Canada's Secret History

Tanya Talaga has made a career of telling the unvarnished truth about Canada, to Canada. In her bestselling books, Seven Fallen Feathers and All Our Relations, Talaga, a Globe and Mail columnist of Anishinaabe and Polish descent, turned her incisive eye on systemic problems like racism in policing and the suicide epidemic among Indigenous youth. But when it came to the personal, to her own family, Talaga always found more questions than answers.

I sat down with Talaga to talk about The Knowing, her third non-fiction book, out today. In the book, Talaga runs toward, not from, her history, filling in the gaps in her own ancestral line. It’s a lineage severed several times, as her First Nations relatives were forcibly sent to government- and church-sponsored residential schools, asylums and new families entirely as part of the Sixties Scoop. After years spent digging into the past, Talaga has learned a few things: about her grandmothers, about Canada’s past and that, when it comes to family, you can never really know the whole story.

—Katie Underwood, managing editor

This year, a crippling cyberattack shut down the Toronto Public Library’s computer system for four months. It was just one of several high-profile ransomware attacks to hit Canadian institutions over the last few years. In this feature from our September issue, Caitlin Walsh Miller reports on the new generation of ultra-sophisticated cybercriminals targeting governments, corporations, hospitals and libraries—and how ill-equipped Canada is to fight back.

Phragmites (pronounced frag-mite-eez) might look like your garden-variety extra-large reed, but the invasive grass poses a massive threat in Ontario. The provincial government just earmarked $13 million to fight phragmites over the next three years, but in the Niagara region, the Green Grazers, a 40-strong team of goats, are already on the case.

FROM THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE

Everyone knows that owning a home in one of Canada’s marquee cities is now largely the purview of millionaires. In Toronto, a typical home goes for nearly $1.1 million, while the price of admission in Greater Vancouver is even higher at $1.2 million (and a house in West Vancouver has the vertigo-inducing sticker shock of $2.6 million). The good news is that we managed to find 10 cities on the rise where you can still buy a house for under $700,000. Read our September issue cover story now.

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