In Bed with the Elephant

Agnès Callamard - Amnesty International’s Secretary General discusses A World of Human Rights, Freedom & Justice for All

Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, has been a defender of human rights for most of her life. Her maternal grandfather fought for the French Resistance during the Second World War.
Callamard was born in 1963 into a lower middle-class family in a small village in Southeastern France about 60 kilometres north of Avignon. She attended Sciences Po Grenoble for her undergraduate degree.
Earned a master’s in international and African Studies at the renowned Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington DC where she was one of a handful of White Students – an experience she describes as transformative.
And she received her PhD at the New School in New York City.
Prior to becoming Amnesty’s Secretary General, Callamard was the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions and the former Director of the Columbia University Global Freedom of Expression project.
Adrian Harewood sat down with Agnès Callamard in May 2025 at the head office of Amnesty International Canada in downtown Ottawa. We spoke about, growing courage, fighting impunity investigating the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the current state of human rights in the world and the ability of Amnesty International to affect change.

GUESTCAST: The Takeover - Smoke, Fire and the Climate Pushback

This week, we’re doing something a little different. We’ve teamed up with our friends over at Canada’s National Observer to share the first episode of their gripping new podcast, The Takeover.
This series pulls back the curtain on a rising movement of politicians, think tanks and billionaires working to dismantle global climate commitments…
All of this at a time when huge parts of Canada enter extreme heat warnings under record-setting temperatures and wildfires burn across the country. 
In this first episode, journalist Sandra Bartlett travels to London to attend one of the biggest conservative conferences in the world.
You can find The Takeover on your favourite podcast app or on Canada’s National Observer’s website.
We’ll be back next week on In Bed with the Elephant with more conversations that matter. But for now, here’s episode one of The Takeover.

Niigaan Sinclair - Imagining Indigenous Futures and Healthier Relations with the Canadian State

Niigaan Sinclair is one of the most creative, provocative and dynamic thinkers of his generation.  As a journalist, academic and son of the late lawyer, jurist, Senator and chair of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Murray Sinclair, he has spent his life and career thinking about the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state.
In his 2024 Governor General Award-winning book of non-fiction, Winipek: Visions of Canada from An Indigenous Centre, Niigaan Sinclair outlines new transformative possibilities for healthier and more productive relations between Indigenous people and Canadians. He imagines a new politics, proposes a collective immersion in Indigenous histories and philosophies, and a return to Indigenous practices in order to inform our collective way forward.
Niigaan Sinclair is a professor at the University of Manitoba where he holds the Faculty of Arts professorship in Indigenous Knowledge and Aesthetics in the Department of Indigenous Studies. He is also an award-winning columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press. 
 

Bob Plamondon - John Diefenbaker: The Political Outsider & Man of the People who became Prime Minister

Bob Plamondon is an acclaimed writer and Canadian historian who thinks for too long John Diefenbaker has been unfairly maligned by his critics and hasn’t been given his due. 
He’s the author of six books. including Blue Thunder: The Truth About Conservatives from Macdonald to Harper & The Shawinigan Fox: How Jean Chretien Defeated the Elites and Reshaped Canada.
His latest book is called Freedom Fighter: John Diefenbaker’s Battle for Canadian Liberties and Independence. 
Diefenbaker was a political maverick- a prairie populist who rose from humble beginnings to become Canada’s 13th Prime Minister.  
He was a complex and at times polarizing figure who throughout his 39 years as a Member of Parliament, remained a political outsider, even within the Conservative Party he led. 
Diefenbaker’s strong personality alienated some of his fellow MPs in the Tory caucus who regarded him as a lone wolf – brusque, domineering and untrusting.
But Dief the Chief’s charisma captivated ordinary Canadians who were inspired by his commitment to their health and welfare, his oratorical flair, and his common touch. They saw  John Diefenbaker as a “Man of the People.” 
John George Diefenbaker was born in 1895 in Neustadt, Ontario. In the southwestern region of the province. He was the grandson of German and Scottish immigrants.  
When he was 8 years old, he and his family moved West where he grew up poor in the fledgling province of Saskatchewan. 
John Diefenbaker served as a lieutenant in the First World War. 
After graduating from the University of Saskatchewan in 1919, he became a small-town lawyer who reveled in fighting for the marginalized, downtrodden and dispossessed. He was a self-described “sworn enemy of discrimination and injustice.” 
As a young man, Diefenbaker brimmed with political ambition. It took him some years to find his footing, but once he finally won an election, he never lost his riding again.   
In the mid-1950s, Diefenbaker took over a fractious and moribund Conservative Party, refashioned it in his image, and transformed it into a political juggernaut, winning three consecutive federal elections, one of them in a historic landslide.
John Diefenbaker provoked strong emotions.
His critics accused him of being an erratic, reckless and ill-disciplined leader. They blamed him for what they regarded as a series of foreign policy blunders, including mishandling Canada’s critical relationship with the United States. They attacked him for canceling a Canadian aviation marvel - the Avro Arrow. 
His supporters though hailed him as a principled visionary, praising him for giving Indigenous peoples the vote, championing the Bill of Rights -a precursor to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, instituting a more inclusive immigration policy, and boldly opposing South Africa’s readmission to the Commonwealth due to its failure to renounce its White Supremacist system of Racial Apartheid. 
John Diefenbaker was a man of contradictions. 
He could be petty, vindictive, unforgiving and even cruel. 
But also, warm, witty, generous and magnanimous. 
At this fraught moment, in which Canada is facing existential threats to its economy and political sovereignty from the sitting president of the United States, Donald Trump, John Diefenbaker provides a historical example of an idealistic, impassioned political leader who was a fierce, unrepentant Canadian nationalist, and refused to capitulate or bend the knee to American hegemony. 
 

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.