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.

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.

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 b******t. 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.

Featured in this episode: Paul Wells

To Learn More

"The longer he's not Prime Minister" by Paul Wells on Substack

"Get started on maybe: Memories of the 1995 Quebec referendum" by Paul Wells on Substack

Right Side Up: The Fall of Paul Martin and the Rise of Stephen Harper's New Conservatism by Paul Wells

The Longer I'm Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006- by Paul Wells

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 a mean Green winning machine and supplant the NDP as the progressive party of choice.

But 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.

Featured in this episode: Mark Leiren-Young

To Learn More

Greener Than Thou: Surviving the Toxic Sludge of Canadian Ecopolitics by Mark Leiren-Young

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 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

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 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 dynasties 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

Music

“Throne of the Soul” by Nihilore. Adapted. Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Magic Escape Room"

Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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

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 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.

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.

Featured in this episode: Jeet Heer

To learn more

"Jeffrey Epstein Was a Warlord. We Have to Talk About It." by Jeet Heer in The Nation

"Jeffrey Epstein and the Mossad: How The Sex-Trafficker Helped Israel Build a Backchannel to Russia Amid Syrian Civil War" by Murtaza Hussain & Ryan Grim in Drop Site News

"Inside Jeffrey Epstein's Spy Industry Connections" by Matthew Petti in Reason

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

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 will try to join Eurovision for some reason? (We don't talk about Eurovision at all).

Today on The Hatchet, Jordan sits down with Arshy to break down the budget and try to make sense of what this all means for Canada.

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

So last week, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith used the notwithstanding clause to force Alberta teachers back to work.

It’s the first time the notwithstanding clause has ever been used in this kind of a manner to end a labour action. And that’s led to some softening of support for Danielle Smith.

But here’s the truth. The latest polls show that if an election were held today, Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party would still easily come out on top.

Why is that? How is Smith’s appeal so resilient? And why the hell can’t Naheed Nenshi and the Alberta NDP get their s**t together?

Well, luckily for us, Jeremy Appel from The Orchard is here to answer those questions and many more.

A few months ago we had a great discussion with Jen Gerson about the unique political figure that is Danielle Smith and her relationship with Alberta’s nascent sovereignty movement. You can think of this conversation with Jeremy as a bit of a sequel to that one.

We talk about some of the underlying reasons behind the teacher’s strike, Smith’s continued flirtation with separatism, how she holds her coalition together with culture wars, the return of pipeline politics and of course, the many failures of Alberta’s NDP.

Now just for context, this was recorded before Smith invoked the notwithstanding clause, but the discussion is still just as relevant today.

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

In 1965, Canada’s postal workers did something so radical, so unprecedented, that it shook our country’s political establishment to the core.

They went on strike.

It was radical and unprecedented because up until then public employees had no right to walk off the job. But for two weeks, postal workers conducted an illegal wildcat action which, by the end of it, saw them winning the right to strike for almost all government workers.

Over the next few decades, you’d see the same pattern time and time again. In the 1970s, union leaders were jailed for defying back-to-work legislation. And in 1981, the union won the right for paid-maternity leave, a first for the public sector, and a right that would gradually expand to many other workers.

In other words, you can attribute many of our labour rights, and even key planks of the welfare state, to the resolve of posties past.

But the age of the noble postal worker appears to be coming to an end. The Liberal government announced major cuts to Canada Post’s core services last months.

And I know what you’re thinking.

This was all inevitable, wasn’t it?

After all, who sends letters nowadays? Maybe once-upon-a-time Canada needed a public mail service, but those days are long behind us. And sure, we’re all sad for the thousands of those people at Canada Post who will be laid off, but that’s just the way of the world.

That’s the narrative that you’re hearing regurgitated in comment sections across the internet and in quotes from business professors to the mainstream press.

But the ongoing labour dispute between Canada Post and its workers is far more complicated, and far more important, than that simplistic story.

Instead this is a story about the hollowing out of the Canadian state. About the gigification of work. About how the managerial class places their need to control workers over the viability of the actual businesses that they run.

So to talk about it all, we’re bringing on Adam D.K. King, a labour studies professor at the University of Manitoba and a labour columnist for The Maple, who has been following this story for years.

Featured in this episode: Adam D.K. King

To learn more

"Canada Post’s Moment Of Reckoning May Finally Be Here" by Adam D.K. King in The Maple

"Return to Sender: As Canada Post evades bankruptcy, workers push back on a future where efficiency trumps the collective" by Stephan Boissonneault in Maisonneuve

"Liberal government instructs Canada Post to end home delivery, close some post offices" Peter Zimonjic in CBC News

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