So now, on top of municipal elections, a provincial by-election in Fort McMurray, a fake senate election, and an even faker equalization referendum, we’ve got a federal election coming.

There’s just a plenitude of things to keep track of now. COVID-19? Still with us, and on the upswing, actually, as we’re more than a week into Alberta’s fourth wave. The opioid overdose crisis? Well, there’s been no firm action on that all year, so it’s still with us too—and getting worse. And investigators continue to identify more graves at the sites of Indian Residential ‘Schools’, with the count now well above a thousand.

And just in case that wasn’t all enough, climate change has been wreaking utter havoc worldwide all summer, and a rapidly-developing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is displacing hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom are arriving now as refugees. These are interesting times, to put it mildly. It’s hard to tell how to proceed.

On the campaign trail, Jason Kenney promised to depoliticize Alberta’s school curriculum, which he alleged was being injected with leftist ideology and “black armband history” by the former NDP government. But the paper trail shows that the UCP’s controversial replacement curriculum has repeatedly been sent to the Premier and his inner circle for approval—even before the education minister ever saw it.

The Liberal government is spending $7.5 million dollars on a Victims of Communism memorial that was started by Jason Kenney 14 years ago. Dan Boeckner of the Bottlemen podcast joins us to discuss the bipartisan consensus on the controversial monument, the news that the organization behind the monument received donations honoring fascists and Nazi collaborators who were responsible for the massacres of hundreds of thousands of people in Europe during World War 2 and much more. 

The dramatic findings of the latest report from the International Panel on Climate Change make one thing very clear: sooner or later, Alberta is in for a reckoning.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres calls the report a “code red for humanity.” So much evidence has piled up that it is now undeniable that greenhouse gas emissions, “unequivocally caused by human activities,” are not only the cause of global warming, but that thanks to two decades of dithering and failing to get our collective act together, 1.1C of that global warming is now already locked-in.

Edmonton's statue of Roman Shukhevych, an infamous Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, has once again been defaced with red paint. This time, a second local monument—a memorial honouring the 14th Waffen SS Division—was targeted as well. 

Nobody's actually going to get elected to the Senate in Alberta's upcoming Senate "elections." So why are the UCP doing it? And why's Duncan Kinney in it? Featuring guest host Producer Jim

COVID protests of a different tenor are happening daily in Alberta's big cities in opposition to the drastic rollback of COVID-prevention measures the UCP announced last Wednesday.

Noon rallies at the McDougall Centre in Calgary and the Legislature in Edmonton were drawing dozens last Friday, but that number has swelled to hundreds. Organizers intend to keep these rallies, and concurrent pressure campaigns like letter-writing to MLAs, going until at least the 16th, or when testing, contact tracing and isolation are reinstated. The Alberta NDP are meanwhile demanding the government commit to holding a public inquiry into how the pandemic has been handled, which does seem like a better use of that tool than what Steve Allan is presently putting it to.

It's late fall 2022. A popular mayor of a southern Alberta town wakes up to a peculiar email: the Second Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns has reviewed several news reports from 2020 and 2021, as well as his social media account, and has determined that he engaged in an “anti-Alberta energy campaign.” 

How do we fix decades of state-sponsored, systemic anti-Muslim hate? According to Alberta's Justice Minister Kaycee Madu all we need is pepper spray. Dr. Muna Saleh and Haiqa Cheema join us to discuss the Alberta's government’s incredibly inadequate response to an epidemic of violent hate crimes against visibly Muslim women.

Political discourse in Alberta kicked off very tediously this week with the Premier trying to pick a fight about trucks. The question of whether Canada’s city-dwellers really need all those F-150s popped up in Passage, a left-wing online publication, last week, and Fox News in the United States picked it up as something to holler about for a few days. And so the Premier ended up hollering about it too.

It’s a safe bet that when Jason Kenney is pivoting to the culture war there’s something real he’d prefer you not be paying attention to. This week, it’s worrying COVID numbers in Alberta, especially out of Calgary. Late last Friday afternoon AHS reported that the R value (an estimate of how many other people each person with COVID infects, on average) was holding steady above 1 and the virus was making gains again. Monday and Tuesday’s data is continuing the trend.