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A database of activities from your peers.

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Ripley's Aquarium draws Attention to Plastic Consumption in Ontario

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Ripley's Aquarium draws Attention to Plastic Consumption in Ontario

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"I hope that they see the canoe being overwhelmed by the plastic, and recognize the sheer volume of the challenge. And that every bottle we buy contributes to that challenge," says Rebecca Jane Houston.

Houston is the Toronto artist behind the sculpture unveiled Wednesday night at Ripley's, though it isn't the first time the work is being seen by the public. It was was displayed outdoors during Pride week this past summer. Environmental Defence Canada, the organization that commissioned the project, thought the aquarium would be a fitting next stop.

"Ripley's is very concerned about pollution in aquatic ecosystems, and we are very concerned about the problem with plastic bottles because there are over a billion bottles going into the environment in Ontario every year," says executive director Tim Gray.

To break it down further, that's about 12,000 bottles thrown out every four minutes, the same number that make up the sculpture. It's a statistic Gray thinks we should all be concerned about.

"They get into the water and they break down into little tiny bits of plastic. They end up in the fish, they end up in the mammals, and eventually they end up in our bodies, bringing with them many toxic chemicals," he says.

To complete the sculpture, the organization collected empty bottles from people across the GTA, giving them 10 cents for each one. Gray said they collected enough bottles to construct the sculpture in just three days.

Ontario and Manitoba are the only two provinces that have not yet adopted this kind of deposit return program for plastic bottles.

"The plastic bottle recycling rate in Ontario is very low. It's only at about 50 per cent. That contrasts with provinces that have a depot return program where it's always [above 80 per cent]," Gray says.

He thinks a money-back guarantee will drastically improve the Ontario's plastic bottle recycle rate, which is the lowest in the country.

Environmental Defence Canada is currently pushing for the province to adopt a deposit system. It has launched the campaign "Cash it! Don't Trash it!" to encourage others to join in their fight, which includes signing a petition to pressure Rod Phillips, minister of the environment, and Premier Doug Ford to take action.

Houston believes putting pressure on all levels of government is the most important thing we can do, even more than taking individual responsibility.

"We need to really consider the greater political action that we can take, to encourage our autonomous political bodies not to be swayed by industry, and to have a really strong backbone to speak up against industries that are forcing us into this dependance on plastic because it's economically important to them," she said.

"What we have to do is speak politically as citizens and not as consumers. And to say, as citizens, we don't want this pollution in our water anymore."

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Ripley's aquarium embraces art to shine a light on plastic bottle pollution | CBC News

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"I hope that they see the canoe being overwhelmed by the plastic, and recognize the sheer volume of the challenge. And that every bottle we buy contributes to that challenge," says Rebecca Jane Houston. Houston is the Toronto artist behind the sculpture unveiled Wednesday night at Ripley's, though it isn't the first time the work is being seen by the public.

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UNESCO MGIEP - Transforming Education for Humanity

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How to Connect ESL Students to the World

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How to Connect ESL Students to the World

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How to Connect Your Foreign Language Students with the World

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A list of options to connect with others.

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Together we are building a strong global community that's ready to take action to help end extreme poverty

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KOSMOS Journal for Global Transformation

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What Does it Mean to be a Global Citizen?

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UPDATED 10/9/18 The growing interconnectedness among people, countries, and economies means that there is a global dimension to who we are. The most positive way of responding to this is by pursuing a path of global citizenship. Global citizens see ourselves as part of an emerging world community, and are committed to helping build this community's values and practices.

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Gillian Sorensen was interviewed by Nancy Roof.

NR: Thank you so much for making time to contribute to Kosmos
Journal. We would like to begin by asking, how would you describe a
citizen of the world?

GS: To be a citizen of the world means expanding your circle of
concern beyond family and friends. It means thinking across borders.
It means identifying closely with others as one human family in
different situations and places far away; identifying with others not as
statistics, but as people who care for their children like you and I
do; who have hopes and dreams for health, for meaningful work, for love,
and all the things that are right at the core of the human spirit. It
means understanding that many issues cross borders. It means trying to
experience what it is like to live with nothing, no shelter, no food, no
health care, no opportunity, and no security. When we see suffering,
deprivation and loss we need to experience it fully. That moves us to
act. A global citizen cannot be passive. I remember Eleanor Roosevelt
saying that peace begins in small ways close to home, by assisting the
poor, feeding the hungry, caring for the elderly and for those who are
alone.

NR: You have a long and fascinating personal history in global
affairs. Would you tell us something about your story and how it
relates to your becoming a global citizen?

GS: When I was a girl, my grandmother, who was widowed at about
the age of 60, had never been out of this country. She decided that she
wanted to see the world. So, she took me with her on two very long
trips-one to Latin America and one to the South Pacific and Australia
and back-by ship. Those were great adventures. They were not cruise
ships either. These were freighters. It was my first exposure to the
world. My parents also thought in global terms and encouraged me to
study languages. I majored in French and spent my third year of college
in France. I traveled every chance I got. Working with the United
Nations offered new opportunities. In addition, I traveled with my
husband in connection with his work. I had a chance to see a
lot of the world and to meet people of all races, religions and
political systems.

You could place me anywhere in the world and I would find out how
to make do, how to make friends, how to get along. Yet, at the same
time, I've been sheltered and never faced the kind of hardship that many
people have. My courage has never been tested to its maximum. So I
don't know if I'm really a global citizen, but I want to be. I try to
be. I move in that direction, actively. It's very important to me.

Mayor Ed Koch appointed me New York City Commissioner for the
United Nations and Consulate Corps when I was about 30. I did that for
12 years. The work of the Commission had a local focus but we dealt
with representatives from around the world, face to face. I learned to
appreciate who they were and what they've come through. That training
exposed me to global issues and opened the door to my UN service under
Secretary General Boutros-Ghali and Secretary General Kofi Annan. As
Assistant Secretary General and Head of the Office of External Relations
under Kofi Annan, one of my key functions was outreach and contact with
the 4200 accredited NGO's. This community of activists reflects every
global concern-human rights health, the environment, the international
criminal court and more. They see themselves as the voice of the people.
They are focused, passionate, and knowledgeable. In the words of the
Secretary General, NGO'sare essential partners of the United Nations.

NR: How many people already engaged in global affairs do you think those 4200 organizations represent?

GS: Millions, millions. The World Wildlife Association has
something like 25 million members. Others, like the International Rescue
Committee have hundreds of thousands of members. Some are smaller, but
the very large membership organizations have enormous resources. Save
the Children, for instance, has its own foreign office. They track
events of the world almost as the United Nations does. NGO's provide a
way to make change happen, to encourage and move governments and to
assist the UN. In some cases they get ahead of governments. NGO's
fronted the campaign against landmines. I have enormous respect for the
NGO community. There are a few difficulties there, but by and large
they are a talented and dedicated group. Some have a national base, but
most have international memberships. By the nature of what they do,
most of them are global citizens. That is, they try to think globally,
even though they may focus on a particular issue. NGO's accredited to
the UN are but a fraction of the civil society universe.

NR: We all have affiliations and loyalties at larger and more
inclusive scales of relationship, from family, to nation, to global, to
kosmos. How do you see the relationship between national and global
identity?

GS: We cannot discount national pride and loyalty. I don't mean
nationalism, which is chauvinistic and defensive. I'm a proud and
patriotic American. But, at the same time, I am a global citizen. We
don't forget where we came from or where our roots are.
To read the rest of this interview, please see the print issue of Kosmos Journal, Fall | Winter 2005.

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Gillian Sorensen was interviewed by Nancy Roof. NR: Thank you so much for making time to contribute to Kosmos Journal. We would like to begin by asking, how would you describe a citizen of the world? GS: To be a citizen of the world means expanding your circle of concern beyond family and friends.

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global poverty project citizen the end of polio live below the line make history united nations 2015 hugh jackman evans bono simon moss

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Global Citizen is a community of people like you - a place to learn about and take action on the world's biggest issues. Your voice matters. Join Global Citizen and a growing movement of people committed to creating a better world.

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Spine Treatment Pioneer

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It was sheer frustration that drove Dr. Raj Rampersaud to develop a better way to care for people with lower back pain.

A decade ago, the Toronto spine surgeon - hailed as one of the best in the world - found himself apologizing to up to 90 per cent of patients referred to him by family doctors for consultations. "There is really nothing I as a surgeon can do for you," Rampersaud, 50, recalls telling patient after patient.

It was discouraging news for patients who had waited up to 18 months for their appointments. And that was typically after they had already waited up to six months for MRIs. Many were unable to work, many were on painkillers, some were even addicted.

Because the patients were not candidates for surgery, the best Rampersaud could offer was referrals to other physicians - for example, pain specialists and physiatrists - who also had long waiting lists.

Had these patients received appropriate treatment earlier, their problems may not have become chronic.

"You can see how the system is failing the individual at every level, every step of the way. That was the impetus for us to say this is not good for me, it's not good for the patient and it's not good for the family doctor ... I get frustrated talking about it because it is such a horrible experience," says Rampersaud, who works out of the Toronto Western Hospital campus of the University Health Network.

The Guyanese-born doctor knew there had to be a better way, so he set about creating one himself. He has since succeeded in overhauling the way Ontario's health system deals with lower back pain.

A six-year pilot project he led wrapped up in March. Ontario's health ministry, through Health Quality Ontario, is now in the process of opening "rapid assessment clinics" across the province, based on Rampersaud's vision for providing better and faster care for patients with back pain.

The clinics are staffed by specially trained physiotherapists and chiropractors who teach patients how to manage their pain.

The results have been good and other provinces have taken notice. Small pilots are now underway in British Columbia and New Brunswick. (These pilots are also built upon research from Saskatchewan, another province that has made great strides in improving care for patients with back pain.)

Ontario is lucky to have physicians of his calibre, says Dr. Bob Bell, former deputy health minister for the province and former president of the University Health Network.

"Ontarians are fortunate that he has devoted so much energy and time to improving care for a common problem, back pain, in the province," Bell says.

A former orthopedic surgeon, Bell trained Rampersaud when the younger doctor was a resident from Western University. Bell says he knew from the start Rampersaud was someone to watch: "You could tell as a student that he was highly skilled and was going to be a leader."

Over the last 10 years, during typical 80-hour work weeks, Rampersaud devised a new clinical pathway for patients, one that allows them to get more appropriate care earlier on, when the chances of success are best.

It meant getting different kinds of health-care providers involved, including physiotherapists and chiropractors with advanced training.

With funding and support from the Ontario health ministry, Rampersaud and his team launched ISAEC, the Inter-professional Spine Assessment and Education Clinics, in 2012. The pilot was set up in three centres: Toronto, Thunder Bay and Hamilton.

Some 478 family doctors and nurse practitioners were recruited. Traditionally, these practitioners have had few tools to help patients with persistent back pain. If anti-inflammatories and some standard exercises didn't work, they would send patients for MRIs and then refer them to surgeons such as Rampersaud.

But with ISAEC, they have another tool in their toolkit. They can quickly refer patients to community clinics where they are assessed by physiotherapists or chiropractors. These health professionals are trained to help weed out the very small percentage of patients who might benefit from anti-inflammatory steroid injections or surgery.

The remaining patients receive education about the nature of back pain and are given self-management and exercise programs, personalized to address their specific conditions.

More than 7,000 patients have so far been treated. The average wait to get into a clinic has been 12 days.

Barbara Pereira received treatment for her back pain at Inter-professional Spine Assessment and Education Clinics. The ISAEC pilot project launched by Dr. Raj Rampersaud has drastically cut wait times for treatment. Rampersaud is part of the Star's Changemaker series, one of 12 Canadians making our lives better. See more at thestar.com/changemakers

Surveys of patients have shown that 99 per cent are satisfied with their ISAEC consultations, 97 per cent are satisfied with their wait times and 94 per cent have a better understanding of their conditions. Ultimately, they have reported a reduced prevalence of unmanageable chronic lower back pain.

The ISAEC pilot also saw:

A 30 per cent plunge in MRI use.

Fewer unnecessary and costly referrals to spine surgeons and other specialists.

And a decrease in waits to see such specialists from as long as 18 months to as little as two weeks.

Bell says ISAEC's success has solidified Rampersaud's reputation as a top-notch surgeon.

"Raj is one of the premier back surgeons in the world based on both his innovation in non-surgical care for patients with back pain and the terrific results achieved with developing minimally invasive microsurgery to deal with nerve compression. He is certainly recognized worldwide as a surgical innovator and leader."

Asked where his drive comes from, Rampersaud credits his parents and tells a familiar story of immigrants sacrificing much for the next generation.

The youngest of 11 children, Rampersaud was born in a small village in the former British Guiana around the time the colony gained independence from the United Kingdom. Because of political unrest, the family moved abroad with not much more than the clothes on their backs.

Most of the family immigrated to Canada. The young Rampersaud was 7 when they settled in a working class neighbourhood of Hamilton.

Racism was rife and Rampersaud recalls being regularly called a "paki" and even getting into fisticuffs because of the colour of his skin.

His father, a dentist back in Guyana, found employment as a janitor. Rampersaud's mother, who did not work outside the home back in Guyana, found a job as a seamstress.

Rampersaud excelled in school and the idea of becoming a doctor was first planted by his parents who wanted a better life for their bright son.

Today, he lives a comfortable life in the west end of Toronto with his wife and four children, three girls and a boy, ages 5 to 12.

His success with ISAEC is especially significant because back pain is one of the most common reasons patients see doctors and is responsible for more than half of all opioid prescriptions.

Up to 80 per cent of adults experience lower back pain at some point in their lives, Rampersaud notes.

Back pain is also one of the most common reasons people miss work, he says, adding worldwide it is responsible for the most days spent with a disability. Persistent back pain can prevent people from working and even socializing. It can also result in mood dysfunction.

"Prevention of chronic back pain is one of the principal goals of ISAEC," Rampersaud says.

Toronto patient Adam Jagelewski was referred to ISAEC last year, after suffering with severe back pain for more three years. Sharp pain radiated down the back of his left leg, making it uncomfortable to sit for more than 15 minutes.

The 34-year-old director at the MaRS Centre for Impact Investing had sought help from chiropractors, physiotherapists, massage therapists, osteopaths, and a number of different doctors at a sports medicine clinic - all to no avail.

Through ISAEC, he received a personalized exercise program, but that proved not to be enough to ameliorate his pain. He was then referred to Marcia Correale, an advanced practice physiotherapist and practice lead with ISAEC. Correale, who works out of Toronto Western Hospital with Rampersaud, advised that Jagelewski get a steroid injection.

During a recent interview, he said he was feeling much improvement and could sit for four hours.

"I saw doctor after doctor after doctor and it felt like there was really no end game in all of this ... It was only until (coming to) this clinic ... that I got help," he said. "I wouldn't say that I have no pain. But it's mitigated, it's manageable pain right now."

Correale says back pain tends to recur. It can be managed but not cured.

"Sometimes when people go to different practitioners, they are looking for someone who will fix them. Sometimes no one is really going to fix them, but people can give you tools to help you manage your symptoms," she says.

Rampersaud calls this "ping-pong" health care and says patients deserve better.

"What I mean is patients are being bounced back and forth from provider to provider, often getting contradictory opinions and treatments. With lack of co-ordinated care for conditions that require multiple providers to manage, our provider-centric system produces what it is designed to give - fragmented, episodic care that is of poor quality and value to patients, providers and the payers."

Rampersaud explains that Ontario's health system, like many around the world, is siloed and is "provider centred" rather than "patient centred."

Different types of health-care providers have not worked well together. Turf wars, payment schemes and a lack of political will are among the reasons the system has not evolved in a way that is best for patients and taxpayers.

'The first thing we did was break down the silos and plop the patient in the middle," Rampersaud remarks.

Primary-care practitioners are a key part of this new "shared-care model" as are patients who are expected to play a central role in the "self management" of their pain, he notes.

The Inter-professional Spine Assessment and Education Clinics allow patients suffering from back pain to get better, faster and more appropriate care.

Dr. Sarah Newbery, former president of the Ontario College of Family Physicians, participated in the pilot project. She says ISAEC has been a boon to primary-care providers such as herself.

"ISAEC has been designed by clinicians for clinicians," says Newbery, who works in a rural practice in Marathon, Ont., along the northern shore of Lake Superior. "It has made management of lower back pain easier for my patients and it has made this challenging area of medicine easier for me."

Rampersaud says his career is much more satisfying today than it was a decade ago. His waiting list is shorter and most of the patients he sees for surgical consultations are actually candidates for surgery.

Other patients who might have been referred to him in the past are getting faster and more appropriate care from physiotherapists and chiropractors at rapid assessment clinics.

"I can't see myself ever wanting to practise the way we used to practise," he says.

The Star is profiling 12 Canadians who are making our lives better. Next week we talk to overdose prevention advocate Sarah Blyth.

Theresa Boyle is a Toronto-based reporter covering health. Follow her on Twitter: @theresaboyle

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Renowned spine surgeon is transforming the way Ontario deals with back pain | The Star

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Dr. Raj Rampersaud launched a pilot project that drastically cut wait times for treatment of lower back pain and changed how Ontario tackles the chronic complaint. He is one of 12 Canadians the Star is profiling who are making our lives better.

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Overdose Response Activist

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VANCOUVER-Two years ago, something terrible was happening in Vancouver: a killer was on the loose and hundreds of people were dying.

The killer stalked construction workers who had been injured years ago on the job. It killed teenage girls. And soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan. It struck on the street, when people were alone in their houses, in coffee shop bathrooms and public libraries.

Sarah Blyth was determined to slow the carnage.

"There were just so many overdose deaths and there were so many overdoses every day and it became so overwhelming that we basically just ... said can we do this? Can we open up the back gate and put a tent and put a couple people there?" Blyth said.

The killer was fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that has tainted nearly all illicit drugs in British Columbia and is now reaching a deadly hand across Canada. With two other long-time activists and a team of volunteers, Blyth started the country's first overdose prevention site in the Downtown Eastside, a Vancouver neighbourhood where many residents struggle with poverty, addiction and mental health.
Read more: Changemakers: Extraordinary people who have an impact on the way we live
Blyth, 46, knew that if she set up a tent and a table in a Downtown Eastside alley and trained volunteers to administer the overdose reversal drug naloxone, they would save lives.

There was just one problem: it was completely illegal.

"We didn't care, Sarah didn't care," said Norma Vaillancourt, who lost her husband years ago to an overdose and now works at the prevention site. "We just wanted to save lives."

Blyth has a Grade 10 education; a learning disability and attention deficit disorder meant she never really found a place in the school system. She bounced around several schools on Vancouver's middle-class west side: University Hill, Lord Byng, Kitsilano Secondary.

"I understand how people can slip through the cracks," she said. "I understand how people don't fit in certain parts of the system. It happens a lot."

Instead, Blyth gravitated to snowboarding and skateboarding. In her early 20s, she and a group of friends started an indoor skateboarding space called the Clubhouse. Then it got shut down by the fire marshal, and there was suddenly nowhere for skateboarders to go.

Blyth started an advocacy group out of a community centre and began to lobby city politicians and neighbourhood residents for more outdoor skate parks. It was a hard sell.

"A lot of people think teenagers are loud and skate parks are loud and it brings chaos," she said.

"We had to meet with people and teach them that having young people do something besides just hang around in their basement or be bored with doing things they shouldn't be doing, why not let them do what they want to do.

"I learned how to push something through that people didn't necessarily understand."

Advocating for skate parks led Blyth to decide to run as a Vancouver park board commissioner in 2008. That was also the year she started working in the Downtown Eastside at the New Fountain shelter, a low-barrier shelter that allowed homeless people to bring in their pets (including, Blyth says, one pet snake), stay together with their partner, and keep their belongings with them.

By 2016, Blyth was managing the Downtown Eastside street market, located in an empty lot on East Hastings the city had designated as a place people could legally sell second-hand goods. Blyth now lives a short distance away from the neighbourhood, on Commercial Dr., but she said the Downtown Eastside is where she feels she belongs.

Vaillancourt is a worker at Vancouver's overdose prevention clinic. She says it's rewarding work because she used to be "in that same spot."

"It's a great community. You won't find a better, more interesting community of people in Vancouver," Blyth said. "I think not everybody understands that, but it's very colourful and I love it."

The winter of 2016 was unusually cold in Vancouver, and the cold was particularly cruel to the people who lived on the streets of the Downtown Eastside and succumbed to overdose. In early December, the province's chief health officer, Perry Kendall, issued a grim call for action: if people weren't outright dying of an overdose, he said, they were often ending up severely brain damaged from exposure to the cold and lack of oxygen.

St. Paul's Hospital in downtown Vancouver was overwhelmed, sometimes with people who were overdosing over and over again. The fire chief appeared before city council to plead for more resources: firefighters were burning out from attending so many calls. Every evening the air would be filled with the sound of sirens as ambulances and fire trucks raced through the streets.

In the Downtown Eastside, Blyth and her team of volunteers were fighting the cold with space heaters in the large white tent they had set up and filled with chairs, tables and harm-reduction supplies like clean needles and naloxone. There was also an open area beside the tent where people could either inject or smoke drugs. If someone overdosed, volunteers would spring into action, injecting naloxone and calling 911.

The idea had seemed like a no-brainer to Blyth and long-time Downtown Eastside advocates Ann Livingston and Chris Ewart: everyone who worked at the market was already helping with overdose after overdose.

The alley behind the market is where so many people go to use drugs, so it made sense to set up shop right there, Blyth said. While a Health Canada-approved legal safe-injection site, Insite, is just a block away, it's almost always full, and the strict federal requirements then in place made it almost impossible to open another legal site. (At the time, there were only two safe-injection sites in Canada, both in downtown Vancouver.) Waiting for government policy to change would have taken months.

Blyth was working long hours, but it still didn't seem like enough.

"You'd wonder if after you left, someone would die in the alley. Were we open late enough? Or could we be open earlier?" she said. "If people died who you knew, you'd worry about that."

Then one night in Victoria, the province's capital, then-health minister Terry Lake woke up at 4 a.m.

"It was freezing in my hotel room and I started thinking about people who are homeless and people who are volunteering at the overdose prevention site," Lake recalled.

"It just crystallized in my mind, here I was in discomfort and I couldn't even imagine the people on the street dealing with substance use issues and the threat of taking a toxic drug and dying."

Several weeks before, Lake had visited Blyth's tent.

"She was so open and willing to share and didn't treat me like some government guy," said Lake, who has since left government.

"In the face of the crisis, she had such an impact on me that I thought, this is crazy: We've got someone out there by herself, you're saving people's lives, and it's our job to do that very thing."

In the first week of December, Kendall and Patricia Daly, chief health officer for Vancouver Coastal Health, called a news conference. At Lake's direction, health authorities would immediately begin to open more overdose prevention sites, modelled after the site operating behind the Downtown Eastside market.

And Blyth and her team got a Christmas present: a heated trailer donated by a local construction company.

To date, there have been no deaths at any overdose prevention site in Canada.

After the tent behind the market had been open for a few months, Blyth started to get calls from people in other cities, usually frontline workers who wanted to know how to open an overdose prevention site in Nanaimo, Edmonton or Toronto.

Her advice was always the same. Set up a table and chairs, train volunteers. And don't ask for permission.

A familiar pattern followed: In Toronto, Mayor John Tory at first opposed a site that volunteers opened in a park, but he softened his stance after visiting it. In Nanaimo, volunteers set up a site in a city hall parking spot, prompting staff to close the city hall building. The overdose prevention site then opened in another location and is still operating.

The leaders of American cities like New York, Seattle, San Francisco and Philadelphia have also expressed interest in the idea, although regulatory hurdles have so far prevented overdose prevention sites from opening there.

At the Overdose Prevention Site on East Hastings St. in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, people take a seat at cubicles to inject drugs. There is a safe place to displose of needles at each cubicle. (Jennifer Gauthier)

The Ontario government, meanwhile, is wrestling with the future of its overdose prevention sites and has paused plans to open three new temporary sites while it carries out a review of the existing facilities.

Vancouver's first Overdose Prevention Site isn't in a tent anymore: It's now located inside a long, narrow storefront in a building beside the market. The front entrance is locked; the real action takes place in the back, where people enter from the alley and take a seat at a cubicle to inject drugs. If they overdose, volunteers are on hand to give them naloxone and call 911.

In 2016, 993 people died of overdose in B.C., almost double the number in 2015, according to the B.C. Coroners Service.

In 2017, the number of fatalities continued to climb, totalling 1,450 by year's end - but in the summer of that year the number of deaths per month started to fall below 100 for the first time in 10 months. This summer, the number had started to once again tick upwards: 162 deaths in March, 133 in April, 134 in July. B.C. is currently on track to record 1,750 overdose deaths in 2018.

While the death toll continues to rise, the province's chief coroner and health officers have acknowledged the role of overdose prevention sites in slowing the rate of fatalities.

At the Overdose Prevention Site on East Hastings St., reminders of the heavy toll of the overdose crisis are never far away. On the other side of a red plastic curtain that separates the cubicles from the rest of the space, six notices of memorial services for people who lost their lives to overdose are posted:Tom Gordon, Chris McPartlin, Doris Schneider, Joseph Steinhauer, Bahman Jokar-Jangkar and Rose Brill.

Blyth says the work is far from over. In 2017, she founded the High Hopes Foundation to provide marijuana to help people get off opioids. But while many cannabis dispensaries operate in Vancouver, they're all technically illegal, and last month a High Hopes kiosk was raided by Vancouver police.

Blyth is now running for city council in this month's Vancouver election and she continues to push for change in drug treatment policy.

"People have to listen when you're a city councillor," she said.

"We need decriminalization, making sure people have safe access to drugs. More detox, more peer support for people with lived experience."

Lake has endorsed her. "She had a way of making people see that was the right thing to do," he said. "She comes at it in a way that makes you want to understand her point of view."

The Star is profiling 12 Canadians who are making our lives better. Next week we talk to women's business booster Vicki Saunders.

Jen St. Denis is a Vancouver-based reporter covering affordability and city hall. Follow her on Twitter: @jenstden

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She was determined to stop the senseless dying in her city. What she did next was illegal - but it saved lives | The Star

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Sarah Blyth was key in setting up the country's first overdose prevention site in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood hard hit by the deadly opioid crisis. She is one of 12 Canadians the Star is profiling who are making our lives better.

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Women's Business Kickstarter

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There was a premature ending to this story, an ending that involved public markets and rounds of financing and men in suits.

Or the sense of an ending, to steal from a great novelist.

For there was Vicki Saunders, a woman of indomitable spirit who had ridden a comet of an idea, a company designed to foster young brilliance and ignite smart young companies. And then came the flock of suits, the pressure to conform to a corporate playbook women had played no role in writing, the criticisms. You're too emotional as a leader. You're not supposed to run a company this way. We don't want you to be the CEO - we want him to be the CEO.

Placing herself back in that moment two decades ago is effortless for Saunders, for the retelling is central to where she is today. "That was a lack-of-leadership moment for me because I didn't stand up to it," she says. "I caved."

And then she got back up.

Now Saunders is 53. This past spring she moved into bright white loft-style office space in Toronto's garment district. There is a map of the world affixed to one wall of the offices of SheEO, the inventively designed, women-directed funding venture she leads. On the map, Canada sports a purple decal. As do the United States, Australia and New Zealand. As Saunders extends the reach of her organization into Asia and Europe those regions too will be coloured purple. The ambition: to create a billion-dollar fund that will annually back 10,000 women entrepreneurs around the globe.

That's an audacious goal. But Saunders's story is captivating. Her days running, appropriately, a company called NRG reinforced lifelong experiences that make her journey deeply relatable. "I was surrounded by people who had picked at me and told me everything that was wrong with me," she says. "I was clearly aware of everything that wasn't right with me, thank you very much. I realized in hindsight how incredibly important it is to surround yourself with people who lift you up and notice what you're great at. We are so beautifully trained to notice all the negatives and not the positives. Everything's about the deficit focus in the world."

The positives Saunders brought to the table all those years ago were dismissed. Corporate culture? Who cares? If it doesn't register on a balance sheet, the suits did not want to know. "They weren't comfortable with my leadership style. I cried at team meetings. Like, oh my God there's something wrong with you. I brought my emotion to the table."

Saunders's smile is broad and welcoming, but her message is firmly set. That emotion, she says, "is part of the power of who we are."

The power of SheEO goes like this: 500 women "activators" individually or in a group contribute $1,100. Understand that this is not an investment. There's no return on investment, no payback, at least not in dollar terms. The activators can, but are not compelled to, play a role in choosing which women entrepreneurs will be funded. The loan is interest-free, repayable across five years. As those funds are repaid, the monies circle back into the venture capital pot. The circle of support, of shared ideas and feedback and mentoring, grows and grows as the circle of activators blooms.

Entrepreneurs are chosen based on certain criteria. The enterprise must be led by, and principally owned by, women. The business itself must bring fresh thinking, defined as a "new mindset, new model or new solution in how they run their business or in their product and service." The company's export potential is a key consideration.

Hayley Mullins is the co-founder of SleepBelt and the Joeyband, a skin-to-skin baby carrying system designed to hold a newborn securely against Mom.

Toni Desrosiers in Victoria is an activator today. In 2015 she was one of the first SheEO recipients. Desrosiers had invented beeswax food wrap. She named her company Abeego Designs Inc. and spent, she says, the first few years experimenting with it. "I understood its function, but I didn't necessarily understand its total purpose, which is the fact that it's breathable, so it keeps food far fresher than any synthetic food wrap on the market."

Conventional lenders were not interested. "Their position was, 'who are you to dare to take on plastic food wrap? It's a well-established product, with dominance around the world. Who do you think you are to take that on?'" Not that potential lenders were much interested in her response. "The sentiment was, 'oh, you don't know anything about business, you don't have any money and we're not going to give you any.' "

So she started out selling at small-scale markets. And then she gained distribution across Canada. And then she started selling online, which pushed her into the U.S. She landed a distributor in the European Union. What began as a small, organically grown, "very, very handcrafted" largely self-funded enterprise was at a turning point. "By the time 2015 rolled around, we were scaling quite quickly, we were growing really fast, but the ability to make the product at the speed we needed to make it wasn't there," she says.

She had heard about SheEO. Given her lack of success in securing conventional financing, she was hesitant. But she was struck by the unconventional application form. "One of the questions was, 'How are you going to change the world?' Incredible ... Instead of 'How are you going to make money?' Most women I know who are running businesses, the first answer out of their mouths is not, 'I'm doing this because I can make a lot of money.' It's typically related to the impact they're making and how that's going to leave legacy ripples through the next generation."

Of the monies raised by SheEO in 2015, $500,000 was split amongst five ventures. Abeego was one of them. "We actually don't reveal how much money each venture gets," Desrosiers explains. "Rather we negotiate for our portion of it, which I think is really unique."

Abeego was rebranded, the production process simplified. "Getting the SheEO funding allowed me to do that," says Desrosiers. Sales in 2017 grew by 275 per cent. This year Abeego is on track to double that growth.

At the SheEO offices, each of the funded ventures is promoted along those bright white walls. There's Skipper Otto's, a Vancouver community-based fishery that supports independent fishing families and sustainable fish harvesting. There's The Town Kitchen, a corporate lunch delivery firm in Oakland, Calif., that provides skills training and pathways to college for urban youth between the ages of 15 and 25. There's the SleepBelt, a swaddling skin-to-skin support system for babies and their new parents.

Vicki Saunders never saw herself as an entrepreneur, at least not during her growing up days in Ottawa, many of which were spent on the Saunders Farm, still a going concern today as a venue for weddings, corporate events and "Frightfest" in the fall. "When I was young we had a strawberry farm - pick your own strawberries, 32 acres," Saunders says. "So I have a sore back for the rest of my life from weeding as a kid. I really learned the value of hard work but also working in a community." Mazes. Tree plantings. Log construction. There were endlessly creative parent-driven projects. "It was absolutely not OK to be sitting around ever."

But there was no talk about the entrepreneurial path. "My parents never talked about the word entrepreneur ... You go get a job and you do the other stuff on the side."

Saunders's own path was marked significantly by her post-university backpack travels to Europe, which dovetailed with the fall of Communist Europe. She found herself in Prague surrounded by newly sprung idealists with hopes for a limitless future. For a time she ran an import business, and opened a retail store in the Czech Republic selling clothes from India that had been hand-blocked in colourful vegetable dyes. "Anything was possible," she says of her time there.

A central thought stayed with Saunders: "What are the conditions that allow a person to emerge at their highest potential? ... I have been on that journey for almost 30 years."

Back home in the mid-'90s she continued on that path, creating an international co-op program for high school students with a curriculum focused on technology, global education and entrepreneurship. The success of that initiative led to the launch of KidsNRG, harnessing teams of young people aged 14 to 24 to provide marketable insights to corporations eager to demystify the consumer tastes and habits of youth.

From there, creating the NRG Group Inc. seemed a natural evolution. Instead of tapping young people for their ideas, why not start a company that would provide seed capital for promising online startups? Why not become an incubator? And why not merge with a Toronto-based investment fund and go public?

The timing was fateful. Markets on the precipice of the dot.com bust were jittery. An initial public offering in the spring of 2000 raised just $15 million, a huge step down from an expected $50 million. Promises made around the launch frequency of ventures - NRG was to provide as much as $250,000 in start-up capital to individual companies - were never met. In the fall, Saunders was insisting that the company was on track with its growth plans. Yet a corporate restructuring in January 2001 left her without an executive title and instead a 12-month retainer to provide consulting services to NRG. In April 2001, just a year after going public, the company's chief operating officer told the Financial Post that "it's fair to say the financial guys are now in control."

Would a buoyant market have delivered a different outcome? It's impossible to say.

SheEO staff members, including founder Vicki Saunders, far left, gather for a meeting including at the SheEO headquarters on Spadina Ave. near Queen St. W. in Toronto. (Richard Lautens)

But what can be said is that Saunders continued to nurture the germ of an idea. She had already launched the SheEO terminology - NRG would host "SheEO of the Year" contests - and as much as she resisted a broad gender-based initiative, the facts were prodding her in that direction. Consider the paucity of venture capital funding that is directed toward women. Fortune magazine's analysis of the gender gap in venture capital funding found that just 2.2 per cent of VC dollars went to female founders in 2017. That, says Saunders, calls for radical change.

As for the corporate playbook, Saunders does sound radical. "Our goal here is to fund you on your own terms. We don't push you to grow. You tell us what you want to do and we decide if we're going to select you or not based on what you're going to do."

At the time of our interview in August, Saunders was in the midst of planning a pilot project for young women in Toronto high schools and busy with "activator season," working to add as many as 3,000 activators across the four regions in which SheEO operates. That would double the size of the activator network in which Toni Desrosiers continues to play a part. "I will always be an activator because I think Vicki has such an incredibly important vision," Desrosiers says. Desrosiers's life has been changed by it, both in the growth of her own business and in the perpetual cycle of supporting other women entrepreneurs.

The Star is profiling 12 Canadians who are making our lives better. Next week we talk to Jean-François Archambault, a food recovery hero.

Jennifer Wells is a business columnist based in Toronto. Reach her on email: jenwells@thestar.ca

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She's helping women change the world - one entrepreneur at a time | The Star

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There was a premature ending to this story, an ending that involved public markets and rounds of financing and men in suits. Or the sense of an ending, to steal from a great novelist. For there was Vicki Saunders, a woman of indomitable spirit who had ridden a comet of an idea, a company designed to foster young brilliance and ignite smart young companies.

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Food Recovery Hero

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MONTREAL-Everybody at the Welcome Hall Mission looks forward to hockey nights - especially Montreal Canadiens home games.

Like most Montrealers, a lot of the people here are diehard fans. But for those who come to this mission in a converted factory in the southwest district of St-Henri for help, there's an added treat: a gourmet meal the next afternoon.

Thanks to a partnership with the Bell Centre, home to the Canadiens, all the uneaten food served in the arena's 124 private and corporate boxes is packaged, refrigerated and brought to the Welcome Hall Mission where it is served for lunch over the next day or two.

"Sometimes it's pasta filled with duck, or ribs, or beef brochettes. There are cheese plates and cold-cut platters - delicious high-end food that in the past would have gone straight to the garbage," said Kathryn Stephens, the mission's director of development and community engagement. "Now the 200-plus homeless men who eat in our cafeteria get to enjoy it, too.

"It's no wonder we are always cheering for the Canadiens to make it into the playoffs!"

La Tablée des Chefs (which roughly translates as Chefs' Table) is the organization that makes it happen. The non-profit group is in the process of revolutionizing the redistribution of food waste from the hotel and restaurant industry. It is turning the commercial kitchen into a place for social change and the chefs, cooks and candy makers who work there into the agents.

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Jean-Francois Archambault visits the Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment kitchen at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto where his group has partnered with Hellmann's and MLSE to launch the Real Food Rescue program to take fresh surplus food and redistribute it to those in need. (Richard Lautens)

Jean-François Archambault, who founded the group in 2003 and serves as its indefatigable CEO, has come up with a formula that makes it easy for chefs and restaurant owners to rescue unused food promptly and safely. In its 15 years in existence, the organization's food brokerage service has set some pretty impressive benchmarks: 750 million tonnes of uneaten food diverted from landfills; more than 2 million people fed with food recovered from restaurants, hockey arenas, hotels, bakeries and hospitals. Along the way it has begun to change the way the food industry handles the excess.

From a modest storefront in suburban Longueuil, on Montreal's South Shore, La Tablée des Chefs has now expanded to Calgary, Ottawa and Toronto, as well as Mexico City and Paris, where the executive chef to French President Emmanuel Macron recently came on board. And this month, the group partnered with Hellmann's and Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment to launch the Real Food Rescue program, taking fresh surplus food from Scotiabank Arena and redistributing it to families who need it most.

Food waste has become an enormous global concern. According to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, as much as a third to half of food produced for human consumption is wasted in one way or another. In March, the Commission for Environmental Co-operation, which includes Canada, Mexico and the United States, released a report that estimated 168 million tonnes of food is wasted in North America every year. In Canada, that amounts to roughly $31 billion worth of food - or 396 kilograms per capita. The reasons are myriad - from overproduction, product damage and imperfect best-before labelling to wastefulness in home kitchens.

Clement hs worked with La Tablée des Chefs for 10 years. She says founder Jean-François Archambault has inspired her to serve those who have less.

It is a problem that is beginning to attract popular attention thanks in part to efforts by activists like the Michelin-starred Italian chef Massimo Bottura, who got people talking when he set up a soup kitchen not far from the prestigious Expo Milan international food fair in 2015 and cooked meals from the event's garbage bins.

But back in the late 1990s, when it first dawned on Archambault that obscene quantities of uneaten food were being discarded in restaurant, hotel and banquet-hall kitchens, it was not a sexy topic. The term "food waste" conjured up images of rotten food that was unfit for human consumption and restaurants and hotels often relegated their leftovers to the dumpster without a second thought.

Archambault, a cook and self-described foodie, had recently graduated from the ITHQ (Institut de tourisme et d'hôtellerie du Québec), Montreal's restaurant and hotel management school, and was working as sales manager in charge of banquets at Château Vaudreuil, a hotel and reception hall in a leafy locale on the shores of Lake of Two Mountains, off the western tip of Montreal island. Every weekend, after the wedding, anniversary and bar mitzvah hoopla ended, he'd watch mountains of leftover food being tossed into dumpsters.

There would be shrimp and crudités from the cocktail stations and filet mignon, vegetables and potatoes - whole pans of food that hadn't even been plated. Sometimes there would be 30 or more extra portions of everything, untouched, because kitchens always overestimate so as not to run short. The staff might eat a bit of the leftovers at the end of their shifts, but most was thrown out. Archambault says he began to wonder: "What if there was a women's shelter or a group home for 12 or 15 people nearby? You could feed everybody there with all of this. For two days."

La Tablée des Chefs has developed a simple and sustainable process that sets a new standard for salvaging food in the hotel and restaurant industry. Here's how the system works: Hotels, restaurants and institutions that want to donate their surplus food - on an impromptu or recurring basis - contact La Tablée. Together they figure out how much food they have to give, who will wrap it up and put it away at the end of the day, whether it needs refrigeration, when it can be picked up and where, how many people it will feed. The organization making the donation must agree to adhere to strict hygiene standards. (Not to donate food that has been left at room temperature for more than two hours, for example.)

On the other end, La Tablée fields requests from charitable organizations, both large and small, that are looking for food to supplement their programs. They are the ones who will be responsible for picking up the food and for ensuring that the "cold chain" is maintained. This means refrigerated products remain refrigerated and frozen products remain frozen at all times. They must pledge to serve the donated food, free-of-charge, in a timely fashion.

Archambault, a ball of endless energy whose every sentence - in person and in emails and texts - ends with an exclamation mark, sees himself and his organization as "the missing link" between the two. La Tablée's primary job, he says, is to make food recovery seamless and safe. To that end, his staff studies the needs of both the donor and the beneficiary organization and sets up a customized program that brings them together. He provides donors with all the containers required to store and transport the food, whether that's single-use aluminum containers or large multiple-use food-grade plastic tubs. He also provides labels that clearly indicate what the food is, when it was made, how it needs to be stored and whether it contains any known allergens.

"If a chef feels secure and confident about the process, he or she is going to be more than willing to give," Archambault said.

Baptiste Peupion, executive chef at the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth Hotel in downtown Montreal is one of 90 chefs who work with La Tablée. He says it is highly rewarding for the kitchen staff to know they are "closing the circle" when they set aside leftovers from the hotel's numerous banquet halls for the Salvation Army crew that comes twice or three times a week to pick it up. At the end of their shifts, the kitchen staff inspects the leftovers at the buffets. What is deemed worthy is transferred to storage bins and stashed in a specially designated part of the fridge. When the pickup crew turns up it knows exactly where to look and what to take.

"As chefs and cooks, we know where the food that comes into our kitchen comes from. And we know what it takes to prepare it and cook it," Peupion said. "It's really great to know that at the end of the line it will be given to someone in need."

Gerry Legatos, the procurement manager at the Old Brewery Mission, which feeds nearly 10,000 people a month, says La Tablée's tried-and-true food-recovery system and its logistical support have given food recovery a new allure.

"There was once a taboo around sharing food waste. People in the food industry worried about donating without knowing how the food would be handled once it left their kitchens. They were terrified of food poisoning," Legatos said. "But there is a new level of comfort with the kind of structure La Tablée has developed. Donors are more ready to help. And on the receiving end, we are reassured that what we are getting is safe. Too often we have to turn down leftover food because there aren't guarantees that it has been handled properly every step of the way."

La Tablée's goal isn't just to salvage leftover food. Archambault says he also wants to get people thinking about issues that would reduce food waste from the start - such as reducing portion sizes in restaurants, shortening the time food stays on buffet tables and making consumers aware of how much food goes to waste in their own fridges. In changing our mentality about food waste, he says he is also promoting social inclusion and human dignity.

La Tablée's other mission, no less ambitious, is to change the way young people think about food. The organization's educational arm offers 24-week culinary classes taught by chefs in 125 high schools in Quebec. (The Quebec government recently invested $5 million and the IGA supermarket chain another $1.7 million to help La Tablée expand its Kitchen Brigade program to more than 250 schools by 2022. The program is also launching this fall in four Toronto high schools.)

Archambault, who is 42, grew up in a middle-class family that loved to eat. His father was a lawyer, a bon vivant who co-founded a gastronomy club but also ran the neighbourhood Christmas food drive. His mother was an accomplished home cook and vegetable gardener. At an early age, he and his brother were enlisted to weed the garden. Even before he was a teenager, Archambault was already making appetizers, soups and salads for family meals. His own three daughters are also budding cooks. But Archambault says he recognizes that many young people - especially those in underprivileged families - grow up without knowing the pleasures and rewards of cooking their own food and eating it around a dinner table with those they love.

It's the last day of culinary camp at La Tablée's Longueuil headquarters and teenagers wearing aprons are whisking and stirring, the clatter of pans and happy chatter of voices filling the large professional kitchen. They have spent the day learning to make pasta and sauces and now it's time to scrub the pots and wipe down the counters.

"Home economics classes aren't part of the school curriculum anymore. At home, where usually both parents work, there is less and less time for cooking and eating together. More and more, people are eating prepared food on the run," says Archambault.

"But the youths who take our cooking classes get really passionate about cooking. They start to think about other issues, too, like nutrition and sustainability. And they become ambassadors of good eating among their peers.

"It begins by learning to make soup and salad. But the long-term goal is for these students to develop culinary independence, which leads to healthier eating habits, which leads to lower levels of obesity."

The Star is profiling 12 Canadians who are making our lives better. Next week we talk to STEM education visionary Eugenia Duodu.

Susan Semenak is a Montreal journalist and cookbook author. Follow her on Instagram @ssemenak

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He had an idea to reduce food waste. It helped feed 2 million people | The Star

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Through La Tablée des Chefs, the non-profit he founded in 2003, Jean-François Archambault ensures surplus food from the hotel and restaurant industry ends up on the plates of the needy. He is one of 12 people the Star is profiling who are making our lives better.

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Hugh Evans: What does it mean to be a citizen of the world?

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Hugh Evans started a movement that mobilizes "global citizens," people who self-identify first and foremost not as members of a state, nation or tribe but as members of the human race. In this uplifting and personal talk, learn more about how this new understanding of our place in the world is galvanizing people to take action in the fights against extreme poverty, climate change, gender inequality and more.

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We all know, in theory, that we ought to use less plastic. We've all been distressed by the sight of Blue Planet II's hawksbill turtle entangled in a plastic sack, and felt chastened as we've totted up our weekly tally of disposable coffee cups. But still, UK annual plastic waste is now close to 5m tonnes, including enough single-use plastic to fill 1,000 Royal Albert Halls; the government's planned elimination of "avoidable" plastic waste by 2042 seems a quite dazzling task. It was reported this week that scientists at the University of Portsmouth have accidentally developed a plastic-eating mutant enzyme, and while we wait to see if that will save us all, for one individual the realisation of just how much plastic we use has become an intensely personal matter.

One early evening in mid-2016, Daniel Webb, 36, took a run along the coast near his home in Margate. "It was one of those evenings where the current had brought in lots of debris," he recalls, because as Webb looked down at the beach from his route along the promenade he noticed a mass of seaweed, tangled with many pieces of plastic. "Old toys, probably 20 years old, bottles that must have been from overseas because they had all kinds of different languages on them, bread tags, which I don't think had been used for years ..." he says. "It was very nostalgic, almost archaeological. And it made me think, as a mid-30s guy, is any of my plastic out there? Had I once dropped a toy in a stream near Wolverhampton, where I'm from, and now it was out in the sea?"

Webb decided that he would start a project to keep all the plastic he used in the course of an entire year. He would not modify his plastic consumption in that time (although he had already given up buying bottled water), and each item would be carefully washed and stored in his spare room.

Webb is a fan of a project - prior to this he ran six half-marathons in six days - but he had little notion of what he would do with his personal plastic mountain until last summer, when he had the idea to make it into an exhibition. Earlier this month, Webb's 12-month haul became part of the Mural-by-the-Sea project, displayed on a billboard at Margate's Dreamland funfair, rechristened Everyday Plastic and documented by the photographer Ollie Harrop.

"Three days before the billboard went up, we started weighing and sorting and counting it all," Webb says. "There were 4,490 pieces in the collection. If you take me as an average person and multiply it by the UK population it means we throw away 293bn plastic items a year." But he is cautious about speaking in such terms. "As soon as you talk billions, it all becomes quite abstract," he explains. "It's like people talk about climate change, and you can't get your head around it. But plastic is tangible, and if you take it back to individual items it starts to resonate."

Of those 4,490 individual items, 60% was food packaging - largely salad and vegetable wrappers and bread bags. Ninety-three per cent was single-use plastic, and just eight items - mostly coffee lids - were made out of biodegradable material.

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'People say: wow, you really like Hula Hoops.' Photograph: Ollie Harrop 2018/Everyday Plastic

"I suppose it is a snapshot of a year in my life," Webb says. "People look at the billboard and say, 'Wow, you really like Hula Hoops, don't you?' Or they say how beautiful it looks, with all the different colours." But it was looking at all the different-coloured items as he sifted through the plastic pile that proved the greatest revelation for Webb. "My reaction when I sorted it all into categories was quite visceral," he says. "You get a really clear picture of what you're consuming and you figure out that all of this stuff was just designed for you to buy it. That black plastic of meat packaging is to hide the colour of the blood, or the brown plastic of mushroom packaging makes the mushrooms look earthy." He laughs. "I work in marketing, and I never thought I'd say this, but we really are being sold stuff we do not need. There is an epidemic of overproduction and overconsumption."

Webb has been a Margate resident for two years, and as he made his regular visit to his local Aldi, he became increasingly aware that it was "practically impossible to go to a supermarket and come away without any plastic packaging ... an aubergine comes in a plastic bag, onions come in a plastic net. And many of these things are made to be obsolete - something like a plastic bag is designed to be used for maybe just 15 minutes. People carry their shopping home in it and then they chuck it away. And it outlives all of them."

Kerbside recycling is limited in Thanet, so prior to his Everyday Plastic project Webb diligently saved up all his bottles and paper and plastic and tins to take to the local recycling centre himself. "But when I took it to the tip, I said: 'Excuse me, where's the plastic recycling?'" he remembers. "And they said: 'Mate, just stick it in the household waste.'"

Recycling, he says, is not the answer - after all, in Webb's collection, just 56 items were made from recycled material. "And that highlights the limits of it," he says. "Recycling is absolutely vital, and we need to invest more in recycling facilities and infrastructure. But really, we need to find ways of using less."

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'Just changing one thing is really important.' Photograph: Ollie Harrop 2018/Everyday Plastic

"Supermarkets are lobbied hard by the packaging industry," Webb says, talking of how he recently visited a shop in Brighton that prides itself on being plastic-free - an achievement that is, of course, laudable. But he also noted that 100g of bran flakes in the shop cost 55p - meaning an average-sized box would add up to more than £4. "We need subsidies for people doing this kind of thing," he says.

The billboard is one element of what Webb hopes will become a bigger project. "I want to take it into schools, and I want to do an exhibition, and I'm working with Friends of the Earth and Surfers Against Sewage to take it to festivals this summer," he says. He will also be publishing a report into the findings of his project at the end of May.

"I'm just one of millions of everyday people who have woken up to what they're consuming," he says. "And the aim is to speak to the awareness-laggers, making people realise that changing your whole lifestyle is difficult, but just changing one thing is still really important. I didn't buy a water bottle last year and I might have used 300 - if everyone did that it would be saving a lot of plastic from going into the sea."
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I kept all my plastic for a year - the 4,490 items forced me to rethink

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Daniel Webb accrued a mountain of plastic - including many packets of Hula Hoops - and made it into a mural, now on display at Dreamland in Margate. We are overproducing and overconsuming, he says, and recycling is not the answer

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Five Ways to Globalize your Classroom

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Educators today have an extraordinary opportunity to inspire authentic global learning by leveraging the 1-1 Digital Learning Environment that is rapidly becoming the norm in schools across the country. With technology at our fingertips, it's never been easier to connect your class with partners around the world for one-on-one collaboration in the globalized classroom. Here are five ways to globalize your classroom with Level Up Village :

1. Study endangered species and learn cutting-edge green-screen presentation skills in Global Explorers . In this course, students become environmental detectives and take a virtual field trip to investigate to explore different animal habitats around the world. Together with global partners from a developing country, they then design and create a shared final project: a green screen multimedia video presentation using videos and images of their chosen species.

2. Create a website with social impact in Global Web Designers . In this course, students team up with global partners to design and create a website focused on global climate change. In addition to learning about hydro, wind, and solar power, they learn to understand trends in global climate change. Moreover, they acquire essential skills in web development by using HTML, CSS and Javascript, while simultaneously learning to problem solve from a global perspective

3. Energize your language arts class with Global Conversations - Malala Yousafzai . In this course, students in your class and a global partner class read and then engage in a guided literature and culture exchange that includes discussions of important themes, such as leadership, access to education and community service. See this to learn more about the recent pilot of this course at Eastern Middle School in Greenwich, Connecticut, in partnership with students in Pakistan, and these articles in Greenwich Time and

4. Develop foreign language skills by connecting with native speakers in Global Language Lab . Available in Arabic or Spanish, this course pairs foreign language students in the U.S. with partners from across the globe for a language and culture exchange for a series of video exchanges on topics such as sports, food, hobbies, travel and career aspirations. Learn more by reading this article by Delbarton School and this one in Education World.

5. about Swift School in Georgia and this Add a 3D Printer to Your School's Makerspace by offering our Global Inventors course. In this course, students learn to harness the power of 3D printing, one of the most innovative technologies of our time, to engineer solutions to real life problems. Using Computer Aided Design (CAD), they create, print and 3D print a variety of projects, culminating in a solar-powered light source they co-design with a global partner student from a developing country. To learn more about this exciting course, read this blog series by a teacher at Delbarton School, this news article blog article with a reflection by a student at St. Joseph's Academy in Baton Rouge and her partner in India.

Why choose Level Up Village? Our innovative global education courses are easy to implement. We provide ready-made curricula, supplies, comprehensive teacher training and seamless connections with our global partners through our globalized classrooms communication platform. By partnering with LUV, your school will directly sponsor Global STEAM education in a developing country through our "take a class, give a class" model. A portion of the tuition is used to deliver the same course to students at one of our Global Partner organizations, many of whom are living on less than $2 a day. Our courses run after school, as part of summer enrichment programs and during the school day. To get started, fill out our contact form and watch for an overview of how Level Up Village facilitates global STEAM collaboration.
For more ideas on creating impactful global learning opportunities for your students, see Five Ways to Super Charge the STEAM Classroom.

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Five Ways to Globalize Your Classroom with Level Up Village

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Educators today have an extraordinary opportunity to inspire authentic global learning by leveraging the 1-1 Digital Learning Environment that is rapidly becoming the norm in schools across the country. With technology at our fingertips, it's never been easier to connect your class with partners around the world for one-on-one collaboration in the globalized classroom.

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Common conceptions about changing the world.

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How To Change The World (a work in progress) | Kid President

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Ten Thousand Villages

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Why our students need to learn more about the world | Ada McKim | TEDxMoncton

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A look into how different countries live.

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See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income | Anna Rosling Rönnlund

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World's First Plastic-Free Aisle in Amsterdam

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World's First Plastic-Free Aisle in Amsterdam

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A model for the rest of the world?

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Read Story Transcript
A supermarket in Amsterdam has become the first in the world to offer an entire aisle of groceries in plastic-free packaging.

The plastic-free aisle at Ekoplaza offers 700 grocery staples - including meat, produce, dairy and snacks - packaged in glass, metal, cardboard or compostable biomaterials.

The Dutch chain plans to roll out plastic-free aisles to all 74 of its stores by year's end. It has vowed not to pass the additional costs of the packaging on to consumers.

"Today is a very exciting day for us," Sian Sutherland, co-founder of A Plastic Planet, told As It Happens host Carol Off.

Sutherland's campaign group worked with the supermarket to make the transition.

"Somebody has stepped up to the plate and said: 'We are going to be first. We are going show the world what a plastic-free aisle can look like.'"

Of the 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic humans made since 1950, 6.3 billion tonnes have already become waste, according to a 2017 study published in Science Advances.

Only nine per cent of that waste has been recycled. The rest accumulates in oceans and landfills, where it can take up to 400 years to degrade.

That's why Sutherland says businesses can't afford to wait for the law to catch up when it comes to plastic-free shopping.

A Plastic Planet is pushing other grocery chains to follow in Ekoplaza's footsteps.

"Legislation takes too long," Sutherland said. "We now know what we are doing to the planet. We can never unknow that. So we have to take action today."

But it's not just about the environmentalism, she said. It's also about consumer choice.

"Why can you buy dairy-free and gluten-free and fat-free and all of those things, but you can't buy plastic-free?" she said.

"The public really wants to have this choice now."

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Amsterdam supermarket opens world's 1st plastic-free aisle | CBC Radio

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Read Story Transcript A supermarket in Amsterdam has become the first in the world to offer an entire aisle of groceries in plastic-free packaging. The plastic-free aisle at Ekoplaza offers 700 grocery staples - including meat, produce, dairy and snacks - packaged in glass, metal, cardboard or compostable biomaterials.

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Examples of Globalization in the Classroom

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Examples of Globalization in the Classroom

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Globalizing your curriculum to foster world ready students can look really different across teachers and disciplines. There is no one best format, rather teachers should focus on developing the...

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Practice Vocabulary while helping a great cause!

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Freerice.com | Not Your Average Online Trivia Game

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Play online, learn online and feed the hungry | Freerice.com

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For every correct answer you choose, 10 grains of rice are raised to help end world hunger through the World Food Programme.

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"A documentary on business for the common good."
Host a screening for your students :)

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Kevin's passion for filmmaking led him to work with the StFX video team and the Athletic department during University, which led him to start KC Productions. Kevin believes that while an effective director needs to be able to tell as story and convey their ideas, it is of paramount importance to be a good listener and effective communicator.

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This is a great resource connected to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

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Global Citizenship Education - What Are We Talking About and Why Does It Matter?

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Global Citizenship Education - What Are We Talking About and Why Does It Matter?

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This article, written in 2012  sums up the Global Citizenship Education in the Higher Education context.

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STEM Education Visionary

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Seated in the hallway of her high school, Eugenia Duodu's head was buried deep in her science textbooks when a student teacher approached.

"You like science?" asked the teacher. Duodu, then in Grade 11, nodded.

Duodu loved science, even though her friends thought it was uncool. It had been a closeted passion since childhood, when she relished TV shows such as The Magic School Bus and Bill Nye the Science Guy. But she had never dreamed of pursuing science. Being Black, raised by a single mom in social housingin Etobicoke,she didn't see herself in that world. She didn't know any scientists and thought they were old white men in lab coats with messy hair. Albert Einstein types

The teacher told Duodu about an upcoming summer mentorship program at the University of Toronto, where students of Indigenous and African ancestry work alongside researchers in labs and clinics. Duodu had grappled with impostor syndrome, doubting her accomplishments and questioning if science was a good fit for her, even though she was a hard worker and had the grades to prove it. And, although she didn't know it, science was literally in her DNA.

She applied, was accepted, and, for the first time, stepped onto a university campus, where she met scientists who looked like her with similar upbringings.

"We were like, 'What? You exist?'... My classmates and I were like, 'We can do this.'... It was a game changer."
More Changemakers: Renowned spine surgeon is transforming the way Ontario deals with back pain She was determined to stop the senseless dying in her city. What she did next was illegal - but it saved lives He had an idea to reduce food waste. It helped feed 2 million people
Duodu went on to get a PhD in chemistry. She's now CEO of Visions of Science Network for Learning, a charitable organization that runs free educational programs in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) for youth in low-income communities. It works with Toronto Community Housing (TCH) and Peel Housing Corporation in 24 locations across Toronto, Mississauga and Brampton, serving more than 500 youth from Grades 3 to 12.

The goal is to break down barriers - negative perceptions of STEM and limited funding for and access to opportunities - and engage kids with hands-on learning experiences. A reason for this is 70 per cent of future jobs will require STEM-based literacy and skills, according to Let's Talk Science, a national STEM-based organization.

"I've always had a passion for youth from (social) housing," says Duodu, 30, who last year moved out of her mom's apartment in TCH. "I saw the opportunity gaps, but also saw their potential."

The organization runs STEM clubs for kids in Grades 3 to 8 on Saturdays from October to May in community spaces such as a building's recreation room or community centre. Children participate in experimental workshops and learn, for instance, how to make paint, build robots and create hydraulic mazes. And they visit places such as the Royal Ontario Museum and the Ontario Science Centre.

When Duodu stepped into a volunteer leadership role at the organization in 2012 - she became CEO in 2016 - STEM clubs were in six communities and are now in 24. They were so successful that a STEM Community Leaders program was created for kids in Grades 8 to 12. In the summer,they visit places such as labs, universities and hospitals. And during the school year, they help run the STEM clubs for younger children, which develops leadership skills.

With Duodu at the helm, the organization became a charity and has been steadily growing, with six full-time staff, 24 part-time workers and 95 volunteers, mostly university STEM students. The organization receives federal funding fromthe Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, which is a provincial agency.

Dawn Britton is the associate director of outreach at U of T Engineering, which has partnered with Visions for almost two decades. Since Duodu came on board, the relationship has deepened. With each passing year, Britton says she sees more kids who aren't afraid to put up their hands, are thinking of taking Grade 11 physics and who want to go to university.

"She's creating a culture within Visions where it is cool to be smart," says Britton. "That's powerful."

And, she says, Duodu has been very good about engaging the support network of youth - parents, grandparents, siblings, influencers - and inviting them to events, which is key to their success.

Nawaal Ali Sharif is one of the hundreds of kids exposed to STEM programs thanks to Visions of Science Network for Learning. The charitable organization runs free educational programs in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics for youth in low-income communities.

Nawaal Ali Sharif, 16, a Grade 11 student at Humberside Collegiate, says Visions programming "will change your life." Four years ago, she started going to the STEM club in her Swansea Mews complex in the city's west end. Back then, Sharif had little interest in science, which was synonymous with lectures and textbooks. That's not the case now. "I actually truly love STEM," she says, noting there were other changes too.

"I was shy. I didn't like speaking and my confidence level was not at its peak ... But since joining the program, my confidence has gone up."

She hopes to study STEM in university and become a teacher. And, she thinks she'd be pretty good too, given her newly acquired leadership skills.

"Visions gave me an understanding of how to handle kids, make them have fun and help them understand and learn concepts they would not ordinarily understand at their age."

She hasn't ruled out becoming a scientist - she knows it's possible.

"When I met Eugenia, I was like 'Whoa.' There are people who look like me who can be scientists. She completely changed my (perception) of what a scientist looked like."

Duodu was raised as an only child in Etobicoke, in a TCH building on Capri Rd., in the Eatonville neighbourhood. She credits her mother with instilling in her a deep sense of community, that was reinforced at their local church - Church on the Queensway - where they are both still active.

Duodu remembers her mother making breakfast for a kid who lived down the hall, and giving it to him in a bag atthe elevator so he wouldn't go to school hungry. Her mother modelled kindness and Duodu was a fast learner.

As a toddler in daycare, according to stories her mom tells, Duodu would wipe the runny noses of children and alert caregivers to poopy diapers. And when she grew up, she'd help her peers by leading tutoring and reading groups.

Duodu's mother, an accounting clerk, was always ready to help with homework, especially math. And she'd sign her daughter up for library programs, piano lessons and art camps. "We didn't have the money to do certain things but my mom made sure to go after opportunities and see what subsidies were available," recalls Duodu.

"I was very empowered to learn and go forward with my learning, but I didn't see that empowerment translate to my classmates, who I knew had the ability ... From a young age, I remember feeling like, 'Why is it that I like this and some people don't?' or 'Why am I doing well and some people aren't?'"

Growing up, she was interested in science, but it was a "weird closeted passion." Then, in Grade 10, at Martingrove Collegiate Institute, she took a biotechnology course. A class project involved having to do a series of tests to determine an unknown bacteria strain. Duodu was hooked. She researched tirelessly and figured it out.

"We had the best teacher. He was a complete light, and was totally hands-on," recalls Duodu. "He opened up my world to the practical side of science. It was like science lifting off your textbook and operating in real life."

She had not planned on continuing science but when Grade 11 started she asked to switch into physics, chemistry and biology. The guidance counsellor discouraged it, saying, "Why would you do that? It's going to be so hard for you."

Duodu was confused. The previous year she had aced science, but maybe the counsellor was right and she couldn't hack it. But Duodu decided to follow her mom's advice and insisted on getting into those science classes.

"As I excelled in university I would think back to that moment and think, 'Oh my goodness, what if I had listened to (the guidance counsellor)? Did she say this to other people who didn't know much about their abilities or themselves?"

During that "game-changer" of a summer mentorship program at the university, Duodu shadowed scientists in labs and followed doctors on rotation, witnessing live births, reading X-rays and studying MRIs.

"It was awesome," recalls Duodu, who returned to high school with a new focus. "I knew I wanted to go to university and I was no longer afraid of going to school for a long time."

While doing an undergraduate degree at U of T - she earned an Honours Bachelor of Science (chemistry and biology) - Duodu worked part-time as a youth worker for Toronto Community Housing.

"I (saw) what life was like across housing, across the city. That started shaping my perspective drastically, seeing how some challenges were the same, and some were completely different, depending on where you lived. Certain ends of the city were better resourced than others and that inevitably affected what happened in school."

At the time, TCH was in the midst of the Tower Renewal project, retrofitting older buildings to make them more energy efficient. Residents complained about things such as low water pressure, and Duodu explained the science behind it and how money being saved could go back into community programs.

"I began to realize that it's so important for communities to be scientifically literate, especially when science is happening to you anyways."

After her undergrad, she pursued a PhD in chemistry. (The Master's program is rolled into the PhD.) Spending countless hours in the lab researching cancer diagnostic tools taught her to look at problems and challenges in a different way and to be open to new possibilities. She drew upon those lessons when she began volunteering with Visions in 2011.

"There were systemic barriers to participation in STEM for youth in low-income communities and I began to think of ways to provide even more opportunities, despite these barriers."

It was also during her PhD that she established a relationship with her father - a chemist - with whom she's now very close.

"It put together a lot of pieces as to why I liked science," she says. "It's funny, I grew up not knowing any scientists and it turns out (I am the daughter of one.)"

Story Behind the Story delivers insights into how the Star investigates, reports, and produces stories.

After finishing her PhD in 2015, Duodu could have pursued academia or industry, but was "deeply passionate" about Visions and dedicated herself full-time to the organization.

There's little research in Canada on children in low-income communities and academic achievement in STEM. But according to a 2014 Toronto District School Board report, the 2011-2012 EQAO results - tests administered by the Education Quality and Accountability Office - show that 65 per cent of students in Grade 3, and 57 per cent of Grade 6 students, from low-income families (earning less than $30,000), achieved the provincial standard for math. By comparison, 89 per cent of students in Grade 3, and 85 per cent in Grade 6, from high-income families (earning more than $100,000), met that standard.

Given the lack of research, Visions is tracking the progress of kids in their STEM clubs.

"We're trying to get the data ... Why are youth from low-income communities so under-represented in STEM? What are the determinants that go into that?

"It doesn't mean that children from low-income communities have less aptitude for science or less interest. Everyone grows up, to a certain point, liking it ... But then it stops."

Maurice Bitran, CEO & Chief Science Officer of the Ontario Science Centre, which partners with Visions, says "every kid who drops out of school or doesn't get the opportunity to pursue what they have talent for, is a loss for society as a whole."

"Anything we can do to inspire kids from these backgrounds and give them opportunities will change their lives, but also will be a positive impact for society."

As for Visions' future, there are plans to expand into communities in Scarborough and Rexdale and grow the programming aimed at high school kids. Beyond that, Duodu hasn't yet decided whether to focus on deepening the impact in the GTA or moving into other parts of Ontario or Canada.

"We have had the opportunity to watch so many of the youth that we work with grow in many ways," says Duodu. "From what I can already see now I am excited about the future of our communities, this city and the country. They are extraordinary and I can't wait to see all that they do."

Eugenia Duodu will be speaking at TEDxToronto at the Evergreen Brickworks on Friday, Oct. 26, at 2:35 p.m. Tomorrow's day-long event can be viewed on a live stream www.tedxtoronto.com beginning at 10 a.m.

The Star is profiling 12 Canadians who are making our lives better. Next week we talk to fiscal transparency watchdog Kevin Page.

Isabel Teotonio is a Toronto-based reporter covering education. Follow her on Twitter: @Izzy74

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Growing up, she dared not dream she could be a scientist. Now she's helping hundreds of kids believe it's possible | The Star

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Seated in the hallway of her high school, Eugenia Duodu's head was buried deep in her science textbooks when a student teacher approached. "You like science?" asked the teacher. Duodu, then in Grade 11, nodded. Duodu loved science, even though her friends thought it was uncool.

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Fiscal Transparency Watchdog

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OTTAWA-By the third year of undergrad, the discipline of economics was starting to lose lustre for young Nigel Wodrich. The tenor of it - with its technocratic nomenclature of human capital and price equilibrium - felt a bit staid, a bit agnostic.

But that feeling was swept aside when he met a new professor who arrived at the University of Ottawa that semester.

His name was Kevin Page.

Wodrich had heard of him, of course. It was 2013, and the bespectacled bureaucrat had just left the public service in a blaze of publicity, after finishing his five-year term as Canada's first-ever Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO). In an era remembered for the government's tight information control, Page's blockbuster reports and financial forecasts repeatedly whipped up furor for Stephen Harper and his Conservative administration.

This earned him accolades as a champion of transparency and accountability, but also a sizable legion of detractors. Former MP Patrick Boyer told Canadian Business that Page was a sanctimonious "white knight" who preened for the media by "wrapping himself in this flag of accountability." The late Jim Flaherty, Harper's finance minister for eight years, once slammed Page as "unreliable, unbelievable, and incredible."

Such acrimony sparked awe for a student like Wodrich. Here was an economist with the gumption to call it like it is, who used his craft to put pressure on politicians to make smarter decisions that would - hopefully - make things better for people. When Wodrich saw that Page was to teach his first class on the 2008 financial crisis, he was hooked. "I have to take that class," he recalled thinking.

It didn't disappoint. In listening to Page talk about how to apply data methodologies to policy issues, Wodrich felt the flame of inspiration. "Working on salient things, working in the public interest, being bold in that work, and being an advocate as well," Wodrich said. "It was something I had never associated with economics."
Read More from the Changemakers Series: Growing up, she dared not dream she could be a scientist. Now she's helping hundreds of kids believe it's possible He had an idea to reduce food waste. It helped feed 2 million people She was determined to stop the senseless dying in her city. What she did next was illegal - but it saved lives
Soon thereafter, Page opened the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy (IFSD) at the university, which he now runs as president and chief executive officer. The place operates as a sort of think tank and training ground, not just for students like Wodrich, but for working public servants who come for schooling in the rigours of fiscal analysis. His methods have since become a model for other governments, who send bureaucrats to his institute.

"People can't follow the money from budgets to estimates documents. And this stuff gets quickly lost," Page, 61, told the Star in his office at the institute. "We need to get to a way better place."

"Kevin takes a genuine interest in developing the next generation," added Sahir Khan, a close friend of Page's who was among the first to join his team at the PBO, and now works with him as executive vice-president of the IFSD.

"His view is that Canada is better off with 35 million PBOs."

There's actually been some progress in that regard. Wodrich was hired as a junior analyst at the PBO in 2015.

Peter Weltman is Ontario's Financial Accountability Officer. He says Kevin Page's legacy as the country's first Parliamentary Budget Officer has inspired his own work.

Page once took a puck to the face during a men's league hockey game. The impact cratered his cheek and cracked his orbital bone in two places. It required the expert hand of a plastic surgeon to fix a titanium plate against the broken section of skull.

"Everybody gets injured," he said with a shrug, seated behind the wooden desk in his office at the IFSD. His face - identical to the image from Harper-era news photos, but for the carpet of post-vacation stubble - tightened into a hockey-guy grimace.

"It's just the price you pay," said Page, crossing his arms and leaning over a steaming mug of coffee. "If you're not getting hit, you're not playing the game."

It's a good metaphor for his time at the PBO. In his 2015 book, Unaccountable: Truth and Lies on Parliament Hill, Page describes a threat to slash his office's budget in the wake of an early controversial report, as well as a feeling of general resistance to his insistence on maximum transparency. "We hung on for dear life," he writes.

He didn't set out spoiling for a fight. When the creation of the PBO was first forecast, Page wasn't sure why anyone would want the job. In the wake of the Liberal " sponsorship scandal," Harper, who was then the new prime minister, had promised legislation to increase government accountability and transparency. Part of the law was the creation of the new position of a Parliamentary Budget Officer, who would lead an office to produce cost estimates for proposed programs at the request of MPs.

By that time Page had climbed the rungs of the public service, from his beginning in the early 1980s as a master's of economics grad in the finance department to his standing as an assistant secretary in the Privy Council Office, the nerve-centre of the federal bureaucracy that supports the prime minister and cabinet in Ottawa. Approaching 50, he lived a comfortable life in suburban Ottawa, married with three kids and coaching hockey and baseball in his spare time.

"You could have a nice, secure job path. Retire and live happily ever after," Page said. "It was kind of a dream job as an economist."

Everything changed in the early hours of Sept. 9, 2006.

Page's 20-year-old son Tyler was walking on the train tracks near Algonquin College in Ottawa when he was struck by a train and killed - a tragic accident that, as Page writes in his book, "felt as if a knife had been thrust into my stomach."

Priorities like a "nice, secure job path" to retirement were suddenly meaningless. After several months in a haze of sorrow that he says never dissipates, Page decided to gamble everything and apply to become PBO. He had lost a son. Nothing could be worse than that.

"There's no question. We're all shaped by different experiences in life," Page said. "You don't look at risk the same way."

He never knew why exactly - out of a lack of other options, or out of empathy for his loss, Page guesses - but Harper gave him the job. Page was named Canada's first PBO in March 2008.

He had long admired the Congressional Budget Office in the United States. Established in the late 1970s, the CBO set the standard for independent assessment of proposed public programs and financial forecasts, Page said. He also admired its commitment to transparency, how it makes information public and aims to communicate what it is doing clearly with American citizens. He wanted to build something of the same quality with the PBO.

"The first thing he told me is I have a mandate, and I think Parliament needs help," said Mostafa Askari, a career bureaucrat who first met Page at Queen's University when Page was a master's student who marked papers for Askari, then a PhD candidate in economics. Askari was among the first people to join Page and set up the PBO. He is now deputy PBO in Ottawa, and plans to retire in January.

"He said, 'I don't care about the risk, I don't care whether people get upset,'" Askari recalled. "That's one of the reasons I wanted to join him."

Page and his team received their first request for a cost estimate later that year, just before the 2008 federal election. It was from Paul Dewar, who was then the NDP's defence critic and he wanted to know the total cost of Canada's ongoing war in Afghanistan, launched with the U.S. and other allies in the aftermath of 9/11.

There were headwinds right away. Much of the information the PBO needed, Canada's defence department refused to provide. Page said he had to go to other countries, such as the U.S., to get estimates for statistics such as the depreciation of military equipment in a field of operation like Afghanistan.

When it came together, the election was underway. And after consulting with the leader of each party, Page opted to release the report during the campaign, showing the billions and billions the war was expected to cost Canadians while they decided who to support in the general election.

Not long after the election, in which the Conservatives won a minority government, he had his first confrontation with the Harper government. Page produced an economic forecast that predicted a recession after the 2008 financial collapse - correctly. But that conclusion contradicted the government's own fall economic forecast that year.

There were further episodes of friction, including a withdrawn plan to slash the PBO's budget - already relatively modest at less than $3 million - by one third. Asked once if the government was purposely misleading the public about the cost of its plan to buy F-35 fighter jets, Page flatly stated "yes."

"The purpose was never to attack the government," Askari said. "We thought Parliament was being misled, so we thought it was our job to inform our clients."

Page's term as PBO ended in 2013 with no prospect of an extension from the Harper government. But by then, his reputation as an ardent pursuer of accountability gave some power to the idea of a respectable PBO. In Ontario, there was a minority Liberal government that agreed to create a Financial Accountability Office for the province.

Two years later, during the 2015 federal campaign, Justin Trudeau promised to make the PBO more independent by ensuring the sitting government doesn't have the unilateral power to dismiss whoever holds the position, and to give it a legal duty to cost out platform promises by major parties in future elections - changes that were enshrined in law in April 2017.

Story Behind the Story delivers insights into how the Star investigates, reports, and produces stories.

The murmur of a class in session could be heard through Page's office door on a recent Tuesday morning. The former PBO was contemplating whether his work has changed Canada's political discourse - as his friends and supporters insist it has. Page said he is happy with the expanded mandate of the office, which he had pushed for when he was there.

But beyond the durability of an institution to empower MPs with information about program costs, Page wants to keep doing the type of work that inspired Wodrich when he first became a professor at the University of Ottawa. Outside his office, public servants from Canada and visitors from Jamaica's finance department were listening to a PowerPoint about how to measure the effects of an economic shock on government deficits.

He wants his students to leave with an appreciation of technical economic tools, but also - like Wodrich - a sense of how those tools can be used for the betterment of policy. Page mentioned his colleague, Helaina Gaspard, who is working on an analysis of the funding shortfall for Indigenous child welfare in Canada. It's that type of work that brings the technical stuff to life, he said.

And so in establishing Canada's first legislative budget office, and laying the groundwork for more analysis at the IFSD, Page said he hopes he can shift Canada's political discourse toward more honesty, in grappling with the realities of dollars and cents.

In its way, the PBO has pushed open the door to that change, Page said. "We nudged it," he said. "We pushed it a little bit."

Now others just need to keep pushing it wider.

The Star is profiling 12 Canadians who are making our lives better. Next week we talk to girls' sports league founder Dana Bookman.

Alex Ballingall is an Ottawa-based reporter covering national politics. Follow him on Twitter: @aballinga

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institute of fiscal studies and democracy

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He became a champion of transparency in Ottawa - and pressured politicians to make smarter decisions with your money | The Star

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Kevin Page was on a "nice, secure job path" to retirement, but his view about what was important changed after a family tragedy. To make a difference, he became Canada's first Parliamentary Budget Officer and founded an institute to train public servants. He is one of 12 Canadians the Star is profiling who are making our lives better.

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Global Citizenship Education Incorporates High Impact Practices

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Global Citizenship Education Incorporates High Impact Practices

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High Impact Practices in higher education have been shown to increase deep learning and

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Girls' Sports League Founder

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A great resource tool related to the Sustainability Goals. Videos, podcasts, and other resources that can be used for classroom use.

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Overcoming the World's Challenges - The Global Goals

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The climate crisis. Ensuring no one goes hungry. Human rights abuses. Extreme poverty. Problems of this scale can be overwhelming, but the Global Goals(also known as the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs) are the solution to tackling them.

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Indigenous Law Trailblazer

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Anti-Bullying Champion

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Indigenous Culture Booster

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Patient Safety Crusader

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Immigrant Network Creator

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The college's English for Academic Purposes (EAP) program provides domestic and international students with the skills they need for success in higher education, work and life in Canada.

Level 6 students have the opportunity to practise their speaking and pronunciation skills by reading storybooks to students at Emma King Public School in Barrie.

Over a two-week period, the students prepare for the event, mastering how to engage an audience through storytelling.

"For both EAP and Emma King students, it's an opportunity to learn about another culture while boosting their reading, speaking and empathy skills," says Georgian faculty member Tamara Fisher-Cullen. "Many of our international students have commented on how it's been a highlight of their studies at Georgian so far."

EAP students have read to Grade 3 students, and senior and junior kindergarten students at Emma King. The initiative started out as one class project and has since expanded.

Georgian students have also shared stories in their native tongue so the young learners can hear and experience other languages.

Fisher-Cullen expects to roll out the initiative at other local public schools in the future.

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Georgian students hone skills reading books to children - Georgian College

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The college's English for Academic Purposes (EAP) program provides domestic and international students with the skills they need for success...

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Global Problems Collocations - Listening Link

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Global Problems Collocations - Listening Link

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https://www.espressoenglish.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Collocations-Lesson25.mp3

In today's lesson, we'll focus on several major global problems.

One critical issue is preserving and protecting the environment. The burning of fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas) produces greenhouse gases (gases that heat up the atmosphere) that deplete the ozone layer and result in global warming and climate change (changes in the earth's temperature and weather patterns).

Some scientists believe that we have already done irreparable damage to the planet, and now we are suffering the consequences of rising sea levels and increasingly frequent natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornados. A number of animal species have gone extinct, and many more are endangered.

To reverse this trend, we must invest in clean energy (energy sources that do not pollute the environment) with renewable resources (elements like water and air, which can be re-used) and utilize manufacturing methods that are not harmful to the environment.

There are still many regions of the world where children die of hunger/starvation (die from not having enough food). Unfortunately, extreme poverty is common in the rural areas of developing countries, where the population often suffers from food shortages (not enough food) and lack of access to clean water.

In the cities, homeless people sleep on the streets if there is not enough room in local homeless shelters. There are also many families on the margins of society (outside the dominant society and culture) who are living below the poverty line and struggle to make ends meet every month.

Although many governments create welfare programs (programs that give money to poor people) to alleviate poverty, the widening gapbetween rich and poor suggests that poverty may never be completely eradicated.

Poverty and underdevelopment contribute to a host of additional problems as well. For example, many people die of preventable diseases because they have no access the safe and effective vaccines that exist. A number of large corporations use child labor in the manufacturing of their products, as poor families may feel they have no other option for survival.

In addition, young women from disadvantaged backgrounds (poor families and situations) are prime targets for human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

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Vocabulary: English Expressions for Global Problems

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Today's lesson will help you expand your vocabulary for talking about global problems like preserving the environment, alleviating poverty, food shortages, and preventable diseases. There's also a practice exercise you can download and print to test your knowledge of the vocabulary in this lesson.

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Develop EAP - A course for EAP students based on the SDGS.

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Develop EAP - A course for EAP students based on the SDGS.

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This course is freely available thanks to the generosity of Averil Bolster and Peter Levrai.

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This is a free-to-use course which develops students academic English skills and their awareness of the UN&amp;amp;#39;s Sustainable Development Goals