Being tested and labelled at an early age can have a devastating effect on a child’s self-esteem and intellectual potential
If Steve Bannon isn’t on the Alberta government’s payroll, he certainly is its muse. Bannon is the notorious former strategic adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump. His views on the benefits of disruption might well inform Premier Jason Kenney’s government tactics of mass disruption in many sectors. These include the most vital areas of health…
The province has long been on the cutting edge of political innovation, despite what some would have us believe
Will Albertans vote for the United Conservative Party on Tuesday? The NDP election victory in 2015 is widely regarded as an accident. Many think it was an aberration in a deeply conservative province that, it’s predicted, will return to its bedrock conservative roots on election day 2019. The conventional wisdom is that Albertans are solidly…
The populist trinity of direct democracy – initiative, referendum and recall – is incompatible with the Canadian political system
The recent Robyn Luff controversy in Alberta illustrates two much broader issues. One is that this MLA, like many Canadians, doesn’t understand how the Westminster-style parliamentary system works. The other is the remarkable persistence of the notion that MLAs are merely delegates of their constituents. Luff, the Calgary-East MLA, complained about being forced to toe…
One small change to the words of O Canada will remind us of our historic debt and help facilitate broader knowledge of Indigenous issues
The catalogue of injustices experienced by Canada’s Indigenous people is long and tragic: residential schools, missing and murdered women, and high incarceration rates, to name just a few. Reading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report on residential schools is a gut-wrenching reminder of just one of the catastrophes they have survived. Against this backdrop, the…