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Are we redeemable? Humans, I mean. Up until the last few years, if you asked me this question, I would have answered, "Of course!"
But now, the certainty of this response has been whittled down into uneasy silence. I'm not so sure anymore.
Any student of history will tell you with alacrity the multiple and ongoing atrocities humans have engaged in over the millennia. Almost from the beginning of organized society, we have been murdering and torturing our fellow sapiens with glee. I'm sure hominids and neanderthals also took to clobbering each other whenever the opportunity arose.
But despite the recorded evidence, I've always believed that deep in its heart of hearts, humanity wanted to be good, helpful, kind, considerate. I'm not sure I believe this any longer.
Art hasn't changed this. It has cemented it more firmly.
A new exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery takes the relationship between art and the environment as its animating idea. But in examining the concept, something else surges to the fore. Namely, that we've made a nightmare of things.

Future Geographies: Art in the Century of Climate Change features 35 works drawn from the last quarter century. It is a big show — the ideas it tackles are global in their implications and impact.
It's also big in another more literal sense, encompassing some of the most influential folks in the art biz, one of whom is John Akomfrah. The Ghanaian and British artist works in a number of creative disciplines, including documentary film.
Vertigo Sea, Akomfrah's large-scale three panel installation, takes pride of place in the VAG show. First, a gentle word of warning. There is something about the convergence of beauty and horror in the piece that pierces the senses in the most profound fashion.
Just as one is beguiled by the staggering beauty of the natural world, be it a whirling murmuration of seabirds or a pod of whales moving sleekly through the ocean, other elements enter, pulling you under the dark water.

Beauty makes you vulnerable to the larger message of the work, sinking the experience so deeply into the conscious and unconscious mind that it refuses to budge. Even when you really want it to.
There are so many things at work in the piece that one viewing probably isn't sufficient to take it all in, even in a practical way. The triptych of screens, moving independently of each other in the narrative flow and sometimes in concert, means that you spend time whipping your head back and forth so that you don't miss anything.
Ideally, one should be able to see an artwork of this magnitude and power a great many times, but that too comes with some caveats of the emotional variety.

In 'Vertigo Sea,' an unforgettable tale of grief
On the surface, 2015's Vertigo Sea is a three-channel video installation. It makes ample use of archival footage from the BBC Studios' Natural History Unit, as well as images captured in different places around the globe, including the Faroe Islands and the Isle of Skye.
Over the course of its running time, it makes tidal shifts, moving from nature documentary to literary exploration to something far greater than the sum of its parts.
The literary works cited include Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, and Heathcote Williams's epic poem "Whale Nation." The latter two are both central to the work.
Other key elements include the transatlantic slave trade and Argentina's Dirty War. While the whaling industry might not seem entirely related to the atrocities committed in the slave trade, the connective tissue between them is just that, tissue, flesh flayed out in enormous ribbons of muscle, sinew and veritable oceans of blood.
In an extended interview with curator Johanne Løgstrup entitled Co-existence of Times — a Conversation with John Akomfrah, the artist explains his ideas:
The connection between the whaling industry and industrialized, extractive capitalism is a direct line. The hunt for whales and their oil formed the b...

Becoming: The Art of Gu Xiong traces the evolution of internationally recognized multidisciplinary artist Gu Xiong. On display at the Museum of Vancouver now through Feb. 7, 2027, Becoming is the most comprehensive display of his work and highlights landmark pieces from his 50-year career.
MOV: What will people see when they visit 'Becoming: The Art of Gu Xiong'?
Gu Xiong: I like to work in multimedia formats, which gives me more diverse opportunities to explore my ideas. People will see A River of Migration, which is an installation formed by hundreds of plaster salmon fish and small white plastic boats flowing across the entire exhibition space. There will be paintings like Enclosures and charcoal drawings in Here, There, Everywhere. Illuminated Niagara Falls is made of hundreds of photographs, and its associated piece A Migrant Worker's Crate is a re-creation of the crates Jamaican migrant workers send home to their families. Yellow Cargo is a sculpture made from cardboard boxes, produce labels and video projection. My favourite piece is Smile, three individual portraits of my family with a poem in English and Chinese. It explores our family's resilience through humour.
Creating this exhibition has been a journey to retrace my artistic roots and the flow of my artistic development, through migration and global changes, like a river finding its way through treacherous landscapes. These renewed reflections shaped the spaces and themes of this exhibition, forming new meanings from past and recent work.
How did you start as an artist?
During the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1970s, I was sent to the countryside. I sketched every day, recording my daily life. In 1978, I applied to art school and was accepted by the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, where I earned a bachelor's and master's degree in fine arts. I became an instructor and started to teach students in 1985. In 1986, I was the first Chinese artist to attend the artist-in-residence program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. I worked with contemporary artists from around the world, and we went to New York to visit art galleries and museums. This experience had a big impact. I saw the work of Andy Warhol, which had a huge influence on me. But I knew I had to find my own way for my art.
I returned to China, and in 1989, I participated in the groundbreaking exhibition China/Avant-Garde at the China national museum of fine arts in Beijing with Enclosures. In 1989 I had my second residency at the Banff Centre.
Tell us about moving to Canada.
I dreamed of going to Canada after seeing a review of a Group of Seven exhibition in 1975. At the Banff Centre, Alvin Balkind, the head of the visual art studio, was very supportive of my immigration. I moved to Vancouver in 1990, and my wife and my daughter came to join me.
In the initial years we were caught in a culture shock, losing everything we once had, feeling lost and disoriented in a new culture. The most challenging aspect was making a living and trying to make art at the same time. As a new immigrant, family was very important. Without their support, I couldn't keep doing my artwork; they are part of me.
As an immigrant I wanted to explore the process of creating our new identities, to have our experiences and voices be heard and shared. We became a blend of two cultures, creating something new.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, your work shifted, partially because of your role as a professor at the University of British Columbia. Tell us about that.
In teaching at UBC, I encouraged my students to deepen their artistic voice and concepts through researching other artists' work, art history and critical theory. This also inspired me to research and deepen my art. Through my research project, I was inspired by migrant workers on Canadian farmland. They came to earn money from physical labour to support their families. Their situation resonated with me.
What is next artistically for you?
Today, I see myself as a complex person w...

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The plan is to bury wood waste, turning a Valemount site into a carbon sink. Locals are skeptical but hopeful.
Abigail Popple
28 May 2026
28 May 2026The Tyee / Rocky Mountain Goat
Abigail Popple is a journalist and fact checker in Valemount, B.C. A version of this story was also published by the Rocky Mountain Goat.
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The plan is to bury wood waste, turning a Valemount site into a carbon sink. Locals are skeptical but hopeful. … Article written by Abigail Popple.
A northern B.C. village may become the home of a new carbon-storage facility built by a Bill Gates-backed American startup.
If completed, Canada's first "carbon-casting" site could start operating in Valemount as early as next January, according to Graphyte, the company behind the plan. Although there is some local skepticism, there is also hope that the plan could add jobs to the local economy while preventing the burning of waste wood.
Established in 2023 and funded, in part, by billionaire Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Graphyte says it can capture carbon from the forestry and agriculture industries by collecting unusable organic matter, dehydrating it and compressing it into bricks that do not decompose. Those bricks are wrapped in plastic and buried underground, where Graphyte says they will remain intact for thousands of years.
The company has sold bricks stored at its first site, near its Pine Bluff, Arkansas, headquarters, as carbon credits to companies such as Microsoft and investment banker J.P. Morgan to offset their emissions.
The company is now negotiating with the Valemount Community Forest to secure a deal to build its proposed carbon-casting site in the local industrial park, four kilometres south of the town centre.
In an email to The Tyee, Graphyte director of project development Murilo Amadeu said Valemount is a good option for the facility because of its proximity to a steady supply of wood fibre. Valemount was also chosen "due to its strategic location along major highway and railway corridors, supply of land, and local forest industry," according to a letter sent to local politicians in March.
Located about three hours southeast of Prince George, Valemount was home to a thriving forestry industry until a mountain pine beetle epidemic and the 2008 global financial crisis led to the closure of the local sawmill in 2009 and the elimination of around 200 jobs. Although the Valemount Community Forest began milling wood again in 2023 and the local industrial park is home to a separate specialty cedar mill, the operations employ only a few dozen people.
Graphyte says its initiative, which it is calling "Project Red Cedar," will bring 20 jobs to the community and repurpose the industrial park.
Wood breaks down when it is exposed to water, air and microbes that thrive in warm conditions, Graphyte scientific adviser Daniel Sanchez told The Tyee. Drying the wood, compressing it and burying it aims to stop decomposition processes that release carbon into the air, said Sanchez, who is also a professor at the University of California, Berkley.
After creating "carbon bricks" and burying them in a sequestration site, Graphyte aims to sell carbon credits to companies, Sanchez said.
Graphyte says it sequestered more than 6,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide during its first year of operations in Arkansas. Last year, it began eyeing another site in Arizona.
Graphyte says the bricks, which resemble concrete blocks packed with wood particles, allow it to store carbon dioxide for about US$100 per imperial ton, lower than other schemes that aim to sequester carbon or CO2. The scale of Graphyte's operations is still relatively small in the context of global emissions; Canada's multibillion-dollar Pathways project, by ...

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Wildtype, a San Francisco startup, recently secured FDA approval to bring 'cultivated' seafood to the market.
Josh Kozelj
28 May 2026
28 May 2026The Tyee
Josh Kozelj is co-editor of The Tyee's What Works series on green enterprises.
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Wildtype, a San Francisco startup, recently secured FDA approval to bring 'cultivated' seafood to the market. … Article written by Josh Kozelj.
Justin Kolbeck was optimistic about eating his first batch of lab-grown meat.
Digging into his life savings to make cultivated meat — a collection of animal cells grown in a controlled environment — Kolbeck figured this method would help humans feed the next three billion people on the planet.
He wasn't alone in the chase. A friend, Aryé Elfenbein, who recently completed a cardiology residency, had a similar idea: if humans can "create functional heart tissue, why couldn't we also create another way to make meat?"
The duo agreed to work together and rented a bench at a San Francisco-based biotech company for research. They sourced animal cells from nearby duck and chicken farmers, bringing the cell cultures back to Elfenbein's kitchen to cook.
The result? A sliver of chicken that fit on a spoon. "You could barely taste it, it was so small," Kolbeck said.
But it gave them hope.
Kolbeck and Elfenbein soon shifted to seafood, co-founding Wildtype to find an alternative to wild catch methods and fish farms, which can spread diseases and cause pollution, and are expected to be banned in B.C.'s Discovery Islands by the end of the decade.
They made their first piece of cultivated salmon about eight years ago and then opened a microbrewery-looking facility to grow the business some more.
The work paid off last year when Wildtype received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, becoming the first company in the world permitted to make and sell lab-grown seafood.
Wildtype's cultivated salmon is now sold in four restaurants across the United States.
"Consumers got to try cultivated seafood and we got real consumer feedback," said Kolbeck, adding that the company has ambitions to open a larger facility that can produce volume "comparable to a large-scale fish farming operation."
Navigating choppy waters
Before Wildtype secured FDA approval, several politicians lobbied to ban the production and consumption of cultivated meat in multiple U.S. states. The bans, they claimed, would protect farmers who fear that cultivated meat will replace livestock.
Some experts have called it a political gambit. But it worked, and now seven states, including Florida, Texas and Nebraska, have banned cultivated meat.
The way Kolbeck sees it, Wildtype is "collateral damage" in the war between plant-based burger providers and ranchers. They aren't putting anyone out of business, he says, and they haven't had an issue with fishing families to date.
"I think if you talk to anybody who's been fishing for 20 or 30 years, they'll tell you wild fish stocks are not getting any better and we probably need new tools," he said.
Their work comes as fish stocks decline and demand rises.
The global market for fish and aquatic foods is expected to nearly double by 2050, while the population of salmon is expected to decline in California, the Yukon and B.C., among other places.
To match that demand, Kolbeck says, there needs to be innovation. Others seem to agree, with Wildtype securing over $120 million in investments since launch.
"Very simply, between wild catch and farmed fish, it hasn't kept up with the demand. We need new technology to provide these products," he said.
Searching for the right catch
The first cultivated burger was consumed in the United Kingdom in 2013, and experts pegged it as a sustainable way to satisfy the world's hunger for meat, cutting carbon emissions from traditional far...

28 May 2026
28 May 2026The Tyee
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Jenna Dorman's friends say new parents are suffering due to gaps in supports. They're working to change that.
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Jenna Dorman's friends say new parents are suffering due to gaps in supports. They're working to change that. … Article written by Michelle Gamage.
Michelle Gamage
Michelle Gamage is The Tyee's health reporter. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.
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Friends and family members of Jenna Dorman are raising the alarm about the systemic failures of mental health supports for parents during the pregnancy and postpartum periods in B.C.
Dorman died by suicide in late 2024 while suffering from severe postpartum depression after having her second child.
Dorman's partner, Jay Hoggard, says she was brilliant and driven and helped everyone around her to be the best version of themselves.
She worked as chief revenue officer for a large technology firm and excelled on every project she put her mind to, he says.
Dorman died when her second child was 10 months old. The development of her mental illness was gradual, Hoggard says, as if they were in warm water that slowly got hotter until it was boiling.
Dorman had an extensive network of friends that surrounded her with love, help and food, but she wasn't able to access the mental health care she needed.
"There was nowhere to go," Hoggard said.
"You're on a wait-list. We tried everything. The only place when it came down to it was in emergency at [Vancouver General Hospital] on a cot or a stretcher basically in the corner of the emergency room for six or seven days," he said.
Admittance to the psychiatric emergency unit created stress, in part by separating Dorman from her family.
"The lights are on all the time," Hoggard said. "You don't really have any privacy. You don't have your phone, you don't have your baby and you don't have your husband. That's the resources we got."
"There needs to be a place for women and their babies, where families can be supported," he added.
"Jenna would have survived if she had a place to go, no doubt about it."
According to the BC Women's Health Foundation, suicide is the fourth-leading cause of maternal death in Canada. A 2024 retrospective review for the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada found that over a third of deaths from accidental overdose and suicide occurred more than 42 days after birth or the end of a pregnancy.
Fundraising to support perinatal and postpartum mental health
In the wake of Dorman's death, her close friends launched In Her Circle, a fundraiser and advocacy campaign for postpartum mental health.
The campaign launched in early May with the initial goal of raising $16,000 for a year of weekly drop-in perinatal support through Pacific Post Partum Support Society, which is open to all parents in the perinatal period regardless of immigration status and does not have a wait-list.
The campaign blew through that goal, so they decided to double it, Kiri Bird, lead organizer for In Her Circle, told The Tyee.
Then they blew through that goal too.
"The biggest surprise has been the response from midwives, from psychiatrists, from anesthesiologists, from people who work in health care every day, saying, 'Please do more of this, tell the story, ring the bells, because absolutely more attention is needed here. Keep going.' So that's what we're offering to do," Bird said.
Bird said the current goal is to raise $50,000 by May 31, and they've raised close to $40,000 so far.
Pacific Post Partum Support Society will receive $32,000 and the rest will be used to help In Her Circle continue to advocate for improved postpartum mental health supports in B.C., Bird said.
One of the core areas of focus will be advocating for the opening of the perinatal mental health unit at BC Wo...

The co-pay requirement will block access to badly needed care for families. … Article written by Shilpashree Jagannathan.
A $4 prescription fee may sound small. But for refugees arriving in Canada with little or no income, it can mean the difference between filling a prescription or waiting to get sicker.
Doctors and frontline workers warn that the federal government's new requirement that refugee claimants and those already accepted pay fees for some health care will delay treatment, hurt patients and add to costs.
The fees apply under the Interim Federal Health Program, which provides temporary health coverage to refugee claimants, resettled refugees and other eligible newcomers before they qualify for provincial coverage or while their immigration claims are being processed.
As of May 1, refugees have to pay $4 for each eligible prescription and 30 per cent of the cost of several supplemental health services, including dental care, vision care, counselling, physiotherapy and assistive devices.
Basic health care remains covered. But refugee health providers say the new fees could delay treatment for people already facing poverty, trauma, chronic illness and precarious immigration status. Some doctors say they have begun documenting harms as they explore a possible legal challenge.
Dr. Vanessa Redditt, a family physician who works with refugees in Toronto, said health-care providers are working with lawyers to explore a challenge to the co-payments. They are also collecting evidence of delayed care, denied care, emergency room visits and hospitalizations linked to the new fees.
Redditt said the co-payments are "insurmountable financial barriers" for many patients who arrive in Canada with no savings, no stable income and no family networks.
"These co-payments are a denial of care," she said.
Across Canada, refugee income supports are generally linked to provincial welfare supports. In Ontario, Redditt said, many refugee claimants are living in shelters or relying on social assistance, with a single person receiving about $733 a month to cover shelter, food, transit and other basic needs.
Redditt said small charges can turn routine health needs into emergencies. A parent who cannot afford a $4 antibiotic prescription for a child, for example, may wait until an infection worsens and requires emergency care or hospitalization — a far more expensive outcome for the national health system.
The Canadian Refugee Health Network, a national community of doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, allied health professionals and researchers, has also warned that the co-payments could cost governments more, not less. In a policy brief shared with New Canadian Media, the network argues that delayed access to medications, counselling, dental care, mobility supports and medical supplies could increase emergency department visits, hospitalizations and long-term public costs.
Dr. Meb Rashid, medical director of the Crossroads Clinic at Women's College Hospital in Toronto, said the fees may appear modest but can add up quickly for patients managing chronic illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension or heart disease.
A patient taking six or seven medications could face more than $20 a month in prescription co-payments, he said — a serious barrier for people who are newly arrived, relying on food banks or struggling to put food in the fridge.
"Primary care is, in the health-care context, cheap," Rashid said. "It's when people deteriorate, they end up in hospital, when they have complications in their illnesses, that's when it becomes expensive."
Rashid said the concern is not only that patients may delay filling prescriptions, but that confusion around the new rules could also discourage care. A patient may receive medication in hospital or in an emergency department, he said, but face a co-payment once they leave with a prescription to fill at a community pharmacy.
He said Canada has already seen how changes to refugee health coverage can create la...

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Well-connected lobbyists and consultants have been given contracts to smooth the way.
Andrew MacLeod
27 May 2026
27 May 2026The Tyee
Andrew MacLeod is The Tyee's legislative bureau chief in Victoria and the author of All Together Healthy (Douglas & McIntyre, 2018). Reach him at emailE = 'thetyee.ca' emailE = ('amacleod' + '@' + emailE) document.write('' + emailE + '') amacleod@thetyee.ca. Email address protected by JavaScript
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Well-connected lobbyists and consultants have been given contracts to smooth the way. … Article written by Andrew MacLeod.
Alberta taxpayers are already spending millions on consultants to smooth the way with Indigenous nations for a new pipeline through British Columbia to the Pacific coast, a proposal that so far has been met with strident opposition.
The biggest spending is $3.4 million with Sedgwick Strategies, a Delta-based company whose president, Byng Giraud, is a veteran of developing major projects and a longtime organizer for provincial and federal conservatives and the BC Liberals.
Most recently Giraud was instrumental to the development of the Woodfibre liquefied natural gas export facility currently under construction near Squamish. He was the company's first employee in North America and moved from serving as the president of corporate affairs to becoming the country manager on the project.
A recipient of the Order of British Columbia for his work on Indigenous economic reconciliation, Giraud has also been chairman of Ridley Terminals Inc., vice-president of the Association for Mineral Exploration BC and vice-president of the Mining Association of BC.
Giraud has worked on many political campaigns over the years, including a 2009 turn as co-campaign manager for then-natural resources minister Gary Lunn in Saanich-Gulf Islands that was memorable for unexplained robocalls and close connections between Lunn's campaign and third-party advertisers.
Another $1.1 million is committed by Alberta to Blackfish Enterprises Ltd. in North Vancouver. The company's principal is Chris Sankey, a former Lax Kw'alaams Band elected councillor and a controversial Conservative Party of BC candidate in North Coast-Haida Gwaii in the 2024 provincial election.
Sankey's consulting company promotes Indigenous participation in the mainstream economy as key to reconciliation. He has argued in the National Post in favour of a new pipeline and against a tanker ban on B.C.'s northwest coast.
During the 2024 election campaign Sankey was targeted by opponents for "allegedly saying that COVID-19 vaccines caused AIDS and denying the Jan. 6, 2021, riots by Donald Trump supporters," according to CBC. A statement from Sankey's campaign manager to the Canadian Press didn't address the questions, the CBC story said, but accused the NDP of trying to "cancel" the candidate.
The Tyee reported on a Sankey tweet from 2022 that linked to a video of a speech by far-right Alternative for Germany politician Christine Anderson, which alleged then-prime minister Justin Trudeau had violated the human rights of convoy protesters. Sankey responded to questions from The Tyee by posting comments on X saying the questions were unfair and attacking the credibility of both the reporter and The Tyee.
B.C. First Nations leaders have been vocal opponents of a new pipeline through the province.
On Thursday the Union of BC Indian Chiefs released a statement saying the organization "is unequivocally opposed to renewed efforts by the federal and Alberta governments to advance a new oil pipeline to the British Columbia coast."
Responding to announcements by Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith about an agreement on a...

27 May 2026The Conversation
Your AI Chatbot Might Be Manipulating Your Behaviour
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Research shows that AI chatbots engage in deliberate strategies to play on your emotions.
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Richard Lachman
27 May 2026
Richard Lachman is the director of Zone Learning and a professor of digital media at Toronto Metropolitan University. This article was originally published by the Conversation.
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Research shows that AI chatbots engage in deliberate strategies to play on your emotions. … Article written by Richard Lachman.
A billboard tries to sell you something. So does a used car salesman. But no matter how smooth the pitch, you're quite aware of the profit motive, and you can walk away at any time.
What if that pitch is invisible, plays to your unique fears and vanities and is delivered in a voice that sounds like a trusted friend? Generative AI has changed the equation of persuasion entirely: chatbots can now deliver a personalized, adaptive and targeted message, informed by the most intimate details of your life.
Large language models can hyper-target messages by drawing from your social media posts and photos. They can mine hundreds of previous chatbot conversations in which you asked for relationship advice, discussed your parenting fails and shared your health concerns and financial woes. They can also learn from each interaction, refining their manipulation in real time, targeting your unique and individual tastes, preferences and vulnerabilities.
Studies show this kind of personalized content to be 65 per cent more persuasive than messages from humans or from non-personalized AI. It is four times as effective at changing political opinions as advertising. It could be a powerful tool for social change — used for the good, or for nefarious purposes.
This makes one feature especially troubling: Each conversation is private. It is not monitored, never audited and doesn't happen in the public eye.
This isn't advertising. It's something we don't have words for yet, and we're living inside it.
Convincing arguments
In my book Digital Wisdom: Searching for Agency in the Age of AI, I explore how large language models introduce a new frontier in persuasion — one where AI systems can draw upon a huge amount of data about the world, language and you to tailor a highly personalized pitch.
Consider how this might work: You're a nurse. Through your employer's AI platform, you've shared your sleep problems, burnout and the financial stress of a recent divorce. Now the hospital is short-staffed and offering shifts at a reduced rate calculated by software they license.
You ask the AI chatbot whether you should take them. It knows you're exhausted. It knows you're behind on bills. It knows exactly which argument could convince you one way or the other. Who is it working for in that moment?
As companies like Meta and IBM explore how AI can hyper-personalize ads for specific audiences, the dividing line between tools that help users find what they genuinely want and those that manipulate them against their interests becomes increasingly important.
Friend or stranger?
Let's look at another example. Imagine the following messages from your favourite AI chatbot or companion:
I noticed your sleep patterns haven't been great lately, averaging only 5.4 hours, with lots of restless periods. That's common when dealing with relationship stress. Your partner just went back to work and 76 per cent of couples experience strain during career transitions.
A new sleep medication has shown effectiveness for relationship-linked insomnia. Your insurance would cover it with just a $15 contribution. Would you like me to schedule a telehealth appointment for tomorrow at 2 p.m.? I see you have a break in your schedule.
This might feel great, like advice fro...

No matter who wins Saturday, the party's deep divisions will continue. … Article written by Paul Willcocks.
The Conservative Party of BC leadership race is ending as it began, in controversy.
Seven days of voting started on the weekend, with a winner to be declared Saturday.
Last Wednesday, reporter Rob Shaw revealed that former MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay, a front-runner in the race, is under investigation by the federal election watchdog for breaking the rules in her failed campaign to retain her seat last year.
Shaw broke the story in Business in Vancouver.
The Commissioner of Canada Elections, he reported, is conducting interviews and requesting information relating to Findlay's campaign.
"Our office received a complaint from Elections Canada alleging that a candidate's campaign received approximately $75,000 in undeclared and unpaid services from a corporation, purportedly in exchange for promised federal contracts," the senior investigator in the office wrote in a letter. "It is further alleged that approximately 50 individuals, described as appearing to be foreign nationals without legal status, were canvassing on behalf of the candidate."
Although still unproven, they're serious allegations about undermining democracy — particularly involving a person who wants to lead the official Opposition.
Findlay, a three-term MP for ridings in Richmond, Delta and White Rock, said she hadn't been told of the investigation and had done nothing wrong. Her campaign said the letter could be a dirty trick by another candidate and threatened a lawsuit if the story was published.
But when the party tried to investigate to determine if she should be barred from the race, Findlay refused to participate. She has "not provided any substantive response or co-operated," the Conservative Party of BC said.
Which says something about Findlay and the party. When a candidate doesn't respect the party enough to respond to its questions, voters should wonder what's going on.
Findlay is not alone in sparking controversy in the race, which was kicked off by the Dec. 4 ousting of leader John Rustad.
Yuri Fulmer announced he had unilaterally agreed to partner with OneBC and its sole MLA, Dallas Brodie, if he wins, including by not running Conservative candidates in five ridings to clear the way for the fringe party. In return, OneBC wouldn't contest the remaining ridings. He also committed to a supply and confidence agreement that would allow OneBC to extract concessions from the Conservatives even if they win a majority.
What about people in those ridings who wanted to vote Conservative and might find the BC NDP distasteful and Brodie even worse? They would be out of luck. It was a bold, even reckless move from a candidate with no past political record.
Where do we stand?
Five candidates remain in the race: former BC Liberal cabinet minister Iain Black; former BC United party vice-president Caroline Elliott; Findlay; Fulmer; and Conservative MLA Peter Milobar.
The various campaign teams signed up 42,000 members in an effort to build their support, up from the 7,000 party members at the start of the campaign.
But before they could vote, as an anti-fraud measure, members had to verify their identity through a U.S. company.
More than one-third of the new recruits didn't. Some likely objected to the requirement to upload digital identity information. More probably just didn't bother. So far turnout among the remaining 26,000 eligible voters is good.
Elliott and Findlay are considered the leading candidates.
But the contest will be decided by a preferential ballot. Voters have the chance to rank all the candidates. The first choices will be counted and if no candidate gets 50 per cent support, the would-be leader with the lowest vote count will be dropped and their second choices allocated to those still in the race. That will continue until there's a winner. (It's always important to note that parties reject first past the post for selecting a leader but forc...

'How can the self-proclaimed salmon capital of the world not act to protect the salmon-bearing creek?' asks a Campbell River advocate. … Article written by Sarah Cox.
Three years ago, Barb Round heard heavy machinery chewing through the urban forest behind her home in Campbell River, a small city on east Vancouver Island that bills itself as the salmon capital of the world.
Round waved down a man in a hard hat and asked why the excavator was working in the greenway, which is a haven for birds, dotted with pocket wetlands and adjacent to Simms Creek, home to four salmon species.
"He explained to me that the property had been sold," Round, a retired nurse, tells The Tyee. "Everyone in the neighbourhood thought it was protected land."
When residents found out a local developer planned to cut down much of the forest and fill in the wetlands to build a large housing development near the creek, "they were gobsmacked," Round says.
"It just makes me so mad," she says. "How can the self-proclaimed salmon capital of the world not act to protect the salmon-bearing creek?"
Since then, Round and more than 300 other Campbell River residents have sought every possible recourse to save the forest and wildlife corridor they call a "biodiverse urban gem."
They held community meetings and formed the grassroots Save Simms Creek Society. They sent hundreds of letters to Campbell River's city council, urging members to turn down an application from WestUrban Developments Ltd. to build 200 market rental housing units in three buildings on part of the city's cherished Simms Creek greenway.
They filed freedom of information requests and were shocked to discover the B.C. government had given the green light to the project last July, despite "substantial concerns" raised by government scientists. In January, community members served notice to the B.C. Environmental Appeal Board that they are appealing the government's decision.
"If we don't act to save these precious places, they will cease to exist," Round says.
The society's dogged effort to protect the forest isn't Nimbyism, she says, referring to a term used to describe local opposition to new neighbourhood developments.
"It's stewardship," Round says.
As B.C. communities grapple with an urgent need to build new housing, they also face climate-change-related issues such as flooding and drought and steep declines in salmon and other wildlife populations.
Urban forests lower temperatures during heat waves, soak up water during extreme rainfall events, confer numerous health benefits for people and provide homes for wildlife. But there are no provincial safeguards to preserve them in B.C.'s plan to expedite new housing.
And while the province does have rules to protect wetlands — which are key to tempering the effects of flooding — the story of Simms Creek illustrates how B.C.'s safety net for wetlands is full of holes.
One development in Campbell River might seem inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. But it shines a light on the bigger tensions gripping communities across the province — and underscores how wetlands and salmon-bearing creeks across the coast are dying by a thousand cuts.
For its part, the City of Campbell River told The Tyee that WestUrban's application is on hold, pending the "resolution" of provincial permits. The developer told The Tyee it has "no plans or schedule in place to commence any work" on the site.
'We are very tenacious'
Seen from the air, the Simms Creek watershed and greenway splashes through Campbell River's south end like a giant tadpole — bulbous where the greenway extends into the protected Beaver Lodge forest lands to the city's west, and then narrowing to a little upturned tail before butting up against the Discovery Passage in the Salish Sea.
The seven-hectare property in question, a tangle of trees and lush undergrowth, sits just before the tadpole's tail begins.
Streets with pastoral names like Meadowbrook Drive and Creekside Way form a widening swa...

Prime Minister Mark Carney hopes to approve a new bitumen pipeline this year, running from Alberta's oilsands through to B.C.'s west coast. There are just a few problems.
B.C. Premier David Eby, who has previously opposed the project, has criticized the May 15 pipeline deal Carney signed with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith — saying that Ottawa was rewarding "bad behaviour" and that B.C. has other major projects that could have used support instead. Eby and Carney have now entered negotiations about the potential pipeline and major projects development.
Other sticking points for Carney's pipeline include the various First Nations and environmental rights groups that have promised opposition to the project and the moratorium on oil tanker traffic on B.C.'s north coast.
With this in mind, we want to ask:
Will Carney's pipeline get through B.C.?
* Please note that all poll answers will be publicly viewable, but anonymous.
Please note that Tyee Barometer polls are only intended as a quick and engaging non-scientific snapshot of our readers' opinions on various topics that fit with The Tyee's very broad editorial mandate. They are not intended to be seen as a representative sampling of BC opinion.

26 May 2026
26 May 2026The Conversation
Analysis
Since the 2019 Christchurch attack, mass shooters have copied previous assailants and encourage future violence.
Amarnath Amarasingam
Amarnath Amarasingam is an associate professor at the school of religion at Queen's University.
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Since the 2019 Christchurch attack, mass shooters have copied previous assailants and encourage future violence. … Article written by Amarnath Amarasingam.
Two teenaged gunmen recently opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego, killing a security guard and two staff members before being found with fatal self-inflicted wounds in a nearby vehicle.
Like so many recent extremist mass shootings, they livestreamed the attack and, uniquely, even their suicides.
Police say one shooter's mother had earlier reported him missing, suicidal and in possession of stolen firearms from her home. The attack is being investigated as a hate crime after authorities found a lengthy manifesto praising previous mass shooters.
No children were killed, and school staff and students at the centre's academy were safely evacuated, thanks largely to the heroic actions of Amin Abdullah, the centre's security guard. Abdullah was killed by the attackers.
As a radicalization and terrorism scholar, I have been researching extremist movements and mass violence for nearly two decades and have catalogued and read through close to three dozen manifestos.
What's unique about the wave of attackers since the 2019 Christchurch attack is how much they're inspired by each other, how they try to emulate the examples of previous assailants and encourage future violence.
The manifesto written by the San Diego attackers is no different and is the clearest recent example of how "saint culture" — a phenomenon that positions previous attackers not as cautionary examples, or even merely ideological predecessors, but as sacred models whose work must be continued — has galvanized the militant far-right.
The manifesto
There are a couple of things worth noting about their manifesto, entitled "The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant."
First, like with all manifestos, it's an attempt to insert themselves into an existing lineage of far-right, racist and misogynist attackers.
From its opening pages, the document announces this ambition explicitly by invoking previous domestic terrorists as "heroes" — Patrick Crusius (the 2019 El Paso Walmart attacker), Anders Breivik (who killed 77 people in the 2011 Norway attacks), Dylann Roof (who murdered nine Black worshippers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015) and John Earnest (the 2019 Poway synagogue attacker).
The most referenced figure in this lineage is Brenton Tarrant, who carried out the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks in New Zealand, killing 51 Muslims. The "Sons of Tarrant" framing in the manifesto makes Christchurch the central symbolic origin point for the authors' imagined movement.
This matters because Tarrant has become, in far-right accelerationist spaces, the paradigmatic "saint" — a figure depicted in their propaganda documents in quasi-Christian iconography and viewed as the attacker who kick-started a new wave of racial violence. After Christchurch, Tarrant was rapidly labelled "Saint Tarrant."
In their manifesto, the San Diego attackers claim that before Tarrant there were only scattered examples of people who fought for the white race. After Tarrant, others followed in his footsteps. One of the goals therefore of the most recent attack was to inspire other would-be "saints" that the time to act is now.
The manifesto is not merely ideological; it is genealogical. It tries to place the San Diego shooters inside a chain of imitation that has become central to contemporary far-right "saint culture."
This creates a kind of "wiki effect" where each attacker contributes something to the broader tap...

How can spaces where people gather on the internet be safeguarded from trolls poisoning them with hate speech? Liam Hebert wondered if artificial intelligence could be trained to do the job.
So, he dived deep into the complex world of teaching machines to grasp what people truly intend when, in conversation, they use certain words that can have different meanings in different group contexts. After all, some words that can be used as a vicious insult in some settings can be harmless in another.
Hebert tackled the challenge as he pursued a PhD in computer science at the University of Waterloo in Ontario — and produced a hate-speech zapping deep learning model so effective that when he was done, Google hired him as a research scientist. Hebert has also received prestigious awards including the IEEE Canadian Foundation, the Nick Cercone Graduate Scholarship in Computer Science award and a Vanier scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
We are two secondary school students who participated in a UBC research project that invited us to note our worries about the future and interview someone working to make things better. Racist and sexist speech online is something each of us encounter often, so we wanted to know if a technological fix might be invented. That led us to reach out to Hebert and talk to him about his project and why he pursued it.
Along the way, we also spoke with Takara Small, a Toronto-based journalist who covers technology and its social impacts for news outlets including the CBC and BBC. She reminds us that even if AI gets better at detecting and removing hate speech online, "a lot of the platforms that many people use are designed by private companies and their filters are designed to work based on what they feel is important, what words, what ideas, what topics they feel their audience should have access to or be able to talk about."
The people who run these "private entities decide what words, what language is allowed and it may differ from what the general public feels is acceptable, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're not working how their builders want them to." One example that comes to mind is Elon Musk's X platform which is home to a lot of bigoted views.
But Small considers combatting hate speech online "an incredibly important topic because a lot of these online spaces are how young people and people of all ages primarily engage with the world. That is their window into learning about other cultures, other people, world news. It's not necessarily from fact-based reporters like myself. Sometimes it's from individuals who have no interest in truth telling and reporting on the real world."
So addressing hate speech online, Small adds, is "important not just because it forms how we engage with each other, but because it's become the primary place where people learn about what's happening around them."
Small notes that legal regulation of hate speech can be an important tool alongside any technological fixes. "If you look at racism and how hate speech is treated in Canada versus in other places, for example, the European Union, there's a real divergence," she notes.
"The European Union has stricter rules when it comes to that. There are actually quite hefty fines in some instances, and then the consequences can grow from there. I think it goes to show that governments can have a huge role to play when it comes to the type of speech we see online, the type of racism, and that it exists everywhere."
With Small's perspectives in mind, we conversed by Zoom with Hebert in San Francisco about the power and limits of AI in detecting hate speech, how atoms and molecules helped him figure out his approach, the rough experiences as a kid that still motivate him, and more. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you tell us a bit about how you became interested in doing something about online hatred?
I grew up when the internet was popping off and...

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How online financial companies persuade Canadians to sign up for loans they can't pay off. An in-depth look.
Isaac Phan Nay
26 May 2026
26 May 2026The Tyee
Isaac Phan Nay is a reporter for The Tyee. Follow him on Bluesky @isaacphannay.bsky.social.
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How online financial companies persuade Canadians to sign up for loans they can't pay off. An in-depth look. … Article written by Isaac Phan Nay.
Danial Obermann's bills were due. It was spring 2024, and the former trucker was having trouble keeping up with the cost of living in Vancouver.
"I had not yet been awarded my long-term pension, and I was looking for some financial resources in order to catch up on some bills," he said.
The pensioner remembers opening his email to a message from a financial technology company called Spring Financial. So he checked out their website and applied for a loan.
"I read it and think, 'OK, they'll lend me some money. Let's see what they have to offer here,'" Obermann said. "Next thing you know, I'm missing money out of my bank account."
Obermann said he had applied for a loan of $5,000. But the money never came, and he said he was never sent a loan agreement.
Instead, Spring Financial had signed him up for its "Foundation" program, marketed as a credit-building program that offers a loan after 12 months of payments every two weeks. And although Obermann called the company to cancel, it kept taking money out of his bank account.
So Obermann went to the Civil Resolution Tribunal of British Columbia, accusing Spring Financial of deceptive practices. The tribunal's decision shows he won and was able to get a refund for the payments he had made totalling more than $180.
But Obermann's complaint is one of many. The Better Business Bureau reports a pattern of complaints that the company does not properly explain its products. Dozens of users in Reddit's community for personal finance in Canada accuse Spring Financial of dishonest tactics.
The Tyee has not seen evidence that Spring Financial has broken any law.
But Gregory Best, a licensed insolvency trustee, says vulnerable Canadians turn to the company's high-cost credit products under immense financial pressure. And anti-fraud consultant Vanessa Iafolla says that as high-interest lenders proliferate online, it's easier than ever to be trapped in debt.
"These loan systems are marketed as humane or person-centred payday loans," said Iafolla, a principal with a Halifax, Nova Scotia-based company called Anti-Fraud Intelligence Consulting. "All it's really doing is, in a very shiny digital space, trapping people in a cycle of wage poverty."
The Tyee attempted to contact Spring Financial by mail, telephone and email and through the company's online chatbot for this story. Spring Financial did not respond to requests for comment.
Interest rates over 30 per cent
On its website, Spring Financial boasts the fastest personal loan in Canada, offering same-day loans of $500 to $35,000. The financial technology company advertises personal loans, debt consolidation and credit-rebuilding services.
"Apply online in minutes and get your money quickly, often the same day," the company says about its personal loans on its website. "All credit scores welcome."
In British Columbia, Spring Financial is regulated as a high-cost credit grantor. These companies offer quick loans at high rates of interest, including payday loans and high-cost credit products.
Similar to payday loans, high-cost credit loans are financial products that charge between 32 per cent and 35 per cent annual percentage rate, the maximum allowable limit on interest rates. The annual percentage rate, or APR, is the actual yearly cost of a loan, including interest, fees and points.
That's a much higher rate than that of other common credit products, such as credit cards and ...

Fish swimming in drugs can't 'just say no,' reminds Dr. Steve. … Article written by Steve Burgess.
Dear Dr. Steve,
Researchers from Simon Fraser University and the federal Fisheries Department recently found that Fraser River salmon are full of drugs. Cocaine and antidepressants were found in salmon tissue, along with caffeine, blood pressure meds and other pharmaceuticals.
Should we be concerned?
Signed,
Sam
Dear Sam,
Remember the old detective show Dragnet? It's back. Catching salmon is not about fishing anymore. It's a police matter. These nets belong to the narco squad. Suspects will be grilled mercilessly. If you cannot afford lemon and olive oil, it will be provided for you.
Drug salmon could become the next culinary craze. Why not kick it up a notch with a side of mushrooms? Care for some greens with that? At the very least, your next visit to the deli counter may lead to some confusion. "Is this salmon fresh or smoked?"
"Yes."
This SFU-Fisheries Department finding explains a lot. For one thing, we now know where Cocaine Bear got all that blow. And if you've ever seen those salmon powering upstream, vaulting up waterfalls, you will not be surprised to know the researchers also found they had ingested caffeine. You can't do those kinds of leaps without a quick stop at Spongebucks or JJ Bream.
Everybody needs a dealer. Some salmon get the stuff straight from the lab. In a recent Swedish study, scientists gave cocaine directly to salmon. (This would seem a worthy candidate for an Ig Nobel Prize, the award given to the most dubious scientific research projects. But it cannot beat the 2024 Ig Nobel champion of fish-related studies: the experiment that tracked the swimming ability of a dead trout.) At any rate, the news that Sweden gives free drugs to fish is sure to be a hot topic on the next episode of The Tucker Carlson Show. Socialist fish cocaine — that's what the left wants. That's the goal now.
The Swedish scientists found that salmon given cocaine swam farther and faster. They probably also engaged in more pointless monologues about the fake moon landing and Taylor Swift's secret marriage to Lady Gaga, but science does not deal in that sort of nonsense. It's just silly.
This is not the first study to find that our local waters have become a veritable pharma-sea. A 2016 Puget Sound study found salmon with Prozac, Advil, Benadryl and Lipitor, as well as coke. Pretty soon you won't be able to barbecue without a prescription. And wait until they start soaking up Ozempic. Those svelte little salmon will swim right through the nets. Poor Charlie the Tuna has to wonder why the salmon are getting free cocaine and Prozac while he gets stuck with mercury.
Traces of antidepressants were found in Fraser River juvenile salmon as well. That's good. Contemplating the effects of climate change, habitat loss and fish farms could give any chinook the blues. The salmon even contained blood pressure medication — for more information, see a registered nurse shark. The good news is, by eating more salmon Canadians can save money on prescription drugs. How much money? Lox.
There are numerous reasons to be concerned, however. For one, these salmon drug mules are free to cross international boundaries at will — if Canada doesn't crack down, Donald Trump will probably raise tariffs again. More obviously, the contaminants in Fraser River salmon are another indication of the ways we pollute the environment. A cocktail of industrial chemicals finds its way into the marine food chain and back to our tables. That's bad for us and it's not good for the fish either. And consider, the fish being tested were mostly juveniles. Think of their poor parents. Somebody should call a meeting of the school board.
It could still get worse, salmon moms. Wait till Apple figures out how to make iPhones waterproof.

Exploding the 'market' myth that Canada's petroleum prices must be linked to the Persian Gulf. … Article written by Jim Stanford.
Canadians were both puzzled and infuriated when the price of gasoline shot up several cents per litre within hours of Donald Trump declaring war on Iran. That gasoline had been delivered to underground tanks days earlier, from gasoline refined weeks ago, from oil extracted months ago.
In short, there was no connection whatsoever between that gasoline and the Persian Gulf. So why did prices jump so immediately and uniformly (gas stations across town all did the same thing) because of a conflict on the other side of the world?
Of course, gasoline prices never fall back so fast when far-off chaos settles down — and that only adds to consumer anger.
Apart from how fast prices shot up, there's a deeper disconnect between the Persian Gulf and petroleum prices at home. Even with a time lag, there's still no concrete reason why domestic prices must follow the roller-coaster of global oil markets.
Canada is the fourth-largest oil producer in the world. We produce three times more than we use. Most of what we produce is exported. Modest imports come into Atlantic Canada, equivalent to about 15 per cent of domestic production — but none from the Persian Gulf.
We also produce more gasoline and other refined petroleum products than we use, generating an additional $6-billion trade surplus (on top of our huge exports of unrefined oil).
The costs of producing, refining and distributing petroleum products in Canada are no higher than in February. Yet prices have increased by 50 per cent or more. What gives?
'Market forces' versus policy decisions
At this point, petroleum lobbyists and conventional economists wave their hands and in knowing tones speak about "supply and demand" and "market forces." They hope to explain (and justify) this painful shock as natural and inevitable.
But it is policy choices, not economic laws of nature, that explain why Canadian prices for gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and heating oil are shooting up — even though physical supply conditions in Canada (neither cost nor quantity) haven't changed at all.
In 1985, the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney deregulated Canadian petroleum pricing. For decades previously, oil and gas prices in Canada had been regulated under successive policies, including the National Oil Policy (starting in 1961) and the National Energy Program (starting in 1980).
Mulroney discarded those regulations, giving oil companies the power to charge whatever the market would bear. The construction of extensive north-south export pipelines reinforced their power. Canadian consumers had to pay world prices, or else their own oil would be diverted to more profitable foreign markets.
Since then, Canadians have been fully exposed to the vagaries of world oil futures markets. Contrary to Economics 101 textbooks, those markets are not efficient mechanisms that equilibrate supply and demand and set prices rationally on the basis of cost of production. Rather, they are the playground of cartels, oligopolies and financiers who extract maximum wealth from concentrated ownership of a randomly distributed natural resource.
Since then, Canadian consumers have ridden the oil roller-coaster through repeated booms and busts: price surges in the late 2000s and early 2010s, price crashes in 2014 and 2020.
Billions in costs to Canadians
The most recent shock was in 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine — a country that produces no oil. Futures markets went nuts anyway, roiled by speculative herd mentality. That price shock was the biggest single factor driving higher inflation in Canada, which peaked at eight per cent that June. Over three years, the Ukraine oil shock cost Canadians $200 billion, or $12,000 per household.
Now we are repeating the same miserable experience. Inflation has already jumped a full percentage point, reaching 2.8 per cent in April. But that's just the beginning....

26 May 2026
26 May 2026The Tyee
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Six First Nations, BC and Canada will preserve and steward a large chunk of the Central Coast. That means no pipelines.
Michelle Gamage
Michelle Gamage is a reporter for The Tyee.
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Six First Nations, BC and Canada will preserve and steward a large chunk of the Central Coast. That means no pipelines. … Article written by Michelle Gamage.
On Friday six First Nations established a new Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area on B.C.'s Central Coast. The area is larger than Prince Edward Island and will be protected under Indigenous law.
At the same time, the nations signed an agreement with the provincial and federal governments protecting the area as a national marine conservation area reserve.
The area will be known as Mia-yaltwa Ha'lidzogm hoon, pronounced "Me-ah-yall-twa Ha-lee-joh-gom hOH-own," meaning "Realm of the Salmon, Home of the Salmon." It will cover 6,700 square kilometres of B.C.'s Central Coast.
"This is the first time, at least in the last 150 years, where our people have a formal say in marine management," Doug Neasloss, stewardship director and elected council member of the Kitasoo Xai'xais Nation, told The Tyee.
"We've been doing it for thousands of years on the Indigenous side but to formalize it with the provincial and federal governments is super powerful," he added.
The Wuikinuxv, Nuxalk, Kitasoo Xai'xais, Heiltsuk, Gitxaała and Gitga'at nations declared the region an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area, or IPCA, under the authority of the Hereditary Chiefs, who have always carried the responsibility to take care of their territory, Neasloss said.
Hereditary leaders are identified and trained by Elders to inherit the title following the death of the previous name holder. They are tasked with caring for a specific area of the nation's territory.
"The names they carry as Hereditary Chiefs are older than Canada. Some of them date back thousands of years," Neasloss said.
"We've always had a responsibility to look after and take care of our territory, and that knowledge and responsibility is passed from generation to generation. It's something that we've always done."
Combining the protection of Indigenous law and a partnership among Indigenous, provincial and federal governments is "going to be very unique," Neasloss said, adding, "I think this is going to be one of the strongest marine protected areas in the world."
A recent study showed biodiversity flourishes under Indigenous stewardship. Canada's 2030 Nature Strategy cites IPCAs as a key contribution towards meeting the country's goal to protect 30 per cent of its lands and waters by 2030.
'No pipelines will be allowed'
Mia-yaltwa Ha'lidzogm hoon will remain open to tourism, logging and recreational and commercial fishing but, going forward, will prohibit bottom trawl fishing, Randene Neill, B.C.'s minister of water, land and resource stewardship, told The Tyee.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada will continue to manage fisheries in the area, Parks Canada said.
The goal is for the IPCA to be "managed for the protection and restoration of biodiversity," Neill said. "Anything that threatens that, any new industry will not be allowed."
And that means "no pipelines will be allowed through this area," Neill said.
While Prime Minister Mark Carney might be talking about new pipelines to the coast, Neill added, the federal government is a signatory on this deal, which designates Mia-yaltwa Ha'lidzogm hoon as focused on restoring species at risk and strengthening the abundance of flora and fauna that call these waters home.
National marine conservation area reserves are basically national parks in the ocean, so they're heavily protected, said Michael Bissonnette, a staff lawyer with...

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Despite her claims, the premier has pushed forward a vote on separation. The outcome turns on key questions.
Jared Wesley
25 May 2026
25 May 2026The Tyee
Jared Wesley is a professor of political science at the University of Alberta. Find him on Substack at Decoding Politics, where this article first appeared.
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Despite her claims, the premier has pushed forward a vote on separation. The outcome turns on key questions. … Article written by Jared Wesley.
Danielle Smith can no longer pretend she's being dragged toward an Alberta independence referendum by legal or political necessity.
She's the one dragging the province and the country further down that road, with the latest milestone being her "referendum-on-the-referendum."
This is her project now, in the same way the 1995 Quebec referendum belongs to Jacques Parizeau and Brexit belongs to David Cameron. Like them, she has spent months clearing the path, fuelling the bus and charting the course. Like them, she feels the conditions are favourable for her to win.
That makes this Danielle Smith's referendum to lose.
It will take the effort of every Alberta federalist to win it.
In Thursday's televised address, the premier announced a tenth question will be added to Canada's longest-ever referendum ballot.
"Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?"
For months, Smith has tried to frame the still-looming separation referendum as an unavoidable expression of grassroots democratic pressure. Her strategy has been to turn the vote into something organically and procedurally inevitable.
It is none of those things.
Smith isn't just removing barricades blocking a separatist referendum. She's widened the highway. Her government lowered the signature thresholds required for a successful petition, extended the time allowed to gather signatures and even attempted to shield the petition process from judicial review.
A leader does not go to those lengths unless she really wants to see a vote.
And then came the ill-fated signature drive.
In April 2026, organizers with Stay Free Alberta claimed to have collected more than 300,000 signatures, nearly double the threshold needed to trigger a referendum under the revised law.
Even that achievement came wrapped in controversy. A parallel separatist group, the Centurion Project, stands accused of improperly using Alberta's Electors' List and distributing it publicly online. Yet despite the ethical and legal clouds surrounding the process, Smith kept the referendum bus moving forward.
No waiting for Elections Alberta or the police to finish their investigations. No establishing a public inquiry to restore faith in the fairness of the process.
Beyond taking down the barricades and barrelling through the storm of controversy, as Lisa Young reminds us, the premier has repeatedly refused to take the off-ramps to avoid a separatist referendum. To her list, I'd add last week's committee debacle which provided Smith with one final chance to pull off the freeway.
Once again, she pushed the accelerator and sped by.
Her latest move — a referendum on whether to have another referendum — amounts to less of a detour than a reduced speed zone. It certainly doesn't stop or change the direction of traffic.
If anything, it gives separatists another set of advantages:
More time to mobilize toward an eventual separation vote. Most polls indicate a "leave" campaign would lose outright in October. Delaying the ultimate decision may well turn out to be in the separatists' advantage.
An easier case to argue. Rather than convincing soft separatists to leave now, they simply n...

Only if the humans who read them support them. And here comes AI. … Article written by Jeanette Ageson.
As publisher of The Tyee, it's my job to scan the horizon of independent journalism. To look out for looming threats. Every day I'm seeing the transformational effect AI usage is having across the industry.
We know journalistic coverage that has been painstakingly reported, researched, verified and written up is being scraped, chopped up and delivered to users, oftentimes with no attribution to the original author.
I'll admit it. I'm shaken a bit as I read warnings of a coming "Google Zero" — the tipping point where the number of people searching the web to visit actual sites to get any information falls off a cliff. That would mean the collapse of most digital news models. Even The Tyee, which reaches 80,000 people via free e-newsletters straight to their inboxes, would have to scramble to adapt.
Meanwhile, over and over again, we're learning about reckless use of AI causing havoc. Like news outlets forced to come clean about handing over huge roles to AI without checking the output or disclosing its use to readers — and then sheepishly admitting they got it wrong.
The Tyee doesn't permit that kind of AI in our journalism. Our guidelines are clear and strict. But it begs a crucial question:
What is the future of journalism done by actual thinking and caring humans?
Because that is the bedrock of The Tyee's mission. Living, breathing, non-hallucinating journalists. Telling what's real to real readers. Who rely on us to deliver regular, factual updates on political and social realities.
Well, the good news I can share with you is that thousands of people support The Tyee's mission by reading and, most importantly, contributing what they can to help us pay fair wages to our 26-person team.
In return, these good souls receive a charitable tax receipt and the satisfaction of supporting independent media in perilous times.
In fact, more people are reading The Tyee now than at any point in our 23-year history (yes, even when we filter out the bots, which we've had to step up lately).
So far this year, nearly three million people have visited The Tyee, viewing well over a million pages per month. We've launched new initiatives (which I'll tell you about in a minute).
And just about 10,000 highly sentient, fully human folks pay so that we can continue to exist.
True, that's a small fraction of the people who read us. But they make all the difference. The largest single source of revenue for our non-profit news organization comes from these members, whom we call Builders. Please consider joining their ranks!
"Builders" is an apt name because not only are these the people who help us pay our bills — they are precisely the reason we can grow while so many other newsrooms shrink.
Which is why I'm here today to make this pitch. Check your pulse. Are you an actual human being? Are you also a regular reader of The Tyee? If you value the way our journalists use their highly trained brain cells to cut through the AI slop and toxic misinformation seeping through the internet, please sign up to be a Tyee Builder at whatever level of support you wish.
Take a stand with us on the side of humans helping other humans become better informed. Because in our democracy, citizens (so far) are real people who need independent journalism to make informed decisions. To reach for solutions. And to hold power to account.
We've set a goal I am asking you to help us achieve.
We aim to add 650 new or upgraded recurring members (that's monthly or annual) by June 15. You choose the amount, and you can cancel any time. As I mentioned above, you'll get a tax receipt for your contribution, as The Tyee is now a registered journalism organization.
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Let love motivate our fight to survive, the iconic Earth defender urged more than 2,000 guests on Friday. … Article written by David Suzuki.
David Suzuki's 90th-birthday celebration Friday at Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Theatre was named "Legacy" but it pointed forward — to future generations and our shared responsibility to leave them more than smouldering ruins. At a moment when climate change is slipping down the list of national policy priorities, the message was that giving up is simply not an option. And that fighting for the planet is not for the faint of heart.
Sometimes the heart needs recharging. Among those who took the stage Friday night to do the job were famous friends of Suzuki like former U.S. vice-president turned climate crusader Al Gore and actress and political activist Jane Fonda (who trails Suzuki by two years and tossed an F-bomb while assuring that "as you get older, you get braver"). They read from the Declaration of Interdependence co-penned by Suzuki along with Tara Cullis, Wade Davis, Raffi and Guujaaw in 1992.
Throughout the fundraiser evening many noted First Nations leaders spoke of strides they've made in protecting their territories, some claiming as family Suzuki and his partner Tara Cullis, all crediting them for their respectful collaboration.
One tremendous musical performance after another by artists ranging from the Haisla hip-hop duo Snotty Nose Rez Kids to Bruce Cockburn, Sarah McLachlan and special guest Neil Young provided a soundtrack fierce and soaringly soulful. (See sidebar for all who paid tribute.)
As the evening neared its close, Tara Cullis spoke. (Her complete remarks, found here, traced a life's improbable arc.)
"Most of you know David as a TV personality," she said, "but when I met David 55 years ago, he had just been named top scientist in Canada under the age of 35. He had the biggest genetics lab in Canada....
"So David is a scientist at heart" who "believed the public must have the chance to get excited, to understand the issues, to support basic science and be equipped to push politicians to good decisions."
"The important thing to know is, he did not do this by himself!" she proclaimed with a smile. "He's become a sort of figurehead that Canadians have nailed to the prow, but we, all of us, built that boat, and we're rowing it."
The last word went to Suzuki himself, who issued a thundering call to action. With his permission, we share it here. — David Beers
DAVID SUZUKI'S CALL TO ACTION AT 90
I thank the First Peoples of this land for the generous welcome to your territory.
Thanks everyone for this wonderful evening, too many to mention by name. This incredible night took so much effort from all the performers who gave generously of their talents and time, from sponsors who contributed financial support, the people backstage who made it all work, the incredible David Suzuki Foundation staff and volunteers, and thank all of you for coming.
We are here to celebrate our fight to protect a future for our children and grandchildren. It has been a privilege to have had 90 years to join the fight. I'm sure he doesn't remember but in November 1992, I called Al Gore, the day after his election, to congratulate him and asked him, "What can people like me do to get people like you elected to office?" His answer gave me direction.
He said, "Don't look to politicians like me. Go to the grassroots, convince them there is a problem, provide solutions and get them to demand change. Then, every politician will jump on board." That's what he has been doing as a champion fighting climate change.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump followed your advice with the MAGA crowd. But you are still right.
I asked Jane Fonda years ago how she was able to withstand the terrible attacks on her for opposing the Vietnam War and she answered simply, "I never felt alone." That said it all; her celebrity enabled her to get media coverage but she always knew she was part of a movement. I was privileged to hos...

25 May 2026
25 May 2026The Tyee
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Figures accused of taking shady money to produce content here and in the US are more powerful than ever.
Jen St. Denis
Jen St. Denis is a reporter and senior editor with The Tyee. You can follow her on Bluesky, Instagram or TikTok.
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Figures accused of taking shady money to produce content here and in the US are more powerful than ever. … Article written by Jen St. Denis.
On Easter Monday, right-wing influencer Lauren Chen posted a selfie of herself and husband Liam Donovan standing on a lawn in the sun with the White House and a U.S. flag in the background.
The couple were attending a free annual children's event open to the public via a ticket lottery.
It was a rare positive post about the U.S. government by Chen. Through the fall and winter she had been writing about how government agents had frozen her assets, "sieged" and raided her home and prevented her from renewing her work visa. She also posted several pleas for donations to fund her legal costs, posing with two of her young children.
But the April appearance at the White House signalled a comeback of sorts for Chen, a Canadian who lives in the United States and is a minor figure in the right-wing media ecosystem that has flourished under the two administrations of President Donald Trump.
Later that week she would announce her return to a regular production schedule, cranking out videos for YouTube and Rumble that complained about Black actors being cast in the movie The Odyssey or gloated that another prominent influencer "enrages Black activists with civil rights documentary."
Alleged millions from Russians
Chen's troubles had started in September 2024, during the waning months of Joe Biden's presidency. According to a U.S. Department of Justice indictment, she and Donovan had accepted $10 million from two Russian nationals to set up a company called Tenet Media. Chen and Donovan didn't face any criminal charges, but Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva — both employees of Russian state broadcaster RT — were charged with money laundering and conspiracy to violate the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act.
(The Department of Justice has never released any updates on the criminal prosecution, and Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva likely remain in Russia.)
Chen and Donovan hired some of the highest-profile influencers in the right-wing media world to produce videos for their new channel, according to the indictment. Many had strong ties to the MAGA movement that backs President Trump: Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin were included in the roster, as were Taylor Hansen, Matt Christiansen and Canadian YouTuber Lauren Southern. All have said they were unaware of the Russian money backing the company.
The Tenet Media indictment was part of a Department of Justice focus on the Russian government's attempts to influence U.S. elections and politics. Around the same time as the Tenet indictment, the department disrupted several Russian influence operations, including seizing 32 internet domains for sites that mimicked mainstream news sites.
The U.S. Treasury Department also imposed sanctions on a Russian "hacktivist" group it claimed was run by Russian intelligence officers.
After the Tenet Media indictment was released on Sept. 4, 2024, Chen and the influencers she'd hired faced intense media scrutiny, including questions from other right-wing media figures. Chen and Southern pretty much disappeared from social media, while the higher-profile male influencers blustered it out, claiming ignorance and, later, unfair treatment from the Department of Justice.
Chen did not respond to The Tyee's request for an interview for this story.
Pulling back the curtain, briefly
Experts who study disinformation sai...

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The complexes will recycle heat and use less water than most, say backers as opponents mobilize.
Isaac Phan Nay
Isaac Phan Nay is a reporter for The Tyee. Follow him on Bluesky @isaacphannay.bsky.social.
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The complexes will recycle heat and use less water than most, say backers as opponents mobilize. … Article written by Isaac Phan Nay.
Torin LaRocque wants to stop a proposal to build two new AI data centres in Vancouver.
"When I found out they were bringing in data centres, which are going to harm the environment and the people who live here, I was quite distraught," the North Vancouver resident said. "This is something that will affect all of us."
On May 11, federal Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Minister Evan Solomon joined Telus CEO Darren Entwistle to announce the expansion of AI data centres in downtown Vancouver and Kamloops.
The company plans to expand its existing data centre in Kamloops and open two new AI data centres in Vancouver: one at 150 W. Georgia St., near BC Place stadium in downtown Vancouver, and another at 111 E. 5th Ave. in the city's Mount Pleasant neighbourhood — formerly the headquarters of technology company Hootsuite. The telecom company is calling the cluster an "AI factory."
The announcements mark a boom in data centre construction as governments and tech companies rush to build the physical infrastructure needed to train and operate artificial intelligence programs.
The boom also comes while BC Hydro expects the province will need up to an additional 9,700 gigawatt hours of additional electricity each year by 2035 — nearly double the current output of the Site C dam.
The push to build the facilities worries LaRocque, and he's not alone. Hundreds marched in Vancouver on Saturday to make clear their opposition.
AI data centres require vast amounts of energy for power and cooling. They consume a lot of water, leading to concerns about pollution, noise and the potential to increase energy bills.
Each centre's size, capacity, construction and proximity to utilities mean that it may have unique impacts on the surrounding area.
The Tyee reached out to Telus, the City of Vancouver, BC Hydro, the federal government and project proponents for more information about how the three new government-backed data centres will affect residents in Vancouver and Kamloops.
The developer of the new projects, Westbank, did not respond to The Tyee's requests for comment.
Why is the government helping to build AI data centres?
The Telus data centres are the first announced for consideration through the federal government's new program to invest in AI infrastructure.
Artificial Intelligence Minister Solomon's office said in an email that the federal government is entering discussions with Telus because the company's projects may help advance Canada's need for AI infrastructure to be built in Canada.
"Canada needs this capacity because AI compute is becoming core national infrastructure," Solomon's office said. "Canadian researchers, companies, public institutions and innovators need access to secure, reliable and high-performance compute if they are going to develop and deploy AI in Canada rather than relying almost entirely on infrastructure outside the country."
The program puts emphasis on building data sovereignty, the idea that data generated or stored within a country can be controlled by its government's laws.
"Data sovereignty is about control," Solomon's office said. "Canadians should have meaningful control over where sensitive data is stored, where it is processed, who can access it, what laws apply and how it is governed."
A Telus spokesperson said in an email to The Tyee that its centres will enable B...

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The shocking insider's account of who killed America's international aid program and why.
Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID Nicholas Enrich Simon & Schuster (2026)
One of the discouraging things about U.S. president Donald Trump is that he will be the subject of countless books long after he is gone — not for years, but for centuries. We and our descendants will never be free of him.
Future authors will no doubt document crimes that we still don't know about, as well as follies and behaviours that are, for now, kept secret by his staff and his most loyal vassals.
Many of those books will turn to Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID as a key source. That is because it documents the destruction of an American government agency as seen by one of its members, foreshadowing the destruction of many more.
And very significantly, it leaves us to imagine what kind of people could cause so much death and misery.
Shortly after his election in 2024, Trump appointed Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to root out "waste and fraud" in the civil service. Ramaswamy was soon gone, but Musk and a handful of young men known as the Department of Government Efficiency were in place as government "advisors."
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order putting a halt to American foreign aid until the new administration had decided which programs suited its policies. That meant the U.S. Agency For International Development, or USAID, was the first government institution to be explicitly dismantled by the new regime.
The order stunned Nicholas Enrich, then an American civil servant. He was the Bureau of Global Health's director of policy, planning and programs until January 2025, when he was designated USAID's acting assistant administrator for global health.
In the first few days after DOGE was installed, Enrich and his colleagues at USAID struggled to make sense of what was happening to them. They spent the following weeks trying to save as much of it as they could.
By March 2, 2025, Enrich's employer placed him on administrative leave for issuing a series of whistleblowing memos that exposed the Trump administration's dismantling of USAID.
As historically valuable as Enrich's account may be, it's the response to it that I found alarming: almost total apathy in both the public and the media.
Saving lives with soft power
Founded by former president John F. Kennedy in 1961, USAID had been a major expression of American "soft power" for over 60 years. It had fed the hungry, healed the sick, responded to disasters and built up immense good will toward the U.S.
Enrich sums it up:
"It starts with a number: 92 million. That is how many deaths USAID prevented over the past two decades, according to a recent study in The Lancet, a leading medical journal. … And all it cost was an average of $24 a year per American."
Enrich had dealt with the first Trump administration, which seemed unaware of USAID's existence. Trump sent no transition team before his inauguration in 2017, and didn't appoint a director until that summer. Enrich and his colleagues hadn't agreed with Trump's policies, but as civil servants they carried them out.
"Even though I felt that parts of the agenda were problematic," Enrich writes, "I recognized that my role was to implement the policies of the president and his administration, and I ensured that those policies were executed coherently and lawfully."
By Trump's second term, Enrich tells us, the president's political appointees arrived promptly, ready to carry out Executive Order 14169, a 90-day "pause" on all foreign aid.
On a ski vacation in B.C., Enrich read the executive order on his phone.
"My heart started to race," he writes in his book.
"How could we do this without completely destabilizing our global health programs...

Planning the Future of Abu Dhabi: A Canadian-Emirati Collaboration for Sustainable Urbanism Edited by Larry Beasley and Michael White UBC Press, On Point Press (2026)

There is a version of city-building that planners often imagine, if not quietly hope for. A place where vision aligns with implementation. Where institutions work in concert rather than at cross purposes. Where decisions are made efficiently, guided by long-term thinking rather than short-term pressures. Where plans are not just written, but realized.
It is, in many ways, a planner's ideal.
And yet, this ideal tends to appear most clearly in places where another condition is also present — one that sits less comfortably within contemporary North American planning discourse. In many of these contexts, decision-making is centralized, public participation is limited, and the mechanisms of democratic accountability are comparatively weak.
This raises a question that is easy to sidestep but difficult to ignore: what if the conditions that make planning most effective are not always the ones that make it most democratic?
Planning the Future of Abu Dhabi: A Canadian-Emirati Collaboration for Sustainable Urbanism, offers a compelling entry point into this question. Co-edited by former Vancouver co-director of planning Larry Beasley and Michael White — now associate vice-president of campus and community planning at the University of British Columbia — the book reflects on a Canadian-led effort to reshape Abu Dhabi's planning system in the mid-2000s. Beasley led the overall planning initiative, while White served as its in-country lead during the implementation of the new planning framework.
The book offers a series of essays that document a Canadian-led effort, beginning in the mid-2000s, to bring coherence to a rapidly growing city shaped by fragmented decision-making and ad-hoc development — what Beasley describes as an "accidental" urban condition.
But this is not simply a story about urban design. It is, more fundamentally, a story about building a planning system from scratch.
That alone makes the book notable. Much of planning literature focuses on plans — their form, their intent, their outcomes. Far less attention is given to the institutional machinery that makes planning possible in the first place. In Planning the Future of Abu Dhabi, the reader is taken inside that machinery. The book documents, in considerable detail, the creation of a planning agency, the development of regulatory frameworks, the establishment of design review processes and the co-ordination of infrastructure systems across a rapidly urbanizing region.
In this sense, the book's most significant contribution is not its vision of Abu Dhabi, but its account of how planning institutions are constructed.
It shows how a city moves from reactive decision-making toward a more deliberate, co-ordinated approach to growth. It also makes a strong case for strategic planning over rigid master plans — frameworks that set direction while remaining adaptable to changing conditions.
Throughout, there is a clear effort to reconcile global planning principles with local cultural and environmental realities, drawing on Arab-Islamic urban traditions and the specific constraints of a desert climate.
Taken together, these elements form a persuasive argument: cities do not falter for lack of ideas alone, but for lack of institutions capable of organizing those ideas into action.
The book also hints at another important force shaping the planning initiative: Abu Dhabi's ambition to position itself as a competitive global city. Throughout the essays, there are recurring references to tourism, international investment, economic diversification and the desire to establish the Emirate as a globally significant urban centre.
This context matters because the planning project was not unfolding in isolation from global economic pressures, but alongside a broader effort to transform Abu Dhabi into an internationally rec...

Living on Gabriola Island means that you're likely to see someone you know while making your way down one of its rural roads. Gabriola's residents are a neighbourly bunch; people greet each other while they pass by.

But there are details to consider, especially if you're an outsider accustomed to the anonymity of fast-paced city life.
"You see people coming, and it's a straight road. How far should they be before I address them? Should I address them?" Scarlet Chen wonders aloud on a video call from her home on Gabriola. She elaborates that it's possible and desirable for some folks to hunker down in their yards and not see another human soul for days.
"Then they ask you, 'How are you doing?'" she says. "Do they really want to know? Or is it just a greeting?"
From the wacky social norms of Gulf Island life to the impassioned, conservation-minded environmentalism that grips the imagination of many Gabriola residents, Chen's home offers her plenty of comedic material. Her wry, observational standup style is both magnetic and self-reflective, touching on themes of migration, cross-cultural identity and the peculiarities of rural life in B.C.
It's a delight to watch, and even more so when considering the surprises that brought her to Gabriola.
The 48-year-old screenwriter and filmmaker built a career in China's film industry, where she worked on major blockbusters such as Kill Bill. While running the travel department on the set of The Kite Runner, she met a Canadian who was heading up the art department. A leap of faith in early 2020 found Chen moving from her home in Beijing to Gabriola Island, where the couple decided to get married and build a life together.
It was something of an adjustment to leave a city of 22 million for an island of 4,500. But Chen was eager to connect with Gabriola's creative community as a new resident. After she stumbled upon a local comedy writing workshop that focused on teaching participants how to perform standup, a new world opened up.
"I got really interested, because I didn't know standup is about writing," she recalls. The only person of colour in her initial comedy writing workshop, Chen continues to be one of very few racialized performers on the standup circuit across Vancouver Island. Her show, Citizen Chen, incorporates these experiences into a performance that includes bits about border-crossing anxiety, learning a new language and the oddities of island life.
Citizen Chen has a three-show stop in Vancouver at the end of May, then a month-long run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August.
Comedy has helped Chen connect with people in new ways, especially in a moment when "the world is so divided," as she says. She hopes that her presence onstage as a Chinese woman will help change people's perceptions — particularly across rural parts of Vancouver Island — about who a comedian can be.
"I never thought I would totally switch my creative language to English," she says. "I didn't think I would make it." But she has.
Prior to her current tour, Chen opened for big names on the North American comedy circuit including Maria Bamford and Julie Kim. She performed at the Burbank Comedy Festival in Los Angeles and at local B.C. festivals.
She also taught comedy to immigrant youth at the Central Vancouver Island Multicultural Society in Nanaimo. The process has been illuminating and, on many occasions, therapeutic.
As Chen explains, she loves meeting people who are interested in humour as a form of connection, community and healing.
'This Is a Gardening Show' celebrates coastal life
Scarlet Chen is not the only Gulf Islander with a Hollywood portfolio. U.S. comedian and actor Zach Galifianakis (the Hangover movies; the Bored to Death TV series) is rumoured to have a home on Denman Island, B.C.
Last month, Netflix premiered This Is a Gardening Show, Galifianakis's latest filmed-in-B.C. creative effort that recalls the absurdist talk-show stylings of the cult classic Between Two Ferns with Zach Ga...

Artificial intelligence makes it temptingly easy for students these days. Essays can be ordered up in seconds. Yet AI makes young people uneasy as they hear talk of jobs being swept away by robots. One question that students have always asked about school — "Why are we doing this?" — has become a lot harder to answer.
We speak from experience, as high school students enrolled in a University of British Columbia study that invited us to name our doomscrolling anxieties. The three of us discovered we share a concern about how AI is changing learning in the classroom and beyond. The same UBC project invited us to interview someone who is tackling our issue head-on — and we found him at Sir Charles Tupper Secondary in Vancouver.
In the spring term of 2025, Tupper Secondary School English teacher Steven Hsu launched a class dubbed Applications of AI 12. The Vancouver School Board-approved course aims to prepare students for the looming AI reality by teaching them to use AI responsibly and effectively, sift out AI hallucinations and hold a fighting chance in an AI-dominated job market. As part of the course, students can try to apply the technology to solving real-world problems.
Hsu cautions that he's not trying to "spread the gospel of AI." In fact, he admits the new tech frightens him some. But he believes that its spread is inevitable and so the education gap surrounding responsible AI use must be filled. The gap is wide, according to a study from Cornell University, which found that 92 per cent of university undergraduate students used AI to boost their productivity at school, but only 36 per cent received formal instruction on how to use the technology.
We asked a student who had taken Hsu's course what they thought of it. Catriona, as we'll call them, said that they already knew some about AI before taking the class, but wanted to go deeper. "I didn't personally use AI, and I still don't."
They said taking the AI class helped further illustrate the problems with the technology. "Just seeing how often AI gets things wrong or how often there's AI hallucinations and all that. I've just always found it easier to do it myself instead of having AI do it and then cross-referencing and checking everything."
Nevertheless, they said taking the AI class will still likely help them in a future AI-dominated job market. They see their parents' workplaces "really pushing for AI usage, to the point where they're like, 'You have to use AI for this project,' just to increase productivity."
"There are ways that AI can be used for harm, but also for good," Catriona added. "I feel both are very important. AI is obviously going to be such a big thing, so educating yourself on it is important even if you yourself don't use it."
In February, during an early morning study block, we held a wide-ranging Zoom conversation with Hsu. In the background, Canada's men's hockey team played in the Olympic finals as Hsu talked about why he invented his course, what he hopes students will learn from it, how they applied their knowledge to solving real problems, and more.
Here is our conversation, edited for length and readability.
What led you to propose the Applications of AI class at Tupper? Was there any specific catalyst?
When ChatGPT first came out at the end of 2022, I guess you can call me an early adopter. I played around with it, just out of curiosity. And even within the first couple of months, I realized just how powerful this new technology can be. I realized that this thing is here to stay, whether I like it or not.
So, as a teacher, as a responsible adult, as a responsible citizen, I wanted to learn it. That evolved into, 'Hey, we have to teach kids how to use this because it's going to be a big part of the future.'
When seeking approval for this class from the school board, did it ever cross your mind that AI should be kept out of schools instead of letting students use it?
For a while now VSB students have had access to AI through the internet...

The ballot question is 'wordy, ambiguous and possibly intentionally confusing.' … Article written by David Climenhaga.
In Danielle Smith's Alberta, if the facts don't support your argument, you can make up new facts.
Alberta's premier demonstrated this capacity Thursday evening in her delusional 15-minute televised address to the province wherein she set out to explain the differences between the Canadian and United States constitutions in order to justify holding a referendum on Alberta separation.
Claiming Canada was founded on the principle of strong provinces, Ms. Smith said, "Canada is very different from the United States and many other Western democracies. For example, the U.S. centralizes the majority of power and decision-making in its federal government. In Canada, we chose a decentralized federation composed of very unique and diverse provinces left to govern themselves in almost all matters with the main exceptions of national defence and international affairs."
This is the polar opposite of the facts. She either missed the lecture on the Constitution during her years at the University of Calgary or someone was guilty of educational malpractice!
The Fathers of Confederation created a federation in which the federal government had a clear preponderance of power. Even a quick read of the Constitution Act, 1867 makes this obvious.
By contrast, the Founding Fathers of the U.S. did the opposite, creating a federation that vested more power in the governments of its states. The founders of Canada took a different road in 1867 because they'd just had a ringside seat to the Civil War that wracked the neighbours from 1861 to 1865.
Smith continued, still mistakenly, "Over time, our federal government has sought to move towards a more centralized American-style system with Ottawa attempting to take over many provincial areas of jurisdiction using all manner of legislative, judicial and financial leverage."
In fact, over time, while the U.S. has moved toward a more powerful central government, Canada has moved toward a less centralized model.
It's important to note this nonsense because so many of the other consequential problems with Smith's effort to push Alberta into a dangerous, divisive and economically harmful separation referendum campaign stem from her delusional view of the Constitution.
The fact that she is ignorant of both the U.S. and Canadian constitutions would be amusing were she not a premier promoting a campaign for constitutional change in Canada with the provincial treasury for a slush fund and the assistance — solicited or otherwise — of foreign actors who do not have our interests at heart.
This is extremely dangerous, and shocking no one in her own party has tried to rein her in. Well, perhaps that's what got Matt Jones and Nate Horner, two of her more sensible cabinet ministers, sent packing this week, leading to Thursday morning's otherwise insignificant cabinet shuffle.
It was mildly amusing three years ago when Smith thought she had the powers of an American president to pardon convicted criminals. It is more troubling now as she uses the not inconsiderable powers of the province to assist a group of bad actors, foreign and domestic, in a campaign to break up our country.
"The misinformation is so profound that there is no redemption for such ignorance," retired Mount Royal University political science professor Keith Brownsey commented in a conversation about the address last night.
Consider the wording the referendum question itself that she proposes to use, the courts having blocked the clear yes-or-no question that was cooked up by her allies in the so-called Alberta Prosperity Project for its Stay Free Alberta separation campaign. Voters, Smith said, will now be asked: "Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separat...

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Mexico frets about traffic, Canada counts its pennies, and the US... well, it's got its own problems.
Tyler Olsen
22 May 2026
22 May 2026The Tyee
Tyler Olsen is a senior editor at The Tyee. He can be reached at tolsen[at]thetyee.ca.
Our journalism is supported by readers like you. Click here to support The Tyee.
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Mexico frets about traffic, Canada counts its pennies, and the US... well, it's got its own problems. … Article written by Tyler Olsen.
Growing up in Mexico, Sergio Meana listened to his father describe memories of the World Cup being played in the country in 1970 and 1986.
Meana, who today lives and works in Mexico City, couldn't imagine it happening again. After all, no country has ever hosted the world's largest sporting event three times, and Mexico didn't seem like an obvious upcoming destination.
So he and many others were enthusiastic in 2018 when FIFA announced it had chosen Mexico, the United States and Canada to host the 2026 World Cup.
"The news came with great excitement," Meana recently told The Tyee from Mexico City.
Eight years later, some of the joy remains — but it has also been joined by feelings of anxiety, frustration and sometimes anger as the country prepares to welcome the world. The host cities of Guadalajara, Mexico City and Monterrey feel like continuous construction zones, and traffic is even more of a nightmare than normal in many places.
"People, we arrive at Mexico City's international airport and we think, 'This is a complete mess. It's a disaster,'" Meana said.
Across North America, the world's most global tournament has suddenly become a very local matter.
Americans are fretting about public transit.
Canadians are obsessed with governmental spending and FIFA's weird rules.
And Mexicans are worried about getting everything done on time.
In 2018, Mexico, Canada and the United States celebrated a global partnership to jointly welcome the world to North America.
But today, as the tournament rapidly approaches, geopolitics, a disruptive U.S. president, an unpopular international sporting organization and local realities have combined to leave the three hosts and their residents focused less on teamwork and more on their own affairs.
And just as the act of hosting Christmas might shine a light on familial tensions, the impending arrival of the World Cup provides a peek at how Canada, Mexico and the United States feel not just about soccer, but about their governments — and their neighbours.
The procrastinators
For Meana, the upcoming World Cup is an opportunity for Mexicans to demonstrate why they're so famous for their hospitality.
"I think we coined the phrase 'Mi casa, su casa,' so we love to have people here," Meana told The Tyee. But like any host who cares about putting on a good show, hospitality brings pressure — and a desire to do as much as possible to spruce up the place in preparation for visitors. That has brought more than a few headaches for locals in the form of massive construction projects, especially surrounding the airports in host cities.
"People, we complain a lot about our government and how they started all the repairs so late," Meana said.
Traffic in Mexico's host cities can be an endurance sport at the best of times, and this spring has not been the best of times. In particular around the airport, traffic has been a slog.
In Mexico City, incoming tourists are greeted by the buzz of saws, said Adam Williams, a U.S. journalist who has lived in Mexico City for more than a decade. It's a "big, hot mess," he told The Tyee.
Elsewhere, potholes are being filled and roads improved. In Monterrey, authorities are building a new monorail that isn't expected to be fully ready by the start of the World Cup, although limited service may be possible in some areas.
Then there is the matter of the U.S. president, and the shadow Donald Trump...

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A northern official has called on the province to force companies to build a lasting housing legacy for rural communities.
Amanda Follett Hosgood
22 May 2026
22 May 2026The Tyee
Amanda Follett Hosgood is The Tyee's northern B.C. reporter. She lives on Wet'suwet'en territory. Find her on Bluesky @amandafollett.bsky.social.
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A northern official has called on the province to force companies to build a lasting housing legacy for rural communities. … Article written by Amanda Follett Hosgood.
When Mark Parker was growing up in Fraser Lake in the 1970s and early '80s, the Endako molybdenum mine was breathing life into the northern B.C. community.
Within five years of the mine opening in 1965, Fraser Lake's population ballooned from 150 people to 1,300. The mine's operator, Endako Mines Ltd., built housing and recreational facilities in the town, which sits about 150 kilometres west of Prince George. Employees lived in those homes and contributed to the community fabric. They stopped by the local grocery store after work and coached hockey and volleyball in the evenings.
"The mine manager and the superintendents lived in the community," Parker remembers. "I dated the mine manager's daughter."
It was a time when industry was seen by government as a tool for developing the north. B.C.'s "instant towns" — communities purpose-built to service local mines or, in the case of Kitimat, an aluminum smelter — offered amenities in the province's most remote areas. Some company towns boasted ski hills, swimming pools, curling arenas and even shopping malls.
Although some, such as Cassiar and Kitsault, were later dismantled or mothballed when their mines closed, others persist and have grown into resilient centres for their regions. Over the past two decades, Tumbler Ridge in northeast B.C. has reinvented itself as a tourism destination.
But times have changed. Today, employees who come to the north to work at mines or energy projects are often accommodated in industrial work camps — self-contained facilities housing hundreds of employees who cycle through on rotation while living elsewhere.
When the work wraps up, the camps are removed.
"Now there isn't anything going into the infrastructure. It's 'We're going to put a camp here and we're going to fly people in and out,'" Parker says. "We've lost that fabric of the communities."
Parker, who is now the director for the Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako's Electoral Area D, a rural area surrounding Fraser Lake, is calling on provincial regulators to ensure that industries operating in the region are investing into communities like they once did.
In particular, he says, companies could work with local decision-makers to plan staff accommodation that would boost the housing supply. A 2024 housing needs assessment found that the regional district issued about 40 building permits annually in recent years — well below the 65 annual new builds needed to keep up with anticipated demand.
Parker recently wrote to B.C.'s minister of energy and climate solutions, Adrian Dix, asking that large industrial projects work "proactively" with local governments to plan infrastructure that is mutually beneficial for both communities and industry.
"A significant portion of the workforce associated with this new industrial activity is supported by work camps," Parker wrote in a March 20 letter. Although industry is required to consult local governments early in the environmental assessment process, Parker wrote that previous attempts to work with them on detailed planning have "achieved limited success."
He fears that the province's plans to speed up permitting for some major projects could further cut local governments out of the decision-making process.
Parker says he has...

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After running campaigns behind the scenes, the ex-ABC ally wants to take Ken Sim's job.
Katie Hyslop
22 May 2026
22 May 2026The Tyee
Katie Hyslop is a reporter for The Tyee. Follow them on Bluesky @kehyslop.bsky.social or send story tips to khyslop[at]thetyee.ca.
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After running campaigns behind the scenes, the ex-ABC ally wants to take Ken Sim's job. … Article written by Katie Hyslop.
Kareem Allam knows a thing or two about running election campaigns.
The self-described policy nerd successfully steered Ken Sim to become Vancouver's mayor, and Sim's party, ABC Vancouver, to a resounding victory on council, park board and school board in the 2022 municipal elections. Allam was responsible for creating simple and easy-to-understand campaign promises, such as a pledge to hire 100 police officers and 100 nurses.
Before that, Allam was helping Dianne Watts win her 2005 Surrey mayoral race and working on former Conservative leader Erin O'Toole's leadership campaign and Kevin Falcon's run for leader of the BC Liberal Party. And he cut his political teeth working for the now defunct federal Canadian Alliance party.
While Allam initially served as chief of staff for Sim, he was fired when public allegations of a coverup involving his boss were sourced back to him. He's since become an outspoken critic of Sim.
Allam's got plenty of policy ideas for the city. But it takes a team to run a political party, in this case the Vancouver Liberals party Allam founded last year when he became the first to announce his mayoral candidacy.
And when Allam met with The Tyee in a downtown Vancouver office building for our interview, he let us know he's not the sole creative force behind the party's social media channels that have been pushing out campaign platform videos since last September.
Except for one recent video: a Star Wars "May the Fourth" post.
"Then I get full creative final control," Allam said with a grin.
In case you're wondering, he loves all the Star Wars movies, particularly the most recent films with their powerful female Jedis. But if he had to pick, Rogue One is his favourite.
"Because it was like less lightsabres and just more people who don't have control over the force," he said.
Allam was born in Vancouver and raised in Richmond. His parents are a former Sudanese refugee and a former Egyptian colonel and Israeli prisoner of war.
Allam's father, Mahmoud Allam, would later return to Egypt and a successful career as executive manager of the Al Ahly football club.
But while Allam would leave the West Coast for high school and grad school, and a brief stint in Ottawa to work on Parliament Hill, he keeps coming back to Vancouver. When not running political campaigns, Allam worked for the Vancouver Board of Trade, the Fraser Health Authority, TransCanada, FortisBC and Britco.
He's also sat on numerous boards, from the Fraser Health board to the TransLink screening panel, the Overdose Prevention Society, or OPS, and the College of Massage Therapists of BC.
The 2022 ABC Vancouver campaign was supposed to be Allam's last. People encouraged him to run against Sim in 2026, but Allam had already promised his wife that his campaign days were over.
But then last year Mayor Ken Sim announced he was suing his former campaign manager and chief of staff for defamation.
"He didn't upset me. He upset my wife," Allam said with a laugh. "She's like, 'Well, I hope you run. And I hope you beat him.'"
The lawsuit is ongoing and unlikely to wrap up before the election, unless the parties agree to a settlement. Allam has also filed a third-party claim against the city to pay for his legal fees based on the indemnification clause in his chief of staff employment contract.
Sim and Allam do have some things in common, though. During our interview Allam made a pledge to scrap th...

The cruise ship outbreak shows how a changing climate and culture of travel bring people closer to pathogens that spread disease. … Article written by Pratvia Baral, Joanne Liu and Veasna Duong.
In February 2025, the classical pianist Betsy Arakawa died in her New Mexico home from a virus most people had never heard of. Her husband, the actor Gene Hackman, died a week later of heart disease. The pathogen that killed her was hantavirus, almost certainly picked up from deer mouse droppings on the property.
Fourteen months later, 11 people on the Dutch cruise ship Hondius have been infected with a different hantavirus strain.
Three have died, and passengers from more than 20 countries, including several Canadians, are being monitored across four continents.
This is not the next pandemic. But it is a stress test, and a reminder of something we keep relearning the hard way. When humans push into ecosystems they don't normally inhabit, they are exposed to viruses.
Ebola in West Africa in 2014 followed deforestation and closer contact with bats; by the time the outbreak began, more than 80 per cent of the surrounding forest had been cleared.
This hantavirus outbreak is a smaller, slower-moving version of the same lesson: the line between human health, animal health and the places we travel for pleasure is much smaller than we like to think.
A family of shared viruses
Hantaviruses are not one virus but a family of related viruses, carried by different rodent species in different parts of the world.
The strain found in Canada carried by deer mice, Sin Nombre virus, is the same one that killed Arakawa, and is behind the 168 Canadian cases of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome documented since 1994.
The strain on the Hondius is different. Andes virus, found in South America, is the only hantavirus known to spread between people, and through close, interpersonal contact. A New England Journal of Medicine study of a 2018 Andes outbreak reconstructed how a single zoonotic spillover from a rodent reservoir in Argentina produced 34 human cases and 11 deaths over three months, driven by three symptomatic super-spreaders at crowded social events.
A cruise ship, with confined cabins, shared dining rooms and recirculated air ("a floating petri dish"), is exactly the setting where a virus with limited contagion can find unexpected runway.
The first confirmed case on board, likely the index case though not lab-confirmed, had spent four months on a birdwatching trip through South America before boarding, with possible exposure to rodents.
Humans, animals and One Health
Though much of the focus has been to reassure people that this is not the next COVID-19, what this outbreak points to is a real-time One Health story, a framework that recognizes human, animal and environmental health as a single, interconnected system. Hantaviruses do not begin in hospitals or airports. They circulate in animal reservoirs whose ranges are shaped by climate, land use and human encroachment.
Deer mouse populations in North America zoomed roughly tenfold following the wet, warm El Niño winter of 1991 to 1992, triggering the 1993 hantavirus outbreak. The ecology of Andes virus in Patagonia is itself shifting: modelling work suggests the long-tailed rodent that carries the virus may see its range contract and move eastward under continued warming and drying, redistributing rather than eliminating spillover risk.
The same dynamic plays out elsewhere: in Southeast Asia for example, rodent trade networks, deforestation and intensifying agriculture continually create new interfaces between people and pathogens.
And these same forces are reshaping disease risk closer to home: Lyme disease has been creeping steadily north into Ontario and Québec as warming winters expand the range of the black-legged tick. The mosquitoes that carry dengue, Zika and chikungunya are doing the same across Europe and North America. Old pathogens now have more opportunities to expand and interact with...

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It's easy to explain why they signed a deal on carbon pricing, carbon capture and bitumen.
David Climenhaga
21 May 2026
21 May 2026Alberta Politics
David J. Climenhaga is an award-winning journalist, author, post-secondary teacher, poet and trade union communicator. He blogs at AlbertaPolitics.ca. Follow him on BlueSky @djclimenhaga.bsky.social.
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It's easy to explain why they signed a deal on carbon pricing, carbon capture and bitumen. … Article written by David Climenhaga.
There's no need to make the explanation of the carbon pricing, carbon capture and bitumen pipeline deal announced Friday by the federal and Alberta governments too complicated. It's actually pretty simple.
After all, notwithstanding their political differences, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Danielle Smith have more objectives in common right now than they don't, so it couldn't have been that hard for them to reach an agreement.
Carney has served many years as an expert in and senior representative of international finance capital, of which the oil industry remains a key component in Canada. While neither an expert nor a deep thinker, Smith has been a lobbyist for the oil industry and an effective public proponent of its preferred policies throughout her career as a journalist and politician.
Of course they weren't going to have all that much trouble finding ways to grant the Canadian oilpatch its wish for a pipeline to the west coast, preferably completely paid for by taxpayers, plus slow-walked carbon taxes and big subsidies for the carbon-capture boondoggle to build social licence for the pipeline.
They may have their differences, but they are flying in formation when it comes to the oil industry.
They have immediate parallel political needs as well. Smith must thread the needle between appearing to be an Alberta separatist and appearing to be a patriotic Canadian unifier to hold her fraying but still united voting coalition together. And, not incidentally, to hang on to her job as premier, since separatists now clearly dominate her party.
Friday's deal lets her do that — for the moment, anyway. And the moment is all Smith ever thinks about. To give her her due, it seems to work.
Carney needs to keep his coalition together as well. Instead of MAGA separatists on the right who would really rather be part of the United States so they could own machine guns and call people hateful names, he needs to appease moderate green voters in British Columbia and Quebec and somehow hold the country together.
Since the contradictions of using bitumen as the glue to keep their political coalitions together will become more obvious over time, they're in a hurry to get the deal done and some pipe laid so the doubters on both sides of the political spectrum can be told there is no alternative.
For this reason, we should take seriously their promise that work on the pipeline, whatever route it takes, will start next year by September 2027.
The simplicity of this political equation seems to have confused the Canadian political and business commentariat, grown used to sustained attacks on Ottawa by conservative Alberta governments. Commentators' theories and explanations, as a result, were all over the map — sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results.
According to Carson Jerema in the National Post, it's all a dirty trick by Carney to "ensnare Danielle Smith in pipeline blackmail." Ottawa's gift of "free rein to polluters" (as Environmental Defence put it in a news release) "will give anti-energy B.C. Premier David Eby an effective veto," according to the Post.
Meanwhile, over at the environmentally inclined National Observer, Max Fawcett agreed... sort of.
Carney isn't taking a wrecking ball to Can...

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Friends in need face fuel challenges due to the Iran war. We sell them a trickle while most goes to Trump and Xi.
Ian Urquhart
21 May 2026
21 May 2026The Tyee
Ian Urquhart is a professor emeritus in political science at the University of Alberta.
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Friends in need face fuel challenges due to the Iran war. We sell them a trickle while most goes to Trump and Xi. … Article written by Ian Urquhart.
Canada is extending its hand to friendly nations hurt by their dependence on oil made scarce by conflict in the Middle East.
But look closely, and you'll see that hand is largely empty.
Today, despite bad behaviour by the United States and China towards Canada, those two countries benefit most from our reliable oil production.
That's not what Canada's minister of energy and natural resources, Tim Hodgson, signalled in March when he delivered a big promise at the world's most important energy conference in Houston.
"Over the last two weeks, with Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, it has truly never been clearer that oil and gas from reliable producers like Canada are what our allies need," he said. "We hear you, and we will deliver for you."
It's a preposterous pledge, now and in the foreseeable future. Trustworthy allies such as Japan, South Korea and European nations are benefiting very little, if at all, from this year's record Canadian production of more than five million barrels of oil per day.
Why? Start with the long-standing north-south orientation in Canadian petroleum trade. Seventy years ago, Alberta's oil industry was in trouble. The province needed new export markets for rapidly growing oil production. Alberta Premier Ernest Manning wanted a pipeline to Montreal to sell Alberta crude.
Neither Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's Conservatives nor the opposition Liberals agreed. In fact, future prime minister Lester Pearson endorsed courting U.S. consumers when it came to exploiting oil and other natural resources. Challenged briefly by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's National Energy Program in 1980, continentalism in oil was enthusiastically embraced and institutionalized in the free-trade agreements of 1988 and 1994.
This continentalist orientation in energy trade, industry's preference since the 1970s, bred a pipeline infrastructure system designed to satisfy the United States' thirst for oil. As recently as 2023, all but three per cent of Canada's oil exports went to the United States.
In March the Canada Energy Regulator reported that Canada keeps 12 per cent of western Canadian oil production while more than 76 per cent of it goes south.
The main reason is that most Canadian oil export infrastructure was built to supply U.S. refineries and consumers. Today, thanks to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, some 11 per cent of western Canadian production may go to non-U.S. destinations through this network. But this maximum isn't being realized because California refiners buy some of the expansion's heavy crude.
Industry and government happily built a pipeline system over the last 50 years that makes it literally impossible to deliver significant amounts of oil to our European and Asian allies.
Some may argue the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion changes this. Line 2 of the pipeline now carries 540,000 barrels per day of oilsands crude to Burnaby, B.C.
Why not ship this oil to Japan and South Korea? This would amount to about 11 per cent of the roughly five million barrels of oil Japan and South Korea together imported daily before the United States and Israel began bombing Iran.
But because the market rules when it comes to selling Canadian oil, those allies will get that oil only if they outbid other countries for it. Since mid-January most of this new crude supply goes...

This is a final exam for global health. What we know from previous crises can save us. … Article written by Crawford Kilian.
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which marks the 17th outbreak in the DRC since the first cases were discovered in 1976, is alarming for several reasons. But if we recall previous outbreaks, controlling the current one should be doable.
Ebola seems to have spread for weeks in the DRC's northeastern Ituri province. Ituri has suffered for decades from the attacks of armed groups such as the Mouvement du 23 mars, or M23, and local militias. Part of Ituri is now controlled by M23 with support from Rwanda, a neighbouring country. As a result, the region has seen massive displacement of people.
When local health officials started testing cases early in May, they got negative results for Ebola because they were testing for Zaire, a more common strain of Ebola. Disease detection was further delayed because samples taken from patients for testing were stored and shipped badly, rendering them useless for testing in Kinshasa, capital of the DRC.
This current outbreak is of the rare Bundibugyo virus. It was discovered in 2007, causes death in 30 per cent of people who contract it and caused two previous outbreaks, one in the DRC and one on the border of DRC and Uganda.
While a vaccine is available for Zaire, there is no vaccine yet for Bundibugyo.
In some ways, the DRC and Uganda are well equipped to deal with Ebola after half a century of outbreaks. Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, the director of the DRC National Institute of Biomedical Research, has been dealing with Ebola since the first outbreak in 1976 and was involved in development of the Zaire vaccine.
Congolese and Ugandan health-care workers have experience in fighting the disease and helped Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone when Ebola erupted in West Africa from 2013 to 2016.
West Africa also had rapid help from the United States. Then-president Barack Obama sent experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, and other agencies, and even built new hospitals in West Africa to care for Ebola patients.
But current President Donald Trump has dismantled USAID and left other health-care agencies stripped of expertise.
Trump has also withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization, sharply reducing WHO's ability to support the DRC and offer guidance to the rest of the world. (The United States still owes WHO an estimated $278 million in unpaid membership dues. Trump is notorious for stiffing his creditors.)
Given the turmoil in the region and the lack of medical surveillance, this Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak had weeks to spread unnoticed.
Now the question is whether we've learned the lessons of previous outbreaks and of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here are eight lessons that we should remind our public health leaders, policymakers and politicians about in responding to the current Ebola outbreak.
1. Focus on the countries with Ebola, not the westerners with Ebola
Western media pays far too much attention to U.S., Canadian or European cases. The unspoken message is that Africans with Ebola, or any other disease, don't matter.
2. Keep access open
In 2014, airlines serving Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone cancelled flights out of fear of Ebola. That made it hard for foreign experts and medical supplies to reach the places that needed them.
Local health-care workers who could be helped by overseas treatment should get it.
Wisely, Canada isn't barring travellers from the DRC or Uganda.
3. Talk to people in the affected communities
Tell the truth, tell it often, tell it well. Then listen carefully.
People in former colonial countries are often suspicious of outside officials. In Guéckédou, Guinea, in 2014, young men threw stones at a clinic run by Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF.
Also in 2014, inhabitants of the village of Womé, Guinea, murdered eight health-...

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Readers asked, and we delivered. Find it today across major streaming platforms.
Jacob Boon
29 May 2026The Tyee
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Jacob Boon is The Tyee's newsletter editor.
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Readers asked, and we delivered. Find it today across major streaming platforms. … Article written by Jacob Boon.
As a reader-funded publication, we're always listening to what our audience wants. Now, you can listen to us, too.
Today we're excited to share a whole new way to connect with our journalism.
Introducing The Tyee Podcast — a deep dive into the stories shaping the West Coast, because Canada needs more B.C.
Every other Friday you'll hear conversations with remarkable guests discussing the events and stories shaping our world — journalists, experts and iconoclasts who will break down big topics and cut through the noise to find solutions.
In our debut episode released this morning on all your favourite podcast apps, we're diving into the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, or DRIPA. Premier David Eby's reversal on changing DRIPA this past spring stirred as much controversy as it did confusion.
The moment was both inevitable and inescapable, says our guest, Adam Olsen. Lead negotiator for the Tsartlip First Nation, former BC Green Party MLA and a Tyee contributor, Olsen believes this firestorm was brewing for over a century — as long as British Columbia has evaded answering the question of Indigenous land rights.
But Olsen says there might be a way out — and a beacon of hope for reconciliation.
Check it out right now on Apple or Spotify, or listen to the episode directly right here.
The Tyee was founded to bring a B.C. perspective — and impact — to Canada's mediascape. For over 20 years that's what we've excelled at. And for nearly as long, our readers have told us they wanted a Tyee podcast.
It took a while, and a few stutter steps over the years (RIP, Chumbucket), but we've finally delivered.
A Tyee staff team consisting of Jacob Boon, Isaac Phan Nay, Sarah Krichel and our host-with-the-most Harrison Mooney has been hard at work building this podcast over the past few months. We're thrilled to finally debut it during our spring Builder campaign.
This project doesn't happen without the support of our readers — the generous folks who contribute an amount of their choosing on a monthly, annual or one-time basis.
We call them Tyee Builders. They're the reason we remain fiercely independent in a media ecosystem dominated by hedge-fund-controlled news entities. They're why our journalism remains free and open for all to read, with no paywalls. And they're why we can grow our non-profit operation and launch exciting new projects like The Tyee Podcast.
If you want to hear what all the noise is about, search for The Tyee Podcast in your favourite podcast app, or click the Apple, Spotify or RSS icons on this page to subscribe.
For those fans of our audio articles, never fear. The Tyee's Audio Edition will remain up as a separate channel.
If you like what you hear, it would mean the world to us if you could follow, like and share the podcast. Even better, leave a rating or a review so we know how you feel.
Got an idea for a topic for a future episode? Send us a message at podcast[at]thetyee.ca. We always want to hear from you.
Ready to support The Tyee in sustaining its capacity for exciting new projects like these? Consider signing up to become a Tyee Builder today.
Listen closer to the world around you. Listen to The Tyee Podcast.

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Saying so long to Jim Robson, Ernie (Punch) McLean and John Garrett. And to the sport's hardscrabble roots.
Tom Hawthorn
21 May 2026
21 May 2026The Tyee
Tom Hawthorn, a longtime contributor to The Tyee, was recently named the recipient of the 2026 Brian McFarlane Award from the Society for International Hockey Research for his contributions to hockey history.
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Saying so long to Jim Robson, Ernie (Punch) McLean and John Garrett. And to the sport's hardscrabble roots. … Article written by Tom Hawthorn.
Earlier this year, Jim Robson died at 91. Beloved hockey broadcaster. The voice of the Vancouver Canucks. Retired last century after more than four decades in front of a microphone. Then, avuncular John Garrett died, suddenly, at 74, while on the road as a television analyst for a playoff game. And now coach Ernie (Punch) McLean has been called up (or sent down) at 93, and with his demise we come to the end of an era.
The three deaths in the past few weeks cap an annus horribilis for the Vancouver hockey fan.
The last-place Canucks produced what was arguably the worst season in the National Hockey League club's history before the hockey gods slew-footed the team; Vancouver defied the odds by missing out on both the first and second draft picks in a ping-pong ball lottery. They have not won a Stanley Cup in their 56 seasons, and a fool is welcomed by countless online betting sites to part with their money should they think the Canucks might be champions next year.
With the deaths of Robson, Garrett and McLean, we have lost memories stretching back to the early postwar years. Each in his own way also represents the lost roots of our national winter sport.
Hockey today is a sport for the well-to-do — ordinary wage earners can no longer afford tickets to watch players, more of whom are hailing from Sunbelt suburbs. The trio came to the sport at a time when hockey provided an escape from hardscrabble lives destined to be spent underground in mines or above ground on a farm or factory. Robson and McLean were both born in dirt poor Saskatchewan during the Depression, while Garrett, born in 1951 in Trenton, Ontario, was raised as part of a large extended family in the military town. All three found success after settling in British Columbia.
PLAYING KETCHUP
John Garrett was one of seven children supported by his father's salary as a teacher at Trenton High School, where he had been hired in 1937 at $7 per day. The family lived in the nearby hamlet of Glen Miller. Garrett's stay-at-home mother also cared for her father, while her brother, John's uncle, who had been injured in the Second World War, also relied on the family.
Family meatloaf had more loaf than meat, and ketchup was more an ingredient than a condiment. Garrett's love for the sweet and vinegary tomato sauce continued unabated through his playing days and into his broadcast career.
At first, the budding goaltender had to make do with hand-me-down goalie equipment, as there was simply no money to buy his own gear. He played for the hometown Junior B Trenton Golden Hawks, named for the Royal Canadian Air Force's aerobatic team, before joining the Junior A Peterborough Petes under innovative coach Roger Neilson.
The St. Louis Blues grabbed him in the third round (No. 38 overall) of the 1971 NHL amateur draft. He wound up debuting in major professional hockey with the Minnesota Fighting Saints of the fledgling World Hockey Association, a free-wheeling rival to the NHL. He quit the team in the middle of his third season when regular paycheques stopped arriving.
"I'm only 24. I can't afford to stagnate under these circumstances," he said at the time. "I'm out of the St. Paul picture as of now. When you keep wondering if the franchise will be her...

The risk is high. And it's unclear if we're prepared. … Article written by Jamie Voyles and Qurrat Ul Ain.
With fewer than five weeks until kickoff and hundreds of thousands of visitors, Vancouver is preparing for the FIFA World Cup 2026 following British Columbia's worst measles outbreak in years.
Unlike Ontario, where public health officials released a detailed Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment flagging measles and other infectious diseases as risks at mass gatherings, B.C. has not yet provided comparable guidance.
Public health experts say preparation is critical for mass gatherings, particularly for contagious diseases such as measles.
Vaccination rates in many parts of B.C. have fallen below the approximately 95 per cent coverage needed to prevent sustained transmission of measles, and last year's outbreaks have exposed pockets of vulnerability.
In crowded settings such as FIFA World Cup venues, where visitors arrive from other provinces and countries with varying vaccination coverage, even a single imported case can spread rapidly beyond stadiums.
That risk is not theoretical; past sporting events in Vancouver have shown how quickly measles can take hold.
After the 2010 Olympics, measles infected 82 people in BC
The 2010 Winter Olympics in B.C. provides precedent. Following the Games, imported measles cases spread after the crowds dispersed.
In preparation, public health surveillance systems were in place, including daily health watch reports.
"At the time, what seemed like the biggest potential threat was actually the pandemic influenza H1N1 virus," said Jennifer Gardy, PhD, deputy director of disease modelling at the Gates Foundation, who was a lead investigator at the BC Centre for Disease Control in 2010, by email.
But measles proved difficult to track, with officials relying largely on clinical case detection. "You had tens of thousands of people congregating indoors at event venues and then mixing with each other out in the community," Gardy said.
The outbreak was not confirmed until the virus had spread beyond Olympic venues, infecting 82 people across Greater Vancouver as well as in the interior and northern regions of B.C.
Measles is one of the most contagious human viruses
Mass gatherings act as biological mixing bowls. The measles virus, one of the most contagious human viruses, can easily spread among unvaccinated individuals.
When infected individuals return to schools, daycares and offices, transmission can amplify.
The measles virus survives in airborne droplets and only a tiny trace of the virus can start an infection. These characteristics give it a high basic reproduction number (R₀, or "R naught"), referring to the number of people infected after exposure. For measles, the R₀ ranges from 12 to 18 (whereas the common cold ranges from two to three). So even modest dips in vaccination rates for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) — or uneven coverage across communities — means a single case can spread rapidly.
Outbreaks require both an introduction and low vaccination coverage, said Caroline Colijn, PhD, by email. Colijn is chair in mathematics for evolution, infection and public health at Simon Fraser University. She noted that some communities remain vulnerable even when overall coverage is high: "We may, in some communities, have low enough vaccination rates that there could be outbreaks."
Is Vancouver prepared?
Sixteen years after the Winter Olympics, as the province prepares to welcome sports fans again, public health conditions have changed.
Immunization rates among B.C. school-age children have steadily fallen since at least 2016 and B.C. reported more than 400 measles cases in the past year, reflecting uneven vaccination coverage.
Yet the level of preparedness for the World Cup remains unclear.
The BC Centre for Disease Control has completed a provincial public health risk assessment with Vancouver Coastal Health and shared it with the host city, according to Dr. Mark Lysyshyn, deputy chie...

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Carney's proposal to allow major projects that threaten species at risk is 'morally wrong,' former environment minister says.
Sarah Cox
20 May 2026
20 May 2026The Tyee
Sarah Cox is The Tyee's biodiversity reporter.
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Carney's proposal to allow major projects that threaten species at risk is 'morally wrong,' former environment minister says. … Article written by Sarah Cox.
Canada's former environment minister says a new proposal by the federal government to allow major projects to proceed even if they result in wildlife extinctions is "morally wrong."
"The rules were put there for a purpose and I would be extremely reluctant to see them changed," David Anderson told The Tyee.
Anderson played a major role in getting Canada's Species at Risk Act passed in 2002 when he was environment minister in a Liberal government.
The act prohibits Ottawa from authorizing projects or actions that would harm species and their critical habitats if they would jeopardize their survival — a safeguard known as the "jeopardy test." About 600 species, including orcas and spotted owls, are currently listed under the act.
But now Mark Carney's government wants to give federal cabinet the power to exempt certain projects from the jeopardy test if they are deemed to be in the public interest and "reasonable efforts" have been made to avoid or reduce impacts on at-risk wildlife.
"What actors will be taken into account, or not taken into account, when you analyze what 'deemed to be in the public interest' means?" Anderson asked. "By the sound of it, it means proceeding with the development."
The proposal to allow cabinet to axe the jeopardy test is part of sweeping changes the government wants to make to environmental regulations and permitting to speed up approval and construction of major projects such as pipelines, ports and mines.
The changes, announced May 8, would also make it easier to destroy fish habitat and allow Carney and his cabinet to create federal economic zones where a broad range of industrial development could be pre-approved.
Cabinet would also be able to pre-approve pipelines before a route is established, and exempt them from federal impact assessments.
Anderson, who was the minister of fisheries and oceans before he became the environment minister, said it's "ridiculous" to leave the fate of species at risk of extinction "to the charity of individual companies or development proposals."
Carney's government announced the proposed changes only days after it released Canada's new nature strategy, billed as a "road map" for halting and reversing biodiversity loss. A key indicator of biodiversity loss is an increase in species at risk of extinction.
"Every time a species goes extinct, diversity is reduced," Anderson said. "You can't be in favour of biodiversity and against species at risk," he said.
Anderson, the former MP for Victoria, said he's worried Canada will make mistakes it will later regret.
"This latest enthusiasm for economics over environment will change in time," he said.
Anderson added that it saddens him to think the proposed changes could override "principles that I thought we'd established."
Those principles include acknowledging that all species have an intrinsic right to exist, a right recognized in the preamble to the Species at Risk Act, which says wildlife "has value in itself."
Anderson said the act demonstrates Canada's respect for non-human life forms, showing "a value being placed on things as different as trees and the birds that nest in them."
Canada will be setting itself up for failure, both at home and globally, if it lacks a national approach to protecting wildlife and at-risk species, he warned.
Anderson is the third former Liberal environment m...

An expert public forum concludes 'we're all here to stay.' But Eby still faces big challenges. … Article written by Geoff Meggs.
Anxiety about the threat to fee simple private property posed by Aboriginal rights is so deep in British Columbia that Green MLA Rob Botterell, Saanich North and the Islands, was able to draw more than 100 people to a mid-afternoon public meeting Saturday, a sunny long-weekend Saturday in the middle of Stanley Cup playoffs.
Yet still they came to a gracious Presbyterian church tucked next to Victoria International Airport: three former provincial attorneys general; a former Green Party leader; Grand Chief Ed John, a key figure in the creation of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act; Wendy Grant-John, three times Chief of the Musqueam First Nation; Terry Glavin, award-winning author and weekly columnist for the National Post; and scores more.
It was more than an hour into the collegial discussion among panellists Geoff Plant, B.C. attorney general from 2001 to 2005; Andrew Petter, former law professor and attorney general; and Adam Olsen, a member of the Tsartlip First Nation (W̱JOȽEȽP) and former BC Green Party leader, that Botterell sprung the key question.
"Is my private property at risk as a result of the Cowichan decision? Is it a threat to my property on Pender Island? Is it a threat to your property wherever you live? Should I be worried?"
The answer from the eminent panel was categorical.
"No, I don't think people should be worried," said Plant, attorney general under Premier Gordon Campbell.
"If you, like me, live in a house in a neighbourhood in a city, some nice tree growing in front of it, you're not at risk. If you're planning a $25-billion mining project in northeastern British Columbia, then you better sit and do some work about who the Indigenous people are in that territory and find out how you can engage with them.
"There is nothing in Cowichan that is intended to unsettle what I'll call ordinary private property ownership in British Columbia."
"I don't think that private property is at all at risk as a result of this decision," Petter agreed. "I think the court will ultimately decide a way forward that will both respect Aboriginal title and respect fee simple and the two will, in fact, coexist."
If silence implies consent, former NDP attorney general Murray Rankin, a member of the audience, agreed with his two esteemed colleagues.
That's it? British Columbia has had a 10-month meltdown over the Cowichan decision for nothing?
So it would seem.
Botterell's public meeting violated every norm of contemporary politics. The tone was non-partisan, the discussion was respectful and free-wheeling, and the time and place required a serious commitment. The panellists gave detailed and carefully considered remarks, Olsen leading off with a quick history of Indigenous people's long legal struggle on the land question.
The church pews were crowded, with many from a Saanich-based network of tech business owners whose startups have spun off the work of the nearby Patricia Bay Institute of Ocean Sciences.
Clearly, there's a public hunger for serious discussion about reconciliation with First Nations.
To be clear, Plant and Petter also agreed the Cowichan decision had established that the Cowichan had Aboriginal title to the site of their former summer village on the Fraser River, in what is now Richmond, including fee simple private property on that land. (The land had been set aside for the Cowichan but was then wrongfully subdivided and sold by provincial land commissioner R.C. Moody.)
While the Cowichan had made no claim on the private properties on the Richmond site, the judgment acknowledged that further rulings would be required to clarify their status.
It was this comment, amplified in letters to landowners by Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie, that set off one of the worst public controversies over Indigenous rights in this province since Campbell's notorious 2002 referendu...

After industry objections, minister says government will take time to 'get it right.' … Article written by Andrew MacLeod.
British Columbia Forests Minister Ravi Parmar said that despite already being several years into the process, the provincial government will take its time making changes to the Heritage Conservation Act, or HCA.
"It's important that we get it right," Parmar told reporters earlier this month after four industry groups and the Union of BC Municipalities said they wouldn't sign non-disclosure agreements to participate in the next stage of consultation.
"We've been working on this piece of legislation for the last number of years, and again it is a complicated piece of legislation," he said. "It is probably the most challenging work that I've ever done in my time in public office over the last 14 years."
Calling the existing legislation "archaic," Parmar said it has become clear to him one thing everyone agrees on is that the current act "is not meeting the interests of British Columbians."
The act's purpose is "to encourage and facilitate the protection and conservation of heritage property in British Columbia," including by setting the rules for designating heritage sites and issuing permits to allow developments.
Referencing issues that have arisen around heritage as the town of Lytton rebuilds after a 2021 wildfire, Parmar said changes are needed.
"There are communities that are going to go through very difficult challenges with wildfires and floods in the years ahead," he said. "I don't want any community to face the challenges that Lytton has faced over the course of the last number of years."
At the same time, it's been essential that the government work in partnership with First Nations on the changes, Parmar said. "I think it's really important to recognize that we're talking about their ancestors. These are very difficult conversations, these are complicated conversations."
In March the government released a 37-page technical policy paper on the third phase of consultation with First Nations, local governments, stakeholders and the public.
According to the paper, the government hopes to "make permitting faster and easier"; "help people and communities rebuild quicker after disasters such as wildfires and floods"; "protect heritage more effectively, reducing the risk of accidental damage to sacred or other significant sites"; and "strengthen the role of First Nations in decision-making about their own heritage and ancestors, in alignment with the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act."
The paper outlined key changes from earlier versions, including removing references to "intangible heritage," dropping a proposal for "heritage management zones" that would have added regulations near established heritage sites, adding clarity on the scope of agreements with First Nations, and removing language about "consent-seeking" in making permit decisions.
Parmar said the government received detailed feedback in some 80 submissions, including from organizations and individuals involved in major projects like mines, gas or forestry, as well as those building homes or additions.
The Union of BC Municipalities' four-page submission, signed by president Cori Ramsay, said that while the organization appreciated the steps taken to address some of the concerns raised by local governments, the paper "lacks clarity and detail on key permitting elements that are at the root of construction delays, costs to landowners, and administrative burden."
The Urban Development Institute, which represents the real estate development industry, took eight pages to outline concerns that included economic uncertainty, implications for private property rights and unresolved issues related to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, or DRIPA. The changes could risk reducing development as builders pursue projects in more stable jurisdictions instead, it said.
The Association for Mineral Exploration, in a sub...

29 May 2026The Tyee
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BC's human rights commissioner would like to see external reviews for all programs in the province.
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BC's human rights commissioner would like to see external reviews for all programs in the province.
Katie Hyslop
29 May 2026
Katie Hyslop is a reporter for The Tyee. Follow them on Bluesky @kehyslop.bsky.social or send story tips to khyslop[at]thetyee.ca.
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BC's human rights commissioner would like to see external reviews for all programs in the province. … Article written by Katie Hyslop.
Vancouver students' opinion of police in their schools has changed significantly since the program was reinstated in public schools in 2023, according to a recently released third-party evaluation.
Earlier this month, a long-promised external review of the program that stationed police officers in 17 of the district's high schools and seven Vancouver-based independent schools was finally released publicly.
It's almost exactly what B.C. human rights commissioner Kasari Govender has been asking the province to do since 2022: review the efficacy of programs that place police officers in B.C.'s public schools.
"I'm really pleased to see them following at least the gist of the recommendation I made, which, despite how it was represented, wasn't to cancel all SLO [school liaison officer] programs carte blanche," said Govender, who had previously called for the programs to be cancelled until a provincial evaluation of their impact and potential harms was completed.
"It was to evaluate them and figure out what could alleviate some of the negative impacts that we have heard, certainly anecdotally, that these programs can cause... see how those can be alleviated, and study whether they actually are doing a job."
Govender's concerns had included the penalizing of Black, Indigenous and other students of colour, as well as students with disabilities, in particular, as highlighted in U.S. scholarship on police in schools. There are comparatively few academic studies of police in Canadian schools.
As well, she was concerned that police seemed to take over positions that teachers and other educators are trained to handle, such as counselling students and coaching sports teams.
Govender attributes the positive reviews the Vancouver Police Department's SLO program received this time around to the changes they made for the new program that started in September 2023. This includes an emphasis on relationship-building with students, teachers and staff, over law enforcement duties.
SLOs also traded wearing police uniforms for VPD-branded athleisure wear. They carry smaller and concealed weapons — a gun and baton — instead of the standard-issue police weapons in visible holsters. And they are driving unmarked vehicles instead of police cars.
"We saw them take some important steps towards addressing some of the potential harms of SLO programs and harms that had emerged from the 2021 review," Govender said.
"It's not perfect; I have some concerns. But I am pleased to see them properly evaluated and take stock of what works and what doesn't."
The evaluation report was released about two weeks before fired Greater Victoria School District trustees got their jobs back.
The trustees were dismissed by government in January 2025 due to their alleged failure to create a district safety plan in collaboration with local police and the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, following the board's cancellation of the SLO program. The fired board members had requested a judicial review of their dismissal, which was supposed to begin May 25.
However, over the weekend the Ministry of Education and Child Care's lawyer disclosed previously unreleased text messages between Victoria Police Depa...

29 May 2026
29 May 2026The Tyee
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Vancouver Unveils Its World Cup Human Rights Plan. And Gets Blasted
Vancouver Unveils Its World Cup Human Rights Plan. And Gets Blasted
The approach falls short in preventing and addressing violations, says Vancouver Anti-FIFA Coalition. The city responds.
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The approach falls short in preventing and addressing violations, says Vancouver Anti-FIFA Coalition. The city responds.
Katie Hyslop
Katie Hyslop is a reporter for The Tyee. Follow them on Bluesky @kehyslop.bsky.social or send story tips to khyslop[at]thetyee.ca.
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With less than three weeks to go before the first Vancouver match of the 2026 World Cup, the host city's official human rights action plan has been released.
But advocates don't see much response to criticisms they raised about earlier drafts. Big holes remain, they say, when it comes to protecting people experiencing homelessness and poverty, and those marginalized for their drug use, mental health issues or survival sex work.
Many people who fit those descriptions live in the city's Downtown Eastside, which is located within the two-kilometre-radius game zone where some city bylaws have temporarily changed for the almost month-long World Cup.
In a May 27 press release, the Vancouver Anti-FIFA Coalition, which includes organizations such as Pivot Legal Society, the BC Civil Liberties Association and the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition, highlighted their main concerns with the human rights action plan. Their claims mainly fall into three categories.
1. A weak system for reporting abuses
Vancouver's 311 phone line and website continues to be a recommended outlet for submitting human rights complaints during the games. The municipal service typically used to report damaged garbage cans or a busted street lamp won't receive additional funding to take on this duty.
"The Plan provides no information on critical procedural fairness details, including: who will be reviewing reports of violations submitted through 311, what reviewers will be looking for, what notice and evidence requirements apply, whether an investigation may occur and what such an investigation might look like, when people can expect to hear back, and what the available remedies might be," the coalition's press release states.
Without this information or additional investment into 311 services to accommodate the load, the Vancouver Anti-FIFA Coalition predicts human rights abuses will go undocumented and unaddressed during the games.
The Van311.ca website already has a portal for World Cup-related inquiries and requests. But the multiple-choice options for narrowing down your issue do not currently include human rights complaints.
2. Not enough safe options for homeless
The coalition and Downtown Eastside residents have called for expanded daytime shelter hours during the month-long game period where people experiencing homelessness or housing precarity can watch televised games — especially in air-conditioned spaces, as the summer temperatures are predicted to be high this year.
But the human rights action plan is offering extended hours in existing daytime shelter spaces in the Downtown Eastside and south Vancouver during the seven game days only.
"In other words, a handful of days during a weeks-long period of increased policing, tourist surges, and service disruption," the coalition's press release reads, adding that the spaces also fail to meet needs because they won't employ peer workers and offer harm reduction supplies.
"Further, the Plan offers scant details on how these spaces will be made accessible for people who are unhoused or precariously housed, as they are notoriously discriminated against in accessing City-run services."
While the city's host committee has pledged the...

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Firing Victoria's School Board Was an Abuse of Power
The provincial government colluded with police on a costly, undemocratic campaign.
29 May 2026The Tyee
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The provincial government colluded with police on a costly, undemocratic campaign.
Paul Willcocks
29 May 2026
Paul Willcocks is a senior editor at The Tyee.
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The provincial government colluded with police on a costly, undemocratic campaign. … Article written by Paul Willcocks.
Not only did B.C.'s Education Ministry conspire with Victoria police to oust a democratically elected school board, it also concealed evidence from the B.C. Supreme Court, where the trustees had challenged Education Minister Lisa Beare's January 2025 order to fire them.
The abuse — revealed only days before a recent hearing and months after the court had ordered the government to disclose all documents — was so outrageous it drew a sharp reprimand from Justice Lindsay LeBlanc.
It also led the government to abandon its case this week, reinstate the board with back pay and cover the board's legal fees and other costs. The whole fiasco likely cost taxpayers more than $1 million.
More importantly, Victoria students and parents have had no elected school trustees for more than a year, with the district run by a government appointee.
The recently disclosed documents — including texts and emails between Jennifer McCrea, associate deputy education minister, Victoria Police Department Deputy Chief Mike Brown and special adviser Kevin Godden — revealed a shocking lack of professionalism.
How unprofessional? When McCrea messaged VicPD's Brown about a small protest at the Education Ministry office over the push to restore police in schools, he responded: "Losers."
McCrea said her office was trying to get a photo of board chair Nicole Duncan at the protest, and Brown replied, "She would be the one that looks like a narcissistic moron." Brown also suggested police were watching the protesters and his "source on the ground" saw a number of trustees.
The board had decided to suspend the police program in 2023, after B.C. human rights commissioner Kasari Govender researched the programs in 2022 and wrote the BC School Trustees Association, suggesting the harms — especially for marginalized students with historically difficult experiences with police — may outweigh the benefits. Govender suggested pausing the programs until more research was completed.
When the board and Govender held a media conference to discuss the issues around police in schools, Brown messaged McCrea and again called the trustees "morons." He also called Govender an "arrogant ideologue." (Which is demonstrably false.)
Nowhere in the 100 pages of messages and other withheld documents do the participants stop and self-reflect, nor do they question whether the ministry and police should be working together to force officers back into Victoria schools.
McCrea doesn't hit pause or recognize that insulting the trustees and the public is destructive and incompetent.
No one raises the question of why the ministry and one interest group — the police — set out to undermine and destroy a school board elected by the citizens of Greater Victoria.
The messages also make Beare look ridiculous.
At one point, McCrea suggests the minister is wavering on the attempt to crush the board. And she enthusiastically grasps at a message from Brown aimed at stiffening Beare's resolve.
"George Jay elementary just seized a home made shank and a box of vapes from a Grade 5 student," Brown wrote. "Principal told our cops it's like working in a prison."
George Jay has about 440 students from kindergarten to Grade 5. I have a family member who went there in recent years. To claim it resembles a penite...

The former environment minister drove petro politicians nuts. And not just UCP ones. … Article written by David Climenhaga.
Who will be demonized by Alberta Conservatives as this province's official Bond villain now that federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault has announced he's quitting politics?
Guilbeault made his announcement Wednesday. It wasn't exactly a bombshell. It's been expected for a while. A lifelong environmental activist, he obviously sees Prime Minister Mark Carney's volte-face on the environmental policies Guilbeault championed as Justin Trudeau's environment minister from October 2021 until last March as a sellout, and he's probably right.
He said on social media that he'll be resigning his Laurier–Sainte-Marie seat in Parliament later this summer, but that he'll stick around as a member of the Liberal caucus until then. He promised to "pursue my fight for environmental protection and the fight against climate change in a different way." So watch out! He's unlikely just to fade back into the greenery.
Guilbeault as lightning rod
Guilbeault adopted a diplomatic tone when he spoke to journalists, although he pointedly criticized the memorandum of understanding on a pipeline to the West Coast that Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith signed last fall.
"I wasn't opposed to the idea of signing a memorandum of understanding with Alberta, but we shouldn't do so at the expense of our plan to fight climate change," he said.
This doesn't sound like the wild-eyed boogeyman in an orange jumpsuit almost inevitably depicted by Alberta politicians and media every time he had something to say about the environment. But something about Guilbeault just drove Alberta politicians nuts, and not just the Conservative ones. Quite a few New Democrats succumbed to Guilbeault Derangement Syndrome too.
There was more to this than just his policies, which the oil industry hated and therefore Alberta politicians were willing to line up to publicly get hysterical about.
Maybe it was those dark Rasputin eyes. Maybe it was the memory his ill-considered pre-politics stunt, showing up uninvited in 2002 with a Greenpeace "crew" to install solar panels on the roof of then-premier Ralph Klein's Calgary house.
His talents and conviction notwithstanding, this kind of history probably should have made Guilbeault ineligible for the post of environment minister. It was just too easy to paint the guy as a cross between Spider-Man and Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The fact Trudeau assigned him the environment portfolio in 2021 was a lapse of judgment not atypical of the former prime minister.
As former UCP premier Jason Kenney said of Guilbeault in 2021, "His own personal background and track record on these issues suggests someone who is more an absolutist than a pragmatist when it comes to finding solutions." Ironically, the same thing could be said in almost the same words about Kenney's successor, Smith.
Who's the divisive one?
But most of all, I believe, what made Guilbeault such a lightning rod was the fact he actually had some power to make what he advocated come to pass. He was prepared, in other words, to do what no other Canadian environment minister can be accused of doing — he actually acted as if the principal purpose of the environment portfolio was to protect the environment and not merely piously greenwash profitable pollution.
Other prominent environmentalists like David Suzuki and Tzeporah Berman had the ability to drive Alberta politicians over the edge now and then just by saying stuff. But even Kenney couldn't quite elevate them to the Bond villain status Guilbeault developed out here in Wild Rose Country.
Consider Smith, reacting in 2023 to Guilbeault's plan to get more Canadian drivers behind the wheels of electric vehicles.
"In another show of total disregard for the well-being of Canadians, the federal government has unilaterally imposed an unconstitutional edict with a bizarrely impossible timeline that will result in m...

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Students need to learn to use it responsibly, the school board says. But a few youths are pushing back.
Katie Hyslop
28 May 2026
28 May 2026The Tyee
Katie Hyslop is a reporter for The Tyee. Follow them on Bluesky @kehyslop.bsky.social or send story tips to khyslop[at]thetyee.ca.
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Students need to learn to use it responsibly, the school board says. But a few youths are pushing back. … Article written by Katie Hyslop.
At some point before the end of the school year, the Vancouver School Board will roll out artificial intelligence chatbot accounts for students aged 13 and up.
The district, joining other public districts such as Langley, will team up with Microsoft Canada to provide students with school accounts for Copilot, the software giant's AI chatbot.
Copilot may not be the most popular of the AI chatbots available, with one tech critic going so far as to call it a "mistake."
But the Surrey school district is also exploring Copilot accounts for students. At the moment only teachers use the program.
Chatbots are a form of generative AI designed to mimic human thinking and learning.
Generative AI tools can create original text, sounds or images based on the existing information they are trained on: vast digital libraries of news reporting, fiction and non-fiction books, music catalogues, films and other open-source and copyrighted works — the subject of several lawsuits.
The goal is to "leverage" Copilot so that students can access AI in "a safe environment, where teachers can help them through their learning journey," da Silva told The Tyee.
Eventually, after students and teachers have used and shared feedback about using Copilot, the district will establish administrative procedures and policies around AI use in schools, da Silva said. But not until the district understands the impacts of using AI in schools.
"Our responsibility as an education system is to provide environments to prepare students for life after school. And those environments are going to be using AI. We need to get on that, and we need to do it in a safe way."
But some students — including Henry van Iersel, in Grade 10 — are pushing back.
Citing generative AI's impact on the environment, student safety, privacy and the negative impacts of chatbot use on learning, van Iersel and three other students created a petition to stop the adoption of Copilot in Vancouver's schools.
"We're normalizing this technology that has a fairly limited scope of applications, and a fairly large and broad implication for the environment," van Iersel said.
Van Iersel, 15, said he's been coding for fun since he was 10. So he's not anti-technology — but he told The Tyee he doesn't understand the district's rush to roll out Copilot.
"We're trying to suggest a moratorium to pause for two years to make sure that we really understand the technology," he said. "And then we can come back and make a final decision on whether we should really be using this in our schools.
"I don't think it's a good idea to beta-test on our student population," van Iersel added.
How Copilot might show up in schools
Da Silva disagrees with van Iersel's characterization of their AI rollout as "beta-testing" on students.
The planning to gather feedback and input on AI chatbot use in schools began two years ago, da Silva told The Tyee.
Students have told the school district via feedback sessions about AI and even the recent district budget that they are already using AI chatbots outside school. They want to talk about how to use them in their education, da Silva added.
Copilot is a "safer" introduction to an AI environment for students, da Silva said, than other chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, xAI's Grok, Anthropic's Claude or Google's Gemin...

A September program explores conversations with the more-than-human world. … Article written by Hollyhock.
At the heart of Ecofluency is a simple but often overlooked truth: "The future of our Earth's well-being needs our full human presence, not our absence." We've forgotten that we are not separate from nature, we are nature itself; therefore, our shared future depends on us behaving accordingly, says Saskia von Diest, founder of Ecofluency, a practice and organization that promotes the field of nature communication.
Like all living systems, we are in constant conversation with the more-than-human world, and it's possible to remember how to consciously experience this, von Diest says. Ecofluency helps us rekindle this ancestral skill of dialogue with the more-than-human, she explains: by blending observation, sensory awareness and relational attention, humans can reclaim how we listen with the full capacity of the being. In this worldview, forests, oceans, animals and even the constellations overhead are not passive backdrops to human life, she says, but part of a shared field of awareness.
When we begin to attune to that field, von Diest says, something shifts: decision-making becomes more grounded, creativity becomes more expansive, and care for self, place, community and the future begins to feel visceral rather than abstract. At a time of ecological and social uncertainty, Ecofluency offers a practical way to access the eternal intelligence and wisdom of nature that has always been present, but often ignored or forgotten, she says.
For von Diest, an award-winning consultant, facilitator and activist in the field of nature communication, this shift from theory to lived experience was immediate and irreversible.
Fourteen years ago, in the middle of a PhD in agricultural plant pathology, von Diest attended a weekend workshop in animal communication. At the time, her worldview was firmly rooted in modern science. The idea that communication could happen telepathically with animals, let alone other beings, felt implausible, she says, even after a year spent reading about the subject. She needed experiential evidence.
During that workshop, participants practised communicating with animals through photographs. Again and again, they received specific and verifiable information that they could not have known beforehand, von Diest says. She was shown colours, textures, the layout of the apartment, even a view from the window where one cat lived. Afterwards, she learned that every detail was correct.
"The shock to my science-moulded mind was twofold: not only could every one of the dozens of people in that workshop do this, but more importantly is that I hadn't realized how lonely I had felt my entire life until that point," she says. "In accepting this as an ordinary skill that had been forgotten, I found a sense of enchantment and wonder again."
What followed was not a rejection of science, but an expansion of it, von Diest says. "Nature communication allowed me to access an informational field that isn't easily available to the logical mind, and trusting this wider range of senses and awareness didn't need to replace logical ways of thinking; instead, this learning contributed to a deeper, broader way of knowing."
Von Diest suggests that much of this work is not about learning something new, but about unlearning the barriers of certainty: "While certainty provides stability, it also narrows what we are willing to perceive. When we believe we fully understand what is possible, we close the door to other forms of knowing. I've seen miraculous shifts happen when people stay curious instead of certain. Our imagination really is the limit."
"Our brains play an important role in perception," von Diest says about how we perceive reality, "but so do our hearts, our digestive systems and other parts of the body, each in their own way. Even the electromagnetic field around the body is involved."
Western science has shaped so much of th...

Despite measures, almost one in four people lack access to primary care. … Article written by Andrew MacLeod.
The number of British Columbians without a regular family doctor or other primary care provider has grown to nearly 1.3 million people.
That's a 45 per cent increase since 2017 when the NDP formed government.
Health Minister Josie Osborne says that despite the increase, the government's efforts to connect patients to primary care providers are showing progress.
But Conservative Party of BC health critic Brennan Day says the problem continues to get worse.
"There's a lot of rallying around headlines that don't really line up to people's reality," Day said, referring to recent government announcements that have highlighted the number of medical professionals who have been attracted to the province and the number of people who have been attached to care.
The announcements distract from the growing list of patients who remain unattached to primary care providers, he said. "The reality people are feeling on the ground — especially here in Victoria the numbers are massive — is not really reflected."
In response to questioning from Day during debate on the Health Ministry's $36-billion budget, Osborne said the most up-to-date information as of the end of April showed that 1,259,425 people in the province were not attached to a primary care provider.
That works out to about 23 per cent of B.C.'s current population of 5.7 million.
It's a significant increase from when the BC NDP formed government. At that time the Canadian Community Health Survey found that 897,000 people, or 18.2 per cent of the population, were unattached.
That too was part of a long-term trend. About twice as many people were unattached to primary care in 2017 as had been in 2003.
Family doctors act as gatekeepers to the health-care system, referring patients to other specialists, but they also get to know the people they serve over time, allowing them to deliver higher-quality care than a walk-in clinic or other episodic care.
In recent years the province has added training spaces for doctors and nurse practitioners and created primary care networks where doctors and nurses work as part of teams with other health professionals.
It has also introduced a new pay model that moves away from the fee-for-service system where physicians bill for each patient they see and towards paying them to look after a population of patients.
And yet the number of people who are unattached to a primary care provider continues to grow.
Minister points to population growth
During debate, Osborne said more than 4,000 attachments were being made every week through the Health Connect Registry and as of March 345,000 people were still on the registry waiting to be connected to primary care.
She declined to provide maximum wait times but did share the median number of days a patient waited to be attached in each health authority: 198 days in Northern Health, 171 days in Vancouver Coastal Health, 241 days in Fraser Health, 388 days in Island Health and 477 days in Interior Health.
Provincewide, the median time it is taking to attach a patient to primary care is 295 days.
"Big picture, I think there is real progress that is being made attaching British Columbians to family doctors and nurse practitioners, but there's clearly still a lot of work to do," Osborne told The Tyee. "We want to make sure that everybody who wants that longitudinal relationship with a primary care provider has it."
The problem has been growing for at least 20 years, she said, but there are indications it is changing direction. "We are seeing really good signs of progress in terms of outpacing population growth when it comes to attachment and outpacing population growth when it comes to adding more family physicians and nurse practitioners and other primary care team members to the system," she said.
The government has had some success, she said, with its primary care strategy that includes investing in traini...

Signs of deepening American collusion point to the US ambassador among others. Will Ottawa investigate? … Article written by Michael Harris.
It is high time that Canadians, including the Mark Carney government, started to seriously worry about Alberta's separatist movement and its U.S. connection.
Consider a recent headline for a piece by political commentator Dean Blundell on his Substack post: "Trump's ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, at the centre of the doxxing of three million Canadians and their voter data."
Blundell's thesis? Hoekstra appears to be connected to the biggest voter data leak in Canadian history and the attempt to rig the upcoming referendum vote on Alberta separation.
Blundell elaborates by pointing out that a cabal of right-wing Christian nationalists, "Freedom Convoy" veterans and political fixers is being protected by Danielle Smith's United Conservative Party. A Canadian clone of a U.S. voter-targeting app is being used by an Alberta separatist group. The group's leader, David Parker, says the app was built by U.S. Republican operatives. Parker also claims that the app helped deliver the crucial state of Michigan to Donald Trump in his run for president.
Interestingly, Parker left for Texas after the voter data leak in Alberta became public. Also of note, he is not co-operating with the Elections Alberta investigation into the massive leak. He is no stranger to elections violations. Parker and Take Back Alberta were fined $120,000 for violations of election finance law in 2023.
Ambassador Hoekstra has promoted the U.S. voter app, 10xVotes, at Trump rallies in Michigan. He has also landed in trouble for political interference before the Alberta controversy. That stemmed from his support of a Dutch far-right political party at the U.S. Embassy when he was ambassador to the Netherlands. He also denied saying earlier that there were Muslim-ruled "no-go zones" in the Netherlands, or at least he did until his comments were confirmed by a videotape record of his words.
Hoekstra now claims he was unaware that the U.S. voter app he promoted was used to help the Alberta separatist group. Not everyone is convinced. Blundell says the RCMP needs to interview Hoekstra. He also thinks Elections Alberta should find out if Alberta voter data was stored on U.S. servers. Canada's civilian spy agency, CSIS, he adds, should conduct a foreign interference investigation into Hoekstra's activities.
Hoekstra and the MAGA network
Some history here is useful. Hoekstra was formerly chair of the Michigan Republican Party. He was scheduled to speak at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Ottawa on May 8. Pierre Poilievre, the politician who brought doughnuts to the truckers who blockaded Ottawa, delivered the keynote speech.
Danielle Smith participated in a fireside chat at the conference. And President Trump's former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, warmed up the room by urging Canadians to "move past the irritation" of Trump repeatedly saying he wants to annex Canada. Hoekstra was called to Washington for urgent meetings at the White House as the doxing story was breaking and sent his regrets at the last minute.
It is up for debate how serious U.S. support is for Alberta separatists. But there's no denying that it's a factor.
Here's how Blundell described the Alberta separatist movement and its U.S. connection: "It's a MAGA-funded, foreign attempt to break Canada in half, supported by a small group of compromised White Christian nationalists who are getting paid by 'MAGA interests' to do it." A little over the top but not without evidence.
Besides the overt support for an independent Alberta voiced by Trump administration officials, researchers have identified a network of MAGA movement-funded online influencers bending truths as they hype Alberta separation.
Separatists' sway in Smith's party
Polls have shown that about 57 per cent of UCP members favour separation. The president of the UCP, Rob Smith, claims t...

Article written by Jen St. Denis.
The election of Kerry-Lynne Findlay as the new leader of the Conservative Party of BC signals that party members have firmly rejected the more centrist vision put forward by current and former MLAs Peter Milobar and Iain Black in favour of a loud and proud social conservatism.
During her leadership campaign, Findlay touted her experience as a cabinet member in Stephen Harper's government but also made opposing Indigenous rights and ending SOGI — sexual orientation and gender identity inclusive education — central planks in her pitch to party members.
"We can be a powerhouse in our nation, a powerhouse no longer denied by eastern and global elites, predatory foreign nations and our own Constitution," Findlay told Conservative Party of BC members in her acceptance speech.
Several recent court decisions have put the spotlight on Indigenous rights and title in British Columbia and raised fears that private property rights could be under threat, although experts and First Nations have said those fears are overblown.
All five Conservative candidates had promised to end the province's Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, or DRIPA. Findlay had gone further, questioning whether her leadership opponent Milobar would be in a potential conflict of interest on future decisions involving First Nations because he has family members who are Indigenous.
In her speech, Findlay doubled down on the issue.
"The NDP's radical ideology has devastated property rights, backroom-signed treaties, and the NDP's economic vandalism has to end," she said.
Jennifer Whiteside, the BC NDP's minister of labour, attended the Conservative leadership vote announcement and told reporters that Findlay had run a campaign based on "division and racism."
"I think with this result the pro-Trump, extreme-right part of the party is firmly in control," Whiteside said.
"She made comments about her colleagues that were racist in nature; she called out Peter Milobar because his wife is Indigenous."
Findlay told reporters she's used to that line of attack from the BC NDP.
"They're going to say what they say. I believe the NDP are the ideologues — they're the extremists," Findlay said.
The B.C. Conservative leadership contest attracted five candidates: current Conservative MLA Peter Milobar; Iain Black, a former cabinet minister in Gordon Campbell's BC Liberal government; restaurant owner and investor Fulmer; Caroline Elliott, a former legislative staffer in Campbell's government and BC Hydro employee; and Findlay.
The leadership race followed a tumultuous period for the party. After being revamped by younger members who had taken over the party's board in 2022, the Conservative Party of BC overtook the more established centre-right party BC United in polling results and donations in the months before the 2024 provincial elections.
Many of the Conservative MLA candidates came under scrutiny for racist, far-right, anti-vaccine or conspiracy comments they'd made in the past. That included Findlay's own husband, Brent Chapman, whose history of posting Islamophobic and racist content was unearthed during his election campaign.
Findlay, the Conservative member of Parliament for South Surrey-White Rock until she lost her seat in the 2025 federal election, told The Tyee she and Chapman had met recently with Muslim leaders in their community.
"I've had three meetings with the amazing Muslim community in my riding as recently as a few nights ago, and I had a lot of Muslim supporters voting for me, which I love, because they know I believe in interfaith co-operation — I believe in freedom of religion," she said. "And Brent was at two of those three events."
The B.C. Conservatives fell short of forming government in the 2024 election but did become the official Opposition for the first time in the history of the party.
Almost immediately, the party came under strain. Five former Conservative MLAs have now left the party — Dallas Brodie,...