Steve

What radicalized you?   For me, it happened back in my freshman year of high school in the early 2000s. The head coach of our hockey team believed in getting the team home to our own beds after road games no matter what instead of staying in hotels. Hotels were a distraction. With no hotel costs, he wanted to use the money to upgrade our road meals. Nothing fancy, just basic meat and potatoes type places like Cracker Barrel or Perkins instead of cold Little Caesars on a dark January bus ride home across rural North Dakota. The athletic director and superintendent shut the idea down and basically just absorbed the savings from his no hotel policy into the athletics budget. So after that our coach, the other assistants, the parents, and us players started fundraising in the off‑season in hopes to get better meals on the road. The first year went great. We raised a ton and were easily able to have nicer sit down meals on every single trip. We all sat together at big tables, had actual food choices, ate healthier and built even more camaraderie. It was fantastic all around. But then other sports teams and parents caught wind. It was seen as unfair. The AD, principal, and superintendent demanded we stop, in order to keep things “equal” across all sports at our public school. They even tried to force our coach to hand over the privately raised money so it could be redistributed. Thankfully, our coach was an old‑school Canadian ex‑pro hockey player who didn’t take shit from anyone, and told them to F off, and we continued with our meatloaf road meals as planned. The principal and AD eventually backed off, but the superintendent had a vendetta against our team and probably mostly just our coach so he never stopped. He even went as low as instructing bus drivers not to take us to the restaurants we’d planned for on the road. Our coach always overrode it, once even driving the bus himself since he had the license from coaching cross‑country. Over the next few years we continued the fundraising for better meals. Some of the other teams, and other parents continued to badger the supt., our coach and even sometime us players about it instead of just joining us in fundraising. Watching peers and especially some of our own “leaders” work so hard to sabotage a positive thing for us was eye opening and really stuck with us. It gave us an early look at how petty and nefarious and systems and people can be, even at the local level. And honestly, in the end, all it did was radicalize about 30 teenage hockey players for the rest of their lives who walked away believing “equality” was the dirtiest word in the English language. 😂

Jason Kenney is concerned Donald Trump is going to bribe Albertans with CASH to vote for independence.

🚨BREAKING: Marilyn Gladu, MP for Sarnia-Lambton-Bkejwanong, has CROSSED THE FLOOR from the Conservative Opposition to the Liberal Government. She is the 5th floor crosser this term. She has served as MP for the Sarnia area as a Conservative since 2015.

Today, the federal New Democratic Party selected its new leader. It is clear that the direction of the federal party under this new leader, someone who openly cheered for the defeat of the Alberta NDP government, is not in the interests of Alberta. Last year, Alberta’s New Democrats voted overwhelmingly to make membership in the federal party optional. Many thousands of our provincial members, including myself, are not members of the federal party. We are a big tent and welcome the support of people who vote for every federal party. We believe in Alberta and we believe in Canadian energy and the good jobs it creates. We believe in more pipelines and in reducing emissions. We believe in strong public services and a strong jobs-driven economy to help pay for them. This is what we are fighting for every day. Albertans deserve federal leaders who understand the importance of Alberta and our essential role in the federation. Our focus is not on what the federal NDP says or does. Our fight is with Danielle Smith and the separatist UCP. Albertans deserve a better government, and we are here to be that better government.

Gas is $2.14 a litre in Vancouver today. 😩

The degree to which Charlie Kirk's assassination affected people and their decisions about life will never be fully comprehended or conveyed but it seems to be surprisingly large