The Hatchet is a podcast and newsletter dedicated to exposing power and money in Canada. Hosted by Arshy Mann, The Hatchet delivers important, original and fascinating journalism about how this country actually works, in a way that no one else can. hatchetmedia.ca
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 the province’s most powerful businessmen, as a star candidate, and it really looked like Quebec sovereignty was about to dominate Canadian politics once again. And then she lost. She lost big — giving…
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 hard at the fine print. And for the most part, Canadians have been willing to go along on this ride. That is until last month, when Prime Minister Mark Carney hung up a “For Sale” sign on Canada’s…
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 European countries, as well as Australia and New Zealand, have followed suit, with massive pension funds often purchasing the airports outright or buying up long-term concessions to run them. But the idea…
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 spokesperson called the allegations “serious” but said little else. And they refused to reveal the names of the officers. But soon, the press began piecing together more of what had happened. And a…
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 homophobic discrimination in municipal hiring. Pride parades and festivals were a regular occurrence. There was a thriving queer nightlife and queer press and queer arts scene. George Hislop, an…
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 unjustified and unjustifiable killing of an unarmed child. And it's all because Quebec’s policing establishment understands what it would mean for the public to see Nooran Rezayi’s death for what it is —…
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 boards that are supposed to govern these forces and maintain civilian rule over the cops; the police chief and upper management that run the force and oversee the day-to-day operations; the…
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. There have been numerous media exposes on the prevalence of sexual violence in arenas as varied as media, sports, business, politics, the service industry and so many others. But when it comes to…
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, Francophone separatists or leftists of all stripes. And that theory, well, it’s basically true. During World War One and into the 1920s , one of the force’s primary missions was to infiltrate and surveil…
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 police has been interfering in the city’s politics, while the RCMP spies on protesters and dissidents. Murder trials in Calgary and Fredericton have fallen apart because of police incompetence. And…
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 Criminal Justice Act But we rarely, if ever, talk about the central issue — money. Organized crime groups have to set up sophisticated operations to launder their money and put it to use. But today,…
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 Trutch, BC's first Lieutenant-Governor and the individual most responsible for the fact that the province resisted signing treaties with First Nations for a century. Instead, provincial government after…
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 wings to save journalism, especially here in Canada. But some of us just, including us over here at The Hatchet, just can’t help ourselves. We’re going to keep plugging away, hell or high water,…
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 over a decade ago. But that lack of attention is a disservice. Because PEI isn’t just a collection of small communities. It’s a full-fledged province, with equal standing in Confederation, and with a…
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 update on The Hatchet. Featured in this episode: Nora Loreto To learn more "The Elephant in the NDP race" by Nora Loreto on Substack "Five takeaways from the NDP Convention" by Nora Loreto on…
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…
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 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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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,…
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…
I think it’s kind of funny how we talk about election campaigns while they’re in progress. Between the polling and the poll aggregators, there’s often a feeling of inevitability to the result. But it also makes those times when the result is unexpected, when the actual will of the voters turns out to be very different from what the polls and the pundits predicted, to stand out in stark relief. We got one of those last week. The polls that were conducted in Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial election campaign showed that the incumbent Liberals were set to handily win another majority,…
Why can’t the government do stuff? I’m not being facetious here. I think most Canadians — in fact, most people who live in western democracies — have a feeling that their governments are incapable of actually delivering on projects or providing services. But it wasn’t always this way. There was an era, not so far back in the future, when the Canadian governments turned petrochemicals into plastics, dug uranium out of the ground, operated airlines and railroads and so much more. But today, governments seem to be focused exclusively on two things: handing out money to big businesses and…
Back a few years ago, there was this moment where it felt like there was a movement building against monopolies. It started in the United States with academics like Lena Khan and Tim Wu and journalists like Matt Stoller speaking out about the creeping corporate concentration that was infecting so much of American life. Eventually that movement found purchase in the Biden administration, which put antitrust at the centre of their agenda. And because Canada is always a little bit behind the United States, we got our own version of that movement. And in a weird way, Jordan and I were both a…
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca Vancouver is a funny place. It’s without a doubt the most beautiful city in the country, probably also the continent and maybe even the world — at least when the sun’s shining. The rainy season, which lasts around eight months of the year, can turn it into a dreary, inescapable limbo. It’s a place filled luxury car dealerships, high-end watch stores and other markers of flamboyant wealth. But also absolutely heart-wrenching displays of visible poverty. Vancouverites are simultaneously proud of their city, and often…
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca This episode is available immediately to paid supporters. For unpaid supporters, we're providing a short preview. Please consider supporting us at hatchetmedia.substack.com The Canadian Pacific created a nation. But it also destroyed nations in the process. This is our third and final episode in our series about the building of the CPR and the foundation of Canada. And at the heart of this story is an unescapable question — what did it cost to create this country? And who paid that terrible price? In the years…
About The Hatchet
The Hatchet is a podcast and newsletter dedicated to exposing power and money in Canada. Hosted by Arshy Mann, The Hatchet delivers important, original and fascinating journalism about how this country actually works, in a way that no one else can. hatchetmedia.ca
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