Special Credit to Anna Reso, M3 and Co-Captains

It took three different streetcars, two separate subways, and over an hour and a half before over 100 UTS Climate Strikers finally arrived at Queen’s Park on September 27th. It was the day of the first Global Climate Strike, and we could feel something was different. As we marched through the streets of Toronto—alongside tens of thousands of fellow students, parents, doctors, nurses, professors, plumbers and people from all walks of life—we held our signs (“Canada is only supposed to have 5 Seconds of Summer,” “Winter is not coming”) and chanted with pride.

Behind the scenes, the groundwork for UTS’s participation began in mid-September, when a group of dedicated staff and students met in the library. From this, a new UTS committee was born — the Climate Action Now team. Today, we have Climate Ambassadors in every grade, as well as a dedicated senior team (including Carolyn Bawden, Isabel Frieson, and RichPop). Our mission is to make UTS a national leader in climate action. With our unique mix of precociously-talented and incredibly-engaged students, there’s no better school for climate action than UTS.

On November 29, UTS students were back on the streets, and the signs were even more creative (“OK BOOM!-ER”). The strike was deliberately held before the COP25 meeting in Spain, which focused on how the Paris Agreement is to be implemented. Although UTS turnout wasn’t quite as high as in September, our contingent was proportionally one of the largest in the city. UTS students formed an impressive crowd outside City Hall, stopping to adorn jackets and scarves with the symbolic green circle pin. Our voices resonated across Bay Street and Yonge Street, with chants of "What do we want? Climate action! When do we want it? NOW!" and "Hey hey, ho ho, climate change has got to go!" As we circled the Eaton Center, we received plenty of attention from bystanders and Black Friday shoppers. This culture of mass consumerism and prioritizing profits over people was flaunted by neon signs flashing “DEALS AS LOW AS $4.99” across billboards and hordes scrambling to make impulse purchases. Hopefully, our message of sustainability and environmental awareness struck a chord with some of the Black Friday mall-goers watching us pass by.

Climate change is a huge challenge, yes. But it is not an insurmountable one. Already there are signs that governments, at home and around the world, have recognized the scale of mobilization needed. On November 5th, the City of Toronto announced a plan to reduce carbon emissions and achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. On the day of the second climate strike (November 29th), the European Union declared its intention to make net-zero targets for 2050 legally binding.

Globally, another encouraging trend is fossil fuel divestment: removing assets and investments from companies and organizations that profit from environmental destruction. The roots of divestment as a whole go back to Apartheid-era South Africa when groups and individuals around the world refused to buy products from the country or invest in South African companies. Today, $8 trillion dollars worth in assets has already been divested from fossil fuels. Prominent divesters include The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller family, and New York City. We in Toronto have a large role to play: the Royal Bank of Canada is the #1 Financier of Fossil Fuels in the world -- a dubious award to win. At UTS, our captains will be reviewing our school’s endowment to make sure our tuition dollars aren’t going to companies that threaten our future. We also encourage all those in the UTS community who hold investments to consider placing them in socially-responsible, fossil-fuel-free portfolios, like the SPDR S&P Fossil Fuel Reserves Free ETF.

Closer to home, there are lots of ways to get involved. Join in USEAC initiatives, like the clothing swap (over 100 items of clothing exchanged!), the eco-anxiety discussion, and meatless lunch day. (In fact, according to Forbes, one of the best ways to decrease your personal carbon footprint is to eat a plant-based diet. La Cubana has a delicious Veggie Medianoche -- highly recommended by Andrei!) Participate in our letter-writing campaigns to government officials; our last one got some incredibly moving messages from staff and students (one of the best quotes, from Dr. Cypher in Student Services: “Climate change is not something that people under 18 should feel responsible for, and guilty about. They were born into this mess, and the adults on the planet are the ones who should be doing something about it.”) The Climate Action Now team continues to find ways to involve the UTS community in climate action. We meet every Friday at lunch, and if you’re interested in joining us, email captains@utschools.ca. Climate change won’t be fixed overnight. But the sooner we take serious action, the better our future will be.

But don’t worry: we’re not satisfied with just marching either. We will continue to find ways to advance climate justice in the UTS community. We will continue to make the personal choices that bring us closer to net-zero environmental impact. We at Climate Action Now also see climate change as an incredible opportunity. Humanity has gotten the signal that our relationship towards each other, and towards our planet, is fundamentally flawed. We now have the potential to build a more just, sustainable world. That’s what we’re fighting for. Will you join us?

My Fair Maiden

Of all the women

I have ever known,

Only one have I ever

Called my own.

In my mind she titters,

hair glittering with gold,

A maiden of fantasy she is,

and groweth never old.

How bold am I!

To others despise,

And look only open

Her fictitious eyes,

Her love in sleep,

Upon waking I weep,

And wish that thine

Dreamtime embrace,

Could in daylight reach.

___

Her name is many,

For many’s place she hath taken.

Her hair auburn, then blonde

Red and then brown

Many names she hath taken

Yet none to life have come

But one!

Oh God please hear my plea,

Take pity on this lonely soul,

‘fore myself grows ragged and old,

Send me my maidens love,

Fast on the wings of thy graceful dove.

S6 Vibes

Tick tock

The clock goes not

Forever stuck

Till I hear congratulations,

Or convoluted consolation

My future seems in limbo,

And in nervous stupor I live,

Yet wait more days I must

And in the Almighty’s plan, trust.

Rise

In smog and soot

Ash and grime

Did we once live

Once upon a time.

But since those days

Have long since past

Do we now live

In splendor at last.

CIties of gold

And towering glass

Wondrous spectacles

Of life lived so fast

Through winding streets

Laughter echoes and floats

Lives lived so sweet, but realize

To build all this was no small feat!

Take a second to this all ponder

Amid busy life’s harried harangued sighs

That life in end is as good as can be,

For once, lucky were our children

to their first birthday see.

Toronto is facing a housing crisis. An RBC analysis found housing stock must double to meet demand, or else rents will rise even more. Nearly half of all tenants and a third of homeowners are spending 30% or more of their income on housing, according to census data. A report commissioned by the city government showed that vacancy rates are projected to keep decreasing as the population grows faster than any other North American city. In short, things are bad and going to get worse.

The first step is admitting you have a problem, and leadership at both the provincial and municipal levels have done just that. John Tory’s latest budget includes funding for 40,000 affordable housing units, plus more money for housing allowances and repairing existing public housing. This is a good step to take, even though it won’t come close to solving the problem completely with over 100,000 households on the waitlist for affordable housing.

Other attempts to solve the problem have failed miserably. Tory’s plan to keep property taxes at the rate of inflation in an attempt to encourage development has failed; developers still haven’t built anything during his time as mayor, and the city now lacks critical funding required to build affordable housing.

At the provincial level, Doug Ford repealed rent control on new units in 2018 as another attempt to incentivize housing construction. This is what you’re supposed to do—higher rents increase the profit from building a rental unit, which encourages more people to build units, which ultimately reduces rents. But the policy hasn’t worked—housing supply has slightly increased, but not enough to prevent rising rents, which will rise even more because there’s no rent control.

In addition to the damning evidence from Doug Ford’s experiment, we also have the results of a nine-year period from 1997 to 2006 with no rent control on new units. During that time, there was no significant increase or decrease in housing construction as rents increased, suggesting rent control had no effect whatsoever on housing construction. Factors such as high inflation and unemployment had a greater impact on both rents and construction, contributing to a housing shortage starting years before rent control was repealed.

As a result of both the housing crisis and the failure of market-oriented policies to solve it, commentators on the left have suggested introducing rent control - not just in Ontario but across North America. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has even suggested instituting national rent control in the United States.

According to the general view in economics circles, the problem with this idea is that lowering rents would make it less profitable to build rental units, decreasing the supply of housing and driving rents up.

Unfortunately, real life is more complicated than economics textbooks, and actual housing markets don’t follow a straight supply-and-demand curve. We need empirical studies on what happens when rent control is implemented to truly understand its implications.

Studies from San Francisco, Cambridge (a Boston suburb), and New Jersey all showed that rent control effectively reduced rents, had no effect on new housing construction, and reduced displacement. In San Francisco and Cambridge, the supply of rental housing decreased, as landlords sold their rental units as owner units to make more money, while supply increased in New Jersey as landlords subdivided existing units—suggesting that well-designed rent control laws can actually have the opposite of their expected effects. In addition, prices of non-rent controlled units in Cambridge and New Jersey did not increase while rent control was in place— despite what conventional wisdom would dictate.

Reducing rents has two critical benefits. The first is that it allows long-term residents of gentrifying areas to remain in the city. Displacement is one of the most serious consequences of rising rents, and low-income Torontonians are already being forced to uproot their lives and move out of the city. If we consider it so unreasonable for a landlord to arbitrarily kick someone out of their home that we decide to create legal protections against it, then we should consider it just as unreasonable when the housing market does the same. From that, it follows that we should institute rent control since all available evidence suggests that rent control stops displacement.

The second is that rent control creates diverse, mixed-income communities and reduces the concentration of poverty. This can mitigate the worst consequences of poverty by providing low-income Torontonians with more access to better services and safer neighbourhoods, while also combating segregation (economically diverse neighbourhoods tend to be more racially diverse as well). In fact, the same New Jersey study I cited earlier found a statistically significant decrease in racial segregation when rent control was adopted.

That said, there are genuine downsides to rent control. Residents of rent-controlled properties may feel trapped in their current living situation if new properties aren’t also rent-controlled, leaving them unable to afford a move even if conditions are inadequate. This scenario is also more likely to occur under rent control because landlords may not invest in maintenance if they can’t recover the cost through rent - though studies show that rent control has no effect on whether a unit has functional plumbing, an indicator of good maintenance. To solve these problems, the municipal and provincial governments must step in to provide the necessary funding for the construction of affordable units and the maintenance of existing units, while enacting tenant protections that harshly punish landlords who intentionally keep their units in poor condition.

Rent control can be challenging to implement, but it has been proven to be an antidote to all the problems facing Toronto’s urban core: rising rents, the displacement of low-income tenants, and increasing racial and economic segregation. Rent control may not be a complete solution to Toronto’s housing crisis, but it’s surprisingly close.

Sources

We live in a dogmatic world, one full to the brim with political polarization. For every issue and topic conceivable, however arcane, there exists outspoken activists and scholars espousing different views, each with its own idiosyncrasies and peculiarities. These causes are often extremely relevant to public discourse, touching our lives in their own unique ways. However, amidst the racket of controversial and multifaceted political debates ranging from gun control or foreign policy, there exists one specific topic that is almost crystal clear: rent control. Almost all economists are in unison in condemning rent control. One survey by the American Economic Review found that 93% of economists were certain that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.” Despite this unanimity, rent control is making a comeback as a ‘quick-fix’ solution to major housing problems across the Western world.

Housing is a basic necessity for all humans, not just in popular opinion but legally, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet across the Western world a lingering crisis is looming- that of housing affordability. From Hong Kong to London, Sydney to Vancouver, global housing prices are reaching record highs. According to the Royal Bank of Canada, the average family in Toronto would have to spend more than 75% of their income to cover the cost of owning a home. Concurrently, housing and renting prices continue their incessant rise. Rents are projected to increase by around 11% this year while Canada’s national housing agency projects that GTA home prices will rise by 5% in 2020 to an average of around $831850.

Despite the global financial recession just over a decade ago, the story in Canada is being replayed across much of the world. Take California, for instance. A staggering 41% of California’s population has been deemed as “cost-burdened” by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. The result of this? Despite being only 12% of America’s total population, California is responsible for 24% of America’s homeless population. In Los Angeles, 44,000 homeless people are responsible for the reintroduction of bygone diseases like typhus, due to widespread street defecation. The situation has deteriorated so far that San Francisco has created a “human poop-patrol” to tackle the problem.

Housing affordability is a fairly common global problem. Unfortunately, so are its proposed solutions. Chief amongst these is the age-old idea of rent control. Put simply, rent control is the practice of the Government instituting limits upon ‘the amount a landlord can demand leasing [or renting] a home’. The core purpose of rent control is to ‘ensure that a city has a certain amount of affordable housing for lower and middle-class residents’, protecting the poor from the excesses of the greedy capitalist class! Portrayed as a beneficial, caring policy, its proponents are often more than eager to ignore its disabling long term consequences.

If it could be summed up in one sentence, the fundamental issue with rent control is that it doesn’t address why rents/costs are rising, it simply misallocates who gets to rent and how much they pay. Rent control is diametrically opposed to the Laws of Supply and Demand in that it does not change the supply of housing or affect the increasing consumer demand for Houses. As famed economist Thomas Sowell puts it, “ the most basic principle in economics is that people tend to buy more at a lower price than at a higher price. Rent control enables people to demand more housing than they would otherwise.” Accordingly, the consistent result of rent control (or quite literally any price control!) is a shortage, “as the quantity demanded increases while the quantity supplied decreases...in response to artificially lower prices”.

Understanding why the quantity of housing demanded increases is simple; it is now cheaper to purchase/rent a home. The reason the quantity of housing supplied decreases is that landlords are incentivized to convert their properties to more profitable enterprises while landlords reduce the construction of rental/housing units in the first place, as it is no longer profitable, thus exacerbating the shortage even further. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that in San Francisco landlords reduced rental overall rental supply by 15%, which on its own resulted in a 5.1% increase in rents. The scale of this is immense. In Melbourne, Australia not one house was built for 9 years in the post-World War Two period as a result of the colossal losses to be incurred in any construction project. When rent-control was banned on a state-wide level in Massachusetts, the first home construction projects in 25 years began.

One of the most intriguing aspects of rent control is that it often results in (gasp) higher rents! Naturally, this seems quite contradictory but is backed up by suitable evidence. Take the example of New York City which for a period of time had the highest rents in America despite having harsh rent control laws for multiple decades! The reason for this is once again related to the construction of rental units. In locales with rent control, builders often only focus on providing for the despised ‘elite’, by constructing opulent mansions and high-end apartments. Since the wealthy are the only ones able to afford housing in an expensive environment (due to rent control), developers have a clear incentive to supply housing for them.

As we get deeper down the rabbit hole, rent control becomes even worse. Not only is there no incentive to construct any housing, but landlords tend to stop caring about day-to-day upkeep and maintenance! As their margin of profit shrinks, they are forced to cut costs in order to stay solvent. The area most affected by this is maintaining properties. In a healthy property market, developers are forced to invest in upkeep so that they can attract tenants away from moving to other competing properties. In a situation with rent control, since there is a significantly higher ‘quantity of demand’ with no change in the supply (as explained above), landlords can be cheapskates and get away with it- after all, it's not like the populace has any better alternatives!

Now that we’ve thoroughly debunked the rather ridiculous concept of rent control, it is time to examine what we can do to fix the housing affordability crisis, specifically that in Toronto, although these lessons are broadly applicable.

First and foremost, we need to improve the way we handle suburbia. As many suburban residents (Baby Boomers) age and cities continue to struggle to densify, newer residents are struggling to find places to live in low-density suburbia. Many experts are now expounding the idea of “gentle densification” as a solution to housing worries. By constructing low rise apartments and townhouses, suburban densification offers a fairly cheap and effective solution to housing affordability. Alas, this is not very politically feasible as NIMBYist (Not In My Back Yard) groups and the prospective suburban homeowner are likely to vociferously oppose such a concept.

Another solution could be simply more suburbs. Again, despite its effective potential, sadly, this is unlikely to occur. While a myriad of investigative reports have concluded that cities with less zoning regulations and more suburban sprawl have significantly cheaper housing and that housing bubbles can be directly linked to a lack of suburban expansion, many opponents continue to espouse rhetoric claiming that suburbs are bad in terms of public transit, efficiency and sustainability.

Herein lies a fundamental dilemma in 21st-century urban planning- the conflict between cities and suburbs. Common knowledge dictates that densification in cities is clearly better than investment in suburbs. Of course, this is a very fallacious manner of thinking. Increasing densification in urban areas is not a magical be-all and end-all panacea to municipal problems. There is a clear consensus on the reality that increased suburbia results in significantly lower housing prices while dense urban centres are notorious for housing bubbles (sound familiar?). Problems such as pollution caused via transit between suburbs and downtown areas are complementary, but not necessary. Improved public transit can easily cut this down.

Secondly, a reduction in immigration levels would prove helpful. Generally, immigration doesn’t have much of an impact on housing prices. Yet today, the supply of new housing is not matching the skyrocketing demand. With fewer sales, less developers are likely to construct new housing, resulting in even higher prices (especially for the most vulnerable, low income Canadians).

Thirdly, we must provide incentives to construct housing. We need immense cuts in Government red tape and regulation to spur the onset of a new housing development boom, similar to the post World War Two era. Furthermore, we can reintroduce Government subsidies for cheap, low income rental housing that lead to the massive growth of such properties in the 1970’s and 80’s.

Finally, curb excessive purchases by extravagant foreign buyers. This type of legislation is already in motion in cities like Vancouver, but the rest of the country could do well to follow as well.

When I was pondering over what topic I should pursue for this essay, I settled upon housing for two reasons. Firstly, it is a massive issue plaguing much of the Western world, and one that has some fairly feasible solutions. But secondly, it is a perfect example of the ridiculousness of the Left. Their formula of labelling landowners and development companies as greedy, malevolent bourgeois capitalists while pushing terrible policies that have failed and are doomed to fail must be exposed and fought against.

An old saying comes to mind: “A Theologist is someone who believes in something despite having no evidence. A Socialist is someone who believes in something in spite of ALL the evidence!” Don’t be the Socialist.

References

1. Applied Economics by Thomas Sowell
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/15/comeback-rent-control-just-time-make-housing-shortages-worse/#comments-wrapper
3. http://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-control/
4. https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/rent-control-old-bad-idea-wont-go-away
5. https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/canada-housing-crisis-solutions_ca_5cd9fb0ee4b031ad510eaa0f
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJvTTGOHFkU

I’ve noticed lately that Ms. Ewing, before dispensing wise life advice to the class, often says “I know that this is a tough of time of year for you guys”. And she’s right. If you were to take pictures of the faces of UTS students in September and compare those to photos taken in February, you would notice a very stark difference: our faces are much more gaunt, taut, and strained. And why wouldn’t they be? In September, you’re brimming full of idealism and coming off a two-month summer vacation. In February, you’re in the middle of feeling the burn from not sleeping well. But there is also a scientific component as to why school just feels harder and less bearable in the winter.

It is a well-known fact that vitamin D is created by exposure to sunlight. What is not well-known is that vitamin D produces a substance called Serotonin. Serotonin may be the most influential substance there is when it comes to controlling human behaviour. It helps facilitate thinking and is critical to producing a feeling of happiness. When there is less sun, it follows that less vitamin D and thus Serotonin is produced, leading to a naturally subdued state of mind. Additionally, levels of melatonin, the sleep hormone, increases when it isn’t sunny, causing you to need even more sleep in the winter.

The winter can be so destructive to people’s mood that the effects even have a name: SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). The rates of SAD increase as you get farther from the equator. In Florida, only 1% of the population. is affected; in the Arctic, that number is 10%. Most people don’t have SAD, but they still do experience the negative effects of the drop in Serotonin. For example, many of the people that I have talked to say it is difficult for them to maintain the grades they received at the beginning of the year. A study of Penn State University students shows that this is not isolated to only UTS students: sophomore, junior, and senior students all saw higher test scores and GPAs in the Spring than in the winter.

So what can you do if winter is the cause of your dim mood? To start, there are always vitamin D supplements. But an interesting study shows that it is possible to bank Vitamin D as long as you spend copious amounts of time under the sun in summer. This vitamin D can then be used to create adequate amounts of Serotonin in the winter so that you can still have a good mood while not getting as much sunlight. Interesting fact: those of us with dark skin have to spend much more time getting sunlight than white people to produce the same amount of vitamin D. Even nature can’t throw us a bone. Maybe a better solution is to give January and February off, instead of July and June. Of course, the main complaint would be that winter is too cold to do the activities that people would otherwise do in summer, but given that Toronto will be among the cities most drastically affected by climate change, the average winter may soon be warmer than this year. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if people’s faces became gaunt, taut, and strained anyways from sitting in the villas with no effective air conditioner during summer for two extra months.

References

https://www.webmd.com/depression/features/summer-sun-winter-blues#1

“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;

It is the green ey’d monster, which doth mock

The meat it feeds on.”

• William Shakespeare, Othello

Type in “jealous friends quotes” on Google and a bunch of Pinterest images will pop up, all along the lines of “fake friends don’t clap for you when you win” or “their insecurity isn’t your fault.” It’s true, having friends who feel terrible about your success can be super irksome. But we don’t like admitting we’re often on the other side of the relationship too – the “jealous friend.” We get pits in our stomachs when we hear of other people’s academic achievements. We feel twinges in our hearts when we see them in happy romantic relationships. Then, we loathe ourselves for our inability to feel happier for them. These feelings are inevitable and lie within all of us. We try to not let our feelings get to us, and tell ourselves, “This is wrong, I should support my friend.” But why do we feel jealous? Do these feelings make us bad friends?

According to evolutionary psychologists, jealousy and envy are more scientific than we think. Sarah Hill and David Buss explain in their research, The Evolutionary Psychology of Envy, that such feelings are naturally found in our biological roots. Jealousy allows us to evaluate our position in the competition for resources. We look at others to see where we stand in order to fix flaws in ourselves. Thus, we’re most envious of those similar to us. This might explain why our reactions to, for example, our friend’s success are often more negative than to the success of a stranger.

Iago from Shakespeare’s Othello called it when he says that this emotion is a “green ey’d monster.” We feel uncomfortable, vulnerable, and guilty, as this monster of a feeling feeds on our hearts. But psychologist Michelle Pat reminds us, “jealous feelings are different from jealous behaviours and actions.” While jealousy is an inherent part of us and cannot be controlled, we get to choose how to respond to those feelings.

So don’t beat yourself up when you recognize your jealousy. Instead, note that the true “bad friends” we often hear about are those who actively harm others to make up for their own inferiority, for example, by gossiping. The next time you feel jealousy creeping in, don’t act on it. Instead, simply acknowledge its existence, then focus on mitigating it. Calm down and take a step back; identify the root causes of your feelings. No matter where your jealousy stems from, as long as you know the cause, you’ll be able to confront it. For example, if it’s due to a lack of self-esteem, take a few minutes to remind yourself of your own accomplishments and that you’re a worthy person too. Jealousy, after all, is similar to other day-to-day emotions – it’s fleeting as long as you don’t hold onto it. There are so many other aspects of your friends that you can focus on, such as how grateful you are to have them. Don’t be an Othello; make sure you treasure those precious ties and do not let jealousy get in the way!

During the Second Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th women began entering the workforce, and there was a hope that this step would make some changes in the home. When the men returned, maybe women would remain at work and their husbands would stay home with the kids for a change. Maybe there would be a full 180-degree turn in what was once known as the traditional household–and perhaps this would spark other changes in the world.

The answer, unfortunately, is that nothing changed. Within heterosexual couples, multiple studies, including one by the United Nations, have found that women still do the majority of housework and childcare compared with their male partners. According to one study by the University College of London, for 93% of couples, women do most of the domestic work, which is on average 16 hours to the man’s 6 per week. And it isn’t a matter of who works more or who works harder: even in couples in which the woman is the primary breadwinner, men do less housework. The division of labour is almost never equal. To make things worse, in only 38% of couples in which the woman earns 80% of the total household income were both partners comfortable calling the woman the breadwinner. The idea that a woman could primarily support her family financially threatens the institutionalized idea of what a traditional household is: one that rejects female success and leadership.

Because systemic sexism has enforced in our minds that within straight couples the man is the provider, we have made it so much harder for women to turn the tide and take over that position. Shown in a study performed by McKinsey & Company, an American management consulting corporation, women, especially women of colour and lesbians, are hugely underrepresented in the workplace. Women are less likely to be promoted and more likely to experience microaggressions and sexual harassment. It’s not just the idea of women working that is threatening, it’s the actual workplaces. Working conditions in which a group is made to feel unsafe, unappreciated, and unwelcome on such a large scale are clearly institutionalized against that group. This in addition to the pressure put on women to pick up the slack at home makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to surpass the typical standard and join the ranks of men in the workforce. The ideal employee is completely devoted to their job, and anyone who is not will not be rewarded with promotions, pay raises, or more important assignments. Women are trapped in a paradox that does not allow us to reach that level.

From a young age, we are taught that the perfect woman has a healthy family, a stable job, cooks breakfast in the morning and dinner at night, and does a million other things in between. We are conditioned to think that ‘having it all’ means doing it all, and that mindset needs to change. The perfect woman cannot exist and still be sane. She is a figment of our imagination, an idea created hundreds of years ago to keep women in a place that men are comfortable in. Though she has changed over the years, it’s not yet enough. We still have a long way to go.

Are you afraid of black cats? These kinds of myths wander around daily life and we tend to believe them. When I stumble across a black cat, whether it’s crossing the street or staring at me from a window, I wonder how a seemingly silly superstition originated. It makes sense that these myths started a long time ago, particularly in religious beliefs. For example, black cats’ importance originated in Ancient Egypt.

My search to understand the root of the black cat superstition led me to consider other origins. Many people consider walking under ladders to be dangerous. In real life, I suppose it could be dangerous because the ladder could break and hurt someone. But for those who started this superstition, safety wasn’t something that was considered. In the Christian religion, the Holy Trinity — The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — is a crucial symbol of the religion and is linked to triangles, and when a ladder is popped up between a wall and the ground, it takes the shape of a triangle! Christians believed that walking under the triangle would disrupt the unity between the three edges of the triangle, and therefore the Holy Trinity, therefore making it bad luck. This idea of myths and superstitions is something that began in ancient times but still affects our lives today. For instance, ways it can affect people’s lifestyles are global hotels or buildings banning floor numbers that are unlucky to some cultures.

Lots of countries have different perspectives about myths and reasons why they could exist. In western cultures, thirteen is considered unfortunate. The painting “The Last Supper” was connected to the number of people who sat down before Jesus was crucified, thirteen. In China, the number “four” sounds like “death” in Cantonese. In Italy, the number seventeen, XVII, if rearranged, makes the word VIXI, which means your life has ended. The number 8 is lucky in China as well because it sounds like “wealth.” Depending on the country, each one has superstitions that are often centred around language.

Even after searching many other myths and superstitions I was still left in the dark about what exactly made black cats so unlucky. I have a pet black cat named Simba, and to me, he doesn’t seem at all unlucky. So let’s debunk the myth of black cats, and perhaps some of the other myths surrounding our feline friends. The black cat superstition originates from most likely the Middle Ages, when the Bubonic Plague started. Black cats have a similar black shade of colour like rats, who were unlucky because they were involved in the process of spreading the plague. Some people associate black cats with witches in disguise. This was not the case in Egypt, since cats, including black cats, were considered sacred. Another myth about cats and their “special powers” are that they can see in the dark. However, it turns out that they can’t see in total darkness, but have better night vision than humans. I was able to verify that Simba slept during the day and was very active during the night, so I was unsure. Maybe he could see in the dark, as he seemed to be nocturnal. But when I researched the sleeping pattern of cats I found that they are able to adapt to humans’ sleeping routine so they generally sleep when the house is quiet, like when we are all out of the house during the day. There are many myths that do not have a definite answer about where they originated and about whether or not they are true. And when it comes to cat myths, sometimes it just depends on the cat itself!

I’ve asked this question before, but I think it’s good to ask again: Are you still afraid of black cats? There are other kinds of superstitions that relate to black cats. Some of these myths can be disproved or proved simply based on religion or personal experience. Overall, just remember that when you come across a black cat, it may not be bad luck after all.