The upshot is that the fat cat invites the starving cat to the palace where she lives. On the day before, there had been a great feast at the palace. Sadly, the huge amount of food left on the floor has now attracted a host of scavenging felines. The result is the sultan requests that archers be brought in to do away with the scavengers. The end.

What this has to do with the controversy involving premier Danielle Smith’s visit to Saudi Arabia in the fall of 2025 is no doubt unclear. I’ll get to that.

Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the Saudi minister of energy, evidently met the premier of Alberta in November 2023, when Calgary hosted the World Energy Congress. The prince and the premier toured a few pavilions together and had a sufficient meeting of minds that the former invited the latter to visit him in Saudi Arabia.

Premier Smith accepted, and the visit occurred. While in the Middle East the premier met an impressive roster of dignitaries, including the Saudi artificial intelligence boss and officials from OPEC.

Months later, back in the Alberta Legislature, Opposition leader Naheed Nenshi asked Smith about some missing receipts. Where she’d been and the list of receipts didn’t jibe. Her explanation was that the oilfields and other spots she’d visited weren’t accessible by commercial aircraft. She’d flown on private jets. This might have seemed a trivial matter, but since the government voyageurs had managed to rack up $64,000 in expenses in Saudi Arabia, for which Albertans were on the hook, Nenshi wasn’t ready to drop the topic.

No one from the UCP side was (or is) offering to have the cat assayed, so we’re still dealing in hypotheticals.

And then there was the cat. A sharp-eyed individual had noticed that in a McDougall Centre office there was a new golden statue of a cat. It appeared in the background of a photo that included the premier. A question was put to the premier: “What’s with the golden cat?” And the answer was: “Oh that. Just a little something from Prince Abdulaziz…?”

The cat was a hefty looking specimen standing on all fours. Inevitably people speculated what it was made of. The initial eyeball assay was that it was made of gold. In the old Arab tale of the two cats, then, this would have been the sultan’s cat rather than the scavenger.

Albertans started doing some math. The cat was hefty, not something you could shove in your purse. Chunky, not light. At the current price of gold (around $7,000/ounce), the cat was one heck of a gift! As news of the statue spread, the possible value bounced around. Some said the cat might be worth millions. More-conservative types said, “Nah. $300,000 tops.” Also unclear was whether the premier or the province owned the cat. It should have been the province, but it wasn’t clear.

When the Opposition leader brought up the trip and the receipts in the Legislature, inevitably the subject came around to the cat.

Initially the government attempted to brush it off. Members portrayed Nenshi’s concerns as a rube-like fuss launched by someone who doesn’t get out much. But wait a minute. Nenshi was the mayor of Calgary for 11 years. And he was awarded the title of the World’s Best Mayor in 2018, for which he got a pretty handsome statue of his own (albeit stainless steel). Anyway, the man has been around, and he wasn’t letting the golden cat escape from public attention quite yet.

The next thing the UCP government had to say about the cat was that it wasn’t gold at all. No, it was a copper cat with a touch of gold paint. Worth maybe a few hundred dollars. One pundit pegged its real value at $80. No one from the government side was (or is) offering to have the cat assayed, so we’re still dealing in hypotheticals.

And I must say I have a hypothetical or two. When the cat went from being solid gold to being (maybe) copper with a paint job, it changed my view of the Saudi royal family’s generosity. And of the esteem in which on our premier is held.

Oh, heck. What should we give that politician from Canada

I don’t know. What about that old copper kitty the maid found at the bazaar

Is no one concerned about the implications of this…?

But, then, it might be a damn long time before any Albertans are asked to visit Saudi Arabia again. Like the sultan in the Arab folk tale, the leaders of that country aren’t exactly known for their sentimentality. And next time the Saudis might suggest that our premier rent a car. Drive in the desert for a few days and see how high and mighty she feels.

Fred Stenson has published 20 books. A new novel, Carpenter Creek, is forthcoming from Thistledown Press in fall 2026.

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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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President Donald Trump was wreaking havoc on the centuries-old American traditions of the rule of law and the accommodation of the tired, poor, huddled masses “yearning to breathe free” from persecution in their native lands. His administration unleashed an army of masked ICE agents to round up and deport non-citizen residents, both legal and illegal, to prisons in countries run by dictators. Even green-card-holding permanent US residents like myself were suddenly being denied re-entry or detained and threatened with expulsion.

I’ve made Montana my home for 20 years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left Calgary in 1993. I was drawn here by the chance to attend graduate school on a scholarship, then grew enraptured by the immensity of accessible wildlands, the progressive vibe of an American university town, and the beautiful and smart Swedish American mycologist I’d met. We married in 2011 and I happily set down roots for good.

Suddenly I’d be risking everything—first by trying to cross into Alberta, and then by trying to get back into my adopted US.

As a permanent resident I have most of the rights of a citizen. Because I can’t vote, I take seriously my other rights and responsibilities, namely the freedom to critique, challenge and condemn the government. In the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, who said in 1918 that “it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about [the president] than about anyone else,” I’ve protested the new regime and stood up for the victims of its extrajudicial decisions. A homemade “Free Mahmoud Khalil” poster is taped to my front window and a “MAGA is American Fascism” banner hangs on my house in Missoula.

I work for a small conservation organization to restore wildlife connectivity along a transportation corridor between Glacier National Park and the vast Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, the only wound in the otherwise intact transborder Crown of the Continent ecosystem that stretches from Crowsnest Pass to Missoula’s doorstep. This work is both practical and symbolic to me, a way to knit a tiny bit of the world together at a time when it’s falling apart.

In late April, Banff was hosting a wildlife connectivity conference, Canada’s first, and I wanted to meet up with colleagues and old friends. But I feared the not insignificant chance that the capricious Trump administration would separate me from my lovely wife and my adult daughter, who lives in Arizona. It might prevent me from ever again seeing the 115-year-old home in Missoula I’d just renovated—painting it Falu red in honour of Sweden’s successful experiment with social democracy, a subtle rebuke to Trump’s lurch into autocracy.

Stuck on the American side watching the chaos unfurl, I began to have serious second thoughts. For the first time, I felt a tinge of the anxiety, insecurity and fear that millions of people around the world live with every day.

Premier Smith announced a new border security team—51 sheriffs with dogs and drones and the power to make warrantless arrests.

I’ve crossed the Alberta–Montana border more times than I can remember. It must be at least 100 times, maybe 150. It started when I was a young boy in the mid-1970s. My mother and father moved my brother and me from the blandness of Scarborough, Ontario, to a booming Calgary in 1971, the beginning of the glory days of Alberta’s enrichment and bedevilment by oil.

My father, when he wasn’t selling Sweda cash registers, became obsessed with slo-pitch. As a German refugee, his eastern Canadian childhood hadn’t included much fun. Life was simply work, school and church in the ghetto that was Cabbagetown. The move cross-country freed my father from the judgments of aging German relatives and sparked a new life in the thrall of southern Alberta slo-pitch.

Between the ages of 6 and 14 my brother and I spent more time at ballparks than in school, and every summer we’d travel to Great Falls, Montana, for the Can-Am Slo-Pitch Tournament. For my father and his middle-class, middle-aged teammates on the Calgary Jaycee men’s slo-pitch team, to cross the Medicine Line and defeat the Americans at their own game, on their own soil—this was their World Series. For my brother and me, it was a chance to chew grape Bubble Yum, which we smuggled back to Canada, and to stay in a hotel with a cloverleaf indoor pool, where we escaped the unrelenting Great Plains heat and played tag with the other slo-pitch orphans.

On one these trips, we got stuck at the border behind what would now be considered a vintage early-’70s Ford Econoline van painted tangerine. Four men with long hair and jeans—“hippies,” Dad called them—were standing on the tarmac laughing while the US border agents inspected their credentials. The hippies asked if I’d take a photo of them leaning against the van, as if they were going to be frisked; in mid-shutter, three border guards interrupted their fun.

“You think this is a joke?” one of the guards said, wresting the camera from my hand, while the others cuffed the hippies’ hands behind their backs and took them who knows where. “Do you think this is a joke?!”

But as the years and crossings passed, it seemed to me that traversing “the world’s longest undefended border” was, if not a joke, a mere technicality. As an adult looking much like those long-haired hippies, I’ve crossed the border in three vintages of Volkswagen vans (1968, 1974, 1991), and the only time I was ever checked for drugs was by the Canadians. The border agents wiped the blade of my pocketknife and the entire inside of the front window and then tested the dusty cloth for drugs. It was negative—and a warning to never smoke pot in my vehicle.

It wasn’t until September 11, 2001, that I realized how seriously the Americans take our common border. On that day, some colleagues and I, after a conference in Kalispell, were checking out of our hotel. There were many guests and too few staff, and I grew impatient, so I wandered back up to my room and turned on the TV. United Airlines Flight 175 had just turned the World Trade Center’s South Tower into a pillar of flame and billowing black smoke. I slumped on the bed and gaped. A replay of the first attack on the North Tower made it clear these were no accidents. The world had changed.

We drove three hours to the Sweetgrass border crossing, a place I knew well. But it was now occupied by Humvees and body-armoured soldiers, probably from Malmstrom Air Force Base outside Great Falls. And there was a Black Hawk.

It’s a peculiar fact that the American military names their combat helicopters after Native Americans, purportedly as a sign of respect for the peoples and cultures the American military tried to wipe off the face of the earth. Of the five helicopters named for Native Americans, only the Black Hawk is named for an individual: a highly respected Sauk war chief who for decades battled his American antagonists. He fought for the British in the long War of 1812, which saw the White House and the Capitol burned to the ground.

It’s reasonable to doubt that Black Hawk would have approved of his name being attached to a flying fortress of war and a menacing symbol of American military might, but one thing is certain: Black Hawks are impressive to behold. I’ll wager that few Canadian civilians have experienced the ferocious visage and the deep, earth-shaking sound of a heavily armed Black Hawk in action, and fewer still at an Alberta border crossing.

On this day the Black Hawk—machine guns visible in both side doors, its rotors thumping out the sound of doom—hung about 50 feet off the ground, precisely over the crosshair created by the last yards of Interstate 15 and the 49th parallel. It pronounced, unequivocally, how easily the longest undefended border in the world could be militarized.

The line was long, the going slow. We were tense and uncertain, and anxiety—ours and theirs—hung thick in the air. Usually it’s the Canadian border guards that size you up when you’re travelling north. Now, in 2001, the Americans wanted to know who was leaving their country. But on that particular day of infamy, a car full of aging white men, one of whom had renounced his US citizenship and moved to Canmore in protest of the Vietnam War, didn’t sufficiently alarm them.

A six-metre-wide cutline comprises much of the Canada–US border, including between Alberta and Montana. The border has been undefended, but our provincial and federal governments are now spending big to “secure” it against trumped-up threats.

A week before the Banff conference was to start in spring 2025, I decided I would cross the border. I knew there was some risk of being denied re-entry into Montana. Trump’s raging hadn’t ended with illegal mass deportations. The US Border Patrol was harassing visitors and legal residents as they tried to enter the US; even unflattering opinions of the president on your smartphone could get you in trouble. But I wasn’t about to let some wannabe dictator in the White House determine whether I, a lawful, taxpaying citizen, could return to my country of birth to attend a conference among good people doing good works.

Besides, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to investigate premier Danielle Smith’s new interest in international border security. Traditionally, nation states secure their own borders against illegal incursions, but Trump was blackmailing the Canadian government with tariffs unless Canada “beefed up” its security to “protect” Americans against what he claimed was a scourge of fentanyl and illegal immigrants flowing across the border. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of America’s border problems knew Trump’s allegations were preposterous. Smith, however, jumped at the chance to impress a pathological liar who, we now know, was going to impose tariffs no matter what Canada did to solve a problem that didn’t exist.

Ever keen to encroach on federal jurisdiction and embarrass prime minister Justin Trudeau, premier Smith announced, on December 12, 2024, a $29-million “investment” in a brand new border security team. Fifty-one new provincial sheriffs would use dogs and drones and be given the power to make warrantless arrests to help make America safe again. Eventually Canada’s federal government acquiesced to the premier’s request to outfit the Alberta RCMP with one of Black Hawk’s eponymous war machines. All of this, supposedly, to appease Trump’s threat of tariffs by securing the Alberta–Montana border against an alleged wave of fentanyl and illegal immigrants.

“If we succeed and maintain proper border security,” Smith said in a live announcement, doing her best to imitate the head of state of a nation at war, “I expect we’ll have a very strong relationship with the United States, as we always have.”

I got a late start from Missoula on April 22, Earth Day, and when I approached the Carway crossing the late afternoon was already casting long shadows. It looked deserted. No cars or trucks. No border guards up and about on the US side. I crossed the line onto Canadian/Albertan soil and pulled up to the window. I pushed my sunglasses onto my forehead and handed my Canadian passport to a kindly female federal border agent.

“Where are you headed?”
“Banff National Park, for a conference.”
“How long will you be staying?”
“Five days.”
“Do you have any guns, alcohol, tobacco or marijuana?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Here you go. Have a nice day.”

I drove north into my homeland, the rugged rangelands of the Blackfeet Nation fading into green circles of irrigated cropland. Not a sheriff, dog, drone or helicopter in sight.

There are actually six crossings along the 298-km Alberta–Montana border. Most people use Carway–Piegan or Coutts–Sweetgrass, or, in summer, Chief Mountain in Waterton Lakes National Park. Few people live along either side of the border, where Coutts, with a mere 300 souls, is the biggest urban centre. On the US side, just east of Sweetgrass, a 10-mile stretch of Border Road connects to local roads in Alberta and Montana as if the border doesn’t exist at all.

Yet the area is now being described like a war zone. Trump said in his first Oval Office press conference in 2025 that Canada, like Mexico, was allowing a plague of fentanyl to cross the border, “killing Americans” and “destroying families.” He said Canada was allowing “mass numbers of people” across the border. As a consequence, he announced a plan for a crippling 25 per cent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico.

Trump’s words have little relationship to reality. Between 2022 and 2024, the US Customs and Border Patrol seized 61,900 pounds of fentanyl at the Mexican border, which is massive. At the entire Canadian border, a measly 59 pounds was found—less than 0.1 per cent of Mexico’s. The same pattern goes for unlawful border crossings. The number of illegal entries into the US from Canada has increased, from approximately 110,000 in 2022 to 200,000 in 2024, but this pales in comparison with the 2.3 million crossings per year from Mexico.

If US border agents were to search my computer, they could at best deny me entry. At worst they could detain me.

A 2022 report of the US’s Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking concluded that “Canada is not known to be a major source of fentanyl or other synthetic opioids or precursor chemicals to the US.” The US Drug Enforcement Agency, with its $2.6-billion budget and some 5,000 special agents, doesn’t even mention Canada in its 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment; Mexico, however, is mentioned 85 times. Likewise Canada isn’t cited in the US Customs and Border Protection’s May 2025 report America’s Frontline Against Fentanyl—but we do learn that the US spends $7.3-billion per year to “secure” the Mexico border, and has invested in “123 large-scale drive-through X-ray systems… to significantly increase vehicle and truck scanning rates across the southwest border.”

In spite of the facts, our own federal government at the time—with an election on the horizon and Pierre Poilievre claiming he’d follow Trump’s lead and send thousands of Canadian troops, agents and helicopters to “take back control of the border”—decided it had to do something. “Whether some of the allegations about what is going on at the border are accurate or not, or credible or not, I don’t have the luxury not to take it seriously,” Marc Miller, Canada’s immigration minister, grumbled in an interview.

A month after premier Smith had beaten them to the punch with her $29-million “investment,” the federal government announced its own $1.3-billion enhanced border security plan, which included 60 drones equipped with thermal cameras and two Black Hawk helicopters, one of them allocated to Alberta. It tightened requirements for the temporary visas that some visitors were using to arrive in Canada legally but then enter the US illegally. It introduced its Strong Borders Act to anoint a so-called “border czar,” presumably the first such czar in Canadian history.

Carway is Alberta’s second-busiest crossing: 4,000 vehicles daily.

Premier Smith, not to be outdone by the feds, threw in an additional $15-million to set up three more Check Stop-like vehicle inspection stations in Alberta, two of them kilometres distant from the border. She then channelled a maxim from historical US oil magnate John D. Rockefeller—“Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing”— and invited Fox News to come up “to enjoy some world-class Alberta beef” and to show Trump—and sympathetic members of her own UCP—how quickly she’d done Trump’s bidding. “That’s what I think the president wants to see,” she said. “That we’re taking this seriously, that we’re going to stop the flow of drugs and guns and people across the border.”

Canadian security experts were underwhelmed. There is a degree of “border security theatre,” said Wesley Wark, a senior fellow at the Waterloo, Ontario-based Centre for International Governance Innovation. “We’re putting up hardware into the sky [such] as Black Hawks. We’re promising 24/7 surveillance designed to appease the United States.”

“If the premier wants to send sheriffs to the border, well, good on [her],” added Richard Huntley, who managed southern Alberta’s Inland Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) office in Calgary for 30 years. “But I can almost bet, in a year, they won’t have caught too much. I doubt it, sincerely.”

Predictably, both Smith’s and the federal government’s expensive efforts failed to appease Trump. His tariffs on Canadian goods not covered in the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement increased to 35 per cent on August 1. Why Because, according to a “Fact Sheet” seemingly conceived in an alternative universe, Canada deigned to retaliate with tariffs of our own (now cancelled) and continued in our “failure to arrest traffickers, seize illicit drugs, or coordinate with US law enforcement.”

It’s unclear how long Alberta’s border farce is meant to last, but it’s already proved fruitless and expensive. If Alberta’s sheriffs prove as adept at finding contraband as Canada’s federal border agents (which is doubtful), Smith’s “crackdown” will cost the public about $5-million per pound of fentanyl recovered. Alberta might also manage to detain and return a few terrified refugee families fleeing into Alberta, so that masked ICE agents can send them to whatever lawless hellhole the Trump administration has in mind.

The 24/7 Coutts crossing is Alberta’s busiest, especially in summer.

The wildlife connectivity conference in Banff was excellent. I asked my Alberta colleagues what they thought of their province’s foray into international border security. Most of them, if they knew anything about it at all, just rolled their eyes and sighed. Some expressed dismay at the similarities between Trump’s and Smith’s relentless performative politics. As I left, they wished me luck getting back across the border. Some offered me a place to stay if I couldn’t return to my wife and Falu-red home.

I tried to clear my digital devices of disparaging remarks about Herr Trump. The task proved impossible. As an amateur scholar on the rise of fascism in my paternal family’s Germany, I’m acutely aware of—and have researched and documented—America’s slide toward authoritarianism and the Trump administration’s use of fascist strategies to foment fear and consolidate power. When I moved to Missoula 20 years ago, I became acutely aware of the racism, militarism and jingoism that imbued American society, not to mention the trove of military-grade firearms that have been stockpiled by civilians. I began to warn my American friends that their homeland was ripe for an authoritarian turn. They mostly said I was nuts.

I’ve sent countless messages and emails and made innumerable social media posts about the dangers posed by Trump and his ilk. Before I left Banff I stored as much as I could on the amorphous “cloud” and deleted most apps from my phone. My laptop, however, held an enormous trove of “treasonous” material I was loathe to part with.

The problem is that by the time you get to the US border agents, you’re already in US territory. You can’t just turn around and go back if you sense trouble. If agents were to search my computer, there’s every reason to think they would at best deny me entry. At worst they could detain me. And they might choose to teach me a lesson, to strike more fear into me or anyone who learned of my situation—which, after all, is why authoritarians stoke fear in the first place.

I wanted to try to cross at Coutts. Ironically, this is the site of the trucker protests in 2022, when 1,000 trucks blocked cross-border traffic for two weeks, and where the RCMP seized guns, body armour, a machete and a hoard of ammunition and high-capacity magazines. All of this was far more dangerous than a trickle of drugs and illegal immigrants. Yet premier Smith not only condoned the Coutts blockade but supported it.

Just as Highway 4 bends from south to east and I caught sight of the town of Coutts, I entered the Red Zone, a 596-km² quasi-military area within two kilometres of the border, along the entire Alberta–Montana border, where sheriffs on Alberta’s new Interdiction Patrol Team can make their warrantless arrests, just like ICE does in Trump’s America. Legal experts say the Red Zone—enabled by provincial legislation in January 2025—is unconstitutional. “How did we get here?” asked professor Shaun Fluker on the University of Calgary’s law faculty blog. “This is the stuff of authoritarian dictatorships.”

Coutts mayor Scott MacCumber said some of his neighbours share Fluker’s concerns. They’re worried they could be apprehended while out for a walk or riding their quad. “What will constitute suspicious activity to the sheriff patrols and what will not?” MacCumber asked.

As I turned south, the border crossing looming, my amygdala fired up like a welding torch. My heart rate quickened. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror and thought about those fun-loving hippies being cuffed and dragged away.

And then, finally, there he was—a US border agent who had the power to ruin my life. I slowed to a stop and looked into the booth. My heart sank. With his long bushy beard and dark uniform, the man sitting before me looked like a Three Percenter hooligan in the insurrectionist mob that broke into the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, hoping to hang Mike Pence.

I smiled and handed him my passport, my green card tucked between its pages.

“Howdy,” he said. “Where do you live?”
“Missoula.”
“How long have you lived there?”
“Twenty years.”
“You have any alcohol or tobacco?”
“No, sir.”
He handed back my identification.
“Have a good day.”
“You too.”

A mile or two on, once I’d passed out of sight, I pulled over and leaned my head on the steering wheel. My cheeks streamed with tears. Not from the stress of the moment or the joy of making it back over the line, but because of the embodied knowledge that those bastards on both sides of the border are only just getting started.

Jeff Gailus is the author of Little Black Lies: Corporate and Political Spin in the Global War for Oil (RMB).

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The post Crossing the Line appeared first on Alberta Views.

Two houses down and kitty-corner from us are two seniors facilities. Just around that corner, where 13th St. intersects 9th Ave., is the playing field of an elementary school. According to City of Lethbridge traffic data, this intersection is the most dangerous in the city.

I have lived on this street for 19 years. Traffic here was always a bit noisy, a bit fast. But in the past few years something happened. As traffic volume increased after the pandemic, the speed, noise and aggressiveness of drivers multiplied. The street became a racetrack, not just for the occasional stunter but for a majority of drivers.

The noise is nearly unbearable most days; it often feels like a vehicle is driving through the house. And getting in and out of our truck in front of the house has become more dangerous. Drivers pass at full speed within inches of me. While we were unloading groceries one evening in 2021, a driver smashed into the back of our truck, pushing it into a tree, totalling it. Another driver hit my next truck parked in the same spot in 2023, smashing it into my partner’s car and totalling both.

One spring morning in 2022, while hurrying to make coffee, I left our nine-month-old bluetick hound pup, Jack, waiting at the back door for me. I forgot that Jack could open the door if it was unlatched. Soon he was out in front of the house. I raced to the front door just in time to see Jack sitting and waiting at the curb, as I had taught him, but fixated on a dog on the other side of the street.

Before I could get the door open and shout his name, Jack gave in to his excitement, forgot his training and began running across. A truck and trailer struck him. His body tumbled halfway down the block. The bloodstains were on the asphalt for a week.

In the chaos and horror of that Monday, when Jack seemed to wake up again and try to breathe—even before the vet told us it was agonal breathing, that he was already brain-dead—I was already making a vow. I would fight to make our street safe again.

In May 2022 I contacted our city traffic engineering manager to tell him about Jack and discuss the growing problem of speeding on our street. The man replied that his department already knew our intersection sees the most right-angle collisions—the most dangerous kind—of any residential neighbourhood in the city. He agreed to order a traffic speed study.

In November 2022 the city deployed the speed study along the same half block that Jack’s blood had stained. Over three days, during the hours that children were walking to or from the school around the corner, 74 per cent of all drivers—23,343 out of 31,764—were found to be speeding, with the top speed during school hours at 110 km/h.

The City’s response, to my surprise, was that the results of the study were normal, due to something the traffic engineering manager called the “85th percentile theory.” The theory—developed in 1961, when vehicle speeds topped out at barely 100 km/h—privileges, above all other considerations, the speed at which 85 per cent of drivers feel they can still operate safely. In traffic departments still using the theory, so long as the 85th percentile speed isn’t more than 10 km/h above the posted limit, there is no need to change the limit or take extraordinary measures to reduce traffic speeds. In effect, traffic engineers using the formula create an unofficial speed limit to reinterpret traffic study data so that it seems like only 15 per cent of drivers are speeding. And traffic engineers will even use the formula to raise speed limits.

The US National Association of City Transportation Officials says the 85th-percentile formula is “designed to fail.” When drivers see other cars going faster, they increase their speed as well, creating a ratcheting effect for speed that has no relation to actual traffic safety. The formula has a deadly blind spot for pedestrians and cyclists, because it was never developed for them or with their safety in mind. The theory was intended for setting speed limits on highways, where visibility is unobstructed and drivers are protected by the structures, materials and crash-safety systems of their vehicles.

Bad traffic theory is only part of the problem on a street like ours. So is street design. As with many communities in Alberta, city founders designed our wide old streets during the late 1800s not to be four-lane highways running through neighbourhoods but so that a full four-horse wagon team could make a U-turn. In 1906 the Alberta government legislated its first urban speed limit at 10 mph, to protect horses from the motor vehicles—or “terror wagons”—that were beginning to use the same streets.

Over the ensuing decades, drivers would begin to occupy the full width of our streets, but until the 1950s the primary users were pedestrians, cyclists, buses and streetcars. That’s when traffic engineers and governments began treating streets like ours, designed for horse and buggy traffic, as large arteries to move motor vehicle traffic quickly through our cities, with the assumption that “wider is safer.”

A 2023 Johns Hopkins study showed that, in fact, narrow streets are safer. Where speed limits are low, the width of a street doesn’t much affect traffic safety. But at 50 km/h, the wider the street, the less safe it is. That’s in part because more lanes and wider streets don’t give drivers more room for mistakes. They just make them drive faster.

And something else terrifying happens when a driver surpasses 50 km/h, on any kind of street in an urban environment.

The morning my puppy was killed, as I scooped up his body I heard behind me the driver saying over and over “I never even saw him.” The man was decent enough to drop off a few hundred dollars to pay for part of the emergency care. But for a long time I wondered how in the hell the driver hadn’t seen Jack. Of course it was my fault our puppy got out of the house. But Jack had been sitting, waiting, four lanes away from the approaching driver, with no obstacles between them. And how was the driver still going full speed when he hit Jack?

According to studies used by state and provincial governments across North America, the limit of brain processing speed causes a shortening of pupil distance in humans with any increase in rate of movement. As a result, even when we’re just walking, the faster we move, the narrower our field of vision. At speeds up to 40 km/h, a driver in a city has good enough peripheral vision to be aware of what’s happening on sidewalks and approaching streets. At 50 km/h, a driver’s field of vision narrows so that it becomes difficult to see a person or puppy emerging from a curb. At roughly 55 km/h—the average speed of drivers on our street—real tunnel vision begins to set in. By about 60 km/h and above—the speed of at least 15 per cent of drivers in the 85th-percentile regime on our streets—the vision cone has narrowed so much that drivers can see only the backs of the vehicles in front of them.

In other words, the man who hit Jack really hadn’t seen him. Nor was he a “bad driver.” Or at least no worse than the other 74 per cent of drivers on our street going above the 50 km/h limit every day, who because of the effect of speed on field of vision might as well be driving impaired.

But why did it take that driver so long to stop even after he hit Jack Why did his truck and trailer drag and roll my puppy’s body so far down the block, making death certain?

According to studies used by transportation engineering and safety associations around the world, reaction time for the average driver is 1.5–2.5 seconds. In the time it takes for anyone’s brain to process that they need to begin stopping, a driver going 60 km/h will travel at least 25 metres. Visual obstacles—our elm trees, bushes, fences, parked cars etc.—limit visibility to 19–30 metres in many places. Most drivers’ brains won’t begin to tell them to stop until after they have hit someone.

Once a driver does begin to brake, in ideal conditions the vehicle will travel at least another 30 metres, with a final total stopping distance of between 60 and 80 metres, more than half a block. When a vehicle is going 40 km/h, a pedestrian’s chance of surviving an impact is nearly 100 per cent. At 50 km/h, the chance of survival falls to 10–20 per cent. At 60 km/h, survivability flatlines to nearly zero.

According to data from the Canadian Traffic Injury Research Foundation and the US Department of Transportation, while pedestrians are involved in only 2 per cent of serious traffic collisions, they represent nearly 20 per cent of fatalities from these incidents (cyclist numbers are similar). A cyclist or pedestrian struck in a collision is nearly 300 times more likely to be killed than anyone inside the motor vehicle. Senior citizens are the most likely to be hit by speeders; aging impairs perception and judgment of the distance of an approaching vehicle, and it makes getting out of the way more difficult. Children as cyclists and pedestrians are most likely to be killed in a collision.

Drivers speed on streets like ours for one simple reason: no one is looking.

In a February 2023 meeting with the chief of Lethbridge Police Service (LPS), I learned that the city’s automated traffic enforcement system didn’t deploy a single photo radar vehicle on our street during the two years before the November 2022 study (due in part to the pandemic). In that meeting the chief promised a six-month “blitz” of our street with enhanced traffic enforcement. But with reportedly only seven staffed patrol cars available to LPS at any given time—for all offences, not just traffic—the blitz amounted to just 93 hours of patrol car enforcement over 180 days, or an average of just over 30 minutes per day for the entire length of a street that sees nearly eight million vehicle trips per year, or about 20,000 per day (with nearly 15,000 of these vehicles speeding, and 3,000 of them at extreme speeds). During that time, officers issued only 176 tickets, an average of one per day of the blitz.

Why so few tickets, with a speeder passing traffic patrollers every four to five seconds, and roughly two extreme speeders passing every minute Presumably a significant part of the 30 minutes “patrol” time per day of the “blitz” would have involved the act of issuing the lone daily ticket. But patrollers must also be selective, only going after the most egregious speeding. This is in part because, according to traffic officers interviewed, no judge will prosecute any driver going less than 10 km/h over the limit, due to speedometer calibration issues. But if the only reason for not ticketing all drivers going above 50 km/h is speedometer calibration legalities, why not just lower all city speed limits to 40 km/h Or, heck, why not lower them even just to 45 km/h and save at least a few more lives by being able to begin ticketing at 55 km/h The answer: Catch-22.

Since 2019, successive UCP governments have imposed a freeze on all new photo-radar installations in Alberta communities unless the locations are school, playground or construction zones. As part of its moratorium, the government also made it illegal for cities to use photo radar on any streets where speed limits are below 50 km/h (excluding school and playground zones). So, a city can keep the higher, proven-unsafe speed limit of 50 km/h, use scarce police resources to ticket only drivers going above 60 km/h, and still use photo radar on the most dangerous streets. Or it can lower speed limits but lose the right to use photo radar to enforce the new limits.

The blame for the province’s ongoing war on traffic radar might not just be the post-pandemic wave of anti-government libertarianism that Danielle Smith’s UCP rode to power in 2023. An apparent analytical failure in an automated traffic enforcement review report done by MNP for Alberta Transportation in 2018 could also have contributed to the governing UCP’s hostility—and the opposition NDP’s ambivalence—towards traffic radar. The first pages of the report repeatedly emphasize that traffic radar installations had only made “small” or “modest” impacts on overall traffic safety in the province—only 1.4 per cent fewer collisions and 5.2 per cent fewer severe collisions overall. But MNP based this conclusion on the impact of a relatively tiny number of installations instead of on total collision rates across cities and the whole province.

On the other hand, virtually every other jurisdictional report referred to deep in the body and appendices of the MNP report reached very different conclusions by using a far more meaningful metric: the impact of traffic radar at the street and neighbourhood level, within 500 metres of installations. These studies, from Arizona to Australia, show that traffic radar reduced the rates of speeding by up to 70 per cent, brought the extreme-speeder category from 15 per cent down to 1 per cent, reduced the number of dangerous angle collisions by up to 85 per cent and, most importantly, reduced the number of severe injuries and deaths by up to 68 per cent. (Closer to home, a 2023 review for the City of St. Albert found that traffic radar reduced “unacceptable speeding” by 92 per cent.)

The results of the UCP’s years-long war on traffic safety have recently begun emerging in bloody detail. The province’s collision data from 2020 to 2021—the most recent years available—show a 20 per cent uptick in pedestrian injuries and deaths, after a steady decline in the years before the moratorium on traffic radar. After one motorist killed a man in his 60s and another killed a 17-year-old girl at a crosswalk in early 2025, the City of Calgary reported that collisions in that city causing serious injuries rose by 20 per cent between 2023 and 2024 (from 2,424 to 2,908), and pedestrian fatalities jumped from four to 13.

In November 2024 the UCP government doubled down on its moratorium by cutting the number of existing photo radar installations from 2,200 to around 650 and prohibiting any photo radar anywhere but in playground or school and construction zones. The province said it might begin allowing individual applications for traffic camera installations on a case-by-case basis. But as one Lethbridge officer told me, local police and communities have no idea about the process or requirements for restoring photo radar to the streets that need it.

Decisions about where radar is needed will now be political and made by people who don’t live—or die—here.

Minister of Transportation Devin Dreeshen says gutting automated traffic enforcement will stop communities from using photo radar as a “cash cow.” But according to Alberta Municipalities, most of the province’s cities and towns don’t actually get any money from traffic fines for general revenues. In 2020 the province upped its take of fines from 26.7 per cent to 40 per cent. Except for those few municipalities without police and who need to hire peace officers, the rest must commit the remaining 60 per cent of fine revenues to community traffic safety programmes and victims funds.

UCP government restrictions on municipal funding have forced cities to stretch police budgets to deal with an exploding addictions and homelessness crisis, which limits police resources for human-operated traffic law enforcement. In another Catch-22, the province is making automated traffic enforcement more necessary at the same time it is taking it away.

If the move to cut photo radar was done to save Albertans money, the decision has been penny-wise and pound-tragic. When Dreeshen made his late 2024 announcement, he said fines from traffic radar amounted to $145-million annually across the province. Besides the incalculable cost of collisions to victims, their families and the community, the City of Calgary pegs the cost of medical response to collisions, lost wages, property damage etc. at about $1.2-billion annually. In Calgary alone.

No elected official in Lethbridge has publicly called for an end to the moratorium on photo radar. Even progressive politicians in this city publicly refer to traffic radar as “speed traps.” Neither has any called out the city’s culture of speed. No one seems to want to get between the addict and their drug—be it the minutes-behind soccer family in their minivan or the bird-flipping driver of the sport-lifted truck.

The majority drives, the majority speeds, the majority elects.

Some local communities, however, have recognized that traffic safety is a civil rights issue, and are beginning to make the safety of vulnerable non-vehicular users central to traffic policy. The City of Edmonton, and later Calgary, recently took the lead in adopting more 40 km/h and 30 km/h speed limits. Municipalities as diverse as Spruce Grove, St. Albert and Banff have been lowering their speed limits by adopting and implementing the principles of Vision Zero, a national and global traffic safety alliance that aims to reduce pedestrian deaths to zero.

Vision Zero rejects the use of the 85th percentile theory for setting traffic policy because it puts only the driver’s feeling of safety—not science or even common sense—above the safety and well-being of pedestrians and cyclists, the young and old, and all vulnerable users. Vision Zero challenges the notion of laying blame for a death on the vulnerable user, saying that cities and drivers must take full responsibility for the safety of all users of our roads. Traffic engineers must not sacrifice the quality of life of people in homes near roads by enabling speeding. And traffic departments should never wait for someone to be killed before taking action to make every street safe.

For help in my fight to make my street safe, I joined my neighbourhood association in summer 2022. In February 2023 I approached councillor John Middleton-Hope—a former officer and city police chief—and asked for his help. Middleton-Hope—who would campaign unsuccessfully as the UCP candidate for MLA in the December 2024 Lethbridge-West by-election—received from me a motion drafted and passed by the neighbourhood association requesting that the city reduce the speed limit on 13th St. to 40 km/h, install a permanent photo radar camera and take other measures to improve traffic safety here. (We were unaware of the province-wide moratorium on new photo radar at the time.)

In April 2023 councillor Middleton-Hope and the rest of Lethbridge city council also received a letter from a group of surgeons at Chinook Regional Hospital pleading for the city to reduce speed limits to 40 km/h city-wide, due to the high rate of injuries and deaths in collisions. That same month the Lethbridge Public School Board—alarmed by the data from the November 2022 speed study on 13th St., especially given the street passes an elementary school—also wrote to city council urging serious action on the speeding problem.

The City’s infrastructure services manager responded with an email to me and city council saying that although our intersection has a high number of collisions, it’s nevertheless “typical” of others like it. One graph in the manager’s letter compared our street to a commercial intersection that had exactly one more collision in a five-year period, most of less severity. Another graph compared the top speed on our street to a fence-divided block that is the transition zone for acceleration onto Whoop-Up Drive, where the posted speed limit is 90 km/h. Both of these other “typical” locations have had recent pedestrian fatalities.

Councillor Middleton-Hope—whose door-to-door campaign for MLA used “Safe Streets” as a slogan (referring to a drugs and homelessness crisis, not actual streets and traffic)—followed up with an email to me saying he felt the City had “done its due diligence on the matter.” In September 2023 Lethbridge city council approved a 40-km/h pilot project in Middleton-Hope’s own remote Paradise Canyon suburb in the far south of the city.

In November 2023 a hit-and-run driver struck a senior citizen on a crosswalk on 13th St., breaking his hips and legs and putting him in intensive care for a week. When I asked an LPS officer whether another senior in the city had survived after being hit by a motorist on the same day a friend’s son had been hit a block from our house in December 2024, he said he didn’t know, because “pedestrians are being hit all the time.” Too many to keep track of.

In 2024 LPS took several months to consider and then deny a freedom-of-information request I made asking for data on the number of pedestrian-involved collisions in the entire city over the years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then, at 7:30 a.m. on January 21, 2025, at a marked crosswalk on a street just like ours in North Lethbridge, a motorist struck three children. It happened at another “accidental highway,” where thousands of cars speed through residential neighbourhoods every day. Fourteen-year-old Marcus, seven-year-old Juliana and five-year-old Joey Bucud—children of Filipino-Canadian immigrants—were holding hands as they crossed to go to school. Witnesses say the driver stopped but was in shock and unable to help. The children were airlifted to Calgary for emergency treatment and surgery, and at the time of writing are slowly recovering.

Lethbridge police have confirmed that our provincial government now bans the use of photo radar at the intersection where a driver ran over the three Bucud children. The intersection is near a school but not in a school zone, very much like our intersection.

The local community responded with love for the family and anger for the driver. Social media quickly blew up with calls for prison time for the driver. For not watching where she was going. For being a bad driver. For being a bad person.

I’d like to tell that driver something different.

I’d tell her how angry I was at the man who hit Jack. And then I’d tell her what I’ve learned since. That the man who killed Jack was no different than 74 per cent of drivers on our street or in our city. That the speed limit the City refuses to lower, or even enforce, creates a situation where drivers can’t see anything or anyone until it’s too late. That she’s probably not such a bad driver or a bad person and that she most certainly doesn’t belong in jail. That our government and local politicians and police failed her as much as they failed the Bucud family and mine.

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Premier Smith also demands that there be no federal emissions cap. Alberta’s oil and gas industry must be allowed to emit freely. As for Planet Earth: “Burn, baby, burn!”

She hasn’t yet said if there will be an Alberta Oath of Allegiance in which citizens must deny the existence of global warming. But neither has she ruled it out.

The premier wants her own provincial pension plan and reckons that all of Canada should pay for it. When Alberta was booming and was the go-to place for Canadians wanting to make quick money, these “Albertans” overpaid into the federal pension system. Though a lot of those people are back in Newfoundland, Smith wants their pension payments to flow back into an Alberta Pension Plan. It should be mentioned that few pensionable Albertans want anything to do with Danielle’s Alberta Pension Plan.

Smith and her UCP cozy up to Trump despite the fact that our province could wind up being the next Puerto Rico.

But that’s beside my point. The point is that Smith and her UCP are, generally speaking, gung-ho and fearless. They cozy up to US president Donald Trump despite the fact that our province could wind up being the next Puerto Rico. As Monty Python said in a movie, they (that is, Trump and Co.) fart in Canada’s general direction.

So, fearless—except for one thing. Danielle Smith and her UCP are mortally afraid of being sued.

Back in 1976 Peter Lougheed’s government came up with a policy that slammed the door on future coal mining. When the UCP came into power in 2019, they felt much warmer toward coal. Across the border, on BC’s Elk River, a roaring coal operation was making good money for the BC government—and also making a lot of residual selenium that was killing fish in the rivers. That water shouldn’t be imbibed by humans lest, among other things, their hair falls out.

But none of this dissuaded the brave UCP government when the Australian coal companies came calling, wanting to start new operations along Alberta’s Eastern Slopes. The government founded a committee of investigation to look into new coal mines. Though the committee recommended against it, the UCP rescinded 1976’s Lougheed coal policy anyway. People living downstream from these possible new mines stood up and roared. It would take much more than a column to describe the many facets of that anti-coal resistance. But one example was Lethbridge city council voting nine to zero against coal development upstream of their water supply.

All Alberta’s government had to do at that stage was say no. But, very oddly, they did not. In fact, in all sorts of ways, they’ve said yes. This is where we get back to the subject of fear.

At the suggestion that the Alberta government might back out, Australian coal companies threatened lawsuits. A famous Aussie litigator was dispatched to Alberta. The Aussies also engaged a long-historied Alberta law firm to represent them. In these threatened lawsuits, some rather gaudy financial compensation numbers were floated.

The interesting thing here is that a lot of wise legal heads were saying, “Let the Aussies go ahead and sue.” The history of such suits is that there would indeed be compensation demanded and paid, but that it would be much smaller than the asked-for amounts.

But the UCP government, normally so brave, froze. Deer in the headlights, as we say. Another analogy might be that the government was like a loud braggart who, at the sight of a snake, curls on the ground and cries.

This contradiction sent me into research mode. My question was: is there such a thing as fear of lawsuits And by gosh, there is! Liticaphobia. There’s even a branch of psychiatry that deals with it. Psychotherapy. Hypnotherapy. Prescription drugs. I seriously think the premier and her affected cabinet ministers should seek help. Further into my research, I discovered that liticaphobia is not equally spread across the landscape. There are hotspots. The US as a whole is such a hotspot, globally speaking. And, within the US, the most affected region is the state of Florida.

This was my eureka! moment. Where has Alberta’s premier gone most often of late Florida!  My advice is obvious. Alberta’s politicians should cease going to Florida immediately. It is hoped that, if they follow my advice, they will soon be brave enough to face the Australian miners in court.

Fred Stenson’s many books include the novels Who By Fire, The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

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Khullar was born in 1964 in Fort Vermilion, a hamlet 660 km north of Edmonton. Her parents had immigrated to Canada from India and worked as teachers in a Mennonite colony in La Crête. When Khullar was in Grade 4, the family moved to Morinville. Khullar attended Old Scona Academic High School in Edmonton, then was an honour student at the University of Alberta and the University of Toronto. After law school, Khullar clerked at the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench and at the Alberta Court of Appeal—a harbinger of her future justice roles.

In her remarks at her swearing in ceremony as the Chief Justice of the Nunavut Court of Appeal, held in Iqaluit, Khullar showed she’d done her homework by referring to the qulliq, an Inuit lamp that is usually tended by women and associated with their strength and warmth.

The Nunavut Court of Appeal meets three times a year in Iqaluit, while the Court of Appeal of NWT usually sits in Yellowknife. In Edmonton the Court of Appeal sits in the south tower of Sir Winston Churchill Square. In Calgary it sits in two locations, hearing criminal cases at the Calgary Courts Centre and the rest of the appeals—for now—in leased space in the TC Energy Tower. Long-time Calgarians might remember the brouhaha that ensued after asbestos and other contaminants were discovered in the old sandstone Court of Appeal building, empty since 2003. A decontaminated version of the heritage building will be incorporated into a new courthouse in Calgary at the same location. The project, announced by then-minister of justice Kaycee Madu in 2021, is still in the planning stage.

Chief justice Khullar does not sit on all the appeals of all the courts she oversees. But in 2023 she was one of the three NWT Court of Appeal justices who heard R. v. Avadluk, a case regarding an indeterminate sentence for a dangerous offender. Of the 101 Alberta Court of Appeal items posted in the first three months of 2024 on CanLII (the Canadian Legal Information Institute’s website), Khullar was on the court panel of at least 10, the range of which included: the province’s duty to negotiate (Métis Nation of Alberta Association v. Alberta), a murder conviction (R. v. Saddleback), suspended limitation periods during COVID-19 (StraightVac Services Ltd. v. Sunshine Oilsands Ltd.), a sentence imposed for child luring and making child pornography (R. v. Love), and a parenting order (Bitz v. Preuss).

One of Khullar’s tasks as chief justice is to implement the federal call for modernization of court operations, which includes allowing more people to appear in court remotely and greater use of technology in jury selection. Modernization will help her deal with another aspect of her job as well: the backlog of cases in the Alberta courts. The Advocates Society, in its 2023 call for action, found Canada-wide endemic delay in the delivery of civil and family justice. Its report states: “In Alberta it routinely takes more than nine months for an application longer than 20 minutes to be heard by a judge in Edmonton or Calgary; and two to three years for a trial longer than five days to be scheduled from the date the parties certify readiness.” In 2023 the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Richard Wagner, noted that Alberta had 22 criminal cases that had been delayed more than 30 months and were therefore at risk of being stayed (halted) under the unreasonable-delay limits set out in R. v. Jordan in 2016.

The current court backlog can’t be blamed solely on pandemic-related court closures, since the backlog existed before the closures. And while the pandemic exacerbated the problem, it also prompted small but ongoing improvements in efficiency, such as conducting more hearings virtually rather than in person.

One of the causes of delay is a perpetual shortage of judges. Chief justice Wagner, in his June 2023 update, chastised the Trudeau government for its slowness in filling judicial vacancies, while also acknowledging other factors such as a shortage in provincial funding and personnel. Justices of the superior courts in the province, i.e., the Court of Appeal and the Court of King’s Bench, are federal appointments. Recommendations for new justices to courts at this level come through provincial and territorial judicial advisory committees. Judges in the lower court in this province—formerly called the Provincial Court of Alberta but renamed in 2023 as the Alberta Court of Justice—are appointed by the provincial minister of justice.

Seven provinces have adopted unified family court systems which are a mix of superior and lower court jurisdictions, to create efficiencies and reduce delays, stress and costs in family matters. In 2018 the federal government offered Alberta enough funding to hire 17 judges for a unified family court, then withdrew that money—$50.2-million over five years—in Budget 2024. “Alberta has been allocated judicial seats which they have chosen not to create, resulting in 17 unused judicial seats intended for unified family courts,” the budget document reads. “By redistributing positions to courts in jurisdictions where they will be put to use, the federal government will ensure funding for Canada’s justice system does not go to waste, as some provinces have chosen to do.” Alberta justice minister Mickey Amery agrees that Alberta’s courts need more judges, but said the federal conditions for a unified family court “simply do not work here in Alberta.”

Another responsibility of the chief justice is to distribute the appeal work among the members of the court. The Alberta Court of Appeal can have up to 14 justices, plus the chief justice, plus supernumerary (retired, part-time) justices. Usually three justices sit at a time. Certain requests, such as permission for a third party to be a part of the proceedings—called leave to intervene—can be heard online by a single appeal judge. Rarely, for more complex legal issues or those of broader significance, five justices might be on the panel.

Efficiency and fairness, for the parties and the justices, are at stake in the distribution of work. Generally the public hears nothing about the process of choosing which justice will adjudicate which matter. The last publicized disruption in the appeal ranks occurred in 2017, when Catherine Fraser was the head of the court, and justice Ronald Berger (now retired) alleged in his “concluding observations” in R. v. Gashikanyi that some judges were chosen more often than others to sit on sentencing appeal panels, and that it followed that there was a lack of diversity of experience and opinions on the panels, which resulted in “a disproportionate opportunity afforded to certain judges to shape the jurisprudence of the Court.”

The other two justices on the Gashikanyi panel responded to Berger’s allegations by emphasizing the role of judicial integrity and impartiality, and by giving examples of situations where random assignment of justices on panels is not always practical, particularly when considering workloads and expertise.

Khullar’s expertise, as stated in her judicial application questionnaire, is in “constitutional law, human rights, labour, employment and other aspects of public law.” She articled at a large Edmonton firm, where she met and worked with Dale Gibson, a scholar and legal expert in many practice areas, including constitutional law and Aboriginal law. When Gibson left to start a boutique constitutional law firm, he asked Khullar to join him, and she accepted. In the preamble to a 2022 tribute she wrote for the Alberta Law Review, Khullar describes Gibson, who died in early 2022, as “my friend, mentor and former colleague.” In the article Khullar writes “the lessons I have learned from him inform my own understanding of what it means to be a principled advocate, lawyer and jurist.”

During her time in practice with Gibson, one of the files Khullar worked on was Vriend v. Alberta, a case that arose in the late 1990s when Delwin Vriend was fired from Edmonton’s King’s College (now The King’s University) for being gay. The case set a foundational precedent for 2SLGBTQIA+ rights, because the Supreme Court of Canada held that it is a breach of the Charter to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. The Vriend case is also known for the coming together of many community groups to intervene, including the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Canadian Labour Congress the Canadian Bar Association and numerous others.

Dale Gibson and Associates, with Khullar as an associate, were the solicitors for the (pro-equality) intervener called the Alberta and Northwest Conference of the United Church of Canada. An article by Khullar, “Vriend: Remedial Issues for Unremedied Discrimination,” was cited by the Supreme Court in the decision. The lead counsel representing Vriend was Sheila Greckol (later a justice of the Alberta Court of Appeal) and cocounsel Douglas Stollery. At the time, Greckol was at Chivers Carpenter, and Khullar eventually joined that firm, became a partner, and then managing partner.

Chivers Carpenter defines itself as “union-side labour lawyers who restrict our practices to labour, employment, administrative and human rights law.” The current managing partner of the firm, Kristan McLeod, took over the role when Khullar was appointed to the bench. McLeod says Khullar is “smart,” “thoughtful,” “compassionate,” “organized,” “a very hard worker” and “generous in terms of identifying work opportunities for others.” When pushed for any possible downsides in Khullar’s character, McLeod says there are none, but then adds that Khullar doesn’t have much patience for judgmental people (which, of course, is actually a good quality, and McLeod readily points out the irony of a non-judgmental “judge.”)

While she was in private practice, Khullar worked on pro bono cases related to unions, women’s rights and the rights of persons with disabilities. She was cocounsel for LEAF in the Supreme Court of Canada case of R. v. Ewanchuk, which questioned the defence of “implied consent” and identified the lower court’s reliance on myths and stereotypes about women. Before she was appointed to the bench, Khullar worked (along with McLeod and others) on R. v. Barton, a case which ended up in the Supreme Court of Canada in 2019 and which dealt with whether consent to a specific sexual activity is consenting to any degree of force. In another pro bono case, McKay-Panos v. Air Canada, a case that lasted almost a decade, Khullar argued that obesity can be a disability for the purposes of flying.

Chief justices have the unenviable and perhaps impossible job of being irreproachable, objective decision-makers.

Khullar’s experience and areas of legal expertise may be heartening to Albertans concerned about the leadership and apparent goals of the current UCP government. But her background should not be interpreted as bias. Her job is to interpret and apply the law, not to make the law. Still, there is comfort in knowing that the arguments of all parties will be fully considered should cases involving recent eyebrow-raising, if not ire-raising, legislation work their way up the legal ladder to the Alberta Court of Appeal. Litigation contenders might include the Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act, the Alberta Pension Protection Act, the Provincial Priorities Act, the Municipal Affairs Statutes Amendment Act, 2024, and the threatened legislation to restrict the rights of transgender and nonbinary children and youth. The province has at least 12 active legal challenges against the federal government. And Albertans can expect that if any decision of the Court of Appeal is unfavourable to the UCP government, the UCP will apply for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada (cost to taxpayers be damned).

Chief justice Khullar is clearly not in her job for magazine coverage or photo ops. She declined an interview for this article. Perhaps due to the workload or the tradition of judges remaining impersonal and communicating primarily through written judgments and legal reasoning, she seems to have gone particularly quiet media-wise after the initial news flurry about her appointment and swearing-in as chief justice.

We know some biographical facts, such as her legal education and professional experience. We know (from a short article published after her swearing-in) that she watches Jeopardy! And we know from the Judges Act that justices of the Alberta Court of Appeal are paid $338,800 each, and the chief justice is paid $371,400. According to Khullar’s 2016 judicial application questionnaire, she does not speak French, she is a mother and she is married. Lawyers I spoke with all reported along the same theme of “she has a big brain and an ability to work with people.”

Should we be curious or impressed (or concerned) that we don’t know more about the top justice in our province Certainly Khullar has good reason for staying off the media radar; the public chat of justices can backfire. Take the extreme case of US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who, in an attempt to appear as a “non-elite” member of society, said he preferred vacations in Walmart parking lots over beaches, only to have journalists reveal, and revel in, proof that for decades he had been taking luxury vacations involving superyachts and private jets. Short of such bald-faced lies, even simple true statements from a justice can be misinterpreted and used to suggest character flaws or judicial bias, especially in these politically polarized times.

Most Canadian justices adhere to a philosophy of restraint, of keeping their personal lives and personal views private. Part of this is to support a work–home balance and a semblance of a “normal” life. And part of it is to maintain the appearance of impartiality. As the familiar maxim goes, although usually not with respect to judges’ personal views and lives, not only must justice be done, it must be seen to be done. Or, as the Canadian Judicial Council put it: “After appointment, judges are not required to withdraw from the world. They may lead a normal life in the community, while retaining a sense of the dignity of judicial office and realizing that the public expects virtually irreproachable conduct from judges.” (Italics mine.)

Irreproachable conduct. That’s a tall order, well beyond any “reasonable person” test that might be applied in a court case. While most of us would not be embroiled in the kind of alleged “obnoxious behaviour” and physical altercation at a posh Arizona resort that led to the early retirement of Supreme Court of Canada justice Russell Brown in 2023, who among us has conducted every day of our lives irreproachably No wonder most justices shy away from public outreach—not to be confused with the more limited outreach to their legal community, which most justices seem more open to. Khullar’s first speaking appearances after she was sworn in as chief justice were at the annual historical dinners, in Calgary and Edmonton, hosted by the Legal Archives Society of Alberta. In March she attended the respective 2024 judges dinners put on by the Calgary and Edmonton bar associations.

And yet, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Richard Wagner, ever since his appointment in late 2017, has promoted transparency in all Canadian courts, and encouraged leadership through outreach beyond the courts. In an era when trust in the Canadian judicial system is declining, and distrust of authority, experts and even accepted facts seems to be at an all-time high, speaking about the court’s role and conduct, when legally and ethically appropriate, might be a good way for senior justices to bolster confidence in our court system.

Chief justice Wagner has held several news conferences, framed as “updates” on the work of the Supreme Court. In his 2022 update he commented on the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, a case which resulted in the removal of the federal right to abortion. While Wagner didn’t give his personal views on abortion, he did speak about how the Canadian judicial system works differently and is non-polarizing. He used his own appointments—to the Supreme Court by the Harper government and to chief justice by the Trudeau government—as an example of non-partisanship. But he stressed, as he often does in his updates, that we must remain vigilant in keeping Canada’s judiciary independent.

In 2019 Wagner praised the transparency of (now retired) Supreme Court justice Clément Gascon, who publicly discussed his struggles with mental health. And in a 2023 news conference he addressed justice Russell Brown’s resignation from the Supreme Court and answered concerns about how the Brown issue might have affected the court’s decisions and process. (Of note, the vacancy created by justice Brown’s resignation was filled with the much-lauded appointment of Mary Moreau, a former chief justice of the Alberta Court of King’s Bench.) In the same 2023 news conference, which lasted an hour and included questions from journalists, Wagner acknowledged the important role of journalism and media in bringing issues to the court’s attention and in upholding democracy.

As much as journalists and the general public might welcome more-transparent justices, this leaves the people who take on this important role, particularly chief justices such as Khullar, with the unenviable and perhaps impossible job of being irreproachable, objective decision-makers and outspoken leaders. Small wonder that some prefer to adopt a closed-door policy.

The mandatory retirement age for federally appointed justices is 75. If chief justice Khullar remains in her current role until then—the year 2039—the public might not hear many of her out-of-court opinions. But once she retires she might decide to be more forthcoming, thus following in the tracks of a few other prominent Alberta-raised justices, most notably retired Supreme Court of Canada chief justice Beverley McLachlin, who, a few months before the end of her judicial term, granted this magazine a sit-down interview at her office in Ottawa (see “Canada’s Top Judge,” Sep 2016, in AV’s online archives). She later released her memoirs, Truth Be Told. Or retired Alberta Provincial Court judge John Reilly, who has published a trilogy of books about his judicial work in First Nations communities.

Until then, we’ll have to trust that chief justice Khullar channels some of the key traits she identified in her mentor Dale Gibson, including “courage, creativity… and foresight,” and that, with her help, the slow and rarefied Court of Appeal will continue to show up for beleaguered Albertans.

Barb Howard is the author of five books, including Happy Sands in the Brave and Brilliant series from University of Calgary Press.

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It’s impossible to say why the incident ended as it did—why, in the words of Edmonton Police Chief Dale McFee, “We are incredibly lucky that there are no reported injuries and no lives have been lost,” including those of a visiting class of Grade 1 students. It’s impossible to say why, 10 months after the fact, we’re not talking about downtown Edmonton as the site of a mass murder, or about how “Edmonton City Hall” has become synonymous with “Sandy Hook” and “Columbine” and “École Polytechnique,” or living with the knowledge that Edmonton mayor Amarjeet Sohi was the first Canadian politician in over 50 years to be assassinated. City police and the RCMP have released no details about why the incident ended so quickly. Gun users speculated online, based on watching security footage, that the shooter’s rifle jammed. “He’s using a higher capacity magazine, but for some reason… stops shooting at the third or fourth pull,” one man writes. “[This] indicates a malfunction. He fiddles with the handle but then drops the rifle.”

If we hadn’t been “incredibly lucky”—if the gun (perhaps) wasn’t a cheap SKS variant and hadn’t (probably) jammed, or if the shooter had brought a second gun—Alberta today would be different. We might be remembering front-page photos of blood streaked across the marble zigzags of Edmonton City Hall’s foyer, or mourning the murders of a dozen Edmontonians, or sickened at the thought that a class of schoolchildren witnessed everything. And almost immediately after the massacre we’d have become livid at our provincial government.

One of the first things most civilized people do after hearing about a mass shooting in their country is demand a ban on the type of gun used. This is what happened after mass shootings in Port Arthur, Australia (1996: 35 dead), and Dunblane, Scotland (1996: 17 dead, most of them kindergarten students), and Utøya, Norway (2011; 68 dead), and Christchurch, New Zealand (2019: 51 dead). The public in each case was strongly in favour of tougher restrictions, as were police, and support came from across the political spectrum. A wide array of guns—automatic, semi-automatic, “military-grade” and, in the UK, most handguns—were eventually banned. Close to a million guns were surrendered through buybacks. Norway already had some restrictions but added the Ruger Mini-14 model used to slaughter dozens of children at a summer camp to its list of prohibited weapons.

“We are incredibly lucky that there are no reported injuries and no lives have been lost.”

Canada is not so different. After the massacre at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989, when a gunman murdered 14 women, our federal government reacted to the public’s horror by passing legislation that included mandatory registration and licensing for gun owners, a national registry, background checks, and verification processes and controls on ammunition sales. The legislation had support across party lines. It took years to create, however, and didn’t preclude Canadians from owning the semi-automatic rifles still associated today with mass shootings. (Canada in 1977 had banned fully automatic guns: those “with the capability of discharging projectiles in rapid succession during one pressure of the trigger.” Think machine guns or the Rambo movies.)

Canada has now banned “assault weapons” as well—or is trying to. Our federal government, borrowing from the US Department of Justice, defines these as “semi-automatic firearms with a large magazine of ammunition…designed and configured for rapid fire” (i.e., the trigger must be pulled repeatedly, but an experienced shooter can get off at least one shot per second). It announced its ban in the aftermath of our country’s worst mass shooting, April 18–19, 2020, when a 51-year-old man impersonating an RCMP officer and armed with two semi-automatic rifles roamed rural Nova Scotia from Portapique to Shubenacadie and murdered 22 people, including a pregnant healthcare aide and a 23-year-veteran RCMP constable.

For nearly 50 years advocacy groups and police in Canada have been calling for a ban. As far back as 1977 the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police had argued “semi-automatic firearms are basically designed as an instrument of war” and have “no sporting use either in the cultural or the recreational sense.” And the federal Liberals had already promised more gun controls following the 2019 Danforth shooting in Toronto (two dead; 13 injured). Portapique jolted them into action. On April 20, 2020, then-public safety minister Bill Blair declared his government would prohibit “military style assault weapons.” “There have been far too many incidents of gun violence in our country,” he said, promising “measures… that significantly reduce those incidents and keep people safe.”

The public was behind him. According to an Ipsos poll that May, compiled after Portapique, 82 per cent of Canadians supported a ban, including 77 per cent of Albertans. A concurrent Angus Reid poll put support across the country at 78 per cent for “a complete ban on civilian possession of assault weapons.” That survey found 60 per cent of conservative voters supported a ban, as did 70 per cent of former gun owners and even 45 per cent of current gun owners. And Portapique didn’t much change public opinion. A year before that mass shooting, Angus Reid had found 75 per cent support among Canadians for an assault weapons ban.

On May 1, less than two weeks after the rampage in Nova Scotia, Blair announced a ban on “over 1,500 models and variants of assault-style firearms” as well as certain components and magazines. The list included the Ruger Mini-14 used at École Polytechnique, Utøya and Portapique, and the AR-15 used in hundreds of US shootings, including Sandy Hook and Columbine. These can no longer be legally used, imported or sold in Canada.

The restrictions came with a two-year amnesty (until 2022) and a promised buyback to be overseen by the RCMP in which owners would be compensated when surrendering their weapons. Gun control advocates celebrated. It looked like Canada was belatedly following the lead of countries that outlawed weapons used in mass killings. But four years later the ban is in limbo.

On the same day that Canada banned assault weapons, then-premier Jason Kenney issued a statement. “The Government of Alberta is concerned about all crime, including the illegal use of firearms,” he said. “[But] today’s order by Ottawa does little to target criminals. Instead, Ottawa is singling out law-abiding Canadians who purchased their property legally, have owned these items safely for years, and who have committed no crimes.” In the years since then, the UCP government has continued to oppose federal efforts to ban guns—which Kenney has called “legally purchased inanimate objects.”

Advocates on all sides of the debate have long argued about what constitutes an “assault weapon” or “military style.” Owners of these guns dismiss such terms as fear-mongering akin to referring to chef knives as “stabbing tools.” But no one disputes that these “inanimate objects” were first designed for soldiers to use to kill other soldiers (e.g., the AR-15 was mass produced for American troops in Vietnam). And ads in archived newspapers remind us that gun shops in Edmonton and Calgary were advertising the likes of AR-15s as “assault weapons” only a few decades ago. Gun advocates in Canada pivoted to calling them “sporting rifles” after École Polytechnique.

For nearly 50 years advocacy groups and police have called for an assault weapons ban.

The Alberta Chief Firearms Office (ACFO)—created by Kenney in June 2020, and which has taken on much of Alberta’s pro-gun advocacy work—responded to questions about the ban by saying “ ‘assault-style’ is not a type of firearms classification for the purposes of regulation under any federal or provincial legislation that governs firearms such as the Criminal Code or the Firearms Act.” This is true. So, in addition to banning 1,500 specific makes and models, the federal government is trying to restrict “assault-style” guns based on a certain level of muzzle energy (thus encompassing sniper rifles) and bore diameter (the threshold captures the most powerful shotguns).

Unlike Americans, Canadians have no enshrined right to keep and carry guns. This has been so since Canada’s founding, and the distinction has been upheld many times by our courts. In summer 2024 a group of UCP members from Medicine Hat, calling themselves the Black Hat Gang, asked premier Danielle Smith to add the right to keep and bear firearms to Alberta’s Bill of Rights. In October Smith said she’d introduce legislation to do just that. Canada’s Charter, however, is unclear.

Gun proponents’ strongest objection is that some guns Canada would ban are used by hunters, including Indigenous people. Even as the ACFO is advising Albertans about how to comply with a ban, it will “continue to stand up for Alberta’s law-abiding hunters.”

Canada’s list of 1,500 “assault weapons” was made by executive order. Four years later it isn’t finalized. Facing opposition from Alberta and other provinces, hunters, gun makers, gun collectors, property rights advocates, various MPs and the Assembly of First Nations, in March 2022 the federal government extended the amnesty until October 2023. In November 2023 it extended the amnesty again, until October 2025. It has withdrawn amendments to legislation that would have clarified which guns are banned and why. Today our politicians are still arguing over which guns are uniquely well suited to killing moose at a distance and which can too easily slaughter a crowd of civilians up close.

Guns seized by police at the Coutts border blockade in 2022, including a semi-automatic rifle modified to shoot 30 rounds in nine seconds.

The debate doesn’t fall neatly along partisan lines. Some NDP MPs call the list overkill. The federal NDP says Canada can’t impede “those who use long guns for hunting and farming, and can’t hinder the treaty rights of Indigenous peoples.” But former federal Conservative leader Erin O’Toole supported the ban. “I want to make my position on firearms perfectly clear,” he said during the 2021 election. “First, the ban on assault weapons will remain in place. Second, the present ban on a number of other firearms that were reclassified in 2020 will remain in place.” He called for “taking the politics out of” the discussion. The Trudeau government in May 2023 said it would re-establish an independent committee to review gun classification. Then-public safety minister Marco Mendicino said this would “take the misinformation out of these debates.”

The federal Conservatives, now under new leadership, might kill the ban. Pierre Poilievre calls the policy a failure, saying last spring about the prime minister: “He has spent 40 million tax dollars that could have secured our ports and our borders, and he has not taken in a single, solitary gun.” (He didn’t elaborate on who’s responsible for delaying the buyback.) At a rural Ontario rally last June, Poilievre, asked by a gun owner his intentions should he become PM, said “We [will] just reverse everything Trudeau has done.”

Regardless, the UCP government says it will prevent the RCMP in Alberta from taking part in an assault weapons buyback. If need be, it will replace the RCMP with a provincial force, and prevent local police from taking part by stopping them from making funding deals with Ottawa.

In the meantime, gun-control advocates are frustrated. “Instead of working on the law, we find ourselves fighting about details and disinformation and procedures,” said Heidi Rathjen, coordinator of PolySeSouvient, whose organization formed in response to the École Polytechnique massacre. Gun owners are in limbo. And some gun makers are proceeding as though the ban isn’t real. “While sales were no doubt initially dampened by the Liberal government’s [changes], the Black Creek Labs SRV2 Siberian semi-auto rifle is in production,” reported Calibre magazine in 2023. “Now, with the Liberals removing those amendments… presumably more shooters are emboldened to put their money down on one of these made-in-Canada rifles.”

Other complications include that no one can say how many guns might be affected by Canada’s ban. According to a 2018 federal report, “Because ‘assault weapon’ is not a legally defined term, providing a count of how many are held in Canada is not possible. However, there are about 100,000 legally owned non-handgun firearms—usually rifles and shotguns—registered to individuals. Some of these could have features consistent with what is described as an assault weapon.” ‘Features’ is a telling word. Guns can be made more powerful, or modified with aftermarket parts, potentially turning a legal gun into an illegal one. Even gun-control advocates acknowledge that an “assault weapon” is not so much a standalone, standardized item, like a baseball bat, but a collection of integrated parts, not all of which are easily controlled or banned. (Magazines and ammo are regulated separately.) Similarly we don’t know how many “assault weapons” are in Alberta. The ACFO says, “[We have] received estimates from the federal government that approximately 30,000 firearms in Alberta meet this criteria.”

A further twist is that the federal government hasn’t only banned “assault weapons.” On December 15, 2023, Bill C-21 received royal assent. The law toughens penalties for gun smuggling and trafficking, adds new offences for “ghost guns” (which lack serial numbers and are 3D-printed or made from parts) and creates new “red flag” laws and licence revocation provisions to address domestic violence or self-harm. Most notably the bill bans the sale, purchase, import or transfer (but not ownership) of handguns in Canada.

Shotguns and hunting rifles may have “historic and cultural importance.” AR-15s do not.

Even the UCP government can get behind tougher smuggling penalties or a crackdown on ghost guns. But a handgun freeze—whatever its merits or drawbacks—is another kettle of fish. Canadians seem to believe that handguns represent less of a threat to them or their kids than do the weapons used in Canada’s worst mass shootings. The people who responded to pollsters after Portapique declared overwhelming support for ridding the country of AR-15s. They didn’t feel quite the same way about pistols and revolvers. Ipsos and Angus Reid both found at least 10 per cent less support for a handgun ban than for an assault-weapons ban, with support falling to as low as 43 per cent in Alberta.

An ordinary Canadian, following the debate through headlines and soundbites, could easily conflate efforts to ban “assault weapons” with a push to eliminate other guns. Handguns are more commonly used in gang violence, domestic and intimate partner violence, suicides and accidental shootings. Compelling arguments can be made for banning them, but reducing mass shootings isn’t on top of the list. When the UCP says “Trudeau’s policies won’t stop gangs,” they’re talking about handguns.

For that matter, when the UCP evokes the “historic and cultural importance of firearms” to our province, they mean shotguns and bolt-action hunting rifles, not AR-15s or their equivalents. Indeed, while something like a quarter of Canadians own a gun (mostly traditional rifles and handguns), few have owned anything resembling an “assault weapon.” But everyone is a potential target for the man who would use an assault weapon for its original purpose.

The arguments opposing a ban on assault weapons are that the federal government’s “ridiculous firearms agenda”—in the words of Kenney—is an affront to law-abiding property owners, including hunters, and that we’ll waste a huge amount of money buying back 100,000 scary-looking but otherwise harmless inanimate objects. If the ban goes ahead, many hundreds of collectors in Alberta will be made to surrender treasured property, even guns that don’t work or haven’t been removed from a locked cabinet in years. Heirlooms handed down from parents will be caught in a gun-grabbing driftnet. Some collectors will choose to keep contraband, becoming criminals with the stroke of a pen, left to worry about when the RCMP will come to inspect their collection.

Many recreational shooters—those who don’t use handguns or smaller shotguns—will have to change their hobby. Some gun ranges will lose business. At Calgary’s Shooting Edge, for example, four of 16 ranges were dedicated to “centrefire rifles,” which include AR-15s and AK-47s (specifically, a Chinese-made descendant of Russia’s famous Kalashnikov). The Shooting Edge shut down in October, blaming the federal ban.

Many hunters will find that weapons they have used safely for years are now illegal to own. They’ll lose lawfully acquired property. They’ll be forced to surrender trusted tools in exchange for compensation they believe is unfair. Some of their new guns will be different—more expensive, harder to operate, less powerful.

Indigenous groups—who know a bit about government mass confiscations—haven’t been assuaged by promises that the final list of banned guns won’t impact subsistence hunting. Nunavut Tunngavik vice-president Paul Irngaut told Canadian senators in 2023 that Inuit hunters face unique dangers and can’t always access search and rescue services. “Semi-automatic rifles are effective and necessary as a humane method to quickly dispatch animals, and as defence against polar bears, grizzly bears and wolves,” he said. If the federal government gets its way, some Indigenous Canadians will be forced to trade higher-powered guns for traditional rifles and deterrents such as bear spray.

The argument for a ban on assault weapons, however, is more compelling: Canada could prevent a mass shooting.

Surveys show that many gun owners support an assault-weapons ban. Some even argue in online forums that a ban on AR-15s is neither a slight on law-abiding gun owners nor the start of a slippery slope toward outlawing hunting or sport shooting. Canadians—Indigenous and otherwise—will continue to hunt, albeit some with new guns and different precautions. Following their assault weapon bans, people in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Norway continue to hunt, using guns. Shooting ranges will sound a bit different, but many will survive.

When most of Canada’s assault weapons have been carted away and destroyed, Canadians will not only feel safer, they will in fact be safer. The correlation between lower rates of gun ownership and less gun violence is backed by research. A 2000 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery concluded: “Across [26] developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides.” Other factors such as the effectiveness of mental health supports and gun-owner screening contribute. But the simple fact is that where there are more guns, there are more deaths from guns.

Australians appear to have less to fear from gun violence today following their 1996–1997 buyback, when over 650,000 guns were taken out of circulation (by a conservative government). From a 2006 article in the journal Injury Prevention: “In the 18 years before the gun law reforms there were 13 mass shootings in Australia, and none in the 10.5 years afterwards.”

The rate of gun crime has fallen in the UK since its government banned civilians from owning most guns, and the country’s homicide rate is the lowest in the OECD (and one-sixth of Canada’s rate).

“[One] thing to remember is that the people who are shot, injured or killed have rights too,” said Calgary-based surgeon, hunter, self-identified conservative voter, and assault-weapons-ban proponent John Kortbeek in a 2021 interview with Cold Steel: Canadian Journal of Surgery Podcast. “They didn’t ask to be shot, they didn’t ask to be killed, and they didn’t ask to be disabled. And that’s a pretty stiff price to pay for ready access to handguns and military style assault weapons.”

Shotguns and hunting rifles may have “historic and cultural importance.” AR-15s do not.

last January at Edmonton City Hall, premier Danielle Smith appeared onstage at events in Calgary and Edmonton with former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson. Carlson owns guns, including an AR-15, and has likened gun control in the US to “class warfare.” As he told the NRA, “The Left hate that guns are tools and that millions of normal people own them. They hate that guns are also a metaphor for true individual freedom.” Neither Smith nor Carlson mentioned the previous day’s incident in Edmonton, nor did Smith’s government issue a statement.

That shooting is largely forgotten. In March the gunman was charged with two terrorism offences and nine other charges. In July he pleaded not guilty. City Hall was closed to the public for two months, then was reopened with metal detectors and other new security measures. Albertans moved on.

Edmonton mayor Amarjeet Sohi is now doubtless safer. But that city also has the Legislature. Alberta has other government buildings, and malls, nightclubs, country music festivals, political conventions, church gatherings. It has schools and daycares and children’s camps. Both my 10-year-old daughter’s public elementary school and my 5-year-old’s preschool in Calgary now do lockdown drills, where they bolt the doors, turn off the lights and take silent cover under desks and tables “in case the bad guys come” (my 5-year-old’s words).

A mass shooting leaves a permanent scar on society. “Certain dates are written into our country’s story as defining days,” Norway’s King Harald said on the 10th anniversary of Utøya. Then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern called the Christchurch massacre one of her country’s “darkest days.” “We are suffering,” said Colchester County, NS, mayor Christine Blair in spring 2024, four years after Portapique. “It’s huge here, and it has affected everyone.”

But the flipside is true too. Gun restrictions reinforce and shape cultural values and norms, in the same way other legislation has long-term effects (e.g., seat belt laws). If mass shootings can traumatize a society, reasonable gun restrictions can inspire a more peaceful one.

The Mass Casualty Commission that was struck following the 2020 massacre in Nova Scotia recom-mended in its exhaustive report a ban in Canada on “all semi-automatic rifles and shotguns that discharge centre-fire ammunition and that are designed to accept detachable magazines with capacities of more than five rounds.” It did so after concluding that mass shootings pose a “significant though rare” threat to Canadians.

But a mass shooting almost did happen in Alberta last January. It may have been prevented only by dumb luck. If a mass shooting does happen here, and three or seven or 22 people are killed, including schoolchildren, a horrified Albertan and Canadian public will immediately demand a ban on the assault weapons used in the massacre. And then we’ll find out that we already did ban these guns—or tried to, before opponents, including Alberta’s government, decided that the chance to prevent a mass shooting wasn’t worth the price.

Evan Osenton is the editor-in-chief of Alberta Views.

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Danielle Smith’s party has a certain record in its dealings with workers. During the United Conservative Party’s first term in government, Alberta’s minimum wage for teenagers was cut from $15 to $13. The minimum wage for adults remained at $15, even in the inflationary years that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. Compensation benefits for injured workers were cut by half a billion dollars over five years. The UCP changed the rules on overtime to give employers extra leverage over workers and decrease the need to pay out time and a half. The then-finance minister, Travis Toews, asked members of the United Nurses of Alberta to accept 3 per cent salary rollbacks in July 2021. Similar wage rollbacks were proposed for homecare aides, licensed practical nurses and other members of the AUPE.

“2024 is payback time,” says Guy Smith with a smile. Approximately 82,000 of the AUPE’s 95,000 members will need their job contracts renegotiated in 2024—that’s 65 per cent of the total membership—and Smith is bullish on the union’s prospects. “They [the workers] were on the front lines, struggling with short-staffing issues, mental health issues, inflationary issues. I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to what our demands will actually be, but they’ll probably be significant.”

Whether the new premier will be any friendlier to organized labour than the previous one is an open question, but Guy Smith vs. Premier Smith will be one of the major narratives of the UCP’s second term.

The AUPE’s members are involved in a wide range of services that are vital to Alberta life. They’re responsible for government administration and policy design and implementation; some are firefighters; some are museum staff, correctional workers or social workers. The interpretive guide at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is an AUPE member.

The pandemic may have subsided, but the struggles of the post–pandemic era are no less challenging for AUPE’s members. These challenges are in three main categories: the increasing cost of living, the privatization of work places, and the condition of perpetually “working short,” with insufficient staff to manage workloads.

Consider the day-to-day reality faced by Samantha Samborski, employed as an individual support worker at a residential homecare facility in Edmonton. She cares for children with severe disabilities who depend on her and her co-workers for almost all of their basic needs. As she explains it, children come to the facility “because of car accidents, or some have just had other accidents happen to them in the early stages of life. And we’ve also had children that have tried to commit suicide. So we see a wide variety of the emotional side of humanity.”

The job has become a lot harder in recent years. “The benefits and pay have not kept up with the realities of today’s world and the inflation crisis,” says Samborski. “More and more workers take second jobs or rely on overtime to make ends meet. And since the pandemic, it’s only highlighted the lack of respect that so many of us feel. We are expected to do more with less.”

Many of Alberta’s public workers feel disrespected: “We’re being expected to do more with less.”

In addition to her work duties Samborski is the chair of AUPE Local 009, which has roughly 600 members. When she started with the local eight years ago, it had over a thousand members. The decline is mostly due to privatization. Facilities close down and reopen as non-profits or private agencies, or they close down permanently. This impacts unionized staff, who often have to go work in the non-profit or private sector, often for less money. Samborski says the facility she works at in Edmonton is at risk of one day closing because it has been ordered to not take in any new patients except under exceptional circumstances. In the summer of 2020, staff were told by email that the government had “alternative service delivery models” for this home and similar residential facilities in the province. As of August 2023, the home was still open and in public ownership.

Samborski is one of the 82,000 AUPE members whose contract is up for renegotiation in 2024. The legal context for collective bargaining has changed in recent years, in part because of the essential services legislation the NDP government brought in to keep the province compliant with a Supreme Court decision. This legislation requires locals such as Samborski’s to have an essential services agreement in place to determine what services will be offered in the event of a strike. No strike action can be taken without such an agreement.

LEFT: Smith in London’s Trafalgar Square, circa 1987, after a rally opposing apartheid. TOP: Smith at a protest against Klein-era cuts, circa 1994, with mentor Linda Karpowich, former AUPE local 006 chair and Alberta Federation of Labour president. BOTTOM: Protesting cuts at Yellowhead Youth Centre, circa 1992; at right is then-social services minister Mike Cardinal.

Aside from the legal considerations, the AUPE is up against an old ideological nemesis: the UCP has given no sign of abandoning its preference for private over public delivery of services. The mandate letter of July 18, 2023, to incoming Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, for example, called for “supporting primary care as the foundation of our healthcare system by assessing alternative models of care and leveraging all healthcare professionals.” While vague, “alternative models” can easily be interpreted as quietly encouraging more privatization.

It’s a trend Guy Smith has seen before, in particular during the premiership of Ralph Klein. “We saw the privatization of entire departments. Transportation, road-clearing and all the infrastructure for government registries,” he says. In the early to mid-1990s, the AUPE’s membership declined from 50,000 to 34,000. The union teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. Former president Carol Anne Dean, elected in 1993, recounted her memory of those years for the AUPE’s 40th anniversary magazine. “It was like bombs were going off everywhere, every day, all the time,” she said.

Smith has participated for long enough in the AUPE, right back to his time with Local 006, that he has an intuitive feeling for the ebb and flow of the Alberta labour movement’s fortunes and how each moment requires its own strategy. When he was a care worker at the Yellowhead Youth Centre in Edmonton, he participated in a 1990 strike that the AUPE had neither sanctioned nor sought to prevent. Media coverage of the strike was extensive, and at least one video from CFRN News is still available online for those wanting to view it. Six managers tried to do the job of 100 striking workers. It did not go well. Anywhere from 16 to 40 youth ran away, and the police had to make multiple arrests. “All hell’s broken loose,” a resident told CFRN News during the strike. Smith and his fellow union members tried to encourage orderliness among the youth, but the relationship between troubled teens and their temporary caregivers, the managers, was so fractious as to be unworkable.

It was a defining moment in Smith’s career. “I built that worksite from an inactive worksite into one that led a strike, and it was thanks to these trusting, supportive relationships as workers,” he remembers. “We were sticking up and standing next to each other when we needed to.… It taught me a lot about other people’s resilience.”

Smith is the son of a barrister and a feminist. His mother, Mair Smith, helped create the Alberta Status of Women Action Committee, of which Helena Freeland, mother of the current deputy minister of Canada, was also a member. From his mother, Smith learned to fight for his beliefs. From his father, he learned different lessons. “I always respected my dad’s judiciousness. Yet the way he treated people was very kind, gentle and fair.”

LEFT: Smith has performed labour songs at many rallies; here, he’s at a 1999 protest to oppose Premier Klein’s plans to privatize healthcare. RIGHT: Addressing AUPE’s annual convention in 2022. Smith: “Society needs to be built on co-operation and collaboration–yet the friction within the various parts of society has to continue. That’s how society move forward.”

The way Smith approaches his job has also been shaped by geography and culture. His wife, Sherry, is from a family of settlers, her parents and grandparents having come to Alberta from Ukraine and Denmark. Smith met Sherry in Grande Prairie and their roots in the town run deep. “I do have a very deep fondness for the kind of community you find in a smaller town,” says Smith.

As anyone who has listened to Smith speaking for more than a few seconds will know, his own family roots are quite different. He was born in St. Chad’s Hospital in the central England city of Birmingham. From there his family moved to Sidcup in Kent before making the big decision to emigrate to Canada. Smith first landed with his parents and sister in Edmonton in 1973. “Then we took the Greyhound bus from Edmonton to Grande Prairie. Six hours! And I thought, ‘Where are we going?’ Because when you go on a six-hour coach ride in the UK, you go through hundreds of villages and towns and cities. So what took me was the vastness, the space.”

He remembers Grande Prairie as a very welcoming community. His parents became well integrated into the community, his father working as a provincial court judge, while both of them also maintained active hobbies—Smith’s mother loving crafts and pottery, his father involved in amateur theatre. In England Smith had been among the last to be picked for the soccer team and had to stay out of the way in the back, chiefly to avoid mistakes. In Canada he was given more exposure to the game and became a better player, which he describes as very positive for his confidence. In 1977 his parents divorced, and Smith moved with his mother and sister to Edmonton. He would have been 15—for many people, the years of teenage rebellion, but he provides no indication of responding with angst or anger to the divorce or to being uprooted again.

His education and career followed a smooth path. After high school, he attended the University of Alberta, earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology and got a job at the Yellowhead Youth Centre in 1983. “I didn’t think much about anything except earning a paycheque and having fun and playing music… and really enjoying my job as a youth worker.” Sherry was at that time a schoolteacher.

They both quit their jobs to go live in England for a while. It’s clear there was a wanderlust, especially in Sherry, that had to be satiated, even if it meant living with very little money. It is this chapter of Smith’s life that appears to have galvanized his worker sympathies. In London he became involved in the Militant Tendency, one of the most radical factions of the 1980s Labour Party. He went doorknocking for a Militant candidate in Tower Hamlets, an old working-class neighbourhood of London’s East End, where socialist ideas were not at all new. There was a strong tradition of union militancy in the area.

Some 82,000 AUPE members will need to renegotiate their job contracts in 2024.

“I was intrigued by their outlook of building a socialist society run by workers, redistribution of wealth and common ownership of the means of production, and all that,” he says.

The Militant Tendency suffered a very public defeat as Labour purged its ranks of the faction’s most outspoken and active members. A critical turning point came in 1985—and it serves as an interesting test case for how Smith views his leadership responsibilities in balance with his idealism and radicalism. Militant was at that time in control of Liverpool’s city council and in a prolonged fight with Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, which had imposed austerity measures. Under Militant, Liverpool ran an illegal deficit budget to continue spending on social programs. But as money ran out, city councillors hired taxis to go around handing out redundancy notices to city staff, convinced that overseas loans could eventually be secured to hire them back.

The then-Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, mocked this “grotesque chaos” in a speech delivered to hundreds of attendees of the party conference at Bournemouth, and the purge of Militant proceeded in ruthless style.

“I think the Liverpool experience actually shows that when there are worker collectives run very much from a grassroots perspective, established institutions are threatened,” Smith says. “However, I do recognize and understand the need for consistent governance, for consistent decisions as much as possible, and for risk mitigation, transparency and accountability… AUPE members need stability in the organization that supports them. Sometimes I’ve had to dial back on my principles for the greater good, and sometimes I’ve had to push those principles for the greater good as well.”

Guy Smith believes that when unions win concessions for workers, all Albertans benefit.

Smith likes the analogy of a chess game for how labour strategy can play out. In the upcoming contract negotiations for 82,000 of the AUPE’s members, Premier Smith will be the chief opponent. “Society needs to be built on co-operation and collaboration, yet, to a degree, the friction within the various parts of society has to continue—that’s how society moves forward,” he says.

He doesn’t believe that Alberta’s NDP, typically seen as an ally of organized labour, has always played the chess game particularly well. Considering Rachel Notley’s four years as premier, Smith says he saw some clear errors of judgment, using as an example the passing of Bill 6, the Enhanced Protection for Farm and Ranch Workers Act. “I think there was some naïveté there,” says Smith. He interprets the fierce resistance to the legislation as a sign that the NDP had misread the mood of rural Alberta.

“What happened over time is that they [the NDP] started getting very insular,” he says. “I didn’t have my first real face-to-face meeting with Premier Notley, even though I’d been asking for one, until three years into her mandate.” He thinks the NDP’s subsequent time as the Official Opposition (2019–) has strengthened the party, and that it’s now time for the NDP to give Albertans something to fight for, not merely against. That’s what the AUPE plans on doing,

While the re-election of a staunchly conservative government last spring might seem to indicate a return to traditional Alberta politics, Smith makes no assumptions about how the next few years will play out. “I think we know the premier has certain beliefs and a direction, but it depends on how the government operates. A good number of new MLAs have come in with new ideas and new backgrounds.”

The cost-of-living crisis has raised the stakes considerably. Mary Jane Fisher has been a licensed practical nurse for over 12 years, usually employed by Alberta Health Services. She is the chair of AUPE Local 045, lives in Okotoks and has a job at a homecare facility in High River. She and her husband renegotiated their mortgage in early 2023, and their monthly payments jumped by $900. “I’m one of the lucky ones,” she says. “My kids are grown up. They’ve left the house. If my kids were still little, in school, $900 a month would have absolutely broken us to the point where we would lose our home. So much for savings, retirement income—anything like that’s completely gone out the window. We’re just barely scraping by.”

Fisher is not alone in her struggles. She says morale among her fellow healthcare workers is low. The repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic are still felt acutely. “You feel like you’re a healthcare hero, and then you go to feeling like you’re a zero when you’re not getting the recognition and the respect that you deserve.”

Like many other leaders in the AUPE, Fisher is deeply concerned about privatization. She describes a new practice called “client-directed homecare.” Under this model, if a client qualifies for homecare but the local facility cannot meet the needs (typically because of staff shortages), the government provides funds through Alberta Blue Cross for the client to hire their own private caregivers. According to Fisher, under such arrangements, the wages paid to the caregivers—those actually providing the frontline services—can sometimes be as low as the minimum wage.

Private homecare is already widespread in Edmonton and Calgary. Now, Fisher says, the risk of privatization is coming to rural Alberta. “In rural Alberta,” she explains, “we’re still lucky that we have in-house healthcare aides. That provides way better streamlined services, because nurses and healthcare aides are all in one office. So our healthcare aides know our nurses, they know exactly what they need to be doing with their clients, and it’s way better.”

Guy Smith believes unions can continue to make progress and win concessions for workers in Alberta, and by extension create benefits for all Albertans. He’s seen evidence of it during his entire career and in all parts of the province, including rural Alberta. He’s seen enthusiastic support for workers on picket lines. “Big trucks—people who may work in the resource sector—they’re honking and waving and dropping off coffee because they actually understand
that sort of David-and-Goliath kind of struggle,” he says.

If the past tells us anything, Smith says, it’s to never count out the AUPE. From near-bankruptcy and rapidly declining membership in 1995 to full coffers and 95,000 members as of 2023, President Smith says he’s ready to take on Premier Smith. “At the end of the day, we have ourselves to rely on, and that’s it,” he says. He’s not smiling.

Laurence Miall is the author of Blind Spot (NeWest Press) and writes on politics and culture for various publications.

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Some level of disagreement is expected—even necessary—in democracies such as Alberta. Elections must offer voters a set of distinct and viable options to choose from. We encounter problems, however, when these options become too antithetical, and when the opposing parties challenge each other’s very legitimacy instead of their points of view. Polarization left unchecked is a threat to our democratic norms and institutions. It destroys the common ground necessary for productive dialogue and debate.

Polarization has played a significant role in the rise of extremist movements. According to the Organization for the Prevention of Violence, Alberta is home to an increase in violent extremism and hate crimes. These movements feature anti-authority and conspiracy narratives that impact our ability to respond to crises such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. A divided and resentful political culture creates instability and even violence, such as the January 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington, D.C., or the February 2022 blockade at the Coutts border crossing.

Many of us think people never change their views, won’t listen, won’t accept when they’re wrong

What can we do, as responsible Albertans, to address this According to some, the answer lies in promoting communication across partisan lines: that is, encouraging people to engage in dialogue with those they disagree with politically. However, simply saying “we need to talk to one another” is not enough when the “other” has an entirely different view of how we should be talking. Challenges can arise when one person is competitive, the other collaborative or when one person aims to change the other’s mind, while the other is intent on simply exchanging perspectives or being heard.

The Common Ground team at the University of Alberta has been exploring new ways of practising dialogue more effectively. Original data collected in our 2021 Viewpoint Alberta survey showed that oppositional dialogue is still happening, most often in person: around 90 per cent of Albertans stated that they had engaged in political conversations with people of an opposite viewpoint over the past month. No other means of dialogue came close to this face-to-face contact, with the nearest being over voice call (44 per cent) and social media (42 per cent).

For over two-thirds of Albertans, oppositional dialogue occurs within their place of residence. This suggests that differences of opinion are literally “close to home” for most people. Women are more likely to engage in oppositional dialogue at home than men (a gap of 15 percentage points), while men are more likely to discuss politics with someone on the other side of the political spectrum when they’re at work (again, a 15-point gap compared to women) or in public (10-point gap). Members of Generation X are less likely to engage in oppositional dialogue at home but more likely to do so in the workplace than Millennials or Boomers.

Engaging in oppositional dialogue does not mean Albertans enjoy it. When asked to describe a time that they engaged in oppositional dialogue, fewer than one in five respondents reported having a positive experience. Nearly a third reported feeling uncomfortable or having been engaged in “conflict” as a result.

One Albertan commented: “The worst opposing-views conversation I’ve had recently was with someone who thinks the COVID-19 vaccines are a hoax, and that it’s a campaign to test large-scale population effects… I left feeling stressed and angry because I was called stupid a few too many times, and my experience was invalidated. I think they can believe anything they want, but when I can give evidence behind my statements and [they can’t], and they refuse to even consider my statements, I find I don’t want to interact with them anymore.”

When asked why they thought other people might choose not to engage in oppositional dialogue, half of our survey respondents cite worries over emotional stress, conflict or the potential for physical danger. Our interviews validated these concerns, with several Albertans describing times when they felt a physical or psychological risk associated with engaging with people they don’t agree with politically. Others saw little point in the dialogue in the first place. Nearly a third of Albertans think other people will never change their views, won’t listen, or won’t accept when they are wrong. Though many Albertans find at least some value in engaging with people who have different views, most hold a negative view of oppositional dialogue.

Of course, not every viewpoint is worth engaging through oppositional dialogue. Engaging with racists, homophobes, misogynists and their ilk is beyond the pale for many Albertans. Some fear reprisal or violence for even raising a topic. These sorts of dynamics fall outside the scope of our comments here.

Fortunately, our study revealed one effective tactic for promoting constructive oppositional dialogue: active listening.

The technique involves focusing fully on hearing the other person’s point of view, observing both verbal and non-verbal messages. It means avoiding the tendency to think of your own response to your partner’s comments. Instead, active listening requires reflecting back what you’ve heard and asking questions to better understand the other person’s position. The goal is to come to a better mutual understanding of each other’s viewpoint, rather than winning the argument.

As simple as it sounds, active listening addresses many of the hang-ups Albertans have about engaging with people who hold differing political opinions. Half of our participants reported shying away from oppositional dialogue because their partner would refuse to acknowledge their point of view. Every one of our interviewees noted that feeling heard was a central component to good dialogue, whether that dialogue was viewed as competitive, co-operative or something else in between.

Feeling heard is crucial to feeling valued and respected in political discussions. Without it, many Albertans shut down, disengage or avoid conversations altogether. Others feel the need to go on the offensive in these discussions, becoming more abrasive as the only means of being heard by the other side. In both cases, moderate voices cede the broader discourse to the most extreme among us, further polarizing our politics.

Engaged and active listening isn’t just a principle we should be teaching children. It’s something we need to practise with even greater intention when having challenging political conversations. So, although knowledge of political subjects, analytical thinking and public speaking skills are important to oppositional dialogue, active listening provides each of us the ability to help our conversational partner open up and be more receptive to receiving new or challenging information. Without active listening, our other dialogue skills are of little value.

To change a mind, finding common ground is a crucial first step

For those looking to engage in more-meaningful oppositional dialogue, we offer the following suggestions:

1) Listen to understand, not to undermine. Active listening can entail paraphrasing things your partner has said, using expressions such as “What I am hearing is…” and “Is that right?” Summarize your understanding in a way that reflects their interpretation of things. You are not agreeing by restating. You are showing your partner that you are trying to understand what they said as they said it. Asking open-ended questions can also let your partner know you are not trying to pin them into a specific response. Use non-verbal cues such as eye contact and nodding gently to show you are engaged. Active listening involves using your whole body, resisting the temptation to reach for your phone. Even if the person doesn’t hold eye contact, you’re showing them they have your attention and that the conversation matters.

2) Demonstrate a willingness to change your mind and learn something new. In our survey responses, people were reluctant to talk to those they feel have already dismissed their perspective even before hearing it. Small conciliatory phrases such as “this is what I think right now,” “as far as I know…” or “I could be wrong” can go a long way. It shows your partner that you’re open to hearing new information and gives them room to reciprocate—to admit they might be wrong or admit they haven’t heard a piece of information before. You are modelling the type of behaviour you would like them to practise.

3) Demonstrate empathy. Many survey respondents were concerned about becoming overly emotional or having to talk to someone who is overly emotional. Our study revealed that while some Albertans value logical, fact-based discussion, others were put off by it. Using affective statements can help. This involves using “I…” phrases instead of “you…” phrases, placing your own feelings at the forefront of your comment. For instance, instead of saying, “COVID-19 anti-vaxxers are terrifying and their behaviour is dangerous,” you can say, “I feel frightened when people refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine, as I am concerned about the danger they might pose to those around them.” The statement is not judgmental; it is your emotional response. It shows your conversational partner that you aren’t trying to attack them. When you notice your partner making similar affective statements, acknowledge and validate their feelings, avoiding the tendency to minimize or dismiss their emotions.

4) Affirm your relationship with the person. A third of Albertans report they are more likely to engage in oppositional dialogue with a family member or close friend than they are with a stranger. Nonetheless, it can be hard to have oppositional dialogue with people you are close to. If you feel comfortable doing so, remind the person as the conversation begins that you value your relationship more than the outcome of the discussion. This can help ease tension and promote a more respectful exchange.

5) Find common ground and consider the other side. This is a way of overcoming polarization, but it can be difficult to put into practice. Below are a series of questions that can help open new ways of thinking. These include:

How important is X belief to you?

When did you first come to believe it and what got you there?

Have you ever shifted your beliefs on this topic?

What is the most convincing counterpoint to your view?

These questions can help open up space for doubt, empathy and further exploration of the logical underpinnings of beliefs, with the aim of finding similarities that can be used as a foundation moving forward. If opposing viewpoints have no clear common ground, perhaps the journeys there or underlying motivations do. You may find you share a common objective but disagree on the best means of achieving it. This opens up some common ground on which to build.

6) Understand that people have varying levels of tolerance for dialogue and conflict. According to our research, many Albertans who are reluctant to engage in political discussions are conflict-avoiders. Consider whether the person you are talking to seems comfortable or willing to talk at all, let alone about politics. Studies have shown that a relatively high number of people are interested in hearing opposing views to their own (some two-thirds of Americans, for instance), but that this percentage is dependent on their choosing to seek out that information, not having it pushed on them. To this end, be patient and do not force dialogue where the other person does not seem interested, even if you feel a desire to talk about politics.

These skills are not meant to be used as a cheat sheet to change someone’s mind. Even if your ultimate goal is to encourage the changing of minds—your own or someone else’s—finding common ground is a crucial first step. People who feel dismissed, undervalued or unheard are unlikely to shift their modes of thinking. That’s why dialogue practices like these can mitigate against polarization by giving your partner at least one non-confrontational and even positive encounter with opposing political views.

Thomas Brown is a U of A alumnus and peacebuilding researcher. Jared Wesley is a professor of poli sci at U of A and lead researcher on the Common Ground initiative.

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In the end Alberta achieved very modest job growth during Kenney’s time, roughly the same as comparable jurisdictions. The more notable outcome—and I’d argue the UCP’s actual agenda all along—has been a significant shift in wealth from workers to employers by cheapening labour. Alberta may have slightly more jobs now than when the UCP took office, but it also has more jobs that are worse: that pay less, to workers with fewer rights, toiling under worse conditions.

Illustration by Gerry Rasmussen

Kenney began his attack on worker rights by targeting teenagers. In June 2019 the UCP cut the minimum wage for most workers under 18 from $15 an hour to $13. Kenney’s rationale was that a lower minimum wage would mean more jobs. “Thirteen dollars an hour is a heck of a lot more than zero bucks an hour, and that’s the option here,” he said. There was (and still is) no evidence that lowering wages creates employment for youth. The only indisputable outcome was more money in the pockets of low-wage employers and less for students, many of whom were saving to afford rapidly rising post-secondary tuitions prompted by government funding cuts.

The UCP also left the regular minimum wage to languish at $15 an hour during Kenney’s time in office, despite the cost of living rising over that period by about 8 per cent. Some 300,000 workers, mostly adult women who have permanent and long-term jobs with large companies, bore the costs of this policy, while the beneficiaries were, again, low-wage employers.

Kenney also took a run at injured workers, reducing their workers’ compensation benefits by half a billion dollars over five years. This included capping wage-loss benefits and de-indexing them from the cost of living, removing an employer’s obligation to rehire injured workers, and radically reducing the likelihood of workers receiving compensation for psychological conditions such as PTSD.

According to one-time UCP labour minister Jason Copping, employers told him that “rising costs” put the Workers’ Compensation Board’s (WCB’s) “future state of sustainability in doubt.” If this is what employers told Copping, it is simply untrue. In 2020 Alberta’s accident fund was fully funded, with $13.7-billion in assets. Indeed, there has been so much excess cash in the accident fund that the WCB has since 2018 subsidized employer premiums by over $1-billion.

A different way to control workers’ compensation costs would be to reduce the number of workplace injuries. In late 2020 Copping introduced significant changes to Alberta occupational health and safety (OHS) rules, which he framed as “improving safety for Alberta workers and making workplaces safer.” In reality these changes gutted the powers of workplace health and safety committees to make workplaces safer—including eliminating the requirement for regular inspections—and made it harder for workers to refuse unsafe work.

Michael Hughes, a spokesperson for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401, told the Edmonton Journal that the right to refuse unsafe work was key to workers protecting themselves during massive COVID outbreaks at the Cargill and JBS meatpacking plants. “We feel it may have actually saved people’s lives.” He said the Kenney government was reckless to weaken that right.

At the same time, the government cut enforcement. In the UCP era the number of compliance orders written by OHS inspectors to employers, directing them to remedy unsafe work, fell by 49.6 per cent, while the number of tickets written for violations dropped by 93.4 per cent. Charges laid against employers and fines levied also declined. Not surprisingly, laxer rules and phantasmal enforcement resulted in the number of serious injuries rising by 16 per cent during Kenney’s tenure.

Finally, the UCP made changes to Alberta’s rules about overtime that allow employers to impose so-called agreements on the averaging of weekly work hours. These “agreements” allow employers to delay the payment of overtime premiums. Minister Copping nonsensically framed these changes as “expanding choice for workers” when in fact the choice of whether or not to pay overtime is granted solely to employers.

The upshot of the UCP’s overtime changes is that employers can require employees to work up to 208 overtime hours per year (roughly five weeks of additional work) without having to pay any overtime premiums. Given that an estimated $3.3-billion in overtime was paid in 2018, the UCP’s changes transferred untold hundreds of millions of dollars from workers to their bosses.

These changes affected a broad swath of Albertans. But Kenney and the UCP particularly targeted public-sector workers. This began in June of 2019, when the UCP legislatively delayed wage-increase arbitrations (affecting 180,000 workers) that had been negotiated with the former NDP government. Public-sector workers—mostly women—and their unions had viewed the arbitrations as a quid pro quo for agreeing to a two-year wage freeze (2017–2019) and saw the delay as a betrayal. During the legislative debate over this bill, Kenney handed out bright-pink earplugs to his caucus. This juvenile behaviour set the tone for the years that followed.

The government rationalized the delay to give it time to get a handle on the province’s finances, which it characterized as “worse than expected.” The UCP’s assertion that the province’s coffers were bare did not, however, stop it from handing business owners approximately $4.5-billion in tax cuts over four years (tax cuts that did not result in meaningful job growth). In the interim the Kenney government set out to justify draconian legislative changes that would drive deep cuts to public-sector wages.

In September 2019 Kenney’s hand-picked panel on Alberta’s finances recommended cutting public-sector spending. It urged the government to erode the wages and benefits of workers who deliver public services (including doctors), either at the bargaining table or through legislation. The UCP wasted no time in complying and, before the year was out, passed the Ensuring Fiscal Sustainability Act, 2019. Tucked at the back of this omnibus bill was the Public Sector Employers Act, whereby the government gave itself the authority to impose a bargaining mandate on all public-sector employers, such as school boards, post-secondary institutions and Alberta Health Services. Employers were furthermore required keep their mandate a secret from the unions during bargaining, and the government gave itself a veto over any settlement that strayed from the mandate.

Illustration by Gerry Rasmussen.

Critics predicted these mandates would make collective bargaining a hollow and fettered process. Unions would go through the motions of bargaining with the employer at the table. Meanwhile, the real decisions would be made by the government in the back room, safely insulated from any consequences. This analysis turned out to be spot on.

The omnibus bill also gave the UCP the power to unilaterally cancel its province-wide agreement on physician compensation, which it did in February 2020. This move was unprecedented in this province; the Alberta Medical Association called it “outrageous.” The government then imposed a new agreement containing significant rollbacks in physician fees and other rights. Physicians were furious, and backlash from doctors and the public alike resulted in the government partially reversing course. After two years of bargaining (including a tentative settlement that was rejected by doctors in 2021), a new agreement was ratified in September 2022 with a below-inflation increase in compensation. In the interim, many doctors left the province, and many Albertans, particularly outside Edmonton and Calgary, faced difficulty accessing family MDs or specialists.

Finally, before going to the table with virtually every unionized public-sector worker in the province, the UCP also made significant changes to Alberta’s labour laws. The Restoring Balance in Alberta’s Workplaces Act was passed in the summer of 2020. In addition to making it easier for employers to thwart workers’ efforts to unionize (under the predictably misleading assertion that the UCP was “restoring workplace democracy”), this Act severely restricted picketing activities during a strike or lockout.

When collective bargaining reaches an impasse, workers can go on strike. The purpose of a strike is to apply economic pressure on an employer to agree to contract provisions that workers also can accept. Workers do so by withholding their labour (which disrupts operations) as well as by picketing. Picketing lets workers dissuade potential customers from doing business with a struck employer. Picketing can also stop or delay traffic into and out of a workplace, which makes it more difficult for the employer to carry on operations. The UCP altered Alberta’s Labour Relations Code to prohibit strikers from obstructing or impeding anyone who wishes to cross a picket line.

Workers sometimes also engage in what is known as secondary picketing in front of businesses owned by their employer’s customers or suppliers or in a public space. The UCP’s changes now require picketers to receive prior permission from the Labour Board to picket anywhere but at their regular place of work. And the UCP’s Critical Infrastructure Defence Act gives the government the power to prohibit picketing in certain public places, including sidewalks, boulevards and roadways.

“These new rules have rendered legal picketing ineffective and effective picketing illegal,” said Susan Cake, assistant professor of human resources and labour relations at Athabasca University. “This has tipped the playing field significantly towards employers, including the government, the largest employer of unionized workers in Alberta.” While the labour movement promised fierce resistance to picketing changes, it launched no legal challenge with any legs. Unions and their members have clearly been reluctant to violate UCP government laws, because of the significant and immediate consequences attached to doing so combined with the delay and uncertain outcome of court challenges.

The UCP’s Restoring Balance in Alberta’s Workplaces Act also interfered with unions’ ability to collect dues. Normally, unions present budgets to their members to vote on each year. Once a budget is passed, every member must pay the union dues required, to fund union activities. The UCP now requires unions to separate out the cost of “core” union functions (e.g., negotiations, handling grievances and educating members) from “political activities and other causes.” Union members are only required to pay the portion of dues devoted to core activities. Unions must get each member to annually opt-in for non-core activities.

According to Kenney, this time-consuming process means “no longer will union workers be forced to fund political campaigns of union bosses!” But the real reason Kenney wanted to interfere in internal union governance, according to United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401 president Tom Hesse, was “to be disruptive, to foment dissent and to encumber unions so they can’t operate.” One knock-on effect of Kenney’s meddling is that unions are reducing their support to charities, community organizations and disaster-relief agencies in order to avoid the hassle of getting members to opt-in. A 2022 Parkland Institute study suggests this will entail a $6-million hit to Alberta communities.

When “bargaining” with major public-sector unions in core government services (e.g., education, healthcare, post-secondary) began in 2020, employers initially proposed wage cuts of 3 per cent to 4 per cent, followed by several years of wage freezes and other sector-specific benefit rollbacks. This pattern clearly demonstrated the government mandates at work behind the scenes. Union leaders began preparing and mobilizing members for strike action, and in October 2020 thousands of AUPE healthcare workers engaged in a one-day wildcat strike to express opposition to the government’s plans to privatize 11,000 healthcare jobs.

As contracts began to be settled in late 2021 and 2022, public-sector workers achieved modest wage increases ranging from 2.75 per cent to 4.25 per cent over four years. While better than initially expected, these settlements continued to fall far behind inflation. And given the demands placed on public-sector workers during the first years of the COVID pandemic, these miserly increases were also deeply insulting.

Post-secondary employers, facing government budget cuts and the government’s secret mandate, were particularly aggressive during bargaining. Faculty at Concordia University of Edmonton, a private university that receives significant public funding, struck in early 2022, and a five-week strike followed at the University of Lethbridge. The Lethbridge strike ended with an agreement that followed the provincial pattern. The employer’s unreasonable behaviour during the strike provided more evidence that the government, not the board of governors, was calling the shots at the bargaining table.

Much of the shift in the government’s demands between 2020 and 2022 can be attributed to the impacts of the pandemic. But even as the crisis revealed the importance and scarcity of healthcare workers, the UCP continued to do less than other provinces to support healthcare workers, including refusing to provide bonus pay to nurses. Alberta’s suddenly improved fiscal situation due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rising oil prices also took away much of the excuse for imposing drastic austerity.

The UCP’s agenda has been to shift wealth from workers to employers.

The mistreatment of public-sector workers did not end at the bargaining table. The UCP pursued numerous “work-intensification” efforts in healthcare. In the fall of 2020, for example, it announced its plan to lay off 11,000 support staff in cleaning, food, laundry and protective services at AHS. In July 2022 all community lab services were handed to DynaLIFE Medical Labs, which move cost another several hundred public employees their jobs.

Kenney also cut funding to Alberta school boards, resulting in approximately 25,000 education workers and education assistants being laid off in early 2020. These layoffs, amounting to approximately 1 per cent of Alberta’s entire workforce, were announced via Twitter on a weekend, only days after Education Minister Adriana LaGrange had said school boards would see no funding cuts. LaGrange later said this was a temporary layoff in response to COVID school closures, and that funding would be restored once in-person classes resumed. Later she said 2,000 of those jobs would never return.

Teachers also saw the UCP hand the management of their pension fund over to the government-controlled Alberta Investment Management Corporation, despite AIMCo’s history of questionable investment decisions and poor returns. Teachers had to go to court to regain control over their pensions.

The UCP government also made drastic cuts to the post-secondary system, including slashing funding to the University of Alberta by 33 per cent between 2019 and 2022. The U of A responded by firing more than 1,100 people (mostly support staff) and hiking tuition by more than 20 per cent.

The government’s unwillingness to address the airborne transmission of COVID through meaningful public health measures means public-sector workers must now perform their jobs in unsafe workplaces. As of September 2022, Alberta’s WCB had accepted 22,478 time-loss claims for COVID, the vast majority of them from municipal, healthcare and education workers. This figure actually undercounts cases in education, because most Alberta teachers are excluded from the ambit of workers’ compensation.

Working very hard in unnecessarily dangerous workplaces for stagnant wages and declining job security is a recipe for burnout and attrition. The government’s refusal to allow school boards to require classroom masking (which directive led to high rates of illness and absenteeism) and its insistence on imposing a curriculum that is poorly designed (e.g., “find gravity on a globe”), age-inappropriate, plagiarized and often outright racist is demoralizing and exhausting.

In January 2022, 37 per cent of teachers said they soon planned to leave the profession or the province due to stress, exhaustion and anxiety. Long-time Alberta public school teacher and principal Sue Bell told reporters she retired early because of a lack of government support for teachers during the pandemic. “I would have worked for a few years more, but the last year-and-a-half just burnt me out. I was done.”

Burnout and illness among nurses are also routinely creating staff shortages, delays for patients awaiting surgeries and other medical treatments, and the periodic closure of rural emergency services. Not surprisingly, healthcare jobs now often go unfilled and other provinces are aggressively recruiting Alberta nurses. Heather Smith, long-time president of the United Nurses of Alberta, told CBC that her members “are just not prepared to deal with the kind of disrespect they’re feeling here in the province. They want workplaces that respect them and value [their] contributions… And they’re quite prepared to do it in other locations.”

Calgary emergency-room physician J. Edward Les wrote in the Calgary Herald about the long-term impact of the government’s treatment of doctors. “Physicians are running harder and harder to keep up, and in return they’re gifted with constant disrespect from governments and growing abuse from frustrated patients. It’s no mystery why family doctors are leaving in droves, and why we can’t attract enough new ones. The real mystery, perhaps, is why there are any good family physicians left at all.”

Things look no better under Kenney’s successor, Danielle Smith, who has asserted without evidence that staffing shortages have been manufactured by AHS. She has also mused about specifically recruiting unvaccinated healthcare workers. The value of hiring healthcare workers who are skeptical of basic infection-control protocols is hard to fathom.

Illustration by Gerry Rasmussen.

One of the most alarming outcomes of the UCP’s sustained attack on workers is the possibility that the morale and trust of many workers has been irrevocably damaged. This is especially bad in the public sector, as such damage can compromise the functioning of basic public services—doctor availability, ambulance response times, surgery wait times, high-school graduation rates, even worsening math proficiency.

In my experience, public-sector workers are used to recurring bouts of difficult working conditions. For the most part, they just persevere. This reflects that they have deeply held commitments to their students or patients, to their co-workers, to their sense of professional duty and belief in the value of publicly delivered services. It also reflects that they have invested in their careers and communities. Most public-sector workers can see that the cyclical nature of the work means better times will return. Rarely are working conditions so bad that leaving a public-sector job, the profession or the province is worth the cost.

But profoundly bad and worsening conditions with no prospects for improvement can shift this calculus. At some point a further harm or indignity, however small, can cause a worker to throw in the towel. Once a worker makes this decision, it’s very hard to get them to re-engage. This is because fixing the problem isn’t just a matter of the employer walking back that last bad thing it did. Rather, it has to fix the whole range of issues that led to this moment. Few employers or politicians are prepared to repudiate their entire agenda.

When a worker actually quits and moves on (rather than just quietly giving up), they’re unlikely to return. Potential replacements, having heard through the social media grapevine just how rotten things are in Alberta, can be tough to recruit. Only people with no better options would take a public-sector job in Alberta, given how badly the UCP treated their predecessors. This bodes ill for all Albertans, who would receive worse service, often in our most vulnerable moments. And it represents a damning indictment of the UCP government.

Bob Barnetson is a professor of labour relations at Athabasca. His most recent research is a chapter in Anger and Angst: Jason Kenney’s Legacy and Alberta’s Right (Black Rose, 2023).

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