Susan Crean’s decision to write about her family servant and dear friend Mr. Wong takes her on a journey that reveals just as much about the ever-shifting nature of multiculturalism and identity in Canada as it does about Wong’s life It’s a brilliant Friday morning in August, 2011 just past nine o’clock, and the sidewalk… More »

Whale hunting is a fundamental practice in the North and should be celebrated, not restricted… Gabriel Nirlungayuk can’t pinpoint when Inuit first began hunting bowheads. “Whaling, from an Inuit perspective, has been ongoing since time immemorial,” says the director of wildlife and environment for the land-claims group Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. But he knows one thing:… More »

Long regarded as the enemy of literacy, comic books and graphic novels are increasingly useful as a way of improving reading skills among otherwise reluctant students, young and old On a cold mid-February afternoon under overcast skies, a school bell rings. The halls of Toronto’s Agnes Macphail Public School flood with children dressed in puffy… More »

In Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan, parallel education systems still exist: the secular public school boards, and separate Catholic school boards. It is time to abolish that system. The problem of separate school boards is not their Catholicism; it is their separateness. Public funding elevates one religious tradition above all others, and in secular, multicultural contemporary Canada, that… More »

The Journal of Behavioral Medicine tells us what humans have always known—singing in groups is good for you. Sing and immune-boosting proteins come flooding through your bloodstream. Psychophysiological changes take hold. Your mood is elevated. Bruce Peninsula knows this intuitively. The band, which can swell to more than a dozen, mixes gospel, folk, and prog… More »

Calgary is not a place to stay. A cultural wasteland with a boom-bust oil economy where hard workers can make their money before moving to a “real” city with “real” arts and culture—but not a place to stay. This is an all-too-common belief about Calgary. But skeptics should take a closer look at the Heart… More »

Before his experience with the youth volunteer program Katimavik, Kamloops resident Erik Nelson subscribed to the usual Quebec stereotypes. “Out here in the West,” he says, “we kind of view Quebec in a very simple light: as the angry, dissatisfied province.” Nine months later, you’ll find Nelson busy planning ways to feed his new-found “obsession”… More »

Dance is an art form often discussed in terms of its complexity and mystery. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” W.B. Yeats famously asked. One wonders, then, what he would make of dance film. For when you add a second layer—the dance of a director’s eye and viewfinder around the dancer—you get… More »

In 1999, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission took a hard look at the then-burgeoning internet. They then did what many Canadians would consider a very un-CRTC-like thing: they decided not to regulate it. That may come as something of a surprise, as we tend to think that if the CRTC has a thing, it’s… More »