The Geography of Royalty
Alberta has extracted several trillion dollars' worth of oil and bitumen from its subsurface. The public share of that wealth is determined by a royalty system that has never collected enough — and rarely saved what it did.
What we've been working through
Smoke in the Lungs of the City
Wildfire smoke blankets Alberta for weeks each summer. Not everyone can close a window.
Jun 2, 2026
Building for Hail
Calgary is in hail alley. The question is how much of that knowledge has been built into the roofs, walls, and deductibles of 600,000 households.
May 20, 2026 Winter as a Health System
At -40°C, pipes freeze, roads close, ambulances slow down, and emergency rooms fill. Cold is not background. It is infrastructure.
May 19, 2026
Who Pays for Sprawl
Every new suburb generates development fees and property taxes. It also creates kilometres of pipe, road, and wire that someone will have to maintain forever. The math rarely adds up.
May 12, 2026
The Measurement State
Before a government can manage a territory, it has to see it. The sensors, registries, and observation systems that make Alberta legible to the state are also making it legible to everyone else.
May 5, 2026
The Distance to Care
Alberta has among the worst physician-to-population ratios in Canada. For most residents that is a statistic. For a growing number it is a geography — measured in hours and kilometres.
Apr 28, 2026System Signals No. 12
The U.S.-Iran war reaches an interim settlement — a draft signed at Versailles, the Strait of Hormuz reopening to the first Saudi tankers in three months — even as the talks for a lasting deal are abruptly called off in Switzerland and Brent settles near $80, roughly 35% below its 2026 peak; a hot microphone at the G7 catches Carney pitching Trump on Canada's 49,000-car Chinese EV cap while the two hold no formal bilateral; CUSMA's review clock runs down to two weeks with the U.S. signalling it prefers annual reviews to renewal; and Alberta prepares its July 1 submission for the newly named Northwest Coast Oil Pipeline into an oil price twenty dollars below where the deal behind it was struck.
- The shock that has organized twelve issues begins to lift: Hormuz reopens to roughly 10 million barrels in transit Thursday, including the first Saudi-owned tankers since the war began; Trump signs a draft deal at Versailles requiring Iran to dilute its enriched uranium for sanctions relief; Brent settles near $80 — but the Switzerland talks for a lasting settlement are called off Friday, and the war premium is draining out of the price ahead of the treaty.
- A live mic at the G7 in Évian-les-Bains catches Carney telling Trump the Chinese EV quota is 'less than three per cent of our market, 49,000 cars' and 'a cap' — 'I thought you'd actually like that'; with no formal bilateral scheduled, the CUSMA negotiation is now conducted by hot-mic aside, the U.S. wary of Canada as a 'drop off port' for Chinese vehicles.
- CUSMA's July 1 review points toward annual-review limbo rather than a sixteen-year renewal — ten years of certainty about nothing — and Alberta files its Northwest Coast Oil Pipeline submission to the Major Projects Office the same day, into an $80 price environment that has narrowed the commercial case struck at $100 by twenty dollars a barrel.
