Acadian youth literacy scores require action

This provincial election has brought uncertainty, excitement, dread, and dozens of Tyee stories. Over the past month, we’ve done our best to sort through platforms, explain the issues, profile important characters, hold the parties accountable and make sense of what, to many, has been a head-scratching election. The depth of coverage, much of which occurred while we were also writing about the province’s civic elections, was possible only thanks to the financial support of our readers.

You gambled the nation and divided a province for your own shameless aims. Enough. Andrew Nikiforuk 23 Oct 2026The TyeeTyee contributing editor Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning journalist whose books and articles focus on epidemics, the energy industry, nature and more.

Tyler Heppell’s family farm in Surrey, B. C., is the first in Western Canada to harvest potatoes each year. The 200-acre property has sandy soil so tractors can move through wet fields that prevent other farmers from harvesting — supplying nearby grocery stores with local produce through May, June and July. But, despite its role in the local food system, the farm is not protected under B. C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve, or ALR. Heppell, a fifth-generation farmer, and his family rent the property from the federal government.

The fight over the CBC has a settled quality to it: Conservative voters barely trust the public broadcaster, while Liberal voters overwhelmingly do. “Defund the CBC” has become a reliable applause line in Conservative politics. It’s tempting to treat this as a story about one broadcaster—its coverage, its hosts, its corrections. But step back from the CBC and a bigger, more uncomfortable picture comes into focus. The CBC is not the disease. It’s the thermometer. Start with the trust numbers on the CBC itself. Across two decades of survey data, the gap between how much Liberals and Conservatives trust the public broadcaster is large—and, importantly, it is not new. If anything, it was widest around 2015 and has narrowed slightly since. Whatever is driving Conservative distrust of the CBC, it is not some fresh scandal but something more structural.

Eight years into a scandal-filled tenure as Brampton’s mayor, one version of Patrick Brown is a tireless public servant who transformed a dysfunctional city hall. The other is something else entirely. At the start of 2018, everything seemed to be going right for Patrick Brown. Then 39, Brown had risen steadily through Canadian politics: elected to Barrie city council at 22, then to Parliament and, in 2015, to the leadership of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives (PCs). He had won as an outsider, promising a break from a party establishment that had lost four successive elections to the Liberals.