Disasters – natural or otherwise – have a way of bringing out extremes in human behaviour and emotions. And so it was with the Easter Week fire at Cathédrale Notre-Dame in Paris: from the Catholic priest who risked his life to save irreplaceable relics and artwork, to French businessmen pledging grandiose sums for rebuilding, to the almost psychotic architecture some proposed for the restoration. For Patrick Keeney, the near-catastrophe triggered deep reflection on our era’s tense relationship between science and spirituality.

Official regret – often delivered with a perfectly moistened eye and quavering voice – has been expressed by our prime minister for a seemingly endless parade of old injustices. Native schoolchildren, gays and lesbians, Sikh immigrants, Jewish refugees, six British Columbia chiefs hanged following the Chilcotin War and Inuit populations suffering from tuberculosis have all received a mea culpa from Ottawa. But does such federal self-abasement correspond to what actually happened? Peter Shawn Taylor casts a gimlet eye at Mexico’s efforts to blame 16th century Spain for present-day complaints and finds that the truth sometimes comes down on the side of colonialism.

During his decades of involvement in Canada’s conservative movement, Gerry Nicholls has seen the right lose cultural influence and suffer more electoral losses than wins. Yet even as leftist smear-and-fear campaigns reach new heights of slander, Nicholls is heartened by this month’s big victory for the united right in Alberta, and hopeful for a larger conservative political and cultural renaissance in Canada and beyond.

In the early hours of November 10, 1938, Nazis attacked Jewish people and their property throughout Germany. “Kristallnacht” was a direct prelude to the Holocaust. Barbara Kay reminds us that how a nation treats its Jewish minority is a signal of the wellbeing of the broader polity, and warns against what she calls the “third wave of anti-Semitism.”

Seems like everyone has a plan to save the planet from Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. Naomi Klein has her Leap Manifesto and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a Green New Deal. Justin Trudeau has a carbon tax – sorry, “price on pollution” – and Andrew Scheer has his, er, whatever. Unfortunately, all of them are economically catastrophic. Grant Brown is a climate change skeptic and borderline heretic, who nevertheless, as a public service, has developed an affordable Climate Change Survival Guide.