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We’re an independent, online news magazine from B.C. founded in 2003. We’re devoted to fact-driven stories, reporting that informs and enlivens our democratic conversation. This feed features our stories, read by AI narration. Our reporting has changed laws, started movements and garnered numerous awards.

  1. 15 hrs ago

    Calling Carney's Carbon Capture Bluff Daunting targets, unrealistic promises Guzzlers of water and capital Beware of leaks More problems after decades of denial

    He pretends the technology is a serious response to the climate crisis. Here's the reality. … Article written by Andrew Nikiforuk. Earlier this month Prime Minister Mark Carney, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and five largely U.S.-owned oilsands companies proclaimed a leap forward in "carbon management." The three parties signed a memorandum of understanding assuring more bitumen production and more oil exports could somehow result in reduced carbon dioxide emissions. The premise rests on a technology known as carbon capture, utilization and storage, or CCUS. The leaders announced that a $16-billion CCUS project, the world's largest to date, would collect, pipe and then bury CO2 oilsands emissions in a saline aquifer the size of Prince Edward Island under Cold Lake. For years now, the governments of Alberta and Canada have talked up the method as means to get "more low-risk, low-cost and low-carbon Canadian energy to market while fighting climate change." Federal Energy Minister Tim Hodgson has said CCUS will help make Canada "a clean energy superpower." Five oilsands producers hail CCUS as an "environmental innovation" or "proven technology." But that's not what the scientific and economic record says. Study after study catalogues a history of high costs, serious risks, geological side effects and broken promises. Most high-profile projects have faced shutdowns, leaks or technical snafus. In a recent paper, two oilpatch veterans delivered a familiar verdict: "Despite extensive funding and research, carbon capture technologies have failed to deliver scalable, cost-effective, or operationally robust outcomes." CCUS is turning out to be a perfect example of what the social critic Jacques Ellul called the "technological bluff." The bluff begins with prominent members of the state, media and industry making extravagant claims about the ability of an emerging technology to foster "progress." Their boasts drown out authentic debate. But once deployed, the technology creates more problems, requiring a new agenda to solve them and initiating another cycle of the technological bluff. By promising to give us what we want, the technology "ultimately dictates what we want," warned Ellul. Thirty years ago, for example, we were assured that computers and the internet would expand democracy and usher in a new era of freedoms. Few challenged the bluff. But perhaps too late we see that the internet can be used to undermine human freedom and mental health. "Lulled by the bluff of technological discourse," warned Ellul, "we sleepily fail to perceive the perils that confront us." Now we've been told by Carney and Smith that CCUS is key to ridding the world of carbon emissions by 2050, building a new Canada and accelerating innovation. What could possibly go wrong? Let's start with the issue of scale. Over the last three decades governments have spent more than $40 billion on carbon capture to build 70 projects connected by 9,000 kilometres of pipeline. Yet the technology captures and stores less than 0.1 per cent of annual global emissions. Annual CO2 pollution now hovers above 38 gigatonnes while captured carbon amounts to less than 40 megatonnes per year. Consider the Pathways Project, which may cost $30 billion given a history of cost overruns for the technology. Annually, it would sequester a paltry six million tonnes of oilsands emissions, which are expected to grow. Zoom out to test whether, as the bluffers promise, carbon capture can reverse rising global emissions. Evidence to date says no. Making a sizable dent in global emissions would require an infrastructure of pipes and plants to match current oil and gas infrastructure, argues energy expert Vaclav Smil. Trying to do so, he says, would be "stupid." That assumes it works as advertised. But most projects have consistently failed to achieve their targets. Equinor's Sleipner project reported for years that it annually stored one million tonnes of CO2 in shale formations 1,000 metres ...

  2. 15 hrs ago

    DULF Founders' Drug Law Charter Challenge Ends DULF Founders' Drug Law Charter Challenge Ends DULF Founders' Drug Law Charter Challenge Ends Billionaires Don't Control Us A compassion club for meth, cocaine and heroin Laying out the case

    News Health Compassion club co-founders Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicum will wait months to learn if they face prison. News Health News Health Rights + Justice Today TodayThe Tyee 68 SHARES Read more: News Health Rights + Justice Compassion club co-founders Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicum will wait months to learn if they face prison. Michelle Gamage 27 Jul 2026 Michelle Gamage is The Tyee's health reporter. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative. Support health journalism that goes beyond skin deep. Become a Tyee Builder. URL copied to clipboard! SHARE: 0 0 Comments / 0 New Compassion club co-founders Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicum will wait months to learn if they face prison. … Article written by Michelle Gamage. The Drug User Liberation Front's constitutional challenge wrapped up Friday, but co-founders Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicum won't know until next year whether their efforts to save lives will land them in jail. They were in B.C. Supreme Court arguing that the law that convicted them each of three counts of trafficking methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin was unconstitutional. Their lawyers, Tim Dickson, Stephanie Dickson and Kaelan Unrau, called 14 witnesses to lay out a case that by criminalizing DULF's compassion club the government violated Section 7 and Section 15 of its members' Charter rights. Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms prohibits the state from depriving people of their rights to life, liberty and security of the person, and Section 15 says all people must be treated equally and have equal protection and benefit from the law. DULF's lawyers said Canadian drug laws are mostly fair but fail to protect people amidst the toxic drug crisis that has killed more than 19,760 British Columbians since January 2014, according to the BC Coroners Service. Canadian drug laws are laid out in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and the Food and Drugs Act. The federal health minister can grant exemptions under Section 56 of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to allow people to violate the legislation in extraordinary cases. DULF's constitutional challenge hinges on how accessible exemptions under Section 56 actually are. Get The Tyee's free daily newsletter in your inbox. Journalism for readers, not profits. Their lawyers argued exemptions are "illusory" and not practically available, which means, they say, the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act violates Charter rights. Crown counsel disagreed and argued the safety valve is available. The case was heard by Justice Catherine Murray. Nyx and Kalicum were running a compassion club in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside where they bought meth, cocaine and heroin from the dark web, rigorously tested the drugs for potency and purity, labelled the drugs and sold them at cost to 47 compassion club members. They were open about what they were doing, regularly speaking with police, all three levels of government and media about the need for this service. They had tacit support from the Vancouver Police Department and the City of Vancouver, and more-direct support from Vancouver Coastal Health, which provided funding for DULF to run its drug-checking service and a location to run an overdose prevention site. DULF applied for a Section 56 exemption to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act from Health Canada, asking for permission to buy and sell drugs for their compassion club, but were denied. They went ahead and opened their compassion club anyway in August 2022. On Oct. 25, 2023, Nyx and Kalicum were arrested by the Vancouver Police Department and each charged with three counts of trafficking under Section 5, Subsection 2, of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. A little over two years later, on Nov. 7, 2025, the pair were found guilty of possession for the purpose of trafficking by Murray. Anyone charged with a criminal offence in Canada has the opportunity to challenge the law they're accused of breaking as unconstitutional. If Mur...

  3. 15 hrs ago

    Don't Call It a Condo Bailout. It's Rent-to-Own and It Can Work

    If it's done right, BC's government can play a key role in helping working people afford a home. … Article written by Ernest Lang. Julie is the name I'll give a nurse I know at St. Paul's Hospital. She earns a good salary and pays her rent on time. She has never missed a payment in her life. She is exactly the kind of person any society would want to see become a homeowner: stable, responsible, rooted in her community. But Julie cannot buy a home, because she cannot save a down payment fast enough in a city where rents consume everything she earns above her basic expenses. She is not asking for charity. She is asking for a path to ownership — a first rung on a ladder that, right now, does not exist for her. That is the person I believe B.C. Premier David Eby and Prime Minister Mark Carney had in mind when, on June 18, a federal government press release pledged a "Canada-British Columbia Partnership on Condo Conversion." Eby has said he wished the idea could have been shared with more nuance a bit later. But the announcement offered a preliminary peek at a proposal to buy slow-selling condos at below market prices and convert them to rent-to-own affordable housing. If it's implemented, Julie and thousands more would be provided opportunities to become not permanent renters of government-owned units, but future owners. You would not know that from the political debate that ensued. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called the federal-provincial condo conversion initiative a bailout. The commentariat proclaimed the program would "privatize profits, socialize losses." Here is the pragmatic reality: if it's done badly, the critics are right. A government that buys distressed housing at prices close to what developers paid does socialize private losses. But that is not an argument against this program. It is an argument about how to build it. As a person who works in real estate finance and housing capital formation in British Columbia, allow me to offer my view of the proposal and address some key questions raised about it. Doesn't Britain's flawed experiment offer a cautionary tale? I do not currently own a condo or invest in any condo development in this province, although I have had such investments in the past. I say that not as a legal disclaimer but because it matters for what follows. I believe housing is the medium by which a lot of structural injustice is perpetuated, so my interest in this specific policy framework is strictly structural and motivated by my desire to live in a more just and less polarized society. I have no direct personal or corporate investment stake in the condo inventories under discussion. I serve on the board of a non-partisan think tank and have shared my views on occasion with policymakers at all levels of government: federal, provincial and municipal. I have also spent years volunteering in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, including serving on the board of Union Gospel Mission — ultimately as vice-chair — working alongside people for whom the failure of housing policy is not an abstraction but a daily reality. I am also an immigrant who lost my father at a young age and grew up in a household with financial precarity, including being part of a 10-person household living in a small three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bathroom townhouse in our family's early years in Canada. That experience shapes how I read what is being proposed here. The "socializing losses" critics may point to cautionary lessons provided by Britain nearly two decades ago. When the U.K. government bulk-bought unsold developer stock after the 2008 crash, its HomeBuy Direct scheme funnelled 64 per cent of the money to the four largest house-builders, propped up inflated prices and left buyers who purchased in 2008 reselling at a loss of more than 20 per cent three years later. That was a bailout. But Ireland did the opposite: its National Asset Management Agency bought distressed property at an average discount of 57 per cent, kept ...

  4. 16 hrs ago

    Canadians Want Surveillance Pricing Banned Canadians Want Surveillance Pricing Banned Canadians Want Surveillance Pricing Banned And governments can act fast, before it reaches your local grocery store. Food prices on the rise Why groceries changed the

    Analysis Health Food 8 8 8 Analysis Health Read more: Analysis Health Food Analysis Health Food And governments can act fast, before it reaches your local grocery store. Sarah-Louise Ruder Today TodayPolicy Options Sarah-Louise Ruder is a research associate at the University of the Fraser Valley. This article first appeared on Policy Options and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence. Support health journalism that goes beyond skin deep. Become a Tyee Builder. URL copied to clipboard! SHARE: 68 SHARES Comments / New Canadians Want Surveillance Pricing Banned And governments can act fast, before it reaches your local grocery store. … Article written by Sarah-Louise Ruder. This spring, surveillance pricing for groceries hit a nerve for Canadians, sparking a flurry of headlines and policy action. In March, Manitoba became the first government in Canada to introduce legislation to ban surveillance pricing, with a focus on grocery prices. The law was enacted in June. Federal NDP Leader Avi Lewis also advocated for banning surveillance pricing, accompanied by NDP MP Don Davies' defeated motion in the House of Commons in April. The same week, the Ontario Liberals introduced the Fair Grocery Prices Act, currently awaiting second reading, which proposes a similar ban. You might find this recent surge surprising, given the ubiquity of these practices. Airlines started experimenting with algorithmic pricing in the 1980s. Consumers are used to surge pricing for flights, hotels and ride-sharing services. Terms like "surveillance capitalism" have even made it into the public vernacular. Yet organized public and policy response to surveillance pricing in general has been lacklustre. Why are people paying attention now? And what should governments do about it? There are several policy levers that the federal, provincial and territorial governments can use to restrict surveillance pricing in grocery stores before the practice becomes widespread. Whereas flights are generally considered a luxury purchase, groceries are essential. The idea of paying even more for groceries leaves a bad taste in Canadians' mouths as food insecurity and the cost of essentials are on the rise. Nearly one in four households across Canada was food insecure in 2025. The average cost of groceries was 27 per cent higher in 2025 than in 2020. Even as overall inflation began to plateau in 2022, grocery prices continued to rise. In a 2023 Mintel survey, 83 per cent of surveyed Canadians believed grocery retailers were using inflation as an excuse to price gouge, and 94 per cent believed it especially harmed lower-income individuals. When Loblaw chairman Galen Weston was called to Parliament Hill along with the heads of Canada's other big grocery chains, he insisted that "the idea that grocers are causing food inflation is not only false, it's impossible." Many people had trouble buying it, accusing grocery giants of "greedflation." While public awareness is still nascent, a 2026 Abacus survey showed that more than half of Canadians were at least sometimes "suspicious of algorithmic pricing" and believed that charging different amounts for the same product was "unfair." Artificial intelligence systems significantly expand grocery retailers' ability to test and optimize customers' "willingness to pay." There are two important technologies in grocery retail that enable surveillance pricing. The first is the shift from paper to electronic shelf labels. Big Canadian grocers are quietly expanding electronic shelf label systems across the country, although their e-reader-style screens are rather inconspicuous. Stores can instantly change prices on electronic shelf labels, manually or through algorithms using data on markets, inventory, competitor prices and even the weather. While consumers have raised transparency and competition concerns related to electronic shelf labels, Canadian grocery giants Loblaws, Metro and Sobeys claim that the recent expansion of elec...

  5. 2d ago

    The Breathtaking Work of an 'Artist's Artist' 'Where science and imagination find an anchor of sorts'

    Why do we make things? If you're an artist like Cameron Kerr, you don't have much choice. "This is what I do, every day of the week," the sculptor explains from his East Vancouver studio. The amount of work on Kerr's studio walls is, in a word, staggering. Outside in a covered area, larger-scale sculptural pieces in different stages of completion reside. Kerr's work, like the man himself, is big and possessed of considerable presence. But it is also curiously fluid, moving in unexpected fashion to incorporate a dizzying array of ideas, images and manifestations. Cameron Kerr: Collecting the Unconscious, a solo exhibition of the artist's work at Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver, runs until mid-August. Curated by the Trapp Projects's Patrik Andersson, Collecting is a deeply curious compendium of the familiar and the wildly idiosyncratic. Please insert, run text width This range shouldn't come as a surprise. In my hours spent to talking to Kerr, the conversation roamed from Canadian rural accents to the home studio of the famed French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Curiously enough, Brion Gysin, creator of the Dreamachine, an interactive work designed to bring on a hypnagogic state, also popped up. Which is fitting, given that many of the pieces in Collecting the Unconscious are doing exactly that. The collection surfaces the interstitial place between sleep and wakefulness, where the conscious mind takes one last gasp before the body slips under the dark water of sleep. Born in Campbell River, Kerr came to art because, as he describes it, he was one of those kids who wouldn't stop drawing. At age 20, he moved to Italy to study marble at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara with American sculptor Manuel Neri. He subsequently immersed himself in the Bay Area Figurative Movement, and he studied metal with Antony Gormley in the U.K. Those experiences informed his approach to such wide-ranging materials as marble, cedar and metal. Although he is primarily a sculptor, Keer's collection of new work in the Griffin incorporates photographic images drawn from diverse sources, including old print magazines like National Geographic. His search for interesting images is expansive in extremis. Eyes, whether in a human, fish or bird, figure large. So, too, are shapes that appear in nature, whether a stone arch sculpted over centuries, or the opening of a halved coconut that the artist purchased in Vancouver's Chinatown. This shared architecture, echoed in natural forms, is revealed and remade, placed onto carved wooden shapes that undulate and snake around the images themselves. Please insert, run XXL There is a curious choreography at work. Not just a call and response, but an arc, akin to an electric current leaping between ideas. The connections between things give rise to their own form of found poetry, highlighting the frisson that occurs in the process of juxtaposition. Put two disparate objects beside each other, and in the space between them, something entirely unexpected springs up. The press material describes these recurring motifs as "vernacular image systems, memory and canonical forms in a variety of mediums." But anyone who grew up flipping through old copies of National Geographic in their grandparent's basement will be familiar not only with the images themselves, but also the Ben Day printing process that uses small dots of colour to create a fully realized image. Curator Andersson, who founded Trapp Projects in 1997 to present and promote the work of local and international artists, met Kerr at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, when the young artist took a survey course on 20th century art that Andersson taught. The two have collaborated in previous exhibitions, including a public art installation undertaken with Barbara Cole and Other Sights for Artists' Projects "where we installed road barriers that [Kerr] had carved out of marble outside Vancouver's Public Art Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Theatre," as Andersso...

  6. 2d ago

    Cory Doctorow Predicts the AI Bubble Will Burst Cory Doctorow Predicts the AI Bubble Will Burst Cory Doctorow Predicts the AI Bubble Will Burst 'If you're not at the table, you're on the menu' Grow or die Two-thirds of a trillion dollars So much money,

    Books CULTURE Books Science + Tech The writer sees a shaky future for a technology that has many of us in a lather. Cory Doctorow Predicts the AI Bubble Will Burst The writer sees a shaky future for a technology that has many of us in a lather. In tech-bro dialect, a centaur is a human assisted by a machine, such as a motorist or a user of hearing aids. "A reverse centaur," Cory Doctorow tells us, "is a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine," like users of social media providing themselves as targets for advertisers. In his latest book, the Toronto-born science fiction author and tech critic argues that artificial intelligence will make us all reverse centaurs, or assistants to machines, if it succeeds. He consoles us with a promise that AI is a classic investment bubble and will soon pop. It's an argument that makes me oddly cheerful about the prospect of global economic collapse. In judging technology, Doctorow writes, "Stop thinking about what the gadget does, and pay attention to who the gadget does it to and who the gadget does it for." If the gadget does something to you, to benefit its inventor, or advertisers, or the police, or scammers, you're on the wrong end of a power relationship. As Prime Minister Mark Carney famously observed, "If you're not at the table, you're on the menu." The marketing of AI in the past few years, especially since the release of ChatGPT in 2020, has been awe-inspiring. It has many of us worried that AI will take our jobs, and possibly destroy the world when it improves itself into godlike power. This marketing, Doctorow says, isn't aimed at us; it's aimed at investors. That's because investors want to put their money into a growing corporation whose greatest profits are in the future. When a corporation stops growing, Doctorow explains, it's considered "mature," ticking along but unlikely to deliver a hot new product or service that will generate a surge in profits. "Once a company stops growing," he says, "it becomes vastly overvalued, because it is now a mature company." This is especially true of the tech sector. Even a multitrillion-dollar corporation like Apple still wants to be seen as growing, always on the verge of attracting a tsunami of money thanks to some new gadget or indispensable app. No such gadget or app will be built in anybody's garage. It will take hundreds of millions of dollars just to construct the global supply chains for such gadgets, and the tech corporations are competing against one another for investments. Very early on, the AI companies knew they needed to make investors, governments and consumers all believe that a race was on — not just between companies, but between nations like the U.S. and China, to produce ever better versions of the technology. The logic went something like this: if Apple faltered, OpenAI would rule. If the U.S. didn't commit to AI, China's versions would conquer the world. Those who invested in the winner would enjoy enormous wealth. To strengthen this belief, tech companies adopted a marketing strategy for AI that Doctorow calls "inevitabilism," which he describes as "the insistence that there is only one conceivable way to do things, and any problems you're experiencing aren't anyone's fault, they're just inescapable reality." He cites the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who famously sold neoliberal economics by saying, without evidence, "There is no alternative." But Doctorow insists we must have choices. And we can't simply accept the billionaires' decisions for using AI. "The boss who tells you the only way to use a cash register is to fire your coworkers and make you do their jobs, too, is practising vulgar Thatcherism," he writes. "They're trying to bamboozle you with inevitabilism." Doctorow sees "the bosses," the managerial classes, as a major market for AI. The bosses are united in their dislike of having to hire workers, and therefore excited by the prospect of replacing them with ...

  7. 2d ago

    A Banned Book Club Blooms in Alberta The Alberta book fight takes pages from an American playbook Book censorship is about power Politicizing parental identity A moral panic fueled by disinformation and social media What to do in the face of censorship

    Early in June, Joh Smolders came home to a surprise. Leaning against the white door of his condo in Airdrie, Alta., a parcel wrapped in bright, vermillion-red packaging stood waiting. Smolders's heart skipped a beat. The first instalment of his subscription to LitResistance had arrived. Filled with anticipation, Smolders, who is transgender, set the parcel on his kitchen table and opened the padded envelope. "I was excited to see what was in it," he said. Inside, Smolders discovered award-winning American author Malinda Lo's lauded 2021 young adult novel, Last Night at Telegraph Club. The package also featured a bundle of cheerful pride swag — stickers, a magnetic bookmark and an enamel pin — plus a note from LitResistance founder Robyn Wilson. Her note explained the flimsy reasons Lo's novel, about two teen girls falling in love in 1954, is one of close to 6,000 books banned from libraries in the United States. "This book is challenged due to obscenity and sexual content," Wilson's one-pager read. "The sexual content in this book includes a consensual makeout session involving two high school seniors that focuses more on personal discovery, emotional intensity and romantic connection between the two characters than on graphic sexual descriptions." Wilson, a social worker based in Edmonton, launched LitResistance in May to raise awareness of the diversity of voices censors are vanishing from libraries not only south of the border, but in her home province, too. "When I first had the idea for LitResistance, I was feeling the weight of everything that's going on in provincial politics," Wilson told The Tyee in a recent video call. Last September, Alberta's United Conservative government introduced a ministerial order requiring school authorities "ensure that school library materials containing any explicit visual depiction of a sexual act are not accessible or available to children or students at school." This led to the removal of at least 160 graphic novels and comic books from school libraries across the province, including titles such as Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer and Mike Curato's Flamer. Both books have found a similar fate in the United States, where school boards and state governments have responded to the pleas of anti-LGBTQ2S+ groups. According to the freedom of expression advocacy group PEN America, the number of book censorship challenges in the United States has almost tripled since 2021.Although Albertans can access the titles removed from school shelves at most public libraries in the prairie province, LitResistance allows Albertans to safeguard the diverse voices censors are trying to silence. For professor Kit Dobson, who teaches English at the University of Calgary and is currently writing a book about book banning, access to diverse perspectives is essential for an increasingly complex society to thrive. "Books offer us complex stories and nuance," he said. While literature exposes readers to uncomfortable ideas and situations that enable critical thought, book censorship does the opposite, Dobson noted. "It forecloses the possibility of having a conversation about books we might not agree with in the first place." Reading censored books is one small action Albertans can take to prevent the erasure of marginalized groups from cultural discourse. To neutralize censorship efforts, however, it is essential to understand the power dynamics that underpin them. The United States offers an unsettling glimpse into what's to come, if Albertans fail to take action. Emily Knox, a former librarian and now professor of information sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has dedicated her academic career to study the reasons American parents challenge books. Her findings suggest that book censorship challenges don't stem from a disregard for books, but the opposite. Challengers know books are powerful artifacts. They contain ideas that shape minds and values, if not a community's culture. This is the ...

  8. 2d ago

    The Spice of Life The Spice of Life

    It's around 6 p.m. on a warm Sunday evening in late May in Bareilly, India. I am at one of the many birthday parties I must attend that summer. I have a very full social calendar as a six-year-old. We are all clutching the spoils of a successfully broken piñata, giggling and ripping open packages of candy. I stuff all my wrappers into the pocket of my shorts, to be forgotten until they are released into the washing machine. Then, as most children's birthday parties go, it's time for dinner. The birthday girl's mother brings out the dish that makes an appearance at almost every birthday I attend that summer, and for good reason — the macaroni pasta in tomato sauce is quick to make, mostly hides the vegetables and adds nutrition to the standard party spread of pop and chips. It will take about three more years to realize that the macaroni dish I eat at countless birthday parties is a distinctively North Indian adaptation of authentic Italian pasta. This specific dish is filled with an assortment of veggies diced up and tossed in a red sauce made with tomatoes, garlic, onion, a splash of lemon juice, cream and Indian spices such as cumin, red chilli powder and chief among them, garam masala. It's the spice I associate most strongly with home, and it's the one I reach for whenever I'm in need of comfort as an international student in Vancouver. That's why I've decided to explore my relationship with this ingredient and why it prompts such strong emotions. A brief history of garam masala Garam masala is a blend of different spices roasted whole, then ground and blended. Garm means "hot" and masal means "ingredients." But as Priyadarshini Chatterjee explains in an article for the Diaspora Spice Co., the word garam does not indicate the spice level of the blend but instead the taseer of the spices added. Traditional Ayurveda, a 3,000-year-old system of medicine, classifies ingredients based on taseer, their elemental potencies. "Ancient medicinal systems like Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine identify ingredients by their elemental properties. Ayurvedic principles, for instance, classify substances into two broad categories according to their virya, or potency, into ushna or hot, and sheetal, or cold. This, in turn, affects the body's energies, metabolism and digestion," Chatterjee writes. Some of the spices used in garam masala such as black pepper, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and mace have heating properties that are considered to warm up the body from inside out. It affects bodily functions such as digestion and metabolism. This is why the spice blend is generally used in the winter season. Some of the spices used are also classified as aromatics in Ayurvedic medicine. We don't really know where, exactly, garam masala came from. Chatterjee writes that only two of the spices in the masala blend, pepper and cardamom, come from India. Cinnamon was primarily grown in Sri Lanka; nutmeg, cloves, and mace were originally imported from East Indonesia, with the production of cloves later being moved to Africa by the Sultan of Oman in the early 1800s, according to an article by Brayan Bwana for the Citizen. Black cardamom was brought in from the Eastern Himalayas. Chatterjee writes that it would be reasonable to assume that garam masala was first prepared in the kitchens of royalty and aristocracy who were able to afford the expensive, imported spices. She adds that the art of creating spice blends to evoke different flavours precedes the Mughal Empire and the creation of garam masala. The trade of the individual spices used in this specific North Indian blend is also linked to the history of European colonization. According to a post on the Maritime History Society website, the high demand for pepper in Europe led European traders and explorers to the Malabar Coast (now in Kerala, India), starting with the Portuguese and the French, and ending with the English. The colonization of Sri Lanka started with Portuguese explor...

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About

We’re an independent, online news magazine from B.C. founded in 2003. We’re devoted to fact-driven stories, reporting that informs and enlivens our democratic conversation. This feed features our stories, read by AI narration. Our reporting has changed laws, started movements and garnered numerous awards.

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    The Tyee
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025
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    The Tyee: Audio Edition

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