Midweek
Wednesday March 8th, 2023 with Cate Newman & Sember Wood
Winter 2023 - Episode #5

With hosts Cate Newman and Sember Wood at the mics, this week’s show was a classic sort of Midweek: a mix of a little bit of just about everything. Reporter Zoe Miller started us off with a conversation she’d had with a local trans woman about the questions this International Women’s Day raised about just who we include as women — and the news she brought was good: It does get better, and has gotten better in this woman’s experience, and she’s especially heartened by how accepting so many people are, especially the young. In daily life, it’s not the way you’d expect from all the confrontation portrayed in the media, she says. Then Anne-Marie Iemmolo told us about the success of the Ottawa Starlight Skating team, a synchronized skating team that just won a silver medal at the nationals in Calgary with a routine called Shipwrecked. The end of university can leave new graduates feeling lost at sea as they seek the safe shore of the first step into their new career. Midweek’s Gail Pope spoke with Prionzita Chakraborty, a recent graduate of the aerospace engineering program at Carleton University, about what this transition was like for her and about the additional struggles and stresses felt in this process by international students like her. Sember Wood was out bright and early on the Sunday morning before our show to meet a woman who’s found a way to help folks put struggles and stresses aside, at least for a while, by inviting them to Dance to Nature! amid the trees at Mooney’s Bay Park. Each participant dances in their own ways to the same playlist provided to them by organizer Alana O’Donnell, so their earbuds are filled with the music but the silent sweep of winter in the park remains undisturbed. Back to stress: Cate Newman brought us a think-tank’s forecast that by 2050, more than one billion people could be climate refugees somewhere in the world as deserts spread, floods rage, sea levels rise, and other mayhem and conflicts worsen — but as Cate reports, many in power around the world are resisting any attempt to class these victims of slow-motion disasters as being truly refugees. What then do we do? Well, Midweek’s Lauren Roulston interviewed a member of the board of Bike Ottawa whose suggestion is to start with simple, do-able steps like how we as individuals get from A to B — and if we do, we may profit personally from it in terms of health and cash, on top of the whole saving-the-world thing. Sember Wood then was back with a preview of a book by author Tracey Lindeman called Bleed, due out on March 21, about the ordeal of endometriosis. Women with this condition can experience disrupted fertility, severe cramping during abnormal and heavy menstrual periods, pain during intercourse, and serious gaslighting by doctors who too often don’t recognize the condition or listen to the women who are suffering through it. Speaking of gaslighting — sorry, groceries, speaking of groceries, the CEOs of Canada’s three major grocery chains were appearing before a Parliamentary committee on the day we put this Midweek together, so we spoke with a manager of a not-so-major local grocery chain, Cedars and Co., about the roles that smaller food retailers can play in the human food chain and about how shoppers can ease the impacts of food price hikes. And if all else fails — that determined job hunt, dancing in nature, biking for the climate, grabbing doctors by the lapels until they listen, chasing interviews for a real radio show on CKCU-FM — if all else fails, there’s always the escape of the make-believe of the movies: Midweek’s Mack Linke found out about the lineup of this year’s International Film Festival of Ottawa from Tom McSorley, its executive director.