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 a...

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...

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 - Discus...

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 studen...

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...

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: Educ...

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 bet...

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 beg...

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 u...

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...

Support our podcast!  Team Advantage sits down with Bryan D. Palmer on his stop through Calgary to discuss his new book, and discuss how labour and anti-colonial movements have historically challenged the Canadian state. We ask what it might take to forge a united front and what the present moment of Canadian Nationalism might mean for left politics. Buy Palmer's book from  Lorimer Books  or your...

WARNING: This episode begins with slam poetry. Team Advantage subjects themselves to some favourite books of UCP ministers and Western Standard columnists in search of the intellectual basis for justifying an independent Albertan nation. We find bad poetry, absurd race science, and convenient economic motivations. We contend that there is a long-standing nationalist rhetorical tradition in this pr...

Support this podcast ! The Winnipeg Police Service is 100 years old - a century they've used to repress dissent, censor media, bungle investigations and devour city budgets. Author James Wilt joins Team Advantage to discuss his new book, Dogged and Destructive: Essays on the Winnipeg Police which explores this history of policing, resistance, and what a vision for a Winnipeg beyond police might lo...

It's election season in Bubble City, the ultra-protected enclave that keeps the rich safe from the mutants of the so-called Uninhabited Zone. When veteran officer Swamp Cop embarks on a dangerous undercover mission, politics just might wind up coming between him and his beloved partner, Officer Schitt. Team Advantage chats with Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson, authors of Justice Warriors Vol. 2: Vote H...

This past year saw a sequence of labour unrest: Teamsters locked out of both CPKC and CN railways, Westjet mechanics striking over Canada Day long weekend, Air Canada pilots reaching a last-minute deal, grain terminal workers in Vancouver striking, and dockworkers getting locked out in Montreal. How is the post-war labour "peace" holding up, and should we be thinking and planning beyond the Rand f...

The 55,000 members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers have been on a nationwide strike since November 15th after negotiations at the bargaining table stalled with their employer Canada Post. Workers are fighting to protect pensions, improve working conditions, and a wage increase that keeps pace with inflation. As CUPW enters its second week on strike, Team Advantage goes to the picket line t...

In this live recording, Jeremy tells us how Kenney has shaped Alberta politics, and expounds on his ideological commitments, his flair for conspiracy and his effective use of political stunts. We also learn of Kenney's taste in music and get Jeremy's response to the toughest question he's been asked since the book came out.  Order Kenneyism by Jeremy Appel from Dundurn Press. 

Gaza solidarity encampments on university campuses in the U.S. and Canada are experiencing violent police crackdowns. How do the student movements of the past inform what's going on now? Team Advantage digs into the history of student radicalism and speaks to encampment supporters about their experiences with police.

What can we learn about the ongoing pandemic and how it's been handled? How's the whole global public health infrastructure, campaign for clean air, and renewed push for workplace going? Does this bode well for future pandemics and crises, and how can we learn from what's happened so far to shape our future demands?

Israel is on a genocidal rampage through Gaza. Team Advantage, joined by intrepid independent journalist Jeremy Appel , examine the historical roots and basic assumptions that underlie Zionism, and discuss a few light topics, like discourse-policing, denouncing Hamas, antisemitism, and settler-colonialism.

In late September 2023, Canadian Parliament clapped for "Ukrainian hero" Yaroslav Hunka, who fought with the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), a unit in the Nazi German military.  Why did Canada let so many Ukrainian Nazis into the country after WW2, and how did this wave of right-wing Ukrainian nationalist shape Canada's Ukrainian diaspora? Team Advantage digs into the work...

The area burned by wildfires in Canada this year exceeded 18 million hectares and burned 1,740 megatonnes of CO2, roughly three times Canada's human-made emissions from 2022. As fire season winds down, Team Advantage examines this new, fun, half-year-long weather phenomenon, and considers the role of fossil fuels and the end of "cheap nature."  Further reading: John Vaillant - Fire Weather Edward...

Support this podcast ! Rachel Notley led the Alberta NDP to their second major electoral defeat in Alberta's latest general election. What does this election say about Albertans and our political culture? How might we make basic social democratic values popular? How should we organize as we anticipate Premier Danielle Smith? And what's next for the Alberta NDP? 

Support this podcast ! What link is there between pushing Indigenous people off land, into reserves, into residential schools, and into forced treatment? How are conversations about "public safety" and policing being mobilized to harm vulnerable people? How has the politicization of the opioid epidemic obscured what's needed to address increasing drug poisoning deaths? Harm reduction advocate Euan...

Culture wars, long-term injury, workplace violence, sexual assaults, nationalistic militarism, and the appropriation of working-class aesthetics... is it possible to like hockey from the left? Can sport unite the working class? Is hockey a serious game for serious men, or a silly game for silly people? Cass Kislenko, Tyler Shipley and Doug Nesbitt join Team Advantage to discuss Canada's game. Doug...