News
Alberta just created the world’s largest boreal protected forest.. right next to the oil sands!
From the Province of Alberta
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The largest contiguous area of boreal protected land in the world has been established in northern Alberta. The Government of Alberta partnered with The Government of Canada, the Tallcree First Nation, Syncrude and the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) on the conservation of more than 6.7 million hectares (67,000 sq. km) of boreal forest. The creation of the Kazan, Richardson and Birch River wildland provincial parks connects the federal government’s Wood Buffalo National Park to other existing wildland provincial parks. The new and expanded wildland provincial parks are: Kazan, Richardson, Dillon River, Birch River and Birch Mountains. In total, these northern Alberta parks contribute more than 1.36 million hectares to the province’s protected area network. This is the largest addition to the Alberta Parks system in its history, and will constitute the largest contiguous protected boreal forest in the world under the guidelines of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Identified in the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan (LARP) in 2012, the new parks were fully reviewed to ensure there are no economic impacts on natural resource industries or communities. Industry tenures in the parks were compensated years ago, leaving the lands free for protection. For the five new and expanded wildland provincial parks, the Government of Alberta proposes to enter into cooperative management arrangements with Indigenous communities. Indigenous advice and knowledge will inform decision-making and management of these lands and the province will provide resources to support this process.
In addition, Alberta plans to integrate an Indigenous Guardian Program into these wildland provincial parks. Under this program, First Nations and Metis peoples will be hired to monitor the areas, help maintain the lands and provide education and outreach to park visitors.
Treaty 8’s Tallcree First Nation, in cooperation with the NCC and the Alberta and federal governments and with support from Syncrude, generously relinquished their Birch River area timber licence and quota to enable one of the new parks (Birch River WPP) to proceed. The Government of Alberta thanks the Tallcree First Nation for working with the government and the NCC to achieve this historic outcome. Alberta and the Tallcree First Nation have agreed to manage the Birch River WPP with mutual benefit toward conservation and economic opportunities.
In addition, the environmental benefits created through the establishment of the Birch River WPP will provide conservation offsets that Syncrude can apply towards future industrial activities.
Establishing the wildland provincial parks (WPPs) will mean a protected area that is more than twice the size of Vancouver Island (32,000 sq. km), slightly smaller than the province of New Brunswick (72,908 sq. km), slightly bigger than the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia (64,000 sq. km), and 10 times the size of the Greater Toronto Area (7,124 sq. km). Background
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By Jen Hodgson
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is using taxpayer money to pad its bureaucracy, while reducing the number of journalists on staff, according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
“CBC defends its very existence based on its journalism, but its number of journalists are going down while its bureaucracy keeps getting bigger and taxpayer costs keeps going up,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Why does the government keep giving CBC more taxpayer money if barely anyone is watching and its number of journalists keeps going down?”
The CBC employed 745 staff with “journalist” or “reporter” in their job title in 2021. That number dropped to 649 by 2025, the records obtained by the CTF show. Of the 6,100 total employees disclosed by the records, just 11 per cent of CBC staff had “journalist” or “reporter” as their job title in 2025, according to the records.
Even journalist roles such as editors, producers and hosts declined between 2021 and 2025.
While the number of journalists employed by the state broadcaster fell, the number of other bureaucrats grew. The total number of CBC management positions increased to 949 in 2025, up from 935 in 2021.
Bureaucratic roles such as “administrators,” “advisors,” “analysts” and sales staff all increased steadily during the same period.
Management positions saw the steepest growth, with titles like “national director,” “project lead,” “senior manager” and “supervisor” leading the surge.
These trends undermine the CBC’s long-standing claim that its frontline journalism justifies its existence. Despite bureaucratic bloat and fewer journalism positions, the CBC continues to promote its news coverage as a reason it deserves more than $1 billion in annual taxpayer funding.
Separate access-to-information records obtained by the CTF show further proof of CBC’s bloated bureaucracy.
The CBC has more than 250 directors, 450 managers and 780 producers who are paid more than $100,000 per year.
The CBC also employed 130 advisers, 81 analysts, 120 hosts, 80 project leads, 30 lead architects, 25 supervisors, among other positions, who were paid more than $100,000 last year, according to access-to-information records. The CBC redacted the roles for more than 200 employees.
CBC’s CEO Marie-Philippe Bouchard insists the broadcaster is a “precious public asset” that provides “trustworthy news and information.”
CBC’s previous CEO, Catherine Tait, made similar comments throughout her 6.5-year tenure.
“A Canada without the CBC is a Canada without local news [in some places],” Tait said in 2022. If funding were withheld, there would be “fewer journalists to hold decision-makers at all levels to account.”’
“Local news is absolutely at the core of what we do,” Tait said in a 2020 interview. “Canadians are coming to the CBC in numbers like we’ve never seen before.”
However, CBC News Network only accounts for about 1.8 per cent of TV audience share, according to its own data.
Meanwhile, taxpayer funding to CBC will surpass $1.4 billion this year, according to the federal government’s Main Estimates. The broadcaster has spent about $5.4 billion of taxpayers’ money over the last five years, according to the government of Canada.
Prime Minister Mark Carney claimed “our public broadcaster is underfunded” during the federal election. He pledged an initial $150-million annual funding increase and said that number could rise even higher.
CBC paid out $18.4 million in bonuses in 2024 after it eliminated hundreds of jobs. Following backlash from across the political spectrum, CBC ended its bonuses and handed out record high pay raises costing $37.7 million.
“Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for an office full of middle managers pretending to be reporters,” Terrazzano said. “The CBC’s own records prove it has fat to cut and if Carney is serious about saving money, he would force CBC to cut its bureaucratic bloat.
“Or better yet, Carney should defund the CBC.”
Internet
It’s only a matter of time before the government attaches strings to mainstream media subsidies
Misinformation is not exclusive to alternative online news organizations
In a previous world, whether they succeeded or failed at that was really no one’s business, at least provided the publisher wasn’t knowingly spreading false information intended to do harm. That is against the law, as outlined in Section 372 of the Criminal Code, which states:
“Everyone commits an offence who, with intent to injure or alarm a person, conveys information that they know is false, or causes such information to be conveyed by letter or any means of telecommunication.”
Do that, and you can be imprisoned for up to two years.
But if a publisher was simply offering poorly researched, unbalanced journalism, and wave after wave of unchallenged opinion pieces with the ability to pervert the flow of information and leave the public with false or distorted impressions of the world, he or she was free to do so. Freedom of the press and all that.
The broadcasting world has always been different. Licensed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), content produced there must, according to the Broadcasting Act, be of “high standard”—something that the CRTC ensures through its proxy content regulator, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC).
Its most recent decision, for instance, condemned Sportsnet Ontario for failing to “provide a warning before showing scenes of extraordinary violence” when it broadcast highlights of UFC mixed martial arts competitions during morning weekend hours when children could watch. If you don’t understand how a warning would have prevented whatever trauma the highlights may have caused or how that might apply to the internet, take comfort in the fact that you aren’t alone.
The CRTC now has authority over all video and audio content posted digitally through the Online Streaming Act, and while it has not yet applied CRTC-approved CBSC standards to it, it’s probably only a matter of time before it does.
The same will—in my view—eventually take place regarding text news content. Since it has become a matter of public interest through subsidies, it’s inevitable that “high standard” expectations will be attached to eligibility. In other words, what once was nobody’s business is now everybody’s business. Freedom of the, er, press and all that.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith
Which raises the point: is the Canadian public well informed by the news industry, and who exactly will be the judge of that now that market forces have been, if not eliminated, at least emasculated?
For instance, as former Opposition leader Preston Manning recently wondered on Substack, how can it be that “62 per cent of Ontarians,” according to a Pollara poll, believe Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to be a separatist?
“The truth is that Premier Smith—whom I’ve known personally for a long time—is not a separatist and has made that clear on numerous occasions to the public, the media, and anyone who asks her,” he wrote.
I, too, have been acquainted for many years with the woman Globe and Mailcolumnist Andrew Coyne likes to call “Premier Loon” and have the same view as Manning, whom I have also known for many years: Smith is not a separatist.
Manning’s theory is that there are three reasons for Ontarians’ disordered view—the first two being ignorance and indifference.
The third and greatest, he wrote, is “misinformation—not so much misinformation transmitted via social media, because it is especially older Ontarians who believe the lie about Smith—but misinformation fed into the minds of Ontarians via the traditional media” which includes CBC, CTV, Global, and “the Toronto-based, legacy print media.”
No doubt, some members of those organizations would protest and claim the former Reform Party leader is the cause of all the trouble.
Such is today’s Canada, where the flying time between Calgary and Toronto is roughly the same as between London and Moscow, and the sense of east-west cultural dislocation is at times similar. As Rudyard Kipling determined, the twain shall never meet “till earth and sky stand presently at God’s great judgment seat.”
This doesn’t mean easterners and westerners can’t get along. Heavens no. But what it does illustrate is that maybe having editorial coverage decisions universally made in Hogtown about Cowtown (the author’s outdated terminology), Halifax, St John’s, Yellowknife, or Prince Rupert isn’t helping national unity. It is ridiculous, when you think about it, that anyone believes a vast nation’s residents could have compatible views when key decisions are limited to those perched six degrees south of the 49th parallel within earshot of Buffalo.
But CTV won’t change. Global can’t. The Globe is a Toronto newspaper, and most Postmedia products have become stripped-down satellites condemned to eternally orbit 365 Bloor Street East.
The CRTC is preoccupied with finding novel ways to subsidize broadcasters to maintain a status quo involving breakfast shows. So we can’t expect any changes there, nor can we from the major publishers.
Which leaves the job to the CBC, whose job it has always been to make sure the twain could meet. That makes it fair to assume Manning will be writing for many years to come about Toronto’s mainstream media and misinformation about the West.
(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, a former vice chair of the CRTC and a National Newspaper Award winner.)
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