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Start with the fact it was a rolling proclamation of owners' stupidity, says Dr. Steve. By Steve Burgess. Dear Dr. Steve, Tesla has announced that production of the Cybertruck will cease. Are you disappointed? Signed, Torque Dear Torque, Alas, poor sheet-metal monstrosity, we hardly knew ye. More than a decade spent in gestation, followed by a fleeting moment in the sun — the Cybertruck is a four-wheeled cicada. Elon Musk first spoke of plans for his electric truck in 2012. After delays, misfires, premature rollouts and missed deadlines, it arrived in showrooms in 2023. Now, like five-day Trump press secretary Katie Zacharia, its brief time is done. Tesla's "Gigafactory," located outside of Austin, Texas, has announced it will no longer produce those big, shiny, five-seat toasters. Musk's two overpriced Texas products, the Cybertruck and failed Senate candidate Ken Paxton, are off the market in the same week. No refunds on either. That's the problem with capitalism — it's too woke. You're better off with government projects, like SpaceX. But the free market is cruel. It stifles personal expression. How will young MAGAs speak their truth now? Cybertruck packed a lot of tsuris into a short period. Musk initially said his vehicle was partly inspired by a Lotus Esprit from the 1977 James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me, a car that doubled as a submarine. Musk said it would be capable of surviving total immersion. In April 2024, a Cybertruck owner reported the vehicle malfunctioned after going through a car wash. Musk had described the truck to investors as "apocalypse technology." And to be fair, come the Apocalypse there probably won't be any more car washes. Tesla then warned owners that corrosion and staining would result from washing the vehicle while in direct sunlight. This made Cybertruck the second MAGA object unable to stand sunlight, along with new White House chief of staff Stephen Miller. Early on, Musk promised the Cybertruck would be bulletproof. An early onstage demo featured an engineer throwing a ball at the truck's window. The window was smashed. Probably should have thrown a bullet. Musk promised the Cybertruck would cost about US$39,900 and have a 500-mile range. This turned out to be accurate insofar as the actual figures contained some nines and zeros and other numbers found on a calculator, albeit in strikingly different arrangements. One version ended up costing US$99,990 with a range of 325 miles. Once on the market, the Cybertruck was subject to seven recalls in the first year. Both the United Kingdom and the European Union ruled they were not road safe due to terrible sightlines. There were fatal accidents, although not many by Musk standards — he probably killed a lot more by cutting U.S. government aid. The Cybertruck proved neither bulletproof nor scorn-proof. Driving one was like standing beside the world's most expensive "I'm with Stupid" T-shirt. Last May, one Texas driver did something particularly stupid — he read the user's manual. And believed it. The Cybertruck manual described a feature called "wade mode" that would allow it to travel through shallow water. He drove it into a lake. Those who recall the car wash incident will not be surprised at the outcome. Eventually the wallowing Cybertruck was hooked and fished out, less submarine than giant sardine. Even those Cybertruck owners bright enough to keep their vehicles on dry land have reported problems with breakdowns and pieces of the stainless steel body falling off. The truck seemed to have design flaws, including the fact that it was much too large to use as a paperweight. The last production vehicle to use stainless steel was another famous automotive flop, the DeLorean, immortalized in the 1985 movie Back to the Future. Perhaps Musk will make a new Cybertruck that can also travel back in time — back to before he pissed away close to half a billion dollars trying to elect a stainless steel dumpster full of GOP nitwits; back before peo...

Once it's burned, gas processed at the Kitimat facility will produce more emissions than all other activities within BC. By Zoë Yunker. Once Kitimat's LNG facility is expanded, gas liquefied at the site and shipped to other countries will produce more greenhouse gases than all other emissions produced by the province of B.C. each year. In September, LNG Canada's joint partners made their final investment decision to double the plant's capacity. LNG emissions projections from Clean Energy Canada suggest that once the expansion is complete, emissions from extracting LNG Canada's gas will be roughly equal to those produced by all the light-duty trucks driving in B.C. each year. The LNG facility itself will produce emissions equivalent to all of B.C.'s residential buildings. But the biggest segment of its emissions by far will occur outside of B.C., when the fuel is burned elsewhere. Those out-of-country pollutants aren't counted in B.C.'s or Canada's emissions inventory. Instead, Canada follows the United Nations' standard method for tallying emissions produced within domestic borders. This is a methodologically tidy approach: it doesn't require countries to unpack the relative impacts of their exported fuels, compared with other options a government might choose. But the approach can obscure the overall climate weight of fossil fuel projects such as LNG Canada, where more than three-quarters of its emissions are released outside of Canada's borders. "We can't simply ignore the downstream emissions that occur when the gas is burned abroad," said Steven Haig, a policy adviser for the International Institute for Sustainable Development. "That still needs to be factored in to how we understand the total climate impact of these projects. "The fact remains that LNG is still a polluting fuel." Canada's federal government and B.C.'s outgoing NDP and newly elected Conservative governments have used the life-cycle approach to arrive at a different conclusion: they say liquefied natural gas, and projects like LNG Canada, can reduce global emissions. B.C.'s new Conservative government campaigned on a plan to work with the federal government to establish emissions "credits" for LNG sales for reducing the use of coal. How LNG Canada will ultimately affect global emissions remains murky, says Dale Beugin, executive vice-president of the Canadian Climate Institute. Besides the emissions produced within B.C.'s borders, it means analyzing what happens when LNG hits the global energy market. "What's being replaced, and what is the alternative?" Beugin said. "Those are really hard questions to answer definitively." What we know about LNG Canada's emissions Projects like LNG Canada produce emissions throughout their entire supply, production and consumption processes, including fracking, liquefying and burning the gas at its final destination. LNG Canada's emissions within B.C.'s borders mostly come from the so-called "upstream" activities to extract the gas. That includes fracking, a process that injects high-pressure water, chemicals and sand underground to blast open pathways within the rock for gas to escape. Fracking is powered by gas, and fracking wells often leak methane — a super-potent greenhouse gas. Clean Energy Canada estimates that upstream emissions stemming from LNG Canada's gas extraction will represent roughly eight per cent of the project's overall life-cycle emissions inside and outside the country, totalling about 6.5 megatonnes each year. LNG Canada's Kitimat facility is also emissions-intensive. It burns gas to make its fuel liquefaction-ready and to power its turbines, and while flaring it to relieve pressure buildups in the plant. An unknown amount of unburned gas likely escapes the plant as methane. Facility-level emissions will represent three to five per cent of LNG Canada's total life-cycle emissions, depending on whether the second phase electrifies its production, according to data from Clean Energy Canada. Assuming ...

Research shows that the people who rely the most on hospital care often leave without receiving it. Here's what can be done. By Colleen Varcoe. People who visit emergency departments but leave without their care completed are often assumed not to have been ill enough to require that care. However, the high rates of people who leave without completed care are a symptom of the mismatch between the Canadian promise of health care for all and the current capacity of the health-care system. The most profound effects of this mismatch fall on people who are structurally disadvantaged. Our research shows that the people who rely the most on emergency departments report the poorest care experiences, and often leave without their care completed. This creates a cycle of worsening health and increasing costs. Studying the care experiences of nearly 1,700 patients across three British Columbia emergency departments, our research team found that people facing the greatest social and economic disadvantages were more likely to report discrimination, lack access to primary care, depend on emergency departments for ongoing health problems and rate their care poorly. They were also the most frequent users of emergency departments. In a different analysis, our research also showed that emergency departments can significantly interrupt this cycle. Promoting equity Our team at EQUIP Health Care has been researching how to increase effectiveness by supporting health-care organizations to focus on people least well-served by the health-care system. In other words, researching ways to promote equity. Studying primary care clinics that serve people marginalized by poverty, racism and other forms of stigma and discrimination, we identified three key dimensions to doing so: trauma- and violence-informed care, cultural safety/anti-racism and substance-use health. We also identified 10 implementation strategies. Our findings showed that patients who received care that promoted equity were more comfortable and confident in their care, leading to increased confidence in preventing and managing their health problems. This, in turn, improved their health outcomes, including depression and trauma symptoms, chronic pain and quality of life. We learned that although education and addressing biases were useful for many providers, interprofessional conversations were needed to develop policy and practices to address racism, stigma and discrimination. We learned that disruption was inevitable and necessary, and that policy change was as important as changes to health-care providers' practice. More effective care Based on these lessons, we partnered with three B.C. emergency departments to design an intervention to support leaders and staff to deliver care more effectively. Emergency departments are under immense and increasing pressure, evident in long waits for care and high levels of staff turnover and burnout, fostering a focus on optimizing short-term efficiency. However, the intervention was designed to align with the quintuple aim of health-care improvement, which optimizes effectiveness by enhancing: Patient experiences and outcomes Health-care provider well-being Health equity Service efficiency Health system efficiency Despite significant challenges related to COVID-19 and the worsening epidemic of overdoses and deaths related to the toxic drug supply, staff at two of the emergency departments mounted intervention strategies. Results showed encouraging trends in patients' perceptions of the quality of their care and discrimination in the emergency department, but there were no significant changes in staff sick time. However, most importantly, there was a significant decrease in the percentage of patients who left without their care being completed at the site with the most robust intervention activities. This is crucial because patients who leave the emergency department before their care is complete often return when their health concerns are more urgen...

In Richmond, a geoexchange energy system could hold lessons for BC's coming energy crunch. By Zoë Yunker. It's a quiet, cloudy morning on the Alexandra Greenway, a tree-lined corridor in Richmond. Today the double-lane bike and walking path is empty, save for a songbird darting by and a bunny nibbling plants just off to the side. Despite the tranquil scene, much of the energy for about 2,000 homes, an Islamic temple and a firehall comes from this otherwise unassuming patch of green space — that is, about 70 metres below ground. That's where hundreds of buried pipes have circulated an infinite loop of fluid, on repeat, for over a decade, pulling heat from the earth into buildings across the neighbourhood and back again. Owned by the City of Richmond, the Alexandra District Energy Utility is among the province's first large-scale, networked energy systems to draw on heating and cooling from the shallow earth. Known to some as geoexchange or a ground-source heat pump, the technology is old, but its use in B.C. remains relatively uncommon. Unlike geothermal energy, which taps deep heat from the earth's mantle and molten core, geoexchange targets earth-buffered radiation from the sun. Its heat isn't hot, but it is stable, and for geoexchange users, that's an asset, not a flaw. "We hopped on this opportunity," says Alen Postolka, director of district energy for Lulu Island Energy Co., the City of Richmond's wholly owned energy utility, which launched the system with Oris Geo Energy, a local building developer specializing in geoexchange, in 2012. At the time, Richmond faced a problem familiar to many municipalities seeking to develop in an era of climate change: the city wanted to decarbonize while continuing to grow. Its population had just grown by eight per cent in the last five years, totalling over 190,000 by 2011. Richmond, which also has the highest life expectancy rate in B.C., is now home to about 210,000 people. Geoexchange appeared to present a solution. The systems are a small but growing international market, led by regions such as the United States and the European Union, including Sweden, whose buildings have over 670,000 units hooked up to some form of geoexchange. The technology has a sleepier profile in B.C., getting little mention from the province as an option for addressing its energy needs. Dana Westermark, developer at Oris, sees that as a missed opportunity to address some of B.C.'s gnarliest energy problems, including a coming shortage of once abundant hydro power and the infrastructure to transport it. "It's really looking at trying to solve some problems that you know haven't really bitten yet but are likely going to bite in the foreseeable future," he says. 'It's basically a battery' Back in the early 2000s, when the Alexandra Greenway was still an undisturbed patch of grass, Westermark, a longtime Richmond developer, was busy helping his friend build a house. "I don't normally do single-family homes, but this person was a friend of mine," Westermark says. Westermark's friend, an "avid environmentalist," wanted a house heated by geoexchange, something neither Westermark nor many other Vancouver developers knew about at the time. "It was very leading-edge to be looking at doing geo back then," Westermark says. There's nothing new about the earth's heat. Recent evidence suggests some humans may have survived through the last ice age in part thanks to the insulated heat of underground caves. Cave dwellers benefited from the same fundamental facts used in geoexchange: despite vast fluctuations above ground, ambient temperatures in the shallow underground remain relatively stable, generally ranging between a chilly but habitable 10 to 12 C. "That's not warm enough for us to feel comfortable. But it can be used as a source of heat," says Jeff Quibell, an engineer specializing in geoexchange with Falcon Engineering in Kelowna. To raise that modest heat, geoexchange systems employ a reverse refrigeration techn...

A cabinet minister's bourbon booze-cruise brouhaha is just the latest in a string of avoidable scandals. By David Climenhaga. Dale Nally doesn't seem like the brightest bulb in Premier Danielle Smith's relatively low-wattage cabinet. Still, Nally's Kentucky bourbon tour mini-scandal is the kind of problem that could easily have been avoided. Just for starters, if you're going to fly out of town to discuss the business of booze, there might be something to be said for not posting photos on your social media accounts with glasses of the stuff in your hands, as Nally appears to do from time to time. Few eyebrows were raised back at the end of August when Alberta's United Conservative Party government announced that the Morinville-St. Albert MLA, who holds the insignificant Service Alberta and "Red Tape Reduction" portfolios in Smith's cabinet, was off to Louisville to "meet with lawmakers and industry leaders to gain insights into the legislative framework behind bourbon's legal designation, the creation of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, and strategies that have successfully attracted investment and visitors." Most Albertans cynically suspect precious little of value happens on such junkets, regularly taken by members of the UCP cabinet. They know that's just the way Conservatives in this province have done business since time immemorial and nobody gets too exercised about it. It probably wasn't the wisest course of action, though, for someone on Nally's staff to hire a ride service that bills itself as "Kentucky's Premier Private Bourbon Tour Experience" and that bills customers several thousand dollars a pop, as it were. It appears not to have occurred to Nally, at any rate, that it might have been wiser just to have rented a van and either politely declined a drink at each stop or instructed a teetotalling underling to get behind the wheel. After all, in public life, expenses should not only be reasonable; they must appear to be reasonable. Surely someone on the UCP staff would have expected the Opposition to comb through the expense receipts when they were published and discover "taxi" receipts totalling more than $4,000. In question period on Wednesday, Marie Renaud, the NDP MLA for the neighbouring St. Albert riding, rose to remind the house that while the Trump trade war on Canada raged, Nally "opened up Alberta to American booze while almost every other province kept it off the shelves." "Then three months later he ran up a nearly $4,000 tab on Albertans' dime on a bourbon tour in Kentucky," Renaud continued in the lead-up to her question. "How did the minister's expensive taste tests of Kentucky bourbon help Alberta families in Morinville-St. Albert?" Nally replied: "We went to Kentucky to meet with their legislators. We met with some of their independent offices, and yes, we met with some of the distillers.... We wanted to use that information to help inform us of how we could brand Alberta whisky in the same way they branded Kentucky bourbon." The neighbouring MLAs have a testy relationship. Renaud shot back: "Given that the minister's expense records list the booze cruise as taxi fare — although what taxi company has a slogan that says, 'You sip; we drive'?... will the minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction apologize for this booze cruise and pay back all the money he spent?" Nally, obviously irritated, huffed: "This is going to come as a shock to the NDP, but international missions are a core part of our job. Unlike the NDP, United Conservatives are focusing on growing Alberta's economy, and yes, that includes our distilleries." Needless to say, this made good viewing in social media video clips. On Thursday, facing more questions on the same topic from Calgary-Currie MLA Janet Eremenko, Nally got up in the assembly and declared that "there was no booze cruise. This was a trade mission." Alberta Hansard says this was followed by "interjections." We all know what that means. When the interjections died dow...

The federal government's latest budget includes some affordability measures, but mostly delivers for big business. By David Macdonald. The federal government released its federal budget on Nov. 5, 2026. They called the document "Masters of Our Destiny" and have framed it as a federal planning document to shore up sovereignty in the face of global uncertainty. In its introduction, the document says it is intended to trigger an "investment supercycle" and makes repeated references to the growing and widespread concern among Canadians related to the cost of living. Once we get past that initial rhetoric, though, the actual budget shows something else — a restructuring of the Canadian state to serve big business. A budget for oil and gas companies This is a budget for corporate Canada — and specifically for its oil and gas companies, which have made money hand over fist on high gas prices. This budget delivers them by far the most of any sector in a massive new corporate tax cut, called the "productivity mega deduction," which allows corporations to write off capital investments into things like machinery on their taxes. The budget highlights its purported benefits across many pages but does not provide a breakdown of who will receive it. We calculated it, showing that 29 per cent would go to oil extraction and refining and another 10 per cent would go to mining. These industries are massive capital spenders, so any tax deduction for capital goes to them. The goal of this type of credit is to have companies spend more on capital. The issue is that these companies would have engaged in much of that capital spending anyway, so we're giving away tax money for nothing. But insofar that it does incentivize new spending, that spending is likely to be in extractive industries — places where we should have an excess profits tax, not more investment. The budget reveals exactly how much the federal government will lose in tax revenue by year — and fully 14 per cent of the deficit in coming years will be due to this new deduction. It is so large that the tax writeoffs for extractive industries alone will make up 10 per cent of all new spending in this budget. If we include all industries, a quarter of the entire budget is devoted to the mega deduction. Individual measures for Canadians, such as the cut in the gas tax, the groceries and essentials boost and child-care spending, make up a third of this budget. Modest improvements in income transfers There were several notable changes in income transfer programs that will move the needle a bit — temporarily — on poverty rates. The biggest is a one-time 50 per cent boost in early 2027 to the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit, a repeat of an increase from 2026. The result will be to move 120,000 people who are just below the poverty line to just above it. The Canada Workers Benefit for low-income working Canadians will be slightly easier to get and its base amount will be higher. This will likely push some people out of poverty, although the budget does not estimate how many people this particular change will bring over the line — likely under 50,000 people. The caregiver tax credit has also been made refundable. When caring for someone, it's often quite hard to work, hitting caregivers in their 50s and early 60s particularly hard since they are not yet eligible for big retirement programs to kick in. That change will move 15,000 people above the poverty line. While not an income transfer program per se, the budget also contains an important $5.4-billion additional investment in child care. This measure was announced in June, so it isn't news from this budget, but it boosts the transfers to the provinces on child care by a third. It will help to continue the expansion of spaces and keep fees low, although in the big provinces outside of Quebec, they are still well over $10 a day. This investment should be made permanent now, rather than requiring the feds to renew it in two years. While ...

The option is detailed in a ministry document obtained by The Tyee. Experts warn it could open doors to US insurers and care providers. By Charles Rusnell. A confidential internal Health Ministry document reveals Alberta's United Conservative Party government is considering implementing the United States' main health-care billing system. Health policy experts say this could open the door to U.S. private health insurance corporations and health-care providers. "This is the clearest sign yet from the Alberta government that it is very interested in not just U.S.-style health care, but it also wants Alberta to have U.S. health care," said Andrew Longhurst, a senior researcher and political economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. If the UCP chooses to align Alberta's billing system with the U.S. system, Longhurst said, that would be a "huge step" towards "creating the conditions to attract U.S. health insurers and U.S. for-profit health-care providers." Longhurst ties the interest in the U.S. billing system to Bill 11, the UCP's controversial "dual practice" policy, which took effect Oct. 1. It allows eligible physicians and surgeons to work in the public system while also providing for-profit, private services, including surgeries, to paying customers. Critics have called — so far unsuccessfully — on the federal government to intervene, arguing that dual practice undermines universal access to health care by creating a two-tier system. They say wealthier patients can pay to jump public wait-list queues, making personal income, rather than medical necessity, the dominant determiner of access. "This is very, very troubling," Longhurst said. The government and the Alberta Medical Association, which represents the province's doctors, agreed in 2022 to modernize the coding system, called the Schedule of Medical Benefits, employed by Alberta's physicians and surgeons to charge the government for medical services and procedures they provide. The Tyee has obtained a draft of an Alberta Primary and Preventative Health Services Ministry document, dated July 16, 2026. It shows that a committee, composed of Alberta Medical Association and government representatives, aided by a consulting firm, narrowed the options for modernizing the coding system to two. One option is to update and modernize Alberta's existing proprietary physician coding system. The second is to implement an entirely new coding system provided by the American Medical Association, referred to henceforth as the U.S. AMA. Alberta's lobbyist registry shows the U.S. AMA registered to lobby on July 17, 2020, about 15 months after the newly created UCP first formed a government following the single-term reign of the Alberta NDP, which staunchly opposes health-care privatization. The association's registration renewal on Aug. 6, 2026, shows it intended to lobby the premier's office, executive council, Alberta Health Services and the ministries of Primary and Preventative Health Services and Hospital and Surgical Health Services. "The Alberta government is currently reviewing its physician coding system for medical services and procedures," the registration states. "The [U.S.] AMA will present its Current Procedural Terminology or CPT code set for use by the province of Alberta as a comprehensive solution to Alberta's medical services coding needs. The CPT code set provides a uniform language for coding medical services and procedures." The U.S. AMA is the largest physician-lobbying association in the United States. It created the CPT code about 60 years ago because it recognized the need for a uniform, standardized language to report surgical and medical procedures. But even as the U.S. AMA seeks to embed its system in Alberta, it has been under intense scrutiny. The Donald Trump administration wants to shift financial incentives toward primary care and prevention and away from treatments after patients are ill that are more lucrative for physicians and surg...

The 'exceptional step' comes as 1,200 mineworkers strike over wages and safety. By Isaac Phan Nay. British Columbia's central labour organization is calling on its affiliate unions, which represent 500,000 workers, not to touch products coming out of the Highland Valley Copper mine while employees are on strike. The BC Federation of Labour issued the declaration — called a "hot edict" — on Friday, nearly two weeks after more than 1,200 Highland Valley Copper mineworkers walked off the job. The mineworkers' union, United Steelworkers Local 7619, said negotiations broke down with the employer over wages, contract work and health and safety issues. Sarah Payne, a spokesperson for Teck Resources Ltd., said in an email that the Vancouver-based mining company is committed to reaching a fair agreement at the bargaining table. "Operations are currently continuing at a reduced capacity," Payne said. "Our focus is on maintaining safe and environmentally responsible operations." The BC Federation of Labour, also known as the BCFED, said in a press release Friday the hot edict aims to add more economic pressure on Teck to reach a fair deal. "A hot edict is an exceptional step to take," BCFED president Sussanne Skidmore said. "But it's become clear this employer believes they can wait out their workers and operate around this strike and B.C.'s anti-scab law. And it's up to all of us to show them how wrong they are." The edict calls for affiliated unions and their members not to handle, load, unload, store, transport, ship, process or otherwise deal with affected products. Despite the strike, the Highland Valley Copper mine is continuing to operate at a reduced capacity. That means managers and supervisors would be operating mining equipment, such as crushers, and putting in long shifts to try to keep the mine running, United Steelworkers Local 7619 president Kyle Wolff told The Tyee Tuesday. "If they're safe, if they're certified, I have no idea," he said. "I feel bad for them to some extent. It's not their fault that this is happening. It's the employer." The strike is largely over compensation and long-running concerns about health and safety issues, specifically how silica dust is controlled and what workers say is the degrading state of mining equipment. And while the union did not disclose either side's exact numbers on wages, Wolff previously told The Tyee the employer asked for a 25 per cent reduction in pensions at the table. The union's Western Canada director, Scott Lunny, said in the BCFED's press release that Teck Resources can afford to pay higher wages. "They aren't just failing to pay workers enough to retain them — they're even asking for concessions," Lunny said. "No company this profitable should be falling so far short of the wages and pensions they can afford to pay." The company is in the middle of a merger with Anglo American, a London, England-based multinational mining company with a market cap of nearly 40 billion British pounds. According to Teck's latest quarterly results report, the company made $1.69 billion in gross profit last quarter, up from $660 million the same quarter last year. Copper production volumes increased across all the company's copper mines except for one in the Coquimbo region of Chile, and were 11 per cent higher than the same period last year. "Across our copper business, we increased production, lowered unit costs and delivered strong margin growth," president and CEO Jonathan Price said in a press release about the report. "These results further demonstrate the strong foundation from which we are advancing toward completion of the planned merger with Anglo American."

Inside the drive to restore 500,000 'keystone' trees along the dammed Nechako. A Tyee special feature. By Ben Parfitt. In Prince George in June daytime highs reach a pleasant 20 degrees, people stroll about in T-shirts, and the snow begins to fly. A flurry of white fluff containing billions of tiny black cottonwood seeds drifts down from the sky. "The air is just filled. The seeds cover everyone's cars. It's in town. It's everywhere," says Jeff Werner, a wildlife ecologist with British Columbia's Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship and an adjunct professor at the University of Northern British Columbia. But year after year, a disquieting number of cottonwoods haven't taken root as they once did, despite the incongruous snow of seed each June. Werner began to ask why several years ago after a trip to the fittingly named Cottonwood Island Park, which lies at the confluence of two great rivers, the Fraser and the Nechako. The park is a popular destination for Prince George residents wanting to commune with nature. It is populated by woodpeckers so tame they can be hand-fed, nuthatches, black bears, owls, bats and all manner of migratory songbirds such as western tanagers and orange-crowned warblers that fly to Central America in the fall and wing back north every spring. All those species and more are there because of the park's signature tree, which is at its full beauty in a gentle breeze, wrote the late U.S. nature writer and botanist Donald Culross Peattie. "For on one side the leaf blades are darkly glittering, on the other almost silvery white.... The trees seem, like the sea, to break into whitecaps before the wind." Several years ago, Werner was walking in the park with retired soil scientist Paul Sanborn, a colleague from UNBC. As they walked, Sanborn pointed out something odd. The park's old, gigantic cottonwoods dominated the forest, yet beneath the giants no young cottonwoods could be found. The forest floor was, instead, dominated by native spruce trees. "We were looking at the forest and realizing that although not appearing to change from year to year, it was actually in a rapid state of flux," Werner recounts. The park appeared in danger of eventually losing "its namesake, singular tree." And not just there, but all along the Nechako. Why, Werner asked, were the giant trees producing so much seed, yet the seeds weren't germinating? His quest ended with a momentous decision to plant half a million cottonwood seedlings along the Nechako River to stave off an ecological crisis in the making. A river stuck in reverse In field trips, the restless ecologist concluded that the dearth of young cottonwoods spoke to a bigger problem: a radically altered river that no longer behaved as it once had. Unlike the Fraser, the Nechako was breached by a dam 72 years ago. The 100-metre-high edifice known as the Kenney Dam transformed nature to provide hydro power to make aluminum in the distant coastal community of Kitimat. "The dam effectively reversed the river's flow, sending two-thirds of its volume back toward the Coast Mountains and the hydroelectric turbines buried within them," The Tyee's Amanda Follett Hosgood reported a few years ago, in a story that looked at the dam's lasting impacts on First Nations. Caught in the crosshairs was the river valley's signature tree. For thousands of years, the First Peoples occupying the Nechako watershed had an intimate connection with cottonwoods. Like their coastal counterparts who sculpted ocean-going canoes out of massive red cedar logs, they exploited the soft wood of equally massive cottonwoods to make river-going dugout canoes and so much more, ethnobotanist Nancy Turner writes in her monumental two-volume work, Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge. They also gathered and ate fresh or dried cottonwood mushrooms that grew beneath their namesake trees, kindled fires using sections of extremely dry cottonwood, used cottonwood resin to make salves for cuts and sores or...

The bestselling book for unlocking creativity has made a recent resurgence. But its author fails to acknowledge some crucial realities. By Sarah Krichel. I was subletting a friend's cozy apartment in Berlin and indulging in an unhurried morning routine when I came across Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. I'd heard of the viral 12-week workbook that claims to unblock blocked artists before — the same one influencers deem "dangerous," warning it will end relationships and transform your life. Even if the word "spiritual" — right there in the title — hadn't totally gone over my head, I wouldn't have been prepared for how Christian this book is. Cameron opens with a controversial albeit enticing argument that, as creations of God ourselves, when we create, we extend his creativity. She then spends numerous paragraphs convincing you, the reader, to stay with her as she evokes the G-word again and again, encouraging you to replace it with "the universe" if that helps you sleep at night. I was enjoying my slow European morning enough to not immediately put the book down when Cameron assumed I had any interest in serving her idea of God. I decided then and there I'd buy my own copy once I got home to Toronto. Published in 1992, The Artist's Way has sold more than five million copies. Its book publisher has re-released numerous anniversary editions and has also published a separate workbook (I thought the original was a workbook?). Its 12 chapters, meant to be read one per week, each guide the reader through a recovery process for different artist principles like integrity, connection and abundance, among other things. They parallel the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous model, which has historical roots in Christianity. Each chapter also includes a hefty and time-consuming list of homework tasks, as well as three check-in questions. What made the book go so viral, however, are the two mandatory tasks on top of the readings, homework and check-ins: morning pages and artist dates. The former has you journal three pages longhand every morning; the latter has you do any activity that engages your inner artist, as long as it's done alone. Cameron constantly reminds you how crucial these are to the process, urging they get done as consistently as possible. Thanks to pandemic boredom, the invention of TikTok and algorithm culture in general, the book has made numerous resurgences. The Artist's Way has been commended by celebrities such as model Bella Hadid. "It's changed my perspective, it's changed my creativity, the way I look at things, I've started to write my poetry again, I've started to write a movie," she said in an interview posted to Instagram in 2023. Then there's the rapper and singer-songwriter Jaylah Ji'mya Hickmon, who performs as Doechii. In 2020, she publicly documented her entire Artist's Way journey on YouTube prior to her rise to fame. We're living in a spiritually starved age. As more and more young people refuse to be proselytized into climbing a Sisyphean corporate ladder, it's little wonder this book maintains a chokehold on the creative class. Still, the profoundness with which Artist's Way enthusiasts talk about the book was dissonant with my experience with it. A flawed yet perfect match for the attention economy Cameron's instructions — journal, go on a walk, visit a museum, spend time in nature, try new things — are hardly revolutionary to anyone who's engaged in rudimentary self-reflection before. What was revolutionary for me personally, however, was my commitment to the ritualistic framework the book offers up. I was determined that it live up to its hype. Thanks to an attention economy that benefits from its mythos (labelling a post with a statement like "BE CAREFUL WITH THIS BOOK" will get a content creator more views than just saying how it went), The Artist's Way is so culturally celebrated that the hype that surrounds it can shape your experience with it. As someone who...

In a new book, the Montreal doctor offers a stirring call for change in how we approach international health. By Crawford Kilian. Ebola, Bombs, and Migrants: Humanitarian Crises in a Security-Obsessed World Dr. Joanne Liu, with André Pratte House of Anansi Press (2026) Dr. Joanne Liu has had a remarkable career as a humanitarian, and it has also made her a keen political analyst. Based in Montreal, Liu is a pediatric emergency physician and a professor at McGill University's School of Population and Global Health, where she directs its Pandemic and Emergency Readiness Lab. She previously worked with Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, or MSF. She started her career with them in 1996. Her book brings together her expertise across 30 years of work. Ebola, Bombs, and Migrants: Humanitarian Crises in a Security-Obsessed World is out now through House of Anansi Press. Early on, Liu explains that the book is not an autobiography but an attempt to "decompress" after 30 years of high-intensity life in MSF, which culminated in serving as its international president from 2013 to 2019. Liu tells us her job as president had little real power, given the autonomy of MSF's national chapters. But the role thrust her into major disasters and conflicts, in which she had to speak for both her organization and for the people it was trying to help. "I have often been asked to detail what I learned from this period of my life," she writes. "I will summarize it in three words: Ebola, Kunduz, and migrants. In my opinion, these three themes literally hijacked the organization I was overseeing. They encapsulated the challenges with which MSF was confronted and the way the organization overcame them in those years." Liu goes on: "The complexity of those challenges was heightened by the international ecosystem of fear the public experienced following the September 11, 2001 attacks. We became obsessed with security." In the case of Ebola, the security obsession expressed itself in various ways. As Liu puts it, Ebola to the rest of the world was "a distant threat that the Western world wanted to keep at arm's length by constructing barricades between it and the affected countries." MSF was involved very early, and obtained the first blood samples in Guinea that confirmed Ebola had somehow leaped across Africa from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. MSF published a communiqué describing Ebola in Guinea as an "unprecedented epidemic." That term, Liu notes, "was not well received by the World Health Organization." A WHO spokesperson tried to minimize the extent and seriousness of the epidemic, and when Liu met with Dr. Margaret Chan, then the director general of WHO, in Geneva, "Chan was visibly unconvinced of the urgency of the situation." Nor were UN member states like the U.S. and the U.K., which showed little concern about Ebola until an infected Liberian arrived in Dallas, Texas and was eventually hospitalized. He died there, but not before passing Ebola to two of his nurses. Ebolanoia Meanwhile, American health-care workers repatriated from West Africa either had Ebola or were suspected cases. The country panicked. The resulting scare resulted in the Obama administration finally taking note and delivering aid and personnel to West Africa. That included a number of brand-new Ebola treatment centres, almost none of which ever saw a patient. But foreign governments still wanted to keep Ebola at arm's length. European and American governments agonized about whether to bring their infected nationals home, or to leave them in place. I well recall that Donald Trump, not yet president, tweeted often about leaving them to take their chances. Trump was actually expressing the spirit of the time, more honestly than most: the spirit of self-protection against perceived threats to personal and national security. That spirit was a rejection of what Liu calls "solidarity," a willingness to take the side of the suffering even at some poss...

Mia Noblet of Nelson, BC has set new world records in the emerging sport of highlining. Not for the faint of heart! By Bill Metcalfe. Walking 350 metres above downtown Moscow on an inch-wide line strung between two skyscrapers, Mia Noblet was surprised by the noise of the city below. She was accustomed to highlining above canyons, lakes, forests and mountains, to the sound of wind and birds. So that day in 2019, the din of a huge city was an adjustment for Noblet. Then 24 she was already an experienced highliner with an international reputation. "The sound travels up. You hear sirens, cars, horns, cranes, construction workers on the top of skyscrapers. You are surrounded by noise." Contrast Moscow with northern Norway in 2018, walking a one-kilometre line above a forested valley and a pristine lake, with a view of the fiords. Or the Utah desert in 2017, on a line ending at a summit known as the Castleton Tower. Or the silence of Antarctica in 2025, where she walked a low line near the water and hopes to go back and find anchors for a higher walk, perhaps as high as her several walks between peaks in B.C.'s Valhalla Range near Nelson, where she grew up and still lives. Noblet, 31, has highlined in 21 countries on seven continents. She has set a number of world records in the emerging sport. She takes part in about three or four events or contests per year. In her walk over downtown Moscow, she and several other highliners set the world record for the highest skyline walk. Noblet set the distance record for women with a 2.7 km walk in France in 2022 on a line strung between two dormant volcanoes. It is very possible to walk a longer distance than that if you do it back and forth on a shorter line, she says, but a long uninterrupted line is different challenge. "You have to be quite careful with wind because even though the line is quite thin, it's kind of like a big sail in some sense. The wind catches it like a sail, and even though it's very thin, it's still very long." In addition to facing the rigours of long distances and times, Noblet has taken on highlining challenges that are a bit more unique. She walked a 469-metre line blindfolded in Utah in 2017 and a 55-metre line wearing five-centimetre high heels in China in 2018. Where time doesn't exist The basic standard of success for a highline walker is to walk without stopping and not fall. Then it is a question of time and distance. Noblet says sometimes she can rest while she walks, if conditions are good. She can let her mind and body relax. "You'll encounter parts of the lines that are quite easy…. There's some sections that feel very flowy and you don't have to balance much. It's almost like walking on the ground. That's where you can maintain a better speed, rest your arms more, rest your mind more." Noblet knows that this calm-but-alert mind-body has been called a flow state, or the zone. She calls it "a place where time doesn't really exist." That timelessness includes being present enough to deal with unexpected changes. Sometimes there is a sudden onset of mental or physical fatigue, or perhaps the wind shifts. Or maybe there is a very subtle change in the flexibility of the line, which is manufactured in sections. In a split second, she has to switch from relaxation to response. "That's what makes you a strong line walker." And it is what gives you a solid international reputation. "Mia Noblet is a name that commands respect, holding more world records than any other female athlete in the sport," writes the International Slacklining Association on its website. "A former competitive speed ice-skater, Mia has successfully translated her explosive power and focus into the highline arena with incredible results." From Nelson to France Noblet was born in Vancouver and her family moved to Nelson when she was three. One day at age seven in a sports store, a poster of a man walking a line high above a mountain landscape caught her attention. To Noblet as a child, it l...

The Conservatives have created a 'volatile' situation in BC. But there is a path forward. By Adam Olsen. For the past two years B.C. Conservative MLAs have been chanting a mantra: "Repeal DRIPA!" It has come to stand for a broad frustration that despite promises otherwise, Crown-Indigenous relations languish, with many of the foundational questions about Aboriginal rights and title unresolved. The Conservatives have convinced themselves, their members and their social media mob that the best way to solve these foundational questions in B.C. is to repeal the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, which was passed unanimously, including with a vote I proudly cast as an MLA, in November 2019. Their simple message is like a sleight of hand. One smooth move and poof! All our problems go away. Premier-designate Lorne Doerkson's message on DRIPA before the election was clear. Now, however, it's increasingly mixed. On one hand, speaking of DRIPA he said: "The reality is it hasn't solved anything. We are in court all over British Columbia with respect to docks at Pender Harbour, mining opportunities in the province. It hasn't solved anything. And what we need to do is work together for the betterment of all people in British Columbia." He's repeated a similar message: "If DRIPA had the opportunity to solve the problems in this province we wouldn't be in court, and legislation that forces two parties together does not seem very beneficial to anybody, in my mind." But, on the other hand, Doerkson said: "I am committed with working on a great path forward of respect, partnership, friendship and conversation." And then: "I am absolutely committed to this, and I mean it when I say that I will take a meeting with First Nations any day so that we can grow a partnership and a friendship together." While in the official Opposition benches, the Conservatives split their time between challenging the BC NDP government and chasing the unhinged and divisive politics of OneBC's Dallas Brodie and Tara Armstrong, whose perspective echoed that of early B.C. lieutenant-governor Joseph Trutch, who entrenched Indigenous land dispossession. Now that the Conservatives are government, Crown-Indigenous relations policy is their responsibility. Before Doerkson proposes any bill related to repealing DRIPA, he should meet with First Nations leaders. Former B.C. Conservative leader John Rustad succinctly described the party's position as grounded in a policy of extinguishment when he said that "Indigenous rights and private property cannot coexist." However, the easy answers Doerkson and his colleagues have been promising to provide certainty, to British Columbians and investors, are far more complex than they have been letting on. As the director of intergovernmental relations and lead negotiator for the Tsartlip First Nation, I have had a seat at the table for conversations where the Crown takes its responsibilities vis-a-vis Crown-Indigenous relations seriously. And I have also seen what happens when it does not: we return to a highly charged, litigious environment where progress moves slowly, if at all. 'It's a very volatile situation brewing' Repealing DRIPA is a straightforward legislative process, and from a political perspective, Doerkson's party won a supermajority. However, managing the consequences is far trickier than they have told the public. Even the way Doerkson describes his expectations of DRIPA is curious. The act was never meant to solve anything on its own. DRIPA is the framework that has always depended on the Crown doing challenging work. It creates administrative tools such as Section 7 agreements, an action plan and aligning laws. If Doerkson thinks that little got solved, it is a failure of implementation, not of DRIPA. Paradoxically, repealing DRIPA would create more of the uncertainty Doerkson says he is ending. Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution, Aboriginal title case law and the federal United Nations Declaration...

In a 'pretty rare' move, Canada is adding over a dozen new aquatic creatures to the Species at Risk Act. By Michelle Gamage. Fifteen new aquatic species are set to be added to Canada's Species at Risk Act, including several in Western Canada. In B.C. these changes include listing the darkblotched rockfish and North Pacific spiny dogfish as species of special concern, both species of Little Quarry Lake threespine stickleback as threatened, and updating the Coastrange sculpin (Cultus Lake population) from threatened to endangered. Dogfish, which are a little over one metre in length, are among about a dozen shark species that live in B.C. waters. The relatively small sharks get their name from the way they travel in groups. The species-at-risk update is also proposing to protect the Atlantic porbeagle shark and the Atlantic basking shark. Basking sharks are gentle giants that can grow up to 12 metres in length. They are filter feeders, similar to the whale shark. The Pacific population has been listed as endangered for the last 26 years. It's "pretty rare" to see aquatic species added to the Species at Risk Act, or SARA, which has been around since 2002, Rebecca Schijns, a marine fishery scientist with Oceana Canada, told The Tyee. "Marine fish are actually one of the most underprotected groups and commercially valuable fish are the least likely to be listed," she said. To be listed under SARA, a population first must be assessed by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. The committee consists of experts from academia, government, non-governmental organizations and the private sector. They meet each year to assign risk categories to plants and animals and provide that data to the federal minister of environment and climate change. The committee has assessed 174 marine fish populations and warned 50 of them are endangered, Schijns said. Despite that, only 13 have been listed under SARA and only three are listed as endangered, including the Pacific basking shark, Atlantic salmon in the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic white shark. By comparison, around half of the terrestrial populations that get assessed by the committee get listed under SARA, she said. Once listed under SARA, a population is protected from being killed, harmed, captured or sold. The legislation is a bit like an "emergency brake" to stop a species from going extinct or being eradicated, Schijns said. The new listings under SARA will complement recent updates made to the Fisheries Act, which added 56 fish stocks, including salmon, snow crab and scallops, to its rebuilding protections earlier this year, Schijns said. The goal of the Fisheries Act is to keep major stocks at sustainable levels and rebuild depleted ones, Schijns added. The act uses a precautionary approach assessment, splitting populations into three zones. In the critical zone, serious harm is occurring to the population. In the cautious zone, fisheries need to reduce their impact. In the healthy zone, the fish population is on track to being sustainable. Layering protections improves coverage and helps the country build towards its 2030 biodiversity goals, which include preventing extinction, supporting sustainability and developing sustainable fisheries, Schijns said. But Canada could still do more to fully implement these two pieces of legislation. More than half of the 200 federally managed fish stocks under the Fisheries Act are not protected by the legislation's rebuilding and sustainability provision, and the government can be slow to implement protections under SARA, Schijns said. The government also needs to do more to prepare for climate change and how it will disrupt both the climate and geopolitical forces, she said. Providing resources today to protect and research populations, and adjust fisheries accordingly, will help create resilient ecosystems and protect food security in the future, she added. The federal government estimates the proposed changes to SARA will...

Corporate consolidation hasn't worked. Could a return to 'mom-and-pop' news outlets be the future? By Amanda Follett Hosgood. April Lindgren could be considered Canada's local news guru. Lindgren spent the first half of her career working as a journalist before moving to Toronto Metropolitan University's school of journalism, where she launched the Local News Research Project nearly 20 years ago. She is currently compiling a national local news directory — the first of its kind in Canada. If anyone knows a thing or two about community news, it's her. So I ask the pressing question: How do you build a successful local news outlet in today's media landscape? The industry has been in precipitous decline for decades. Over the past 20 years, tech companies have been siphoning advertising away from traditional news outlets, leading corporate media owners to consolidate news outlets and reduce editorial staff. Rural and remote areas have been hardest hit, leaving the remaining small-town reporters to do more work with fewer resources and reducing the volume of local news coverage. When it comes to solutions, Lindgren doesn't hesitate: the key to survival is doing good journalism. "I would have a laser-focused commitment to producing journalism that will matter to people in the community," she says. "There's a whole range of coverage that you want to write about so that people see themselves in the news that you're generating and it builds a sense of community." It sounds simple. But the challenges facing Canada's news media are more complicated. Lindgren's research shows that of 640 local news outlets that closed in Canada since 2008, nearly three-quarters were community newspapers publishing fewer than five days a week. Of the closures, nearly 100 were located in B.C. The losses amount to fewer journalists sitting in small-town council meetings, alerting communities to violent offenders or missing persons and covering local events. As a result, reporters are stretched thin and residents are less informed about their communities. Many are turning to social media for news, with the result that misinformation and conspiracies are replacing verified, on-the-ground reporting. In many cases, the effects of declining news capacity may be unknown. "We don't know what we miss," Canadian Association of Journalists president Brent Jolly says. "That's the problem." The Tyee spent several months speaking with media professionals, experts and community members about the decline in local news capacity. We interviewed a junior reporter who bought the historic Alaska Highway News after it closed three years ago; we looked at how a local broadcast journalist covered a wave of violent crime in his community; and we profiled Trent Ernst, the only news reporter within 100 kilometres when the deadly Tumbler Ridge shooting occurred earlier this year. While our reporting focused on northeast B.C., a region that has lost a half-dozen newspapers over the past decade, the challenges of declining local news capacity are ubiquitous across B.C. and Canada. So, how can we save local news? It starts with good journalism. But news outlets need to be supported to do that work. Here's a summary of what we heard in conversations with more than two dozen experts, journalists and community members about what the future might look like for a healthy news ecosystem in smaller communities. Put community news reporters back in the community The challenges in local news date back to last century. Large media chains gobbled up small-town newspapers through the 1980s and '90s and then, as profits began to soften in the early 2000s, began to gradually cut local reporters and replace them with content shared among multiple publications. Then came the internet. By the early 2010s, advertisers were increasingly moving their business online and local news revenues were in free fall. Today, Canadian media companies collectively receive less than four per cent of the country's onl...