Accidental Deliberations: Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your week. – Sara Moniuzsko reports on the World Health Organization’s recognition that COVID-19 is still causing nearly 10,000 reported deaths per month (to say nothing of unreported deaths and disabilities). And Michelle Ghoussoub reports on research confirming that access to prescribed opioids results in dramatic

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Alberta Politics: From us to WE: The Dickensian ‘Big Society’ seems to be back again, if it ever left

Who can forget the “Big Society”? Just about everyone, it turns out. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Photo: Justin Trudeau/Flickr). “The Big Society,” cooked up by a senior aide to former British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, was the ridiculous idea neoliberal governments could shuffle off their key responsibility for assuring

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Alberta Politics: It’s almost as if the new coronavirus has evolved to exploit the vulnerabilities of the modern neoliberal state

“The risk to Albertans is still low,” the Government of Alberta’s official website soothingly assured us yesterday afternoon, the day the World Health Organization officially declared the effects of the coronavirus swiftly coursing ’round the globe to be a pandemic. This may reassure some of us. Others, not so much.

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Alberta Politics: What Brexit and Ottawa’s decision on the Teck oilsands mine have in common: Jason Kenney’s stubborn intransigence

Question: What do Brexit, which finally happened on Friday but the full implications of which are yet to unfold, and Ottawa’s impending decision on the Teck Resources Ltd. Frontier oilsands mine in northern Alberta have in common? Answer: Both are examples of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s stubborn tendency to cling

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Northern Reflections: Our Undoing

The EU has granted Boris Johnson another extension on Brexit. But, however long Brexit takes, Neal Ascherson writes that the ugliness of it all has destroyed the United Kingdom and the bonds between Britons: It’s commonly said that the Brexit years have made the English more xenophobic, less tolerant, more

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