This lively and opinionated history is a whirlwind tour of the Canadian land and inhabitants from the earliest human occupation to the present. The country has undergone several fundamental changes - from Indigenous occupation, to French and British colonization, to the rise of an independent nation and distinct society - and it is doing so yet again. Fully revised, this updated 150th anniversary edition incorporates the latest research that helps us understand the course of history in Can...

Wilderness and Waterpower: How Banff National Park Became a Hydroelectric Storage Reservoir explores how the need for electricity at the turn of the century affected and shaped Banff National Park. Today's conservationists and energy researchers will find much to think about in this tale of Alberta's early need for electricity, entrepreneurial greed, debates over aboriginal ownership of the river, moving park boundaries to accommodate hydro-electric initiatives, the importance of water for...

Alberta's iconic river has been dammed and plumbed, made to spin hydro-electric turbines, and used to cleanse Calgary. Artificial lakes in the mountains rearrange its flow; downstream weirs and ditches divert it to irrigate the parched prairie. Far from being wild, the Bow is now very much a human product: its fish are as manufactured as its altered flow, changed water quality, and newly stabilized and forested banks. The River Returns brings the story of the Bow River's transformation ful...

Tar Sands critically examines the frenzied development in the Canadian tar sands and the far-reaching implications for all of North America. Bitumen, the sticky stuff that ancients used to glue the Tower of Babel together, is the world’s most expensive hydrocarbon. This difficult-to-find resource has made Canada the number-one supplier of oil to the United States, and every major oil company now owns a lease in the Alberta tar sands. The region has become a global...

Passionate and cogent, this could be the most important book of the year for CanadiansWe are complacent. We bask in the idea that Canada holds 20% of the world’s fresh water — water crises face other countries, but not ours. We could not be more wrong. In Boiling Point, bestselling author and activist Maude Barlow lays bare the issues facing Canada’s water reserves, including long-outdated water laws, unmapped and unprotected groundwater reserves, agricult...

“It can start with a knock on the door one morning. It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer.” So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Between 2008 and 2015, the TRC provided opportunities for individuals, families, and communities to share their experiences of residen...

Bestselling author Chris Turner brings readers onto the streets of Fort McMurray, showing the many ways the oilsands impact our lives and demanding that we ask the question: In order to both fuel the world and to save it, what do we do about the Patch?In its heyday, the oilsands represented an industrial triumph and the culmination of a century of innovation, experiment, engineering, policy, and finance. Fort McMurray was a boomtown, the centre of a new gold rush, and the oilsands ...

Expanding on his landmark Globe and Mail series in which he documented his travels down sixteen of Canada's great rivers, Roy MacGregor tells the story of our country through the stories of its original highways, and how they sustain our spirit, identity and economy—past, present and future.No country is more blessed with fresh water than Canada. From the mouth of the Fraser River in BC, to the Bow in Alberta, the Red in Manitoba, the Gatineau, the Saint J...

Rural life in North America has changed dramatically since the days of the family farm, when people worked the same land for generations, let their cows graze in pastures and their chickens scratch in dirt, and sold their produce locally. The few remaining small farmers now struggle to survive, strangled by debt and a rash of complex regulations designed to drive them out of business. In their place are corporate-backed factory farms with little understanding of, or sympathy for, rural lif...

An "easy-to-follow and comprehensive" step-by-step guide for US citizens who want to emigrate to Canada ( Publishers Weekly ).More and more Americans are thinking of moving to Canada to find a job, attend colleges and universities, peace of mind—even retirement—and whatever their motivations, they will have to navigate the Canadian immigration, citizenship, and naturalization processes.So whether you're thinking ab...

What if Canada 's so-called environmental nightmare was really an engineering triumph and the key to a stable and sustainable future?For years, Canadians have been hearing nothing but bad news out of the Athabasca Oil Sands. From 20th Century economists decrying it as a perpetual money-loser in the face of more easily-extracted foreign oil to green groups around the world declaring it the world's worst industrial enterprise, sometimes it seems as though no good could ever come from...

A contrarian view of Alberta and Albertans from the outspoken and often controversial former Calgary Herald columnist.In 2005, Alberta celebrates its centenary: a hundred-year stretch that has seen the province catapulted from being little more than thinly populated grassland and mountain to one of Canada’s richest provinces, one with a fair claim to being perpetually misunderstood. Albertans, of course, are passionate about their province, even when to outsiders the senti...