Minister LaGrange Protected Charter And Home Schools Yet Is Being Targeted For Her Nomination

Article submitted by Wyatt Claypool of the National Telegraph

The performance of a lot of Alberta UCP Cabinet Ministers has left a lot to be desired over the past couple of years, but the one Minister that absolutely does not describe would be Red Deer-North MLA Adriana LaGrange.

LaGrange has been genuinely doing amazing work as Education Minister, helping to reform the public education system, and promoting the growth of the charter and homeschooling systems with more support typically monopolized by the public system.

She has also helped focus classrooms back onto straightforward teaching of mathematics and English in grades K-6, as well as started cutting politics out of the social studies curriculum, which she frequently took note of after being appointed Education Minister in April of 2019.

It is concerning that anybody would think that these were appropriate questions for a Gr. 10 Social Studies test. Alberta has a great story to tell about our responsible energy sector, and educators should not be attacking it. We'll get politics out of the classroom. #abed #ableg pic.twitter.com/GXFMNBxnXO

— Adriana LaGrange (@AdrianaLaGrange) November 28, 2019

After The National Telegraph contacted both Parents For Choice In Education and the Alberta Parents Union both pro-school choice and education reform groups had almost nothing but good things to say about Minster LaGrange.

Frankly, an even bigger endorsement of Minister LaGrange’s work is just how much the NDP and left-wing Alberta Teachers Association (ATA) hate her.

Regarding the latter, despite how hostile the ATA has been towards the UCP government and the reforms made to the education system, Minister LaGrange was able to wrangle the ATA into signing a new collective agreement with the province while she simultaneously took away the ATA’s arbitrary power to discipline teachers and gave the responsibility back to the province.

This all raises the question of why someone would want to challenge LaGrange for her nomination.

Well, it seems that certain political organizations new to the scene simply want their people in the legislature.

That organization is Take Back Alberta, which originally campaigned to remove Premier Jason Kenney in the leadership review vote has now moved on to trying to take out anyone associated with Kenney’s government, or at least anyone who hasn’t endorsed their preferred UCP leadership candidate.

Ironically many of the people backing Take Back Alberta are the same political insiders that either helped to install Kenney as UCP leader back in 2017, as well as Erin O’Toole in 2020, and who have contributed to the feeling of alienation within grassroots in conservative politics in Canada.

Take Back Alberta is backing a man named Andrew Clews whose claim to fame is founding an Alberta anti-mandate group called Hold The Line (with only 1,000 followers), and predictably his pitch to UCP members in Red Deer North is that LaGrange is not pro-freedom enough.

In an interview with True North, Clews said:

Even to date, I have not heard (LaGrange) voice any type of support for the rights and freedoms that we once had as Albertans, I’m not impressed with how our government has handled the pandemic, how they have so casually given rights and taken rights away from Albertans…we need to elect leaders to go to the Alberta legislature and stand for freedom.

While most people would agree the UCP government did a poor job standing up for Albertan’s civil liberties over the past two years, it would also be wrongheaded to think Minister LaGrange had much to do with it.

Yes, LaGrange did not stand against Kenney in the strong and principled manner that MLA Drew Barnes did, and while what Barnes did was highly commendable and important, LaGrange was not exactly a big supporter of lockdowns and mandates. She mostly just stuck to her ministerial work while Kenney and other members of his cabinet hard-charged on mandates.

Clews himself even tactically admits that LaGrange never publicly supported the lockdowns and mandates by focusing his criticism on the fact she was not publicly against them, not that she was publicly in favour of them.

On the issue of education, Clews basically endorses the job Adriana LaGrange has been doing as Education Minister.

Clews stated that:

We need to reform the funding for our school system so that the funding goes to the child and follows the child as opposed to going automatically into the public school or Catholic school system…

Frankly, unless Andrew Clews believes that LaGrange should be magically reforming the education system overnight, she is doing exactly what he said he wants to be done, but seeing as she is not the premier, she has had to move slower than she would want to.

Part of LaGrange’s support for charter schools has been making more funds available to them in order to reflect the increase in the proportion of students attending charter schools.

We need to actually evaluate our elected officials on their overall performance and not nitpick on one specific aspect of their record in order to justify throwing them out of office.

I, (the writer of this article), was strongly against lockdowns and mandates, and the reporting I did here at The National Telegraph contributed significantly to protecting unvaccinated workers, as well as getting Dr. Verna Yiu removed from her position as the CEO of AHS for incompetence in the management of ICU beds.

With that in mind, I don’t take much issue with anything LaGrange did or did not say over the last two years. She would be close to the bottom of the list of people I’d hold responsible for the lockdown regime, and on issues regarding education, I’d say her record, for the most part, is unblemished.

Very few politicians could ever be reelected if Adriana LaGrange was someone deemed unworthy of continuing her work in government, but the people behind organizations like Take Back Alberta do not seem to care about any limiting principles. Their goals seem to be more based on political ambition than anything truly connected to the conservative grassroots.

If I was a UCP member in Red Deer North I would be voting to renominate Education Minister Adriana LaGrange.

———

Details on the Red Deer North UCP nomination vote are listed below:

– August 18, 2022
– 11:00am-8:00pm
– The Pines Community Hall
– 141 Pamely Avenue

Related Topics:#AdrianaLaGrange #EducationMinister #RedDeerNorthMLA #RedDeerNorthUCPNomination feature

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Published on December 27, 2025

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Federal prosecutors say Minnesota’s exploding social-services fraud scandal may now rival nearly the entire economy of Somalia, with as much as $9 billion allegedly stolen from taxpayer-funded programs in what authorities describe as industrial-scale abuse that unfolded largely under the watch of Democrat Gov. Tim Walz. The staggering new estimate is almost nine times higher than the roughly $1 billion figure previously suspected and amounts to about half of the $18 billion in federal funds routed through Minnesota-run social-services programs since 2018, according to prosecutors. “The magnitude cannot be overstated,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson said Thursday, stressing that investigators are still uncovering massive schemes. “This is not a handful of bad actors. It’s staggering, industrial-scale fraud. Every day we look under a rock and find another $50 million fraud operation.”

Authorities say the alleged theft went far beyond routine overbilling. Dozens of defendants — the vast majority tied to Minnesota’s Somali community — are accused of creating sham businesses and nonprofits that claimed to provide housing assistance, food aid, or health-care services that never existed, then billing state programs backed by federal dollars. Thompson said the opportunity became so lucrative it attracted what he called “fraud tourism,” with out-of-state operators traveling to Minnesota to cash in. Charges announced Thursday against six more people bring the total number of defendants to 92.

BREAKING: First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson revealed that 14 state Medicaid programs have cost Minnesota $18 billion since 2018, including more than $3.5 billion in 2024 alone.

Thompson stated, "Now, I'm sure everyone is wondering how much of this $18 billion was… pic.twitter.com/hCNDBuCTYH

— FOX 9 (@FOX9) December 18, 2025

Among the newly charged are Anthony Waddell Jefferson, 37, and Lester Brown, 53, who prosecutors say traveled from Philadelphia to Minnesota after spotting what they believed was easy money in the state’s housing assistance system. The pair allegedly embedded themselves in shelters and affordable-housing networks to pose as legitimate providers, then recruited relatives and associates to fabricate client notes. Prosecutors say they submitted about $3.5 million in false claims to the state’s Housing Stability Services Program for roughly 230 supposed clients.

Other cases show how deeply the alleged fraud penetrated Minnesota’s health-care programs. Abdinajib Hassan Yussuf, 27, is accused of setting up a bogus autism therapy nonprofit that paid parents to enroll children regardless of diagnosis, then billed the state for services never delivered, netting roughly $6 million. Another defendant, Asha Farhan Hassan, 28, allegedly participated in a separate autism scheme that generated $14 million in fraudulent reimbursements, while also pocketing nearly $500,000 through the notorious Feeding Our Future food-aid scandal. “Roughly two dozen Feeding Our Future defendants were getting money from autism clinics,” Thompson said. “That’s how we learned about the autism fraud.”

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Canada’s EV gamble is starting to backfire

Published on December 26, 2025

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Things have only gone from bad to worse for the global Electric Vehicle industry. And that’s a problem for Canada, because successive Liberal governments have done everything in their power to hitch our cart to that horse.

Earlier this month, the Trump Administration rolled back more Biden-era regulations that effectively served as a back-door EV mandate in the United States. These rules mandated that all passenger cars be able to travel at least 65.1 miles (and for light trucks, 45.2 miles) per gallon of gasoline or diesel, by the year 2031. Since no Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicle could realistically conform to those standards, that would have essentially boxed them out of the market.

Trump’s rolling them back was a fulfillment of his campaign promise to end the Biden Administration’s stealth EV mandates. But it was also a simple recognition of the reality that EVs can’t compete on their own merits.

For proof of that, look no further than our second bit of bad news for EVs: Ford Motor Company has just announced a massive $19.5 billion write-down, almost entirely linked to its aggressive push into EVs. They’ve lost $13 billion on EVs in the past two years alone.

The company invested tens of billions on these go-carts, and lost their shirt when it turned out the market for them was miniscule.

Ford’s EV division president Andrew Frick explained, “Ford is following the customer. We are looking at the market as it is today, not just as everyone predicted it to be five years ago.”

Of course, five years ago, the market was assuming that government subsidies-plus-mandates would create a market for EVs at scale, which hasn’t happened.

As to what this portends for the market, the Wall Street Journal argued, “The company’s pivot from all-electric vehicles is a fresh sign that America’s roadways – after a push to remake them – will continue to look in the near future much like they do today, with a large number of gas-powered cars and trucks and growing use of hybrids.”

And that’s not just true in the U.S. Across the Atlantic, reports suggest the European Union is preparing to delay their own EV mandates to 2040. And the U.K.’s Labour government is considering postponing their own 2030 ICE vehicle ban to align with any EU change in policy.

It’s looking like fewer people around the world will be forced by their governments to buy EVs. Which means that fewer people will be buying EVs.

Now, that is a headache for Canada. Our leaders, at both the federal and provincial levels, have bet big on the success of EVs, investing billions in taxpayer dollars in the hopes of making Canada a major player in the global EV supply chain.

To bolster those investments, Ottawa introduced its Electric Vehicle mandate, requiring 100 per cent of new light-duty vehicle sales to be electric by 2035. This, despite the fact that EVs remain significantly more expensive than gas-and-diesel driven vehicles, they’re poorly suited to Canada’s vast distances and cold climate, and our charging infrastructure is wholly inadequate for a total transition to EVs.

But even if these things weren’t true, there still aren’t enough of us to make the government’s investment make sense. Their entire strategy depends on exporting to foreign markets that are rapidly cooling on EVs.

Collapsing demand south of the border – where the vast majority of the autos we build are sent – means that Canadian EVs will be left without buyers. And postponed (perhaps eventually canceled) mandates in Europe mean that we will be left without a fallback market.

Canadian industry voices are growing louder in their concern. Meanwhile, plants are already idling, scaling back production, or even closing, leaving workers out in the cold.

As GM Canada’s president, Kristian Aquilina, said when announcing her company’s cancellation of the BrightDrop Electric delivery van, “Quite simply, we just have not seen demand for these vehicles climb to the levels that we initially anticipated…. It’s simply a demand and a market-driven response.”

Prime Minister Mark Carney, while sharing much of the same environmental outlook as his predecessor, has already been compelled by economic realities to make a small adjustment – delaying the enforcement of the 2026 EV sales quotas by one year.

But a one-year pause doesn’t solve the problem. It kicks the can down the road.

Mr. Carney must now make a choice. He can double down on this troubled policy, continuing to throw good money after bad, endangering a lot of jobs in our automotive sector, while making transportation more expensive and less reliable for Canadians. Or he can change course: scrap the mandates, end the subsidies, and start putting people and prosperity ahead of ideology.

Here’s hoping he chooses the latter.

The writing is on the wall. Around the world, the forced transition to EVs is crashing into economic reality. If Canada doesn’t wake up soon, we’ll be left holding the bag.