Corre Tull, chair of the the BC Watershed Security Coalition, explores the challenges facing Canadian watersheds in our Feature Interview. Canada's watersheds face intensifying demands from industry, including new data centres, while Donald Trump makes unsettling comments about US desires for Canadian water.

Corre believes that to protect jobs and the natural water so central to Canadian identity, Canada needs to think of watersheds as key infrastructure and give them active monitoring and management plans to maintain them.

This Week Below the Fold looks at a couple important new stories that didn't make national headlines:

• Tom checks in with Farouk Karim, Quebec political analyst, about polling shifts after the CAQ and Quebec Liberals picked new leaders and Quebec Solidaire put a focus on affordability
• Nikki takes a look at how Canadians' data security concerns are showing up in responses to the Canada census and the BC Conservatives' leadership race

Love It Or Heave It is about something you love and want to keep, or something you'd like to heave and forever forget. This week:

• Tom loves that he called it right three months ago when he predicted the Ontario Liberal Party old guard would try to defeat Nate Erskine-Smith by any means necessary
• And Nikki is also loving the BC Conservatives claim of 42,000 members doesn't appear to be true, something she predicted a few shows ago

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Josh Bizjak, Douglas Caldwell Layton Foundation executive director, talks with Left East to West about his organization’s movement-building work, the varying themes and challenges in different regions of the country -- and trying to build a national story from them.

A major effort of the DCLF is their series of annual speaker and social events in eight cities across the country. Their region-focused events bring together the broad social democratic movements to reflect on the way forward. Josh discusses the art of pulling together Canada's varied regional social democratic movements into a united Canadian vision.

PLUS: Nikki gives some insight on how BC’s new gig economy laws and some solid union organizing work could set new labour standards across Canada. Tom explores how the tipping point strategy, which degrades government support on core issues over time, has made the Doug Ford PC government vulnerable.

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Dave McGrane, University of Saskatchewan political studies professor and “Social Democrats of the North” podcast host, tells the history of Canada’s social democratic impulses, and the movements and people that have advanced them.

Through Canada’s labour and farm movements, Dave tracks the women and men who fought to take power from old extractive elites and democratized and modernized the Canadian economy.

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