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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. 5 HRS AGO

    Fashion Used to Be Fun

    On days when I'm feeling glum about the state of the world, I re-watch The Devil Wears Prada. The 2006 movie is based on a 2003 novel of the same name by Lauren Weisberger. The book was ostensibly a work of fiction, but it turned heads because of Weisberger's real-life experiences working as a personal assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour. The Devil Wears Prada is not the best film ever made, nor even a particular favourite of mine (Anne Hathaway still gives major cringe), but there is something about the world it presents, one from recent history, that provides a form of comfort. Once upon a time, I bought every fashion magazine on the newsstand: Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, W, sometimes stooping as low as InStyle. Then I'd wait impatiently for the beginning of the next month, when all the new issues hit the streets. In the pre-internet era, glossy mags ruled the roost like the dinosaurs of old, roaring about hemlines and handbags. Vogue's annual September issue weighed as much as newborn baby. The overstuffed edition was the pièce de résistance in the fashion calendar, an exhaustive compendium of glossy ads and iron-clad fashion dictates. It was wadded to the absolute gills with everything covetable and stylish. I bought it without fail and poured over every page. That world seems long ago and far away now. Fashion and media have transformed The Devil Wears Prada 2, the sequel to the original, opened in theatres on May 1 and is well on its way to making a boffo box office profit. Prada 2 updates the original story based on Weisberger's roman à clef, but Weisberger wasn't the first to tear aside the silken curtains of the high fashion world. Other books like Mary Cantwell's 2000 Manhattan Memoir and André Leon Talley's 2021 The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir also examined the highs (haute, in fashion parlance) and lows of working in fashion media without resorting to thinly disguised versions of the real people involved. In the years between the book and now the two films, media and fashion have both changed enormously. This truism provides the body from which springs a veritable multi-headed hydra of issues — everything from corporate conglomeration to body positivity or lack thereof, the rise of the digital realm and the tech bro billionaires who oversee it. In a recent re-watch of the 2006 film, a few things were jarring, especially the emphasis on thinness. The heroine of the story, Andrea "Andy" Sachs (Hathaway), is nicknamed "Six" in reference to her dress size. But it also infers a certain cluelessness. Even classlessness. When Andy wanders into the offices of Runway Magazine (a thinly veiled version of Vogue) and meets its fearsome editor Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), she is very much a babe in the fashion woods. With ambitions to becoming a real journalist, Andy takes the job as Priestly's assistant, thinking a year at the magazine will open multiple doors and potential employment. What follows is a plunge down the rabbit hole into an entirely new world, one governed by the rules, dictums and opinions of the arbiters of style. In this realm, Priestly is the Red Queen, a dictatorial ruler who keeps her subjects in check with a purse of her lips, a withering gaze and a facility with insults that operate on the level of cruise missiles. Utterly obliterating, in other words. In her lumpy blue sweater (actually, cerulean) Andy is almost too easy a target. But after being blown to smithereens, she decides to fight back. She transforms into a glamazon and whittles herself down to a size four. The plaudits are immediate: in come the men, clothes and a tiny smidgen of respect from her ice-queen boss. In the new film, Priestly is kept on a tight leash, no longer allowed to comment on women's bodies, but still finding a way to slide in a few vicious barbs under cover of boomer confusion. As she states in the film about the new concept of inclusivity and body positivity, "why?" In 'Prada 2,' money metastasize...

    10 min

  2. 5 HRS AGO

    What Drives a Country to Use Workers as An Export?

    A sharp new book rethinks Canada's immigration system. A Tyee interview with Alberta contributor and labour activist Marco Luciano. The story of Alberta is the story of generations coming to the prairie province in search of a better life. This has been the force that shaped Alberta's earliest days as a province, and it continues to drive the experiences of newcomers working here now. Before it even became Canada's 10th province in 1905, Alberta's broad prairie skies and rolling foothills were already lodged in the imaginations of people seeking for a better life. In the late 1800s, thousands of Ukrainian, Hungarian, Romanian and German families arrived in Alberta to farm wheat, barley and oat crops. At the same time, American cattle drivers found in the prairies the ideal landscape to set up permanent ranches, launching a cattle industry that would become an Alberta staple. Towards the end of the 20th century, Alberta's booming oil and gas sector attracted Canadians from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in search of a fresh start after the Atlantic fishing industry collapsed in the early 1990s and a surge of unemployment battered the Maritimes. More recently, in the 2020s, the promise of high-paying jobs, shorter commutes and reasonably-priced suburban homes lured more than 116,000 Ontarians, and roughly 111,000 British Columbians, to move to the prairie province. To support the influx of new arrivals, more than 19,000 employers in Alberta sought to leverage the federal temporary foreign worker program to recruit the labour needed to build new homes, stock shelves and pour double-doubles without jeopardizing the prairie province's affordability advantage. Since 2022, roughly 90,000 migrants have received a permit to work in Alberta via the temporary foreign worker program alone. Like the generations of newcomers before them, temporary foreign workers came to Alberta seeking to improve their livelihoods — and their families. Earning a wage in Canadian dollars can afford the children of temporary foreign workers an education in their home countries, access to adequate health care or simply a more stable life. Their hopes, however, often come with a hefty price tag. A new book uncovers the realities of foreign workers across Canada, and seeks to reimagine immigration policy from a perspective that centres the humanity and lived experiences of newcomers. In A Renewed Canadian Welcome: Eleven Visions from Migrants and Advocates, Salvadorean Canadian policy analyst and refugee rights advocate Emilio Rodríguez brings together the voices of activists, organizers and academics whose lived experience informs their sharp critiques of an immigration system that they say is exploitative and drenched in racism. "Migrants and refugees are integral to the fabric of our communities," Rodriguez writes. "But the recognition of our importance must go beyond rhetorical or merely symbolic gestures. What we demand, and believe are owed, is dignity, equality and justice." For workers in the Global South, migration offers a way out of poverty With few opportunities back home, lower-income workers from the Global South can seldom choose to stay at home. It's a reality for many to seek employment opportunities abroad, as their countries of origin rely on their migration as a source of revenue, writes Marco Luciano, a labour rights activist and director of Migrante Alberta, an Edmonton-based advocacy group for the Filipino diaspora. In the Philippines, Luciano explains, workers have become a profitable export. The remittances of more than 10 million workers living abroad account for roughly nine per cent of the country's economy, World Bank data shows. But there are few pathways for permanent immigration available to migrant workers. And non-permanent residents lack the basic rights that their fellow Canadians take for granted. Leaving an abusive employer, or facing a life-altering illness or injury, can cause foreign workers to lose their immigration s...

    12 min

  3. 5 HRS AGO

    We’re Talking Less. And Scrolling More

    "The word is fragile and uncertain, but extremely precious. We are left with only the word. It is our last resort, but is irreplaceable for establishing communion between us, and also between us and something as indispensable to us as our daily bread." — French sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul Sometimes a story crosses my desk that weaves together the themes of my critical reporting on technology, and often in unexpected ways. For decades now I have argued that technological devices and systems, all designed to further the efficiency of machines, have become a dominant colonial force that has eroded our humanity. Yet, we swerve around the growing evidence of loss and conquest like frenzied commuters avoiding potholes on a one-way road called progress. The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, for example, has shown how technological devices have ruined our attention spans and filled the lives of children with anxiety, depression and dread. Meanwhile the American journalist Nicholas Carr has documented how increasing the speed and flow of information on the internet undermines the art of talking and plunges users into "a very, very busy void." As Carr eloquently writes in an April 2026 essay on World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee's new memoir: "The internet operates at a scale and speed that conflict with the brain's deliberate pace of thought, the intellect's slow accumulation of knowledge and the psyche's limited capacity for stimulation and social exchange." Iain McGilchrist, the brilliant Scottish psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher, has documented how engineered environments or historical traumas can rewire brains balanced by two hemispheres for left hemisphere dominance. The left hemisphere is reductionist, brash, opinionated and manipulative. It treats the world as an object and operates with the subtlety of autocorrect. And when it no longer serves the right brain, the side that prizes real things and intuition, things go astray. You end up with a Silicon Valley brain. Now these same insidious technological forces rewiring human thought appear to be silencing another human behaviour: the spoken word. We're speaking 338 fewer words a day A startling March 2026 study, called Sliding into Silence? We Are Speaking 300 Daily Words Fewer Every Year, from researchers at the University of Missouri and University of Arizona reports that for each year between 2005 and 2019, people spoke an average of 338 fewer words a day. That translates into a loss of some 120,000 every year. In July 2007, Matthias Mehl, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona, reported in Science on talkativeness among the genders. In that study, he noted that the average person spoke about 16,000 words a day. That was 2007, before the launch of the iPhone, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and the mania known as AI. Mehl's estimate on the volume of human chatter was based on a technological intrusion. Participants in the study wore a device called EAR, or electronically activated recorder. It fit into a pocket like a glass case. Every 12 minutes or so, the device sampled 30 seconds of conversation. From recordings collected by the device, researchers were able to estimate the number of words spoken daily. Let's fast forward to 2026. Mehl and his colleague Valeria Pfeifer, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, sought to replicate the study. They captured chatter data from more than 2,000 participants, all wearing EARS in 22 different studies over a 14-year period, from 2005 to 2019, and all for different study purposes. They accidentally found that a profound change had taken place. Compared to subjects first reported on in 2005, the average volume of spoken words had dramatically eroded by nearly 3,000 words. Instead of expressing 16,000 words a day, people from the age of 10 to 90 are now averaging around 12,700 words a day. The reduction from 2005 to 2019 in the estimated number of words spoken per day represents...

    11 min

  4. 22 HRS AGO

    Who's Behind the Residential School Denialism Movement?

    News Indigenous 56 News Indigenous Rights + Justice News Indigenous Rights + Justice Who's Behind the Residential School Denialism Movement? Today TodayThe Tyee Who's Behind the Residential School Denialism Movement? Read more: A network of retired academics and think tanks is chipping away at established truths. Emily Enns 8 May 2026 Emily Enns is a freelance journalist based in Winnipeg. This article was reported and written as part of the University of King's College master of journalism program. Our journalism is supported by readers like you. Click here to support The Tyee. URL copied to clipboard! SHARE: 68 SHARES [Editor's note: This article contains discussion of residential school denialism and abuse at residential schools.] A network of retired academics and think tanks is chipping away at established truths. … Article written by Emily Enns. One morning last November, Shay Paul opened Facebook from her home in Kamloops, B.C., and was shocked to find her online community pages transformed. Every group she was part of — from a page for Kamloops community updates to one for local thrifters — was awash in what she called residential school denialism. "It was slandering and dragging my leadership through the mud. It was very vocal threats of violence in my own community," said Paul. Paul is an artist and community organizer living in Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc. She had known there were people in Kamloops who denied the history of her people and especially of their experiences at Kamloops Indian Residential School, but she had never seen it this blatant. "Everywhere I looked on social media, it was in my face for like a week," said Paul. "I didn't feel safe here." She was sure she knew what had sparked it. The day before the torrent of denialism suddenly appeared in her feed, a demonstration had taken place on the Kamloops campus of Thompson Rivers University. Protesters wore sandwich boards bearing messages such as "What remains?" "215" and "Denial or truth?" The words were an apparent reference to the radar detection of approximately 200 anomalies consistent with children's graves discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School back in 2021 — a finding the demonstrators called a "mass deception" perpetuated by the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc Nation. They were met with a small crowd of counter-protesters wearing orange shirts and beating drums in resistance to their message, but the impact of the event resounded through the region in the days afterwards. Residential school denialism, while always present in the community, had emerged from the background and blown up "like a match to tinder," according to Paul, in the wake of the demonstration. Months later, Paul said, the shift is still noticeable. "Even now... there's not a Facebook post that goes out about Indigenous events in Kamloops where there's not at least one person in a comment section on a shared post saying something about how our experiences as Indigenous people are fabricated," said Paul. The Thompson Rivers University event was not an isolated one, nor did it emerge in a vacuum. It was one of a series of events led by Frances Widdowson, a former Mount Royal University professor, on university campuses across Canada. Widdowson has not been alone in her efforts to generate skepticism about Canada's residential school history. She is part of a group of roughly two dozen retired academics, lawyers and writers from across the country who collaborate with one another in an email group to construct a more positive version of residential school history. Collectively, the members of this group are having an outsized impact in sowing doubt about the harms of the residential school system. They have published over 500 articles about residential schools on various platforms in the last five years and have published three books in the same time span. The books, as well as many of the group's articles, have been published through the charitable think tanks Frontier...

    31 min

  5. 22 HRS AGO

    Mark Carney Thinks AI Will Save Money. It Will Also Cost Lives

    The rush to embrace flawed tech could bring disaster. … Article written by Natasha Tusikov and Blayne Haggart. The Mark Carney government has made "deploying AI at scale" a cornerstone of its attempt to make government more productive and slash costs by cutting 28,000 jobs by 2029. The goal is to achieve savings of $60 billion over several years. There are many reasons to be skeptical of the government's AI strategy. Savings projections resulting from digitalization should be taken with a grain of salt. For example, the Phoenix pay system, designed to automate the federal payroll, was supposed to save $70 million per year. Instead, unable to deal with the complexity of paying hundreds of thousands of public servants, it has cost the federal government $4.34 billion and climbing to try to fix it. However, unrealized savings are the least of the concerns coming from the government's wholehearted embrace of AI, including algorithmic-based tools. Deploying these technologies as cost-cutting measures will not only result in worse service for Canadians, but also put lives at risk — as has already happened here and in other countries. If the federal government is intent on exploring the use of AI (however it is defined) in government, it should do so not as a cost-cutting measure, but only after careful, case-by-case deliberation that pays close attention to how this (or any) technology interacts with the people using, and affected by, the tech in question. Two forms of AI The problems begin with the technologies themselves. Simplifying greatly, focus on two general forms of AI. The first, "generative AI" such as ChatGPT produces probabilistic output predicting what the next word is likely to be in a sequence based on its training data. It produces patterns that look like human thought, but it's just repeating patterns in its data. As such, it's prone to producing "hallucinations," which can involve presenting false information as true. These are not technically incorrect outputs per se because the program is simply doing what it's designed to do: provide probabilistically determined strings of words and sentences. The fact that this problem cannot be fixed means that its output can never be fully trusted. The second form is "discriminative AI," such as decision-making algorithms that produce options and targets by identifying patterns in data. Such programs are only as good as the data provided and their algorithms — both of which are created by humans and therefore share their biases and fallibilities. Two recent Canadian cases reveal that governments' experimentation with generative AI and algorithmic decision-making in delivering immigration and social-assistance programs has already resulted in serious negative consequences. In the first case, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada acknowledged using generative AI to reject an application for permanent residence on the grounds the applicant's job duties didn't match her claimed Canadian job experience. However, the AI tool erroneously generated the applicant's current job duties, which means the algorithm wrongly rejected the application. In the second case, Quebec launched an AI-driven overhaul in 2025 of its social-assistance system called Project UNIR, which uses algorithms to help determine eligibility for financial assistance. The project eliminated the previous "assigned agents" who worked with clients from the beginning to the end of their files. It now divides tasks in each applicant's file among officials working in different regions. One man killed himself after being given incorrect information by staff saying he was ineligible for assistance — a mistake exacerbated by the lack of a human agent who knew the context of the man's file. Other people calling the system have expressed suicidal thoughts because of its administrative delays and document losses. What makes these two cases — as well as the three deaths from listeria in 2024 due to the Canadian Food In...

    9 min

  6. 22 HRS AGO

    Can the City Block the Opening of a Downtown Harm Reduction Site?

    Not really, say opposition councillors. And it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars. … Article written by Michelle Gamage. A celebrated harm reduction and recovery advocate is rejecting an honour given to him by Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim because the mayor is trying to prevent a new harm reduction location from opening. Two years ago, Sim declared May 29 "Guy Felicella Day" to honour Felicella's tireless advocacy work. But now Felicella says the honour isn't worth the paper it's printed on. He called the recognition "disingenuous" because Sim is obstructing vital harm reduction services. Felicella said he made the decision to return the honour after speaking with his wife and young kids. It's important to teach them integrity, he said, even if they're still too young to understand the weight of their father's actions. This all started on Tuesday, when Vancouver Coastal Health announced the new location of an overdose prevention site, or OPS, in the Vancouver City Centre area. The new location will be at 900 Helmcken St., with a lease term beginning June 1. City Coun. Rebecca Bligh says the location will require some work and a development permit before it can open. This is the third location of the Thomus Donaghy Overdose Prevention Site, which operated at 1101 Seymour St. before it was moved to 1060 Howe St., and closed again Jan. 31, 2026. Health authorities have been ordered by the province to open overdose prevention sites wherever they're needed. The Vancouver City Centre area fits the bill. It has the second-highest rate of overdose deaths in the Vancouver Coastal Health region, with 94 fatalities last year, and the second-highest number of 911 calls in the VCH region, according to the health authority. Just hours after VCH announced the new location, Sim introduced an "urgent motion" in city council directing City of Vancouver staff to "to take all lawful steps to prevent the opening of the proposed overdose prevention site." The motion passed late Tuesday evening, supported by Sim and six ABC Vancouver councillors and opposed by the four opposition councillors. During Tuesday's city council meeting, Sim said the new harm reduction site was the latest in a series of "previous, failed OPS sites." Coun. Peter Meiszner called the OPS "another failed experiment." Which really got under the skin of Felicella, who told The Tyee that overdose prevention sites aren't a failure. "These sites have proven for decades to save lives and reduce harms," Felicella said. 'It's insulting' Felicella is a former drug user whose life was saved thanks to the quick work of staff at an overdose prevention site in 2013. Today he is an advocate for harm reduction and recovery, supporting families dealing with addiction, and speaking to students about his story of recovery from addiction and homelessness. Since 2021 the Thomus Donaghy Overdose Prevention Site has supported 149,603 visits and responded to 480 overdoses, according to VCH. "It's insulting to me and thousands of other people whose lives have been saved to say these sites have 'failed,'" Felicella added. "I get it, the public is sick and tired of people using drugs in public. But you can't be sick of the solution that addresses that," he said. "That area is riddled with overdoses and deaths." During Tuesday's city council meeting, ABC councillors and the mayor spoke about their concerns that the province was focusing on harm reduction instead of treatment. In a message posted to Facebook, Sim said the previous harm reduction sites "became focal points for street disorder and open drug use." The new harm reduction location appears to have taken this critique into consideration. VCH says the new site on Helmcken includes supervised inhalation, supervised consumption and a lot of indoor space in order to encourage people to hang out inside, rather than on the sidewalk. This will also reduce public drug use, VCH said, because it gives people a place to go. The Tyee sent a media request as...

    9 min

  7. 22 HRS AGO

    Feds Won't Recommit to the BC Salmon Farm Ban

    As lobbying intensifies, the Carney government is 'considering how it can best move sustainable aquaculture forward.' … Article written by Sarah Cox. Prime Minister Mark Carney appears to be backing away from Ottawa's commitment to ban open-net salmon farming in coastal B.C. in 2029. Bob (Galagame') Chamberlin, chair of the First Nation Wild Salmon Alliance, told The Tyee that the federal government won't recommit to the ban and he's very worried it will be dropped or altered. "I'm not sure if they're intimately aware of the pushback that's going to erupt should the ban be tinkered with," Chamberlin said, pointing out the ban is supported by 130 First Nations in B.C. The decision to end open-net pen salmon aquaculture in coastal B.C. was made by Justin Trudeau's Liberal government in 2024, following mounting evidence that parasitic sea lice and diseases from farmed fish were being transferred to wild juvenile salmon along migration routes. For a story published earlier this week, The Tyee asked Fisheries and Oceans Canada, commonly referred to as DFO, if the government is still committed to the ban or planning to modify it. DFO referred questions to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, which didn't answer the questions directly. After the publication of The Tyee's initial story, media relations spokesperson Alison Reilander sent an emailed statement saying the federal government is "considering how it can best move sustainable aquaculture forward in British Columbia." The government's unwillingness to recommit to the ban follows lobbying by seven international salmon aquaculture industry groups and individual salmon farming companies that say Atlantic salmon can be farmed sustainably in open-net pens along B.C.'s coast. Atlantic salmon are not native to the west coast. The three biggest salmon farming companies operating in B.C. — Norway-headquartered Grieg Seafood BC, Mowi Canada West and Cermaq Canada — have reported lobbying the federal government a total of 42 times since Carney took office in March 2025, according to the federal lobbyist registry. Grieg and Cermaq lobbied to promote the benefits of their salmon farming investments in Canada, while Mowi lobbied about regulatory decisions for B.C.'s salmon farming sector and the transition plan for salmon farming. Mowi, the world's largest salmon farming company, has reported lobbying Fisheries Minister Joanne Thompson three times and the Prime Minister's Office four times since Carney took office, according to the registry. 'A deeper understanding of the industry and regional economy' Reilander said the federal government "recognizes the importance of salmon aquaculture for the B.C. economy." She pointed to a draft salmon aquaculture transition plan released in September 2024, before Carney was elected. Since then, an interdepartmental task force has conducted more than 120 engagements with First Nations and stakeholders, Reilander said. "This work has provided a deeper understanding of the industry and regional economy, as well as the diverse views on the transition," she said, adding the government is reviewing "all of the different perspectives." At a press conference last week in Ottawa, Chamberlin and other members of the First Nation Wild Salmon Alliance called on the Carney government to honour its commitment to the ban, warning that continued hesitancy to reaffirm support for the removal of open-net pen farms will undermine reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Chamberlin said the alliance's repeated requests for a meeting with Carney have been rebuffed. He said he met last fall with Thompson but has been unable to obtain a meeting with Thompson or any other federal minister since then. At a meeting in Ottawa last week with Sony Perron, a deputy minister with Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, Chamberlin asked about a timeline for the publication of a promised report related to the salmon farming transition but didn't get a di...

    8 min

  8. 1D AGO

    Report Warns of Russian and US Disinformation Campaigns on Alberta Separatism

    Researchers say MAGA influencers and Russian state media are trying to sway opinions. … Article written by Jen St. Denis. A new report is warning of both Russian and American government involvement aimed at promoting Alberta separatism. Researchers from the Canadian Digital Media Network, DisinfoWatch and the Global Centre for Democratic Resilience warn that the activity they've tracked is threatening "the ability of Canadians to make political decision freely, without foreign coercion or manipulation." They've produced a report titled Decision Making & National Unity Under Threat: Foreign Interference, Cognitive Sovereignty, and the Alberta Referendum. The research groups are calling on the federal government to introduce legislation or strengthen existing laws to require greater transparency from social media companies and develop a robust plan to track and respond to foreign disinformation campaigns. Marcus Kolga, the director of DisinfoWatch, had blunt advice for Canadians based on the report's findings. "There's no silver bullet to protect us from these influence operations, but what I would say to Canadians, at the very top of my list and this is really simple: limit your time on social media," Kolga told The Tyee. "But if you're on social media, and the algorithms — which are designed to increase profit for these companies — if the content elicits a strong emotional reaction, it's probably a good idea to take a step back, take a deep breath and take a look at what you're consuming and where it's coming from." The researchers found that targeting western separatism is "explicitly instructed in Russian government strategy" and say that Russian influence operations have already created or deployed websites and social media accounts to "directly target Alberta." One example, the report notes, is a website called AlbertaSeparatist.com which also has associated TikTok and YouTube accounts. The report authors say that website has been "attributed to Russian operations." Alberta separatism is also frequently covered on Russian state media sites Sputnik and Pravda Today. An analysis by the researchers found 67 news articles on Pravda Today dealing with Alberta separatism or becoming the "51st state," compared with 14 articles that focused on Ontario, between Dec. 24 and April 25. The articles presented Alberta separatism as a "growing and popular" movement, focused on Alberta's economic grievances with Canada, reported contacts between separatist leaders and U.S. government officials and republished a slew of material from mainstream news, Telegram channels and MAGA influencers to "create a laundering effect in which local grievances are blended with strategic narratives." The report notes Russia's "extensive track record" of misinformation and disinformation operations targeting democratic societies by amplifying existing divisions in societies over issues like LGBTQ+ rights and other "culture war" topics. When it comes to the United States, the report authors characterized the effort as "overt" rather than Russian "covert" attempts to sway public opinion. That's because some American government officials and influencers have been totally open about their support for Alberta separatism and President Donald Trump's repeated suggestions to make Canada the "51st state." Separatist leaders have claimed to meet with high-level U.S. government officials in the State Department, and have claimed to have discussed a $500-billion line of credit to support a separate Alberta. MAGA influencers have also supported Alberta separatism, the report authors note, including Steve Bannon, who advised Trump during the president's first term. Bannon and Tucker Carlson have both used their large video platforms to support Alberta separatism. On April 2, Carlson — a former FOX News host who independently makes videos and other political content — told his audience that Canada "is not sovereign" and said the U.S. should consider coercive regime cha...

    6 min
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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.

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