The Hatchet

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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 winter break, I set myself a mission. I was going to learn as much as I could about federal politics.
I went back and read through (or at least familiarized myself with) as many of the classic books of Canadian political journalism and history as I could. Most were written by authors that we don’t talk about much anymore, despite the fact that they were giants of their respective eras. Christina McCall-Newman, Jeffrey Simpson, Peter C. Newman, Donald Creighton, John Duffy. And then there were excellent books by more contemporary writers about the Ottawa of the past and present from journalists like Susan Delacourt and John Ibbitson.
But none of these writers, great though they may be, made me feel like I was getting a nitty-gritty understanding of federal politics more than Paul Wells.
Now of course, like almost every journalist in the country with even a passing interesting in federal politics, I’ve been reading Wells for years. But during that winter, I really immersed myself in his work, his books, past features, his current reporting, the whole shebang.
And I have to say, I often found myself disagreeing with him. But I emerged with a new appreciation for what he does.
Wells has a keen eye for history and a willingness to call out b******t. His prose is evocative, without being flashy. And despite his many, many years of experience reporting on politics from Montreal and then from Ottawa, he never felt to me like he’d been co-opted by the Laurentian establishment.
I’m sure this sounds like a lot of unnecessary fawning over someone who is probably the most respected political journalist in Anglo-Canada.
But I just want to convey to you all how excited I was to talk to him — especially right now, at a time when Canadian politics all of a sudden feels more serious than it has in years.
Since the beginning of the New Year, we’ve been inundated not with soundbites, not with scandals, but with speeches.And I don’t think there’s anybody better to dig into these serious times than Wells.
During our conversation, we covered a lot of ground, including the 20th anniversary of Stephen Harper’s election and the ups-and-downs that Carney and Poilievre have recently faced. But I was especially glad that we got to spend a good amount of time talking about the return of national unity as a serious political issue in this country.
Featured in this episode: Paul Wells
To Learn More
"The longer he's not Prime Minister" by Paul Wells on Substack
"Get started on maybe: Memories of the 1995 Quebec referendum" by Paul Wells on Substack
Right Side Up: The Fall of Paul Martin and the Rise of Stephen Harper's New Conservatism by Paul Wells
The Longer I'm Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006- by Paul Wells

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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 point might have come at the end of last year.
That’s when Elizabeth May, after consulting with Prime Minister Mark Carney, voted in support of his budget. And then not too long after, he went and signed an MOU with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith committing to more pipelines for the oil sands.
For Mark Lerien-Young, none of the rolling disaster that is the Green Party of Canada has come as a surprise. After all, he was watching from the inside as much of it went down.
Mark is a longtime writer, journalist, humorist, science podcaster, environmental activist and former Green Party of Canada employee and campaign manager. And he’s just written a book about what it was like to try to navigate the egos and incompetence of the Greens. The book is called Greener Than Thou: Surviving the Toxic Sludge of Canadian Ecopolitics, and in it, he gives and insider account of the cult of Elizabeth May.
And some of the details make working in that party sound like living in a house of mirrors. Mark says that at a certain point he came to realize that many people in the Green Party didn’t actually want to elect more MPs because that would mean more work for them.
He writes that “Many books you read come with the proviso that all persons are fictional and any resemblance anyone living or dead is purely coincidental. My disclaimer is that the Green Party of Canada is purely fictional.”
In our conversation, Mark was brutally honest about the frankly absurd way that a party that more than a million Canadians voted for in 2019 does business. And why despite their abysmal recent performances, Elizabeth May is here to stay.
Featured in this episode: Mark Leiren-Young
To Learn More
Greener Than Thou: Surviving the Toxic Sludge of Canadian Ecopolitics by Mark Leiren-Young

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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 liquor to American gangsters during Prohibition.
But those were just the origin stories. This episode is about what happened when those two worlds collided.
Edper-Brascan controlled over 500 companies. The beer you drank, the team you watched, the mall you shopped at, the house you lived in — all of it could be traced back to this sprawling conglomerate. At its height, it was worth more than $120 billion.
All of this was Jack Cockwell’s domain. Immigrant, corporate philosopher, ruthless operator, Cockwell single-handedly imposed his will on Canada’s business establishment and dominated the 1980s like no one else.
But by the end of the decade, people on Bay Street began to whisper.
Something was rotten at the heart of Cockwell’s empire. They said that the whole thing was a mirage. A lie. A house of card waiting to fall over.
They all turned out to be right.
To learn more:
The Brass Ring: Power, Influence and the Brascan Empire by Patricia Best & Ann Shortell
Edper by Keith Dalrymple
“The Edper Puzzle” by Kimberly Noble in The Globe and Mail
“The Second Coming” by Rod McQueen in The Financial Post
“Fears for a Leveraged Leviathan” by Clyde Farnsworth in The New York Times
“He was a titan of Bay Street and a senator. But J. Trevor Eyton died owing millions in taxes and on the verge of bankruptcy” by David Bruser & Jesse McLean in The Toronto Star


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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 great fortune, there is a great crime. And the crimes of the Bronfmans were numerous. But they were able to get away with it all, thanks to bribery, destruction of evidence and the intimidation of witnesses.
For decades, the Bronfmans were able to write their own history of how their wealth was acquired. But the truth can only stay buried for so long.
The Bronfman dynasty is one of the greatest dynasties that the Americas have ever seen. But like so many dynasties, they would fall apart into ignominy.
And at the centre of all of this was the most powerful businessman in Canadian history, the kingpin himself — Sam Bronfman.
Featured in this episode: Stephen Maher, Jordan Cornish
To learn more
The Bronfman Dynasty: The Rothschilds of the New World by Peter C. Newman
“The ties that bind the Liberals and the Bronfmans” by Stephen Maher in Maclean’s
The Brass Ring: Power, Influence, and the Brascan Empire by Patricia Best & Ann Shortell
The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Seagram by Nicholas Faith
Mavericks: Canadian Rebels, Renegades and Anti-Heroes by Peter C. Newman
Music
“Throne of the Soul” by Nihilore. Adapted. Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Magic Escape Room"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
I dunno by grapes (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: J Lang, Morusque


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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 story.
Brookfield has been in the news constantly over recent months. The Conservatives attacked the company for moving the headquarters of one of their subsidiaries to New York City. The NDP have accused it of avoiding taxes through offshore havens. And Prime Minister Mark Carney, the former chairman of Brookfield Asset Management, has found himself on the defensive because of his association with the company.
But what these political attacks miss is a far more important story. It’s a story of a company that has been central to Canada’s history and economy for more than a century.
So what exactly is Brookfield? That’s a question that we here at The Hatchet have set out to answer.
What we found was a company that almost defies description.
Brookfield has been a financial universe unto itself, operating by a different set of cosmic laws and fundamental forces than other corporations.
It’s a company that’s shown an almost unparalleled talent for reinvention. Over its 125-year-history, it’s morphed from a neo-colonial experiment to Canada’s most ruthless corporate raider to a seemingly boring storehouse of our collective pension earnings.
Now it is one of a tiny handful of financial entities that sit at the very centre of the global economy.
And so that’s why we’ll be spending this series focusing exclusively on this incredibly important and yet rarely understood company.
We’ll be digging into its epic history, its contentious present and what the continued domination of firms like Brookfield could mean for everyday people.
In this first episode, we shine a light on it’s first incarnation — Brazilian Traction, Light and Power — and how it managed to dominate the people of South America’s biggest nation for most of the 20th century.
Featured in this episode: Tyler Shipley
To learn more
Canada In The World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination by Tyler Shipley
The Brass Ring: Power, Influence and the Brascan Empire by Patricia Best & Ann Shortell
Let Us Prey: The Practices and Profits of Canadian Corporations and Businessmen edited by Robert Chodos & Ray Murphy
The Light: Brazilian Traction, Light, and Power Company Limited, 1899-1945 by Duncan McDowall
Support us at hatchetmedia.substack.com
The Hatchet is a podcast and newsletter dedicated to exposing power and money in Canada. We deliver important, original and fascinating journalism about how this country actually works.
Music: I dunno by grapes (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: J Lang, Morusque



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hatchetmedia.substack.com/subscribe