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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Laurence Decore

The mayors of today seem to have little idea how powerful they can be when they’re fighting for what is right for their citizens… when they are both courageous and, importantly, creative in marshalling the support of their citizens against an oppressive “superior” power. Alberta’s big-city mayors,after all, are elected by citizens who live and vote in as many as 46 provincial constituencies and 20 federal ridings. Premiers and prime ministers are all too aware of the potential electoral danger posed by a mayor who can rile up so many people over issues that closely touch their lives.

Unfortunately, courage and creativity in fighting ill-willed governments are not in great evidence these days. Too many people in all walks of life are bowing to political (and economic) power that has become so pervasive in our province that almost no one believes it can be fought. Too many politicians seek office for power, rather than to serve. They know how to be elected, but not why.

Much can be achieved by a mayor who brings courage, creativity and a sincere focus on public service to the office. Laurence Decore, Edmonton’s mayor from 1983 to 1988, exemplified those values more than any Alberta politician since Peter Lougheed.

Decore’s father, John Sr., a chief judge of the federal district court and a former Vegreville Member of Parliament, instilled in his son a strong social responsibility to work to improve the lives of everyday people regardless of their sex, ethnicity or socio-economic status. Laurence was taught that the purpose of politics is service, not power.

On the day of his swearing-in ceremony—held for previous mayors behind closed doors in the presence of family and “upscale” political supporters and donors—Laurence Decore at the last minute ordered that chairs, tables, linen, cutlery, tea and munchies be set out on the plaza in front of City Hall, and that buses be sent to senior citizens homes to bring people to a “swearing-in tea party.”

One of Decore’s first moves was to fire the previous mayor’s chauffeur and order the “limo” be sold. He drove his own modest Ford throughout his years in office.

Once, during a heated public debate over the publicly owned Edmonton Telephones’ request for a $1 monthly increase to residential phone bills, one of Decore’s advisers sent him a note asking why he was making such a big deal out of a small increase. The mayor replied it would take a dollar from the already meagre food budgets of the poor. He convinced the phone company to apply more often for much smaller increases.

Alberta Report mid-1990s. In 1993 Laurence Decore’s Alberta Liberal Party got within a few thousand votes (in the tightest 10 constituencies) of forming government.

Early in Decore’s tenure the city administration was topped by a powerful Commission Board of senior unelected bureaucrats. While the mayor was a token elected member, the chief commissioner chaired its meetings. The mayor was in effect subservient to change-resistant bureaucrats and their boss.

On day one of his mayoralty, Decore ordered that the locks be changed on the private stairway between the chief commissioner’s office and the mayor’s office. He chuckled at the shouted fury of the chief commissioner when the man discovered he would henceforth have to use a public stairway and glass-walled waiting room until the mayor admitted him.

He also evicted the once-powerful members of the Commission Board from their parking stalls under City Hall, giving these to elected council members. He ended the practice of firefighters ferrying the commissioners’ cars offsite to be washed. Council members were made top priority for invitations to public events; commissioners, who’d been first before, now came last.

Within a few months, Decore convinced council to disband the Commission Board, replacing it with an executive committee of elected councillors and, to his great dismay at now being the lone bureaucrat, the chief commissioner. Councillors were rotated yearly to ensure each council member an equal chance at Executive Committee participation during their three-year term.

With elected people back in control at city hall, the appropriate balance of power was finally restored.

Decore saw to it that the Citizen Action Centre—which answered citizen questions and helped people who had issues with the bureaucracy—was given authority to act on the mayor’s behalf in resolving a host of issues previously subject to time-consuming involvement by the mayor and councillors and any number of bureaucrats. Citizens were amazed at the refreshing speed with which their needs were now looked after.

Each Friday noon, Decore hosted a high school student council and their police resource officer for a pizza lunch in the mayor’s office lounge. He didn’t have a political agenda to impart; he simply listened.

Also, each week he and top representatives from the Citizen Action Centre and Edmonton Transit System visited a different seniors home to bring residents news of current happenings at City Hall, to answer their questions and hear their complaints and suggestions.

When he had time for a lunch on his own, he often would go to cafeterias or modest restaurants and sit in the middle of the room. Before he’d finished his meal, people of all ages would have approached him with everything from a handshake to a complaint about potholes.

As part of the city’s debt reduction strategy, many councillors wanted to privatize services such as waste removal and building cleaning. Decore passionately argued that city employees had higher standards because profit wasn’t their underlying motive. He convinced council to adopt a 50:50 split between the public and private sectors to keep the latter in check vis à vis standards and costs.

He maintained a healthy respect for unions. He may not have always agreed with their demands, but no union leader left Decore’s office thinking they didn’t get a fair hearing. When the City’s budget needed assertive trimming, he knew city employees would need facts if they were going to believe the city wasn’t just artificially setting the stage for wage cuts. He implemented a “cascade system” wherein each layer of management was thoroughly briefed about budget details, then assigned to impart those details to the next level down in the hierarchy. In turn, those people did the same with the next level, until finally every employee knew the facts.

Using this system the City won an international Government Finance Officers Association award for the humanity with which it had accomplished downsizing with a minimum of grief to employees.

Laurence Decore with a mobile phone in 1986, when mobile cellular telephone service became available in Edmonton.

When so-called “senior” governments did things that harmed Edmontonians by depriving the city of revenue or by withdrawing critical services that supported people, Decore was fearless in taking on those governments and in marshalling the active support of the city’s citizens in his battles.

In his time, his city’s ownership of Edmonton Telephones was unique in North America. But EdTel was prevented by premier Peter Lougheed’s provincial government from receiving a fair share of the revenue generated by long-distance phone calls made by the company’s own customers. Decore asked Lougheed to “make it right” many times but was constantly rebuffed. He decided finally to place public pressure on Lougheed, with a strategy that humbled the province and its publicly owned Alberta Government Telephones (AGT).

In complete secrecy, a dozen telecom consultants were brought to the city and housed in a downtown hotel. For several weeks they developed a technical strategy whereby EdTel denied AGT the information it required to know what telephone number was originating a long-distance call. This rendered AGT unable to bill EdTel customers for long-distance calls. As a temporary fix, AGT operators throughout Alberta were forced to intercept outgoing EdTel calls and ask what number the caller was calling from. This worked for awhile, until a councillor working on the strategy slipped it to the media that there was no reason callers had to give AGT the right number.

Decore had a giant LED counting display placed on the City Hall information desk. It showed the amount of revenue that EdTel was being denied, right to the minute. He placed newspaper ads with mail-in forms people could use to demand that the premier give EdTel its fair share of long-distance revenue. Tens of thousands of those forms were completed, returned and dumped on the floor at news conferences.

Finally, after a long period of non-response, Lougheed—who had never before known a political defeat—agreed to appoint retired Supreme Court justice Tevie Miller to conduct an inquiry into Edmonton’s claim on its long-distance revenue. Miller eventually sided with the City, and EdTel was suddenly worth tens of millions of dollars more than it was before. The EdTel Endowment Fund, created from profits from the eventual sale of the public company, paid $45-million in dividends to the City of Edmonton in 2023. It ended that year with a market value just shy of $1-billion.

The province’s municipal leaders should be screaming bloody murder.

On another occasion, minister of social services Shirley McLellan announced the government’s intention to withdraw provincial funding for pre- and after-school daycare programs. Knowing how many thousands of families—especially single-parent ones—would be devastated by the withdrawal, Decore met with the minister within days. He calmly informed her that as mayor he had more than 700 buses under his control, each of which could seat 50 moms and kids who were about to be denied these important programs. He asked her to imagine the political effect of 100 or more of those buses—each delivering 50 parents and kids to the front steps of the Legislature—for a giant protest.

The minister reversed her position the next day.

One more great example of Decore’s courage in standing against “greater” powers occurred when Conservative finance minister Michael Wilson was developing rules for the coming imposition of the GST. At a Big City Mayors conference, it was made known that the minister was considering imposing GST on city departments that are provided services by other city departments—for example, when the law department secures rights of way for LRT line extensions.

At the next Big City Mayors meeting, fortuitously held in Ottawa, Decore circulated a dummy copy of a powerfully worded brochure sized to fit inside every city’s monthly utility bill envelope. The brochure bluntly explained the federal government’s intent—and its ultimate inflationary effect on property taxes—and gave all the information necessary for people across the country to phone their complaints to Wilson and prime minister Brian Mulroney’s offices.

Once the mayors approved the strategy, Decore convinced Vancouver mayor Michael Harcourt to walk with him across the street to Wilson’s office and demand to be seen. Wilson could hardly ignore the mayors of two of Canada’s largest cities. He saw them, heard the strategy, read the dummy brochure, recognized the magnitude of their potential political threat… and nothing was ever again heard about imposing the GST on internal civic services.

Decore knew how to use political power. That’s what politicians do when they know why they seek office.

Years before becoming mayor, Decore, as chairman of the Canadian Multicultural Council, organized a lobby effort on behalf of organizations who wanted prime minister Pierre Trudeau to include “multicultural” in the description of Canada in section 27 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Trudeau bitterly resisted, but in the end, the strength of Decore’s national lobby forced Trudeau to acquiesce. The Charter now includes this wording: This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians. That sentence enabled the flow of federal funding to support multicultural organizations.

After that, Trudeau harboured quite a dislike for the mayor of Edmonton. Decore simply didn’t care.

When, a few years later, new prime minister Jean Chrétien was forming his cabinet, Decore called him to promote Anne McLellan—an Edmonton MP well known locally but without national profile—as minister of natural resources, the ministry responsible for oil and other industries. He told Chrétien that McLellan was brilliant, a quick study and respected by the oilpatch. Chrétien, however, was determined to appoint a different MP, one with no connection to Alberta or the oil industry. The prime minister attempted to mollify Decore by telling him it wasn’t necessary to match ministers’ provinces of origin to the nature of their department’s responsibilities. The increasingly tense conversation went back and forth until finally Decore, by now quite ticked off, replied to Chrétien’s argument with: “Damnit, Jean… I’ll believe that when you appoint a fisheries minister from Saskatchewan!”

McLellan was appointed natural resources minister a few days later. She eventually became deputy prime minister.

When Canadian National closed the iconic Macdonald Hotel in 1983, it had become an embarrassment to Edmonton: a missing front tooth, a psycho-logical “downer” that dragged on Decore’s intent to revitalize the downtown. Learning that CN’s CEO was soon to visit Edmonton, Decore invited him to a meeting in his office. The CEO, Decore had heard, was a superior type who was highly conscious of his immense power and often dismissive of lesser mortals. When the CEO appeared, Decore had secretarial staff seat him in the glass-walled waiting room. Decore let him cool his heels in full view of the media for 20 minutes past the agreed meeting time.

When they finally met, after the CEO had explained all the reasons why CN could not possibly reopen the Macdonald, Decore unfolded a large black flag carrying the CN logo in white. He told the CEO that if a reopening were not announced very soon, he would fly the flag permanently in front of City Hall. Further, he threatened to organize a Pied Piper-style march from the City Hall flag-raising to the hotel, led by legendary jazz trombonist Big Miller. Decore threatened to nail up a proclamation at the Macdonald demanding that CN reopen the hotel as a display of its respect for a city whose broader region was responsible for more than half of CN’s national freight revenue.

At the same time, Decore told the CEO he would be equally difficult if CN continued refusing to entertain the relocation of its huge downtown switching yards, a move which would finally free the land to enable developments such as Grant MacEwan University. CN quickly announced the reopening of a significantly upgraded Macdonald Hotel, and within a year it was in negotiation with a councillor over the relocation of its downtown switching yards.

A few years later, as leader of the Alberta Liberal Official Opposition, Decore took his party to within a few thousand votes (in the tightest 10 constituencies) of winning the 1993 provincial election.

The man knew how to use political power. That’s what politicians do when they know why they seek office.

Alex Macdonald was chief of staff to former Edmonton mayor Laurence Decore (1983–1988) and an adviser when Decore became leader of the province’s Official Opposition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by Omar Ramadan
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS
2025/$19.99/72 pp.

The 2006 Lebanon war. The 2007 Lebanon conflict. The October 17th revolution in 2019. The 2020 Beirut explosion. The liquidity crisis. It’s against this backdrop that Lebanese-Canadian poet Omar Ramadan has lived and composed the poems in his debut collection, This Sweet Rupture, a lyrical and at times terrifying ride-along through Manitoba blizzards, DQ Blizzards, Whatsapp calls, Google Streetview, Istanbul taxis, Beirut checkpoints and the Vancouver airport.

The title refers to rupture, but the thread through the work is of bridging and blending: English with Arabic, father with son, nation with nation, history with modernity. Arabic words and script are used throughout, comprising perhaps no more than 1 per cent of the text, but present and prominent in their unannotated claim to attention. For the reader who speaks no Arabic, the effect is an erasure, and a recognition of lack or failure to know a world. For the Arabic speaker, it’s a different book. In the poem “Sesame Love” Ramadan asks the “question of ‘when did hummus become hummus’…/ What singular moment in time did the cultural lexicon decide/ this word is acceptable not to italicize. Does the OED have/ jurisdiction/ over what is acceptable.…” The couple buying hummus at the grocery store in this poem, well, let’s just say they make a bad choice—for an inauthentic product that has recently been the object of some boycotts—yet, he concludes, “…I don’t lay the blame at their feet, or in their hands, or on their tastebuds.” This is a book that you’ll think about while you read. But you’re not going to be told what to think, or what to do.

The title refers to sweetness, and in the literal sense, food is a recurrent theme across this collection. Lavish, sensory descriptions of home country foods are a trope of English-language diasporic literatures, and Ramadan doesn’t stint on these, but he gives the same loving attention to a Krispy Kreme doughnut, as in “Suckers”: “I thought about the sugar melting on my tongue. I watched the doughnuts/ from behind the glass plate pass through the conveyor, cooked fresh and live./ How the dough would glide into the oil, come out looking inflated. How the/ inflated dough passed under endless sugar glaze.”

Ramadan has finely honed skills as a storyteller, sharply  pinpointing the core of a narrative. He’s a multisensory observer, invoking tastes, smells, temperatures and those interoceptive sensations that underlie emotion. Whether he’s jaywalking to Safeway, fishing for sharks with his uncle, or watching his father disassemble a rifle at the dinner table, we feel ourselves viscerally present. The poems skip across geographies, but each is precisely placed and essential to the sweetness of the whole.

Dawn Macdonald is a writer and researcher in Whitehorse.

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Probably every generation thinks they’re at some crucial crossroads where the decisions they make or fail to make will reshape the future. In fact it feels like we have been living through a succession of such turning points, always on the verge of big change but somehow never quite making the turn.

After the 2008 global financial meltdown and the recession that followed, the worst since the Great Depression, pundits declared that we had got it all wrong, that the status quo could not hold. The financial chaos had revealed how costly the deregulation of the financial sector had been and how fragile was an economy built on massive mortgage-fuelled household debt. That many banking executives who had contributed to the crisis got huge bonuses while others were losing their jobs or their homes or were just hanging on made clear that things were indeed upside down. Political leaders talked about the need for a new morality, that we were seeing the dark side of globalization, that we could no longer tolerate corporate giants too big to fail. And yet in no time we were back to business as usual.

Or take climate change. A few years after the financial meltdown, Naomi Klein wrote her powerful This Changes Everything about how climate change will force the world to rethink, well, everything. It seemed no longer possible to ignore or pretend away the already evident consequences of climate change and the risks it poses to civilization. Extreme weather events were telling us our antagonistic relationship with nature could not continue. In Canada, pundits wrote that no political party could hope to win an election without an ambitious and credible climate plan. For a while we were making progress, albeit very modest given the climate crisis. Yet now it seems we are ready to backtrack. Not only can political parties run without a climate plan, they can promise to undo the limited progress we have made.

And then came the pandemic. COVID-19 exposed how woefully unprepared we were, how stretched we had allowed our health and social services to become, and the often fatal costs of privatizing long-term care. It made glaring the consequences of inequality and weak labour protections, as the poor, the marginalized, Indigenous communities, people of colour and frontline service workers were hardest hit.

COVID-19 made glaring the consequences of inequality and weak labour protections.

But the pandemic also showed us that better was possible. Governments of all stripes stepped up to protect our health and keep people and firms afloat, rolling out with unaccustomed speed billion-dollar programs that, for a time, even reduced poverty and inequality. Firms raised the wages of frontline workers who put themselves at risk so we could stay safe. We experienced the kind of solidarity that often comes with crisis, finding ways of helping each other and celebrating healthcare workers and others on the front lines.

In the midst of the pandemic, governments here and just about everywhere were talking about huge public investments “to build back better.” Change was in the air. And then inflation hit, the result of fragile global supply chains, war and greed. The pandemic programs were rolled back, as were the pay raises. There was no more talk of building back better. Even the COVID solidarity proved fragile, momentary, the now infamous “Freedom Convoy” revealing how angry many had become at government and how raw our differences. Social media, the major source of human connection through the lockdown, fuelled our outrage and magnified our divisions. Yet again the opportunity for change passed, the optimism and solidarity with it.

And now we face a new challenge. Donald Trump’s tariffs and insistence that Canada should become the 51st state have ignited an unprecedented burst of patriotism. Will this finally be the turning Perhaps to understand how to move forward we need to look back at how we got here.

It was not so long ago that most people assumed things would just keep getting better, that every generation would surpass the previous one. For decades after the Second World War, it seemed capitalism and democracy were not only compatible but mutually reinforcing, high profits and high wages could coexist, endless economic growth would benefit everyone. Unions were strong. Governments were active in the economy and in providing for our welfare. We owned things together—transportation, energy, cultural institutions, even a vaccine agency.

By the 1960s, in what has become known as the equality revolution, those who’d been left behind in the expansion of the welfare state were demanding to be let in and were making progress. Democracy was expanding, becoming more inclusive, more robust.

And then came the 1980s. While corporations and neoliberal think tanks had been fighting unions and the expansion of the welfare state all along, economic turmoil at the end of the 1970s gave the opposition their moment. The world was changing. Global competition was more intense. Former colonies were demanding more for their raw materials. Oil prices skyrocketed. Profits declined. Businesses raised prices. Inflation soared. Conditions were ripe for the neoliberal counter-revolution. Business leaders and neoliberal institutes pounced.

Defining neoliberalism is a tricky business. It’s a slippery concept and, like every -ism, is used in different ways and takes different shape from place to place and over time. Essentially it holds that competition in the free market is the route to freedom and prosperity, and that government’s role is to create the conditions for the market to work its magic.

As Karl Polanyi wrote in his classic work of economic history and social theory The Great Transformation, ideologies are often hijacked by powerful interests and transformed to support those interests. That was certainly the case especially in the Anglosphere as corporations invested heavily in a network of persuasion—media, think tanks, university chairs—to attack the welfare state and sell neoliberalism.

As a political project, neoliberalism is best understood as the single-minded focus on economic growth, the primary role of government being to create the conditions for business to thrive, stripping away as many of the barriers to profit as politics allows—capitalism with the gloves off. Competition in the “free market” would sort out the winners and losers. Inequality, in this framing, is not only inevitable but right. If the winners are unleashed, everyone benefits; good things will somehow trickle down to the rest.

The winners did win big, but without much of the promised trickling down. Instead, we got extreme inequality and increasing insecurity, as many, especially the young, find themselves competing for precarious jobs with few benefits or prospects, often working in cities where they cannot afford to live.

Neoliberalism has delivered corporate concentration, monopolies, plutocracy, a massive shift from public power to private power. It has even failed in its own terms. Profits grow but the economy not so much.

And yet neoliberalism refuses to die. It contains, it seems, the seeds of its persistence. Of course, those with power and privilege always try to hold on to both. Money talks, and with extreme inequality it talks louder than ever. Neoliberalism changed us. It changed how we view government and how we view one another. It changed what we think is important and what we believe is possible. It’s in how neoliberalism has changed us that it exerts its greatest hold.

Taxes are how we pay for the things we do together that we cannot do alone.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that we’ve organized ourselves such that our collective action problems—the ones we can only solve together—have hit the level of “polycrisis” while our collective toolkit has rarely been weaker. Decades of neoliberalism has eroded public power. Nowhere is that more evident than in how we have come to view taxes.

Taxes are how we pay for the things we do together that we cannot do alone. They are also the way we reduce inequality and deconcentrate power. The generations that preceded us were much readier to pay taxes than we have been. No doubt they grumbled—who likes paying bills?—but they kept voting for governments that raised taxes. That was how we got medicare, expanded education, built public infrastructure.

All that changed. Taxes became the third rail of politics, a no-go zone. Just think of the reaction of many business leaders to the modest change the federal government introduced to the capital gains inclusion rate in the 2024 budget. Even though it largely affects the affluent. Even though capital gains are still taxed at a lower rate than earned income. Even though Canada’s marginal effective tax rate is still the lowest in the G7. Investment will dry up, we are told. Why would it Investment didn’t suffer when not so long ago capital gains taxes were even higher.

People will flee, we are warned. Really Where will they go A telling study in the US puts the lie to the taken-for-granted assumption that when governments raise taxes on the rich, the rich take their money and run. Cornell sociologist Cristobal Young and his team recently published a study that examined whether millionaires do in fact move to lower-tax states when their state raises taxes. Their answer: no. Taking your money and moving to another state should be relatively easy compared to changing countries. But millionaires are less likely to move than any other income category, whether to avoid taxes or for any other reason. They prefer to stay right where they made their millions. The poor are far more likely to move, to escape poverty. Opportunity, community, quality of life matter more than tax rates. Of course tax increases have behavioural consequences, but so too do tax cuts.

Think of the language our political leaders use whenever they talk about taxes, offering us tax cuts as though those have no consequences, appealing to us as hard-working taxpayers as if to say we are paying taxes for what some “others” get—the hard-working taxpayer versus the undeserving. So we come to see taxes as a burden, punishment, even theft. No political promise seems to resonate quite as positively as the promise of a tax cut or a “tax holiday.” The revenue-neutral carbon tax, even as most Canadians got back more money than they put in, was made into a contentious issue.

Part of the “problem of taxes” is that people don’t like to be played for suckers, to think they are paying more than their fair share. Not only have we over the last decades shifted the tax burden from the rich and the corporations to the many, but the rich have become extremely effective at avoiding taxes, exploiting tax havens and loopholes, or even using illegal means to evade the tax collector. Ordinary people begin to think: If the system is rigged, why should I pay taxes?

Politicians have learned they should avoid any perception that they are “tax and spenders.” Yet all governments tax and spend. The questions ought to be:  What is it we should be doing together that we could not hope to do alone, and what is a fair and equitable way to pay for that What better way to constrain our ability to do big things together than to take tax increases off the table and treat tax cuts as a free good?

Not only were taxes off the table but government borrowing came to be seen as “for emergencies only.” We have been encouraged to view deficits as toxic and to measure governments on their ability to balance budgets. Here’s how this combination of tax and deficit phobia has changed our world: governments cut taxes on the promise that the cuts will generate so much growth that they will pay for themselves or will be paid for through greater government efficiency. But tax cuts never pay for themselves, and there’s never enough waste to cover the lost revenue. So deficits soar. And because deficits are supposedly toxic, public services are cut back. Quality declines. Wait times lengthen. We come to believe that we are no longer getting our money’s worth. If service is lousy, why not opt for a tax cut—even though that will make things worse—and why not support privatization, even if that makes services more expensive and less accountable?

Of course we need to be fiscally responsible, to manage fiscal risks, but that cannot mean giving priority to fiscal health over human health and the health of the planet. When the Trudeau government eschewed the long-standing commitment to annual balanced budgets, that was to the good. But fiscal hawks and much of the mainstream media continue to view deficits and increasing debt as a sign not that governments should raise taxes but that they must cut spending, regardless of whether spending was the primary cause and with no consideration of the human and economic costs of austerity. Robert Reich, after resigning from Bill Clinton’s cabinet, described the combination of tax and debt phobia as a conceptual straitjacket. And as we obsess over public debt, private debt breaks records and sets us up for more bubble-bursting.

Similarly, think about how we view government regulation. Regulations are how we protect the environment, labour and human rights. Instead, we have been encouraged to think of them as red tape, a drag on the economy. We are, it seems, ready to use the heavy hand of criminal law to regulate people but not so much giant corporations, despite their enormous power to drive prices and deflate wages, despite their devastating impact on our environment and on our democracy.

Yes, we have to take into account the costs of regulation, but we also need to consider what we lose through deregulation and regulatory capture, allowing corporations to self-regulate. Think of the bursting of the dotcom bubble, the Gulf oil spill, Enron, and of course the 2008 meltdown. Bruce Campbell’s book on the tragic oil train crash in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, lays out in devastating detail how regulatory capture contributed to the disaster. Years before, a deadly E. coli outbreak in Walkerton, Ontario, traced directly to deregulation of the water system, helped bring an end to then premier Harris’s “common sense revolution.” And of course, climate change and nature loss are the most threatening examples of regulatory failure.

All this to say we have organized ourselves in a way that makes crises more frequent and intense and has undermined the tools we need to make things better.

Government has come to be viewed as the problem. Disdain for government now comes not just from those who have been ill-treated or who got the short end—that is to be expected—but from our political leaders themselves. Governments, we are told, should not interfere in the market.

Decades of neoliberalism—of favouring private power over public power and, for that matter, private debt over public debt—have left us with bargain-basement citizenship: government asks less of us, and we ask less of government. There is no society, we were told. Don’t look to government for help or to society for excuses. Look after yourself and your family. Not surprisingly, research has revealed an epidemic of loneliness, as many feel on their own to manage all the change that’s coming at them. If strength is not to be found through common citizenship, many turn to the people they know and like, often people “like them.” The trust and solidarity necessary to act together across our differences are weakened. If the future is not ours to shape, democracy itself is diminished.

The answer for Canada is in rebuilding our collective toolkit and rediscovering our collective power.

So, given all that, am I optimistic, and if so, how is that even possible I find comfort in Antonio Gramsci’s formulation “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” I am optimistic, in other words, because I have so decided. Pessimism or cynicism sucks out all the energy for making things better. Despair is not an option. Gramsci, writing in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s as fascism was on the rise, cautioned that we must not underestimate the hurdles nor assume that better is assured—only that better is possible and we must fight for it. In these in-between times things could flip either way.

Most of us know the future we’d prefer—living in harmony with one another and the natural world, with security for ourselves and our kids, access to health, learning and the arts, affordable housing, decent work, a balanced life, a secure retirement, liveable communities, peace. Polls bear this out. What’s missing is the belief that we can do big things together, that we are in fact in this together.

Despite this, I do believe there are grounds for optimism of the Gramsci sort. While it’s true that Donald Trump’s Republicans won the White House and Congress, barely, Americans also consistently voted for progressive measures such as higher minimum wages, paid sick days, reproductive rights—when given the choice. Polls show that Canadians are ahead of their politicians in readiness to tax the rich and rein in corporate power. According to a recent Abacus survey, over 70 per cent of Canadians believe the rich and corporations are not paying their fair share.

Big change usually starts outside of conventional politics and political parties—in civil society. Despite everything, many people are fighting to make things better and sometimes winning. #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Pride. Four Indigenous women decided to fight against a bad bill that undermined Indigenous rights. They lost that battle, but their efforts became a movement, Idle No More, whose impact continues to ripple. It’s been a very tough time for environmental causes, but we might take heart from the recent victory of a coalition of activists in stopping the mayor and council of Vancouver from implementing their plan to reintroduce fossil fuel heating in new homes and buildings, which had been banned since 2022. It was only through the tireless efforts of childcare advocates over decades that we are finally getting a universal $10/day childcare program. Disability activists made important if modest progress with the recent announcement by the federal government of a new disability benefit for working-age adults. Unions are making something of a comeback, bringing in some of the hardest to organize service workers. Recently 20 unions got a taste of collective power when they joined together to stop the Ontario government from thwarting a teachers’ strike.

If the many out there fighting—for decent work, for peace and against racism and hate and poverty, for human and civil rights, for electoral reform, for basic income, for climate action—can overcome the learned neoliberal competitive bias and distrust, to see that they are stronger together, who knows what big things could be achieved Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth examined hundreds of protests and civil actions globally, trying to understand what it takes to move the yardsticks, and what she found, to her surprise, was that if just 3.5 per cent of a population join together to fight—peacefully—for progressive change, they almost invariably succeed.

Previous generations built things. They gave us medicare, pensions, welfare, employment insurance, universal education, public infrastructure. They passed along a world better than they inherited. We have not taken good care of what they built. What will we build?

In the face of Donald Trump’s threats and tariffs, some are urging us to do whatever it takes to appease him, and many business leaders are calling for more of the same: even lower taxes, fewer regulations, no more climate action—peak neoliberalism. Some are pushing for greater integration even as Trump has made inescapable the dangers of our US dependence. The answer for Canada is not this; it is in rebuilding our collective toolkit and rediscovering our collective power—taking back the future and breaking free of neoliberalism.

Alex Himelfarb is an author and academic. He served three prime ministers as Clerk of the Privy Council, 2002–2006.

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There was “nothing to fear” in the New Eldorado of Alberta according to a 1910 federal ad campaign.

More than a century later, in August 2022, then-premier Jason Kenney launched a new ad campaign, “Alberta is Calling,” that once again peddled a vision of Alberta, this time seeking to lure workers from other provinces with the promise of low taxes, cheaper housing, higher wages and a mountain view. The first phase of the campaign targeted healthcare, trades and technology workers in Vancouver and Toronto with ads that ran online, on television and radio and on billboards and posters plastered at strategic locations—“Toronto’s busiest subway station is currently a giant ad for Alberta” said a headline in a Toronto lifestyle magazine in September 2022. A second phase of the campaign launched in March 2023, with ads across eastern Canada targeting workers in occupations facing labour shortages in Alberta, promising them a $1,200 “signing bonus” if they moved west. In March 2024 a third phase targeted skilled trades workers in BC, Ontario and Quebec, dangling the carrot of a one-time $5,000 tax rebate. All told, the ad campaign cost the Alberta government at least $10-million, plus the incentive money.

Since “Alberta is Calling” was launched, Alberta’s population has surged—by more than 204,000 between April 2023 and April 2024, a number that includes over 55,000 coming from other provinces (a Canadian record for interprovincial migration) and the rest of the influx from other countries. The province’s population boom—4.4 per cent growth in 2023 (above the national average of 3.2 per cent)—has been felt most in the cities. In 2023 Calgary’s metro-area population grew by 6 per cent, adding 96,000 people, while Edmonton’s grew by 63,000, a rise of 4.2 per cent. Alberta’s fastest-growing city, Airdrie, saw its population rise by 6.4 per cent in 2023, to 86,000, surpassing once-bigger cities such as Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie and Medicine Hat.

“The fact that so many people are coming to our province, I look at that as a positive, and we want to keep that going,” said premier Danielle Smith on the Shaun Newman Podcast in January 2024. “Let’s have an aggressive target to double our population,” from the nearly five million people of today to 10 million by 2050.

“Why?” Newman asked.

“Because then we’ll be the second-largest province,” said Smith. “We want to build this place out so that we can actually have the political clout we deserve, because right now we’re being treated as a junior partner by Ottawa.

“I think people are coming to this province because they know we do things differently here. We respect free enterprise. We respect individual liberty,” she said. “We have an obligation to be that bastion of freedom. And I think we should welcome the people who want to come here and enjoy it with us.”

The ambition recalls the famous line from the 1989 film Field of Dreams: “If you build it, [they] will come.” Except that in Alberta we’ve done the opposite—Alberta called, but didn’t first build out the field, so to speak. As a province we have not built the infrastructure or public services to absorb this many people this quickly. In the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts, advocates and policymakers noted the gaps and cracks that had been exposed and widening in Alberta’s public infrastructure and public services. Decades of government cuts, funding at levels insufficient to meet the pressures of inflation and population growth, deferred maintenance and a long-neglected infrastructure deficit led to cumulative impacts in which the structural pillars holding up public healthcare, public education, affordable housing, affordable utilities and public transit in Alberta were threatening to crumble. But instead of a sustained, long-term investment with a plan to fix these problems, we simply added to the load.

Alberta’s healthcare system has faced intense pressures that have resulted in widespread barriers to access for critical services. The reality for primary care is a painful one: the Alberta Medical Association (AMA) reported that in March 2023 up to 750,000 Albertans were lacking a regular primary care provider. While the Canadian Institute for Health Information puts the current figure at 15 per cent of Albertans aged 18 and over, the AMA projects that with the recent population influx the number of Albertans seeking a family doctor could soar up to 950,000.

Between 2020 and 2023 the number of family physicians accepting new patients plummeted 79 per cent province-wide, from 887 to just 190. The story is similar in every health zone: an 88 per cent decrease in the Edmonton zone, an 81 per cent decline in Calgary and a fall of 89 per cent in the South zone, where just seven physicians were accepting patients in a region with nearly 350,000 residents. The website Alberta Find a Doctor, which aims to connect those seeking care with a doctor, nurse practitioner or clinic taking patients, has posted to its search page a warning to Albertans that, due to the “limited availability of family doctors and nurse practitioners… it may not be possible to find someone accepting new patients close to your preferred location.” It directs the unsuccessful to call the AHS non-emergency line 811.

Even as hundreds of thousands of Albertans struggle to access primary care, the government celebrated a net increase in physician registrations: “More doctors registered in Alberta today than at any time in the province’s history,” boasted health minister Adriana LaGrange in October 2024. “We know Alberta is an attractive place to work as a physician.” The figures from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta show 518 additional registrations over the previous 12 months—but that increase barely accounts for the population growth in the same period. Even if all of those physicians were practising in comprehensive primary care (and evidence from CPSA, AMA and CIHI indicates they are not; overall trends show new doctors choosing specialties other than primary care), Alberta still faces what AMA past-president Paul Parks terms a “deficit position” due to “having lost 2,471 physicians” in an “exodus” from the province since 2019. In a survey of its members in September 2024, the AMA found that 58 per cent of physicians in rural, family and acute care in Alberta are considering leaving the province or medical practice altogether; 65 per cent of those physicians have acted on their discontent and begun making plans to get out by 2029.

Among nurses, a September 2024 study found approximately 48 per cent of them in Alberta are leaving the profession by age 35, putting Alberta among the bottom four provinces for losing young nurses. The ratio of nurses leaving the profession to those entering it has worsened by nearly 40 per cent since 2013. Polling by the Canadian Federation of Nursing Unions supports that figure: approximately 40 per cent of nurses across all age groups intend to leave the profession within one year, citing insufficient remuneration, overwork and understaffing, stressful work environments and a lack of work–life balance.

Glowing promises from Alberta in the Toronto subway.

In Alberta the UCP government’s campaign to dismantle and restructure Alberta Health Services (AHS) and divide healthcare provision among four new agencies has left nurses feeling their concerns are being ignored. The reshuffle is imposing new workload burdens and additional costs without improving working conditions or healthcare delivery. Instead of a comprehensive and evidence-based health workforce plan for recruitment and retention, the UCP government has relied on sporadic announcements of limited funds to incentivize more people into nursing, while increasing funding for private nursing agencies to provide temporary coverage. Over seven years of available data, Alberta’s spending on for-profit nursing agencies exploded by some 13 times, from under $400,000 in 2015–16, to more than $5-million in 2021–22. As nurses in Alberta enter another contentious round of collective bargaining, political commentator David Climenhaga notes that “we now have a system in which employers plead poverty to keep staff nursing wages low while they are forced to pay far more to nursing agencies for staff they can no longer operate without.”

Meanwhile, Alberta hospitals are aging past their useful lifespan, and bed space numbers still haven’t recovered from the Ralph-Klein-era cuts in the 1990s. The long-promised and -delayed South Edmonton hospital was shelved after the UCP government halted funding for it in the 2024 budget. Despite doubling in population, Edmonton has had no new hospital since 1988. Without the South Edmonton hospital, the Edmonton zone alone will be short nearly 1,500 beds by 2026 (when the new facility would have opened). It would require the equivalent of a new hospital in each of Edmonton and Calgary to meet the healthcare needs of the more than 200,000 new Albertans that moved here last year.

Public education in Alberta is under similar strain. After consecutive years of record-setting enrolment growth, schools in the Calgary Board of Education district hit 93 per cent use of space in 2023–24, leaving little room for the projected 8,000 new students. Only two high schools in the city were anticipated to be able to accept new students in 2024–25, as total enrolment had reached 103 per cent capacity. CBE is estimated to need over 40,000 new student spaces over the next 10 years.

The challenge for Edmonton public schools is equally daunting: to meet projected enrolment growth and catch up on the existing shortfall, the district would need 50 new schools by 2033. To cope in the short term, the district implemented a growth control model in 2020 that utilizes a lottery system for oversubscribed schools.

Overcapacity leads to unwieldy class sizes and increased class complexity, along with limitations on programming as music rooms and libraries are converted into makeshift classrooms and access for students with special or additional needs is constricted. Parents of these students increasingly feel pushed out the door towards charter schools that can promise lower student–teacher ratios and more resources (though charter schools are not obligated to accept all students).

In the public system 1,500 educational assistant roles are unfilled due to a lack of provincial funding. EAs are meant to help mitigate the class size and complexity challenges. Yet, when 3,200 EAs and other support workers walked off the job in a one-day protest in October 2024, parents of special-needs students were told that for “safety” reasons their children “should stay home.” The system—in which the province directs school districts’ budgets and bargaining offers—cannot function without these EA staff, but doesn’t pay them a living wage or offer adequate working conditions.

While the 2024–25 provincial budget claimed record-high investment in K–12 education, the funding increase to public schools was only 4 per cent. The Alberta Teachers’ Association estimates that per-student funding—already the lowest in Canada—would need to increase by 13 per cent just to hit the national average.

Contrast this with the unprecedented funding in 2024 to private for-profit and charter schools for infrastructure and transportation. Charter school student spaces are now set to double—to 12,500—and, according to premier Smith, government funding will enable “thousands” of new spaces for students in “independent” private schools. That’s on top of Alberta’s uniquely high allocation of per-student funding to private schools at 70 per cent of the public rate. As the public system remains underfunded, Albertans are seeing a strategic shift of resources from the public system to the private education market.

Post-secondary institutions have been similarly starved of public money. The province has cut its share of funding to colleges and universities while capping tuition increases for domestic students. As a result, public post-secondary institutions have seen per-student funding drop to historic lows. Their response, amid limited permitted revenue streams, has been to rely heavily on increasing enrolment of international students and greatly increased fees. But now, when the number of international students is being capped across the country, students considering studying in Canada may be reconsidering that option due to limited student housing, reduced access to healthcare and fewer pathways to legitimate work. This in turn has deepened the financial crunch for public post-secondaries, leading to even more deferred maintenance, deeper cuts to support staff and a greater reliance on contracted teaching staff.

New Albertans must have somewhere to live. While housing starts appear to have made up for some of the ground lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, the roughly 40,000 units that began construction in 2024 didn’t fully cover an additional 204,000 Albertans—even if one were to generously distribute five people per home. Affordable, government-subsidized housing faces an even worse shortfall: while 1,235 new units were funded in 2024, only 250 of those were completed between December 2023 and October 2024. Meanwhile, in Edmonton alone, the number of residents without stable housing hit 5,000 in 2024, up 2,000 in a year and having nearly tripled since 2020. This affordable housing deficit has led to expensive downstream impacts—approximately $1-billion annually, including more public money going to increased policing and security, medical care and mental health and addictions support. The only long-term solution to homelessness is housing—surely that is obvious. What is less clear is who should build those houses and how. To what extent should basic necessities such as shelter be left to market forces Should governments be obligated to ensure sufficient housing is built to meet the needs of the population they have deliberately sought to expand?

Not only housing is lacking at the local level. A 2024 report by the Rural Municipalities of Alberta calculated Alberta’s overall rural municipal infrastructure deficit at $17.25-billion. That includes deferred maintenance or replacement of roadways, bridges and water utilities that are vital to communities’ survival. Based on current provincial funding, that deficit will grow to $40.7-billion in 2028—more than doubling in three years. This state of affairs is a direct consequence of years of underfunding below inflation and population increases. In 2011–12, the provincial government budgeted $420 per capita for rural municipal infrastructure; by 2022–23 that figure had dropped to $150 per capita. Taking into account recent increases allocated in the 2024–25 provincial budget only sees a fraction of that lost ground regained—to $186 per person. A one-time grant program announced by the province in October 2024 to help small- and medium-sized communities address population pressures on infrastructure accounts for a mere 0.15 per cent of the total infrastructure shortfall.

Those wondering about the consequences of a few more years of infrastructure neglect might think back to Calgary’s dry, dirty summer of 2024, when council imposed city-wide water restrictions on residents and businesses after a crucial water main failed. As Alberta’s urban municipalities grow, so does the urgency for building public transit, emergency services, recreation facilities and services over and above keeping the lights on and the taps running. The economic reality for many municipalities, however, is challenging. The City of Edmonton, for instance, now receives less funding from the province than it did in 2009, before adjusting for inflation, even as the population of the city has grown by nearly 50 per cent.

The $10-million ad campaign worked. Alberta’s population surged by more than 204,000 between April 2023 and April 2024

Amid steady growth punctuated by spikes of immigration in recent decades, Alberta did not build the public infrastructure and services necessary to fully support that growth. This was a deliberate and explicit policy choice—enshrined again now in finance minister Nate Horner’s mandate letter from premier Smith—to hold provincial spending at less than inflation plus population growth. Collectively, as a province, we are now living with the repercussions—the day-to-day impacts of rapid growth without a sustainable plan. Instead of a plan, we have initiatives such as the “Alberta is Calling” campaign to bring in new workers.

The argument for bringing in workers has some value—of course we need construction workers to build new schools, hospitals and continuing care facilities, and teachers, nurses and support workers to staff them. Of course we need skilled tradespeople to support diversifying our economy, to develop renewable energy resources, to clean up abandoned wells—not merely to squeeze every drop of bitumen from the oil sands. But this is not, by and large, the objective of the “Alberta is Calling” campaign, nor of this government in general, which appears to favour piecemeal recruitment and retention, wage suppression and interference in collective bargaining and continued political antagonism toward public-sector workers.

For premier Smith, as she said on the Shaun Newman Podcast in January 2024, the point of quickly growing Alberta’s population is to increase the province’s political clout within Canada and to confirm Alberta as a “bastion of freedom.” But not everyone loved that pitch. In August 2024 a video clip of her appearance on the podcast was posted to X (formerly Twitter), where her call for an “aggressive target to double our population” drew scathing criticism from conservatives both online and at UCP-members-only town halls, where Smith spoke ahead of a party leadership review vote in November.

On September 12 Smith reframed her message on population growth, appearing to pivot hard with a press release that blamed “the Trudeau government’s unrestrained border policies” for infrastructure challenges in Alberta. Focusing on a federal proposal to relocate asylum seekers to Canada throughout several provinces, Smith declared “excessive levels of immigration to this province are increasing the cost of living and strain[ing] public services for everyone. We are informing the government of Canada that, until further notice, Alberta is not open to having these additional asylum seekers settled in our province. We simply cannot afford it.” [Italics mine.] In her statement, Smith emphasized that the province “has always welcomed newcomers who possess our shared values—and we will continue to do so.” As CTV News reported, “when pressed on what those ‘shared values’ are, a representative told CTV News ‘freedom, family, faith, community and free enterprise’ are important.”

The language recalled the ad campaign in the early 20th century that pitched Alberta as a homeland for self-made “pioneers” seeking freedom of opportunity. That promotion sold a version of the Canadian West that didn’t really exist, but in the selling it conjured a self-identity for the nascent Alberta. While not aligning with the reality lived by many Albertans over the last century, it created a mythology that politicians such as Smith can lean on to evoke an imagined past and the notion of an ideal Albertan. But the question is for whom and to what end?

An answer emerged on September 17, when premier Smith spoke to Albertans in a video address that began with a reference to “shared values” before announcing new funding for schools. The subsequent press release summed up the message: “The population growth has not only increased pressure in the public and separate school system but has increased demand for publicly funded charter programming and space needs.” Charter schools—a slippery slope to privatized education—would get infrastructure funding, and, in a policy unique in Canada, the UCP government will spend public money to build the bricks-and-mortar infrastructure for private schools.

In other words, the UCP government’s solution to the problem of how to bridge the gap between the growing population and Alberta’s lagging public infrastructure capacity is to privatize that infrastructure and our public services as much as possible.

In fall 2024, like clockwork, the UCP government pulled the oil price card from its trusty deck of diversions, hinting about a possible deficit in the 2025–26 budget and paving the way for lowballing public-sector wages and cutting public services. At a crucial time in our province, when massive investment in and restoration of the social safety net is needed, the spectre of cuts, flight of professionals and another round of privatization and public infrastructure firesales looms once more. While newcomers to Alberta may be unfamiliar with this playbook, for some of us this recalls an Alberta we recognize all too well.

The spiral of chaos and dysfunction is a result not of incompetence but of deliberate strategy. When the systems we rely on are broken, and the purported “solutions” on offer merely cause more damage, the most vulnerable Albertans—the very young, the elderly, the poor, the disabled or those with complex needs—will bear the costs. Is this the Alberta we want to build?

Rebecca Graff-McRae is the research manager for the Parkland Institute at the University of Alberta.

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by Richard Kelly Kemick
BIBLIOASIS
2024/$22.95/248 pp.

Hello, Horse is ex-Calgarian and new-ish Vancouverite Richard Kelly Kemick’s first collection of short fiction, which is not to say he isn’t seasoned at the short story. Nine of these 11 collected stories have been previously published, with the tenth shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s novella contest. His other books include I Am Herod (Goose Lane, 2019), a comical look at the Badlands Passion Play, and Caribou Run (Goose Lane, 2016), a collection of poems.

What makes Kemick a powerful writer is his range of emotional depth and subject matter, and the speed at which he establishes his narrative worlds. He wastes no time introducing a story; rather, he assumes the reader’s intelligence, beginning most stories at a healthy trot and some, such as “Our Overland Offensive to the Sea,” at a gallop.

Love (or longing for love), as well as a persistent sense that we are both snared by and performing within our environments, are key themes that emerge throughout the collection. Kemick’s characters seem to love while in another’s shadow. In the titular story, “Hello, Horse,” a young woman can’t quite tame and make tender a wild thing full of grief. Her revelation is that others exist outside of herself, within their own pain. In “Patron Saints,” our narrator loves a newly famous author whose memoir records a tragic love story that will forever shadow theirs. Our narrator waits in Paris for his lover to return from a high-profile book tour while a Bengal tiger prowls, loose from the zoo, both hunting and being hunted: “There’s a certain respect you’ve got to have for something that sticks around so long where it obviously shouldn’t.” In “Sea Change,” two British Columbia teachers attending a conference in politically tense Cuba flirt with adultery. Their affair never transpires, remaining constantly in a state of delay, but their ruminations on how their lives have led to this moment spark two very different personal revolutions. A young man is captivated by an older magician in “The Great and the Gone,” becoming her lover and her assistant. There’s a palpable distance between them, however, caused by a great loss: the only thing the magician has managed to make disappear but never find again is her own daughter.

Alongside explorations of lovers and longing, each story in Kemick’s collection is disarmingly comical, emotionally rich apart from and as a product of that comedy, and delightfully absurd. Throughout the book is a masterful tension in the idea that reality is always already stranger than it seems. From talking dogs to brutal, cross-checking nuns, Hello, Horse is smart writing.

Colby Clair Stolson is a writer from Ponoka.
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by Tom Wayman
HARBOUR PUBLISHING
2024/$26.95/312 pp.

Tom Wayman’s The Road to Appledore is a gentle narrative about how the author came to be the steward of a rural property near Winlaw, BC. The memoir of property, work, nature, home and self opens with Wayman and his partner, Bea, travelling from Vancouver to the Kootenays with his possessions crammed into a moving truck that has no reverse: a perfectly symbolic vehicle for Wayman crossing his own personal Rubicon. His move alone to a nearly nine-acre property is prompted, in part, by his desire to reassess his relationship that has become “comfortable, but not satisfying,” as described by their marriage counsellor.

However, this is not a maudlin, introspective book. Indeed, the reader may be left with a desire for more personal revelations, but that is not the book’s central aim. Instead, it is outward-looking and focuses on the labour of making and maintaining a home, that Sisyphean task. Appledore—the name Wayman gives his property, after a poem by A.A. Milne—becomes a home through labour, and the labour itself becomes a kind of home.

The second part of the memoir is divided into chapters named after seasons and elements. Wayman captures the personality of Appledore in its different seasonal expressions in prose and, on occasion, poetry. At times the details become overwhelmingly specific: the gravity-fed water system and its parts and problems, for instance, are described in minute detail. But the gentle humour of Wayman is present throughout, as he encounters roaming bears, amusing characters, even a talkative cloud (the cloud heard with pharmaceutical assistance).

Although the book is not explicitly a personal memoir, the character of Wayman is revealed slowly, piece by piece, through passing references to, for example, his teaching, his anti-war work and his union activities. The careful and sensitive eye of the author—as he describes the animals, trees and gardens of Appledore—reveals a studious and keen observer. At times, he also brings his observational powers to bear on larger topics: “Or maybe,” he astutely notes, “lack of curiosity is a by-product of how our society generally doesn’t encourage us to pay attention to where things come from: to learn about the working lives of those who feed, clothe, house us and more.”

The book, though, does exactly that: it encourages us to pay attention to how things such as water, food and community come to us. He does so unassumingly, with well-crafted, precise writing, good humour and an obvious deep affection for the land. This is a meditative reflection on home that captures well both the joys and the struggles of rural life, and we come to understand the labour of home is ultimately a labour of love.

Jay Gamble teaches English at the University of Lethbridge.

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