YegDowntown

I’m hard pressed to imagine an equal to either Sir Patrick/Sir Ian or Bill Irwin/Nathan Lane. But then those two were so different that maybe there is yet room for another interpretation.

‘Berta friends: don’t forget that today’s the day you can pre-order your COVID vaccine. bookvaccine.alberta.ca/vaccine/s/pr...

Danielle Smith is a separatist.

I'm only a separatist when it comes to traffic.

“the kindest person in the room is often the smartest.” JB Pritzker is a mensch.

MarMOST.

I found a map from 1979 of Via Rail routes across Canada with daily service, and compared it to a new map I made of cities that are currently served by daily (minimum 7 trains/week) passenger rail service.

It's bleak.

Alberta needs immigrants - their drive, their entrepreneurial spirit, their artistic and creative talent, their hard work, their skills, their investment capital. And we’ve been proud to welcome refugees - from Ukraine and Eritrea, South Sudan and Myanmar and Syria. This hateful racism is not us.

Alberta as we know it today simply would not exist without the millions of immigrants and refugees who built it, who loved it, and who were proud to call it home - including my grandparents and my mum. This bitter xenophobia is as unAlbertan as it’s possible to be. I’m ashamed. I’m disgusted.

The Book Nearly Died With Him in the Amazon. But the Story Endured.

Glad to see this piece about my pal Dom's book in @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/b... and very glad to have been part of events this week launching his words into the world

And if anyone speaks up and questions our HC spending and priorities (AHS CEO, AHS Board, ASI leads...) they are fired and muzzled.

And now we have four ORGs and four Ministers and NO ONE is looking at the big picture...

and ABs are suffering for it.
10/10

- Because NO ONE, absolutely NO ONE, is coordinating this care
- govt killed AHS before Acute Care Org operational, and now we have multiple surgical sites with NO WORKFORCE/RESOURCE COORDINATION

We will keep spending more and more and these numbers will worsen.
9/10

- the AB Surg Initiative was created to improve surgery wait times for ALL Surgery. For some reason our Premier ONLY cares about wait times for surgery that can be done in a CSF???
- we have our priorities backwards
7/10

CIHI Surgery Wait Times 🧵
First note what we track: hip/knee replacement + cataracts (not life threatening) and Hip Fracture Repair (life threatening)
- so the only surrogate for in HOSP life threatening surgery care we report = hip # repair
- and this metric is worsening
1/10

How the Anglosphere's Planning Department is YIMBYism’s Main Obstacle Montreal doesn't have these problems! Francophones beat us on this one.

Planning departments aren't neutral experts—they're institutions traumatized by decades of NIMBY meetings, encoding unreasonable opposition into 'professional wisdom.'

When we're forced to learn planning jargon we are playing a rigged game. 👇

open.substack.com/pub/venat/p/...

Over the past several decades they've shed every independent means they had of reality-checking themselves and so their model of the world gets weirder and weirder and less capable of accurately forecasting what's likely to happen

I was thinking last night about the fascist right's apparent tendency to act impulsively and fail to plan or follow through, and I wondered if maybe it's due to their model of reality is increasingly based on total fantasy and provides no predictive or explanatory power

Once again they are doing something right in Edmonton

Dance off!

Canada’s sovereignty is facing an existential threat over disproven allegations that illicit fentanyl, originating from Canada, is significantly contributing the American drug poisoning emergency.

This Bill is a dangerous and unfounded admission of guilt

🧵

#cdnpoli

www.canada.ca/en/public-sa...

It is deeply hilarious that the Hudson's Bay Company was founded in 1670 and chugged along for three and a half centuries and Private Equity finished it off in like five years.

Elsewise it's just creative accounting to say "well, the emissions didn't happen *here*, so it's not our fault".

Getting CC(U)S hydrogen to be cheaper than electrolytic is a whole other challenge.

It spreads fast because it’s emotional.
It sticks because it’s social.
And it becomes dangerous because it’s self-reinforcing.
When denial becomes identity, evidence becomes the enemy.

Some people deny reality because they’re confused.
Some deny it because they’re scared.
Some because they’re angry.
But then there’s something deeper, something more organised.
Something I call disordered denial.

I hate watching creative young women get cruel, shitty, condescending media & online treatment that people will inevitably *apologize* for in a decade & write about how *bad* it was (in the 70s, 90s, 10s)… then start doing all over again, to another set of young women

Maybe Carney should start shouting about handguns every time Trump mentions fentanyl

This CTV story says Zelenskyy is coming to southern Alberta - which makes sense, since the G7 is in Kananaskis. But it would be so meaningful if he were to visit Edmonton, or Vegreville or Smoky Lake. I can’t begin to imagine the emotional response. #yeg #Edmonton

Due process gave Trump enough time to become president and take due process away.

Trump Aid Cuts End Contraception Access for Millions of Women (Gift Article) The United States was a key supplier of contraceptives in many developing countries. The Trump administration has ended that support.

The U.S. has ended financial support for family planning programs in developing countries, cutting ~50 million women off from access to contraception.
One woman who has run family planning programs for decades told me: "Women will pay for this with their lives."
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/h...

Danielle Smith claims flying to Florida to pose with Ben Shapiro is “going into the lion’s den”.

The truth is, it’s a trip to a Republican safe space, a far-right fundraiser & more about pumping the Premier’s ego than promoting Alberta.

Albertans shouldn’t be on the hook to pay for it. #ableg

You know, maybe Peace, Order, and Good Government isn’t half bad for a motto