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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.

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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.