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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Should Jury Selection Be Changed?
Steven Penney says yes.
Imagine receiving a jury summons in the mail. You dutifully report to the courthouse and wait patiently for the selection process to unfold. When your name is finally called, you stand before the judge, lawyers and defendant. One of lawyers utters “challenge,” and the judge immediately tells ...
Reducing the Harm
It's a little after 10 o’clock in the morning and Taylor feels like she’s climbing the walls.
When her name is called and the door to Lethbridge’s supervised drug consumption site buzzes open, Taylor moves quickly on her crutches. She settles into a chair at the second booth from the end ...
Justice For None
Blair Jason Hinkley, accused of aggravated sexual assault, was released from an Alberta prison in 2016 because the Crown took too long to bring the case to trial. Hinkley was then arrested again, in June 2017, and charged with assaulting another woman. In April 2018 the case of alleged murderer ...