Tuesday morning the UCP government announced massive cuts to AHS.

Side-stepping the swelling public support for doctors and nurses, the UCP are going after workers in less high-profile roles: support staff like housekeepers, laboratory workers, and laundry workers.

In total the cuts amount to 11,000 layoffs--that’s 11,000 good, stable health care jobs eliminated in the middle of a pandemic. 

Elizabeth Simons is the co-author of a new piece published by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network on a group of young men in the Wexit movement, the Alberta Separatist Youth League, who have big political aspirations and are also extremely explicit in their anti semitic, racist, and authoritarian beliefs in leaked private chat logs. 

The “Alberta Model” concocted by the UCP government and the Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions (MMHA) Jason Luan to deal with the opioid poisoning crisis is social murder in action. The contempt Premier Jason Kenney and his political elite allies have for Alberta’s poorest and most marginalized people means we will see tragic, preventable death at a scale we’ve never seen before. 

When Wing Kar Li revealed Health Minister Tyler Shandro’s personal connection to a private health brokerage that stood to benefit from decisions he was making as a minister, the United Conservative Party attacked her on social media. As the situation unfolded and threats started rolling in, Li began to worry that enraged supporters would find her home and seek retribution. 

Postmedia, the American-hedge-fund-owned corporation with a near-monopoly over Alberta’s newspapers, is going hard this month on the narrative that Canada has “a left populism problem” and that our (actually centrist and not socialist at all) Prime Minister is engineering a “socialist coup.” But as we’ve seen very clearly in Alberta over the last few weeks, Canada’s extremist problem isn’t radical socialists--it’s the far-right.

You can’t be anti-racist if you don’t know where the racism is happening and nearly every single institution and government in Alberta just doesn’t collect data on Black people. Thankfully the Edmonton Public School Board and Norquest College have both announced that they will start collecting race based data. 

Alberta’s corporate media wasteland got a little more bleak this week as the long-time host of 630 CHED’s morning talk radio program, Ryan Jespersen, has been fired.

Yodit Tesfamicael, an organizer with Students4Change and Black Women United talks with us about the work she's a part of to help improve black lives at Norquest College. An important starting point has been getting that institution to collect race-based data. Turns out you can't be an anti-racist organization if you have no idea how black people are doing. 

We have returning champion Laura Kruse on to discuss her latest Red String column. There is a huge effort going on to whitewash a dangerous and extreme right wing conspiracy theory and tens of thousands of well meaning folks are getting sucked in. And it's using child sex trafficking as the entry point. 

There’s video evidence of white supremacists physically attacking demonstrators at an anti-racism rally in Red Deer yesterday, but the RCMP confirmed this morning that they will not pursue any charges.