Thanks to Raul of Charlie Angus / The Resistance’s Meidas Canada, I am thrilled to share the presentation that University of Calgary Public Health Professor, Lindsay McLaren, and I gave at the Public Interest Alberta (PIA) Common Purpose, Collective Action 2026 conference in Edmonton last month. The presentation outlines our backgrounds, a better vision, our experience, an action, and how to join us! Lindsay and I outline the need to recenter Alberta and Canada’s economies around public and planetary health. That comes with:
Recentering decision-making around water and land restoration, not energy growth.
Recognizing we are in a polycrisis: seeing multiple and additive crises with the common root causes: extraction, accumulation, and exploitation.
Unwinding the neoliberal playbook of manufactured scarcity (cutting of public services), division, deregulation, private wealth accumulation, and stunting of our imaginations.
Reclaiming the term “economy” as “caring for one another”. Own the economy you wish to foster.
Grow alternatives which include principles of reciprocity, solidarity, and equity.
Look to other jurisdictions, including the Canadian Quality of Life Framework, to help shape your local well-being economy.
We hope to have a similar meeting in Calgary this fall to continue this effort, stay tuned! A special shout out to TheBreakdownAB for all of Nate Pike’s help in gaining support for recalls.
Should you wish to join Lindsay and I in shaping a well-being economy in Alberta through the PIA Democracy Task Force in Alberta, please email Brad Lafortune of PIA here: brad.lafortune@pialberta.org. Help Brad (or I) know what you’d like to see from the Democracy Task Force.
The Gravity Well | Public Interest Alberta Collaboration
I had the pleasure of joining Brad Lafortune of PIA in co-hosting a webinar on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) data center explosion happening in Alberta, across North America, and the world. Locally, the United Conservative Party of Alberta did not run on a platform of AI water and power consumption or foreign surveillance intensification. The webinar features Representative Melanie Sachs of the House in Maine. Melanie created and passed a non-partisan AI ban bill, ultimately vetoed by a single elected official. Melanie shows the specific project at play in her area and its derelict conditions.
It’s vital Albertans follow the success, and learn from the failures, of other jurisdictions in order to stop AI data center construction in Alberta and Canada.
