I’ve wanted to travel the world since I was a teenager. In 2009, after studying mechanical engineering at a university in Nigeria, I got a job with an oil and gas company that sent me to Texas. Three years later, I moved to India for work and, since then, I’ve lived in 15 countries. During all that globetrotting, I met and married my wife, Bola, and we had two children. For years, Bola and the kids were going back and forth between Nigeria and wherever I was located at the time. Eventually, I realized how much my jet-setting life disrupted our family, so Bola and I decided to find a permanent ..read more

When Rick Mercer, Canada’s favourite satirist son, retired from the rant game in 2018 after a blazing 15-season run of the Rick Mercer Report, he could have gone quietly. For a while, he got into amateur potato farming. But, every day in his shed overlooking the Atlantic, he was also writing, a new loquacious hobby that resulted in not one but two back-to-back instant bestsellers. There’s 2021’s Talking to Canadians, which charts Mercer’s course from his school days to getting CBC’s green light, and The Road Years, released last October, which chronicles everything after, including the drum le ..read more

1. Tate McRae | Musician After conquering TikTok, this 21-year-old pop phenomenon is ready to win over the world In September of 2023, Tate McRae’s single “greedy” started a sprint up the charts, hitting No. 1 around the same time as she performed on Saturday Night Live and landed on the cover of Billboard magazine. Who was this suddenly unavoidable presence whipping her hair, with more TikTok followers than Beyoncé? In response to her sudden ubiquity, a particularly aggressive army of web trolls cried “industry plant”—a term that has been used to dismiss a certain type of well-packaged, label ..read more

In September of 2023, Tate McRae’s single “greedy” started a sprint up the charts, hitting No. 1 around the same time as she performed on Saturday Night Live and landed on the cover of Billboard magazine. Who was this suddenly unavoidable presence whipping her hair, with more TikTok followers than Beyoncé? In response to her sudden ubiquity, a particularly aggressive army of web trolls cried “industry plant”—a term that has been used to dismiss a certain type of well-packaged, label-backed talent since the boy-band era. The new main pop girl (an actual term) seemed to have come out of nowhere ..read more

If standing atop the hockey world feels like a Canadian birthright, dominating men’s basketball is another story. Though a Canadian invented the game, Canada has struggled to be relevant within it: one of our only two NBA teams relocated to the U.S., we have yet to win an international basketball championship and we haven’t climbed an Olympic podium for the sport since 1936. We had a brief moment of glory in 2019, when Kawhi Leonard and the Toronto Raptors won the NBA title and sent the city into a frenzy even the Leafs would be jealous of. But five years later, we’re starving for the next big ..read more

Ryan Reynolds never set out to be one of Hollywood’s most bankable venture capitalists. As the story goes, the actor made his first big investment play buying ownership interest in Aviation Gin in 2018, after he tried the product and it was just that good. Celebrity-backed booze brands are as common as celebrity Ozempic prescriptions, but the difference is that Reynolds didn’t just put his face on the product—he also rolled up the sleeves of his superhero suit and got involved. Taking charge of Aviation’s branding efforts, he produced cheeky, self-deprecating ads that put an unknown alcohol br ..read more

Sophia Mathur has been showing up for the environment since she was quite literally in the womb—her mother, Cathy Orlando, was pregnant when she was protesting Big Fossil Fuel in the 2000s. Mathur grew up in Sudbury, Ontario. At seven years old, she was tagging along with her mother to MPs’ offices and Parliament and, at age nine, to Capitol Hill, politely refusing diversionary trips to local zoos with her dad. “At the time, I was obsessed with big cats, and I thought, If we were more on track to solve the climate crisis, these animals would be saved!” Mathur remembers. Mathur’s advocacy picke ..read more

Nestled on a beautiful campus in London, Ontario, Huron is one of Canada’s oldest universities, having recently celebrated its 160th anniversary. But its rich history is far from the whole story. With a vibrant community, small class sizes and a unique social impact mission, Huron is now the fastest-growing university in the province, showing a notable increase of 33.8 per cent in first-year, full-time undergraduate applications compared to last year. Huron’s president, Dr. Barry Craig, delves into the university’s distinctive student experience, the factors shaping its ongoing legacy and its ..read more

For the past 16 years, I’ve worked as a family doctor in community clinics throughout the country—in Yellowknife, La Ronge, Saskatchewan, Toronto, and in Sydney, Nova Scotia, where I’m based right now. In all of these clinics, I’ve encountered patients facing the same crippling dilemma: work while ill or lose income because their employer doesn’t provide them with paid sick days. As a doctor, my typical advice is for them to stay home and take all the time they need to recover. Many aren’t able to, and some end up back in my office a week later with a more severe version of their initial illne ..read more

In 1997, the day after he completed his civil engineering degree at the University of British Columbia, Hamed Shahbazi launched Info-Touch Technologies, his first startup. It began as a chain of internet-enabled kiosks in convenience stores across America, designed to help the digitally underserved get online. When the internet went global, Shahbazi pivoted his kiosks to email, PalmPilot syncing, video teleconferencing and, finally, bill payments. His last switch stuck: catering to the many Americans, including immigrants, who lacked bank accounts and needed a way to pay their bills fast, Shah ..read more