The Year of Bargaining Diplomatically
Last year the government of Alberta faced a mountain of public-sector contract negotiations. A whole mountain range, actually. Collective agreements covering roughly 180,000 employees expired: [...]
Harry Vandervlist
Harry Vandervlist
Citizen Taxpayer
The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot.” George Orwell offers these colourful examples of debased political language in his classic 1946 essay [...]
Cosmopolitan Alberta
The other day my curator and writer friend Diana Sherlock got back from her new flat in Berlin. In her Calgary living room, we looked at photos of the view from her Berlin window, which overlooks [...]
Will that be Truth or Profit?
Over the coming decades, Alberta’s universities will be lucky to survive in any recognizable form. Over the coming decades, Alberta’s universities will be among the most important contributors to [...]
Seeing in Black and White
For well over a century, if you were talking about photography as an art form, you were talking about black and white photographs produced using film and photographic paper. From Eugene Atget [...]
Really Big Sky Country
Scholars and scientists were the first genuine global citizens. From medieval scholars walking across a fragmented Europe in search of a copy of Aristotle’s writings to Charles Darwin filling the [...]
Playwrights: Alberta’s Forgotten Wordsmiths?
“For much too long,” writes John Murrell in his introduction to Vern Thiessen’s 1996 play Blowfish, “the playwright has been regarded as inhabiting a sort of neutral (and neutered) zone between [...]
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Jason Kenney’s Vision for K-12
It was by all accounts, a fiery speech. Standing on a blue-curtained stage in front of a couple thousand supporters at the UCP’s inaugural policy convention in Red Deer in May 2018, leader Jason Kenney went on the attack against anti-oilsands activists and the foreign money he says funds them ...
Mandate Creep: National Parks and Tourism
I retired from a career with Parks Canada a few years ago, not long after signing off on a management plan that prescribed a 2 per cent annual increase in visitors to Banff. Local businesses were ecstatic that the new plan seemed finally to acknowledge tourism growth as a priority ...
Deficit-Free by 2023!
Alberta’s most recent budget (2018–19) projected an $8.8-billion deficit—a shortfall of $2,024 per Albertan. Although that estimate was revised to $6.9 billion in the February third quarter fiscal update, this remains the province’s third large deficit stemming from the recession starting in 2014. Maintaining expenditures even as revenues drop unexpectedly ...