Health Advocacy Inc.:
Three years ago Sprout Pharmaceuticals hired a PR firm to help ensure that the US Food and Drug Administration approved its drug, flibanserin, to treat women with low libido. Described by critics [...]
Rising Abruptly
Gisèle Villeneuve’s works straddle languages, informed by her native Montreal and by Alberta, where she has lived for nearly 40 years. Her last novel, Visiting Elizabeth, was a hybrid [...]
Better Now: Six Big Ideas To Improve Health Care For All Canadians
The good guys of Canadian healthcare are writing in full force. Dr. Danielle Martin’s engaging new book, Better Now, is one of several recent releases from leading Canadian intellectuals, [...]
Ritual Political Suicide
Why do so many politicians take a cleaver to their own political careers? It isn’t just that they make a blunder: a hand in the cookie jar when no one’s looking, or getting a little carried away [...]
Hunting Season
Very early this morning, headlights crept down rural roads across Alberta, turned in to the edges of fields and woodlands, and blinked out. Had you been there, you might have heard the muffled [...]
In Focus: Theatre Canmore
A new theatre company launched in Canmore this September with a lineup of shows created and performed by local artists. Theatre Canmore’s artistic director, Melanie DesRoches, says a lot of [...]
The Mapmakers
On January 24, 2017, I took a road trip. Driving from Calgary to Drumheller that day was like floating in a void. Heavy fog under a blank-canvas sky. Snow on the field stubble. Frost on the fence [...]
A Different Prescription
A country that prides itself on its universal healthcare system has a glaring coverage gap: pharmaceutical drugs. As doctors and academics in this field, we see the consequences. Take, for [...]
Assisted Dying
It was the summer of 2015, and Hanne Schafer—a 65-year-old Calgarian psychologist who loved opera and camping and her husband of nine years—decided it was time. Over the previous two years, [...]
MOST READ
MOST READ
Missing Answers
On February 23, 2021, something amazing happened—almost a miracle, as far as I’m concerned. I got to ask Premier Jason Kenney a question during a news conference (about the upcoming legislative sitting). Before that, the last time I’d been called on to ask a question was December 18, 2020—67 days ...
The $120 Billion Question
The Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) has lately come under intense criticism. The Kenney government’s changes to the Crown corporation’s mandate in 2019—the transfer, without prior notice, of several public pension funds to AIMCo—alarmed pension fund members who worried about ceding control of their pensions and were unsure about AIMCo ...
My Mother’s Story
My mother was a refugee, and Canada was her refuge.
My mother died this August, a few days before her 81st birthday. And as I sat down to write her eulogy, I kept thinking about the confluence of events that brought her to Alberta, and about Alberta’s legacy as a home ...