Six months ago president-elect Joe Biden said "I've been against Keystone from the beginning. It is tarsands that we don't need — that in fact is very, very high pollutant." 

Joe Biden has been clear: he’s going to kill this project. He was always going to kill this project. Yet even when it was brutally obvious that Biden would be America’s next president, Premier Kenney kept betting the farm on Keystone XL.

Every year the poppy is at the centre of a cyclical, empty, culture war debate. Last year, it was Don Cherry. This year, it’s Whole Foods. 

It’s been a wild week for political news. Now that the big distraction to our south is (mostly) out of the way, let me catch you up on what’s been happening locally.

The Auditor General released the latest audit of Alberta’s books and wow, is it brutal. The AG found over $1.6 billion of accounting screw-ups under the UCP, a nearly unprecedented level of book-fudging.

Three law firms with deep connections to the United Conservative Party have recently gained a large amount of business from the Alberta government, publicly available documents show.

“It demonstrates a connection between political activism, donations to key players, and rewards in terms of legal service billings,” says Nigel Bankes, the natural resource law chair in the faculty of law at the university of Calgary.

We speak with Andre Goulet of the Harbinger Media Network about his plans to knock Ben Shapiro and Pod Save America off the Canadian political podcast charts. We also discuss Canadaland, the future of the CBC and what's next for the Progress Report. 

This morning strikes erupted across the province as nursing-care and support workers set up pickets at hospitals throughout Alberta.

Devon, Whitecourt, Calgary, Wetaskiwin, Edmonton, High Level, Claresholm, Evansburg and Okotoks are just a few of the dozens of communities with active strikes. My colleague Duncan is maintaining a strike tracker on our website with the full list.

The strikes come after months of threatened cuts from the UCP government--the latest being a plan to lay off over 11,000 laundry, housekeeping, and support workers and to privatize their jobs.

Thousands of healthcare workers across Alberta walked off the job today in a wildcat strike. This action by workers follows attacks on Alberta's public health care system by Jason Kenney's United Conservative Party that seeks to cut, outsource and privatize many of these critical workers' jobs. 

Today, Alberta’s unionized healthcare workers began wildcat strikes across the province in response to UCP austerity, layoffs and privatization. This is alongside Alberta’s active COVID-19 cases going from a trickle to a flood. The likelihood of our hospitals being overwhelmed grows every day. Alberta remains mostly open, with Jason Kenney promoting “personal responsibility” in lieu of a coherent state response to the crisis. The worst-case scenario outlined months ago is rapidly approaching, case numbers are increasing, and the supports propping up the system are being systematically destroyed. 

Back in March 2020, Jennifer Rapuano-Kremenik saw a father with a young child holding a sign that read, “Single father, need help. Don’t want money, want a job.” That inspired her to get together with friends to start a grassroots organization called Harvest Hills Cares which has helped more than 3,200 families in need of food, shelter, and other support so far.

Placing me on hold multiple times to take calls for assistance in the short time we were on the phone, Rapuano-Kremenik told me about some of the more poignant situations she’s addressed over the past seven months.

Once again, the United Conservative Party have laid bare their priorities at their annual general meeting. And this time, for a change, people seem to be believing them.