By Terri Chu
There’s a lot to love about the Annex: cultural vibrancy, a wide variety of local independent businesses, walkability and trees.
Can you imagine this place without the big, beautiful maples? The streets would feel empty and dystopian.
By Terri Chu
We live in a sea of green, red, and orange signs here in University-Rosedale, and for all the things we might disagree on, our neighbours agree on a few key points: climate change is real, vaccines work, science can move us forward.
By Terri Chu
The richest among us earned record profits during another COVID-19 year while the poorest among us are risking their lives in understaffed service jobs.
Tags: Annex · Columns · Life · Opinion
By Terri Chu
As an environmentalist, few things make me cringe quite like Christmas does. We are heading into the season when Canadians will each discard a staggering 50 kg of trash over the holidays.
By Terri Chu
While we all wait for vaccines to bring us back to some sense of “normal” (don’t hold your breath as the variants might beat us at this game), let’s take a moment to reflect on how much normal really sucked: for so many Torontonians, “normal” meant sitting in the car for hours just to get to work.
By Terri Chu
India’s population of 1.3 billion people is in a state of “lockdown” until May 3. One of the initial impacts was a massive wave of migrants, suddenly jobless, walking hundreds of kilometres to their home-communities. In the country’s most populated state, Uttar Pradesh, state officials have instructed village councillors not to allow returning labourers in. In India and around the world, Coronavirus is laying bare a capitalistic hard-truth: the poor are expendable.
On November 11, Canadian leaders extolled the virtues of soldiers who lost their lives defending the ideals of democracy. On that day, we might have told the story of the nearly 2,000 Canadian soldiers who fought to defend Hong Kong against Japanese invasion in 1941. Five hundred of those soldiers did not come back, and many others returned deeply scarred after living as prisoners of war.
Tags: Annex · Columns · Opinion
Bling bling! Jaws dropped and the media was bedazzled by the newly unveiled Toronto Raptors championship rings on October 23. For the team’s opening game, each player was awarded a golf-ball of 10 karat gold covered in 14 carat diamonds, and the nearly 20,000 fans watching at Scotiabank Arena were given replicas. Instead of being star struck, I feel sick. Instead of celebrating the making and baring of those rings, we should be denouncing them and the culture that clouds the story they really tell.
Tags: Annex · Columns · Opinion
By Terri Chu
Few celebrities have given me hope about the fate of the planet quite like Marie Kondo has. We literally created a mega celebrity out of a woman who teaches you how to throw stuff away. Did coffee just come out your nose? Stop to think about this. A person who teaches you to throw things away is a social media superstar making millions from Youtube, Instagram, and books.