The hidden humans powering the AI economy | CBC News

The hidden humans powering the AI economy | CBC News

The hidden humans powering the AI economy
Why artificial intelligence needs humans to function


Nora Young · CBC News · Posted: Nov 06, 2025 1:00 AM PST | Last Updated: November 6


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As AI models advance, they will require more specialized training — meaning companies may soon no longer need many of the very humans who helped make them what they are today. (Unsplash)

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Since January, Tina Lynn Wilson of Hamilton, Ont., has been freelancing for a company called DataAnnotation.

The 45-year-old says she loves the work, which involves checking responses from an AI model for grammar, accuracy and creativity. It calls for analytical skills and an eye for detail — and she also gets some interesting projects, like choosing the better of two samples of poetry.

“Because it is a creative response, there would be no fact-checking involved. You would have to indicate … what the better reply is and why.”


The work Wilson does is part of a huge, yet not well-known, network of gig workers of the emerging AI economy. Companies such as Outlier AI and Handshake AI hire them to be "artificial intelligence trainers, contracting with large AI platforms to help them train their models.

Some data annotation work is poorly paid — even exploitative, in other parts of the world — but there's a broad range of jobs in training, tending to and correcting AI. It's labour the tech giants seem to prefer not to talk about. And as models advance, they will require more specialized training — meaning companies may soon no longer need many of the very humans who helped make them what they are today.
WATCH | Why your next job interview could be with an AI bot:




Your next job interview could be with an AI bot
May 28|
Duration2:10Companies are using AI hiring bots to screen, shortlist and talk to job candidates. Advocates say the technology frees up human workers from tedious tasks, but some applicants say it adds confusion to the process, and there are concerns about HR job losses.
Human expertise

We often hear that today's generative AI is trained on vast amounts of data to teach it how human ideas typically go together. Sometimes called pre-training, that’s only the first step. For these systems to produce responses that are accurate, useful and not offensive, they need to be further refined, especially if they're going to work in narrow fields in the real world.

This is called fine-tuning, and it relies on human expertise. It's basically gig work: done on a per-assignment basis, without guaranteed hours. The Canadian AI trainers we spoke to made about $20 an hour, though some more specialized work can pay around $40. Still, inconsistency can be a problem.

"You cannot rely on this as a main source of income," said Wilson, who described her work as that of a generalist. Many other annotators consider it a side hustle as well, she said.

Tina Lynn Wilson has been freelancing for a company called DataAnnotation since January, and says she loves the work. (Submitted by Tina Lynn Wilson)

Reinforcement learning from human feedback is a type of fine-tuning that relies on people evaluating AI outputs.

Wilson’s work involves evaluating how “human” an AI response sounds.

“This is especially true for voice responses,” she said. “‘Is this something a human would like to hear?’”

So, when ChatGPT or Claude sounds uncannily human, that's because humans have trained it to be so.

"It's still the output of a software product," said Brian Merchant, a tech journalist specializing in labour and digital technology. "You need quality assurance of the output of a commercial, for-profit, software product.”

Brian Merchant, a tech journalist specializing in labour and digital technology, says firms typically want to show their product 'feels magical, feels powerful, feels like it’s the future.' (Jaclyn Campanaro)


Outlier AI has more than 250,000 active contributors across 50 countries, said Fiorella Riccobono, a spokesperson for Scale AI, its parent company. Eighty-one per cent hold at least a bachelor’s degree, she said. The company was not able to provide Canada-specific numbers.
A possibly changing market

There are signs that the market for this work is changing, with less demand for the generalized labour that people like Wilson do. Scale AI recently laid off generalist workers in Dallas, according to Business Insider, in a shift toward more technical training. Meanwhile, newer, more advanced models, like that by Chinese firm DeepSeek, have automated the reinforcement process.

"Demand for contributors with specialized knowledge and advanced degrees has grown significantly as AI systems become more complex,” said Riccobono.

Eric Zhou, 26, was one of these specialized workers. After studying materials and nanoscience at the University of Waterloo, he freelanced for Outlier AI part time for about a year. There, he assessed prompts and AI responses about undergrad-level physics and chemistry, and corrected answers.

26-year-old Eric Zhou freelanced for OutlierAI for a year, assessing prompts and responses delivered by its models. (Submitted by Eric Zhou)

"It's very fun work if you're just doing the science questions,” he said. “So that problem-solving part, I really enjoyed."

He found, however, that tasks could take more time than the company allotted, so a job listed as $20 for an hour of work could take longer, with no additional pay.

There seems to be no shortage of Canadians working in specialized fields and looking to supplement their income improving AI, including a number of Zhou’s friends.

That means workers feel they can constantly be replaced, he said.
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‘Digital sweatshops’

Still, AI as a whole relies on a global supply chain throughout the training process, much of which is outsourced to workers in lower-wage countries. This can mean fine-tuning data, but a lot of the work is in data labelling, which can be gruelling.

The number of people employed in this field are estimated to be in the millions. Companies have been accused of exploiting lax labour laws in regions like East Africa and Southeast Asia.


"There are a variety of what you could call digital sweatshops in anywhere from the Philippines to Kenya, where workers are essentially transforming these data sets into products that can be used by AI,” said James Muldoon, co-author of the book Feeding the Machine, about human labour and hidden costs of powering AI.

James Muldoon is the co-author Feeding the Machine, a book about human labour and the hidden costs of powering AI. (Submitted by James Muldoon)

He says the tasks can be brutal, as he found in field work in Kenya and Uganda, where people worked up to 70-hour weeks for just over a dollar an hour, under conditions he called “really appalling.”

While many of the annotators had ambitions to work in the tech sector more meaningfully, he said they found themselves stuck doing “really boring, excruciating” tasks.

AI companies typically don’t focus on the human labour that powers automation. Merchant, the tech journalist, says these firms typically want to show their product “feels magical, feels powerful, feels like it’s the future.”

“Very rarely do you have a job that's completely taken over by machinery, especially in industrial settings,” he said.

“What you usually have is a technology that can get you part of the way.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Nora Young

Senior Technology Reporter

Nora Young is senior technology reporter with CBC News. Her technology show, Spark, aired on CBC Radio One for 17 seasons. She is author of The Virtual Self. Her favourite technology is her bicycle.

Stop worrying about your AI footprint. Look at the big picture instead.

Stop worrying about your AI footprint. Look at the big picture instead.
MIT Technology Review · 4 hours ago
by Casey Crownhart · Climate change and energy


Picture it: I’m minding my business at a party, parked by the snack table (of course). A friend of a friend wanders up, and we strike up a conversation. It quickly turns to work, and upon learning that I’m a climate technology reporter, my new acquaintance says something like: “Should I be using AI? I’ve heard it’s awful for the environment.”

This actually happens pretty often now. Generally, I tell people not to worry—let a chatbot plan your vacation, suggest recipe ideas, or write you a poem if you want.

That response might surprise some people, but I promise I’m not living under a rock, and I have seen all the concerning projections about how much electricity AI is using. Data centers could consume up to 945 terawatt-hours annually by 2030. (That’s roughly as much as Japan.)

But I feel strongly about not putting the onus on individuals, partly because AI concerns remind me so much of another question: “What should I do to reduce my carbon footprint?”

That one gets under my skin because of the context: BP helped popularize the concept of a carbon footprint in a marketing campaign in the early 2000s. That framing effectively shifts the burden of worrying about the environment from fossil-fuel companies to individuals.

The reality is, no one person can address climate change alone: Our entire society is built around burning fossil fuels. To address climate change, we need political action and public support for researching and scaling up climate technology. We need companies to innovate and take decisive action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Focusing too much on individuals is a distraction from the real solutions on the table.

I see something similar today with AI. People are asking climate reporters at barbecues whether they should feel guilty about using chatbots too frequently when we need to focus on the bigger picture.

Big tech companies are playing into this narrative by providing energy-use estimates for their products at the user level. A couple of recent reports put the electricity used to query a chatbot at about 0.3 watt-hours, the same as powering a microwave for about a second. That’s so small as to be virtually insignificant.

But stopping with the energy use of a single query obscures the full truth, which is that this industry is growing quickly, building energy-hungry infrastructure at a nearly incomprehensible scale to satisfy the AI appetites of society as a whole. Meta is currently building a data center in Louisiana with five gigawatts of computational power—about the same demand as the entire state of Maine at the summer peak. (To learn more, read our Power Hungry series online.)

Increasingly, there’s no getting away from AI, and it’s not as simple as choosing to use or not use the technology. Your favorite search engine likely gives you an AI summary at the top of your search results. Your email provider’s suggested replies? Probably AI. Same for chatting with customer service while you’re shopping online.

Just as with climate change, we need to look at this as a system rather than a series of individual choices.

Massive tech companies using AI in their products should be disclosing their total energy and water use and going into detail about how they complete their calculations. Estimating the burden per query is a start, but we also deserve to see how these impacts add up for billions of users, and how that’s changing over time as companies (hopefully) make their products more efficient. Lawmakers should be mandating these disclosures, and we should be asking for them, too.

That’s not to say there’s absolutely no individual action that you can take. Just as you could meaningfully reduce your individual greenhouse-gas emissions by taking fewer flights and eating less meat, there are some reasonable things that you can do to reduce your AI footprint. Generating videos tends to be especially energy-intensive, as does using reasoning models to engage with long prompts and produce long answers. Asking a chatbot to help plan your day, suggest fun activities to do with your family, or summarize a ridiculously long email has relatively minor impact.

Ultimately, as long as you aren’t relentlessly churning out AI slop, you shouldn’t be too worried about your individual AI footprint. But we should all be keeping our eye on what this industry will mean for our grid, our society, and our planet.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Where might Andrew live on the Sandringham estate?

Where might Andrew live on the Sandringham estate?

Where might Andrew live on the Sandringham estate?
12 minutes ago
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Ben Hatton & Maia Davies
Getty Images, York Cottage, Alamy, Oliver's Travels
Anmer Hall, York Cottage, Park House and Gardens House are all on the estate - but not all of them are available


Newly stripped of his "prince" title, Andrew is moving from his Windsor mansion, Royal Lodge, to the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, it is understood.

Formal notice was given to surrender the lease at the Royal Lodge on Thursday, and the move will take place as soon as possible.

The historic, sprawling estate covers approximately 20,000 acres (8,100 hectares) with 600 acres (242 hectares) of gardens.

It was bought as a private country retreat for the future Edward VII when he was Albert, Prince of Wales in 1862, and has since been passed down from monarch to monarch.



The estate itself covers several residential villages and hamlets, and includes nearly 10,000 acres (4,000 hectares) of farmland.

The main building - Sandringham House - is thought to have more than a hundred rooms, including a ballroom.

It remains a country retreat for the Royal Family and is where they traditionally gather at Christmas.

Sandringham is a private estate - not an official royal residence - and it is understood the King will be privately funding Andrew's accommodation there, and that it will not be directly funded by the taxpayer.

The Palace has not yet said exactly where on the estate Andrew will live, or when he could move.

But royal sources have said it will not be immediate, and instead be "as soon as possible and practicable".

Here is a look at some of the options on the estate.

York Cottage
Alamy


Originally known as Bachelor's Cottage, York Cottage is about a quarter of a mile from the main house.

It has its own set of stables and kennel buildings, according to Historic England, and overlooks one of two man-made lakes on the estate.

There were reports ahead of Prince Harry's marriage to the Duchess of Sussex that the pair might have been gifted the use of York Cottage by Elizabeth II for use as a country home, but no such plan was ever confirmed and the move never materialised.

It has reportedly been used as an office and accommodation for staff in recent years.
Follow live updates on this story
Everything we know about Andrew losing titles and Windsor mansion
Virginia Giuffre's family speak to BBC: "She'd be so proud"

Park House
Brendan Beirne/Shutterstock


The birthplace of Diana, Princess of Wales and her childhood home, Park House was rented by the Spencer family for many years.

In 1983 it was gifted to Leonard Cheshire, a disability charity, which used it to run a 16-bedroom hotel for the disabled, their carers and family.

The charity planned a £2.3m refurbishment before the pandemic hit, but announced in 2020 it would not go ahead with the proposal and said instead that it was working with the Sandringham estate to exit the lease.

Gardens House
Oliver's Travels
Gardens House was put on the market as a holiday let over the summer


Another option is the Gardens House, which was once the residence of the head gardener on the Sandringham estate.

The Edwardian house has six bedrooms and three bathrooms - and is one of two properties on the estate available to the general public as a holiday let.

It was put on the market in July at a weekly price of £4,110. It is not unusual for royal residences to rent out property to holidaymakers - with eight cottages and lodges available for hire at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.

Wood Farm
Shutterstock


This is one option that is understood to have been ruled out.

The farmhouse, described as "small and intimate" by former housekeeper Teresa Thompson, has strong associations with Andrew's parents.

His father, the late Duke of Edinburgh, chose the secluded property as his permanent home when he retired from public life in 2017.

He and the late Queen already regularly stayed there in preference to opening up Sandringham House when it was just the two of them.

Anmer Hall
Getty Images


Anmer Hall was gifted to the Prince of Wales and Catherine, Princess of Wales as a wedding present by the late queen in 2013 - so this may be an unlikely choice.

They spend much of the school holidays in the 10-bedroom, Grade II*-listed house, which is about 2 miles (3km) east of the main Sandringham house.

The Georgian property dates back to about 1802, but some parts are much older - and it has formed part of the Sandringham estate since 1898.

 

Prime number: College students double down

Nick Iluzada

Major news out of US colleges: More students than ever are opting for a second major. Now that learning to code doesn’t guarantee a high-paying job, college students are double-majoring to help their resumes stand out. Based on a Hechinger Report analysis of federal data, the Washington Post reports: Nationwide, ~12% of graduates earned more than one credential in the 2023–2024 school year, compared to just 6% a decade earlier. It’s happening at elite universities, private colleges, and massive state schools. Between 2014 and 2024, double majors spiked 334% at Harvard, 317% at Belmont University, and 169% at the University of California, San Diego. And with the prospect of a super-tight job market for new grads looming, many appear as strategic about what subjects to study as they are about how to fit in three different parties on opposite ends of campus in the same night. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where double majors are up 25% over the decade, almost 60% of computer science students who take on a second major pick data science—a field where the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects to see a growth of high-salaried jobs.

Terminator Trump Must Be Toppled Now | The Tyee

Terminator Trump Must Be Toppled Now | The Tyee


Terminator Trump Must Be Toppled Now
Clearly unfit for office, he deserves to be impeached. Before it’s too late.

Michael Harris YesterdayThe Tyee

Michael Harris, a Tyee contributing editor, is a highly awarded journalist and documentary maker.Our journalism is supported by readers like you. Click here to support The Tyee.

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Ground him. Protesters march with a giant inflatable Donald Trump in Los Angeles on Oct. 18. Photo by Ethan Swope, the Canadian Press.


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Trump’s fit of pique decision to “terminate” trade talks with Canada and boost present tariffs by 10 per cent is typical of this thin-skinned tyrant with a perverse appetite for retribution.

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Seven million of his own citizens recently rejected his power-grabbing tantrums when they filled streets to march and shout, “No kings!”

And now, keying off Trump’s Canadian ad tantrum, the Wall Street Journal has mocked the president for claiming “he’s not ‘a king,’ but on tariffs he is acting like one, and without a proper delegation from Congress as the Constitution requires.”

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has it right. Donald Trump is a grave threat to democracy who disregards the rule of law while engaging in “blackmail on a daily basis.”

Indeed, given the gravity of Trump’s transgressions against freedom and brutal policies on health care, immigration, and international law, it has become clear that the man who would be king should be removed from office as unfit to be president. Before it is too late.

Normally an American politician would take notice that his acts have sparked mass protest in all 50 states. In fact, Trump has got the whole world on edge. That’s why the No Kings rallies spilled over into Canada and Europe.

Trump’s response? He posted an AI-generated video of himself flying a jet-fighter over Times Square in New York, dropping feces on protesters. This stupendous vulgarity was posted on the president’s personal Truth Social account.

Trump couldn’t have registered his utter contempt for his own citizens more blatantly. Or showed more graphically why he is totally unfit to occupy the Oval Office.

That said, his response was perfectly in keeping with the basis of Trump’s burgeoning tyranny. Either you are for him, no matter what he says or does, or you are the enemy. There is no such thing as legitimate opposition in Trumpworld, just falling in line or getting traduced and, if possible, crushed.

That’s why Trump called the No Kings protest the “Hate America Protest.”

That’s why he threatens to lock up mayors and governors who resist his policy of sending the military into their cities and states to deal with non-existent emergencies.

That’s why he constantly links Americans exercising their constitutional right to peaceful protests to communism, terrorism, and Hamas. That’s why, like Richard Nixon, Trump has an enemies list.

Upending the rule of law

Before democracy fails, there is an intermediate step that any would-be dictator like Trump must take: the dismantling of the rule of law. The supreme law in the U.S. is the Constitution. Though he swore an oath to uphold it at his inauguration, Trump has since worked assiduously to upend it.

Most journalism south of the border refers to this process as Trump’s “norm breaking.” The euphemism is wholly inadequate to describe what is really going on. Trump is not norm breaking, he is law breaking.

Just as he did as an elected official when he tried to subvert the will of the American people by asking Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” him 11,780 votes so he could win an election he lost.

Just as he did when he pardoned all the violent protesters from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Just as he did as a private citizen when he was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide his antics with a porn star.

Or when New York Attorney General Letitia James found the Trump company guilty of long-standing tax fraud.

An autocrat and his loyalists

Consider some of the other profound transgressions that sycophants in his own party have allowed to take place in Trump’s second term without raising so much as a whimper.

The U.S. system of governance is based upon the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Trump has violated the checks and balances of that arrangement at every step of the way. He sees himself as the Big Kahuna directing everything.

A case in point. Trump has usurped Congress’s power of the purse, as guaranteed by Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution.

The president, at his whim, has frozen or “paused” billions of dollars of funding already passed by Congress. That is illegal under the 1974 federal Impoundment Control Act, which expressly forbids the executive branch from delaying funding already approved by Congress.

Trump violated the Constitution when he usurped the power of Congress to impose tariffs. He even declared a false emergency in order to give him the power to bring in a series of draconian tariffs that hurt not only close allies like Canada, but his own citizens. The U.S. auto industry is on track to pay $10 billion by the end of October as a result of Trump’s auto tariffs on Canada and Mexico.

Under the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, public figures, including the president, aren’t supposed to profit from holding office.

According to reporting by David Kirkpatrick of the New Yorker, Trump and his family have raked in $3.4 billion since he took office in 2017.

That includes $28 million from merchandise sales, including the infamous USA Bible, Trump hats, shirts and sneakers. And then there was that free jumbo jet from Qatar, and billions of dollars from Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia.

Trump is currently using the government shutdown to pursue other actions that have no basis in law. The president and his head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, have set out to conduct mass firings in the public service. A federal judge recently issued a temporary injunction against those illegal firings.

The administration has even tried to withhold pay for public servants who have been furloughed during the government shutdown. The is also flatly illegal under the Employee Fair Treatment Act, which Trump himself signed into law in 2019.

Trump has also trampled on the basics of the justice system, directing his attorney general and others to investigate and prosecute his perceived political enemies.

After getting rid of Erik Siebert, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who wouldn’t deliver political indictments on demand, Trump appointed his own former lawyer to the post to “get things moving.”

Never mind that Lindsey Halligan had zero prosecutorial experience. Never mind that she was a slavish Trump loyalist.

Halligan advanced Trump’s agenda on request, indicting former FBI director James Comey, New York District Attorney Letitia James, and former national security advisor turned Trump critic, John Bolton. Trump has now identified others he wants prosecuted, including former CIA Director John Brennan, for what he calls “political crimes.”

Destroying checks and balances

It is notable that one of the key provisions of the so-called Project 2025 document, in which the Heritage Foundation laid out the legislative priorities of the second Trump term, was to change the relationship between the DOJ and the White House.

The separation of those powers was to be replaced by a new arrangement, with the president directing his justice officials as if they were just any other political staffers.

It has not been enough for Trump to bend all government employees to his will. The autocrat who wants to have his face on a $250 bill to mark America’s 250th anniversary, also wants to harness, humble, and humiliate the media.

That project started with a spate of legal actions by Trump against the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CBS, and ABC. Trump went on to end public funding for the public TV and radio networks PBS and NPR based on their allegedly “biased” reporting.

Under his inept and unqualified secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, journalists have been asked to sign a document agreeing to publish only those stories that are Pentagon-approved.

Forty to 50 journalists representing all the major agencies turned in their badges rather than comply. As Nancy Youssef of The Atlantic put it, “To agree not to solicit information, is to agree not to be a journalist.”

Trump’s take? “The press is very disruptive in terms of world peace,” he bloviated to reporters at the White House. “The press is very dishonest.” Strange words coming from the man who told over 30,000 lies during his first presidential term alone, according to the count by the Washington Post.

Trump has done most of his damage to democracy and the rule of law inside America.

There is ICE, his army of thugs in masks, without identification or warrants, who scoop up brown and Black people for instant deportation.

There is Trump’s cynical attempt to control the judiciary through the power of appointment, a strategy that has produced a docile and dutiful Supreme Court. That court has since empowered Trump’s drive to grossly expand the powers of the executive branch.

There is also Trump’s punitive use of the federal purse, in which the president has withheld billions in funding from jurisdictions he sees as unfriendly, such as New York.

But Trump has not limited his disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law to domestic politics. He is also wreaking havoc on the international scene.

Without any war powers approval from Congress, the President has ordered the military to blow up several vessels from Venezuela and Colombia, which he claims were carrying drugs destined for the United States. At least 36 people have been killed in those strikes.

These attacks have been carried out without any legal authority, or any evidence proving that the people aboard the vessels were the ’narco-terrorists” that Trump claimed they were. As a result, Colombia has accused Trump of murder and critics say these lethal attacks amount to war crimes.

In addition to the summary execution of suspected drug dealers, Trump has also publicly confirmed that he has approved covert operations within Venezuela by the CIA.

Now that he is also moving assets from the U.S. Southern Command into the area, Venezuela is worried that Trump is planning an invasion. The country has asked for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council over Trump’s military actions in the Caribbean.

Impeach before it’s too late

Given that Trump’s iconoclastic demolition of American values, democracy, and the rule of law have taken place in less than a year of his second term, the question must be asked. Can Americans afford to trust the electoral process to get rid of this tyrant?

Sadly, the answer is no. That’s because Trump’s unscrupulous regime has already taken steps to undermine the country’s system of free and fair elections.



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This is the president who told Texas to come up with five more Republican seats by re-districting. Other Republican states have also been asked to resort to gerrymandering or redistricting to add more seats to the Republican column ahead of next year’s mid-term elections.

Impeachment and Article 25 are draconian steps, not to be taken lightly. But given what is on the line — a dictator in the White House — it is more than justified. Trump, after all, wants to call all the shots, like a king or an emperor.

James Madison, the most quoted Founding Father of America, said it best in the Federalist Papers back in 1788.

“The accumulation of all powers — legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Trump has brazenly announced his intentions. Now the question is what, if anything, Americans are prepared to do about it.


Read more: Politics

Sherbrooke chooses Bibeau

Sherbrooke chooses Bibeau

Sherbrooke Record · 17 hours ago

by Matthew Mccully · Municipal

By Bryan Laprise

Local Journalism Initiative

 

Less than two hours after polls closed on election night, Nov. 2, Marie-Claude Bibeau was projected as the winner of the Sherbrooke mayoral race. Bibeau previously served as the member of parliament for Compton–Stanstead and held several ministerial roles in Justin Trudeau’s government.

According to the latest data from the Elections Quebec website, Bibeau won with 47.14 per cent of votes—some 27,550 votes—, with an advance of 10,019 over her closest competitor, Vincent Boutin, who finished with 30 per cent of votes. He was followed by Guillaume Brien with 6,754 votes (11.56 per cent). Raïs Kibonge, leader of Sherbrooke Citoyen, outgoing mayor Évelyne Beaudin’s party, finished with the least number of votes; some 6,607 (11.31 per cent).Bibeau celebrated her victory at Siboire Microbrasserie in downtown Sherbrooke, surrounded by family, friends, her team and supporters. A few minutes before 10 p.m., she gave her celebratory speech.“Thank you to Sherbrookers who trusted me, it’s a great privilege that you’re giving me. It comes with a lot of responsibilities, but I won’t let you down,” she said, in her opening remarks.

She proceeded to thank the other three mayoral candidates for their campaigns, with whom a “campaign of ideas” was led, with all four candidates offering different visions for Sherbrooke. According to Bibeau, the Sherbrooke municipal election campaign was a great example of democracy and of respect of each other’s ideas, creating an example for others to follow. Bibeau congratulated all the district councillors who were elected, saying she is excited to work with all of them.

“As I repeated many times over the campaign, I will be the mayor of all Sherbrookers over the whole territory—a mayor that will work hard with her municipal council to reinstate a sense of belonging and pride [in citizens] from one end of the city to the other,” stated the elected mayor.

First elected to the federal government in 2015 under the Liberal banner, Bibeau has been involved in politics ever since, keeping her MP seat through the 2019 and 2021 elections. Prior to this entrance into politics, she had been involved in many cultural organizations, such as being the director of the Musée de la nature et des sciences de Sherbrooke and being co-owner of the Camping de Compton.

She attributed part of her victory to this history of involvement. “During the last 10 years, I’ve built trusting relationships with the people of the region, which I believe were helpful. Before those 10 years of politics, I already had 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur and as a manager as well,” Bibeau said. “I have quite a good network regionally—nationally as well.”

Bibeau had the support of her partner, Bernard Sévigny, who served as the mayor of Sherbrooke from 2009 to 2017. While he explained that all of Bibeau’s engagements were her own, he did answer some of her questions, especially when it came to the feasibility of initiatives, providing a few guideposts. “When she was making an engagement, she knew it was possible and realistic.”

“I think that from now own, Sherbrooke will be well served,” Sévigny added. “I know Marie-Claude well, I know how she does things, and I think that people will appreciate her way of doing things, her way of working with all citizens, partners and institutions. It’s her strength and I think people will see what she’s capable of.”

Part of Bibeau’s campaign included not making specific engagements based on hard numbers. Bibeau explained that this direction was taken to favour working with the municipal council and out of a necessity to see facts. “I need to hear from experts, I want to make real consultations and also speak with the stakeholders. I can do that in a quite expeditious matter,” she said. Being able to hear everyone’s perspectives and figuring out what could be a good consensus is one of her strengths, according to her.

During an interview with The Record after her speech, Bibeau outlined that her first priorities will be to meet with all the individual councillors to better know them, their experience, knowledge and expertise. “I believe one of the key elements to have a good team spirit is to make sure everyone is in their element,” she explained.

She chose to run as an independent to favour collaboration. Meeting with councillors works towards her main campaign promise of solid leadership and collaboration within the council, with the city’s employees and other local organizations.

Within the coming weeks, the first big undertaking will be working on and tabling the next municipal budget, which must be approved before Christmas.

Some of the main concerns of Sherbrookers which will be part of her work within the municipality over the coming years is focusing on municipal responsibilities “starting with roads” and water infrastructure including the water treatment plant. Other areas to work on are homelessness, climate change and sustainable mobility.

“We must work together. The best idea doesn’t have to come from the mayor. It can come from everywhere, I don’t care,” she expressed playfully. “I believe in collective intelligence, and I think we have to put all our resources together to face these challenges.”

The Republican Plot to Destroy Education Research

The Republican Plot to Destroy Education Research

Elon Musk and the Trump administration have gutted the Institute of Education Science.


by Chris Lewis

October 16, 2025



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The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

Good data drives good decision-making, and education is no exception. The data provided to researchers from independent research organizations, public-private partnerships, and other institutions helps teachers, administrators, and lawmakers make good decisions about how to approach schooling.
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That’s why it is critical to highlight the Trump administration’s assault on public data at the Department of Education—just one part of its war on public education in general.

In February, Elon Musk and his DOGE team cut a total of 89 contracts worth $881 million from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research and data arm of the department. This obscure organization is critical in ensuring that schools from K-12 to college are funded and competitive, and that students are getting financial aid. The contracts were for vendors that helped the institute collect essential data, including the effectiveness of transition support for young people with disabilities and common education standards (which includes common vocabulary data and tools to help education stakeholders).

A 2002 product of the Bush administration, the point of the IES is to improve education outcomes in the United States by providing high-quality data and analysis for state and federal governments. As the New America foundation puts it, IES’s role is to research what works. The institute has four major research arms: the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the National Center for Special Education Research, the National Center for Education Research, and the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. Each performs a pivotal role in education data gathering for stakeholders.

Related: Trump’s Education Department cuts funding allocated to minority-serving institutions

NCES, for example, collects and reports information on student performance and achievement based on standardized test scores, as well as the literacy level of adults. Its data is used by a host of different parties, from researchers to legislators, to understand and improve enrollment, benchmarks, and the performance of educational initiatives. Factoring everything from student performance to teaching techniques to administrators into the data helps inform financial aid, basic needs gaps, and many issues that students face. The data provided by NCES is used by lawmakers to help make decisions on district funding allocations. Without it, there are no reliable, objective metrics to help determine schools’ needs.

The data provided by IES also helps elevate student populations that would otherwise be entirely ignored. Take student parents, people trying to balance getting an education with raising a child. The GAINS for Student Parents Act requires public colleges to give student parents information about services and resources, as well as adjusting costs of attendance and net price valuations to include dependent care. IES data helped elevate an almost entirely invisible population of students that faces unique problems; there aren’t national political organizations for student parents, so lawmakers would have been fairly oblivious to this population’s needs without this data.

Read more from the Revolving Door Project

And the numbers here are not small. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, undergraduate students who are either parents, guardians, or pregnant while in college make up nearly one-fifth of the student population. They don’t have the institutional support offered to non-parent students, and often work more than 40 hours a week between both work and school, because financial aid is typically not enough to live on. A comprehensive picture of these students only exists due to data collected through the IES’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study.

In short, IES is a vital partner to schools, districts, policymakers, and researchers. In theory, it is a nonpartisan entity, merely conducting research and providing the resulting data to anyone, and hitherto its value has been recognized by Democrats and Republicans alike.

But no longer. As Musk’s assault on the agency shows, education of any kind is now a partisan issue. The Trump administration is refusing to publicize data that bear on the needs of marginalized people because American conservatives are now dead set against the very idea of public education of any kind. The cuts to IES are just one part of this effort.

Currently, IES can barely function. Due to the 1,300 layoffs at the Department of Education under Education Secretary Linda McMahon—a woman who, not coincidentally, is so comically ignorant she confused AI with the A1 steak sauce—IES has a mere 20 federal employees left. According to The Hechinger Report, there are only three people left to do the work of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, which is the common measure of K-12 achievement through standardized tests. Ultimately, the layoffs will result in less and lower-quality data that can be provided to stakeholders to help ensure student and teacher success.

Good education requires data that helps educators personalize instruction, make adjustments to the rigor of the curriculum, and overall ensure that students are learning. Administrators use good data to help build out smart reforms or set specific goals for their students or teachers. The assault on this research and data agency is yet another example of the administration’s disregard of the material consequences of its wrongheaded fight against expertise.

While forcing prestigious universities such as the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard to bend the knee gets the most attention from the mainstream media, what Trump is doing to IES will have a far broader and deeper impact on American schools. If he and McMahon have anything to say about it, in the future only wealthy white people will have access to a quality education in this country.

‘How did we get here?’: documentary explores how Republicans changed course on the climate | Documentary films | The Guardian

‘How did we get here?’: documentary explores how Republicans changed course on the climate | Documentary films | The Guardian

‘How did we get here?’: documentary explores how Republicans changed course on the climate


In The White House Effect, now available on Netflix, archival footage is used to show how the US right moved from believing to disputing the climate crisis



Adrian HortonTue 4 Nov 2025 10.02 GMT
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In 1988, the United States entered into its worst drought since the Dust Bowl. Crops withered in fields nationwide, part of an estimated $60bn in damage ($160bn in 2025). Dust storms swept the midwest and northern Great Plains. Cities instituted water restrictions. That summer, unrelentingly hot temperatures killed between 5,000 and 10,000 people, and Yellowstone national park suffered the worst wildfire in its history.


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Amid the disaster, George HW Bush, then Ronald Reagan’s vice-president, met with farmers in Michigan reeling from crop losses. Bush, the Republican candidate for president, consoled them: if elected, he would be the environmental president. He acknowledged the reality of intensifying heatwaves – the “greenhouse effect”, to use the scientific parlance of the day – with blunt clarity: the burning of fossil fuels contributed excess carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, leading to global warming. But though the scale of the problem could seem “impossible”, he assured the farmers that “those who think we’re powerless to do anything about this greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House Effect” – the impact of sound environmental policy for the leading consumer of fossil fuels. Curbing emissions, he said, was “the common agenda of the future.”

That clip – startling to anyone even glancingly familiar with Republican orthodoxy in the years since – appears early in The White House Effect, a new all-archival documentary that examines the evolution of the climate crisis from non-partisan reality to divisive political issue. The 96-minute film, now available on Netflix, takes its name from Bush’s unfulfilled guarantee of environmental action during his four years as president, a pivotal missed opportunity – if not, as the film implicitly argues, the pivotal missed opportunity – for bipartisan US leadership on the climate crisis. “There was this moment in time when the science was widely accepted, when the public was all about tackling this,” co-director Pedro Kos told the Guardian. “It was a mom and pop issue, as American as apple pie. Flash forward to four years later, and you have a completely split electorate. How do we get there?”


The film, directed by Kos with Jon Shenk and Bonni Cohen, first rewinds the clock from Bush’s uncontroversial campaign promise back to the 1970s, when the science on the greenhouse effect became a public talking point. In news footage from the late 70s, ordinary Americans react to then President Jimmy Carter’s exhortation to face “a problem that’s unprecedented in our history” with patriotic enthusiasm; sacrifices, they confirm, may be necessary. By the early 1980s, faced with a gas shortages and hours-long lines at the pump, some of that enthusiasm had crumbled. As the Republican presidential candidate, Reagan responded to the discontent by blaming the government and calling for authority to be transferred back to the private sector (or, to use a Reagan euphemism, “experts in the field”) – setting the stage for the Republican party’s symbiotic relationship with large oil companies well aware of the impact of emissions on the climate. (To quote an internal Exxon document from 1984: “We can either adapt our civilization to a warmer planet or avoid the problem by sharply curtailing the use of fossil fuels.”)


But the film largely focuses on Bush, a blue blood east coaster who made his fortune in the Texas oilfields, and who nevertheless began his term in office in 1989 determined, at least outwardly, to break from his predecessor on the environment. Bush appointed an environmental activist, William Reilly, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency; he exhorted Congress that “the time for action is now.” The White House Effect illustrates the political forces that eroded such purpose: the corporations that, according to their own internal documents, sought to downplay and discredit scientific evidence to protect their profit; the power games by White House chief of staff John Sununu, an ally of corporate lobbyists who outmaneuvered Reilly by encouraging climate skepticism in the aftermath of disasters such as Hurricane Hugo and the devastating Exxon-Valdez oil spill.

The film works exclusively with meticulously edited archival footage – the team sorted through more than 14,000 clips from more than 100 sources, including VHS tapes stored in the New Jersey garage of a former Exxon Mobil publicist and a memo from a confidential “Global Warming Scientific ‘Skeptics’ Meeting” convened in 1991 by Sununu to empower media appearances by prominent climate contrarians. The reliance on archival was part of an effort to “immerse the public in a time when this wasn’t a political football – where we experience the politicization of the issue, rather than being told it,” said Kos. “Whenever you turn on a camera and interview someone in the present, that’s automatically going to come with the political connotations that the present brings.”
View image in fullscreenA still from The White House Effect. Photograph: Netflix


Cohen and Shenk are veterans of climate change films; the married couple directed An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, the follow-up to Al Gore’s groundbreaking documentary on looming climate catastrophe. But with The White House Effect, “we wanted to do something very different from what we’ve done in our past work and what we think of as the ‘climate change genre’ of documentaries: we wanted to just drop the truth bomb of history,” said Shenk. “We need that, right? We just need the truth.”

With archival, there’s “an opportunity to expand the conversation,” Cohen added. From man-on-the-street interviews to standard network broadcasts from the period, “hopefully you can see yourself in the film no matter who you are as an American, and feel that you’re part of the conversation, rather than some liberal film-makers preaching at you.”

The platforming of climate skeptics on mainstream media and Sununu’s counsel seemed to have an effect on Bush. By 1990, speaking at a White House conference on the climate crisis, he equivocated where he once held firm: “One scientist argued that if we keep burning fossil fuels at today’s rate, by the end of the next century, Earth could be 9F warmer than today. And the other scientist saw no evidence of rapid change,” he said. “Two scientists, two diametrically opposed points of view. Now, where does that leave us?” It left the US hamstrung by political division. Two years later, the “environmental president” reluctantly attended the 1992 Rio “Earth Summit”, a major United Nations conference to set international targets for emissions reductions, advocating against such measures in the name of economic development and stability. The move, from the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, angered other countries, but Bush chided the international coalition: “I don’t think leadership is going along with the mob.” The seeds for outright climate denial, and the Republican party’s unfettered and open alliance with corporate interests, had been sown.
View image in fullscreenA still from The White House Effect. Photograph: Netflix


Nearly three decades later, in 2019, Reilly rued how the US missed an “incalculably important” opportunity at Rio. “The advantage we might have had if president Bush had committed to seriously undertake the reduction of greenhouse gases is that we might have removed the partisan nature of the dialogue in the United States,” he said. If that prospect, in the era of hyper-partisanship, increasingly absurd natural disasters and the Trump administration’s dismantling of environmental regulation, feels deeply infuriating – well, Cohen argued, that’s the point. “Climate change films, at least in the last 10 years, have been trying to spoon-feed the medicine of the climate crisis, and then have a ‘hope bucket’ at the end, where you can feel OK,” she said. “Our job is to create the rage. We can’t shy away from the rage. And if this film, in all of its irrefutable archival historical glory, can create that rage, then we’ve succeeded.”

The hope, she added, is that “you can feel the rage and you can feel the intolerance for the denial of truth, and that you’ll actually do something about at the ballot box. The hopelessness is when you feel like you can’t do anything. But we have a large electorate in this country – let’s get out there.”

Kos, having overseen the mass archival effort, encouraged viewers to look at “the overall arc of history” – even in the face of the Los Angeles fires, the Texas floods, the rapid and unprecedented intensification of hurricanes like the one that devastated Jamaica just last week – “what good is despair going to do?” The truth of political power, for good and for ill, is “right there in front of our eyes.”

“The choice is in our hands,” he added. “We’ve shown you a what-if moment from 1988. We’re now in another what-if moment.”

The White House Effect is now available on Netflix

Running out of pennies?

 

Prime number: Zero pennies

Illustration: Nick Iluzada

The anti-penny crusaders have won, but at what cost? The lowly copper-plated coin is disappearing from use—and it’s causing some headaches for US businesses. A number of merchants across the country have completely run out of pennies after the US government stopped making them earlier this year and failed to issue new guidance, the Associated Press reported: Sheetz, the convenience store chain that Western Pennsylvanians swear is better than Wawa, ran a promotion offering customers a soda if they brought in 100 pennies. Kwik Trip is rounding every cash transaction down to the nearest nickel, which will reportedly cost the company $3 million this year. The Treasury Department says the US will save about $56 million by no longer minting Abe Lincoln’s face, per the AP. Businesses are generally on board with the decision but want more clarity on how to proceed. “We have been advocating abolition of the penny for 30 years,” a spokesperson for the National Association of Convenience Stores told the AP. “But this is not the way we wanted it to go.”

Donald Trump Is a Commie - by Jonathan V. Last

Donald Trump Is a Commie - by Jonathan V. Last

Donald Trump Is a Commie

Bernie’s democratic socialism is still compatible with liberal democracy. Trump’s national socialism is not. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Jonathan V. Last

Nov 03, 2025

∙ Paid

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages /Shutterstock)

1. Two Paths

On Friday I wrote about the Trump administration’s latest foray into national socialism:

• Trump wants to build nuclear power plants.

• He has chosen Westinghouse to build them.

• He will pay Westinghouse $80 billion for the projects.

• In return he has compelled Westinghouse to pay him the government 20 percent of any “cash distributions.”

• Between now and the end of January 2029, the government can compel Westinghouse to go public via an IPO, at which point the government will be awarded 20 percent ownership of the company, likely making it the single largest shareholder.

This is literally seizing the means of production. But to, you know, make America great again. Or something.

Other of Trump’s national socialist policies include:

• Refusing to enforce the 2024 law requiring the sale of TikTok until he was able to compel that the business be sold at an extortionately discounted price to his political allies.

• Creating a Golden Share of U.S. Steel for his government.

• Requiring Nvidia and AMD to pay the government 15 percent of all revenues from chip sales to China.

• Acquiring a 10 percent ownership stake in chipmaker Intel.

• Acquiring a 15 percent stake in rare earth producers MP Materials, a 10 percent stake in Lithium Americas Corp., and a 10 percent stake in Trilogy Metals Inc.

• Creating a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Digital Asset Stockpile.”

• Taking steps to create a sovereign wealth fund to be used as a vehicle for government investment.

• He has demanded that Microsoft fire an executive he does not like and demanded that private law firms commit to doing pro bono work on behalf of clients he chooses for them.

This is not quite the economic regime of China or Saudi Arabia. But it’s in the same zip code. And it’s heading in their general direction and away from the regulated American free market economy as it had existed until ten months ago.

So why is it so hard for people to just say, out loud, what is obvious: Donald Trump is a socialist who is trying to make the American economy function more like Communist China?