No Little Plans

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 RohnerThomas 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-FlowersLater 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.”

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 NotesWhen 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-CloutierSiila 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-CloutierIn 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 CloutierToward 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 SmithAssociate Producer: Sabrina BrathwaiteExecutive Producer: Katie JensenMusic: 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 NotesThe 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 GrantIn 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 JamesDr. 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 MolepoThroughout 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 SmithAssociate Producer: Sabrina BrathwaiteExecutive Producer: Katie JensenMusic: L CON

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.”

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.”

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.”

The health of our oceans and seas affects everything from human health to food security to global climate and international economics. The seas and oceans provide work to 3 billion people around the world—and they need help from all of us. Water is a very big deal. Here’s some proof: Water covers about 71 percent of the Earth’s surface (USGS Water Science School) Oceans represent 99 percent of the planet’s living space when measured by volume (United Nations) The livelihoods of more than three billion people are reliant on marine and coastal biodiversity; similarly, oceans are the primary source of protein for three billion people (United Nations) And here is Vice’s Motherboard asking a very good question: Why Haven’t We Explored the Ocean[s] Like Outer Space? The purpose of SDG 14 is to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.” Learn more about its targets and indicators, and track their progress, directly from the UN. Canada has the world’s longest coastline—202,080 kilometres spanning the Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. The gap between us and number two is massive: That’s Norway, at a mere 58,133 kilometres. Canada has committed to conserving “at least 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas, consistent with national and international law and based on the best available scientific information” by 2020. According to Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada, by 2017, our efforts had covered close to 8 percent. Alia Dharssi is a Vancouver-based journalist whose work focuses on sustainability, global development and Canada’s policies on plastic pollution. She’s been reporting on the SDGs for the Discourse, and has published articles including: “Plastic pollution pileup on Canada’s beaches exposes environmental policy gaps” “How microplastics get into the food system” “What you can do about plastic pollution” You can follow more of her work on her own website. Josh Laughren is the executive director of Oceana Canada, an offshoot of an American organization founded to address a deficit in spending on ocean advocacy by environmental advocacy groups. He has spent two decades focusing on conservation and climate change, helping to establish marine protected areas across Canada’s coasts and leading our first Earth Hour. Much of his interview for this episode relates to this 2016 article he wrote for iPolitics: “What is Ottawa hiding in our oceans?” It concludes with this challenge to the federal government: The government of Prime Minister Trudeau was elected on a platform of openness and change. This transparency is needed in the management of our fisheries and oceans and it can be created by taking such actions as making public a list of Canada’s fisheries and their status, and releasing the fisheries checklist that is used to conduct stock assessments. By delivering on their election promise to increase transparency, the Trudeau government and Fisheries Minister Hunter Tootoo have an historic opportunity to restore our oceans to their healthiest potential, for now and for generations to come. You can help reduce marine debris by joining the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup, a conservation partnership by WWF and Ocean Wise. It began in 1994, when employees and volunteers from the Vancouver Aquarium worked together to remove debris from a beach in Stanley Park. The effort has since gone national, with well over 20,000 cleanups removing more than 1.3 million kg of trash from Canadian shorelines. CREDITS: No Little Plans is hosted by Vicky Mochama. This episode was produced by Katie Jensen, Sajae Elder and Matthew McKinnon. 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.”

When we think of a homeless person, we tend to see the stereotypical image: an older single guy who is sleeping on the streets. But the reality is way more complicated. Nearly a third of people experiencing homelessness are women. Almost one in five are young people. Families stay in shelters for twice as long as individuals, and Indigenous populations are overrepresented. But how do we fix it? Meet Erin Dej and Jesse Thistle, two experts with big ideas on how to eradicate homelessness in Canada. Erin Dej has a PhD in criminology from the University of Ottawa and an MA in legal studies from Carleton University. She previously held a postdoctoral fellowship with York University’s Canadian Observatory on Homelessness—a “non-partisan research and policy partnership between academics, policy and decision makers, service providers and people with lived experience of homelessness.” She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. At COH’s Homeless Hub, Erin worked on A New Direction, a framework for homelessness prevention that draws on lessons learned from Wales, Scotland, Australia and Germany—countries that have tried, and succeeded with, thoughtful, effective strategies to improve the lives of their neediest citizens. Jesse Thistle previously had what he has called “a long career as a homeless drug addict.” He is now a Trudeau and Vanier Scholar, a Governor General medalist, the resident scholar of Indigenous homelessness at COH and an advocate for the rights of Indigenous homeless people across Canada. His life story and academic works have been widely reported: “He was once a homeless drug addict. Now he’s one of York’s top students” (Toronto Star, 2016)“From street to scholar: Jesse Thistle creates new definition of Indigenous homelessness” (CBC Radio, 2017) Jesse has created “an Indigenous definition for homelessness” that expands far beyond the mere fact of not having a roof to sleep under. His broader understanding of the experience includes a dozen “dimensions” that better explain it. For the full definition of Indigenous homelessness in Canada, visit homelesshub.ca/IndigenousHomelessness. CREDITS: No Little Plans is hosted by Vicky Mochama. This episode was produced by Katie Jensen, Elena Hudgins Lyle, and Matthew McKinnon. 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.”

In 2015, the United Nations challenged the world to meet 17 big goals that have one encompassing ambition: Leave no one behind. The Sustainable Development Goals are meant to improve the health of the planet and the lives of everyone on it. We have until 2030 to achieve them. This is No Little Plans, a podcast about the state of SDG progress in Canada, featuring many of the people who are doing the most to help this country succeed. CREDITS: No Little Plans is hosted by Vicky Mochama of Vocal Fry Studios and produced 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.”