The modern welfare state owes much of its origins to religion. Blessed with ample resources and driven by a moral duty to improve the lives of those in their care, churches and religious orders in the Middle Ages created the first universities, hospitals, homeless shelters and food banks. More recently, however, the pendulum of power has swung mightily in favour of secular government. And now, with church attendance on the wane, those secular forces seem determined to destroy their spiritual competition once and for all. Examining a potentially devastating federal proposal to strip religious organizations of their charitable status, Anna Farrow considers the impact churches play in today’s civil society – and wonders how Canada’s less fortunate would fare in a world bereft of faith.

Quebec’s CAQ government was elected on the promise it would not hold another referendum on independence, but it has been engaged in nation-building all the same. The CAQ’s latest effort to defend Quebec’s identity has it demanding that all immigrants adhere to a “common culture” – one that both insists on the absolute primacy of the French language and is anti-religious at its core. The CAQ government is even musing about banning all prayer in public. Anna Farrow deconstructs this determined agenda and discovers not a benign civic nationalism, but a national project that bases inclusion on a difficult-to-access, narrowly-defined common culture – and excludes those who don’t fit.

When – or perhaps if – Canadians think about “foreign aid”, they probably imagine idealistic aid workers treating patients in a remote health clinic, a technical expert designing a new bridge or perhaps an academic offering advice on operating fair courts of law. But these are all being pushed into the background as ideology takes over the planning and provision of Canada’s foreign assistance programs. Not only have bridges and tractors given way to morning-after pills and wind turbines, but aid programs are being shaped to serve only certain kinds of people. The kinds Liberals like. Anna Farrow charts the radical remaking of foreign assistance in which Canada uses foreign aid to interfere in the domestic politics and local cultures of recipient countries, turning the mild-mannered middle power into a practitioner of coercive diplomacy and cultural imperialism – arguably even neo-colonialism.

That elderly nursing home residents represent a large proportion of Covid-19 fatalities is a familiar if sad fact to most Canadians. Even sadder and more disturbing would be if many of those deaths were avoidable. And if some were deliberate, it would be shocking and outrageous. In this investigative piece, Anna Farrow explores the widespread use of “population triage” in several jurisdictions during the pandemic’s early months. While healthcare establishments seemed woefully unprepared in nearly all respects, Farrow found they were lightning-quick to adopt what amounted to killer protocols on thousands of elderly and vulnerable citizens. This included not merely the withholding of advanced care but end-of-life measures using fatal drug cocktails.