This is the last in my series of articles on Alberta’s great separatist adventure: an extraordinary waste of money, political oxygen and everyone’s time that ended with roughly three quarters of Albertans deciding that destroying Canada probably wasn’t such a good idea after all. Except I may have been watching the wrong story. While everyone—including…
A few days ago, Alberta, the Canadian province where I am from, voted on whether to begin the process that could eventually have led to a binding referendum on independence. It didn’t get very far: roughly 76% voted to remain Canadian. But the process itself struck me as interesting, particularly from where I now live,…
Today, back home in Alberta, people are voting in a referendum that isn’t quite a referendum, essentially a vote on whether there should eventually be a vote on leaving Canada. For readers in Spain, this requires a little explaining. Alberta separatism comes with oil, old grievances against Ottawa, memories of Quebec, a dash of Brexit…
Alberta has always had a taste for epic stories about itself: the frontier, the oil patch, the independent Westerner standing against a distant and meddlesome East. But lately, those old myths have begun to sound less like history than political scripture. In “Homer on the Range: From Sophocles to Danielle Smith,” I look at Alberta’s…
What if a dream of the sea could spark a rebellion? From the high Andes to the heart of Alberta’s oil country, The Great Landlocked Rebellion uncovers how nostalgia, geography, and fossil-fuel politics collide in a surreal story of imagined horizons and real-world resentment. Curious how a ghostly mariner becomes symbolic of modern political fever…
They Call It a Pause. We Know It’s a Ban. In my latest rabble.ca column, “The lists we keep, and the ones that keep us”, I unpack why Danielle Steele’s so-called “pause button” isn’t a timeout — it’s a warning sign. What’s being sold as “reflection” is, in truth, a move to ban books, stifle…
Premier Danielle Smith wants to protect Alberta’s children from the horrors of Judy Blume, Alice Munro, and a stray queer kiss in a YA novel. But there’s one book she’ll never ban: the Bible. The irony? Crack it open and you’ll find stories drenched in blood, lust, betrayal, mutilation, and pimped-out daughters — the kind…
Curious about how literature, identity, and cultural myths intersect in the most unexpected places? My most recent stop on the Camino a Ítaca takes readers into the heart of Alberta’s book-ban culture—and reflects on the broader implications for societies everywhere, including Spain. Click over to read the English version over on SUR in English or…