Nazis Archives - Alberta Views

Sinner’s Banquet

Catherine Owen — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:00:20 +0000

by Randy Nikkel Schroeder
NEWEST PRESS
2026/$23.95/342 pp.

I’ve never read a book like Sinner’s Banquet. Randy Nikkel Schroeder has created a dark (and funny!) romp of a novel that fuses real and imagined Mennonite culture, noir tropes, Shakespearean-style insults and a deep goth sensibility.

The opening chapter drives you into the narrative at high speed with the surprise of Lethbridge, Alberta, being called “LA” and the energy of Schroeder’s similes such as “white as a peeled creamsicle.” The novel’s wild plot, which takes as many twisting turns as the protagonist’s turbocharged Cressida, involves the plight of Luke, a shunned Menno (due to adolescent sexual shenanigans in a church) now residing in Vancouver and working as a dealer, who gets on the wrong side of Serendipity Hamm, the “benzo queen,” after he tries to pull a scam. Fleeing back to his past with his doomed buddy Buddha to attend his uncle Ezra’s funeral, Luke just gets more wacko as he meets up with childhood accomplices, such as the deviously erotic Nora, and they plot revenge. I can’t give away the gory deliverance, but I must warn you, it’s intensely abject and not for the faint of gut.

The trio’s initial plan turns ever more complicated as it draws in a dastardly embalmer, a vicious gravedigger, an incipient deacon, Andy, who got the moniker Ratzy (for being a tattler), two dashing cops, a Hutterite and a nasty biker called Moby Dyck. The story recalls Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled tales, spiced with Trainspotting-style vice, with characters plucked from the mouth of The Big Lebowski’s Walter Sobchak (“I’ll dry your socks on your mother’s cross,” “I’ll make egg rolls with your foreskin.”) Benjamin Hertwig’s Juiceboxers and Susan Perly’s Death Valley also come to mind. But Sinner’s Banquet is unique, with uncommon scenes involving the history of Nazism, Dionysian cannibalism, a mysterious drug called Rumijch and the desecration of corpses. Grim, yes, but rollicking too.

The short chapters are full of clever allusions to everything from A Tale of Two Cities to Melville, insertions of Plautdietsch lingo (that “meidung” feeling), a plethora of jokes (at times repeating their “badabum” a bit too often, as when Luke inserts his “you’re a real poet” riposte with four different characters), and even some beautiful descriptions of the prairies (“the dark slopes of the Porcupine Hills and the windswept ridges of the Whaleback”). At the end of this unravelling world, Luke remains, both altered and unchanged by his brutal experiences, the entire narrative a kind of meditation on the Thomas Wolfe saying “You can’t go home again.” Sinner’s Banquet is a terrifically startling read, and putting it down, I wonder, “How am I gonna stir my butter now?”

Catherine Owen is the author of 17 books of poetry and prose.

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Should Canada allow the display of Nazi symbols?

Joanna Baron and Richard Robertson — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:24:37 +0000

Joanna Baron says yes

Executive director, Canadian Constitution Foundation

Der Stürmer was a German newspaper in the 1930s that published virulently anti-Semitic tirades. In Weimar Germany Der Stürmer and its publisher, Julius Streicher, were prosecuted for hate speech no fewer than 36 times. Yet each time, Streicher’s notoriety and martyrdom grew—the courts became an arena for him to display his odious views. As for the other German laws criminalizing anti-Semitic speech, history has delivered a clear verdict on their efficacy in preventing the Holocaust.

Despite this historical failure, European countries maintain strict laws against Holocaust denial, anti-Semitic hate speech and displaying Nazi symbols. Yet these same countries struggle with high rates of anti-Semitic hate crimes. Canada is now poised to follow this path: the Carney government (with its Bill C-9) proposes to criminalize “wilfully promoting hatred” by displaying specified symbols, including Nazi symbols, in public.

Holocaust survivors and Jewish communities rightly feel threatened and degraded when Nazi symbols appear in public spaces. The question is not whether such displays cause pain—they clearly do—but whether criminalization is the appropriate or effective response. I argue it is neither.

Hate and bigotry have always existed, irrespective of government attempts at suppression. And criminalizing hateful symbols doesn’t make these views disappear. It drives them underground, where they attract the allure of forbidden fruit and generate sympathy from state attempts at suppression. When hate is visible, civil society can respond with counter-protests, education and social ostracism—tools far more persuasive than government bans. Hidden from view, hate becomes harder to identify, monitor and effectively counter.

Visibility serves another crucial function: law enforcement can track connections between symbolic expression and genuinely illegal activity. Canada already properly criminalizes hate speech closely connected to violence or true incitement. Banning symbols divorced from immediate physical harm actually undermines those efforts.

Perhaps most troubling are the inevitable enforcement problems. Who decides what constitutes “wilfully promoting hatred” Criminal law can’t capture the nuances of context. Is a museum displaying Nazi symbols for education guilty What about political satire or anti-Nazi art If Nazi symbols are criminalized, why not Confederate flags, Soviet hammer-and-sickles or “F*** Trudeau” signs Speech bans depend on the state drawing arbitrary and subjective lines, chilling expression that people fear could be punished under vague categories.

Our Charter provides for reasonable limits on speech when genuine harm occurs. It addresses true threats and incitement, including provisions criminalizing the advocating of genocide, wilful promotion of hatred, uttering of threats, intimidation, harassment, mischief and unlawful assemblies. Creating special criminal categories for symbols risks politicizing enforcement and inviting inconsistent application based on whoever holds power. Sunlight and social revulsion work better than martyr-making prosecutions over a patch on a jacket.

Richard Robertson Says No

Director of research and advocacy, B’nai Brith Canada

Few symbols trigger as much emotion in Canada as the Hakenkreuz (“hooked cross”), commonly thought of as a swastika, or other Nazi iconography. Wherever they appear, these symbols invoke the memory of the Third Reich and the horrors of the Holocaust. In some contexts it is appropriate to use Nazi symbols for artistic, historical and educational purposes. But when such iconography is used to wilfully promote hatred, the Government has a clear imperative to act.

As a matter of principle, our democracy has no business censoring sentiments that are unpopular or even detestable. But our fundamental freedoms have reasonable limits; when rights are abused to promote hatred, an appropriate balance must be struck. This is a founding principle of our constitutional system. A limited prohibition on the public display of Nazi symbols is paramount if Canadians are to continue living together in a society of diverse opinions, cultures and faiths.

In Canada it is already accepted that our freedoms aren’t absolute. In R. v. Oakes the Supreme Court held that the federal government may impose reasonable limitations on the fundamental freedoms enumerated in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This would be the case for a prohibition on the public display of Nazi symbols, provided it is rational and measured and that the impact on freedom of expression is minimal and proportional to the harm such displays cause.

Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, proposes to criminalize the act of using Nazi symbols in a public space to wilfully promote hatred against any identifiable group. That such an amendment, if enacted, would infringe on Section 2 of the Charter, which guarantees Canadians’ right to freedom of expression, is not up for debate. It is, moreover, incontrovertible that, in our Charter system, it is permissible to create legislation that infringes on our fundamental rights, provided it is done within the parameters set out in the Oakes test (a framework for deciding whether government action that infringes a Charter right is justified). In this instance, the law would only apply to specific symbols, such as the Hakenkreuz, when used in a specific context. Courts have applied a similar limitation to other forms of expression, including obscenity.

The proliferation of Nazi symbols isn’t a theoretical dilemma. A growing number of neo-Nazi movements and other nefarious actors, exploiting societal divisions, are using Nazi iconography to promote hatred. With increasing frequency, Nazi symbols have been displayed in public spaces with hateful intent. This alarming trend demonstrates an urgent need to amend the Criminal Code to deter the use of Nazi symbols to promote hate, and to hold perpetrators of such acts accountable.

Amid the ongoing crisis of anti-Semitism and the worsening hatred plaguing our society, our government has a vested interest in restricting the public display of Nazi symbols that are being used to wilfully promote hate. The impact of the proposed legislation on individuals’ Charter rights is justifiable under Section 1 and would reflect Parliament’s sincere commitment to combating hate and protecting human rights.

joanna baron responds to richard robertson

Richard Robertson and I share the conviction that Nazi ideology led to the worst crime in history and is despicable. We also agree that Holocaust survivors and Jewish communities deserve protection from hatred. Where we differ is on whether Bill C-9’s criminalization of Nazi symbol displays advances legitimate government objectives while minimally impairing free expression. I argue it fails on both counts.

Robertson writes that C-9 would criminalize using Nazi symbols “to wilfully promote hatred against any identifiable group.” But Canada already criminalizes the wilful promotion of hatred, under section 319(1) of the Criminal Code. The Supreme Court upheld this provision in R. v. Keegstra, and clarified in Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v. Whatcott that it captures expression that is “ardent and extreme” in its derogation of an identifiable group. If displaying Nazi symbols with intent to promote hatred already violates this law, what exactly does Bill C-9 add?

The logical inference is that C-9 targets displays that don’t currently meet the threshold for “wilful promotion of hatred.” This means it aims to criminalize either displays without intent to promote hatred, or displays that lower the bar for what constitutes such promotion. Even if a judge uses discretion and declines to convict for displays without hateful intent, the bill raises the spectre of enforcement problems, inviting police to view simple displays of symbols as criminally culpable, and chilling protected expression.

My interlocutor’s own claims undermine his case for criminalizing symbols. He writes that Nazi symbols appear “with increasing frequency” in public spaces “with hateful intent.” If these displays truly constitute wilful promotion of hatred under existing law, why aren’t they being prosecuted Crown prosecutors have discretion to lay charges under section 319(1) when they believe there’s a reasonable prospect of conviction. The perceived need for C-9 suggests these displays don’t meet the current legal threshold, which means the bill’s purpose is to criminalize speech currently considered protected.

Simple displays of symbols could be viewed as criminally culpable, chilling protected expression.

Robertson also asserts that C-9 would satisfy the Oakes test for justifiable Charter violations. The Oakes test, however, requires not just a pressing objective but also that the law be rationally connected to its objective, with minimal impairment of rights and with benefits exceeding the harms. Other democracies’ experiences suggest banning hate symbols won’t further the objective of reducing hate. It instead grants them a mystique that attracts more people to the cause. Germany’s post-war symbol bans have allowed neo-Nazi movements to flourish there despite criminal prohibitions. France’s strict laws haven’t prevented that country from suffering some of Europe’s highest anti-Semitic hate-crime rates.

The comparison to obscenity law also is irrelevant. Obscenity typically involves private material and commercial transactions, not political expression, in public spaces. Nazi symbols, however odious, are inherently ideological and political expression: at the core of what the Charter protects. Courts have consistently held that political speech, even when deeply offensive, receives heightened protection.

Robertson dismisses practical enforcement concerns by gesturing to “similar limitations” courts have applied to other forms of expression. But he provides no mechanism for making the distinctions his framework requires. Who decides whether a display promotes hatred or is educational Police at a demonstration A Crown prosecutor reviewing charges A judge at trial At what point does someone know they’re safe from prosecution?

He also ignores the potential for enforcement creep. If Nazi symbols can be banned based on historical atrocities and potential for promoting hatred, what principled basis exists for not banning other symbols Indeed, justice minister Sean Fraser indicated he is open to widening the legislation to ban other symbols associated with hate. We can speculate: the hammer and sickle represents regimes responsible for the Holodomor, the Great Purge and the gulag, killing tens of millions. The Rising Sun flag offends many Koreans and Chinese, given Japan’s wartime atrocities. What would prevent these from also attracting criminal sanctions in Canada?

Canada already has good ways to address genuinely harmful conduct such as criminal harassment, uttering threats, assault, incitement to violence and, yes, wilful promotion of hatred. These address conduct and true threats while leaving mere offensive expression to social response. It is vigilance against bad actors, and confidence in the resilience of an open society, that will keep us safe and free, not new layers of state-enforced censorship.

richard robertson responds to joanna baron

Joanna Baron is right to raise concerns about freedom of speech, but her analysis mischaracterizes Bill C-9, the government’s proposed Combating Hate Act, as well as its historical parallels and precedents.

What Parliament has proposed is far less extreme than Baron would have readers believe it is. The government is not contemplating a law that would criminalize hateful speech—one of the proposed amendments identifies specific Nazi symbols, including the Hakenkreuz, and only under certain circumstances. For the proscription to be applicable, the accused would have to publicly display the symbol in a way that “wilfully promotes hatred.” That is a high threshold, and it will help courts distinguish acts that are intentionally hateful from those which, although objectionable, cannot be considered criminal under our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Still, Baron is no doubt expressing an instinctual skepticism shared by many Canadians. Government decisions that limit our freedoms should never be taken lightly and must always be questioned. But in this case, the law has clearly defined which symbols it proscribes and under what circumstances. Baron’s suggestion that the proposed amendments would be used to ban symbols that have not already been enumerated in Bill C-9 is unfounded. Any additional proscriptions would need to be implemented through the development of novel legislation that would be subject to the checks and balances inherent to our democratic process.

It is difficult to comprehend how Baron could describe these as “vague categories” based on “arbitrary” lines. In some instances, she’s simply wrong: she posits that Bill C-9 might prevent a museum from curating Nazi iconography, even though the legislation contains explicit exemptions for purposes that are “educational or artistic” in nature.

We will safeguard Canadians’ basic freedoms while contributing to a system of respectful discourse.

The notion that Bill C-9 or similar anti-hate laws would make policing more difficult is dubious. The legislation doesn’t prevent anyone from owning Nazi flags or materials, nor does it criminalize Nazi ideology. The law only concerns public displays of defined symbols when used to wilfully promote hatred. Our courts have already set a high threshold for what constitutes such conduct.

It’s not unreasonable for Baron to question how effective Bill C-9 would be in practice. But she misrepresents the results of similar efforts in Europe, where symbols such as the Hakenkreuz are already illegal. These laws tend to be more expansive than the reforms to Canada’s Criminal Code that Parliament has introduced. Moreover, it is logical to assume that, when a country introduces laws criminalizing anti-Semitic conduct, the documented number of anti-Semitic hate-crimes in that country will increase. Baron cites the phenomenon as proof that anti-hate laws do not work. In fact, it’s just the opposite.

Underlying Baron’s objections and misrepresentations is an apparent critical misreading of the relevant historical context. In her opening she argues that laws against anti-Semitic speech in the Weimar Republic failed to prevent the Holocaust, and that this is one reason to question the merit of similar legislation in the 21st century. This is absurd. The Holocaust happened because the Nazis overthrew the Weimar system and replaced it with a totalitarian regime. She also implies that these rules may have backfired and allowed Nazis such as Julius Streicher to depict themselves as martyrs. But this omits critical context about interwar Germany. Numerous scholars have shown that the Weimar-era anti-hate laws were too lenient to serve as a deterrent, while the authorities rarely enforced them, in part because the Republic was unstable and perceived as illegitimate, for manifold reasons.

Modern Canada, by contrast, has robust enforcement, a constitutionally entrenched Charter of Rights and Freedoms and a strong, democratic national ethos. Our society also has the benefit of hindsight: for most Canadians, the hakenkreuz is a symbol inextricably linked to the Holocaust and abuse of human rights. Banning its public display would reflect a consensus on the need for legislative reform to address the proliferation of hatred.

The effect of the legislation will not be to drive hate underground, as Baron contends, because Nazi ideology is already on the fringes of Canadian society. There is a difference between objectionable views that some individuals may hold and movements that openly use hate symbols to stir up violence against minorities and undermine democracy. Such practices endanger freedom of expression in ways that are far more pernicious and egregious than a reasonable limitation on public displays involving specific symbols. The government is being proportional and balanced, safeguarding all Canadians’ basic freedoms while contributing to a system of discourse that is respectful and peaceful for all parties involved.

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Shadows of Tyranny

Alex Rettie — Thu, 01 May 2025 08:00:06 +0000

by Ken McGoogan
DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE
2024/$36.95/320 pp.

Former Calgary Herald books editor Ken McGoogan’s Shadows of Tyranny is a collection of vignettes about reporters, writers, soldiers and resistance fighters who fought fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s not just a book about the past, though. From the silhouette of Trump on the cover to the final chapter raising the spectre of a possible US invasion of Canada(!), McGoogan’s angle is that he’s telling the story of a past age of dictatorship just in time for a new one.

Time, as W.H. Auden wrote in 1940, tells us nothing but “I told you so,” and the implication that interwar statesmen should have known what was coming runs throughout Shadows of Tyranny. Here’s McGoogan on prime minister Mackenzie King, who was before the war a committed believer in appeasement: “King wrote a note thanking Hitler for… a silver-framed photo of the Führer…. By this time, Hitler had already dispatched four thousand innocents to concentration camps and created laws turning German Jews into second-class citizens.” Whether King should have known what would happen in the future is debatable, but what’s not debatable is that many people throughout the 1930s, including many Canadians, were committed anti-fascists. King simply chose not to listen to them, as Chamberlain chose not to listen to Churchill until war had become inevitable.

McGoogan has a lot to say about those who enabled Hitler, but the heart of the book is the tale of how people of foresight and goodwill tried to prevent the expansion of fascism in Europe. McGoogan combines his flair for engaging narrative with meticulous research (of secondary sources, mostly, not archival ones) to tell stories many readers will be unfamiliar with. These include the story of Alberta born and raised Matthew Halton, one of the first to report from Nazi Germany in 1933, and later a renowned war correspondent. Halton’s level-headed view of the danger Hitler posed is contrasted with the chorus of politicians who were happy to see Hitler as someone they could work with. (That the Western Allies were later happy to see Stalin as somebody they could work with, and that some of the most committed anti-fascists were Stalinists, is a still-open wound of history that McGoogan touches on, but only briefly.)

McGoogan includes many Canadians in his book, but he also includes George Orwell and French Resistance fighters and collaborators. These people’s stories have been told many times before, as have the stories of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, so it might have been better if the book were more focused. On the other hand, the stories themselves are well worth reading, especially if they inspire readers to find ways to defend democracy here and abroad.

Alex Rettie is a long-time reviewer for Alberta Views.

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April 7–11, 2025

Alberta Views — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 19:15:08 +0000

Monday, April 7: The UCP government announced it will tie hospital funding to the number and type of procedures performed. Premier Danielle Smith said the new model will lower costs through competition between public and private providers. The Health Sciences Association of Alberta, a health worker union, argued the model will encourage private facilities to prioritize low-complexity surgeries. Others said the model will disincentivize preventive care and erode the public health system.

April 7: Public Safety and Emergency Services Minister Mike Ellis introduced Bill 49, which proposes the creation of a Crown corporation to deliver independent police services to municipalities. The legislation is widely viewed as the next step toward the UCP government’s goal to replace the RCMP in Alberta.

Tuesday, April 8: An Edmonton Zone Medical Staff Association statement criticized the UCP government for failing to protect the public from measles. The association calls on the province to begin providing regular updates and create a plan to reach a 95 per cent vaccination rate. As of April 11, 58 cases had been confirmed in Alberta in 2025. In all of 2024, only two cases were reported.

April 8: Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides introduced Bill 51, the Education Amendment Act. The bill replaces the word “private” with “independent” when referencing non-public schools. It also denies school boards from removing trustees without a recall petition. The change is said to be in response to sanctions imposed on Red Deer Catholic trustee Monique LaGrange after she posted a meme comparing the LGBTQ2S+ movement to Nazis.

April 8: An Angus Reid poll suggests that 30 per cent of Albertans want to separate from Canada if the Liberals win the upcoming federal election—a rate identical to Quebec’s.

Wednesday, April 9: In response to Municipal Affairs minister Ric McIver’s introduction of a bill proposing to repeal municipal codes of conduct and terminate all current complaints or sanctions against councillors, Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi said, “The bill is an affront to voters.” McIver argued the codes have been “weaponized” to silence councillors.

Thursday, April 10: The National Police Federation, representing the RCMP, responded to Bill 49, expressing “deep concern” about “a costly, unproven provincial police model, this time under a new name, without transparency, consultation or a clear financial plan.” The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, representing more than 700 sheriffs, said it doesn’t have enough workers for its existing responsibilities, involving protecting courthouses and transporting inmates.

April 10: A leaked email suggests Alberta Health is directing its employees to not speak to the Auditor General with regards to the AHS procurement scandal, instead prompting them to redirect inquiries to Rose LLP, legal counsel hired by Alberta Health.

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Should We Nationalize the Oil Sands?

Max Fawcett & Martin Lukacs — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 16:10:42 +0000

Martin Lukacs, the investigative journalist, editor at The Breach and author of The Trudeau Formula says yes.

This is a make or break decade for climate action, which will either usher in a transition to a low-carbon economy or lock in a future of floods and fires of the sort that have devastated Alberta. Increasingly alarming reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have underlined that we need to keep more than 80 per cent of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground. Yet epic shifts like that aren’t exactly the outcome of modest market signals, which are still the dominant approach of governments in Canada.

If we want to dramatically drive down greenhouse gas emissions, there’s no precedent of the private sector mobilizing at the speed and scale required. A carbon price—the preferred policy tool—simply won’t cut it. Instead we’ll need a revived public sector capable of leading a rapid and just transition off oil, making major public investments in green infrastructure, transit, retrofitted houses and conservation.

To adapt a joke from US climate journalist David Roberts, Canada didn’t help defeat the Nazis by taxing factories that weren’t producing enough planes and tanks for the war effort.

Just as during the Second World War, we’ll need vastly more public control of economic activity, this time geared to creating millions of good green jobs and raising the standard of living for all. And it should include deploying the most dramatic tool in the planning arsenal: full public ownership.

Should Canada’s oil industry be up for nationalization Yes, but with a strong caveat: not immediately, and indeed only after the industry looks different than it does now. The share prices of oil and gas companies are massively inflated, because they’re based on expected profits from fossil fuels they still plan to dig up and burn. Before we can even consider public ownership, those prices will need to drop. We should start with policies that cap production, curtail the ability of companies to explore for more oil, and cut billions in subsidies that have tilted the playing field in favour of fossil fuels. A tougher regulatory agenda would drive down oil companies’ profits and force them to start paying the full cost of dumping their waste into the atmosphere.

And instead of being bailed out, this is when they should be bought up—at fire-sale prices. Before we wound down companies’ fossil fuel operations, the last years of revenue would be used to help fund a broader green transition and retrain workers for renewable industries—because tradespeople who drill for oil can just as easily drill geothermal.

The public ownership option is already surprisingly popular. A 2005 poll showed that half of the country, and more than a third of Albertans, supported the idea—and that was without any party or politician of profile having advocated for it in decades. This will change as the case for bold thinking becomes more evident. Planning, banning, buying and banishing: these should be the new watchwords of the era.

Max Fawcett, the freelance writer and former editor of Alberta Oil magazine says no.

Bold, progressive ideas have plenty of political currency right now, and few ideas are bolder than nationalizing Canada’s oil sands industry. But when you swing for the fences you increase your risk of striking out, and that’s how this particular at-bat should be scored. Publicly owned oil companies aren’t necessarily a bad idea, and Norway, where Equinor (formerly Statoil) has helped the government save hundreds of billions of dollars over three decades, is proof of that. But unless someone has access to a time-travelling DeLorean, Alberta can’t go back and relive those years. As for the years ahead, a nationalized oil sands industry would almost certainly do more to harm the public than help it.

Why First and foremost, nationalizing a sector whose five largest companies have a combined market capitalization of more than $70-billion would have hugely negative impacts on investment in Canada and Alberta. Our fledgling cleantech sector, for example, and the companies in it that do everything from build wind farms to produce advanced materials such as lithium and carbon fibre, might pay the highest price— kneecapping, somewhat ironically, its ability to create jobs and contribute technology as the global economy decarbonizes. And whether we like it or not, external investment is the lubricant that keeps the gears from seizing up in an economy as small as Alberta’s—and Canada’s, for that matter.

There is, I confess, a well-fed devil on my shoulder who would enjoy watching a federal government led by a Prime Minister Trudeau try to nationalize the oil sands, if only for the reaction it would elicit from certain Alberta conservatives. But such a move would almost certainly be beyond its constitutional purview, to say nothing of the political consequences that might follow. And while the Government of Alberta could theoretically do it, the current one in Edmonton doesn’t seem capable of managing a lemonade stand, much less a multi-billion-dollar industry. Even its predecessors have failed badly on this account, from the disastrously over-budget Sturgeon Refinery (so expensive that it might as well burn literal money) to the Getty era’s failed forays into ventures such as meatpacking plants and pulp mills. Governments may not be universally bad at owning profit-making enterprises, but the ones in Alberta seem particularly ill-suited to the task.

That’s why we should focus on helping these companies adapt and evolve, not on expropriating their assets. Our goal should be to increase the public’s return and reduce its economic and environmental risks. That can be done through policies such as a higher carbon tax, one that encourages more pollution-reducing innovation and whose proceeds can be used to chip away at the billions of dollars worth of environmental remediation that’s still needed. But the cost of nationalizing these companies would be too great—especially when in the end it would fall most heavily on Albertans.

Martin Lukacs responds to Max Fawcett

An irony in this debate is that the Canadian government has already embraced the tool of nationalization. It just happens that they’re using it not to arrest climate breakdown but to accelerate it—by buying and attempting to construct an economically unnecessary and environmentally destructive project, the Trans Mountain pipeline. (Jason Kenney himself followed Trudeau’s example by backstopping Keystone XL with a $7.5-billion public investment.)

The silver lining in these disastrous moves is they should demonstrate that dramatic public intervention in the economy, shunned for decades because of supposed pragmatic constraints, was in fact avoided for entirely ideological reasons. Free market triumphalism consigned many of the most important levers of government power to the wilderness. But now that the fences neoliberalism erected around the political imagination are finally collapsing, we should vigorously revive bold policy to confront the climate crisis.

I happen to agree that nationalization of the oil industry is out of the question in the short term—Alberta and Canada have missed their chance to capture hundreds of billions of dollars in oil wealth for rainier days, Norwegian-style, which private oil companies instead made off with. But democratic economic planning in the energy sector must still be on the agenda. After all, the notion that we can stave off climate catastrophe with a “focus on helping these companies adapt and evolve,” as Fawcett suggests, is about as fanciful as time travel.

Globally, oil and gas companies have in their reserves more than five times the amount of fossil fuels than the carbon budget of the atmosphere can handle. They are determined to burn it all. Mere market nudges won’t knock the oil giants off this lethally lucrative business model. As we now know, they investigated and understood before anyone the science of climate change, and used that knowledge to spend decades funding disinformation campaigns to mislead the public and delay climate action. They’ve bullied and dictated policy to Liberal, Tory and NDP governments alike. Today, they are shifting to more subtle strategies, trying to delay decarbonization by accepting mild carbon taxes that give them a back door out of more serious regulations.

These companies will never adapt and evolve. Left to their own devices, they’ll only dig in and burn our planetary future.

A second irony in this debate is that it was indeed a Prime Minister Trudeau who came closest of all Canadian politicians to getting these questions right—Pierre Elliott, that is, when he introduced major public ownership and government involvement in managing the energy sector in the 1970s and early 1980s.

His National Energy Program had major flaws, asserting the authority of the federal government without sufficient political preparation and ignoring Indigenous rights. But he was right to create a strategy to increase control of a vital and poorly overseen industry, raising the federal share of revenue, increasing Canadian and public control of oil extraction, and helping with the conservation of energy. Before oil companies and the right-wing press launched a red-baiting campaign to turn the NEP into a bogeyman, it was highly popular: polling at the time by oil lobby groups showed the policies were supported by an overwhelming majority of Canadians, including a majority of Albertans.

The program remains one of the most ambitious and far-ranging interventions by Canada’s government in our economy, and a model of what we might do. “Despite the program’s egregious faults on provincial resource control, it deserves credit as the only time Ottawa ever stood up to Big Oil and its allies in Washington,” economist and founding director of the Parkland Institute Gordon Laxer has written. Our governments must be pushed to recover this willingness. This time, they should put hard limits on exploration, production, new pipelines and overall emissions; massively tax corporate profits to fund low-carbon improvements to our standard of living in healthcare, housing and public transit; use conventional oil to serve domestic energy needs; and yes, perhaps even eventually publicly own some companies—at a scale exceeding what Pierre Trudeau was willing to do. That would be the surest way to ensure we get maximum benefit as we wind down fossil fuel use and transition to a renewable energy economy.

One other area in which Fawcett and I agree is that none of this will happen under Alberta’s current regime. But governments change, and the political climate sometimes even faster. As Albertans and others experience cascading climate disasters and the increasingly visible impacts of a contracting industry, these opportunities may present themselves more quickly than we anticipate.

It won’t happen a moment too soon. As the IPCC has put it, staving off climate breakdown will require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” There couldn’t be a stronger scientific imperative to use every policy tool at our disposal.

Max Fawcett responds to Martin Lukacs

If you wanted to find a way to dump gasoline on the smouldering embers of Alberta’s separatist movement, you couldn’t do much better than follow the advice Mr. Lukacs lays out in his opening argument. After all, he is proposing to deliberately reduce the value of Alberta’s largest oil and gas companies—which all Canadians are invested in through the Canada Pension Plan, and which Albertans are even more obviously exposed to—before buying them at “fire-sale prices.”

When you’re the one intentionally setting the fire, though, that’s generally known as arson. Mr. Lukacs is right that these companies won’t be able to burn all of the reserves on their books, but he seems to overlook the fact that they don’t have to in order to thrive. The global transition to a low-carbon economy is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity, and our oil and gas companies shouldn’t be denied the chance to participate in it.

That participation is underwritten by the federal carbon tax, which is set to rise to $170 per tonne by 2030. This is the bridge that will help these companies cross the river, as it simultaneously forces them to reduce their emissions and encourages them to invest more of their capital in low- and zero-carbon alternatives. And make no mistake: There is nothing “modest” about the price signal that the Government of Canada has committed to, despite what Mr. Lukacs wants you to believe. Whether some people like it or not, markets will play a key role in helping us reach our net-zero emission goals—and in creating thousands of new jobs along the way.

I understand the temptation to compare the challenge we face dealing with climate change to the one the Allied powers overcame during the Second World War, and I understand why writers like Mr. Lukacs continue to do it. But a war against Nazi Germany and a global campaign to reduce emissions of an invisible gas are fundamentally different, and pretending otherwise only serves to obscure the challenge we actually face. Canadians were willing to make sacrifices and take steps back then that they would instantly balk at today, especially when the threat is still comparatively distant and diffuse.

But if there’s one aspect of this analogy that holds up, it’s the role that strategic alliances will play in any victory. Winning a war is a messy business, and in the Second World War that meant fighting shoulder to shoulder with Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. In the fight against climate change, it will mean working with corporations, including the oil and gas industry and the capital markets that sustain them. Yes, as climate campaigner Bill McKibben has said, “to win slowly on climate is to lose.” But winning slowly is preferable to losing quickly, and any victory on climate change is going to require as many people pushing in the same direction as possible.

And as much as I hate to trade in the kind of arguments that would appeal to Jason Kenney and his more fervent supporters, I can’t help pointing out the irony of a Quebec-based writer suggesting a course of action that would have disproportionately negative consequences for Albertans. We have not, despite what Alberta’s premier suggests, been sending cheques to Mr. Lukacs’s province to fund their social programs and other entitlements. But Alberta taxpayers have been net contributors to Confederation for many years, and the balance on that particular account is well in excess of $250-billion.

It’s time for the rest of the country to contribute to Alberta’s future. That doesn’t mean subsidizing oil sands companies or pretending climate concerns aren’t fundamentally reshaping their future. But it does mean using our public policy matches to light a fire under the oil sands companies that Albertans have helped build rather than burning them to the ground. Sure, nationalizing them would scratch an itch that some people feel, but the strategy wouldn’t do anything to solve the problem it claims to address. Instead it would discourage investment in Canada and make it far more difficult to create the kind of clean energy companies that we all want to see grow and thrive here. It would do very little to actually reduce global oil consumption and the carbon emissions it creates, as other producers would fill the void. And it would effectively reward other global oil producers who haven’t been trying to reduce their emissions the way ours have.

It would also blow apart the political cleavages that are already forming here in Alberta, giving life to a separatist movement that could be even more destructive than the one that consumed Quebec for so long. Yes, as Mr. Lukacs noted, a 2005 poll showed that more than one-third of Albertans supported nationalization. But that means nearly two-thirds didn’t—and I’d bet good money that if a poll were taken today the number would be even higher.

I’m all for pushing companies to move as far and as fast as possible in reducing their emissions. That’s what a rising carbon price will do. But in lighting a fire under them, we can’t afford to set the province ablaze in the process—and we should be wary of anyone who’s recommending the use of gasoline.

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Children of Freedom

Paula Simons — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 01:02:10 +0000

The National Library and Archives of Canada is an imposing example of mid-century modernist architecture, its 1960s Star Trek design vibe an odd juxtaposition to its archival purpose. Inside, the library aims to hold a copy of every book ever written by a Canadian, every book ever published by a Canadian and every book written about Canada.

Including, perhaps, the most evil book about Canada ever created: Hitler’s own personal handbook for the destruction of Canada’s Jews.

You’ll find it in the Jacob M. Lowy Collection, a treasure trove of ancient and rare Hebraica and Judaica. The collection got its start with a remarkable endowment from Montreal businessman Jacob Lowy, who managed to escape the Holocaust in 1938 and dedicated much of his life after the war to collecting the artifacts of Jewish culture that survived Hitler’s genocidal terror.

But the book I’m speaking of wasn’t donated by the late Mr. Lowy. It was purchased at auction by the library in 2019 for $6,000.

“Nur für den Dienstgebrauch!” reads the frontispiece. And on the inside front cover, Der Führer’s personal bookplate: “Ex Libris Adolf Hitler.”

Compiled by German intelligence in 1942, it details how and where to find the Jews of North America. While the first two-thirds of the book details Jewish organizations and clubs in the US, the final section provides similar demographic data for the Jews of Canada, based on public census and immigration information. The guide includes the “helpful” information that 48,724 Jews live in Montreal, 45,305 in Toronto and 17,236 in Winnipeg. But while those were the largest centres of Jewish population, the book records that 1,622 Jews lived in Calgary, 1,057 in Edmonton and 692 in Saskatoon.

From this pernicious document we learn that the Canadian Rassejuden—the “race of Jews,” to translate the offensive Nazi phrase—come primarily from Russia and Poland, with smaller communities from Romania, Lithuania, Austria and Hungary. The data is spookily precise. It records, for example, that exactly 92 Canadian Jews speak Magyar as a mother tongue.

Nur für den Dienstgebrauch! reads the frontispiece. This is a classified document, for official eyes only.

And pasted on the inside front cover Der Führer’s personal bookplate: Ex Libris Adolf Hitler.

Here’s the Holocaust brought home: a concrete testament to Nazi plans and ambitions to bring the extermination of the Jews to Canada. Some of those anonymous Jews neatly enumerated in Hitler’s columns of numbers were my own father, uncles, aunts and grandparents, who were living in Edmonton then.

We can tell ourselves it never could have happened here. That Canadians, that Albertans, would never have allowed it. But then, the Germans of 1942 had no monopoly on anti-Semitism.

In an era when anti-Semites can march through Charlottesville, Virginia, with blazing tiki torches, when neo-Nazis and their sympathizers storm and take the US Capitol, when Alberta too is seeing its own “blood-and-soil” nationalist rhetoric, this slim book should serve as a silent reminder of the need for eternal vigilance against the politics of hate and division, against the dangerous, toxic combination of mob violence and state sanction. Or state silence.

But the Lowy Collection preserves other messages too.

Included in its holdings is a copy of the first published English translation of the Passover service, the Haggadah—printed in London in 1770, when George III was on the throne. The translation was printed with those long 18th century s’s that look more like f’s, so “sufficient” looks more like “fufficient” and “sing songs” reads as “fing fongs.” Yet once you’re past the typography, the 250-year-old text, as translated by one Alexander Alexander, is remarkably similar to the version my own family recites around the Seder table each year as we celebrate the liberation of the Jews from ancient slavery.

“The likeness of this poor bread did our ancestors eat in the land of Egypt; all those who are in want, let them approach and partake,” it reads. “At present we are here, but next year we hope to be in the land of Israel, at present we are in servitude, but next year we hope to be Children of Freedom.”

Passover begins on March 27 this year. Last year, when my family held our Seder over Zoom, we imagined we’d be able to celebrate together and in person this year. Instead we are still in internal exile. We are all still in bondage.

The Hagaddah tells a story of hope, liberty and defeat of tyranny. It promises that evil cannot endure. For many faiths and many Albertans, spring is a season of resurrection, redemption and renewal. How we all need that hope and promise now—when it feels as though we’re at war against an invisible enemy.

In the words of Alexander Alexander, at present we are in servitude. But next year we hope to be Children of Freedom. Next year, may we be together, bound tight to those we love.

Paula Simons is an independent Senator, a former columnist for the Edmonton Journal and a long-time Albertan.

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Should government apologize for past sins?

David Bercuson & Mitch Miyagawa — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 20:10:24 +0000

David Bercuson, University of Calgary history professor, says yes.

Nations, religious groups and political parties sometimes commit great harms in the course of their development. In the past Canada imposed a residential school system on Aboriginal people that broke up families, imposed non-Aboriginal ways on Aboriginals under threat of punishment and tried to eliminate a social culture that had existed for thousands of years. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, west coast politicians, provincial and federal, imbued with the racism of a century, caused the federal government to banish Japanese-Canadians without a shred of evidence of disloyalty on the part of those citizens, displace them to other provinces and seize their property under the provisions of the War Measures Act of 1914.

When the steamship St. Louis arrived in Canadian waters in 1939 filled with German Jews trying to escape Nazi persecution, the federal government turned the ship away. No Jews were wanted in Canada at that time; anti-Semitism was rampant, especially but not exclusively in Quebec, and the passengers were returned to Europe, where many of them eventually went to Nazi death camps and were slaughtered.

These are but a few of the harms that Canada has inflicted on minorities. Should we apologize to the descendants for the wrongs that were done their ancestors Ottawa now has done that in each of these cases. The apologies won’t reverse history. Nothing can undo the harms that were done. Apologies do not “correct” history. But they can be powerful symbols to Canadians today that their nation—like other nations—is not perfect, makes terrible mistakes and needs to acknowledge those mistakes in order to allay the hurts done to the people who were victimized and to demonstrate to Canadians today that we acknowledge that great harm was done, that we are sorry for it, and that although we cannot change history, we must learn from it in order not to repeat it.

In 1959 the Roman Catholic Church renounced age-old charges of deicide against Jews, declared that all Jews at the time of Christ were not responsible for his death and neither were Jews in 1959 and, in effect, apologized for 19 centuries of persecution and slaughter. That apology put Catholic–Jewish relations on the road to healing and was followed by Jews and Roman Catholics drawing closer together than ever in history.

There must be conditions to these apologies. They cannot be handed out like transit tickets. They must be reserved for egregious cases. They must reflect real understanding by the perpetrator of the impact on the victims. Some sort of token compensation might accompany the apology. The victims—who may seek further action such as damages—must accept the apology as a first step in moving on. But apologies can be a sure sign of greater national, religious or other maturity. A real apology is an act of the heart. A nation or institution without a heart is empty of humanity.

Mitch Miyagawa, documentary filmmaker and writer, says no.

In 1989 My Dad received the first official Canadian government apology. An 11-year-old in 1942, he had been labelled an “enemy alien” and taken from his home in Mission, BC. His parents and older siblings were forced to labour in sugar beet fields near Picture Butte, Alberta. My dad, aunts and uncles didn’t talk much about what had happened. I grew up middle-class in the first decades of official multiculturalism, and that apology was the first time I realized the state was not always—or perhaps ever—a benevolent parent that had my best interests at heart. But my dad never questioned the government. He proudly called himself a Canadian. That pride in a country that stole his family’s life was a contradiction I explored in my 2012 documentary A Sorry State.

Making that film, I realized that government apologies are full of contradictions. On the one hand, they reveal histories of government acts of racism, sexism and colonialism that are at odds with official versions of the national story. In doing so, government apologies are important moments when the truth of our official histories—the ones told in schools, on memorials and in citizenship texts—is called into question, and with it the government’s source of legitimacy.

On the other hand, the illuminating nature of government apologies is always clouded by politics. In many ways, the apologies are strategic acts calibrated for maximum gain. They portray current authorities as appropriately sorry and determined to change things, while making insignificant or token commitments. They avoid implicating the current government, and place all the blame in the past.

I see a government apology as the result of colliding forces: assertions of state-sanctioned injustice and inhumanity, and the state’s attempts to remain the hero in a national myth of progress. Justin Trudeau seems to be trying hard to play that hero, and has made apologies a key element of his statecraft—five official apologies and counting, including for the Komagata Maru incident, the turning away of Jewish refugees in 1939, the oppression of LGBTQ military, and the hanging of several Tsilhqot’in leaders in 1864. The latest apology, in March of this year, was for Canada’s mistreatment of Inuit with tuberculosis.

There’s plenty to be cynical about in all of these apologies, particularly when the 94 Calls to Action that came out of the 2008 Residential School apology and subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Commission have yet to be honoured or implemented. Instead, “reconciliation” has become a government buzzword. We should be wary of the vague political promises and pat-myself-on-the-back subtexts apologies carry.

I’ve decided I’m more about reckoning than reconciliation. While they may be valuable flashes of suppressed historical fact, and serve as emotional release for many people, government apologies now appear to be taking us further from any true reckoning with the consequences of ongoing colonial rule.

David Bercuson responds to Mitch Miyagawa.

Mitch Miyagawa is right to be suspicious of government apologies. And he is correct that government apologies “are strategic acts calibrated for maximum gain.” We must expect politicians to act as politicians, whose chief aim is to protect their jobs and the salaries, benefits, allowances and other plunder that citizens bestow on them. But does that mean that every act of government, especially apologies, can be judged by the same standard That would be to reduce them to the same base considerations.

Government apologies must be limited to clear cases of injustice committed in the past that did great harm to specific people and that are considered unacceptable by the ethical, moral and social standards of today. Apologies should never be issued frivolously.

For example, economic and social policies of the 19th century did great harm to working-class Canadians, but they were part of the wealth-producing ideas of their day. If an entrepreneur built a factory in the 19th century with inadequate safety measures to protect the lives, let alone the welfare, of the workers who laboured there, should a government today issue an apology No. Because by the standards of that day, health and safety of workers weren’t considered necessary and just parameters of employment, even by most workers themselves. Today such working conditions are considered essential to the employment of factory workers. Expectations evolved because of the growth of trade unions, the election of progressive governments, changing social values and the realization that the basic economic costs of the lack of a safe and healthy work environment far outstrip the costs of creating that environment.

The same measure should be applied to any historical act of government, or lack of action. After all, we recognize degrees of culpability in our criminal law, and such degrees stretch back to Biblical times with the Ten Commandments and the Code of Hammurabi. Governments can be benevolent or they can be wicked or anything in between; not all actions of government are the same.

So too in the evil or malevolent acts of government. Some of those acts may be so heinous as to cause grave injustices to particular groups of people, injustices that were not deserved at the time or have since been condemned in the court of history. The words of Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court John Roberts in 2018, in referring to the 1944 case Korematsu vs. the United States (decided against Fred Korematsu by the US Supreme Court) are relevant here. Korematsu had challenged the internment of 120,000 Japanese by the Roosevelt government but lost his case because the Supreme Court decided the government had knowledge of security issues that overrode Korematsu’s civil rights. In 2018 Roberts spoke for the majority of the court in deciding to uphold President Donald Trump’s partial travel ban on people from Muslim countries, which Justice Sotomayor, speaking for the minority, had cited as equivalent to the Korematsu case. Roberts declared: “The dissent’s reference to Korematsu… affords this court the opportunity to make express what is already obvious: Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—has no place in law under the Constitution.” In other words, Roberts declared that the Supreme Court had been wrong in 1944 and that any reference to the decision to dissent against government action now is invalid.

The United States issued an apology to the Japanese-American community in 1988. At that time, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act. The Act acknowledged the more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent who were imprisoned in US internment camps during the Second World War. The legislation also paid out $20,000 in compensation to each surviving victim.

In this case, and in the case of Canada’s expulsion of Japanese citizens from the west coast in 1942, there was never any evidence that any of the people wronged had any intention of doing harm to Canada or the US. The motive for removing their civil rights in both countries was a racism that had lingered from the mid-19th century.

In the case of the St. Louis in 1939, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King sympathized with the plight of the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany but bowed to the then-deep anti-Semitism of many Québécois, as expressed by his minister of justice, Ernest Lapointe. The ship and its 900 refugees were denied permission to land in Canada. In King’s mind, evidently, alienating large numbers of Quebec voters was just not worth the lives of the St. Louis passengers.

In the case of Canada’s Aboriginal people, the 19th-century practice of suppressing Indigenous identity was widespread as a legitimate way for government to deal with the racial and social issues involved with western settlement. “Make Them All White Men” was the solution, and few Canadians took any notice, let alone protested against such action.

Now that official racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Indigenous policies are no longer acceptable to Canadians—or Canadian law—government apologies are past due. But apologies should never be handed out gratuitously, to any group who claims to have been discriminated against in the past, for frivolous political reasons. With politicians and governments, that is always a danger.

Apologies must be limited to cases of injustice in the past considered unacceptable by the ethical, moral and social standards of today.

Mitch Miyagawa responds to David Bercuson.

I respect that David Bercuson wants to address historical oppression and atrocity meaningfully. I was struck by a few things he wrote. I’ll use those points to expand on why I don’t want to see more government apologies.

First, he writes that “apologies demonstrate to Canadians… that great harm was done, that we are sorry for it, and that although we cannot change history, we must learn from it in order not to repeat it.” As I wrote originally, I do see value in creating more accurate stories about Canada, its origins and its current colonial state. I consider, for instance, the impact that the 2008 residential school apology and the Truth and Reconciliation process had on me. To see the scope of the damage of residential schools—and realize how these schools were, and are, part of a systematic campaign against Indigenous people—so clearly laid out, for all to see, was shattering.

While I agree with Bercuson that apologies acknowledge historical harm in a beneficial way, I’m troubled by the line “we cannot change history.” History isn’t something written in a book that’s locked away in a glass cabinet. It exists materially in the land around us, in our houses, in our villages and towns and cities. It’s in the way we relate to each other, and it exists in the stories we tell about ourselves and where we live. We carry history with us. I believe we can change it.

Governments already change official stories through acknowledging systemic abuse, racist policies or theft of land. But they put forward similar fatalist assumptions as Bercuson in their apologies—that nothing can really be done about what has happened.

There are two parts to an apology—setting the story straight, and action. The action is to restore dignity, respect, relationship and whatever was stolen. Governments miss this second part and purposefully misdirect our attention away from it.

On that note, Bercuson writes that “token compensation” might be a part of apologies, but nowhere mentions real, meaningful action. Only that a government might “learn.” He’s quite right that this is how governments prefer to apologize. Look closely at the ways governments try to “action” apologies through purely financial and symbolic means—in other words, token compensation. For instance, has Trudeau, for all his apologetic ways, made any significant response to the 94 Calls to Action in the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation plan If a government can’t move beyond mere compensation for pain, then how are we to ever trust any further apologies?

Finally, Bercuson suggests that these “great harms” are a natural part of a nation’s “development” on the road to “maturity.” I see a direct link between the idea of nations as forever growing, progressing and developing, and the ways our heads of state always make themselves the champion in the story of progress. I’m concerned that Bercuson is suggesting that “boys will be boys,” painting a picture of an “immature” nation making “understandable” errors and hurting others. Reading the argument as a whole, I worry Bercuson doesn’t see the difference between “apology” and “excuse.”

Fans of government apologies might argue that Canadian governments are actually limited in what they can do. Governments are actually capable of changing a lot, and suddenly. Power can be redistributed on a large scale. But for now (thankfully) we have a system where one head is never strong enough to do that. A head is always scared it will get chopped off and replaced by another one.

The Canadian government has a body, too, made up of departments, sections and branches, fuelled by money and trade, functioning to regulate and control populations through various means: police, law, ways we are permitted to live, culture, history. The body has remained the same since Confederation, and though it may have evolved, it is still only fundamentally capable of governing in certain ways.

This is the situation for government apologies. A 150-year-old body with a new head every four years tries to convince its citizens of its own reform by way of serial apology—an “apology,” in this case, play-acted, without real consequence.

Horrors in Canada’s past live on today. Look at how the Indigenous dispossession and residential schools continue to have intergenerational effects, including high rates of addiction, children in care and incarceration. I do see hope to address these. But I see it on the ground, in the local and in the individual, not in the national or governmental. I see it in people that live together, geographically and socially.

As individuals and groups of individuals, we live in specific places and specific circumstances, not abstract. It’s up to us to make local cultures of respect, because it’s not something you can legislate or manage or order. I want to live in a culture of respect that individuals feel inside them and hold dearly, a culture that comes from belonging to a place, and seeing it as a real home. A local culture, based in community.

In this culture apologies would mean something. They’d be about communities getting healthy enough to talk to other communities, individuals getting healthy enough to get real with other individuals, and figuring out meaningful reckonings and actions. People are trying to do just this near where I live on the west coast. I don’t doubt people are trying this elsewhere too. Local community apologies wouldn’t be about relying on government to “have a heart,” as Bercuson wrote. They would start with our own hearts and those hearts around us.

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All The Rage

Tadzio Richards — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:30:56 +0000

The tipping point came a week from the end of the campaign, and
by April 16 in the Big Four Roadhouse on the Calgary Stampede grounds, United Conservative Party supporters felt scant need for civility. Not anymore. The UCP had won the 2019 Alberta election, taking 63 seats to the NDP’s 24. Sixty-four per cent of registered Albertans voted, the highest percentage since 1982, and 54.9 per cent of those voters chose the UCP.

Television coverage of the results played on multiple screens behind the main stage at the UCP election-night headquarters. Alberta Liberal Party leader David Khan, whose party won zero seats and garnered 1 per cent of the vote, was the first to concede. He congratulated premier-elect Jason Kenney but cautioned, “Some of your candidates have expressed values of intolerance and bigotry. Their fear-mongering was abusive and embarrassing. I urge you to root out and remove those values from your party. They have no place in Alberta or in our government.”

Kenney’s A-team promise was undermined by racists, homophobes, anti-abortionists and white supremacists that wanted to set UCP policy and capture UCP nominations.

UCP supporters booed. Over 1,000 were in the Roadhouse, many of them wearing white or blue United Conservative Party T-shirts and ball caps given out at the entrance. Many booed Khan with the same bitter gusto they’d hurled earlier in the evening at Justin Trudeau, when the prime minister also appeared briefly on one of the TV networks.

Blue, white and red balloons were tucked into nets high on the ceiling, ready to fall. Jason Kenney, the crowd anticipated, would soon ride into the Roadhouse in his blue Dodge Ram pickup. A man of many promises, he would ascend to the stage to herald a sharp reduction in corporate taxes in Alberta, a resurgence in the conventional oil and gas industry and, by implication, a return to the heady days when even a young man out of high school could get a lucrative wage in the patch. The crowd was in no mood for empathy.

The TVs cut to NDP leader Rachel Notley on a crowded stage in Edmonton, her husband and two young adult children by her side as she delivered her concession speech. “My friends,” she said, “four years ago Albertans hired us to do a very big job at a very difficult time. And we did that job—with purpose. And we did it with integrity.”

The Roadhouse crowd booed, a swelling wave that drowned out her speech.

“This is so great,” said one of the four men in tailored suits directly in front of me at the back of the crowd. “It’s awesome,” said another. They were well into their cups—three of them drinking cans of Bud Light and the other man drinking from a big plastic glass. “I was out door-knocking with this guy,” said one, the only man without a bald spot, his trim wavy hair flecked salt and pepper grey. “He’s an oil and gas guy, he owns a company up in Red Deer that had 50 employees and two buildings when the NDP were elected—they’re down to an office of eight right now.”

In her speech Notley acknowledged the 2014 “oil price collapse was hard, exposing deep vulnerabilities in our economy.” Her government’s accomplishments—from economic diversification to worker protections to strengthening public healthcare and public education—helped keep Alberta stable, she said. But the men in front of me were barely listening. Kenney had promised to repeal most NDP legislation, and as Notley spoke the men were talking about the Alberta Party, the centre-right party that won zero seats though they got 9.1 per cent of the vote. “It’s a polarizing election,” said one man. “You’ve got to be on one side or the other. People want aggressive, Trump-like, take-a-position politicians.”

“…And friends,” said Notley, on the screen, “today the number of children living in poverty is half of what it was when we were elected. That is 44,000 more kids who go to school with a full stomach and with clothes to keep warm in the winter.”

“Ah, resign already!” shouted the man with salt and pepper hair. “Concede!”

“…And to every person that has worked with us to stand against bigotry,” said Notley, “know that in Alberta there can be no place for racism…”

“Booo!”

“…and we will never shy away from calling it out, because we know we are all Albertans, fellow citizens on a common journey…”

“Na-na-na-na,” the crowd began to sing, “Hey-hey-hey, good-bye!”

“Friends,” said Notley, after congratulating premier-elect Jason Kenney, “the path we chose was right for the province. It reflected the province we have become—young, incredibly diverse, outward-looking, confident; a province of enormous entrepreneurial energy joined with the conviction that we can achieve more working together than we can alone. Friends, if one thing is true, it is this: We have fundamentally changed the politics of this province forever.”

“Never again!” shouted a man near the front stage, a call repeated in the crowd as if an echo. “Never again! Never!”

“Courage, my friends,” said Notley, to end. “It’s not too late to build a better world.”

“Goodbye!” a man shouted at the screen. “Go away!” screamed another, somewhere in the crowd, his voice guttural as if scaring off an intruder.

“Alright! Ladies and gentlemen,” said Dave Rutherford, a former talk radio host, on the microphone at the front of the Roadhouse. “What a great night for Alberta!”

“Yeaaaah!” The crowd cheered and whistled. “Everybody, please direct your attention to the screen,” said Rutherford, as a video showing Kenney and his blue truck began to play. “We’re getting close to you-know-who!”

“Santa?” said the salt-and-pepper haired man. “Santa’s here?” The men beside him laughed. They clicked beer cans and cheered.

Premier Notley dropped the writ for the 28-day campaign on March 19, one day after the Speech from the Throne and two days after she accepted her party’s nomination as the NDP candidate in Edmonton-Strathcona. The UCP was leading in the polls. They’d been ahead since the Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties merged in August 2017, and in mid-March 2019, according to CBC’s aggregated polling data, the gap was wide: 50 per cent for the UCP to 35.3 per cent for the NDP. Even so, the election timing looked good for the governing party, largely because the RCMP were now investigating a UCP scandal.

On March 16 CBC News broke a story—based on leaked internal UCP documents—revealing that during the 2017 party leadership race Kenney’s campaign provided fellow candidate Jeff Callaway’s team “with resources including strategic political direction, media and debate talking points, speeches, videos and attack advertisements, all aimed at undermining Kenney’s main political rival, Brian Jean.” Callaway, referred to as a “kamikaze candidate,” eventually dropped from the race to endorse Kenney. A year and a half later the RCMP were now “investigating allegations of irregular political contributions to Callaway’s campaign.”

The day after that story broke, the line to get in to Notley’s nomination event at St. Basil’s Cultural Centre in Edmonton stretched into the parking lot. NDP MLAs and cabinet ministers greeted people inside the doors. Speakers blared loud, peppy music. “Do you know this song?” asked NDP Finance Minister Joe Ceci as we shook hands. “It’s called ‘White Flag,’ by Joseph.” He leaned in, his voice lowering to a whisper. “It’s about never giving up. The lyrics are great.”

Inside the hall about 1,000 NDP supporters were gathering in, pressed tight, the jaunty song chorus filling the air:

…I could surrender but I’d

Just be pretending, no I’d

Rather be dead than live a lie

Burn the white flag…

The NDP crowd, from many backgrounds, old and young, was celebratory and defiant. They cheered Edmonton slam poetry champion Omar Farah as he performed two poems, including one for Jason Kenney—“we see how you treat women, trying to revoke the right to abortion”—and they roared when Rachel Notley took to the platform in the middle of the hall, surrounded on all sides by supporters.

For Notley it was a home crowd. She thanked her children—“having a premier for a mom is not easy”—and joked about her husband, Lou Arab, “an amazing partner and… you’ve also become a solid grocery shopper.” Then she got fiery. Notley drew attention to the RCMP investigation into the UCP leadership race—“Shame!” shouted people in the crowd—and highlighted “clear policy differences between me and Mr. Kenney [that] will have profound consequences on generations to come.”

While the NDP raised corporate taxes from 10 per cent to 12 per cent, said Notley, the UCP would chop them to 8 per cent and “blow a four-and-a-half-billion-dollar hole in Alberta’s budget.” In contrast to the NDP’s funding for new schools, new teachers and an updated K–12 curriculum, Kenney would “freeze spending” on education, she said, meaning that public funding wouldn’t rise to meet growing student enrollment. “Banks and large corporations get the biggest tax cut in history and education gets frozen,” she said of UCP policy. “It is just plain reckless.”

The crowd loved it. “Rachel! Rachel! Rachel!” they chanted.

The next day at the Alberta Legislature, in a much different event full of tradition and pomp, Lieutenant Governor Lois E. Mitchell delivered the Speech from the Throne. It was a long, laudatory list of NDP government accomplishments:

“Corporate and union donations have been banned…

“Trans Mountain [pipeline] remains in play because we compelled the federal government to step up and buy it…

“We have leveraged nearly $13-billion in new private-sector refining and upgrading investments in Alberta, creating more than 8,500 new jobs…

“We established a $25-a-day childcare pilot program and… will undertake a major new program to help young mothers and families save thousands of dollars….”

No crowds cheered or booed. But the subtext was clear: The campaign was on, and the election, at least as the NDP wanted to frame it, would focus on Rachel Notley versus Jason Kenney. That was a competition a lot of people should see, said one of the security guards I talked to at the Legislature. “You should come for Question Period when Notley and Kenney are both here,” he said. “She’s a sharp debater. And so is Kenney. He’s very smooth, almost too smooth,” he said. “All of us ex-police here,” he said of the guards at the Legislature, “when [Kenney] talks we go: ‘I don’t know’…. You know when you’re talking to someone and the hairs on the back of your neck go up It’s too smooth.”

Long before the election was called, Jason Kenney made a promise to UCP members. This was at the party’s first leadership debate in Calgary on September 20, 2017. Kenney shared the stage with fellow contestants Brian Jean, Doug Schweitzer and Jeff Callaway (the “kamikaze candidate,” who distinguished himself at this debate by scolding Jean barely 20 seconds into his opening statement).

In response to a question about how they would “engage” with the other candidates if they became UCP leader, Kenney said: “I would do what Peter Lougheed did in 1970 and ’71. He reached out to the A-team of Albertans; he asked people to step up for public service, to make sacrifices—accomplished people from business and other walks of life. I would try to do the same thing, [to recruit] a big team of principled, diverse, ethical conservatives…. I am absolutely committed to including my three competitors in our team, as key players in renewing the Alberta advantage.”

It didn’t go quite as promised. Callaway didn’t seek a UCP nomination and wasn’t in the front pages again until the “kamikaze” scandal broke. Jean resigned as a UCP MLA in March 2018. But their absence wasn’t the issue; Kenney’s A-team promise was undermined by a proliferation of racists, homophobes, anti-abortionists and white supremacists that wanted to set UCP policy and vied to capture UCP nominations.

“Bozo eruptions”—such as pastor Allan Hunsperger’s blog post that suggested gays and lesbians would burn in a “lake of fire”—had torpedoed the Wildrose in the 2012 election, a campaign in which they had been far ahead in the polls. Kenney wanted to avoid that. In his early speeches he often stressed the need for “discipline” among party members. And yet, at the same time he also held the door open for potential controversy.

While running for UCP leader Kenney signed a “Grassroots Guarantee.” He claimed it would “let us develop policy in the same way we created the party—democratically, with the grassroots members in charge.” This claim was quickly tested. In May 2018 the UCP held a policy convention where party members passed a resolution that would allow schools to notify parents if their child joined a gay–straight alliance. It was an out-gay-kids policy. Kenney told reporters it wouldn’t be on the party platform. “Guess what—I’m the leader,” he said. “I hold the pen.”

In other words, in Jason Kenney’s UCP, all opinions are equal, but some opinions are more equal than others. Instead of social issues, Kenney wanted the election to focus on the economy, as per the polls: “Forty-seven per cent of people in Alberta think pipelines or the economy are the most important issues facing the province,” a CBC poll reported in 2018. “Other issues, like education and health care, don’t even come close.”

The NDP also focused on those top-of-mind issues. In 2015 they had brought in the Climate Leadership Plan, which imposed a carbon levy, accelerated the phase-out of coal power in Alberta and—with the support of chief executives from Suncor, Cenovus, Shell Canada and Canadian Natural Resources—imposed a cap on greenhouse gas emissions from the oil sands. Prime Minister Trudeau gave federal approval for two oil pipelines out of Alberta—Trans Mountain and Enbridge Line 3—and said, “This would not be possible without the leadership of the Notley government.”

But the pipeline plans hit a snag. On August 30, 2018, the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed the approval of Trans Mountain because the federal government failed in its duty to consult “in a considered, meaningful two-way dialogue” with affected First Nations. The NDP had claimed their climate policy won “social licence” for pipelines and that construction would start on Trans Mountain by the spring. Now it wouldn’t happen.

Kenney pounced. He promised that if elected the first act of his government would be to repeal the “punitive” $30-a-tonne carbon tax. The federal Liberal government had said it would impose a carbon tax on provinces that didn’t have one, so Kenney’s promise was really a pledge to give provincial revenue to the feds, but politically that didn’t matter: Polls said Alberta’s carbon tax was unpopular.

Rage was a common mood at UCP events, anger mixed with paranoia…. The angry rhetoric and the flirtation with the far right were not isolated events.

Ontario’s new Conservative premier, Doug Ford, came to Calgary, and he and Kenney held an anti-carbon-tax rally for 1,500 raucous attendees who shouted and cheered as Kenney bashed at the spectre of Trudeau and Ford condemned “the worst tax ever!” A country rock band at the event changed the lyrics of “Sweet Home Alabama” to reflect the crowd’s antipathy to people such as Neil Young, the singer who once compared the oil sands to Hiroshima:

I heard Neil Young sing about her

I heard old Neil put her down

I hope Neil Young will remember

An Alberta man don’t need him around anyhow…

Rage was a common mood at UCP events, anger mixed with paranoia. At a September 2018 party forum for nomination seekers in Calgary-Glenmore, candidate Philip Schuman told the crowd packed into a community hall that “Alberta is under attack. Once again we have a Trudeau in Ottawa, and he is baring the hostile fangs of contempt at our people and our resources.” Schuman—endorsed by Calgary city councillor Jeromy Farkas and UCP MLA Richard Gotfried—didn’t win. His campaign was derailed after Press Progress revealed Schuman offered to fund an alt-right Instagram account that shared racist and anti-Semitic material, including memes glorifying Hitler. But he wasn’t alone: The angry rhetoric and flirtation with the far right were not isolated events.

Jason Kenney, for instance, had a long media trail of homophobic and anti-abortion comments dating back to the late 1980s. He didn’t apologize for those statements but said he wouldn’t say those things now. What he did do was vilify Trudeau every chance he got. Assailing Ottawa has long been a successful political strategy in Alberta. But Kenney widened the focus of anger to also scapegoat environmental activists. In this he drew on the writings of Vivian Krause, a researcher who has correctly noted that US philanthropic foundations give money to anti-tar sands climate change advocates, but then claimed, without evidence, that environmentalists were responsible for the oil sands “production cap”—actually an emissions cap—and the cause of the failure to get new pipelines built.

Kenney promised a publicly funded “war room” to “push back” at the “lies and myths told about Alberta’s energy industry.” He spoke of this to audiences as diverse as the Calgary Chamber of Commerce and a Grande Prairie gathering of the Yellow Vests—a pro-pipeline protest movement that also attracted hate groups such as Soldiers of Odin, white supremacists who were photographed near Kenney in the Grande Prairie crowd.

“Welcome to populist politics Alberta-style,” wrote energy journalist Markham Hislop, decrying the impact of Krause on Kenney’s rhetoric, “where facts are optional and indignation is a constant state of mind.”

“Welcome to populist politics Alberta-style,” wrote Markham Hislop, decrying the impact of Vivian Krause, “where facts are optional and indignation is a constant state of mind.”

The toxic anger bubbled into view on many fronts. In multiple constituencies prior to the campaign, UCP nomination candidates were disqualified owing to anti-Islamic social media posts—such as those by Todd Beasley in Brooks-Medicine Hat, who called Muslims “fools who are really worshipping Satan.” In Calgary-Mountain View, on the day the writ was dropped, star candidate Caylan Ford—personally recruited by Kenney—resigned after leaked Facebook messages revealed that she was “saddened by the demographic replacement of white peoples in their homelands.” Calgary-South East candidate Eva Kiryakos, a lawyer and one of many UCP candidates championed by anti-abortion advocates, resigned after tweeting derogatory comments about Muslim refugees. In Drayton Valley-Devon, UCP candidate Mark Smith, the party’s education critic, faced calls to resign after a recording was released of a 2013 sermon in which he drew parallels between homosexual love and pedophilia. Kenney let Smith remain a candidate.

The Smith recording was too much for nationally syndicated talk radio host Charles Adler, a conservative and friend of Kenney. On April 2 Adler asked Edmonton talk radio host Ryan Jespersen why Kenney didn’t “simply say this does not represent Alberta values… his party’s values, or his values, and be done with it?”

“It does represent Jason Kenney’s values and that’s why Jason Kenney is not doing a damn thing about it,” said Jespersen. “He’s beholden to Ezra Levant and Rebel Media. He’s beholden to [anti-gay-straight-alliance lawyer] John Carpay, who has compared the pride flag to the Nazi swastika. He’s beholden to home-schoolers and anti-vaxxers. He’s beholden to anti-choice activists. He’s beholden to people on the fringe that are providing a huge amount of support for him from the social conservative side of things.”

Adler asked why: “Politically it sounds suicidal.”

“Because he’s greedy,” said Jespersen. “Because he wants to be premier to become prime minister, because he’s watching [federal Conservative leader] Andrew Scheer and he has eyes on the ultimate prize, and he knows to get there he has to be premier of Alberta and he will do it at all costs. He’s lying to Albertans, Charles, and he’s lying to conservatives, which is the worst part about it.”

In the final week of the campaign Rachel Notley stayed almost exclusively in Calgary. Polls had the UCP ahead. But pundits and political strategists agreed that whoever won Calgary would win the election, and Notley held multiple rallies throughout the city. In a speech she said Kenney would not get a pipeline built. “He will stomp his feet. He will throw a tantrum. He will attack the rest of Canada,” she said. “And he will put Trans Mountain at risk.” The NDP had a plan for “an economy of the future,” she said, which focused on growing the petrochemical sector—“turning our energy into products the world needs and doing it with Alberta workers right here in Alberta.” The NDP plan also included funding for seniors care and a massive expansion of the $25-a-day childcare program across the province. The Calgary crowds were enthusiastic, if not huge.

But the polls didn’t move. Early in the campaign the UCP had promised to repeal NDP legislation that “prohibited schools from notifying parents if their children join gay-straight alliances.” Hundreds of people protested the policy in Calgary and Edmonton. On April 3, after the scathing Jespersen comments, Charles Adler interviewed Kenney and asked: “Why are so many people who bash gays and bash women… who bash Muslims, attracted to the United Conservative Party?” Kenney said that wasn’t true and didn’t apologize for incidents involving UCP members. Then the leaders debate, on April 4, failed to deliver a memorable moment that changed the polls

The tipping point—when UCP strategists stopped caring about the scandals—came with a week to go. Internal UCP polling, done before the writ dropped, found that 70 per cent of Albertans favoured cutting the corporate tax rate by at least a third. The implication—that for a majority of voters the promise of economic benefit trumped all other issues—was a basis of UCP strategy. But Kenney never acknowledged it until April 9, when he told reporters that bozo eruptions and gay-straight alliances were “manufactured outrage” and the UCP wouldn’t be “distracted by issues that voters are not talking about.”

It didn’t matter that CBC News published a bombshell story on April 10 alleging that fraudulent email addresses were used to cast votes in the UCP leadership race. Nor that follow up stories reported, as a whistleblower put it, that the alleged “big bosses” behind the plot were long-time party activists and Kenney supporters.

It didn’t matter that energy economists raised serious doubts about Kenney’s ability to shift Alberta’s energy economy into high gear again, doubts forcefully expressed by Markham Hislop: “Mr. Kenney is making a fundamental mistake about the Alberta oil and gas industry. If it’s not a mistake, then he’s deliberately misleading Alberta voters and that’s far worse,” said Hislop, in an online video commentary on April 11. “Mr. Kenney is advocating policies designed to help the struggling conventional producers, while rolling back the policies designed to support production growth from the big five [integrated oil sands companies] that will account for almost 100 per cent of growth over the next 20 years…. It makes no sense.”

None of that mattered. On election night Kenney drove into the Roadhouse in his blue truck, windows open, high-fiving the jubilant crowd. In his victory speech he denounced “those foreign-funded special interests that have been leading a campaign of economic sabotage against this great province.” He praised voters who chose “free enterprise values.” Cribbing from ex-US President Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon’s famous speech in 1969, Kenney said: “The silent majority has spoken.”

“Don’t forget to set your clocks back 50 years tonight,” wrote one wag on Facebook that night.

Not everyone saw the outcome as the return of a conservative fortress. At the end of election night I talked to Danielle Smith, former Wildrose Party leader and now a talk radio host. During the 2015 campaign she said Alberta was becoming a two-party province. I asked if she still felt that way. “More than ever,” she said. “If Jason’s strategy fails to get pipelines built, if Notley’s able to make the case that the more collaborative strategy was the better one, if he goes too far and too deep on cuts to get to a balanced budget and the NDP are able to point out places where [the UCP] make mistakes,” she said, the NDP could win again in four years.

“And if [the UCP] don’t succeed in moderating the more extreme social conservative voices… they’ve got to get that resolved, there’s a lot of gay conservatives here tonight and they can’t keep pushing them out of the party with some of the extreme rhetoric,” she said. “We now have a competitive two-party system. I think the days of having a dynasty of 30 or 40 or 50 years—that’s over.”

Tadzio Richards is an associate editor at Alberta Views. Share your reflections on the 2019 Alberta election: letters@albertaviews.ca.

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Reject, Accept, Embrace

Fred Stenson — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 21:07:13 +0000

All “new” things (most of which are not actually new) seem to go through a cycle from rejection to gradual acceptance and finally embrace. One might assume I’m about to wax philosophical about immigration, and one might further think, “I’ve heard all that. I think I’ll pass.” But wait! I’m going to start with a business example.

Back in 2004 I was researching a video project on the oil sands. I interviewed Ned Gilbert, an elderly Calgarian who had been sent from the US to Alberta in the 1950s by J. Howard Pew, owner of Sun Oil. The Pew family had created Sun Oil
(whose corporate descendants include Sunoco), and J. Howard was an outside-the-box kind of thinker on the subject of petroleum. For instance, he beat practically everyone to the idea of peak oil. In the 1950s, when the world was overflowing with nice liquid crude, Mr. Pew’s calculations told him that conventional oil would soon be depleting. He predicted it would run out in the early 1970s. If you recall, the 1970s featured market shortages of oil, near-panic and huge lineups at gas stations. People started thinking J. Howard Pew was a genius at prediction.

But back in the ’50s, J. Howard had decided he wanted to know everything he could about the giant gooey mess that was the Alberta oil sands. While everyone else was still laughing at bitumen and avoiding it, Pew wanted in. So Ned Gilbert, a tall, gangly young man, found his way to Calgary and Edmonton and investigated the purchase and leasing of prime oil sands. What this would lead to was the Great Canadian Oil Sands project on the upper Athabasca River: the first commercial-scale oil sands strip mine, hot-water separation and bitumen upgrading complex. It started up in 1967.

Something I learned from Mr. Gilbert was totally unexpected: in his era the conventional oilmen hated the oil sands guys. They regarded them as fools with an outside possibility of becoming competitors. The traditionalists pushed Alberta’s government to put a strict cap on how much of Alberta’s oil could come from oil sands. This went beyond business. Conventional oil people would not willingly share a room with oil sands types. Anyone associated with the oil sands could not take out a membership in Calgary’s Petroleum Club, for instance.

What makes this information feel odd is how it doesn’t square with current or even recent reality. Since the 1990’s upsurge of interest in oil sands investment, most of the world’s major energy companies have staked places in the oil sands. Many executives in the oil sands come from conventional oil backgrounds.

So there it is, my natural progression theory, in action. And now for immigration.

In the early 20th century, when Canada was in a huge hurry to populate the prairie provinces with homesteaders, it suddenly became a whole lot less fussy about who the immigrants were. Germany, with whom we would soon be at war, was a favoured happy hunting ground for farmer immigrants, as was most of western Europe. Ukrainians were less admired, but they were farmers. Clifford Sifton, Canada’s man in charge, decided to send out agents to lure them. Ukrainian farmer-immigrants were often called Galicians, because Galicia and Bukovyna were provinces of Austro-Hungary inhabited by Ukrainians.

The response from Anglo-Saxons already living in Alberta was negative. They saw the men in sheepskin coats and women in babushkas and reacted with aversion. They said publicly they feared an inevitable deterioration of the human capital of the West. Those who currently say stuff like this about immigrants to Alberta perhaps wear yellow vests or Nazi tattoos. These long-ago spokespeople were social leaders, activists, people we admire still today—like newspaperman Bob Edwards and reformer Nellie McClung. McClung was a member of the Famous Five, who established personhood for women in Canada. Emily Murphy, another Famous Fiver, was famously suspicious of the Chinese.

My point is not to run down these renouned figures of our past but rather to show how even they, wonderful as they were, had the same tendency to reject the new and different in society, before taking the step to accept and embrace.

So what is my point In a world where technology makes things instant that used to take time and require a bunch of pokey steps, isn’t the modern thing to do with immigration to skip the old process and go directly to the embrace?

As for oil, if there are oil people out there (conventional and oil sands, usually found in the same corporate bed) who are still expressing hostility toward alternative energy producers (wind, solar, geothermal or other), get a wiggle on. Go for the embrace. You’ll all be simply Energy Companies in a decade or less. Why dawdle #

Fred Stenson’s most recent novel is Who By Fire (Doubleday).Other books include The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

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Jason Kenney’s Vision for K-12

Alexandra Zabjek — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 09:41:09 +0000

It was by all accounts, a fiery speech. Standing on a blue-curtained stage in front of a couple thousand supporters at the UCP’s inaugural policy convention in Red Deer in May 2018, leader Jason Kenney went on the attack against anti-oilsands activists and the foreign money he says funds them. He spoke of war rooms, alliances and retribution. And then Kenney promised an equally full-throttled attack on a very different enemy. “If the NDP tries to smuggle more of their politics into the classroom through their curriculum,” he said, “we will put that curriculum through the shredder and go right back to the drawing board.”

The pronouncement drew 48 seconds of applause from the full house in front of him, arguably the most enthusiastic response of the night. In contrast to the wild applause, Kenney held a look of sombre gravitas, nodding his head to signal his commitment to that pledge.

It wasn’t the first time Kenney had denounced the Notley government’s efforts to update Alberta’s kindergarten through Grade 12 curriculum. His talking points centre on the idea that the rewrite is being done “in secret” and with a “socialist agenda.” Kenney’s attacks on curriculum have been consistent with his commentary on such issues as school funding, parental rights and gay–straight alliances. “We are profoundly concerned about the government’s direction…on education,” he said in his maiden speech to the legislature. “What Albertans don’t want is failed pedagogical fads or political agendas in the classroom.”

Since winning the UCP leadership, Kenney has offered glimpses of his approach to education—without actually releasing a formal platform on the file. There was his promise to “fight like heck” for private schools, his support for an alternative sex-ed curriculum in separate schools (“It’s not for me or the premier to dictate to the Catholic system how it teaches Catholic values”), and a core mantra about “parental choice” in education.

“If the NDP tries to smuggle more of their politics into the classroom through their curriculum, we will put that curriculum through the shredder and go right back to the drawing board.” – UCP leader, Jason Kenney

Albertans may not want “political agendas” in the classroom, but for Kenney education policy is all about ideology. His comments reflect an ambition to steer the province’s K–12 system toward a more socially conservative and market-oriented underpinning—even to encourage more Albertans to educate outside the traditional public system. And the fastest way for him to do that, critics say, is to undermine the public system itself.

The heart of Wilcox, Saskatchewan—pop. 264—is the Athol Murray College of Notre Dame, a private boarding school that regularly boasts of the professional hockey players who have risen through its ranks. In 1976 an 8-year-old Jason Kenney arrived there with his family. According to a 2014 article in The Walrus, Kenney’s father had been headmaster of a Winnipeg girls school when he was called to help the famous but nearly bankrupt Notre Dame College in southern Saskatchewan. Martin Kenney arrived at the school with his family and they stayed for 15 years, helping to build a preparatory school that is now known as a powerhouse for minor hockey in Canada.

Kenney’s educational history makes him unique among Alberta leaders: If the UCP forms government this year, Kenney would be the province’s first post-Depression premier to have graduated from a private school. (Richard Reid, Alberta’s sixth premier, who held the role in 1934 and 1935, was the last with such a designation.)

Alberta has about 100 accredited K–12 private schools, which range from religious institutions with tuition fees of a few thousand dollars to elite preparatory schools with august stone buildings and sweeping campuses, where parents can spend up to $22,930 for their children to attend.

Alberta currently funds private school students at about 70 per cent of the amount it provides for public school students—the highest such rate in the country. This system of public subsidies for private schools has existed in Alberta for decades, though the 70 per cent rate has been in place only since 2008, when Premier Ed Stelmach raised it from 60 per cent.

Kenney has been effusive in his support for private education. During a telephone town hall last August, he accused the NDP of greenlighting a campaign to defund private schools and said he’d vigorously defend “school choice.” (Rachel Notley indeed criticized public funding for private schools while in opposition, but has not changed the funding formula as premier.) What his pledge means is unclear. When a UCP spokeswoman was contacted by Alberta Views for an interview with Kenney, she replied: “Our platform is currently under development and we will have more to say about our vision for Alberta’s education system closer to the election.”

The UCP has released several policy documents, including a draft policy framework in January 2018 that called for “equal funding regardless of school choice—public, separate, charter, home or private.” A few months later, at the party’s first annual general meeting in Red Deer, UCP members voted for a slightly amended statement, to ensure “equitable per-student funding in accordance with school choice.”

The change from “equal” seems notable. But “equitable” is open to interpretation, perhaps deliberately so. Does it mean maintaining the status quo Could it mean raising the per-student grant for private schools, possibly to the same level as for public schools Could it mean giving money for private schools’ capital projects Perhaps private schools could apply for other grants they’ve long been denied—for transportation or technology or class-size reduction initiatives.

“Choice” is also open to interpretation—the word is sprinkled throughout UCP education policy declarations and Kenney uses it constantly in speeches. He frames it in the context of parents being able to select a specific program, school or pedagogical approach for their child. On his now-defunct “grassroots guarantee” website, Kenney wrote in 2017 that parental choice “is one way to keep the whole system more accountable… through a kind of positive internal competition [between schools].”

The Alberta-based non-profit Parents for Choice in Education, which was front and centre at the Red Deer convention, argues “parents are the experts on their own children, and they should be free to choose the method of schooling that best meets the needs of their families.” (The organization did not respond to requests for an interview.)

Others worry “choice” means exclusivity and elitism. For Barbara Silva, communications director for Support Our Students (SOS), education conversations that focus on “choice” too often centre on parents—not the students the system is meant to serve. “‘Choice’ is absolutely a euphemism for segregation,” she says. “It’s dangerous language because it means segregation [and] it means parents can do what they want with their children. It’s geared towards the parent—or the taxpayer—and rarely refers to the rights of the child.”

Such language is an affront to the notion of the public good, she says. “It’s never combined with the expectation of what education should achieve. Children have a right to equitable access to public education. That is not a parent’s choice.”

SOS is a non-profit born out of the budget cuts that threatened Alberta’s K–12 system in 2015. The group says it wants public funds to go only to public schools. Silva views Kenney and the UCP as part of a larger right-wing populist movement that has swept from Donald Trump’s America to Doug Ford’s Ontario. She notes that within a month of the PC victory in Ontario last year, Ford’s government cancelled a $100-million fund for school repairs. Kenney himself has promised a period of “sustained restraint in spending.” Silva expects this means slashing funds to public education.

She adds, however, that the ultimate goal of cuts may not be fiscal restraint but rather the undermining of public education, as in the US, where parents become fed up with rundown public schools and overcrowded classrooms and opt for private education instead. “If you… believe Alberta is immune to these forces, that would be ludicrous,” she says.

If a UCP government increases the per-student grant for private schools or adds capital funding or other funding streams for private schools, this could increase demand for private education. But organizations such as the Association of Independent Schools and Colleges in Alberta say they aren’t pushing for an increase to per student funding. “When we talk to education ministers, we’ve always said we want predictability and sustainability so we can plan longer term,” says John Jagersma, who heads the association.

The UCP has stated it would promote “school choice” by encouraging an expansion of charter schools. Alberta is the only province to have charters, which were brought in by the Klein government in the early 1990s. Such schools must deliver education in a way that isn’t found in existing public systems. The province currently caps the number of charter school authorities at 15, though each may have several campuses. “Right now, charters serve about 9,000 students but growth isn’t possible because we’re capped,” says Dale Erickson, the superintendent of the Calgary Arts Academy. “Most charters have large waiting lists but because there are limits on space, we can’t expand.”

At present, opening a new charter school isn’t easy. A charter authority must apply to the local school board and explain why a particular educational model is needed. (Alberta’s existing charters include Almadina, which has “a unique emphasis on English language acquisition”; Boyle Street Education Centre, whose students’ education has been interrupted; and Suzuki Charter, with its focus on music.) The board might then open such a program itself. If not, the group can ask the minister of education for permission to open a charter school. Over the past five years, the ministry received five such applications. None were approved.

Erickson says charter schools are often misunderstood, even by education ministers. “Whenever there’s a change in [minister], charter schools have had to start over to help the ministry understand what a charter is,” Erickson says.

ast October Premier Notley attended a seemingly innocuous event at Edmonton’s Hazeldean elementary school. “Read-in Week” encourages prominent community members to read to schoolchildren. Notley posted a photo of herself on Twitter reading Mouseland to a group of students seated cross-legged on a carpeted floor. The book is about a group of mice who vow to vote out their cat leaders, who don’t have the interests of mice at heart. The tale was famously narrated by NDP grandfather Tommy Douglas as his party, the CCF, was en route to winning the 1944 provincial election in Saskatchewan.

Kenney responded quickly on Twitter: “The NDP tries to assure Albertans they’re not pushing political ideology in their curriculum reform. But when the premier visits young students in the classroom, what does she read to them NDP founder Tommy Douglas’s socialist propaganda tale Mouseland. We can’t make this up!”

For the past two years, Kenney has consistently attacked the NDP’s curriculum overhaul as a “socialist” project being done “in secret.” A major curriculum rewrite, initiated by the Redford government, was already underway when the NDP won power. In 2016 the new government formally relaunched the $64-million project, to take place over six years. The plan was to rewrite the entire K–12 curriculum. Some subjects, such as fine arts, hadn’t been updated in over 30 years, while others, such as social studies, had gone through a curriculum rewrite about a decade prior.

By 2017, opposition politicians such as Chestermere-Rocky View MLA Leela Aheer and conservative pundits were calling on the government to release the names of the hundreds of people—including volunteer teachers and education ministry staff—working on the project. The idea of a “secret rewrite” started to gain traction even though, according to Edmonton Journal education reporter Janet French, past rewrites have never seen the authors involved identified. Meanwhile almost 10,000 Albertans contributed to changes through a curriculum survey in May and June of that year.

As drafts and outlines of the curriculum were posted online, Kenney accused them of being “riddled with politically correct themes.”

“How do you get into the history of Métis settlements in a general outline but no reference to the First or Second World War I’m sorry, I’m not buying it. I think we’ve caught them trying to prepare a really distorted social studies curriculum,” Kenney said in a September 2017 interview with Canadian Press after the government released a 13-page draft outline of changes to be made to the social studies curriculum. A few months later, Kenney made his threat to toss the curriculum in the shredder.

Education Minister David Eggen replied by saying the draft curriculum does cover Canada’s military history—domestic and foreign—and cited “guiding questions” such as “To what extent do contending ideologies influence relationships within and among nations and countries?” Alberta’s and Canada’s history, including an emphasis on Indigenous relations, is central to the new curriculum, he told reporters, adding: “I find it very disturbing that someone would suggest otherwise.”

Carla Peck, a University of Alberta professor of social studies education, is part of a teacher focus group working on the curriculum. She’s one of about 50 members, mostly teachers, who review curriculum written by a different group of approximately 50 other educators, mostly education department staff. She does this work as a volunteer.

“The idea that the (curriculum writers) are all minions in some sort of left wing army is just ridiculous and foolish,” she says. “Teachers by and large… are ethical and committed to the work they do and the children they teach. Teachers are guided and required to abide by a code of ethics that includes not indoctrinating students.”

If Kenney makes good on his promise to toss the curriculum rewrite, Peck worries about all the time and work that will have been wasted. She’s also concerned about how much further behind Alberta’s students will be if they must wait for another curriculum to be pushed through the time-consuming process. Even once that curriculum is done, resources must be purchased, standardized tests rewritten and teachers trained. It could take another six years.

But more than that, Peck thinks ripping apart years of work would cause irreparable cracks in the education system and create distrust by the people who make it run. “Imagine you just put two or more years of work into trying to create the best possible curriculum for kids—and then you’re told it’s going to be put in the shredder?” she says. “Why would I ever volunteer again Why would I trust you would value my work?… It puts teachers in a place where they’ll be exhausted by the process and maybe lose interest.”

Why has updating curriculum become so controversial Steven Khan, an assistant professor of math, education and computational thinking in the department of elementary education at the University of Alberta, attributes it to our modern world of social media and deepening ideological entrenchment. “In that environment, where you don’t have a system of trust and policy coherence across electoral cycles, what might be happening is you end up listening to whoever has the loudest voice,” he says. “The broader political climate is somewhat toxic; the discourse around education can be toxic. And trust and transparency, the ability to contextualize sufficiently and the motivation to do so, has faded into the background.”

This increasingly charged political climate has expanded into the legislature. In fall of 2017 the Notley government passed Bill 24, An Act to Protect Gay–Straight Alliances, making it easier for students to set up GSAs and mandating that educators can’t tell parents when a child joins such a group unless the student is under direct threat of harm. A coalition of private schools launched a constitutional challenge against the law. Eggen threatened to pull all public funding from the 28 private school authorities who refused to obey the law (another 66 private school authorities complied) by June 2019.

Bill 24 has been a flashpoint ever since. Kenney opposed the legislation, and his criticisms have been echoed by Parents for Choice in Education and many Christian private schools. The Calgary-based Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) officially launched the court challenge, arguing the bill violates multiple Charter freedoms, including freedom of religion and expression, and keeps parents from knowing where their children are and who they associate with.

However, for Glynnis Lieb, executive director of the University of Alberta’s Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services, the backlash to Bill 24 is an attack on the LGBTQ+ community. “[Opponents] have been so vocal that people expect the UCP to change things,” she says. “This feels like a targeted focus on the [LGBTQ+] community that I haven’t seen in the decade plus I’ve been in Alberta.”

If Bill 24’s amendments to the School Act are repealed, Lieb is concerned for students who’ve been part of GSAs or even thought of joining one. “We’ve seen how quickly people will take a step back [when] they’ve just emerged from their comfort zone…. how quickly people revert to places of fear and ostracism.”

“‘School choice’ is absolutely a euphemism for segregation. It’s dangerous language because it’s… geared toward the parent—or the taxpayer—and rarely refers to the rights
of the child.” Barb Silva, Support Our Students Alberta

Whether Kenney will change the law governing GSAs is unclear. At Red Deer the UCP rank and file approved a declaration that the government should “reinstate parental opt-in consent for any subjects of a religious or sexual nature, including enrollment in extracurricular activities/clubs or distribution of any instructional materials/resources related to these topics.” For many, that means a repeal of Bill 24.

From the beginning, Kenney, a staunch Catholic and defender of parental rights, has said teachers should be able to use their own discretion to choose whether notifying parents is in the student’s interest. After the Red Deer convention, he said explicitly that the motion was “poorly worded,” that he “hold(s) the pen on party policy,” and that there should be “no mandatory notification” to parents of students who join a GSA. At the same time, however, the constitutional challenge is being spearheaded by an organization headed by a friend and ally of Kenney’s, the JCCF’s John Carpay. When Carpay made headlines last fall for comparing the pride flag to a Nazi swastika, Kenney declined to expel Carpay from the party.

Lauren Alston, the province’s GSA coordinator, thinks students will find a way to organize themselves regardless. But she still worries about the effects of a repeal. “Any attack on a student’s ability to control who knows they’re ‘out’ will immediately make students uncomfortable with even attending a GSA or accessing any of that information,” she says. “And it sends a message to other students.

Another UCP policy declaration takes aim at the Alberta Teachers’ Association. Delegates in Red Deer voted to support a government-mandated split of the ATA into separate union and professional bodies.

Professional organizations that both advocate for and discipline their members—whether doctors, dentists or teachers—are sometimes accused of being in a conflict of interest. For example, in 2018 a teacher from the Grasslands School Division saw her licence revoked after 37 years of teaching practices described by former students as “belittling” and “humiliating,” which prompted questions about whether the ATA adequately disciplines its own members. (A formal complaint was not lodged with the ATA until 2016.)

The ATA has both investigated complaints about teacher conduct and protected its members in regards to employment and collective bargaining since 1935. ATA president Greg Jeffery says his membership would strongly oppose any effort to split the ATA. What’s more, he’s “somewhat mystified” about the idea. Jeffery says he has written four letters to Kenney regarding the declaration but received no response as of late January 2019. “We have a collegial model in Alberta,” he says. “Our administrators are part of our association; a principal isn’t a school manager; a principal is a lead teacher within a school, and that’s their primary role, to be a model to the rest of the teachers. In other provinces, where associations are split, [this] often involves removing the administrators and it creates an adversarial relationship in the schools.”

In a May 2018 ATA News editorial, ATA executive secretary Dennis Theobald proposed a theory about the declaration: “While [the UCP] are not enamoured of the Association’s advocacy for public education and participation in curriculum design, nothing has raised their ire more than the ATA’s efforts to protect and create safe and caring spaces for gender minority students, teachers and others in the school community. These people understand that they’ll have to go through teachers to advance their agenda, and they’re cunning enough to know how to make that easier—just strip the profession of its autonomy; just split the ATA.”

Meanwhile, another storm over religious doctrine in schools could well explode when the province releases its updated sexual education curriculum for older grades. After last year’s provincial election in Ontario, Ford’s government announced it wanted teachers to revert to a 20-year-old sex-ed curriculum because it didn’t like changes made by the Liberal government three years before. In Alberta, Kenney has supported Catholic superintendents who want to write an alternative sex-ed curriculum that would retain faith-based messages.

Silva, from Support our Students, sees a parallel between Ford’s criticism of sex-ed in Ontario and Kenney’s attacks on the curriculum rewrite currently underway in Alberta. “It’s rhetoric used to undermine teachers,” she says. “If you can undermine teachers and undermine the curriculum, you give people pause and a reason to leave the system. And then you can grow the privatization movement.”

Alexandra Zabjek is a journalist in Edmonton. Her previous AV story (June 2017) was about Alberta’s Status of Women ministry.

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