Earlier this month Premier Jason Kenney told the Calgary Chamber of Commerce an anecdote he heard from a suburban developer that a hundred families a week are moving from Toronto to Calgary. The reason why he believes it? “I know because my brother is one of them, just showed up in his U-Haul, last night.” 

Jennie Russell and Charles Rusnell were reporters with CBC Investigates, the award-winning investigative unit of CBC Edmonton until suddenly calling it quits on December 16, 2021. Rusnell and Russell broke stories that changed Alberta for the better. They did the kind of groundbreaking, original, investigative journalism that is so needed in today’s age. 

We take a look back at their top ten stories, in no particular order, and share their work that defined journalism in Alberta for the past decade. 

For all the time and effort Jason Kenney, Postmedia and the oil and gas industry have put in to convincing people that evil foreign funded environmentalists have ulterior motives it turns out that the Canadian oil and gas industry is majority foreign owned. This fact has been discovered by Gordon Laxer and published in a new report titled, Posing as Canadian: How Big Foreign Oil captures Canadian energy and climate policy. Host Duncan Kinney sits down with Laxer to discuss his groundbreaking report.

Members of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 569 are very pleased after the City of Edmonton announced a reversal on its July 2021 decision to privatize 100 transit cleaner jobs, said ATU 569 president Steve Bradshaw. 

After most Canadians vote for parties who promise climate action, they may wonder why Canada is by far the worst G-7 carbon-polluting country. While the U.S. and Japan are roughly at their 1990 emission levels, Canada’s are up 21 per cent. The EU is 25 per cent lower and Britain’s is down a remarkable 40 per cent.

To learn why Canada always breaks its climate promises I investigated the influence of Big Foreign Oil because the production of oil and gas is Canada’s greatest and fastest growing source of carbon pollution.

The report “Posing as Canadian. How Big Foreign Oil Captures Canadian energy and climate policy” was recently released and explains why.

Petra Schulz of Moms Stop the Harm joins us to talk about the ongoing disaster that is the opioid poisoning crisis, how the UCP is making it worse and what we can do to stop it.

The final session of the Alberta legislature for 2021 wrapped up this week with an all-nighter that dragged all the way into Tuesday morning. COVID, the drug poisoning crisis, climate disasters next door—there’s no shortage of reasons for urgency, but in what has become the typical fashion for this government, the last stretch of the session was all about doing things for the UCP. Or doing things for the upper echelons of the party, and especially for Jason Kenney, to be more specific, because what’s wild about this session going to overtime is that the UCP were filibustering one of their own members.

Drug policy researcher Hilary Agro joins us to dissect the Edmonton Police's reaction to the revelation that a huge portion of their officers never carry Narcan, how the EPS spreads misinformation about fentanyl and the move by Toronto to decriminalize drug possession.

On August 14, 2020 Edmonton Police Chief Dale McFee attended the first annual United Conservative Party Derby, a political fundraiser where MLAs dress up in T-Rex costumes and race each other on a horse track outside of Lacombe. This partisan activity is troubling, says one researcher and activist from Edmonton, but consistent with the chief’s record as “a conservative through and through.”

In a governing party that says things like ‘weed causes Communism’ and ‘Jason Kenney was sent to us by God,’ you really have to take it to the next level to stand out, and one cabinet minister really does go harder than anyone else—Minister of Justice Kaycee Madu.