My “Open Range” column from the March 2011 issue of Alberta Venture magazine: Of Necessity and Invention What would you prefer: being a young star athlete, child actor or one-hit pop-music wonder who flames out into bitter decades spent flogging real estate? Or first toiling in obscurity for what seems like multiple lifetimes before finally finding [...]

My “Open Range” column from the February 2011 issue of Alberta Venture magazine The decline of service Hey, Katie, how’s it goin’?” the young snowboarder queuing up in the ski area cafeteria asked the cashier. “Pretty good – but really stressed!” she answered breathlessly. I’d been through the brief lineup a couple of times – [...]

My Open Range column from the January 2010 issue of Alberta Venture magazine: Why Can’t We Get It Right? Is there anyone left in Alberta who doesn’t have a health-care horror story? As someone with aging parents, I regularly hear about what has befallen them or their friends. For people of an age when every [...]

My “Open Range” column from the December 2010 issue of Alberta Venture magazine Three cheers to Stephen Harper for steering Canada away from a U.S.-style spending calamity American voters showed their disenchantment with President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in last month’s Congressional mid-term elections, and a bigsource of their fury was the colossal [...]

My “Open Range” column from the November 2010 issue of Alberta Venture magazine: Formula looks good on paper, but failure looms large As a longstanding CBC critic, I’ve been tied into knots by The Tudors. The constant intrigue and relentless violence, the almost-soft-core-porn nudity and joyously uninhibited bonking have proven irresistible. My weakness for the [...]

My “Open Range” column from the October 2010 issue of Alberta Venture magazine: U.S. governors can teach us a lesson we should already know Two things about our provincial government’s near $5-billion budget deficit are especially stomach-churning. First, the sheer avoidability. This is the Progressive Conservatives’s third long cycle of profligacy, mind-spinning numbers and deer-in-the-headlights [...]

My “Open Range” column from the September 2010 edition of Alberta Venture magazine: Bound to fail, guaranteed to waste money Of the ways suggested for Canada to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the most seductive is “cap and trade”. It’s hailed as being both effective at cutting emissions and economically efficient, minimizing costs while maximizing benefits. [...]

My “Open Range” column from the August 2010 issue of Alberta Venture magazine: The BP disaster shows that advertisers ignore authenticity at their customers’ peril It was a widely hailed marketing coup, a much-talked-about case study and the biggest antler rack on the ad agency’s trophy wall. BP would no longer stand for the storied [...]

My “Open Range” column from the July 2010 issue of Alberta Venture magazine: Over-reliance on processes, systems and modelling trumps human judgment One reads with a sickening sense of impending doom the recent second-by-second accounts of the Deepwater Horizon’s final minutes and the lives that were torn apart and snuffed out. There’s more than enough [...]

My Open Range column from the June 2010 issue of Alberta Venture magazine: Black Bonanza author defends Alberta’s turf and pokes a stick at anti-oil sands crusaders Was it only four years ago the Alberta government parked one of those monster oil sands trucks on the Washington Mall, within site of Congress? It was Alberta’s [...]