Starting a business can be a difficult task for every industry, now more than ever. The upfront capital required, real-estate licensing, the infrastructure regulations, fire safety guidelines, the list goes on. Not for the faint of heart. However, there is something amazing about the concept of crafting the perfect product, then aligning that with superb branding and executed by a talented team. Thankfully, this is a positive news story. Where three like-minded entrepreneurs are acting on their passion and motivation to work through adversity and build a business together.
(From Left: Chris Ainsworth, Jeff Robertson and Mark Willoughby)
Broken Spirits recently opened their doors to Calgarians, where you and your friends can enjoy highly refined spirits distilled at their location. Being well aware of these challenging times, Mark, Chris and Jeff, in line with the completion of their testing phase, decided that they wanted to bring some positivity to the wider community and open their doors.
Jeff, Mark and Chris met in 1997 while working together at an Outback Steakhouse in Calgary. Building a strong friendship over twenty years, fast forward to two and a half years ago, they found themselves sitting around a table discussing a common interest to create their own brewery. After some thought and inspiration from some of their favourite gins, their interests pivoted to opening a distillery. Tying all of their experience, technical skills and industry acumen together, they felt confident in moving forward with starting their own brand.
We all love a good origin story. After sipping some beautifully crafted gin and in conversation with Mark and Chris, they offer some additional insight behind starting Broken Spirits Distillery.
“As a trio, we have built it up to where we are today. It has always been more about a partnership, building through adversity and keeping our spirits up, which is where the name Broken Spirits originated. Our focus moving forward is now on comradery and the community here”
Located just off of 36th Street NE and the Trans Canada Highway, now open with reduced hours and capacity straight out of the gate. The team at Broken Spirits is welcoming new customers on select days of the week, specifically Thursday and Friday between 4:00pm to 9:00pm and Saturday 3:00pm to 9:00pm. Until the Alberta Health Service guidelines have been lightened, all bars, breweries and distilleries such as Broken Spirits, will continue to put the focus on customer safety as their top priority.
Like a party we are all invited to, Calgary breweries, bars and distilleries alike are one of my favourite examples of a strong community. As I claim to be no expert on this subject, Mark and Chris speak on what community means to them in the wake of their opening:
“We are a community within the three of us, extending to our families who have shown us a lot of support. In addition to that, we are very fortunate to have the location that chose. Even our parking lot is a community within itself with neighbours like Sunny Cider and Heathens Brewing. Even just blocks away, within the craft district that is building here, Toolshed Brewing and Common Crown brewing are building a community of their own.”
“Since our opening, we have had people coming in, posting on their social media and we have experienced a lot of interest in supporting businesses in this area. That even expands out of our area in the NE, where we have had visits from the broader craft distillery and brewery community in Calgary. It has been clear there is a real push from a group of people with a common goal – wanting to grow the community and the industry here in Calgary.”
Positive feedback is one surefire way to know that it can the right time to hit the ground running with the launch of new products. Fortunately for me as a ‘gin guy’, I had the opportunity to taste the Broken Spirits gin and their spiced sugar cane spirit. Safe to say with the care Jeff has put into the products, these three guys are on to something great. Chris and Mark offer their thoughts on the initial feedback they have received.
“The feedback has been very positive so far. We have experienced a lot of great comments on our branding and product packaging, designed by a local designer, has really captured our vision and created a brand that our community can connect with.”
“We have also been getting really positive feedback on our spirits too. Either mixing it or drinking it straight, hearing customers say they can really connect with the flavours we have instilled in our products. To further that, we have experienced non-gin drinkers simply try our product and end up leaving with a bottle, which is huge.”
If you are like me and you love gin, I would highly recommend visiting the Broken Spirits Distillery location and trying it for yourself. If you are more of a rum connoisseur, don’t forget to try the spiced sugar cane spirit before you go. Looking forward to learning more about the Broken Spirits brand as it continues to grow and I wish Chris, Mark and Jeff the best moving forward.
If you would like to learn more about the Broken Spirits Distillery or to check out the products and merch they have available, visit their website here or on their social media below.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
President Donald Trump said Thursday that changes are coming to his aggressive immigration policies after complaints from farmers and business owners.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote in a social media post Thursday morning. “In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
Later Thursday, Trump made it clear that businesses need workers.
“Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers – they’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great. And we’re going to have to do something about that,” the president said.
He added: “We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have, maybe, what they’re supposed to have.”
Just how Trump may change his approach to immigration enforcement remains unclear, but he said he wants to help farmers and business owners.
“You go into a farm and you look and people, they’ve been there for 20 or 25 years and they work great and the owner of the farm loves them and you’re supposed to throw them out. You know what happens? They end up hiring the criminals that have come in, the murderers from prisons and everything else,” Trump said.
Trump said changes would be coming soon, but gave little detail on how policies could change.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
In a later post on Truth Social, Trump said illegal immigration had destroyed American institutions.
“Biden let 21 Million Unvetted, Illegal Aliens flood into the Country from some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional Nations on Earth — Many of them Rapists, Murderers, and Terrorists. This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” the president wrote. “They have stolen American Jobs, consumed BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in Free Welfare, and turned once idyllic Communities, like Springfield, Ohio, into Third World Nightmares.”
He added that deportations would continue: “I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History. Polling shows overwhelming Public Support for getting the Illegals out, and that is exactly what we will do. As Commander-in-Chief, I will always protect and defend the Heroes of ICE and Border Patrol, whose work has already resulted in the Most Secure Border in American History. Anyone who assaults or attacks an ICE or Border Agent will do hard time in jail. Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”
For years, Canada’s political class sold us on the idea that carbon taxes were clever policy. Not just a tool to cut emissions, but a fair one – tax the polluters, then cycle the money back to regular folks, especially those with thinner wallets.
It wasn’t a perfect system. The focus-group-tested line embraced for years by the Trudeau Liberals made no sense at all: we’re taxing you so we can put more money back in your pocketbooks. What the hell? If you care so much about my taxes being low, just cut them already. Somehow, it took years and years of this line being repeated for its internal contradiction to become evident to all.
Yet, even many strategic conservative minds could see the thinking had internal logic. You could sell it at a town hall. As an editorial team member at an influential news organization when B.C. got its carbon tax in 2008, I bought into the concept too.
And now? That whole model has been thrown overboard, by the very parties had long defended it with a straight face and an arch tone. In both Ottawa and Victoria in 2025, progressive governments facing political survival abandoned the idea of climate policy as a matter of fairness, opting instead for tactical concessions meant to blunt the momentum of their foes.
The result: lower-income Canadians who had grown accustomed to carbon tax rebates as a dependable backstop are waking up to find the support gone. And higher earners? They just got a tidy little gift from the state.
The betrayal is worse in B.C.
This new chart from economist Ken Peacock tells the story. He shared it last week at the B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
What is shows is that scrapping the carbon tax means the poor are poorer. The treasury is emptier.
What about the rich?
Yup, you guessed it: richer.
Scrubbing the B.C. consumer carbon tax leaves the lowest earning 20 percent of households $830 per year poorer, while the top one-fifth gain $959.
“Climate leader” British Columbia’s approach was supposed to be the gold standard: a revenue-neutral carbon tax, accepted by industry, supported by voters, and engineered to send the right price signal without growing the size of government.
That pact broke somewhere along the way.
Instead of returning the money, the provincial government slowly transformed the tax into a $2 billion annual cash cow. And when Mark Carney won the federal election, B.C. Premier David Eby, boxed in by his own pledge, scrapped the tax like a man dropping ballast from a sinking balloon. Gone. No replacement. No protections for those who need them most.
Filling the gas tank, on the other hand, is noticeably cheaper. Of course, if you can’t afford a car that might not be apparent.
Spare a thought for the climate activists who spent 15 years flogging this policy, only to watch it get tossed aside like a stack of briefing notes on a Friday afternoon.
Who could not conclude that the environmental left has been played. For a political movement that prides itself on idealism, it’s a brutal lesson in realpolitik: when power’s on the line, principles are negotiable.
But here’s the thing: maybe the carbon tax model deserved a rethink. Maybe it’s time for a grown-up look at what actually works
With B.C. now reviewing its CleanBC policies, here’s a basic question: what’s working, and what’s not?
A lot of emission reductions in this province didn’t come from government fiat. They were the result of business-led innovation: more efficient technology, cleaner fuels, and capital discipline.
That, plus a hefty dose of offshoring. We’ve pushed our industrial emissions onto other jurisdictions, then shipped the finished goods back without attaching any climate cost. This contradiction particularly helped to fuel the push to dump carbon pricing as a failed solution.
The progressives’ choice was made once the anti-tax arguments could no longer be refuted: to limit losses it would be necessary to deep six an unpopular strand of the overall carbon strategy. This, to save the rest. That’s why policies like the federal emissions cap haven’t also been abandoned.
To give another example, it’s also why British Columbia’s aviation sector is in a flap over the issue of sustainable aviation fuel. Despite years of aspirational policy, low emissions jet fuel blends remain more scarce than a long-haul cabin upgrade. The policy’s designers correctly anticipated that refiners would never be able to meet the imposed demand, and so as an alternative they provided a complex carbon credit trading scheme that will make the cost of flying more expensive. For those with a choice, nearby airport hubs in the United States where these policies do not apply will become an attractive alternative, while remote communities that have no choice in the matter will simply have to eat the cost. (Needless to say, if emissions reduction is your goal this policy isn’t needed anyways, since the decisions that matter in reducing global aviation emissions aren’t made in B.C. and never will be.)
I’m not showing up to bash those who have been genuinely trying to figure things out, and found themselves in a world of policy that is more complicated and unpredictable than they realized. Simply put, the chapter is closing on an era of energy policy naïveté.
The brutally honest action by Eby and Carney to eject carbon taxes for their own political survival could be read as a signal that it’s now okay to have an honest public conversation. Let’s insist on that. For years now, debate has been constrained in part by a particular form of linguistic tyranny, awash in terminology designed to cow the questioner into silence. “So you have an issue with clean policies, do you? What kind of dirty reprobate are you?” “Only a monster doesn’t want their aviation fuel to be sustainable.” Etc. Now is the moment to move on from that, and widen the field of discourse.
Ditching bad policy is also a signal that just maybe a better approach is to start by embracing a robust sense of the possibilities for energy to improve lives and empower all of the solutions needed for tomorrow’s problems. Because that’s the only way the conversation will ever get real.
Slogans, wildly aspirational goal setting and the habit of refusing to acknowledge how the world really works have been getting us nowhere. Petroleum products will continue to obey Yergin’s Law: oil always gets to market. China and India will grow their economies using reliable energy they can afford, having recently approved the construction of the most new coal power plants in a decade amid energy security concerns. Japan, which has practically worn itself out pleading for natural gas from Canada, isn’t waiting for the help of last-finishing nice guys to guarantee energy security: today, they are buying 8% of their LNG imports from the evil Putin regime.
Meanwhile, we’re in the worst of both worlds: our courageous carbon tax policy that was positioned as trailblazing not just for B.C. residents but for the world as a whole – climate leadership! – is gone, the poorest are puzzling over why things feel even more expensive, and nobody knows what comes next.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
