• Opinion

December 11th 2025

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I was editing a story this week from reporter Natasha Bulowski and I was struck by how valuable Civic Searchlight is at detecting what’s going on at the municipal level.

Natasha has been reporting on the impact of data centres on towns and cities in Alberta where the provincial government is trying its best to hurry the power-hungry developments along. Please donate to further this important work.

Again and again, reading Natasha’s draft, I was struck by how much detail she was able to bring to an Alberta story she’s reporting from Ottawa: letters that tiny municipalities had submitted to an esoteric government investment body, and comments from a rural county planning meeting. She found people to talk to who aren’t connected to any major group but who are making an impact locally — the precise kind of people we want to find but who can be elusive.

None of this is easy to get. I would know — I spent years as a local reporter and editor. Reporting on even one municipality requires a lot of legwork, and somehow she had gathered intricate detail from several towns, all at once.

Then it hit me. Natasha has been using Civic Searchlight. *Of course *she would be able to get all this detail.

Civic Searchlight is the powerful tool that *Canada’s National Observer *released this fall. Developed by our technology and democracy reporter, Rory White, the tool gathers up and transcribes the goings-on from municipal meetings across the country, and makes them searchable. When you donate to The Climate Solutions Reporting Project, you help fund the reporting that follows up on the climate stories we see, thanks to Civic Searchlight. We can barely keep up with the stories on our desks now, critical stories about how climate policy is being decided upon at the local level.

Our entire team immediately recognized the value of Civic Searchlight, and like Natasha, they’ve used it to great effect: uncovering networks spreading disinformation, reporting on how communities are dealing with landfills and other disruptive developments, and understanding how towns along the Trans Mountain pipeline route face a major loss of revenue from how the pipeline is taxed.

But we didn’t want to keep this empowering tool for civil society groups, researchers, journalists, and ordinary citizens to ourselves. We released Civic Searchlight so even our direct competitors can use it free of charge.

I’ve been blown away by the reception: name a major media outlet in this country and I guarantee you someone there is using Civic Searchlight. Major national institutions, including federal government departments, have signed on. Universities. Local environmental groups. Civic Searchlight has become a must-have tool for people who care about the functioning of local government.

I want to make it even better. We’ve got hundreds of municipalities on it now, but there are more to add. We also hope to expand to include provincial and federal bodies. We want to create new search functionality to help people find what they’re looking for, and get alerted when things change. We want to make it available to a broader audience. As for us, we’ll continue to use it as a window into discussions and deceptions around climate policy that, without it, would go under the radar.

As I see it, the future of journalism isn’t just telling stories, it’s helping people connect directly with the structures of power around them. With your subscription to Canada’s National Observer, you’re getting the stories, but, today I ask you to contribute to a much bigger mission and ambition. Please give by December 25th.

December 11th 2025

Editor-in-Chief