Passages

For more than 20 years, Dave Meslin has been a community organizer focused primarily on three topics: sustainable transportation, visual communication in public spaces and electoral reform. Or, as Meslin poetically puts it, his focus has been on bikes, billboards and ballots. 

While these topics might appear disconnected, Meslin thinks there’s a common thread, which is giving voice to groups that are being systemically excluded by a dominant force: he writes, “Roads designed exclusively for cars, invasive corporate signs, and a cartel of prehistoric political parties–each of these suffocates other voices. In each case, there are elite forces at work maintaining the status quo. And in each case, those forces can be overpowered only by effective political advocacy.”

Dave Meslin’s book is called Teardown: Rebuilding Democracy from the Ground Up. It’s part handbook for organizers, part memoir of his decades of work for a better democracy, and part philosophical manifesto about what human beings and communities can do when given the chance. 

Meslin’s work has been adapted for television by TVO, in a series called Unrigged.

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Canadian historian Harold Innis devoted the years before his death in 1952 to the question of communication–its bias, its relationship with empire, its capacity to foster thought styles so dominant as to entrain "all minds and set them running in predetermined 'grooves.'"

Those last words belong not to Innis but to David Cayley. Cayley is a writer and broadcaster, whose decades of work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation–the CBC–ranged in subject matter from history and philosophy to criminology and current affairs. On CBC Ideas, his voice and style were instantly recognizable.

Drawing on that background, David Cayley’s newest book is called The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back). In it, Cayley pushes his reader to develop the recognition, humility and humour that he thinks might constitute "the first step to a responsible practice of media." 

This episode draws on passages from the following CBC Ideas series produced by Cayley:

• The Legacy of Harold Innis
• Turning Points in Public Broadcasting: The CBC at 50
• The Origins of the Modern Public

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To lift oneself up against the gravity of common sense, it takes a probing mind and searching spirit. It takes focus and scope, it takes dialogue with people who have real experience, and it perhaps also takes some acquaintance with history.

Ed Dunsworth is a historian of labour, migration, and politics at McGill University. His 2022 book is Harvesting Labour: Tobacco and the Global Making of Canada’s Agricultural Workforce. It’s an intricate and ambitious look at how global trends and trajectories have passed through the prism of one specific sector in one specific county, just off Lake Erie in southern Ontario.

Harvesting Labour undermines our default understanding of agricultural work in Canada, not least by showing farm workers of many eras and origins organizing, resisting, and asserting their own dignity. 

This episode also discusses Dunsworth’s 2023 book, Harvesting Freedom: The Life of a Migrant Worker in Canada, co-authored with Gabriel Allahdua.

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There are a number of ways that one could describe Tonya K. Davidson’s new book, Ottawology. On one level, it’s a synthesis of sociological theory and research about Canada’s capital. It is also to some extent a map of the vital tensions that we find in all cities. At yet another level, it's a book that helps its readers perceive the richness of urban life, and every city’s potential to nourish both individuals and society.

Davidson is an associate professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa. 

The final passage heard in the episode is from Tara Milbrandt’s chapter of Seasonal Sociology.

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Annie Dillard is verbally vibrant and deadly in description. But it’s the nature of the solstice season too, impeccably balanced, a knife’s edge of mortality and vitality. 

Passages featured in this solstice reading bonus episode are from Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) and The Writing Life (1989).

A great work, like a great river, has many tributaries. In the case of Plato’s Republic, American classicist James Romm divines one such buried stream, exploring Plato’s encounters with tyranny on his several trips to the Greek West. Romm’s 2025 book is Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece.

Passages from Plato’s Seventh Letter are from Jonah Radding’s translation, found in Heather L. Reid and Mark Ralkowski’s Plato at Syracuse. Passages from Plato’s Republic are from Allan Bloom’s translation.

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Ed Broadbent’s political thought and action was based on a desire for a fuller and richer democratic life, and a basic respect for his fellow Canadians. In one of his final years, Broadbent wrote that his political task had been “to communicate a social democratic vision to ordinary Canadians,” providing tangible improvements to their lives in the process.

Amongst Broadbent’s co-authors for his final major publication was Frances Abele. Abele is Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor’s Professor Emerita at Carleton University’s School of Public Policy & Administration. Her 2023 book with Ed Broadbent, Jonathan Sas and Luke Savage is Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality.

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Democracy is both a lofty ideal and a humble collection of practices, institutions and dispositions. 

Dave Moscrop’s writing travels between these two poles. Moscrop brings gentleness to his judgment of individual democratic decision-makers and an urgency to the overall project of elevating our democracy.

Dave Moscrop is a commentator on politics for TV, radio and print, his writing appearing in a range of Canadian, American and British publications. His 2019 book is Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones.

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Dennis Lee's poems sound the depths of human interiority, but also show that interiority has external (and political) correlates.

The poems featured in this summer reading bonus episode are collected in Lee's 2017 book, Heart Residence.

For Andrew Coyne, Canadian democracy has become more ceremony than substance. His 2025 book The Crisis of Canadian Democracy maps the imbalances between government and Parliament, leaders and caucus, prime ministers and cabinets. And he shows the fundamental risks posed by these asymmetries, particularly as declining legitimacy diminishes action and initiative, at a moment when the country badly needs each.

Andrew Coyne writes for the Globe and Mail.

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