Good morning, and welcome to the weekend.
Grab your cup of coffee or tea, and sit down with a selection of this week’s great reads from The Globe and Mail. In this issue, Greg Mercer digs into the neglected lives of coal miners, many of whom suffer from a devastating illness called black lung, and the government’s shortcomings in tracking cases before it’s too late.
In his research for this story, Mercer says he was denied access to Cape Breton’s Donkin mine, which has recently reopened. The closest anyone can get is a replica built underground called the Miners Museum in Glace Bay. The inside of a mine is an eerie environment, he says. It’s cold and wet and everything echoes. But for many coal miners, Mercer says, spending days underground is par for the course, just as it’s widely accepted among them that they’re going to have lung problems. Black lung doesn’t kill its afflicted right away, he says. Instead, it makes it more difficult to do everyday tasks. ”These guys are constantly out of breath – even walking across the room is very exhausting for them,” he says.
Carrie Tait reports on a right-wing movement determined to influence the results of the coming Alberta election.
And Ivan Semeniuk reports on the autonomous laboratories of the future.
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How workers’ compensation is failing Canada’s coal miners
Retired miner Wish Donovan, who suffers from coal workers' pneumoconiosis, uses a cane to walk out of the mine shaft under the Miners Museum where he works as a guide in Glace Bay, N.S., on Feb. 2, 2023.DARREN CALABRESE/The Globe and Mail
As Canada’s coal companies ramp up production to meet growing global demand, provincial compensation systems are failing to track a surging comeback from an old disease – black lung, an often fatal illness increasing among non-smoking coal miners at an alarming rate – and once thought to be a relic of the past. A Globe and Mail investigation has found that cases of black lung are under-reported because of inconsistent or non-existent tracking, the patchwork testing for the disease is inadequate, and compensation programs remain widely inaccessible to most of those who need it.
David Parker, founder of Take Back Alberta, speaks to a small audience in the basement of Deer Run Community Centre in Calgary on April 24, 2023.Jude Brocke/The Globe and Mail
With just one month to go before Alberta’s provincial election, Carrie Tait focuses her lens on the efforts of Take Back Alberta, an ambitious movement born out of anger toward COVID-19 restrictions that aims to influence power and remake society’s institutions to reflect the values that thread its believers together. Tait reports on how Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s ties to the group’s leader, David Parker, are stoking division within Take Back Alberta and with Smith’s own party.
The rise of the self-driving lab
Trays of molecules, created and stored at The Matter Lab, a self driving chemical lab at the University of Toronto in Toronto, March 27, 2023.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
The University of Toronto’s ‘self driving labs’ are a likely winner of federal artificial-intelligence financing. The autonomous labs offer a glimpse into a new era in which the chemist at the lab bench who makes discoveries through trial and error is replaced by a system than can learn to automatically identify, create and test the molecules that it judges to have the highest likelihood of success. They combine material science with the power of AI, robotics, and advanced computing to rapidly design and test new materials, and reduce the time and cost of bringing materials to market. Ivan Semeniuk reports on the paradigm shift that is poised to transform how we discover the stuff our future is made of.
Net Zero Hour: The urgency and opportunity of embracing clean energy
The Globe and Mail
It took Canada 31 years to get to the starting point on net zero ambitions. But if we’re going to have any chance of avoiding the worst effects of climate change, we need to take drastic measures to embrace clean energy now. Jeffrey Jones reports on 13 ideas that could get us there if we act fast.
Lack of research funding pushes PhD students out of Canada, threatening a new brain drain
Andrea Wishart, a PhD candidate at Department of Biology of the University of Saskatchewan, stands for a photograph at the U of S campus in Saskatoon, Sask., on April 21, 2023.Heywood Yu/The Globe and Mail
Many graduate students and postdoctorate scholars are living on stipends that pay near the poverty line, according to Support our Science, a grassroots group. As a result, researchers are leaving Canada, with those who choose to stick it out finding alternative ways to supplement their income. As funding for graduate students, post-docs and research-granting councils stagnates, scientists warn that Canada could lose a generation of talent. And the risk is that such a brain drain wouldn’t just be the result of students leaving the country – but the field of scientific research altogether.
The American Civil War was Canada’s fight, too. And we were on the wrong side
Union and Confederate forces fight at Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862, still the single deadliest day in U.S. military history. The battle in Maryland killed more than 3,600 soldiers out of about 23,000 total casualties.Library of Congress/Library of Congress
The myths we tell ourselves about our history say a lot: not about who we are, but who we like to think we are. Our view of the past is not only about what kind of country we think Canada was – but what it could and should be. As Julian Sher writes, in reality, Canada served as a kind of northern front for the Confederacy, a safe haven from which Southern agents launched cross-border raids, laundered money and hatched plots against Abraham Lincoln.
At Hot Docs 2023, the Lac-Mégantic tragedy is explored from every angle imaginable
A decade after an unattended train derailed in Quebec's Eastern Townships, killing 47 people, director Philippe Falardeau revisits the event in the documentary,Courtesy of Hot Docs
The train derailment in 2013 in Lac-Mégantic lingers in the national memory as a scar, traumatic and permanent. Years later, the accident, which killed 47 people instantly and displaced thousands of residents in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, is set to premiere at Hot Docs this weekend. Unfolding in four hour-long chapters, Québécois filmmaker Philippe Falardeau’s Lac-Mégantic – This Is Not an Accident balances emotional moments – including interviews with family members of victims – with rigorous research into the institutions and agencies that failed Lac-Mégantic residents. Barry Hertz reports on the miniseries, calling it a testimony to the strength and resilience of a small town.
Camilla will thrive as Queen in ways that previous royal mistresses could only dream of
Britain's Camilla, Queen Consort, during her visit to Coram Beanstalk in London, Feb. 2, 2023.JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images
For centuries, European kings have married their mistresses, with most of the marriages ending badly. (See Anne Boleyn, who apparently set the tone.) But while Camilla’s relationship with King Charles has certainly been mired in controversy throughout the years, Eleanor Herman believes she might see a different fate than the rest.