Episodes

Emily McIntosh - Bill 5 - Women of Ontario Say No I first heard about the Women of Ontario Say No campaign on Instagram . One of the campaign’s posts was shared by a number of female municipal council members …

Rural Women Councillors in Ontario - 100 Days in Office This episode is a conversation with four first-time rural women councilors, all serving in small communities across Ontario. They talk about what their experience has be...

Gitanjali Aggarwal - Meeting Rural Women Where They Are The PARO Centre for Women’s Enterprise is an organization that supports women entrepreneurs across Ontario. The organization’s approach to supporting women is unique in ...

Jean Bota - ‘Building Capacity in Rural Crime Prevention Project In our last episode , we talked about just one element of crime in rural Canada, intimate partner violence, with Pamela Cross of Luke’s Place . She mentioned th...

Pamela Cross - Luke’s Place - A Rural Inquest Pamela Cross is a feminist lawyer ; a well respected expert on violence against women and the law. She is revered for her work as a researcher, writer, educator and trainer. …

Councillor Michelle Friesen - Whitehorse, Yukon Territory Michelle Friesen caught my eye, initially, with a post on Instagram. She was addressing her city’s council, as a sitting councillor herself, about the discovery of chi...

Duane Kumala-Thomas: Highlander Studios - History and Truth Duane Kumala-Thomas recently invited me to his art studio called Highlander Studios in Woodstock, Ontario for a tour and a conversation about his studio, his work, h...

How Freebruary Helps Canadian Producers Last week, my good friend Stella Sehn , a family farm honey producer in the Prairies told me about Freebruary . She started to explain and then she said she’d just send me this one …

Filling the Gaps - Dee Ann Benard & Daniela Seiferling - Rural Development Network I first came across the Rural Development Network or RDN when I started the podcast in 2021 and I signed up for its newsletter, following its …

Ame-Lia Tamburrini: Circles for Change in Rural Canada Recently, I’ve been thinking deeply about the value of circles when it comes to community building and community engagement. It seems to me that the division we see in Ca...

Belinda Clemmensen - Women, Leadership and Saving the World Over the holidays this year, I took a connection break. That meant trying my best to unhinge from social media and work. I felt like I needed to rethink the podcast...

Will 2023 Bring Clean and Resilient Growth for Rural Canada? - John McNally - PLACE Centre What is clean and resilient growth and how does it fit into a rural perspective in Canada and will 2023 be the year we …

Autumn Ongaro - FEAD: A Taste of Home in Norfolk County This is the third in a series of rural-based authors. I love this book because it’s a combination of a recipe book and a storybook. Autumn Ongaro is the …

Grandview HealthCare Solutions is a grassroots, community driven organization that grew out of the need to better serve patients in Grandview, Manitoba and the immediate surrounding area. This is another case of a community c...

Catharine Wilson - Being Neighbours: Cooperative Work and Rural Culture, 1830–1960 I have a fascination with Canadian history and more specifically, rural Canadian history. I have a keen interest in what life was like in rura...

Physicians Assistants: Can Physicians Side-Step Ego to Health Rural Health Care? Eric Demers and Dr. Alex Nataros Physicians Assistants or PAs are, in essence physician extenders, they extend the care of a primary physician. ...

Ann Douglas - Navigating the Messy Middle A Fiercely Honest and Wildly Encouraging Guide for Midlife Women This is the first in our series of Rural Authors and Rural Books . Ann is an award-winning writer and bestselling auth...

This is the second in a series of interviews about rural Canadian health care. Last episode we talked about the BC Rural Health Network , a collective of citizen-led collaborators that have organized to put pressure on the go...

One of the fundamental challenges in rural Canadian communities is health care. Folks in rural and remote communities are not the same as our urban counterparts and therefore our health care needs to be different. And there a...

Kaity and Montana Adams own Adams Family Ink and Boutique on Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, near Brantford, Ontario but it is clear Kaity runs the business. But this is at the root of her Indigenous heritage and …

Politicization of Wind Energy in Rural Canada This topic was brought to me by one of our newsletter subscribers named Ruby. She’s concerned that hundreds of wind turbines are moving into an area of Eastern Ontario where she a...

Bias, Hate and Extremism - Part 2 (This episodes is the second of two-parts) This is part 2 of a two part series on bias, hate and extremism, specifically in rural Canada. If you haven’t heard it, I hope you …

(This episodes is the first of two-parts) Almost everyone has a bias, a way of thinking, an opinion, it’s pretty much human nature. Journalists, when I went to journalism school, were only supposed to report on facts and not ...

Every Sunday I've been hosting Open Circle Zoom calls, inviting folks from across rural Canada to talk about the issues on their mind that week. This was recorded just ahead of Ontario's municipal elections and leaks to media...