My Week at Sea with Canada’s Alt-Right
If its sounds like a nightmare to be stuck on a boat full of followers of Canada’s conservative media provocateur and Breitbart acolyte Ezra Levant, well, you’re in luck: one liberal writer took that trip so you won’t have to.
Je M’Excuse: Guilty Memories From An Anglo Montreal Childhood
Even now, as someone who has lived in Toronto for almost two decades, I cannot shake the Quebec out of me. Both professionally and socially, I notice that my human bonds grow fastest and strongest with other members of the Quebec diaspora. Those multiply nested countercultures seem to give us a unique outlook on life—a combination of self-awareness, clannishness, polyglotism, and cosmopolitan posturing that often leaves us chatting alone, amongst ourselves in the kitchen, at parties in Toronto and Vancouver. The jokes we tell and the questions we ask may be in English. But the backstory comes with French subtitles.
Peace Be Upon You
While his American neighbors to the south argue over a Muslim registry and deportations, one Canadian imam works to save fellow Muslims from radicalization. Enlightening people with knowledge is his true jihad.
Geek Love: On Nerditry as Salvation in ’70s Small-Town Canada
At The Walrus, Kevin Patterson writes on how his fraternal twin brother embraced nerditry to navigate the homophobia of small-town Canada in the ’70s.
Canadian Mining’s Dark Heart
For one Canadian mining company, measuring the real price of gold requires counting environmental destruction and large scale sexual violence against women.
Making Sense of Life In the Death Zone
I was just a few hours shy of the Earth’s summit and feeling deceptively strong. My blood was turning to sludge; my brain and lungs were slowly swelling as my heart pounded against my chest. I was dying, but I felt inspired. Optimistic even. I was three hundred metres into the Death Zone, yet still hours away from my goal.
Big Lonely Doug
How a single ancient tree in western Canada became a nationwide celebrity and media sensation, as well as the powerful image environmental groups needed to try to slow the ongoing destruction of the country’s old-growth forests.
Choosing to Set Him Free: The Stillbirth of Charlie Showman
My son was born in Toronto on September 15, 2010. He had dark, wet hair, and when I cradled him, he was warm and damp, swaddled in a flannel hospital sheet. He smelled just how you would think a newborn baby would smell. He had a pink, thin upper lip and a button nose. His eyes were closed, but the death certificate later said they were brown.
Hold the Fort: How One Fort McMurray Family Built a Dream and Watched it Burn
Now, after the fire, all that’s left of the Frigons’ dream house is the foundation blocks it once stood on, a pile of rubble, and the blue trampoline their kids used to jump on out back.
From above, the damage left by the Beast—the nickname Fort McMurray fire chief Darby Allen has given to wildfire M-009—looks like a Rorschach test, with its blots and streaks of black. Officials say it’s burned more than 250,000 hectares now—three times the size of Calgary.
Above the Fold
The former editor-in-chief of the Winnipeg Free Press and the Edmonton Journal reflects on the damage being done to Canada’s newspapers.