Courtney Walcott decided to run for Calgary council after that morning.
The Western Canada High School English and social studies teacher stood in front of his packed and masked morning class trying not to be distracted. Today, November 26, 2020, councillors would vote on whether to cut money from the police budget and reallocate the funds to other services aimed at improving community safety. The decision would end a four-day marathon of budget talks. Because Walcott was a spokesperson for Defund2Fund Calgary, a community group focused on police reform, he very much wanted to be there. But Calgary council meetings are held on weekday mornings, when most people are working.
The night before the meeting, Walcott was worried. After months of meeting with city councillors, Calgary Police Service (CPS) and activists, all of a sudden there was silence. A few days earlier Walcott had talked to Evan Woolley, the councillor for Ward 8, who had initially drafted the police budget motion as a response to systemic racism and to police brutality incidents earlier in 2020. He assured Walcott everything would be fine. Calgary police chief Mark Neufeld had said he supported a modest reduction to CPS funding. The police had launched an anti-racism strategy a few months prior to the budget vote.
Later that night Walcott received a text from another councillor: “Don’t worry,” it read. “Everything’s good. It’s handled.”
As Walcott stood in the classroom, though, he heard a familiar ding on his phone. Then again. Ding. Ding. Ding. He silenced it, forcing himself to not look at the dozens of messages flooding his device. As soon as class was over, he grabbed his phone. The messages, from fellow activists, said the votes weren’t adding up. The motion had been amended, then defeated. And again amended and defeated again. And then a third time.
“Each motion was chipping away at what we fought for,” Walcott said. “[Council] thought they were doing us a favour. They thought this would be a win.”
After a full day of compromise, Calgary’s 15-member council decided that $8-million would be given to CPS for “alternative call response models.” In short, the police emerged from the four-day budget debate with more money than they’d asked for. This, even though CPS itself had barely a month earlier proposed a $40-million reallocation, in part “to accelerate actions to improve equity, diversity and inclusion within CPS.”
The decision, says Walcott, sent the wrong message about police accountability: “Even the police knew that this was a bad outcome.”
It’s been two years since that day. For Walcott, much has changed. He’s no longer a teacher at Western Canada High School—he’s now the councillor for Ward 8. He was elected in October 2021, replacing the retiring Woolley.
Walcott is only the second Black councillor to have been elected in Calgary. Virnetta Anderson was the first, in 1974. “I’m continuing the legacy,” he says. “I’m a part of the legacy.”
Walcott is used to a certain spotlight, having been in a classroom with 37 sets of eyes staring at him as he shares ideas and has lively conversations with students. “Teaching is so intimate,” he says. But his new role is markedly different: “When you’re a councillor, you get backlash.”
The first backlash came after he wrote about the Beltline protests. For the better part of the last two years, protesters have shown up to the neighbourhood just south of downtown Calgary to express opposition to public health measures. What started small became much bigger and much noisier by mid-winter 2022. Residents were increasingly agitated by the protesters, who were harassing passersby and blocking roads.
Walcott, who represents Beltline residents, published an op-ed in February 2022 in the Calgary Herald speaking out against the protests. “Canadian society is not fragile because of how easy it is for our citizens to express their discontent,” he wrote. “It is fragile because of how long we allow discontent to fester into intolerant views, into hate towards institutions and toward each other, before we act.”
Then the emails started coming. Complaints ranged from people asking why Walcott didn’t stick to topics such as waste management, to people asking why he’s against “family-friendly” events. “When I was an advocate, I got rewarded when I spoke out,” he said. “Now, in this role, when I speak out, I get in trouble.”
Defund2Fund would reallocate $20-million (roughly 2.5 per cent of the Calgary Police budget) to social services.
Walcott walks a tightrope every day, trying to support his constituents in Ward 8 while also carefully criticizing a growing far-right, racist movement. “The rules these people are playing by aren’t often challenged,” he says. “We expect residents and business owners to be tolerant of the crowd. So protesters say ‘We have freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly.’ Alright. But you also have section 1 of the Charter about reasonable limits. That’s why we have bylaws, and why people need a permit to protest.”
The criticism comes from all sides, he adds. “People now ask me ‘Why aren’t you critical of the police?’ ” he says. But being elected doesn’t mean he’s changed his views, Walcott says; it means he’s expressing them differently.
“Police reform means improving outcomes for people in need and for those who have historically been oppressed by colonial and racialized systems,” says Walcott. “Police reform in its truest sense—revisiting hiring practices, lethal-force training, misconduct reviews, the ability to dismiss people from the job—sits with the province. But municipalities have the important power of governing the police through the police commission.” And councillors vote on the police budget.
In March 2022 Chief Neufeld announced that CPS officers were no longer permitted to wear the “thin blue line” patch on their uniforms—a black and grey Canada flag with a blue line, representing police, bisecting it. For some people, the patch represents police honouring officers killed in the line of duty. For others, the patch is a symbol of white supremacy. After fierce opposition from the Calgary Police Association (CPA), with the union distributing “countless” patches and announcing that its members would defy the order, Neufeld suspended his decision.
Weeks of discussion resulted in the union meeting the CPS brass halfway. “We reluctantly recommend you remove the TBL [thin blue line] patches and comply with [the Police Commission’s] order,” wrote CPA president Johnny Orr to his members in June. As a compromise, officers are allowed to wear the patch on their dress uniform.
Walcott faces pressure from some activists to denounce the symbol. But it’s not that simple. “When a police officer says, ‘Why are you going after the thin blue line?’ you want to take a step back,” he says. “What could that symbol mean to other people?” But this notion cuts both ways, he says. “For example, we have the Canadian red ensign. It’s the ol’ Canadian flag, right? But it can be a symbol used by right-wing nationalists who are saying ‘no’ to truth and reconciliation and ‘no’ to immigrants. It doesn’t matter how I think about a symbol; it’s more how it’s being used.”
Walcott became part of Alberta’s Black community in 2006. When his mother died at the age of 39, Walcott, then a teen, left his home in Scarborough, Ontario, to live with his father in Hidden Valley, a neighbourhood in north Calgary. His father had come to the city a decade or so earlier from Cape Breton. The first Black settlers had arrived on that island in the 1600s. “I’m a descendant of Caribbean slaves,” says Walcott. “That’s a huge part of our history.”
Walcott was 16 years old when he entered Grade 11 at Notre Dame High School and he was one of only a few Black students. He wasn’t ready for the culture shock. “I went from going to Caribana in Toronto to the Stampede.”
He did what he thought he needed to do to fit in. He began to act out the stereotypes. “I used to do this thing in high school,” he said. “If we went to get sandwiches, I’d say ‘Where’s the fried chicken? It was self defence. Sometimes I worried about my Blackness. I felt: Either you stand out or you assimilate. There was no middle ground. So you do ‘code-switching,’ you know, using your white voice. You choose your circles [in which] to use your normal voice.”
His salvation came at Mount Royal University, where he studied Black history. For the first time, Walcott says, he found his community, his people. He went on to the University of British Columbia to get his education degree. He returned to Calgary in 2017 and began teaching and coaching junior girls basketball at Western Canada High School.
As the school’s only Black teacher, he noticed the lack of Black history and culture in the curriculum. In 2017 he became the anti-racism equity facilitator for the Calgary Board of Education. Then, in 2020, he partnered with the Canadian Cultural Mosaic Foundation to start a petition calling for the CBE to create an anti-racism task force. Within days the petition had acquired almost 7,000 signatures. A few weeks later the CBE created the Collaboration for Anti-Racism and Equity Support Advisory Council (CBE C.A.R.E.S.). In 2021 Walcott received a Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence.
“He knows how to build trust with people,” says Carma Cornea, the principal at Western Canada. “When he started our Black History month programming, he made sure we had our students take the lead. He’s both humble and unafraid to say sorry if he makes a mistake.”
Inspired by Walcott’s work, Ire Olaoye and Alisha Omusuku, two Grade 11 students, created a cultural day of events at the school. “We wouldn’t have done this without him,” says Olaoye. “He’s done so much to support us, even when he’s not here. No other teachers look like us here, and he supported us.”
Walcott loved to introduce his students to the Harlem Renaissance, teaching that Black cultural movement right alongside Shakespeare and the Beatniks. One of his favourite poems is “Mother to Son,” by Langston Hughes:
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
On July 7, 2020, Calgary city council hosted a special public hearing on systemic racism and police violence. It had been 43 days since the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which had been recorded and the video played over and over, prompting protests advocating for police reform in more than 60 countries. It had been 38 days since Maurice McLoughlin resigned from CPS rather than face disciplinary action for killing Anthony Heffernan, an unarmed man in mental distress when the police came to his hotel room. It had been more than six years since Godfred Addai-Nyamekye was beaten by CPS constable Trevor Lindsay in a construction zone in –28°C weather, which resulted in an internal police investigation that is still unresolved.
Walcott spoke at the meeting. He was given five minutes to sum up his experience. “As a person of colour, as a biracial man, as a Black man, I have lived under the shadow of qualifications my entire life. I’ve had to qualify my Canadian-ness, I’ve had to qualify my whiteness, I’ve had to qualify my Blackness. And then I moved to the northeast [Calgary], and somehow all the work I had done qualifying and quantifying my value was lost in the stories and stigma of the northeast. I realized the terror people felt toward the northeast correlates along poverty and colour lines.”
“I believe we need to defund the police,” he told the audience. “A $400-million-plus budget for police is absurd in light of the $60-million earmarked [municipally] for social services. Police officers are not mental health workers. Police officers are not social workers. Police officers are not community outreach workers. Police officers are not paramedics. Police officers do amazing work. They are a part of a system I believe can work, but we have placed too much on their shoulders and it is weighing them down.”
“Defund the police” became the catchphrase of 2020, albeit one with different meanings to different people. In an op-ed in Chatelaine, Sandy Hudson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada, described the defund the police movement as a push to reimagine public safety. “Black activists are not saying that we need to do away with publicly provided safety services,” she wrote. “Instead, we are acknowledging a very troublesome truth: at best, most police services do not keep any of us very safe. At worst, they target, brutalize and kill Black and Indigenous people. When we say Black lives matter, we’re saying our lives are worth [consideration of] a new way to provide safety and security services in our society.”
Indigenous and Black people are disproportionately targeted by the police in Canada. Department of Justice data show that Black people represent 7.3 per cent of federal offenders— more than double their share of the population. Nearly a third of people who enter the criminal justice system in Canada are Indigenous, even though Indigenous and First Nations people make up only 5 per cent of the adult population.
In 2020, then-mayor Naheed Nenshi tried to put to rest the idea that representatives like him advocate radical measures that would endanger public safety. “What we’re [proposing] is funding a better system,” he said. “But I think some people are—either ignorantly or wilfully—pretending that ‘defund the police’ means ‘abolish the police.’ ”
By the time of a mid-2020 Ipsos study, 48 per cent of Albertans supported the concept of defunding the police. In a June 2020 op-ed in the Calgary Herald, Chief Neufeld wrote, “Had you asked me a few weeks ago whether systemic racism was a problem in Calgary and in the Calgary Police Service, I may have said no. But after weeks of hearing many stories, some very painful, about the prevalence of racism in our city and the experiences of people of colour, it’s clear there is much more work to be done.”
Around the time of the public hearing, Walcott got a call from organizers at Defund2Fund, a local group pushing for police reform. He became their spokesperson. The original idea from Defund2Fund was for $20-million (roughly 2.5 per cent of the CPS budget), spread over two years, to be reallocated from police towards social services. The Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics reported in 2019 that an estimated 50 per cent to 80 per cent of calls to the police are “non-criminal” and consist of responses to alarms, disturbances, domestic disputes, traffic accidents, sick or injured people, overdoses or mental-health-related crises. Funding would go towards social programs dealing with these issues.
Walcott sees defunding the police as a way to prioritize what’s important. “A budget is a moral document,” he says. “It signifies what you value, because in our system, what you invest in and what you spend money on signifies your values. It makes sense to reallocate funds to social supports.”
CPS implemented an anti-racism strategy in September 2020. Walcott met often that year with Chief Neufeld, who agreed to the budget reallocation (80 per cent of CPS funding comes from city council) and directed CPS’s recommendation to city council.
But things started to unravel at the November 2, 2020, council meeting. Ward 11 councillor Jeromy Farkas and Ward 4’s Sean Chu brought forward an amendment asking for the $20-million to be taken from city reserves, not from the police budget. The amendment failed. Council approved a preliminary vote for the $20-million reallocation on the condition that CPS make a presentation before the final decision. At a subsequent meeting, after a failed attempt from Farkas and Chu to take the $20-million funding from arts and culture, council decided to take $8-million from city reserves.
“The city was more willing to spend its own money than hold the police accountable,” says Walcott. “People were saying, ‘Well, at least we got funding’ [for social services]. That’s not the point. There’s no risk in taking money from the reserves. You look progressive without solving the problem. No one at the table fully understood what we were asking for.
Walcott’s goal is to reduce the need for police and to bring awareness about how policing perpetuates systemic racism.
He has a seat at the table now. Not long after being elected, Walcott was appointed to the Calgary Police Commission. He is only its second Black commissioner. The commission oversees the $528-million CPS budget. How will having a seat at the table affect how Walcott approaches his work of reducing systemic racism and holding the police accountable to their promises to reform? For Walcott, better policing will come from new commitments to anti-racism and equity efforts, from the unification of the 911, 211 and 311 support dispatch systems and from the city’s hiring more social workers and increasing financial support for non-profits that provide mental health and addiction services. His goal is to reduce the need for police in society and to bring awareness about how policing perpetuates systemic racism. “Even now,” he says, “I think the needle has moved a bit already.”
Walcott says he doesn’t like being called an activist, because he thinks the term is too narrow. He doesn’t like being called a politician either, because the term doesn’t emphasize enough how much politics involves helping people. It’s a tightrope, he says, learning how to be who you are within the expectations of new responsibilities. He settles on calling himself an “advocate,” someone who works on behalf of others.
“I’m here to help uplift the voices of those not represented, those taken for granted,” he says.
Julie Sobowale is a Saskatchewan-based writer and the western director of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists.
