What does society look like when community safety isn't handled by armed cops authorized to kill people? We rejoin our conversation on disarming, defunding and dismantling the police with Reakash Walters and Molly Swain. 

Responding yesterday to criticism for letting Alberta Premier Jason Kenney take a question from a reporter for a controversial right-wing news site during Tuesday’s virtual COVID-19 update, Press Secretary Christine Myatt tweeted defensively that “I don’t think anybody wants the government deciding who is or is not a journalist.”

Oliver, the largest neighborhood by population in Edmonton, is named after Frank Oliver, a racist, corrupt, land thief who was instrumental in creating modern western Canada. This is not an isolated event, Edmonton has a rich history of naming neighborhoods, streets, parks, LRT stations and buildings after racist, criminal and problematic characters from history. 

The uprising against systemic racism and police brutality that was sparked by the murder of George Floyd has gone global. And the demands of the demonstrators are coalescing around a single goal: defund the police.

So what does that mean, to ‘defund the police?’

Edmonton and Calgary spend nine times more on the police than they spend on housing the homeless or social programs. Combined the two cities spend $750 million a year on cops. We talk with Reakash Walters and Molly Swain about how to divest from police and invest in the community. 

Budgets are moral documents. They allow you to see, mathematically and with great precision, what a government’s priorities are.

And for Alberta’s two biggest cities the top priority is clear – police. 

The UCP are trying to snatch away financial, social and education benefits from 2100 former foster kids. It's incredibly cruel and totally needless and A.C. and her lawyer Avnish Nanda have taken the government to court and won to keep these benefits – for now. We talk about this case with Nanda and Jenn Prosser an organizer and campaigner who grew up in foster care and kinship care during the aftermath of Klein's cuts. 

It’s an extremely dark time in North America. For six days now, American police have been escalating violence against protests that erupted after Minneapolis police murdered an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, by choking him to death in the street.

You might not have noticed it with the United States of America tearing itself apart but over the weekend, but Premier Jason Kenney sent out an official press release alongside the requisite social media messages celebrating the 90th anniversary of the theft of all of Alberta’s resource wealth from Alberta’s original inhabitants. 

Well, it’s nice to know someone’s happy about the global coronavirus pandemic!

Canadians got a rare glimpse into Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage’s thinking yesterday thanks to a friendly podcaster at the Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors.