Born in Romance
Peter grew up in Banff, the son of a pioneering family (then the “Whites”). His father, Dave White, first worked for the CPR and then in 1894 acquired, through an unpaid debt, a hardware, grocery [...]
Steven Ross Smith
Steven Ross Smith
Searching for Mary Schäffer:
In 2006 Colleen Skidmore, Alberta writer, scholar and researcher, edited This Wild Spirit: Women in the Rocky Mountains of Canada, a marvellous compendium of writings and images by and of women [...]
Deep in the Furrows
I’ve gone around and around fields for a week cutting winter rye and winter wheat. Divining my thoughts are earth’s invisible coils about my head. From “Swather As Threshold” in Afternoon [...]
Optical Illusion
My 94-year-old mother and I are sitting in a southwest Calgary medical office and settling in to spend the day. It will be a long one but by the time we leave, my mother will have a new right eye [...]
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Mandate Creep: National Parks and Tourism
I retired from a career with Parks Canada a few years ago, not long after signing off on a management plan that prescribed a 2 per cent annual increase in visitors to Banff. Local businesses were ecstatic that the new plan seemed finally to acknowledge tourism growth as a priority ...
Take Us to Your Leader
We were expecting a brawl. When Premier Rachel Notley and United Conservative Party leader Jason Kenney faced off for the first time in the legislature on March 12, 2018, we were ready for plenty of eye gouging, hair pulling and gut punching, politically speaking.
The two had been enthusiastically on the ...
The 2019 Election
If all goes according to plan, Alberta will have a provincial election this spring. But what if it doesn’t go to plan? What if we don’t have an election this spring?
Oh, I know we’re supposed to. Heck, we have a provincial law that says the election is to be held ...