The Inquirer
The Inquirer is a tabloid that mysteriously appears at the local convenience store in Kingsley, Alberta. Rather than detailing the lives of celebrities, however, the paper turns up the latest [...]
The Dark Set: New Tenderman Poems
As the title suggests, Edmonton poet Tim Bowling’s 14th book of poetry, The Dark Set: New Tenderman Poems, revisits the lost salmon-fishing culture of British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. Originally [...]
An Honest Woman
Calgary writer JoAnn McCaig’s latest novel, An Honest Woman, has a matryoshka doll structure: It layers the story of a single, middle-aged woman who is writing a novel about a single, middle-aged [...]
Teardown: Rebuilding Democracy from the Ground Up
A warlike parliament. Infantile legislatures. “My way or the highway” leaders. Legislation-by-lobbyist. Ignored grassroots. Unrepresentative governments (Canada has had a female PM for all of 132 [...]
Citizen Action: Organizing a Workplace Union
Unionization first came up at our west Edmonton Red Lobster at the end of January 2018. I was approached by co-workers and asked if I was interested in starting something. I quickly said yes—we [...]
Workspaces
WorkSpace Canada “examines the individual choices people make in a society where most of us are bound to gainful employment.” Weinhold has taken 4,000 photographs from across Canada for this [...]
Should Union Membership Be Optional?
John Mortimer, the president of the Canadian LabourWatch Association says yes As Canada is a signatory to UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, our answer should be yes. Article [...]
Just Transition
There were times when I was taking home about $3,500 a week.” That was in the oil sands, during the boom before 2014. Lliam Hildebrand was a young welder who had come to the Athabasca oil sands [...]
Making Magic
A stillness comes over the natural world each August as birds cease their territorial singing and the year’s crop of fledglings quietly fatten on the summer bounty of bugs and berries. Noise has [...]
Kenney’s War on Workers
My wife and I spent our last day of our summer vacations in 2019 on a picket line with healthcare workers at Edmonton’s old General Hospital. Most of the cleaners, healthcare aides and nurses at [...]
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The Lesson of Lougheed
For 100 years, between 1905 and 2005, Albertans changed their government only three times (1921, 1935, 1971). The last of these elections, the most portentous, happened 50 years ago this August. Alberta has now changed government twice in the past six years. The next election may see yet another new government—meaning ...
The Assault on Higher Education
The Kenney government proclaimed in fall 2019 that Alberta’s post-secondary institutions were “overly dependent” on government funding—which is an odd thing to say about a public good. Then it declared that the province’s grant to the schools should be reduced by 20 per cent by 2023. The rationale for this ...
Rediscovering a River
The Cree called it Kisiskâciwanisîpiy—the swiftly flowing river. For the Blackfoot, it was omaka-ty—the big river. It starts in the Columbia Icefield, at the toe of the Saskatchewan Glacier, and cuts the province in half as it flows through Banff and Jasper national parks, northeast to Edmonton, then east-by-southeast across the ...