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Politics Archive

Anatomy of an Occupation

by Paul Gettlich What really happened at Occupy Toronto?

Photograph by Ana Lee Smith.

While surfing the web in late September 2011, a Humber College student named Bryan Batty comes across footage of the New York Police Department pepper-spraying protesters at Occupy Wall Street. Batty once considered himself a social democrat, but he was caught up in a mass arrest during Toronto’s anti-G20 protests in 2010, and he …

Getting Plowed

by Selena Ross In this exclusive investigative report from Montreal, Maisonneuve exposes the bid-rigging, violence and sabotage at the heart of an unlikely racket: snow removal.

Illustration by Anna Minzhulina.

One winter morning a few years ago, a driver steered his snowblower down the streets of a Montreal neighbourhood. It was the day after one of the season’s first snowfalls, and the roads were lined with fresh, white drifts. As usual, the driver’s co-worker walked ahead of the huge vehicle, warning pedestrians to move …

The Death of Networks

by Christopher Szabla Occupy and the Arab Spring are often glowingly compared to the decentralized, democratic internet. But that very similarity may have doomed these movements from the beginning.

Illustration by Yarek Waszul.

The first wall appeared a few months ago, stretching across busy Mohammed Mahmoud Street. Others soon followed, cleaving downtown Cairo in two. On one side: the protesters who continue to occupy the blocks surrounding Tahrir Square, where, in early 2011, many of them helped bring an end to Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year rule. On the other …

Michael Schmidt and the Battle Over Raw Milk

by Brittany Devenyi The Ontario farmer is the public face of the movement to legalize unpasteurized milk. Why is he so passionate?

AS I DRIVE down a muddy, narrow road, past acres of farmland guarded by overarching trees, everything looks like a carbon copy of itself. The six-digit numbers, glued to every mailbox, are different at each lot, but the same—in the way a barcode identifies a product, but doesn’t reveal anything about the commodity itself. I stop at number …

After Jack

by Nick Taylor-Vaisey Last May, Jack Layton led the NDP to the greatest victory in party history. Now that he’s gone, will the party be able to maintain its momentum?

Illustration by Gérard DuBois.

Jack Layton’s death, on August 22, came at the peak of his political career. As the leader of the federal New Democratic Party since 2003, and as a Toronto city councillor in the eighties and nineties, his entire adult life had been consumed by politics; his final achievement—Canada’s first social-democratic Official Opposition …

Unleashed

by Katherine Laidlaw Two years ago, an Ontario man was killed by a Siberian tiger—one he kept in his own yard. Nobody knows how many other deadly pets might be prowling Canada’s suburbs.

Illustration by Team Macho.

“Do I hear eight-thousand-eight-thousand-eight-thousand? Do I hear nine-thousand-nine-thousand-nine-thousand?” The auctioneer’s tenor echoed through the huge, cold room, the smell of feces and grease thick in the air. A gasp rippled through the two-hundred-strong crowd as we saw what stood in the ring: two Grant’s zebras, hostile and nervous.

I drew back slowly from the …

Tenth Anniversary: Spring

ISSUE 43 Tenth Anniversary: Spring 2012

online content:

also in this issue:

  • Face the Music

    by Tim Falconer How can someone who passionately loves music also be a terrible singer? Tim Falconer takes up voice lessons—and discovers the surprising science of tone deafness.

  • The Big Job

    by Deni Y. Béchard As a teenager, Deni Y. Béchard went to Vancouver to live with his father, an ex-con with a penchant for telling tall tales. He met a man desperate to forget the past.

  • The Homesickness of Astronauts

    by Johanna Skibsrud "She felt a great sadness. She would remember next to nothing of this, even soon."
  • [see full issue contents]