In 1971, more than half of Canadian women worked outside the home. In the opening of a Take 30 episode from that July, host Adrienne Clarkson notes the practice has become rather unremarkable, and the balance between career and homemaking no longer made a woman an “oddity or social outcast.” The main subject of the episode was, at the time, one of the most famous working mothers in Canada—Chatelaine editor, Doris Anderson.
Born in 1921 in Alberta, Doris had a difficult upbringing in her mother’s Depression-era boarding house. She learned a frugality that became imbued in her later work at Chatelaine. According to journalist Michelle Landsberg, there were no expense accounts at the magazine, the supply cabinet was closely monitored, and, in the adjudication of the annual “Ms. Chatelaine” contest, spendthrift women held little chance against pennywise competition.
Doris graduated from the University of Alberta in 1945, and, finding little work out west, moved to Toronto to begin her career in journalism. A familiar story to modern journalists, she held down multiple jobs, including copy editing for Eaton’s advertising department, and researching and writing for one of Canada’s first female radio hosts, Claire Wallace.
She began her relationship with Chatelaine in the advertising department in 1951, and, through intense determination, quickly received promotion to the editorial staff. After five years under editor John Clare, Doris took the reins as managing editor for what became the most studied and controversial period of the periodical. Under her direction, Chatelaine developed a feminist approach, publishing articles about sexuality and women’s rights. The magazine would quickly exceeded the circulation of any other Canadian monthly, despite the formidable competition of U.S. publications.
As house prices in red hot markets like Toronto and Vancouver soar, squeezing out first-time buyers, many have blamed the influx of foreign home buyers for driving up prices. To that end the government of British Columbia, in its 2016 budget, included a promise to track foreign home ownership by requiring all those who buy a home in the province to disclose their citizenship. While the goal is to determine the impact foreign investment has on home prices, the government stopped short of saying what, if anything, it would do with the information.
So what are some options? Here are nine ways other countries and regions (plus one province) have tried to manage foreign investment in local real estate markets.
Mexico: Foreigners can purchase property in the country’s interior region, but are unable to directly buy inside Mexico’s “restricted zones”—a prime area encompassing 100 km from the country’s borders or 50 km from the coastline. However, there are ways to work around the regulations with the fideicomiso, which is essentially a trusteeship in which a Mexican bank holds the deed to the property for the buyer. (A constitutional amendment to ease these restrictions passed the government’s lower house in 2013, but has yet to pass in the Senate.)
Hong Kong: Non-permanent residents and foreign companies should expect an added 15 per cent surcharge on home purchases.
Switzerland: The Swiss government imposes annual quotas for how many homes can be sold to foreign non-residents in the country’s various cantons. Some regions have their own additional restrictions, which could include limiting the size of the property, requiring foreigners to buy homes that are already foreign-owned or setting the bar for non-Swiss at one property per family.
Guernsey: An island located between Britain and France, Guernsey has a two-tier housing market: the local market and the open market. While there are no controls on who can buy in either, only qualified residents can live in local-market housing (meaning foreigners can buy those homes but can’t live in them). If non-qualified residents want to own and live in a home, they must buy one of the 1,597 private dwellings on the open market, which typically are much more expensive. The Open Market Housing Registrar is presently closed, so no new properties are being added to the list.
[. . .]
Prince Edward Island: Yes, P.E.I. is part of Canada, but when it comes to limiting foreign buyers, it shares more in common with other countries. Non-residents—and this applies to Canucks living outside the province too—are limited to five acres of land or 165 feet of shoreline.
The union representing Toronto public library employees have launched a campaign to highlight the growing problem of precarious work.
Toronto Public Library Workers Union Local 4948 says its members represent the highest rate of precarious work of all City of Toronto departments and agencies.
The union says half of workers hold jobs that are part-time, with unstable income, no job security, no benefits and no pensions.
Furthermore, 75 per cent are women and 50 per cent of them work part-time without benefits.
Probably the biggest reason is that Bernie lacks credentials in our community. Relying entirely on something you did in the 60's is something Jesse Jackson wouldn't even do. Even Jesse had to put in work. Next, equally big reason: The Clinton's are family... Plain and simple. They were the first presidents and major politicians to stand with us and pay attention to us. They weren't perfect, but their solidarity with us goes a long way. I'd even go so far as to say that if we knew about Obama what we know now, and he was going against Hillary... Hillary would get a good deal of the black vote. Not a majority. But she'd give him a good run for his money. And, boy, If it was Barack vs Bill... Welcome back Bill! Lol the Clinton's are to black people what the Reagan's are to republicans.
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Edit 3: Ok. This post TOOK off. I feel really bad for not including links to help support my view here, especially because the mods have worked so hard to keep this place neutral and substantive. Here are some useful links now that I'm finally on a laptop and not mobile[.]
Last Men Standing Trailer from San Francisco Chronicle on Vimeo.
Since 1981, when the first man succumbed to a disease that did not yet have a name, AIDS has taken more than 20,000 lives in San Francisco, most of them gay men, most of them decades too soon.
Students and lawyers, musicians and doctors, drugstore clerks and teachers: They were young men exploring sex and drugs, falling in love for the first time, building a political movement. They were still growing up.
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When San Francisco General Hospital opened the nation’s first inpatient AIDS ward, nurses started a scrapbook for photos of patients and staff and thank-you cards from families. They also started a list. On the first page, in 1983, one nurse at Ward 5B wrote: “I don’t want the names of the folks who have died on this ward to be forgotten.” Just 28 carefully handwritten names appear on that page. A few pages later, the list for 1985 contains nearly 200 names, each so tightly scrawled, some are hard to read. The scrapbook is now held at the San Francisco General Hospital AIDS Ward 5B/5A Archives at the Public Library Video by Erin Brethauer
AIDS gutted their generation. But not everyone died. Many men had the remarkable luck — and often brutal misfortune — to struggle on. Now some have fought AIDS for half their lives, and by the most primitive measure, they’ve won.
In San Francisco and across the country, AIDS has become an older person’s disease: More than half of those living with AIDS or HIV, the virus that causes it, are now 50 or older. In San Francisco alone, 6,000 gay men have been living with HIV or AIDS for at least 20 years. Some have been able to thrive. But most have not.
In the darkest years of the epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, AIDS was almost always fatal; the prognosis was a few years, maybe a few months. These men, then in their 20s and 30s, weren’t supposed to make it to 40. Now some are 60 years old, even 70, still alive but wounded physically, psychologically and economically.
For many, time stopped when they were diagnosed. They let go of futures they had no reason to believe would ever arrive. So they have no savings, no retirement money, no strategy for continuing to live in a city that’s increasingly unaffordable. Over the next decade or so, many will need financial aid when private disability benefits run out.
[Tye] Fortner was 22 and homeless when he started feeling weak, with crushing stomach pain and terrible headaches. A sex worker from the age of 16, sometimes too high on crack to remember to use protection, he had been putting off the inevitable for weeks before he finally decided to get tested for HIV. The result came back positive.
“My whole world changed,” Fortner says, recalling the moment six years ago when he received his diagnosis. At first it changed for the worse as he struggled to come to terms with his diagnosis.
But then, it changed for the better.
After years of homelessness and a day-to-day existence, Fortner, now 28, was faced with the tantalizing prospect of a place to sleep, regular meals, and more thorough New York City services provided to people who reach a certain stage of the disease. First he would have to meet their diagnosis requirements; then he would receive help.
“I didn’t know about the services,” he says. “I didn’t know that once you have AIDS you’re entitled to all this other stuff.”
That silver lining was a surprise to Fortner. And while it might seem counterintuitive, contracting the virus has made life easier for other young homeless men in New York City, who in return for developing full-blown AIDS gain a roof over their heads and basic services.
This cruel paradox — having to get really sick in order to enjoy a better, more comfortable life — has not gone unnoticed. “I have experienced people [who are] grateful that they have HIV,” says Sage Rivera, a research associate at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who has worked with hundreds of LGBT youth. “It’s sort of like a sigh of relief or an extra boost,” he says. “There are a whole bunch of different names for HIV within the [LGBT] community: ‘the monster,’ ‘the kitty,’ ‘the scratch,’ ‘the gift that keeps on giving.’ So people say, ‘I have the kitty — so now I can get my place. Now I can get hooked up; I can get my food stamps, I can get this, I can get that.’
A drug that can stop the transmission of HIV is getting within reach of Torontonians who can’t afford its steep price.
Health Canada approved the use of Truvada on Monday as a prevention tool commonly called PrEP, giving people who can’t afford its $830 a month cost hope that they might be able to take it someday soon.
Until now, people using the drug for prevention have mostly been part of a “lucky minority” with “good, private drug insurance coverage,” said Dr. Darrell Tan, an infectious diseases specialist at St. Michael’s Hospital.
“That leaves people with the option of going without or purchasing it out of pocket —which is exorbitantly, prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of individuals,” he said.
Truvada was approved in Canada a decade ago as a management tool for people who already have HIV. Monday’s decision takes that approval further, extending it to include use by HIV negative people who are looking to stay negative.
During this time he came in for his regular HIV test and this showed he had acute HIV infection, with a negative test for HIV antibodies but a positive test for the HIV p24 antigen, which shows up sooner. His HIV viral load three days later was 28,000 copies/ml – rather low for acute HIV infection and suggestive that either his PrEP had ‘blunted’ viral replication without stopping infection, or that the highly drug-resistant virus was replicating weakly.
[. . .]
The resistance test showed that the patient had HIV that had no significant resistance to the protease inhibitor class of antiretrovirals. He had one resistance mutation to the first generation NNRTI drug nevirapine, and complete resistance to emtricitabine. He also had extensive resistance to the first-generation NRTI drugs like zidovudine (AZT) and stavudine (d4T), and these mutations also confer some resistance to tenofovir. However he did not have the so-called K65R mutation that confers high-level resistance to tenofovir, and it was estimated that the resistance pattern he did have only confers 1.3-fold resistance to tenofovir, meaning that drug levels 30% higher than those needed for non-resistant virus should have been enough to prevent infection – and he had much higher drug levels than this in the tests. Resistance, however is a complex process and some combinations of mutations can catalyse higher levels of resistance than they would produce alone.
Not relevant to the apparent PrEP failure, but to the spread of drug resistance, was the fact that this patient also had two resistance mutations to the integrase inhibitor drugs and complete resistance to the drug elvitegravir.
Transmission of HIV with integrase inhibitor resistance is very rare, and especially resistance to drugs other than raltegravir, the first integrase inhibitor. The pattern of resistance observed is compatible with the unnamed person who passed on the virus being on a failing regimen of Stribild (the two-class, four-drug combination pill of tenofovir, emtricitabine, elvitegravir and cobicistat). Given that four out of the five first-line HIV drug regimens recommended by the US Department of Health and Human Services are integrase inhibitor-based, and that this drug class is being investigated for use as PrEP, it would be of concern if more integrase inhibitor-resistant virus started to circulate.
The patient himself was put on a potent three-class regimen of dolutegravir, rilpivirine and boosted darunavir and became virally undetectable only three weeks after starting it.
Sunday marks the 182nd anniversary of the very day back in 1834 that the Legislature of the Province of Upper Canada (after 1867 the Province of Ontario) passed 4th Wm IV, Chap. 23 being an act to extend the limits of the Town of York; to erect the said town into a city and to incorporate it under the name of the City of Toronto.
Now with the legislated ability to run the community under financial rules afforded to cities, Toronto could now institute methods by which it could raise money to pay for infrastructure improvements (sidewalks, sewers, roads, etc. sound familiar?) — actions that were heretofore impossible as a town. First on the list was the implementation of something called property tax. And so the story begins. Next came Toronto’s first municipal election day, when the first representatives were voted into office. That date was March 27, 1834, at which time William Lyon Mackenzie was elected as Toronto’s first mayor.
The map was prepared in June of 1834 by the multi-talented William Chewett (1753 – 1849), one of the Province of Upper Canada’s pioneer surveyors. It depicts the layout of Toronto just weeks after it was elevated from town status (York) to that of city with a new name, Toronto. Some of the features of our present-day city and obvious on Chewett’s map are the meandering Don River (to be straightened into its present confines late in the 1880s), the site of the military garrison (now Fort York) and the new community’s main east-west thoroughfare that was initially called Lot St. so named in recognition of the parcels of land — Lots — that fronted on that street. Lot St. was renamed Queen St. soon after and in honour of the newly crowned Queen Victoria. Near the top left of the map, the land set aside for King’s College is identified. This higher school of learning had received its charter in 1827 and by 1850 had been restructured and renamed the University of Toronto. To allow for expansion, land surrounding the new city’s boundaries was set aside and named the Liberties. More maps showing the growth of our city over the past two centuries can be found at Nathan Ng’s fascinating website oldtorontomaps.blogspot.ca
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