Opinion

Author Adam Weymouth canoed the length of the Yukon River. His brilliant book, Kings of the Yukon, takes the reader on a journey of sound, smells, shifts of light and colour, storms and sunshine, wistfulness, fear, and admiration for the mighty King salmon and the people along the way.

Toronto City Council is set to kick off a three-day meeting Tuesday, their first since Doug Ford was elected Ontario’s next premier, and some city councillors are using the opportunity to tell Ford they think some of his major election promises suck.

The fevered rhetoric coming from Trans Mountain pipeline boosters is dangerous. It’s provocative. And it bears no relationship to the facts on the ground.

Cree Elder Patrick Etherington went to see the bishop in 1986 at the Roman Catholic Diocese of Moosonee, Ont. As a 30-year-old man, now a father, he walked straight into the local headquarters of the organization that had stolen him from his own parents.

Energy efficiency and technology squeeze the carbon bubble, writes David Suzuki. It's a bubble that will burst with or without government action.

Laurie Embree drove 400 kilometres from 108 Mile House to participate in the protest. She is a mother of four, a grandmother of three.

David Dodge, former Bank of Canada governor, advisor to Alberta’s NDP government, made a grim prediction about the pipeline: “There are some people that are going to die in protesting construction of this pipeline. We have to understand that. Nevertheless, we have to be willing to enforce the law,” Dodge told a forum in Edmonton. Kevin Taft weighs in on Dodge's foreboding words.

It is incumbent upon the B.C. government to stop the arithmetic trickery and to bring intellectual honesty and scientific thinking to a resolution of the old-growth issue on Vancouver Island.

“I think we need to go beyond just the festival scene if we want to be truly progressive - the nightlife scene also deals with those issues. We need to take responsibility as a community to change this culture of entitlement to women's bodies." - Melanie Doucet

"Their profit margins are bigger than oil and gas. Most people don’t know this,” explains Alyssa Arbuckle, Associate Director of a digital humanities lab at the University of Victoria.

The familiar clop-clop-clop of horses carrying tourists around Old Montreal has long been a familiar sound to locals and visitors, and a tradition for centuries. According to animal rights advocates, however, the calèches are an antiquated and often inhumane industry.

Scientist David Suzuki asks "how do we ensure the price of fossil fuels includes the costs of pollution, environmental degradation and climate disruption?" The simplest and proven way, he writes, is to put a price on carbon emissions.

Since he was elected in 2014, Mayor John Tory has had it easy. With Doug Ford now the premier-designate of Ontario, things are about to get hard.

Environmentalists have accused the B.C. government of lying about the amount of majestic, centuries-old trees left standing in the province. The National Observer reported last month that the B.C. government, through B.C. Timber Sales, had approved permits for logging that saw some of the world’s biggest red cedar and Douglas fir trees cut down in the Nahmint Valley on Vancouver Island.

It's been a crazy week in politics. Here's an analysis of influences and voices beyond borders, with National Observer's Editor-in-Chief.