For seven days in July, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission met in Gatineau, Quebec, to deliberate on the future of the Canadian internet. Until this summer, the CRTC took an essentially laissez-faire approach to the web: it was too new and too poorly understood to start carving out rules to govern it. But the […]

On May 5, 2006, 35 Toronto area video-game developers converged in one spot with a particular goal in mind: to create an entire game, start to finish, in just three days. It was a daunting task, but in the end 10 completed games were assembled, while seven others came just short of the deadline. The […]

It hasn’t been easy being Alberta’s neighbour these last few years. While Canada’s economic wunderkind enjoyed double-digit growth, next-door Saskatchewan saw the near-disappearance of the family farm and watched 35,000 residents in five years flee to other provinces. So when the Conservative Saskatchewan Party swept to power in 2007, promising a $20,000 tuition rebate for […]

CanLit has the literary equivalent of the Y2K bug—it can’t flip over into this century When he delivers public lectures, editor and writer John Metcalf is fond of illustrating CanLit’s paradoxical obsession with tales of the rural past by describing the query letter he once received from a then-unheard-of Russell Smith. Metcalf claims that Smith […]

In which the author finds his lefty credentials sorely tested by one malodorous cat It’s hard enough to be a socially progressive, left-leaning, anti-globalization, conscientious sort in this world, but to be a socially progressive, left-leaning, anti-globalization, conscientious sort and be mildly inconvenienced? It’s too much to bear. As I write this, Toronto is several […]

In choosing Veronica over Betty, Archie Andrews overturns 70 years’ worth of cultural expectations “Just a matter of skill, that’s all!” Archie Andrews’ first words (said as he stood precariously atop his bike) may have seemed spontaneous in 1941, but 70 years have imbued the line with more weight than a supersized chocolate malt. The […]

Marriage certificates in hand, middle-class gays and lesbians have drifted away from the fight for queer rights. Underfunded and burnt out, the activists left behind say there’s still plenty of work to do. Last January, Helen Kennedy sat behind the Hockey Night in Canada desk with CBC’s Ron MacLean, explaining why her organization, Egale Canada, […]

It’s a familiar ritual in movie palaces and multiplexes all over the country. You find yourself in a lineup for a film that you know nothing about, aside from its reputation as a remarkable new work by a hot young director from the Carpathians, or maybe Polynesia. For sustenance, you have foregone popcorn in favour […]

Two elections. Two women. Two killings. One legacy? Not really. One victim became a world icon, while the other barely registered on the books of the international media. Such are the divergent post-mortem fates of Neda Agha Soltan and Zeina al-Miri. The former was shot in the streets of Tehran during post-election disturbances in June. […]

You know it’s wrong to toss your e-waste in the trash but you also know that too often e-waste ends up in a country like India or China, where labourers are exposed to toxic fumes and cancer-causing dioxins as they strip down old electronics, and discarded heavy metals end up contaminating local soil and water. […]

[Editor’s note: If you’re curious, This Magazine has its own Tumblr blog. Visit quote.this.org] I have never left a cinema with as big a grin on my face as when I watched the spectacularly awful Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Every complaint I had heard was spot-on—that the acting was abysmal, the plot incomprehensible, the […]