Why Brookfield is hard to describe

This episode was first published on April 12th, 2025.

Happy New Year, Hatchet listeners!

The chance to put out good journalism is its own reward, but to everyone who has listened, shared, or supported us over the last year—thank you.

We wanted to kick off the year by updating you on our series on Brookfield. It’s been a long road, but we’ll be publishing the next two new episodes this week, with more to come later in the month.

We can’t wait for you to hear it.

But before you do, we wanted to re-publish the first episode in the series. It’s an important primer for an increasingly complicated story.

Brookfield has been in the news constantly over recent months. The Conservatives attacked the company for moving the headquarters of one of their subsidiaries to New York City. The NDP have accused it of avoiding taxes through offshore havens. And Prime Minister Mark Carney, the former chairman of Brookfield Asset Management, has found himself on the defensive because of his association with the company.

But what these political attacks miss is a far more important story. It’s a story of a company that has been central to Canada’s history and economy for more than a century.

So what exactly is Brookfield? That’s a question that we here at The Hatchet have set out to answer.

What we found was a company that almost defies description.

Brookfield has been a financial universe unto itself, operating by a different set of cosmic laws and fundamental forces than other corporations.

It’s a company that’s shown an almost unparalleled talent for reinvention. Over its 125-year-history, it’s morphed from a neo-colonial experiment to Canada’s most ruthless corporate raider to a seemingly boring storehouse of our collective pension earnings.

Now it is one of a tiny handful of financial entities that sit at the very centre of the global economy.

And so that’s why we’ll be spending this series focusing exclusively on this incredibly important and yet rarely understood company.

We’ll be digging into its epic history, its contentious present and what the continued domination of firms like Brookfield could mean for everyday people.

In this first episode, we shine a light on it’s first incarnation — Brazilian Traction, Light and Power — and how it managed to dominate the people of South America’s biggest nation for most of the 20th century.

Featured in this episode: Tyler Shipley

To learn more

Canada In The World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination by Tyler Shipley

The Brass Ring: Power, Influence and the Brascan Empire by Patricia Best & Ann Shortell

Let Us Prey: The Practices and Profits of Canadian Corporations and Businessmen edited by Robert Chodos & Ray Murphy

The Light: Brazilian Traction, Light, and Power Company Limited, 1899-1945 by Duncan McDowall

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Music: I dunno by grapes (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: J Lang, Morusque

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