Paula Simons has always had a lot to say — and the guts to say it. For 20 years, she racked up awards for her work at the Edmonton Journal, where she explored Indigenous Rights, same-sex marriage and mental health care before many would broach the topics publicly. After being appointed as a senator in 2018, she’s stayed just as opinionated.
While those opinions are strong, they’re also complex and open to change. Simons is a proud Albertan “right down to the marrow of my beefy bones,” one who both defends and questions her home province. That includes the impacts of its oil and gas economy: as Simons told us when she took the Moose Questionnaire, reporting on the aftermath of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfires helped her realize the effects of climate change are already here and must be addressed.
Since then, Simons has been insistent that Canada’s economy and environment should both be healthy, no matter how complicated the balance. She’s questioned what corporate giants have actually done with the money they’ve been given for orphan well cleanup and has supported carbon pricing — while also rejecting a ban on west coast oil tankers she believed would be ineffective in protecting the ocean and needlessly hurt Alberta.
It’s a lot to think about. Luckily, the North Saskatchewan River Valley is right outside her door. As the senator (and Royal watcher) heads back to Ottawa for the 45th Parliament (and to meet King Charles), here’s what she said about her love for “the most extraordinary urban park in Canada” and the rest of the natural world.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
One of the most extraordinary natural sites I’ve ever seen is the North Saskatchewan River. I grew up in the river valley and when you grow up near someplace, you often take it for granted. But a couple of summers ago, I made it out to Métis Crossing, a Métis heritage site northeast of Edmonton, and they took me on a canoe tour.
At that point, the river gets much more wide and much more wild. We saw an entire colony of eagles who were going through mating. So there was wild eagle sex happening in the sky. A bear swam alongside the canoe, never mind the beaver and all the other wildlife you would expect. It really changed my view of the river and its beauty.
Taman Negara National Park in Malaysia. I was able to travel there years and years ago, before I was married, before I was a mom. It’s one of the oldest rainforests in Malaysia, if not the oldest. It’s huge. It was really magical and numinous to be in that space.
I choose the magpie for kissing. It’s hard to kiss a bird, and a corvid at that, but I think magpies are smart and funny and bold and sexy.
I think the beaver would make an excellent husband. I think beavers are hardworking and responsible and really good at home repair.
Kill is easy. I would kill the mosquito. I would kill them all day long and all night long.
I think environmentalists don’t understand how much frontline work farmers and ranchers are doing to improve soil health and to sequester carbon. Not enough people know about regenerative agriculture and the farmers and ranchers who are adopting techniques that are both new and very old to make their farming more healthy and environmentally friendly.
[They’re] working on an agricultural practice where they don’t till the soil, where they don’t use nearly as many artificial fertilizer inputs, where they are leaning big into composting, where they are using regenerative techniques to make the soil healthier. They don’t get enough credit. Smart farming and ranching techniques sequester carbon naturally. You don’t need to dig a big hole and have a pipe. Plants already know how to sequester carbon. We just have to help them to do that.
Again, because I have very recently served as the deputy chair of the agriculture and forestry committee: I think Big Ag could really make a difference. There are all kinds of regenerative techniques, from what you feed your cows so that they produce less methane, to the way that you graze and the way that you farm, that could make dramatic improvements in sequestering carbon and improving the capacity of soil to be resistant to drought, to be resistant to flooding. It could have an enormous impact on not just on climate change, but on the health of the land and the health of the water.
No. I grew up in a neighbourhood where people had outdoor cats and they would fight outside my bedroom window at night and scream. I really, really, really hate outdoor cats and I think it’s mean to the cats.
I have to say, as a journalist, I did not understand the importance of carbon pollution. I knew air pollution is bad, water pollution is bad. I understood tailings ponds have an environmental footprint. I understood that sour gas has an environmental footprint. But I don’t think we understood the collective impact of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.
As an Albertan, you grow up with a triumphalist narrative about the oilsands. My dad was one of the first lawyers to have a practice in Fort McMurray. On his desk he had little jars of oil sand and then the pure oil and then the sulfur. If you grew up in Alberta when I did, you learned the legend of Karl Clark, how important it was that we learned how to set the oil free. I had to deprogram myself to understand that we could not continue with an economy in this way, and that the techno-triumphalist narrative of breaking the oilsands was insufficient to understand the crisis of the moment.
Towards the end of my time at the Edmonton Journal, I covered the impact of the Fort McMurray wildfires. I covered the impact on the city of the climate refugees who arrived here. If that wasn’t a wake-up call for everyone, I don’t know what will be.
Oh, I have spent a lifetime trying to change people’s minds about things. As a political columnist, I wrote a lot about queer rights and gay marriage. One of the things I’m proudest of is the number of people who came to me over the years and said, ‘Your columns changed my mind about about gay marriage and about LGBT rights in general.’
Rocky Mountains. Rocky Mountains. Final, only answer.
I think there’s something very particular in Alberta about the way the oil and gas sector is coded as masculine. Those are hard jobs. There are not that many women who work in the oil patch, because that’s hard, physically demanding labour. I think there’s a kind of a mythos that oil and gas is manly — for manly men — therefore to care about climate change, which could have an impact on that industry, is somehow effeminate and somehow undermines the masculine, strong culture of the patch.
My daughter lives in Vancouver, so I would take the excuse to go to the west coast to see her.
The furthest north I’ve ever been is Iqaluit, back when it was still known as Frobisher Bay. I was flying to Germany. I was 17 years old and our plane had to make an emergency landing. We all had to go off the plane down those blow-up slides.
The runway in Iqaluit was not built for 747s so they took everything off the plane that they possibly could. They took out the seats, if they could remove them. They took all the luggage out. They took all the extra fuel and they just let the captain and the co-pilot fly away and they left us there, at the school gym in Iqaluit. It was high summer, so I always remember being there and going, ‘Oh, I’ve heard about the “land of the midnight sun” my whole life.’ I’m from Edmonton, and I thought the sun set late here. But no, this is Iqaluit in July. It was very cool.
Eventually, Air Canada, many, many hours later, sent a 737 to pick us up. We’d been on a 747 and so there weren’t enough seats for everybody. We had to all squish into the 737 standing-room only and fly the rest of the way to Frankfurt.
I would like to go back to Iqaluit at some time on a more scheduled flight.
I have a Portuguese Water Dog that demands to be walked a great distance, no matter what the weather. So she gets me out, she gets me off and into the North Saskatchewan River Valley, [which] runs right through the core of the city. A 10-minute walk from my front door, I can be in nature in a way that you would think I was in a national park.
I might ask Karl Clark, the Alberta scientist who figured out how to separate the oil from the oilsands, which was Alberta’s great economic miracle. The oilsands are an extraordinary energy reserve and it was this great mission for Alberta scientists and researchers to figure out how to make them accessible, how to bring that oil to market and now we see some of the consequences of that. One might wonder if it’s a Pandora’s box we wish we hadn’t opened.
Smoked salmon in honour of the Yiddishkeit in my family. Lox at all times, lox at all events.
My parents were not nature people. My dad took us to the opera. He took us to the track to watch the horses. It was my Uncle Chuck, my mother’s sister’s husband, who came from a very old Franco-Albertan family and loved the wilderness. He was the one who took us hunting. He was the one who took us snowmobiling. He was the one who taught me not to scream when leeches got on my legs at the lake. He was the one who taught me not to be so prissy about nature. He was the one who taught me how to think about animals and wildlife in a way that wasn’t Disney sentimentality.
As I say, I did not grow up in an outdoorsy kind of way. My mom was an immigrant. She came as a refugee to this country. I didn’t grow up knowing how to skate. I didn’t grow up knowing how to ski. So I wanted to make sure that my daughter learned how to skate, that she learned how to ski. I wanted to make sure she went camping. I’m not going camping, but I wanted to make sure that she had that experience. She’s so much more outdoorsy than I ever was and I love the pictures she sends me of her hiking and biking and all of the things that she’s getting up to in B.C.
Harry and Meg’s in British Columbia. I was a British history geek and a parliamentary history nerd, and, you know, they’re Royals. Also, I don’t know anything about soccer or the Spice Girls.
My mother’s phrase was, ‘I had to sleep on the ground when I was a refugee. Why would I do it on purpose?’ In the 1970s, my parents did build a fabulous house in the woods. That was my parents’ idea of camping, that they should sleep surrounded by outdoor beauty in a climate-controlled environment with flush toilets.
Want more Moose? Check out how other artists, athletes, politicians and notable people have answered The Narwhal’s Moose Questionnaire.
Updated on May 27, 2025, 2:20 p.m PT: This article has been updated to correct the year of the Fort McMurray wildfires, which occurred in 2016 and not in 2014 as previously stated.
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