This Week's Round-Up: July 13, 2026

• What Poilievre’s shadow cabinet shuffles mean

• Decoding the Free Alberta Strategy

• Canada can already stop surveillance pricing

• End the Temporary Foreign Worker Program

• 85% of Canadians want AI regulated

How Mark Carney Became a Sex Symbol

A guide to the social media accounts calling our prime minister hot

BY AMARAH HASHAM-STEELE

The politician licks his lips. The clip then cuts quickly to him winking at the camera before turning his head to the side and smiling. The soundtrack is Shaggy’s steamy reggae hit “Boombastic.” The star of the show? Prime Minister Mark Carney. This Instagram reel, posted last June to an account called markcarneythirst, has nearly 30,000 likes and over a thousand comments.

Weird things happen on social media all the time. But Carney is a former banker in his early sixties, about five feet nine with grey hair, moderate in every sense of the word—hardly your typical sex symbol. Why is the internet so thirsty for him?

Submit Your Pitch for the Mansbridge Essay

The Walrus is partnering with Peter Mansbridge to launch a new $5,000 essay program supporting emerging writers in Canada. Writers in the first five years of their career are invited to pitch original reported essays for publication in The Walrus.

FROM THE WALRUS LAB IN PARTNERSHIP WITH WORLD WILDLIFE FUND CANADA.

A Legacy of Love and Conservation

After a trip to Churchill, Manitoba, inspired a deep connection to the Arctic, one family's love of the North became a lasting commitment to protecting it. This moving story explores how a legacy of generosity can help conserve wildlife, support northern communities, and preserve one of Canada's most extraordinary landscapes for future generations.

Pattern Recognition

Sheima Benembarek’s “Why Don’t We Take Stalking More Seriously?” (January/February) investigates the state of criminal harassment and stalking. The failures described are not primarily those of individuals, evidence, or even intent. They are failures of system design. The legal framework for criminal harassment is built to detect episodes, while stalking operates as patterned erosion over time. Harm accumulates through repetition, context, and disruption of normal life, yet the law requires victims to prove fear in a way that is immediate, visible, and legible to a “reasonable person.” What’s missing in our legal response is not punishment severity but pattern recognition. Until criminal harassment law is redesigned to recognize cumulative impact rather than episodic threat, the burden will remain on victims to perform fear convincingly enough for them to be protected. I hope Benembarek’s feature helps shift the conversation from “Why didn’t they report sooner?” to “Why is the system so bad at seeing harm while it’s still preventable?”

Michael Brooke
Thornhill, ON

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