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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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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As I’m sure you all know, the media is not doing well. Layoffs and closures have left the industry in a state of absolute disrepair. Even the so-called new media outlets that were supposed to save us — think BuzzFeed and Vice — have largely packed it in.

The podcasting bubble has popped and newsletters have flatlined. In short, there just isn’t some magical business model or format waiting in the wings to save journalism, especially here in Canada.

But some of us just, including us over here at The Hatchet, just can’t help ourselves. We’re going to keep plugging away, hell or high water, because we think that someone has to.

And there are others like us, including Peter Nowak at Do Not Pass Go, an outlet dedicated to exposing the dirty dealings of Canada’s many many monopolies and oligopolies. And despite the difficulties of trying to build new outlets from scratch in this environment, one nice thing is that folks like Peter and ourselves have been helping each other out in trying to build up a new media ecosystem.

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So I was so happy when Peter invited me and Vass Bednar on to his show to celebrate his 1000th subscriber, just to talk a little bit about the state of competition in the country.

Give it a listen. And know that behind the scenes, we’re collaborating on some pretty interesting stories together that we think you’re going to love.

Throughout my journalism career, I’ve developed a fascination with stories about corruption. If you’ve been listening to the work that Jordan and I have done either at COMMONS or here at The Hatchet, you’ve probably picked up on that.

And during that time, I’ve developed some theories about where I think corruption is happening, but isn’t being fully exposed or made right.

My first theory is that I think Anglo-Canadian politics is just as corrupt as Quebec politics. For decades, those of us in the Rest of Canada have patted ourselves on the back while various elected officials in Quebec have been charged with political crimes. But I’m increasingly convinced that the only difference is that police in Quebec are willing to arrest politicians. And the cops in the rest of the country aren’t.

My second theory is that corruption is more likely to happen in smaller jurisdictions, where fewer people are going to be paying attention. Journalists and activists often ignore what’s happening in smaller communities because they don’t have the resources to be monitoring every government body.

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And that, in a very round about way, brings us to the subject of this episode. It’s not surprising that Prince Edward Island gets ignored by most of the press outside of the Maritimes. It’s by far the smallest province, with less than 200,000 residents. And the last time PEI politics were being covered nationally was when PEI senator Mike Duffy was at the centre of a massive expense scandal well over a decade ago.

But that lack of attention is a disservice. One, because like I said, I’m increasingly convinced that all of us Anglo provinces are way more corrupt than people think. And two, because PEI isn’t just a collection of small communities. It’s a full-fledged province, with equal standing in Confederation, and with a government responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in spending.

For a relatively small place, those are some pretty high stakes.

So I was really interested to read about a possible corruption scandal that’s come out in the province, which has already led to the resignation of a cabinet minister and is being investigated by the RCMP. It involves allegations of a golf course development, sensitive wetlands and allegations of bribery. Which sounds like your cookie-cutter corruption scandal.

But there’s a lot of things about this story that are out of the ordinary. First off, this alleged bribe wasn’t paid to the politician, but to a sort of do-gooder group of retired francophone teachers. And secondly, it was the premier himself that exposed his alleged corruption.

So I decided to give a call to Stu Neatby, the political reporter for The Guardian, PEI’s paper of record. Alongside trying to parse through this corruption scandal, Stu also walks us through the state of PEI politics and another strange conflict-of-interest case involving another PEI minister, who just wants to go fishing. It’s the most Prince Edward Island political story you’ll ever hear.

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So I’m sure many of you have noticed that things have been fairly quiet from us at The Hatchet.

And there’s a good reason for that. Let me explain.

For those of you who don’t know our backstory, Jordan and I had worked together for six years making a show called COMMONS on the Canadaland network. We loved what we did and we were incredibly proud of our work. But, inevitably, there a came a point where we both felt that it was time to leave.

And so we didn’t futz about — we both gave our two-weeks notice, and then tried to figure out what came next. We decided that we should try to make something of our own from scratch and to launch a brand new outlet. And thus, The Hatchet was born.

And we knew that if we wanted to have even a chance at success, we had to have something up and running by the time the news of our departures became public, so that our audience knew where to find us.

Which gave us only a handful of weeks to not just scrape together a strategy for what this new outlet should be and handle all of the business-side logistics of it all, but also start putting together the first few episodes so that we could hit the ground running.

And then we launched.

We’ve basically been doing all of this by the seat-of-our-pants since. And I can safely say that this last year and a half has been a demonstration in just how far adrenaline can take you.

But at a certain point, it became clear that we needed to take a little bit of time and think strategically. And so that’s what we’ve been doing the last few weeks. And we’re really excited by what we came up.

The most important news is that this is going to mean a lot more Hatchet for our subscribers — weekly podcasts and newsletters, a number of entirely new shows, big projects, and so much more.

We’ll be rolling all of that out bit-by-bit over the next few weeks and months.

But for today, we’re excited to bring you this conversation between Nora Loreto and myself about the promise and peril of Avi Lewis, the new NDP leader.

We recorded this not long after the NDP convention and we dissect the challenges Avi will face as the party’s standard-bearer, including his relationships with labour, the provincial parties, his own party’s bureaucracy and much more.

It’s a really in-depth discussion and I think both Nora and I try to be as honest as we can in our assessments of the kind of candidate Avi presented himself as and the kind of leader we expect him to be.

The Toronto Police Service is one of the oldest institutions in this country. In fact it’s 33 years older than the country itself.

And in all of those nearly two hundred years of history, you’d be hard-pressed to find a darker time for the force than right now.

That’s because last week, seven current and one former Toronto Police officers were arrested and charged with an absolute litany of offences — drug trafficking, theft, accepting bribes, illegal weapons possession, conspiracy to obstruct justice, fraud, breach of trust, harassment and, worst of all, conspiracy to commit murder.

And while we don’t have many details yet, the little we do know is certainly breathtaking. The investigation began after hitmen attempted to assassinate a corrections officer at his home last year. And many of these officers are alleged to have used the police database to facilitate shootings across the region, seemingly at the behest of an alleged drug trafficker Brian Da Costa.

During the press conference announcing the charges, the media were shown video after video of gunmen firing shots into cars and homes in suburban neighbourhoods.

In addition to murder and intimidation on behalf of a drug trafficker, many of these officers were allegedly dealing themselves, everything from cocaine to adderall to fentanyl, while also working with illegal cannabis stores dotted throughout the city.

And there already appears to be connections to the city’s infamous tow-truck industry, which has itself been responsible for an absurd number of shootings and murders over the last few years.

This is far from the first scandal of a similar variety that has plagued police forces in Ontario. The most obvious parallel is the so-called “Scherzer crew,” a rogue TPS drug squad that was alleged to have embarked on a four-year-long crime spree, robbing drug dealers throughout the city. More recently, cops from a variety of agencies have been charged with corruption in connection with all of that tow-truck crime.

But this latest set of allegation is at a level above anything else this city has ever seen. Conspiracy to commit murder? Of a corrections officer? That speaks to a level of brazenness that’s hard to comprehend.

But here’s the truth of the matter — none of this should be a surprise. This deep-rooted corruption is an inevitable consequence of how the TPS operates. For at least half-a-century, the Toronto Police have been masters of this city, subject to no authority other than their own.

We have allowed this police force to morph into a violent gang. It’s time they were finally brought to heel.

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This case of corruption is only the latest symptom of an obviously sick institution. On the Toronto subreddit, one user named u/whatistheQuestion, compiles a rolling list of news stories about local police misconduct every year. It makes for desultory reading — police shootings, excessive force, robbing civilians, lying on the stand, professional incompetence, sexual assault, drunk driving and every other kind of bad behaviour under the sun.

There are around five thousand sworn officers in the service. And it’s truly hard to imagine a random sampling of five thousand city residents committing as many unethical and illegal actions on a regular basis.

And the irony is that most of those stories recount the kinds of incidents that are in the news one day and gone the next. Ask your average Torontonian, and they’re likely to mention an entirely separate set of major scandals — the G20 mass arrests; the killings of people in mental health crisis, like Sammy Yatim and Andrew Loku; the specious murder prosecution of Umar Zameer; the longtime use of carding against Black boys and men; sexual harassment of female officers within the department; the negligence of allowing a serial killer to run rampant in the city’s queer community; and much more.

At first glance, all of these controversies might seem to have little do with one another. But what unites all of these, as well as the most recent corruption scandal, is that they all share the same root cause — impunity. The cops simply aren’t accountable to anyone outside of themselves. Like other municipal police forces across the country, the TPS isn’t merely a public service provided by the city to its residents. It has morphed into a power centre of its own, the most influential and untouchable political entity in the city. This allows the police to ensure that the systems that are set up to hold them to account are defanged, allowing both individual officers and the force as a whole to do as they wish.

None of this is new. For five decades, the Toronto Police have fought against civilian control over the agency, one of the most hallowed principles of Canadian policing. And whenever anyone or anything tries to put a limit on their unbridled powers — whether it be a mayor, city council, the police board or everyday citizens — the cops have been willing to use whatever means necessary to get their way.

The Toronto Police have been at war with this city’s residents and its representatives. And it’s a war that they continue to win.

Fifty years ago, the Toronto Police were facing a similar crisis. In 1976, a royal commission report detailed the brutal and illegal methods employed by many officers. The arbitrary arrests. Random beatings. Routine lying. But what was especially distributing was the normalized use of sexual torture on suspects who would be stripped and abused with implements like the so-called “claw.”

Much of the public was incensed and reform was clearly in order. But the situation just got worse from there. In the late 1970s, the Toronto Police went on a killing spree. In the span of 13 months, they had shot eight men dead. That included Albert Johnson, a 35-year-old Jamaican-Canadian who had been complaining of police harassment for months before he was gunned down in his home. Two officers chased a clearly erratic Johnson into his home and killed him in his room.

Things devolved to a point that Gerald Carter, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Toronto, was openly proclaiming that “it was dangerous” for everyday people to even complain about police misconduct.

And then, in 1978, John Sewell, the leader of city council’s progressive wing, was elected mayor. And Sewell, to his great credit and his political detriment, did his best to take on the power of the Toronto police.

It’s not like Sewell was some kind of a radical on policing — he was an advocate of reform. He wanted the cops to stop harassing Toronto’s gay community and for city council to have an actual say in how the police budget was spent. For these sins, the Toronto Police took to routinely calling him gay slurs and tried to destroy his reputation in the press. The provincial government overruled him at every turn and Sewell was defeated in his re-election bid.

But it’s what happened next that’s really important to understand. Two months after Sewell was out of office, the Toronto Police initiated Operation Soap, a mass arrest of more than 300 gay men in various clubs and bathhouses throughout the city. The Bathhouse Raids were the largest mass arrest in Canadian history to the point, with the exception of the October Crisis.

Even at the time, this enormous violation of civil rights was correctly understood as a rebuke to Sewell — the cops were spitting in the face of a mayor who had dared stand up to the Toronto Police. And they were sending a message to anyone else who might try to do the same.

And ever since then, the Toronto Police have reigned supreme. Far more than our elected mayors or city councillors, it is the cops who have had final say in this city. And whenever anyone dared challenge them, they’ve gotten the Sewell treatment

In 1988, a man named Lester Donaldson was shot and killed by a Toronto Police officer in his home. It was an eerie repeat of Albert Johnson killing a decade earlier. And in response, a number of Black Torontonians created the Black Action Defence Committee, an activist organization aimed at holding the police to account. They were led by a man named Dudley Laws, a longtime police critic and one of the most compelling activists in the city’s history. And they were effective. They argued that it was a conflict-of-interest for the police to investigate its own officers when they killed someone on the job. And because of their advocacy, the province created a civilian review commission, the Special Investigations Unit, to take that power away from the police.

Once again, the Toronto Police could not abide by that kind of disrespect.

And so, as with police critics both before and after him, they sought to destroy Dudley Laws’s reputation. The cops targeted him as if he were a mafia boss, enlisting two other police forces and using 75 individual officers, all in an effort to try to find a crime they could pin on him. And they were successful. Laws, who worked as an immigration consultant, was charged with helping four people illegally cross the border. And while the charges were eventually stayed by the Crown and Laws was never convicted, the Toronto Police had accomplished their goal — they had defamed their most prominent critic and made him a criminal in the eyes of much of the public.

They were still left with the SIU, this new civilian agency. But that also proved to not be much of a problem. According to various reports written by the province’s ombudsman, SIU investigations almost never result in criminal charges. While the ombudsman’s office demonstrated that the agency itself often has a pro-police bias, they also showed that almost every part of the law enforcement apparatus — whether it be individual officers, the police services, the police unions and even the Ministry of the Attorney-General, actively work to cripple SIU.

An agency built to hold the police to account became an exoneration machine.

Another crucial way that the police are supposed to be held in check in this province is through direct civilian oversight. The police chiefs are hired and governed by the police services board, whose members are appointed jointly by the provincial and municipal governments. This is who the police chiefs are supposed to be directly accountable to. But as we’ve seen, the Toronto Police do not like accountability.

In 1991, Susan Eng, a prominent Toronto lawyer and police critic, was appointed chair the Toronto Police Service Board. She soon began to publicly clash with the chief. And so the cops did what they’d always done — they used their extraordinary powers to target their boss

The police put together a secret dossier on Eng, full of unfounded rumours that she was connected to East Asian gangsters. And they began to surveil her, having detectives follow her around and wiretapping conversations she would have with her friends.

The man who led the investigations into both Dudley Laws and Susan Eng, an up-and-coming detective named Julian Fantino, would go on to be appointed chief of the Toronto Police Service in 2000.

In the years that followed, other members of the Toronto Police board, invariably politicians who were critical of the cops in some way, also came under attack.

In 2000, the cops succeeded in pressuring then-city councillor Olivia Chow into resigning from the police board after she made remarks criticizing the police response to a protest in front of Queen’s Park that turned violent.

In 2003, Alan Heisey, another man who was viewed as a police critic, was appointed to be chair of the Toronto Police Service Board. And within a week, the Toronto Police had leaked a memo claiming that Heisey had told a sex crimes investigator that he understood how someone could be attracted to an eight-year-old. It was a blatant attempt to smear their new boss as a pedophile.

When city councillor John Filion was appointed to the police board in 2004, details of his divorce were leaked to the Toronto Sun. While it has never been proven this was done by the Toronto police, Filion made it clear who he thought was behind the story. He also alleged that neighbours had complained to him that someone was surveilling his home.

All of this created a situation where Toronto police board members became fearful of criticizing, let alone enforcing any kind of accountability from, the Toronto police. In the words of one former vice-chair of the board, they had become “the tail wagging the dog.”

And to see just how cowed the police board eventually became, you only have to look at what happened in 2007, when news of that secret investigation into Susan Eng finally became public. Instead of demanding an explanation of how such inappropriate and illegal surveillance could have taken place, the police board ordered an investigation into how the story had become public.

While there hasn’t been evidence of this kind of surveillance in recent years, the Toronto police board has not been able to reassert true civilian oversight over the cops. Under Bill Blair, who was seen as a leader of a new generation of progressive cops, the Toronto police continued to do what they willed. The mass arrests and absurd levels of police brutality during the G20 protests in 2010 were only one indication. By the end of his tenure, Blair was fighting the police board tooth-and-nail over carding, refusing to implement new regulations over the blatantly illegal practice. Toronto police board chair Alok Mukherjee all but admitted that Blair was “insubordinate” and was forced to compromise with him.

Blair, like Fantino before him, was rewarded for this disobedience. He was elected to parliament, made a minister, and, just last week, was appointed to the cushiest job in government — high commissioner to the United Kingdom.

Like the Special Investigations Unit, the Toronto Police board has demonstrated time-and-time again that it doesn’t have the will or the ability to hold the cops to account.

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As the power of institutions like the police board have waned, the police union continues to be in the ascendancy. The Toronto Police Association is probably the single most powerful political force in this city, a cozy position its enjoyed for years.

Here’s what former TPA president Craig Bromell told The Toronto Star in 2016.

“We weren’t the most powerful police union, we were the most powerful union in the country. We were it.”

And he was clear-eyed about what the union did.

“The police union’s only job is to protect those who protect others, not the community, not the politicians. Their only function in life is to protect those coppers and their civilian members.”

Whenever politicians proposed any changes in an attempt to reign the police in, the TPA had numerous tools at its disposal to make sure that they got their way.

If an officer was disciplined in a manner the union disagreed with, they’d initiate a wild-cat strike, refusing to do their jobs. If there were tense negotiations over a new contract, the union would threaten that police might be liable to get the “Blue Flu” and all call in sick at once if they didn’t get their way.

Take for example one of the many recent fights over the police budget. By the end of Bill Blair’s tenure as chief, the Toronto police were being asked to find savings in their ever-ballooning budgets. This did not go over well with the Toronto Police Association. The police responded with an unofficial labour action where they refused to enforce traffic laws. This was never officially acknowledged by either the top brass or the police union, but the consequences for everyday Torontonians were very real. The number of collisions in the city skyrocketed by 2018, while the money brought in by tickets declined by over $30 million.

The union has long had the power to make-or-break political careers. They’ll label city councillors and MPPs they didn’t like as “soft-on-crime,” a political death sentence in a city always anxious about public safety. And they too have conducted their own off-the-books surveillance operations into police critics.

All together, the political power of the police union has created a situation where, almost without fail, the police budget increases, even when other municipal services are being squeezed. And despite the fact that it’s city council that provides the actual money that funds the police force, they don’t get a say in what the cops spend that money on. In fact, until 2020, city councillors couldn’t even see what was in the budget itself.

The power of the police union has never been more evident than in the last few years, where they’ve won even larger budgets for themselves — a 60 per cent increase over ten years — at a time when the city has been in a state of fiscal crisis. Just days ago, they received a $94 million increase, even in the wake of the corruption allegations.

The union fights tooth-and-nail to protect the other financial benefits that cops are given, like being first-in-line for lucrative off-duty contracts to guard municipal construction sites, a job that often pays around $100 an hour. And regardless of the severity of the misconduct, the police union will use every tool in its power to ensure no Toronto police officer faces any consequences for what they do on the job.

Together, all of this has created a police force whose first and last loyalty is to itself.

Which brings us back to the incredible allegations announced last week.

As always, whenever there’s a story about police corruption, the top cops went to great lengths to paint this as a case of “a few bad apples.”

“We will not let actions of a few define the reputation of the many,” thundered TPS Chief Myron Demkiw from the podium.

And while details are still minimal, the little we do know paints an extraordinary portrait of a broken institution. First, there’s the breadth of the corruption. The eight officers came from four completely different police divisions (11, 12, 23 and 52), as well as a member of a city-wide task force. In other words, many of these officers did not even work together, unlike the Scherzer crew, which was a more limited story of a drug squad gone bad.

When asked by the press how these disparate officers even knew each other, York Regional Police said that they were connected by a single officer, Constable Timothy Barnhard.

“Our information led us to believe that it was relationships that Constable Barnhard had with other officers….But instead of framing it as individual divisions, I would frame it more as relationships amongst individual police officers, connected specifically to Constable Barnhard at the genesis of this investigation.”

Now one of the most important things to understand about these allegations is that the investigation didn’t begin within the Toronto Police, but the York Regional Police, a neighbouring force. And that might be the most damning fact of all.

Because if we are to believe the police narrative about this case, it means that one constable, with ties to a drug trafficker, was able to recruit seven others into a criminal conspiracy. This leads to one of the three possibilities. Either every single police officer who Constable Barnhard approached agreed to join with him to commit crimes. Or, Barnhard approached other officers, who declined, but those officers refused to speak out about it. Or finally, there were Toronto police who were approached by Barnhard, reported his conduct through the proper channels, and nothing was done to stop him.

Each of those possibilities leaves us with the same conclusion — the Toronto Police is broken.

And there were opportunities to stop Barnhard before. In 2016, he pled guilty of using his police powers to illegally investigate a man who he had gotten in an argument with. He lied, claiming that he’d seen the man run a red light, using that as an excuse to search him and issue him a ticket. When Barnhard finally admitted to the lie, his punishment was giving up a few days of pay.

Of course, this isn’t just a Toronto problem — we’re already seeing three officers suspended in connection with the investigation from the Peel Regional Police.

Now I don’t want to downplay the fact that these charges have indeed come to light. According to the York Regional Police, more than 400 officers from four different law enforcement agencies participated in Project South, the seven-month investigation that led to these arrests. They should be applauded for that.

“The investigating officers represent the very best in what we expect of our police officer; demonstrating integrity, professionalism, ethical investigations, and a commitment to uncovering the truth and holding offenders accountable, including fellow police officers,” YRP deputy chief Hogan said during the press conference.

Hogan is correct. Even without knowing the details, I don’t doubt that Project South involved some of the most impressive police work that this province has seen.

And yet, I’m still left asking myself an uncomfortable question. How many of those 400 officers who were involved in this totem of police accountability have ever witnessed their fellow officers engaging in unethical or criminal activity, and refused to report it?

“We have left no stone unturned,” TPS Chief Demkiw told reporters. But so far, that’s obviously not the case. Other people within the police service knew something about what was going on. Kicking every single one of those officers off of the force will only be the beginning of accountability.

Ontario’s inspector-general for policing, a relatively new police watchdog, has already ordered a province-wide investigation that will focus on issues such as access to police databases, vetting of officers and how officers are supervised. All of that is well and good. But if history is any guide, this new watchdog will do what the old ones did — put the interests of the police ahead of the public.

That’s because the problem with the Toronto Police, and police services across this country, is a political one. They are simply too powerful.

That power consistently allows them to evade external accountability and creates a culture where corruption is tolerated. Whenever controversies like this arise, reforms are initiated, police chiefs are fired, oversight agencies are created. But the fundamental problem never changes.

In fact, we can already see the wheels of this big blue machine beginning to spin. Chief Demkiw claimed that understaffing was partially to blame for this corruption, incredibly turning this story about massive police misconduct into another opportunity to turn on the money spigot. The Toronto Police Association has demanded that they, and every other police union, be given a seat at the table for the inspector-general’s investigation.

And politician after politician has already started to fall into line. Councillor Shelley Carroll, the current chair of the police services board, expressed her “utmost confidence” in Chief Demkiw. Mayor Olivia Chow pushed through that $94 million increase to the police budget with barely a debate. And Premier Doug Ford called this all “ a bump in the road” and deployed that ever-present cliche. That this was merely a few “bad apples.”

We’re long past the point where the Toronto Police need to be brought to heel. If the cops continue to resist reform, then maybe revolution is in order. It’s time to start contemplating radical measures that will severely limit their power — you could start by taking routine discipline out of the hands of uniformed officers; assigning police responsibilities like traffic and parking enforcement to other municipal agencies; and finding ways to break the back of the police union.

But the most radical reform of all may also be the most necessary — civilianizing the police force. It is not a commandment from heaven that all police forces need to be treated like the military, where one rises through the ranks and only uniformed officers can manage one another. Few other institutions in our society operate in this way. This is what creates the “thin blue line” culture where officers do whatever they can to protect each other, even at the cost of the public’s well-being.

Why can’t civilians be brought in to manage cops, especially at a time when things have gone so spectacularly wrong?

Of course, that kind of solution is impossible in the near-term, even if it’s necessary in the long-term. For now, we’re left with what we have — a broken institution that we have no real way of holding to account.

In the aftermath of this corruption investigation, there’s been a lot of talk about trust. Mayor Olivia Chow said that the police have to “earn” back the trust of residents and Premier Doug Ford said that “I don’t want the public to lose trust in our great police.”

But the problem with all of that rhetoric is that the Toronto Police never earned our trust to begin with.

Just over a year ago, when we were launching The Hatchet, there was one thing in particular that worried me — I’ve never felt fluent in federal politics.

I think I knew as much as your average journalist — I followed the news, I had my opinions and I had a general sense of the history. But outside of the occasional story, it just wasn’t a beat that I had a lot of experience covering.

Once Trudeau resigned in January 2025, it became clear that Parliament Hill was going to dominate the news cycle. And so over that winter break, I set myself a mission. I was going to learn as much as I could about federal politics.

I went back and read through (or at least familiarized myself with) as many of the classic books of Canadian political journalism and history as I could. Most were written by authors that we don’t talk about much anymore, despite the fact that they were giants of their respective eras. Christina McCall-Newman, Jeffrey Simpson, Peter C. Newman, Donald Creighton, John Duffy. And then there were excellent books by more contemporary writers about the Ottawa of the past and present from journalists like Susan Delacourt and John Ibbitson.

But none of these writers, great though they may be, made me feel like I was getting a nitty-gritty understanding of federal politics more than Paul Wells.

Now of course, like almost every journalist in the country with even a passing interesting in federal politics, I’ve been reading Wells for years. But during that winter, I really immersed myself in his work, his books, past features, his current reporting, the whole shebang.

And I have to say, I often found myself disagreeing with him. But I emerged with a new appreciation for what he does.

Wells has a keen eye for history and a willingness to call out bullshit. His prose is evocative, without being flashy. And despite his many, many years of experience reporting on politics from Montreal and then from Ottawa, he never felt to me like he’d been co-opted by the Laurentian establishment.

I’m sure this sounds like a lot of unnecessary fawning over someone who is probably the most respected political journalist in Anglo-Canada.

But I just want to convey to you all how excited I was to talk to him — especially right now, at a time when Canadian politics all of a sudden feels more serious than it has in years.

Since the beginning of the New Year, we’ve been inundated not with soundbites, not with scandals, but with speeches.And I don’t think there’s anybody better to dig into these serious times than Wells.

During our conversation, we covered a lot of ground, including the 20th anniversary of Stephen Harper’s election and the ups-and-downs that Carney and Poilievre have recently faced. But I was especially glad that we got to spend a good amount of time talking about the return of national unity as a serious political issue in this country.

So I hope you all enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

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This episode is for paid subscribers. If you would like to hear the whole thing, please support The Hatchet.

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Now this might seem hard to believe, but there was a time when the Green Party of Canada was riding high. If just a few things went their way, they were on track to becoming a mean Green winning machine and supplant the NDP as the progressive party of choice.

And that moment was only six years ago in 2019.

Jagmeet Singh was fighting for his political life in a by-election and trying to get seat in Parliament. Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott had resigned from the Liberal caucus and were negotiating with the Greens to defect.

The party doubled their caucus in a by-election when Paul Manly won what had always been a safe NDP seat in Nanaimo. And then during the federal election, they elected their third MP, Jenica Atwin, this time in New Brunswick.

The Greens were the official opposition in Prince Edward Island and held the balance of power in British Columbia. Climate change was a major political issue from coast to coast to coast. It was a good time to be Green. And it seemed like a good time for Elizabeth May to finally pass the torch of the party she had led for so long.

But alas, it was not to be.

Singh won his by-election. Wilson-Raybould and Philpott passed on the Greens to sit as independents. Manly lost his seat in the 2021 election. John Horgan’s New Democrats won a resounding majority in British Columbia and in PEI, the Greens went back to being the third party.

And that leadership race resulted in a relatively unknown Toronto lawyer named Annamie Paul taking the crown. She went on to hound Jenica Atwin out of the Greens over allegations of antisemitism before self-immolating as party leader, retiring, and returning to political obscurity.

Elizabeth May came back to become party leader. And since then, the party has been a cavalcade of absurdities too long to document here. But for me, the lowest point might have come at the end of last year.

That’s when Elizabeth May, after consulting with Prime Minister Mark Carney, voted in support of his budget. And then not too long after, he went and signed an MOU with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith committing to more pipelines for the oil sands.

For Mark Lerien-Young, none of the rolling disaster that is the Green Party of Canada has come as a surprise. After all, he was watching from the inside as much of it went down.

Mark is a longtime writer, journalist, humorist, science podcaster, environmental activist and former Green Party of Canada employee and campaign manager. And he’s just written a book about what it was like to try to navigate the egos and incompetence of the Greens. The book is called Greener Than Thou: Surviving the Toxic Sludge of Canadian Ecopolitics, and in it, he gives and insider account of the cult of Elizabeth May.

And some of the details make working in that party sound like living in a house of mirrors. Mark says that at a certain point he came to realize that many people in the Green Party didn’t actually want to elect more MPs because that would mean more work for them.

He writes that “Many books you read come with the proviso that all persons are fictional and any resemblance anyone living or dead is purely coincidental. My disclaimer is that the Green Party of Canada is purely fictional.”

In our conversation, Mark was brutally honest about the frankly absurd way that a party that more than a million Canadians voted for in 2019 does business. And why despite their abysmal recent performances, Elizabeth May is here to stay.

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In 1978, a South African accountant orchestrated one of the most audacious and ruthless hostile takeovers in the history of Canadian business.

His name was Jack Cockwell. And over the next decade, he would build a corporate empire unlike anything Canada had ever seen.

This is the third episode in our series examining the history of Brookfield. In our first two episodes, we traced the company’s lineage through Brazilian Traction, the neo-colonial monopoly that dominated South America, and through the Bronfmans, the bootlegging dynasty that supplied liquor to American gangsters during Prohibition.

But those were just the origin stories. This episode is about what happened when those two worlds collided.

Edper-Brascan controlled over 500 companies. The beer you drank, the team you watched, the mall you shopped at, the house you lived in — all of it could be traced back to this sprawling conglomerate. At its height, it was worth more than $120 billion.

All of this was Jack Cockwell’s domain. Immigrant, corporate philosopher, ruthless operator, Cockwell single-handedly imposed his will on Canada’s business establishment and dominated the 1980s like no one else.

But by the end of the decade, people on Bay Street began to whisper.

Something was rotten at the heart of Cockwell’s empire. They said that the whole thing was a mirage. A lie. A house of card waiting to fall over.

They all turned out to be right.

To learn more:

The Brass Ring: Power, Influence and the Brascan Empire by Patricia Best & Ann Shortell

Edper by Keith Dalrymple

“The Edper Puzzle” by Kimberly Noble in The Globe and Mail

“The Second Coming” by Rod McQueen in The Financial Post

“Fears for a Leveraged Leviathan” by Clyde Farnsworth in The New York Times

“He was a titan of Bay Street and a senator. But J. Trevor Eyton died owing millions in taxes and on the verge of bankruptcy” by David Bruser & Jesse McLean in The Toronto Star

This is the second episode in our series about Brookfield, the Canadian financial giant. In our first episode, we told you about one half of the company’s corporate lineage — Brascan, the Canadian monopoly that dominated Brazil for half-a-century.

But Brookfield has another parent — the Bronfman family. And their story is even more remarkable.

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It begins in the dusty prairie towns of Saskatchewan at the turn-of-the-century, where Jewish cowboys and American gangsters came together to create one of the great fortunes in world history.

And behind every great fortune, there is a great crime. And the crimes of the Bronfmans were numerous. But they were able to get away with it all, thanks to bribery, destruction of evidence and the intimidation of witnesses.

For decades, the Bronfmans were able to write their own history of how their wealth was acquired. But the truth can only stay buried for so long.

The Bronfman dynasty is one of the greatest that the Americas have ever seen. But like so many dynasties, they would fall apart into ignominy.

And at the centre of all of this was the most powerful businessman in Canadian history, the kingpin himself — Sam Bronfman.

Featured in this episode: Stephen Maher, Jordan Cornish

To learn more

The Bronfman Dynasty: The Rothschilds of the New World by Peter C. Newman

“The ties that bind the Liberals and the Bronfmans” by Stephen Maher in Maclean’s

The Brass Ring: Power, Influence, and the Brascan Empire by Patricia Best & Ann Shortell

The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Seagram by Nicholas Faith

Mavericks: Canadian Rebels, Renegades and Anti-Heroes by Peter C. Newman

Happy New Year, Hatchet listeners!

The chance to put out good journalism is its own reward, but to everyone who has listened, shared, or supported us over the last year—thank you.

We wanted to kick off the year by updating you on our series on Brookfield. It’s been a long road, but we’ll be publishing the next two new episodes this week, with more to come later in the month.

We can’t wait for you to hear it.

But before you do, we wanted to re-publish the first episode in the series. It’s an important primer for an increasingly complicated story.

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Brookfield has been in the news constantly over recent months. The Conservatives attacked the company for moving the headquarters of one of their subsidiaries to New York City. The NDP have accused it of avoiding taxes through offshore havens. And Prime Minister Mark Carney, the former chairman of Brookfield Asset Management, has found himself on the defensive because of his association with the company.

But what these political attacks miss is a far more important story. It’s a story of a company that has been central to Canada’s history and economy for more than a century.

So what exactly is Brookfield? That’s a question that we here at The Hatchet have set out to answer.

What we found was a company that almost defies description.

Brookfield has been a financial universe unto itself, operating by a different set of cosmic laws and fundamental forces than other corporations.

It’s a company that’s shown an almost unparalleled talent for reinvention. Over its 125-year-history, it’s morphed from a neo-colonial experiment to Canada’s most ruthless corporate raider to a seemingly boring storehouse of our collective pension earnings.

Now it is one of a tiny handful of financial entities that sit at the very centre of the global economy.

And so that’s why we’ll be spending this series focusing exclusively on this incredibly important and yet rarely understood company.

We’ll be digging into its epic history, its contentious present and what the continued domination of firms like Brookfield could mean for everyday people.

In this first episode, we shine a light on it’s first incarnation — Brazilian Traction, Light and Power — and how it managed to dominate the people of South America’s biggest nation for most of the 20th century.

Featured in this episode: Tyler Shipley

To learn more

Canada In The World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination by Tyler Shipley

The Brass Ring: Power, Influence and the Brascan Empire by Patricia Best & Ann Shortell

Let Us Prey: The Practices and Profits of Canadian Corporations and Businessmen edited by Robert Chodos & Ray Murphy

The Light: Brazilian Traction, Light, and Power Company Limited, 1899-1945 by Duncan McDowall

Support us at hatchetmedia.substack.com

The Hatchet is a podcast and newsletter dedicated to exposing power and money in Canada. We deliver important, original and fascinating journalism about how this country actually works.

Music: I dunno by grapes (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: J Lang, Morusque

I’ve had a hard time knowing what to make of the still-unfolding saga around Jeffrey Epstein.

Like basically everyone else in the world, I’ve been following the story with interest for years.

Even before the Miami Herald’s explosive 2018 investigation into the extend of his sexual abuse and how he had been able to get away with it, I had a vague understanding of a man named Jeffrey Epstein who abused girls and hobnobbed with powerful men like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates.

And since then we’ve learned so much more. There have been so many journalistic investigations into Epstein’s connections with the elite, into his finances and into the circumstances around his death.

Of course, we’re still left with more questions than answers. Which has allowed Epstein to become this sort of Ur-conspiracy theory that people online obsess over. Was he a CIA asset or a Mossad agent? Was he collecting blackmail on the rich and powerful? Did he really kill himself?

But somehow, there was a part of me that felt like these were the wrong questions to ask. That they didn’t explain exactly who this guy was and why he was able to get away with what he did for so long. And didn’t really get at the heart of why this story has global importance.

And then just the other week, I read a piece by Canadian journalist Jeet Heer in The Nation that made it all make sense to me.

Heer argues that the Epstein was — alongside many other things — a warlord.

He was basing this assessment on a number of articles that have been coming out of publications like Drop Site News and Reason that examine troves of email correspondence that Epstein had that the mainstream media is so far refusing to report on.

And the case he makes is compelling. So I decided to give Jeet a call and ask him all about it.