Maclean's July 2025

In late May, I travelled to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, with my mother and daughter to see Anything Goes at the Shaw Festival. We’re fans of golden-age musicals—Irving Berlin and Cole Porter and original Broadway cast recordings from the ’50s and ’60s. We visit Shaw every year together, a three-generation road-trip tradition. Before the play, we ate a picnic lunch down the road from the theatre, looking across the narrow Niagara River to the shores of New York state. From where we sat, America was a short canoe trip away. I stared across the water with fresh eyes, processing the turmoil Trump’s short reign has unleashed on the world. Until this year, I viewed America as a benign neighbour, a friend. But on this trip, it looked different—foreign and hostile. Niagara-on-the-Lake is…

BLUE CRUSH In the run-up to the federal election in April, we sized up the Conservative Party. How would they reshape the country if they took power? Who was driving the bus? And why had so many young Canadians—usually a reliable source of left-wing votes—taken up with Poilievre and Co.? Some readers were amazed at the very existence of such creatures. After reading your article about young conservatives, I was perplexed how a human rights student and daughter of immigrants who mentions always being concerned about money growing up could support a party that continually votes against initiatives that benefit low-income families and actively speaks about taking away people’s rights. I would absolutely love for my children to own a home one day but not at the expense of other…

As Canada looks inward to re-assert national values in the face of global uncertainty, few institutions feel more homegrown-or more enduring-than Desjardins. This year, the financial co-operative celebrates its 125th anniversary, marking over a century of influence on the country’s financial landscape through a model rooted in trust, equity and community. "For us, social impact isn't an option, it’s a responsibility," says Guy Cormier, president and CEO of Desjardins Group. "It’s a deeply rooted belief that has been in our DNA for 125 years." Desjardins began in Levis, Quebec, in 1900, founded by Alphonse Desjardins and his wife, Dorimene. The idea for North America’s first credit union was sparked after Alphonse, a stenographer in the House of Commons, heard a parliamentary debate about rampant loan-sharking. One story about a Montreal…

BACK WHEN DIANA MATHESON was a star midfielder for Canada’s national women’s soccer team, plays were analyzed using magnets on tactical boards. But in 2022, a year into her retirement, she found herself mapping out the country’s first pro women’s league on a bar napkin in Toronto’s west end with Thomas Gilbert, her partner at Project 8 Sports—the company they founded to bring the idea to life. It would be her biggest win yet, even bigger than her stealthy bronze-clinching kick at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. The Northern Super League launched this spring, with franchises in six cities—including Montreal, Vancouver and Halifax—and ambitions for many more. Overdue? Maybe. Or maybe perfectly timed: thanks to the Professional Women’s Hockey League and, soon, Toronto’s own WNBA team, women’s sports are popping…

AFTER I GRADUATED from the University of Ottawa with my B.A. in business administration in 2015, I went on a back-packing trip around California. It turned out that my holiday coincided with the worst drought in the state’s history. Signs of the crisis were everywhere—lawns browned and burned, lakebeds dried up into cracked mudflats. The governor’s office lowered water usage limits by 25 per cent to protect the state’s supply, infuriating wealthy home-owners and golfers. I saw news reports about financially overleveraged farmers dying by suicide as their crops withered. And yet, when I got to San Francisco, I couldn’t see across the bay for all the fog. That was my eureka moment: the sky was full of water. Why couldn’t we use it to fight what was happening on…

FOR MOST OF MY ADULT LIFE, my mother and I were estranged. She was difficult, prone to anger and often declined to answer the phone for weeks or months at a time. Twenty years ago, when I offered to introduce her to my husband, she replied with a one-word email: “NO.” The last time I saw her was in May of 2022. My sister and I—she in Paris, me travelling in Berlin—had spent a week trying to reach our mother. Finally, we hopped on a train to the small town in France where she lived to make sure she was okay. The visit was tense and suffocating, as if the confinement of the pandemic had made her home smaller, or me into a giant. When my mother died the following year,…