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689 Plays6 days ago
After nine years as Progress Alberta's executive director and the editor of the Progress Report, Duncan Kinney is moving on to stabler, more raise-a-family-able things. Join us as we reminisce about some of our greatest hits during Duncan's tenure and talk frankly about the issue of 'activist journalism.'
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:12
Speaker
friends and enemies welcome to The Progress Report. We are your hosts, Jim Story and Jeremy Appel, coming at you from Amiskwichi, West Kaigan in Treaty 6 territory, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta. Today's guest was a real easy fellow for us to find is our outgoing Executive Director, Duncan Kinney.
Transition and Future Plans
00:00:30
Speaker
Duncan, welcome to the show. Hello, and yes, thank you for having me, and it's a pleasure to not have to to do the intro, so thank you for for filling in. Yeah, well, it's going to take me a while to get used to it.
00:00:42
Speaker
I'm still a little shaky, but big boots, big boots. Why do we have boots to fill? That's a question that I think a lot of audience members are thinking right now. Why do we have boots to fill? um Yeah, I have ah stepped away from the progress report as the editor and executive director. I am going to school. I'm training to be a psych nurse at McEwen University.
Reflecting on Progress Alberta's Impact
00:01:06
Speaker
And so after nine years, literally, like almost to the day to the month ah after starting Progress Alberta and about five years, one and a half years after kind of concentrating on journalism with the Progress Report, I am stepping away and you know,
00:01:23
Speaker
Jim, you are now you know the longest serving member, and Jeremy, staff writer, and Jim and Jeremy, are you'll you'll both be taking on the content level and to replace me, we've hired a very competent, very awesome Hijal Desarkar to take on the director of operations role, to take over some of the admin and operations and other stuff that I did that wasn't journalism role over a progress up for them. So yeah.
00:01:51
Speaker
It's going to be a big empty space in your brain for a while where a lot of enemies have lived for a bit, I think. You're going to have to find a new nemesis at work. Is there a day in your work team yet? I mean, I think it's, it's funny cause like I have 12 tabs open right now, you know, like, um, I, you know, I have 12 tabs open. I don't have six stories on the go. I'm not juggling a bunch of stuff that has to get them. Like I have, well, I guess I kind of have two jobs now, but I'll wish I would get to later, but like, yeah, like.
00:02:28
Speaker
It is wild to think that something that occupied my life and my brain and my, you know, just like, you know, essence for so long is now just- Yeah, your identity. I mean, for quite a while, you have been the face of this organization. You have been the Progress Alberta guy.
00:02:48
Speaker
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And you know, it was was it was always a ah group effort, you know, early on. I can't remember when you were hired, Jim, like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen. You've been here for a long, long time and there's people that other folks have come and gone and Jeremy got.
00:03:02
Speaker
became a staff writer in 2023. And, uh, you know, I think the progress report and progress Alberta are going to continue to exist, can continue to do the kind of interesting, original, independent investigative and accountability journalism that no one else does.
Investigative Journalism Highlights
00:03:18
Speaker
But, um, but yeah, just not with me around. Well, before we let you go, why don't we at least tap into some memories? We got some great hits in the, uh, the oeuvre. Why don't you tell us a bit about some of your favorite projects that you worked on with us?
00:03:34
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the there really is kind of the two phases of Progress Alberta, right? we Like prior to 2019, we were kind of a hybrid organization. We did investigations, but we also were doing kind of organizing and campaigns. And ah something from that era that I'm really proud of is our work on private schools and really kind of taking the time to dig into just how much money these private schools get. How did Alberta come to be the province that pays the most for private schools?
00:04:05
Speaker
the ones that has that has the most. you know like Literally like Ontario, ah Nova Scotia, Prince Edward r Island, Newfoundland, Labrador. like all these like Only five provinces actually pay money to private schools to exist. And of those five, Alberta pays the most by like a wide margin. And just kind of like digging into both the present day numbers, the history, even like some of the more egregious examples of like, there was ah an ostensibly public school that was functioning in Calgary that was attached to the like palace or school board.
00:04:40
Speaker
And it was like some super Catholic thing. And they were charging $13,000 a year as like fees but to get around. And after we wrote our story, they did kind of go back to being a private school. So it's like, you know, there was some positive effects. We were, we were never able to unfortunately get the Alberta NDP to ever fucking do anything on private schools, despite being the like sworn enemy of both the Alberta NDP's existence and electoral success, as well as the public school system in general. But that's kind of,
00:05:07
Speaker
uh, you know, their own cross the bear and their own cowardice. Yeah, I think, uh, the Alberta NDP refusing to take good advice is going to be a bit of a recurring theme in this episode. Yeah. Yeah, I think that was a fun one. I mean, it's not just the writing, too. You know, I really ah was an editor as well at Progress Report and worked with writers, worked with, a a you know, a young up and coming young whippersnapper by the name of Jeremy Appel to do some very interesting work on Brett Wilson. And and Jeremy, I'm curious to your thoughts about the Brett Wilson story that we published and and what your thoughts are on it, because I think it really holds up and really stands out as an excellent kind of Progress Report piece.
00:05:48
Speaker
Yeah, it was one of those great pieces where you hear people talk all the time about these orphan wells that Brett Wilson dumped on the public. I think Scott Schmidt at Medicine Hat News might have mentioned them in a column.
00:06:06
Speaker
before we did this story, but yeah, it was it was something that just hadn't been covered. I mean, you're not gonna, you wouldn't expect mainstream news ah to cover it unless he was implicated in some sort of scandal involving them, right?
00:06:31
Speaker
um So, ah yeah, I'm really proud of that piece.
Jeremy's Journalism Journey
00:06:36
Speaker
I think it holds up. i and you know Something that you had never seen in mainstream media is sort of at the end where I encourage people to tweet it at him. ah yeah Yeah, exactly. mad and yeah and he's still that He so never really you still never really responded to any of that, has he? No. When I was at the ah Conservative Party of Canada Stampede BBQ a few years ago, he was there. you know He stands out because of the shirts he wears. um and I was so tempted to just go up to him with a video recording and just being like, brett
00:07:16
Speaker
Why won't you pay to clean up your orphan wells? But I didn't want to get kicked out. So I didn't do that. But one day I'm sure I'll run into him. I'll be able to ask him about that. Um, and you know, but it takes me back to really when I got laid off, uh, from the mess and had news in April, uh, 2020, uh, you know, one of the first people to call me up after was you Duncan, and you just said, let's, let's do some, some journalism. And, uh, you helped me really do my first investigative reporting stories ever. I'd always wanted.
00:07:55
Speaker
to do investigative reporting, but with the working at a daily newspaper, there just wasn't ever any time. It was like, no, rewrite this press release from the police. Yeah. Go to court, cover what happened. You know, shit yeah. Oh, man. The amount of days I spent at court. And you didn't do just do the Brett Wilson piece, too. I think there was one. It was the Manateau piece. The Manateau one was the first one. I remember that Candace National Observer picked it up, which was ah my first time being published ah by them. I've since written a few things for them ah sort of exclusively. But yeah, that was a really good piece. And I remember you just sent me this, this Google doc with all of these like links to financial statements. And we're just like here, turn this into a story, interview some people. And yeah, it it really,
00:08:53
Speaker
ah was the start of I think a really fruitful professional partnership ah between us. And just to just just for the audience who are maybe not familiar with four-year-old progress report stories, the Manitok story that we're talking about was essentially a company that went under, ah like an oil and gas company that went under. And then a bunch of their junk got dumped into the Orphan Well Association kind of pool of orphan wells. But the same guy, like the literal same CEO, started up another company and then ended up just taking over the like other half of the company that wasn't junk.
00:09:31
Speaker
And like this was apparently just allowed. You were just allowed to do that, which I was ah kind of gobsmacked to find out. And then I was like, well, Jeremy, and please go go go talk to the a talk to the Alberta energy regulator. Talk to this guy. I mean, I don't think you ever commented, but.
00:09:46
Speaker
Yeah. And that was like, yeah, kind of our first kind of instances of collaborating. There's another collaboration. I remember the the the guy's name, ah Mass Gerama, I believe
Controversial U of A Donations
00:09:56
Speaker
his name was. I remember I reached out to him on LinkedIn because of course yeah these guys are all spend, these guys all spend a lot of time on LinkedIn.
00:10:05
Speaker
the the most normal insane kind of social media network. Yeah. um And yeah, that fucker never got back to me. I mean, not that I would have said anything interesting, um anything, you know, I mean, it was really the AER. I remember getting comment from them.
00:10:25
Speaker
And they were like, well, have you know that we forced them to like, it was like, we did a great job. all the What about all the orphan wells? We didn't allow them to dump on the orphan wells.
00:10:46
Speaker
yeah Yeah, we did a great job, actually. Yeah, I know. I i love AER. I think another one that miss I'm going to miss the AER and they're non... Actually, I think AHS is the best at giving non-statements, but I think another story that you and I worked on, Jeremy, that I think still holds up quite well and still has never been addressed, actually, is the university of Alberta and their Nazi donations. um why Why don't you walk the audience through that one? and
00:11:17
Speaker
Yeah, so this came right after the Jaroslav Honka scandal, the Waffen SS veteran who received a couple standing ovations in Canadian Parliament. And then it ah soon after it came out that Honka um was ah had had a an endowment at the u University of Alberta's ah Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies in his name. And so with that,
00:11:58
Speaker
um
00:12:02
Speaker
We decided, I think a lot of people were talking about, I mean, of course, Peter Savrin, who's a Waffen SS veteran, was the Chancellor at the U of A in the 1980s, and he was also very influential in the old PC party.
00:12:19
Speaker
and And, you know, I, per Anders Redling in Sweden, who I believe got his PhD at University of Alberta, um had published a bunch of research into it, and the um U of A Students Association, we're also looking into it um in other faculty at U of A. um So we worked together with them and each other to you get like a number, like how much money
00:12:58
Speaker
are we talking about in in in Nazi donations? ah And um I believe it was 1.4 million we reached? And that's not including the $3 million dollars endowment from
00:13:18
Speaker
Peter Jasek, who didn't- Yeah, the guy who tried the guy who tried to join the 14th Waffen SS. but couldn't So he didn't join the 14th Waffen SS, but it wasn't for lack of trying, right? um And ah he remained till the day he died. ah Nazi sympathizer, certainly as it pertained to Ukraine's national ambitions.
00:13:47
Speaker
ah which But um yeah, and of course nothing has happened about that since. I did file, I guess I'll let listeners in on a little a little secret that I i have filed a FOIP request.
00:14:04
Speaker
um u of a is taking its sweet ass time uh to get back to me but i am quite interested in the what the conversations uh surrounding that were like i think um a driving force for our organization has always been this sort of promethean urge it's like stealing the fire from the gods and hand handing it out kind of thing because we're a couple of uh or handful of folks that don't really have anybody holding our leash, you know, we can do what we want with it.
00:14:41
Speaker
e
00:14:44
Speaker
No, I mean, there's ah you know someone who wrote there' someone who wrote and ah someone who wrote an excellent story for us about ah Jason Kenney's weird brother and his shutdown,
00:14:57
Speaker
now shutdown, youth treatment facility in Kelowna. That's now- He had the brain science brother, the neurology. Yeah, he now has like you know an excellent job in journalism and he does great work and he's doing great work. and like was that Was that Jack?
00:15:14
Speaker
Yeah, Jack Farrell. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. I remember that story and I don't think I, I don't think I knew Jack at the time, so I didn't put two and two together.
00:15:30
Speaker
We've had resources to work with that a lot of folks in this space haven't, you know, I imagine we'll get more to this in the discussion later in the episode, but, um, you know, we kind of fell into some funding that other people did not have access to. And it's been a real honor and pleasure to be able to hand that out to people. Yeah. And to just do journalism, right? Like, I think one of the things that I am going to miss is, you know, having a scoot doing journalism, knowing that you have some fucking, you know, powerful actor, you know, that they've said either something that's like directly contradicted by your reporting or that is going to make them look bad.
Accountability in Journalism
00:16:13
Speaker
and sending them those questions, going to a press conference, knowing that you have them, like, dead to rights. Like, I am going to miss that, you know? Like, one of the stories, even just from this, from 2024 that I'm really proud of is the ah young nurse story, right? This is a bit of a two-parter because we got leaked, we got leaked audio from Uh, Danielle Smith bragging at the petroleum club. I think it was the petroleum club, one, some fancy private club in Calgary. Yeah, it was about, yeah, about what a great job they were doing, you know, of, uh, evicting ah homeless people from tents in like minus 20 degree weather. And she's all great she also, she also boasted about how she was making the left's heads explode with how great job she's doing.
00:16:58
Speaker
It's how great a job she's doing it, making sure that more and more more and more unhoused people you know lose limbs to frostbite. But anyways, so we have this kind of disgusting bragging to you know Calgary's monied oligarchs in rich and elite class about what a great job they're doing of of fucking with homeless people in Edmonton.
00:17:17
Speaker
And then we get that audio and we kind of publish it. And contained within that audio is this like these lurid stories kind of used to justify this brutality and violence against unhoused people. And one of the stories was this like story of like a young nurse being sexually assaulted and how that was kind of like, and that was being blamed on people who, like unhoused people who lived in an encampment. And then that act, and then the followup is that then that person that young nurse who was sexually assaulted reached out to me and was like, I don't believe that the people who assaulted me were unhoused. It was it was like down the street and around the corner from the encampment that is being referenced in the news stories. And like, I think it's really fucked up that Daniel Smith is using my incredibly traumatic personal experience to justify this stuff because I don't believe in these homeless sweeps.
00:18:07
Speaker
And so with ah you know the blessing of of this young man, I go to this press conference and I con confront Danielle Smith with the fact that like, hey like person who you're holding up as like an example of why you're doing all this this violence on house people says it they don't believe they were attacked by homeless people and they want you to stop doing it and she you know what her Daniel Smith way kind of dissembled and blah blah blah oh the privacy and this that and the other thing I was like well no they talked to me like they know what the privacy implications of me asking this question are they're watching right now and and then the kind of most hilarious part of this of that exchange was when
00:18:43
Speaker
Daniel Smith was like, well well, Chief Dale McPhee is right here next to me. like He can answer you know questions for you about all this all the the like brutality and violence on the streets per perpetrated by unhoused people and then like her minister of public safety, Mike Ellis, taps her on the shoulder and Dale like shakes his head. and like was and like I regret kind of not following up in the moment being like,
00:19:06
Speaker
No, no, you're not gonna answer, but no, and then they just, they just kind of, Dale just kind of brushed it off. Despite his boss, or I mean, her boss, ah Dale's boss, I should say, kind of being like, answer this guy's question. He was like, no, I can't, it's Duncan Kinney. I can't, I can't dare, I wouldn't dare talk to him in a public forum, even though it makes me look like a fucking idiot. Well, if we're going to talk about you ah getting the powerful in a pinch, holding people accountable, that, that sort of thing, ah we got to talk about this whole,
00:19:34
Speaker
long arc between you and chief of police, Dale McPhee. Why don't we go all the way back to the start of that one with the dinosaur suit? Yeah. So like we were the only outlet to report on the fact that the chief of Edmonton police service, Dale McPhee attended a UCP fundraiser. A UCP fundraiser hilariously that where kind of UCP MLAs like dressed up in Tyrannosaurus Rex suits and raced each other on a horse racing track in Lacombe. Horse racing track in Lacombe, but like this is news. Like Police chiefs are not allowed nor encouraged, nor is it really part of like norms to have police chiefs participating in partisan political fundraisers. Wasn't he attending the event with ah like a private sector pal, a lobbyist pal of some sort?
00:20:19
Speaker
Yeah, he was attending with a guy ah from Red Deer, a friend of his, who runs a ankle bracelet company, like ah a company that does like monitoring of people, of people who've been convicted of crimes. ah ah and Incidentally, a sector that has been rewarded handsomely by the UCP. They've shelved a bunch of money at ankle bracelet companies.
00:20:38
Speaker
I don't know. I'm surprised to hear that. Yeah, I don't I don't recall if this guy's company specifically has done well, but I don't imagine he's done poorly. And and so, yeah, he was attending with this like guy who runs an ankle bracelet monitoring company. And that's the only reason that we found out about it was because a tipster, this guy had just posted on his like public Facebook kind of like classic stupid old guy shit had just like posted on his public Facebook a picture of him and Dale at the fundraiser.
00:21:05
Speaker
And so like that was the picture for the story. And ah we reached out to him and he was like, blah, blah, blah. And we reached out to Dale and he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, everyone kind of was like, i yeah, I did it. I guess he didn't deny it. I had him dead to rights. And we published a story and and to kind of like rickets from the rest of the media, which was just bizarre to me to be like this is publicly available information, like.
00:21:29
Speaker
You don't want to ask the chief of police about why he's attending UCP fundraisers. It seems to have taken quite a long time for the corporate media around here to realize that to bothering Dale McPhee is fun and productive. I see ah Lauren Boothby from the journal is is stepping into your your shoes a bit. Dale is going after her at press conference now.
00:21:53
Speaker
Yeah, she's a great reporter. She was just asking honest, I mean, she was just, I mean, this is the thing about doing accountability journalism is that like powerful people don't like it. And so when a reporter like Lauren Boothby from the journal stands up and and it asks again, any question, a question that any reporter should be asking, right? It's like, hey, you seem to have ah initiated an extremely political witch hunt against your political enemies who are serving, who are appointed to the Edmonton police commission, the body that oversees you as the chief, what do you have to say about that? And he's just like, well, you're biased. You're, I'm not going to talk to you. You need to sit there and listen and not talk. And like, just like loses his noodle over like, again, basic accountability questions. Like the thing that kicked it off, you know, his, my, my, my credential review and all the other nonsense that followed it was essentially just Dale holding a press conference during the, during the, um,
00:22:44
Speaker
It was the convoy nonsense, right? It was the convoy nonsense and these fucking yahoos were showing up in town every weekend and just leaning on their horns for like hours straight. And Dale was holding a press conference talking about how great a job he was doing. And it's just like, hey, Dale, Duncan Kinney here. ah I don't think, and a lot of people don't think you're doing a good job because nothing is happening. just The same thing keeps happening every weekend. and They're still honking. Yeah. and And then he just got all pissy and huffy with me and like, you know, you know how he kind of mumbles and grumbles. And eventually he cut me off.
00:23:21
Speaker
and And then, yeah, and then, you know, a few weeks later I learned that, you know, my my credentials, my quote unquote credentials were under review for a reason that still I've never been given a reason for why i my credentials, my media credentials with the EPS were under review. But of course it didn't stop me or the and or the organization park report from reporting on the police or on Dale. You know, we ended up forcing the commission to reveal his salary. You know, he's the second highest paid municipal police chief in Canada.
00:23:51
Speaker
Uh, you know, something that the only thing that became public was because we foiled it. And then in the course of doing that fight, they didn't want to give it to us. I'm like, you have to like this. These are, these are like salary numbers. Like you can, uh, like this is no money out the door. You're not allowed to not disclose it. Um, you know, we were the only organization we were, and actually some media I think did follow us on that.
00:24:16
Speaker
Uh, you know, we were also, we broke the story of the Edmonton police services secret surveillance plane. You know, like the fact that they had kept a a plane, a literal like aero plane at an airport that they like had in a hangar, they would go out and fly for um surveillance reasons. Probably they kept it secret from, from the city of Edmonton, from the people of Edmonton for its entire lifespan. Like the only reason we knew about the secret plane was because they were asking for more money to buy a new plane because that plane was at the end of its life.
00:24:46
Speaker
At which point people were asking, replacing what? You're replacing what? Yeah. Yeah. I think, ah you know, if you look back, your personal conflict with Dale and the Edmonton Police was kind of destined, given our organization's conflicts with the Edmonton Police earlier through, I mean, when I think back to the earliest campaigns that we did, the things that first got us on the board and brought us to people's attention, there was first the series of surveys that you did about people's general political leanings in Alberta. they There's more of more of us than we think. Absolutely, yeah. and and this ah So this was one of the first ones, right? And then you mentioned the the other one of the other of the the top three, which was ah the private schools campaign, which which brought a lot of and notability to the organization.
00:25:45
Speaker
And then of the, kind of the initial three big projects, the one that we haven't mentioned is carding, which was which was huge for us. And I think is what initially kicked off our interest and I think our subsequent radicalization when it comes to policing in Alberta. And that was a campaign that we had quite a lot of help from. We worked closely with Bashir Mohammed, Ray Kash Walters, and Black Lives Matter Edmonton.
00:26:14
Speaker
as well as some academics up and down the province. Did a speaking tour with Desmond Cole. That was like our first real like success with FOIPs with Lethbridge police. We got insane FOIPs from Lethbridge police for that. Like, yeah. And following up on that campaign, that's what led us into then looking into school resource officers. And I think by the time we had done a whole bunch of research on carding and a whole bunch of research on SROs, and we had learned how bad things were, particularly with the Edmonton Police Service, there was kind of no other direction for us to go than to be critical and that he skeptical of the police. And if you're an investigative journalist, if you're a journalist interested in holding
00:26:59
Speaker
powerful groups and institutions accountable, like you are going to come across the police. like They face zero pushback from nearly everywhere else in society, and they do so many harmful things.
00:27:12
Speaker
ah and so Here you are. if your If your eyes are open, if you're doing the work, if you're interested in how society functions, like you are going to see something that the police do that is egregious and corrupt or awful. And you're not going to believe that they're that they're getting away with it and you're going to be compelled to write about it. you know And that's just a part of like doing journalism.
AIMCO and Banff Train Controversies
00:27:36
Speaker
um And sadly, you know and not a lot of other and our journalistic institutions or organizations are interested in doing that work, but the progress report is.
00:27:44
Speaker
For sure. you know Contending with power, the frustration of contending with power, the radicalization of dealing with that frustration. and These are things that I really want to talk about. And I have some questions for you. But I think there's there's one last area of the greatest hits that we absolutely cannot fail to touch on. And that is AMCO. You have been laser focused on AMCO for several years now.
00:28:13
Speaker
i It's a shit show over there. Tell us a bit about your, your, your work around EMCO and the oil and gas investment stuff. Yeah. Like, okay. So like, let's set the scene here. So it's locked down, you know, COVID 2020.
00:28:32
Speaker
can't You're supposed to stay at home. you know Everyone's going crazy. and The way that I go crazy is I go down the rabbit hole of AMCO and specifically investments that they had made in oil and gas companies. There had been a very misguided directive put out by the Alberta NDP when they were in charge to be like, hey, AMCO, you should think about investing local.
00:28:54
Speaker
And ah they shouldn't have done that. That was very stupid. And government shouldn't be telling EMCO what to do anyways. But they did it. And a the way EMCO interpreted this directive was to be like, hey, we should invest in a bunch of oil and gas shitcos. ah You know, oil and gas juniors, midsize companies and oil field service companies.
00:29:15
Speaker
And so they just started spreading money around willy-nilly all over the oil patch to fucking garbage companies. They invested in Trident Exploration, and the company went tits up like a year and a half later, like $60 million dollars down the drain, dumped thousands of orphan wells on the Orphan Well Association's books. They invested money in, oh man, like Razor Energy, a company that went bankrupt at the beginning of last year.
00:29:41
Speaker
of beginning of 2024, but that everyone and their dog could look at what Razor was doing and know that it was going to be a dog. And then not ah and then on top of that, the people who run Razor were giving out dividends and doing share buybacks with AIMCO, with the fucking money that they were getting from AIMCO, this like the absolute dog shit fucking company, no business doing dividends, no business doing share buybacks. And the only way way they were able to get away with it was because AIMCO was pumping money into them for some reason.
00:30:09
Speaker
And then, you know, like this is just straight up corruption stuff that like no one else was covering. And ah so I ended up writing like a 60 page report on um all of this kind of nonsense that was happening between AMCO and the oil and gas ah industry.
00:30:26
Speaker
published it kind of during COVID. And you know people it got read. People who care about AMCO, people who care about this sort of stuff read it. But it just led to like years of just me kind of keeping an eye on these companies, keeping an eye on on what AMCO was up to. And then, of course, famously, AMCO gets blown up by ah you know the UCP this year for failing to, I don't know who knows why, maybe because they were doing too much DEA. They've given like six different reasons for why they did it at this point.
00:30:54
Speaker
Um, mostly it just seems because they wanted to install fucking Stephen Harper as the, as the chair of it. ah Somehow he has returned. Yeah. And like, I mean, they got rid of the ethics commissioner that like stopped him from becoming a director. I think a couple of times, at least anecdotally, that's what I've heard from a couple of different sources, but like,
00:31:16
Speaker
Yeah, like the AIMCO stuff is, it's unsexy. you know it's ah it's ah it's ah It's a weird little niche of kind of Alberta corruption and story, but it is like, we're talking about real money here, man. There's lots of real money. Lots of real money going out the door. And this is, this I mean, the other thing about AIMCO is that AIMCO is 70% of the assets managed by AIMCOs are not and not the government of Alberta's.
00:31:42
Speaker
No, they belong to workers. It's the deferred wages of workers. It's pension money. ah you know they have they have inco These pension plans are by law obligated to work with AMCO as their fund manager. They cannot shop around. The government gets to pick that the the directors of AMCO who pick the CEO. like like It is an absolute dog shit situation. and It's one that deserves far more accountability journalism and investigative journalism And I was happy to provide just a sliver of what was kind of needed over that time, because there was a lot of dodgy business. And I assume it's only going to get worse too, because they've created this Heritage Investment Opportunities Corporation and Stephen Harper is going to be like doing God knows what. um Well, I hope you will be happy to hear that we are not putting the torch down on AMCO and the investment stuff. We will continue to be digging deep for as long as there is dirt. No, that's good.
00:32:34
Speaker
i'm like I'm very glad to hear that. and yeah like ah Just a couple more things before we kind of kick it on to the next thing. there's The train deal, that was a couple of years ago, but they wanted to build the... Invest Alberta was trying to get a train deal done between Banff and Invest Alberta was still pushing this train deal despite the fact that the guy who was going to benefit from the train deal, the guy pushing the train deal was the former chair of Invest Alberta.
00:33:03
Speaker
Yeah, these guys somehow cooked up a plan to build a train that was not palatable to leftists who post on Discord. Yes, somehow. What are you going to say, Jer? That's Adam Watrous, right? That's the guy. Yeah, yeah. Adam Watrous, this kind of guy. We were calling capital.
00:33:22
Speaker
Lyricon Capital, he's a big UCP guy. He owns Mount Norquay. And we had the goods on it, man. like There was a part of the UCP like world that did not want this train deal to happen. And like they were giving me so much fucking juice on that. They were giving me so much juicy fucking bits and back behind the scenes stuff on like on this train deal. Because what they were asking for was insane. They wanted $30 million dollars a year for 30 years.
00:33:49
Speaker
to run this train and like they were they were flying out um ah you they were flying out like cabinet out to baf like they they had spent a bunch of money on a sponsorship of the like canadian downhill team and when and there was like a There was a World Cup downhill event at Lake Louise and they like rented out a couple of hotels and gave a pitch deck and like had like on the hill fucking VIP section. Like they were spending money to try and get this train deal done. And we had the goods on them and reported on it and like.
00:34:21
Speaker
you know Ultimately, we were successful. The train deal was killed under Kenny. Every once in a while, you keep hearing about it being revived, but it seems like they're trying to to get money out of the federal government instead of the provincial. They they want this like massive cash payment every year to run it from some level of
Intersections of Journalism and Activism
00:34:36
Speaker
government. but Really proud of that one. Um, Connor McDavid's missing laptop. We got a good tip three. People still talk to me about that one on the street or we'll bring it up in conversation. in shaa They find it yeah one day. They'll find Connor McDavid's missing laptop. Three fucking detectives work in the case. Yeah. Like there's some fun stories like that to come up over, over time. And you know, I'm, I'm sad. I'm going to miss it. Well, you know, bouncing back to the train story, I got to say that one of my favorite things that happens in this job used to happen a bit more.
00:35:04
Speaker
uh, is conservative sources coming to us so that they can knife other conservatives in the back. Like it is a pit of stakes over there. And it is surprisingly easy to get dirt on them because they're they're all constantly, uh, trying to get one over on each other. I feel like the volume of that stuff has, uh, gone down a little bit recently. I think they're probably shopping more of it over to the breakdown. Yeah. They seem to be the clearinghouse. Yeah. A little less skepticism, but, uh,
00:35:33
Speaker
Man, we got some fun tips about oh guys back in the day, that's for sure. You see ah some voices in mainstream media often refer derisively towards activism disguised as journalism and how it's not legitimate journalism. I think most recently, Sean Amato from City News, who is a major proponent
00:36:05
Speaker
of this idiocy. um Also ran for city council once, by the way. um Got mad at you, Duncan, ah for um saying,
00:36:21
Speaker
here's where you can join striking education workers on the picket lines. Well, specifically, he he got mad at us saying you should join them.
00:36:32
Speaker
Oh, right. because if Yeah, that's right. Because that's the thing. If you say, here's where you can, then that's legitimate journalism. But then if you express your opinion, then suddenly it's it's fake. and it's I believe he said that you were contributing to the distrust of media. right Because, of course, mainstream media has no responsibility for that. It's it's guys like us who Yeah, all the ads that they run at the bottom of their stories, tricking seniors into investment deals and nutritional supplements and and Bitcoin scams. Those aren't corrosive to journalism, but us being open and honest about what our position is, that's corrosive somehow.
00:37:15
Speaker
Right. And oh if it's your position that journalists just shouldn't be allowed to express opinions and that you just tell people the facts. Right. I mean, that's flawed, too, because how do people decide which facts are more most important or which experts to speak to? Right. That involves a personal perspective on what is important and whose voices should be amplified. But if that's your position, then OK, fine.
00:37:46
Speaker
But I always challenge people who say this, are are political commentators or op-ed writers, are they activists or journalists? Right? And um never they never seem interested in answering that question, probably because ah
00:38:07
Speaker
their entire position uh crumbles uh if they're like yeah of course uh you know david staples is a journalist he might not be a good one but he's still a journalist he's not an activist disguises journalist and it's like
00:38:23
Speaker
Yeah. And so anyways, I, but this is obviously, uh, you know, it's not just a motto who, uh, takes this view. No, no, no. He's just particularly outspoken about it. Uh, for reasons that I, uh, it's a long time criticism that's been pointed at, you know, at myself and at the organization and yeah yeah in other, uh, in other, uh, organizations to, uh, like ricochet. Yeah. The, the tight you get to reach gets it. Yeah.
00:38:52
Speaker
our well gets never Never the Journal is opinion page that or or the Globe and Mail or the National Post. It's it's just, it's always left wing progressive media. And then, I mean, you know, I think when you push a lot of these people, they'll be like, oh, well, it's also rebel news, right? And so creating this false equivalency between what we do and what they do. And um this is a really long winded way of asking you, Duncan,
00:39:22
Speaker
how you respond to that line of ah of thinking that you can either be an activist or a journalist, but you can't be both. and Yeah, I mean, it's a well-worn criticism of myself and of the organization. And of of those are the other institutions as well. And it's it's it's pretty infantile. I mean, if you think about it for more than a few seconds, because
00:39:51
Speaker
journalism doing journalism is a political act. It's fundamentally it fundamentally is like if you are taking the time to whether professionally or as an amateur to go to an event or to put words on paper and try to explain the world in a way by talking about an event or series of events and explaining to a wider audience what's happening and choosing to talk to sources and verify and do basic journalism, you know, that is always going to be a political act. And there's a reason why billionaires and rich people and oligarchs and industrialists buy up newspapers or other communications platforms. um It's because it's, despite the fact that never really a moneymaker, except for kind of a brief period in newspapers history for about 30 years,
00:40:44
Speaker
it is obviously very conducive for their politics to own a newspaper,
Political Nature of Journalism
00:40:50
Speaker
for the newspaper to talk about you know their preferred subjects and to talk to their preferred experts and to talk about society in a way that's conducive to their business interests continuing to function and and not be, say, expropriated by a worker state. you know like it is ah to to to pretend To sit around and pretend that like newspapers and ah media outlets and journalists aren't political they're not doing politics is infantile and anyone who says so should be treated as an infant which is kind of what you should think of David Staples as uh and and so like it's again if you think about the criticism for more than a few minutes journalism is politics politics is journalism
00:41:37
Speaker
and when you are doing journalism, you are committing ah both an act of journalism as well as an act of politics. And to divorce the two, you know you can try, but you're not going to be successful. Even the act of picking which stories to cover as a journalist is political. The this the mere act of setting an editorial agenda and then like setting that out and then picking which stories to write, you are making a political judgment.
00:42:06
Speaker
Readers of the Progress Report email newsletter, which you can subscribe to, I'll put a ah link to it in the show notes of this episode, may recall a research study that that we shared in a recent newsletter, which was, it was a meta study of sources of political misinformation in European politics. And they found in that, that there wasn't a specific
00:42:36
Speaker
like spectrum of like radical to not radical and your journalism got worse and worse and and less trustable, the more radical you go. They found that there was actually just one specific cohort that was spreading most of the political misinformation and and it wasn't radicals and it wasn't conservatives and it wasn't populists. It was this specific political group that you can kind of draw a circle around it by calling it radical populist conservatives, but like it's a specific political movement. It's not like there is an inherent and inherent kind of lack of being able to do journalism that hits you if you become too politically radical. And I think the important takeaway from that study was that the left and the right aren't mirror images of each other. We're different because we have different values.
00:43:33
Speaker
The leftist values that we have at this organization, our values include freedom of the press. They include accuracy and precision in reporting. They include ah democratic institutions. And when you compare us to the radicals way over on the other side of things, these are people who fundamentally don't believe in the press. So of course they're not going to respect the um the process of good journalism the way that that we do. These are people that fundamentally don't believe in democracy or democratic institutions. So they they don't approach this with the same mission that we have. They don't feel they aren't being Promethean. They aren't handing out the fire from the gods, right? I think a lot of people who level these criticisms of activist journalism, yes, there are many of them who just do it out of their own
00:44:28
Speaker
professional interest or their class interest, or because they are politically centrist so that they they think that they're objective and everyone else is wrong, like a lot of centrists do. But I think a lot of the problem is just that people think that it's a mirror image, that they think that anyone on the left who is a bit of a rascal is doing Israel event, but for communism. And that's not what this is about.
00:44:57
Speaker
No, I think there's a good kind of capper to it. like you know You can get into the weeds on activists versus journalists and all this nonsense, but like again, I come back to um you know doing journalism is a political act and the politics of the person doing the journalism should be relatively obvious when you read it. ah I don't think that that's a bad thing. I think that should be a good thing. And when you read the progress report, I don't think there was ever any ambiguity about what we stood for or who we were standing behind. you know We were standing behind the oppressed. We were standing up for workers. That is who we are. That is the work that we do. That is the work that will continue to be done.
00:45:47
Speaker
and so You know, you could do journalism that doesn't do that. There's lots of places that do that work, you know, go nuts. And there's even, you know, official corporate news sites that that like, you know, first draft of history, paper of record, like, I'm not going to be grudge workers out there doing that work, but you should be doing that work with your eyes wide open and and realizing, you know,
00:46:13
Speaker
who are you working for? Who's your employer? What are their goals? What are their political goals? um And so like, you know, we never did, we didn't cover every press conference. We didn't rewrite every press release. That was not the work that we did. And then places that do that stuff, I'm not gonna be a graduate, especially the the workers on the front line. But, you know, at the end of the day, ah journalism was political.
00:46:37
Speaker
And to think otherwise is is is foolish. And you know i'm I'm proud of the work that we did and I will stand behind it. Well said.
Farewells and Future Endeavors
00:46:47
Speaker
you know I'm proud to have worked with you too, Duncan. It's it's been a pleasure.
00:46:54
Speaker
Well, um we're we're reaching the end of our time here. I don't think we have too much time to fit more in. Jeremy, do you have something that that you really want to say before we wrap up?
00:47:07
Speaker
No, just ah all the best, Duncan, on your new career path. I look forward to you ah you know ah becoming an influential actor on your union executive.
00:47:26
Speaker
and um glad that, you know, you're not becoming a travel nurse and we'll have to leave us. I'm almost done. So yeah, all the best, Duncan. And ah thank you for, um ah you know, I think few other people have really ah played as much of a role as you have in shaping me as as as a young journalist. And while I don't necessarily agree with every um you know stylistic
00:48:06
Speaker
ah
00:48:09
Speaker
decision you've made or, you know, way of asking a specific question at, uh, you know, specific press conference. Um, I am, uh, so glad to have had your, uh, mentorship over the past, uh, I guess it's five years now. Yeah. It's been a minute. It has been a minute. As always, uh, you know, like, and subscribe, follow the pod. Uh, if you would like to support us.
00:48:39
Speaker
Please take a look in the show notes for the Patreon link. We would be very gracious for anything you'd like to pitch in. I'm starting a bit of a hobby project on the weekend, so if you like video games, ah tune in ah to twitch dot.tv on Saturday. I'll be streaming. Just look for Jim Story. We're playing some games with the Alberta Advantage guys. And aside from that, that's all we have for today. So thank you, Duncan, for coming on to tell the stories. Thanks, Jeremy, for helping me co-host today. Thank you, family communist, for our awesome theme song. And goodbye. Thank you for having me. Bye.