Druh Farrell

Senior Alberta officials stalled release of coal mine pollution science

https://www.threads.com//post/DYe11IrlCyV

https://thenarwhal. ca/alberta-stalled-coal-mine-pollution-study/ Bring ID, go sign the waternotcoal.ca petition until June 7. Water Not Coal

Before and After in Warsaw (Poland)

🌍 At IMMdesignlab we work for Climate Adaptation: Building Resilient Cities 🏙️

With climate change posing increasing risks to urban areas, it's crucial to prioritize adaptation efforts. Hundreds of millions of urban dwellers are vulnerable to its direct and indirect impacts.

Climate adaptation involves anticipating these effects and taking proactive measures to prevent or minimize damage, while also seizing opportunities that may arise. Research shows that well-planned adaptation saves lives and resources in the long run.
Adaptation strategies are essential at all levels of urban administration: local, regional, national, and EU. Let's work together to foster resilience, promote sustainable development, and achieve SDG11!

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You’re invited to The Tree Party: Plant Baby Plant on May 30.
Don’t miss our keynote speaker, the amazing Erna Buffie, who will challenge us on "Nature smart citizens - what can you do to transform your city?”

They call her “the tree lady.” Erna Buffie, author of Out On a Limb: Saving the Urban Tree Canopy, is a writer, environmental activist and documentary filmmaker, who worked with CBC's The Nature of Things for more than 20 years. Her award-winning films include: Smarty Plants - The Secret World of Plant Behaviour and The Changing Sea. Past chair of Trees Please Winnipeg Coalition, she now writes regular opinion editorials for The Winnipeg Free Press on urban issues, from climate change and trees to downtown renewal.

Can’t come for the whole day? No problem – drop in as time allows – we’ll have activities throughout the day. Check out our lineup of speakers:

11.10 Carole Monture from Indigenous Climate Action - "The answer is us - indigenous led nature-based solutions"
12.00 Saadiq Mohiuddin, Jared Blustein - "Tree Equity and how planting mini forests can help"

12.30 Latifa Pelletier-Ahmed, Ken Wright - "Native plants in Alberta"

1.15 Dr Ken Fry - "Pollinators and beneficial insects: a functioning garden"

1.45 Catherine Hamel - "Community building and mobilising action”

This event is FREE, family friendly and all are welcome | The space is accessible
May 30 | 10:00 – 3:00 Central Library (800-3rd Ave SE)
Learn more: https://www.calgaryclimatehub.ca/tree_party2026

The Tree Party is the brainchild of Women Who Get Sh*t Done in collaboration with the Calgary Climate Hub. We’re thrilled to partner with the Calgary Public Library for this year’s event.

CANADA CALLS OUT ISRAEL AS CANADIANS KIDNAPPED AT SEA Israel kidnapped 428 volunteers bringing food and medical supplies to Gaza. They were illegally seized in international waters and treated to brutal conditio...

Seems treasonous, no?

There's quite a lot going wrong in this province these days. Join some people advocating to make it better. See you on May 29!

Holy hell.
"I went home to the heartland of Alberta independence. Even after covering Donald Trump for 10 years, I was still terrified by what I found"
By Richard WarnicaSenior Opinion Writer
Richard Warnica is a Toronto-based senior opinion writer for the Star. Reach him via email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]).
EDMONTON, CALGARY, MOSSLEIGH, LETHBRIDGE—I had known Mitch Sylvestre — the architect of the Alberta independence movement — for less than five minutes when he first implied King Charles might have him killed.
It was late February. We were in a loud coffee shop near the Alberta Legislature. He kept mouthing the words. “The King! The King!” But he wouldn’t say them out loud. “I don’t want to get shot,” he said, then whispered them again, enunciating this time, barely audible: “The King.”
“The King?” I replied. “Yes,” he said. “It will be the end of my days.”
At that point, I still assumed Sylvestre must be joking. He is, after all, a serious political player in Alberta. It’s not just that he’s leading the campaign to have his province break away from Canada. He is also deeply enmeshed in the ruling United Conservative Party (UCP).
So I played along.
“You think the king is going to come for you?” I asked, laughing.
He let out an exaggerated “noooo” while nodding vigorously.
“I saw him when he was in Ottawa,” I said. “I don’t think he knows his way around a rifle.”
Sylvestre moaned. “That’s not even funny,” he said. “That’s not funny at all.”
I spent a week in Alberta recently, following Sylvestre around and speaking to separatist supporters, opposition leaders, economists, pollsters and more. I wanted to understand how Alberta independence — a movement long relegated to the kookiest fringes of the far right — had become so real so fast.
It’s a personal issue for me. I was born in Edmonton. I grew up in Calgary. Most of my family and some of my closest friends still live in the province. If, as seems increasingly likely, Albertans vote on independence this fall, they will be voting on my right to keep going home without a passport.
They are also dangerously detached from reality.
I saw Sylvestre speak in person, both in our interview and at events across the province, for more than five hours combined. I later reviewed hours more footage and transcripts from other speeches and interviews he gave as he barnstormed across Alberta making the case for independence. An astonishing number of the stories he told at every stop were either exaggerated, distorted or outright false.
Sylvestre seems to truly suspect, to cite one example, that King Charles has both the capacity and the interest in having him killed. He thinks oil spills help trees grow, that Canada has the highest taxes in the world. I saw him tell one crowd in Mossleigh, Alberta that he thinks there are Chinese communist soldiers in Canada in part because he saw six Asian men in West Edmonton Mall wearing new coats.
In another era of Canadian politics, Sylvestre’s devotion to far-right memes, conspiracies and outright disinformation would be disqualifying. But here’s the thing: in Alberta, right now, it’s working. On Monday, Sylvestre hand delivered more than 300,000 signatures to election officials in Edmonton, far surpassing the 178,000 he needed to get a referendum on the ballot.
That’s what makes Sylvestre perhaps the most important person in Canadian politics right now. He is trying to break up the country. His name is literally atop the independence petition. And he has at least the tacit and quite likely the active support of significant parts of the Alberta government.
I’m also not 100 per cent convinced he’s going to lose.
Jason Kenney: ‘Be careful what you ask for’
Sylvestre is a tall man, and almost completely bald. He owns a sporting goods store in Bonnyville, a small town northeast of Edmonton, and usually dresses like a high school basketball coach on banquet day.
On stage, he speaks in declarative fragments. He booms, pacing back and forth, bouncing from conspiracy to conspiracy. He also seems to be constantly moving the lower half of his mouth: up and down, side to side, in little half loops, like an actor doing warm-ups or someone who has just been punched in the jaw.
What I found on my trip, and in weeks of reporting both before and after, shocked me. Make no mistake, Sylvestre and the movement he’s helping lead are deadly serious. They can pack rooms in tiny hamlets and big cities. More importantly, they have become perhaps the most influential faction inside the UCP.
I spent weeks exhaustively fact checking Sylvestre. I have no qualms saying his speeches and interviews are packed with near ceaseless errors of fact and interpretation. At the same time, I don’t believe he is deliberately lying about anything. I think Sylvestre genuinely thinks the pitch he’s making for independence is both factual and righteous. “You can nitpick a point here, a point there,” he said in one of our talks, “but the general premise … is absolutely credible.”
In Sylvestre’s mind, the federal government has been undermining Alberta since the moment the province entered confederation in 1905. He and other separatists (and quite a few federalists) believe that an eastern elite concentrated in Ontario and Quebec have consistently stifled Alberta’s energy industry, that the federal equalization formula is biased against Albertans and that the structures of federal power are so tilted toward the centre that Albertans will never receive a fair shake.
An independent Alberta, Sylvestre believes, would be richer and more free. It would also have lower taxes, fewer regulations, fewer immigrants and more Alberta-born children. “Our constitution, it says that you’re going to have to be born in Alberta to become a citizen,” he told the crowd at one event I attended. “So we’re going to have to get those girls making more babies.”
It’s a pitch thousands of Albertans have signed on for, and one I saw hundreds of people eagerly swallow at events across the province earlier this year.
But Sylvestre didn’t always feel this way about the rest of Canada. In fact, he told me as we drank our coffees that he was never political before 2020.
“What changed?”
“COVID!” he said. “They shut me down and Canadian Tire and Walmart stayed open. That’s what did it.”
Sylvestre blames former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney for temporarily closing Sylvestre Sporting Goods, which sells mostly guns and fishing gear, during the pandemic. He joined the UCP shortly afterward with the explicit goal of driving Kenney out of office and, later, installing Danielle Smith in his place.
To this day, Sylvestre remains one of the UCP’s most important organizers. As such, he believes Smith has no choice but to indulge the separatists in her party.
He may be right. A recent poll pegged support for independence at 55 per cent among UCP voters. As premier, Smith has certainly gone to extraordinary lengths to clear the separatists’ path. She lowered the number of signatures required to get a referendum on the ballot. She killed off one court challenge brought by Alberta First Nations and had her government intervene in another. She has, critics say, delayed the efforts of a rival, pro-Canada, group to get their own petition on the ballot.
“I really don’t know what her own views are,” said Paula Simons, who spent decades as an influential journalist in Edmonton before becoming an independent Alberta senator. “I don’t think anybody else does either. But in order to stay in power, she knows, in her RNA, that that requires placating the most radical elements of her own party.”
What those radical elements want is clear: Independence. Between January and late April, Sylvestre and his allies circulated a petition that sought to put this question to voters: “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be part of Canada to become an independent state?”
On Monday, Sylvestre dropped off dozens of bankers’ boxes stuffed with signed petitions to a loading dock at Elections Alberta headquarters in Edmonton. Outside, he addressed scores of cheering supporters waving Alberta’s blue and yellow flag. “So the updated tally is 301,620,” he said. “Now we’re in the Stanley Cup Final.”
If those tallies are verified by elections officials — and if they aren’t stopped by a court challenge — many believe Smith will schedule the referendum for October, when the province is already set to vote on nine other items related to immigration and provincial autonomy.
What happens after that is anyone’s guess. Committed support for separatism in Alberta remains relatively flat. But some pollsters — not all of them — suggest it is growing. In March, Pollara released a survey that found that 27 per cent of decided Albertans would vote to separate, the highest such number in five years.
A significantly higher number of Albertans, meanwhile, may be willing to vote for independence just to create leverage with Ottawa, according to many pollsters and political insiders I spoke to.
“I get contacted by smart, sophisticated, usually oil patch-related people, almost every day that tell me that I’m a complete idiot because I don’t understand negotiating,” said former Alberta premier Jason Kenney. “My message to the frustrated federalists who want leverage is: Be careful what you ask for.”
Those numbers still suggest the separatists would very likely lose a referendum if it were held today. But a lot can happen between now and next fall. “Campaigns can take on a life of their own,” said Dave Cournoyer, a longtime Alberta political analyst.
A year before the Brexit vote, some polls had “remain” up by 20 points.
‘There’s no f—-ing shame’
My parents left Montreal for Edmonton with my two older brothers in 1981, not long after Quebec’s first sovereignty referendum in 1980. I was born later that year, the first Albertan in the family.
My parents, especially my mother, were always relatively liberal for Alberta. Still if you had asked me as a kid, I probably would have agreed that, yes, Alberta was getting screwed over by the East. Western alienation was just part of the air we breathed.
But not separatism. The most ardently pro-Alberta people I knew in the 80s and 90s were also the most patriotic. They would talk about Ottawa like it was Gomorrah then go out and get Canada flags tattooed on their calves the day they turned 18.
There’s significant debate in the province as to when that changed. Many experts and insiders I spoke to see contemporary Alberta separatism as a northern echo of the far-right populism driving Donald Trump’s popularity in the U.S.
Having spent much of the last 10 years covering Trump, I do buy that, to a degree. Both movements are populist, rural-dominated, anti-immigrant and driven, to at least some extent, by a decline in high-paying, secure blue collar jobs.
I also had the same feeling talking to separatists in Alberta that I often get talking to supporters at Trump rallies — that somewhere along the line we had each entered different worlds, with different facts and different values. The key difference now, however, was that I was talking to them in my home country.
Andrea Ainslie grew up in the same part of Calgary I did, at roughly the same time. We spoke on FaceTime after meeting in the comment section of a pro-independence Facebook group. What she told me didn’t sound at first all that different from the kinds of things I’d hear from my friends’ dads in backyard barbecues in the nineties.
“I think most of it is really around the inequity between the provinces,” she said. “So Quebec, for example, has got their special deal and has always seemed to have a special deal with the federal government.”
Ainslie also expressed something I would hear over and over again at independence rallies: that people back East don’t just take Albertans for granted, they look down on them.
That’s classic Western alienation. It’s also a viewpoint I understand. I’ve lived in Toronto for almost 15 years; I’m still shocked by how little some people in this part of the country know or care about the West. When Ainslie told me that Alberta is under-represented in the House of Commons and the senate, I nodded in agreement.
But the longer we spoke, the less it seemed like we were moored in the same reality. One of the major reasons Ainslie wants to separate is so that Alberta can control its own immigration system. “I’m certainly not a racist person,” she told me. “I think in some cases, we’ve brought in doctors and things like that. But I mean, when you see immigrants breaking in and robbing a liquor store or taking advantage of stores or extorting people or crime, and it’s a certain demographic continuously, that’s concerning, especially with our catch and release system.”
Ainslie told me that she believes “Caucasian, white males specifically,” are being excluded from job opportunities in Canada and that the reason her daughter can’t get a job at Tim Hortons is because the company is “getting subsidized … to hire foreigners.”
(Tim Hortons does employ thousands of temporary foreign workers across Canada, but does not get subsidized to hire them. The company also says about 95 per cent of its about 100,000 Canadian employees are hired locally.)
Ainslie and I come from the same place at the same time. So many of our terms of reference are identical. Yet when it comes to politics and information, we’re floating on different rafts in different oceans.
I don’t think you can underestimate the role that fracturing of shared knowledge has had on the growth of the separatist movement in Alberta. Much of Sylvestre’s stock presentation is sourced directly from far-right online outlets, influencers and social media accounts. Those kind of sources didn’t exist 20 years ago. They certainly wouldn’t have gone mainstream.
Near the end of my week in Alberta, I had breakfast in Lethbridge with Shannon Phillips, a former NDP MLA and cabinet minister. As I ate from a massive bowl of eggs, bacon, cheese and hollandaise, I asked her what had changed in Alberta. She held up her smartphone and shook it. “It’s this black rectangle,” she said. “People are bathing in a sea of lies.”
This isn’t just an Alberta problem, obviously. But there are Alberta-specific factors. The province has always been more right-wing than the rest of the country, and more prone to populism. The collapse of the local news business has also been far more severe, and impactful, in Alberta, than it has been in Toronto.
I’m biased on that point. I started my newspaper career 20 years ago this summer at the Edmonton Journal. I watched for years as outside owners took that place apart, stripping it of experience and influence, and accelerating a mass splintering of public norms in Alberta.
Phillips put it more bluntly. “There are no f—-ing guardrails left,” she said. “There’s no f—-ing shame.”
I think that’s what surprised me most about my conversations, not just with Ainsley, but with separatists all over Alberta. It’s not that I’m shocked people hold some of these views. But I am still surprised they would say some of them on the record to a reporter from the Toronto Star.
“People are here for free,” Sylvestre told me, over coffee. “They get paid a lot of money to come down here to take our jobs.”
“Which people?” I asked him.
“Immigrants!” he replied.
That kind of unapologetic openness is new, and it’s not just happening at rallies or in media interviews. Rakhi Pancholi, an NDP MLA in Edmonton, told me she’s experienced blatant racism over the past two years in Alberta in a way she never has before, sometimes even from her own constituents. She ties that, at least in part, to the rhetoric driving the independence movement, and to the people, including Danielle Smith, enabling it.
That’s not just a left-wing opinion. Leela Aheer, a founding member and former deputy leader of the UCP, told me the political atmosphere has changed dramatically in Alberta in recent years.
What happened? I asked her.
“COVID,” she replied. “One hundred and fifty thousand per cent.”
‘Danielle Smith has opened the door’
The Aspen Outpost in Mossleigh, Alberta, sticks out of the grassland southeast of Calgary like a glowing flag planted on a yellow moon. Only 53 people live in the hamlet, according to the last census, but the Outpost, a truck-stop, restaurant and bar, holds hundreds more. The night I arrived, the parking lot overflowed with pickup trucks, SUVs and at least one backhoe, planted beneath a neon sign visible for miles either way down Highway 24.
I was in Mossleigh to see Mitch Sylvestre for a second straight night on his Stay Free Alberta tour. The Mossleigh stop was one of dozens of events the independence organization held this year, signing up voters for the referendum and picking up volunteers.
Sylvestre was due up fourth, after two online content creators and a country singer named Lyndsay Butler.
“This next song is a song that I thought I would never have to write, living in the freest country in the world,” Butler told the crowd midway through her set. “I completed this song the day Jason Kenney—”
She paused. Tears welled in her eyes.
“I still get a little emotional,” she said.
“The day that our premier, Jason Kenney, decided that, actually, yeah, no, we decided we could put a vax pass in place and we can control you all and ruin your lives and do whatever we want with you, because we control everything.”
Much of the energy now turning the western alienation of my childhood into direct support for separatism in Alberta stems from the anti-establishment fervour that emerged during the COVID era. It’s the same energy that spawned the trucker convoy and the UCP rebellion against Jason Kenney.
“I think a lot of them got a great sense of meaning and satisfaction and righteousness from the COVID struggle,” Kenney told me. “They regarded their support for the convoy movement as a moment of great moral meaning for them. … And so they’re looking for a new fight. And they’ve transitioned to separatism.”
How that transition happened — and why — is still not 100 per cent clear. A surprising number of plugged-in political insiders in Alberta believe malign foreign actors may be playing a role — an argument backed up now by multiple media reports.
Several others told me they think Prime Minister Mark Carney’s surprise victory in last year’s federal election was a major spur. Still others say just about the only relevant factor is Smith’s refusal to shut the movement down.
“Danielle Smith has opened the door to a referendum on separation,” said Janet Brown, Alberta’s most respected political pollster. “And that door has not been open before.”
There is no doubt that Smith’s at least tacit support for a referendum is a defining factor in the current separatist wave.
(In an emailed statement, Sam Blackett, Smith’s press secretary said the premier “has always been clear” that she, her government and her caucus “support a strong and sovereign Alberta within a United Canada. This means Alberta remaining a province of Canada while advancing provincial autonomy …”)
At the same time, I also believe Smith is responding to a genuine, focused energy from her base. The absolute number of committed separatists in Alberta may not have changed that much over the past five years, according to pollsters, but the influence they have and the noise they’re making certainly has. And as disconnected from reality as much of Sylvestre’s message is, millions of Albertans have been listening to it; hundreds of thousands of them, at least, seem to like what they hear.
‘The doctor offers him MAID!’
The coffee shop where I met Sylvestre on my first full day in Alberta was about three blocks from my last apartment in downtown Edmonton. Most Canadians don’t think much of Edmonton, when they think of it at all. But I love the place. It can be creative, diverse, strange and welcoming. At its best, it is the opposite of all the stereotypes eastern Canadians hold about Alberta.
That’s part of what bothers me so much about the independence movement. It is reinforcing ideas about Albertans I’ve been telling people in my adopted home aren’t true since I moved here in 2011.
At the same time, that dynamic goes both ways. Some people in Ontario or Quebec may ignore or look down on Albertans. But the people selling Alberta independence are doing so largely based on lies about how the rest of this country works.
The first thing I asked Sylvestre when we sat down was what had changed. How did the western alienation that I grew up with morph into the separatism he was selling today? He looked at me like I was slow, or worse, from Toronto.
“It’s the Liberals!” he said.
I fact checked the leader of the Alberta independence movement. I was shocked by what I found
Sylvestre told me he believes the federal Liberal party under Justin Trudeau and now Mark Carney is stealing “everything we can borrow and everything we send them.”
“And where’s it going, is my question,” he said. “I’ve got a real good idea.”
That’s when he brought up the King.
Sylvestre seems to honestly believe that Trudeau and Carney have shipped billions of dollars in stolen Canadian money to King Charles. Exposing that theft, he implied, is what is going to get him killed.
It isn’t the only unlikely thing he believes.
He told the crowd that night in Edmonton that until 2019 it was illegal for Canadian journalists to lie, that the Liberals brought in 15 million immigrants in 10 years, that for every billion dollars in foreign aid handed out between 2015 and 2025, Justin Trudeau may have pocketed nine hundred million of it. (I fact checked many of Sylvestre’s claims in more detail in another article that you can read on the Star’s website.)
Some of his claims were easily disprovable — that Canada has the highest taxes in the world, for example. (According to the OECD, our labour taxes are below average and our consumption taxes are among the lowest in the developed world.)
Others were so strange I found them all but impossible to fact check definitively.
At the event in Edmonton, he told a story about a reformed gangster turned ma*****na farmer in Bonnyville getting beat up after cutting off a home invader’s hand with an axe before driving his assailants away with an unregistered firearm. It ended with easily the most surprising punchline I have ever heard.
“He’s got a concussion,” Sylvestre said of the ex-gangster. “And what happens in the hospital?”
He paused for effect.
“The doctor offers him MAID.”
(I was not able to reach either the axe-wielding ma*****na farmer or his lawyer, but one Alberta expert on medical assistance in dying told me the scenario as described struck her as “ridiculous.”)
When I asked Sylvestre about all of this, he told me, in essence, that it doesn’t matter if he gets small details wrong — he meant that Canada has the most taxes, not the highest, for example (although that is also wrong) — his broader points stand: the media is allowed to lie; Canadians are overtaxed; Alberta would be stronger and more prosperous on its own.
“You’re nitpicking fine little things and missing the big point,” he said.
A spokesman for the broader independence movement later followed up by email claiming that Sylvestre was being rhetorical, not literal, in almost every case where he was factually wrong. But having listened to Sylvestre for hours and spoken to him one on one, I don’t find that explanation remotely credible.
I also think that when it comes to breaking up a country, the details do matter. Sylvestre is not a fringe figure. In Alberta, right now, he’s on the inside. And we’ve all seen firsthand what can happen when movements like his — built on demonizing outsiders, disparaging experts and promoting misinformation — are allowed to become the mainstream.
In February 2016, I watched Donald Trump tell a cheering crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire, that he planned to throw 179,000 “illegal criminals” out of the country. Ten years later, almost to the day, I was inhaling tear gas in Minneapolis while masked agents from Trump’s immigration police nabbed people from the streets based on the colour of their skin.
A few days after I came back from Alberta — a trip I largely spent in crowded rooms full of people who are vocally skeptical of vaccines — I got the sickest I’ve been since my last confirmed case of COVID. For weeks I could barely stay awake more than a couple hours at a time. My head felt less foggy than it did clouded, like my skull was packed with ultralight gas.
Even after I recovered, I still didn’t feel right. I realized, eventually, it wasn’t physical anymore. I had gone to Alberta worried about the future of one province. I came home frightened for an entire country.
We like to imagine we are immune somehow from whatever it is that has torn the American polity apart so violently over the past 10 years, that what is happening there could never happen here. I promise you it can. In Alberta, it already is.

You’re invited! This year's Tree Party marks Calgary's first ever "Bloom", a Plant Baby Plant community activation that turns inspiration into action.

Robin Wall Kimmerer , the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, will give a video welcome to the event and to the Plant Baby Plant movement, sharing its message of joy and reciprocity.

Connect at the fun hands-on workshops for all ages. Engage in deep dive talks from a range of experts on everything from pollinators to how to plant a food forest to how to organize community action. Kids activities will include making wildflower seed balls and tree story time.

Alongside a packed lineup of sessions from community building to nature clubs for kids, and composting to rainwater harvesting, we are excited to present speakers:
🌳 Keynote by Erna Buffie, author of Out On A Limb: Saving the Urban Tree Canopy
🌎 Carole Monture, Indigenous Climate Action: The answer is us - Indigenous led nature based solutions
🦋 Dr Ken Fry, Pollinators + Beneficial Insects: A functioning garden
🦹‍♀️ Catherine Hamel, Community building + mobilising action
🌲 Saddiq Mohiuddin & Jared Blustein, Tree equity and how mini forests can help

This event is FREE and all are welcome | The space is accessible
May 30 | 10:00 – 3:00 CentralLibrary (800-3rd Ave SE)
Learn more: https://www.calgaryclimatehub.ca/tree_party2026

Photo of Robin Wall Kimmerer by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Please read. It's important.

The Closed Circle: Why Alberta Separatism Functions Like a Political Cult There is a reason so few people ever walk away from the inner circles of Alberta separatist politics.