On July 1, President Donald Trump posted a tweet congratulating Canada on its 150th anniversary and referred to the prime minister as “my new found friend @JustinTrudeau.” This might seem odd, especially in light of recent disagreements between the two leaders over the Paris climate accord and Trump’s threats to ditch the 20-year-old North American Free […] More »

On November 21st the Macdonald-Laurier Institute will celebrate the 25th anniversary of Free Trade with a “gala” dinner that promises to be a “remarkable evening”. It’s being billed as a can’t-miss event, presumably attended by autocratic millionaires who will be outfitting themselves with new monocles and pocket watch fobs for the evening. I imagine most […] More »

“You know that here in Colombia, there are many human-rights violations,” says José Oney Valencia Llanos, who earns his living cutting sugar cane in Colombia’s fertile Cauca Valley. “Business people, through multinational and transnational corporations, have violated human rights and attacked workers, directly and indirectly.” Oney told me this on a humid afternoon in El […] More »

When the Canadian government introduced Canadian Content rules for radio, listeners from coast to coast to coast were made to endure the strains of Gowan, Glass Tiger and Platinum Blonde. Today, many Canuck acts are critically acclaimed and commercially viable—hitting the Billboard charts on a regular basis. Could screen quotas do the same thing for our homegrown filmmakers? More »