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Published by Team Advantage
Fresh from the birthplace of the CCF! Commentary and analysis on local and provincial politics from a left perspective.
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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 and the upcoming event on July 5. From Turtle Island to Palestine - Calgary People's Assembly
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 Left to Right: Saskatchewan's Political and Economic Transformation by Dale Eisler Who is the NDP for? by Haseena Manek "My quality of life has been compromised": U of S study finds STC closure has had a devastating impact on Saskatchewan people by Sara Birrell Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences by Anton Jäger Related Episodes: Vote No! Calgary's Olympic Bid, Which Is Class War The Fall of Saskatchewan: The Sask Party Under Brad Wall
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 - Discussions of childhood sexual abuse and suicide. Timestamp: 22:30- ~28:30. Also flagged in the audio so you can skip to avoid. Additional Resources Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson, How To Bring Your Kids Up Gay by Eve Sedgewick Kinderkommunismus by KD Griffiths and JJ Gleeson Ethics in the Light of Childhood by John Wall Solidarity with Children - An Essay Against Adult Supremacy by Madeline Lane-McKinley Wrong Again: The political evolution of "parental rights" CCPA Our Schools / Our Selves - Summer / Fall 2025 The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century by Kathryn Bond Stockton
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 student population, how student activism intersects with off-campus politics and when and why the state responds with violent force. Follow Dr. Lexier at @robertalexier.bsky.social and check out her work here: Book - Student Power: Canadian Student Movements From the Sixties to Today Podcast - Student Power: A Canadian Student Movement History Podcast
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 implemented, and what can be done about a government at war with workers. Further Reading Varieties of Austerity - Heather Whiteside, Stephen McBride, and Bryan Evans 30th Anniversary of the 1995 Budget: Lessons to Improve Canada's Federal Finances Today Budget fédéral 2025: un Canada assujetti au secteur privé et à l'industrie militaire Related Episodes Killing the Welfare State: Liberals and the 1990s TORIES: Calgary Laundry Workers vs Ralph Klein
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: Education in Alberta Previous episodes on trade unions and collective bargaining: Canada's Hot Union Summer: what comes next? Canadian vs U.S. Unions Watch the entirety of the AFL's October 29 response to Bill 2 . Read Gil McGowan's feedback on Roberta Lexier's presentation about the need to organize towards a general strike: https://x.com/gilmcgowan/status/1681761153826033666 Further reading: Back to School - Notwithstanding the Charter Amnesty International Canada condemns Alberta government's use of Notwithstanding clause in Bill 2 From Consent to Coercion: The Continuing Assault on Labour No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (book) Jane McAlevey: The Only Way to Win Is to Strike
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 better society. Works Cited: Canada In The World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination – Tyler Shipley Imperial Canada Inc.: Legal Haven of Choice for the World's Mining Industries – Alain Deneault & William Sacher Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism – Martín Arboleda Canadian Mining in Ecuador series - Brandi Morin
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 begins with a discussion of what the Progressive Publics symposium is all about before saying goodbye to the NDP with a brief history. Then the team discusses the possibilities of a socialist project to come. With live heckling from the audience! (Mostly Jeremy Appel.)
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 understand the current moment of rising nationalist sentiment. We ask if it's even possible to extricate a good Canadian nationalism from the history of colonial land theft and genocide that undergirds this state, revisit the one time Canada was actually cool, and offer trenchant critiques of Canadian civic statuary. Works Cited Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels - Erica Benner Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism - George Grant Canadian capital and secondary imperialism in Latin America - Todd Gordon and Jeffery Roger Webber La tentation québécoise de John F. Kennedy - Jean-François Lisée Responding to Donald Trump with a popular democratic project for Canada - Marcel Nelson Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada - Kari Polanyi Becoming Native in a Foreign Land; Sport, Visual Culture, and Identity in Montreal, 1840-85 - Gillian Poulter Mohawk Interruptus - Audra Simpson Louis Riel - Thee Headcoats Related Episodes Imagined Alberta: Western Canadian National Fantasies The Waffle, the NDP, and Full Breakfast Socialism
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 Tom Fraser joins Team Advantage to discuss the political economy of pension funds and the forgotten horizons of revolutionary possibility they once represented.Check out Tom's new book - Invested in Crisis: Public Sector Pensions Against the Future Other works mentioned by Tom: Maple Revolutionaries - The Economist The North will rise again: pensions, politics and power in the 1980s - Jeremy Rifkin Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism - Quinn Slobodian Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of imperialism - Kwame Nkrumah Related Advantage Episodes: Kenney's Great Albertan Pension Robbery
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 local independent bookseller. Further reading recommendations from Bryan Palmer: Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition by Glen Coulthard Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States by Audra Simpson Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State by Shiri Pasternak
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 province, place this tradition within a broader history of nationalism, seek out it's through-lines and examine how such rhetoric spreads out from the writings of right-wing cranks and enters more mainstream discourse. Primary Sources Canada and Her Colonies by Alwyn Bramley-Moore The Unfinished Revolt by John Bar and Owen Anderson Mavericks by Aretha Van Herk Secondary Sources Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson Nations and Nationalism since 1780 by Eric Hobsbawm Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo Of Passionate Intensity by Trevor Harrison Dreamscapes of Modernity by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim Land as Pedagogy by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Support this podcast!
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 look like. A Local History of Queer Abolitionist Organizing and a Call for Police Abolition by Leon Laidlaw Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom by Sara A. Seo Disaggregating the Policing Function by Barry Friedman An Equity-Based Review of Police Involvement in Schools: The School Resource Officer Program in the Louis Riel School Division by Fadi Ennab Bar None Winnipeg
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 Harder , and discusses the quaint features of placid Canadian life. Follow Matt Bors on Twitter @mattbors and BlueSky @mattbors.bsky.social Follow Ben Clarkson on Twitter @benclarkson and Bluesky @benclarkson.bsky.social Purchase Justice Warriors: Vote Harder direct from Matt's webstore or wherever fine books are sold.
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 formula? Thanks to Adam D.K. King for joining this episode. Read more of his work here , and follow him @AdamDKKing1 . Support our podcast!
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 to hear what striking workers have to say. Recorded on Wednesday, November 20th, 2024 in Calgary. Support your local CUPW picket line ! Support the Duncan Kinney Legal Defense Fund
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.
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Observed September 17, 2026. Cached outside the daily freshness window; the positions keep the date they were taken on.
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