Columns

In the 1990s, Premier Ralph Klein and Prime Minister Jean Chrétien teamed up to lure investment dollars to the Alberta oil sands. One of the carrots on offer was that, in the pre-payout period of [...]

One June day I headed deep into the Whaleback wilderness of southwestern Alberta in search of one of the most beautiful of native lilies—the blue camas. Blue camas was part of the ecological [...]

Try and picture them all. On his first visit to the Waterton area in 1865, John (“Kootenai”) Brown wrote: “The prairie as far as we could see east, north and west was one living mass of buffalo. [...]

If political partisanship bothers you, it probably means your political tribe is in power. You’re satisfied with what they’re doing, but the opposing side is making headway in the polls with [...]

Look at a satellite image of Alberta at night, and you can map our richest agricultural soils by the concentration of urban lights. When European immigrants arrived here in the late 1800s and [...]

The newspaper business has been in trouble for a long time. One of the gaudier proofs was last year, when Torstar and Postmedia traded a bunch of newspapers for the purpose of killing them. That [...]

If you could hold a black-throated green warbler in your hand, it would be soft to the touch and strangely light. Barely as long as an avocado, the slender greenish bird with a black neck and [...]

I credit The Guardian for sparking my interest in the relationship between golf and politics. That publication has been all over Donald Trump’s relationship to the sport. One of their articles [...]

My dad used to derive a quiet pleasure from driving our family’s station wagon past stuck four-wheel-drives. Alberta’s foothills and mountains had few good roads in the 1960s. Dad took things [...]

Spring draws nigh: the season of the birds and the bees. Birdsong is a welcome gift, but where would we be without bees? Their obsessive quest for pollen and nectar keeps much of Alberta’s native [...]