Write what you know best, aspiring writers are often told. For Lauren Watson, that was once a road tale worthy of Kerouac that she penned as a freelancer for the National Post in 2013 about her rock climbing adventures while living out of her old Volvo station wagon. Writing was something Watson aspired to after graduating from the University of Guelph in 2009 with a degree in geography, and she even studied journalism briefly at Ryerson University in Toronto. Climbing won out for a decade, however, as she moved to “Canada’s climbing Mecca” of Squamish BC, founded the Ground Up climbing gym and taught the intricacies of rope climbing. Watson couldn’t resist the lure of journalism, however, and despite the profession’s hard times lately she sold her business last year and enrolled in the fabled master’s program at Columbia University in New York City. It could hardly have gone better, as she reported from Rwanda for her thesis, won the Jean Anderson Award for Climate Reporting for a story on carbon capture in Kenya, and was recently named Delacorte Fellow at the school’s long-publishing Columbia Journalism Review.

One of her first articles for the CJR published last week pulled an ugly scab off a long-festering Squamish wound, and since the story involved news on Facebook, it was picked up by popular media websites NiemanLab and Mediagazer.

The story began a couple of years ago during the last municipal election campaign in Squamish, when a spate of mysterious Facebook pages began to show up in the feeds of residents. “The pages presented as community organizations: Squamish Now, Squamish Voices, Squamish Forward,” wrote Watson. “Initially, they contained mundanities—local events, reports of dog poop on the hiking trails. Over the course of a year, however, they shifted in tone, with outraged posts about the municipal council and candidates in the upcoming election.” Local elections in a town of 23,000 an hour north of Vancouver might normally pass unnoticed, but these are hardly normal times in Squamish, which is the location of a proposed $1.6 billion liquid natural gas plant and seaport. The plant would process natural gas shipped by pipeline from northern BC for export by supertanker down Howe Sound, past Vancouver and out to the wider world. It has been in the works for almost a decade, but has received opposition from not just environmentalists but also nervous locals. Environmental and safety concerns have been compounded by a long-running housing crisis in Squamish, which is a bedroom community not just for Vancouver but also for the Whistler ski resort farther north. Woodfibre LNG’s proposed solution of a massive cruise ship to house plant and port workers, which has been dubbed a “floatel,” is innovative yet contentious for the disruption it might bring.

The National Observer reported in early 2022 that right-wing operatives masquerading as local grassroots groups on Facebook were attacking local politicians across Canada. Squamish Mayor Karen Elliott was called “corrupt and incompetent” on the Facebook page Squamish Voices, which the Observer linked to Canada Proud. It had been founded in 2019 by Jeff Ballingall, the former digital director on Erin O’Toole’s campaign for the federal Conservative Party leadership, through his Toronto-based strategic communications company Mobilize Media Group. Ballingall had similarly launched Ontario Proud in 2016, noted the Observer, and it raised more than a half million dollars from developers and construction companies to run a Facebook campaign credited with helping Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives win the 2018 Ontario provincial election. Squamish Voices had bought at least $15,900 worth of ads targeted at Elliott and Squamish city council members in the past year, reported the Observer, but there was no indication of where the money came from.

This has been happening in small towns too, like Squamish or Vaughan, where BC and Ontario Proud microtargeted a hate campaign at Karen Elliott and Marilyn Iafrate. https://t.co/FqS9dkn8db

— Kent Clark (@kentcclark) August 3, 2022

A more extensive investigation by The Breach just before that fall’s election chronicled what it called “an ‘extreme example’ of big-money meddling in small-town campaigns.” Squamish residents were being hit with “a tsunami of manipulative online messages in advance of a critical election,” it noted, adding that councillors who voted against a proposed high-end housing development had been attacked online. Squamish Voices, it reported, had “escalated its political attacks by making an anonymous and unsubstantiated sexual assault allegation against a mayoral candidate who has refused donations and meetings from developers.” The Breach found that the group had spent up to $78,000 on Facebook ads since its founding the previous year, which was well in excess of the legal spending limit for municipal elections of just over $1,000. It also found that the Woodfibre LNG project was behind the website Squamish Forward, which “presented itself as a group of concerned residents trying to ‘advocate for a bigger and better Squamish.’” The website disclosed no relationship with Woodfibre LNG, and the company denied any ongoing involvement with the website beyond providing it with some start-up funding. “I terminated that support, recognizing that the organization had shifted to become more partisan,” stated Woodfibre LNG President Christine Kennedy. The story was also picked up by The Tyee, which noted that “the majority of Squamish Voices’ ads railed against council’s supposed failure to invest in housing, transit and parking—hot-button topics in a community that has grown 22 per cent since 2016.”

The story does not seem to have been reported in Canada’s mainstream media, which was then locked in a dispute with Facebook owner Meta over the Online News Act that would be passed in 2023. Mainstream coverage of Woodfibre LNG has been much more positive, especially in the major daily newspapers published by Postmedia Network, which has long been paid by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers to promote energy projects. Its Vancouver Province ran a paid campaign for the Woodfibre project and its National Post practically salivates over LNG’s potential to make BC an “oil and gas powerhouse.”

That was then, as Watson noted in her CJR article aptly headlined “The Before and After.” The 2022 election returned the incumbent Squamish city council, which “given the swirl of falsehoods that preceded it, represented a journalism triumph.” It was one that depended on social media, however, as Facebook had been both the source of disinformation and the antidote to it by carrying links to factual investigative articles. Since Meta blocked links to news on Facebook and Instagram last year to avoid paying tens of millions a year to publishers under the Online News Act, there is now little opportunity to counter disinformation on its popular platforms. “They went from blocking the news to facilitating the bamboozling of the news,” Tyee founder David Beers told Watson. “If you were an old-fashioned Orwellian dictator, you couldn’t come up with a more clever plan.”

With the residents of Squamish again being bombarded by campaigning, this time for a contentious provincial election, and the Green Party calling for a halt to the Squamish LNG project over health concerns, Facebook users have had to seek the truth elsewhere. “There is news to be had, but it requires that my neighbors seek it out more intentionally than they’ve grown accustomed to,” wrote Watson. “Readers who could once comment on the Facebook posts of their local news organization—generating discussion and story ideas—now have nowhere online to go; Squamish politicians have lost that line of sight to their constituents.” The upside is that many have quit social media in disgust and local candidates are increasingly meeting voters in person for real conversations. “Still, pseudo-journalistic pages remain on Facebook,” noted Watson, “posting press releases and promulgating unsubstantiated claims.”

For a small town, Squamish is fairly well-served by local news media, including the weekly newspaper Squamish Chief, which is named after the 700-metre granitic dome Stawamus Chief that looms over town, and the online-only Squamish Reporter. The Local News Project at Ryerson, which as I documented in my 2023 book, The Postmedia Effect, was influential in bringing the $595 million federal news media bailout passed in 2019, pumps out regular reports showing how “news deserts” and “news poverty” are sweeping the nation. These reports, which have greatly exaggerated the scale of the local news collapse, have largely missed the counterbalancing explosion of independent online news media outlets, which according to one count numbered 270 by 2023, of which 191 focused on local news. Unfortunately, these online publications relied heavily on the free distribution provided by Facebook to grow their audiences, and without it they are hard pressed to compete for attention. That’s just the way the MSM likes it, of course.

News Media Canada, the newspaper industry association which lobbied hard for the media bailout that was extended until 2029 after Meta blocked news on Facebook, cheekily campaigns on the slogan “Choose Truth.” The truth is that they can’t handle the truth, or choose not to. If they had their way, nobody else would, either.

Marc Edge is a journalism researcher and author who lives in Ladysmith, BC. His books and articles can be found online at www.marcedge.com.