When Rick Mercer, Canada’s favourite satirist son, retired from the rant game in 2018 after a blazing 15-season run of the Rick Mercer Report, he could have gone quietly. For a while, he was an amateur potato farmer. But, every day in his shed overlooking the Atlantic, he was also writing, a hobby that resulted in two back-to-back instant bestsellers: Talking to Canadians, which came out in 2021, charts Mercer’s course from his school days to getting CBC’s green light, and The Road Years, released last October, chronicles everything after, including drum lessons with Rush’s Neil Peart, adventures in dogsledding, and loads of facetime with politicians.

Mercer realized he still had many miles left in the tank. When his friend Jann Arden, another CanCon icon turned author, released a book of her own, the two teamed up for a series of live events—that later morphed into Will They or Won’t They, the duo’s unscripted country-wide spring comedy tour, which kicks off at the end of this month in Kitchener, Ontario. Luckily for Mercer, a lot’s happened since he went on rant hiatus; luckily for us, he’s still got a lot to say—as I discovered when I spoke with him a few weeks ago in a wide-ranging conversation for Maclean’s.

—Katie Underwood, managing editor

For a decade, John Macfie worked the traplines along the Hudson Bay watershed, visiting remote northern Ontario communities, meeting Indigenous people and taking photographs along the way. Here, curator Paul Seesequasis shares the stories behind some of Macfie’s most fascinating images, now displayed at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

When Catriona Smart and her fiancé, Jimmy Cook, gutted their Forest Hill mansion, they were told the basement—a grimy engineering nightmare—was impossible to fix. After a two-year renovation and a full gut job, the basement now holds their very own speakeasy club with a fully functional 21-foot statement bar, a DJ booth and a dance floor.

FrOM THE

2024 POWER LIST

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, a gangly 25-year-old guard from Hamilton, Ontario, is currently leading the Oklahoma City Thunder through an auspicious 2024 campaign. The Great One moniker may already have been taken by a certain hockey star, so consider Gilgeous-Alexander Canada’s Next One—a talent of incredible on-court physicality and timing, and lots of off-court swagger.

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