Essay

“Hello, 911. What is your emergency?” “I’m at the St. Albert Inn and I think someone has poisoned me.” “We’ll send someone right away.” I hadn’t been poisoned. I had just spent the night in [...]

Dawn is breaking January 1, 2020, when I receive a phone call. The paramedic on the other end informs me that my brother, Olivier, has fallen and can’t get up. Administrators of the lodge where [...]

In August 2019 the government of Alberta invited me to join the 16-person board of governors at the Banff Centre for an initial three-year term. I had applied through normal channels, was vetted, [...]

In 1950s rural Alberta, streams, lakes, forests and meadows teemed with biodiversity. It was paradise for kids. Spring, summer and fall; barefoot, grubby and largely unsupervised, we caught frogs [...]

Toronto freelance portrait photographer Markian Lozowchuk (disclosure: his mother and I are second cousins) has photographed Justin Trudeau for Toronto Life and Margaret Atwood for Maclean’s, but [...]

I was in Spain when the world went sideways. I was visiting one of the world’s oldest universities, founded in 1218, the University of Salamanca. It sits atop a hillside on the river Tormes, [...]

I knew about ranching back in the 1980s. Ranchers were the bad guys who killed off bears and whose cattle trashed their habitat. Like most environmentalists of the day, I got my insights from [...]

Charlie Russell loved to fly, and he seldom phoned first those times when he would fly his Kolb ultralight airplane north from Hawk’s Nest ranch on the boundary of Waterton Lakes National Park, [...]

The black and white photograph, such as those taken with a Brownie box camera, shows a man, perhaps 40 years old, with the sun- and wind-burned face of a farmer, a thick hank of dark hair falling [...]

I found him asleep at Wendy’s on a scuzzy patch of 17th Avenue, his forehead resting on the makeshift pillow he’d created from one arm. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew it was my brother: the [...]