Author: Robert Richardson

This spring, Jocey Alec, a Wet’suwet’en land defender and daughter of Dinï ze’ (Hereditary Chief) Woos, travelled to Toronto to voice concerns to leaders of Canada’s largest bank, which financed a pipeline running directly through her territory. She was allowed to speak for 11 seconds.It was three years after armed police raided Wet’suwet’en territory, enforcing a court-ordered civil injunction against anyone impeding construction of the pipeline, called Coastal GasLink, which will carry fossil fuels from northeast British Columbia across Indigenous territories to the coast.The pipeline was made possible with the help of Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), which acted as the “exclusive financial advisor” to TC Energy, the company behind the pipeline’s construction. As “global lead coordinating arranger,” the bank also helped arrange loans for project construction financing.Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs fiercely opposed Coastal GasLink running through their unceded territory without their consent, while at the same time, five of six elected Wet’suwet’en band councils supported the project and signed agreements with the pipeline company and the B.C. government. The pipeline’s construction was finished last winter.

Source: RBC on defensive over fossil fuel critiques | The Narwhal

There are no humans working the new Xiaomi production lines – this new Smart Factory is 100% automated. Indeed, the company says the system is smart enough to diagnose and fix problems, as well as optimizing its own processes to “evolve by itself.”The 80,000-square-meter (860,000-sq-ft) facility, located in the Changping district on the northeast outskirts of Beijing, follows a pilot smart factory in Yizhuang, which produced about a million units a year of the company’s Mix Fold smartphone.”There are 11 production lines,” says Xiaomi Founder and CEO Lei Jun in a short video, embedded below. “100% of the key processes are automated. We developed our entire production and manufacturing software to achieve this.”

Source: Xiaomi’s self-improving factory: 10M+ phones a year, untouched by humans

While news of its buyout bids has brought fresh attention to the company’s financials, The Local and The Narwhal dug into instances where GFL was found to be out of compliance with environmental rules and examined the response from officials. GFL did not reply to our repeated requests for an interview or comment. Here’s a sampling of what we found at three of its Canadian locations. Dead fish in North Stormont, Ont.GFL’s facilities in the township of North Stormont, southwest of Ottawa, were highlighted in a 2021 report by the office of the auditor general of Ontario as an example of how the provincial environment ministry allows companies to continue operating and growing despite repeat offences. In North Stormont, the auditor general’s report said, the ministry found GFL was contaminating surface water by repeatedly discharging treated leachate (sometimes described as “garbage juice”) “at concentrations resulting in 10 per cent fish mortality.” GFL, meanwhile, was falsely reporting test results to the ministry that showed zero per cent fish mortality, the report added. Despite this, the report said, the ministry granted new approvals to the company, including for the expansion of the landfill where the issue was occurring.In an email, Craig Calder, chief administrative officer and clerk for the Township of North Stormont, did not directly answer our questions about how the township responded to this issue, nor whether the contamination was still happening.Instead, Calder suggested we contact the Environment Ministry about any enforcement efforts pertaining to this landfill. “The safety and wellbeing of our community, and constituents, is of paramount importance to the Township of North Stormont,” Calder said. “The township has confidence that our provincial regulatory partners investigated, and took steps to remedy, any deficiencies identified.”

Source: What we found at three Canadian GFL locations | The Narwhal

The Labour-led Welsh government has committed to introduce “globally pioneering” legislation that would in effect make lying in politics there illegal.Members of the Senedd described it as a historic moment that would combat the “existential threat” that lying in politics poses to democracy.After a passionate and dramatic debate in the Welsh parliament on Tuesday evening, the government’s counsel general, Mick Antoniw, said the legislation would be introduced before the next Welsh elections in two years’ time.

Source: Welsh government commits to making lying in politics illegal | Welsh politics | The Guardian

Recordings reveal TC Energy’s alleged attempts to influence governments in North America through sophisticated intelligence gathering, fostering relationships with national security officials and countering opposition to fossil fuel developmentsBy Matt Simmons (Local Journalism Initiative Reporter) and Mike De SouzaThis article is part of a series about revelations from leaked recordings of TC Energy executives. Subscribe to our newsletter, for more on this investigationJuly 2, 2024 14 min. readTC Energy executives based in Washington D.C. worked to influence Canadian policies, including in the country’s spy agency, according to leaked recordings of internal calls.Illustration: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal. Donald Trump photo: Chris Szagola / Associated Press. Joe Biden photo: Susan Walsh / Associated Press. David Vigneault photo: Justin Tang / The Canadian PressIn 2017, Michael Evanoff was tapped by former U.S. president Donald Trump to serve as assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security. In his testimony to the Senate foreign state committee, he detailed his previous experience in the foreign service, noting he had completed eight overseas postings, four of which were designated high threat. “Among other things, I established the first [diplomatic security] liaison position with a U.S. military regional command, managed the largest Russian spy case and damage assessment in NATO history and designed a post-9/11 informant ‘walk-in’ program at our Islamabad embassy that contributed to the capture of Khalid Sheik Muhammad,” he said at the time.Evanoff now works for TC Energy, a Calgary-based multinational fossil fuel company with offices in Houston and Mexico City. His official title is director of national security policy, geopolitical intelligence and research. From his home in Washington, D.C., the former Trump appointee uses his extensive geopolitical and military background to protect the company’s interests: crude oil and natural gas pipelines in Canada, the United States and Mexico, which earned TC Energy $11 billion in 2023.A leaked recording of a February TC Energy “lunch and learn” session featuring Evanoff and his colleagues is now pulling back the curtain on internal company discussions, including its apparent strategies about how to influence governments, benefit from geopolitical crises and leverage existing relationships with a range of senior government officials — including the head of Canada’s spy agency.

Source: Former Trump staffers say they shaped TC Energy tactics | The Narwhal

Rajen Toor’s 2023 harvest should have been an occasion to celebrate. Toor and his wife Bree, the duo behind wine label Ursa Major, had just purchased their own vineyard in the fall of 2022. For six years, Toor had been making his small-batch wines from grapes purchased from his family winery in Oliver, B.C., and, more recently, from a vineyard he and Bree leased on the Naramata Bench. Harvesting the first crop from their own vineyard would have been a triumph for two young winemakers.“We’d seen the place and fallen in love,” Toor says of their Keremeos vineyard. But after a mild winter — an increasingly common occurrence in B.C.’s Interior — a sudden cold snap dropped temperatures in the Similkameen Valley down to -25 C in December 2022. The Syrah, Viognier and Zinfandel vines that were already planted on the property were severely stressed. “It not only killed the buds, but most of the vines,” Toor says. Now, more than a year later, he’s ripping dead vines out of the ground.

Source: B.C. winemakers grapple with the climate crisis | The Narwhal

It has delayed, damaged, and perhaps permanently disfigured the federal case against Trump for what prosecutors have called his attempt to steal the 2020 election.In a 6-3 ruling on Monday, the court set strict guidelines for prosecuting a president, and instructed a lower court to sort through them before starting any trial over his efforts to undo the 2020 election result.In doing so, the court’s conservative majority has effectively ensured Trump will not stand trial for his acts in 2020 before November’s election that could return him to power.This means Trump has now successfully delayed every criminal case he faced but the least serious of the four: his New York hush-money trial, which resulted in a conviction that has had minimal political impact.Monday’s decision, critics say, has made a mockery of the justification from some high-ranking Republicans who opposed impeaching Trump in 2021: The justice system would hold him accountable, they said.

Source: U.S. Supreme Court takes a chainsaw to the most consequential criminal case against Trump | CBC News