The Edmonton CFL team has finally changed its name after years of Inuit and non-Inuit supporters speaking out against its name. Before the team finally changed the name, they claimed in an online survey that the name was “originally chosen more than 100 years ago out of acknowledgement, perseverance, and hardiness of Inuit culture.”

Alberta’s COVID-19 numbers are worse today than on the day the provincial government first closed the schools—and they’re trending higher and higher. Alberta’s curve is “no longer flat,” warns Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health. We have stumbled back into the realm of exponential growth.

But in less than five weeks, the UCP are planning to completely re-open our schools.

We kick off the inaugural edition of the Red String, a monthly column from Laura Kruse on conspiracy theories and Alberta, with a bit of theory and history on conspiracy theories in Canada. From Freemasons to aliens to Q and everything in between. Also, please read Laura's story on one of our favourite conspiracy theories that isn't a conspiracy theory titled McKinsey, 🍞📈, and the UCP’s incoming evisceration of Alberta’s post-secondary system.

In December of 2019, the statue of Roman Shukhevych outside of the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex was vandalized with red tape and spray-painted with the words “Nazi Scum.” According to both the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex and B’nai Brith this act is being investigated by the Edmonton Police Service’s hate crimes unit. The Edmonton Police Service has refused to reply to inquiries from the Progress Report on this matter.

With 750,000 Alberta children due to head back to overcrowded classrooms during a resurging killer pandemic, now seems a great time for a pop quiz.

In June, Alberta’s United Conservative Party government handed management consulting firm McKinsey & Company a $3.7 million contract to comprehensively review Alberta’s post-secondary system. To understand why our post-secondary system is well on its way to being viciously ripped to shreds by the high priests of neoliberal ideology we look to Pete Buttigieg.  

Edmonton’s CFL team has still not changed its racist team name despite pressure continuing to mount on multiple fronts. 

Two Lethbridge police officers illegally surveilled NDP MLA Shannon Phillips and followed and ran checks on people she met with after an informal meeting she had at a diner when she was a cabinet minister. 

Our guest Abdul Malik makes the case for why the UCP's new union busting bill is actually good. Plus Duncan follows up on his story about the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator war criminal statue by going down the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator rabbit hole. 

As the cries for defunding the police and investing in community supports grows, police forces are blunting these with their own attempts at reform. Edmonton police are putting video cameras in cars and the Calgary police are expanding use of body cameras. But focusing on cameras is a smoke screen that doesn’t address the systemic racism in how policing works or stop police violence.