Like many cities in Canada, Nanaimo has a housing crisis. As rent prices have surged, so has homelessness. According to the city's last official count, there are 515 unhoused people in Nanaimo at any given time. By population, that is a higher homelessness rate than the city of Vancouver. Our series, IDEAS for a Better Canada (produced in partnership with the Samara Centre for Democracy), explores how homelessness affects the health of our democracy and why long-term solutions are so hard to achieve.

Public libraries are the forum for intellectual freedom, a core value that librarians protect for the sake of democracy. Yet libraries have now become a target in the culture wars of the U.S. – and in Canada, too. It’s an urgent conversation to have, no matter where one sits on the political spectrum. Libraries exist to give everyone access to a wide variety of content, even when books may offend others. Librarians are increasingly having to persuade skeptics that all ideas belong on their shelves. In our series, IDEAS for a Better Canada (in partnership with the Samara Centre for Democracy) we ask: What do we have if the freedom to read isn’t ours anymore?

The Sermon on the Mount is one of the greatest gifts of scripture to humanity; just ask Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Leo Tolstoy. But who's making any use of it today? In a time when an eye for an eye still seems to hold sway, IDEAS producer Sean Foley explores the logic of Christian non-violence, beginning with Jesus' counsel to 'turn the other cheek.' *This episode won a Wilbur Award for excellence in communicating spiritual themes. It originally aired on Oct. 14, 2022.

IDEAS is a place for people who like to think. We value curiosity and deep conversation. And we work hard to bring you the ideas that shape and re-shape our world. No topic is off-limits. New episodes drop Monday through Friday at 3 pm ET.

Saturn, an alligator that was supposedly Hitler’s favourite animal was 'liberated' from the Berlin zoo when the Red Army invaded Germany at the end of the Second World War. The reptile was relocated to Moscow where it died in 2020. But with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Saturn’s story has become once again a symbol in wartime geopolitics. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 10, 2023.

It’s been a few months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, with the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, overseeing government operations. The U.S. has been a platform for him, a source of money, resources and leverage, says historian and author Quinn Slobodian who has studied Musk's global history. Slobodian points out that Musk is “the symptom of a society which empowered him.” When we wanted technical solutions to social problems, Musk responded. He may not be what we wanted, “but as the saying goes, he’s the one we deserve.”

We are all vulnerable to digital surveillance, as there’s little protection to prevent our phones from getting hacked. Mercenary spyware products like Pegasus are powerful and sophisticated, marketed to government clients around the world. Cybersecurity expert Ron Deibert tells IDEAS, "the latest versions can be implanted on anyone's device anywhere in the world and as we speak, there is literally no defence against it.” Deibert is the founder of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a group of tech-savvy researchers who dig into the internet, looking for the bad actors in the marketplace for high-tech surveillance and disinformation. In his new book, Chasing Shadows, he shares notorious cases he and his colleagues have worked on and reveals the dark underworld of digital espionage and subversion.

There's no universal definition for the word freedom, according to American historian Timothy Snyder. He divides the word into two categories for people — the freedom "from" and the freedom "to" various things. In the U.S., Snyder calls oligarchs like Elon Musk and President Donald Trump "heroes of negative freedom,” focused on being against things. But the author of On Freedom says it's a trap, because once you’re against one thing, it builds into an endless loop of the next thing. True freedom, he says, is to thrive for the sake of our common future.

The Gulf of America/Gulf of Mexico controversy reminds us that maps may appear authoritative, but are a version of reality. At the same time, they can be rich, beautiful and informative, as Vancouver’s Kathleen Flaherty explains, in this 2005 documentary made before Google Maps changed mapmaking forever.

At a time when Canadians are rallying around the flag, IDEAS thought we could all use a little Stompin’ Tom Connors to keep us going. Famous for his black cowboy hat, he was an original, writing hundreds of songs about what it means to be Canadian. He may have died 12 years ago, but his songs live on, and resonate today.