The Breakdown With Nate Pike

The Alberta UCP campaigned in part on ending publicly funded partisan advertising by governments but also on the promise of creating a “War Room” to advocate for Alberta’s Energy sector. Instead, it appears that the UCP instead created an organization funded by taxpayers that is not only using taxpayers money for partisan advertising, but it appears that they’re using taxpayers money to fund third...

We drove all the way up to the Alberta Legislature to film/record our mid year special! In this episode we break down the recent changes to election finance and we break down Bill 1, supervised consumption sites, more Shantics, alarming changes to the Victim Support Fund we have an interview with economist Kelly Rudyk and we kick the whole thing off with a surprise press conference!

There’s no doubt that education has been a hot topic since the UCP came to power in Alberta. But while a lot of the more publicized changes have been in the K-12 realm, Advanced Education has also experienced a pretty significant amount of upheaval as well. We caught up with Alberta Party Advanced Education Critic Myles Chykerda to get his thoughts on some of these changes!

On this special episode of The Breakdown Nate sits down with Calgary activist, educator and Drag King Shane Onyou to get his perspective on the reduction of protections that the Alberta UCP government has made to GSA’s (Gay Straight Alliances), the recent bylaw by the City of Calgary banning Conversion Therapy and a whole lot more!

There’s been a lot of developments surrounding education and the education minister in Alberta. Particularly, there’s been a lot of confusion surrounding the recent education survey and secondary to that, why literally thousands of results were thrown out. To help understand these developments around education as well as and some of the history behind those developments, we reached out to Sean Dun...

On this episode we take a look at the recent Conversion therapy ban by the City of Calgary (remember to check out our supplemental podcast with Dr. Kristopher Wells), we look at the recent abandonment of investments into the oil sands by the largest wealth fund on the planet, we break down the major changes that the Jason Kenney and the Alberta Government have recently made to not only environment...

On May 25th, the City of Calgary joined the ranks of a growing number of municipalities taking a stand against conversion therapy and actually crafting a bylaw banning the practice of conversion therapy. This didn’t come without some controversy though. To help understand the controversy and some of the history behind it, we reached out to Dr Kristopher Wells. Dr Wells has an extremely well establ...

On May 28th and 29th, the same group that organized the mega protests across ALberta in February is organizing another one, this time with more of an emphasis on art, communication and of course all with keeping social distancing in mind. We caught up with James from the grassroots or Alberta Forward to find out all the details!

On this episode of The Breakdown we try and take a look at why seniors homes across Canada have been hit so hard with Covid 19, we break down the provinces response to the challenges affecting Alberta’s homeless population as well as the tremendous amounts of criticism that have been levelled at the province and the Minister of Community and social services, we thank paramedics, we take a look at...

It’s extremely hard for any sort of collaboration between two groups when one group holds all the power and can unilaterally change the rules of their partnership. And yet, since the introduction of Bill 21that’s exactly what the UCP government has done with physicians in Alberta. The UCP has repeatedly said that their goal is to reduce costs, but they have continuously tried to make systemic chan...

On this special podcast version of The Breakdown, we are proud and excited to share a conversation with Founder and CEO of “Be The Change YYC”, Chaz Smith. As the expression goes, the measure of any society is how they take care of their most vulnerable. There’s no question that some of the most vulnerable Albertans are the ones who survive on the streets. The number of homeless Albertans in our p...

On this special audio only version of The Breakdown, we sit down with Alberta Liberal Party Leader and practicing constitutional lawyer, David Khan to discuss the implications of the significant powers that the UCP granted themselves under Bill 10. In our conversation, we discuss the serious lack of legislative oversight with Bill 10, the UCP’s war on physicians and the fact that Alberta physician...

We’re back! It took us a while to find out footing but. On this episode we have two deep dives! We do our best to break down a bit of Covid 19, bust some Covid myths and then do our second deep dive into the whole Tyler SHandro debacle. As an added bonus we’ll be following up this episode with two more mini episodes over the next week, so look forward to that too!

On this episode we Breakdown the Teck cancellation, the provincial budget, some of it’s serious cuts that will affect a lot of Albertans, the SCS review, an interview with Dr. Jillian Ratti, protests across the province, bad social media from political parties and so, so much more! We even have the Calgary Raging Grannies on as special guests to try and offer a little help resetting the moral comp...

On this extended edition of The Breakdown we take a look at the Teck Frontier mining project, the recent alarming changes to the AISH schedule, catch up on some of the embarrassing recent missteps from the Alberta Party and for our deep dive we sit down with Stoney Nakoda elder Rachel Snow to try and get some better context on the Wet'suwet'en crisis and the state of First Nation relations in Cana...

On our second episode of 2020, we’re taking a look at the back and forth that happened surround the apparent removal/then not removal of water and tissues for people testifying in the Alberta Court System, and then we have two deep dives this episode! The first is on what happens when smaller oil and gas companies start to fail, who picks up the tab for their back rent and taxes, and then most ala...

On our first episode of the new year, we have an interview with the current Acting Leader of the Alberta Party, we take a look at the recent news about the Rutherford Scholarship from last summer (hint: it wasn’t an IT problem) and we break down the incredible (and it really is incredible) list of missteps of the UCP War Room (the Canadian Energy Centre) and ask the fundamental question, are Alber...

Our last episode of the year! For our year end wrap up we drove up to the Alberta Legislature to cover off a few of the major stories of the last few weeks. On this episode, we break down the firing of the election commissioner, surging domestic violence in our province and the problem with the UCP government deciding not to keep an eye on Alberta’s growing classroom sizes! Plus we have a holiday...

The UCP Government has decided to discontinue monitoring class sizes across our province. We sat down with Sean Dunn from Support Our Students to break down how this happened and what it means for the future of Alberta Education.

With the new High School for North Calgary finally approved, this is our last episode in the empty field! With the new provincial budget cutting deep, we take a look at its effects on first responders and AISH recipients. We also do a deep dive on Wexit and we have a rebuttal to several key Wexit platforms and beliefs by constitutional lawyer David Khan!

Here’s our full segment from Episode 9 on Canada Action where we go through how they’re very much more than they seem and how they have some pretty established ties to the UCP.

We sat down with Constitutional Lawyer David Khan to try and Breakdown what Brexit is about and the many, many obstacles that it faces.