Stella Stosik, 64, of Montreal passed away in peace on Thursday, January 20 from an aortic aneurysm.— Montreal Gazette notice, January 29, 2022
The word that best describes winter 2022 in Canada’s second-most populous city may well be “grim.” By conveying the twin qualities of darkness and otherworldliness, it is perfectly suited to summarizing a season of macabre and strange firsts — and…
James Hughes
James Hughes is the editor of Beyond Shelters: Solutions to Homelessness in Canada from the Front Lines. He lives in Montreal.
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James Hughes
I should probably dislike Erin Dej’s A Complex Exile: Homelessness and Social Exclusion in Canada more than I do. After all, the book is a searing critique of modern homeless shelters and their sometimes paternalistic and exclusionary practices. I happen to run one of those shelters in Montreal, the Old Brewery Mission.
Like other shelters across the…
Even before the pandemic, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation proposed that a group of nurses be called a “compassion.” And since January, compassions have been a regular sight at the shelter I run in downtown Montreal. Every five days or so, with their laptops and super swabs, a half-dozen nurses in full scrubs have been conducting COVID‑19 testing of the people we serve at the Old Brewery…
There is a great ad from the 1980s about Fram oil filters you can still find on Youtube. A mechanic is telling his customer that his colleague, Joe, has been fixing a lot of engines recently. To avoid this cost, he affirms in a friendly and confident way that it is important to change the oil regularly and “put in a new Fram filter when you’re supposed to.” The ad concludes with these legendary words:
Narrator: “You can pay me now [for the filter].”
Joe: “Or you can pay me later [to fix your engine at a much higher cost].”
Since the dawn of the welfare state in Canada (and everywhere else in the developed world for that…