2020-2024

More Irrigation, Fewer Farms

Alberta Views, June 2021

Finalist for the 2021-2022 Alberta Magazine Award, Editorial Package: Print

The public is investing almost $1 billion to expand Alberta’s irrigation network. For whose benefit?

The only sound for miles is tires crunching gravel. Eric Musekamp drives north, home to an address he rarely gives out. He has to be careful: You don’t win many friends in these parts by advocating for farm workers.

Rural Frontiers

NEW TRAIL, AUGUST 2022

Finalist for the 2022-2023 Alberta Magazine Award, Feature Writing: Long

Rural communities around the world share the experience of decline. Yet, paradoxically, researchers and other experts will tell you rural areas must play a growing role in their countries’ development

How do you quantify the soothing glint of first light on a foggy harvest morning? The euphony of birdsongs and tranquil whispers of wind? Sometimes it’s hard to articulate to outsiders why rural life is worth fighting for.

Picking up the Pieces

EDIFY, JANUARY 2022

Winner (Silver) for the 2022-2023 Alberta Magazine Award, Editorial Package

How COVID-19 has fanned the flame of Edmonton's lethal overdose crisis

Pandemic and overdose casualties show us how easily we can turn a blind eye to mass death if we choose. They show us how dehumanizing, exculpatory terms like “comorbidities” downplay preventable deaths, and how words like “junkie” rationalize them. For meaningful redress, we need to understand and then dismantle the mechanisms by which the deaths of our neighbours become part of the machinery humming in the background. The callousness toward preventable pandemic deaths was foretold by callousness toward preventable overdose deaths. What future horrors does today’s carnage foretell? What pieces will be left to pick up?

Book Review: The Observer

Alberta Views, APRIL 2024

Reviewing The Observer, a novel by Marina Endicott

Julia is a writer who watches Fellini films and studies esoteric philosophy. Hardy, the policeman, is also a poet and former reporter, and they befriend a celebrated poet—as though Endicott is most comfortable telling the story through the lenses of people who write and attend the symphony.

Book Review: A Kid Called Chatter

Alberta Views, JULY 2022

Reviewing A Kid Called Chatter, a novel by Chris Kelly

Greaves’s shadowy presence forces us to ask if the ideas they embody are discrete or dialectical. This tension creates the book’s strongest moments: unanswerable questions of mercy, fear, doubt and grace.

Book Review: Borderlands

Alberta Views, October 2020

A review of Borderlands by the Calgary photographer Mark Vitaris

We visit places with names like Pinto Horse Butte, sit in the shadows of hoodoos and lopsided barns and see crumbling motels, pockmarked seed elevators, long-lonely playgrounds and the husks of hollowed-out homesteads.

Book Review: Rain Comin' Down

ALBERTA VIEWS, MAY 2020

A review of Rain Coming’ Down: Water, Memory and Identity in a Changed World by Robert William Sandford 

Like the titular Creedence Clearwater Revival song, it’s a clue that Rain Comin’ Down isn’t really about the rain. It’s about the fall.

2018 - 2019

The High and Lonesome Sound

eighteen bridges, summer 2018

Finalist for the 2018-2019 Alberta Magazine Award, Alberta Story

Selected for Best Canadian Essays 2019, published by Biblioasis

Amid the horror of the opioid crisis, it's clear the rural life is vanishing and there’s no pill to cure the ill. What can we do?

The rural history of Alberta is full of abandoned company towns like Mercoal, coal-mining communities like Bankhead and railway camps like Coalspur. Kitscoty, where I went to school, was named after a tomb. Its population grows but its culture shrinks. It had a grocery store, but it burned down and won’t be rebuilt. The old bank, long ago transformed into an antique store, was finally torn down. Most of the businesses on Main Street have shuttered. Even the liquor store couldn’t stay open. I look at our local history and have little hope. But I do have stories.

The Life of Pie

Avenue Edmonton, March 2018

Finalist for the 2018-2019 Alberta Magazine Award, Feature Writing: Long

Jonathan Avis had a gift for turning around distressed food businesses. But, after a whirlwind of misfortune, the one business he couldn’t turn around was his own

In the harbour of balmy Puerto Escondido, Mexico, Avis lines a 50-gallon oil drum with firebrick, installs a chimney on one end and cooks Neapolitan pizzas over crackling Baja mesquite. Four decades creating food products have brought him – a towering, lanky Brit with a permanent open-mouth smile – to this one. Nothing’s momentous about this product, though. It won’t help him reach $20 million in sales, it’ll win him no awards of excellence. It’s a meek slice of margherita, which he’ll sell to raise money for the boating club he commandeers. Avis speaks scant Spanish, but an aphorism catches his ear: A falta de pan, buenas son tortas. With nothing better, this will do.

High Society

Avenue Edmonton, June 2018 (excerpted in Alberta Views, November 2018)

Winner (Gold) of the 2018-2019 Alberta Magazine Award, Service: Lifestyle

How cannabis will change your city – and, maybe, you

Cannabinoids. Hydroponics. Indica, kief. Backcrossing, bongs, blunts, bowls, bubblers and borosilicate: Ten years ago, if you knew someone who could use those words in the same sentence, chances are that person owned a shady-looking backyard shack you weren’t allowed to open and held an inordinate interest in LED lights and Rubber Soul.

Walk a Mile

The Yards, summer 2019

Finalist for the 2019-2020 Alberta Magazine Award, Profile

A blind disability advocate explains how he sees Oliver — and how his neighbourhood sees him

The driver handed him his groceries. “You do okay for yourself,” he said to Workman, as he turned to leave, before adding: “Considering you’re blind.”

2016 - 2017

The End of the Line

Alberta Venture, March 2016 (EXCERPTED IN ALBERTA VIEWS, JULY/AUGUST 2016)

Amid chronic underfunding, administrative red tape and a breakdown in trust, Alberta First Nations take their fight for safe drinking water to all levels of government 

“We all want to accomplish the same thing,” Alexis says. “We want our kids to grow up in a good environment, for our grandchildren to enjoy what we enjoy and to know they’re going to have a future.”

The Fall of the House of Evans

Alberta Venture, May 2016

Jay and Robert Peers defrauded investors of $80 million, scarring their family's 100-year-old legacy

After millions of dollars disappeared, the investors demanded to know, first of all, where their money went. Then they asked themselves in bewilderment: Who is the real Jay Peers?

When in Drought

Alberta Venture, March 2016

Following the irrigation network that feeds the world and defines a province

“You know why we have starlings here? Because some jackass loved Shakespeare so much he tried to recreate Shakespearean-type animals in New York’s Central Park.” Like the starling, settlers to southern Alberta arrived because of naïve ambition, and stayed because they conquered their new habitat.

The Lights on Beacon Hill

Alberta Venture, August 2016

After the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history, Fort McMurray reopens for business 

On the easternmost reaches of Fort McMurray, across from Dickinsfield, I meet a pastor named Kunle Oladebo in a mostly barren 100-acre plot called Abraham’s Land. He invited me here to glimpse the city’s future. The tract is named after the biblical nomad – sacred to Christians and Muslims alike – who was called by God to a land he’d make his own.

Big Weed Takes Aim

Alberta Venture, April 2016

As marijuana lurches toward legalization, Big Weed targets the little guys

“That’s the big rift in the cannabis industry,” he says. While patients flock to dispensaries, Big Weed profits from their closure. “It’s profit over patients,” he adds. As he prepares his plea bargain, he and Melissa have had to go on welfare. It’s a blunt juxtaposition between the industry’s ascendance and the snuffing of the plant’s biggest champions.

The Forest and the Trees

Alberta Venture, JULY 2016

Does the expiration of the U.S.-Canada softwood lumber agreement spell the end of Alberta’s forestry industry?

The trade of lumber between Canada and the U.S. isn’t free, exactly. It’s been brokered by a succession of treaties, the most recent being the Softwood Lumber ­Agreement, which stood for nine years. That agreement expired last October, leaving the two countries at, as it were, loggerheads. While Canada is advocating for a new agreement in Washington, U.S. lumber producers have no such ambition. Instead, many of them want to sue us.

On Tailings, Alberta’s Last Chance to Clean up its Act

Alberta Venture, December 2016

Oil sands operators say they’ve made the reclamation of tailings ponds a key tenet of their social responsibility mandate. They haven’t

The concern for groups like Pembina, however, is that companies are incentivized to come up with the cheapest and most flexible solutions – which aren’t necessarily conducive to fundamental change. “Meanwhile, the issue only gets more concerning every day,” Severson-Baker says. “We’re adding huge amounts of tailings to the landscape and we’re running out of time to clean everything up before companies reach the decline stage of production.”

From ‘Temporary’ Albertans to Permanent

ALBERTA VEnture, FEBRUARY 2017

These changes will benefit Alberta, and it’s worth remembering how many were fought for and won by migrant-worker coalitions and non-profits

There are countless stories of abuse gone unreported, and changes to work-permit applications mean months of unemployment for workers who leave hostile work environments or lose their jobs.

Alberta’s Case for Free Movement

Alberta Venture, December 2016

Anti-immigration rhetoric is suddenly more dangerous, and more prevalent, than ever

“I think the fear is that somehow there’s this zero-sum game if the newcomers are given certain benefits,” says Stephen Carattini, CEO of Catholic Social Services, which has helped settle almost 1,500 Syrian refugees (about 60 per cent of whom are children younger than 12) in Edmonton and Red Deer. “But for the most part, what we see is an expansion of the economy, a sort of ripple effect flowing out.”

Living the Bust

Alberta Venture, February 2016

You’ve seen the numbers – now, hear from those rebuilding their lives after losing their oil-and-gas sector jobs

The end of the month came. McVey sold everything he could on Kijiji and packed the rest into his car. After two days on the road, he checked his bank account. There was an EI deposit. “Too little, too late,” he says. “My credit is ruined. I lost everything I worked for while in Alberta.”

2015

And They're Off!

Alberta Venture, September 2015

Century Downs aims to revive Alberta's horse racing industry. Is it a safe bet?

Ryneveld takes me to the casino’s roof, from where we can see CrossIron Mills in the distance. He points to a section of land where ground has been raised for the foundation of a grandstand that never came to fruition, where the new racetrack was initially supposed to be.

“It was going to be the Taj Mahal of racetracks,” he says, citing the $250-million price tag – nearly 10 times the cost of Century Downs. The grandstand would have held 15,000 people.

“It would have gone bankrupt in a year,” he says.

Railroaded

Alberta Venture, December 2015

The harvest of 2013 should have been a windfall for prairie farmers. Instead, the grain industry lost billions. Farmers blame the railways – and they’re banding together to change the rules

Kelly McIntyre has finally quelled the fallout from his 2013 harvest. It should have been one of the best years ever for the Fairview farmer; wheat production across the prairies was up almost 40 per cent from a year earlier. Instead, it was a crisis.

The Dry Sell

Alberta Venture, September 28, 2015

As harvest rolls in, so do publicly funded insurance payments to drought-stricken farmers. But do the payments actually mitigate the drought's impact? Or is it a billion-dollar solution to the wrong problem?

There are, indeed, potential solutions that can ease producers’ pain, and the government is implementing them. But some of them are flawed – they don’t go far enough, or they don’t impact enough people. It seems that in shining the spotlight on the $1-billion payout, we’ve passed over some more practical local solutions, and we’ve left the province’s most vulnerable farmers in a precarious position heading into next year.

Waiting for a Downpour

Alberta Venture, July 15, 2015

The recent drought has impacted farmers’ pastures and crops to the point of emergency. Is this a bad year or the new normal?

At his quarter-section ranch just southeast of Ponoka, where he’s lived for 23 years, Greg Bowie kneels to grab a handful of grass. Last night’s rain amounted to less than one-tenth of an inch, and yet the rolling fields look lush. But he pulls up blades no longer than six inches that are already starting to go to seed, which means they won’t grow much more, if at all. “If this were a normal year, this type of stuff would be the worst we’d see,” Bowie says. “This year, it’s the best.”

Saving Sangudo

Alberta Venture, February 2015

How one town raised the capital to invest in – and save – the local abattoir

“The old guy who was running it, he was at the point where he was just going to shut the doors and walk away,” Ohler says. “This group realized that if that business was lost, it’d be another hit to the community, so we decided to go buy it.”