While many of the notable candidates for Calgary’s next municipal election say they didn’t fundraise in 2024 at all, campaign disclosure data from last year shows that a select few have put together appreciable war chests.

Lawsuits for Alberta’s latest boondoggle are already starting to pay out, and the first disclosed payment—a settlement with one of the five companies who were demanding $16 billion in damages—already has Alberta twice as deep in the hole as 2022’s “Turkish Tylenol” debacle.

In March 2015, two Edmonton Police Service (EPS) officers—Sgt. Greg Lewis and Const. Darren French—were charged with trafficking illegal steroids within the police force and suspended without pay. 

The Edmonton Sun reported that six officers were caught purchasing anabolic steroids from Lewis and French between 2005 and 2013, leading Chief Rod Knecht to confidently state that the scandal “was confined to a small group of individuals and their associates.”

One of the officers identified by the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT) was Const. Warren Driechel, who was then a member of the Edmonton Drug and Gang Enforcement Unit. 

This week on the pod we chat with former Alberta NDP health minister Sarah Hoffman about Alberta's ongoing measles outbreak, what's behind it, and what the opposition thinks should be done.

Members of the public appointed to Premier Danielle Smith’s Alberta Next panel have given a combined total of more than $44,315 to the ruling UCP, according to an analysis of campaign finance records. 

The 16-person panel consists of five UCP elected officials—the premier, Environment and Protected Areas Minister Rebecca Schulz, Leduc-Beaumont MLA Brandon Lunty, Athabasca-Barrhead-Westlock MLA Glenn van Dijken and Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills MLA Tara Sawyer—and 11 public appointees.

With seven public appointees having donated money to the UCP, this means that three-quarters of panelists are either UCP MLAs and/or donors.

Attendees at the first stop of Premier Danielle Smith’s travelling “Alberta Next” roadshow in Red Deer were overwhelmingly supportive of her series of proposals to enhance Alberta’s autonomy.

This is likely due to the fact that free tickets for the event were released to UCP members before the general public, a source who holds a UCP membership confirmed to the Progress Report.

In this week's episode of the Progress Report podcast, Jeremy tells us about the swords, paintings, German far-right politicians and dubious local characters on offer at the Canada Day separatist rally at the Whistle Stop Cafe in Mirror, Alberta.

Bicycling has always had a bad rap it seems, accruing devoted haters from the get-go. In the late 19th-century women cyclists were warned they’d develop “bicycle face” and the greater social mobility these contraptions afforded them had some worried that gender lines were being blurred. Medical journals raised fears of reproductive damage, deformations, mental illness—even “homicidal lunacy.”

Speed and danger to pedestrians (and horses) were also early concerns. Safety is no small issue—73 per cent of cyclist fatalities are caused by motor vehicle collisions. Failure to respect road safety rules can be deadly for cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists alike. However, stats show that in areas where cycling is more prevalent—including dedicated cycling infrastructure—collision and fatality rates drop substantially.

But the dialogue has shifted. These days it seems that bicycles are often viewed as being in competition with motorized vehicles as they tend to share the same infrastructure. Rather than being understood as a method of lowering vehicle congestion, bikes are being blamed for making the situation worse. 

There’s no political event in Alberta more quintessential than Stampede, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

When the American vaudevillian entertainer Guy Weadick first cooked the idea up in 1912, Alberta’s ranching industry was already largely out the door. As several essays explain in Lewis Thomas’s Rancher’s Legacy, advances in mechanized farming coupled with a brutal 1906-1907 winter had already pushed ranching into steep decline, and agricultural land in the province was increasingly being used for wheat, not cattle.

A year before employees at two downtown Edmonton mental health clinics were pressured into transferring their patients’ prescriptions to Shoppers Drug Mart, Alberta Health Services (AHS) signed a contract to embed Shoppers within a northeast Edmonton addictions recovery facility, according to documents obtained through FOIP. 

A former employee of Henwood Treatment Centre told the Progress Report that the presence of an on-site pharmacy created pressure to accept more in-patients than before, compromising their quality of care, and redundantly fill patients’ prescriptions that they had brought with them before entering treatment.