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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 [...]

  AV: Why seek office? Why the NDP? So where I grew up, the Cowichan Valley, is a big resource area. My dad’s in forestry, as are a lot of people I know. And when I was born, in 1975, Tommy [...]

  AV: Alberta collects some $8.7-billion less in tax revenue than we would if we had the rates of the next-lowest-taxing province [BC]. Your press releases say Albertans “benefit” from low [...]

On January 24, 2017, I took a road trip. Driving from Calgary to Drumheller that day was like floating in a void. Heavy fog under a blank-canvas sky. Snow on the field stubble. Frost on the fence [...]

Poleconomy, a 1980s family board game billed as “The Game of Canada,” has you move plastic beaver tokens, buy real-life companies and try to amass the most money. Occasionally you get elected [...]