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

Alberta’s 2025 budget is high on rhetoric but low on detail when it comes to plans for the new, “refocused” system of health-care agencies that will replace Alberta Health Services (AHS).

New education funding outlined in the 2025/26 budget continues to fall behind the Alberta government’s own estimate of inflation and population growth, with the exception of subsidies for private schools and early childhood education centres.

One of the biggest recipients of nursing contracts from Alberta Health Services (AHS) over the past two years is a British company that has subsidiaries in the U.S., Canada, Australia, China and Japan. Another is a company co-owned by a self-published author and motivational speaker that might not be registered to operate in Alberta. 

Premier Danielle Smith and her UCP government, up to its figurative eyeballs in the murky and still-growing AHS procurement scandal, haven’t had much time to wage media war against the education support workers who continue to strike for better pay and working conditions in Edmonton, Calgary, Fort McMurray and elsewhere.

But that doesn’t mean their allies outside of the Legislature aren’t on the job. Spotted in the wild this week: a conservative Christian lobby group trying to convince Albertans that private schools are somehow more “accountable” than the public system.

Kim Siever joins us on the pod to talk about his labour-focused journalism with The Alberta Worker, and we chat for a bit about the still-developing AHS procurement scandal and Alberta's gigantic and ongoing education strike.

Working as a travel nurse involves some major trade-offs, sacrificing a pension and paid sick days for flexibility as a “private contractor,” says a nurse from Edmonton who worked for several agencies in Halifax after experiencing pandemic burnout in 2022.

After nine years with Progress Alberta, our executive director and editor of the Progress Report Duncan Kinney is getting out of the rascal business. Join us as we reminisce about some of Progress Alberta's greatest hits during his tenure, and discuss the thorny issue of 'activist journalism,' on the latest Progress Report podcast.

The parents of Anthony Heffernan, an unarmed 27-year-old who Calgary police shot in a motel room in 2015, have had their appeal of a limited Police Act investigation into his killing dismissed.

Alberta Health Services (AHS) records show that five companies have dominated Alberta’s agency nursing market, enjoying the major share of AHS contracts from 2015 to 2023. 

AHS spending on contract nursing increased steadily from $388,000 for contracts with two companies in the 2015/16 fiscal year to $5 million with five companies in 2020/21 before increasing exponentially to $81 million with 27 companies in 2022/2023.