Lorne Gibson: Election Commissioner
Lorne Gibson was Alberta’s first Election Commissioner—an independent non-partisan officer of the Legislature, appointed in May 2018. Previously he served as Alberta’s Chief Electoral Officer [...]
Welcome to the Anthropocene
Welcome to the Anthropocene is a virtuosic, challenging book of poetry by Alice Major, who served as Edmonton’s first poet laureate. This collection is by turns a lament, a dirge and a [...]
The Irrelevance of Space and Other Stories
The world is always in movement,” wrote V.S. Naipaul, the late British novelist and travel writer. It’s an apt description for the themes and characters—the “restless feet and wandering [...]
Women Who Dig
In this beautifully written and lavishly illustrated book, journalist Trina Moyles addresses the links between patriarchy and agriculture in Canada, the US, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba, India and [...]
The Figgs
The Figgs are a family ripe with dysfunctionality—all adult children live at home, working dead-end jobs, and their bickering is full of profanity. Yet parents June and Randy Figg remain [...]
Public Deliberation on Climate Change
Alberta—and the planet—has a “super wicked” problem. First described in 1973, wicked problems defy “rational” policy responses, such as a cost/benefit analysis, in part because they have multiple [...]
Trade in the Trump Era
Canada’s prosperity depends on trade; Alberta’s even more so. The province exported over $100-billion worth of products last year, generating roughly one of every three dollars earned by [...]
The Pipelines We Need
Read any of Alberta’s daily newspapers and you will know that our province’s only hope is new pipelines. Nothing else will save us. I took some convincing, but I’m in. In fact, I’d like to [...]
Going to Pot
The windows of the former flower shop are still papered over, but soon customers will mill about in a very different kind of store. The floors will be polished concrete, and the dated [...]
Elections 2019
Even humorists feel dark about the world at times, and when I do I force myself back to the basics: food and family. Don’t worry, I’m not going to lecture on why food and water are essential to [...]
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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 ...
Herd Memory
On a cold day in February, I flew over the tightly knit stands of black spruce and jack pine in northwestern Alberta, straining my eyes below, eager to catch sight of a woodland caribou. My dad, a wildlife biologist, called them the “grey ghosts” of the boreal. Woodland caribou have ...
Uncanny Resemblance
Historians are loathe to use the past to describe the present. But sometimes similarities between past and present are sufficiently striking that they may well offer up some useful lessons for today. The parallels between Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party (UCP) government and William “Bible Bill” Aberhart’s Social Credit government of the ...