Edmonton City councillor and police commissioner Anne Stevenson proposed a minor change to how reports on use-of-force tactics are compiled during a Sept. 21 police commission meeting. What happened next demonstrates just how ineffective an institution the Edmonton Police Commission is. 

Alberta has all the trappings of a modern subnational government attached to a real life, honest-to-god state: political parties, laws, a bureaucracy, a guy in a fancy hat who carries a mace. But decades of conservative rule have hollowed out Alberta to the point where it is simply incapable of providing the services, support and guarantee of safety that a provincial or state-level government should provide.

A 2021 appointee to the University of Alberta senate who has pledged to end “liberal indoctrination” donated more than $20,000 to conservative political parties from 2016 to 2021 and sat on the board of his local UCP constituency association.

An Edmonton cop who stole cash in three separate incidents, including once from a murder crime scene, gets to keep his job, according to a recent ruling by an Alberta Court of Appeal judge and may be owed more than a half-million in back pay.

Chief Dale McFee of the Edmonton Police Service blamed the victims of Cst. Alex Doduk in two recent civil trials where Doduk was charged with assault with a weapon and where he shot someone to death. Cst. Doduk is currently on paid leave for an unrelated matter which has not been disclosed. 

Civil rights activists in Edmonton have launched a lawsuit to stop the city from evicting encampments of unhoused people when the city knows they have nowhere to go.  Officially, the city says it will vigorously fight for the right to continue brutalizing the homeless, stealing and destroying their property, and putting their lives and safety at risk. But morally, there is only one ethical choice for councillors and the mayor: the city needs to lose, and these thirteen politicians need to do whatever it takes to make that happen.

Harm reduction advocate Euan Thomson, pictured with a "Dead People Don't Recover" sign, protests the Alberta Recovery Capital Conference on Feb. 21. After he promoted the protest on his newsletter earlier that month, Calgary police searched his name in their database. (Submitted)

Calgary police won’t explain why a local harm reduction advocate and police critic’s name was searched in their database twice in February, but maintain that the searches were legitimate. 

Euan Thomson filed an Aug. 9 complaint with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta (OIPCA) about the police database search, arguing he’s being targeted for his activism. He requested the identity of those who conducted the search, the reason why they conducted it and any internal correspondence regarding the search. 

“It feels at minimum like a breach of trust and a breach of privacy, but at worst it feels like an attempt to intimidate me into silence,” he told the Progress Report. 

A lawsuit is being launched by a local human rights group that claims Edmonton’s policy of evicting homeless people from encampments violates their civil rights. 

There’s not much that demonstrates our warped priorities better than a 2020s Alberta summer.

Ever since things got especially bad a few years ago, it’s been the same perverse show. All winter we’re inundated with horror: unhoused people literally freezing on the streets as they can’t get a warm place to sleep, people are dropping left and right from drug poisonings, and everything right in everyone’s faces as desperate people on the precipice of death shelter in the only public spaces they can get into.

Then the sun comes out, the snow melts, and as soon as the cities’ unhoused folks are out in encampments instead of the train stations, all the electeds dust off their hands and decide they’re due for a break. It’s festival season! Time to get some party photos for the Instagram!

It is not time to get some party photos for the Instagram.

A new collective agreement between the Edmonton Police Association (EPA) and the City of Edmonton that was imposed by an arbitrator will cost the city an estimated $19.7 million, or roughly $10,000 per cop.