This year, Canada celebrates its 150th birthday. Ours is a country of rich history—but not all Canadian stories are told equally. In this special report, This tackles 13 issues—one per province and territory—that have yet to be addressed and resolved by our country in a century and a half At a St. John’s rally on April 6, the […] More »

Of all the arts, dance is arguably the most physically and emotionally exhausting, and with an average annual income of a professional dancer sitting at $18,000, the real-life Natalie Portmans live way under Canada’s poverty line. And the crippling anxiety that might overtake an almost-30 dancer who fears his or her career is ending is […] More »

[Note: this editorial appears in the November-December 2011 edition of This Magazine, which will be on newsstands and in subscribers’ mailboxes in early November.]  Looking back on autumn 2011, it seems increasingly clear that the movement known as “Occupy Wall Street” will be viewed as a genuinely important historical moment for the West. The idea, […] More »

Could you live on $14,000 a year? Could everyone in Canada? And could we live on $14,000 a year for the rest of history? That’s the sort of uncomfortable, prickly question Peter Victor likes to ask. And the way you answer might say a lot about the future of the planet. That’s because Victor is […] More »

On Monday, the Toronto Star reported on two Ontario judges who opened an investigation after noticing slumping jury attendance rates — at times reaching as little as 50 percent. The article goes in depth, examining jury absence rates and penalties by province. Only three of the provinces and territories track jury attendance, but those who […] More »

That wild bolshevik magazine Time has had the gall to question the notion that America is the best country in the world. The March 14th cover story, by Fareed Zakaria displays a red foam finger the reads “We’re #1” pointing downwards. “Yes, America is in decline,” reads the caption. Some could argue that the U.S […] More »

In the search for underlying causes of the Middle-Eastern revolts, food, technology, Twitter, and social media have been identified as possible suspects. Last week, Dylan Robertson argued here that these are in fact food revolutions—that drastically increasing food prices had worn away at citizens (commenter Jen Hassum said that “bread determinism” wasn’t entirely true either; […] More »

The golden age of the welfare state wasn’t that golden. The real solution is economics that actually promotes equality Remember the good old days when Canadians used to think the government was supposed to help everyone share in economic prosperity and prevent anyone from shouldering the brunt of economic adversity? We thought we’d learned the […] More »

When Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, checks into his Vancouver hotel suite a few weeks from now, he will find (as he flops, exhausted, no doubt, from the strain of private jet travel) a “video wall,” paid for by the citizens of British Columbia. The bank of televisions are a requirement of […] More »

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 […] More »

When Finance Minister Jim Flaherty first revealed his stimulus spending package back in January, he announced that Canada’s Economic Action Plan would “protect Canadians during the global recession” and “put more money in the hands of Canadian families, to help them weather the current storm.” Although Flaherty claims to have introduced a budget that is […] More »