About Varda Burstyn

Varda Burstyn was born in Israel, and raised in Israel and Canada. Her early  forays  into politics and social activism took place in  Chicago in 1967 and 1968 where she joined that city’s first feminist group, became an active participant in Rev. Jesse Jackson’s economic justice campaign Operation Breadbasket, and in the campaign to stop the war in Vietnam. She was also learning more about pollution and ecology and in 1969, back in Toronto, joined the founding staff of the newly established Pollution Probe at the University of Toronto. As well as loving, and eventually writing about, literature, fine art and popular culture and becoming active in Canadian politics, in the NDP and the independent left, and subsequently producing a body of work on governmental and state politics, she has remained an environmentalist activist and writer ever since. Through the 1970s, in Toronto and Montreal, she earned her living as a youth and family worker while studying and being active in a number of social change organizations.

She began teaching part-time (film studies, Atkinson College, York University, Toronto) and writing professionally in 1980. That decade saw the beginnings of a mobilization of the women’s movement on the subjects of pornography and censorship and, as a board member of the Canadian Images Film Festival, which came under fire for showing a feminist film with explicit imagery, she was asked to defend the festival in the arts community and women’s movement (1981). From then until 1987, Varda produced a body of work on many aspects of the politics of sexual representation and the realities of increasing sexual commodification. 

In 1987, Varda, who had always remained engaged in peace and two-state solution efforts related to Israel,  traveled for an extended stay in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank . She interviewed key players in all those sites in order to move beyond the often superficial reportage of the day and present an in-depth look at the politics of this region. What she found was presented in a 3-hour CBC Radio Ideas series - Israel at the Crossroads.

When the New Democratic Party, Canada’s social democratic party, came to power in Ontario in late 1990, Varda was asked to join the health reform team in the new minister’s office as the major (new) policy speech writer. In a year and a half of whirlwind work, she became familiar with every aspect of Ontario’s health care system, and also worked hard to bring about the first (and still only) environmental health clinic in the public health care system, in Toronto - whose doors opened in 1996. Until 1998, Varda took on more  consulting work in the health care sector, at the federal, provincial and regional levels, in the context of multiple initiatives – too many rolled back or undone by subsequent governments, unfortunately.

During the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, while living in Montreal and Cincinnati, she continued to work in sports studies and  in the area of reproductive and genetic technologies, including on an award-winning series produced by the National Film Board of Canada, Main basse sur les genes and Clonage (1988).

From the mid-1990s to the mid 2000s, while her volunteer work saw her as Vice-Chair of Greenpeace Canada, Varda also researched and wrote a fictional work – a prophetic, fact-based novel of environmental and political suspense, Water Inc., which has been translated into French, German, and Korean.

In 2005 and 2006, Varda took on emerging issues in the emerging knowledge about the widespread adverse effects of environmental, especially chemical, agents on children’s health. She  wrote a loose series of three articles on different aspects of this subject, two anthologized in Praeger Press’s cross-over series, Childhood in America , the third in the acclaimed anthology, Child Honouring.

Since the mid 2000s, Varda has worked with a variety of allies and clients – patients’ organizations, health care providers, government health officials, physicians and others, in voluntary and consultative capacities – on an extended multi-stage, multi-component effort to bring about health care services for people who suffer from a number of chronic, environmentally- linked illnesses that have become epidemic, but for which Canada’s health care systems provide no care.

Misdiagnosed, she had suffered (misdiagnosed) from one such disease process  - Multiple chemical sensitivity, also known as ES (Environmental Sensitivities) or TILT (toxicant induced loss of tolerance) - at mild to moderate levels most of her life. But in 2000, thanks to an intense, prolonged chemical exposure, she radically deteriorated only to discover anew there was no clinical capacity to treat this condition in Canada’s famously “universal” health care system.

And so, from 2008 to 2017, with a number of other senior colleagues in and around Ontario’s health care system and in advocacy organizations, she was the initiator, then eventually the lead overall project consultant of what turned into a multi-year, multi-stakeholder study process to establish a network of environmental health clinics and centre of excellence, called the Ontario Centre of Excellence in Environmental Health (OCEEH) – learn more about this  project and the reports it produced.

This process eventually resulted in the establishment of an Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s Task Force on Environmental Health 2016 to December 2018, which produced two reports, in 2017 and 2018. Varda was instrumental in writing the first in 2017, but resigned after this because of major differences she had regarding the government’s limits and distortions of the mandate of the task force. Her history and evaluation of the task force’s Phase 1 report (2017) are available here, from her informational website, Dispatches from the Chemical Edge. Click here for her 2019 in-depth critique, with extensive research support, of the invalid definition of MCS appended by health ministry officials without task force approval, to the final report (2018), along with an constructive discussion about the lack of awareness of MCS in the medical profession in Canada, and what is needed to repair this.