Acquah, who bought a 2024 Tesla Model Y, shares a frustration many owners of electric vehicles (EVs) in Alberta feel: they live in one of only two provinces in the country—the other is Saskatchewan—in which you’re taxed for simply owning a zero-emissions vehicle.

It’s not so much the existence of the tax that annoys Acquah and other EV owners. Instead, they say it’s a symptom of a larger anti-electric-car attitude in Alberta’s UCP government, which is actively stifling local EV adoption. The effort is marked by heated rhetoric by conservatives who see the vehicles as part of a Liberal anti-oil conspiracy. Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, for example, once claimed an EV sales mandate would be akin to “banning the rural way of life.” Danielle Smith called federal EV adoption targets “environmental extremism.”

But if the UCP is hostile to EVs, they’re swimming against a global tide. One in four new cars sold around the world in 2025 were electric. Some 20 million EVs were sold globally that year. In China fully half of new cars are EVs. Alberta lags far behind not only that rate but even other Canadian provinces. BC has 195,000 registered EVs on the road, for example, nearly 10 times Alberta’s meagre total of 20,000.

EVs remain polarizing in Alberta, says Andrew Batiuk, president of the Electric Vehicle Association of Alberta (EVAA), where they pit environmentalists and tech fans against supporters of oil and gas who perceive a threat to the province’s economy. As the naysayers see it, the more EVs there are, the less fossil fuel that gets burned. And that’s a sore spot for Albertans who rely on oil and gas for their livelihoods. That’s partly why the province aggressively opposed the Electric Vehicle Availability Standard—the so-called EV sales mandate—that Justin Trudeau’s government introduced in December 2023 to reduce air pollution and fight climate change. Prime Minister Mark Carney has since cancelled the mandate.

Opponents aren’t wrong that the cars reduce the world’s demand for oil. It’s estimated that EVs already displace somewhere between 1.3 and 1.8 million barrels per day of oil consumption. That’s a fraction of the over 100 million barrels of oil currently being burned daily. Nonetheless, the trend has been noticed in the oil industry, which provides 144,000 jobs in Alberta. It also threatens a government that relies on that industry. Alberta is projecting $13.2-billion in non-renewable resource revenues in 2026/2027, 18 per cent of its total revenue.

All of this biases our government against EVs. Premier Smith has even gone so far as to aggressively promote the production of so-called blue hydrogen from natural gas for use in hydrogen-powered vehicles. Across the world, sales of these rivals to EVs are faltering. The cars are virtually absent from Alberta. The province’s only public hydrogen refuelling station, at Blackjacks Roadhouse in Nisku, which Smith’s government helped fund, closed down permanently in early 2025.

The economic impact of oil and gas gives the industry an outsized influence on provincial policy. Charges Daniel Breton, president of Electric Mobility Canada: “I see the premier of Alberta more or less as a puppet of the oil and gas industry, and her government as well.”

But for all of this hostility, EVs may yet prevail—even in Alberta.

Anti-EV campaigners often draw on outdated anecdotes and at times deliberate misinformation. One favourite claim is that EVs—with their multiple battery packs—are worse for the environment than gas-powered vehicles. Initially, an EV does indeed have a higher carbon footprint, Batiuk says. Making the batteries is energy intensive and requires rare-earth minerals. But the gap with gas-powered vehicles evens out within one to two years of ownership, depending on distance driven. After that, the carbon footprint of an EV becomes substantially smaller, especially since Alberta has converted its electricity generation from primarily coal-fired plants to natural gas, solar and wind.

The EVs-are-worse argument has been debunked by no less than the Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose website announces: “FACT: Electric vehicles typically have a smaller carbon footprint than gasoline cars, even when accounting for the electricity used for charging, plus they are far more efficient when it comes to energy use.”

Other biases are almost comical. Angie Dean, president of the Tesla Owners Club of Alberta, says someone once asked her if it was OK to wash her electric car.

Ironically, the people who make and sell EVs don’t always help. “Misinformation is a huge problem, even when it comes to car manufacturers,” says Electric Mobility’s Breton. He argues some manufacturers are “spreading crap” about EVs—even their own models—because they don’t particularly want to build the vehicles, or are frustrated by “unrealistic” government EV sales mandates. The “green halo” effect of having an EV in, say, Ford’s lineup might be good for the company’s marketing image. But EVs are costlier to make, and many, such as the F-150 Lightning, are sold at a loss. (Ford recently announced it is ending production of the truck.)

Anti-EV campaigners often draw on outdated anecdotes and deliberate misinformation.

Dealers sometimes discourage buyers from choosing EVs. Doug Green, dealer principal of High Country Chevrolet Buick GMC in High River, says he invested $250,000 in equipment upgrades at the dealership to service EVs at the urging of GM, but he has sold only three of the vehicles, at a net loss of $10,000. “I was so happy to be rid of those,” he says. He also paid $6,000 to ship three additional unsold EVs to dealers in Quebec. Green says one customer in town bought a Blazer EV, only to discover she’d have to shell out $3,000 to install curbside charging from her duplex, which doesn’t have a garage. “She was unprepared,” Green said. Meanwhile, he says, the only public EV-charging station in town was out of commission. Chargers have since been added at the Ford and Chrysler dealerships.

Angie Dean wasn’t surprised to hear of the GMC dealer’s attitude. “I’ve heard so many stories from people who have gone into car dealerships and been excited about an electric car and [are told], ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me show you this gas car here.’”

And then there’s the myth that EVs don’t work in cold weather. Green claims an electric SUV with a rated 500-km range is really only capable of travelling 300 km, because you shouldn’t fully charge the battery. And, he contends, it will suffer dramatic power losses in the cold. “If you drive in the wintertime, and you put winter tires on, then it’s going to go in half,” he says. “If it’s cold out, then it’s going to go in half again, and if there’s snow then it’s going to go in half again.”

Dean scoffs at Green’s doomerism. She said her Tesla Model Y might lose 40 per cent of its range when the temperature hits minus 40, but that’s “extremely uncommon.” In Calgary’s more typical winter temperatures, she says she sees an estimated 15–20 per cent loss of range. Yet some people just don’t believe her. She recalls an incident in February 2025 when she parked at a local Home Depot. “This guy walks up to me and says, ‘You know those things don’t work here in the winter.’ And I was, like, I’m right here! Do you think I just pushed the car here?”

Dean’s experience reflects research by Recurrent, a US-based organization that tracks EV performance. The study, conducted during the winter of 2025–26, analyzed data from more than 30,000 vehicles across 34 models from 13 automakers. Although performance varied by make, the study found that EVs maintain on average around 80 per cent of their rated range in freezing conditions.

Meanwhile an underreported fact is that gas-powered cars are likewise less efficient in colder weather. The EPA estimates that a drop in temperature from 24°C to 7°C can increase gas consumption by 12–28 per cent. And EVs actually start more reliably than gas cars do in the winter, because they aren’t affected by cold-sensitive oil and have no sparkplugs, which are especially susceptible to low temperatures.

Even when people appeal to facts to disparage EVs, their assertions are often only half true. The UCP government claims, for example, that electric vehicles do more damage to roads than gas-powered cars do, because they’re heavier. An EV does tend to weigh more than its internal combustion engine equivalent—perhaps 10–15 per cent more. But as Breton notes, EVs are lighter than the giant pickup trucks so common in Alberta, and the province isn’t levying a special tax on pickups. “Alberta and Saskatchewan are both taxing EVs under some dubious excuse,” Breton says. “It has a lot more to do with politics than facts.”

Horner, the Alberta finance minister, also justified the $200 tax when he introduced it in February 2025 as a way to offset revenue lost by drivers who don’t buy gasoline or diesel, which is taxed by the province. But Breton questions why the flat rate is disproportionately high. Albertans, on average, drive 15,200 km per year, consuming 1,216 litres of fuel in a typical mid-sized vehicle. Under the province’s current fuel tax of 13 cents per litre, that would translate into $158 in road taxes—21 per cent less than what EV owners must fork over. Says the EVAA’s Andrew Batiuk: “It seems punitive.”

In an emailed statement, Horner claims the tax is “fair” and states: “Alberta’s tax on electric vehicles is in line with what drivers of a typical internal combustion engine vehicle pay in fuel tax annually.” EV proponents find such stonewalling typical. Batiuk says his organization just can’t get the ear of government: “We don’t have much of a relationship with them.”

And if Alberta’s government were truly interested in a full accounting of the costs and benefits of EVs vs. traditional vehicles, it would consider other facts. Pollution from gas- and diesel-fuelled cars and trucks is killing people. A March 2022 federal report analyzed data from 2015 and found that 1,200 Canadians, including 82 Albertans, died prematurely that year from the effects of pollution from cars and trucks. Another 2.7 million people suffered from acute respiratory symptoms. Breton argues considerations such as marginally higher EV weight need to be weighed against the $9.5-billion annual health cost to Canadians from gas-powered vehicle pollution.

Horner’s statement dismissed pollution and health concerns. “Alberta has some of the cleanest air in Canada and the world, and that isn’t changing,” it read. “Our transportation emissions have declined 12 per cent since 2015 and will keep falling.”

But the main barrier to EV adoption in this province isn’t special punitive taxes, uninterested EV dealers or disinformation. Alberta drivers won’t fully embrace EVs until there are enough public chargers available across the province to ease so-called “range anxiety”—the fear that one’s car battery will deplete far from home. Similarly, the extent of the local charging network affects whether or not we will attract EV-driving tourists from places like BC, says Danielle Wiess, director of transportation initiatives at the Fernie-based Community Energy Association. “EV drivers go where they can charge.”

But the UCP government is offering no help to expand Alberta’s charging network. The province had 429 EV charging stations in December 2025. That’s just 6 per cent of the 7,000 chargers found in BC, which has 5.7 million residents versus Alberta’s five million.

In 2020 the Community Energy Association managed the Peaks to Prairies charging network, which connected communities from Canmore to Medicine Hat and south to the US border. Working with local municipalities, ATCO installed 20 direct-current fast-charging sites across southern Alberta. The $1.2-million contribution from the then-NDP government was the last time Alberta has funded any EV charging infrastructure, says Wiess.

Charging one’s EV at home also remains a vexing problem for Alberta’s renters and condo dwellers. Provincial building codes don’t require EV charging capacity to be added to new multi-unit residential buildings—condos and high-rise apartments. “We’re still building condos and apartments without charging infrastructure considered,” says the EVAA’s Batiuk. “At [a single-family] home, you can plug in an EV. But when you live in a condo or apartment, you don’t have the option to charge at home. Selling that person an EV is a more difficult task.”

The situation is even more challenging in rural areas that lack the fast EV chargers found in the Peaks to Prairies network. “If I have a boat to pull to a lake, and I pull it to Little Bow Provincial Park, there’s no chargers down there,” says Green, the GMC dealer.

Under a joint federal/municipal program, incentives cover up to nearly half the cost of installing chargers at businesses, condos, Indigenous communities, public facilities and not-for-profit organizations. But remote communities that install such infrastructure can encounter sticker shock just to keep their chargers operating. In December 2025 a City of Cold Lake committee reported that it would need to quadruple the rate the city offers at its city-owned EV charger. Wiess says Level 3 (also known as DC fast) chargers incur high demand costs if they’re used infrequently.

Alberta is also at odds with provinces that have created incentives to purchase EVs. BC offered rebates of $4,000 to buyers of electric vehicles but scrapped the program in May 2025 under budget pressure. Before the program ended, zero-emission vehicles accounted for almost one in four new vehicles sold in BC. In 2025 BC registered almost as many EVs in just its fourth quarter as Alberta’s overall number of EVs. (Alberta and Newfoundland are the only provinces that don’t provide Statistics Canada with data on new EV registrations. They only report total registered EVs.) Quebec, with a population of nine million, has even bigger incentives than BC did, and registered 82,700 EVs in 2025.

The feds announced in January they will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into Canada. Previously tariffs made these prohibitive.

The ingrained resistance to EVs in Alberta manifests in some of the most unlikely places. Batiuk discovered that the owners of Ol’ MacDonald’s Resort and Campground, on Buffalo Lake about an hour northeast of Red Deer, imposed a $60/night EV surcharge in 2024. A notice on the resort’s website stated its “electricity etiquette” rule is “a small price to pay to ensure the fair and sustainable use of these shared resources.” (The Alberta Motor Association reports that the typical cost to charge an EV in Alberta ranges from free—at roughly half of Calgary’s public charging stations—to $15 at fast-charging sites such as those in the Peaks to Prairies network.)

Messages left at the resort for listed owner Jean MacDonald were not returned. “We [also] tried to talk to them,” says Batiuk, “and they weren’t interested in talking to us.”

But EV advocates such as Batiuk, Dean and Breton believe EVs will eventually prevail—including in Alberta. The federal government recently committed $1.5-billion to expand Canada’s public EV charging network, so essential to driving the vehicles any distance, especially rurally. Mark Carney’s government also announced in January 2026 that it will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into the country at a nominal 6.1 per cent tariff rate. Previously a 100 per cent tariff had made the cost of these cars prohibitive. Even premier Smith had called for Carney to drop the tariff and let Chinese EVs in—if only because she hoped it would enable Albertans to sell more canola and pork in China.

Major Chinese manufacturers such as Chery and Geely are preparing to enter the Canadian market. BYD, which in 2025 surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest EV maker, plans to open 20 dealerships in Canada, first in Toronto, then in Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary.

Those Chinese EVs may comprise just a fraction of the 1.8 million vehicles sold in Canada each year. But more significantly, federal EV incentives are being restored. Sales of EVs across Canada dropped by nearly one-third last year as provincial and federal incentives ended. In February of this year Carney introduced a new, $2.3-billion, five-year program that offers individuals or businesses up to $5,000 to purchase various types of EVs. At the time, the prime minister predicted EVs will reach 75 per cent market share in Canada by 2035 and 90 per cent by 2040.

By the time the federal incentives end in five years, Breton says, they may be unnecessary. This is a point on which EV advocate Breton and EV skeptic Green agree. “I’m not asking for special treatment,” says Breton. “Just don’t stand in the way of progress.” “I’m always interested in change,” says Green. “Just let the free market decide.”

Dean, a planner with the City of Calgary, says she sees beyond the personal benefits of driving an EV. She believes she’s helping future generations, and every effort counts. Someone once told her, “Your one electric car isn’t going to do anything,” she says. “And I replied, ‘But it’s what I can do. If I can do something, I’m going to do it.’ ”

Doug Firby has over four decades of experience in newspapers, including at the Calgary Herald. He’s now president of Troy Media.

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Cass and her husband, Mike, first looked to buy in Calgary in 2016, when they were in their early 30s. Back then, the market seemed manageable. Sales had dipped, prices had softened, and throughout that year the city’s overall benchmark price hovered just above $400,000. Then Mike went back to school for specialty healthcare training, and they hit pause on their plans. It made sense to keep renting and use the money they’d been saving for a down payment for the five-year program’s tuition instead.

Five years later, in 2021, the housing market shifted dramatically. Home prices across the country began rising midway through 2020, driven in part by historically low borrowing costs and changing demand for space as remote work became more common. Calgary logged a record year for home sales in 2021, with the benchmark price ending the year at over $464,000. As prices climbed, many millennials like Cass found it harder to get a foothold in the market. Existing homeowners, meanwhile, saw their properties evolve from just places to live into financial windfalls rapidly increasing in value. While these weren’t Vancouver or Toronto prices, housing affordability was starting to affect almost everyone in Canada, including Albertans.

Municipal leaders were blunt about the situation. “Calgary is in a housing crisis,” begins the City of Calgary’s housing strategy. Approved in 2023 and set to run through 2030, it’s a 98-action plan to increase supply and affordability. Nearly one in five households cannot afford their housing, the strategy states, and with costs continuing to rise, “more Calgarians are seeing their dreams of homeownership becoming further out of reach.”

That was the case for Cass and Mike. Their subsequent years of renting, and their eventual search again for a home to buy, were shaped by policies at every level—from federal programs such as the new First Home Savings Account, to the provincial affordable housing strategy, to municipal zoning rules that affect what is available and where. Their experience offers a window into how governments are trying to make homeownership attainable for first-time buyers, in a market very different from the one encountered by Canadians before them. They continued to rent, including an apartment in Calgary and a house in Cochrane, which they eventually had to leave in 2020 when the landlords decided to move back in. Between places, they lived with Cass’s parents, a stopgap she acknowledges not everyone has available or would enjoy. “We all like each other,” she says. “We’re very fortunate.”

Next they felt settled renting a three-bedroom house in the northwest Calgary community of Dalhousie, but their rent rose, from $1,750 in 2020 to $2,800 in 2024—and then the landlord decided to sell. Renting felt increasingly precarious, Cass says, especially in a province without rent control or any prospect of additional protections for renters. In 2025, for instance, a provincial government spokesperson told The Globe and Mail “Alberta will not go down the disastrous road of rent control.”

With rents roughly equal to a mortgage payment and Cass and Mike both feeling more settled in their careers—she as a manager at an architecture firm, he practising manual osteopathy—they decided it was time to again consider buying. They began watching listings in late 2024 as Calgary’s benchmark price neared $588,000, with supply tight as more and more people poured into the city.

Housing affordability, meanwhile, had become a defining national issue as several forces converged. Record-low interest rates during the pandemic dramatically increased borrowing power. But construction struggled to keep pace, constrained by factors including labour shortages, supply chain breakdowns, rising material costs and municipal rules. Then, as home prices spiked, interest rates also rose, and it became more expensive to borrow money. Many prospective homebuyers were shut out of the market.

In response the federal government made big promises. “An entire generation of young Canadians is questioning whether they can afford a place to live today and whether they will ever be able to own a home of their own,” states Ottawa’s 2024 housing plan, pledging 3.87 million new homes by 2031.

In 2025 prime minister Mark Carney announced Build Canada Homes, a new federal agency meant to scale up affordable home construction using public lands, funding tools and new building technologies. But a closer look at planned spending on housing programs, by the parliamentary budget officer, found little action to date on that promise. Federal spending will actually decline by 56 per cent in the next four years, and the government has not yet laid out an overall plan to achieve its goal to double the pace of housing construction over the next decade.

Even so, the market housing affordability problem is one that no single level of government can fully solve. As Mike Moffatt and Alex Beheshti, housing economists with the Missing Middle Initiative at the University of Ottawa, said in a December 2025 report, “While the federal government can and must do more, most housing policy levers rest with the provinces and municipalities.”

Governments can set the rules and offer incentives, adds Sandeep Agrawal, professor and inaugural director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Alberta, but they don’t build most of the homes. “Someone can make all the policies… and they have some effect on the market,” he says. “But 50 per cent or more is in the hands of builders and developers and what people are looking for.”

In Canada, “housing affordability” typically refers to whether homeowners and renters can access housing that is reasonably priced relative to their income. Many governments use a simple definition: housing is “affordable” if it costs less than 30 per cent of household income before taxes. It’s a widely used but blunt tool.

For homeowners, housing costs typically include mortgage payments, property taxes, condominium fees and utilities. For renters, it’s rent and utility costs. That leaves out real-life expenses that add up, such as tenant or home insurance (which in Alberta is higher than the national average), maintenance costs for older homes, and transportation. A cheaper home on the city’s edge can quickly become costlier once fuel, parking and vehicle ownership are factored in. Some governments do account for this. Edmonton’s city plan, for instance, aims for households to spend no more than 35 per cent of average expenditures on housing and transportation combined. But most governments do not.

“Affordable housing,” meanwhile, is its own complex category. Many assume the term refers solely to government-subsidized rentals, but the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) defines it broadly, including housing provided by the private, public and non-profit sectors. In Alberta the provincial government’s 10-year affordable housing strategy, Stronger Foundations, released in 2021, focuses on new housing units and more rent supplements, aiming to serve 40 per cent more households. But Alberta is falling short of its goal, and experts caution that using subsidies to help make market housing more affordable can keep people in private rentals, which may not provide rent stability.

When it comes to market housing, Alberta has long been viewed as a relative bright spot—a place where homeownership, while harder than it once was, remains more attainable than in most of Canada. That reputation drew people. In 2022 the province launched its “Alberta is Calling” campaign to attract skilled workers with the promise of low taxes, comparatively cheaper homes and higher wages.

Around the same time, federal immigration changes contributed to unprecedented population growth across Canada, with the country’s population increasing by a record one million people in 2022 and, at the time, federal targets for bringing in newcomers set to rise year over year. By mid-2024, even Canada’s national housing agency conceded the country could no longer build its way back to 2004 affordability levels—a baseline year chosen because the economy was steady and housing costs were still proportionate to average incomes. CMHC instead shifted its target to 2019 levels, calling them more realistic.

In Alberta, a surge in both interprovincial and international migration in 2024 led Calgary and Edmonton to their biggest population growth in more than 20 years. People began “chasing affordability,” as ATB chief economist Mark Parsons put it in a report of the same name. Affordability issues, however, were felt unevenly across the province. A recent analysis by the parliamentary budget officer, for instance, found that Calgary saw a sharp deterioration in affordability compared to other major cities in Canada, while Edmonton remained among the most affordable.

In response, new home construction ramped up dramatically. Calgary led the country in housing starts in 2024 and was on track to repeat that in 2025. Edmonton hit an all-time high in 2024, surpassing a record that had stood since 1978. “The market’s largely been able to respond,” says Scott Fash, CEO at BILD Alberta, an association that represents builders and developers across the province. “But with housing, it can never respond at the speed at which growth often occurs. That’s the lag of going through approvals and then actually building the housing units.” A growing share of that construction is purpose-built rental, historically a small slice of Alberta’s housing starts. New CMHC incentives have rapidly increased builder enthusiasm; in 2025, purpose-built rentals accounted for 37 per cent of housing starts in the province. Still, inventory remains below 10-year averages, and prices remain above them. Fash’s organization also monitors markets outside Calgary and Edmonton, and has noted demand pick up in Grande Prairie, Red Deer and Lethbridge.

And while new builds add supply, experts warn more construction alone won’t fix affordability. The financialization of housing—treating homes and rental units as financial assets for profit, driven by large investors such as REITs, private equity and pension funds—continues to push prices higher. A report on the financialization of housing, for Canada’s independent federal housing advocate, describes it this way: “Financial firms operate rental housing with a goal to increase rents, making it their business model to reduce affordability.” About 20 to 30 per cent of Canada’s rental housing is now financialized, the Canadian Human Rights Commission estimates, which most impacts disadvantaged groups.

In Calgary, median home prices have risen dramatically—more than 40 per cent in the last five years.

It was into this landscape that Cass and Mike began searching. They set a budget of $650,000 to $800,000 and aimed to put 10 per cent down on a 30-year mortgage—without family assistance. They’d been saving for a down payment in a First Home Savings Account, a federal program launched in 2023 that lets first-time buyers put money tax-free into a down-payment account.

Like many first-time buyers, they faced the twin hurdles of saving enough for a down payment and qualifying for a mortgage—both of which have become harder in recent years. And because Mike is self-employed, they had to provide additional documentation to secure financing. It now takes a typical young Albertan about 10 years of full-time work to save a 20 per cent down payment, according to think tank Generation Squeeze. For Baby Boomers, it took roughly six.

Cass and Mike approached their purchase deliberately, wanting to ensure they could manage mortgage payments on a single income if necessary and avoid slipping into being house poor. “We didn’t want to get into a scenario where we bought a house and then all we could do was stay in our house,” Cass says. Their search unfolded alongside a stretch of declining interest rates, as the Bank of Canada cut its benchmark rate from 4.75 per cent in June 2024 to 2.25 per cent in October 2025, lowering borrowing costs and nudging more buyers back into the market.

That market was still challenging for first-time buyers. In Calgary, median home prices have risen dramatically—more than 40 per cent in the last five years—while median incomes have not kept pace. Reid Hendry, the City of Calgary’s chief housing officer, says the “price-to-income ratio” has been widening for decades. In 2000 the city had the “gold standard” level of “3:1 over an entire-market basis.” Now the city’s ratio is “approximately 5.5:1.” This means that compared to 2000 it now takes nearly double the amount of time—close to six years instead of three—for people making the average household income in Calgary to buy a home. “When we talk about affordability,” says Hendry, “we often focus immensely on price, but what’s very important as well is income.”

While Cass and Mike searched for an affordable home in Calgary, they might have had an easier time looking in Edmonton. A 2025 analysis pegs Edmonton’s price-to-income ratio at 4.61—the second-best among Canada’s 22 metro areas over 200,000 people (in that analysis, Calgary’s ratio is calculated as 6.14). “Edmonton consistently ranks as one of the most affordable large cities in Canada, despite having some pretty big population increases over the last couple of years,” says Travis Pawlyk, branch manager of development services for the City of Edmonton.

Why is that Pawlyk frames the city’s role in supporting housing affordability as one of facilitating supply. The City has used policy and regulatory changes to encourage a diversity of housing types and speed up development permitting, letting developers respond quickly to market conditions. The Canadian Home Builders’ Association ranked Edmonton first among Canadian municipalities for its development processes, approval timelines and fees in its two most recent benchmarking studies.

A major policy piece is the city’s new zoning bylaw, introduced in January 2024. It allowed more housing types and higher density across the city, including up to eight units on lots previously restricted to single-family homes. While a significant rewrite, it built on years of prior reforms. “This is about a decade in the making,” Pawlyk says, echoing a sentiment shared widely. “Housing affordability doesn’t happen by accident,” wrote then-councillor and now mayor Andrew Knack in an Instagram post in April 2025. “It happens through deliberate policy decisions over a long period of time.”

The increase in housing supply “is largely due to reforms made by municipal governments, rather than by the government of Alberta.”

Major policy shifts began around 2015, Pawlyk notes. That year, Edmonton amended its zoning bylaw to allow subdivision of residential properties at least 50 feet wide. Secondary and backyard suites were also permitted on most single-family lots, and by late 2019, duplexes and semi-detached homes became permitted uses, effectively ending single-family-only zoning. In 2020 Edmonton became the first major Canadian city to eliminate parking minimums for homeowners and businesses entirely.

These changes have not come without pushback. “Edmonton neighbourhoods in revolt over residential lot-splitting,” read a 2016 Edmonton Journal headline. More recently, former Liberal leader and MLA Kevin Taft and other members of the Coalition for Better Infill criticized the 2024 bylaw for “deregulating the infill industry, eliminating most neighbourhood input and relaxing or removing many regulations.”

Still, Pawlyk emphasizes the need for Edmonton to grow differently, moving away from the long-standing assumption that new suburbs will absorb most population growth. Compact development, he says, advances both financial and sustainability goals, but it requires creating conditions for more residents in mature neighbourhoods—a shift he says takes political courage.

Federal funding has helped. Edmonton received $192-million through the Housing Accelerator Fund, some of which supports an Infill Infrastructure Fund to offset the cost of public infrastructure upgrades—a major barrier to building new homes in established areas, according to the city. Another federal measure eliminates the Goods and Services Tax (GST) for first-time buyers on new homes up to $1-million, offering direct relief to buyers.

Provincial initiatives to reduce impediments to building also played a role, though to what extent is up for debate. “While housing supply has been rapidly increasing in the province, that is largely due to reforms by municipal governments rather than the government of Alberta,” wrote housing economist Mike Moffat in a May 2025 report card that gave Alberta the lowest grade among the provinces for taking action to address housing supply. Calgary and Edmonton were singled out for leadership on zoning, approvals and permitting, with a recommendation that these best practices be applied province-wide. Edmonton also earned recognition for becoming the first Canadian city to institute an automated permit review system, reducing parts of the permitting timeline by 95 per cent or more.

In December 2025 Moffatt and the Missing Middle Initiative released a new report card that gave each province a grade based on several categories, including housing supply. Compared to the previous report card in May, Alberta’s score was up—tied for third overall—and the province got the highest score in the country in the category that asked: “Is the housing supply increasing, and are there enough homes to house the current population?”

Industry groups, meanwhile, are pushing for greater consistency across municipalities. Scott Fash with BILD Alberta says his organization recently consulted with municipalities, industry and the province to identify legislative changes that could streamline development further. A key priority, he says, is taking what works well in one place and replicating it more broadly. “We want to be able to create approval systems and zoning where we can go ahead and respond to the market in a pretty rapid fashion,” Fash says. “We’re better than most of the rest of the country, in terms of being able to do that quickly, but there’s still some work to be done.”

A three-storey multi-family home under construction in the Grovenor neighbourhood, Edmonton, February 2024.

Searching in Calgary, Cass and Mike wanted a single-family detached home built in the late ’80s or early ’90s, ideally in the northwest, close to family and within the ring road to keep commutes manageable. In August 2025 they found what they were looking for: a 1,700-square-foot, three-bedroom home in Scenic Acres, the same northwest Calgary neighbourhood Cass had lived in as a kid. The house, built in 1990, was mostly original, save for what Cass describes as a DIY kitchen facelift. It had a large yard, an attached front garage and the feel of a classic suburban family home. “It was one of the first places we had seen that we both felt confident in saying yes to,” Cass says. They viewed the house the first day it was listed and immediately put in an offer over the $674,900 asking price. Their bid was successful and they ultimately closed at $689,500.

When Cass and Mike bought their first home, in their late 30s, the moment landed with a mix of excitement and apprehension. It was, after all, the biggest purchase of their lives. “I never in a million years thought I would ever spend this much money in one fell swoop,” Cass says.

There was also a glaring way to put their purchase into perspective. Thirty-three years earlier, Cass’s parents had built a 1,350-square-foot bungalow on a corner lot in the same neighbourhood for $119,000. They were in their early 30s, raising two young kids on a single income. A generation later, prices in Calgary had climbed so dramatically that what was once attainable on one salary now typically requires two, many more years of saving and a bit of luck.

Near the end of 2025, as Cass and Mike were settling into their new home, conversations around housing began to shift again. Federal immigration policy had slowed international arrivals, though interprovincial migration into Alberta remained strong. Record-setting housing starts were beginning to catch up to demand, easing supply pressures and nudging prices down slightly from the previous year.

Still, chief housing officer Reid Hendry warned that momentum must be maintained. “The market has cooled a little, and home prices are quote-unquote softening, but what are they softening relative to?” he asked, stressing the need for continued government investment in meeting Calgarians’ housing needs. The nature of affordability challenges was shifting, now affecting a smaller slice of people but hitting that group more deeply.

For Cass, the day-to-day realities of homeownership were still sinking in, from needing to replace a broken fridge and adjust the surrounding cabinetry to make it fit, to being able to paint without asking a landlord’s permission. “More and more every week, it does seem more permanent,” she said. “And that’s a really nice feeling. It’s a lot less worrisome than thinking, ‘Are we going to have to move again next year?’ ”

Cailynn Klingbeil is a freelance writer and editor based in Calgary. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian and The Globe and Mail.

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The post Home at Last appeared first on Alberta Views.

I didn’t immediately recognize the woman in a toque and red and black plaid coat, but she remembered me. It was Tania, my other daughter’s one-time preschool teacher, now a public elementary school teacher and volunteer with the campaign to recall local MLA—and Minister of Education—Demetrios Nicolaides. She introduced another volunteer, Trevor, a big-shouldered man in a red “When We Fight, We Win!” shirt. He turned out to be my older daughter’s former Grade 1 gym teacher. Small world.

We chatted about the new recall campaign, ballooning K–12 class sizes, the ongoing teachers strike, the connection among all of these. “We do have a bit more time on our hands these days,” Trevor joked. “But we’re not all teachers,” Tania said. Earlier that day I’d read in the news that “Recall Nicolaides” had been started by an oil and gas geophysicist.

I hadn’t realized, however, that the campaign was already out collecting signatures. Politics in Alberta these days moves fast.

A young couple with a baby was filling out the petition—name, address, contact info, confirmation of vote eligibility, date, signature. A pickup truck honked as it pulled up. A man in tan overalls hopped out and joined the line. Tania gestured to the table, with its pens and clipboards. “You live in the riding,” she said. “Are you going to sign?” My six-year-old was grabbing my arm. She was cold. She was hungry. One second is over! Maybe next time, I told Tania.

In fact, I had questions before I was willing to add my name. Try to remove our MLA, outside of an election What exactly would we be signing up for?

A frequent criticism in Alberta is that our political representatives face too little accountability. “When most of us stink at our jobs, we get sent packing,” wrote the Canadian Taxpayers Federation in 2020. “[But] that standard doesn’t apply to politicians.” Citizens’ main recourse is elections. Between elections, leaders are reluctant to sanction MLAs for fear of damaging their party “brand” or undermining caucus solidarity. MLAs are reluctant to criticize leaders, who could refuse to sign their nomination papers. But citizens can try to hold politicians accountable in another way. Recall votes—found in almost two dozen countries, most famously at the state level in California (which has had 182 recall campaigns!)—are a way for citizens to take charge. They decide whether or not their elected representatives should be removed before their term is up.

Recall reflects the idea that MLAs are delegates of electors, morally bound by constituents’ preferences. If enough constituents are dissatisfied with an MLA’s performance, they can remove that MLA from office. Recall requires limits to prevent frivolous use. Californians’ recall efforts failed for decades before governor Gray Davis was removed in 2003, in a contentious campaign The Guardian dubbed “a circus fit for the fruit and nut state.”

Albertans have long favoured recall. Premier William Aberhart enacted recall in 1936, only to kill the law after the people of High River made him one of its first targets. In the 1990s Reform demanded recall. So did the provincial Liberals. Recall “gives people an element of control over their politicians,” said leader Laurence Decore. “It also gives MLAs the power to tell their leader they can’t vote for a bill, because their constituents wouldn’t stand for it.”

With recall, citizens decide whether or not their representative should be removed before their term is up.

Then along came Jason Kenney. On the 2019 campaign trail he said his government “would introduce a Recall Act allowing voters to fire their MLA in between elections if they’ve lost the public’s trust.” (For clarity he tweeted FIRE in all-caps.) In 2021 his promise—applied to mayors and councillors too—became law. It would be a two-step process. Collect enough signatures, and you trigger a yes/no vote. If constituents vote the politician out, you trigger a by-election.

Kenney’s legislation was criticized as both vindictive and token. It seemed aimed at municipal and NDP politicians, a tool to silence progressive voices. But the National Post’s Colby Cosh, a recall champion, called the law “weaksauce.” A campaign required valid signatures from 40 per cent of a constituency’s voters: for MLAs, often close to 16,000 names; for mayors, hundreds of thousands. Organizers had only 60 days. They couldn’t launch a recall campaign until 18 months after an election and not within six months of the next one.

Proving left- and right-wing critics alike correct, the first target of recall, in 2024, was Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek. The campaign collected 69,344 names, or only 5.4 per cent of the city’s population. Organizer Landon Johnston called the threshold “always impossible.” But the stigma clung to Gondek, who then finished third in the 2025 mayoral race. Johnston parlayed the spotlight into a successful run for councillor in Ward 14. And the campaign, wrote the Calgary Herald’s Rob Breakenridge, “exposed some of the shortcomings of the recall process itself.”

A week or so after my chat at the car wash, I was passing the Bowness Ratepayers Scout & Guide Hall and saw a familiar roadside table and signs. I’d just read in the news that recall papers had been served for Airdrie-East MLA Angela Pitt. I’d seen a video of Calgary-North West MLA Rajan Sawhney abandoning the podium as her audience chants “Re-call! Re-call! Re-call!” A website calling itself “Operation Total Recall” claimed that many more such campaigns were in the works.

One reason for newfound interest in recall was that Danielle Smith had changed Kenney’s rules. Campaigns could now start sooner, just a year after an election. Volunteers had an extra month to gather names. The signature threshold could be lower too, based now on previous voter turnout rather than electorate size. Recall Nicolaides was suddenly no longer alone. I pulled over to ask the volunteers how they felt about this.

On this evening, Tania and another volunteer were confirming by flashlight that a woman who wanted to sign did in fact live in the riding. When the lineup eased, I asked them: “Have you seen the Total Recall website?” They laughed. Tania downplayed their influence. “But something’s definitely happening,” the other volunteer said. “I think the Forever Canadian campaign opened up a lot of eyes.” (Former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk’s citizen-led anti-separation petition had amassed 456,000 signatures.) “And then the notwithstanding clause—that just blew it up.”

In late October 2025 Smith’s government had invoked the clause to force 51,000 striking teachers back to work, the first time this power to deny Charter rights had been used in Alberta. The move was widely condemned. Though Recall Nicolaides was already well underway by then, the organizers behind Operation Total Recall cited abuse of the notwithstanding clause as their catalyst: “When fundamental rights are set aside, it creates a precedent that affects us all.”

Tania didn’t ask me to sign the petition this time. Maybe she thought I already had. Or maybe she was feeling a surge of validation. Something was happening in Alberta.

Signatories in Calgary-Bow. Yeremiy: “Recall was the only tool I could see to hold my minister and my MLA accountable.”

And then the recall dam burst. November 10: Grande Prairie MLA Nolan Dyck. November 14: Calgary-Fish Creek MLA Myles McDougall. November 14: Morinville-St. Albert MLA Dale Nally. On it went. Jackie Lovely (Camrose). Jason Stephan (Red Deer-South). Searle Turton (Spruce Grove-Stony Plain). Social media was buzzing: Who wants a new MLA? Operation Total Recall was now calling for 44 UCP MLAs, nearly the entire caucus, to be removed.

By the end of the year some 26 recall campaigns had been approved by Elections Alberta. Premier Smith, as MLA for Brooks-Medicine Hat, was among the targets. Recall Nicolaides itself was now only weeks from its deadline—January 21—to collect enough signatures. Further recall applications dried up as either an MLA was deemed “impossible” to recall or citizens watched events in Calgary-Bow and beyond, playing wait and see.

Elections Alberta announced it needed additional staff to verify potentially hundreds of thousands of petitioner names and addresses and to confirm the eligibility of canvassers. This meant a substantial budget increase. A UCP-controlled legislative committee said no, which would have effectively killed recall in Alberta. Their refusal was ridiculed even by staunch conservative pundits, and the committee caved. Wrote Edmonton Journal columnist Lorne Gunter: “They [the UCP] made their bed and now they have to lie in it.”

Proponents were required to make their case in a statement not exceeding 100 words. Recall Nicolaides’s Jenny Yeremiy wrote that her MLA, as minister, showed “a clear failure to support public education,” citing privatization, more public funding for charter and private schools, overcrowded classrooms, insufficient staff and inappropriate curricula. MLA Mickey Amery, wrote his complainant, “supported policies that put vulnerable groups at risk and increased the cost of living.” Danielle Smith’s “disregard for local expertise and community voices” left her constituents “without accountable leadership.” Many statements cited the notwithstanding clause.

MLAs mounted a common defence: I do meet with voters, I do listen, our UCP got a mandate from Albertans. But Nicolaides, as the first up, set the tone. His recall, he argued, was illegitimate. The recall process should be reserved for “breaches of public trust, ethical violations or dereliction of duty,” not “dissatisfaction with government policy.” Using recall to “overturn an election,” he wrote, “undermines stable governance and the electoral process.”

The irony of UCP MLAs being targeted by a law they themselves had enacted only months earlier—unanimously, and over the objections of the opposition—wasn’t lost on anyone. Cosh, the pro-recall National Post pundit, likened Smith to Dr. Frankenstein gaping at his monstrous creation. “It is, frankly, just a bit silly for UCP politicians to now insist that recall was only to be used in cases of misconduct or incapacity,” he wrote. “If recall itself is legitimate, its semi-organized use to put collective pressure on governments must be legitimate.”

As recall spread, Kenney chimed in. He’d never intended his law to be used as a weapon, he told the CBC, but as an “ultimate tool of accountability” if a politician did “something absolutely egregious, illegal, grossly unethical.” Years earlier Kenney had given only two justifications to FIRE one’s MLA: If they’d “lost the public’s trust” or “broken promises.”

Elections Alberta’s “Recall FAQs” webpage, at “Valid reasons to recall,” says only: “There is no set criteria.”

Other jurisdictions erect guardrails. Florida, for example, limits recall to cases of “malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, and conviction of a felony involving moral turpitude.” In Alberta simply being an MLA is enough.

The irony of UCP MLAs being targeted by a recall law they themselves had enacted only months earlier wasn’t lost on anyone.

Alberta’s recall law, as written, created other issues as well. Among the 26 MLAs subjected to recall was Calgary-Beddington’s Amanda Chapman, one of two NDP members caught up in the melee. The proponent, Laurie McCormack, offered as pretext that Chapman “chooses harsh partisan attacks likening Alberta’s elected government to extremists, and backs public sector unions over… families’ real priorities.” Similarly, NDP MLA Peggy Wright (Edmonton-Beverly-Clareview) deserved recall because she—per her complainant—“facilitates the exposure of children to sexualized material.” Wright was said to be “routinely inaccessible” to this constituent and “doesn’t return emails or calls.”

Then there’s the recall effort against Lethbridge-East’s Nathan Neudorf, which appeared to be bogus, organized perhaps by an ally of the UCP MLA himself. The stated case against Neudorf by “Ryan Tanner” was conspicuously lacking specifics: “Recent voting activity from him demonstrates a disconnect and his inability to meet the needs, desires and expectations of those he represents.” As reported by the CBC, would-be canvassers in Lethbridge emailed Tanner to help collect signatures. They never heard back. No petition locations were posted. No website was created. (Ultimately no signatures were sent to Elections Alberta.) But as long as a recall campaign against Neudorf was officially registered, no other one could be started.

Neudorf eventually declared, at the legislature, “I’m not actively involved in my own recall.” As a letter to the Lethbridge Herald pointed out, “This seems like a feeble equivocation. Were you passively involved, or were you aware it was going to happen before stepping back for plausible deniability?”

The law allowed for more abuses. MLA Dale Nally claimed that Joshua Eberhart, his recall campaign’s organizer, “does not vote in provincial elections,” so the effort was thus “without merit.” The campaign was allowed to go ahead, and Elections Alberta later determined Nally had violated election law.

Recall Gondek’s Landon Johnston told CTV News he suspected his petition was used by other conservative political actors for their own data-gathering. “I warned the privacy commissioner halfway through this project,” he said. “Anyone can co-opt this petition for their own gain.”

I was at home, sick, on a snowy mid-winter afternoon when the doorbell rang. On my porch were two older men, wearing parkas, toques and canvasser IDs and carrying shiny elections-grade Recall Nicolaides signs. They identified themselves as fellow Bownesians. “Have you heard about the campaign to recall our MLA?” the shorter man asked.

By now With nearly a third of Alberta’s MLAs being recalled… Oh—I’d heard.

I stepped outside to keep the dog inside. We chatted about Smith, her forcing teachers back to work, her flirting with separatism. The taller man said he’d voted UCP in 2023, and “that was a mistake.” He called Smith “Trumpy.” I said I sympathized with their anger.

But I told them I didn’t have much love for recall. I knew of its dubious record in the US. I didn’t like it when Kenney brought recall north. The anti-Gondek campaign struck me as baseless and sexist. Now opposition MLAs were being targeted out of spite. I was certainly amused by the UCP getting a taste of its own medicine. But I found myself agreeing with aspects of the Nicolaides defence. These were largely policy disagreements. The policies in question were perhaps stupid, or narrow-minded, or cruel. Ideally they’d be indefensible at election time. But none of these recalled MLAs stood accused of a conflict of interest or serious crime. And if one UCP MLA should be recalled for bad policy, so should they all.

The men said none of this mattered. Fact was, the UCP had brought in recall, and what was happening to them now was legal and just.

I couldn’t disagree. But I was sick, and in bare feet, and we could see our breath. The men asked if I’d sign the petition. I said recall didn’t exactly align with my idea of Alberta democracy. They said they respected my position. Then the shorter man, as he turned to walk away, gently pushed back one last time. “You know—they’re [the UCP] changing the rules of our democracy,” he said. “They’re taking away our rights. What else are we supposed to do?”

The Smith government has changed the rules. It not only used the notwithstanding clause to force teachers to work under contract terms that 90 per cent of them had voted to reject, it used the clause three more times that fall to override Albertans’ rights. It gave itself the power to decide whether a proposed referendum question violates the Constitution. It changed election laws, reinstating corporate and union donations to parties and political action committees (PACs) and suppressing the vote by restricting special ballots and requiring more ID. University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley wrote that these changes, alongside making recall easier, “mark another step in the Americanization of Alberta’s democratic institutions… and are the latest in a long list of democratic transgressions in this province.”

Campaign volunteers, fall 2025. Yeremiy calls recall a “gift” from the UCP: “It’s helping us build from the ground up.”

When I spoke on my doorstep with the gentlemen from Recall Nicolaides, they said the team had collected “maybe 6,000” signatures. Their aim was 16,006 signatures, or 40 per cent of the voter turnout in Calgary-Bow in 2023—and, really, they needed still more names to be on the safe side. Their three-month timeframe was fast closing. It didn’t look good for the campaign. And a more personal deadline was also looming. I had to decide if I’d add my name to the petition.

I decided to call Yeremiy. The woman who’d organized against Nicolaides—and inspired citizens from Medicine Hat to Grande Prairie to take up pens against their own MLAs—had told media she’d never planned to launch a recall, not even after Smith eased the rules. She’d tried to meet with Nicolaides to share her concerns. He dismissed her. When they finally spoke, at his office, he was aggressive and threatening. And so recall, she told the CBC, was “the only tool I could see that was capable of holding my minister and my MLA accountable.”

I asked her what she’d thought when Kenney brought in recall. “I remember wondering: What are they up to?” she said. “And then I remembered it being applied to Jyoti Gondek and thought, Oh, that’s what it’s about. I get the impression it was put in place in case the NDP got elected [in 2023], so they had a way to undermine the government.” She found that others troubled by Nicolaides’s record nonetheless had misgivings about recall. “[People] commented at the doors and at various signing locations about the recall action—not wanting to support it in any way.”

She said that “the way I could justify it” is that this UCP government doesn’t listen. “People who put forward thoughtful alternatives for this province are completely ignored.… And when [an MLA] does stand against anything within that party, they’re dismissed from their roles.”

Yeremiy believes this lack of accountability is getting worse. “I can use a specific example,” she said. “When the Eastern Slopes were opened up [to coal mining in 2020], it caused public outrage, and there was a response from the minister at the time. She reversed the action.” In fact, Kenney’s energy minister, Sonya Savage, had said that the 44-year-old policy protecting parts of the Rockies would be reinstated and that citizens would be consulted if her government ever again tried to make changes to it. “An important part of being a responsible government,” Savage had said, “is to admit when you’ve made a mistake and to fix it.”

But the Smith-era UCP is shameless, said Yeremiy. They’re unwilling even to slow down, let alone reverse. “We’ve seen that with coal. We’ve seen that with healthcare. We’ve seen that with education. We’ve seen that with the renewables moratorium. Literally everything this government has done, there’s no means for the public to put a stop to it.”

Yeremiy said the three-month-long petition effort had been “exhausting.” I wasn’t exactly surprised when she told me they were unlikely to get enough signatures to trigger a recall vote. But then she described the campaign in a surprising way. “They [the UCP] have given us a gift with this recall legislation,” she said. “It’s forcing us to speak with our neighbours. In the environmental and social justice movements, there’s a lot of camaraderie and solidarity. But at the end of the day we have to be able to talk to the people who live beside us.” She described a recent Eastern Slopes meeting in Canmore. “It was mostly local, and they offered great thoughts. But the challenge is we’re not bringing new people along. So what [recall] is doing, its gift, is it’s making us speak with people who normally aren’t interested in these important issues.”

I’d been thinking for weeks about recall as a provincial issue. But Yeremiy wasn’t focused on other recall efforts across the province. She was organizing dozens of her neighbours, many she’d never met before, to engage in local politics. They in turn were speaking with their neighbours, thousands of them, at the car wash, at roadsides, on doorsteps. About politics. About important issues. Class sizes. Charter rights. Representation. They were, as community organizers like to put it, “connecting with systems of power to enact change.”

This idea “came from my being a geophysicist and liability expert,” Yeremiy said. “We have to do land-based organizing. I go to meetings, talk about the land, have conversations. But the challenge, with people all over the province, is we’re not doing it in our own community. So recall is ultimately about governing ourselves. That’s what this gift is. It’s helping us understand how to build from the ground up.”

On a Sunday afternoon in late January I drove to the Foothills United Church in Bowness. My eldest daughter was with me. We’d been running errands; this was our last stop. The church, built in the 1940s and plastered in white stucco, had a Recall Nicolaides sign poking out of its dead grass. People were filing in through the main doors.

We saw Tania at the petition-signing table in the vestibule and said hello. She hadn’t seen my older daughter, her former student, in nearly eight years. Two other women, volunteers I hadn’t yet met, were at the booth. It was loud, but we chatted awhile. Their signature-collecting efforts would “absolutely fall short,” they said, their deadline now days away. Probably well short. But today was a celebration. A band was playing in the main church space. A Raging Granny passed by in an oversized floppy green hat. My daughter returned to the table with a cookie and a handful of pretzels.

I remained unconvinced about the idea of recall. If anything, Alberta’s recall insurgency strongly directs us to fix representative democracy. Rather than try to pick off MLAs between elections, one by one or 26 at a time, we need to curtail the vast power of party leaders, demand more free votes in the legislature, disallow corporate donations to parties, and protect the authority of independent watchdogs. And our elections must be proportional. First-past-the-post poisons the well, often elevating to positions of power “representatives” who are supported by a fraction of their electorate and ignore everyone else. Small wonder we end up in acrimony.

And yet I’d spent more time than ever over the past three months—outside of an election period—talking about politics with people in my community. I’d met neighbours. I’d discovered they had similar concerns to mine. Recall Nicolaides canvassers had done this and then some. A few told me the campaign had awakened them to the power of organizing. It had even given them hope. One volunteer, Rob, told me he’d had fun: “Just going out and collecting signatures has been such a positive experience.”

Yeremiy would be asked by a Calgary Herald reporter whether too few signatures would constitute failure. “Not even a little bit,” she said. “I feel so much more empowered than I did before this started. Most people involved in this petition have never been in politics before, (but) they felt compelled to do something, watching the misdirection of this government.”

Tania handed me a pen. I signed the petition. My daughter cheered. This list of names was an imperfect but unmistakable message to my MLA, my government and every citizen of Alberta. And if I couldn’t get behind recall itself, I would stand with my neighbours.

Evan Osenton is editor of Alberta Views. His “We Could Prevent a Mass Shooting” (Dec 2024) and “Who Wants Albertans to Gamble More?” can be found in AV’s online archives.

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The post Operation Total Recall appeared first on Alberta Views.

We’ve all seen how that has been going for the United States, and, frankly, for the rest of the world. The only word that captures it is “revolutionary.” Project 2025 has turned the US on its head and reset the country’s relations with everyone else.

There are probably only a few dozen people or so who have actually read the 920-page Project 2025 cover to cover. I don’t count myself as one of them. But I did read Alberta’s own little version of the document, and it was illuminating to say the least.

Like many Albertans I’ve been struggling to keep pace with the rate at which the UCP has legislated since Danielle Smith took the helm in 2022, often in unconstitutional ways that target minorities and override treaty rights. They have passed legislation, often in the middle of the night, that will leave extraordinary impacts on citizens of the province, alter the nature of our democratic society and could ultimately see Alberta remove itself from Confederation. On four occasions they have invoked the notwithstanding clause to override Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Some people, such as federal justice minister Sean Fraser, have described this approach as a form of “democratic backsliding” designed “to cater to a unique political opportunity that may be a good fundraising email but will potentially violate constitutionally protected rights of vulnerability.”

Similar to our neighbours in the US, Albertans are in our own anti-democratic revolutionary political vortex, in which we’re being pulled into the unknown by a MAGA-adjacent far-right UCP government.

It might have helped to see some of this coming. Turns out we could have, if only we’d read the Free Alberta Strategy sooner.

The Free Alberta Strategy was written in 2021 by Rob Anderson, Barry Cooper and Derek From at the height of anti-Trudeau sentiment in the province, and in the altered-reality state of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, when so many radical ideas were incubated in a stew of isolation and myopia-inducing screen time. Anderson is a lawyer with a history in provincial politics who is now premier Danielle Smith’s chief of staff. Cooper is a political science professor at the University of Calgary. From is also a lawyer.

The document is a shade under 50 pages and contains a smattering of footnotes from Ted Morton, Jack Mintz, Lorne Gunter, Preston Manning, Pierre Poilievre and the Fraser Institute. Not exactly a non-partisan affair. And it certainly isn’t written with any attempt at neutrality or objectivity either. On the contrary, it is laced with incendiary rhetoric that seeks to demonize eastern Canada in simplistic and snide ways. It sets Alberta up as an oppressed victim of Confederation that has been “pillaged” by a federal government that has become an “existential threat to our province’s economic viability and the core freedoms of our people.”

The strategy asserts that “Ottawa has fundamentally breached its constitutional agreement with Alberta.” Accordingly, it has become incumbent upon the provincial government to “repudiate this arrangement on behalf of its people, to renegotiate its terms of membership in Confederation and, if Canada’s federal and provincial leaders refuse to negotiate, to form an independent nation.”

The authors then call on the government of Alberta, which at the time was led by premier Jason Kenney, to pass a Sovereignty Act that would allow the province to disregard all federal laws at its discretion; turf the RCMP and replace it with a provincial force; create independent provincial legislation for financial institutions, presumably to end federal regulatory oversight over banks working in the province; end equalization transfers; opt out of federal health, education, resource development, environmental regulation and property rights; replace the Canada Pension Plan with an Alberta version; do the same with Employment Insurance; replace the federal government in international diplomacy and negotiation; and give the provincial legislature the power to make all future judicial appointments.

These are the strategic moves the authors believe will “offload the burden of Ottawa’s tyrannical economic policies against the Province, and secure self-determination for the people of Alberta within a reformed confederation, or if necessary, as an independent nation.”

Albertans are in an anti-democratic revolutionary political vortex.

According to the authors “a vast majority of Albertans” agree that the province in recent years has been “economically terrorized by the Government of Canada.” “Eco-extremists,” they say, have looted the province of “well over $600-billion” through transfer programs.

Anderson, Cooper and From blame the federal government for increases in suicides, bankruptcies and overdoses. And they suggest the feds have “commenced a deliberate strategy to phase out and eliminate Alberta’s largest and most critical industry.” Policies such as the carbon tax, clean fuel regulations and environmental impact assessments are characterized as “assaults.”

All of this dramatically sets up an extortion play which is the core of the strategy: “In the event that Ottawa refuses to recognize Alberta’s provincial rights of sovereignty, and instead continues its strategy of economic tyranny, co-opted management of our resource sector and the marginalization of our citizens, it may leave our province with no other recourse but to leave Confederation entirely.”

Rather than co-operative federalism, this is shakedown federalism. It’s a “do what we say or we are done” extortionist strategy that is rooted in an inflated sense of grievance that doesn’t jibe with any discernible reality.

Politicians and political scientists are careful to acknowledge the real sense of grievance that some Albertans feel vis-à-vis their relationship with the federal government. You can’t argue with people’s feelings after all, but you can take issue with how they choose to rationalize and justify them. There’s nothing on the public record that could plausibly support characterizing the federal government’s relationship with Alberta as something equivalent to economic terrorism, as the authors of the Free Alberta Strategy assert. To the contrary, since 2010 oil production in the province has more than doubled, from two million barrels a day to 4.1 million barrels a day.

The Free Alberta Strategy didn’t get much traction with Jason Kenney’s UCP, perhaps because in year one of Kenney’s reign Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, ramped up investment in the TMX pipeline, which runs from Edmonton to tidewater at Burnaby, BC. The project eventually cost the federal government $34.2-billion. Even for Kenney it would have been a stretch to describe this massive outlay of public dollars as an “assault” or a form of “terrorism” committed against his province by the evil overlords in Ottawa.

But since Kenney was given the bum’s rush by the far-right separatist wing of the party he created, the strategy has come back into vogue. In fact, Kenney’s successor, premier Smith, is hewing closely to much of the plan.

Before going further it’s important to be fair to the authors of the Free Alberta Strategy and not paint them as being fully responsible for planting the anti-democratic seeds the UCP has sown since.

The trio of Anderson, Cooper and From were careful to recommend a transparent, democratic approach to adopting their strategy and, if necessary, a democratic approach to ending Alberta’s place in Confederation. They prescribed that their strategy be adopted first as official policy, that the policy be outlined clearly to Albertans and that there should be a democratic process to give the government the mandate to pursue the strategy.

Once the democratic mandate was in hand, after a successful electoral victory with the Free Alberta Strategy as a platform, they suggested a pre-referendum blue ribbon panel on provincial secession be held and that a detailed plan be drafted by policy experts, lawyers and members of the private and public sectors that would cover the full ambit of requirements to establish an independent Alberta. They argued for a full year to be given to consultations, discussions and debates on the merits of the plan and its risks and rewards.

Danielle Smith’s UCP did not follow this recommended process. Just as Donald Trump dishonestly denied any knowledge of Project 2025 during the last presidential campaign and then proceeded to implement vast portions of its radical agenda within his first year back in the White House, Smith’s UCP did not campaign on the Free Alberta Strategy’s tenets but have embraced them wholeheartedly since forming government. Smith’s UCP don’t, therefore, have a democratic mandate to pursue these ideas, by any standard. Yet they have implemented the components of the strategy at a ferocious pace.

First, through Bill 54, which made it comprehensively easier to bring about a secession referendum by reducing the number of signatures required, and then Bill 14, which was passed in order to eliminate any bearing the Charter of Rights of Freedoms and the Treaties might have on the process, the UCP has shown it intends to construct a credible threat of separatism that it can use to extort the rest of Canada.

They have taken the Free Alberta Strategy into Trumpian territory by running on one set of issues and governing on their opposite. Believe it or not, the planks of the UCP’s winning 2023 campaign platform were tax cuts, safe streets, mental health supports, education and career training, investing in tourism, improving healthcare for women and children, and a guarantee to maintain public healthcare. None of the ideas included in the Free Alberta Strategy were campaigned on by Smith’s UCP.

However, in December 2022, just two months after Smith won the leadership of the UCP, her party introduced the Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act, which achieves one of the Free Alberta Strategy’s major milestones. This really should have been a wake-up call to the electorate that under Smith’s leadership the UCP would tack hard to the right. “It’s not like Ottawa is a national government,” said Smith after the legislation passed its final reading at 1 a.m. on December 7.

UCP leadership candidates debated the Free Alberta Strategy in June 2022; most of them opposed Alberta acting as a sovereign jurisdiction. Travis Toews said it would create chaos and scare off investors. Brian Jean: “Telling Albertans… not to follow some laws is frankly irresponsible.” The winning candidate, Danielle Smith, endorsed the Free Alberta Strategy.

Provisions in the Sovereignty Act armed Smith’s government with a set of new powers to disregard federal laws at its own discretion. In effect, this kneecaps the role of the courts in this province, by setting the provincial legislature as the arbiter of the constitutionality of federal law.

In a radical revision of constitutional democracy, the act allows the provincial cabinet to decide whether it is in or out on specific aspects of federalism, including federal regulations and even enforcement of the Criminal Code by provincial entities. The dean of the University of Calgary’s law school, Ian Holloway, called the legislation an “unconstitutional gambit” and accused the premier of “engaging in a game of political chicken.”

Smith’s government furthered this line of legislation in late 2025 with the International Agreements Act, which seeks to put the province on an equal plane with the federal government when it comes to managing international relations. It asserts that no international agreement signed by the federal government is binding on the province. Something like a major climate change agreement would presumably not be binding on Alberta unless agreed to by the provincial legislature. This assertion of provincial autonomy over international relations runs counter to all norms of statecraft. But it is a tactic explicitly described in the Free Alberta Strategy, which states in its section on international relations that Alberta “can no longer afford to entrust its interests to hostile and unreliable federal governments. It must take full control of its own international and interprovincial trade and commerce.”

The UCP has also moved to establish its own police service. The Alberta Sheriffs Police Service (ASPS) was created through Bill 4, which came into force in November 2025 as the Public Safety and Emergency Services Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 (No. 2). There remains a great deal of ambiguity with respect to these sheriffs’ purpose, jurisdiction and relationship with other police services in the province.

The sheriffs were originally established to do prisoner transport but evolved to take on traffic control roles and security around the legislature grounds. The latest evolution of the service appears aimed at broadening their authority and increasing their complement to the point that they could eventually be in position to take over from the RCMP at the end of the current policing contract, which expires in 2032.

Setting up a provincial police service is no easy task and doesn’t happen overnight or without extraordinary cost, so this is a half measure less by choice than by necessity. Nevertheless, it is a move drawn from the Free Alberta Strategy, which advocates removing the RCMP—perceived as an extension of federal authority—from its policing role in the province. It is notable that this is being done against the grain of overwhelming public opinion. A survey conducted for the National Police Foundation on the prospect of an Alberta provincial police force found only 31 per cent of respondents were in favor of replacing the RCMP, while three-quarters were satisfied with the policing services received from the Mounties. Seventy-one per cent of respondents said they felt the public had not been adequately consulted on the proposal, and 81 per cent said there were more pressing issues for the province to address.

On January 23, 2026, the premier sent prime minister Mark Carney a letter threatening to withhold “the necessary funding to support any new judicial positions in the province” until the federal government agreed to make significant changes to how judges are appointed in Alberta. Following the Free Alberta Strategy’s extortion tactic to a tee, and its strategic direction to assert greater autonomy over judicial appointments, the premier has for now stopped short of the nuclear option articulated by Anderson, Cooper and From, which recommends the provincial legislature appoint all future judges serving in Alberta.

Instead, the premier is proposing a major reform of the appointments process that would see the establishment of a special advisory committee comprising “four non-partisan experts—two from Alberta and two appointed by the federal government.” The committee would make recommendations to the two ministers of justice (federal and provincial), who would then be expected to “work collaboratively to identify the successful appointee(s).”

“Of course it is treasonous, of course it is illegal… and we’re going to have to have… help from abroad.” —barry cooper

The premier also wants this committee to influence appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada and make recommendations to the prime minister about who should fill vacancies on the top bench.

Federal justice minister Sean Fraser saw the letter as a threat to judicial independence and the rule of law, and told media “it’s essential that we have a judiciary who’s able to make decisions without fear or favour amongst those who have the power to appoint or, in theory, remove a judge from the bench.” The Canadian Bar Association and its Alberta branch also expressed “grave concerns” about premier Smith’s proposal, which they saw as a threat that if carried out would ultimately “punish Albertans by limiting access to a properly functioning justice system.”

Under Smith’s leadership the UCP has also toyed with the idea of breaking with the Canadian Pension Plan and establishing a provincial plan instead. Smith floated the idea—one of the main pillars of the Free Alberta Strategy—as part of a 2023 survey she put to all residents of the province who wanted to participate. It took 21 months for her government to finally release the results of the survey, which showed that only 10 per cent of respondents supported the idea of an Alberta Pension Plan.

The other tactical moves recommended in the Free Alberta Strategy—legislating an end to equalization payments and establishing an independent banking act—have yet to be attempted by Smith’s government.

Rather than co-operative federalism, this is shakedown federalism.

The shakedown approach to federalism that is the hallmark of Smith’s government clearly has its intellectual roots in the Free Alberta Strategy. The approach derives from an understanding of Confederation as being fundamentally unfair to western Canadians, who, according to one of its authors, Barry Cooper, have been under the thumb of an imperialist power structure seated in Laurentian Canada since before Confederation. It seeks to use the ultimate threat of separation as leverage to reset the terms of the Canadian federation.

For his part, Cooper—a committed separatist—does not believe the Laurentians are capable of comprehending “what they have done.” In an interview for this article, he characterized this as a “failure of imagination” to meet “the just complaints of Alberta and Saskatchewan.”

In June 2020 Cooper joined BC political talk show host Stuart McNish on Conversations that Matter to discuss Alberta separatism. Cooper articulated his theory that western Canadians have been exploited by the Ontario/Ottawa/Quebec imperial complex and went on to expound a sense of fatalism about the future of Canadian federalism. In his view, western Canadians will eventually conclude that the relationship with Laurentian Canada will never change or evolve in meaningful enough ways to make it worth remaining in Canada.

According to Cooper: “Eventually you have to do something. Of course it is treasonous, of course it is illegal, and of course it is going to be very unpleasant, and we’re going to have to have… help from abroad. We’re going to have to rely on the Americans. It will depend on whether or not Saskatchewan and Alberta have leaders who are willing to understand the very serious implications, which means among other things getting the Americans on board.”

Here, Cooper seems to have presaged the now well-publicized efforts of the Alberta Prosperity Project to conscript the help of the Trump administration in their efforts to split Alberta from the rest of Canada. And while the Smith government hasn’t overtly and explicitly declared its separatist intentions, nor openly courted the Trump administration’s support in becoming an independent state, it has legislated in a MAGA-adjacent, far-right fashion.

With Trumpian disregard for constitutional norms, Smith’s government has used the notwithstanding clause to attack the rights of organized labour and of gender diverse people in the province. With Trumpian xenophobia it has signalled an intent to crack down on immigration and the rights of immigrants and refugees in the province. It has introduced two-tier healthcare through Bill 11, and encouraged two-tier education by subsidizing private schools at the highest rate in Canada and increasing funding to charter schools at a rate three times higher than its increase to public schools.

These moves could be construed as a method of demonstrating the UCP’s alignment with the Trump administration. This is not insignificant, particularly in light of the US’s November 2025 National Security Strategy, which states that “we will reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy.”

Under premier Jason Kenney, a former federal cabinet minister in the Harper government and a committed federalist, the Free Alberta Strategy barely made an impression. Under premier Smith’s UCP, the strategy is being aggressively implemented.

Cooper was forthright in stating that while he hasn’t spoken with either Rob Anderson—now the premier’s chief of staff—or premier Smith in a number of years, he is “quite supportive of what she has done.”

The Free Alberta Strategy provides a clear window into the strategic logic and tactical moves premier Smith’s UCP will make in destabilizing relations with the rest of Canada and setting Alberta on a path to separation. As Project 2025 has done in the US, the Free Alberta Strategy has begun to fundamentally alter Alberta politics and society. It’s a reckless and anti-democratic plan that seems hell-bent on destroying Canada. Canadian citizens can orient themselves amid the chaos by understanding that Smith and her government are intent on pursuing the Free Alberta Strategy to its logical conclusion. If they want a preview of where this is all headed next, they need only keep an eye on our neighbours to the south.

Patrick Lennox is the author of At Home and Abroad: The Canada–US Relationship and Canada’s Place in the World.

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The post Shakedown Federalism appeared first on Alberta Views.

Ariana and her siblings aren’t like other kids. “We came to Canada because my parents felt they were in danger in my country,” 13-year-old Ariana told me on a video call last September. She didn’t elaborate on the perils her family faced back home, but many Mexicans face threats of extortion, violence or kidnapping from narco gangsters. When Ariana’s family arrived in Edmonton from Mexico in 2019 they applied to stay in Canada as refugees. The federal government denied their claim in 2022. The decision rendered the family without status and therefore required them to leave Canada. Instead they decided to remain in Edmonton illegally, joining the ranks of Alberta’s undocumented.

Most undocumented Albertans strive simply to remain unseen. But this invisibility acts as both a cloak and a curse.

According to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), an undocumented migrant is, simply, “an individual who has no authorization to reside and/or work in Canada.” The number of undocumented or “non-status” people in Canada is much more difficult to know. Estimates from academic sources range from 20,000 to half a million people—a range so vast as to be practically meaningless.

The overwhelming majority of non-status individuals in Canada, and in Alberta, first entered the country through legal means. Many are temporary foreign workers who have overstayed their work permits. The rest are believed to be international students with lapsed study permits, visitors whose visas have expired, or rejected refugee claimants like Ariana’s family. Many had been in Canada for years before they lost their status. A vanishingly small number sneaked into the country or were smuggled in. In my four years of research into migrant labour—documented and undocumented both—I’ve never heard a single story of anyone coming to Alberta this way.

Most undocumented migrants strive simply to survive and remain unseen. But this invisibility acts as both a cloak and a curse. Staying in the shadows makes it harder for undocumented people to be expelled, while at the same time allowing their plight to go unnoticed. They often work multiple under-the-table jobs, usually for less than minimum wage. They endure all manner of exploitation from employers, knowing that reporting abuse could lead to their own arrest and deportation. Undocumented Albertans are also ineligible for most government services, including medical care and, as with Ariana’s siblings, basic education. Their lack of status leaves them profoundly vulnerable.

While the federal government was considering Ariana’s family’s refugee claim, the three eldest children all attended the same Edmonton Catholic elementary school. Ariana’s littlest sister was still too young. By the time the IRCC rejected the family’s application, Ariana had graduated to junior high and moved on to a different school. Her brother and middle sister remained in the same elementary, however. Her little sister, now old enough for kindergarten, was enrolled there too.

Or at least Ariana thought so. She became suspicious when she returned one day from her junior high classes to find her siblings already at home. Her parents eventually told Ariana that the school’s administration refused to enroll her sister when they learned she was undocumented. And when they realized the whole family lacked status, they kicked out Ariana’s other two siblings. Because Ariana’s junior high didn’t check her immigration status—or at least didn’t concern themselves with it—she was spared.

Both of Ariana’s parents work long hours at under-the-table jobs and can’t afford childcare, so the three children usually stay home alone. “They mostly play outside in the neighbourhood,” Ariana said. Some undocumented parents bring their school-banished children to work with them. They’ll sit in a corner and stare at their phones for hours while their parents clean offices, for example.

When I spoke to Ariana in the fall of 2025, her middle siblings had already missed two years of school. Her little sister should’ve been in Grade 2 but she’s never attended school at all. Their mother bought an English language textbook, and she tries to give her school-less children lessons when she has the time. But she isn’t a teacher. Ariana worries as much for her siblings’ social development as their education. She fears that everything they’re missing now will affect their future. “And it’s not their fault,” Ariana said.

Ariana says her parents are considering returning to Mexico, weighing the risk from the threats they came to Canada to escape. “Canada is forcing a family back to a dangerous situation where they could lose their lives,” says Whitney Haynes, executive director of the Alberta Workers Association for Research and Education (AWARE). One of AWARE’s primary missions is to support workers with precarious immigration status, and their families.

Haynes says she reached out to the Edmonton Catholic School Board on behalf of Ariana’s family. She didn’t get far. “They refuse to sit in the same room or have any kind of phone call with us,” she says. Instead, she’s met with Division Support Services and the One World One Centre, which administer registrations for Edmonton’s public and Catholic school boards respectively. Haynes has spoken at trustee meetings and reached out to teachers and school administrators. She says the situation extends well beyond one family. “We know for sure Alberta is actively kicking out kids,” she said. “Teachers and principals are too scared to talk about the issue because it’s too political.”

Ariana’s parents don’t like to talk about their status either—not to their children and certainly never in front of outsiders. Even their friends don’t know they’re undocumented. “For my family, it’s something to try and hide,” Ariana said. “I don’t know if they’re scared or embarrassed.”

Ariana is neither. In December 2024 she addressed an Edmonton Public School Board meeting. She told the story of her parents losing status. “My parents have done everything they can to fix the situation,” she told the board, and reminded them that “every child in the world, regardless of their status, has a right to education.” She may have no legal right to remain in this country, but she refuses to believe this is just.

According to Alberta’s Education Act, to be “entitled to have access to an education program” in Alberta, a person must be a legal resident of Alberta and have a parent who is a legal resident of Canada. That “and” in the legislation is important. This means that even Canadian-born children—Canadian citizens, in other words—are not entitled to public education in Alberta if their parents lack status.

This wasn’t always the case. Previous versions of the Act had an “or” instead of an “and,” which entitled all Canadian-born children to education in Alberta regardless of their parents’ status. The “or” was replaced with an “and” when the new Education Act came into force in September 2019, under Jason Kenney’s newly elected UCP. Danielle Smith’s education minister, Demetrios Nicolaides, did not respond to questions about whether or not removing undocumented students from Alberta schools is his government’s policy. But Haynes says she first started hearing stories like Ariana’s in 2023, the same year Smith led the UCP to re-election.

These bakery workers felt gratitude towards an employer who paid them considerably less than the minimum wage.

Denying services to the children of undocumented parents has precedent in this province. Until 2016, Alberta denied these children medical care too. Alberta Health regulations at the time said, “babies born in the Province of Alberta to a non-resident of Alberta are not considered residents of Alberta and are therefore not eligible for coverage with the Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan.” Alberta and Quebec were the only provinces with such a restriction.

This policy was changed through the efforts of an undocumented Filipina named Evangeline Cayanan. After she gave birth to her daughter McKenna Rose in Edmonton, a local clinic refused to perform her baby’s first checkup. Evangeline was dismayed. She reached out to Migrante, the provincial chapter of a national organization that advocates for Filipino migrants. Together, they started a campaign for a law that would guarantee health services for all Canadian-born children, regardless of their parents’ status. “I’m just worried about my baby,” Evangeline says in a campaign video. “I don’t want to beg for anything here. I just want to fight for her right as a Canadian. Just give everything that my baby should have.”

The campaign succeeded. In January 2016 Alberta’s NDP government introduced a new policy, called the McKenna Rose Law, which extended health coverage to all Canadian-born Albertans, regardless of whether or not their parents were visitors, unsuccessful refugee claimants or holders of expired permits.

Haynes has recently heard concerns from obstetricians, however, that the health rights of Canadian-born children of undocumented parents might be taken away again. Premier Smith’s government has mused about withholding provincial social programs from those lacking “Alberta-approved immigration status.”

Undocumented people themselves, of course, remain ineligible for health coverage. Doctors at some clinics will provide free primary care for non-status Albertans, but these are few and far between. Even if an individual can find a doctor willing to provide a gratis examination, pharmacists require an Alberta Health card before filling prescriptions. Non-status patients might get the care, but they won’t get the meds.

Some undocumented migrants also fear that health workers will report them to immigration authorities. As a result, they tend to quietly tolerate minor ailments and not seek care at all. Evangeline told me she is exceptionally careful at work, knowing she can’t access medical treatment. When she is sick, she goes to Google instead of a doctor. “It is self-remedy,” she told me.

Google, though, can’t deliver babies. The most common reason undocumented migrants seek medical care is to give birth. Childbirth is expensive and hospitals often turn away undocumented migrants who can’t pay.

In March 2024, Perla Estrada rushed to the emergency room of Edmonton’s Royal Alexandra Hospital. An ultrasound showed she had low amniotic fluid, and the doctor told her she needed an emergency C-section. After waiting several hours, and even though Alberta Health Services policy clearly states “you will not be denied emergency medical care in Alberta even if you do not have medical insurance,” a nurse told her she needed to pay $5,000 in advance before any surgeon would see her.

Perla had suspected that she, as an undocumented person, would have to pay for her baby’s delivery. Friends had told her the hospital would charge around $10,000, and Perla had started saving as soon as she found out she was pregnant. She managed to put aside $4,000, but not enough to cover the doctor. A Spanish-speaking nurse told her that “the department” at the Royal Alex had implemented this rule for patients without status, and that she should try another hospital.

A friend took her to Misericordia Community Hospital, where doctors performed the surgery and delivered Perla’s daughter, Violet. Perla told the CBC, “If I didn’t have a friend that helped me and took me to the other hospital, more likely I would have just come home, and something completely different would have happened.” Misericordia billed Perla afterwards.

Perla wasn’t the only undocumented mother-to-be in Edmonton asked to pay up front. Omar Yaqub, executive director of Islamic Family, a faith-based service organization, recalls an undocumented Tunisian woman who showed up for a scheduled C-section. Like Perla, the patient knew she’d have to pay for the delivery, and members of the organization offered to write the hospital a cheque. The anaesthesiologist, though, demanded $3,000 in cash. The woman wasn’t prepared to hand over a wad of bills before getting her epidural, says Yaqub, with the whole scenario seeming less like a medical procedure and more like a drug deal.

Being undocumented means more than simply lacking a right to services such as education and healthcare. It also means having no right to the protection of the law. This is not merely a bureaucratic circumstance but an all-encompassing identity. In her memoir The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio expresses the unique status of the status-less:

From the undocumented people I have loved, I have learned that all of us share something a bit peculiar, fantastical and controversial, which is this: We operate in this world like we are a little bit [outside] the law. This does not mean we are not law-abiding. We have to be extremely careful not to have any run-ins with the law—because even a traffic ticket can lead to deportation. We pay taxes, too… But as an undocumented immigrant, everything we do is technically against the law. We’re illegal.

Filipinos such as Perla and Evangeline have a colloquialism for this fraught condition: tago ng tago, which means “always hiding.” Before coming to Edmonton, Evangeline and a cohort of five other undocumented Filipinos worked off-book at a bakery in Scarborough. They packed bread for $7 an hour, more than three dollars less than Ontario’s minimum wage at the time. Their employer also rented them an apartment. “We were grateful,” Evangeline told me. “All that mattered at that time is we had work, we could survive and someone was helping us.” That the workers felt gratitude towards an employer who paid them considerably less than the minimum wage shows the position non-status people find themselves in.

Being undocumented means more than having no right to services. It means having no right to the protection of the law.

Arlene and her daughter Maya know this position well. Arlene gave birth to Maya while in Edmonton on a temporary foreign worker visa in 2011, two months before her work visa at Dairy Queen was set to expire. Maya’s father had abandoned them, and Arlene’s employer declined to renew her contract. “They didn’t even give me a reason,” Arlene said.

Arlene had suffered from depression since she was a girl, when her mother was kidnapped and murdered in Mexico City. Being rendered status-less in Canada, combined with postpartum depression, made Arlene despair. “I couldn’t handle it,” she said. Her family urged her to return to Mexico. She did, but returned to Edmonton in 2016. Maya, a Canadian citizen, didn’t need any papers, but Arlene came on a visitor visa. She worked as a live-in nanny under-the-table for an employer who promised to secure a work permit for her. The employer paid Arlene only $150 per week for more than 50 hours of work. Arlene knew she was being exploited and underpaid, but she had little recourse. Who could she complain to Like all undocumented workers, Arlene didn’t want to out herself to the authorities and felt thankful to have a job at all.

Arlene’s employer never obtained a work permit for her. “I was cheated by that person,” she said. “I had a really bad time with her. I was suffering from emotional abuse, so I had to move.” Arlene left that job and remained in Canada after her visitor visa expired. The federal government rejected her application for permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds in 2020. She’s been undocumented and living tago ng tago ever since.

Maya is 14 now and goes to a junior high in Edmonton. Arlene fears attending her school concerts and other functions open to parents. She cites how in 2021, four Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) officers in New Westminster, BC, tailed an undocumented mother after she dropped her daughter off at kindergarten, then handcuffed her in an alley on her way home. The agents eventually released her, but the incident spooked Arlene. “I’ve heard stories,” she said. “I’m afraid something like that is going to happen to me.”

This precarity breeds fear. Undocumented people worry that the next knock on the door could be a CBSA officer. Another undocumented teenager in Edmonton told me how after receiving a prank call from someone pretending to be from the CBSA, her terrified mother hung blankets over the windows, turned the lights off at night, and kept her children home from school for weeks.

Arlene’s greatest worry is for her daughter. “Maybe if I was single, I wouldn’t care about being caught and sent back to my country,” she said. But Maya has lived nearly her entire life in Alberta. “She doesn’t know anywhere else.”

The number of undocumented people in Canada and Alberta will undoubtedly grow because of changes in government policy. Immigration policies meant to reduce the number of non-permanent residents—such as tightening eligibility for post-graduate work permits for international students and blocking people who’ve been in Canada for more than a year from seeking refugee status—could have the opposite effect. People with no legal way to remain in the country will retreat to the shadows instead. More Albertans will join the ranks of the “always hiding.”

Marcello Di Cintio’s books include Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers and Walls: Travels Along the Barricades.

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The post Always Hiding appeared first on Alberta Views.

I trekked down to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union hall in Edmonton’s Strathcona industrial park on a pitch-black November evening to check in on the state of the federal NDP leadership race. About two dozen union men were there to hear the local leadership candidate, Edmonton-Strathcona MP Heather McPherson, discuss her plan to resurrect Canada’s social democratic party from its worst-ever election defeat.

Of the five candidates pursuing the leadership, McPherson is the only sitting MP, making her the only contender able to introduce legislation. Her recently proposed private member’s bill to ban employer-dominated “company unions,” which earned McPherson a legal threat for specifically naming the Christian Labour Association of Canada, was a big hit at the union hall that night.

Whoever leads the federal NDP after the votes are counted on March 29 in Winnipeg will have a daunting task ahead of them, inheriting a rump party of seven seats and without official party status in the House of Commons. Whether the next leader is McPherson, Avi Lewis, Rob Ashton, Tanille Johnston or Tony McQuail, they will have to chart a path back to electoral relevance.

That path will have to start with the NDP’s traditional base, the working class, whose votes the Conservatives have made a concerted effort to attract under Pierre Poilievre. Writing in the Windsor Star, journalist Trevor Wilhelm noted that in the 2025 federal election, “multiple former orange NDP strongholds once propped up on union shoulders turned Tory blue,” including Windsor-West and London-Fanshawe in southwestern Ontario and Elmwood-Transcona in Winnipeg. The NDP will try to win back members of this socioeconomic group—people who engage in wage labour, working in manual or service-related jobs that lack the economic security and control over their working conditions enjoyed by salaried professionals, workers who can be but aren’t necessarily unionized.

In an interview at the IBEW hall, James Ball, president of Canadian Union of Postal Workers Local 730, recognized that the next NDP leader “has a bit of a struggle ahead of them.” With workers’ wages falling behind inflation, even as they secure gains through collective bargaining, Ball said, “a lot of workers are angry.” Poilievre’s Conservatives are winning them over by “really leaning into the rage bait,” with the leader’s tirades against immigrants, “woke ideology,” “vaccine vendettas” and “global elites preying on the fears and desperation of people to impose their power grab.” McPherson is well suited to winning these voters over, Ball said, because of her campaign’s emphasis on “meeting them where they are and understanding what they need.”

Heather McPherson on the the picket line with postal workers, Edmonton, September 2025

McPherson believes that a major NDP failure isn’t so much what it’s saying but how it says it. “The reason Poilievre was able to resonate with so many people is because he had a disciplined message. He was talking about issues that matter to Canadians,” she said in an interview a couple days before the IBEW event. The NDP, she added, needs to counter Poilievre’s language of anger and fear with a “simple, hopeful” message that at the same time promises policies that appeal to working people.

At her September campaign kickoff, McPherson said the party needs to “stop shrinking into purity tests and pushing people away.” One of her caucus colleagues, Winnipeg Centre MP Leah Gazan, said she was “appalled and deeply disappointed” by McPherson’s use of the phrase “purity test.” “That framing is frequently used to dismiss calls for justice from marginalized communities—especially Black, Indigenous, racialized, 2SLGBTQ+, disabled and immigrant workers—who now make up a major part of the labour movement and the working class,” Gazan wrote on Twitter.

I asked McPherson to clarify who in the NDP is administering purity tests and against whom. She responded in general terms, referring to a tendency in certain progressive circles in which “if you use the wrong words, somehow you get excluded,” which she said is anathema to building a larger movement.

She invoked, by contrast, Zohran Mamdani’s successful New York City mayoralty campaign in 2025, “which I think we’ve all been invigorated by.” McPherson said Mamdani spoke to people “about the things that mattered to them, and he spoke to them in a way that was simple, digestible and easy to access.” His campaign was laser-focused on issues of affordability, a priority from which the candidate wouldn’t waver.

Canada’s social democratic party is coming off its worst-ever election defeat. It lacks official party status in the House of Commons.

The NDP’s messaging, said McPherson, ought to focus on three closely interrelated issues—jobs, housing and the cost of living. “Until those issues are being addressed, we can’t reach Canadians,” she said.

The first leadership campaign policy McPherson unveiled was her housing platform, the centrepiece of which is to establish a federal Crown corporation to build housing in partnership with municipalities, organized labour and Indigenous governments, with a goal of building 1.2 million non-market housing units within a decade. Carney’s Build Canada Homes, by contrast, is focused on offering market-based incentives to private builders. McPherson’s policy also includes creating a National Renters’ Bill of Rights that would cap rent increases and prevent “unfair evictions,” banning real estate investment trusts from accessing public housing funds, and converting corporate-owned housing into co-op or non-profit units through a public buy-in program.

The second policy proposal the McPherson campaign produced was to put “power back in the hands of the people who make the NDP work” by engaging members in discussions around policy, candidate recruitment and training, giving constituency associations more resources and autonomy and hiring regional organizers to enhance coordination between them.

Avi Lewis with Ontario Public Service Employees Union Local 243 members at Niagara College, 2025.

Avi Lewis’s background is not one you might expect from someone leading a left-wing populist insurgency within the NDP. His grandfather, David Lewis, led the party from 1971 to 1975, and his father, Stephen Lewis, was the Ontario NDP leader from 1970 to 1977. Both worked to purge the party of the leftist Waffle movement in 1972.

The younger Lewis’s leadership platform is focused on offering a series of public options in major areas of the economy to challenge the concentration of corporate power, a radical proposal he says will substantially lower consumer costs. Echoing the Mamdani campaign, Lewis is proposing a series of publicly owned grocery stores across Canada, which The Globe and Mail dedicated a Thanksgiving Monday editorial to arguing against—a source of pride for Lewis. “It was significant to me that we had really landed on something that the elites in Canada don’t want to talk about,” said Lewis in an interview, “that they felt the need to respond to it after only three weeks of campaigning from one candidate in a party with only seven seats.”

Despite what the Globe editorial board says, Lewis believes this policy in particular has widespread support. “Working people are pissed off and exhausted by getting ripped off at the grocery store, and these populist-left economic policies for public options are popular across the political spectrum,” he said.

The Lewis platform also calls for a series of regional public telecom companies modelled after the success of SaskTel; postal banking, which is a reality in France, Germany, Italy and the UK; and a public non-profit pharmaceutical manufacturer, which Canada used to have with Connaught Labs before it was privatized by Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government. Like McPherson, Lewis wants to establish a national public housing builder, but his would build a million (rather than 1.2 million) non-market housing units within five years (rather than 10).

Lewis cautions that when politicians and media refer to working-class voters, they’re often referring to one segment of the working class, which he describes as “white skilled-trades guys in hard hats.” These are the workers with whom Poilievre has taken hundreds of photo ops as part of his concerted effort to attract them. “That’s a really important part of the working class,” said Lewis, “but they’re far from the whole story.”

A much larger cross-section of Canada’s working class toil in the service and care sectors. Many of these workers, which include everyone from Tim Hortons employees to long-term-care nursing aides, live in the suburbs, where Lewis acknowledges the NDP has “huge inroads to make,” and are first-generation immigrants. “Those are jobs dominated by women, with a huge proportion of racialized women, and they are underpaid and undervalued, and, in my view, some of the most essential workers in our economy,” said Lewis.

In addition to being “work that builds and maintains the connective tissue of society,” Lewis emphasizes that these sectors also have “very light footprints environmentally.”

On November 27, about a dozen Edmontonian supporters of Lewis gathered in the basement of the Whyte Avenue Boston Pizza to watch the NDP leadership debate on TV. One of them was Stephen Buhler, a former oil and gas worker from rural Alberta who used to manufacture mechanical seals for pipelines and now works as a machinist at the University of Alberta.

Buhler said he finds Lewis’s campaign refreshing because he advocates “bold” policies, such as a public grocery option, “that actually get people excited,” instead of engaging in endless compromises to appeal to “some person that, frankly, doesn’t exist.”

“When I was working in oil and gas, what I really wanted was an option that was not oil and gas. I wanted to help build future solutions that actually protect the planet and ensure we’re not stuck with the oil and gas roller coaster over and over again,” he said.

Rather than engaging in “process after process after process” and “working around the edges” to determine which specific set of focus-group-tested policies the public wants to see, Buhler believes the job of a political leader is to offer bold solutions that will materially improve people’s lives. “I’m seeing Heather McPherson talk about how she wants to consult people. She’s not really giving anything that we can really chew on,” he said. “It’s just kind of vibes.”

The key to winning back working-class support is to provide “solid and concrete” policies that support labour priorities.

Rob Ashton on the picket line with striking Ontario nurses in late 2025. Ashton, as a longshoreman, is something of a rarity in federal politics—a party leadership candidate who comes directly from the shop floor, the rank and file of workers.

No leadership aspirant has put workers front and centre more than Rob Ashton, a dock worker who has served as president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union for more than a decade. He speaks explicitly of “class war” and the need for the NDP to be “unapologetically loud” in fighting it. “All we see happening is our lives getting worse, the working class,” he told The Tyee. “We’re all getting screwed, and we’re all getting lied to, election after election after election. I’ve had enough of it. This is a time where workers—Canadians—need a true voice in Ottawa.”

Ashton’s “Worker Power Plan” pledges to require that workers have seats on corporate boards (although he doesn’t specify how many), to repeal section 107 of the Canada Labour Code, which the federal Liberals have repeatedly used to order striking workers back to work, and to replace the temporary foreign workers program “with a fair program, built from the ground up to protect all workers, their status and their labour.”

His advocacy for dockworkers’ interests has, however, placed him in the awkward position of being open to a repeal of the federal tanker ban on BC’s northern coast, which position earned him praise from Alberta’s UCP government.

Tanille Johnston, the federal NDP’s first Indigenous woman leadership aspirant, touted her working-class upbringing at her October 9 campaign launch, noting that her father was a miner and her mother was a small-business owner. “They taught me what perseverance looked like—that if you work hard and care for your family, act with integrity, you could lead a good life,” she said. “But today so many Canadians are finding that that promise is a lie.”

Johnston, a social worker in addition to being a city councillor, has proposed implementing minimum nurse-to-patient ratios, which BC’s NDP government introduced in 2024 in collaboration with the BC Nurses’ Union, on a national scale. She also speaks of adopting national rent control, and fully incorporating pharmacare, dental care, vision care and mental health care into the public healthcare system. “We’re finished with half measures,” Johnston proclaimed at an October NDP leadership forum in Nanaimo.

Tony McQuail, an organic farmer from Huron County, Ontario, wants to collaborate with the Greens to ensure there’s only one candidate from either party running in each riding, and advocates “degrowth” economic policies in which the corporate pursuit of endless economic growth would be abandoned in favour of democratic decision-making about resource allocation.

McPherson says the NDP needs to be “unapologetically interested in winning”—not aiming to be “the conscience of Parliament.”

The NDP convention in Winnipeg falls roughly on the 10th anniversary of the 2016 federal party convention in Edmonton, where members voted to turf leader Tom Mulcair, who sharply departed from the NDP’s social democratic roots with an ill-fated pledge of balanced budgets. But it was also where Lewis set off a firestorm by proposing a policy resolution on the Leap Manifesto, a controversy with reverberations in today’s leadership race.

The 1,300-word blueprint for a green economy, including expansion of the low-carbon care economy, was written by Lewis, best-selling author Naomi Klein (his wife) and journalist Martin Lukacs, who now serves as a policy adviser to the Lewis leadership campaign, alongside a group of environmentalist, labour and Indigenous leaders.

The most contentious detail in the manifesto was its call for an end to “new infrastructure projects that lock us into increased extraction decades into the future,” a thinly veiled reference to pipelines, which Alberta’s NDP government was pursuing vigorously at the time the manifesto reached the floor of the federal NDP convention.

Then-premier Rachel Notley called the document “naive,” “ill-considered” and “very tone-deaf.” Environment minister Shannon Phillips, whom Lewis had endorsed during the 2012 provincial election, gave a closed-door speech to the federal caucus, disparaging those who suggest “we should shut down, in the short or even medium term, the industry that powers this province and this country.” This sentiment was echoed by Wildrose leader Brian Jean, who called the Leap Manifesto a “radical anti-Alberta resolution,” and Alberta PC leader Ric McIver, who suggested it reflected “radical socialist ideology.”

For McPherson, who wasn’t yet an MP at the time but was an active party member, the Leap was a “ridiculous political policy” and “vanity project.” “My opposition to it certainly wasn’t opposition to the messages within it,” she said in our interview. “It was opposition to how it was brought forward and how it undermined the work of our membership.”

But elements of the party membership were on board for the manifesto. In the months between the Leap’s release during the 2015 federal election campaign and the NDP’s 2016 convention, the Canadian Press reported that more than 20 NDP riding associations had endorsed it.

Lewis worked on the Leap resolution with former MPs Meghan Leslie, Craig Scott and Libby Davies, as well his aunt, former Ontario NDP president Janet Solberg. The former MPs kept Mulcair in the loop about the resolution every step of the way, who relayed it to the Alberta NDP leadership, said Lewis.

Because the resolution was so low on the list of resolutions for the Edmonton convention, Lewis had to make his case before a prioritization panel about why it should be debated at all. “The Alberta NDP didn’t send anyone to speak against that,” he recalled, “because they already knew that the resolution was coming, and they’d already agreed that it should have a chance to be voted on by the delegates.”

The motion ultimately adopted by the party membership by a wide margin called for elements of the manifesto to “be debated and modified on their own merits and according to the needs of various communities and all parts of Canada.”

NDP leadership contenders (left to right) Rob Ashton, Tanille Johnston, Avi Lewis, Heather McPherson and Tony McQuail

Jen Hassum, the executive director of the Broadbent Institute, a think tank named after late federal NDP leader Ed Broadbent and which advocates for social democracy, argues there’s been a “class detanglement” in recent decades, in which parties that have historically appealed to blue-collar voters, such as the NDP in Canada, the Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK, increasingly draw their support from a higher-income, university-educated professional class.

Hassum attributes this phenomenon to the rise of neoliberalism, with its promise to workers that “deregulating and selling off government assets is going to lead to greater competition, cheaper costs and therefore perhaps a better standard of living.”

But “that didn’t materialize at all,” she told me. “In fact, what happened is the rise of private equity squeezed people for their time, their energy and their money, to the point where working-class people have very limited time and resources, and even very little trust, to be able to participate in politics.”

In New York City, Mamdani was able to partially reverse this trend, with exit polls showing him winning among voters who made between $30,000 and $200,000 a year, tied with former governor Andrew Cuomo among those who make between $200,000 and $300,000, and losing among both those who make less than $30,000 and those who make over $300,000.

The reason he did so wasn’t only due to his affordability-oriented policies or effective communication. “Good policy in a vacuum is just good policy,” said Hassum. What made the difference was his ground game. Mamdani’s network of thousands of canvassers, many of whom cut their teeth with the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter, literally met people where they were at to pitch their candidate to the masses while traditional media dismissed him as a far-left extremist.

The relationship between policy, communication and organizing is “symbiotic,” said Hassum. “The secret to organizing is that that’s actually how a campaign ought to learn about the policies that move people, and even the words to use to tell the story and to tell the bigger narrative.”

There’s a lesson here for the NDP as it rebuilds. “Something that I really hope to see from the NDP is a resurgence in having volunteers—regular, typical, ordinary people—do the work of reaching out within their communities and do that base organizing,” Hassum said. The NDP has the priorities and interests of most Canadians at heart, she argued. “Any seat in this country can be flipped, because our interests are aligned.”

Speaking on stage at the IBEW union hall last November with Local 424 assistant business manager Scott Crichton, McPherson said the NDP’s failure to resonate with working-class voters was especially tragic because “we’d somehow lost touch with people that we were supposed to be representing,” leading to a two-party duopoly outside of Quebec led by people who are entirely uninterested in labour issues. “Mark Carney does not give a damn about working-class Canadians, and Pierre Poilievre—he doesn’t even know what they are,” said McPherson. “This guy has literally never done anything except work in the House of Commons, basically just getting into fights.”

Crichton told me that the “key” to winning back the working class is to provide “solid and concrete” policies that support labour priorities, and to clearly state these in the party platform, as opposed to offering “rhetoric and jargon.”

For McPherson, the NDP needs to be a party that is “unapologetically interested in winning.” “I have no time for folks who think we should be the conscience of Parliament,” she added. “That’s not what I want to do. I want to elect more New Democrats, and I want us to be able to win.” She looks to the provincial NDP governments of Wab Kinew in Manitoba and David Eby in BC as models to emulate. “We’ve seen how when provincial parties across the country are able to win, they can fix things for Canadians and make life better for Canadians,” said McPherson, who’s been endorsed by former Alberta premier Notley and environment minister Phillips.

But before the federal NDP can win, McPherson said, there’s a need to “rebuild our party in a way that respects the membership.” In recent years, she said, the party “has treated our members, frankly, like some problem to be solved, not like the base of our movement.” This means working with local riding associations—and not only in ridings deemed winnable, but across the country, because those are the people who can provide insight into how to win on the ground.

McPherson credits the Edmonton Strathcona NDP riding association with flipping the long-time conservative seat to the NDP for the first time in 2008. In 2025, McPherson’s 47 per cent support was the highest share of the vote that any NDP candidate won. “We did the work, we knocked on the doors, and we talked to folks about the things that mattered to them,” she said. “And now it’s the strongest seat for the NDP in this country.”

Jeremy Appel is an Edmonton-based journalist interested in politics, the media and corporate power. He’s the author of Kenneyism: Jason Kenney’s Pursuit of Power (Dundurn, 2024).

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I’ve never been to Red Deer’s downtown, but as a prairie girl I feel immediately at home parking diagonally beside a diner fronted by a cheerful red-and-white awning and a sandwich board declaring today’s special: beef dip. I walk a block to the modern courthouse surrounded by a pretty garden. Inside I surrender my leather bag containing a notebook and three packs of nasal naloxone to bored-looking security guards. They ask if I’m a lawyer. I shake my head. Nobody gives me—a neatly dressed, middle-aged white woman—a second glance. I consider telling them I’m trying to understand the anatomy and physiology of fundamental rights.

The reason for my trip to Red Deer is to attend, in person, the hearing of a Charter challenge arguing that an SCS is an essential health service, one that’s potentially lifesaving.

Canadians believe that access to healthcare is a right of citizenship. Yet even people who are keenly aware of health inequities are often surprised to learn that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Canada Health Act and the numbered Treaties all fail to guarantee us a right to healthcare. And although Canada is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which directly addresses health and medical care, that document is legally non-binding. Such lack of statutory protection partly explains why we see so few cases of Charter breaches regarding access to healthcare in Canada. The need for such protection has also been obscured by an assumption that elected officials, guided by the principles of medicare, will act in the public’s best interest.

I am attending, in person, a Charter challenge arguing that supervised consumption sites are an essential health service.

As a physician, it was only after health services that my patients really needed came under threat that I began to question why the public interest seems to regularly exclude the population I serve: people experiencing homelessness who use drugs.

The closure of Red Deer’s SCS is only one example. An SCS is a health service where people can consume their own criminalized substances (which are increasingly contaminated with toxic additives) without being arrested for drug possession or accidentally dying. In this uniquely decriminalized space, service users and care providers alike are exempted from charges under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA). Health professionals and medical equipment provide a life-saving response in cases of overdose, which is one of the reasons an SCS is sometimes called an overdose prevention site, or OPS. But an SCS operates under federal exemption, while an OPS operates under provincial ministerial order for an urgent, temporary response to a crisis. An SCS is also a simple and cost-effective intervention that connects people with other health and social services as well as decreases transmission of infectious diseases.

Over nearly a decade, between January 2016 and September 2025, at least 10,936 Albertans—an average of three per day—have died from opioid poisoning. But across Canada, including in Alberta, supervised consumption sites have responded to tens of thousands of poisonings—and not seen a single death. Irreplaceable by other services, SCSs are as critical to my patient population as cardiac catheterization labs are to people with coronary artery disease.

In following various court challenges around my patients’ access to care, I reviewed what all Grade 9 social studies students in Alberta learn. Federalism—the division of powers and the checks and balances that enable our democracy to operate—assigns to the judiciary the interpretation of legislation designed by elected representatives accountable to the electorate. The judiciary presumes that policymakers intend to be and are, after careful community and expert consultation, equipped to determine and prioritize the public’s best interest. When called upon to review a dispute, judges must at times balance the rights of some against the well-being of many. For example, an Alberta law meant to protect against traumatic brain injuries requires that all minors must wear helmets when bicycling, even though some object to the infringement on their bodily autonomy. This balancing act is a weighty responsibility and relies heavily on the public-interest presumption.

Yet times are changing. What happens when the presumption does not hold What happens when a government decides to ignore established frameworks for healthcare, when its community engagement is merely performative, when scientific expertise is mocked, when the public interest is defined so narrowly I’m all too aware how hard it is to witness despair on the streets. But I can’t reconcile how one person’s feelings of fear or inconvenience legitimize the annihilation of what is—to someone else—a life-saving health service.

Court of King’s Bench Justice Debbie Yungwirth presides over the hearing in Red Deer as lawyer Avnish Nanda reads from the affidavit of plaintiff Aaron Brown. Nanda describes how, prior to the Red Deer SCS opening in 2018, Brown had experienced numerous drug poisonings. In the seven years the SCS was operating, he had none. Then, within only a few weeks of the SCS’s closure on March 31, 2025, Brown experienced another life-threatening drug poisoning. He is arguing that the closure of the SCS is a breach of his Charter rights.

When I was working in Calgary’s emergency shelters as the drug poisoning crisis accelerated in 2017, a patient told me that, knowing he might lose consciousness after using drugs, he’d try to “land” in a public space with the hope someone would find him. To this man—as to Aaron Brown—an SCS is a lifesaver, a place to receive dignified and competent care instead of facing the end of his days alone on the floor of a mall washroom.

Data show that more people die in public from drug poisonings after SCS closures. Despite warnings of foreseeable harms, SafeLink Alberta’s mobile SCS for Calgary and Medicine Hat had its grant agreement retracted in the summer of 2019, after the UCP government froze all funding pending a review of local supervised consumption services. The provincial government then closed Lethbridge’s ARCHES SCS in 2020, after which that city saw drug poisoning deaths rise from 56 in 2020 to 125 in 2023. In Edmonton the number of overdose-related EMS calls to the area surrounding the Boyle Street SCS—which was shut down in the spring of 2021 under cover of the pandemic—have increased dramatically. Operating licences, granted by the province, on all remaining SCSs (in Calgary, Lethbridge, Grande Prairie and Edmonton) are set to expire by March 2026. As the government shows no signs of renewing these, Alberta may soon have no SCSs at all. Contracts are instead being handed to private, for-profit companies operating abstinence-only programs.

My application to speak about the positive impacts of an SCS was denied. I attended wearing tape over my mouth that read “Silenced.”

The provincial government justified its closures using results from its SCS review, which was conducted by an internally appointed UCP committee and which considered only socio-economic factors. The committee noted the impacts of an SCS on businesses, who felt “left out” of consultations, and on condominium owners, who perceived disorder and needle debris. My own application to speak to the committee about the positive health impacts of an SCS was, however, denied. I attended the public forum wearing a piece of tape over my mouth that read “Silenced.” I intended for this to represent the committee’s disregard for frontline health workers like me and, more importantly, the voices of the forever silenced: those who had already died from lack of access to an SCS. The government report was later criticized by public health scholars as “fundamentally methodologically flawed, with a high risk of biases that critically undermine its authors’ assessment of the scientific evidence.”

Albertans, now years into UCP governance, are no strangers to public consultation parading before a predeter-mined outcome. The SCS review was merely one of the first.

In the Red Deer courtroom, while I sit on an uncomfortable wooden bench suspiciously similar to the pews in my grandmother’s Protestant church, Nanda cites the case of Canada’s first SCS. Insite began operating in Vancouver in 2003. In 2008 prime minister Stephen Harper refused to renew the Criminal Code exemption that allowed Insite to operate. In 2011 the Supreme Court of Canada found this action unconstitutional. The court’s decision invoked section 7 of the Charter: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.   

While this decision preserved Insite’s service, Alberta’s SCS-related court decisions seem to take another tack. Even when a risk of irreparable harm is acknowledged by the courts, as it was in two other court cases I’ve tracked, policymakers are still given the benefit of the doubt to enact their laws. Judges here have overly relied on an interpretation of the public interest that is biased towards politically shaped perceptions of public safety, while their rulings undervalue the very lives of the dispossessed.

Aaron Brown’s is not the only case to challenge the provincial government’s cruel removal of lifesaving health services. “We don’t want to sue our government,” said Petra Schulz, co-founder of Moms Stop the Harm, “but we don’t have a choice.” Schulz lost her youngest child, Danny, to an accidental overdose in 2014, before the province had any SCSs. After the UCP took power in 2019, Schulz saw that government create barriers to access and then close the harm-reduction services she had worked so hard to help build in memory of Danny. She and others filed a Charter complaint in 2021; it was dismissed in 2022.

“As families who have lost loved ones to the toxic drug crisis,” Schulz says, “we do whatever it takes to ensure that people have access to essential lifesaving services. When all other avenues are exhausted, Charter challenges and the courts provide one more chance to reverse deadly government policies. As a private individual it’s scary to take your government to court. [But] it’s not as painful as losing your child.”

So many families and communities are still facing that pain. Meanwhile, Alberta’s government is determined to tackle an “addiction crisis” that seems illusory: while poisoning deaths are rising, the rate of substance use disorders in Canada has been holding steady.

In the court case I witnessed last summer, the provincial government claimed that the closure of Red Deer’s SCS was simply a matter of scarce resource allocation. Nevertheless, the UCP is pouring $1.55-billion into addictions recovery. If the decision to close an SCS were in fact based on a fiscally responsible government’s careful management of scarce resources, it would be difficult to reconcile how so many hundreds of millions can be invested in the ill-defined and far less acute problem of “addictions” while SCSs, meant to address toxic drug deaths, are shut down.

Having personally spent many hours supporting groups and agencies attempting to set up new SCSs in Alberta, I know that funding is far from the only barrier. It was difficult enough even before the UCP formed government to manage all of the protocols and processes for provincial approval and obtain the federal exemption required to run an SCS. After the UCP implemented new licensing standards in 2022, it became virtually impossible. Since then, no new SCS licences have been issued and no new permanent services have been opened.

Although Calgarians were told that dispersed services were being developed to reduce pressure on the single, centralized site run by Safeworks at the Sheldon Chumir Health Centre, and despite local shelter operators conducting meticulous community engagement and adhering to other licensing requirements, the public has subsequently been informed that new site proposals were unsuccessful. The Safeworks site itself has been threatened with closure ever since.

The Supreme Court of Canada has already ruled that access to an SCS is a Charter-protected necessary health service.

It seems obvious that neither cost savings nor discretionary, well-informed addictions policy are the real reason for SCS closures in Alberta. Policy proposal #22 at the 2023 UCP AGM reveals the party’s mission to deliberately close SCSs. It reads, in part: “Public consumption sites… are blights upon the neighbourhoods… and a hazard to the Albertans living in those neighbourhoods.” Although some perceive activity around an SCS as disruptive or even scary, there’s no evidence that an SCS creates additional crime. The absence of an SCS, however, does increase public drug use. Besides, any consideration of “neighbourhood residents” should include the people who use an SCS, as they often live nearby.

Done properly—that is, distributed sites with a variety of service models available—would enable harm reduction to be part of a comprehensive system of care that serves everyone. The UCP’s reasons for closing these sites are political.

Alberta deputy minister of mental health and addictions Evan Romanow outlined in an email the service alternatives to an SCS in Red Deer. These include a Rapid Access Addiction Medicine clinic, which provides walk-in treatment for substance use disorders, and “enhancements” to safe withdrawal (a.k.a. detox) capacity. While Alberta has long needed additional resources meant for treating substance use disorders or preventing severe complications of withdrawal, such as seizures, none of these alternatives provide a decriminalized space nor scientifically proven overdose prevention.

In Red Deer, Crown counsel Nate Gartke told the court that Narcotic Transition Service (NTS) would be one of the programs to replace the SCS. On a phone call shortly after my trip to her hometown, Dr. Thara Kumar, a Red Deer emergency physician who has worked at both the SCS and the NTS, explained why the latter cannot replace the former: “The NTS is small-scale, serving only those with opioid use disorder who were unsuccessful at all other treatments. The NTS is a different part of the continuum of care. The [SCS] serves everyone.” In the three months prior to its closure, the Red Deer SCS saw more than 5,000 visits from 173 unique service users. The NTS, according to a statement made in court by Gartke in April 2025, registered only six patients.

A few weeks after my visit to Red Deer, Justice Yungwirth dismissed Aaron Brown’s challenge. In so doing, she deferred to government: “Alberta did not create barriers to access available health services. Rather, Alberta made the decision to fund alternative services…. In the public interest, Alberta had a right to do so.” Nanda told me: “We are appealing. Mr. Brown believes that there is a moral, ethical and legal imperative to ensure that the errors identified in the decision are addressed.”

I too am troubled by Justice Yungwirth’s decision and its seeming disregard for the unique characteristics of SCS that protect the life and liberty of someone diagnosed with a substance use disorder, which is a mental disability. The potential for generalizing Yungwirth’s interpretation—which, it strikes me, is the whole point of case law—is also concerning from my point of view as a generalist physician in a province that is moving away from evidence-based health policy and toward supporting for-profit private interests. According to Yungwirth’s justification, “any specific health service” could thus be replaced: emergency departments by private hospitals, cardiac catheterization units by juice stands, primary care by quackery. Why Alberta has a right to do so.

Jenn McCrindle is a long-term outreach worker in central Alberta and co-founder of Reclaim Collective. Many of the challenges confronting the Red Deer SCS arose, she points out, from the failure of promises to build out the tiny trailer’s services to include comprehensive, wraparound services in a permanent location. “The trailer was meant to be temporary,” she says. “It feels like [the government] just wanted it to fail.”

Angie Staines, founder of 4B Harm Reduction outreach group, notes that as contaminants in the drug supply have become more complex—and therefore so too have drug poisonings—permanent supervised consumption services are needed more than ever. Responding to complex overdoses in a controlled setting such as an SCS is by far preferable to trying to do so in an alley or park. The response on the streets falls to “a lot of broken people doing heavy work just trying to keep the community safe,” Staines says. They’re often short of sterile drug use equipment. They face tighter requirements for personal ID. Staines says such realities prevent services from adapting to patients’ needs. The inevitable inadequacies are then used as an excuse to eliminate a service rather than improve it.

Having responded to many overdoses on the streets myself, I empathize with Staines’s and McCrindle’s significant psychological, physical, emotional and moral distress. Though I’m fully trained to respond to medical emergencies, lately I’ve been experiencing shakes and nausea after responding to streetside overdoses. It’s a feeling beyond overwhelming. Dr. Kumar also points out that “the current government makes people working in harm reduction and addiction medicine waste so much time and energy simply fighting to keep services—that are evidence-based and widely accepted through the rest of the country—open and funded. That energy could be so much better spent actually doing the life-saving work and trying to create new solutions to these complex problems.”

In addition to these many risks and frustrations, people who respond to drug poisonings are vulnerable to drug possession charges under the CDSA. Removing the decriminalized space of an SCS could therefore, as the Insite decision acknowledged, engage their section 7 Charter rights.

With its ruling on Insite, the Supreme Court of Canada has already decided that access to an SCS is a Charter-protected necessary health service. Yet Alberta continues to deliberately exclude whole groups of people from accessing care and is making appropriate care provision impossible. Our justice system must rise to the challenge and fearlessly check the power of politicians who recklessly breach Charter rights. If it doesn’t, who will?

Bonnie Larson is a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine.

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Evidence in the surroundings shows that Palliser was correct, for a time. Patchy remnant shelterbelts of hardy caragana and feral crabapple trees and the unpainted, wind-tilted shacks and timber-gutted barns of old farms mark like gravesites the long-ghostly hopes of early-century dryland homesteaders, their dreams long-since blown away like dust by bad farming practice and countless chinooks.

But today, where the broken dreams and mostly unbroken prairie had been, there are now leafy greens, ochred seedheads and shiny golden stubble of a dozen kinds of cash crops. Leggy-wheeled, spray-fuzzed irrigation pivots spread in all directions like aluminum-and-rubber centipedes, each nearly half a kilometre long. And near and far, clutches of shiny galvanized steel bins rise—tonnes of grain in each.

Those early, failed homesteaders might be mystified at the prosperity of this remote corner of the province today. John Palliser would be stunned. The first answers to this mysterious reversal are in the landscape itself. The useless land Palliser referred to was actually an area of mixed sandy loam soils, well suited for growing high-value crops such as vegetables, but too porous to hold water. And whereas the great plains to the east are flat and largely featureless, the land here slopes in great ocean swells gently down toward the hidden valley of the South Saskatchewan River. After the dustbowls of extreme drought in the 1930s drove most farmers off this land, the province invested heavily in the 1950s in industrial-scale irrigation systems that brought water from the South Saskatchewan up onto the shortgrass prairie.

Adding water to sandy loam in a region that receives the highest number of sunshine hours per year in Canada wouldn’t have been enough for such a transformation, though. The other critical ingredient that would make this land flourish is here, in the din of a potato harvest operation run like a military campaign, with pop-up factories, fleets of trucks, and dawn-to-dusk frenzy: an army of temporary labourers as available, cheap and disposable as the water of the river below.

In the main farmyard where the potato factory is set up, the driver of a full spud truck performs a lumbering yet precise manoeuvre, slipping around an emptied outgoing truck and pirouetting into a waiting position. He looks for the signal to reverse from the backer, a Cree man of slight build, 64-year-old Elmer Crookedneck. Elmer is dressed in safety gear and giving signals like an aircraft marshal on a flight deck. When the truck is in position at the factory’s receiving conveyor under Elmer’s guidance, the driver—another Cree man, stocky, in jeans, rodeo buckle and cowboy boots, 58-year-old Dwayne Ernest—jumps from the high step of the truck to scoot back and help Elmer with the controls of the tipper bed. The two men shout to each other over the din while they work buttons and levers, and another five tonnes of large, dirt-clad golden potatoes begins to roll out of the tipper chute in a steady stream onto the conveyor.

Dwayne spends a few minutes helping Elmer with “grading,” the primary job at a potato harvesting factory. The two scan the stream of spuds rolling up the conveyor towards the first giant holding bin, and reach over the clattering belt to grab and throw into smaller loader bins behind them whatever they can of the rocks, damaged spuds, potato vines and lumps of clay the size of footballs: anything that is not a good potato.

The tipper empties, and Elmer directs the change-out of Dwayne’s truck for the next in under a minute. The river of potatoes rumbles up to the belt past two Mennonite boys working brooms under the conveyor and passes by the watchful eyes and quick hands of six Mennonite women in the wooden grading shack built over the conveyor behind the second holding bin. The stream of spuds will spill onto another conveyor and travel 80 feet or more past five more Mennonite women graders, then climb past two Mennonite men working at another conveyor that angles high into the mouth of the nearest of the two giant storage bins. The fully graded stream of potatoes will finally pile out where two more Mennonite women are moving high and deep in the shadows of the bin, directing the unloading end of the conveyor.

None of these workers nor most of the dozens of truck and tractor drivers and other workers are permanent employees of this farm. They are what economists call “reserve armies of labour,” underemployed populations available and ready to show up for a few weeks at harvest time when suddenly thousands of drivers and backers and graders and pilers and sweepers are needed on farms across southern Alberta, to work like mad until the fields are empty and the bins are full. And people like Elmer and Dwayne and a handful of others represent the last of the forgotten army of thousands of Cree workers—mostly from northern Saskatchewan—who for crucial decades were critical to farming operations like these and instrumental in building this corner of the province into the vast, wealthy agricultural empire it is today.

An army of temporary labourers is as available, cheap and disposable as the water of the river below.

Few Canadians know the legacy of Cree people from Saskatchewan working on southern Alberta farms. The Potato Growers of Alberta’s 50 Years of Working Together commemorative book at the old irrigation museum in Taber does not contain a single photo or word about Cree workers in any of its 400-plus pages. Even the Dutch-Canadian farmer I met a few kilometres from here didn’t seem to know much about Cree workers. “I used to use Dutch exchange students,” he says with a shrug. “Now I only use Mexican Mennonite workers.”

Yet many untold thousands of Cree people have worked on southern Alberta’s farms in the last half century, especially in sugar beet and potato production. Ron Laliberté—a Métis man and retired professor of sociology and indigenous studies—spent months interviewing Cree workers and beet farmers in southern Alberta in the early 1990s. He says the Canadian government began recruiting Cree labourers for sugar beet farmers after the latter lost easy access to labour by Japanese-Canadians “evacuated” from BC during the Second World War. The first buses in 1953 brought 120 Cree workers. By the 1980s the number had climbed to 3,000 Cree workers and at least 2,000 Metis and non-status Indians per year—the largest employment of First Nations people in Canada since the days of the fur trade. By the 1990s Cree workers made up 85 per cent of the labour force on sugar beet farms. During some seasons, up to 95 per cent of the men of some reserves in northern Saskatchewan were working on farms in southern Alberta.

Laliberté says that for those not willing to come of their own accord, the sugar beet industry pushed the government to cut social benefits during the months the Cree workers were needed down south. He says the Cree workers, always using humour to cope, started calling themselves “Grab-a-hoe Indians.”

The work at the factory pushes on under floodlights until nearly 9:00 p.m. The Mennonite boys and young women head straight for their family homes in the surrounding hamlets and farms. Elmer, Dwayne and two more Cree men—Dwayne’s brother Clem Ernest, 47, and their nephew, Jeremy Crookedneck, 27—make a quick supper in the shop kitchen, the same as they had for lunch: ham sandwiches with Velveeta slices and cans of Coca Cola. They take turns in the single shower and climb the stairs up to a storage room above the kitchen where they have four cots, a small living area for boots and gear carved out of a jumble of racks, boxes, desks and old computers. When I arrive, Dwayne is seated on a cot at the back of the room, pulling off his boots. “It’s his birthday today,” he says, pointing with his lips, Cree-fashion, toward the bed across from him, where Elmer is already asleep.

Left to right: Clem Ernest, Elmer Crookedneck, Dwayne Ernest and Jeremy Crookedneck.

I have known these men’s families since I was a boy and my preacher dad would take our family to the Little Island Lake reserve at Ministikwan, Saskatchewan, for camp meetings. Dwayne’s crews used to meet me at the racetrack in Lethbridge on a Sunday afternoon every harvest. After the races, we would have a kind of Thanksgiving dinner together at my house. Ten years ago my dining and living room would be full of Cree men and women around the table and at TV trays. Last visit, there were only five Cree men at our table, no women. This season Dwayne told me there would be only four in the crew, and they didn’t have gas money to make it to Lethbridge on the Sunday. I asked to come out to the farm at Bow Island to witness what might be one of the last crews, before their people’s legacy of work here fades away, unremembered.

Elmer wakes up, turns and sits on the edge of his cot. His T-shirt has the picture of a rodeo bronc rider and the words “Bucking Cancer!” on the front. He has been at the work for nearly a week already. He looks weary. He speaks to Dwayne in Cree for a few moments before turning to speak with me.

Elmer Crookedneck.

“One of my first memories is coming down here by bus from Meadow Lake,” he says. “We stayed at a house in Vauxhall, my whole family. I started hoeing sugar beets when I was 10 years old. A few years later, we started working potatoes, and have ever since. One of my sons was born here during a harvest 24 years ago.”

Elmer says this is his first job since he was diagnosed with prostate cancer five years ago. After surgery, the cancer was still there, so he had to do radiation therapy. He tried to work driving heavy equipment after the radiation but couldn’t last more than a few hours a day. He says he took this job because he has family to support, kids and grandkids, one living with him. “And I would rather work than get money for free.”

The next day I tag along with Dwayne in his spud truck to a harvest “circle” about 20 km from this farm, one of a conglomerate of five farms called Quattro Ventures Inc. Irrigation farmers use the term “circle” to mean the 130 acres that an irrigation pivot can cover out of the 160 acres of a typical quarter section. This conglomerate farms 162 circles, or about 23,000 acres, with 40 per cent of them dry, 60 per cent irrigated. The company agronomist, Emily Ford, says that because potato crops must be rotated to prevent scab and other diseases, they follow a “one-in-six” rule, only planting a circle with potatoes once every six years. So, to be a potato grower, you need access to a lot of land. In the off years the company will plant other high-value crops such as peppermint, beans, peas, seed canola and hemp. But potatoes remain king. (Estimated value in southern Alberta: $3-billion per year.) Ford says because of increasing water scarcity, the irrigation district allocates only 10 inches of water per year per acre for potatoes. She says a good crop requires 18 inches of water, about 1,800 cubic metres (nearly half a million gallons) per acre. Farmers cover any deficit by borrowing water allocations from their other, less water-intensive crops such as wheat.

Neighbouring farmer Tony Varekamp delivers meals to Corny Neufeld and other Mennonite workers.

Dwayne, like Elmer, has been working on southern Alberta farms since he was a boy and has spent the last 22 years working for this one. He says he can make more money in three days here than in three weeks of driving school bus back on the reserve. He also drives truck for the farm during spring planting and other harvests. In total, he works here about three months of the year. He says he keeps coming back because of his friendship with the farm owner, Lloyd Ypma. Each season, he tries to recruit other people from the reserve to come work with him. Fewer come each year.

At the field, Dwayne steers his large “tipper” truck into position at the end of a furrow and waits for the call to tag-in when the harvester has filled the truck ahead. The harvester pauses only moments for Dwayne’s truck to line up under the unloading spout, then the machine and truck move in tandem at pace, both harvesting and transferring the fresh spuds simultaneously. The moving transfer takes only five minutes. The harvester waves off the filled truck and calls in the next. Dwayne drives back to the main farm in the blinding dust of other trucks, artfully dodging trucks from other farms at gravelled intersections, no thought of slowing down.

The reason for the hurry is in the grey sky to the north. Farmers grow potatoes as late into the season as they can for maximum yields, but if they don’t get the crop off before the first freeze, an operation like this can lose millions of dollars in a single night. Drivers like Dwayne wake at 4:30 a.m. to be out to the circles by 5:15. The factory crew starts at 5:30 when the first loaded trucks are coming in, and everybody works until the last trucks come into the factory well after dark, unless the weather is too hot. Operations shut down for heat, not out of concern for the crews but because putting hot potatoes into cool storage bins could cause the whole lot to rot.

Because of the frenzied pace of the work and the exhaustion of the men at day’s end, it is hard to interview some of them during the week. But as most of the potato farms around Bow Island are owned by church-going Dutch Calvinists, the crews get Sundays off and sometimes a Saturday evening like this one. I find the Ministikwan crew sitting in camp chairs in the dark around the tailgate of Dwayne’s pickup parked in the farm shop—now eerily quiet—sharing a pack of Bud Lite.

The men tell me Elmer has already gone to bed. They call him “mushum,” the Cree word for “grandfather.” Dwayne and his brother Clem have been visiting quietly, nursing their beers, while nephew Jeremy plays a game on his phone, coping. When I take out my camera, Dwayne and Clem hide their beers. Even though it’s only a few hard-earned drinks at the end of a long week, they know the stigma about Native people and alcohol.

Jeremy puts his phone away for a few moments to tell me this is his first harvest and first real job. He says he wishes he had weighed himself before he came. He had trouble staying on his feet the first few days, backing trucks and chipping soil from the inner sides of their tipper beds, but has adapted and feels like he is getting into shape. He wants to get a permanent job when he gets home to the reserve. His uncles tell him they’re proud of him.

Clem is quiet, serious, a deep thinker with a strong jaw. Tonight is the first time he speaks to me. He asks if I know how many Native people have lived on these lands, how many languages they speak, how many thousands of years they have been here. And how many Cree people used to work on these farms.

He tells me about seeing old photos of his grandparents and parents hoeing sugar beets, thinning and weeding in the blazing heat, sometimes three times per field per season, through spring and long summer days. “It looked like the cotton fields down South,” he says. “The pay was something like that, too.”

Clem and Dwayne confirm what Laliberté says he heard when talking with Cree workers in the early 1990s. Cree people started to lose their place in the sugar beet fields in the 1970s when farmers started bringing in dual-nationality Mennonites from colonies in Mexico, who would work for less money, sometimes bidding for fields at half the rate that Cree people were paid. When farmers started using newly invented herbicides to get rid of weeds in the 1980s and 1990s, the “Grab-a-hoe” jobs disappeared altogether.

By the 1980s, 3,000 status Cree and at least 2,000 Métis harvested sugar beets in southern Alberta.

Meanwhile, Cree men and women had started working potato harvests in the late 1960s. Sugar beet farmers needed large amounts of labour during the growing months but just a few drivers at harvest. Potatoes needed little work in the growing season but massive reserve labour for harvest, especially for grading. The Cree first worked for the same Japanese-Canadians who had come as involuntary labour from BC for sugar beet farms in Alberta during the war. Many of those Japanese families had had market gardens in BC, and by the 1950s started to buy small plots to grow vegetables for market in southern Alberta. When the Japanese introduced methods of flood irrigation using now available water from the South Saskatchewan, they showed that money could be made in growing potatoes. And when they bought more land, and their machines could harvest four or eight or sixteen rows instead of two, and farms became too big to run with family labour, these early Japanese farmers had access to an army of reserve labour already available: the Cree workers from the sugar beet fields.

Japanese-Canadian farmer Mas Nishima, 88, of Taber, tells me that without the Cree workers, many farmers would have had to plow their crops under. “They saved my farm and a lot of other farms in southern Alberta,” he says.

With all the elements for success—the know-how, the sun, the soil, the water and the cheap, available temporary labour—the potato sector exploded. New processing plants followed. Then came Dutch-Canadian farmers from Ontario with money to buy land and equipment and go bigger. Many of them had no history working with Cree people, no memory of them, no special ties like friendship.

Clem explains that in the early days, there were only Cree people working sugar beets and potato harvests, on every farm. “What you see here today, the Mennonites, that was all us back in the day, men and women,” he says. “Then we got pushed out. The Mexican Mennonites worked cheaper.”

In the pre-dawn chill, Mennonite women grade potatoes on the conveyor

Just as importantly, according to Laliberté, after those Mennonite families settled permanently in southern Alberta, they became more immediately available than the Cree from northern Saskatchewan. Cree families would come back the next season and go farm-to-farm looking for work, only to find their old jobs had already been given away. And some farmers, and Cree people themselves, would say that Mennonite workers did not have the same problems with alcohol that made some Cree workers—most of them survivors of residential schools—“unreliable,” especially after a few weeks of hard labour, long hours, no rest and bad living quarters, often just abandoned chicken coops or cow sheds. Mark Miyanaga, co-owner of Triple M Farms near Taber, later tells me that despite any problems a small number of Cree workers did have with alcohol at times, they were as a whole as reliable and hard-working as anyone.

Laliberté says that remarkably, however, he never heard of any conflict between the Cree and the Mennonites or other people who replaced them. Clem confirms this: “Our people are good to get along with,” he says. “Whatever happens, happens.”

Elmer and Dwayne know of only two more crews of Cree men in the area. Cousin Emil is working on one nearer to Bow Island, and cousin Brian is working on a Japanese-owned farm near Taber. “Brian says that farm is going to be hiring ‘Mexican Mexicans,’ next year,” Dwayne says, using air-quotes. “Real Mexicans.”

“So, this might be the last year they hire any Cree people,” he says.

“Yeah, but we’ll still be around,” Clem says, jutting his jaw a little more. “Just maybe not here.”

I check in with Elmer throughout the following week. He never slacks off in the work. But on the next Thursday night, after nearly two weeks of standing on his feet backing trucks in, 15 hours a day, his ankles swell to the size of his knees. The pain keeps him awake all night. On the Friday morning, the swelling is too much for him to put his boots on. “I wanted to stay until the end,” he tells me. He will drive the 700 kilometres home alone that day, bringing the number of the last crew down to three.

Virgil Grandfield is grateful to Lloyd Ypma for letting him camp at his farm and document the work of Dwayne’s crew.

Text and photos by Virgil Grandfield

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