If climate catastrophe doesn’t get us in the long run, it seems our own prime minister is fixin’ to do so right now. Gone are even lip service to jobs and development; now it’s all about getting Canada to “net-zero emissions” at literally any cost. Thousands of jobs going up in smoke is just a typical day’s work. Grant A. Brown sifts through the 17 “top priorities” in Justin Trudeau’s grandiloquent “mandate letter” to his new environment minister and unearths the utopian scheme shrouded under the unfocused haze. Brown also shows that the “gender-based” employment impacts our woke prime minister is so eager for are already happening – and the results ain’t pretty.

It’s not as if the Jason Kenney government’s taxation and spending decisions will escape scrutiny. The NDP, public-sector unions, left-wing activists and much of the news media have plenty to say. So what is added by an officious federal appointee from Quebec sniping that the Government of Alberta’s chosen fiscal direction is – wait for it – “unsustainable”. Matthew Lau takes on this tired cliché, applies a combination of mainstream economics, the historical record and common sense and finds that the Liberal-appointed Parliamentary Budget Officer has it nearly all wrong.

The view that social media are a wasteland of trivia and irrationality that’s making everyone dumber has become so common as to form an example of the very genre it condemns. In truth, decidedly non-trivial things are being communicated, just not in ways that older generations – or not-yet-clued-in members of current ones – quite understand. The current meme-war over the political and economic legacy of the Baby Boomers, for example, may well define how this generation is remembered as it fades into dotage and beyond. Millennial Aaron Nava shoulders the almost superhuman burden of working with a boomer editor to illustrate one skirmish in the eternal inter-generational tug-of-war.

There has been no shortage of advocates, naysayers, analysts and putative leaders circling the great question of Alberta and Saskatchewan’s future place inside or perhaps outside Canada. As in any functioning democracy, however, the outcome will be driven by the great mass of people in the middle. What they think and how they feel matters most. In this thorough piece of original reporting, Doug Firby gives voice to overlooked Albertans who are considering the issue deeply. While their opinions vary widely, they are united in their determination that their beloved province get it right this time.

Amidst the divisions cleaving Western society in the 1960s and 1970s, one thing seemingly everyone came to agree upon was the importance of equality before the law. But almost as soon as this hard-fought concept was universally accepted, it came under direct assault – often by its former champions. Today officially-sanctioned discrimination in the name of equality of outcomes is commonplace – and getting worse. Peter Shawn Taylor reports on the newest “Canadian value”: a Crown corporation charging different prices for different races.

Time was that riding public transit was a tad déclassé, reserved for kids, little old ladies and people who hadn’t quite arrived, or never would. Songs like The Guess Who’s “Bus Rider” depicted its dreariness and repetitiveness. Nowadays, hopping the LRT or subway is cool, a virtuous act signalling environmental wokeness and “moving on” from the automobile. The riding experience, naturellement, needs to meet the steep expectations of current gens. And that doesn’t come cheap. James R. Coggins outlines the political game played by federal and municipal politicians that’s seeing tens of billions of dollars being shovelled into city coffers for lavish urban transit schemes, while country dwellers pay part of the freight and receive little but neglect and carbon taxes in return.

The causes and state of relations between Western and Central Canada are usually viewed through a political, economic, fiscal, geographic or at times demographic lens. Less common is looking at who rules, why, what they have done and what they are like. That would be the “Laurentian Elite”. Despite its profound role in shaping Canada, discussing it still seems mainly to interest political junkies. As a proud and concerned Westerner who grew up and was educated amidst the Laurentian Elite only to escape its clutches, John Weissenberger rips away the veil and deconstructs what he regards as this decaying class.

What’s old is new again, and that extends well beyond aviator shades and flat-billed caps into the political realm. New again and, sometimes, even more urgent than the first time. The federal votes had barely been counted last month before calls erupted to dust off the Alberta Agenda, aka, the “Firewall Letter” of 2001. Some see its measures as forming Alberta’s first big step towards independence; others hope the same policies would help douse separatist flames. Just as quickly, opponents confidently pronounced all of the Agenda’s items unworkable. Tom Flanagan, co-author of the original Alberta Agenda, reviews its five policy recommendations and evaluates their merits in the light of current circumstances.

With nearly 190 million downloads per month, Joe Rogan is arguably the world’s most popular podcaster. Yet employees of the streaming platform Spotify want to exert editorial control over his show. Josh Dehaas looks at the rise of censorship of social media and Big Tech’s banishment of people who hold certain views.

Canadian health care can be world-class – if you can actually get some. If not, you might just die waiting. Other countries innovate, experiment and embrace change to improve their systems. Canada, not so much. Here, inertia, status quo protection and self-satisfaction reign. And don’t ever raise your voice in the waiting room or you’re liable to get kicked out for “abusing” the staff. Veteran journalist Doug Firby conducted a diagnosis of what ails our system – interviewing patients, talking to experts and reading key reports – and, in this exclusively reported feature, presents his prognosis.