On the Brink
There is something angelic about trumpeter swans. Rare, ethereal, the size of a child, they wear robes of white feathers and course across the sky like clouds. They were once widespread in Canada [...]
Jeff Gailus
Jeff Gailus
Black Swans
A heartbeat off Highway 63 north of Fort McMurray, a boardwalk leads you through a quiet grove of aspen and jack pine, where songbirds fill the air with their tweets and twitters. It was too [...]
Lobbyists and Lip Service
Shortly after 3:00 p.m. on March 7, 2007, following what Hansard describes as “a fanfare of trumpets,” freshly minted Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach introduced the Lobbyists Act in the legislature. [...]
Wild Alberta’s Last Stand
The Castle wilderness is our own Costa Rica. Tucked into the southwestern corner of Alberta, the Castle features the largest number of plant and animal species of any region in the province—an [...]
Mind Games
There’s an old saying in research: Go to the source. And so, on a cool November Thursday, I stopped in to speak to former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein at his newest place of employment, the swank [...]
Alberta’s Grizzly Century
When Andy Russell died on June 1, 2005, nature honoured him with a tempest the likes of which he had never seen in Southwest Alberta during his 89 years. Rain fell like lead shot for almost a [...]
The Battle for Banff
Last week, within a two-hour walk of my back door, the Fairholme wolf pack set upon a female cougar just inside Banff National Park’s east boundary. One on one, a cougar is the ultimate predatory [...]
Who Killed Garrett Campiou?
At about 10 P.M. on November 2, a 14-year-old boy told his adoptive father he was going out to visit his grandmother. The boy and father had recently returned to Edmonton from British Columbia [...]
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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 ...
Should All Drugs Be Decriminalized?
Hakique Virani says yes.
Twelve-step addiction recovery programs teach that it is irrational to “do the same thing over and over again expecting different results.” This should be a lesson for legislators too. As the 4,000 Canadian families who lost a loved one to an opioid overdose last year know, our ...
Holy Healthcare
Just tell them we don’t have it here.” That’s what the nurse told me in Killam Hospital, an hour east of Camrose. I’d asked what would happen if a woman came into our ER asking for the morning-after pill. The nurse wasn’t being self-righteous, but simply explaining the policy.
As ...