Maisonneuve Magazine

Ben Dornan July 8, 2026 The impacts of slashed arts funding in Nova Scotia will run deeper than the wallet. Granville Street is a relatively quiet road on the average day in downtown Halifax. You’ll find Granville just a few steps uphill from the city’s Atlantic Ocean waterfront. The main attractions on its six blocks spanning from Duke Street to Salter Street include various entrances to office buildings, a Mountain Equipment Company store and one of the downtown’s main paid parking garages.

In the late summer of 1995, I was stuck in afternoon traffic on the 40 Autoroute. It was day four of the 3,000-plus-kilometre drive with my closest friend from Saskatoon, in our late-eighties white Hyundai Excel hatchback. We hated the homogeneity of the small city where we grew up and had decided to abscond east. Now we were so close, and still hours away, the Trans-Canada a total parking lot. I’d never experienced anything like it. Anita and I sat there, idling, sweating, listening to “Add…

Taylor C. Noakes July 8, 2026 The Montreal Olympics, which took place fifty years ago this summer, shaped the city for worse and for better. Alighted upon the industrial skyline of Montreal’s East End, a giant concrete flying saucer. An iconic element of the cityscape for fifty years, Olympic Stadium has become something more in the minds of Montrealers than what it was originally intended to be.

Ella Keogh July 8, 2026 Thanks to digital surveillance apps, early childhood educators are increasingly treated like kids. With one hand I rub a child’s back as they fall asleep. With the other, I log the lunches of ten toddlers into an app on my iPhone. I push myself to think beyond the loud lullaby mix playing on the classroom’s laptop to try to remember what and how much everyone ate. It’s nearly impossible to log everything as it happens.

Graham Latham July 8, 2026 Doctors and activists are fighting the Carney government’s cuts to healthcare for refugee claimants. Early this year, Dr. Angela Caron began seeing the Awad family, who came to Canada fleeing genocide in the Gaza strip. (Maisonneuve is using a pseudonym for the family due to their precarious status.) Caron is a clinical psychologist and member of the Canadian Muslim Healthcare Network. She works with many refugee claimants in the Ottawa area.

The wine-mouthed hyenas between us. Conquering Shirley Street, licked by the wet tongue of summer. A neighbour paints their letterbox into a blood clot. Everything is florid beneath the doughy sun. You meet with a displaced piece of sidewalk, and I rub the hatches of your knees into a remarkable display of ruby. These gold-plated hoops burn through our lobes. Hypoallergenic is only the lesser likelihood of defiance. We run ourselves into street dogs with the clipped ears of cattle — the ones…

Waseem Haja July 8, 2026 Thrifting culture is in sharp decline, revealing the death of an idealized Montreal. For some months now, I have been dodging a person I refer to as my policeman. He isn’t, of course, my policeman. He isn’t even a policeman. He might, unbeknownst to you, be your policeman. So, beware. I first noticed my policeman towards the end of autumn at a thrift store where he is employed as a security guard. He is unassuming. The proportions of his limbs, torso, and head are unremarkable.

Last summer, I hurried into Montreal’s La Fontaine Park. I was late, alone and anxiously searching for the entrance to the park’s public theatre, Théâtre de Verdure. I was meeting a friend at a free concert for Suoni Per Il Popolo (pictured left), a long-running music and arts festival in the city. Once I finally made my way through the gates into the open-air theatre, I felt my body relax, soothed by the experimentalist klezmer of Black Ox Orkestar. I grabbed a seat and gazed around at the…

When we were both still halfway young— indifferent as a cedar grove is to the shade it folds among— we saved a beaver’s pelt. We drove up Highway 17, amid the wide dishevelled spread of north Ontario. Of course we did. It was your third time or your fourth on that untangled road. And yes, what Diefenbaker vowed to build— a highway through the wilderness— was there. We’ve left it, unfulfilled. We found the beaver blundering lengthwise along the lane toward …

Comic.