On today’s episode of The Chopping Block, we’re talking about what the daylight savings debate says about the state of our democracy, and what a hologram says about the state of Canada’s relationship with India.

For the last month, the Trump administration has been claiming that Canada has been interfering in the American midterm elections. And the US ambassador has said that the president will likely blame Canada for losses in Michigan and Maine.

So if we’re going to be falsely accused, maybe we should just start doing it anyways. Should we be bribing legislators? Or creating an AIPAC for Canada? Maybe we can use the multitude of Canadian Hollywood celebrities to honeypot governors and senators?

On today’s episode of The Chopping Block, we take a look at all of our options. And we dig into the war between the American owners of Stelco and the Canadian government.

We are very excited to announce a new, weekly show from us at The Hatchet.

For a while now, Jordan and I have been thinking about ways that we can bring you news in a more fun and casual format. So going forward, every week, we’ll be putting out episodes of our new chat show, which we’re calling The Chopping Block.

And this is the very first episode.

Now I’m sure some of our more observant listeners might notice that we’ve used that name for a number of other segments before. But going forward, The Chopping Block will only refer to our weekly chat show, which will come out every Thursday.

Just like the rest of The Hatchet, we’ll be focusing on politics, corporate power and policing. And this new show, will be in addition to our regular slate of interviews, columns and documentary episodes.

In this first episode, Jordan and I talk about Olivia Chow’s decisive win in the Toronto mayoral election and her complicated relationship with the city’s cops. And then we dig into the avalanche of scandals that the Montreal police are facing.

So today is the day of the Alberta referendum. And we just wanted to share with you some more of my conversation with Jeremy Appel.

Here we dig into Danielle Smith’s origins as a media personality, and what that can teach us about her as a political figure. And specifically we take a look at some of the columns she wrote early on in her career where she espouses ideas like….how smoking can actually reduce your risk of cancer.

It’s a really interesting lens through which to understand Danielle Smith and I had a lot of fun talking to Jeremy about it. And make sure to check out Jeremy’s new book, Dark Phoenix: The Rise, Fall and Re-emergence of Danielle Smith which is available now.

Monday is the big day. The modern Alberta separatist movement has existed in one form or another since the 1980s. And Monday’s referendum represents the closest they’ve ever come to achieving their goal.

And the person who has gotten them this close to the promised land says she isn’t even a separatist herself.

It’s a very strange position overall. Danielle Smith is the leader of a party whose membership is increasingly dominated by people who want Alberta to leave Canada. She has a prime minister who has been increasingly willing to give her what she wants. Even though it was the election of Mark Carney that directly prompted Danielle Smith to lower the thresholds for referendums, leading us to this moment.

But what is clear is that for all of her contradictions, Smith is the most important political figure in Canada right now, aside from the Prime Minister himself.

So what happens to Smith after Monday? And will Alberta separatism continue to grow even if they lose this vote?

Jeremy Appel is the founder of The Orchard, and has just published a new book on Alberta’s premier called Dark Phoenix: The Rise, Fall and Reemergence of Danielle Smith.

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Remember 2014?

Pauline Marois, the Parti Québécois Premier of Quebec, had just called an election, trying to turn her minority into a majority. She was running on the so-called Charter of Values and hoping to channel the culture war forces towards a third referendum. She had just recruited Pierre Karl Péladeau, one of the province’s most powerful businessmen, as a star candidate, and it really looked like Quebec sovereignty was about to dominate Canadian politics once again.

And then she lost. She lost big — giving up a majority government to the Quebec Liberals.

Things only got worse for the sovereigntists in the following years. In 2018, François Legault’s party, the Coalition Avenir Québec, came to power, vowing to stop focusing so much on the federalist-separatist debate and instead focus on the economy. By 2022, the PQ was down to just three seats.

Today things look very, very different.

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Last week, CAQ, under the leadership of Christine Fréchette, was completely wiped out. And the PQ’s Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, or PSPP, as he’s often referred to in Quebec, will be the province’s next premier

But the death of CAQ and the return of the separatist government are far from the only unlikely stories that have emerged from this election: You have the rise of the Conservative Party of Quebec under former shock jock Eric Duhaime, who captured 19 seats, mostly in the Quebec City region; the survival of the Liberal Party of Quebec, which looked like it might be finished after their leader, Pablo Rodriguez, resigned and replaced by a relative unknown Charles Milliard, and somehow he emerged with 40 seats; and even Quebec Solidaire, the leftist sovereigntist party that mostly competes for seats in the downtowns of Montreal and Quebec City, had a decent night, potentially holding the balance of power in this new minority legislature.

Quebec politics hasn’t looked this unpredictable in years, and so I wanted to talk to friend of The Hatchet, Nora Loreto, all about it.

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There’s something that I’ve noticed lately when it comes to how we talk about whatever is happening in Canada these days.

Every announcement from the government, every hot take from the newspaper columnists and the talking heads on the nightly news comes with a caveat: WE ARE IN A TRADE WAR.

And that means that any investment in Canada right now is viewed as a great investment. Just don’t look too hard at the fine print.

And for the most part, Canadians have been willing to go along on this ride.

That is until last month, when Prime Minister Mark Carney hung up a “For Sale” sign on Canada’s four largest airports to a room filled with the world’s richest investors.

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This time, there has actually been some pushback. And I think that’s because it’s less clear who this is supposed to benefit.

It’s hard not to think that Mark Carney’s Liberal’s have secured bottomless latitude to extract value out of Canada wherever they see fit — as long as it’s in the name of capital “I” investment. And if you’ve got a problem with that, well, you’re probably not on Team Canada. Or maybe you just don’t understand it.

That’s certainly been the party line when it comes to the airport deal — even when we know that in other countries where they’ve tried the exact same thing the results have been crystal clear: prices go up and services get worse.

So when Peter Nowak, Canada’s preeminent competition watcher, called me up last week I knew exactly what was on his mind.

If our governing monopoly says it’s open season for big business in Canada, where exactly does that leave the rest of us?

Peter and I dig into all of that and do a little cross-country check-in on the state of Canadian competition.

NOTE: A version of this conversation also appeared in Do Not Pass Go

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Last month, the Bank of Canada unveiled the design for the new $20 bill. It will be the first banknote that features our current head of state — the King of Canada, Charles III.

And I hate everything about it.

First off, I feel bad for Charles. The designers didn’t exactly pick a flattering portrait of the man, placing considerable emphasis on his big ears. As someone who also lives with comically large ears, I feel slightly offended on his behalf.

And while I’m no lover of the Canadian monarchy, I reluctantly accept that the King of Canada probably belongs on our currency.12

My first major gripe with this new release is the fact that it’s vertical.

There’s something about vertical bills that makes my skin crawl. Perhaps I’m just rebelling against our modern disdain for all things flat and outwardly-expanding, in favour of the slim-and-tall. Thanks to the smartphone, photos and videos have moved away from being predominantly horizontal (beautiful, correct, the way nature intended), and are now overwhelmingly vertical (off-putting, fiendish, maybe even immoral).

Mohammed Bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, tried to resist this modern obsession by proposing a 170-km “horizontal skyscraper” called the Line. But such a beautiful dream could never become a reality in this age dominated by up-and-down. The project looks like it will never materialize.3

And so it is with banknotes.

Historically, the majority of countries have printed bills that (properly) present their images and text from left-to-right4. After all, the wallet has always been a horizontal medium. But over the last two decades, a class of degenerate currency designers have pushed some states to introduce upright bills. Truly debauched countries like Switzerland have fully adopted the practice.

But in typical Canadian fashion, we have refused to take a side. In 2018, we introduced our first vertical bill, the $10, featuring Nova Scotia civil rights activist Viola Desmond. And now, eight years later, this new $20 bill will join this ignominious club.

But despite my partisanship in this War of Dimensions, this is far from my biggest problem with our money. In fact, I don't really care all that much about it. I'm mostly using it as an excuse to write about my true grievance — we put the most boring possible people on our money.

The time has come for us to do a complete overhaul.

Up until the 1960s, the only face that was featured on our banknotes was the reigning queen or the king of Canada.5

But in 1969, Edgar Benson, Pierre Trudeau’s first finance minister, decided to make a change. Canada was increasingly embracing its identity as a nation independent of the British Empire, and Benson felt that our symbols should reflect that.

“I believe that in Canada we don’t pay enough attention to our prime ministers who have done a great deal for our country,” he said at the time. “So we’re going to simply put their portraits on other bills in our country.”

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He chose four Canadian PMs to be featured on our banknotes — John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, Robert Borden and William Lyon Mackenzie King. At the time, placing these men on our money was a bold move, representing a break from the British imperial tradition.

And I respect what he did. What I don’t respect is what happened in the decades after — nothing.6

Instead, we’ve largely kept the same faces on our money ever since.

Now I sincerely want to ask — what percentage of Canadians have a positive view of Prime Minister Robert Bordon? Better yet, what percentage of Canadians have a view, any view, of Robert Borden? Even historians consider him to be a middling prime minister, giving him an average ranking of eighth overall.7

Like it or not, the image of the monarch on our money inspires a feeling in some people, whether positive or negative. I doubt that seeing Borden’s face makes even the most patriotic Canadian feel anything at all.

Even when it comes to a truly significant prime minister like William Lyon Mackenzie King — a man who occupied the post longer than any other — your average Canadian is as likely to think of Japanese internment or the MS. St. Louis or the conscription crisis as they are one of his more positive achievements.8

Some will surely argue that this has more to do with the lacklustre nature of our historical education or because the much-dreaded “wokeness” has infected the Canadian mind.

But I want to be very clear here. I’m not arguing that we should remove Laurier from the $5 bill because of his racist immigration policies or kick Borden off the $100 bill because he campaigned under the slogan “A White Canada.” (Though I am sympathetic to those arguments).

I simply think we’re missing out on an important opportunity. Our banknotes constitute some of most important symbolic real estate available to us as a country. And unlike most of our peers, we have consistently chosen the most boring options imaginable.

Because almost no one else does it this way!

Most major countries do not simply have a handful of lacklustre political leaders on their currency. They choose to honour a panoply of achievement that actually connects the people to the nation.

Let’s take the United Kingdom as a representative example. Since Robert Walpole became the first prime minister in 1721, Britain9 has had 59 different PMs. Many of them have been immense, historically-significant figures: Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee. Walpole himself, as the first and longest-serving prime minister, might merit recognition on money.

But the British pound has only ever featured two PMs — the Duke of Wellington and Churchill.10

Instead, they’ve decided to honour a wider array of extraordinary British people: Jane Austen, J.M.W Turner, Alan Turing and yes, Winston Churchill and King Charles. So we have a writer, a painter, a mathematician, the greatest drinker in modern British history and the King.

To my mind, that is a collection of people that speak to what it means to be a modern day Brit.

Other countries have done much the same.

Before the adoption of the Euro, France honoured Claude Debussy, Marie and Pierre Curie, Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Eiffel, Paul Cézanne, and many others on the Franc.

Italy chose Raphael and Caravaggio, the master painters; Marconi, the inventor of the radio; Volta, the inventor of the battery; and the opera composer Bellini.

Even Germany, which has the most fraught relationship with nationalism of any country around, chose figures that said something about who they are. The Deutsche Mark featured individuals like the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (representing a long, proud tradition of scientific and philosophical inquiry) and the Brothers Grimm (representing a similarly proud tradition of terrifying little children).

Australia and New Zealand, which are our closest analogues, similarly use their cash to feature architects and singers and engineers and authors, alongside the occasional politician.

Who do you think feels more pride?

The average Kiwi who sees Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, and Edmund Hilary, one of the two first climbers to summit Mount Everest, on their money? Or the Canadian, forced to stare at Laurier and King’s faces for half-a-century?

And because they can draw upon a much wider pool, Australia and New Zealand have been able to showcase important Indigenous figures from their history11.

Which brings me to the one exception to the totalizing rule of Prime Ministers on Canadian money — civil rights activist Viola Desmond, who was brought onto the $10 bill in 2018, controversially replacing John A. Macdonald. Desmond is exactly the kind of person I think we should be featuring on our money. She’s a significant figure in Canadian history, who fought against racial discrimination outside of electoral politics.

But because she’s the exception to the rule, the one person who breaks from our musty monetary traditionalism, her presence on our money feels less like a celebration of an exceptional Canadian and more like tokenism. It’s historical pandering — throwing a bone to the oppressed peoples of this country, so that we’ll finally quit our whining. In some ways, it’s the worst of all the possible options. The Canadian government is demonstrating that the Big Four of Macdonald, Laurier, King and Borden are not sacrosanct, but they don’t have the courage to fully embrace a broader and deeper vision of Canadian history.

The Bank of Canada has announced that the next five-dollar bill will feature Terry Fox, as close to a unifying figure as we have in Anglo-Canada. And that’s an excellent choice12. Canada should take that opportunity to finally change over entirely, let the prime ministers rest, and give some other Canadians a chance at monetary glory.

So who to choose? Well, first off, by breaking away from the way that we’ve always done things, we don’t have to choose just one set of people for all time. Different figures can be chosen in different decades, making it easier to dig deep into our proud history of art, culture, science, activism, military service and yes, even politics. Each time we make a shift, it will be an invitation for Canadians to explore our past and debate its significance amongst ourselves.

Now I certainly have my preferences, which lean towards the artists. Give me Emily Carr for her iconic paintings and Oscar Peterson, who by my estimation is the greatest musician this country has ever produced. If they were on the $50 and $100 bills, maybe more Canadians would seek out Carr’s Church in Yuquot Village or Peterson’s marvellous Hymn to Freedom. How about Robert Service, the Bard of the Yukon? What Canadian English-speaking child hasn’t been moved and beguiled by The Cremation of Sam McGee?

Labour heroes like Daniel John O’Donoghue, whose organizing contributed to the legalization of unions in Canada, and Helen Armstrong, who helped lead the Winnipeg General Strike, would make for good candidates. So would Indigenous leaders like Thayendanegea (also known as Joseph Brant), Gabriel Dumont and Francis Pegahmagabow.

For scientists and inventors, we have a bevy of riches. Frederick Banting and Charles Best for their work discovering insulin, and thereby saving millions upon millions of lives. Alexander Graham Bell for his invention of the telephone. Sanford Fleming, the chief engineer of the CPR, which bound Canada together.13

And here, I want to make an important point — being featured on our money isn’t the same as being canonized. These shouldn’t have to be saintly figures completely above controversy. After all, Bell had a genocidal attitude towards Deaf people. Banting was an anti-Semite. Fleming’s engineering marvels contributed to the deaths of Chinese workers and Indigenous peoples on the plains.

But we can honour them for what they did right, and what it says about what we want Canada to be, while still being honest about the who these people were and the negative sides of their legacies.

Don’t like my suggestions? Well, I have even more! For the people who continue to insist that we must worship at the altar of politics, they could push for a Fathers of Confederation series. Macdonald could make a return, joined by men like George-Étienne Cartier, George Brown, Louis Riel, Amor De Cosmos and George Coles. Hell, why not throw Joey Smallwood, the man who brought Newfoundland and Labrador into Canada, in for good measure?

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For another politico-centric series, you could shift the focus to the provinces, and feature portraits of some of the most influential and important premiers — men like Saskatchewan’s Tommy Douglas, Quebec’s Jean Lesage, Ontario’s Oliver Mowat, Manitoba’s John Norquay, BC’s WAC Bennett and Alberta’s Peter Lougheed (or William Aberhart for the sickos).

And again, I want to emphasize that I don’t like many of, if not most, of these people. As a born-and-bred British Columbian, I've never been able to shake the feeling that Wacky Bennett is one of history's greatest monsters. But how many people east of the Rockies have even heard of Bennett before? That, I think, is the point. Our money is one of the few places where we could all be invited to have a true national conversation about our history and what it means.

And it’s for this reason that I think we also have to avoid the very Canadian impulse of eliding the conversation entirely and only feature landscapes and buildings, as some countries like Russia and Brazil do. No, we must be forced to choose real historical people, and thereby have the real conversations and debates that will invariably arise from the choosing.

The options are endless. The long-list that I put together for myself has almost 50 people. I’m sure you have your choices that you would want to see. And I frankly find it hard to believe that when presented with such a beautiful and open world of choices, most Canadians would fight to retain Robert Borden on our cash.

We’ll claw and scratch at each other over who should be selected and who’s left out. But after all, that’s what serious countries do. And if that’s what we want to be, this would be a start.

There’s a specific kind of person I really hate running into at parties, especially networking events or professional gatherings. They might walk up to you and start to chat, asking you the kinds of polite questions that people do at these sorts of things. “How have you been? How’s work going? Is your boss still acting like a jackass?”

And while the words coming out of their mouth make it sound like they’re interested in talking to you, their eyes are telling a different story. They keep looking just over your shoulder, waiting to see someone a little more important than you. And the worst part is that they’re so damn obvious about it. Everything about them suggests that you simply don’t matter enough to be taking up any of their time.

That’s the feeling I’ve been having this week as I watch Mark Carney’s much ballyhooed “investment summit” unfold. And it’s because so much of what’s being said isn’t about Canada or Canadians, not really. Instead, Carney is looking over our shoulders, and trying to wave past us, so he can talk to the big money investors who he thinks are the ones that really matter. And worse, he’s doing whatever he can to make them happy, even at our expense.

The foremost example of this is the recent announcement that the federal government intends to open up our major airports to private, for-profit investment.

Allowing big, private money to buy up chunks of our airports has been a long-held neo-liberal dream in Canada. Kim Campbell proposed it during her short-lived government, as did Justin Trudeau in 2017.

They were both hoping to follow in the example of Margaret Thatcher’s UK, which became the first western nation to fully privatize their existing major airports back in 1987. Since then, many European countries, as well as Australia and New Zealand, have followed suit, with massive pension funds often purchasing the airports outright or buying up long-term concessions to run them. And that includes Canadian pension funds, like Ontario Teachers, which up until recently, held major stakes in Birmingham, Bristol and London City airports.

But the idea has never really caught on in Canada, for one very good reason — Canadians hate it. A recent Nanos poll found that over 50% of Canadians oppose the plan and with only a little over 30% in favour. And that’s because Canadians clearly have an intuitive understanding that airports aren’t the kind of asset that it makes sense for governments to completely sell-off. They are, after all, natural monopolies, giving them enormous power to charge what they want.

So why does Carney want to do this? Because it’s not about what’s best for Canadians. Instead, this is a proposal that works for the benefit of major asset managers and pension funds. Last year, the Maple Eight (a colloquial term for Canada’s eight largest pension fund managers), were begging the government to privatize publicly owned assets so that they could have a piece of them. These giant pools of money are on a desperate search for increased returns, wherever they can be found. And vital infrastructure is a great place for them to do it. Because they know that they can gouge consumers with no consequences.

Everyone knows that’s how these kinds of deals work. So it’s especially galling that the government still frames this proposal as a way to lower costs for consumers. Nothing could be further from the truth.

After all, these institutional investors aren’t charitable enterprises. If these funds spend billions to buy up our airports, they’re going to want billions back. And there’s two simple ways for them to do so — raise prices or cut services.

And in a country like Canada, airports don’t really even have to compete with other forms of travel. Sure, if you’re visiting Toronto from Montreal, you have the option to take the train. Or if you’re truly brave, the bus. But that’s not realistic if you need to go to Vancouver instead. And if you’re travelling to Yellowknife, it’s impossible.

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IFM Investors, a major Australian pension fund, is one of the funds most desperate to buy up some of these airports. Australia privatized their major international airports back in the 1990s, under Prime Minister John Howard’s Thatcherite government.

And so how has the Australian experiment played out?

Back in 2024, Australia’s former competition commissioner, Allan Fels, was tasked by the Australian Council of Trade Union to look into consumer price-gouging across the economy. Airline tickets were one of the many areas that he found everyday Australians were being taken for a ride.

Like Canada, Australia is a very large country served by only a handful of major airlines, and Fels found that the lack of competition led to higher ticket fares. But there was another major problem — airports were also gouging prices.

“Airports, too, as a natural monopoly are enabled to overcharge and their prices are unregulated,” the report stated.

Fels went on to write that “there is also a very strong case for the introduction of price regulation in relation to airports, which hold a very clear monopoly.”

Australia’s four largest airports — Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth — are all privatized. And according to the country’s competition commission, airport fees have been increasing significantly above inflation in all of them. In Perth, revenue-per-passenger increased by 59% in inflation-adjusted terms in the decade before 2022.

In addition, the Sydney, Brisbane and Perth airports were all able to make a profit even during the COVID-19 shutdowns, an indication of their monopoly power and their ability to pass off their costs to everyday customers.

The man who actually privatized the airports, former Howard government transportation minister John Sharp, has said that he regrets not placing more aggressive price controls on these airports.

Initially, Australia imposed price-controls that expired after five years of the sale, which Sharp has said was not nearly long enough.

“Because what happened was that after five years the government then lifted the regulated pricing for airports, so that airports were free to do whatever they wanted to do,” he told the ABC News.

“And as a result of that we’ve seen the cost of services provided by airports increase dramatically, which means that airfares are higher as a consequence, because the airlines can’t absorb those increased costs.

“They need to pass them on. And they do.”

The Sydney airport found other creative routes to go after consumers. They increased the price of parking and then shut down a free passenger pick-up area, a blatant misuse of their monopoly power. And one that made life just a little bit worse for everyday Australians who needed to travel.

In New Zealand, it was a similar story. Airport privatization has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of increased fee revenue that has gone into the pockets of private consortium.

Here’s the truth — by privatizing our airports, in full or in part, the price of a flight will go up in Canada. The only real uncertainty is how much more consumers will have to pay.

And what for?

This is the question that I haven’t seen answered. No one is making the case for how this will benefit everyday Canadians — not the pension funds nor the prime minister.

Instead, they’re trying to dodge the question. For instance, IFM Investors, that Australian pension fund that is so desperate to buy a piece of our airports, recently released a very suspect survey.

They polled 3,000 Canadians, finding that 79% of people say “additional investment in airports is important or needed.”

Who’s going to say no to “additional investment” in anything? But I bet if I asked Canadians whether they want airports to be partially privatized or if they think airport fees should increase substantially, the results of the survey would be markedly different.

But here’s the most ridiculous part of this whole scheme. Our airports are already privatized. The government doesn’t run YVR or Toronto Pearson or Montreal Trudeau. They are managed by private airport authorities that are run as non-profits. Collectively, they pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the government, and if there’s any leftover revenue, they have to invest it into the airport itself.

So what Carney is actually proposing is turning our airports from non-profits into for-profit enterprises. I don’t see how extracting hundreds of millions of dollars from these airports so that a pension fund can post a slightly higher return is going to benefit air travellers in the long-run.

One interesting note that did come out of the survey is that they found that Canadians were much more willing to trust pension funds than other kinds of owners.

And while I believe that’s true, they frankly shouldn’t be. We would be better served as thinking of these pension funds as massive private equity operators, which is exactly what they are.

Would Canadians be willing to sell off long-term concessions to our airports to private equity? Because that’s exactly what we’re being asked to do.

Pension funds and other institutional investors are often described as “patient capital,” that don’t need to make an immediate return in order to justify their investments. But this comes with a downside — the leases that they demand are in the order of decades. In other words, once they have their claws in something, it’s going to be a very long time before they pull them out.

And once a deal is made, there’s no going back.

Now at the very least, Carney isn’t looking to sell the airports outright, just sell off long-term concessions. But the consequences will be largely the same.

And what I find the most frustrating is the total lack of honesty about everyone’s motivations. They’re acting like Canadians are stupid. That we’re not even worth talking to.

If Carney believes that the federal government’s deficits are so bad that we need to sell off the rights to our own infrastructure, then he needs to tell Canadians that. Because that’s the only reasonable justification I could even imagine for such a harebrained proposal.

But he isn’t doing that. Instead, he’s talking over our shoulders to the men wearing Savile Row suits and Patek Philippe watches, acting like our opinion doesn’t even matter.

The least he can do is look us in the eyes and tell us the truth.

The Toronto police have had a rough few months.

Back in May, while the police service was still reeling from the fallout of the worst corruption scandal in recent history, three off-duty TPS officers were arrested in Barcelona, Spain.

In typical fashion, the Toronto police withheld most of the important details from the public, citing concerns for the ongoing international investigation. A police spokesperson called the allegations “serious” but said little else.

And they refused to reveal the names of the officers.

But soon, the press began piecing together more of what had happened. And a disturbing picture began to emerge.

The three officers had been arrested in connection with an alleged violent, sexual assault.

But there was one detail that seemed to get under everyone’s skin and garner most of the attention.

The fact that when these off-duty police officers were arrested and charged with a serious crime in a foreign country, they allegedly had the temerity to flash their badges.

That detail came to dominate the conversation around this story. And how could it not? It’s an almost cartoonish example of how many police officers feel that they’re above the law — apparently, even foreign laws. How could an action like that mean anything other than — “I am one of you. And we protect our own”?

But as the coverage of this story played out, I couldn’t help but notice that the emphasis on the flashed badges detracted from what should be the more pressing concern here.

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Three sworn officers were arrested and charged with sexual assault, assault and resisting arrest. One of them was alleged to have fled the scene and was found two days later at an airport.

And if history is any guide, the police will do their best to keep this case shrouded in secrecy.

So we wanted to talk to someone who actually went to Spain and spoke to people on the ground about what happened. The details may be disturbing, but it’s important that the public knows about these allegations.

Allan Woods is a veteran Toronto Star reporter based in Paris. Normally, he covers international politics. But when this story broke, he made his way over to Barcelona, and put together the most comprehensive report that we have on this story.

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On September 21, 2025, the Longueuil police shot and killed Nooran Rezayi, an unarmed fifteen-year-old boy. The specific circumstances around his killing were shocking enough. But another aspect that stood out was the fact that the Longueuil police service had been the subject of enormous praise over the past few years for its efforts in community policing.

Below is an excerpt from our interview with Ted Rutland, an associate professor at Concordia University, about why community policing initiatives keep failing and what can actually be done to reduce to police violence.

This is part of our ongoing look at the killing of Nooran Rezayi. If you haven’t already, please take a look at some of our previous work on the subject:

“The Killing of Nooran Rezayi”

“Quebec cops killed a teenage boy. Now they’re targeting his friends.”

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The Hatchet: One of the things that I was really interested to learn from your piece in The Rover was that the Longueuil police have been media darlings over the last few years, and have been held up as an example of everything that a good police force should be doing. Could you tell me just a little bit about how they got this reputation, and whether it was an earned one?

Ted Rutland: It’s certainly not an earned one. The escalation of the Longueuil police to the status of media darling began when a person named Fady Dagher became the police chief. And Fady Dagher is an ethnically Lebanese person who grew up in Africa, and was a police officer in a very racialized neighbourhood in Montreal called Saint-Michel for many years. He became the head of the neighbourhood police precinct, and was already establishing a brand as the person who wanted to humanize the police, who wanted to create a different kind of police force.

And when he was hired as the chief of the Longueuil police, he was given free reign to change the practice of the police, and certainly the image of the police. One of the things that he did is create a program called RÉSO, which essentially put police officers in the community without uniform, without a weapon for six weeks to get to know community organizations and the communities that the police normally target.

So that meant poorer communities, racialized communities, people suffering from mental illness etc. And I guess the idea is that somehow in those six weeks, the police will learn a kind of empathy and understanding that will lead to them being different kind of police officers when they pick up their uniform and their gun again.

And the media loved this. Radio-Canada created a 10-episode TV series called, in English, The Avant-Garde Police, which was all about this radical experiment in Longueuil of doing policing differently.

And of course, neither the media in those 10 episodes nor just media coverage in general did the obvious thing and question whether this is actually new or not — and it’s not — and two, think about whether this is actually changing anything or not — which it wasn’t.

And so in the article I wrote for The Rover, I try to show that what you had in the last four or five years was two things: you have the expansion of RÉSO and these sort of community policing programs that give the police a wonderful image, but that obviously don’t change anything in terms of how the police actually operate. And second, this new anti-gun squad, which was a mechanism to harass, shake down, and arrest racialized youth and young adults.

And to me, that’s not uncommon at all. There’s a famous book published in 1978 called The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove by Tony Platt, and it looks at the way that the police in the 1970s were changing in two ways. One was towards increasing repression and violence, a more militarized form of policing — SWAT teams, advanced weaponry, new kinds of technologies, intelligence, surveillance etc. And the second was the velvet glove of community policing.

I don’t really think I said much in The Rover article that wasn’t said in 1978. Since the late ‘70s, we continually have these two kinds of advances of increased violence and repression and increased public image management and community relations that translates into positive media coverage. But it also does win over some members of the community.

And so we don’t live in a police state — as much as I find it fun to say that at protests sometimes. We have a police force that does require some level of community consent. And so one of the things that community policing does is it wins over some members of the community through these promises of engagement, reform, and change.

And so they end up providing some kind of legitimacy and support as the police are expanding violence in their neighbourhoods.

Why is it that we then keep returning to this idea of community policing? Because, as you said, since the ‘70s, you could look at any city in North America, and I feel like every 10 years you’re going to have a new initiative that claims we’re doing things entirely differently and we’re focusing on “community policing.” And it seems that police leadership often get a lot of runway if they use those words.

Why is it that we keep repeating this over and over and over if it doesn’t actually work?

I think about this question all the time. And my answers are provisional. It’s easy enough to understand why the police keep offering this, because when they’re advancing these supposedly new community policing initiatives, it’s in moments where they’re being protested, they’re being confronted.

It’s when people are contesting their violence, their power, their unaccountability, and sometimes, their budgets. And so what they have that they can offer that will quell some of that resistance and maintain their existing power and resources is community policing. So that part doesn’t seem like any kind of mystery to me.

Why the rest of us buy into this is much more complex. One of the things I would say is that the media are not especially interested in the history of the police. They’re not especially interested in thinking structurally about the police. Politicians aren’t either.

If we look at Montreal, we’ve had a series of liberal and sometimes even progressive governments since the 1980s that would probably like the police to be less violent. But they also need the police to ensure a particular kind of order to enable real estate investment, to convince people who would otherwise live in the suburbs to gentrify the city, to create a feeling of safety for tourists, to have people out in the evening spending money etc.

So I think that police violence is central to the kinds of politics that we have. It serves a certain purpose. It enables profit-making. It enables governments to hold power and raise revenues. And so I think to, to a large extent, the people who hold the power to change things don’t really want to change things. And community policing offers them a way of saying “we’re changing things, we’re taking things seriously.”

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If you were an openly gay man in Toronto in 1980, chances are that you would’ve thought that life was getting better.

After all, the last decade had seen so…

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This year, Nooran Rezayi should have been doing what most sixteen-year-olds across the country do — learning how to drive.

He grew up on the South Shore of Montreal, and getting around in a car is a necessity for any teenager in the suburbs. Right now, he should be celebrating the end of the school year and making plans for the rest of the summer. His parents should be hassling him to stop spending so much time with his friends, insisting that he needs to start thinking about the future. And he should be brushing them off, like most teenagers do.

But he won’t.

He can’t.

Because Nooran Rezayi never got a chance to be a sixteen-year-old boy. Last September, he was gunned down in the middle of the day by a member of the Longueuil police. He bled to death on the same streets that he should be practising his turns on. And his parents will never be able to lecture him about his future, because he has none.

On September 21st of last year, someone called 911 stating that more than a dozen individuals were roaming around a street in Longueuil, all wearing black, and armed. Security footage shows us that when police arrived on the scene, there were only six youths, and they were sitting on a curb. When they saw the cop car, the teenagers ran. And within ten seconds, one of the police officers shot Nooran Rezayi twice.

While we know very few details of the official investigation, we do know that Nooran did not have a gun.

The killing of Nooran Rezayi should have sparked outrage in Canada. It’s exactly the kind of event that Canadians watch happen in the US, right before we smugly proclaim that we’re thankful we live in a civilized country.

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There are many reasons why the story has played out under the radar. For one, Quebec itself has been in a law-and-order mood over the last few years, with politicians, the press and the public engaging in a moral panic about crime — especially crime that’s perceived to originate amongst young, non-white people.

And outside of Quebec, the national press doesn’t perceive this to be an important story because it took place in a largely francophone, suburban community. If Nooran had been killed in the streets of Toronto or Edmonton or even Montreal, I am certain that his name would be widely known across Canada.

But despite the lack of outrage and the lack of interest, Quebec’s policing establishment appears set on muddying the moral waters even further.

Last week, the Montreal police announced a raft of charges related to Nooran’s death. But they weren’t against the police officer who killed him or the colleagues that helped that cop conduct an illegal investigation in the hours after the shooting.

The charges were made against Nooran’s teenage friends, some of whom witnessed their friends’ death first hand. Eleven underage youths were charged with numerous offences, including conspiracy to commit assault, conspiracy to kidnap, wearing a disguise for criminal purposes, possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose, unlawful assembly and not complying with court orders.

These are incredibly serious charges and the sheer number of them is staggering. And while the SPVM refused to state how many of these young people were on the scene when Nooran was shot and killed, they have confirmed that at least some of them were.

So what could possibly have led up to this? And why are these young people being charged when we still haven’t heard a word about whether or not Nooran’s killer will also be facing the justice system?

When a police officer injures or kills someone in Quebec, the Bureau des Enquêtes Indépendantes (BEI) is supposed to immediately step in and take over the investigation. The BEI is supposed to be an arms-length agency that can investigate police officers in a fair and unbiased manner. There are numerous problems with that description of the agency — namely, that the BEI has never once charged a Quebec police officer for killing anyone.

But let’s put that aside for a moment.

After the police shoot someone, they are obligated to immediately call the BEI, who will then begin an investigation. In Nooran’s case, that didn’t happen — the Longueuil police officers waited hours before they contacted the BEI and began to independently interview witnesses and canvass for surveillance footage, tainting the BEI’s investigation.

This wasn’t the first time that the Longueuil police was caught skirting the BEI. Le Devoir recently revealed that Longueuil police officers waited 10 days before reporting an incident in which a civilian was severely injured and eventually died. In fact, 9 per cent of all BEI cases involved a police agency failing to report an incident to the BEI right away. For the Longueuil police service, that number is 20 per cent. And despite the fact that officers who don’t report cases to the BEI are supposed to be fined for breaking the rules, the agency has never once issued a fine to a single officer.

Two days after Nooran was killed, the BEI tasked the SPVM to look into the circumstances that led to Nooran and his friends being on the street that day. The reason for this is because the BEI is only supposed to look into police officers themselves. Any other alleged crimes that they come across are passed off to a different police agency to look into.

And on its face, that seems like a reasonable approach. As SPVM chief inspector David Shane argued, if a person is shot by the police in the commission of a bank robbery, it’s the BEI’s job to investigate the shooting, and another police agency’s job to look into the bank robbery itself.

But the circumstances in this case are far from simple.

First off, the SPVM took the most aggressive approach to this as possible to investigate these teenage boys. They assigned their major crimes unit, the same unit that goes after biker gangs and serial killers. In other words, the Montreal police threw their full investigative might against a bunch of teenage boys, many of whom had just witnessed their friend shot to death by a cop.

And in February, they went into action. Around 100 SPVM officers conducted simultaneous raids on the homes of these boys, the majority of whom were still underage at the time and living with their parents. And now come these charges, which are numerous and deadly serious.

Because of the secrecy surrounding police investigations, we don’t have confirmation of what these charges are actually pertaining to or how they might be linked to why these young people were on the street in Longueuil the day Nooran was killed. But through media leaks, we can piece together the most likely scenario.

According to Radio-Canada, the SPVM believe that Nooran and his friends had been feuding with another group of teenage boys since the end of the school year. After Nooran was killed, the police found a baseball bat and some ski masks, indicating that they were likely out there to grab one of the rival boys and rough him up, or at the very least, threaten him with violence. This would help explain almost all of the charges we know about, including the conspiracy to commit kidnapping and assault, the possession of a weapon and wearing a disguise for a criminal purpose.

But did you notice what’s missing from that list of charges? Kidnapping or assault. Or even attempted kidnapping.

In fact, the SPVM has confirmed that no one was hurt and no firearms were involved. The only person injured in this whole saga was Nooran Rezayi. And the only gun found at the scene belonged to the Longueuil police.

So what’s happening to that police officer? Likely, nothing. The BEI has completed its report and has sent it to the prosecutor’s office, who makes the ultimate decision on whether or not to file a charge. But no charges have ever been filed against a Quebec police officer after a police killing as a result of a BEI investigation. And Quebec doesn’t even make the BEI reports public. So in all likelihood, we will never learn the name of the officer who killed Nooran Rezayi and we will never know the justifications provided for them to not be charged.

The SPVM’s Racism Crisis

And this is where I think we need to take a good, hard look at the SPVM and the pat-on-the-back culture of Canadian policing. The entire reason that independent agencies like the BEI in Quebec, the SIU in Ontario or the IIO in British Columbia were set up was that the public no longer trusted police agencies to investigate other police agencies when it came to shootings.

And at least from the outside, it appears that the SPVM is doing its best to ensure that the public outcry over the killing of an unarmed child by their sister agency is as small as possible. Why else would they spend so much time, money and manpower going after a bunch of teenagers who haven’t actually hurt anyone?

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I can promise you that if a teenager calls the police today and tells them that boys from another school have threatened to beat him up, it will not lead to a hundred cops simultaneously raiding homes in five different municipalities.

Even in the immediate aftermath of Nooran’s killing, media commentators were speculating that these youths were up to no good, thereby justifying Nooran’s death.

And the racial element cannot be ignored. Over the past two decades, Quebec has been engaged in an increasingly outrageous moral panic centred on immigrants, Muslims and non-white people. They are portrayed as not only being alien to Quebec society, but as inherently violent, especially the young boys.

Nooran, whose parents are from Afghanistan, and his friends are exactly the kinds of young people that the media and the police have spent years trying to make Quebecers afraid of.

And we now know that the SPVM in particular has been a breeding ground for some of the worst racial animus imaginable. In June, Montreal police chief Fady Dagher announced that sixteen officers from Montréal-Nord were under investigation for coordinated racist actions against Black and Arab Montrealers. At least one of the police officers is expected to face criminal charges.

We don’t have all of the details, but the little we do know is shocking enough — multiple police officers arresting people solely because of their race and then taking “trophies,” like locks of hair, from their victims. Other officers allegedly overheard them routinely make racist remarks and encourage their colleagues to join in on their racist and demeaning behaviour.

While most of the officers were relatively young recruits (with the exception of two sergeants), this is the same unit that killed Freddy Villanueva, an unarmed 18-year-old Honduran immigrant, in 2008.

And despite what some may argue, racism is a deeply-embedded problem within the SPVM. Random police checks, which are often motivated by race, remain an ongoing practice within the force. In the chic Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood, a Black person is 15-times more likely to be arrested than a white person. Even Montreal’s own mayor, Soraya Ferrada, has told reporters that her husband, who is Black, has been randomly stopped five times within the last year, for no reason whatsoever. And in the city at large, Arab Montrealers are even more likely to be randomly stopped by the police than Black residents.

Much of the media scrutiny around the SPVM’s racism scandal has died down over the last few weeks in the aftermath of the tragic killing of SPVM officer Mohamed Lamine Benredouane by an incel shooter last month. In fact, a public forum about the scandal has been postponed multiple weeks because it overlapped with the civic funeral for Benredouane. Why these two events were scheduled for the same day is a question that only the SPVM can answer.

A Cover-Up

All of this begs the question — can the SPVM be trusted to honestly conduct the investigation into Nooran’s friends?

I, for one, am extremely skeptical.

As an institution, it is in the SPVM’s interest to sweep the story of Nooran Rezayi under the proverbial rug. For one, Fady Dagher, the chief of the Montreal police, led the Longueuil police service from 2017 to 2022. And because they are in neighbouring jurisdictions, the two police forces often work on joint operations together.

But even if these two police forces weren’t joined at the hip, there is a simple reason to doubt the SPVM’s impartiality — cops look out for one another.

Especially when it comes to the use of force, the thin blue line culture remains at the heart of how police operate. You would be hard-pressed to find any police officer in this country go on the record and publicly state that a colleague was wrong to use their firearm against a civilian.

Now some will argue that the charges filed against Nooran’s friends had to go through prosecutors first. But recent events have shown us that Crown attorneys are not immune from seeing themselves as part of law enforcement. In Ontario, two cases were thrown out last month after Crown prosecutor Marnie Goldenberg was seen swearing at a Toronto police officer outside of a court room when he refused to state that a man had intentionally driven a vehicle at a fellow officer.

“We protect our own,” she was heard yelling at the officer.

For me, I keep coming back to one question — why was this case such a priority for the Montreal police? Why did they assign the major crimes squad to it? Why were around a hundred officers deployed for simultaneous raids targeting underage kids?

Because remember, none of these youths are alleged to have hurt anyone at all. Even if that was their intention, they are not being charged with assault or kidnapping or any other kind of violent offence. In fact, it seems almost a certainty that if Nooran Rezayi had not been killed by a police officer, none of these youths would have been charged with anything at all.

And also remember this — if the Longueuil police officer who killed Nooran is ever charged, some of these youths would be witnesses at his trial. Will Nooran’s friends feel that they’re under pressure to alter their testimony because of the criminal charges against them? And will these charges be used as leverage in the civil suit filed by Nooran’s family against the Longueuil police?

This summer, instead of learning to drive or applying to colleges, these kids will be spending their time consulting lawyers and going in and of court rooms. The charges filed against them will be used to demonize their communities and to justify their friends death.

We need to call this what it is — a cover-up. The full force of the state is being deployed against a group of teenagers in order to silence them, smear their reputations and cover-up the unjustified and unjustifiable killing of an unarmed child.

Because Quebec’s policing establishment understands what it would mean for the public to see Nooran Rezayi’s death for what it is. They know, deep in their hearts, that if people truly had to reckon with what happened, there would be fury and outrage directed at the cops. They are doing everything in their power to distract from the one inescapable fact surrounding this entire sordid affair.

The fact that there was only one victim of violence on that sunny day last September. His name was Nooran Rezayi. He was fifteen years old. He was unarmed.

And he was killed by the Longueuil police.

There’s an unfortunate tendency to talk about the cops as some kind of a monolith.

And don’t worry, I’m not about to go on some lecture about how not all police officers are bad. I just mean that we often miss that police forces are complex, political institutions with competing centres of power.

There are the police boards that are supposed to govern these forces and maintain civilian rule over the cops; the police chief and upper management that run the force and oversee the day-to-day operations; the rank-and-file cops who actually do the police work; and the union that represents them.

Even in relatively well-run police forces, there’s inevitably going to be tension between these different levels. But it’s not uncommon for those tensions to turn into outright infighting and backstabbing, which can have profound implications everyday people.

That’s one way to think about what’s been happening in Saint John, New Brunswick.

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The city’s police chief Robert Bruce has been in his position since 2021.

And over the last year, tensions that had been building between him and everyday officers have spilled out into the open in dramatic fashion. A police union rep was dragged out of a city council meeting by force. Numerous harassment complaints have been filed against the chief by the officers working directly with him.

And you have a police force where one out of every five officers is on leave, putting a major drain on the city’s resources.

But the chief claims that at the heart of all of this is simply the police union playing dirty, and refusing to go along with the change that is necessary to modernize the Saint John police force and make it more accountable.

So what is actually going on here? And who’s in the right?

Andrew Bates, a reporter from The Telegraph-Journal, joined us in The Hatchet studios in Toronto to help us make sense of this mess.

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This episode contains substantial discussions of, and some descriptions of, sexual violence, and so it may not be appropriate for all listeners.

For the last few years, it’s become almost a cliché to talk about how we’re in the middle of a new era of accountability when it comes to sexual violence.

Whether it’s the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein or the ongoing revelations from the Epstein Files, the rich, famous and powerful appear to be having their crimes exposed and, on occasion, even punished.

Here in Canada it’s been no different. There have been numerous media exposes on the prevalence of sexual violence in arenas as varied as media, sports, business, politics, the service industry and so many others.

But when it comes to actually prosecuting these alleged crimes in the legal system, Canada’s track record has been much more mixed.

The Jian Ghomeshi trial, which kicked off Canada’s #MeToo movement years before The New York Times expose on Harvey Weinstein, ended with an acquittal.

On the other hand, billionaire fashion mogul Peter Nygard is now serving eleven years in prison for sexually assaulting four women in Toronto at the height of his fame and power.

Quebec technology billionaire Robert Miller was arrested and faced two dozens charged, including sexually assaulting minors. But last year he was found unfit to face trial due to advanced Parkinson’s disease.

And last year’s Hockey Canada trial, maybe the most high-profile case of them all, ended without any guilty verdicts.

If there’s one takeaway that I have from all of these trials and the way that they’ve been covered, it’s this — each trial comes to represent the whole in the public’s mind. Each individual case became a litmus test on whether or not #MeToo has gone too far or not far enough.

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And the trial of Frank Stronach has been no different.

Stronach is one of the most recognizable and influential billionaires in Canadian history. The founder of Magna International, an auto parts manufacturer, he has long been considered to be a leading light of Canadian industry. And he never shied away from the spotlight, making himself a near-constant public figure in the worlds of thoroughbred horse-racing and politics, both in Canada and in his birth country of Austria.

But two years ago, he was arrested and eventually charged with eighteen alleged sexual crimes involving thirteen women, from a period that spanned from 1977 to 2024. And when the stories first broke, it was hard not to see just how remarkably similar most of the accounts from the alleged victims were. From the outside, it seemed like these charges would lead to a successful prosecution and significant jail time.

But today, that no longer appears nearly as certain.

Stronach is facing two separate trials, the first of which wrapped up in April.

And that trial has been an unmitigated disaster for the Crown.

During the course of the trial, it was revealed that the police hadn’t even tried to verify whether or not Frank Stronach was in the country for one of the alleged assaults. Prosecutors were upbraided by the judge for allowing an accuser to knowingly lie on the stand. And the Crown was forced to drop charges related to three of the seven accusers, putting into question the entire course of the prosecution.

The judge is expected to deliver her verdict as early as this week.

So what happened here? And is any of this indicative of a broader trend or a larger point?

Stronach’s defence team certainly thinks so. Here’s what defence lawyer Leora Shemesh said in her closing arguments.

“I say with the greatest respect that the pendulum has swung so far the other way that we’ve really lost our ability to balance and respect our constitutional norms. This “Believe all Women” and the “#MeToo” movement and political platforms of not challenging women or testing their complaints really have no place in our criminal justice system.”

So is she right? Is this a case of #MeToo gone too far?

I’m not so sure. Part of me suspects that if this trial is indicative of anything, it’s about broader failures of police and prosecutors to take their jobs as seriously as they should. That it might be part of a pattern of procedural laziness that has doomed so many other high-profile cases in Canada.

Here to talk about it all is Joseph Brean, a reporter for The National Post, who has been covering the trial from inside the court room.

We go in-depth about what actually happened during the trial, whether or not it represents broader failures in the justice system and if criminal trials can ever bring justice for historical sexual assaults.

There’s this idea that often gets bandied about.

That the RCMP, from its very inception, has been a tool of political repression.

People will argue that for most of the force’s 150-year history, the Mounties have been used to clamp down on perceived opponents of the state, whether they’re Indigenous activists, Francophone separatists or leftists of all stripes.

And that theory, well, it’s basically true.

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During World War One and into the 1920s, one of the force’s primary missions was to infiltrate and surveil any group deemed potentially subversive. This typically meant leftists, trade unionists and immigrants from communities deemed untrustworthy, especially Jews, Ukrainians and Finns, even if they’d committed no crimes.

When the Cold War came around, the RCMP surveilled over 800,000 Canadians.

In the 1970s, Mounties were literally planting false flag bombs that they could then pin on Québécois radicals.

And just this year, a CBC News investigation has revealed the ridiculous lengths that the RCMP was willing to go to in order to sabotage Indigenous rights groups in that same decade.

Of course, there are many more examples. But what unites these shameful episodes in the history of the RCMP is that they were led by units within the police force dedicated specifically to targeting political dissidents within Canada.

These units went by different names: the Intelligence Section, the Special Branch, the Directorate of Security and Intelligence, the Security Service.

But all of them were committed to rooting out politically unreliable Canadians — and then, silencing them.

After a royal commission issued a damning report about the RCMP’s dirty tricks in 1981, the federal government decided that the Mounties should get out of the business of intelligence gathering and political policing.

Of course, they never really stopped, especially when it came to Indigenous groups. But over the past few decades, things have been a little bit better. Yes, the RCMP still infiltrated groups of leftist organizers, and continued to surveil Canadians expressing political opinions that the cops deemed to be too radical. But unlike the 1920s or the 1970s, there typically haven’t been entire branches or units within the RCMP explicitly dedicated to political policing.

That is, until now.

It’s called the Critical Response Unit. And it operates under the umbrella of the British Columbia RCMP.

The unit was created in 2017, in order to crack down on the resistance to the Coastal GasLink pipeline in Wetʼsuwetʼen territory in northern British Columbia. At the time it was called the Community-Industry Response Group. It was then deployed to repress protests to old growth logging in Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island.

Today, it has become a permanent fixture within the BC RCMP. And this unit is now being used to surveil political dissent of all stripes, especially pro-Palestinian protesters on university campuses.

And if you think about it for a second, it kind of sounds like a leftist fever dream. A police unit that was founded to protect a gas pipeline and is now spying on pro-Palestinian students?

But that’s exactly what it is.

Emma Bainbridge investigated this new political policing unit — alongside Tia Dafnos and Shiri Pasternak — for The Breach.

And she’s here to talk about what they found.

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If you work in the media long enough, you’ll start to notice the cycles.

Bit by bit, the press will start to take an issue more seriously. They’ll devote more reporters to that specific beat, opinion writers will focus their ire on it, stories on that topic will be more likely to lead off an evening broadcast.

And then, the tide will recede. And not only are you back to where you started, but the media will be talking about how “things have gone too far” and “common sense must prevail.”

There’s no better example of this phenomenon than how we talk about policing. I’m sure all of you can remember it well — in the mid-2010s, the media began to scrutinize police forces all across the country, spurred on by activist movements like Black Lives Matter. And it all peaked in 2020, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

But then came the backlash. Increasingly, crime became the overriding concern and media critiques of the police were no longer in vogue.

This isn’t even the first time we’ve been through this cycle. If you go back through Canadian history, it happens over and over and over again. In the 1970s, Canadians were outraged by police abuses. And in the 80s, law and order was back in fashion. In the 90s, there were uprisings in Toronto and Montreal against the cops. And then came the Summer of the Gun. And so on and so on.

But this doesn’t help anyone. Today, police power and police misconduct appears to be growing. Toronto is amidst the worst policing crisis in its history. And while the details of that were still coming out, three off-duty Toronto police officers were charged with sexual assault in Spain.

In British Columbia, the Vancouver police has been interfering in the city’s politics, while the RCMP spies on protesters and dissidents.

Murder trials in Calgary and Fredericton have fallen apart because of police incompetence. And in Edmonton and St. John, the police chiefs have been accused of serious misconduct.

And then there’s Montreal. Last year, two unarmed people were killed by Montreal-area police forces, including including one of a fifteen-year-old boy.

This is why we’re launching a new, ongoing series from The Hatchet called “A Few Bad Apples.” It will be both a podcast and a newsletter. The purpose is to maintain a consistent eye on what’s happening in the world of Canadian policing, in every corner of the country, and not just follow the media trends.

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This is only made possible by our supporters, so if you haven’t already, please go to hatchetmedia.substack.com and become a supporter today.

And for our first story, we’re going to the South Shore of Montreal, where one of the most horrific stories you can imagine is still unfolding — the killing of Nooran Rezayi, an unarmed child, by the Longueuil police. And the blatant attempt to cover it up.

There’s something about the way we talk about crime that I’ve always found frustrating.

Whether it’s car theft rings or fentanyl trafficking or targeted killings, we end up having intense political debates about peripheral issues — should we be locking more people up or making it harder to get bail or changing the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

But we rarely, if ever, talk about the central issue — money.

Just like legitimate businesses, criminal enterprises are trying to make a profit. But in order to make that happen, they have had to set up sophisticated operations to launder their money and put it to use.

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In the past, that was difficult. Not anymore. Today, there exists a shadow financial system that has made it easier than ever for criminals to launder their money.

It’s cryptocurrency.

And ironically, it’s often the same politicians who run on tough-on-crime agendas — people like Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim or Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre — who are simultaneously embracing crypto, the preferred currency of the modern criminal.

I’m sure none of you are surprised by the fact that criminal love using crypto — but what is surprising is how easy it is to turn that crypto into cash. We’re talking about eye-popping sums; hundreds of thousands of dollars at once, without the Canadian government knowing about it.

It’s a system that feels almost purpose built to facilitate crime on an enormous scale.

So today, we’re talking to Emma McIntosh, an investigative reporter from The Toronto Star, about that paper’s investigations into the brazen world of crypto-money laundering.

The Star, alongside its global investigative partners, went undercover to do some of these transactions themselves. And they did the work that Canada’s investigative agencies often refuse to do — dug through documents, court records and blockchain transactions to actually trace where this money comes from — and where it goes.

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The Chopping Block is an additional newsletter for supporters of The Hatchet.

When Harjit Sajjan was sworn in as Justin Trudeau’s first defence minister, it was to much fanfare.

“Everyone Thinks Canada’s New Defense Minister Is a ‘Badass’” declared a VICE News headline in characteristically bombastic fashion. “Harjit Sajjan: Canada’s ’bad-ass’ defence minister” intoned a similarly-positive Maclean’s profile.

The press made much of Sajjan’s role as a military intelligence officer in Kandahar and, closer to home, as a member of the Vancouver police anti-gang squad.

But in a cabinet full of chronic under-performers, Sajjan was one of the worst. His false self-description as the “architect” of Operation Medusa, the most celebrated battle in Canada’s War in Afghanistan made him a laughing stock when it was exposed. (Though few questioned the fact that Operation Medusa was itself a debacle, but that’s beside the point). His handling of sexual misconduct claims in the military led him to be censored by the House of Commons. Eventually he was shuffled out of the defence portfolio into a series of less high-profile ministries, where he could do less damage.

Though the Liberals were once again ascendant in 2025, Sajjan didn’t seek re-election. Instead, mere weeks after he vacated his seat in the House of Commons, Sajjan joined the private arms industry.

The former defence minister is listed as the co-founder and executive of Juno Industries, a start-up looking to become a Canadian military contractor. Just last week, Juno Industries secured $12 million in funding and is angling to go public on the Toronto Stock Exchange through a reverse-takeover.1

According to press accounts, Juno Industries wants to become the Canadian-version of Anduril Industries, the Silicon Valley military contractor started by Oculur VR founder and Hawaiian shirt enthusiast Palmer Luckey.

And so far, the media coverage around this start-up has been largely laudatory, just like when Sajjan first became a minister.

Whereas I have a lot of questions.

First off, Sajjan was a cabinet minister a year ago. Does no one else think it might be a little inappropriate for a former Liberal cabinet minister to co-found a company seeking to do business almost exclusively with the federal government while his seat in the House of Commons is still warm? In order for Juno Industries to succeed, they will need to get money from ministers who Sajjan sat at the cabinet table with and from bureaucrats who he was only recently overseeing.2

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There is a spectre haunting British Columbia.

If you’ve been paying any attention to BC politics over the last eight months, you know that the province has been whipped up into a panic over Indigenous rights.

The scale and ferocity of this panic is unlike anything I can remember seeing in my lifetime. They insist that the collective prosperity of British Columbians is at risk — your private property, your very homes, are at risk. Those First Nations are coming to take it all.

It all started with the Cowichan decision in August, when a BC court found that a chunk of land in the city of Richmond had been the site of Cowichan village, which was stolen outright by BC government officials. Those bureaucrats then sold that land for their own personal benefit, all the while hiding their involvement in the transactions. It was theft and corruption. Therefore the Cowichan Tribes still had some rights to that land and the government, which had resisted negotiations, had to work out a just solution.

But because of poor communication from the city and the province — and because of bad faith actors looking to exploit the situation — it soon became an article of faith that all private property in BC was at stake.

And then came a December 2025 court case about mining rights that, in essence, said mining companies had to consult First Nations, referencing the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People Act, which the BC legislature passed unanimously in 2019.

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This second court ruling, combined with the first, sent the hysteria machine into overdrive, and put David Eby’s NDP government into a crisis. Eby promised to amend DRIPA, a move that was opposed not only by First Nations in the province, but by members of his own caucus.

He has now backed down, but the BC Conservatives, who are in the midst of a leadership race, are all trying to out-bigot one another, claiming that these court decisions and DRIPA in particular represent an existential threat to the province.

(If you think I’m exaggerating, I urge you to watch their most recent leadership debate in full).

But there is a spectre haunting British Columbia.

It's not First Nations, or the courts or even DRIPA. It’s a man, long-dead, who is in many ways responsible for all of this modern-day panic.

His name was Joseph Trutch.

Trutch was the province’s first Lieutenant-Governor and more than anyone else, he helped create the unique situation that BC finds itself in when it comes to Indigenous land rights.

Because for most of the province’s history, BC has defied British and Canadian legal tradition, and resisted signing treaties with First Nations. And for over a century, provincial government after provincial government closed their eyes, put their fingers in their ears and just pretended that Indigenous title didn’t exist.

And now, that past is coming back to haunt the province.

That is the story that is largely missing from all of the panic about land rights in BC. Because if we do what the pundits and right-wing politicians want us to do — which is ignore First Nations and the legal claims they have to their territory — we will be opening the door to true chaos.

So today, we’re examining that history and how it continues to play out with Adam Olsen; a writer, a member of Tsartlip First Nation on Vancouver Island and the former Green Party MLA for Saanich North and the Islands.

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