Today looks to be a watershed moment for the future of the B.C. NDP, as its provincial council determines whether to follow a recommendation to disqualify Anjali Appadurai from its leadership race – and in the process effective disenfranchise the entire membership in favour of a coronation. But it’s worth
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Accidental Deliberations: Friday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to start your year. – Shawn Micallef highlights how the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the refusal by far too many people to follow a social contract – including anti-social leaders elected to shape and apply it. – Owen Jones writes about the dangerous disinformation – spread with far
Continue readingAlberta Politics: As COVID-19 cases soar, UCP MLA tells constituents the pandemic is behind us
Alberta set a new daily record for COVID-19 yesterday, with 1,105 confirmed new cases reported over the previous 24 hours. No fear, though. Apparently the worst of the pandemic is already behind us! Ms. Rosin during her tenure as a member of Premier Jason Kenney’s “Fair Deal” Panel (Photo: David
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Derrick O’Keefe writes about the possibilities raised by the B.C. NDP’s majority election win – as well as a need for far more ambition to achieve them. – Elise von Scheel reports on new polling results showing that no matter how desperately
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Randy Robinson writes that Doug Ford’s gratuitous austerity will have severe costs in both jobs and lives. And James Downie comments on the desperate need for a Biden administration to make major investments in an equitable and sustainable U.S. economy. – Justin
Continue readingAlberta Politics: COVID-19? Forget about it! Alberta restaurants to stay open, Premier Jason Kenney vows
“Alberta restaurants to stay open, barring ‘catastrophe,’ premier says,” the CBC’s online headline writer summarized yesterday. Here, as they say on social media, let me fix your headline: “Alberta restaurants to stay open, sparking ‘catastrophe,’ premier says.” Premier Kenney visits an Alberta Restaurant that presumably will be staying open no
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Second COVID-19 wave rolls into Alberta as Premier Jason Kenney continues to emphasize ‘personal responsibility’
Alberta has now passed a significant milestone — more COVID-19 cases than at the peak of the first wave of the pandemic in the spring, 3,138 compared to 3,022 on April 30. There were 898 new cases over the weekend if you count Friday, as Alberta Health Services does, and
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Math is hard, but not so hard you can’t spot the holes in Tyler Shandro’s cost-saving shell game
Math, apparently, remains hard. Except, perhaps, calculus of a political sort. The real Mr. Shandro (Photo: Alberta Newsroom/Flickr). On its face, Health Minister Tyler Shandro’s claim that firing 11,000 low-paid public sector health care employees will save about $600 million makes little sense. Others have done the same calculation and
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Fossil fuels may be fading, but Alberta stands ready to supply bad economic ideas to Canada and the world
VICTORIA — We Albertans can be enormously proud, I guess, of our continuing influence on the Dominion. We surely must be the leading exporter of ridiculous, potentially destructive ideas in Canada. B.C. Premier John Horgan (Photo: David J. Climenhaga). Consider Andrew Wilkinson, hapless leader of British Columbia’s Liberals (who are
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Riding high in the polls, B.C.’s New Democrat premier calls a snap election — the right, predictably, whinges
VICTORIA — Strangely, all those conservatives who are anxious to get us back to school and business as soon as possible didn’t seem to be very happy yesterday when B.C. Premier John Horgan called a snap election for Oct. 24. Supporters of B.C. political parties other than Mr. Horgan’s New
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Alberta takes over as Canada’s political Crazytown; privatized health care suffers a setback
VICTORIA — When I was growing up here in Lotusland, British Columbia had the reputation of being the Crazytown of Canadian politics. The late Allan Fotheringham, the Vancouver Sun columnist we all read religiously, famously summed up Canadian politics like this: “In the Maritimes, politics is a disease; in Quebec
Continue readingAlberta 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
Continue readingAlberta 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
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Stephen Harper and Preston Manning, joined at the hip by history and not particularly liking it, make changes
On Wednesday, former prime minister Stephen Harper abruptly quit the Conservative Party of Canada’s fund-raising board, supposedly to give himself time to prevent Jean Charest from becoming leader of Canada’s Conservatives or prime minister of Canada. Yesterday, we learned that Preston Manning would quit his eponymous market-fundamentalist call centre in
Continue readingAlberta Politics: From the first nail in the Velvet Coffin to the death of Star Metro — the decline of Alberta’s newspapers
The bad news was delivered on social media yesterday by employees of Star Metro newspapers in cities outside Ontario. Whatever was behind the Toronto Star’s decision in April 2018 to hire real journalists and publish free print newspapers in five major cities across Canada, including Calgary and Edmonton, apparently it
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Those elusive Liberals of Edmonton Strathcona: Where did Mainstreet’s pollsters find them?
Volunteers for NDP candidate Heather McPherson’s campaign in the federal Edmonton-Strathcona riding are asking themselves, where the heck are those mobs of Liberal voters one pollster claims to have identified in the riding? Door-knocking in 2019 in the progressive-leaning riding on the south side of the North Saskatchewan River feels
Continue readingAlberta Politics: B.C. Appeal Court’s Trans Mountain ruling may not be quite the slam-dunk Alberta thinks it is
The unanimous ruling Friday by the British Columbia Court of Appeal that the B.C. Government does not have the constitutional authority to control what goes inside the federally regulated Trans Mountain Pipeline is being hailed as a great victory in Alberta. Church bells didn’t actually ring on Friday, but the
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Albertans, in their ‘bitumen bubble,’ may have missed the significance of West Coast Green goings on
We Albertans have been living in a bit if a bubble – a bitumen bubble. As a consequence, we may not all have noticed what’s been happening on Canada’s West Coast. So the potential significance of the victory in a federal by-election Monday by Paul Manly of the Green Party
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Fielding questions about Jason Kenney’s apparent effort to channel Vladimir Putin, B.C. premier sounded like the grownup
CALGARY – For those of us used to listening to Alberta politicians on the topic of pipelines, British Columbia Premier John Horgan made for a refreshing change yesterday, sounding remarkably like the grownup as he responded to Premier Jason Kenney’s proclamation into law of the NDP’s unconstitutional bill to shut
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Nearly a third of Alberta’s electorate voted in advance polls – whatever can it mean?
One of the mysteries of the 2019 Alberta election campaign that comes to an end with today’s election is the truly astonishing number of advance ballots cast. Nearly 700,000 Albertans voted in advance polls. That is close to 30 per cent of the electorate. This is unheard of in Alberta,
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