Acquah, who bought a 2024 Tesla Model Y, shares a frustration many owners of electric vehicles (EVs) in Alberta feel: they live in one of only two provinces in the country—the other is Saskatchewan—in which you’re taxed for simply owning a zero-emissions vehicle.

It’s not so much the existence of the tax that annoys Acquah and other EV owners. Instead, they say it’s a symptom of a larger anti-electric-car attitude in Alberta’s UCP government, which is actively stifling local EV adoption. The effort is marked by heated rhetoric by conservatives who see the vehicles as part of a Liberal anti-oil conspiracy. Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, for example, once claimed an EV sales mandate would be akin to “banning the rural way of life.” Danielle Smith called federal EV adoption targets “environmental extremism.”

But if the UCP is hostile to EVs, they’re swimming against a global tide. One in four new cars sold around the world in 2025 were electric. Some 20 million EVs were sold globally that year. In China fully half of new cars are EVs. Alberta lags far behind not only that rate but even other Canadian provinces. BC has 195,000 registered EVs on the road, for example, nearly 10 times Alberta’s meagre total of 20,000.

EVs remain polarizing in Alberta, says Andrew Batiuk, president of the Electric Vehicle Association of Alberta (EVAA), where they pit environmentalists and tech fans against supporters of oil and gas who perceive a threat to the province’s economy. As the naysayers see it, the more EVs there are, the less fossil fuel that gets burned. And that’s a sore spot for Albertans who rely on oil and gas for their livelihoods. That’s partly why the province aggressively opposed the Electric Vehicle Availability Standard—the so-called EV sales mandate—that Justin Trudeau’s government introduced in December 2023 to reduce air pollution and fight climate change. Prime Minister Mark Carney has since cancelled the mandate.

Opponents aren’t wrong that the cars reduce the world’s demand for oil. It’s estimated that EVs already displace somewhere between 1.3 and 1.8 million barrels per day of oil consumption. That’s a fraction of the over 100 million barrels of oil currently being burned daily. Nonetheless, the trend has been noticed in the oil industry, which provides 144,000 jobs in Alberta. It also threatens a government that relies on that industry. Alberta is projecting $13.2-billion in non-renewable resource revenues in 2026/2027, 18 per cent of its total revenue.

All of this biases our government against EVs. Premier Smith has even gone so far as to aggressively promote the production of so-called blue hydrogen from natural gas for use in hydrogen-powered vehicles. Across the world, sales of these rivals to EVs are faltering. The cars are virtually absent from Alberta. The province’s only public hydrogen refuelling station, at Blackjacks Roadhouse in Nisku, which Smith’s government helped fund, closed down permanently in early 2025.

The economic impact of oil and gas gives the industry an outsized influence on provincial policy. Charges Daniel Breton, president of Electric Mobility Canada: “I see the premier of Alberta more or less as a puppet of the oil and gas industry, and her government as well.”

But for all of this hostility, EVs may yet prevail—even in Alberta.

Anti-EV campaigners often draw on outdated anecdotes and at times deliberate misinformation. One favourite claim is that EVs—with their multiple battery packs—are worse for the environment than gas-powered vehicles. Initially, an EV does indeed have a higher carbon footprint, Batiuk says. Making the batteries is energy intensive and requires rare-earth minerals. But the gap with gas-powered vehicles evens out within one to two years of ownership, depending on distance driven. After that, the carbon footprint of an EV becomes substantially smaller, especially since Alberta has converted its electricity generation from primarily coal-fired plants to natural gas, solar and wind.

The EVs-are-worse argument has been debunked by no less than the Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose website announces: “FACT: Electric vehicles typically have a smaller carbon footprint than gasoline cars, even when accounting for the electricity used for charging, plus they are far more efficient when it comes to energy use.”

Other biases are almost comical. Angie Dean, president of the Tesla Owners Club of Alberta, says someone once asked her if it was OK to wash her electric car.

Ironically, the people who make and sell EVs don’t always help. “Misinformation is a huge problem, even when it comes to car manufacturers,” says Electric Mobility’s Breton. He argues some manufacturers are “spreading crap” about EVs—even their own models—because they don’t particularly want to build the vehicles, or are frustrated by “unrealistic” government EV sales mandates. The “green halo” effect of having an EV in, say, Ford’s lineup might be good for the company’s marketing image. But EVs are costlier to make, and many, such as the F-150 Lightning, are sold at a loss. (Ford recently announced it is ending production of the truck.)

Anti-EV campaigners often draw on outdated anecdotes and deliberate misinformation.

Dealers sometimes discourage buyers from choosing EVs. Doug Green, dealer principal of High Country Chevrolet Buick GMC in High River, says he invested $250,000 in equipment upgrades at the dealership to service EVs at the urging of GM, but he has sold only three of the vehicles, at a net loss of $10,000. “I was so happy to be rid of those,” he says. He also paid $6,000 to ship three additional unsold EVs to dealers in Quebec. Green says one customer in town bought a Blazer EV, only to discover she’d have to shell out $3,000 to install curbside charging from her duplex, which doesn’t have a garage. “She was unprepared,” Green said. Meanwhile, he says, the only public EV-charging station in town was out of commission. Chargers have since been added at the Ford and Chrysler dealerships.

Angie Dean wasn’t surprised to hear of the GMC dealer’s attitude. “I’ve heard so many stories from people who have gone into car dealerships and been excited about an electric car and [are told], ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me show you this gas car here.’”

And then there’s the myth that EVs don’t work in cold weather. Green claims an electric SUV with a rated 500-km range is really only capable of travelling 300 km, because you shouldn’t fully charge the battery. And, he contends, it will suffer dramatic power losses in the cold. “If you drive in the wintertime, and you put winter tires on, then it’s going to go in half,” he says. “If it’s cold out, then it’s going to go in half again, and if there’s snow then it’s going to go in half again.”

Dean scoffs at Green’s doomerism. She said her Tesla Model Y might lose 40 per cent of its range when the temperature hits minus 40, but that’s “extremely uncommon.” In Calgary’s more typical winter temperatures, she says she sees an estimated 15–20 per cent loss of range. Yet some people just don’t believe her. She recalls an incident in February 2025 when she parked at a local Home Depot. “This guy walks up to me and says, ‘You know those things don’t work here in the winter.’ And I was, like, I’m right here! Do you think I just pushed the car here?”

Dean’s experience reflects research by Recurrent, a US-based organization that tracks EV performance. The study, conducted during the winter of 2025–26, analyzed data from more than 30,000 vehicles across 34 models from 13 automakers. Although performance varied by make, the study found that EVs maintain on average around 80 per cent of their rated range in freezing conditions.

Meanwhile an underreported fact is that gas-powered cars are likewise less efficient in colder weather. The EPA estimates that a drop in temperature from 24°C to 7°C can increase gas consumption by 12–28 per cent. And EVs actually start more reliably than gas cars do in the winter, because they aren’t affected by cold-sensitive oil and have no sparkplugs, which are especially susceptible to low temperatures.

Even when people appeal to facts to disparage EVs, their assertions are often only half true. The UCP government claims, for example, that electric vehicles do more damage to roads than gas-powered cars do, because they’re heavier. An EV does tend to weigh more than its internal combustion engine equivalent—perhaps 10–15 per cent more. But as Breton notes, EVs are lighter than the giant pickup trucks so common in Alberta, and the province isn’t levying a special tax on pickups. “Alberta and Saskatchewan are both taxing EVs under some dubious excuse,” Breton says. “It has a lot more to do with politics than facts.”

Horner, the Alberta finance minister, also justified the $200 tax when he introduced it in February 2025 as a way to offset revenue lost by drivers who don’t buy gasoline or diesel, which is taxed by the province. But Breton questions why the flat rate is disproportionately high. Albertans, on average, drive 15,200 km per year, consuming 1,216 litres of fuel in a typical mid-sized vehicle. Under the province’s current fuel tax of 13 cents per litre, that would translate into $158 in road taxes—21 per cent less than what EV owners must fork over. Says the EVAA’s Andrew Batiuk: “It seems punitive.”

In an emailed statement, Horner claims the tax is “fair” and states: “Alberta’s tax on electric vehicles is in line with what drivers of a typical internal combustion engine vehicle pay in fuel tax annually.” EV proponents find such stonewalling typical. Batiuk says his organization just can’t get the ear of government: “We don’t have much of a relationship with them.”

And if Alberta’s government were truly interested in a full accounting of the costs and benefits of EVs vs. traditional vehicles, it would consider other facts. Pollution from gas- and diesel-fuelled cars and trucks is killing people. A March 2022 federal report analyzed data from 2015 and found that 1,200 Canadians, including 82 Albertans, died prematurely that year from the effects of pollution from cars and trucks. Another 2.7 million people suffered from acute respiratory symptoms. Breton argues considerations such as marginally higher EV weight need to be weighed against the $9.5-billion annual health cost to Canadians from gas-powered vehicle pollution.

Horner’s statement dismissed pollution and health concerns. “Alberta has some of the cleanest air in Canada and the world, and that isn’t changing,” it read. “Our transportation emissions have declined 12 per cent since 2015 and will keep falling.”

But the main barrier to EV adoption in this province isn’t special punitive taxes, uninterested EV dealers or disinformation. Alberta drivers won’t fully embrace EVs until there are enough public chargers available across the province to ease so-called “range anxiety”—the fear that one’s car battery will deplete far from home. Similarly, the extent of the local charging network affects whether or not we will attract EV-driving tourists from places like BC, says Danielle Wiess, director of transportation initiatives at the Fernie-based Community Energy Association. “EV drivers go where they can charge.”

But the UCP government is offering no help to expand Alberta’s charging network. The province had 429 EV charging stations in December 2025. That’s just 6 per cent of the 7,000 chargers found in BC, which has 5.7 million residents versus Alberta’s five million.

In 2020 the Community Energy Association managed the Peaks to Prairies charging network, which connected communities from Canmore to Medicine Hat and south to the US border. Working with local municipalities, ATCO installed 20 direct-current fast-charging sites across southern Alberta. The $1.2-million contribution from the then-NDP government was the last time Alberta has funded any EV charging infrastructure, says Wiess.

Charging one’s EV at home also remains a vexing problem for Alberta’s renters and condo dwellers. Provincial building codes don’t require EV charging capacity to be added to new multi-unit residential buildings—condos and high-rise apartments. “We’re still building condos and apartments without charging infrastructure considered,” says the EVAA’s Batiuk. “At [a single-family] home, you can plug in an EV. But when you live in a condo or apartment, you don’t have the option to charge at home. Selling that person an EV is a more difficult task.”

The situation is even more challenging in rural areas that lack the fast EV chargers found in the Peaks to Prairies network. “If I have a boat to pull to a lake, and I pull it to Little Bow Provincial Park, there’s no chargers down there,” says Green, the GMC dealer.

Under a joint federal/municipal program, incentives cover up to nearly half the cost of installing chargers at businesses, condos, Indigenous communities, public facilities and not-for-profit organizations. But remote communities that install such infrastructure can encounter sticker shock just to keep their chargers operating. In December 2025 a City of Cold Lake committee reported that it would need to quadruple the rate the city offers at its city-owned EV charger. Wiess says Level 3 (also known as DC fast) chargers incur high demand costs if they’re used infrequently.

Alberta is also at odds with provinces that have created incentives to purchase EVs. BC offered rebates of $4,000 to buyers of electric vehicles but scrapped the program in May 2025 under budget pressure. Before the program ended, zero-emission vehicles accounted for almost one in four new vehicles sold in BC. In 2025 BC registered almost as many EVs in just its fourth quarter as Alberta’s overall number of EVs. (Alberta and Newfoundland are the only provinces that don’t provide Statistics Canada with data on new EV registrations. They only report total registered EVs.) Quebec, with a population of nine million, has even bigger incentives than BC did, and registered 82,700 EVs in 2025.

The feds announced in January they will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into Canada. Previously tariffs made these prohibitive.

The ingrained resistance to EVs in Alberta manifests in some of the most unlikely places. Batiuk discovered that the owners of Ol’ MacDonald’s Resort and Campground, on Buffalo Lake about an hour northeast of Red Deer, imposed a $60/night EV surcharge in 2024. A notice on the resort’s website stated its “electricity etiquette” rule is “a small price to pay to ensure the fair and sustainable use of these shared resources.” (The Alberta Motor Association reports that the typical cost to charge an EV in Alberta ranges from free—at roughly half of Calgary’s public charging stations—to $15 at fast-charging sites such as those in the Peaks to Prairies network.)

Messages left at the resort for listed owner Jean MacDonald were not returned. “We [also] tried to talk to them,” says Batiuk, “and they weren’t interested in talking to us.”

But EV advocates such as Batiuk, Dean and Breton believe EVs will eventually prevail—including in Alberta. The federal government recently committed $1.5-billion to expand Canada’s public EV charging network, so essential to driving the vehicles any distance, especially rurally. Mark Carney’s government also announced in January 2026 that it will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into the country at a nominal 6.1 per cent tariff rate. Previously a 100 per cent tariff had made the cost of these cars prohibitive. Even premier Smith had called for Carney to drop the tariff and let Chinese EVs in—if only because she hoped it would enable Albertans to sell more canola and pork in China.

Major Chinese manufacturers such as Chery and Geely are preparing to enter the Canadian market. BYD, which in 2025 surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest EV maker, plans to open 20 dealerships in Canada, first in Toronto, then in Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary.

Those Chinese EVs may comprise just a fraction of the 1.8 million vehicles sold in Canada each year. But more significantly, federal EV incentives are being restored. Sales of EVs across Canada dropped by nearly one-third last year as provincial and federal incentives ended. In February of this year Carney introduced a new, $2.3-billion, five-year program that offers individuals or businesses up to $5,000 to purchase various types of EVs. At the time, the prime minister predicted EVs will reach 75 per cent market share in Canada by 2035 and 90 per cent by 2040.

By the time the federal incentives end in five years, Breton says, they may be unnecessary. This is a point on which EV advocate Breton and EV skeptic Green agree. “I’m not asking for special treatment,” says Breton. “Just don’t stand in the way of progress.” “I’m always interested in change,” says Green. “Just let the free market decide.”

Dean, a planner with the City of Calgary, says she sees beyond the personal benefits of driving an EV. She believes she’s helping future generations, and every effort counts. Someone once told her, “Your one electric car isn’t going to do anything,” she says. “And I replied, ‘But it’s what I can do. If I can do something, I’m going to do it.’ ”

Doug Firby has over four decades of experience in newspapers, including at the Calgary Herald. He’s now president of Troy Media.

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The students in my small program came from across the US—but also from India, the UK and the People’s Republic of China. (And in 1986 that was still a very rare thing.) There was even another Canadian—from Calgary. Stanford understood that recruiting foreign students made campus a more cosmopolitan and creative place. That, in turn, raised and maintained the university’s status both in America and around the world.

Today when I remember how thrilled I was to start my studies, I’m infuriated by the way America has politicized and weaponized the granting of student visas. For Trump it’s been a perfect three-for-one bargain. He has been able to indulge his xenophobia and prosecute his war on science and knowledge, all the while taunting and punishing universities that don’t bow down to his will and whims.

But while it’s easy to denounce Trump’s petty vindictiveness, Canadian politicians have also been playing political games with the issue of international students here. In January 2024 the Trudeau government announced plans to cut the number of international study permits by 35 per cent. The avowed reason was to reduce pressure on rental and housing prices, and to respond to the specific Ontario problem of cut-rate diploma mills that were luring foreign students with false promises. The plan apportioned student permits differently for each province, in some cases cutting the number of student visas allotted to that province by as much as 50 per cent.

Applications have plummeted. International students got the message they’re no longer welcome here.

There was certainly a problem, especially in metro Toronto, of small commercial colleges charging high fees for programs of dubious educational value. But to scapegoat foreign students for Toronto’s and Vancouver’s long-time high rents and housing prices was political pandering to populist prejudice.

Meanwhile, Alberta’s colleges and universities have spent years trying to recruit more foreign students. Those students pay higher tuition than Canadians, of course, which helps make up for cuts to provincial funding. And bringing in international scholars helps build an institution’s global reputation. Whether those students return to their homelands with new skills and credentials, or later apply to immigrate to Canada, the results are a win for Alberta and its standing on the world stage.

Almost 30,000 more foreign students registered at Alberta colleges, polytechnics and universities in 2023–2024 than did 10 years ago. SAIT in Calgary and Norquest College in Edmonton have seen the biggest increases. In 2013–2014 SAIT had 1,616 international students. Last year it had 7,743. A decade ago Norquest had just 153 international students. In 2023–2024 it had 5,383. The University of Alberta has the most international students in the province—more than 9,000 last year. But other schools, from University of Lethbridge to Keyano College, have also seen sharp rises in international enrollments.

The federal policy didn’t cap international enrollments in Alberta. We are still allowed to welcome more students. Nonetheless, many post-secondaries here have reported sharp drops in international applications—and school presidents have been quoted by the CBC as saying they believe applications plummeted because international students got the message they were no longer welcome in Canada. (Though I’m guessing homophobic and separatist rhetoric from Alberta’s government also hasn’t helped to win hearts and minds.)

Without international students and their tuition dollars, some Alberta campuses will cut staff and offer fewer courses.

I had hoped Mark Carney—an Edmonton boy who was once a foreign student at Harvard and Oxford—might change Canada’s unfriendly messaging. We could and should seize this moment to recruit top academic talent: undergrads and graduates who’ve either had their US student visas delayed or denied, or who’ve decided not to run the risks of being a foreign student in Trump’s America, subject to his mercurial mood swings. Instead, during his first prime ministerial press conference, Carney reiterated his vow to cap the total number of temporary workers and international students in Canada, to reduce their numbers from 7 per cent of the population to less than 5 per cent by the end of 2027.

What a wasted opportunity for Canada, for Alberta and for our post-secondary schools, especially our top universities. If we want to be prepared for the economic, social and security challenges ahead, we need to invest many more provincial and federal dollars in higher education, create more opportunities for Canadian students and open our doors to international students—not as an act of charity, but because they have so very much to offer us in return.

Paula Simons is an independent senator and the host of the podcast Alberta Unbound. She lives in Edmonton.

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A few days later I got a panicked phone call from a member of an environmental group I was in touch with. Was I aware that the United Conservative Party government had just opened up one of Alberta’s most beloved landscapes to coal mining I was not. It seemed newsworthy and I started writing about it. Others joined in, and you all know what happened next. Probably the greatest environmental backlash this province has ever seen eventually forced the government to back down. At least for a little while.

But let’s compare the rollout of the coal policy rescission with another major Alberta land-use move, the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan. That plan governs energy development, water use, farming and ranching, recreation, forest management and nature-based tourism over a huge part of southern Alberta. It was released in 2014 after five years of study. Thousands of Albertans made themselves heard during three rounds—three rounds!—of public consultation. The legally binding plan remains in place and is relied on for guidance by everyone from municipalities to NGOs.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the distance we’ve travelled. We once made policy using the classic conservative virtues of careful thought and consultation. We now have top-down fiats delivered from on high.

You are not about to listen to a research paper. I’m going to speak from personal memory and experience, as someone who has travelled this distance I speak of. That journey has led me to a few conclusions. What I’ve seen is that at a time of environmental crisis, when cities are literally burning and major watersheds drying, our governments are denying us the conversations we need to have. They’re drawing the blinds on our window into policy, they’re closing the shutters on our view into decision-making and they’re bricking up our doorways into understanding.

I came to the Edmonton bureau of the Canadian Press in 1994 and worked there until I retired in September 2024. I arrived back in the days of Ralph Klein. I didn’t agree with a lot of what that government did, but I will say this for Ralph: when the legislature was in session, he would show up regularly in the press gallery media theatre at 1:30 and take questions. And not just a few, for there were a lot of us back then. Ralph would stand there and field everything we threw at him. We’d shout out questions from the floor and he’d take them on. Some of those press conferences went on for over an hour. It got to be a bit of a press gallery joke—keep Ralph talking and eventually he’d say something newsworthy. Nor was Ralph the only open-access politician back then. Ministers were buttonholed daily in freewheeling scrums. Often they granted personal interviews, in person or on the phone. And after the hurly-burly of a big day, a throne speech or a budget, reporters and politicians would gather at a bar across 109th St. from the legislature for beers. Those were the days.

Compare that to a Danielle Smith presser. First, they’re rare. Smith prefers to address Albertans through social media or her radio show. Second, they’re short—in my experience, rarely more than 20 minutes or so. Many times I was still in the question queue when things wrapped up. Third, they’re highly managed. Government communications staff choose the questioners, putting control in their hands. Chosen reporters are then limited to two questions each. If a politician can’t bat aside two questions with message-track responses, they’re in the wrong job. Almost all UCP press conferences follow this pattern. So do those of many other politicians, Liberal and Conservative. They all do it that way now because it works. It keeps things under control.

If that were my only complaint, I wouldn’t be speaking with you here today. No doubt some form of order needed to be imposed on us unruly reporters, especially as more and more of us dial in rather than show up. Press conferences have always been part theatre, and are not a reporter’s most important source of information. But the noose on access has been pulled much tighter than just that.

Part of a reporter’s job is to collect as many different sides to a story as can be crammed into the copy. It was routine for me, after I’d listened to someone’s concerns or read some new research, to go to the government for its side. Back in the day, I could usually get someone on the phone who understood and could actually explain the policy in question. Sometimes I could get the minister. Even press secretaries would answer a verbal back-and-forth with on-the-record responses.

By the end of my career, explanation and response had deteriorated into “comment.” If I wanted “comment” I had to email a question or two to the requisite press sec and wait for a response. It normally came right on my deadline, generally three or four sentences of motherhood statements that a colleague of mine used to call “banana mumble chicken.” There was little chance for follow-ups or clarification. Take what you get and be grateful for it. Often, the responses didn’t even address the questions I’d raised and were simply partisan jabs—government good, opponents bad. It was often a challenge to find something actually usable for my story. Again, this is not unique to Alberta. It started with Stephen Harper in Ottawa, and they all do it now. But Alberta seems uniquely enthusiastic about emailed “comment.” For example, the head of communications at the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) once told me bluntly that the institution’s policy is that all communications are conducted through email. Nobody is allowed to talk to anyone, under any circumstances, lest they say something.

Cabinet ministers Forget about it. Over my career, I interviewed, repeatedly, every single environment minister from Ralph Klein onward. Some of them I was on pretty good terms with. The UCP have had two environment ministers—Jason Nixon and Rebecca Schulz. I once got five minutes on the phone with Nixon. Despite dozens of requests, Schulz never spoke with me. Not once.

Nor is the clampdown limited to politicians and political staff. I used to be on a first-name basis with some of the Alberta government’s top scientists, and we have had some really good ones working for us. If I needed information on say, caribou populations, or chronic wasting disease in deer, I could go straight to the expert right away. By the time I left the Canadian Press, it took elaborate, secretive machinations on the level of a spy novel to talk to actual scientists. For good reason. One researcher refused to speak to me at all about a published paper he had co-authored, for fear of repercussions from Alberta, even though he no longer worked for the government and lived in the US.

And then there’s FOIP. It’s supposed to stand for freedom of information but may have been better summed up by a Klein-era cabinet minister as “Fuck off, it’s private.” FOIP searches used to be extremely useful to me. I got all kinds of stuff—draft reports on sour gas releases written before the bureaucrats had had a chance to water them down, for example. Some of my first oil sands stories, back in the late 1990s, were based on internal environmental impact studies I’d gotten through FOIP. I understand that not everything can or should be released. But over the years, the redactions just kept getting bigger. I think peak redaction was achieved the day I got a FOIP response consisting of 300 completely blank pages. Yes, I did write a story about it.

There are still reporters doing excellent FOIP work, God love ’em, but it’s getting harder. The Globe and Mail has declared Alberta the most secretive jurisdiction in a secretive country, and recently things have gotten worse. The UCP has introduced legislation that would extend exemptions from the law to political staff, keeping more people nice and warm under a blanket of secrecy.

The flipside of ignoring troublesome questions is cherry-picking whom to listen to. This also happens. Look at the recent study on reforms to the AER, written by a pair of long-time insiders and containing no input from civil society. Look who has standing before the regulator’s hearings—unless you are literally next door to a project, you have no voice. Look at the Siksika First Nation, forced into court over broken government consultation promises. And if I may leave purely environmental concerns for a moment, consider the government’s recent report into its COVID response, headed by a former UCP nomination candidate and dismissed by medical professionals as misinformation.

Maybe you’re saying “So what. Governments are elected to govern, and that means making choices that not everyone’s going to be happy about. Majority rules, and if you don’t like it, try again in the next election.” I would suggest that’s a grade-school understanding of democracy. Governments are entitled to act on their agendas, but they are not entitled to pretend those who don’t agree don’t exist. Mature administrations try to find some compromise, to bring everyone along and to govern for everyone. It’s the difference between parliamentary democracy and an elected monarchy.

I would argue further that broad discussion among an informed public is particularly crucial in environmental issues. Decisions about the health of a river or a forest, the integrity of a landscape or the abundance of wildlife last for generations. A law on tax policy can be changed after the next election if it doesn’t work out. A law that allows the removal of a mountaintop alters Alberta forever.

As well, you may have noticed that the world is changing. Climate change will eventually force a worldwide shift away from high-carbon energy, the kind of energy our province produces. We will not have a choice in this. It will happen, for the alternative does not bear thinking about. We all know the extent to which this province depends on oil and gas. But for the first time we can see that this industry that has powered our province for so long is vulnerable. We desperately need to have honest conversations about where we’re going, how long it will take to get there and what this place will look like when we arrive. Instead, it’s an information-free zone. Instead, we get “ethical oil,” as if the jet stream or the oceans cared about our human rights laws. Instead, we get bromides about “world-class” regulatory systems, as if unreclaimed wells and tailings ponds don’t dot our landscape.

Instead, we get what happened to Alberta’s renewables industry. Some said the developments would use too much farmland, or that wind turbines are too hard to reclaim. Those objections were all pretty much refuted, some by researchers at this school [U of C]. But reality-based information didn’t matter. The decisions were made behind closed doors on the advice of nobody knows who. The most promising parts of the province are now shut off to the renewables industry, and money is fleeing elsewhere.

Finally, I would argue environmental decisions reveal important things about Albertans as a people. Choosing what to exploit and what to preserve shows what we value and who we care about. This land is our home. And like a home long lived in, how it looks reflects its residents. When we allow one more bit of caribou habitat to wink out or one more trout stream in the foothills to silt up, we lessen ourselves. And we lessen following generations. I’m going to argue that what we do to our home, our province, we do to ourselves. Surely we should all be around the table to talk about that.

Again, I’d like to emphasize that this is my experience. I’m sure other reporters see things differently. I’m not arguing with them, I’m just telling you what it’s been like for me. And this is what I’ve seen in 25 or 30 years on the environment beat in Alberta—fewer chances for public input, fewer answers from government, and a gradual restriction of public space while decision-making concentrates in fewer and fewer hands.

So where does this leave us Fortunately, with a number of bright spots. While our country’s largest newspaper chain, Postmedia, is nowhere to be seen on this issue, good environmental journalism is being done by many mainstream news organizations. And independent media that take environmental issues seriously are a rising force. I’m thinking of the National Observer, The Tyee, Hakai magazine and of course The Narwhal—which is, astonishingly, only seven years old and already inflecting the national conversation.

Another hopeful sign is what I call the democratization of data. Our governments may be increasingly close-mouthed, but in a way that matters less and less. As I speak, dozens of satellites orbit overhead monitoring a whole range of environmental benchmarks, from greenhouse gas emissions to clear-cutting. And they’re doing it in real time at a level of precision that boggles the mind. Ten years ago, data like this was precious and rare. Now, it’s a commercial product you can go out and just buy, or acquire from sources like the European Space Agency or NASA. Environmental groups have become expert at using this data to ground-truth government claims. They use geomatics with impressive accuracy and speed. I remember that during the initial controversy about Alberta’s coal policy the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society made maps of all the coal exploration leases that were much more comprehensive and useful than anything released by the government. Similarly the late, lamented Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project carefully documented the size and extent of the lingering impacts of the energy industry, a great service to us all. Scientists themselves are becoming increasingly outspoken about the consequences of our current path.

So despite government attempts to direct the environmental conversation, they are increasingly unable to. That’s good.

Still, environmental journalism is always going to be a tough row to hoe. Nobody likes the environmental reporter. In good times, you’re a buzzkill. In bad times, you’re a job-killer. You’re always kind of a scold. And it ain’t glamorous. You’re not out there with hip waders, shoulder-to-shoulder in the swamp with the intrepid field biologist. No, you’re back in the newsroom, going through court judgments and regulatory documents, because that’s where we really decide who gets to do what to whom. You’re adding up and staring at long columns of figures until a pattern emerges or your eyes cross, whichever comes first. And it takes resources to do this, the chief among them time. In a newsroom, time is the most precious commodity of all. As journalism resources shrink, there’s less of that precious commodity for everyone.

It takes a personal toll as well. There aren’t too many good-news stories on this beat and you always seem to be writing about loss. That weighs on you after awhile. It weighed on me.

But that’s the world we live in. What we make of it is up to us, reporters and members of an engaged public. And before I close, I’d like to remind you of what still can be made. I’d like to return to the event with which I started this talk—the coal policy rescission.

It didn’t take long for news of the government’s plan to spread. My colleagues and I got the information out as quickly as we could, and I have never seen anything like what happened next. It was clear Albertans felt a sacred trust had been breached and that their sense of themselves, who they were and where they lived, had been attacked. Within days, ranchers, big-city nature-lovers, small-town mayors, scientists and country music stars banded together and forced the UCP government to backtrack. We demanded, and got, a seat at the table and a forum for our voices. We demanded, and got, policy that protected what we loved and wanted for our children. It was maybe the most inspiring story I ever covered and made me realize how much, despite everything, I love this place.

Now, you may say the coal threat is back. Yes it is, and that shouldn’t be a surprise. As the writer Jane Rule tells us, politics is like housework: Just because you swept the dirt out last week doesn’t mean it doesn’t need doing again. The point is that it can be done. It can be done when the facts are on the table, and it can be done when people are heard. It can be done, and it must be done. It’s hard and disheartening and it never seems to end, I know. But in the words of the great Lyle Lovett, what would you be if you didn’t even try?

Bob Weber is a retired environment reporter formerly with the Canadian Press. The Edmonton-based Weber started at CP in 1996 and specialized in environmental coverage and Arctic issues

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Plastics are everywhere. Microplastics—tiny particles of plastic less than five millimetres long—have been found near the top of Mount Everest. A deep-sea submersible descended to the deepest point in the oceans, in the Mariana Trench, and found a plastic bag. Scientists found phthalates—chemicals used to increase the flexibility of some plastics—embedded in the skin of ants in remote parts of the Amazon rainforest. In Antarctica, an icy, unpopulated continent, 97 per cent of birds were found to have ingested microplastics—primarily common plastics such as polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene. Microplastics were similarly found in the blood of 77 per cent of people tested by scientists in the Netherlands. So, it would be no surprise to find such particles in the North Saskatchewan River.

But getting a clean sample wasn’t easy. To avoid polluting 1,500-litre samples of river water, the researchers designed and built a pump out of stainless steel, with no plastic at all. Then they worried about other things that contain and shed tiny bits of plastic, such as their clothes and lifejackets. “When we started sampling,” said Bryksa, “we would have to stand downriver [from the pump] because that lifejacket is contaminating the sample.” Studying plastic pollution would be easier, they joked, if their lifejackets were made of concrete.

Left: In August 1955 a LIFE magazine article ran with the then-celebratory but now vaguely sinister title “Throwaway Living.”
Right: Kwabena Akese, Accra, Ghana, 2020. In Canada only 9–12 per cent of plastics are recycled. Most of the rest goes to landfills.

Unless you were born before 1907, when the first synthetic plastic was invented, everyone alive today has been born and raised in the age of plastic. Forget the generational divides—Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha—we’re all part of the same era, an age marked by the increasing abundance of often useful and convenient plastic stuff and the growing amount of plastic waste found everywhere on earth.

The scale of plastic production today is mind-boggling. In 1950 all countries around the globe together produced 1.5 million tonnes of the stuff. In 2025, globally, over 500 million tonnes of new “virgin” plastics are now created every year. Much of it is disposable—50 per cent of virgin plastic is turned into single-use items meant to be thrown away—and little of it is recycled. In Canada, depending on who’s making the calculations, only 9 to 12 per cent of plastics are recycled. Of the rest, the vast majority of the over three million tonnes a year that’s tossed out goes to landfills. Some 4 per cent is burned in incinerators and 1 per cent of plastic in Canada is lost into the environment as litter.

Figuring out how to keep the good things about plastic while limiting the downsides is one of the great conundrums of our time. In Alberta a variety of organizations think they have a solution to that problem. These groups range from the government of Alberta to recycling and chemical industry associations to NAIT polytechnic—where the sampling for microplastics study is part of a 10-year, $10-million program called Plastics Research in Action (PRIA). The NAIT program—funded by energy company Inter Pipeline—began in 2020, according to informational material, “with a single focus: finding ways for society to reuse and recycle plastic waste as valuable commodities. In short, PRIA is on a mission to build a sustainable circular economy.” The Alberta government has a similar goal in its “Natural Gas Vision and Strategy,” released in 2020, promoting a “plastics circular economy,” which they define as “when the full value of a plastic product is used across multiple lifecycles, not just used once and then discarded.”

Alberta’s plan is to reduce plastic waste while growing the plastics industry. “The future is bright, and it is circular,” said Leduc-Beaumont MLA Brandon Lunty (UCP) at the start of the third annual Alberta Circular Plastics Day at NAIT in March 2025. It sounds laudable. But you might ask: to what extent is a plastics circular economy for real?

Undeniably plastic has benefits. “This looks promising,” wrote Leo Baekeland, with prophetic understatement in his laboratory notebook after inventing the first synthetic plastic in 1907. His product—Bakelite—could be heated and moulded into various shapes such as radios, telephones, toys and other mass-produced goods. Its inventor made a fortune. But Bakelite had flaws. Made from chemical compounds teased from wood alcohol and coal tar, it was brittle and couldn’t absorb bright colours. New varieties of plastics were soon invented, and today 99 per cent of plastics are derived from oil and gas, including hydrocarbons such as ethane and propane.

The plan for our “circular economy” is to reduce plastic waste while growing the plastics industry.

In simple terms, “plastic”—from the Greek plastikos, meaning mouldable—is a synthetic polymer. A polymer is a chain of molecules—hence the “poly” (“many”) in long tongue-tripping names such as polyethylene and polypropylene. Plastics can be hard or flexible, depending on chemical structure and additives. But in its various forms, plastic is lightweight, durable and insoluble. It’s also relatively cheap to make in large volumes.

That’s handy for all kinds of products. Bottles, bags and clingwrap, for instance, are made from polyethylene. So too is the most common type of polyester. Coffee pods, straws and microwavable dishes are made from polypropylene. Cutlery and take-out cup lids can be made of polystyrene. Most vinyl siding on houses is polyvinyl chloride. The list of products that contain plastic today is almost endless. Bike helmets. Cell phones. Seatbelts, airbags and dashboards in automobiles. Medical equipment is now mostly made of plastic, not least because it’s hypoallergenic and it’s easier—think syringes—to ensure the sterility of a single-use product in a hospital.

Proponents of plastic can be extravagant in their praise. “In many instances, plastics are the solution to the climate change problem,” said Bob Masterson, president and CEO of Chemistry Industry Association Canada, to a committee of MPs in 2019. “That includes lightweight, high-strength plastic composites in the automotive sector, improved insulation in the building sector, enormous quantities of plastic resins that are vital to the production of renewable energy from wind turbines and solar panels, as well as the very important role of plastic packaging in reducing food waste.” The shelf life of zucchini, the MPs were told—with a helpful info sheet from the Flexible Packaging Association—is extended from one day to five days when stored in plastic packaging. Ground beef is extended from three days to 20. Grapes allegedly remain edible for 70 days instead of seven.

Plastics also benefit the economy. In 2020 Alberta’s petrochemical sector was valued at $12-billion. That’s but a portion of the $35-billion the sector generates in Canada as a whole and a tiny sliver of the US$712-billion global plastics market. Alberta has vast supplies of oil and gas—including ethane and propane—and global demand for plastics is growing. According to the International Energy Agency, “petrochemicals are set to account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand to 2030, and nearly half the growth to 2050.” Given this economic projection, the provincial government wants to produce more plastic in Alberta. Goal number one in the “Natural Gas Vision and Strategy,” for instance, is “for Alberta to become a global top 10 producer of petrochemicals” and “to grow this sector by more than $30-billion by 2030.”

Government subsidies, under both the NDP and the UCP, have boosted the sector toward that goal. In 2019 the federal Liberal government gave $49-million to Inter Pipeline to both “invest in efforts to reduce plastic waste” and to build a polypropylene plant—the first in Canada—just northeast of Edmonton. In 2021 the province, through the Alberta Petrochemical Incentive Program (APIP), granted $408-million to Inter Pipeline to help build the Heartland Petrochemical Complex. Completed in 2023, that $4.3-billion plant now turns Alberta propane into 525,000 tonnes of pea-sized plastic pellets a year—mostly for export to the US.

Similarly, the APIP is granting about $1.8-billion to Dow Chemical’s Path2Zero project near Fort Saskatchewan. Construction began in 2024 on the plant, which will turn ethane into plastic polyethylene pellets for export, primarily to Asia. It’s the first such facility to be considered “net zero,” in part because it will burn hydrogen and bury CO₂ nearby—reducing emissions lower than if it were built without those elements. The federal government is giving the “green plastic” project $400-million in investment tax credits. In late November 2023 premier Danielle Smith and then-federal finance minister Chrystia Freeland stood together in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland to announce that the $11.6-billion project had official approval to be built. “This project is the embodiment of the future of Canada,” said Freeland, “which is we have a growing economy, we have more great-paying jobs, and at the same time we’re reducing pollution.”

To date, the history of dealing with plastic waste has largely been a tale of failure. The latest flop was in December 2024 when about 175 UN countries held talks in South Korea to establish a legally binding global treaty to cut plastic pollution. It ended without an agreement.

It’s not as if the stakes were unknown. Plastic doesn’t dissolve. That’s great for storing water in bottles, for instance, but not ideal if you factor in that plastic bottles take somewhere between 400 and 1,000 years to fully break down. Some one million plastic bottles are bought every minute on earth. Add in other kinds of plastic, and it’s estimated that a truckload of insoluble plastic escapes into the environment every minute—much of it into the ocean, most famously in the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” which includes 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic floating in an ocean area twice the size of Texas. But plastic also breaks down locally into minuscule pieces. “It is widely agreed upon that smaller particles can enter the bloodstream and organs more easily than bigger particles,” says a 2022 article in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Letters.

The potential health risks are reason for caution. “Plastics are made out of the combination of thousands of chemicals,” said Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, the lead author of a research article on plastic pollution released prior to the treaty talks in Korea. “Many of them, such as endocrine disruptors and forever chemicals, pose toxicity and harm to ecosystems and human health.” That alarm was echoed in an Environment and Climate Change Canada news release, also just before the talks: “The scale of this problem has reached a boiling point that requires urgent action,” said the feds, “with plastic pollution projected to grow by 2.5 times by 2040.”

In Canada the urgency around plastic waste had grown since January 1, 2018, when China stopped importing almost all used plastics for recycling. Previously Canada had exported most recyclable plastic—including what’s thrown in blue bins—to China and other Asian countries. The cost of dealing with all that waste hit fast. In 2019 the City of Calgary, for instance, spent $330,000 to store 2,000 tonnes of plastic clamshells, hoping to find a way to recycle them, then eventually dumped them—about 92 semi-trailer loads—into the landfill.

Alberta and the federal government soon fought over how to deal with plastic waste. Both sides, curiously, drew inspiration from the same document. That 2019 report by Deloitte, which the feds had commissioned, pointed out that in Canada we overwhelmingly produce, buy and use virgin plastics that are thrown away with little recycling. But plastic waste, said Deloitte, is “a lost opportunity.” If Canada recycled 90 per cent of plastics—moving from a “linear” to a “zero plastic waste” economy—the benefits could include thousands of new jobs and lower greenhouse gas emissions. It wouldn’t be easy—under the status quo only 25 per cent of discarded plastic is collected for recycling. Most plastic packaging, textiles, auto parts and electrical and electronic equipment end up as waste. But with better waste collection, bigger recycling plants, new incentives and innovation, the ambitious promise could be realized. Alberta and the feds agreed on the gist of all that. But on one point they sharply diverged.

In 2019 an all-party committee of MPs, convened after the Deloitte report, recommended “that the federal government commit to banning single-use plastic products—such as straws, bags, cutlery, cups, cigarette filters and polystyrene packaging.” The feds subsequently banned some of those single-use items such as plastic straws and plastic grocery bags. In response, a consortium of plastics companies, including Dow Chemical and Calgary’s Nova Chemicals, sued the feds. Alberta was an intervener in the case in support of the petrochemical companies. In 2023 the Federal Court of Canada ruled that the federal government’s labelling of some plastics as a “toxic substance” was jurisdictional overreach. The feds appealed, and the Single-Use Plastics Prohibition Regulations remain in force while the appeal is in court.

Constitutional matters aside, the fight comes down to one question: Should there be limits on plastic production The UCP government says no. A ban on plastics would be a “serious threat” to the petrochemical industry, said then-premier Jason Kenney in 2022. Environment minister Rebecca Schulz added to that dissent in April 2024. “The federal government would be better served by taking a page out of Alberta’s plan, which diverts plastics from landfills and turns used plastics into new products,” she said. “This is the promise of Alberta’s plan to create a plastics circular economy, a modern miracle in which, through chemistry, we can have all of life’s conveniences and necessities while protecting our environment and reducing plastic waste.”

The third annual Alberta Circular Plastics Day—organized by the Alberta Plastics Recycling Association (APRA)—was held in March 2025 in the sprawling and light-filled Productivity and Innovation Centre at NAIT. Among the attendees—described by Tammy Schwass, the executive director of APRA, as “about 200 people from across the plastics value chain in the province”—were representatives from Dow, Nova and Inter Pipeline, reps from recycling companies, reps from companies selling new products made with recycled plastic, instructors from NAIT, and groups such as the Recycling Council of Alberta, which in 2024 officially switched their mandate from “supporting the recycling value chain” to “advancing the circular economy.”

“Our government sees plastics as an opportunity, not a problem,” said MLA Brandon Lunty, at the start of the conference. “We see this as a waste management issue, not a plastics issue.” He admitted he was “a circular plastics newbie” and sent greetings from minister Schulz, who was not able to attend. The UCP government, he read from prepared notes, “is working with the recycling industry, plastics manufacturers and Albertans to eliminate the plastics we don’t need, innovate to ensure the plastics we do need are either reusable, recyclable or compostable, and circulate the plastic items we use to keep them in the economy and out of the environment.”

Notably, he touted Alberta’s new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations, which came into force on November 30, 2022, and were “fully implemented” on April 1, 2025. These are intended to shift the “burden of collecting, sorting, processing and recycling waste” away from municipalities and onto the producers of plastic packaging. A central body, Alberta Recycling Management Authority, will oversee the system, similarly to new EPR systems in Ontario and Quebec. The idea is that companies which produce plastic pollution will pay for or find ways to reduce that pollution.

Polyvinyl chloride releases harmful chemicals when melted. Polystyrene turns into a “weird powdery mix.”

“We know this transformation to a circular economy will take time,” said Lunty. How much time is unclear. But challenges were on display at the conference—not least that some plastics are very hard to recycle. Take, for example, a potato chip bag. “That chip bag might have 12 layers of foil and different kinds of plastic in it,” said Mark Sabourin at an exhibition booth for EFS-plastics, a company opening a new recycling plant in Lethbridge in July 2025. Each kind of plastic in those layers has a different melt temperature. That means if you heat the bag at just one temperature, the layers glom together into a piece of junk. “Recycling has to be like for like,” said Sabourin. Plastic products are stamped with numbers 1–7. EFS will specialize in recycling numbers 1, 2 and 5—basically polyethylene and polypropylene—turning those kinds of used plastics back into pellets to ship to producers that want such recycled material.

Even “like for like” recycling isn’t straightforward, however. Recycled plastic is not the same as virgin plastic. At the Nova Chemicals booth, bright-white virgin polyethylene pellets were displayed beside darker-coloured recycled pellets. Each time a plastic is “warmed up again to melt into a pellet,” said Robert Clare, the Nova rep, “you get more degradation.” He showed clear plastic bags made of virgin polyethylene beside bags made with “30 per cent recycled” plastic. The bags with recycled plastic had visible speckles. “It’s still fit for purpose,” he said. “You can fill it with liquid or solids and it would be hermetically sealed.” But for commercial purposes it’s not up to snuff. A used plastic can be turned back into a pellet up to 10 times, he claims, but each time it’s made into a new product it must be blended with virgin plastic to “boost the performance,” and chemical additives are needed to mask imperfections.

Other plastics pose more difficult challenges. Polyvinyl chloride releases harmful chemicals when it’s melted down. Polystyrene, said Sabourin, “turns into this weird powdery mixture that floats everywhere.” Most recyclers don’t want it.

Those problems are among the reasons why most plastics end up in the landfill. Finding ways to keep plastics out of the dump has been a primary focus of research initiatives at NAIT, along with funding for pilot projects and start-up companies from both government and the private sector. Dow Chemical, for instance, paved a parking lot at the new Path2Zero project with asphalt that included some 2.2 million plastic bags worth of used polyethylene. NAIT and Heartland Polymers (Inter Pipeline) collaborated to turn plastic polypropylene waste into a wax that they mixed into asphalt used to pave roads at four test sites, including on the Alexander First Nation. Alberta Innovates—which funds research projects “aligned with Government of Alberta priorities”—gave out numerous grants, including $250,000 to both PolyCo (a start-up that also partnered with NAIT), which makes luxury floor tiles from recyclable polypropylene, and to Resolve Plastics Recycling, which turns mixed plastics into cinder blocks that can be used to build everything from garden sheds to roadway crash barriers. Merlin Plastics, the biggest Alberta-based recycling company, got $2-million from Emissions Reduction Alberta (which doles out money from the government’s TIER fund) to research a “commercially viable” method for recycling used food-grade clamshells back into new food-grade clamshells. “The circular economy is in its infancy in the province,” said Schwass, praising all that’s been accomplished so far. “It’s only been about five years since we started talking about it here.”

Jeremiah Bryksa looking for plastic in the North Saskatchewan River. He’d like to study microplastics in food packaging next.

By designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems,” says a quote from the UK-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation (which since 2010 has been acknowledged as the leading proponent of the circular economy concept), “we can reinvent everything.” It’s an ambitious idea. One that in Alberta still appears far off in the future.

Jennifer Koole, a conference attendee and the executive director of the Recycling Council of Alberta, told me in an interview that “there is a way to measure the circularity of an entity, whether that’s a country or a province. We haven’t measured it for Alberta,” she said, “but Canada’s circularity level is 6.1 per cent. That means a small percentage of materials [plastic or otherwise] are being recycled or recovered and there’s a lot of opportunity to do more.”

A few presenters who spoke at Alberta Circular Plastics Day—via Zoom—expressed hope that strict regulations could still be brought in to address plastic waste in the environment. Ryan Parmenter, from Environment and Climate Change Canada, told attendees that negotiators for a global treaty on plastic pollution will meet again in Switzerland in August 2025. This time, he said, “I think we’ll be able to move forward.” The stakes were highlighted by Roxana Sühring of Toronto Metropolitan University. “Plastics are complex chemical mixtures that are released into the environment throughout a product’s life cycle,” she said, explaining a study in which she traced microplastics back to their source products by analyzing chemical additives in various plastics. Microplastic regulation is needed, she said, but she wonders how it would be enforced.

Near the end of the day I talked with Jeremiah Bryksa. His microplastics sampling project was wrapping up in April 2025 and he was working on having the results of the study peer-reviewed and published in a journal. “We found plastics everywhere” in the North Saskatchewan River, he said. “They’re really low concentrations.” This surprised him. “I thought I would see way more plastic,” he said. “The river’s pretty clean.”

I asked how plastics are getting into our bodies, given that most people apparently have microplastics in their bloodstream. “The biggest exposure route is just through being indoors,” he said. “Most microplastics come from inhalation.”

At NAIT, he said, “our work is industry-driven, so I don’t get to choose what I work on.” But if he could choose, he said, “I would love to do more microplastic work. They come from plastic bottles. All food is packaged in plastic.” Studying microplastics in food packaging “would be a really interesting space to go to next.”

Tadzio Richards is a National Magazine Award winner and the associate editor at Alberta Views.

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by Teresa Wong
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
2024/$24.95/240 pp.

All Our Ordinary Stories, a graphic novel memoir by Teresa Wong, is a profoundly moving meditation on entangled family histories—one in which the pairing of text and image convey a depth of storytelling akin to great cinema. The collection feels simultaneously mundane and multitudinous: an auntie regaling you with stories; a crash course in Chinese-Canadian history; a deadpan long form comic on life with immigrant parents; a gut-punch of a confessional memoir about grief, mothers and the emotional distances from those who might be geographically nearest to us.

The book is episodic, wide-ranging and non-chronological, anchored by Wong’s assured narrative and minimalistic black-and-white illustration. Beginning with the aftermath of her mother’s stroke, the narrator unspools her own life with wry humour and acute attention. She traces the contours of her first-generation upbringing in Calgary, watching her mother serve Chinese food at the mall food court. She absorbs English from TV shows while translating for her parents. She navigates the heartache of language loss in herself and her own experience of parenthood. She gathers fragments about the lives of her grandparents and documents her parents’ escape to Hong Kong during the civil war. Later she travels with her mother to Hong Kong and China, where her in-betweenness, a hallmark of diasporic identity, becomes even more pronounced. Stark, at times sparse drawings bring focus to the words, and Wong’s voice is measured and self-aware. Her work excels in the use of negative space, which reinforces a central focus of the book: the idea of absence. What is unsaid—or cannot be said—resonates just as loudly as what is actually spoken.

As a lover of graphic novels, I found the simplicity of the illustration noteworthy. While Wong does employ more dynamic, detailed drawing, it is reserved for flashbacks, such as the Cultural Revolution and her parents’ harrowing migration. The contrast seems to convey the horror and persistence of transgenerational trauma and memory, juxtaposed with the bareness of everyday banalities. But even in her default style, Wong’s gaze is remarkable in her penchant for the tangible and material. Seemingly innocuous visual details linger far beyond the page, such as the preparation of fruit as a familial ritual of care, chopsticks in a dish-drying rack, the rare touch of a hand. For those who appreciate visual media with transportive storytelling, All Our Ordinary Stories is a vulnerable, stunning work of art. For those who have lived similarly in-between lives, and who recognize themselves and their own families in this work, it’s something more—transformative and transcendent.

Céline Chuang is a writer and bookseller in Edmonton.

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by Alvin Finkel
JAMES LORIMER & COMPANY
2024/$25.95/416 pp.

In Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality, former Athabasca University professor Alvin Finkel embarks on an ambitious project: chronicling social justice campaigns across the entirety of human history and the globe. The result is a broad, thought-provoking survey that covers early empires and feudalism, the emergence of capitalism, European imperialism and the two world wars, the Cold War, neoliberalism and the present day.

Finkel argues that inequality is not inevitable or inherent to “human nature.” Rather, “societies choose consciously or unconsciously what values to promote,” he writes, asserting that for the vast majority of human history these values were largely collectivist. Using somewhat limited archaeological and anthropological evidence, Finkel argues that for nearly 300,000 years societies were almost exclusively organized around common ownership, open decision-making, gender equality, resource sharing and peaceful relations. Some, he says, still are.

While scholars generally view the agricultural revolution as the driving force behind the fundamental shift towards competitive and militarist principles about 10,000 years ago, Finkel disagrees. That shift, he claims, was a long, drawn-out process essentially disconnected from farming and always resisted by various groups and individuals.

But why and how do inequality and conflict come to dominate human societies Finkel appears to blame so-called “aggrandizers,” defined as “unscrupulous leaders” that arise in communities containing more than 50–100 members and who use both private property and surplus resources to achieve and maintain political and economic control over the masses. “Even if only a few groups… in a territory adopt hierarchical and militarist social organization,” he says, “their ability to force others to accept their leadership can result in wide swaths of humanity being deprived of peace and egalitarianism.”

But he cannot mean that to restore social justice we must disperse eight-billion-plus people on the planet into small, communal, egalitarian collectives at risk of scarcity and famines without surpluses. That it does not matter how many people fight for justice and equality, because the conditions allowing such values to exist are long gone. Or perhaps this is why, despite thousands of years of resistance, the masses have failed to do more than contain the worst excesses of the “parasitic elites.”

Answers aren’t clear from the book. In Humans Finkel discusses slave rebellions in ancient Greece and China; religious uprisings leading to Buddhism, Christianity and other sects; peasant and worker resistance in the imperial core; Indigenous and slave uprisings on the peripheries of empires; recent protests against climate change, economic inequality and war; and much more. It’s a lot, and a more thorough discussion of the function of oppression might better connect and explain them.

But this is not the main focus of the book. Finkel is mostly concerned with efforts “to re-establish… rights to inclusion, justice and equality that our early ancestors enjoyed.” “At almost all times in the history of humans,” he writes, “there have been at least some communities that are organized around the same principles as the original members of our species organized their communities.” As such, it is impossible to view human nature, defined as “plastic and not fixed,” by focusing solely on stratification, discrimination and conflict.

While oppression is experienced and opposed differently depending on context, he writes, it is also remarkably consistent across time and place. Ultimately, it’s a hopeful thought. For approximately 97 per cent of human history, our ancestors organized their societies around egalitarian and pacifist principles and, even today, many stubbornly fight against incessant oppression and injustice. Perhaps we can too.

Roberta Lexier is a professor in the departments of general education and humanities at Mount Royal University.

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The contact for Mraiche Holding Corporation was a Sam Hassan Mraiche using an email address from another one of his companies, Carver PA, a corporation that, by their own description, “specializes in providing training to the petrochemical industry.”

That initial purchase of PPE was reportedly for $228-million and included masks, gowns and thermometers. Most of the supplies were made in China. The quality control was so bad it made widespread news.

The masks, delivered under the brand name Vanch, were reportedly of such low quality that many didn’t even fit the faces of healthcare workers properly. They had nose pieces that unsafely didn’t hold their shape and because of that, couldn’t create a seal providing the proper protection for healthcare workers braving the pandemic. Perhaps worst of all, many masks came with an odour that healthcare workers claimed was making them sick.

Many have since pointed out the masks were not made by a single manufacturer, but by multiple manufacturers with varying quality. Contrary to the Government of Alberta documentation, Vanch is not the name of the manufacturer. It’s the brand name of a Chinese stationery group which sourced the masks from anyone who could meet their order, and then packaged the masks in their Vanch-branded boxes. Nonetheless, AHS continues to use Vanch masks.

So, to be clear, at the start of the pandemic, when protection for healthcare workers should have been a foremost concern, a company that had no obvious experience or track record in providing healthcare personal protective equipment received a sole-source contract for products that turned out to be substandard and allegedly harmful to the very healthcare workers it was supposed to protect.

And that company was run by Sam Mraiche.

AHS was paying 85¢ a mask from Mraiche Holding Corp. compared to 50¢ a mask from Acklands-Grainger. So Mraiche Holding Corp. was charging 70 per cent more for a lesser quality product, and Albertan taxpayers covered that cost.

This sole-source contract for problematic PPE was, in effect, the birth of a new company called MHCare Medical, operating under the Mraiche Holding Corporation (or Mraiche Investment Corporation) umbrella. And it wasn’t the last time they would deliver problematic product to Alberta at great cost to the taxpayer.

Later in the summer of 2022, Canada experienced a tridemic caused by ongoing waves of the Omicron COVID variant, a spike in RSV among children, and an early start to the flu season with a strain of influenza B that particularly affected kids. This caused an unprecedented demand for children’s pain and fever medication in the forms of acetaminophen, most commonly known as the brand name Tylenol, and ibuprofen, most commonly known as children’s Advil and Motrin.

It’s also worth noting that over the first half of 2022, most public health measures across Canada, except voluntary vaccination, were abandoned. In August of 2022, Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto recommended parents get prescriptions for those medications [acetaminophen and ibuprofen] to ensure supply in advance of the flu season, even though they are non-prescription, over-the-counter medications and a prescription would not ensure supply if the pharmacist were out of stock. By the time the Canadian Pharmacists Association was able to get out a rebuttal, mass hoarding in advance had already begun emptying shelves in eastern Canada and causing a 53 per cent increase in sales in US pharmacies along the border.

This caused a nationwide shortage of these two medications heading into the fall respiratory virus season. To make matters worse, the 2022–2023 influenza season started in October, roughly six weeks earlier than expected. As soon as pharmacies got stock, people would clean out shelves to stockpile it at home, even if their kids weren’t sick. In September 2022, Health Canada began working with global manufacturers to adapt their products for the Canadian market. By November 2022, the federal government had approved the import of nine brand name products from the United States and Australia, resulting in the import of over 4.4 million units over the winter. In parallel, Canadian manufacturers massively ramped up production of children’s acetaminophen and ibuprofen under brand names trusted by Canadians to release 13.9 million units by May 2023.

Normal demand across Canada for these medications is 300,000 to 400,000 bottles per year. The combination of sudden surge in illness in 2022 plus the hoarding emptied retailer shelves. But as sharply as that pediatric influenza B spike began in October, it fell in November, and largely ended over Christmas. It became obvious over the month of November that Health Canada’s pumping the market with imports would catch up to the market by year-end, especially with the drop in pediatric influenza and the related calming and hoarding.

Nonetheless, on December 6, 2022, premier Danielle Smith and then health minister Jason Copping announced they were signing a deal with Turkish company Atabay Pharmaceutical for five million bottles of children’s acetaminophen and ibuprofen to supply to Alberta pharmacies at a cost of at least $80-million.

Danielle Smith said: “Your government is taking action to help provide the medication Alberta families need. I’m happy to announce that we have secured a supply of five million bottles of children’s acetaminophen and ibuprofen for Alberta families right now.

“Your government is working with Alberta Health Services and Health Canada on the details and logistics to import this medicine, and you can feel confident that we are all moving as quickly as we can so that Alberta families can get what they need, and it will be available at your local pharmacy in short order once it arrives.”

They claimed this medication would be available for import in a few weeks if Health Canada practised the spirit of co-operative federalism. They also claimed parents would be able to keep their kids out of the hospital if they could buy the medication in pharmacies.

Danielle Smith said: “I think one of the reasons for this announcement is to make sure that we are providing parents with the medication they need so that they can treat at home and ensure that they can break the fever at home. That’s the most important step we can do to keep the pressure off the hospital.”

During this shortage many physicians issued public statements that while these medications provide comfort care, they aren’t lifesaving, and they don’t halt the progression of a virus. They manage the symptoms.

Copping falsely claimed that there was no manufacturer in Canada, even though Johnson & Johnson manufactures their version of these products in Guelph. Copping also falsely claimed that Health Canada had approved the raw ingredients from the Turkish manufacturers but not the final product.

Even after the debacle with PPE, the government used Mraiche’s company in a sole-sourced contract to obtain children’s medication.

Alberta has about 700,000 children under the age of 12. The Alberta Pharmacists Association claimed they could use about 500,000 bottles, if received in December as promised by Smith and Copping, but did not commit to buy any. Alberta was ordering more bottles than the entire population of the province. Five MILLION bottles.

Premier Smith and health minister Copping were confident that Albertans wouldn’t be on the hook for the surplus, and that Alberta would be able to sell the bottles to other provinces. For additional context, five million bottles is about 10 to 14 times the entire national demand for children’s pain and fever medications. Between imports and increased domestic production, Health Canada stockpiled over 18 million bottles that winter. Surplus inventory after the winter was more likely to be a problem than a shortage. Out of the $80-million total budget, the Government of Alberta committed to purchase $70-million worth of meds at $14 a bottle, which is about twice the retail price. The other $10-million was for unspecified internal costs.

The Atabay dosage was not the same as the North American dosage, which is a safety issue triggering advance warnings from pharmaceutical colleges as well as Alberta Blue Cross. Because of this, the Atabay products could only be brought in by “exceptional import” in a process requiring attestation of the shortage by Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer of Health.

But there was also the problem that Atabay hadn’t supplied medicine to the Canadian market, and their products—that Alberta taxpayers had just paid millions for—did not meet Health Canada specifications: dosage, child safety caps, warnings, dosing devices, packaging, labelling and more.

Copping admitted that Alberta taxpayers would have to subsidize the price to other provinces to match their wholesale prices; that wholesale cost of $14 a bottle was, and is, significantly more than the normal retail cost of the trusted supply that had already seen a huge manufacturing increase a month before this deal was even made.

The problems continued.

The medication itself didn’t even start to arrive until January, but because of issues with the labelling and the dosing, that first shipment of 250,000 bottles could only be distributed to Alberta hospitals, where nurses could be trusted to perform the extra work of converting the dosage before administering the medication to patients. Medication for the public to purchase in pharmacies didn’t arrive until late March, two months after Health Canada allowed another exceptional import and well after the shortage of the trusted brand name supply had been resolved.

The medication had to be stored behind the counter, as the pharmacists were required to teach parents how to adjust the dosage. But the problems didn’t stop there. Because of the delay in nine shipments, and the wrong dosage, no other provinces had any interest in buying them. Also, since Health Canada has not provided regulatory approval for any Atabay product at a national level, any other province could only get them on a case-by-case application to Health Canada—again for exceptional import—which again would require a shortage.

Alberta was ultimately only able to import 1.5 million of the five million bottles purchased, because the shortage justifying the exceptional import had ended and Health Canada never provided approval for anywhere other than Alberta. New health minister Adriana LaGrange directed this massive overshoot to Alberta hospitals. This inventory was dumped into AHS books even though AHS never had a shortage and had its own suppliers through 2022 and 2023, and the original stated intent for these medications was that they had been purchased for retail sales in pharmacies.

Perhaps most concerning, though, the medication that was distributed to hospitals for use was only approved for ages 2 and up. AHS determined that because of its consistency, if used with newborn babies in the neonatal intensive care units, it could place them at a risk of a condition called necrotizing enterocolitis, which kills the intestines of infants, when the medication is administered through feeding tubes.

Alberta Health Services discontinued the use of the medication entirely. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. All told, Alberta hospitals used the medications for only two months before returning to their already established supply. But that only further underscores the question: if the medication was originally purchased to be distributed in pharmacies for the public to buy, why was it ever redirected to the hospital supply?

Alberta only received 1.5 million bottles of the five million bottles the province paid for. And of that 1.5 million, only a total of 4,700 bottles made it to community pharmacies for the public and only 9,000 bottles made it into hospitals across the province. Alberta ended up paying to store the rest of the medication, and has no way to recoup any of the money spent. Given that only 13,700 bottles ever made it into any kind of circulation, Danielle Smith paid $5,839.42 per bottle using taxpayers’ money.

Although the government tried to hide the existence of a middleman who allegedly orchestrated the entire deal, it has since been confirmed to be the importer, MHCare Medical, the company owned by Sam Mraiche. They received the $70-million from Alberta Health. It is unknown how much of that they paid to Atabay for the 1.5 million bottles actually shipped. It’s also unknown whether the five million bottle minimum purchase was required by Atabay or by MHCare Medical.

Even after the safety debacle with the masks and the PPE, the government still decided to use Mraiche’s company in a sole-sourced contract through AHS to obtain children’s medication. The products never received regulatory approval, they had the wrong dosage despite a custom manufacturing run, and multiple shipments were required to get the safety caps and labelling right—seemingly by trial and error—requiring secure disposal. Again, all paid for by Alberta taxpayers. Some have since speculated that individuals within the UCP government had attempted to purchase the five million bottles of Atabay product in order to bootstrap MHCare Medical into being a national distributor of pharmaceutical products, starting with the children’s acetaminophen in the hopes that there would still be a shortage when the imports finally arrived.

The taxpayers carried all the risk of that minimum buy, of the failure to meet the regulatory requirements and of demand drying up before the late arrival of the product. It was an entirely predictable $80-million catastrophe. The mismanagement of the government and MHCare Medical caused both parties to fail at establishing MHCare as a distributor of pharmaceuticals, if that was their goal. To this day, they only have a Health Canada licence to import, not to distribute or retail. They do not list any pharmaceuticals for sale.

How is it that Sam Mraiche and MHCare medical kept getting contracts after their Vanch masks failed to meet the required ASM standard Most of them wouldn’t fit or hold any shape, and many of them caused breathing issues and skin rashes in healthcare workers. And after 100 per cent of the children’s acetaminophen product failed to have the standard dosage, was never approved by Health Canada outside of exceptional circumstances, was months too late and effectively cost $80-million to only get 13,700 bottles to hospitals or pharmacies?

In 2023 Sam received the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee medal from UCP minister Muhammad Yaseen in a ceremony that was quickly posted to the MHCare promotional website and their YouTube channel. There’s no advertising like free advertising.

Sam Mraiche has won more than a quarter billion dollars in sole-source contracts from Albertans to supply medication that was only used in hospital for two months, was minimally used in pharmacies, that no other province wanted; and masks and other PPE that healthcare workers call problematic.

On May 10 Danielle Smith flew to Vancouver with two staffers and an impressive entourage to watch a game in an elite private skybox with tickets that were gifted to her by a private citizen, one Sam Jaber. Jaber was appointed to the board of Invest Alberta on November 22, 2023, by Danielle Smith. The fact that Smith accepted these tickets is a problem in and of itself or at least it would be almost anywhere else in Canada….

Who else was at the game The photo of the premier at the hockey game appears to be a peek into the sprawling network that Sam Mraiche has built for himself. In the back row, we have Aaron Barner, senior executive officer for the Métis Nation of Alberta, then Sam Mraiche, then Andrea Sandmaier, the president of the Métis Nation of Alberta, and then Sam Mraiche’s wife. Also in the picture are David Eby and his family. But the key to understanding all of the invisible connections in this picture is the person who isn’t even in it, the person who made the whole picture possible: Sam Jaber.

Mr. Jaber is a businessman and accountant whose primary business appears to be the accounting firm Jaberson and Associates. That business is run out of an industrial office strip mall at 5430 136 Ave NW in Edmonton. The other business run out of that address is Phoenician Accounting and Tax Services. Jaberson and Associates and Phoenician share a business address, phone number and a client portal that says “Welcome to the Jaberson and Associates client portal” but is hosted on the Phoenician website.

Four numbered companies were registered by Sam Jaber in September of 2023, just two months before he was appointed to Invest Alberta. The records address for all four companies is Sam Jaber’s offices. All four of these numbered companies use the contact email address ocorcescu@carvercorporation.com.

An online search reveals that Olesea Corcescu used to be a payroll administrator for Phoenician Accounting, an accountant with Carver and a senior accountant with MHCare Medical.

The registered office for all four companies is 3001, 14815 119th Ave NW in Edmonton. That address is also the location of the Carver building, a three-storey office block that also serves as the headquarters for MHCare and the Carver PA Corporation. That’s the same Carver Corporation that Sam Mraiche used as his contact throughout the Vanch debacle before he converted the holding company to MHCare Medical Corporation in 2020.

Sam Mraiche, whose companies provided controversial products on not one but two high-profile occasions, and who has presumably made a boatload of money off of those deals on the taxpayer dime, has a long-standing business relationship with Sam Jaber. The same Sam Jaber that gave Danielle Smith expensive elite skybox tickets.

From the Oct 27, 2024, episode of The Breakdown, a podcast about provincial politics produced by Nate Pike. Founded five years ago, The Breakdown has over 40,000 followers on social media and YouTube and is available on most podcast platforms.

You can find The Breakdown on X @TheBreakdownAB

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by Andrew Yang and Stephen Marche
AKASHIC BOOKS
2023/$16.95/280 pp.

The American electorate is torn between a polarized two-party system on the one hand and the dangerous allure of systemic disruption on the other. The tech industry has already roiled most of post-war capitalism. What happens when the tech-bros turn to politics?

Andrew Yang and Stephen Marche’s disruptor-in-chief is the apotheosis of American meritocracy. Cooper Sherman is a centrist populist with big ideas. Unlike Trump, who exudes cynicism, this man truly believes he is a force for good. And just like some other billionaires, he’s a walking, talking illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect: a man with limited experience overestimating his own abilities.

A defining characteristic of the successful political thriller is that its authors are almost as interesting as the conspiracies they invent. Yang was a memorable candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries and brings an insider’s perspective. Edmonton-raised Stephen Marche made a name with a book of speculative non-fiction about American social breakdown, The Next Civil War.

Where The Next Civil War was chilling, The Last Election is winking and wonkish. Characters are sketchy: both ethically compromised and poorly drawn. And that is by design. As the end approaches, narcissism and naked ambition limit self-actualization. Everyone feels the prickle of dread, but nobody knows the score. “The political condition of the United States is so toxic… that the suspicion of a great shock coming has morphed into a common expectation.”

This is the sort of novel plotted by political science graduate students after a night of absinthe, but its melodrama is the right tone for politics today. In The Last Election, the end of American democracy comes through the arcane byways of the US constitution and the machinations of unnamed villains among the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the real antagonist is the system itself, a ponderous thing designed for stability in the 19th century and too easily subverted by ambitious patricians today.

On the face of it, the plot is absurd. But is it any more preposterous than everything that’s happened in the past decade Not really. What’s more, the tawdriness of unsubtle conspiracy doesn’t detract from the reading experience, because the surreal is where we live now.

I don’t want to damn with invidious comparison, but this novel reminds me of The Handmaid’s Tale. Everything Margaret Atwood wrote about in 1985 has happened before and since. It’s much the same for this novel. In fact, most of the ground covered has already been documented by concerned academics in books such as How Civil Wars Start, by Barbara F. Walter, and White Rural Rage, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman.

As the reader charges towards election day, our populist candidate gives voice to the dread at the heart of polarized politics: “We are on the cusp of our civilization rising to a new level of mass prosperity and renewed dignity of the individual, or collapsing into the horrors of a few secretive rulers holding all the money and all the power and all the say.” This is indeed our fear: that an impending crisis of techno-feudalism will be hastened by the delegitimation of democracy.

In this, the worst of all possible worlds, there is no institutional fix for simmering rage. And the intensity of emotion is now part of the problem. Voters sense looming disaster and choose a big man to shadow-box with unseen foes. That they are to blame for the destruction of their own democracy is meaningless as the noose pulls tighter. I won’t tell you how it all ends, because you already know. This is the last election before whatever comes next.

Marc D. Froese is a professor of political science and the director of International Studies at Burman University.

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What is curriculum and how does it prepare students for an unknowable future The Alberta government defines curriculum as “values, learning foundations and outcomes for Kindergarten to Grade 12 education.” In the past the process of writing and revising curriculum was generally straightforward, the work done by public servants in consultation with curricular and subject experts. That process hasn’t changed. But today curriculum has become hugely contentious—particularly social studies. Everything gets argued about in public, from who should be consulted on the curriculum, to what schools should teach, to the emphasis given to various material, to the sequence it’s taught in, to which grades to teach different ideas at, and then, finally—no small consideration—what students are asked to do with the material they’re given.

Under Hancock, the goal of revising curriculum was to present “a vision for education to 2030.” Those days of optimism would sour. Drafts of the new curriculum were criticized for emphasizing job skills over critical thinking. In March 2014 the Edmonton Journal broke news that an advisory panel for the new K–3 curriculum would include Syncrude, Suncor and Cenovus. NDP MLA Deron Bilous compared this to Scholastic’s failed 2011 effort in the US to take money from coal lobbyists and publish pro-coal education material. The news only reinforced public skepticism. Alberta’s curriculum process was tainted.

When an NDP government came to power, its goal was similar to Hancock’s. “The world is changing,” said then-minister of education David Eggen, restarting the curriculum process in 2016. “We know that the 21st century career involves using critical thinking skills… to process information, to access it and make evaluations on those higher levels.” Eggen consulted with eight subject-area working groups of about 400 people. The opposition UCP, however, decried the government’s eventual draft curriculum for, among other things, its “political correctness” and “absence” of military history. Then-leader Jason Kenney said if he became premier he’d “put that curriculum through the shredder and go right back to the drawing board.”

In the past the process was generally straightforward. But today curriculum has become hugely contentious.

Alberta’s leadership soon changed again, and the curriculum process restarted again, then slowed to a crawl, bogged down in controversy and disillusionment. The working groups were abandoned. New consultants were brought in. In March 2021 Kenney unveiled a new curriculum for all K–6 subjects. His draft was widely criticized both for its content and the way it was created. The revised social studies curriculum, in particular, was pilloried. Large chunks of it appeared to have been plagiarized. The Confederacy of Treaty 6 First Nations called it a “Eurocentric, American-focused, Christian-dominant narrative” that “perpetuates rather than addresses systemic racism.” Almost every school board in the province refused to pilot any of the new curriculum. Once more we were back to the drawing board.

In April 2022 Alberta Education released revised K–6 curriculum for math, English language arts and literature, and physical education and wellness. In March 2023 the ministry followed up with revised curriculum for science and French. Some boards announced they were prepared to let their schools pilot these curricula over the 2023–2024 school year on a voluntary basis. But social studies remained under wraps, a work in progress being assembled by civil servants under the watch of UCP education minister Adriana LaGrange and, from June 2023 onward, Demetrios Nicolaides.

In the fall of that year Alberta Education set up three groups—curriculum development specialists (“the specialists”), curriculum content contributors (“content contributors”) and teacher curriculum consultation (“teachers”)—to “inform” the continued development of social studies. The specialists were academics with expertise in pedagogy and curriculum, including Kathryn Crawford, Ambrose University; Meyranie Giroux, Conseil Scolaire Centre-Nord; J-C Couture, University of Alberta; Pierre Rousseau, Campus St-Jean (U of A); Craig Harding, Mount Royal University; Amy von Heyking, University of Lethbridge; Yvonne Poitras Pratt, University of Calgary; and David Scott, U of C.

The content contributors worked in political science departments at either the University of Calgary or the University of Alberta, with the exception of Michel Kelly-Gagnon, a lawyer and former president and CEO of the Montreal Economic Institute. The final group was composed of 27 current or retired K–12 teachers. All groups were told the government’s goal was to get a draft ready in time for piloting in the fall of 2024.

What each group did that fall isn’t easy to discern. Terms of reference obtained through a freedom of information request showed the roles and responsibilities for each group were almost identical. All participants were asked to contribute social studies subject matter knowledge according to their particular expertise, review the draft curriculum and provide feedback, and engage in online and in-person “working sessions.” All group members were required to sign non-disclosure agreements. The teachers were given one additional requirement: “Be curriculum champions throughout the curriculum development and implementation process.”

Only after their engagement with Alberta Education was over and a revised draft had been made public in March 2024 did members of the specialists group speak out. In an open letter they said they were “deeply disappointed” to discover that their input had been ignored. They deplored the curriculum’s “failure to define key social studies concepts… such as critical thinking, citizenship, historical thinking, inquiry and multiple perspectives,” the limited opportunities it offered for critical thinking, and the tokenistic gesture made toward Alberta’s diversity generally and First Nations, Métis and Inuit worldviews and perspectives specifically. “An absence of clear purpose has created a random sequence of learning moments rather than a coherent animating vision,” they wrote. “Instead of a program that inspires hope and possibility for engaging the pressing issues of our world, this draft is an exhausting and unwieldy roadmap to a better version of yesterday.” In conclusion, they said the government must start over.

One of the authors of that letter was Couture, an adjunct lecturer of education at U of A. “The current programs bolted together just don’t work,” he said in March 2024. “The idea under Minister Hancock in 2010 was ‘less is more.’ We need to cut down on the content [i.e., facts] and focus on skills and competencies. That never happened.”

In an interview that March with CBC, Couture said it looked like the government had made token attempts to integrate pedagogical and curricular experts’ feedback. “Unfortunately, it’s a case of lifting key words and phrases and inserting them into what the government was planning to do anyway, which is still a very knowledge-based curriculum,” he said. “Knowledge-based” might sound good—but the approach, he said, is overwhelming. “How can you claim that you’re going to have time to do critical thinking and inquiry… when I am, as a Grade 6 student, being trotted through 100 knowledge items on the history of democracy, going back to ancient Greece and Rome and the evolution of the Magna Carta?

Carla Peck, a professor of social studies education at the U of A, says she spoke with Jennifer Cassidy, assistant deputy minister for Alberta Education, in October 2023, and was told that the draft curriculum was already complete. Nevertheless, that fall the ministry conducted a general survey, eventually completed by “more than 12,800” Albertans, about what people would like to see in the new social studies. The fact that a draft was complete wasn’t explained. From September 2023 to January 2024, ministry officials met with teachers, multicultural organizations, Indigenous and francophone communities and other education specialists for a series of curriculum consultations to supplement feedback from the three working groups. Yet very few of these people were actually allowed to see the draft. It’s unclear what their advice was, or whether it was taken into consideration.

At a glance, draft curricula from different Alberta governments generally have a common look. All subjects, from social studies to math to physical education, are presented in the form of a table. In the NDP government’s 2018 draft, for example, the table was organized into guiding questions, learning outcomes, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge and competencies. An “essential understanding” spans Kindergarten to Grade 4. The UCP government’s drafts are similarly organized, with slightly different categories: organizing ideas, guiding questions, learning outcomes, knowledge, understanding, and skills and procedures.

The criticism of Alberta’s recent social studies drafts generally starts with their framework. Lindsay Gibson is an assistant professor of curriculum and pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. Back in 2017 he was an assistant professor in social studies education at the U of A and part of Alberta Education’s curriculum-writing group—until he resigned in November 2018. His resignation letter to minister Eggen was critical of many aspects of the draft curriculum, but particularly the framework, also described as the “architecture.” “Alberta Education has been unwilling to make even the slightest changes to the framework even when presented with evidence that it isn’t helping teachers write learning outcomes that are clear and purposeful,” he wrote.

Gibson argued that the 2018 framework failed to present a “coherent understanding of history and geography,” adding that Alberta’s existing K–12 curriculum was already ranked last among all provinces and territories by Historica Canada for how well it addressed Canadian history and citizenship. (Historica is a national charity best known for its “Heritage Minute” ads and for publishing The Canadian Encyclopedia.) Eggen’s revised curriculum was unlikely to fare better, Gibson wrote, describing it as “far too present-focused.”

His criticisms echo how Alberta’s specialist group in spring 2024 decried the UCP government draft’s lack of an overarching vision. In their case, however, they saw in the framework too much emphasis on the past and too little on the present—a focus “largely on learning outcomes that do not ask students to think critically about events and issues in our world today.”

The main difference between NDP-era and UCP-era curricula is perhaps hinted at by these overarching frameworks. Eggen’s draft, for example, contains this high-level “essential understanding”: “Active citizenship contributes to the vitality of communities that can promote pluralism among diverse people in a democratic society.” In the UCP government’s 2021 draft, “essential understandings” had become “organizing ideas,” and many of them are longer, for example: “Understanding the history of our province, nation and world and developing cultural literacy allow us to appreciate the varied richness of our shared human inheritance of original writings, artifacts, stories, beliefs, ideas and great cultural and artistic achievements from different times and places. Lessons of the past and knowledge of diverse experiences help us overcome ignorance and prejudice and recognize our common humanity and dignity.”

Peck shared the specialist group’s concern about the UCP draft’s overarching emphasis on lessons of the past. “In this curriculum, ‘knowledge’ just means facts,” she wrote on her blog. “In history education… powerful knowledge means more than the mere accumulation of facts and dates… It also includes helping students learn how knowledge is created.”

Other criticisms of the curriculum rewriting process have included how one subject integrates with others taught at the same grade level. Peck, for example, argued that the April 2024 Social Studies draft won’t inform other subjects. “The argument behind having a common architecture [across curricula] is that it’s supposed to make it easier for teachers to do cross-curricular planning,” she said in an interview. “When they’re looking at the science [curriculum] and they’re looking at social studies, they can see connections.” But the authors of this draft “haven’t actually done a comparative analysis of what students are being asked to learn in math in Grade 3 and social studies in Grade 3 to make sure that the concepts are actually aligned.”

As an example, Peck referred to the learning outcome in the draft that requires Grade 2 students to “explore ways trade and taxation support local communities.” Specifically, the “knowledge” section expects students to learn that governments collect money through taxes, which is used to provide services such as police, healthcare and education. Peck argued this isn’t an age-appropriate expectation. “In math, they haven’t yet developed the number sense to make sense of these things.” She added, on her blog, “The concept of ‘government’ is too abstract for kids of this age.”

John, an assistant principal and teacher at a southside Edmonton K–6 school (who asked that I not use his real name), agreed. “To talk about the specifics of taxation policies and what the municipal government is responsible for—that’s stuff I’m having problems with [in] Grade 6 every year,” he said. When asked if the revised curriculum has an overall coherence, John laughed. “I think [we] used to have that in the old curriculum.” He says topics have become “mixed up” and “moved all over the place.”

This latter criticism seems borne out by comparing UCP drafts. The 2021 curriculum, for example, asked that Grade 2 students learn about the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who went from Italy to China, visited the court of Kublai Khan and travelled along the famous Silk Road, a vast trading route. This was listed in the “knowledge” column of the table, underneath a heading called “encounters with other worlds.” Over in the corresponding “skills and procedures” column, students were asked to “retell the story of Marco Polo’s journey to the Orient and back, and what he discovered in the Far East.” But in the 2024 draft the story of Marco Polo had disappeared entirely. This invites the question: If Marco Polo’s voyage had been considered essential content just a couple of years before, why was it now omitted It gives credence to the charge that this curriculum lacks a guiding rationale.

Peck also worried the revised curriculum left little room for student inquiry. The government “has clearly [indicated] whatever answer they think is the most appropriate for the guiding question and the learning outcome,” she said. Because of that, the curriculum “is very prescriptive.”

In 2021 Jason Kenney’s new curriculum was widely criticized both for its content and the way it was created.

Much criticism of the UCP’s March 2024 draft curriculum and earlier drafts alike involves their treatment of First Peoples. The 2018 version unveiled by Eggen, for example, with mandatory lessons on residential school history, colonialism and treaties, was dismissed for its “political correctness”; the 2021 draft issued by Kenney was deemed dismissive of Indigenous people and was at worst “racist.” Dwayne Donald, the Canada Research Chair in Reimagining Teacher Education with Indigenous Wisdom Traditions, said the process has been frustrating. “The way in which we argue about what should be in there is a distraction that serves the needs of the government,” he says. “We need to create a vision… about how to understand ourselves in relation to each other, how to understand ourselves in relation to the life all around us.”

Donald believes the latest curriculum continues to lack a unifying vision for how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people could live together. “We have treaties, and they’re sacred covenants, and they have been a massive curricular omission in our country.”

On April 26, 2024, minister Nicolaides held a press conference to announce that the curriculum had been revised yet again. The previous draft had been criticized for its reliance on lower-order verbs in the skills and procedures category, which Peck had argued encouraged less cognitive complexity and demanded less intellect and creativity of students. Among those verbs, many fell into the category of “remember.” Peck had found numerous verbs in the March 2024 draft that were stand-ins for “remember,” in particular “describe” and “identify.” But this revised draft had higher-order verbs including “evaluate” and “create,” indicating skills of greater complexity. In a briefing following the press conference, Alberta Education said that “verbs used in skills and procedures have been strengthened to encourage critical thinking.”

The revised curriculum had other tweaks. The changes reduced what some critics had seen as a too-heavy load and too much focus on memorization, and rearranged content to be more age-appropriate. Taxation, previously introduced at Grade 2 in the draft released just one month previously, would now be discussed for the first time in Grade 5.

Among the notable changes revealed in April were additional First Nations, Métis, Inuit and francophone histories, contributions and perspectives. But while the curriculum’s focus on First Nations, Inuit and Métis had expanded from the 2021 draft to the 2024 version, omissions remained. Nowhere in the new curriculum are K–6 students expected to learn about residential schools. This is despite the Truth and Reconciliation’s Call to Action 62(i), which calls on provinces to “make age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties and Aboriginal peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade 12 students.” Nicolaides said that some apparent omissions “relate to content in junior high and high school. So obviously, we haven’t developed that content. [But] I’m sure we’ll be able to address that.”

The Alberta Teachers’ Association had panned the March 2024 draft and wasn’t reassured by the April revision. In May the ATA called for the curriculum process to be paused. “We welcomed the opportunity to provide feedback… unfortunately, teachers’ recommendations aren’t reflected in this most recent draft,” said ATA president Jason Schilling. “Rather than proceeding to pilot a curriculum that we know is flawed, let’s take the time needed to get it right.” Among teachers’ unresolved concerns, he said, are a still-unrealistic number of concepts, some of which remain “developmentally inappropriate and conceptually inaccurate,” as well as a persistent failure to engage higher-order thinking skills.

Paul (not his real name), an elementary school teacher in Grande Prairie, is concerned that the latest revision still provides no guidance on how social studies classes should approach current events. This is quite unlike the 2005 program of study, which states that “the infusion of current events, issues and concerns is an essential component of social studies.” That version describes how to use current events as a teaching tool.

Paul speculates that the omission of current events from the 2024 draft is a result of a new code of professional conduct for teachers that took effect in January 2023 (and is now enforced by the Alberta Teaching Profession Commission, not the ATA). Under this code, a teacher may not teach in a manner that exploits their “ideological advantage.” By this, the government says, it means “perspectives taught to students in a biased manner with the intent to take advantage of a student’s uninformed or under-informed opinions.” Ministry staff say a similar provision is in effect in BC, and that the intent is “to make sure teachers and teacher leaders do not exploit students for material, ideological or other advantage while in a position of authority.” In Paul’s view, with the new code in effect and no guidance from the curriculum, “teachers could be nervous” about using news stories as opportunities to make learning more relevant.

A lack of clear purpose in 2024 “created a random sequence of learning moments rather than a coherent animating vision.”

Minister Nicolaides seemed to believe the 14-year process of revising Alberta’s social studies curriculum was finally making some headway. “I think our approach has been to take politics out of the classroom and give students a deep understanding of history, to understand an evolving and complex world, and give students the skills that they need to be successful,” he said at the April press conference.

He may have been too optimistic. A week later, at a May 3 debate in Edmonton between the (then) five candidates seeking the NDP leadership, all said the UCP government had irrevocably politicized the development and content of social studies. All five pledged to start the process over if they become premier. “We’ve got to ditch this curriculum,” said Naheed Nenshi. “You have my pledge that I will put experts back at the front of that process,” said Sarah Hoffman. The way we should rewrite curriculum, said Gil McGowan, “is by handing it over to professionals, including teachers, doing it on a regular cycle instead of all at once, providing a proper amount of time for piloting and development.”

Alberta’s new social studies curriculum will be piloted in nine school boards in September 2024. While it’s possible that more tweaks will have been made, the April 2024 version is likely the one that will be rolled out provincewide in fall 2025. That is, until it’s scrapped, and we start the process all over again.

Laurence Miall is the author of Blind Spot (NeWest Press, 2014) and writes on politics and culture for various publications.

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