The Progress Report

Sandra Azocar, the executive director of Friends of Medicare, joins us to analyze and breakdown Jason Kenney's new COVID restrictions as well as a recently passed bill that allows private, for-profit plasma farming operations to be set up in Alberta. 

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Links:

• What Is the Blood of a Poor Person Worth?
• A push in Alberta for “pay for plasma” distracts from bigger questions
• The Twisted Business of Donating Plasma
• Pay-for-plasma lobbyists showing up in lobbying registry
• With passing of Bill 204, UCP ideology reigns over science & evidence
• Blood Plasma and Poverty: Where Do Plasma Donation Centers Locate?
• Why Thousands of Low-Income Americans 'Donate' Their Blood Plasma to For-Profit Centers

University of Calgary law professor Lorian Hardcastle joins us to talk about her controversial piece on Dr. Hinshaw and why Hinshaw needs to exercise her powers to stop the death and destruction that COVID is wreaking. We also talk about what the government of Alberta needs to do get this disaster under control 

If you like this podcast and you want to support it go to https://www.theprogressreport.ca/patrons and become a monthly patron!

Links:

• Politicians are failing. Canada’s chief medical officers need to step in.
• Former Alberta chief medical officer of health says job involves walking political tightrope

Dave Cournoyer of Daveberta fame joins us to discuss Alberta's multiple overlapping crises. We talk COVID-19, Jason Kenney's $1.7 billion dollar whoopsie, conservative connected law firms making bank and how the smart money is on Joe Biden cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline. 

If you like this podcast and you want to support it go to https://www.theprogressreport.ca/patrons and become a monthly patron!

Links:

• Law firms with conservative connections doing big business under UCP government
• Kenney bet big on Trump and KXL – but Biden won
• Daveberta

We speak with Andre Goulet of the Harbinger Media Network about his plans to knock Ben Shapiro and Pod Save America off the Canadian political podcast charts. We also discuss Canadaland, the future of the CBC and what's next for the Progress Report. 

We speak with Courtney Walcott and LJ Parker about their work with the Defund2Fund coalition on defunding the police in Calgary as well as psychopathic challenge coins, why so many teachers and principals think it's ok to use the n-word in school, domestic violence in the Calgary Police Service and more. 

If you like this podcast and you want to support it go to https://www.theprogressreport.ca/patrons and become a monthly patron!

Further reading:

• Calgary police officer charged with domestic offences
• Calgary Police Service Firearms Training Unit challenge coin
• Longer thread on police challenge coins
• Students suspended over recording of Calgary school principal using N-word
• Hundreds of Calgary students join anti-racism walkout at Bishop McNally High School
• Bishop McNally students allege truck tried to hit them during anti-racism walkout
• 'Unbelievably inappropriate': Calgary police prohibit distribution of 'offensive' coin
• Defund2Fund

Elizabeth Simons is the co-author of a new piece published by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network on a group of young men in the Wexit movement, the Alberta Separatist Youth League, who have big political aspirations and are also extremely explicit in their anti semitic, racist, and authoritarian beliefs in leaked private chat logs. 

Yodit Tesfamicael, an organizer with Students4Change and Black Women United talks with us about the work she's a part of to help improve black lives at Norquest College. An important starting point has been getting that institution to collect race-based data. Turns out you can't be an anti-racist organization if you have no idea how black people are doing. 

If you like this podcast and you want to support it go to https://www.theprogressreport.ca/patrons and become a monthly patron!

Further reading:

• Edmonton Public Schools to become first Alberta board to collect race-based data
• NorQuest College takes steps to sustain success of black students

We have returning champion Laura Kruse on to discuss her latest Red String column. There is a huge effort going on to whitewash a dangerous and extreme right wing conspiracy theory and tens of thousands of well meaning folks are getting sucked in. And it's using child sex trafficking as the entry point. 

If you like this podcast and you want to support it go to https://www.theprogressreport.ca/patrons and become a monthly patron!

Further reading:

• Stranger Danger! Stranger Danger!
• The Red String: #SaveTheChildren, human trafficking hysteria and the expansion of the police state
• Reply All #166: Country of Liars
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We are joined by Oumar Salifou of the Is This For Real? podcast to talk about Edmonton Police's militarized hardware show and tell, the media's poor coverage of police and the upcoming Police Act review. 

If you like this podcast and you want to support it go to https://www.theprogressreport.ca/patrons and become a monthly patron!

Further reading:

• Edmonton Police show off their new armoured vehicle, drone fleet, and other militarized hardware
• Is This For Real? 
• Alberta Justice Minister Kaycee Madu calls push to defund police ‘ridiculous’

This is a re-run from September 11, 2019. We speak with Ricardo Acuna and Sandra Azocar, two Chilean refugees, to listen to their stories of the CIA-backed coup that installed brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and overthrew a democratically elected socialist government on September 11, 1973. 

Listen and subscribe on Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts or just subscribe to the RSS feed

If you like this podcast and you want to support it go to https://www.theprogressreport.ca/patrons and become a monthly patron!

Further reading:

• CIA still refuses to reveal everything it knows about Pinochet coup in Chile
• Canada’s support for the right wing coup in Chile 
• Allende’s last words to the people of Chile
• Documenting U.S. Role in Democracy’s Fall and Dictator’s Rise in Chile
• Declassified American intelligence documents on American involvement in Chilean coup
• Chile dictatorship victim toll bumped to 40,018
• How the Chilean coup forever changed Canada's refugee policies
• The ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awful TollPinochet forced to mount coup, Klein says
• Universities entangled in flap over Klein essay
• Review clears Klein of plagiarism allegation