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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Consider this also my disclosure that I’m a party member—reluctantly—and a confession that I’ve spent much of the past 20 years needing to hope, usually against all evidence, that the results of a democratic vote in Alberta might pleasantly surprise me. They’ve done so on a few rare and exquisite occasions, the two most notable ones involving both the party gathering that day and its frontrunner candidate—though not both at the same time.

I’d watched in delighted shock as Naheed Nenshi won his first mayoral race in Calgary in October 2010. I’d stood with thousands of others in front of the Legislature in Edmonton in May 2015 with my jaw agape to Looney-Tunes-character levels, still unable to fully process that I was watching Alberta’s NDP being sworn in as the new government. (I wasn’t a party member then and I still don’t like being one, but for now I’m reluctantly in the wing of the party that is genuinely bothered that my Alberta NDP membership also means I’m nominally a federal NDP member.) And now I’d arrived at the Hyatt Regency’s Imperial Ballroom to witness Nenshi being chosen as the NDP’s new leader. A few months earlier this outcome might’ve shocked me nearly as much as that first mayoral victory. Nenshi was very much not a partisan of the NDP (or any other party). But the result was a certainty by the time it was made official.

Calgary Herald, October 19, 2010

Alberta Views, April 2011

The route by which we’d arrived at this moment is likely familiar to anyone paying even casual attention to Alberta politics, but here’s my condensed version: In 2023, as the culmination of a stunning political comeback, Danielle Smith led the United Conservative Party to re-election  and retained her position as premier. She did so by winning virtually every non-urban seat in the province, along with just enough ridings in Calgary to seal the deal. Her margin of victory consisted of only a few thousand votes in close Calgary races, making electoral success in that city appear absolutely crucial for winning a provincial election from here on out. This is all uncharted territory for Alberta politics, because until 2023 there hadn’t been a genuinely close two-horse race here in living memory.

The slim margin of victory notwithstanding, Danielle Smith was premier again, and in her return to power she summarily commenced to do Danielle Smith sorts of things. These included, in just the first few months, upending the management and structure of the healthcare system, actively impeding the province’s wildly successful renewable energy business, and tossing aside a long-standing rhetorical commitment to LGBTQ+ rights to bring in new policies designed to make life worse and more dangerous for LGBTQ+ youth. This last Danielle Smith sort of thing may have been the final straw for Nenshi, who’d surely been hearing pleas to consider a run at the NDP leadership since the day he stepped down as mayor in 2021. He joined LGBTQ+ activists in February 2024, in front of the very City Hall he’d once presided over, to deliver a ferocious and powerful rebuttal to Smith’s new policies, which would change the rules around gender-affirming healthcare and oblige schools to notify parents of a child’s name change (and require parental consent for those under the age of 15). Effectively, it would soon be provincial policy that school administrators must out trans kids to their parents whether the kids were ready for that or not.

An NDP leadership race had never been like this one: the stakes had never been as high.

Nenshi’s speech at that rally left no doubt that he took Smith’s abandonment of her commitment to protect LGBTQ+ youth personally. He has known her since they were both active in campus politics at the University of Calgary in the early 1990s, and he claimed he’d taken her at her word that she wouldn’t do anything as premier to make the province less safe for those kids. This makes it highly plausible that whatever mix of factors convinced Nenshi to abandon his own long-standing commitment to non-partisanship, Smith’s new socially conservative policies regarding LGBTQ+ youth ranked high on the list. (I know Nenshi socially, but I’m not privy to any of his thinking on this decision.)

In any case, the former mayor declared his intention to seek the Alberta NDP leadership in March, five weeks after that City Hall rally. And his candidacy summarily changed the dynamics of the race with all the subtlety of a prairie hailstorm. Within weeks, the party’s membership numbers had risen to such a stunning degree that one of the candidates, Edmonton MLA Rakhi Pancholi, viewed as a strong contender for the leadership, ended her campaign and shifted her support to Nenshi.

There followed the usual mechanics of a party leadership race—stump speeches and town-hall meetings, social media ads and debates—but no objective observer expected any result other than the one that greeted us on that sunny June day.

At the Calgary Pride Festival, September 2023.

So join me back at the Hyatt Regency. Ride up with me on the escalator from the lobby. Overhear a prominent Calgary Sun columnist a few steps farther up discussing his summer holiday plans. And soak in the obvious symbolism of Alberta’s NDP gathering in a luxury conference hotel’s Imperial Ballroom in the heart of corporate Calgary to welcome its new leader. Historically, the NDP is not corporate, nor luxurious, nor based in Calgary. And if you go far enough back—not that far, really, perhaps to 2014, when the NDP was fourth in the provincial seat count—that Sun columnist up ahead of me on the escalator surely didn’t feel obliged to cover their leadership events, because it didn’t matter much to Calgarians who the head of the provincial NDP happened to be.

Let’s skip ahead now past some friendly nods and how-ya-doins to the main event. The party faithful now gathered to fill the room, the small talk friendly and anxious, the number of faces I associate primarily with Nenshi’s municipal politics running roughly 1:1 with faces I associate primarily with Calgary’s fledgling NDP machine.

Greetings from the Grand Hyatt ballroom’s podium on this day fell to Joe Ceci, the former NDP finance minister and de facto head of the party’s Calgary caucus. Ceci opened with a short, vivid anecdote about how far the party had come. When he’d first mulled a run for a provincial seat in the months ahead of the 2015 election, he said, he’d given real consideration to running as an independent. Not even a decade ago, the NDP’s standing in Calgary had been so weak that it didn’t seem to offer him anything that a resourceful candidate with the organization and name-recognition of a former city councillor couldn’t cobble together for himself.

Even if he was overstating how seriously he’d considered the indie approach, who could’ve blamed him if he’d gone that way Ceci was, after all, a Calgary progressive, and he knew as well as anyone in the room what that had meant before 2015. It meant there was no clear path to victory at the provincial or the federal level and never had been. So what did it matter which party banner you stood under The goal for a Calgary progressive running in a provincial election was to try to steal a single seat in the Legislature, where your likely role in the real business of government would at best consist of trying to broker a deal or two with the reigning conservatives to get some pale facsimile of your ideals embedded in the legislation they were rubber-stamping. Provincial politics were dynastic in Alberta, and the dynasties were conservative. Serious opposition to the regime came almost exclusively from breakaway factions in its own ranks. But a progressive Running in Calgary Red, orange, purple—the colour of the banner barely mattered at all.

The dynastic nature of Alberta politics isn’t news, I realize. But the full scale of it is worth pausing to marvel at. From 1935, when William Aberhart’s Social Credit party defeated the United Farmers of Alberta to form government, until 2015, when conservatives spread their votes evenly enough across two parties to hand the Legislature to the NDP, there had been one change in governing party. Of the nine Social Credit governments, only two controlled less than two-thirds of the province’s seats. The Progressive Conservatives formed 12 governments, and only two of those—the one that brought them to power in 1971 and the Liberals’ near-miss in 1993—were majorities of less than two-thirds. Tally it up: 21 governments, one change in ruling party, and essentially no serious challenge to conservative rule other than that interregnum between the Lougheed and Klein dynasties, when King Ralph was left to eke out his first win in 1993. To be a progressive in this 80-year epoch was to make some sort of peace either with occupying the thin progressive section of the conservative benches or residing forever in the wilderness of no-hope opposition, alongside a dozen or so other lonely souls.

All of that changed with the NDP’s shocking victory in 2015—possibly forever. And everything since, including Joe Ceci’s fun little warmup joke about seeing more hope in flying solo than in riding with the party that won the whole election, has been an exercise, by turns giddy and gut-churning, in trying to map out the new landscape on the fly and find the strongest footing in this wild new terrain.

In 2024 winning the leadership of the NDP meant, for the first time ever, taking the reins of a progressive party with a legitimate shot at forming the next government. There had never been an NDP leadership race like this one, because the stakes had never been as high. There’d barely even been stakes before.

June 22, 2024. Nenshi got 86 per cent of the vote. In his victory speech he shared his vision of an Alberta ready to “start dreaming big.”

So that was the NDP’s path to this moment. What about mine I was looking on from the sidelines at the Hyatt Regency that day, knowing—before his name was called—that I’d registered my vote for the victor. And, yes, wishing I hadn’t been obliged to also become a member of the federal NDP in order to do so.

I take party affiliations seriously. It matters less to my kind of journalism than it does to a daily reporter on the government beat, but I don’t ever want anyone to assume I’m speaking for anyone but myself. I’ve only been a party member at any level twice before. The first time was a federal NDP membership, which I bought to lend my support to Jack Layton’s run for the leadership in 2003 because he was the first politician I’d ever heard talk sensibly and at the appropriate scale about the climate crisis. I let that membership lapse when Layton’s NDP cynically attacked good climate policy to hasten the destruction of the Liberals under Stéphane Dion and his “Green Shift” platform in the 2008 election. The federal NDP has still not restored real coherence to its climate policies—which is, in part, why I resented being made to join the party as a necessary condition of my Alberta NDP membership.

From a base of 16,277, the party grew to 85,277 members eligible to vote for the new leader.

The next membership I took out was with the Green Party of Canada, so I could run as (and vote for myself as) the Green candidate in the 2012 Calgary-Centre by-election. I let that one lapse when the Liberals arrived with a workable and effective climate policy package in 2015. I was a member of no party when Nenshi declared his candidacy for the Alberta NDP. One of his stated goals on the campaign trail was to consider whether the party should maintain its formal partnership with the federal party. It’s not a trivial question, and it cuts to the core of what kind of party the Alberta NDP is and wants to become.

Back at the Hyatt’s Imperial Ballroom, Joe Ceci ceded the podium to a series of officials variously touting the party’s bedrock social democratic values and celebrating the fact of its extraordinary growth during the leadership campaign. The numbers were legitimately impressive—from a base of 16,277 at the start of the race, the party had grown to 85,277 members now eligible to vote for the new leader. The surge in membership was widely acknowledged to have been a product of the attention that accompanied Nenshi’s candidacy—particularly in Calgary. And it is likely in Calgary where the question of the Alberta NDP’s federal ties is most urgent.

When Nenshi raised the issue during the campaign, Rachel Notley responded with a full-throated defence of the formal federal link that provides a particularly clear illustration of the limits to the party’s growth—in appeal, perhaps also in imagination—under an old-school NDP leader. In an interview with the Calgary Herald, Notley responded to Nenshi’s challenge by pointing out that she first met Tommy Douglas when she was just four years old, which is about as strong as bragging rights get in NDP circles. “The idea of running away from that brand is to me silly, superficial, short-sighted,” she said.

When I ran for Parliament in Calgary in 2012, I quickly learned that long-time campaign volunteers share a lore about the parties. Conservatives tend to run the most aggressive campaigns, Liberals the most arrogant ones. But no party, so goes the lore, is as fiercely partisan as the NDP. NDP campaigns have a reputation for trusting in fellow Dippers from afar over local experts lacking sufficient party ties. The NDP would rather maintain righteous internal agreement on a key issue than massage a position to win a race. They too often prefer the correct stance over the best tactics. And that perhaps explains, at least in part, why Notley’s NDP, facing an uphill battle to unseat an unpopular UCP government in 2023, came to the conclusion that unveiling plans for a corporate tax hike was a move worth making in the middle of a struggle to win over Calgary voters wary of a party considered hostile to business.

I can’t say exactly how Notley and her team arrived at that particular decision, and I can’t say with certainty that it was a pivotal factor in the NDP falling a few thousand votes short of victory in a handful of Calgary ridings that would’ve delivered enough seats to win the election. But I do know that political insiders familiar with the lore thought it was exactly on brand. Maddeningly on brand. Which is why changing the brand does in fact matter—because it’s not just the brand that changes under a leader with no previous party affiliations but the whole way the party thinks. And to consistently compete for and win elections in Alberta, the NDP needs to learn how to think differently from its old-school roots. It shouldn’t feel in any way like it is abandoning those roots—the party’s long history of championing workers’ rights and building social democracy are assets in Calgary as much as they are to its long-standing Edmonton supporters. But it must become a party with a broader and more nimble imagination, a party that can attract votes from Lougheed Tories and traditional Liberals recently arrived from the rest of Canada as readily as from its union-backed “Redmonton” base.

I attended a leadership debate at the BMO Centre in Calgary in mid-May, and Kathleen Ganley summed up the NDP’s experience in the 2023 election this way: “We were right about everything. But it wasn’t enough.” The candidates on stage—Sarah Hoffman, Gil McGowan and Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse, in addition to Ganley and Nenshi—spent a good portion of the debate praising each other, tacitly agreeing with Ganley’s assertion that the party was on the right side of the issues. All also agreed, though, that the NDP had to expand its appeal beyond its traditional base. Being right was not enough—the party needed to learn how to win in the two-horse races to come.

Vigorous agreement doesn’t produce many sparks, but Hoffman and Nenshi did engage in a heated exchange over the City of Calgary’s closure of a mobile home park under his mayoral watch. Nenshi defended his record vigorously, and the discussion spun off into policy esoterica. I happened to look over just then and notice that Zain Velji, the Nenshi campaign’s co-director, was seated just across from me in an empty row at the back of the room. His gaze never left his phone throughout, nor showed the slightest concern at the sharp attack his candidate was fending off. I’ve known Velji since he chipped in on my campaign in 2012, and I know first-hand that he understands the lore as well as anyone. He didn’t seem at all worried—and didn’t need to be—that Nenshi’s social-democratic bona fides were being called into question. The tens of thousands of new members registering to vote in the leadership race were not rushing in to argue over shades of orange in an urban housing policy. They were coming because they reckoned the party’s tent might finally be broad enough for them, and because the ringleader they were coming to vote for might attract a crowd big enough to win the next election.

I was surprised by the results after all. Not by the outcome—Naheed Nenshi won easily—but by the sheer size of the victory. I’m not an NDP loyalist, not aware of its internal dynamics. I’d heard rumblings about an old guard that might rally a bit against the insurgent and assumed there was some truth behind those rumours. Instead, the announcement of the vote tally, when it came, echoed around the Imperial Ballroom to affirm a coronation. Nenshi received 86 per cent of the vote. The nearest runner-up (Ganley) came in at only 8 per cent. I wasn’t expecting multiple runoff tallies or anything, but I didn’t anticipate such a landslide.

Elation filled the room. No surprise there—everyone on the winning side in politics seems at least a little delirious about it all, regardless of the stakes. What struck me the most was the sort of tableau the elation created. In his victory speech, Nenshi contrasted his vision of an Alberta ready to “start dreaming big” against the small-minded, defensive, backward-looking UCP version. He described his province not as a “fortress to be defended” but as a “wide-open door with a welcome mat.” And then, one by one, he called up the members of the NDP caucus to attest bodily to that vision.

Here was an NDP caucus showing legitimate, lived-in diversity with effortless ease. Here was an NDP caucus numerous enough to fill the Hyatt Regency’s stage to overflowing—something few progressive caucuses in the province’s history could accomplish. Here, more than that, was an NDP caucus that looked and felt like the Alberta I’ve known and loved best in my 20 years as a resident and sometime dreamer of brighter political futures, a place that truly is remarkable in its open-mindedness and progressive ambition. If that isn’t the only Alberta there is, it’s the one that has been most notably absent as a permanent presence in its politics for most of the dynastic conservative epoch.

Here was a real, united, ambitious opposition, ready and able to contend for power not just in the next election but in any number after that. Never has that existed in Alberta’s progressive politics. And that’s why I’m willing to hope, to dream—to bet, even—that an entire new epoch began on that first Saturday of summer in downtown Calgary.

Calgary’s Chris Turner is the author most recently of How to Be a Climate Optimist, which won the 2023 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

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I wish children didn’t die.
I wish they would be temporarily
elevated to the skies until the war ends.
Then they would return home safe,
and when their parents would ask them:
“Where were you?” they would say:
“We were playing in the clouds.”
—Ghassan Kanafani

Frost was settling on saskatoon bushes in the yard, contrasting white on the siding against the black puck marks on the driveway. Inside, a fruiting fig tree sat in a darkened window. But in the basement of her Edmonton home, 10-year-old Zeher Assaf was running. Her feet went pat-pat, pat-pat, pat-pat, marking a steady rhythm against the droning treadmill belt.

It was hours past bedtime. Her mom said she could run another day, it was not her fault her relatives left so late. But at nearly midnight on November 8—a school night—Zeher would not be deterred. “I didn’t want to mess up,” she says.

Zeher had committed to run the length of the Gaza Strip, 40 kilometres, as a fundraiser. Throughout the horrors of this conflict, streamed live over social media, many adults have shouted, while others have stayed silent or hopeless in their refrains of “it’s complicated.” But for Zeher it was simple—she would help.

A month before, she wasn’t thinking about Palestine. She knew there was conflict, but like any pre-teen she was preoccupied with other things in life—friends, school, track. She was busy playing with her cousins or watching her favourite cartoon, SpongeBob SquarePants, or trekking to her brothers’ hockey games.

Now she was halfway through eight consecutive days of five-kilometre runs, each day five times her normal max.

Zeher was getting tired.

Sometimes she would entertain herself by thinking of a song she likes, such as Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.” Kilometre after kilometre, adding a melody in her mind to the rhythm of her feet, the tempo of her heartbeat, the hum of the machine:

“But I keep cruisin’
Can’t stop, won’t stop movin’
It’s like I got this music
In my mind sayin’, ‘It’s gonna be alright’ ”

But now she kept thinking about the kids like her, a world away, hurt and dying.

“Mom, what’s wrong Why are you crying?” Children are being hurt.

It was Sunday, October 7, the day after Hamas had shocked the world with the bloody attack on Israeli civilians. Zeher, still oblivious, pulled on a black dress, straightened her long dark hair, patted on a touch of pink lip gloss, and, after packing it into a quilted gold clutch with her cell phone, she was ready—off to join 500 guests at her Lebanese family’s wedding.

Like many of the older guests, Zeher’s grandfather had lived through wars in Lebanon. Even after raising his family in Fort McMurray he was still attentive to the on-again, off-again regional fighting, worrying about what might come next.

Of course, he couldn’t have known then that months of intense Israeli retaliation would kill more than 30,000 Gazans. While world leaders have authorized aid, or bombings, or brokered hostage releases, or revoked UNRWA funding, or brought charges of genocide to the international court, parents everywhere have tried their best to shield their children.

As of February this year, more than 13,000 Palestinian kids have been killed. An average of 10 a day have suffered amputations, many without anaesthetic. Many more have lost homes, family members and schools. At least 33 Israeli children were killed in October.

At the wedding, still protected from such dark knowledge, Zeher danced happily with her great-grandmother. But in the days to come, she started to notice the change. Now her mom was always on her phone. Sometimes while she made dinner. Sometimes with tears running down her cheeks.

“Mom, what’s wrong Why are you crying?” Zeher asked. Her mom said children were hurt and it was making her sad. She said Palestinians didn’t have freedom, and it’s a long story. Her mom started to mirror her phone on the TV sometimes, letting Instagram stories play so she could watch from the kitchen.

One day Zeher walked in and there, on her living room television: a dusty toddler leaned against a tiled wall as tremors shook his tiny frame. His eyes were wide, wide open, even his pupils spread like dark moons as he looked everywhere and nowhere. “I was asleep,” he says in Arabic. When a doctor folded the child into an embrace, only then did the boy cry.

Zeher started to cry too.

“Why is this happening?” she asked. But answers were exploding farther and farther from comprehension.

After recess, streams of kids flowed through school hallways to a locked classroom, and in the little eddy of waiting students, Zeher joined an argument.

“He was like, oh, ‘Palestine started it first, so they deserve it.’ And then I told him, “No, they didn’t. Israel started bombing them and stuff in 1948.’ And he didn’t believe me.”

Of course, there’s more to the story than either of the kids could have known. Jews, Muslims and Christians all have thousands of years of history there. And the modern conflict is influenced by, among other things, foreign interference, a series of wars, mass displacement, the Holocaust, failed peace agreements, Jewish settlements and, since 1967, militarized occupation of Palestinian territory.

For Zeher, all that mattered was that Israel was bombing Gaza and kids were getting hurt—she wanted people to care.  So for her next track practice, she pinned a Palestinian flag around her shoulders.

“Mom, what if they don’t like it?”

But on the field, her coach told her it was beautiful, waving as she ran—even if it caught around her legs. Zeher switched to a smaller flag and wore it as often as she could. To school, track, ceasefire protests and errands—she was conspicuous at an NHL event. She wore it to the rink to cheer for her brothers, pinned at the neck with a tiny Canadian flag.

She was excited to wear it to a local fun run, until it was cancelled. But an hour later her mom’s inbox chimed with a serendipitous invite from Islamic Relief Canada, a faith-based humanitarian charity, to “Run for Gaza.”

Zeher only had to raise $250 to qualify—easy—so they set a stretch goal of $1,000 and signed up. Her mom, a medalled runner, could help. And, of course, Zeher would wear the Palestinian flag.

On Halloween her flag trailed her as she roamed the playground with her costumed friends—Hermione Granger, a dumpster, a pink princess and Ghostface. Later, trick-or-treating with her little brother, the pair were a streak of red, white, green and black among the nighttime ghouls and heroes. All of the houses were kind—each kid went home with a bag full of candy, even some full-sized chocolate bars.

Zeher’s parents had screened her from the worst social media images. Still, she had seen enough—she saw whole neighbourhoods in rubble, an ice cream truck, the most joyful of trucks, now repurposed to cool corpses. But the day the fundraising page went live, one picture collapsed the space between Zeher and Gaza.

Children’s shoes rested white on a blue medical sheet. They were just like a pair she had, tucked safely in her closet. But these shoes were drenched in blood. Their tongues were crimson, every crevice and lace was stained, nearly obscuring the pink Nike swooshes.

She was walking in a parallel reality.

“They’re no different from us. They’re all humans like us,” she says. “They deserve justice and love and rights.”

They upped the goal to $10,000. She rolled change at the kitchen table—$150. Her brother sold his Halloween candy and chocolate almonds—$100. Her family sent money, and within days the online donations reached $5,500.

Zeher ran her first-ever five kilometres—red, sweaty and breathing hard—for Gaza. She felt the effort the next day, but she had to do it again.

On Facebook, Abdelrahman, 7, and Omar, 5, lay still in white shrouds. Their father, doctor Iyad Shaqura, bowed to embrace their bodies.

The following afternoon, Zeher ran five more kilometres.

On Facebook a sobbing boy asked, “Why are you killing them Small kids in hospitals, why are you like this Why don’t you go help them Help them, please.”

The next day, Zeher couldn’t run until nearly midnight. She was only halfway to her goal. In the morning, she was so stiff it hurt to walk. But after some stretching, she ran at the indoor track while her aunt and a cousin cheered another milestone—$8,000.

On Facebook, in the Nur Shams refugee camp, young Ahmed wrote: “You can’t make us leave our home.”

The next day, her legs carried her five more kilometres.

On Instagram, 13-year-old double-amputee Layan al-Baz: “I don’t want false legs. False legs will remind me, and I don’t want to remember.”

They doubled the goal to $20,000. Zeher ran again.

Across the finish line, “Yeah, Zuzu! So proud of you, we love you!” 

So often Zeher’s family orbited around hockey, but today her big brother and her dad, a volunteer coach, left the tournament early to cheer for her grand finale. Now they were in the growing crowd of supporters—Zeher was the star. She frolicked through the crowd, cooing at the babies, alternately teasing or high-fiving cousins and accepting affections of proud older relatives.

“GO ZUZU GO”—her cousin’s handmade sign invoked her nickname. Palestinian flags waved gently overhead in the setting sun, keffiyehs rested on shoulders below.

The air started to bite at fingertips but Zeher was warm, bouncing and fidgeting with the tension of the starting line.

“Oh my god, the time’s coming, the time’s coming,” Zeher bubbled over. “I’m literally shaking right now. I’m so scared.”

“THREE, TWO, ONE, GO! GO ZUZUUU!” And her feet tap-tap, tap-tapped the asphalt.

Her mom led the way. A family friend and trainer paced with Zeher, coaching as they ran. By the first kilometre, the sharp edge of a cramp shot through her muscles. At kilometre three, her cousins joined, running along in support. She smacked her gum and gulped air. In the last kilometre, she wondered if her legs would break. The trainer asked if they were almost done.

“I don’t knoooowwww,” she said, her exaggerated whine proving she was OK.

Then there were the final stairs, climbing up and up, and she was across the finish line tape, in the envelope of cheers and bells and horns. “Yeah, Zuzu! So proud of you, we love you! Great job, Zuzu!” She was awash in glitter cannons, flowers and so many cheek-smacking kisses.

Everyone cheered the $16,000 total—her parents later added another $4,000 to maximize the federal government’s donation matching commitment. While all the adults congratulated her, her little brother spelled out his best reward.

“You’re getting to eat chips! Everything on the table tonight,” he declared. “Eve-ry-thing you want!”

Back at hockey, one of the parents told her he was proud of her—the man’s cousin and cousin’s son had been killed in Gaza. After the run, money still trickled in. Zeher returned her family’s bottles and donated some of her own gift money. Her aunt baked cookies for $30 a dozen and raised another $784. The fundraiser finally closed at $25,050—Islamic Relief would later recognize her with an award.

Zeher’s next fundraiser might be a hot-chocolate stand, or maybe another, even longer run.

The next week at school, Zeher sat in her homeroom class while her teacher screened the CTV segment on her fundraiser.

“It was pretty cool to see all the kids seeing what I did and them being shocked,” says Zeher. They watched together as she ran across the finish line then stood steady in the bright camera light.

“Um, I thought it was pretty sad to see lots of children and babies dying. And so that’s what motivated me,” she told the reporter.

Zeher still did not understand why people were being killed, but for her, the action was obvious.

“You should help.”

Amber Bracken is a photojournalist arrested in 2021 while reporting pipeline protests. In 2022 she won the overall World Press Photo of the Year for “Kamloops Residential School.”

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The post Run for the Children appeared first on Alberta Views.

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.

The post A Seat at the Table appeared first on Alberta Views.

After scouting locations in the kitchen, living room, backyard (“you never go into the bedrooms”), in the end “we shot her at her table, and while we were working, she was on three phones, one with Brazil, another with the UK, and texting. Her ‘workspace’ is at a corner of her kitchen table.” (In 2017–2018 Freeland, as minister of foreign affairs, was leading Canada’s renegotiation of NAFTA.)

Freeland’s older daughter, Natalka, had let Markian into the “nondescript” townhouse. He noticed Ukrainian paintings on the wall, Ukrainian sheet music open on the piano. “I hit it off with Natalka, whose Ukrainian language is impeccable. We knew the same folk songs. ‘Oh, you’re Ukrainian! Mum will love this.’”

For a previous article Freeland had listed a Ukrainian alphabet book as one of the “10 things she can’t live without.” “My kids are four, nine and 12,” she’d said. “They’ve all read this book. I’m Ukrainian Canadian, and I speak only Ukrainian with my children. If they ask me for anything in English, they know they won’t get it. My husband, Graham, is picking up the language, too: he’s had 12 years to practise.”

On this day the Toronto Life stylist had found Canadian-designed clothes for the shoot, but Freeland was adamant about wearing her own clothes. “I’m not going to apologize for the stain on my dress. I have three kids.” Markian: “So we ended up with her own outfit for the cover, her red dress, in which she’s so comfortable, and the stylist just had to make sure it was smoothed out.” “I’ll play along for your cover,” Freeland conceded, and submitted to light makeup.

The shoot completed, Markian joined Freeland at that kitchen table, “talking about growing up in the west, our respective times in NYC and what drew us back to Canada, why politics And the possibility we are distantly related through one of her aunts.”

I asked how a decision is made, among all the photos he takes, for a cover. Once his job is done the magazine’s editorial team takes over, but “usually the best image speaks for itself.” And this turned out to be the case with Freeland’s image on the November 2017 cover of Toronto Life. It was Markian’s choice too (and was the source image for a painting now hanging in Rhodes House in Oxford, England). “It truly captures her stature and shows her larger than life force. She is a spitfire, and I feel I captured the essence of her drive and outlook. She’s stately but not arrogant, elegant but not overly glamorous, open in expression, yet firm and grounded in stature.”

Suddenly from the flat lands of the grande prairie you drop into the blue-green shimmer of the valley of the Peace and into the town nestled at the foot of rolling bluffs of the riverbank, strung out along the waterway on its way to the Arctic. In 1977 I was on assignment for Chatelaine, shortly after the victory of the separatist Parti Québécois in Quebec. The Rest of Canada was having a fit, and my assignment was to meet with “ordinary Canadians” to find out why. First stop: Peace River, Alberta, to interview Don and Halyna Freeland.

“The first time I met Chrystia, she looked just like her mother—a fierce ball of energy.” Anne McClellan

I’d known both of them, before their marriage, as undergrads at the University of Alberta. What better way to get reacquainted than to visit They agreed to meet. In the photo in the Freeland home taken by Chatelaine’s photographer, everyone is on the living room carpet including their two girls, “Natalie, 6, and Christie, 9,” tucked under Don’s arms.

Although himself a Liberal, Don called the defeated Bourassa (Liberal) government “rotten corrupt” and the surprise would have been its re-election. “I’m not like the prime minister [Pierre Trudeau], who says, quote unquote, that [Quebec’s separation] would be a crime against humanity. There have been many crimes against humanity, but Quebec seceding is not such a crime.”

Don Freeland doesn’t speak French and has no interest in learning it. Married to a Ukrainian-Canadian—Halyna Chomiak Freeland—he’s more interested in his daughters growing up as bilingual Ukrainian–English speakers. Halyna speaks only Ukrainian to the girls and Don isn’t fussed. “We’re a long, long way from Montreal. I’ve been to Montreal and it felt like a foreign country. But I feel at home in Billings, Montana.”

Home is Peace River, where Don and Halyna share a law practice as well as a farm half a mile from his grandfather’s homestead, 1,800 acres, half of it in feed grains, the other in hay for their Hereford cattle. His grandfather had come up from the US and farmed in the valley—according to a relative, “the Freelands had all their land in the valley, fantastic land, not up on the bank”—which Don’s father, Wilbur, inherited, then expanded. “It’s been my home all my life,” said Don.

In the story of the Chomiak-Freelands, it is the Freelands, not the Ukrainians, who are the settlers. Chrystia Freeland said as much in 2012 in The Atlantic: “We buried my grandfather last spring. He had died in his sleep in his own bed at 95, so, as funerals go, it wasn’t a grim occasion. But it was a historic one for our small rural community. My great-grandparents were early settlers, arriving in 1913 and farming the land throughout their lives. My grandfather continued that tradition, and now rests next to them on a hillside overlooking the family homestead.”

When we were all still undergrads, and Halyna and Don were in arts pre-law and law respectively, Don liked to hang out with the Left on campus—that would be the New Democratic Youth, where Halyna was active. Halyna’s sister and Chrystia’s aunt, Chrystia Chomiak, remembers the old NDY house next to Tuck Shop with portraits of Karl Marx and Taras Shevchenko on the walls: “Excellent parties!” As soon as they had their degrees, Don and Halyna married in the Chomiak family church in Edmonton, St. George Ukrainian–Catholic, and moved to Peace River. Their law firm did mostly commercial and civil litigation, although, as Don said in 1977, “In a small community you have to do pretty near everything that comes in the door.” Halyna, however, did only criminal and civil law while also setting up a daycare in town and travelling to clients in smaller communities, an experience that would later feed her legal and social activism as a feminist lawyer. While Don ran once for the provincial Liberals, Halyna ran twice for the federal NDP.

Halyna’s mother, Alexandra Chomiak, arrived from time to time from Edmonton to babysit Chrystia (b 1968, christened Christina Alexandra) and Natalie (b. 1971); Alexandra would do the same when the Freelands came to Edmonton on weekends and dropped the kids off with Baba and Dido. Halyna’s sisters, including aunt Chrystia Chomiak, were also frequent visitors.

Chrystia Freeland recalled her childhood, as told by Linda Diebel of the Toronto Star in 2015: “Memories from Alberta’s Peace River country make Freeland’s heart soar. ‘I had a wonderful childhood. It was magical.’…‘He loved the Peace River so much,’ she says of [grandfather] John Wilbur Freeland. His father was John, so he became Wilbur—wartime flyer, rodeo bronc rider, boxer under the name ‘Pretty Boy Freeland,’ lawyer and farmer…. He put her and her only sibling, Natalka, on a big brown mare named Princess when they could barely hang on. And when she was 12 and Natalka 10, he gave them horses for Christmas.”

In 2012, when then-journalist Freeland was still writing for American audiences from her perch in New York City, she took up the subject of “the family farm,” to refute the usual lamentations about “the good old days in rural areas, the family farm’s decline, and the inevitable loss of the homestead,” and pronounced the regret “obsolete.” Case in point: her father’s operation in Peace River, the third generation on the land but “bigger and more prosperous than ever.”

Don Freeland not only had his own 3,200 acres [1295 ha] under cultivation, he rented another 2,400 acres [971 ha], “all told, a territory seven times the size of Central Park.” The article lists the tonnes of wheat, canola and barley and litres of vegetable oil that he reaps from the land, with the help of two hired hands—two!—and others at seeding and harvesting.

“I remember,” she later told the Toronto Star, “coming home from working in the fields with my grandfather one day in the summer, and he stopped and said to me: ‘You know, what I love most about the farm is that every field has a different view and every one is beautiful.’”

In 1978 Don Halyna Freeland divorced, and Halyna moved with the two girls back to Edmonton. (Chrystia entered Grade 4.) It was a swift and deep immersion into an urban activist community, Ukrainian-Canadian, leftist and feminist, a life under the tutelage of Halyna and her extended family and her political sisterhood. As Halyna’s obituary (2007) summarized, “She was a lawyer, activist, teacher, community organizer, bookstore founder, co-operative housing pioneer, politician, student and international legal reformer; she was a single mother, an art collector, a gourmet cook and a voracious reader.”

Halyna’s parents, Mykhailo and Alexandra Chomiak (Chrystia’s maternal grandparents), had left western Ukraine in 1939 and by 1945 were in a refugee camp in Germany, where Halyna was born in 1946. In 1948 the family immigrated to Canada, grateful to be safe. “They never dared to go back” to Ukraine, but, as Chrystia wrote in a 2015 essay “My Ukraine, and Putin’s Big Lie,” “for the rest of my grandparents’ lives, they saw themselves as political exiles with a responsibility to keep alive the idea of an independent Ukraine.”

“ ‘You don’t judge people by their economic means’ was Halyna’s basic principle.”  Chrystia Chomiak, on Freeland’s mother

Chrystia Chomiak tells me that Mykhailo and Alexandra learned some English in the displaced persons camps; once the family had settled into a house in Jasper Place (a community not yet incorporated into Edmonton), “Mum learned [English] from the ads in the Edmonton Journal.” It was already a multilingual household, with Alexandra and Mykhailo speaking Ukrainian and Russian interchangeably with Polish, but without English Mykhailo could not practise journalism nor go back to law school and instead worked “for years” as a lab assistant. Two more children were born in Canada and the family of eight somehow fit into a one-bedroom bungalow on a double lot in Jasper Place, where Alexandra cultivated a “massive” garden (“Mum could ‘speak’ to the plants”) and did a prodigious amount of canning. “Our family was poor,” Chrystia Chomiak recalls, almost wistfully. “But houses were cheap—we had electricity, an outhouse, but no running water until 1953,” when indoor plumbing was installed and a second bedroom was added. “At the store we bought salt, sugar, flour, tea and prepared meats. Credit was not always extended. We collected bottles on the way home from school. We got our clothes at the ‘Canadian’ (Protestant) churches for everyday clothes. But we each had one very good outfit from Holt Renfrew and Johnston Walker. Of course we never afforded a car.”

 This was never a white bread family, literally as well as figuratively: no white bread allowed on the Christmas table in the Chomiak household. Rye bread was de rigueur and always provoked a discussion when they visited Vienna Bakery: sour or not, light or dark But “milk and cream all the time. We were a potato family, in every style.” This explains, perhaps, Chrystia Freeland’s acquisition of poutine as her favourite fast food.

A friend remembers how a social conscience is bred: “During Halyna’s funeral, Chrystia [Freeland] described how their mother would use family domestic events as teachable moments to get across basic political concepts. One time, when they made their usual Saturday morning stop at Vienna Bakery, Halyna decided it was time to teach the girls about the unfairness of majority rule versus proportional representation, pointing out that under a majority system, Natalka, who didn’t like the rye bread that Halyna and Chrystia favoured, would never get to choose the bread she preferred. Not fair!”

Until Jasper Place amalgamated with Edmonton in 1964, the “border” was at 149th Street and the end of the trolley line. Chrystia Chomiak admits she and her siblings grew up among “lots of very poor and dysfunctional neighbours, the generational poor. Junk and mean dogs in their yards. People were mean—throwing rocks at the windows of the house of the Black family.” Nevertheless, the Chomiaks understood that “our family was very much more educated than our neighbours,” with all the attendant intellectual and cultural advantages that sent them off, one after the other, to university. “I love Jasper Place,” says Chrystia Chomiak, “not Edmonton.”

Still, the girls did wish their mum would make Rice Krispie squares instead of Viennese tortes for Hallowe’en at school.

Carless, the Chomiak family made the trek into Edmonton on Sundays to St. George Ukrainian–Catholic church. As parents they were not particularly “pious.” According to Chrystia Chomiak, the family kept the religious traditions such as the main feast days and fasts. But Mykhailo and Alexandra as grandparents continued to have a strong influence on the granddaughters, who had to have a religious education, end of discussion. Dido Mykhailo would pick up Chrystia and Natalka and the three of them would walk over to St. George’s “because his ‘atheist daughter,’ the socialist Halyna, wouldn’t take them.” When the granddaughters stayed with Baba Alexandra in Jasper Place, they would go with her to the Orthodox cathedral, to be with her own Orthodox people. And this, Chrystia Chomiak agrees, was the extent of her nieces’ “churching” in Edmonton.

In January 2020, Edward Luce, The Financial Times’s US national editor, came to Edmonton to have lunch with his former boss, Chrystia Freeland, who was visiting family. They met at Bistro Praha. (Many of us took grave offence at New Yorker Luce’s description of this beloved eatery as “somewhat faded.”) On Freeland’s recommendation, Luce ate prodigiously: “Since Freeland, 51, has frequented this place for 40 years, we agree that she will order for me. …‘You must try the Prague egg—it’s one of the bistro’s specialties,’ she says …At this point my main course lands with a thud. It includes serried ranks of Hungarian sausages, a mountain of sauerkraut and foothills of Ukrainian dumplings.” Freeland, however, is fasting: She’s home for the holidays, it’s Ukrainian Christmas Eve, and the rule is you cannot eat before evening, the Holy Supper. “I’m going to cheat,” she says, and orders a cappuccino.

Chrystia Chomiak tells me that “the whole family in Edmonton was involved in Plast.” This scouting association is essentially a post-Second World War transplant from western Ukraine, where it had been founded in 1911. Vera Pastuszenko Krawec, whose parents had signed her up in Edmonton at age 6, concurs that “we were mainly first-generation children of immigrants. Plast was close to the original Baden-Powell model, and still very Christian. Everything starts and ends with a prayer.”

I form a picture of Chrystia Freeland, plastunka extraordinaire, who was in summer camps with Krawec. Krawec lists the attractions: “Adventure, companionship, social and survival skills, camping in the woods, roughing it in tents: heck, yes. Ages 6–10 stayed in cabins on Lake Wabamun, but age 12 and over roughed it in tents on the ground. Dug our own latrines, built fencing and benches, learned to forage for food, make meals, tie knots. We turned out as super-capable people; you’d want one of us on a plane if it crashes.” This was particularly true of plastuny from Edmonton. Those from Ontario were “super-soft.”

Uniforms were de rigueur—boys in pants or shorts, girls in skirts—and festooned with merit badges, “not easy to earn,” as plastuny moved up the ranks of achievements in astronomy, bike-riding, gun safety at a shooting range, embroidery, rock-climbing. “Duties and leadership abilities were non-gendered. That’s why I loved it so much. What a glorious organization!” No English speech allowed. Lots and lots of singing of traditional and patriotic Ukrainian songs.

Chrystia Freeland wasn’t in Krawec’s cohort and wasn’t always at the weekly Saturday meetings, but she was always at summer camp. “Her dad would show up at the camp, but because he wasn’t one of ‘us’ [not Ukrainian] and because her parents were divorced, she was a bit of a curiosity. Nobody was divorced in the Ukrainian community in those days.”

Krawec isn’t surprised Chrystia has made such a mark for herself. “She was tiny and very cute and you could tell she was smart. Her Ukrainian language was impeccable. If she hadn’t been a ‘drop-in,’ she would have been a leader. I don’t remember her not being good at anything—perhaps not so athletic. Kitchen duties required lots of skills, but I remember she couldn’t have the cookies at dinner because she wasn’t allowed sugar.”

 In April 1983 Chatelaine published “Sisters: The Unbreakable Bond,” by Myrna Kostash. Chrystia Freeland is 14, Natalie, 12. Growing up in Edmonton, they like to do things together: go to music lessons, take holidays, cook a meal, and talk, talk, talk when the lights are out and they’re in bed. They admire each other’s accomplishments without a trace of jealousy (Chrystia: “Nat’s always been more artistic and creative.” Natalie: “You put your creativity more into writing.”) and complain about each other with amazing good nature.

Chrystia: “We share a bedroom, and sometimes I think she’s a real slob.” Natalie: “Sharing a bedroom has been the worst experience of my whole life.” Chrystia: “Nobody babies me the way they baby Nat.” Yes, but. Natalie: “On Awards Night, if she gets the Gold Medal and I only get a Silver, that’s yucky. I want to show everybody I’m as smart as she is.”

By 1983 I had become a member of an impressively large fan club in Edmonton (and well beyond) of Halyna Freeland and had spent considerable time in her home in the inner-city and Ukrainian Norwood neighbourhood, where she settled with her daughters in 1979. She had set up a law practice with a social conscience formed from her childhood: “In her legal practice,” Halyna’s sister Chrystia reflects, “people would come to her as one who would help poor people who couldn’t always pay. ‘You don’t judge people by their economic means’ was a basic principle.”

A friend said: “Halyna had a tremendous influence on her daughters’ political and social consciousness. Their dining room table was the centre of many feminist and political discussions, events and campaigns. It was undoubtedly the scene of the campaign that Halyna spearheaded in getting women’s groups involved in an ultimately successful lobby to change the incredibly unfair matrimonial property laws in the 1970s.”

This was the notorious Murdoch v. Murdoch, when Irene Murdoch, “a ranch wife from Nanton, Alta., left her home (and 25-year marriage) in 1968 with a broken jaw and collar bone,” and claimed, on the basis of the economic input of her labour, half the family cattle ranch, a claim rejected at divorce court and all the way up to the Supreme Court in 1973, where it was rejected again (by an all-male bench). Speaking for the majority (4–1), Justice Martland found that the wife’s labour was not beyond what was normally expected of a ranch wife. Uproar upon uproar.

 “Chrystia would have been very young when this was all happening, but it illustrates the kind of household that she grew up in.”

Halyna whirled on, and drew other women into her orbit. She was active in the Local Council of Women, Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) and International Women’s Day. Halyna was a co-founder of Common Woman Books—and raised her daughters as “voracious readers.”

“Halyna was a force to be reckoned with, and you didn’t cross her,” Marie Gordon, a fellow lawyer and activist, remembers, still in awe. Of course the bookstore meetings were all run as collectives, a “revolutionary process, living our principles.” You brought your babies into the store with you and there was a jolly jumper in a doorway. As well as feminist literature, the store sold cookbooks, music and magazines, and T-shirts emblazoned with words from the anarchist Emma Goldman. And daughter Chrystia was “part of the milieu.”

Much later Freeland, in the running to be MP for University-Rosedale Toronto, answered a 2015 questionnaire by Toronto Life:

Who’s your role model? “My late mother.”

What do you want your tombstone to say? “‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution.’ This was one of my mother’s favourite quotes. Emma Goldman spent some time living in our riding and died in Toronto.”

In 1982 planning began for Hromada, a “Ukrainian, socialist and feminist” housing co-op in Old Strathcona. Halyna said, “One of my dreams has been that people who are not related can live together as a family.”

We met at the Freeland (mother and daughters) home, always at a large oval dining table laden with potluck contributions while Halyna presided as our host and lawyer. As with the bookstore collective, our decisions were made—at Halyna’s insistence—only after consensus had been achieved in an interminable “round robin” of opinions and arguments. No winners or losers, no majority vs. minority views.

One founding member I’ll call “Nadia” remembers that, at one of the meetings as we ate and argued and drank and smoked like chimneys, Chrystia and Natalka came down the stairs and interrupted our proceedings to announce, “We’ve been thinking about how, since we are going to be living in this co-op too, we should have a say in the decisions you’re making.” This was respectfully discussed—and the consensus was, okay, but not until you’re 16.

“Nadia” went on: “I liked the people socially—their warmth and generosity—but when I sat in on some Marxist readings I wondered what I’d got myself into.” And there were “endless meetings,” endless discussions with the architect, and “the fantasy! Sliding doors between units. A communal kitchen. A sauna…”

I moved in, end of 1984, and the sense of community had if anything deepened. I have the photos to prove it: women’s vegetarian potlucks, birthday parties (Halyna and I shared the date), the visit of Sviatyi Mykola (St. Nicholas) on December 19, legendary “alternative,” i.e., “feminist-socialist” malankas/New Year’s Eve parties that required months of preparation. We hosted scholars from Ukraine, and Halyna planted an apple tree in the common area where the kiddies played.

What’s not to love Yet, on the few occasions when a journalist profiling or interviewing Chrystia Freeland mentions the (Ukrainian, socialist, feminist) housing co-op where “she spent a good chunk of her childhood,” she is reticent. (In 1988 she left for Harvard to study Russian history and literature.) And she’s in very few of my photos. “I don’t know if this is still what it calls itself,” The Globe and Mail’s Adam Radwanski quotes her musing of the place. He adds: “This fledgling attempt at communal living in a corner of Edmonton… is understandably not her go-to when speaking publicly about her upbringing…. And no, she has never been a socialist herself.”

Chrystia Chomiak put it this way: “Both of her [Halyna’s] daughters are very socially conscious, but for Chrystia her economic solutions differ even though she shared the goal with her mother of economic equality and security. Look at what supports were rolled out to deal with economic dislocations during COVID. Her lifestyle and values show this.”

In 1988 Halyna Freeland ran for the federal NDP in Edmonton-Strathcona. To implement or not to implement the US–Canada Free Trade Agreement hammered out by Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney The NDP were dead set against it, fearing US domination over all our made-in-Canada institutions.

So of course many of us hromadnyky worked on Halyna’s campaign. We gathered under balloons and crepe paper streamers, sat in front of a giant TV screen to watch, hearts sinking, as primarily Ontario and Quebec voters gave Progressive Conservatives 169 seats in a 295-seat parliament. “The result fundamentally altered Canadian politics,” Stephen Azzi writes. “In the words of historian Norman Hillmer, [the free trade deal] marked ‘a final recognition of Canada’s inevitable destiny as a North American nation.’ ”

The irony is stark: In 1988 Halyna Freeland’s NDP opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement that three decades later was renegotiated by Chrystia Freeland, Liberal cabinet minister.

In the meantime, in 2008, Linda Duncan ran in and won Edmonton-Strathcona for the NDP, and it’s been NDP ever since. Duncan, in retirement, says Freeland is “very approachable,” and in the House their relationship was “always convivial.”

Duncan was three times an election monitor in Ukraine and shares with Freeland inspiration from the 2014–2015 “Revolution of Dignity” on Independence Square in Kyiv: “Fascinating, because it gave a flavour of participatory democracy on the ground.” In 2019 Duncan received an Executive Hetman award from the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Alberta Provincial Council (UCC-APC). She’s chuffed about it. “Liberals and Conservatives compete with each other as to who loves the Ukrainians more. I grew up in Alberta, where the prevailing attitude toward Ukrainians was as ignorant farmers. To visit Ukraine—what an eye-opener, all of it. What a beautiful country.”

While Chrystia was at Harvard, Halyna left law practice and, with the declaration of independence of Ukraine in 1991, moved to Ukraine in 1992 to work for an NGO, the Ukrainian Legal Foundation. She lived in Kyiv for the next 10 years, while Chrystia was up north in Moscow as bureau chief for the Financial Times, 1994–1998. Chrystia would visit Halyna in her mother’s Kyiv apartment, which she now owns with her sister.

At that point, both mother and daughter had long since moved on from Edmonton.

 Chrystia Freeland’s career in journalism and politics is much documented. She has written two widely acclaimed books, Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution and Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. As a cabinet minister she has sometimes been called “The Minister of Everything.”

On November 25, 2019, as a newly minted Intergovernmental Affairs minister, Chrystia Freeland was in Edmonton for her first meeting in that role with Alberta premier Jason Kenney. Her visit coincided with that of former president of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, and all three were guests at a banquet hosted by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. Orysia Boychuk, UCC-APC president, sat at the head table with them. I was curious what the atmosphere had been like, given the strained relations between the UCP and the Trudeau feds, and the noncommittal conclusion to Freeland’s and Kenney’s meeting earlier that day: “It was a good start,” Kenney told reporters.

“We didn’t know how it was going to play out,” Boychuk told me. “I mean, would Kenney even agree to attend if Freeland were there?” The UCC hoped there would be common ground between two people who had “passionately defended” Ukraine (Kenney while minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism in Harper’s cabinet). In a word, said Boychuk, “It was beautiful!” Edmonton’s Ukrainian community has long admired Freeland from her days as a journalist, as someone of “depth and breadth, willing to advocate in any way for Ukraine. It was a very emotional evening.” Beyond just behaving well, respectful of and acknowledging their political differences, Freeland and Kenney bonded. Through the entirety of Poroshenko’s speech, Freeland, translating, never took her mouth away from Kenney’s ear. Boychuk: “It was sweet.”

I ask Anne McLellan, the ninth deputy prime minister of Canada, 2003–2006 (Freeland is the tenth—Harper didn’t appoint a deputy), and formerly my MP for Edmonton-Centre, if she thought the “political culture” had changed for women MPs since she was in office 1993 to 2006. Given that more women are in positions of power and influence and Justin Trudeau (b. 1971) and Chrystia Freeland (b. 1968) are of a generation brought up “in a time and place where you assume equality and inclusion,” then, yes. “You’d hear stories from women who were in office in 1984, 1988, when female washrooms were an issue and sexist comments weren’t always called out. But in 1993 my female cabinet colleagues and I were focused on doing our jobs.”

During her time in politics McLellan had “strong support” from the Ukrainian–Canadian community, which is how she came to know Halyna, who, on her visits back to Edmonton from Ukraine, would gather with her network of women keen to hear reports of her legal activism in Kyiv. “The first time I met Chrystia,” Anne remembered, “I thought she looked just like her mother, a fierce ball of energy. That intensity is what sustained Halyna in Ukraine and now sustains Chrystia.”

“I speak only Ukrainian with my children. If they ask for anything in English, they won’t get it.” Chrystia Freeland

When McLellan and I spoke, Freeland had recently been appointed Minister of Finance and the commentariat had expressed trepidation about her fitness for the job, vacated by a businessman, Bill Morneau. At the same time, much was made of her roots on an Alberta farm, and it was this that, “as Finance Minister… proves [Freeland’s] nothing like Morneau,” Andrew Willis argued in The Globe and Mail. She had been speaking (virtually) to a business crowd at the Toronto Global Forum, and set their minds at ease: “I am from rural northern Alberta,” she said; Canadians, like farmers, “dream big and spend big and can afford to do so.”

Farmers: this resonated for McLellan, who was born and raised on a dairy farm in Nova Scotia: “There is something ingrained in you if you’re born on a farm.” She has been in Alberta since 1980, while Freeland has been away, but the two women share “Alberta perspectives.” Specifically, she says, perspectives gained from families who work on the land, “always living with risk and how to mitigate it. As kids we understood risk—animals get sick!—and we could lose it all because of factors beyond our control. This makes you risk averse.”

But, McLellan emphasizes, there is an uplifting side—neighbourliness—and it makes you respectful of other people’s anxieties and ready to help out if there’s a crop failure. By the same token, there is such a thing as society, “and government matters to the quality of life, even of existence.”

In the acknowledgements at the end of Plutocrats, Freeland includes Anne McLellan in the “Maple Leaf community [that] has been central to my thinking.” Moving among international political and financial movers and shakers, what in the end does she espouse “I sometimes describe my own political philosophy as being simply ‘Canadian.’ ”

From childhood, Chrystia Freeland shared a goal of economic equality and security with the various communities she grew up among. By her own account, that shared goal was already taking shape in “consciousness-raising meetings convened in a kitchen in Peace River.” 

Myrna Kostash writes literary and creative non-fiction and is the author of All of Baba’s Children. She lives in Edmonton.

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It might also be a metaphor. In the 2012 election, Premier Alison Redford vowed to bring the inner workings of Alberta’s government into the light. Voters around the world are well used to such campaign-trail rhetoric. Transparency! Accountability! Open government! But changing the culture of an established bureaucracy, not to mention the modus operandi of career politicians, is easier said than done. Redford came out of the blocks running. A month after winning she created a new department, the Ministry of Accountability, Transparency and Transformation. To lead the charge, she tapped Scott, a lawyer and rookie MLA from Fort McMurray-Conklin.

Scott’s start, at least on this day, is less auspicious. A handful of people are clumped together in a room full of empty tables, waiting. Scott is halfway through a 12-day provincial tour, part of a review of Alberta’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, or FOIP. Most of these sessions are designed for the public, but this one is specifically for journalists. The turnout isn’t promising. Four members of the media are here—a pair from Shaw Cable and two from this magazine. An interest group has sent a representative, and a few concerned citizens have come out.

Once Scott arrives, he dutifully delivers his spiel on the FOIP Act review. Other presenters do their bit, questions are fielded, there’s some milling around and then it’s back out the door and into the rain. All told, Scott’s summer barnstorm across Alberta drew about 150 people. The online portion of the FOIP consultation, which lasted roughly six weeks, garnered 400 responses and another 30 written submissions.

In theory, Alberta’s disclosure law says government is a caretaker of information that belongs to citizens. In practice, however, those that actually seek information under the FOIP Act—journalists, opposition MLAs, watchdog groups, academics and others invested in keeping tabs on our leaders—say the system also has built-in features that allow for as much obstruction as access.

That politicians can be unscrupulous is, sadly, a given. Conflicts of interest, illegal donations, influence peddling, Mike Duffy and Nigel Wright, Pamela Wallin, Mulroney–Schreiber, Shawinigate—the list goes on. A legislated right to know what takes place behind closed doors can help bring skeletons into the light. Better still, the mere presence of a strong disclosure law can deter corruption before it happens, curbing the number of skeletons hidden in the first place.

The right to know what government is up to is considered a pillar of democracy. The job of upholding democracy, it bears noting, feels out of place amidst the bad coffee and free plastic pens of a Holiday Inn. But if Redford and Scott are sincere in their pledge to openness, public consultation is just the beginning. Much needs to be done to overhaul a FOIP system that stacks the deck in favour of opaqueness.

Secrecy, Power and Transparency share a long history. The Roman historian Tacitus used the term arcana imperii to describe the clandestine approach used by emperors to maintain authority. The idea of arcana imperii was taken up by Renaissance philosophers who saw secrecy as a tool used by their own monarchs to consolidate power. The tide began to shift during the Enlightenment. In 1766 Sweden adopted the world’s first freedom of information act. Drafted by Anders Chydenius, a learned priest from a hinterlands parish, the law’s Swedish name is offentlighetsprincipen, or the “principle of publicity.” Before Chydenius, any writing about the affairs of Swedish state was banned.

The thinkers who shaped the early days of democracy understood the inherent political tension between transparency and secrecy. In 1822 James Madison, who penned the first drafts of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, wrote that “a popular Government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

Access to information in a modern sense is relatively new. The US adopted the Freedom of Information Act in 1966 following years of public pressure. The groundbreaking legislation served as a model for a handful of other countries, which implemented disclosure laws over the next few decades. Canada waited until 1982 to adopt its Access to Information Act. The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 saw a spike in the number of freedom of information (FOI) laws on the books. Now, more than 90 countries have some form of disclosure legislation. Among Canadian provinces, Nova Scotia blazed the trail, implementing its Freedom of Information Act in 1977. New Brunswick followed a year later. Alberta didn’t adopt its FOIP Act until 1995. That still beat Prince Edward Island, which took until 2002 to proclaim legislation.

Alberta’s FOIP Act covers a lot of ground. It deals with protection of privacy: what information can be collected about citizens, who uses it, and for what, and how it can be disclosed. It also grants Albertans the right to information held by public bodies—government ministries, school boards, municipalities, police and others.

In its first General Assembly in 1946, the United Nations called freedom of information a fundamental human right. In 1995 the UN further explained: “Freedom will be bereft of all effectiveness if the people have no access to information. Access to information is basic to the democratic way of life. The tendency to withhold information from the people at large is therefore to be strongly checked.”

If governments are indeed hard-wired for secrecy, then freedom-of-information legislation can be thought of as a counterbalance. Information gives citizens the tools to scrutinize government decisions, to know what questions to ask and to make educated decisions at election time.

“Alberta is one of the worst FOIP jurisdictions in the world… Loopholes provide enormous wiggle room.” —Centre for Law and Democracy

How does Alberta’s FOIP system stack up to other places Not well. Each year, the media industry association Newspapers Canada issues report cards that compare the quality of disclosure regimes in Canadian jurisdictions. In 2012 Alberta received a B for the speed with which FOIP requests are processed, but a D for its completeness of disclosure—the third-lowest grade in the country. The Centre for Law and Democracy, a non-profit organization based in Halifax, found similar results in its 2012 study, which looks at 61 indicators of transparent regimes. Alberta scored 53 per cent, tying for last place among Canadian provinces and 55th in the world, behind Colombia and Mongolia but just ahead of Angola and Thailand.

“Certainly, I’m not very happy that Alberta’s law did as poorly in those studies as it did,” says Jill Clayton, Alberta’s Information and Privacy commissioner. “I think there’s a lot of room to improve.” Clayton became Alberta’s third privacy commissioner in early 2012. Her job deals with all things FOIP in the province. If a FOIP user feels a request was handled improperly, for instance, the appeal ends up on Clayton’s desk. Experts say an empowered official acting at arm’s length from government differentiates transparent regimes from more secretive ones.

Alberta having a FOIP Act and a privacy commissioner puts it ahead of places that don’t. Legislation, though, only goes so far. “A law is only as good as its implementation,” Clayton says. “You can have the strongest law in the world and not have the resources or the political will to implement it properly.” Alberta’s shortcomings when it comes to freedom of information, as Clayton suggests, can be split into three areas: the legislation itself, how the law is implemented and political will.

“What many in government don’t understand is that they don’t own the information. It belongs to the public.”
—Charles Rusnell, CBC Edmonton

No FOI legislation allows citizens access to everything. Some information, whether personal or from a public body, must be confidential. It’s easy to understand, for instance, why a person’s medical history shouldn’t be available to just anyone. Alberta doesn’t have nuclear weapon launch codes, but if we ever do, we’d best keep them beyond the reach of a FOIP request. Information laws attempt to balance the competing interests of privacy and availability through a mechanism known as “exceptions to disclosure.” Alberta’s FOIP Act contains a long list of exceptions. Information may be withheld if it’s deemed harmful to public safety, protected by privacy laws or would hurt the business interests of a third party (e.g., terms of contracts signed with government). But exceptions can also be used to keep information hidden from public view, even if doing so violates the spirit of the law.

Alberta’s FOIP Act contains an exception, for instance, that allows cabinet ministers to keep all manner of records—briefing materials, meeting minutes, emails—away from the public. The idea is to protect the decision-making process, allowing for frank discussions among officials. What’s lacking, though, is an obligation to prove how the information, if disclosed, would harm the public interest. Without such a test, this exception can be used as a catch-all that allows officials to withhold almost any information. The Centre for Law and Democracy is unequivocal in critiquing what Alberta puts out of bounds, noting the province is “one of the worst jurisdictions in the world with regards to its treatment of exceptions. Together, these loopholes ensure that the law cannot serve as a proper tool of governmental accountability, as they provide an enormous amount of wiggle room for recalcitrant public officials who would seek to avoid disclosure of embarrassing information.”

Alberta’s FOIP Act may also be overridden by so-called paramountcy provisions contained in other legislation. Such clauses carve chunks out of the FOIP Act, putting information beyond its reach. Alberta’s law is trumped by more than 35 paramountcy provisions. The Mines and Minerals Act, for example, contains a clause that excises information about royalties from the disclosure law. The rationale behind the exclusion is to protect the competitive interests of oil and gas companies. The clause, though, also prevents Albertans from gaining insight into the billions in royalty dollars collected each year from resources they ostensibly own. Throw enough paramountcy provisions at a law and experts say even the best legislation will be effectively neutered.

In his review of the legislation, Scott says everything is on the table, including exemptions from the Act. “We’re going to be looking at each exemption,” says Scott. “We’re asking: Does it make sense for Albertans?” Scott has enlisted five experts on freedom of information to help, in part by examining policy elsewhere. Once finished, Scott says, this province’s legislation will measure up to any in the world. Not everyone is as hopeful. Laurie Blakeman, MLA for Edmonton-Centre and Liberal opposition house leader, is particularly skeptical of Scott’s promise. In 2010 she joined an all-party committee that presented 24 recommendations to the legislature following a nearly year-long review of the FOIP Act. None were acted upon. “Now we have a new minister doing a new review,” Blakeman says. “When I asked him, ‘Explain to me why you would repeat this effort all over again,’ he couldn’t.”

Scott has heard the knocks on his legislative review, as well as the criticisms about Alberta’s approach to disclosure. He disagrees with both. “I’m certainly aware that some people think there’s a culture of secrecy [in Alberta’s government],” he says. “My own experience with this government, and even with this FOIP review process, is that we’re getting information out.”

For Scott’s new legislation to become law, he’ll still need to get a bill past cabinet and his colleagues in the legislature. Even if that happens, the work still won’t be finished. Finding the political will to properly implement the law is another matter entirely.

The experience of using FOIP in Alberta is seldom described as user-friendly. “I can buy rare Belgian beers online with a credit card and have them in my house 24 hours later, yet I can’t make a FOIP request to my own provincial government without a pile of paperwork and pulling out cheques,” says Scott Hennig, a vice president at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF). “I’ll be the only guy buying stamps and cheques when I’m 80, because they don’t want to make this any easier on us. And if they could… figure out how I’d have to go hand-deliver a stone tablet, they would.”

Alberta levies a $25 charge for each FOIP request, a cost that may seem small, but one that Hennig says can deter potential filers. Some Canadian jurisdictions charge only $5 per request. Across the country, the CTF files upwards of 500 FOI requests a year. Whether governments should even charge to process FOI requests is open to debate. Hennig has discussed many of his concerns with Scott and is hopeful about the review. That said, he also wonders how a bureaucratic culture that’s taken an oppositional approach to information requests for so long might actually change. “We fill out a request, we send it and we basically plead with a public body to provide us with information, whereas we should be viewing it as no different than our right to vote,” says Hennig. “We don’t go to the polls and plead with the election worker to please allow us a ballot so we might vote, and then they have a decision to make on whether they’re going to give us one or not.”

A request for information begins by contacting the FOIP officer at a public body. The City of Red Deer has one, as does Alberta’s Ministry of Energy, Alberta Health Services and the Edmonton Police. Alberta has 903 FOIP coordinators in all. Sometimes information is sought from a big department that handles hundreds of requests a year, such as Alberta Environment. In other cases, “FOIP coordinator” is only one hat worn by a staffer in a municipal office that rarely sees a request.

Having hundreds of coordinators using individual discretion to interpret legislation, handle requests and redact documents would seem to jeopardize consistent application of the law. But regular FOIP users are generous in describing the work done by coordinators, saying most believe in the spirit of the law and do their best to get information out as quickly as resources allow. The more serious problems with FOIP often reside further up the food chain. For information to be truly free, the powers that be have to want it that way. In theory, FOIP staff are independent from the departments in which they work. In reality, political interference still happens.

Frank Work spent a decade as Alberta’s Information and Privacy Commissioner. Before leaving in 2011, Work saw FOIP requests stymied in any number of ways. “You can have a really good law, but human ingenuity being what it is, if there’s not the willingness to implement it, there are always ways to circumvent it. There are always ways to slow it down and delay it,” he says. “I defy anyone to come up with a law that will force good access to information on a public body that doesn’t want to do it.”

For a FOIP user, what happens behind the curtain is a black box. Once a request form is dropped in the mail, power shifts to the recipient. The system may well work as planned—a FOIP coordinator gets a request, finds the information and sends it out. Given higher stakes, though, Work says the flow of information can slow to a trickle, a tactic that can frustrate or even derail requests. Some deputy or assistant deputy ministers will even review requests that could be politically damaging, be it a conflict of interest or improper spending on the taxpayer’s dime. If a piece of information makes someone in charge uncomfortable, frontline staff are unlikely to pass it along anytime soon.

Legislation sets a 30-day window to respond to requests, following which a public body can ask for a 30-day extension. Once 60 days have passed, a department head may choose to withhold information by, for example, applying an overly broad interpretation to an exception. They must provide a reason for denying information, and the decision can be appealed to the privacy commissioner. Still, the bureaucratic back-and-forth doesn’t happen quickly. “A public body can refuse to give the time of day if it wanted to and that would force [a request] to wind up at the commissioner’s office,” says Work. “That would… add a year, two years, maybe even more to the process.” If information is time-sensitive and concerns, say, something that would be material to an election, stalling can effectively defang a request.

Delaying is only one tactic used to avoid disclosure. Cost is another. Beyond the initial $25 charge, processing fees can run into the thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars. The privacy commissioner can be asked to waive the cost on the grounds of public interest. These requests will sometimes be granted, but the experience of churning through the process is, once again, both frustrating and time-consuming.

Most Albertans will never file a FOIP request, but for those who do, the byzantine workings of government prove another hurdle to accessing information. Without an intimate knowledge of the type of information that exists, it can be hard to even know where to begin.

Pick something you’d like to know more about. Maybe you’re from Cold Lake and you’re curious about the oil that seeped out of Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.’s Primrose project last year. Maybe you want to know what CNRL told government. How do you start Which department do you approach What information do you want to find out What questions do you ask What wording do you use in your request Have you a right to government email exchanges with CNRL executives If the FOIP coordinator delivers a fee estimate that runs into the thousands of dollars, what then And if you eventually get a box full of blacked-out papers, what recourse do you have?

“FOIP should be no different from our right to vote. We don’t plead with election workers to allow us a ballot.” —Scott Hennig, Canadian Taxpayer Federation

Charles Rusnell has spent a career answering these types of questions. An investigative reporter with CBC Edmonton, he made his first FOI request in 1984 while still in journalism school. Since then he’s filed thousands more. (Full disclosure: Rusnell is a colleague at CBC.)

At any given time, Rusnell and his investigative partner, Jennie Russell, have several hundred requests on the go. They used FOIP to help break news that forced the dismissal of former AHS chief financial officer Allaudin Merali, whose expense report left citizens on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in questionable claims. Their requests also informed the public that Premier Redford, when she was justice minister, took part in the decision to award a government tobacco-litigation contract—the largest legal action in Alberta’s history—to her ex-husband’s firm. Other conflicts of interest brought to light include those of Edmonton-Manning MLA Peter Sandhu, who lobbied ministers and government officials to change legislation that would benefit his struggling home-building company. Such success shows that Alberta’s FOIP system can work. That said, Rusnell and Russell spent years developing the institutional knowledge needed to navigate a system that can set people up to fail. “What we see every day in our work is still, within the government, a resistance and an unwillingness to be transparent,” Rusnell says. “What many of them don’t understand—or they don’t care to understand—is that they don’t own this information. It belongs to the public, we have a right to it. They’re simply the ones who keep the information for us.”

Rusnell seems alternately weary of the barriers he has to negotiate and angry that those roadblocks even exist. Part of the problem, he says, comes back to resources. “We talk to freedom of information coordinators all the time and I don’t give them a hard time about not meeting deadlines. They’re swamped,” he says. “They have so much work and they’re not properly funded.” Many departments, Rusnell says, believe in the spirit of the law and work hard to get information out. A lack of resources, though, is in itself a built-in obstruction to disclosure. A FOIP coordinator may need to dig through a patchwork of storage boxes, filing cabinets and computer systems to find answers. If Redford’s government is serious about transparency, it would commit to digitizing files and making databases easier to search. This would take resolve, but it would also lay the groundwork for more proactive disclosure and a truly open government.

As things stand, Albertans must make do with a status quo that puts the onus of keeping government honest on the shoulders of a few watchful groups. Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, is on the panel advising Scott’s review. Any scrutiny of access to information regimes, he notes, also puts into relief the customary role of the press as the fourth estate. “You need heavy, knowledgeable users who can use the system to bring greater transparency to the activities of governments… but we don’t need everyone using it all the time,” Geist says. “We don’t get everybody showing up to a press conference to ask the questions they have of an elected official. The media does it and then spreads the word.” The decline of traditional media in the revenue-crumbling age of online news augurs poorly for government accountability in Alberta. The CBC’s Rusnell and Russell may be doing yeoman’s work, but beyond them, few, if any, journalists in the province have the time or resources to make more than haphazard use of FOIP requests. The Calgary Herald and the Edmonton Journal, to name just two outlets, are shells of their former selves, both newsrooms gutted of copy editors, reporters and senior writers.

Thomas Jefferson is credited with saying the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. No matter how pleasant life is in Alberta—an affluent province nestled inside one of the world’s most democratic countries—it would seem unwise to become complacent about the laws that safeguard that comfort. When the virtues and pitfalls of democracy were still being mapped, thinkers such as Jefferson and Madison saw the power imbalance that arises when a select few know more than everyone else. When citizens place their faith in a democratic government, they accept this inequality; the right to information is government’s way of returning that trust. Decisions made in secret can be arbitrary or even corrupt. If no one knows, who’s to find out?

Don Scott hopes to complete his FOIP review and have new legislation in front of the house for the spring session. If not, he says, fall at the latest. A cynic could see his tardy arrival to the Holiday Inn back in the spring as a poor omen. Rather than overhauling vital legislation, the review may only be ticking the box on his boss’s campaign promise. Albertans, for their part, should hope he was just caught in traffic.

Paul Haavardsrud is a CBC business reporter and a former reporter for Dow Jones, the Financial Post and the Calgary Herald.

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Four years later, I gulped and issued a call to action to Alberta activists: find beauty in a clear-cut. This call was inspired by a Buddhist teaching offered by Jim Butler, an Alberta environmentalist and ordained Buddhist monk. Butler’s spiritual teacher suggested that his greatest learning would be to go into the middle of a clear-cut until he could find beauty in it. Confused yet intrigued, I reacted with every cell of my body. I devoted myself to finding beauty in the clear-cut of my heart.

Certain activists talk about going through pain as a gateway to spiritual evolution. This is what I had to do. To find beauty I first had to go through “duality consciousness”—to understand this way of thinking, the harm it causes, how it leads to the profound disconnectedness of our times. On the other side, I found “unity consciousness,” a place where all is interconnected.

I became curious to learn how others face their own pain and evolve their activism. Nearly 10 years after setting out on my own personal journey, I visited with three local activists, Sarah Kerr, Leila Darwish and Shannon Rosnau, to see how they’re responding to the call to find beauty beyond the duality. 

Sarah Kerr worked at the Arusha Centre in Calgary for eight years, four years of which she also organized against corporate globalization. In 2002 Kerr shifted the focus of her activism to social and ecological healing. Kerr’s shift was sparked on the podium of a peace rally in Calgary’s Olympic Plaza. When a Poet for Peace punched another peace activist, she knew something was deeply wrong. “I needed to change how I did this work,” she says. “I stepped back to really reflect on how transformation happens. I came to see that working for peace and justice is about working for healing.” 

Kerr is now studying toward her PhD in Transformative Learning and Change at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Her focus is the role of consciousness in collective healing. “It really has become for me not so much about change or justice, although those are parts of it,” she says. “The frame I see it in now is about healing. The work we’re doing is healing for the world. And what we’re healing, really, is this consciousness, this way of seeing the world. We’re healing the lens through which we in Western culture see the world.” 

“Activism has developed parallel to the traditional political system. It’s still based on provoking responses.”

For Kerr and others, that lens is the Western, dualistic worldview that dominates our society. The lens is so familiar, so foundational to our society and its institutions, that it’s often difficult to see and know where and how dualistic attitudes shape us. Given the dominance and pervasiveness of the Western worldview, even suggesting another way of looking at things—let alone healing from something we don’t realize hurts us—is strange. 

Kerr and others invite us to consider the quality of life that the dualistic lens of the world offers us. She believes our society is experiencing a crisis of disconnection, that we’re bombarded with events that break our hearts. But she doesn’t shy away from this heartbreak. “A heart broken is a heart open,” she says. “If you can’t let your heart be broken, you can’t ever actually move to the next stage.” Duality consciousness keeps us stuck individually and collectively in heartbreak; we need to create space to move beyond, into unity consciousness.

After working as a community organizer on environmental issues in Alberta, Leila Darwish left the province for a year and a half to travel and reflect. After activist medic training and four months in Nepal and India, she spent a month and a half as a witness to the Jewish/Palestinian conflict. 

Darwish’s ancestors include Palestinian refugees to Canada and Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. As the first in her family ever to go back to Palestine, her experience was personally very meaningful. While in Palestine, Darwish witnessed homes being forcibly entered and people being arrested and beaten by Israeli soldiers. Witnessing such suffering, she says, broke her heart. Darwish chose to invest herself in energetically “sucking out the pain like venom,” she says, consciously taking on others’ emotional pain. 

Darwish’s acts of compassion caused her own traumatic symptoms. It was only later, as she worked the land and put her hands in the soil of a permaculture farm in the Gulf Islands, that her heart was healed, through this deep connection with the Earth. Darwish says she gained wisdom about healing. “I got to feel heartbreak and feel what that’s like,” she says. “I also got to know that when your heart’s broken that really just gives it more surface area.” Darwish also saw the power and strength that can come from letting oneself feel deeply. “If we let ourselves feel that depth of emotion, then maybe someday our activism will respond with that depth,” she says. Darwish has a deep faith in the transformative power that can come from surrendering one’s mind to the full depth of emotions. 

Instead, what often happens in activism is that the heart shuts down. People argue with facts, figures and statistics, quoting reports and respected experts to make a rational case that is void of emotional content. While some see this as a necessary tactic in a world where dualistic thinking prevails, Darwish sees the default to rationality as a misguided act of self-protection. “We’re fighting, but it’s a tough fight and it hurts,” she says. “Sometimes folks shut down their hearts and live in their minds. There seems to be a fear that if we open it up, we will go down and may not get back up.” People are afraid to be overwhelmed by the unmanageable power of emotions. Paradoxically, she says, the heart presents us with pain to which we can respond with courage. Facing pain with courage presents an opportunity for us to deepen as people—spiritually and as activists. 

Activists often work in the darkest situations. “We walk a fine line when it comes to activist work,” Darwish says. “Just on the other side can be despair and depression, and so much of our work is about building faith, hope and perseverance. But I think it’s inevitable that we cross that line sometimes. And when we do, hopefully we have the support of our community and friends.” 

To be depressed in a disconnected world may only be a sign that we are sane, says US civil rights activist Diane Nash. In considering depression in this light, the stigma can shift from the depressed person to the disconnection and suffering in society that causes depression. When we cross that line into depression with support and without stigma, it can, says Darwish, “make us better activists as well as healers and support workers for other folks who struggle with that line—which I think is everyone in this culture.” 

Darwish also sees grief as an opportunity, not as a failure, on the path to enlightenment. “According to some spiritual beliefs, if I’m seeking enlightenment and peace, I should detach myself from the world,” she says. “If I’m really upset about the state of the world, that means I’m not enlightened, I’m too attached. I think that belief does a huge disservice to the world.” Grief, she says, can be an opportunity to deepen a spiritual practice as love flows amid the chaos. 

“Part of me wants to leave Alberta sometimes,” Darwish admits. “It’s a hard place to be. But then maybe the part of me that’s a healer and a medic holds me here. We need to go to the places in the world that need our love the most. Like a clear-cut needs some love. Let’s not turn away from that. There’s a lot of history to account for here in Alberta, a lot of damage that needs to be healed. Maybe that’s why it’s important to be here, to be in these places where so much damage is, because that’s where our work and our hearts call us to be.”

Activists must “stay open to everything we experience,” writes Pema Chödrö. “Let difficult times… humble us.”

How is Alberta damaged It depends on your worldview. From a duality worldview, there are many places more empirically damaged than Alberta. But many Albertans cannot identify with a forest, have no sense that all living beings are interconnected. Some activists, even, don’t fully acknowledge our interconnectedness. This makes things more challenging for their fellow activists.

“Activism has developed parallel to the traditional political system,” says Shannon Rosnau, an activist from Whitecourt now living in BC. “It’s still based on provoking responses from these traditional systems. I don’t want to interact with these systems as they now are.” Rosnau’s rejection of traditional systems was transformative, she says. She now wants a similar change “on the outside. If I do my own inner work, I’m hopeful that this can somehow be conveyed in the outer world too. I don’t want to play the same old game. I have to change myself and then maybe the game will change too.”

Rosnau decided to “not replay old approaches to things” when the town of Whitecourt announced in 2008 that they were considering a nuclear power plant project. She “waited for the universe to show me a sign that I was meant to do something.” She wanted to put her new consciousness into action, wanted to free herself of the illusion that those opposed to nuclear are separate from those who support nuclear. Rosnau and others started The Tipping Point Project. The activist campaign that followed wasn’t a “fight” for a “win,” but a campaign of shifting awareness on a number of levels.

As Rosnau attempted to raise awareness of alternatives to nuclear power, the debates began to be characterized by frustration, anger and personal attacks. In spite of this, Rosnau told herself not to vilify nuclear power’s proponents. “I reminded myself that this is another being; in the way of Mayan spirituality, this is another myself,” she says. All Aboriginal spirituality is grounded in unity consciousness, in a lived experience of the interconnectedness of all beings. Living and working as an activist, Rosnau became “really aware of my old tendency to judge,” she says. She tried “just to be present with this person, hear them for what they are saying and to be still with that.”

In 2009 Rosnau decided to move from Whitecourt to the Sunshine Coast. “Being in Alberta was increasingly hostile to my soul,” she says. “It’s as though we [activist leaders] held space energetically for a lot of people [while] others hid behind us.”

In Whitecourt, Rosnau was recognized as an authority and a leader to whom others deferred. When others handed power to her, they deferred responsibility as well, validating their personal apathy. Many had the attitude that “well, we don’t really have to do anything because they’ll do it… We’ll support them and they’ll be the ones who will speak up, speak out and make the change.” Rosnau’s role as an activist leader became a burden. While activism was her personal call to action, hierarchical attitudes toward her leadership felt wrong. Since moving to BC, Rosnau has felt supported as an equal in a community of people who share leadership in a much more holistic way.

A major difference in her new community is “there’s a common spiritual feeling that we are the ones we’re waiting for, and we can’t look outside of ourselves for somebody else to save the world,” Rosnau says. “We’re the ones who’ll make the changes, but in a very different way than things have looked before.” The community values collaboration and co-operation where all are leaders. 

The nuclear power issue still resonates on a very deep level for Rosnau. She was “constantly struck by the metaphor of nuclear,” she says. “What do they do in the process of creating a nuclear reaction to generate power Well, they split the atom. And it seemed so symbolic to me, because I’m becoming ever more in touch and aware and attuned with us being one.” From a dualistic worldview, the splitting of the atom releases a massive amount of energy and is a strong metaphor for dualistic thinking, of man’s power over nature, of splitting that which is whole. From a unity consciousness perspective, the healing journey mends that which is split, fractured, disconnected, and restores the natural and original form—oneness. Rosnau commits herself to unity consciousness in her day-to-day activities and in her activism against the literal splitting of the atom.

Alberta activists all find different ways to bring into wholeness things that have been split apart. Seeing a beautiful forest cut to the ground is heartbreaking. But activists need to go into the middle of a clear-cut until they can find beauty in it.

Pema Chödrön, an American author and ordained Buddhist nun, writes in Practicing Peace in Times of War about the transformative potential of keeping the heart open despite suffering. “Becoming intimate with pain is the key to changing at the core of our being—staying open to everything we experience, letting the sharpness of difficult times pierce us to the heart, letting these times open us, humble us and make us wiser and more brave,” she writes. “Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.”

The events of 9/11 brought my fundamentalism to the surface and gave me the opportunity to heal. Today the necessary call is for a higher state of consciousness and for collective processes that support all of us as we grieve the damage done to our world. It is clear we are living in times of heartbreak. And that is our most sacred opportunity.  

Meagan Smith-Windsor lives at Matchean Lake near Edmonton. She is writing a book about transformational healing and learning.

The post Beauty in a Clear-Cut appeared first on Alberta Views.

From the train of vehicles came some 25 people, clothed in orange jumpsuits and humping backpacks stuffed with chains and banners. They set up a perimeter, scaled a four-storey dump truck loaded with bituminous sands, and unfurled, bungee-corded and waved their signs. They wrapped chains around their vehicles and their bodies, snapped the locks and waited. And then came the attention. 

Greenpeace’s September 15, 2009, action at Albian—and its subsequent, equally high-profile actions at Suncor’s Fort McMurray operation on September 30 and the Scotford upgrader near Fort Saskatchewan on October 3—was hardly unprecedented for social and environmental movements in general and for Greenpeace specifically. But these types of acts of civil disobedience are virtually unheard of in Alberta, and certainly mark the first time any group has tried such tactics in the debate on the oil sands, the mammoth project that has come to dominate, if not outright define, Alberta’s political, economic and environmental climate over the past decade.

That much could be surmised from the Alberta government’s initial response: in the wake of the actions, Premier Ed Stelmach and then-Solicitor General Fred Lindsay made noise about seeking tough sentences. Lawyer Brian Beresh expressed concern that Stelmach was trying to use his position as premier to exert influence over the judicial system and undermine activists’ right to a fair trial. (Proceedings are moving slowly for the 37 activists charged: no case has yet made it to court.)

Mike Hudema’s methods seem fueled by suspicion of more conventional forms of civic engagement.

Formed in 2007, the local iteration of the notorious inter-national environmental group physically occupies only one site permanently: a nondescript warehouse in a light-industrial strip along Edmonton’s Calgary Trail. Their psychological footprint is much bigger: almost immediately after they set down roots in Alberta, they began grabbing headlines with daring media stunts. 

In November 2007, a team of activists rappelled from Edmonton’s High Level bridge and unfurled two banners that have since become posters for their activities: both black, one features a crude white outline of the province, red paint splattered like blood in the location of various oil sands developments, while the other simply proclaims “STOP THE TAR SANDS” in giant white letters.

The next April, Greenpeace dropped in, literally, on the annual Premier’s Dinner in Edmonton, rappelling from the ceiling as onlookers gasped and unfurling another banner, this one reading “$telmach: the best Premier oil money can buy.” 

A few days later, some 1,600 ducks unwittingly landed on one of the tailings ponds at Syncrude’s Aurora North site; most drowned in the oily waste. Greenpeace began showing up on oil company property. In July 2008, Greenpeace slipped past security at the same Syncrude pond and placed banners overtop a tailings outflow pipe featuring a skull and crossbones and a message urging Alberta to stop developing the tar sands. 

Syncrude was eventually charged under the Alberta Environmental Protection & Enhancement Act and under the federal Migratory Birds Convention Act. At the beginning of their trial in March 2010, after Stelmach told a reporter that he hadn’t yet seen photos of the ducks, Greenpeace showed up at the Legislature to present the premier with giant, gift-wrapped pictures of the oil-soaked birds. 

In between all of these actions, Greenpeace staged more-conventional protests on the Legislature steps, outside corporate head offices and even at government-sponsored pancake breakfasts. In short, in the three years since they opened an office in Alberta, Greenpeace has become one of the most consistent and high-profile voices against oil sands development.

But while few will dispute that they’ve been effective at drawing the spotlight to the oil sands in general and to their own actions in particular, just what that means for their goal of actually stopping the oil sands is less clear.

“If you’re at A and you’re trying to get to B, you need to have someone screaming for C.”—Marlo Raynolds

“I’m sure there’s more than one effect, and I’m sure they’re conflicting effects,” says Dr. Laurie Adkin, a political science professor at the University of Alberta and expert on environmental movements and democratic citizenship. “Greenpeace’s actions have definitely brought more international and national attention to this issue,” she says. “But more media attention is always kind of ambiguous, how that plays out politically. On the negative side, some people will feel antagonized, will feel more hostile to Greenpeace and environmentalists in general, because they feel this act is embarrassing the province somehow.”

Put another way, headlines do not always translate into policy changes, and in going to such extreme lengths to bring attention to the issue, Greenpeace may be letting its medium overwhelm its message. That said, it’s probably wrong to assume that the Alberta public truly understands what Greenpeace is doing. There may in fact be more method to Greenpeace’s “madness” than immediately meets the eye. 

In a time of almost unprecedented political apathy in Alberta, when a person who casts a vote is in the minority, people who chain themselves to the industrial machinery that fills the government coffers might as well be aliens. Mike Hudema, however, was actually born in Medicine Hat and, save a brief stint working for an NGO in San Francisco, has spent his entire life studying and working in this province. For the last three years, his job has been to head up Greenpeace’s Alberta chapter as their climate and energy campaigner, and so is as responsible as anyone for the tactics Greenpeace employs to spread their message about the environmental effects of oil sands development. 

Knowing Hudema’s past, the headline-grabbing stunts come as little surprise. Though he initially attended the University of Alberta for a business degree, he completed a bachelor of education in drama and eventually a law degree. He quickly made a name for himself: at a 2002 university board of governors meeting, activists showed up to protest tuition hikes waving signs and dressed in outrageous costumes—Hudema wore a chicken suit. On the strength of that notoriety, he ran for students’ union president that year—though by his own admission he had no intention of winning, viewing the campaign instead as a platform to criticize student council. His criticisms were evidently shared by voters: he was unexpectedly elected. 

Even in that position of power, Hudema was not a quiet or conventional president: he stirred up controversy in his orientation speech, calling on first-year students to get active at an event that was typically a boosterish celebration, and invited the media to witness him paying his tuition by rolling wheelbarrows full of coins to the cashier’s window.

Hudema has not moved far from the university, literally or figuratively. His small house—six blocks from the U of A campus on a street characteristic of Edmonton’s tree-lined and quiet older neighbourhoods—sticks out for its decoration. In the corner of one picture window is a poster of Ed Stelmach, his eyes fixed in an ominous Children of the Corn-esque gaze overtop the words “The EUB is watching you.” In another window sits a “Free Tibet” sign. A familiar sticker on the mailbox asking for no junk mail is dwarfed by a pair of Greenpeace stickers calling for an end to the tar sands, lest the postal worker wonder where the house stands on the issue.

The interior is no less strident: the famous picture of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics is flanked by a red-splattered Stop the Tar Sands poster and the two banners from the High Level bridge protest. A Diego Rivera print hangs on the other wall. Not evident in his living room is Hudema’s fondness for Jack Kerouac (“The only people for me are the mad ones…”) and Arundhati Roy (“Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing”), both of whom he quotes in his email signature. 

Despite outward appearances—the day we met, he was wearing a T-shirt urging support for the Lubicon Cree—Hudema is calm and measured in conversation. One on one, at least, he is something like an anti-demagogue; he fights to contain emotion and sentiment and seems to use sound-bite quotes and an officious, debater’s voice to hide what’s going on under the surface. This is an ability that no doubt serves him well when speaking with one of the many outraged citizens who call him to complain in the wake of another action.

Greenpeace activists.

Keyed into the right topic, though—Hudema’s experiences meeting with cancer-stricken residents in Fort Chipewyan, say, or how he felt standing in the Albian Sands’ black expanse with a few dozen other people who “care enough about what’s happening to stand up,” as he puts it—and his voice has a low crackle, his breathing becomes heavier, his eyes lock in an unwavering intensity. It’s at moments like this that the reason for his commitment is apparent: this is a man who can’t just see an injustice, he feels it.

“I work for Greenpeace, which is known as an environmental organization, but I try as much as possible to also approach activism from a social justice perspective: what are the human impacts of developments, what’s being done to communities?” Hudema says. “I don’t really see too much of a line, to be honest. To make a distinction between protecting the environment and protecting human societies, to me is a false dichotomy.”

Hudema stands out among local activists. A survey of NGO workers and volunteers would no doubt turn up people with just as much conviction (if not as many posters), but Hudema’s unique methods seem fuelled by a suspicion of more conventional forms of civic engagement. Hudema doesn’t spell it out as such, exactly, but he does make frequent mention of a democratic system that “doesn’t ever really encourage our participation” and the internal pressures that prevent people in government and industry from rocking the boat. 

“There are a lot of good people that work in the system. It’s not that there aren’t good lawyers out there or good bureaucrats or people in industry that really want much more substantial change. It’s just that they don’t have much room to move,” he says. “There isn’t that greater social pressure that gives them much more space to demand bolder things. They can only demand these very small steps, rather than big leaps and bounds. I see my role as trying to make that space possible. I think I’m more useful trying to create that outside pressure, because I don’t see that much room for movement working internally.” 

That’s a position that U of A professor Adkin can understand coming from an environmental group in this province.

“Most environmental organizations in Alberta have had a very long and dismal experience of trying to participate in consultation processes in which the terms of reference are set by the government, the panels of stakeholders are appointed by the government and the outcomes of consensus are not necessarily going to be implemented,” she says. “They’ve had many more experiences of a pretense of democratic process than real forms of meaningful input.”

Not that this fact endears Greenpeace to many people in Alberta. One need only consult the comment sections of online news stories to sample the hostility they engender: though the group does have its defenders, the comments tend toward the negative, ranging from people imploring the government to “run down” or “jail” the “eco-terrorists” and “jobless hippies” to people sympathetic to Greenpeace’s environmental goals but who accuse the organization of grandstanding or caring more about getting their name out than really trying to change oil sands policy.

Still, Greenpeace does have some support among people who work on environmental issues in Alberta. While the Pembina Institute shares similar ideas about the need for environmental stewardship, you’d be hard pressed to find a group more dissimilar in their methods to Greenpeace than the Calgary-based environmental and energy issues think tank (notably, Pembina stops well short of calling for a shutdown of the oil sands). Headlines are harder to find for Pembina’s work, though, which is largely devoted to participating in government consultations and publishing reports on topics such as oil sands pipelines and Canada’s largest greenhouse gas emitters. 

Pembina’s executive director, Marlo Raynolds, describes the think tank as a “bridging organization” between governments, NGOs and corporations, aimed at establishing a consensus solution on environmental issues. And he only sees that work aided by some of Greenpeace’s extreme tactics. “I’m a strong believer in the theory of ABC,” he says. “If you’re at A and you’re trying to get to B, you need to have someone screaming for C.” 

Raynolds understands this first-hand: as a veteran of many multi-stakeholder committees set up by the Alberta government, he’s been frustrated by a lack of action on environmental regulation—especially after many of these committees were able to produce consensus recommendations endorsed by industry, environmental groups and affected communities. For him, more awareness of oil sands issues will only increase pressure on the government to stop ignoring input, and will only create the political will to move forward.

“I think it’s so important to recognize that there’s a spectrum in any movement. Greenpeace does an incredible amount of valuable work in terms of shining the spotlight on big issues,” Raynolds says. “Once the spotlight is on something or someone or a company, often those entities are forced to react, or at least think, and this provides space for organizations like ours to put some ideas on the table for solutions.”

Raynolds points out that Greenpeace does similar work to Pembina, commissioning reports and conducting research, but says Greenpeace’s lower-profile activities tend to get overshadowed by their stunts. One such report is “Green Jobs: It’s Time To Build Alberta’s Future,” co-commissioned by Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL), which focuses on the economic benefits of sustainable energy development. “Green Jobs” is a comprehensive and forward-thinking document that seeks to prove one of Greenpeace’s fundamental arguments about oil sands development: that economic prosperity and environmental stewardship needn’t be mutually exclusive.

70% of Albertans support slowing down oil sands development: Pembina.

However, it was also the result of a collaboration that’s not likely to be repeated anytime soon. The report was published a few months before Greenpeace’s actions in Fort McMurray and Fort Saskatchewan—actions that, according to AFL president Gil McGowan, soured many of his organization’s members on working with Greenpeace in the future.

“Thousands of construction workers, many of whom are members of unions affiliated with our unions, weren’t able to go to work that day. Many of those people were left harbouring angry feelings toward Greenpeace. That’s going to make it more difficult for us to work with Greenpeace in the future,” McGowan says. “On one hand, they’re deliberately taking positions that some could characterize as extreme in order to broaden the debate; on the other hand, by taking those positions they run the risk of alienating individuals and groups who might otherwise be their allies.”

And while McGowan says that the AFL certainly wouldn’t rule out working with other environmental groups in the future, he notes the risk that Greenpeace’s actions are diminishing the voice of the whole. Like it or not, not everyone in the province is especially attuned to the subtleties of the environmental movement, and the fact that Greenpeace’s actions are on the nightly news while other groups toil behind the scenes can create an impression among the public that the entirety of the environmental movement is as radical as Greenpeace. 

Raynolds has found this to be true with Pembina. He hopes that as environmental issues are pushed to the forefront of public consciousness, more people will be able to differentiate between groups. “It’s a serious problem, but [the confusion] is mostly from people who don’t take the time to understand the differences between organizations and approaches: they see one group and they make up their mind about the whole environmental movement,” he says. “I think that’s evolving, though. It only takes [interacting with different organizations] once to see that the groups are very different.”

For Greenpeace’s part, these are drawbacks they understand. Bruce Cox, executive director of Greenpeace Canada, says that the implications of each action are carefully considered. He considers awareness of the problems—especially on a national and international level—to be the higher goal: “For every person that might take umbrage at a direct action or act of civil disobedience… there are probably 50 people out there who learned about the problem for the first time.”

Hudema, meanwhile, points to the urgency of the issue of climate change as sufficient justification for any blowback that may come Greenpeace’s way. “A lot of our recent activities [were motivated by] the fact that 300,000 people on average die every year because of climate change. That’s the UN’s own figures,” he says, his voice wavering. “It really is a life-and-death situation for a lot of people around the world, and a lot of people downstream in this province. If you’ve seen people go through cancer, I think it justifies a peaceful protest that maybe shuts down an oil sands operation for six hours. I think that’s more than justified.” 

However, whether more such actions are justified remains to be seen. All sides agree that the environmental cost of oil sands development is attracting more and more attention, both at home and worldwide. Partially thanks to Greenpeace’s global network of activists, protests about the oil sands have started in countries far removed from Alberta, including demonstrations in Washington, DC, and an occupation of a Total refinery in France. Consumers of oil sands oil have started to question its overall cost. Some 850 American mayors signed a resolution to avoid using high-carbon fuels in municipal vehicles. Retail giants such as Whole Foods and Bed, Bath & Beyond announced in February that they would look for alternatives to oil sands fuel for their fleets. A recent survey commissioned by the Pembina Institute shows that more than 70 per cent of Albertans support slowing down oil sands development.

The space Hudema talks of creating seems to be coming. That, says Adkin, will leave Greenpeace with some important questions about their own role. When citizens, environmental groups and think tanks are able to get industry and government to sit down and reach a consensus about some of Alberta’s most important environmental issues, when all sides are finally willing to achieve a compromise, it remains to be seen what if any role Greenpeace can play.

“I think on one hand they really have to think hard about their tactics in relation to their goals, and what’s possible to achieve and how they can achieve it,” Adkin says. “On the other hand, they can’t simply set aside their principles and their own understanding of what’s at stake. They have to reconcile these ideas; to be tactical without being co-opted, without being compromised so that in the end they don’t achieve very much either. It’s a difficult game for them.”  

David Berry is a freelance writer and editor who lives in Edmonton. He is also an entertainment correspondent for Global TV.

The post The Disobedient Albertans appeared first on Alberta Views.

It was March of 2006, and the John Howard Society was planning to move its halfway house for men to Sunalta. The agency was clearly under duress: to make way for the Calgary Stampede’s latest expansion, the City of Calgary had expropriated rows of small postwar homes in Victoria Park, including JHS’s Bedford House, which for more than two decades had been a transitional home for recovering criminals. The City paid the society $750,000 for Bedford, put them on a lease and told them to find a new place.

Easier said than done. In Calgary, real estate comes two ways—expensive and scarce. John Howard Society executive director Gordon Sand knew this. Fortuitously (so he thought) the society had bought a piece of land in Sunalta, in the inner city beside the highway-like Crowchild Trail, right before land prices escalated further. Sand thought that with the blessing of the City’s planning department and the community, the society would move there and rebuild. 

However, word quickly spread that 32 parolees from federal penitentiaries were on their way. Sunalta and Scarboro are neighbouring communities, but they’re fundamentally different. Sunalta is gritty inner city, a mix of homes, apartment buildings, churches and stores, some parts gentrified, others dilapidated. Some 85 per cent of residents live below the median Calgary income. Scarboro, by contrast, is an affluent residential enclave. The Sunalta School (in Scarboro) is one of the top-ranked in the province. It’s the type of community where residents have successfully closed the community to cut-through traffic, and getting in and out is a laborious affair. This is where Morisset lives with her husband, where her two daughters attend school.

Years ago, I worked at McGill University when Morisset was student body president. I watched her stand up in front of the university’s board of governors and argue passionately against proposed tuition increases. Later I heard she’d gone to law school and then moved to Calgary with her husband.

So I wasn’t surprised to hear that she stood up at that meeting to ask alderman Madeleine King why, if the halfway house was such a good neighbour (as the panel was insisting), the City wasn’t keeping it on the Stampede grounds, where the parolees could be closer to work opportunities, hop on the LRT, exercise at a local gym and be more easily supervised.

Bedford represents a larger problem. Throughout the city, there’s barely been a boo about taking away precious affordable housing from Victoria Park. There was no outcry for Bedford House. After all, a houseful of criminals on parole are hardly a sympathetic bunch. Instead, expensive new condos are set to go up across Victoria Park. An historic school is being used for a façade for one condo, and this development is being lauded.

King told Morisset that Bedford House was “inappropriate” for Stampede’s out-of-town visitors. After all, sex offenders are among Bedford’s residents. Upon hearing this, Morisset says she “mentally dug in.” “I thought, ‘That’s it. I’m going to pour my heart and soul into this. King doesn’t want a halfway house [near] our guests. If those inmates are too dangerous for our guests to the city, then they’re too dangerous for my children’.” 

I’d watched Morisset lose the tuition battle to McGill’s board of governors, but now she had children. This fight was going to be different. 

Halfway houses are a fact of life in Canada. Our criminal justice system gives about 3,000 prisoners conditional releases each year so that they can serve their sentences in the community, under supervision. Most agree that this arrangement eases the transition and keeps us all safer in the long run. It’s also a lot cheaper to keep parolees in halfway houses, where staff earn $13–$18 an hour, than in prisons where unionized staff pull in $49,000–$68,000 yearly with full benefits and pensions.

The administration of halfway houses is shouldered by the federal government through community correctional centres and by not-for-profits such as the Salvation Army, Elizabeth Fry Society and John Howard Society. In Alberta, the federal government provides $7-million yearly to various agencies to run 16 halfway houses in Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge and Red Deer. Many of these houses are in mixed residential/commercial communities and most are close to downtown.

Bedford House is well suited to Victoria Park, says Gordon Sand. “It’s been a wonderful location,” he says of the site they now lease from the City. “We’ve been here for 22 years and had a good relationship with the community.” 

The society argues that criminals in the community are not dangerous and that reoffending is rare; they claim that more than 80 per cent will complete their parole. According to Corrections Canada, of 3,000 parolees released into the community every year, roughly 22 will commit a violent crime, 130 will commit a non-violent crime and 380 will violate conditions of their release. Some people, such as forensic psychologist Steve Wormith at the University of Saskatchewan, think reoffence rates are under-reported. Such is the public’s suspicion that even Corrections Canada faced a bitter battle with the community after it located a parole office across from an elementary school in Ottawa. The office must move by 2009.

While all kinds of offenders go to halfway houses, the sticking point for many communities is sex offenders. Of the approximately 365 halfway house inhabitants in Alberta, 43 are sex offenders. 

How can a community be persuaded to accept recovering criminals into their midst In Red Deer, it was by allowing community members to help choose house residents. The Horizon House executive director at the time, George Atkey, spent considerable time in the downtown community where the halfway home was to locate.

He also established an advisory committee, as have other John Howard agencies. “I tried to get across to the community that [this] is a crime prevention strategy, that the halfway house make[s] them safer,” he says. He knows how public opinion can catch like wildfire. When a local newspaper reported on his visit to a potential site, the community began rallying against the halfway house before Atkey was ready to advocate for it.

Touchiness about living next to criminals cannot be underestimated. So Atkey also promised two things: the advisory committee, including community members, could assist in selecting who came in, and the halfway house would be located near a police station. The proposed building helped, too. The Park Hotel, a defunct strip bar, dates from 1902. By almost anyone’s standard, a halfway house would be a kind of revitalization. 

And when it opened in 2002, it was. The halfway house was called Horizon House; the entire building was renamed Park Place. Currently, retail occupies the first floor: Thai Garden restaurant, Housewarming gift shop, La Tienda Latina and the Brain Injury Society of Alberta. A new office building is going up next door. Though no one from the Red Deer Downtown Association or the RCMP would comment about Horizon House, they haven’t exactly publicly criticized it either. 

Horizon House has several unique elements: it houses both men and women and has a handicapped suite. It won’t take more than three sex offenders at one time, and no predatory offenders at all (they’re considered too dangerous). It will not take anyone who has tried to commit suicide. “The main thing is getting the community to understand that if they have concerns, they’d rather know where they live and see the parolees than have them live next to them unsupervised,” says current executive director Geoff Smith. Horizon has a 6:00 pm mandatory attendance and a 10:00 pm curfew. Horizon’s promise to allow the community to choose its residents has fallen by the wayside; after two years, few community members had expressed reservations. Horizon’s volunteer board of directors still includes community members, however.

All is not totally calm. There was one incident a few years ago when a Horizon House resident robbed a bank. Smith called it a “gentle” robbery. “He was having trouble integrating, and I think he wanted to go back to prison,” Smith says. “He had a butter knife and no one was hurt.” 

In order to move into Sunalta, the John Howard Society needed the City of Calgary to give it a development permit—which it received in August 2006, after meetings with some community groups but only one major community consultation. Executive director Sand had helped locate Berkana House, the Elizabeth Fry Society’s halfway house for women, years earlier. He was unprepared for the response this time. The community fought back. Did it ever.

The community raised at least $35,000 (opponents say it was much more) and hired two experts to fight the halfway house. The first was Chris Davis, a former City of Calgary lawyer who knew well the ins and outs of making an appeal. The second was “star witness” Kim Rossmo, a Canadian professor at Texas State University known for “geographic profiling” (or figuring out where criminals are likely to strike).

“At first, the City thought [the residents] were just NIMBYs… then they realized the scope and scale of the project was wrong,” says Davis. He helped the community organize its arguments. Their key one was that the proposed building—several storeys, more than 30 beds—was simply too big for the community and far too close to two elementary schools. There were also other special care facilities in the area: a 150-bed drop-in centre (technically in another community), a women’s addiction treatment centre and an Aboriginal resource centre with 85 children. “Has the community not already done its part?” he argued. Davis lined up the legal ducks and got ready for the appeal board, something the average citizen (or even the average group) would be hard pressed to execute.  

Then came the big gun. Rossmo hired five researchers to do a literature review to take to the appeal board. Rossmo hammered away at John Howard’s research, challenging everything from their re-offence statistics to how the society collected its data. He argued that the parolees were dangerous, and that the proposed house’s placement at the edge of the community meant they would have to walk past homes, parks and schools to get to bus routes; they’d be too close to children. At least 5 per cent would reoffend while living in the community, he argued, and some 10–68 per cent of parolees would return to reoffend after leaving the halfway house—after making a mental map of the Sunalta/Scarboro neighbourhoods. 

Sunalta School in Calgary’s Scarboro.

Reflecting later, Rossmo outright accuses the JHS of lying on several fronts. “One of the things I found duplicitous was the use of certain terms,” he says. He argues that the JHS included homes for the mentally ill as halfway homes in its reoffence records. “I pulled up original reports and read them, and they were group homes,” he says. He also expressed concerns about the types of criminals coming to the community. “You don’t get into a Canadian federal penitentiary without doing something serious. The [society] was playing games with the recidivism rates. I’m a criminologist, this is what I do. You can’t bullshit me with statistics.” For its part, the JHS says it was caught off guard: what it thought was a planning issue became a full-on debate about justice and risk management.

The seed of fear took root. JHS director Gordon Sand shakes his head at the memory of the meeting. “It was a freak show,” he says. He recalls community members nodding their heads in agreement as Rossmo rolled through his list. On February 24, 2007, the City of Calgary Appeal Board ruled in favour of the community and refused to grant the development permit. Although their report termed Rossmo’s evidence “highly speculative,” it did note many of his concerns: the size of the halfway house, proximity to elementary schools, necessity of walking through the community to bus routes, and the presence of other special care facilities. It didn’t touch on the issue of recidivism, which seems very difficult to nail down.

There was immediate fallout. Alderman Madeleine King, a Stampede Board member who’d been in favour of moving the halfway house to Sunalta, was defeated in the next municipal election by former Scarboro Community Association president John Mar. “The process was completely wrong; they met with the community once,” Mar says. “We’ve totally set the bar for community associations on how to fight a planning issue.” Could they have done it without raising tens of thousands of dollars and hiring legal experts “Probably not,” he admits.

Looking back, some lessons can be learned. The John Howard Society felt that since it was turfed out of its preferred location, the City of Calgary had an obligation to help it relocate. Scarboro/Sunalta residents felt the halfway house was a fait accompli, and this incited a “siege” mentality. Doug King, the chair of justice studies at Mount Royal College, supports the notion of halfway houses, but thinks agencies like JHS need to better consider their advocacy.

“The society [had a] low-key strategy in the initial planning phases,” he says. “It seemed that they were quite guarded about what they wanted to say about the new facility… This allowed a very organized and [well-] funded opposition to seize the initiative and mobilize the community. It didn’t help that the issue was being played out within the context of impending provincial and municipal elections in which one of the dominant concerns was crime and social disorder in Calgary.”

For their part, the John Howard Society is preparing a new communications strategy, a point by point defence to counter all of the arguments against its existence. It doesn’t want to be caught off guard again—though it thinks no amount of advocacy would have made a difference to the Sunalta/Scarboro situation. 

So where does that leave us The John Howard Society owns a weedy piece of land in Sunalta. Bedford House is on borrowed time in Victoria Park. “We’re like the kid that no one wants to dance with,” JHS director Sand says. The agency is looking at a nearby site it had hoped to get from the beginning—in the same Victoria Park neighbourhood, facing train tracks and near a bus roundabout. The City owns the land but won’t sell it or make any other decision about it right now. Sand wonders whether the JHS might someday trade their Sunalta land for this parcel. There are few other options. The reality is that Calgary has one of the toughest housing markets in the nation. Prices have doubled in the last six years. Land costs are up. Construction costs continue to escalate. 

In 2007, Gordon Laird wrote a seminal report on homelessness for the Sheldon Chumir Foundation. He sees the fate of Bedford House as a footnote to the story of a lack of affordable housing in Calgary. Laird did an internship at the JHS years ago and was impressed with Bedford House. He thinks the discussion about any halfway house in Alberta needs to focus on both the lack of low-cost housing and on an important missed aspect of the discussion: the quality of the staff who supervise them. The skill of an $18-an-hour staff member can build bridges between—or divide—the halfway house and the community. The agencies that run halfway houses are also undervalued, he argues. 

“Halfway houses are necessary, and while concerns are justified given the background of some clients, the work of agencies like the JHS is often taken for granted,” Laird says. “The people in Canada’s prisons are disproportionately poor and Aboriginal, and housing affordability can be a major obstacle to reintegration. In helping bridge the housing gap, and in providing counselling and support, agencies like the JHS not only reduce incidence of crime and increase the security of our cities but save Canadians untold millions on correctional clients lost to reoffending, homelessness or mental health issues.”

John Rook is CEO of the Salvation Army Community Services, which has 13 low-risk parolees in a partial halfway house at its downtown Calgary Centre of Hope residence. He thinks institutional living is really not the way to go. “I’d do the whole thing differently for the low-risk parolees we serve,” he says. “I’d use the ‘housing first’ model, an exit-to-community model which has proven effective in England and the US. In this model, parolees live in their own apartments… Halfway houses take away people’s dignity; they’re very controlling with imposed structures… I think we’ve got a big problem with social exclusion; how we care for people who seem to be disaffected or disenfranchised tells a lot about society.” 

Maybe so. And yet parents just want to protect their kids, and those who’ve suffered sexual assault aren’t exactly sympathetic to the overall good of society when their pain is so fresh. 

In Scarboro, Sunalta School is again riding high in educational rankings. Kids run around and walk home in safety. Parents have greater peace knowing that some 30 ex-cons weren’t transferred to their neighbourhood. As the sun sets on Victoria Park, Bedford House awaits its fate.  

Janice Paskey is a faculty member at Mount Royal College and the mother of two school-aged boys. 

The post Not in My Backyard appeared first on Alberta Views.

For many Albertans, a job at the plant would be a bottom-of- the-barrel employment option. But for people like 38-year-old Jorge Solis, a temporary worker from El Salvador who came to Red Deer in October 2004, the plant represents much more: a decent wage, for starters, as well as health coverage, dental benefits and ESL classes.

“In my country it is very bad,” explains Solis, who works as a loin-trimmer at the plant. “You make five dollars a day.”

On the surface, the temporary foreign worker program looks like a win-win situation, and in some cases it is. Workers from developing countries can come to Canada and make more in a day than they make during several weeks at home, and worker- starved Alberta employers benefit from their labour. But there’s a darker, less publicized side to the program.

“These workers are more vulnerable,” says Jason Foster, director of policy analysis for the Alberta federation of Labour. “It’s not a good deal for them. It might be on the surface, because they can make more money than they did back in their home country, but they don’t get the same rights as landed immigrants or Canadian citizens.”

Every year, thousands of foreign workers come to Canada with temporary work visas. In 2005, they numbered almost 100,000. About 10 per cent of them came to Alberta, but that proportion is set to increase as meat plants, construction companies and even restaurants look overseas for employees. Companies as diverse as Suncor, Boston Pizza and Canadian Tire are bringing in workers from countries as far away as the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

“For the last number of years it’s been challenging, especially in the smaller markets,” explains Clark Marcolin, owner of the Boston Pizza in Whitecourt. Marcolin brought in several workers from Sri Lanka after trying in vain to fully staff his restaurant with local employees. “You do every avenue of exploring to try and get people and nothing works,” he says. “It’s been a huge learning curve for everybody.”

The provincial government has long foreseen and hastened the influx of temporary foreign labour in Alberta. In May of 2004, then Learning Minister Lyle Oberg signed a memorandum of understanding with the federal government for oil sands construction projects. The agreement emphasized that employers “want assurance that they will have a secure source of skilled tradespeople when they require them, to avoid loss of project investments and loss of productivity and to ensure that project timelines can be met.”

However, the memorandum of understanding is vague about the workers’ rights. It says wages must be equal to the prevailing wage rate, working conditions must “meet generally accepted standards for the trade in the region,” and collective agreements must be honoured for jobs that are part of a bargaining unit. All of these are stipulations of the federal program.

Even if these conditions are met (and that’s not always the case), foreign workers like Solis face other challenges. Most foreign workers who come to Canada can’t speak English, and they struggle with loneliness long after they’ve said goodbye to their spouses and children in their home countries. They won’t get to see them again for a year or two.

At the UFCW Local 1118 office in Red Deer, about 20 Salvadorans, including Solis, sit at round tables and pore over English/Spanish dictionaries while taking notes. for six hours each week, the workers come to the strip-mall office to take ESL classes. The atmosphere is jovial and reflects the celebratory nature of Latin American culture; the room resounds with laughter as the workers joke around in Spanish, despite the “English only” rule instituted by the teacher.

Language is a huge challenge for the workers. Upon arriving in Canada, the Salvadorans had to immediately start working under supervisors who spoke no Spanish. One woman in the class describes how newcomers get by at the plant without understanding English—“just say yes, or just say no,” she says, nodding and shaking her head the way she did to her super- visors before she could understand what they were saying.

“In my country it is very bad,” explains Solis, who works as a loin-trimmer at the plant. “You make five dollars a day.”

“Most people who speak English in El Salvador are people who are wealthy,” explains Isabel Herrera, a volunteer with the Central Alberta Immigrant Women’s Association. “They go to private schools.” Herrera and her family came to Red Deer in 1991 after two of her husband’s brothers were killed in El Salvador’s brutal civil war. Now, Herrera helps Salvadoran temporary workers who struggle to integrate into a foreign culture in which they must immediately function. Like most of the workers, Herrera spoke no English when she arrived in Canada. fifteen years later, she speaks fluently and runs a child care service from her home.

But even though there is a community of Salvadorans in Red Deer, it’s often challenging for workers to connect with that community. Some of the workers go to Mass (most of the workers are Catholic), but there are no parishes in the city that hold services in Spanish. “They go to Mass, but they don’t understand,” says Herrera.

Because the Salvadorans board with one another in apartments and houses, they don’t often speak English outside of work. The classes have given them the opportunity to learn and speak more English, and they’re especially grateful since knowledge of either English or french is a prerequisite to Canadian citizenship—something most of the workers want to secure.

The Salvadorans in the ESL class have been nominated by Olymel to stay in Canada as permanent residents, and they’re anxiously waiting to be accepted by Alberta’s provincial nominee program. Hopes are high among the workers, and they dread the thought of leaving Canada. “I don’t want to go back to El Salvador,” says Solis, who hopes that his application for residency is accepted, not only so he can stay in Canada, but also so his wife and two children can immigrate. “They want opportunities, too,” he explains. Spouses and children under 18 can immigrate once the worker’s nomination is accepted.

The workers give many of the same reasons for wanting to become permanent residents. Canada is cleaner than El Salvador. It’s safer. There are more jobs, and employers pay better wages. There are more opportunities for their children in Canada.

“Everyone is scared to go back,” says Herrera. “[The Canadian government] never promised that they’d be able to stay, but they started to get their hopes up.”

Loneliness is another big struggle for the workers. They buy phone cards and call their husbands, wives and children back in El Salvador. Herrera and other members of the Salvadoran community in Red Deer invite some of the workers over to their homes on weekends—“to help them relax,” explains Herrera. The Salvadorans also take the workers shopping when they move out of company-leased housing. “We help them find beds and all the stuff they need for their apartments,” says Hererra.

Other foreign workers are less fortunate than the Salvador- ans at Olymel. At least at Olymel, workers don’t have to worry about being paid fair wages. The same isn’t true everywhere. Even though the federal government requires that foreign workers must be paid the prevailing wage rate for a job, foreigners are often paid less than their Canadian colleagues when they aren’t represented by a union. Furthermore, the federal government has no mechanism in place to ensure workers are being paid fair wages.

“That statement is air, because they’re not on the ground inspecting those workplaces,” says foster. “They’re not checking employment records to make sure that temporary workers are being paid what the employers said they’d pay them.”

Workers who cause trouble or bring negative attention to their employer can be sent home the next day if the employer chooses. “You’re not going to defend your rights if you know that if they fire you, you’re deported,” says foster. “Their existence in the country is exclusively dependent on them staying in the good graces of their employer. That’s not a good situation to put anybody into, ever.”

Jorge Solis, 38, left El Salvador to work at the Olymel pork plant in Red Deer. He is one of thousands of foreign workers in Alberta. (Jeremy Klaszus)

By comparison, at Olymel the Salvadoran workers are guaranteed fair wages and job security. The starting wage at the plant—for both foreigners and Canadians—is $10.55 an hour, plus premiums. They have union representation. They have fair benefit packages that include dental and optical coverage. They enjoy their jobs at the plant—though they admit it’s challenging—and want to keep working there.

“The job is very hard, but it’s good for money,” says Guadalupe, a temporary loin-trimmer at the plant who has a husband, three daughters and a son in El Salvador. “I miss them. And them to me. Every night I talk with my daughters. My daughter, she says, ‘Mama, come back, please.’

“It’s difficult for me to be here, but it’s better for them.”

Several blocks south of the UFCW office, vehicles are pulling into the parking lot of a Wendy’s restaurant and pulling back out within mere seconds. The reason The dining room of the fast-food joint is “temporarily closed,” says a sign on the door. Go through the drive-through, it says. Not enough workers. A giant sign in front of the restaurant advertises the benefits of working at the fast-food joint.

No one can argue that Alberta has a labour shortage in some sectors—especially the service industry. however, there is some contention about whether or not there is an actual shortage in sectors like the construction trades. Companies like Suncor see a shortage where unions don’t, and are turning to temporary foreign labour as a solution. “We’re seeing the beginning of what could be a fairly significant labour shortage,” says Brad Bellows, a Suncor spokesperson. “Certainly, bringing in temporary guest workers is a last-option response.” A subcontractor of the company recently brought in 30 Filipino welders, ironworkers and pipefitters to work on Suncor’s firebag in-situ project.

But unions and tradespeople argue that some employers in the province—especially in the oil sands—simply want to bring in temporary foreign workers to bypass a unionized domestic workforce. “Our building trades locals have yet to encounter any difficulty finding an appropriate number of skilled workers to fill those jobs,” says Foster. “There are other workers available. It’s just that many employers only want workers who will work for lower wages.”

Temporary work permits are issued federally. In 2004, none were given to foreign welders, ironworkers, steamfitters or pipefitters headed for Alberta, but in the past year hundreds of permits have gone to Alberta-bound workers in these trades. Companies like Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. and Suncor have raised the ire of organized labour in Alberta by importing foreign workers. (It didn’t help that Canadian natural negotiated with the Christian Labour Association of Canada—an “employer-friendly” union intensely despised by traditional unions—to represent the workers on its horizon project.)

Workers who cause trouble or bring negative attention to their employer can be sent home the next day. “You’re not going to defend your rights if you know that if they fire you, you’re deported,” says Foster.

In addition to accusing employers of using the foreign worker program to bust unions, the AFL also says employers use the foreign worker program as a way to avoid hiring domestic apprentices. Alberta’s apprenticeship system has a low completion rate: less than half of the Albertans who start apprenticeship programs go on to complete them.

“[Employers] want it both ways,” says Foster. “They want quick, easy access to temporary workers, and at the same time they’re not prepared to build apprentice training into their hiring and labour plans. And the government is quite happily feeding that irresponsibility.”

The call for more workers in Alberta prompted the federal government to open a new temporary foreign worker office in Calgary last September. The office helps employers move their applications through the system faster. Citizenship & Immigration Canada staff at the office have been busily handing out information on the program. Several months after the office opened, the government made it easier for employers to bring in foreign workers for 170 different jobs. Typically employers need to advertise jobs extensively before bringing in foreign workers, but for the jobs on the list, that’s no longer a requirement.

But even as more employers look abroad for workers, the jury’s still out on whether or not bringing more foreign workers to Alberta is a good idea, especially for jobs that have no union representation. foster and other labour advocates want more to be done to ensure that once the workers arrive, they have protections and freedoms beyond what the employer decides to give them. “Why are we setting up a situation,” he says, “where we allow a group of people, just because they don’t happen to be Canadian, to be exploited?”

Jeremy Klaszus is the contributing editor at Alberta Views.

The post The New Temps appeared first on Alberta Views.