Alberta Politics: Math is hard, but not so hard you can’t spot the holes in Tyler Shandro’s cost-saving shell game

Math, apparently, remains hard. Except, perhaps, calculus of a political sort. The real Mr. Shandro (Photo: Alberta Newsroom/Flickr). On its face, Health Minister Tyler Shandro’s claim that firing 11,000 low-paid public sector health care employees will save about $600 million makes little sense. Others have done the same calculation and

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Alberta Politics: Fossil fuels may be fading, but Alberta stands ready to supply bad economic ideas to Canada and the world

VICTORIA — We Albertans can be enormously proud, I guess, of our continuing influence on the Dominion. We surely must be the leading exporter of ridiculous, potentially destructive ideas in Canada. B.C. Premier John Horgan (Photo: David J. Climenhaga). Consider Andrew Wilkinson, hapless leader of British Columbia’s Liberals (who are

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Alberta Politics: Can Canada’s Conservatives resist temptation to try to sabotage the accord with the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs?

It will be interesting to see how the Conservative Opposition in Ottawa and Alberta’s Conservative government react to yesterday’s announcement the federal and British Columbia governments have reached an accord with the Wet’suwet’en First Nation that would recognize its system of hereditary governance. Participants said the agreement reached yesterday in

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Alberta Politics: Stephen Harper and Preston Manning, joined at the hip by history and not particularly liking it, make changes

On Wednesday, former prime minister Stephen Harper abruptly quit the Conservative Party of Canada’s fund-raising board, supposedly to give himself time to prevent Jean Charest from becoming leader of Canada’s Conservatives or prime minister of Canada. Yesterday, we learned that Preston Manning would quit his eponymous market-fundamentalist call centre in

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Alberta Politics: From the first nail in the Velvet Coffin to the death of Star Metro — the decline of Alberta’s newspapers

The bad news was delivered on social media yesterday by employees of Star Metro newspapers in cities outside Ontario. Whatever was behind the Toronto Star’s decision in April 2018 to hire real journalists and publish free print newspapers in five major cities across Canada, including Calgary and Edmonton, apparently it

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Alberta Politics: How will Alberta politicians respond now that groups like Canada’s nurses are demanding action on climate change?

FREDERICTON – On the last day of their national convention in New Brunswick’s capital city today, the approximately 900 delegates of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on Canadian governments to recognize climate change is a global crisis and a health emergency, and to act

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Alberta Politics: Fielding questions about Jason Kenney’s apparent effort to channel Vladimir Putin, B.C. premier sounded like the grownup

CALGARY – For those of us used to listening to Alberta politicians on the topic of pipelines, British Columbia Premier John Horgan made for a refreshing change yesterday, sounding remarkably like the grownup as he responded to Premier Jason Kenney’s proclamation into law of the NDP’s unconstitutional bill to shut

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