If we can slag organizations when they fail us, surely we can thank them when they go out of their way to help us. And this summer, both the Weston Family Foundation and the National Bank of Canada helped Canadian literature and Canadian women in big ways and just in time.
For 20 years, the Giller Prize was the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Riding the bank’s rising commitment, the Giller became one of the best sponsorships in the land. Its purse grew from $25,000 to $100,000, its televised Gala became CanLit’s one big night, and a middle-sized fiction award became Canada’s richest literary award. Indeed, The Giller Effect boosted book sales for all the prize’s nominees.
Then in the Fall of 2023, authors and jurors began withdrawing over Scotiabank’s stake in an Israeli arms manufacturer, Elbit Systems. One author, Madeleine Thien, returned her prize from 2016, though not her $100,000 prize money.
I wrote about this a lot back then, saying the only certainty from the protests was that sponsors would leave and the Giller would go dark, hurting the very books and authors it was set up to celebrate. Talk about Ready, Fire, Aim. So, to no one’s surprise, in September, 2024, the bank’s name came off the prize and early last year the partnership formally ended. And who could blame Scotiabank, or any other bank or organization that stepped in to take its place, knowing their reward was to be punched, kicked and reviled in the public square?
Last summer, the Giller was asking Ottawa for $5 million over three years. They warned that “without stable funding, the Giller will be forced to cease operations at the end of 2025.”
Then last week, the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation announced a $4 million gift to the Giller to expand its programming and open the award to new voices. As always since 1994 when Jack Rabinovitch founded the Giller, the 2026 longlist and shortlist will be announced in the Fall with the award ceremony in Toronto on November 16.
When it comes to supporting literature in Canada, the Westons not only came to play, they came to stay. Last year, they announced multi-million dollar support to the Toronto International Festival of Authors, and in 2024 they added the $75,000 annual Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction to the millions they’ve given the Writers’ Trust of Canada since 2011.
There are two parts of the Giller story that aren’t as well known.
First, the Giller never got any support from Ottawa. For more than 20 years, the Canadian Book Fund has been frozen at $39 million. The publishing community was in no mood to see a private and, in their mind, privilege-drenched prize skip the queue. Second, last year’s Giller only happened because of an unannounced $1 million bridge gift from the Westons, a rescue no one knew about while it was happening.
The Giller is alive today not because a corporation stepped in to replace Scotiabank, and not because Ottawa or any other government stepped in to help. It happened because a family foundation stepped in. I think we’re going to see more of this, of wealthy people and their foundations saying: “This cause is important. There will be heat if we support it. We don’t care.”
The second case last week involves a bank stepping up, not stepping back.
The National Bank Open is Canada’s largest tennis tournament, and rotates its venues between Montreal and Toronto. This year, the men’s tournament (ATP 1000) was played in Montreal and the women’s (WTA 1000) in Toronto, and next year the men and women will swap locations and play in the alternate city. The prize money for the winning men was always much more than for the winning women. As recently as 2023, prize money for women at the National Bank Open was less than a third of the total purse. And tennis is just one of the half dozen pro sports where women are lobbying for equal pay with men. This includes basketball, where WNBA players get a much smaller share of league revenue than men in the NBA; soccer where women’s soccer organizations are closing the massive World Cup prize gaps and club wage discrepancies; hockey where women hockey players lobby for livable wages, and equal training resources; and cyclists and big-wave surfers who have organized public campaigns and legal pressure to mandate equal purses across major events.
The gap in pro tennis is not modest.
But this year, with Iga Świątek lifting the trophy at Sobeys Stadium in Toronto and Ben Shelton doing the same at IGA Stadium in Montreal, the women’s champion took home $1,085,220 and the men’s champion $1,151,420 — the women’s purse now $7.43 million against the men’s $9.42 million, or about 79%. Next year, women will earn the same as men. Total women’s prize money will land near USD $10 million, a 350% increase in four years.
As the Globe and Mail noted: “Prize money has been equal for men and women at the four Grand Slam tournaments since 2007. Yet many other tournaments still award women much less than they reward the men, even in those where they play the same best-of-three-sets format.”
The Weston and National Bank cheques didn’t just cover a shortfall. They expanded the organizations they’re supporting: for the Giller, a national book tour and year-round programming for short-listed authors; and for women’s tennis, National Bank set a date for parity and built the commercial machinery not only to reach parity, but to sustain it. National also gave their program a name: Game. Set. Equity.
Because Canada has so few banks, they play an outsize role in our finances and our lives. I’ve often said they are the best markers for social change, the elephants in our many but tiny rooms. Last year, our Big Five banks earned a combined CAD $58 billion, and our largest private foundations sit on billions more. But the National Bank of Canada isn’t one of the Big Five. It’s sixth, and yet it’s on the ramparts actually doing something for women’s rights, wondering where all the other banks are.
But the real lesson here is both the Giller and women’s athletics are bigger today than they were last month because a foundation and a corporation each displayed that rarest of all qualities: the courage of their convictions.
Meanwhile…
1. Vacation, if you can manage it. Arthur Brooks tried to vacation like a European and failed; Massey College is politely asking for its cutlery back; and if the mosquitoes at the cottage have finally gotten to be just too much, console yourself with a grilled martini and learning that Utah’s Cookie Queens may be America’s most improbable dessert empire.
2. Spies, and smoke. If you’re a wannabe sleuth, Bellingcat is running a five‑day Toronto workshop for citizen open‑source spies (details in the Bellingcat brochure). Meanwhile Dave Barry weighs in on the Canadian smoke problem, and Witold Szablowski’s How to Feed a Dictator spills the beans on what Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and more actually eat for dinner.
3. Statesmen behaving strangely, again. Barack Obama is launching a podcast about his favourite novels; the *Guardian* has the reading list, even though the London Review of Books reminds us that almost no politicians, save JD Vance, write their own books. Elsewhere, Donald Trump leaves Turkey in a hurry and then serves up more wretched excess.
4. Money, markets, and the maple‑leaf moment. Here’s every world currency against the U.S. dollar in 2026; plus, the world just placed a very large bet on Mark Carney, backed by wads of money pouring into Canada. A useful counterpoint: Canada and the rest of the world reminds us where we actually sit.
5. Big tech, bigger claims. Palantir‘s Alex Karp gets a bracing profile‑and‑critique; The Economist’s editor interviews the world’s richest man; Yuval Noah Harari sketches what the future actually looks like; and you probably don’t own a Tesla Pi phone yet – though the rumours won’t quite die.
6. Frontier, north and hot. Greenland has issued a strong warning as a Trump‑linked oil firm prepares to drill, then backs off. A Canadian writer proposes a Northern Shield pipeline routed away from the U.S. border – the way we once tucked Ottawa inland for the same reason. Then dive with Nautilus Live and explore the ocean floor, or drift the other way with the largest ever 2‑D map of the universe.
7. High notes and low. Pianist Alexei Volodin gives a recital from a hospital bed; a physicist shows why strings don’t vibrate the way you think they do; and if you’d like something quieter to concentrate by, try Music for Programming.
8. Body, brain, and the long game. Two hopeful reads from the dementia file: how dementia is being defeated and how to reduce your own risk of developing it. And a three‑minute at‑home autism test that may one day exist, and a hard look at what CPR is really good for. Finally, I agree with the Globe and Mail’s André Picard: we should all know how to swim.
9. Words and writers. Aaron Sorkin, on what we can learn from Aaron Sorkin; an industry gut‑check on where publishing goes from here after a $2 million book deal comes undone; The *Times* on the audiobook boom; and, on Instagram, the most successful made‑up word of all time.
10. Watch yourself being watched. The New York Times on Flock cameras and the automatic license‑plate dragnet; a game where you play gerrymanderer; and an Instagram guide to turning a tip into an investigation.
11. Scroll, don’t think. Picture-takers get fresh photo ideas and a mesmerizing flight wall; hosts crib from these table setters; runners remind us it’s gold or nothing; murder rates get an overdue exposure; and someone finally collects a page of usable lifequotes.
12. Look, and look again. The Awwwards, the Oscars of web design, celebrate sites worth studying; Britain’s National Gallery invites you into its Imaginarium; John Thomson’s photographs of 19th‑century China still stun; a beloved cartography site collects old maps; NPR’s Planet Money Summer School reopens; and an older woman says Draw Me Like One of Your French Girls; plus a reminder that no, you don’t actually want to time travel. And spare a moment for Alexander Graham Bell, whose long‑distance call started all of this.