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.

As is their wont, ASIRT released a report on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend. The results of their investigation? The complete exoneration of two Calgary cops who shot a woman to death at a Beltline-area hotel in March 2021. The woman, who was in the midst of a mental health crisis, was shot dead by two Calgary cops after she pointed a BB gun at them. 

Alberta lost 179 souls to drug poisoning in April 2023, the most we’ve ever lost. Every one of those deaths was preventable. They were the product of a policy choice. 

An Edmonton cop who spoke at a Coutts area pro-border blockade rally and posted a tearful video on Instagram of her in uniform thanking Ottawa convoy protesters and saying she would refuse “unlawful orders” has been found guilty of discreditable conduct. She was reinstated with a reprimand that will stay on her record for five years.

The media business is doing incredibly poorly. Bell Communications laid off about 1,300 media workers last week, and are closing or selling nine radio stations. Postmedia is close to bankruptcy (and would have been bankrupt years ago if not for government subsidies). And all of this is all just the market doing what it does best. 

A proposed law enforcement and trucking industry training facility in Beaumont violated the government's own rules by having conservative-connected insiders lobby the government after the proposal had been submitted. This site could also potentially be used as a new training facility for a provincial police force.