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 »

It was a great moment for the Conservatives’ law and order agenda, and a terrible one for justice. Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan recently announced new anti-terrorism legislation that would allow Canadian victims of terrorist attacks on both domestic and foreign soil to sue individual terrorists, terrorist organizations, or even countries accused of supporting […] More »

For at-risk youths, Pathways to Education may be a one-way ticket out of poverty. The program can be described as an “early intervention” initiative: it identifies demographically disadvantaged students and, from grade 9 onwards, guides them towards high school completion and post-secondary education through a combination of tutoring, mentoring, and scholarships. Unlike tuition freezes or […] More »

The English language reached 1 million words yesterday. It’s a bit of a humbling realization if you’re intent on developing your vocabulary. It means, if you want to know every English word, you will need to learn a word an hour for the next 114 years, which means you’re probably already too late. That’s also […] 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 »

Ever the  moral hinterland, the U.S. state of Texas has recently been in the news for an exceptionally despicable practice: charging victims of sexual violence up-front payments for their own rape kits, which pack a financial wallop of up to $1800. No one has conducted an official poll on the matter, but I’m fairly confident […] 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 »

At a yuppie-friendly health food supermarket, Helen Goode pushes her shopping cart down the produce aisle. She reaches a mound of green apples reading “Conventionally Harvested $3.99/lb.” Just beside these lies another mound of apples, labeled “Organic $5.49/lb”, followed by a selection of “Sustainably Harvested Organic” apples, then “Locally Grown Sustainably Harvested Organic” apples, then […] More »

Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park is home to one of the planet’s most richly diverse ecosystems. Beneath it lies enough oil to generate some billions of dollars in revenue. What’s a poor Andean nation to do? Hold off drilling in exchange for cash, it turns out. In 2007, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa proposed a novel solution: […] More »

The furor over the new Conservative attack ads, which were released early last week, has thankfully started to die down. But their central jab — that Ignatieff has been out of the country for 34 years and is only back because he is a political opportunist — has continued to inspire a stream of Facebook […] More »

“It’s  aggravating to put up with the amount of sanctimony and hypocrisy that’s around,” griped Globe and Mail columnist, longtime activist, and former This Magazine editor Rick Salutin, at the early May launch of Yves Engler’s book, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, where Salutin was the keynote speaker. Engler’s book sheds light on […] More »