Unintended Consequences
Out in the Open | Posted: December 1, 2017 6:32 PM | Last Updated: August 16, 2018
You set out to do something. You have the best of intentions. You can almost taste that golden carrot just dangling in the distance. The dream may be alive. The problem is... sometimes reality gets in the way. This week, Piya asks: How do you recover when things don't go according to plan?
Here are the stories from this week's episode...
Leap — and the net may not appear. Tasneem Jamal and her husband Craig Daniels uprooted their lives and moved to Tanzania to follow their dreams. But even before they left Canada, the plan started to go sideways. And soon, Tasneem was in freefall. She tells Piya how the chaos unintentionally served her initial goal.
In 2008, Nebraska passed its version of a safe haven law, which allows parents to legally, anonymously and safely give up their babies. But it failed to include an age restriction. OITO producer Debbie Pacheco explores how that led several parents to drop off children as old as 17.
When Regina Louise was 13, she met a woman who was kind, trustworthy, and who she wanted to be able to call "mom". For Regina, that was a first. But the courts thwarted the plan for Jeanny Kerr to adopt Regina. It took nearly 30 years, but they finally became mother and daughter in the eyes of the law. Happy as they are about that, they mourn the lost years.
Dating another Indigenous person was important to Sarain Fox, because who she chose to have children with would determine whether her grandchildren could have Indian status. Eventually, she met the perfect match... but ended up finding out her plan wasn't everything she wanted in the first place.
In pursuit of young professionals to fill their downtown condos, some Toronto developers failed to consider something important: those people love dogs. Piya heads out with dog walker Gilleen Witkowski to see how one neighbourhood is bereft of open spaces for pets to pee and poop... and how that's fuelling tensions between neighbours.
This episode originally aired on December 1, 2017.