Enforcement against the anti-maskers seems to have finally kicked off, as over the past week several prominent figures in the movement have successfully taunted authorities into taking action. 

Two organizers of the Bowden ‘anti-lockdown’ rally, which drew hundreds the weekend of May 1, have been charged with breaking the Health Act. Chris Scott, the owner of the Whistle Stop Cafe in Mirror, was arrested after his latest anti-mask protest event, and many attendees were ticked. Down in Calgary, street preacher and far-right organizer Artur Pawlowski and his brother were arrested on Sunday.

Every day for the past 14 months independent journalist Nora Loreto has tallied up COVID deaths in residential care. We chat with Nora about her incredibly valuable but unpaid journalism, the long-term care disaster and the state of Canadian media. Don't miss it. 

Will the Alberta government bring in stricter pandemic measures today? That was the assurance of Premier Jason Kenney yesterday, in a long, rambling, confusing afternoon press conference.

Minnesota is often called the most Canadian state in the U.S. and given the fact a pipeline corporation is working closely with the police to arrest and harass their political opponents we're inclined to agree. Alleen Brown of the Intercept joins us to discuss how Alberta based pipeline corporation Enbridge is funding and supplying police in Minnesota in order to quash Indigenous-led resistance to the Line 3 pipeline.  

Marshall Smith, the chief of staff to Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Jason Luan and a key architect of the “Alberta Model” of abstinence-only addictions treatment, reportedly forced people in recovery to phone bank for his political candidate of choice in one of his previous roles. 

Jason Kenney continued his bad habit of blaming others for his catastrophic mishandling of the third wave of this pandemic by making racist, “anti-indigenous” comments regarding vaccinations in northern Alberta on April 26th. 

The regional municipality of Wood Buffalo—the north-eastern chunk of Alberta containing Fort Mac—has declared a state of local emergency.

There’s only one hospital in Fort McMurray and its ICU is already full. The schools are all closed. The virus is ripping through the ‘man camps’ in the area where oil sands workers live; over a dozen work camps in the RMWB are reporting outbreaks. 

It’s the worst hotspot in Alberta, with a rate of over 1300 cases per hundred thousand people. And Alberta itself is the worst spot in the country. At over 450 cases per hundred thousand, Alberta is even worse than Ontario, where Doug Ford has already taken the desperate step of calling in the military to work at hospitals.

Julia Levin of Environmental Defence joins us to talk about her recently released report that dives into just how much financial support the fossil fuel industry squeezes out of the federal government and we also have Jeremy Appel on to discuss his investigative deep-dive into the 16 orphan wells famous rich guy W. Brett Wilson was able to dump on the public. Would it surprise you to discover that these two are connected? Listen to the pod to find out how. 

How can we protect our communities from the third wave of this pandemic when our own provincial government won’t take it seriously? Maybe it’s time we learned something from the anti-maskers. 

When Forent Energy, a floundering oil and gas company, and its former chairman and its single largest shareholder, minor Calgary celebrity W. Brett Wilson, were given an environmental protection order from the Alberta Energy Regulator, they didn’t clean up their mess—instead Wilson dumped 16 wells on the Orphan Well Association, leaving millions of dollars of liabilities to the public to pick up for him.