Opinion

The Alberta government set about selling a budget with a multibillion-dollar deficit Wednesday to a crotchety constituency that has grown used to massive oil-fuelled surpluses.

There are enough conflicting messages contained in the Alberta budget to leave the average taxpayer dazed and confused for a week.

Arguing that newspapers are dead makes about as much sense as arguing that rotary dial telephones are dead: It’s pointless.

Back in October, Jeff Rubin looked at the housing meltdown and found that it didn’t fully explain the global recession that was then forming.

If Alberta had a planned economy, you’d have to say the plan has worked out exceedingly well. That is, if you happen to be a transnational corporation doing business in either of the province’s two top industries, energy and agriculture.

The explosion of gunfire in a quiet Red Deer neighbourhood on the weekend has awakened the community in more ways than one.

In March 1987, then Alberta treasurer Dick Johnston — back when finance ministers were called treasurers — told Albertans they enjoyed the highest per-capita program spending in the country.

Like most Alberta newspapers, the Red Deer Advocate has received plenty of letters from seniors angry about the province’s plan to charge some of them more money for pharmaceuticals.

To the Pembina Institute, for lashing out against a fine imposed against the oilsands giant Suncor Energy and its work-camp operator, Compass Group, for breaking environmental laws in two incidents.

The French city of Strasbourg and the German town of Kehl, which face each other across the river Rhine, will be in lock-down this weekend as the grandees of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) gather to celebrate the alliance’s 60th anniversary and protesters home in on the site from all over Europe.