Our Almost-Revolution
One little girl got into trouble and her baby was born three months after she was married. That baby was only four pounds in weight because the girl was almost starved to death… That little [...]
Alvin Finkel
Alvin Finkel
Seeking Equality:
Left-leaning Canadian scholars often point to more redistributive Scandinavia to demonstrate that greater economic equality, achieved through government policies, benefits society at large. [...]
Give and Take:
A wealthy Canadian federal politician introduced income tax changes to remove the loophole of lower rates for family and personal corporations. But he ended up on the defensive because he had [...]
Notley Nation: How Alberta’s Political Upheaval Swept the Country
It remains a pleasant shock that Alberta is no longer a political monolith. Why Rachel Notley’s NDP triumphed and how well they are governing have occasioned considerable debate since the [...]
Co-operation or Bust
At a workshop in the fall of 2008, my Athabasca University colleague Jay Smith conducted a revealing political experiment. Using 10 excerpts from Liberal, New Democrat and Green platforms from [...]
More than Wages
When Willa Gorman began working in the fibres area at Celanese in Edmonton in 1965, the chemical plant employed over 1,000 workers. “We worked with chemicals with absolutely no safety as we know [...]
MOST READ
MOST READ
The Story of Joseph Lewis
In 1799 Joseph Lewis, a Hudson's Bay Company employee, arrived in what is now Alberta. He was 27 years old but his life had already been crammed with adventure.
Born in 1772 in Manchester, New Hampshire, at 20 he’d made his way to Montreal, where he joined the North West Company ...
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 the information picket were women of colour. Like public-sector workers across the province, they were ...
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 for work.
Before that, the Victoria, BC, native spent his first eight years after high ...