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I’m a fan of mass transit, everything from how it allows cities to be denser and more interesting, to the clack and rumble of a good subway—New York’s, Boston’s, Toronto’s. I enjoy unique [...]

Either way, the three-hour drive between Edmonton and Calgary on the QEII highway has the same itinerary: nice landscape, cows, trees, pumpjack, anti-Ottawa billboard, creeping boredom, leg [...]

By 2050 somehow we’ll need to feed 10 billion humans while also having reduced the vast harms of food production, not least its water pollution, deforestation and contributions to climate change. [...]

Ten minutes east of Taber, as the semi-trailer flies, is Lamb Weston Canada ULC, owned by the $23-billion ConAgra Foods of Chicago, USA, which turns Alberta-grown potatoes into fries, including [...]

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 [...]

AV: You’re one of only two remaining MLAs from the Klein era. Yeah, I’ve actually seen six premiers. From 2004 until 2015 was quite an unstable government situation. They were changing ministers [...]

  AV: What do you see as the purpose of post-secondary education? It serves two purposes. The first is to create well-educated citizens who are prepared to engage in public discourse and [...]

  AV: Does your government lose some credibility on the environment file due to its strong support for pipelines? No, because the replacement of a 50-year-old [Kinder Morgan] pipeline with a [...]

  AV: What does a typical week look like? I’m out and about a lot. The year before last I put 100,000 kilometres on my truck, just getting around the province, meeting producers, meeting [...]

  AV: Far more Albertans are workers than employers, but our culture really celebrates “the entrepreneur”—the job creator, the employer. What do you think about this? Well, we need both. A [...]