Alberta Advantage Podcast

Activist and organizer Wesam Cooley sits down with Team Advantage to discuss the pragmatics of organizing street actions in a city like Calgary. We discuss a bit of Wesam's personal history, the experience and theory he brings to his efforts, the challenges of coalition building in a radical movement, and how to deal with police repression. Wesam also tells us about the Calgary People's Assembly and the upcoming event on July 5.

From Turtle Island to Palestine - Calgary People's Assembly

Team Advantage joins forces with Team Unmaking Saskatchewan to dig into just what is wrong with our provincial wings of the New Democratic Party. The liberal outsider in Nenshi and the establishment backed pragmatist in Beck both seem allergic to doing politics. Are left populism and robust social democratic policy impossible here, or is there another path these parties could take.

Resources:

• From Left to Right: Saskatchewan's Political and Economic Transformation by Dale Eisler

• Who is the NDP for? by Haseena Manek

• "My quality of life has been compromised": U of S study finds STC closure has had a devastating impact on Saskatchewan people by Sara Birrell

• Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences by Anton Jäger

Related Episodes:

• Vote No! Calgary's Olympic Bid, Which Is Class War

• The Fall of Saskatchewan: The Sask Party Under Brad Wall

In Alberta as elsewhere reactionary backlash is targeting trans people, particularly trans children. Team Advantage examines the framing of this backlash and explores how it may be rooted in the cultural construction of childhood and education. We also review the history of trans identity, working towards a better framing and ways to stand in solidarity with trans children

CONTENT WARNING - Discussions of childhood sexual abuse and suicide. Timestamp: 22:30- ~28:30. Also flagged in the audio so you can skip to avoid.

Additional Resources

• Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson,

• How To Bring Your Kids Up Gay by Eve Sedgewick

• Kinderkommunismus by KD Griffiths and JJ Gleeson

• Ethics in the Light of Childhood by John Wall

• Solidarity with Children - An Essay Against Adult Supremacy by Madeline Lane-McKinley

• Wrong Again: The political evolution of "parental rights" CCPA Our Schools / Our Selves - Summer / Fall 2025

• The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century by Kathryn Bond Stockton

In 2024 university campuses across Canada saw encampments and other protest actions. In a new book and podcast series Dr. Roberta Lexier places these actions within the broader history of student activism in Canada since the 1960s. In this discussion we ask her how student activism differes between Québec and the rest of Canada, how radical praxis can be maintained in a rapidly turning over student population, how student activism intersects with off-campus politics and when and why the state responds with violent force.

Follow Dr. Lexier at @robertalexier.bsky.social and check out her work here:

• Book - Student Power: Canadian Student Movements From the Sixties to Today
• Podcast - Student Power: A Canadian Student Movement History Podcast

In the lead up to the federal budget, the government signalled that it would include sharp cuts, referencing the steep austerity of the 1995 federal budget.

Team Advantage takes a look at what the budget actually contains, situates it in the current political moment and examines how it actually compares to 1995. We ask how the nation building rhetoric Carney campaigned on could actually have been implemented, and what can be done about a government at war with workers.

Further Reading

• Varieties of Austerity - Heather Whiteside, Stephen McBride, and Bryan Evans

• 30th Anniversary of the 1995 Budget: Lessons to Improve Canada's Federal Finances Today

• Budget fédéral 2025: un Canada assujetti au secteur privé et à l'industrie militaire

Related Episodes

• Killing the Welfare State: Liberals and the 1990s

• TORIES: Calgary Laundry Workers vs Ralph Klein

Alberta's teachers have been ordered back to work, and their right to strike, collectively bargain, or even present a legal challenge have been stripped away by Danielle Smith's UCP. How is organized labour in Alberta responding to this existential threat?

Previous episodes on public education:

"Balance" in Climate Change, Cursive Writing: Alberta's Curriculum Review When Public Isn't Public: Education in Alberta

Previous episodes on trade unions and collective bargaining:

• Canada's Hot Union Summer: what comes next?
• Canadian vs U.S. Unions

Watch the entirety of the AFL's October 29 response to Bill 2.

Read Gil McGowan's feedback on Roberta Lexier's presentation about the need to organize towards a general strike: https://x.com/gilmcgowan/status/1681761153826033666

Further reading:

• Back to School - Notwithstanding the Charter
• Amnesty International Canada condemns Alberta government's use of Notwithstanding clause in Bill 2
• From Consent to Coercion: The Continuing Assault on Labour
• No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (book)
• Jane McAlevey: The Only Way to Win Is to Strike

Canada exists to put holes in the ground and extract surplus value for shareholders. In this episode, originally recorded in 2021, Team Advantage opens the Canadian trench-coat to find total corporate impunity. We discus how the Canadian state facilitates resource extraction within its borders and around the world at the expense of the common good, then imagine what mining might look like in a better society.

Works Cited:

• Canada In The World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination – Tyler Shipley

• Imperial Canada Inc.: Legal Haven of Choice for the World's Mining Industries – Alain Deneault & William Sacher

• Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism – Martín Arboleda

• Canadian Mining in Ecuador series - Brandi Morin

Every century or so the Canadian left gathers at the Royal Canadian Legion #1 in downtown Calgary to inagurate a new era of progress. In 1932 it was J.S. Woodworth and the gang in 1932 at the founding of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (which would become the NDP). On July 13, 2025 it was Team Advantage, Shama Rangwala, André Goulet, Roberta Lexier and Rob Rousseau.

This live recording begins with a discussion of what the Progressive Publics symposium is all about before saying goodbye to the NDP with a brief history. Then the team discusses the possibilities of a socialist project to come. With live heckling from the audience! (Mostly Jeremy Appel.)

Support our podcast! Rhetorical and real threats to Canadian sovereignty pose a tough question to critics of the Canadian state: Do we align with liberal nationalists in defense of the Canadian project or do we remain skeptical?

In this episode Team Advantage traces a brief history of Canadian nationalisms, including earlier attempts at imagining a socialist national project, in order to better understand the current moment of rising nationalist sentiment. We ask if it's even possible to extricate a good Canadian nationalism from the history of colonial land theft and genocide that undergirds this state, revisit the one time Canada was actually cool, and offer trenchant critiques of Canadian civic statuary.

Works Cited

• Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels - Erica Benner
• Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism - George Grant
• Canadian capital and secondary imperialism in Latin America - Todd Gordon and Jeffery Roger Webber
• La tentation québécoise de John F. Kennedy - Jean-François Lisée
• Responding to Donald Trump with a popular democratic project for Canada - Marcel Nelson
• Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada - Kari Polanyi
• Becoming Native in a Foreign Land; Sport, Visual Culture, and Identity in Montreal, 1840-85 - Gillian Poulter
• Mohawk Interruptus - Audra Simpson
• Louis Riel - Thee Headcoats

Related Episodes

• Imagined Alberta: Western Canadian National Fantasies
• The Waffle, the NDP, and Full Breakfast Socialism

Join our live show Friday June 13 6PM - Royal Canadian Legion #1, 116 7 Ave SE, Calgary - Free Entry - Register here! Public sector pensions are one of the hard-won victories of the 20th century labour movement, but they did not come through the neoliberal era unchanged. They are now managed like any other investment fund and are implicated in all the faults of global capital. Union researcher Tom Fraser joins Team Advantage to discuss the political economy of pension funds and the forgotten horizons of revolutionary possibility they once represented.Check out Tom's new book - Invested in Crisis: Public Sector Pensions Against the Future Other works mentioned by Tom:

• Maple Revolutionaries - The Economist
• The North will rise again: pensions, politics and power in the 1980s - Jeremy Rifkin
• Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism - Quinn Slobodian
• Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of imperialism - Kwame Nkrumah

Related Advantage Episodes:

• Kenney's Great Albertan Pension Robbery