In Bed with the Elephant

Ricochet Media Summer Fundraising Campaign: https://ricochet.media/donate/ Fred Anderson was born in Mississippi in the late 1940s. He was among the youngest full-time SNCC workers in an organization defined by its youth. He was a courageous young rebel, a teenage wunderkind, who at 15 was working as an organizer alongside such civil rights luminaries as Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, Hollis Watkin...

Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, has been a defender of human rights for most of her life. Her maternal grandfather fought for the French Resistance during the Second World War. Callamard was born in 1963 into a lower middle-class family in a small village in Southeastern France about 60 kilometres north of Avignon. She attended Sciences Po Grenoble for her undergraduate...

This week, we’re doing something a little different. We’ve teamed up with our friends over at Canada’s National Observer to share the first episode of their gripping new podcast, The Takeover. This series pulls back the curtain on a rising movement of politicians, think tanks and billionaires working to dismantle global climate commitments… All of this at a time when huge parts of Canada enter ext...

Niigaan Sinclair is one of the most creative, provocative and dynamic thinkers of his generation.  As a journalist, academic and son of the late lawyer, jurist, Senator and chair of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Murray Sinclair, he has spent his life and career thinking about the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. In his 2024 Gover...

Bob Plamondon is an acclaimed writer and Canadian historian who thinks for too long John Diefenbaker has been unfairly maligned by his critics and hasn’t been given his due.  He’s the author of six books. including Blue Thunder: The Truth About Conservatives from Macdonald to Harper & The Shawinigan Fox: How Jean Chretien Defeated the Elites and Reshaped Canada. His latest book is called Freed...

The Far Right is having a moment. Some might even say it’s on the march. Seven EU member states including Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia – now have far-right parties within government. The Far Right’s footprint seems to be spreading around the world. In the summer of 2024, the far right had strong showings in the European parliament elections.  F...

Sean Speer is an academic, policy analyst influencer, public commentator, and guide, described as one of the brightest intellectual lights in Canada’s Conservative firmament. During the government of Stephen Harper, he was a senior policy advisor in the Prime Minister’s Office responsible for the Finance and Treasury Board portfolio. He was Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s Director of Policy and la...

Omar El Akkad is a Canadian writer and journalist who has neither ducked nor run for cover. He hasn’t averted his eyes or closed his ears or his heart to the suffering unfolding on our tv screens, tablets and smartphones in real time. Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1982. He grew up in Qatar settled in Canada as a teenager and graduated from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He no...

Leilani Farha spends much of her time thinking about ways to make housing more accessible and affordable for people everywhere. She’s a Canadian lawyer and human rights activist who for six years between 2014-2020, was the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing. In 2019 she was the subject of an award-winning documentary called Push about the unaffordability of housing worldwide an...

Someone who is well versed in the current state of human rights in the US is the Irish-born Harvard-trained lawyer, Paul O’Brien. He is the executive director of Amnesty International USA – one of the world’s leading human rights organizations. I recently sat down with Paul O’Brien when he visited Canada in early May 2025. We spoke at the headquarters of Amnesty International Canada in downtown Ot...

Judy Rebick has lived her life at the intersection of community activism and political party organizing. ` Born on August 15th 1945 on the cusp of the Baby Boom, Judy Rebick has been at the forefront of Canada’s most significant social movements for the last 60 years , whether it has been as a student activist in the 1960s , an organizer and journalist with socialist revolutionary groups in the 19...

Armine Yalnizyan has spent her career explaining budgets, markets and fiscal matters to generations of Canadians. She’s an economist and the Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers and a regular columnist to the Toronto Star. In 2023 she was awarded the Galbraith Prize in Economics. Named in honour of the esteemed Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith.    

John Vaillant's 2023 book Fire Weather: The Making of A Beast chronicles the gargantuan Fire that engulfed Fort McMurray, the fourth largest city in Alberta and centre of Canada’s oil industry nine years ago this May. He describes how residents, politicians, civic officials and firefighters dealt with a cataclysmic event that destroyed 2400 homes and structures, damaged thousands more, and caused...

In November 2024 the Syrian government of Bashar Al Assad was toppled in a revolution. The Assad family dynasty ruled over Syria with iron fists for over 50 years. Maher Arar knew the Assad regime all too well.  In late September 2002 just a year after the Al-Qaeda led September 11th  attacks on the United States  and in the midst of the so called War on Terror that followed 9/11, Maher Arar, a Sy...

In May 2022, the Italian lawyer and academic Francesca Albanese became the first woman to assume the role of UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. At the time she couldn’t have predicted how events in the fall of 2023, about 18 months into her tenure, would transform the lives of millions of Palestinians and Israelis, and thrust her into the global spotlight. Hamas’ deadly...

Our guest today is Andrew Johnston, a professor of late 19th and 20th Century US History at Carleton University in Ottawa. He’s a specialist in imperialism and foreign relations, liberalism and pluralism in American social thought, and the history of international thought.  Donald Trump’s second presidency has already been a game changer. His brazen public statements about his desire to annex Cana...

Stephen Maher is an award winning columnist and investigative reporter who has written for Postmedia News, iPolitics, and Maclean’s. His most recent book is called The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau tells the story of one of the more tumultuous prime ministerial tenures in Canadian history.  In early January 2025, Canada’s federal Conservatives seemed headed for a landslide victory...