Alberta is not ready for a warming world

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.
Read moreStatues of colonizers are coming down across Canada, it’s time to take down Edmonton’s Churchill statue

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.
Read morePOD: Happy Abolish Canada Day!

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.
Read moreWho poisoned the body politic?

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.
Thin blue line symbol not okay on cop uniforms, says Edmonton chief of police

The contentious ‘thin blue line’ symbol has attracted more attention recently as it has been spotted at various police and police union headquarters—and even on on-duty cops—in recent months. But what you might not know is that the Edmonton Police Service claims to have actually banned it already.
Read moreWinston Churchill was a genocidal mass murderer

A statue of Winston Churchill in Edmonton recently got an artistic re-imagining. Nisha Patel and Najib Jutt join host Duncan Kinney to talk about the racist, murderous legacy of Winston Churchill and the British Empire and what it is to be done about the statue, squares and schools named after this mass murderer.
Read moreLife in the necropolis

The academics have a word for what we’re seeing in Alberta, and it’s necropolitics: the politics of who lives and who dies. The subjugation of life to the power of death.
Achille Mbembe, the scholar who coined the term, looked at it in the context of wars and occupations. He wrote that those who have power create death-worlds, “forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”
Read morePOD: Ontario is not sending its best

Where did Kevin J. Johnston come from? Independent journalist Kevin Metcalf digs into the history of this infamous Ontarian and relatively recent Calgary transplant who has recently been locked up for a series of increasingly dangerous and aggressive anti-lockdown stunts.
Read moreHow hard is it to give away a million dollars?

The UCP are off to a hilarious start this week, still stumbling to properly announce Alberta’s new COVID vaccine lottery.
You’d think it’d be an easy crowd pleaser—and simple to explain. ‘If you get your vaccine, we’ll put you in a draw for a million dollars!’ But by the end of day Monday, we had all sorts of variations from the Premier, the Health Minister, and their interminably-posting caucus staff. In one weird version presented by Kenney, you could enter the lotto, not bother with the shots, and then if you did get the winning ticket still claim the prize as long as you ran out and got vaccinated before picking it up.
Read moreThe definitive history of Kevin J. Johnston: Hateful Ontario loser

Kevin “Jackal” Johnston is in pre-trial custody until his trial on July 12 following a series of anti-lockdown stunts in Calgary, Edmonton and Dawson Creek, BC. He’s been in the news recently as a mayoral candidate in Calgary, but what you might not know is that he has a storied history out east, too.
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