For over two decades, Marci Ien has been a fixture in the Canadian media scene. From covering the national news for CTV in Halifax, to anchoring the wildly successful 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, to being a political reporter at Queen’s Park, Ien has had a long and celebrated career as a broadcast journalist. 

It’s been a busy month for Annamie Paul. The bilingual lawyer from Toronto won the leadership race for the Green Party of Canada after 8 rounds of voting on October 3. Following the leadership race, she immediately turned her attention to the by-election in the Toronto-Centre riding. Paul subsequently called for both the Toronto-Centre and the York-Centre by-elections to be postponed as COVID-19 numbers surged. When Paul and I spoke on Thanksgiving Monday, she told me she did between 20-30 interviews a day during her first week as leader.

Nehassaiu deGannes expresses her artistic practice through the worlds of both theatre and poetry. A natural-born storyteller, she follows in the tradition of African griots who used ancestral memory, physical movement, vocal presence, and the power of language, to engage with their communities. Covid-19’s far-reaching impact has included a gutting of the global arts community, and its impact on the theatre world has been no less demoralizing.

Dawit Tibebu is an Ethiopian photojournalist in Toronto who has been practicing photography for almost a decade. In an exhibit that runs from October 8, 2020 to November 1, 2020, Dawit presents a series of photos entitled Freedom "Fighters: Ethiopia" at the Black Artists’ Network in Dialogue (BAND) Gallery in Toronto. The exhibition is sponsored by the Royal Bank of Canada.

Tropicana Community Services is now in its 40th year of serving the Black community in the Greater Toronto Region in multiple ways. However, with the emergence of Covid19, Tropicana has had to not only rethink how it celebrates this milestone but figure out new ways to continue its programming during the lockdown. Despite all the challenges that have come with this, the organization seems to have emerged even stronger and better. I spoke with Raymund Guiste, Tropicana’s Executive Director.

“Art is the physical representation of feeling.” Jaylah Hall Possessing wisdom beyond her years, wunderkind Jaylah Hall knew from the age of 12 who she was, and what she wanted to be. Preadolescence isn’t usually a time when most people can boast enough of self-awareness to know that their uniqueness isn’t a handicap; especially when you’re Black.

(Photo by: Marie-Anne Letarte) In Canada, we pay a lot of lip service to our brand of multicultural mosaic, usually without an understanding that the mosaic extends beyond just language or skin colour. It’s the “culture” within that “cultural mosaic” that causes the most trouble between different camps in society, (particularly when a certain camp considers themselves the native culture to which all others must assimilate). Manuel Mathieu asks the viewer to consider that our worlds are interconnected in ways that they may have never considered.

Bio Photo: Courtesy Sarah Martin Nathan Eugene Carson is a multifaceted, multidisciplinary artist, whose trajectory has been less dictated by the hierarchical confines of what an artist is supposed to do, and more guided by an intuitive understanding of what an artist is supposed to be. Carson brings the same freedom of thought and expression encouraged by his creative familial upbringing into his first major solo exhibition at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.

Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, cannabis has been considered an essential service that continues to pull in money at a time when many businesses are just trying to stay afloat. As an industry, it was lucrative before it was even legal; an alternate marketplace for poor and working-class entrepreneurs. Thanks to the heavy-handed reaction of racially biased law enforcement, a disproportionate amount of those underground businesses swept up in police raids and street checks were Black and Indigenous.

In December 2016, Dafonte Miller was assaulted by off-duty police officer Michael Theriault, and his civilian brother Christian. The altercation occurred over an alleged car break-in attempt. During the altercation, Miller was attacked with a metre-long metal pipe which led to him losing an eye. The Theriaults were charged with aggravated assault and attempted obstruction of justice. In June 2020, Constable Theriault was convicted of the lesser charge of assault, while his brother was acquitted.