The Tyee: Audio Edition

The Tyee
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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. 16 hrs ago

    Who is Kerry-Lynne Findlay?

    We trace the controversial B.C. Conservative leader's path from Liberal lawyer to hardline social conservative. By Steve Burgess. It was November 2000, and victory had just been declared in a legal case that had been making headlines for years. The high-profile court battle had pitted the Musqueam band against leaseholders challenging huge rate increases. A Supreme Court decision had severely curtailed the amount the Musqueam could charge. One of the leaseholders, a former Ladysmith resident with a law degree from UBC, had helped lead the legal fight. "This decision means that this has now become a community where it is possible to live," said Kerry-Lynne Findlay. "It's now possible to survive economically." The Musqueam leaseholders' case marked the introduction of Findlay to the public sphere. She would eventually go on to win a seat in Parliament for Delta-Richmond East and serve in the cabinet of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. After an up-and-down career in federal politics, Findlay re-emerged in 2026 as the leader of the resurgent Conservative Party of BC. Now she is running to claim the provincial riding of Abbotsford-Mission, hoping to lead her party from inside the B.C. legislature. As the B.C. Conservatives churn with dissent and defections, Findlay has held to a hard-line agenda that separates the pragmatic from the true believers. The Sept. 26 byelection is shaping up as a referendum on a leadership tenure in danger of foundering almost as abruptly as it began. The Tyee asked the Conservative Party of BC for an interview with Findlay or another representative, but did not receive a response. Findlay was born in January 1955, one of seven children. Her older brother Greg had a long CFL career as a BC Lions linebacker, and Findlay's father Stephen, an electrician, previously played for the Hamilton Tigers (before the team merged with the Hamilton Wildcats to become the Hamilton Tiger-Cats). According to a 1997 article in the Vancouver Bar Association's magazine, The Advocate, she graduated from the prestigious Crofton House School in Kerrisdale and proceeded to study at UBC, first earning degrees in history and political science before adding a law degree in 1978. Findlay went on to a distinguished legal career, culminating in her appointment as Queen's Counsel in 1999. She later served as a member of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. Politically, Findlay started out as a Liberal. She was active in the federal party, serving as a convention delegate and an executive in the Vancouver Centre riding association. Her first husband, Arthur Boyd Ferris, was a prominent Vancouver lawyer who had been a top Liberal strategist in Ottawa — in 1968, Ferris chaired Pierre Elliot Trudeau's campaign committee when he captured the Liberal leadership. He and Findlay had two children before Ferris died suddenly of a heart attack in 1989. Findlay later spoke of being "suddenly widowed, with two young children," and moving to a house on Musqueam territory in southwest Vancouver. She subsequently met Brent Chapman, an actor in TV commercials whose career would eventually include horror movie sequels like Halloween: Resurrection and Freddy vs. Jason. They were married in 1993 and Findlay had two more children. Findlay's political orientation seems to have changed drastically by 2000. Her first foray into elected politics was as the unsuccessful Vancouver Quadra candidate of the Canadian Alliance, the successor to the right-wing Reform Party. By the time of her candidacy, Findlay had gained considerable media attention as the public face of the Musqueam leaseholders in their legal fight against the band. In the 1960s, the Musqueam First Nation had leased lots on its reserve land in southwest Vancouver to non-Indigenous families. Homeowners owned their houses but paid rent to the band for the land. The rents had been quite low, ranging around $400 annually. But in 1995 the Musqueam announced they would be upping the rent to $36,000 per ...

  2. 16 hrs ago

    Ken Sim Is Taking Credit for Lower Crime Rates

    And blaming Pete Fry for public safety issues. The stats, and the complexity of intersecting crises, paint a different picture. By Katie Hyslop. On Sept. 9, incumbent majority party ABC Vancouver opened their civic election campaign by dropping three ads on YouTube. Two of the three focused on Green Party of Vancouver Coun. Pete Fry's public safety voting record. At the same time, ABC credited themselves for the recent decrease in violent crimes reported in Vancouver. Fry is one of five candidates currently running to unseat incumbent ABC Mayor Ken Sim, who is seeking a second term in office. In 2022, ABC won the election with a majority on council, the school board and the park board. Since then, five elected ABC members have left or were kicked out of the party, meaning the party currently only has a majority on council. Recent voter polling shows Fry is more popular with decided voters than Sim. Fry is also now the only progressive party candidate left in Vancouver's mayoral race, after William Azaroff of OneCity Vancouver and Stephanie Allen of COPE ended their mayoral campaigns earlier this month. ABC Coun. Peter Meiszner says it's Fry's public safety record, not his polling numbers, that led to ABC's focus on him. "It's really to highlight his voting record on council," Meiszner told The Tyee, adding the ABC majority council has "put a lot of efforts and resources towards public safety in the city." The narrator of one ABC ad says, "In the middle of a massive public safety crisis, Pete Fry cut millions of dollars from the Vancouver Police budget." Grainy footage of Fry speaking in council, as well as blurred faces of people committing assault and being arrested, flash across the screen as ominous music plays in the background. The other video ad intersperses grainy clips of Fry with images of street encampments, and people with blurred faces being arrested, sitting on sidewalks or committing assault, with clips of a green park, a running toddler and the ABC councillors, Mayor Sim and Vancouver Police Chief Steve Rai opening the new Woodwards police training centre earlier this year. "Task Force Barrage tackled organized crime, violence and street disorder, and the new VPD training centre is bringing desperately needed change to the Downtown Eastside," the narrator says, alleging Fry voted against against Task Force Barrage, a $5 million boost to police presence in the city's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. But that's not true, Fry told The Tyee in a recent interview, because Vancouver city council wasn't given opportunity to vote on Task Force Barrage. However, council did vote on whether or not to provide $5 million in funding for the task force in November 2025, nine months after the initially six-month task force started up. Fry, along with COPE Coun. Sean Orr and OneCity Vancouver Coun. Lucy Maloney, did vote against providing the $5 million, but were outvoted by their ABC council colleagues and then-independent Coun. Rebecca Bligh. The attack on Fry's record comes seven months after Sim and ABC Coun. Lenny Zhou were caught telling Chinese language news media that COPE Coun. Sean Orr had distributed illegal drugs in public on Christmas Day 2025. Zhou repeated this accusation in Mandarin on Wechat, a social media site popular with Vancouver's Chinese diaspora community. Initially Sim let Zhou take the blame, before Canadian Press revealed the accusation originated with Sim. Orr, who categorically denies the accusation, is currently suing Sim for defamation. The ABC majority council also declined to sanction Sim this past spring after the city's integrity commissioner determined Sim had harassed Orr on other occasions. Sim, Zhou and Orr are currently seeking re-election. Overall ABC's ads critiquing him are misleading, Fry told The Tyee. "They've conflated a lot of material into a narrative that they're trying to suggest that I'm somehow against public safety," said Fry. Fry told The Tyee that he supports police, b...

  3. 23 hrs ago

    BC Conservatives Are Not Far-Right, Findlay Says as Party Friction Continues

    As a by-election and possible snap election loom, the embattled BC Conservative leader is continuing to face dissent within her own party. By Jen St. Denis. Kerry-Lynne Findlay tried to present a united, more moderate version of the Conservative Party of BC at the annual Union of BC Municipalities convention this week. In a speech given Thursday to the province's mayors and councillors, Findlay criticized the provincial deficit and talked about the need to lower taxes, boost the economy and get tough on crime. She promised that a B.C. Conservative government would respect municipal leaders' autonomy and provide stable and predictable funding. She avoided talking about her desire to end the Indigenous rights legislation known as DRIPA, which had been a central feature of her leadership campaign. Nor did she mention socially conservative topics like her opposition to B.C.'s sexual orientation and gender identity, or SOGI, policy in schools. Instead, Findlay gave a standard UBCM speech. But it came at the tail end of a week that showed the party under Findlay's leadership continues to be in turmoil. The speech followed news stories about an emergency caucus meeting, MLAs demanding her resignation and emerging reports that the party may have had hired a private investigator to investigate former and possibly current members. B.C. Conservative MLA Claire Rattée had called Findlay out for failing to attend caucus meetings, writing in a Substack post that Findlay had left MLAs in the dark about "her policy plan for the fall legislative session or snap election." During a post-speech scrum, Findlay said she couldn't tell reporters which MLAs had asked her to step down. "That's up to them to tell you," she said. Findlay, who was elected leader of the party in May but does not yet have a seat, is running in a by-election in the riding of Abbotsford Mission that will be decided on Sept. 26. BC NDP Premier David Eby has been hinting this week that a snap election might be in the cards this fall. An election could allow his party to take advantage of favourable polling numbers and chaos in the opposition ranks. In addition to her relatively sober UBCM speech, Findlay posted a video on X this week in which she attempted to reassure voters that the party's platform hasn't changed since the 2024 provincial election, when the B.C. Conservatives won 44 seats and became the Official Opposition. (Today, the party has just 28 seats, with nine MLAs leaving after Findlay's leadership win.) "Frankly, I'm confused when people say that we have moved the party to the right or even the far-right," she said in the Sept. 16 video. At the scrum that followed her UBCM speech, the party arranged for a row of still-loyal B.C. Conservative MLAs to stand behind Findlay. Asked about the reports that the party had hired a private investigator to investigate MLAs, Findlay said she knew nothing about the allegation. On Thursday afternoon, CHEK News reported that its political correspondent, Rob Shaw, had been told he was one of 14 people on the investigator's list of subjects. CHEK reported the other investigative targets included several MLAS and former B. C. Conservative staffers, along with Lululemon billionaire and political financier Chip Wilson. Asked whether the B.C. Conservatives were prepared for a possible provincial election, Findlay responded that the party is "always ready" for a campaign. She then speculated that Eby might be planning to "nullify" the upcoming Abbotsford-Mission vote by calling a provincial election. "He could have called a general election, but instead he called a by-election, maybe just to keep me busy," Findlay said. "And then when he saw that I was going to win it, maybe he's going to nullify it so that I don't have that win." Findlay said she would welcome the return of various MLAs who have left the party during former leader John Rustad's tenure as well as her own. "We are open, as I said in my speech, to anyone who is on boa...

  4. 1d ago

    The Nation-Building Strategy Nobody Can Tariff

    Why Mark Carney should get government far more involved in delivering affordable housing for Canadians. By Ernest Lang. At the Canada Investment Summit in Toronto this month, Canada presented global investors with a 66-page prospectus: 167 projects across eight sectors, ranging from a $57-billion Arctic port expansion to coastal pipelines, critical minerals and quantum computing, all aimed at attracting $1 trillion in international capital. Behind that pitch sits the machinery. Prime Minister Mark Carney's Major Projects Office currently supports 18 major projects and eight transformative strategies deemed vital to Canada's economic interest. The projects make the headlines — LNG Canada's second phase, the Red Chris mine expansion, small modular reactors. The strategies are broader — critical minerals, Atlantic energy, port gateways. What is the common denominator? Every project on that list carries offtake risk. Beyond what our small domestic market consumes, someone outside this country must agree to buy what it produces, at a price that clears, under trade rules that hold. Gas, copper, power, minerals. Housing is the only nation-building asset available to Canada with no offtake risk at all. The demand is fundamentally domestic, demographically underwritten, and cannot be tariffed, blocked at a border, or repriced by another country's trade policy. That should make it the most attractive infrastructure category on the list. However, the Major Projects Office does not list housing anywhere. That omission is a strategic error, and it is fixable. Stephen Harper put a price on sovereignty at the launch of his book Flags of Canada last year: "I would be prepared to impoverish the country and not be annexed, if that was the option we're facing." That is a serious man telling the nation that we may be called to make real sacrifices for our sovereignty, and plenty of Canadians are quietly doing the same math. Singapore's history is the argument that it does not have to be a trade-off at all. As founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew documented in his memoir, From Third World to First, a city-state with virtually no natural resources — not even enough domestic fresh water — and a per-capita income comparable to Ghana's chose, as one of its first acts of sovereignty, to build housing for its own people. Because of this decision at a critical juncture in Singapore's history, it became one of the globe's richest countries, and its people thrive without ever choosing between independence and prosperity. They treated housing as infrastructure, and got both. I was born in Singapore, but my parents immigrated to Canada in the mid-1970s before I turned three. I have lived here for five decades, married a Canadian I met in high school, and raised two sons who are now in university. My perspective is not that of a homesick expatriate. It has been formed by five decades of being Canadian, and by my work in real estate and finance. The automatic view in my industry — one I held myself — is that supply is a market problem with a market solution, and that government involvement is the disease rather than the cure. But after spending the better part of a decade studying how other countries, including the country of my birth, house their people, I have concluded that the evidence points somewhere uncomfortable for those of us who naturally prefer market solutions. My firm is also a partner in one of the projects I use as part of the evidence below, and I will flag it when I get there. Housing is key to productivity Start with the number that should be driving Canadian economic policy and mostly isn't. The OECD has projected Canada will post some of the weakest real GDP per capita growth of any advanced economy through to 2050. Housing is not the only reason, but it is a larger one than its usual placement in the social policy file suggests. And the fact it is often missing from the economic policy file is a big part of the problem. Capital locked ...

  5. 1d ago

    David Eby Fuels Early Election Speculation

    As the Conservatives shed MLAs, and the NDP's polling looks comparatively rosy, the timing couldn't be better for BC's ruling party. By Andrew MacLeod. British Columbia Premier David Eby spurred talk of an early election as he laid out the choice voters would face. "I don't have any election announcement to make," Eby told reporters at a media availability in Surrey on Wednesday. "I do recognize that it's important for British Columbians to be able to have a say about the direction of our province given the incredible disruption that Donald Trump has brought to our economy and to our politics in the province, but I'm not making any announcement today about an election date." The next provincial election isn't scheduled until the fall of 2028, but in recent weeks Eby has declined to rule out calling the election early. On Wednesday he confirmed that the NDP has lined up Cheryl Oates, who until the end of August served as his interim chief of staff, to manage the campaign whenever it happens. The possibility of an early election has been a reality since 2024, when the NDP won a one-seat majority in the legislature, Eby said. "We have continually told Elections BC, I tell my caucus all the time, that we need to be election ready," he said. One of the factors, he added, is the health of some of the BC NDP's MLAs. Vancouver-Strathcona MLA Joan Phillip died in August, and two more NDP MLAs have cancer. Eby has not yet called a byelection to replace Phillip. A different byelection is set for Sept. 26 in Abbotsford-Mission, where the candidates include Conservative Party of BC Leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay and former NDP cabinet minister Pam Alexis, as well as representatives of the BC Greens, CentreBC and Libertarian party. The race will be close, Eby predicted. It comes as the Conservative caucus has shrunk to 28 MLAs, down more than a third from the 44 elected two years ago, with several of the departees citing a lack of confidence in Findlay's leadership. Seven former Conservatives have announced they will sit as part of a new party that doesn't yet have a name and is led on an interim basis by Kamloops Centre MLA Peter Milobar. Aside from the disarray and volatility of the opposition, the premier might also be encouraged by recent polls. On Wednesday the Angus Reid Institute found his approval rating had shot up to 41 per cent, a 10-point recovery from its last survey. An Ipsos poll released this week found support for the NDP at 45 per cent, a 10-point lead over the Conservatives. The timing is unlikely to get better for Eby and the NDP, though he may want to wait until after the Abbotsford-Mission byelection and the province's municipal elections, which are scheduled for Oct. 17. Or it could come sooner. Political consultant Brad Zubyk, who was former Conservative Party of BC leader John Rustad's chief of staff, posted on X that the chance is "greater than zero" that the NDP will go as soon as Saturday to make sure the campaign is underway before Findlay has a chance to lose the byelection. A spokesperson for Elections BC, which runs and oversees the province's election, confirmed in an email the organization has "determined we need to assume an increased readiness state" in part due to "recent public commentary and speculation." The agency says it will be inquiring about the availability of spaces for district electoral offices and voting places, restocking supplies and preparing to recruit election officials. It was also clear from Eby's remarks that he had considered what the defining issue of a potential election would be: the threat from U.S. President Donald Trump's administration. "I'm sure that's front of mind for many British Columbians as they consider the impact on their jobs, on their economic opportunities in the province, and there are two very different proposals on the table from the major political parties in the province," Eby said. He said the NDP has been working with the federal government to strengthen the...

  6. 1d ago

    Will BC's Land Zoning Plan Protect More Forests?

    New pilot sites will help determine whether restored areas are logged again, government ministers say. By Ben Parfitt. As the provincial government advances plans to carve British Columbia's lands into zones where logging and other industrial activities are permitted or barred, a former longtime public servant says he is struggling to not be cynical about what could lie ahead. In August, The Tyee broke the news that the provincial ministries of Forests and Water, Land and Resource Stewardship were proposing to divide B.C.'s vast and spectacularly diverse lands into "working forest," "multiple-use" and "conservation and protection" zones. The details were included in a leaked internal government email. The zoning exercise is happening as Premier David Eby tells Forests Minister Ravi Parmar to find more trees for companies to log in order to meet a logging target of 45 million cubic metres per year. Forest ecologist Andy MacKinnon, who worked as a research scientist in the Forests Ministry for 30 years, said he worries that the "Path to 45" initiative will drive the zoning plan. That initiative largely focuses on expediting logging approvals and increasing logging rates. MacKinnon worries that if the zoning plan prioritizes logging, land placed in the proposed conservation and protection zone might be focused in extremely steep terrain or alpine areas where forests have little or no commercial value. "It's entirely possible to protect large percentages of an awful lot of the province without having any timber supply impact whatsoever," MacKinnon told The Tyee. "A cynical man would suspect that that's what the government is up to." The Tyee asked Parmar why the zoning process is needed when both his ministry and the logging industry have operated for decades on the understanding that there is a "timber harvesting land base," or THLB, in the province where logging activities are permitted. Parmar said that while the THLB continues to exist, it "is not the THLB of yesterday," due to the surge in the number of wildfires and extensive insect attacks that have occurred in the province in recent decades. He said that as the zoning process unfolds, a guiding principle will be that there is "no net loss" in either the working forest or the area of land that is zoned as conserved or protected. Parmar said a zoning process for the province's forests is not a new idea and was contemplated by Gordon Campbell's BC Liberal government in the early 2000s. Establishing a working forest zone would bring greater certainty to the forest industry in terms of where it is approved to operate and would reduce paperwork by clearly defining broad areas in which companies could operate over time, Parmar said. "I don't see why they should be submitting cutting permits block by block," he said. Randene Neill, the province's minister of water, land and resource stewardship, said that more old-growth forests will be placed in the proposed conservation and protection zone and that the upcoming zoning decisions will be guided by advice the government received six years ago from professional foresters Al Gorley and Garry Merkel. That advice took the form of a 72-page report calling on the government to make a "paradigm shift" in its management of old-growth forests. The government later solicited the advice of an expert panel that recommended that logging be deferred in 2.6 million hectares of old-growth forests in the province. "We want to get folks on the same side to say, 'How can we do this work together to achieve the goals of a good, sustainable industry, conserve the areas that we know are important and really do that through the lens of conservation?'" Neill told The Tyee. The government is looking to apply the new zoning concept first in four candidate areas. It has identified one of those areas near Campbell River on Vancouver Island. It says the work will be done in partnership with the Na̲nwak̲olas Council, a group representing six north-Island Fir...

  7. 1d ago

    More Time Needed to Get Gas Royalties Right, Nation Says

    West Moberly Chief Roland Willson says 'significant' accounting error raises doubts about BC's commitment to getting its fair share. By Andrew MacLeod. The British Columbia government needs to halt plans to implement a new oil and natural gas royalty regime until the details can be independently assessed to make sure they are fair, says Roland Willson, Chief of the West Moberly First Nations. "Somebody has to oversee what's going on here because I don't have faith that the province is doing a good job on this," Willson said. "This is taxpayers' money that funds hospitals, funds the police, funds the teachers.... There's billions of dollars just floating out of the province and nobody's saying anything about it." An official with the Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions said the government intends to release details of the new framework later in the fall and implement it in January. Along with determining how much money the province collects from oil and gas, the royalty calculation affects the amount available to Treaty 8 First Nations, including West Moberly, through revenue-sharing agreements. The province is transitioning away from a piecemeal system where rates move depending on many factors, including market prices, how productive a well is, how old it is, what fluid it produces and various incentives introduced over decades. The provincial government recently admitted it had made accounting mistakes in this year's budget, flagged in June by Treaty 8 technical advisers consulting on the proposed new royalty framework, that significantly overestimated natural gas revenues. The province admitted to the mistake only in late August, after Business in Vancouver published a story about the discrepancy. On Monday Finance Minister Josie Osborne presented a quarterly update that reduced the estimated revenue to the province from royalties by $300 million a year due to the mistake. A further $225-million reduction in the current year was because of lower gas prices. The declines contributed to the province's already record deficit growing to $13.8 billion, another $450 million higher than when the budget was presented in February. While the error was significant, the bigger issue is whether the government can be trusted to make sure the province is fairly compensated for the publicly owned resource, Willson said. While Treaty 8 First Nations wanted to make sure they were being treated fairly, he added, they discovered in the process that the wider B.C. public isn't being treated fairly either. "What I don't understand is why the hell isn't anybody screaming about this," he said. "The people of British Columbia should be just furious about this." Review found royalty system was 'broken' The Energy Ministry announced work on the new royalty framework in 2022 after an independent review — by Nancy Olewiler from the school of public policy at Simon Fraser University and Jennifer Winter, who teaches in the school of public policy at the University of Calgary — described the existing system as "broken." "It does not support and contribute to government and societal goals," they wrote. "It consists of piecemeal modifications to a system that was designed for a different era with different risks, technology, and market conditions." The system was too complex and cost a lot both for the industry to comply with and for the government to administer and audit, they found. Overall, it was benefiting the industry over the public. "It has contributed to a significant decline in the Crown's share of the net economic value from petroleum and natural gas resources over the past 15 years and a transfer of value from the province to industry." The province pledged to fix the system and get a fair return for the resource. It introduced a transitional system and originally set Sept. 1, 2024, as the date a finalized new framework would be in place, though it has since delayed the implementation to January 2027. "The new framework will be based on ...

  8. 2d ago

    Why Patriotic Calls to Support 'Canada's' Oil Ring Hollow

    As Trump's US rakes in oilsands profits, we're sold a clouded narrative of energy sovereignty. By Shane Gunster. Canadians are reading labels again. Since Donald Trump launched his trade war against Canada, many of us have renewed our commitment to buying Canadian whenever we can. Politicians are talking about building Canadian, buying Canadian and reducing our dependence on the United States. Behind all of this is a pretty simple idea: ownership matters. Where something is made matters, but so does who owns the company making it and where the profits ultimately end up. Maybe it's time to take a closer look at the label on "Canadian" oil. According to a recent analysis from Canadians for Tax Fairness and the Alberta Federation of Labour, the four companies that dominate oilsands production — Canadian Natural Resources, Cenovus, Imperial Oil and Suncor — are close to three-quarters foreign-owned, with approximately 60 per cent of their shares owned by Americans. None are majority-owned by Canadians. Together, these companies account for more than 80 per cent of oilsands production. In recent years, a striking share of the record-breaking profits generated by these companies has been funnelled to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks. Between 2021 and 2024, the big four distributed almost $80 billion to shareholders. The Canadians for Tax Fairness report estimates that nearly three-quarters of that went to foreign owners, including more than $6 out of every $10 to U.S. shareholders. The current disruption of oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz is only intensifying this dynamic. Canadian consumers pay more and corporate profits go up, with much of it going directly into the pockets of foreign — primarily U.S. — investors. So just as Canadians are doing our best to ensure that the money we spend stays in this country, billions of dollars generated from Canadian resources are flowing south of the border. Yet most Canadians probably do not think of the companies that dominate the "Canadian" oil sector as majority foreign-owned, or that they are increasingly operated primarily to maximize returns to foreign shareholders. Instead, many are likelier to think of this industry as something that is inherently Canadian, an essential aspect of "who we are and what we do," as former Conservative politician Jim Prentice once put it. Why? Misled by 'symbolic nationalization' For more than two decades, the oil industry and its political supporters have mounted a remarkably successful campaign to portray this corporate, heavily foreign-owned industry as something that belongs to all of us. Oil becomes "Canadian energy." Its exports become "our exports." Policies that increase corporate revenues become investments in Canadian prosperity. I call this symbolic nationalization. The "Canadian" oil industry is a corporate, for-profit enterprise managed first and foremost in the interests of private, often global, shareholders. Yet a flood of advertising, public relations, political speeches, industry advocacy and sympathetic media coverage has relentlessly encouraged us to imagine the sector as though it had actually been nationalized and operated in the public interest. Symbolic nationalization performs a kind of political alchemy: it transforms the specific interests of the oil sector into the general interests of all Canadians. So what is good for Suncor, Imperial Oil or Cenovus becomes good for all of us. In three open letters published in the months following Trump's initial attacks, some of Canada's most powerful CEOs seized upon the threat to Canadian sovereignty to pitch an agenda of expanding fossil fuel production, higher corporate profits and regulatory rollbacks as nation building of the first order. Higher profits for the oil industry become prosperity for all Canadians. Expanding fossil fuel production and infrastructure becomes an exercise in economic sovereignty. Dismantling environmental protection and climate po...

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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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