“I have a feeling that the information highway has reached a dead end,” says Michael Enright. “We are so flooded with so-called information that we are drowning in it. The result is a dislocation, a sensation that when everything is deemed important in some way, nothing is important. A lot of this is attributable to the internet and the rise of social media. Social media have two fronts; one is the trek of inconsequential people doing inconsequential things. The other is the wide dissemination of hate and the threat of violence, not to mention actual harm done to women, young people, and indeed to the political process itself. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, ‘with all this information, where is the wisdom?’”

Our history lessons about the Great War focus on life in trenches, poison gas, battles and the bravery of our troops overseas. But what was life like for those at home in Canada? Based on stories told to her by her great aunt and research conducted in the local archives, Lynne Golding will speak to us about recruitment efforts; the shortages of food and farm labour; the conversion of factories and business for the production of war materials; the development of flight schools; the treatment in Canada of those of Austrian heritage; the endless fundraising and knitting efforts; the creation of military convalescent hospitals; and the onset of Spanish flu.

Lemurs are primates found only in Madagascar, a beautiful and exotic place, the fourth largest island in the world. However it is threatened by habitat loss and environmental degradation. Professor Wright will discuss the varieties of lemurs including the Golden Bamboo Lemur she discovered that was new to western science, her work to create a protected area that became Ranomafana National Park and a World Heritage Site, and the challenges facing Madagascar and Lemur conservation efforts. She will feature her recent work to preserve the "Lost rainforest of Crystal Mountain" and update us on the translocation of twelve threatened greater bamboo lemurs from a degraded forest fragment into the protection of the Ranomafana National Park.”

In 1924 an exhibition in London of Canadian landscapes moved the renowned English critic C. Lewis Hind to celebrate them as “the most vital group of paintings produced since the war – indeed, this century”. These landscapes of Canada’s northern lakes and rugged backwoods, painted in a boldly Post-Impressionist style, had been produced over the previous decade by the collective of Toronto-based painters known as the ‘Group of Seven’, whose aim was to forge a national school of landscape painting. In this lecture Ross King will look at both the myths and the realities of how these painters – including their talismanic colleague Tom Thomson, who died in 1917 – stormed the conservative bastions of Canadian art to establish themselves on the international stage as practitioners of a distinctive avant-garde.

Everything about us is an emergent property of our enormous, intricate, and orderly nervous system. And our nervous system, like any other system, requires security. Providing that security is the job of our immune system. But treason at the biological level is real. At every level of the nervous system there are internal miscreants, rabble-rousers, and spies. In this lecture, neurologist Dr. Roy Baskind will take us on a tour of those autoimmune domestic threats – from our nerves, up our spinal column, and into our brain – and in the process expose our internal ‘fifth column’: autoimmunity against our own nervous system. This lecture aims to leave us with a newfound awe of our personal neurological government and how it can all go so wrong.

The Jewish population of Canada is currently about 400,000 people of which close to half reside in the GTA.  They first settled in the area in the 1820s and their number continued to increase when Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe arrived in Canada in large numbers after 1880.  They came seeking a home and country in which they could not only survive and prosper, but one in which they could leave a positive legacy for their children, grandchildren, and the generations that followed.  They did indeed find the refuge they were searching for in Toronto and elsewhere, yet their acceptance and integration into the larger society was not always wanted or welcome, and the struggles they faced caused much inner turmoil and hardship.  In this lecture historian and author Allan Levine examines the key lessons, trends and patterns of two centuries of Jewish life in Toronto.

Honey bees play a vital role in agriculture through the pollination of food crops. One third of the food we eat is pollinated by bees. Honey bees provide 80% of this service – native bees provide the rest. Did you know there are 423 species of native bees living in Ontario? They are also vitally important as they pollinate many native plants. Hummingbirds and some bat species pollinate too! Honey bees face numerous health challenges and the role of the University of Guelph’s Honey Bee Research Centre (HBRC) is to help beekeepers keep their bees healthy. The centre conducts hive health studies and trains beekeepers on a global scale. In this presentation Paul Kelly will outline the challenges bees face, survey the research and education activities of the HBRC, and let us know how we can help them help bees.

Ron Brown’s latest book, Top 170 Unusual Things to See in Ontario, was newly released and expanded in 2022. Using the book as a starting point, this illustrated lecture will explore some of Ontario’s most unusual features and landscapes including such phenomena as The Screaming Heads, Guelph’s “Notre Dame”, Toronto’s Graffiti Alleys, and its “Luminous Veil” on the Bloor Street Viaduct as well as the light show in Brockville’s railway tunnel.

Over five centuries in Europe a remarkable concert instrument evolved: the carillon, consisting of tuned bronze bells expressively played from a keyboard. Before the outbreak of the Great War there were more than 140 “singing towers” in the Low Countries, providing melodic soundscapes to their communities. Wars wreaked destruction on the European carillons, but the fame of their voices also inspired a carillon renaissance to build new towers across the world serving as musical memorials. In 1922 Toronto’s Metropolitan Methodist Church (now Metropolitan United Church) installed the first modern tuned carillon in North America. In the century since, ten more carillons were built in Canada and more than 170 installed across the continent. In this illustrated lecture Andrea McCrady will celebrate North America’s newest carillon to serenade Toronto at Yorkminster Park Baptist Church.

Professional explorer and adventurer Adam Shoalts returns to the Yorkminster Park Speakers Series to tell us about his latest adventure and book: a 3,400 km solo canoe journey from Lake Erie to the Arctic. The expedition took over three months and saw Shoalts depart from Long Point and travel all the way to the Torngat Mountains and Ungava Bay. Adam will share the story of his journey as well as photos from it. This lecture coincides with the publication of Adam’s book about his journey, Where the Falcon Flies, on October 3rd 2023. Copies of the newly released book will be available for purchase and signing.

When she a young child, Heather’s mother told her that Mark Twain was a great-uncle. It seemed like a really cool thing to tell people, but other than that, it held little meaning for her at the time. Fast forward forty years: one night while Heather found herself between jobs and with time on her hands a TV ad for Ancestry reminded her of Mark Twain and she decided to see if there was any truth to the family story. Only later did she realise that this was the moment her passion for genealogy was born. In this talk Heather will share stories from her own work – involving archival research, personal interviews and the latest in genetic DNA technology – to help us understand why the field of genealogy has grown exponentially in recent years and why it has become not only Heather’s passion but also her second career. Perhaps she will also inspire you to begin your journey tracing your own family history.

While Holocaust denial is easy to identify and straightforward to explain, Holocaust distortion is a more insidious and complex threat. Unlike the deniers of yesteryear, people, states, and institutions engaged in Holocaust distortion do not deny the factuality of the event. They argue instead that their nation, their people, their tribe, had nothing to do with it. There were some corrupt individuals, no doubt, but helping and rescuing of Jews was the default position of our people, argue the nationalists. And, with the formidable funding provided by the states engaged in Holocaust distortion, the Shoah is being re-branded into a positive narrative in which enthusiastic and altruistic Gentiles strive to save their Jewish neighbors from the clutches of the Germans. We thought we knew that the German genocidal plan had many willing helpers across Europe but this knowledge is now being put to question and assaulted by the agents of Holocaust distortion.