This and that for your Thursday reading. – Maanvi Singh reports on the corporate purchase of water rights in Arizona which signals the diversion of the necessities of life to the highest bidder once greed and mismanagement have undermined their availability. – Drew Anderson writes about the similar water crisis
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Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Jingwei Li et al. offer an update on the current state of knowledge surrounding long COVID, including the need for far more work dealing with its wide range of harmful effects. Kavita Bajeli-Datt reports on a new survey from India finding an
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: The Alberta Pension Plan: Pierre Poilievre Weighs In
It took Danielle Smith five months to go from “Nobody is touching anyone’s pension” to “Look! It’s a shiny new APP! Albertans will get much more and it will cost much less!!” And she had the LifeWorks report to backup her claim. LifeWorks says Alberta is entitled to 53%
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: The $334 Billion Assumption or Why Smith’s APP is a Non-Starter
Well that inspires confidence. When LifeWorks respectfully submitted its report to the Smith government outlining how Alberta could move from CPP to an Alberta Pension Plan, the executive summary was signed by someone who preferred to remain anonymous, hence their signature was “Redacted to protect privacy.” Perhaps Anonymous was
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Alberta in 2023: COVID, Conservatives, and the plan to make the energy rollercoaster even scarier
“Conservative” governments never like to let a crisis go to waste. Dr. John Cowell, sole administrator of Alberta Health Services (Photo: Alberta Newsroom/Flickr). Hence the concept of “disaster capitalism,” which author Naomi Klein so chillingly described in 2007 as the end result of the Shock Doctrine of modern neoliberal economics.
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Budget ’23: The Same Old Razzle Dazzle (with sprinkles on top)*
I’m not sure what Trevor Tombe did that caused Danielle Smith to say he was becoming one of her favourite economists, but it certainly wasn’t this. In a recent article about Budget 2023 Tombe said the budget moved Alberta into a “new fiscal reality where we are more reliant on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Jonathan Lambert discusses how politicized messages have been used to weaponize uncertainty and changing information during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jonathan Howard points out how successful mitigation practices have been used to serve a misleading narrative downplaying the actual risks of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your Boxing Day reading. – Kyle Hanniman and Trevor Tombe examine the relative fiscal positions of Canada’s federal and provincial governments – concluding that while there isn’t a need for austerity anywhere, there’s a lot more room to maneuver at the federal level than in most provinces
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Covid-19 and Jason Kenney is MIA
Remember Nov 13, 2020 when Jason Kenney said “Covid is starting to win and we cannot let that happen…This two-week push is, I believe our last chance to avoid more restrictive measures.” Just for context that same day Dr Rosenblum, an Edmonton ER doc, said the healthcare system was within
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Whatever happened to the UCP’s belligerent response to inconvenient European bankers and environmental litigators?
Once upon a time in Alberta if some foreign bank had dared to announce it wasn’t about to put money into any more Alberta oilsands projects there would have been a furious roar from Jason Kenney. There would have been threats to unleash a War Room on the bankers as
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Happy Canada Day! Or, as the UCP would have it in some corners of rural Alberta, Grumpy Dominion Day
Happy Canada Day! Alberta is the only place in Canada, I’d wager, where someone who was barely out of diapers when our country’s national holiday was renamed Canada Day would make the point they really think it oughtta still be Dominion Day. But these are strange times and Wild Rose
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Never mind the Kenney Government’s ‘Blueprint for Jobs’ — 26,000 jobs gone with the wind in a day
So, make that 26,000 Alberta jobs, gone with the wind! Now that some of the smoke is starting to clear from Premier Jason Kenney’s Saturday Afternoon Massacre of school board jobs, it’s apparent initial estimates by school trustees and union leaders of 20,000 jobs lost were about 30 per cent
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: The Leader and His Team
It’s been a tough week for everyone; especially that “young, energetic and diverse team with deep experience” that Jason Kenney (his words by the way) appointed to Cabinet. Health Minister Shandro took it upon himself to turn up at a Calgary doctor’s house and yell at him for reposting a
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Bill Morneau’s COVID-19 response: This economic and health crisis is no time for timidity or hesitation
According to Bill Morneau, “as Minister of Finance, my only job is to make sure that Canadians can keep food in the fridge.” That’s actually a rare useful thought for a federal finance minister to keep front of mind in calamitous circumstances like the present ones. Economist Jim Stanford (Photo:
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: COVID-19: A Study in Leadership
“The first role of government is to help people in crisis or need. That’s why we have government.”– John McCain Crisis separates the leaders from wannabes. We will be watching our leaders and wannabes very carefully over the next few months to see how they respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: How did we get to Wexit?
“Is this democracy’s death spiral? Are we falling, in this and other countries, into a lethal cycle of fury and reaction, that blocks the reasoned conversation on which civic life depends?” – George Monbiot The cycle of conservative fury and reaction hasn’t stopped for Albertans. It started with relentless attacks
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Labour Day reading. – Hassan Yussuff discusses what’s at stake for Canadian workers in this fall’s election campaign. And Binyamin Applebaum and Damon Winter rightly point out that while one job can be difficult enough, there are added stresses where workers need to try to satisfy
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Never mind sparse facts in Alberta’s first-quarter financial update, its subtext is deep cuts are coming soon
The United Conservative Party Government led by Jason Kenney wants deep cuts, and, by God, it’s going to have them. That includes tax cuts, which will drive the province’s books deeper into the red, and cuts to services to help pay for the tax breaks. If the facts, such as
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Irony is dead but doublethink thrives as Calgary opts to cut services and subsidize hockey billionaires at once
Really, what can one say about the deal the City of Calgary struck with the Flames professional hockey club yesterday for the former Cowtown’s taxpayers to subsidize half the cost of a new arena for the team to the tune of $225 million at the same moment as this city
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: The 2019 Provincial Election: What it will be about and what it should be about
Last week Ms Soapbox had the pleasure of appearing on a panel with economist Trevor Tombe and naturalist Kevin Van Tighem to discuss our perspectives on the upcoming provincial election. The event was moderated by Shelley Youngblut and presented by Alberta Views magazine and Wordfest. We focused on two questions:
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