Taking Back the Neighbourhood
When he moved into a 1960s-era northside bungalow in Lethbridge six years ago, Clint Russnaik liked his new neighbourhood. It was a “great place,” he says, somewhere where “nothing bad happened.” [...]
Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard
From its opening lines, Jenna Butler’s Magnetic North, a poetic chronicle of her two-week-long sailing journey through Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, delivers keen, tactile observations of a [...]
The Melting Queen
Bruce Cinnamon’s debut novel The Melting Queen takes a unique approach to both historical fiction and magic realism, two genres that Alberta writers have long worked with in transformative ways. [...]
Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy
On January 1 of this year, a large number of women, estimated at “hundreds of thousands” and “five million” in different stories in The Guardian, formed a human chain that stretched the entire [...]
Leaving Canada…
The desire to leave Canada comes and goes in Alberta. But not in all Albertans. In December 2018, the pollster Research Co. tested the strength of Alberta secessionism and found that 69 per cent [...]
Paying the Piper
You get what you pay for. But since tax policy is anathema to many Albertans, it seems we’d rather buy climate disaster, obesity and ill health, dead birds and damaged watersheds than pay for a [...]
Should Alberta Have Higher Taxes?
Greg Flanagan says YES—Eventually Why impose taxes in the first place? First and foremost, to pay for the public services we all need and enjoy. In an ideal public-finance world we’d first [...]
The New Literacy
Calgary’s new public library garnered worldwide attention when it opened in November 2018. And rightly so: Its stunning, inventive design made Architectural Digest’s “most anticipated” list [...]
Back to the Garden
When I think about being an Albertan, I think about gardening with Dad. He took it up when he was 85; he’d retired and he needed more to do. But his new hobby was not for the faint of heart. When [...]
Whipsaw Change
If you think at times you’ve got a tough job, just be glad you’re not a member of Alberta’s civil service. These poor souls don’t know if they’re coming or going. They’ve spent the past four [...]
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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 ...