Issue 12 (HOME) (December 5, 2022) (Volume 143)

THE VARSITY

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The University of Toronto’s Student Newspaper Since 1880

UTMSU holds protest demanding that U of T terminate UTM professor

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Jadine Ngan editor@thevarsity.ca

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Al Aref Helal utm@thevarsity.ca UTM Bureau Chief

Alyanna Denise Chua utsc@thevarsity.ca UTSC Bureau Chief

Emma Livingstone grad@thevarsity.ca Graduate Bureau Chief

Lexey Burns, Nawa Tahir Varsity Editors

On November 30, the University of Toronto Mississauga Students’ Union (UTMSU) held a protest calling on the university to terminate UTM Professor Robert Reisz. Executives from the Prevention, Empowerment, Advocacy, Re sponse, for Survivors (PEARS) Project also spoke at the event. The protest occurred out side the William G. Davis Building at UTM, with around 40 students in attendance.

Ten days prior to the protest, The Varsity published an article detailing an external inves tigation that U of T commissioned, which found that Reisz had violated the university’s Policy on Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment. In re sponse, the PEARS Project released an open letter calling on U of T to terminate Reisz, com mission a review of how the university imple mented its policies, publicly condemn Reisz’s actions, and issue an official apology to sur vivors. As of December 4, the open letter has amassed over 1,700 signatures.

The protest

UTMSU President Maëlis Barre started the protest with an announcement describing the logistics and support available to attendees through UTMSU’s peer support program. The UTMSU had also offered free shuttle bus tickets to anyone from UTSG who wanted to partici pate in the event.

Reagan Roopnarine, vice-president equity of the UTMSU, reiterated the demands that PEARS listed in its open letter.

“Robert Reisz is not an isolated issue,” said Roopnarine. “He is the product of institutional practices that tuck harassment under the rug. He is the product of policies that put the com fort of predators over the safety of survivors.”

Micah Kalisch, founder and director of PEARS, also spoke at the protest. Kalisch said that they’ve talked to survivors who feel help less and hopeless “because this university will not protect them, will not support them, and will not remove their abusers from campus.”

Klark Janowski, the arts and advocacy lead at PEARS, told protest attendees that she’d re cently emailed U of T President Meric Gertler, telling him that the Sexual Violence Prevention

& Support Centre (SVPSC) didn’t help her when she tried to seek support after experiencing sexual assault. Janowski read out the reply that she received from the president’s office to the crowd. “I’ve had horoscopes more sincere than that email,” she said.

In the response she received from the presi dent’s office, the executive assistant of the president wrote that Janowski’s email would be forwarded to the SVPSC. Janowski believes that, by forwarding an email about SVPSC’s negligence to the SVPSC, the president’s office violated the university’s sexual violence policy, which states that U of T will treat disclosures and reports in accordance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

Following the speeches, protestors entered the building and marched upstairs to Reisz’s office, where they found that someone had re moved Reisz’s name from the nameplate. The protestors gathered outside the closed door and taped up signs, including ones that read “We stand against racism” and “Silence = Com pliance” written in red and black. They also put up red tape across the office door.

Afterwards, organizers led the crowd in sev eral chants on the building’s front steps before the protest dispersed.

The UTMSU organized a decompression space for the attendees following the protest, providing support and a safe space to con nect with other individuals. The decompression space included drinks and snacks, as well as games, colouring pages, and music.

Student reactions

Liam McFadden, a protest attendee and presi dent of the horror club at UTM, told The Varsity that individuals like Reisz are “ruining academia for the next generation.”

“Professors have a job to inspire and train the next generation, and [Reisz is] doing a major disservice to science itself,” McFadden said.

In an interview with The Varsity, Kalisch said that the turnout at the protest demonstrates the “continued resiliency of our student body to keep each other safe and hold the university accountable.”

Campus Safety officers present Campus Safety officers also attended the pro

test. Kalisch viewed their presence as an indi cation that U of T cares more about its property than the student body.

Barre also noted the presence of Campus Safety. In an email to The Varsity, Barre wrote that one officer introduced themself to the or ganizers before the protest started, but the UT MSU wasn’t aware other officers were present until after the protest ended. “Campus Safety was not wearing a uniform or any other visible identification,” wrote Barre.

A UTM spokesperson explained that, “At the onset of this event, Campus Safety officers in plainclothes proactively identified themselves to the organizers to let them know they were present.”

According to Barre, some attendees told the organizers that they felt uncomfortable because of Campus Safety’s presence.

Next steps

Kalisch stressed that this protest was only a first step. “This isn’t something that’s going to blow over,” they told The Varsity. According to Ka lisch, PEARS and student unions plan to con tinue pressuring U of T to fulfill the open letter demands.

Sarah Rana, vice president equity of the University of Toronto Students’ Union (UTSU), told The Varsity that executives of the UTMSU, UTSU, and Scarborough Campus Students’ Union plan to attend future meetings with the university administration. She said that the stu dent unions will pressure U of T to have another professor take over the two courses Reisz is scheduled to teach next semester. Both cours es — BIO354 and BIO356 — are required for UTM’s paleontology major.

“We don’t think that students should be put in an uncomfortable position just because they’d like [to take] a mandatory requirement [for] a degree,” said Rana.

The UTSU is also putting together an infor mation access request for the investigation U of T conducted on Reisz, which the university has not disclosed to the public. The UTSU plans to ask the other student unions, as well as indi vidual students, to do the same.

With files from Jadine Ngan.

Parmis Mehdiyar business@thevarsity.ca Business Manager

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Abdulmunem

Robert Reisz violated sexual harassment policy, scheduled to teach two courses in winter

The UTMSU and PEARS Project posted signs condemning Robert Reisz on his office.

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The breakdown: Knowing your rights while living in residence

Are you a student tenant? The Varsity explains your rights

Jessie Schwalb Assistant News Editor

U of T students living on campus are entitled to certain rights, which are outlined in various legal agreements and laws. For example, when stu dents agree to live in a U of T residence, they are required to sign occupancy agreements, each with their own terms and conditions.

In this article, The Varsity breaks down three important legal documents — residence-specific occupancy agreements, the Residential Tenan cies Act (RTA), and Ontario’s Human Rights Code — for students to understand their rights as ten ants and the protections these acts and codes have for their residents.

Occupancy agreements

According to a U of T spokesperson, each resi dence’s occupancy agreement outlines the rights and responsibilities of student tenants. All stu dents living on residence must sign an occupan cy agreement specific to their college or campus. The fine print of these agreements outlines how students must act while living in residence and discloses important information to students. For example, signatories of the University of St. Michael’s College occupancy agreement effec tively acknowledge that certain college’s facili ties “contain asbestos in one form or another.”

Although older buildings often contain asbestos, a U of T spokesperson assured The Varsity that facility operators ensure the asbestos poses no risks to students and staff.

To prevent the spread of bedbugs, the Trinity College, Innis College, and Chelsea Hotel occu pancy agreements specify that, if bedbugs are detected, residents won’t be relocated to a new room.

Of the agreements covering residences at UTSG, only the Chelsea Hotel occupancy agree ment specifies that “every effort will be made to address maintenance issues in a timely manner.”

No other occupancy agreement commits the uni versity to maintain rooms in any specific condi tion of livability. “Though it may not be noted in Occupancy Agreements, all residences address maintenance issues on a priority basis,” wrote a U of T spokesperson.

The Residential Tenancies Act

The provincial RTA was first passed in 2006. This act requires Ontario landlords to simplify the lan guage of leases, limits the amount that landlords can increase rent, and allows tenants to appeal conflicts to an independent tribunal or court of justice. According to the act, landlords must also keep living accommodations in good condition and reimburse tenants if landlords evict them be cause of renovations.

The RTA does not apply to residences pro vided by educational institutions, provided that “the living accommodation is provided primarily to persons under the age of majority, or all major questions related to the living accommodation are decided after consultation with a council or association representing residents.”

According to the U of T spokesperson, “All of our student residences have a residence council, association or committee which provides stu dents with the opportunity to voice concerns and consult on all elements of the residence experi ence, such as residence life activities, furniture replacement needs, utilities, and rate increases.”

Residences meet this requirement in a variety of ways. Some colleges, such as Woodsworth and University College, consult formal residence councils on student issues. Other colleges, such as Trinity, do not consult residence councils but instead bring questions related to residence to various elected student leaders.

Human rights protections for tenants Although university residences are not covered

under the RTA , they are subject to Ontario’s Human Rights Code . This document affirms renters’ right to “equal treatment in housing without discrimination and harassment.” Un der the Code , landlords can request rental or credit history but cannot use a lack of rental or credit against a potential tenant. The Code also prevents landlords from filtering potential tenants based on whether they meet a certain rent-to-income ratio.

Landlords must also accommodate any of their tenants’ special needs up to the point of “undue hardship.” Students living in residence can register with U of T’s Accessibility Services to request accommodations.

According to U of T’s Office of the Ombud sperson, students with concerns about their university residence should first try to contact the Dean of Students or Director of Residence for their specific building.

If the problem is not resolved, the next steps depend on the college and campus where a student lives.

UTSFI hosts rally in solidarity with protestors in Iran

November 30 event part of global day of action for Iran

Amini’s death ignited national protests in Iran. In the weeks since then, pro testors’ fury has grown into a global condem nation of the Is lamic Republic’s regulations and its regime as a whole.

The UTSFI’s rally was held as part of a global initiative to show solidarity with people protest ing in Iran. More

“Amplify the voice of the people” To mark this day of action, members of the UTSFI stood outside Sidney Smith Hall and held signs with images of people that the Ira nian Regime had killed. UTSFI members also led chants calling for justice for victims and other Iranians. UTSFI president Niloofar Ganji read aloud a statement that was written by the UTSFI and the Iranian Scholars for Liberty. The Iranian Scholars for Liberty, which is a nonpar tisan, nonreligious group formed by Iranian fac ulty, students, staff, and alumni from over 100 universities from across the world.

The statement called attention to the arrests and murders following the protests in Iran. As of November 12, the Iran Human Rights group, a nonprofit organization that operates in and out side of Iran, reported at least 400 deaths so far with regard to the ongoing protests. The state ment also emphasized the increasing suppres sion that the Iranian regime has subjected the country’s ethnic minorities, such as the Kurdish and Baloch people, to following the protests.

The statement also highlighted how protests in Iran have been negatively affecting the coun try’s students. It specified that Iranian police, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Paramilitary Volunteer Militia, and the Plain clothes Police have raided campuses, dorms, and high schools, and have assaulted and ar rested Iranian students. The statement added that professors and instructors have also been fired or suspended because of their support for the students.

The Iranian Scholars for Liberty’s own state ment, posted on its website, includes a list of demands for “academia and governments” to meet. These demands include issuing state ments condemning and demanding an end “to the assault on the academic community in Iran,” boycotting Iranian academics who have facili tated or are facilitating the Regime’s attacks on Iranian students and scholars, and to disen

gage with the Islamic Regime’s lobbyists “who promote the Regime’s propaganda.”

According to the Iranian Scholars for Liber ty’s website, the group’s short-term goal is to “[elevate] the voices of Iranians fighting for free dom… as a result of decades of persecution.” The group’s long-term goal is to raise global awareness of the physical and verbal harass ment that the Iranian regime has on Iranians, as well as call attention to the police’s crackdowns on nonviolent protests within the country.

“We are standing with

them”

In an interview with The Varsity, UTSFI member Sara Shariati said that the UTSFI was formed by students who previously didn’t know each other but had all previously organized protests at U of T. Once protests started happening in Iran, Shar iati explained, these students came together, re alizing that they had a shared goal.

“We decided to join our voices so that we could form a stronger group,” Shariati said.

As outlined by the UTSFI’s Student Organiza tion Portal page, the group aims to create safe and inclusive spaces for Iranians and Iranian Ca nadians at U of T to “engage with and preserve the Iranian cultural and historical heritage.” To accomplish this, the UTSFI has set the follow ing goals: to address the history of oppression in Iran, to preserve and document it, and to provide “an open platform to the Iranian community to emerge as a free society from this history.”

Shariati highlighted the necessity of consistent rallying from groups such as the UTSFI, because “pressure works.”

“Normal people have power, and it shouldn’t be underestimated,” Shariati said.

Moreover, Shariati pointed out the importance of calls for action happening in university set tings, saying that “the hope of any country should be its students.” When rallies are organized by people in academic settings, Shariati explained, it demonstrates to others globally that educated people want to amplify the voices of Iranians. Shariati added: “[It lets] Iranian students… know that we are also standing with them.”

On November 30, Iranian students and allies at U of T formed a human chain along St. George Street, between the road’s intersections with Harbord Street and Willcocks Street. The chain was part of a rally hosted by the Univer

sity of Toronto Students for a Free Iran (UTSFI).

This rally took place during an ongoing glob al movement sparked by the death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini on September 16. Amini was a 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman who died in custody after Iran’s “morality police” arrested her for violating Iran’s mandatory dress code.

than 200 other universities worldwide also hosted campus rallies on the same day.

Alexa DiFrancesco Features Editor

The death of Mahsa Amini sparks protests against gender-based violence. ALEXA DIFRANCESCO/THEVARSITY

U of T’s on-campus student residences face space shortage

Thousands of

students

still on on-campus residence waitlists

Caroline Bellamy Design Editor

This year, many U of T students had trouble secur ing on-campus housing due to increased demand for U of T’s student residences. As of November 28, thousands of students are still on on-campus housing waitlists.

To resolve some of these issues, U of T is of fering students financial aid for housing-related expenses and is building new student residences.

Residence housing shortage over the summer

With the return to in-person learning after two years of online classes, the demand for U of T’s on-campus housing became apparent over the summer.

In an email to The Varsity, Vice-Provost, Stu dents Sandy Welsh explained that U of T offers a first-year housing guarantee to students because it recognizes both the challenges that students face in securing off-campus housing and the benefits that come with an on-campus residence experience.

However, the number of students with a firstyear housing guarantee, as well as the number of other students who applied for on-campus housing, was higher than expected. So, over the summer, U of T offered refunds to students who were willing to withdraw their applications to oncampus housing. These refunds constituted the residence deposit and additional funds for stu dents to secure off-campus housing. Students who had applied for Chestnut residence, for ex

ample, were offered $2,000 in compensation as well as refunds for their deposits.

Ultimately, 496 students accepted residence re funds and additional funds from U of T. Of these students, 325 were UTSG students and 171 were UTSC students.

Because UTSC approved too many students for residence, the university placed 18 students in offcampus housing accommodations. In a Septem ber governance meeting, UTSC Dean of Student Experience and Wellbeing Neel Joshi reported that UTSC housed these students at the Canadian Col lege of Naturopathic College, which is 45 minutes away from the UTSC campus. According to Joshi, UTSC also gave the students TTC passes in order to make the students’ commute “more manage able.”

As of November 28, 2,092 students are still on the university’s residence waitlist. However, Welsh believes that “many” of these students may no longer be interested in moving into residence this semester, and may only be waiting for the January residence intake.

At the start of the fall 2022 semester, 4,325 students with the first-year guarantee moved into on-campus UTSG residences. Currently, nearly 10,000 students live in residence across all three campuses.

Financial support

Welsh encouraged students to access university bursaries should they need additional funds to cov er their housing costs. Bursaries are intended to financially support students who have exhausted all other options — such as government support,

part-time employment, or family support — and are still unable to cover their education-related ex penses.

Students can visit their registrars to learn more about financial aid that might be available to them. “It is the policy of the University of Toronto that no student offered admission to a program at the Uni versity should be unable to enter or complete the program due to a lack of financial means,” wrote Welsh.

Expansion of on-campus residences

On December 2, 2021, U of T broke ground on the newest student residence at Sussex and Spa dina. This upcoming UTSG student residence took ten years to be approved and will have 509 beds. In an interview with The Varsity, U of T President Meric Gertler said that U of T had to make “com promises” such as reducing the number of beds in residence as a result of the “approval process” and discussions with local neighbourhood associa tions. The residence is expected to be completed by fall 2024.

UTSC is also set to complete a nine-story stu dent residence at Ellesmere Road by fall 2023. The new building will contain 750 beds, which would almost double the number of students who will be able to live in residence at UTSC.

“We would love to build more; we have the will. We just need some cooperation from our govern ment partners to accelerate the process, because there’s tremendous urgency,” said Gertler.

In an interview with The Varsity, Prentiss Dantzler — an assistant professor at UTSG’s Department of Sociology who researches urban development —

U of T faculty’s housing availability concerns peak with ongoing housing crisis

U of T plans new faculty housing on downtown campus

Lexey Burns Deputy News Editor

During a September UTM Campus Affairs meet ing, Associate Sociology Professor Jerry Flores proposed that U of T reserve some units from a new student residence, planned to be com pleted by 2026, for faculty.

UTSG is the only campus that currently op erates faculty housing. UTM and UTSC do not have faculty housing units.

At the meeting, UTM President Alexandra Gil lespie explained that UTM is currently working on multiple different ideas that involve “some of the space [and] the land that [they] already own, and some investments [they] might make.”

Gillespie noted that no one had previously pro posed merging student housing with faculty housing.

Gillespie acknowledged that U of T wouldn’t be able to fix housing issues at large — “But that doesn’t mean we don't have an obligation to look at mitigating it where we can,” she said.

Current faculty housing

A university spokesperson wrote in an email to The Varsity that “U of T is one of a few Cana dian universities to offer faculty housing.” The university’s current faculty housing is home to approximately 75 faculty members, with some units reserved for visiting faculty.

U of T launched its faculty housing coopera tive program in the late 1990s. Currently, this program is only available to faculty members for four years after the start of their employment.

Resident experiences

Physics graduate student Sean Colford cur rently resides in student family housing, which is combined with faculty housing. Colford was on a waitlist for nearly two years for the housing unit they currently reside in.

In comparison to his previous housing ar rangements, Colford explained that the student family housing unit was a big upgrade for “pretty much the same cost.”

In an interview with The Varsity, Kate Mad dalena, a writing and media studies professor at UTM, said she believes U of T would benefit by exploring different ways to support faculty in the long term.

“The faculty at U of T are a tiny privileged group of people of course, but we’re one tiny slice of a whole population experiencing a hous ing crisis,” she said.

Maddalena only teaches at UTM but was offered a spot in the UTSG faculty housing in 2020. Before she moved to Toronto from North Carolina, she had been looking at housing in Mississauga to cut down on her commute. Un fortunately, UTM faculty housing “just wasn’t an option.”

Now, halfway through her allotted time in fac ulty housing, Maddalena has begun considering her next steps. She expressed that she’s con cerned about her carbon footprint due to the constant commute to her classes and office at UTM, but does not want to disrupt her child’s education by relocating and switching schools at such a young age.

Zdenko Mandušić, an assistant professor from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, expressed his concern that, once he moves out of faculty housing, he will have long commutes that cut into the time that he can spend with his family.

Mandušić noted that he has heard his col leagues express concern for future generations of faculty because the university is “going to be looking at a situation where housing is going to be an issue of equity.” Mandušić explained that future faculty may decline jobs because, despite the salary U of T offers, some individuals may not be able to afford residence in the GTA.

Mandušić explained that because of the current housing market the university’s faculty would split into “this two-class system” between faculty who are homeowners and faculty who are new to the Toronto area and thus unable to afford housing.

explained what U of T has to do in order to build new residences.

Dantzler said that U of T has to show that there is a demonstrated need for new residences and new residences will be filled. The university, unlike pri vate investors, cannot afford to have vast expanses of empty rooms. But, according to Dantzler, dem onstrating this need is difficult to do because the number of students who want to live on campus may fluctuate from year to year.

Recently, U of T has started placing students in alternative housing, such as rooms at the Chelsea Hotel. Temporary housing solutions such as this add extra housing in the form of short-term con tracts. According to Dantzler, they also provide op portunities for the university to show a long-term demonstrated need for additional housing.

LEXEY BURNS/THEVARSITY

According to a statement from a U of T spokesperson, the university was forced to end the program in 2020 because of regulatory re quirements by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. These new require ments prevented individuals from using a loan from their employer as that would “increase their indebtedness as part of equity toward a down payment.” This implies that faculty would be acquiring an asset with debts or other liabilities attached.

The future of faculty housing Mandušić said another similar program to the Housing Loan Program “would be a much welcome program as far as I’m concerned.”

Mandušić and his family’s time in faculty hous ing is coming to an end in July 2024 but he expressed interest for the university to extend the faculty housing limit beyond four years. He believes four years isn’t enough time for faculty to save money for a house with current Toronto housing prices.

Mandušić said that he and his family will have to move outside of the GTA after their time in faculty housing runs out. He is not sure if he and his partner will be able to buy a house and will most likely continue renting; even then, he says that it will be costly to rent a housing unit that can accommodate his family size.

According to the university spokesperson, the university is assembling a working group to cre ate a new faculty home ownership or loan pro gram, as well as to manage an environmental scan of other academic institutions’ programs.

The spokesperson added that multiple initia tives are also in progress to provide additional housing for faculty, such as The Gateway proj ect. The Gateway project will be the largest uni versity housing development generated for stu dent families, faculty, and staff in Canada. This project hopes to provide approximately 600 to 900 apartment-style units for faculty and stu dent families. The final number is dependent on the different types of units. The project is set to be constructed at the corner of Bloor Street and Spadina Avenue, although the university has not published an expected completion date.

U of T faces a shortage in on-campus housing spaces for students.

Faculty and Staff Housing Loan Program

Prior to September 2020, U of T operated its own Faculty and Staff Housing Loan Program by which it assisted faculty members in obtaining a mortgage.

Ready Our Youth hosts naloxone education event for UTM students

Organizations discuss need for solution

Al Aref Helal UTM Bureau Chief

Content warning: This article discusses sub stance use.

On November 28, Ready Our Youth (ROY) hosted an event to educate UTM students about the use and importance of naloxone. With the national opioid overdose crisis continuing to ravage com munities across the nation, Canadians between the ages of 15 and 24 are the fastest growing population requiring hospital care from opioid overdoses according to Health Canada. Although some alternative medicines are currently under development, naloxone remains one of the most widely available drugs used to reverse opioid overdoses. Between 2017 and 2021, Ontario Provincial Police used naloxone to save more than 200 lives.

The UTM event was borne out of a collabora tion between ROY, a UTM organization dedicated to educating students on the opioid epidemic; the Psychology Association of Undergraduate Stud ies at Erindale; and Halton Alcohol, Drug and Gambling Assessment Prevention & Treatment Services (Halton ADAPT), a non profit communi ty-focused agency devoted to helping people af fected by the opioid epidemic.

To begin the event, Alex Cimino, a clinical case manager at Halton ADAPT, discussed the opioid

epidemic in Ontario. According to Cimino, mortal ity from opioid overdoses spiked during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic: “[In Ontario] in 2020, there were 2,461 deaths from opioid overdoses or opioid-related deaths. That’s huge,” said Cimino. These deaths constituted a roughly 57 per cent increase from

in midst of opioid crisis

2019 levels, and the situation is not improving. “In 2021, [opioid-related deaths in Ontario] were 2,880, still a very drastic number… and this is hav ing a huge impact on our society,” said Cimino. To address this issue, Cimino highlighted the importance of naloxone, a safe and fast-acting medication that can reverse the effects of opioid overdoses. According to Cimino, first responders in the GTA take an average of 15 minutes to arrive on a scene, so carrying naloxone could be the difference between some

During the event, Cimino ex plained the steps necessary to identify an opioid overdose and administer naloxone. Students can obtain free naloxone kits at various locations in the GTA, includ ing needle ex change and harm reduc tion programs. Such kits are provided through

the Ontario Naloxone Program, which provides free kits without a prescription. Currently, the Discovery Pharmacy at U of T, run by the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, is also piloting naloxone training for some university offices.

In an interview with The Varsity, Nardeen Oweis, the president of ROY, discussed their worries con cerning the increased prevalence of opioid addic tion among “youth our age.” According to Oweis, ROY plans for the near future include another nal oxone education event and mental health initia tives in February to help connect UTM students to the resources they need.

For more information about naloxone and opioid overdose prevention, you can access:

• The Know Your Drugs 101 Harm Reduction Toolkit,

• Toronto’s Take Home Naloxone Program, reachable via email at theworks@toronto.ca or via phone at 416-392-0520,

• Toronto’s Overdose Prevention Line at 1-888-853-8542,

• Safer Use Peer Support Line at 1-888-2335633 between 8PM-1AM,

• Overdose Response Service, which is available to anyone in Canada and can be reached at 1-888-688-6677, or

• Halton ADAPT’s Intake Desk at 905-6396537 or its Opioid Outreach and Treatment Services at 1-855-211-0898.

Scammers take advantage of U of T students seeking housing

International and out-of-province students most at risk

Lexey Burns Deputy News Editor

Despite recent hits to housing prices associated with increasing interest rates, Toronto remains an incredibly expensive city for renters. In their breakdown of Toronto living costs, U of T Student Life estimates that housing for students costs be tween $1,000–2,700 a month, depending on fac tors such as location and housing type.

With the increase in rent and students’ desire to study in person as the pandemic subdues, rental scams have skyrocketed.

Student scam experience

In an email to The Varsity, a student — who re quested anonymity because they fear repercus sions from their scammer — described how a landlord tried to scam them over the summer.

The student, who was on exchange from Uni versity of Geneva, Switzerland, looked into a place to stay during their exchange. Just before coming to Toronto to start their studies, they saw an ad on a U of T off-campus housing website. Accord ing to the student, the website originally listed four rooms available, so they applied. The landlord re sponded and explained that the four rooms were not available separately. The landlord informed them that he had a fifth room in the house that he hadn’t yet listed. The room was priced at $600.

The student explained they had a contact in To ronto who went to visit this landlord. The student also had a few conversations with the landlord over the phone and everything seemed okay. The landlord sent the student a lease, and the student signed it.

After signing the lease, the student sent the first and last month rent deposit, which totalled $1,200.

A few days later, the bank, Toronto-Dominion, asked for more information about the landlord who was receiving the payment, including the landlord’s nationality and their date and place of birth. According to the student, they received a negative response from the landlord, who claimed the information the bank required was confiden tial, which is what aroused the student’s suspi cion.

A few days following this interaction, the stu dent’s bank advisor forwarded them an email from

the Canadian bank. According to the Canadian bank, the landlord in question appeared on a red list of individuals who had a history of suspicious banking activity.

The student cancelled the payment and ter minated the agreement. The landlord responded with a message that made the student feel threat ened.

The student did not ask any U of T services for help following this experience, but they reported the ad to the off-campus housing site.

Scam reports

The Varsity spoke with Paloma Bertossi, Student Life officer of housing education and outreach, who said that students reported more scams this year than in previous years. Since the beginning of the fall term, Student Life has received formal reports from five students who fell victim to hous ing scams.

Bertossi explained that, in two of the cases, the advertisements students saw did not properly re flect the rental spaces, so the students involved

believed that they hadn’t received what they paid for. One out-of-province student arrived in Ontario only to have their supposed landlord promptly cut off all communication, leaving them without a place to live. Housing services placed the student into a residence.

In the two other cases, students found a listing through a U of T off-campus housing website. The contact associated with the listing started asking the students for illegal deposits and pressured them to pay additional money. “Once they receive that money, [the scammer] would disappear,” said Bertossi. Although U of T didn’t initially detect any “red flags” indicating that the listing was fraudu lent, the students began to suspect that the listing was a scam. They contacted U of T, which took down the listing.

Bertossi explained that, between first and last month’s rent and a holding fee, one student lost a total of $4,000 to a scammer. According to the 2006 Residential Tenancies Act. Ontario landlords are not allowed to charge tenants ad ditional fees, which may include holding fees.

Rental ad criteria

U of T staff check every listing they receive be fore posting it on the off-campus housing web site. There are certain red flags Bertossi looks for when reviewing listings. She checks whether the ad has plenty of pictures, if the unit seems real to her, and does a reverse Google search on some of the photos provided to see if any thing different shows up online. Bertossi also explained that she follows up with landlords to ask about any conflicting information she dis covers online.

“The other main thing I look for is: does it look too good to be true?” said Bertossi.

Bertossi stressed that students should re port rental scams because highlighting poten tial scams can help make sure that someone else does not fall victim. When U of T receives a scam report, they flag the scammer’s name, credit card number, or any other information the scammer used. If the scammer creates a new account, Student Life can use this information to identify the scammers more easily.

Housing resources

In a statement to The Varsity, Sandy Welsh, vice-provost students, wrote, “Unfortunately, rental housing scams do happen, and interna tional students are particularly vulnerable.”

U of T offers various workshops and modules to help keep students informed about man aging the rental market and avoiding scams. These modules include documents, including a sample rent receipt, an apartment viewing checklist, and the Ontario Standard Lease form to help students differentiate between legitimate housing advertisements and scams.

Welsh advises international students who cannot view a property in person to send some one in their place or use a verified rental agency or realtor.

According to Welsh, in “the unfortunate case that a student is scammed, or thinks they might have been,” the university provides contact in formation so students can report the scam and get in touch with wire transfer companies.

Downtown Legal Services also provides ser vices for students who want to take scammers to court.

UTM event hopes to spread awareness of substance use resources. STEVEN LEE/THEVARSITY

U of T off-campus housing websites are reviewed for scams before being posted to the public. AUGUSTINE WONG/THEVARSITY

Munk Debates: Should we trust mainstream media? Debate sees largest vote gain in history

Vurjeet Madan Photo Editor

On November 30, the Munk Debates hosted its biannual debate at Roy Thomson Hall. The motion of the debate was, “Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media.” On the PRO side were Douglas Murray and Matt Taibbi, and on the CON side, arguing against the motion, were Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg.

The Munk Debates are held twice a year in Toronto. According to its website, the series aims to provide a platform for leading thinkers to engage in “civil and substantive public debate” about “the big issues of the day.” It was estab lished by Peter and Melanie Munk, the philan thropists who also named U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

At the start of the night, organizers polled the audience and found that audience members were almost evenly split about the motion. But by the end of the event, 67 per cent agreed with the PRO-side debaters, the largest vote gain to have ever been recorded at a Munk Debate.

The debaters

Among those who argued that the mainstream media should not be trusted was Murray, a best selling author and associate editor for the UKbased weekly magazine The Spectator. Many have accused Murray of xenophobia, particu larly in connection to his books attesting that the demographic changes in European countries spell the death of “Western values.” Alongside

him was Taibbi, an award-winning investigative reporter and former contributing editor for the Rolling Stone

Gladwell, a globally recognized New Yorker writer and bestselling author, and Goldberg, an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, ar gued against the motion. Gladwell and Goldberg previously spoke at Munk Debates in 2015 and 2018, respectively.

The debate

Taibbi started the debate with a personal story. “I grew up in the press,” he said. “My father was a reporter, my stepmother was a reporter, my godparents were reporters.” He said that, de

spite his intimate connection with the journalism industry, he believes that the industry has “de stroyed itself” because each outlet only speaks to one specific political demographic.

Murray supported Taibbi’s argument and pointed to large Canadian media outlets’ cov erage of the trucker convoy protests as an ex ample. “Your prime minister decided in advance that these [protesters] were defeated all along,” he said. “Now, what would mainstream media do at such a time? It would question [this nar rative]. The Canadian mainstream media did not.” In that case, Murray argued, the Canadian mainstream media acted as an arm of the gov ernment.

Even though the speakers often said that they wanted to broaden the scope of the debate be yond the United States, their examples often re volved around American issues and events.

Before the debate, 52 per cent of audience members voted that mainstream media should be trusted; after the debate, this number dwin dled down to 33 per cent.

Previous debates

Previous Munk Debate issues include whether the capitalist system is broken, whether Western countries should assist refugees, and whether religion is a force for good in the world.

Previous debaters at the Munk Debates in clude public intellectuals such as Stephen Fry and Alain de Botton, as well as controversial fig ures such as Henry Kissinger, Laura Ingraham, and Jordan Peterson.

In 2018, hundreds of protesters gathered outside Roy Thomson Hall to demonstrate against the Munk Debate because Steve Ban non was set to speak. Bannon was a White House chief strategist under Donald Trump and has espoused white nationalist views. Po lice ultimately beat demonstrators with batons, pepper sprayed the crowd, and arrested some protesters.

Advocacy groups commemorate international day for eliminating violence against women

PEARS Project and Vivir Sin Miedo raise awareness of gender-based violence

Chief

Content warning: This article discusses sexual and gender-based violence.

To mark the International Day for the Elimina tion of Violence Against Women, members of the Prevention, Empowerment, Advocacy, Response, for Survivors (PEARS) Project and Vivir Sin Miedo TO hosted an event to raise awareness and stand in solidarity with women who have faced gender-based violence and discrimination.

The event on November 25 involved a clothesline project with messages of solidar ity for those who have experienced sexual vio lence, as well as the performance of a feminist anthem by members of Vivir Sin Miedo TO. Vi vir Sin Miedo TO is a feminist group focused on integrating Latin American feminist perspec tives and building community among Latin American women in Toronto.

Clothesline project

The clothesline project encompassed three clotheslines, strung near the front entrance of the Sidney Smith Building, with notes hanging from each line. In an interview with The Var sity , PEARS Project founder Micah Kalisch explained the significance of the notes on each line. The first line included notes on what people could do to prevent violence against women, the second line included notes for how people recovered after an event of gen der-based violence, and the last line was “take a note, leave a note.”

“Anyone who identifies as a survivor can take a little note that someone has written or anyone can leave a note for a survivor to take,” Kalisch explained.

Art and activism

At 4:00 pm, members of Vivir Sin Miedo TO performed the feminist anthem, “Un violador en tu camino.” The anthem was created by the Chilean feminist art and performance collective

LasTesis and has been translated into many different languages.

In an interview with The Varsity, co-founders of Vivir San Mideo Andrea Caceres, Sofia Karter, and Raquel Serrano said that they were inspired by how Latin American feminists have incorporated art and culture into their movements and said they wanted to translate that knowledge for Canada.

They added that their organization hopes to cre ate a space for Latin American women in Toronto to discuss shared experiences and raise aware ness of gender-based violence in Latin America.

“I think what we have experienced here, at least in Canada, is a lot of silence when it comes to gen der-based violence,” said Caceres.

“So I think that it is about creating community. It’s about being here and being present representing

our community in Canada, but as well refusing to be silent,” she said.

Further action

Kalisch told The Varsity that event was impor tant for raising awareness and communicating to survivors of sexual violence that the PEARS Project can provide support.

“I think that one of the reasons doing events like this is so important is because it raises awareness and it helps to break the silence and the stigma that surrounds gendered vio lence,” said Kalisch. “Sexual violence thrives in silence and so being able to bring awareness to it helps to start dismantling that culture of silence and systemic silencing.”

Kalisch also expressed disappointment with

the University of Toronto’s response to sexual violence on campus. She specifically refer enced the university’s silence regarding the recent allegations of sexual harassment, racist microaggressions, and academic bullying by UTM Professor Robert Reisz.

“I think it’s just important for survivors to know that while the university continues to fail us, there is a powerful and compassionate community of survivors and allies who are go ing to stand together and support however we can,” said Kalisch.

International Day for the Elimination of Vio lence Against Women is the first day in the UN’s sixteen days of activism leading up to December 10, which marks International Hu man Rights Day.

Kalisch also noted that a significant day in Canada is December 6, which is the anni versary of the 1989 Montréal Massacre. The Canadian government marks that day as The National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women to commemorate the lives of the 14 women engineering students at L’École Polytechnique Montréal who were murdered by their male classmate.

If you or someone you know has been af fected by sexual violence or harassment:

• Contact the PEARS Project at thepe arsproject@gmail.com for disclosures, trauma-informed support, and consulta tions.

• Contact the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre at (416) 597-8808.

• Call the Women’s College Hospital Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Care Cen tre at (416) 323-6040.

• Call the Scarborough Grace Sexual As sault Care Centre at (416) 495-2555.

• Call the Assaulted Women’s Helpline at (866) 863-0511.

• For further resources, including informa tion about accessing U of T services, visit the ‘Resources for Myself’ tab on thepe arsproject.wordpress.com.

Meanwhile, Gladwell and Goldberg referred to large media outlets such as The Washington Post and The New York Times to argue that the profession of journalism has consistently been rooted in integrity and in finding all sides to sto ries, wherever it may lead the journalist.

U of T’s Munk Debate took place on November 30. VURJEET MADAN/THEVARSITY

Emma Livingstone Graduate Bureau

thevarsity.ca/section/comment comment@thevarsity.ca

Toronto’s climate is changing, and our infrastructure isn’t ready

Rising temperatures and flooding puts the city’s infrastructure at risk

Kayla Litschko Comment Columnist

A troubling prediction for heat waves and heavy rain in Toronto’s future has raised concerns about the state of the city’s infrastructure and whether it can withstand extreme temperatures and water exposure.

Last year, the United Nations’ Intergovernmen tal Panel on Climate Change released a report detailing extreme and unpredictable weather in the near future, and how cities like Toronto are es

ter drainage. Not to mention the subway tracks, which lie completely flat, were not constructed with possible flooding in mind.

Additionally, cities specifically trap immense amounts of heat due to the lack of plant life and the increase in materials like metals and cement due to construction. Toronto especially contains a lot of asphalt, which is notorious for trapping heat.

The current construction of Toronto is not prepared to withstand the changing state of the climate. The impending climate crisis also poses a huge threat to the University of Toronto and its

Many of the university’s buildings are hundreds

tage sites. Older buildings constructed of brick,

mental levels of erosion, and further construction and reinforcement is necessary to ensure that U of T’s buildings survive a wetter, hotter climate.

Besides the potential damage to campus build ings, students may need to be wary of basement apartments as well, which already flood often in the downtown area.

Luckily for the university, the campus has a large amount of plants, parks, and wildlife. Plants and parks help to offset extreme heat and absorb excess moisture, which will be useful in the com ing years.

How can we protect Toronto from the cli mate crisis?

Reinforcing the Toronto sewage system is also a solution architects could look into, as a few de tention tanks already exist that prevent excess rainwater from overflowing into Lake Ontario and the outskirts of the city, and more may be on the way. More plants and wildlife around the city could also potentially mitigate extreme heat and excess water, as seen on University of Toronto’s campus.

flux of water exposure expected in cases of

The main focus of Canadian climate action is re ducing carbon emissions, with the goal of reach ing ‘net zero’ emissions by the year 2050. How ever, many of the plans being laid for Toronto’s reducing emissions are long term goals, and while the promise of net zero could potentially come to fruition in 30 years, Toronto’s climate is already feeling the effects of the climate crisis.

More money and focus needs to be shifted to ward protecting the city from the current climate and weather changes by providing infrastructural reinforcement. There are many plausible — albeit expensive — solutions to the Toronto infrastruc tural problem. The construction of dikes and le vees, or water barriers, may help subway tracks and Toronto streets by directing water away from roads and into existing drains.

From an engineering standpoint, an examina tion of Toronto’s transit system and its ability to withstand excess water and heat is sorely need ed. During heatwaves, British cities have seen their metal train tracks expand due to the nature of the materials used in their construction, and To ronto transit lines will need further reinforcement and analysis given the upcoming weather predic tions.

Both the City of Toronto and U of T need to prepare their infrastructure for the effects of the climate crisis. Both bodies need to focus on act ing in the present and take the necessary actions to protect their streets and buildings from incur ring damages.

Budgets need to shift from vague future goals to upcoming construction plans — the safety of all Torontonians should take priority as all institutions try to navigate an uncertain future of potentially dangerous weather changes.

Kayla Litschko is a second year in University Col lege studying history, bioethics and political sci ence. She is a climate columnist in The Varsity’s comment section.

Supporting RBC On Campus is supporting the climate crisis

Chloe MacVicar Comment Columnist

Earlier this year, during a University of Toronto En trepreneurship (UTE) panel to launch the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Innovation Challenge, stu dents expressed their outrage of the partnership between UTE and RBC. Students were crying out “This is greenwashing” and carrying banners that read “Fund Futures not Pipelines.”

With University of Toronto Asset Management Corporation’s move to divest from fossil fuels last year, and U of T more recently meeting its fossil fuel divestment commitment, chatter about divestment has been widespread across campus. Divestment involves eliminating investments or funds in com panies. More specifically, fossil fuel divestment in volves terminating association with companies that invest in fossil fuels.

By divesting from companies that are involved in the fossil fuel industry, we deprive these com

panies of their primary goal — money. Divestment from fossil fuel by the university is a break from en vironmental degradation and a rebuttal against the climate crisis. It represents a way forward and an opportunity to build a more sustainable future.

RBC’s role in the problem

Across Canadian universities, RBC’s On Campus program has become a resource for those seeking budgeting advice and career-focused guidance.

Created with students in mind, the On Campus program is advertised as a supportive space for students to learn about money management. RBC promotes the On Campus program as an oppor tunity for networking and career and professional development. However, RBC’s actions behind the scenes are destroying our most fundamental as pect of community — the environment.

RBC is Canada’s largest bank and the country’s biggest financier of fossil fuels. In 2019, the com pany was the global leader in financing tar sands — large deposits of crude oil that are found around the world. Over the last four years, the bank has

contributed over $140 billion to fossil fuels.

Despite consistent scientific evidence on the ef fects of fossil fuels on the climate, RBC has yet to change its practices. Rather than taking steps to align its actions with the goals of global legislation, RBC continues to invest billions in fossil fuels.

RBC’s dedication to fossil fuels is inconsistent with the values the company claims to uphold. Publicly, the bank identifies the climate crisis as a critical problem, yet, in 2021, continued to increase its funding of tar sands by 51 per cent. In 2021, RBC President and CEO Dave McKay stated that, “Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our times,” yet, the company continues to be involved in the world’s most environmentally de structive industry.

Supporting RBC is supporting climate change. Banking with RBC is investing in fossil fuels. The fossil fuel industry cannot survive without the sup port from corporations like RBC, and demanding banks divest compromises the fossil fuel industry’s ability to survive.

vestments, allowing RBC to offer their services on

campus shows that U of T’s work is not finished. This is where the problem starts; encouraging students to bank with RBC is encouraging them to support a company that depends on environ mental degradation for success. By allowing RBC On Campus to take place at U of T, the university is not fully dissociating from the fossil fuel industry and letting the actions of the country’s largest finan cier of fossil fuels be swept under the rug. Fossil fuel funders don’t belong at U of T, and severing partnerships with banks involved in the fossil fuel industry represents dedication both to the climate and to our futures.

Partnering with universities makes RBC seem like a champion of the younger generation. But this is a façade that obscures its true actions — RBC cannot claim to champion youth while simultane ously destroying their future. Fossil fuels are sys tematically eroding the biosphere’s capacity to support future generations, and to let its financiers onto our campus is to turn a blind eye to the reali ties of their environmental impact.

It starts at U of T

RBC’s actions behind the scenes cannot go un noticed. As part of the generation that can make a difference, we must pledge to stop banking on fossil fuels.

Commercial banks rely on young people. If thou sands refuse to associate with fossil fuel financiers, the banks will have no choice but to divest. If our banks fail to support our futures, there’s no reason we — or our university — should support them.

Fossil fuels have a hold on our society, but with collective action and widespread divestment, we can loosen its chains. We must stop associating with banks that pour money into fossil fuels. Divest ment is an opportunity to sever all ties to the tyran nical industry of nonrenewable resources, and we should take advantage of it.

It starts at U of T — by calling for fossil fuel funders to be removed from our campus and tak ing a stand for our environment, our lives, and our futures.

Chloe MacVicar is a third-year student at University College, studying environmental studies, political science, and writing. She is a climate columnist for The Varsity’s comment section.

VURJEET MADAN & JESSICA LAM/THEVARSITY

U of T must create more homes for students away from home

Eleanor Park Associate Comment Editor

While many students at U of T look forward to returning to their cozy homes to spend the holidays with their families, there is a significant population in Toronto who do not have a home to return to.

As of 2021, in Toronto there were an estimat ed 18,096 people experiencing homelessness and an additional 6,605 people experiencing sheltered homelessness. The City of Toronto, with roughly 100 shelters, is running the largest shelter system in Canada. However, one critical group affected by homelessness that is often overlooked is youth.

Homelessness and the youth

Many youth in Toronto are experiencing home lessness. In 2021, a staggering 11 per cent of Toronto’s homeless population were between the ages of 16 and 24. In 2019, 26 per cent of residents at the shelter Covenant House To ronto were students and half of that population were specifically university or college students. What’s worse is that since 2019, the CO VID-19 pandemic has resulted in heightened economic inequality and a rise in the cost of liv ing. For instance, compared to last year, the av erage cost of rent for a one-bedroom condo in Toronto has risen by 20.4 per cent. The harsh reality is that the Canadian economy is strug gling to recover from the pandemic, and youth are among the most vulnerable populations during this struggle. It’s no surprise, then, that there’s a homelessness crisis amongst youth.

In an article for the Financial Post, a U of T computer science student who resides in Ho rizons for Youth, a Toronto shelter for young adults, reported that he started living in the shelter when his dormitory access expired af ter his first year. He struggled with finding even a basement apartment or roommate that he could share the cost of rent with. Horizons for Youth is an hour from campus and so now he has to grapple with his schoolwork on top of

commuting for an hour, all the while living in a state of homelessness.

The onus is on U of T to address student homelessness

Living in Toronto is not cheap. As such, when making the decision to attend U of T, many stu dents often compromise financial security for the sake of attending a university internationally recognized for its excellence.

For a school that operates on a $3.23 billion budget, of which 68 per cent is from student fees, U of T needs to do better to help students grappling with homelessness. By not ensuring proper housing for financially disadvantaged students, U of T is actively building barriers to higher education.

In the long run, U of T needs to work harder to ensure accommodations for its students. In 2021, market research firm Bonard reported that there were almost 1.6 million post-second ary students in Canada, but only 200,000 beds in purpose-built student accommodations.

The lack of student housing on campus leads many students to seek out off-campus housing. However, with the higher-than-ever rent prices in Toronto and competition with families and professionals, students struggle to find affordable housing. This ultimately leaves many students homeless.

I believe that students have the right to be educated at an academically rich public univer sity like U of T, but I also believe that students have the right to be provided financially reason able options of residence.

U of T can do more to work with the City of Toronto to ensure that its students are not struggling to secure housing. The average stu dent at U of T is already spending a significant amount in tuition and fees. By not helping its fi nancially disadvantaged students secure hous ing, U of T is contributing to the homelessness crisis in Toronto.

Eleanor Park is a second-year student at Trinity College studying English and religion. She is an associate comment editor at The Varsity.

U of T needs more purpose-built accommoda tions to address youth homelessness

Many youth are experiencing homeless.

COURTESY OF ADAM THOMAS VIA UNSPLASH

Exploring the meaning of home for U of T students

International students start from scratch in a new country

For many university students, home is a com plex concept. Going to university often means leaving behind what’s familiar. That may involve moving from the suburbs into town, or it may involve moving hours and hours away. For the over 27,000 international students at U of T, it may involve moving to a whole new country.

most 10 times that of domestic students. They also don’t have access to student loans programs available to Canadians. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ontario froze do mestic tuition for postsecondary students. But tuition fees for international students continued to rise.

Factoring in recent inflation around the world and its impact on exchange rates for the Ca

Study visas permitting only 20 hours of offcampus work a week can present a serious barrier to international students trying to root themselves in Toronto. International tuition fees are incredibly high and, on top of that, international students may not have as many personal resources nearby to offset costs of everyday living. Without the ability to work, not only will international students have a hard

How are students supposed to concentrate on schoolwork when something disastrous is going on back home? The university and many independent student advocacy groups provide resources that can help students in some of these situations, but none of those resources can work as a magic wand.

Ultimately, the way to address all of these problems must in

information.

This problem isn’t unique to U of T. There’s a lot of financial pressure on international stu dents in the Canadian university system at large, which is going to impact other aspects of their lives down the line.

These impacts may not be visible in aca demics until they’re already causing significant harm — but they’ll definitely be felt at home, where students juggle the effects of their men tal health on top of managing everything else in their lives.

If we don’t go out of our way to prioritize all the issues that students are handling at home, those issues won’t be properly addressed. So let’s start talking about that. Let’s talk about the complexities of building a home as a stu dent and all the ways those complexities feed into the existing financial and logistical dispari ties faced by international students at U of T.

Financial challenges

International students’ tuition at U of T is al

the country during the housing search.

All the while, international students may have to reckon with problems of legal docu mentation that can impact their ability to plan for their immediate future. When visas don’t come through in time, students may end up in an impossible limbo where they’re unable to enter the country but are still expected to be present for class. Time windows for traveling may be cut short and lead to further complica tions during the age of COVID-19, making the logistical situation even more frantic for students who have no backup housing in the area.

On top of all that, until recently, interna tional students have faced stringent restric tions on their ability to work in Canada, lim ited to only 20 legal hours of work per week.

Although the work week restrictions are cur rently lifted, that’s only temporary — even though students have advocated against them for years — and the restrictions still apply to any students who applied for visas after October 8.

ic, and cultural factors inherent to relocation. Moving somewhere new, on top of setting up things like housing and health care, means having to establish a new home, setting up new social and emotional support systems, and managing the mental workload of run ning a household.

At the same time, some international stu dents may face specific challenges to establish ing themselves in their new setting, either due to language barriers or general antiimmigrant senti ment. The university offers programs for English language learning, and student advocacy groups can help with finding a community, but a lot of these resources are opt-in — in order to access them, the burden is on students to reach out.

Meanwhile, many students may be navigat ing complicated politics or global events back home on top of juggling their studies. We’ve seen countless examples of this in the past year alone — students with concerns about family or friends because of the floods in Pakistan, the protests in Iran, the war in Ukraine, or COVID-19 restric tions in China.

good.

But while we advocate for these changes in the long term, we still need to pay attention to what’s going on with students in the meantime.

Home isn’t just a sentimental word to describe the place where you live — it involves a multitude of factors that affect every aspect of being a stu dent, from the time you get up in the morning to the time you go to bed at night. For students far from home, it’s something whose distance can domino into financial, emotional, and pragmatic effects everywhere down the line.

So that’s why we’re going to keep covering home at The Varsity, in all its different forms. We’re all going to need to work together to keep the university to account on this one — home, after all, is a concept bigger than any one per son. And it’s not something we can afford to ignore.

The Varsity’s editorial board is elected by the masthead at the beginning of each semester. For more information about the editorial policy, email editorial@thevarsity.ca.

The Varsity Editorial Board

Tracing the world from Toronto

Coming to terms with your country from continents away

Eleanor Park Associate Comment Editor

Content warning: This article discusses deaths from the recent crowd crush in Seoul, South Korea, as well as gender-based vio lence and murder in Iran.

When I snuggled in my bed on the night of October 29, my last thought was the Hal loween costume that would be delivered to me the next morning. Minutes after shutting my eyes, however, my phone buzzed with a Facebook notification. I gave into the gate way of doom scrolling through social media and realized something was off.

Different Korean accounts were uploading footage of bodies on the ground with other people performing CPR on them. Thousands of commenters were tagging people they knew who were near the neighbourhood of Itaewon, Seoul. Captions read that six peo ple fell unconscious in Itaewon amidst a Hal loween party. I remember the two assump tions that crossed my mind when consuming the news: the event was either a tasteless Halloween prank or a minor accident.

The next morning, the world became aware that 149 people had died in a crowd crush in a downhill alley; the death toll even tually rose to 158 over the following weeks. On that silent Sunday morning, my family and I sat in front of the television, seeing no con crete report on any of the events by President Yoon Suk-yeol’s conservative government and the police force. The first concession by authorities that there were no protocols for dealing with such a massive crowd came on the following Monday. It was succeeded by a belated statement from South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo that acknowledged the “lack of deep institutional knowledge and consideration for crowd management.”

South Koreans were infuriated. Most who had lost their lives in the Itaewon disaster were younger than 30. Eleven emergency calls were made from the area where the ac cident occurred but the police dispatched officers on only four cases. This event was harrowingly similar to the sinking of the Se wol ferry in 2014, which took 304 lives — mainly of high school teenagers — while the later-impeached former President Park Geun-hye of the conservative government was absent for seven hours. I was 12 years old and reticent when the Sewol ferry sank; I am now eight years older and capable of fury, mourning, and indignation over another avoidable tragedy that has occurred before even a decade passed.

I happened to be living in South Korea on a gap semester when the tragedy occurred in Itaewon; however, the 120,000 Koreans living in Toronto digested these events from great geographical distance. This made me question how people soak in tragedies that occur back home when they are far from home. At a diverse school like U of T, how are young students from a myriad of different countries dealing with the pain and suffering from the countries their identities are rooted in? People with ties to other countries often feel isolated and have their trauma exacer bated when Canadians and Canadian media do not hold a nuanced view of other coun tries.

Through speaking with other U of T stu dents from South Korea, Iran, and Brazil, I was able to take in each country’s tragedies, protests, and political polarization with an en tirely new personal and human perspective that I am privileged to share.

Taking in Itaewon from Toronto Gloria Song, a second-year student at Trin ity College, was with her family when she

first saw the news of the Itaewon crush. As the daughter of first-generation South Kore ans who settled in Canada, seeing televised news reporting the initial number of deaths made Song immediately call family and friends back in South Korea, despite their drastic 14 hour time difference.

Even after confirmation that everyone her family knew was safe and well, however, Song was still unable to erase the footage from her mind.

In 2022, a tragedy like that of Itaewon is especially difficult to fathom when living out side of the country. Throughout her years liv ing in Canada, Song has witnessed many of her Korean-Canadian peers grow to accept and embrace their home country through its cultural boom that spread without barriers. Colloquially referred to as being part of hal lyu, or the ‘Korean Wave,’ South Korean cin ema, music, Netflix shows, makeup brands, and food have been rapidly taking the globe in an unparalleled way.

Beneath all of the glamour, Song sees the hard work of everyday South Koreans that built the country into what it is now. However, this is what makes the Itae won tragedy so poignant. Song re marked, “No matter how hard Kore

an people… [try to] show who we are… I don’t see it being at its full potential if the government is so unstable.” Song explained that South Koreans studying abroad are left with the trauma of potentially losing people they knew or could have known as a con sequence for seeking a better life elsewhere.

It’s hard to talk about trauma back home when people here don’t see the whole pic ture — the tapestry of nuance that makes your home what it is. Beneath the catchy lyrics and dance moves of 2012’s Gangnam style, Canadian listeners missed the song’s deeper meaning about inequality in postglobalization Korea. Meanwhile, the con certs of groups like Blackpink hide K-Pop’s widespread abusive work conditions and the economic struggles that pressure desperate young people to audition in the first place.

Unravelling revolution

On September 16, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year old Kurdish-Iranian woman, decided to go on a family trip to the country’s capital, Tehran. Amini’s plan was abruptly cut short when the country’s “morality police” arrested her for violating Iran’s dress code. Amini died in po lice custody three days later, after sustaining blows to the head and falling into a coma. Amini’s death came weeks after the the Ira nian government decided to implement more stringent laws for wearing the

hijab by utilizing facial recognition technology on public transport. Concerns were height ened when Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi signed this law, especially since the Iranian regime started phasing in biometric identity cards in 2015 — allowing for a majority of the Iranian population to be easily identified for violating dress code.

Iranian women have been fighting for au tonomy over their bodies for decades. The current Iranian regime imposes mandatory veiling on women. Throughout recent years, younger women started to take part in non violent protests by removing their heads carves, as Vida Movahed, a mother in her 30s, popularized in 2017.

It is for this reason that Tara Hejazi, a fourth-year UTSC student, wholeheartedly agreed with her father when he told her she should be proud to be an Iranian woman. She called what the world is seeing in Iran right now as a “woman-led revolution” and she could not be more proud of it. For Hejazi, to see so many women forcefully lead the de cades of resistance into a nationwide protest is empowering.

But, although Hejazi spoke of the Iranian women with great admiration and pride, she often stopped mid sentence to hold back tears or take a breath dur ing our interview. The brief pauses she took encapsulated her understanding of the suffer

ing felt from the Iranian government’s ruth less murder and detainment of women, men, and children.

Hejazi knows that there are many more killings and detainees that are not being ac knowledged by the Iranian regime and, in many cases, being dismissed with lies. In October, Iran’s Forensic Organisation offi cially published that Amini’s death was “not caused by blows to the head and vital or gans and limbs of the body” and the police still deny that the 22 year old underwent any physical harm.

In Toronto, even at a distance from Iran, Hejazi is fighting for her people through weekly protests. She knows that Iranians are connected wherever in the world they are, and that this challenging period will be over come. She also appreciates the U of T pro fessors who have understood that her mind is preoccupied with trauma and provided le niency with schoolwork.

Nevertheless, she still finds discussing a subject matter with such great weight diffi cult in her personal life with friends, a senti ment that I understand. When matters do not directly affect your friends, you become du bious on whether what is happening in your home country is even relevant.

Regardless, Hejazi is persistent. People should not stop talking about Iran and she is confident that the regime will fall because of the Iranian people.

A country divided

When thinking of her loved ones living in Brazil, second-year UTM stu dent Ana Porto feels guilty about where she currently

lives. Porto flew to Canada in 2018 in search of a better education and employment op portunities; though content with her current life, she understands that, by moving, she was emotionally distancing herself from Bra zil.

The 7,000 kilometres between Brazil and U of T seemed especially far during Brazil’s presidential election on October 2. The elec tion was dubbed the most important one in the country’s democratic history; Brazil achieved democracy in 1985 after transition ing from a military regime that had been in place for 21 years. One of the strong sup porters of Brazil’s former military regime was the far-right candidate and incumbent presi dent of the nation: Jair Bolsonaro.

Representing the conservative Liberal Party, Bolsonaro has been referred to as the “Trump of the Tropics.” After his inaugura tion in 2019, the country’s level of poverty was exacerbated due to the COVID-19 virus, which he perceived as the “little flu.” This dis missal proved to be lethal; almost three years after the declaration of the pandemic, Brazil has the second highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the world, with over 680,000 lives lost.

Although the pandemic affected the entire world, the situation in Canada was much less dire than in Brazil, with 46,710 COVID-19 deaths. From afar, in a relatively safer country, Porto has been able to monitor the situation in her home. A helpful

source of insight stemmed directly from her father, who works in public education in Brazil.

After emphasizing how Brazilian students inevitably need to pay for education in pri vate schools due to the lack of resources allocated for public schools, she recalls that she and her father discussed how difficult the pandemic was for children in public schools.

To her dismay, her father informed her that, “When COVID-19 ended and classes re sumed, most kids didn’t come back because they had to make money.” Children withdrew from schools and started working hard labour jobs to financially sustain their families — “al most half of the kids didn’t come back,” Por to’s father told her.

It was this knowledge that led Porto to ab stain from voting for Bolsonaro. The election result accordingly represented that half of Brazilians also found his politics unbefitting to their values. However, his popular competitor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won only by a 1.78 per cent margin, exemplifying how the nation is undergoing deep political polarization.

Da Silva will be inaugurated for the third time on January 1, 2023. He referred to this as a “resurrection” because he had been in carcerated for an alleged role in the biggest corruption scandal of Brazil: ‘Lava Jato’ or ‘Operation Car Wash.’ After being imprisoned for 580 days, da Silva was released when it was divulged that Judge Sergio Moro, who spearheaded the corruption investigation, did not follow due le gal process, and instead privately

communicated with prosecutors to scheme charges against da Silva.

The investigation was a pivotal turning point in Brazil’s political state. The bribery scandal was what ultimately prevented da Silva from running against Bolsonaro in 2018, notwithstanding polls indicating the former’s higher popularity. The omnipresent support of da Silva, his shocking corruption scandal, and Bolsonaro’s subsequent win over a sig nificantly less popular candidate from da Sil va’s Workers’ Party all amalgamated to build extreme political chaos.

While Brazil celebrated da Silva’s re claimed presidency, Porto had more pressing concerns. Throughout the race, she did not see her values reflected in either candidate and the sense of impending doom from the bifurcation of her home country precedes any relief from the election result.

Above all, living in Canada heightened Porto’s apprehension of most people in Bra zil who cannot easily access the internet and must accept televised news at face value. She said that “it’s hard for [most Brazilians] to be educated about politics in Brazil.” Por to’s father had told her that education of the younger people is key to saving their coun try; when thinking of the students who were forced to leave school to work, her fear for Brazil became tangible.

While her home country was politically di vided in half, Porto stayed in Toronto, with one question lingering in her mind: with whom could she talk about the political stress from Brazil? The same sentiment seemed to linger for Song and Hejazi: who can they turn to in Canada?

The home that keeps us quiet

This is where we start and end: Toronto. It is home to students such as Song and I, who lost 158 people of our age from our home country. It has students like He jazi who are furious over protestors be ing killed while fighting for a fundamen tal right. It has students like Porto who see the vicious cycle of polarized politics leading to the loss of a younger genera tion in education and politics. The stories are plentiful; students from anywhere can be mourning or hurting for the place they call home.

Our impression of the bustling city is twofold: to us, Toronto is a second home, but we do not feel close to its heart. Neither Song nor I have felt that the death of young Koreans was thor oughly discussed by Canadian media. Hejazi does not think Canadian media is giving the necessary amount of coverage to the Iranian protests. Porto confesses she has talked about Brazil to two people at maximum because Canadians are un aware of Brazil’s political state. How can these tragedies, pain, and trauma go by silently?

As Hejazi told me, Canada is a politically and economically stable country. In Canada, we are automatically granted the privilege to look away from global events, but we are handed the platform to amplify the voices of those who do not have the same privilege as us.

Every U of T student has the responsibil ity to stay curious about global events. We are members of a home that is built on the strength of heterogeneity; we need to care about having nuanced conversations to un derstand the layer of trauma that many con ceal, because a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved.

If you or someone you know is in dis tress, you can call:

• Good 2 Talk Student Helpline at 1-866-925-5454

• Connex Ontario Mental Health Helpline at 1-866-531-2600

• Gerstein Centre Crisis Line at 416929-5200

• U of T Health & Wellness Centre at 416-978-8030

How to make your home more cost effective

living

Nina Uzunović Business Correspondent

In October, Canada reported an inflation rate of 6.9 per cent — a huge jump from the 1.8 per cent inflation rate observed in October 2019. Students are certainly seeing the effects of these rising costs as they are being forced to navigate a brutal rental market and purchase commodities at much higher prices.

The issue of the brutal rental market is be coming all the more pressing for students, who are already facing decreased budgets due to food prices hitting 40-year highs, as well as in creasing costs of living.

Finding a cheaper home

On October 27, the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board released data detailing the cur rent state of the rental market. It reported an increase in the competition for condo rentals, citing that rent for the average one-bedroom condo apartment increased by 20.4 per cent from the previous year. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment observed a 14.5 per cent increase.

To aid students in finding affordable housing, U of T created the Off-Campus Housing Finder website, a platform for directly connecting stu dents with landlords willing to rent to the stu dent demographic. The website also helps stu dents find roommates through its Roommate

Search Tool, where students can create profiles detailing their interests, housing preferences, lifestyles, and habits.

Private rental housing isn’t the only option for students, with co-operative housing often pro viding more affordable prices and removing the headaches of dealing with landlords or tenants. Co-op housing is member-owned, meaning that each resident has a say in the operation and governance of the housing unit. Rather than ne gotiating a set rent with landlords, monthly rent is determined collectively by members.

Moreover, co-op housing fosters a sense of community, considering that all members are working together to run the unit — electing directors, setting policies, and approving bud gets.

Taking advantage of student discounts

Toronto offers several student discounts on a range of commodities including groceries, en tertainment, retail, restaurants, and more.

At Bulk Barn, students can enjoy a 15 per cent discount on regular-priced goods on Wednesdays. This is a great way to purchase bulk foods at a lower price. At the Metro on Bloor Street West, students can get a 15 per cent discount on Wednesdays and Thursdays with their TCards. Students should also save their shopping at Shoppers Drug Mart for Thursdays, as they get 15 per cent off their pur chases when they present their TCards at the

Shoppers at 236 Bloor Street West.

Entertainment in a big city like Toronto does not have to make a dent in your wallet either! The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) offers stu dents discounted tickets when they show their student ID. University students can also visit the ROM for free on Tuesdays. The Art Gallery of Ontario is free for anyone under the age of 25. Students who visit the Ripley’s Aquarium can also get a discounted ticket, at around $30.

Finally, Spotify users receive a special student rate for Spotify Premium, so when you are view ing your Spotify Wrapped at the end of the year, you can bask in the fact that you paid less for it.

True Blue savers

Students have also found their own hacks to lower their costs of living. Alexandra Schneider is a fourth-year student studying environmental studies, philosophy, and political science. “To mitigate the cost of living I have stopped eating out as much and started making more meals from home,” wrote Schneider in an email to The

Varsity. Schneider also wrote that she brings her own food to campus instead of using the school dining halls and cafes.

Elissa Chrapko is a second-year econom ics and public policy student. Chrapko echoes Schneider’s sentiment about the importance of maintaining a food budget. She finds that sharing meal prepping responsibilities with her roommates has helped her maintain this budget and manage her time.

“Staying organized and on top of my meal prep is super essential to me,” wrote Chrapko in an email to The Varsity. She does this to avoid losing money on food waste and eating out if she runs out of groceries or has too much schoolwork to do.

“In general, I have just become more mindful of my spending and have tried to cut out any unnecessary costs,” wrote Schneider.

Yang Ki Associate Business & Labour Editor

In 2020, Canada was the third most popular country in the world for international students to study in with 503,270 university and college in bound students. Although the COVID-19 pan demic would put a dent in this figure in the next few years, this figure was the culmination of 10 years of growth in the country’s attractiveness as an international center for learning. Cumu latively, the past decade saw an 11.2 per cent increase in international student enrolment prior to the pandemic.

As Canada’s top university, U of T takes the lion’s share of students coming to Canada an nually. Out of the 231,291 international students who enrolled in Canadian universities for the 2021–2022 academic year, 27,130 enrolled at U of T as of November 1, 2021. Upon gradua tion, many of these new alumni will face a tough question: where will they call home?

International students by the numbers U of T’s international student enrolment has in creased every year since 1997. From that year’s modest intake of 1,958, the international stu dent intake has since increased by more than 1,000 per cent to the aforementioned 27,130 in 2021.

These students come from all over the world. From the 2021–2022 cohort, 15,671 students — or just under 58 per cent — originated from China. In a distant second place, India was the country of origin for 2,082 students — just under eight per cent. In third was the United States of America with 1,171 students, or just over four per cent.

Reasons to stay

These students may be attracted to U of

T for many reasons. In its promotional material aimed at potential international students, the university website highlights its international academic reputation, its location in the heart of Toronto, its vibrant student life, and the “unpar alleled academic opportunities” it offers.

However, some students just appreciate the intellectual and cultural stimulation that inter national education can bring. “In my opinion, overseas study experience can help individuals improve their cross-cultural sensitivity, crosscultural awareness, cross-cultural competency and cultural intelligence,” wrote E Lai, an eco nomics and book and media studies student, in an email interview with The Varsity

Home is where the heart is Third-year visual studies and media studies student Mingyu Guo hopes to land a job and become a permanent resident after graduation. “I came to Canada in 2015,” Guo wrote in an interview with The Varsity. “I have spent almost nine years living in Canada, and I really enjoy the peace of life here.”

Baiyi Chen is a second year Rotman Com merce Management specialist. “I think that home is a place that has family members, a place surrounded by love,” Chen wrote in an interview with The Varsity. Unlike Guo, Chen plans to return to China once their studies are complete.

They attribute this decision to their greater comfort level communicating in

Mandarin. “Canada is an English speaking country, and my first language is Mandarin, which makes me feel ‘insecure’ in Canada,” Chen explained.

Staying in a new home

So what can international students looking to permanently call Canada home do to make their dreams a reality? The simplest path to trading a student visa for permanent residency is the Fed eral Skilled Workers Program (FSWP).

FSWP applicants are graded out of 100 points during the process with a minimum score of 67 points required for selection. Obtaining a fouryear university degree already provides a candi date with 15–25 points, giving them a significant advantage during application. FSWP’s English comprehension requirements are also similar to U of T’s requirements for incoming international students, thereby guaranteeing that U of T stu dents automatically meet another criterion of the program.

Permanent residency via FSWP is a long-term prospect, though. International students looking to stay in the country immediately after graduation would most likely need to look to transform their student visa into a work permit. This would allow them to get employment in Canada while they work to meet other FSWP criteria.

Luckily, the post-graduation work per mit (PGWP) is designed specifically for international student alumni in this exact situation. PGWP applicants need to have been full-time students for their entire degree and must apply within 180 days of receiving their last set of final grades. Successful PGWP applicants are allowed to work in Canada for up to three years, putting them on the path for ac ceptance into the FSWP.

JISHNA SUNKARA/THEVARSITY

With inflation on the rise, here are some ways to lower your cost of

Home is where Con Hall is: U of T’s character as a gateway to Canada Do international students want to make Canada their forever home?

Andrew

Arts & Culture

Wakanda Forever and Haiti

Dumé Features Accessibility Correspondent

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has finally hit theatres and left viewers in tears. The film was a beautiful tribute to Chadwick Boseman who passed away from cancer after playing the noble Black Panther, king and protector of Wakanda. The film also contained much need ed Indigenous, Myan, and Aztec representa tion, as well as elements of Latine culture and critiques of Spanish colonialism.

However, besides the online dialogues on the questionable romantic shipping of Namor and Shuri, or even on the topic of colonialism and how rich countries often strip the resourc es of “poor countries” for their own wealth, it was the small features of Haiti shown in the film that made my eyes water.

Dumé — pronounced Du-may — is more than a last name that shows up on my byline for articles I submit to The Varsity . It happens to be the only Haitian name I inherited from my father. He was born on the island. His nose was filled with the smell of roasted coffee as he grew up on the coffee plantations. Creole is his mother tongue. His young mind was filled with the history of his people, and he is able to recite the history around the dinner table today.

Recent history

My father tells the gut wrenching stories of how the Spanish conquered Hispaniola and killed off the Tainos and Arawak, the Indigenous peoples of Ay-ti, or how the French shipped Africans to the island to work on the coffee and sugar plantation to their deaths. How France and the US placed an embargo on Haiti to prevent them from international trade. Or even about the corruption, assassinations, or natu ral disasters that seem to happen every couple of months.

We can talk all day about corruption and gangs in Haiti — according to a New York Times article, the country’s previous president, who was assassinated two years ago, was compiling a list of Haitian businesses and po litical figures involved in a drug trafficking net work that sold product to the US.

But we can’t just point fingers at the cur rent government and tell it to do better without

identifying one of sources of the problem: pow erful Western countries who took advantage of Ay-ti’s natural resources, placed an embargo when it gained independence, prevented their economy from growing, and kept Haiti sub dued through a few political strings that persist to this day.

For instance, the American Marine Corps in vaded Haiti in 1915 and remained in the coun try for the next two decades. The goal was to “keep the peace,” since assassinations and coups had ousted six presidents within the span of five years. But the US military would go on to reshape Haiti’s government and es tablish a national army, which is known for hu man rights violations and coups. Jean-Berrand Aristide was elected president with majority support after the first democratic elections in 1990, yet the military forced him to resign and the US military returned in 1994. In 2000, Aris tide returned again and won the presidency with 92 per cent of the vote, yet he was re moved by Haitian and US military and exiled to South Africa.

The US’ role in these two coups may be disputed, but there is a clear connection be tween the US and Haiti through non-govern mental organizations (NGOs). Haiti has the highest record number of nonprofit organiza tions in the world, most of which are humani tarian and claim to help with development and relief.

But these NGOs can also bypass the state and weaken it. For example, the millions of dollars that Western federal governments and rich individuals raise for Haitian relief are not sent to the Haitian government directly to as sist with development due to risk of corrup tion; instead they send the money to NGOs. NGOs then take a cut to pay for equipment, wages, and resources, leaving a small portion left for Haiti — an easily abused system.

Also, any food aid given as part of relief programs by the US’ federal government has been heavily subsidized, benefitting American farmers because they have the resources to manufacture the goods cheaper. This drives local Haitian farmers out of business as due to a lack of resources and equipment, they are unable to reduce the price that is afford able for poor Haitian families.

I’m sure you may have heard about these stories from the news or even a deep dive from The New York Times , so I won’t repeat them in detail here. But the thing is, Haiti has become a nation looked down on with pity. Even rich people talk about Haiti in such a depressing manner, demonstrated by Trump calling Haiti and other African countries “shitholes.”

Toussaint Louverture and Wakanda For ever

But the one story you may not know, the one my father has embedded into my mind, starts with a historical figure named Toussaint Louverture.

If you have watched Wakanda Forever , you may recognize the name of Toussaint as the other name of Prince T’Challa, son of King T’Challa and Nakia. We were introduced to the six-year-old boy in the mid credit scene after Shuri finally allows herself to accept the deaths of her mother and brother. The reveal makes the death of Shuri’s brother an easier pill to swallow as he now lives on in his son.

While most of you may have teared up at the reveal of the late king’s secret son, I teared up when I realized that T’Challa Junior’s nonWakandan name was Toussaint. He is named after the first Govenor General of Haiti; a former slave, and the successful leader of the Haitian Revolution who liberated Haitains from slavery.

I will not glaze over the problematic char acteristics of Louverture’s leadership, during which he resorted to the plantations after free ing his people from it to develop the economy. Under his leadership, Haiti — known back then as Saint-Domingue — remained a domain of France, which is why he is called the “governor general,” not king nor emperor.

Toussaint was simply a product of his time, where slavery, especially through plantations, was the only guaranteed way to produce wealth. While he certainly treated his citizens much better than a slave owner would, return ing to a place of trauma definitely did not sit well with the people and led to protests.

Regardless, Toussaint’s military prowess and intelligence was what freed the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue, making Haiti the first slave-free nation to be governed by former slaves in the Americas in 1804.

This is the reason why Haiti, as even a small backdrop in the film, supports the movie’s overall theme. Both Wakanda and Talocan represent Indigenous regions — Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean — that were bru tally colonized for their natural resources, but have been reimagined in Wakanda Forever as if they weren’t.

In Wakanda Forever , after decades or even centuries of being hidden and isolated from the world, other countries — especially European countries— now seek to obtain their most valuable resource — vibrarium. So much so that in the film, France actually sends their army to secretly invade Wakanda, while American scientists go deep underwa ter, encroaching on Talocan territory.

It should be noted that T’Challa’s decision to make Haiti the place of refuge for his family contradicts everything we know about Haiti: its violence, corruption, and natural disasters, all of which could kill his family. But when we enter Haiti for the first time, the film doesn’t focus on these negatives. Instead, we visit a school, where children play happily and in peace. It is a sign of development. By nam ing his son Toussaint, T’Challa foreshadows a leader who will be able to rise up and defend his home against the looming threat of colo nizers stealing vibranium.

In the end, Wakanda Forever has brought me, a Haitian, some level of positive represen tation. Never before would I expect to have my father’s country integrated into a Marvel film so spectacularly, in a way that enriches the overall story, despite being featured so briefly.

As a Marvel fan, I was losing hope in Mar vel’s ability to keep phase four together. While they had pushed out a lot of new content, it didn’t land the same way as the Infinity Saga. The stories being told were interesting, and provided representation and diversity — but outside of Wanda, Loki, Moon Knight, Yelena, Spiderman, and Shuri, I wasn’t as invested in a lot of the characters. But this movie was a perfect send off for this phase, one that perked my intrigue to see where they take the Marvel Cinematic Universe further, and where Black Panther and the world of Wakanda will go next.

The significance behind T’Challa’s son’s name: It’s time for a little history lesson

Catherine

Haitian history features in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. COURTESY WALT DISNEY UK PRESS

Nostalgia Interrupted fails to arouse sympathy by eradicating hope

There’s more to the stories of marginalized communities than suffering

Makena Mwenda Creative Director

The page for UTSC's Doris McCarthy Gallery on its Nostalgia Interrupted exhibition opens by using fear-mongering words like “terror,” “ag gression,” and “insidious” to describe the sta tus of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) in our current society. This introduction foreshadows the doomsday-core exhibition that is to come. Nostalgia Interrupted is a commen tary on the idea of reminiscence, and how ra cialized people do not have the luxury of looking back on history with a sense of joy in the same way white people might. It claims that classic nostalgia looks at the world with “rose-coloured idealism,” but then swings the pendulum in the opposite direction by exhibiting works that are fatalistic and pessimistic, without answering the question: is either extreme good?

The problem with this exhibition is not the individual artists and their work, but the cura tion of their art together. Alone, some pieces in the Nostalgia Interrupted series stand as pow erful critiques of the racist structures that rule Canada. For example, “Deer in Headlights” by Algonquin artist Caroline Monnet uses stacked concrete blocks to critique the political oppres sion of Indigenous peoples, by visually repre senting how late in history Indigenous peoples gained the right to vote.

“Sebastia” by Dima Srouji uses glass-blown artifacts placed in sand-filled boxes to critique archeological practices of taking non-Western artifacts for display in the Western world. Alone, these works may be interesting, but together, they become a repetitive oversimplification of lived experiences of racialized people. Together,

they leave the viewer wondering, is this all that racialized people are? Victims of circumstance?

Nostalgia Interrupted follows the practice of “trauma feeding,” which is a practice in the arts that arouses moral sympathy while institu tions capitalize on the suffering of marginalized groups. By using shock value and moral panic, an artist engaging in “trauma feeding” sensa tionalizes the lived experiences of vulnerable groups. This empty despair and unnecessary melodrama brings more uninvited pain to racial ized viewers.

One example of this is the exhibition’s incred ibly dim lightning. The effect casts a shadow on the already depressing art, and yet it does not feel moody; it instead feels like overkill. Secondly, some of the work was closer to the floor than it should have been — again, this may have been a way of forcing us to look down at the art, hunch our shoulders, and make us look as contorted as the art made me feel. Through out the exhibition, it was clear that the curators went out of their way to exploit viewer emotions to arouse sympathy — but they elicited nothing but pity.

The problem with this exhibition was not that it pointed out the hard realities that racialized people faced, and are still facing in Canada to day. Highlighting such experiences is necessary to create positive change. Other galleries in To ronto have done this successfully, such as the Dis/Mantle exhibition by Gordon Shadrach — which is currently running at the Spadina Muse um. This exhibition shows the lived experiences of a Black American freed slave who came to Canada and worked as a laundress in the Spa dina Mansion. Although it was realistic about the harsh reality that she faced, it also centered

The magic of nonfiction

Michelle Fornasier Varsity Contributor

Recently, when I was scrolling through Twitter, I came across at tweet by social psychologist Amy Cuddy: “Tell me about a nonfiction book that both (1) emotionally moved you as you read it, and (2) permanently changed the way you see the world?”

She received hundreds of fascinating re plies, so I thought it would be interesting to hear from different people in the U of T com munity to explore their views on nonfiction and hear about the noteworthy books we should all read. The Varsity interviewed four different

people to get four different opinions on the magic of nonfiction books.

The power of reality

Each person who was interviewed spoke about vastly different books within this literary genre. However, many interviewees discussed the unique power of nonfiction books.

In an interview with The Varsity , Alexis Hart, a 2021 U of T alumni, who studied human bi ology and psychology, chose to speak about Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. This memoir explores Zauner’s relationship wit her mother, her mother’s Korean culture, and the last few years of her mother’s life after a termi

Black perspectives, beauty, and independence. Similarly to Nostalgia Interrupted, Dis/Mantle also had a focus on the experiences of racial ized people in the past. Instead of framing them as victims and helpless damsels, it centered their reclamation of power. The issue with Nos talgia Interrupted is that it only focuses on hard ship and completely disregards any opportunity to highlight the community and progress racial ized people have made. Although each artwork had strengths, when put together, the Doris McCarthy Gallery created an ode to misery and stagnancy and invites viewers to wallow in it.

The entirety of this exhibition was draining

and demeaning, and I left feeling sad and hope less. There is nothing wrong with art making an audience emotional; however, when that emo tionality lacks a call to action and glimmers of hope, it rings hollow. Especially in relation to art that depicts racialized people, a more holistic perspective is necessary. Without one, margin alized people become reduced to their suffer ing, a caricature of their whole selves. This exhi bition lacked both a call to action and a glimmer of hope, and it almost seemed like it called for people of colour to collapse and die because nothing will ever change.

nal cancer diagnosis. It highlights the intrica cies of cultural connections, family, and grief.

“I think it was definitely more impactful that it was a nonfiction book,” Hart said. “And just knowing that these were real people, real ex periences… it added an extra dimension to the book that you don’t often get with fiction.”

Hannah Koschanow, a fourth-year student double majoring in English and Canadian stud ies, spoke about How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, which is about the different ways social media cap tures our attention and how we can reclaim our attention by taking the time to truly do nothing.

Koschanow said that, although a fiction book on a similar topic might also be impact ful, nonfiction is uniquely so. “You might have to do a little bit more work and you know, parsing through… the theory… [but] her argu ment is very clear. Whereas I feel like with a fiction [novel] that’s less explicit,” Koschanow explained.

Dr. Paul Hamel, a professor in the Department of Labora tory Medicine and Pathobiology chose to speak to The Varsity about a few different books, including Open Veins of Latin by Eduardo Galeano Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eter nal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

Open Veins of Latin America is a beautifully written book about waves of exploitation of both people and resources in Latin America over the course of 500 years. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid ties together the music of Jo hann Bach, the beautiful artwork of Maurits Escher, and the math ematical theories of Kurt Gödel and seemingly superimposes them onto Alice in Wonderland

In contrast to Hart and Koschanow, Hamel discussed how fiction and non fiction accomplish very different things.

“You don’t know where things come [from in fiction], right?” Hamel argued. “Even fiction books are very often rooted in real events… according to the way the author understands how [reality] works.”

Feelings of isolation

Perhaps people turn to nonfiction to discover that others can relate to their experiences.

Hart felt that Crying in H Mart impacted her because her own relationship with her mother and Greek culture is mirrored in the book.

In another interview, Molly Metz, a voracious reader and professor in the Department of Psychology, chose to talk about The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis, which is a biography about two psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and their platonic love story as two male friends and academics.

Metz also shared The Undoing Project with two famous psychologists she personally knows, who have a similar type of relationship as the one depicted in the book.

“When I shared this with them, they also thought it was really special because no one understands their relationship and they’re like, ‘This is the first time I’ve seen myself repre sented in this kind of story,’ and so I do think that there’s something about this being real that did make it special,” said Metz.

Beyond the realm of traditional education People often turn to nonfiction to further their education, learn outside of what traditional schools teach, and develop new ways to look at the world. For example, Hamel felt that Open Veins of Latin America viscerally taught him the consequences of exploitation on peo ple’s lives, while Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eter nal Golden Braid gave him a new lens through which to look at the world.

Clearly, nonfiction is an important literary genre for readers to be enlightened, gain new insights, and to feel connected to the world. What noteworthy nonfiction books would you add to this list?

Doris McCarthy’s newest exhibition reduces marginalized people to their suffering. COURTESY DORIS MCCARTHY GALLERY

How nonfiction books have the power to transform your worldview

Four readers explain the nonfiction books that made them love the genre. VURJEET MADAN/THEVARSITY

Why don’t we listen to the radio anymore? Radio deserves a rise in listeners

Deol Managing Online Editor

If you’re a commuter like me, you understand the importance of a good morning routine. Rolling out of bed in the early morning before the sun has the chance to rise and navigating

playlist — maybe even a podcast. For me, I hit the FM button on my car radio and tune into Toronto’s 99.1 FM — CBC Radio One.

Radio’s always been my way of ‘being dif ferent’ from my peers. As pretentious as it sounds, I always found a spark of joy whenev er I got the chance to explain why you should

value to radio that we shouldn’t take for grant ed. Especially the publicly funded CBC Radio One, part of the greater CBC network. When I tune into Metro Morning , CBC Radio One’s early morning show, I find myself learning something new about recent events — domes tic and foreign — that I couldn’t have learned mindlessly scrolling through Twitter or the Ap ple News app. Hearing a first-hand account of a pharmacist, also a parent, grappling with the recent Tylenol shortage for their children from two perspectives, coverage of Canada’s run at the World Cup, and the lack of donations and volunteers at community fridges in Toronto all come to mind as important stories that many people might just gloss over. These impor tant community stories deserve an audience, and radio is the perfect platform for all to hear about it.

The Rogers network outage of this past July reminded me of why we should be grateful for radio. I woke up that morning to see my phone not connected to the internet, nor the cellular network — “Alright,” I thought, “maybe my phone’s just acting up.” As I entered the car and turned on my radio, I heard the hosts discuss that there was, in fact, a massive out age, and the internet and cellular networks for Rogers users were unavailable — and my day changed drastically.

Many people scoured their neighborhood look ing for a coffee shop with internet, others cracked open a good book, some even went for a walk. Me?

I went to my garage, pulled out a really old radio set and tuned into all my favourite stations periodically. By the time the internet came back up, I had already gotten my fill of music, news, and programming, and didn’t truly mind the vacation from the device that sucks so much of our time.

At the time, I thought that this event would lead to a radio renaissance, and we would all be tuning in more often. In a way, I was right, but the truth is, this increase in listenership in Canada has been going on for a while. A 2021 Statista graph, which shows data from the Numeris PPM Top-line Radio Statistics survey, demonstrates an increase in listener ship across many major Canadian cities from 2016–2021. Clearly, more people are starting to value that thing we all kind of forgot about in the streaming era.

I found some of my favourite bands through the radio. Maybe, the next time you feel bored of the music you’re into, you should try turning on the radio. You never know what you might hear.

Take a chance and go to a niche concert!

Ása

Kingdom

Everyone here looks like art.

That’s how I felt at my first concert in the local Toronto music scene. Self-expression manifested in the form of colourful shirts, blocky shoes, and jewelry that was about to be tucked away during the mosh pit. A beige ushanka, bright dresses, and the coolest prints on tote bags. It’s hard to look around the ven ues without your eyes being pulled in five dif ferent directions.

My friend Annabel Barbon, a first-year hu manities student at U of T, was performing there as the bassist in an indie rock, post-punk band — Kingdom of Birds. On September 10, a few of our mutual friends gathered and head ed over to the Tranzac, a self-proclaimed, “Not for profit arts hub in Toronto’s Annex Neigh bourhood.”

Ruckus Women, a local art collective work ing toward facilitating the decolonization of creation founded by Maia Taruc-Pilling — a third-year U of T student majoring in Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity — had orga nized this night. Titled “RUCKUS I: THE RISE OF RUCKUS,” it featured a diverse live mu sic lineup and Toronto artists lining the sides of the venue selling everything from ink prints to sketched computer stickers and mystery poem bundles. The concentration of creation was staggering.

The second show I went to was hosted at Press Vinyl Cafe. Vinyl boxes of thousands of records ran along the sides of the store, and at the back, Hockey Academy was playing its way through their setlist. If you’re like me, there’s nothing quite like live music. The pulsing of the drums and the bass, that electrifying energy ev eryone has as a band works up to the chorus, to that guitar riff, to the beat drop. It’s magnetic. Everyone gravitates toward the music like bees to honey, leaning in on one another to feel the beat.

The energy is just incredible. The entire com munity wants to be here, really wants to be here.

I was lucky enough to sit down with Kingdom of Birds, who have been in the Toronto music scene since 2016, and talked about their ex perience with shows, what it’s like to be the ones performing on the stage, and how they see the crowd.

in sixth grade, described the mini-concerts as get-togethers. “When we book the shows and choose the bands we want to play with, it’s like we’re playing with our friends… It’s like a house party. Live music and we just mess around… It’s music we like, with people we like,” said Berezny.

During the show at Press Vinyl Cafe, Ber ezny’s guitar strings broke in the middle of Kingdom of Bird’s setlist. Massimo Jolicoeur of Hockey Academy let her borrow his guitar, and within a few minutes, the band was up and playing again. Berezny laughed at the memory: “I consider us to be friends with Hockey Acad emy, Grumpy Truck… we are friendly with lots [of bands].”

“I feel like it’s generally pretty community based. Everyone gets to know each other,” Barbon added.

The found family bleeds beyond the bands and the lineups into crowds as well. At Ruck us Women, a girl in a Backseat Lovers shirt with sunglasses struck up a conversation with me. Another girl with pink makeup joined in. It was impossible to tell if everyone was old-time friends or had just met.

Zoe Deligianis, a first-year humanities stu dent at U of T, is both a huge concert goer and a developing production technologist. From their view in the crowd, they describe the shows as “a really beautiful thing. I’ve met so many incredible people.” The second you walk into a venue, you know you have a com mon interest with everyone you brush shoul ders with. They’re all here to appreciate the music.

Deligianis’ specialty lies in lighting and general stagehanding, and they just helped handle lights for a show for the band Motel 67 and the Scratch Collective in early November. “I got to see people… I haven’t seen since high school.”

Music draws people out. It takes intention to get into the crowd. To look up the shows, to trek your way over to the venue, to see through every artist and appreciate their craft.

Jacob Leslie, also known as Stretch, is an other Toronto-based production technician who has worked on all sorts of events. He’s set up giant lighting rigs for corporate gigs, handled audio for smaller shows at Tail of the

“I’ll be at some one-off jazz show… and I’ll run into some random person I met play ing bass for some metal show in the middle of nowhere,” Leslie said. “It’s cool to meet those connections and be able to just recognize these people… They’re in this with you.” The musicians are in the crowd, and half the crowd is musicians in one way or another.

“You get to know the crowd as well,” Barbon said. “As you keep playing shows, you see the same groups of people showing up and it’s al ways like a nice little reunion.” The performers stay after shows to sell merch, hop outside for a smoke with friends, and converse with the attendees. They listen and mosh and cheer for other bands just before ripping through their own setlist.

Another testament to how connected the scene is — the fact that Beatrice, the drum mer of Kingdom of Birds, also plays for another band, Heavenly Blue. When asked about how she approaches balancing double the gigs and practice sessions, she said: “I just really en joy playing with both of the bands. It’s different music, different people, different vibe, different crowd.”

“That’s the one thing I love about it. It’s never boring,” Leslie stated. “There’s no [monotony]

in this job. I’m at different venues all the time, every job is different, the crowd is different.”

It’s such a physical, visceral experience. Proof-of-payment stamps are slapped on the back of your hands in sharpie. Mosh pits swal low you up and throw you around just to spit you out. The kick drum vibrates through the floor as the band goes at it. Sometimes you sway to softer, kinder songs, and other times you can’t breathe after the last verse ends. “It’s always interesting,” said Leslie. “There’s always a story to tell.”

As for Kingdom of Birds, they’re planning on just doing what they love. Barks and Moans their next album is set to be released soon. You can catch them at Monarch Tavern on De cember 22, and you know what? I want you to go to a show. Are they a little intimidating? Yes, because everyone’s so passionate. But are they an absolute blast? Yes.

“You should feel welcome to go to any show even if you don’t know people personally… Just like show up. It’s super chill,” Berezny said.

“All the bands will be thrilled when people show up,” Barbon added.

“Yeah, that’s all we want. For people to come to the show,” Berezny concluded.

So, go to a show. See the moving, breath ing, art. I’ll see you there.

Berezny, the guitarist and lead singer of

of Birds who founded the band

Junction, and worked the live sound at festi vals like Riverfest Elora.

Angad

Behind Toronto’s youth music scene is a warm community. COURTESY OF ANDREW NORRIS

Miran Tsay Varsity Contributor

MIA CARNEVALE/THEVARSITY

look into the bright amalgamation of Toronto’s youth music scene

Dhalla Science Editor

In November 2022, the Earth’s human population reached 8 billion.

More than 8 billion humans are alive, and our population is growing exponentially. How did we get here, to the point of such rapid population growth and expansion? And, more importantly, is this growth sustainable?

Increasing populations throughout nature al ways come with challenges, but the ones faced by humans are especially unique. From issues of health equity and happiness, to balancing eco nomic progress and environmental protection, there are many challenges the human race will have to face as we expand and transgress the boundaries we usually see on populations in na ture.

But is it all bad, and is the human race equipped to handle these challenges?

The story so far

A bit over two centuries ago, during the industrial revolution, mortality rates started to drop dramati cally — particularly among infants and young chil dren — as we developed modern medicine and sanitation methods. Until then, population levels had been relatively stable. According to the UN, it took all of human history until 1804 to reach the point where even one billion humans were alive on our planet.

But as mortality rates dropped, birth rates also increased. More and more people were living till adulthood and having children, and it wasn’t until 1960 that researchers developed reliable meth ods of birth control. Following that first milestone of one billion people, we took only 123 years to reach a population of two billion, followed by 33 years for three billion, and less than 15 years for each subsequent billion. If current trends remain unchanged, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) estimates that the human population will grow to 11 billion by 2,100.

Today, even as we reach new heights, things are starting to slow down. It took us 13 years to go from four to five billion people and a further 11 to reach six billion, but it’s taken a full 12 years each to get to seven and eight billion people, and it might take even longer to reach nine billion. But even though populations have grown with

human progress, continued growth can also be linked with slow social progress. One factor as sociated with population growth, identified by the UNDESA, was increased birth rates in certain regions, caused primarily by a “lack of autonomy and opportunity among women and girls.”

Health inequities

One concern with population growth is that more people needing the same resources and public services will worsen existing inequities, particularly in health.

In an interview with The Varsity, Carmen Logie — Canada research chair in global health equity and social justice with marginalized populations and a professor at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work — defined health equity as “a stance that all people deserve access to well-being,” which focuses on “how resources and social pro cesses produce a type of health inequality.” When social structures do not allow everyone to benefit from resources and programs, we end up with un equal access to services and resources such as health care, ultimately impacting health outcomes.

When we look at health risks related to obesity, for example, public health communication tends to focus on the individual. Still, Logie explains that because our social environment “has so much in fluence on our ability to access healthy food, walk around our neighbourhoods, and access a range of health clinics,” reasons behind health factors like obesity are more systemic than they may appear.

Logie explains that these disparities in equity can exist across several dimensions — including gender, sexual orientation, and race, as well as the intersections between these.

And as populations grow, there is a risk that these disparities will only get bigger.

We’re already seeing the impacts of this in the realm of climate change. Logie and her colleagues recently found that when girls and women face increased water scarcity, they may also face in creased gender-based violence.

Gender-based disparities already exist before water scarcity becomes an issue, but the added psychosocial stress of lack of water further ampli fies these disparities.

Instead of populations increasing across gen erations, we’re now also seeing ageing popula tions. Nations are worried that ageing populations may result in slower progress, potentially leading to a lack of resources as populations grow. Still, it seems as though this trend will continue in most of

the world besides sub-Saharan Africa.

So, what can we do? To create a more equi table society, Logie mentions we should focus on social determinants of health and ensure people have equal access to basic needs. We also need to focus on bridging the gaps and disparities be tween genders, races, and other axes where these issues occur. Only through holistic, intersectional approaches will we progress in this realm.

Happiness

As populations grow and cities get denser, chang ing circumstances could impact individuals’ hap piness and satisfaction levels. In an interview with The Varsity, Felix Cheung, Canada research chair in population well-being and assistant professor of psychology at U of T, discussed the potential impacts on well-being we might face as society changes.

Cheung’s lab at U of T, the Population WellBeing Lab, focuses on better understanding the determinants and consequences of satisfying and purposeful lives. They use interdisciplinary ap proaches to explore population well-being in differ ent global contexts.

Cheung mentioned that, while population growth may not directly impact well-being, “popu lation density has a detectable but small negative effect on happiness.” Since urban areas are able to accommodate more people, it is reasonable to expect that population densities in these areas will increase across the globe. Therefore, indirectly, increasing populations may have consequences on the happiness and well-being of individuals in cities.

But there are ways to mitigate these issues. “We need to think about development from a humancentred way informed by well-being or happiness research,” Cheung argued. We can use the knowl edge we get from happiness research to create better policies and cities.

While we look for solutions and means to im prove population well-being, it is essential to un derstand that happiness, like health, is not just an individual responsibility. Many health and wellness programs put the burden on individuals by pre scribing gratitude journals or meditations. While these practices can be beneficial, they may also often backfire by making people think they should be happier than they are. Instead, individuals, or ganizations, and governments need to work to gether to achieve satisfaction in our lives and hap piness, especially as populations increase.

Is this growth sustainable?

Whenever there are discussions on population growth, one line of questioning always arises: how much longer can we keep going? How long will it be before nature takes its course and human populations collapse, unable to sustain the level of growth we’ve maintained since the industrial revolution?

The rationale behind these questions is simple and based on general ecology principles. Every population in every species has a carrying capac ity — an upper limit for the number of individuals a particular environment can support. As a popula tion approaches this point, provided there are no predators to limit its growth, resources become more scarce and harder to come by, reducing the population’s growth rate until its size declines or remains constant around the species’ carrying ca pacity.

If every other species has this, it seems intuitive to assume the same of humans.

The argument puts forth that, in a finite world like ours, continued demographic and economic growth is impossible. Technological innovation may also never be able to replace natural re sources fully, which could limit population growth.

To avoid resource depletion catastrophes, propo nents of this argument claim we should control human populations to reduce humanity’s drain on natural resources.

Arguments around carrying capacity are known as the pessimistic side of the population growth question. But many individuals, including Pierre Desrochers, an associate professor of geography, geomatics, and environment at U of T, favour the optimist’s position more.

When talking about population growth, opti mists argue that larger populations lead to more individuals engaged in trade, creativity, and prog ress, creating more prosperity than individuals working alone would experience. One part of Des rochers’ argument is based on trade — animal populations are limited to resources within their re gion, but humans seem to have evolved past that with the ability to trade.

Another essential aspect of this argument is human creativity. In an interview with The Varsity Desrochers points out the brain’s powerful ability to “recombine existing things in new ways, solv ing problems, and the more we advance, the more we can advance.” Innovation then seems more exponential than linear as more people from our growing society build upon past creations to keep up with the rate of human population growth and needs.

According to Desrochers, pessimistic perspec tives on population growth have been proven wrong throughout human history. From Catholic priests in the 1600s to economist Thomas Mal thus, who popularized the pessimist perspective in the eighteenth century, the pace of human in novation has outstripped all predictions. “The limits argument does not apply to human beings,” Des rochers claims.

Despite the fact that human population growth doesn’t seem to currently be limited by environ mental factors, we are seeing a steady decline in growth rates across the world. Many nations, including most of Europe, Canada, Brazil, and Sin gapore, are now below ‘replacement-level fertility,’ since each new generation is less populous than the previous. Despite this, these nations have in creasing populations, potentially due to immigra tion and increasing life expectancy.

Overpopulation, at least on a global scale, is not a concern in the way many think it to be. Humanity and its technological innovations have the power to keep us going for a long time. But there are still factors that are limiting us — our social and cultural priorities, which inform policy and shape the world we experience, are also going to have to adapt as human populations change and grow. The mismatch between our priorities and what we actually see in the world today creates dangerous inequalities — and that will only get worse until we address them properly.

Are increasing populations truly dangerous for humanity?

As the human population grows, we need to be proactive about taking care of each other

Sahir

MARGARET ATKINSON /THEVARSITY

It starts at home: socializing gender in early child development

How play in childhood affects gender stereotyping

Ajeetha Vithiyananthan Associate Senior Copy Editor

As a child, have you ever been told not to wear a piece of clothing or play with certain toys because they’re not “gender appropriate”? As you grew up, did your expectations of gender evolve with the changing times?

Elham Hoominfar, a professor at Utah State University’s Department of Sociology, Social Work & Anthropology, writes that gender socialization “is the process by which individuals develop, re fine, and learn to ‘do’ gender.” We learn our cul ture’s gender-related norms and expectations, ‘do’ gender by performing tasks based on our gender assumed by society, and refine our gender identity through others’ feedback and our conse quent interpretations.

While one’s sex may be biologically and physi ologically determined as male, female, or intersex at birth, gender develops in response to cultural conceptions of masculinity and femininity and ex ists on a spectrum.

Primary agents of gender socialization include schools, peer groups, and media. However, the astonishingly early ability to distinguish gender points to family as the first agent. A study on the development of gender schemas found that by 1.5 years of age, children could not correctly classify photos of people according to gender, and yet, by 2.25 years, half of the children could. Those who could correctly identify gender also demonstrated gender-specific play.

The reason for these ‘early labellers’ are their parents, who were more likely to positively or neg atively respond to gender-typed play.

How do parents socialize gender in children?

The influence of parents on children’s gender development can occur in three forms: gender-

stereotypical expectations, gender-role modelling, and differential treatment of daughters and sons.

Despite the increasing gender equality in the past several decades, gender stereotypes about personality traits, abilities, activities, and roles persist. Parents commonly reinforce gender roles with essentialist statements and descriptive ste reotypes. Instead of prescriptive stereotypes stating what behaviour should occur, parents de scribe general patterns about each gender, like “girls like reading” or “boys like math,” and rarely challenge them.

Parents’ behaviours are even better predictors of children’s gender-role attitudes than parents’ ideologies. For example, parents modelling divi sions of household labour and childcare can in fluence children’s ideas of gender-specific roles. A 2018 study published in the Universal Journal of Education Research found that children whose fathers were more involved in childcare engaged in less gender-based stereotyping, as the fathers demonstrated that the adult male role may include nurturing alongside instrumental activities.

One might wonder what dynamics are present in same-gender parents’ households. Research found that while children of same-gender parents are generally less likely to endorse certain gender stereotypes, children of same-gender couples where one was designated as the primary care giver and the other as the primary breadwinner were more likely to express gender stereotypes about adult roles and occupations. Even here, the stereotype that nurturing is strictly a feminine quality — and, by extension, a quality of women — persists.

Parents also tend to encourage gender-stereo typed activities, which, in turn, may also influence children’s learning of cognitive and socioemotion al skills, as well as their interaction styles. When parents give boys building blocks, toy guns, and

action figures, they may promote logical-mathe matical skills, motor skills, aggression, and soli tary play. When parents give girls dolls, kitchen sets, and dress-up apparel, they may foster nur turing, aesthetic values, and social proximity.

Another 2018 study found that parents’ posi tive feedback for gender-normative behaviour encourages children to play with “gender-appro priate” toys, even when cross-gender options are available. Even with changing gender norms, stereotypically feminine qualities are being deval ued. Research finds that parents are more flex ible about activities considered acceptable for daughters than sons: for their sons, most par ents encourage masculine-stereotyped activi ties, like athletic participation, while few parents encourage feminine-stereotyped activities, like doll play.

By encouraging a mixture of activities and cross-gender group play and modelling gender egalitarian behaviour in the household, parents can offer more flexibility in children’s gender iden tities, a broader repertoire of social and cognitive skills, and ultimately, a freer self-concept.

Conclusions

Gender socialization doesn’t stop with childhood. In later life, education, peer groups, and media take more precedence in shaping gender identity. However, the effects of early gender socialization can carry on into our adulthood. With women com prising about 91 per cent of registered nurses but only about 43 per cent of physicians in Canada, we should raise questions about gender roles fostered at a young age.

If more boys could see themselves as nurturing and more girls could see themselves as equally capable of logical problem-solving, would these numbers change?

Many well-known research and theories about early gender socialization are a bit outdated, ignor ing LGBTQ+ identities — particularly those who identify as transgender, non-binary, or gender fluid. With a growing understanding of gender develop ment, gender diversity, gender expression, and gender dysphoria, parents of gender nonconform ing children will have the resources to guide them — and one day, we may be able to deconstruct gender identity entirely.

Angel Hsieh Varsity Staff

Scientists are stereotypically reputed to be coldblooded maniacs, conducting insane experiments in secret labs and working for mor ally dubious institutions. Pop cul ture tends to portray scientists as wickedly smart but very awkward in social situations, but these ste reotypes aren’t always accurate.

No matter what your impres sions of scientists are, here is a compilation of some simple science experiments you can perform with household items.

Homemade lava lamp

Materials: One clean plastic 16 oz soda bottle with cap, vegetable oil, one Alka-Seltzer tablet, food co louring of your choice, and water.

Procedure:

1. Fill the plastic bottle 75 per cent full with vegetable oil.

2. Add water up to the neck of the bottle, leaving a little space be tween the water line and the brim of the bottle.

3. Add droplets of food colour ing into the bottle until a bright co lour is achieved.

4. Break the Alka-Seltzer tab let into small pieces and add one piece at a time.

5. You can tip, twist, or shake the bottle for more action!

Alka-Seltzer is an antacid commonly used to relieve an upset stomach, with a chemi cal composition of basic sodium bicarbonate and acidic citric acid. The carbon dioxide bubbles you

observe in the lava lamp are the result of an acidbase reaction. When dissolved, sodium bicarbon ate and citric acids collide and react to produce carbon dioxide.

Oil and water also do not mix well and have clear separations because oil is hydrophobic, or ‘water fearing.’ The long carbon fatty acid chains in oil do not react with water molecules, resulting in the separations we see during oil spills.

Making a pasta rocket engine

Materials: Tube-shaped pasta that can stand up on its own, active dry yeast, mason jar, hydrogen peroxide, and a lighter.

Procedure:

1. Drill a small hole through the mason jar cap.

2. Fill up the mason jar two-thirds full with hy drogen peroxide solution.

3. Add a quarter teaspoon of yeast into the jar and mix gently.

4. Put the punctured lid on and place your pasta over the hole, without screwing it in.

5. Light the top of the pasta with a lighter.

According to Newton’s third law of motion, any force exerted will result in an equal and opposite force in return. For a rocket to launch, it requires a tremendous amount of hot gases forced out of the back via combustion. The pasta engine in this experiment demonstrates the fuel burning process and energy release that mimic the combustion in real rockets, but does not take off with this setup.

The pasta rocket is a model of hybrid rockets that burns a solid fuel, like the hydrocarbon in pasta, in the presence of a liquid oxidizer. The in teraction of yeast with hydrogen peroxide solution generates oxygen gases. The advantage of such a rocket design for real space missions is that the presence of a liquid oxidizer allows more precise control of flow at a low cost, and it is easy to ma neuver and manage simultaneously. For this ex

periment, the design allows us to turn off the flame without the risk of explosion.

Glow-in-the-dark ice

Materials: Tonic water with quinine, ice cube tray, working freezer, and ultraviolet black light.

Procedure:

1. Dilute a bottle of tonic water with a bever age you enjoy.

2. Pour the contents into an ice cube tray and freeze it.

3. Shine a UV light on the ice whenever you want the glowing effect.

The key ingredient to produce the glow-in-thedark effect is the quinine in the tonic water. Quinine first absorbs the invisible ultraviolet light then emits it again in a visible wavelength, which is the under lying mechanism for fluorescence. The emission of light comes from the excited object reverting to an unexcited state. Quinine is derived from tree bark and has been used for treating malaria from the parasite Plasmodium falciparum for centuries. This pathogen causes malaria by getting into red blood cells. Quinine either kills the parasite or prevents it from growing endogenously in the body.

While science often seems restrictive and closed off, these experiments show that science can be made accessible to all. Creativity and curiosity are natural feelings we have, and science can be an avenue to fuel them!

FIFA missed a red card call with human rights issues in Qatar

U

Mekhi Quarshie Sports Editor

of T professors discuss the link between sport and politics in

tances are not only a lifeline for the families of the migrant workers but Nepal’s economy as well.

In the deep dark recesses of FIFA’s 2010 eval uation report on potential 2022 World Cup lo cations lies a statement about one candidate in particular:

“If Qatar is awarded the hosting rights, FI FA’s legal risk appears to be low… The neces sary government support has been secured.” Many are starting to wonder if FIFA made a misjudgement granting Qatar hosting rights. From Qatar’s beer ban to its controversial ban of the “One Love” armband — a symbol of in clusivity — fans, players, and companies have been questioning their support for the 2022 Qatar World Cup.

In particular, though, some of the most notable news occurred before the ball ever touched a Qatari soccer pitch: it started with the construction of the seven World Cup stadi ums and the hands that belonged to the peo ple that slaved away. As part of The Varsity’s Home issue, we took a look into the Qatari migrant worker problem, and how we could possibly fix it.

What’s the use?

A migrant worker, much like the name denotes, is a worker who provides labour abroad, in a country in which they do not have citizenship. According to the Human Rights Watch, this situation frequently leads to exploitation in volving abuse, harsh working conditions, and often death.

In an interview with The Varsity, Michelle Buckley, an associate professor in UTSC’s De partment of Human Geography and an expert on migrant-worker relations in the Gulf states, explained the importance of migrant workers: “The population of Gulf states like Qatar and the UAE and so on [is] actually quite small, and so they relied on enormous numbers of noncitizen workers.”

Buckley stressed that the migrant workers in question aren’t only the construction work ers that you see in mainstream media. Migrant workers in Qatar work in a range of sectors, from retail to law enforcement to domestic work, and account for as much as 85 per cent of Qatar’s population of 3 million people.

“States really wouldn’t function the way they do without the importation of huge amounts of often lower wage, migrant labour,” Buckley said.

In the midst of outcry, it is important to note that the concept of migrant work is not ob jectively negative, and these workers actually support the economies of nations from where they emigrate, as they send funds back home, called remittances.

“The flow of remittances back from the Gulf region… for countries like Nepal, is an abso lute lifeline,” Buckley explained. These remit

Nepal sends more than 25 per cent of its population overseas, which accounts for a quarter of the country’s national income. Cut ting out this source of income entirely would most likely result in a complete upheaval of Nepal’s economy. Overseas labour is not the problem here, but rather the blatant maltreat ment of foreign-born workers. One of the rea sons overseas labour is so lucrative is due to the ignorance of human rights issues.

“I don’t think we can really rely on any numbers that the state might give us”

To complicate things further, reports on the exact number of migrant worker deaths in Qa tar have been inconsistent, with mainstream media grasping for salacious headlines on one end, and Qatari officials supposedly underrep resenting numbers on the other. On November 29, Hassan al-Thawadi, the secretary-general of the World Cup organising committee, noted that worker deaths relating to the construction and preparation for the World Cup were “be tween 400 and 500.” These numbers are sig nificantly smaller than the Guardian’s reported

midst of World Cup

“A worker may work on a site, feel unwell, leave the site, go back to their dorm, and hours later they might pass away because the heat of course is really brutal in Qatar… there’s really no way to know [the true cause of deaths] for sure,” Buckley said.

With the 2022 World Cup lighting up living rooms around the world, it’s essential that we

seems to be a key problem that, if resolved, could result in the betterment of human rights conditions at mega-sporting events.

Another solution that Darnell put forth would be a permanent site for the megasporting events, that the games return to af ter every interval break. “What if we stopped building the facilities for the World Cup or the Olympics every time we host the games… we could have the Olympics in Athens every four years and the facilities would be there.” Dar nell outlined. “There’s less money in that, ob viously, but the environmental benefits would be clear and we couldn’t fall into this trap of bidding for games.”

“Once the games start, the contradic tions stand still”

Another group that could draw attention to the migrant worker issues in Qatar is athletes themselves. The World Cup has been a hub for this. A prime example is the German team placing their hands over their mouths before a group stage game against Japan in protest of FIFA’s restriction to allow players to wear the One Love armband.

6500, which is the total number of deaths of migrant workers since Qatar was announced as the host for the tournament — not specific to the constructions of the venues. This drastic incon sistency within the reporting of numbers can be confusing to the public.

“I don’t think we can really rely on any numbers that the state might give us,” Buckley responded when asked about the accuracy of the reported numbers of migrant worker deaths in Qatar. For example, heat stress is posited to be a leading cause for the deaths of migrant workers, but Qa tar does not include that in its death count.

identify a solution. In order to do this, it’s es sential to discern the groups that can facilitate change in the first place.

On lack of transparency: “FIFA is definite ly following the money” “We do not react based on whatever pres sure we receive; we act when we decide the time to act has come,” FIFA president Gianni Infantino said when he faced the world with an hour-long speech on the eve of the World Cup’s opening ceremony.

Infantino addressed the fact that Qatar had a legal obligation to provide compensation to workers in need. However, Human Rights Watch refuted Infantino’s statements, saying that in reality, bureaucracy makes it increas ingly difficult for workers to get this kind of compensation. It also pointed out that, in a particular instance, it took four years for a worker to get compensation from Qatar for months of unpaid wages, by which time the long wait took a toll on his health.

Simon Darnell, an associate professor at U of T’s Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Edu cation, highlighted this notion, explaining that “the organizations that are in charge, like the IOC and FIFA… always stop short of calling out the host countries in response to these issues.”

The lack of transparency from FIFA and the Qatari government about human rights — from true death counts to policy outcomes —

In a world where the popularity of athletes is amplified through social media in an unprec edented manner, Bruce Kidd, former Olympi an distance runner and professor emeritus of Sport and Public Policy at U of T highlighted the importance for athletes to speak out.

“I think the days when athletes can put their blinders on and say, ‘All I’m going to do is fo cus on my sport’ are over.” Kidd highlighted, when asked about the importance of athlete advocacy in light of human rights issues.

Kidd reflected on his rise to fame in the 1960s, which he managed to take advantage of by using his voice for a purpose. “I was a prominent athlete in the early 1960s,” Kidd said, referring to his hallmark win against Mur ray Halberg, 18 national senior track and field championships, and widespread fame. With his background as an associate sports edi tor of The Varsity and columnist of the Cana dian University Press, Bruce explained, “I was used to making my voice known, and I landed in support of the first voices for gender equity, the Olympic Movement for Human Rights… I’ve been a lifelong ally.”

Perhaps if more athletes step up as Kidd did in the 1960s, the scene will shift.

What now?

When the 2022 World Cup ends on December 18, fans and teams will go home, but migrant workers won’t. Hopefully, this article has shed some light on what such reforms look like.

This article has been shortened for print. The full version can be found online at thevarsity. ca

A worker cuts down on a wire while building a stadium. COURTESY OF INTERNATIONAL LABOUR ORGANIZATION

Three migrant workers smile at the camera. COURTESY OF WBUR BOSTON'S NPR NEWS STATION

Five on three penalty leads to tough 3–1 loss for Blues against Laurier Golden Hawks

Early goal by Owen Robinson not enough to secure the win

Victoria Paulus Varsity Contributor

Prior to Saturday night’s match, the Varsity Blues men’s hockey team were ranked third in the West division at 9-5-1 after they beat the Waterloo Warriors 4–0 in Waterloo, Ontario on December 2.

On Saturday, December 3, the Blues played the Wilfred Laurier Golden Hawks at their home rink, Varsity Arena, for the second time this season. These two teams had faced each other in the first game of the regular sea son, where the Blues secured a 2–1 win in overtime.

What happened

Within the first four minutes of the game, the Golden Hawks were given a penalty for holding, which set the tone for the rest of the night. Both teams came out aggressively, and the Blues created many offensive opportunities, yet nei ther team could score.

The score was 0–0 going into the second pe riod, but it was not long until Blues’ defender Ryan Barbosa picked up the puck in the end zone and carried it up to the half. He made a sharp pass to teammate Cole Purboo, who passed it across the net for forward Owen Rob inson to tap it into the back of the net.

Just minutes later, Blues’ defender Nick Grima received a two-minute penalty, which re sulted in the Hawks’ first goal. A fight broke out

in front of the net and Barbosa was sent to the pen alty box, handing the Hawks an other play advantage.

The Blues’ started the third period hungry for more goals, but their penalties got in the way of this; not even a minute apart, two players from the Blues were given penalties for boarding and high sticking. The five-on-three powerplay led to the Hawks’ second goal of the game, putting the score at 2–1.

With under five minutes left in the game, Bar bosa was given another penalty for slashing and the Hawks scored their third and final goal of the game, securing a 3–1 against the Blues.

What’s next

The Blues now sit in fourth place in the west di vision 9-6-1, with 19 points overall, and are now on a well-deserved break until the new year. On January 2, the Blues will be back for an exhibi tion game against Niagara University, to prepare them for their regular season matchup against Lakehead University on January 6.

The Blues beat the Lakehead Thunderwolves 4-1 the last time the two teams faced off on No vember 19, and look to do the same in the new year.

The NBA has always presented itself as an Ameri can organization, but has seen a tremendous influx of international talent over the last decade. While international superstars such as Luka Dončić, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Joel Embiid dominate the headlines, Canadian influence in the NBA is quietly growing. In the last NBA draft alone, two Canadian players were picked in the lottery.

The number of new Canadian players entering the league each year is reflective of the growing contingent of Canadians playing in the NBA. From 2000–2010, only four Canadians debuted in the league. This year saw six new players join the league, and over the last four years combined, 22 Canadians have made their NBA debuts. Among all these new Canadian players, a few of them look like future All Stars and players who could raise Canada to new heights on the world stage.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander

Of all the Canadian stars in the league, Shai Gil geous-Alexander, is shining the brightest. He’s av eraging 31.1 points a game so far this year, along with 6.1 assists and 4.9 rebounds. Ever since he was traded to Oklahoma City, Gilgeous-Alexander has been making a name for himself, improving his scoring total every season. This year, he’s tak

en his game to another level and is likely to earn his first All Star selection.

Shaedon Sharpe

Shaedon Sharpe was probably the biggest un known coming into the 2022 NBA draft. After a tumultuous year leading up to a draft in which Sharpe didn’t play a single game for his team in Kentucky, people began to doubt his number-one ranking in his high school recruiting class. This led to him falling to Portland as the seventh pick.

Now, he’s proving his worth on a red hot Port land team who are near the top of the Western Conference. He’s averaging 8.2 points in 20 min utes a game off the bench for the Portland Trail Blazers, making him a Canadian player to keep your eye on as he continues his NBA career.

Bennedict Mathurin

Bennedict Mathurin is another Canadian who’s in his first year in the league. He was drafted sixth by the Indiana Pacers, one spot ahead of Sharpe.

He’s at the top of the NBA’s most recent Rookie of the Year (ROTY) Ladder, and for good reason.

He’s averaging 18.9 points off the bench for the Indiana Pacers, who are performing much bet ter than expected this year. Don’t be surprised if he stays in the race for ROTY all season and be comes an elite scorer in the NBA.

Jamal Murray

Jamal Murray is coming back from an ACL injury this year, but he remains one of the best Canadian players in the league. He set high expectations for himself in the NBA Bubble playoffs in 2020, av eraging 26.5 points a game as Denver made an unexpected run to the Western Conference Final. Now, with Murray coming back from injury, the Denver Nuggets can hope to make another deep playoff run. Look for Jamal Murray to continue to improve throughout the season and return to AllStar form by the playoffs.

Former NBA Canadians you may not know about

Hank Biasatti — 1946; six games: In addition to being the shortest Canadian to play in the NBA — called the Basketball Association of America at the time — Windsor native Hank Biasatti was also the first-ever Canadian to play. He took part in the very first game of the BAA, suiting up for the Toronto

Huskies against the New York Knicks on Novem ber 1, 1946, right here in Toronto. This made him the first international player in the league as well. Biasatti left the basketball career early to pursue his true love — professional baseball.

Sim Bhullar — 2015; three games: You may know Brampton’s Sim Bhullar for his height or for being the first NBA player of Indian descent. What you may not have known is the center’s per-minute career performance was better than that of any other Canadian in history in terms of three of the most common advanced basketball metrics: box score plus-minus, win shares per 48 minutes, and player efficiency rating. To see the actual numbers, consult the table below. Of course, he only played for three minutes, making any real comparison silly, but Bhullar still deserves some love. After all, at seven feet five inches, he is the tallest Canadian to ever play in the league, and the seventh tallest NBA player overall.

Daniel Santiago Varsity Contributor

Since we’re not fully on the other side of the CO VID-19 pandemic, having a home gym, even if it only consists of a few pieces of equipment, has become a must. Given that most U of T students are already too preoccupied with work on and off campus, there is hardly any time for the often busy and hectic gym. At home, however, with just some basic equipment, you can fortify your body, keep your health in check, and help you get through the day with energy.

My philosophy toward buying home gym equip ment is simple: it has to be portable, multi pur pose, and multi dimensional. The following is some equipment I recommend for those of you who want

to make a little home gym for yourselves. Note that a couple of these will cost you quite a bit, but if you want quality, durable equipment, it’s a sacrifice you must make.

Jump box

Jump boxes can be used for a variety of lowerbody and upper-body exercises. Plus, it’s relatively easy to move around as it only weighs around 7 kilograms and it can support up to 180 kilograms.

If you’re interested, don’t fret, there are plenty of plyometric boxes out there. Just ensure that you buy one that is made out of metal and can sup port your bodyweight — the higher the weight it can support, the better.

Jump/speed/heavy rope

Cardio exercise has been getting a lot of flak lately,

but the worse your cardiovascular health is, the worse you’ll feel physically and mentally. Car dio is also scientifically proven to reduce the risk of many serious conditions. What better way to work on your heart than with a jump, heavy, or speed rope? What’s the difference between the three, you ask? The jump rope is the commonly used rope; the heavy rope is weighted, usually weighing around half a kilogram; and the speed rope is more like a wire coated in plastic, which makes it pretty light and moves quickly when you swing it. You can buy them anywhere, and all three types are pretty affordable. A tip for those getting a speed rope and want to use them on the pavement: wrap the rope with electric or masking tape to prevent it from splitting in half!

Sliders

Core sliders have been a staple in home gyms, but it’s important to get sliders that are quite spacious — wide enough to hold either your hands or

the balls of your feet in place to ensure that you can do upper- and lower-body exercises without hassle. The typical circular core sliders can only accommodate the user’s hands, and can never hold the balls of the user’s feet in place when doing lower-body exercises.

All in all, bringing the gym home might be the most efficient thing that a university student can do. Hopefully this article helps you do just that!

Mac Bell, Ismail Benchekroun Varsity Contributors

JESSICA LAM AND DANIEL SANTIAGO/THE VARSITY

Kyle Potts glides by defenseman Steven MacLean. COURTESY OF SEYRAN MAMMADOV/VARSITY BLUES MEDIA

ALL-PRO REELS AND FRENCHIEINPORTLAND/WIKIMEDIA

COMMONS; JESSICA LAM/THEVARSITY

In photos: Finding home

Navigating Toronto’s housing market is no easy feat

Lexey Burns Deputy News Editor

When an individual goes to university, they should first be worried about making friends, then their program and classes, and maybe even midterms and final grades. University is also the first phase where students are learning to live on their own, and that means finding a place to live.

For U of T students located in Toronto, the housing market makes it harder to find a home than if they were located outside of the city.

According to the Toronto Regional Real Es tate Board (TRREB), the average cost for a one-bedroom condo in Toronto in 2022 was $2,481 — up by 20.4 per cent from 2021. Meanwhile, the average rent for a two-bed room apartment rent jumped by 14.5 per cent to $3,184.

Not only is the rental market facing an all time high for demand, creating skyrocketing prices and rental scams, but U of T student residences have also become part of the is sue.

Despite the foreboding thoughts in regard to the availability and affordability of housing in Toronto, the hype around the city is well de served. Strong education, a fun nightlife, and plenty of culture allow any person, regardless of their domestic or international status, to feel at home.

One of the appeals about Toronto is that you’ll never know who you’re going to meet. The population of Toronto is currently sitting

eas in Ontario, home owners and residents are leasing out basements or rooms to afford rent or mortgage prices.

On a budget, it’s common to see students applying for space in other people’s homes, and sharing kitchens, bathrooms, and some times bedrooms with people they’ve never met before, just so they can be in the city.

Finding housing requires a creative solution. Almost no one’s housing situation is clean cut and straightforward, and therefore, it is essen tial for U of T to be creative when addressing the ongoing housing crisis. Housing situations can make or break someone’s mental wellbeing, and this situation cannot and should

Getting around.

Houses down Huron Street, near UTSG.

Toronto resident converts bus for alternative housing.

The realistic upstairs neighbour.

The Annex is a prominent area for students to live near the St. George campus.