To be a Canadian who lives in Alberta, to use a religious analogy, is a bit like being a non-sectarian believer trapped in a fundamentalist sectarian community. What unites us as Canadians is almost unmentionable, while the sectarian priests prevail, preaching dangerous myths for sectarian purposes. As I read over the UCP’s flyer on its… Continue reading An APP: Lies, Damned Lies and Satistics
Category: Alberta Politics
Complicity of Silent Leadership
Let’s hope the courage the NDP lacked in the recent election campaign – the courage to critique the disastrous economic record of the UCP, and the Conservatives before them, and to propose a far-sighted alternative for our economy – a vision a majority of Albertans is ready for – will return to its natural home in the social democratic Opposition in the Legislature.
Oh Alberta! What a Fiasco!
In a triumph for colonial ideology, a majority of Albertans have once again chosen for their leaders the compradors of duplicitous, foreign-owned Big Oil.
Alberta Leaders’ Debate Disappoints
The debate underlined the immaturity and insubstantial nature of our democratic practice. We seem trapped in a world where serious public examination of the issues confronting us is impossible, however desirable.
Our Captured Oil and Gas Regulators: Institutional Racism at Work
Recent months provide fresh evidence that despite Canada’s formal support of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), racist decision-making permeates the practices of oil and gas regulators and their political masters.
It’s the Profits, Stupid!
Free of the colonized ideology, it doesn’t take a genius to see that the allocation of our social and economic surplus today is out of line with our values and inappropriate to the challenges we face collectively.
Ecocide, the End-Stage of Capitalism?
Our capitalist economy can’t find the capital to save itself. Our colonized political system hampers our regaining the agency to engineer a re-allocation of capital to ensure our survival.
“Degrowth”: A Revolution by Any Other Name
The political agents of the fossil fuel industry and their media sycophants, have made even the idea of “just transition” unspeakable.
Alberta’s embarrassingly feckless Premier, Danielle Smith, sounds shocked when she states the obvious, that a “just transition” implies the wind-down of the dirty energy sector. Duh! And the federal Liberals play right along, dishonestly pretending otherwise while abandoning the term so as not to offend!
Corporate Colonialism And Our Fragile Democracy
The notion that politics is the art of the possible only holds water when the electorate is truly aware of its potency and agency and acts accordingly. In that case, imagination, not colonized thinking, sets the limit of the possible.
The Trans Mountain Scandal: Why Aren’t Canadians Angrier?
We trust our corporate colonizers and their political handmaidens and ignore the evidence that might demand we act to assume our democratic responsibilities. If Cecil Rhodes were alive and a Canadian today, he’d be an oil industry CEO or a Bank President.