On the same day that the Health Minister unceremoniously fired the Alberta Health Services board for refusing to revoke $3.2 million in bonuses, the Energy Minister announced the appointment of…
Last week Health Minister Horne out-trumped Donald Trump by firing not one but all 10 members of the Alberta Health Services Board—the board his government created in 2008 to deliver…
Ms Soapbox has been in a quandary all week. She was troubled by what she’d observed at the meeting of the College of Physicians and Surgeons governing council. Finally the…
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said to Ernest Hemingway, “You know, the rich are different from you and me.” Hemingway replied, “Yes. They’ve got more money”.* I was sitting in a…
Platts, a global company with a remarkably flaccid name, finds itself smack in the middle of an international price fixing scandal and I really hope the Alberta government is paying…
Sigh…where to start? The barrage of bad news spewing out of the Premier’s office has been so intense that the government’s Machiavellian takeover of post secondary institutions and research and…
Conrad Black, the Canadian media mogul and convicted felon* was in Calgary last week to have a “conversation” with the Calgary business elite (and me) over lunch at the Calgary…
For years I’ve wondered whether unions had outlived their usefulness and were simply using their collective bargaining power to crank up wages and benefits at the expense of…well…who knows what.…
I’ve been to Washington DC many times, but this trip was different. In addition to the usual buzz created by lobbyists, bureaucrats, politicians and businessmen who had places to go…
Mayo Clinic seen from Cafeteria This past January Mr Soapbox and my youngest daughter (let’s call her Mini) went on a pilgrimage to the Mayo clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Unbeknownst…
Last week Ms Soapbox was introduced to the Legislative Assembly by Liberal MLA, Laurie Blakeman, the oldest (as in longest-serving, not age!) opposition MLA. Ms Blakeman noted that Ms Soapbox…
What would it take to make you plead guilty to a crime you didn’t commit? One hundred dollars? One thousand dollars? Need more information? Okay, what if the crime isn’t…
Ogden Nash To paraphrase Ogden Nash (actually Mr Nash did not utter this famous phrase, but for some reason we all think he did), “Spring has sprung, the grass is…
On March 17, 2013, Alison Redford’s PC government broke the back of justice…and none of us saw it coming. Lady Justice, or Justitia, is the personification of the justice system.…
So it’s come to this has it? Premier Redford has officially abdicated responsibility for the Canadian natural resource strategy to her communications director, Stefan Baranski, who persuaded Ms Redford to…
“Opening new markets across Canada and around the world has become job one for this government.”—Finance Minister Horner on the 2013 Budget priorities, Alberta Hansard p1440. That simple sentence tells…
Susan on the Soapbox is sick. Stay tuned. Professor Matthew Hay … assailed by the furies of typhoid, measles, influenza, whooping cough and scarlet fever (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
We interrupt our regular programming—the PC spin on the cause of the $4 billion budget shortfall—to bring you an important public service announcement from the Premier-In-Waiting, Mr Lukaszuk. Mr Lukaszuk…
When Richard Nixon told David Frost than an illegal activity is not illegal “when the president does it” he confirmed what we’d all suspected: the “tone at the top” as…
“How can you trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders? The man can’t even trust his own pants.”—a line from the spaghetti western Once Upon a Time…
