In Bed with the Elephant

Leilani Farha spends much of her time thinking about ways to make housing more accessible and affordable for people everywhere. She’s a Canadian lawyer and human rights activist who for six years between 2014-2020, was the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing. In 2019 she was the subject of an award-winning documentary called Push about the unaffordability of housing worldwide and the impacts of financialization o...

Someone who is well versed in the current state of human rights in the US is the Irish-born Harvard-trained lawyer, Paul O’Brien. He is the executive director of Amnesty International USA – one of the world’s leading human rights organizations. I recently sat down with Paul O’Brien when he visited Canada in early May 2025. We spoke at the headquarters of Amnesty International Canada in downtown Ottawa. Here’s our conversation.

In a...

Judy Rebick has lived her life at the intersection of community activism and political party organizing. `

Born on August 15th 1945 on the cusp of the Baby Boom, Judy Rebick has been at the forefront of Canada’s most significant social movements for the last 60 years , whether it has been as a student activist in the 1960s , an organizer and journalist with socialist revolutionary groups in the 1970s, spokesperson for pro-choice gr...

John Vaillant's 2023 book Fire Weather: The Making of A Beast chronicles the gargantuan Fire that engulfed Fort McMurray, the fourth largest city in Alberta and centre of Canada’s oil industry nine years ago this May. He describes how residents, politicians, civic officials and firefighters dealt with a cataclysmic event that destroyed 2400 homes and structures, damaged thousands more, and caused over 100,000 people to flee their h...

In November 2024 the Syrian government of Bashar Al Assad was toppled in a revolution. The Assad family dynasty ruled over Syria with iron fists for over 50 years. Maher Arar knew the Assad regime all too well. 

In late September 2002 just a year after the Al-Qaeda led September 11th  attacks on the United States  and in the midst of the so called War on Terror that followed 9/11, Maher Arar, a Syrian-born-McGill University educate...

In May 2022, the Italian lawyer and academic Francesca Albanese became the first woman to assume the role of UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. At the time she couldn’t have predicted how events in the fall of 2023, about 18 months into her tenure, would transform the lives of millions of Palestinians and Israelis, and thrust her into the global spotlight.

Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel, on October 7th ,...

Our guest today is Andrew Johnston, a professor of late 19th and 20th Century US History at Carleton University in Ottawa. He’s a specialist in imperialism and foreign relations, liberalism and pluralism in American social thought, and the history of international thought. 

Donald Trump’s second presidency has already been a game changer. His brazen public statements about his desire to annex Canada and slap tariffs on imports ente...

Stephen Maher is an award winning columnist and investigative reporter who has written for Postmedia News, iPolitics, and Maclean’s. His most recent book is called The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau tells the story of one of the more tumultuous prime ministerial tenures in Canadian history. 

In early January 2025, Canada’s federal Conservatives seemed headed for a landslide victory in the upcoming election. Polls sug...