Category: Life & Love

For years, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors was known as the “five little kings,” given the $35 billion budget the board wields and, of course, the fact that they were all men. Just five supervisors wield power over the nation’s most populous county, which more than 10 million residents—or one-quarter of the state’s population—call home. It also makes LA County the largest non-state level government entity in the country, making the policies it implements a test case for other major cities around the U.S. and the world. Although the board is more than 150 years old, the first woman supervisor wasn’t elected until 1991 and the board was male-dominated until 2017. Now, for the first time in its history, all five supervisors are women after Holly J. Mitchell joined Hilda Solis, Sheila Kuehl, Kathyrn Barger, and Janice Hahn.

“It’s definitely a new era for LA County,” Supervisor Hilda Solis told ELLE.com. “This is history-making.”

Each of the supervisors boasts an impressive political resume. Solis was the secretary of Labor under President Obama; Kuehl was the the first openly gay person elected to the California legislature; Barger spent decades working for the Board of Supervisors; Janice Hahn grew up in a political family and served in the U.S. House of Representatives, and before she was elected, Mitchell was a state senator and chair of the state’s Budget Committee.

Barger praised Mitchell’s work as a progressive policymaker, highlighting her fights for criminal justice reform and childcare advocacy for underserved communities. “She’s got a real fire in her belly to come in, work, and collaborate,” Barger said.

The implications of what happens politically in Los Angeles County are huge for the country, given its ranking as the fifth largest economy in the world. “If LA County sneezes, there are tremors, because what happens here is so powerful,” Solis said. With a population and budget bigger than many states’, the county’s policies can create a blueprint for implementation on an even broader scale, especially in a year when it feels like all bets are off.

“2020 has been such a cataclysmic year of change, with so much going on all around us, but also for the board. I think it’s symbolic of the direction they have moved in, in recent months, in terms of really taking on, head-on, many really progressive issues,” Mitchell told ELLE.com.

Activists have always called Los Angeles home and pushed to hold elected officials accountable, but the pandemic, along with the 2020 presidential election, activated voters in a new way. Initiatives like Measure J—which was approved by voters in November and requires the county to budget no less than 10 percent of its revenue to address the disproportionate impact of racial injustice through community investment and alternatives to incarceration—and progressives like urban planner and activist Nithya Raman being elected to LA City Council show how far residents have come in wanting a government that better works for the people it serves.

“The COVID-19 pandemic put a spotlight on what was already there,” Hahn said. “It exacerbated homelessness, poverty, inequality, justice reform—it just showed the cracks that were already there in our society. It made these issues even more visible, and gave us more of an opportunity to solve them and really make some giant leaps toward fixing those things.”

All of those issues are top of mind for the board, with most of the women agreeing that the appeal of the office is “the amount that you can get done. And you can get it done much more quickly,” Kuehl said.

With residents increasingly convinced they can’t rely on Washington to address communities’ needs, Hahn said, “I think more and more people are looking to their local government to solve their problems.”

Still, elected officials have been known to fall short. In September, the board formally ended the county’s cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a move LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva also supported, after intense pressure by activist groups. Last month, after the board voted 3-2 (with Kuehl, Solis, and outgoing supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas in support; Mitchell was sworn in on Dec. 6) to uphold a reinstated ban on outdoor dining, Kuehl landed in hot water when she was spotted dining outdoors hours after the vote. While she wasn’t violating county rules, the move struck a nerve, and protesters have gathered outside her home to oppose the ban.

The drive to push for more was a deciding factor in Mitchell’s decision to run for the board. “I consider myself an activist policymaker; I decided to run for office out of my frustration in the activist space that I occupied,” she said. “I literally made the decision to run for this office sitting in the budget subcommittee hearing, where the members of this budget subcommittee of the assembly were proposing to cut a billion dollars out of subsidized child care.”

Barger and Mitchell also credited Gloria Molina, the first woman elected (although not the first appointed—that honor goes to Yvonne Brathwaite Burke) to the board for helping pave the way. “I have to tip my hat to Gloria Molina, who was the first, and that’s equally as significant,” Mitchell said. “To be a woman of color and break that glass ceiling? I can only imagine the challenges. She must have been really cracking open that male culture.”

Molina’s legacy will live on when Solis takes over as chair of the board and Mitchell becomes her vice-chair, meaning the two women of color on the board will also be in charge of it—a powerful message to Los Angeles and young, civically-minded women everywhere. Kuehl said the shift in public perception from “‘Oh, [electing all women] is possible’” to “‘this is normal’” is critical.

“The normalization of women on any elected bodies, I think, increases when you see, not just that we’re all women, but the variety of women that we are,” she said.

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Across Canada, farmers have been gathering outside consulates in cities like Toronto and Vancouver in support of their counterparts in India, who have been protesting a series of agricultural laws implemented by the Indian government in September of this year. The marches in India, from the Punjab region of the country towards New Delhi, began in late November and have escalated into violent clashes between police and farmers, making international headlines that inspired peaceful protests here in Canada with calls for the Canadian government to step in. But what exactly are the Indian farmers protesting and how does it affect Canadians?

Here, everything you need to know about the ongoing protests in India, and why we should all be paying attention.

Why are farmers in India protesting?

On a micro level, these protests are about agricultural legislation. On September 20, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government passed two agriculture bills aimed at reforming the country’s stressed farming sector.

According to BBC, the two bills passed loosen rules around the sale, pricing and storage of farm produce. Specifically, farmers will be allowed to sell their produce at a market price directly to private buyers (for example: agricultural businesses, supermarket chains and online grocers). In turn, these private businesses can hoard essential commodities for future sales.

Typically, farmers have sold their wares to government-controlled wholesale markets; these markets are run by committees comprised of other farmers who act as middlemen for brokering sales and storage. The benefit of this system, also known as the “mandis system,” is it allows farmers to sell the majority of their produce at assured prices. But with the passing of this new legislation, “the Modi government is effectively getting rid of that system,” says Jaskaran Sandhu, director of administration at the World Sikh Organization. And it’s a problem for small, independent farmers, Sandhu says, which just so happens to be the *majority* of farmers in India. “The government is also going to be removing what’s known as MSP, so the minimum set price,” he says, “which would do away with a  kind of  guaranteed return on crop; for pretty much all farmers that allows them to have some predictability in their income stream so that they can plan for the next year.” According to BBC, many farmers are nervous that this is a step towards abolishing the Mandi system altogether, which would mean the end of wholesale markets and assured prices, leaving them with no back up option; for example, if they’re not happy with the price offered by a private buyer, they can’t use the Mandi as an alternative option or bargaining tool.

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But these protests aren’t *just* about the new legislation itself, but rather, about the way the legislation was implemented. “First and foremost, [the farmers] weren’t consulted properly and the Indian government bypassed the normal hearings that would be done on something like this in order to pass it through quickly,” Sandhu says. Which is true. The bill was passed in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which may have contributed to its acceleration, but which meant that the typical processes of consulting with farmers wasn’t accessible. In September, when the bill was passed, Modi and his government were heavily criticized by even members of their own party for the speed with which the bills were passed.

Is this Democracy?

Bills are passed amidst complete chaos,
Opposition MPs are silenced,
Vote division is not done,
Rajya Sabha Procedure, hidden from the public

Our democracy, our farmers, our Nation is under attack, we must protect it at all costs. #KisanVirodhiNarendraModi pic.twitter.com/jtBIkDdCDe

— Congress (@INCIndia) September 20, 2020

The big issue, Sandhu explains, is that this isn’t the first time the current government has passed a bill without proper consultation. In November 2016, Prime Minister Modi decided overnight to ban Rs 500 and Rs 1000 as legal tender, leaving citizens in a lurch, and in August 2019, the government stripped the state of Kashmir of its autonomous status in a controversial and highly contested move.

“This was actually a pattern from the Modi government of a kind of authoritarian maneuvering,” Sandhu says of the latest agricultural legislation. “So there’s been a repeated pattern from the Modi government to take authoritarian measures and bypass democratic procedure that would be normal in a parliamentary democracy.”

Why would the government do that?

So, if it’s so controversial, why exactly would the government implement this new legislation? “In the government’s eyes, this is modernizing farming and bringing reform into the farming sector in India,” Sandhu says. In fact, Prime Minister Modi called the decision a “watershed moment,” with the government projecting that support plans in the agriculture sector will double farmers’ income by 2022. But that doesn’t mean that this is necessarily the way to go about it.

“I want to be clear, farmers have called for reform  for decades,” he emphasizes. “There’s [just] a stark disagreement on what that reform looks like.” As opposed to the corporate model Modi’s government has implemented, Sandhu says farmers want a more holistic approach to farming reform. It’s something farmers *have* been asking for, for awhile now. In fact, between December 2004 and October 2006, the Swaminathan Commission—a commission headed by agricultural scientists to address issues in farming—submitted five reports identifying causes of farm distress and suggesting ways in which the government could support farmers. According to India Today, since 2006, farmers have been calling for these suggestions to be implemented, among them the statement that “farmers [need] to have assured access and control over basic resources including land, water, bio-resources, credit and insurance, technology and knowledge management, and markets.”

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The Swaminathan reports have gone largely unacknowledged by the government. “It’s kind of  a re-imagining of how to support folks on the ground,” Sandhu says of what farmers need. “This corporate privatization model is not what they asked for.”

So why exactly does farming need reform? For a lot of reasons. “There’s issues with water tables in India, especially within the Punjab region, depleting. There’s been environmental impacts as a result of the green revolution back in the sixties, when modern pesticides were introduced that have caused irreparable damage to ecosystems and lands,” Sandhu says. In addition, due in part to diminishing economic clout, farmers in India are currently facing a suicide epidemic. According to Al Jazeera, more than half of the country’s farmers are in debt, with India’s National Crime Records Bureau reporting at least 20,638  farmer deaths by suicide in 2018 and 2019.

How does this affect farmers?

The major issue farmers have with the new legislation is the fear that it’ll push out the Mandi system entirely, forcing them to only work with—and at a disadvantage to—private corporations. If these corporations deal with farmers directly—in what’s called contract farming, dictating produce prices—”a lot of farmers feel like it’s an asymmetrical negotiation with corporations who will then box them out or force them into more difficult situations where the corporation is going to turn around and take advantage of them,” Sandhu says, “whether it’s buying up land, whether it’s forcing up prices on things and making it unaffordable for farmers;  they’re going to be at the whims of private interest versus public interests.”

It’s also important to note that the agricultural sector employs 80% of working women in India; with 48% of that number engaged as self-employed farmers, per 2018 stats from Oxfam India. This means that women and their livelihoods are disproportionately impacted by these new bills.

What has the response been from the Indian government?

So far, the response has been not so great. When farmers initially started marching towards New Delhi on November 26, they were met with barricades along the route, with the government going as far destroying parts of the national highway and digging trenches at certain points to block their path. For Canadians: “That’s the equivalent of the federal government in Ottawa going to the 401 [highway] and essentially bulldozing sections of it,” Sandhu says. In addition, police have released tear gas and used water cannons, as well as physical brutality against protestors. “There’s images of police attacking and protesters with sticks, beating them up; and [just] indiscriminate violence from the state,” Sandhu says.

And what does Canada have to do with this?

While Sikh Canadians may make up just over 1% of Canada’s overall population, they have strong ties to their communities and have a visible presence in Canadian culture, society and business. And many Punjabi Canadians still have family back home, making their plight a personal one, and therefore making the protests in solidarity across Canada unsurprising. “Those are our family and friends; they’re our mothers, our fathers, our elder brothers and sisters,” Sandhu says. “So there’s a deep, personal connection that we’re marching in solidarity here with.”

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“A lot of [Canadians] are connecting through India and even have land there,” says Suka Kahlon, a B.C. berry farmer whose family has been in the industry since the 1980s. “[These protests] are really important, as far as the political situation back home, and it’s important that the agriculture community in the Punjab and the rest of India does well and continues to do well.”

And having Canadians protest *is* helpful, because it puts pressure on the  Indian government and signals to Canadian politicians that this is an issue that requires international scrutiny. For his part, in early December Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke out about the protests and in support of the farmers, stating: “We believe in the importance of dialogue and that’s why we’ve reached out through multiple means directly to the Indian authorities to highlight our concerns.”

“The protestors [in India] are literally risking their lives by doing this, and without international scrutiny, there is nothing stopping India from resorting to statewide violence,” Sandhu says. “By protesting at Indian consulates around the world, including in Canada and getting politicians and Prime Minister Trudeau to speak out on it, India has to ensure that the people protesting are respected and that a state security crackdown doesn’t happen.”

So, what happens next?

The government has to listen. “This specific issue can be solved,” Sandhu says. “I think that’s why they protest, because they think there’s a solution here.” And the solution is re-appealing the implemented legislation. “The farmer unions have been pretty steadfast in that there’s no compromise on this issue. So the only reality here is that the government, take these suggestions and it goes back to the drawing board on what reform looks like.”

Kahlon agrees. If the farmers do win this dispute, he says, it’ll be a symbolic win, but important, as hopefully indicative that the government can’t push *anyone* around, and has to listen to the country’s citizens and their needs. “If the government appeals those law, it’ll only go back to the status quo, and that wasn’t a perfect situation,” he says of farming reform. “What’s more significant would be the BJP [government party] having to pull back and sit back and say, ‘Oh, the people have come together and we’re willing to listen and we can’t just push our agenda forward.’ I think those are the real issues behind the headlines.”

And until then, the farmers will keep protesting. CTV News reports that some protestors have stocked up on six month’s worth of food supplies, should it come to that. “For the Sikh faith, you’re supposed to stand up against all forms of oppression, irrespective of whether it actually impacts your community or not,” Sandhu says. “So the Sikh psyche is one designed for fighting for rights, human rights, decency and respect.”

FLARE has reached out to the office of Prime Minister Modi. This story will be updated with any response.

The Best Western in Galena, IL looks unremarkable from the outside — just another hotel chain off the highway. Inside, it’s a different story. There’s a stone-walled cave room, a shell-shaped bed in the aquarium room, and a classic honeymoon suite filled with mirrors. “What a nice surprise,” Margaret Bienert says to the camera, soaking in a foamy bath and drinking wine from a plastic cup with her husband, Corey.

As a travel video series, Margaret and Corey’s A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour is charming and goofy. The California-based duo, now in their 30s, have been together for over 11 years and naturally play off each other’s energy. In Miami at Executive Fantasy Hotels, for example, they do improv comedy with sex furniture, trying to figure out how it’s supposed to work. At Toledo’s Designer Inn & Suites, Bienert checks the bed for hairs and finds a leftover candy. On their popular Instagram account, which has nearly 90,000 followers, the mood isn’t quite so kooky. The still images of their themed room adventures have a more dreamy and ethereal vibe, transporting you to a time and space that feels divorced from time and space.

Hotels are, philosophically, otherworldly. Even the most generic motel is a liminal space, hanging somewhere between regular life and fantasy, but themed rooms take it a step further. They create fantasy within reality. Putting that fantasy on social media both exposes the illusion while creating another. It’s a deviation from the bland millennial aesthetic that floods other travel influencers’ feeds. You know the look — white walls, exposed brick, mid-century modern tables. That style is specific to nowhere, found all over the world. Themed hotel rooms, on the other hand, are specific to only themselves. “These designs shake you into processing what you’re looking at,” Bienert told ELLE.com.

“You can’t walk in and just think, ‘Oh, that’s pretty.’ A true themed hotel room should be three dimensional. What can I touch? What can I sit in? I want there to be a shape,” she said. At the Anniversary Inn in Salt Lake City, the duo plays foosball in the Player’s Clubhouse and relaxes in the Venice suite’s gondola bed. The kitsch becomes part of the adventure and builds a narrative.

In her essay about the architecture of honeymoon resorts, Barbara Penner writes that sensory engagement is part of the desired effect. The rooms are supposed to appeal to the body. It’s an invitation “to feel, to stroke, to recline onto, to sink into, to grasp, to indulge, to consume.” After all, this is about romance and sex. Historically, themed rooms can be traced back to bridal chambers on Mississippi River steamboats starting around 1840. Frilly and regal, they were designed to make women more comfortable with losing their virginity.

Around the 1950s, the aesthetic of honeymoon hotels shifted to capture the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. There are raised platforms that look like a stage, props, lighting, and mirrors. In these rooms, you’re the star of the show — a notion that, when Bienert started the project, was a stark departure from her upbringing in purity culture, a strict form of abstinence practiced by young Evangelical Christians that requires no physical, emotional, or spiritual intimacy with others until marriage.

“I grew up super religious, and sex was something that I didn’t talk about or think about. The first time I visited a themed hotel, it transformed my view of sex and how I could participate in it,” she says. “Seeing myself in all the reflected surfaces made me feel like I was the lead in a 90s romantic comedy. It felt like it was for me. When you’re not sure how to be sexy, or not sure if you’re allowed to be, the room creates an environment where it’s inescapable.”

While many sexually-driven spaces are geared towards men (like adult theaters or brothels), themed hotels might be the only mainstream venue explicitly designed for women to explore their eroticism. Bienert says, “It’s not like, bam, an elaborate sex swing and mirror above the bed. The rooms draw you in, they romance you. It’s more about the pleasing lighting, the light pink curtains, and having a glass of wine in the hot tub. Then you notice the mirror and the sex swing in the closet when you’re ready for it.”

Renowned couples therapist Esther Perel writes that because women are often socialized to be caretakers, they might find it difficult to focus on themselves in sexual situations. Among cis women in heterosexual relationships, women are more likely to identify as objects for the purpose of male satisfaction than the subject of their own fantasies. Perel urges women to give themselves permission “to feel [their] own narcissism” as an entrypoint for sexual freedom.

In her own life, Bienert has noticed the link between being seen and feeling good.

“If lots of mirrors in a hotel room freak you out, I want people to wonder why they’re afraid to see themselves. I’ve noticed that a lot of women in my life, especially from other generations, don’t want to be in group photos or want to stand in the back. I really don’t want to feel that way about myself, and I don’t want other women to feel that way. We should give ourselves permission to prioritize ourselves, be allowed to feel good and be seen,” she says.

Staying in a themed hotel room can provide more than a new window into our sexuality. Studies show that sharing new experiences makes us happier in our relationships. Although it wasn’t their explicit intention, Bienert agrees that the couple’s adventures into the unknown have drawn them closer together. “When you’re in your relationship groove, there aren’t many moments for you to dress up and do something special. The hotels make us step outside of the norm,” she says.

While some travel accounts are aspirational, making us covet faraway places and luxury experiences, Pretty Cool Hotel Tour is a relatively accessible way to broaden your horizons without straying too far from home. The rooms usually cost less than $200 a night and are generally close to major cities. But if you’re looking for your own themed hotel experience, Bienert recommends staying open-minded about the experience—even if that means bringing your own bleach and sheets. While some hotels are top notch, others are lagging in their cleaning services and general hospitality.

“I want people to understand that it’s part of the character. Sometimes you have to wipe down a tub and put up with the smell,” says Bienert. “Don’t go to a themed hotel and leave a two-star Yelp review because you expected it to be perfect.” She hopes that her project will generate more customers for the hotels and keep them from closing.

Because of COVID-19, however, their travel plans have been delayed. As they find ways to continue A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour, Margaret and Corey are temporarily living in Palm Springs and designing their own themed rooms for a friend’s vacation home. “It’s called The Rainbow Getaway and each room will be a different color. We’re not going to push it too far,” says Bienert. “But I currently have $1,000 of pink fake fur that’s definitely going up on the walls.”

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My Darling Quarantine,

I fell in love with you the moment I first heard your name. I knew it was wrong—I hated myself for loving you, but I couldn’t help myself. I yearn for you: your sweet, sweet stillness, your long hours of the day, your unvarying sense of self. How could I love something so destructive, a by-product of a disease that has brought so much pain and suffering? Alas, I’ve always had terrible taste when it comes to love.

You came at the end of March and ended winter with your warm embrace. You immediately put me at ease. Sure, the news was horrifying, but you were the solution! Your intentions were pure. You tucked me in and promised everything would be okay as long as we stuck together. Everything about being with you was cozy: staying in, drinking tea, board games, that night we got drunk on red wine and counted all the stars. Time felt like it didn’t exist with you. There was not one ungentle morning. We fell asleep and woke up whenever we wanted.

When spring came and you were still there, I knew what we had was real. At first, I thought there was no way we’d last. That the honeymoon phase would come to an end and we’d tire of each other as the weeks went by. But with every passing day, my fondness for you only grew stronger. And now that I know what it’s like to have you, I don’t think I can ever lose you.

Before you, I struggled with incessant shame. Anytime I had an interaction with another human, I would feel an onslaught of humiliation. Every other lover I’ve had has tried to make me change the way I see myself. But not you. You knew that wouldn’t work; instead, you eliminated all possible social-anxiety-inducing situations. There were no dinners, no gatherings, no meetings—no accidental run-ins on the street.

With you, I would never again spend hours after socializing, rethinking all the things I said or should have said. Gone was the fear that everyone I had just mingled with had come to the conclusion that they now hated me. Not only that, you allowed me to live without guilt. No more scrambling for excuses or feeling bad for lying to distant cousins about why I couldn’t make the family barbecue. It wasn’t my fault anymore; it was yours, and you were happy to take the blame.

For so long, my jealousy controlled me. But I wasn’t jealous with you. You made sure I wouldn’t feel that way. I knew where everyone was. My best friend was stuck in a house with me, forced to choose me over her other friends day after day. My crushes and exes couldn’t flirt with a barista or meet new girls at parties. They were only able to contact the short list of people they already knew, me included.

In the “real world,” or what I like to call the world before you, when I’d find myself falling into depression, a minuscule task could tip me over the edge. I think back to a morning when I was feeling hopeless and had resigned myself to my bed. My mother called and asked if I would drop her bite plate off at the dentist and then pick it up a few hours later. I can’t drop off your bite plate, I said, I’m trying to get through the day.

In that state of mind, the thought of having to get up for a bite plate felt like flying across the country. But you, amazing you, you took all those menial tasks away. Depression suddenly became not only socially acceptable, but the norm. No one would try to pull me out of it; most of them now understood it for themselves, and the rest literally weren’t allowed to come near me to even try.

Before you, my shame, jealousy, and depression could be triggered by the hundreds of strangers I’d see on social media. With a tap on the screen, I’d watch as they achieved another new dream to add to their long list of accomplishments. But you halted their aspirations. And because I am a deeply selfish, insecure girl, I loved it. These strangers’ virtual lives were no longer taunting me with their successes. They even allowed us to watch as they spiraled downward because of it. The lack of attention made them do endless things for our entertainment; we had so many laughs at their expense, you and I.

Despite millions flouting you, you managed to do some great things that we never could have predicted. Without frivolous daily distractions, we were forced to see the truth, look social injustice in the eye. You helped shift people’s perspective. You reduced carbon emissions, keeping cars from polluting our streets and bringing airline emissions as low as they may ever be in our lifetime. You forced everyone in this world of ultra-globalization to live locally. You single-handedly brought people to their senses, conserving and rationing what they had and learning to be self-sufficient in ways society told them they didn’t have to be. You emptied out hundreds of coffee shops in gentrified neighborhoods. How much plastic did you save? My hero.

The virus that brought you into this world has fueled nightmares, but you came here to destroy it. Maybe if others had loved you as much as I did, your mission would have succeeded earlier. Lives and businesses would have been saved and things would be getting back to normal. Alas, our president was more interested in his political fortunes than he was in you, and others must go to Nobu.

I wish people understood how rare it is to find someone who protects you and allows you to indulge in your worst vices: spoonfuls of peanut butter, isolation, flirty texting with no pressure of it going further, lounging in pajamas. You’re the healing lifestyle of a breakup without the broken heart. When you leave for good, I’ll surely have one, though. I don’t think I’ll ever get over you. I’m so in love with you, so attached and codependent, I’ll probably just pretend we’re still together.

Yours always,

Cazzie

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Desiree Watts just wanted to find community with other skaters.

She remembered roller skating as a child growing up in upstate New York, living with her grandmother, who’d been a roller disco queen in the 70s and 80s. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it seemed like a perfect time to pick the sport back up. Countless others seemed to have the same idea: TikTok and Instagram came alive with videos of BIPOC skaters looping around to funky tracks, and waitlists appeared to buy retro-inspired skates online.

“As soon as I put them on and hit the street, it was like second nature, even though I hadn’t done it in over 10 years,” Watts, 23, told ELLE.com.

Watts, who’s now based in Buffalo, was looking for an outlet to learn new tricks and connect with other skaters in lockdown, so she joined the Planet Roller Skate Facebook group, named for the Long Beach-based shop that sells popular lines of colorful skates.

Indy Jamma Jones—real name Amy West—is a major presence in the online world of roller skating. She started the Facebook group only a few years ago after joining forces with Pigeon, owner of the brick-and-mortar Planet Roller Skate shop. Before long, the PRS online group grew to more than 10K members, West told ELLE.com. Things were humming along nicely.

But shortly after George Floyd’s murder in late May, the group went off the rails. A Black community member posted in the group looking for support, and recounted a recent experience of being racially profiled by the police while skating. Hundreds of likes and comments in solidarity poured in, with other skaters sharing their own experiences being discriminated against. An hour or two later, the post disappeared.

When the same member posted again to ask why her post had been deleted, a group moderator finally chimed in, saying it violated the group’s rules against posting “political” content. Members of the group noted that posts about LGBTQ issues, body positivity, sexism, and misogyny had previously been allowed to flow without interference. Some saw the justification as clear evidence of a double standard when it came to issues of race and the Black Lives Matter movement; members left the group in droves. The moderator who’d justified the deletion also left.

“They showed me it was not a safe space for us to be heard,” Watts said.

Artemis Peacocke, a Seattle-based skater who posts under the name Faeiryne Faun, was banned from the group after asking moderators to clarify the rules. In a YouTube video she posted about the ordeal titled “Is Planet Roller Skate and Indy Jamma Jones Racist?”, Faun says she was told her comments violated rules around being “courteous” on the page.

“This is reality for us, whether you’re roller skating or grocery shopping…being Black will affect you, and sometimes it will kill you,” she says in the video, which has now been viewed more than 120,000 times.

Faun also called out Jones for calling talk about George Floyd’s murder “adult content” and promised to make another group where these “adult” topics would be open for discussion.

After the dust cleared in July, West posted a teary-eyed apology video for her more than 226,000 YouTube subscribers apologizing for the “harm that I’ve caused.”

“Instead of taking the time to understand why people were hurting and were upset, I saw my friend being called out, and I reacted to protect her,” Jones says in the video. Much of the community didn’t seem moved by her apology, and in a follow up video, Jones spoke directly to her critics: “You, judgers of my character, may no longer suggest that I am racist.”

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West’s attitude about the incident has evolved since then. Now living in NYC, she told ELLE.com that, as founder of the PRS Facebook group, she takes full responsibility for its “poor moderation.” She feels like a “complete idiot” for having used the term “adult” to describe the original post’s content.

It’s well-known in skating culture that rinks throughout the U.S. employ a strategic kind of segregation: “Adult night” almost always means Black skate night. She remains embarrassed, sorry, and ashamed, she says. But West adds that she’s learned—and continues to learn—from what happened.

“I feel like my world perspective is shook in the best way, in a way that was totally necessary, and I’m thankful for that,” she said. “And I’m thankful to everybody that’s called me out.”

---

The Planet Roller Skate group is out of West’s hands now. (It’s since been renamed The Unity Skate Collective.) The LA shop originally built by Pigeon, real name Shayna Meikle, is now Pigeon’s Roller Skate Shop, and the online store for PRS redirects to pigeonsrollerskateshop.com. West still helms the Instagram and YouTube channels.

Significant subterfuge between West and her former partner, much of which happened publicly on social media, muddies the understanding of who owned what. While Meikle has reduced her role to employee, West maintains that ownership of the online shop was “a 50-50 joint business venture,” albeit one with no legal contract in place.

Many skaters have decided to shun both parties—or at least find community elsewhere. New, inclusive, actively anti-racist communities on social media, like BIPOC Who Skate and Queer Skate Alliance, offer more ethically conscious alternatives.

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Watts opted to start her own space.

“I wanted to create a group for BIPOC like myself, so our voices can be heard in the roller skating community,” Watts told me. The group she founded, Roll Out: A Roller Skater Collective, now has nearly 6,000 members.

TogetherWeSkate was also founded in the wake of Planet Roller Skate’s implosion. A team of about 18 manage its members and content. With the exception of blocking hate speech or otherwise offensive content, the moderators for TogetherWeSkate and Roll Out rarely remove posts by community members. What’s more, neither tries to weed politics out the conversation; both understand that, especially for members of marginalized communities, identity can be inherently political.

For 19-year-old Lauren, a TogetherWeSkate mod, finding inclusive spaces as an Asian LGBTQ woman who is neurodivergent is uncommon: “I’m not really used to having these inclusive spaces for my identities in larger society. It’s just not there,” she says.

Peacocke has since started her own group, too. Through Seattle Skates!, she and two others cultivate community with IRL meetups and collective fundraising for social justice organizations.

And as the community tries to build better and more inclusive spaces, fighting against modern forces that erase Black history—like gentrification and the police state—have also become a critical effort. During segregation, Black skaters were banned from rinks and protested to win their right to entry. This led Black skaters to develop their own styles and skating moves, separate from the white population they weren’t permitted to roll alongside.

To this day, Black skaters are often discriminated against at rinks through coded rules like no “small wheels” or skates without standard toe stops (both typical of Black skating styles) and no “saggy pants” allowed.

Nina Tadic, a co-founder of TogetherWeSkate, told ELLE.com that “Skating is a sport that has been kept alive by Black skaters in particular.”

“It’s our obligation as members of this community to make sure that recognition is in place and make sure that all skaters feel heard and have a voice,” she said.

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After days of suspense, the swirling uncertainty around the 2020 United States presidential election settled in the late morning of November 7 when news outlets reported Joe Biden as the projected winner. The momentous win for the Democratic party meant, of course, that Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris would join him at the White House as vice president-elect, making her the first woman, Black person, and South Asian person, to take office.

The symbolic victory made many women, especially women of colour, feel that the dream of reaching the country’s highest offices is actually attainable. But Harris’s journey to historic juncture, like her legacy, has been a complicated one, leaving many grappling with weighing the magic of this moment with her controversial record as a “progressive prosecutor” whose accomplishments were not always beneficial to the communities she claimed to advocate for.

Here, we take a look at Harris’s path to the White House, including her teenage years in Montreal, early career as a prosecutor, history-making Senate win and some of the challenges, and controversies, she has faced along the way. 

Kamala Harris’s childhood as a daughter to immigrant parents 

Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California to Shyamala Gopalan and Donald J. Harris, on October 20, 1964. Before Harris was born, her mother had immigrated to the U.S. from India to attend the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) where she obtained both a master’s and doctorate degree, and went on to have a career as a biomedical scientist. Her father, who had immigrated from Jamaica to also study at UC Berkeley, was an economics professor at Stanford University. While Harris has said that her parents met during the civil rights movement and would frequently take their young daughters to civil rights marches, as a multi-racial American and the child of two immigrant parents, Harris learned at a young age that the country she called home was not always friendly to its citizens of colour. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Harris recalled visiting her father in Palo Alto after her parents divorced and being told by a neighbourhood child that she was forbidden from playing with Harris and her younger sister, Maya, because they were Black. While in elementary school she was bussed to an almost entirely white school in a different district as part of a federal attempt to desegregate schools, something Harris has said made her feel like an outsider. 

Her early education—and Canadian connection

In 1976, five years after her parents divorced and at the age of 12, Harris’s mother accepted a teaching position at the McGill University Faculty of Medicine in Montreal. Harris, her mom and her younger sister moved to Canada where she finished elementary school, then attended and graduated from Westmount High School where a former classmate told CBC’s Let’s Go “she got along with everyone.” While living in Montreal, the future vice president-elect learned French and even started a dance team at her high school. After graduating, Harris moved back to the U.S. where she pursued a degree in political science and economics at Howard University, one of the longest standing Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the country. During her time at Howard, she became a prominent member of the campus’s debate team and pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha (the first Black sorority ever created, and whose origins began on Howard’s campus). After completing her degree at Howard, Harris went on to obtain a law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of Law where she served as president of its chapter of the Black Law Students Association.

Read this next: Here’s What You Need to Know About the Major Issues in the U.S. Election

The milestones—and controversies—of Harris’s career as a prosecutor

Shortly after graduating from law school, Harris began her career as deputy district attorney in the prosecutors’ offices Alameda County, California. She spent eight years there before moving to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office as assistant district attorney where she later oversaw the career criminal unit. From there, she took a job at San Francisco City Hall where she ran the Family and Children’s Services Division representing child abuse and neglect cases. 

It would be in this role, and subsequent positions, that she prosecuted a number of controversial three-strike cases whose harsh sentencing has been the subject of much public criticism. While considering a person’s criminal past during sentencing is not a new concept, the Three Strikes Law, which was first established in 1994 as a part of an aggressive nationwide anti-violence strategy, enforces mandatory life sentences for repeat offenders. A number of states have adopted some form of a “three strikes” rule that seeks to punish repeat offenders, but California has been widely criticized for its particularly harsh enforcement of the law. Under California’s controversial three strikes law, any person who has committed three felonies, which includes crimes like arson, robbery, drug possession and firearm violations, can receive a life sentence. Despite the fact that the law was meant to be applied to violent repeat offenders, many crimes on the list of offences that can contribute to a mandatory life sentence are, on their own, ones that would not carry such a harsh punishment. As a result, critics say the law has had catastrophic results for people who have committed a series of non-violent crimes such as drug possession which disproportionately impacts Black people who make up 43% of the state’s prison population. 

Even though Harris has consistently faced criticism for prosecuting people under the three strikes law, it is seemingly a decision she stands behind. During a radio interview with The Breakfast Club, the vice president-elect said that she “would never apologize for saying that when a child is molested or a woman is raped or a human being kills another human being that there should be serious consequences for that.” 

Harris’s history-making appointments as the district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California

In 2003, Harris ran and won against her former boss to become San Francisco’s district attorney, making her the first person of colour ever elected to that position. During her time in the District Attorney’s office, she launched the “Back on Track” initiative that was designed to help low-level offenders get a fresh start by providing them with education and job opportunities. She went on to become the first Black, and first woman, attorney general of California in November 2010. However, as historical as her win would be, some of the decisions she would make as attorney general would come back to haunt her. 

As attorney general, Harris supported certain causes that proved potentially harmful to those that she said she so desperately wanted to protect. For instance, she advocated passionately for a truancy initiative where parents of students that were habitually late to school faced risk of prosecution, even though there were concerns that it would disproportionately affect low-income people of colour the most. (There’s much evidence that it did just that.)

And during a time when the public has become increasingly aware of the violence that police officers disproportionately inflict on people of colour, it’s jarring to learn that Harris opposed a bill that would require her office to investigate shootings involving police officers as well as refused to support body-worn cameras. The Vice President-elect has also been reluctant to commit to defunding the police. 

A picture of Harris’s career accomplishments, and controversies, would be incomplete without mentioning her history of fighting to uphold wrongful convictions, including the case of Kevin Cooper, a death row inmate whose trial was laced with racism and corruption. As science advanced during Cooper’s sentence, he sought a more advanced stream of DNA testing that could prove his innocence. Harris opposed it. It wasn’t until an exposé of the case went viral that she changed her position.

Read this next: How to Deal With the Stress of the Election

Her time in the U.S. Senate

In 2016, after the first California Senate seat in 25 years opened up, Harris ran, won, and made history again after becoming only the second Black woman, and the first South Asian American, ever to do so. After joining the Senate, Harris’s accomplishments included advocating for a single-payer health care system, supporting the introduction of legislation to increase access to outdoor recreational sites in urban areas, and providing financial assistance to low-income families facing an increasingly expensive housing market in the state of California.  

Harris made headlines when, as a member of the Judiciary Committee, she questioned Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 on the sexual assault allegations he faced. And when clips of her persistent and unwavering questioning went viral, it was clear to many that Harris’s impact on the world had only just begun. 

Harris again made headlines and proved that she was a force to be reckoned with when, as part of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she confronted Attorney General Jeff Sessions about his contact with Russia during the Trump campaign. Her anger and distrust towards the Trump administration was anything but concealed. Having a firsthand look at how things were being run in Washington as a Senator fuelled a fire in her to really make change in her country. In an interview with Vogue, she recalled sitting on the couch after Donald Trump had been elected president and thinking “This. Can’t. Be. Happening.”

Read this next: 6 Takeaways From a Historic Election Weekend

Harris’s bid for the U.S. presidency

On January 21, 2019 (Martin Luther King Jr. Day, no less), Harris announced on Good Morning America that she would be running for president in the 2020 election.”I love my country,” Harris said. “And this is a moment in time that I feel a sense of responsibility to fight for the best of who we are.” She started strong in her bid to become the Democratic presidential nominee, giving an especially strong showing at the Democratic primary debate in June 2019 when she confronted none other than Joe Biden on his history of opposing the federal bussing program that sought to desegregate schools, a program that Harris, despite feeling at times like an outsider, had benefited from. Harris detailed the journey of a young girl who boarded the bus every day in search of a better education before revealing, “That little girl was me.” 

But after candidates began poking holes in her idealistic healthcare plan, one that limited the costs that Americans would have to contribute for healthcare, but neglected to take into consideration the guaranteed pushback from private insurers, and bringing up many of her controversial decisions as attorney general, her popularity began to slip. In December 2019, Harris announced that she was withdrawing from the presidential race. 

And finally, Harris’s path to the vice presidency

Although her run for president was unsuccessful, on August 11, 2020, Biden announced that he had selected Harris as his running mate, to which Harris responded “I’m honoured to join him as our party’s nominee for Vice-President, and do what it takes to make him our Commander-in-Chief.” This made Harris the fourth woman ever to appear on a major political party’s presidential ticket in the U.S., and the first Black woman, as well as the first South Asian person, to be nominated for national office. 

Despite reservations about Harris’s past as a prosecutor, her road to becoming the U.S. vice president-elect has been historic, and for many, the future is a hopeful one. “While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last, because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities,” Harris said during her November 7 victory speech in Wilmington, Delaware. 

What’s next for Vice President-elect Harris? Between Trump’s refusal to concede the presidency, Biden’s ambitious transition plan and the president-elect’s COVID-19 task force, the next few months will be busy as the work of transforming the country begins and the American people start to see if Biden and Harris will indeed champion policy that ameliorates the lives of the people who elected them. As Harris put it in her victory speech: “Now is when the real work begins, the necessary work, the good work, the essential work, to unite our country and heal the soul of our nation.” 

Shortly before noon EST on Saturday, history was made when Pennsylvania—and its 20 electoral college votes—was called for Joe Biden, pushing him over the 270 electoral college votes needed to beat the sitting president, Donald Trump. Celebrations ensued across the United States, and the world, with jubilant Biden supporters dancing, singing and popping bottles of champagne on the streets. (These celebrations occurred alongside ongoing, baseless claims of voter fraud.) The Democratic Party’s win was a salve for many following an incredibly difficult year, and it was also incredibly historic on multiple fronts. Here, six takeaways from this monumental victory.

While I may be the first, I won’t be the last. pic.twitter.com/R5CousWtdx

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 8, 2020

Kamala Harris becomes the first female and first woman of colour vice president

“While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last, because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities,” Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said in her victory speech on Saturday night in Wilmington, Delaware. She was dressed in all white—honouring women’s rights activism—and also spoke about her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who came to the U.S. from India when she was 19, and the generations of Black, brown, Asian, white, Latino and Native American women who “paved the way for this moment tonight.”

We did it, @JoeBiden. pic.twitter.com/oCgeylsjB4

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 7, 2020

President-elect Joe Biden becomes the first candidate to unseat an incumbent in 28 years

The last presidential candidate to do so was Bill Clinton, who beat Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1992, then held on to the job for two terms.

Throughout U.S. history, only eight other incumbent presidents have lost their re-election bids: Jimmy Carter (D), Gerald Ford (R), Herbert Hoover (R), William Howard Taft (R), Benjamin Harrison (R), Martin Van Buren (D), John Quincy Adams (Whig) and John Adams (Federalist).

Senate control remains undecided

The Democrats need 50 seats to control the Senate; following the election, the Republican and Democrats each hold 48 senate seats, with no party likely to take control until a runoff election for two seats is held in Georgia on January 5, 2021. (A runoff occurs when no candidate earns enough votes to clear a state-mandated percentage for victory.)

The New York Times has proclaimed the southern state—which typically runs Republican—“a new political battleground” after Biden eked out a narrow lead there that is headed for a recount. The state has not sent a Democrat to Senate in two decades, and much of the Dems’ newfound success there has been credited to Stacey Abrams—who ran for governor in 2018, lost by a narrow margin and became a staunch advocate against voter suppression.

Georgia, thank you. Together, we have changed the course of our state for the better. But our work is not done.

Join me in supporting @ReverendWarnock and @ossoff so we can keep up the fight and win the U.S. Senate➡️https://t.co/JTyH1UVEtd #LetsGetItDoneAgain #gapol pic.twitter.com/qH5ZfmsgI7

— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) November 7, 2020

Trump has not conceded

To be clear, the current POTUS does not need to concede in order for Biden to become president on January 20, 2021—but doing so is the standard, and not to mention, the decent thing to do. However, as of Sunday afternoon, Trump has made no move to admit defeat, although CNN reports that his son-in-law Jared Kushner has broached the topic. (The White House disputes this report, but if it’s true, what we wouldn’t give to witness that conversation.)

Instead, since the election was called for Biden on Saturday, Trump has issued a series of petulant tweets that allege election fraud—with absolutely zero proof—most of which have been flagged by Twitter for misinformation.

In an official statement following the Biden call, Trump maintains (incorrectly!) that the election has not been won, and says that on Monday his team will “will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated.”

If they don’t start this soon there might not be any press left here to cover it. Journalists keep leaving.

— Richard Hall (@_RichardHall) November 7, 2020

To that end, on Saturday afternoon, Rudy Giuliani—Trump’s personal lawyer—stood in front of a podium in Philadelphia to discuss alleged examples of voter fraud in the state. The event quickly went viral—though not for reasons that the Trump camp had hoped. Instead, it was the location of Giuliani’s speech—the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a Philly business which is adjacent to an adult bookstore and crematorium—that drew the most attention, as many assumed the event was incorrectly booked, and that the campaign meant to reserve the swanky Four Seasons hotel in downtown Philadelphia. (The New York Times says the landscaping business, “in a friendlier part” of the predominantly Democratic town, was always the intended venue.)

To clarify, President Trump’s press conference will NOT be held at Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia.
It will be held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping— no relation with the hotel.

— Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia at Comcast Center (@FSPhiladelphia) November 7, 2020

Biden’s Day One promises

Biden’s transition website, buildbackbetter.com, lists four immediate priorities: COVID-19, economic recovery, racial equity, and climate change.

After he takes the oath of office, Biden says that the United States will rejoin the Paris climate accord. (The U.S. officially withdrew from the global agreement on climate change action on November 4.) Christiana Figueres, a key architect of the accord, was shown on Twitter jumping up and down over the news of Biden’s win.

Thank you, United States! The election of @JoeBiden is huge not just for America, but for the world. Here’s how it landed with @CFigueres to see that the US is on it’s way back into the #ParisAgreement #ElectionDay @UNFCCC pic.twitter.com/iaDpELx2mb

— Tom Rivett-Carnac (@tomcarnac) November 7, 2020

Biden also has his work cut out for him on getting COVID-19 under control—the disease is currently surging in the U.S., which saw a record 132,790 new cases on Friday. In his victory speech on Saturday, Biden said that as of Monday, he’ll “name a group of leading scientists and experts as transition advisors to help take the Biden-Harris COVID plan and convert it into an action blueprint that will start on January 20, 2021. That plan will be built on bedrock science. It will be constructed out of compassion, empathy and concern. I will spare no effort—none—or any commitment to turn around this pandemic.”

And, generally, the last part of January is looking pretty packed for Biden: the Washington Post has a rundown of other executive orders the new president reportedly plans to sign shortly after inauguration, including reversing “Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization,” repealing “the ban on almost all travel from some Muslim-majority countries,” and reinstating “the program allowing ‘dreamers,’ who were brought to the United States illegally as children, to remain in the country.”

What Biden and Harris’ victory means for Canada

Congratulations, @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris. Our two countries are close friends, partners, and allies. We share a relationship that’s unique on the world stage. I’m really looking forward to working together and building on that with you both.

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) November 7, 2020

Obviously, Biden will be a more predictable president, and the new administration promises to have a closer, less-fraught relationship with the Canadian government. And, as Edward Keenan points out in the Toronto Star, Biden’s win is a hopeful sign for Canadian politics, as “the nationalism, populism and misinformation tactics of Trump’s campaigns and government will look less attractive to Canadian politicians now that they’ve been defeated—for now, anyway.”

Congratulations to President-elect @JoeBiden. As your friend, neighbour, and closest ally, Canada will work shoulder to shoulder with you as together we confront the greatest challenges of our time, at home and abroad.

— Chrystia Freeland (@cafreeland) November 7, 2020

Biden has also promised to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry crude oil from Alberta to refineries in the U.S. Gulf Coast. And, while the United States remains Canada’s top trading partner, Biden has vowed to ensure “the future is made in all of America,” which could concern Canadian manufacturers. If Biden is successful at curbing the coronavirus, border restrictions could ease.

And, as Keenan writes in the Star, the Biden administration will likely also have a positive effect on treatment of asylum seekers in the U.S.—which will also impact Canada: “The Trump administration’s treatment of asylum seekers led to a flood of irregular refugees at the Canadian border, and to the Supreme Court ruling our pact with the U.S. on refugees unconstitutional. Biden’s promises to accept more asylum seekers and dramatically overhaul treatment offer the prospect of a partnership on refugee policy we may be able to live with.”

We hate to break it to you but we don’t know who won. Late into election night, it was unclear whether Donald Trump will be re-elected, or if Joe Biden will uproot him and become the next president of the United States.

Trump and Biden both have paths to victory, but a handful of key states—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio—were still too close to call late on Tuesday night. So we wait. We wait for the results, and we wait for the inevitable disputes and legal challenges thereafter. We try to ignore Twitter.

You may be flashing back to four years ago and you may not believe your eyes. We aren’t sure we do either, although you are reading our best attempt to decipher the flood of early results that flashed across our screens Tuesday. The nation’s eyes are strained. And we Canadians didn’t even have to vote.

If your tired eyes weren’t glued to network television on election night, here are a few things you missed, and a few key conclusions—at least the ones we’re prepared to make—about what it all means.

No landslide for Biden 

What the early election results show is that the electoral map in 2020 looks pretty similar, in many ways, to the map in 2016. People are set in their partisan ways—despite Democrats’ best attempts to frame this election as a decision on the very soul of American democracy.

By early in the night, it was clear that there would be no resounding victory for Joe Biden, as some pundits predicted. Pollsters had noted that several southeastern states could portend a Biden victory if he flipped them—Georgia, North Carolina, Florida. He didn’t even come close.

If Biden did win, it would be because of small gains here and there. There were no big upsets; the only states that looked likely to flip, like Arizona, had been identified well in advance as major battlegrounds. Trump support remained strong, especially in rural areas—stronger, perhaps, than most of the commentariat expected.

It all sounds a little familiar. Pollsters tried to be cautious about their models this time around, after their failure to predict the 2016 result. Dare we suggest they take yet another look at their methodologies?

Read this next: How to Deal With the Stress of Election Night

It’s not over by a long shot

We permit you a celebratory beverage of your choice, if the results so far encourage you—and a hearty drink if they don’t—but please take it all with a grain of salt. (Especially if you chose tequila.)

Even if the election looks to be leaning one way or the other by early Wednesday, a final call won’t come for a while. Nor should it. We won’t be in a position to know which way some key states—cough, cough, Pennsylvania—will swing until a few days after the election, because of when officials are expected to finish processing ballots.

And then, even if one candidate declares victory, the other won’t necessarily be in a position to concede until anticipated legal battles are settled.

Trump told several rally crowds in the lead-up to the election that if he doesn’t win, that’ll be because of a “rigged” election. You can bet that Democrats will be just as motivated to make sure no fraud is at play.  Republican and Democrat lawyers—along with civil rights organizations—are preparing for legal battles over recounts or contested results, especially where large portions of mail-in ballots were involved. Some estimates suggest these battles could drag into January.

Read this next: What the Overturning of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. Could Mean For Canada

Democracy is healthy… at least, based on this one metric?

If one thing’s for sure it’s that Americans wanted to make themselves heard this year, one way or the other. This election looks like it will be historic for voter turnout.

The proportion of eligible voters who showed up to the polls in 2016—about 59%—was already higher than any other U.S. presidential election since the ‘60s. Any higher than 63% turnout this time around and we’re looking at the best participation rate in a hundred years. Another potentially historic trend, per exit polls: the majority of white voters is getting smaller.

The pandemic made for a quieter election day in many parts of the country, but early voting more than made up for that. Upwards of 100 million early votes were cast in total, almost 74% of total votes cast in 2016. Strikingly, before the polls opened on Tuesday, a third of Texas’s entire population of 29 million people was represented in a count of 9.6 million absentee or early ballots.

We can safely rename them the Divided States 

We know this subheading isn’t very witty, but we are tired. On a positive note, election day itself does not appear to have featured the kind of widespread chaos or attempted voter suppression of pessimists’ wildest dreams. It may be too early to tell whether doomsayers are on to anything with predictions of civil war, but for now let us say those concerns feel overblown, too.

No matter which candidate wins, neither will have won by all that much. There is no sign that the United States’ increasingly-polarized political landscape will get any less so. Divisions will play out dramatically during the election fallout, with Trump expected to sow much uncertainty about the result. For people protesting systemic racism in the U.S. who’ve decried Trump’s veiled nods to white supremacist groups, such a close result will be worse than discouraging.

And in the immediate future, rifts will continue to play out as the country struggles to get its public health crisis under control. Compliance with health advice, especially mask-wearing, has become politicized. Already, more than 230,000 Americans have died during the pandemic. As the final results pour in, we hope our neighbours can muster the compassion and civility that will be required to weather the extended tragedy.

Read this next: Here’s What You Need to Know About the Major Issues in the U.S. Election

The U.S. electoral system is a mess 

Did you think a list of “takeaways” would fail to mention how incredibly confusing American elections are? Especially in a close race?

It’s not that nobody has noticed how convoluted things are, or how difficult for average people to understand. It’s that the system is set up for inertia, not for nimble pivoting to more-coherent mail-in ballot rules. The fact the system is so weirdly inconsistent from state to state—when and how voters can register; when and how ballots can be received; when and how they are counted—prevents Trump’s predictions of widespread fraud from making much sense.

Then there is the broader, seemingly eternal debate over the existence of the electoral college, whose members represent states in actually electing the president. Most states operate on a winner-take-all basis but, again, not all of them.

Although America is likely to avoid the nightmare scenario of an electoral college tie, will this close shave with a disastrously unclear result finally convince states to opt out of the system? Don’t hold your breath. In 2016, if the U.S. elected presidents based on the popular vote, Trump would not have entered the oval office. Republicans will do everything they can to hang on.

With the U.S. election happening this week—smack dab in the middle of a pandemic and a worldwide crusade against racial injustice—there’s no denying it’s a stressful time. According to the American Psychological Association, 68% of Americans say the current political climate is a significant source of stress regardless of their preferred candidate. (That’s up from 52% in 2016.)

We’re feeling the stress in Canada, too. The impact of American politics, after all, is not limited by borders, and can affect global issues including everything from migration to environmental policy. Plus, uncertainty—of our political future, health and economy—has already raised stress and anxiety levels for most of us thanks to the pandemic, which has caused job insecurity, health scares and a lack of access to our usual supports, like seeing friends and simply being able to get out. A recent Angus Reid Institute poll found that 50% of Canadians feel their mental health has worsened since the start of the pandemic in March. 

With a potential second Trump presidency looming over all of us, this uncertainty and inequality has never been more in the spotlight, highlighted by chaotic debate after chaotic debate, and the recent confirmation of pro-life Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. This is an election, then, that stands to impact many, particularly BIPOC, the LGBTQ community and women. 

“When someone is in a perceived position of power and supports division, inequity, racism, sexism and perpetuates re-opening the wounds of history that have yet to be healed, it can create a sense of collective anxiety, grief and stress,” explains Randi-Mae Stanford-Leibold, a Toronto-based mindfulness and self-care instructor and counsellor who held over 100 free counselling sessions this year for people impacted by American politics everywhere from Toronto to Tanzania. “Trump has brought a painful truth to the forefront that many BIPOC have been living with quietly all over the world. I’ve had people reach out to me who were deeply impacted and experiencing vicarious trauma. The loss and unrest has sent a ripple in the world that cannot be denied.”

Read this next: Here’s What You Need to Know About the Major Issues in the U.S. Election

Making matters even more tense is that news media likely won’t call the election results for several days, if not longer, due to an overwhelming number of mail-in ballots this year. (Usually, they have enough data to make a call on election night even though ballots are still being counted, but this year it’s expected a higher percentage of ballots will come in post-November 3.) And, of course, Trump is already setting the stage to contest ballots that arrive after election day if he loses. 

It’s more important than ever, then, to formulate a self-care plan ahead of the election, the results of which are likely to be drawn out for days or even weeks. 

“Before a wound heals, we must look at it with clear vision, flush out any debris,” adds Stanford-Leibold. “Figure out what tools we are going to use to heal it. Apply the tools, and take care of the wound as it heals. America is at the stage of looking at its historic and generational wound with clear vision.”

Here are six tools you can use on the big day and well after:

Build a support network

Whether it’s a group chat, an election night bubble or a community hub, build a network of support around you. Times as stressful as these are made much more difficult when navigating solo. By finding and creating your own safe space, whether that includes friends, family, a therapist or neighbours, you’ll have somewhere to share your feelings, and find support and validation.

“Human connection is so important; it restores hope,” says Stanford-Leibold, who explains that, at a time when uncertainty is high, optimism can be cultivated collectively. “People have been afraid to feel joy because it feels ‘wrong’ right now. But coming from a spiritual point of view, we still need the vibrations of joy to lift each other up. We can be afraid but we can be courageous at the same time.”

Eat your feelings

There is nothing that brings people together—even from across the aisle—than food. Just ask Capri Cafaro, former Ohio Senate Democratic Leader, political commentator and author of United We Eat, which compiles 50 recipes from politicians all around the U.S. 

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“The warmth and hospitality of a shared meal is something everyone can relate to,” says Cafaro. “During my time as minority leader, I found that cooking kept me grounded, and focused on what’s important: home, community, family. Even the aromatherapy, whether you’re working with garlic and onions or cinnamon and nutmeg. It’s all self-care. In the State Senate, when we would get bipartisan legislative victories, I would bake a pie for Democrats and Republicans to share and build camaraderie. It’s using food as a way to unite people, no matter their views. You may not like the politician, but you may like their recipe. We all gather around the table the same way, and that’s a disarming and humanizing practice.”

So whether it’s “game night”—as Cafaro dubs election night—or a dark winter that you’re cooking for, comfort food is key. (She recommends Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar’s tater tot hotdish from United We Eat.) And she knows what she’s talking about. The former senator says she’s feeling just as much stress as we all are. “Election night is always nerve-wracking, whether I’m on the ballot or not. You feel powerless after voting and during the lead-up. A lot is at stake this year and there has been a particular divisiveness within America, which bleeds over into a lot of Western nations. We’re facing not just matters of inequality, but a basic belief in science.”

Meditate and self-soothe

Take some time each day—even just five minutes—to unclench, breathe, connect with yourself and meditate. Make this a moment to be thankful for what you have and your loved ones. Stanford-Leibold advises, “Treat gratitude like a little snack for your mind, body and spirit throughout your day. In the morning, pause and write down three things you’re grateful for. Before bed, pause and offer gratitude to your body for carrying you throughout the day.” 

Meditation can also look like yoga or taking long, quiet walks. If you’re skeptical, plenty of research has linked meditation to lowered anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. And in 2020, it’s especially easy with the help of apps like the BIPOC-owned Shine, Headspace, Calm, Breethe and Ten Percent Happier. The latter two even offer special election-related meditations to help you prep for November 3.

Unplug

Social media has never been louder than it is now. And we’ve never been more glued to our screens, thanks to social distancing. But if there were ever a time to distance yourself from media and technology, this may be it. Give your Twitter fingers a break for a day, maybe even a week, and especially before bed. Disengage and immerse yourself in the world around you. Your iPhone’s screen-time notification might be annoying, but it’s there for a reason; give it a listen and set boundaries. 

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“I don’t engage with the news until I choose to,” says Stanford-Leibold. “I don’t engage in social media unless I intentionally choose to engage. People can take their power back by being intentional about their engagement. Instead, let nature be your healing place.”

Take action

All of that said, it’s the obvious things that can make a difference, too, whether that’s watching your favourite comfort movies, having your most grounding playlist on repeat, or just taking care of the physical. In other words, don’t be afraid to distract yourself in whatever ways you can, and don’t be hard on yourself for being less productive or feeling anger and frustration. Instead, redirect those emotions into action in your community. 

“We can always make a difference in our own backyard,” says Cafaro. “Think about the things that you’re passionate about, whether it’s a local domestic violence shelter, senior centre, school; the little things you can do for your neighbours matter.” 

It’s supporting your community that can make a real difference in the world, and will give you a sense of control during a time when you feel little. As Stanford-Leibold says, “Believe that change is possible; regardless of the election outcome, you are a powerful agent of change. You can make choices that can impact people and the world beyond the distance you can conceive of.”

This year has been tough on a lot of relationships, but for one New Yorker, it was extra difficult as the pandemic revealed new sides of her boyfriend, a 34-year-old working in tech. Here, the 35-year-old publicist (who wishes to remain anonymous) tells her story.

In January 2020, my then-boyfriend moved into my studio apartment in Manhattan. We had been dating for nine months and things were going really well. I have lived with a guy before and I was ready for him to move in, but this was a big step for him because I was his first serious girlfriend.

On paper, we made sense. When we met, I remember thinking, this is who I’ve always pictured myself with. He checked all of the boxes: he’s tall, has a great smile, and wears stylish glasses, is successful and motivated in his career, has a really warm personality, and a quirky sense of humor. We connected most over our love of food and cooking; on our second date we went grocery shopping and made a big meal together. Things were going so well that just four months into our relationship, he introduced me to his parents. I was a little surprised that he introduced me so soon, but I was also very happy. I had never dated anyone who did that and have always craved being included in a family.

Then, after just two months of living together, COVID came to town, and like many couples, we transitioned to working from home. It didn’t last long. After a few difficult days with the two of us trying to make it work in such a small space, he told me he needed more space and was heading to his parents’ house in New Jersey. His parents told him not to visit me, but he came twice anyway, though he refused to stay overnight. The infection rates were very high here at the time, so I understood. What I couldn’t understand, though, is that he didn’t seem worried at all about me being alone in the city during the pandemic.

Being isolated in my apartment gave me plenty of time to, well, obsess over our relationship. With so many other aspects of life missing, I had nothing to distract me from confronting the deeper questions I had about our potential future. The more I dug in, the more I discovered he had some issues I couldn’t overlook. And it all started with masks.

Early on in the pandemic, he didn’t see the importance of wearing a mask, so he didn’t buy one, using a bandana instead. I didn’t really understand why he didn’t prioritize getting a real one. I think he thought it wasn’t worth it since he was under the impression that COVID-19 would pass.

I felt like he wasn’t taking the virus seriously and I wasn’t sure where he was getting his information about COVID-19. He would say things like, “It’s not so bad. It’s only the naysayers that are saying it’s worse than a flu.” That really upset me. My friend’s stepfather died of COVID-19. Maybe he had never had a health scare in his family, but I was still shocked by his response.

He made running errands together impossible. We would be all set to walk into a grocery store and he would tell me he preferred to wait in the car rather than wear a mask. It was annoying, he said; it was hard to breathe, he said. I wouldn’t call him a vocal anti-masker, but it bothered me that I was the one taking on all of the risks by going into stores to get supplies we both needed just because he didn’t feel like going inside with his face covered.

There were other warning signs, but I was determined to make our relationship work. (The idea of being single during a pandemic was a powerful motivator.) So at the beginning of the summer, I found us a two-bedroom to share near where his parents lived. I went into the lease knowing the relationship might not work out—for one, before we moved in, he told me he was planning to eventually move far away from New York City and I never want to leave—so I made sure to hold onto my studio apartment just in case.

It felt like every week I would discover something new and unfortunate about him. One day I checked the mail and it sparked something in my mind. I realized that we hadn’t talked about how we were going to vote absentee in the upcoming presidential election. When I mentioned how concerned I was about receiving my ballot, he blurted out that he didn’t believe in voting. Honestly, I was shocked. I thought it was because he is registered to vote in another state, but he elaborated, telling me, “No, I don’t believe in voting. I don’t think it matters.” Before that conversation, he had never really expressed his political views. He was always pretty neutral when politics came up; I had no idea that was because he was essentially a closeted non-voter.

He told me he hadn’t voted in the 2016 presidential election because he didn’t feel strongly about one candidate or the other. He was able to recognize that President Donald Trump isn’t doing a good job, but it wasn’t enough for him to say, “I’m going to take action and vote him out.”

As summer transitioned into fall, we tried to enjoy each other’s company, but he kept revealing things I found hard to accept. We often have deep conversations while taking walks and one day when we were out for a stroll, I asked him if he would get a COVID-19 vaccine once it became available. I was careful and specific about what I meant. I told him I knew we wouldn’t be first in line to get the shot—healthcare workers and older people need to get it first—and we’ll likely have some concerns about safety, especially if Trump is still in office, and want to see how others fare before getting it ourselves. But I said, you’re going to get it eventually, right? That’s when I learned he didn’t believe in any vaccine because he claimed he never got sick and that he had a great immune system. (He failed to recognize that he was vaccinated by his parents as a child.) I got really upset and reminded him that the vaccine isn’t just about him, that he could have COVID-19 and not know it.

Then, I asked if he was planning to get a flu shot. He told me he was not only not planning to get one, but that he hadn’t had a flu shot in his whole adult life. I was surprised and appalled, but I was also starting to see a trend: If something didn’t impact him directly, he wouldn’t take it seriously or care.

All of this made me think hard about our future. Did I really want to marry someone who didn’t care enough about me or others to wear a mask? Could I spend my life with someone who refused to exercise his right to vote? Did I really want to have a family with someone who wouldn’t get vaccinated? Worse, with someone who might not want me to get our kids vaccinated either?

Since I ended our relationship, I’ve been thinking a lot about what went wrong. Yes, the world was entirely different two years ago when we met, but I also realize now that while my ex checked off a lot of the superficial boxes, they weren’t the important ones. I know now that there are bigger areas you need to be aligned on: health, politics, the way you see the world and the other humans living in it.

Now that all of this is behind me, I’m easing back into online dating. Since the last time I was on the apps, I’ve noticed many have made a much-needed improvement; they now ask you to answer questions about how important things like politics and vaccines are to you. Maybe one day soon they will ask about your stance on wearing a mask, too.

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On a Friday in May, I walked into the doctor’s office almost 20 weeks pregnant with identical twins. I came home that night pregnant with just one baby.

My son is now one. When I see his face, when I feel him reach for me, I think of his brother. I treasure my son; I would have treasured them both. But one morning in May, my husband and I were given an hour to agree to terminate one twin so that the other would have a chance to live.

Identical twins don’t run in families. They’re the result of an unlikely mutation where the embryo divides. We spent weeks in shock when the eight week ultrasound showed two fetuses, but once I felt the twins move, they were real to me. They were a pair. At our first anatomy scan, the ultrasound tech kept saying “not your hand!” to my belly, as the twins tangled up, the smaller one nestled into his brother, little spoon in big.

The smaller one. Identical twins are complicated, especially those that, like ours, share a placenta. For weeks, they were just different in size, and needed to be watched closely. It wasn’t dangerous, until suddenly, it was a crisis, and I needed medical care that can only be found in a handful of hospitals in this country.

The twins had developed Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS). They were sharing their blood supply, and one was getting too much of that supply, starving the other. Untreated, progressive Twin to Twin will result in fetal demise for both twins nearly 100% of the time. While the vast majority of cases don’t progress past the initial stage, when TTTS does progress, it happens suddenly and cataclysmically.

A two-and-a-half hour ultrasound on Friday morning with specialists showed us that the little twin, Twin B, had lost more than half of his minimal amniotic fluid in the hours since our last scan. He could barely move. At one point, I looked up at the screen to see twelve images of his brain; even I could tell something was wrong. When the scan was over, the doctors told us the situation had changed considerably. We now had stage three Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome, and Twin B had bleeding in his brain. When they left the room, I turned to my husband and calmly said, “You know we’re talking about termination now.” Then, suddenly sobbing, I asked him if he thought they could save the bigger twin.

A kind and gentle doctor told us Twin B was going to die. He explained that when one twin’s heart stops in a shared placenta, the other twin’s body will send out all of its own blood to try to create a blood pressure in its sibling. That action will almost always ensure that both twins die. We couldn’t save Twin B, but if we terminated him through a procedure called Radio Frequency Ablation (RFA), we could try to save Twin A. There would be no bleeding out for Twin A, one tiny body giving everything to save another. There would be a very good chance of the pregnancy surviving, but I would have to make the choice to stop B’s heart.

We had an hour to decide. There was no choice. I’m their mother; I wanted Twin A to have a chance to live. We agreed to the RFA.

When we got home from my abortion, I took my prenatal vitamins and cried myself to sleep. For the four months my pregnancy continued after the termination, I carried Twin B’s remains next to the wriggling, healthy body of his brother.

I had an abortion to save my baby’s life. Abortion opponents would tell you this is rare, that most second and third trimester abortions have nothing in common with mine. I will tell you differently, that I had a medical procedure in the midst of a devastating medical tragedy, and that every abortion is a medical procedure. I had a life-saving procedure, but unlike most life-saving procedures in this country, mine is on trial today in Supreme Court confirmation hearings, in rallies around the country, and in Congress. This procedure, an act that took place inside my body to end my child’s life and save my child’s life, is called immoral.

Abortion is often called selfish and lazy; termination for medical reasons thought of as eugenic. My abortion was none of these things. There is nothing more terrible an abortion opponent can say to me than I can say in the truth of what happened, which is that I consented to stop my baby’s heart and carry him dead in my body for four months so his brother would have a chance to live. Worse only would have been if America forced me to let both my babies die inside me.

Perhaps my abortion feels so extreme and unlikely as to be irrelevant to the debate. While advanced Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome is rare, termination out of love is not, termination for medical reasons is not, and women and fetuses have the right to the medical care they need. The principle is the same. I may have stopped one baby’s heart but doing so allowed another to live; it was the medicine he needed to survive. Taking away that chance out of the belief that abortion isn’t medicine makes babies like my Twin A – a joyful, walking, giggling one-year old – collateral damage. How would letting him die have been pro-life?

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

For more than two weeks, tens of thousands of people have been protesting in the streets of Nigeria, with people picking up signs and raising their voices in solidarity around the world. Their goal? To #EndSARS. If you’ve been online in recent weeks, chances are you’ve seen the now-viral hashtag trending. And everyone needs to be paying attention to what’s happening.

Here is everything you need to know about SARS, the #EndSARS movement and what is happening in Nigeria now.

What is SARS?

The Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) was established in 1992 under the dictatorship of Ibrahim Babangida, according to Carl LeVan, Professor at American University in Washington, DC. (There is some disagreement around when SARS was actually established, with some saying it’s as far back as 1984.) “SARS itself is explicitly a product of the dictatorship in 1992,” LeVan, who specializes in comparative political institutions, democratization and African security and has published books on the subject, says. When Babangida took power in 1992 (by overthrowing Muhammadu Buhari, who has since come back into power as the current elected President of Nigeria), “he took power with the goal of dealing with more serious crime,” LeVan says. At the time, the country was facing rising levels of crime, especially pertaining to armed robbery and kidnappings. (Nigeria has one of the world’s highest kidnap-for-ransom rates, where wealthy citizens or groups—who are assumed to be able to afford to pay a fee—are typically targeted.)

“They were doing a good job dealing with reducing the level of armed robbery in Nigeria,” Isa Sanusi, media manager at Amnesty International in Nigeria tells FLARE of the early days of SARS. But, somewhere along the way they started to derail from their initial goal, he says. Since at least 2014, the human rights organization has logged widespread human rights allegations against SARS, including extrajudicial executions, torture, rape and extortion by officers, documenting 82 cases between January 2017 and May 2020. On top of this, SARS officers have also been accused of taking bribes. Per a 2020 report, “detainees in SARS custody have been subjected to a variety of methods of torture including hanging, mock execution, beating, punching and kicking, burning with cigarettes, waterboarding, near-asphyxiation with plastic bags, forcing detainees to assume stressful bodily positions and sexual violence. Findings from our research indicate that few cases are investigated and hardly any officers are brought to justice on account of torture and other ill-treatment.”

“They’re increasingly become lawless,” Sanusi says of SARS’s actions. “They’ve turned their job into an opportunity to make money instead of protecting Nigerians.”

What is the #EndSARS protest movement?

Since the beginning of October, Nigerians have taken to the streets to protest police brutality in their country. Young people in particular are mobilizing in major Nigerian cities, calling for the abolition of the SARS special police task force that has been operating for more than two decades. The task force, which is under government jurisdiction, has been accused of inflicting severe human rights violations on its citizens. And people have had enough.

The #EndSARS hashtag dates back to at least 2017, when people began using it online share their experiences of violence and assault at the hands of SARS. This most recent protest was launched by an October 8 viral video which allegedly showed SARS officers killing a young man in one of the country’s southern states. While authorities have denied that the video is real, according to Al Jazeera, the man who filmed it has been arrested, leading to more outrage from citizens. And this recent round of mass protests has led to further violence against the protestors themselves, including 25 people who were shot in Lagos, Nigeria while demonstrating on October 21 , with an unnamed witness telling BBC News that soldiers “pulled up… and they started firing directly” at protestors. An investigation by Amnesty International also found that Nigerian army and police killed at least 12 peaceful protesters on October 20.

In addition to protesting police brutality, demonstrators are also speaking out against Nigeria’s bad governance, citing grievances such as poor educational opportunities for citizens.

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Tell me about the history of SARS

Why would members of SARS, who are meant to protect the Nigerian people, exploit and harm them? It’s a little more complicated than just a group of bad people doing bad things. As Sanusi points out, this move from legitimacy towards lawlessness has been in part spurred on by poverty in the country. “I think it has to do with the declining standard of living in Nigeria,” he says. While Nigeria experienced a drop in the poverty rate between 1999 and 2007, impacted in part by the return of the country to civilian governance in 1999 (meaning that the people of the country could elect a president, as opposed to the previous dictatorship), a 2019 study in the Journal of Poverty found that “the majority of Nigerians have low living standards,” and that, despite this decrease in poverty between 1999 and 2007, more recently there has been an increase in poverty in almost every region of the country, both urban and rural. As of 2019, according to data from the Washington-based Brookings Institutions, around 87 million Nigerians live in dire poverty.

And those who work within SARS are not exempt from that poverty—or the cycle of corruption themselves, Sanusi says. “Increased corruption, mismanagement of resources, even corruption within the police force” all may impact an individual or organization, according to Sanusi. “Nigeria is [in a] situation where someone superior or in a leadership role within the Nigerian police may corruptly steal money meant for equipment or for salaries of policemen,” he continues.

Which is something that has actually happened. Despite the fact that there are about 350,000 police officers in the country, according to LeVan, it was disclosed several years ago that about 50,000 to 60,000 people on the police payroll didn’t actually exist. “They were ghost employees,” LeVan says. “So not only are individual police officers engaged in corruption, but there’s corruption—where people want police and they want security—and someone in the middle level management is just taking those invisible salaries.”

So, Sanusi says, when policemen are sent to the streets in the name of protecting people, they’re also looking for money to care of themselves; and they use their position as SARS officers to that end. “Gradually they become more brutal, they become more cruel.”

Another reason SARS has been able to wield their authority with impunity for so long? The remnants of centuries of dictatorship. Over the years, leading up to 1999, dictatorships established different subgroups that held different functions within the security services. SARS was one of them. “In some ways, this is another example of something that was created by a dictatorship and then the government never really got rid of it,” LeVan says. Working in the legislature during the time after the government’s transition away from a dictatorial regime, LeVan witnessed conversations around overhauling the laws and giving the country a clean slate. “But people became so focused on the daily economics that I think some of these rule of law questions really got pushed into the background,” he says.

Further, in understanding Nigeria as it stands now, it’s important to know that current president Muhammadu Buhari is a former dictator himself who staged a military coup at the end of 1983. In 2015, Buhari was elected as president after running four times, which was in itself monumental, as LeVan, who explored Buhari’s election win in his book Contemporary Nigerian Politics: Competition In a Time of Transition and Terror, says a ruling party hadn’t lost an election since Nigeria gained independence from Britain in 1960. “There was something that was compelling about Buhari’s message,” LeVan says. “And his coup, when it happened in 1983, was actually fairly popular; people thought that somebody like Buhari at that time could really get a handle on things and calm down a difficult security situation.” While Buhari’s campaign message in 2015 was one of anti-corruption, LeVan says that what we’re seeing now with SARS and the continuing corruption under Buhari’s government is that, as he says, “the old habits die hard.”

“There are still these ghosts of the dictatorship that haunt the habits of governance,” LeVan says. “[Buhari] has surrounded himself with some people who believe that a strong hand of the state is what is needed to really stabilize things.” Meaning, in many ways, that the government benefits from this corruption.

This complacency from the federal government means that SARS can continue to do what it’s been doing, with little institutional accountability on the part of the police.

Is SARS’s behaviour a human rights issue?

100%. “This is a serious human rights issue,” Susani states. “We consider torture a human rights violation and they do torture people. They also confiscate property from suspects, we also consider that as an egregious human rights issue. And the fact that SARS is supposed to be dealing with armed robbery and other high crimes like kidnapping, but instead of doing that they have concentrated their attention on arresting young people; these are all violations of human rights.” In fact, over the past 10 years, Amnesty International has issued four separate reports on SARS and their tactics.

In addition, SARS’s response to the protests is also an issue. “Nigerian citizens protesting police brutality in the past few weeks have reportedly been shot and killed, or tortured, by the disbanded SARS,” says Sukanya Pillay, an international human rights expert and member of Canadian Lawyers For International Human Rights (CLAIHR). (On October 11, President Muhammadu Buhari announced that he had dismantled SARS, re-deploying former SARS officers to other unites. There’s more on this below.) “If true, such actions by SARS raise serious questions about violations of international human rights law, particularly the right to life, right to peaceful protest and freedom of assembly, and serious questions about extrajudicial executions and torture.” These rights, Pillay says, are protected in several international human rights laws, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and in the African Charter on Human Rights, both of which are legally binding upon Nigeria. “The use of excessive force and violence against protestors contravenes international standards on policing and use of force.”

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What has the response been to the #EndSARS protests?

The global response to the #EndSARS movement has been overwhelming, with people across the world calling for change. Celebrities like Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kanye West and John Boyega, not to mention politicians like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have called for the end of SARS on social media.

I have a feeling that this is more than just SARS. Nigerians want true change! They are done managing faith without practical action and we support you. 💪🏾 https://t.co/FpNqb1wufa

— John Boyega (@JohnBoyega) October 14, 2020

I’m calling on @mbuhari and the @hqnigerianarmy to stop killing young #EndSARS protesters. #StopNigeriaGovernment

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 20, 2020

I thought SARS was dismantled. Isn’t that enough?

The #EndSARS protests and high-profile calls to action have worked, to a certain extent. On October 11, President Muhammadu Buhari announced that he had dismantled SARS, replacing it with the newly-formed Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) task force. Former SARS officers have been deployed to other policing units. But protestors and academics say that isn’t enough, because it feels like more of a reallocation than dismantling. “I’ve been chatting with activists in Nigeria a lot the last couple of days, and no one is satisfied with the creation of the new police unit at all,” LeVan says. “It just seems like putting a new name on the same group of offenders.”

“I don’t think it is the end [of SARS],” Susani agrees. “Even though SARS has been dismantled, Nigerians believe that something concrete has to be done to prove that the atrocities [they’re] committing will stop.” Susani refers back to the numerous offences SARS has committed over the past four years, and the immediate uproar and then inaction from the government. “When SARS has either killed a young man or tortured Nigerians, people will be angry. They will come out and protest maybe for half a day or one day, and the government says, ‘we are going to report this. We are going to look into your complaint.’ So four times within the last four years, they have promised to end the atrocities of SARS, but nothing changed in power. They just become [worse]. That is why Nigerians don’t trust the government when they say we are going to protect you from SARS and make it better.”

So, what happens next with SARS?

For one, real police reform. “[This needs to be] where individuals can be held accountable and that isn’t seen as punitive to the police as a whole, but something that encourages better behaviour and builds trust with the people that they need to protect and work with,” LeVan says. As well, there needs to be better training and pay for law enforcement. (As Susani notes, some torture tactics by SARS has been attributed to a lack of modern policing and investigating skills, though it’s important to emphasize that that isn’t a blanket statement and in no way excuses torture.) “There should be a mechanism of accountability when it comes to policing so that if a policeman tortures someone, the person has the right to and can get justice,” he continues. “But a situation where people cannot get justice, that’s not good.”

“It’s a hard conversation, but I think there is some political space in the country to do that sort of thing now,” LeVan says of reform.

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What can Canadians do to help the#EndSARS movement?

For people who are outside Nigeria, Susani says the key to helping is to put pressure on the Nigerian government and politicians to end corruption and make the government work for the people. “The governance should not be about providing luxury for people in politics, it should be in service to the people,” he says.

And also, as LeVan emphasizes, don’t let the current news cycle about Nigeria be the only thing you read about the country. “It’s really important to learn about African countries when things are also good,” he emphasizes. “We wouldn’t want this bad news about police violence to reinforce negative stereotypes.” Especially because Nigeria is modern, resourceful country in so many ways. LeVan points to the country’s low number of COVID-19 infections as an example of this. The country—which has 200 million citizens—had, as of July, only counted a total of 33,000 cases since the start of the pandemic. This, despite the fact that many would assume they have a weak health capacity. (It’s important to note that these numbers could in part be due to limited testing.) In contrast: the United States. “I’m living in the richest country in the world and there are 70,000 new infections every day,” LeVan says. “So Nigerians find great resourcefulness and ways to do things right. This is a moment where all eyes are focused on police and public safety and the dignity of the individual, and that’s a wonderful thing to observe.”

A dozen days before the United States election and we have just watched one of the last clangs in the excruciatingly-slow-moving car crash that has been the 2020 presidential campaign.

Feel free to take a breath of relief because you will not need to see President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden on stage together again before Americans vote. Or maybe ever. Hallelu.

Those few remaining undecided voters won’t have been swayed much by the second and final  debate, although it was meatier, more coherent and more informative than the first. There was no clear winner or loser. Each septuagenarian played well to his base.

Happily, we didn’t need to watch and analyze a handshake. Unfortunately, no fly landed atop either’s head to give us the distraction we might’ve craved during an increasingly taxing 90 minutes. Instead we were left to watch and—whether entertained, bemused or depressed—reckon with the notion that these two men are the best America’s political establishment has to offer in a time of crisis.

On that cheery note, if you decided to skip it altogether (we can’t blame you) here’s what you missed.

Trump would prefer a nasty fight 

Across the board, the general wisdom from pundits was that Trump should maybe tone it down a little. Just—you know—have a modicum of patience, a teensy bit of respect, a dash of decorum. A little less bloviating, a little more calm.

Well, colour us absolutely shocked that Trump lost sight of that advice as the night went on. Although he came out of the gate much milder than in his pre-coronavirus-diagnosis performance and maintained a higher level of decorum throughout, that newfound civility frayed into the evening.

By the 45-minute mark, his relatively cordial tone toward Welker—who firmly commanded the situation—became much more combative. By an hour in, he got bolder with his interruptions, and the debate began to look more like what we saw earlier this month.

A newly-introduced mute button, used sparingly, offered some reprieve from the incoherent crosstalk we might have expected. But to go uninterrupted wasn’t always to Trump’s benefit. It gave him what should’ve been  golden opportunities to go after Biden—and sometimes the silence did mean that his attacks took on the tenor of legitimate, traditional debate. But other times, the longer Trump went on by himself with no audience or feedback from his opponent, the more unhinged he came across.

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Biden stays above water 

Although many Americans have already voted, and few are at a loss for which candidate to support, every vote still counts. It was entirely possible that Biden, whose verbal snafus have gotten him into hot water in the past, would make a critical mistake on Thursday that could dominate the dying days of the campaign.

Biden’s answers were sometimes rambling, a word salad of talking points mostly remembered. But he also had moments that were snappy, direct and persuasive. He was deft in responding to Trump’s attacks. When Trump tried to raise the spectre of Bernie Sanders, he explained that he had beat him, and that Trump was actually running against Joe Biden.

Biden avoided a catastrophe, although he certainly overused the phrase “c’mon.” But several of his retorts could be misleading if taken out of context, like a sarcastic comment mocking Trump for being okay with teacher deaths.

He also managed to convey much of his policy platform—including with quite some detail on climate change. That came with some risk, and not because of Trump’s assertion that he knows far more about the climate and about, specifically, “wind.” In what the Trump campaign will inevitably use as attack fodder over the next 12 days, Biden confirmed that, as president, he would “transition” away from the oil industry over time—an issue important to a number of key states that Trump immediately recited by rote, including Pennsylvania and Texas.

Still, Trump’s main rebuttal to any of Biden’s present-day ideas was to ask why Biden didn’t “get it done” during his time as vice-president. The president rarely pivoted to his own ideas.

Read this next: ‘Mr. Vice President, I’m Speaking:’ 5 Takeaways From the U.S. VP Debate

The president would like you to take a chill pill 

Having now spent three days in hospital with COVID-19 himself, you’d think Trump might exhibit more sympathy with the more than 223,000 fellow Americans who have succumbed to the virus. OK, you might not think so, but you might hope so. Too bad for you.

A segment on the pandemic yielded attempts by Biden to outline his plan, including mandating masks and moving toward rapid testing, and boasts by Trump that things are actually pretty swell, and would’ve been worse under his opponent’s watch.

Trump downplayed the idea that Americans would still be dealing with the pandemic into 2022. The virus “will go away” and spikes and surges will “soon be gone,” Trump said, touting the drugs he was given while in hospital. “We’re learning to live with it,” Trump said.

“We’re learning to die with it,” Biden retorted.

The former veep suggested voters shouldn’t trust Trump’s assurances that a vaccine is on the way in “a matter of weeks,” because “this is the fellow that said it would be over by Easter,” and by summer, and “no serious scientist” was talking about a similar timeline. He said lockdowns can be necessary for public health. “We can’t lock ourselves up in a basement like Joe does,” Trump said. “He has this thing about living in the basement.”

Read this next: What the Overturning of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. Could Mean For Canada

Biden calls Trump’s dog whistle a “foghorn” 

Trump dodged a question about whether his rhetoric has contributed to racial strife by claiming that no president since Abraham Lincoln has done more for the Black community. He said he thought that Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States, “didn’t even try” to do anything.

“They can say anything. It makes me sad because I am the least racist person,” Trump said. “I can’t even see the audience because it’s so dark but I don’t care who’s in the audience, I’m the least racist person in this room.”

Biden disagreed, saying Trump has added fuel to every racist fire that ignited under his watch, and has shown no commitment to moving the needle toward equality. “This guy is a dog whistle about as big as a foghorn.”

On Trump’s attacks that Biden supported crime bills in the ‘80s and ‘90s that led to widespread incarceration on minor drug charges, Biden reiterated that the bills were a “mistake” and that nobody should ever go to jail because they have a drug problem.

Trump doesn’t know what’s going on with his own taxes

When Biden challenged him on the fact he still hasn’t put out his tax returns—putting him out of step with other modern presidents—Trump said, “I’m going to release them as soon as I can.” About a New York Times report that he had paid shockingly low tax bills in 2016 and 2017, Trump said he asked his accountants what happened and concluded that: “I already prepaid it. Nobody told me that.”

I still remember the day I told my husband, he was “ruining my life.” It was an oddly clear San Francisco day in April 2017 and we had just finished having lunch. In a couple of weeks, I’d be returning to my job as a reporter for Fortune Magazine after taking a few months of maternity leave, and I was trying to enjoy my final days of total freedom with a leisurely walk in the middle of the day.

That’s when my husband, Suneel, told me he wanted to leave San Francisco, move back to his hometown in Michigan, and run for Congress. Tears flooded my postpartum eyes; there were a lot of “absolutely nots” and “fuck nos” thrown around. But over the following weeks, my stance softened. It was 2017, a couple of months after President Donald Trump was sworn in—in part, by winning Michigan—and deep down, I felt as strongly as Suneel did about helping a swing state turn blue.

So, we made a deal. If he lost his election in 2018, it was solely my choice on where we would move next. I felt certain that if he didn’t win, we’d move back to San Francisco, or to New York City, where I’d spent most of my twenties. And that’s how, after nearly a decade of living in California, I agreed to pack up our apartment and two little girls and move to a small Midwestern suburb called Birmingham, Michigan.

The first week was a blur of Target and Home Goods runs. I remember thinking, the streets are so wide, there are so many trees and Ford Explorers everywhere. One evening, unpacking what felt like the millionth box in a row, our doorbell rang. I just knew it would be a neighbor complaining about the big moving truck parked out front that had been blocking most of our street for days. Instead, the woman at the door—our new neighbor Jenny—handed me a plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, along with she and her husband’s cell phone numbers, “in case we needed anything at all.”

There’s a saying, “proximity breeds intimacy,” but in a place like San Francisco, I lived on top of people without ever exchanging names, let alone baked goods. The only person whose number I had in case of emergencies was our part-time babysitter. When I was nine months pregnant, and my husband needed to travel for work, she was the one I planned to call if I started having contractions and needed to go to the hospital.

I soon discovered that while suburban Michigan was much less dense, it was much closer knit. When temperatures started dropping to the single digits I feared, I found myself drinking eggnog and even singing carols in living rooms around the neighborhood. I bundled up and walked my daughters to playdates with new friends. We were officially in “hibernate” mode, but so was everyone else.

Months later, as the snow began to thaw, people rejoiced with backyard barbecues and street parties, a palpable “we made it” vibe in the air. None of this converted me to a cold-weather fan, but it did help me understand how people in the Midwest wear enduring winter as almost a badge of honor.

For the first time in my life, I was beginning to understand what people meant by community. I had people who wanted to be there for me, and they knew the feeling was mutual. New friends passed out fliers for my husband’s campaign and held fundraisers. They drove my daughter to activities when I’d have to travel for work.

I felt even more supported this year during COVID. During our Shelter in Place order, my youngest daughter suffered a bike injury, splitting her finger open. One of our close friends and neighbors, an ER doctor who was about to work a night shift at her hospital, rushed to our house to check on her, escorted us to the nearest urgent care, and waited until we were able to determine what the next steps were for our daughter. Another close friend dropped off freshly made Indian food every week, without fail, for no reason, other than to help ease the challenge of cooking every meal during the pandemic.

During my first years in Michigan, very few called to ask me for advice about leaving a city behind. (Actually, I can count the number of people: one. One person called me for advice). But this year, I’m suddenly super popular. Over the past few months, I’ve heard from over a dozen friends. (Honestly, I think I’m losing count!) They ask, Can we still walk to get their morning coffee? What’s it like without public transportation to take your kids to school? Does DoorDash deliver to the burbs? What types of coats protect you from below zero temperatures? Oh god, remind me, how does one procure a driver’s license?

I tell them everything I’ve just told you—about the closeness and community I have found here—but I also share the flip side of the coin: That not all members of our new community embraced us. In my years living in San Francisco, no one ever made a comment about the color of my or my family’s brown skin. It’s not to say racism didn’t exist in California, but it wasn’t something I personally experienced. But in parts of Michigan, when my husband and I knocked on doors for his campaign, many people made their feelings clear. Door slams were accompanied with shouts of, “Get back on your camel!” or “Go back to your own country!” When I posted a photo on Facebook of us on our anniversary, one Michigan local commented that we should “deport ourselves.” (For the record: Suneel was born in a suburb of Detroit; I was born in Baltimore.)

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, I sat down with my eight-year-old daughter to talk about racism. Taking a deep breath, I explained to her what discrimination is, and how it is hurtful to people of color. She looked at me with wide eyes and said, “I know what that is mommy, it’s happened to me a few times.” My heart broke as she recounted in detail a story of being told she couldn’t be in a “club” with the other girls because her skin and hair were “dark.”

Close encounters with racism weren’t the only drawback I’ve experienced as a result of our move away from the West Coast. While proximity may not breed intimacy, in San Francisco, it can breed opportunity. As a technology reporter, juicy stories seemed to fall into my lap and I fed off the ambition surrounding me. Parents at my child’s preschool, who mostly worked in tech, became my sources. Standing in the line in a coffee shop, I’d hear people blurt non-public information about the latest startup they were working on.

My local Starbucks in Birmingham, Michigan is lovely, but the gossip taking place over lattes is far more relevant to the PTA than tech media. When the stories and jobs are no longer being handed to you, it forcefully gives a moment of stillness to figure out what you want in your career. In suburban Michigan, I wasn’t being approached to write stories about the buzzy new startup that had raised a boatload of venture capital from celebrities. Facebook and Google were no longer coming to me with exclusives about their latest hire or launch.

Instead, was a freelance reporter with no stories, no platform, and no relevance. It felt like our move was synonymous with demise of a career I’d worked so hard to curate. That was painful to process, and yet very liberating. I realized what that is, is to be writing stories like this for Elle, not chasing scoops on the latest Amazon acquisition.

My husband ultimately lost his campaign for Congress in 2018, but neither of us forgot about the deal we’d inked the year before. A few months after his loss, he asked, “Where’s it going to be?”

I don’t think he ever expected me to say, “Here. I want to stay here.”

Even now, after three years in Michigan, I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t miss San Francisco sometimes. My life there was thrilling. Interviewing the CEOs of major tech companies, profiling celebrities, drinking wine in Napa, hiking around Marin County, scouting slick apartments we might one day be able to afford—it feels very distant from my life right now. How I’ve come to see it is: I’ve traded an exciting life for a full life. I live on a tree-lined street where my daughters ride their bikes on the sidewalks with their friends. During the days, I work on writing stories I truly care about. And on the weekends, we spend time with friends. We rarely talk about work or whose company is being acquired. And it feels great.

It sometimes takes experimentation to figure out what you really want from life. To my friends who call for advice about leaving coastal cities for a “simpler life,” I encourage them to think about it as a two-way door. Give it a shot; you can always go back. And maybe you’ll learn more about yourself along the way. I learned that, for me, happiness doesn’t hinge as much on my physical location as much as it does the community that surrounds me.

Now, instead of watching the sunset over the Pacific, I watch it go down over a tiny set of Evergreen trees that line my backyard. Until now, I hadn’t believed what they said—that beauty is everywhere, if you look with love. These days when I call it a night, I lean over to give my husband a kiss, and with a smile, I whisper, “Thank you for ruining my life.”

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I’m the daughter of Trinidadian immigrants to Canada—a Black woman of East Indian and African heritage, like Kamala Harris. Like the Democratic vice presidential candidate, I also went to high school in Montreal. And like her, my husband is white. With these similarities, I’ve wondered what Kamala Harris family gatherings look like. They have to be better than my own.

No matter what, relationships with in-laws can be tricky. But this is especially true in interracial relationships, where you could find yourself confronting a bright orange sign blaring, “Earth’s Most Endangered Species: THE WHITE RACE,” in your brother-in-law-to-be’s garage, while your toddler-aged daughter bounces on your hip. You might have to swallow your shock-induced nausea, return to the house, and compliment your sister-in-law to be on her manicotti, because these people are a part of your daughter’s family, because you are afraid, and because this wasn’t the first time you didn’t know what else to do.

While this was the first evidence of their sign-up-for-membership racism, it was far from the first time my partner’s family revealed their racial hatred.

The string of incidents began in 2008 when, after my not-yet-husband moved to Texas where I planned to join him, I accepted his mother’s invitation to a Fourth of July party. By then, he and I had been together for over a year, but this marked the first time I’d be on my own with his family. As a BBQ complete with stars-and-stripes plates wore on, it was late-afternoon before I finally slipped away to the bathroom, where, through the window, I heard: “That place is great because there are no (racial slur) there.” There was the giggle and a female voice. “Shhh…She’s inside!” Old tears spilled over. I wiped them away and returned to the party because I didn’t know what else to do.

On another solo visit to his mother’s house, I endured her account of how a Black priest (“Who was very nice”) administered last rites as her husband lay dying. As she told it, her husband, (“Who—no offense—was prejudiced”) woke to find a Black man standing over him, and she claimed the shock essentially pushed her husband to his grave. At her kitchen table, I said, “I’m sorry for your loss,” because I was too afraid to say, “Am I really hearing this?”

But when my not-yet-husband’s brother referred to a landscaping project as “(racial slur) work,” I couldn’t stay silent. “What’s wrong with you?” I demanded as he stormed away. His wife explained, “He’s mad because he swore he’d never use that word again in front of you. If you want to get him back, you should call him an asshole. He hates that word.” In that moment, I might have laughed, because I wanted to cry.

Years later, on an island in the Caribbean, my partner asked me to marry him. Surrounded by sun and surf, our families so far away, getting engaged seemed like the logical next step after moving across the country together, enduring the natural highs and lows of any relationship, and navigating a range of tensions—racist family-members, awkward looks in still-segregated neighborhoods—that came with being a biracial couple. But three years after he offered me a ring at sunrise, we couldn’t get it together to plan a wedding—maybe because I couldn’t imagine spending what should be one of the most beautiful days of my life with people who felt comfortable using racial slurs.

As it turns out, having a mixed-raced child is easier than planning a mixed-race wedding.

In 2012, we welcomed our little Texan. Our daughter is the first girl in her father’s family in more than one hundred years. And on her second trip to New Jersey, she clung to me as I wondered: What exactly is Earth’s most endangered species?

In the ensuing years, my to-be-mother-in-law tried to slow the growing silence between us, and I grew tired of her pleas. “What do you want me to say? We’re family,” she’d explain, as if my being tied to her would dilute their racism. I grew tired of my fianceé’s brother’s versions of an apology: “I don’t mean you. You’re different. You have an education.” I was also angry with my fiancée for relentlessly asking, “What do you want me to do?”

In the beginning, I did try to answer his question. But I became overwhelmed by the fatigue that comes with educating people who might not want to learn. And I stopped looking for answers, because his family’s can’t we all just get along? began to feel more like can’t you just make us feel better?

For years, the fights were regular, heated, and tearful. I wanted nothing to do with his family, and some days I wanted nothing to do with him. But we continued to manage increasingly stressful visits to see family in the Northeast—the mere anticipation of which would cause relationship strife for months prior.

However, things changed.

When my fiancée and I signed the wrong domestic partnership paperwork at the DMV and were accidently married, maybe our new commitment brought new hope. Or maybe things changed when our friends celebrated our accidental marriage by throwing us a wedding party and the racial slur-using brother, who was invited, didn’t come. Or maybe things changed when I stepped back and my husband stepped forward—signing his mother up for an online unconscious bias training course. And long before there was a run on White Fragility and Tears We Cannot Stop and How to Be an Anti-racist, he read each of the books, even before I’d heard of them. He did his work while I tended to my own pain.

Last fall, my husband, daughter, and I returned to the Northeast for a short visit. We ate pizza in Manhattan and snacked on West Indian food in Brooklyn. When I asked my husband if he would let his family know we were just 30 miles from where he grew up, he hesitated. “Maybe this can just be a family trip,” he said, meaning just the three of us.

Over the phone, his mother cried when she realized we’d made the cross-country trip but didn’t cross the Hudson River. For the first time, she might’ve realized that “all of this race stuff” is more about protecting the three of us than about making her feel guilty.

As scores of Americans wake up to the reality of systemic racial oppression, for Black people, the wake-up is validating, but it also compounds a profound fatigue. Yet for our family, the wake-up also affirms the work we’ve done, while re-emphasizing that our story can’t be unique, even if we often felt alone. Our work isn’t just about making family-gatherings more hospitable—it’s about changing the country, one family at a time.

Recently, our daughter asked from her booster in the back seat of the car, “What’s the n-word?” With a gulp, I explained it’s used to hurt Black people and stings like no other word. She cried before she said, “Well, maybe white people use that word because they feel bad about themselves.”

Wise words. Still, I don’t want her to be hurt, even by those who are in pain themselves.

My husband’s family has plenty of reasons to feel bad—the sudden loss of a patriarch, the daily grind of trying to make ends meet. And while my daughter’s wisdom is a simple way of understanding his family’s pain, it doesn’t make me understand their racism. I can never go back to the house where I found White Power propaganda, even if I know we’re all hurting.

This is not an attempt to shame my in-laws. Nothing positive would come from that. Nor is this an argument for, or against, free-speech—experts far more compelling than me can argue both sides. But this is an account of how not “cancelling” my in-laws took me to places I never thought I could go. Growing up, I didn’t talk about race with people who didn’t think like me—we all stayed on our own sides. So how could I imagine getting close enough to marry someone who grew up in a family so different from my own? But in 2020, we’re all inching closer to each other, because enough is enough.

These days, my mother-in-law and I exchange cordial texts for birthdays and holidays, and she and my daughter video-chat when I’m out of the house. I haven’t seen my brother-in-law since that visit to the garage years ago.

It’s easy for cancel culture to play out online—where we can cancel from a distance, often without even knowing a person. But real-life doesn’t fit the same mold. In real life, we’re just doing the best we can.

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As if we weren’t already living through a pandemic-induced dystopian nightmare this year, Republicans south of the border are attempting to push through the confirmation of an anti-choice Supreme Court justice candidate who once served as a “handmaid” in a hierarchical male-dominated religious community and, in 2006, signed a public letter in favour of overturning “barbaric” Roe v. Wade, the legal foundation for access to reproductive healthcare rights in the U.S.

The appointment of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s seat on the highest court in the United States would tip the scales in favour of anti-choice organizations that have been chipping away at abortion rights for decades. Already, 90% of American counties lack their own clinic and 21 states stand poised to severely limit or outright ban abortions should Roe be struck down by a reconstituted, conservative-dominated court. American women are and should be scared that their access to safe abortion could largely disappear.

But should Canadians be worried, too? From pop culture to populism, social and political trends originating in the U.S. tend to seep north and into the Canadian collective consciousness. Population-wise, we’re a small country sharing a landmass with a behemoth. So amidst hearings to confirm Trump’s nominee (the Senate will vote on October 26), we’re seeking advice from an expert: Can the effects of a change in the U.S. see an erosion of access to care in Canada?

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Kelly Gordon, assistant professor in the Political Science department at McGill University, researches conservative movements and the way they intersect with politics and gender. She’s also the co-author of a book called The Changing Voice of the Anti-Abortion Movement: The Rise of “Pro-Woman” Rhetoric in Canada and the United States. We asked Gordon to weigh in on the health of reproductive rights on our side of the border and the influence that major shifts in U.S. abortion policy could have in Canada.

What abortion laws in Canada look like right now

“One of the really interesting things about Canadian abortion law is that since 1988, we actually don’t have any laws about abortion on the books. That’s really rare,” explains Gordon, citing the late ’80s Supreme Court move to strike down the abortion provision in Canada’s criminal code as unconstitutional. During the period between 1969 and that historic 1988 decision (shout out to the late abortion advocate Dr. Henry Morganthaler), abortion was only an option for women whose life or health was endangered by a pregnancy and the procedure had to be approved by a medical panel. Before 1969, it was banned completely.

Currently, Canadian women across the country are entitled to unrestricted abortion care, funded in part by the Canada Health Act. In terms of access, however, provincial governments are in charge of where and how easily care can be obtained. This is the point at which politics can enter the arena, but provincial roadblocks are typically (if not quickly) thwarted by the Feds.

The fact that, aside from private members bills, “no government has tabled any abortion-related legislation tells us a lot about the relationship between parties and politics and abortion in Canada as opposed to the U.S., where we saw the consolidation of the Republican party around a ‘pro-life’ anti-abortion agenda,” says Gordon. While the political Right embraces an anti-aboriton stance as a strategy to sway and divide American voters, Canadian parties at the federal level try to steer clear of the topic, classifying it as a medical rather than a political issue.

How access to abortion in Canada differs from access in the U.S.

“Abortion by and large is accessible with big caveats and most abortion care is funded by the Canadian government,” says Gordon. “So that makes it really different than in the American context. This is not to say that abortion access is equitable across the country—we see big barriers to access in rural areas.”

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For example: For many years, tiny, conservative Prince Edward Island didn’t have its own abortion care facility. Currently, New Brunswick does not provide coverage for clinic-based care to residents, forcing some women to book overnight travel in order to access hospital services. The Federal government says that the province’s refusal to pay for clinic-based care contravenes the Canada Health Act and has withheld funding accordingly. Yet despite the discrepancies in access among the provinces and between rural and urban communities, access to and affordability of abortion care remains much better in Canada than in the U.S. where individual states have far more control over reproductive health legislation than provinces do. See: HBO Max’s Unpregnant for a comedic-but-based-in-fact account of a teenager having to travel from Missouri to New Mexico in order to get an abortion without the involvement of her parents (something required by all but 13 states).

In Canada, access to abortion is actually making slow but steady progress, including the approval of Mifepristone and subsequent loosening of restrictions around use of the drug, which Gordon calls the “gold standard of medication abortion.” Mifepristone would make abortion more available in communities where facilities and other resources are scarcer.

Public opinion on abortion care in Canada versus the U.S.

Despite an apparent rise in high-profile abortion activism in Canada (Torontonians won’t soon forget the encounter that went down in 2018 between protesters and the owner of a vegan pizza shop) the numbers show that abortion is met with majority approval among the public. “Some polling says that up to 85% of Canadians support legal, funded access to abortion care,” says Gordon. “So we have really high levels of public support. There’s also some evidence that when we have national debates about abortion care or when debates seep up from the U.S. support actually goes up.”

That said, public support for abortion care is also quite high in the States. The people lobbying for restrictive abortion legislation are conservative (often religious, according to a 2019 Gallup poll) special interest groups that apply pressure to state lawmakers. In turn, these legislators, largely in Republican-held areas, often use TRAP legislation to quietly erode access instead of mounting light-of-day attacks on care that would be protested in a big way by the majority. One infamous example took place in North Carolina in 2013 when a restriction to abortion access was passed in the middle of the night, attached to a bill about motorcycle safety.

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“These are things you do when you really don’t want the public to have the opportunity to understand what is going on and participate in the fundamental democratic process of being able to lobby your elected officials so that they are representing you,” Ilyse Hogue, President of NARAL Pro-Choice America recently told The New York Times’ The Daily podcast.

The shifting strategies that anti-choice groups use to push their agenda in Canada

Movements like the National Campus Life Network (a group with more than 40 chapters based on campuses across the country) and Campaign Life Coalition (the organizers behind the annual March for Life) employ tactics that involve a shift in focus from the “rights” of a fetus to the “harm” abortion inflicts on women. “The anti-abortion movement is sort of shifting both their tone, particularly towards women, and also kind of in the contours of their arguments,” says Gordon. “What they realized is that religious, fetal-centric arguments aren’t going to persuade Canadians. So what we see is ‘abortion harms women’ arguments.”

For example, she explains, anti-choice activists accuse abortion care providers of misleading women, they falsely claim that abortion physically and psychologically harms women, they broach the topic of sex-selective abortion and label it as discrimination against girls and women, and they cite the unfounded statistic that 90% of women regret their decision to have an abortion. “They’re also foregrounding really smart young telegenic women to do it,” Gordon says. “You’ll never see a male anti-abortion activist talk about the movement on TV in Canada anymore.” In the U.S., she explains, anti-abortion activists constitute a larger, less cohesive group and strategies can diverge though the “pro-woman” rhetoric is being adopted there, too.

Looked at side-by-side, if Canadian anti-abortion activism appears to present a united (if small) front staging a campaign against the monolith of the Federal government, American activism looks, to defenders of abortion care, more like a game of whack-a-mole in which groups both large and small can launch simultaneous attacks federally as well as state by state.

The health of abortion rights in Canada

“I think we can 100% say that the anti-abortion movement in the U.S. has been winning since Roe v. Wade—it has been winning for the last 30 years,” says Gordon, adding, “The anti-abortion movement in Canada has been losing for the last 20 years.” While access to abortion care in the U.S. is rolled back, access in Canada continues its slow march forward, the 2015 Health Canada approval and 2017 public availability of mifepristone being one example and the continuing resistance from Canadian politicians at the Federal level, both Liberal and Conservative, to bend to anti-choice NGO pressure being another.

Even current Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, who identifies on a personal level as anti-abortion, has explicitly stated that he isn’t interested in “removing rights from Canadians” when it comes to access and care. So while anti-choice groups make small inroads into the political sphere (like Campaign Life Coalition did when it backed Premiere Doug Ford’s election in Ontario) Federal politics remain impenetrable. Politicians are keenly aware of the majority position on abortion.

Read this next: Here’s What You Need to Know About the Major Issues in the U.S. Election

But all of this doesn’t mean that Canadian women shouldn’t keep an eye on the security of their rights. In 2013, two liberal, female justices had just been confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court by former President Obama, making threats to Roe v. Wade appear incredibly distant. Just seven years later, American women are facing a dark age for reproductive rights and dominion over their own bodies. A lot can change. We need to stay vigilant.

In September, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a nearly $221-million investment in Canada’s first Black Entrepreneurship Program (BEP). This program will help thousands of Black entrepreneurs across the country not only recover from the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis, but grow their businesses through the years (hopefully) beyond the pandemic.

Through the BEP, the federal government will distribute $93 million over four years, including $53 million for a new National Ecosystem Fund to help Black business owners access funding, mentorship and business training. Another $33.3 million will be provided through the new Black Entrepreneurship Loan Fund in partnership with several financial institutions (including Canada’s Big Five banks), which will grant Black business owners between $25,000 and $250,000 in loans. A Black Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub, with up to $6.5 million in funds, is also in development in order to collect data on the current state of Black entrepreneurship in Canada and help identify the resources necessary to change the status quo. 

Based on a Canadian Women’s Chamber of Commerce report, women of colour entrepreneurs have faced the highest percentage of loss of contracts, customers or clients, along with negative mental health impacts, due to COVID-19. And according to data by FoundHers and the Canadian Venture Capital Association, 0% of Canadian Black women-led businesses have received venture capital funding, while one of Black female entrepreneur’s key challenges remains a lack of funding. 

Many of the business owners who the fund is intended to help have some questions. Primarily, they’re asking: why now? The systemic barriers facing Black entrepreneurs in Canada have long existed, with Black Canadians afforded less access and opportunities than their white counterparts. Since March 2020, when the pandemic began, these barriers have become even more glaring, leaving many businesses struggling or forced to shut down. 

A month on from Trudeau’s announcement, few other details have been announced regarding the BEP, including when it will launch, when entrepreneurs can begin to apply or how the funding will be allocated. And many entrepreneurs have said what the government is offering is simply throwing money at a deep-rooted systemic issue, and that the fund’s focus on loans feels counterproductive.

Adeela Carter and Amoye Henry, co-founders of Pitch Better, a Toronto-based organization dedicated to helping women advance in business, explain. “When we look at the past and how government funding has been deployed in even recent years, history has shown us that federal resources have not always reached the communities who need it the most. There are negative stigmas surrounding it. In Black and immigrant communities, loans are often looked at negatively because there are systemic barriers that have prohibited BIPOC from having access to good credit. Black women founders may feel that it’s not for them because they may specifically feel like they don’t fit the criteria or they may not want to take the risk out of fear of failure and having to repay a loan. [They] may not trust the ‘system.’

“We have so many promising stories of resilience and creativity by many Black founders [in the U.S.], but in the Canadian context, the funding and the data is just not there—yet,” Carter and Henry say. “To live within a world where you are deemed invisible within the confines of the mere concept of ‘diversity’ is sad in itself.”

Many of the women looking to apply for the BEP have taken the root of the matter into their own hands, working to innovate and uplift Black businesses together through their own work. Carter and Henry have made it their mission, for example, by providing female entrepreneurs with the tools they need to succeed in business (more on that in a minute). There is no mistaking, after all, that ethnic and racial backgrounds can influence and limit access and opportunities. And while the BEP may be far from a perfect plan or catch-all solution, it is a start according to many of the Black women in business I spoke to across Canada. Each of them, including Carter and Henry, plan to apply for the BEP, and feel this initiative—despite its limitations—is a step in the right direction.

Adeela Carter and Amoye Henry, co-founders, Pitch Better, Toronto 

As friends and entrepreneurs for over a decade, it seemed natural that Carter, the owner of consulting firm Carter Strategy Group, and Henry, a small business consultant and the founder of the AfroChic Cultural Arts Festival, would one day go into business together. Over the years, when the pair attended business conferences together they realized there was little programming and funding available for Canadian women of colour. So they took action. 

“We realized that our definition of diverse is different from Canada’s definition of diverse,” the pair say, describing how white women are often the beneficiaries of funds directed at helping those in need in business. “The resources set in place to support marginalized founders were not touching the people that actually needed it, so we formed Pitch Better.” 

Pitch Better bridges the gap between women-led start-ups and the means to acquiring capital through grants and investments, connecting entrepreneurs with seasoned professionals through workshops and coaching sessions. The company also collects data across Canada through FoundHers, its own national research study, to identify the tools needed to help women entrepreneurs and to assist them in applying for grants and investments. 

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“We founded Pitch Better to equip female leaders, which is largely made up of women of colour, with the resources, tools and networks to even the playing field and position them for success in scaling their businesses and penetrating the global market,” Carter and Henry say. “We have decided to apply for the fund because our business needs to operate on a substantial scale. We have had an overwhelming response from women-led start-ups and small business owners across the country. Our staff is growing quickly and the work needed to be done has become an endless battle.  

“We are here, seated at the table, ready to do the work. Despite the [aforementioned] potential doubts and challenges, we feel this program is overall a great opportunity for entrepreneurs to take their businesses to the next level. We are grateful to be able to live in a country where the government has stepped in to identify this as an issue that needs to be addressed and to be part of those conversations.”

The CEO of Made by Africans, an eCommerce platform for African vendors all over the world, Ejibola Adetokunbo-Taiwo is dedicated to shining a light on those business owners and artists who may not otherwise have reach outside their own communities. “I believe that entrepreneurship drives economic growth, and economic growth drives global impact and global impact makes the world a better place,” Adetokunbo-Taiwo says, explaining that when Black businesses grow and have a platform, they inspire young entrepreneurs of colour everywhere. She adds: “By empowering local African brands who would normally operate their business within their country to scale on a global level, my company broadens their sales scopes, enlarges their customer bases and raises their sales revenues.” 

But Adetokunbo-Taiwo, determined to offer her peers a leg up in a field where she’s carved out her own success, hasn’t stopped there. Having also founded de Sedulous Women Leaders, a mentorship, training and coaching initiative for women entrepreneurs in her hometown of rural Grande Prairie, Alberta, the “empowerment program” now has sister chapters in Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa and even Surrey, U.K., with two more in development in Saskatchewan and British Columbia. 

“The goal is to raise a tribe of women leaders across Canada with significant emphasis on immigrant Black women,” Adetokunbo-Taiwo shares. “I am a strong believer that when a successful woman shares her hustling business journey with others, the storytelling creates an inspiration that can elevate other women to want to discover more of their potential and skills. The platform is quickly becoming a movement. My mantra is always ‘see you at the top—the place where we all belong.’” 

“I believe the BEP is coming at a time when Black entrepreneurs are yearning for support and longing to make their businesses stronger,” Adetokunbo-Taiwo says. She’s hopeful that the fund will help her with everything from technology upgrades to boosting marketing. And that, unlike the government’s original COVID-19 relief fund for businesses, which has—to date—spent over $30 billion in loans and which 70% of Black-owned businesses are not eligible for, this one will benefit more minority business owners. “The intent is clear and it is needed now more than ever. It might be minimal compared to what the government spends on other communities, but it is going to change a lot of things for the Black business owner in Canada.”

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Adedoyin Omotara, CEO, Adoniaa Beauty, Calgary

It may come as a surprise to some that trained electrical engineer Adedoyin Omotara spends most of her days working in her true passion: beauty. The founder and CEO of Calgary-based Adoniaa Beauty, Omotara offers not only her own line of cosmetic products, but beauty classes as well as makeup, hair and skincare services. The company’s goal is to support and empower women from all backgrounds through beauty as they find themselves at each stage of their lives. But that doesn’t make it an easy job, she says. Omotara has loans to consolidate, which she hopes to accomplish with the help of the BEP and in order to finally feel “stress-free” so that she can focus entirely on growing Adoniaa Beauty. 

“It’s about time,” Omotara says of the fund. “Our voices are being heard finally and the government is responding to our inability to thrive in the community, especially as business people. I think it will go a long way for new start-ups and existing businesses. Especially in this economy, we all need some sort of cushion and confidence boost.” 

When it comes to the criticism of the fund, she says, “Whether you like it or not, money is the currency that the world uses and how it shows support. Having one solution is better than having none as the conversation continues. It’s not the end of systemic racism, of course, but it’s a means to an end. I’d just really love to have more seats at the table, more opportunities to be involved in politics and to assume more leadership roles so that the generation coming after us can see us in these positions and be able to dream as well.”

As the founder of The Diversity Agency, a Toronto-based speakers’ bureau representing diverse voices across Canada, Andria Barrett has made it her career goal to make space for people of colour at the top of their game, from the business world to the art world. The company even offers workshops on anti-Black racism and racial bias training for the workplace.

“I started my agency because Black speakers like myself are unrepresented and our voices are missing in the event and conference space,” Barrett says. “I wanted to give the dynamic speakers in my community who have been turned away from mainstream agencies a platform to be showcased.”

But since the start of the pandemic, The Diversity Agency has seen many of its bookings cancelled, and is now pivoting to virtual events, leaving one of Barrett’s biggest concerns—that the BEP’s funding will not be awarded quickly enough. “Business owners need this money now, not six months from now,” Barrett says. “It won’t make up for what Black people have had to endure due to systemic racism, but it will allow us to stay in business, at least for now. So is it enough? No. Is it a start? Absolutely.”

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A former competitive cheerleader herself, Alice Charles now co-owns and operates Legacy Cheerleading, a Manitoba-based program for youth interested in learning the sport. “We promote confidence in our youth and put an emphasis on safely developing the body and minds of our kids into the most successful versions of themselves,” Charles says. “Cheerleading is a team sport like no other, where literally any type of body can participate. Each person has an integral role in the team. I have always wanted to be a part of creating a safe and supportive space for children where they have community. The goal could be building friendships, overcoming anxieties, gaining new skills or confidence. Empowering youth creates empowered adults, which means a better future for us all.”

When it comes to that better future for the company itself, Charles has found accessing funding to be a challenging process. “We’ve run the business debt-free since the beginning, when we built it from the ground up. When it came time to getting our own facility, we were met with so many barriers, especially when we had to submit our photo identification,” Charles says. “Getting funding will finally allow us some flexibility within our operations. We can build on ventures within our business without the restrictions we have had and without worry. We can provide resources to our community in terms of education, equipment and other resources to help the young athletes and their families that come through our door.”

“Money will not fix systematic racism, but it will hopefully allow Black people access to take a step past the gatekeepers,” Charles says. “It’s momentum. This hopefully allows Black entrepreneurs to have more visibility, the opportunity to educate and, as a result, create impactful lasting change.”

In the U.S., presidential elections are like marathons. Candidates can start campaigning up to a year before the February Iowa primary, and everyone is exhausted by the end. But while we’ve been hearing for months about the presidential race, election day is finally just around the corner. When Americans vote on November 3, the presidency, the balance of power in the Senate and Congress, and gubernatorial positions at state levels are all at stake. 

With looming issues like a Supreme Court vacancy (RIP RGB), COVID raging out of control in many states, the window to meaningfully combat climate change quickly closing, and growing calls for police abolition, this election could define America beyond the next generation, and affect all of our futures. 

And while many Canadians enjoy gawking at the whole process and believe Canada is superior to its southern neighbours, we actually struggle with many of the same issues and are simultaneously in danger of being influenced by trends in U.S. politics. It’s no coincidence, for example, that the Conservative party’s new slogan is “Take Back Canada”—eerily reminiscent of Donald Trump’s infamous 2016 campaign tagline, “Make America Great Again.” 

So, even though we won’t be going to the polls in a few weeks, it’s important we understand what’s at stake with the major issues in the U.S. election, and where things stand on those same issues here in Canada. Here, your U.S. election primer on the top issues we all need to pay attention to.

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Climate change

Republican stance

The prospect of a second Trump presidency scares climate scientists. The administration spent its first term weakening or reversing many environmental regulations, muzzling scientists at federal agencies and putting a former coal-industry lobbyist, Andrew Wheeler, in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency. While Trump hasn’t officially denied climate change, he often rejects or downplays the ways climate change contributes to things like the recent California wildfires. A second term would likely bring more of the same inaction or active disregard for the urgent threat of climate change.

Democrat stance

Joe Biden sees climate change as “a global crisis that requires American leadership” and plans to create a national strategy on climate change that includes things like signing the Paris Agreement, an international climate change accord that aims to limit global warming to below two degrees Celsius. However, many have criticized Biden in the past for not being aggressive enough in his plans to address climate change during his vice presidency. 

What’s happening in Canada?

Given that the United States is one of the worst global emitters of greenhouse gases, the upcoming election has a significant impact on our global future. But we also have work to do on our own climate inaction: While Canada is a signatory to the Paris Agreement, and Canadians like to believe we’re doing better than the U.S. on this issue, Trudeau purchased the Trans Mountain Pipeline in 2018 to help Alberta continue to extract bitumen from the tar sands—a crude oil that many believe should be left in the ground. Canada is also not doing nearly enough to combat CO2 emissions—in 2018 we were found to produce more greenhouse gases per person that any other G20 country, including the U.S. 

Public health

Republican stance

Under Trump’s leadership, there have been more than 7 million cases of COVID-19 in the United States and more than 200,000 people have died. While Trump is currently fighting with the FDA to fast track a vaccine for late October, he was recently exposed by Bob Woodward for knowingly downplaying the seriousness of the virus—which likely led to the country’s higher death rate. Even Trump’s recent diagnosis hasn’t changed his dismissive approach to COVID: He’s since tweeted several messages downplaying the severity of the virus. 

Trump would also like to limit or eliminate the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—which could affect many Americans’ access to health care. 

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Democrat stance

Biden has shared that his COVID response plan would be to mount a national emergency response to protect frontline workers and minimize the spread of the virus, to eliminate the cost barriers involved in prevention and care for COVID-19, and support those economically affected by the crisis. He would shift responsibility for the response to the federal government from the states. He supports the ACA and plans to build on it.  

What’s happening in Canada?

While Canada was initially hailed as doing a lot of things right in its fight against COVID-19, numbers are increasing across the country as schools and businesses have opened back up. With the expiration of the CERB benefit, people who were relying on it will transition to Employment Insurance and other benefits like the new Canada Recovery Benefit, which will provide $500 weekly for up to 26 weeks. 

Racial justice

Republican stance

Much of Trump’s 2016 campaign and presidency was built on fear of racialized others—from supposed Mexican rapists and criminals, to Muslims travelling or living in the U.S. More recently, in the first presidential debate he refused to denounce white supremicist group the Proud Boys, and instead asked them to “stand back and stand by.” 

In terms of actual policy, Trump has implemented immigration bans, deployed federal agents to “maintain law and order” at Black Lives Matters protests and spoken approvingly about violently repressing protesters, and expanded ICE in ways that have devastated migrant and refugee families. He is now weakening Fair Housing and HUD rules that support integrated suburbs in an apparent effort to play on white voters’ prejudice. 

Democrat stance

Biden’s platform represents no substantive structural reform of the systems that lead to racial injustice in the United States, despite the fact that he has frequently spoken out against racism during his campaign. His response to the Black Lives Matter protests is to reform police departments rather than divert funds to other community interventions and services, as many activists are calling for. While a Biden presidency could see policies put in place to reduce the abuses and human rights violations happening via ICE, he has no plans to abolish ICE. 

What’s happening in Canada?

Writers like Robyn Maynard and Desmond Cole have cast a spotlight on how Canada is built on colonialism and structural racism at all levels of government: From high rates of racialized police violence to racist and genocidal policies that harm Indigenous people and people of colour, Canada has a long way to go to achieve racial justice. Canada’s Public Safety Minister Bill Blair indicated in June that Canada was looking into reforms to our criminal justice system but didn’t give specifics. Meanwhile, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has repeatedly called on the Liberals to work on “reprioritizing” police funding. 

The economy

Republican stance

Across the U.S., the economy has lost 4.7 million jobs since Trump took office in 2016, although many of those losses are COVID-related. Trump has shared no plan to financially support those struggling to find work in the wake of the pandemic, other than the one-time $1,200 stimulus that was sent out earlier this year and the $600 per week unemployment benefit that expired on July 31. His broader economic plan includes a mix of things including renegotiating trade deals, a focus on energy and resource extraction, reducing the debt, repealing Obamacare and sending alleged illegal immigrants back to their home countries. 

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Democrat stance

According to economists, Biden’s economic plan is likely to create 7 million more jobs than Trump’s. A recent report suggested that Biden’s proposals would lead to 18.6 million jobs during his first term and an average increase in income of $4,800 per person. Meanwhile, it said Trump’s policies would lead to an increase in only 11.2 million jobs and no real income gains on an individual level. Biden would also support a January 2021 COVID stimulus and an increase of the minimum wage to $15. 

What’s happening in Canada?

Since the Canadian economy is so entangled with the U.S. economy, the stronger the U.S. economy is the better it will be for Canada. Canada is currently struggling with our own COVID-related economic recovery but Trudeau is looking at another wave of pandemic-related spending.

Reproductive Rights

Republican stance

According to activists and rights groups, a second Trump term could have devastating consequences for abortion rights in the U.S., because of his track record of supporting limitations on abortion. The appointment of a Republican Supreme Court justice could mean the overturning of Roe vs. Wade since Trump’s current nominee Amy Coney Barrett is “pro-life.” Even if Roe is upheld, many activists have noted the possibility of the passing of more TRAP laws that function as backdoor ways to limit abortion access in most of the country. 

Democrat stance

A Biden win could make room for a pro-choice Supreme Court justice, if Trump doesn’t manage to appoint Barrett before he leaves office. Biden plans to reinstate federal funding for Planned Parenthood, codify Roe vs. Wade by making the right to abortion access a federal law, and potentially repeal the Hyde Amendment, which does not allow federal dollars to go towards abortions. 

What’s happening in Canada?

Abortion isn’t as divisive in Canada—at least not politically—but many people still face barriers to abortion and reproductive health access. For example, abortions are hard to access in rural areas, or in places like New Brunswick where the government only funds them at hospitals. We also have limits on when you can get an abortion during your pregnancy that range from as few as 12 weeks to 24 weeks. 

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I can’t vote—what can I do? 

While the U.S. election will have a significant impact on Canadians, we don’t get a say in what happens. So, what can you do? You can work to encourage Americans in Canada to vote by mail. You can also work on these issues in Canada by writing your representatives, getting involved in activism or protests on the issues that matter to you, speaking out, and supporting mutual aid networks that help activists work on these issues internationally.