Surveillance
The Toronto Star is reporting on a $3.7 million contract providing Palantir access to Canadian military data – "a big piece of Canadian sovereignty data-exposure,” as one expert said. This may enable Palantir to leverage ongoing social media monitoring, including facial recognition.
supervised consumption
As provinces like Manitoba resume harm reduction as usual, the Alberta government's coup against supervised consumption appears to be crumbling underfoot with no medical or public health experts coming to bat. Can an American economist in Italy save the government's case against consumption sites?
Calgary Police
Sixteen years ago, Raheleh Tarani’s brother was killed by Iranian authorities during a protest. Her May 9, 2024 assaults and arrest at UofC by Calgary police brought back flashbacks – this time, frenzied concern for the safety of her sons attending that protest on Canadian soil.
Police
Drug Data Decoded writer/editor joins eight other plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking damages and vindication that Charter rights were violated during the brutal police operation to remove a peaceful demonstration at the University of Calgary on May 9, 2024.
Surveillance
The Ministry of Public Safety, working to prevent the release of files related to surveillance of nonprofit organizations by government police, has admitted that it holds 300 pages of records related to investigations of nonprofits across the province.
Surveillance
The Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Act allows any citizen to trigger an investigation of a neighbour for drugs on the property. Since its adoption across Canada two decades ago, the snitch legislation has never been used to attack a nonprofit agency – until now.
forced abstinence
A conservative provincial government is writing off Alberta's Compassion Intervention Act as a violation of disability rights, favouring community-based treatment over residential rehab. However, a trip out west last June shows its evolving interest in privatized inpatient facilities.
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The Research Review Council formed in early 2025 with government authors of a recent fraudulent study on supervised consumption services. But, when asked for records of the council's authorized projects, the Centre of Recovery Excellence inexplicably denies its existence.
Nine days after it announced a fraudulent study published by its staff, the Alberta government is moving quickly to dismantle what remains of supervised consumption services in the province.
From 2021 to 2025, the Alberta government gave at least $745,000 in conference sponsorships to Last Door Recovery Society. The deliverables were redacted but appear linked to conflicts of interest among authors of a recent government study attempting to justify supervised consumption site closures.
The Alberta government's Crown corporation has published its first study using personal health numbers of people accessing supervised consumption sites. While its findings fail to hold up, it offers a case study of how conflicts of interest and privacy oversight are at a crisis point in Alberta.
Selective data sharing by some of Alberta's top health officials may backstop plausible deniability for government negligence in closing sites – with impacts all the way to Ontario.
"No other sites shutting down," Recovery Alberta leaders told staff in late 2024, as the Red Deer site closure was announced. A year later, the Royal Alex Hospital site was closed. New documents reveal both closures relied on suppression and distortion of service usage data by Recovery Alberta.
Newly obtained documents reveal a hidden plan to build a drug jail in Grande Prairie, raising questions about how many additional facilities are in the works.
Mike Parker, the president of the Alberta union that includes paramedics, reacts to reporting by Drug Data Decoded showing the Alberta government under-reports ambulance dispatches to drug toxicity by as much as 89 percent.
The Alberta government says it has “the most transparent data reporting system in North America" for drug toxicity. In reality, internal data manipulation causes most emergency calls to go unreported.
Launched to government fanfare on sole-source contracts, the Digital Overdose Response System app is barely used most days and has registered just 51 ambulance dispatches over four years –– around 0.14 percent of the ministry's under-reported dispatches for opioid toxicity in that period.
Drug Data Decoded had a breakthrough year in 2025, topping 2,000 subscribers and winning an Alberta Magazine Award for drug policy coverage.
A new policy in federal prisons removes methadone and Suboxone opioid treatments, leaving only a patented once-per-month gel injection available to prisoners. A large group of experts is raising serious concerns about harms to prisoners –– and the corporate motivations behind the move.