All the Cool Things Going on at The Rover

If you’re reading this, odds are you’re feeling a bit down about the state of the world right now.

We certainly are. We’re not exactly surprised by the US election results, but we are shocked nonetheless. We’re concerned at the thought of what this means for women, the LGBTQ+ community and racialized Americans. What this means for Gazans, and Ukrainians. What this means for us, north of the US border.

We’re angry, too. 

Anger is a misunderstood emotion. It gets a bad wrap. What it means, at its base level, is a perception of injustice, of unmet needs, of something going against what we believe we can reasonably expect. Given the circumstances, all those feelings are justified. 

But anger is wasted if it is not channelled into something constructive, into a means to meet the injustice of the moment — that’s what we’re telling ourselves. As the saying goes, “don’t get angry: get busy.”

We’re taking that to heart, and we hope you do too. We’ve got a few things on the go behind the scenes, that you may or may not have heard about. This seemed like a good time to share a little more about them, to get the momentum going, to get buy-in from the people we are accountable to — you. 
If you’re a paid member of The Rover, know that you are a part of this story. You make this possible. And if you’re a casual reader/newsletter subscriber, know that this is for you, too. Thanks for following us on this journey. We’ve got lots of work to do.

Support your local troublemakers: become a Rover member today!

Series on the Justice System with L’actualité

A few months back, we were awarded a $10,000 grant to co-author a huge investigative piece on Quebec’s judicial system alongside Hal Newman and L’actualité magazine. 

So far, Hal has secured us a treasure trove of documents through the province’s access to information laws. We’ve been interviewing and shadowing legal aid lawyers, suspected criminals, victims of violent crime and a who’s who of workers inside our (extremely complicated) legal system. 

If all goes well, we should start writing the piece in January and — because we’re working with a magazine — we’ll probably publish by next spring. It feels like an eternity from now but I don’t know that anything similar has been published in Quebec in the past decade. 

Illegal Dumping Plot Continues to Thicken

The Rover’s months-long investigation into illegal dumping on Mohawk territory has set off a chain of events that could end with a rather large trucking company facing criminal charges.

Two sources with direct knowledge of the criminal investigation into the Kanesatake dumping scheme say detectives are gathering evidence against Nexus Construction for violations of the Fisheries Act. These could lead to over $1 million in fines and a possible criminal conviction with jail time. Although prison is unlikely, for the alleged perpetrators, the mere fact that it’s on the table shows how seriously the government is (suddenly) taking this. 

These developments, we were told, are possible because of photo evidence taken by Rover photographer Peter McCabe, our dogged reporting, but mostly because of the courage of so many Mohawk whistleblowers who came forward to uncover the dumping.

The flip side is that many of the other people facing legal problems for their alleged involvement may actually be victims themselves. Some of those who owned properties where the dumping occurred may have been duped by truckers with fake manifests or, in some cases, their own relatives. 

We’ll continue to follow this wherever it takes us and it’s important that you, the reader, know that this was only possible because of your financial support. Journalism: it gets shit done.

The End of The Midnight Choir — and New Podcasts Upcoming!

You might have noticed that we’ve stopped putting out episodes of the podcast we launched earlier this year, The Midnight Choir. It was an experiment of ours in our larger plan to break into multimedia content production. In its roughly 25-episode run, we learned a lot about what works well in a low-budget, local news analysis podcast, and what doesn’t. 

Based on that experience, our podcast producer Isaac Peltz felt like The Midnight Choir’s format didn’t make the most of the time and energy they can put into the project. They proposed an investigative format podcast, which would tie in better with our stated mandate of producing investigative journalism. 

Since bringing The Midnight Choir to a close, Isaac’s been hard at work on a new podcast, with a new name and a new format, that we’re very excited to present to you when the time is right. Peltz will work with Gabrielle Brassard-Lecours — who co-founded Pivot and Ricochet Media — for the project. Stay tuned for that!

We’re also glad to announce that our journalism fellow Natalia Rivero Gómez and Peltz are working on a podcast about Montreal’s community of Latin American musicians and how they’re using their art to create a new home in their chosen country. Having heard a few clips, we can confidently say it’s unique, touching, and oozes with rhythm.

Growing Our New Instagram

Meta shut down Canadian news content on Facebook and Instagram, which was a huge bummer. It effectively cancelled out all the work we had done growing our social media presence, particularly our Instagram account which was starting to take off. 

But we got inspired by La Converse and Pivot, two great local publications you should have on your radar, who created new Instagram accounts to try to circumvent the ban, so far to great success. The trick is to not use words that could out us as producers of journalistic content and to emphasize the community aspect of the project, and so far it’s working. 

Follow us at @therover.community, where you can keep up with our work and find behind-the-scenes content, memes, made-for-social short videos, and more!

And, since we effectively copied our friends, we have to encourage you to follow La Converse (@communauteconverse) and Pivot (@pivot.communaute). Both do great work and deserve all the support they can get. 

The Misfits of Confederation Series

Our essay series exploring themes of belonging/alienation in so-called Montreal/Quebec/Canada, which we’ve decided to name The Misfits of Confederation Series, is still open and accepting pitches. It’s an effort to create a home for diverse voices to reflect on their experiences in the communities we are a part of. So far, we’ve had some great pieces from Rali Jamali, François Larocque and Diamond Yao who, through their submissions, demonstrate the kind of eclecticism we want the series to embody. 

We do receive more pitches than we are able to accommodate, so please don’t be discouraged if we don’t accept yours, and do consider us for another pitch in the future. 

Now is a good time for a bit of a disclaimer: we receive a lot of emails — pitches, story leads to follow up on, comments about past articles, accusations of radical left-wing extremism, all kinds of stuff. We do read everything, and try to respond to as much as we can, but there are phases when we’re bad at responding, usually because we’re swamped dealing with something like a grant application or some other big-picture issue. We’re sorry if we let one of your emails go unanswered, and we encourage you to send us another. Pitches go unresponded the most, often because we take a bit of time to think about a lot of them, discuss them as a team, and often decide that we don’t feel we’re the place to publish it. Again, we’re sorry, that’s the part we’re not great at yet. Please do follow up if you don’t hear from us!

Thanks again for joining us on this wild ride.

With love and in solidarity,

Savannah & Chris