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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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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The Western Canada High School English and social studies teacher stood in front of his packed and masked morning class trying not to be distracted. Today, November 26, 2020, councillors would vote on whether to cut money from the police budget and reallocate the funds to other services aimed at improving community safety. The decision would end a four-day marathon of budget talks. Because Walcott was a spokesperson for Defund2Fund Calgary, a community group focused on police reform, he very much wanted to be there. But Calgary council meetings are held on weekday mornings, when most people are working.

The night before the meeting, Walcott was worried. After months of meeting with city councillors, Calgary Police Service (CPS) and activists, all of a sudden there was silence. A few days earlier Walcott had talked to Evan Woolley, the councillor for Ward 8, who had initially drafted the police budget motion as a response to systemic racism and to police brutality incidents earlier in 2020. He assured Walcott everything would be fine. Calgary police chief Mark Neufeld had said he supported a modest reduction to CPS funding. The police had launched an anti-racism strategy a few months prior to the budget vote.

Later that night Walcott received a text from another councillor: “Don’t worry,” it read. “Everything’s good. It’s handled.”

As Walcott stood in the classroom, though, he heard a familiar ding on his phone. Then again. Ding. Ding. Ding. He silenced it, forcing himself to not look at the dozens of messages flooding his device. As soon as class was over, he grabbed his phone. The messages, from fellow activists, said the votes weren’t adding up. The motion had been amended, then defeated. And again amended and defeated again. And then a third time.

“Each motion was chipping away at what we fought for,” Walcott said. “[Council] thought they were doing us a favour. They thought this would be a win.”

After a full day of compromise, Calgary’s 15-member council decided that $8-million would be given to CPS for “alternative call response models.” In short, the police emerged from the four-day budget debate with more money than they’d asked for. This, even though CPS itself had barely a month earlier proposed a $40-million reallocation, in part “to accelerate actions to improve equity, diversity and inclusion within CPS.”

The decision, says Walcott, sent the wrong message about police accountability: “Even the police knew that this was a bad outcome.”

It’s been two years since that day. For Walcott, much has changed. He’s no longer a teacher at Western Canada High School—he’s now the councillor for Ward 8. He was elected in October 2021, replacing the retiring Woolley.

Walcott is only the second Black councillor to have been elected in Calgary. Virnetta Anderson was the first, in 1974. “I’m continuing the legacy,” he says. “I’m a part of the legacy.”

Walcott is used to a certain spotlight, having been in a classroom with 37 sets of eyes staring at him as he shares ideas and has lively conversations with students. “Teaching is so intimate,” he says. But his new role is markedly different: “When you’re a councillor, you get backlash.”

The first backlash came after he wrote about the Beltline protests. For the better part of the last two years, protesters have shown up to the neighbourhood just south of downtown Calgary to express opposition to public health measures. What started small became much bigger and much noisier by mid-winter 2022. Residents were increasingly agitated by the protesters, who were harassing passersby and blocking roads.

Walcott, who represents Beltline residents, published an op-ed in February 2022 in the Calgary Herald speaking out against the protests. “Canadian society is not fragile because of how easy it is for our citizens to express their discontent,” he wrote. “It is fragile because of how long we allow discontent to fester into intolerant views, into hate towards institutions and toward each other, before we act.”

Then the emails started coming. Complaints ranged from people asking why Walcott didn’t stick to topics such as waste management, to people asking why he’s against “family-friendly” events. “When I was an advocate, I got rewarded when I spoke out,” he said. “Now, in this role, when I speak out, I get in trouble.”

Defund2Fund would reallocate $20-million (roughly 2.5 per cent of the Calgary Police budget) to social services.

Walcott walks a tightrope every day, trying to support his constituents in Ward 8 while also carefully criticizing a growing far-right, racist movement. “The rules these people are playing by aren’t often challenged,” he says. “We expect residents and business owners to be tolerant of the crowd. So protesters say ‘We have freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly.’ Alright. But you also have section 1 of the Charter about reasonable limits. That’s why we have bylaws, and why people need a permit to protest.”

The criticism comes from all sides, he adds. “People now ask me ‘Why aren’t you critical of the police?’ ” he says. But being elected doesn’t mean he’s changed his views, Walcott says; it means he’s expressing them differently.

“Police reform means improving outcomes for people in need and for those who have historically been oppressed by colonial and racialized systems,” says Walcott. “Police reform in its truest sense—revisiting hiring practices, lethal-force training, misconduct reviews, the ability to dismiss people from the job—sits with the province. But municipalities have the important power of governing the police through the police commission.” And councillors vote on the police budget.

In March 2022 Chief Neufeld announced that CPS officers were no longer permitted to wear the “thin blue line” patch on their uniforms—a black and grey Canada flag with a blue line, representing police, bisecting it. For some people, the patch represents police honouring officers killed in the line of duty. For others, the patch is a symbol of white supremacy. After fierce opposition from the Calgary Police Association (CPA), with the union distributing “countless” patches and announcing that its members would defy the order, Neufeld suspended his decision.

Weeks of discussion resulted in the union meeting the CPS brass halfway. “We reluctantly recommend you remove the TBL [thin blue line] patches and comply with [the Police Commission’s] order,” wrote CPA president Johnny Orr to his members in June. As a compromise, officers are allowed to wear the patch on their dress uniform.

Walcott faces pressure from some activists to denounce the symbol. But it’s not that simple. “When a police officer says, ‘Why are you going after the thin blue line?’ you want to take a step back,” he says. “What could that symbol mean to other people?” But this notion cuts both ways, he says. “For example, we have the Canadian red ensign. It’s the ol’ Canadian flag, right But it can be a symbol used by right-wing nationalists who are saying ‘no’ to truth and reconciliation and ‘no’ to immigrants. It doesn’t matter how I think about a symbol; it’s more how it’s being used.”

Walcott became part of Alberta’s Black community in 2006. When his mother died at the age of 39, Walcott, then a teen, left his home in Scarborough, Ontario, to live with his father in Hidden Valley, a neighbourhood in north Calgary. His father had come to the city a decade or so earlier from Cape Breton. The first Black settlers had arrived on that island in the 1600s. “I’m a descendant of Caribbean slaves,” says Walcott. “That’s a huge part of our history.”

Walcott was 16 years old when he entered Grade 11 at Notre Dame High School and he was one of only a few Black students. He wasn’t ready for the culture shock. “I went from going to Caribana in Toronto to the Stampede.”

He did what he thought he needed to do to fit in. He began to act out the stereotypes. “I used to do this thing in high school,” he said. “If we went to get sandwiches, I’d say ‘Where’s the fried chicken It was self defence. Sometimes I worried about my Blackness. I felt: Either you stand out or you assimilate. There was no middle ground. So you do ‘code-switching,’ you know, using your white voice. You choose your circles [in which] to use your normal voice.”

His salvation came at Mount Royal University, where he studied Black history. For the first time, Walcott says, he found his community, his people. He went on to the University of British Columbia to get his education degree. He returned to Calgary in 2017 and began teaching and coaching junior girls basketball at Western Canada High School.

As the school’s only Black teacher, he noticed the lack of Black history and culture in the curriculum. In 2017 he became the anti-racism equity facilitator for the Calgary Board of Education. Then, in 2020, he partnered with the Canadian Cultural Mosaic Foundation to start a petition calling for the CBE to create an anti-racism task force. Within days the petition had acquired almost 7,000 signatures. A few weeks later the CBE created the Collaboration for Anti-Racism and Equity Support Advisory Council (CBE C.A.R.E.S.). In 2021 Walcott received a Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence.

“He knows how to build trust with people,” says Carma Cornea, the principal at Western Canada. “When he started our Black History month programming, he made sure we had our students take the lead. He’s both humble and unafraid to say sorry if he makes a mistake.”

Inspired by Walcott’s work, Ire Olaoye and Alisha Omusuku, two Grade 11 students, created a cultural day of events at the school. “We wouldn’t have done this without him,” says Olaoye. “He’s done so much to support us, even when he’s not here. No other teachers look like us here, and he supported us.”

Walcott loved to introduce his students to the Harlem Renaissance, teaching that Black cultural movement right alongside Shakespeare and the Beatniks. One of his favourite poems is “Mother to Son,” by Langston Hughes:

Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

On July 7, 2020, Calgary city council hosted a special public hearing on systemic racism and police violence. It had been 43 days since the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which had been recorded and the video played over and over, prompting protests advocating for police reform in more than 60 countries. It had been 38 days since Maurice McLoughlin resigned from CPS rather than face disciplinary action for killing Anthony Heffernan, an unarmed man in mental distress when the police came to his hotel room. It had been more than six years since Godfred Addai-Nyamekye was beaten by CPS constable Trevor Lindsay in a construction zone in –28°C weather, which resulted in an internal police investigation that is still unresolved.

Walcott spoke at the meeting. He was given five minutes to sum up his experience. “As a person of colour, as a biracial man, as a Black man, I have lived under the shadow of qualifications my entire life. I’ve had to qualify my Canadian-ness, I’ve had to qualify my whiteness, I’ve had to qualify my Blackness. And then I moved to the northeast [Calgary], and somehow all the work I had done qualifying and quantifying my value was lost in the stories and stigma of the northeast. I realized the terror people felt toward the northeast correlates along poverty and colour lines.”

“I believe we need to defund the police,” he told the audience. “A $400-million-plus budget for police is absurd in light of the $60-million earmarked [municipally] for social services. Police officers are not mental health workers. Police officers are not social workers. Police officers are not community outreach workers. Police officers are not paramedics. Police officers do amazing work. They are a part of a system I believe can work, but we have placed too much on their shoulders and it is weighing them down.”

“Defund the police” became the catchphrase of 2020, albeit one with different meanings to different people. In an op-ed in Chatelaine, Sandy Hudson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada, described the defund the police movement as a push to reimagine public safety. “Black activists are not saying that we need to do away with publicly provided safety services,” she wrote. “Instead, we are acknowledging a very troublesome truth: at best, most police services do not keep any of us very safe. At worst, they target, brutalize and kill Black and Indigenous people. When we say Black lives matter, we’re saying our lives are worth [consideration of] a new way to provide safety and security services in our society.”

Indigenous and Black people are disproportionately targeted by the police in Canada. Department of Justice data show that Black people represent 7.3 per cent of federal offenders— more than double their share of the population. Nearly a third of people who enter the criminal justice system in Canada are Indigenous, even though Indigenous and First Nations people make up only 5 per cent of the adult population.

In 2020, then-mayor Naheed Nenshi tried to put to rest the idea that representatives like him advocate radical measures that would endanger public safety. “What we’re [proposing] is funding a better system,” he said. “But I think some people are—either ignorantly or wilfully—pretending that ‘defund the police’ means ‘abolish the police.’ ”

By the time of a mid-2020 Ipsos study, 48 per cent of Albertans supported the concept of defunding the police. In a June 2020 op-ed in the Calgary Herald, Chief Neufeld wrote, “Had you asked me a few weeks ago whether systemic racism was a problem in Calgary and in the Calgary Police Service, I may have said no. But after weeks of hearing many stories, some very painful, about the prevalence of racism in our city and the experiences of people of colour, it’s clear there is much more work to be done.”

Around the time of the public hearing, Walcott got a call from organizers at Defund2Fund, a local group pushing for police reform. He became their spokesperson. The original idea from Defund2Fund was for $20-million (roughly 2.5 per cent of the CPS budget), spread over two years, to be reallocated from police towards social services. The Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics reported in 2019 that an estimated 50 per cent to 80 per cent of calls to the police are “non-criminal” and consist of responses to alarms, disturbances, domestic disputes, traffic accidents, sick or injured people, overdoses or mental-health-related crises. Funding would go towards social programs dealing with these issues.

Walcott sees defunding the police as a way to prioritize what’s important. “A budget is a moral document,” he says. “It signifies what you value, because in our system, what you invest in and what you spend money on signifies your values. It makes sense to reallocate funds to social supports.”

CPS implemented an anti-racism strategy in September 2020. Walcott met often that year with Chief Neufeld, who agreed to the budget reallocation (80 per cent of CPS funding comes from city council) and directed CPS’s recommendation to city council.

But things started to unravel at the November 2, 2020, council meeting. Ward 11 councillor Jeromy Farkas and Ward 4’s Sean Chu brought forward an amendment asking for the $20-million to be taken from city reserves, not from the police budget. The amendment failed. Council approved a preliminary vote for the $20-million reallocation on the condition that CPS make a presentation before the final decision. At a subsequent meeting, after a failed attempt from Farkas and Chu to take the $20-million funding from arts and culture, council decided to take $8-million from city reserves.

“The city was more willing to spend its own money than hold the police accountable,” says Walcott. “People were saying, ‘Well, at least we got funding’ [for social services]. That’s not the point. There’s no risk in taking money from the reserves. You look progressive without solving the problem. No one at the table fully understood what we were asking for.

Walcott’s goal is to reduce the need for police and to bring awareness about how policing perpetuates systemic racism.

He has a seat at the table now. Not long after being elected, Walcott was appointed to the Calgary Police Commission. He is only its second Black commissioner. The commission oversees the $528-million CPS budget. How will having a seat at the table affect how Walcott approaches his work of reducing systemic racism and holding the police accountable to their promises to reform For Walcott, better policing will come from new commitments to anti-racism and equity efforts, from the unification of the 911, 211 and 311 support dispatch systems and from the city’s hiring more social workers and increasing financial support for non-profits that provide mental health and addiction services. His goal is to reduce the need for police in society and to bring awareness about how policing perpetuates systemic racism. “Even now,” he says, “I think the needle has moved a bit already.”

Walcott says he doesn’t like being called an activist, because he thinks the term is too narrow. He doesn’t like being called a politician either, because the term doesn’t emphasize enough how much politics involves helping people. It’s a tightrope, he says, learning how to be who you are within the expectations of new responsibilities. He settles on calling himself an “advocate,” someone who works on behalf of others.

“I’m here to help uplift the voices of those not represented, those taken for granted,” he says.

Julie Sobowale is a Saskatchewan-based writer and the western director of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists.

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Two-thirds of the 32 officers with the Blood Tribe Police Service (BTPS) identify as Indigenous. Three of them, including Melting Tallow, started to grow their hair at the outset of 2020. Long hair, in Blackfoot culture, is considered a symbol of strength. The police chief talked about the value of using his platform to showcase his identity and express pride in his heritage. He gave the example of Norman Manyfingers, a former Calgary officer who grew braids in the early 1990s. The three BTPS officers are joining in that tradition of challenging the status quo of what it means to be a police officer in Canada. “I wanted to keep that going so it’s not lost,” he said. 

Melting Tallow is 48 and has spent his career—24 years and counting—working for First Nation police services. The BTPS is one of three self-administered First Nation police services in Alberta. The other two are the Tsuut’ina Nation Police, which covers the reserve that borders southwest Calgary, and the Lakeshore Regional Police, which serves five First Nations in northern Alberta near Lesser Slave Lake.

These services are similar to others in Canada in that they’re overseen by a civilian commission and abide by laws and standards set out by legislation. But there are also important differences. One is related to funding. The federal and provincial governments jointly fund 36 such services across Canada through the First Nations Policing Program (FNPP). Federal funding comprises 52 per cent of each service budget and the province or territory covers the rest. Other differences are more philosophical. The program was created in 1991 to provide a more culturally responsive and community-focused type of policing. It was intended to address many of the same criticisms of systemic racism that are levelled against police today. The key strategy for realizing this vision was to train Indigenous people to police their own communities.

I had driven to Standoff to learn more about this independent and parallel system of law enforcement at a time of active debate across Canada about how to rethink and reform the police.

This past June, a few weeks after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Blood Tribe Chief Roy Fox issued a statement about systemic racism. He shared the story of an unprovoked attack by two RCMP officers outside his home in the late 1980s and drew a direct connection between the creation of BTPS in 1991 and discriminatory conduct by the Mounties. “Blood Tribe members have had their share of encounters with systemic racism in all areas, including the criminal justice system,” the statement reads.

The statistics are stark. Ivan Zinger, the Correctional Investigator of Canada, released a report in 2020 that showed more than 30 per cent of inmates serving a federal sentence in this country identify as Indigenous. They account for less than 5 per cent of the general Canadian population. A CBC database tracking people killed by police in Canada shows that from 2000 to June 22, 2020, 555 people lost their lives to police. Eighty-nine, or 16 per cent, were Indigenous.

Rick Ruddell, a professor of justice studies at the University of Regina, explained that the FNPP was created after government task forces and inquiries concluded that Indigenous people were getting substandard policing. First Nations started taking matters into their own hands, creating their own police without input or direction from the government. “In the 1980s… a lot of these independent police services started emerging throughout the country, Manitoba, Quebec, a little bit in Ontario,” Ruddell said. The FNPP was created to professionalize these services and provide a way to fund them. He explained how the program was well intentioned, even revolutionary. Canada is the only country in the world with a national program for funding standalone police in Indigenous communities. “The problem, though, was that they were chronically underfunded,” Ruddell said.

Today these services are seen as the second-class police service, said Erick Laming. A member of the Shabot Obaadjiwan First Nation in Ontario who’s working on his Ph.D. in criminology from the University of Toronto, Laming agrees that First Nations police have been underfunded from day one. “They’re not taken seriously to do a job even though their jobs are more complex and more difficult than a lot of other police services,” he said. Some reserves and First Nations communities have high levels of crime and poverty. These issues, Laming explained, have their roots in colonial policies such as residential schools. In 2019 the Blood Reserve, for example, had a crime severity rating five times higher than the provincial average and a violent crime severity rating six times higher. These indicators take into account both the volume and the seriousness of incidents reported to police. (The Blood Reserve is the largest reserve by area in Canada and home to about 9,000 residents.)

Trying to do more with less has undermined the FNPP’s potential. Twenty-two of the original 58 self-administered services have disbanded. Officer retention is a challenge and the proportion of Indigenous officers is falling. Dwayne Zacharie, the chief of a self-administered service from the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory south of Montreal, stepped down as the president of the First Nations Chiefs of Police Association at the end of October after serving three terms. He estimated 1,300 Indigenous officers worked under the FNPP when he joined the Kahnawake Peacekeepers in 1996. Today it’s more like 800. “So we’re going in the wrong direction,” Zacharie said.

Despite the headwinds, Blood police have achieved a remarkable feat: No BTPS officer, over the past 30 years, has fired their gun at another human. “We have never had anybody that we shot, or shot at,” Melting Tallow said.

This is especially remarkable given the long-standing distrust of police among many Indigenous people. It was the RCMP that carried out many of the Canadian government’s racist policies against Indigenous people, such as catching and returning children who tried to escape from residential schools. Indeed, Melting Tallow felt a change in how he was treated by the community when he started out as a fresh-faced constable with the Siksika Nation Police Service (since disbanded) at the age of 25. He grew up on the reserve, which is about an hour’s drive southeast of Calgary. “My circle of friends went really small,” he said. “Nobody sent me Christmas gifts and stuff, because I was transitioning into something. I had some authority. I had the power to remove someone’s rights from being a free person to being in jail.”

He admits to being a little overzealous after graduating from RCMP training in Regina. He saw the world in black and white. You did wrong, you got a ticket. You did wrong, you went to jail. Melting Tallow thought he was doing a good job. “There was no complaint about my conduct to the chief of police. The complaints came through my dad. Everybody was talking to my dad.” Casey Melting Tallow was also an officer with Siksika Police, and one day he took his son aside.

“Use your ears,” he told the young officer. “That’s what they’re there for. You only got one mouth, but you got two ears.” The advice stuck. Kyle began supplementing his by-the-book RCMP training with on-the-ground teaching from the community. “Those lessons came all the way up until even now and we’re still learning,” he said.

Melting Tallow became acting police chief of the Blood Tribe in 2016 and took the role permanently in 2018. “There’s never been anybody who has grown up in the system, so to speak, who’s taken over the lead,” he said.

The BTPS record, or lack thereof, on deadly use of force is noteworthy even for a small and rural service, Laming said. “It just highlights the cohesiveness of the relationship between police officers and the community.” He’s researching use of force by Canadian police and the experiences of Indigenous and Black community members when interacting with officers. His own database has found that over two years, 2018–2019, police in Alberta shot at people in 39 separate incidents, killing 14.

“Look at the roots of First Nation policing—you wanted people from the community, right?” Melting Tallow said. “So when you know somebody, even if they’re pointing a gun back at you, you might be poised to [shoot], but you give that second thought.” Several recent initiatives were designed to further embed Blood police in the community. Starting in 2017, new BTPS recruits are trained at Lethbridge College instead of the RCMP academy in Regina. Local elders teach cadets about Blackfoot history and culture, colonialism and the legacy of the residential school system. “When [cadets] become police officers there’s a connection already there,” Melting Tallow said. “They seek out those elders for more information. The learning is always continuous.”

At the end of 2017 Melting Tallow rented rooms at a conference centre in Lethbridge and invited his staff, police commissioners, elders, band councillors and other community leaders for a week-long brainstorm session about the future of the reserve’s police service. The discussions focused on the Declaration of Elders, the Kainayssini, which is the Blood Tribe’s constitution and provides a set of guiding principles for the Kainai people. Three values were singled out for the police: Iiyika’kimat, which means try hard or persevere; Ainnakowa, the Blackfoot term for respect; and Kimmapiiyipitsinni, compassion.

“Compassion,” Melting Tallow explains. “You’ve got to have that. We’re not just going to fill our cells and put everybody in jail. It’s not going to work, because it hasn’t worked for 100 years.” The new values are displayed on a plaque in his office. They’ve also been painted on the side of every marked police vehicle.

William Singer III  is an artist and activist who has spent most of his 56 years living on the Blood Reserve. He belongs to a variety of advocacy groups, including Idle No More, Community in Unity, the American Indian Movement and the Oldman Watershed Council. He also organizes his own o’tapi’sin aohkanooyaawa, or people’s gatherings. He held one on the reserve this past Canada Day in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

I asked Singer if he saw the video of Allan Adam, chief of the Fort Chipewyan First Nation, getting tackled and punched by an RCMP officer outside a casino in Fort McMurray in March of 2020. “When I see that, I always think, ‘Well, that could be me,’” he said.

Singer summed up his relationship with the RCMP by describing an illustration by Everett Soop, an Indigenous cartoonist and essayist whose work appeared in the Kainai News in the 1970s and early 1980s. “Me and My Shadow” was one of Soop’s first published cartoons and depicts a caricature of an Indigenous man whose shadow is in the unmistakable silhouette of a Mountie in uniform.

Singer spent seven years in residential schools and was forced to keep a closely cropped brush cut. “I didn’t like that. I felt like I was a different person,” he said. “Every family member had long hair, really long hair. So for me that was a tradition that I wanted to keep going.” His father warned him that long hair would make him a target for police.

“When I was 16, I started having run-ins with the RCMP here on the reserve, either in Fort Macleod, Cardston or Lethbridge.” It got worse when he started driving. “I would get followed. I would get hassled.” And when he was in his early 20s, his cousin, Chester Heavy Runner Jr., was shot and killed by a Lethbridge police officer.

Singer said his interactions with the RCMP have improved recently. Officers from the Cardston detachment support him when he organizes an event. “But it’s just that understanding that they’re on the other side of the road in a different place. And I’m on this side. It’s a completely different world.”

He’s not talking about a metaphorical road. The Blood Reserve is bordered by three rivers: the Oldman to the north, the Belly to the west and the St. Mary to the east. The south border runs horizontally along the line of Highway 5. On a map, the reserve looks like someone spilled a glass of water that flowed freely across the paper on three sides, but encountered a hard and fast barrier at the bottom. Step north across Highway 5 and you’re in Moses Lake, a small community where many struggle with homelessness, poverty and addiction. Step south and you’re in prosperous, teetotalling Cardston.

An Aboriginal Peoples Television Network documentary from 2019 chronicled the ways Indigenous people experience racism in Cardston. “Whether or not we’re in the right, we’re always in the wrong—no matter what the situation is,” Singer said, adding he’s grateful the Blood Tribe has its own dedicated police service. “Not only are they here on the reserve and they’re some of our community members, but there’s an understanding of the climate that we live under.”

Every once in awhile a BTPS officer stops by to visit Singer and his wife on their property about 13 km north of Moses Lake. The last time was in early 2020 at the outset of the pandemic. “They just came by to see how I was doing—if I had food, if I was okay, if I was depressed,” he said. The officer mentioned community resources that were available if he needed help dealing with grief or just needed someone to talk to. “They take their time to talk to you because this is their community,” he said.

As the director of the Kainai Wellness Centre, Terri-Lynn Fox oversees a variety of community and counselling services on the Blood Reserve. “They need to be more visible,” she said of BTPS police. They’re always invited to participate in the centre’s events but rarely come. “Family violence has to do with policing,” Fox said. “Missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls has to do with policing. Residential schools and all the effects have to do with policing.” But even though she’s frustrated by the lack of engagement, Fox understands that the BTPS are stretched thin. “They do the best they can given the resources they have.”

In 2014 the Auditor General of Canada issued a detailed analysis of the FNPP that revealed a fundamental disconnect between theory and practice. The federal government never intended for the FNPP to fully fund police services in First Nations communities. The goal was to enhance existing police with Indigenous officers, who would provide community-oriented services. But five of the 10 self-administered services surveyed for the AG’s report said they had totally replaced the provincial police in their communities.

Public Safety Canada responded to the AG report by updating the terms and conditions of the FNPP to better reflect the reality on the ground.

The most recent update, in 2018, defines self-administered First Nation services as providing “day-to-day, local police services.” The program doesn’t fund specialized units, such as investigative teams or forensic services. For anything beyond a frontline response, First Nation police are supposed to reach out to the agency outlined in the Provincial Police Services Agreement—the RCMP, Ontario Provincial Police or the Sûreté du Québec.

“We would be calling [the RCMP] more if we knew that they would come,” said Dale Cox, chief of the Lakeshore Regional Police Service (LRPS). “We don’t call because we know they’re not able to—they don’t have the capacity either. So we do the best we can.” Cox has been an officer for 43 years, including three decades with the RCMP.

With a homicide, Cox said the RCMP will do the investigation without question. “After that it starts to get very unclear and it falls to the discretion of the RCMP if they will attend, or if they have the resources to attend,” he said. When I talked to Cox in late October, his officers were working on a fatal hit and run as well as conducting longer-term drug investigations with possible connections to organized crime. “All that translates into more officer time spent doing the files, which keeps snowballing—you keep getting further and further behind, because while you’re doing that, calls are still coming in,” Cox said. Other police services in Canada are funded for specialized units that take over an investigation so frontline officers can focus on the next call.

Melting Tallow described a similar dynamic on the Blood reserve. Some investigations inevitably get shelved because officers can’t follow up in a timely manner, which leads to an erosion of trust in the community. The BTPS was recently funded for an additional five officers, bringing the total to 37. Instead of adding to the front line, Melting Tallow is creating an investigative unit. He plans to have the five-officer team operational by April 2021.

Dwayne Zacharie has done something similar with the Kahnawake Peacekeepers, which have a three-member investigative unit. But he said First Nations services make sacrifices to fund these necessary resources, such as paying officers across the service a lower salary, because the FNPP doesn’t recognize specialty units as a legitimate expense.

Tsuut’ina police are in a unique situation—they have a close working relationship with the Calgary Police Service and the RCMP. Tsuut’ina’s band government also supplements their budget; the FNPP funds 10 officers and the nation another 16. The service has grown, said police chief Keith Blake, in anticipation of an influx of visitors expected with a $4.5-billion project that will include 1,200 acres of retail, office and tourist amenities along the ring road in southwest Calgary.

The FNPP was created to encourage Indigenous officers to work and live in the same community over their career. This would allow officers to build relationships and trust. But demanding workloads, lower pay, fewer benefits and a dearth of opportunities for career advancement have led to burnout and high turnover. Six of the Lakeshore Police’s 13 officers left in 2019. That was an unusually bad year, but officer retention is a struggle for First Nation services across Canada. An officer with BTPS told me he recently crunched some numbers and discovered that 80 per cent of their new hires leave after three years.

Cox is proud of the relationship that LRPS officers have cultivated with the community, but he added: “It’s hard to put on fire prevention talks when you’re always putting out fires.”

First Nations police services are funded through agreements between the band, province and federal government. All three chiefs of Alberta’s self-administered First Nations services said the three levels of government rarely make it to the table for meaningful negotiations. This means the terms of old agreements limp forward year after year with last-minute, one-year extensions. It’s hard to plan for the future when you don’t know if you can keep the lights on next year. 

On the same day I talked to Melting Tallow in his office, which is in one of two mobile trailers added to the station in 2016, Governor General Julie Payette was in the Senate chamber in Ottawa delivering the throne speech to open the second session of the 43rd Parliament. Under the heading “Addressing Systemic Racism,” Payette pledged that the federal government would “accelerate work to co-develop a legislative framework for First Nations policing as an essential service.”

The report on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, released in June 2019, called for a similar reform.

Weeks after the throne speech, Alberta introduced Bill 38, the Justice Statutes Amendment Act 2020, which Justice Minister Kaycee Madu said would formally recognize First Nations police services in legislation.

Tsuut’ina police say the province is acknowledging their worth. “We have the same training that’s required, we have the same qualifications and recertifications, our standards and audits occur every two to three years like every other police service,” chief Blake told media. “Now we’re actually being recognized, and that means a great deal to our officers and the community.”

A BTPS statement outlined how Bill 38 would provide more stability and security. It also noted that existing systemic inequities make it difficult to offer the community the service it deserves or provide employees with the support they require. “We have not had access to the same resources or opportunities as our policing partners,” the statement read. 

If First Nations police are classified as an essential service, funding could improve. Melting Tallow said the current model feels like a lottery. “Is it census Is it crime rate?” He has no idea what criteria Public Safety Canada uses to decide which service gets what sum of money. A PSC spokesperson seemed to confirm this assessment in an email. “Introducing legislation that makes Indigenous policing an essential service would require the government to develop an adequate, sustained and consistent funding framework for these services, rather than making them rely on discretionary funding.”

After I spoke with Melting Tallow, Sergeant Jim Bennett took me for a tour of the reserve in an unmarked pickup truck. It was his first day in uniform after a four-month hiatus. “I’ve actually been off on injury, a back injury, and I’m on a graduated return to work,” he told me as we headed south out of Standoff on Highway 2. The warm weather so late into September had translated into bumper crops and a busy harvest for farms on the reserve. We passed several immense combines out in the fields.

Bennett is in his early 40s, bald, with a sturdy brown beard. The gregarious officer started his career with the RCMP in Whitecourt, but wanted to be closer to his son and family so applied for a job with the BTPS in 2009. He grew up in Raymond, a 45-minute drive east of Standoff. Bennett told me he’d been in four fights as a police officer over the past 11 years. The last one happened at the end of May on a nightshift in a cell at the station.

“It took three of us to control somebody,” he said. “They had overdosed on fentanyl and were hiding stuff.” After a paramedic treated the person with an IV of Naloxone, officers tried to find the drugs. They confiscated three hunks of purple fentanyl, but Bennett slipped a disc and pinched a nerve in his back during the struggle. “I’ll never be pain free—I’m tolerable,” he said.

We pulled off the highway onto a winding residential street. Almost all the bungalows had the same rectangular shape. Some were well maintained and looked new. Others were boarded up or had an array of vehicles parked haphazardly out front. Dogs wandered the street, but we didn’t see any people. “Down here our standard calls are intoxication, overdoses, domestics, assaults.” Bennett estimated that about half of his calls for service are from Moses Lake.

We stopped in front of the Moses Lake Shelter, a squat blue building next to an abandoned church. For the first time since Bennett had begun working for the BTPS, the shelter was open in September. The organization received emergency funding to maintain services during the pandemic. Normally the facility is closed April 1–October 1, which is partly why a few years ago a tent city sprang up on the east side of Highway 2.

Bennett is not a typical officer for the BTPS, or probably for any police service for that matter. He has learned to speak Blackfoot and has been adopted into over a dozen families on the reserve. In 2012 he was presented with a feathered headdress by the Kainai Warrior Society, which he described as a kind of veterans association for the Blood Tribe. “Besides my marriage, obviously my wedding day and the births of my children, the next-greatest experience I’ve had is the day I received my headdress,” he said.

The sergeant has undertaken an array of volunteer projects in the community. The most recent included raising $40,000 to build five tiny homes so people have somewhere safe to sleep when the shelter closes every spring. Bennett earned the Officer of the Year award in 2014 from the First Nations Chiefs of Police Association. Two years later, in February of 2016, he was sitting at his desk at the station struggling to type a single sentence. “I tried for half an hour to type one word and I was just so bombed out,” he said. “I can’t even describe it. It’s just a terrible, terrible thing to go through.”

Bennett was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and compassion fatigue. “I have two sons now and two daughters, and to go in some of these homes and see this poverty and see the things that officers see, especially out here, it’s difficult,” he said. “It took a toll on me, so I needed a year off.” He burned through his mental health benefits within a month and after only three sessions with a psychologist. Bennett eventually found a program through Canada Mental Health. “So here I am, a serving police officer in Canada with PTSD now having to seek out a free service,” he said. “And that’s how I got better.” The BTPS has since allocated more resources to these kind of benefits, Bennett said, so another officer doesn’t have that same experience. But that decision meant sacrifices to other parts of the budget. “That’s partly why people quit, because we’re underfunded. We do way more with less,” he said.

We crossed Highway 5 out of Moses Lake and took a brief drive through Cardston. Bennett pointed out a group of five men from the reserve standing on a corner in front of an historic brick building. He knew them all by name. “I’ve probably arrested these people 100 times each,” he said.

I asked if it’s ever frustrating, apprehending the same person for the same offence time and time again. Bennett took a deep breath. I got the sense the question annoyed him. “It’s not—because we’ll never know what they’ve been through, why they are the way they are,” he said. People with addictions always have a backstory. The Blood Tribe sergeant was not here to judge. He was here to help.

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Avnish Nanda says yes

Litigator and instructor in constitutional and environmental law at U of A

Our society places a high value on public safety and has developed a variety of state institutions to pursue this public good. Police are tasked with preventing the collective and individual harms inflicted on society through activities ranging from homicides to property crimes, and to apprehend those who commit these transgressions so that they can be held accountable through our legal system. The state affords the police a “monopoly on violence”; this is the only state institution that has the lawful authority to use physical force on citizens, even to the point of taking life.

But not all threats to public safety can or should be addressed through the use of force. This is what the concept of “defund the police” attempts to highlight. The state’s resources can be redirected to other agencies to better maintain public safety. In many instances, dispatching police will not adequately address the threat to public safety. In fact, the arrival of the police might itself constitute a greater threat.

In Alberta much of the work of our police services revolves around responding to mental health distress calls. The deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals in Canada in the 20th century has led to policing being the state’s immediate response to individuals in mental health crisis. Approximately 30 per cent of the Edmonton Police Service’s work involves officers dealing with individuals suffering from such episodes. The Calgary Police Service devotes similar resources and time to mental health related calls.

Police officers are taught to respond to threats to public safety through their use-of-force training. In cases concerning individuals suffering from mental illness, a police presence can often escalate tensions. This can result in the police using force, even lethal force, on individuals they were sent to help.

In recent years police services in Alberta have relied on expert, non-police mental health intervention specialists to address a portion of the calls they receive. These specialists are employed by Alberta Health Services and are considered essential to addressing mental health distress calls in a non-lethal manner. However, there aren’t enough resources to ensure that every such call is attended to by a mental health expert. Only a small number of calls receive this sort of specialized response.

Defunding the police is not about taking resources away from police services in an effort that undermines public safety. It’s about addressing public safety in a manner that prioritizes the lives of all members of our community. In the context of mental health calls in Alberta, this might involve diverting funds away from police to establish a specialized AHS agency to respond to individuals in crisis. This could ensure that people suffering from mental health episodes are attended to by experts who can address their situation and not exacerbate matters to the point where they or others are harmed.

Howard Burns says no

Executive director of the Alberta Federation of Police Associations and retired police officer

Albertans expect our elected representatives to ensure we’re getting good value for our tax dollars. Policing costs are usually one of the largest line items in municipal budgets. As such, they receive a great deal of scrutiny before they’re approved. Nowadays, as a result of tragic events in the US, some local politicians are clamouring to cut the very police budgets they previously supported. Such decisions appear disingenuous, based on emotion rather than fact.

When these emotional arguments are closely examined, they often don’t hold up to scrutiny. For instance, police brutality is frequently touted as a reason for change, but the facts demonstrate that any use of force by Alberta officers is exceedingly rare. In 2019 the average use of force rate during police encounters in Alberta’s two largest cities was 0.5 per cent. In most professions, a 99.5 per cent success rate would be celebrated. Imagine results like that in the medical field!

Another pretext for change is the flawed premise that the police are racist. This assertion is based on statistical evidence that shows some minority groups are overrepresented in their dealings with the police. Other causes for this situation haven’t been considered, and a giant leap in logic must be taken to determine that police are the problem. Considering that most police interactions are call-driven, it’s far more likely that any overrepresentation is a result of broader societal failures and not racism by police. Overrepresentation of these same groups in the prison system further supports a societal failure premise.

Those calling for cuts to police budgets need to understand the true implications of what they’re asking for. Significant reductions will result in the elimination of many ancillary services. Ironically, some of these services are actually meant to alleviate the very things our communities have expressed concern over. Expenditures aimed at assisting at-risk youth, victims of crime and other vulnerable people will likely need to be cut. Programs designed to prevent crime or foster diversity will need to be curtailed. Officer training will have to be reduced, and outlays for expensive equipment such as body-worn cameras will need to be re-examined. If the cuts run too deep, layoffs will be inevitable, leading to the likelihood that emergency calls go unanswered during peak call periods.

On a more positive note, the conversation surrounding police budgets has provided us an opportunity to reframe the role of the police. Defining police responsibility is a worthwhile endeavour and should be pursued. The police can no longer be everything to everyone, and the real task at hand is to determine who should take on duties the police have inherited by default (e.g., mental health and non-criminal matters).

Decisions about police funding must be fact-based and data-driven. Emotional arguments based on false narratives have no place in the decision-making process. Police budgets should remain intact until reliable facts and data dictate otherwise.

Avnish Nanda responds to Howard Burns. 

Racial inequities in Alberta policing are well documented. In 2017 a landmark investigation into the Edmonton Police Service’s use of street checks revealed that Indigenous and Black residents were far more likely to be subject to the practice. Street checks are a “preventative policing” technique that involves officers stopping and interrogating individuals on the grounds that they appear suspicious. The stops don’t occur in relation to a specific criminal act or investigation. Rather, by detaining and questioning suspicious-looking individuals without lawful grounds to do so, the aim is to disrupt crimes before they happen.

But it just so happens that Indigenous and Black people are more likely to appear suspicious to the EPS and to be subject to street checks. Though Indigenous people represented 5 per cent of Edmonton’s population in 2017, one in every five individuals subject to a street check by the EPS where a single race was recorded was Indigenous. Black people were similarly overrepresented in street check data relative to their share of the population. The EPS offered a number of alternative explanations to avoid acknowledging the obvious: systemic racism and racial prejudices were leading officers to stop Indigenous and Black Edmontonians at higher rates than other residents. To this day, the EPS maintains street checks as a legitimate, “non-racist” policing practice.

This isn’t the first time the EPS has been accused of racism. Last summer a scandal erupted in the canine unit when it was revealed that officers had put up posters depicting police dogs attacking Indigenous and Black people, who appeared in the posters as racist caricatures. However, in sharp contrast to its defence of street checks, the EPS recognized the motivations behind the conduct of the officers involved in the incident, describing it as “racist behaviour” in its ranks that would not be tolerated. No officer has been held responsible for the posters, however, and no investigation has been launched into whether the racist views literally on display within the canine unit resulted in improper, discriminatory policing conduct among its members.

The EPS isn’t the only police force in Alberta that has been reluctant to acknowledge racism in its midst. In June, when pressed whether systemic racism exists in policing in Canada, the RCMP’s commanding officer in Alberta, deputy commissioner Curtis Zablocki, denied that this was the case. After Zablocki was widely condemned for his comments, including by his superiors, he took back his statement and acknowledged that systemic racism is rampant in policing in Canada and that it must be stamped out.

However, similar to the EPS, the RCMP’s actions have fallen short of its words. This past September, when a crowd of white supremacists descended on anti-racism protesters in Red Deer who were marching against police racism and broader racial equity issues, the RCMP stood by, refusing to intervene and protect the demonstrators from being physically assaulted. After being confronted for witnessing the attack and failing to protect protesters, the RCMP initially refused to investigate the matter. Their conduct, including comments by the head of the local RCMP detachment indicating he felt the white supremacist presence and views were just as valid as those of anti-racism protesters, led to public uproar. Eventually the RCMP conducted a full-scale investigation and laid charges against participants.

Even our policing oversight body has a racism issue. The Alberta Serious Incident Response Team, which investigates allegations of major police misconduct, doesn’t believe it should collect data on race or ethnicity, claiming such information has limited value. Its refusal to do so further entrenches systemic racism in policing by not capturing and probing how race factors in to incidents of police misconduct.

The EPS’s street check data; the racist posters targeting Indigenous and Black people found in a police detachment locker room; RCMP standing metres away without intervening, and watching white supremacists pummel anti-racism protesters demonstrating against police violence—none of this surprises anyone involved in police accountability work. Race and incidents of police misconduct, including police-involved deaths and other serious use of force incidents, are connected. The problem is we can’t tell the whole story unless ASIRT fills in the details. We’re left with anecdotal evidence and incomplete records, allowing police to evade accountability for race-based inequities in policing.

“Defund the police” is about accountability. It’s about ensuring that we have a state institution that protects the public safety and well-being of all Albertans, and that this guarantee isn’t dependent on one’s mental health, skin colour or ethnicity. For many, policing in Alberta, in its current form, is unable to provide that assurance, and they are willing to consider alternative ways to achieve this public good. Whether through reform or radical transformation, better is not only possible but must be pursued without delay.

Howard Burns responds to Avnish Nanda.

“Defunding the police” means different things to different people. Some believe defunding should be a form of punishment for perceived wrongdoing by the police. Many in this camp have the unrealistic goal of abolishing the police and dismantling society’s public safety framework. A second segment believes defunding involves redefining police responsibility and redistributing any realized cost savings. This is a much more realistic goal, and it appears that Mr. Nanda subscribes to this vision.

I concur with Mr. Nanda that policing has become the “immediate response” to individuals suffering a mental health crisis. Alberta police services have inherited this responsibility by default and there really isn’t a present-day alternative.

I question Mr. Nanda’s contention that approximately 30 per cent of police calls in Calgary and Edmonton involve “mental health episodes.” In 2019 the Calgary Police Service received a total of 560,604 calls for service. Of those, 4,799, or 0.9 per cent, were for mental-health-related events, according to CPS. The Edmonton Police Service numbers are similar, at 4,928 mental health calls from January 2019 to October 2019, as reported in The Globe and Mail. Granted, these numbers only reflect calls with a known mental health component. The actual number of mental-health-involved calls was undoubtedly higher, but the 30 per cent estimate seems inflated.

Mr. Nanda is correct that police officers are trained to respond to threats to public safety and use of force is a part of that training (as is de-escalation). It is also true that a police presence at a mental health call can escalate tensions; however, it is equally true that sometimes police presence has the opposite effect and contributes to a successful resolution.

Mr. Nanda uses the terms “mental health crisis” and “threats to public safety.” It is important to distinguish between these. A mental health crisis is usually a non-criminal event that oftentimes can be resolved without police involvement. Threats to public safety are typically criminal matters that require police intervention. A mental health crisis can become a threat to public safety when a subject’s behaviour escalates to a dangerous or criminal level. Once that occurs, the police are the only ones trained and authorized to deal with the threat.

Police are called upon when a mental health crisis escalates into a threat to the public; however, quite often the police are unaware of any mental health concerns and are responding based purely on a subject’s reported behaviour. If that behaviour is found to present an imminent threat to public safety, appropriate force may be used. It is key to understand that most deadly-force police encounters are dynamic and occur quickly, with officers reacting to a subject’s behaviour. Quite commonly, a subject’s mental health issues are not discovered until after the encounter has concluded.

The link between mental illness and the use of deadly force by police is well established. In 2018 retired Court of Queen’s Bench chief justice Neil Wittmann reviewed CPS use of force in 21 officer-involved shootings, 2012–2017. “Drug use and mental health concerns were identified as a factor for 10 (46 per cent) affected persons and alcohol in three (14 per cent). Four (18 per cent) persons made a demand for the police officer to kill them (suicide by cop).”

I agree with Mr. Nanda that public safety needs to be addressed “in a manner that prioritizes the lives of all members of the community.” That being said, I don’t believe that Alberta police officers have been recognized for the excellent work they are already doing to tackle mental illness.

My initial argument pointed out that any use of force by Alberta police officers is exceedingly rare (0.5 per cent of police encounters), indicating that they’re doing a good job of de-escalating most situations. Unfortunately this good work is largely ignored, garnering little public and media attention.

A recent example of Alberta officers de-escalating a serious mental health situation occurred in Red Deer last August. RCMP officers responded to the murder of Dr. Walter Reynolds at his medical clinic. They were met by a combative subject, reportedly armed with a hammer and a machete. The officers defused the situation and took Deng Mabiour into custody without the use of lethal force.

It is central to recognize that Alberta police services were alive to the challenges presented by mental illness long before the “defund the police” movement ever became popular. Both Calgary and Edmonton police have well-established partnerships with Alberta Health Services. These police and crisis teams (PACTs) provide an integrated approach to people suffering a mental health crisis. Their work is an invaluable piece of the proactive efforts police make every day to avoid threats to public safety. Successful initiatives like this are truly the answer and should be broadened and expanded.

Defunding the police isn’t the answer! Don’t do it!

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The post Should We Defund Police? appeared first on Alberta Views.

Coleman has an affinity for big-picture, strategic thinking. He studied the measurement of organizational performance of police organizations for his Ph.D. from the University of Regina. He was also a cop in Calgary for 27 years and then the chief of police in Moose Jaw for another 10. In the early 2000s Coleman formed an unlikely partnership with a forensic psychologist from Ontario. Coleman and Dorothy Cotton set themselves the ambitious goal of reforming how police respond to citizens in a mental health crisis. They collaborated on pioneering research and advocacy that inspired a paradigm shift in the culture of Canadian policing.

Police have a complex and challenging job. Except for paramedics, emergency room staff and firefighters, they’re the only public service available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We call the cops if there’s a bank robbery. We call the cops if we come across a 3-year-old wandering alone. We call the cops if we see someone running naked outside in the middle of winter.

They have also become the front line for a chronically underfunded and overwhelmed mental health system. Police agencies across Canada are reporting year-over-year increases in the number of calls involving people in a mental health crisis. The most recent Statistics Canada numbers, from a 2012 survey, indicate that five million Canadians come into contact with police every year. Of those, 18.8 per cent, or about one in five, meet the criteria for having a mental health or substance use disorder.

These encounters are not always positive. In the spring of 2018 the CBC published the first national database on police-involved fatalities. It took six months to compile the numbers from thousands of coroner reports, court records and interviews with families. Between 2000 and 2017, police killed 461 people in Canada. The CBC found that over 70 per cent of the victims had mental health and substance abuse problems.

I drove to High River in early June to meet Coleman and to learn about what police services are doing to improve how they respond to people in crisis. I was also curious about what inspired a police officer turned police chief with decades of experience on the street to devote the second half of his career to convincing people that cops should behave more like social workers.

Police have become the front line for a chronically underfunded and overwhelmed mental health system, and these encounters are not always positive.

At 73, Coleman is still at it. He has the air of an engineer, someone with faith in the power of practical solutions—and a pen in his dress shirt pocket to jot them down when they occur to him. He works as a public safety consultant, and his home office is mission control. Coleman teaches two online courses, one on organized crime for Athabasca University and the other at Dalhousie University about strategic human resources. He has testified as an expert witness on de-escalation and mental health at several police-involved-fatality inquests and reviewed the training curriculums at police academies across Canada.

Before I arrived that afternoon, Coleman had received an email from a Toronto Star reporter. Durham police had arrested two people on what had been a mental-health-related call and the reporter wanted Coleman’s opinion on the video clip.

“It’s an expectation and a legitimate service of the police to attend to people in these sorts of states of crisis or distress,” said Coleman (who moved to Calgary from England in his early twenties and still speaks with a subtle accent). He explained that the term “mental health crisis” includes a range of conditions and behaviour. A diabetic who is hypoglycemic, for example, can have delusions and psychotic episodes. The umbrella term includes people with brain injuries, people on drugs, people under a lot of stress. All of us, including police, are vulnerable. “I always say, and it’s been supported by the literature, policing is a human service,” he said.

Coleman also got a request that morning to review the latest version of a new type of de-escalation training the Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services is considering implementing at the provincial police college. A multidisciplinary team from across Canada developed the training program. The group includes academics, police officers, use-of-force instructors, forensic psychologists, mental health clinicians and people with lived experience of a mental illness.

The team also employed theatre professionals. “It used actors, not police officers pretending they’re a person with a mental illness, because that’s been fairly common in recent times and it’s ineffective—totally ineffective,” Coleman said. He’s been a part of the federally funded project since it got off the ground in 2017.

We sat in armchairs in the living room, which overlooked the backyard and a gradual hill down to a wooded streambed. The verdant setting, vintage wallpaper and exposed wood beams gave the house the feel of a rural cottage. Coleman grew up in the East Sussex village of Isfield, just north of the English Channel. “It was always talked about on the farm. ‘Strong guy, tall guy—you’d make a good police officer,’” he said. Watching a short film about the Stampede helped draw the young man to Calgary in 1967. “This was pretty exciting for an English farm kid. Riding bulls Chuckwagon racing just seemed wild.”

Reality fell short of that vision of a tough cop wrestling his way out of scraps and bringing swift justice to unsavoury characters. He joined the Calgary Police Service in 1969 and found himself responding to situations with vulnerable people in desperate situations. “These people were not involved in criminal activity, but they were involved in health issues,” Coleman said. “We had absolutely nothing in the way of preparation.”

Looking back, knowing what he knows now, Coleman wishes he had approached numerous interactions differently. One in particular made an indelible impression. “It was not far from Marda Loop. These things stick with you, and if the house is still there, I could probably take you to it,” Coleman said. It was around 1976 and he and his partner were assigned to apprehend a woman for a psychiatric assessment. The family had obtained an order for her apprehension by police under the Mental Health Act.

They arrived midmorning and the husband answered the door. Two kids in their early teens were also home. “She was obviously acting irrationally. You could see that when you came in. She was very agitated. She spoke loud and she would… I’m not sure she screamed, but she would shout out.” They tried to calm the woman, who was in her late 30s, but she refused to co-operate. “Looking back on it, she was scared. Very, very scared.” Coleman described how the situation escalated. “She fought and fought and fought. In the end—this is sort of the part that I really regret—we rolled her over on the chesterfield and handcuffed her, and dragged her into the car screaming.”

Throughout the ordeal, Coleman kept thinking there had to be a better way.

Dorothy Cotton experienced the same sort of unfortunate circumstances, but from another perspective. She was promoted to administrative director of forensic services at the Kingston Psychiatric Hospital in Ontario in 1999. The unit treated people found unfit to stand trial or not criminally responsible for their actions. The new role brought her into regular contact with police. As Cotton got to know some of the officers, they started coming to her with questions.

“The police would have people who they were extremely concerned with out on the street,” she said. Someone refusing to go to a shelter, even though it’s the middle of winter and they might freeze to death. Someone regularly wandering into traffic. Someone calling 911 dozens of times a day.

“There was a trend, certainly during the years when I worked in forensics, when you had people who clearly had substantial mental health problems, but somehow weren’t able to access the mental health system,” Cotton said. She explained how the problem began in the 1970s, when psychiatric institutions were shut down but funding for community-based mental health supports never materialized.

Without other options, police charged people with minor offences: vagrancy, disturbing the peace, jaywalking. Once charges were laid, the courts could step in and order the person to a psychiatric hospital. “I started becoming really aware of the completely no-win situation the police were in—that they would see people out there who were very ill, who really needed help, but they didn’t have the resources or there was nothing they could do,” she said.

And so Cotton reached out to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP). Her message was similar to Coleman’s sentiment that day in Marda Loop: The police and the mental health system are working with the same people. Why not find some way to coordinate resources There had to be a better way. “I actually think [the CACP] misunderstood, and thought I was talking about the mental health of police officers, because they sent the letter to the human resources committee,” Cotton said.

Luckily, Coleman, with his penchant for strategic thinking, served on that committee. (He still does.) He remembered how his colleagues were stymied by Cotton’s proposal. Even as a forensic psychologist, she was an outsider. Police have traditionally been stubbornly insular organizations and suspicious of external influence. The committee, which has about 20 members, meets in person three times a year. It had taken about a year and a half before Coleman even stepped forward. “I put up my hand and volunteered and the rest actually changed my professional life,” he said.

Coleman and Cotton met for the first time in Quebec City in 2002 and launched the inaugural Psychiatrists in Blue conference later that same year. They organized the conference in cities across Canada for the next five years. It was the first national forum for police to get together and not only learn from international experts in the field of mental health and de-escalation, but also to share ideas about what was working in different parts of the country.

“It was very clear to me early on that this was probably the most important thing I was ever going to do with my life,” Cotton said. She quit her job at the hospital after getting pressured to stop working with Coleman. Hospital leadership thought her research collaboration with a police chief added to the stigma that people with a mental illness were more prone to criminal behaviour. “I was very dogged—my mother always called me Dorothy Persistence.”

After the Mental Health Commission of Canada was created in 2007, it tapped Coleman and Cotton for research on how police are trained to handle interactions with people in mental health crisis. Out of that work came a proposed learning model called TEMPO: Training and Education about Mental Illness for Police Organizations, completed in 2010. Coleman and Cotton provided a comprehensive update in 2014. It was a blueprint for the type of training Coleman wished he’d had before setting out on his career as a police officer.

New officers are trained at a variety of facilities across the country. Some provinces, such as Ontario and BC, have one authoritative academy that trains every officer, except for the RCMP, which runs its own facility in Regina. In Alberta, the Lethbridge, Calgary and Edmonton police services all deliver different training programs. TEMPO was the first effort to create a national baseline for teaching police how to respond to people undergoing a mental health crisis. It was designed as a gap analysis tool so that each training program could identify what they were getting right and where they needed to improve. It was not mandatory, however, and training facilities could pick and choose what, if anything, to implement.

Before Bill Moore became the executive director of the CACP in July of 2017, he had been a deputy chief with the Halifax Regional Police and in charge of the service’s mental health programming. He credits Cotton and Coleman with inspiring a profound shift in the perception of what constitutes legitimate police work.

“They were probably instrumental in the concept of a police officer as a social response person,” Moore said. “They assisted in making it part of mainstream policing.” And with TEMPO they supplied a roadmap for cultivating the requisite skills. “The second thing they did is they assisted in bringing an increased level of professionalism in the way that we did it.”

That kind of change had to come from within in order to take root, explained Moore. “[Coleman] was an insider. He was a chief of police. He had immediate credibility in the policing community because he’d walked in our shoes.” And when Coleman and Cotton cracked that door open, they made room for others to follow.

Jennifer Lavoie, an associate professor of criminology from Wilfrid Laurier University, has noticed a significant change in the last few years in police services requesting outside help from academics and researchers. This trend is especially pronounced in determining how best to prepare officers to respond to people in crisis. “You’ve really seen a willingness, an openness, that I haven’t seen before in police services,” Lavoie said. “They see that they can’t approach this alone anymore.”

She cited several reports on high profile, police-involved fatalities from across Canada in recent years that have ratcheted up the pressure on police to make substantive changes. The latest review of police conduct in Alberta was undertaken by retired Court of Queen’s Bench chief justice Neil Wittmann and published in the spring of 2018. Then-Calgary police chief Roger Chaffin asked Wittmann to examine the service’s use of force after officers shot 10 people, killing five, in 2016. It was the most shootings by any police service across the country that year. Wrote Wittmann, “I have found that there remains an urgent need to explore and address the issue of police encounters with persons in crisis.”

The former justice made 65 recommendations for reform, many of which emphasized the need for better de-escalation and crisis intervention training. Lavoie described how many of these independent reports keep coming back to the matter of training. She has also studied the efficacy of mobile crisis teams, which include a police officer and mental health professional responding to calls together. “Most services don’t have the funding for mobile crisis teams. Those that do can’t offer the services 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” she said.

Several Alberta cities, including Calgary, Edmonton, Red Deer and Grande Prairie, have Police and Crisis Teams (PACTs), which are jointly funded with Alberta Health Services. The teams, comprised of an officer and a mental health clinician, are on call seven days a week, from 6:00 a.m. to midnight. Wittmann’s review, however, noted that they’re used in a post-crisis capacity. They’re called in after the initial emergency response.

“We have to train officers, all front-line officers, on how to respond to people in mental health crisis,” Lavoie said. She is one of the lead researchers on the new scenario-based training program Coleman works on.

The research project is in the second year of a four-year term, and officers from the Durham Regional Police Service are helping to test the scenarios. The team is gathering evidence to see if the program develops a specific set of competencies associated with de-escalation. “It’s one of the first studies in Canada to look at whether a particular type of training, in this case scenario-based training, is effective and will lead to performance changes,” Lavoie said. This evidence-based approach is part of what attracted the attention of the Ontario government. The team has also fielded inquiries from several police academies from across Canada.

Many of the core ideas in TEMPO have been implemented in the new training program. Lavoie described how an officer works through one of the scenarios and then talks with a panel of experts about how it unfolded. Mental health clinicians, use-of-force instructors, people with lived experience of mental illness, and police trainers all provide feedback on how the officer handled the simulation. Coleman and Cotton recommended this kind of multidisciplinary approach, specifically highlighting the value of including people who have experienced mental illness. TEMPO was a direct challenge to the status quo of having only police train the police.

“Much of the feedback we get from officers after the training is around how impactful it was to hear about the experiences of people with significant mental illness, and to understand recovery,” Lavoie said. Cops invariably meet people who are having a very bad day. Sometimes they encounter the same person, under the same awful circumstances, over and over again. Police don’t have as much exposure to people who get better or to how, with the right supports, people with a chronic mental illness can lead regular lives. “I think that message gets across in those lived experience stories that are shared with the officers,” she said.

Lavoie described how Coleman made a big impression on the research team at one of the first meetings back in 2017. He was on a video call from his home office in High River when he introduced the concept of procedural justice. “The idea of police responding to people—all people, but especially people in crisis or with mental health challenges—with dignity, fairness, respect. And how those principles, that way of responding to a person, can engender de-escalation,” Lavoie said.

Procedural justice is not a new idea. Coleman said the basic tenets have been applied in policing for a long time, but they weren’t explicitly articulated as part of a coherent philosophy. “It’s about fairness. It’s about due process,” Coleman said. “At the end of the day, the person understands what is happening to them and why.” He first heard the term procedural justice used in relation to policing at criminology conferences in the US in the wake of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. The unrest began in 2014 after Michael Brown Jr., an unarmed African-American, was killed by a white police officer.

It takes time and patience for police to engage with people in crisis in such a way that they understand and accept what’s happening. “We didn’t do that the day I had the bad experience,” Coleman said of his interaction with the woman in Marda Loop. He estimated that he and his partner were at the house for no more than half an hour. “I’m not sure we were in a hurry to go to another call. We were just trying to get it over with. We didn’t take the time.”

Coleman described a recent case in Calgary where he thought police did exercise patience and take the time needed to resolve the situation peacefully. In late May officers responded to reports of a domestic incident at a house in the community of Panorama. They waited outside the home for 16 hours before the man gave himself up. Coleman explained how the traditional model of policing taught officers to stand their ground. Responding to people in crisis requires an understanding of when to take a step back.

 BEFORE I LEFT HIS HOUSE IN HIGH RIVER, Coleman showed me a memo written by the superintendent of the East Sussex Constabulary. It was framed and hung on the wall just inside the front door. The document was dated September 15, 1940, and outlined how Coleman’s grandfather, during the Battle of Britain, apprehended a German pilot who’d crashed into the field right next to where he was farming. Coleman’s grandfather, unarmed except for a pitchfork, escorted the prisoner back to his house, locked him in the shed out back and then had someone go to the nearest telephone to alert the police. Coleman doubts his grandfather had some innate gift for de-escalation. The pilot was probably only too happy to make a graceful exit from the Second World War.

The post Changing the Culture of Canadian Policing appeared first on Alberta Views.

At a corner property across from Russnaik, however, is a neglected-looking blue and white house. The windows and doors are boarded, and a temporary steel fence prevents entry. Facing the street is an official-looking sign with a terse warning: UNLAWFUL TO ENTER PROPERTY.

The property was shut down last fall by sheriffs acting under the authority of Alberta’s Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Act (SCAN). In the previous months, Lethbridge police had made 12 visits to the house, but the problems persisted. Upon receiving complaints from nearby residents, SCAN investigators set up surveillance. In one four-day period last summer they observed 42 different individuals visiting the property, making at least 15 illegal drug transactions. Working with Lethbridge police, investigators learned that heroin, methamphetamine and carfentanil were among the drugs being used and sold there. Russnaik estimates as many as 20 people were flopping at the house. “The people always changed,” he says. When things were at their worst, two males violently assaulted a lone female in the street.

For Russnaik and his neighbours, something needed to be done, and soon.

SCAN relies on civil law, where the burden of proof is the balance of probabilities. The more rigorous requirement in criminal cases is to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Enacted in 2007, SCAN gives sheriffs the power, with a court-ordered community safety order (CSO), to shut down properties for up to 90 days when drug trafficking, prostitution, child exploitation or gang activity are ongoing problems. After the fence comes down, sheriffs have input on who can live at the property for a one-year period from the date the CSO was issued. A lesser-used provision, targeted at organized crime, allows sheriffs to shut down fortified buildings and remove armoured doors, bulletproof wall plating and other modifications. In either case, costs incurred to shut down a property—fence rentals, needle cleanup, winterization—can be charged back to the owner. This is tough legislation. For criminals, the message is clear: Move along, you are not wanted here.

Modelled on similar legislation first enacted in Manitoba in 2002, SCAN gives sheriffs powers that are beyond police. This is because the legislation targets property rather than people. Whereas police respond to crime by filing Criminal Code charges against individuals, SCAN investigators shut down properties with a caveat registered against the land, so that accused lose their base of operations. This is thought to close the revolving door, where released individuals simply return home and continue dealing drugs while awaiting their trial date.

With this focus on property rather than people, SCAN investigators rely on civil legal proceedings, where the burden of proof is the balance of probabilities rather than the more rigorous requirement, in criminal cases, to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This civil approach—using the Court of Queen’s Bench—means sheriffs can act quickly, end-running many of the important but time-consuming safeguards built into the judicial system. Some of the normal checks on state power are absent. Not only is the identity of the complainants kept confidential, but surveillance occurs without warrants and the names of evictees are publicly posted at closed properties, even when they have not been charged with a crime. All of this happens with little delay because judges must hear CSO applications on an urgent basis.

Any legislation that makes it easier to rid neighbourhoods of problem residents will be popular with police and law-abiding homeowners and tenants. Still, the program is not beyond criticism. Some people may wonder, reasonably, if CSOs only move crime from one neighbourhood to another. The complaint process, which is guaranteed to always remain confidential, might encourage frivo-lous complaints and unnecessary surveillance (maybe your neighbours think you have too many backyard parties in the summer). By publicly naming the evictees on the posted CSO, sheriffs might further marginalize already marginalized people, such as sex workers. The civil aspect of the program is potentially troubling too because it gives the province a back door to legislate on matters that are, at base, criminal. With our constitutional division of powers, criminal law is an exclusive federal responsibility; provincial authority is limited primarily to the day-to-day enforcement and administration of such federal laws.

For Russnaik and his neighbours, however, the above concerns are academic when they recall the daily and nightly issues they faced on the ground. For them, the surveillance, fence and boarded windows remind them their provincial government stepped in—not with mere words, but with force—to help them take back their neighbourhood. Their right to enjoy their property, in peace and without fear, was restored.

As for the rights of evictees, however, questions remain. Could the same results be achieved using only police and the Criminal Code Does the provincial government really need to reach for such a heavy hammer What was motivating our MLAs when they brought forward this legislation?

With the weight of both the neighbourhood and the state against them, most evictees simply move along.

Following Manitoba’s lead, Saskatchewan enacted SCAN legislation in 2004, as did the Yukon Territory in 2006 (where lawmakers added bootlegging to their list of prohibited activities). Since then, five more provinces, including Alberta, have adopted these measures. The programs are similar, but some provinces have unique provisions. Investigators in Nova Scotia can shut down properties being used for gambling. In British Columbia, where the legislation was enacted more recently, measures must be taken to ensure vulnerable evictees are not rendered homeless. As an early adopter, Alberta largely copied the text of the Manitoba legislation.

In Alberta the idea to bring in SCAN legislation came from recommendations made in 2007 by the Crime Reduction and Safe Communities Task Force. Chaired by Heather Forsyth, a long-time MLA and Klein-era solicitor general, the task force had a threefold mandate: “to make recommendations on effective ways to reduce crime, make Alberta’s communities safer, and improve public confidence in the criminal justice system.” Other task force members were Edmonton’s chief of police, two municipal politicians (including Ric McIver, a Calgary alderman at the time) and several legal experts and community leaders.

Although many of the 31 recom-mendations focused on crime preven-tion—addictions treatment, early education, expanded mental health services—the motivation was also to make the consequences of crime more severe. The SCAN legislation was one such recommendation, but the task force also called for more police, closer monitoring of repeat offenders and a civil forfeiture program that would use the proceeds of crime to compensate victims and fund crime prevention. The task force members were serious about dealing with the public’s lack of confidence in the criminal justice system.

At the time, though, crime was not a growing problem in Alberta. In their report, the task force members acknowledged that serious crime rates had been declining since the early 1990s. Their own survey found that 93 per cent of Albertans felt safe in their homes after dark. But Albertans did not—and usually do not—talk about crime in these aggregated, statistical terms. The preoccupation here is that criminals have it too easy. Recalling their community consultations, the task force members wrote that they “repeatedly heard concerns about the lack of meaningful consequences for crimes and about sentences that appear to be nothing more than a ‘slap on the wrist.’ ”

With those punitive overtones, the proposed bill was brought to the legislature. Support came from across party lines. Art Johnston, a retired police officer, and the Progressive Conservative who introduced the bill, called it “a proactive approach at stopping and preventing disturbing and dangerous activities in our neighbourhoods.” Mo Elsalhy, with the Alberta Liberal Party, hoped the legislation would empower citizens. “It’s the same philosophy as Neighbourhood Watch,” he said, “but now with a mechanism at the end where there is a result.” Ray Martin of the Alberta New Democratic Party gave the full support of his caucus. No MLA spoke expressly to oppose the bill.

Now, more than 10 years after it was established, the SCAN program employs roughly 40 sheriffs and has an annual budget of $3-million. In 2009, sheriffs conducted 351 investigations, resulting in 19 warning letters and six CSOs; in 2018 there were 836 investigations, 83 warning letters and six CSOs. Over the lifespan of the program, 4,700 problem properties have been investigated and 72 CSOs have been issued. These numbers reveal Albertans are quite willing to confidentially register complaints against their neighbours. In turn, this means sheriffs are conducting a considerable amount of surveillance without public knowledge and without a judge’s oversight.

Linda McKay-Panos believes that Albertans should be concerned the province is using civil legislation this way to tackle criminal matters. She is the executive director of the Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre at the University of Calgary, where she is also a sessional law instructor. “Although they say it is only property they are focused on,” she says, “what they do does affect people.”

She explains that tenants are particularly vulnerable because SCAN overrides the Residential Tenancies Act, where the notice period for eviction from a month-to-month tenancy is normally one month or, in exceptional cases, 14 days. When a CSO is issued, however, the eviction date is whatever the court decides. This can make tenants homeless almost immediately.

To be fair, investigators rarely apply to the courts for a CSO. Most landlords, when they receive a warning letter, take their own steps to avoid a CSO. Usually this means eviction. Only now, when landlords pursue an eviction, as they normally would under the Residential Tenancies Act, the surveillance collected by the SCAN investigators can be used as evidence. This also presents a problem for tenants, says McKay-Panos, because they do not know who made the complaints. “There is not a lot of opportunity for the person to meet the case being made against them,” she says. With the weight of both the neighbourhood and the state against them, most evictees simply move along.

This high level of community involvement, where citizens are always watching, was exactly what MLAs were looking for as they debated the legislation. “[SCAN] is commendable,” said PC Len Mitzel, “because it proposes an entirely community-based answer to crime. Citizens in our community are suitably placed to know when illegal activity is taking place. They know when something is out of the ordinary, and they have a personal stake in ensuring that crime does not happen in their neighbourhoods.” MLA Elsalhy delivered a more direct message to criminals: “You know what You are not going to go unnoticed. And you know what Everybody’s watching. I’m watching you. My neighbours are watching you. The person down the street is watching you.”

McKay-Panos takes issue with the more ominous aspects of SCAN. “It is kind of like citizens are acting as a watchdog on behalf of the state,” she says. Andrew Woolford, a criminology professor at the University of Manitoba, has similar concerns. Writing from a critical perspective, he wonders if the legislation leads to the “deputization” of citizens, enlisting us as partners to work on behalf of the criminal justice system. This Orwellian take on the legislation may not be an exaggeration. Complainants do little more than call a toll-free number or go online where they fill in nine lines of text. They only need to believe there is illegal activity, that it is ongoing and that it adversely affects their neighbourhood. SCAN investigators will then move in with their surveillance, while regularly providing updates to the complainant (who can never be called upon to testify in court).

To their credit, SCAN investigators in Alberta have not developed a reputation for abusing their power or acting arbitrarily. In other provinces, however, some curious scenarios have resulted from use of the legislation. In Nova Scotia, for example, a family of five was evicted from their home, without any of them being criminally charged, when the parents failed to control their drug-addicted adult sons. In Saskatchewan, a young man who regularly smoked marijuana was evicted from his rental home when a neighbour reported he was selling drugs. He was eventually charged with simple possession, and the trafficking charges—the basis of the original complaint—never stuck in court. Critics point to these examples, and others, to make their case that SCAN legislation is too heavy-handed.

The legislation has not yet been tested in Alberta higher courts. In one case in Saskatchewan, however, an evicted tenant challenged the constitutionality of SCAN, saying the law is criminal in nature and therefore beyond the powers of the province to enact. The judge in that case admitted that criminal activities were indeed referenced in the civil court proceedings but concluded that the SCAN legislation still only affects the property and, in and of itself, does not put evictees at risk of being charged with a criminal offence.

Not surprisingly, police in Alberta are strong proponents of SCAN. They work closely with SCAN investigators, in fact, openly sharing information and resources. Police are often as frustrated as nearby residents when it comes to their capacity to respond effectively to the ongoing problems associated with drug houses. Indeed, when the legislation was being debated, several MLAs recalled stories they had heard, directly from police, where they were told the criminal justice system alone is often not enough to rid a neighbourhood of serious crime.

Mark Smallbones, a sergeant with the Lethbridge Police Service’s Priority Crimes Unit, knows first-hand the limitations inherent in the criminal justice system. Along with his constables, he was directly involved in bringing criminal charges against the people coming and going from the blue and white house. They also identified two other problem properties in the same neighbourhood, eventually determining that all three were connected. Using the criminal code, Smallbones secured search warrants and pressed charges. The landlords at the latter two properties co-operated, bringing an end to the ongoing issues. As might be expected, though, the drug activity was then pushed toward the remaining house. Smallbones knew the sheriffs were finally needed. “I like SCAN,” he says, “because they come in with the civil aspect and they have powers I do not have as a police officer.”

To shut down the house, Smallbones worked closely with Mike Letourneau, a SCAN investigator who has been with the program since its inception. As Letourneau explains, the circumstances at the third property were complicated. Of the three owners, only one was living at the property. Because of his ongoing drug use, the other two owners—his mother and his former spouse—distanced themselves from the property. When he ignored the warning letter from SCAN, the investigators proceeded with a CSO. When it was served, Letourneau says, the drug-addicted owner was apprehended and everyone flopping at the house left without incident. The bank that issued the mortgage then proceeded with a foreclosure. 
As has become the custom, Letourneau held a media scrum as the property was being boarded up. He thanked the community for stepping up and sharing their concerns with SCAN. “Four very fearful and very frustrated complainants contacted the SCAN unit,” he told reporters, before detailing the investigation. “There was enough evidence in this property to go forward and take an application for a community safety order in Queen’s Bench court and on September 25 we did just that, and we were successful.”

Justice Minister Kathleen Ganley praised Letourneau’s work. “This is yet another example of the important role SCAN investigators play in keeping Alberta neighbourhoods safe and secure,” she said. “I want to thank SCAN investigators for their diligent efforts to address criminal activity across our province.”

Should Alberta’s SCAN legislation be left alone, or does it need to be amended?

If the burden of proof is only the balance of probabilities, as in civil court, the legislation can probably continue to serve our communities well enough without changes. But when put against the criminal standard, where charges must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, some aspects of the legislation are drawn into question. It’s not clear, for example, what communities gain when sheriffs publicly name evictees, especially those who haven’t been charged with a crime (which is why none are named in this article). Also, if SCAN did not override the Residential Tenancies Act, evictees would then have at least 14 days to figure out where they’re going to live next. Moreover, until the legislation is finally challenged in our higher courts, the matter of whether the province is acting beyond its constitutional powers will remain unanswered. At least one lawyer in Edmonton, however, is standing by, ready to meet the challenge. A court challenge, he writes, might determine that SCAN is a “serious infringement of people’s liberty and a draconian approach to penalization rather than keeping communities safer.”

Back on Russnaik’s street, several of his neighbours are unwilling to speak publicly because they still fear the people they watched coming and going from the blue and white corner house. They are just relieved the ordeal is over. They are not much interested in talking about how the legislation might undermine civil liberties or the safeguards built into the criminal justice system. For them the differences between civil and criminal law are largely abstractions.

When asked if he has any concerns with the process, Russnaik only brings the conversation back to the results. “It was a really good day when that house was shut down,” he says, standing in his kitchen. “The whole block was pretty much celebrating.”

Jeff Doherty lives in Lethbridge. In 2016 AV published his story on secondary suites.

The post Taking Back the Neighbourhood appeared first on Alberta Views.

The first angle, in the back alley of the Edmontonian’s meat shop, shows Sobieh confronting a younger man on a phone. The business owner has a metal tool in his hand but doesn’t raise it. The young man retreats but doesn’t leave.

At 19:00:42 a camera inside the butcher shop’s storage room captures three male officers entering the back door, weapons drawn. Sobieh arrives from the opposite entrance, and upon seeing the police, throws an object to the ground. He stops, arms akimbo. An officer shows him one raised palm. The 60-year-old raises both hands, then drops them, turns around and takes two steps. An officer kicks the back of Sobieh’s leg and grabs his shoulders. A second officer kicks the butcher’s knee and Sobieh falls on his hands. The same officer knees Sobieh’s head, causing him to collapse on his right arm. A third officer helps restrain him and the second kicks Sobieh’s side. The third hammers four blows to the butcher’s back, the second kicks him, presses a knee on his back and then pulls Sobieh’s right arm from beneath him. Sobieh is cuffed, the officers stand—and so begins Edmonton’s most contested allegation of police brutality in recent memory.

Sobieh’s defence lawyer, Tom Engel, says the man who called the cops, and whom his client confronted in the alley, had threatened a meat shop employee the day before. He insists that Sobieh cooperated by freeing his hands upon seeing the police, and that he only turned his back to inform co-workers in the other room. He says the officers’ use of force was excessive and they acted like thugs.

The Edmonton Police Service (EPS) members allege that Sobieh was belligerent and rejected their orders, that they had reason to believe he was dangerous, that even after he was face down they had to free his arm to be sure he was weaponless.

Of the agency’s first 140 files, all but 10 exonerated the accused police officers. So just how objective or independent is ASIRT?

Six years ago a case like this might have been investigated internally by the same police agency that employed the accused officers, but in 2008 Alberta’s Ministry of Justice and Solicitor General’s office formed the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team—or ASIRT (pronounced “assert”)—an independent unit to police the police. The unit has jurisdiction over every sworn officer in Alberta. Now, whenever an on-duty officer’s actions cause serious injury or death or whenever an off-duty officer is accused of a sensitive crime such as sexual assault, ASIRT investigates it objectively and independently.

But in the first 140 concluded files between 2008 and 2012, all but 10 exonerated the accused officers, including Sobieh’s case. This makes critics like Engel wonder: Just how objective or independent is ASIRT?

After you’ve entered the office tower in downtown Edmonton, passed a travel agency and a dental office and taken the elevator to the 15th floor, ASIRT’s heavily secured, bulletproof door is unexpected. But if you know the story of Lee Christopher Monrose, who entered the unit’s Calgary office in June 2010 and stabbed an investigator, then the renovations for security make sense. The 27 team members spread across Alberta’s two largest cities must live in two worlds, simultaneously addressing highly sensitive crimes and providing transparent public service.

Monrose—who would eventually be found criminally insane—believed that the ASIRT investigator, an RCMP officer temporarily hired by ASIRT, was delaying a case against the Calgary police officers who had shot Monrose during a 2009 traffic stop. Another high-profile incident involved a St. Albert RCMP officer suing ASIRT for damages after the agency laid six charges that were later withdrawn for lack of evidence, charges which the officer insists were based on rumours spread by his ex-spouse, an EPS officer.

For Clifton Purvis, ASIRT’s founding director and the person to whom all agency staff report, these incidents show it’s impossible to please everybody. “At the end of the day, somebody is going to be unhappy no matter what,” he told me in December, in the agency’s boardroom, two weeks before he would leave the organization he built from scratch for an interim position as assistant deputy minister to the Solicitor General.

A lawyer for two decades, Purvis left the general prosecutions branch in 2003 for special prosecutions related to organized crime. Two years later he was assigned to Project KARE and led investigations about Alberta’s murdered and missing women. In 2007 he successfully applied to be ASIRT’s first civilian director—but there was a catch. “The agency was only a plan,” he said. “There were some documents drafted, some legislation and a budget, and that was it. I went forward and built it.”

Before ASIRT opened on January 1, 2008, the only agency like it in Canada was Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU), an outfit so maligned that a 2008 report by that province’s ombudsman titled Oversight Unseen called it a “muzzled watchdog.” But unlike the SIU, the instigation of which was prompted in 1990 after allegations of police racism, Alberta’s agency wasn’t born from a crisis of confidence. Rather it was a proactive decision, said Purvis.

Though this made his job easier, Purvis still went in knowing that failure to earn public trust from the beginning could harm ASIRT. Thus it was important to sever police agencies from investigations at the earliest point.

All ASIRT cases are referred not from a city’s chief of police, but from the Director of Law Enforcement in the province’s Solicitor General’s office. Once a case is received, ASIRT assigns a head investigator, who might be a civilian such as a private detective, an intelligence analyst or, somewhat controversially, a temporarily transferred municipal or RCMP officer (though they can’t lead an investigation involving their home agency). Once the primary and his or her team complete the report, which can take anywhere from six to 12 months, it goes to the civilian director for review. If he or she doesn’t suspect an offence, the case is closed and the accused police officer’s supervisor can decide whether internal discipline is needed. If the director does suspect an offence, however, the case is sent to the Alberta Crown. Should both parties agree, the civilian director lays charges and the justice system proceeds as usual.

Before 2008 an officer would usually have been investigated by a peer in his or her own agency. If they hadn’t collaborated in the past, they’d likely do so in the future. As EPS chief Rod Knecht, who used to handle these cases, put it: “Your kids might play with each other.”

Bob Kells, a retired RCMP officer and president of Calgary’s RCMP Veterans’ Association, told me he saw something like ASIRT coming in 1992, a decade after the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was passed. Canadians, he said, became more scrutinizing and demanding of law enforcement. “I was concerned at that time that the public wouldn’t stand for police investigating the police, and it was time to do something different to give credibility to investigation.” When officers investigated one another, biases naturally came into play. “They might not have interviewed everyone they should have, or asked the right questions, because they knew something internally,” said Kells.

Maureen Collins, executive director of the John Howard Society of Alberta, which runs victim’s service programs, pointed out that the Director of Law Enforcement acts as a buffer between ASIRT and civilians by deciding which cases the team can investigate. “If I get beat up in the remand centre or I have a complaint, I can’t just phone up as a layperson and get an independent body to look into it,” she said. However, ASIRT is a major step up from the old days, she said, and vetting the cases is necessary to keep the agency from becoming overwhelmed.

Purvis is immensely satisfied with what ASIRT has achieved. In particular, he’s proud of having adopted independent overseers in culturally sensitive cases, for instance appointing a Somali community leader to assist at interviews and help get reluctant witnesses talking. First Nation liaisons have explained the investigative process at town hall meetings on reserves. “It’s not enough for us to conduct an independent, objective investigation if we don’t let the community know that’s what we’re doing,” explained Purvis. “What are they to assume We need to tell them what we’re doing and satisfy them that we’re doing the right thing.”

Other governments are impressed by ASIRT. Several provincial and territorial police forces have hired the team to lead their internal investigations, and in 2011 the Canadian Armed Forces asked the agency to investigate the death of a young soldier in a CFB Edmonton detention cell (the death was ruled not suspicious and the case concluded without charges). On top of the 35 to 45 local cases Purvis sees each year, plus those from other regions, he has helped Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and BC create nearly identical teams and is working with Quebec on its forthcoming police watchdog.

“ASIRT is probably the most respected model in the country,” said Knecht. “Even talking with my colleagues in the US, it’s considered pretty groundbreaking.”

Richard Roosenthal of BC’s watchdog, the Internal Investigations Office (IIO), agrees. “To my knowledge, there are no programs similar to the [ASIRT] model in the US,” he said. The IIO civilian director would know; he built and led less robust units in Denver and Portland.

What sets ASIRT apart, especially from Ontario’s 23-year-old SIU, is its broad mandate. SIU only investigates “serious” incidents, usually defined by a civilian death or injury requiring hospital attention, but a third of ASIRT’s files are classified as “sensitive”—allegations of sexual assault, corruption, child luring. To that end, Alberta’s watchdog has jurisdiction over all sworn officers in the province, on duty or off, including the RCMP.

“The legislation that created ASIRT is provincial legislation. Arguably it wouldn’t have had force over the RCMP, who are governed by the federal RCMP Act,” explained Purvis. “When I was trying to implement the ASIRT model, a lot of people in Ottawa said the RCMP would not be subject to independent civilian oversight.” With approximately 2,500 Mounties in the province, losing that fight would have undermined ASIRT’s effectiveness. “There was some heated negotiation with the RCMP,” said Purvis. “The leader of K Division [the Alberta unit] showed real vision and courage, and, contrary to the advice he was getting from Ottawa, agreed to [conform] to the jurisdiction of ASIRT.”

Purvis takes responsibility for some challenges. In one of ASIRT’s first files, an EPS officer assigned to the new agency attempted to lead another EPS member to exoneration. When defence lawyer Tom Engel brought this conflict of interest to Purvis’s attention, the investigator was removed.

Tom Engel has lost count of how many cases he’s represented against the actions of police where the officer was eventually exonerated by ASIRT, but he still maintains a good working relationship with Purvis. They’ve met several times to discuss Engel’s misgivings. Few of Engel’s issues have been addressed, largely, he thinks, because ASIRT can’t be truly objective as long as it hires—or “seconds”—active-duty officers.

“What they said is ‘we’re seconding officers,’” Engel told me. “They’re still members of the Edmonton Police Service, and they’re investigating other members of the Edmonton Police Service.” Though it’s not ASIRT practice for seconded officers to head an investigation into someone from their home agency, the latter may be required to assist in an investigation. In one case, an EPS use-of-force expert, Shawna Goodkey, was seconded to help investigate her colleagues’ actions, a decision Purvis stood by. Said Purvis, “She’s a valuable expert that contributed a lot to the organization on issues of use of force, and I found her not to be biased but in fact a very objective independent investigator.”

Gary Creasser was seconded from CPS in 2008, but he never returned to the police. He’s since become the Calgary ASIRT office team commander. According to Creasser, numerous “stopgap measures” ensure objectivity, such as not allowing the primary investigator and suspect to come from the same agency. “The investigation is not steered toward the guilt or the innocence of the officer or officers involved,” he said. “It gathers evidence, puts it in a comprehensive report and then sends that report along with the evidence to our civilian director for review.”

“While [investigators] are seconded to me,” added Purvis, “they report to me and they work in this office.” ASIRT must balance independence with investigative confidence, he said, because the injured citizen, their family and the police officer under investigation are “all entitled to the best investigation.”

Retired University of Alberta criminologist Keith Spencer told me, “Usually the people with the best investigative abilities and experience are people that come from law enforcement backgrounds, and that of course is not acceptable to some citizens.”

But in BC, the IIO is doing things differently. Any investigating officer must have retired from the force, and he or she can’t have worked in the province in the last five years. “The intent,” said the IIO’s Richard Roosenthal, “was to create a level of independence to ensure that an officer has been removed from the culture of policing for a substantial period of time and to ensure that people recognize that the IIO is independent of the police and the province.”

Purvis doesn’t think ASIRT needs such stringency, because it was created proactively. The SIU and the IIO were created reactively, the latter requested by a judge after the tasering death of Robert Dziekański at Vancouver International Airport in 2007. But Edmonton’s police chief goes further and insists the culture of policing is actually an asset. “It’s extremely valuable in doing investigations,” said Knecht. “[Investigators] get the nuances, the dedication to service, how a person identifies with his or her employer or between partners.”

And even the IIO’s civilian director said BC’s system poses challenges. “[The investigator] needs to be made current, so they require a significant amount of training,” said Roosenthal.
Engel would like to see ASIRT—if not remove officers entirely from its staff—adopt something similar to BC’s model. “I’ve looked at particular cases and it’s obvious when you compare them to prosecutions of citizens for assaulting police officers… there’s far less scrutiny, much less of an investigation,” he said. However, he believes ASIRT’s biggest flaw isn’t its use of officer/investigators, but what happens at the end—the fact that ASIRT’s director must seek the Crown’s approval, unlike police, who can lay their own charges.

Because although ASIRT’s headquarters leases public space and is headed by a civilian, the view from the boardroom window doesn’t look to the street but rather to its creator, the Alberta Legislature. That’s who exonerated the three officers in the Sammy Sobieh case. Not Purvis.

When the Sobieh file was concluded in October 2012, more than a year after the video was first shown by CBC, CTV and other media, the mini press conference looked different. Instead of the usual setup that saw Purvis before an ASIRT banner, speaking into a few mics, Alberta Justice assistant deputy minister Greg Lepp was present to explain how he and Purvis, analyzing the same video and same report, came to different conclusions.

Although Purvis suspected excessive force had been used, the prosecution didn’t think a conviction was likely, because it believed police were responding to a man holding a meat hook in a butcher shop. “It’s not like they were responding to a Care Bear manufacturing plant,” Lepp told me when we met in January. “Everyone’s a Monday-morning quarterback in those situations.”

Because the police have training to use force if they suspect there’s a weapon, and because in Sobieh’s case his arm under his torso could have concealed a weapon, Lepp said no judge would likely convict the officers. “It’s not [Purvis’s] job to evaluate the case to determine whether there’s a reasonable likelihood of conviction,” he said. “That’s our job.” Purvis can only evaluate whether there is reasonable suspicion—a small but important difference. “Our standard is somewhat higher,” says Lepp.

“In our legal system there are some checks and balances,” insisted Purvis. “I don’t mind telling you, in that case, I had reasonable and probable grounds to believe that a criminal offence had occurred. I’m not frustrated in the system—the system works well. We conducted an independent investigation, we sought the truth, we did our job, and the Crown has done their job, and that’s the way it is.”

Purvis said it’s not the first time ASIRT and the Crown have disagreed, but this is their first public disagreement, brought on by extensive media coverage.

If ASIRT were as transparent as the IIO, which publishes full reports for every case it completes, we would know how many charges would have been laid if ASIRT’s civilian director had the same power as police officers, who lay the majority of charges in Alberta, or the Crown. But ASIRT only publishes a sample of its completed files, and does so in small, single-page snapshots. However, even a cursory look through these shows several cases Purvis sent to the Crown for review, suspecting an offence, that concluded without charges.

The officers in Sobieh’s case would likely have been prosecuted in Ontario, since the SIU director must lay charges whenever he suspects an offence. Last year alone SIU laid 15 charges from 110 concluded cases.

Security footage from Sammy Sobieh’s butcher shop, Aug 21, 2011.

“Measuring success by the number of cases charged is a very dangerous thing,” said Purvis. He insisted he’s just as proud about the officers he’s helped exonerate. “We must have the courage to say nobody did anything wrong. It’s interesting information for the public, but believe me when I say [charges] are not how we measure our success.”

Ontario doesn’t measure success by charges either. According to a scathing 2008 report by the Ontario ombudsman, that province’s conviction rate was a pitiful 16 per cent. Purvis wouldn’t want to see the same thing happen to the organization he’s since left. The Crown’s review of ASIRT cases, he said, safeguards against misconduct both in policing and prosecution.

But the EPS’s Knecht wouldn’t balk if ASIRT were given equal powers. He’d even like to see its mandate expand beyond all serious matters to everything under the Criminal Code that involves police. “Why even create the perception of bias?” he said. An independent body “makes my job easier because I can say about allegations, ‘ASIRT’s going to investigate them.’”

Spencer, the criminologist, doesn’t think anything will ever totally wash away public distrust. “There is little hope of ever getting a system that is going to satisfy everyone, because either the remedy suggested isn’t harsh enough or the investigation isn’t thorough enough,” he said. “Having an independent body never makes all of it go away.”

However, Engel thinks ASIRT can do better. Not only does he want to see future civilian directors laying their own charges, he thinks the legislation already allows this but just isn’t being enforced. Surprisingly, Purvis doesn’t deny this. But he thinks laying charges would be futile, because the Crown would just withdraw any case it doesn’t think stands a chance in front of a judge. “That’s why there’s this consultative process,” he said.

Engel was pleased when ASIRT was announced five years ago, but he’s since lost faith. He’d like to see a team with Crown prosecutors who charge and indict lawyers, judges, police officers—anyone too close to the law by virtue of their profession. “They have to be insulated from the regular prosecutors, who have to work hand in hand with police officers, and they have to be people who have the stomach for it.”

The irony of the Sobieh case is that just as charges against the officers were dropped, so were those against Sobieh for allegedly threatening the man in the alley with a meat hook. Due to doubt over whether the officers acted lawfully, the Crown also favoured the accused in the charges against Sobieh. It could leave one wondering if justice was done.

But not even Engel will dismiss ASIRT. Though he called it toothless, he also told me, “The investigative quality [of ASIRT] is much higher than what one saw when the police service investigated themselves.” And that’s one thing he, Greg Lepp and EPS chief Rod Knecht can all agree on.

As Purvis eases into the Solicitor General’s office as an assistant deputy minister, he may have more power policing the police than before, and not just because he’s now Lepp’s equal. His new position also encompasses the Director of Law Enforcement, meaning he chooses what ASIRT investigates and he can give the prosecution his opinion on any files his interim replacement, Calgary prosecutor Jane McClellan, sends up the chain.

Though his position at the Solicitor General’s office is just interim, it’s unlikely Purvis will go back to ASIRT. When I followed up with him in January, he told me he was in the process of rewriting his old job description to “[redefine] the reporting structure of the civilian director.” He wouldn’t elaborate on what that could mean, and added, “ASIRT is still in the evolutionary process.”

But he was adamant that the agency works. “The critical reason why ASIRT has been successful is we’ve been careful to consider everyone’s viewpoint,” he said. “Affected people, whether they are families or individuals, their views are important. But theirs aren’t the only views. It’s important that police themselves have confidence in ASIRT, just like people in the justice system, whether they’re judges or the Tom Engels of the world. It’s important they have confidence that their positions are being considered.”

Omar Mouallem is a National Magazine Award nominated writer, Metro News columnist and rapper. He lives in Edmonton.

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