Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Francesca Paris examines the cognitive disability facing many younger American adults (among others) as a result of long COVID. – Trish Hennessy discusses the need for a focus on social investments and preventative action to improve public health. – But both Graham
Continue readingTag: Danielle Smith
Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Cory Doctorow discusses how the concentration of wealth and power in corporate hands represents a threat to individual freedoms and the pursuit of social justice. And Pete Evans reports on new Statistics Canada showing that the gap between the wealthy few and
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Here We Go Again: Restructuring AHS
According to Danielle Smith, AHS isn’t “truly accountable” and it’s been a “management problem” for quite some time. So she’s going to blow it up. This week some brave soul leaked a 36-page slide deck asking cabinet to approve a “package of reforms to refocus the health care system to
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Danielle Smith and Tucker Carlson: Four reasons the Alberta premier will join the far-right American bloviator on stage
Danielle Smith’s plan to meet on a Calgary stage with far-right American bloviator Tucker Carlson on Jan. 24 has generated a surprising amount of what passes for serious commentary in Canadian media lately. Tucker Carlson on stage at a 2018 right-wing conference in Florida (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons). Much of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Ajit Niranjan reports on the Copernicus Climate Change Service’s findings that 2023 is on pace to be the hottest year on record, with October’s temperatures at 1.7 degrees above the pre-industrial level. – Damian Carrington highlights a UN report warning of the destructive insistence of
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The UCP AGM – A Common Sense Response to Gender Activism in Schools
“Alberta’s premier leads a party whose most active members almost unanimously want the province to refuse to house trans women in women’s prisons, and require schools to tell parents if their children want to secretly change their pronouns, as New Brunswick and Saskatchewan have controversially done. United Conservative Party members
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to start your week. – Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon reports on the less-than-surprising revelation from New Brunswick’s departing chief medical officer of health that political preferences were a major factor in COVID-19 decision-making. And Liz highlights how the rich, powerful and well-connected are still insisting on COVID precautions to avoid
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Danielle Smith Addresses the UCP/TBA AGM
I watched Danielle Smith’s speech to her supporters at the UCP AGM and all I could think of was Salvador Dali’s painting of the clocks. Time was melting, the landscape was warped. Going backwards Smith told the crowd that in the next Legislative session the Smith government will
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Jingwei Li et al. offer an update on the current state of knowledge surrounding long COVID, including the need for far more work dealing with its wide range of harmful effects. Kavita Bajeli-Datt reports on a new survey from India finding an
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Danielle Smith Goes to the Pembina Climate Summit
Perhaps Danielle Smith forgot she where she was when she told the attendees at the Pembina Climate Summit that clean electricity by 2035 was impossible and anyone who thought otherwise was a fantasist. The Summit attendees paid $400 to $600 for the one-day event which brings together “thought leaders from
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Derek Lynch writes about the need to recognize that humanity isn’t separate from the living environment it needs to survive. Eric Ralls points out how the climate breakdown and dwindling biodiversity are part of the same crisis. And Katie Surma highlights how climate
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Help was on the way? Looks like the goal of UCP’s $70M+ ‘Tylenot’ stunt was simply to own the Libs
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and her United Conservative Party government may look like fools for having paid $70 million up front to a Turkish drug manufacturer last December for a huge supply of children’s pain medication most of which will likely never reach Alberta. A bottle of ‘Tylenot’ (Photo: Alberta
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: The Alberta Pension Plan: Pierre Poilievre Weighs In
It took Danielle Smith five months to go from “Nobody is touching anyone’s pension” to “Look! It’s a shiny new APP! Albertans will get much more and it will cost much less!!” And she had the LifeWorks report to backup her claim. LifeWorks says Alberta is entitled to 53%
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Will Danielle Smith’s pension scheme drive a wedge right into the heart of Conservative support?
In the past few hours, a lot of metaphorical ink has been spilled on the duelling open letters about the Alberta Government’s scheme to pull the province’s still-skeptical population out of the Canada Pension Plan, the first from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday and the response from Alberta Premier
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Arijit Chakravarthy and Martha Lincoln offer a reminder that COVID-19 isn’t about to go away just because we’re refusing to deal with it. And CBC News and Adam Toy report on renewed masking requirements in Manitoba and Alberta health care facilities respectively.
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Protecting the Environment: There has to be a better way
In 2019 the federal government enacted the Impact Assessment Act which regulated “designated projects” (think: oil sands, mining and other major projects within provincial boundaries). The Kenney government tagged it the “No More Pipelines Act” and brought a reference case to the Supreme Court of Canada arguing that the IAA
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Canadian Ditchley Foundation tells TBA’s David Parker he’s out as a director; Premier Smith does damage control
According to Take Back Alberta Executive Director David Parker, he has been informed by the Canadian Ditchley Foundation he’s being dumped as a director of the organization. Canadian Ditchley Foundation President Pierre Lortie (Photo: The Ditchley Foundation). In a bitter sounding tweet on the social media site known as X
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Conservative Danielle Smith vows to dismantle Alberta Health Services, Conservative Ed Stelmach’s greatest achievement
Today’s political weather forecast: Ill winds that blow no good will begin throughout Alberta on Wednesday. Mr. Stelmach’s health minister, Ron Liepert, in 2012 (Photo: David J. Climenhaga). After that, conditions will get worse. Wednesday is when Premier Danielle Smith has promised us her health minister will present a plan
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Danielle Smith’s Alternative Reality
Albertans live in an alternate universe. How else can we explain last week’s press conference where Danielle Smith pilloried the draft electricity regulations which are designed to ensure Canada’s electrical grid is running on 100% clean energy by 2035* and unveiled a national advertising campaign of print, radio, TV, social
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: The $334 Billion Assumption or Why Smith’s APP is a Non-Starter
Well that inspires confidence. When LifeWorks respectfully submitted its report to the Smith government outlining how Alberta could move from CPP to an Alberta Pension Plan, the executive summary was signed by someone who preferred to remain anonymous, hence their signature was “Redacted to protect privacy.” Perhaps Anonymous was
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