To face the future, Canada needs more Canadians. But why and how many?Canada’s population has always grown slowly, when it has grown at all. That wasn’t by accident. For centuries before Confederation and a century after, colonial economic policies and an inward-facing world view isolated this country, attracting few of the people and building few of the institutions needed to sustain a sovereign nation. In fact, during most years before 1967, a greater number of p...

Even among people who would never subscribe to its more dramatic claims, the "Eurabia" movement has popularized a set of seemingly common-sense assumptions about Muslim immigrants to the West: that they are disloyal, that they have a political agenda driven by their faith, that their nhigh reproduction rates will soon make them a majority. These beliefs are poisoning politics and community relations in Europe and North America--and have led to mass murder in Norway. Rarely challenged, thes...

From one of Canada's leading journalists comes a major book about how the movement of populations from rural to urban areas on the margins is reshaping our world. These transitional spaces are where the next great economic and cultural boom will be born, or where the great explosion of violence will occur. The difference depends on our ability to notice.The twenty-first century is going to be remembered for the great, and final, shift of human populations out of rural, agricultural...

An updated edition of The Islamist Phoenix is now available as ISIS: The Terror Nation (978-1-60980-725-2)From its birth in the late 1990s as the jihadist dream of terrorist leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the Islamic State (known by a variety of names, including ISIS, ISIL, and al Qaeda in Iraq) has grown into a massive enterprise, redrawing national borders across the Middle East and subjecting an area larger than the United Kingdom to its own vici...

For almost its entire history, Canada has been run by the political, media and business elites of Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. But in the past few years, these groups have lost their power—and most of them still do not realize it’s gone. The Laurentian Consensus, the term John Ibbitson has coined for the dusty liberal elite, has been replaced by a new, powerful coalition based in the West and supported by immigrant voters in Ontario. How did this happen?Most people are unaware tha...

A powerful and original argument that traces the roots of our present crisis of authority to an unlikely source: the meritocracy.Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another – from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball – imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in ...

In the last few decades what it means to be rich has changed dramatically. Forget the 1%; it's the wealthiest .01% who are fast outpacing the rest of us. Today's colossal fortunes are amassed by the diligent toiling of smart, perceptive businessmen who see themselves as deserving victors in a cutthroat international competition.Cracking open this tight-knit world is Chrystia Freeland, an acclaimed business journalist. At ease in Davos or Dubai, Freeland has reported on the lives an...

The New York Times bestselling exposé of what passes for business as usual in Washington todayThere was a time, not so very long ago, when perfectly rational people ran the Republican Party. So how did the party of Lincoln become the party of lunatics? That is what this book aims to answer. Fear not, the Dems come in for their share of tough talk— they are zombies, a party of the living dead.Mike Lofgren came to Washington in the early eighties—tho...

Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction Award The benefits of living in a digital, globalised society are enormous; so too are the dangers. The world has become a law enforcer's nightmare and every criminal's dream. We bank online, shop online, date, learn, work and live online. But have the institutions that keep us safe on the streets learned to protect us in the burgeoning digital world? Have we become complacent about our personal security — sharing our...

Canada has always been known as a good place to live: a tolderant, prosperous, stable country that treats its citizens fairly and protects the weakest in society. Yet during the past seven years, it has started to change into a harder, more mean-spirited place. What is going on?According to political scientist Christian Nadeau, this transformation is being engineered by Stephen Harper and the neo-con ideologues around him. The Conservatives have a clear agenda that they are impleme...

History can be a very useful tool in understanding why we and those we must deal with think and react in certain ways. But in the wrong hands it can be dangerous and used to foster a sense of grievance or a desire for revenge. Eminent historian Margaret MacMillan is fascinated by the power of history in our thinking. In The Uses and Abuses of History, she points out some of the traps that we can fall into when assessing the present in light of the past.

Ottawa has become a place where the nation’s business is done in secret, and access to information?the lifeblood of democracy in Canada?is under attak.It’s being lost to an army of lobbyists and public-relations flacks who help set the political agenda and decide what you get to know. It’s losing its struggle against a prime minister and a government that continue to delegitimize the media’s role in the political system. The public’s right to know has been undermined by a governmen...