Hey, 12-year-olds in Alberta will soon be able to hunt without adult supervision using laser targeting devices on their hunting rifles! What could possibly go wrong? Parks and Forestry Minister Todd Loewen is at it again, introducing legislation that draws on a deep well of bad ideas about wildlife management and by all appearances a […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
CUPE education workers in Fort Mac and Edmonton reach settlement deal after weeks on picket lines
After more than 17 weeks in some cases, braving temperatures that dipped into the sub 40s if you don’t count the wind-chill, education workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees in Fort McMurray and Edmonton reached settlement agreements yesterday. The three mediated agreements between negotiators for CUPE’s locals and the Edmonton Public, Fort […]
Posted inCanadian Politics
Despite his opponents’ constant and often deceitful yammering, Justin Trudeau grew in office, and history will remember him well
“You can hear him. The man is teary-eyed.” I speak, of course, of Rick Bell, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s favourite political commentator. I hope Mr. Bell will forgive me for plagiarizing the lead of his March 8 column, in which he pretends that he isn’t sorry to see a choked-up Mr. Trudeau about to leave […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
Former AHS CEO wants her wrongful dismissal lawsuit to skip oral questions and ‘proceed directly to trial’
Charging that “an army of lawyers at Bennett Jones has been hired to defend the Government, I assume at great expense to the taxpayer,” former Alberta Health Services CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos said in a public statement yesterday she is “worried there’s a strategy to try to bring me to my knees financially.” Accordingly, Ms. Mentzelopoulos […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
Sure looks like it’s pride that keeps the UCP from just dumping that useless Turkish ‘Tylenot’ it bought in 2022 to own the Libs
Pride, according to the Solomonic wisdom, goeth before destruction. Here in Wild Rose Country, though, it goeth before a big storage fee! So far, for example, it’s cost something like five and a half million Loonies in storage charges for unusable medicine and questionable COVID masks destined for the landfill! So it turns out that […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
Reshuffling EMS services to a redundant new bureaucracy may not make much sense, but that’s what the UCP is doing
Now that most of the province’s ambulances and their crews have finally all been transferred to Alberta Health Services, the United Conservative Party Government has decided to transfer them all again, this time to its redundant and unneeded Acute Care Alberta entity. The changeover will officially take place on April 1, which seems appropriate. Why […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
Jason Kenney is back on social media, and boy, does he sound cranky! So what’s up?
Jason Kenney is back! And, boy, does he sound cranky! What’s up? Once upon a time, Alberta’s first United Conservative Party premier was an industrious social media commentator – or at least someone on his public engagement staff was on his behalf – generating no shortage of hostile responses on Twitter, the microblogging application we […]
Posted inCanadian Politics
With an election looming as our country faces a grave threat to its survival, it’s high time for Canada to ban Twitter/X
OTTAWA – Last year, as the U.S. government debated and then followed through on banning TikTok, Republican lawmakers advanced numerous arguments against allowing a hostile foreign power to control a significant medium of public discourse. They said a social media application owned by someone who is close to an autocratic leader might be used as […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
Did Donald Trump just save Canadian supply management for another generation?
OTTAWA – It’s a funny old world and it looks as if Donald Trump just saved supply management. If there’s a single thing hated with abiding passion by Canadian market fundamentalists –admirers of the U.S. president almost to a man and woman, at least until the moment he started threatening Canada with massive tariffs for […]
Posted inCanadian Politics
Cultural policy has no place in trade deals – when we caved to Trump’s bullying on copyright in 2022, we lost
OTTAWA – Canada needs to put everything we gave away to the United States over the past four decades of trade negotiations back on the table! It seems like just the other day — although in fact it was 70 months ago — that Donald Trump signed the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, supposedly guaranteeing that Canadian […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
Finance Minister Nate Horner delivers a Budget Speech with a split personality
Finance Minister Nate Horner rose in the Alberta Legislature yesterday afternoon and delivered a Budget Speech with a split personality that reflects the rock and the hard place the United Conservative Party Government has found itself between. Speaking in a monotonous drone inside the Legislative chamber as more than 2,000 striking public education workers and […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
Good Morning, Alberta! It’s Budget Day in Wild Rose Country! Brace yourself!
Good Morning, Alberta! It’s Budget Day in Wild Rose Country! South of the 49th Parallel, U.S. President Donald Trump is still talking tariffs, keeping everyone on the edge of their seats. Premier Danielle Smith’s efforts to persuade him to let her be the hero who ended the tariff threat went nowhere. So Canadians aren’t laughing […]