Comment by patcon
13 hours ago
I grew up in New Brunswick. It is a strange place politically.
I find it wild that the BBC never mentioned the most glaring underbelly of this:
New Brunswicks most significant employer for the past 100 years is Irving Oil & Irving Paper and Irving Forestry. They are different arms of a privately held family-run business, run by the descendants of the original founder (whose records are not as public as a traded company), in charge of the main industries of the province. They owned every newspaper in the province, and are known to be adversarial to any community paper, starting new papers just to drive out of business the small upstarts they don't own -- I've seen it play out in my community. People are literally afraid to criticize this family publicly, because they fund SO MUCH of the nonprofit sector. If you are trying to get a project off the ground, you can't look sideways at them or your project will be buried. And their papers certainly won't speak kindly of your criticism.
And most glaringly, one of their ex-Vice Presidents was premier of the province during this time.
So there is an extra level of concern that some locals have about the optics of the province shutting down the research.
The Irving family is highly manipulative of political affairs, and imho have held the province back for decades (e.g. influencing what schools get funded/built, to create the working stock that support their businesses, etc)
This was one of the more surprising things to me when I lived in Canada: that there is so much of this. Depending on which region you are in you will either have state monopolies on the strangest things and/or a couple of families that have their fingers in just about every pie. And don't get me started on the telecommunications sector.
I wonder if this is largely a function of geography and population. Do we see similar strange things in countries like Australia, Sweden, etc.? Kind of like a small town effect at the national scale.
Sweden has a fair amount of it - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systembolaget and (formerly) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoteket as examples.
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I think it goes back all the way to the founding days of Canada, essentially the Hudson Bay Company.
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The Family That Owns New Brunswick: The House of Irving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9I-HY3wfVM
After reading about the mysterious firing and payoff of glysophate studying scientists it seems obvious what stone is going unturned here.
They are very litigious.
They are also strangely generous. They fund a lot of good, as they know how to conceive of "good". They are more like mostly-benevolent-but-controlling royalty of sorts. Including the "everyone has an opinion" part of royalty. Whether they are good or bad for the region, there are polarizing views.
I understand the general vibe as a learned helplessness of sorts.
I mean look at the number of industry apologists in this thread alone.
Strikingly similar to the reaction around cancer clusters, including the witch doctors who still think “mass hysteria” is a thing.
It’s not always environmental, but it’s usually environmental and weird to not start with that assumption.