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…
There is a strange experience that comes with living abroad: occasionally the country you live in looks very different from the country being discussed elsewhere. That was the starting point for this piece. Over the past year, I’ve watched Spain’s Pedro Sánchez become something of a progressive pin-up internationally: articulate, pro-European, humane on immigration and,…
There are landscapes we carry inside us long after we leave them, places we assume will always be there waiting for us. The Okanagan Valley is one of those places for me. Last summer, I brought my daughters back there. Then the highway closed, the smoke descended, and a familiar landscape suddenly became something else.…
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…
In 2021, Lytton, British Columbia, reached 49.6°C — hotter than Las Vegas — and then burned almost entirely to the ground. Five years later, smoke from Canada’s increasingly ferocious wildfire seasons was drifting south across the border, fouling American cities and threatening the World Cup. The response from Washington? Blame Canada — and threaten to…
I just published two versions of the same essay: one in Spanish, from Europe, and one in English, for Canadian and anglophone readers. They’re siblings rather than twins—similar in structure, different in inflection, each shaped by its imagined audience. The piece reflects on Canada, on Mark Carney’s Davos speech, and on that peculiar comfort of…
My brother was named after a cowboy. That detail says a lot about my father, his generation, and the way America once looked from the outside: big, confident, morally certain, the man in the white hat who did ugly things for noble reasons. My dad loved Shane (Raices Profundas), and I grew up with that…
Some wars last years, flatten countries, and leave entire generations trying to remember what normal life used to feel like. And then there was the Whiskey War. Yes — a real territorial dispute between Canada and Denmark, carried out for decades with flags, polite notes, and strategically placed bottles of whisky and schnapps left on…