Wait, wait, little one: learning to connect through a story of survival
When I turned 10 on March 12, 2011, we had been living in Homs for about four months. The atmosphere was shifting in Syria. It seemed that just as we began settling into our new life, everything else around us was stirring up. News reports were filled with words like revolution, Egypt, oust, Arab Spring, […]
Quebec’s relationship with the oil industry: it’s complicated
The Lac-Mégantic disaster remained seared in Quebec’s consciousness. The train that exploded in July 2013—one example of the fiftyfold increase in oil-by-rail between 2009 and 2013—had come through the American Midwest, crossed into Canada at Windsor, then passed through Montreal before heading toward the Maine border to cut across the northern part of the state, […]
Stursberg issues rallying cry to protect Canadian media amid encroaching U.S. tech giants
Canadians are increasingly at risk of checking out of the national conversation with the decline of the news industry and the arrival of American streaming services, argues Richard Stursberg, a former CBC executive, in his new book. In The Tangled Garden: A Canadian Cultural Manifesto for the Digital Age, Richard Stursberg, the former head of […]
Force is not just what comes out of the barrel of a police officer’s gun
Force is not just what comes out of the barrel of a police officer’s gun. It certainly is that, but it also takes many other forms: intimidation; arbitrary actions that criminalize or harass ordinary people, especially if they are Black, brown, Indigenous or poor; use of the collective power of unions and professional associations to […]
‘I was instantly struck by the power that this one image held and how much emotion was wrapped up in this picture of a single giant tree alone in a clear cut’
A calm wind ruffled the branches of some of the largest trees in the world. It twisted and turned through the forest, picking up scents of cedar and spruce—even a faint tinge of salt, this close to the Pacific Ocean. Late afternoon sun had burned off any lingering mist, leaving a clear blue sky. Nearly […]
Elliott takes a raw, fierce deep-dive into the lasting legacy of colonialism in Canada
OTTAWA—A couple of years ago, my young son asked me if there was a difference between Ottawa and the settlements in the occupied territories. Aren’t both, he asked, communities built on stolen land? I didn’t have a good answer then, and still don’t. Here in “progressive” Canada, we are rarely asked to consider what it […]
Freedom of expression is under attack on campus
The commons that is the subject of this book is a platform or space for the debate, discussion, and collaboration that are both inherent in and essential to the idea of the university. This space is multidimensional and has varying degrees of formality. It is to be found in the governance framework and networks; in […]
A nice day for a Green wedding: Elizabeth May ties the knot on Earth Day
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May wed John Kidder over the holiday weekend in Victoria, B.C. Ms. May, a first-time bride, met Mr. Kidder when he ran as a Green Party candidate in the 2013 B.C. provincial election and they soon became friends. Following the Green Party convention last September, the two became romantically involved. The […]
‘I always knew that my public policy research had, at some point, to address the First Peoples’: Courchene
One wonders whether the architects of the Constitution Act, 1982, had any premonition of what the interaction among the royal proclamation, the Constitution Act, the Charter, and the original BNA Act would lead to in the hands of the legal system and, in particular, the Supreme Court of Canada. By any definition, the results, as […]
Growing global population: burden or boon to the environment?
Historical overview As the chemist and geographer Daniel B. Luten observed on the eve of the famous 1980 Julian Simon-Paul Ehrlich wager, since the late 18th century “the question of limits to growth and optimism and pessimism regarding the human prospect [has been] debated without consensus” while interest in the issue has “waxed and waned […]
