Good morning and welcome to the last B.C. Insider newsletter of this year. News-wise, it will be a pleasure to see the back of 2025.

It’s been an unrelenting news cycle both nationally and in British Columbia. The political drama has been, well, more dramatic than usual. (Goodbye, Justin Trudeau and John Rustad, hello Mark Carney and...?)

The tragedy of the Lapu Lapu Day festival attack in April revealed sobering holes in B.C.’s mental health system.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war has hit the province especially hard, deepening an already desperate situation in the forestry sector.

The B.C. Supreme Court’s decision throwing land ownership into question has rattled the business community and raised questions about the cost of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

These were among the topics most widely viewed by Globe readers last year, according to data crunched by Moira Wyton, the Globe’s audience editor based in Vancouver, who is a wizard at decoding such preferences.

But Moira’s work also revealed readers’ deep appreciation for the characters that have breathed humanity into some of these difficult stories.

Trump’s tariff war sent Globe reporters across the country to corners we don’t usually get to in an effort to understand how the U.S. administration was already upending ordinary life.

Those postcards included Mike Hager’s sit-down in Nelson, B.C., with exiles from a different U.S. policy: draft dodgers from the Vietnam War. Andrea Woo travelled to Point Roberts, Wash., just down the road from Tsawwassen, B.C., to speak to the bewildered Americans who are watching their Canadian customers shun the tiny pene-exclave as a result of Trump’s threats.

Nancy Macdonald and Mike spent considerable time this year explaining the care that should have been on offer to Kai-Ji Adam Lo, the man charged with 11 counts of second-degree murder and 31 of attempted murder for allegedly driving his SUV through a crowded street festival.

But readers were also delighted with Mike’s entertaining story about Canada’s last waterbed salesman.

“Paul Drysdale has spent nearly half a century dispelling the foundational myth that a waterbed will improve your love life,” he wrote.

Nancy crafted a deeply observational piece about the unravelling of Victoria’s Pandora Avenue, one of the most-read stories that The Globe produced last year. It led to some hard reckoning from the traditionally liberal city council in Victoria, including a burst of extra money for attention to the issue.

And in an only-in-B.C. kind of story, Nancy also offered readers a whimsical look at efforts to save a gigantic log that had washed up on Kitsilano Beach no one knows how long ago. For some reason, city staff in 2025 declared it a menace. The community fought back. The city ultimately relented and the log remains for the beach’s picnickers, evening cuddlers and kid climbers.

B.C. Legislature correspondent Justine Hunter has spent decades following the expansion of Indigenous rights through all levels of Canadian courts. Her authoritative and steady explanation of the impact of the Cowichan land claim decision – a B.C. Supreme Court ruling numbering almost 900 pages – was one of the most downloaded episodes of The Globe’s Decibel podcast this past year.

But among Justine’s top five most-read stories was her adventure retracing the steps of 20-year-old Myra Ellison, who, in the summer of 1910, trekked 300 kilometres over 40 days, through bogs and across glaciers, as she helped establish Strathcona Provincial Park.

Justine is herself an accomplished climber and originally wanted to recreate Ellison’s odyssey as closely as possible. But she drew the line on a few things: Justine insisted on modern hiking boots and despite my urging, declined to do the trip in a woollen skirt, the way Ellison did. (To be fair, Justine also did the hike without the staff required to replicate some of Ellison’s menu: lobster paté, canned mutton and plum pudding with “proper sauce.”)

The coming year will require us to continue our work on some of these difficult but deeply consequential stories. All of us look forward to the chances to write to surprise and delight.

All the best in the year to come. Thanks for reading.

This is the weekly British Columbia newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.