While cyclists in Toronto rallied to remember Darcy Allan Sheppard, the cyclist killed after allegedly being dragged along Bloor St.  by a car driven by former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant, another car accident was causing comparative degrees of outrage at the eastern edge of the country… and this one embodies my worst fear. More »

With the death early this week of Toronto cyclist Darcy Allan Sheppard, tensions between cyclists and motorists, always common, seem to have reached a boiling point. A spontaneous demonstration and  memorial last Tuesday on Toronto’s Bloor Street attracted thousands of cyclists who blocked traffic and held a moment of silence for Sheppard. The incident has […] More »

Above we’ve embedded the live stream of today’s Citizen Media Rendezvous taking place in Montreal, sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada’s Citizenshift initiative. The segment above features four speakers: Véronique Marino (INIS) Geraldine Cahill (The Real News Network) David Beers (The Tyee) Laurent Mauriac (Rue 89) The second panel of speakers, above, featured […] More »

Jordan Himelfarb—who among many other talents is the Arts & Ideas editor for This Magazine and senior editor of The Mark, above—is giving a talk this Wednesday in Toronto called “The New World of Journalism: Audiences, Editorial and Momentum,” and if you’re interested in the future of our troubled news media, this will be worth […] More »

Journalism’s most fearless reporters take on its toughest question If you’re a journalist and still brave enough to announce that fact on social occasions, you can be more or less assured what the next question will be. “Don’t you worry,” someone will always begin with a sheen of sympathy, “that journalism is dying?” There are […] More »

You’ve probably noticed by now, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock or just standing endlessly in line to offload your garbage, that Pride is in full swing. I have to admit I find Toronto Pride kind of overwhelming. This is largely because I come from Scotland, where Pride is shared by two cities who […] More »

Girls are expected to behave a certain way. While I’m not exactly sure what that means, I do know that I was once chastised by one of my high school drama teachers for what she diagnosed as “this stupid Goth thing you’re going for”: referring—albeit inaccurately—to my self-styled uniform of inky dyed hair, Salvation Army […] More »

Is it too ambitious to call chapbooks the quintessential medium for Canadian poetry? Certainly many do. And it is true that in these tiny works of ephemera have been published some of the most experimental and best work of Canadian poets such as Gwendolyn McEwen, Jay Millar, and of course bp Nichol. Moreover, like the […] More »

It’s only fair that the 11-day Celebrate Canada! festival should kick off with National Aboriginal Day. After all, what better way to commemorate this crazy multicultural mosaic of a country than by launching its celebration in honour of the first people to make it awesome? We’ve compiled a list of things to see and do […] More »

A couple summers ago I was working for a medical ethics organization in Israel and we started receiving complaints from a group of former soldiers who were suffering from a mysterious cluster of similar medical problems: shaking, memory loss, fatigue. It turned out that while they were serving in the army, the men had received […] More »

What does “free” look like? This was the prompt sent out to a group of local Toronto artists around two months ago. The results, which were hung along the fourth-floor hallway of the Case Goods Warehouse in the Distillery District last weekend, elegantly captured a word that is part economic reality, part political manifesto, and […] More »