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 [...]
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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 ...