Sandy Garossino, columnist with the National Observer, joins us to break down the lies, damn lies and statistics in the Allan Inquiry's final report.

Alberta’s UCP government has been responsible for so many dramatic boondoggles and disasters that we’d nearly forgotten they could be scummy in the banal, cheap way that men in power so often are. This week we are reminded, as Kenney and company scramble to handle allegations of sleaze and sexual harassment at the highest level of the adminstration.

The former chief of staff to Doug Schweitzer, Ariella Kimmel, has filed a wrongful dismissal suit against the premier’s office, and the allegations don’t leave the UCP looking very good. The scene recalls the worst of Alberta’s old-boys’-club politics, with heavy drinking all over the ministers’ offices, drunken cabinet members raging and screaming at staff, and powerful men sexually harassing the women who work there.

After more than two years, $3.5 million dollars and a couple of dozen embarrassing scandals the “Public inquiry into anti-Alberta energy campaigns” is finally complete and buried deep in the report, on page 596, you’ll find a sentence that invalidates the whole enterprise. 

Have you ever wondered about the phrase “strike while the iron is hot”? It’s from blacksmithing. It isn’t easy to change something as hard as a lump of metal. You could hammer at it for days and not get anywhere. But get that iron into the forge for a bit and the bonds that kept it stuck loosen up, and for a brief window—until it cools down—it’s malleable. You can change it, if you strike while the iron is hot.

The iron is hot in Alberta today. Across the province, power arrangements in many towns and cities, especially the big two, have been melted down. That’s mostly thanks to Premier Jason Kenney, the least popular Premier in Canada and possibly the most hated Premier in Albertan history. This election was an opportunity to stick it to him, and wow did we ever.

Sprawl city council reporter Jeremy Appel, Jim Storrie and Duncan Kinney break down everything you need to know and make some predictions before the upcoming municipal elections in both Edmonton and Calgary. 

You’d never know it from the tight city councillor races happening in Edmonton and Calgary but just last year there was the largest protest movement in North American history and all of it centred around one simple demand that city councillors actually control: defunding the police.

Trent Daley and Duncan Kinney discuss the defund the police sized hole in the discourse around our municipal elections, some of the wackier school board trustee candidates out there and the incredibly disturbing Moleman case.  

If, like approximately 77% of Albertans, you think that Jason Kenney’s got to go, this month there’s a great opportunity to give him a swift kick in the ass: municipal elections are on all across the province.

Back in 2020, the UCP had big plans for this year’s muni elections. They changed the election financing laws so that big donors could dump money into conservative campaigns. They planned a fake senate election and a meaningless referendum that they thought they could use to drive their supporters to the polls.

But all of that planning isn’t working out so well in the face of the UCP’s COVID disaster.

The executive director of the Friends of Medicare, Sandra Azocar, returns to the pod to discuss the state of Alberta's healthcare system and the deliberate choices by Jason Kenney and the UCP that led to this catastrophe. 

A small Alberta-based oil and gas company that has received substantial financial support from Alberta pensioners, the Alberta government, and the federal government is now getting into crypto mining—the energy-intensive and not-very-climate-friendly process of creating digital tokens like Bitcoins. Their windfall of government funding comes despite a dysfunctional relationship with its university research partner, regular failures to make interest payments to debtors, and a spotty environmental record.