It’s been a momentous week in Alberta—especially in Edmonton—for matters both theatrical and not. And you haven’t heard from me in a minute, so let me catch you up.
Scabs sent in to replace striking workers in Edmonton
Let’s start with the serious before we get to the clown show. Education support workers in both Edmonton and Sturgeon are on strike. Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) has responded by bringing in scabs, the union says.
CUPE spokesperson and former first husband Lou Arab points out in that last linked article that before the strike, schools in Edmonton were already failing to hire all the education support workers they needed, a clear sign that salaries are simply too low. But rather than meet the union’s demand, EPSB is paying an even higher rate to have their work covered by temps.
The weather had been mild for the first few days of this job action, but it’s getting miserable out there now. Every picket appreciates supporters dropping by with coffees and such for the folks walking the line. If you’d like to join or support a CUPE picket in Edmonton or Sturgeon, contact them through their website here.
EPS and the UCP pick a fight over the Edmonton police commission
Back in 2020, we warned that the UCP were giving themselves new powers to meddle in municipal police commissions, which are supposed to be oversight bodies that keep the police in check. And they did: 2022’s Bill 6 was enacted into law as the Police Amendment Act (2022).
Criminal defence lawyer Tom Engel told Duncan at the time that the bill “invites political interference by the province in policing,” and boy was that ever right on the mark. (Engel, by the way, is representing Duncan in an unrelated court case.)
The Edmonton Police Service (EPS), still under the direction of the UCP-aligned Dale McFee, who is on the way out to become Alberta’s most powerful civil servant, invoked these measures this week. The EPS is calling on UCP Minister of Public Safety Mike Ellis to intervene in the appointment of new police commissioners by city council. Cheekily, EPS does not explain in their request what’s wrong with the city’s picks, claiming they can’t say “for privacy reasons.”
One of those appointed commissioners, Dan Jones, simply threw his hands up and quit in response. But that didn’t stop Minister Ellis from confirming that he would go ahead with the intervention anyway, which now solely targets appointee Renee Vaugeois.
Vaugeois is the executive director of the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights, a non-profit that we’ve had the pleasure of engaging with at a couple of events in the last year. The centre is concerned with poverty and police brutality, and last produced Safer For All, a documentary focusing on police accountability in Edmonton.
One can see pretty clearly what the EPS might not like about Vaugeois, but it’s my theory that the identity of the candidates doesn’t really matter. The UCP did not know specifically who was coming in when they cooked up Bill 6 three years ago. What they did know is that Edmonton will soon be voting for a new mayor and council, and painting Amarjeet Sohi and those councillors who sit a bit to his left as anti-police will be good for them in the election. I suspect this play has been in the works for a while.
Press and electeds (mostly) unite for nationalist theatre
OK, now we’re getting to the sillier stuff. Prospective Liberal leader Mark Carney launched his campaign in Edmonton yesterday, where he came out swinging against “the far left.” Ah, the true architects of our woes: the local university Communist Revolution chapter.
Of course, that’s not all he talked about. Like nearly everyone in the Canadian political sphere, he also had a lot to say about resisting Donald Trump’s maybe-serious threat of nailing Canada with severe tariffs and his not-so-serious threat of annexing the whole country.
It’s all a bit silly to me. Nationalism in a settler state is, to put it mildly, a bit of a bad look. Created through the illegal dispossession of Indigenous Peoples, the colonial nations of the old Commonwealth—Canada included—are essentially criminal enterprises. Let’s hope that what passes for leftist electoral representation around here sticks to matters of real concern to the working class instead of rallying around the flag.
The one person you’d expect to take Donald Trump’s side over Canada’s of course has.. While political figures including Rachel Notley are being marshalled for a national working group to respond to Trump’s threats, and even Doug Ford is on side, our Ivermectin-slinging podcast oaf premier says heck no. The biggest stick in Canada’s negotiating arsenal is its oil and gas exports, argues Lisa Young, and Alberta being off-side severely weakens Canada’s position.
Sundries
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Janice MacKinnon rises once more to plague the living: the author of former premier Jason Kenney’s austerity-legitimizing “Blue Ribbon panel” report and former Saskatchewan New Democrat is back in the news after University of Alberta student newspaper The Gateway reported that MacKinnon, who was appointed by the UCP to the school’s board of governors, was a driving force behind its recent decision to re-brand away from ‘equity, diversity and inclusion.’ MacKinnon also complained about a report that described Canada, unfairly in her opinion, as a “settler colonist society.”
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The lingering stink of an alleged Pretendian business scandal isn’t holding back Liberal Edmonton-Centre MP Randy Boissoneault, who announced Wednesday that he will run again for his seat, and that he supports Chrystia Freeland for Liberal leader.
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Over at the Orchard (please donate to the Report so that we can just pay for all of this guy’s work here!), my colleague Jeremy has Indigenous Climate Action’s response to a January 3rd study that shows the Alberta Energy Regulator has been under-reporting the environmental damage from tailings pond spills for over a decade.
- An interesting read that came across my desk—OK, my Discord—this week is this study on political misinformation from the University of Amsterdam. Researchers found that being a serial misinformation-spreader isn’t really correlated with populism, as the prevailing theory goes. Nor does it correlate with conservatism specifically. Rather, most of the misinformation online is being spread by a small set of political figures associated specifically with far-right radical populism. The non-populist right wingers weren’t much worse than average, and the socialist populists actually scored as more honest.
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