6 of our best, but under-read stories from 2025

O Canada faced some serious backlash as it was front and centre on an international stage when the Toronto Blue Jays took part in the World Series. Canada’s army was dubbed a “boutique” military, only capable of niche operations and deployments due to inadequate funding and slow procurement. A Canadian symbol, the goose, once considered a honking nuisance is given some grace. Women in Afghanistan shared their heartbreaking and hopeful stories about life with the Taliban back in charge.

This year’s longreads have covered a wide range of topics. These ones may have been under-read when they were first published— but they’re worth reading now.

As the new year approaches, here are six stories you should dig into from 2025.

She was 20 years old, dreaming of a fulfilled life. The smart, ambitious young woman was among 20 Afghan women and girls enrolled in a secret school, seeking knowledge and a future.

But the Taliban were back in charge after Western forces withdrew from Afghanistan in September 2021, and they had different plans, as did her authoritarian, ultra-conservative father; she would marry an Afghan man of his choosing living in Turkey, a man she did not love.

She saw no way out of this future she did not want. She left a note, placed a smartphone in record mode, and hanged herself.

“I lost her,” said Negin, her 33-year-old teacher who set up a school in her home in a suburb of a city in northern Afghanistan. “She was 20 years old with lots of dreams.”

Negin goes by one name because she fears the Taliban’s retribution. Her school teaching young women English, vocational skills and activities such as painting, are forbidden by the Taliban. But she is determined to provide a bright spot, a glimmer of hope in their bleak existence.

Read more by Ehsanullah Amiri

In the end, the verdict came late on a Friday afternoon when Toronto’s courthouse was quiet, and the only other observers in the gallery were a few curious staff.

But two weeks previously, it was a bright and bustling fall morning when Tamar Cupid, 27, was formally placed in the hands of his jury.

Cupid stood up beside his lawyers. The robed registrar spoke. “Members of the jury, look upon the accused, and hearken to his charges.” The registrar read them aloud. Manslaughter, aggravated assault, robbery. And then, with a rhetorical flourish scripted long ago, the registrar spoke the crucial words to the 12 seated jurors: “For his trial he hath put himself upon his country, which country you are.”

With its stirring language, this ceremony that unfolds daily in courtrooms across Canada emphasizes the human side of criminal justice.

In this room, Crown and country are not abstract civic concepts, but actual people. Criminal trials are not the robotic application of rules or deference to some all-powerful state authority, but a weirdly psychological communal journey from opening ceremony through evidence to closing statements and onward into the inner sanctum of the jury room, with no deadline or even much instruction about how to actually deliberate, only the colossal task of unanimously deciding someone’s future.

Read more by Joseph Brean

It’s early fall on a shallow stretch of the Rideau River in Ottawa, a few hundred metres below Hog’s Back Falls. That’s the point where the Rideau Canal splits off from the once-natural waterway it has commandeered as a boat channel for almost 200 years, and where the liberated river finally reasserts its wildness.

In this remnant feral section of the Rideau, which runs past Carleton University, hundreds of Canada geese — showing an untamed spirit, like the stream that has drawn them here — are massing in a honking, splashing, fluttering maelstrom of exuberance.

They arrive on this mid-October day every few minutes in gaggles of five, eight, 12. There’s a sense of urgency, it seems, as they descend rapidly from the sky, some of them “whiffling” — performing a mid-air body twist that sends the bird plunging sharply — to hit their chosen landing spot on the water.

Now and then, an individual frantically skims across the surface of the water in pursuit of another — half-flying, half-swimming, long black neck aimed low and beak flared — in what looks like a vigorous game of chase. The behaviour, perhaps a mating or bullying display, will subtly reset the social order within this congress of Branta canadensis, Canada’s iconic white-cheeked goose.

Read more by Randy Boswell

David Grenon started Canada’s national anthem ahead of Game 6 of the World Series with a bright smile and booming voice before making a gesture for the crowd to join in. And did they ever.

By the end, after the awkward flip from French back to English at Toronto’s Rogers Centre, row after row, tier after tier of Blue Jays fans were knocking it out of the park. It wasn’t the usual tepid muttering or vague mouthing of words, but actual singing, with gusto, of a rousing rendition of O Canada.

It was so well received it didn’t make headlines.

It doesn’t always go that way.

Read more by Adrian Humphreys

The Alaskan Air Identification Zone extends 150 miles from U.S. territorial airspace and into Canada’s airspace in the North. It begins where sovereign airspace ends but is a defined stretch of international airspace that requires the ready identification of all aircraft in the interest of security.

On two consecutive days in February, two Russian Tupolev bombers accompanied by two Sukhoi Su-35 fighters flew into the zone. On both days, Feb. 18 and Feb. 19, they were intercepted by F-35 fighters, a Boeing E-3 Sentry early warning and control aircraft, and a KC-135 Stratotanker for aerial refuelling. All American aircraft.

On April 15, Russian aircraft flew into the zone again and were detected and tracked. According to the North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad), this is a regular occurrence.

Last July, a joint sail between Russians and Chinese went into the Bering Sea, a body of water in the north that divides the Eurasia continent and North America. They stayed in international waters.

And there was the infamous case of the Chinese spy balloon that floated over Canada and the United States from Jan. 28 to Feb. 4, 2023, before being shot down by a U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor fighter jet over the Atlantic near the coast of South Carolina.

Canada has come to rely on the U.S. military to help defend us. “We’re protecting Canada,” said U.S. President Donald Trump in his recent meeting with Prime Minister Mark Carney in the Oval Office. While Trump has dismissed the notion of using the U.S. military to realize his dream of making Canada the 51st state, that doesn’t mean he’s content providing Canada with what he calls “free military.”

Read more by Chris Lambie

In the chill dark of a March night on a Nova Scotia river, a hip-wader-wearing woman put Canada’s sovereignty to the test.

Or rather, the 40 or so net-wielding members of Sipekne’katik First Nation on the opposite bank were calling Canada’s bluff.

They caught juvenile American eels (elvers) under their own band-issued licenses in defiance of a Fisheries Act requiring them to have licenses approved by the federal fisheries minister.

“I think it was the fourth call to DFO I asked their dispatch if they could say whether any officers were on duty,” said Suzy Edwards, a commercial elver harvester.

“They wouldn’t. We flagged down a passing RCMP officer and he said they’d been told to stand down on elver-related matters.”

The issue at hand is larger than the tiny translucent juvenile American eels being dumped into buckets that night.

It’s whether the federal government will enforce its own laws when challenged by First Nations claiming a sovereignty that goes well beyond that acknowledged by the Supreme Court of Canada.

The lucrative East Coast fishery — lobster is Canada’s most valuable seafood export — has been made a testing ground for federal government reconciliation policies.

Read more by Aaron Beswick

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