Fortunately, on the phone from Calgary, Sharon was anything but “prickly.” She was warm and friendly and full of laughter. And her guidance to me was solid. She said aspiring playwrights should try to get as much life experience in and out of theatre as they could, in part because that would inform their writing, but also because that’s simply a recipe for living an interesting life. As for playwriting, she was blunt: the profession is frequently challenging and enormously frustrating, even for her. “I don’t mean to be discouraging, but I really don’t have a lot of positive things to say,” she said. And then she laughed.

We spoke for close to an hour, much longer than I had intended. This from one of Canada’s most widely produced playwrights, a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and a three-time winner of the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Drama Award. Back then I didn’t think someone of her stature would have much time for a young, inexperienced person like me. But as I learned later, when it came to young writers and artists, Sharon could be generous with her time, mentoring and supporting them however she could. That mentorship was a part of her devotion to theatre as a whole. In a comprehensive biography, Sherrill Grace writes that Sharon had experience doing just about any job you could think of in a theatre, from acting to being the artistic director to running the box office. When I asked Sharon why she was a playwright, she said it’s because theatre lives and breathes in the same space as the audience.

Her road to a life in theatre was a rocky one. Mary Sharon Chalmers was born in 1936 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Her father was a hard-working and respected physician, while her mother was a former nurse who left the profession to raise a family. Life at home was far from idyllic. Her father’s absence and persistent infidelity caused deep marital strain, and her mother’s unhappiness as a housewife led her to alcoholism and increasingly erratic behaviour, and she ultimately died by suicide. It all left Sharon with profound emotional scars.

While attending the University of New Brunswick, Sharon met Ross Pollock. The two married quickly and moved to Toronto, where she became a housewife and mother. But Ross was physically and emotionally abusive, to the point that Sharon’s misery led to a moment of desperation when she unsuccessfully tried to poison him.

Amid her demanding life as a mother, Sharon began attending plays and eventually joined an amateur theatre group. Ross disapproved. After a particularly violent incident, she fled back to Fredericton with their five children. She got involved with another theatre group and soon began a relationship with a fellow actor, Michael Ball. When he was offered a position in the drama department at the University of Calgary, Sharon moved west with him. In Calgary she toured with the Prairie Players through small-town British Columbia and Alberta, earning accolades including best actress at the Dominion Drama Festival.

Her road to theatre was rocky…. She tried to poison her disapproving husband.

While pregnant with her sixth child, Sharon wrote her first play for the stage. A Compulsory Option won the 1971 Alberta Playwriting Competition and was produced the following year. Her next work, Walsh, about the relationship between a North-West Mounted Police officer and the Sioux chief Sitting Bull, premiered at Theatre Calgary in 1973 and was subsequently produced at the Stratford Festival. Walsh brought Sharon wide public attention and more productions, and by the time she was 38, she had begun a promising career as a playwright. She started to write plays in part out of frustration with not seeing Canadian stories on the stage. “I wanted other actors to stand up and say my words,” she said, “to speak directly through an experience I shared with those other Albertans and Canadians.”

Walsh was an important development in Sharon’s career. It demonstrates her storytelling gifts—a reviewer in the Ottawa Citizen said Walsh had “that indefinable magic that is the essence of the art” of theatre—and reveals her strong inclination to write about historical injustices.

But I didn’t read Walsh until just after I had finished my degree, and by then it would only affirm my deep admiration for her as a playwright. It was Blood Relations that first exposed me to Sharon’s work, when the University of Lethbridge drama department produced the play for its mainstage season in 2003. The two plays had different impacts on me in my early twenties, but when I reread the two scripts at 41, I noticed both are about individuals caught in oppressive social and political systems. In the case of Walsh, we get a glimpse into the Canadian bureaucracy that was seemingly designed to inflict hardship on Indigenous people, with NWMP colonel James Walsh being a captive and reluctant agent of this bureaucracy, and into the Sioux people, led by Sitting Bull, being forced to return to the United States from which they had fled. “Honour, truth… the lot… they’re just words,” says Walsh in the play. “I gave my life to them, and they don’t exist.”

On the other hand, Blood Relations examines how the repressive roles imposed on women cause the protagonist to lash out in a horrifying way. The play is about Lizzie Borden and the circumstances leading up to the 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother, of which she was accused and acquitted. Though the story may seem far removed from Sharon’s experience, she felt a personal connection to Lizzie’s case. “Prior to working in the theatre,” she wrote, in the afterword to the Methuen edition of the play, “I was married for some years to a violent man. I spent a great deal of time devising, quite literally, murderous schemes to rid me of him…. I would have killed to maintain my sense of self…. And so it is with Lizzie.” In Blood Relations, Sharon was less concerned about whether Borden committed the murders and more interested in why she might have done it.

I saw the play well over a decade before the #MeToo movement and, at 20, my comprehension of feminist issues was juvenile. Yet even someone as oblivious as I was could see that Blood Relations was about how accepted social conventions restrain women. Lizzie is trapped in a strict Victorian family that suppresses her personal ambitions and independence. She’s pressured to spend time with a suitor she despises. She watches helplessly as her father signs title to the family farm she loves over to the stepmother she hates. She’s refused the opportunity to get a job to attain her own independence, and her father refuses her the money to live on her own. Her stepmother tells her she has no rights. Later, when Lizzie protests too much, her father butchers her beloved pet birds.

But the play doesn’t just catalogue the ways women have historically faced limited prospects for freedom and were punished for seeking autonomy. When I saw the play, what stood out to me was its moral ambiguity. Lizzie’s violence can be seen as an act of defiance against subjugation, making her character and her actions morally complex. The crime was heinous, no question. But at the same time, it was clear to me that Lizzie’s legal options were limited, that she had been backed into a corner, and under that extreme duress she became desperate and reckless, lashing out at the people who had pushed her too far. Sharon didn’t offer a safe separation between guilt or innocence, instead confronting her audience with serious ethical questions about violence as a reaction against oppression.

I had never seen a play like Blood Relations. At that time in my life, I was only studying drama in university as a stopgap toward going to film school, with no plans to finish my degree or take up theatre as an artistic practice. The production of Blood Relations didn’t single-handedly change that, but it did open my eyes to how the stage could tell a deeply layered story as rich as anything I’d seen on film.

In Blood Relations Sharon was more interested in why Lizzie might have done it.

It wasn’t just the thematic elements of the play that struck me, but also the way in which Sharon told the story. The action that unfolded before me wasn’t a linear, by-the-facts murder mystery, but a twisting and turning play-within-a-play that introduced me to a new level of theatricality. In the play, as the stage lights come up in the theatre, an Actress character is standing centre stage in an upper class Victorian room, reciting Hermione’s lines from Act 3, Scene 2 of The Winter’s Tale:

Since what I am to say must be but that
Which contradicts my accusation, and
The testimony on my part no other
But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me
To say “Not Guilty.”…

Lizzie Borden then enters and, after a brief exchange with the Actress, the two of them decide to have some fun by acting out the events leading up to the infamous crime. I watched the Actress don Lizzie’s costume to play Lizzie Borden, while Lizzie herself put on a costume fit for an observer servant. From there, the action seemed to go back in time as characters from the past entered the stage to re-enact what happened.

Pollock performing in Blood Relations at Theatre Calgary in 1981. Her play is based on the true story of an unsolved double-murder in 1892

This play-within-a-play device jolted me out of my passive observance. What was this extra layer of psychological and temporal complexity being thrown at me Of these two women, who was the real Lizzie Borden Why include this role-playing at all Why not simply tell the story in a simple, straightforward fashion But of course, I embodied the answer to this latter question: I leaned forward in my seat and paid close attention, piecing the action together in my own way, while the audience around me was likely doing the same. What might have been a chronological, facts-of-the-crime murder mystery became something more engaging and thought-provoking, pulling the audience into more-active scrutiny of the unfolding drama. The play-within-a-play device pushes Blood Relations deeper into the realm of theatricality and imagination, lending itself well to different readings and varying interpretations, raising questions about identity, memory and truth, and ultimately making the whole experience more subtle and artful.

Two moments from the play remain as vivid to me now as they did then. The first occurs late in the play, when Andrew Borden lies napping on the couch, and the Actress, playing Lizzie, hums a soothing tune as she approaches him, carrying a hatchet. Standing over him, she raises the axe, and just before she swings it down, the lights in the theatre go out. In the darkness the voices of monstrous children sing the now infamous skipping rope rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one

The second memorable moment happens at the play’s end. After a confrontation with her sister, Emma, during which Lizzie grips the hatchet, the question of whether Lizzie committed the crime comes up.

Emma: You didn’t… did you?
Miss Lizzie: Poor Emma.
The Actress: Lizzie. [She takes the hatchet from Miss Lizzie.]Lizzie, you did.
Miss Lizzie: I didn’t. [She smiles.] You did. [The Actress looks to the hatchet, then to the audience.] [Blackout.]

From left to right: Sharon Pollock’s play Walsh, about Sitting Bull’s exile in Canada after the massacre at Little Bighorn, Talonbooks, 1973; Blood Relations, NeWest Press, 1981; Doc, Broadview, 1985; Saucy Jack, about Jack the Ripper, published in 1994 by Blizzard.

Sharon revealed a different kind of theatricality with her 1984 play Doc. This was one of the few plays I read as an undergraduate that really lit a fire under me to write for the stage. Ironically, when I first read it, I was oblivious to how autobiographical the play is to Sharon. Doc draws heavily on her family history growing up in Fredericton, with characters who are extensions of her overworked physician father, her despairing and alcoholic mother and the playwright herself.

In an interview with Canadian Journalist, Sharon said every play she writes “begins as an attempt to understand the world around me. I make up a story in which I can control the elements and the motivation of the characters. I create a little world which I know has meaning and makes sense. When I’m finished doing that, I’m better able to cope with what began as something incomprehensible to me.” So it seems she wrote Doc to clarify her thoughts and feelings surrounding her family’s troubled history, believing theatre can process, explore and make sense of complex personal relationships.

When I first read the script, it showed me that an intense family conflict can also be highly theatrical. Rather than presenting a linear, kitchen-sink drama, Doc is a memory play where the action shifts across time, with characters living and dead occupying the same space. The aged doctor and his estranged daughter Catherine reunite and try to make sense of their dark past, their conflicting memories playing out against one another. Temporal barriers are broken down, with characters from different time periods addressing one another, creating an elaborate and fluid interrogation of the past. In Doc, Catherine and Katie are the same person played by different actors at different stages of life, yet they speak to each other, each trying to come to grips with events in their own way. And all of it written with dialogue that avoids tedious melodrama and instead presents five humans with their own psychologically complex voices.

She wrote Doc to clarify her thoughts and feelings about her family’s troubled history.

In one scene, Ev, a worn-out doctor, stands isolated onstage while his wife, Bob, watches from the shadows.

Ev: We had the worst goddamn polio epidemic this province has seen, 11 years ago. We had an outbreak this year. You are lookin’ at the attending physician at the present Polio Clinic—it is a building that has been condemned by the Provincial Fire Marshal, it has been condemned by the Provincial Health Officer, it has been condemned by the Victoria Public Hospital, it’s infested with cockroaches, it’s overrun by rats, it’s the worst goddamn public building in this province! When is the government gonna stop building liquor stores and give the doctors of this province a chance to save a few fuckin’ lives!
Bob: Haven’t you got enough?
Ev: Enough what?
Bob: Enough! Enough everything!
Ev: You’re drunk.

As personal as Doc is to Sharon, this passage reflects how relevant it is to the rest of us. We are living in a time in Alberta when doctors and nurses are similarly burning out from overwork and the healthcare system is in crisis. Such is the power of Sharon’s craft, transforming the deeply personal into the universal, the private into the public.

Nicole Garies as Lizzy Borden in the University of Regina theatre department’s production of Blood Relations, November 2018. U of R Photography

Sharon continued working as a performer off and on throughout her career. In 2011 she was in rehearsals for Verb Theatre’s production of Marg Szkaluba (Pissy’s Wife), a one-woman show about a survivor of domestic violence. One day, the show’s director, my friend Jamie Dunsdon, emailed me to ask if I would come to the last week of rehearsals and be on book for Sharon, following along in the script and providing her with her line if she forgot.

I attended the rehearsals, watched Sharon work like a pro, and only had to cue her lines a few times. On opening night, I watched her onstage at the Ironwood in Inglewood, where she embodied blue-collar Marg Szkaluba’s fiery wit and defiance with passion and humour. After the show I was invited to join the creative team for drinks. There we were, a handful of eager artists in our mid-twenties having a beer with a 75-year-old woman who happened to be one of Canada’s most accomplished playwrights—youthful ambition and seasoned mastery converging over a shared passion for theatre.

That was Sharon for you. Despite her stature and achievements, she remained grounded and approachable, and shared her knowledge and experience in a way that nurtured the next generation of artists. Theatre was much more to her than a mere job or a pleasant pastime. It was central to her identity and sense of purpose. She devoted her life to it as a performer and as an administrator and, most importantly, as a playwright who gave voice to Canadian stories and sensibilities at a time when such things were almost entirely absent from our stages. Yes, she could be blunt, perhaps by some estimations even prickly, but she was always striving for excellence in craftsmanship, and she did so with great respect and generosity.

Since 2021 Sharon Pollock is no longer with us. For people who didn’t know her as a close friend or as family, all we have left are her plays and our memories of having seen them. For me, Sharon will always be the one who transformed how I conceive of theatre—this art form that lives and breathes with its audience. Every time I go to a play, I hope to be captivated the way Sharon’s plays captivated me, that there may be moments as brilliant as the ones I witnessed in Blood Relations, that the experience might light a fire under me the way Doc did. When the show is about to start, my anticipation goes up as the lights in the theatre go down.

Andrew Torry is a playwright in Calgary. His work has been shortlisted for the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post On the Edge of My Seat appeared first on Alberta Views.

The post Four Newcomers appeared first on Alberta Views.

Khullar was born in 1964 in Fort Vermilion, a hamlet 660 km north of Edmonton. Her parents had immigrated to Canada from India and worked as teachers in a Mennonite colony in La Crête. When Khullar was in Grade 4, the family moved to Morinville. Khullar attended Old Scona Academic High School in Edmonton, then was an honour student at the University of Alberta and the University of Toronto. After law school, Khullar clerked at the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench and at the Alberta Court of Appeal—a harbinger of her future justice roles.

In her remarks at her swearing in ceremony as the Chief Justice of the Nunavut Court of Appeal, held in Iqaluit, Khullar showed she’d done her homework by referring to the qulliq, an Inuit lamp that is usually tended by women and associated with their strength and warmth.

The Nunavut Court of Appeal meets three times a year in Iqaluit, while the Court of Appeal of NWT usually sits in Yellowknife. In Edmonton the Court of Appeal sits in the south tower of Sir Winston Churchill Square. In Calgary it sits in two locations, hearing criminal cases at the Calgary Courts Centre and the rest of the appeals—for now—in leased space in the TC Energy Tower. Long-time Calgarians might remember the brouhaha that ensued after asbestos and other contaminants were discovered in the old sandstone Court of Appeal building, empty since 2003. A decontaminated version of the heritage building will be incorporated into a new courthouse in Calgary at the same location. The project, announced by then-minister of justice Kaycee Madu in 2021, is still in the planning stage.

Chief justice Khullar does not sit on all the appeals of all the courts she oversees. But in 2023 she was one of the three NWT Court of Appeal justices who heard R. v. Avadluk, a case regarding an indeterminate sentence for a dangerous offender. Of the 101 Alberta Court of Appeal items posted in the first three months of 2024 on CanLII (the Canadian Legal Information Institute’s website), Khullar was on the court panel of at least 10, the range of which included: the province’s duty to negotiate (Métis Nation of Alberta Association v. Alberta), a murder conviction (R. v. Saddleback), suspended limitation periods during COVID-19 (StraightVac Services Ltd. v. Sunshine Oilsands Ltd.), a sentence imposed for child luring and making child pornography (R. v. Love), and a parenting order (Bitz v. Preuss).

One of Khullar’s tasks as chief justice is to implement the federal call for modernization of court operations, which includes allowing more people to appear in court remotely and greater use of technology in jury selection. Modernization will help her deal with another aspect of her job as well: the backlog of cases in the Alberta courts. The Advocates Society, in its 2023 call for action, found Canada-wide endemic delay in the delivery of civil and family justice. Its report states: “In Alberta it routinely takes more than nine months for an application longer than 20 minutes to be heard by a judge in Edmonton or Calgary; and two to three years for a trial longer than five days to be scheduled from the date the parties certify readiness.” In 2023 the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Richard Wagner, noted that Alberta had 22 criminal cases that had been delayed more than 30 months and were therefore at risk of being stayed (halted) under the unreasonable-delay limits set out in R. v. Jordan in 2016.

The current court backlog can’t be blamed solely on pandemic-related court closures, since the backlog existed before the closures. And while the pandemic exacerbated the problem, it also prompted small but ongoing improvements in efficiency, such as conducting more hearings virtually rather than in person.

One of the causes of delay is a perpetual shortage of judges. Chief justice Wagner, in his June 2023 update, chastised the Trudeau government for its slowness in filling judicial vacancies, while also acknowledging other factors such as a shortage in provincial funding and personnel. Justices of the superior courts in the province, i.e., the Court of Appeal and the Court of King’s Bench, are federal appointments. Recommendations for new justices to courts at this level come through provincial and territorial judicial advisory committees. Judges in the lower court in this province—formerly called the Provincial Court of Alberta but renamed in 2023 as the Alberta Court of Justice—are appointed by the provincial minister of justice.

Seven provinces have adopted unified family court systems which are a mix of superior and lower court jurisdictions, to create efficiencies and reduce delays, stress and costs in family matters. In 2018 the federal government offered Alberta enough funding to hire 17 judges for a unified family court, then withdrew that money—$50.2-million over five years—in Budget 2024. “Alberta has been allocated judicial seats which they have chosen not to create, resulting in 17 unused judicial seats intended for unified family courts,” the budget document reads. “By redistributing positions to courts in jurisdictions where they will be put to use, the federal government will ensure funding for Canada’s justice system does not go to waste, as some provinces have chosen to do.” Alberta justice minister Mickey Amery agrees that Alberta’s courts need more judges, but said the federal conditions for a unified family court “simply do not work here in Alberta.”

Another responsibility of the chief justice is to distribute the appeal work among the members of the court. The Alberta Court of Appeal can have up to 14 justices, plus the chief justice, plus supernumerary (retired, part-time) justices. Usually three justices sit at a time. Certain requests, such as permission for a third party to be a part of the proceedings—called leave to intervene—can be heard online by a single appeal judge. Rarely, for more complex legal issues or those of broader significance, five justices might be on the panel.

Efficiency and fairness, for the parties and the justices, are at stake in the distribution of work. Generally the public hears nothing about the process of choosing which justice will adjudicate which matter. The last publicized disruption in the appeal ranks occurred in 2017, when Catherine Fraser was the head of the court, and justice Ronald Berger (now retired) alleged in his “concluding observations” in R. v. Gashikanyi that some judges were chosen more often than others to sit on sentencing appeal panels, and that it followed that there was a lack of diversity of experience and opinions on the panels, which resulted in “a disproportionate opportunity afforded to certain judges to shape the jurisprudence of the Court.”

The other two justices on the Gashikanyi panel responded to Berger’s allegations by emphasizing the role of judicial integrity and impartiality, and by giving examples of situations where random assignment of justices on panels is not always practical, particularly when considering workloads and expertise.

Khullar’s expertise, as stated in her judicial application questionnaire, is in “constitutional law, human rights, labour, employment and other aspects of public law.” She articled at a large Edmonton firm, where she met and worked with Dale Gibson, a scholar and legal expert in many practice areas, including constitutional law and Aboriginal law. When Gibson left to start a boutique constitutional law firm, he asked Khullar to join him, and she accepted. In the preamble to a 2022 tribute she wrote for the Alberta Law Review, Khullar describes Gibson, who died in early 2022, as “my friend, mentor and former colleague.” In the article Khullar writes “the lessons I have learned from him inform my own understanding of what it means to be a principled advocate, lawyer and jurist.”

During her time in practice with Gibson, one of the files Khullar worked on was Vriend v. Alberta, a case that arose in the late 1990s when Delwin Vriend was fired from Edmonton’s King’s College (now The King’s University) for being gay. The case set a foundational precedent for 2SLGBTQIA+ rights, because the Supreme Court of Canada held that it is a breach of the Charter to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. The Vriend case is also known for the coming together of many community groups to intervene, including the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Canadian Labour Congress the Canadian Bar Association and numerous others.

Dale Gibson and Associates, with Khullar as an associate, were the solicitors for the (pro-equality) intervener called the Alberta and Northwest Conference of the United Church of Canada. An article by Khullar, “Vriend: Remedial Issues for Unremedied Discrimination,” was cited by the Supreme Court in the decision. The lead counsel representing Vriend was Sheila Greckol (later a justice of the Alberta Court of Appeal) and cocounsel Douglas Stollery. At the time, Greckol was at Chivers Carpenter, and Khullar eventually joined that firm, became a partner, and then managing partner.

Chivers Carpenter defines itself as “union-side labour lawyers who restrict our practices to labour, employment, administrative and human rights law.” The current managing partner of the firm, Kristan McLeod, took over the role when Khullar was appointed to the bench. McLeod says Khullar is “smart,” “thoughtful,” “compassionate,” “organized,” “a very hard worker” and “generous in terms of identifying work opportunities for others.” When pushed for any possible downsides in Khullar’s character, McLeod says there are none, but then adds that Khullar doesn’t have much patience for judgmental people (which, of course, is actually a good quality, and McLeod readily points out the irony of a non-judgmental “judge.”)

While she was in private practice, Khullar worked on pro bono cases related to unions, women’s rights and the rights of persons with disabilities. She was cocounsel for LEAF in the Supreme Court of Canada case of R. v. Ewanchuk, which questioned the defence of “implied consent” and identified the lower court’s reliance on myths and stereotypes about women. Before she was appointed to the bench, Khullar worked (along with McLeod and others) on R. v. Barton, a case which ended up in the Supreme Court of Canada in 2019 and which dealt with whether consent to a specific sexual activity is consenting to any degree of force. In another pro bono case, McKay-Panos v. Air Canada, a case that lasted almost a decade, Khullar argued that obesity can be a disability for the purposes of flying.

Chief justices have the unenviable and perhaps impossible job of being irreproachable, objective decision-makers.

Khullar’s experience and areas of legal expertise may be heartening to Albertans concerned about the leadership and apparent goals of the current UCP government. But her background should not be interpreted as bias. Her job is to interpret and apply the law, not to make the law. Still, there is comfort in knowing that the arguments of all parties will be fully considered should cases involving recent eyebrow-raising, if not ire-raising, legislation work their way up the legal ladder to the Alberta Court of Appeal. Litigation contenders might include the Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act, the Alberta Pension Protection Act, the Provincial Priorities Act, the Municipal Affairs Statutes Amendment Act, 2024, and the threatened legislation to restrict the rights of transgender and nonbinary children and youth. The province has at least 12 active legal challenges against the federal government. And Albertans can expect that if any decision of the Court of Appeal is unfavourable to the UCP government, the UCP will apply for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada (cost to taxpayers be damned).

Chief justice Khullar is clearly not in her job for magazine coverage or photo ops. She declined an interview for this article. Perhaps due to the workload or the tradition of judges remaining impersonal and communicating primarily through written judgments and legal reasoning, she seems to have gone particularly quiet media-wise after the initial news flurry about her appointment and swearing-in as chief justice.

We know some biographical facts, such as her legal education and professional experience. We know (from a short article published after her swearing-in) that she watches Jeopardy! And we know from the Judges Act that justices of the Alberta Court of Appeal are paid $338,800 each, and the chief justice is paid $371,400. According to Khullar’s 2016 judicial application questionnaire, she does not speak French, she is a mother and she is married. Lawyers I spoke with all reported along the same theme of “she has a big brain and an ability to work with people.”

Should we be curious or impressed (or concerned) that we don’t know more about the top justice in our province Certainly Khullar has good reason for staying off the media radar; the public chat of justices can backfire. Take the extreme case of US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who, in an attempt to appear as a “non-elite” member of society, said he preferred vacations in Walmart parking lots over beaches, only to have journalists reveal, and revel in, proof that for decades he had been taking luxury vacations involving superyachts and private jets. Short of such bald-faced lies, even simple true statements from a justice can be misinterpreted and used to suggest character flaws or judicial bias, especially in these politically polarized times.

Most Canadian justices adhere to a philosophy of restraint, of keeping their personal lives and personal views private. Part of this is to support a work–home balance and a semblance of a “normal” life. And part of it is to maintain the appearance of impartiality. As the familiar maxim goes, although usually not with respect to judges’ personal views and lives, not only must justice be done, it must be seen to be done. Or, as the Canadian Judicial Council put it: “After appointment, judges are not required to withdraw from the world. They may lead a normal life in the community, while retaining a sense of the dignity of judicial office and realizing that the public expects virtually irreproachable conduct from judges.” (Italics mine.)

Irreproachable conduct. That’s a tall order, well beyond any “reasonable person” test that might be applied in a court case. While most of us would not be embroiled in the kind of alleged “obnoxious behaviour” and physical altercation at a posh Arizona resort that led to the early retirement of Supreme Court of Canada justice Russell Brown in 2023, who among us has conducted every day of our lives irreproachably No wonder most justices shy away from public outreach—not to be confused with the more limited outreach to their legal community, which most justices seem more open to. Khullar’s first speaking appearances after she was sworn in as chief justice were at the annual historical dinners, in Calgary and Edmonton, hosted by the Legal Archives Society of Alberta. In March she attended the respective 2024 judges dinners put on by the Calgary and Edmonton bar associations.

And yet, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Richard Wagner, ever since his appointment in late 2017, has promoted transparency in all Canadian courts, and encouraged leadership through outreach beyond the courts. In an era when trust in the Canadian judicial system is declining, and distrust of authority, experts and even accepted facts seems to be at an all-time high, speaking about the court’s role and conduct, when legally and ethically appropriate, might be a good way for senior justices to bolster confidence in our court system.

Chief justice Wagner has held several news conferences, framed as “updates” on the work of the Supreme Court. In his 2022 update he commented on the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, a case which resulted in the removal of the federal right to abortion. While Wagner didn’t give his personal views on abortion, he did speak about how the Canadian judicial system works differently and is non-polarizing. He used his own appointments—to the Supreme Court by the Harper government and to chief justice by the Trudeau government—as an example of non-partisanship. But he stressed, as he often does in his updates, that we must remain vigilant in keeping Canada’s judiciary independent.

In 2019 Wagner praised the transparency of (now retired) Supreme Court justice Clément Gascon, who publicly discussed his struggles with mental health. And in a 2023 news conference he addressed justice Russell Brown’s resignation from the Supreme Court and answered concerns about how the Brown issue might have affected the court’s decisions and process. (Of note, the vacancy created by justice Brown’s resignation was filled with the much-lauded appointment of Mary Moreau, a former chief justice of the Alberta Court of King’s Bench.) In the same 2023 news conference, which lasted an hour and included questions from journalists, Wagner acknowledged the important role of journalism and media in bringing issues to the court’s attention and in upholding democracy.

As much as journalists and the general public might welcome more-transparent justices, this leaves the people who take on this important role, particularly chief justices such as Khullar, with the unenviable and perhaps impossible job of being irreproachable, objective decision-makers and outspoken leaders. Small wonder that some prefer to adopt a closed-door policy.

The mandatory retirement age for federally appointed justices is 75. If chief justice Khullar remains in her current role until then—the year 2039—the public might not hear many of her out-of-court opinions. But once she retires she might decide to be more forthcoming, thus following in the tracks of a few other prominent Alberta-raised justices, most notably retired Supreme Court of Canada chief justice Beverley McLachlin, who, a few months before the end of her judicial term, granted this magazine a sit-down interview at her office in Ottawa (see “Canada’s Top Judge,” Sep 2016, in AV’s online archives). She later released her memoirs, Truth Be Told. Or retired Alberta Provincial Court judge John Reilly, who has published a trilogy of books about his judicial work in First Nations communities.

Until then, we’ll have to trust that chief justice Khullar channels some of the key traits she identified in her mentor Dale Gibson, including “courage, creativity… and foresight,” and that, with her help, the slow and rarefied Court of Appeal will continue to show up for beleaguered Albertans.

Barb Howard is the author of five books, including Happy Sands in the Brave and Brilliant series from University of Calgary Press.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post The Non-judgmental Judge appeared first on Alberta Views.

The worst possible answer—to deny any such problems exist—is embodied by the current premier of Alberta. Jason Kenney’s refusal to acknowledge that the source of Alberta’s prosperity is leading the planet to ruin has become his strongest claim to greatness; he has transcended political calculation to become an avatar of human self-destruction. That much is obvious. Exactly which alternative to denial constitutes the best path forward, however, is anything but clear.

Outside the premier’s office, a bewildering array of prospective solutions—political, technological and cultural—all clamour for attention. Some are complementary, like wind power and vegetarianism, but many are mutually exclusive, like biomass energy and forest protection. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how replacing a billion internal combustion engines with a billion Teslas could be problematic.

It gets confusing fast. But for all their diversity, the countless paths to ecological sustainability fall into two broad categories that boil the whole mess down to a single clarifying question: reform or revolution

It so happens that another Albertan avatar has come to represent the first of those two options. Somewhat ironically, that man is the polar opposite of Jason Kenney. Just three years older than the current premier, Mark Carney is a soft-spoken, cerebral consensus builder who studied economics at Harvard and Oxford. His global-mindedness and “keep calm and carry on” manner have led him ever further from the province he grew up in. Kenney doesn’t hold so much as a bachelor’s degree, didn’t grow up in Alberta and is a provincial, brawling populist. Carney, with his unflappable public demeanour and family-man decency, is more like Canada’s Obama—adored by the centre-left, distrusted by progressives and universally loathed by conservatives. He clearly enjoys a standing invitation to join the federal Liberals if he’s ever so inclined. But it seems that no political office, nor any one nation, is grand enough to contain Carney’s ambitions, which amount—if not quite in his own words—to rescuing the planet.

He’s been at it for over a decade now. In 2011 a Maclean’s headline described Carney as “The Canadian hired to save the world.” Back then, the crisis appeared to be primarily financial. Carney, while still governor of the Bank of Canada, had been named chairman of the Financial Stability Board, a Swiss-based institution created in the wake of the Great Recession to coordinate policy among central banks and regulators so that global cash flow would never again dry up the way it so calamitously did in 2008.

The Great Recession wiped some two trillion US dollars off the map. Ten years of roaring growth later, that figure sounds like chump change—at Glasgow, Carney announced that $130-trillion US is now ready for deployment in the war on climate change. Many were quick to point out that not a penny of that incomprehensible sum has actually been committed (more on that in a moment), but the fact that $130-trillion of investable cash is standing by for anything at all makes clear that one thing Earth isn’t running out of is money.

In 2013 Carney moved from the Bank of Canada to the Bank of England, where he navigated Brexit and the Eurozone crisis. He left in 2020, then whipped off a 600-page manifesto called Value(s) while he pondered his next moves. Carney is now firmly ensconced as global capitalism’s messiah for climate action. He is the UN’s Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance; was Boris Johnson’s finance adviser for COP26; stood side by side with Justin Trudeau in Glasgow to call for a global price on carbon; and spearheaded the Glasgow Financial Alliance of Net Zero (GFANZ), a coalition of central banks, asset managers, pension funds and insurance companies whose collective worth as of COP26 added up to that $130-trillion Carney touted on day three at Glasgow.

In Mark Carney’s opinion, there’s no need to overthrow life as we know it in order to preserve the biosphere. We just need to regulate global finance and force business leaders to stop treating the natural world as an externality; that is, as a cost not priced into the final goods. If we make these critical reforms, Carney insists, we can “turn climate change from an existential risk into the greatest commercial opportunity of our time, transforming financial peril into moral progress.”

I can’t think of another living soul I want so badly to believe in while distrusting so completely.

He is Canada’s Obama—adored by the centre-left, distrusted by progressives and universally loathed by conservatives.

There is, of course, no objection I could raise that Carney hasn’t already responded to.

“Markets alone won’t solve our most intractable problems,” he acknowledges at the outset of Value(s). “We need political processes to define our goals and objectives—to set our values. Markets can then be marshalled to help discover and drive solutions in a form of mission-oriented capitalism.” Don’t worry, Carney’s saying, he knows “the market simply cannot be the answer to every question.”

This pre-emptive assurance comes just after an anecdote about lunching with Pope Francis in the Vatican. Before they ate, the Pope shared a parable comparing wine and grappa to humanity and markets. Wine, the Pope said, “is many things. It has a bouquet, colour and richness of taste that all complement the food. It has alcohol that can enliven the mind.” This was very different from the grappa they would have at the end of their meal. “Grappa is just one thing: alcohol. Grappa is wine distilled.” Just so, the Pope intoned, “Humanity is many things—passionate, curious, rational, altruistic, creative, self-interested. But the market is one thing: self-interest. The market is humanity distilled.” Francis then told Carney and his fellows seated around the table, “Your job is to turn grappa back into wine, to turn the market back into humanity.”

This is Carney the Renaissance Man talking. It’s a version of himself that reappears throughout the book—when he invites Greta Thunberg to see all the useless gold stored beneath the Bank of England and ruefully reflects how “with her, you are always conscious of misplaced priorities, of the time slipping away, of the need to rearrange national priorities and act. Now.”  Carney the Renaissance Man rejects GDP as a measure of economic health, laments the corruption of Wall Street and the inequality it has spawned, and decries how “the price of everything is becoming the value of everything,” a sly reprise of Oscar Wilde’s definition of cynicism. This Carney wants you to know he’s a John Stuart Mill guy; he rejects Jeremy Bentham’s robotic view of human nature by quoting Mill’s celebration of

“…the love of beauty, the passion of the artist, the love of order, of congruity, of consistency in all things, and conformity to their end; the love of power, not in the limited form of power over other human beings, but abstract power, the power of making our volitions effectual; the love of action, the thirst for movement and activity, a principle scarcely of less influence in human affairs than its opposite, the love of ease…”

And when Carney turns his gaze to the ecological consequences of unregulated capitalism, he seems genuinely horrified. He notes that the world’s animal population has shrunk by an estimated 70 per cent since he was born, catalogues the barrage of fire and flood and drought that has swept the world over the past decade, and exclaims, “What had been biblical is becoming commonplace.” His description of climate science reflects a deep familiarity with the issue and leads him to insist that “net zero isn’t a slogan, it’s an imperative of climate physics.”

But another version of Carney undercuts the Renaissance Man’s message in a hundred subtle ways, including his opening assurance that markets aren’t always the answer. Carney may honestly believe that, but markets are his only answer. Carney urges honesty, a sense of social duty, ethics and integrity on his readers and the leaders of capitalism alike, but nowhere in the 600 pages of his book does he urge anyone to simplify their lives. At no point does he suggest buying or driving or flying a little bit less. At no point does he entertain the possibility that an economic system built on the pursuit of infinite growth might have made a fundamental error.

Quite the opposite. Consider his passage on Greta Thunberg: “Like many, I am persuaded by the force of [Thunberg’s] logic and her cry for intergenerational justice,” Carney writes. “We diverge, however, on how to solve this immense problem… Continued growth isn’t a fairy tale; it’s a necessity.”

He’s quick to add, “But not just any growth,” and clarifies, “We need a world where we are no longer guided solely by measures like GDP, that were devised a century ago when the earth seemed immortal and when the social norms of the market felt immutable.” But in the prescription that follows, Carney the Renaissance Man gives way to Carney the Technocrat—the dispassionate expert who occupies a world of logic and numbers, untouched by human imperfections like desire. When this Carney takes over, his language grows detached and clinical, bereft of urgency: “The policies for achieving our climate goals should be designed to encourage the economic adjustments and technological innovations at the least possible cost,” he writes. “The critical success factors are the establishment of a broad social consensus, the use of clear, consistent communications and the building of credible and predictable track records for government and regulatory policies.”

In Carney the Technocrat’s mouth, the fact that one million species are now teetering on the brink of extinction becomes “our failure to treat nature as an asset and its loss as an asset-management problem.” The sociopathy of Exxon and other oil majors, who spent decades lying about climate change and who continue to obstruct decarbonization at every possible turn, leads Carney to conclude that “the valuations of existing reserves and the scale of new investments still appear inconsistent with timely attainment of net zero.”

That’s not the voice of someone confronting an existential crisis. It’s the sound of a shareholder report being read out loud by someone who believes that no matter how the company fares, they themselves will be all right.

Carney insists we can “turn climate change from an existential risk into the greatest commercial opportunity of our time.”

It’s not that Carney is sitting idle or acting in bad faith. He is totally engaged, working his incomparable contact list and sleeping less, I’m sure, than I do. In the middle of July, while I was on vacation and reading the immense book Carney had just published on the subject dearest to my heart—a book most authors would have spent months promoting—Carney was tweeting out images of himself in conversation with Boris Johnson, whom he appears to have converted to the cause. (Whatever else you want to say about Johnson, he has consistently fought for more stringent climate action than his own party feels comfortable with, and has worked to accelerate policies that have already dropped the UK’s emissions more than 40 per cent below 1990 levels.) Carney hasn’t wasted a nanosecond since. However cynical one feels about his proposal that capitalism can be employed to solve the problems capitalism has produced, there can be little doubt that Carney is himself a true believer.

But in what, exactly Is he trying to save the world from the worst excesses of capitalism, as he and his fans might insist Or is he trying to save capitalism itself?

Carney’s life has been one of tremendous affluence and power. For all his public modesty, there’s a fine line separating his personal fortune from the greed that he identifies as a core problem of modern economics. He regards his settling for the paycheques of a public servant as just that—a sacrifice—despite earning over £800,000 (C$1.35-million) a year throughout his eight-year tenure as governor of the Bank of England. True, he could have made far more if he’d stuck to his initial trajectory in private finance (Carney spent 13 years at Goldman Sachs before entering public life). But by any rational measure he’s an extraordinarily wealthy man, and has been for almost all his adult life. Nor should we forget that he’s currently on the payroll at Brookfield Asset Management as vice-chair and head of transition investing, where, it seems safe to assume, his income once again transcends that of the best-paid public servants on earth. His interest in money is not just academic.

That doesn’t necessarily contradict his message that the world needs more integrity. Honesty and honour aren’t incompatible with a certain degree of wealth, and perhaps Carney is still on the right side of that dividing line. He wants us all, especially the leaders of business and politics, to care about our fellow humans, including those not yet born. That’s a noble, needed message, especially when backed by the rules and regulations that Carney has a track record of advocating. What it isn’t is a message of revolution.

And that’s precisely what makes Carney a figure I long to believe in, yet can’t trust. I’m a middle-class white guy living a middle-class white guy life. My comfort zone extends to the edge of rapid reform and not much beyond it. What Carney’s telling me without ever quite saying so is that that’s all right. He’s saying, “I get you.” We come from the same place. We both grew up in Edmonton, middle-class white boys with fathers who taught at the University of Alberta. We became men in a time and place of unparalleled opportunity for people who look and speak like us. Our lives diverged radically as adults, but for both of us, effort and intention have been rewarded with positive outcomes. That’s more than a great many humans have been able to count on, and you don’t have to be a multi-millionaire for it to colour your expectations of the future.

I would like it very much if all that were required of me and the society I live in were to replace bitumen mines with wind farms, retrofit our houses, switch from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, maybe eat less meat and pay a bit more tax. I want Mark Carney to be right. But that’s not where the numbers are pointing.

The numbers are pointing to an abrupt and overwhelming collapse of life as we know it on earth. This collapse isn’t some future prospect. Eastern Canada already lost its cod. Alberta is about to lose its caribou. The Fraser River that runs through Vancouver, where I live, has, in just the past decade, lost what used to be one of the world’s most prolific sockeye salmon runs. These are a minuscule handful of examples of a catastrophe too large to contemplate.

The destruction of the biosphere is poised to translate into something far more severe than what the pandemic has just wrought—and let’s not forget that the pandemic itself is one manifestation of the destruction I’m describing, since habitat destruction has quadrupled the rate at which new infectious diseases emerge in the past 80 years. That’s an almost impossible message to internalize, even for someone like me who has spent the better part of his own adult life spreading it. I tend to water it down just when thinking about it. I err on the side of optimism when writing about it or discussing it in public. In private and in public, I’m afraid to look too closely.

“In matters of money, there is no room for doubt,” Carney writes, and true to form the man emanates more confidence than almost any other figure in the climate saga—certainly far more than I have ever felt. Radiating certainty is a core part of his job—people who aren’t sure of themselves don’t attract trillions of dollars—and Carney performs it to perfection. But I can’t help wondering: Is there an element of performance here Does he in fact harbour any doubts about his mission, somewhere deep inside?

Put another way, has he ever been afraid for his life?

That’s the question I would love to ask him, the one query I’ve never heard him confront. Has he ever been physically afraid of death, and how did that feeling compare to the sensation he gets when contemplating climate change A person who feels fear needn’t panic or lose their cool, but their voice might take on a certain urgency, a timbre of passion, that conveys an impression of vulnerability. A sense that they have just as much to lose as you or I. Which, for all his unimpeachable commitment to the cause, is a sense I never get from Mark Carney.

Well, I’ve never heard a cat erupt in song, either. Why should I expect a lifelong money manager to start talking like David Suzuki Should I not be happy that the most highly regarded banker in the world has devoted himself, at the height of his powers, to convincing his colleagues that climate change is real Isn’t his voice the best we could have hoped to emerge from the world he inhabits Shouldn’t we all take the $130-trillion he’s rallied to our cause and run with it as far as we can?

Probably. Let’s just not pretend that the $130-trillion Carney gathered at Glasgow is about to be spent on wind turbines and solar panels. It isn’t necessarily about to be spent on anything. All it amounts to is a promise from the institutions holding that money to start keeping track of the carbon they put into the sky—a promise that doesn’t stop them from putting that carbon into the sky if investors decide they’re alright with that.

Some investors are increasingly not okay with that. By the eve of COP26, the fossil-fuel divestment movement had diverted $39-trillion from investments in coal, oil and gas. This shift from carbon-intensive to carbon-free finance can only work if the carbon is carefully accounted for in the first place. That accounting is precisely what the Glasgow Financial Alliance of Net-Zero is promising.

“It’s not blah, blah, blah,” Carney insisted when he made his announcement in Glasgow. “The money is there for the transition.” It’s important to acknowledge that accomplishment. It’s also dangerous to suppose it’s enough.

Arno Kopecky grew up in Edmonton and lives in Vancouver. His latest book is The Environmentalist’s Dilemma (ECW Press).

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Mark Carney appeared first on Alberta Views.

Before all of that: 2007. The political baseline then, in Calgary as in the province as a whole, was stagnation. Government as a series of shrugs and self-congratulations. Who remembers what Dave Bronconnier, the last person to sit in the mayor’s chair, stood for What his vision for the city was Who remembers voting in the 2007 municipal election (I do. It was a pointless errand en route to something more worthwhile, like dropping payment for a gas bill in the mail. We used to do that too, then, not so long ago—pay our bills by mail.) In 2007 the incumbent mayor’s only serious opposition was a multi-millionaire dogged by rumours of shady business dealings in Kenya who bought a little more than 10 per cent of the vote. Incumbents were returned in 9 of the 12 wards, two of them by acclamation.

Does it overstate the case to say no one really cared in 2007 Voter turnout was 33 per cent. It had been even lower in the 2004 election. Maybe it doesn’t even overstate it to say no one cared about municipal politics the whole decade.

It certainly felt like no one cared. I was doing research back then for a small group called Sustainable Calgary, and the consensus among municipal-level progressive non-profits was that the problem wasn’t a lack of non-profits producing reports full of good ideas but a yawning chasm between ideas and implementation. Civic engagement seemed all but non-existent. And so a bunch of us got together to create a little conference called CivicCamp to try to figure out how to overcome the inertia of municipal politics, and one of the people who helped organize it was a civic-minded business prof from Mount Royal University named Naheed Nenshi. And nothing was the same in Calgary politics after that.

So, yes, let’s be clear about the baseline. The baseline was a shrug, a yawn, a backroom deal, a 20-year neighbourhood development permit after half an hour of idle debate. And let’s be clear as well that the change following the 2010 municipal election was seismic. However anyone might rate the Nenshi years in Calgary, there is no denying they were the Nenshi years.

That’s how it began—the first flush of optimism in a roaring boomtown. A great purple wave carried a candidate who initially polled nearly at zero to victory in a 2010 campaign that used youth and diversity and newfangled social media to wash over the city’s inertia and land its man in the mayor’s chair. It ends this year, amid great anxiety, in a busted boomtown reeling from the pandemic, a city whose political climate feels some days like a toxic cloud. In early April Nenshi announced he wouldn’t seek a fourth term. “There are many voices that haven’t always felt heard,” he said, “and it felt like the right time to make some room.”

I’m not at all objective on this subject, to be clear. Nenshi is not a close enough friend that we share confidences—I learned he wasn’t running again, as anyone else might, when the news broke on Twitter—but he is close enough that he’s handed me a gift of his mother’s excellent samosas in my living room and it feels a little odd referring to him as Nenshi, per journalistic convention, and not Naheed, as I’ve often greeted him socially.

A great purple wave carried a candidate who initially polled nearly at zero to victory in a campaign that used youth and diversity and newfangled social media to wash over the city’s inertia.

I’m glad for my friend Naheed that he’s stepping down, because the job seemed to be visibly grinding him down in his last term and because a fully recharged Naheed has so much to bring to whatever he chooses to do next. I’m sad for Nenshi and his constituents, because he will leave the mayor’s chair at a pivotal moment in the city’s (and the world’s) history. And whatever else, we know after 11 years how he would lead us through change, and it was pretty damn good leadership in most respects, and I’m worried for Calgary in its absence.

To begin to wrestle with Nenshi’s legacy, I asked him what he thought it might be. Nenshi is not cagey in the way of a classic backroom politician, but he does sometimes say things those kind of politicians say. And so he answered, at first, with a cagey politician’s line: “I never really thought about my legacy.” And then he expanded on it, as is his professorial tendency: “When someone asks me whether or not they want to run for office, I always give them the same advice. Which is be the best one-term person you can be. You know, just go to work every day, don’t think about the concept of political capital. Don’t think about how this decision will impact you in the next election. Just think about what you can do with the time you’ve been given, which is a precious gift, to help make decisions about people’s lives.”

A fine cagey politician’s line. Here’s something about Nenshi, though. He means all of that. Truly. That’s the first thing I’ll miss about him—that he did the mayoral job, particularly the most crucial, crisis-level parts, with a deep dedication to the idea of public service and a genuine commitment to making the choices he believed were best for the largest number of Calgarians.

This was the Mayor Nenshi of the 2013 flood. The city’s emergency crews oversaw the official response, of course, but Nenshi’s sheer ubiquity in the tensest days of the disaster set a clear and unwavering tone. Nenshi was seemingly everywhere all day, on TV and on social media, always calm, reassuring and decisive, talking up the ways Calgary was making it through the mess while gently ribbing those who ignored civic orders to stay out of the way of emergency crews. His guidance made all the room needed and more for the city’s very best spirit to explode out of the debris, for neighbours to pitch in with all their hearts, for McMahon Stadium’s parking lot to fill with so many volunteers it all but overwhelmed the city’s capacity to deploy them. The Globe and Mail’s Gary Mason has written that Nenshi’s management of the flood “should be studied in courses on leadership.” I agree, and it is surely the cornerstone of his legacy—when a city in deep crisis needed a forceful, pragmatic mayor, he was more than up to the task.

Nenshi’s management of the 2013 flood is surely the cornerstone of his legacy. When a city in deep crisis needed a forceful, pragmatic mayor, he was more than up to the task.

The other thing about Nenshi, though, is that when he claims never to have thought about legacy, he’s both telling the truth, in that it wasn’t the motivation for his decisions, but he’s also talking nonsense, because of course he thought about how he would leave his mark on the city. He’s not lacking at all for ego or ambition. He wanted that mark to be substantial. I suppose that’s the question of his legacy: Did he succeed in that?

Mayors are often measured by tangible things, and some of the ones built on Nenshi’s watch are irrefutably impressive. As a first-time candidate, Nenshi made much of his background as a bookish child of immigrants who asked the public library to allow him to withdraw more books than the limit permitted. And so perhaps the strongest emblem of his years in office is the new Central Library. Plans for a new library predated Nenshi’s arrival at city hall, but he became its vocal champion, ushering a new plan through a rare unanimous council vote in 2013 and celebrating the ambitious design by the world-renowned Norwegian firm Snøhetta at every turn. The library, which opened on time and under budget in 2018, is surely one of the best civic buildings in the country, immediately transformative in palpable ways—the welcoming space itself, the services and amenities it brings downtown, the way it opens up the east side of the inner city. It says something about Calgary in the 21st century that possibly its greatest building is a public library. And it says something about Calgary’s ambitions that its new public library is an architectural achievement of international import, earning the city a spot on The New York Times list of “52 places to go” in 2019. It’s not hard to see it as a physical embodiment of what Nenshi wanted Calgary to be—civic-minded, welcoming, unfussily world-class.

Nenshi first ran for mayor, in 2010, by leaning into his strengths as a wonky professor. He assembled a list of 12 “better ideas” for Calgary and unveiled one a week throughout the campaign. He promised “politics in full sentences.” And on the campaign trail—in living rooms across the city and in thread after thread on Twitter—he was open, direct and expansive in explaining those ideas to anyone who wanted to talk with him.

The “better ideas” are a dual laundry list of policy-wonk wishes and standard political promises. And yet as the third term comes to an end, the mayor’s actions match them still. If he hasn’t enacted all of them, he at least tried hard. Number 12, the last on the list “Outstanding libraries, recreation amenities and a vibrant cultural scene.” Nenshi notes that several new branch libraries and four new recreation centres opened during his tenure, and every other library in the system got renovations.

Nenshi was the new Central Library’s champion, ushering the ambitious plan through a rare unanimous council vote in 2013. It is surely one of the best civic buildings in the country.

Further down the list, other items pop out as issues Nenshi returned to again and again. No. 9, for example: “Calgarians will be able to get around easily by any transportation mode.” We could certainly quibble over the definition of “easily,” but Nenshi’s tenure saw Calgary’s largest-ever investments in transit and cycling infrastructure. The transit capital budget, for example, expanded from a little over $150-million per year around 2012 to a peak of more than $300-million, with major new investments in a Bus Rapid Transit system and a new CTrain fleet. The transit expansion is nowhere near extensive enough to make a major dent in the city’s car dependency, but the improvements are substantial. The downtown cycle track network is a great gift to the city, and I see it snaking outward in all directions now with little of the fuss that accompanied its launch, because it works. Calgary’s transit network is slowly evolving from a hub-and-spoke design that only moves people in and out of the core into a system with more options for neighbourhood to neighbourhood travel. And there is now near universal agreement that expanded transit is the centrepiece of the city’s transportation future—and its budget—which was emphatically not the case in our CivicCamp days. Progress is sometimes less than you’d like, but it’s still progress. (The Green Line, Nenshi assured me, will get built.)

Another better idea was to “reduce the number of people living in poverty and ensure opportunity for all.” Nenshi takes some pride in having ushered in the city’s first-ever poverty reduction strategy, which included Canada’s first sliding-scale fee for monthly low-income transit passes and a new application process that enables people to apply just once for numerous low-income subsidies—the largest Canadian municipality to adopt this more dignified (and cost-effective) approach, and with the most subsidized programs to boot. Nenshi also described Calgary’s new community action plan on mental health and addiction as “probably the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life, certainly my political life.” And Nenshi has seen progress on this front. Calgary’s poverty rate declined until 2018, even if the pandemic and oil-business bust have since pushed it back up.

He has other real victories as well, most of which point at one or another of the original better ideas, some of which will leave marks on the city’s landscape for generations. One is the change made in 2016 to how the city calculates “off-site levies.” This is a pure Nenshi move—technical, wonky, transformative. The off-site levy is the fee paid to the city by developers when they build new communities, intended to cover the costs of public services such as new roads, sidewalks and utilities—a mostly unseen subsidy taxpayers handed to suburban developers and homeowners for decades. Calgary’s levy had always been insufficient, with much of the uncovered costs borne by taxpayers citywide. The 2016 change boosted the levy by more than $100,000 per hectare, an increase of nearly 50 per cent, bringing the fee much closer to the actual cost to the city. In a Calgary Heraldcolumn at the time, Nenshi called it “one of the most important decisions of our term,” arguing that it will “fundamentally change how we pay for growth in this city.”

Did the off-site levy change end Calgary’s outward growth Alas, no. But it certainly tilted the scales toward a better balance and a denser and more sustainable city.

Nenshi’s first few years fufilled his promise of “politics in full sentences,” with the mayor in sole command of his Twitter account and using it to engage citizens. (Sometimes, famously, helping them find their missing pets.) When his victory struck the rest of Canada and the world as wildly improbable—a Muslim elected mayor of Cowtown?—Nenshi made a shrewd choice to use the international spotlight to highlight the city he loved. “I’m going to take advantage of this,” he told the CBC. “I’m going to tell people around the world a story about a place where pluralism works, and where multiculturalism works, and a model perhaps for the world.”

And it did seem to work, for a time. After the flood, Nenshi barely campaigned and was still returned to office in a landslide. The World Mayor Project awarded him its “World Mayor Prize” for 2014. Never mind that such accolades are wildly arbitrary—the title fit the city’s vibe. Calgary was young and smart and successful, and so was its youthful, geeky mayor. It felt like the era that first came into view in 2010 had fully arrived.

And then came Trump, and Jason Kenney in his theatrical prop of a blue pickup truck, and politics in Calgary rapidly turned poisonous.

Nenshi told me about a debate his office had in its first year about banning one particularly noxious Facebook troll from the mayor’s page. The forum was otherwise civil, so they chewed over the decision for weeks. By the time of the 2017 election, however, social media feeds seethed constantly with hateful, often racist rhetoric. The city where, as Nenshi always put it, “nobody cares where your daddy came from” had become a beacon for poisonous, xenophobic right-wing politics. Nenshi himself expressed shock after his narrow 2017 victory at how toxic the campaign had been. When I crossed paths with him after that election, I noticed a wariness and weariness sharply at odds with the smartest-guy-in-the-room buoyancy that had given his political career such irresistible energy. Politics in full sentences had been drowned out by epithets smeared on Facebook walls.

In retrospect, 2018 has begun to feel like the nadir of the Nenshi Years. Calgary was reeling economically, the reactionary right had united behind Kenney, and the mayor was wading through the political morass with a luckless plodding far removed from his once-confident stride. No. 1 on that faded 2010 list of better ideas reads: “Nenshi proposes common sense policy on secondary suites.” That battle—to allow homeowners to add a basement apartment without appealing to the entire city council for approval—dragged on through multiple failed votes that revealed Nenshi’s weakness at rallying allies to his causes. Critics of the mayor often cite his arrogance and unwillingness to compromise; the endless drag of the secondary suite debate, which was repeatedly amplified as yet another bunch of homeowners arrived at council chambers to argue that their mother-in-law apartment wouldn’t ruin the fabric of their neighbourhood, felt like that weakness writ large, and over such a pointedly puny issue. When council finally voted, narrowly, to change the secondary suite process in March 2018, it felt less like a victory than a pointless street fight’s exhausted end.

The mayor himself pointed to the plebiscite later that year on Calgary’s bid to host the 2026 Winter Olympics as his greatest personal regret. Nenshi saw the Olympics as a way to fast-track infrastructure projects—affordable housing, athletic facilities, entertainment venues—as well as update the city’s image and boost its tourist economy. He admitted to me he botched the sales pitch (he should’ve sold it hard as a city-building exercise), then got lost in a jurisdictional squabble between the federal and provincial governments, which led to the fateful decision to put the bid to a plebiscite vote. Nenshi’s pro-Olympics side lost, and an unwarranted share of his political capital had been spent on nothing. “It was a shame and I think a missed opportunity for Calgary,” is how he put it.

Perhaps even harder to swallow for many long-time Nenshi supporters was his vote for a new arena for the Calgary Flames. There’s much more to the deal than just a hockey rink of course, but in public it played out largely as a battle between the crazily wealthy, arrogant ownership group of an NHL team and an increasingly cowed city council. After years of wrangling over the arena’s location and the size of the city’s investment, council committed to splitting the $550-million cost, with the stated promise of economic benefits in excess of the city’s half of the deal. But third-party analysis indicated that the City’s end of the deal would be a net loss of nearly $50-million in present-day dollars.

It was a surprise to see the mayor on the cowed side of the vote—though of course this is emphatically not how he characterized it, and his approach has more merit than the debate around the arena project permitted. He reminded me that he launched his 2017 re-election campaign standing next to the last remaining tree among “a sea of surface parking lots” in Victoria Park, a community that had collapsed under the weight of neglect and the exigencies of the Saddledome and Stampede grounds. “I kicked off my 2017 campaign saying ‘Let’s imagine what we could do to not only create a great neighbourhood here but to help with our economic development.’” The rebirth of Victoria Park, he assured me, is the substantial public benefit that will come from the public money he voted to invest in the deal.

As our conversation wound down, I asked Nenshi the question I’d batted back and forth with friends in recent months. Some grim mixture of the pandemic’s grind, the provincial government’s braying intransigence, and the self-defeating commitment of many prominent business leaders in Calgary to denying the basic facts of the global energy economy in the 2020s had us all wondering out loud whether the city was still the right place for us, whether we and our families had a durable future here. The question, phrased that way, wounded Nenshi. Whatever else, no one should ever doubt his abiding love for the city.

“Of course you want to stay in Calgary,” he answered. “We built—with every bit of politician hyperbole in place—we built the best place in the world. We built a place of limitless—except for the weather—we built a place of limitless opportunity. We built a place where people have the ability to live with dignity. And that’s because we do the work. And so it’s heartbreaking for me to hear that.”

Listen. I’ve known Naheed Nenshi for more than a decade. I’m fully aware of his weaknesses as a politician, but I also know his strengths. And one of those is when he talks about service and community and making a great city better, he really does mean it to his very core. And that’s why when I suggested someone like me might want to leave Calgary, he was soon in soaring rhetorical mode.

“Ultimately,” he told me, “if you’re worried, if you think provincial politics is too corrosive, or people are really mean, or Alberta is the land of the anti-mask idiots who put everyone else at risk, and I don’t want to be a part of that anymore I want you to look up on a spring day at that big blue sky and realize… that we have been a beacon of hope for people from every corner of this broken earth to come and live in a place of safety and opportunity and dignity. And it happens because we make it happen. So yeah, the fight is harder now. Yeah, the jerks are louder now. But that’s no reason to give up the fight. In fact if anything that should embolden all of us to fight even harder.”

Earlier in our conversation he told me about a messy recent debate at city council. The City had proposed a new “Guidebook for Great Communities”—a set of planning guidelines, more or less—and Nenshi’s political opponents had used it to rend their rhetorical garments over its alleged threat to fill every neighbourhood in Calgary with tall buildings and poor renters. Council chambers inevitably plays host to a lot of grotesque NIMBYism, and this was some of the ugliest in a while. An anonymous organization had taken out a front-page ad in the Herald to oppose the Guidebook, and the entire first day of discussion had been one homeowner after another, many from affluent Elbow Park, decrying the creeping socialism and ruination of neighbourhood character contained in the document.

Nenshi: “What was interesting to me is the people following along on social media. And they were getting quite upset. And suddenly, in the evening of the second day, the tenor of the public submissions completely changed. When before, judging by people’s voices, we didn’t really have anybody under the age of 60 presenting—maybe under the age of 55—suddenly we had so many young voices. When before we had gone through dozens of people without a single non-white person, suddenly we had a bunch of non-white voices, in a city that is one-out-of-three non-white. And they spoke with such optimism about their city and such positivity about the future that I thought, this is really remarkable. And I found out later that these folks had all self-organized on Twitter.”

He was describing the 2021 version of the project that had made us colleagues. How he and I and a handful of other like-minded, committed Calgarians had come together more than a decade earlier, and we’d decided, despite the palpable apathy of the time, to try to make the city better. And there were more now, ready to do the same, probably more than ever. What Nenshi was saying was the city was in good hands. I hope he’s right.

Chris Turner is the author, most recently, of The Patch (Simon & Schuster). His new book on the global energy transition, from Penguin Random House, comes out in 2022.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post The Nenshi Years appeared first on Alberta Views.

Six-foot-four, brainy, lanky, dapper—Iveson barged into that election as if visiting from a much savvier universe. He rode the bus to campaign events. He spoke in long, idea-rich sentences and blogged about it all. Yet what was most new was him. He was photogenic (“almost absurdly handsome,” one columnist swooned) but also highly capable. He was a technocrat who was engaging, a Trekkie who understood entrepreneurs, an urbanist and progressive who talked about filling potholes. But what Iveson was most was an idea. Edmonton was on the cusp of a generational shift not only in demographics but in attitude. The city wanted to attract people—and impress them. Iveson embodied an Edmonton to be.

Still, as the torchbearer for the future, Iveson was an outsider in Edmonton’s political establishment. To beat Nickel, Iveson and team would have to hustle. The Journal noted the campaign was slick (his fliers were designed to perch over the edge of a mailbox, making them unmissable) and had endorsements from former MLA Don Massey and then-current MLA Raj Pannu. The papers still weren’t convinced. A Sun columnist bet Iveson $100 Nickel would beat him, and no newspaper sent reporters to Iveson’s election-night party. As the results came in, though, the papers and broadcasters had to scramble. Iveson, with 16,848 votes, had beaten Nickel by more than 2,000 votes.

At his victory party at a bar on Whyte Avenue that night in 2007, someone filmed Iveson’s victory speech with a cellphone and posted it to YouTube. “Conventional wisdom said you can’t unseat incumbents, or that it happens so rarely you shouldn’t bother to try,” he says. “Well, we did.… Conventional wisdom is bad for the city.”

Iveson’s political story begins with his surprise council win, but Edmonton was ready for change. The city’s 2007 population was younger and growing faster than almost any other city in Canada. Unemployment stood at just 4 per cent. Housing prices had spiked. Alberta was building roughly $140-billion in capital infrastructure projects. “Conventional wisdom” in Edmonton had responded to booms with lazy, expensive sprawl. The sobriquet “Deadmonton” was the result. Toronto mayor Mel Lastman once called the city a “clapboard outhouse.” But Edmonton was confronting this latest boom by asking if the city could grow smarter. People under 40 were choosing Edmonton over other cities, wanting to build it into something better. Iveson represented this group. He’d lived in Toronto and had job offers there, but chose to come back.

The next political domino fell for Iveson, ironically, in Calgary. In 2010 that city elected 38-year-old Naheed Nenshi—another wonk, and a long-time friend of Iveson’s—in a “Purple Revolution” defined by youth and urbanist energy. Like Nenshi, Iveson articulated the structural challenges that Alberta’s cities faced during their breathless growth spurts, and he prescribed a similar fix—long-term planning focused on building public transit, slowing sprawl and increasing density.

By May 2013, Iveson had been a councillor for six years. Edmonton had added 100,000 new residents in that time alone. The incumbent mayor, Stephen Mandel, announced he wasn’t running again, setting up the election race as a conversation about infrastructure and growth: Iveson territory. “We can all feel it: This election can be the moment where Edmonton turns,” Iveson blogged. “This can be where we begin to show people they were wrong to underestimate Edmonton.”

His vison was to build, borrow to do so, spur infill development “without pitting new neighbourhoods against old,” tackle poverty and run a long-stalled LRT through mature neighbourhoods to incentivize redevelopment. His ideas were practical—repaving streets—but they were also wonkish, such as tackling infrastructure deficits, including sewer renewal. Iveson was an “intellectual who often sounds as though he’d rather deliver a university lecture than a stump speech,” wrote then Journal columnist Paula Simons. Nonetheless, Iveson’s platform resonated with a city that had nearly doubled in population in his 34 years of life.

The 2013 campaign for mayor pitted Iveson against the established former MLA and city councillor Karen Leibovici and former Sun columnist turned politician (and now MP) Kerry Diotte. No matter: Iveson won 273 of 279 polls outright, and took more than 50 per cent in 246 of them. This wasn’t just a slice of the population voting for city-building, it was almost everyone. “It’s the first time somebody is mayor without having the establishment on his side,” wrote Vitor Marciano, a Wildrose Party adviser, in the Journal in 2013.

Iveson articulated the structural challenges facing Edmonton, and prescribed long-term planning focused on building public transit, slowing sprawl and increasing density.

And Iveson was right—you really could feel it (I arrived from Toronto that spring and was swept up into the city-building energy). At the core was Iveson, his wife, Sarah Chan, and their two young children playing avatars for an underdog, mid-size city on the rise. They appeared at hip events, modelled shoes and tweeted all of it. “They projected an image of Edmonton that we found appealing, not just being socially progressive but of looking cool,” says the now-Senator Simons. “We found that image flattering and exciting, and one we wanted to live up to.”

Donald Lawrence Iveson was born in Edmonton to Margaret and Robert Iveson in May 1979. Margaret was a high school (and later university) English teacher; Robert, or Bob, was an award-winning sculptor who read encyclopedias with Don. The family lived in Edmonton’s affluent Parkallen neighbourhood. Margaret remembers Don, an only child, as smart and curious. “Bob would say to Don, ‘You can think anything you want, you can have any opinion you want, but you have to have evidence,” she says. “If your dad asks you for your evidence when you’re, whatever, 6, I think it’s a good start to building evidence into things.”

After graduating from Strathcona High School, Iveson enrolled at the University of Alberta, where he became managing editor of the Gateway, the student newspaper, and where his love of evidence spilled into editorials. There he met Chan, as well as the people who remain his closest friends and who have mobilized to help him win elections. The Gateway was a “weird, intense club,” says close friend Adam Rozenhart. Iveson was a get-it-right rather than a get-it-done sort of guy. “Everything needed to be so perfect, like, down to the word.” 

Iveson then left to complete his degree in political science at the University of Toronto. There he became president of the Canadian University Press. He later returned to the U of A to work again at the Gateway, as business manager, and then as an advocacy director with the Students’ Union. Then, at 27, he ran for city council.

Once at city hall, Iveson—a workaholic who was known to download information from city reports until the wee hours (“I feel a little guilty pleasure when I tell him something he doesn’t know,” fellow councillor Bryan Anderson told Avenue magazine that year)—struggled with the human side. “He had pretty strong opinions and felt they were based in logic and reason, and therefore everybody else should agree with him,” Simons says. “When people didn’t agree, it took him a while to understand that he had to be a little more human, that not everybody was going to be interested in his analysis.”

In 2013 as he stared down council under his first watch as mayor, Iveson offered a warning to councillors, borrowing from Theodore Roosevelt: “The next four years are not going to be easy. Nothing great is easy.”

Edmonton councillor Aaron Paquette says he was partly inspired to run in the 2017 election—which mayoral race Iveson won with more than 70 per cent of the vote—by Iveson’s first term and vision. But once on council, Paquette says he felt lukewarm with Iveson’s pace on certain issues and frustrated by his insistence on listening to people who don’t have evidence on their side. “On policy, there are definite disagreements [between us],” Paquette says. Transit, a central focus for Paquette, has improved markedly under Iveson’s leadership; the city has its first ever data-driven redesign of its network and 13 kilometres of new LRT track, with construction of another 14 km underway. But it “doesn’t go far enough” Paquette says. (Notably, Iveson doesn’t support free transit; Paquette does.) Transit reform in Edmonton is “too conservative and moving too slowly,” he says.

Iveson’s city-building has also come under fire for its cost. Property taxes have risen (though were recently frozen during the pandemic). The Edmonton Chamber of Commerce has routinely pushed back, framing increases as threats to businesses. The clearest sign of frustration within Iveson’s council was when Michael Oshry, a young, ambitious entrepreneur who did it all in Edmonton—Iveson’s sort of guy—decided not to run again in 2017 after just one term. (He is now running for mayor this October.) Oshry recently told the Journal of his one term with Iveson that “it just wasn’t an atmosphere where the talents of the whole team were being used.” Oshry declined an interview for this story.

The establishment side of Edmonton has questioned, consistently, why the City now operates in realms it didn’t before. For example, the City is the developer of Blatchford, a 536-acre community on the old downtown airport lands, where it has built geothermal infrastructure and invested almost $100-million. The result so far is a few dozen townhouses more than 10 years into the 30-year project. There is also Edmonton’s continued push to defeat homelessness. In August 2020, as Edmonton dismantled a large homeless camp downtown, Iveson raised eyebrows by proposing a 10-weekplan to end homelessness (it included requests to acquire hotel rooms and apartments using federal grants, working around the uninterested province). The timeline was not met.

There is also Iveson’s intellect. He doesn’t argue. He listens, debates, offers evidence. It’s always about policy, not personalities. To a person, Iveson is described as “fair,” but evidently, after he peppers people with facts and counterarguments, he leaves some feeling like their ideas were ignored. “People could find him condescending—that he was lecturing them rather than explaining to them,” Simons says.

These sentiments come through, if diplomatically, from his peers. “Don Iveson has pointed the city in completely the right direction in terms of the city we want to build and the issues we want to be concerned about,” says councillor Michael Walters, who has been at city hall since 2013. “I just think he could have gotten way more out of his council and his community.”

Still, the stubborn insistence in following his vision has been vital. Iveson’s focus on Indigenous reconciliation, which he makes clear in most public speeches, has changed the conversation; Edmonton even renamed its wards to reflect the region’s Indigenous roots. And when the second phase of the Valley Line LRT was threatened after the arrival of the UCP in 2019 and that government’s first budget, in which they gave themselves a 90-day withdrawal clause on funding commitments for the project’s second phase into west Edmonton, the pressure on Iveson to back off was immense. “He didn’t blink,” Walters says.

This laser vision has made change beyond Edmonton. Sturgeon County mayor Alanna Hnatiw, who sat on the Edmonton Metropolitan Regional Board with Iveson for years, credits the board’s growth plan (Iveson is one of its architects) with density targets that address urban sprawl regionally rather than just within Edmonton’s limits. The relationship, though, hasn’t been easy. “He’s Mr. Point of Order,” Hnatiw says, chuckling. But she says Iveson is always fair. The two are now friends.

Today, eight years after Iveson’s mayoral win and nearly 14 after his arrival on the municipal political scene, his city-building agenda feels flat. Oil prices have stayed persistently low. The pandemic has magnified all problems. Office vacancies hover at 20 per cent. Unemployment is at 10.5 per cent, the worst of all big cities in Canada. The political winds now blow against big ideas and infrastructure investment. The coalition of progressives and centrists Iveson built is increasingly fragmented. Homelessness in Edmonton is growing, and tension between Iveson and Premier Jason Kenney has come out into the open (with the mayor earlier this year calling the UCP government’s “failure to work with Edmonton on supportive housing… truly frustrating [and] confounding”).

Meanwhile, Iveson’s angriest detractors in Edmonton still can’t spell his name right—he’s “Mayor Iverson” in the comments sections. An October 2020 poll by Leger found his approval rating at just 38 per cent. The following month, he announced he would not seek re-election.  

“It just seems like a different city from the hopeful 2013 campaign he ran,” says Rozenhart. “This most recent term, I think he’s accomplished some great things, like bike lanes and the LRT and the work he’s done on the Edmonton region with other municipalities. But I think it’s just gotten harder because the general sentiment and the attitude in the city is somehow different, maybe a little darker.”

On his blog, Iveson offered this about his decision: “I had only ever hoped to serve two terms as your mayor….”

Iveson’s magnum opus is Edmonton’s City Plan (passed in December 2020), a combined Municipal Development Plan and Transportation Master Plan. It’s a vision for Edmonton at two million people by 2040, but more or less within the same boundaries as today. This means—if the private sector buys in (the lingering question)—that half of all new housing will be infill, up from the current target of 25 per cent, which Edmonton has hit for several years. Half of all trips will be taken by transit, cycling or walking rather than car. The plan, like so many other policies Iveson has helped craft, puts Edmonton far ahead of where it was. Kalen Anderson, who was director of urban analysis with the City of Edmonton, says, “This integrated body of work will be a lasting legacy for his leadership and will shape Edmonton’s future.”

Councillor Paquette believes the city plan and all the behind-the-scenes effort to reshape Edmonton’s administration, everything from revising how committees are run to changing zoning bylaws and parking requirements, will be next to impossible to reverse, preserving Iveson’s legacy. “The iceberg was the past: the deficit on infrastructure,” he says. “We were digging ourselves a city-sized pothole. It sounds like I’m pumping up the mayor in spite of myself. I am.”

 In the summer of 2019, Dan Lazin rented a Fiat 124 Spider convertible and spent four days driving around Virginia looking at historic sites with his buddy Don Iveson. Lazin had met Iveson in Grade 10 math class and ultimately helped him run for council. Now he lives in New York City, where he works for Google. Time with Iveson is rare.

Lazin says Iveson took 20 minutes or so to drop his public voice and speak as a friend. But once that happened the two enjoyed themselves. At one point, as it rained, they even found the right speed to drive to keep the top down but the water out. But Iveson was, as ever, still Iveson. “The conversations we had in the car, the most memorable of them, were essentially planning-out schemes for infrastructure, talking about high-speed rail possibilities between Edmonton and Calgary, or the air shipment stuff between Asia and Edmonton,” Lazin says.

The two have always been like this, Lazin adds—big-project guys. “There’s always the sense of we’re both trying to achieve something. I mean achieve something in the world, like build the next thing.”

Iveson is now 41 and showing grey in his pandemic beard. Of late he’s taken to being less of a diplomat. In May 2021, when three people died of an apparent overdose in a downtown park, Iveson blamed Kenney’s government and mocked his “‘yahoo’ moment of the Stampede,” referencing the premier’s timeframe for reopening businesses and declaring the pandemic over. But when we catch up by phone (thanks, pandemic), he’s still Iveson—always that public voice, always that slightly “TedTalk meets technocrat” worldview.

I ask where Edmonton is at as he leaves office, and he says the city is still like Austin is to Texas—an island of people “who want to get to the future that should be better rather than go back to some past that ain’t going to happen again.” The city is “as poised as it can be” to reach that future, he believes.

Still, I ask about the bittersweetness of the moment. The southeast leg of the Valley Line LRT that Iveson championed won’t open before he leaves office, thanks to delays, including the discovery of a “car-sized” slab of concrete in the river valley that got in the way and led to endless jokes. The Metro Line LRT, which ran at half-speed for years after it opened in 2015, thanks to Edmonton’s troubles with procurement and vendors, took a toll on Iveson’s reputation. Time did too. Progressives feel he hasn’t gone far enough; conservatives can’t wait for him to go.

“I have a sense of many people’s disappointments, because we hear about those a lot,” Iveson says. “But it wasn’t until I announced I wasn’t going to run again that [I heard] more generous feedback—even a sense of loss from people who have appreciated my leadership and my approach.”

The problems with LRT in particular made “easy theatre for headlines,” Iveson says, but led to hard changes in how the City did things. “It’s not a particularly sexy political message, and so it doesn’t make a good story when we fix these things. All that folks remember are the parts that went wrong. I’m satisfied that we learned from each mistake and got better each time.”

I ask about his reputation as a “Mr. Spock” who struggles with the human side. “I think I tend to be more in my head than in my heart when trying to solve public policy challenges,” Iveson says. “But I’ve also been told my most effective leadership has come when my heart is engaged.” Iveson concedes he was naïve when he showed up at council in 2007, but he feels he’s grown over the years. “I thought that if you had the most facts and the best argument, you could win. But you’ve got to motivate people emotionally too, and I had to learn the confidence to do that.”

So, what’s he going to do now “I really don’t know, honestly,” Iveson says. “I know it will be civically engaged. I was wired that way. I think it’s baked in by nature at this point. But that can take many different forms.”

Lazin says Iveson would be the first to admit he didn’t get done all he wanted to or others wanted him to. “I do think he’ll probably be back in politics at some point, but my guess is there will probably be a good long gap,” he says. “I really do believe the signs he’s sending out—‘Nah, not right now, because I need a break’—because it is a punishing job.”

The post The Legacy of Don Iveson appeared first on Alberta Views.

After scouting locations in the kitchen, living room, backyard (“you never go into the bedrooms”), in the end “we shot her at her table, and while we were working, she was on three phones, one with Brazil, another with the UK, and texting. Her ‘workspace’ is at a corner of her kitchen table.” (In 2017–2018 Freeland, as minister of foreign affairs, was leading Canada’s renegotiation of NAFTA.)

Freeland’s older daughter, Natalka, had let Markian into the “nondescript” townhouse. He noticed Ukrainian paintings on the wall, Ukrainian sheet music open on the piano. “I hit it off with Natalka, whose Ukrainian language is impeccable. We knew the same folk songs. ‘Oh, you’re Ukrainian! Mum will love this.’”

For a previous article Freeland had listed a Ukrainian alphabet book as one of the “10 things she can’t live without.” “My kids are four, nine and 12,” she’d said. “They’ve all read this book. I’m Ukrainian Canadian, and I speak only Ukrainian with my children. If they ask me for anything in English, they know they won’t get it. My husband, Graham, is picking up the language, too: he’s had 12 years to practise.”

On this day the Toronto Life stylist had found Canadian-designed clothes for the shoot, but Freeland was adamant about wearing her own clothes. “I’m not going to apologize for the stain on my dress. I have three kids.” Markian: “So we ended up with her own outfit for the cover, her red dress, in which she’s so comfortable, and the stylist just had to make sure it was smoothed out.” “I’ll play along for your cover,” Freeland conceded, and submitted to light makeup.

The shoot completed, Markian joined Freeland at that kitchen table, “talking about growing up in the west, our respective times in NYC and what drew us back to Canada, why politics And the possibility we are distantly related through one of her aunts.”

I asked how a decision is made, among all the photos he takes, for a cover. Once his job is done the magazine’s editorial team takes over, but “usually the best image speaks for itself.” And this turned out to be the case with Freeland’s image on the November 2017 cover of Toronto Life. It was Markian’s choice too (and was the source image for a painting now hanging in Rhodes House in Oxford, England). “It truly captures her stature and shows her larger than life force. She is a spitfire, and I feel I captured the essence of her drive and outlook. She’s stately but not arrogant, elegant but not overly glamorous, open in expression, yet firm and grounded in stature.”

Suddenly from the flat lands of the grande prairie you drop into the blue-green shimmer of the valley of the Peace and into the town nestled at the foot of rolling bluffs of the riverbank, strung out along the waterway on its way to the Arctic. In 1977 I was on assignment for Chatelaine, shortly after the victory of the separatist Parti Québécois in Quebec. The Rest of Canada was having a fit, and my assignment was to meet with “ordinary Canadians” to find out why. First stop: Peace River, Alberta, to interview Don and Halyna Freeland.

“The first time I met Chrystia, she looked just like her mother—a fierce ball of energy.” Anne McClellan

I’d known both of them, before their marriage, as undergrads at the University of Alberta. What better way to get reacquainted than to visit They agreed to meet. In the photo in the Freeland home taken by Chatelaine’s photographer, everyone is on the living room carpet including their two girls, “Natalie, 6, and Christie, 9,” tucked under Don’s arms.

Although himself a Liberal, Don called the defeated Bourassa (Liberal) government “rotten corrupt” and the surprise would have been its re-election. “I’m not like the prime minister [Pierre Trudeau], who says, quote unquote, that [Quebec’s separation] would be a crime against humanity. There have been many crimes against humanity, but Quebec seceding is not such a crime.”

Don Freeland doesn’t speak French and has no interest in learning it. Married to a Ukrainian-Canadian—Halyna Chomiak Freeland—he’s more interested in his daughters growing up as bilingual Ukrainian–English speakers. Halyna speaks only Ukrainian to the girls and Don isn’t fussed. “We’re a long, long way from Montreal. I’ve been to Montreal and it felt like a foreign country. But I feel at home in Billings, Montana.”

Home is Peace River, where Don and Halyna share a law practice as well as a farm half a mile from his grandfather’s homestead, 1,800 acres, half of it in feed grains, the other in hay for their Hereford cattle. His grandfather had come up from the US and farmed in the valley—according to a relative, “the Freelands had all their land in the valley, fantastic land, not up on the bank”—which Don’s father, Wilbur, inherited, then expanded. “It’s been my home all my life,” said Don.

In the story of the Chomiak-Freelands, it is the Freelands, not the Ukrainians, who are the settlers. Chrystia Freeland said as much in 2012 in The Atlantic: “We buried my grandfather last spring. He had died in his sleep in his own bed at 95, so, as funerals go, it wasn’t a grim occasion. But it was a historic one for our small rural community. My great-grandparents were early settlers, arriving in 1913 and farming the land throughout their lives. My grandfather continued that tradition, and now rests next to them on a hillside overlooking the family homestead.”

When we were all still undergrads, and Halyna and Don were in arts pre-law and law respectively, Don liked to hang out with the Left on campus—that would be the New Democratic Youth, where Halyna was active. Halyna’s sister and Chrystia’s aunt, Chrystia Chomiak, remembers the old NDY house next to Tuck Shop with portraits of Karl Marx and Taras Shevchenko on the walls: “Excellent parties!” As soon as they had their degrees, Don and Halyna married in the Chomiak family church in Edmonton, St. George Ukrainian–Catholic, and moved to Peace River. Their law firm did mostly commercial and civil litigation, although, as Don said in 1977, “In a small community you have to do pretty near everything that comes in the door.” Halyna, however, did only criminal and civil law while also setting up a daycare in town and travelling to clients in smaller communities, an experience that would later feed her legal and social activism as a feminist lawyer. While Don ran once for the provincial Liberals, Halyna ran twice for the federal NDP.

Halyna’s mother, Alexandra Chomiak, arrived from time to time from Edmonton to babysit Chrystia (b 1968, christened Christina Alexandra) and Natalie (b. 1971); Alexandra would do the same when the Freelands came to Edmonton on weekends and dropped the kids off with Baba and Dido. Halyna’s sisters, including aunt Chrystia Chomiak, were also frequent visitors.

Chrystia Freeland recalled her childhood, as told by Linda Diebel of the Toronto Star in 2015: “Memories from Alberta’s Peace River country make Freeland’s heart soar. ‘I had a wonderful childhood. It was magical.’…‘He loved the Peace River so much,’ she says of [grandfather] John Wilbur Freeland. His father was John, so he became Wilbur—wartime flyer, rodeo bronc rider, boxer under the name ‘Pretty Boy Freeland,’ lawyer and farmer…. He put her and her only sibling, Natalka, on a big brown mare named Princess when they could barely hang on. And when she was 12 and Natalka 10, he gave them horses for Christmas.”

In 2012, when then-journalist Freeland was still writing for American audiences from her perch in New York City, she took up the subject of “the family farm,” to refute the usual lamentations about “the good old days in rural areas, the family farm’s decline, and the inevitable loss of the homestead,” and pronounced the regret “obsolete.” Case in point: her father’s operation in Peace River, the third generation on the land but “bigger and more prosperous than ever.”

Don Freeland not only had his own 3,200 acres [1295 ha] under cultivation, he rented another 2,400 acres [971 ha], “all told, a territory seven times the size of Central Park.” The article lists the tonnes of wheat, canola and barley and litres of vegetable oil that he reaps from the land, with the help of two hired hands—two!—and others at seeding and harvesting.

“I remember,” she later told the Toronto Star, “coming home from working in the fields with my grandfather one day in the summer, and he stopped and said to me: ‘You know, what I love most about the farm is that every field has a different view and every one is beautiful.’”

In 1978 Don Halyna Freeland divorced, and Halyna moved with the two girls back to Edmonton. (Chrystia entered Grade 4.) It was a swift and deep immersion into an urban activist community, Ukrainian-Canadian, leftist and feminist, a life under the tutelage of Halyna and her extended family and her political sisterhood. As Halyna’s obituary (2007) summarized, “She was a lawyer, activist, teacher, community organizer, bookstore founder, co-operative housing pioneer, politician, student and international legal reformer; she was a single mother, an art collector, a gourmet cook and a voracious reader.”

Halyna’s parents, Mykhailo and Alexandra Chomiak (Chrystia’s maternal grandparents), had left western Ukraine in 1939 and by 1945 were in a refugee camp in Germany, where Halyna was born in 1946. In 1948 the family immigrated to Canada, grateful to be safe. “They never dared to go back” to Ukraine, but, as Chrystia wrote in a 2015 essay “My Ukraine, and Putin’s Big Lie,” “for the rest of my grandparents’ lives, they saw themselves as political exiles with a responsibility to keep alive the idea of an independent Ukraine.”

“ ‘You don’t judge people by their economic means’ was Halyna’s basic principle.”  Chrystia Chomiak, on Freeland’s mother

Chrystia Chomiak tells me that Mykhailo and Alexandra learned some English in the displaced persons camps; once the family had settled into a house in Jasper Place (a community not yet incorporated into Edmonton), “Mum learned [English] from the ads in the Edmonton Journal.” It was already a multilingual household, with Alexandra and Mykhailo speaking Ukrainian and Russian interchangeably with Polish, but without English Mykhailo could not practise journalism nor go back to law school and instead worked “for years” as a lab assistant. Two more children were born in Canada and the family of eight somehow fit into a one-bedroom bungalow on a double lot in Jasper Place, where Alexandra cultivated a “massive” garden (“Mum could ‘speak’ to the plants”) and did a prodigious amount of canning. “Our family was poor,” Chrystia Chomiak recalls, almost wistfully. “But houses were cheap—we had electricity, an outhouse, but no running water until 1953,” when indoor plumbing was installed and a second bedroom was added. “At the store we bought salt, sugar, flour, tea and prepared meats. Credit was not always extended. We collected bottles on the way home from school. We got our clothes at the ‘Canadian’ (Protestant) churches for everyday clothes. But we each had one very good outfit from Holt Renfrew and Johnston Walker. Of course we never afforded a car.”

 This was never a white bread family, literally as well as figuratively: no white bread allowed on the Christmas table in the Chomiak household. Rye bread was de rigueur and always provoked a discussion when they visited Vienna Bakery: sour or not, light or dark But “milk and cream all the time. We were a potato family, in every style.” This explains, perhaps, Chrystia Freeland’s acquisition of poutine as her favourite fast food.

A friend remembers how a social conscience is bred: “During Halyna’s funeral, Chrystia [Freeland] described how their mother would use family domestic events as teachable moments to get across basic political concepts. One time, when they made their usual Saturday morning stop at Vienna Bakery, Halyna decided it was time to teach the girls about the unfairness of majority rule versus proportional representation, pointing out that under a majority system, Natalka, who didn’t like the rye bread that Halyna and Chrystia favoured, would never get to choose the bread she preferred. Not fair!”

Until Jasper Place amalgamated with Edmonton in 1964, the “border” was at 149th Street and the end of the trolley line. Chrystia Chomiak admits she and her siblings grew up among “lots of very poor and dysfunctional neighbours, the generational poor. Junk and mean dogs in their yards. People were mean—throwing rocks at the windows of the house of the Black family.” Nevertheless, the Chomiaks understood that “our family was very much more educated than our neighbours,” with all the attendant intellectual and cultural advantages that sent them off, one after the other, to university. “I love Jasper Place,” says Chrystia Chomiak, “not Edmonton.”

Still, the girls did wish their mum would make Rice Krispie squares instead of Viennese tortes for Hallowe’en at school.

Carless, the Chomiak family made the trek into Edmonton on Sundays to St. George Ukrainian–Catholic church. As parents they were not particularly “pious.” According to Chrystia Chomiak, the family kept the religious traditions such as the main feast days and fasts. But Mykhailo and Alexandra as grandparents continued to have a strong influence on the granddaughters, who had to have a religious education, end of discussion. Dido Mykhailo would pick up Chrystia and Natalka and the three of them would walk over to St. George’s “because his ‘atheist daughter,’ the socialist Halyna, wouldn’t take them.” When the granddaughters stayed with Baba Alexandra in Jasper Place, they would go with her to the Orthodox cathedral, to be with her own Orthodox people. And this, Chrystia Chomiak agrees, was the extent of her nieces’ “churching” in Edmonton.

In January 2020, Edward Luce, The Financial Times’s US national editor, came to Edmonton to have lunch with his former boss, Chrystia Freeland, who was visiting family. They met at Bistro Praha. (Many of us took grave offence at New Yorker Luce’s description of this beloved eatery as “somewhat faded.”) On Freeland’s recommendation, Luce ate prodigiously: “Since Freeland, 51, has frequented this place for 40 years, we agree that she will order for me. …‘You must try the Prague egg—it’s one of the bistro’s specialties,’ she says …At this point my main course lands with a thud. It includes serried ranks of Hungarian sausages, a mountain of sauerkraut and foothills of Ukrainian dumplings.” Freeland, however, is fasting: She’s home for the holidays, it’s Ukrainian Christmas Eve, and the rule is you cannot eat before evening, the Holy Supper. “I’m going to cheat,” she says, and orders a cappuccino.

Chrystia Chomiak tells me that “the whole family in Edmonton was involved in Plast.” This scouting association is essentially a post-Second World War transplant from western Ukraine, where it had been founded in 1911. Vera Pastuszenko Krawec, whose parents had signed her up in Edmonton at age 6, concurs that “we were mainly first-generation children of immigrants. Plast was close to the original Baden-Powell model, and still very Christian. Everything starts and ends with a prayer.”

I form a picture of Chrystia Freeland, plastunka extraordinaire, who was in summer camps with Krawec. Krawec lists the attractions: “Adventure, companionship, social and survival skills, camping in the woods, roughing it in tents: heck, yes. Ages 6–10 stayed in cabins on Lake Wabamun, but age 12 and over roughed it in tents on the ground. Dug our own latrines, built fencing and benches, learned to forage for food, make meals, tie knots. We turned out as super-capable people; you’d want one of us on a plane if it crashes.” This was particularly true of plastuny from Edmonton. Those from Ontario were “super-soft.”

Uniforms were de rigueur—boys in pants or shorts, girls in skirts—and festooned with merit badges, “not easy to earn,” as plastuny moved up the ranks of achievements in astronomy, bike-riding, gun safety at a shooting range, embroidery, rock-climbing. “Duties and leadership abilities were non-gendered. That’s why I loved it so much. What a glorious organization!” No English speech allowed. Lots and lots of singing of traditional and patriotic Ukrainian songs.

Chrystia Freeland wasn’t in Krawec’s cohort and wasn’t always at the weekly Saturday meetings, but she was always at summer camp. “Her dad would show up at the camp, but because he wasn’t one of ‘us’ [not Ukrainian] and because her parents were divorced, she was a bit of a curiosity. Nobody was divorced in the Ukrainian community in those days.”

Krawec isn’t surprised Chrystia has made such a mark for herself. “She was tiny and very cute and you could tell she was smart. Her Ukrainian language was impeccable. If she hadn’t been a ‘drop-in,’ she would have been a leader. I don’t remember her not being good at anything—perhaps not so athletic. Kitchen duties required lots of skills, but I remember she couldn’t have the cookies at dinner because she wasn’t allowed sugar.”

 In April 1983 Chatelaine published “Sisters: The Unbreakable Bond,” by Myrna Kostash. Chrystia Freeland is 14, Natalie, 12. Growing up in Edmonton, they like to do things together: go to music lessons, take holidays, cook a meal, and talk, talk, talk when the lights are out and they’re in bed. They admire each other’s accomplishments without a trace of jealousy (Chrystia: “Nat’s always been more artistic and creative.” Natalie: “You put your creativity more into writing.”) and complain about each other with amazing good nature.

Chrystia: “We share a bedroom, and sometimes I think she’s a real slob.” Natalie: “Sharing a bedroom has been the worst experience of my whole life.” Chrystia: “Nobody babies me the way they baby Nat.” Yes, but. Natalie: “On Awards Night, if she gets the Gold Medal and I only get a Silver, that’s yucky. I want to show everybody I’m as smart as she is.”

By 1983 I had become a member of an impressively large fan club in Edmonton (and well beyond) of Halyna Freeland and had spent considerable time in her home in the inner-city and Ukrainian Norwood neighbourhood, where she settled with her daughters in 1979. She had set up a law practice with a social conscience formed from her childhood: “In her legal practice,” Halyna’s sister Chrystia reflects, “people would come to her as one who would help poor people who couldn’t always pay. ‘You don’t judge people by their economic means’ was a basic principle.”

A friend said: “Halyna had a tremendous influence on her daughters’ political and social consciousness. Their dining room table was the centre of many feminist and political discussions, events and campaigns. It was undoubtedly the scene of the campaign that Halyna spearheaded in getting women’s groups involved in an ultimately successful lobby to change the incredibly unfair matrimonial property laws in the 1970s.”

This was the notorious Murdoch v. Murdoch, when Irene Murdoch, “a ranch wife from Nanton, Alta., left her home (and 25-year marriage) in 1968 with a broken jaw and collar bone,” and claimed, on the basis of the economic input of her labour, half the family cattle ranch, a claim rejected at divorce court and all the way up to the Supreme Court in 1973, where it was rejected again (by an all-male bench). Speaking for the majority (4–1), Justice Martland found that the wife’s labour was not beyond what was normally expected of a ranch wife. Uproar upon uproar.

 “Chrystia would have been very young when this was all happening, but it illustrates the kind of household that she grew up in.”

Halyna whirled on, and drew other women into her orbit. She was active in the Local Council of Women, Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) and International Women’s Day. Halyna was a co-founder of Common Woman Books—and raised her daughters as “voracious readers.”

“Halyna was a force to be reckoned with, and you didn’t cross her,” Marie Gordon, a fellow lawyer and activist, remembers, still in awe. Of course the bookstore meetings were all run as collectives, a “revolutionary process, living our principles.” You brought your babies into the store with you and there was a jolly jumper in a doorway. As well as feminist literature, the store sold cookbooks, music and magazines, and T-shirts emblazoned with words from the anarchist Emma Goldman. And daughter Chrystia was “part of the milieu.”

Much later Freeland, in the running to be MP for University-Rosedale Toronto, answered a 2015 questionnaire by Toronto Life:

Who’s your role model? “My late mother.”

What do you want your tombstone to say? “‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution.’ This was one of my mother’s favourite quotes. Emma Goldman spent some time living in our riding and died in Toronto.”

In 1982 planning began for Hromada, a “Ukrainian, socialist and feminist” housing co-op in Old Strathcona. Halyna said, “One of my dreams has been that people who are not related can live together as a family.”

We met at the Freeland (mother and daughters) home, always at a large oval dining table laden with potluck contributions while Halyna presided as our host and lawyer. As with the bookstore collective, our decisions were made—at Halyna’s insistence—only after consensus had been achieved in an interminable “round robin” of opinions and arguments. No winners or losers, no majority vs. minority views.

One founding member I’ll call “Nadia” remembers that, at one of the meetings as we ate and argued and drank and smoked like chimneys, Chrystia and Natalka came down the stairs and interrupted our proceedings to announce, “We’ve been thinking about how, since we are going to be living in this co-op too, we should have a say in the decisions you’re making.” This was respectfully discussed—and the consensus was, okay, but not until you’re 16.

“Nadia” went on: “I liked the people socially—their warmth and generosity—but when I sat in on some Marxist readings I wondered what I’d got myself into.” And there were “endless meetings,” endless discussions with the architect, and “the fantasy! Sliding doors between units. A communal kitchen. A sauna…”

I moved in, end of 1984, and the sense of community had if anything deepened. I have the photos to prove it: women’s vegetarian potlucks, birthday parties (Halyna and I shared the date), the visit of Sviatyi Mykola (St. Nicholas) on December 19, legendary “alternative,” i.e., “feminist-socialist” malankas/New Year’s Eve parties that required months of preparation. We hosted scholars from Ukraine, and Halyna planted an apple tree in the common area where the kiddies played.

What’s not to love Yet, on the few occasions when a journalist profiling or interviewing Chrystia Freeland mentions the (Ukrainian, socialist, feminist) housing co-op where “she spent a good chunk of her childhood,” she is reticent. (In 1988 she left for Harvard to study Russian history and literature.) And she’s in very few of my photos. “I don’t know if this is still what it calls itself,” The Globe and Mail’s Adam Radwanski quotes her musing of the place. He adds: “This fledgling attempt at communal living in a corner of Edmonton… is understandably not her go-to when speaking publicly about her upbringing…. And no, she has never been a socialist herself.”

Chrystia Chomiak put it this way: “Both of her [Halyna’s] daughters are very socially conscious, but for Chrystia her economic solutions differ even though she shared the goal with her mother of economic equality and security. Look at what supports were rolled out to deal with economic dislocations during COVID. Her lifestyle and values show this.”

In 1988 Halyna Freeland ran for the federal NDP in Edmonton-Strathcona. To implement or not to implement the US–Canada Free Trade Agreement hammered out by Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney The NDP were dead set against it, fearing US domination over all our made-in-Canada institutions.

So of course many of us hromadnyky worked on Halyna’s campaign. We gathered under balloons and crepe paper streamers, sat in front of a giant TV screen to watch, hearts sinking, as primarily Ontario and Quebec voters gave Progressive Conservatives 169 seats in a 295-seat parliament. “The result fundamentally altered Canadian politics,” Stephen Azzi writes. “In the words of historian Norman Hillmer, [the free trade deal] marked ‘a final recognition of Canada’s inevitable destiny as a North American nation.’ ”

The irony is stark: In 1988 Halyna Freeland’s NDP opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement that three decades later was renegotiated by Chrystia Freeland, Liberal cabinet minister.

In the meantime, in 2008, Linda Duncan ran in and won Edmonton-Strathcona for the NDP, and it’s been NDP ever since. Duncan, in retirement, says Freeland is “very approachable,” and in the House their relationship was “always convivial.”

Duncan was three times an election monitor in Ukraine and shares with Freeland inspiration from the 2014–2015 “Revolution of Dignity” on Independence Square in Kyiv: “Fascinating, because it gave a flavour of participatory democracy on the ground.” In 2019 Duncan received an Executive Hetman award from the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Alberta Provincial Council (UCC-APC). She’s chuffed about it. “Liberals and Conservatives compete with each other as to who loves the Ukrainians more. I grew up in Alberta, where the prevailing attitude toward Ukrainians was as ignorant farmers. To visit Ukraine—what an eye-opener, all of it. What a beautiful country.”

While Chrystia was at Harvard, Halyna left law practice and, with the declaration of independence of Ukraine in 1991, moved to Ukraine in 1992 to work for an NGO, the Ukrainian Legal Foundation. She lived in Kyiv for the next 10 years, while Chrystia was up north in Moscow as bureau chief for the Financial Times, 1994–1998. Chrystia would visit Halyna in her mother’s Kyiv apartment, which she now owns with her sister.

At that point, both mother and daughter had long since moved on from Edmonton.

 Chrystia Freeland’s career in journalism and politics is much documented. She has written two widely acclaimed books, Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution and Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. As a cabinet minister she has sometimes been called “The Minister of Everything.”

On November 25, 2019, as a newly minted Intergovernmental Affairs minister, Chrystia Freeland was in Edmonton for her first meeting in that role with Alberta premier Jason Kenney. Her visit coincided with that of former president of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, and all three were guests at a banquet hosted by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. Orysia Boychuk, UCC-APC president, sat at the head table with them. I was curious what the atmosphere had been like, given the strained relations between the UCP and the Trudeau feds, and the noncommittal conclusion to Freeland’s and Kenney’s meeting earlier that day: “It was a good start,” Kenney told reporters.

“We didn’t know how it was going to play out,” Boychuk told me. “I mean, would Kenney even agree to attend if Freeland were there?” The UCC hoped there would be common ground between two people who had “passionately defended” Ukraine (Kenney while minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism in Harper’s cabinet). In a word, said Boychuk, “It was beautiful!” Edmonton’s Ukrainian community has long admired Freeland from her days as a journalist, as someone of “depth and breadth, willing to advocate in any way for Ukraine. It was a very emotional evening.” Beyond just behaving well, respectful of and acknowledging their political differences, Freeland and Kenney bonded. Through the entirety of Poroshenko’s speech, Freeland, translating, never took her mouth away from Kenney’s ear. Boychuk: “It was sweet.”

I ask Anne McLellan, the ninth deputy prime minister of Canada, 2003–2006 (Freeland is the tenth—Harper didn’t appoint a deputy), and formerly my MP for Edmonton-Centre, if she thought the “political culture” had changed for women MPs since she was in office 1993 to 2006. Given that more women are in positions of power and influence and Justin Trudeau (b. 1971) and Chrystia Freeland (b. 1968) are of a generation brought up “in a time and place where you assume equality and inclusion,” then, yes. “You’d hear stories from women who were in office in 1984, 1988, when female washrooms were an issue and sexist comments weren’t always called out. But in 1993 my female cabinet colleagues and I were focused on doing our jobs.”

During her time in politics McLellan had “strong support” from the Ukrainian–Canadian community, which is how she came to know Halyna, who, on her visits back to Edmonton from Ukraine, would gather with her network of women keen to hear reports of her legal activism in Kyiv. “The first time I met Chrystia,” Anne remembered, “I thought she looked just like her mother, a fierce ball of energy. That intensity is what sustained Halyna in Ukraine and now sustains Chrystia.”

“I speak only Ukrainian with my children. If they ask for anything in English, they won’t get it.” Chrystia Freeland

When McLellan and I spoke, Freeland had recently been appointed Minister of Finance and the commentariat had expressed trepidation about her fitness for the job, vacated by a businessman, Bill Morneau. At the same time, much was made of her roots on an Alberta farm, and it was this that, “as Finance Minister… proves [Freeland’s] nothing like Morneau,” Andrew Willis argued in The Globe and Mail. She had been speaking (virtually) to a business crowd at the Toronto Global Forum, and set their minds at ease: “I am from rural northern Alberta,” she said; Canadians, like farmers, “dream big and spend big and can afford to do so.”

Farmers: this resonated for McLellan, who was born and raised on a dairy farm in Nova Scotia: “There is something ingrained in you if you’re born on a farm.” She has been in Alberta since 1980, while Freeland has been away, but the two women share “Alberta perspectives.” Specifically, she says, perspectives gained from families who work on the land, “always living with risk and how to mitigate it. As kids we understood risk—animals get sick!—and we could lose it all because of factors beyond our control. This makes you risk averse.”

But, McLellan emphasizes, there is an uplifting side—neighbourliness—and it makes you respectful of other people’s anxieties and ready to help out if there’s a crop failure. By the same token, there is such a thing as society, “and government matters to the quality of life, even of existence.”

In the acknowledgements at the end of Plutocrats, Freeland includes Anne McLellan in the “Maple Leaf community [that] has been central to my thinking.” Moving among international political and financial movers and shakers, what in the end does she espouse “I sometimes describe my own political philosophy as being simply ‘Canadian.’ ”

From childhood, Chrystia Freeland shared a goal of economic equality and security with the various communities she grew up among. By her own account, that shared goal was already taking shape in “consciousness-raising meetings convened in a kitchen in Peace River.” 

Myrna Kostash writes literary and creative non-fiction and is the author of All of Baba’s Children. She lives in Edmonton.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Not a White-Bread Childhood appeared first on Alberta Views.

Profile

Born: Calgary
Education: BA in economics and political science; MBA; U of C
Prior to politics: VP of business development for Fracture Modeling Inc.
First elected: 2019/4/16
Riding: Calgary-North East
Sworn in as Minister: 2019/4/30
Responsibilities: Income, employment, disability supports; family violence prevention; other community supports
Contact: css.minister@gov.ab.ca
Deputy Minister: shannon.marchand@gov.ab.ca

Interview
Interviewed by Evan Osenton

AV: Did you grow up in a politically engaged household?

Sawhney: I actually didn’t. My parents immigrated to Canada in the late 1960s, and our household was very much trying to make ends meet. My dad is well educated, so we watched the news every night and knew what was going on. But in terms of actual engagement, there was very little.

AV: So when did you personally get interested or involved in politics?

Sawhney: Through my extended family. My cousin is George Chahal; he’s the councillor for [Calgary’s] Ward 5 and I worked on his very first campaign. [I did] a lot of door knocking with him and his family in 2007, the first time he ran. He lost by 33 votes. I helped again in 2013 and 2017. His family is more politically engaged, and I was always on the outskirts of that. But when he decided to run for councillor, we were all in—the whole family. And I found it exciting. In the last campaign I was heavily involved and became very aware of the different issues in the neighbourhoods I grew up in.

AV: When did you get interested in provincial politics?

Sawhney: I have a background in energy; I’ve been in oil and gas for 23-plus years. I was working for the Alberta Energy Regulator on methane emissions abatement regulations. I was an economist on that file. And I just wasn’t happy with government policy. I saw, with my own eyes, investment fleeing the province. A lot of major oil and gas companies exited, and I became very concerned. I have a daughter who’s a reservoir engineer. You start thinking “What kind of opportunities are going to be available for graduates or even for somebody like me?” And that’s when I thought: I’ve been in this space for a long time. I have a very articulate voice. I need to advocate for the energy industry.

AV: Public trust in politicians is low, often ranking below scientists, corporations, NGOs, the media. How much trust do you place in politicians?

Sawhney: I personally have never felt distrust of politicians. It’s a difficult job. There are many factors at play. You can’t predict what will happen with commodity prices. Some things that happened in Alberta with respect to oil and gas, nobody can do anything about them. But the UCP did a lot of public engagement. I did a ton of doorknocking. Our platform commitments are very specific, and we’re going to deliver on them. Hopefully that’ll go a long way in restoring some of that lost trust.

AV: You wrote on your campaign website that “as a working mother of four… I understand the challenges women face balancing responsibilities at home and in the workplace.” Does the government have a responsibility to help women face these challenges?

Sawhney: All employers—government, private sector, non-profit—have a responsibility to be cognizant of the needs of not just women but all parents. We have an evolving society, with lots of things at play, and they should create policies to help parents manage things a bit better.

AV: What’s something government could do or make the private sector do differently—a law they could change?

Sawhney: Let me tell you about a conversation with the premier. After the election he asked me, “How do you feel about work/life balance I didn’t know you have young children. To make things easier, you can work out of McDougall [Centre], because there’s a lot of travelling back and forth.” That conversation meant a lot. I’ve never had that conversation with an employer before, save one. So I think it set the tone in terms of a recognition that parents have a whole other life that’s equally, if not more, important.

AV: What about the gender pay gap Should the government do anything to address this?

Sawhney: I don’t think so. Awareness is important, but I don’t think the government’s role is to enforce wage parity, because that’s very difficult. I think it’s a problem. Employers need to get on board. And I don’t know what the proper mechanisms are to install. But I don’t think it’s government regulations.

AV: Do our political institutions need to change to attract more women to run for office?

Sawhney: I think attitudes moreso need to change. The UCP did a tremendous job in engaging women and encouraging them and opening doors. Just making it easier for women to be involved. Any position has to be based on merit, but we also need to remove barriers that prevent women and other minorities from making their way through certain doors.

AV: What barriers to women entering politics do you want to remove?

Sawhney: I know this isn’t true in all cases, but I was so involved in my job and my family and raising my children. You just don’t know what you don’t know. I didn’t know about the social media aspects of campaigning, and I wasn’t as networked as maybe a lot of my male counterparts were. So systemic situational barriers exist, and sometimes you just need a bit more resources to catch up. Like, how to do fundraising, how to meet people who can help with your campaign.

AV: The UCP platform says “The get ’er done spirit of Albertans means we don’t sit around waiting for government to solve a social problem. One of the first principles of conservatism is that civil society should come before government and that voluntary groups are generally more effective in preventing and reducing social problems than a big bureaucratic state.” What problems do you think charities and volunteers are more effective at addressing and which are better handled by government?

Sawhney: It’s a bit of a difficult question because I’m just so new to the portfolio. If I’m just going from intuition, and based on my own volunteer experience, I’d say frontline support workers in women’s shelters and sexual assault centres know the issues, the clientele, know what they need. Also, persons with developmental disability organizations. Having first-hand knowledge of vulnerable segments of society [makes] organizations better equipped to design programs and ensure clients’ needs are met. Government has a very, very significant role in ensuring we provide funding to these kinds of organizations so that basic services are in place. [As for when] government is better suited, AISH is legislatively mandated. It’s government’s responsibility to ensure those people have basic income to meet their needs.

AV: The 2012 report “Poverty Costs” argued that investing in poverty prevention costs less than spending to alleviate the consequences of poverty. What do you think of that idea?

Sawhney: Poverty is such a complex, multifaceted issue. There are many different elements; people are born in poverty and that cycle perpetuates. But the real-life stories I encountered… people who want to work, are able to work, but are unable to find opportunities and are down to their last 10 bucks. All you want is to be able to pay your mortgage, your rent, put food on the table. So preventing and reducing poverty—you know, investing in programs that get people to work, removing barriers that prevent them from working, creating opportunities, particularly for the disabled community, the sooner we’ll move toward the goal of reducing poverty in our society.

AV: In February, StatsCan showed that Alberta’s child poverty rate was cut in half between 2015 and 2017, from 10 per cent to 5 per cent, which is the lowest rate in Canada and means 44,000 fewer children are living in poverty. What do you attribute that to?

Sawhney: I haven’t read the report. But I’m very pleased to [hear] those numbers. Obviously, we all want to go in the same direction and we all want to alleviate poverty. I’d have to look at the report and the assumptions and the statistics and how—I don’t even know how child poverty is really defined. Maybe we need to do more. But my immediate response is bravo. That’s wonderful.

AV: In January, Alberta increased AISH and income support and indexed those to inflation. What do you think of those moves?

Sawhney: I think it’s fair. It’s compassionate. I think it’s sensible. Inflation has made life much more expensive for all Albertans, all Canadians. I’m fully supportive.

AV: Some critics of income support say eligibility is too lax—that it’s too easy to go on welfare. Others say it’s so strict you have to be destitute before you qualify. What do you think?

Sawhney: I’m still learning the benchmarks for eligibility, so I won’t comment. But, again, government’s role is to make sure we take care of Albertans. And, like I was saying, if somebody has 10 bucks in their bank account and they don’t know where their next meal will come from… We need to help out when we can. We’re a compassionate, giving society; we take care of each other; civil society has a big role to play and government has a role. We need to develop partnerships to ensure everybody has a life of dignity and has equality of opportunity.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Rajan Sawhney appeared first on Alberta Views.

Del Graff, Child and Youth Advocate

Del Graff was appointed as Alberta’s sixth Child and Youth Advocate in 2011. Created in 1989 to report to the Minister of Human Services, the Office of the Child and Youth Advocate (OCYA) became an independent office of the Legislative Assembly in 2012. The OCYA, with some 60 staff, advocates for young people in the child intervention and youth justice systems. Among other duties it investigates the serious injury or death of children in foster care. From 2012 to 2017 the OCYA investigated 216 deaths of children and youth that were in or had recent involvement with Alberta’s child intervention system. Twenty-five of the 35 youth who died by suicide in that time were Indigenous. For more information on getting help for vulnerable children and youth in care, including access to legal representation, see ocya.alberta.ca.

AV: You were appointed Alberta’s Child and Youth Advocate in 2011 and the next year the office became independent. What’s the importance of independence for your work?

Independence provides us with an opportunity to serve young people without the approval or interference of the government of the day. It allows us to speak publicly about issues that are important for children and youth. It enables us to have a different level of credibility—when the public hear from us they recognize that we’re not speaking on behalf of government, we’re speaking on behalf of young people, which is what our legislation intends that we do.

AV: Your mandate expanded on April 1, 2018. What is your mandate now

Since we first became independent there have been a series of expansions regarding our mandate. One of the key ones—which started in 2012 but has evolved since then—is a responsibility for providing reviews of the children who pass away while they’re in government care or while they’re in the custody of youth offender centres. In 2014 an expansion to a broader population included young people who had died within two years of being involved with the child intervention system. And then in April 2018 the big change, with respect to those investigative reviews, was we became responsible for doing reviews of all children who die while they were involved with government care. So that means that we have to look beyond systemic issues into other issues as well and do mandatory reviews of every child who’s in care when they die.

AV: Are there main themes that you’ve identified in those reviews?

One of the themes we identified is there are these young people who have tragic outcomes in their lives, who are in circumstances where they are in the midst of transitions—leaving government care and returning to their home, or between placements in government care, or leaving government care and moving on to independence. Those transitions are times of higher stress and higher concern in terms of the safety of young people.

AV: In a 2016 report, “Voices for Change,” you noted an “over-representation of Indigenous children and youth in our child intervention system.” Can you elaborate on that

Indigenous young people make up less than 10 per cent of the Alberta population of young people and yet they account for 70 per cent of the kids in care. That’s a huge over-representation. We recognize there’s a history in this country of adverse impacts from government intervention for Indigenous children and their families, communities and nations. The colonization of Indigenous people for 150 years, the residential schools and the way children were treated over generations—children who went to residential school didn’t have the model of parents and grandparents to help them to understand what parenting was all about. And then they’re out of residential school, they become parents themselves, and they repeat a cycle that has just been devastating for Indigenous people. And the complexities of that, of poverty and neglect for indigenous communities, all contribute to an over-representation [which] in Alberta is among the highest in the country.

AV: In 2016 you drew attention to the Indigenous youth suicide crisis and called for a province-wide suicide prevention strategy. Has there been action on that

You’d want to talk to the government of Alberta about that, particularly the minister of Children’s Services, but as I understand it there has been work done… Alberta is one of only a few provinces that doesn’t have a strategy; it’s quite troubling—at one point Alberta was one of the leaders in the world with respect to suicide prevention programming, and over the years that has deteriorated so there isn’t even a provincial strategy in place that’s functioning. To clarify: What we [the OCYA] do when we make recommendations is provide the government with a six-month window to start to take action and then say “What have you done?” And they provide us with updates. We put those onto our website… Our recommendations aren’t binding, and for legislative offices, mine in particular, that can be a challenge when we want to have fast action to serve the young people in this province.

AV: But you do identify gaps. In the investigation into the youth you called “Jimmy,” who died by suicide, you said “there are no provincial child intervention policies that recognize the vulnerabilities of at risk adolescence.” That’s a big gap.

There are big gaps in the system and part of our role is to advise government on those gaps, where they are and what we think needs to be addressed… How they address them is [government’s responsibility]. What we do is we hear through our investigations, our discussions with young people, and our individual advocacy—where we serve somewhere around 2,500 young people a year—about what needs to change… We hear from young people every day about the struggles they face. Sometimes those struggles are about not having their voice heard, not being included in planning, unplanned moves happening to them without their input. There are all kinds of different areas of struggle that we hear on a day-to-day basis from individual young people.

AV: In 2017 your office wrote a special report on LGBTQ2S+ youth. Why did you write it and what did you find

We were hearing, through young people that we saw through individual advocacy but also through their allies, [about] issues related to young people who are sexually and gender diverse not having their needs met through the child intervention system or through youth justice. We found that significant challenges faced this population with respect to identity and to having reasonable places to live that were safe. Not just physically safe but emotionally, mentally and spiritually safe—they lack access to service in a significant way. We saw consistent themes regardless of who we spoke to and that resulted in a report. Since we released that report we’ve been going to communities [where] we bring decision-makers and community agencies that support sexually and gender-diverse young people, and those young people themselves, to tables to say: “Have a dialogue about this. We want to know what your thoughts are. We want you to be able to influence those decision-makers directly and for them to hear the stories of what it’s like to not feel safe and what the implications are when you’re treated in a way that is not reflective of who you are.” That makes decision-makers more aware than I could ever accomplish.

AV: You’ve investigated many tragic stories. But you also praise the work of child intervention workers, “which the public never hears about.” What should the public hear about

It is one of the challenges with respect to child welfare social work—how do you make it so people understand that the tragedies we are able to bring to the public’s attention through media are by far the exception Every day in this province thousands of children are being effectively served by the child welfare system without those kinds of incidents happening… There are people who strive to keep children connected to their families and their communities and we need to acknowledge that as well as acknowledge the tragedies otherwise we don’t have a sense of balance.

AV: Is there anything you’d like the public to pay more attention to

I want the public to recognize that the systems in place to serve vulnerable people are accountable to the public. The welfare of our children is everybody’s issue and I want people to recognize that the rights of children in this province are paramount. I hope the public takes an interest in vulnerable children more so than is the case today. Our public awareness outreach is an attempt to do that, to make it so the public has a greater interest in what happens for vulnerable young people. When that happens the circumstances for those children can’t help but improve… You can think about your own history and say “Who influenced me when I was a child?” For most people it’s parents and extended family, but there are always those teachers, coaches, individuals that took an interest—who cared—that make a positive difference. For vulnerable children it’s the same. They need to have people who take an interest.

Interviewed by Tadzio Richards.

The post Del Graff appeared first on Alberta Views.

Fred Wrona, Chief Scientist

Fred Wrona was appointed Chief Scientist and Assistant Deputy Minister at Alberta Environment and Parks in April 2016. His role is to provide scientific oversight of the province’s environmental monitoring and reporting systems, and to communicate scientific information to Albertans and the minister. Monitoring was previously carried out by an arms-length agency—Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Agency (AEMERA), established by the PC government in 2014—where Wrona was also lead scientist. Born and raised in Calgary, he got his Ph.D. in aquatic ecology from the University of Calgary. He has taught at several universities, including U of C, and was for many years a senior adviser with Environment Canada, working on issues such as climate change and oil sands monitoring.

AV: What does a chief scientist do?

On behalf of the government I’m a champion of science, of research and the role of evidence in informing the decision-making processes of government. I provide scientific advice to address very complex issues, either myself, or I will tap into the best available expertise in this province, or if need be nationally or internationally. The government only has a certain capacity to do this kind of work—a lot resides in our academic institutions; some of it resides in the private sector—so my role is to help build scientific credibility and excellence through networking and collaborating with the right organizations and institutions.

I actually wear two hats. I’m the chief scientist, but I’m also the assistant deputy minister of the monitoring system that has moved back into government again. So I have a cadre of scientists in research and science and monitoring divisions that report to me, doing the actual boots in the field analyses and monitoring, working in collaboration with other monitoring agencies and groups in Alberta or the federal government. Under the legislation, I have a public reporting schedule—on the state of the environment, state of watersheds, airsheds. We’re responsible for producing those data and having those indices reported to Albertans. I’m also to ensure that this information meets rigorous ethical and scientific standards. I’m looking at developing codes of ethics and conduct like other professional associations’. And then the other very important thing that attracted me to this position is I have two independent advisory panels that by legislation report to me and the minister. The first panel consists of conventional, Western-trained scientists. I use their knowledge and experience to help strategically advise us about: Are we on track Are we off track Equal with that we have an Indigenous wisdom advisory panel. So this is the braiding and weaving of Indigenous knowledge systems with Western science to inform what we know about impacts, about potential directions for improvement using Indigenous and local indicators in addition to Western or conventional science indicators to better inform what we’re doing on the landscape and with Indigenous communities.

AV: You’ve said it’s important to make data public. Can you discuss that

A key element of what I’m doing is having peer-reviewed literature backing what we do. It’s another form of building credibility in the science community. One of the main things I’m working very hard on is a commitment to making the data public, open and authoritative so that it’s not disputed. If you go back to why AEMERA was set up [officially established in 2014], the monitoring, evaluation and reporting systems we had here were insufficient and not necessarily credible; they weren’t open, weren’t transparent. I’m bringing those standards and quality assurances to the table to say this is how we have to change our systems.

AV: What’s happening with monitoring in the oil sands region?

A new memorandum of understanding was federally–provincially signed by the two ministers in December [2017] to renew the oil sands monitoring program. They made a commitment to formally engage Indigenous and Metis communities in the design and implementation—so, building capacity in those communities to help do the monitoring and be at the table for the results. Industry will be there. The Alberta Energy Regulator will be there. That program is, really, testing and assessing: Do the current regulatory frameworks protect the ambient environment in that region from cumulative effects of oil sands development If not, or we have hot spots we need to deal with, the monitoring system must have sufficient adaptability and quickness to provide that data, and we have to react to it. What we’re trying to do is improve that system. It’s not there yet.

AV: What do you need to get there?

Well, in that area it’s not only federal and provincial government scientists doing the monitoring, we’ve got academics involved and the regional monitoring associations. We’re trying to get the Indigenous communities more directly involved in that monitoring network; a variety of different players. At the moment it’s resourced through the oil sands approval processes, where industry is putting in $50-million a year to basically run the monitoring system, and we’re leveraging other work, including government investments and academic research studies. We’re using significant resources.

AV: Industry employs many scientists. Can you tap into industry expertise and still maintain public trust?

I’m glad you pointed that out—industry does a lot of monitoring. The distinction I’m making is in the oil sands they have a footprint—within a fence line. The ambient environment is outside of this fence line condition—the river systems, the forests, the air systems beyond where industry is. Industry does a significant amount of monitoring within the fence line, and that data goes to the regulator, and we’re working on getting those data also available to [feed into] what we’re trying to do here.… Industry is with us at the table. But they’re not the ones out doing the monitoring on the landscape in terms of ambient monitoring. For that we have the oil sands monitoring program. We’re developing an oversight process so that we have First Nations at the table, the regulator, governments at the table—industry are one of the groups and they do bring information, but they don’t oversee the monitoring.

AV: That’s you?

That’s through this oil sands monitoring program jointly managed between myself—in my role as chief scientist, as a program lead—and I have a federal counterpart, the deputy minister of science and technology, who is a program co-lead with me. Ultimately we report to the provincial and federal ministers. Government has the responsibility to oversee this monitoring. I play an important role as chief scientist, and the scientists in my program are part of that. I have an oversight function but we’re not the only ones delivering on it.

AV: You’ll be delivering a state-of-the-environment report for the oil sands?

We’re hoping to release a comprehensive set of reports on water quality, quantity and ecosystem health, about six to eight major reports based on the monitoring done since 2012, pulling all that together. Then we’re going to have other reports we’re commissioning—on biodiversity in the area, on air quality. A lot of technical reports have been produced already in peer-reviewed publications. The challenge we have, and the other role that I have as chief scientist, is knowledge translation to the public. That’s a major gap. I mean, I can produce a paper that six other people in the world that work in my discipline might enjoy and say is great science. What’s important is to make that relevant to dealing with the “So what?” question from the public. We’re hiring science writers to help. That’s a very high priority for me because that’s often where science fails.

AV: Your office released a report on the Castle region. It stated that limiting human activities would “improve the condition of headwater streams.” Should resource development be limited in other, similar areas?

My role is to provide credible information to inform the discourse and the dialogue about what potential impacts were or are or are projected to be in relation to potential scenarios on the landscape. You need good baseline information to compare to and you need good systems to be in place to continue to monitor. [But] as chief scientist I don’t identify the public interest. My role is to uphold the credibility of the science and to deliver information to the public. The public and stakeholders or others are always going to come up with issues they want information on. So one of the things I do look at is: Where do we have gaps in our monitoring and evaluation programs relative to other jurisdictions or emerging areas Do we have information on something that’s going to, from a government and a public point of view, bite us because we haven’t been paying attention I want us to be proactive, ahead of the game. You don’t want to be crossing a threshold or a tipping point in a system and saying “Why didn’t we do the following?” We want to inform management actions before that occurs.

Interviewed by Tadzio Richards.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Fred Wrona, Chief Scientist appeared first on Alberta Views.