Last fall, when my son left home in Toronto for his first semester of university on the West Coast, I was not nearly as bereft as I imagined I’d be. He seemed ready for an adventure, and I was excited to see how it would all unfold. But I also wasn’t convinced he was saying goodbye for good. There’s a reasonable chance that he’ll move back in one day.
When my generation graduated university in the 1990s, moving home was considered a sign of failure. People disdainfully labelled people who do so “boomerang kids.” Not anymore. Rents today in major Canadian cities are astronomically high. Entry-level salaries rarely even cover the costs of shared rental accommodations. University graduates do the math and figure out quickly that their childhood bedroom is the only sensible option as a launchpad for adulthood. Many of my fellow Gen X friends are now welcoming back their university-graduate kids.
Claire Gagné explores this phenomenon in the cover story of the next issue of Maclean’s. In her reporting, she expected to find a bunch of disgruntled twentysomethings desperate for independence, annoyed that their parents were still nagging them to empty the dishwasher. Instead she encountered a surprisingly harmonious new normal, where adult children and their accommodating parents make the best of economic necessity—even while they worry about what lies ahead.
Perhaps we’ll never go back to a world where young people live on their own right after university. That might have been a short-lived, late-20th-century experiment—in which case Gagné’s story provides a roadmap to the future. Suffice it to say, I’m not turning my son’s empty bedroom into a home gym anytime soon. Visit macleans.ca for more coverage of everything that matters in Canada, and subscribe now to save 25%. —Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief, Maclean’s |
Canadian nationalism used to be a powerful force for progress. Now, in response to Donald Trump’s threats, University of Toronto professor Robert Schertzer thinks it’s high time to rediscover a common vision for our country. “The one positive of Trump’s tariff threat is that it has re-stoked a need for nationalism,” Schertzer writes in this essay for Maclean’s. “Call it what you will: patriotism, pride, or anger. The signs are everywhere.” |
Many cultural institutions are grappling with rising costs, but Canadian theatre is undergoing a quiet resurgence, says Crow’s Theatre artistic director Chris Abraham. “The ability to sit still and pay attention to one thing for an extended period of time is a vanishingly rare thing in the age of algorithmic distractions,” Abraham writes in this essay for Maclean’s. “For a growing number of Canadians, the theatre has become one of the last, best places to slow down and reap the rewards of giving our unbroken attention to a story well told.” |
Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Toronto-born artist Joyce Wieland became a New York star with her innovative, genre-defying works. Her practice spanned experimental feminist films, erotic graphite sketches, heritage quilts and pop-art paintings. The only unifying thread in her career? Coded political messages on themes like pacifism, activism, nationalism and environmentalism. This retrospective features more than 100 works, including drawings, paintings, collage, film, textiles and prints. It follows Wieland’s career from her beginnings in Toronto through her successful film career in New York and her return to Canada, where she became the first living Canadian woman to have a solo exhibit at the National Gallery. After its stop at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the show will make its way to Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario in June. |
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