Opinion

Haven’t we all pondered this at one time or another – or just about every frickin’ day since November, 2016, when 63 million Americans walked into voting booths and pulled the lever for Donald Trump?

The Province of British Columbia apparently knew what to do to lessen the intensity of wildfires by 2017. The reports they'd commissioned in 2003 after the catastrophic Kelowna wildfires were explicit. Remove small trees and other burnable debris and do controlled burns.

Fully 79 per cent of Canadians believe we “face a catastrophe if we fail to do more.”

Hidden by gloomy tales of the decline of North America’s news media is a success story in southwestern British Columbia. Here, a cluster of digital outlets have flowered by paying for top notch investigative and solutions-focused reporting. They are forging new business models and training the next wave of journalists.

In 1976, I participated in my first environmental assessment. It was a review of a proposed hydroelectric dam carved out of land that had been in Cape Breton Highlands National Park. What I didn’t know when I showed up in the high school gym in Baddeck, Nova Scotia for the hearings was that the Wreck Cove Hydro Project was the subject of the first federal review ever in Canada.

Now, I know the advice that many of us abide by. Don’t feed the trolls and by in large, I don’t. I’m breaking this rule because I think the misogynistic and violent nature of certain comments and potential links to pro-oil platforms needs to be called out.

It seems odd that a major U.S. government climate report released November 3 didn’t receive more media attention. But then, the main thing newsworthy about the Climate Science Special Report is that it was released at all, apparently without political interference.

For Jagmeet Singh, Canada’s newly-elected NDP leader, the biggest challenge of the 2019 election may be proving that he can withstand a dog-whistle campaign, says former MP Laurin Liu.

Does Valérie Plante owe part of her victory to the sweeping influence of the #MeToo movement and an overwhelming desire by voters to disassociate from the Old Boys’ network and an era of arrogant men steamrolling through what they wanted? Without a doubt.

In July 1925, the State of Tennessee put a substitute biology teacher named John Thomas Scopes on trial for teaching children about evolution in the Tennessee public schools.

Ask any person of colour how they feel the day after a terrorist attack. My friends tell me the hate is palpable. We are a much less civil society than we like to think. These are troubled times and tolerance is on the run. To think that we are immune to barbarism is naïve, myopic and dangerous. And journalists are a fundamental safeguard against such a descent. We must recognize them as such.

Political discourse in Alberta currently relies on a series of opposing narratives: the energy sector vs. the environment, corporate interests vs. the public interest, government spending vs. cuts.

Corporations can’t vote, but by putting enormous amounts of money into campaigns and lobbying, they can hijack the political agenda.That’s the case with the fossil fuel industry — the most profitable in human history, writes scientist David Suzuki.

As Americans and millions around the world sit transfixed by the news emerging from the Mueller investigation, one question seems glaringly absent. How did a guy like Trump elude major scrutiny by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the IRS, gambling regulators and every other major police agency for his entire adult life?

The Liberal plan to legalize pot next year will not only make history. It may be key to the governing party’s chances of re-election in 2019. Polling data that surfaced after the 2015 election suggests that the youth vote strongly contributed to the Liberals’ majority win at the ballot box. Millennials reportedly turned up at the ballot box in “unprecedented” numbers.