• Fearless Reporting on the Climate Crisis & Corporate Power

    Fearless Reporting on the Climate Crisis & Corporate Power

    Fearless Reporting on the Climate Crisis & Corporate Power From exposing pulp mill politics to investigating 'green' hydrogen projects, Joan's investigative work holds corporations and governments accountable while amplifying community voices fighting for climate and environmental justice.

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  • From Africa to Atlantic Canada: Stories of People & Places

    From Africa to Atlantic Canada: Stories of People & Places

    From Africa to Atlantic Canada: Stories of People & Places With over 30 years of international experience, Joan brings unique perspectives from seven African countries to her reporting on environmental challenges, public transport, and community activism in Canada.

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  • That Matter: Environmental Justice & Corporate Accountability

    That Matter: Environmental Justice & Corporate Accountability

    Discover Joan Baxter's award-winning books, including "The Mill: Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest" and "Seven Grains of Paradise," alongside her investigative journalism exposing environmental issues and corporate capture across Canada and Africa.

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Sign for Northern Pulp at the entrance to the Pictou County pulp mill declaring Northern Pulp is a Paper Excellence company. Photo from 2021.

This article was first published by the Halifax Examiner on August 25, 2025. 

Article summary:
• Over the lifetime of the Northern Pulp mill, Nova Scotia lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of incompetent, naive, and complicit governments.
• As Northern Pulp’s billionaire Indonesian owners have opted not to build the new mill and instead allow the company to go into bankruptcy, 420,000 acres of Nova Scotia forest land are up for grabs.
• A shadowy company called Macer Forest Holdings has placed an under-valued bid of $104 million on the land.
• A Macer-affiliated company called Acadian Timber looks poised to log that land.
• One of Acadian’s board members, paid $56,000 annually, is Karen Oldfield, the interim president and CEO of Nova Scotia Health.
• Maurice Chiasson, a lawyer who represented the province in the Northern Pulp insolvency hearings, is now representing Macer Forest Holdings in the very same court process.
• As the government is mandated to protect 20% of the province and is far short of meeting that obligation, buying back the Northern Pulp land presents an inexpensive opportunity to meet that goal.

It was clear from the start of Northern Pulp’s insolvency case filed in the British Columbia Supreme Court six months after the Northern Pulp mill closed, that the outcome was never going to be good for Nova Scotia.

Spoiler alert: the outcome is not only not good, it’s downright bad.

Legal giveaways and concessions by successive generations of Nova Scotian governments to the various large foreign owners of the pulp mill meant Northern Pulp had all kinds of legal recourse to punish Nova Scotia for not amending the 2015 Boat Harbour Act, and not allowing the mill to continue to pump toxic effluent into Boat Harbour, which had despoiled the Pictou Landing First Nation estuary for half a century.

When Northern Pulp failed to come up with a viable new effluent treatment system that passed environmental muster by the deadline of 2020, the mill had to shut down.

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A giant white pickup truck with raised suspension and massive wheels is parked in front of a small black car on a gravel parking lot.

This article was first published by the Halifax Examiner on October 28, 2024. It is the third and final article in a series looking at the ongoing trend in North America for ever bigger and taller pickups and SUVs, and some of the problems these pose both for human health and safety, and for the health of the planet. In this article we look at what governments in Canada could, at least in theory, do to tackle the bloat. Part 1 is available here and Part 2 is available here.

For 10 years Ben MacLeod watched from afar what was happening in his home town of Halifax, and was pleased to see HRM Council undertaking “progressive initiatives” on traffic safety, and the “gradual construction of the bike lane network.”

“It was exciting to see them moving in the right direction,” he said in an interview.

MacLeod, an urban planner and sustainable transportation advocate, had moved to Hong Kong in 2012, and in 2022 moved back to Halifax, where he grew up.

“I was excited to come back to see what’s changed,” he said.

What MacLeod didn’t bargain on, what made him “a little bit shocked” when he got home, however, was the “design trends” in the vehicles on the roads, and how prevalent big vehicles had become.

“Eighty-six percent of new vehicles in Canada are now SUVs [sports utility vehicles] and pickup trucks, which is shocking,” said MacLeod, who doesn’t own a car and mostly gets around on foot or on bicycle.

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A large black and shiny GMC pickup in a parking lot, with a smaller silver Tucson SUV on its right. Behind the pickup, underneath the large green letters saying "Sobeys" is the entrance to the store.

This article was first published by the Halifax Examiner on October 25, 2024. 

This is the second in a series of three articles looking at the ongoing trend in North America for ever bigger and taller pickups and SUVs, and some of the problems these pose both for human health and safety, and for the health of the planet. In this article we look at what has driven the trend, and what it means for the climate, the environment, and our cities. Part 1 is available here, and part 3 here. 

In March 2022, Lisa Roberts – a former journalist and NDP MLA in Nova Scotia – wrote an opinion piece for the erstwhile Atlantic Canadian Saltwire media network. Her piece was called ‘Trail of tragedy follows pickup trucks.’

In it, Roberts said she winced when she heard about yet another pickup truck striking a cyclist in Halifax, sending the cyclist to hospital with “life-threatening injuries.” That reminded her of two other collisions that “shattered families” the previous year, both involving a pickup truck colliding with a pedestrian or a smaller vehicle.

“Larger, heavier vehicles mean more serious injuries and not for those in the larger, heavier vehicle,” Roberts wrote. “And trucks have gotten larger without being more functional. My grandfather’s pickup truck, which hauled firewood regularly, was easier to get into and had a longer bed.”

“For the sake of our health and safety, we have to talk about trucks,” Roberts urged.

So far, it appears Roberts’ plea for a meaningful conversation about large pickups has gone largely unheeded in this part of Canada.

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A new and very shiny large silver-grey pickup in a car dealer lot, with a massive chrome grille, and the letters, GMC, in red in the middle of the grille.

This article was originally published by the Halifax Examiner on October 24, 2024. It is the first of a three-part series. Part 2 is available here, and part 3 here. 

Why this series

Just after the turn of the millennium, in 2002, American journalist Keith Bradsher wrote a book called High and Mighty. SUVs: the most dangerous vehicles and how they got that way.

The book begins: “Sport utility vehicles have taken over America’s roads during the last decade, and are on their way to taking over the world’s roads. The four-wheel-drive vehicles offer a romantic vision of outdoor adventure to deskbound baby boomers.”

Bradsher continues:

Yet the proliferation of SUVs has created huge problems. Their safe image is an illusion. They roll over too easily, killing and injuring occupants at an alarming rate, and they are dangerous to other road users, inflicting catastrophic damage to cars that they hit and posing a lethal threat to pedestrians. Their “green” image is also a mirage, because they contribute far more to smog and global warming … The success of SUVs comes partly from extremely cynical design and marketing decisions by automakers and poorly drafted government regulations. The manufacturers’ market researchers have decided that millions of baby boomers want an adventurous image and care almost nothing about putting others at risk to achieve it, so they have told auto engineers to design vehicles accordingly. The result has been unusually tall, menacing vehicles like the Dodge Durango, with its grille resembling a jungle cat’s teeth and its flared fenders that look like bulging muscles in a savage jaw…

Cadillac, a division of General Motors, rushed the Escalade onto the market in 1998, a little over a year after the Lincoln Navigator went on sale and was an instant hit. To make the Escalade, GM essentially put lots of chrome and optional equipment on a GMC Yukon Tahoe SUV. The Tahoe, in turn, uses the underbody and a lot of other parts from the full-size Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. So Cadillac was essentially taking a [US]$20,000 work truck, tricking it up with lots of chrome, leather seats, and a fancy stereo, and selling it for close to [US]$50,000. This is how automakers have earned enormous profits on full-sized SUVs.

That was 22 years ago.

Since then, everything Bradsher predicted has occurred, possibly even exceeding his gloomy forecast. The vehicles have grown much bigger and even more menacing, and far more numerous, marketed to more and younger demographics. Compared with the front ends of today’s pickups, the grille of the Dodge Durango of yesteryear looks as harmless as a kitten’s nose. In 2024, the best-selling vehicles in the U.S. were the Ford F-series, the Chevy Silverado, and the Ram pickup trucks, with some starting at over $100,000.

In 2023, for every regular passenger car sold in Canada, six trucks — primarily larger pickups, SUVs, and vans — were sold. The same is true in Nova Scotia.

Across North America, road safety and environmental groups have been blowing the whistle on this vehicle bloat for years, and numerous studies show that big vehicles threaten lives and living environments. Even The Economist recently ran a front-page story about big cars and pickups killing Americans. But so far in Canada, regulators don’t seem to be listening.

This series of three articles looks at what is driving the trend for ever bigger and higher pickups and SUVs, and the many reasons this is bad for people, roads, cities, the environment, and the climate. We start by looking at the risks these oversize vehicles pose to other road users.  

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A man with black hair and a beard, wearing a puffy orange jacket with black trim, uses a pink-handled knife to scrape at the shiny bark of a very large yellow birch tree trunk, which is twice his girth.

This article was first published by the Halifax Examiner on December 27, 2024.

It’s a bone-chilling morning near the top of Nuttby Mountain in the Cobequid Hills of northern Nova Scotia. About a dozen people have assembled for a late autumn walk in the woods, or more specifically, for lessons in forest health and human health on the lovely piece of woodland that belongs to their host and guide, David Heatley.

Before heading into the forest, the group gathers around a small campfire, and they exchange thoughts on the toll that post tropical storm Fiona took on this landscape two years ago. The wind-thrown trees are still evident all over these hills.

Heatley speaks about the losses of special forest places, and how these can cause grief. But, he adds philosophically, this is also the life and death cycle in the forest, which never ends.

And with that, Heatley leads the group into the 34 acres of woods he stewards. He takes them to what he calls his “special place,” and starts to list its many sensory gifts.

So begins the lesson on “forest bathing.”

Forest bathing is a concept recognized decades ago in Japan, and while it has many meanings and applications, in short, it is “the simple and therapeutic act of spending time in a forest.”

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Some glass doors with vertical metal handles are obscured by paper on the inside. On either side of the shuttered entrance are grubby off-white tiles, and a metal sign reading "Hudson's Bay Company Incorporated May 1670" and above that, someone has scribbled with marker pen, "Bye colonizers." A planter painted red, yellow, blue and pink is in front of the wall, below the sign.

This conversation was first published by the Halifax Examiner on March 28, 2025.

Private equity firms have been in the news this year.

As I reported here, Canada’s oldest retailer, the iconic Hudson’s Bay Company, has declared bankruptcy and has been liquidating all but six of its 80 stores across the country.

Like so many other retail outlets before it, The Bay succumbed to the private equity buyout-and-bankrupt scourge. The Bay is owned by NRDC, a large U.S. private equity firm owned by real estate mogul Richard Baker, who has “driven a set of coffin nails into The Bay.”

Canada’s new Prime Minister Mark Carney has also been scrutinized for his private equity background. Before becoming leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and then prime minister, Carney spent nearly five years as chair of a private equity firm – Brookfield Assets Management – and there have been criticisms of the way Brookfield operates, and its use of the tax haven of Bermuda for two of its funds.

Many Canadians who are active on the stock market – including Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre – are invested in Brookfield through exchange-traded funds. That’s how pervasive large private equity firms have become.

In a recent report for the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project (CAMP), author Rachel Wasserman laid out some problems with private equity, or more specifically, with “buyout private equity.” The buyout private equity playbook involves the “leveraged buyout,” when a firm borrows heavily to purchase healthy mature businesses, including consolidating or “rolling up” small independent businesses to take control of an entire sector (such as veterinary services, funeral homes).

The playbook includes saddling the acquired company with the debt used to acquire it, increasing profitability by cutting staff and expenses, stripping it of real estate assets if it has any, and renting premises back to the company. Buyout private equity firms profit massively from short-term serial investments, and then flip them, usually to another private equity firm. In some instances, however, their profiteering drives the company into bankruptcy.

Witness the demise of The Bay.

But it’s not just the owners and employees of the private equity firms who are benefiting from this parasitic playbook. Anyone receiving a pension may well be unwittingly complicit in the private equity business. Canada’s Pension Plan and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, for example, are two of the biggest investors in private equity in the world, because it is usually very profitable – even if, sadly and ironically, it often harms workers.

After I reported on the immense economic and social damage that buyout private equity causes, I received a lot of feedback from readers who expressed frustration about the problem, and asked what – if anything – could be done to rein in these firms.

I wanted to know the same thing.

So I got in touch with Jon Shell, chair of Social Capital Partners, an independent Canadian organization that sees extreme wealth inequality and concentrated ownership of assets in Canada as “big problems” it wants to help fix.

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