Editorial—Good Stuff

Welcome back!  So, after a short staycation we return with the latest issue of The Voice Magazine.  This week, we start it all off with a feature interview with a student raised in Zimbabwe and now pursuing his psychology degree at AU with an aim to take it to post-graduate studies.

Also this week, we continue being able to bring you our Fiction Feature, with another story from Lucy D’jorno.

Then I had a decision to make, as Alek Golijanin submitted a couple of articles, both very much worth a read.  Whether it’s his disturbing article about pre-teens in India or his uplifting article about some of the people in concentration camps, both are good reads and informative as well.  In the end, the uplifting story took the feature position, but that doesn’t mean the other articles are any less, whether it’s [blue rare]’s look at the costs and benefits of travelling or Marie Well’s ideas for finding and following your life’s mission, I’m pretty happy with this week’s Magazine.

Meanwhile, here in Calgary, MRC, SAIT and the U of C are all noting a lack of available housing for their students, with rental inflation and AirBNB conversions taking many homes outside the range of possibility for many students.  It’s become so severe that the University of Calgary is taking to posting advertising in community newsletters to try to convince people to consider renting a room to a student.

It seems very strange to me, these days, to be worried about whether you’d be able to take post-secondary education simply because you can’t find a suitable place to live, but this is one of the restrictions of brick-and-mortar schools.  A restriction that often means these schools receive higher levels of government funding to be able to build new classrooms and new facilities to house and serve the needs of physically present students.

Also recently, the Alberta government has put a moratorium on approving any new renewable energy projects because, it claims, the Federal Government’s attempt to seek Net Zero emissions means they wouldn’t be able to bring enough natural gas plants online to back up the power production that these new renewable efforts would cause.  Suggesting that the variability of renewable power generation, as the wind or sun go down, means we’d all be suffering blackouts unless there was sufficient natural gas to back it up.

Even if things like batteries didn’t already exist, we already know that there is sufficient power capacity to back up the renewable plants, because there’s enough capacity right now to supply our power needs without any renewables.  They seem to think that being able to add more power to the system will instantly cause people’s power needs to go up.

In truth, all it will do is force the fossil fuel companies to lower prices to be able to compete with renewable energy generation.  And that is what I think is the UCP’s actual concern.  With a budget dependant so heavily on royalties, and with a royalty rate that, for some reason, automatically adjusts as the price of oil adjusts (what other industry has their suppliers automatically adjust the purchase price as their own prices vary?)  Anything that drives down the price of oil also drives down royalties, and their ability to argue they’re budgeting sensibly will be exposed.  In the end though, it’s still Albertans who pay, we just don’t pay it in taxes, we pay it in our utility bills.

Enjoy the read!