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The gigification of Alberta's paramedics
1.1k Plays1 year ago
Freelance investigative journalist and former paramedic Brett McKay joins Duncan Kinney to discuss his recent piece in the Breach which makes the convincing case that the increased use precarious paramedics in Alberta is a part of a deliberate strategy to make it easier for the UCP to privatize ambulance service in Alberta.
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Transcript
Introduction and Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey folks, Duncan Kinney here, host of The Progress Report. Today we're speaking with freelance journalist Brett McKay about a recent excellent piece he wrote for the breach on the oubrification of Alberta's paramedics. It treats the emergency medical services crisis in Alberta as what it actually is, a labor crisis, and not some mysterious force that came out of nowhere.
Understanding Alberta's EMS Labor Crisis
00:00:18
Speaker
The UCP and the AHS have treated workers so badly that they just don't have enough workers to fill the shifts in order to have a functioning EMS system.
00:00:28
Speaker
There's all sorts of other bad stuff that we're going to get into as well, but it's a really good piece of analysis and the link is in the show notes. We are also still a member of the Harbinger Media Network and there are too many good podcasts to count that are out there that are on there. There's Victor's Children, Alberta Advantage,
00:00:46
Speaker
Unmaking Saskatchewan, there are so many good podcasts on there. So if you do follow them on social media, get their emails, just so you can keep on top of all the great stuff that's coming out.
The Progress Report's Mission and Support
00:00:55
Speaker
And of course, if you like what we do here, if you regularly listen to the pod, if you like the investigative journalism that we do, if you subscribe to the newsletter, if you feel it provides value, please consider becoming a recurring donor.
00:01:05
Speaker
Our content is 100% free, never behind a paywall, and it is listener supported. So if you can donate, please do. There's a link in the show notes, or you can just go to theprogressreport.ca. And now onto the show.
From Paramedic to Journalist: Brett McKay's Journey
00:01:30
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, recording today here in Amisquatchi, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory on the banks of the mighty Kaskasaw, Mississippi, or the North Saskatchewan River. Join us today is Brett McKay, an investigative freelance journalist based here in Edmonton, who recently filed a pretty incredible story with the independent news outlet The Breach.
00:01:55
Speaker
titled, Rise in Alberta's Precarious Paramedics, a UCP Privatization Strategy. The story was so good and filled such a needed hole that I brought Brett on the pod to discuss his story. Brett, welcome. Hello, Duncan. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for paying attention to my story and inviting me on here to talk a bit more about it.
00:02:17
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, congrats on the story. It's, it's really well done. Is that, was that your first piece with the breach? You're a, you're a pretty like early career journalist, right? Yeah, that's right. It is my first with the breach and I am just freelancing at the moment and trying to ramp up the number of places that I can get my work in. Yeah. So, so let's get into it. So,
Impact of Casual Employment on EMS Stability
00:02:40
Speaker
What drew you to writing, what is essentially a labor story about Alberta's paramedic workforce? Yeah, I agree. It is definitely a labor story and that's how I approached it. What drew me to it is I used to work as a primary care paramedic in Alberta and I still have some ties to that community and to that industry and I had seen somebody commenting on
00:03:09
Speaker
all these unfilled shifts that we hear about. There's the 10,000 shifts in Calgary that the NDP was talking about, and it's kind of a routine thing that these are going unfilled. And somebody had commented that what they're not saying is how many of these are casuals. And so that
00:03:28
Speaker
you know, got me thinking about whether or not I'd be able to actually get data to show this if there wasn't really a difference between the number of shifts being full-time or casual and difficulty in filling them. And, you know, firsthand experience, you used to be a paramedic or I guess an EMT now called a primary care paramedic. You know, you would even have first-hand experience about why
00:03:52
Speaker
I mean, on the work conditions, why people might leave. It doesn't come out in the piece, but it definitely comes out as someone who knows what's going on in the field. Why did you leave? Was it just a mid-career crisis? Were you sick of driving an ambulance? What led you to journalism?
00:04:14
Speaker
Yeah, I left because of stress. I burnt out simply and I made the choice that I think a lot of people are making that I've been hearing from paramedics who've messaged me since this piece came out is that I was working full time. I
00:04:32
Speaker
went down to casual as a desperate attempt by myself to find a better work-life balance and to create more space in my life hoping that I would get better and get over it. Eventually, I just realized it was something that I had to completely remove myself from in order to get better and to get over that stress and all the complications that brings.
00:05:05
Speaker
The journalism thing was a few years down the line. I decided to go to university and it's a field that I've always been drawn to and I mean, it's worked out really well for me since then.
00:05:19
Speaker
So, so walk us through the kind of like, you know, the main thesis of your story. Like if you could summarize the story and you know, one or two paragraphs, how would you do it?
00:05:32
Speaker
So we hear so much about the number of unfilled shifts and the crisis in EMS and AHS or UCP's response is pretty frequently like we've bought new ambulances and we've created new shifts and created new positions and what's missing from that is the specifics of those positions. Most of them being casuals which has its limitations in filling, reliably filling a schedule.
00:06:02
Speaker
And this is a pattern that you can see over the last several years from, say, 2018 on, that there has been a marked decrease in the number of full-time positions, like nearly a 10% drop in the amount of full-time workers with AHS EMS. And at the same time, casual workers have increased, now making up about a third. And so the casual workers don't have
00:06:30
Speaker
They don't have paid sick days. It's inherently more vulnerable. They're sometimes on these short-term contracts, sometimes on an on-call basis, working as few as three shifts a month. And it creates these vulnerabilities within EMS, which I think we're already there. But with the pandemic and the added stresses that have come from that, as well as other
00:06:58
Speaker
converging health crises in the province, it has helped create this problem in EMS with these thousands and thousands of shifts going unfilled with very little that can be done with the staff that we have and with this strategy to fix it. Yeah, like the EMS crisis, the healthcare crisis, the nursing crisis, like any time any politician talks about
00:07:26
Speaker
a crisis in the healthcare system, it is primarily and fundamentally a labor crisis. There are simply not enough workers to do the amount of work that needs to be done. And then you layer in on top of this an employer who in AHS, who is hiring what? 10 times more casuals than they are full-time? Walk us through the numbers here. How many new hires at AHS are casuals versus full-time paramedics?
00:07:54
Speaker
So the number of new hires over the last, since like 2019, every year it's been over 90% are casual. And so the most recent number I have would be for the calendar year of 2022. And what AHS told me is that about three quarters of those are casuals. And so,
00:08:17
Speaker
You know, those are new hires that doesn't include people who were casual and hired to full time. But if you look over that same period, uh, the pool of casuals has grown by 41% compared to the pool of full time workers, which is only grown 6% in the same period. Yeah. Like there is a gobsmacking chart that is included in the story that is just like, I tweeted it out when on the, the main, uh,
00:08:46
Speaker
progress report account when the story originally came out is just like you would not treat any other first responder or even healthcare class of worker like this where so many of these workers are like being treated like
00:09:02
Speaker
incredibly disposal Amazon warehouse workers or Uber drivers where the business model is just built on burning them out and finding new ones. But the trouble with that is that paramedics, it's not as easy to hire and train and retain paramedics as it is. I mean, not that anyone should be treated like those Amazon workers are treated, but paramedics is a skilled trade and they're treating it like you can go to the grocery store and get more.
Privatization of EMS Services in Alberta
00:09:29
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Daniel Smith talked about Uber buying healthcare at some point. I think this is proof that it's been underway for some time. It's like Uber or Amazon where they're expecting there's always going to be this pool, but we're already pushing into other countries. They're talking about going to Australia to try and get these people. The fact is that there are
00:09:58
Speaker
trained professional paramedics in Alberta who want to do this work too, and they're getting fewer and fewer opportunities to do so. What the union has been saying, what paramedics have been saying is that it's harder to make that jump from being a casual to being a full-time employee at the same time that more people are burning out and leaving too. Those positions just aren't being replaced.
00:10:22
Speaker
Not only is the UCP and the Alberta government turning paramedic work into this just-in-time gig worker, Uber ambulance shit, but they're also working towards privatizing the ambulance system. What have been the first steps towards that here in Alberta?
00:10:40
Speaker
So the first steps with that would be this announcement of inter-facility transfers being opened up to private companies. So I think starting in Edmonton and Calgary, that would be units that are now taking people who are not emergent, cars that would be staffed with emergency medical responders. They're opening that up to private companies, ostensibly to take some of the pressure off of frontline workers and
00:11:11
Speaker
more pressing emergency response or more critical patients. But this follows the same sort of trajectory of any attempt to privatize healthcare, which is identify a crisis, take advantage of it and propose privatization as a solution to it rather than
00:11:29
Speaker
you know, responding to what paramedics or frontline workers are asking for themselves, which in this case is to hire more casuals as full time and give them benefits and create an emergency medical services system that treats workers well and where workers want to stay on long-term. Yeah. And the other thin edge of the wedge here when it comes to privatization is, is this kind of so-called non-ambulance transport that the UCP are pushing, like,
00:11:59
Speaker
you know, John Cowell, this new kind of like the czar of AHS who has been tasked with Daniel Smith of kind of reorganizing AHS for her. You know, he's he is very first press conference. He spoke glowingly of this like, you know, company that, you know, got him home after from the hospital to home after surgery or whatever.
00:12:20
Speaker
And, but the thing about that is that if you are non ambulance transport, like you don't need a special service for that. Like you could just jump in a cab, like, or, or, you know, like if you need, if you need, uh, there are cabs that will transport people in wheelchairs, you know, but if you're in a gurney, if you're, if you're horizontal,
00:12:40
Speaker
Like you need a professional, you know? Like this non-ambulance transport stuff is really, I also see it as a like stealth privatization of the healthcare system. You build up this shadow system, right? And then, oh, well, it turns out we just need them for more and more and more, right?
00:12:57
Speaker
Yeah. And the HSAA has commented on that too, about like this trend towards casuals and casualization, creating a workforce that is more easily transferred to those private services. You know, like if you have
00:13:12
Speaker
1,000 plus casuals with AHS at the moment who don't have long-term job stability, and then you have this private service coming up that can offer more reliable shifts or can offer something else. It pulls away from the public sector as well. It's easy to slide them into it.
00:13:32
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And so AHS just wouldn't give you the data on this kind of like this scale, the sheer scale of their casual workforce when it comes
Challenges with Workforce Management and Transparency
00:13:41
Speaker
to paramedics. You had to pry it out of them with a Freedom of Information request, right? No, actually, it was, I went to them for a requesting this data. And like with AHS, there's a privacy person
00:13:59
Speaker
who fields these sort of things. I talked with them and they suggested that if I could make do with information that had already been released, I wouldn't have to file the FOIP. And so I got access to
00:14:14
Speaker
Four documents from previously released information going back to 2016 and was provided with that. I didn't have to request new information as it was already contained. So like I got a lot more than what I was looking at, but this sort of breakdown I've pieced together from those documents.
00:14:36
Speaker
Okay. That's actually surprisingly helpful for AHS comms. They are, of all the comms departments at large bureaucracies that I have dealt with, they are the masters of the absolutely dog shit quote that you gradually have to use because you've got to include their side of the story, but it's just like
00:14:56
Speaker
fucking terrible. The quote from the AHS in your piece is like, many of our staff prefer the flexibility of casual employment as it offers the ability to choose shifts and contributes to work-life balance. They're not wrong, but the reason why people are choosing it is because working for AHS sucks ass and is literally making people crazy and making them quit and burn out. Yeah. I immediately flagged that as kind of like,
00:15:26
Speaker
pretty common union busting talking point, you know, when we're talking about like the shift to contract workers or like Uber and Amazon and things like that, part of the recruitment strategy is to say that we offer flexibility in our shifts and so on, uh, which is, you know, replacing the word precarity with flexibility. Um, like single moms, they love the flexibility that our work employs, but it's, then it's like, you know, if you're just like,
00:15:55
Speaker
hired her full time. She could just like, you know, hire someone to take care of her kid or whatever, you know? Yeah. And it's, um,
00:16:03
Speaker
Like I don't think there's really a choice and that's the issue. Like there are valid reasons to want to work as a casual, especially in EMS. Like I've known people who only ever worked as a casual and they say had their own business and did it on the side of a small community because they wanted to, they liked the work and, or wanted to help other community or whatever. But what we're hearing like from paramedics from the union is that
00:16:30
Speaker
people are making this choice because they don't have any other options. So like paramedics are burning out. I mean, there's been tons written on this elsewhere too, just the stresses that people are facing during the pandemic and this workload and so on. And they're being denied access or sorry, they're being denied the requests for time off or for a leave. And that could be to recover or that could be for family issues and so on.
00:16:59
Speaker
And so without that option, people are choosing to go down to casual as well. So there's a grain of truth in that statement, but again, I don't think it's a real choice. It's an effort to preserve some sense of personal wellbeing and mental health and career life balance and all of that because you can't find it with your employer as is.
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah. And, and you know, we don't, we're dealing with like Anik data here, you know, but we don't have any solid in numbers on burnout in this piece or that are available from a HS at the moment, but the raw numbers.
00:17:37
Speaker
from the Alberta College of Paramedics certainly paint a picture of the paramedic workforce in Alberta, which is that in 2017, the end of 2017, there was 9,460 registered paramedics in Alberta. And in 2022, there are more than 600 less paramedics in this province, just based on just pure registered with the College of Paramedics numbers.
00:18:01
Speaker
You cannot have less paramedics now than you had six years ago and expect your system to function. Population has grown here in Alberta that the amount of paramedics needs to grow with it. It seems bad to me that there are less paramedics now than there were six years ago. As a former paramedic and someone who studied this stuff, would you agree with that?
00:18:25
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. You'd have to drill down those numbers to really identify what's going on there. But even off the top of my head, I know AHS has been saying part of the stress in the system is because calls have increased 30% over that same period of time, which is even more than population growth. But then you have obviously population growth on top of that.
00:18:52
Speaker
So you would expect that there would be, you would want more paramedics dealing with that. And that also kind of speaks to the amount of people leaving the industry
Working Conditions and Paramedic Demands
00:19:01
Speaker
too. Like you said, there's no great number on the turnover rate. Like it's
00:19:08
Speaker
kind of universally accepted that it has a high turnover rate and that's increased during COVID. But I've never seen numbers like AHS has said it, the union has said it. And I think this speaks to it too. It's not just people going down to casual or part time or something, but people leaving the industry entirely.
00:19:26
Speaker
Yeah, and it's not just the fact that people leave the industry, they burn out their workers so fast. It's that a lot of paramedics also just don't want to seem to work for AHS. They are the largest employer of paramedics by far. They employ, according to the college, 42% of paramedics in this province are employed by AHS, but that means 58% art.
00:19:47
Speaker
58% are working in integrated fire or fire only units. They're working in oil sands projects and industrial paramedics or any numerous of the other places that paramedics can work and probably because they'd get treated better. AHS is based on the balance of evidence we have here. It just seems like a dog shit employer.
00:20:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean at the very least there's other options out there for paramedics that are less stressful and that like fire is like fire has a much longer history in terms of an established industry that like the rates of burnout are lower. It's like not as
00:20:38
Speaker
reliant on churning through people and finding someone else to replace it. They have great benefits packages and they have pensions and so on. Industrial for that matter where you can go and make probably better money than AHS doing significantly less work without the risks you put yourself in on the front line on a daily basis. Exactly, right?
00:21:08
Speaker
The fact that so many paramedics of the 8,600-some paramedics in this province, a bunch of them were like, I could work for HS or I could literally work anywhere else, I think says a lot. You brought it back to, you keep saying this, this is a labor story, this is a dignity and respect thing.
00:21:26
Speaker
I mean, you talk to the union, you still have contacts with people who are on the front lines. What are the demands of the people who are actually doing this work? How do they want to be treated as workers if they want this situation to improve? The primary demand is to just hire more casuals as full-time.
00:21:49
Speaker
You can see in the way AHS is hiring too. When we talk about casuals, that can mean a couple of different things. That can be someone who's on call and has a requirement to work three or more shifts a month and they're just signing up for shifts to become available. AHS is also choosing to hire people on these 89 day contracts, which is
00:22:11
Speaker
any more than that, they would no longer be classified as casual by the collective agreement. It's a very deliberate strategy to hire people without having to give them sick days, without having to give them benefits and that sort of thing and what medics and the union and so on are saying.
00:22:30
Speaker
is to just actually hire people that want to work and treat them as though you want them to be around, like create an environment where people are not wondering if they'll have a job in two weeks. Some of the other demands that I've seen over the last couple of years are to focus on ways to take stresses off EMS, like the safe consumption sites. There was
00:22:57
Speaker
demands to have those reinstated because all that crisis fell to EMS to deal with when those facilities were closed or moved.
00:23:08
Speaker
Yeah. There has been, there are some clear demands that I've seen, you know, from HSAA, you know, the union that represents paramedics in this province, like hire more casuals full time. Get on shift, get off your shift on time has been a consistent message. It's apparently paramedics are just like
00:23:27
Speaker
working 12, 14, 16 hour days and are just unable to clock out because they're with patients and they're unable to download them onto the hospital. Do you have personal experience with that? Is that still happening?
00:23:40
Speaker
I don't know how much personal experience I have with that. I've certainly read the same things and if you look at AHS's data on this, the amount of overtime that was clocked between 2022 versus 2021, it was nearly double at an expense of over $20 million to AHS. They're paying out
00:24:04
Speaker
so much more overtime. And I think that speaks to the amount of unfilled shifts and like how much is falling to the people who are working. Like, uh, there's obviously issues with downloading patients to the hospital and getting out of there and so on. But like, again, if you're part of a workforce that is chronically understaffed, you're going to have to pick it up in some way. And a lot of that ends up being overtime.
00:24:30
Speaker
Yeah. The government of Alberta loves, they're regularly putting out healthcare press releases. It's election season, the election's only a couple months away, two, three months away now. And they've put a steady drum beat of balls in the air when it comes to the little pitter patter re-announcements or pilot projects or bullshit that, but they want to talk about healthcare because they want to steal the NDP's thunder.
00:24:54
Speaker
And this fucking line they have in all their press releases makes me insane because it's like Alberta has the best frontline healthcare workers in the world. They will say that at the start of every single healthcare press release they have, they put out, and it's just like, okay, bro, that's fucking great. It's a great line. But you certainly aren't fucking paying them like it.
00:25:15
Speaker
Um, so emergency medical responders, these are like, is there below the EMTs kind of skill wise training wise? This is like the baby, baby paramedic kind of first aid plus type of training. And the job that most EMRs do are these inter-facility transfers.
00:25:36
Speaker
And EMRs in Alberta, the starting pay right now is $20.71 an hour. And it tops out at 24.61 an hour, 24.69 an hour, sorry.
00:25:52
Speaker
in BC, one province over, where they just ratified an ambulance agreement that I don't even have access to. These numbers are from the old collective agreement. They definitely got to raise it. They don't even have access to it yet. They just ratified it.
00:26:08
Speaker
EMRs, the people who are doing inter-facility transfers, start out at $25, $47 an hour. Their starting is higher than the max in Alberta. In BC, doing inter-facility transfers is a full-time actual job that you could support your family with.
00:26:26
Speaker
Whereas in Alberta, you practically have to be casual because you could make more money being a lifeguard than you would doing this inter-facility transfer work. The government is trying to privatize this inter-facility transfer work, right?
Consequences of Privatization and Labor Policies
00:26:47
Speaker
like you've said, it's unlikely that these private companies are going to willingly offer a better package right out of the gate. The reason even we have this 2071 starting is because of
00:27:04
Speaker
union negotiation. When I started working as an EMR, it was significantly below that and I wasn't AHS. When I went to AHS, my pay immediately increased. So I think you would expect that it's not going to be any better, certainly. And I think worth mentioning too, if you're interested in having
00:27:27
Speaker
Paramedicine be considered more of a career, like a long-term career and not something you do for a couple of years and bail. It's really important to have EMRs who are able to work with EMTs and paramedics and be on front lines and getting that experience as well as just being a part of like the AHS ecosystem where it's easier to move up when you advance your training and become an EMT or primary care paramedic or what have you.
00:27:53
Speaker
Exactly right. Another goodwill gesture that the government of BC made towards their paramedics was unilaterally, during negotiations, not even given up during negotiations, they were just like, hey, this sucks and you've been complaining about this. We're going to give you a $10 an hour boost to your on-call pay.
00:28:12
Speaker
And it was like, again, if you want to fix this, there are a bunch of things that you have to do, but you have to treat your day workers with dignity and respect. And one of them is paying them what they're worth. Like firefighters, cops, they all get paid far more than paramedics.
00:28:33
Speaker
to do arguably less work, and cops have certainly far less training, and yet it's the paramedic workforce that's getting hung out to dry, right? Yeah, it is. That goodwill gesture is great. I
00:28:54
Speaker
I wonder if that is like for the 96 hour shifts where people are on call basically the entire time or what that refers to.
00:29:07
Speaker
such an obvious labor issue to me. And it's clear like how this labor policy is then having this branch out effect on like public health and so on. And it's kind of amazing that the employer, AHS in this case carries that mentality of like reducing costs and at the expense of public health and at the expense of the wellbeing of paramedics too, who like, you know, they'll,
00:29:35
Speaker
praise in public statements and so on, but this is the reality of any sort of labor negotiations that they're trying to squeeze more out of them
00:29:47
Speaker
than they're getting already. Exactly. And even this drive, you mentioned in your piece too, this is a very common feature of governments close to elections of like, we're going to go out and recruit foreign nurses or foreign paramedics in this case. And apparently they're doing a recruitment drive for paramedics in Australia to bring them to Canada. But
00:30:10
Speaker
International migration for paramedics, the numbers from the past two years are infinitesimal. I asked the College of Alberta Paramedics about this. The last year was nine paramedics. The year before last, there was 13 paramedics who came to Alberta internationally. Even if you tripled that program, it would be a drop in the bucket compared to what you need.
00:30:41
Speaker
Even if you were able to attract 30 to 40 international paramedics to come to Alberta, it's like, so what? Yeah. I feel like it's worth mentioning too that this also just feeds into the precarity that is being introduced into the EMS system as it is. I've written about this elsewhere about foreign workers or temporary workers in Canada.
00:31:03
Speaker
What is problematic about that is these people, just like I mentioned in this piece about how casual workers have less job security, are less willing to speak out because they fear that they might get
00:31:18
Speaker
reprimanded in some way as in not being given enough shifts or the contract not being renewed and it has this insidious way of undermining labor power and undermining worker power on the job site and giving the employer more control. It's even more so with foreign workers. It's one thing if you're a casual and say I work in Edmonton and I live in Edmonton and then I have to find a new contract.
00:31:45
Speaker
and from Australia or from anywhere else for that matter. And like me not having my contract renewed means me leaving the country and having to return. It just increases that sense of insecurity and you know, undermines any willingness you might have to participate in a job action or help organize or like even just speak up when you see like some violation of your rights as a worker.
00:32:11
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's, it's always funny when they, they, I mean, one, they're never as successful as they think because the international kind of like cross training shit is just like always more complicated than you would imagine. Um, and then two, it's just like, yeah, like if you could bring in this like workforce that's dependent on you for their existence in your country, it's, it's the whole like temporary foreign worker thing where it's like, you know, this is why I don't go to fucking Tim Hortons because like their entire workforce is
00:32:40
Speaker
not their entire workforce, but the vast majority of their workforce is exploited temporary foreign workers who depend on Tim Hortons to be in the country, or at these Tim Hortons franchisees. So that's a very astute bit of analysis as well. But I think we're coming to an end to our conversation here. Is there any other last thoughts on, if you could, if you were emperor, picture yourself, say you're John Cowell,
Solutions and Closing Remarks
00:33:06
Speaker
say you're this
00:33:06
Speaker
aged man who for some reason has been given godly power over Alberta's healthcare system. What would you do to fix this? And I think you've mentioned him already, but just kind of run him down one more time.
00:33:20
Speaker
Yeah, really, I would just listen to what paramedics are saying would fix it. Like they know better than anyone that is frontline paramedics as well as the union that represents them. And I don't think it's outlandish or anything. It's just hiring more
00:33:37
Speaker
casual workers into full-time positions and to get rid of this just-in-time scheduling strategy, which is creating all these vulnerabilities and unfilled shifts. There's no easy fix, but that's a great place to start is just having more full-time workers who are taken care of and who aren't burning themselves out
00:34:00
Speaker
on the job. There you go. So, um, thanks for coming on. Uh, now is the time of the show where you get to plug your pluggables. What are you working on? How can people find what you're doing? Um, and support the work that you do. Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at seeing red R E A D. Uh, my other content information, everything is there. I am,
00:34:26
Speaker
Well, working on a bunch of other freelance pieces that hopefully will be out soon and you'll see them there first. Yeah. And you're not a podcaster. So this is, this is, this is your podcast debut or is, is this, uh, one of the first ones you've done? It is one of the first ones I've done. Yeah. I am not a podcaster. I am working on a podcast, but I'm not far along enough to even pitch it. Oh, there you go. Well, welcome. I soon, everyone will be a podcast.
00:34:52
Speaker
But, I don't know, maybe the podcasting trend is petering out. But I look forward to reading more of your work, and this was a really good piece. I'm really glad you could come on and talk about it, so thanks so much. Thank you for having me. Yeah. And folks, if you like this interview, if you like this podcast, if you like the other work we do at theprogressreport.ca,
00:35:12
Speaker
We need your help. There are about 500 or so folks who help keep our little independent media project going with regular monthly donations. It's super easy to do. You can go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons or just go to the website and it says support the progress report. It's very easy. Put in your credit card. Make the jump to becoming a regular donor. We'd really appreciate it. All our content is free forever. There's nothing behind a paywall. And it really is like public interest journalism that you will not get anywhere else.
00:35:42
Speaker
Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, I am very easy to get ahold of. You can reach me on Twitter, where I am far too often at, at Duncan Kinney. And you can reach me by email at DuncanK at ProgressAlberta.ca. Thank you to Jim Story for the edit. Thank you to Cosmic Family Communist for our theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.