The Sunday Edition for May 26, 2019
Air pollution kills more people than smoking or wars: Journalist Beth Gardiner was living in London with her husband and daughter and was made deeply uneasy by the stew of diesel fumes in the city. So she decided to travel around the world talking to researchers, campaigners and regulators who are working to improve the quality of the air around us. Gardiner's book is called Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution.
How an Inuit-Montessori preschool hopes to reinvent education in the North: The program at Pirurvik, an early childhood education centre in Pond Inlet, Nunavut, for which the name means "a place to grow," was developed three years ago by combining traditional Inuit knowledge with the Montessori method. Its founders recently won the Arctic Inspiration Prize, known as "the Nobel of the North." Kieran Oudshoorn's documentary is called A Little Nest.
Government subsidies for business are greater than Canada's entire defence budget: From Bombardier to General Motors to the oil and gas industry, Canadian businesses benefit handsomely from government grants and tax breaks, even though politicians on both the left and the right have opposed so-called corporate welfare for decades. Peter Armstrong's guests are John Lester, executive fellow at the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy, and Roberta Lexier, a professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary who specialises in the history of the NDP.
Anakana Schofield on friendship, assisted death and the contradictions of being human: Schofield's latest book, Bina: A Novel in Warnings, tells the story of an angry and riotously funny 74-year-old Irish woman who is part of an underground group helping people end their lives on their own terms.
Remembering the bitter strike at Crown Holdings: Following our coverage of the Winnipeg General Strike, we look back at another notorious strike — one of the longest in Canadian labour history. It began in 2013 at the Canadian plant of American multinational company Crown Holdings, which makes cans for beer companies. The company demanded its existing workers take pay cuts, and declared new hires would receive 40 per cent less than current employees. After 22 months, the strike ended; the union made no gains. Ashley Walters's documentary, which first aired in October 2015, is called More Powerful than God.
Your reaction to: photographer Isa Leshko's portraits of old farm animals, and our coverage of the Winnipeg General Strike.
Music this week by: Don Thompson Quartet, Skydiggers, Emma Rush, Amanda Martinez, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Johann Sebastian Bach and Glenn Gould, Anne Lindsay, Rhiannon Giddens and Alexis Baro.