Road to Reconciliation: An examination of what meaningful consultation and economic reconciliation look like
If you relied on the headlines alone, you might conclude that the Indigenous peoples of Canada are squarely against oil and gas development. You would be wrong. Headlines, by their nature, highlight crisis and conflict in simplified terms. But the debate over Indigenous support for resource development is highly nuanced. Readers must go beyond the…
Visitors just have to be prepared to go with the flow, consider unconventional approaches and be flexible enough to adapt to travel with no reservations
To say it is a challenging year to travel out of province is to put things mildly in the extreme. With the enduring COVID-19 threat, most provinces have residents-only campsite reservation policies and national campgrounds have been booked tight for months. Yet with a little ingenuity and adventurous spirit, we discovered that British Columbia is…
The government of Premier Jason Kenney has decided to end a 44-year moratorium on open-pit coal mining in southern Alberta
Desperate times sometimes lead to catastrophic measures. In Alberta, the beleaguered provincial government is in a financial situation that could be characterized as desperate, suffering from the double-whammy of collapsed resource revenues and, of course, the massive spending required to address the social wildfire known as the COVID-19 pandemic. The desperate measure that the United…
If the Conservative Party of Canada truly wanted to turn its party-of-angry-old-white-men image on its head, to herald a new era or principled conservatism, and to reach out to voters who have not considered them in the past, then members would choose Leslyn Lewis as their new leader. But they should not do that. This…
Adding more weapons, equipment and officers doesn’t provide a straight line to happier and safer communities
Putting more force into our police forces might seem intuitively like a logical way to more effectively fight crime. Real-life experience suggests that’s not necessarily so. Experts say when using force is available, then it’s human nature for a trained police officer to fall back on that option when the going gets rough. Too often,…
The WE mess shows sunny ways have been replaced with dark days of the same old cronyism in the halls of power
Just when you think our prime minister may actually be growing into his job, he does something so ill-considered, so tone-deaf and so contrary to generally accepted political convention that all the confidence he has earned in the past few weeks evaporates in a flash. Such was Justin Trudeau’s foolish and inexplicable attachment to the…
Referendums have been the source of high anxiety and popular uprisings in recent years. Whether they’re a truly democratic way to make vital decisions that best serve the public interest is a matter of great debate. However, there really should be no debate – nine times out of 10, they’re a bad idea. Alberta Premier…
It’s time to reduce funding to police and reallocate those dollars to more proactive ways to reduce crime
Here’s a couple of questions that might have seemed crazy to many people just a few short years ago but are gaining purchase today. Do we really need as much policing as we have? Or are the ever-growing police budgets actually inadvertently leading to greater violence? A lot of us have believed that police exist…
First in a series on the crisis in policing. Routine traffic law offenders like myself are often struck with the arrival of each new ticket about how a lot of police enforcement is built around the model of ‘force.’ The point of issuing a ticket doesn’t really seem to be about changing behaviour but rather…
There are people behind the scenes working hard to provide answers to hard questions, even if they’re hard to unravel
There’s been a lot of chatter over what was behind Justin Trudeau’s pregnant pause during a news briefing on June 2. Now, stopping to think before answering is not something politicians are known for. But in this case, it wasn’t a bad idea. After all, the prime minister had just been asked a very tricky…
If you relied on the headlines alone, you might conclude that the Indigenous peoples of Canada are squarely against oil and gas development. You would be wrong. Headlines, by their nature, highlight crisis and conflict in simplified terms. But the debate over Indigenous support for resource development is highly nuanced. Readers must go beyond the…
