I didn’t grow up in a world that was particularly nice, or privileged, or kind. It was a middle-class existence in a scrappy resource town with a tough veneer. While other kids were reading Dick and Jane, I was reading the Vancouver Sun. By fifteen I was reading news overnight on CFFM, ripping wire copy and rewriting it, while also playing DJ for the other fifty-five minutes of the hour. Two different roles on the same shift. I preferred news.

The first time I saw something truly horrible was early 1980. I was driving my friend’s Mustang between Quesnel and Williams Lake, late at night, when I came on an incident on the road. I pulled over. A panicked man stood in front of a crumpled pickup. A woman’s purse stuck vertically out of the grill. She had been thrown so far we couldn’t find a body.

I drove to the nearest farm, found a phone, and called the RCMP. Then I called my newsroom.

That second call mattered to me and set my career course. The adrenaline of being first with a story is addictive, and I chased that feeling for the next four decades. I became a reporter who could lead coverage on the worst and ugliest cases you could imagine. Mass murders. Natural disasters. More bodies rolled out of crime scenes than I can count, my camera rolling the whole time.

Along the way I’ve been called a vulture. I’ve been threatened. I’ve been sued more than once. I once faced off against a motorcycle gang. Journalism can be fun. It is not easy, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t done the job.

The part that doesn’t show up on air is what people give you. Victims of some of the most horrendous crimes I’ve covered have opened up to me over the years — trusted me with their stories when they had no reason to trust anyone, least of all a reporter with a camera. I’ve covered some of the most horrendous trials in Alberta’s history over the past thirty years. Those stories accumulate. The stories the victims tell you accumulate also.

I was in Fort McMurray when the fire hit. In 2013 I spent three weeks on a hilltop above Calgary doing live shots for CBC, waiting for the city to drain, and another three weeks doing the same for High River. You learn what it means to watch a city empty out while you’re moving toward it. Evacuation convoys run one direction. Reporters run the other, looking for a place to sleep, something to eat, and a story that does the moment justice.

I have never served in a war zone, and I won’t pretend to know what that’s like. But I have colleagues who do that work now, filing from places I wouldn’t go, and it bothers me when I see them criticized for it. They are not propagandists. They are our eyes and ears in places most of us will never stand. When a photographer holds a shot steady while a building comes down around them, or a correspondent keeps their voice level while reading a casualty count, that is not a performance. That is training built over years, doing exactly what I did on a smaller stage outside Williams Lake: staying functional when everything in you wants to look away.

I think about that stretch of highway more than I’d like to admit. Forty-some years of newsrooms haven’t dulled it. What has changed is what I understand about the job now that I didn’t at nineteen — that showing up for the worst day of someone else’s life, and doing it honestly, is a form of service most people never see and rarely thank you for. You don’t do this work for gratitude. You do it because someone has to tell the story straight, and because the people living through it deserve better than a rumour or a guess.

That’s the job. Not the byline. Not the live shot. The purse in the grill, and the decision to make the second phone call.

The October 19 referendum makes no sense and won’t necessarily change anything. But it stands out as the most expensive electoral exercise in Alberta’s history, perhaps even Canada’s.

Nearly five times more people than employed to run the 2023 provincial election need to be hired to process ballots, count votes, and act as returning officers. Each of the ten questions gets its own ballot, meaning voters will mark ten separate pieces of paper and drop them into ten separate boxes. According to CBC News, this will require Elections Alberta to print 45 million ballots.

Meantime, the agency that runs our elections is struggling to recruit the 60,000 election workers it needs. With the vote three months out, CTV reports, the province has managed to sign up 25,000 — fewer than half.

A conservative estimate for the total cost of holding this vote is around $150 million, once you add in everything: the $300,000 website, built by a former UCP staffer, the advertising, the television spots. It adds up fast.

None of this was necessary. So let’s look at where that money might have gone instead.

• The new Good Samaritan continuing-care facility in northwest Edmonton, now under construction, is budgeted at $165 million and will hold 280 beds for people with complex medical needs. In other words, $150 million is almost enough to build the whole thing.

• Alberta’s new Highway 1/Range Road 33 interchange, including a four-lane bridge, is estimated at $49.4 million. The referendum bill would buy roughly three of those — bridges included.

• Edmonton’s Kaskitêw Asiskî mixed-income affordable-housing development is costing about $44.4 million for 132 homes. Using that as a benchmark, $150 million is the construction cost of more than 400 homes. A different benchmark, Veterans’ House Canada, runs $16.1 million for 40 units of supportive housing for homeless veterans. On that model, $150 million equates to roughly 370 supportive-housing units, services and community space included.

• Alberta currently estimates a new K-6 school in Edmonton’s Glenridding Heights at $36.9 million. At that price, $150 million covers roughly four new elementary schools. A new K-9 school in Edgemont is estimated at $46.7 million, meaning $150 million would cover about three of those instead.

Every one of these numbers comes off Alberta Infrastructure’s own website. These are real projects already in motion. With the money being poured into this referendum, we could be building more of them. Or funding homeless shelters. Instead we’re spending a fortune on a referendum about nothing — setting up a system built to fail, and handing a fringe movement a fundraising platform in the process. More on that in an upcoming column.

Danielle Smith’s government likes to talk about waste. It found $150 million of it and decided to spend it on a ballot question nobody asked for, run through a system it can’t staff, to settle a fight that changes nothing. That’s not governing. That’s arson with a receipt.

Four schools. Three highway interchanges. A continuing-care home. Hundreds of housing units for veterans and families who need them now, not hypothetically, not after a vote that resolves nothing.

Alberta deserves better. It’s paying dearly to get worse.

To put a stick in the spokes is an old expression. It means stopping the wheel, no matter the damage. I tried it once, around age nine. It did not go well.

In present-day Alberta, the UCP government is doing the same thing to the democratic process.

Bill 54, passed by the legislature in May, is the stick. The October 19 referendum nobody wanted is the spoke. This is a shitshow in the making, and the UCP is making it worse.

Anyone who voted in the municipal election remembers how disorganized and slow it was. We used to get results within hours of the polls closing. Now we wake up not knowing, because Bill 54 banned tabulators in Alberta. Every vote has to be counted by hand. Every person counting those votes has to be paid. And the bill imposes an unrealistic deadline: an unofficial count within 12 hours.

I’ve already registered to vote by mail, because I know election night is going to be a mess. October 19, unpredictable weather, long lines — the least committed will give up and go home. That’s the problem. People voting for the status quo, for Canada, don’t feel the same adrenaline in their veins that the separatists do. Discourage people from voting and you hand more ground to the side that’s already fired up.

Pitting neighbours against one another

This bill does something else too. It pits neighbour against neighbour.

I believe in Canada. I believe it’s one of the finest places to live in the world. I’m fortunate to have been born here. I understand our history, and I acknowledge that the land we’re sitting on was part of great Indigenous nations.

The fact that some of my neighbours believe an X on a ballot lets them take this province for themselves is insane. Alberta is an integral part of Canada, and should remain so. The mere fact that we’re arguing about this shows the cult-like mentality that has infected the pro-independence movement. Tell someone long enough that they’re getting screwed, and surround them with a media sphere that says the same thing, and eventually they’ll believe they’re getting screwed.

History is full of charismatic leaders who’ve convinced ordinary people to do unspeakable things to one another because of the stories they were told. Rwanda comes to mind. In 1994, close to three-quarters of a million people died in a genocide that radio helped set off. Two groups, Hutu and Tutsi, had lived side by side for generations.

The station doing the damage was RTLM. It didn’t sound like propaganda. It sounded like good radio — funny, informal, the kind of station people wanted on. That’s what made it effective. It spent months calling Tutsis “cockroaches,” turning neighbours into an existential threat, until wiping them out could be sold as self-defence instead of murder. Eventually the station stopped hinting and started directing: where to put the roadblocks, who to look for. One economist later matched radio reception to Rwanda’s mountain terrain and found that villages with the clearest signal saw significantly more killing than villages with poor reception. The tribunal that prosecuted RTLM afterward didn’t call it irresponsible journalism. It called it genocide.

I’m not saying Danielle Smith is running a genocide. I’m saying the mechanism is the same, scaled down: control the story, and you control what people are willing to do to one another.

Alberta today

In Alberta today, it feels like we have a government intent on setting one side against the other. Smith should never have entertained a referendum in the first place. She had the standing to shut this down before it started, and she chose not to. The other nine questions tacked onto the ballot don’t fix that. They’re just dumb — padding dressed up as democracy, giving voters the illusion of consultation while the real question sits at the top of the page, waiting.

Flooding the zone

Trump does it best: get people fearful and talking about something else, and they stop asking about AHS procurement, or any of the other problems facing this government.

So keep that in mind on October 19. A long line at the polling station isn’t an accident. A vote that takes three days to count isn’t an accident. A ballot padded with nine extra questions isn’t an accident. Every obstacle between an Albertan and a ballot box was put there on purpose, by a government that wins when fewer of us bother to show up.

The stick is already in the spokes. The only question left is whether enough of us show up anyway to keep the wheel turning.

The best television story I’ve seen recently is about a dog and a duck.

It’s also likely the least consequential story I’ve turned my attention to. But it’s the storytelling that carries it, and that’s the point.

I’m a longtime fan of Steve Hartman, the CBS News veteran whose beat is the odd and unusual stories of America. This one — a golden retriever named Barley who lost her spunk after starting seizure medication, and Louie, the duck who somehow brought it back — comes out of Brookhaven, New York. It’s a simple premise. It shouldn’t work as well as it does.

That’s because the dog and duck saga combines the talents of Hartman, a highly intuitive videographer, an outstanding editor, and a couple of producers up and down the line. Television was, and still should be, a team sport.

Over my years in the industry I watched the resources we needed to do the job get stripped away, one layoff at a time. Excellent camera operators lost their jobs because they didn’t want to double as editors — a separate skill, not an add-on. I know a few people who can do both with excellence. They’re a rare breed, and newsrooms used to know better than to bet the newscast on rare breeds.

Increasingly, television newsrooms are hiring VJs instead. You set up the story, shoot the story, do the interviews, edit the story. That’s a ridiculous ask of any human being if you want quality television journalism. Something gives. It’s usually the storytelling, because storytelling is the part that takes time, and time is the first thing newsroom budgets go after.

Now I see Global and CTV struggle to maintain an audience. Not long ago, each network was pulling 100,000-plus viewers for the 6:00pm show. Big ad revenue, big budgets. But they’ve been cutting and cutting, and now there’s little craft left in the product.

I’m a graduate of the National Press Photographers Association Newsvideo Workshop at the University of Oklahoma. It was early in my career, and a bootcamp for storytelling if there ever was one. We were taught the values of storytelling. How pictures work with words, and clips help tell the story. A simple pan from a normal family to a duck, with perfect delivery, sells the story.

We learned to respect the people who trusted us with their story. We learned to be honest with ourselves and our viewers. We learned how to tell great stories on television, work with, and communicate well with our teams.

The failure of television news today is a failure of those values. We get plenty of talking heads, live shots, and b-roll. What we don’t get enough of is someone taking the time to find the story and tell it properly.

Hey, news directors: let’s get back to great storytelling.

Hartman’s dog-and-duck story reportedly drew a massive audience to CBS this week — proof, if any was still needed, that people will show up for a story told well, even one this small.

Well worth the investment. Somebody just has to be willing to make it.

Political careers can be made or broken by the smallest things. Alison Redford went down over government aircraft and a culture of entitlement. Jim Prentice helped sink a 44-year political dynasty with four words: “I know that math is difficult.” Gary Hart’s shot at the presidency ended with a weekend involving Donna Rice.

Now Max Miller, a Republican congressman from Ohio and former Trump White House aide, is going down over a blue bunny.

The full details spilled into my Tuesday afternoon while I had CNN on. For more than 20 minutes I watched an elected official eviscerate his own career in real time.

Miller is in the middle of an ugly custody dispute with his ex-wife, Emily Moreno — daughter of Republican Senator Bernie Moreno. Their toddler has a stuffed blue bunny she can’t sleep without. Senator Moreno says Miller held onto it for 48 hours, leaving the kid crying at night. Miller denies it.

Make sense? Not to me.

Whatever the truth, this was a communications problem with an easy fix: have a clear, direct, believable answer ready. Instead, Miller sat down for a 20-plus-minute live interview with Jake Tapper.

Tapper opened with the bunny. Miller dodged, complained about his father-in-law, and questioned why Moreno waited to go public. Tapper dragged him back: did you withhold the bunny? Miller finally said no. By then the interview was already off the rails.

It got worse from there. Tapper worked through the allegations one by one, and the contradictions piled up. Miller said his daughter was too young to have said certain things — right after claiming he had recordings of her saying other things. Tapper called it out. Later Miller waved off firsthand accusations as hearsay. Tapper reminded him firsthand testimony is, definitionally, not hearsay.

Miller came off like that guy from high school who could lift weights and wrestle but couldn’t complete a sentence. Or a thought.

I don’t usually spend much time on American politics — there’s plenty going on here at home — but this was one of the biggest self-owns I’ve ever watched happen live.

The winner this week is WestJet’s flight attendants.

WestJet isn’t the airline we grew up with anymore. It launched in 1996 on an employee-ownership pitch: buy shares through payroll deduction, get the company match, and the theory was staff who owned a piece of the place gave better service. For a long time, it worked.

Then Onex bought WestJet in 2019 and took it private. Last year, Onex sold a combined 25 per cent stake to Delta, Korean Air and Air France-KLM. The scrappy western Canadian upstart is now fully wired into private equity and the global airline alliance system. Passengers noticed — less legroom, more fees, more nickel-and-diming.

Then the flight attendants said the company was doing the same thing to them. Their issue was simple: pay for work done on the ground before wheels-up. WestJet answered with talk of credit hours and wage formulas. The union answered with four words:

Unpaid work won’t fly.

They struck on one of the busiest weekends of the summer — nearly 500 flights cancelled, roughly 250,000 travellers stranded. That’s usually the kind of disruption that turns the public against the union. Instead, the anger landed on WestJet.

The strike lasted about a day before a tentative deal recognized ground-pay work. The flight attendants got what they wanted and came out of it looking sharp: a real grievance, a message anyone could repeat, and public sympathy behind them the whole way.

That’s how it’s done.

Max Miller talked for 20 minutes and made things worse. WestJet’s flight attendants needed four words and won.

Your communications winners and losers for the week.

Sam Kinison was one of my favourite comedians. He could begin a routine in an almost reasonable tone, as though he were simply sharing an observation. Then the temperature would rise. The voice would sharpen. By the end, he was yelling the truth directly into your face until it hurt.

Sometimes he was on point. Sometimes he was just saying outrageous things because outrageous things were funny. But lately, I understand the impulse.

We are living through one of the most intense summers I can remember.

Parts of my beloved Spokane, Washington, have burned. Wildfires around the city destroyed at least 700 buildings and forced roughly 64,000 people to evacuate. North of there, The Bradley Creek fire devastated the Okanagan Indian Band near Vernon, destroying about 230 homes, along with lakeside cabins. These are not distant dots on a map to me. Spokane and the Okanagan are places I love. I know their roads, hills, lakes and particular smell in summer. Now I watch them burn on my screen.

Here in Edmonton, I have spent much of the summer dealing with a flooded basement and cleaning up the consequences. I have not had flooding in years, not since I did all the work that was supposed to prevent it. Yet here I am again, hauling things out, drying things off and wondering what the next storm will bring.

Then I open social media.

Yes, forestry practices matter. Firebreaks matter. Prescribed burns matter. Indigenous fire stewardship matters. Decades of suppressing every fire have allowed dangerous fuels to accumulate in some regions. Communities need better planning, evacuation routes and defensible spaces.

But none of that cancels the central fact. Human-caused climate change is producing hotter and drier fire weather across North America. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says this with high confidence. Heat pulls moisture from soil, trees, grass and deadfall. Snow melts earlier. Fire seasons grow longer. Once a fire begins, those dry fuels allow it to spread farther and burn more intensely.

Much of Canada’s boreal forest is vast and remote. It is not a suburban park where someone can arrive with a rake and a pickup truck. Are we supposed to carve roads through it so crews can tidy the forest floor?

Seriously?

And if Canadian forestry practices are the whole explanation, how do we account for fires across the United States and Europe? Spain, Portugal, France and Greece have all fought major fires this summer. France alone reported more than 90,000 hectares burned by the end of July amid record heat and severe drought.

Different countries. Different governments. Different forestry systems.

The same hotter planet.

What remains strangely absent from much of the online conversation is the enormous burning elephant in the room: fossil fuels.

China deserves criticism. It remains the world’s biggest coal consumer and a massive emitter. But China also understands where the global economy is moving. In 2025, it added nearly 500 gigawatts of renewable capacity, including about 370 gigawatts of solar and 117 gigawatts of wind. That represented more than 60 per cent of worldwide renewable-capacity growth.

China is not abandoning fossil fuels quickly enough, but it is building the industries that will dominate the next energy era.

Alberta, meanwhile, slammed the brakes on the fastest-growing part of the energy economy. The Pembina Institute estimated that the province’s 2023 renewable-energy moratorium affected as many as 118 projects representing at least $33 billion in potential investment. Within the following year, 53 projects had withdrawn from the development process.

This is not an argument for turning off the oil taps tomorrow. Alberta’s economy, public services and thousands of families depend on the industry. A transition has to be managed honestly and intelligently.

But a transition requires moving.

Instead, we behave as though the planet is a corporate asset to be stripped, drained and sold before the quarterly report comes due. We call that prosperity. Our children may call it theft.

We are borrowing this planet from them. What exactly do we intend to return?

A scorched forest? A flooded basement? Smoke-filled summers? A handful of extraordinarily rich people and millions of others struggling to insure their homes, pay their power bills and breathe the air?

I started this column quietly.

Now I understand Sam Kinison.

WAKE UP.

Politics today is increasingly performative. It’s not merely about what you believe, what you have accomplished, or whether the policy survives close examination. It’s about how you sell it.

Danielle Smith understands that better than almost anyone in Canadian politics.

She comes across as a seasoned performer. She looks into the camera, speaks in complete thoughts, and gives viewers a simple story with a beginning, a villain, and a triumphant ending. Her latest video promoting a new west coast pipeline is a master class. Aspirational. Clear. Confident.

Compare that with the messaging of the Alberta NDP. I’ve long been a fan of Naheed Nenshi. I watched him work tirelessly, and do magic on social media, when I was covering the Calgary floods in 2013. But he’s arguing facts like the university professor he was, while Smith is massaging the message like the veteran communicator she is. Here’s an informational news conference from Nenshi. There are solid facts in it. But do you want to stick around to the end?

The Smith video is slick, confident, and beautifully produced. The pictures move. The music swells. The graphics and visuals underscore the message, and the language is clear. A new pipeline is a win for Alberta. No matter that the climate is changing, it feels like progress.

I don’t know which agency produced it, or what it cost. But whoever made it understands political communication, and how to make Smith look her best.

The Alberta NDP has a different problem. Its communications too often feel improvised, overexplained, and visually second-rate. Sorry to my friends who work there, but the party has to step it up. Good intentions are not a production strategy.

Nenshi is actually in favour of the pipeline. He raises real questions about who is paying for it — important questions. A $35-to-$40-billion pipeline, backstopped by the federal and provincial governments, is nothing to sniff at. Factor in the cost overruns on Trans Mountain, and you get a sense of the financial risk our government is taking on.

There are unanswered questions about the environmental consequences, about what happens in the long term. We need leaders in opposition who can raise those challenges.

Here’s the thing. Every poll taken this year has the UCP leading the NDP — in spite of multiple scandals, questionable policies, tacit support for separatism, and an unwanted referendum.

Among the expenses for the October referendum: $300,000 for a website, the contract handed to a former Smith staffer, built to push voters in the direction the government wants.

I’ve seen this playbook before. Remember the Alberta Next panel and its questionnaires, where the questions were loaded and the results skewed before the final report ever landed. This government uses the levers of power, and first-rate communications, to make it look like it’s working for you.

We call this propaganda, and the word makes people think of dictatorships and lies. But propaganda is older and broader than that. It is organized persuasion designed to spread a worldview. Governments used posters, pamphlets, speeches, and films during the First World War. The Nazis later married propaganda to censorship, mass media, and hatred, with catastrophic results. That is not a comparison to Alberta. It is a reminder that political power has always depended on controlling the frame.

The most effective propaganda is not necessarily false. It selects. It simplifies. It repeats. It shows you the jobs, the steel, and the prosperity, while keeping the public risk, the environmental cost, and the market uncertainty outside the camera frame.

That missing frame matters.

We are living through intensifying heat, wildfire, flood, and extreme weather. Western Europe just recorded its hottest June on record. The World Meteorological Organization says the last eleven years were the hottest on record. Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency expects clean-energy investment in 2026 to reach roughly $2.2 trillion — nearly double what’s going into fossil fuels. The world isn’t abandoning oil tomorrow, but capital, technology, and electricity generation are moving.

Against that backdrop, Alberta’s premier says the province will not leave an estimated $10 trillion worth of oil in the ground. It’s a powerful line. It may also be a dangerous promise, if it keeps Alberta from preparing seriously for the economy that comes next.

Marshall McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message.” Smith has mastered the medium. The Alberta NDP keeps hoping the message will carry itself.

It won’t.

When I started working in downtown Edmonton in 2003, I was excited. We were across the street from Churchill Square, near City Hall and the Courthouse. City Centre Mall was a vibrant place. The Bay had just moved in down the mall from us. There were a couple of well-stocked food courts, and lots of pubs to hit after work. I miss those days.

The headline today is restaurant closures, urban blight, the slow decay of downtown Edmonton. A city centre doesn’t die in a day, but I had 23 years to watch the process. The first thing that sucked the life out of the place was the 2004 rebuild of Churchill Square. Once a little urban oasis, it got turned into a gaudy, tacky slab of concrete. A Taste of Edmonton used to happen on grass, vendors set up among the trees. It was cool.

Then they paved over the whole damn thing. Taste became a commercial event, closing streets to cram in more vendors. The vibe changed, the prices soared, and as a guy who worked downtown, the disruption was annoying.

The Bay closed in 2020. A bunch more stores in City Centre Mall followed. The two downstairs food courts got merged into one upstairs that never delivered. When the McDonald’s closed, I knew we were doomed. The downstairs — the most fun, eclectic part of the mall — became parking.

Downtown got rowdier. Social disorder and drug use went unchecked. Eventually the security guards patrolling the mall where I worked started wearing flak jackets. Grabbing a coffee from Tim Hortons turned into an adventure. I started running into people smoking meth in the pedway. It got scary.

The breaking point we ignored

I think meth was the breaking point, and we as a society let things slide, not recognizing the toxic and lethal consequences of more drugs, more addiction, and more social disorder in our city centre.

My shifts often ended late, and I’d wait for the bus outside the mall. In winter they had a heated shelter, which helped. Then they stripped out the heat and the walls because too many people were using it to do drugs. So I stood in the cold, unsheltered, while whatever was going to happen around me happened anyway.

Then came COVID. I went home to work, so I didn’t need to go downtown every day. During COVID I was diagnosed with cancer, which cost me another year off. When I came back, City Centre was a ghost town. I saw people passed out, or nodding off, outside our studio almost daily.

Then one day I stepped off the bus on Jasper Avenue. The body was already covered. A crew from Boyle Street Community Services were waiting for the police and medical examiner to come and take the body. They’d just found him dead. God knows how long he’d been laying on the street before anyone even noticed.

That’s what it became, working downtown: carry naloxone, be ready to use it. One of the things I’m most grateful for today is that I no longer have to go downtown every day.

I’m sorry for the restaurants closing. I’m sorry for the people still working in downtown offices, especially my media colleagues on the night shift.

I honestly don’t know what to make of Alberta’s Compassionate Intervention Act, or Edmonton’s oddly named Integrated Stabilization Centre (ISC), frankly it sounds too much like ICE for my comfort. But I do know the demise of downtown is the result of a series of bad political and business decisions, made one after another over two decades. City Centre is in receivership. Downtown Edmonton is in free fall. And I don’t know what brings it back.

Welcome to the Streisand effect, Jill Dunlop. The Ontario Minister of Emergency Preparedness appeared on the storied radio show As It Happens on Tuesday, being questioned about the Ontario government’s response to northern wildfires. Eight minutes into the interview, a second voice came on the line saying it was time to “wrap it up.” My former colleague Nil Köksal, who I greatly respect as host of the program, explained that she had more questions and asked for three more minutes. The staffer hung up.

The interview—and the intervention—has gone viral. Congratulations to the unnamed staffer who stepped in on live radio to end an interview the moment it got uncomfortable. As It Happens is a legacy radio show. The staff are sharp, the hosts among the best in the world. I first began listening about 50 years ago, working as an evening operator at a local CBC affiliate. The only other time I’ve heard a conversation interrupted by an outside voice was when Barbara Frum was interviewing a foreign head of state and an operator broke in. Barbara had none of it. Nor did Nil.

The difference: the foreign head of state stayed on the line. Dunlop hung up. Bad move.

But now, on to the win. I want to tip my hat to the Calgary Police Service for their communications around the tragic disappearance of Parker, an 11-year-old boy with autism. CPS offered a video today that was straight to the point. Sergeant Chris Martin posted a highly informative clip explaining the places a small, scared boy with autism might be hiding.

Acting Staff Sgt. Scott Gunterson added at a news conference: “We are far from believing that Parker must be dead. We still believe that there is a strong hope that he is alive, and I see no reason to abandon that.”

Years ago I covered the disappearance and search for Nathan O’Brien, who was five at the time, along with his grandparents Kathryn and Alvin Liknes. I attended many news conferences at the CPS Westwinds campus. CPS was forthright and helpful then. They still are now.

So today’s other draw goes to the Edmonton Police Service, with whom I’ve had a checkered relationship over the years when it comes to their comms people. EPS has been doing some good work in communications lately, but their latest video—introducing their new Integrated Services Centre, which reads way too much like ICE—seems like a poor choice of name.

I know there’s a difference between ISC and ICE. But to the ear it sounds the same, and both are talking about taking people off the street and locking them up without charges. EPS tried to tie this one up in a nice bow. Sadly, it failed. We do need to deal with people who are struggling. But a video promoting cells where we put addicted and unwell people, branded as ISC—that isn’t a winner.

The air in Edmonton has turned rancid again. Firesmoke fills my nostrils.

Maybe I should write the Prime Minister and order him to make it stop. But I won’t. I’m not the President of the United States, and I live in the real world.

I grew up in the interior of British Columbia, where forest fires, that’s what we called them then, would happen. The water bombers came out, and eventually the fires got put out. That was that. I don’t recall a single moment in the first forty years of my life when the sky turned orange and smoke drifted across the continent.

My first wake-up call was the McLure, B.C. fire in 2003. A discarded cigarette started a little fire that turned into a big one. The farm where I’d spent every childhood summer sat directly across the Thompson River from where it began. My grandmother’s old house was spared. About 72 homes and the local sawmill were not. It was the most devastating thing I’d seen in my life to that point. I had no idea it would get worse.

Eight years later, in May 2011, a fast-moving fire ripped into Slave Lake, Alberta, forcing evacuation and burning about half the town. I didn’t think it could get worse. It did.

On the morning of May 3, 2016, I went into work at the CBC and was told to grab my go-bag — an overnight bag I kept under my desk — and head to Fort McMurray. There was a fire burning near the city, and we needed to keep an eye on it. I worked for The National. My crewmates Briar Stewart, Rick Bremness, and I headed out the door and arrived in town around 1:45 p.m.

We could see flame on the horizon, so we pulled over at an Esso station to get some shots. That’s when all hell broke loose. A little after two, the fire ripped into the city. I found myself facing a wall of flame just metres away. Traffic out of the city had stalled. I called our newsroom and told them what was happening. Then I went to work — I was on stills, Rick was on video, Briar was reporting.

Briar, now a foreign correspondent for the CBC, was fearless. We set up across the highway from the fire and went live. Little balls of flame landed around her, starting smaller fires as she stood there.

When she finished, we tossed our gear in the back of our white Ford Explorer and looked for a safer place to shoot from. But Fort McMurray is an industrial city, and we realized we were surrounded by very explosive tanks. Eventually we found a spot, turned on the Dejero so we could feed live, put the camera on the tripod, and stood in the smoke. In those days news crews didn’t travel with respirators. We had no safety equipment, no food, and, as it turned out, no gas in the tank.

We were still feeding live when an RCMP cruiser raced around the corner, the officer screaming at us to get out, now. No time to call the network. We tossed all our gear — still transmitting to Toronto — into the truck and got out, taking refuge at a fire station.

We spent the night there. Three of us and a truckload of gear, trying to steal a minute or two of sleep while a city burned around us. We did live shots until midnight, then were up again at 3 a.m. to start feeding CBC News Network.

At noon the next day, we were evacuated again, this time to Anzac, where we set up in a field with fuel critically low. No food, only a few bottles of water left. We were forced down Highway 881, running on fumes in every sense. Then a miracle: a gas station, run by one of the area’s First Nations, with a long line and a quota of 25 litres per vehicle. We were nearly out of gas by the time we reached the pumps. As I paid for our 25 litres, the person behind the counter said that was it — they were out too.

The shelves of that little shop had been stripped bare. I think we scraped together some leftover peanuts, and we headed south.

We ended up at an oilsands plant near Lac La Biche, which became our base for the next few days. Fed and fuelled, we kept covering the fire, travelling as far up Highway 881 as we could before the whole area was blocked off. By then the CBC cavalry had arrived — the Winnipeg team first.

I’ve had a hard time with fire and smoke ever since. When the fire hit Jasper, I had a visceral reaction — I was physically ill. I passed on the assignment. I knew then that my days of covering news on the ground were over.

The CBC covered my treatment for PTSD. I still feel it when the smoke rolls in.

The climate is changing. The weather is changing. Kids today will never know the plain joy of a summer with blue skies and zero worries.

And I’m astounded that our province keeps pushing pipelines and data centres in the name of capitalism, while the world around us burns.

The worst offender is south of the border. The United States has shown zero commitment to the environment since the current occupant took the White House. Shame on him for shaming Canada over a bit of smoke. I’ve choked on enough of it. I wish people would wake up to what we’re doing to this planet.

End of lecture.

Last week a young woman walked up to Premier Danielle Smith at the KDays pancake breakfast on the legislature lawn and let her have it. She’s angry about the UCP government’s record, and on plenty of counts, I think she’s right to be. What I can’t defend is the yelling. Or the profanity that came with it.

I didn’t like it when a man cornered Chrystia Freeland at Grande Prairie city hall and screamed obscenities until she reached an elevator. I didn’t like it when people threw gravel at Justin Trudeau on the campaign trail. I’m not thrilled about efforts to crash Doug Ford’s annual summer barbecue, either.

I have serious problems with all of those leaders. But when they show up at a public event, they’re entitled to a bit of dignity. Politics is hard enough without adding raised voices and f-bombs to the mix. We can disagree with people. We don’t have to scream at them.

The “fascist pancakes” line made me laugh, I’ll admit that. But shouting the f-word in public, or printing it on a t-shirt, is a bit much. I’ve used that word myself, more than a few times, usually in a newsroom or a news van when everything was falling apart around me. I’m not proud of it. As my street filled up with young families over the past few years, I’ve made a point of watching my language outside. There are kids up and down the block who don’t need to hear it, and I’ve cautioned a few friends over the same thing over a beer in my backyard.

It’s the t-shirts and the bumper stickers that bother me most. Why print it? Why wear it? Somebody’s already selling shirts with the pancake line on them, and I’d bet money the orders are coming from people who’d never say the word to a stranger’s face. It’s one more sign of how little civility is left in our politics, and how comfortable we’ve gotten broadcasting our anger instead of arguing it.

Words carry weight. There are a couple that will never cross my lips, and I cringe whenever I hear them. I’m also sorry I leaned on the f-bomb as often as I did in my younger days.

The fascist pancakes meme is cute, and the woman’s complaints about Smith and the UCP are legitimate. Alberta’s rush to court AI data centres deserves scrutiny. So does the province’s drift toward separatist rhetoric. Those are real arguments, worth having in public, in daylight, with the premier standing right there. But the volume and the profanity bury the argument. Nobody walks away from a video like that talking about data centres. They talk about the swearing.

That’s the real cost. Every f-bomb aimed at a politician hands their supporters an easy way out. Instead of answering the question, they get to point at the tone. Instead of debating the policy, they get to call the other side unhinged. Shouting doesn’t just fail to persuade anyone who wasn’t already convinced. It gives the target a free pass to dodge the point entirely.

I spent four decades in newsrooms and news vans asking politicians hard questions, plenty of them uncomfortable, some of them downright pointed. I made it a rule to stay civil, because the people on the other side of the microphone are still people, whatever I think of their politics. I slipped a couple of times over the years, lost my temper on the phone or muttered something I shouldn’t have off camera. I’m not proud of those either.

None of this means we go quiet. Alberta has plenty to be angry about right now, and the anger is earned. Show up at the town hall. Write the letter. Hold the sign. Ask the hard question, and ask it loudly if you have to. Just leave the f-bombs in the car.

These are trying times in Alberta, and they’re likely to stay that way for a while yet. But Barack Obama had it right when he told a heckling crowd: don’t boo, vote. Don’t shout, vote. It’s still the best way to tell a politician exactly how you feel, and it’s the only kind of noise they actually have to listen to.

Global TV stations in Edmonton and Calgary are not going dark. The newsrooms are staying open. But the local news Albertans watch each night will now be assembled in Toronto.

Corus says local news delivery will continue in both markets, and the company remains committed to “high-quality journalism.” There will be layoffs. How many and who is still an open question. My thoughts are with my many friends who work at Global. The company delivered the standard corporate send-off to the people losing their jobs, thanking departing Global News personalities and wishing them well in their “future endeavours.”

I have heard that line too many times in Canadian broadcasting. For those of us who worked in local television, on-air personalities are essential to the relationship between a station and its audience. Viewers trust the people they have watched through elections, floods, fires and Stanley Cup runs. When those people go, a station doesn’t just trim payroll. It erodes trust built up over decades.

To be fair, centralizing production doesn’t mean every reporter vanishes. Journalists will still show up at city hall, cover fires, stand outside the legislature, and file from Edmonton and Calgary.

But a local newscast is more than a reporter in front of a camera. It runs on producers who know the city, editors who know the history behind a story, and anchors who actually live where they broadcast. Once those calls get made in Toronto, the news may still arrive locally. Whether it stays local is another question.

This isn’t happening because Corus found a better way to cover Alberta. It’s happening because Corus is in serious financial trouble. Television advertising revenue fell 20 per cent last quarter. Total television revenue dropped 16 per cent. Radio revenue fell 15 per cent. The company is seeking approval for a recapitalization plan meant to cut its debt and other liabilities by more than $500 million and save up to $40 million a year in interest payments. Its shares trade under four cents. One of Canada’s largest broadcasters is now, functionally, a penny stock.

I’ve called Corus a Canadian media giant circling the drain before. That wasn’t hyperbole. The company built from Shaw’s old media assets in 1999 has shed value, shed staff, closed services, and watched the business model under conventional television keep collapsing.

The bigger warning is that Corus isn’t unique. In 2023, Bell Media asked the CRTC to scrap the rules forcing its CTV stations to air set amounts of local news, part of a wider push for regulatory relief. The commission said no, but the direction is clear enough. Canada’s private broadcasters increasingly treat local news obligations as costs to cut, pool, or eliminate. Regulators keep signalling flexibility on the rules; companies keep reading that as permission to consolidate further.

These companies will keep saying they’re committed to local journalism, and some executives may even believe it. But commitment shows up in reporters, producers, camera operators and editors on the ground — not in the words on a news release.

A newscast about Edmonton, built in Toronto, will still include Edmonton stories. But each job, each decision, each piece of production that leaves the city makes it a little less local. Ask Global viewers in Saskatoon or Kelowna, where consolidation has already happened how things worked out. Eventually “local news delivery” may describe nothing more than the transmitter.

There was a time when Global Edmonton was a fixture in the city. You came home, turned on the six o’clock news. And you got the city in an hour. News, sports, and Bill Matheson on weather.

Before it was Global, it was ITV — Independent Television, launched in 1974. Ambitious, scrappy, local, a little rough around the edges. A series of ownership changes folded it into the Global Television Network in 2000. The name changed. The habit of watching didn’t.

That’s why the trouble at Corus Entertainment matters. This isn’t a Bay Street story or a penny-stock curiosity. Corus owns Global News, and it reaches straight into Edmonton living rooms, courtrooms, council chambers and election nights.

Corus is fighting for survival.

Back in 1999, Shaw split off its media holdings into Corus. Shaw kept the pipes — cable, telecom. Corus got the content — specialty channels, radio, Global television, local newsrooms across the country. For a while, that split looked smart.

Then look at how the two halves fared. Shaw sold to Rogers; the pipes were worth something. Corus is circling the drain. Its stock trades in pennies. Debt, falling TV ad revenue, cord-cutting and streaming did the damage. The old model — cable subscriptions, mass audiences, commercials — still exists, but it’s badly wounded.

Now Corus is asking the CRTC to approve a recapitalization deal: lenders would forgive roughly $500 million in debt in exchange for 99 per cent ownership of a new parent company. Call it what it is: a rescue, and rescues only happen when something’s in real trouble.

Here’s the bitter part. Global Edmonton may still be one of the strongest local news brands in the city. Ratings data from past years showed it overtake CTV at six o’clock, and it’s held a real local audience since. This isn’t a newsroom that failed to matter. The audience is there. It’s the corporate structure underneath that’s giving out.

A newsroom can still matter and still be in danger. We’ve watched this movie before, in newspapers.

Postmedia owns the Edmonton Journal, the Sun, the Calgary Herald and Sun, the National Post, and a long list of other Canadian titles. The mastheads are still Canadian. The ownership isn’t, in any way that counts: Postmedia is deeply tied to Chatham Asset Management, a U.S. hedge fund. Postmedia’s own 2026 director-election filing excluded more than 62 million variable voting shares held by Chatham and its affiliated funds from the independent-shareholder vote — that’s how much sits outside Canadian hands.

None of this is a knock on foreign investors or hedge funds as a rule. It’s that journalism isn’t a normal business. A newspaper isn’t a brand or a line on a balance sheet. It’s the public record of a community. When ownership shifts from publishers to debt-holders, the mission doesn’t change in a memo. It changes in the newsroom budget. Reporters go first, then photographers, then the court and city hall beats. Once those jobs are cut, they don’t come back.

Postmedia is the Canadian cautionary tale already in progress. The buildings still stand, the websites still publish, the opinion pages still shout. But the daily reporting muscle has been cut down to almost nothing. Edmonton once had a noisy, competitive newspaper-and-TV ecosystem. What’s left is thinner papers, smaller newsrooms, a TV sector under financial strain, and digital outlets doing good work without the resources to fill the gap.

If Corus keeps weakening, the real question for this city is who’s left to cover it. Not who’s left to post a hot take or a rumour and call it journalism — who actually shows up. Who sits through council, watches the police commission, covers the trial nobody else attends, asks Alberta Health Services why the ER is jammed again, explains what a zoning change actually means for your street.

Local news isn’t nostalgia. It’s civic infrastructure, and it tends to disappear quietly. It starts with fewer reporters, then fewer beats and editors, and eventually fewer hard questions asked of people in power. The city doesn’t get less complicated just because fewer people are watching it.

Alberta, of all places, should be paying attention. This province already has more than its share of grievance politics, separatist fantasies and foreign-influenced noise online. Every vacuum in the information system gets filled by something — PR, propaganda, or people with no editor, no standards and no real interest in being right. Professional journalism has never been perfect. I’ve worked in enough newsrooms to know we miss stories and get things wrong. But the fix for flawed journalism is better journalism, not none at all.

The risk isn’t that people end up knowing nothing. It’s that they end up knowing a lot of things that aren’t true — the meme, the partisan clip, the manipulated video, the anonymous accusation — with no one left to check any of it.

The national picture isn’t much better. Corus is one of the last private Canadian media companies with a real national footprint and local newsrooms. Postmedia is wounded and foreign-financed. Bell has cut deep. Rogers controls more of both the pipes and the content. CBC matters, but it’s publicly funded and a permanent political target. Independent digital outlets are doing real work, but most are small and underfunded.

We built an entire system around monetizing the pipes — cable bills, internet, wireless, bundles. We never built one that reliably pays the people who gather the news.

That’s the lesson sitting in the wreckage of the old Shaw-Corus split and the slow hollowing-out of Postmedia. The pipes survived. The content side didn’t. And here in Edmonton, that should matter, because the next wildfire, the next ugly election, the next death in care, the next quiet rule change at the legislature — somebody still has to cover it. Not perform it. Cover it.

A Canadian media giant is circling the drain, and the story starts in cities like this one, where local news still matters even as the economics underneath it fall apart. Lose it, and we don’t just lose a company. We lose a set of eyes on power — and power has never gone looking for more scrutiny on its own.

I spent most of Thursday trying to write a straight analysis of the proposed Meta data centre in the industrial heartland. I read up on closed-loop, liquid-cooled systems with dry cooling. I looked into power draw, water use, how these projects have played out in other jurisdictions. By the end of the day I had a pile of technically accurate copy that would put a caffeinated reader to sleep. I’m not a technical expert, though I once played one on TV. So I’m scrapping that piece and writing this one instead, because the real story here isn’t the cooling system. It’s who’s building it.

The premier stood for her photo op this week, welcoming a company she called a big win for Alberta. Smiles all around. What went unmentioned is that the company doing the ribbon-cutting has done more to gut local newsrooms than any other single entity in Canadian history.

Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. For fifteen years, local advertising dollars that used to fund reporters, editors and photographers in this province flowed instead to Meta’s servers in California. That money built nothing here. Newsrooms across Alberta shrank, merged or folded, not because readers stopped caring about their communities, but because the ad revenue that paid for coverage got vacuumed up by a platform that produces none of its own journalism.

When Ottawa passed the Online News Act and asked Meta to pay Canadian publishers for the news content that drove traffic to its platforms, Meta’s answer wasn’t negotiation. It was a ban. Canadians can’t post or share news links on Facebook or Instagram. The company that helped hollow out local journalism simply removed the news from its platform rather than pay for it. That’s not a footnote. That’s the whole relationship in one move.

Now that same company wants to build a data centre here, and the province is treating it as an unambiguous economic win.

Maybe it is, in part. There will be construction jobs, and construction jobs matter. But the entire point of a data centre is that once it’s built, the machines run themselves. A facility like this employs a fraction of the people during operation that it does while it’s being poured and wired. The long-term local benefit is smaller than the ribbon-cutting suggests.

Then there’s the noise. A closed-loop cooling system works something like the radiator in your car: fluid circulates through a loop and gives up its heat to the air instead of water. Fine in principle. In practice it means banks of industrial fans running around the clock, every day of the year, next to whatever community sits closest to the property line. That’s worth public discussion before shovels go in the ground, not after residents start filing noise complaints.

Alberta already has a preview of how these fights go. Kevin O’Leary’s Wonder Valley AI Data Centre, proposed near Grande Prairie, got an exemption from the province’s mandatory environmental impact assessment in April, though it still needs specific technical permits before construction. Indigenous groups and local residents have raised ongoing concerns about environmental impacts and energy diversion. That’s the pattern to watch: provincial enthusiasm running ahead of the environmental and community review that would normally settle these questions first.

I’ll be honest about where I land, which is not in a tidy place. I’m not opposed to data centres on principle, and I’m not going to pretend Alberta doesn’t want the investment. But I can’t write a clean-hands piece about a company being welcomed as a corporate citizen when that same company spent the past decade dismantling the industry I’ve spent my career in, then walked away from a law requiring it to pay for news rather than comply with it.

The environmental questions around this project deserve real scrutiny: water use, grid capacity, noise, what happens to the site if the AI investment bubble cools off faster than the servers do. Those are legitimate, answerable questions, and someone should be asking them hard.

That’s exactly the kind of digging that costs money and takes reporters who aren’t stretched across four beats because the newsroom shrank again last year. The industry best positioned to hold a project like this to account is the one Meta helped weaken. I don’t know if that’s irony or just how extraction economies work. I do know that whatever gets built in the industrial heartland, I’d like it covered by journalists who still have jobs to come to. Whether that happens is the more interesting question, and it’s the one nobody’s putting in a press release.

On Tuesday, Rogers Media eliminated 230 jobs and shut down six radio stations across the country. The stations going dark are 1130 NewsRadio and Sportsnet 650 in Vancouver, 660 NewsRadio and Sportsnet 960 in Calgary, NewsRadio 95.7 in Halifax, and 570 NewsRadio in Kitchener. Eighty of those jobs belong directly to the stations. The licences go back to the CRTC. The rest of the cuts are scattered through sales, marketing, programming and TV.

Rogers called it a response to “declining audience and revenue trends.” That what a company writes in a press release, hoping the story will end quietly. It won’t, not for the people who worked there, and not for the rest of us who are watching local radio disappear.

I’ve been in this business since 1974, when I walked into a station in Kamloops at fifteen, picked up a set of headphones and cued my first record. I spent years after that in small-market radio — CHAB in Moose Jaw, CFJC, CKOV, CKWL. I know what those jobs look like from the inside, because I held a few of them. So I’ll say plainly what the coverage this week keeps dancing around: this isn’t really a story about changing habits. Podcasts didn’t kill 660 News in Calgary. A big radio chain did.

There was a time when the vast majority of radio stations in Canada were locally owned. The one chain I worked for, Moffat, was dedicated to radio and was a company that understood the markets they were in.

There was a time when radio stations were community fixtures, not product lines. People knew the morning DJ, which reporter covered city hall and which one covered the courts. A good newsroom knew where there were traffic issues, what city council was doing, and what the cops were up to. That kind of local knowledge doesn’t show up on a balance sheet, so it got treated like it didn’t exist. Consolidate the stations, network the programming, cut the newsroom in half, and then act surprised when the audience stops feeling any loyalty to what’s left. That’s not a changing habit. That’s a company hollowing out the thing that made people tune in, then blaming the people for noticing.

Sadly none of this is new, and Rogers didn’t start it, Bell did. In June 2023, Bell Media walked away from six AM stations in one move: CFRN/TSN 1260 in Edmonton, CJBK NewsTalk 1290 in London, two Vancouver signals in CFTE and CKST, CKMX in Calgary, and CFRW in Winnipeg. The CRTC spent the next three years formally revoking those licences one at a time, the last of them, Calgary’s CKMX, only this past May. Corus ran its own quieter version of the same play: CHML in Hamilton gone, CHQT in Edmonton dark after Corus shifted CHED to a new frequency and let 630 die, CKGO near Vancouver folded into the pile. All three of Canada’s biggest media companies have spent the past three years doing the same thing on a rolling basis: pull the AM signal, hand the licence back to the CRTC, absorb whatever news function survives into a bigger regional hub or just do away with it altogether. Then they call it a response to the market.

These aren’t three isolated corporate decisions. They’re the same decision, made three times, by the three companies that own most of the dial in this country. It’s Rogers, Bell and Corus, one after another, deciding a local AM newsroom costs more to keep than it’s worth in shareholder value.

What gets lost isn’t just jobs, though the jobs matter. It’s a piece of shared civic media a city has. Most of Canada’s newspapers have been gutted already, the bones sold off to an American hedge fund, and local TV news is on life support.

I’m not pretending every hour of radio was good. Plenty of it wasn’t. There was lazy radio and loudmouth radio and a lot of formula radio. But there was also a newsroom that answered the phone and a reporter who knew every member of city council by first name because they’d covered it for a decade. That’s what Rogers priced out this week, along with 230 people’s futures.

Among those who lost their jobs yesterday are people I know, and I grieve for them. Radio is a small, tight-knit community, and sadly today it’s a little smaller.

Where I live, we’re experiencing the wettest June on record. Forget the once-in-a-hundred-year storms we seem to get every second year now — this has been a doozy. That’s why I’ve spent the better part of the past week in my basement with a shop vac and a mop, just trying to keep the water from rising.

When you’re home alone slopping up water, you ask yourself questions: why are all these boxes on the ground, what can be salvaged, what needs to move to higher ground, and why is there so much more rain in the forecast.

Stick with me — this is not a story about my basement. Because while I was cleaning up from record rainfall, Europeans are suffering through the worst heatwave they’ve ever seen. Some places are facing temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius. Meantime, their forests are burning, with extreme fire conditions across much of the continent. I wish we could send them some rain.

Scientists with a group called World Weather Attribution say what we’re seeing is the impact of climate change. Wildfire seasons across this country keep getting longer and meaner — a trend Natural Resources Canada has been documenting for years now, not predicting — documenting. And NOAA’s latest Arctic assessment describes a region warming several times faster than the rest of the planet, with the kind of changes that don’t reverse on a human timeline.

None of that is news, exactly. What’s news is the response to it.

Alberta’s government is currently pushing for a new oil pipeline to the west coast, built on the argument that global demand for oil and gas — especially in Asia — isn’t going anywhere for decades. Maybe that’s true. But notice the shape of the conversation. We’re not asking how fast we can cut emissions before the bill gets bigger. We’re talking about getting more fossil fuels out of the ground, even faster, for places that are already shifting to alternatives.

China, one of the biggest energy consumers on earth, is aggressively shifting to wind and solar power. Its stated targets, according to the World Economic Forum, are to peak emissions by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2060, with non-fossil sources targeted to make up roughly a quarter of its energy mix within the next few years.

Meanwhile, once in power, Alberta’s UCP set about cancelling green energy projects while actively promoting the oil and gas industry. According to the Pembina Institute, 11 gigawatts of wind, solar and energy storage have been cancelled since October 2023 — more than enough to cover Alberta’s average total power demand.

This all happened because an entire industry, helped along by grievance politics and ordinary economic fear, has spent thirty years successfully reframing a measurable physical process as a matter of opinion. Climate change didn’t need to be disproven. It just needed to be made to feel optional — one more thing reasonable people could disagree about, like tipping or hockey teams. Delay dressed up as debate. That’s the whole trick, and it worked.

It’s still working. South of the border, the Trump administration has been pulling apart the infrastructure that lets anyone measure what’s happening to the planet in real time. PBS reported on the removal of hundreds of ocean-monitoring sensors from major research sites. A move that thankfully is getting significant push back.

Still, the journal Science reports the administration’s proposed budget would cut $1.6 billion from NOAA next year, eliminating its Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and targeting what officials call “Green New Scam” climate programs.

The belief seems to be that if it can’t be measured, it isn’t happening. Climate science hasn’t just been sidelined — it’s been vilified.

In Alberta, federal climate targets have been thoroughly rejected. Some people are calling for separation, so we can build as many damn pipelines as we want and extract that bitumen down to the last drop. If the world burns, so be it.

Alberta has every right to want a functioning economy and a future for its workers. But a future and a bigger bet on the same commodity that’s been driving the floods, fires and heatwaves are not the same thing, no matter how many times a press release uses the word “transition.”

Meanwhile the people actually absorbing the cost are farmers losing crops to drought and hail in the same season, insurers quietly repricing flood risk out of reach for ordinary homeowners, municipalities patching infrastructure that wasn’t built for this much water this fast, and a guy in his basement with a shop vac, doing math on what’s salvageable.

Floodwater doesn’t check which party you voted for before it finds your foundation. Heat doesn’t soften because a premier says “energy security” with enough conviction. We can keep treating this as a debate with two reasonable sides, or we can admit the debate ended a while ago and what’s left is just the weather, showing up to collect.

Around mid-morning on Sunday, the parking lot at Real Canadian Superstore fills up fast. Entire families pour in, some still dressed for church, fighting over parking spots like it’s a competition to see how close you can get to the front door. You’ll see the same thing at Canadian Tire, Home Depot, pretty much any big box in town. A generation ago, that scene would have been unthinkable. Mixing church and commerce on a Sunday? You’d have been run out of town.

Until 1985, Sunday shopping was illegal in Canada. The Lord’s Day Act came into force in 1907, and it was really just a tidied-up version of old British Sunday laws, which themselves traced back to a Roman decree from 321 AD. So in the grand sweep of history, Sunday shopping is the new kid. Though to be fair, the Romans never had to contend with big box retailers, power centres or West Edmonton Mall.

One of the few carve-outs in the Act let pharmacies stay open, since medication counted as essential. Drugstores noticed the gap and drove a truck through it. London Drugs in B.C. quietly started selling more than pills. So did Big M Drug Mart in Calgary, and it was eventually charged. The Big M case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and on April 24, 1985, the ban on Sunday shopping was ruled unconstitutional.

After that, provincial bans started toppling like dominoes. Stores defied the rules before the rules officially gave up, and there wasn’t much the provinces could do about it. Some places held out for years anyway, just on principle.

A law built to protect a day of rest got killed for violating freedom of religion. There’s a particular kind of irony in that.

As the provincial walls fell, families rearranged their weekends without much fuss: church, then shopping, then dinner, a new holy trinity. Bars got to open too, which mattered to the more secular crowd. Before that, the only legal way to get a drink with friends on a Sunday was to order food. There was a place in Kelowna that served draft beer by the jug, so long as you ordered a small pizza. We called it the Last Chance Saloon.

According to the market research firm Circana, Sunday went on to be the biggest shopping day of the week for about a quarter century. Big box stores, with their oceans of parking, deep selection and rock-bottom prices, thrived through the turn of the millennium. After more than 1,800 years as the day of rest, Sunday became the day to get stuff done.

But the tide’s going out again. Saturday has quietly overtaken Sunday as the busiest shopping day, and smaller shops are picking off customers fed up with crowded lots, long lines and self-checkouts that cause more problems than they solve. Online shopping is chewing into the big boxes from the other side too. It’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including Christmas morning, and it never makes you hunt for parking.

Humans are fickle creatures. Killing the Lord’s Day Act mattered enormously to people who believed in a seventh-day rest. But once the law was gone, it was forgotten fast, and shopping settled into the gap between church and family dinner: not quite sacred, not quite ordinary. Just Sunday.

A right-wing provocateur spent the weekend in Banff. He had tea “overlooking the sublime views of the glaciers.” Lovely.

Then he got to the point. Banff was “packed with foreigners.” Parking was impossible. People were “ripping down branches to use as walking sticks.” And Canada’s all-access pass, he wrote, should really be called “India’s all access pass” — just in case anyone missed which foreigners he meant.

It was a bad, plain racist rant. No other way to read it. Also not surprising: Press Progress once profiled this same guy pointing out he was involved with an online store selling white supremacist memorabilia. A man who was selling white supremacist kitsch on the side is not going to surprise anyone with a tweet like this.

What should surprise you is what happened next. Alberta’s Minister of Municipal Affairs, Dan Williams, reposted it. And added his own line:

“The purpose of the park is for Canadians to visit! If we -citizens- don’t have meaningful access the park is failing Canadians.”

Let’s sit with that for a second. Since when does non-white mean non-Canadian? I know plenty of people of South Asian descent who are second and third-generation Canadian. They have exactly as much right to Banff’s glaciers as Dan Williams does.

Here’s the part that should bother Travel Alberta’s marketing department: the agency spends more than $75 million a year telling the world to come visit our parks. So you’ve got a government department spending millions to bring people here, and a cabinet minister in that same government implying that if you’re not Canadian — which, read closely, and based on the post Williams was responding to, it seems to say if you’re not white — stay home.

According to Travel Alberta, visitors spent more than $15 billion in the province in 2025. Around 250,000 jobs are directly related to tourism. It is big business in Alberta, and a minister of the crown is telling people to stay away.

Most organizations have social media policies precisely so an employee doesn’t have a bozo eruption in public. In plenty of workplaces, Williams would be shown the door by Monday morning. At minimum, a stern talking-to and a refresher course. But this is the UCP’s Alberta. Fair bet: nothing happens.

There’s a lot of racism simmering under this province’s surface, and you don’t have to dig far to find it. October’s separation referendum has questions nobody asked for, several of them dressed up around immigration — which is, last I checked, federal jurisdiction, not Alberta’s to legislate by ballot.

A couple of years back, this same government ran a slick national campaign called Alberta Is Calling. People answered. Then it became clear the people they wanted answering were white.

We are all immigrants here. My family came from England. Some of my friends’ families came from India, or Africa, or China — all had families that came here and are now proud Canadians. Williams doesn’t have a citizenship problem. He has a colour problem. And now we know what colour he’s calling for.

One of the oldest tropes in journalism is follow the money. Who is buying whom, and at what price. In politics there should be neat money trails, financial disclosures, audited statements. That way you knew who was paying the party, who was behind the campaign and with a little research you could figure out the quid pro quo.

These days it’s too easy to buy a politician. Citizens United drove a Tomahawk missile through financial disclosure rules in the United States, and that has trickled across the border in a way that dark money flows from one pocket to another.

Dark money, for the uninitiated, is dollars from a donor with an agenda to a cause. It’s used to influence us on any matter of issues. They might be called a political action committee or a grassroots movement. But somehow, somewhere, someone is paying for it. The bigger the campaign, the larger the money transfer.

The really amazing thing about dark money is you have no idea who is paying the bill, or what their motives are.

So here’s a cute little story.

A couple of years ago a company called Tenet Media was broadcasting all kinds of popular right wing propaganda in the United States and Canada. Tenet had deep pockets and recruited some of the big names in conservative media: Lauren Southern, from Surrey, B.C., Lauren Chen, one of the co-founders of Tenet, from B.C. Benny Johnson, who wrote for some of the biggest right wing outlets in North America. Breitbart News, TheBlaze, National Review, and The Daily Caller.

As it turns out Tenet Media was getting its funding from Russia, which would be quite happy if Canada and the U.S. just burned down, or fell out a window, in true Russian style.

Receipts? Right here, here, but if you’re like me, you want to read the court records, which you will find here.

So in the interest of understanding dark money, how it works, and how it’s affecting your train of thought - here’s a Tuesday top ten.

1. Dark money lives behind a curtain

A Facebook ad looks local. A podcast sounds independent. A rally looks organic. But take a peek behind the curtain and you see a wizard controlling the propaganda machine. It’s basically the plot of the Wizard of Oz. Except that the wizard remains hidden until there are federal investigations crossing multiple jurisdictions. What a convenient hiding spot.

2. It turns real anger into someone else’s weapon

Dark money finds anger that already exists and exploits it. Albertans have genuine grievances: Ottawa, the cost of living, health care, energy policy. Dark money doesn’t create that frustration, but it decides which enemy gets named, which facts get dropped, which slogans get repeated until they sound like common sense. The anger is real. The script may not be.

3. It makes fringe ideas look mainstream

Enough money can manufacture momentum — matching signs, friendly polls, boosted influencers, identical talking points in every comment section until people assume everyone already agrees. The trick isn’t persuading anyone directly; it’s convincing them the crowd has already moved. Around Alberta separatism, that raises plain questions: who’s paying for the organizing, the tools, the messaging and who benefits if Albertans turn against the country they helped build?

4. It lets foreign actors play in our politics

Foreign influence rarely arrives as a spy with a briefcase. It arrives as content: a meme, a podcast, a fake local news site, a boosted influencer nudging Canadians a little further apart. A divided Canada serves rivals who benefit when democracies turn on themselves. That doesn’t mean every separatist is foreign-directed — it means separatist anger is exploitable, and once it’s exploited, the ordinary Albertan becomes the audience, not the author.

5. It gives billionaires a louder vote

Democracy is supposed to run one person, one vote, but it doesn’t work that way anymore.When the wealthiest people on Earth can flood the information environment, amplify allies and punish critics, the idea that everyone still speaks on equal terms gets harder to take seriously.

6. It turns politics into procurement

Money’s influence doesn’t end on election night. It shapes who gets contracts, access and favourable policy. Alberta has faced its own questions — the private surgical contracts, the Turkish children’s pain medication deal; Ontario had its Greenbelt controversy. Not every contract is corrupt, but secrecy breeds suspicion, and voters don’t need to be paranoid to wonder who had influence.

7. It weakens the referee

Dark money thrives when watchdogs are weak or ignored. Elections Alberta has levied significant penalties against Take Back Alberta over advertising and financing rules, including out-of-province and out-of-country contributions and poor financial recordkeeping. Founder David Parker, also a co-founder of the Centurion Project, faces penalties of his own. These aren’t bookkeeping footnotes — political finance rules exist because democracy needs guardrails, and anyone seeking power should follow them in public.

8. It turns voter data into a weapon

The Centurion Project points to a second problem: modern politics runs on money plus data — voter lists, targeting models, phone numbers, addresses. That data can inform people. It can also manipulate and pressure them. If Alberta separatism is being organized with sophisticated data tools, Albertans deserve to know who built the system, who paid for it, and what safeguards exist.

9. It replaces journalism with influence

A generation ago, local reporters covered council meetings, court hearings, financial reports and budgets, all the unglamorous paperwork, but where real stories live. Newsrooms have shrunk; influencers have multiplied. It’s not an equal trade. Influencers can be useful, but most don’t verify documents, and rarely disclose who pays them.

10. It makes everyone cynical

The deepest damage comes last. Dark money convinces people the whole system is rigged: every politician bought, every fact fake, every scandal partisan noise. That cynicism doesn’t fix anything. It helps the people doing the wrecking, because citizens who trust nothing eventually stop demanding anything.

The fix isn’t silencing political speech. It’s sunlight. Disclose who’s funding a movement. Protect voter data. Accept scrutiny for public contracts. Anyone trying to reshape Alberta or Canada should have the nerve to do it in the open. Because when money hides, power hides, and democracy looks like theatre.

Living in Edmonton, it is hard to miss the opioid crisis.

For years I worked downtown at City Centre, the nearly dead mall where security often outnumbered shoppers, and open drug use was a common sight. I was accosted, exposed to toxic fumes, and threatened more than once.

It’s impolite to say, but we were among walking zombies. People on public benches folded in that now-familiar pose, bodies bent over in what has become known as the fentanyl slump. People passed out on sidewalks. The desperation around transit stops, alleyways, doorways. Security guards, police, outreach workers and paramedics moving from one crisis to the next.

Not hidden. Not abstract. Right there in the middle of the city.

Go to Vancouver, Seattle or San Francisco and you see the same thing, amplified. In some neighbourhoods the scale is almost impossible to process. People living fix to fix. Half-conscious on concrete. Slipped out of ordinary life and into a darker economy of pure survival.

It is not just the big cities, either. Go to Wetaskiwin, Red Deer or Lloydminster and you find the small-city version of the same grief.

Mexico felt different.

That is not a scientific statement. It is an observation from repeated visits. I have travelled through Mexico City, Guadalajara, Puebla, Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende, Querétaro, Merida and other places. I have walked through tourist districts, colonial centres, working neighbourhoods, markets, bus stations and ordinary streets.

I saw poverty. I saw homelessness. Mexico is not some postcard fantasy where hardship hides behind warm weather and tequila shots.

But I did not see the opioid tragedy I see in Edmonton. Not at anything close to the same scale. I did not see the empty, desperate people living entirely from one hit to the next. I did not see sidewalks that looked like open-air emergency wards. I did not see the same public collapse that has become so common in parts of Canada and the United States that we risk treating it as normal.

So I tested my observation against the numbers.

What I found was grim.

Alberta’s fentanyl death rate is not just high by Canadian standards. It sits inside a North American catastrophe that has hit Canada and the United States far harder than Mexico — at least according to official figures.

The Mexico figure includes both opioid and methamphetamine deaths, so it is not a clean apples-to-apples comparison. Differences in toxicology, death investigation and reporting systems also complicate the picture. Even so, Alberta’s opioid death rate in 2022 was thirteen times higher than Mexico’s combined figure.

That should stop us cold.

The easy explanation is to say Mexico has stronger families, tighter communities, deeper social bonds. There may be something to that. People who are housed, connected and supported are less likely to disappear into the most dangerous corners of the drug supply.

But that explanation lets us off too easy.

Canada and the United States did not end up here because families suddenly failed. We got here through a long chain of policy decisions, medical practice, pharmaceutical marketing, untreated pain, poverty and neglect.

The opioid crisis in North America began, in large part, inside the health care system. Prescription opioids were promoted, prescribed and normalized at a scale Mexico never experienced. People were exposed to powerful drugs through legitimate pain treatment. Some became dependent. Then prescribing rules tightened, but dependency didn’t. The market shifted. Fentanyl moved in.

That is the disaster we are living with.

Fentanyl is not just another drug. It is cheap, potent and unforgiving. It contaminates the unregulated supply. It turns addiction into a lottery. It kills experienced users and first-timers alike. It kills people who know the risks and people who never get a second chance to learn them.

Social programs matter. Housing matters. Mental health care, treatment, safe consumption sites, detox beds, recovery programs, income support, outreach workers — all of it matters.

But those are brakes, not walls.

Canada has more social supports than the United States, yet still has a devastating opioid death rate. Alberta has been hit brutally. That tells you the welfare state alone cannot stop a poisoned drug supply once the crisis takes hold.

Mexico’s lower numbers likely reflect several things at once: far less medical opioid exposure, drug markets that developed differently, opioid use historically more concentrated in northern border regions, and yes, undercounting from weaker toxicology and reporting infrastructure.

But the broad lesson holds.

The opioid catastrophe in Alberta, Canada and the United States was not inevitable. It was built by overprescribing, by pharmaceutical marketing, by untreated pain and trauma, by poverty, homelessness, isolation and policy failure. Then supercharged by fentanyl.

When I walk through downtown Edmonton, I don’t see a mystery.

I see people we failed long before they hit the sidewalk. Failed by family sometimes, yes, but also by medicine, housing, labour markets, mental health systems, drug policy and political indifference. I see a society still arguing about whether people deserve help while the body count keeps rising.

Mexico is not proof that drug crises can be wished away. It has its own violence, corruption, addiction and suffering.

But my time there, and the numbers behind it, leave one question that will not let go.

Why did we let fentanyl become this visible, this deadly, this normal, and why do we keep letting people die on our streets?

Sources:

• Alberta Substance Use Surveillance Data

• Public Health Agency of Canada

• CDC National Center of Health Statistics

• Secretaría de Salud / Dirección General de Epidemiología / SISVEA