Not everyone has gotten back to their pre-pandemic normal yet but Alberta’s UCP government sure has. The war with nurses is back on, and AHS dropped a hell of a bomb last week, aiming for 3% rollbacks to nursing wages along with a host of other nickel-and-dime cuts from all angles. This, after Alberta’s nurses have already been stuck with years of salary freezes. This in an Alberta where hospitals in even the capital city are closing beds for lack of staff. And this, after those nurses have been in a grueling fight for over a year to keep coronavirus from overwhelming the whole province.

Last week’s brutal, historic heat wave has highlighted just how unprepared Alberta is for climate change—and shown us just who will be most at risk.

Alberta has yet to fully tabulate the fatalities but the numbers from British Columbia, hit by the heat just before us, are bleak. The BC Coroners’ Service estimates that in our neighboring province nearly 600 people were killed by the heat. We can surely expect some grim statistics of our own once Alberta’s numbers are crunched.

Reeling from the discoveries of thousands of unmarked child graves—each a victim of an attempt by our government to eradicate Indigenous cultures—people celebrated Canada Day differently this year. Monuments glorifying colonizers were toppled across the country, and at least one was decapitated. Statues of both Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth were brought down in Winnipeg. A statue of Captain Cook was thrown into the sea in Victoria. Frank Oliver’s plaque here in downtown Edmonton received an artistic reimagining with a splash of blood-red paint. 

As the numbers of unmarked graves at the sites of former residential schools piles up Rob Houle returns to discuss happy and sad fireworks, what you're celebrating when you're celebrating Canada Day and we dive into the details of a couple of sites where it has long been speculated that there are mass, unmarked graves in Alberta.  

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.