The problem of Councillor Chu
Sean Chu is the councillor for Calgary’s Ward 4. He was re-elected for his third term in the recent civic election. It now appears that Councillor Chu has a skeleton…
Bill Longstaff
Why can’t conservatives win the mayoralties of Alberta’s major cities?
Alberta’s reputation as a bastion of conservatism has been belied once again by the recent municipal elections. Both Calgary and Edmonton, which together make up over half the province’s population,…
Calgary remains in good hands
If there was a natural successor to retiring mayor Naheed Nenshi it would be Jyoti Gondek. Like Nenshi she is well educated (Ph.D. in urban sociology) with a thorough grasp…
Refunding the police
How quickly the tide turns. Hardly a year has passed since the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer triggered protests that pressured cities across the U.S. to…
Kudos to David Card and the minimum wage
Good news from the world of the dismal science. A Canadian boy, David Card, has won a share of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics. Nice to see one of…
The death graph
A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. It’s true for me anyway. Maybe it’s my engineering background, but charts, graphs, etc. often make a point much more effectively…
Vote Kinney for Senator
Now that the federal election is out of the way, I turn my attention to the upcoming Calgary municipal election. Both the mayor and the councillor for my ward have…
Big climate promises at the UN … but
The United States and China, rivals on the world stage and also the two biggest economies and the two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases made some big climate promises at…
Are the new Conservatives the old Conservatives?
Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives showed a new face during the recent campaign. A surprisingly progressive one. The leader said the party has let Canadians down, citing climate policies and engaging with…
“Help”
“Effective September 15, 2021, the Government of Alberta has declared a State of Public Health Emergency. … We have identified two areas where the federal government could assist with our…
A fine result
Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister. Over $600 million to change absolutely nothing. Over $100 million more than the 2019 election, primarily because of the cost of COVID protocols. All quite…
Alberta needs a new Lougheed for a new era
Fifty years ago, Alberta entered the modern era. With the provincial election of August, 1971, Albertans dismissed Social Credit, their governing party for 36 years, and elected the Progressive Conservatives.…
A Vote Compass surprise
Being a sucker for surveys, I couldn’t resist the Vote Compass survey on the CBC News website. The survey purports to locate your position on the political landscape relative to…
Alberta’s debt to the Maldives
As humanity continues to heat the planet, there are winners and losers. Let me rephrase that. Ultimately nobody wins; in the long term if global warming isn’t halted it will…
Voting strategically in an election we don’t need
So we are to have an unnecessary election. Didn’t we make our views clear enough in 2019? We didn’t give one of the parties a majority because we didn’t buy…
From Cuba to Myanmar, the military as enemy of democracy
Heavily dependent on tourism, the Cuban economy has been hit hard by the pandemic’s restrictions on travel. The loss of Canadian tourists is a particularly heavy blow as in recent…
Canada’s progressive tilt—mitigating first-past-the-post
From 2006 to 2015 we endured a decade of Conservative rule even though the Conservatives never won the support of even 40 percent of Canadian voters. Such are the idiosyncrasies…
Climate change tops voters’ priorities … seriously
The most recent Angus Reid Institute poll on Canadians’ priorities and voting intentions had at least one big surprise. That, at least to this observer of the Canadian mind, was…
Burning up the credits
Purchasing carbon offsets is a popular way to act against global warming, or at least to alleviate one’s conscience. An offset allows a business, government or individual to pay someone…
“Why are we building houses if we don’t have enough water?”—A big lesson from a little town
Oakley, Utah, is small but appealing. Nestled in the mountains beside the Weber River less than an hour’s drive east of Salt Lake City, the town offers an attractive bargain…