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At Canada’s National Observer, I covered Toronto-based Thomson Reuters’ $125-million USD contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to use Thomson Reuters’ detailed database of American residents’ personal information to assist in a crackdown on alleged immigration and voter fraud.

@jeremy.appelIn my latest for @Canada’s National Observer, I speak to critics of Thomson Reuters’ $125-million contract to sell detailed personal information of millions of American residents to ICE #greenscreen #fyp #viral #journalism #cdnpoli

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I appeared on Pivot Points, a brand new public affairs show on CJSR, to speak alongside Taproot Edmonton publisher Karen Unland, activist and entrepreneur Haruun Ali, and host Asad Chishti about AI, the climate crisis, police accountability and more.

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In June 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney nixed the Digital Services Tax, which would have charged American tech giants just 3% of their Canadian revenue for the privilege of doing business here.

The prime minister explicitly pitched this rollback as a goodwill gesture to restart moribund trade negotiations with U.S. President Donald Trump and avoid the prospect of future tariffs.

This became overarching justification, whether implicit or explicit, for Carney rolling back capital gains taxes, dismantling various environmental regulations, engaging in a rapid military buildup, enabling increased deportations and state surveillance with the Strong Borders Act, and sending representatives to the Trump administration’s preposterous summit on the scourge of left-wing extremism.

None of it was enough. With Trump announcing on Monday that he is imposing 50% tariffs on $20 billion of Canadian goods, or 5% of exports to the U.S., under a previously unused section of the 1930 Tariff Act, the material results of Carney’s approach are clearer than ever.

“The lesson they taught Carney and most Canadians is that if you give up something pre-emptively, you’ll get nothing in return,” Christopher Sands, director of the Center for Canadian Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., told the Globe and Mail.

While it’s easy to write off Carney’s unrequited policy concessions as a failed negotiating tactic, I suggest it’s more helpful to understand them as part of a broader corporate authoritarian consensus that Carney is willfully facilitating, acting less as a head of state and more as the CEO of Canada Inc., maximizing value for shareholders.

Remember, the initial impetus for tariffs was border security. When the Canadian government gave Trump what he wanted on the border, the justification shifted as the tariffs ramped up.

The major tariffs Canada faces are 50% on steel and aluminum, 25% on auto parts, 10% on softwood lumber (a long-time trade irritant between Canada and the U.S.), 30% on selected upholstered wooden furniture, and 50% on cabinets and vanities.

Canada has its own retaliatory tariffs of 25% on steel and aluminum, 25% on auto parts, and 25% on steel derivatives. The federal government has dropped every other retaliatory tariff in a stated effort to convince the Americans to renew USMCA with some modifications.

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All provinces except for Alberta and Saskatchewan have banned U.S. alcohol from their shelves in response to American tariffs. Trump cited that, alongside protectionist measures to protect Canadian dairy farmers from U.S. competition — the elimination of which is a perpetual obsession of Canadian conservative commentators — and the retaliatory steel tariffs as justification for the latest round of tariffs.

And now U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer says the administration is pursuing interim bilateral agreements with Canada and Mexico before negotiating a deeper restructuring of USMCA — one which will no doubt put U.S. corporations at an even greater advantage.

“There will always be another agenda on the table, another imagined slight, a goalpost to move, or just a need to make others dance,” writes National Post comment editor Carson Jerema in a rare flash of insight.

But then the right-wing ideological enforcer immediately — and almost certainly inadvertently — urges the Liberal prime minister to stay the course.

“There isn’t much Canadians can do, except to look inward, cut taxes, deregulate and, yes, cut trade barriers, to bring up our productivity and incentivize businesses to invest here,” Jerema added.

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Through all these trade measures and countermeasures, it’s important not to lose sight of the way Carney is fundamentally restructuring the Canadian state to serve the interests of largely foreign capital and in so doing “help make America great again.”

In this sense, the trade dispute provides Carney with a necessary crisis to build popular consensus for restructuring the Canadian state along corporate lines.

Whether by ramming through fossil fuel and other industrial projects on an expedited timeline, abandoning Canada’s climate commitments while wildfires rage, supporting the U.S. and Israel’s aimless war on Iran, permitting Canadian companies to profit off the Trump administration’s violations of migrant rights, and continued military procurement from American defence contractors, Carney is largely operating in tandem with Trump.

And what are Canadians getting in return? The beginnings of two-tiered health care, which Carney could stop at any time by reducing health transfer payments under the Canada Health Act; the proliferation of AI into all aspects of our lives without our consent; a carbon capture hub that is already slated to cost more and reduce emissions less than initially advertised; a 60% cut to nature conservation; and the authorization of pesticides that the government has deemed harmful to our health.

With Trump’s annexationist threats and “51st state” taunts, I’m sympathetic to the notion that any Canadian leader would need to tread lightly in disentangling Canada from the U.S. orbit, lest we become Ukraine to America’s Russia.

There’s no doubt a delicate balance to be struck in pursuing alternate trade relations and alliances, especially as Alberta’s impending quasi-independence referendum poses a homegrown opportunity for the U.S. to destabilize Canada.

But when we examine the grand scheme of Carney’s approach to U.S. relations, it becomes increasingly clear that this balance is entirely off kilter, with hollow rhetoric of protecting Canadian sovereignty used to obscure Carney and Trump’s shared ambition of restructuring their states as profit-making enterprises for a select few.

At a certain point, one must concede that Carney is doing all this simply because he wants to be the CEO of Canada Inc.

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At Alberta Native News, I covered Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak’s remarks at the AFN’s annual general assembly in Ottawa, in which she criticized the federal government’s weakening of proposed clean water legislation.

I also reported on a recent study that shows Indigenous women are more likely to be disrespected and mistreated while giving birth than white women and other racialized women.

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The day after Alberta NDP leader and Edmonton-Strathcona MLA Naheed Nenshi announced that he plans to run for a Calgary seat in the 2027 provincial election, the former two-term chair of the Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) announced her intention to seek the nomination for the province’s safest NDP seat.

Trisha Estabrooks, who worked as a CBC journalist for 17 years and ran for the federal NDP in Edmonton Centre in last year’s election, launched her nomination bid in Friday’s sweltering heat on a pub patio in the riding she’s seeking to represent.

“Nothing gets me more fired up than this separation bullshit and the panicked antics and dangerous policies at the UCP,” Estabrooks said of her decision to enter provincial politics at this time.

Former Alberta NDP leader Ray Martin, whom Estabrooks credited with recruiting her to run for the EPSB in 2021, Edmonton-Strathcona MP Heather McPherson and the riding’s former NDP MP Linda Duncan were in attendance, as were Lori Sigurdson — the only member of the Alberta NDP caucus to make an appearance — and Alberta Union of Provincial Employees president Sandra Azocar.

Estabrooks credited her journalistic work with influencing her decision to enter politics nearly a decade ago.

“Journalism was a really good fit until it wasn't,” she told the audience. “What happened was I started to develop pretty strong ideas and opinions, and so I felt compelled to express those in a more democratic way.”

Estabrooks resigned as board chair in October 2023 to run in Edmonton Centre in the next federal election.

She remained as a trustee until January 2025, when she resigned from the board to support striking educational assistants, making her the second trustee after Marcia Hole to do so.

Despite campaigning for 18 months, the former EPSB chair finished a distant third behind Liberal Eleanor Olszewski — now the minister of emergency management and community resilience — and Conservative Sayid Ahmed, although her 15.5% vote share was more than double the NDP’s disastrous nation-wide performance.

This time, Estabrooks, who’s been working for public health-care advocacy group Friends of Medicare for the past year, is running in a riding she can’t lose.

Ex-premier Rachel Notley’s former riding has been represented by the NDs for 36 of the past 40 years, with the brief interregnum occurring courtesy of Liberal MLA Al Zawriny, who defeated New Democrat Barrie Chivers in 1993.

Nenshi — famously not an Edmontonian — won the riding with 82% of the vote in the 2025 by-election following Notley’s resignation and his ascendancy to the party leadership.

Estabrooks passed vetting for the nomination a few weeks ago and has since already raised the maximum amount for an Alberta NDP nomination candidate — $5,000.

It’s no secret that Estabrooks is a vastly different flavour of New Democrat than the incumbent Edmonton-Strathcona MLA.

Nenshi has repeatedly sought to distance himself from the federal party while Estabrooks has made no secret of her affiliation — a significant fault line within the Alberta NDP.

“I'm looking forward to bold ideas from our party,” Estabrooks said, outlining some of her priorities as a candidate:

Public dollars for public schools. Let's fast-track renewable energy projects. This one's near and dear to my heart: keeping our public health care public and shutting down two tiers. Not just restoring AISH [Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped], but increasing it. On protecting workers and human rights, these are fundamental things government should be doing, and on making policy changes that put people first and their kids first.

Speaking to reporters, the nomination candidate identified these positions as aspirational, accepting that not all of them will necessarily make it to the party’s platform for the next election, scheduled for October 2027.

“When you run as a candidate, it's a chance to stand up for what you believe in, and so in my speech, you could hear what I stand for,” said Estabrooks.

“We're at a moment where the party is actively working on their platform, and I fully expect to see some strong policies come forward from the party as we get closer to that election.”

It’s unclear at this point whether there will be a competitive nomination for Edmonton-Strathcona.

Phil Johnston, who was widely rumoured to be pursuing the nod, was at the launch, with the confirmed candidate thanking him for his “support.”

Asked whether she anticipates competition, Estabrooks was cautious not to preclude the nomination outcome.

“I think competitive races are good for our party,” she said. “At the same time … if this goes to be an uncontested race, then that's the will of the membership and the will of the party.”

The original version of this story misstated the amount of money Estabrooks has raised. She raised the maximum amount a candidate is permitted to raise under Alberta NDP rules. Fundraising for nomination contests is no longer provincially regulated.

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The body ostensibly tasked with providing civilian oversight to the Edmonton Police Service (EPS) isn’t interested in hearing criticism of Chief Warren Driechel’s February trip to Israel.

On Thursday, the Edmonton Police Commission (EPC) held its first meeting since this newsletter revealed that Driechel travelled to two illegal West Bank settlements, which Canada has never recognized as part of Israel, and met with a paramilitary police unit that executed two unarmed Palestinians on camera.

The chief also visited a facial-recognition surveillance system in occupied East Jerusalem that monitors Palestinian residents 24/7 before meeting with a representative of a mysterious “Company C.” Edmonton police have piloted facial-recognition software on body-worn cameras from Corsight AI, an Israeli firm.

It’s unclear if anyone on the EPC was aware of these details, let alone the trip itself, when it was unilaterally approved by chair Ben Henderson, a former city councillor, who attended the July 16 meeting virtually.

Following a butchered land acknowledgement at the meeting’s outset from commissioner Karen Leibovici — a former Liberal MLA and ex-city councillor — EPC vice-chair Shazia Amiri laid out the contours under which speakers could address the commission.

“Commission meetings are not a forum for discussing international conflicts, geopolitical events, or matters outside the commission's mandate,” said Amiri.

“The commission has made it clear that matters related to conflicts in the Middle East are outside our mandate and will not be addressed as part of this forum.”

She added that the EPC is in the midst of a policy “review of the police chief’s business travel … to determine whether any changes are required,” which will be discussed at a future meeting.

Amiri did not elaborate on why having a review in process should preclude members of the public from expressing their concerns with his choice of destination.

As CityNews reported last week, several members of the public, all of whom have been critical of Driechel’s Israel trip at previous meetings, have been banned from speaking at EPC meetings until 2027.

In 2024, the EPC unanimously passed a motion empowering executive director Matthew Barker to filter out speakers whose past commentary he regards as “defamatory, derogatory, and demeaning.”

The narrowing of what the EPC considers within its purview put those who were permitted to speak in a bind, noted Katy Ingraham, a local police accountability advocate who was the first speaker at the meeting.

“I don't actually really quite understand the public engagement portion of these meetings anymore. As someone who has engaged in this process for years now, it seems like we're tip-toeing around democracy,” she told commissioners.

In an interview outside the EPC chambers at city hall, Ingraham elaborated on her concerns.

“This commission has been continually moving the goalposts as for what the public can talk about,” she told The Orchard. “As a civilian oversight body, who is your allegiance to? Because it is certainly not the public who has very valid questions about transparency and accountability.”

Given the fine line between geopolitics and the Israeli policing practices Driechel went to study, some of the speakers who got through the EPC censors were able to provide substantive critiques.

Local nurse Kelsey Lyseng suggested that the EPC update its policies to prevent police from engaging in “partnerships or training exchanges with countries that are subjecst of documented human rights violations.”

This same suggestion was made at a previous meeting by Youssef Deiab, one of the speakers who have been suspended from addressing the commission.

Beth Capper, an English and film studies professor at the University of Alberta, linked the EPS’s piloting of Corsight AI technology to Driechel’s Israel trip, specifically citing this outlet’s reporting. (Thanks Beth!)

“The police chief's visit to Israel, where police have many documented abuses and human rights violations against Palestinians … raises fears about racial profiling and human rights violations here in Edmonton, particularly in Edmonton's Indigenous, Palestinian, Muslim and Arab communities,” said Capper.

“The privacy concerns that come with the adoption of facial-recognition technology only compound these issues.”

Other speakers who raised these concerns, however, were shouted down by the acting chair.

The afternoon’s penultimate speaker, another nurse, was repeatedly interrupted by Amiri — once after she mentioned the number of health-care workers murdered by Israeli forces and again when she raised issues with the procurement of Corsight’s technology.

“But it’s related,” she objected after Amiri’s second interruption.

“It’s actually not,” replied Amiri.

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When the nurse attempted to explain its relevance, Amiri said her time was up and called on security to physically remove her.

The final speaker was Ryan O’Toole, an Indigenous woman who attempted to connect the EPS’s disproportionate use of force against Indigenous people in Edmonton to Israel’s violence against Palestinians, which has been characterized as genocidal by the International Association of Genocide Scholars and a United Nations commission of inquiry.

“What happens to Palestinians happens to us as Indigenous Peoples. We are not two separate struggles. We fight for our lives in the face of dispossession of land, surveillance and elimination,” said O’Toole.

“Miss O'Toole, I've already been quite clear, so your time is now up,” Amiri interjected.

“No, but this has to do with...”

“Thank you so much for that,” added Amiri, who again dispatched peace officers to kick a member of the public out of the meeting.

The EPC isn’t alone in its unwillingness to discuss details of Driechel’s Israel jaunt.

The corporate press has been as uninterested in reporting the documented details of Driechel’s trip as it has been in providing the context for why a police chief’s trip to Israel at this moment is so incendiary.

With rare and honourable exception, mainstream news reporting on Driechel’s travel neglected to mention that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in 2024 that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal and “tantamount to apartheid,” that the ICJ is currently hearing allegations of genocide against Israel, or that Israel’s minister who oversees its national police — Itamar Ben-Gvir — is sanctioned by Canada.

The substance of Driechel’s critics’ complaints was removed from the equation. Meanwhile, Israel’s supporters were permitted to state as fact with zero pushback that criticizing the police chief’s travel choices is itself a form of stochastic antisemitic violence.

Mayor Andrew Knack, who was initially critical of Driechel’s Israel travel, has since gone silent. He didn’t respond to The Orchard’s inquiry about the chief’s itinerary after it was first reported.

Edmonton-Strathcona NDP MP , who serves as the party’s foreign affairs critic, did respond, calling the details of Driechel’s trip that this newsletter uncovered “deeply disturbing.”

Her statement to The Orchard is worth quoting at length:

The Edmonton Police Service should not be taking lessons from paramilitary forces engaged in an illegal occupation and accused of multiple human rights violations including extra-judicial executions. Chief Driechel and the EPS need to be transparent with the public and come clean as to what exactly the Chief was doing on this trip, who he met with and why, and how Israel’s dangerous and dehumanizing military policing practices in the illegally occupied West Bank will be applied in Edmonton.

Chief Driechel declined to speak to reporters after Thursday’s meeting.

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Scholar of right-wing populism Carmen Celestini recently released a book, God’s Angry Men: The Political Legacy of the John Birch Society, which details how the John Birch Society’s paranoid conspiracism influenced the trajectory of right-wing politics in the U.S.

Reaching the zenith of its political power during Barry Goldwater’s ill-fated 1964 presidential campaign, there’s a clear parallel with how Alberta Premier Danielle Smith navigates the far-right populists in her midst.

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• God’s Angry Men (Bloomsbury Press, 2026)

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A scholar of conspiracy theories, religion, extremism, and hate, and how these impact politics in North America. Let's look below the salacious to find the cause and implications.

By Dr. Carmen Celestini

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Regulations won’t fix Alberta’s legislation enabling physicians to work in both publicly funded and privately insured practice, according to a new legal analysis presented on Parliament Hill.

Lawyer Emma Phillips publicly shared her findings via video feed at a Tuesday news conference. Attending in-person were representatives of the Canadian Health Coalition, which solicited her analysis, Canadian Doctors for Medicare, Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights, and Alberta’s Friends of Medicare.

The group of public health-care advocates assembled in Ottawa to call on the federal government to intervene against Alberta’s impending two-tiered health care by withholding health transfer payments from the province.

Bill 11, or the Health Statutes Amendment Act, which goes into effect in September, will make Alberta the first Canadian province to permit physicians to work in both the publicly funded and privately insured systems.

The legislation establishes a list of normally publicly funded procedures for which physicians will be able to charge privately for expedited care, in effect creating a paid fast lane for health care.

The Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association, which has 18 registered lobbyists representing the interests of the insurance industry in Alberta, has boasted that Bill 11 treats them as a “key partner in the healthcare system,” as reported by The Breach.

The Canada Health Act requires that provinces “must provide for insured health services on uniform terms and conditions and on a basis that does not impede or preclude, either directly or indirectly whether by charges made to insured persons or otherwise, reasonable access to those services by insured persons.”

“It has been evident since Bill 11 was passed into law in December that nothing in any regulation can undo the fundamental harm created by the legislation, it is the very structure of dual practice introduced by Bill 11, which is inherently offside the Canada Health Act,” explained Phillips.

On June 18, Minister of Hospital and Surgical Health Services Adriana LaGrange announced regulations for dual practice, which she claimed would protect the public health-care system.

These include establishing a minimum number of hours that physicians must work in the public system before becoming eligible for dual practice, which will be different for each physician based on their region and the number of hours they normally work.

Dual-practice physicians will also be required to keep separate records of their public and private practices, which Phillips emphasized is the only regulation that has been legislated thus far.

Procedures for life-threatening conditions, including cancers, will not be eligible for the dual-practice model.

“The regulations continue to allow Albertans to be charged extra billing and user fees. They continue to permit some Albertans with the ability to pay to jump the queue, regardless of medical need, and they create inequitable access to health care for Albertans based solely on ability to pay,” said Phillips.

She added that by permitting physicians to bill privately for otherwise publicly insured services, the government has established “structural incentives to shift other critical health resources already in short supply into the private payment sector, thereby increasing wait times and reducing access in the publicly insured sphere.”

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After the regulations were unveiled, federal health minister Marjorie Michel said the ministry is “taking the time to review them carefully and engage with Alberta officials to better understand their components and potential impacts before they are implemented.”

Under the Canada Health Act, Phillips noted, the federal government is obligated “to deduct amounts equal to the extra billing and user fees” from the Canada Health Transfer, from which Alberta is due to receive $7 billion this year.

“Legally,” she emphasized, “these deductions are mandatory. It is not up to the discretion of the minister.”

The federal health minister also has the discretionary ability to withhold additional funds “over and above the dollar for dollar deductions resulting from extra billing and user charges” if they believe the “core principles” of the Act are being violated, added Phillips.

“What Minister Michel cannot do is to continue to sit on the sidelines as Alberta prepares to dismantle Medicare when the Canada Health Act itself requires the federal government to act,” she said.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has himself been conspicuously silent about Bill 11.

Portraying public health care as the sort of “nation-building project” for which the prime minister has expressed fondness, Friends of Medicare executive director Chris Gallaway noted that Carney’s quiescence “has been interpreted purposely by those seeking to privatize and profit off of our health in Alberta as consent for what is being implemented in Alberta.”

A June open letter signed by leaders of several right-wing think tanks and advocacy groups applauded Carney for his “openness to health care reforms being pursued in Alberta.”

Canadian Health Coalition chair Jason MacLean cautioned that if Carney fails to meaningfully challenge the erosion of universal health care embodied by Bill 11, that “will be his legacy.”

With Alberta’s Oct. 19 quasi-independence referendum approaching, MacLean argued that Carney’s intervention to protect Albertans’ public health care would demonstrate “exactly what staying in Canada delivers for them.”

“None of us are here to defend the status quo,” emphasized Dr. Melanie Bechard, an Ottawa-based paediatric emergency physician who chairs Canadian Doctors for Medicare.

“Too often, I see young patients, children who are desperately waiting for surgeries, who come to the emergency department with medical complications related to their delayed treatment.

“But let me be clear: the solution to this issue is not dual practice.”

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Other countries that have adopted the dual-practice model, including Australia, Ireland, the U.K., Brazil and Chile, have seen an increase in wait times in the public system, according to a May 2026 correspondence in leading British medical journal The Lancet from University of Calgary public health researcher Babatope Adebiyi.

Australia, whose model is the closest to the one Alberta is introducing, has longer wait times than Canada for key procedures, such as cataract surgery, coronary artery bypass graft, hip replacements and knee replacements.

“Better solutions exist,” said Bechard. She cited team-based care, centralized intake referrals and enabling surgeons to earn overtime pay as “proven strategies” for strengthening public health care.

Ana Laura Zarco Fuentes of Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights explained that her work is dependant upon a “strong public health-care system.”

“When access to essential care depends on the ability to pay, we put individual and public health at greater risk, and we create new barriers to essential and timely care,” said Fuentes.

“These barriers fall hardest on those already facing challenges: young people, workers in precarious employment, newcomers, survivors of domestic violence, and families struggling to afford groceries.

“These are the people who cannot simply pay their way to the front of the line.”

The Ministry of Hospital and Surgical Health Services didn’t acknowledge a request for comment from LaGrange by deadline.

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This piece was originally published in Ricochet.

More than half of Canadian daily newspapers are owned by Postmedia, giving the MAGA-aligned newspaper chain enormous influence over the flow of information and how current events are perceived across the country.

In addition to its explicitly Conservative flagship national newspaper, the National Post, Postmedia has a monopoly on major daily newspapers in Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Saskatoon and Regina, in addition to owning the Toronto Sun and Montreal Gazette.

“In the last 10 years, they’ve been imposing an ever further right-wing agenda on their newspapers,” Marc Edge, author of the Postmedia Effect: How Vulture Capitalism Is Wrecking Our News, told Ricochet.

“It’s been quite a transformation of our largest newspaper chain into a conservative monolith, and it keeps growing because Postmedia keeps buying more and more newspapers and newspaper chains.”

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Months after Postmedia purchased the Sun chain of tabloid newspapers, it merged newsrooms in Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton, resulting in 90 layoffs. In 2024, Postmedia purchased SaltWire, Atlantic Canada’s largest newspaper chain, and the Halifax Herald, resulting in 60 layoffs.

The Halifax Herald was the company that owned the Chronicle Herald, an independent Halifax daily newspaper that is almost as old as Canada itself, which was owned by the local Dennis family for much of its existence.

When the sale to Postmedia was announced, former Chronicle Herald managing editor Dan Leger said that it “realizes a longstanding fear, soulless right-wing dark money buying the fine old paper,” which he predicted would be a “vicious blow to local coverage.”

In 2019, journalist Sean Craig reported that “Postmedia has given a directive for all of its papers to shift to the political right, in an unprecedented, centralized fashion.”

Since then, the range of acceptable opinion at Postmedia, and the National Post in particular, has shifted even further rightwards, with the company’s coverage serving to normalize Alberta separatist sentiments, anti-trans bigotry, and state repression against Palestine solidarity activism.

Ricochet spoke to several current and former Postmedia journalists, who have been granted pseudonyms so they could speak freely without professional repercussions.

“There’s definitely an agenda,” said Drew, a Postmedia journalist at a daily newspaper. “Sometimes it expresses itself in an overt way and sometimes it’s much more subtle.”

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Drew emphasized that Postmedia’s agenda largely manifests itself in the narrow range of opinion reflected in its newspapers’ editorial pages across Canada.

Commentary, they said, is heavily skewed towards conservative commentators, and in some cases “fairly extreme conservative commentators,” but at the local level, there exists a firm wall between commentary and reportage.

That’s less the case at the National Post, where news reporting is frequently, although not always, torqued along the lines of its opinion pages, which a Postmedia reporter at another daily, Bailey, characterized as a “dumpster fire.”

While Bailey described the local newspapers as generally operating as their own “little fiefdoms,” they acknowledged that Postmedia does impose National Post content on local papers.

Local editors have no control over which National Post columns reporting or sponsored content appear on their websites. Additionally, the “B” section of every Postmedia daily consists of a truncated version of the National Post, which is also imposed on local editors.

“Some of their garbage makes it into our pages or onto our website,” Bailey told Ricochet.

American ownership

Since 2016, Postmedia has been majority owned by Chatham Asset Management, a New Jersey-based hedge fund owned by Republican megadonor Anthony Melchiorre, who dined with President Donald Trump shortly after his initial election that year.

Chatham also owns the National Enquirer, the celebrity gossip tabloid that conspired with Trump to kill a story on an adulterous relationship, and in 2020, it purchased the McClatchy newspaper chain, which owns the Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee, and the Kansas City Star.

It’s difficult to know for certain how much input Postmedia’s American ownership has in its editorial direction. Foreign ownership restrictions prevent Chatham from appointing more than a third of Postmedia’s board.

“Is there a case to be made that what this company effectively represents is a debt factory that can be used to sell securities to American investors? Absolutely,” said Parker, a former reporter at a Postmedia city daily.

“Does that necessarily trickle down to somebody that’s doing day-to-day reporting? Probably not at a national level.”

It’s undeniable that the debt-ridden chain’s ownership by a hedge fund has drained it of resources that could be spent on news reporting, which itself serves an ideological function.

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“Since Chatham took a majority stake in Postmedia, the company has cut its work force, shuttered papers across Canada, reduced salaries and benefits, and centralized editorial operations in a way that has made parts of its 106 newspapers into clones of one another,” wrote New York Times reporter Edmund Lee at the time of the McClatchy deal.

The Times noted that between 2016 and 2020, Postmedia has laid off 1,200 employees. In 2023, Postmedia announced plans to lay off 11 per cent of its editorial employees.

In 2021, Postmedia accepted more than $35 million in federal government subsidies. Writing to shareholders, CEO Andrew MacLeod said the company would likely not be profitable if not for “government support,” PressProgress reported at the time.

The company told its shareholders that the taxpayer dollars are, in fact, “key pillars” of its business strategy, despite spending the previous year calling pandemic emergency government subsidies “lavish handouts” for “welfare slackers,” while pundits call for the defunding of the CBC.

Postmedia’s combined cost cutting and acquisitions, Edge explained, represents an “insidious process,” in which Postmedia expands its national reach while reducing news outlets’ capacities to produce local content, resulting in Postmedia “feeding us the National Post from coast to coast.”

“It’s becoming more and more a National Post country,” he said.

How balanced is reporting actually?

Antonia Zerbisias, the Toronto Star’s former media critic, told Ricochet that she rejects the notion of reporting that is objective and entirely free from outside influence, noting the confluence of internal and external pressures on newsrooms shape the final product.

“No matter what, you know someone is looking over your shoulder when you are writing a story,” said Zerbisias.

Citing sociologist Warren Breed’s 1955 study, “Social Control in the Newsroom,” Edge noted the “unwritten rules” that govern mainstream media.

“You learn as a young journalist what will and what will not get in your newspaper, and you learn to go along to get along, or else you end up getting out,” he said.

Self-censorship is a phrase that came up repeatedly in interviews with Postmedia reporters who spoke to Ricochet. But the need for self-censorship doesn’t apply to Postmedia columnists and reporters who are aligned with Postmedia’s political agenda.

“Look at the shit they get away with,” said Bailey.

Adam Zivo, a National Post columnist who travelled to Ukraine to cover Russia’s war, has boasted of working for Ukrainian intelligence to entrap an individual he suspected was a Chinese spy.

Tristin Hopper, whose Twitter bio describes himself as a “columnist and reporter” for the National Post, has fantasized online about running over pro-Palestinian protestors, whom he referred to as “watermelon zombies,” with his car. In 2019, he gained infamy for posting a photo with his foot on a dead raccoon, boasting that he stomped it to death.

Toronto Sun parliamentary reporter Bryan Passifiume endorsed ICE officers’ killing of 37-year-old mother Renee Good in Minneapolis in January 2026 on Twitter, echoing discredited Trump administration claims that Good attempted to hit ICE agents with her vehicle.

“In this case, the far left ended up catching a few well-deserved bullets for their miscalculation,” Passifiume said.

He was suspended for a few weeks for this remark, but has since returned to writing heavily editorialized reporting.

Boosting Alberta grievance narratives

The National Post has long served as a forum for Western Canadian grievance politics, which has culminated in an October 19 referendum in Alberta on whether to have a future independence referendum.

With U.S. President Donald Trump threatening to annex Canada as the “51st state,” and Alberta separatist leaders meeting repeatedly with Trump administration officials, National Post founder Conrad Black has repeatedly taken to his newspaper to praise Trump, who pardoned Black of his 2007 fraud conviction during his first term.

In a January 2026 column, headlined, “Formidable Trump changes the world,” Black wrote that Trump’s “enemies still have no idea of his formidability.”

A May 2026 Black piece, entitled, “Canada better hope that Alberta doesn’t leave with its wealth,” the disgraced media baron opined that “if Alberta is not allowed to export its oil and natural gas and satisfy foreign demands for it, there is likely a majority in that province who would prefer to secede from Canada.”

Support for Alberta independence has remained consistent at about 27 per cent support, according to respected Calgary-based pollster Janet Brown.

The Post hasn’t explicitly supported Alberta independence, instead taking an approach similar to Premier Danielle Smith, a former columnist at Postmedia’s Calgary Herald, giving credence to separatist narratives without endorsing separatists’ proposed solutions.

Former premier Jason Kenney took a similarly affirming approach to Alberta separatist grievances, launching the Fair Deal Panel to send chair Preston Manning across the province to catalogue how unfairly Alberta is treated by the federal government and scheduling a referendum on whether equalization should be removed from the Canadian Constitution.

Kenney now sits on Postmedia’s board, a development which Postmedia staffer Drew said they and their colleagues found concerning, given Kenney’s tendency to publicly attack “legacy media” reporting that doesn’t suit his political agenda.

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“There’s always been kind of a fine line between journalism and politics,” said Edge, “but you can tell a lot about a publication or a newspaper chain by who they select to sit on their board.”

Kenney has recently been on a media rehabilitation tour, in which he’s been cast as a principled opponent of the very Alberta separatist forces that he attempted to cultivate as premier. Postmedia papers have played a key role in this rehabilitation campaign, although other outlets have been happy to lend a hand.

Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid wrote a February 2026 op-ed claiming that if Kenney were still premier, “there would be no coddling of separatists.”

“The Alberta government would stand firm for Canada. He’d be fierce about it, no waffling,” Braid wrote in a column that was republished in the Edmonton Journal, Woodstock Sentinel Review and the Beacon Herald in Stratford, Ontario.

Zerbisias, who was a CBC reporter in Montreal during the original 1980 Quebec Referendum, sees a parallel in the way press coverage amplified the spectre of separatism until it became mainstream.

“It was hyped up and torqued by the media in a way that caused alarm and economic harm to Quebec and especially Montreal,” she said, adding that the same dynamic applies to Alberta separatism.

A National Post news report on a poll showing support for Alberta separatism reaching a five-year high of 27 per cent was reprinted in the Journal, Herald, Ottawa Citizen,Montreal Gazette, Vancouver Sun, Leader Post, StarPhoenix, Windsor Star, London Free Press, Sentinel Review and Beacon Herald.

Climate science denial

A key motivator for Alberta separatism is the desire to liberate the oil and gas industry from the federal Liberals’ climate policies. On this question, there’s no daylight between the National Post and the separatists.

On the opinion side, the Post has always taken what Zerbisias referred to as a “drill, baby, drill” approach to oil and gas, leading inevitably to dismissing and downplaying climate concerns.

Recent headlines in the Post include “Pushback to climate alarmism a global vibe shift,” “The high cost of climate alarmism” and “The ‘existential’ climate crisis is fading away.”

Regarding reporting, Edge said it’s important to look not only at what is being reported but also “what stories are not covered.” The National Post simply doesn’t cover the climate crisis, leaving the only word on the matter to its climate science-denying opinion columnists, including the newspaper’s founder Conrad Black and longtime Financial Post columnist and comment editor Terrence Corcoran.

A 2021 letter in the Journal of Environmental Research that examined the accuracy of climate coverage of 17 newspapers in Canada, the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand. The National Post ranked dead last.

“Many of Postmedia’s readers are living in climate-impacted communities, and those readers are having their lives and livelihoods deleteriously affected by those impacts,” Sean Holman, the University of Victoria’s Wayne Crookes Professor of Environmental and Climate Journalism, told Ricochet.

“It is a profound disservice that the news media has done to their audiences to not adequately explain why those impacts are happening, given everything that we know about climate change.”

Israel and antisemitism

Nowhere is the line between reporting and commentary more blurred at Postmedia than coverage of Israel’s conduct and allegations from pro-Israel groups that antisemitism in Canada has reached crisis proportions.

In a March 2026 report on a World Symposium Against Antizionism scheduled for Toronto, Passifiume writes that “Toronto’s anti-Israel and far-left activists began a well-organized campaign targeting Toronto’s Jewish community mere days after the October 7, 2023 attacks.”

“Military operations by Israel and the United States to eliminate Iran’s despotic and dangerous regime only renewed anti-Jewish sentiment in Canada, with gunmen opening fire on three synagogues earlier this month, and several Jewish-owned businesses finding themselves the target of antisemitic vandals,” Passifiume added without explaining how he knew the vandals’ motivation.

In a story framed around Toronto-born Israeli deputy foreign affairs minister Sharren Haskel’s calls for the RCMP to investigate antisemitic “gang” violence in Canada, Passifiume referred to October 7 as a “siren call for anti-Israel radicals in Canada to commence campaigns of disruptive protests, university-based intimidation encampments and marches against Canadian Jews.”

He quoted Larry Zeifman, an accountant who used to sit on the board of a Toronto synagogue, who said that in order to keep Jewish Canadians safe, Prime Minister Mark Carney must say that “he respects and supports Israel’s efforts to defend itself, that he rejects the antisemitic measures of the ICC (International Criminal Court) and the UN, that he is moving Canada’s embassy to Jerusalem, and that (Benjamin) Netanyahu is invited to Canada and that (Carney) will travel to Israel.”

“Anything less than that will continue to suggest to us that we are not heard and valued like other groups in Canada,” added Zeifman.

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In neither piece of reporting did Passifiume speak to anyone with a different point of view.

Passifiume was one of several Postmedia contributors who have accepted paid trips to Israel by the Exigent Foundation, an organization co-founded by former Canadian ambassador to Israel Vivian Bercovici, who is herself a National Post contributor.

PressProgress has reported that at least two of these trips were funded by the Israeli government.

National Post editor-in-chief Rob Roberts, Toronto Sun editor-in-chief Adrienne Batra, Sun columnists Warren Kinsella and Brian Lilley, National Post and Ottawa Citizen columnist Terry Glavin, and Zivo are other Postmedia employees who travelled to Israel with Exigent.

Responding to independent journalist Rachel Gilmore’s criticism of media personalities who went on a separate trip to Israel funded by the Israeli consulate, Passifiume claimedthat these paid junkets provide “valuable context to a conflict that Canadian media regularly gets wrong.”

As previously reported by The Maple, the pro-Palestinian advocacy group Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East took Postmedia to the National NewsMedia Council (NNC) in December 2023 for running entirely one-sided “advocacy polemics” from the right-wing Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) as news stories.

These articles have been published in the National Post, Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Sun, The Province, Windsor Star, Regina’s Leader Post, Saskatoon’s StarPhoenix, the Kingston Whig-Standard and London Free Press.

The NNC dismissed the complaint in April 2024.

“IDF kills Hamas terror cell leader posing as ‘Al Jazeera’ journalist,” read an online August 11, 2025 National Post headline for a JNS article on the Israeli military’s killing of Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif.

After online backlash, the Post tweaked the headline later in the day to “Israeli strike in Gaza slays Anas al-Sharif, who Israel says posed as an ‘Al Jazeera’ journalist while directing rocket attacks for Hamas.”

Two weeks later, Post comment editor Carson Jerema wrote a column headlined, “How about not hiring terrorists to report the news?” in which he complains that a “National Post headline that identified Sharif as a terrorist attracted vitriolic reaction in Canada from activists, some of whom call themselves journalists.”

“For those working in a trade where skepticism is at its core, journalists are remarkably credulous when it comes to anything smearing Israel,” Jerema wrote, expressing no skepticism of Israel’s claims that Palestinian journalists are moonlighting as militant commanders.

Fomenting anti-trans hatred

Another piece of convergence between extreme right-wing opinion and skewed reporting at Postmedia is its coverage of trans people.

Amy Hamm was fired as a Vancouver nurse last year after the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives ruled that she “made discriminatory and derogatory statements regarding transgender people, while identifying herself as a nurse or nurse educator, across various online platforms including, but not limited to, podcasts, videos, published writings, and social media.”

When Hamm was first brought before the college in January 2023, National Post columnist Michael Higgins wrote a column, headlined, “B.C. nurse Amy Hamm is being persecuted for believing in biology,” in which he likened her to former psychologist and National Post contributor Jordan Peterson.

A year later, Hamm penned her first Post column, in which she advised against “raising our hands to speak before whimpering politely towards a cacophony of rainbow-adorned tyrants,” and soon became a regular fixture in its opinion pages.

When the FBI announced it was investigating doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors in June 2025, Hamm praised the agency’s “extrajudicial moral stance on the worst medical scandal of our time” in a column published in the National Post and Winnipeg Sun.

“There are times when something is so egregiously and evidently wrong that it warrants such action as the FBI’s intimidation. This is one of those times,” wrote the disgraced nurse.

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In November 2025, Hamm wrote a column defending Alberta Premier Danielle Smith pre-emptively invoking the notwithstanding clause to shield a suite of anti-trans laws from judicial review.

These laws require parental consent for trans students changing their pronouns and names in school, ban gender affirming care for minors, and prohibit trans women from participating in female sports.

“There is something heinous, wicked and dead wrong going on: children are being sterilized and made lifelong medical patients for a pseudo-religious belief system,” wrote Hamm. “Who cares what stops it?”

Post health reporter Sharon Kirkey has facilitated this anti-trans hysteria through her reporting, which unlike Hamm’s commentary has travelled widely outside of the National Post bubble.

Kirkey published a more than 2,000 word report in April 2026 on Dr. Karine Khatchadourian, a pediatric endocrinologist who used to provide gender affirming care for minors but has since urged her colleagues to “reassess” the practice.

The field of gender affirming care, Kirkey writes, is “so turbulent and charged with emotion that providers are reluctant to express doubts for fear of being alienated by colleagues and condemned by activists as transphobic.”

Kirkey dedicates a total of 18 words to the majority view that gender affirming care shouldn’t be curtailed: “Meanwhile, numerous medical organizations, including the Canadian Paediatric Society, continue to endorse an affirming approach to gender dysphoria.”

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The reporter doesn’t appear to have sought comment from these medical organizations.

In addition to the Post, this story was published in the Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, Leader Post, StarPhoenix, Vancouver Sun and Ottawa Citizen.

Holman of UVic said that Postmedia routinely publishes “material that is not consistent with democratic values,” chief among them “evidence” and “tolerance.”

He emphasized that Postmedia isn’t the only right-wing news outlet to suffer from this deficit, which “can also afflict a left-wing news outlet.”

“But I think that given the prominence of Postmedia as often the only print outlet in certain jurisdiction, it behooves us to have a little more scrutiny around what is published and what isn’t published,” said Holman.

‘Very few reporters within Postmedia would piss on Postmedia if it was on fire’

Postmedia’s political agenda has produced resentment among employees of its local newspapers and the communities they serve.

Parker, the former Postmedia reporter, noted that any reporter working for a Postmedia daily will have likely encountered members of the public who won’t engage with them because of the company’s reputation.

“People on the outside might hate Postmedia for one reason or another, good, bad or otherwise, but I don’t think anybody hates Postmedia as much as somebody that has to fucking work for Postmedia,” said Parker.

“Very few reporters within Postmedia would piss on Postmedia if it was on fire.”

Sitting public appointees to Alberta university boards of governors have donated nearly $107,000 combined to the ruling UCP since 2019, according to an analysis of Elections Alberta financial disclosures.

These appointees include a former Cabinet minister who lost his seat in the last provincial election, a former staffer for the premier, the party caucus’s past executive director and the chair of the 2022 UCP leadership race committee.

The provincial government is able to appoint a chair and as many members as it wants to a public university’s board of governors, via order in council, who serve alongside a maximum of nine members nominated by the university.

Under the Post-Secondary Learning Act, these boards have a sweeping mandate of overseeing the “management, government and control of the university buildings and land.”

These are volunteer roles, but the prestige that comes with them, and their ability to help pad a resume for future money-making opportunities, shouldn’t be understated.

The Orchard cross-referenced the names of the government’s current appointees to university boards with Elections Alberta financial disclosures dating back to 2019 — the year of the first provincial election featuring the UCP.

According to this analysis, appointees made $108,977 in political donations, with $106,757 to the UCP and $2,220 to the NDP, meaning that 98 per cent of appointees’ donations went to the party which appointed them.

There were 23 people who made political donations appointed to a board of governors, 21 of whom donated to the UCP, making the average donation of UCP donors $5,084.

With 75 public appointees to the boards of Alberta’s seven public universities, that means that more than one in four have donated to the UCP.

The only one of Alberta’s seven public universities without any appointees that have donated money to the UCP is Alberta University of the Arts.

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The University of Alberta was the university whose public appointees donated the most to the UCP with $44,948, followed by University of Calgary with $37,580 and Athabasca University with $13,188.

The top UCP donor sitting on a university board is a familiar face.

Jason Copping, who previously served as labour minister and health minister before his defeat in the 2023 election, was appointed to the UCalgary board of governors in December 2025, which received no press attention.

He’s given a total of $11,229 to the party he represented in the legislature.

Other nakedly partisan appointments include Premier Danielle Smith’s former director of policy co-ordination Ryan Hastman ($7,278), former UCP caucus executive director Brittany Baltimore ($5,174) and former chair of the UCP Leadership Race Committee David Price ($2,999), who were appointed to the UAlberta, Grant MacEwan University and UCalgary boards, respectively.

The two Alberta NDP donor appointees are Martin Kennedy, who joined MacEwan’s board in June 2024 and made a $500 donation to the NDP in 2023, and Darcy Gonci, who’s been a board member at the University of Lethbridge since 2020 and has donated a total of $1,720 to the Alberta NDP in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.

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Lisa Young, a political scientist at UCalgary who has previously worked in administration, told The Orchard that the mandate of public appointees to university boards is “tricky.”

While a board of governors has a fiduciary duty to put the best interests of the university first, explained Young, the government will seek to appoint board members to “steer the institution in a direction the government wants.”

“When the best interests of the university and the government’s direction don’t overlap, government appointed board members might find themselves in a challenging situation,” she said.

Young added that university boards appear to have likely made a “strategic choice” to avoid “conflict with the provincial government” since the UCP government purged Athabasca University’s board in October 2022 of members who criticized plans for increasing the online university’s physical presence in Athabasca.

Below are the six universities with UCP donor appointees, ranked by the amount of money donated to the ruling party, with brief bios including the donation history of each relevant appointee.

University of Alberta ($44.9K)

Rob Seidel ($11,175)

Seidel, a corporate lawyer, was appointed to the UAlberta board of governors in June 2024. He previously served on the Grant MacEwan University board from 2002 to 2008, co-chairing the fundraising committee to build MacEwan’s new School of Business.

Seidel is the former chair of Alberta Innovates Health Solution, a now-defunct Crown corporation that subsidized private sector health-care research, and served on former premier Jim Prentice’s transition team after he won the 2014 PC leadership race.

He donated $2,625 to the UCP in 2026, $3,450 in 2025, $2,625 in 2024 and $1,875 in 2023, in addition to a $600 contribution to the party’s Lac Ste. Anne-Parkland constituency association in 2020.

Darren Durstling ($9,750)

Durstling, who was appointed to the board in June 2024, owns ONE Properties, a real estate investment firm with properties in Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto.

He contributed $2,625 to the UCP in each of 2024, 2025 and 2026, as well as $1,875 in 2023.

Brad Ferguson ($7,875)

Ferguson was appointed to chair UAlberta’s board of governors in April 2026. He’s a senior VP and Western Canadian market lead for management consulting firm Optimus SBR.

From 2021 to 2022, he was an assistant deputy minister for the Alberta government’s Environmental, Social and Governance Secretariat.

Ferguson served as the president and CEO of the Edmonton Economic Development Corporation from 2012 to 2018.

He donated $2,625 to the UCP in each of 2024, 2025 and 2026.

Ryan Hastman ($7,278)

Hastman, the corporate director of strategic partnerships at Covenant Health, was appointed to the UAlberta board in June 2024.

He has deep ties to federal and provincial conservative politics, and used to be friend of the newsletter ’s right-wing foil on the Daveberta podcast.

Hastman served as Premier Danielle Smith’s director of policy co-ordination for her first few months as premier.

He worked as Minister of Advanced Education Rajan Sawhney’s chief of staff from 2021 to 2022, when she was transportation minister, and 2019 to 2020 when she was community and social services minister, and served as the deputy director of government caucus in between.

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Hastman was the only Conservative candidate to lose in Alberta in the 2011 federal election, when ran against NDP incumbent Linda Duncan in Edmonton-Strathcona.

He was a senior special assistant to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff Guy Giorno from December 2008 to April 2009, and before that was a spokesperson for Public Safety Canada under ministers Stockwell Day and Peter Van Loan.

But Hastman also has experience at UAlberta, where he worked in various director roles from 2012 to 2019.

He’s given a total of $7,278 to the UCP, consisting of $1,413 in 2025, $399 in 2022, $2,026 in 2021, $3,100 in 2020 and $340 in 2019.

Venkata Vemana ($5,795)

Appointed in March 2024, Vemana is an engineer with the Veracity Engineering and Risk Consulting Services. From 2016 to 2023, he worked on the first phase of the Valley Line LRT expansion for TransEd.

He’s contributed a total of $5,795 to the UCP and its Calgary-Edgemont constituency association from 2019 to this year. This includes combined donations of $263 in 2026, $2,500 in 2025, $1,000 in 2023, $684 in 2022, $761 in 2021, $288 in 2020 and $300 in 2019.

Diane Wheatley ($1,575)

Wheatley, the chief administrative officer of talent acquisition firm Humanis Advisory Group, was appointed to the UAlberta board in June 2024. She also sits on the board of the Veterinary Information Network, an online community for veterinarians based in Davis, California.

She donated $1,050 to the UCP in 2025 and $525 in 2024.

Miles Safranovich ($1,500)

Since 2009, Safranovich has served as an executive at Nuna Logistics, a mining and heavy civil contractor that is 51% owned by the Kitikmeot Inuit Association and 49% owned by the North American Construction Group. He was appointed to the UAlberta board in June 2024.

He donated $500 to the UCP in 2025 and $1,000 in 2024.

University of Calgary ($37.6K)

Jason Copping ($11,229)

Copping was first elected as the UCP MLA for Calgary-Varsity in the 2019 provincial election, serving a single term before his defeat by NDP MLA Dr. Luanne Metz.

He was former premier Jason Kenney’s inaugural labour and immigration minister from 2019 to 2021, when he was appointed minister of health.

Since leaving politics, Copping has started his own consultancy firm, in addition to serving as a special advisor to corporate law firm Blue Rock Law and strategic advisor to Compliance Health Technologies, which is building an AI model for health-care training, credentialing and compliance monitoring.

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His donations span the party, his former constituency association in Calgary-Varsity and small donations to the Grande Prairie-Wapiti and Calgary-Beddington constituency associations.

Copping donated $638 to the UCP in 2025, $375 in 2024, $375 in 2023, $4,243 in 2021, $3,200 in 2020 and $2,398 in 2019.

Aleem Dhanani ($9,813)

Dhanani is a realtor and developer with Bri-More Developments who was appointed to the UCalgary board in 2022.

In 2025, he donated $3,750 to the UCP and donated $3,450 in 2024. In 2021, Dhanani donated $150 to the Calgary-Bow constituency association, the riding represented by then-advanced educator minister Demetrios Nicolaides, and another $150 to the party. He contributed $2,313 to the UCP in 2019.

Steven Major ($9,476)

Major, a corporate lawyer, is a senior partner at Bennett Jones, the law firm that employs former premier Jason Kenney as an advisor, and sits on the board of Enserva, an energy services sector advocacy group.

He’s the former president of the Canadian Bar Association and past chair of the Canadian Energy Executive Association.

Major donated $1,875 to the UCP this year and another $1,875 in 2025.

In 2024, he contributed $2,500 to the ruling party and gave $3,226 in 2023.

William Sembo ($3,288)

Sembo, who works for global financial services company Lazard, was appointed chair of the UCalgary board of governors in May 2026.

He previously chaired the Strategic Advisory Board of the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases and served as the vice-chair of the Dean’s Advisory Board at the Cumming School of Medicine, both at UCalgary.

In 2025, he donated $3,288 to the UCP.

David Price ($2,999)

Price, an employment lawyer at Bennett Jones, was appointed to the UCalgary board in 2023 after serving as a senator for the university for two years.

In 2022, Price served as the chair of the UCP Leadership Race Committee. From 2024 to 2025, he chaired the Alberta Court of King’s Bench Applications Judge Recruitment Panel.

He also sat on the interim policy and bylaw committee for the newly formed UCP from 2017 to 2018, and prior to PC and Wildrose’s merger was the secretary of the Wildrose board and president of the Calgary-Foothills Wildrose constituency association.

Price donated $2,324 to the UCP in 2024, $375 in 2023 and $300 in 2022.

Karan Dutt ($400)

Appointed in June 2024, Dutt is a senior engineer with MEG Energy who previously worked as an engineer for the Alberta Energy Regulator.

The same year of his appointment to the UCalgary board, Dutt donated $400 to the UCP.

Jeff Davison ($375)

Davison was a one-term Calgary city councillor who served from 2017 to 2021 and unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2021 and 2025. He now works for LMNO Consulting

During his stint on council, Davison was perhaps best known as an enthusiastic advocate for dedicating public funds to building a new hockey arena to replace the aging Saddledome.

In his most recent mayoral campaign, Davison pledged to repeal blanket zoning, eliminate residential parking fees and freeze property taxes for four years “to restore fiscal discipline.”

He was appointed to the UCalgary board in March 2026. In 2025, Davison gave $375 to the UCP.

Athabasca University ($13.2K)

Lori Van Rooijen ($10,188)

Van Rooijen was one of the board members appointed after the UCP purged Athabasca’s board in October 2022.

She also chairs the board of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum and previously chaired the Alberta Jubilee Auditorium Society board.

Van Rooijen, a founding partner with the development firm Larkspur Projects, donated $3,750 to the UCP this year, $3,938 in 2025, $500 in 2024 and $2,000 in 2020.

Leo de Bever ($3,000)

Also appointed in the October 2022 shakeup of the board, de Bever is a senior fellow at the CD Howe Institute think tank and has previously served as the CEO of AIMCo.

He made a $3,000 contribution to the UCP in 2019.

Grant MacEwan University ($5.2K)

Brittany Baltimore ($5,174)

Baltimore, who was appointed to the MacEwan board in June 2024, worked as Labour and Immigration Minister Jason Copping’s press secretary, the UCP deputy director and party executive director between 2019 to 2021.

She now works as the director of engagement for insurance company Alberta Blue Cross.

In 2021, Baltimore donated $1,389 to the UCP, $25 to the Lethbridge-East constituency association, $500 to the Strathcona-Sherwood Park constituency association and $210 to the West Yellowhead constituency association. In 2020, she contributed $3,050 to the party.

Mount Royal University ($5K)

Dexter Nelson ($3,100)

Nelson owns Horsetrack Ranche in Carseland, a hamlet 68 km southeast of Calgary. An athletic therapist by trade, he serves as the president of Sport Medicine Council of Alberta.

Nelson is the former department chair of MRU’s Physical Education and Recreation Studies. He was appointed to the Mount Royal board of governors in November 2024.

In 2025, he contributed $3,100 to the UCP.

Tracey Bodnarchuk ($1,539)

Bodnarchuk is the CEO of Canada Powered by Women, an advocacy group for women in the energy industry, and is a principal with TAB Consulting Group. She’s previously worked for KPMG Canada, Norton Rose Fulbright, Suncor Energy, KPMG and Deloitte.

She was appointed to the MRU board in May 2026.

Bodnarchuk donated $445 to the UCP in 2025, $500 in 2024 and $594 in 2023.

Steven McLeod ($349)

McLeod, who was appointed to the board in May 2026, is a data analyst with Tourmaline Oil. He previously served on Bow Valley College’s board of governors.

In 2022, McLeod donated $349 to the UCP.

University of Lethbridge ($879)

William Chapman ($879)

Appointed to the board in February 2024, Chapman has been a Coaldale town councillor since 2007. He’s also the president of the Highway 3 Twinning Development Association.

Chapman donated $288 to the UCP in 2023, $253 to the Taber-Warner constituency association in 2021 and $338 to Taber-Warner in 2020.

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A retired lawyer in rural Alberta has launched a class action lawsuit on behalf of nearly three million Albertans whose personal information became publicly accessible in a separatist organization’s voter identification database.

The June 25 statement of claim names the Alberta government, chief electoral officer, the Centurion Project and its founder David Parker, the Republican Party of Alberta and “John Doe” as defendants.

“The breach has exposed millions of Albertans to loss of privacy, misuse of personal information, identity-related risks, profiling, targeting, harassment, and significant distress arising from the loss of control over their personal information,” reads the statement of claim.

The lead plaintiff is Cliff Docken, a retired class action practitioner lawyer, in Bragg Creek, Alta. As a result of the breach, Docken had to purchase identity theft insurance, according to the statement of claim.

The Centurion Project is under RCMP, Elections Alberta and Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta investigation for allegedly building a database of 2.9 million voters for an illegally obtained provincial list of electors.

The plaintiff class for the lawsuit includes anyone whose information was included in the Centurion database, but the lawsuit proposes an additional “vulnerable person subclass.”

The subclass includes victims of domestic violence, peace officers and others who work in the justice system, health-care professionals, journalists, politicians and anyone whose physical safety could be demonstrably impacted adversely from their residential information being publicly accessible without their consent.

Readers may recall that Elections Alberta showed up with Edmonton police to the April 29 launch of the Centurion Project to inform organizers that they were under investigation for obtaining and using a copy of the province-wide list of electors, which is only supposed to be in possession of political parties.

I happened to be there. As my story went to press in the morning, Elections Alberta was in court to get a temporary injunction ordering the Centurion Project to take down its database, which anybody could sign up for. The Court of King’s Bench granted this request.

Because each copy of the list of electors is seeded with different fake names, Elections Alberta determined that the Centurion Project used the same list provided to the separatist Republican Party of Alberta in 2025, although it remains to be determined how the Centurion folks obtained this list.

Journalist first received a tip that the Centurion Project’s database was ill-begotten, which she forwarded to Elections Alberta on April 1 — almost a month before the elections watchdog initiated its investigation.

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SCOOP: Jen Gerson: Elections Alberta's massive failure could have put people in danger. I tried to warn them.

By: Jen Gerson…

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3 months ago · 413 likes · 103 comments · Jen Gerson

On April 10, Gerson received a letter from Election Commissioner Paula Hale, claiming that “with the evidence currently available there are not reasonable grounds to allow me to direct an investigation.”

Hale called Gerson’s evidence “compelling,” but said she can’t “discount the potential that data you attributed to being from the list of electors was not from another legitimate source such as Canada Post or the various data brokers.”

Gerson, however, told me that she provided Elections Alberta with evidence that the Centurion database included voter identification and polling station numbers, which Elections Alberta lawyer Joey Redman said in court was how the watchdog determined the database could have only come from the electors list.

Gerson’s early intervention is absent from the statement of claim’s timeline of events.

The lawsuit separates the defendants into three categories: those who are responsible for the collection and safe retention of voter data (the Alberta government and chief electoral officer), those who obtained the data legally but failed to protect it (the Republican Party of Alberta) and those who obtained it illegally and distributed it (Centurion, Parker and John Doe).

John Doe is being used as a catch-all for the various actors who have “obtained, accessed, distributed, downloaded, disclosed, or used the personal information of Class members.”

“The Defendants knew or ought to have known that the List of Electors contained highly sensitive personal information requiring the highest degree of protection,” the statement reads.

“The Defendants knew or ought to have known that unauthorized disclosure, dissemination, or misuse of the information would create foreseeable risks of identity theft, fraud, harassment, stalking, intimidation, political profiling, doxxing, threats to personal safety, and other harms.”

The data breach represents a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms sections 7 and 8, which uphold the right to “life, liberty and security of the person” and protect against “unreasonable search and seizure,” respectively, the claim contends.

The statement includes several alleged breaches of the Election Act, including section 19(1), which requires political parties to “take all reasonable steps to protect the list and the information contained in it from loss and unauthorized use,” and section 20, which outlines acceptable uses for the list.

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It’s noteworthy that this lawsuit isn’t only targeting the actors who allegedly improperly disseminated the list of electors but also includes the government, says political scientist Lori Williams of Mount Royal University in Calgary.

“As always with lawsuits, they go after the deepest pockets, generally speaking, because there are costs associated with this,” Williams said in an interview, adding:

There are people who are going to have to subscribe to services to protect their information, or to monitor whether that information has been disclosed or is being improperly used, and of course, there may be security costs that are associated for some people. Those costs are things that people want to recoup.

Williams also noted the inclusion of Parker personally as a defendant. Parker has twice come under Elections Alberta scrutiny for his activities — first with Take Back Alberta in relation to undisclosed advertising for the UCP during the 2023 provincial election, and then with the Centurion Project.

In both cases, Parker claimed that he was the victim of government persecution and has refused to co-operate with investigators.

“This isn’t about the government, this is about fellow citizens saying this is disrespectful of us, of our rights and our privacy — things that [Parker] says he cares about — and so it’s particularly damning for him,” she said.

Parker didn’t respond to The Orchard’s request for comment.

While the Court of King’s Bench ordered the Centurion Project to take the database down, and for Centurion and the Republican Party to provide a list of every person who accessed it, the statement notes that the “full extent of dissemination remains unknown.”

“The Plaintiff pleads that copies, extracts, screenshots, downloads, derivative databases, derivative datasets and reproductions of the List of Electors may remain in the possession or control of unknown individuals and entities both within and outside Alberta and Canada,” the statement reads.

The claim further alleges that this leak was “not an isolated incident but arose from systemic failures in governance, oversight, supervision including security controls, access management, auditing, monitoring, training, reporting and security compliance.”

Williams noted that in addition to providing financial remedy and acting as a deterrent against future abuse of the list of electors, a successful class action suit could spur legislative changes.

Two specific changes Williams said are necessary to prevent another Centurion scandal is removing political parties’ exemption from being investigated for privacy breaches, as well as reducing the amount of information parties can collect and narrowing who within parties can access it.

“All of those things need to be part of this process as well,” she said.

You can read the full statement of claim below.

2026 06 25 Filed Statement Of Claim Docken Vs Alberta Et Al 2603 14136

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At Alberta Native News, I wrote about First Nations’ calls for the RCMP to investigate Premier Danielle Smith for treason for her dealings with separatists and for her executive director Bruce McAllister to resign for racist remarks he made in response to the call for an investigation.

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Edmonton is the Front Line Against this Authoritarian Neoliberal Frankenstein Monster

The Shadow City Interviews are part of a multi-year inquiry into the nature of Edmonton. I am currently working on this in two ways: first, through interviews with residents who have insights about the city, and second, through “field notes,” each one offering a long-form examination of a particular aspect of the city, always grounded in a concrete plac…

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• Edmonton Police Service Chief Warren Driechel visited the illegal West Bank settlements of Beit Horon and Qasr al-Yahud during his February 2026 trip to Israel. The trip was funded and organized by the U.S.-based Major Cities Chiefs Association.

• Delegates met with the undercover Yamas Ayosh - Judea & Samaria Unit, which is under the direct command of the Israeli military. In November 2025, the unit killed two unarmed Palestinian men in the West Bank after they had surrendered in what the UN human rights chief called an “apparent summary execution.”

• The trip included business class flights from Newark to Tel Aviv and back, with delegates staying for a week at the Ritz-Carlton Herzliya, a five-star coastal hotel where rooms cost a minimum of $745 USD a night.

• One of the top sponsors of the Major Cities Chiefs Association is Axon, which manufactures the body-worn cameras that Edmonton cops are required to wear. Axon has partnered with the Israeli company Corsight AI — a firm with ties to former prime minister Stephen Harper — to implement facial-recognition technology on its cameras, which has been piloted in Edmonton.

• The visit included a stop at the command and control centre for Mabat 2000, a network of CCTV cameras throughout occupied East Jerusalem that uses facial recognition technology to surveil Palestinians. Amnesty International has called the system an instrument of “automated apartheid.”

Edmonton’s police chief repeatedly travelled to illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank during his February 2026 trip to Israel and met with an undercover border police unit that had recently executed two unarmed Palestinian men after they had surrendered, according to documents obtained through access to information.

Edmonton Police Service (EPS) Chief Warren Driechel also visited a 24/7 facial recognition surveillance centre in occupied East Jerusalem that Amnesty International has described as part of a system of “automated apartheid,”

Driechel travelled to Israel from February 15 to 23 with the Salt Lake City-based Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA), which fully funded the excursion.

The MCCA paid to fly Driechel and six other police chiefs on business class from Newark to Israel and back. The trip included accommodation at the Ritz-Carlton Herzliya in Tel Aviv, a five-star luxury hotel on the Mediterranean Coast where a room costs a minimum of $745 USD a night.

The identities of the other delegates are redacted in the documents obtained by The Orchard, which include correspondences regarding the trip within the EPS and between the EPS and MCCA. The documents also include Driechel’s itinerary, and a briefing that was prepared upon his return to Edmonton.

The trip was unilaterally approved by Edmonton Police Commission Chair Ben Henderson without any public discussion among commissioners.

While there’s no indication from the available documents that Driechel met with him, Israel’s national police is overseen by Itamar Ben-Gvir, a convicted criminal notorious for his extremist rhetoric and behaviour. In June 2025, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and the U.K. all placed sanctions on Ben-Gvir for his role in facilitating violence against Palestinians.

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The visit included meetings with local and national police forces, and tours of communities in southern Israel that were targeted in the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, and the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, as well as other historical and holy sites.

Upon reviewing Driechel’s itinerary, Michael Bueckert, the vice president of the advocacy group Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, told this newsletter that it was “much worse than any of us expected.”

“This tour is like an overview of all of the main institutions and actors directly involved in the apartheid control of the Palestinian people as a whole in so many ways,” said Bueckert.

In July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory ruling that Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it conquered in 1967 — namely, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip — is illegal and “tantamount to apartheid.”

The ruling adds that consequentially, states are “under an obligation not to render aid or assist in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

The ICJ is in the process of hearing a separate case brought forward by South Africa in early 2024, arguing that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — a position shared by Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights groups, as well as the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

This context was almost entirely absent from local coverage of Driechel’s Israel excursion, which was first reported by CityNews in March.

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In his post-trip briefing, Driechel said the trip provided him with “insight into policing under complex, rapidly evolving and extremely divisive conditions.”

Kevin Walby, a criminologist at the University of Winnipeg, told The Orchard that he understands why a Canadian police chief would want to travel abroad to learn best practices being applied in other jurisdictions.

He questions, however, why Driechel would travel to Israel if that was his aim.

“The fact that a Canadian police service would go to learn about apartheid policing should, just on the face of it, shock Canadians,” said Walby, who reviewed the documents.

He added that Canada already has discriminatory policing for Black, Indigenous and other racialized people, but that the EPS appears to “want more of it,” reflecting a “broader approach that mirrors what the Israeli police are doing.”

“Ultimately, the whole point is to ratchet up social control to the same levels that social control is doled out in Palestine,” said Walby.

The EPS did not acknowledge a list of detailed questions this newsletter sent about the trip documents.

Visiting illegal settlements

The MCCA delegation twice crossed the Green Line, which demarcates Israel’s internationally recognized borders, to enter settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The Canadian government’s longstanding position is that it “does not recognize permanent Israeli control” over the occupied territories, including the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and regards Israeli settlements as illegal and a “serious obstacle to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace.”

On Feb. 21, delegates began the day with a tour of Qasr al-Yahud, a site in the Jordan Valley believed to be where Jesus was baptized.

Despite being located on the West Bank’s eastern border with Jordan, access to the holy site is controlled by the Israeli government.

On the morning of Feb. 23, the trip’s final day, Driechel travelled to Beit Horon, a settlement in the West Bank that is site of the Israel Border Police’s main instructional training facility, Bahad Magav, where he and other delegates received a briefing.

In the afternoon, delegates returned to the Israeli side of the Green Line to visit the Nitzani Oz checkpoint, which is located on the border of Tulkarem, a Palestinian city and refugee camp in the West Bank.

There they met with Yamas Ayosh - Judea & Samaria Unit, an undercover unit in the occupied West Bank, which Israeli officials refer to by its Biblical name, Judea and Samaria.

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One of Driechel’s key talking points following the trip was that he met strictly with policing officials, not any government or military leaders.

But in his briefing, Driechel acknowledged how the National Israel Police’s “military origins continue to influence its operational model,” citing its “discipline and readiness,” and “command and control structures.”

“Readiness basically means readiness to apply lethal force — shoot to kill,” explained Walby. “That is a model that police here even say they’re trying to move away from.”

Driechel also noted the national force’s “exceptionally high level of integration with other security and enforcement bodies, including border services, patrol forces, and counterterrorism units.”

According to a 2023 report from the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, the Israel Border Police is “subordinate to the IDF’s Central Command in all matters related to its operations in the [occupied] territories.”

On Nov. 25, 2025, less than three months before Driechel’s trip, Yamas forces operating in the northern West Bank city of Jenin shot and killed two unarmed men — Al-Muntasir Abdullah, 26, and Yousef Asasa, 37 — after they had surrendered.

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The Associated Press reported on the killing, which was caught on video:

In a video shown on Palestine TV, which has no sound, the two men come out of a garage holding their hands up and lifting their shirts to show they are not carrying explosives. They are ordered to the ground and kicked by one of the policemen. They are then ordered back to the garage. In a video shown by Egyptian TV station Al-Ghad, the men are ordered back to the entrance of the garage. As they are on the ground and surrounded by troops, gunshots are heard and the men slump down, apparently lifeless. At least one soldier is seen firing his weapon.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk condemned the two men’s “apparent summary execution” as a “brazen killing.”

Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir travelled to the Yamas unit’s base the day after the killings to “hug the heroic fighters” and promote their commander to deputy superintendent.

The Orchard asked the EPS if Chief Driechel was aware of this recent history when he met with the unit, but received no response.

Within the Green Line, MCCA delegates met with police officials in Rishon LeZion, the Gaza border town of Sderot, and the Palestinian cities of Nazareth and Taybe.

The identity of an official the delegates met in Rishon LeZion is redacted.

According to reporting from CNN, Israeli police have solved just 15% of homicides in Palestinian communities within the Green Line, compared with 65% in Jewish communities.

Controlling the message

The ATI documents include emails between EPS chief of staff Patricia Misutka, director of external relations Lauren Wozny and two MCCA representatives whose names are redacted, in which the EPS grants the U.S.-based organization oversight of communications regarding the delegation.

On Feb. 6, after the EPS began receiving media inquiries, Wozny wrote: “are we ok [sic] to confirm he will be visiting Israel (no mention of delegation) and that for security purposes we are unable to share additional details until he has returned?”

The MCCA official responded: “If you need to confirm the trip now, please do not mention the delegation (MCCA, other participating chiefs, etc.). Whatever you plan to distribute after the meeting, can you share it with us first?”

On March 6, Wozny wrote to the MCCA, referencing CityNews’s impending story:

Sounds like the trip went well.

Just following up on this as the Chief has an interview with a local media outlet regarding his trip next week. If you have any key messaging you’d like us to reference, let us know and we will build that into his briefing. We’ll be writing a generic statement for any other media that may follow up as a result, which I will share with you for info once it’s written.

Internal messaging among EPS employees from before and during the trip reveals an awareness that Driechel’s Israel jaunt would be controversial among the public whose interest he is sworn to serve.

On Feb. 11, Misutka wrote an email with the subject line, “Fw: MCCA Delegation to Israel — CONFIDENTIAL,” which relayed Driechel’s itinerary and other trip details to EPS Deputy Chief Nicole Chapdelaine, Wozny and legal counsel Megan Hankewich.

“Sharing for the purpose of managing leaks and messaging in advance of Chief’s return, as well as for potential investigation info. Please do not share beyond what is absolutely essential,” wrote Misutka.

This newsletter asked the EPS to elaborate on what Misutka meant by potential investigation, but received no response.

A Feb. 20 email from Police Operations Chief Devin Laforce to Wozny and J’lyn Nye, a former journalist and broadcaster who is now the EPS’s director of marketing and digital media, suggests that the Edmonton Police Commission (EPC) was kept out of the loop about the trip that their chair approved.

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In the email, Laforce notes that the chief had a meeting scheduled with the EPC to discuss his trip at some point in early March.

“The one caveat, and you need to ensure, [sic] that the Chief does not meet with media on this topic until after he has had a chance to speak with the EPC,” wrote Laforce.

The University of Winnipeg’s Walby said that these exchanges reveal that the EPS’s “allegiance as an institution is to these other policing bodies.”

“They don’t have an allegiance to the citizenry, “ he said, adding:

It points to some bigger problems with Canadian police. They’re not really accountable to us through police boards or any other modality. They do whatever they want, they partner with whomever they want, they’re actively spinning what they’re doing, so you can see the PR machine that they have kick into action here.

Who is Company C?

On the trip’s penultimate day, Driechel and the other delegates received a briefing in occupied East Jerusalem on the mass use of facial-recognition technology, which the EPS has piloted on a smaller scale, before meeting with a representative of an unidentified firm.

One of the MCCA’s top sponsors is Axon, a U.S. military contractor which provides the association with $150,000 a year as a “capstone sponsor.”

In December 2025, EPS acting superintendent Ken Martin boasted about EPS being “the first police service in the world to test Axon’s facial recognition technology” on officers’ body-worn cameras.

CBC investigative journalist Taylor Lambert reported in April that while Axon provides the body-worn camera hardware, the facial-recognition software comes courtesy of the Israeli company Corsight AI, whose technology the Israeli military has deployed to conduct surveillance in Gaza.

Corsight AI is co-owned by the Israeli AI firm Cortica and Awz Ventures, a Canadian investment firm that boasts former prime minister Stephen Harper as both a partner and president of its advisory committee.

Corsight officially launched in 2019 after Awz Ventures provided it $5 million in funding, and three of its five board members are Awz partners.

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On Feb. 22, according to Dreichel’s itinerary, the MCCA delegation received a security briefing at Mabat 2000 - Old City Command and Control in occupied East Jerusalem.

Mabat 2000 consists of a network of thousands of CCTV cameras that extract biometric data from Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem without their consent.

“The system enables Israeli authorities to identify protestors and keep Palestinians under constant observation, even as they go about their ordinary daily activities,” reads a May 2023 Amnesty International report entitled Automated Apartheid: How Facial Recognition Fragments, Segregates and Controls Palestinians in the [Occupied Palestinian Territories].

After a guided tour of holy sites in Jerusalem, the itinerary lists a 1 p.m. “lunch with Company C.”

At 2 p.m., the delegates had a security briefing and tour with the Israel Border Police, followed by two timeslots that are listed as “TBD.”

The EPS didn’t respond to inquiries about whether “Company C” was Corsight, nor whom delegates met with during the TBD timeslots.

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“The purpose of the trip was educational, and no contracts, equipment or training were procured during the trip,” reads a statement EPS spokesperson Cheryl Voordenhout sent to media in March.

In his briefing to the EPS, Driechel mentioned technology in the context of “identifying, prioritizing, and acting on credible threats quickly and effectively.”

“Those posing security threats often use technology to carry out their actions. This means police must be leaders in technological advancement to proactively respond to and counter attacks,” he wrote.

Bueckert of CJPME said that the combination of the EPS piloting Israeli facial recognition technology and the chief’s tour of an Israeli surveillance hub underscore how “these tours are inappropriate.”

“There’s nothing really to learn, unless you are open to thinking about the Edmonton public as a hostile population to be subdued, repressed and terrorized,” he said.

‘There’s no bridge building at this point’

When news of the trip broke, the National Council of Canadian Muslims issued an open letter signed by more than two dozen local organizations and mosques that called for Dreichel’s resignation.

“For many members of Edmonton’s Muslim community, particularly those with family directly impacted by the ongoing genocide, this decision has caused deep pain,” reads the March 11 letter.

“It has also significantly undermined trust in the Edmonton Police Service at a moment when trust between police and communities is more important than ever.”

Bueckert of CJPME said that “all of the concerns from the community about this trip, and what it means for how the police views its relationship to its community at home, have totally borne out.”

”It’s incredibly grotesque, immoral and absolutely disqualifying,” he added.

The Jewish Federation of Edmonton accused Driechel’s critics of engaging in “libels and accusations that are divisive and seek to normalize anti-Israel sentiment and hate,” and circulated a petition calling on Edmontonians to “stand with Chief Driechel against the extremists.”

Driechel told CityNews that he travelled to Israel because, like Edmonton, both Jews and Muslims live there, and that he wanted to “understand what’s occurring there and how it’s informing what’s going on in our own cities.”

In his post-trip briefing, Driechel wrote without elaboration that he was “mindful that it offered a single lens on complex issues, and that there are other perspectives and realities to consider.”

The Orchard asked the EPS what measures Driechel has taken to consider other perspectives and realities, which went unacknowledged.

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The chief has refused to apologize for the trip. “What can I be sorry for?” he told reporters. “I’ll continue to work with the community on their concerns.”

But will the community continue to work with Driechel?

Mousa Qasqas, a local activist who hails from the West Bank, has taken flak from fellow Palestinian-Canadian community members for his previous willingness to engage with the EPS when organizing pro-Palestinian protests in the city.

“Now I’m of the opinion we need the police chief gone,” he told The Orchard upon learning of Driechel’s Israel itinerary, emphasizing that he was speaking only for himself.

“He went to an area that is considered illegal by his own government. That, to me, is too much. There’s no bridge building at this point. There’s no reconciliation. There’s nothing we can do.”

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I made Ben Mulroney quite mad on air while I was away, so I recorded a response to him.

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Inside Canada’s Conservative identity crisis, Haniel Sorensen, The Breach (June 18)

What does it even mean to be a Conservative? What are the distinct policies Conservatives are fighting for that clearly distinguish them from Carney’s Liberals?

Again, in his keynote speech, Poilievre argued that Conservatives “have won these debates so thoroughly that Liberals have stopped debating us altogether and started plagiarizing.” Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole recently struck a similar note, writing to Carney on his Substack: “keep it up on all of these issues.”

Carney’s current agenda on the environment, immigration, government spending, foreign policy, defence, and technology is already being pursued in a manner similar to, if not directly aligned with, longstanding Conservative priorities. Carney is moving forward with new pipelines, aggressive deregulation, disregarding Indigenous sovereignty, cutting immigration and ramping up deportations, gutting the federal public service, inflating our defence (war-making) capabilities, getting tougher on crime, selling off public assets, undermining labour unions, doing away with pharmacare, and doubling down on AI technologies and data centres.

While some key differences regarding social policies, cultural politics, and geostrategic relations with China and the United States remain, in broad policy strokes, they are fairly analogous to many existing Conservative policy platforms.

Because of Carney’s uncanny imitation of conservative politics, speakers and attendees alike appeared to have already conceded a degree of ground on the policy front, begrudgingly beginning to reckon with their movement’s unclear posturing. If many of the policy battles have already been won, what comes next?

At CSFN, the answer increasingly seemed to lie in culture rather than policy. Across the conference, many of the best-attended panels and busiest booths focused on immigration, national identity, gender politics, and the perceived erosion of traditional Canadian values.

If Conservatives are struggling to distinguish themselves through policy, they appear increasingly willing to do so through questions of culture, belonging, and who gets to define the nation.

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Alberta

Not enough time to put Water Not Coal question on referendum ballot: Smith, Stephen Hunt, CTV News (June 17)

Smith’s Power Plays Depend on These Hand-Picked Appointees, Charles Rusnell, The Tyee (June 17)

Supreme Court allows former Alberta MLA’s $2.2-million lawsuit against ex-chief electoral officer to proceed, Matthew Black, Edmonton Journal (June 19)

Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi calls on Ottawa to review dual practice surgery model, Cindy Tran, Edmonton Journal (June 19)

Canada

Police say young people being recruited to carry out GTA shootings using encrypted messaging services, Codi Wilson and Joshua Freeman, CP24 (June 16)

Nate Erskine-Smith considering run for Toronto city council. Outgoing Liberal MP discussed idea in meeting with Chow, Ben Spurr, Toronto Star (June 16)

World Zionist Organization removed from Canada’s West Bank sanctions draft before release: sources, Raffy Boudjikanian, CBC News (June 16)

TSDB cancels permit for anti-Palestinian racism workshop over ‘divisiveness’, Cherise Seucharan, Toronto Today (June 18)

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Carney government passes law allowing authorization of banned pesticides, Marina von Stackelberg, CBC News (June 19)

B.C. mining exploration company NovaRed recruits Kristi Noem as strategic adviser, Niall McGee, Globe and Mail (June 19)

USMCA heads into unpredictable new phase with no extension likely, Mark Rendell and Steven Chase, Globe and Mail (June 19)

U.S.

Justice Department Decision to Allow Paramount Deal Surprised Staff Investigators, Dave Michaels, Dana Mattioli, Sadie Gurman and Jessica Toonkel, Wall Street Journal (June 15)

Did Kamala Harris’s Silence on Gaza Cost Her the White House? Ta-Nehisi Coates, Vanity Fair (June 15)

Democratic socialists surge in mayoral races across the US as anti-Trump fervor rises, Matt Brown, Associated Press (June 18)

SpaceX handed lowest possible ESG rating by MSCI, Ramsay Hodgson, Financial Times (June 20)

World

A boat with migrants capsized north off Libya, leaving 51 dead or missing, group says, Samy Magdy, Associated Press (June 19)

Draft dodgers in Ukraine do what they must to avoid the front lines, Mark MacKinnon, Globe and Mail (June 19)

First Quantum’s shuttered mine passes audit, as Panama weighs restart, Elida Moreno, Reuters (June 19)

The U.S. Is Ramping Up Economic Warfare. Its Enemies Aren’t Blinking. Rory Jones, Patricia Kowsmann and Thomas Grove, Wall Street Journal (June 20)

Mass atrocities looming in another Sudanese city, UN says, Geoffrey York, Globe and Mail (June 21)

Middle East

The End of the U.S.-Israel Alliance, Joshua Leifer, Foreign Policy (June 15)

The Israeli right is marching under a new flag, Menachem Klein, +972 (June 15)

This New Party Wants to Write a New Future for Israel, Mairav Zonszein, New York Times (June 16)

Inside Trump and Netanyahu’s Complicated Relationship, Josh Dawsey, Alexander Ward and Anat Peled, Wall Street Journal (June 17)

15 articles a day: The extent of the Israeli army’s media interference, Haggai Matar, +972 (June 17)

U.S. intelligence warns Israel is likely to undermine Iran peace deal, officials say, Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, Gerry Shih and Warren P. Strobel, Washington Post (June 19)

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How Deal With U.S. Could Reconnect Iran to the Global Economy, Patricia Cohen, New York Times (June 19)

The plot against Palestine Action, Jonathan Cook, +972 (June 19)

The Surprising Reaction Inside Iran to Its War Victory, Séamus Malekafzali, The Intercept (June 20)

Vance Heads to Peace Talks, After Iran Says It Closed Strait of Hormuz, Andrew Dowell and Robbie Gramer, Wall Street Journal (June 20)

Israeli fire kills nine people in Gaza, including a child and journalist, medics say, Nidal Al-Mughrabi, Reuters (June 20)

Tech

Sucked In. The Maw That Feeds AI Mania, Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee (June 15)

What If It All Came Out? Bridget Read, New York (June 15)

AI data centres’ voracious thirst for water makes their environmental footprint even bigger, Eric Reguly, Globe and Mail (June 19)

AI opposition isn’t the product of a lack of “literacy”, Paris Marx, Disconnect (June 19)

They Looked Like They Were Getting Rich on Polymarket—but None of It Was Real, Katherine Long, Caitlin Ostroff, Neil Mehta and Brenna T. Smith, Wall Street Journal (June 20)

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Country singer Corb Lund arrived at Elections Alberta’s Edmonton office in a horse trailer Wednesday to drop off what he estimates are 200,000 petition signatures to put banning new coal mining in the Rocky Mountains on October’s growing referendum ballot.

According to Water Not Coal spokesperson Laura Laing, the citizen-initiative referendum campaign had 3,000 volunteers spread “corner-to-corner across the province,” collecting signatures in all but the province’s three most remote northern ridings.

The campaign had until Wednesday to collect 177,732 signatures in support of asking Albertans whether they agree that:

The Government of Alberta shall prohibit through legislation all coal exploration and mining activities within the Eastern Slopes of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, other than mines that are in actual production as of January 1, 2026. For clarity, this prohibition includes Northback Holdings’ Grassy Mountain Project and Valory Resources’ Blackstone Project as well as any projects to expand any producing mines.

Lund told reporters that he expects “nothing less than the government to use our question … precisely as it’s on the signature sheet.”

The question would certainly add a different flavour to the premier’s recent referendum-maxxing, with 10 questions already scheduled for Oct. 19. These include whether to have a future independence referendum, varying degrees of immigration restrictions and constitutional changes that would give provinces (and their premiers, incidentally) more power.

Chris Chang-Yen Phillips, an environmental historian whose research focuses on the Rocky Mountains, was one of a few dozen supporters who showed up to witness Lund deliver the petition signatures, despite intermittent rain throughout the day.

“This was such an obvious question that so many Albertans just have absolute consensus on. We don’t want to pollute our waterways, we don’t want to dig up our Rockies and foothills, and I wanted to be a part of that movement,” Phillips told The Orchard.

He noted Albertans have a long history of environmental advocacy, from the Whale Society of Edmonton in the 1980s, which pushed for a global moratorium on whale hunting, to photographer Gladys Reeves’s efforts in the 1920s to protect Edmonton’s River Valley and “Indigenous people protecting this land for thousands of years.”

“We’re just the latest in a long chain of stewards,” said Phillips.

He added that when it comes to protecting the environment, “there’s not a huge urban-rural divide” as is often presumed.

Local volunteer Kathy Fisher, who recently collected signatures in Camrose, a town of 20,000 about 95 km southeast of Edmonton, said the campaign “created connective tissue between communities,” establishing “linkages which weren’t there before.”

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The movement to protect the eastern slopes of the Rockies from the predations of foreign coal companies brought together environmentalists, rural land owners and Indigenous communities beginning in 2020.

That’s when then-premier Jason Kenney rescinded the province’s 1976 coal policy, which banned open-bit coal mining on the eastern slopes of the Rockies. Kenney backtracked due to public outcry, issuing a moratorium on coal mining and exploration in the eastern slopes in 2022.

The provincial government has paid $238 million in settlements with Atrum Coal and Evolve Power for issuing the moratorium after they had purchased leases for coal projects.

In January 2025, Energy Minister Brian Jean lifted the moratorium for projects that were already underway, including Northback’s open-pit Grassy Mountain and Valory’s underground Blackstone projects.

A joint federal-provincial review panel rejected Grassy Mountain in June 2021, citing “significant adverse environmental effects.”

After an April 2024 meeting between Northback and Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) executives, as reported by Andrew Nikiforuk at The Tyee, the AER approved exploration permits for Grassy Mountain.

‘Sometimes these are long fights’

Fisher, who’s originally from Montreal, comes from a legacy of conservationist struggle. Her father was involved with the Montreal Parks and Playgrounds Association, which sought to preserve Mount Royal from industrial development.

It took until 2005 for the province to establish the Mount Royal Natural and Historical District.

“Sometimes these are long fights,” added Fisher.

She isn’t the only Water Not Coal volunteer whose environmentalism is intergenerational.

Dylan Pitman’s father was part of the movement to stop the Alberta-Pacific pulp mill in Athabasca, which produced then-environment minister Ralph Klein’s famous one-finger salute to environmentalists.

“We lost that fight. That pulp mill is there and that river is all the worse for it,” said Pitman.

He added that this movement feels different, given the impressive array of groups aligned against coal mining in the eastern slopes.

“We have all these organizations and different people that get out there and connect all across the province,” Pitman said.

Coal companies complain; Lund calls ‘bullshit’

Both coal companies named in the Water Not Coal petition — Northback and Valory — issued separate statements on June 10 in response to its apparent success.

“Alberta has a proud history of developing projects to meet global demand for our resources, and there is strong support for this project,” an unsigned statement from Northback reads, referencing a 2024 plebiscite on coal mining that was confined solely to the Crowsnest Pass, which received 72% support.

Grassy Mountain, if built, won’t be located in the Crowsnest Pass but in the Municipal District of Ranchland, which attempted to fight the mine in court.

“They cherry picked a group of people who want the jobs who will not suffer the effects of the mine. They pretend that’s democracy, and it’s just propaganda bullshit,” Corb Lund told reporters.

Valory CEO Ian Slater said it’s “disappointing to see misinformation about this industry, especially in Alberta,” without specifying which of the campaign’s claims he disputes.

“At Valory, we are committed to developing this resource responsibly through an underground mine operating under Alberta’s rigorous environmental and regulatory standards,” wrote Slater.

“The facts are simple: this project will create jobs, support local communities, protect our land and water and help supply a resource the world continues to need.”

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Lund said that these companies are “in a heavy duty PR campaign right now because they’re feeling the heat.”

“As soon as they get in there, in my estimation, they’ll do what almost every coal company does, which is start to push back against the regulations and lobby the government to loosen them,” he predicted.

Prairie Mines and Royalty ELC received an environmental protection order in May after a berm collapsed at its Coal Valley Mine, polluting the Lovett River with wastewater, which isn’t the first time the company has faced environmental sanctions.

“They’ll pay the fine and just keep going,” said Lund.

If the coal mining question is added to the ballot in October, which Premier Danielle Smith has indicated is her intention, expect Northback and Valory to spend big on efforts to shift public opinion in support of coal mining.

“The fortunate thing about our position is that we’re correct. They can spend all the money they want,” said Lund.

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At Canada’s National Observer, I covered the Elbows Up for Climate summit that occurred Thursday in Edmonton, where progressive municipal leaders strategized about how to pursue climate action in the face of federal and provincial government obstinacy.

Earlier in the week, I reported for CNO about the extent to which the Centurion Project doxxing three million Albertans raises the risks of foreign interference in October’s referendum.

For Alberta Native News, I reported on Treaty 8 First Nations of Alberta raising the prospect of civil disobedience if October’s quasi-independence referendum proceeds, as well as Indigenous representation at last week’s Alberta Federation of Labour Day of Protest in Edmonton.

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This story was originally published in Alberta Native News.

Nisga’a Nation in northwestern B.C. says it hasn’t been consulted on proposed routes for a new tar sands pipeline that pass through its modern Treaty lands.

On June 1, the CBC reported that Alberta’s government is examining three potential routes to B.C.’s northern coast for a new bitumen pipeline that Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed to designate as a priority project in his memorandum of understanding with Premier Danielle Smith.

The story was based on documents, “which were shown to local community leaders during private consultations on the proposed project this spring,” wrote CBC business reporter Kyle Bakx.

The Nisga’a Lisims Government issued a June 2 statement to clarify that it wasn’t part of these consultations.

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“We can confirm that the Nisga’a Lisims Government has held no discussions with the Alberta and the Federal Government about any oil pipeline proposals,” said the statement.

In 2000, the landmark Nisga’a Final Agreement was signed by Nisga’a Nation, the Government of B.C., and the Government of Canada, which established the Nisga’a Lisims Government and recognized its jurisdiction over the Nass Wildlife Area.

The Nisga’a Lisims Government notes that some of the proposed routes end up in ports that are part of its Treaty territory, and another crosses through it, all of which would require consultation with the First Nation.

“All Nisga’a citizens can rest assured that despite this ill-conceived process being advanced by the Alberta Government, nothing can happen on our lands without our consent, our Treaty guarantees it,” reads the statement.

“At the same time, anybody can draw lines on a map and speculate about all kinds of projects.”

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The First Nation band added that it’s “singularly focused” on its own liquified natural gas (LNG) projects, Ksi Lisims export terminal and the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission (PRGT) pipeline, which are being done “in a way that is compatible with our values and long-term objectives.”

Both projects, referred to collectively as Ksi Lisims LNG, have been designated as a priority at the Major Projects Office by Prime Minister Carney, with the plan to export 12 million tonnes of LNG annually upon completion.

In May, the Canadian government facilitated a deal with Germany to export a million tonnes of Ksi Lisims LNG annually starting in 2030.

The Nisga’a Lisims Government is facing a lawsuit over the project at the B.C. Supreme Court from two of its own members, who argue that band leadership didn’t adequately consult its members on the $12-billion project.

Last year, the Lax Kw’alaams Band and the Metlakatla First Nation filed separate judicial review applications in Federal Court against the federal government for approving the LNG project without considering its broader impact.

Iran responds to Israeli attack on Beirut suburbs with ballistic missiles

Iran has attacked Israel with ballistic missiles for the first time since the two countries and the U.S. reached an April ceasefire, with the strikes coming hours after Israel launched an attack on Lebanon’s capital.

The Iranian projectiles were all intercepted by Israel’s missile defence system on Sunday.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is in the middle of negotiations on a longer-term truce with Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, which the Iranians blockaded after the U.S. and Israel launched a war on Iran in late February.

Another consequence of the war was Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia and political party Hizbollah attacking Israel on its northern border.

As Middle East scholars Muhannad Ayyash of Mount Royal University and Jeremy Wildeman of the University of Ottawa told me in our livestream the other day, Iran insists that any long-term ceasefire deal apply to Lebanon.

Since March, Israel has occupied about 20% of Lebanese territory, killed more than 3,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands, even after a ceasefire was announced on April 16.

The Financial Times reports that the Israeli strikes on Beirut appear to have targeted the Dahiyeh suburb, where support for Hizbollah is strong:

The Israeli military claimed it was “striking Hizbollah infrastructure”, without providing any evidence.

The strike came days after Hizbollah rejected a ceasefire negotiated between Israel and the Lebanese government — the latest of many that have failed to quell the fighting. This most recent attempt would have required the militant group to cease its activities in southern Lebanon and begin to disarm, without making clear what concessions, if any, Israel would make.

It also did not specify a timeline for Israeli forces to withdraw from the swaths of Lebanese territory they now occupy.

Instead, Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz said earlier this week that his country would continue its operations in southern Lebanon, and Lebanese residents would not yet be allowed to return to their homes there.

For what it’s worth, Trump said he’s “not happy” with the Israeli strikes on Lebanon and would urge the Israelis not to retaliate against Iran.

The Israeli military vowed that it would “strike the enemy with determination as soon as the order is given.”

Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, a far-right extremist even by Israeli standards, said: “Tehran must burn tonight.”

The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps said that any Israeli response will invite “even more forceful and regret-inducing strikes.”

Hinting at a wider regional conflagration, the Kata’ib Hizbollah militia in Iraq vowed that U.S. military bases would become “legitimate targets” if the U.S. retaliated on Israel’s behalf.

Read the full story at FT.

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