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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The Redwater Decision
All across this province, from the banks of the Peace River to the barley fields of Lethbridge County, 155,000 holes have been drilled in the ground that share four characteristics: They were made to release oil and gas from the Earth’s crust; they’ve produced as much hydrocarbon as they’re going ...
Thug Life
The month after Chris Crane’s 18th birthday was a blur. The Alberta Warriors gang member spent most of it drunk or stoned, blowing $16,000 on alcohol and marijuana in just three weeks. His first month of official adulthood ended with an armed robbery, a drive-by shooting at a house frequented ...
Amarjeet Sohi
On a Friday morning in spring 2016, Amarjeet Sohi sat barefoot in the den of his craftsman style home in south Edmonton. His first few months as Canada’s federal minister of infrastructure had been frantic, sending him across the country to listen to the wants and needs of every big-city ...