Who is Danielle Smith without Justin Trudeau?

The federal Liberals held their leadership vote this weekend and picked economist and ur-banker Mark Carney, which means a lot of Albertans are going to have to switch the stickers on their trucks.

This leopard's spot-changing did not last very long. From an advertisement on PragerU's website

Trudeau’s exit, paired with Trump’s sneak-attack trade war, has completely overturned the political discourse here in Alberta and across the country. And while polling suggests the shifting ground might end up saving us from a Pierre Poilievre government, it’s also giving cover to many who don’t deserve it.

Tyler Shipley, whose text Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination ought to be required reading for any Canadian, stood up last week to argue a position that I think is as correct as it will be unpopular.

“Nationalism is a negation of class politics—it is a repudiation of true solidarity,” wrote Shipley on Bluesky. 

“Fighting one nationalism with another nationalism is useless and self-defeating. A spike in Canadian nationalism will empower the most racist, reactionary, anti-solidarity assholes within these borders.”

Go have a look at the entirety of his argument if you can, because I don’t have the space to paste it all here.

He’s already being proven right. Look who’s bubbled back out of the muck and started posting again: Jason Kenney. Kenney’s doing big numbers online waving the flag and decrying Trump, and I see a lot of folks falling for it. Never mind that Kenney handed the keys to the MAGA-aligned UCP to inflict Trumpism on us here in Alberta.

For a minute, it looked like even Premier Smith, who has for months been taking Donald Trump’s side in this whole affair, was getting on the bandwagon too. But apparently that didn’t stick for Smith, who will be speaking at a fundraising gala for PragerU—an organization that injects far-right propaganda into American schools—with the loathsome Ben Shapiro on March 27th.

Procurement scandal watch

The RCMP are officially on the case of the Alberta Health Services (AHS) procurement scandal, though I’m not sure if that’s going to mean any more than the RCMP investigating Jason Kenney’s leadership vote scandal.

The Breakdown, a centre-to-just-a-tiny-bit-left journalism project led by Nate Pike, is back on the air after a legal injunction against them was overturned last week. It’s still unclear to me whether the initial injunction actually banned Pike from posting, but that’s irrelevant now. The Breakdown has been a major clearing-house for accusations regarding AHS, the Smith administration, and several well-connected businessmen.

We have not been able to verify all of The Breakdown’s claims, but we do have one of our own. While investigating a different matter—a juicy sole-source contract that Shoppers got to distribute expensive COVID-19 tests—Jeremy found that the AHS staffer who signed off on the sole-source contract was Blayne Iskiw, presently implicated in the AHS matter due to his ownership of two numbered companies in the private surgical business.

Meanwhile, down at the Legislature, UCP MLA Pete Guthrie was banned from caucus meetings for at least thirty days after he resigned from cabinet and demanded that Health Minister Adriana LaGrange do the same.

From the Report

A roundup of our latest since the last newsletter. We didn’t send you a newsletter in February, so it’s a long list!

• Jeremy’s investigation into the Iskiw-Shoppers connection, mentioned above.
  
  
• Podcast: Dr. Wing Li and Chris Gallaway join us to analyze the 2025 budget
  
  
• From me: Alberta’s 2025 budget light on details about a health system that’s being entirely reconfigured
  
  
• From Jeremy: Budget 2025: Private school funding outpaces inflation and population growth while public system falls behind
  
  
• Also from Jeremy: Largest AHS nursing contractors from past 2 years include foreign firm and company co-owned by motivational speaker
  
  
• Who's backing up the UCP in their fight against education support workers? I looked into a right-wing Christian charity that put out an op-ed against the striking workers.
  
  
• Podcast: Catching up with The Alberta Worker—Jeremy and I hosted guest Kim Siever, whose labour-focused publication The Alberta Worker we respect greatly.
  
  
• From me: Palestinian solidarity activists continue call for end to Edmonton's business with Arad Group
  
  
• “Definitely not a sustainable way of living”: a look inside the private system that is replacing your public nurses—Jeremy Appel interviewed workers about their experience in the private agency nursing system.
  
  
• Podcast: #DEXIT—our exit interview with comrade Duncan Kinney, where we chat about his reasons for moving on, the ongoing campaign by the Edmonton Police Service against him, and our favorite projects in the near-ten-years that Duncan and I ran this little operation.
  
  
• And from Jeremy all the way back at the start of February—A decade after Anthony Heffernan was killed by Calgary cops, review board dismisses family’s appeal of police investigation

Sundries

Not from us, but worth your attention too.

• All that Tylenol we bought and couldn’t use is getting shipped off—possibly to Ukraine—Carrie Tait and Alanna Smith report for the Globe and Mail. There is a fun irony in the MAGA-aligned Smith’s cold meds stunt, initially intended to show up the Liberals, turning into an international aid program, especially to Ukraine. Well, at least it’s not all going in the trash. And no, we’re not getting any money for it.
  
  
• Troy Pavlek reports that Andrew Knack—the Edmonton city councilor both loved and hated for his brand of technocratic centrism—will not be running for his seat again. One of Knack’s staffers, Rajah Maggay, is stepping up as a candidate.
  
  
• Former Edmonton council crank Kerry Diotte has defeated present Edmonton council crank Karen Principe in this weekend’s nomination vote and will be the Conservative candidate for Edmonton-Griesbach, Dave Cournoyer reports.
  
  
• In their latest episode, “Imagined Alberta,” the Alberta Advantage podcast “subjects themselves to some favourite books of UCP ministers and Western Standard columnists in search of the intellectual basis for justifying an independent Albertan nation.”
  
  
• Technically not ‘from us’ but from his own newsletter: Jeremy Appel produced a two-part series investigating the University of Calgary crackdown on pro-Palestine demonstrations last year. Spoiler alert: the UCP had their fingers in it the whole time. Part I and Part II are available on his site.
  
  
• Right-radical populists including a “self-described ‘white ethnonationalist’” have infiltrated the town council and library board in Valleyview and are waging war against the kids in a local library’s gay-straight-alliance club—an in-depth CBC investigation from February.
  
  
• Zain Velji and Richard Einarson are behind a new third party advertiser, “Forward Canada,” which looks poised to advertise against the Conservatives in the federal election. Their first support-identification campaign is a petition defending the CBC—a clever idea to filter out the Tories. Velji and Einarson are both veteran political operatives at this point, though you may know Zain better through his appearances on the podcast “The Strategists.”

From the editor

Our new team member Hijal de Sarkar, who handles Duncan Kinney’s old fundraising and admin duties now, has been reaching out to long-time subscribers for feedback and donations. And the one thing we’re hearing consistently is that people just want more.

Happily, I can report that it looks like we’ve managed to get things working again after having to adjust to Duncan’s departure. The content pipe has been snaked and the juice is flowing. Something that your feedback made very apparent was that social media (we’re on Bluesky and, reluctantly, Twitter) and our little website are not enough to make sure everyone knows when we publish new work. So we’ll be stepping up the frequency of the email newsletter again.

Right now, Jeremy, Hijal and I are all on half time for lack of funds, and we don’t have much in the bank to commission freelance work. If you’d like to help us climb out of that situation, one-time and recurring donations are very welcome and you can make them through our website. We can also take a cheque if you don’t trust that web stuff.

Thanks for your time and attention. Go get a copy of that Tyler Shipley book.

In solidarity,

Jim Storrie