Fixing Foster Care
Kohkom Kathy smudges before she begins to talk. She asks for grandmothers-past to allow her to speak without anger. But what comes out is a hard laugh that ends on a high note. It’s Kathy’s [...]
By Shari Narine
Childcare
Childcare
It Takes A Village
During the Second World War the Ernest Manning government refused to invest in wartime day nurseries for Calgary and Edmonton—despite the fact that so many Alberta women with young children had [...]
By Tom Langford
The Daycare Debates
“Everybody thinks children can be hung on a hook from 0 to 5 and then go into schools,” says Anita Cooper, Lethbridge Community College early childhood development coordinator, venting [...]
Crisis in Alberta Daycare
As usual, some families hoping to put their children in daycare with the Red Deer Child Care Society ended up on a waiting list last fall. But for the first time ever, their disappointment was [...]
MOST READ
MOST READ
The Plans to Strip-Mine Coal in the Mountains
It looks like spectacular wild country, but some see it more as a big money sandwich.
The top layer of that sandwich is comprised of alpine grasses, forget-me-nots and stonecrop, glacier lilies and ancient, brave pines whose branches have been gnarled and weathered by centuries of wind. In summer, solitaires and ...
Herd Memory
On a cold day in February, I flew over the tightly knit stands of black spruce and jack pine in northwestern Alberta, straining my eyes below, eager to catch sight of a woodland caribou. My dad, a wildlife biologist, called them the “grey ghosts” of the boreal. Woodland caribou have ...
The Big Man in Cargo Shorts
Leonard was the first to find him. The man was face down in the school’s outdoor learning space, next to a planter of basil. He was fat, his calves the size of a turkey dinner, his hair a gnarled mess of seaweed. Leonard wondered if the man was dead and ...