Happy Holidays! It may take a few days for its perpetrators to admit this, but Alberta has all but certainly already passed Peak Separatism. The current 2018 spasm of Alberta separatist sentiment peaked late last week, probably some time Thursday afternoon. By the time we’re all saying Happy New Year
Continue readingTag: Canadian Politics
Canadian Dimension: Don’t blame seniors for rising healthcare costs
Photo by Jeff Bowen Healthcare is a big-ticket item on the nation’s annual budget. In its most recent report on national health expenditure trends, the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI) reveals that total expenditures on healthcare were expected to reach $228.1 billion, or $6,299 per Canadian, in 2016. This
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Doug Ford’s Ontario: Hard Right Turn
Photo by Martin Reis ‘‘Ford’s ‘government for the people’ thus pivots, like Trump’s regime in the U.S., around ideological appeals to a hard-right provincialism, patriarchal family values set against a hostile world of crime and terrorism, mobilization of ethnic and racial chauvinisms, and mystical market solutions for every ill.’’ A
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Trudeau’s “progressive” trade agenda is anything but
Photo by FORTUNE Global Forum Mass protests against free-trade agreements have died off since the days of the annual confrontations in the aughts, but this is at least in part because progress on opening trade globally appears to have stalled. In recent years, international trade volumes relative to global GDP
Continue readingAlberta Politics: About the cost of operating that truck convoy: Was it a political donation, and was it strictly legal?
I have questions about that massive truck protest convoy in south Edmonton yesterday, the one that tied up commuter traffic and prevented people from reaching Edmonton International Airport and just happened to take place at the same time as a visit to the neighbourhood by federal Opposition leader Andrew Scheer.
Continue readingAlberta Politics: With friends like these … it’s sure depressing to compare Canada in 1979 to the U.S. in 2018
Canadians of a certain vintage will clearly remember “the Canadian Caper,” that dangerous moment in 1979 when our diplomats put their lives on the line to smuggle six of their American colleagues out of revolutionary Iran. Given the situation in Iran – revolutionaries storming the U.S. Embassy, diplomats held hostage,
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Alberta separation: Are Russian bots messing with our province, or just homegrown right-wing agitators?
Are Russian bots behind the recent busy social media campaign to persuade Albertans they want to separate from Canada, a la Brexit? Or is this just the work of right-wing Canadian agitators using well-tested digital agitprop techniques to undermine the Liberal Government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau? You can’t rule
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Think rail cars, guns and Liberals, this stuff will hit the fan!
Having bought Canada a pipeline it may or may not want at considerable expense, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continues to spend political capital on Alberta as well, now saying the federal government is prepared to help the province finance the purchase of additional railroad tanker cars to raise the volume
Continue readingScott's DiaTribes: Doug Ford for the People? More Like For Big Business (Bill 66 discussion)
So, the Ontario government released or introduced Bill 66 today in the Legislature. It does many appalling things under the guise of “opening Ontario for business”. It may open Ontario for business but it strips the public of protections for clean water, health and safety regulations for wastewater and food
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Seriously, what’s the good of an effective carbon tax if it’s politically impossible to implement?
Recent political developments in France and Alberta, though quite different in tone, suggest carbon taxes may not be a viable way to address climate change – leastways not without reaching an unlikely consensus they must be imposed. You may not believe me yet, but you can count on it, politicians
Continue readingScott's DiaTribes: Hamilton’s Power Couple
I’m being slightly facetious.. but a big congrats to my cousin and cousin-in-law JP Danko and Dawn Danko for being elected to Hamilton City Council and School Trustee respectively. Dawn was just named vice chair of the Hamilton District School board as well. Everyone in the family is very proud
Continue readingScott's DiaTribes: Ontario Conservatives present a “climate change plan” that has been shown to fail.
A follow-up to my last post: The Ontario Conservative government has finally presented its plan for mitigating climate change. No carbon tax! No cap and trade! Sounds great.. until you see the details: “Rather than imposing a price on carbon pollution as a cost of doing business, the Tories are
Continue readingCowichan Conversations: Friends Don’t Let Friends Smoke Corporate Weed
Canadian’s are going to be in for quite the ride as the greed driven governments and corporate opportunists manage to screw up one of the things that we were famous for, BC Bud. These massive Read more…
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Professors protest Moe Government plan to shutter archives in four locations, including University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon
SASKATOON, Sask. No sooner did the government of Saskatchewan oh-so-discreetly announce it is about to close four branches of the provincial archives and consolidate it all in one location in Regina than more than 30 Canadian scholars had an open letter of protest circulating on the Internet. When the branch
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Alberta politicians need to tread carefully when they comment on the coming job losses at GM Canada in Oshawa
We don’t yet know why General Motors Corp. has decided to walk away from its last auto-assembly plant in Oshawa, Ont., which CTV reported last night the Detroit-based company will announce it is doing at 10 o’clock this morning. I’m sure there will be plenty of suspects. I have one
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Brexit Redux: Looking back at Jason Kenney’s strange comments when the U.K. shot itself in both feet
Back in June 2016, hours after Britons had narrowly voted to leave the European Union, a lot of Albertans scratched their heads at Jason Kenney’s bizarre Brexit commentary on social media. At the time, Mr. Kenney was still drawing a paycheque as the Conservative MP for Calgary Midnapore. He was
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Big Oil wants a milk break … and supply management’s foes are all over the media – except when they’re not
On Tuesday, the president of Cenovus Energy Inc., one of the Big Five players in the Alberta oilsands, called for temporary production cuts across the Canadian oil sector to push the sinking price of oil back up again. It’s all about supply and demand, as the well-educated readers of this blog
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Edmonton Conservative MP Kerry Diotte threatens defamation action against young people who criticized him on Twitter
Edmonton Griesbach MP Kerry Diotte has threatened a young writer and former constituent with a defamation lawsuit for tweeting critical comments about his appearance in photos with Faith Goldy, an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of Toronto who is widely viewed as a white nationalist. Bashir Mohamed, 23, who has written
Continue readingAlberta Politics: While Albertans panicked about state of the oilsands, the Big Five bitumen-extraction corporations made billions
While Albertans have been in flap over the state of the province’s oilsands industry, the Big Five Oilsands extraction corporations have been raking in billions. “Despite the 2014 oil price crash and the ongoing hand-wringing over pipelines and the price differential, the reality is the Big Five oilsands producers have
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