The French have an expression for it: leaving “par la petite porte,” by the side door. It usually denotes an uncomfortable departure, for reasons ranging from boredom to disgrace.
In the mythological view of some self-described progressives, compassion is a market long ago cornered by themselves.
The worst regimes in Africa seem to arise along the stretch of tropical coastline between Ghana and Senegal.
There’s little doubt that students currently studying nursing in Alberta will eventually be able to find jobs somewhere — but it appears a lot of them are going to have to leave the province.
From Copenhagen to Kandahar, this country has a problem with certainty. In its absence, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives concoct strategies that fly in the face of reasonable probability.
Recently, this paper ran a news piece outlining how spending at Red Deer City Hall is routinely increasing at a rate that far outstrips the ability of the taxpaying public to shoulder the burden.
If you want to start an argument at a Christmas party this week, be sure to bring up the Copenhagen climate deal.
I was in the backyard on Sunday, digging snow — a lot of snow.
I wasn’t clearing a path to the back lane garbage area. I did that the week before. I was digging, and digging, for something special — Christmas.
One of the myths Albertans enjoy telling themselves is that we have the lowest taxes in Canada. We have no sales tax and our income tax rate is a flat 10 per cent.
In much of the Western world, the December festive season has become little more than a celebration of excess and conspicuous consumption. We run around in malls like maniacs as we count the “shopping days” till Christmas, searching for the perfect gifts for everyone we know.
To the two heroic police constables for the amazing rescue on Dec. 11 of a man freezing to death while clinging to the outside of a freight train rumbling south down the track in -38C temperatures.
Earlier this week, televangelist Oral Roberts died at age 91.
Billed long in advance as mankind’s last great opportunity to save the planet, the global summit on climate change in Copenhagen has been destroyed by the very people who say they most wanted it to succeed.
To get a true picture on how we ended up with Bill 50 and calls for an investigation by the province’s ethics commissioner, we need to expand our view somewhat.
So the government of Alberta has its first deficit in 15 years and expects at least two more. Estimates of the budget deficit vary with the latest at about $4 billion.
Now the media pundits are piling on the RCMP following the release of the Paul Kennedy report on the RCMP and the death of Robert Dziekanski.
Kennedy claimed the cellphone video captured “a defining moment.”
Propaganda. Character assassination. Censorship.
The tools of dictators and despots have been pressed into service by the Conservatives since a special parliamentary committee began investigating what they knew and when about allegations of Canadian complicity in the torture of Afghan detainees in 2006-07.
We’ve not seen anything like it in Alberta politics for a long while.
The Progressive Conservatives are scared for good reason, following the release of an Angus Reid survey last week that shows the Tories in second place — for the first time since the beginning of life on Earth.
Evidently — an advisable use of the word — the testimony of police, plaintiffs or witnesses to a crime are not the gold standard of proof in a court case, not like they used to be. Human memory, even that of trained observers, can be made suspect. So if you can’t get DNA proof of the facts like they do on TV, you’d better scan for a video on YouTube.
If you thought your relationships were complicated, try being an acacia tree; or an ant, or a large herbivore. Nature, it turns out, is full of complicated relationships. And we mess with them at our peril.
