I Am Herod
Richard Kelly Kemick is an agnostic who decides to try out for a role in the Canadian Badlands Passion Play. It’s a lark. He’s starting to conclude he’s less a writer than a failed writer, his [...]
Jay Smith
Jay Smith
Beverley McLachlin: The Legacy of a Supreme Court Chief Justice
With her retirement from the Supreme Court of Canada in 2017, a certain genre of Beverley McLachlin hagiography has emerged. The first woman to serve as Chief Justice, McLachlin cuts a formidable [...]
The Inquirer
The Inquirer is a tabloid that mysteriously appears at the local convenience store in Kingsley, Alberta. Rather than detailing the lives of celebrities, however, the paper turns up the latest [...]
Courtroom 356
If you want a glimpse of criminal justice in Alberta, walk up to Courtroom 356 in Edmonton on a weekday morning. Once you go through the glass doors into the foyer, the air smells just a bit of [...]
Women in Criminal Justice:
Women in Criminal Justice is a wide-ranging book of essays by lawyers and judges who are also women. This simple thread, the gender of the writers, gives a glimpse into Canada’s vast and complex [...]
Left
With her third novel, Calgary’s Theanna Bischoff delves into murder mystery. Left is built around a disappearance: 29-year-old Natasha Bell, a nurse in Calgary, goes missing while jogging one [...]
The Figgs
The Figgs are a family ripe with dysfunctionality—all adult children live at home, working dead-end jobs, and their bickering is full of profanity. Yet parents June and Randy Figg remain [...]
Dropout
Having your child drop out of school is a parent’s worst nightmare. Avery, Leslie Gavel’s eldest daughter, did just that. She was smart, from an engaged, middle-class family, in French immersion, [...]
Overhauling Everything Schools Teach Kids
On one of Edmonton’s warmest days in early April, NDP education critic Deron Bilous knocked on the office door of Education Minister Jeff Johnson. Bilous held a thick stack of papers—a petition [...]
Beyond Books
Each morning, David McMain tries to get to work an hour before he officially starts. But he doesn’t head straight to his office at Edmonton’s Stanley Milner library, where he is an outreach [...]
MOST READ
MOST READ
The Lesson of Lougheed
For 100 years, between 1905 and 2005, Albertans changed their government only three times (1921, 1935, 1971). The last of these elections, the most portentous, happened 50 years ago this August. Alberta has now changed government twice in the past six years. The next election may see yet another new government—meaning ...
The Assault on Higher Education
The Kenney government proclaimed in fall 2019 that Alberta’s post-secondary institutions were “overly dependent” on government funding—which is an odd thing to say about a public good. Then it declared that the province’s grant to the schools should be reduced by 20 per cent by 2023. The rationale for this ...
Rediscovering a River
The Cree called it Kisiskâciwanisîpiy—the swiftly flowing river. For the Blackfoot, it was omaka-ty—the big river. It starts in the Columbia Icefield, at the toe of the Saskatchewan Glacier, and cuts the province in half as it flows through Banff and Jasper national parks, northeast to Edmonton, then east-by-southeast across the ...