Activists raise enough funds to open Canada’s first dedicated support centre for men in Toronto

Sarah Boesveld | 18/11/13 | Last Updated: 18/11/13 7:24 PM ET

Activists say they now have funding to open the first Canadian Centre for Men and Families by next spring — an opening that will seek to legitimize the nascent cause of men’s issues in Canada.

The Toronto centre will be the first dedicated and funded place for men to discuss issues of equality, fatherlessness, declining enrolment and increasing suicide rates, according to the Canadian Association for Equality, which on Monday announced it has raised the $50,000 needed to create such a space.

With the help of crowd-sourcing site Indiegogo, the group has now upped its financial goal to $75,000, to be met by Nov. 30.

Iain Dwyer, a founding member of the two-year-old organization, calls the dedicated centre “a first step.”

The men’s centre is everywhere else

“We can use this to project ourselves, give people who need services somewhere to come, whether we help them at that centre or use it to refer them somewhere else,” he said, adding donations have come from all over the world.

Mr. Dwyer is hoping the centre — which will likely be a rented second-floor office space somewhere along one of Toronto’s subway lines — will also serve as a “template” for universities looking to open men’s centres of their own. He said there are interested parties at York University, the University of Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph.

The notion of men’s centres have become a point of tension on university campuses across Canada, deemed unnecessary and even a challenge to women’s centres, which have been well established on many campuses since the 1970s. The most recent debate over men’s centres took place last year at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. The student union voted to fund the centre, but the decision was met with fervent opposition.

As the frequently asked questions page on the university women’s centre website put it: “What is the men’s centre? The simple answer is that the men’s centre is everywhere else.”

But the challenges faced by young men do appear to be real, men’s centre proponents say: According to the Canadian Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, 25% of men who drink are considered high-risk for alcohol abuse — that’s compared to 9% of female drinkers. Data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information report that men are four times more likely than women to commit suicide. According to well-being indicators from Human Resources Canada, university enrolment for women has far outpaced enrolment for men, with 28% of women participating in 2005-2006 and only 18% of men.

Mr. Dwyer said the organization will expand its education and advocacy efforts but also offer services.

“We’re trying to deal with people who offer legal advice to men” on divorce and child custody concerns, Mr. Dwyer said. “And we’ve talked with a few psychologists who want to offer discounts for therapy services.”

The group is also looking to team up with Sheena’s Place, a Toronto-based eating disorder clinic that wants to offer a place for men struggling with body issues.

The centre, Mr. Dwyer hopes, will further legitimize a cause and a group that has been met with protest in its short existence — one of the most high profile was last November, when the group hosted a talk by men’s issues writer Warren Farrell at the University of Toronto.

“This [men's issues] movement is peddling some nice, easy answers,” women’s rights activist Steph Guthrie said at the time. “Those easy answers are going to leave a lot of people in the lurch.”

Mr. Dyer said their cause — speaking up a little louder for men now that women’s issues are far more established — has been misunderstood. But with more visibility, he said, will come more clarity.

“A lot of people like to characterize it as being an anti-feminist kind of thing which, for perfect reason, immediately puts people’s backs up,” he said. “Combating that has been a big part of what we’re trying to do.”

National Post