A co-organizer of a Palestinian solidarity march who was charged with a hate crime for leading a chant of, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” has had his charges stayed.

There’s no shortage of dramatic political news this November, from historic rallies against the occupation of Gaza to an aggressive play by Danielle Smith to restructure Alberta’s health care system. But while the spotlight is elsewhere, Alberta’s Legislative Assembly is still open for business. Here’s what you need to know about eleven new laws they’re cooking up in there:

The University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) has quietly cancelled a webinar about the Waffen-SS and the Galicia Division which included Alik Gomelsky, a speaker with no apparent academic credentials whose writing focuses on rehabilitating Ukrainian Nazi collaborators.

After a Nov. 5 pro-Palestine march in Calgary, co-organizer Wesam Khaled was charged with a hate crime for leading a chant of, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” his fellow organizers say.  

The Progress Report podcast is back and fellow Progress Reporters Jeremy Appel and Jim Storrie are around to break down the resolutions and the vibes heading into the upcoming UCP AGM. This is the first AGM with Danielle Smith at the helm and we'll see where her loosey-goosey leadership style plays with an increasingly bug-eyed UCP grassroots. 

If you live in Edmonton you are going to see a higher than expected increase to your property taxes. If you’re one of 4,500 inside city workers in Edmonton you haven’t seen a pay increase in five years and are still without a contract.

In September, following a two-week visit to Canada, UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery Tomoya Obokata declared Canadian programs that tie foreign labourers to a specific employer, including the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) Program, to be a “breeding ground” for modern slavery. 

On Sept. 26, University of Alberta VP Verna Yiu announced that a $30,000 endowment for the school’s Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) in the name of Yaroslav Hunka, the Waffen-SS veteran who earned international infamy after he received two standing ovations in Canadian Parliament, would be returned to his family. 

The school also committed to reviewing its naming policies to avoid similar embarrassments in the future. 

The University of Alberta’s Nazi veteran donor problem runs far deeper than a $30,000 donation in Hunka’s name. The U of A has far deeper ties to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, with endowments and donations in their names worth well over $1.4 million.

Edmonton City councillor and police commissioner Anne Stevenson proposed a minor change to how reports on use-of-force tactics are compiled during a Sept. 21 police commission meeting. What happened next demonstrates just how ineffective an institution the Edmonton Police Commission is. 

Alberta has all the trappings of a modern subnational government attached to a real life, honest-to-god state: political parties, laws, a bureaucracy, a guy in a fancy hat who carries a mace. But decades of conservative rule have hollowed out Alberta to the point where it is simply incapable of providing the services, support and guarantee of safety that a provincial or state-level government should provide.