The Hatchet

Hatchet Media
  • 4.8 (115)
  • BUSINESS

The Hatchet is a podcast and newsletter dedicated to exposing power and money in Canada. Hosted by Arshy Mann, The Hatchet delivers important, original and fascinating journalism about how this country actually works, in a way that no one else can. hatchetmedia.substack.com

  1. Separation Anxiety (w/ Paul Wells)

    4D AGO

    Separation Anxiety (w/ Paul Wells)

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.substack.com Just over a year ago, when we were launching The Hatchet, there was one thing in particular that worried me — I’ve never felt fluent in federal politics. I think I knew as much as your average journalist — I followed the news, I had my opinions and I had a general sense of the history. But outside of the occasional story, it just wasn’t a beat that I had a lot of experience covering. Once Trudeau resigned in January 2025, it became clear that Parliament Hill was going to dominate the news cycle. And so over that winter break, I set myself a mission. I was going to learn as much as I could about federal politics. I went back and read through (or at least familiarized myself with) as many of the classic books of Canadian political journalism and history as I could. Most were written by authors that we don’t talk about much anymore, despite the fact that they were giants of their respective eras. Christina McCall-Newman, Jeffrey Simpson, Peter C. Newman, Donald Creighton, John Duffy. And then there were excellent books by more contemporary writers about the Ottawa of the past and present from journalists like Susan Delacourt and John Ibbitson. But none of these writers, great though they may be, made me feel like I was getting a nitty-gritty understanding of federal politics more than Paul Wells. Now of course, like almost every journalist in the country with even a passing interesting in federal politics, I’ve been reading Wells for years. But during that winter, I really immersed myself in his work, his books, past features, his current reporting, the whole shebang. And I have to say, I often found myself disagreeing with him. But I emerged with a new appreciation for what he does. Wells has a keen eye for history and a willingness to call out b******t. His prose is evocative, without being flashy. And despite his many, many years of experience reporting on politics from Montreal and then from Ottawa, he never felt to me like he’d been co-opted by the Laurentian establishment. I’m sure this sounds like a lot of unnecessary fawning over someone who is probably the most respected political journalist in Anglo-Canada. But I just want to convey to you all how excited I was to talk to him — especially right now, at a time when Canadian politics all of a sudden feels more serious than it has in years. Since the beginning of the New Year, we’ve been inundated not with soundbites, not with scandals, but with speeches.And I don’t think there’s anybody better to dig into these serious times than Wells. During our conversation, we covered a lot of ground, including the 20th anniversary of Stephen Harper’s election and the ups-and-downs that Carney and Poilievre have recently faced. But I was especially glad that we got to spend a good amount of time talking about the return of national unity as a serious political issue in this country. Featured in this episode: Paul Wells To Learn More "The longer he's not Prime Minister" by Paul Wells on Substack "Get started on maybe: Memories of the 1995 Quebec referendum" by Paul Wells on Substack Right Side Up: The Fall of Paul Martin and the Rise of Stephen Harper's New Conservatism by Paul Wells The Longer I'm Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006- by Paul Wells

    6 min
  2. The Green Party is a Natural Disaster

    JAN 20

    The Green Party is a Natural Disaster

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.substack.com This episode is for paid subscribers. If you would like to hear the whole thing, please support The Hatchet by going to hatchetmedia.substack.com. Now this might seem hard to believe, but there was a time when the Green Party of Canada was riding high. If just a few things went their way, they were on track to becoming a mean Green winning machine and supplant the NDP as the progressive party of choice. But since then, the party has been a cavalcade of absurdities too long to document here. But for me, the lowest point might have come at the end of last year. That’s when Elizabeth May, after consulting with Prime Minister Mark Carney, voted in support of his budget. And then not too long after, he went and signed an MOU with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith committing to more pipelines for the oil sands. For Mark Lerien-Young, none of the rolling disaster that is the Green Party of Canada has come as a surprise. After all, he was watching from the inside as much of it went down. Mark is a longtime writer, journalist, humorist, science podcaster, environmental activist and former Green Party of Canada employee and campaign manager. And he’s just written a book about what it was like to try to navigate the egos and incompetence of the Greens. The book is called Greener Than Thou: Surviving the Toxic Sludge of Canadian Ecopolitics, and in it, he gives and insider account of the cult of Elizabeth May. And some of the details make working in that party sound like living in a house of mirrors. Mark says that at a certain point he came to realize that many people in the Green Party didn’t actually want to elect more MPs because that would mean more work for them. He writes that “Many books you read come with the proviso that all persons are fictional and any resemblance anyone living or dead is purely coincidental. My disclaimer is that the Green Party of Canada is purely fictional.” In our conversation, Mark was brutally honest about the frankly absurd way that a party that more than a million Canadians voted for in 2019 does business. And why despite their abysmal recent performances, Elizabeth May is here to stay. Featured in this episode: Mark Leiren-Young To Learn More Greener Than Thou: Surviving the Toxic Sludge of Canadian Ecopolitics by Mark Leiren-Young

    6 min

  3. JAN 9

    The Dark Prince of Bay Street | Brookfield

    Support us at hatchetmedia.substack.com In 1978, a South African accountant orchestrated one of the most audacious and ruthless hostile takeovers in the history of Canadian business. His name was Jack Cockwell. And over the next decade, he would build a corporate empire unlike anything Canada had ever seen. This is the third episode in our series examining the history of Brookfield. In our first two episodes, we traced the company’s lineage through Brazilian Traction, the neo-colonial monopoly that dominated South America, and through the Bronfmans, the bootlegging dynasty that supplied liquor to American gangsters during Prohibition. But those were just the origin stories. This episode is about what happened when those two worlds collided. Edper-Brascan controlled over 500 companies. The beer you drank, the team you watched, the mall you shopped at, the house you lived in — all of it could be traced back to this sprawling conglomerate. At its height, it was worth more than $120 billion. All of this was Jack Cockwell’s domain. Immigrant, corporate philosopher, ruthless operator, Cockwell single-handedly imposed his will on Canada’s business establishment and dominated the 1980s like no one else. But by the end of the decade, people on Bay Street began to whisper. Something was rotten at the heart of Cockwell’s empire. They said that the whole thing was a mirage. A lie. A house of card waiting to fall over. They all turned out to be right. To learn more: The Brass Ring: Power, Influence and the Brascan Empire by Patricia Best & Ann Shortell Edper by Keith Dalrymple “The Edper Puzzle” by Kimberly Noble in The Globe and Mail “The Second Coming” by Rod McQueen in The Financial Post “Fears for a Leveraged Leviathan” by Clyde Farnsworth in The New York Times “He was a titan of Bay Street and a senator. But J. Trevor Eyton died owing millions in taxes and on the verge of bankruptcy” by David Bruser & Jesse McLean in The Toronto Star This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hatchetmedia.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 7m

  4. JAN 7

    The House of Bronfman | Brookfield

    Support us at hatchetmedia.substack.com This is the second episode in our series about Brookfield, the Canadian financial giant. In our first episode, we told you about one half of the company’s corporate lineage — Brascan, the Canadian monopoly that dominated Brazil for half-a-century. But Brookfield has another parent — the Bronfman family. And their story is even more remarkable. It begins in the dusty prairie towns of Saskatchewan at the turn-of-the-century, where Jewish cowboys and American gangsters came together to create one of the great fortunes in world history. And behind every great fortune, there is a great crime. And the crimes of the Bronfmans were numerous. But they were able to get away with it all, thanks to bribery, destruction of evidence and the intimidation of witnesses. For decades, the Bronfmans were able to write their own history of how their wealth was acquired. But the truth can only stay buried for so long. The Bronfman dynasty is one of the greatest dynasties that the Americas have ever seen. But like so many dynasties, they would fall apart into ignominy. And at the centre of all of this was the most powerful businessman in Canadian history, the kingpin himself — Sam Bronfman. Featured in this episode: Stephen Maher, Jordan Cornish To learn more The Bronfman Dynasty: The Rothschilds of the New World by Peter C. Newman “The ties that bind the Liberals and the Bronfmans” by Stephen Maher in Maclean’s The Brass Ring: Power, Influence, and the Brascan Empire by Patricia Best & Ann Shortell The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Seagram by Nicholas Faith Mavericks: Canadian Rebels, Renegades and Anti-Heroes by Peter C. Newman Music “Throne of the Soul” by Nihilore. Adapted. Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Magic Escape Room" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ I dunno by grapes (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: J Lang, Morusque This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hatchetmedia.substack.com/subscribe

    57 min

  5. JAN 6

    The Canadian Octopus | Brookfield

    This episode was first published on April 12th, 2025. Happy New Year, Hatchet listeners! The chance to put out good journalism is its own reward, but to everyone who has listened, shared, or supported us over the last year—thank you. We wanted to kick off the year by updating you on our series on Brookfield. It’s been a long road, but we’ll be publishing the next two new episodes this week, with more to come later in the month. We can’t wait for you to hear it. But before you do, we wanted to re-publish the first episode in the series. It’s an important primer for an increasingly complicated story. Brookfield has been in the news constantly over recent months. The Conservatives attacked the company for moving the headquarters of one of their subsidiaries to New York City. The NDP have accused it of avoiding taxes through offshore havens. And Prime Minister Mark Carney, the former chairman of Brookfield Asset Management, has found himself on the defensive because of his association with the company. But what these political attacks miss is a far more important story. It’s a story of a company that has been central to Canada’s history and economy for more than a century. So what exactly is Brookfield? That’s a question that we here at The Hatchet have set out to answer. What we found was a company that almost defies description. Brookfield has been a financial universe unto itself, operating by a different set of cosmic laws and fundamental forces than other corporations. It’s a company that’s shown an almost unparalleled talent for reinvention. Over its 125-year-history, it’s morphed from a neo-colonial experiment to Canada’s most ruthless corporate raider to a seemingly boring storehouse of our collective pension earnings. Now it is one of a tiny handful of financial entities that sit at the very centre of the global economy. And so that’s why we’ll be spending this series focusing exclusively on this incredibly important and yet rarely understood company. We’ll be digging into its epic history, its contentious present and what the continued domination of firms like Brookfield could mean for everyday people. In this first episode, we shine a light on it’s first incarnation — Brazilian Traction, Light and Power — and how it managed to dominate the people of South America’s biggest nation for most of the 20th century. Featured in this episode: Tyler Shipley To learn more Canada In The World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination by Tyler Shipley The Brass Ring: Power, Influence and the Brascan Empire by Patricia Best & Ann Shortell Let Us Prey: The Practices and Profits of Canadian Corporations and Businessmen edited by Robert Chodos & Ray Murphy The Light: Brazilian Traction, Light, and Power Company Limited, 1899-1945 by Duncan McDowall Support us at hatchetmedia.substack.com The Hatchet is a podcast and newsletter dedicated to exposing power and money in Canada. We deliver important, original and fascinating journalism about how this country actually works. Music: I dunno by grapes (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: J Lang, Morusque This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hatchetmedia.substack.com/subscribe

    29 min

  6. 2025-12-03

    What the mainstream media won't tell you about Jeffrey Epstein

    I’ve had a hard time knowing what to make of the still-unfolding saga around Jeffrey Epstein. Like basically everyone else in the world, I’ve been following the story with interest for years. Even before the Miami Herald’s explosive 2018 investigation into the extend of his sexual abuse and how he had been able to get away with it, I had a vague understanding of a man named Jeffrey Epstein who abused girls and hobnobbed with powerful men like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates. And since then we’ve learned so much more. There have been so many journalistic investigations into Epstein’s connections with the elite, into his finances and into the circumstances around his death. Of course, we’re still left with more questions than answers. Which has allowed Epstein to become this sort of Ur-conspiracy theory that people online obsess over. Was he a CIA asset or a Mossad agent? Was he collecting blackmail on the rich and powerful? Did he really kill himself? But somehow, there was a part of me that felt like these were the wrong questions to ask. That they didn’t explain exactly who this guy was and why he was able to get away with what he did for so long. And didn’t really get at the heart of why this story has global importance. And then just the other week, I read a piece by Canadian journalist Jeet Heer in The Nation that made it all make sense to me. Heer argues that the Epstein was — alongside many other things — a warlord. He was basing this assessment on a number of articles that have been coming out of publications like Drop Site News and Reason that examine troves of email correspondence that Epstein had that the mainstream media is so far refusing to report on. And the case he makes is compelling. So I decided to give Jeet a call and ask him all about it. Featured in this episode: Jeet Heer To learn more "Jeffrey Epstein Was a Warlord. We Have to Talk About It." by Jeet Heer in The Nation "Jeffrey Epstein and the Mossad: How The Sex-Trafficker Helped Israel Build a Backchannel to Russia Amid Syrian Civil War" by Murtaza Hussain & Ryan Grim in Drop Site News "Inside Jeffrey Epstein's Spy Industry Connections" by Matthew Petti in Reason Support us at hatchetmedia.substack.com The Hatchet is a podcast and newsletter dedicated to exposing power and money in Canada. We deliver important, original and fascinating journalism about how this country actually works. Music: I dunno by grapes (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: J Lang, Morusque This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hatchetmedia.substack.com/subscribe

    29 min
  7. Guns and Splutter: Breaking Down the Budget

    2025-11-11

    Guns and Splutter: Breaking Down the Budget

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.substack.com The much anticipated budget is finally here and it promises to make "Canada Strong." Between the eye-popping promise to enable $1 trillion dollars in investments over the next five years and the $78.3 billion deficit, there’s a lot to take in. And that’s before we get into the really critical stuff… like maybe Canada will try to join Eurovision for some reason? (We don't talk about Eurovision at all). Today on The Hatchet, Jordan sits down with Arshy to break down the budget and try to make sense of what this all means for Canada. Support us at hatchetmedia.substack.com The Hatchet is a podcast and newsletter dedicated to exposing power and money in Canada. We deliver important, original and fascinating journalism about how this country actually works. Music: I dunno by grapes (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: J Lang, Morusque

    4 min

  8. 2025-11-03

    Wild, Wild (Rose) Country

    So last week, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith used the notwithstanding clause to force Alberta teachers back to work. It’s the first time the notwithstanding clause has ever been used in this kind of a manner to end a labour action. And that’s led to some softening of support for Danielle Smith. But here’s the truth. The latest polls show that if an election were held today, Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party would still easily come out on top. Why is that? How is Smith’s appeal so resilient? And why the hell can’t Naheed Nenshi and the Alberta NDP get their s**t together? Well, luckily for us, Jeremy Appel from The Orchard is here to answer those questions and many more. A few months ago we had a great discussion with Jen Gerson about the unique political figure that is Danielle Smith and her relationship with Alberta’s nascent sovereignty movement. You can think of this conversation with Jeremy as a bit of a sequel to that one. We talk about some of the underlying reasons behind the teacher’s strike, Smith’s continued flirtation with separatism, how she holds her coalition together with culture wars, the return of pipeline politics and of course, the many failures of Alberta’s NDP. Now just for context, this was recorded before Smith invoked the notwithstanding clause, but the discussion is still just as relevant today. Support us at hatchetmedia.substack.com The Hatchet is a podcast and newsletter dedicated to exposing power and money in Canada. We deliver important, original and fascinating journalism about how this country actually works. Music: I dunno by grapes (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: J Lang, Morusque This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hatchetmedia.substack.com/subscribe

    45 min
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4.8
out of 5
115 Ratings

About

The Hatchet is a podcast and newsletter dedicated to exposing power and money in Canada. Hosted by Arshy Mann, The Hatchet delivers important, original and fascinating journalism about how this country actually works, in a way that no one else can. hatchetmedia.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Hatchet Media
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    44
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Hatchet Media
  • Show Website
    The Hatchet

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