Spur 17 Toronto Final Program

a national festival of politics, art and Ideas
Sunday April 9
MASHA GESSEN
ANNA MARIE TREMONTI
MODERATOR
Risk and Geopolitics
3:00 PM
Location: Innis Town Hall
The US Presidential results caught many people in this country – and around the world – by surprise.
Yet, we have seen echoes of the same far-right, populist, anti-immigration language in our own
Conservative Party of Canada leadership campaign as well as in France and other European nations.
The tragic events in Quebec City are a terrible reminder that Canada is not immune to the impact
of hateful rhetoric. Spur explores the recent US Election, the implications of Russia’s involvement in
North American politics, and what that means for Canada, given the massive inter-connectivity of the
modern world.
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and author of many books of nonfiction, most recently The Future
Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, forthcoming from Riverhead in October. She is also the author of
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (Riverhead, 2012). She is a contributing opinion writer
to The New York Times and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, among other publications. She
lives in New York.
Anna Maria Tremonti is the host of CBC Radio One’s flagship network morning news program, The Current.
Previously, she has been a senior reporter for CBC television’s The National and a host of The Fifth Estate. As a
foreign correspondent she was based in Berlin, London, Jerusalem and Washington. She has covered provincial
and federal politics across Canada. As host of The Current, she has interviewed people as diverse as Malala
Yousafzai and Henry Kissinger. She has broadcast The Current from Kabul, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Havana, New
York, Chicago, Miami and across Canada.
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