centres, but any Maritimer will tell you that this statistic comes with an important caveat: on average, incomes are often lower, which can make life just as unaffordable. Fredericton is one of the Atlantic Canadian real estate market’s last-standing loopholes: the median house price is a manageable $304,000, but the city’s residents have the highest income per capita in the province. The cost of real estate has already nearly doubled in Fredericton since 2019, but a handful of building incentives are poised to supercharge supply and stabilize prices. The city has issued more than $500 million worth of construction permits since 2022, meant to densify the city with nearly 700 new…

The Maritime Bargain

The Buzzy Border Town

BENCHMARK HOUSING PRICE: $595,100 POPULATION: 229,660 A HALF-DOZEN YEARS AGO, Windsor had some of the cheapest real estate in North America—you could still find a house in the city’s gritty downtown, for instance, for as low as $150,000. Today, those same houses are now going for at least $275,000. The benchmark house price in the city is also now much higher, currently around $595,000. It all comes down to the simple fact that the city is now a truly desirable place to live, buoyed by new federal investment, increasingly adventurous nightlife and a renewed connection with Detroit. Windsor’s house prices remain a bargain compared to similar-sized Ontario cities, like Hamilton or London (don’t even think of putting them up against Toronto’s). You can still score a small but attractive home…

The Buzzy Border Town

The Prairie Pick

BENCHMARK HOUSING PRICE: $320,000 POPULATION: 226,404 AFTER BOTTOMING OUT in recent years, Saskatchewan’s agricultural industry is on a breakneck ascent—as a source of clean energy. Regina’s economy is now buoyed by a behemoth renewable diesel fuel plant, where the fuel is produced using the region’s abundant canola crops. The plant is one of several future-minded employers setting up shop in the province’s capital—there’s also Raven Industries, an American agtech company that’s building autonomous farm equipment. The city has flourished along with its innovation landscape—Saskatchewan set a record this year for population growth—and plans to densify to keep up with all of its newcomers. Regina received $35.2 million from the federal government’s Housing Accelerator Fund in exchange for its plans to fast-track more than 1,000 new units in the next three…

The Prairie Pick

So You’ve Been _Hacked

0n a July morning in 2022, Brad Hynes, the IT manager for the town of St. Mary’s in southwestern Ontario, was backing up the town’s computer systems when things went haywire. File names became unintelligible strings of characters. Desktop icons went blank. File after file was impossible to open, a string of digital duds. The background wallpaper on Hynes’s screen disappeared, replaced by the red-and-black logo of a Russian ransomware gang called LockBit. A line of all-caps text appeared: “All your important files are stolen and encrypted!” Hynes immediately took the town’s systems offline to prevent the hackers from digging into anything they hadn’t already compromised. Then he called the town’s CAO, who called his boss, Mayor Al Strathdee. Strathdee was on the highway, driving back to town from meetings…

So You’ve Been _Hacked

Whole Lotta L❤ve

For proof of polyamory’s move into the Canadian mainstream, look no further than our easternmost province. In 2018, a judge in Newfoundland and Labrador ruled that a polyamorous trio of two men and a woman were all legal parents to their child—ruling against the province, which had refused to list more than two parents. “Society is continuously changing,” the judge wrote, “and family structures are changing along with it.” In 2021, a British Columbia Supreme Court judge issued a comparable decision on behalf of a similar “triad” relationship. Polyamory, a relationship structure in which three or more adults form a long-term, committed relationship, suddenly seems to be everywhere. A 2019 survey of Canadian adults by researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto found that one…

In 2016, my relationship with my husband ended. We’d been together almost 10 years and had four daughters, and the split was one of the worst periods of my life. My friend Adam, whom I’d known since I was 18, became a rock for me throughout the experience. It wasn’t long before we started dating. A few months after that, a mom-friend I knew asked me out for a drink. That night, she surprised me by telling me that she and her husband were interested in dating me as a couple. I was even more surprised by Adam’s reaction: if I wanted to explore their proposition, he said, I shouldn’t stop on his account. So, for about six months, I dated my friend and her husband. It was a beautiful experience,…

The Long-Distance Lovers

I discovered polyamory seven years ago, in my mid-40s, quite by accident. Before that, my relationships were standard monogamous pairings: I married at 24, then divorced and dated on and off. I had a seven-year common-law relationship, followed by a friendswith-benefits situation that I reluctantly agreed to—I didn’t identify as non-monogamous then, but I was in love with the person and felt I had no other choice. I met my current partner, André, on OkCupid in 2017. Neither of us identified as polyamorous at the time. About a month into dating, during an intimate moment, André playfully suggested that it would be helpful to have an “extra set of hands.” I replied, “That would be hot.” That night, we set up a joint dating profile to see if we could…

The Long-Distance Lovers

I met Blue in 1996, just after graduating from university. We were never totally exclusive, and about a year into our relationship, we decided we would be polyamorous. I don’t want to own someone, nor have someone own me; I want to do my own thing and the people I love to do theirs. In 2007, Blue got pregnant with our daughter, Kaia. At the time, Blue was also in a close relationship with another partner, Jbash. We knew the dynamics would transform when a baby entered the picture, and he knew he’d need to step back or step in. Jbash and I were already friends, but this was going to be a dramatic change. The three of us talked carefully before we made our decision: we merged to form…

The Reformed Monogamists

In 2018, I was separated from my second husband and busy being a mom to my five children. I didn’t have time or energy for anything serious, and I wasn’t looking for anything more than someone to see a movie or eat dinner with. Then two separate dating apps matched me with the same man, Denis, within 24 hours. It was hard not to take it as a sign. Denis’s profile said, “Full disclosure: I’m still living with my ex-wife, and we’re still friends.” That might have scared some people off, but to me it seemed refreshingly honest. We made a dinner date, and Denis told me he identified as polyamorous, which sounded ideal given my situation. Afterwards, I couldn’t get him out of my mind. He was so witty,…

The Reformed Monogamists

The No-Secrets Polycule

Chris and I have been friends since 2001, when he was still married to, as we lovingly call her, “Wife 1.” I was in an open relationship at the time, and Chris’s marriage was semiopen—we’d all been polyamorous since before we even knew the word. By 2011, Chris had divorced his wife, and my relationship had broken up. During a family emergency, I called on him for help. And after spending time together, we decided to take the next step. There was no big conversation about polyamory at the time. I knew he had other lovers; he knew I wanted to keep exploring. There was a built-in, implicit understanding that, whatever happened, I trusted him and he trusted me, as long as we let each other know what was going…

The No-Secrets Polycule

HENRIETTA SOUTHAM vividly recalls the Edwardian-style fanfare that signalled summers at the family cottage on Ontario’s Big Rideau Lake in the ’70s. Her father was Hamilton Southam of the Southam newspaper empire, and every day at the lake was a party worthy of Downton Abbey. At the beginning of each summer, they loaded a boat with long dresses and smoking jackets and even had an old-fashioned squishing apparatus to wring out laundry on the island. Upon arrival at the cottage, they devoured cakes and capons. They wore straw boaters and formal gowns and played tennis and croquet. Marlene Dietrich was a guest one time, and a virtuoso opera singer gave private concerts for years. “It was a genteel paradise,” says Southam, now the owner and designer of Henrietta Southam Design…

GROWING UP, Kyler Zeleny had one goal: to leave his hometown of Mundare, Alberta, a sleepy, 900-person farming community 45 minutes east of Edmonton. He spent most of his childhood on his parents’ farm, shooting bottles with pellet guns and playing in hay bales with his cousins. “It was peaceful, but people thought that to be a success, you had to leave,” he says. At 18, he became one of many millennials to abandon Mundare and nudge the town one step closer toward extinction. He departed for the University of Alberta in Edmonton, then moved to England for an M.A. and, finally, to Toronto Metropolitan University to earn a Ph.D. In 2014, he published his first book, Out West, about life in the Prairies, parachuting in and out of communities…

“The Taliban tried to kill me at 16. Eight years later, I am free in Canada.”

I ATTENDED A PRIVATE ENGLISH SCHOOL in the Jaghori District of Ghazni province, Afghanistan. We’d walk for hours just to reach the old, two-storey mud building where we’d learn English—a language the Taliban consider to be the tongue of traitors and occupiers. In 2013, when I was 15, I graduated from advanced classes and got a job teaching basic English there. More than 400 students attended classes each week. In February of 2014, I left home for what should have been a short trip to buy books in Kabul. My brother Rohullah woke up as I was leaving. We didn’t know it would be years before we’d see each other again. I boarded a bus at the station. As we crossed onto the highway, two men on motorcycles stopped us. They…

“The Taliban tried to kill me at 16. Eight years later, I am free in Canada.”

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