To prepare for our regular staff meeting earlier this week, we flipped through the last year of This to see what we covered well, and what we’ve missed. The findings clearly showed us the kinds of stories we tend to cover—and pointed to a few things we need to work on. First a word on […] More »

Nuclear power has always been controversial, but even green power sources like wind and hydro meet resistance from locals. When Nova Scotia entrepreneur Luciano Lisi unveiled a plan to blow 250 megawatts of wind-power into his province’s coal-based grid, he didn’t expect it to be this controversial. But his proposed wind-hydro hybrid project, involving 44 […] More »

In a small bright room in downtown Toronto, a young Aboriginal woman is auditioning for a role she never expected to play. “I’d like to read the part of Billy Jack,” she says. With script in hand, the woman narrows her eyes and begins to read: “It’s my medicine bag. Got some owls feathers, sacred […] More »

“You know that here in Colombia, there are many human-rights violations,” says José Oney Valencia Llanos, who earns his living cutting sugar cane in Colombia’s fertile Cauca Valley. “Business people, through multinational and transnational corporations, have violated human rights and attacked workers, directly and indirectly.” Oney told me this on a humid afternoon in El […] More »

When Finance Minister Jim Flaherty first revealed his stimulus spending package back in January, he announced that Canada’s Economic Action Plan would “protect Canadians during the global recession” and “put more money in the hands of Canadian families, to help them weather the current storm.” Although Flaherty claims to have introduced a budget that is […] More »

On the surface, Victor Buffalo v. The Queen is a dispute over mismanaged oil money—$1.38 billion of it, to be exact. But the deeper questions raised by the case could spark a full-on legal war across Canada, topping $190 billion in claims and changing the face of Canadian government/aboriginal relations forever More »