“Some newspapers dig. Some newspapers are a constant embarrassment to the powerful. Some manage to be entertaining, provocative, and fair at the same time. There are a few such newspapers in Canada.”

That statement probably doesn’t come as a shock to many Canadians in 2017.

What may come as a surprise is that the quote is actually drawn from a report published in 1970 by the Special Senate Committee on Mass Media. If Canada’s media landscape was stifled by mediocrity nearly 50 years, it’s positively suffocated by it now.

Canada has one of the most monopolized media landscape in the world. And since 2008, the Canadian Media Guild reports that more than 10,000 media jobs have been lost. There are now four public relations people for every journalist in this country — a figured that has doubled since 1990.

Sparks of Hope From Around the World

Yet, while there’s much doom and gloom about the state of the news industry worldwide, there are reasons to be hopeful as well.

In the UK, The Guardian just reported a 15 per cent boost in digital revenues, with more people paying for its journalism than ever before. That includes 230,000 paying “members,” who choose to pay $6.99 a month to support quality, independent journalism.

In The Netherlands, De Correspondent raised $1.7 million in 30 days to launch in 2013 and boasts 56,000 members who pay 60 euros a year in a country of just 17 million people. Its mission is to be the “antidote to the daily news grind.”

“We have a different perspective on what is newsworthy. It’s not sensational but foundational. To uncover the foundation, though, you have to work with the people who read you and who are members,” publisher Ernst-Jan Pfauth said in an interview with NiemanLab.

De Correspondent has its eyes on a U.S. expansion next. There, it’ll join the digital frontier with the likes of ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest — and which has won several Pulitzer Prizes in the process.

Meantime, here in Canada a handful of plucky start-ups concentrated in British Columbia are at the forefront of the new digital frontier. DeSmog Canada is one of them.

Imagine if there was an ‘Environment’ section of your newspaper — we’re that, but fully digital. Our goal is to make complex energy and environment news accessible to Canadians and to shine a light on critical, under-reported stories.

Part Newsroom, Part Non-Profit, Part Tech Start-Up

Like De Correspondent, we strive to go beyond the headlines and help people make sense of the world by looking at the foundational issues.

For instance, instead of reporting on the twists and turn of every pipeline controversy, we look closely at the environmental assessment process and how reforms would decrease the dysfunction. While reporting on a controversial hydro dam in B.C., we zoomed out and spoke to experts in Labrador and Newfoundland about their experience with a similar project. Long after most media have moved on from B.C.’s Mount Polley mine disaster, one of the largest environmental disasters in Canadian history, we continue to shine a spotlight on the need for reform of B.C.’s mining regulations.

The success of DeSmog Canada relies upon a willingness to take risks and experiment. We think of our culture as part newsroom, part non-profit and part tech start-up.

While completing my journalism degree at Mount Royal University, I spent a year working at a newspaper in England. I was inspired by the fearless journalism I saw there by the likes of The Independent, The Guardian, the BBC and Which? Magazine. If an energy company was found to be overcharging customers, the media would go on a full-out campaign to right the wrong. They didn’t feign objectivity where the public interest was concerned.

Back in Canada, I find all too often that journalists lean on a sanguine notion of “objectivity” to excuse a blasé approach to matters of the public interest.

At DeSmog Canada, like De Correspondent, we reject conventional journalism’s ideal of objectivity. We serve the public interest fiercely and put the needs of our readers at the forefront of our newsgathering decisions. Our journalists are fair and independent and operate according to the highest journalistic standards, yet they’re also explicitly subjective.

Can Reader-Funded #News Save Canadian #Journalism? Via @reporteremma & @DeSmogCanada https://t.co/lzmdYRuJZa #cdnpoli #media @TheTyee @jsource pic.twitter.com/IL7F23fKsG

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) November 10, 2017

Proving the Non-Profit Journalism Model In Canada

While there are plenty of people who say non-profit media can’t be successful in Canada, we work every day to prove them wrong.

In 2015, we were named as a finalist for a Canadian Online Publishing Award for “Best News Coverage” alongside the CBC, Globe and Mail and Maclean’s Magazine. And this year Canada’s Clean50 called DeSmog Canada a “powerhouse investigative environmental journalism outlet” while naming me as an “Emerging Leader.”

Our reporting has sparked coverage by virtually every major news outlet in the country, including the New York Times, the Globe and Mail and CBC and has been cited several times in the House of Commons and the B.C. Legislature.

In 2015, we uncovered a secrecy scandal regarding Canada’s oil spill response plans, which created so much public outrage it resulted in regulatory changes. In British Columbia, we’ve spent years doggedly covering the issue of the Site C hydroelectric dam, because it skipped a review of costs and demand by the B.C. Utilities Commission. We tracked down high-profile critics of the project, like the former CEO of BC Hydro, and spent time on the ground with those facing its biggest impacts.

We’ve launched multi-year Freedom of Information research projects to track fossil fuel funding of university research and political interference by energy companies. We’ve also acted as a watchdog for Canada’s track record on climate change and covered environmental appeals cases in remote communities — all at a time that few journalists have been willing or, more importantly, able to track such issues.

Filling Canada’s Void for Public Interest Journalism

For all of this, we are sometimes called “advocacy journalism” or worse, but looking around the world, it’s clear we are filling a void in Canada for hard-hitting public interest journalism.

Many people wonder how we fund our operation. The answer is three-fold: 1) We’re incredibly lean with just two full-time staff and a handful of key freelancers. 2) We’ve been lucky to receive core support from two foundations concerned about the environment and climate change. (We disclose our donors on our website in line with the Institute for Non-Profit News’ policy on donor transparency.) 3) Small donations from readers comprise an increasing portion of our revenue.

This year, our readers really stepped up and we doubled the amount of revenue we received in small individual donations. Our readers have funded photo essays of remote resource projects, independent polling and, increasingly, they are becoming members and giving $10 or $20 a month to support independent journalism. Our readers make us who we are.

As we look to the future, we see this ad-free, member-funded model as the way to sustain in-depth journalism.

Membership Allows Readers To Become Part of Community

While non-profit news outlets have proliferated south of the border, the same trend hasn’t been repeated in Canada.

Why not? It’s largely a matter of charitable law. In the U.S., journalism qualifies as a charitable activity, but in Canada it currently does not. That makes earning foundation grants harder and further points to reader-funded models being the way of the future in Canada.

Times of crisis represent an opportunity for quality journalism. This year, U.S. news outlets have benefitted from what’s being called the “Trump bump.”

In January, ProPublica received $104,000 in donations, up from just $4,500 in October. Meanwhile, Slate generated 1,000 new members per week, passing the 30,000-member mark — a 66 per cent increase from pre-election.

“We believe people don’t become members for ‘access to the content,’ ” De Correspondent’s Pfauth told NiemanLab. “They become members because they want to be part of a movement/community.”

That sentiment bodes well for specialized websites like DeSmog Canada, which give citizens a meaningful way to make a difference and be part of a community.

How to Join DeSmog Canada

While traditional outlets are blurring the line between editorial and advertising more each day, we’ve turned away from an ad-driven model and toward focusing on the reader. Because we don’t have to chase clicks, we can focus on in-depth, sense-making journalism that helps readers be better citizens.

At a time that beat reporters are on the decline, our team works the environment beat with an in-depth knowledge and commitment to investigative reporting not found in most traditional publications.

Times like these require new efforts to build trust and community in an increasingly unstable, fractured world. And the role media plays in shaping and informing public conversations has never been more apparent.

We built DeSmog Canada to jump into the fray, to re-engage Canadians in an increasingly noisy, urgent conversation about energy and the environment. What we’ve learned is that not only do Canadians want and deserve better news — it’s something they’re willing to step in and support.

We are currently on a membership drive. Please become a member today.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

By Chris Wood. This article originally appeared on The Tyee. 

The sound of water is loud in a land muffled by snow. No human sound penetrates this broad valley between tapering extensions of the Rocky Mountains, 100 kilometres southwest of Grand Prairie, Alberta. A stray beam from the low winter sun washes the landscape in pink. A young doe caribou makes her way to the water. She's thin, ribs visible beneath her winter coat. At the water's edge she lowers her head to drink.

Suddenly grey shapes burst from the shadows. The swiftest comes racing over her own hoof-trail, leaps and sinks sharp teeth deep into her haunch, lacerating ligament. Within minutes, the doe's struggle is over. The wolves settle in to eat.

For Alberta's foothills caribou, death row is a fraying triangle of pine, spruce and aspenforest and meadows, stretched along the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and running roughly from Banff, west of Calgary, some 630 kilometres north and west over the provincial border into British Columbia. A broad thumb of forest thrusts east toward Slave Lake.

A second area with a similar ecological community, not quite as large, straddles the provincial borders north of Fort St. John, B.C. Anchored on Alberta's Chinchaga Wildland Park it holds the headwaters of the Hay River. The two areas are isolated from each other by the trans-border Peace River and its development corridor of gas fields, forest mills and a soon-to-be-built third hydroelectric dam and reservoir on the river.

An expanse of 120,000 square kilometres, the size of Nicaragua or North Korea, might seem roomy enough to provide security for wildlife. But only about five per cent of that area enjoys some form of protection, the biggest chunks in Banff and Jasper National Parks. Outside those areas' boundaries, Alberta's foothills are open for ranching, forestry and mineral extraction.

Two ranges of the Alberta foothills forest. Source: The Encyclopedia of Earth.

When you're an animal like the foothills caribou, larger than a full-grown lama with an extended family that can run into hundreds of individuals, you need your space. More than that, you need a certain kind of space: a large-scale mosaic of thick forests, more open woodland and meadows. The same is true for scores of other creatures that became adapted to the particular mix of landforms and weather and other plants and animals, as well as its regular disturbance by forest fires and seasonal river floods, that emerged here over thousands of their generations before European settlers arrived.

Threatened 'refugees'

The caribou is not the only species making a last stand in the shifting scraps of shelter the Alberta foothills forest still offers.

It's also one of the last havens east of the Rockies for the Grizzly Bear. Not, as most people think, originally a forest-dweller, Grizzlies were the uber-predators of the open prairies before those were surveyed off into square-mile sections for farming.

Forced into the foothills, Grizzlies "are refugees" there, says Matt Wheatley, a wildlife ecologist who worked for the province on protected areas before joining the faculty of the University of Alberta.

Grizzlies, powerful and adaptable, are ranked as a species of relatively low "special concern" by the federal government. While they are failing to survive in the forest's southern portion, their numbers are reported to be stable in the northern part.

Bull trout spend January in dark, deep pools of the foothills, waiting for the ice over them to melt and the cycle of spawning to begin again. But they too are ranked as "threatened," mostly by the side effects of forest clearing.

Caribou, though, are the most critically vulnerable, assessed in the highest risk category of imminently endangered by "extinction or extirpation throughout all or a significant portion" of their former home. Many of the herds recorded in historic population surveys "are not really extant any more," says Wheatley's University of Alberta colleague, biologist Cindy Paszkowski.

Other species at risk have found refuge in the foothills' natural forest mosaic of jack and lodgepole pine, black and white spruce and aspen, regularly opened by fire into meadow clearings. Long-toed Salamanders and Columbian Spotted Frogs, American Badgers and Pygmy Owls, Wolverines and Cougars also shelter in this ecological transition zone between the drier prairie, and the higher altitude montane, more arid and a lot colder.

A century of occupation

If this "just right" quality allows the foothills forest to shelter refugee species from other vanished landscapes, it also helps explains why so little of it remains intact after a century and a half of post-Indigenous human occupation.

Many species at risk once found refuge in the foothills' natural forest mosaic of jack and lodgepole pine, black and white spruce and aspen. Photo via Shutterstock.

It was the value of forest timber that attracted the first settlers from the increasingly crowded Utah and Montana territories to what is now Alberta in the late 19th century. Flush with new technology and the era's enthusiasm for exploiting "undeveloped" resources, they launched a century of full-throttle extraction that has altered virtually every centimetre of the former landscape.

Changes in land cover, forest mix, and the regularity of fire and flood, have altered the ecosystem which once allowed the Caribou, Bull trout and others species to thrive, to the point that what remains is "not the real deal any more," Paszkowski says.

It is, for one thing, generally a much younger forest. Over the decades loggers removed most of the trees more than 70 or 80 years old, whose trunks supported rich crusts of lichen that caribou could rely on for winter forage.

Loggers, and later farmers, also sent plumes of disturbed soil down creeks newly exposed to the sun, clogging the fine grains of clean gravel that Bull trout need for nest-building and warming the water in many sections beyond the cold-water species' tolerance.

In the last half-century, as forestry activity continued to chase the region's larger mammals from one refuge block of older growth to another, a new threat arrived. The explosive growth of oil and gas exploration sent seismic crews to virtually every corner of the foothills, cutting metres-wide, clear-cut corridors through hill and dale.

"Caribou have adapted for thousands of years to live in old, dense forest," Wheatley observes. "This kept them away from the most efficient predator in the system, which is wolves. Until you start exploring the forest for oil and gas, and you create trails [that] made it easier for wolves to encounter caribou."

Some foothills herds, Wheatley believes, have been losing members to wolves and other stressors at the rate of five to 10 per cent a year. At that rate, "your population is gone in 10 years," he says.

Seismic lines and road networks have also allowed humans on ATVs or snowmobiles year-round access deep into what remains of the heavily altered ecosystems. And as Paszkowski notes, "any human activity is probably not good for caribou, nor for grizzly bears."

The Albertan foothills are one of the last havens east of the Rockies for the Grizzly Bear. Photo via Shutterstock.

The bears are the object of illegal trophy hunting, but a more lethal factor may be road kills and freight trains — especially those carrying grain. Attracted by fallen grain alongside tracks, even the world's most powerful bear meets its match in a diesel locomotive.

Nowhere left to go

Overarching all of these threats to the foothill refugees, ecologists say, is an even less obvious factor: fire — or rather, the way European settlers in the last century and a quarter have altered its rhythm.

Once relatively frequent, relatively small fires cycled through older stands of foothills forest. Caribou and many other animals could avoid their conflagration, returning later to the newly refreshed open meadows and young forests the fires left behind. Scorched trees that fell into creeks created shelter for Bull trout spawning beds.

But viewing forest fires as destructive to timber value and threatening to settlements, provincial governments have invested heavily for decades in their suppression.

Now, the former natural cycle has been irrecoverably disrupted. The mosaic of open meadow, parkland and denser forest is out of balance. Remaining forested areas are unnaturally old, and dense with unburned fuel. When fires do ignite, they burn more deeply, far wider and for longer.

Outside of protected areas, forest managers are experimenting with re-introducing smaller fires through controlled burns. But those are risky, and despite their name may run out of control, threatening the very last sanctuary for fugitive wildlife.

The foothills' few protected areas, Wheatley worries, "are too small for both fire and the animals. We've run out of natural capital to play with if we want to put fire back into the landscape."

The caribou, like the Prairie grizzlies and the Bull trout beneath the winter ice, have nowhere left to go.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

When you cover energy and environment issues day in and day out, you’re prone to having some pretty geeky fantasies.

Case in point: over the holidays, my mind wandered to considering what advancements in Canadian energy policy I’d put on my wish list for 2015. I could have rattled off five or 10 things, but one kept rising to the top.

If I could wave my magic wand and make just one thing happen on the energy and environment front, what would it be? I’d like Alberta to start managing its oil wealth more responsibly.

The context: as 2014 draws to a close, Calgary public-school officials are asking the province to cough up the funding required to complete eight new schools and two modernization projects on time.

Right now, one-third of Calgary’s schools are running at more than 90 per cent capacity. All of the projects that require funding have been announced by Alberta Premier Jim Prentice since he took office in September.

“With the recent fluctuation in oil prices, we’re concerned,” Calgary Board of Education trustee Amber Stewart told Metro Calgary.

Let’s take a pause and reflect on how totally absurd this is for a moment.

Alberta has been developing one of the world’s largest sources of oil for more than 40 years and yet Calgary’s schools are nearly overflowing and the province doesn’t know if it’ll be able to locate the cash to build new ones because — surprise! — the price of oil changed.

So what’s wrong here? For starters, new infrastructure shouldn’t be tied to the price of oil. Even the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives can agree that the Alberta government shouldn’t rely on non-renewable resource revenue to fund its operating expenses. (For the best run-down on this topic, read Money for Nothing: The Province vs. Non-Renewable Resource Revenue by Alberta Oil editor Max Fawcett.)

Fawcett references a 2013 Fraser Institute report that said to treat oil revenues as “analogous to sales tax receipts, and to spend them on projects that provide a flow of present services, would be to engage in unwise capital consumption, a drawing down of principal. Intuitively, the present generation would be selfishly eating away at a finite stock pile of wealth, rather than acting as custodians of ­nature’s gifts on behalf of all future generations.”

Another report by former Premier Ed Stelmach’s Council for Economic Strategy noted: “The true Alberta advantage is not the ability to create a low-tax environment by underwriting a significant proportion of government services with funds received from the sale of energy assets.”

Despite generating almost $190 billion in non-renewable resource revenues since 1980, the value of Alberta’s Heritage Fund was just $17.3 billion at the end of 2013 — paling in comparison to both Norway and Alaska’s non-renewable resource savings.

So here we are digging up two millions barrels of oilsands per day, and Prentice is warning that tough times could lie ahead as oil prices plunge below $75 U.S. per barrel. The province has projected that there could be a $7 billion shortfall in revenues next year as a result of the price crash.

Could these fiscal woes offer the window of opportunity needed for Albertans to wake up and see how poorly their oil wealth is being managed?

It took millions of years for all of that oil to end up trapped in sand in northern Alberta. We only get one shot at digging it up. It’s high time we start getting that right (and getting that right would inevitably mean going slower and collecting higher royalties).

The first step in changing the way Alberta manages (or mismanages) the oilsands is to untether government spending from oil revenues, thus starting to dismantle the government’s reluctance to fairly regulate industry. Right now you have a situation in which the Alberta government is reluctant to bite the hand that feeds it.

As an added bonus, keeping one-time resource wealth out of the province’s operating budget could weaken the government’s chokehold over its citizens (pretty easy to stay in power when you’re dishing out $400 “prosperity cheques”) — not to mention actually creating a savings fund for the future.

In an interview with The Tyee, Terry Lynn Karl, one of North America's foremost experts on the politics of oil, offered some wise words on the impact of oil revenue on governments. 

"Let me be clear: the commodity itself is neither good nor bad,” she said. “But the excessive profit involved from what Adam Smith called 'reaping what has not been sown' has led to a concentration of power and influence that makes it exceptionally difficult to fight the negative consequences of hydrocarbon dependence.”

The first step to breaking up that concentration of power and influence? Stop borrowing from the future and spending oil revenue like it's going out of style.

So here’s a little new year’s resolution suggestion for Prentice and the Alberta government: show your commitment to managing the oilsands responsibly by weaning yourselves off relying on one-time oil revenues to provide government services. If you showed that kind of courage, there may be short-term pain, but Albertans 50 years from now would still be clinking their glasses in your honour.

Photo: Jim Prentice by Connect 2 Canada

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

“All media requests are not equal.”

Journalists from small, alternative and independent media outlets have long believed that’s why they get no response or a delayed response when they contact the government for information. That can make it more difficult for them to break stories, frustrating the public’s right to know.

But it’s also an adage you’d never, ever expect to see the government write down — until spin doctors at the federal department of citizenship and immigration did exactly that in a document I obtained via a recent access to information request.

Was it a pique of honesty that led them to put those words in black and white, an error or just plain indiscretion?

Well, according to a department representative, the document — a 16-page draft guide prepared for citizenship and immigration’s spokespeople — was never approved and doesn’t reflect how media requests are actually handled.

But, even with that caveat in mind, the guide may give us a glimpse inside the mind of a government spin doctor.

It states, “Inquiries received from major media outlets must receive greater attention and effort…than calls received from minor media sources or student journalists.”

Similarly, “calls from major international media outlets (i.e. Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times) as well as calls on sensitive issues,” demand even more attention.

In other words, according to the guide, the department should give more help to foreign reporters — and their audiences — than some Canadian reporters.

But, in an e-mail, citizenship and immigrations media relations advisor Nancy Caron used capital letters to stress the “DRAFT” nature of that document.

The first page of the document stresses the same thing, adding “procedures are constantly evolving to meet changing circumstance.”

It then goes on to state that the guide is simply meant to provide “a snapshot of where we are today. It reflects how the DG of communications, the Director of Ministerial Events and Media Relations and the Minister’s Office wish us to process media calls.”

Nevertheless, according to Caron, the document was “never presented to, nor approved by CIC’s management.”

Indeed, she stated her department “provides all media outlets with the same service level and attention. Media requests are triaged and addressed based on deadlines for publication…In fact, in the first quarter of the current fiscal year, 90.7% of journalists’ deadlines were met, regardless of their outlet.”

But journalists I spoke with say the “all media requests are not equal” approach matches their own dealings with the federal government.

Jeremy Nuttall, national reporter for the online magazine The Tyee, has said that, “Forget about the back burner, it feels like you’re not even on the stove.”

An example: back in 2012, when Nuttall was reelancing for The Tyee and covering the government’s controversial decision to approve the use of temporary foreign workers by HD Mining International Ltd. in British Columbia.

He said the citizenship and immigration “answered at first…then darkness” when the story “heated up.”

“I’ve worked for larger places and there is more of an effort [by government] to get your replies,” said Nuttall, who has also reported for the Canadian Press, CBC News and the Globe and Mail.

Parliament Hill freelancer Justin Ling said he’s had similar experiences. “I’ve been doing a lot of stories for Vice News recently and I can tell you the departments don’t care about Vice News,” he said. “It’s not their demographic, they just don’t give a shit.”

“The departments definitely have targeted approaches based on who you are calling from and who you are,” continued Ling, who has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post and Maclean’s.

“The consequence is that it reinforces the consortium of news outlets that people go to for news. It’s unfortunate.”

It is — especially at a time when those outlets are on the decline, with journalists outside the “consortium” trying to investigate stories the mainstream no longer can.

By treating those journalists as second-class reporters — either in policy or in practice — the government is once again frustrating the public’s right to know.

Because if members of the fourth estate can’t get the information they need from the government, neither can Canadians — keeping voters in the dark and their elected officials unaccountable.

This post originally appeared on Sean Holman's Unknowable Country.

The Media Call Process at Citizenship and Immigration

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.