WHEN IT COMES TO THE ENVIRONMENT, Stephen Harper doesn’t have a hidden agenda—he’s always been upfront about his healthy-industry-over-healthy-Earth policies. In 2006, for instance, in his first speech outside Canada after he was elected as prime minister, he called Canada an “emerging energy superpower,” suggesting his intention to expand oil sands production. “And that has […] More »

For the past three years, This Magazine has waded deep into the bad deeds of our country’s corporations. Each time, we scour hundreds of public records, court cases, company filings, and media reports to find our country’s most shameful corporate citizens. For 2013-2014, we found more than enough to enrage us. The now (unfortunately) familiar […] More »

  Amid the whirlwind of controversies surrounding rape and consent, I’m reminded of the cliché, “raping the land”. It’s a grisly metaphor that’s come to signify the senseless destruction of an otherwise innocent place. Nowhere is that metaphor better actualized than in the laying of a pipeline through the pristine B.C. interior. And have the […] More »

Ian McCormick is one of the new generation of Canadian farmers.  Thanks to programs like FarmStart and CRAFT (Canadian Regional Alliance for Farmer Training), new farmers — young people and folks who often didn’t grow up farming — are trying their hand at small-scale production.  FarmStart helps develop a new generation of farmers by leasing […] More »

Carl Cosack wonders who is standing on guard for his piece of Ontario. The 52-year-old rancher manages a herd of black angus cows and 30 horses, making him one of Ontario’s last traditional trail hands and proud owner of one of the province’s few remaining amateur ranches (don’t call it a “dude ranch”). Thanks to […] More »

On a cold December day nine years ago, a group of young people from the Grassy Narrows First Nation lay down in front of a line of logging trucks on a snow-covered road. Chrissy Swain, now 32, recalls that day at Slant Lake, about an hour north of Kenora, Ontario, which set off what has […] More »

The residents of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, live downstream from the most destructive industrial project on earth. A portrait of a community in peril Canada’s oil sands are the largest and most environmentally destructive industrial project in the world. So far, oil sands development has eliminated 602 square kilometers of Boreal forest and emits 29.5 million […] More »

Vast, impressionistic, and haunting in its sparseness, Roberta Holden’s landscape photography calls to mind the dark, faraway corners of memory and dreams. Taken from days in the Arctic, over the frozen oceans near Greenland, and during the long nights in Morocco, Holden’s work evokes nostalgia for landscapes untouched by human development—a phenomenon many of us […] More »

On October 1st, consumers in B.C. will shoulder a price increase on small appliances. But this modest fee will make a big impact on waste reduction throughout the province. Tomorrow, The Canadian Electrical Stewardship Association is launching Unplugged, a small appliance recycling program. The motivation: over 2 million small appliances wind up in British Columbia’s […] More »

Over the last 40 years, 90 countries have amended their constitutions to include the right to a healthy environment. Portugal was the first in 1976, and since then scores have followed, from Argentina to Zambia. But not Canada. What we have is the 1999 Canadian Environmental Protection Act. Under that law, polluters found in violation […] More »

Vancouver’s First Majestic Silver plans to mine for silver in the heart of Mexico’s peyote country. For the Huichol people, the project is an environmental risk—and a spiritual crisis Photographs by José Luis Aranda Under a heavy afternoon sun, the desert landscape in central Mexico lays long into the horizon, interrupted only by railroad tracks, […] More »