Content warning: Police brutality and violence

Say you’re a curious journalist who’s doing a power ranking of the UCP leadership race candidates and you’re trying to figure out if there’s any data out there that supports your purely gut-based predictions from a week ago. Maybe polls would help? 

Documents released by the Edmonton Police Commission show that the Edmonton Police Service had plans to arrest Freedom Convoy counter-protestors en masse, but had no plans to mass-arrest anyone involved in the Freedom Convoy itself. 

Twenty eight separate Alberta Muslim organizations, including nearly every major mosque in the province, are demanding the resignation of Alberta Human Rights Commission chief Collin May in a letter sent to Justice Minister Tyler Shandro.

Law professor Martin Olszynski joins Duncan Kinney to talk about the unique danger Danielle Smith and her proposed Alberta Sovereignty Act poses to democracy.  

In a move that is sure to degrade my mental health I’m going to write a weekly (maybe biweekly!) power ranking of the UCP leadership race. The rules will be made up and the points won’t matter but I will do my best to catalogue who’s up, who’s down and to track the big narratives of the race to crown the next leader of the UCP and Alberta’s next premier, at least until the next election. 

The Edmonton Police Service are proposing to convert jail cells in their downtown headquarters to provide “integrated addiction support for individuals that are potentially banned from shelters and are in a position of harm to themselves or members of the community,” according to the business plan for the recently-funded Chinatown Healthy Streets Operation Centre. 

In the summer of 2020, after public demands to reform or defund the police including a Black Lives Matter petition with over 13,000 signatories, Edmonton City Council voted to allocate roughly $11 million a year in funding from the Edmonton Police Service budget to social programs and to end homelessness. Now, 40 per cent of that money is going right back to the police in 2023 and 2024.

The podcast is back from its summer break with an extended conversation with Angus Quinton with Get Your Drugs Tested. This Vancouver based organization has done the most testing of the illicit drug supply of anyone in the world and it's a model that has huge public health implications in dealing with the drug poisoning crisis. 

The terrible surge in fatalities among people who use drugs in the last decade is called a drug poisoning crisis for a reason: the iron law of prohibition means more concentrated, more dangerous drugs keep making their way into the drug supply with tragic results.