There’s not much that demonstrates our warped priorities better than a 2020s Alberta summer.

Ever since things got especially bad a few years ago, it’s been the same perverse show. All winter we’re inundated with horror: unhoused people literally freezing on the streets as they can’t get a warm place to sleep, people are dropping left and right from drug poisonings, and everything right in everyone’s faces as desperate people on the precipice of death shelter in the only public spaces they can get into.

Then the sun comes out, the snow melts, and as soon as the cities’ unhoused folks are out in encampments instead of the train stations, all the electeds dust off their hands and decide they’re due for a break. It’s festival season! Time to get some party photos for the Instagram!

It is not time to get some party photos for the Instagram.

A new collective agreement between the Edmonton Police Association (EPA) and the City of Edmonton that was imposed by an arbitrator will cost the city an estimated $19.7 million, or roughly $10,000 per cop.

As is their wont, ASIRT released a report on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend. The results of their investigation? The complete exoneration of two Calgary cops who shot a woman to death at a Beltline-area hotel in March 2021. The woman, who was in the midst of a mental health crisis, was shot dead by two Calgary cops after she pointed a BB gun at them. 

Alberta lost 179 souls to drug poisoning in April 2023, the most we’ve ever lost. Every one of those deaths was preventable. They were the product of a policy choice. 

An Edmonton cop who spoke at a Coutts area pro-border blockade rally and posted a tearful video on Instagram of her in uniform thanking Ottawa convoy protesters and saying she would refuse “unlawful orders” has been found guilty of discreditable conduct. She was reinstated with a reprimand that will stay on her record for five years.

The media business is doing incredibly poorly. Bell Communications laid off about 1,300 media workers last week, and are closing or selling nine radio stations. Postmedia is close to bankruptcy (and would have been bankrupt years ago if not for government subsidies). And all of this is all just the market doing what it does best. 

A proposed law enforcement and trucking industry training facility in Beaumont violated the government's own rules by having conservative-connected insiders lobby the government after the proposal had been submitted. This site could also potentially be used as a new training facility for a provincial police force. 

The city of Edmonton in concert with the Edmonton Police Service have set a new record by evicting unhoused people living in tents from the same location twice in six days, with one of those evictions occurring during a heat wave. 

During the 2019 provincial election I did everything I could to try and keep Jason Kenney away from power.

An infamous police brutality incident from 2017—in which crown prosecutors declined to lay criminal charges despite a recommendation to do so from ASIRT—has concluded. The police discipline process has ended and the professional consequences for repeatedly kicking and punching someone who was “clearly surrendering” has been decided. Thanks to a deal cut between the officers and Chief Dale McFee’s office the three cops got 35 hours of community service. Two of the three officers were also promoted before the discipline process was complete.