Cities

  • True North Interview

    Reading the Canadian storyteller’s posthumous new book, Jonathon Van Maren retraces in imagination his travels from his own driveway to the main streets of small towns and cities across the land.

    Earlier this fall, a new book by radio host, writer, and Canadian storyteller Stuart McLean was released: The Vinyl Café Celeb...

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  • Picture Parliament Without Parties

    Peter Menzies argues the salvation of Canadian democracy lies in our two youngest political jurisdictions where consensus government, not leadership whip cracking, prevails.

    Six years and three elections ago, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau was about to become Prime Minister. Deficits were to be modest and temporary, Canada was going to “be back” as a global player, ways were to be sunny, transparency would blossom like flowers i...

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  • Will Canadians Stick With Justin the Changemaker?

    In his latest Cardus Insights newsletter, Executive Vice President Ray Pennings argues this election is about deciding whether to continue Prime Minister Trudeau’s transformation of Canada.  

    Ray's Cardus Insights newsletter strives to “connect the dots” among faith, business, and public life. Read a sample and sign-up for Cardus Insights.

    The first day of Canada’s ...

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  • Canada Fails Afghan Religious Minorities

    Human rights workers tell Susan Korah it’s inexplicable Canada hasn’t prioritized the rescue of Christians and minority Muslims.

    Afghanistan’s religious minorities are facing nothing less than a genocide but the Canadian government has yet to make a firm commitment to protect some of the most vulnerable among them, say Canadian human rights activists.

    Hazaras and Christians – ...

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  • We Cannot Abandon Lebanon

    Susan Korah reports on the desperate state of the former Mediterranean oasis one year after the blast that decimated Beirut.

    One year ago today was a night of splintering glass and splattering blood. 

    On August 4, 2020, as the last hours of pre-sunset daylight illuminated Beirut’s skyline, a cataclysmic explosion shook the city like the blast of an atomic bomb. It turned o...

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  • The Moving Goalposts of COVID Response

    Faced with pandemic “certainties” that quickly turn out to be up, down, and all around, Don Hutchinson cautions that science can provide estimates but not ultimate truth.

    A friend recently joined the growing group of Canadians who take issue with the moving goalposts of the declared as life-or-death (not-really-a) game of pandemic response. Another compared the relationship between science advisors and politicians t...

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  • Talking Turkey About Tulips

    Ottawa’s annual Tulip Festival owes its origins to a Turkish refugee and Canada going Dutch during the Second World War, Susan Korah discovers.

    The transformation couldn’t be more dramatic. Each May, thousands of tulips in full bloom turn Ottawa’s parks and public gardens into bursts of vibrant colour, ranging from fiery reds and yellows to delicate pastels—all the more striking after the dreary gr...

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  • When A Pope Comes Home

    The welcome for Pope Francis on his visit to Iraq was a memorable first step. Now hope must become reality, Susan Korah reports.

    A calculated risk in the face of pandemic fears and potential security threats, the visit of Pope Francis to Iraq brought incalculable benefits, say members of the country’s indigenous Christian community. 

    Traumatized by years of violence and hate w...

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  • Great Reset? Or Grand Unravelling?

    Prime Minister Trudeau has mused that COVID-19 will allow for Canadian society to “re-set” on a number of fronts. Peter Menzies says we’ll have to avoid coming apart at the seams first.

    Last week’s unravelling of the so-called Atlantic bubble should erase any lingering romantic thoughts that Canadians are united in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Since July 3, the nation’s four Atlantic provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, New Br...

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  • For Whom the Polls Toll

    Fixated as Canadians are on soundings of popular opinion that foretell who will govern us next, Don Hutchinson writes, the only poll that counts is in the booth where we mark our ballots on Election Day.

    Polling doesn’t have the sex appeal of commercials about beer, pickup trucks or electric cars, but it does attract the attention of millions of Canadians. Whether pick-one-from-this-list junk polling on television, radio and social media, or more extensive ...

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  • Hitting the (Ouch!) Bumpy (Owww!) Post-Pandemic (Ooof!) Road

    CNN celebrity thinker Fareed Zakaria maps 10 potholes from here to post-pandemia. Reviewer Robert Joustra, as if channeling the Tao of Eeyore, isn’t sure the ride’s worth the ruts.

    “There is no new normal,” “these unprecedented times,” “now we all have to work together” – whatever your favorite pandemic BINGO drinking phrase is, you’ve heard it enough since March that you probably had to either give up the game or check into rehab. ...

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  • Blueprints for God’s Hotels

    Raymonde Gauthier, co-curator of a current exhibit at Montreal’s Hôtel Dieu museum, explores with Peter Stockland how the 19th century partnership of Bishop Ignace Bourget and architect Victor Bourgeau shaped the city’s spiritual landscape.

    About 40 years ago, Raymonde Gauthier found a PhD topic by glancing out the window of her small apartment at the corner of Montreal’s St. Laurent Boulevard and Sherbrooke Street.

    Through the heat of Quebec’s post-1960s anti-clerical nationalist eupho...

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  • Sharing Memory Matters

    Energy wasted defending or toppling statues should instead power a national conversation about what, why and how we collectively commemorate our pluralistic pasts, Peter Stockland writes.

    Pictured: a memorial mural found in Belfast for those who lost their lives in conflict. Photo by Peter Stockland.

    For her book Talking Stones: The Politics of Memorialization in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland, Elisabetta Viggi...

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  • Finding the Right Helping Hands for Beirut

    Canadian NGOs are meeting the challenge of keeping aid dollars from disappearing into corrupt pockets after the explosion that shredded the Lebanese capital, Susan Korah reports.

    I think our country sinks beneath the yoke; It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash Is added to her wounds.

    William Shakespeare

    It’s a long way from the bleak, windswept moors of...

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  • Big City in Training

    Convivium’s Rebecca Darwent finds her old hometown growing up from underground as a brand new light rail commuter train lets Ottawans connect from the far flung ‘burbs almost as if they lived in a real city like Montreal.

    If there’s one thing I know about Ottawans, it’s that we like to complain about our transit system. And rightfully so. Waiting for a bus that never shows up, having buses pass by due to over capacity, cancelling routes so often that the OC Transpo Twitter f...

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  • Another Look at the Lending Market

    Anticipating next week’s Cardus study on pay day loans, and a vote by the city of Kitchener to regulate the sector, Convivium’s Rebecca Darwent talks to Cardus Work and Economics Program Director Brian Dijkema about helping low-income Canadians gain fair and equal access to credit.  

    Rebecca Darwent: Can you start by bringing us up to speed on the work you have been doing to set the stage for what has led to the paper we are expecting for release next week?

    Brian Dijkema: We have done six reports on payday lendin...

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  • Alberta's Show of Hands

    Premier Jason Kenney’s no-frills swearing in gives Father Raymond de Souza time to turn from politics to art and find beauty in the work of human hands.

    EDMONTON – The swearing-in of Alberta’s 18th premier, Jason Thomas Kenney, and his cabinet was a rather workmanlike affair, in contrast to the swearing-in of Rachel Notley four years ago. Then, the ceremony was held outdoors, on the expansive groun...

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  • Trying to Find a Place in This World

    In the last seven years, Convivium contributor Haley Welch has moved many times: to new neighbourhoods, new provinces, and new countries. To move on (or away) is not equivalent to editing out the reality of that place from her story, she writes.

    When I moved into my first apartment that I would not share with roommates, I was elated. It was a bit by accident, and not entirely financially feasible, but it was the best option at the time. I had secured a full-time, permanent position at an great orga...

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  • The Shared Space of Faith And Science

    Milton Friesen, program director of Cardus Social Cities, will deliver a lecture this evening at McMaster University’s Divinity College on Religion And Science: Conspiring Together For God. As Milton tells Convivium’s Peter Stockland, he intends it as a catalyst to a much broader and deeper conversation about the institutional responsibilities of faith and science in Canada’s common life.

    Convivium: Science versus religion is always a hot topic, but I gather you’ll be talking about it in a somewhat different way than we’ve come to expect?

    Milton Friesen: I’ll be looking at the institutional aspects of...

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  • Living A Different Answer

    Father Deacon Andrew Bennett, director of Cardus Law, celebrates Christmas with hundreds of Millennials  who respond to old holiday questions with a new zeal for Truth

    “So how was your Christmas?” “What did you get up to over the holidays?”

    These seemingly quite innocent questions linger in the air at this time of year in our schools, around the proverbial water cooler at work, in the university residences, and in ...

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  • Calling for the Common Good

    Today, we release the final piece in our series of Policy Options articles that have emerged as a response to our Spirited Citizenship: Care, Conflict, and Virtue round table in Ottawa last month, convened in partnership with the Angus Reid Institute to mark Canada’s Sesquicentennial. 

    (Mr. Milton Friesen, Program Director of Cardus Social Cities program, Mr. Joe Gunn, Executive Director for Citizens for Public Justice (...

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  • Start the Revolution Without Me

    Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts features a summer exhibition, Revolution, paying tribute to the 1960s. Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland drops by and finds the only thing missing is the whole truth about that often dangerously demented decade. Did they forget how to spell Charlie Manson's name?

    “And all the lousy little poets coming ‘round/tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson/see the white man dancin’….” Leonard Cohen The Future

    Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts is a major institution in Canada’s only real city, which is w...

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  • Canada: Intimations of Liberty

    Hearing the seductive, loon-like call of so-called postnationalists who claim Canada is without identity, political philosopher John Von Heyking insists the Fathers of Confederation would have seen the “ironic pose of non-identity as infertile soil for heartfelt protection of rights.” 

    In October 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the New York Times Magazine: “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada… There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search fo...

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  • Building the Social City

    The networks of relationships needed to make a community not only liveable but also sociable can be vast and complex. But as Milton Friesen writes, they can also be entered into, appreciated and drawn upon by something as simple and convivial as shared conversation over grits and fried catfish. 

    Chief among the privileges of leading the Cardus Social Cities program are the many opportunities to meet people who are doing significant work in communities and cities across Canada, the United States and around the world. These conversations, email excha...

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