Grace Kennedy

CivicSearchlight - by Canada's National Observer Search transcripts of municipal meetings across Canada. Find discussions about topics that matter to your community with Canada's National Observer's search tool.

Today we launch Civic Searchlight, a tool for searching local government meeting transcripts across 550 municipalities in Canada.

Access is open for researchers and journalists:

civicsearchlight.nationalobserver.com

A hand-lettered banner in front of a yellow door that reads: Welcome to Hobbiton

A boxed set of Tolkien’s poetry on a wood bookshelf with a flower crown, small sword, and hobbit hole painting.

A copy of The Hobbit on a dining table with a bouquet wrapped in birchbark, a pear upside down cake, a stack of apples, and a charcuterie board.

A completed Lego set of Bag End.

Happy #HobbitDay to those who celebrate! Pics from the weekend’s bi-annual Hobbit Party.

I had a dream I was a reporter working in an intergalactic news agency writing an investigative story on alien poaching and now I need @matthewclaxton.bsky.social to write the story please and thanks.

Hi, fellow reporters!

I'm not seeing this technique as much anymore, so I think we should review "the brutal parenthetical" when writing about people who are objectively terrible.

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There are folks who like to take "sides" in local media, cheering for or against organizations or journalists like they're heroes or villains in the ongoing struggle for truth.

But in B.C., it's more like an ecosystem. There are places you might like less or more, but they all contribute.

Saw your stuff at the fair! Congrats on the v. important wins 🏆

Do I maybe have a novel idea based on this very premise, with the main character eventually being forced to attend council meetings and public hearings to turn her dream into a reality? Is it maybe inspired by hours and hours of watching local council meetings? Who’s to say.

I’m a young woman who inherits/wins a dilapidated house. I make zero rezoning and/or building permit and/or business license applications to the local council while I turn it into a B&B.

We can't even boycott the USA in peace, they're dragging us over the border now.

"elbows up" (tread water while the US coast guard drowns you for fishing in Canada)

It’s the 487 draft emails that really complete the horror.

Personal news: In this morning's newsletter, I announced that I'm leaving FVC (and Overstory Media) at the end of the week.

My reasons include general burnout, personal living circumstances, and the challenges that come with operating a publication, especially one part of a larger media business.

Almost done my second full week of Not Doing Journalism, and let me tell you, sleeping in rocks.

I haven’t totally abandoned FVC though—I spent part of today at the Chilliwack Archives helping figure out how best to archive our work for the future.

Important: Lytton is not "on fire" or "evacuated."

A fire that erupted on June 30 is now being classified as "being held" at six hectares. Which is pretty tiny for a BC wildfire.

There's another wildfire to the north, but it's far from Lytton. Over-dramatizing isn't helpful.

Coastal biomedical labs are bleeding more horseshoe crabs with little accountability Horseshoe crab blood is used to test vaccines around the world. But while Europe has approved a synthetic alternative, biomedical labs are bleeding more crabs from the Atlantic coast.

Doing research for my book today, and came across this absolutely bonkers NPR story on horseshoe crabs, blue blood, and a massive resource exploitation industry.

Hello, FoodSky! I have a relatively simple question about U.S. grocery supply chains that is not really a google question, it's an ask-an-expert question. Literally just one question, could be answered by email or a five-minute phone call. Can anyone point me to someone who could help? For a story.

Thanks Stephen!

You can build a good, sustainable outlet from scratch *very* slowly. But If you're an existing outlet that is failing, it's very, very hard (impossible?) to reverse a decline with the incremental benefits that come from good journalism. The bad legacy economic forces outweigh the good quality forces

My thread did not mention Joti, who was my first real colleague, and not just an editor. Having another reporter felt like such a luxury, and I’m so glad we got to work together. Ditto for Josh and Grace 2—they made FVC a better place to be.

Also, I do have a book coming out—so I am definitely not hanging up my writing hat any time soon. Even though I am officially jobless, I still need to work all next week to finish the edits for my book by the deadline. And I have lots more stories I want to make sure I get out into the world.

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I don’t know what’s next for me yet, other than putting a load of kids clothes in the laundry because we are really running out of pants. But I am so grateful for the time I had at the Fraser Valley Current, and I really hope it won’t be my last time reporting on the valley.

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There were also professional reasons. Although Tyler and I are the face of FVC, we are not its owners. And there were things happening within the company that I could not support. (@timbousquet.bsky.social wrote about some of those issues in his stories on The Coast, another OMG publication.)

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Making the decision to leave The Current was really hard. On the one hand, I loved the work and the community. On the other hand, Tyler and I were doing more than a two-person team’s worth of work. With my husband out of town every other month and two small kids, it was not sustainable.

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Generations: One family's history at the Stave Falls Powerhouse Tour guide Janis Schultz has deep family connections to BC Hydro's Stave Falls dam

I could literally keep going forever, linking stories that I am proud of. So I will stop after this one that came from my baby, the FVC History Edition. It only lasted a year, but I loved having a dedicated look at Fraser Valley history each month. There was so much we hadn’t covered yet.

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Government 101: How does Canada's federal government work? Everything you forgot you knew about federal elections, jurisdiction, and law-making.

Hearing how people used the hubs also led to another joint story by Tyler and myself: Government 101. The social studies class you forgot you needed.

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I always hated elections before, but I really found a lot of pleasure in building these web pages that were actually useful for people. Readers said it actually helped them figure out how they wanted to vote—and what could be more important than that? Journalism clearly preserving democracy.

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The Fraser Valley's 2025 Federal Election Hub How to vote, candidate lists, and more on the federal election in Langley, Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Mission and the rest of the Fraser Valley

We also did the tedious, gouge-your-eyes-out work of creating news you can use, especially during elections. (This is where sitting at the desk comes in.) For the last three elections I created local election hubs—which were a trial due to their finicky internal links.

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Community, competition, and joy: Preparing for the Chilliwack Fair For generations, Chilliwack women have been entering their baking, produce, and flowers into the Chilliwack Fair's home and garden exhibits.

Of course, my time at FVC wasn’t all doom and gloom. The beauty of The Current was that we not only produced really important, high-quality investigations and features, but we also got to write goofy little local stories, like how to win at the Chilliwack Fair.

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Death on the tracks: Chilliwack's rail fatality rate is among the worst in Canada In the last 40 years, more than 120 people have been killed by trains in the Fraser Valley; nearly half of those deaths have been in Chilliwack

Speaking of background knowledge: I am proud of my investigation into railway deaths in the valley. With help from my train-fanatic husband, I was able to map 123 recorded railway deaths in the region. The maps and data showed Chilliwack was one of the deadliest railway cities in the country.

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Sumas Lake, the Nooksack River, and the historic roots of a 21st Century disaster Sumas Lake once covered much of the Fraser Valley's fertile farmland. This is the story of how it disappeared, how it could re-appear, and some of the challenge

We also won a Webster for our reporting on the return of Sumas Lake and the historic roots of the disaster. That story was a case of the right people being in the right place at the right time. Tyler had the background on the Nooksack River, I had a history of Sumas Lake open on my desk.

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