Skip to content

From the archives

That Ever Governed Frenzy

Through the eyes of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Michael Wernick

Rumble on Parliament Hill

In the ring with Justin Trudeau

Return of the Robber Barons

Chrystia Freeland asks if we can tell “makers” from “takers” among the new super-rich

Amy Reiswig

Amy Reiswig writes on topics ranging from dance films to Faroese Viking metal.

Articles by
Amy Reiswig

Sentenced at Birth

On forced mother-child separation November 2024
The allegorical figure of Justice, with her scales and sword, was first blindfolded in the sixteenth century, and today she is seen as an embodiment of impartiality: a weighing of evidence and arguments that is unmuddied by prejudice. But some detect a much less noble reason for Justice’s covered eyes: they represent the system’s blindness to abuses right under its…

Private Eyes

Who is watching the watchmen? June 2023
In its 2002–03 annual report, the Security Intelligence Review Committee first acknowledged that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had “reorganized its operational structure” and begun to “deploy resources in novel ways,” including through “relationships with organizations not subject to the Committee’s review.” Documents in subsequent years referred to (equally vague) “non-traditional partners” and the need to manage “relations with the private sector.” What this all…

Crisis Mismanagement

Homelessness in our largest city April 2023
A page on the National Housing Strategy’s website begins, “There is no place like home.” It’s a cozy-sounding, feel-good line — a glib reference to a ruby-slippered fiction full of magic and happy endings that highlights the divide between those tasked with creating solutions to homelessness and those who need them. The same could be said about public health messaging in the early days of the pandemic: Stay…

Sentence Structure

Views from the inside October 2022
Prisoner. Convict. Inmate. Criminal. What’s often missed in this list of terms for incarcerated people — by unconscious habit or deliberate choice — is the foundational truth underpinning everything else: human being. Labels work like walls; they can obscure, separate, and silence. And as with physical barriers, efforts must be made if we want to get around…

With the Grain

Dead trees outlast the lives of men July | August 2022
When the sun and the wind play together just right, the hill of young cedar and Douglas fir behind my house looks alive with green fire. It’s almost impossible to imagine this place without trees, yet even my small island in British Columbia’s Salish Sea was extensively logged in the first half of the twentieth…