#Best of 2023: Maclean’s must-read interviews

In 2023, Canadians had the tough conversations: on AI, housing, immigration, labour, the opioid crisis, Indigenous sovereignty and other hot and fraught topics. In many cases, we were conversation-starters ourselves—best-sellers, decision-makers, government ground-breakers, tech titans and Hollywood heavy-hitters who got the world talking. Maclean’s was able to chat one-on-one with many of these personalities, with captivating, controversial and often entertaining results. Here, our must-read interviews with the country’s story-shapers from the last 12 months.

In his Giller Prize–winning short story collection, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, Toronto physician Vincent Lam took readers behind the exam-room curtain and into the hectic, heart-straining lives of young doctors. His fifth book, On the Ravine, out this month, plunges readers into the opioid crisis, via two of Bloodletting’s most memorable characters. One of them is the considered, compassionate Dr. Chen—thought to be Lam’s alter ego—who is determined to save his patients, no matter the personal cost. 

It’s a dynamic that Lam knows well. In 2013, as opioid use exploded across Canada, he pivoted from emergency medicine to addictions and, in 2017, opened Toronto’s Coderix Medical Clinic. There, his team takes a two-pronged approach to substance-abuse treatment: pharmaceuticals and therapy. Lam believes the problems proliferating in Canada’s ERs and addictions clinics—crowded waiting rooms and lack of consistent access to GPs—are intertwined. Regardless, he is determined to provide quality care, to his patients and himself.

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The robots are coming. Well, technically, they’re already here, but Martin Kon just arrived. Fresh off a stint as YouTube’s chief financial officer—where he and his team launched the platform’s TikTok-esque video Shorts—the Ontario-bred tech exec hopped back over the border and became president and COO of the mega-successful three-year-old AI startup Cohere, based in Toronto. Its mandate? Commercializing better human-computer conversations. Basically, they want a word. 

Cohere’s recent US$125-million funding boost, and Kon’s pivot, coincides with the recent popularization of natural-language processing, or NLP, the branch of AI that’s teaching computers to digest and produce speech and text with the sophistication of human beings. As everyday websurfers use NLP-based tools like ChatGPT to produce A-plus college essays, the founders of Cohere are hoping to revolutionize the way the world does business. I spoke with Kon about all things AI during his first week back in Toronto. He had just finished setting up his new work computer. 

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Jay Baruchel is everywhere: in slashers, sex farces and sports movies; opposite mythical lizards in Disney’s How to Train Your Dragon franchise; and he’s worked with directors as varied as David Cronenberg, Judd Apatow and even himself. If you’re wondering how an Ottawa-born, Montreal-raised kid with a Gumby body and a voice like a twisted balloon has been working steadily since 1995 (he’s now 40 and busier than ever), the answer is simple: Jay Baruchel loves movies—loves them.

Baruchel loved his BlackBerry, too. He hung on to it until 2019. It makes sense, then, that his next movie is, well, BlackBerry. The film, out this month, chronicles the rise and fall of Research in Motion, the Waterloo moonshot whose founders had the zany idea to merge computers with cellphones. Baruchel plays Mike Lazaridis, the engineering student turned RIM co-founder who watched his dreams get gobbled up by the iPhone, but not before they made him a billionaire. Playing the more level-headed partner gives Baruchel a chance to showcase his dramatic chops. It also demonstrates why, unlike the now-obsolete gadget, his success continues.

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Sarah-Ève Pelletier has no bad memories. The pool-deck hijinks, the contagious pre-performance euphoria, the sequins—that’s what she recalls about her decorated five-year artistic swimming stint with Canada’s national team. That golden time left such a mark, in fact, that every one of Pelletier’s career moves since has allowed her to keep a toe in the world of sports. After retiring in 2007, Pelletier, a Quebec City native, earned back-to-back law degrees, eventually working as in-house counsel for the Canadian and international Olympic committees.

Now, Pelletier is nearly a year into a role that’s forced her to confront the ugly underbelly of Canadian athletics. Last June, she was appointed the country’s first sport integrity commissioner, leading a new federally funded office meant to manage complaints about alleged abuses and institutional rot within the country’s national sporting organizations. (In mid-May, Sports Canada announced the creation of another oversight body to ensure the commissioner’s recommendations—and any sanctions—are carried out.) Horror stories have come in waves, recounted by athletes from sports as varied as soccer, gymnastics, water polo and bobsleigh. Pelletier’s less focused on restoring their glory than their humanity. Until then, she says, she can’t stop.

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If you believe the early hype, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan rolled off her parents’ couch in Mississauga, Ontario, and into a star-making lead role in Netflix’s hit high school rom-dram Never Have I Ever. It was 2019, and a friend sent the tweet announcing Mindy Kaling’s casting call. Ramakrishnan, then 17 and tired from a long day at real-life Meadowvale Secondary School, went, so it goes: Eh, why not?

In truth, Ramakrishnan, now 21, has always had big plans. Okay, maybe “preferred manifestations.” She hadn’t banked on besting 15,000 other young girls to play the now-iconic teenage try-hard Devi Vishwakumar. Acting wasn’t her first dream; she wanted to be an animator. Later, she was cast as Priya Mangal, an (animated) South Asian tween, in Pixar’s Turning Red. Things have a funny way of working out—just rarely in the way she imagines.

The final season of Never Have I Ever, set in Devi’s senior year, streams this month. Another freshly adult actor who’s had less success with serendipity might dread an open schedule, but Ramakrishnan is mostly relaxed. What’s the next big thing for the erstwhile “next big thing”? A university degree? A stint as a Disney princess? She’ll figure it out—or the universe will.

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Fires are burning all around Jyoti Gondek. There are the actual fires, blazing wildly across Alberta, but also transit violence, empty office towers—the same sticky issues facing most big-city mayors in Canada. See also: the shock-jock politics that railroaded Alberta’s last election.

Gondek, a former policy analyst turned city councillor, has become a standout progressive in a province that’s mostly gone UCP blue. She’s allergic to lofty ideological pronouncements, but you can discern her stance from her strategy: pushing mobile crisis-response teams to fight homelessness; courting young workers, a move that has drawn record venture-capital dollars to Calgary; and exploring green energy sources, placing her in the crosshairs of Alberta’s oil industry.

Calgary recently threw $200 million into a visionary downtown turnaround, converting vacant offices into housing—a plan that’s attracted “how’d she do that” inquiries from American mayors and supercharged a city once speculated to become the next Detroit. Gondek isn’t trying to burn down Cowtown’s establishment—even if her name is Punjabi for “little flame.” She’s trying to do her job.

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On the off chance you overhear a Canadian bragging, it’s usually to say that this is the greatest country in the world. It might violate our national modesty policy to add that we’re now also one of the most desirable, but the data’s there: in 2022, we welcomed close to a million newcomers (a record) and, a year prior, unseated the U.S. as the number-one destination for international workers. People want to come to Canada, and Canada really wants them here.

In June, staring down the ongoing labour shortage, the federal government announced a revamped federal express-entry system, complete with shiny new expedited pathways to permanent residency for U.S. H-1B visa holders and immigrants with sought-after expertise in fields like health care, tech and, crucially, the trades. Prior to a surprise cabinet shuffle by the Prime Minister in late July, the man responsible for delivering on the government’s ambitious target—500,000 immigrants annually by 2025—was Sean Fraser, then the minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship.

Fraser, a trained lawyer and loyal Nova Scotian, spent his whole life watching talent flee his home province for more promising opportunities elsewhere. His old office is facing a backlog 800,000 applications deep—not to mention newly urgent questions about Canada’s affordability, thanks in part to our bonkers real estate market. Those same questions follow Fraser into his new role as minister of housing, infrastructure and communities. When Maclean’s spoke with him in the weeks leading up to his new appointment, Fraser was convinced that Canada is the place to be, warts and all.

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When Toronto native Peter Attia was working as a surgical resident at Johns Hopkins, he was haunted by a very specific stress dream: he’d see himself frantically running around a city sidewalk, trying to catch eggs that were falling from the sky. Many times, they’d splatter on the pavement—and all over his scrubs. Attia, who was training to be a cancer surgeon, later realized the eggs symbolized patients, people whose disease had advanced too far to treat.

That helplessness caused Attia to quit medicine for a time, eventually returning to practice armed with a fresh idea he called “Medicine 3.0”—a visionary approach to health care that manages disease before it starts, using a combo of exercise, nutrition, sleep, the occasional supplement and emotional wellness. It’s also the thesis of Outlive, his new, wildly popular, death-defying book.

Between Early Medical, his Austin-based clinic (where he’s treated several members of the Marvel Cinematic Universe) and The Peter Attia Drive (his podcast, downloaded 75 million times), Attia is widely regarded as a rare credible voice in an easy fix–filled health climate, one packed with rapidly aging boomers way more likely to see Dr. Google before their own GP. But Attia’s biggest selling point is, perhaps, his vulnerability. As a physician, he can prevent the worst. As a man, he knows all too well that he’s fallible.

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Every night is a blockbuster night for Shawn Levy. Coming up in the ’90s, the Montreal-born director, screenwriter and producer mastered the buttery box-office banger—think Date Night, Cheaper by the Dozen, Night at the Museum and The Pink Panther (Beyoncé’s version). Even now, it’s virtually impossible to escape his creations. Perhaps you’ve heard of Stranger Things? He produced it. Deadpool? He’s partway through directing instalment three. Star Wars? Ha! In development.

Hollywood’s franchise fetish certainly shows no signs of abating, but, lately, Levy’s had to evolve his oeuvre along with a shifting industry, one disrupted by streamers; a new wave of scrappy, Macbook-owning Canadian talents; a contentious SAG-AFTRA strike and, relatedly, AI. Even the crowned emperor of family comedies is wading into more dramatic fare, with this month’s All the Light We Cannot See, a Netflix miniseries based on Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-winning novel, set during the Second World War. In fact, Levy’s production company, 21 Laps Entertainment, has more than 10 Netflix vehicles in the hopper. He’s going to make it impossible for you not to love them, too.

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Last year, Hockey Canada was in hot water. That July, news broke that the organization had pulled money from its National Equity Fund—which includes player registration fees—to settle an alleged sexual assault case involving members of Canada’s 2018 men’s world junior team. The fallout was swift: faithful sponsors, like Canadian Tire and Tim Hortons, bailed, the entire board of directors stepped down, and Sport Canada temporarily froze federal funding. Even the Prime Minister weighed in: Canadians were right, he said, to be disgusted.

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Katherine Henderson was saddened too. In September, the devoted hockey mom and high-level sports exec—previously at the Pan and Parapan American Games—became the first female president and CEO in Hockey Canada’s history. In her most recent gig as CEO of Curling Canada, Henderson fought for (and won) pay equity for the sport’s female players, so she’s certainly equipped to correct hockey’s festering bro culture. Consent training, governance reviews and a new dressing-room policy are a few measures meant to right the ship. Will they be enough to take Hockey Canada off ice?

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