This morning strikes erupted across the province as nursing-care and support workers set up pickets at hospitals throughout Alberta.

Devon, Whitecourt, Calgary, Wetaskiwin, Edmonton, High Level, Claresholm, Evansburg and Okotoks are just a few of the dozens of communities with active strikes. My colleague Duncan is maintaining a strike tracker on our website with the full list.

The strikes come after months of threatened cuts from the UCP government--the latest being a plan to lay off over 11,000 laundry, housekeeping, and support workers and to privatize their jobs.

Thousands of healthcare workers across Alberta walked off the job today in a wildcat strike. This action by workers follows attacks on Alberta's public health care system by Jason Kenney's United Conservative Party that seeks to cut, outsource and privatize many of these critical workers' jobs. 

Today, Alberta’s unionized healthcare workers began wildcat strikes across the province in response to UCP austerity, layoffs and privatization. This is alongside Alberta’s active COVID-19 cases going from a trickle to a flood. The likelihood of our hospitals being overwhelmed grows every day. Alberta remains mostly open, with Jason Kenney promoting “personal responsibility” in lieu of a coherent state response to the crisis. The worst-case scenario outlined months ago is rapidly approaching, case numbers are increasing, and the supports propping up the system are being systematically destroyed. 

Back in March 2020, Jennifer Rapuano-Kremenik saw a father with a young child holding a sign that read, “Single father, need help. Don’t want money, want a job.” That inspired her to get together with friends to start a grassroots organization called Harvest Hills Cares which has helped more than 3,200 families in need of food, shelter, and other support so far.

Placing me on hold multiple times to take calls for assistance in the short time we were on the phone, Rapuano-Kremenik told me about some of the more poignant situations she’s addressed over the past seven months.

Once again, the United Conservative Party have laid bare their priorities at their annual general meeting. And this time, for a change, people seem to be believing them.

We speak with Courtney Walcott and LJ Parker about their work with the Defund2Fund coalition on defunding the police in Calgary as well as psychopathic challenge coins, why so many teachers and principals think it's ok to use the n-word in school, domestic violence in the Calgary Police Service and more. 

Last week the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) published an incredible scoop: that a group of Hitler-quoting, Stormfront-posting, Nazi Germany enthusiasts operating under the banner of the Alberta Separatist Youth League (ASYL), had embedded themselves into positions of power in the ‘Wexit’ Alberta independence movement.

Tuesday morning the UCP government announced massive cuts to AHS.

Side-stepping the swelling public support for doctors and nurses, the UCP are going after workers in less high-profile roles: support staff like housekeepers, laboratory workers, and laundry workers.

In total the cuts amount to 11,000 layoffs--that’s 11,000 good, stable health care jobs eliminated in the middle of a pandemic. 

Elizabeth Simons is the co-author of a new piece published by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network on a group of young men in the Wexit movement, the Alberta Separatist Youth League, who have big political aspirations and are also extremely explicit in their anti semitic, racist, and authoritarian beliefs in leaked private chat logs. 

The “Alberta Model” concocted by the UCP government and the Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions (MMHA) Jason Luan to deal with the opioid poisoning crisis is social murder in action. The contempt Premier Jason Kenney and his political elite allies have for Alberta’s poorest and most marginalized people means we will see tragic, preventable death at a scale we’ve never seen before.