Contact tracing is broken. 

Dr. Hinshaw told us on November 5th that contact tracers would now only be contacting people in “high priority settings.” Only the close contacts of health care workers, minors, and individuals who live or work within communal facilities (like long term care homes) would be notified that they had been exposed to COVID-19 and that they should self-quarantine. People sick with COVID in a non-priority setting were now expected to now do all of this on their own. 

Dave Cournoyer of Daveberta fame joins us to discuss Alberta's multiple overlapping crises. We talk COVID-19, Jason Kenney's $1.7 billion dollar whoopsie, conservative connected law firms making bank and how the smart money is on Joe Biden cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline. 

Originally published on the Shades of Colour Instagram account. Republished with permission. 

The UCP’s latest anti-worker legislation, the Orwellian-named Ensuring Safety and Cutting Red Tape Act (otherwise known as BIll 47), is another attempt by the UCP to roll Alberta back a couple decades when it comes to workers rights.

These changes reduce costs for employers on the backs of workers, transfer even more power to the boss and will see workers face an even crueler world if they get sick or injured on the job. When Albertans get up in the morning to go to work they expect to come home safe and healthy. For some workers that isn’t the reality. Here are the biggest changes to Occupational Health and Safety (OHS)  and the Workers Compensation Board (WCB) in this legislation that will affect you in your day to day work life.

Six months ago president-elect Joe Biden said "I've been against Keystone from the beginning. It is tarsands that we don't need — that in fact is very, very high pollutant." 

Joe Biden has been clear: he’s going to kill this project. He was always going to kill this project. Yet even when it was brutally obvious that Biden would be America’s next president, Premier Kenney kept betting the farm on Keystone XL.

Every year the poppy is at the centre of a cyclical, empty, culture war debate. Last year, it was Don Cherry. This year, it’s Whole Foods. 

It’s been a wild week for political news. Now that the big distraction to our south is (mostly) out of the way, let me catch you up on what’s been happening locally.

The Auditor General released the latest audit of Alberta’s books and wow, is it brutal. The AG found over $1.6 billion of accounting screw-ups under the UCP, a nearly unprecedented level of book-fudging.

Three law firms with deep connections to the United Conservative Party have recently gained a large amount of business from the Alberta government, publicly available documents show.

“It demonstrates a connection between political activism, donations to key players, and rewards in terms of legal service billings,” says Nigel Bankes, the natural resource law chair in the faculty of law at the university of Calgary.

We speak with Andre Goulet of the Harbinger Media Network about his plans to knock Ben Shapiro and Pod Save America off the Canadian political podcast charts. We also discuss Canadaland, the future of the CBC and what's next for the Progress Report. 

This morning strikes erupted across the province as nursing-care and support workers set up pickets at hospitals throughout Alberta.

Devon, Whitecourt, Calgary, Wetaskiwin, Edmonton, High Level, Claresholm, Evansburg and Okotoks are just a few of the dozens of communities with active strikes. My colleague Duncan is maintaining a strike tracker on our website with the full list.

The strikes come after months of threatened cuts from the UCP government--the latest being a plan to lay off over 11,000 laundry, housekeeping, and support workers and to privatize their jobs.