Meet the Minister: Joe Ceci
AV: Alberta collects some $8.7-billion less in tax revenue than we would if we had the rates of the next-lowest-taxing province [BC]. Your press releases say Albertans “benefit” from low [...]
It’s Complicated, Honey
Spring draws nigh: the season of the birds and the bees. Birdsong is a welcome gift, but where would we be without bees? Their obsessive quest for pollen and nectar keeps much of Alberta’s native [...]
Making a Living
At present, the job with the fastest-growing potential has to be professional fact-checking. The job is finding reliable sources for supposed facts. An expert fact-checker can find support for a [...]
Should Government Go into Debt?
Trevor Tombe says debt can be useful Thomas Jefferson wrote over 200 years ago that “the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” To [...]
Break the Bank
Many Albertans are aware that our government is incurring budget deficits and that our Treasury has accumulated a substantial debt, approaching $45-billion. Fewer realize that our province is [...]
Salestaxphobia
Time for a sales tax?” is the whack-a-mole question of Alberta politics—one that pops up in the Legislature, in press scrums, in newspaper headlines. No matter how long it’s been since the last [...]
Less Painful Duties:
The once-renowned and far-from-late Calgary barrister C.D. Evans has, toward the end of his eighth decade, delivered himself of a sequel to his 2011 memoir Painful Duties. My first thought on [...]
Annie Muktuk
Norma Dunning’s debut short story collection is sensitive, intelligent and intense. Right from the first story, “Kabloona Red,” in which an Inuit woman knocks back cheap red wine whenever her [...]
The Unravelling
Back in 2010 I reviewed Clem and Olivier Martini’s book Bitter Medicine, in which they describe their difficult experiences getting appropriate care for Olivier’s schizophrenia and help for the [...]
Darwin’s Moving
Since 2006, Taylor Lambert has been working on-and-off for Darwin’s Moving and Deliveries, first as a student and later as a freelance journalist. From that experience comes Darwin’s Moving: part [...]
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The Plans to Strip-Mine Coal in the Mountains
It looks like spectacular wild country, but some see it more as a big money sandwich.
The top layer of that sandwich is comprised of alpine grasses, forget-me-nots and stonecrop, glacier lilies and ancient, brave pines whose branches have been gnarled and weathered by centuries of wind. In summer, solitaires and ...
Alberta’s Black Swan
The best evidence of our conservative government’s cluelessness before the economy tanked in 2020 is the provincial budget. It was passed in a rush on March 18, 2020, two months after the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, had arrived in Canada. Oil demand in China was already down 20 per cent. Oil storage ...
Part 1: A Tribute to Charlie Russell
Charlie Russell loved to fly, and he seldom phoned first those times when he would fly his Kolb ultralight airplane north from Hawk’s Nest ranch on the boundary of Waterton Lakes National Park, to our “ranchette” near the Crowsnest Pass. We would hear the thrum of the plane’s Rotax motor ...