Maclean's May 2025

For months, editors at this magazine operated with total certainty that Pierre Poilievre would be Canada’s next prime minister. Canadians were ready for a change. They blamed the Liberals for a litany of grievances: for bungling immigration, for ignoring the cost of living crisis and for a certain sanctimoniousness that seemed out of touch with the challenges people were facing. Pierre Poilievre, the pugnacious leader of the Opposition, masterfully tapped into the discontent of a nation and became the overwhelming favourite in the polls. Many of our stories at Maclean’s, including a few in our popular annual Year Ahead issue, speculated about what would happen when—not if—Poilievre won the election. But nothing is certain in politics, and the last few months have been an astounding, mind-bending, sometimes nauseating case study…

ELBOWS UP Our March issue was packed with stories about how the housing crisis is keeping Gen Z in their childhood bedrooms and the moral quandary of MAID for people with mental illness. But most readers just wanted to talk about Stephen Marche’s opinion piece on how the U.S. couldn’t conquer Canada even if it wanted to. This article doesn’t mention the obvious: Americans have never had to deal with guerilla warfare on their own soil. Canadians look and (mostly) sound like Americans. Domestic security would become impossible. Canada’s wilderness allows for never-ending guerilla warfare that couldn’t be eradicated. If the U.S. couldn’t napalm all of Vietnam, it has no chance with the Canadian North. Also, the Canadian military has done joint operations with the U.S. for over 60 years.…

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE NATION’S NEWSMAKERS TIMOTHY SNYDER, AMERICA’S most famous (living) historian, has found himself north of the border. For decades, he’s parsed the ins and outs of authoritarianism—and the tyrants who weaponize it—both in his professorial post at Yale and in 16 books, including last September’s On Freedom and On Tyranny, a 20-point guide to dictator-proofing yourself, published shortly after Donald Trump was first elected and currently back on the bestseller lists. Now on sabbatical from Yale, Snyder was recently appointed director of the Public History Lab, a research hub at the University of Toronto, where he’ll also begin teaching this fall. His particular brand of expertise is in demand everywhere—not just in Trump’s America—for obvious, if not uplifting reasons. Snyder is often referred to as “the leading interpreter…

I WAS BORN just weeks before the start of the 1985-86 NHL season. It was the height of Wayne Gretzky’s decade-long domination of the game, when his skill and prowess on the ice seemed superhuman. For eight years running, from 1980 to 1987, he was awarded the Hart trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player. From ’81 to ’87, he was the league’s leading scorer. It was never a question of whether Gretzky would score on any given night—only how often. Growing up as a hockey fan in Caledon, Ontario, I knew I had to be the first to shout “I’m Gretzky!” when playing pond hockey with friends. I knew how controversial it was to leave him on the bench during the 1998 Nagano Olympics. And I knew that I…

PIERRE POILIEVRE HAS BEEN unsparing about what he sees as the Liberals’ failures on defence. He claims that the forces are short 16,000 troops, and that procurement of ships, planes and other equipment has been slow and clumsy. He says he wants to transform Canada’s military from “woke” to “warrior.” Some of those critiques have merit—to address them, he plans to pump more money into the military. He’ll uphold the Liberals’ existing pledge to increase military spending to two per cent of GDP, as per Canada’s NATO commitments, and he’ll defund some foreign aid in order to invest in defence. We know where much of that money will go: north. Poilievre’s top military priority is to establish a stronger presence in the Arctic, which is also Canada’s greatest territorial vulnerability.…

IN JANUARY, Jordan Peterson uploaded a 100-minute interview with Pierre Poilievre to his YouTube channel. During their long, digressive conversation, the Conservative leader accused Justin Trudeau of being an authoritarian, said “wokeism” was responsible for hate crimes and railed against rampant immigration. Standard Peterson fare, in other words. Plenty of Canadians find Peterson’s entire persona to be toxic. But that doesn’t matter. His audience is huge and extremely engaged. By granting Peterson so much time and attention, Poilievre was flattering those who have largely tuned out legacy media in favour of the very online, right-wing information ecosystem that has risen in parallel to it. There’s no better example than podcaster Joe Rogan, whose three-hour interview with Donald Trump last October beamed the candidate straight into the AirPods of millions of…