The Conversation Piece

The Walrus Gala is the biggest night of the year for The Walrus, bringing together hundreds of writers, journalists, artists, and supporters in one room to celebrate the work of Canadian journalism.

This year, the night raised close to half a million dollars in support of The Walrus’s award-winning reporting. For the first time, The Conversation Piece set up a podcast booth in the middle of the celebration, and guests including Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, editor-in-chief Carmine Starnino, and board chair Åsa Kachan stopped by to share what the night, and The Walrus, mean to them.

This special episode of The Conversation Piece features highlights from The Walrus Gala 2026.

Support fact-checked Canadian journalism today by donating to The Walrus.

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Before people care what you believe, they must believe that you care. Anthony Morgan learned that lesson not from a polarization study, but from a U-Haul counter on the worst moving day of his life.

Anthony Morgan is co-host of CBC's The Nature of Things and a social scientist studying polarization and misinformation. Drawing on a personal story about a tense exchange with a rental clerk, he shows how curiosity and compassion—not being right—are what actually build belonging across difference. This special episode of The Conversation Piece features content from The Walrus Talks: Power and Belonging, supported by The Belonging Forum.

Morgan spoke at The Walrus Talks: Power and Belonging in April 2026.

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Elbows up, maple leaf flags, a stadium full of people rising for the anthem—Riley Yesno stayed seated, and asks whether this new wave of Canadian nationalism is really the belonging we're looking for.

Riley Yesno is a scholar, writer, and Indigenous Politics Expert at the University of Toronto and The Yellowhead Institute. Drawing on her own experience as the granddaughter of residential school survivors, she questions whether rising Canadian nationalism is a genuine source of belonging or a reactive response to fear, and argues that real safety comes from community, not the nation-state. This special episode of The Conversation Piece features content from The Walrus Talks: Power and Belonging, supported by The Belonging Forum.

Yesno spoke at The Walrus Talks: Power and Belonging in April 2026.

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Belonging often means entering a system whose values, references, and aesthetics were never built with you in mind. Alica Hall asks what gets lost in that exchange—and what it might look like to stop asking for entry altogether.

Alica Hall is the Executive Director of the Nia Centre for the Arts, Canada's first professional multidisciplinary Black arts centre. Drawing on her own experience building the centre in Toronto's Little Jamaica, she explores the cost of belonging to systems not designed for you, and what becomes possible when artists are seen without having to translate themselves. This special episode of The Conversation Piece features content from The Walrus Talks: Power and Belonging, supported by The Belonging Forum.

Hall spoke at The Walrus Talks: Power and Belonging in April 2026.

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Agency isn't something Canada hands newcomers along with healthcare and a job. It's something they have to claim for themselves—and Maiwand Rahyab thinks the country's next chapter depends on it.

Maiwand Rahyab is founder and CEO of Resilient Societies, an organization protecting civic space and democracy in Canada and around the world. Drawing on his own journey to Canada as a refugee from Afghanistan, he argues that true belonging requires more than access to basic services—it requires the space to contribute, and the agency to matter. This special episode of The Conversation Piece features content from The Walrus Talks: Power and Belonging, supported by The Belonging Forum.

Rahyab spoke at The Walrus Talks: Power and Belonging in April 2026.

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Susu, boxhand, meeting turn, partner—the informal banking systems built by marginalized communities have names most Canadians have never heard, and don't recognize as a legacy already thriving here.

Dr. Caroline Shenaz Hossein is Canada Research Chair of Feminist Political Economy and founder of the Diverse Solidarity Economies Collective. Drawing on more than a decade of research into rotating savings and credit associations, she shows how these community-run economies build the trust and belonging that formal institutions often fail to offer. This special episode of The Conversation Piece features content from The Walrus Talks: Power and Belonging, supported by The Belonging Forum.

Dr. Shenaz Hossein spoke at The Walrus Talks: Power and Belonging in April 2026, in Toronto.

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Community isn't the soft stuff around democracy—it's the load-bearing wall holding it up.

Amanda Munday is executive director of New Majority, a nonpartisan organization that activates young and first-time voters. Drawing on her own experience building a co-working and childcare space after hitting a wall of policy inaction, she shows how community infrastructure—not political access—is often what turns advocacy into real change. This special episode of The Conversation Piece features content from The Walrus Talks: Power and Belonging, supported by The Belonging Forum.

Munday spoke at The Walrus Talks: Power and Belonging on April 9, 2026.

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Public libraries have run on overdue fines and quiet-please rules for generations. Increasingly, more of them are dropping both—and discovering that connection, not silence, is what makes a place worth belonging to.

Åsa Kachan is CEO and Chief Librarian of Halifax Public Libraries. She drawing on her own experience growing up in libraries, she shows how removing fines, welcoming food and conversation, and designing for accidental encounters can turn libraries into places where belonging happens by design. This special episode of The Conversation Piece features content from The Walrus Talks at Home: Place and Belonging, supported by The Belonging Forum.

Kachan spoke at The Walrus Talks at Home: Place and Belonging on November 4, 2025.

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Physical infrastructure can be seen. Relational infrastructure can only be felt—and it might be the difference between a park and a place worth belonging to.

Jorge Garza is director of Networks for Change at the Tamarack Institute. Drawing on communities like BC's Tri-Cities, he shows how relational infrastructure—the connections and collective intelligence beneath a place—is turns static spaces into ones that generate real belonging.

This special episode of The Conversation Piece features content from The Walrus Talks at Home: Place and Belonging, supported by The Belonging Forum.

Garza spoke at The Walrus Talks at Home: Place and Belonging on November 4, 2025.

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Beneath the noise of traffic, one Toronto space is quietly proving that conversation—not commerce—is what makes a neighborhood.

Anna Gallagher-Ross is senior manager of programming at The Bentway, a public space beneath Toronto's Gardiner Expressway that hosts year-round arts programming and social gatherings. Drawing on The Bentway's research, she shows how seating, art, and play turn passersby into neighbours—and why public space is public health infrastructure. This special episode of The Conversation Piece features content from her presentation at The Walrus Talks at Home: Place and Belonging, supported by The Belonging Forum.

Gallagher-Ross spoke at The Walrus Talks at Home: Place and Belonging on November 4, 2025.

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