Toronto is an incredibly vibrant place made vibrant by everyday people. It’s a unique corner of the world, located on the shores of Niigaani-gichigami, Lake Ontario, our source of water.
Honestly, we love it. There’s so much going on, any hour of the day. The creative spirit of the people of this city is incomparable.
But for all that’s good about Toronto, life here is often bleak. So many of us are working hard — soul-crushingly hard — just to get by. A small portion of the city has a lot of money and lives in decadence. But most people don’t. We see you. We are you.
We’re with you, taking the TTC, dealing with delays, with subway lines shutting down, with packed shuttle buses. Dealing with bad bosses and demanding customers. Praying neglectful landlords won’t raise the rent too much, and that schools will be funded well enough to give kids the attention and care they deserve.
By nearly all measures of affordability, Toronto is the most expensive city in Canada and life here is often a grind. COVID continues to impact our friends, families, and communities and workplaces, but governments and most businesses keep pretending it’s in the past. The healthcare system keeps hobbling along, dragged down by deliberate underfunding by successive governments, with emergency rooms bursting at the seams and even shutting down.
And then there’s this municipal election, which hasn’t gotten much attention. Why?
Well, the incumbent mayor, John Tory, has been following Doug Ford’s playbook of staying out of the media and avoiding debates.
Under Tory, the City spent almost $2 million dollars clearing homeless encampments from three parks last year after shelters across the city had to reduce their capacity by more than 50 per cent because of the pandemic. They sent in private security and cops to clear the encampments, and beat the crap out of people, leaving unhoused people with nowhere to go. A few months later, Tory was chairing a meeting for the feuding billionaire Rogers family, a role which pays him generously.
In Toronto, independent media have a critical role to play holding elected officials accountable, telling stories of resistance and challenging authority. While mainstream media outlets too often uncritically repeat police
talking points and create scares around things like “quiet quitting,” a number of independent media worked to shine a light on evictions, exploitation in the workplace, and countless other stories of working class people.
Here and NOW
There’s a void in this city, especially with NOW Magazine seemingly out of print. An important, no-bullshit voice has pretty much gone silent. But Toronto needs a gritty free magazine now as much as ever. We’ve watched with deep sadness as NOW’s staff have reportedly gone unpaid for months, still putting their souls into it.
But the decline of NOW, founded in 1981 by leftists and artists in Toronto, has lit a fire in us. We couldn’t just sit idly by. So we, as a small group each involved in independent online publications, including The Hoser, Media Co-op, Briarpatch, PressProgress and others, dreamed up a new publication. A smaller group of media workers came together to solidify and publish The Grind. This issue is a mix of excellent journalism from progressive publications across Canada republished in print, plus brand-new writing and art.
To get this first issue together we worked as a volunteer team, making time in between our jobs. There’s no big investor behind The Grind — no tech bros, no hedge funds — and we’re incorporated as a non-profit with a mandate to put all the money we raise into the publication itself.
We managed to scrape some money together, including money we donated ourselves and loans we gave the magazine, and it has been just enough to pay writers, photographers, designers, and the printer.
To make this publication viable long-term — which means hiring paid staff — we’re going to need your help.
Part of the reason NOW didn’t work out in print is it didn’t really ask readers to support it financially, instead relying almost 100 per cent on advertisers for revenue. We have some ads in this issue and we’ll gladly run more. But we know that to really be an independent magazine telling important stories, calling out injustice, and being a voice for workers, we need help from readers like you.
If you read this issue and like what you see, please consider making a donation by sending
an e-transfer to info@thegrindmag.ca.
We’re excited to share this first issue with you, and we’re already cooking up the next one. We want to expand to include more arts and culture coverage, an events section, and more news and analysis like you’ll find in this issue.
Got a story idea or an event to promote? Or just want to rant? Send us what you’ve got to info@thegrindmag.ca.
Your support and input is what will allow us to keep publishing The Grind, telling stories about your Toronto.
This article appeared in the 2022 Oct/Nov issue.
