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15 Episodes 2016 - 2016
Episode 1
After the Canadian Supreme Court struck down laws around sex work as being harmful to people in the trade, the federal government passed Bill C-36, which criminalizes johns who patronize sex workers. The government argues these laws are intended to protect women from human traffickers, but critics say they make the trade more dangerous for those consensually doing sex work. It's now illegal for sex workers to advertise their services, and because johns are committing a crime, they may pressure workers to rush into encounters without vetting potential clients. We sent Lowell, a pop singer and former stripper, to meet with policy makers and law enforcement officials to discuss C-36. Lowell also went down to Nevada to see how a regulated, legal sex industry functions. Finally, she met with a john to see how he feels about his behaviour becoming newly illegal.
Episode 2
Host Damian Abraham looks at the current state of marijuana policy in Canada and travels to Vancouver to discuss how the province, as well as the country, could benefit from the regulations like those implemented in states like Colorado.
Episode 3
Abortion has been a legal medical procedure in Canada for more than 25 years, but in spite of that, access varies widely across the country. Urban residents are far likelier to have easy access to the procedure, while rural people may face extra costs and time requirements like travel and figuring out where to go. Sarah Ratchford investigates abortion access in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, two provinces with restricted access to abortions and conservative political climates that make access a difficult issue even to discuss. She attends a pro-life rally crashed by pro-choice activists, goes undercover into a pregnancy crisis center, and talks to an activist helping people access under-the-counter abortions in Prince Edward Island (PEI).
Episode 4
Their objective is to destroy patriarchy; their weapons are bare breasts. FEMEN "sextremists" have now set up shop in more than ten countries, but only have one active branch in North America. In this documentary, VICE journalist Brigitte Noël enters the world of FEMEN Quebec as they disturb the public space with their homegrown brand of activism, bringing skin, controversy, and feminism to the front page. As FEMEN set out on a mission to protect Canadian women's abortion rights, Noël shadowed the group to get a better understanding of their message, their approach, and whether their shock-and-awe tactics actually work.
Episode 5
The first thing you notice about Sarnia, Ontario, is the smell: a potent mix of gasoline, melting asphalt, and the occasional trace of rotten egg. Nestled inside a giant ring of chemical production known as the Chemical Valley, sits a First Nations reservation called Aamjiwnaang, whose residents inhale dangerous emissions every time they step outside. Sarnia is home to more than 60 refineries and chemical plants that produce gasoline, synthetic rubbers, and other materials that the world's industries require to create the commercial products we know and love. The city's most prominent and profitable attraction is an area about the size of 100 city blocks known as the Chemical Valley, where 40 percent of Canada's chemical industry can be found packed together like a noxious megalopolis. According to a 2011 report by the World Health Organization, Sarnia's air is the most polluted air in Canada.
Episode 6
Cannabis in Canada is still widely illegal. With the new Liberal government, the odds of legalization, further criminalization or decriminalization of marijuana coming to fruition are still to be determined. But despite that, black market growers and grey market marijuana dispensaries are more prevalent than ever. And the sometimes dangerous, and legally dubious process of manufacturing weed oils and other concentrates is rising with growers investing tens of thousands of dollars to make sheets of potent pot wax. With the legal fate of weed still in the balance, VICE host Damian Abraham went to BC, the Wild West of Canadian chronic, visited grows operating illegally or semi-legally, met concentrate manufacturers making large quantities of oil in spite of the law, and checked in on the exploding dispensary scene that the federal government has tried to shut down.
Episode 7
Canada has the world's second-largest supply of fresh water, but 94 First Nations communities have limited or no access to it. Nearly a quarter of the First Nations communities administered by Health Canada are currently without clean water. The alerts issued by the federal government range from "boil water advisories" going back more than 20 years to crippling "Do Not Consume" orders. The federal government opts to deliver rations of bottled water to First Nations rather than build treatment plants that would provide jobs and consistent water. VICE traveled to two First Nations communities with long-standing boil water advisories to meet with the chiefs, the political negotiators and the young residents who have spent their whole lives without accessible clean water. In this episode, VICE heads to the remote Neskantaga First Nation in Northern Ontario where after 20 years under a boil water advisory, they have slipped down the Federal government's priority list for safe drinking water from four to nineteen, with no explanation.
Episode 8
Transgender health access is a rarely discussed but highly contentious topic in Canada. While nine out of ten provinces offer some access to some surgeries-though there is only one hospital, in Montreal, that provides the full gamut of treatments-New Brunswick stands alone by not offering any funded procedures to transgender individuals. In part 1 of On Hold, we went to Fredericton to let AJ Ripley, a non-binary transgender person who prefers the pronouns "they and them," take us through their life in New Brunswick fighting for access to proper health services. Watch our documentary On Hold to hear from transgender patients who are desperately battling for fair treatment in the healthcare system, and doctors and experts who say providing this care is possible, and in fact the difference between life and death.
Episode 9
Transgender health access is a rarely discussed but highly contentious topic in Canada. While nine out of ten provinces offer some access to some surgeries-though there is only one hospital, in Montreal, that provides the full gamut of treatments-New Brunswick stands alone by not offering any funded procedures to transgender individuals. In part 2 of On Hold, we took AJ, a non-binary transgender person, to Toronto to see how services differ in a big city. But even there, it's far from perfect. Watch our documentary On Hold to hear from transgender patients who are desperately battling for fair treatment in the healthcare system, and doctors and experts who say providing this care is possible, and in fact the difference between life and death.
Episode 10
VICE embeds with Drag the Red, the volunteer-run initiative to dredge Winnipeg's main river searching for bodies of missing aboriginal women. Later, we meet the family of Misty Potts, a First Nations woman who disappeared in 2015.
Episode 11
You can't help but shudder at the sinister nickname for British Columbia's Provincial AutoRoute 16, known as "The Highway of Tears," which is both a trucking passage and the winding graveyard of up to 42 aboriginal women-most of which assumed murdered by a series of active serial killers. In fact, the RCMP, Canada's famous Mounties and the chief police force investigating the murders-believes there are active serial killers currently operating along the highway. The RCMP puts the official number of women who have been murdered along the highway at 18. Running west to east through some of the most remote terrain in North America, passing by desolate First Nations reserves and logging towns, the highway has become synonymous with the endemic violence towards Native women in Canada: They're five times more likely than any other ethnicity in the country to be raped or murdered. Ray Michalko, a former RCMP detective who quit the force, is now one of the only men on the job as a private investigator. He works directly with the families of missing or murdered indigenous women on his own dime. He takes VICE on a tour of, basically, Canada's Valley of Death and connects us with the families who have turned to him after sometimes decades of stalled police investigations.
Episode 12
Episode 13
Officially founded in 1999, Nunavut is the youngest territory in Canada. It's only been two generations since Canada's stewardship of the land forced the Inuit people out of their semi-nomadic way of life and into a modern sedentary one. But while the introduction of contemporary conveniences seem to have made life more comfortable, the history of Canada in the arctic is mired in tragedy, and the traumatic effects of residential schools and forced relocations are still being felt. Today, Nunavut is in a state of social crisis: Crime rates are four times the national average and the rates of suicide are more than ten times higher than the rest of Canada. If you ask people here what the driving force of the problem is, a lot of them will say: alcohol. Even though alcohol is completely illegal in some parts of the territory, it's been reported that 95 percent of police calls are alcohol-related.
Episode 14
The wettest place in North America was on fire last summer. High temperatures coupled with the fact that summer 2015 was the driest period since records began in 1893 meant more and longer wildfires. 5,208 new fires are being reported every day and the province is struggling to get both the human and financial resources to keep up - the summer of 2015 was one of the most destructive ones. VICE heads to BC to see how the wildfires are affecting the fragile BC ecosystem - everything from air quality to caribou migrations and salmon populations have been touched. We talk to firefighters on the ground and in the air, trek through charred forests with environmental scientists, and discuss connections to the climate change with BC's climate experts.
Episode 15
Right now, in the 21st century, South Korean scientists are actually working to resurrect the prehistoric woolly mammoth using cloning technology and the flesh of perfectly preserved specimen once buried in Northern Siberia. The hope is that if they can find an active cell from the meaty leg of a 40,000 year old frozen mammoth, it could hold the keys to bringing back the extinct species. At the same time, shady tusk hunting Siberians looking for mammoth ivory support the Korean cloning project, by discovering frozen mammoths in the quickly melting permafrost of the Russian Far North. This bizarre supply chain inspired us to travel to Seoul, Yakutsk, and Moscow, to learn about humanity's quest to both profit from, and clone, the legendary woolly mammoth.