The voices of students used in this piece were collected anonymously from a sample of 37 post-secondary students that have completed unpaid internships.
Today’s graduating students struggle.
Many earn a degree, but have little or no technical experience, and an obvious solution is an internship.
Today, unpaid internships are becoming infamous, warranting headlines and strong reactions.
“I think they are so insidiously evil,” said Bridget Eastgaard, creator of personal finance blog Money After Graduation.
“There is this mind set of the people that have completed unpaid internships. They act like it has made them a better person because they had to struggle so much,” she said.
Eastgaard calls it “The Bootstrapping Millennial Martyrdom Complex”, and has written about it in her blog. Essentially, those who suffered in the early years of their career see it as a rite of passage, and believe all others should too.
And with discussions within federal government trying to protect young workers, the limits of student suffering are up for discussion.
Today, more than ever students are paying to work, giving in to the ‘hidden costs’ of unpaid internships.
The hardest cost is deciding between paid work or an unpaid internship, but for Eastgaard, the benefits of working for free is not worth doing full time.
“I don’t want to see young people working 100 hours a week because they have to have two full time jobs,” she said
More than 50 per cent of the post-secondary students surveyed had part time jobs, and more than half kept those jobs while completing an unpaid internship.
Current proposed federal legislation would allow unpaid internships of four months or less. Originally proposed under the Harper Conservatives, the proposed changes to the Canada Labour Code focus on internships in federally regulated sectors that are “primarily for the benefit of the intern.”
Advocacy groups representing students pulled out of the consultations due to this proposed change.
The average part time job is 15 hours a week, and minimum wage in Ontario is $11.25 an hour; the average student taking four months off of work loses out on at least $2,700 dollars over 16 weeks.
Full time hours would earn them at least $6,300.
Internships can push students to work overtime, creating a struggle to balance budget and build a decent resume.
Quitting a paying job can make things harder.
“It’s one thing to take a job that you’re not getting a pay cheque for, but it’s quite another to leave a job to take a job that you’re not getting a pay cheque for,” said Eastgaard.
Other issues include relocating or commuting costs.
“A really good opportunity sometimes comes with those associated costs of moving,” said Eastgaard.
One student surveyed relocated to stay with family for free, while another spent $1,000 dollars on flights. When asked why they simply said, “one day I want a job.”
Another student took an opportunity abroad that also came with a costly commute. Her employer had promised a bus pass, but that never materialized, causing problems for a tight budget.
Student’s reported spending anywhere from $50 to $10,000 on relocation costs for unpaid positions, with 40 per cent of respondents spending more than $1,000.
Some costs are less obvious as well.
Unpaid internships can also force students into buying new equipment, clothing or joining networking activities.
Students reported spending up to $600 on these ‘satellite’ costs.
Tallied up, internships ranged from one week to five months, and cost anywhere from nothing to $10,000, not including lost wages.
Students keep costs low by staying close to home, living with friends or family, and keeping a tight budget for food and clothing.
In any case, internships are a serious financial burden, but a dream opportunity is hard to pass up.
Eastgaard’s advice is to evaluate the ROI— return on investment.
“When you’re considering an internship that is going to impact your finances in a negative way, make sure that it ultimately will have a positive ROI in your career,” she said.
“It can’t be just like ‘yay I’m bringing someone coffee in publishing.”
When it comes to the students, some call internships “a necessary evil,” while others feel they “should be illegal.”
Feed Mills like this one in Lethbridge Alberta are the source of particulate matter releases, which have almost doubled in the Animal Food Manufacturing industry since 2014. (Credit: Hi Pro Feeds)
Air pollution emissions from Canada’s Animal Food Manufacturing industry have increased 92 per cent since 2011 according to Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Reported Pollution Data.
In 2014, Environment and Climate Change Canada reported that 38 facilities were producing 1,917 tonnes of air emissions, a jump from the 2011 reports that record just 996 tonnes of air pollution across 36 facilities, almost a quarter of which are found in Alberta.
An almost doubling in emissions signifies a boom in the industry, which serves North American livestock and agriculture markets.
The major pollutant is particulate matter, the form of air pollution most associated with health risks.
“Fine particulate matter is a real mix of different components,” said Kim Perotta, the Executive Director of CAPE, the Canadian Association of Physician’s for the Environment.
She added that particulate matter is linked to “increases in rates of heart disease, acute health impacts around lung disease, and increased in rates of lung cancer.”
The issue of particulate matter emissions are evident to Holly Nicoll, Director of Marketing at Hi Pro Feeds, an Alberta based animal food manufacturer.
Up until last year, the Hi Pro mill in Olds, Alberta was producing a significant amount of particulate matter pollution, in this case dust. But in 2015 improvements were made.
“I’d be there for the day and I’d get in my car and there would be grain dust on my windshield,” said Nicoll.
In 2014 alone, the Olds location released 292 tonnes of particulate matter into the air, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. The emissions were primarily releases from pressurized equipment.
“We went about doing some upgrades, putting in filters and screens to reduce any dust coming out of the mill,” said Nicoll.
“Now I can go there and there’s no such thing.”
Air Pollution outside of Edmonton’s Sherwood Park neighbourhood (Credit: Wolfgang Schlegl via flickr)
Air pollution and emissions targets are handled on the provincial level, and legislation has shown clear improvements, said Perotta.
In September of 2015, Alberta Environment Minister Shannon Phillips said the province is on track to have the worst air quality in Canada unless immediate action is taken. Phillips plan has focused primarily on the oil industry and coal-fired power plants in the province.
“The time to act is long overdue,” she said at a press conference.
It’s something Nicoll and Hi Pro have recognized.
“It’s all part of the equation in terms of being responsible in the industry,” she said.
But the business has grown, and expansion is positive for the economy and for efficiency.
“We want to be as efficient as possible and in doing that I think the efficiencies that we’re creating in the business are actually helping in terms of emissions,” she said.
But environmental sustainability is one issue, and there are many priorities the industry has to manage.
“The biggest challenge that we’re facing right now is government regulations, and more importantly food safety,” said Nicoll.
Perotta says that government regulations make a difference, and when it comes to controlling pollution and air emissions those regulations are a powerful tool.
She attributes much of the improvement seen today in provinces like Ontario to legislation action.
“We have seen a response to changes in regulations that have required changes in technology, and have resulted in improvements in air quality,” she says.
But until those same kinds of regulations are established in Alberta, what it comes down to is efficiency.
“The industry is expanding,” she says. “We’ve got to feed the world.”
In today’s market it takes a lot more than a quality deposit for a mining junior to make it big. In today’s graphite industry, it’s nowhere near enough.
For Focus Graphite Inc., an Ottawa based exploratory mining company no amount of technical success seems enough. Started as Focus Metals Inc. in 2001, it established itself as a lead mining junior in Canada in the early 2010’s, signing the first major offtake agreement with a Chinese conglomerate, positioning it at the forefront of a whole new market. That positioned it at the front of a whole new market.
Former Focus Graphite Inc. President and Chief Operating Officer Donald Baxter, P.Eng. spoke on their Focus Graphite’s Li-ion battery-ready graphite material on BNN in May of 2014. Baxter has since ended his relationship with Focus Graphite Inc. (via YouTube)
“We went out too far too fast,” says Chester Burtt, who sits on the board of directors for Focus Graphite.
“We found ourselves out there all alone.”
China today produces almost 70 per cent of the world’s graphite, but with the demand for higher quality deposits for green technologies, many companies both within and outside of China are looking for the next big supplier.
Focus was the chosen one, but the thrill was short lived.
“We failed to realize that the adoption of [electric vehicles] and green technology applications didn’t proceed as fast as we thought it did, and as fast as we were going,” says Burtt.
Today, Focus Graphite finds itself on the other end of the spectrum, struggling without a market in an industry still recovering from the commodity crash,.
Focus stock has been in decline since early 2012, and in early December sat at 0.09 cents a share.
Burtt says things are looking up.
“We’ve come back to center,” he says, describing the company’s move in the spring of 2015 to end their relationship with Donald Baxter, appointed president in September of 2013.
Baxter was reportedly moving the company towards lithium-battery operations, prioritizing the arguably more niche market.
Today, Focus has returned to the original vision of President and CEO Gary Economo, whose experience in the tech industry spans decades. It’s a vision which, Economo says, is all about “being able to provide better solutions for green energy creation, green energy transmission, and energy storage.”
The only thing he says is standing in its way right now, is communication.
“The market doesn’t really understand or realize who we are and what we’re doing,” he says.
The answer: it’s building a mine.
Publishing feasibility studies and results demonstrating the quality of the crystalline flake graphite found at Focus Graphite’s key deposit, the exploration company is shifting to development.
Its key project Lac Knife is located in the Côte Nord region of Québec, and Focus says it is one of the highest-grade flake graphite deposits in the world.
As there is no leading graphite-miner in Canada, exploration companies, including Ottawa neighbor and competitor Northern Graphite Corp., are racing to develop mines on their highest quality graphite deposits.
With industry giant Tesla Motors Inc. planning to build a $5 billion lithium-ion battery “Gigafactory” in Nevada – sourcing its raw materials from North America exclusively- graphite producers in Canada and the United States are in a rat-race to find out who can be the first to supply Tesla.
“We’re the only one at the end of the day that can supply them with what they want, the quality and the purity, in the time frame that they need it, and that’s within 24 months,” says Burtt.
“In reality only a couple of these mines are going to make it to production,” he says. “The rest are just a stock-market story.”
With 100 per cent ownership of Lac Knife, Focus certainly had a good place to start. But work since has been challenging, and the next steps are daunting; finishing permitting, securing funding, and getting its mining license.
The plan is for a low-cost open pit mine, for which it needs $165 million, two-thirds of which is reportedly already committed.
Much of that support comes from the Quebec government, looking to create more jobs in those communities. It’s the last $60 million that’s proving an issue.
“We have people interested in us, but we just have to get the market to play along,” says Burtt.
But that’s not the only door open for Focus.
They’re closely tied to Grafoid Inc., an Ottawa based graphene research, development, and investment company. The two companies share management members, including CEO Economo.
With a signed offtake agreement with Grafoid, the product from Lac Knife can be used to develop and expand applications of graphene, the modern magic mineral.
“It’s the most surprising material that has been discovered in the last 20 years in terms of its properties,” says Michael Hilke, associate professor at McGill University’s Physics Department.
“It’s only 10 years old and there’s already a number of applications either in design or already on the market,” he says.
“That’s very fast.”
Graphene is more than 200 times stronger than steel by weight, conducts heat and electricity and is nearly transparent. Between bio-applications, photo-voltaics, and mechanical applications, the future of graphene today is thought by some to be limitless.
“Focus Graphite’s future is linked to Grafoid,” says Burtt.
Or so Focus hopes.
“We’re visionaries developing our own end markets,” says Economo. “We’re much different than all the other junior exploration companies.”
An athlete’s fight against average, to cross the finish line against all odds.
Photography and Story by Clare Bonnyman.
A kilometer away, and Michelle Rumney’s feet were sore.
After 225 kilometers, and over 16 hours, her body was breaking. “My body just said, ‘what are you doing? ’It started shutting down.”
So close to the finish, Rumney came up the final hill, met a friend, and took a selfie. Minutes later, she ran across the line, hearing the announcer declare her one of the final finishers of Ironman Canada 2015. Pulled away to the medic, assessed and free to go home, Rumney sat with friends to watch fireworks, and left with the fleeting sense of accomplishment.
It was all over- for now.
Average is relative. To many, Rumney is average.
An average 50 year-old mother of four from Barrie, Ontario. A full-time elementary teacher. A wife of almost thirty years, a sister and a daughter. Rumney is also an average Ironman triathlete, travelling 226 kilometers at an average of 16 hours and losing about 4 toenails; usually.
Average is relative, but Rumney is part of a community pushing beyond, creating a new normal. Pitting themselves and everything they’ve got against the clock to cross the finish line.
To those who know an Ironman, or any triathlete, this mindset is about as average as it gets. An Ironman race is unlike any in the world, challenging athletes on a 3.86 km swim, a 180.25 km bike ride, and a marathon – 42.2 km of running to cross the finish line. Today hundreds of thousands compete in Ironman races around the world. From June to August, they fight alone against the clock to beat 16 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds, the cutoff time for the race.
Rumney’s official time for her second Ironman Canada – in Muskoka on August 29, 2015 – was 16 hours, 20 minutes, and 29 seconds. Not bad considering fifteen months earlier at the Rose City Half Ironman in Welland, Rumney felt a stabbing pain in her leg and walked the final 18 kilometers.
Six months later she was lying in the Royal Victoria hospital in Barrie with a misdiagnosis.
“They thought I had a torn meniscus, but they read the scan wrong,” she says. “They shouldn’t have gone in there at all.”
Instead, doctors found the back of Rumney’s patella was fragmented. They shaved it and left three small scars on her knee. Had they not gone in at all, they would have given her cortisone shots, impairing her ability to train. Rumney wouldn’t have been crossing the finish line ten months later.
A small price to pay to compete, something Rumney takes with a grain of salt.
“Great and not great,” she says.
The race of course, isn’t just a single day commitment. An Ironman race takes months if not years of dedication and training, leading to a season that lasts just three months. Most athletes compete in one event per season, and spend the rest of the year training.
It’s a sport one falls into, but not one you can excel at by luck or chance.
Fifteen years ago the death of her son led Rumney to give triathlons a go.
A life long athlete, she remembers then, “…Just doing activities to do activities, and I said I might as well do something with it.”
Her son died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), the unforeseen, unexplainable death of a child less than one year of age. It’s a diagnosis that remains a mystery even after a thorough autopsy, and today accounts for for 80 per cent of unexpected infant deaths. The exact cause of SIDS is unknown, but the aftermath is life changing.
Turning to triathlons, Rumney quickly developed a passion, channeling her energy and focus into physical activity, anything to bring herself back out into the world. In the 15 years since, Rumney has taught courses, coached athletes, and of course competed. Now Rumney is a member of the Barrie Baydogs, a 100-member triathlon club, even sitting as president for almost two years.
But her first Ironman was a secret.
Registering for an official Ironman race isn’t as easy as an email. The cost for a general entry is upwards of $200, dependent on when you register and where you race. Then there are costs for equipment, transportation, hotel, and more.
Rumney’s first race was small – only a few dozen athletes in Ottawa. She signed up quietly at Christmas.
“I didn’t tell anybody I was doing it until almost June,” she says. “Because ‘average sized’ people don’t do triathlons.”
As a regular-sized woman, Rumney knew she didn’t look like what people think an Ironman athlete is meant to look like. But following her first half distance race, she couldn’t help herself.
“They say, ’well once you’ve done a half you might as well do a full.’ I don’t know who says that but apparently someone does.”
On the day of her first full race, a hot Saturday in September 2010, Rumney raced alongside athletes passed out from exhaustion. Her feet blistered and swollen, she summoned the energy to stand after the bike, and began the marathon.
“This lovely volunteer says ‘honey are you going out on a run?’ and I say yes, and she says ‘you might want to take your bike helmet off’.”
“All I thought was are you fucking kidding me?”
After removing her helmet, she finished in just over 15 hours.
Her second race was a different story. Following her surgery in November, Rumney was in recovery, returning to school in a wheelchair and then crutches to deliver progress reports.
Her focus was getting better, and getting back to the gym. But in January and February her knee started to swell.
From that point onward, Rumney was in intensive therapy mode. She even purchased a personal ultrasound machine. The last two weeks before she raced Muskoka were filled with a circuit of eight specialist appointments. She would go from physiotherapy, to the chiropractor, to massage, and then to an osteopath, moving from most painful therapy to least.
She wasn’t running until May, and the farthest she was able to go was 10 km, a far cry from the marathon she signed up for. Her commitment was almost spiritual.
“As soon as you start giving yourself an excuse, you might as well throw it in because there is a thousand reasons why I shouldn’t have even started, and I chose not to listen.”
“It’s a choice.”
The decisions Rumney and other Ironmen make are reflected in the struggle each of them face in the final portion of the race.
Ironman-series triathlons are largely thankless, with top competitors qualifying for the championship race in Kona Hawaii, held every October. Only one athlete in the world is dubbed the Ironman each year, but most athletes don’t care. Thousands collapse, cry, and crawl to the finish line.
“There can only be one winner, and everybody else is cannon fodder,” Rumney says. “You finish because you choose to. You choose to suffer, you choose to throw up, and you choose to feel like crap, just to finish. It’s something you manage; it’s not something you race. If you don’t do it for yourself you might as well not do it.”
After crossing the finish line, Rumney received her medal, gathered her gear, and went to her hotel. The next day she drove back to Barrie and arrived home to her husband and youngest son, and got ready for work. School was to start Sept. 8, and Rumney had plenty to do.
A teacher for 16 years, she had to set up her classroom. Filling it with beanbags, yoga balls, and stools, she prepared herself for the entrance of 22 new students, and her personal brand of controlled chaos in a ‘freeform classroom’.
Her all-in approach to life extends to her classroom.
Every morning she wakes up at 5:30 a.m. If she doesn’t have practice –she coaches three basketball teams and the cross-country team- she takes herself to the gym.
She hasn’t run since the race, still struggling with her leg. Though the season is done, Rumney can’t take it easy. It’s a public service: “I need to be at the gym; I don’t want to kill anybody.”
Post-gym, she makes her way to school. When her kids arrive she takes them for a run around the block or to the gym, warming them up for learning.
It’s all a part of Rumney’s philosophy.
“If you want someone settled and focused, you need to run the crap out of them first.”
Rumney will continue to run the crap out of herself as she sets her sights on her next race. She wants to race every five years for as long as she can. “It’s a choice to be healthy or not,” she says.
A choice Rumney has had to fight for.
She has arthritis, and it runs in her family. It’s the same diagnosis that led her brother to get his feet fused this year – the procedure one of her sisters had last year. While hers isn’t quite as debilitating, Rumney can’t change a tire. She doesn’t have the hand strength.
But it’s all part of her ‘ordinary’ she says.
“Last year my ordinary was not being able to do a squat without a lot of pain, this year that’s not my ordinary. I take whatever is my ordinary, knowing that everything is changeable, both the bad and the good.”
Growing up, her parents encouraged activity. The kids were encouraged to try just about everything, and weren’t allowed to quit until they’d carried it through the season. They were assumed to be active, but it’s a normal that only Rumney has sustained into middle age.
When it comes to her Ironman plans, she’s got a wealth of support. But do they understand swimming, biking and running 225 kilometers in a day, on a bad leg, with arthritis?
For two years I was proud to have hosted and managed Charlatan Live, a weekly news radio show on CKCU FM in Ottawa.
The show has officially closed for the season, but remains an incredible experience in news gathering and production, interviews, news writing, broadcast journalism and audio editing.
All the episodes from the last two years are now officially up and archived on the CKCU FM website:
Carleton alumni Jeff Davis and Jonah Brotman made their pitch on Dragon’s Den on Feb. 3, walking away with $50,000 and the support of Canada’s wealthiest barber.
Davis and Brotman met at Carleton during their undergraduate studies and have since co-founded the StashBelt, a belt with a built in zipper that travellers can use to safely carry money or documents.
The products are handmade in Kenya, and were inspired by Davis’s experience working as a journalist in Nairobi. While reporting on post-election violence in 2007, Davis was arrested and accused of being an American spy.
“He didn’t have his passport on him,” Brotman said. “But he did have a little money belt that his dad had actually hand sewn for him, and so he popped it off, opened the zipper, and pulled out photocopy of his passport, which is what got him out of jail.”
Davis came back from Kenya, enlisted the help of friends Brotman and Seth Rozee, and in late 2011 StashBelt was born.
A successful Indiegogo campaign in 2013 raised $10,000 for the project, and on Season nine of CBC’s Dragon’s Den, the team asked for $50,000 for a 33 per cent stake in the company.
To prepare for the show, the team practiced their 90-second pitch for weeks. “As much as I hate to admit it, since childhood my father has always said practice, practice, practice,” Brotman said. “He was right.”
But being comfortable in front of Canada’s richest and most influential business people was by no means a small task for Davis, Rozee and Brotman, but their passion goes beyond business. “I think that comfort comes when you know your product, you really believe in the mission,” Brotman said. “It’s about supporting a trade not aid mentality, and about empowering Kenyans.”
Pitching $50,000 for a third of their business, the trio walked away with $50,000 from ‘The Wealthy Barber’ Dave Chilton. Chilton also offered to be a mentor to the trio.
“That’s something that is really exciting for us,” Brotman said. “He’s sort of supporting us not just as a monetary investor, but he’s really giving his time and his support to help grow our business.”
Looking now to expanding into big retailers and across North America, the threesome behind Stashbelt is looking to share the experience.
“We just started it because we had a passion for it,” Brotman said. “A lot of students often feel like unless they study business they can’t do some of these things.”
But that’s not the case.
“You should try,” he said. “People can do a lot more than they think they can.”
Folk music fans filled the Bronson Centre on Nov. 29 to celebrate the country’s best performers in the genre. The 10th annual Canadian Folk Music Awards showcased traditional and innovative Canadian folk musicians.
The Centretown venue was packed to the rafters in a ceremony that was live streamed and broadcast across Canada.
Gerri Trimble, program officer for the music section of the Canada Council for the Arts, has watched the development of the diverse community and says how unique the Canadian folk music scene really is.
“It’s a huge field,” she says. “I think (folk is) a broad word, which is of course is blessing. It’s the greatness of it, the bounty of the whole thing.”
The Canada Council supports musicians financially to help them broaden their reach and develop their craft and was a sponsor of this year’s CFMAs.
“Little grants here and there, whether it’s a travel grant or a grant to compose music, make a difference and it makes a contribution to the vitality of the folk scene,” says Trimble.
In recent years, the Canadian folk music scene has expanded, with new festivals appearing every year.
“I think it wandered in the wilderness for a while,” says Ottawa-born David Newland, Canadian folk musician and poet.
Newland was working behind the scenes at this year’s awards, running the live stream and interviewing winners.
“There has always been a weird dance between folk music and technology,” he says. “People didn’t know what to do.”
In 2009, Newland co-founded Roots Music Canada, a multimedia blog following Canadian folk musicians. It’s an example of how technology is enabling modern artists to share their music more effectively than ever.
Various online platforms give musicians the means to control their own careers. They can record and produce independently, sharing and spreading their work online, he says.
The ability for musicians to control their own career and be their own label is a serious help for emerging folk artists, but not the only option.
True North Records, Canada’s oldest independent record label, has championed folk music since 1969. The Juno Award-winning label works with industry greats Bruce Cockburn and Gordon Lightfoot and newcomers such as East Coast artist Matt Andersen and Winnipeg’s Del Barber.
“All of us came up for the awards,” says David MacMillan, marketing director at True North. “We were the ones making all the noise.”
True North Records had 15 artist nominations at this year’s CFMAs. Group The High Bar Gang won vocal group of the year, while Matt Anderson took home contemporary singer of the year.
The company helps bring Canadian folk music to national and international audiences. Though the industry can be difficult to break into, MacMillan doesn’t think this should discourage artists from trying.
“From booking gigs to a car breaking down on you, there’s a million kinds of challenges,“ he says. “If you can get out there and promote it, then play it.”
Lynn Miles, an Ottawa-based musician, is signed to True North Records. A performer at the show this year, Miles enjoys the awards for the community aspect.
“Everybody’s always on the road, so when you cross paths with people, its always fun to talk and just laugh about how ridiculous it all is,” she says.
Miles’ career has spanned 40 years and about a dozen albums.
“Because of things like these awards and CBC and other radio stations that actually play our music, (the industry is) supported a little bit more now,” she says.
But she’s full of advice for young Canadian folk musicians hoping for a big break.
“I always say follow your heart, follow the art — the money will either arrive or it won’t,” she says.
Beyond that, her message is one of dental wisdom.
“If you’re a musician, you don’t have a dental plan,” Miles says, “so start flossing now.”
(Edited and condensed before publishing on Centretown News Friday November 28, below find my original feature-length piece)
By Clare Bonnyman
It’s a story for the ages: a young Canadian travels to Turkey, falls in love, and finds herself married to a Kurdish freedom fighter.
That is the story of Laurie Fraser, an Ottawa-based writer whose novel The Words Not Spoken – based off her real life – was featured in a recent celebration of Kurdish culture at the Main branch of the Ottawa Public Library.
It was Laurie’s marriage to a member of a Kurdish militant organization in 1994 that moved her to the small Turkish village of Gorema.
Fraser was on hand to share her story on Nov. 15 at the library’s first ”Words and Kurds” cultural event.
“Hopefully the lines between my actual experiences and pure fiction are seamless,” says Fraser. “The fiction is believable, and the truth is sometimes outrageous.”
The afternoon featured Fraser alongside Carleton University professor Jaffer Sheyholislami, sharing literature inspired by the culture of Kurdistan, an area that straddles Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran, with a population of approximately 28 million.
Since 1983, continued acts of political violence overrun Kurdistan.
Kurdish nationalist organizations seek to establish an independent nation state of Kurdistan, while other groups campaign for Kurdish autonomy.
“We said we should look at the lighter side of things and shed some light on what else Kurds do,” says Sheyholislami. “Like any other people they live, they have music, they have poetry.”
The event was designed to open a “dialogue on current issues, and to share past experiences,” says event organizer and master of ceremonies Jeghir Jahangir, of the Kurdish Youth Association of Canada.
The KYAC coordinates events to celebrate Kurdish identity and freedom. While most events take a political stance, this event was designed to celebrate and share Kurdish culture.
“It’s not about news, it’s not about politics,” says Fraser. “Let’s just share stories.”
But the political struggle of the Kurdish people was recognized throughout the afternoon.
Sheyholislami introduced his poetry readings with a nod to the current Kobane resistance, where “sons and fathers, daughters and mothers, side by side have been defending their town against the onslaught of ISIS for the past two months.”
The event was held only a day after news broke that Michael Zehaf-Bibeau – the gunman involved in the Ottawa shootings on October 22 – was surfing the Web in the same Metcalfe Street library branch in the days leading up to his attack on Parliament.
The Canadian government has claimed that Zehaf-Bibeau’s actions were ideologically motivated, and that he was inspired by ISIS. Recent reports state that he was radicalized as far back as 2009.
But the crowd looked to the future when Sardar Saadi — a University of Toronto PhD student — tuned in via Skype to share information about the Rojava Media Project.
The project aims at assisting youth in the Rojava region of Kurdish Syria, empowering them in a “multi-religious, multi-ethnic region that has been exploited by so many powers,” said Saadi.
The event closed with footage from Saadi’s visit to Rojava this past August. He spent two weeks with nine students, training and equipping them to produce documentaries.
For many, it was their first time holding a camera.
Saadi hopes to return to Rojava, but in the meantime is sharing his work at Kurdish events across Canada, working closely with organizations like the KYAC and activists like Jahangir.
“While there is a political resistance side,” says Jahangir, “there is also a cultural resistance side.”
New provincial anti-smoking regulations ban the sale of tobacco products on post-secondary campuses. The legislation comes into effect in January, removing tobacco products from the shelves of campus retailers across Ontario.
For most Ottawa institutions, the regulation won’t change anything. Algonquin College and University of Ottawa removed tobacco products from campus retailers’ years ago, meanwhile Carleton University has not.
Of the Carleton retailers, no vendor overseen directly by the university sells tobacco products. However, retailers run by the student groups the Carleton University Student Association and Rideau River Residence Association, do.
“This is something that’s been coming for quite some time,” said CUSA Business Operations Manager Rod Castro. “We just never really knew what the time frame was.”
Castro oversees Henry’s convenience store on the Carleton University campus, a centrally located spot for students to pick up a snack, and where they used to be able to buy cigarettes.
Castro said that they are not the stores top-selling item, as “cigarettes are more of a traffic creating item, sort of like gas is at a gas station.”
However the legislation will have a significant financial effect.
“Cigarette sales is probably 20-25% of our total sales, and there really is no replacement for that type of revenue” said Castro.
“Literally I expect a drop in sales of about 20 or 25 percent, instantly.”
CUSA’s cigarette sales for the 2014-2015 school year were estimated at $53,000 in profit. As the legislation is only in effect for one of the three semesters, a profit-loss of approximately a third, or $17,666, could be predicted for CUSA.
Students forced to search off campus for a pack of smokes.
New provincial legislation is going to make buying a package of cigarettes more different for students at Carleton University.
Other institutions in Ontario have already implemented bans on the sale of tobacco products and even smoking on campuses, some leading up to the expected regulations.
“We’ve definitely been preparing for it,” said CUSA President Folarin Odunayo. “There were discussions when we first heard about the law coming about, and other situations on campuses across the country.”
But unlike other campuses, Odunayo and CUSA chose not to make a decision for the Carleton community.
“We can certainly encourage students to not smoke and inform and educate students about the health hazards of smoking, but I don’t really think it is in our position to ban things from the campus,” said Odunayo.
He said CUSA “can only provide the information, students are mature enough to make decisions on their own.”
CUSA welcomes initiatives onto campus to educate students about the hazards of smoking, like Leave The Pack Behind, a youth-oriented tobacco control program that has had a presence on campus throughout the fall.
International student Ivana Kolkovic came to Carleton from Serbia, and as a smoker says she is against the new regulations.
“I just feel that there are so many other things that are as dangerous as smoking,” said Kolkovic.
She says it is a personal choice whether or not to smoke.
“There are many issues around it,” she said. “People think that you smoke because you cannot cope with your problems and things like that, but I think that things are more complex.”
Odunayo says that unlike other Ottawa campuses that have more strict rules around smoking, CUSA didn’t feel that it was in any position to restrict students.
“You’ve got to ask yourself, is CUSA in the position to ban anything from campus?” he said. “We only have to provide a safe environment.”
Cassandra Leblonde, a second year English major who lives off campus, said she doesn’t know if she’d walk from campus to Bank Street to pick up a pack.
“Depends how much I wanted some smokes,” she said. “It’s a pretty big addiction.”
Facts and Figures about Tobacco on campus.
facts sourced from:
A 2004 study by Physicians for a Smoke Free Canada and a 2006 report by the University of Waterloo.
Clare Bonnyman 