Travers Fellowship

 2021

The Stories

In 2021, two Travers Fellowship recipients were selected to split the award.

Sadiya Ansari will examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the childcare crisis to the fore in Canada. She will produce a solutions-based feature for The Walrus based on the German model, where since 2013 childcare has been a legal right for parents with children over the age of one. Germany provides an example of how a federated state reoriented its childcare policy from individual to collective responsibility, and could show the way for Canadians who hope for a program protected from political whims.

Alex Boyd will chart the fault lines that are currently spreading around the world, dividing the vaccinated from the unprotected. As Canadians clamour for vaccines, much of the world is still waiting for their first shots, and could be waiting long after most in this country are protected. What will the ripple effects be of countries like Canada putting their own population first? How will an inequitable vaccine supply reshape global relationships? As more vaccines arrive within our own borders, what does Canada owe the world?

Here is the link to our 2021 announcement

The Journalists

The Reporting

Alex Boyd

The Reporting

Sadiya Ansari

The Reporters’ Notebook

Alex Boyd

Sitting in a dark plane cabin, surrounded by foreign oil workers bound for shifts on the offshore oil platforms that pepper the Angolan coastline, I was the definition of a parachute journalist.

While my seat mates watched movies or discussed their “traitor” colleague who’d just bought a Tesla, I was speed reading—trying my best to inhale the history and politics of a country I would have struggled to place on a map just two days earlier.

As my editor is fond of saying, with any story you can go micro, and hang your narrative on one person’s experience, or you can go macro, and strive to give your reader the bird’s eye view. Here, it felt important to aim for the latter, and try to explain just how badly this had gone for the world.

Yet trying to keep track of the global vaccine effort was like trying to predict the path blazed by a forest fire.

Each time I thought I had my story mapped out, some combination of more potential vaccines, secretive purchase agreements and a shapeshifting virus would shuffle the deck all over again.

But from the earliest planning stages of this project, I’d hoped to observe the arrival of a shipment of vaccines paid for by Canada, to see firsthand the actions of a country that, so far, had promised much to its neighbours but accomplished little.

The communication folks at UNICEF—the NGO tasked with the Herculean job of global vaccine distribution—were keen to help. But in the race to get shots into arms, the crates of vaccine were often already on the plane or even in the air before they knew for sure who had financed them, they told me. Not all countries were open to a nosy visitor.

So when I got a call saying I might be able to finally see one in Angola the following week—though this plan depended on a rushed visa being granted in a matter of days—I didn’t hesitate. I started packing.

As an aside, I can’t say I would recommend travelling during a pandemic. I was denied boarding on my first flight to Angola because of alleged COVID border restrictions--almost missing the shipment as a result—though the next day, a different airline let me board with a cheerful wave. I worried constantly about where I would get my next PCR test and when, and, in the greatest unintentional timing of my life, was on a plane out of Namibia when Omicron was announced.

But all of that aside, the central challenge of reporting remained the same. It wasn’t lost on me how little I knew about the country I was landing in, however. Critics sometimes wonder why western outlets set their own reporters instead of hiring local freelancers, and I was aware there was little I could learn by speed reading on the plane over that would compare to someone who actually lived there.

There was also, of course, the tremendous privilege Canadians had on this issue—a privilege that I felt very literally pumping through my veins in the form of antibodies, courtesy of the vaccine I’d rolled up my sleeves for months earlier.

It’s drilled into reporters that our job is to report the news, not to be the news. And yet, it was impossible to walk into a vaccination centre where people had waited for hours in the sun in the hopes of getting a precious shot of vaccine without thinking of the two doses I’d received months earlier.

Many of the people in those lines were my age or younger, despite the fact that the AstraZeneca vaccine Canada had sent hadn’t been offered to my age group back in Canada because of a very slight risk of blood clots. By the time those shots landed in Angola, that vaccine brand was hardly being used in Canada at all.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt grimier as a reporter, standing in a basketball stadium turned vaccination centre with the type of punishing jet lag that had left me slightly untethered from reality.  I would ask people what vaccination meant to them, but the question left hanging in the air between us was a weightier one—what does it mean to finally receive what I already have?

Which is not to play the “woe is me” card—let’s be honest, I’d just flown halfway around the world to scratch the itch of my own curiosity—but that reckoning with my privilege felt like part of the reporting process in a way I’d never quite grappled with before.

I couldn’t shake the sense that the way people were reacting to me was also a result of my status as a citizen of a country with such plentiful access to vaccines that frontline workers would soon be throwing them in the trash. In comparison, health officials seemed keen to impress on me that the precious doses they’d been sent wouldn’t go to waste, as if they needed to prove themselves worthy of the life-saving shots.

“Your vaccines are over here,” someone would say, ushering me over to a chest freezer when I walked into a new vaccination centre. “Your vaccines will all be gone within the week,” someone assured me.

Leaving a meeting with government officials, one joked as I was leaving—“Tell Trudeau to send more!”

The fact that I was there became a news story in itself—at one of the vaccinations centers, the Angolan journalist I’d hired to do translation pulled me aside. A couple of local reporters had asked if I would answer a few questions about my trip, he said. It felt hypocritical to decline an interview request, but when a small crowd quickly formed and questions turned to my thoughts on the Angolan roll out, I was quickly out of my depth.

As I saw it, I was there to see whether Canada had done what it said it would do, but their line of questioning slanted more towards, ‘have we done enough for Canada?’

I don’t think it’s possible to go into a situation with zero preconceptions, but at the very least, I hoped to steer around some of the more well-worn stereotypes that western media often uses when they talk about Africa. There is a long history in journalism of tracking down the person with the most emotional story, someone who, preferably, had been left shattered by the virus and whose story would tug the heartstrings of Canadian readers.

But rather than risk reinforcing perceptions of Africa as a continent perpetually down on its luck, I hoped to focus instead on the many capable people who were devoting every waking hour to moving vaccine, pushing back against inequity, and doing everything in their power to make sure this didn’t happen again.

But in some ways, being rooted in a Canadian understanding of the world was a positive.

In journalism you must know your subject, but you must also know your audience. When trying to convey the important of a story to a Canadian audience, understanding how the vaccination debate has played out in Canada and seeing a story the way a Canadian reader would are critical tools.

To understand, on the most basic level, how much privilege Canadians wield here is powerful motivation.

Ultimately, it felt valuable to be telling this story as a Canadian reporter, with the aim of putting the question to Canadian readers—is this what we expect of our country?

I’m grateful that the Travers Fellowship funding gave me the opportunity to try.

The Reporter’s Notebook

Sadiya Ansari

When I first moved to Berlin in 2020, I started noticing kids everywhere: school-aged kids playing soccer, toddlers being herded on busy streets by childcare staff on their daily walk, babies dragging their diapered bums across the sandbox while their moms hovered nearby with coffee.

I couldn’t help but contrast this to Toronto, where I’m from, where there are districts where you really need to look for a stroller. And yet from the trendiest neighbourhood to the quietest in Berlin there was always a playground and a kita nearby. Was I imagining that there seemed to be daycare centres on every corner?

That’s when I started chatting up parents about their childcare options, and discovered it’s free in Berlin — parents who have a state-funded spot pay just 23 euros for food a month. That’s compared to an average of early $1900 a month in Toronto for children under 18 months. I also started to notice the difference it made for those deciding to have children: even as the cost of living rises, it’s one stable factor would-be parents can rely on. 

At the same time, the debate in Canada over childcare was boiling over — across the country parents faced challenges with both access and cost, and the pandemic pushed parents to the limit. That led to a firm commitment from the government to support childcare. In last year’s budget, the Liberals promised a national childcare plan, modelled after Quebec’s $10-a-day program. But what does it take to actually make that happen?

The most interesting thing about the German model for me, was that parents have a right to a subsidized childcare spot for children over one. Legislation granted that right to parents in 2013, and policy and funding models have rearranged themselves to ensure that right is realized — municipalities can and have been sued when parents aren’t able to find a spot. 

As someone who is ambivalent about having children, the more I learned about the German right to a childcare spot, the more appealing the concept became. All of a sudden, the financial burden that can be the equivalent to a second rent or mortgage payment was no longer an issue. For many, that means you don’t have to move out of the city to make the numbers work, or make a decision between delaying going back to work because your salary would barely cover what you’re paying in daycare fees anyway.  

While I researched the situation across the country, I dug into Berlin and Hamburg as two cities with some of the best models across Germany. Speaking with parents and childcare educators in particular brought home how this policy — which touted resulting in more babies, more women in the workforce, and better educational outcomes for children — actually impacted people's lives. 

Meeting Olivia Schulz in Hamburg was particularly interesting because as a Canadian living in Germany, she had been able to compare her options when she got pregnant — and chose Germany. She told me about suffering from postpartum depression after giving birth to her daughter Mila, and how the guarantee of 25 hours of care, even if Schulz wasn’t working, helped her take the time she needed to recover. It also gave her the ability to rethink her career — a sales job with long hours wasn’t ideal for her life anymore. And finally, Schulz was also able to try out three different kinds of care for her daughter Mila: a more traditional daycare centre, a tagesmutter (what we would call a home daycare), and a parent-run centre.

I was determined to visit as many daycare centres as possible, and while inviting a stranger around children during a pandemic wasn’t always a welcome idea, some persistence and a supply of N95 masks helped me visit a few centres in both Berlin and Hamburg. What fascinated me was how many options there were with publicly-funded care.

The Apoidea daycare centres in Hamburg follow the Reggio Emilia philosophy, a Northern Italian approach that puts children at the centre of their learning. I visited one of their locations in an industrial-looking block in the central district of Altona. Inside the two-storey centre, kids from one to six years old have many options to occupy them over the day: an atelier for painting, a music room, another dedicated to arts and crafts, one full of costumes to play dress up, a library, and another room with cushions and rugs to rest. Childcare staff are seen as guides, and the children themselves – those who are old enough — decide what interests they want to follow on any given day. 

Frederik Siebeneichner was my guide during my visit. Despite being at the management level, kids and parents knew him well — sitting outside with him around pickup time, Siebeneichner was interrupted every few minutes by kids bursting to tell him something or parents saying hello. Siebeneichner has worked in the social sector for 24 years, and before working with children, he worked with teens. He noticed preventative programs with teens didn’t make sense, for him, it made sense to start younger. 

He loves his job — you have to, to keep going in this industry, he says. There are so many challenges for childcare educators: long hours, a high administrative burden, increasingly demanding parents, and of course, constantly changing care guidelines during a pandemic. But one of the biggest challenges in Germany is the shortage of workers across the country that puts more pressure on existing staff. Siebeneichner himself was feeling the pinch as he was covering for a manager who quit while also doing his regular job of managing all six centres. 

Equity was also an issue he was grappling with — there were about 140 children at the centre I visited Siebeneicher at, and about a quarter had a migration background. Refugee children typically don’t have funded childcare spots, so local parents raised money to include refugee families — part of the centre’s “DIY” approach to inclusion, says Siebeneichner.

Talking to parents and researchers in Berlin, I realized like any other policy, even a one-size-fits-all approach can result in privileged parents who know how to navigate the system snapping up benefits while less privileged parents end up on wait lists. Equity in access is an issue Canada will have to consider, along with others Germany is still grappling with like its shortage of qualified staff.

Ultimately, the German example shows the difference in quality of life for families when the state decides to take a leadership role in ensuring there is support for goals like encouraging higher birth rates and increasing numbers of women in the workforce — those goals have implications for care, and the state can step in to ensure families feel supported. 

A comparative policy story isn’t exactly the kind of foreign reporting trip I imagined when I started my career. But one way I have reoriented my work in the last few years is to do more solutions-based reporting — only exposing problems through reporting can be exhausting for readers, and not very motivating as a reporter, especially during a global pandemic where there seemed to be no end to the bad news. Childcare is such a pressing issue in Canada, and in highlighting the experiences of how one country managed to revolutionize care, I hope we can learn from both its successes and failures. I’m grateful the Travers Fellowship allowed me the time and resources I needed to do just that.