Skip to main content

Good morning, it’s James Keller.

Newsrooms typically mark the end of the year by looking back at the biggest and most impactful stories of the past 12 months, and there are so many things that happened across Western Canada in 2018 that would fit the bill.

Alberta’s economic crisis has deepened as the Trans Mountain pipeline is stalled in the courts and the relationship between Alberta and British Columbia, which included a brief boycott of B.C. wines, remains fraught. Western alienation has grown to levels not seen since the Ralph Klein era. Calgary flirted with an Olympic bid before rejecting it in a plebiscite. Next door in Saskatchewan, the bus crash that killed 16 people connected to the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team has left a scar that continues to be felt throughout Western Canada.

In B.C., the Trans Mountain pipeline has also driven the political debate, though the provincial government’s legal arguments against the pipeline actually failed (it was the First Nations and environmentalists whose arguments won). Voters rejected proportional representation for a third time. Vancouver elected a new mayor, former NDP MP Kennedy Stewart. The province suffered one of the worst flooding seasons on record, followed by one of the worst fire seasons.

Those are all stories that we will continue to follow well into 2019, and much has already been written about how they — and many others — have shaped the region. Instead of the usual recap of the year’s news, we’re using the final Western Canada newsletter of the year to look back at some of the lighter stories and features that stood out among our favourites of 2018.

This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief James Keller. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here. This is a new project and we’ll be experimenting as we go, so let us know what you think.

A cereal killer in Alberta: Carrie Tait looked at how a handful of mysterious genetically modified wheat stalks disrupted trade with Japan and South Korea. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency investigated for seven months but could not figure out how the GMO wheat came to be growing by the side of a road in Alberta. CFIA said they deserve credit for finding the wheat in the first place — like tracking down a needle in a haystack — but experts warned that it could have long-term consequences if officials here don’t solve the mystery.

'Organized chaos and critical thinking’: David Ebner profiled Danita Short, who is the Alberta-born founder, chief executive and primary muse of an upstart fashion label called Land of Distraction, which launched last year and has seen a meteoric rise in the fashion world.

The race to save the Doukhobors: If you know anything about the Doukhobors, a religious sect from Russia with a sizeable presence in southeastern B.C., it’s most likely the story of when the provincial government seized hundreds of children from their parents in the 1950s. But that only involved a small faction of B.C’s overall Doukhobor population, who moved to Canada from Russia in the early 1900s and whose numbers eventually grew to the tens of thousands. But the number of descendants who still identify as Doukhobor has plummeted. Violetta Kryak, a recent journalism grad who spent time at The Globe as part of the Langara College’s Read-Mercer scholarship, travelled to Castlegar, B.C., to find out where the Doukhobors are today — and how they are trying to save their culture from extinction.

Healing crystals, “free” juice and vitamin shots (but no Gwyneth): Gwyneth Paltrow has built a wellness empire in Goop that in many ways has overtaken her acting career. Goop has a clothing line, beauty and wellness products, and a publishing arm. And most recently, Ms. Paltrow has launched a series of so-called Wellness Summits, one of which landed in Vancouver this past fall. Marsha Lederman visited the conference — despite some mockery from friends and colleagues about vaginal eggs or vaginal steaming (both real) — and found aspiration and a touch of shame.

Branding day on the Prairies: Carrie Tait went to Vermilion, Alta., to get a first-hand look at the longstanding — and at times controversial — practice of branding cattle. Branding is an umbrella term for the work that takes place on cattle operations in the West each spring and it covers everything from communal meals to castrations. Branding days are part of Prairie culture that, in addition to the practical work, brings communities together through work, beer and food.

Poetry and music to “keep the cowboy lifestyle and culture alive”: The small southwestern Saskatchewan community of Maple Creek hosts an event every September bringing together fans of Western lore to hear poetry about hired hands and homesteaders and love and death and castrating bulls. It’s one of hundreds of cowboy poetry gatherings held across North America, and the oldest such event in Canada. Marty Klinkenberg looked at the events and the cowboy culture they aim to preserve.

‘A lot of people think it’s just ugly': David Ebner travelled to Los Angeles to see how a monolithic six-storey building in the city’s downtown became a flashpoint in an architectural preservation debate that had thrust a media-shy Vancouver real-estate developer, Onni Group of Companies Ltd., into a spotlight. It’s a debate that has played out with equal ferocity in the company’s hometown of Vancouver, where fights over development, gentrification and heritage overshadow nearly every major development.

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe