HellsBelle

The motivations that have contributed to the separatist movement and Alberta’s sense of grievance in recent years are not especially discrete; it’s more like a nebulous Venn diagram. Simple politics have pushed some people toward separatism. Indeed, the paucity of separatist talk during the time when Stephen Harper was prime minister suggests there’s a significant political component to the idea; when Liberals are in power, people feel more inclined to talk about leaving. Culture also plays a role. When Angus Reid pollsters talked to separatists in February 2026, 86.5 percent said they thought Canada forced Alberta to take in too many immigrants, and 96 percent believed that an independent Alberta would better protect personal freedoms.

But ... separatists tend to find the economic arguments particularly seductive. Angus Reid polling shows 96 percent of respondents who want an independent Alberta believe they would be free from economically damaging federal government policies. Separatist leaders promise the elimination of the personal income tax while creating a new provincial sales tax of 5 percent. They also claim Alberta would save $75 billion from no longer paying federal taxes.

Not all separatists promise immediate prosperity, but the argument remains persuasive. Cameron Davies is the leader of the Republican Party of Alberta. “I don’t paint an immediate rosy, utopian picture of what independence looks like,” he says. “Will it be difficult? Yes. Will it be immediate sunshine and rainbows? Probably not. But will it be worth it? Five, ten, fifteen years down the road for your kids and your grandkids? One hundred percent yes.”

Workers at the first Apple store to unionize in the US are pushing back against the company’s decision to shut it down by June, alleging that Apple’s decision is rooted in “a cynical attempt to bust the union”.

On Monday, the union filed an unfair labor practice charge against Apple, alleging unionized employees at the store in Towson, Maryland, are being denied transfer rights and other rights compared with workers at non-unionized stores. The union is also alleging retaliation for being unionized.

According to the union, Apple claims the collective bargaining agreement prevents relocation, a claim the union says is “simply false, and raises serious concerns that this closure is a cynical attempt to bust the union”, the union said in a statement.

Apple denied the claims in the charge. “We strongly disagree with the claims made, and we will continue to abide by the agreement that was negotiated and agreed with the union. We look forward to presenting all of the facts to the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board],” a spokesperson said in an email.

A federal judge is tapping out of the Trump administration.

Donald Trump appointed Judge Alan Albright in 2018, but last week, the Texas-based judge announced his sudden resignation, revealing that his time on the bench will come to a close in August.

The reason seems to be related to personal fulfillment: Bloomberg Law reported Monday that Albright had given “signs” that he “wasn’t enjoying the job” in the week leading up to his shock retirement.

In his wake, Albright leaves behind one of the largest backlogs of litigation for any federal judge. As of last September, Albright’s lagging pen accounted for 70 percent of the 129 civil cases that were pending in the Western District of Texas for three years or longer. At the same time, Albright had 446 undecided motions, approximately twice the number of any other district judge in the Fifth Circuit. His colleagues in Austin—Robert Pitman and David Ezra—had none, according to Bloomberg.

A Nevada judge sentenced Dances With Wolves actor Nathan Chasing Horse on Monday to life in prison for sexually assaulting Indigenous women and girls.

A jury had previously convicted him of 13 charges, mostly related to the sexual assault of three women.

Accusers and their families told Judge Jessica Peterson they continue to suffer from the trauma caused by Chasing Horse, 49, and struggle with their faith after he exploited his position as a spiritual leader.

"There is no way to get back the youth, the childhood loss, my first time, my first kiss, the graduation I never got to have," said Corena Leone-LaCroix, who was 14 when Chasing Horse assaulted her.

"The life that little girl could have lived has been taken from me forever," said Leone-LaCroix, who came forward publicly to share her story.

In March 2024, the Food and Drug Administration under President Joe Biden introduced a new rule that would have banned, after decades, the use of electric shocks on disabled children as a form of punishment. A ban on forcibly shocking kids—which the American Academy of Pediatrics says causes “long-lasting adverse physical and psychological impacts,” was set to come into force last year—but the Trump FDA kicked the can down the road, giving itself more time to decide whether its new leadership was on board.

Now, two years later, the FDA’s website claims that a decision will be made in the coming days on whether or not to follow through.

Massachusetts’ Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (JRC), the focus of a 2007 Mother Jones investigation, remains the only known US institution to use electric shock devices to control—and punish—disabled youths in its care, many of whom are autistic or have mental illnesses, like schizophrenia.

A new poll from the Angus Reid Institute suggests Canadians are giving Prime Minister Mark Carney's government a passing grade in its first year of international relations, but it has failed to meet expectations on affordability issues.

The poll asked 2,013 Canadians a series of questions about the government's performance since it won the election on April 28, 2025.

Last spring's election campaign was dominated by the trade war with the U.S. and centred on who was best positioned to handle the relationship with the mercurial President Donald Trump and the economic turbulence of his tariffs.

A year later, just 31 per cent of those polled said they think the Canada-U.S. relationship will be the top concern for the government in the next year. The No. 1 priority for 52 per cent of respondents was reducing the cost of living.

The Newfoundland and Labrador government has approved hikes in greenhouse gas emissions at a nickel mine in northern Labrador and the Cenovus-owned White Rose oilfield off the coast of St. John's.

Cenovus estimates that its new West White Rose platform will increase emissions at the oilfield by about 21 per cent at peak operation, or an amount equivalent to about 100,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide, according to documents obtained through access to information legislation by The Canadian Press.

That's roughly the same as the emissions from more than 23,300 vehicles driven for one year, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Three major earthquakes that rattled Alberta’s Peace River country in 2022 and 2023 had nothing to do “with natural tectonic activity” as initially claimed by the Alberta Energy Regulator and everything to do with the oil and gas industry’s hidden waste problem: toxic water.

A new study led by University of Alberta geophysicists has once again confirmed, as The Tyee originally reported, that “the largest known induced earthquake in Canada” was triggered by injecting large volumes of wastewater produced from bitumen facilities deep into the ground.

The temblor knocked people off their feet and pushed the ground up three centimetres.

An injection well operated by Obsidian Energy, a Calgary-based firm, was the primary trigger of the earthquake cluster “with secondary contributions from multiple distant wells more than 20 km away,” said the study.

Since 2012 Obsidian’s 2000-metre-deep disposal well has injected more than one million cubic metres of salt water into the ground. A record-breaking earthquake occurred on Nov. 20, 2022, near the disposal well after fluids migrated into a nearby fault about 50 kilometres from the town of Peace River.

Ahead of an important fiscal update this week, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is demanding Prime Minister Mark Carney cap the federal deficit at $31 billion, in part by eliminating big ticket items like a major rail project and the gun buyback program.

"We should have no deficit," Poilievre wrote in a letter to Carney. "And if I were Prime Minister right now, we would be on track to achieving that. But your Liberal government has made that impossible for this year."

The $31 billion cap Poilievre proposes is what the former Trudeau government projected the deficit to be for the 2026-27 fiscal year when it tabled the 2024 fall economic update.

The nearly 80-year-old Edmonton Historical Board (EHB) is among seven civic advisory committees city council is moving to dissolve on Tuesday.

Edmonton’s mayor says the city is looking to sunset the committees to modernize the way they engage with the community. But history advocates say the move was abrupt, and came without a clear plan for who will take over the EHB’s work.

He also noted the looming cut comes after the Alberta government eliminated funding for the 119-year-old Historical Society of Alberta.

Charges have been stayed against a now-resigned Manitoba RCMP constable alleged to have stolen roughly $300 from a vehicle during a 2024 traffic stop, after the complainant in the case left the country.

Ben Harder resigned from the force last year while being investigated for the incident, which was alleged to have happened on Nov. 19, 2024 in Portage la Prairie, Man.

Mounties previously said they got a public complaint just over a week later. Harder was charged with theft and breach of trust.

A spokesperson for the Crown said in an email Thursday prosecutors determined there was no reasonable likelihood of conviction in the case, "as the complainant and key witness is no longer in Canada and the Crown has been unable to contact him."

A Minnesota-based wilderness protection group is sounding the alarm that a nearly-overturned mining ban in the U.S. will open the door to copper-sulfide mining — a move they say risks leaking sulfuric acid into shared Boundary Waters at the Canadian border, including Quetico Provincial Park and the Lake Superior watershed in northwestern Ontario.

That ecosystem sprawls across the Minnesota-Ontario border, which sits about 160 km southwest of Thunder Bay. On the US side, it measures about 4450 square kilometres — roughly the size of Woodland Caribou Provincial Park — and is adjacent to about 240 km of the Canadian border.

Recently, Congressional Republicans sent U.S. President Donald Trump a resolution to lift the federal ban on mining near the BWCA, and it narrowly passed Senate last week. Watchers expect the move will clear the final hurdle — a signature from President Trump — and give a subsidiary of Chile-based Antofagasta Minerals the green light to extract copper, nickel and other precious metals at the headwaters of the national forest.

According to Marshall, copper-sulphide mining like that proposed, "creates sulfuric acid, which is chemically the same as battery acid and creates an enormous amount of battery acid that's virtually impossible to contain."