Blue Storm Bratt, Duane; Sutherland, Richard; Taras, David
2023
eBook
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In 2019, the United Conservative Party, under the leadership of Jason Kenney, unseated the New Democratic Party to form the provincial government of Alberta. A restoration of conservative power in a ...province that had seen the Progressive Conservatives win every election from 1971-2015, UCP quickly began to make political waves. This is the first scholarly analysis of the 2019 election and the first years of the UCP government, with special focus on the path of Jason Kenney’s rise to, and fall from, provincial political power. It opens with an examination of the election from a number of vantage points, including the campaign, polling, and online politics. It provides fascinating insight into internal UCP politics with chapters on the divisions within the party, gender and the UCP, and the symbolism of Kenney’s famous blue pickup truck. Explorations of oil and gas policy, the Energy War Room, Alberta’s budgets, health care, education, the public sector, Alberta’s cultural industries, and more provide unprecedented insight into the actions, motivations, and impacts of Kenney’s UCP Government in power. Contributions from top political watchers, journalists, and academics provide a wide range of methods and perspectives. Concluding with a survey of the impacts of COVID-19 in Alberta and a comparison between Jason Kenney and Doug Ford, Blue Storm is essential reading for everyone interested in Alberta politics and the tumultuous first years of the UCP government. Providing key insights from perspectives across the political spectrum, this book is a captivating deep-dive into an unprecedented party, its often controversial politics, and its unforgettable leader.
A policy travelogue Kingfisher, Catherine Pélissier
2013., 20130915, 2013, 2013-11-05
eBook, Book
An ethnography of the development and travel of the New Zealand model of neoliberal welfare reform, this study explores the social life of policy, which is one of process, motion, and change. ...Different actors, including not only policy elites but also providers and recipients, engage with it in light of their own resources and knowledge. Drawing on two analytic frameworks of the contemporary anthropology of policy-translation and assemblage-Kingfisher situates policy as an artifact and architect of cultural meaning, as well as a site of power struggles. All points of engagement with policy are approached as sites of policy production that serve to transform it as well as reproduce it. As such,
A Policy Travelogueprovides an antidote to theorizations of policy as a-cultural, rational, and straightforwardly technical.
We are coming home Conaty, Gerald Thomas
We are coming home,
2015, 2015, 2014, 2014, 2014-11-30, 2015-03-15
eBook
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In 1990, Gerald Conaty was hired as senior curator of ethnology at the Glenbow Museum, with the particular mandate of improving the museum’s relationship with Aboriginal communities. That same year, ...the Glenbow had taken its first tentative steps toward repatriation by returning sacred objects to First Nations’ peoples. These efforts drew harsh criticism from members of the provincial government. Was it not the museum’s primary legal, ethical, and fiduciary responsibility to ensure the physical preservation of its collections? Would the return of a sacred bundle to ceremonial use not alter and diminish its historical worth and its value to the larger society? Undaunted by such criticism, Conaty oversaw the return of more than fifty medicine bundles to Blackfoot and Cree communities between the years of 1990 and 2000, at which time the First Nations Sacred Ceremonial Objects Repatriation Act (FNSCORA)—still the only repatriation legislation in Canada—was passed. “Repatriation,” he wrote, “is a vital component in the creation of an equitable, diverse, and respectful society.” We Are Coming Home is the story of the highly complex process of repatriation as described by those intimately involved in the work, notably the Piikani, Siksika, and Kainai elders who provided essential oversight and guidance. We also hear from the Glenbow Museum’s president and CEO at the time and from an archaeologist then employed at the Provincial Museum of Alberta who provides an insider’s view of the drafting of FNSCORA. These accounts are framed by Conaty’s reflections on the impact of museums on First Nations, on the history and culture of the Niitsitapi, or Blackfoot, and on the path forward. With Conaty’s passing in August of 2013, this book is also a tribute to his enduring relationships with the Blackfoot, to his rich and exemplary career, and to his commitment to innovation and mindful museum practice.
“…deeply informative and readable…. An absence of Canadian texts in the museum field and in cultural communication leaves open the mistaken idea that we are mere ciphers for practices from abroad. By making an important Alberta story available in this fascinating and important volume, AU Press has performed an essential cultural service for all Canadians.” —Literary Review of Canada
With lively, informative contributions by both scholars and activists, Bucking Conservatism highlights the individuals and groups who challenged Alberta's conservative status quo in the 1960s and ...70s. It uncovers the lasting influence of Alberta's noncomformists and poses thought-provoking questions for contemporary activists.
At the place known as Head-Smashed-In in southwestern Alberta, Aboriginal people practiced a form of group hunting for nearly 6,000 years before European contact. The large communal bison traps of ...the Plains were the single greatest food-getting method ever developed in human history. Hunters, working with their knowledge of the land and of buffalo behaviour, drove their quarry over a cliff and into wooden corrals. The rest of the group butchered the kill in the camp below. Author Jack Brink, who devoted 25 years of his career to “The Jump,” has chronicled the cunning, danger, and triumph in the mass buffalo hunts and the culture they supported. He also recounts the excavation of the site and the development of the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Interpretive Centre, which has hosted 2 million visitors since it opened in 1987. Brink’s masterful blend of scholarship and public appeal is rare in any discipline, but especially in North American pre-contact archaeology. Brink attests, “I love the story that lies behind the jump—the events and planning that went into making the whole event work. I continue to learn more about the complex interaction between people, bison and the environment, and I continue to be impressed with how the ancient hunters pulled off these astonishing kills.”
Second promised land Hiller, Harry H
Second promised land,
c2009, 20090501, 2014, 2009, 2009-05-01
eBook
Combining statistical analysis and ethnographic study, Harry Hiller uncovers two waves of in-migration to Alberta. His innovative approach begins with the individual migrant and analyzes the ...relocation experience from origin to destination. Through interviews with hundreds of migrants, Hiller shows that migration is complex and dynamic, shaped not just by what Alberta offers but also prompted by a process that begins in the region of origin which makes migration possible, and helps determine whether migrants stay or return home. By combining a social psychological approach with structural factors such as Alberta's transition from a regional hinterland province to its emerging role the global system, discussions of gender, the internet, and folk culture, Second Promised Land provides a multi-dimensional and deeply human account of a contemporary Canadian phenomenon.
Hydraulic fracturing has been inferred to trigger the majority of injection-induced earthquakes in western Canada, in contrast to the Midwestern United States, where massive saltwater disposal is the ...dominant triggering mechanism. A template-based earthquake catalog from a seismically active Canadian shale play, combined with comprehensive injection data during a 4-month interval, shows that earthquakes are tightly clustered in space and time near hydraulic fracturing sites. The largest event moment magnitude (Mw) 3.9 occurred several weeks after injection along a fault that appears to extend from the injection zone into crystalline basement. Patterns of seismicity indicate that stress changes during operations can activate fault slip to an offset distance of >1 km, whereas pressurization by hydraulic fracturing into a fault yields episodic seismicity that can persist for months.
Associated with the development of the oil sands resource in northern Alberta, Canada are elevated emissions of NOₓ and SOₓ from diesel-fueled vehicle and upgrader stack emissions. Ultimately these ...emissions are returned to regional terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in the form of elevated atmospheric N and S deposition. About 30 % of the regional landscape is covered with peatlands, including ombrotrophic bogs that receive nutrient inputs solely from the atmosphere. From 2009 to 2014 we examined the effects of N and S deposition on Sphagnum fuscum growth and on recent net accumulation of C, N, and S in peat in six bogs, located between 11 and 251 km from the oil sands industrial center. Averaged across all sites and years, average deposition of NH₄⁺–N, NO₃⁻–N, DIN, SO₄²⁻–S, Ca²⁺, Mg²⁺, and ortho-P was 0.52, 0.64, 1.17, 7.70, 10.04, 3.29, and 0.15 kg ha⁻¹ year⁻¹. Deposition of NO₃⁻–N, DIN, SO₄²⁻–S, Ca²⁺, and Mg²⁺ decreased exponentially with distance from the industrial center. Averaged across all sites and years, vertical growth and NPP of S. fuscum was 16.6 ± 0.6 mm and 259 ± 9 g m⁻² per growing season, increasing exponentially with proximity to the industrial center. Correlations suggested that climatic factors, and in particular late growing season precipitation and the growing season Aridity Index (potential evapotranspiration to precipitation ratio) may be more important than the chemistry of atmospheric deposition in affecting S. fuscum growth. Across all sites and years, net C, N, and S accumulation in peat over the most recent 25 years averaged 67, 1.29, and 0.30 g m⁻² year⁻¹ and increased with proximity to the industrial center. Over the past 25–50 years, net C, N, and S accumulation in peat was lower than in surface peat, with only net S accumulation exhibiting an increase with proximity to the industrial center. In a region where bogs have persisted on the landscape for millennia with low atmospheric deposition of elements, changing precipitation chemistry, and in particular elevated deposition of N, S, Ca and Mg, related to oil sands development is influencing bog function, as evidenced by S. fuscum growth and biogeochemical responses.
Canada is regularly presented as a country where liberalism has ensured freedom and equality for all. Yet with the expansion of settlers into the First Nations territories that became southern ...Alberta and BC, liberalism proved to be an exclusionary rather than inclusionary force. Between 1877 and 1927, government officials, police officers, church representatives, ordinary settlers, and many others operated to exclude and reform Indigenous people. Presenting Anglo-Canadian liberal capitalist values and structures and interests as normal, natural, and beyond reproach devalued virtually every aspect of Indigenous cultures. This book explores the means used to facilitate and justify colonization, their effects on Indigenous economic, political, social, and spiritual lives, and how they were resisted.
