“The risk to Albertans is still low,” the Government of Alberta’s official website soothingly assured us yesterday afternoon, the day the World Health Organization officially declared the effects of the coronavirus swiftly coursing ’round the globe to be a pandemic. This may reassure some of us. Others, not so much. Yesterday afternoon, Alberta had 19 […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
Report forecasts future of Alberta’s oilsands as more production, fewer jobs, and less spending
Thanks to technological advances and modular facilities, leading oilsands companies are increasing bitumen production while cutting the numbers of people they employ and spending less money, says a new Corporate Mapping Project report published this morning by the Parkland Institute. More than 34,000 oil and gas workers in Alberta have lost their jobs since the […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
Appointment of conservative economist Jack Mintz to head Jason Kenney’s latest economic panel is not a good augury for Alberta
Come into my office, Alberta, and sit down. I’m sorry to have to tell you that your prognosis is not good. I’m not talking about coronavirus. That will be painful, but you’re strong and young and I’m confident you could survive coronavirus … When Premier Jason Kenney says there’s a “global coronavirus recession,” what he […]
Posted inCanadian Politics
Remember when Canada was about to become ‘a global energy powerhouse’? So how’d that work out?
Anybody remember Stephen Harper’s plan to turn Canada into “an energy superpower”? That was in July 2006, a dream articulated in Mr. Harper’s first speech abroad as Canada’s prime minister. Canada was not only about to become “a new energy superpower,” Mr. Harper told the Canada-U.K. Chamber of Commerce in London, his government intended to […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
Talks between Alberta’s docs and government, which went off the rails on Valentine’s Day, are back on again
A big fight with Alberta’s doctors might have seemed like a good idea when the United Conservative Party’s strategic braintrust came up with the plan a few weeks ago. But that was then. This is now. With the docs primed for action, their constitutional lawyers loaded for bear, full-page advertisements appearing in community newspapers throughout […]
Posted inBestsellers
The Marrow Thieves, young adult fiction by Canadian Metis author Cherie Dimaline, leads Alberta independent bookstore sales
Here are the lists of the top 10 fiction and non-fiction titles sold by independent booksellers in Alberta during the week ended Sunday, March 1, 2020. The lists are compiled by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta, and include sales at Audreys Books in Edmonton and Glass Bookshop in Edmonton. ALBERTA FICTION BESTSELLERS 1. The […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
Coronavirus discovered in Alberta just as politics trumps science in supervised drug clinic report
COVID-19 has arrived in Alberta. But first, we need to talk about how the United Conservative Party Government has found a nearly perfect formula for dealing with science when it reaches inconvenient conclusions running counter either to the ruling party’s ideology or its political calculations. It strikes a committee of sympathetic folk, calls it an […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
Investment advice: If you have the choice, don’t trust right-wing politicians with your retirement money
After my father died in Victoria in 2008 at the age of 91, my sister opened his safety deposit box and discovered $5,000 in shares in the British Columbia Resources Investment Corp., better known as the BCRIC, universally pronounced at the end of the 1970s as the “brick.” When I say $5,000 in shares, of […]
Posted inGeopolitics
With coronavirus chaos south of the line, brace yourself for some of it to come to our way in Canada
U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s incompetent and ideologically driven response to the international coronavirus crisis poses a serious national security threat to Canada. Can we do anything about it? Say, closing the border to non-Canadian travellers from the United States, as Russia sealed its border with China in the first days after it became apparent […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
Kenney to Edmonton: Drop dead!
When the New York Daily News published its famous FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD headline on Oct. 30, 1975, all president Gerald Ford had done was deny a federal bailout to Gotham, which was nearly bankrupt. It shows the power of a great headline that Oct. 29, the day President Ford gave the offending speech, […]
Posted inCanadian Politics
Can Canada’s Conservatives resist temptation to try to sabotage the accord with the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs?
It will be interesting to see how the Conservative Opposition in Ottawa and Alberta’s Conservative government react to yesterday’s announcement the federal and British Columbia governments have reached an accord with the Wet’suwet’en First Nation that would recognize its system of hereditary governance. Participants said the agreement reached yesterday in Smithers, B.C., after three days […]
Posted inAlberta Politics
Alberta’s self-selecting separation survey — unscientific, biased, tendentious, and a poor use of tax dollars
Is the Kenney Government trying to persuade Albertans, one step at a time, that separation from Canada would be a good idea? How else do we explain the gratuitous inclusion of a question giving respondents the opportunity to express support for Alberta’s separation from Canada in an online questionnaire published by Premier Jason Kenney’s so-called […]