They were once the proud mastheads of one of North America’s most respected newspaper chains, the Southam group.Then Canada’s dominant urban dailies, titles like the Ottawa Citizen and the Calgary Herald, endured two painful changes of ownership.Editorial and managerial upheavals brought on by Conrad Black (1996-2000) and Canwest’s Asper family (2000-2010) widened old fault lines and cracked

It is a government running on empty.That's sadly ironic given that Alberta's Progressive Conservatives are perched on a wealth of energy resources.A once-great party of the people, the PCs have been undone by their leaders’ rigid, authoritarian ways and their rank incompetence in managing the province’s business.The government has lurched from one policy disaster to another.Consider the PC government’s

There’s a kind of mire obscuring our view of Alberta, Canada’s energy province.It’s the residue of a tired, underachieving government, a political party that has been in power for far too long, forty years and counting.The PC party machine is ring-fenced by appointees and patronage seekers, a network of dependants whose blind allegiance insulates the party leadership, cabinet and caucus from