Independent

Welcome back to Our Readers Write, our weekly round-up of the sharpest, most thoughtful comments left on The Hub, chosen with the help of your thumbs-up. Alberta dominated the conversation again this week, and our readers brought family history, constitutional memory, and plain-spoken demands to the question of what a fair deal within Confederation looks like. Elsewhere you pulled out Edmund Burke to referee a debate about conservatism’s future, ran the arithmetic on a new pipeline, took the Nobel committee to task, and argued for a feminism with room for mothers. As always, it is the reasoning, not the volume, that earns a spot here. Thank you for writing. On “Alberta’s $630-billion case for re-federating Canada, not leaving it”

A UNB councillor is raising alarms that drought is leaving portions of the watershed without surface water — threatening fish, ceremony and his family’s connection to the water Brian Holmes, a councillor for the Upper Nicola Band, walks through a dry stretch of the Nicola River on Sept. 18, 2026, a few minutes downstream from his community of spaxmn (Douglas Lake) in the Nicola Valley, in B. C.’s southern interior. Photo by Aaron Hemens

Welcome back. Nothing below is leaked, overheard or guessed at. Every line comes from the government’s own proactive disclosure records, filed by the departments, agencies and Crown corporations that spent the money. We simply read them so you don’t have to—and this week, they read like a travel agent’s dream and a grocery list. Tom Clark, Canada’s Consul General in New York, hosted 72 attendees—66 federal attendees and six guests—on August 4 for what the records call “furthering multilateral interests abroad.” Total: $2,922, or about $41 a head. The vendor line is the charm: Trader Joe’s, Wild Fork Foods, Costco, FreshDirect, Amazon, and four named wait staff. Diplomacy, it turns out, can be done with a membership card and a cart.

Jessica Hutchinson, executive director of conservation group Redd Fish Restoration Society, remembers the long, restless night in December 2025 listening to the thrum of a rainstorm in Tofino, B. C. Lying in her bed, she hoped the culmination of years of planning, weeks of construction and eye-watering helicopter bills would hold. As Hutchinson lay awake, rain poured down from the steep hillsides surrounding Tranquil Creek like it normally did, sending a surge of water into the river below. But now the deluge had an obstruction: a tangled mass of around 50 trees, tufted like a giant bird’s nest and lodged into the riverbed, causing the flow to ricochet and swoop under and above. Pools and eddies had begun to form below the wooden mass of the river’s new intruder, also known as an engineered logjam, reflecting a years-long effort that is relatively uncommon in B. C.

Montreal’s September 2026 calendar has turned into a useful snapshot of what collecting looks like when it moves offline. Card-focused events are landing across the city and its immediate orbit in unusually quick succession, from a September 20 show on Rue Lafond to a three-day sports-card gathering in Laval the following weekend and a large trading-card market at Centre Mont-Royal on September 26. That concentration matters because cards occupy an unusual place in culture. They can be pieces of a game, records of sporting careers, design objects, nostalgic objects and, occasionally, assets worth serious money. Yet saying that “cards have value” can hide an important distinction. A card does not automatically store financial value simply because numbers, characters or famous faces appear on it. In most contexts, cards communicate or reflect a value created somewhere else: a game state, a player’s popularity, scarcity, condition or a community’s current level of interest.

To many, B. C. Premier David Eby’s snap election call seemed like an odd choice. The government still had two years in its mandate. Big questions — like the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act and the budget deficit — were left unanswered. Plus, all the best lawn sign spots had already been claimed by candidates for municipal government. If The Tyee’s Victoria bureau chief is put off, he’s not showing it. Andrew MacLeod said the election call has morphed into something of an early Christmas. “When they called it, I was definitely in the camp of, like, ‘Do we really need to do this now?’” he said. “But there are announcements every day, and there are people arguing about ideas, and you get into the spirit of it. So it is kind of fun.”MacLeod has covered seven previous provincial elections and nearly two decades’ worth of provincial politicking for The Tyee. This election cycle is no different. This week, he gives us the long view on campaign-trail drama and breaks down what this election is really about. Note: Episode transcripts may contain errors. Always check the corresponding audio before quoting any part of the transcript.

This summer, the Tyee began covering what was sure to be a fractured and fascinating civic election in Vancouver. Starting in July, we interviewed every major mayoral candidate, held a mayoral debate event and provided deep dives into key election topics such as crime and public safety, housing and parks and recreation. But you told us that would not be enough. And it made sense.

The news “broke” this past weekend that B. C. Premier David Eby has access to not one but two spaces in the province’s beleaguered system of subsidized childcare. His wife is a doctor, and he is premier. By any possible measure, this is not a low-income family. Many are outraged, most especially his political opponents. And it is indeed shocking that a household with an income so deep into six figures would pay $10-a-day per child for daycare, a service that before 2018 was routinely $60-a-day per child (a cost that was itself also subsidized). It is particularly galling when so many Canadians with far lower incomes than his are on wait lists.

Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are set to sign a cooperation framework at a Montreal summit at the end of October that would admit Canadian companies to EU cloud and artificial-intelligence tenders, give Canada a role in the Galileo satellite system, smooth European investment in Canadian critical minerals and commit both sides to buying 50 Canadian-built De Havilland water bombers, the Globe and Mail reported, citing a draft joint statement. Ottawa and Brussels call the package an “alliance for the future” meant to reduce exposure to an unpredictable Washington, but a group of former diplomats and trade officials argued Thursday that one-off deals are not enough and that the two leaders should instead issue a joint declaration of common principles, open to other middle powers, in the spirit of the 1941 Atlantic Charter. Both governments are seeking shelter from protectionism under U. S. President Donald Trump. Under the leaked text, Canadian firms could bid on European cloud and AI infrastructure work normally closed to outsiders, and the De Havilland aircraft would be ready for wildfire duty by 2030.

Frances Nunziata at a bakery in York South-Weston. Frances Nunziata, Toronto’s longest serving city councillor, is ready for another term in office. Do her constituents feel the same?

The Alberta separatist movement faces a major test on October 19, with Albertans voting on whether to kick off a legal process to hold a referendum on full independence from Canada. However, poll numbers in favour of separation haven’t cracked 25%, suggesting the movement faces potential defeat on the main question:

Toronto has a lot of problems and figuring out what's important to you can be difficult. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself. There’s so much to care about in Toronto from housing to food.

The leaders of B. C.’s three main political parties spent nearly two hours on Oct. 14 vying to be the province’s next premier. BC NDP Leader David Eby, Conservative Leader Lorne Doerkson and Green Leader Emily Lowan faced more than a dozen questions each from moderator Shachi Kurl during the only debate of the election campaign. Not one of those questions focused on environmental issues or climate change. Nor did any of the leaders question each other about their proposed environmental policies during the open debate portions of the broadcast. In fact, the only leader to mention the climate crisis was Lowan as she introduced herself to the audience. “I am the only leader on this stage that feels the decisions being made in the legislature, especially as it relates to the cost of living crisis and the climate crisis,” Lowan said, claiming she is the only one of the three party leaders who “has worked a minimum-wage job in the past decade.”

For voters wondering whether it’s worth the work to acquaint themselves with all the candidates and issues in this year’s Vancouver school board election, Carolyn Broady has a message. “A good, strong public education system is at the centre of strong democracy,” said Broady, past president of the BC School Trustees Association, in an interview with The Tyee.

British Columbia’s election-packed October will mean some voters will be able to cast ballots twice on Saturday. As B. C.’s local general election comes to a close, advance polls for the provincial election will also be open in many places on Saturday. In a few communities, both polling stations will be located in the same building.

What Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1975 called an “infamous act” has returned in our day. On Sunday, Oct. 4, as Jews were celebrating Simchat Torah, the same day on the Hebrew calendar that Hamas and other antizionist militias committed a genocide of Israelis three years earlier, the Green Party in the U. K. passed its own resolution declaring “Zionism is Racism.” It is as if the Green Party wants to place itself in a lineage of antizionist propaganda, explicitly resuscitating the 1975 UN resolution that was pushed by the Soviet Union and the Arab League.

As voted by our readers in the 2026 Best of MTL readers poll, these are the best hair salons in Montreal. For more results from the Best of MTL, please click here. These are the best hair salons in Montreal. To read the 2026 Best of MTL issue, please click here.

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