This is an incredible tool built by @nationalobserver.com that will help foster enhanced transparency at the local level. All CAJ members can join Civic Searchlight....NOW! A big thanks to @jameswsthomson.com for this. Contact him ASAP! HT to @rorywh.bsky.social @davidmckie.bsky.social and team

Enbridge execs have been boasting to shareholders they plan to return $40-$45 billion to them over the next five years supported by gas expansions across the continent. Ontario in particular is a cash cow where they have an opportunity to "over earn." www.nationalobserver.com/2025/10/09/a...

@nationalobserver.com launched a great resource to help journalists and citizens hold councils accountable! Kudos to @jameswsthomson.com @davidmckie.bsky.social @rorywh.bsky.social!!

This new tool is the sort of thing I would have loved to get my hands on when I was a community news reporter more than a decade ago. Kudos to @rorywh.bsky.social and the CNO team for their hard work on this asset, and to the publication for releasing it freely to journalists and researchers.

Disinformation about municipal policy and politics is increasing sharply. I see it literally every day. It's misdirecting people, and making them unhappy, angry, and disconnected from reality. #yyj #disinformation #misinformation

As the campaign continues to pop up in communities across the country, Canada’s National Observer has developed an unprecedented new tool that allows us to track the spread of campaigns like this: Civic Searchlight. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/10/08/i...

This is very cool and super valuable. Congrats to the team at @nationalobserver.com for launching this important new tool. Check it out folks 👇

This is excellent news and such important work: www.nationalobserver.com/2025/10/08/n...

Canada’s National Observer unveils a powerful tool for fighting disinformation www.nationalobserver.com/2025/10/08/n...

Today, @nationalobserver.com is launching a tool to search municipal meeting transcripts across Canada. The tool has already helped us unearth a climate denial network targeting towns and cities, report on AI data centers, measure our impact and more. Journalists and researchers, sign up for free!

Today we're launching a new, powerful tool for public accountability created by @rorywh.bsky.social. Civic Searchlight compiles hundreds of municipalities' public meetings and makes them searchable for the first time. It's free to use and we hope you journalists and researchers put it to work.

Today we launch Civic Searchlight, a tool for searching local government meeting transcripts across 550 municipalities in Canada. Access is open for researchers and journalists: civicsearchlight.nationalobserver.com

As climate disinformation groups move into the shadows, Canada’s National Observer has developed an unprecedented new tool: Civic Searchlight. To build it, we assembled a database of council meetings in more than 550 municipalities. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/10/08/i...

Just as adding a filter to a cigarette doesn’t promise cancer-free smoking, pairing oil production with carbon capture doesn’t actually decarbonize the fuel. Here's Catherine McKenna on the grand bargains being discussed and why she sees CCUS as a dead end.

Replaying the Trudeau-era strategy of influencing policy by lobbying high-level officials isn't working for climate groups, who are now pivoting to an outsider game to find leverage in the age of Carney. This past weekend's protests were just a start to shift the political calculus.

Obtained federal planning documents say its "critical" to incorporate climate risks like wildfires for major events like the G7 Summit. That's quite the contrast to the Kananaskis Wildfire Charter issued during the summit that did not include a single reference to climate change.

Imperial Oil’s marketing materials have for years promised that the plant would convert canola oil into diesel using “hydrogen produced with carbon capture and storage technology.” But that isn’t happening. Story from @rorywh.bsky.social www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/19/i...

My latest: Imperial Oil’s marketing materials have for years promised that the plant would convert canola oil into diesel using “hydrogen produced with carbon capture and storage technology.” But that isn’t happening. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/19/i...

The wildfire danger where homes meet forests is rising worldwide. Using new data, we built a detailed map of Halifax’s fire-prone forest edge — and explain what it says about the state of the wildland urban interface in Canada. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/16/n...

The wildfire danger where homes meet forests is rising worldwide. Using new data, @rorywh.bsky.social and @cloelogan.bsky.social built a detailed map of Halifax’s fire-prone forest edge — and explain what it says about the state of the wildland urban interface in Canada.

The perception that red tape is preventing Canada from building major projects doesn’t hold hold up. Hundreds of projects, worth hundreds of billions of dollars are planned under existing regulations. Yet Carney blames a bureaucratic maze for stifling growth to justify his deregulatory agenda.

Explosive hurricanes and searing wildfires are pushing U.S. insurers to the limit, upending housing markets, and even reshaping the makeup of some communities. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Gil Gaul reports:

a very credible group of people predicted 20 years ago that the insurance industry would push to solve climate change to hang onto their industry instead they, like every other corporation, decided the imperative to increase profits for shareholders in the stort term was the way forward.

LNG Canada Phase 2 is the largest project in Carney's first batch of major projects and would double export capacity at the site. I'd bet Ottawa forks over some cash to make it happen — Carney suggested the Major Projects Office would consider that. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/11/n...

In late June, Google quietly scrubbed its pledge to hit net zero by 2030 from its sustainability website as it goes full steam ahead on hyperscale data centers and generative AI.

“I don’t like the precedent this sets,” said the town’s mayor, Jeff Genung, at a council meeting Monday night. Genung was concerned that if Cochrane exited the program, it could be used as an example to reverse environmental policies elsewhere. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/11/n...

Carney hinted he’ll soon release a ‘climate competitiveness strategy’ that insiders expect will boost industrial carbon pricing while cutting other emission reduction policies, echoing previously failed attempts at striking a grand bargain. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/09/a...

Carney hinted he’ll soon release a ‘climate competitiveness strategy’ that insiders expect will boost industrial carbon pricing while cutting other emission reduction policies, echoing previously failed attempts at striking a grand bargain. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/09/a...

We traced back the history of Google's sustainability website and found that quietly deleted its net-zero priority area. In its place is a new area Energy, focused on building out AI. My latest article with @dariussnieckus.bsky.social www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/i...

With power demand spiking from AI data centres, in July Google quietly scrubbed its net zero pledge. Great work here from @rorywh.bsky.social and @dariussnieckus.bsky.social www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/i...

Important investigation here from @rorywh.bsky.social on The Epoch Times circumventing Meta's ad ban to pump out disinformation, and Meta's ongoing refusal to credibly enforce its own rules. It's one of the many ways Canadian democracy is being poisoned. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/08/21/i...

Some genuinely excellent investigative work by CNO's @rorywh.bsky.social — don't miss it!

New story out today. I traced three anonymous Facebook pages back to the Epoch Times, which is banned by Meta. The pages were branded as 'educational research centres' and advertised surveys to collect political opinions and contact data from Canadians. They were seen over 22 million times.

In the past 12 months, The Epoch Times has spent over $300,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads promoting political surveys to collect the emails of Canadians using a series of anonymous pages. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/08/21/i...

Excellent and very alarming story… On paper there is a mechanism for holding Canadian companies accountable for human rights abuses abroad. But as John Woodside discovered, that position has been empty for months.

It has been nearly 500 days since Canadian oil company ReconAfrica was accused of committing human rights abuses and environmental destruction in an ecologically sensitive region in Namibia — and the alleged victims still have no answers. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/08/07/n...

High premiums drove a combined profit of $4.13 billion for Canadian property and casualty insurers in 2024. But as climate risks multiply and premiums skyrocket, the current situation is becoming unsustainable. Some insurance firms have started quietly retreating from the riskiest regions.

As insurance providers roll out new advertising that emphasizes the rising threat of increasingly common natural disasters without mentioning climate change, Canadians are noticing that their premiums are also increasing at alarming rates. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/07/29/n...

Since May 2025, the Insurance Bureau of Canada has spent over $150,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads raising the alarm about the risks of the climate crisis — without mentioning it by name. Enjoyed working with @dariussnieckus.bsky.social on this one. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/07/29/n...

“He needs to engage with 634 communities individually, not cram us in one room," Mohawk Council of Kahnawake Grand Chief Cody Diabo said as he walked out of the meeting with Carney, citing deep frustration with the summit. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/07/17/n...

"This website I'm quoting from, I don't know a whole lot about," a town councillor told his colleagues. "I just thought their words were better than mine." The site is run by "a group using an AI chatbot to craft talking points aimed at persuading local politicians to abandon net-zero programs."

“This website I’m quoting from, I don’t know a whole lot about… but I just thought their words were better than mine.” — Alberta councillor, citing a website with an AI chatbot pushing towns to quit net-zero programs. Latest from @rorywh.bsky.social www.nationalobserver.com/2025/06/27/n...

Canada's two largest pension funds (CPP and CDPQ) have chosen radically different climate strategies. The CPP retreated from net-zero (blaming anti-greenwashing rules) while CDPQ blew a hole through that logic by doubling down on climate action. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/06/27/a...

Bots running world? Misinformation-laden website almost convinces Alberta town to abandon climate program www.nationalobserver.com/2025/06/27/n... by ‪@rorywh.bsky.social "...a group using an AI chatbot to craft talking points aimed at persuading local politicians to abandon net-zero programs."

“This website I’m quoting from, I don’t know a whole lot about… but I just thought their words were better than mine.”— Alberta councillor, citing a website with an AI chatbot pushing towns to quit net-zero programs

This is what happens to Canadian democracy when you can take a decades-old US conspiracy theory and get a chatbot to reframe it as fiscal responsibility.

South Korea gender divide update 😲 Young men lean right by 50 points (74% conservative vs 24% centre-left) Young women lean left by 22 points (58% centre-left vs 36% cons)

Enjoyed working with Marc Fawcett-Atkinson on this investigation into how hidden funding sources helped manufacture support for coal in Alberta. We found evidence that 'fact-checker' Debunk Inc. is run by the daughter of oil executive Michael A Columbos. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/06/03/n...

This is a must read investigation. Fossil fuel misinformation is being pumped at municipal leaders using AI chatbots. Great stuff here @rorywh.bsky.social www.nationalobserver.com/2025/05/28/i...