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Alberta election: is change in the wind?

  Could Alberta be the bellwether for shifting politics in North America’s oil patch communities? Alberta citizens vote in a provincial election today.  Alberta — world famous as home of the oil sands — has been ruled by the Progressive Conservative party for more than four decades, and it is the base of Canada’s hard-right federal Conservative government. Now the socialist New Democratic Party, which received less than 10 per cent of the popular vote in 2012,  is on a wave of massive popular support, and numerous opinion polls give it a shot at governing. The election of a socialist government

Fracking: Canada’s top court to review Alberta’s duty to citizens

By Chris Wood Does a Canadian provincial government have any responsibility to protect your natural security? Nope. Nada. Rien. It can pretty much do as it likes, wrecking your water and any other part of the environment that it likes in the process. And you can just go pound sand. That, in non-legal language, was pretty much what an Alberta Court ruled in the case of Jessica Ernst, a former oilfield biologist who lost the use of the water wells on her small ranch east of Calgary after a gas company hydro-fracked several drill-holes nearby. Ernst had appealed for help

New Facts and Opinions this week

If Facts and Opinions were published on old-fashioned print, we’d be selling a thick, heavy book on newsstands this week — glossy pages packed with photos and scintillating text plus, given the prohibitive costs of print, scads of advertising to sway your minds and empty your wallets. Instead, F&O is a digital journal, non-partisan, owned by its contributors. And we’re different from most in our reliance only on subscribers – neither we, nor your eyeballs, can be bought; no advertisers are welcome on our pages. And this week we’ve put out a great digital “book” — thought-provoking, informative, packed with

Tesla claims new battery is world-changing

To hear the company chief tell it, Tesla’s new battery will change the world. Tesla Motors Inc. CEO Elon Musk announced the release, at an event live-streamed online, of a new Tesla battery design he described as “like a beautiful sculpture on a wall,” and of a scalable technology Musk said is capable of providing clean power for all human needs globally. The need to store renewable energy was the missing piece for a carbon-free future world, Musk told a cheering audience in Hawthorne, California. All previous battery designs “suck,” said Musk. “They’re stinky … They’re bad in every way.”

Canada’s Queen of Suspense: L.R. (Bunny) Wright

  BRIAN BRENNAN: BRIEF ENCOUNTERSMay 2015 Mourning was widespread for mystery writer Bunny Wright when she died of breast cancer at age 61 in February 2001. Fellow writers penned personal tributes that were published in newspapers across Canada. Her two daughters, who had worked on the final copy-edit of their mother’s last novel, Menace, while she was in the hospital, also published touching newspaper tributes. What would Wright have thought of all this adulation? She likely would not have been comfortable with it. Such was the impression I got from the one and only interview I ever did with her,

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