Nazi collaborator monuments in Edmonton defaced with red paint and words “Actual Nazi” and “Nazi Monument”

Edmonton's statue of Roman Shukhevych, an infamous Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, has once again been defaced with red paint. This time, a second local monument—a memorial honouring the 14th Waffen SS Division—was targeted as well.
Read morePOD: Kinney For "Senate"

Nobody's actually going to get elected to the Senate in Alberta's upcoming Senate "elections." So why are the UCP doing it? And why's Duncan Kinney in it? Featuring guest host Producer Jim
Read moreProtests against UCP COVID policy are building big momentum

COVID protests of a different tenor are happening daily in Alberta's big cities in opposition to the drastic rollback of COVID-prevention measures the UCP announced last Wednesday.
Noon rallies at the McDougall Centre in Calgary and the Legislature in Edmonton were drawing dozens last Friday, but that number has swelled to hundreds. Organizers intend to keep these rallies, and concurrent pressure campaigns like letter-writing to MLAs, going until at least the 16th, or when testing, contact tracing and isolation are reinstated. The Alberta NDP are meanwhile demanding the government commit to holding a public inquiry into how the pandemic has been handled, which does seem like a better use of that tool than what Steve Allan is presently putting it to.
Read moreConflating dissent with disloyalty, Allan Inquiry sets a dangerous precedent

It's late fall 2022. A popular mayor of a southern Alberta town wakes up to a peculiar email: the Second Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns has reviewed several news reports from 2020 and 2021, as well as his social media account, and has determined that he engaged in an “anti-Alberta energy campaign.”
Read morePOD: Pepper Spray For All

How do we fix decades of state-sponsored, systemic anti-Muslim hate? According to Alberta's Justice Minister Kaycee Madu all we need is pepper spray. Dr. Muna Saleh and Haiqa Cheema join us to discuss the Alberta's government’s incredibly inadequate response to an epidemic of violent hate crimes against visibly Muslim women.
Read moreAs worrying COVID numbers emerge around Calgary, Jason keeps on truckin

Political discourse in Alberta kicked off very tediously this week with the Premier trying to pick a fight about trucks. The question of whether Canada’s city-dwellers really need all those F-150s popped up in Passage, a left-wing online publication, last week, and Fox News in the United States picked it up as something to holler about for a few days. And so the Premier ended up hollering about it too.
It’s a safe bet that when Jason Kenney is pivoting to the culture war there’s something real he’d prefer you not be paying attention to. This week, it’s worrying COVID numbers in Alberta, especially out of Calgary. Late last Friday afternoon AHS reported that the R value (an estimate of how many other people each person with COVID infects, on average) was holding steady above 1 and the virus was making gains again. Monday and Tuesday’s data is continuing the trend.
Read moreAfter two years and $3.5 million, Steve Allan's inquiry finds... nothing?

A leaked draft of Steve Allan’s inquiry report on “anti-Alberta” environmental activism has everything you’d expect: climate change denial, weird conspiracy theories about activists plotting for a Marxist “one world government”, and plenty of sloppy, lazy inaccuracies. But then there’s something you wouldn’t expect. In the draft, about three quarters of which the Progress Report acquired last week, Commissioner Allan takes great pains to say, repeatedly, that despite all the inflammatory filler crammed into his report, he has no evidence that the environmental movement has done anything wrong at all.
Read moreEnvironmental groups respond to the Allan Inquiry

This post will be updated if and when more environmental organizations make their submissions to the Allan inquiry public.
The Allan Inquiry into so-called “anti-Alberta energy campaigns” is only a few days away from its July 30 deadline. Although whether Allan will submit his final report on time still remains to be seen but there is some progress to report. The inquiry has shared a draft version of its report with about 40 environmental groups and funders that were named in the report.
Read moreExclusive: Allan inquiry finds nothing ‘improper’ and no ‘misconduct’ by Tar Sands Campaign

Steve Allan's inquiry into "anti-Alberta energy campaigns" is poised to find that nothing done by climate activists, or the donors who funded them, "is in any way improper or constitutes conduct that should be in any way impugned," according to sections of the draft report obtained by the Progress Report.
Read moreBack to pre-pandemic normal: the UCP declare war on nurses again

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.
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