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In 2004 I broke the story that a paper Ralph Klein had tabled in the legislature, an essay on the Chilean Revolution that he’d written for a class at Athabasca University, was a collection of quotes lifted from other sources without citations. (Our lawyers advised me not to use the term plagiarism. Other news outlets were less punctilious.) How did I score this scoop I’d simply typed various phrases from Klein’s paper into Google—which was still something of a novelty—and found the sources he’d borrowed from so liberally.

Five years later I broke a story about the Stelmach govern-ment’s multimillion-dollar rebranding campaign, which featured a photo of two blond children, in cable-knit sweaters, frolicking on a beach. Except the kids weren’t Albertan. Nor was the beach. It was a stock photo of English children in Northumberland, playing near a castle that, according to legend, had been home to a knight of the Round Table. The Journal story, headlined “Sir Lancelot wants his beach back,” included a ludicrous claim from the government that there had been no intent to deceive. “The children are a symbol of the future,” I was told. “They symbolize that Albertans are a worldly people.”

From the vantage of 2026 it may be hard to understand why these two stories were front-page scandals. With ChatGPT and other large language models running amok in high school and university classrooms, Klein’s cut-and-paste sloppiness seems almost quaint. At least the premier went to the effort of finding sources and copying them himself. Today artificial intelligence has automated plagiarism and made a mockery of our long-held taboos about passing off other people’s work as our own. Intellectual property Original thought What do they matter, when with a few keyboard strokes a program can stitch together a plausible paper—or column Never mind that the AI is stealing or, worse, making stuff up, adding citations and quotations it has simply manufactured.

And oh, how I long for a time when stock photos were the worst of our problems. In 2026 AI doesn’t just plunder bits and pieces from original work to concoct believable fakes, stealing the livelihoods of artists and photographers and graphic designers. AI has made it simple to strip everyday photos of women and girls, turning them into instant fake porn.

Artificial intelligence can manipulate photos and videos so we no longer know what’s true.

Indeed, AI can manipulate photos and videos so that we no longer know what’s true or false and when to believe the evidence of our eyes. When Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Black civil rights activist from Minneapolis, was arrested this past January for protesting, the White House shared an AI-altered photo of her arrest. The doctored version darkened her skin, removed her lipstick, made her look heavier, and turned her proud stoic expression into a flood of messy tears. Amidst all the horrors in Minnesota that month, that incident didn’t get much attention. But the racism, the misogyny and the petty malice chilled me in a different way than the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—the White House was willing to trample the truth with an ease that would have made Goebbels pea-green with envy and Orwell sob into his beer.

I’m no Luddite. I’ve toured the cutting-edge AI labs at the University of Alberta and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. Alberta researchers are world leaders, doing exciting work in machine reinforcement learning and developing AI to do everything from improving the diagnosis and treatment of cancerous tumours to running power plants more efficiently. Nor am I worried about sentient AI becoming self-aware and leading a robot rebellion. What worries me isn’t smart computers—it’s stupid humans, using the crudest energy-sucking generative AI tools to make themselves dumber, debase creativity and undermine the very concept of truth itself. (And I haven’t even touched on the horror stories of people who fall in love with their chatbots, or turn to them for dangerously bad advice, without seeming to understand they’re caught in a narcissistic feedback loop, speaking to their own reflection.)

When I see governments and businesses pushing people to use AI to answer every email, goose every online search or even draft official documents, I can only hope this fever dream will pass, that it will become fashionable again to write and create and think for ourselves. Until then, I’ll be boycotting anything that blurs the line between reality and faked fantasy. Maybe I am a latter-day Luddite. After all, they weren’t afraid of machines. They were afraid of what the Industrial Revolution would do to their communities and societies. Before our own post-industrial AI revolution overwhelms us, let’s decide which human values we’re willing to sacrifice—and which we’re not.

Paula Simons is an Alberta senator and a member of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications.

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As for Steve, it’s been 26 years since he first visited a GA meeting. Now 47, his relationship with recovery has been off and on. “I probably have 20 years of clean time combined,” he says. Roughly 180,000 Albertans, according to the Canadian Community Health Survey, have or are at risk for gambling problems.

Growing up in south Calgary, Steve bet on childhood marble or pool games, taken in by the highs of winning. By 17 he was sneaking into the Elbow River Casino. “I just couldn’t wait until I was 18,” he says. As Steve matured into adulthood, gambling took over his life. His debts became too high to keep his addiction secret. He lost a marriage “after being given 100 chances.” Family members started getting calls from banks and other lenders demanding Steve repay the money.

In 1999, when Steve attended his first GA meeting, Alberta’s gambling landscape grounded itself in the physical realm. There were casinos—his preferred type of play—as well as video lottery terminals (VLTs), bingo, scratch tickets and lotto and Sport Select slips to fill in with a pencil. With only half of Canadians using the internet as the millennium dawned, everything online was in its infancy. This included gambling.

Then “grey-market” gambling websites started to appear online. Registered in such far-flung places as the Caribbean or the Isle of Man, they were illegal and unregulated in Canada. The players logging on didn’t know or care. A Canada West Foundation report proposed that the problem was best ignored. “It is not clear that a reasonable market for internet-based gambling in Canada exists, nor is it clear that such a market could be created,” wrote Robin Kelley, Peter Todosichuk and Jason Azmier in 2001. The authors argued that in trying to capture these players, governments might just create wider problems.

The grey market grew, however, as internet adoption increased and the number of websites expanded. Eventually people began gambling through browsers and apps on their smartphones and tablets. Provinces decided the market was a threat, and responded by launching their own legal, publicly owned online casinos, including, in 2020, Play Alberta. Gambling activity spread further with the legalization of single-sport betting nationwide in 2021.

The following year, Ontario started regulating the online private-casino—dubbed iGaming—industry. This officially enabled online casinos, including those previously operating outside Ontario law, to be licensed by the province. In exchange they would pay a cut of their revenues to the provincial government. Ontario now has some 50 operators, which run 87 websites.

In a few short years iGaming has become a huge industry in Ontario. More than two million user accounts have been opened, of which one million are active. Gambling has contributed more than $1.6-billion to Ontario government coffers. The government of Alberta has taken notice. They want in on the action. Albertans have already been seeing ads for gambling apps and websites (e.g., on Hockey Night in Canada) that they can’t actually use, at least legally.

As the second mover in Canadian iGaming, Alberta could learn from—or ignore—Ontario’s lessons. Though our government has said Alberta will “massage” Ontario’s blueprint, provinces often simply copy policies. Alberta will also help set the stage for provinces that follow suit. This province’s approach could even shape the gambling industry abroad. But whether Wild Rose Country will put a good system in place depends on who you ask.

In June 2024 the Minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction, Dale Nally, took the stage at the Canadian Gaming Summit in front of a large photo of himself to talk about “Betting on the Alberta Advantage.” Hair slicked back, Nally introduced himself not by his actual title but as the province’s “Minister of Fun.” He noted Ontario’s “success” with iGaming, and said Alberta wanted to follow in its footsteps. He said Albertans watching sports see ads for things they love, like beer, trucks and gambling. “But there’s something we don’t like about the ads,” he said, in a recording shared with AV by a journalist in attendance. It was the disclaimer that says “Ontario only.” “So we’ve got to change that.” Nally told the gambling company representatives in the audience to come find him later, to pitch, because Alberta would soon be open for business.

Consultations followed with stakeholders, including First Nations and other land-based casino operators in Alberta. In the legislature, MLAs debated how Alberta would soon usher in a new era of gambling. Amendments to proposed legislation—including player-protection measures such as gambling education, advertising limits and financial outlays for harm reduction—were defeated. And then, in May 2025, the iGaming Alberta Act was passed. The floodgates are expected to officially open in 2026.

Minister Dale Nally noted Ontario’s “success” with online gambling, and said Alberta wants to follow in its footsteps.

What awaits Albertans is an experiment. Countries such as Denmark, Sweden and the UK have versions of iGaming marketplaces. But in North America the iGaming industry is still in its infancy. Besides Ontario, iGaming marketplaces exist in only seven US states. Online sports betting is more widespread, both across Canada and, according to the American Gaming Association, in 34 US states. Though quick to tout benefits—namely revenue—governments like Ontario’s are also facing consequences, including more gambling addiction and growing concerns over advertising, such as its effects on children and youth.

Steve is already hearing about these concerns in GA meetings, with the biggest change in recent years being how people gamble. Older people are still using casinos and VLTs, he says. “But the younger people coming in now are mostly online gamblers.”

Nally isn’t hearing as many reservations. The people he talks to want us to be like Ontario. “Albertans have said ‘Why don’t you do the same here?’” Nally told CBC in a 2025 interview about iGaming. “Why don’t you put in place safety measures Why don’t you stop the money from leaving the province, and keep some of it in Alberta?”

Putting aside the open question of how many people expressed such preferences to Nally, or what their interests are, governments have traditionally let revenue potential, not consumer input, drive gambling expansion.

The founding father of gambling economics, the late William Eadington, was skeptical of online gambling’s role in public revenue generation, because he felt more taxes could be collected from physical venues such as casinos.

Though the online market is bigger for operators—by virtue of its 24/7, borderless, portable access—governments don’t earn the same spoils. While the Ontario government takes over 80 per cent of the revenues from land-based casinos and VLTs, it takes only 20 per cent of online iGaming revenues.

Ontario’s iGaming private companies have collectively taken more than $7.6-billion in just over three years, five times the online gambling revenue the provincial government has collected. Publicly owned online casinos in Alberta and Ontario don’t have partners to split revenues with, meaning the government keeps it all. The Edmonton international airport currently keeps 15 per cent of gross gaming revenue from its VLTs, while 85 per cent is returned to government coffers. Alberta charitable casinos are currently taxed at 83 per cent of net revenue. But Alberta’s online iGaming casinos are likely to be taxed at only 20 per cent, as in Ontario.

In short, the province will receive a much smaller cut from each dollar spent in a new iGaming regime than it is used to receiving from other forms of gambling.

The Alberta government downplays the possibility of iGaming cannibalizing higher-taxed land-based gaming. When launching Play Alberta, it said this wouldn’t happen, due to the province’s focus on targeting grey-market gamblers. Nonetheless, it’s very likely. A consultant’s report commissioned by casino operator Great Canadian Entertainment suggested Ontario casinos could lose about $550-million annually from gamblers flocking instead to iGaming. And indeed Ontario casino revenues fell below target in fiscal 2023–24 by almost that very amount. For the government to avoid taking a financial hit, then, Alberta’s gamblers will need to lose more money—or more Albertans will need to start gambling.

Land-based gambling creates economic spinoffs through casinos and VLT venues. These include job creation and additional tax revenues from food and beverages, payroll and property. Ontario is losing these “silver linings” of gambling. When Play Alberta launched, its potential impact on casino revenues was enough for the Tsuut’ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations to file a lawsuit citing potentially unfair competition.

When William Eadington wrote about online gambling earlier this century, the massive global industry we live with today was, in some respects, unfathomable. But now professional sports leagues have given up their long fight against betting potentially corrupting the sanctity of their games. Governments have permitted marketing on a grand scale with few restrictions, as in Ontario. And they have  succumbed to the temptation to steer away from more-profitable gambling options for a smaller share of a larger pie.

In part, this is due to the spectre of grey-market gambling, which drives a narrative known in gambling research as overcoming “regulatory resistance.” Gambling proponents invoke the perils of the grey market (or illegal black market) to wear down and defeat resistance to legalizing gambling. According to a 2021 paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, concerns include loss of consumer freedom, lower economic growth, and lack of safety.

Governments and consultants suggest that vast sums of money are currently being gambled away in unregulated markets. In 2020, as Play Alberta was being launched, Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis (AGLC) suggested Albertans were gambling away $378-million on the unregulated market.

Minister Nally, who didn’t respond to an interview request, spoke of the shadow side of the industry disdainfully in the legislature. “There are two parts that really are quite offensive,” he said. “One is that the money is not just leaving Alberta; it’s leaving the country for offshore destinations. So we don’t see a penny of that. And some of these operators are repugnant.”

Switching gamblers from unregulated to regulated gambling is called “channelization.” Some industry observers consider even 80 per cent to be a low goal. Ontario, which according to an Ipsos poll sees 86.4 per cent of its gamblers use the province’s regulated iGaming market, is chasing a 90 per cent channelization rate.

Unsurprisingly, channelization rates run lower in jurisdictions such as Alberta that have a single, publicly owned online casino rather than dozens of privately run websites that court the public with incentives to gamble and try to outmarket each other. In 2023–24 (the most recent annual report available), Albertans placed $5.3-billion in bets across all games on Play Alberta. That’s a 20.8 per cent increase over the previous year. After prize payouts and expenses, this netted the government $235-million. Prior to the 2020 launch, the province didn’t earn one cent from regulated online gambling.

The amount by which iGaming could expand Alberta’s regulated market is debated. Analysts project the new market could reach $1-billion to $1.25-billion at maturity. With 20 per cent of gross gaming revenue going to the provincial general fund—the same rate Ontario takes from iGaming partners—at least $200-million could be expected annually. Meanwhile $200-million is equivalent to only 0.25 per cent of the province’s projected 2025–26 total expenses.

For Alberta to avoid taking a financial hit, gamblers will need to lose more money—or more Albertans will need to start gambling.

So, is it worth it to allow all this online gaming Carrie Shaw, an Alberta Gaming Research Institute (AGRI) research chair at the University of Alberta, says she’s skeptical of revenue projections, because how much will get captured is calculated differently depending on who’s crunching the numbers. “I don’t know that the rationale for opening the market in Alberta is as evidence-based as it could be,” she says.

Take, for example, that no foolproof way exists to estimate the market size of Albertans wagering on grey-market sites. Often activity like this is measured through user surveys or web-traffic patterns, not spending data. Other information, such as the number of player accounts at a given online casino, is proprietary. Estimates vary too widely to tell a definitive story.

Though the province officially claims that Play Alberta has captured 45 per cent of the local online gambling market, data shared with the industry magazine Canadian Gaming Business by H2 Gambling Capital suggests the number is closer to “28 per cent of non-lottery gaming.” (H2 didn’t respond to an interview request.) A survey of online gamblers by Ipsos and the Canadian Gaming Association, an industry trade group, reported that only 22.7 per cent wager on Play Alberta. And of those players, just over half also gambled on grey-market sites.

If one assumes Play Alberta currently has 45 per cent of the market, with its 434,000 registered player accounts, the remaining 55 per cent of the market wouldn’t constitute 530,445 grey market accounts. Although Play Alberta permits only one account per individual, verified using government ID, players can sign up for accounts with multiple online gambling operators in iGaming or grey markets.

David Forrest, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Liverpool, says the average from UK Gambling Commission surveys is two accounts. But academic reviews of problem-gambling screenings suggest the number can actually be six or seven per gambler. Taking this into consideration can dramatically reduce the potential market size of iGaming in Alberta by several magnitudes. It can also distort channelization rates by making them appear higher by measuring total accounts rather than total players.

Forrest adds that attempts to survey gamblers on money spent are also challenging. Estimates range widely due to issues with self-reporting, including lack of recall or stating the amount wagered or the amount lost interchangeably.

Besides issues around the actual revenue potential of iGaming, Shaw at AGRI says other unintended consequences aren’t being properly reviewed. Online gambling, she notes, is inherently riskier than the in-person kind. Yet Canada already has insufficient public data on the consequences of gambling, whether detailed addiction rates, the number of calls to gambling helplines or the magnitude of harms such as gambling-related bankruptcies, domestic violence or suicides.

In 2018 Statistics Canada estimated 2.9 per cent of Ontarians have gambling problems or are at some level of risk for them. In December 2024 a Pollara report for Mental Health Research Canada put that number at a whopping 22 per cent. The Ontario Problem Gambling Helpline says it’s seeing a spike in calls. The scraps of evidence so far, wrote four Ontario psychologists for The Conversation in January 2025, “suggest a notable rise in problem gambling since [iGaming’s] introduction.”

Facing public criticism, Ontario banned celebrities from appearing in ads to promote iGaming—unless they’re promoting “responsible gaming.” It’s unknown whether this is having the intended effect. “We don’t have any evidence to suggest it’s having [an] impact,” Shaw says. And we know little about the long-term effects of online gambling ads on children and youth.

The biggest criticism so far, however, is that Alberta is moving ahead with the industry before crafting many of the rules and regulations.

Other than a plan for centralized self-exclusion that will enable patrons to ban themselves from all iGaming casinos at once—a feature Ontario still lacks—few specifics are yet known about Alberta’s iGaming market. Nally has said he believes responsible gambling should be a regulatory issue, not written into law. That way, he told the legislature, changes can be made “on a dime” as required by the market rather than requiring a legislative process.

That isn’t good enough for experts on gambling activity and addiction. “I think the onus is on the provider and the regulators to actually partner with [arm’s length] researchers,” Shaw says. Though researchers at the AGRI have a good working relationship with the provincial regulator, Shaw adds, the institute hasn’t been asked to perform independent research in the lead-up to Alberta opening its iGaming market.

It’s also critical to address a less tangible query: Will the consumer protections offered as part of an Alberta iGaming industry outweigh the negative consequences for the public writ large When discussing why an iGaming industry even needs to be created here, the provincial government publicly defaults to messages related to safety and responsible gambling. “Our goal is not to create new gamblers but to make existing online gambling safer,” Nally has said.

Brady Simpson, a University of Calgary doctoral candidate who studies gambling marketing, finds this messaging baffling. “What do you think is going to happen when these massive—in some cases multibillion-dollar—[companies] are able to inject their marketing dollars into Alberta The whole point is new-customer acquisition and then retention of those people.”

Simpson adds that such a permissive approach isn’t being taken with tobacco, alcohol or cannabis. Gambling too has health and addiction risks. Tobacco, alcohol and cannabis typically aren’t as close by as one’s phone, with its new, enticing, soon-to-be-legal gambling apps. At a minimum, says Simpson, “We should have limitations on marketing and accessibility.” Instead, the industry is “about to open the floodgates.”

What is happening now with iGaming in Alberta is familiar. It’s the same process every time Alberta expands its gambling options. The same questions, the same concerns, the same alleged drive to stamp out illegal activity, the same push to expand industry, the same lack of digging into how previous gambling expansion has affected people. It has happened before, here and across the country, and history is repeating itself.

Lobbyists are already pushing for an iGaming market in BC, but at present the government there says it isn’t interested. The Quebec Online Gaming Coalition—which includes member companies Bet99, Draft Kings and Flutter—has been lobbying for an iGaming market in that province since May 2023.

Yet this could be a moment to steer away from the old narratives and rationales that turned legalized gambling into a massive business.

When Nally spoke to industry insiders, he told them Albertans love to gamble. But the “Minister of Fun” also told the legislature: “I want to be perfectly clear: if you don’t gamble today, please don’t start tomorrow. That is not the purpose of this.” Meanwhile his government is projecting that Alberta’s gambling industry will grow. If this isn’t a mixed message, what is?

Steve has been in recovery since 2019, and he is determined to make it stick. “There’s a difference between abstinence and recovery,” he says. Previously he only focused on abstinence from gambling, which he saw as time off. Now he’s actively in recovery, which for him involves following a 12-step program and doing service work, including as an executive with Southern Alberta Gamblers Anonymous. He knows what will happen if he veers off course. “I won’t stop until I lose all my money. I’m going to be a liar. I’m going to be a thief,” he says. “I might as well say bye-bye to my family and my friends and my work.”

One thing he is confident about with Alberta’s new iGaming regime is that it won’t unleash a flood of new people with gambling addiction into his meetings. But not because they won’t exist. “There are thousands and thousands of compulsive gamblers in Calgary,” he says. “Yet every night we have a meeting, maybe 15 to 20 of us are in the room.”

Journalist Rob Csernyik has a forthcoming book from Sutherland House on gambling-related suicides in Canada.

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And while passengers wait in those lines, they can’t help but look over at the lucky Verified Travellers, whisking their way through the short, speedy Verified Travellers line, where people can leave their computers in their cases, their toothpaste in their toiletry bag and their boots on their feet.

As they stand watching, they may be wondering—how do I get to be a Verified Traveller?

Four classes of Canadians, in fact, get to use the “good line.” First, current members of the Canadian Armed Forces. Second, RCMP members as well as most members of provincial and local police forces. Third, pilots, flight attendants and other aircrew members in uniform, as well as any airport employees who carry special Restricted Area Identification Cards.

If you’re not in one of these categories, the only way to use the fast line is with a NEXUS card. NEXUS is a joint US/Canadian program that lets Canadians cross more easily into the US. It’s ideal for people who do a lot of cross-border business or who work in both countries. Applicants go through security background checks and in-person interviews by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA)—and US Homeland Security.

During the first Trump term, when COVID hit, the whole system ground to a halt, creating multi-year waits to get a card. Then the US tightened its rules. Canadians used to be able to go to any major international airport, such as those in Calgary and Edmonton, to be interviewed by US border officials. Now Canadians can only book an interview by crossing a US land border or by buying an airline ticket to an American destination. Getting an appointment isn’t easy. When I spoke to the CBSA a few months ago, they said more than 100,000 Canadians were waiting for an interview.

That’s not the only problem. For many Canadians, the idea of submitting to vetting by Trump’s Homeland Security apparatus, of providing the Trump regime with their fingerprints and their retinal scans, is more than a little disquieting. Then, this past summer, the CBSA confirmed that Homeland Security will only accept NEXUS cards with genders clearly marked F or M. For trans, gender-fluid or gender non-binary Canadians, that means a NEXUS card may simply be out of reach.

The CBSA says applications for NEXUS cards started dropping noticeably last November, right after Trump’s second election. It’s hard to see that trend reversing anytime soon.

The idea of providing the Trump regime with our fingerprints and retinal scans is disquieting.

That’s a problem for Canadian airports. Without enough Verified Travellers in the queue, they can’t afford the staff to keep Verified Traveller lanes open. Already, Ottawa’s airport only opens its Verified line during limited peak hours. The Canadian Airports Council warns that if we don’t have enough Verified Travellers, security wait times will increase for everyone.

Why do we still rely on a country that has threatened our sovereignty to investigate our citizens and collect and retain their private and biometric information It’s not just gender queer Canadians at risk. What if the Trump government just doesn’t like your politics, your social media posts or your skin tone Why have we surrendered to another country the authority to determine which Canadians can be trusted?

Maybe you don’t think you need a NEXUS card. Canadians have dramatically reduced US travel since Trump’s annexation threats. But if you want to fly from Edmonton to Moncton, and leave your boots on, you must show a NEXUS card. If you want to fly from Calgary to Ottawa, without unpacking your laptop, you need a NEXUS card. The only way for Canadian frequent fliers to travel conveniently within their own borders is with Donald Trump’s blessing! It’s bonkers.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As it happens the CBSA already carries out its own background checks in order to issue NEXUS cards. So what is preventing Canada from issuing its own trusted traveller cards to Canadian citizens who aren’t going to the US I haven’t been able to get a proper answer to that question. And so I recently tabled a motion in the Senate calling on the government to investigate the creation of a sovereign, domestic Verified Travellers program for Canadian air passengers.

It’s well past time for us to repatriate control of our airport security systems and stop contracting out our security assessments to a foreign power. It may cost a bit more. But it will be worth every penny for us to reclaim our national sovereignty, and to ensure that every Canadian has the equal right to travel efficiently—even with toothpaste.

Paula Simons is an Alberta senator and a member of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications. 

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Some are bound to argue with my choice of year. Computers and cell phones have been around longer than that. So why have I done such a daft thing as pick the present year My excuse is that I believe 2024 will go down in history as the “Year of the Deepfake Elections.”

The term “deepfake” appeared on Reddit in 2017. But a fellow at the University of Montreal had already pioneered the technology in 2014. The idea of the deepfake is to digitally replace one person’s likeness with another. The “digital” here is important, because people started faking non-digital photographs practically the minute they were invented. But doing it on digital video and audio is a relatively new frontier.

And how quickly it has evolved. Right off the bat, deepfakes were used for blackmail and character assassination, starting with putting celebrity heads on other bodies in pornographic videos. This was the adolescent phase. Actually, “phase” is a wrong concept for something that has practically happened all at once. One of the founding fathers of the deepfake was a fellow who mingled digital video of himself with that of Barack Obama and fooled most of the people most of the time in 2017. Another deepfake milestone was when Donald Trump was seen on video encouraging the population of Belgium to exit the Paris climate agreement. In that case there was more reason to be fooled, but for once the stupid thing wasn’t being said by the real Donald.

Under the ubiquitous name AI (artificial intelligence), deepfaking is now so commonplace that your kids might get a deepfake kit this Christmas and give you a video of yourself singing “Yellow Submarine” in a clown costume the same day.

But back to elections and 2024. The reason I’m picking this as the Year of the Deepfake Elections is that, globally, over 50 countries are having elections in 2024. Canada, for the moment, is not one of them. But billions of Earthlings will vote in 2024, so it’s rather important that we know how much of the digital video and audio passing before our eyes and ears is real as opposed to concocted by AI labs on behalf of people who would like to “fix” an election. This would include the dreaded “foreign actors” we are told are tampering with our elections all the time. Never has it been so easy or so likely.

Since this seems rather important, I dug around to see if there are any accessible, reliable tools for knowing when you’re watching a deepfake and not the real article. What I found was a bit sad. Instead of some compact piece of brilliant electronic wizardry that I could point at the suspicious video, and that would then decree it “real” or “fake,” I was told the best way to avoid being fooled by deepfake material is to “watch things live.” If we’re talking elections, I assume this means I should go in person to speeches and debates. Failing that, I should watch live broadcasts. Otherwise, given a delay between a speech or debate and when I watch it, deepfakers could slip in and rejig their candidate’s dumbest statements into something smarter—or meddle with their opponents’ clips and soundbites to make them seem as stupid as possible.

In a nation 7,500 km wide, voters don’t get to live-attend much during a federal election. People with jobs and parenting duties find it hard as well to watch live TV as opposed to repeats and news-hour summaries.

Another piece of advice for avoiding being fooled by the deepfake is to “watch their lips.” If the relationship between the lip action and the verbiage starts to look like Frodo Baggins speaking Mandarin, beware. But, having worked in documentary video for a large chunk of my life, I have to ask: what about audio and video that just happens to be out of sync Is there not a risk of ditching an honest candidate because of a non-insidious technical screw-up?

So there it is, folks. That’s all the advice I could find for protecting us against the deepfake. Watch things live. Watch their lips. For the record, I do totally believe that we will never again experience an election where politicians aren’t made to appear on the internet saying things they never said. There may, however, be another line of defence. Why don’t we go back to noticing if a politician lies or not. If he/she lies, he/she will also cheat—using whatever technology is available. It’s primitive, I suppose, for this world of highly sophisticated technology. But I recommend it nonetheless.

Fred Stenson’s many books include the novels Who By Fire, The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

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Chris Turner says Yes

The author of How to Be a Climate Optimist, winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize

I consider myself a climate optimist, even as an era of deepening climate disasters descends upon us. Canada’s 2023 wildfire season established a grim benchmark for the scope of the challenges humanity will face for the foreseeable future.

The engine of my optimism lies well outside the frame of news coverage of these disasters. But that doesn’t detract from its importance. That engine operates on the solution side of the equation, and it grows more powerful daily. I’ve been reporting on the global energy transition for 20 years and now routinely see numbers and details thought impossible only a decade ago. The one currently boggling my mind is 392 gigawatts—a rigorous estimate of how much new solar power was added to the world’s electricity grids in 2023 alone. This is virtually identical to the generating capacity of the world’s entire nuclear fleet. It’s also about four times as much solar as was installed on earth 10 years ago. That’s one year. Solar power alone.

And it’s very much not alone. The numbers are similarly staggering for wind power, electric vehicles, hyper-efficient heat pumps, energy storage—a comprehensive toolkit for climate action. All of it has quickly vaulted from margin to mainstream, defying even the rosiest estimates. And the 10 years just past show every sign of being mere prelude to the 10 years of transformative growth ahead, as prices continue to plummet and adoption curves for clean technology breach tipping points in one country after another (Bloomberg News counted at least 87 such countries as of October 2022).

The picture the International Energy Agency paints is an optimist’s dream. Electric vehicle use is expected to grow tenfold by 2030. Renewable energy will contribute at least 80 per cent of all new electricity generation worldwide from now until then as solar becomes the cheapest source of power virtually everywhere on earth. Electric heating and cooling (generated mostly by heat pumps) will overtake gas- and oil-fired boilers in market share. And fossil fuel use—first coal, then oil, then gas—will peak in overall demand before the decade is done.

Add that all up and it amounts to a clear victory. It likely won’t keep warming below 1.5°C, but credible analysis indicates the trajectory of current policies and pledges would land in the 2.1°C–2.4°C range by 2100. And there is every reason to assume ambitions will mount steadily as the energy transition toolkit becomes cheaper, more flexible and more familiar.

Let’s say modestly, then, that odds are at least even that the energy transition continues to accelerate over the next decade. That would surely generate the wherewithal to keep warming below 2°C (which until the 2015 Paris talks was seen as an ambitious goal). When I began searching for climate solutions 20 years ago, business-as-usual had a fossil-fuelled rocket strapped to its back pointed at 4°C or 5°C of warming—apocalyptic territory. That’s off the table now. The first generation of the energy transition has given us ample cause for optimism.

Andrew Nikiforuk Says No 

The author of Tar Sands, winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award

Civilization has for 150 years burned cheap, portable fossil fuels to pave paradise and erect a complex network of concrete cities decorated by many parking lots. In the process we have eradicated wildlife, replumbed rivers, overpopulated the earth and changed the climate with the emissions from billions of our energy slaves, such as diesel trucks.

Many greens now propose to fill these parking lots with battery-operated vehicles and other digital gadgets highly dependent on energy-intensive mining. Climate optimists plan to either bury CO₂ emissions under parking lots or suck them out of the air with dubious, unproven and unbuilt technologies such as carbon capture or direct air machines.

But these techno solutions represent dead ends. Climate change, which is accelerating, is not a technical problem that can be solved solely by new technologies; it is social problem rooted in ruinous energy consumption patterns that will require behaviour changes. The “clean tech” transition won’t make a real dent in emissions until humans change our focus and embrace an energy descent by shrinking our energy footprint. That means fewer technologies, cars, people and parking lots.

In this age of the absurd, let me be clear. I’m not saying renewables aren’t needed, but rather that the material, money and time needed to replace 46,423 power stations run by oil, coal, gas and nuclear energy with 586,000 power stations run by wind, solar and hydrogen isn’t feasible and won’t reduce emissions. Furthermore, I recognize climate change as just one symptom of what ecologist Bill Rees calls “overshoot.” Too many people are spending finite volumes of energy to replace natural systems on the planet with materially intense artificial ones run by energy-intensive robots. Electrifying the Titanic will not remove the many icebergs in our path. The scale of mining, for example, needed to support an energy transition boggles the mind. We can’t build more solar panels, windmills or electric cars without extracting more copper, lithium, iron ore and aluminum along with rare-earth metals. That means transforming the carbon-rich peatlands in Ontario’s Ring of Fire into $67-billion-worth of metals and radioactive waste.

Many techno-optimists ignore the costs of mining and argue we’ll cut emissions through more-efficient technologies. Economist William Jevons documented the flaw in this thinking in the 19th century. He observed that as the efficiency of steam engines improved, industries simply employed more of them to produce new goods for more consumers. Efficient tech leads to more energy consumption, not less. Jevons’s Paradox partly explains why the world is producing more fossil fuels than ever. Global coal demand reached record levels in 2023.

The much vaunted low-carbon economy promises a chaotic extension of the status quo. British philosopher John Gray recently characterized the problem aptly: “Net zero will be remembered like having cancer and using candle therapy.”

Chris Turner responds to Andrew Nikiforuk

In Andrew Nikiforuk’s argument against climate optimism, he cites three experts (besides himself): a philosopher, an ecologist and a 19th-century economist. This might be a fine start for the faculty of a liberal arts college, but I’m not much convinced it’s the braintrust needed to produce durable climate solutions.

I have nothing but respect for the liberal arts—I’m a lifelong practitioner—but philosophers and ecologists are nowhere near the top of my list when I’m looking for an installer for my new high-efficiency heat pump. And I certainly wouldn’t trust any of them to manufacture one, let alone the millions now being churned out to reduce emissions from heating and cooling buildings worldwide.

To be clear (and a little less facetious): the task of taming the climate crisis is primarily one of building new clean energy systems for a technologically advanced, mostly industrialized planet of eight billion souls. And I remain a climate optimist even when the esteemed John Gray compares that work to candle therapy, because, to use the lingo of his native Britain, John Gray evidently knows bugger-all about the global energy transition.

There are several big hairy statistics in Nikiforuk’s argument, but in the absence of citations I can’t speak to their accuracy other than to suggest they don’t pass the eye test. If Nikiforuk has an authoritative source on why it will take 586,000 wind, solar and hydrogen power stations to phase out fossil fuels, he ought to share it right away with the International Energy Agency, Bloomberg New Energy Finance and other professional trackers of the energy transition—who have already revised their estimates for new solar installations upward for 2023 several times to track China’s mounting ambitions. The figure also seems to deny the existence of geothermal, biomass and any number of other new technologies still in (increasingly rapid) development.

There is nowhere near enough room for us all to take up local, artisanal, pre-industrial subsistence farming.

I have to assume the point of citing this strangely precise figure—586,000, no more, no less—is not to offer recourse to facts but to point in alarm at a big scary number. See also Nikiforuk’s reference to exactly $67-billion in minerals and metals to be dug out of northern Ontario, which displays a level of certainty and foresight not even the Ring of Fire’s most enthusiastic boosters generally trade in. Researchers just discovered enough lithium for more than 300 million electric vehicle batteries under the Salton Sea in California, and Toyota has bet its electric vehicle fleet on a solid-state battery made from sodium instead—does that affect this $67-billion bonanza Never mind. It’s a large number, and it is allegedly borne to your front door on a great geyser of radioactive waste. And so you should not want it.

Beyond the specious numbers, I take exception to Nikiforuk’s use of the word “feasible.” In his estimation, the energy transition now well underway, the machinery of which I have personally observed on four continents, is not feasible. Whereas “behaviour changes” are feasible, even though the exact kinds remain unspecified, and he presents no evidence whatsoever of the political, social or economic mechanisms that might, in the space of a decade or two, unite all humanity in adopting such behaviour changes, presumably more or less all at once.

Perhaps this will be the year strict vegetarianism is adopted by everyone on earth. In the meantime, I’ll continue to rely on the concrete evidence of the energy transition itself as my compass of progress on the climate front. Which, to cite one fact regarding feasibility, has already shifted the behaviour of investors, developers and governments to the point where renewable energy is the source of the majority of the world’s new electricity generation as we speak.

Ultimately, Nikiforuk’s is not an argument about solving the climate crisis so much as an argument against industrial capitalism. Fair, I suppose. But I’ve found no evidence, in 20 years of searching, that there’s a way to solve this crisis at anything less than industrial scale—there are eight billion of us and nowhere near enough room for us all to take up local, artisanal, pre-industrial subsistence farming or the like. Nor have I discovered any mechanism more efficient at shifting the gears on the great industrial apparatus of the global economy in the direction of lower emissions than market capitalism, ideally but not always under the guidance of a liberal democracy. (Notwithstanding China’s role in building much of the transition’s essential equipment.)

How exactly would humans alter our many irredeemable behaviours in time What system of organization would emerge to guide eight billion of us in more enlightened patterns of behaviour Nikiforuk offers no answer. In my 20 years of reporting, meanwhile, the energy transition has offered me a clear answer. An optimistic answer. One that grows more feasible by the day.

Andrew Nikiforuk responds to Chris Turner

I appreciate Chris Turner’s enthusiasm and optimism about the future, but I don’t share it. My reading of events, history and numbers suggest the green transition is a grand illusion. Nor is it green. Over time, it will not become cheaper, flexible or more familiar as Turner claims. Nor will it stop the runaway train known as climate change. Instead, the transition will become more chaotic due to material limits, growth of the technosphere, unmanageable complexity, geopolitical chaos, environmental degradation and political instability.

First off, reality should temper Turner’s enthusiasm. Climate change is accelerating, and thousands of scientists have warned that life on the planet is under siege. Wrote data scientist Christopher Wolf in the journal Biosciences in 2023: “Without actions that address the root problem of humanity taking more from the Earth than it can safely give, we’re on our way to the potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems and a world with unbearable heat and shortages of food and freshwater.”

Meanwhile the non-fossil-fuel system Turner envisions hasn’t even been built yet. In 2022 electric vehicles represented only 2 per cent of cars on the road. In 2022 renewable energy (excluding hydropower) accounted for only about 7.5 per cent of global energy consumption. In other words, the metals and materials needed to build the solar panels, windmills, power lines, electric cars and batteries envisaged by Turner haven’t been mined or processed yet. And they’ll come with extreme environmental costs. There is no such thing as a clean revolution.

Second, transitions don’t subtract energy; they tend to add new kinds of energy. When the industrial world started burning coal, it didn’t stop cutting down forests. When it switched to oil, it didn’t abandon coal. And so on. Despite the recent growth of industrial solar and wind facilities, civilization’s dependence on fossil fuels has not diminished one iota. This is due to increases in population and per capita consumption. Renewables, for example, only met 42 per cent of increased energy demand in 2019.

So the world is not using renewables to retire fossil fuels but simply to spend more energy.

The materials needed for solar, wind, electric cars and batteries come with extreme environmental costs.

US sociologist Richard York, writing in Energy Research & Social Science in 2019, warned that there will not be any meaningful subtraction of fossil fuel demand until civilization faces the challenge of economic growth. “The rapid and continuing growth of total energy consumption—which is connected with continuing economic growth—makes it so that removing an energy source like fossil fuels is very difficult, even when the production of other energy sources is growing.”

My third point concerns material limits. The so-called green transition shifts the problems of extraction from oil to minerals. Renewables can’t operate without rare metals. Battery-operated vehicles require six times more minerals than a conventional vehicle. Mining is a rapacious and dirty industry. Lithium mining destroys water; child slaves mine cobalt in the Congo; rare-earth minerals have left behind a trail of poisonous radioactive waste in China. Canada is now proposing to mine the hell out of the carbon-rich Hudson Bay lowlands in the Ring of Fire to put more battery-operated vehicles on the road. Destroying vital carbon sinks to save the planet doesn’t sound like a moral solution.

Turner’s enthusiasm also ignores the demands of the technosphere. Civilization has used fossil fuels to build a semi-autonomous offshoot of the biosphere composed of steel, bricks, plastic, glass and cement, managed by digital machines. This ever-growing system has an insatiable appetite for dense, fossil-fuel energy. It gobbles oil and materials to expand while spewing streams of waste including CO₂. Plastics alone now outweigh all wild animals. The growth of the technosphere explains why more electricity from renewables will not help. Whatever the future of particular renewable energy sources, writes the engineer Peter Haff, “the driving forces are already in place for transition to rates of energy consumption that are larger than, and perhaps much larger than, the current power level of fossil-fuel use.” Artificial intelligence, for example, is expected by 2027 to consume as much electricity as Sweden.

Lastly, the scale of the problem has been sorely underestimated. Total electrical power in the world is roughly 27,000 terawatt-hours (TWh). According to geologist Simon Michaux, the extra capacity needed to phase out fossil fuels is roughly 37,000 TWh. The green transition “proposes to construct an electrical system much larger than the existing grid, using energy that is more expensive and not as effective as what we have now.”

In sum we need a different plan that changes human behaviours, relies less on energy-intensive technologies, relocalizes life and accepts limits to economic growth.

The post Should We Be Optimistic About Our Climate Future? appeared first on Alberta Views.

Some might find it remarkable that print has survived at all. Nonetheless with the December 2022 issue of Alberta Views we completed 25 years of publishing a print magazine. In this Jan/Feb 2023 issue we mark that anniversary and reflect on the cultural revolution we’ve witnessed unfold in the first decades of the new millennium.

In our very first year Myrna Kostash described the 25-year-olds of that time as already being comfortable with technology (“The Next Alberta,” Fall 1998). Now called Gen X, they were “at home with the ubiquity of the new media and excited by the possibilities inherent in the new technologies.” She continues, “If my generation is the first to have been exposed full-time to television, Generation Next, at the end of the 1990s, is playing computer-based games and surfing the internet instead.” She has hope for this generation, but grave concern for the society they need to find a place in: “How do webheads construct community in the rubble of disintegrating public works?… in the attack on the idea of public space—formerly defined, even in Alberta, as a collective consensus to invest in institutions serving the common good.”

It was the Klein era. Following the example of Reagan and Thatcher, his aim was to shrink the role of government, to lower taxes, cut funding to services, deregulate and privatize. In those early years Alberta Views was alarmed by the attack on public institutions. We documented the cuts to the funding of healthcare, education, social services and infrastructure, and we were concerned about the lack of critical commentary in the media. In the Sep/Oct 2001 issue David Taras and Larry Johnsrude made the case that “concentration of media ownership stifles the free market of ideas and therefore is not good for democracy.” (“Are our newspapers betraying us?”)

The Conservatives practised austerity, but where they did spend big was on technology, for example, building the SuperNet. In the Sep/Oct 2002 issue Mark Wolfe and Mary Ann Moser critiqued the plan (“The Wired, Wired West: Who knew The Alberta government has a plan to make this province the most wired in the world.”)

The SuperNet was originally a $300-million project ($193-million of it public) intended to connect 420 rural Alberta communities by 2004 to a high-speed digital network in places where private companies had no incentive to build. Eventually the SuperNet cost a billion dollars, and rural households still didn’t have adequate access to the internet.

Wolfe was skeptical from the get-go. “Leaving aside the wider question of general technological intrusion on our lives, I seriously question the planning process around the Alberta SuperNet. Keep in mind, the networks being constructed comprise only the hardware component of the project. In itself, there’s nothing terribly questionable about building for high-speed internet-like access at reasonable cost. If I lived in rural Alberta, I’d be delighted. What is questionable is the project’s planning process and the number of blind spots in its conception—in user expectations, efficiencies and social impact.”

Moser countered that the project wouldn’t provide service to individuals: “[The SuperNet] will connect a local school, hospital, library or municipal office, forming a hub that will allow internet service providers to offer rates in these communities competitive with those offered in cities. The strategy is designed to provide the same advantage to rural and urban dwellers alike.”

Wolfe was right to have reservations. Having not fulfilled its promise, by 2011 the government wanted even more money for the SuperNet. David Climenhaga observed, “Now that someone wants us to spend more money on it, it’s being described as a flop that made it no further than the town office and the public library in Smallsville and Elk’s Knuckle.”

By 2018 CBC reported that according to that year’s auditor general’s report, “Service Alberta did not properly manage and monitor the $1-billion in contracts the government signed with private companies to build the SuperNet…. Problems with the contracts extended over 17 years, from when the initial agreements were signed in 2001 to when a new contract was finally signed in 2018.”

Recently while COVID-19 raged, rural Alberta was still suffering from digital poverty. The CBC reported, “Charlene Smylie, who is running as councillor for Parkland County’s Division 5, said during the pandemic she’s seen local students without good internet access sitting in school or library parking lots to access wifi for remote schooling.”

At the same time as they were cutting funding for education the Conservative government was buying computers for schools. Despite cutbacks in other areas of education, the government injected $125-million between 1996 and 2001 into educational technology, including computers.

Linda Flanagan warned in the Sep/Oct 2002 issue (“Problems and Potential of Digital Technology for K-12”): “But technology cannot be a substitute for experiences in the physical, social world. Young children especially need to move, play, build, discuss and read. As we move deeper into the 21st century, public educators and those who support them must continue to look for ways to improve student learning and better prepare graduates for participation in the knowledge era. Clearly, the investment must be in people as well as machines. Only by understanding the new digital techniques and recognizing both their potential and their danger can schools take charge of computers to obtain the maximum benefit for students.”

The wired generation makes little or no distinction between citizen journalists and professional journalists, between rumour and reporting.

From its beginning, the Internet revolution was wreaking havoc on the print universe. The rise of digital technology exacerbated the fall of the city newspaper. The Edmonton Journal and the Calgary Herald had been considered good papers when Southam owned them. In 1996 Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc. bought them both, cut costs and reduced staff. In 2000 they were sold again to the Asper family’s CanWest Global and were required to run “national editorials,” compromising the independent voice of each newspaper. In 2009 a bankrupt CanWest sold its newspapers to Postmedia, which consolidated operations. Though they had promised not to, Postmedia merged the newsrooms of the Edmonton Journal, the Calgary Herald and the two cities’ Suns.

We chronicled the decline of print newspapers over many years. In the May/June 2004 issue, Lisa Gregoire asked, “Are Alberta’s two big dailies telling you what you need to know?” (“The Slipping News.”) She quoted Robert Bragg, a former Calgary Herald reporter: “He says local coverage has become trite and forgettable: the entertainment section is obsessed with ‘looking up the skirts of famous actresses’ rather than covering the vibrant local arts scene; and city news doesn’t adequately reflect Calgary’s growth and diversity except in boosterism or tokenism. ‘It’s an embarrassment for a city this size to have a paper this shallow, this out-of-touch with whatever’s going on…. They don’t put enough resources into it.’”

Circulation was plummeting. At one time almost everyone read their city paper, but by 2003 only a third of households in both Edmonton and Calgary subscribed. By 2008 this was down to only a quarter of households, 26 per cent for the Journal, 27 per cent for the Herald. By 2015 paid circulation was down to less than a fifth of households.

What was contributing to this decline in circulation It was a vicious cycle: as quality went down, readers cancelled their subscriptions. As readers cancelled their subscriptions, quality went down. But really there were fewer readers because of online news. In the December 2008 issue Susan Ruttan argued that even though they were in decline, newspapers were more necessary than ever (“The Case for Newspapers”). Ruttan was there in the Hollinger era. “In the months after Black took over, a kind of panic gripped many of the senior managers of the chain; they knew Black’s libertarian views clashed radically with the mild-mannered liberal stance of most editorial pages.” She deplored what happened to the papers but she still believed in them.

“The traditional model of a newspaper, the thing that thumps on your doorstep at 6:00 a.m., may go—but that’s not the essence of newspapers. The essence is the content, the daily reporting by trained journalists who have sat through council meetings, read secret government reports, attended press conferences, interviewed parents of murder victims and cultivated contacts on their beat. No amount of chat room pontificating (or CNN talking head) can replace that grunt work. You may say ‘Mayor Bronconnier’s a good guy’ or ‘Edmonton needs a downtown arena,’ but how do you know Few people have the time to regularly watch Bronconnier at city hall, or to talk to experts about arenas. A reporter will do that for you. Increasingly, we turn to the internet, not newspapers, for our information. That’s the new battleground for the news business.”

In that same 2008 issue Todd Babiak reiterated that young people prefer online news to papers—if they read at all. (“Black and White and Dead All Over.”) He anticipated the coming age of fake news: “Canadian newsrooms are shrinking. Newspapers are shrinking. The move to websites has been vigorous. Young people—even smart young people—are getting their information from social networks. But even social networking needs a primary source. Where does it originate A growing cadre of citizen journalists, who are bound by neither training nor libel laws, took to the internet. They blogged, inventing and repeating rumours. They guessed. They commented on Facebook sites. For at least two generations of wired North Americans, there is little or no distinction between citizen journalists and professional journalists, between rumour and reporting.”

We focused on one of the better citizen journalists in our June 2009 issue. (“Citizen Bloggers: Online social media and networks provide new ways for Albertans to get political.”) Dave Cournoyer argued that online citizen journalists could fill the information gap as local political news coverage fell victim to cutbacks and layoffs at daily mainstream newspapers. He became a blogger because “I felt that with the consolidation of ownership of the daily newspapers and local television stations, the political discourse in Alberta was becoming narrower by the week. With a quick visit to the Blogger website, within minutes I had registered and launched my very own blog, www.daveberta.ca.”

Cournoyer demonstrated how out of touch certain politicians were by telling an amusing story. He’d registered the domain name www.edstelmach.ca for approximately $14.78 four months after Ed Stelmach became premier. When he was threatened with litigation, he went public, posting the letter from Stelmach’s lawyer on his blog.

Cournoyer was upbeat about the digital age. “Fully 85 per cent of Calgarians and 78 per cent of Edmontonians over the age of 16 go online. The percentage of citizens who use the internet to search for information about government or to communicate with politicians is also rising. But this is only the tip of the iceberg of the internet’s vast potential for citizenship.” He went on to show how politicians were using Facebook and Twitter and how like-minded citizens were finding each other on networking sites.

“Twitter has even made its presence felt in the Alberta Legislature. Using the tag #ableg, Twitter users across Alberta comment on and debate issues under discussion in the Legislature and Question Period. Citizens can follow live discussions in the Legislature and post ‘tweets’ instantly so that citizens in other cities know what’s going on under the dome before the mainstream media are able to tell them.”

He articulated the optimism current at that time about the promise of the internet and social media: “This is an exciting opportunity: the decentralization and democratization of news coverage is a positive evolution in media. The internet rewards innovation, and well-written and credible blogs could carry the same weight as a city newspaper. Now that citizens are realizing the power they hold to publish their own content and commentary, they will continue to contribute to and affect the dialogue.”

In what must be the understatement of the decade, Cournoyer observed, “Facebook allows citizens to find like-minded people by cross-referencing information such as ‘political orientation’ with ‘location’. The implications for citizenship and politics are vast.”

As unlikely as it was that the insights of bloggers could carry the weight of a traditional newspaper with its army of reporters, factcheckers and editors, newspapers were indeed dying. We asked if it was the end of our city newspapers again in the March 2017 issue (“Paper Thin: Deathwatch for Alberta’s big-city newspapers”). Ian Gill argued the firing of so many staff with the consolidation of newsrooms was the culmination of a steady decline in quality and readership.

“The newsroom mergers—a mushing of distinct journalistic formats, cultures and audiences—heralded the end of Alberta’s big-city newspapers as we had known them. When the dust settled, Edmontonians and Calgarians had to adjust to uniformity in their leading newspaper titles. The quality of the Journal, Herald and Suns, already in decline, fell precipitously.”

One long-time Journal subscriber explained why he wasn’t renewing his subscription: “Seeing someone who had written for the Journal for 30 years now appearing in the Sun as well was like having Wayne Gretzky playing for both the Edmonton Oilers and the Calgary Flames.”

Two of our own columnists had different opinions about the seriousness of the loss of the daily city newspaper. Fred Stenson in “Survival of the Richest: One future for newspapers” (May 2018) said newspapers were obsolete:

“Well, there’s this digital thing that puts news into your home, car or purse. Such news is all but instant. Tsunami on the other side of the planet. I’ve got it in my pocket minutes after the waves hit shore. I’d go so far as to say that if Kim Jong Un or The Donald accidentally starts a nuclear war, I’ll find out on Twitter before I hear a siren—and, as for finding out in the newspaper, maybe never. Newspapers—printed onto paper, wheeled out of a press, put into trucks to travel far distances… If the idea of news is that it be new, the cumbersome daily production and transportation of printed pages is a whole lot more than a small problem. Whalebone corset, steamboat, stagecoach, draft horse, transistor radio, typewriter, newspaper.”

Stenson saw no difference in reading a newspaper online or on paper. “It isn’t whether paper newspapers survive [but] whether iconic newspapers can buy enough time to lure their customers across to a digital platform.”

Graham Thomson in “Who’s Keeping Watch?” (May 2020) had a different perspective on this. Online newspapers had not maintained the quality of the old print newspapers. In 1992 there were at least 25 members of the Alberta Legislature press gallery. “Alberta’s four major newspapers had a dozen or so reporters and columnists based at the Legislature. Today, those four papers are all part of the Postmedia chain, which has assigned just two reporters to the Legislature. It makes it harder for journalists to make sense of what’s happening and to hold a government to account…. You could argue that in a digital age, when news conferences are livestreamed on Facebook, you don’t need reporters assigned to the Legislature. But you do. Reporters know the players, the issues and the context.” Thomson agreed with Ruttan that what is essential is daily reporting by trained journalists who have witnessed what’s going on. This is the opposite of what’s happening online.

Because of digital media, a huge segment of the population is now badly misinformed.

Anyone can generate content on digital media such as Facebook and Twitter and TikTok. Smartphone cameras now meet professional requirements for news picture quality. The most politically charged news events of our time have been captured on the cellphones of bystanders. When “everyone is a content creator,” some believe that smartphones can make up for the absence of reporters, just as Cournoyer believed that blogs could replace newspapers.

But there’s no guarantee of accuracy or factuality in online social media reports. Certainly in the beginning nothing obligated those platforms to ensure that the information people see was verifiable. Being outrageous is more interesting than being accurate. Conspiracy theories, fake news and outright lies spread faster than truth. People are vulnerable to believing this misinformation (accidental inaccuracy) and disinformation (purposeful deception). So now we have a huge segment of the population badly misinformed.

One of the most important functions of the daily city newspaper was to provide a shared text for citizens. When everyone read the same paper every day, they had a common base of information to discuss a problem. The proliferation and variety of sources of digital online information mean that citizens no longer have a shared text to give them a common understanding of reality.

“Big data” technology enables the sending of news to digital devices tailored to the preferences of the owner of the device. So you get information only about subjects you’re interested in and opinions you agree with. Far from having a shared text, each of us gets different texts reinforcing our biases. This fragments society. Narrowminded groups are convinced that only they are right and others holding different views are crazy.

By 2016 digital media had ushered in the Trump era and the gaslighting of the entire world. Trump’s communication medium of choice was Twitter, a platform that even its new owner Elon Musk called a potential “free-for-all hellscape.” Musk is a “free speech absolutist,” but free speech must have limits. As Evan Osenton observed in his editorial in our September 2018 issue, “Governments in Canada can restrict speech when it does real harm to other people—not just psychological harm (through denying facts), but exposing them to the risk of violence.”

Who could have anticipated the evils unleashed by the technological revolution and the rise of social media—polarization, lies, seemingly the end of truth? In the post-truth world, objective facts have less influence in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Truth is not determined by evidence, but rather by the number of people willing to believe and share an idea. That’s a dangerous world, one of division, demonization, fragmentation, breakdown.

The demise of print and the rise of digital paralleled the demise of “we” and the rise of “me.” Individual freedom was beginning to take precedence over the common good—the well-being of society as a whole. The libertarian idolizes the rugged and willful, independent individual. Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is no such thing as society.” Her view was that we’re only an aggregate of separate autonomous individuals responsible only for ourselves.

But tell that to an epidemiologist. Disease behaves differently in different societies, as we learned so well in the pandemic. The COVID-19 death rate per 100,000 population, as at November 5, 2022, was 326 in the US, 123 in Canada and 37 in Japan. Your chance of being sick has less to do with you as an individual and more to do with the society of which you are a part. That society affects you in myriad ways.

For example, in our November 2021 issue, we found that the pandemic had exposed systemic horrors in long-term care in Canada (“Fixing Long-Term Care”). “Of all countries in the world, Canada had the highest percentage of its COVID-19 deaths coming from long-term care: 80 per cent…. In our most-stricken long-term care homes, staff walked away, patients died of starvation and dehydration, in their own excrement, alone—in Canada! … We’re a profoundly ageist society. We do not value older adults; we value them less when they’re not ‘unit-producing individuals’…Neither does our society value the work of caregiving, work often done by women—and in the case of long-term care, almost entirely by women, over half of whom are women of colour.”

If we’re going to improve conditions for individuals, we have to change society. And one of the only ways to do that is through good government. An effective response to COVID-19 required effective collective action. When a plague sweeps through, it can’t be every man for himself. We are literally in it together. This is anathema to the fans of Ayn Rand, including our unelected premier.

Digital media created a wildfire of misinformation about COVID. Timothy Caulfield from the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta said at the time that “misinformation is a dire, imminent threat to the lives of all Canadians and is proven to be one of the factors fuelling COVID-19 infections, and dissuading Canadians from getting vaccinated.”

The protests against health restrictions, the occupation of Ottawa by the truckers “freedom convoy” and the Coutts border blockade were all fuelled by digital misinformation. The situation is made worse when politicians lend their support to these misguided efforts because their right-wing ideology meshes with the libertarian sentiments of the protesters.

About digital misinformation Caulfield says, “It’s exhausting to see the rage and the consistency of the messaging. They always fit into this one basket. If you think vaccines don’t work, you think monkeypox is a conspiracy, climate change isn’t real… you can go down the list and tick the boxes. You’ve got to counter this stuff, even if you think it’s absurd.” Caulfield has spearheaded a campaign to counter the “infodemic” with evidence-based content. He refers to the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 vaccines were a cover to implant trackable microchips in the population. “It was almost laughable, but a big hunk of North American society is at least open to it.”

Do our current leaders pretend to believe conspiracy theories to appeal to the duped masses, or do they actually believe, having been duped themselves Premier Danielle Smith presents herself as a sympathizer with the “freedom convoy,” seems to admire Putin, says cancer is preventable,  believes that the World Economic Forum is a secret cabal exploiting the pandemic to dismantle capitalism, and asserts that the unvaccinated are the most discriminated-against group she’s ever seen.

Believers in reason were gratified when, in October 2022, Alberta Court of King’s Bench Justice Grant Dunlop ruled that the UCP government’s order to lift mask mandates for school children was unreasonable. He made it clear that such a decision is not for politicians to make, but for the chief medical officer of health, who has the knowledge and the authority. The top doctor’s concern is the health of the entire public, unlike the partisan politician seeking popularity with her base. The justice also found that UCP Education Minister Adriana LaGrange created “widespread misunderstanding” by saying that schoolboards could not impose their own mask mandates when her statement didn’t, in fact, carry legal weight.

Almost immediately Premier Smith objected and asserted “our government’s full authority with respect to this and other health and education matters.” For her, individual wilfulness takes precedence over the rule of law and the well-being of society. Given her susceptibility to the questionable information circulating in the online digital world, what kind of leadership can she provide?

As citizens concerned with our shared public life, we need valid information based on sound reasoning and solid evidence. In a secular pluralistic society, we need to respect agreed-upon criteria for determining whether a statement is credible. We have to be able to come to agreements in order for society to function.

It’s not enough to access information online. Print publications are still valuable.

Over the 25 years that we have been publishing Alberta Views, the digital realm has triumphed. But we still stand by print. It goes without saying that we can’t know what’s happening in the world without trained reporters and qualified journalists paid by publishers. But beyond that I would also argue that it’s not enough to access information only online. Print publications are still valuable.

Digital publication is fast and cheap, but it is also ephemeral. Digital media can modify or delete contents and they disappear. Browsing online content on a digital device with texts pinging in, it’s easy to be distracted. An online article has links that take you down the rabbit hole. More importantly, we don’t retain or even understand online material as well as print. A mounting body of research bears this out.

The opportunity to investigate the different effects of print and digital arose in schools. Some school districts no longer provide students with textbooks; they issue iPads with downloaded e-books. Studies comparing the performance of students learning from hard-copy books and those with only digital versions show the consequences. An overview of the research by Bella Ross et al. in 2017 found “an overwhelming number of studies reviewed suggested that print-based texts contributed more to increased comprehension and recall than e-texts. For example, Singer and Alexander (2016) found that students were better able to recall key points linked to the main idea and other relevant concepts when reading print. Students reading print-based texts performed significantly better on a reading comprehension test than those reading e-texts.”

Screens and digital media also cause stress and exhaustion. More time on screen is having a bad effect on how well we sleep, so much so that doctors recommend no screen time for at least an hour before you intend to fall asleep.

Part of the difficulty of reading on screen is that you can only see a certain amount of material at a time and you don’t know where you are in the document. In a print publication you know where you are. It’s easier to find a passage on a print page. Print gives you a better mental spatial orientation to the physical layout of a text. If you need to reread a section to better understand an idea, it’s easier to find that section in a physical document, or to flip ahead to get an overview.

Print has other advantages. Since we have to spend so much time on screen for work or school, print is a relief. It is a slow medium, conducive to thoughtfulness. A print document conveys a sense of significance.

Sitting in a chair with a book or magazine is a pleasurable experience. The mind is far less likely to wander reading print. It’s not just that the reader can focus on the text without the distractions and interruptions of a digital device. Reading print is a visceral experience that involves sight, touch and smell. The thickness of the document, the feel of the paper, its texture and scent engage the senses and draw the reader to pay more attention.

But the pleasure of print pales when considering its most important characteristic: the fact that the printed page exists in the physical world. Once we commit something to print and publish it, it’s out there. It can’t be changed. So we take extra care to factcheck, to verify information. That makes print more trustworthy.

And we need trustworthiness now more than ever.

Jackie Flanagan is the founder of Alberta Views and for years was its editor. She doesn’t own a cell phone or visit Twitter.

The post Publishing Through a Cultural Revolution appeared first on Alberta Views.

Any recent library user knows it’s been ages since libraries simply offered what Bill Ptacek, CEO of the Calgary Public Library, calls “just buildings with a bunch of books.” He recognizes that “if that’s what we are, we’d have been extinct years ago.” Today’s library has become “a community centre on steroids,” in the words of Michael Brown, the president and CEO of the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation (which played a large role in making the new Calgary building possible). Local libraries have begun to redefine their mission as supporting the multiple literacies essential to any functional 21st century citizen: financial, health, cultural and media literacy.

To see what this looks like in practice, and what difference it might be making to Albertans, I took a little library road trip in fall 2018.

You enter Edmonton’s downtown public library—in the temporary space it’s using until 2020— through Enterprise Square on Jasper Avenue. Inside, the swirl of activity sums up the glories and challenges of a truly inclusive urban space, and the abstract concept of multiple literacies takes obvious, concrete form.

Through a small window you can see a patron in headphones recording electric bass in a studio available to the public. You press yourself against the wall to make way for tightly managed herds of schoolchildren who parade past banks of computers where slouching Edmontonians scroll through job ads, play games and check email. Some mutter to themselves, others sway intently to earbud music. One kid-herd enters a glass-walled play space for reading time; another follows a tour of the whole library. Bright lime-green robots scattered on the floor await programming from other kids in coding workshops. Oblivious to the 40 or so children a few metres away, another musician works with audio-editing software, headphones clamped over her ears. Library staff help a customer log in to video games at a dedicated terminal, while digital librarian Holly Arnason of the library’s MakerSpace shows me things people have made with the library’s 3D printer, vinyl cutter and one-stop book-printing-and-binding machine.

When did the library become a workshop or an art and music studio As Ptacek put it: “The idea that you can create stuff in the library is a new thing. The idea of coming to a place where you don’t have to spend any money to learn how to use these state-of-the-art technologies—I think that’s what a library should be all about.” It’s certainly happening on Jasper Avenue. But what are libraries in smaller centres doing?

Just a short drive south, but far from the everything-at-once urban buzz of a downtown library, Lacombe’s Mary C. Moore public library fills up with mothers and kids on their way home in the late afternoon. In the central space, a long table holds platters of cookies—and we’re all invited to help ourselves! I’ve arrived in time for the annual Christmas baking contest, where adults and children judiciously nosh and comment. Some older patrons reading magazines nearby join in, and now it’s a three-generation cookie-fest. I ask some of the moms what—besides books and cookies—brings their families to the library. The answers include the armchair-travel speaker series (this winter includes Iraq, Afghanistan, India and the First and Second World War sites of the Lacombe Legion tour), the international film screenings, and all the online resources. Throughout my visit, behind a Do Not Disturb sign posted on the glass looking into the History Room, a highly concentrated young woman completes a university exam. If you take a distance education course you still need to write timed exams in a controlled space—public libraries provide that service too.

Compared to a big-city branch, Lacombe’s library seems very cozy and traditional. But it too works as a community centre serving multiple literacies. It plays a civic role of a physical town square in a time when so many “public” spaces have been privatized.

You see this contribution across the province: the Lethbridge main library branch’s recent renovation created a spacious community meeting room. As in so many European public libraries, Lethbridge also hosts social workers for part of each week, who can connect residents with mental health and addiction services, seniors services and so on.

In the downtown library’s main space, a wall covered with cotton shopping bags on hooks offers a financial literacy kit, a digital literacy kit or a book club kit (to help you start one up). To develop your physical literacy you can sign out basketballs, baseball kits, soccer balls, skipping ropes, horseshoes and lawn darts. But why, I ask the staff, do I see… a rubber chicken Silly question: It’s a “motivational throwing tool.” Anything to get patrons moving.

And there are snowshoes. I chat with local library user Nicola Wood, who explains her mixed feelings about borrowing snowshoes. Tramping around in the snow and cold was never her idea of fun. Still, she got out there to support her daughter’s curiosity about the sport. The experiment bore unexpected fruit when her daughter joined a group that’s now, aboard their very own snowshoes, helping conduct annual winter bird counts in the Crowsnest Pass. It’s an example of one form of literacy development leading to others—ecological and scientific, in this case. What’s more, it led one Lethbridge family to broaden their community connections.

This is not an isolated example. Another Lethbridge patron, Deanne Broderick, tells me how the library contributed to her life even before a library building existed in her part of town. As a new mother in West Lethbridge, she discovered that the public library housed children’s storytime programs in nearby senior citizens facilities, to the delight of the residents, the kids, and the mothers who needed to travel only a few minutes. Literacy-building turns into community connections once again. Deanne’s very earliest library experiences didn’t involve a building either. When she was 11 years old the highlight of her summers was the “old, stinky” school-bus bookmobile with its trove of Nancy Drews.

That bus full of books reflects the way libraries, for centuries, pursued their work of connecting, informing, teaching and supporting, mainly through print and cultivating print literacy. Today’s emphasis on fostering multiple literacies rests on another important motivation: removing barriers. Lethbridge library CEO Terra Plato can recite her mission statement to me from memory: “Lethbridge Public Library provides, preserves and promotes valuable resources, in a comfortable, welcoming place, where people of all ages can express their creativity, stimulate their imagination and satisfy their learning.” As she explains, “It’s all about making people more successful.” But which people All people—as she points out, you need not be a cardholder to use library space and resources. (You should still get a card, she insists, if only so you can revel in all the online material it provides access to, from music and film to instructional video and research databases.) “We’re one of the last truly open, available public spaces. We’re here to equalize the playing field for everybody,” she says.

Openness and inclusivity come with challenges. Plato notes that “as this very open public space, we were one of the first places to feel the impact of the opioid crisis. Lots of at-risk people spend time in the library.” For her this diversity of users is desirable: “We are here for everybody. We have standards of behaviour, but until they are breached, everybody’s welcome here.” (This policy has its critics: An online comment in the Calgary Herald called that city’s new library “the world’s most architecturally stunning homeless shelter.”)

This social-barrier-busting inclusiveness has never discouraged Nicola Wood from bringing her young children to the Lethbridge library. For them “it’s a safe public space where you can just hang out. I want my children to go out of the house. Get off their phones. Socialize. And this is an accessible space they can go to and do something good, cool, fun, interesting.” The family uses the library as a base from which to learn more about and get more involved in their own city. For instance, the Lethbridge Presents program provides library patrons with free tickets to concerts, basketball games and museums. As a result, says Nicola, “My kids can be more active and engaged in their community.”

By making community resources available for playful, barrier-free experiment—why not try the symphony if it’s free?—the library offers up the city’s cultural life for the kind of cost-free sampling and experimentation that happens when you randomly choose books from the shelf and discover a new favourite author. Facilitating these community connections benefits everyone, in part by creating a more resilient population: “People with connections to the community, who have something to do, are better able to cope with hard times,” argues Plato.

With these conversations in mind, I head back to Calgary for a good look at the new building—for now, the most celebrated and visible demonstration of the ongoing renewal of local public libraries’ mission. This includes embracing reconciliation as a fundamental part of libraries’ community role. One of the first things I notice in the new building’s soaring entrance is an enormous three-part mural by Keegan Starlight, Kalum Teke Dan and Roland Rollinmud. Raising my eyes past the mural, I find another of the library’s Indigenous placemaking elements, in the form of Lionel Peyachew’s buffalo sculpture composed of words from Indigenous languages. In the top-floor Elders’ Guidance Circle the furniture is by Glenna Cardinal, and on the wall a photo-text piece by Brittney Bear Hat addresses storytelling. Also on the top floor, Calgary’s inaugural Indigenous Languages Resource Centre builds on existing courses in Blackfoot, Michif and Cree, which local branches had already begun to offer in partnership with the city’s Aboriginal Friendship Centre.

“Being able to come into the library and share our stories—from Stoney, Tsuut’ina, Blackfoot… it’s an amazing step for Calgary.”
—Keegan Starlight

When I toured the library just before it opened in 2018, painter Starlight was making final touches to his section of the mural. He shared his own reaction to the new facility: “The inclusion we have now, being able to come into the library and share our stories—from Stoney, Tsuut’ina, Blackfoot… it’s an amazing step for Calgary. To have things like the Elders’ Guidance Circle; that’s where you see hope coming right back into the community.” Starlight, who is from Tsuut’ina, says his grandmother needed five languages to navigate her world, to make connections and learn what she needed. That learning took place face to face; it was spoken and heard. A “building with a bunch of books” could never have worked as a way of transferring and sharing that lived knowledge and wisdom.

In their own fashion, Alberta’s public libraries grasp that print literacy and solitary book-consultation now take their place within a constellation of multiple literacies and essential human exchange. Citizens need places to meet, to experiment freely with new ways of learning and creating, to gather and discuss and plan and decide. And while the visible architecture of our new “community centres on steroids” matters enormously, the less-visible human architecture of connections and increased capacities will form a more lasting gift from public libraries to their communities.

Harry Vandervlist, professor at the University of Calgary, has served on the editorial boards of U of C Press and NeWest Press.

The post The New Literacy appeared first on Alberta Views.

Alberta universities are signing agreements with Coca Cola or Pepsi as exclusive purveyors of soft drinks on campuses in exchange for something like 47 dollars per student head in contributions to scholarship funds. In Edmonton, sales agents of Mars Fundraising (an offshoot of the multinational corporation that makes Mars bars and M&Ms) pitch their candy at elementary schools: pupils sell a box of candy for $3, of which $1 goes to the school, $2 back to Mars Fundraising. The issue is the cash-strapped schools’ increasingly desperate strategies for raising money—and the exhaustion of parents and teachers “volunteering” at bingos, casinos and raffles to replace a gymnasium floor. Does it matter that a public school system is moving toward corporate models of operation It should deeply matter, this encroachment of corporate and commercial culture on “civic culture.”

To read the entire article, from the Fall 1998 issue, click here.

Kostash revisits “The Next Alberta”:

That title was a riff on a book I was working on that would be published in 2000, The Next Canada: In Search of Our Future Nation. In both cases I was tracking the Big Questions besetting the then-current generation of 25- to 35-year-olds, or at least the questions I was asking as a veteran of another era altogether, the 1960s.

I admitted I was skeptical this Generation X that followed us Boomers could be anything near as radical, sexy or Canadian. Faced with the corporatization of the universities, where were their barricades and sit-ins Living with budget-slashed social benefits and threadbare safety nets, where were their organizing labour union drives to fight back With all the excitement of a “borderless” world of free trade agreements and global pop culture, who among them gave a damn about keeping Margaret Atwood in print?

In this excerpt I read those anxieties as they played out in the Alberta of the 1990s in the thrall of Ralph “King” Klein. To refresh our memories, let us consult Wikipedia (with sources from The Globe and Mail and CBC): “During Klein’s austerity campaign, the ‘Klein Revolution’ or the ‘Alberta Advantage’ as Klein called it, [the premier] slashed government spending by deep cuts—more than 20 per cent—in public spending, resulting in massive job losses in the public sector. His government took a knife to funding for arts and health programs, going so far as to demolish hospitals, lay off thousands of nurses, and sell off the provincial public telephone company, AGT, to private interests. Without necessary infrastructure, Alberta was unprepared for the boom times.”

I am struck, when rereading my 1998 text, that much of what I deplored has become the new normal. The worry that “webheads” were going to have difficulty creating real (i.e., not virtual) community has been exacerbated a thousandfold by social media and the smartphone. The arts sector and its infrastructure in Alberta are chronically underfunded, leaving the initiative and naming rights to private investors. We still go boom and bust in a regular economic cycle.

But skepticism did not win the day in my book and neither should it have in AV. Across Canada the Generation Xers were telling me they were passionate Canadians because “I believe in taking care of each other,” i.e., they were certainly not American—and, 20 years later, maybe they were the ones who voted in Alberta’s NDP government and its social-democratic Advantage.

Myrna Kostash writes literary non-fiction.

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