The Hatchet

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 actuall...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca 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 ve...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca 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 th...

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...

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 Europe...

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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca 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 much progress. Homosexuality had been partially decriminalized back in the late 1960s. A few years later, Toronto had become the first city in the country to ban hom...

The Montreal police have arrested and charged the friends of an unarmed teenage boy who was shot and killed by the Longueuil police last year. Meanwhile, the police officer who killed Nooran Rezayi is a free man. The whole thing stinks of 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 whitewash the unjust...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca 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 boa...

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. Th...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca There’s this idea out there that often gets bandied about; that the RCMP, from its very inception, has been a tool of political repression. People claim 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, Franc...

This is the first installment of "A Few Bad Apples," a new, ongoing series about police misconduct from The Hatchet. Across Canada, police continue to act with impunity. Toronto is amidst t he 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca There is a spectre haunting British Columbia.  If you’ve been paying any attention to BC politics over the last eight months, the province has been whipped up into a panic over Indigenous rights.  And all of it can be traced back to one man — and no, it’s not Premier David Eby. The man haunting the province is Joseph Tru...

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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca 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 ov...

Nora Loreto comes on The Hatchet to discuss whether Avi Lewis, the NDP's new leader, is set to be the socialist saviour or doomed to be another Dipper dud. 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. Also, an...

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 offenc...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca 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 stor...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca This episode is for paid subscribers. If you would like to hear the whole thing, please support The Hatchet by going to hatchetmedia.substack.com . 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...

Support us at hatchetmedia.substack.com 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 t...

Support us at hatchetmedia.substack.com 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. It begins in t...

This episode was first published on April 12th, 2025. 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 m...

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 abu...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca The much anticipated budget is finally here and it promises to make "Canada Strong." Between the eye-popping promise to enable $1 trillion dollars in investments over the next five years and the $78.3 billion deficit, there’s a lot to take in. And that’s before we get into the really critical stuff… like maybe Canada wil...