We speak with Dean Dettloff about his recent piece on how Jason Kenney is at odds with the Pope on carbon pricing, austerity and how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. We also touch on the history and the reality of the Christian left in a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation. 

On November 27, 2020, Premier Jason Kenney held an all-day meeting at Government House for at least 12, and as many as 30 senior government officials and staffers. The very same day, Kenney shut down banquet halls and conference centres across the province. 

Jason Kenney may have blown billions of dollars of Albertans’ public money betting on Donald Trump and Keystone XL, but it’s paying off for him personally.

He’s been doing the rounds in the media all week playing up a performance as the great pipeline defender, the champion of Alberta oil.

Chief McFee of the Edmonton Police Service answered the Progress Report's questions (kind of) on defunding the police, secret armoured vehicles, school resource officers and more. We break down his answers with Reakash Walters and Molly Swain.

Sometimes you just have to take a minute to marvel at what the Edmonton Police Service (EPS) gets up to. In just one week we saw the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT) release a report on a truly clownish negligent discharge of a firearm by a member of the EPS responsible for training other Edmonton police officers on how to safely use their guns. Then six cop cars managed to get into a massive traffic accident while in Calgary as part of an unofficial procession in a funeral for a Calgary police officer. Then it was revealed that a senior spokesperson and media relations professional for the EPS is a conspiracy theorist who called the pandemic the "#Scamdemic" and labelled Jason Kenney and Dr. Deena Hinshaw as “puppets for the globalists,” after public health restriction were extended. 

Jason Kenney’s catching shame from constituents, supporters, right-wing columnists and even his own caucus for letting his MLAs and staff break Alberta’s COVID travel restrictions to vacation in Mexico, Hawaii, London and Las Vegas. But shame on vacationing during the pandemic has also come from someone else: Pope Francis, the leader of the faith Kenney has built a career invoking for political gain.

Joe Biden, who will be sworn in as president of the USA on Wednesday, will cancel the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day on the job. Joe Biden is following through and doing exactly what he said he would do back in May. This news is in no way a surprise.

Despite this Jason Kenney invested $1.5 billion of our money directly into the project plus loan guarantees worth several billions more. He did this knowing that Biden was very likely to cancel the project if he won the election. Jason Kenney bet billions of dollars on Donald Trump winning the next election and we all lost. 

Just before Christmas Finance Minister Travis Toews signed several still-secret and unpublished ministerial orders that handed over financial control of the Alberta Teachers’ Retirement Fund (ATRF) and most of Alberta’s other public sector pensions to AIMCo. The ATRF as well as the Local Authorities Pension (LAPP), the Special Forces Pension Plan (SFPP) and the Public Service Pension Plan (PSPP) are now the plaything of AIMCo and workers and their representatives have little to no say in how their pensions’ funds are managed.

The B117 variant of COVID-19 is hyper infectious, currently rampaging through the U.K. and Ireland and is already here in Canada. It's only a matter of time before it gets to Alberta. We talk to Dr. Gosia Gasperowicz about the super strain and what Alberta needs to do to stop it. 

In the wake of the failed attempt at a coup by supporters of Donald Trump, conservatives across the country are scrambling to distance themselves from Trumpism and the far-right media-grifter complex that propped it up. Closer to home, Alberta conservatives are scrambling to distance themselves from something too--their own leader.

Jason Kenney’s approval ratings are in the gutter after we all learned last week that six of his caucus members and a whole whack of his staff ignored the pandemic restrictions they’ve imposed on all of us to go party in Hawaii, Mexico, London and Las Vegas, and it doesn’t look like everyone in the UCP caucus wants to follow him there.