Happy Sands
Barb Howard’s new novel, Happy Sands, details the summertime revelation of 42-year-old massage therapist Ginny (short for Ginette, which reminds her of a “too-small bottle of booze, the kind you [...]
Jay Smith
Jay Smith
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 [...]
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 [...]
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The Absurd UCP Curriculum
Jason Kenney arrived in Alberta provincial politics with a laser focus on reforming K–12 education, and one of his primary targets was curriculum—what students learn in school. During the first annual general meeting of the United Conservative Party in 2018, Kenney announced: “If the NDP tries to smuggle more of their ...
We Are Our Own Masters
On January 30, 1649, Charles, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, lost his head. Literally. The king, believing he had a divine right to rule, tried to shut down parliament and reign as absolute monarch. He was arrested, tried by parliament for treason and publicly executed.
First, the republicans of Oliver ...
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 ...