The area burned by wildfires in Canada this year exceeded 18 million hectares and burned 1,740 megatonnes of CO2, roughly three times Canada’s human-made emissions from 2022. As fire season winds down, Team Advantage examines this new, fun, half-year-long weather phenomenon, and considers the role of fossil fuels and the end of “cheap nature.”
Further reading: John Vaillant – Fire Weather Edward Struzik – Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future Alex Callinicos – The New Age of Catastrophe Jason Moore – Capitalism in the Web of Life
Rachel Notley led the Alberta NDP to their second major electoral defeat in Alberta’s latest general election. What does this election say about Albertans? How might we make basic social democratic values popular? How should we organize as we anticipate Premier Danielle Smith? And what’s next for the Alberta NDP?
What link is there between pushing Indigenous people off land, into reserves, into residential schools, and into forced treatment? How are conversations about “public safety” and policing being mobilized to harm vulnerable people? How has the politicization of the opioid epidemic obscured what’s needed to address increasing drug poisoning deaths? Harm reduction advocate Euan Thomson joins Team Advantage to discuss the realities of Alberta’s drug poisoning crisis.
Culture wars, long-term injury, workplace violence, sexual assaults, nationalistic militarism, and the appropriation of working-class aesthetics… is it possible to like hockey from the left? Can sport unite the working class? Is hockey a serious game for serious men, or a silly game for silly people? Cass Kislenko, Tyler Shipley and Doug Nesbitt join Team Advantage to discuss Canada’s game.
A group known as Take Back Alberta appears to have seized control over sizable parts of the United Conservative Party and secured the leadership of Danielle Smith. What is this group? What motivates them, and who are their key figures? PressProgress writer Stephen Magusiak joins Team Advantage to discuss his recent piece, Who Is ‘Take Back Alberta’ and What Do They Really Want?
The Bank of Canada is explicitly trying to increase unemployment by raising the cost of borrowing money. Is excessive employment the cause of inflation, and if not, what are the consequences of this policy likely to be? Economist Jim Stanford joins Team Advantage to talk about profiteering, the housing market, and the potential for a recession within the next year.
A few short years into Alberta PC Premier Ralph Klein’s deficit-slashing austerity regime, Calgary’s hospital laundry workers were given devastating news: they were going to be fired. Having been pushed to the brink, they took to the streets the next day on a wildcat strike. Soon, the city would be galvanized by the strike, with sympathy strikes soon forcing Klein’s government to cancel health spending cuts and talk of a general strike in the air.
Foster, Jason. “Revolution, Retrenchment, and the New Normal: The 1990s and Beyond.” In Working People in Alberta: A History, edited by Alvin Finkel, 205–241. Edmonton: AU Press, 2012.
Reshef, Yonaton, and Sandra Rastin. Unions in the Time of Revolution: Government Restructuring in Alberta and Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.
Taylor, Jeff. “Labour in the Klein Revolution.” In The Trojan Horse: Alberta and the Future of Canada, edited by Gordon Laxer and Trevor Harrison, 301–313. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995.
Building a Community Movement for Better Transit feat. James Wilt: Saturday, March 18th | University of Alberta. RSVP: michaeljanz.ca/transitcamp2023
Alberta, under the incredible leadership of Premier Danielle Smith, has declared sovereignty — or rather, proclaimed itself “sovereign within a united Canada,” whatever that means. What even is sovereignty? How might it to relate to Indigenous sovereignty? Who even wants this?
You see, the woke establishment wants to control what media Albertans see, what vaccines we take, the resources we develop — and even what we are allowed to grow and eat. Independent journalist Jeremy Appel joins Team Advantage to explore Danielle Smith Thought.
In the 1980s and 1990s, free trade and economic integration were intensely debated topics and the subject of debate in national elections, and generally opposed by the political left. Most recently, right-populist political formations — like Trump and Brexit — have resurfaced the issue of free trade, critiquing it for their own purposes. Why is it that nobody except the political right wants to talk about free trade anymore, especially when our countries have strategic decisions on the horizon— like resourcing pandemic responses and mitigating climate change?
