Former politician Cheri DiNovo was raised an agnostic atheist and, from an early age, thought religion was silly. “I didn’t understand why people were religious,” she says. “I always wanted to have that conversation, but was embarrassed to ask because I saw that some of the Christians I knew were very smart people who did […] More »

Growing up in an Ismaili Muslim community in Toronto, there was no explicit acceptance of queer folks, says Thawer. “I simply did not know where to look to find other people like myself.” At the age of 23, Thawer finally found his people at Salaam Canada, a social network and support group for those who […] More »

This year, Canada celebrates its 150th birthday. Ours is a country of rich history—but not all Canadian stories are told equally. In this special report, This tackles 13 issues—one per province and territory—that have yet to be addressed and resolved by our country in a century and a half  I hadn’t been this excited about a stamp […] More »

One morning, in early September 2011, I sat at my work computer and watched my hands hover over the keyboard, shaking. I had just flown back to Montreal from Morocco, a trip I’d done many times since I immigrated to Canada six years ago; I was used to flying across time zones. But these hands […] More »

On March 22, Pope Francis created a commission—of four men and four women—that will directly advise him  on policies regarding sex abuse. This has been done a year after Pope Benedict requested Catholic Church authorities around the globe create national guidelines on how to protect children in the Church by the end of May 2014. […] More »

“The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.” -Slavoj Zizek As we all move slowly into the second […] More »

On May 10, the annual anti-abortion rally was held on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. This year’s event has come at a very interesting time in the Canadian abortion debate. Only weeks earlier, Stephen Harper denounced fellow Tory Stephen Woodworth’s bid to reopen the debate in the House of Commons. Woodworth, a Conservative backbencher, recently proposed […] More »

That Catholic schools do not always look positively upon homosexuality may not come as a great surprise, given their collective track record. But in the past week, two news stories have brought new and unique anti-gay measures taken at Catholic schools to light. First, officials at Missisauga’s St. Joseph’s Catholic  Secondary School allegedly restricted students’ use of […] More »

On November 16 the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly (Social, Humanitarian & Cultural) debated a resolution demanding an end to summary and arbitrary executions. Included in the text was a non-exhaustive list that highlighted many of the groups that are currently subject to inordinate levels of state persecution: ethnic groups, linguistic minorities, street […] More »

Free at last. After three years and nine months thwarting a deportation order in the sanctuary of a Montreal church, Abdelkader Belaouni became a Canadian citizen in October 2009. Belaouni was one of the refugees I spoke to for my article “Gimme Shelter” in This Magazine’s July-August 2009 issue. At the time, he was living […] More »

Quebec is going ahead with its ludicrous ban on religious head-coverings like the niqab and the burka on provincial government property. It’s an astonishing piece of legislation that manages the improbable feat of being baselessly arbitrary and obviously xenophobic. The whole law is crafted to be targeted at a single identifiable—and extremely tiny—minority, but Premier […] More »