Prime minister Stephen Harper has recently announced a preliminary agreement with the European Union, which could be one of the biggest free trade agreements Canada has ever signed.
The deal grants far reaching access to the 500 million consumers in the EU’s $17 trillion market. It is expected to increase trade across the Atlantic by 20 per cent, add $12 billion to the Canadian GDP and create 80,000 new jobs.

I t appears that University of Calgary President Elizabeth Cannon considers herself entitled to a salary higher than nearly any of her counterparts, even when the reputation and renown of the University of Calgary indicates that she does not deserve it.

In the name of protecting their Jewish identity, the Israeli government and people are running a discriminatory campaign against African refugees. The state of Israel has built a detention camp for refugees that can hold over 10,000 people, as well as established new laws to arrest and detain people of African descent on site, whether or not they have been involved in criminal activity.

An artist’s work is indicative of the type of person who made it, so I was only mildly surprised when Chuck Palahniuk appeared in front of the audience dressed like a barefoot Dumbledore in a shiny red robe, pajamas and a bejeweled scarf, telling us that if we didn’t blow up our beach balls he would berate us.

Palahniuk’s eccentric personality and twisted sense of humour translates into bestselling transgressive fiction. He has written 13 successful novels, two books of nonfiction, as well as a bizarre collection of short fiction.

When Montreal-Toronto band Yamantaka // Sonic Titan’s first album, YT//ST, was shortlisted for the 2012 Polaris Prize, fans were left wondering if the group would be able to trump their critically appraised debut album. UZU is the answer to that question — it’s a volcanic yes.

If you haven’t listened to an Arcade Fire album since Funeral, the music on Reflektor will come as a bit of a surprise. Since their debut album, the Canadian band has moved away from traditional indie-rock and towards a more ephemeral and unconventional sound. This shift is most noticeable in their latest album, which almost completely ditches classic rock conventions in favour of alternative dance and disco.

The footwork and juke genres have seen a surge in popularity within the underground dance music community in recent years. Created to promote a growing movement of Chicago dance crews and battlers in the early 2000s, the sound has since gone global with the help of some of the U.K.’s electronic music mainstays. Following a string of successful EPs and singles released under Kode9’s London-based label Hyperdub, DJ Rashad has now produced footworks’s seminal LP in Double Cup.

With the recent Senate scandal blowing up and revealing a sea of political corruption, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s integrity has come under attack. Calgary-based author Chris Turner intensifies this assault on the Conservatives and Harper in his latest book, The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper’s Canada.

It was inevitable that Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. would have to face an existential crisis: is it a Marvel movie in television form or a Joss Whedon show — a question I raised in a previous column. Five weeks in and comments around the Internet are predictably divided, between continued excitement and rising disappointment. A moderate consensus is that the show is still figuring itself out.

Bell, one of Canada’s largest telecom companies, has recently announced that they are going to begin collecting more detailed data from their customers for the purpose of selling this information to advertisers and third parties.

This reveal will hardly come as a surprise to many Canadians. All three of Canada’s biggest telecom companies — Telus, Rogers and Bell — have a history of unscrupulous business practises, with Bell being the most ruthless of them all.