The biggest stories of 2023

If there was one subject that dominated Canadian conversations in 2023, it was the housing crisis. At Maclean’s, we didn’t need to conduct a reader poll to figure that out: we just paid attention to the stories that resonated with readers. And this past year, readers couldn’t get enough housing stories. They read our pieces about mortgage anxiety, the dearth of student housing, the unhoused, the overhoused, and the drama of finding a decent place to live.

But nothing prepared us for the reaction to “The End of Homeownership,” the long, juicy cover story we published in the summer by Michelle Cyca about a generation’s reckoning with the sheer impossibility of ever owning a house. Cyca roots her story in Vancouver, where she lives, a place that has become utterly unaffordable to young people with good jobs. It was our best-read story of 2023.

Longform storytelling is at the heart of what we do at Maclean’s. It’s what we love to publish and what you love to read. This year, we did big, ambitious stories on video game addiction, climate change, rent strikes and other urgent topics. In a world that seems addicted to short-form videos, soundbite clips and haiku-length tweets, feature-length magazine articles provide a necessary space for complex thinking. Deeply researched, well-crafted articles allow for nuance, and I was thrilled to see so much of the work we published in 2023 click with our audience. Here are the best-read stories of the year.

—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief

Jessica Davey-Quantick was working as an information officer with the N.W.T. fire department this past summer during its worst wildfire season yet. In this harrowing memoir for Maclean’s, she shares what it was like fielding emergency calls and media requests, plus how it felt to evacuate—and then return.

Costa Rica is a climate-change hotspot. For Perry Gladstone—who moved there in 2010—living through floods, landslides, hurricanes and lightning strikes there provided enough reason to move his family back to Canada permanently: "In the end, it became clear that the best thing for our own future, and for this place we loved, was to leave it."

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