Business
“The Worst Is Over” – Conference Board Outlook On Alberta’s Economy
By Sheldon Spackman
“The worst is over”. That message from the Conference Board of Canada regarding Alberta’s economic outlook for 2017. That message came during a Western Business Outlook presentation made to numerous local business leaders at the Welikoklad Event Centre in Red Deer on Thursday.
The event featured remarks and presentations from Craig Alexander, Senior Vice-President and Chief Economist at the Conference Board of Canada, Pedro Antunes, Executive Director and Deputy Chief Economist at the Conference Board of Canada and Todd Hirsch, Chief Economist at ATB Financial among others. Hirsch says from 2013 to the present, Alberta’s employment level has dropped 3.7 percent, while total wages have come down 5.8 percent in that time. As for his outlook on the price of oil this year, Hirsch expects it stay between 50 – 60 dollars a barrel in 2017.
The event was hosted by the RDC Donald School of Business, with hopes of the speakers being able to shed some light on what type of economic future might be in store for Albertans this year.
Business
Zelensky appoints Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland as economic adviser in Ukraine
From LifeSiteNews
Ex-Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced her resignation from Parliament amid Conservative criticism that she can’t serve Canada while working for a foreign government.
Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland is stepping down from Parliament after being appointed as an adviser in Ukraine.
In a January 5 post on X, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shared the appointment of Freeland as an economic adviser to Ukraine, prompting Freeland to announce her resignation from the Canadian Parliament hours later.
“Today, I appointed Chrystia Freeland @cafreeland as an Advisor on Economic Development,” Zelensky wrote. “Chrystia is highly skilled in these matters and has extensive experience in attracting investment and implementing economic transformations.”
News of her appointment was blasted by Conservatives, who quickly pointed out that Freeland’s position in the Ukrainian government would compromise her work within the Canadian Parliament.
“You cannot serve as a member of Parliament (and collect an MP salary) while working for a foreign government,” Conservative MP Andrew Lawton wrote on X. “It’s that simple.”
Freeland responded to the backlash just hours later, revealing that she plans to resign from Parliament in the coming weeks.
“In accepting this voluntary position, I will be stepping aside from my role as the Prime Minister’s Special Representative for the Reconstruction of Ukraine,” she wrote.
“In the coming weeks, I will also leave my seat in Parliament. I want to thank my constituents for their years of confidence in me. I am so grateful to have been your representative,” Freeland concluded.
Despite serving as a Canadian MP, Freeland’s dedication to Ukraine has played an important role in her career since the beginning of the Ukraine and Russia conflict in 2022. Already, Freeland was serving as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada’s new Special Representative for the Reconstruction of Ukraine.
In May, Freeland was appointed minister of transport and internal trade in Carney’s cabinet after the federal election. Freeland was previously former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s deputy prime minister and finance minister.
However, she resigned from these positions in December 2024 after Trudeau requested her resignation as finance minister.
During her time in power, Freeland was known for her ties to globalist groups and her heavy-handed response to anti-mandate protesters during COVID.
During the 2022 Freedom Convoy to protest ongoing COVID regulations, Freeland froze the bank accounts of Canadians, who donated to the protest without a court order.
Later, hearings revealed that Freeland told fellow cabinet members the Freedom Convoy supporters whose bank accounts were frozen under the Emergencies Act would not be able to access their funds until they first reported to police.
Freeland was also personally commended by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, for working to achieve his globalist goals.
In addition to attending WEF meetings, Freeland is currently a member of the WEF Board of Trustees.
Freeland also touted the WEF’s anti-carbon narrative just days after a “renewable” energy crisis left many Canadians without power during one of 2024’s coldest weeks.
Business
President Trump And The Doomsday Glacier… a blow to the planet, or to funding for climate alarmism?

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Steve Milloy
President Donald Trump is driving climate researchers literally to the ends of the Earth as they try to save their taxpayer funding. Expect to see a slew of hand-wringing reports about, and even perhaps from, the Thwaites (aka “Doomsday”) glacier in West Antarctica.
The glacier got its nickname from a Rolling Stone reporter in 2017 in an article titled: “The Doomsday Glacier: In the farthest reaches of Antarctica, a nightmare scenario of crumbling ice – and rapidly rising seas – could spell disaster for a warming planet.”
Past the ominous title, the scare is that the Thwaites is melting and could raise sea levels by 10 feet, which would submerge about 2-3 percent of the global land mass, excluding Antarctica.
Last May, the Trump administration announced it would cut funding for the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a football field-long icebreaker that has been taking researchers to study the Thwaites glacier. In its 2026 budget request, the National Science Foundation said it was terminating the lease. There is no replacement ship on the horizon.
Researchers wanting to go to Antarctica, where it is now summer, have had to scramble for ships. This scramble has been made more challenging because ship owners and researchers, afraid of losing taxpayer funding, are also taking reporters and their crews along to dramatize the budget cuts using the backdrop of the scariest thing they can imagine – the Doomsday glacier.
New York Times reporter Raymond Zhong has already filed articles since Dec. 30. PBS has a reporter aboard a ship sending alarmist reports. Undoubtedly, there are other reports on their way as well.
Will the Doomsday glacier live up to its name? Or will it be another in a long line of failed, if not dishonest, apocalyptic climate predictions?
It seems to be true that the Thwaites glacier is melting. But there’s much more to consider just than that.
The rate of melting is very slow. A 2023 study estimated that over the next 50 years, the Thwaites glacier might add as much as a few millimeters (about one-tenth of an inch) to global sea level over the next 50 years. That is a far cry from the claim of 10 feet of sea level rise.
Next, the fate of the Thwaites doesn’t seem to have anything to do with emissions or “global warming.” Research indicates that there are 91 volcanoes under the West Antarctic ice sheet. Not surprisingly, the Thwaites glacier is melting from the inferno beneath.
Of course, the Thwaites couldn’t be melting at the surface because there’s been no warming in West Antarctica since the late 1990s. In fact, West Antarctica has cooled by about 3°F since 1999.
Another recent study reported that the Thwaites glacier started melting in the 1940s as the result of an El Nino, a little-understood, but periodic natural warming of the Pacific Ocean: “The glacier retreat in the Amundsen Sea was initiated by natural climate variability in the 1940s. That ice streams such as Thwaites Glacier and Pine Island Glacier have continued to retreat since then indicates that they were unable to recover after the exceptionally large El Niño event of the 1940s,” the researchers concluded.
The more one reads about the Thwaites glacier, the easier it becomes to understand why they have to call it the “Doomsday glacier.” Once you understand the non-threatening reality, the only way to make it scary is to give it a scary name and hope people are too frightened to look past it.
Three cheers for Trump for defunding this and other climate research. As these researchers lose their funding, maybe they can move to Hollywood and try writing disaster scripts.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.
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