Alberta Politics: Danielle Smith essay calling for health care user fees and co-pays was not peer reviewed: U of C School of Public Policy

Danielle Smith’s controversial 2021 paper arguing how to introduce user fees and co-pays to Alberta health care is not a research paper and was not peer reviewed, a spokesperson for the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy said yesterday. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith (Photo: Alberta Newsroom/Flickr). This answers a

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The Daveberta Podcast: Episode 64: Pandemic, Partisanship, and Post-Secondary Education in Alberta

Melanee Thomas joined Dave Cournoyer for a deep dive into Alberta’s politics during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the relationship between the provincial and federal governments, and how Albertans’ political self-identification could be influencing Premier Jason Kenney’s decision to avoid serious public health measures including a province-wide mandatory mask mandate. Thomas

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Alberta Politics: Oddities: online term paper ‘ghostwriter’ site believes impersonator used UCP minister’s name and credentials

An online custom term paper writing service called UnemployedProfessors.com says it now believes a contract writer listed on its website under the name and credentials of Alberta’s minister of advanced education is an impersonator. After references to the “unemployed professor profile” in the name of Demetrios Nicolaides cropped up on

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Alberta Politics: As predicted, ‘Fair Deal’ Panel reheats the Firewall Manifesto to manufacture consent for policies Albertans don’t want

Consider the report of Alberta’s “Fair Deal” Panel, released yesterday by Premier Jason Kenney with considerable fanfare. It strongly suggests the Harper-Kenney wing of the Canadian Conservative movement is made up of people who purport to be Canadian patriots when they’re in power in Ottawa but are Prairie separatists when

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Alberta Politics: Freedom of information filing reveals supposedly independent ‘Blue Ribbon’ Panel had help from staff in Alberta premier’s office

It turns out Janice MacKinnon’s six-member “expert panel” was using a script cooked up in Premier Jason Kenney’s office at least part of the time it was supposedly taking its “deep dive” into Alberta’s books last year. Alert readers will recall that when freshly elected United Conservative Party Premier Jason

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Alberta Politics: Rebranded ‘War Room’ aims for ‘measured tone’ in riposte to acerbic Medicine Hat News column, doesn’t quite succeed

All the Alberta Government’s rebranded Energy War Room is trying to do, pleaded Managing Director Tom Olsen yesterday in his much anticipated riposte to an acerbic column last week in the Medicine Hat News, is to bring a little civility to the debate about whether or not foreign-funded enviro-propagandists are

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Alberta Politics: University of Calgary acted like ‘Big Oil U’ in 2015 controversy, paper by B.C. academic researchers concludes

It’s not every day you see terms like “corporate obstructionism” and “institutional corruption” used to describe the way things are done at one Canadian university in a peer-reviewed academic paper written by scholars from two other institutions and published in a respected academic journal. This is one reason I think

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Alberta Politics: New Year’s bitter Twitter attacks on fact-checking economists suggest UCP will try to make 2018 the Year of the Big Chill

PHOTOS: University of Alberta economist and professor Andrew Leach. Below: Calgary-Fish Creek United Conservative Party MLA Richard Gotfried (Photo: Mr. Gotfried’s Facebook page), UCP Leader Jason Kenney, and University of Calgary economist and professor Trevor Tombe (Photo: U of C). New Year’s in Alberta blew in on a bitter winter

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