''Canada's National Observer'' (CNO) is a news website that features daily news, analysis and opinion on energy, climate, politics, and social issues. Its owner, Observer Media Group, is a certified B Corporation. By 2015, CNO had a Vancouver office and later opened offices in Ottawa and Toronto.

History

In its 2016

Kickstarter Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...

campaign, CNO described the journalism it set out to do as a "dramatic new series about the world's fight to beat climate change." The original team included Charles Mandel, Elizabeth McSheffrey, Bruce Livesey, Sandy Garossino, Jenny Uechi, Mike De Souza, Valentina Ruiz Leotaud, and Bruno De Bondt, with Linda Solomon Wood as editor-in-chief." The campaign crowdsourced $70,863 from 784 backers. The 2016 Kickstarter campaign listed issues that CNO's investigative journalists would cover, including the role of corporations that impede change, climate policies related to the 2015

Paris Agreement The Paris Agreement (french: Accord de Paris), often referred to as the Paris Accords or the Paris Climate Accords, is an international treaty on climate change. Adopted in 2015, the agreement covers climate change mitigation, adaptation, and ...

food security Food security speaks to the availability of food in a country (or geography) and the ability of individuals within that country (geography) to access, afford, and source adequate foodstuffs. According to the United Nations' Committee on World ...

, the

oil sands Oil sands, tar sands, crude bitumen, or bituminous sands, are a type of unconventional petroleum deposit. Oil sands are either loose sands or partially consolidated sandstone containing a naturally occurring mixture of sand, clay, and wate ...

hydraulic fracturing in Canada Fracking in Canada was first used in Alberta in 1953 to extract hydrocarbons from the giant Pembina oil field, the biggest conventional oil field in Alberta, which would have produced very little oil without fracturing. Since then, over 170,000 ...

, and

animal welfare Animal welfare is the well-being of non-human animals. Formal standards of animal welfare vary between contexts, but are debated mostly by animal welfare groups, legislators, and academics. Animal welfare science uses measures such as longevit ...

. The centrepiece of CNO's launch was Bruce Livesey's May 4, 2015 article, "How Canada made the Koch brothers rich.". On January 1, 2016, CNO published the first in a special series of articles on the

Great Bear Rainforest The Great Bear Rainforest is a temperate rain forest on the Pacific coast of British Columbia, Canada comprising 6.4 million hectares. It is part of the larger Pacific temperate rainforest ecoregion, which is the largest coastal temperate ra ...

in partnership with Tides Canada, Teck, and Vancity. In a 2016 article, ''

National Post The ''National Post'' is a Canadian English-language broadsheet newspaper available in several cities in central and western Canada. The paper is the flagship publication of Postmedia Network and is published Mondays through Saturdays, with ...

'' columnist

Terence Corcoran Terence "Terry" Dollard Corcoran (born November 6, 1942) is columnist and comment editor for the Financial Post section of the Toronto-based '' National Post''. Biography and works Born in Montreal, Quebec, Corcoran received a Bachelor of Jour ...

described a "newspaper war" between the

Postmedia Network Postmedia Network Canada Corp. (also known as Postmedia Network, Postmedia News or Postmedia) is a Canadian media conglomerate consisting of the publishing properties of the former Canwest, with primary operations in newspaper publishing, new ...

and the ''

Toronto Star The ''Toronto Star'' is a Canadian English-language broadsheet daily newspaper. The newspaper is the country's largest daily newspaper by circulation. It is owned by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary of Torstar Corporation and par ...

''. He criticized ''Torstar'''s "series of personal and corporate attacks" against Postmedia, in particular CNO reporter Bruce Livesey's massive "5,000-word take down" of Postmedia. Livesey's article was published in both the CNO and in the ''Star''. Corcoran said Livesey was "a master of the inappropriate juxtaposition of fact and conclusion" and called the CNO a "left-wing Vancouver online magazine". In October 2017, CNO teamed up with ''The Toronto Star'', ''

Global News Global News is the news and current affairs division of the Canadian Global Television Network. The network is owned by Corus Entertainment, which oversees all of the network's national news programming as well as local news on its 21 owned-an ...

'', the Michener Awards Foundation, the

University of Victoria The University of Victoria (UVic or Victoria) is a public research university located in the municipalities of Oak Bay and Saanich, British Columbia, Canada. The university traces its roots to Victoria College, the first post-secondary insti ...

-led Corporate Mapping ProjectThe Corporate Mapping Project
brings together a large team of academic and community-based researchers, and advisors from environmental, Indigenous, labour and independent media groups. The project is hosted by the

, and jointly led by UVic, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the

Parkland Institute The Parkland Institute is an Alberta-wide, non-partisan research institute, situated within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta. The Institute studies economic, social, cultural, and political issues using the intellectual approach of ...

, together with a larger group of partners." and four journalism schools for "the largest collaborative journalism project in Canadian history." The "Price of Oil" project was created for the purpose of "tracking oil industry influence in partnership with investigative journalism students from across the country."

Notes

References

{{Reflist Canadian news websites Online magazines published in Canada Political magazines published in Canada Magazines established in 2015 Magazines published in Vancouver News magazines published in Canada B Lab-certified corporations

History

See also

Notes

References