This Week's Round-Up: December 15, 2025

The Leaked Report Pushing Mark Carney Toward the F-35 Fighter Jet

A mysterious internal study seeks to rig the multi-billion-dollar debate over Canada’s air force

Photo of a fighter jet flying in the sky.

Using bright colours to drive the message home for the hard of thinking, the table shows that the F-35 (represented in very nice and inviting green) is head and shoulders above the poor Gripen (represented mostly in a forbidding and dangerous red). Supporters of the F-35 have made much of the table; I mean, how can you argue with actual numbers? Well, colour me skeptical.

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Photo of Prime Minister Mark Carney holding a small sign that reads Canada.

Carney’s Pipeline Play Tests the Coalition That Put Him in Power

The energy megaproject has triggered a fight that spans provinces, parties, and ideologies

BY PAUL WELLS

Can Carney Build a New Majority Around the Promise of Getting Things Done?

The Liberals’ most powerful message may simply be: government can work

BY COLIN HORGAN

Trump’s Terrifying New Security Doctrine Turns Canada into a Target

The 29-page blueprint casts us as expendable

BY WESLEY WARK

Collage image of Danielle Smith, Kevin O'Leary, and Wayne Gretzky (in grayscale) surrounding Donald Trump who is in a red monochrome.

Have You Heard the One about Kevin O’Leary, Wayne Gretzky, and Danielle Smith Walking into Mar-a-Lago?

It’s a joke that ends with three Canadians helping Trump meddle with our sovereignty

BY MARK CRITCH

Photo of an alt-right protest with participants holding signs, flags, and performing Nazi salutes in monochromatic red.

Paramilitary “Fitness Clubs.” Anti-Trans Crusades. Far-Right Extremism Is Here

White nationalism is gaining ground in Canada

BY RICHARD R. GOODE

Photo of the tops of rows of white tents at night.

I Was Displaced to a Tent in Gaza. I Don’t Want to Remember Any of It

I never expected to outlive this genocide

BY BATOOL ABU AKLEEN

Photo of four sets of clothing belonging to doctors and nurses on a black background.

In a Rare Move, Two Manitoba Hospitals Declared Unsafe for Nurses

Staff describe being punched, kicked, and sexually assaulted. The union is discouraging members from the facilities

BY KELLY-ANNE RIESS

The Friendship That Taught Me Community Can Transcend Politics

Editor Gerald Owen pushed me to be fair in assessing ideas I disagreed with. He made me a better writer and a better person

BY JEET HEER

Image of Souvankham Thammavongsa sitting on a concrete floor

Souvankham Thammavongsa Doesn’t Mind If You’re Jealous of Her Career

In both her writing and life, the two-time winner of the Giller Prize does exactly what she wants

BY ARIELLA GARMAISE

Photo of a woman sitting in a garden near brick houses, reading a newspaper.

Why Co-ops Are the Solution to Our Housing Crisis

Years-long wait lists show a model people want but governments keep ignoring

BY LUDOVIC VIGER

Image of brown paper with a tear in the middle; the tear exposes two keyboard buttons: A and I

I Thought My Colleague Was a Traitor for Teaching Students to Use AI. Then We Talked

The one thing we agree on? Every part of our job has changed

BY AMANDA PERRY

A MESSAGE FROM THE WALRUS LAB IN PARTNERSHIP WITH MOUNT PLEASANT GROUP

Considering the Planet at the End of Life

This episode of Sorry For Your Loss looks at what it means to honour both the individual and the planet at the end of life. Jim Cassimatis, former registrar at the Bereavement Authority of Ontario, outlines how the system is regulated and where sustainability fits in. Quinn Hunter, a licensed funeral director and advocate for greener practices, shares alternatives to traditional burials and cremations, including aquamation and forest interment, and the changes underway as more people begin to ask whether death can be sustainable.

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In this episode of What Happened Next, host Nathan Whitlock is joined by Renée Bondy. Renée’s writing has appeared in Herizons, Bitch, Bearings Online, and The Humber Literary Review. Her debut novel, [non]disclosure, was published by Second Story Press in 2024. Renée and Nathan talk about how she is adjusting to her relatively luxurious new writing space, about swerving into literary fiction after a life spent as an academic and activist, and about how the difficulty of the issues she explores in her debut novel led her to put support structures in place at the launch event for it.

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Beyond the Grave

From the age of eighteen to twenty-four, I worked in cemeteries restoring historic gravestones. I’m pretty sure it will go down as the best job I ever had. Ellen Himelfarb’s “The Dearly Departed Are Getting Creative with Death” highlights the growing scarcity of available plots in old urban cemeteries, in part due to expanding cities and the paucity of land. The reason I loved working in those cemeteries so much is because of how beautiful they are. Most are lined with trees older than the inhabitants of the soil. They are dotted with headstones and flat markers made of materials from all over the world (and the odd early twentieth-century zinc marker). These are public spaces. Quiet, well shaded, good benches, old stones. They’re mature parks. It would be a shame to let the city sprawl swallow these spaces that haven’t changed much since their advent. Build more cities, build more cemeteries.

Kipp Macdonald
Hamilton, ON

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