DEADLINE EXTENDED!

The previous deadline of June 30 has been extended to July 7 because of the postal strike. We still encourage entries to be submitted via email to guarantee we receive them before the deadline.

E-mail your submission to: shortstory@albertaviews.ab.ca with “Short Story Submission” in the subject line and the attached entry in .txt or .doc format. Please include the cover letter as a separate attachment or in the main message window.

Enter our annual short story contest! Win $1,000 and get published in Alberta Views.

Guidelines:

• The contest is open to all residents of Alberta except employees of Alberta Views.
• An entry fee of $30 includes a year’s subscription to Alberta Views and is non-refundable.
• The winner will be published in our December 2011 issue and will receive a prize of $1,000.
• Stories should be no longer than 3000 words! Entries exceeding 3000 words will be disqualified.
• Entries may not be previously published or submitted for publication elsewhere until the winning story is announced.
• The deadline for submissions is June 30, 2011.
• Anonymity will be carefully preserved throughout the judging process. Author’s name must not appear on the story itself. Include a separate cover letter with story title, author’s name, address, phone number and/or e-mail and word count.
• There are no other limits! The contest is open to stories of any style and on any subject.

E-mail your submission to: shortstory@albertaviews.ab.ca
with “Short Story Submission” in the subject line and the attached entry in .txt or .doc format.
Please include the cover letter as a separate attachment or in the main message window.

Or mail your submission to:
Alberta Views
Suite 208 – 320 23 Avenue SW
Calgary, AB T2S 0J2
Please do not send originals.

FAQ’s:

Can I pay the fee online?
Go to the subscription page and enter Short Story Entry in the promo box provided. You can also pay by phone, 1 877 212 5334

What if I already subscribe to Alberta Views?
If you subscribe to Alberta Views the entry fee will extend your subscription for another year.

Do I get feedback about my story?
Story evaluations will not be offered.

Does the story have to be about Alberta?
You must be a resident of Alberta; the story itself does not have to be about Alberta.

Call or e-mail if you have any questions, we are happy to help.

What’s Brews & Views?

Glad you asked.

Brews & Views is a growing event held every month (or at the least every other month) for readers and Albertans alike to meet authors and thinkers on local issues. They are lively, informal panels where crowd participaction is encouraged. In fact, to aid in this, subscribers have a free beer on us.

Event is free for subscribers or you can buy a subscription at the door ($15 for a beer or wine, riveting discussion and year’s worth of a darn fine magazine—not a bad little deal in my opinion).

The last B&V featured four fine Crowsnest Passians (Passites?): author David Thomas, artist Lynnette Jessop, councillor Brian Gallant and realtor Randall Whiteside. The theme, “What will come to the Pass?” was a discussion of big changes in the works and what the Pass might look like in 5, 25, 50, 100 years … Adventure tourism hot spot? Thriving film industry? Artist mecca? Or perfectly quiet backwater?

The date of the next Brews & Views is Dec 7, 2011 at 7 p.m. at Calgary’s Shelf Life Books (1302 4 St SW). Topic: How do we measure happiness in Alberta? Featuring author Mark Anielski (The Economics of Happiness), Alberta Views’s 15-year columnist Fred Stenson, winner of the 2011 fiction contest Elaine Hayes and magazine founder Jackie Flanagan.

Click here for the Brews & Views  poster

In the meantime, please enjoy these photos from previous B&V’s, and we’ll see you in your town soon.

Sincerely,

The AV Club.

At the Art Gallery in the Crowsnest Pass. Topic: What will come to the Pass? From left, author and advocate for keeping the Pass just the way it is, David Thomas, touter of adventure tourism, councillor Brian Gallant, advocate for more outdoor art, artist Lynnette Jessop and local film industry proponent, Randall Whiteside.

A full fort at the N.W.M.P Fort in Fort Macleod. From left, authors Fred Stenson and Doug Horner, rancher Tony Bruder and (hidden) Western Producer Barb Glen discuss “what’s in the water” politically and literally in southern Alberta, while a crowd member raises some questions.

A “threeding” (three-person reading) at ShelfLife Books in Calgary. Left to right: Aritha van Herk (author), Kristjanna Grimmelt (winner of Alberta Views 2010 short story contest), Alex Rettie (Rettie on Books columnist, Alberta Views).

Water, conservation and bears, oh my! (Then, after the first round of brews, the existence of God, the meaning of life and other various philosophical musings) at the Canmore Hotel. Left to right: Jeff Gailus (author of the Grizzly Manifesto), Michale Lang (curator at the Whyte Museum), Bob Sandford (author Water, Weather and the Mountain West, water conservationist), and Ben Gadd (author Handbook of the Canadian Rockies, naturalist).

Topic: “Urban Farming,” at the Dish & Runaway Spoon in Edmonton. Left to right: Ron Berezan, the Urban Gardener (just behind the blueberry bush) Patty Milligan, owner of Lola Canola Honey, and Tracy Hyatt, first-time gardener (it’s her blueberry bush).

Topic: “Women in the Workplace,” at the Galt Museum in Lethbridge. Left to right: Writer Shannon Phillips, Glenn Scott (AUPE), Ian McKenna (labour rights lawyer) and Lisa Lambert (Womanspace).

Topic: “Mayoral Election Financing and Undue Influence of Local Developers,” at Broken City in Calgary. Left to right: soon-to-be-mayor Naheed Nenshi, mayor hopefuls Jon Lord and Paul Hughes and OPUS Dev’t Corp’s Hannes Kovak.

May 29

Report after last Sunday: Diversify into mozza ball, jazzercise markets.

Sunday morning and the team is out at Lilac Fest on 4th St. Calgary. Our tent featured a blank canvas inviting people to scribble the change they want to see in the world. Alas, for the third year in a row, you will notice our booth was next-door to something infinitely more awesome—burlesquercising. And our other neighbourino’s were the good people of Famoso pizzeria. Talk about your competition in the a so-called dying age of print. Usually the weather is on our side—minus-something celsius and wet—so people come under our tent and, sure what the heck, sign me up for a magazine subscription, it’ll help dry my boots. But Sunday the weather was delightful, one of the only sunny days all year (hence the absence of lilacs at this year’s Lilac Fest) and who wants to be burdened by social consciousness when there’s hot Latin jazz and ice-cold lemon gelato  … For one, I propose we diversify into both the jazzercizing and mozza ball markets, if for no other reason than office morale.

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Jan 18

Like the banana, we must peel back the layers of every mundane detail in the ongoing saga that is our industrial food-chain. Well. There is only one layer with a banana analogy. But still.

Lunchtime at the office and we’re once again ruminating the merits of our food rather than merely ruminating the food itself. It’s something like a game, which for the sake of this blog post/public service announcement we will call “Good Banana, Bad Banana.”

The banana in question is a Dole banana with a sticker about three-times the size of a regular banana sticker indicating it is certifiably organic—good banana. The banana is also a banana; that is, it was necessarily grown in a more tropical clime and shipped thousands of kilometres on a steady stream of affordable, non-renewable fossil fuels—bad banana. The banana’s oversized sticker includes a website and a three-digit number indicating the plantation on which it was grown—in this case, farm 759 “Mar Plantis” on the coast of Ecuador—good, or at least, very informative, banana. The website links to a page with pictures of Mercedes Molina and her family who own the plantation. They look like a lovely bunch of banana makers—good banana. The banana itself tastes delicious—good banana—but would have ripened on a truck and if not timed right, a whole lot of bananas would have been thrown out at the grocery store despite their incredible journey—bad banana. Finally. The banana is a spendiferous source of potassium—good banana.

Score—Good Banana: 4.5; Bad Banana: 2

What a time to be alive …

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Jan 1

Fresh Paint, fresh ideas, fresh underwear (some of us)

Among other things, you may have noticed the magazine’s online visage has undergone a digital facelift. We also recently went “under the brush” last week, painting the office (and while away from work for the day, the town) red. And in continuing the surgery analogy, we’re perhaps proudest of all of our fine  office implant, ad sales manager Jen.

For those interested in knowing more about what’s new at the magazine—and agreeable to seeing what else I can cram into a thoroughly stretched-out, under-researched health/medical analogy—how about some other ways we’ve freshened up our appearance.

Looking around, the gentlemen for starts are all clean-shaven after a bewhiskered and rather futile Movember. Also, the embarrassing scent many of us were too polite to mention that emanated from the office fridge has, as mysteriously as it came, dissipated. The Office’s Handy Coffee-Related Accident Promulgator (OHCRAP) shows that we’ve gone a record 22 days without a coffee-related accident in the office. And the inordinate amount of kitchen Tupperware has been purged, disposed of and subsequently replaced by an inordinate amount of more Tupperware.

In short, life is good.

Certainly, however, the newest and the most important thing about the upcoming year is our new theme, “newcomers.” Beginning in the new year, the magazine will look at all the same topics you’ve come to know and love but with the undertone of “the changing face of Alberta.” And where better to start than on a new blog on a new website wearing new underwear?—personally speaking.

JOB POSTING  IS NOW CLOSED.

You are an intelligent, mature, professional, supremely organized individual with at least 5 years experience ensuring the smooth running of a busy office and keeping the financials in impeccable shape. You are accurate, detail-focused, deadline-oriented and able to take initiative. You have the ability to walk into an office environment, assess what needs to be done, and do it. You love what you do and consider your work a vocation—your passion is providing the day-to-day stability that allows others within an organization to focus on growth, innovation, and taking the organization to the next level.

Alberta Views is looking for a Bookkeeper / Administrator to join our small, dedicated staff. Go to our contact page to find out how to apply.

Certainly, Robert Kroetsch, as a writer, shaped the imagination of Alberta. his chronicles of a profoundly hyperbolic place have articulated this province in a way that can only be compared to Gabriel García Márquez’s portraits of Colombia. And yet, despite his long and venerable list of publications, Kroetsch, quiet and self-effacing, is not as celebrated as he should be. He is Alberta’s Faulkner, Alberta’s Dante.

You could read 100 history books about the rise of Social Credit and the election of William Aberhart in 1935, but none will evoke the spirit of those times so well as his The Words of My Roaring. In that novel, Kroetsch captures the terrible effect of drought and defeat, and how the politicians who promised the impossible offered the kind of hope that people needed so much they elected a chimera.

It is possible to drive across Edmonton’s High Level Bridge, but the experience changes completely if you’ve read about the famous traffic jam of horses in The Studhorse Man, which won Kroetsch the Governor General’s Award for fiction in 1969. Set at the end of the Second World War and just before the 1947 Leduc oil strike that made the horse truly obsolete, the novel helped (and helps) Albertans understand the extent to which we are governed by the dichotomy between horse and car, weather and oil. It combines the energy and madness that give this province so distinctive a character.

It is possible to discuss Alberta’s weather, which we do, interminably, as introduction and demarcation, as aphrodisiac and punctuation, with all the surprise and outrage and resignation that our uneasy climate provokes. But only Kroetsch’s novel What the Crow Said makes our unpredictable snow-in-July and chinook-in-January so extreme that the male characters take up arms in a war against the sky. The humour, the wild surmise of Kroetsch’s stories, reflects beautifully the tall tale that is so often Alberta’s undoing. But it is seductive too, how a hailstone can provoke love, how snow proposes marriage. “It’s snowing. Someone must take a wife,” declares a character in that novel. In the face of an Alberta winter, love is the only answer.

This year was the Royal Tyrrell museum’s 25th anniversary, but Drumheller’s august institution is much richer if one reads Kroetsch’s Badlands, a novel about the crazy excess of the bone collectors and how they fought and feuded in the bone beds in order to get their hands on those fossils. This story is nothing so dry as a squabble between paleontologists, but a fully articulated journey to the underworld, a past where dinosaurs ruled.

In short, Kroetsch has written Alberta, taken its dust and DNA and made those elements into greater stories, words recreated in a mythic context. he’s been called Mr. Canadian Postmodernism, a daunting title. But Kroetsch is also a poet who can make a seed catalogue elegiac, who can turn screen doors into arias, who can, in a mother’s whisper, “Bring me the radish seeds,” encapsulate love. His latest book of poetry, Too Bad, features on the cover a cartoon of a man comically peering into his pants. Even growing old is for him a subject of profound laughter.

Kroetsch is not sentimental about Alberta’s greed or graft, our wealth and deficiency. “We’re trying to win,” he says. “Having to win is a dangerous compulsion. We’re willing to destroy landscapes, in the name of winning.”

And yet, Kroetsch is not sentimental about Alberta’s greed or graft, Alberta’s wealth and deficiency. “Alberta is caught up in a kind of game—it plays hockey against the rest of the world,” he says. “It’s in a competition—partly because of oil and gas—but we love the excitement of the game, we love to participate, and while we talk about being individuals in Alberta, we love being part of a crowd. We vote as a crowd.

“It’s a competitive issue, too: we are really trying to win. And we’ll do anything. having to win is a dangerous compulsion. That’s why we’re willing to destroy landscapes and natural habitats, in the name of winning.”

The wise talking crow in the novel What the Crow Said asks, “Win? Win? Somebody’s going to win?” It is obvious that all gamblers lose, and yet they go on gambling. “We love that. We love to gamble,” says Kroetsch, even if we end up a stinking, ragtag crew of ne’er-do-wells.

Worse, he believes, is that we ignore our past. “The Athabasca River has a wonderful history of fur trade and exploration, but now we see it as a place to make money—we don’t want to know about its history,” he says. “We want it to be present and not past. We’re not attuned to the mythos of a place. And Albertans seem susceptible to being controlled by corporations and their version of events. We start to buy their story: ‘Look how wealthy we are!’ We’re so proud of being rich. Wealth has even replaced sexuality in our culture. Instead of having a sexual imagination we have a profit imagination.”

As for our scenery, Kroetsch understands its lure and its danger. “It’s postcard beauty,” he says. “one of the interesting things about postcards is what you don’t see. In Alberta, you stop seeing most of the province. You expect to see Rocky mountains and grizzly bears and badlands, so you don’t see the highways and the buildings and the sprawl. The Rockies have been so central to our invented mythology that we’re stuck with too obvious a landscape. We’re busy looking at the scenery. We don’t know the depths—at least we haven’t acknowledged them—and so we look at surface. having a scenic imagination is very dangerous because you can fool yourself.”

Kroetsch now lives near the exact spot where the first big gusher of our fortune and misfortune blew in. Is Leduc a beautiful place or is it ugly? It’s both, he says, and yet it still bears traces of essential generosity. “The other day I was sitting on a bench in the sun, in the hot sun,” he says. “A man came by and said ‘You shouldn’t be sitting in the sun without water!’ And he gave me a bottle of water. he cared. That’s Alberta, too.”

He remembers returning to Alberta after decades away and being amazed at how urban the province had become. “When you’re away, a place doesn’t change. It stays the way you remember it,” he says. “But one of the side effects of urbanization is homogeneity. certain kinds of repetition erase place. I mean, look at Canadian Tire. There’s a Canadian Tire everywhere. Earlier you went to an individual store or gas station… now you don’t know what country you’re in, let alone what city.”

Kroetsch’s observations of our present are seasoned by his memories of growing up in the Alberta of the 1930s. “What I remember mostly is space,” he says. “I lived on quite a big farm and there were lots of big farms around. They weren’t big by today’s standards, but you could wander around for days exploring, being in nature, discovering yourself. There was immense freedom in that. now, space has become place but it’s more contained. You know, space gives you freedom but it’s a little bit scary. now, we have the security of the city. Which is great security—we have the fire department and the police department— but kind of a loss. Then, we knew we were a part of nature. now, we think we’re in control.”

Nature, he claims, was respected, even if it brought devastation. “I can’t remember grasshopper plagues much, but I remember lizards one time. It was just the right conditions for them to hatch. I remember too, one year we had a bad hailstorm. ‘We got hailed out!’ I said to my father. he was distressed, but he wasn’t, not really. That was a part of nature. once in a while in Alberta, you got hailed out. I couldn’t understand his tolerance. But he was an optimistic man. The first thing we did was make ice cream with the hail. That’s an Alberta reaction.”

Kroetsch celebrates a rural spirit that might be vanishing but that still textures this province. We’re careless about that part of our past, think it’s irrelevant to our urbanized culture. But behind our flash and sophistication, it lingers: kids wading in ditches full of muskrats and birds and ducks, an incredible sense of bounty, a garden full of vegetables, a sky full of blue.

As a child who grew up in that time, Kroetsch felt privileged. “My parents thought it was a good life, for sure,” he says. “And you know, when I was a kid, most of the population lived on farms. not any more. one effect that oil has on an economy is to hurt agriculture. The young men leave the farm and go get a better job, an economic switchover. The family farm is gone.”

He makes lucid the madness that is our Alberta. He makes realistic our tall tales. He makes hyperbolic our ordinariness. He makes comic our despair.

But the spirit of rural Alberta seems to percolate through our dreams and memories. Kroetsch has returned, he says, for the landscape and for the community. “One of the interesting things about where I live now, with people who are in their 80s, is how much experience we share. Living on the prairies. Stories about the weather, what you ate, a sense of democracy—we are democratic here in a way fundamentally different from everywhere else, even though living in Alberta has meant a level of prosperity that is quite extraordinary.”

And what about this vigorous, perceptive writer living in a retirement community? Is this a deliberate Kroetschian choice, to move into an almost-nunnery of Albertans at the end of life? “It’s a nice mixture of solitude and company,” he says. “I’m not very good at being alone. To put it another way, I can’t stand to be alone and I can’t stand to be with people. Which puts me in kind of a bind. I don’t know if it’s the human condition or the Alberta condition or what.”

He exemplifies, he says, a person torn between rural and urban. “The movement into cities [which in canada are quite new] is a big transition. We’ve had to learn how to be urban. I see that in these women I live with in the lodge. They lived much of their adult lives in cities, but they talk with each other about those early years when they were in small towns or on farms. It’s a more reassuring world. You can sit down at the dinner table and just say the word ‘potato’ and they start talking about potatoes. All the different experiences they had. You wouldn’t know they’d lived in cities.”

But time is fluid and Kroetsch can easily shift to a world of party lines and well water. “I remember the phone—our ring was four shorts and a long,” he says. “When our main well was drilled, I was mystified to think there was water flowing in streams underneath us. Isn’t that amazing? I’m still amazed by it. Water, I think, is one of the biggest mysteries. on the surface we were so short of water. And then underneath, here’s all this water. Strange. But it was work, too. I hated wash day because I did nothing but carry water!”

I teach the novels and poetry of Robert Kroetsch to young Alberta students. Every year they read his writing and express outrage and disbelief. “This is a crazy book,” they say. “It’s not realistic.” If we are reading What the Crow Said, I just point out the window. In November the temperature is often balmy. In April there might be a horrific spring snowstorm. The weather in Kroetsch’s writing, I tell them, is only hyperbolic on the page. Translated to Alberta, it becomes commonplace.

That is the hallmark of this astonishing writer. He makes lucid the madness that is our Alberta. he makes realistic our tall tales. He makes hyperbolic our ordinariness. he makes comic our despair. he is the one writer who has truly managed to capture our oxymoronic character, our greed and generosity, our penchant for self-deception, our eagerness to repeat our mistakes. few places are lucky enough to harbour their greatest scribe. Alberta could not be luckier.

Nobody comes back to Alberta to die. That’s a fact. They return to recapture the dream that Alberta was and to see how that dream continues. Kroetsch has always, he confesses, been interested in places on the edge. This is the edge.

Rick Holler’s bright modern apartment is a long way from his former haunts in downtown Edmonton. That suits him just fine. “I keep away from my old friends,” says Holler, a 55-year-old with a long history of drug and alcohol abuse and stints in jail. “None of them know where I live. I don’t need the drugs in my life.”

He came out of a rehab program last June, but relapsed within a day because he was back in his old environment. Then he heard about Edmonton’s new 10-year plan to end homelessness. Through the Boyle Street Community Services agency he got his first apartment in many years in July, applied for rent support and was able to put life in the emergency shelters behind him. Holler’s one-bedroom apartment is sparsely but adequately furnished—a small kitchen table and two chairs, a comfy couch and coffee table, a flat-screen TV loaned by his cousin. He’s starting to put pictures of various kinds on the walls. At least for now, he’s not using drugs and alcohol.

“I’ve been craving a beer lately,” he admits, but he knows one beer will lead to many more, plus the drugs. So he’ll do something to distract himself from his craving, or he’ll go to a Cocaine Anonymous meeting. And each Friday he gets a visit from his Boyle Street support worker, who helps him adjust to his new life. “This is the best thing that’s happened to me for a lot of years,” he says.

Rick Holler is one of several thousand homeless people who have been housed through 10-year plans launched in 2008 in Calgary and 2009 in Edmonton. These ambitious plans, funded almost entirely by the provincial government, aim to end homelessness by providing affordable housing, support workers and addiction and mental health treatment to people moving out of homelessness.

The plans were sparked by an explosion in numbers of homeless people in Alberta’s big cities beginning in the early 1990s. The 2008 count of homeless in Calgary was 4,060, nearly 10 times the 447 in 1992. Edmonton was not far behind, with 3,079 homeless people in 2008. And the one-day count that produces those numbers is considered the tip of an iceberg: thousands more people drift in and out of homelessness in a year.

The Alberta government says that without a serious effort to change the situation, the province could have more than 20,000 homeless people within a decade. It has made its own 10-year commitment and is putting serious money behind it—some $100-million this year to provide housing, plus $42-million to fund agencies that support people leaving homelessness. The total cost over 10 years is expected to be $3.3-billion, divided between capital costs to build housing ($1.3-billion) and operating costs for social supports ($2-billion).

The province expects the 10-year plan will cost less than maintaining the status quo. A homeless person currently costs the province over $100,000 annually (in healthcare, judicial and correctional resources); simply “managing” the existing homeless population for the next 10 years is expected to cost $6.65-billion. A person’s needs aren’t eliminated once the person is housed, of course, but their likelihood of being arrested, needing an ambulance or visiting a courtroom is significantly reduced. The government expects that the 10-year plan will actually save the province $7.1-billion over the next decade.

Get the full story on newsstands Jan 1.

This province was built on suffering: the defeat and oppression of the Aboriginal people; the privation and struggle of the early settlers; the suspicion, when the country was at war, of Canadians of German or Japanese descent; the fear of those of different religious beliefs—even Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic, not to mention Buddhist, Sikh and Muslim; the pain caused by prejudice and animosity. Some suffering is unavoidable, but much is the result of mean-spirited attitudes and policy.

In 1885 the population of what was to become Alberta was only 15,533. The indigenous people outnumbered the whites, who were mostly French fur traders, Ontarians or British and American ranchers. Five big waves of immigration—the first at the turn of the 19th century, the second after WWI, the third after WWII, the fourth after the 1967 removal of racial biases from immigration regulations and the fifth with the economic boom of the oil sands—have brought people to the province from every corner of the globe.

From the start, federal immigration policies have shaped Alberta. The federal dream to build a nation linked by a railway from sea to sea required and enabled the settling of the prairies. The government wanted hardy, self-sufficient peasants and farmers. (They’d have to be tough to survive.) Vigorous recruitment in northern Europe brought Germans, Scandinavians, Russians, Ukrainians. The offer was 160 acres of land, which had to be tilled and cropped to gain title, with no help from the government.

Every homesteader was homeless on arrival. The first task was to build a dwelling, often only a sod hut at first. Communal pacifist groups such as the Mennonites, Hutterites and Doukhobors, fleeing persecution in their homeland, were guaranteed military exemption. Mormons from Utah with experience in dryland farming were encouraged to come to southern Alberta. Chinese men—who had helped build the railway, but couldn’t afford the head tax to bring their wives and children—opened cafés and laundries and lived lonely, outcast lives. Italians worked in the coal mines in the Crowsnest Pass. All newcomers suffered culture shock, homesickness, family separation, hunger, backbreaking work, harsh conditions, bitter cold, drought, failed crops.

After WWI almost 100,000 immigrants came to Alberta. Though the federal government preferred to recruit from Britain, under pressure from the railways they opened the doors to eastern Europeans: Czechs, Croatians, Hungarians, Poles, Slovaks and Romanians. In 1942, the federal government appropriated the property of Japanese-Canadians on the coast of British Columbia, and forced 2,600 of them into the sugar beet fields of southern Alberta. After the war another 100,000 immigrants arrived, many of them European refugees and displaced persons. These were not farmers, but urban workers. The federal government was responding to international pressure to assist in solving the refugee problem, and to businesses needing a labour supply.

With race theory thoroughly discredited, Canada’s 1967 immigration policy for the first time applied the same rules to all immigrants regardless of racial origin. Many Africans, Chinese and South Asians have come to Alberta since then.

The people of Alberta have always had remarkably diverse ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds: it was so in 1905 at the formation of the province, and it is even more so today. Most people who come here want only a better life. I hope all of us whose forebears suffered unnecessarily will have a kinder attitude to the more recent newcomers to our province.

If this or any other feature in Alberta Views inspires comment share your views with us.
Email us at: letters@albertaviews.ab.ca

or write to us at:
Alberta Views
Suite 208, 320 – 23rd Avenue SW
Calgary, AB
T2S 0J2
Canada

From April through August 2010, we asked several focus groups of immigrants from Asia, South and Central America, Europe and the Middle East about what had changed for them over the last year, and if they were seeing any indicators of economic recovery.

In 2006, Jovani Cuero, his wife, Germania Villota, and his daughter Angie sought asylum in Canada, trading the crowds and equatorial heat of Bogota, Columbia, for an apartment fourplex in east Red Deer.

It’s hard to imagine Chaz before the booze, before the Olympics—back when the sun hung up there and wouldn’t go down.