Toronto

Hundreds of shoes will be placed outside Pickering city hall this week, a message from some of those who but for COVID-19 restrictions would be there demanding municipal and provincial politicians call off their push to pave over rare urban wetlands on Toronto’s outskirts. 

Red Music Rising is the country's first Indigenous-owned and operated record label dedicated to showcasing Indigenous music.

The working arts space SKETCH, near Trinity Bellwoods in Toronto’s inner west, provides a stage for a diverse cast of young people on the city’s margins to create and facilitate. It’s tantalizingly close to securing its space permanently.

Officials expressed growing concern on Wednesday, February 17, 2021, over highly transmissible new COVID-19 variants taking hold in Canada's biggest cities and in First Nation reserves across the country.

The York region bordering Toronto has a large semi-rural section where housing and youth services are harder to access, a problem compounded for young queer folk at risk of or experiencing homelessness.

The pandemic has shifted student activist efforts online, but the movement is alive and well, organizer Aliénor Rougeot tells Patricia Lane.

They’ve been closed or reduced to serving the odd overpriced takeout beer for most of 2020, but bar owners are still paying liability insurance as though drunken patrons are stumbling downstairs to the bathrooms, if they can retain coverage at all.

Varsity athlete Stella Isaac was a prime recruit for Debbie King’s #ParkdaleFitPlay, a month-long online effort to get the neighbourhood engaged and active in the cold and dark of winter under lockdown.

Ontario sisters Jenny and Clarissa Vasquez opened a tamale pop-up sales business, joining the legions of young people innovating in tough times.

For Cass Van Wyck and Luis Fernandes at Assembly Theatre, an independent performance space in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, tight budgets and low overheads were a staple of life well before a pandemic upended their plans for 2020.

Rachelle Wintzen had just reopened her boutique yoga studio after dropping $150,000 on a major renovation when it was forced to close again last March. She has been accumulating more debt and hustling to hang on ever since.

Young people from around Toronto and elsewhere are using the downtime of the pandemic to work on projects to fight the stigma around HIV and AIDS and to support those living with the conditions.

Fashion designer Sinéad Clarke whipped up thousands of face masks starting last March to contribute to local pandemic-fighting efforts, and has been adapting the operations of Toronto’s Irish Design House ever since.

On Wednesday, Amanda Gorman became the youngest poet ever to perform at a presidential inauguration, calling for "unity and togetherness" in her poem, The Hill We Climb.