Ideas

2026 CBC Massey Lecturer Leilani Farha believes the only way to really understand the housing crisis is to visit people in their homes. This fall, she’s been travelling the country doing exactly that. Ahead of the broadcast of her lectures, Housing Inc.: A Global Takeover and Our Fight for Home, she sits down with Nahlah Ayed to share excerpts from her conversations.

Vimy, Dieppe and Normandy are places that hold profound and enduring meaning for many Canadians. But few have heard of Brunete, Teruel and Fuentes de Ebro — battles that saw Canadian volunteers facing Nazi bullets and bombs during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1965, CBC researcher Mac Reynolds spoke with volunteers to understand why they defied Canadian law to put their lives on the line to fight fascism in a country not their own. This documentary is called "A Duty Beyond Borders," by freelance contributor Stephen Smith.

The current wave of anti-elitism and anti-urbanism we're seeing from authoritarian leaders and their followers may seem to have erupted out of nowhere. But for New Yorker writer and former CBC Massey Lecturer Adam Gopnik, what we see now stems from historic antisemitism. *This episode originally aired Feb. 18, 2025

The 2023 detainment in Russia of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich made international headlines. Two years post-release, he’s taken the story back in a book: This Cursed Beautiful Land. He discusses journalism, freedom and international law at the 2026 Graeme Gibson Talk, along with fellow writers Carol Off and Philippe Sands.

In the wake of the U.S. midterm elections, Kim Lane Scheppele is relieved that the electoral process ran smoothly. Yet she believes there is still reason to fear for the health of American democracy. She argues that not all government coups require long knives, tanks, kidnapped politicians, renegade army officers or even clear illegality.

There’s such a thing as “constitutional” coup, says the Princeton politics professor.
This type of coup gradually overcomes safeguards through legal and norm-changing measures, using the tools of democracy itself, until all that remains is one-party autocratic rule. Scheppele draws on her years living in Hungary and Russia, plus her study of democratic collapses around the world, to propose a ten-point checklist that helps us spot when such a constitutional coup is underway. And like many American experts on autocracy, she’s now turning her analytic gaze on her own country.