The Edmonton Police Service had such difficulty finding volunteers for a ceremony honouring outgoing chief Dale McFee that it had to pay officers overtime and ask EPS lawyers to participate, according to documents obtained through FOIP.

As McFee ended his tenure as Edmonton police chief to become Alberta’s top bureaucrat, the EPS held a changing of command ceremony on Feb. 21 to mark the transfer of power from McFee to interim co-chiefs Warren Dreichel and Devin Laforce, which was followed by a reception in McFee’s honour. 

In this week's belated episode of the Progress Report podcast, Euan Thomson gives us an update on the current status of Canada's drug poisoning polycrisis; also, we chat about the star Liberal candidate in Calgary who was involved in the University of Calgary crackdown on Palestinian solidarity protesters last year.

Things are not going well in Alberta’s health system—especially when it comes to timely access to surgeries. But with the many spoilers of COVID-19, the “refocusing” of AHS into new agencies and now the procurement scandal that the Alberta NDP have been calling “CorruptCare,” diagnosing what exactly is going wrong isn’t easy.

Health policy researcher Andrew Longhurst’s new report for the Parkland Institute, Operation Profit: Private Surgical Contracts Deliver Higher Costs and Longer Waits, attempts to make some sense of the mess. The Progress Report sat down with Longhurst for an interview after his report was released last week so he could walk us through his analysis.

On Wednesday, the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) leadership announced a “solidarity pact” it entered with more than two dozen unions, but offered few details on the pact’s tangible impact. 

Most of the participating unions are AFL affiliates, but the AFL made their announcement at the west Edmonton headquarters of the Alberta Union of Public Employees (AUPE), Alberta’s largest union. 

Carney’s first act in office puts an end to an Albertan invention

Rest in peace to a real one: Canada’s carbon tax is dead, slain by Prime Minister Mark Carney.

It’s a policy move with particular resonance to Alberta and not just because all the conservatives here hate it. While a variety of approaches to pricing carbon have been tried over the years, the federal carbon tax cribbed almost entirely from the Notley NDP’s climate plan.

Journalist Susan Thompson joins us on the pod with the latest from Valleyview, where the local library is under political siege from a batch of odd characters including a UCP VP of comms and a white nationalist who worked for the local MLA.

An energy company’s attempt to set up a Bitcoin mine against a landowner’s wishes on land it leased for extracting natural gas has been quashed at the Court of King’s Bench. 

In a March 10 decision, Justice Christopher A. Rickards ruled that Persist Oil and Gas violated the terms of its lease with plaintiff Roy Flowers, who’s owned the land since 2012, ordering the company to shut the mine down.

Who is Danielle Smith without Justin Trudeau?

The federal Liberals held their leadership vote this weekend and picked economist and ur-banker Mark Carney, which means a lot of Albertans are going to have to switch the stickers on their trucks.

A year after hiring a lobbying firm with close ties to the governing UCP to advocate on its behalf, Shoppers Drug Mart scored a $2.5-million agreement with Alberta Health Services (AHS) to provide mandatory COVID-19 tests for international travellers.

One of the AHS officials who signed off on that agreement is Blayne Iskiw, a director and shareholder of a company at the centre of allegations that the UCP government pressured AHS to accept inflated contracts to operate chartered surgical facilities.

Dr. Wing Li from Support Our Students and Chris Gallaway from Friends of Medicare join Jim and Jeremy to dissect Alberta's 2025 budget.