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Paul Brandt is not a fringe troll with a microphone. He’s a mainstream Canadian artist with a public record of philanthropy, and he’s closely associated with “Not In My City,” a project focused on combating sexual exploitation and trafficking. So when he was slated to appear as a keynote speaker at Alberta’s North Central Teachers’ Convention and then disappeared from the final program, the obvious question is not “what did he tweet?” It’s simpler:
Who made that decision, and why won’t they say so plainly?
The reporting to date suggests Brandt was initially scheduled, then “not included in the final schedule,” with no substantive explanation offered beyond that. That’s not a scheduling explanation. That’s a refusal to explain.
And refusals matter, because when institutions won’t tell the truth in normal language, people assume the worst—and sometimes they’re right.
The Mechanism: Institutional Silence Creates Political Meaning
If you remove a speaker at the last minute and provide no reason, you create a vacuum. That vacuum fills with the most plausible theory available.
In this case, the most widely circulated theory is that Brandt’s public comments touching Alberta independence politics annoyed someone. Is that proven? No. It remains inference. But it is an inference made easier by the ATA ecosystem’s habits: highly political instincts, high message discipline, low transparency.
If the truth is mundane—contract issue, travel issue, logistical conflict—then say it. If the truth is “we didn’t want this topic,” then say that, too. Adults can handle disagreements. What they can’t handle is managerial fog deployed as reputational control.
Precision: Who Is “The ATA” Here?
One important correction: teachers’ conventions are not simply “the ATA” as a monolith. Convention programming is organized by convention associations and boards; the ATA is part of the structure, but local governance and planning matter.
That distinction doesn’t let anyone off the hook. It just tells us where accountability should point: the convention organizers and the ATA officials involved need to identify the decision-maker.
Not “we didn’t include him.”
Not “the schedule changed.”
Not “it was complicated.”
Name the person or committee. Publish the rationale. Own it.
The Drag Bingo Contrast (What We Can Prove, and What We Can’t)
Let’s also clean up another point, because credibility matters more than vibes.
There is evidence that at least one ATA local (Calgary Public Teachers, ATA Local 38) has promoted drag bingo events for teachers—adult social programming and fundraising, including a “Drag Bingo 2.0” event advertised for February 28, 2026 at Hudsons Canada’s Pub. Other posts and recaps indicate this has been a recurring event.
What that does not prove is “drag queen programming for children in classrooms.” If you want to make that claim, you need separate documentation. This piece doesn’t need it.
The point is narrower and stronger:
ATA-affiliated organizations are willing to put their name to drag entertainment for adults, as part of educator culture—and yet they won’t clearly explain why a speaker connected to anti-exploitation advocacy was removed from a major professional gathering.
That mismatch doesn’t prove bad intent. It proves something else: selective transparency. When the programming is ideologically safe, the institution is loud. When the programming might trigger internal conflict, the institution becomes a ghost.
The Real Issue Isn’t Paul Brandt. It’s Institutional Governance.
If you are a teacher paying dues, you should be furious—not necessarily because Brandt is the perfect keynote, but because your professional association is behaving like a risk-management shop instead of a member-serving institution.
Here are the questions that require answers:
- Who made the call to remove him from the program?
- What criterion was used—professional relevance, conduct, political sensitivity, “safety,” reputation risk?
- When was the decision made?
- Was Brandt given a reason, and is that reason publishable?
- Will the organizers commit to a transparency standard going forward?
If those questions can’t be answered, the institution has a bigger problem than one cancelled keynote. It has a legitimacy problem.
Because once you normalize silent removals, you don’t just manage controversy. You teach your own members that power flows upward, speech gets filtered, and you’re expected to smile.
Verdict
You can disagree about Alberta independence. You can dislike country music. You can even decide a trafficking-focused keynote doesn’t fit your convention theme. Fine. That’s politics.
But if you can’t say it openly—if your default mode is bland non-answers and managerial evasion—then you’re not leading educators. You’re managing a brand.
And Alberta parents are right to notice. When the people tasked with protecting children won’t speak plainly about their own choices, they don’t look principled. They look captured.
Albertans deserve better than that. And teachers do too.
Canada still runs a legal category of “Indian” through federal law. Not as history. As operating code. The Indian Act governs registration, band governance, and the reserve framework. Identity becomes partly administered by statute, not only lived in community. (laws-lois.justice.gc.ca) When a state maintains a separate legal lane for a class of people, it does more than recognize difference. It reproduces difference through process and permanence.
Get the timeline right because this is where critics go hunting. The Indian Act was assented to on April 12, 1876, as a consolidation of laws “respecting Indians.” (sac-isc.gc.ca) Consolidation is not an accident. It is a choice to centralize control, define membership, and keep Indigenous life routed through Ottawa’s legal plumbing. Once you do that, you create a stable incentive loop. Governments manage liability and jurisdiction. Communities defend the gateways through which rights, services, and recognition pass. The system is not neutral simply because it is administrative.
Martin Buber’s vocabulary helps name the moral move without turning this into a sermon. An I–It posture treats people as objects. They become cases, stakeholders, units, problems to be managed. An I–Thou posture treats them as subjects with agency and dignity. A system that sorts people into different legal kinds makes I–It governance easier. Bureaucratic proxies replace encounter. Resentment follows because the relationship becomes instrumental even when the language stays compassionate.
You can watch the machine work in Alberta right now. Elections Alberta issued a Notice of Initiative Petition in late January 2026 for a citizen initiative proposing an Alberta independence referendum question. (elections.ab.ca) First Nations responded with litigation arguing the province had constitutional duties to consult on the impacts of such a referendum and failed to do so. (globalnews.ca) Alberta’s population reached 5.0 million in Q4 2025. (economicdashboard.alberta.ca) That is a large public, a loud politics, and a long list of grievances looking for a target. In that environment, it becomes easy to blame “Indians” as a block instead of blaming the architecture that turns every dispute into a status-mediated struggle over courts, duties, and jurisdiction.
The safest conclusion is also the strongest. Treat this as structure, not as villains. There are Indigenous voices, including William Wuttunee, who argued decades ago that the reserve-dependency model traps people and that integration on Indigenous terms was a path out. (uofmpress.ca) You do not need to adopt his full program to accept the warning. As long as legal status remains the main conduit for dignity, power, and money, Canada will keep reproducing otherness by design. Too many institutions cannot cash their cheques any other way.
References
Source Speech (YouTube)
Indian Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. I-5) — Justice Laws (official text)
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/i-5/
Indian Act, 1876 (“amend and consolidate…”) — SAC-ISC archival text
https://www.sac-isc.gc.ca/eng/1100100010252/1618940680392
Martin Buber (I–It / I–Thou) — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buber/
Elections Alberta — Notice of Initiative Petition issued (Jan 27, 2026)
New Citizen Initiative Application Approved, Notice of Initiative Petition Issued
Alberta separation petition legal challenge context — Global News (Jan 23, 2026)
3 Alberta First Nations say separation petition is unconstitutional
Alberta population (5.0M in Q4 2025) — Government of Alberta Economic Dashboard
https://economicdashboard.alberta.ca/dashboard/population-quarterly/
William Wuttunee / Ruffled Feathers — University of Manitoba Press
https://uofmpress.ca/books/still-ruffling-feathers
Hey folks, I’m just here watching the NDP continue to betray women and their hard fought for rights in society. Janis Irwin, of course is at the forefront of deciding that we should be including men in female sports, spaces, and services? Why? Because these men have special gender feelings that tell them that are women.
The Alberta NDP cannot define what a woman is, and now is actively campaigning against female safety in Alberta. Broad claims, but let’s look at the specifics.
Wow! You see here, Janis doesn’t actually link to what she has labelled transphobic and hateful. Let’s move on to what she is referring to – a message to Linda Blade from Brian Jean a Leadership candidate for the UCP.
Read judiciously. Take some time and see what is being said in the message.
So do you see the absolute TRANSPHOBIC HATRED there. The notion that biological sex is real and that it is important in sports (and to be frank, every-fucking-where else) to maintain fairness and safety.
Make careful notes here folks as this is the exact bullshit routine every faux-progressive shitter performs when faced with any sort of criticism or inquiry about their position. There are no counterpoints, there are no rebuttals, and no arguments just wild baseless accusations. This just happens to be an member of the legislative assembly here in Alberta and sadly the fact free hyperbole is par for the course.
It’s a farcical disgrace.
More to the point there is a person with political power that uses this sort of hyperbolic rhetoric to advance a platform and ideology that actively harms women and their rights in society.
Scary stuff. It is unsurprising that the Alberta NDP is losing female support as they support the erosion of female rights and safety in society.
Talk to your political representatives and find out if they support this attack on female boundaries in society and be wary if they cannot define what a woman is.
Go to Linda Blade’s website or The Canadian Women’s Sex Based Rights website to get more information on the important subject at hand.
We all know the UCP are scum. Just terrible garbage people. Broken promises left and right, austerity for everyone, and harming the poor, the young, the old, the severely handicapped, and everyone. Then they lie about doing these things even as they are doing them. This is pretty much neo-liberalism 101. It’s been going on since Reagan, Thatcher, and our very own Brian M. and Klein. What’s also true is that your average UCP supporter is also trash.
Yup, that’s right. I’m calling you all trash. That, after all that’s been going on, the UCP would still win an election if it was called today is reprehensible. It means one of three things is happening. It means either you don’t know what’s going on, or you don’t care what’s going on, or you support what’s going on. In any of these three situations you are trash but it’s the people who don’t know what is going on that are the worst of you. Not that this distinction matters much as the scale ranges from sewage byproducts to nuclear waste. But ya, those of you who don’t know what is going on are the nuclear waste.
Seriously, if you are in ignorance of what is going on all that means is that it is purposeful ignorance, the worst of all ignorance. It would take a concerted effort to avoid all media and be unaware of how your choice at the polling station is decimating this province. But I’m guessing if you are reading this then you aren’t one of those people because they are likely unicorns. As in they don’t exist or if they do they are so rare that they’ve never been spotted by another person.
As for the other two, which is worse you ask? Well, you guessed it, it’s those that don’t care. At least those who support this selling off of our province stand for something. I mean it’s a terrible and evil something, but at least it’s something. If you are one of those people that just shrug your shoulders and go “ehh.. one politician is as bad as another” then you are the problem. You’ve literally just lived through a politician that kept the lights on during one of the worst economic downturns we’ve ever had and are seeing a politician that took a bad but improving situation and immediate turned it into dog shit and see no difference. Honestly, you are bad and you should feel bad.
But wait, there is still time! You can contact your MLA, tell them you voted for them and you are very angry and will not be voting for them next …. BWAHAHAHAHA. Nope. Sorry. It’s too late. Kenney is an unaccountable king for the next few years and by the time he is done with his first term the damage will take generations to repair. But don’t worry, because that won’t happen either because you idiots will still keep voting UCP because one politician is as bad as another, am I right?
So to sum things up, the UCP are trash and so are their supporters. Their austerity is causing generational damage to our province and everyone will suffer, especially the most vulnerable. Nothing they do will bring back the heydays of $100/barrel of oil and nothing they can do can even affect that. So we’re all screwed because garbage people are voting for garbage politicians.
When the economy is down, and the money is tight, and a recession looms in the near future what would be the best course of action for the government of Alberta? Apparently, firing 6000 people from their jobs is the correct answer according to Jason Kenny and his merry band of right-wing ideologues. The raging boner the UCP has for austerity and the gutting of the public sector has never been more apparent.
“Nearly 6,000 Alberta public-sector jobs could be eliminated as the UCP government tries to cut costs and find efficiencies, the provincial government signalled to Alberta’s largest union in letters released late Friday afternoon.
The union received the letters in advance of bargaining for 2020 collective agreements. The letters are not formal notices of layoffs, but as required under the collective bargaining process, outline cuts the provincial government might make.
The potential cuts would impact 2,500 Government of Alberta positions across several ministries, as well as the following positions at Alberta Health Services:
- 1,000 to 2,000 housekeepers;
- 350 administrative support and medical transcription employees;
- 250 general support staff, such as maintenance employees;
- 235 laundry and linen operations staff;
- 200 auxiliary nursing employees, such as licensed practical nurses and health-care aides;
- 200 home care services staff;
- 165 foodservice employees.
“The [Government of Alberta] will continue to guarantee employment security until March 30, 2020, for permanent bargaining unit employees using attrition, vacancy management and redeployment to meet employer needs,” states a Thursday letter to the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees from Alberta Public Service Commissioner Tim Grant.”
Because having 6000 fewer breaking even, paying their bills without assistance, and supporting the floundering local economy isn’t sound economic policy.
The mass layoffs will put people who have to use our health care system at risk. Never fear though, these public employee’s may be partially replaced by private workers and companies who will charge more for the same job, while providing inferior service and products.
“If further contracting out initiatives are to be considered in future, we will advise as required,” the letter states.
“AHS will continue to consider all options available to meet our organizational needs including changes to staff mix, service redesign, including changes and repurposing of sites, relocating services, reducing or ceasing the provision of services,” it says.
Notley said it is clear the UCP government intends to further privatize public services.
“Albertans will pay the price for this. And again, it’s entirely unnecessary. This has gone from prudent fiscal management to an extreme ideological vendetta.”
The ‘fuck you, I’ve got mine’ crowd has been crowing about trimming the fat and reducing bloat in the public sector. They never seem to connect the idea that the people working these jobs: nurses, teachers and those who support them, are more likely that not, providing services that benefit the fat trimmers.
See also the standard neo-liberal ploy of hollowing out public institutions, then decrying said institutions for not being effective, and then turning to privatization as the magical panacea that will fix the systems they just sabotaged.
The problem is that this strategy never works for the benefit of the end users – the public – as they inevitably will be saddled with less efficient, more expensive private services. Who this benefits, of course, is the businesses and corporations who will make handsome profits while immiserating the populace.
Thank you UCP voters…
This is a special thank you to UCP Voters. This is special because it is discussing the new UCP Bill 8.
I like to call it the “We’re a bunch of small minded bigots and we’re going to take it out on children” bill. It’s also the bill that removes the protections for LGBT people in Alberta, specifically those that allow those in school to form GSA clubs. These clubs save lives. These protections not only allowed them to be formed, it also prevented the schools from outing these youth to their parents. Something that most assuredly will happen from those within the Catholic School System at the very least.
But this really isn’t about Jason Kenney, or the Catholic School System. This is about you, the UCP voter. These people are just doing exactly what they’ve always said they will. It is you, the UCP voter who have elected these people. That the UCP is now doing exactly what they always said they would do is no surprise. That means that you, the people who have elected these goons, are directly responsible for giving them the power to do so. This means one of two things in this specific case.
- You are a hateful bigot that thinks dead kids is preferable to kids being both gay and alive.
- You don’t actively hate gay people but you are comfortable enough with gay kids offing themselves so you can vote in someone who will ensure that this happens just so you can vote in a party that has the name conservative in it. This despite there being two other neoliberal parties that would have governed almost identically to Kenney economically without being regressive on social issues.
And that’s the crux of it. Either way the blood of every dead kid that kills themselves because they didn’t have the support a GSA club could have provided is directly on your hands. You had a choice and you chose the party full of hateful bigots. YOU are the problem dear UCP voter. I would wish you would choke on the blood of these dead kids but I can’t. Because I care that these kids don’t kill themselves. You obviously don’t though. Perhaps I’ll leave you with this: Go fuck yourself UCP voters.
So today Jason Kenney officially scrapped the Alberta Carbon Levy (which has been successful in reducing emissions and transition us to clear energy sources) while Edmonton is covered in smoke.
A move so garish that even Kenney couldn’t go through with the planned celebrations and instead pretended to care about the wildfires for a minute. So ya, way to go UCP voters. You elected a government that promised to accelerate climate change and subsequently make these wildfires worse. I hope you choke on this smoke. I know your children and grandchildren will (while there is still trees at least).
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…