In Bed with the Elephant

Evan Balgord - Executive Director of the Canadian Anti- Hate Network

The Far Right is having a moment. Some might even say it’s on the march. Seven EU member states including Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia – now have far-right parties within government. The Far Right’s footprint seems to be spreading around the world.
In the summer of 2024, the far right had strong showings in the European parliament elections.  Following the federal election in Germany in February 2025 the populist, Eurosceptic, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany Party or AFD is now the second largest party in the German parliament.
In early June 2025 Poland’s nationalist conservative   presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki, described by commentators as being part of the radical right, surprised many by pulling off a narrow election victory.
According to the authors of the book “The Great Right North,” Far Right activism is also on the rise in Canada. They point to the growth of Far-right groups like “La Meute” and “Pegida Canada” that, they claim, have attracted tens of thousands of followers across the country. Joining me now to discuss the state of the Far right and White nationalist groupings in Canada is Evan Balgord. He’s the executive director of the Canadian Anti-hate Network. 

Sean Speer – The State of the Conservative Party and the Future of Conservatism in Canada

Sean Speer is an academic, policy analyst influencer, public commentator, and guide, described as one of the brightest intellectual lights in Canada’s Conservative firmament. During the government of Stephen Harper, he was a senior policy advisor in the Prime Minister’s Office responsible for the Finance and Treasury Board portfolio. He was Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s Director of Policy and later worked at the Fraser Institute as Director of the Centre for Fiscal Studies. Sean
Speer is currently a Senior Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and an editor- at large at The Hub a Conservative-leaning news and commentary website that he helped found in 2021.

Omar El Akkad - Speaking Truths about Gaza - Rebuking the West's Complicity & Double-talk

Omar El Akkad is a Canadian writer and journalist who has neither ducked nor run for cover.
He hasn’t averted his eyes or closed his ears or his heart to the suffering unfolding on our tv screens, tablets and smartphones in real time.
Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1982. He grew up in Qatar settled in Canada as a teenager and graduated from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He now lives in the the Pacific Northwest of the United States. His books include the award-winning novels American War and What Strange Paradise. Both were finalists in CBC’s Canada Reads and winners of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for Fiction. His latest book is called “One Day Everyone will have always been against this” and it addresses what has been transpiring in Israel, Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 2023 and long before…

Leilani Farha - Former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing

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 on housing security. Leilani Farha is currently the Global Director of the Shift. A human rights organization focusing on housing, finance andclimate.

Paul O'Brien - Executive Director of Amnesty International USA discusses Human Rights in the United States

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 recently released review of the first 100 days of the Trump presidency, the human rights organization, Amnesty international USA, outlines how the Trump administration is pursuing an agenda that seems bent on “eroding human rights protections, fostering fear and undermining the rule of law.”
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” That’s from Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10th, 1948. The principal author of the landmark document was a Canadian. The New Brunswick born McGill University law professor John Peters Humphrey.
Around the world, institutions and individuals dedicated to the defense and protection of human rights are facing increasing attacks. Human rights are under extreme duress in the United States.

Judy Rebick - The Future of the NDP after a Disastrous Election

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 groups and ally of abortion rights advocate Dr. Henry Morgentaler in the 1980s, president of Canada’s leading feminist organization the National Action Committee on the Status of Women and progressive commentator and tv host in the 1990s , writer and academic in the 2000s.
Throughout that time, she has also been either associated with or at the centre of numerous groupings and organizations determined to reform and transform the NDP. Whether as an engaged member of the Waffle Movement, the Campaign for an Activist Party, the New Politics Initiative or the Leap Manifesto. And so given her history , there’s no better person in Canada to assess the current state of the NDP and to consider a path for its future, than her.

Armine Yalnizyan - Canada's Economic Future, Recession and Evaluating Federal Party Platforms

Armine Yalnizyan has spent her career explaining budgets, markets and fiscal matters to generations of Canadians. She’s an economist and the Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers and a regular columnist to the Toronto Star. In 2023 she was awarded the Galbraith Prize in Economics. Named in honour of the esteemed Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith.
 
 

John Vaillant - 21st Century Climate Reality and Fort McMurray's Community & Solidarity after the Cataclysmic Fire in 2016

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 homes in Northern Alberta in what remains the biggest single day evacuation in the history of modern fire.
John Vaillant is one of Canada’s most celebrated writers. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Outside and National Geographic. He is the award-winning author of four books including The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth Madness and Greed, The Tiger” A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, and a the novel Jaguar’s Children. He is the recipient of the Governor General Award, The Writer’s Trust Non-Fiction Prize, and the Windham Campbell Literature Prize 

Maher Arar - The Syrian Revolution and Interrogation & Torture in Syrian Prison

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 educated engineer, was on his way home to Canada following a family trip to Tunisia.  While on a stopover at New York’s JFK Airport, Arar was detained by US authorities and held for 12 days. He was then sent secretly on a private plane to Syria through Jordan. Maher Arar would spend a harrowing 10 months and ten days in some of Syria’s most notorious prisons where he was interrogated and tortured. Following a nationwide campaign led by his wife Monia Mazigh, Arar was released from Syrian detention and returned home to Ottawa in October 2003. 
A few months later the Canadian government established a “Commission of Inquiry that examined his case.”   Finally in January 2007 the Canadian government officially apologized to Maher Arar and paid him over $10 million dollars in compensation for its complicity in his detention. 
Adrian Harewood spoke to Maher Arar in mid-December 2024 just weeks after the revolution that swept Syria. They discussed the political earthquake occurring in Syria, his memories of growing up during the Assad dictatorship, his time in the Syrian gulag and his hopes for the people of Syria.

Francesca Albanese - UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories

In May 2022, the Italian lawyer and academic FrancescaAlbanese became the first woman to assume the role of UNSpecial Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. At thetime she couldn’t have predicted how events in the fall of 2023,about 18 months into her tenure, would transform the lives ofmillions of Palestinians and Israelis, and thrust her into the globalspotlight.
Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel, on October 7th , 2023, killed 1200people including over 600 civilians and 39 children. Israel’ssubsequent attacks on Gaza have now killed over 50,000 people,including over 14,500 children according to UNICEF, displacedmillions and flattened much of the territory.
Francesca Albanese has become a polarizing global personalitydue to her forceful and unrelenting defense of the rights ofPalestinians and her equally powerful condemnation of Israel’sprotracted assault on the Palestinian people.
Albanese has consistently called Israel’s actions in Gazagenocide. And has demanded that the world stop the carnage.
As a UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese travels theworld giving interviews, delivering speeches and filing extensivereports. Her job is high profile, stressful and comes withenormous responsibility, and considerable risk. It’s also unpaid.Francesca Albanese is effectively a devoted volunteer whoenthusiastically gives of her free labour. The job of SpecialRapporteur consumes her. But she thinks the sacrifice is worth it.Despite facing intense opposition from the United States, Canada,Israel, France and Germany, in April 2025 Francesca Albanesewas reappointed by the UN’s Human Rights Council to a three-year term as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the occupiedPalestinian Territories. It means she will be in the position until2028.
In November 2024 Francesca Albanese came to Canada and it isthen that I had a chance to sit down with her when she paid a visitto our studio in Ottawa. What followed was a wide-rangingconversation about the plight of the Palestinian people, thehorrors that the world has been witnessing in Gaza, allegationsthat she is anti-Semitic and her own personal journey.