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.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Mar 10, 2017
Length: 19 minutes (4,824 words)

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.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Dec 22, 2016
Length: 8 minutes (2,146 words)

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.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Dec 14, 2016
Length: 30 minutes (7,717 words)

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.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Nov 30, 2016
Length: 12 minutes (3,080 words)

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.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Oct 24, 2016
Length: 30 minutes (7,515 words)

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.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Oct 19, 2016
Length: 7 minutes (1,964 words)

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.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Sep 21, 2016
Length: 11 minutes (2,985 words)

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.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Sep 6, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,251 words)

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.

Source: The Walrus
Published: May 17, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,250 words)

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.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Feb 4, 2016
Length: 14 minutes (3,631 words)