The Canadians

Aaron Pete is a First Nation Chief, law graduate, and host of the Nuanced podcast. Through hundreds of conversations across Canada’s political, cultural, and ideological divides, he has earned a reputation for approaching disagreement with curiosity rather than certainty.   We begin by exploring what shaped Aaron’s approach to dialogue and what he has learned from speaking with people across the p...

Modern society has become very good at communication and increasingly poor at understanding.   In this solo minisode, Jared Michael explores the difference between listening and simply waiting for our turn to speak. He reflects on disagreement, dehumanization, curiosity, and why recognizing another person’s humanity may be one of the most important skills a healthy society can cultivate.   A refle...

Stephen Jenkinson is a culture worker, author, and founder of the Orphan Wisdom School. He holds master’s degrees from Harvard Divinity School and the University of Toronto and is the author of numerous books, including Die Wise and his most recent work, Trembling, Still.   This conversation began as an attempt to discuss Stephen’s earlier work on death and grief, but quickly moved elsewhere. Inst...

Therapeutic coach Glynis Sherwood joins The Canadians for a conversation on scapegoating, family dynamics, shame, conflict, and public shaming.   We explore the human tendency to place blame onto individuals rather than confront deeper tensions requiring personal or collective self-reflection. From family conflict and workplace dynamics to online mobs and cancel culture, Sherwood argues that scape...

Andrew Weaver is a climate scientist, former leader of the BC Green Party, and one of Canada’s most prominent voices on climate policy.   Widely reported to have endorsed John Rustad and the BC Conservatives’ climate plan during the last provincial election, Weaver begins by pushing back on that framing, using it as a starting point to discuss what it means to engage across political lines in an i...

Nick Osmond-Jones is a former investigator with the Office of the Ombudsman in British Columbia. Before entering government, he spent a decade working in Alberta’s oil and gas industry, eventually returning to school to pursue a career in public service aligned with his values.   What happens when someone inside a public institution begins to feel that the norms they once trusted are changing? And...

Eric Kaufmann is a political scientist and professor at the University of Buckingham, and one of the few academics who has tried to define what people mean when they talk about “woke” as an ideology, rather than just a term of criticism. Much of the current discussion around these ideas is confused or imprecise. In this conversation, we slow things down and start at the beginning. What is “woke”?...

David Cayley spent more than thirty years as a producer for the CBC radio program Ideas, where he created hundreds of documentaries on history, philosophy, politics, religion, and culture. He is also the author of several books, including his latest, The CBC: How Canada's Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back), a reflection on the corporation and the question of what a public b...

Hal Niedzviecki built the heartbeat of North America’s zine movement — then lost it all for defending free expression.   In the mid-90s, his magazine Broken Pencil championed DIY art, radical self-expression, and underground culture. For nearly 30 years, it gave a voice to Canada’s creative outsiders. But in 2017, Hal published a short editorial questioning the new rules around “cultural appropria...

STEPHEN R. BOWN is one of Canada’s leading writers of non-fiction, and the winner of the 2024 Governor General’s Award for Popular History (the Pierre Berton Award). His books The Company and Dominion stand among the most vivid retellings of Canada’s origins; stories that remind us how ambition, ingenuity, and brutality often shared the same frontier.   In this conversation, we use The Company and...

What hidden costs does inflation place on families, savers, and communities?   On Bad Canadians, Jared Michael sits down with Seb Bunney, Bitcoin author and educator, to unpack the ideas behind his book The Hidden Cost of Money. Together they explore how today’s debt-based monetary policy quietly shapes our lives — driving up the cost of housing, reshaping family choices, and distorting the incent...

Amy Hamm is a Canadian nurse, National Post columnist, and co-founder of CaWsbar, a women’s sex-based rights organization.   In this episode, she recounts her years-long battle with the BC College of Nurses and Midwives, which disciplined her for publicly affirming that biological sex is real. What began as personal expression escalated into a high-stakes test of whether Canadian institutions can...

What happens when knowledge is treated as sacred dogma? On Bad Canadians, Jared Michael sits down with internationally renowned theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, editor of the new anthology The War on Science, to explore why ideas must remain open to challenge. The book brings together voices from physics, biology, mathematics, philosophy, and the humanities. Across these fields, Krauss argue...

Eva Kurilova is a Canadian writer and thoughtful critic of today’s gender ideology.   In this episode, she explores how the word “queer” is often misunderstood as a sexual orientation, when in fact it represents a broader ideological identity—one rooted in opposition to normativity and permanence in grievance. We dig into how this framework has helped justify the medicalization of vulnerable child...

In this solo minisode, host Jared Michael takes a step back to reflect on the deeper mission behind Bad Canadians. Drawing on the work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and the metaphor of the “rider and the elephant,” Jared explores why rational arguments so often fail—and how emotional connection, humility, and lived experience can move us more than facts ever could. This is a short reflecti...

Lisa Bildy is the Executive Director of the newly launched Free Speech Union of Canada—a non-partisan organization defending freedom of expression in an era where that principle is increasingly under pressure. Prior to this, she spent years at the forefront of Canada’s free speech battles—helping overturn the Law Society of Ontario’s mandatory DEI pledge and representing clients like Amy Hamm and...

For nearly three decades, activist Ted Smith has been at the centre of Canada’s medical cannabis movement. As the founder of the Victoria Cannabis Buyers Club and a key figure in the 2015 Supreme Court case that opened the door to cannabis edibles and oils, Smith has fought tirelessly for patient rights in the face of legal and political resistance.   In this episode, we discuss how the legalizati...

Guest Lydia Perovic asks Canadians to look deeper - into places we've long taken for granted. What happens when the Enlightenment ideals that quietly shaped our identity are replaced by values most Canadians wouldn't recognize, let alone choose? Follow Lydia on X: https://x.com/LyyPerr Lydia's Website: https://www.lydiaperovic.com/ Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BadCanadians Follow Bad...

Join host Jared Michael in a conversation with National Post journalist Tristin Hopper as they discuss odd bits of Canadian history, the state of modern journalism, and the anti-zionist protests occurring in Canada since October 7th, 2023. Tristin's new book Don't Be Canada is now available online or at a bookstore near you. He also discusses lesser known tidbits from Canadian history in his podca...

A brief overview of the approach and commitments host Jared Michael will use while attempting to understand Canada's contrarians.