Vancouver and Toronto are facing similar cultural challenges

The Toronto mayoral election will take place on June 26. Many of the cultural debates that have arisen in the current mayoral race in Canada’s largest city also reverberate here on the Wes Coast. Indeed, several issues raised by cultural organizations in Toronto are very similar to the cultural challenges being faced in Vancouver, according…

Official languages support remains high across Canada

A strong majority of Canadians, from findings of a recent public opinion survey, agree official languages and other forms of diversity can go hand in hand, and can even strengthen each other. Raymond Théberge, the Commissioner of Official Languages, released the data from the survey on official languages February 24, 2022, indicating 87 per cent…

Moral dilemmas in the time of a pandemic

The ongoing COVID-19 outbreak has instigated dramatic social and behavioral changes across the globe, and with them, new problems and debates arise, some of which present difficult moral choices for policy- and decision-makers. Azim Shariff, associate professor at UBC and director of the Centre for Applied Moral Psychology, whose research mainly focuses on the applications…

Portraits of almost half a millennium of French presence on Canadian soil

In February 2019, the Senate moved to the Senate of Canada Building, a former train station built in 1912. It is expected to occupy its temporary location for at least 10 years while Parliament’s Centre Block –the Senate’s permanent home – is rehabilitated. Although Centre Block is shuttered for rehabilitation work, Canadians can still experience…

Women played a key role in local war resistance during the Vietnam era

As part of the Vancouver Historical Society’s free lecture series, Lara Campbell, professor and Chair of the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University will speak on Thursday, April 28 at 7:30 p.m. in the Museum of Vancouver. Her talk, entitled Local Protest and Transnational Politics: Vietnam War Resistance in Vancouver…

Politics of art: caricatures and culture

Provoking thoughtful commentary from readers on social issues can create barriers with just the use of words. Political cartoons – often witty, at times graphic, but never dull – transcend such barriers to inform and even sway public opinion through a captioned pictorial representation of underlying attitudes and emotions. In the past, political cartoons have…