Canada’s Border Problem – Fixing Legacy Mistakes

The Story After the U.S. elections last November, many Canadians half-jokingly prepared for an influx of disaffected liberal Americans fleeing the new Trump regime. And while the Canadian immigration website crashed on the night of the election, it seems that few American political refugees have indeed crossed the border. Rather, Canada now faces a much more…

The View from Kenya: One Social Entrepreneur’s Quest to Revolutionize the Agricultural Sector

Editor’s Note: Earlier this month, the Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Calgary Chapter hosted a visit from Samuel Wachieni, a Kenyan social entrepreneur. Samuel’s visit was part of EWB’s Kumvana Program – an annual exchange in which top entrepreneurs and leaders from sub-Saharan Africa visit Canada to learn from and share their own experiences with Canadian…

A Resilience Approach to Political Hate Speech

Canada – Not as Civil as You Might Think The past seven days were supposed to be a good week for Canada. Last Monday, Justin Trudeau went to Washington and delivered exactly what almost every Canadian was hoping for: an acknowledgment from President Trump that the U.S.-Canadian trade relationship was valuable and only needs to be…

Jennifer Welsh’s “The Return of History”: (Re)Defining Liberal Democracy for the 21st Century

As I browsed bookstores last December for holiday gifts (and a few gifts for myself), one book repeatedly caught my eye – The Return of History: Conflict, Migration, and Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century, by Canadian international relations scholar Jennifer Welsh. I noticed it for three reasons: (1) the title was a clear rhetorical response to one of…

The View from Colombia, Part II: An Imperfect Peace

Editor´s Note: On October 3, 2016, the Colombian people shocked the international community by narrowly rejecting a peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). After more than 50 years of violence, most observers in Colombia and around the world expected that there would be widespread support for such an agreement, in order…

The Top World Music Albums of 2016

Following up on our top news articles of 2016, another annual Pine Tree Republic tradition is to review the past year in world music. With digital music services making ever more music available from around the world, it can be difficult to distinguish what makes “world music” distinct from any other kind of music we might hear these…

The Top News Articles of 2016

Happy New Year to PineTreeRepublic readers! As we enter 2017 and approach our second anniversary, it seems like a good moment to continue an emerging annual tradition: the top 10 list of our favourite news articles from the past year. If nothing else, the twists and turns of 2016 demonstrated the importance of high-quality journalism in order to…

The View from Colombia, Part I: An Imperfect Peace

Editor´s Note: On October 3, 2016, the Colombian people shocked the international community by narrowly rejecting a peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). After more than 50 years of violence, most observers in Colombia and around the world expected that there would be widespread support for such an agreement, in order…