This Week's Round-Up: December 17, 2025

• Canada’s expendable in Trump’s new strategy

• White nationalism is gaining ground here

• Rising violence against nurses

• Why we need more co-op housing

• Should universities embrace or ignore AI?

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

They say Gretzky skates to where the puck is going. And apparently, that’s Florida, because he’s been hanging around Mar-a-Lago more than Smith with an unlimited Sunwing voucher. He won’t put on a Team Canada jersey, but he’ll jam his hockey hair into a MAGA hat no problem. Maybe that’s why broken-hearted Gretzky ran to big daddy Trump to defend him too. Some liquor stores started pulling Gretzky wines from the shelves and #GretzkyTraitor was trending on X. So Trump came to the rescue.

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.

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.

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

— Sean Young

Fundraising & Engagement Officer