Letters to the Editor: December 2025

Corporate Canada

Christopher Pollon’s “The US Badly Needs Rare Minerals and Fresh Water. Guess Who Has Them?” is an excellent article about Donald Trump’s desire for Canadian resources, but it doesn’t include what worries me. As Canadian citizens, we say “Elbows Up,” but will our corporate entities stand with us when they are under threat? Do we feel our corporations—and their leaders—are more loyal to democracy than our American equivalents? I think many of them would have no problem with a vassal state if it allowed them to avoid Trump’s wrath. They may simply look for the transition that least interferes with their business. We need to convince our elites that there is no going back to being run from the outside.

Robert Hope Owen Sound, ON

Fight or Flight

I don’t think the title of David Moscrop’s essay “Air Canada Flight Attendants Faced Down Ottawa—and Won” is accurate. The flight attendants won ground pay equating to an extra thirty and thirty-five minutes based on size of plane, with slight increases in the future. That’s it. If the flights are delayed, nothing. The only thing they won was exposing the collusion between Ottawa and Air Canada. Maryse Tremblay, for example, the chair of the Canada Industrial Relations Board, which issued a back-to-work order amid the strike, was formerly legal counsel for Air Canada. If anything comes from this strike, I hope it is that the Liberals think twice about interfering with the right to strike, which is protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Ilan Levy Calgary, AB

Cruel Intentions

Michelle Shephard’s “Where Cruelty Is the Point” (July/August) is an informed and bleakly sobering account of the military prison in Guantánamo Bay. As Shephard writes, it is all too easy to think of Guantánamo Bay as exceptional, a special exclusion zone reserved only for the “worst of the worst.” To think of the prison in this way is to reproduce the language of its architects and apologists. The harder but more important thing to remember is that the prison’s enormous, costly stake in state-sponsored surveillance, intimidation, coercion, and violence makes it continuous with the larger carceral logic governing the punitive, unforgiving, and xenophobic nation that invented it. In its cruelty, and in its ongoingness, Guantánamo Bay is America.

David L. Clark Toronto, ON

Greek Tragedies

I connected to Michael LaPointe’s short story “More Love” (September/October), about a young couple travelling from Athens to the Greek isles, in an unexpected way. Many years ago, I took a ferry with some temporary travelling companions from Crete to the port of Piraeus near Athens. Sleep was impossible, so I told my companions I was going up to the rear deck to find a bench in the fresh air. A row over from where I was lying, two young women, heads together, were having a quiet but intense conversation. I drifted off to sleep. In the middle of the night, I was disturbed by voices and people moving around me. One of the women who had been nearby was speaking in distressed tones to several members of the Greek crew. It felt like a waking dream, and I drifted off once more. As morning broke, I awoke with a start and a clear thought: the other woman had jumped! Sitting up, I saw I was alone on the upper deck. It took me a moment to realize we were moving in a wide arc, circling a spot in the sea. The pattern continued for a while, the ship slowly circling in a southerly direction. All of a sudden, the ferry resumed course, and we continued north to mainland Greece. I did not see the young woman who was so distressed in the night again, but the image of her face has stayed with me. We never learned what happened to her travelling companion, just as we are left to wonder about Matty’s fate.

John Crump Ottawa, ON