I’m finding it hard to live in the world at this moment in history. Over and above the daily headlines about Gaza and Ukraine, there is a major violent humanitarian crisis in Sudan, which has been largely overshadowed by the focus on the former two. In fact, the website for the Geneva Academy tells us that there are currently over 100 armed conflicts raging across the globe. None of these affect me personally, and yet in a way all of them do. Edited to add: And now, Israel has started a war with Iran.
Peace by Chocolate is the story of a large family that had a successful, internationally renowned chocolate business in Damascus, a business the father had created from scratch as a young man. This business was the reason he met his beloved wife, which led to the births of seven children. It was the reason his family home, a single-story building when his own father was young, grew into a 10-storey home for much of his extended family. It’s a story of success and love and plenty …
… until the Assad regime responded to the arrival of the Arab Spring in Syria by turning on its own people, killing hundreds of thousands and turning hundreds of thousands more into refugees. The Hadhad family survived, but their beloved family home and their chocolate business did not.
After three years of languishing as refugees in Lebanon, the Canadian government finally chooses the eldest son, Tareq, to come to Canada. Meanwhile, a group of people in Nova Scotia have come together to welcome at least one family, to save at least one person, from this horrible conflict by bringing them to Canada and helping them settle in the small town of Antigonish.
When Tareq arrives at Halifax airport on a snowy night just before Christmas, to his surprise, he is greeted by dozens of people who have been making calls and filling out paperwork and fundraising for a couple of years. Tareq’s arrival is the first of the fruits of their labour.
What follows—the way things come together, the barriers that fall away, the pieces that fall into place—is nothing short of remarkable. Within months, he is joined by most of his family. His father begins making chocolate in the kitchen of their new home and selling it at a winter fair. The chocolate business outgrows the kitchen, and then the basement, and then a shed. Within less than a year, the Hadhads open a factory in the small town that’s welcomed them—and several other Syrian families—and Peace by Chocolate, the company, becomes a major local employer.
The farther their remarkable story spreads, the more remarkable it becomes, leading to international speaking engagements, meetings with heads of state—and a request by CBC journalist and author Jon Tattrie to write a book about them. As Tattrie writes of his first meeting with Tareq in the Author’s Note:
I’d been watching Tareq Hadhad for almost two years. I knew the names of his mother, father, sisters, and brother. I knew of his dreams to be a doctor. I knew of his family’s passion for chocolate. I knew they’d lost everything in the Syrian war and rebuilt it in Canada. But I didn’t know how. How had they turned from refugees into pillars of the community so quickly?
And I didn’t know how small-town Canada had truly reacted to a Middle Eastern Muslim family dropping out of the clear sky to take up residence. My previous books had documented the intense and often violent racism minorities face in Nova Scotia. Eddie Carvery was a young black man in the 1960s when Halifax bulldozed Africville, his family home for generations. He moved into the ruins in 1970 to plant his body as a living protest for justice. He was still there forty years later when I asked him if I could tell his story. And I’d written about the notorious Edward Cornwallis, the British soldier who founded Halifax and tried to exterminate the Mi’kmaq First Nation. I’d written about Daniel Paul, the Mi’kmaw elder who campaigned for decades to get the city to take down its Cornwallis statue.
Would I find the same grime under the shiny story I’d been reading about the Hadhad family and Peace by Chocolate?
The answer is no. But to find out more you’ll have to read Peace by Chocolate, which quickly became a national bestseller and was later made into a multi-award winning motion picture. Whichever way you choose to find out more about this story, I caution you to do so with a box of tissues at hand. I’m getting misty again just writing this.
I lost my virginity when I was 14. It was the early seventies, a decade one must have lived through to understand, and it was practically a competition between my friends and I. I was one of the first and all of it just happened, the way things do when you’re 14 and in a very big hurry to become cool after a childhood of being thought just the opposite.
But then when I was 15, my best friend had a baby. When I was 16, my dad died suddenly. When I was 17, I got very sick and almost died, just as my mother and I were moving to the other side of the country to be closer to extended family but far, far away from any of my friends or anything familiar. My adolescence started out as the typical baby-boomer experience you’d see on That Seventies Show, but it didn’t end up that way. After the wild summer when I was 14, I grew up very fast.
My experience was the polar opposite of what Nellwyn Lampert (class of 2017) describes in her memoir, Every Boy I Ever Kissed (Dundurn, 2019). A member of the millennial generation, Lampert talks about her coming-of-age experiences, including what can only be described as a long and frustrating battle to lose her virginity to someone—anyone, really—with wit, humour, and really good writing. Here’s a sample:
The first time I got really drunk was at my mother’s fiftieth birthday party the summer before I started university.
It was the perfect, small-town summer day. The trees were dappled by the sun, the grass was freshly cut, and the lake was a calm, deep blue. Those are the country days I dream about and novelists spend hours trying to describe. The soft smoke from the barbecue; the deep Muskoka chairs; the condensation from a cold bottle of beer dripping from the corners of your mouth; the tall, blue-eyed country boy lounging in your back yard.
Tyler was an old childhood friend. He was always hanging around our house, sleeping over, and showing up for dinner unannounced. My family always greeted him with loud hellos, hugs, and a big plate of whatever was on the stove.
I thought he was lovely.
He was the kind of guy who could make you feel at home simply by smiling at you. Loved. Included. Special. None of it was forced. His smiles, his laughter, they were always the realest thing in the room.
The sun was setting and casting its soft glow over the day when my older brother brought out a bottle of vodka. He and his friends stood around the kitchen counter lining up shot glasses in a row. The real adults were all outside not paying attention, but they wouldn’t have cared even if they knew.
My brother counted the shot glasses on the counter. “Nell, you want one?”
“Sure.”
The word came out of my mouth even before I’d had a chance to think. I’d drunk a little bit of vodka before, mixed with juice, so I honestly didn’t think anything would happen after just one shot.
Turns out I was wrong. And turns out he’d poured me a double.
My brother handed me a glass of orange juice.
“You’ll want this after,” he said.
I raised my shot glass to the ceiling and clutched the juice in my left hand.
I slammed the vodka down like a pro and downed the juice like a good girl. Almost instantly I stumbled back into the fridge.
“You okay?” my brother asked with a smile.
I stood up a little straighter.
“Never better.”
I felt taller. My breasts felt bigger. Without looking in the mirror, I could just feel that my hair and makeup were flawless. I licked my lips and looked up at Tyler through heavy eyelids. I wanted to throw my arms around his neck and press my lips against his.
But he was on the phone. Talking to his new girlfriend, my brother told me.
Ouch!
And if you want to find out if she ever gets the boy, you’re going to have to read the book.
I enjoyed this memoir thoroughly. There are just enough scenes in here that seem familiar, despite the fact that I grew up two generations earlier than Lampert, but also enough scenes that are thoroughly new to me to provide insight into my adult children’s generation.
An excellent read, flowing enough to devour in a weekend. I highly recommend it.
Diverse topics, discussed from a woman’s perspective:
I can’t imagine it. I’ve tried, but it’s beyond my ability. The closest I can come to imagining what it must have been like to survive the Holocaust and, against all odds, marry, have children, and live a happy life is knowing what it was like to be the child of an RCAF pilot who spent three months injured in a POW hospital in occupied France.
I suppose it’s understandable that people can’t imagine living through such trauma themselves. It protects us. But when you’re the child of people who survived that horror, when the knowledge of what one or both of your parents experienced forms the backdrop for your entire life, lived in comfort and safety in one of the richest countries in the world—that’s a different story.
For most of her life, Reichert coped with the knowledge of what had happened to her father by not thinking about it. I don’t blame her. She and her father talked about one day writing a book together about it, but for one reason and another that day never came. Until one day, after a trip to her father’s native Poland and an encounter with the perfect bowl of borscht, Reichert realized the time had come.
The result of that realization is How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty (Appetite by Random House, 2025). A memoir with strong culinary overtones, How to Share an Egg shares with the reader that good food has played an important role in the author’s life, not only because, as the daughter of a successful restaurateur, she grew up with excellent cooking but because her father had very nearly starved to death.
The preface to the book opens like this:
Imagine two boys—a couple of skeletons, really—roaming the German countryside. One is fourteen, the other, a little older. It’s the spring of 1945, and they haven’t eaten much besides potato peels and coffee grounds for three years. They knock on door after door until they find a farmer who goes into his kitchen and brings something back: a single brown egg. One egg for two starving boys. …
The book you’re about to read is a tale of hunger and sorrow and love. It’s a mishmash of what happened to my dad and what’s happened to me; a portrait of a parent and a child, a father and a daughter. It’s both a small story and an enormous one, a study of contrasts. And because it’s my family, it’s a story about food—sumptuous meals and meals of almost nothing at all; food that is simple and complicated, basic and bountiful. Food that is rife with meaning.
How does a daughter reconcile her privilege when her father had nothing? How does she set her table, heavy with plenty, when her ancestors were lucky to share a single egg? As much about survival as sustenance, the story you’re about to read is about a family that lost everything and built itself up again, one meal at a time.
I sometimes worry that recent generations simply don’t know enough about the Holocaust. I worry about the way this lack of knowledge has been fuelling a global resurgence in antisemitism. I’m heartened by the appearance of books by the children of survivors, like Reichert. If there was ever a book to teach about that shameful period in human history while making you go from laughing to crying and back again, this is surely it.
Books about the Holocaust:
Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal, by Marsha Faubert. Review coming soon.
One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity, by Amy Fish. Review coming soon.
I’m not religious. Which doesn’t mean I don’t have faith. My faith is atheism. I believe what we see is what we get, we have one chance to leave a positive impact on the people around us, and our afterlife is what we leave behind in those people’s hearts and minds.
It also doesn’t mean I don’t respect other people’s faiths. I do, very much. Even when I don’t understand their religious choices, as I don’t understand all the choices of the Muslim women Sheima Benembarek wrote about in Halal Sex, I respect their right to make those choices, free of judgment. Which is probably why a diehard atheist like me got so much out of a book of essays written by a devoted Christian.
Karen Stiller (class of 2018), author of The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More (Tyndale, 2020), has written a book filled with stories about what it’s like to be married to a member of the clergy—the burden of other people’s (and her own) unrealistic expectations, the wish that sometimes people would just stop talking to her and leave her alone, the loneliness of being unable to find a friend in one’s own community, the disappointment when her husband’s career takes the family places they’d rather not go instead of where they’d love to go.
Stiller not only offers insight into what that life is really like, but she does so in an I-bet-you’re-more-fun-at-a-party-than-anyone-might-guess authorial voice, which she combines with a self-deprecating sense of humour that makes you wish that party was happening tonight. In a chapter on family, Stiller weighs in on what it’s like raising three human beings who are blessed and burdened with being minister’s children:
The messes and misses are what Brent and I remember the most, what touch us so deeply—our clumsy selves just trying to do our best. There are so many real things that we did wrong, especially me with all my yelling.
I wish I had never once shouted. I also wish they had not stretched plastic wrap around the living room lamps as I watched, helpless, while interviewing someone on the phone for a magazine article I was writing about whether or not spanking was a good thing. I wished they had not dumped a can of beans in their brother’s bed, or put all my bras in the freezer on April Fools’ Day. I wished that a frog had not been dropped in a sink full of dishes because, as it turns out, frogs die in hot, soapy water. …
I also wish I had done those things I had planned to do, like cooking a meal from a different country every week, learning about the culture together (sitting quietly, taking turns reading out loud), and praying for the people who lived there (sitting quietly, taking turns praying out loud). I did not do that, not even on one single Wednesday evening. That was an idea I had before we had kids, something nice to do with your puppy maybe.
This is a deeply human book, a book I chuckled along with as I recognized, against all odds, how much Stiller’s life reminded me of mine, a book I feared I wouldn’t enjoy (and then wouldn’t know what to write about) but instead ended up reading in one sitting. It’s the kind of book I like to read when I’m awake at 3 AM, much as I like reading Richard Wagamese’s gentle memoirs-in-essays, so that its kind and soothing message can take my mind off the troubles racing like squirrels around my brain—and allow me to find my way back to an untroubled rest.
With Ramadan starting February 28, I thought this week’s blog post would give a nod to the Muslim faith. I’m not sure what I expected when I started reading Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America (Viking, 2023) by Sheima Benembarek (class of 2020), but what I found was so much better than anything I imagined.
As a baby boomer who grew up in the seventies, I always thought of myself as a person who didn’t have too many sexual hangups. As a middle-class white woman who grew up in a secular Christian household, I had many preconceived notions (largely wrong) about Muslim women. So, it was a surprise to me to read the stories of a half-dozen Muslim women who are forging their own paths sexually.
Hind is a self-described niqabi—she wears the full body-covering niqab, with only her hands and eyes showing, which she chose because she tired of being subject to the male gaze. I’m guessing many if not most Western women think of the niqab as a sign of women’s oppression. I let go of a friendship years ago because the person in question said outright that she had no respect for women who wore even a headscarf for religious reasons because they were submitting to male oppression. But the male gaze can be oppressing too and I understand the perspective that covering up might have a freeing effect.
Regardless, underneath her niqab, you never know what colour HInd’s hair might be—turquoise, maybe—as she practices a form of self-expression that’s meaningful to her. She’s also in an unusual marital situation—divorced from her first husband, now sharing her second husband with another woman (her idea), but living separately and independently because she doesn’t get along with his first wife. Her husband spends two days a week with her and the rest of the time with his other wife and children. (I could deal with such a relationship.) She has an abundant sexual appetite but her first husband didn’t, which was one of the reasons they went their separate ways. And despite the conservatism of her faith, she’s very open in talking about sexuality and educating young people in her community about it.
Benembarek writes skillfully about a half-dozen women who are expressing their sexual identity in their own ways. Like Azar, a nonbinary transgender Sufi, which Benembarek describes as the hippy group of Islam. And Bunmi, a black bisexual Texan Muslim of Nigerian heritage who gave up the headscarf and can now be found roller skating and smoking a joint. And Eman, who’s “one half of a popular Jewish-Palestinian lesbian comedy duo who, after marrying, combined their last names and professionally call themselves the El-Salomons.”
And then there’s Khadijah who,
sashays back and forth in her cherry red pleather thigh-high boots, watching herself in the floor-length mirrors in front of and behind her. It takes practice to stay up on those eight-inch heels and even more practice to confidently swing around on a pole in them. The boots are made of polyvinyl chloride, a durable type of plastic; she wears stockings to avoid sweating profusely and to ease the labour of peeling them off. Her brown curls are conveniently out of the way and up in a messy bun, and she adjusts a sheer black cape that’s not long enough to conceal her frilly black high-rise panties. …
Khadijah worries her pole dancing isn’t as sophisticated as the other women’s; she has more experience in burlesque. She’s the only woman of colour dancing in the studio that afternoon, and the combination of leather and black and red fabrics suits her. The stern yet sultry look she’s putting on does too.
None of these women are what would come to my mind if you had asked me to describe a Muslim woman before reading Halal Sex. But then, if there’s anything I love in any book, it’s the opportunity to learn. For me, Halal Sex was all about learning.
Every year for Christmas, everyone in my family puts together a wish list. For the past several years, my list has included whatever books have been published by graduates of King’s University’s MFA in creative nonfiction, minus whichever of those I’ve already read. The list keeps growing—it now includes more than 50 books, of which I’ve read about half—so which ones appear under the Christmas tree is increasingly a surprise.
For Christmas 2023, one of the books was Laura Pratt’s Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition (Random House Canada, 2023). I started reading it soon after Christmas. But then a new relationship I was in, for which I had high hopes, ended abruptly and I didn’t have the heart to continue.
I picked it up again in the summer when I was travelling. Overall, the trip didn’t go well. There was a death in the family right before I left, I had my phone and wallet stolen while I was on a train to northern Scotland, and my sailing charter around the Inner Hebrides was cut short because of gale-force winds, including the tail end of Hurricane Ernesto. Not my best trip ever.
Reading Heartbroken was a high point while confined below decks to escape the weather. With my own sad relationship a few months into the rearview, Pratt’s book helped me deal with the dregs of my feelings about it. The back cover sums the book up this way:
“When Laura Pratt’s long-distance partner of six years tells her ‘it’s over’ at a busy downtown train station, she is sent reeling, the breakup coming out of the blue. He, meanwhile, closes himself off, refusing to acknowledge Laura and her requests for explanation.
“In the following days, months, and then years, Laura struggles to make sense of the sudden ending, alone and filled with questions. A journalist, she seeks to understand the freefall that is heartbreak and how so many before her survived it, drawing on forces across time and form, and uncovers literary, philosophical, scientific, and psychological accounts of the mysterious alchemy of how we human beings fall in love in the first place, and why, when it ends, some of us take longer to get over it, or never do. She weaves this background of cultural history with her own bracing story of passionate love and its loss, and offers some hope for arriving—changed, broadened, grateful—on the other side.”
What I enjoyed most about this book was the way Pratt weaves together the story of her all-encompassing loss with minute details of a vibrant and passionate love affair unfolding in a club in Toronto, an apartment in Montreal, the Laurentian Mountains, the streets of New Orleans, and anywhere else the couple’s whimsy took them. And then she enlivens the lyrical quality of her own prose with snippets of poetry, fiction, and research on everything from stages of grief to the history of love and the science of memory. In a chapter on happiness, she writes:
“And so we fed on each other, writing and playing and fucking, a thousand points of light. And we did it all inside the exquisite torture of a long-distance relationship, the inherent privation, privilege, and prolonging of which cannot be overstated. Extraordinary circumstances breed extraordinary experiences and our intermittent encounters were feverish. I was overheated as I brushed my hair in the airport bathroom on those brilliant Thursday evenings, my sparks glancing off the tiles. I was beautiful and couldn’t wait to show him, to step out of those sliding doors and into the Montreal evening and his Toyota. To light up the sky with our happiness.”
This was a beautiful, heartbreaking book. I recommend it to readers of all ages who have loved, whether or not they have also lost.
PS. Closing in on a year after my four-month relationship ended, I still find myself wrestling with what went wrong, waiting for the day I can simply say “It was fun while it lasted” and leave it at that.
I wanted to respond to this column by The Globe and Mail health columnist André Picard last week—a bit off topic for my blog but not for me personally, as will become clear.
My son is a pediatrician. He graduated from St. George’s University School of Medicine in Grenada. There are many stereotypes about doctors coming out of Caribbean schools being less qualified than those trained in Canada. They are false. All doctors working in Canada must demonstrate the same capacity by passing stiff exams at each of four stages: entrance into medical school, entrance into residency, entrance into the profession, and board certification.
A candidate who fails at any one of these stages may not go onto the next and may therefore not qualify to practice medicine in Canada. Candidates who were educated, trained, and have worked in countries where the medical system is significantly different than our own must undergo rigorous education and training to practice up to the standards that make Canada’s medical system globally enviable. But in terms of qualifications, these candidates are not the same as candidates who were educated and trained in systems that may operate on a slightly different model but produce physicians that are equally as qualified as those who attend Canadian medical schools.
I can’t speak to medical schools in England, Ireland, and Australia, where the quality of medical care is similar to ours in Canada. I can only speak to what I know about as a result of the fact that my son attended a Caribbean school, a school that has overcome significant prejudice to become a prestigious medical school in its own right.
So, what’s the educational difference for physicians who graduate from a medical school in Canada or one in the Caribbean?*
First, it’s important to note that medical schools operating in the Caribbean are, for all intents and purposes, USian schools. Students do their first two years at campuses in the West Indies, where the cost of building, operating, and maintaining a medical school is lower than in the US or Canada. They then go onto internships, their first shot at hands-on practice under the strict guidance of experienced physicians, at USian hospitals, where the standards of care are very similar to our standards in Canada.
So, what’s the difference that gets students from basic sciences through internships to graduation and residencies (the second stage of hands-on practice)? It’s basically that Canadian and Caribbean schools use a different operating model, as do medical schools that operate within the geographical US.
In Canada and the geographical US, a student’s credentials for admission to medical school must be the crème de la crème of each year’s pool of applicants. But as Canadian and US-based medical schools operate on a pass-fail basis, once a candidate has been accepted, it’s unusual for them to flunk out.
And the overall credentials for any pool of applicants are influenced by more than quality. For example, the makeup of a particular graduating class might be heavily influenced by economic conditions at the time they applied. This was the case, for example, during the 2008 recession, when jobs were so scarce that people in many fields were accepting positions well below their qualifications and at lesser pay than they might have been offered months earlier (I knew some of them).
At that time, many young people went back to school to improve their qualifications. (I was working in international education at the time and had direct knowledge of this.) Suddenly, for reasons having nothing to do with their qualifications, the pools of candidates increased, and many applicants didn’t make it into schools that might have accepted them just months earlier.
I don’t know if Caribbean schools experienced a bumper crop of applicants at that time, but it would make sense that they did because of their operating model. To gain entrance, one must pass the same rigorous exam as is the basic requirement for all students, but other entrance qualifications may not be as stringent. For example, a student might have just barely passed their exam, might have less volunteer experience in their application, or might not have done as well in the interview.
Does that mean students graduating from these schools are less qualified than those graduating from Canadian schools? Not at all. Caribbean schools operate on a model that accepts students from around the world whose entrance qualifications may be lower than required by Canadian schools. But then, unlike in Canadian schools where it’s near-impossible to flunk out, their progress is graded at every turn.
This gives the students an opportunity to improve on any deficiencies in their entrance requirements and repeatedly show that they deserve their spot in the school. It also contributes to a very high attrition rate, which can top out at around 60%.
This is not cheap for students. At the time my son completed his education, the cost was $400,000 USD, easily four times higher than a Canadian school. And students who flunk out don’t get a refund on what they’ve paid for their year.
The most-qualified applicants are offered significant scholarships to encourage them to attend. However, given the schools’ global focus, the largest scholarships typically go to students from majority world** countries who couldn’t otherwise afford to attend but who will take their education back to their home countries to improve life there—a fair system if I’ve ever heard of one.
After finishing their two years of basic sciences, students complete their internships at hospitals in the US. In contrast to students who attend Canadian or US-based schools, this gives them an opportunity to do part of their internships at different hospitals, working under different doctors and different systems and exposing them to a wide range of perspectives, which I see as a bonus to this system.
In other words, students who make it through the rigorous program of studies at Caribbean-based schools are at least as qualified as students who attend school at a Canadian or US-based medical school, if not in some ways more so.
Yet the column I linked to at the beginning of this post was titled “International med school graduates are an untapped resource, as well as a complex challenge.” In it, Picard writes:
“It’s important to note that there are two types of IMGs. The first are Canadians who study medicine abroad in places like Grenada, Ireland and Australia, usually because they weren’t accepted to Canadian schools. They argue they have a “constitutional right” to compete for residency spots on an equal footing with Canadian grads if they pass Canadian exams.
“The second type of IMGs are those educated in other countries who emigrate to Canada. If they do so before residency, they have little chance of getting a spot. (The exception is grads from countries like Saudi Arabia, who “buy” residency spots but must return home after training – a topic for another day.)
“We limit the number of doctors we train because money isn’t unlimited. We already have 97,384 physicians in Canada, and spend $32.5-billion annually paying them. Rationing is a reality.
“If we want more doctors, then one avenue is to open more residency spots for IMGs. A report last year from a group of independent senators recommended adding 750 spots, essentially doubling the current number.
“Of the group of IMGs who have trained and worked in other countries before emigrating to Canada, some of them could start work tomorrow while others do not have the appropriate qualifications. The challenge for regulators is to figure out who’s who.
“The path to practice has many hurdles: demonstrating you graduated from a legitimate medical school, having your credentials verified, passing Canadian exams, showing competency in English, having your competency tested and finding a job.”
I agree that ensuring the IMGs who lived, trained, and worked in other countries before coming to Canada must be carefully vetted before working as physicians in Canada, and doing so can be complicated. But when it comes to Canadian students who simply went overseas to train in systems that operate on a slightly different model but graduate physicians who are equally as qualified as those who study at Canadian schools, as demonstrated by the rigorous screening they must go through before practising in Canada, I fail to see the challenge. As the first link in the above quote (to SOCASMA, the Society of Canadians Studying Medicine Abroad) notes:
“Currently, provincial Ministries of Health allow Canadian medical schools to control selection for entry level training jobs called medical residencies. Canadian medical schools have used this power to exclude qualified Canadians from competing against their graduates for these positions.
“Canadians who have studied medicine anywhere but Canada and the U.S.A. are prohibited from competing against their peers who graduated from Canadian and American medical schools. They can only compete in the IMG (international medical graduate) stream, and only if they agree to enter into return of service contracts. The IMG stream is a very limited opportunity stream.
“In British Columbia, only 4 out of 65 medical disciplines are available to Canadians who have international medical degrees despite passing the national medical knowledge and clinical skills exams.
“Canadians, who choose to study overseas, and other international medical graduates, are treated as second class citizens when it comes to competing for positions in one of the most prestigious callings in Canada. The two-class system of medical residency selection currently in place is an affront to the fabric of Canadian society. This type of class system feeds the growth of a culture of entitlement and it feeds prejudice, both of which are destructive to a free and democratic society. It also prevents Canada from hiring the most qualified Canadian physicians. This impacts access to health care and the quality of health care for all Canadians.”
The blocks to this stream of IMGs practising in Canada are, to avoid mincing words, stupid. At a time when 6.5 million Canadians lack access to a physician, the rules and regulations that categorize Canadian graduates of fully accredited medical schools abroad along with physicians who graduated from medical schools that cannot hold their own in the Canadian system are, not to put too fine a point on it, stupid.
I fully understand and agree with the need to ensure physicians practising in Canada are qualified to practice at a level commensurate with our own graduates. But the existing system miscategorizes graduates of a system where the only differences are that a) Canadian students study outside our borders, b) students who under perform can flunk out at any stage of the game, and c) students pay for the full cost of their education themselves rather than having it subsidized by Canadian taxpayers.
This creates disadvantages that affect all of us. It needs to change. 6.5 million Canadians who don’t have a physician of their own can’t afford for it not to change.
(*There may be other differences between schools in Canada and other countries, such as Ireland or the UK. For example, some countries do not require doctors to complete an undergraduate degree before applying to medical school, as we do in Canada, but admit students directly from secondary school into a pre-med program and from there into medical school.)
(**I prefer the terms majority world and minority world countries to value-laden terms like firstworld and third world or developed/industrial world and developing world.Majority and minority world reflect the reality that the world’s wealth is concentrated in the pockets of the minority populations of a few countries, while the majority of the world lives in poverty that most of us in countries like Canada and US can’t even imagine. I like the way these terms, which I first encountered in a magazine called The New Internationalist and which I highly recommend, force people to stop and think about what’s really going on in the world.)
Continuing my meander through the 50+ books published out of the MFA program in Creative Nonfiction at University of King’s College …
If you’re a parent, you know what it’s like to be out somewhere, anywhere, when your young child suddenly needs a toilet … and there are none to be found. This was the repeated experience Lezlie Lowe (class of 2016) had when she had young children, and it was what she chose to write about when she undertook her master’s degree in creative nonfiction.
An easy-flowing read replete with really good bathroom humour, No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs (Coach House Books, 2018) was an eye opener for me. I’ve raised three children, but I’d never thought of all the reasons people need public restrooms. The text on the back of the book mentions some of the people being failed by a global lack of attention to one of people’s most basic needs. People like “the homeless who, faced with no place to go sometimes must literally take to the streets,” a problem that became even more pronounced during the Covid pandemic. And “people with invisible disabilities, like Crohn’s disease, who stay home rather than risk soiling themselves on public transit.”
That one got me. I have Crohn’s disease, which flared up right around the time I started the MFA program. It was embarrassing having to get up and go to the toilet several times during morning lectures and mentor groups, but at least we were in a building with toilets nearby. If I’d been at home … let’s just say I would have stayed at home all morning.
But public restrooms fail a lot of people, like girls who need a bathroom right now when their period suddenly gushes through their pad or tampon. And trans people, who face bigotry every time they use a public restroom. Women are habitually underserved by bathroom stalls that are equal in number to men’s urinals. Several studies calling for “potty parity” argue that, considering clothing differences, menstruation, and anatomy, women’s washrooms should have twice as many stalls as men’s have urinals.
Parents of children still in diapers become very aware of the need to find a clean and dry place to lay a child down for a change, especially if it’s a messy one. And don’t get me started on pay toilets. I thought these monstrosities were things of the past until I went to Scotland during the summer of 2024 and found myself without the appropriate coinage to answer nature’s call in a public mall.
There are solutions, and Lowe writes about one of the best: “The Portland Loo is a vandalism-proof, twenty-four-hour flush-toilet enclosure. An anti-tech fix for on-street public bathrooms. The Loos are simple, oval-shaped rooms with a toilet. They’re spacious enough to fit strollers, wheelchairs, and even bikes. In contrast to the high-tech entrances, timers, and air-conditioning systems at work in conventional APTS [automatic public toilets] like those in Toronto and New York, Portland Loos are naturally lit and ventilated and completely off grid. They also happen to be an example of the successful use of crime prevention through environmental design—louvred sides allow people on the outside to see that there’s someone inside while maintaining privacy, and exterior handwashing sinks get people right out after they use them.” Best of all, they’re designed for everyone. Free to use, taxpayer supported. A true public service.
It may just be the phenomenon that once you become aware of something, it seems to start popping up all around you all the time, but it seems to me that the tide toward more and better public toilets is slowly turning. And Lowe’s book might very well have had something to do with that. I can’t think of a better reason to be a writer.
Here are some books I put in the category of “I never would have thought of that as a book topic, but what a great idea!”:
I’ve long been intrigued by rules and expectations around gift-giving. In my family growing up, gift-giving was uncomplicated. You bought or made something you thought the recipient would like.
Your only expectation in giving it was that the recipient would appreciate the thought that went into it even if they didn’t appreciate the gift itself. And if there was something specific about the gift that didn’t work—it was the wrong size, or you already had one—it was not a personal sleight for the recipient to exchange it for something that worked.
I had no idea gifts could be used to hurt people until I was an adult. Then I met my husband’s mother. I don’t recall her giving me anything for Christmas or my birthday for the first three years I was with her son; why would she? We lived together (unmarried) and I was the wrong faith (atheist). She didn’t like me.
We got married on December 7, 1983. For Christmas that year, we flew from Vancouver, where we’d moved after my mother had a health crisis, to Kingston, where my partner had grown up and his mother still lived. It was our first Christmas with his family since he’d moved away from them two years earlier.
For Christmas, my MIL gave me a nightgown and a housecoat. The nightgown was an odd choice because she knew I slept in the nude; I ignored the obvious hint. I did need a new housecoat, and I tried to be grateful for this one (and wore it until it wore out) even though it wasn’t at all my style.
A few days later, I saw both garments on sale at Woolworth’s, the nightgown for $9.99 and the housecoat for $19.99. This would have been a day or two after my husband’s birthday, for which she gave him a plush, Pierre Cardin housecoat with the $60 price tag still pinned into the neck. (This was 1983, when $60 was worth about a billion in today’s dollars.) I’m not sure how she could have given me a more obvious message that marrying into her family did not mean that I was on the same level as anyone else in the family, a message my husband confirmed was likely exactly what she meant. After that, she only gave me gifts if my husband pushed her to. A few years later, he told her that he’d taken to sharing his annual birthday cheque from her 50/50 with me. Shortly after that, she stopped sending him anything.
One family member on my side was an absolute genius at buying gifts. She loved flea markets and kept her eyes open year-round for gifts her loved ones, especially the young children, might enjoy. She didn’t always hit the mark, but even when she was miles off base, we all valued her gifts because we knew she put a tremendous amount of thought into them. Unfortunately, she and her partner were not always as good at receiving gifts. I think they assumed that because we always showered them with praise for the gifts they offered, knowing this meant a great deal to them, they assumed that they always hit the mark. They further assumed that if others didn’t hit the mark with them, that meant they weren’t trying very hard.
They were not easy to buy for. But on one occasion, I thought I really had gotten it right with a colourful wall hanging in a particular South American folk style. The look of disappointment on their faces when they opened it said everything. At some point, they said they didn’t want to exchange gifts anymore because they couldn’t afford it, and I’m sure that was part of it. But I think it was also that we could just never figure out what they’d appreciate, and they grew tired of that.
In the past few years, I admit I’ve begun to tire of gift giving. Our annual Christmas wish list has turned into a list of hyperlinks to exactly the gift the individual wants. I’ve never been a fan of buying gifts because I like them regardless of whether I think the recipient will like them. But neither am I a fan of people being so particular about what they want that all the mystery and surprise of gift-giving is gone. I
This brings me to the latest issue, which started with one person refusing a gift. They had a reason, which I didn’t understand, but it was a cash gift, so it was easy enough to redeposit. Months later, when I thought the reason for refusing the gift had passed—my bad for not checking my assumptions—I brought back gifts from a trip that I planned to give everyone for Christmas. I needed to give one of the gifts a good deal sooner than Christmas because it would spoil.
The intended recipient took pains to refuse my gifts in a very polite text. But I still found their refusal … confusing. I ended up giving the spoilable item to someone else. As to the other item, the would-be recipient suggested that I enjoy it myself. But I would never buy something at that price point for myself. So, I’ve decided to keep it for them. It will only improve with age. If they won’t accept it before I die, I’ll leave it to them in my will.
I have to say again that the person who refused my gifts was not in any way rude in the way they refused them. Yet I’ve still spent a lot of time puzzling over my own hurt response to this. It’s been suggested to me that no one is obligated to accept a gift, which is certainly true. It’s been suggested that my difficulty in accepting this refusal is the opposite of showing love. It’s been suggested that I shouldn’t allow gift-giving to become a source of conflict.
I’ll be perfectly honest in saying I don’t know what’s right, but the whole situation led me to thinking about gift-giving in general. So I did a bit of research (emphasis on “a bit”).
Gift-giving goes back millennia and serves a variety of purposes: gifts to gods in exchange for a bountiful harvest or an edge in battle. Gifts to leaders of other clans or tribes or nations to establish friendship and trust. Gifts at weddings to bless the marriage with fecundity, at births to pray for long and happy life, at anniversaries and birthdays to express a wish for more of the same.
The most famous anthropologist to study gift-giving was Marcel Mauss, who wrote an essay, appropriately called “The Gift“, that examines the ways gift exchange builds social and economic relationships. Mauss’s student, the famous Claude Lévi-Strauss, posited that structures such as kinship systems, commerce, and gift exchange are similar across cultures. Other anthropologists and psychologists have noted that in building social and economic bonds—yes, the value of the gifts exchanged is part of it, in much the same way that the food served and clothing worn at a state event are part of it—gifts form part of the glue that binds cultures, and individuals, together.
A web page called “The Psychology of Gifting” lists a half-dozen reasons why people give gifts: to build and reinforce relationships, to show love and devotion, for symbolic communication, to receive something in return, to help others, or to find a mate. It also lists four main types of gifts: those that are symbolic of the giver and receiver, those that are symbolic of the giver’s knowledge of the receiver, those that are symbolic of the occasion, and those that contain an array of significant meanings.
There’s a reason virtually every national capital in the world has an inventory of gifts received from other nations, gifts no one will ever use because they belong to no one person and that’s not their function. Such gifts are offers of friendship and trust, offers for two nations to let down their guard and establish mutually beneficial relationships.
Similarly, personal gift-giving is an act of both reaching out and welcoming in. We let down our guard, show our vulnerability. In giving a gift, we hope the recipient will receive it in the spirit in which it’s intended. The harder we work at finding the perfect gift, the greater our anticipation of the recipient’s pleasure—and the deeper our disappointment if it’s not received with the joy we’d hoped for.
When people don’t show their appreciation for a gift, much less when they simply refuse it, it hurts. And it hurts all the more because the gift-giver’s guard is already down. Rejection of the gift feels very much like personal rejection.
Sometimes in a scenario like that, people express their hurt by getting angry and looking for explanations. What happened to what they thought was a mutually trusting and caring relationship? And that hurts even more.
What’s especially interesting to me about this situation is that I, as the person whose gift has been refused, am considered the one who’s at fault. Why am I making something out of nothing? Who am I to make the other person feel bad? If only I would have accepted the rejection without saying anything, everything would have been all right. There’s no responsibility on the person who refused the gift to recognize how that might have felt to me. There’s only a responsibility on me to accept the rejection graciously.
I still believe gift exchange, whether it’s interpersonal or international, is valuable.
It left me wondering, briefly, if gift-giving is worth it, if letting down one’s guard is worth it.
I still think it is. Although I’m still feeling hurt about the current situation, which has ballooned out of all proportion at a time of year when, in my culture, we’re supposed to be appreciating one another, I still believe gift exchange, whether it’s interpersonal or international, is valuable. Just as I think, and history demonstrates, that gift exchange serves many valuable purposes, talking through misunderstandings in gift exchange provide an equally valuable opportunity to communicate about our differences and similarities and come to new understandings.
But to do that, both parties need to agree to set aside hard feelings and listen to those they’ve hurt. That’s never easy. But another thing I’ve always believed is that the harder things are to do, the more worthwhile they’re likely to be. So I’ll wait until the other party is ready to talk, and then I’ll listen and hope they’ll do the same.
I wrote this piece years ago about the impact the December 6 massacre had on my life. It was published in The Ottawa Citizen on December 4, 1993, just four years after the massacre. Although there are a few things I’d change or add, for the most part it still resonates, so I thought I’d share it today on the anniversary of the 1989 massacre of 14 women at École Polytechnique.
One night a few years ago I lay frightened in bed. Someone in the parking lot was throwing something repeatedly at my window. While my rational side felt it was just a friendly prank, my mother-bear instinct told me to restrain my curious three-year-old from going to look. What if more than a mischievous smile came through the window, but a brick—or worse?
I’d seen a news feature on violence against women that night. Two weeks earlier, I’d wept over the death of my dog, a Doberman that had provided me with comfort and security for nine years.
During that time, I had almost forgotten the menacing possibilities of unexplained creaks and groans in the floor boards of an aging home. For the first time in years, I remembered what it was like to feel unsafe in my own bed. My little girl curled up to me and said, “Mommy, I wish Blue didn’t die. I wish Daddy was home.”
My children’s father is by no means perfect, but like an increasing number of his peers, he has decided that respect for others and ongoing self-examination should be a cornerstone of his life. Here is a man who is light years beyond “helping out.” He does his share. When I wanted a home birth, he trusted my instinct. When he heard a disc jockey make light of “Take Back the Night” activities, he registered his complaint with the station management.
That night, I agreed with my daughter. I wished her Daddy was home.
The wish, and the fear, lasted only moments. The lock rattled. The front door opened. Footsteps mounted the darkened stairs. A mans’ form paused outside my half-open bedroom door before pushing it open.
“Hi honey, I’m home,” my husband whispered. “Didn’t you hear me throwing things at the window?”
It was the night of Dec. 6, the second anniversary of Marc Lepine’s massacre of 14 women, and the first national day of memorial to female victims of male violence.
“I got lots of comments on my white ribbon today,” he said. “The women were pleased to see it. A couple of the guys wished they’d thought of it. I was surprised how many of the kids knew what it meant. Did anyone comment on yours?”
Heart still racing, I replied no, no one had taken notice.
We live in a word in which property ownership is wealth and wealth is power; in which 80 per cent of the work, paid or unpaid, is done by women, while 99 per cent of the property is owned by men; in which men have the ability to exert both fiscal and physical power over women; in which Marc Lepine is far from alone in instilling fear in women because of his choice to abuse that power.
In this work, it is incumbent upon me to understand life through the eyes of men like my father, who, though never abusive, believed and acted as if he was superior to my mother; men like the ones who abused me as a child, an adolescent, and a woman; even men, like my husband, who strive to behave differently, but don’t always know how.
There is no parallel requisite for them to see the world through my eyes.
My husband’s actions that night are illustrative. He requires neither physical, emotional, nor fiscal superiority over me in order to feel masculine. While he wishes that the economic value of children-rearing was recognized, he respects its intrinsic value as much as if I received remuneration. He does not silently tolerate sexist remarks.
On that December evening, this man committed an act of awareness: He wore a white ribbon. Then he came home and committed an act of unawareness.
Acting aware is a good first step. But for my husband to be aware of what it is to be a woman in 20th-century North America, he must find a way to experience the fear that I live with every day. The panic to which I’ve grown accustomed through years of practice. The heart-quickening anxiety I feel when a guy in a muscle car slows down to take a better look, when heavy footsteps quicken behind me on an empty street, when a stranger—or even a neighbour—knocks on my door in the middle of an evening when I’m home alone, not even a dog to keep me company.
As I lay frightened in bed that night a few years ago, I reviewed my choices: Stay put or go look. If I looked, I knew I’d probably see a friendly smile; or I might be confronted by a man reminded by that evening’s newscasts of his anger at women. If I stayed put, I could be teaching fear to my daughter; or I could be assured that I was protecting the two of us from anger that strikes enough ordinary Canadian women to fill a room in the time it takes to watch a Schwarzenegger video.
If I looked, I might later hear a police officer, doctor or judge berating me for taking unnecessary chances, for assuming that my own home could protect me and my young children from harm. If I stayed put, I could hear the voice in my own head chastising me for consenting to live my life in fear.
Being aware of every move, every minute is the reality of the world through women’s eyes. It is a reality I try daily to share with my husband, one he must find a way to learn and share with other men if it is to change in his little girl’s lifetime. It’s the reason that men like him, who start by wearing white ribbons on Dec. 6, must not stop there.
It’s why Dec. 6 will never again be just another day.
