The Progress Report podcast is back and fellow Progress Reporters Jeremy Appel and Jim Storrie are around to break down the resolutions and the vibes heading into the upcoming UCP AGM. This is the first AGM with Danielle Smith at the helm and we'll see where her loosey-goosey leadership style plays with an increasingly bug-eyed UCP grassroots. 

If you live in Edmonton you are going to see a higher than expected increase to your property taxes. If you’re one of 4,500 inside city workers in Edmonton you haven’t seen a pay increase in five years and are still without a contract.

In September, following a two-week visit to Canada, UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery Tomoya Obokata declared Canadian programs that tie foreign labourers to a specific employer, including the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) Program, to be a “breeding ground” for modern slavery. 

On Sept. 26, University of Alberta VP Verna Yiu announced that a $30,000 endowment for the school’s Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) in the name of Yaroslav Hunka, the Waffen-SS veteran who earned international infamy after he received two standing ovations in Canadian Parliament, would be returned to his family. 

The school also committed to reviewing its naming policies to avoid similar embarrassments in the future. 

The University of Alberta’s Nazi veteran donor problem runs far deeper than a $30,000 donation in Hunka’s name. The U of A has far deeper ties to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, with endowments and donations in their names worth well over $1.4 million.

Edmonton City councillor and police commissioner Anne Stevenson proposed a minor change to how reports on use-of-force tactics are compiled during a Sept. 21 police commission meeting. What happened next demonstrates just how ineffective an institution the Edmonton Police Commission is. 

Alberta has all the trappings of a modern subnational government attached to a real life, honest-to-god state: political parties, laws, a bureaucracy, a guy in a fancy hat who carries a mace. But decades of conservative rule have hollowed out Alberta to the point where it is simply incapable of providing the services, support and guarantee of safety that a provincial or state-level government should provide.

A 2021 appointee to the University of Alberta senate who has pledged to end “liberal indoctrination” donated more than $20,000 to conservative political parties from 2016 to 2021 and sat on the board of his local UCP constituency association.

An Edmonton cop who stole cash in three separate incidents, including once from a murder crime scene, gets to keep his job, according to a recent ruling by an Alberta Court of Appeal judge and may be owed more than a half-million in back pay.

Chief Dale McFee of the Edmonton Police Service blamed the victims of Cst. Alex Doduk in two recent civil trials where Doduk was charged with assault with a weapon and where he shot someone to death. Cst. Doduk is currently on paid leave for an unrelated matter which has not been disclosed. 

Civil rights activists in Edmonton have launched a lawsuit to stop the city from evicting encampments of unhoused people when the city knows they have nowhere to go.  Officially, the city says it will vigorously fight for the right to continue brutalizing the homeless, stealing and destroying their property, and putting their lives and safety at risk. But morally, there is only one ethical choice for councillors and the mayor: the city needs to lose, and these thirteen politicians need to do whatever it takes to make that happen.