TL;DR: join us this Friday!
Every century or so the Canadian left gathers at the Royal Canadian Legion #1 in downtown Calgary to inaugurate a new era of progress.
If you missed meeting J.S. Woodworth and the gang in 1932 at the founding of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (which would become the NDP) you can join Team Advantage, Roberta Lexier, Rob Rousseau and other guests from the Harbinger media network this Friday, June 13 at 6pm. We'll say our farewells to the last noble project, soundly defeated in the most recent federal election, and offer a new intervention to set the course in the coming decades. With fascism on the rise at home and abroad the stakes could not be higher—but entry is free and the drinks are reasonably priced!
This is the first night of the Progressive Publics symposium and it is sure to change your life — and the fate of this country. Join us Friday night for the live show at the Legion, register here. And if you are so inclined, sign up to attend the panels connecting scholarship and independent media at Mount Royal University on Saturday. In future years you will be asked whether you were there that night in Calgary. Make sure your answer is "yes."
Gang back.
Greetings friends,
Alberta Advantage is going live in glorious RealColour, and if you’re online or in Calgary you can enjoy the gift of our presence.
TONIGHT: Alberta Advantage LIVE on Twitch.tv. We’re playing LETHAL COMPANY and getting very intoxicated. Every time we die or do something stupid we will pledge more money to Skipping Stone, just to stick it to our transphobe overlords and neighbours. Laughs, laffs, and gaffes for a good cause. It starts at 7PM Mountain Patriotic Time wherever fine internet is sold.
SATURDAY: Alberta Advantage pal Jeremy Appel wrote a whole gosh darn book about Jason Kenney. I don’t read but I imagine it’s very good. To ring in the occasion we are hosting him at a book signing and social. We’re also going to record a live podcast! It all starts at 4PM Mountain at Highline Brewing (1318 9 Ave SW, Calgary). Be there or hush up! It’s free!
How many pipelines to tidewater does a gal have to buy to form a majority around here?
If you have or are thinking about having kids, consider not living in Alberta.
Imagine your life with kids. Conventionally you’re looking at two adults with full-time employment, theoretically eight hours per day but probably more, and kids in some kind of care during business days. Recently the Death Machine Guard were asleep at the wheel and some crumbs fell off the Wealth Spewer into the Prole Cage in the form of subsidized daycare. Such glorious vittles we’ve never seen, and for a moment it looked like We could get a pace or two ahead of the Reaper.
Or so I thought. As usual, the daycare cash was just some mud and paint over a closet-sized hole in the drywall. Stick a finger in it and the fix sags, as any seasoned parent could have told me. Hell, I could have figured it out myself if I went putting my nose into documentation of my future misery. But who wants to spend a Friday night like that?
The subsidized daycare is rational - hours to match your work day, come grab your kids, shove some calories in them, and wrestle them through bedtime like a young Linda Blair. Then the kids make a critical error - they age. Around five they go to kindergarten. Even less expensive, but the care goes from around eight hours per day to four or less. Worse, those half days do not include Fridays which, last I checked, most employers count toward a full work week. What the fuck do you do now?
Add to that misery the misery of your teacher comrades. Their unions, operating with occasional excellence, can’t get concessions on class size so they spackle over those cracks by winning more Professional Development days. Completely necessary - if you jam 45 kids into a (my) grade 11 English class they might expect some grades at the end of it. Those essays explaining that Moby Dick is actually a metaphor for Insta clout won’t read themselves. Those days off aren’t covered with a statutory holiday, so I hope you have some flexible childcare and the cash to pay for it.
All the sudden the number of monthly hours a five year-old is in some sort of childcare in Alberta plummets for one very stupid year, right when everything is just starting to normalize. Maybe your post-maternity leave career is just getting back on track and then the Calgary Board of Education domes you from two kilometers like a bureaucratic Chris Kyle. Of course you can always pay for private kindergarten (not subsidized in any way) or try to collect some subsidy pennies for after-school care. Enjoy three month processing times and updating the government every time you sneeze lest you incur clawbacks
Even these indignities are non-uniform. Seemingly nine-in-ten Calgary schools have this part-time scheme while some lottery-winning-ass parents are situated near the half-dozen or so schools that have full-time programs. This is in stark contrast to British Columbia and other, cooler provinces that feature full-day public programs. Live in Alberta? Spring for private kindergarten at the low, low price of a kidney or hope one parent can quit their jobs. Some parents I know are just opting out of kindergarten entirely.
It’s a hash of unequal programming, underfunded and crumbling buildings, underpaid staff, and widespread kneecapping of productivity and happiness that could really be the underpinning of a successful social democratic election campaign. Lots of people are parents, and a lot of parents vote. Is there anyone I can inform of these facts so they could come up with policy proposals? Is there a left-leaning party in this fucking place? I will have to do more research.
👺Not sure why the UCP bother hiding drug poisoning death statistics. They don’t care about these people and probably praise their death as cost-savings. Why not just put the numbers out?
🫀Giant dummies poised to nuke mega-dummies with dumb-dumb bombs.
💄I wonder what this province could build if we had a normal corporate tax rate.
🐖Google wants to benefit from people using Google News and other products but they don’t want to help local news to thrive. They want to keep all that ad revenue for themselves and fuck your functioning democracy. The idea on this one is sound but I’m not jumping for joy if Postmedia becomes a funnel for Google dollars to Postmedia shareholders.
🍖Canadian bread price fixing is brought to you by…the Bimbo Group? That can’t be right…
🥡Any new train is a good train.
🍸Pour one out for Sue if that wood/grippy/bussy right.
🥁100 politically significant films.
📉Labour Intensive chats with Jim Stanford about your grocery bill choking you to death.
🎧CJPME Debrief talks Palestine with an activist badass enough to stay in Jerusalem.
🔇Canada Re-Imagined assures us that all hydrogen tech won’t Hindenburg us.
🎚️The Orchard and Tech Won’t Save Us sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.
✒️On June 30th, a screening of No Visible Trauma will take place in Calgary. It’s an important film to see if you have concerns about the brutal conduct of the Calgary Police Service. You can check out our coverage of the film here, and chortle at the stupid response the CPS had during the local premiere.
A Quick Note: if you want us to include an article, petition, link to an event, or just want to drop us a quick line, reply to this newsletter or reach us at albertaadvantagenewsletter [at] gmail [dot] com. We’d love to hear from you!
Our editor is Clinton Hallahan. Newsletter subject lines are stolen from these songs.
You are now entering the Alberta Advantage free column zone. No fare is required to travel past this paragraph. You may find this a refreshing change of pace.
Few aspects of daily life currently appear to be escaping privatization (public services), inflation (consumer goods), and sheer breakdown of online platforms… Twitter and Netflix, anyone? From the downtown TD Free Fare Zone on Calgary's LRT line – first of its kind in Canada! Alberta leads the way! – to Scotiabank teaming up with Little Free Libraries, previously non-branded entities enmesh with corporate conglomerates to maximize exposure like never before.
Disorienting and dispiriting as such changes can be, naming rights are the tip of the private iceberg. Long-held pillars of Canada’s hallmark welfare state have seen escalating attacks from provincial Conservative governments in the perma-pandemic world. The federal Liberal government doesn't push back; Prime Minister Trudeau only lightly brushes off the wildest theoretical proposals to gut healthcare and education, while not commenting on actual implementation as it’s happening. Their rhetoric might be slightly different, but these two parties are parties of business.
At a time when many folks need enhanced and ongoing health treatments, job supports, retraining, and education opportunities, Premiers Smith, Ford, and others continue to push their wealth transfer agendas.
Underfunding of public services is a deliberate political decision. We must keep this front of mind when we hear leaders grasping at straws. Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek calls the Toronto-Dominion sponsorship an “innovative revenue source” for Calgary Transit, one that will ostensibly help improve service. Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones cites the need to be “bold, innovative and creative”, as for-profit surgery and diagnostic centers are set to gobble up public insurance funds. (Naming rights for your knee surgery have not been secured as yet.)
No need to simply take our word on privatization. The sorry current state of former Alberta Precision Laboratories provides a fine case study and reality check.
The province’s lab services provide community medical testing to the population, as ordered by medical professionals. Originally public, the labs were privatized by the Klein government in 1996, under DynaLIFE Labs. The company’s operations were found to be inadequate (by the very same government!) in 2006, and the services were again made public.
History was bound to repeat, as then premier Jason Kenney – in one of his final acts in office – handed the contract for labs in most Alberta regions (notably, all city clinics) to DynaLIFE in June 2022, with Premier Smith finalizing the deal. “More and better services” were initially promised.
The change rolled out to patients in December 2022. Health Minister Jason Copping claimed DynaLIFE would draw on its “innovative” history while Mauro Chies, Interim AHS President & CEO, said “the transition of community services to DynaLIFE will ensure hospital labs, operated by APL, are able to focus on the emergency, inpatient and urgent needs of acute and ambulatory hospital patients.” An age-old distinction laid out directly on the operating table, DynaLIFE profits from routine work and lets the public system continue to handle what’s most difficult, risky, and expensive.
In Calgary, the dozen or so collection clinics remain virtually the same, albeit with significantly reduced appointment openings and increased waiting room times, obvious to rightfully annoyed patients. Workers experience bait-and-switch tactics regarding their pensions, moving from defined benefit plans to RRSP contributions. Touted “cost savings” (which never pan out) and shareholder payouts are swiped directly from nurses’ financial futures.
“It’s always going back and forth [between AHS and DynaLIFE]. Usually nothing changes," says one nurse at a Northwest clinic, unfazed. She continues her bleak observations. "I think this one might stick, though. They’ve changed the signs. Before, they hadn't done that.”
Examining this situation in detail, we can see privatization for exactly what it is. Not innovation, not improvement. Newspaper pundits claim that knee-jerk reactions to privatization are overwrought. Much like the “jurisdiction” crowd, they explain that the public misunderstands the delicate, nuanced interplay between public funding and private delivery.
But, in fact, your wary friends and neighbours are correct, understanding very well that life is getting worse for them and better for those at the top.
What is to be done?
We must reject the rationale for privatization. Time and again, it’s been proven to erode public trust, drain public funds, and make things more complicated for ordinary people. Conversely, we can even consider decommodifying “market-based” goods and services as one aspect of embracing a more equal and just society.
We can use tactics, strategy, and arguments of workers' resistance, from historic moments like the 1995 Laundry Workers' Strike. We can hear brave voices like Cindy Pendon, laundry worker and CUPE member, call to us from the past: “We’re all little people – laundry staff – and we were the first ones to stand up to the big guys. We didn’t care if it was illegal to go on strike… we didn’t have anything to lose.”
Tried and true resistance might not not look like innovation. We can be grateful it doesn’t! If it ain’t broke… it just might bring about genuinely free conditions.
-Karen, Team Advantage
🏴There isn’t enough tax money to run Canadian cities anymore after everyone realized their email job could be done without spending 10% of your earnings on business casual clothing and commuting. You will get a higher tax bill (if you can afford a home) and your city will cover the risk of converting office space into apartments because fuck you.
🏴The idea was that if you profit from doing oil things in the oil province you have to clean up your oil mess when you run out of oil at the oil place. The new idea, after decades of those clean-ups being done with the enthusiasm of a prisoner submitting themselves to waterboarding, is that you have to clean up your oil mess but taxpayers will pay for it. Our provincial government knows that paying to clean up your own mess is a bit of a downer! She’s actually helping!
🏴Danielle Smith is an expert in leveraging those effete Quebecois in getting her dullard agenda done and by God she is not above using La Belle Province to give billions to the billionaire owner of the Calgary Flames.
🏴A reminder that Alex Dunn bodyslammed a woman in handcuffs into a concrete floor. The woman later died suddenly and protestors insisting Dunn face justice were charged with trumped-up bullshit. Dunn might face a 30-day staycation.
🏴Toronto Police Service cross the line and try to FUCK WITH OUR BAG.
🏴What do you get when a pro-cop mayor is elected along with a slate including retired cops and at least one wife of a cop? You get the cop/nurse crossover the world has been waiting for. NURSECOP! COMING THIS SUMMER TO THEATRES EVERYWHERE.
🏴Remember when a gang of armed rural ecoterrorists broke some stuff along the Coastal Gaslink line? The cops desperately want you to believe it really happened and it wasn’t just dinner theatre.
🏴That (relatively) new, shiny pilot’s union is looking to put foot to ass over at WestJet.
It appears that the Steelworkers got the goods from CP Rail.
A dumbass was shouted down by comrades in Lethbridge.
📉A dumbass, a girlboss, and the elected leader of a western province walk into a bar.
🎧Chatting about that idiot who got shouted down in Lethbridge by comrades.
🔇Drugs are decriminalized in BC despite the provincial NDP being dumb as hell.
🎚️The most dangerous peepee in the whole country.
A Quick Note: if you want us to include an article, petition, link to an event, or just want to drop us a quick line, reply to this newsletter or reach us at albertaadvantagenewsletter [at] gmail [dot] com. We’d love to hear from you! If you want to send some old timey mail, grab those stamps and send tributes/cake/not anthrax to Alberta Advantage Podcast, PO Box 52167 Edmonton Trail, Calgary, AB, T2E 8K9.
Our editor is Clinton Hallahan. Newsletter subject lines are stolen from these songs.
The newsletter is back and we are NOT hiring an accountant but WE ARE getting a restraining order against every single person reading these words.
May 2022 sucked so bad I decided to not shove your face in it. Now I emerge from the Harkkonen goop-bath med-bed thing ready to moistly link you to shit that will ruin your day.
The amount of bad shit that has happened since the last newsletter went out is staggering. I’ve deleted about four starting paragraphs just being spoiled for choice. The cannibalizing of Jason Kenney? A health system strained to breaking? The death cult down south? I don’t think I’m the only one taking a look around, putting my hands on my hips and saying to myself, welp. Fuck.
So here’s some old stuff and some new stuff. I’m sure I’ll have lots to write about next time.
🦾Duncan Kinney is causing organs of the City of Edmonton to shit themselves weekly at this point. It’s a good reminder that police forces are independent political actors with their own best interests and they should be considered broadly hostile to regular people.
🤡The best part about Alberta is you never know how bad things are because we don’t care to know. What we do know is living here is hazardous to your health. We’ve known for a long time, and we will get periodic reminders.
🐵If you reduce the number of duties and powers the police have the less weight they have to throw around at random citizens because they don’t like them personally.
🧀The developer had their risk reduced, the landlord will reap huge downtown rents, and they’ll still lobby for lower taxes at every turn. The citizen always loses, the developer always profits.
⛳️The Kobyashi Maru of supporting a labour organization.
🎯South Korean truckers know they can bring the country to its knees.
🚀A world bubbling with active shooters is one where a Taser drone is a pretty good idea! Fly a hunk of plastic into the nose of a teen with dreams of 4chan glory and zap him before his bodycount gets too high. But, like the members of a certain ethics board, we just don’t live in a world where a product like that isn’t flown in swarms into groups of people demanding silly things like human rights. Oh well.
🦽300 people per week are dying in Canada of COVID.
🌌If you try to deprive the carceral state of grist, or reduce property values in exchange for human dignity, they will fucking get your ass.
🛠All levels of power know organization is dangerous.
🧸COVID profiteers to the gulag when.
🎊I’m just saying it’s pretty easy to buy live insects in Canada if your buddy has a court date. I’m also just saying that rescheduling a court date is difficult. I’m also also saying you can only be denied a court date for so long before it gets easy to dismiss charges on procedural grounds. Don’t use this knowledge for subversion!
☣️Washington State secretly sucks, but it used to suck way more.
🔅Oh my gosh they just admitted it.
🔔Make your manager cry over union-busting? That’s a win.
🎴The workplace birthday party is a sheet cake lie designed to keep you docile.
🏴☠️Everything new will be first used to fuck you over.
📉Never trust anything private, but always trust Paris Marx.
🎧Forgotten Corner hits a nice milestone.
🔇Left Turn Canada mourns the dopey corpse of the Horwath ONDP.
🎚️Je ne sais pas exactement de quoi parle cet épisode de Faisez vos recherches car je ne parle pas français. On dirait qu'il s'agit de Bored Apes mais je peux me tromper. Quoi qu'il en soit, c'est un excellent podcast, vous devriez donc l'écouter et faire attention aux singes.
A Quick Note: if you want us to include an article, petition, link to an event, or just want to drop us a quick line, reply to this newsletter or reach us at albertaadvantagenewsletter [at] gmail [dot] com. We’d love to hear from you! If you want to send some old timey mail, grab those stamps and send tributes/cake/not anthrax to Alberta Advantage Podcast, PO Box 52167 Edmonton Trail, Calgary, AB, T2E 8K9.
Our editor is Clinton Hallahan. Newsletter subject lines are stolen from these songs.
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