Half the valley shakes
I went to Toronto for a bit and wow, I get how that place produced Doug Ford. If I had to drive on the 401 all day I would also sell drugs and start a sticker factory. Yikes.
Sometimes the thing is the important thing, but sometimes the other thing AROUND or NEAR the thing is more important. Like the chocolate around the Twix cookie or the clitoris, everything Calgary city council is saying AROUND declaring a state of climate emergency is more interesting than the declaration itself.
Hot on the heels of a pancake machine breakfast with our Beautiful Energy Leaders, newly minted Mayor Jyoti Gondek got right down to it - it’s an emergency! The climate is trying to kill us! Because we tried to kill it! We went for a backstab but instead got caught looking stupid. These heat domes and locust swarms and saltwater big bangs and dik-dik murder herds are our fault. But don’t let that stand in the way of big money opportunities!
The Calgary Chamber of Commerce said we can become “the Silicon Valley for energy transition technologies” and that there is “a lot of money on the sidelines looking to invest in the energy transformation”. A guy at the head of the impossibly-named cornball company Avatar Innovations said “the energy transition is the single greatest economic opportunity facing Calgary”. The mayor herself said the declaration was essentially a PR move “so we can actually attract capital and talent here”.
No big actions, no vast recalibration. Just lifting our skirts a bit and showing our garters so the true masters will disembark the Money Train at our station. That’s the real target, the real thing. So powerless are we that everything we do is just to see if the market will fix it.
And why would we do anything? We’re trying to get to net-zero by 2050, a goal that would be laughable if the laughs weren’t echoing off the Prime Question - at this speed aren’t we all effectively dead? Waiting for the market and this ceremony that precedes their genius seems dumb in that shadow. We’re trying to shut the stable door on climate change here in Cowtown, but the horse will be well gone, gone and away, off to a new city and to college. The horse has a new job, and a new wife, and a filly and a colt. The horse is educated enough now to see the end of the world, and is apathetic as the stable owners who so carelessly freed him into horrible Knowing. He hopes a market solution will present itself, and soon. The end, he says, is neigh.
🌔Flouride is coming back to Calgary water, but a couple of dullards remain on council.
🥠Brian Jean is trying to get back into the UCP and has moved on from jokes about beating women to propaganda about being scared of black men.
⛳️Businesses are suffering because of the daily dumb-fuck convention outside Without Papers Pizza, but the workers inside are the ones to feel the constant ache of having the dumbest people in the city swarm outside the window.
🎻Employee abuse at Activision Blizzard starts from the top and sluices down.
🏏This dork who looks like a half-assed John Lithgow is the reason why a bunch of rich people don’t pay their proper taxes. Bury him under the jail with his clients.
🧉IATSE has an electoral college (what the fuck) and they’re fucking everything up.
🍆Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you’re smart.
🍖The unions at the New York Times are getting militant and we love to see it.
🍩Spain was in trouble before COVID, and now that trouble is more plain.
🍨Notes From Below is doing a survey of work in 2021 with collections of writing and data from workers. The first results are trickling in.
📉Forgotten Corner bagged an honest-to-goodness elected official to come onto their podcast.
🎧Take The Fight Back has Nora talking blogs and feminism in the digital age.
🔇Commons is doing a series on Canadian mining, the source of most of our extraction economy and a good amount of our mercenary hiring.
🎚️Alberta Advantage! The CCF! A winning combo!
🥦British Columbia is underwater and their governments are collectively shrugging their shoulders about what to do about it. Fortunately you can help! Help the cows if you have a boat.
🎋Pay attention to the land defenders at Wet'suwet'en this week as the RCMP, lacking anything to do, are sending troop-looking goons up that way. Help as you can.
🐩National Housing Day is November 22. In Calgary, ACORN Canada and Public Interest Alberta are planning a demonstration at Housing Minister Josephine Pon’s constituency office for November 26 at 3PM.
A Quick Note: if you want us to include an article, petition, link to an event, or just want to drop us a quick line, reply to this newsletter or reach us at albertaadvantagenewsletter [at] gmail [dot] com. We’d love to hear from you! If you want to send some old timey mail, grab those stamps and send tributes/cake/not anthrax to Alberta Advantage Podcast, PO Box 52167 Edmonton Trail, Calgary, AB, T2E 8K9.
Our editor is Clinton Hallahan. Newsletter subject lines are stolen from these songs.
The cows made the newsletter 🥺