What's new
Alberta Daily is built in the open and changes most weeks. This is what has landed recently, what we are still trying to get permission to publish, and where a reader can genuinely help.
Last updated September 9, 2026.
- 🔧 Improved
The air ambulance planes are on the map too
Alongside the STARS helicopters, the flights map now knows Alberta's fixed-wing air ambulances — the King Airs that fly out of Edmonton International for the provincial programme, and HALO's helicopter in Medicine Hat. Same rule as STARS: you can see one is flying, but not the path it took.
- ✨ New
Tap a bus to see where it goes and when
Every bus and train on the live transit map now draws the line it is running when you tap it, and lists the stops still ahead with the time it reaches each one. The times are the city's own live predictions — the same ones their apps show — so a bus running late says so.
- 🩹 Fixed
Calgary buses finally show their route number
Calgary's live feed sends a bus number but no route number, so every Calgary vehicle on the map read "Bus 8246" and searching for route 3 found nothing at all. The route is now recovered from the city's other live feed: 311 of 440 Calgary buses gained a route the first time it ran, and route search works there for the first time.
- 🔧 Improved
The flights map knows who is flying
Planes over Alberta are now sorted into airliners, cargo, private and training, and air ambulances — each one a filter you can switch off. Tap an aircraft and it names the operator rather than just the code, so WJA241 reads as WestJet 241. Where a route is on file, the map draws where the flight came from and where it is going, with the distance and time still to run.
- ✨ New
Search the sky by flight or tail number
The flights map has a search box. Type a flight number, an airline, an aircraft type or a tail number — with or without the hyphen, so both C-GABC and CGABC work — and press enter to fly straight to it and open its card.
- ✨ New
STARS helicopters on the flights map
All eleven STARS air ambulances are identified by tail number and drawn as a red helicopter. Their flight paths are deliberately left out: a position tells you the service is up, while a trail from a hospital to a small town can tell a community who was on board. The volunteer receiver network rarely catches low-flying helicopters, so most days this shows nothing.
- 🔧 Improved
The mosquito index steps aside for winter
Edmonton's last trap count was July 16, so a homepage tile reading "55 days ago" was not telling anyone much. The mosquito index now leaves the homepage at the end of August and lets itself back in next spring, the day the season's first count is published. The page itself stays where it was, all year.
- 🩹 Fixed
Alberta for fun opens with the rest
The last shelf on the homepage — the quiz, the daily poll, ghost towns, roadside attractions, On This Day — shipped closed while the other three shipped open, so the part of the site people stay for was the part nobody saw. All four shelves now start open, and your browser still remembers any you close.
- 🩹 Fixed
Road closures, cameras and winter roads are live again
Alberta 511 started requiring a key in August, so those four maps had been stuck showing August 20 and were marked paused. The key came through. Closures, construction and incidents, highway cameras and winter road conditions are all updating again.
- 🩹 Fixed
The crop report is current again, and now shows harvest progress
It had been stuck on August 12. When harvest started, the province swapped the crop conditions table for a harvest one, and our reader could not find the table it was looking for. It reads both now, so you get per cent of each crop off the field by region, plus soil moisture. Each figure is stamped with the date of the report it came from.
- 🔧 Improved
Stories now share with a picture of where they happened
Share a story — on Facebook or anywhere else — and the preview now shows the place it is about: the High Level Bridge for Lethbridge, the Saamis Teepee for Medicine Hat, the Bow River for Calgary. Province-wide stories keep the mountains.
- 🔧 Improved
The daily Facebook posts say which one they are
The morning and evening briefings now post with the Rockies again, labelled "Morning summary" or "Evening summary" and dated, with the temperature and sky for all eight regions along the bottom.
- 🔧 Improved
The daily Facebook posts now carry the weather
Our morning and evening briefings used to post with the same photo of Moraine Lake every single day. They now carry a picture that changes daily, showing the temperature and sky for all eight regions — and the evening one draws the night sky, so a clear night is a moon rather than a midday sun.
- 🩹 Fixed
A few skies were showing the wrong symbol
"Increasing cloudiness" showed a thermometer instead of a cloud, and wildfire smoke shared its symbol with fog. Winter conditions the site had never seen — ice pellets, freezing drizzle, blowing snow, hail — would have shown thermometers too. All fixed before the first cold snap.
- 🩹 Fixed
Searching events by date now returns that date
Searching “September 20” used to list events across 26 different dates, because the year 2026 contains a 20. Search now understands the date itself, so “Sept 19”, “19 September” and “September 19” all show that day and only that day, and a festival is found by any day it runs. Searching by name, venue or city is unchanged.
- 🩹 Fixed
Christmas Day was showing under December 24
Events listed with a date but no start time were being filed one day early — Christmas Day sat under a December 24 heading, Boxing Day under December 25. They now appear on the day they happen. Nine listings were affected.
- ✨ New
Charity events now say so
Events run by a registered Canadian charity carry a green “Registered charity” marker. We add it only when we hold the organization’s CRA registration number — hover the marker to see it — so it is a fact you can check on the public register rather than our opinion of a good cause. Nothing guesses: no event gets the marker from words in its title.
- ✨ New
A “Not working?” button on every map
Spot a wrong number or a map that won’t load? Map, road and live pages now carry a small report button. Tell us what you see — and, only if you leave the box ticked, your browser and screen details, listed in full before you send — and it goes straight to the people who run the site.
- 📌 Note
What we will and won't take money for
Our editorial policy now says it plainly: we don't publish sponsored articles, guest posts or paid links. The one exception is an organizer paying to promote a real event — those sit in their own labelled block on the events page, named with who paid, and never change how an event is described or reach our news summaries. Gambling is excluded from all of it.
- ✨ New
Contributed articles, when they're worth running
We can now publish the occasional piece written by a named person outside Alberta Daily — provincial history, a first-hand account, something nobody else has covered. They run under the writer's own name rather than our AI desk byline, they're checked against original records before they go up, and no money changes hands in either direction.
- ✨ New
Share any page
Every page now ends with a quiet share row — Facebook, X, Reddit, WhatsApp, email and copy-link, plus your device's own share menu on phones. Stories, maps, live briefs and road pages also carry one right beside the content, so a closure or a headline reaches the group chat in two taps.
- 📌 Note
The road maps stalled on Aug. 20 — here's why
Alberta 511 changed its data service to require an access key, and our road closures, construction, highway cameras and winter roads maps quietly stopped updating that day. Restoring them needs a new key from Alberta 511. Until that lands, those numbers stay off the homepage rather than being shown as current, and each map page says exactly how old its data is.
- 🔧 Improved
The homepage now shows everything the site has
The feature tiles are grouped into four shelves — Money & bills, Everyday essentials, Outside, and Alberta for fun — and eleven features that only lived in the footer (home values, crop report, ghost towns, daylight and more) finally have a spot on the homepage. Each shelf collapses, and your browser remembers which ones you keep closed.
- 🔧 Improved
Real icons on story and event cards
The emoji are gone — a hockey stick no longer sits on golf and chuckwagon stories, and the circus tent is retired from community news entirely. Cards now carry quiet line icons, and sports stories get their own sport's mark: hockey, football, golf, soccer, baseball or racing.
- 🔧 Improved
The Top Story is now the day's biggest story
The hero used to show whatever published most recently — which once meant a thunderstorm watch already displayed in the alert chips on the same screen. The Top Story is now chosen by how widely a story was reported and how much it matters province-wide, and anything already covered by the live alert strip can't occupy the hero too.
- 🩹 Fixed
News that isn't about Alberta no longer publishes here
Stories with no Alberta connection — a Montana crime story, an Ohio plant explosion, a Nevada wildfire — were slipping into the feed labelled "Province-wide". The check that catches these was watching but not acting; it now blocks them before they publish. Fourteen such stories were taken down, and 23 more were re-filed under their correct region.
- 🩹 Fixed
The same story should only appear once now
Near-identical copies of one story were publishing side by side. Ten duplicates were merged into their best version — old links redirect and every outlet's credit was kept — and new stories are now checked against each other and against recent coverage before they publish, so genuine follow-ups still appear but re-reports do not.
- ✨ New
Alberta's energy pages now have one home
A new section gathers the four energy pages: where the province's electricity is coming from, where the power is out, oil and gas prices, and the regulated rates on your bill. The grid page also now shows the system marginal price — the price of the next megawatt, which is the live figure the hourly pool price averages out.
- ✨ New
You can now see where Alberta's electricity is coming from
A new page shows the province's generation mix live — how much is coming from gas, wind, solar, hydro and the rest — plus the pool price and whether Alberta is importing or exporting power. The figures are the AESO's, used with their agreement; the percentages are ours and say so. Not the outage map: this is where power comes from, not where it is off.
- 🩹 Fixed
The ad-free pages are now ad-free however you get to them
A few pages carry no advertising because the people whose data they show require it — the avalanche map, the power grid page, the road and camera pages. That held if you opened one directly, but not if you clicked through from elsewhere — from the new energy section to the grid page, say — where Google's ad code stayed loaded from the page before. Those pages now start fresh.
- 🩹 Fixed
"12 full closure" now reads "12 full closures"
The line at the top of each live map counts what's on it — and it was pasting the filter names in as written, so most maps read "12 full closure, 3 partial / lane closure". Every map now words its own counts properly at one and at many.
- ✨ New
Avalanche danger ratings are on the site
Avalanche Canada gave us written permission, so the avalanche danger map is live — Kananaskis, Banff and Lake Louise, Jasper, Waterton and Rogers Pass. Ratings show in Avalanche Canada's own wording, never reworded, each linking their full forecast. It is summer, so every region reads "Summer Conditions" until late fall. Never enter avalanche terrain on the strength of a map.
- ✨ New
The outage map now covers rural and central Alberta
FortisAlberta gave us written permission, so the outage map is no longer Edmonton-only — it now covers their rural and central service area, about 558,000 customers. Their planned work shows separately in blue: power scheduled to go off later, never counted as an outage. Calgary (ENMAX) and ATCO areas still aren't permitted, so an empty area there isn't the same as no outages.
- 🔧 Improved
The quiz got much bigger — and every question was re-checked
The daily quiz went from ten questions to 69, so it stops repeating itself. Before any of the new ones went live we checked them all against original sources — Environment Canada's climate archive, the Provincial Archives, city archives, Parks Canada — and corrected 26 explanations with details wrong. Every question now cites a primary source instead of Wikipedia.
- 🔧 Improved
Share cards now carry the Rockies
When a story or the daily briefing is shared — on Facebook or anywhere else — the preview card now shows Moraine Lake fading behind the headline instead of a plain blue panel. The photo is the same CC-licensed Andrea Belvedere image as our homepage, credited on every card.
- ✨ New
Alberta Daily is on Facebook
The morning and evening briefings now post to our Facebook Page, along with big stories as they land and emergency alerts as they're issued — weather-warning posts carry a map of the affected areas. The link is in the footer of every page.
- ✨ New
Where you're allowed to sled
The 38 hills Calgary, Edmonton and Grande Prairie designate for tobogganing, mapped, with the safety rules that come with them. Designated means somebody looked at what's at the bottom of the hill — it doesn't mean supervised.
- ✨ New
Every highway camera in the province, on one page
Hundreds of Alberta 511 cameras as a wall instead of a map — the mountain passes first, then the cities, then the long rural stretches. Pictures come straight from 511 and refresh about once a minute.
- 🩹 Fixed
Counts of one now read as one thing.
A quiet day could produce "1 weather alerts in effect" on the live pages, the homepage strip and the newsletter. Every count now uses the proper singular — "1 weather alert", "1 road closure", "1 fire ban, restriction or advisory".
- 📌 Note
We checked eighteen more news sources. We can use none of them yet.
Rural municipal news, farm papers, oil and gas trade press, the province's own newsroom — all measured, all blocked or unclear on their own terms. The province's newsroom would be the biggest win on the site, so we've written to ask. Until somebody says yes in writing, we don't take it.
- ✨ New
The roadside attractions are on a map now
Every giant pysanka, perogy and landing pad in the directory, pinned, with directions from each one. Most entries also gained a line about what you're actually looking at — and two came off the list: the Calgary "bighorn sheep" turned out to be live sheep at the zoo, and nobody outside a single map entry could confirm Cold Lake's moose exists.
- ✨ New
Four more things about Alberta, explained
What a chinook actually is and why it warms up coming downhill; why Alberta has no sales tax and the sixteen months in 1936 when it did; what a quonset is and how a US Navy building became a prairie word; and why the winter sky grows sundogs, haloes and pillars. Every claim linked to where it came from.
- 📌 Note
The editorial policy now covers sports, minors and Indigenous communities
Rules we were already following are now written where you can hold us to them: under-18 sport is covered at team level only, betting content is banned outright, and cultural events are described in the organizer's own framing — never embellished by AI.
- ✨ New
The weekly question
One light question about living here, every week — never politics. Your answer stays in your browser; we don't collect votes, so there's no tally and we won't invent one. Written replies via the contact page can run in the newsletter.
- ✨ New
The daily Alberta quiz is open
Five questions a day, one at a time, every answer explained and linked to its source. Keep a streak going, and a perfect score earns confetti. All ten opening questions were fact-checked against fetched sources before going live — three were corrected in the process.
- ✨ New
Somewhere in Alberta — a daily guessing game
One photograph of somewhere in the province each day. Five guesses, each miss tells you how far and which way — and solving it earns confetti and a streak. Nothing about you is stored anywhere but your own browser, and the shareable result has no place names in it.
- ✨ New
Alberta explained
Plain answers to things people actually wonder about, written here and linked to their sources. First up: why the province has no rats — and why "rat-free" does not mean what most people think it means.
- ✨ New
A Chinook counter for the season
The Chinook page now keeps a running count of the winter — separate Chinooks, days, the longest stretch and the most recent. It starts filling in when the season does, in October, and says plainly how long it has been watching.
- ✨ New
How much daylight we're getting
Sunrise, sunset and day length for eight cities, and how many minutes each one gained or lost overnight. Fort McMurray gets nearly two hours more than Lethbridge in June — the gap is worth watching.
- ✨ New
Alberta's ghost towns
Lille, Mountain Park, Sharples and Anthracite — places the coal left behind. Rowley, Dorothy, Wayne and Retlaw get their own section, because they turn up on ghost-town lists constantly and people actually live there.
- ✨ New
Roadside attractions
Eighteen big strange things beside Alberta's highways, from the Vegreville pysanka to the Torrington Gopher Hole Museum, each with directions and a link to check the location.
- ✨ New
Public health advisories
Outbreak and exposure notices by health zone, shown exactly as the province issues them. When we cannot read the official page in full we say so rather than showing a short list as if it were complete.
- ✨ New
The Alberta crop report
Soil moisture, crop conditions and pasture by region, with the five-year average alongside so the numbers mean something. Updated through the growing season; the page says plainly when it is between seasons.
- ✨ New
Small-town event calendars
Ten municipalities' own event calendars now feed the events page — Cardston, Edson, Beaumont, Bonnyville, Leduc, Redcliff, Provost, Wabasca and two counties.
- ✨ New
The rodeo hub
The professional season calendar in one place, with the amateur circuits that nothing else aggregates — 48 of the 59 stops are in Alberta.
- 📌 Note
Council coverage is being tested before it publishes
We are summarizing what small-town councils decide, from their own published minutes. Nothing is live yet: it runs in a review mode first, because closed-session items have to be removed by software before anything is summarized — never by asking an AI to skip them.
- 🩹 Fixed
Counts across the site now agree with each other
The fire-ban count on the homepage disagreed with the one on the map. Every number a page prints now comes from one place, and a test fails the build if a page starts counting on its own.
- 🔧 Improved
Advertorial kept out of the news feed
Sponsored posts that arrive through legitimate news feeds are now screened out before they reach the site.
What we're waiting on
A fair amount of Alberta information is published openly but licensed in a way that stops us relaying it. We do not work around that — if a source says no, or says nothing clearly enough, we leave it alone and ask. These are the asks currently outstanding:
- Council minutes from eleven more towns. Edson, Hinton, Camrose, Cochrane and others publish their agendas through a platform whose terms block automated readers entirely. We have asked; until they say yes, those councils are not covered.
- Alberta Health Services. AHS publishes boil-water and beach water-quality advisories, and it is the only source in the province that does. Its terms permit personal use only, so we link them rather than list them.
- Rodeo results and standings. Permission is confirmed for most of the season. One sanctioning body's terms are ambiguous, so its results stay off the site until that is settled in writing.
How you can help
- Tell us when we're wrong.A wrong date, a place described badly, an attraction that came down years ago — corrections are the most useful thing anyone sends us, and they get fixed the same day.
- If you work for a town, county or agency and your public information is not on the site, it is almost always a licence question rather than a technical one. A short note giving permission is usually all it takes.
- Tell somebody about a page. The small-town pages exist because nothing else covers those places. They only matter if the people there find them.
Anything above — corrections, permissions, or a source worth adding — goes to the contact page. How the site decides what it will and will not publish is set out in the editorial policy, and every source is listed on the sources page.