No doubt the dominant issue on most Albertans’ minds today is this awful, historically unprecedented heat. But perhaps not if you’re a Muslim woman. Then you might have a more pressing concern.

The National Council of Canadian Muslims revealed yesterday that, in a continuation of the pattern of rising violence against Muslim women in this province, on Sunday night a man opened fire on a woman wearing hijab in Edmonton in a drive-by attack. She escaped with her life, thankfully, but as I’m writing this no suspects have been identified. The woman did not recognize her attacker, and in the dead of night—the attack occurred just before midnight—it’s unlikely the attacker could have identified her. All he would have seen was her hijab.

The contentious ‘thin blue line’ symbol has attracted more attention recently as it has been spotted at various police and police union headquarters—and even on on-duty cops—in recent months. But what you might not know is that the Edmonton Police Service claims to have actually banned it already.

A statue of Winston Churchill in Edmonton recently got an artistic re-imagining. Nisha Patel and Najib Jutt join host Duncan Kinney to talk about the racist, murderous legacy of Winston Churchill and the British Empire and what it is to be done about the statue, squares and schools named after this mass murderer. 

The academics have a word for what we’re seeing in Alberta, and it’s necropolitics: the politics of who lives and who dies. The subjugation of life to the power of death.

Achille Mbembe, the scholar who coined the term, looked at it in the context of wars and occupations. He wrote that those who have power create death-worlds, “forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”

Where did Kevin J. Johnston come from? Independent journalist Kevin Metcalf digs into the history of this infamous Ontarian and relatively recent Calgary transplant who has recently been locked up for a series of increasingly dangerous and aggressive anti-lockdown stunts. 

The UCP are off to a hilarious start this week, still stumbling to properly announce Alberta’s new COVID vaccine lottery.

You’d think it’d be an easy crowd pleaser—and simple to explain. ‘If you get your vaccine, we’ll put you in a draw for a million dollars!’ But by the end of day Monday, we had all sorts of variations from the Premier, the Health Minister, and their interminably-posting caucus staff. In one weird version presented by Kenney, you could enter the lotto, not bother with the shots, and then if you did get the winning ticket still claim the prize as long as you ran out and got vaccinated before picking it up.

Kevin “Jackal” Johnston is in pre-trial custody until his trial on July 12 following a series of anti-lockdown stunts in Calgary, Edmonton and Dawson Creek, BC. He’s been in the news recently as a mayoral candidate in Calgary, but what you might not know is that he has a storied history out east, too. 

University of Manitoba history professor Sean Carleton joins us to break down Jason Kenney's long history of defending the genocidal legacy of Canada and its first prime minister John A. MacDonald, whether Canada Day is cancelled (it is) and the pros of tearing down the statues of the architects of genocide. 

Management at Alpha House—which operates shelters in Calgary and Lethbridge for people with a broad range of physical, mental health, and substance abuse challenges—is trying to stop its staff from unionizing. And according to one employee, they’ve crossed the line into illegal practices: management recently fired a staff member who was part of the union drive.

There is one scandal in Alberta right now that demands all of our attention. It doesn’t have anything to do with sky palaces. Brian Jean isn’t in it. There won’t be a referendum on it. And while the columnists and pundits seem to have all the time in the world for those gaffes and stunts, this issue is getting pushed to the back burner.

I would describe it as Alberta’s most pressing and severe crisis. I would say that every day that passes with things the way they are currently is a cruel, brutal injustice. And outrageously, that opinion probably puts me in the minority.