Crack in the Northern Gateway pipe dream

By Nancy Macdonald - Friday, January 20, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Darryl Dyck/CP

The business case for Enbridge’s $5.5-billion, twinned Northern Gateway pipeline, which would send Canadian crude bound for Asia to the B.C. coast, seems sound: the project could inject $270 billion into Canada’s GDP while fetching $10 more per barrel than the oil gets when transported south, to the country’s current, lone oil customer. But politics, it became clear as an environmental review launched last week in Kitimat, B.C., may yet derail the pipeline dream—its importance to the country’s financial future notwithstanding.

Ottawa’s smoke-and-mirrors strategy of bashing the project’s foreign critics, which was timed to the hearing’s launch on B.C.’s soggy, northwest coast, allows Canadian politicians to avoid pointing fingers at what really stands in their way: British Columbia First Nations, empowered by a decade and a half of legal victories that have granted them a significant say over land in their traditional territories. The powerful Wet’suwet’en, who vigorously fought a land claim over 13 years, culminating in 1997’s landmark Delgamuukw ruling establishing the existence of Aboriginal title in B.C., are among dozens of bands that oppose the project, and call its proposed, 1,176-km route home. “It’s going to get ugly,” says Terry Teegee, vice-tribal chief of the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council. “Battle lines have been drawn.”

Legally, experts say, B.C. bands have more clout than those outside the province, thanks partly to an accident of history. Few entered treaties with the Crown, unlike First Nations elsewhere in the country; and since they never signed away title, courts now require their input when resources are extracted from their traditional lands.

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The World Junior Championships are obscene. But we better win.

By Dave Bidini - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

This is not a Leafs column, so let’s put the sorrow and hope and impossibility of faith aside for a moment. Let’s take a breath, let’s launder that blood and mustard-splotched Boimstruck sweater. Let’s set aside the schedule and the standings and forget that Luke Schenn was ever born, for in a few weeks, NHL teams won’t matter. Pro hockey won’t matter. What will matter is what happens in Calgary and Edmonton, and even there, the Oilers and Flames won’t matter. Soon, it will be Christmas and New Year’s: junior hockey time. Players you don’t yet know yet will fill your screens and busy your papers and crowd your radio dial. Canada will be playing. Canada is always playing. And they better win. They better.

That our country—or rather, the dominant hockey-loving pie slice of our country—will bend routine and design days and evenings around games is a given. What’s not a given is whether this is necessarily, unequivocally, a good thing. A few questions: Are we putting too much pressure on kids to carry on Canada’s obsessive desire to succeed at all things blade and skate? Does that obsession mean that we unconsciously absolve the trappings of the junior game: young men playing for peanuts while owners get rich off their dreams; the dirty secret of hazing and alcohol and drug abuse; youth fight culture; and a citizenry that emerges from the pro hockey derby having learned nothing through their formative years except how to take a pass and throw a hit? Lots about junior hockey is good—giving identity and economy to small places; allowing kids, in the best case scenario, to absorb lessons about leadership and courage—but there’s a certain obscenity in blanket coverage of awkward kids posing for TSN promos like the gladitorial men they are not. And if discussions about the failings of the NHL to make the ice friendlier and more concussion-free—consider wider rinks and small equipment—then shouldn’t that be part of the junior hockey discussion, too? Continue…

In conversation: Alberta Premier Alison Redford

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Jason Franson

Since she clinched the leadership of Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives in October to become premier, Alison Redford has focused her efforts on promoting the province’s interests across Canada and the U.S., including the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which was put on hold by the Obama administration last month. Her whirlwind tour through Washington, New York, Toronto and Ottawa in November was a sharp contrast with Redford’s homebody forerunner Ed Stelmach. But her approach is no surprise to those familiar with the important work she did on the international stage, which she has rarely discussed in detail.

Q: The potted biographies about your international work are very jargony—“she facilitated this,” “she served in such-and-such an office.”

A: Well, I think part of the reason for that is the biographies are written by people that don’t have international backgrounds. They’re written for the way my political life has been for the past two or three years, as opposed to when you get into the guts of it.

Q: Can you talk about your career in plain English, then?

A: I’d gone to law school in Saskatchewan and taken a lot of human rights law, on top of the regular training, and I had always been involved in politics, so I spent time in Ottawa working for Joe Clark, who was then chair of the Commonwealth Ministers on South Africa. That’s where the debates were happening over whether sanctions should be applied to South Africa—debates that involved Mulroney and Reagan and Thatcher. I worked for Clark on a regional desk that included South Africa, and then I went back and articled, but I never got it out of my system.

I had an opportunity in about 1990 to go back to South Africa on what was originally a six-week contract, working for the European Union. At that time in South Africa you had a government that was getting ready for transition. Nobody knew what it was going to look like. You had the African National Congress, which was not just a political force but was really almost becoming a de facto government. Essentially, a government in parallel was beginning to be established there.

Q: What was your role there?

A: I was a technical adviser to the legal and constitutional affairs committee of the ANC, which was providing advice to the most senior leadership levels of the ANC. The constitution was essentially being written and negotiated at the same time. So I worked on that; and I also worked on individual special projects. They were going to have to create a public broadcaster with a governance board; they were going to have to create a human rights commission. So I would go out and work with Canadian experts, or experts from other countries, and provide policy recommendations on institutional change. And then they would make decisions as to what they wanted to do.

When a lot of that work started to get done, I went to work for the Australian Embassy doing what you would think of as nuts-and-bolts development work. I funded projects through the embassy on things like sports development, HIV/AIDS, theatre groups that were teaching local communities about education. We built water projects, we dealt with domestic violence. All of the issues about huge, transformative social change, but at a community level.

I was there until 1996 and then I came back to Calgary and I practised family law. I was in a partnership with a couple of people who were criminal defence lawyers, but I didn’t like that.

Q: Why not?

A: I’d come out of a South African tradition, which involved mediation, intraspace bargaining, all that kind of stuff. It was the beginning of the “getting to yes” model of the world. And I came back to Canada and practised family law, and saw a criminal law that was completely litigious and adversarial. I practised law for about four or five years in Calgary and then decided I wanted to go back to development work. I moved to Ottawa and managed a constitutional development project for the Canadian Bar Association. Our partner in South Africa was called the Legal Resources Centre; it did a lot of test-case litigation on freedom of expression, employee rights, whether pregnant women had the right to antiretroviral HIV drugs, that kind of stuff.

Q: Was there a moment when you considered committing to South Africa permanently?

A: Yes. When I lived in South Africa in 1995, I applied for citizenship. And they turned me down. I don’t think South Africa in 1995 was looking for a lot of white people to immigrate, quite honestly. So I just went through the normal process and didn’t get accepted, and I thought, well, that’s fate telling me it’s time to come home. Which it probably was.

Q: In a hypothetical future after politics, is there a chance you’d go back?

A: No, no. The second time I went back I had the chance to spend a year in Cape Town, on and off, not working, just living. I really did love it. But it felt like I’d been there long enough. And so we came back to Calgary, and that’s when my daughter was born, in 2002. I carried on in Calgary doing international development work for a company called Agriteam Canada, which would run projects for the World Bank, the United Nations, the European Union, that sort of thing. They’d done education, health care, water, but they’d never done governance. We started to get projects around things like judicial training in Vietnam, judicial training in Bosnia. And I managed three or four of those projects over a long period of time.

Q: And is that what ultimately put you in Afghanistan?

A: I was in Afghanistan in 2005 for the first parliamentary elections. It’s a compelling country. I felt very fortunate to get to go. It wasn’t dangerous like being there during the worst of it, and I think it’s more dangerous now than in 2005, but there was so much to do and we were starting from nothing. That was the first time that I’d taken one of the most senior leadership roles in an election system. We ended up not just having to organize a system where you were telling people it was okay to vote, and safe to vote. I’d be going and talking to women about what a vote was. They knew it was something important, because I’d go to these meetings and they’d bring their daughters. This was very fundamental voter education, with comic books and theatre and trying to get communication to the mosques and imams.

We also had to draft the election law. When I got there the first night, I said to my two colleagues, an American and an Australian, “Okay, where’s the elections act?” “Well, you’re writing it.” A group of us wrote the election act, took it to cabinet, and got it approved. We were doing things like negotiating who was going to be allowed to run as a candidate; we’d have rules, like, if you still funded your own private standing army, we didn’t think you should be able to run. That was really difficult to get through cabinet, because there were some people at the table who had private armies.

Q: Is your international experience going to be a particular asset to you as premier? You took the Keystone XL pipeline file by the throat with your recent trip, and it makes one wonder why this sort of thing wasn’t tried before things started to get out of control in D.C.

A: Well, first of all, the process of making a regulatory decision on Keystone is one that has to run domestically in the United States and we needed to respect that. The citizens of the United States need to talk about how that infrastructure project will impact communities and state governments and all of that.

What I do think is that it’s a really big world out there. There are a lot of players. There’s no doubt that we have known for some time that we were going to start to see the agenda around energy issues and environmental issues change. And my view has always been that it’s possible to be effective in that arena if you can anticipate what’s coming next. I’ll tell you that I believe that in the last while Alberta hasn’t had leadership that understood Alberta’s role internationally. We needed to understand that decision-makers in Europe could impact us, not just decision-makers in Ottawa. It’s not just us in control of our own destiny. We are part of a global economy, and a global energy sphere, and we need to understand the impact that the political dialogue could have on our province.

Q: Is that part of why you won?

A: I believe Albertans saw in this leadership campaign that it was time to have a leader who understood all that. I’ve gotta tell you, I’m a little surprised by some of the commentary around the fact that [I’ve done] a lot of travel. Really? In my life? This isn’t a lot of travel.

Q: So we should expect to see you on the road a lot more then?

A: I’m very ambitious and bold on trade missions. I think Alberta’s future is China, India and Vietnam. We need to be in those countries. I look at the people in this province, whether they live in Edmonton or Fort McMurray or Calgary, and the way that they do business. They move around this globe pretty fast. They’re doing it effectively and making important decisions and attracting investment to this province, and I think Albertans want their government to be that way. And we’re gonna be that way.

Making our streets safer

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 0 Comments

Conservative MP Peter Goldring has resigned from the Conservative caucus after being charged for refusing a breathalyzer test this weekend.

Two years ago, on the basis of civil liberties concerns, he criticized a proposal from Mothers Against Drunk Driving that would have required drivers to comply with random screening. He also apparently opposed new drunk driving legislation being pursued by the Alberta government.

A prairie football phenomenon

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 1:40 PM - 0 Comments

Photographs by Chris Bolin

“I told my wife last week: you can have the baby any day but Friday,” says Darryl Salmon, head coach of the Raymond Comets high school football team. Stephanie Salmon was due to deliver the couple’s second child on Tuesday, Oct. 18. Her husband’s team had a home game on Oct. 14—a “nothing game,” as even school athletic director Todd Heggie admits. The Comets, 4-2 against provincial Tier I competition, had already secured a spot in the playoffs. Two bye weeks for the team lay ahead, leaving plenty of time for the baby to arrive without disruption.

And Coach Salmon is, frankly, not short of help coaching his squad—not in Raymond, Alta., which generally has a few ex-Comets hanging around who played college or pro football. Fans of Canadian university football will remember Salmon as the starting quarterback for the University of Alberta Golden Bears of 2004, when the team went 7-1 and returned to the Canada West championship game after a 20-year absence. As a head coach, Salmon is not easy to pick out on the sideline, spending most of his time in close contact with his QB while others tend to the complicated choreography of line play and defence.

No one in Raymond—though it’s hard to be certain—would have begrudged the boss a night off. He didn’t get one. Sure enough, Stephanie was awakened by contractions at 5:30 a.m. on the morning of game day. She handled it with the aplomb of an experienced pocket passer, arriving at the Raymond hospital at 8:30 a.m. Seven-pound, seven-ounce Maddie was born at about 11:30 a.m. And when the Cougars of Calgary’s Catholic Central High kicked off to the Comets at 7 p.m., Salmon was there on the sidelines. “He’d have stayed with me if there had been a problem,” says Stephanie, “but under the circumstances, I figured I could spare him for a few hours.”

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The newest math

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 11:24 AM - 0 Comments

After one version last week and another last night, the official House of Commons math now adds 15 new seats for Ontario, six for British Columbia, six for Alberta and three for Quebec.

The provinces thus break down as so.

Ontario 38.8% of the population and 35.8% of the seats
Quebec 23.1% and 23.1%
British Columbia 13.3% and 12.4%
Alberta 11.0% and 10.1%
Manitoba 3.6% and 4.1%
Saskatchewan 3.1% and 4.1%
Nova Scotia 2.7% and 3.3%
New Brunswick 2.2% and 3.0%
Newfoundland 1.5% and 2.1%
PEI 0.4% and 1.2%

House of Commons math

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 3:48 PM - 40 Comments

If the Star’s sources are correct, the Harper government’s plan to rebalance the House of Commons will see 13 seats added in Ontario, six in Alberta, five to British Columbia and two to Quebec.

The NDP has tabled its own bill on seat distribution which generally uses a formula based on the results of the 2011 census. On the question of Quebec, it would ensure that Quebec maintain the same proportion of seats as it had on Nov. 27, 2006: the day the House adopted the Prime Minister’s motion that the Quebecois form a nation within a united Canada.

At that point, Quebec had 75 of 308 seats, or 24.35%.

Under the government’s changes, Quebec would have 77 of 334 seats, or 23.05%.

Update 4:03pm. Using the government’s seat numbers, you would have to give Quebec a total of eight more seats (83 of 340) to get to 24.41%. Seven more seats, or 82 of 339, equals 24.19%.

Redford wins Alberta PC leadership in tight race

By macleans.ca - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 10:35 AM - 2 Comments

Allison Redford beat perceived frontrunner Gary Mar to take the leadership of Alberta’s Progressive Conservative Party after a close race that wasn’t decided until the early hours of Sunday morning. Redford will become Alberta’s first female premier. The 46-year-old family and human rights lawyer held a press conference Sunday morning, telling reporters in Edmonton that she plans to establish family care clinics and restore $100 million in education cuts. However, she won’t call another session at the provincial legislature until next year, when she will present a budget and call a general election. Redford indicated that she will invite Mar and other leadership candidates to take positions in her cabinet.

Calgary Herald

Badlands humour

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Teletoon

The U.S. is full of Canadian comedy writers, but they usually don’t get to make many jokes about their native country. That’s where Crash Canyon comes in. The new animated series on Teletoon was developed by a Calgarian writer for The Simpsons, Joel H. Cohen, who hired several other Canadian writers, including Simpsons colleague Tim Long and How I Met Your Mother’s Chuck Tatham.

Though shows like The Simpsons and HIMYM frequently have Canadian jokes, they’re usually obvious ones about Tim Hortons and hockey. On Crash Canyon, a mix of Family Guy and Gilligan’s Island about a Canadian family stuck in a canyon in Alberta, Cohen told Maclean’s that the writers finally had the opportunity to put in Canadian insider jokes like an ice cream store called “Don and Cherry’s” and a Monopoly game called “Moncton-opoly.” There are other possibly lost-on-Americans jokes, such as a stylist character who calls himself “the René to her Céline” and a road sign that says, “Now entering Saskatchewan—Welcome to our Nothing.”

“Americans love to make fun of Canada, so this is a chance to show another thing Canadians do better than the U.S.,” Cohen says. “In that sense, I guess we’re being patriotic. Now where do I pick up my Order of Canada medal?” Of course, not all the Canadian references are for insiders; Teletoon’s advance trailer includes a joke where the family daughter mixes up Anne Frank with Anne of Green Gables.

Wanted in Alberta: one premier

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 3 Comments

Larry Wong/Edmonton Journal

Alberta’s Progressive Conservative government turned 40 on Aug. 30. That first win back in 1971 was regarded as an upset, but one man saw it coming—Peter Lougheed’s rural boss, House leader, and political Merlin, Dr. Hugh Horner. In the days before the election, the tall, soft-spoken Horner circulated amongst legislature reporters, promising skeptical scribes that the upstart PCs would capture about 50 seats (the final figure was 49). Today Horner’s son Doug is part of a six-person field from which PC members will select a chief for an election fight anticipated next spring.

It’s the latest chapter in the tale of eternal Alberta PC renewal. This time last year there were many who didn’t think the Tories would make it to age 41. Premier Ed Stelmach, the compromise candidate who had succeeded Ralph Klein, had turned out to be a tongue-tied bungler. And the Wildrose Alliance, a right-wing alternative party led by young and eloquent Danielle Smith, was at the government’s heels in the polls. A January caucus coup led by Ted Morton forced Stelmach into a slow-motion retirement.

Morton is one of the candidates for the leadership, and whether or not he triumphs, his move seems to have been the best thing for the party. With a gang of possible leaders capturing media attention and shoplifting Wildrose policies, Alberta’s natural governing party has surged back into a commanding lead. A late July Environics survey gave the PCs a towering 54 per cent share of voters, with the Wildrose (renamed simply the Wildrose Party this summer) at 16 per cent and the NDP and Liberals even further back.

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Choking the oil sands

By Chris Sorensen and Luiza Ch. Savage - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 9:21 AM - 18 Comments

Jiri Rezac/WWF/Polaris

Over the next few weeks, as many as 2,000 climate change protesters are expected to descend on Washington in an effort to draw more Americans into the debate over Alberta’s oil sands—one of the most carbon-intensive sources of fossil fuel on the planet. But this time, anti-oil sands groups aren’t focusing on the vast open pit mines near Fort McMurray, which one activist memorably compared to J. R. R. Tolkien’s fire-spewing and charcoal-covered realm of Mordor, but on a major pipeline project that the industry needs to move forward with its expansion plans.

Supported by such high-profile environmentalists and left-leaning luminaries as David Suzuki and Naomi Klein, the protesters, who will risk arrest during their White House sit-in, hope to stop President Barack Obama’s administration from approving the proposed 2,673-km Keystone XL pipeline that is being built by TransCanada Corp. and would move crude oil from northern Alberta to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, north of the border, anti-pipeline rallies are scheduled to take place over the next few months in Vancouver and Ottawa. In addition to the Keystone XL project, the Canadian rallies will also focus on a proposed 1,170-km pipeline, built by Enbridge Inc., that would connect northern Alberta to an oil-shipping terminal in Kitimat, B.C., running through an area that opponents claim is pristine wilderness and the habitat of a sacred species of bear.
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Edmonton’s murder belt

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 12:27 PM - 3 Comments

Perry Mah/The Edmonton Sun/QMI Agency

The 2011 homicide counter started clicking early in Edmonton, and it has not stopped. Just three hours past midnight on New Year’s, police were called to an Ethiopian restaurant on Edmonton’s 107th Avenue—the “Avenue of Nations,” where East African immigrants are following the earlier footsteps of the Vietnamese boat people. On reaching the scene, investigators found 23-year-old Somali man Mohamud Mohamed Jama dead from a gunshot to the head.

A wounded witness refused to co-operate, and other patrons clammed up too. Fellow Somalis declared the victim a “typical Canadian young man” who “wasn’t involved with gangs or drugs.” But Jama died nine days shy of his sentencing for a 2007 aggravated assault; he had pleaded guilty of stabbing another Somali man eight times.

Jama’s unsolved murder struck a wearisome chord for Edmontonians, from the north-central crime scene to the frustrations of the cops trying to pry loose information from clannish Somali-Canadians reluctant to trust police. Yet the bloody big picture of Edmonton in 2011 defies neat categories or models. For reasons that remain obscure, a working-class city has exploded this year into unrelenting, record-breaking levels of violence.

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Syphilis is on a comeback

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, July 13, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 5 Comments

Veronique de Viguerie/Getty Images

Ghosts, the 1881 Henrik Ibsen play in which syphilis signifies “the tragedy of heredity,” was a death knell for the 19th century. The 19th century did not take it well. Ibsen was met with pan-European abuse for his “dirty act,” his “almost putrid indecorum.” The funny thing, to the modern reader, is that Ghosts never explicitly mentions syphilis. In 1881, theatregoers understood doomed Oswald Alving when he described the inherited contagion that surfaced “down there” and spread to his brain. Today’s undergraduates need annotation; they live in a world of high-quality public health care where syphilis, a disease knocked out readily by penicillin, is almost never encountered.

In contemporary Canada it still flares up occasionally among high-risk groups, particularly gay men. But now Alberta, suddenly plagued with the pre-antibiotic horrors of adult neurosyphilis and congenital syphilis among newborns, has had to launch a shock campaign of public awareness. As in Ibsen’s time, so in ours: debate within Alberta has concentrated on the message, with scant attention paid to the crisis itself—a crisis as anachronistic in the 21st century as a cholera epidemic caused by a contaminated water pump.

Alberta made syphilis a reportable disease before the Second World War and introduced mandatory screening for expectant mothers shortly thereafter. But beginning in 2005, with an economic boom creating high mobility, crack cocaine enjoying a renaissance, and strains increasing on Alberta’s health care system, syphilis broke into the heterosexual population, with “street-involved” Aboriginal women hit particularly hard.

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Turning water into money

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 12 Comments

Dominique Favre/Reuters

Last month, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé SA, the world’s largest food company, made a splash in Alberta for announcing, via an interview with Reuters in Geneva, that Nestlé was in talks with the Alberta government to establish a so-called water exchange—a market in which water, life’s sine qua non, could be bought and sold just like wheat, pork bellies or any other commodity. “We are actively dealing with the government of Alberta to think about a water exchange,” said Brabeck-Letmathe, describing the province as ideal for such a scheme because water there is scarce and competition for the resource between farmers and oil sands operators is fierce.

This was news to the government of Alberta, which swiftly moved to allay fears about the commodification of Alberta’s water, and its potential export. “Alberta’s water is not for sale and will not be,” Environment Minister Rob Renner told the legislature.

Yet Renner did not deny outright that the province had met with Nestlé, or others, to discuss the notion of setting up a water market in which licences to access the Crown-owned resource could be traded for money. (The province left it to Nestlé to clarify the issue: “Nestlé SA representatives have not met the government of Alberta to discuss an exchange-based water trade,” a press release said.) In fact, Renner signalled the province might indeed have an appetite for setting up such a system: “I think there will come a day, at some point in time, when we need to value water. Whether that means in the form of a regulatory regime or whether it means in some form of a market remains to be seen.”

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Just say no, for various reasons

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 1:39 PM - 58 Comments

Stephane Dion explains why Alberta and British Columbia should rejected the Senate Reform Act.

This unbalanced distribution of Senate seats -a historical artifact -is a problem for the two western provinces and an anomaly of our federation; Stephen Harper’s reform would make the situation much worse. In the existing unelected Senate, this problem is mitigated by the fact that our senators play their constitutional role with moderation, letting the elected House of Commons have the final word most of the time. But in an elected Senate, with members able to invoke as much democratic legitimacy as their House counterparts -if not more, since they would represent provinces rather than ridings -the underrepresentation of British Columbia and Alberta would take its full scope and significance.

The trouble with city bats

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

In flat and treeless Alberta, little brown bats flock to the big city—Calgary—where tall buildings and bridges provide ample space to roost, says Joanna Coleman, who recently completed her Ph.D. in biological sciences at the University of Calgary. But that doesn’t necessarily mean city bats are in good health, in spite of Coleman’s expectation that, if urbanization were to benefit bats anywhere, it would be in the Prairies. In a new study—the first to look at the urban life of Prairie bats—she actually found that city life might not benefit bats after all.

Coleman looked at 1,600 little brown bats, working in three different zones in and around Calgary: urban, rural, and a “transition zone.” Bats were captured in fine nets, weighed, measured—in the case of females, researchers checked whether the bat was lactating—and then released. “I was very uncomfortable with them at first,” says Coleman. In her previous work as a veterinary technician, “I’d handled all kinds of critters, but bats are very fragile,” she says. Up close, she adds, they’re also “extremely cute.”

Coleman caught the most bats in the city, but found these bats weren’t actually healthier than their country counterparts (those in the “transition zone,” she says, appeared to be in the best shape). Why bats don’t flourish in the city isn’t clear, but it could be because they’re facing more competition for food, or even urban annoyances like street lights. Even so, “I wouldn’t necessarily try to improve the urban habitat for bats,” she says, “until we understand why the city isn’t so great for them.” Now teaching biology at the University of Calgary’s campus in Doha, Qatar, Coleman admits she’s been scouring the desert city for any sign of bats—with no luck. “I walk around with my head up.”

Inside the Slave Lake inferno

By Colby Cosh - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 7:20 AM - 4 Comments

The fire destroyed 40 per cent of the community’s structures

“At 4 p.m. I was taking aerial photos of the forest fire,” says reporter-photographer Caezer Ng of Slave Lake, Alta.’s Lakeside Leader. “Based on what I saw from the air, I was fairly encouraged. It looked like there was a comfortable kilometre-and-a-half, maybe two-kilometre gap between us and the fire. By five o’clock I was on the ground in a burning town.” It was the afternoon of Sunday, May 15. In a matter of minutes, some 40 per cent of the structures in the community of 7,000 would be lost to a conflagration of unexpected speed and destructiveness. Slave Lake’s gleaming $36-million town hall, completed just 17 months ago, went up in flames almost as though it had been built out of thermite. So too did the Catholic church, the public library, and the mall.

The town, a fast-growing centre for oil patch activity, forestry and tourism, sits 200 km north of Edmonton at the eastern tip of Lesser Slave Lake. Like much of northern Alberta, it had been scourged for much of the previous week by dry, warm winds gusting up to 100 km/hr, winds normally much more characteristic of the province’s arid south. Duncan MacDonnell, a public affairs man for the provincial ministry that oversees forest protection, walked outside Saturday in Edmonton and immediately kissed his leisurely Sunday goodbye: “I knew there was a full day of wildfire briefings in front of me.” He was right; within the next few days, two dozen wildfires would grow out of control throughout the province and 1,100 sq. km would be scorched.

Slave Lake’s rapid expansion over recent years had left it without much natural separation between new subdivisions and the surrounding bush. The fire that eventually ravaged the town began 15 km to the southeast on Saturday, and residents were advised to be ready to bug out on two hours’ notice. When the inferno arrived, they did not get half that. The front of the blaze leaped local highways with an ease that surprised firefighters, and hot winds spread the fire in sudden terrifying flashovers rather than picturesque tongues of flame. Propane tanks and other fuel-storage facilities exploded in a steady stream of pops as families sought out safer parts of town. The burning of the local Ford dealership, with its trucks and its repair shop full of flammables, is said to have been especially memorable.

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The West is in and Ontario has joined it

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 147 Comments

Photograph by Chris Bolin

Democracy, great and terrible as the sea: unknowable, implacable, irresistible, destroyer of parties, deliverer of others, humbler of leaders, elector of bricklayers and assistant pub managers. Tremble before it, and stay out of its path when it moves.

Five parties were picked up, shaken out and tossed aside by the voters in this astonishing election, but of all the many implications one is fundamental: the Conservatives are now in a position to replace the Liberals as the natural governing party in Canada, as dominant, potentially, in the 21st century as the Liberals were in the 20th. This isn’t just a victory, the first Conservative majority in a generation. It is (at least under the terms of the current electoral system) a realignment. Simply put, the West is in—and Ontario has joined it.

The temptation, looking at the wreckage of the Liberal and Bloc Québécois parties and the meteoric rise of the NDP, is to compare this election to 1993, which shattered Brian Mulroney’s old Conservative coalition into its Bloc and Reform party fragments. But it’s much more consequential than that. In retrospect, 1993 changed very little. It handed power to the Liberals, but it did nothing to alter the long-term dynamic of Canadian politics: the remorseless shrinking of the Liberal base.

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The biggest, baddest dinos still rule

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Nancy Stone/Chicago Tribune/Getty Images

Mike Taylor, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol, recently announced a newly discovered dinosaur, Brontomerus mcintoshi, whose whopping thighs suggest it may actually have kicked smaller rivals out of the way. In a nod to its muscled legs, his team cheekily named it Brontomerus, which literally translates to “thunder thighs.” (The name is also an homage to dinosaur expert John McIntosh.) The story was accompanied by an illustration of Brontomerus punting a smaller dinosaur through the air, its blood spurting gorily. “Not all of our colleagues were as delighted as we were,” Taylor says. “There was a feeling in some quarters that it could give a frivolous notion of what paleontology is all about.”

The study of dinosaurs is just a small part of Taylor’s field, but it gets the lion’s share of attention. Take, for example, the current American Museum of Natural History exhibit on the “world’s largest dinosaurs,” which generated tremendous buzz before it even opened on April 16, or a new study suggesting some carnivorous dinosaurs—like velociraptors—could see in the dark and hunted by night, which was reported around the world. Meanwhile, “a scientist might harvest 10,000 fossilized molluscs, and discover things that have a great deal of significance, but they don’t grasp the public imagination like a dinosaur,” Taylor says. This can lead to competition among paleontologists, and sometimes even sour grapes. “There’s a Hollywood aspect of science,” says University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno. “It’s about impressing your colleagues, and with good reason,” including funding. “But there’s some jealousy,” he says, “that goes with that turf.”

A prolific paleontologist who’s discovered dinosaurs on five continents, Sereno’s a master of making his work exciting and, he says, “accessible.” One of his splashiest finds came in 2009: he and his team dug up five species of 100-million-year-old crocodiles in the Sahara, and named them BoarCroc, RatCroc, DuckCroc, DogCroc, and PancakeCroc, whose giant head was flat as a pancake. The press release included a photo of Sereno enveloped by the spiky jaws of SuperCroc, a 40-foot, eight-ton monster he’d found on an earlier dig. “I wanted names that were evocative,” Sereno says. Researchers recently announced they’d found a new cousin of Tyrannosaurusrex, named Zhuchengtyrannus magnus, or “tyrant from Zhucheng,” for the place in China where it was found; the largest known dinosaur is Argentinosaurus, named for its place of discovery, too, which Taylor calls “a monumental failure of the imagination.”

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Quebec and Alberta: best buds?

By Erica Alini - Friday, April 29, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Atlantic Canada: Only 10 per cent of people from Eastern Canada are airing their political opinions online during the current campaign, compared to 18 per cent across Canada. But when they do log on to voice their opinions, they’re the most likely of any Canadians to do so every day.

Quebec: Contrary to popular belief, most Quebecers don’t hate Albertans. Sixty-one per cent said they have a positive view of Alberta, and—even more surprising—71 per cent said the western province should continue to develop its oil sands, provided it does everything possible to limit any environmental impact.

Ontario: While the disaster in Japan shook many Canadians of their confidence in nuclear energy, just 41 per cent in Ontario—the lowest rate of any province—said the disaster worsened their view of nuclear power (the national average is 49 per cent). And 30 per cent of Ontarians continue to support building new nuclear power plants (just 12 per cent in Quebec feel the same way).

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A final public service in a long, distinguished career

By macleans.ca - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 2 Comments

Nathan Denette/CP Andy Clark/Reuters

Ralph Klein always tackled problems head-on. And he generally got the last word.

As a crusading journalist in Calgary, he took frequent and deliberate aim at city hall. After an improbable victory as mayor, there were numerous tussles with balky bureaucrats. As provincial environment minister, he had many memorable scraps over government policy and finally, as premier of Alberta, he battled countless interest groups and unions—he once joked that his “day was not complete without a protest or two, or three”—while bringing fiscal rectitude to the province. His repeated electoral successes, and defeat of Alberta’s deficit, are the stuff of Canadian political legend.

That same determination held for his personal trials as well: when his drinking became an issue in 2001, he promptly admitted he had a problem and quit cold turkey.

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Stephen Harper and Canada, a love story (IV)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 9:04 AM - 251 Comments

Eleven years before he declared himself and his side to be “Canadians first and only,” Stephen Harper declared his allegiance to an Alberta quite apart from Canada.

The following op-ed was published by the National Post on December 8, 2000, shortly after that year’s federal election. Sorting out how he got from writing what appears here to saying what he says now probably goes as far as any question towards sorting out Stephen Harper. Continue…

The prairie putsch to replace Ed Stelmach

By Colby Cosh - Friday, February 4, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 8 Comments

Photography by Chris Bolin

Ed Stelmach, who announced his eventual retirement from the Alberta premiership last week, is technically leaving as an undefeated champion. He won five elections as an MLA, came up the middle to shock the nation and succeed Ralph Klein as Progressive Conservative leader in 2006, and won one of the largest majorities in Alberta history in 2008′s general election.

He guided the PCs to impressive strength in the polls in the city once known as “Redmonton.” As Alberta’s first Ukrainian premier, he will retain living-legend status for the rest of his days. He is even relatively popular with the province’s public-sector unions, who are fretting over his departure.

But there is one group he never quite won over. Unfortunately for Stelmach, it was his own caucus, which collectively became convinced in December that the premier was leading them to disaster. A very quick decision to resign was the result. High-ranking employees in the premier’s office showed up for work on the morning of Jan. 25 suspecting nothing amiss, and were horrified to learn at around 9 a.m. that their fiercely loyal, unfailingly considerate boss was giving up.

The collapse in confidence is no mystery. Ever since the province’s budget tilted into the red in early 2009, Stelmach had given endless assurances that Alberta would be back in surplus for 2012-13. His finance minister, Ted Morton, was confidently repeating those assurances as late as November 2010. All along, Tories facing re-election had clung to the hope that, whatever Stelmach’s errors in areas like oil-patch policy and health care, they would have a balanced budget to run behind in spring 2012.

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Software for your Alberta politics B.S. detector

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 7:35 PM - 103 Comments

Some of you will be reading my column on the resignation of Ed Stelmach as Alberta premier as early as today; some of you will have to wait until next week. In the meantime, I’ll give you some principles you can use to filter the hypotheses of other observers.

First of all, don’t believe anyone who tells you that Alberta politics is governed by some mystical tidal pattern of stagnation punctuated by revolution. Anybody who’s been here for the past 20 or 30 years should have learned to tune out the “massive change is just around the corner!” refrain by now, if only because advancing age has made him half-deaf. Preston Manning alone has been guilty of a dozen or so end-times prophecies of this sort (though, in fairness, prophecy is sort of a family tradition with him). News flash: pretty much everybody who voted here in 1935 is underground, and not because a basement suite was all they could afford. The Alberta electorate of 2011 in no way resembles that even of 1981; not ethnically, not culturally, not spiritually, not ideologically.

And the political spectrum itself has changed. As much as there might be a casual longing for a revival of “Peter Lougheed Conservatism”, Lougheed’s style of state corporatism, which led to budget disaster in the 1980s after his suspiciously timely exit, would probably now put any candidate who embraced it on the left wing of the federal NDP. Don’t believe anyone who tells you there is some unexploited, powerful hidden welter of Red Toryism in Alberta, waiting to spew forth into an appropriate channel. Even the reds aren’t that Red anymore.

There is no particular reason for Alberta politics to seek the same equilibrium in which our federal government is trapped, so don’t believe anyone who argues for realignment as some kind of cosmic axiom. Yes, I’m looking at Jeffrey Simpson here. Simpson is described endearingly by his employer as “a regular visitor to Alberta”, which seems like a deliberate invitation to scorn, but the man obviously is well-informed about the place. His characterization of the Alberta Liberal Party can only have come from someone familiar with it.

Simpson, however, believes Alberta politics is reverting to a “normal” shape (one it has never had) because the province no longer has any reason for hostility and suspicion toward a federal government led by a Calgarian. (With the bonus, one presumes, of a chief justice from Pincher Creek.) I think our visitor underestimates the ease of Ottawa-bashing in a world where Alberta farmers can still be jailed for defying the Wheat Board; where Alberta still pays toll upon toll for its presence in Confederation, layering pension and employment-insurance outflows on top of explicit fiscal equalization; where, as finance minister Ted Morton recently pointed out, Albertans are being billed specifically for the provincial sales tax liabilities of Ontarians and British Columbians. Morton’s a smart guy! He can find reasons to be upset with Ottawa almost as fast as Ottawa can come up with ways to screw Alberta!

I would tell you not to believe anyone who sees no difference between Ted Morton and Danielle Smith, but then, you barely have any choice aside from me. My column anticipating a personal tilt between Morton and Smith in the Calgary exurbs has been superseded with embarrassing speed by events, but at least it was written by somebody who can distinguish between various species of “right-winger” if given a pair of field glasses and sent out into the bush. The Morton-Smith personal combat, which already started when Smith announced a candidacy smack-dab in the middle of Morton Country, is more than superficial. Morton, by trifling with property rights as resource minister, has attacked the very principles Smith built her career around. She is physically moving to the rural south because Morton painted a target on himself; his core organizers and financial backers are gone, many directly to her, and they are not coming back. The Globe‘s Josh Wingrove is all over this, and understands it better than most writers for Alberta organs do; he, at least, is no mere visitor.

But, really, is there any realistic doubt that Morton and Smith could stage a pretty interesting political battle? Forget even the intriguing stylistic contrast: one of them has been a rights advocate for her entire career and the other is the country’s leading intellectual opponent of liberal “rights” rhetoric. One of them is pro-choice and pro-gay marriage; the other made his reputation blowing raspberries at the Morgentaler and Vriend decisions. It’s literally not possible that any reasonable person could be equally comfortable with either of the two as premier.

Other myths to be wary of? Don’t believe anybody who talks up the Alberta Party, at least until it has a leader, some policies, and a history of contesting elections. The idea that an Alberta political movement can go from zero to government in 6.8 seconds, just because Social Credit did it 76 years ago, is just a variant of the “every X years Y happens” myth. (Hasn’t anybody in this province read The Poverty of Historicism?) Don’t believe anything you are told about low Alberta voter turnout unless the province’s young-skewing demographics are factored in; young people don’t vote anywhere in the Western world, and we have more of them than you do.

And don’t put too much stock in the election of Naheed Nenshi as mayor of Calgary. What he accomplished was remarkable, but it also required less than 40% of the vote in a race where the establishment favourite, Barb Higgins, turned out to have a bad case of China Syndrome. The people who got giddy over big bad Calgary electing a relatively liberal mayor apparently haven’t heard that the last time Calgary elected a non-Liberal was 1977.