Dear Potential Subscriber,
Here’s what you get as a subscriber: We publish three times a week. Every Tuesday, we send you an in-depth newsletter called The Main; every Wednesday we send paid subscribers our deeper journalistic and analytical work, called The Bulletin; and on Friday, we send you a humorous, social-media rich catch up — “everything that’s fit to tweet” — called The Round-Up. A lot of our work is open for free subscribers. Our most in-depth work is available for those who support us with moolah.
Okay, but what are you about?
We’re entering a decisive election cycle in Alberta. Though municipal politics are often dismissed as being about filling potholes or tending to concerns about sewage, this ignores the reality of municipalities in modern Canadian governance. Years of downloading of responsibilities by the provincial and federal governments from above, and an ongoing migration to urban centres from below, has resulted in a growing importance of municipal policies, politicians and the collaboration between all levels of government.
This is the thinking behind Rage Against the Municipal. This is a newsletter that will focus on the 2021 municipal elections across Alberta as a decisive moment in this important relationship. This year’s elections are different.
Okay, but what sort of stuff’s in your newsletter?
Each week, co-editors Danielle Paradis and Tim Querengesser round up the news and on a bi-weekly schedule, we will look deeply at the 2021 election campaign in Alberta. We’ll tell illuminating stories and uncover forces at play at a provincial level. We’ll endeavour to rethink the 2021 municipal election. These are not a series of disconnected elections in disconnected communities. As a whole, this is about Alberta and its future.
One of the missions of Rage Against the Municipal is to explain the importance of municipal governments in our changing world. An increasing number of us live in urbanized areas. More and more of us depend on municipal services. More and more of us want quality of life investments in our communities. What often stands in the way is a constitutional arrangement that makes municipalities, including the very largest cities, creatures of their provinces.
We tell stories with this firmly in mind.
That sounded pretty bookish. We also like to joke around a bit. We scan Twitter a lot. We like a good meme. We’re really funny in person.
How do I subscribe?
Click this button!
Okay, but what sort of questions are you asking?
“How conservative is Calgary?”
“Is Edmonton Liberal and Conservative?”
“How long has Alberta been conservative?”
Actually, these are all common Google searches for Alberta. We want to help answer these but also to explore the politics and policies at play that leads people to ask them.
Okay, but are you gone after the elections this October?
Think of this as a pop-up journalism project. We’re currently building a community by trying to tell Alberta stories using a new lens. If we’re successful, we intend to evolve this project well beyond the municipal elections in October.
Okay, but am I cooler if I join?
Do you have to ask? Of course you are. You will be very cool. Extremely cool.
But back to the newsletter: Over the long term we want to build our community to be able to support more of the content you want — interviews, essays, analysis. Be in touch and tell us how we’re doing.
- Danielle Paradis and Tim Querengesser
Rage Against the Municipal is written on Treaty 6
Treaty Six commits all who live on the land it encompasses to a relationship of mutuality, respect, and continued renegotiation of the relationship for “..as long as the sun shines, the rivers flow, and the grass grows..."
The treaty was signed by the Indigenous peoples who have lived in what is now called Alberta since time immemorial and the settlers that have settled on this land in far more recent times.
Rage Against the Municipal is written on Treaty Six land.
Editor Tim Querengesser is a settler. His family origins are from Germany and Ireland. His German family arrived in what is now called Ontario in the 1850s; his Irish family arrived in Canada in 1911. He grew up on treaty land in Ontario — both the Haldimand Tract, as well as land that’s contested, near the Saugeen 29 Reserve.
Editor Danielle Paradis is Metis. Her family comes from the Manitoba St. Boniface/ Red River area but she is a born and raised Albertan who is happy to call Treaty 6 territory her home.
Work
Both your trusty co-editors have jobs. To avoid any perception of conflict with his day job, co-editor Tim Querengesser will not write about anything directly about Edmonton as of May 1, 2021.
More questions? Send us an email at RageMunicipal@protonmail.com
