Canadian News

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has issued a recall for more than three dozen types of bread and buns made by eight separate producers after pieces of metal were found inside the products. Read More

Police in Gatineau are investigating after a 19-year-old man was killed when the motorcycle he was riding crashed at about 3 a.m. on Boulevard des Allumettières, between Boulevard Wilfrid-Lavigne and Samuel-Edey Street in the Aylmer sector. Read More

Quebec will closely monitor the potential impacts a new Donald Trump presidency will have on immigration and tariffs on exports, the province's premier said Wednesday.

QUEBEC — Premier François Legault said Wednesday that he fears a period of turbulence will follow the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, and is pressing Ottawa to step up border controls in the event there is an influx of immigrants. Read More

The Sûreté du Québec announced on Wednesday it has made an arrest in connection with a fatal hit and run last June on the Décarie Expressway. Read More

Four people were taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries Wednesday following a multi-vehicle collision on Highway 17 near Haley Station, about 100 kilometres north of Ottawa. Read More

A man who was convicted of a double slaying at the Montreal courthouse in 1983 learned on Wednesday that the Crown will not pursue a second trial against him. Read More

As the shock waves of the victory of Donald Trump and the Republican Party in the United States' elections reverberated around the world, Quebec's National Assembly unanimously voted in favour of the right to abortion Wednesday. Read More

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has issued a recall for several brands of bread and buns due to pieces of metal in the products.

All Hookers Go to Heaven is the debut novel of Canadian writer Angel B.H. The novel is a twist on the classic coming of age genre, exploring it through sex work. The protagonist, aptly named Magdalena, or Mag for short, was raised in a strict Christian home in the Maritimes, and moves to Montreal to pursue her studies, runs out of money, and begins dancing at the now closed infamous Club Supersexe. She later transitions to full-service sex work and takes the readers along while she tours (the sex work equivalent to a business trip) across the world. 

The prologue of the book enthralled me; it is a magical realism-filled meditation on what happens to strippers when a club closes. The author employs this literary technique and imbues strippers with magic so that they are able to change rigid societal structures. Otherwise social change can feel inconceivable. I remember the surprise I felt when Supersexe closed down: According to stripper lore, the club was being audited, which the owners refused, and then the club mysteriously burned down. The author of this new style coming of age also addresses the magic of strippers, in the prologue and what she refers to as “the Hustler’s Curse”. 

“Strippers aren’t witches, nor is hustling a curse. But there were times when it certainly felt like it” —this sentence from the book moved me to tears. Strippers metamorphize in the changing room from a girl next door, to a glamazon that enthralls and enchants men, and what is a witch if not a badass woman in charge of her own fate, a woman who turns her desire, in this case the desire for cold hard cash, into existence? 

As for the Hustler’s Curse, in a way, the curse is that with the beginning of every shift, there is a chance for magic, a chance that your life will be better than before you walked in, a chance that maybe today is finally the day that a wealthy and generous client will bestow upon you the money that you need to escape the socioeconomic circumstances that brought you to the club in the first place. If that mythical client doesn’t materialize, the Hustler’s Curse compels one to keep hustling with the promise that bit by bit, you’ll be able to escape your circumstances.

After a year working at the Supersexe, Mag decides to try her luck in New Orleans. But she lacks a work visa, and is unable to get hired by any of the local clubs, turning instead to sugar dating. She meets Tim, who pays her to go to a swinger’s club called Colette with him, and pays her based on the number of people they manage to swing with that given night. While this is initially lucrative, Tim is increasingly problematic with more and more demands on her time. Their outings also make Mag question what it means to do sex work as a queer woman. B.H. writes: 

“More and more, it felt as if I was engaging in some kind of public porn theatre. It came to irritate me that, inside Colette, lesbian action existed as a fantasy of, and not a threat to, the heterosexual norm. I found my sexuality there both exploited and trivialised—especially because, unsurprisingly, there was little to no sexual contact between the men.”

Things with Tim come to an end when he convinces Mag to join him for a weekend at a swinger’s club in Jamaica, and when she returns,  she’s caught with the cash she made at the US border. Unable to explain her income, she gets deported back to Canada and banned from entering the US for five years. 

From there, Mag follows the money based on a trail of whispered recommendations from other sex workers. Their advice in a way reiterates the Hustler’s curse—the whispers compel her into action as she travels to Berlin, Australia, Singapore, Thailand. In the course of her (mis)adventures, Mag does full-service sex work under different legal approaches to sex work: From the fully legalized brothels in Australia, to picking up men in fancy hotel bars in Singapore, where sex work is heavily criminalized. She’s in Berlin when the escort site Backpage closes down, and feels the chilling effect of FOSTA-SESTA legislation, which instead of preventing human trafficking like intended, actually pushed sex workers further underground and made it harder to screen clients for safety.

Her whirlwind tour, often filled with sex, drugs and problematic clients ends with her booking a vacation with a friend she just finished touring with, where they share their hopes and dreams for the upcoming New Year. This bittersweet ending reminded me of a vacation that I took to Panama with a colleague when she was fresh off a break up, and I was burnt out from working and going to university full time. 

Like Mag, we hung out on the beach, did a little ritual, set our intentions and let the ocean do its magic and help make our dreams come true. Because in the end, it’s really us girls who have each other’s backs, and the sex worker friendships and community forged along the way in this book, like in life, are the best part!

I highly recommend this book, it’s a meditation of self, of queerness, friendship and chasing money in a capitalist system. B.H. writes: “Possessed by the spirit of capitalism, we create our own Mythologies.”

All Hookers Go To Heaven does exactly that—it shows how sex work turned a regular, small town Christian girl into a woman who forged her own path and wrote her own story.

The post Canadian writer explores coming-of-age through sex work appeared first on rabble.ca.

The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) has taken the makers of an AI chatbot to court over what it says are a violation of its terms of service, due to the chatbot scraping CanLII's database in bulk.

Some people might think the dreary morning is a side-effect of the U.S. presidential results. Read More

A 47-year-old man is in stable condition in hospital after being struck with a blunt object during a brawl that broke out Tuesday night in the West Island municipality of Pointe-Claire. Read More

The Quebec Liberals want semaglutide — also known as Ozempic — to be covered by medicare for weight loss. You may object and say it would cost too much and that people should be responsible for their own lifestyle choices. But the point of paying for semaglutide is not to lose weight. The point of paying for semaglutide is to prevent the complications of obesity like heart disease, liver disease and arthritis. We shouldn’t cover the costs of semaglutide because we want people to be thin. We should cover the costs of semaglutide because we want people to be healthy.  Read More

For the second time in as many days, a pedestrian in Montreal had died after being hit by a truck. Read More

Over the next seven years, the province plans to add more than 1,000 new beds to its correctional facilities.

After more than 20 years, Lorne Ulley has lost count of exactly how long it has been since he and his wife, Eunice Ulley, first started selling poppies in Montreal's Central Station every November. Read More

During my six years as a nurse in an emergency room, where many of my patients were elderly and nearing the end of their lives, palliative care meant "comfort care only." In other words, we were to try to manage pain and other symptoms without invasive interventions. Palliative patients could receive narcotics or other drugs for comfort but were not eligible for CPR or intubation, for example. Read More

Oh well. The game started in such promising fashion for the Canadiens Tuesday, with the Habs playing probably their best first period of the season. But they came out of the first frame in a scoreless tie with the Calgary Flames and then the CH weren't nearly as good after that, with the Flames out-shooting them 26-8 after the first. Read More

Re: Should daylight saving time end? Ottawa expert shares health risks, Nov. 1. Read More