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Getting rid of coal is obviously good news, but somehow it feels like the government is throwing a bone to those pesky environmentalists so they keep shut while the oil industry happily carries on with its catastrophic exploitation of oil sands in Alberta and elsewhere...

GP mis-remembered the number. The murder rate of aboriginal women is 3-4 times higher than the murder rate of non-aboriginal women in most western provinces (link). (So, to answer your question: per capita, compared to the same statistic for non-aboriginals.) For example, aboriginal women represent 28% of all female homocides in Alberta, and "As of November 2013, there are 19 unresolved missing Aboriginal females and 28 unsolved murders." (link).

You can find many more links online. Most of the statistics come from reports released by the Government of Canada, or by the various provinces. What's news-worthy is that, despite releasing these reports, the government refuses to actually do anything about them.

Ah a west-coast canuck. I'm a east-coaster.

We have 5 companies in total that another poster listed. Remember though, up until a few years ago we had zero competition, becuase these companies wanted to maintain a monopoly. Now you can pick any ISP you want, and pretty much get anything you want in terms of speed as long as it's available in your area.

http://canadianisp.ca/ is a fine resource for those who want to look around, myself I'm on Teksavvy(25/10 grandfathered plan though there are better I'm happy with it)--I pay the same rate I did in 2002 when I first got broadband from Rogers, and have a 300GB cap with zap the cap on--I have an unlimited cap but am throttled from 8pm to midnight. Midnight to 6am I believe it is downloads are always unlimited on every plan. Anyway, we've got lots of competition here now besides the incumbents. It reminds me of the US broadband market back in '99-01ish when you could get a 6/1DSL line for $9/mo unlimited in Indianapolis.

Now the problem in western canada is we've got lots of people moving there from the east and all of these companies have their heads up their ass in terms of rollouts for ports on DSL, and oversubbed cable lines. My sister is in Grande Cache, she's lived there now for 4-5 years, and it wasn't until last year when I was out there that she was able to get broadband because there were no ports available. It's a mess, a really bad mess. So much so that the improvement districts are looking at setting up their own municipal internet solution.

Look to Canada for a few provinces where this is being done with success:

Alberta Serious Incident Response Team: ASIRT has jurisdiction over all sworn police officers in the Province of Alberta. Their mandate is to investigate incidents or complaints involving serious injury* or death of any person, and matters of a serious or sensitive nature, that may have resulted from the actions of a police officer.

Any time a person is killed by police results in an automatic investigation - and I've seen a number of them result in charges against police officers. Ontario looks to have done the same with the Special Investigations Unit.

I think the theme for success you will see is having a civilian agency.

Different people learn differently. Consider the possibility that you are simply not using the learning style best suited to you. There are tools to help with this.

The sleep thing as well, obviously. But consider that you may not have a fruitful approach to learning in general.

Fine.

Child Protective Services

And yes, Alberta really is in Canada.

Fine.

Child Protective Services

And yes, Alberta really is in Canada.

This will be ready to go far sooner than 2030.

There are already carbon sequestration projects underway in Alberta that expect results within the next two years.

Not sure if you're aware of this, but there are plenty of places in the world where methane is dissolved naturally into the groundwater. Here's a page relating to a methane survey in the UK, and here's one from Alberta, Canada. There are plenty of other gasses in groundwater such as CO2 and radon, but most of the other ones aren't flammable.

If you want to make the case that methane in someone's tapwater was *caused* by artificial fracking, there's more to it than simply observing that the methane occurrence post-dates the fracking operations. You need to know what the "normal" level is, and sometimes that can be quite high, to the point that you have to properly vent your well or risk an explosion. Even drawing down the groundwater (e.g., by overpumping a water well) can increase the amount of natural methane flowing from the surrounding rocks. The water well owners could have triggered the problem themselves by improper well design and/or use. Anecdotes like "my water didn't used to have methane like this until the fracking started" are meaningless without looking at the details. It has to be studied carefully.

Never fear, IBM started flying tape backups to an alternate datacenter (datacentre?), probably in Ontario...

Care to share with us how you found out about this hoax?

It is not a hoax, it is just that natural gas occurs in many aquifers: Environment Alberta says "Methane gas occurs naturally in groundwater aquifers in most geological sedimentary basins worldwide...Biogenic methane is produced by subsurface bacteria and is a common natural source of methane gas in groundwater aquifers used for water well supplies...Biogenic gas typically contains above 1000 times more methane than ethane....The results show that the gas contained in the sampled wells is primarily biogenic in origin."

We don't use tailings ponds anymore.

Bullshit. The Government of Alberta's own tar sands propaganda site backs up GPs claim of 170 square kilometers of tailings ponds— that's about two Manhattans. It goes on to state that "(e)fforts continue to develop new tailings performance criteria, management technologies and practical solutions to reduce and potentially eliminate tailings ponds as we know them today." Still, tailings ponds are expected to expand to about 250 square kilometers— almost three Manhattans— by 2020.

http://www.energy.alberta.ca/Electricity/1591.asp

Excerpt: The operational staffing level of a nuclear power reactor is well-established. The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) reports that the average nuclear plant in the U.S. creates 400–700 direct full-time positions for a 1000-MW nuclear plant, and about the same number of induced positions (NEI, 2008)in the local economy. Another study (in support of the U.S. Nuclear Power 2010 Program) collected best-estimate data for the next-generation plants beginning to come online, and estimated that the requirements would be in excess of 700 employees per reactor.

The Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI) has undertaken a similar assessment of the 17 CANDU reactors operating in Canada. The direct workforce employed at the reactors is 16,137, or 949 per reactor, which is somewhat higher than is expected for the advanced CANDU reactors.(Timilsina, 2008)

And this link: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf49a_Nuclear_Power_in_Canada.html
Says that Canada's "18 reactors" (I suspect the two sources differ on the meaning of "reactor" as in "reactor vessel" vs "nuclear plant", because we haven't built a new one lately) have 12,679 MW of capacity, NET.

16,137 / 12, 679 = 1.28 employees per Megawatt.

I suspect that, however, includes ALL the employees of the plant, not just operators and maintainers (add clerical, training, and the inescapable empty-suits).

And in any event, it's trivial. A full-time position is at most 2000 hours/year, let's pay them a nice high average of $90,000. The net megawatt is 8760 hours per year, at $30 each if you're selling from the generator at a below-coal 3 cents/kWh: $262,800. Staff costs would be one-third, or 1.3 cts/kWh.

Your big problem with nuclear is paying off the mortgage on the $4M-$8M of capital costs you put in on that megawatt of capacity. Nuclear would like it to be $2M and sometimes claims that, but $8M is unfortunately closer to recent estimates. That takes a good $400,000/year to pay off, so you need to charge nearly a nickel per kWh just to pay that. Then you need a few more cents to pay for the salaries, and the fuel and other operating costs. Presto, you're charging a good 7 cts/kWh, nearly twice as much as coal or even gas.

The devastating facts about this particular solar project are that the sustained plant output is only half the max. That means this plant isn't costing under $7/watt to build, but over $13. The mortgage per megawatt is $650,000, or 7.4 cts/KWh. That's an economic death sentence even if those 0.8 employees worked for minimum wage.

By "economic death sentence" I mean "if you have to compete with coal and they don't have to pay the externalized costs they inflict on the environment", which they basically don't at the moment, and have the political power to keep from doing so for at least a while yet. (Never mind global warming, they should have to pay heavily for all that mercury in the air and the 20,000 deaths/year from particulates...but they don't).

But, hell, it's early days yet. They'll get cheaper with practice and mass production, if they can crank it up. And in the American southwest, there will be windfall profits on power at noon in the summer when all the air conditioners are on and the plant is cranking the full 110 MW.

Well, one thing that you can do is push for charter schools to be set up under the umbrella of the public school system. That is, if a charter has enough support from parents and certain standards are met then space will be found within existing school locations to implement the charter group.

Go here to read more: http://education.alberta.ca/parents/choice/charter.aspx

The variety of education offerings is impressive and goes beyond the list given. There are smaller groups that have been organized within school districts that offer, for example, hybrid home and public schooling.

If you passionately believe in a particular approach to teaching your kids, it is very possible to get that approach up and running and integrated into the public school system. ...but the parents have to do the paperwork and the organizing.

In Alberta - it's illegal to have a billboard on a Highway. Based solely on the idea that it causes more accidents because billboards are distracting. This isn't a direct attack on the speed limit, a major factor, or Alchohol, another major factor. Because attempting to control those other 2 factors would cause a huge upset.

Everyone once in a while people post things that are 100% incorrect.

Alberta highways are full of billboards. No such law exists. From advertising the local ski resorts (of which we have many), to "keep Ottawa out of Alberta" (ie: Alberta separatists), we have plenty of billboards.

And those are only 2 examples out of the hundreds I saw last time I went on the road.

There are rules to limit them, but they are most certainly not illegal. If they are, it's certainly a law that's not being enforced very well.

There are guidelines, but no ban..

A month of severance per year? In Alberta you can terminate any employee as long as you give sufficient notice or pay in lieu. And for 5 years of service that is 4 weeks pay - the maximum is 8 weeks! That doesn't sound like a large severance package to me... (Full list at http://employment.alberta.ca/SFW/1474.html) I don't that any of the other provinces vary too significantly. I'd still stand by taking the job if it is necessary and starting the search for the next technical job while still employed.

What the hell are you talking about? Only New Brunswick is legally bilingual, all other provinces are English only except Quebec which is French only.

What the hell are you talking about? Only New Brunswick is legally bilingual, all other provinces are English only except Quebec which is French only.

What the hell are you talking about? Only New Brunswick is legally bilingual, all other provinces are English only except Québec which is French only.