Table of Contents

  • Habitat: Convocation Hall with Head Usher Rachel
  • In Season
  • U of T’s Electrical Grid

    • Features

  • The invisible 40 per cent – If you’re a student who takes care of a parent, a sibling, a grandparent, or your kids, you’re not alone – U of T just treats you that way
  • This ain’t your dad’s recession… yet? – Three students get the recession talk from their parents. Dads have good advice!
  • In transit – Read this while hiking it up to the north pole. A long look at our lives as commuters
  • If that place goes, the whole block goes with it – Workers at the Korex soap factory have been striking since June. Why hasn’t anyone noticed?
  • Is the SPP Dead? – If that place goes, the whole block goes with it – Noticed an awful lot of policy “harmonization” with the U.S. lately? If the ultra-secretive security and prosperity partnership were a conspiracy theory, it wouldn’t be this scary
  • A Complicated kindness – U of T sponsors refugee students for their first year, but they’re on their own after that

    • Remembrance Day Supplement

  • What would an Afghan War memorial look like?
  • The Individual Soldier
  • Culture Wars

    • Editorial Address

    When the Great Ice Storm froze eastern Canada to a standstill in 1998, I was in Grade 7. My dad and I woke up early one morning in Toronto, and drove up to our cottage near Parry Sound, loading the SUV with pretty much anything you might need if facing an ice storm. We then drove to where the majority of my parents’ family trees live, in the belt between Kingston and Ottawa. It was a fun and surreal experience. I learned a valuable lesson about how the times you grow up in affect you for the rest of your life.

    My dad’s parents lived in what was once their summer cottage. They had absolutely no electricity when we reached them. When we got there, we unloaded our supplies, including a generator that my dad and his brother-in-law set up for my grandparents to use.

    If you’ve ever had to use a power generator, you’re very cognizant of just how much electricity a house uses. You can’t run everything at the same time. You have to make choices, tradeoffs. An argument quickly ensued at my grandparents’ house. My dad and uncle thought it was important to have things like heating. My grandparents were very sure they needed to run the freezer. During an ice storm.

    As far as my grandparents were concerned, the matter was perfectly clear. You’re allowed to freeze alone in the dark, but you do not let food go bad under any circumstances. This is was what being young during the Depression taught them.

    In this year’s Massey Lectures, Margaret Atwood spoke on the subject of debt, how our views on the subject have changed, and where they’ve remained constant. Atwood reminds us that aside from what we owe to the bank, everything we think we own we’ve actually borrowed from the planet. Andrea Yeoman’s map of campus electricity use is an important first step in examining what we’re borrowing.

    In her lectures, Atwood recounted her parents’ attitude towards money. Given the Maclean’s cover story a couple weeks ago on the joys of frugality, it seems we’ve come full circle. More and more, I find I have questions for my grandparents, were they still around, about their experience of the Great Depression and how it influenced their life choices. I wonder how living during the current world financial instability will influence our own. Kelli Korducki has compiled three unique perspectives on this subject: students interviewing their parents on how they made it through the last time around.

    Our finances are to some extent the fruits of our own choices. But the cost of living in this country are also determined by the machinations of a small group of elites. If you’re a Canadian or an American under 20 years of age, you’ve lived your entire life under the North American Free Trade Agreement, or the FTA that preceded it.

    Those agreements have shaped our lives. There are secretive talks in the works about an add-on to that agreement, called the Security and Prosperity Partnership. Alex Molotkow sets out to find out what the SPP could mean, and is already meaning, for you.

    Nominally, this issue is about the cost of living. Unintentionally, it’s become an issue about families

    There’s another theme running throughout these stories: U of T is a commuter school.

    What we don’t talk about often enough is how this commute permeates every aspect of our lives. Shoshana Wasser’s story of how difficult student refugees find the move out of residence tells us that being a commuter is really a different way of life.

    Jane Bao’s piece on the cost of commuting details some extremely long rides to school, but the frustrations of those travels are ones we all know. They’re opportunity costs—school, work, money, family, friends—all traded in the strange currency of the GO Train schedule.

    Those who worry about a super-lefty nanny state are missing the point when it comes to funding public housing, transportation, and family care. Cutbacks curtail personal freedom and the ability of the individual to rise above their circumstances. As one student caregiver asks in Allison Martell’s story, “How much of my life do I have to put on hold?” Student caregivers are some of the best multi-taskers U of T’s got. Why is the city, the province, and—because of U of T’s national prominence—the country, losing it’s most important resource in transit?

    We often hear that those who fought in the World Wars were fighting for our way of life. For Remembrance Day we examine the human, emotional, and cultural costs of war. Whatever your opinions about wars past and present, we must consider what it is we ask soldiers to put their lives on the line for. Remembering is important—it’s our debt for living.