Shopping doesn't honour sacrifice

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.

Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.

Then again, in Alberta, you can just go shopping.

Yes, some places in Canada shut their stores the whole of Remembrance Day.

Other spots, at the very least, don’t allow malls and other retail outlets to open until the early afternoon, 12:30 or 1 p.m. It is such a no-brainer.

A Wildrose MLA is now proposing to do the same here.

Laws in Nova Scotia and Manitoba, for example, begin by stating the country’s  . . .

New tailings pond OK'd

One day after Premier Ed Stelmach vowed to rid the oilsands of tailings ponds within a “few years,” Alberta’s energy regulator approved a new tailings pond that’ll operate for more than two decades.

It remains foggy whether Stelmach’s idea can be realized, as even Energy Minister Ron Liepert declined to say if it’s possible to eliminate tailings ponds any time soon.

The Energy Resources Conservation Board gave conditional approval for a new tailings pond for the Fort Hills oilsands project, a joint venture led by Suncor Energy, provided it will submit test results of tailings  . . .

Wildrose still has much to prove

The Wildrose Alliance has been touted as the Great Right Hope - the party that will bring down the Tory dynasty.

But strip away the hype, and one has to wonder whether the Danielle Smith-led party is really a government-in-waiting, as she has proclaimed.

Their performance in the House during the spring sitting could be described as mediocre at best.

It definitely wasn’t inspiring. The fact their well-spoken leader doesn’t have a seat didn’t help matters.

Outside the House, Smith and the party’s three MLAs still haven’t learned how to court the media and garner much needed  . . .

Braid: Dave Rodney's veto power puts democracy in peril

Most of the time, Dave Rodney looks like a harmless Tory MLA with an inexplicable case of hero worship for Premier Ed Stelmach.

If the Calgary-Lougheed backbencher makes the news, it's usually to provide some unintended hilarity, as happened last week when CTV cameras caught him yakking on his cellphone as he pulled into the legislature.

The timing wasn't good; it was the day after the government introduced legislation to ban drivers from using hand-held phones.

But Rodney had another big moment last week.

And it was far more dangerous to democracy than drivers.

Rodney became the  . . .

Doom of democracy ticks closer as Tories fire up the smoke machine
Stelmach government does its darndest to divert attention from latest tactics to keep Liberal opposition in check

Alberta needs a doomsday clock.

You know, like the one run by atomic scientists at the University of Chicago that symbolically indicates how close humanity is to global disaster, whether from nuclear war or climate change. The hands are currently at six minutes to midnight; the closer we get to midnight, the closer we are to the end of the world as we know it.

Alberta's doomsday clock, on the other hand, would measure how close we are to democratic destruction. If we had such a clock, the hands would have edged a little bit closer to midnight this week.

No big lurch forward but the kind  . . .