Judy Rebick has lived her life at the intersection of community activism and political party organizing. `

Born on August 15th 1945 on the cusp of the Baby Boom, Judy Rebick has been at the forefront of Canada’s most significant social movements for the last 60 years , whether it has been as a student activist in the 1960s , an organizer and journalist with socialist revolutionary groups in the 1970s, spokesperson for pro-choice groups and ally of abortion rights advocate Dr. Henry Morgentaler in the 1980s, president of Canada’s leading feminist organization the National Action Committee on the Status of Women and progressive commentator and tv host in the 1990s , writer and academic in the 2000s.

Throughout that time, she has also been either associated with or at the centre of numerous groupings and organizations determined to reform and transform the NDP. Whether as an engaged member of the Waffle Movement, the Campaign for an Activist Party, the New Politics Initiative or the Leap Manifesto. And so given her history , there’s no better person in Canada to assess the current state of the NDP and to consider a path for its future, than her.

Armine Yalnyzian has spent her career explaining budgets, markets and fiscal matters to generations of Canadians. She’s an economist and the Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers and a regular columnist to the Toronto Star. In 2023 she was awarded the Galbraith Prize in Economics. Named in honour of the esteemed Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

John Vaillant's new book is entitled Fire Weather: The Making of A Beast. It chronicles the gargantuan Fire that engulfed Fort McMurray, the fourth largest city in Alberta and centre of Canada’s oil industry nine years ago this May. He describes how residents, politicians, civic officials and firefighters dealt with a cataclysmic event that destroyed 2400 homes and structures, damaged thousands more, and caused over 100,000 people to flee their homes in Northern Alberta in what remains the biggest single day evacuation in the history of modern fire.

John Vaillant is one of Canada’s most celebrated writers. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Outside and National Geographic. He is the award-winning author of four books including The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth Madness and Greed, The Tiger” A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, and a the novel Jaguar’s Children. He is the recipient of the Governor General Award, The Writer’s Trust Non-Fiction Prize, and the Windham Campbell Literature Prize