Maclean's January/February 2025

As a child, I regularly visited the Ontario Science Centre, an educational facility in Toronto designed by the legendary architect Raymond Moriyama in the late ’60s. I enjoyed playing with the interactive exhibits, exploring gravity, space travel and forest ecosystems. But decades later, when I visited with my own kids, the place seemed down on its luck. Exhibits had stopped working. Areas were blocked off and under repair. The escalators were often on the fritz. Years of neglect had taken their toll. So when Doug Ford’s government abruptly closed the centre about six months ago, I wasn’t surprised. Many other people, however, were outraged: critics saw the shutdown as a ploy by the province to justify a for-profit spa complex down by the waterfront where, theoretically, some version of the…

LIVING ON THE EDGE Readers responded sympathetically to Marc-André Gagnon’s November memoir about drowning in debt—and living in his car to pay it off. With stories like these, it’s easy to blame the guy and say he should’ve known better than to get into debt. To an extent I agree, but there’s a bigger takeaway. There’s a mismatch between what people expect and want, based on what’s sold to them by society and what is financially possible. You could make the argument that, in the past, the wage-to-living-cost ratio was high enough that you wouldn’t have to bust your ass so much to just barely get by. “Is it that crazy to get an education and then expect a decent life afterwards?” McDeltat Hacker News Could he have lived more financially…

TOMMY DOUGLAS WOULDN’T be too pleased if he could see the state of Canadian health care today: warlike wound-dressing in ER hallways, creeping privatization, scattershot definitions of “medically necessary” and more than six million of his fellow citizens without a family doctor. Like Douglas, Jane Philpott—a trained family doctor herself—is big on radical reforms. Canada’s former health minister outlined her own plan to bust through the system’s discombobulation in last year’s bestseller, Health for All. One proposal is the creation of primary-care “homes,” teeming with nurse practitioners, therapists, housing workers, dieticians, tax experts (!) and, of course, family physicians. Ones we can actually get in to see. For the moment, Philpott is forced to narrow her focus. She exited the toxic (her word) political milieu after the Liberals’ cabinet-shattering SNC-Lavalin debacle…

DURING MY 15-YEAR CAREER as an HR specialist, I designed leave-management programs, like disability and parental leaves, for large Canadian companies. When it came time for me to have my first child in 2011, I knew the drill. I submitted for the maximum time—which, in days of EI past, was roughly 12 months—and socked away extra savings in advance. My second and third leaves were more complicated: I had a newborn with medical needs, plus some of my own. I decided to return to work, taking part-time career counselling gigs so I could make money and attend doctors’ appointments. Over and over again, I heard the same issues from women I knew—about parental leave and juggling responsibilities—so I thought, Why not all get together to talk? That’s how Moms at Work,…

MOST CANADIAN STUDENTS spend their formative years in cookie-cutter classrooms with painted concrete walls. But in 2017, a group of Quebec-based education advocates—including celebrated architect Pierre Thibault—broke with tradition. They persuaded then education minister Sébastien Proulx to kick in $3 million to create Lab-École, a non-profit incubator aimed at developing learning environments that would make children excited to go to school. Lab-École’s model, inspired by primary schools in Denmark, Finland and Japan, included large windows, natural materials, and ample room for kitchens, common spaces and play. In 2019, six schools were chosen to receive Lab-École make-overs, one of which was Marguerite-d’Youville in Saguenay, a mid-sized city west of the St. Lawrence River. The combined team of Agence Spatiale, Appareil Architecture and BGLA Architecture drafted the proposal for what would become École…

THE HIJAB’S MEANING is unique to each woman who chooses to wear it. My own relationship with the veil began when I started school in Tehran at age six. At first it was just part of the uniform, but soon I noticed how the women in my family wore it. They seemed so mature—so I started wearing it every day. It became a part of who I was. I spent my childhood in Dubai and Tehran, then moved to Ottawa when I was 10 years old. We returned to Iran after a few years to be near family. There, I earned an English literature degree and taught English to students of all ages; working with young children brought me the most joy. In 2017, when I was 23, I moved…