Longform North

This episode is a little different. It's an interview with an A.I. of Sir John A. Macdonald. So what does that mean? Well, it means that I gathered up the transcripts for all the House of Commons Debates for every year that Macdonald was Prime Minister, and threw in a few other historical resources as well. I processed those and made them available to a large language model, similar to the one tha...

Here in Canada, you can get clean drinking water simply by turning on a tap. Unless you live in one of the many First Nations communities that are subject to long-term drinking water advisories. In which case, you have to boil the water first before you can use it. Or you have to use bottled water for everything, including brushing your teeth or cooking with. How is it that in a first-world countr...

A little over 25 years ago, a book by the historian Jack Granatstein came out, called Who Killed Canadian History? It sparked some controversy back then about how ignorant most Canadians are about Canadian history, and how riddled it is with politics and bureaucracy. And, Granatstein said, if you don't have any memory of your history, then you don't really know who you are, other than maybe 'not b...

Welcome to Longform North -- a longform interview podcast featuring Canadian voices and stories about Canada. Canada is a federal country, which means power is divided between two levels of government - the federal government and the provinces. And even though it's all one country, the provinces are very different from each other. They have different economies, different cultures, different politi...

Welcome to Longform North -- a longform interview podcast featuring Canadian voices and stories about Canada. In Canada, we pick our leaders through elections, where the person who gets the most votes wins. But it's actually a little bit more complicated than that. And some people think that the way we do elections should actually be changed. So what are the rules for how someone wins an election?...

Welcome to Longform North -- a longform interview podcast featuring Canadian voices and stories about Canada. The word parliament comes from a French word that means to talk or have a conversation . Though I think the impression a lot of people have about Canadian parliament is that there isn't much conversation going on there beyond prepared talking points. But you might be surprised to hear that...

Welcome to Longform North -- a longform interview podcast featuring Canadian voices and stories about Canada. There's a set of freedoms we have in this country. There's the freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and lots of other freedoms. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms gives us protection for all these freedoms -- except when it doesn't. How far does the Charter go...

Welcome to Longform North -- a longform interview podcast featuring Canadian voices and stories about Canada. On this inaugural episode, we're talking about the origins and foundation of Canada's political system. Canada is a parliamentary democracy, and this system inherits from traditions and ideas that are much older than Canada itself. But what are those ideas, where did they come from, and ho...