Maclean's February 2023

Over the last few months, I have watched the events unfolding in Iran with awe and admiration. The protests, sparked by the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the country’s morality police, have been led largely by women, many of them young, who are demanding freedom for themselves and their fellow citizens. The bravery on display is breathtaking. Under a regime that reacts violently to the slightest hint of dissent, any act of resistance is supremely risky. Yet people are flooding streets by the thousands, shouting, “Women, life, freedom.” Well-known female actors and sports figures have posted images on social media without head coverings, brazenly defying a law that requires them to wear a hijab. The images have captured the attention of the world and garnered widespread…

CRISIS POINT In his December cover story, the Ontario ER doctor Alan Drummond wrote about the overcrowding and underfunding in Canadian emergency departments. His candour and clarity earned a swell of admiration from readers, including his colleagues and patients: A beautifully written story about the heroism of small-town medicine. Our friends are fortunate to have people like Dr. Drummond working for them. Don Farwell, Stratford, Ontario After reading Alan Drummond’s article, I have even more respect for this well-known man. He has been a voice for the health-care system for many decades. It’s a shame the government wasn’t enlightened by his advice years ago. For many decades I have witnessed his compassion while I was attending to my own mother at the Great War Memorial hospital in Perth. Dr. Drummond…

IN HIS GILLER PRIZE–WINNING SHORT story collection, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, Toronto physician Vincent Lam took readers behind the exam-room curtain and into the hectic, heart-straining lives of young doctors. His fifth book, On the Ravine, out this month, plunges readers into the opioid crisis, via two of Bloodletting’s most memorable characters. One of them is the considered, compassionate Dr. Chen—thought to be Lam’s alter ego—who is determined to save his patients, no matter the personal cost. It’s a dynamic that Lam knows well. In 2013, as opioid use exploded across Canada, he pivoted from emergency medicine to addictions and, in 2017, opened Toronto’s Coderix Medical Clinic. There, his team takes a two-pronged approach to substance-abuse treatment: pharmaceuticals and therapy. Lam believes the problems proliferating in Canada’s ERs and addictions…

AS A TEENAGER IN THE ’80S, long before anyone cared much about climate change, I did a science project that showed the tremendous amount of power that could be produced from just a tiny amount of uranium. Even then, I knew fossil fuels were finite and that we would one day need an alternative source of energy. Renewables like hydro, wind and solar are great, but we shouldn’t forget the reliable, low-emissions standby that is nuclear power. People have plenty of reservations about nuclear: it’s scary, it’s costly and what to do with all that waste? And yet there’s no path to net zero by 2050 without it. Excitement is building around one model of reactor in particular. It just might require Canadians to think smaller. Small modular reactors, also…

ABOUT A DECADE AGO, when I was 25, I moved out of my parents’ Toronto home and started renting on my own. I was working in fashion marketing at the time and had no problem finding a place I could afford. I lived in a studio apartment for six years, initially paying $1,100 a month. I thought I was on my way to purchasing my own home one day. When I was 32, I’d managed to save enough to move out of my old apartment and purchase a condo with my partner at the time. It was 2020, and the condo cost about $500,000. But when the relationship ended, he bought me out. The amount I received wasn’t nearly enough for a down payment on my own place, and because…

GROWING UP IN Richmond Hill, Ontario, Anika Sawni was the rare kid you’d call a wellness buff: she ate nutritiously, hiked, skied and played ringette. Then, shortly after she left home in 2014 to study cognitive science at McGill, Anika abandoned her healthy habits in favour of tipsy nights out in Montreal. By her fourth year, she’d gone straight-edge—and not just because of the hangovers. “I saw my friends engage in sloppy behaviour, like regrettable hook-ups and missed tests,” she says. “I thought, Why is binge-drinking so normal?” These days, there’s no shortage of zero-proof proxies for partying Gen Zs, the most alcohol-free cohort in recent history. But back when Anika was newly sober, she had to settle for soda water with lime. After graduation, she pitched a booze-free beverage…