Posted by lewww 19 hours ago
Sadly, the Irvings have extremely close ties with both the Liberals [1] and Conservatives [2][3] and are essentially untouchable due to Canada's parliamentary nature.
The NYT has been doing an on-the-ground report on this issue for a couple years now [4][5]
It reminds me of similar stories I heard while growing up from family friends of mine who ran a construction business on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland about how cheap it was to "lobby" and get a personal meeting and photograph with Martin and Harper, and this was after Railgate.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/03/canada...
[1] - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-minister-le...
[2] - https://nsadvocate.org/2020/09/15/big-win-for-the-irvings-in...
[3] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/pcs-criticized-...
[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/magazine/canada-brain-dis...
[5] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/world/canada/irving-famil...
> He also warned that some patients' blood work showed elevated levels for compounds found in herbicides such as glyphosate, and said more testing should be done to rule out environmental toxins, including the neurotoxin BMAA, which is produced by blue-green algae.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/new-brunswick-n...
This is an odd sentence to me, I assume there’s some reasoning under there that makes sense to the writer, but it doesn’t follow to me. It feels ‘just so’ to me, like there more to this than simply they can’t do anything because parliament.
In a province like NB where most politicians from both parties either solicits donations from Irving or are former Irving careerists(eg. the former Premier Higgs who was Irving's CFO), it gives Irving's leadership an inordinate amount of power.
My relative who owns a construction business would do something similar in Punjabi heavy ridings in BC as well - he's become fairly prominent in the Gurdawara and Mandir circuit, and because most older Punjabi Canadian voters don't really follow English language news (and in some cases cannot even speak English), they tend to defer to the candidate and party that the Gurdawara or Mandir committee makes a hukumnama for. In ridings across much of BC, there are enough of these kinds of Punjabi voters (Sikh and Hindu) that MPs will try to co-opt these committees to become their de facto enforcers for the community.
Eric Adams in NYC used similar immigrant machine politics which landed him on the FBI radar, because the old country's intel organizations continue to monitor their diasporas, and oftentimes leverage them tactically, which led him to being caught in the dragnet due to two separate investigations into Turkish [0] and Chinese [1] influence ops in NYC.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/nyregion/eric-adams-brian...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/nyregion/adams-china-camp...
Can't you unelect the MPs? Doesn't the paper thin margins increase those odds? Honestly, it doesn't sound like the issue is a parliamentry system, but rather people either aren't aware of the issues (media), or have decided (wrongly or rightly) not to care. Either way I still don't get how that's the parliamentry nature as much as it's the people's. That's kind of the point of these systems.
I don't know enough about Candaian Punjabi dispora to comment about the other stuff.
All MPs in NB need to kiss the ring, otherwise they'll face a well funded challenger.
Furthermore, 1 out of every 7 NBers are employed by JDI and Irving Oil.
> Either way I still don't get how that's the parliamentry nature as much as it's the people's. That's kind of the point of these systems
The ability to threaten a no-confidence motion means individual MPs can have an outsized impact on the executive branch.
But the doctor in the OP explicitly pointed out that they had increased levels of glyphosate in their blood:
> He also warned that some patients' blood work showed elevated levels for compounds found in herbicides such as glyphosate, and said more testing should be done to rule out environmental toxins, including the neurotoxin BMAA, which is produced by blue-green algae.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/new-brunswick-n...
Just because glyphosate is everywhere doesn't mean it can't be concentrated in a particular place.
To be clear I'm not taking a stand for the glyphosate argument at all. I just don't think your line of reasoning is a fair counterargument in this case
"Melissa Nicholson said her 59-year-old mother, who has suffered for four years with a neurological disorder, received test results indicating she had levels of glyphosate in her body that were 47 times higher than the acceptable level."
This is bizarre. Either she lives right next to a farm that's spraying it, and she's getting it blown into an open window in her house where she's breathing it, and then immediately went for a blood test... or she's somehow ingesting it in/around her house (like from a bottle of Roundup that keeps getting splashed on something she's ingesting).
Commercial forestry at JD Irving's scale largely died out in much of the US excluding Maine (where it is also has inordinate political power [1][2]).
[0] - https://www.conservationcouncil.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/0...
[1] - https://themainemonitor.org/maines-future-with-irving/
[2] - https://mainebiz.biz/article/the-irving-influence-a-look-at-...
Additionally, Industrial scale lumber harvesting uses magnitudes more Glyphosate than a home gardener or your local HOA.
i do think we have to think hard about how we want to deal with the rapid expansion of FNDs and social contagion.
The article ends in a heart breaking way. The one woman is applying for MAID. I wonder if she had better care if she could have been properly diagnosed and treated. Instead, she is going to try to end her life.
I think there's a real indictment here about how liberal Canada's MAID program is which the article glosses over.
> The couple waited eight months to get important test results from Marrero, Strickland said, as April's condition worsened. Soon Strickland could no longer manage her care. But to get her a place in assisted living he needed a letter of support from Marrero. "I think I waited four months for that letter," Strickland recalled. "I kept phoning and asking."
just sounds like medical malpractice. You shouldn't keep five hundred patients hanging if you can't handle five hundred. Makes all the talk about being empathetic and caring sound like bullshit. I feel bad for those who are probably misdiagnosed but refuse to get a second opinion thanks to the successful mental subjugation.