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.

A leaked draft of Steve Allan’s inquiry report on “anti-Alberta” environmental activism has everything you’d expect: climate change denial, weird conspiracy theories about activists plotting for a Marxist “one world government”, and plenty of sloppy, lazy inaccuracies. But then there’s something you wouldn’t expect. In the draft, about three quarters of which the Progress Report acquired last week, Commissioner Allan takes great pains to say, repeatedly, that despite all the inflammatory filler crammed into his report, he has no evidence that the environmental movement has done anything wrong at all.

This post will be updated if and when more environmental organizations make their submissions to the Allan inquiry public. 

The Allan Inquiry into so-called “anti-Alberta energy campaigns” is only a few days away from its July 30 deadline. Although whether Allan will submit his final report on time still remains to be seen but there is some progress to report. The inquiry has shared a draft version of its report with about 40 environmental groups and funders that were named in the report. 

Steve Allan's inquiry into "anti-Alberta energy campaigns" is poised to find that nothing done by climate activists, or the donors who funded them, "is in any way improper or constitutes conduct that should be in any way impugned," according to sections of the draft report obtained by the Progress Report. 

Not everyone has gotten back to their pre-pandemic normal yet but Alberta’s UCP government sure has. The war with nurses is back on, and AHS dropped a hell of a bomb last week, aiming for 3% rollbacks to nursing wages along with a host of other nickel-and-dime cuts from all angles. This, after Alberta’s nurses have already been stuck with years of salary freezes. This in an Alberta where hospitals in even the capital city are closing beds for lack of staff. And this, after those nurses have been in a grueling fight for over a year to keep coronavirus from overwhelming the whole province.

Last week’s brutal, historic heat wave has highlighted just how unprepared Alberta is for climate change—and shown us just who will be most at risk.

Alberta has yet to fully tabulate the fatalities but the numbers from British Columbia, hit by the heat just before us, are bleak. The BC Coroners’ Service estimates that in our neighboring province nearly 600 people were killed by the heat. We can surely expect some grim statistics of our own once Alberta’s numbers are crunched.

Reeling from the discoveries of thousands of unmarked child graves—each a victim of an attempt by our government to eradicate Indigenous cultures—people celebrated Canada Day differently this year. Monuments glorifying colonizers were toppled across the country, and at least one was decapitated. Statues of both Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth were brought down in Winnipeg. A statue of Captain Cook was thrown into the sea in Victoria. Frank Oliver’s plaque here in downtown Edmonton received an artistic reimagining with a splash of blood-red paint. 

As the numbers of unmarked graves at the sites of former residential schools piles up Rob Houle returns to discuss happy and sad fireworks, what you're celebrating when you're celebrating Canada Day and we dive into the details of a couple of sites where it has long been speculated that there are mass, unmarked graves in Alberta.  

No doubt the dominant issue on most Albertans’ minds today is this awful, historically unprecedented heat. But perhaps not if you’re a Muslim woman. Then you might have a more pressing concern.

The National Council of Canadian Muslims revealed yesterday that, in a continuation of the pattern of rising violence against Muslim women in this province, on Sunday night a man opened fire on a woman wearing hijab in Edmonton in a drive-by attack. She escaped with her life, thankfully, but as I’m writing this no suspects have been identified. The woman did not recognize her attacker, and in the dead of night—the attack occurred just before midnight—it’s unlikely the attacker could have identified her. All he would have seen was her hijab.