Deep in the Furrows
I’ve gone around and around fields for a week cutting winter rye and winter wheat. Divining my thoughts are earth’s invisible coils about my head. From “Swather As Threshold” in Afternoon [...]
Labour
Labour
Beyond Bill 6
A thousand angry Albertans gathered on the steps of the Legislature in late 2015. They weren’t the usual protesters—longhaired peace activists or radicals of any kind. They were solid, salt of [...]
The Year of Bargaining Diplomatically
Last year the government of Alberta faced a mountain of public-sector contract negotiations. A whole mountain range, actually. Collective agreements covering roughly 180,000 employees expired: [...]
Meet the Minister: Christina Gray
AV: Far more Albertans are workers than employers, but our culture really celebrates “the entrepreneur”—the job creator, the employer. What do you think about this? Well, we need both. A [...]
By Evan Osenton
Essential Workers’ Right to Strike
Marni Soupcoff says workers have no right to strike. It’s true. I don’t think essential workers should have the right to strike. But before I go any further with my case for why, you [...]
The Gig Economy
When Edmonton rock radio station The Bear planned to broadcast an all-night Halloween contest from a graveyard, they wanted 22-year-old student Andy Ferguson to work the shift. Ferguson had [...]
By Andrew Cash
Not Your Father’s Union
When Maria Lemus arrived in Canada from El Salvador in 1987, becoming a vocal union supporter was the farthest thing from her mind. She had just narrowly escaped being kidnapped in a place of [...]
By Jason Foster
The War on Workers
On Friday, April 26, 2013, corrections officers at the Edmonton Remand Centre began a wildcat strike. The root cause of the illegal strike, they say, was government inaction on safety concerns [...]
Alberta’s Most Unsafe Workplace
On June 18, 2006, Kevan Chandler entered a grain silo on the Tongue Creek Feeders lot, near High River. Grain had encrusted the sidewall of silo number seven—a building 90 feet high and 30 feet [...]
Welcome to Alberta
When Gonzalo Camacho left behind his wife and young daughter in Colombia to come work in Brooks, in February of 2008, the weather wasn’t his only shock. “I was a married man and suddenly I was [...]
MOST READ
MOST READ
Part 2: A Tribute to Charlie Russell
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 urban-based environmental groups. In Alberta’s ranch country the story seemed almost always to be about conflict ...
Part 1: A Tribute to Charlie Russell
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, to our “ranchette” near the Crowsnest Pass. We would hear the thrum of the plane’s Rotax motor ...
AURA OF POWER: An Alberta Election Game
To download a printable version of the game rules click here.
OBJECT OF THE GAME
The goal is to win a majority of Alberta’s 87 seats (i.e., at least 44) and, with them, raw, unchecked power for four long years.
In a minority situation, a party leader can win the election if they successfully ...