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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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As for Steve, it’s been 26 years since he first visited a GA meeting. Now 47, his relationship with recovery has been off and on. “I probably have 20 years of clean time combined,” he says. Roughly 180,000 Albertans, according to the Canadian Community Health Survey, have or are at risk for gambling problems.

Growing up in south Calgary, Steve bet on childhood marble or pool games, taken in by the highs of winning. By 17 he was sneaking into the Elbow River Casino. “I just couldn’t wait until I was 18,” he says. As Steve matured into adulthood, gambling took over his life. His debts became too high to keep his addiction secret. He lost a marriage “after being given 100 chances.” Family members started getting calls from banks and other lenders demanding Steve repay the money.

In 1999, when Steve attended his first GA meeting, Alberta’s gambling landscape grounded itself in the physical realm. There were casinos—his preferred type of play—as well as video lottery terminals (VLTs), bingo, scratch tickets and lotto and Sport Select slips to fill in with a pencil. With only half of Canadians using the internet as the millennium dawned, everything online was in its infancy. This included gambling.

Then “grey-market” gambling websites started to appear online. Registered in such far-flung places as the Caribbean or the Isle of Man, they were illegal and unregulated in Canada. The players logging on didn’t know or care. A Canada West Foundation report proposed that the problem was best ignored. “It is not clear that a reasonable market for internet-based gambling in Canada exists, nor is it clear that such a market could be created,” wrote Robin Kelley, Peter Todosichuk and Jason Azmier in 2001. The authors argued that in trying to capture these players, governments might just create wider problems.

The grey market grew, however, as internet adoption increased and the number of websites expanded. Eventually people began gambling through browsers and apps on their smartphones and tablets. Provinces decided the market was a threat, and responded by launching their own legal, publicly owned online casinos, including, in 2020, Play Alberta. Gambling activity spread further with the legalization of single-sport betting nationwide in 2021.

The following year, Ontario started regulating the online private-casino—dubbed iGaming—industry. This officially enabled online casinos, including those previously operating outside Ontario law, to be licensed by the province. In exchange they would pay a cut of their revenues to the provincial government. Ontario now has some 50 operators, which run 87 websites.

In a few short years iGaming has become a huge industry in Ontario. More than two million user accounts have been opened, of which one million are active. Gambling has contributed more than $1.6-billion to Ontario government coffers. The government of Alberta has taken notice. They want in on the action. Albertans have already been seeing ads for gambling apps and websites (e.g., on Hockey Night in Canada) that they can’t actually use, at least legally.

As the second mover in Canadian iGaming, Alberta could learn from—or ignore—Ontario’s lessons. Though our government has said Alberta will “massage” Ontario’s blueprint, provinces often simply copy policies. Alberta will also help set the stage for provinces that follow suit. This province’s approach could even shape the gambling industry abroad. But whether Wild Rose Country will put a good system in place depends on who you ask.

In June 2024 the Minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction, Dale Nally, took the stage at the Canadian Gaming Summit in front of a large photo of himself to talk about “Betting on the Alberta Advantage.” Hair slicked back, Nally introduced himself not by his actual title but as the province’s “Minister of Fun.” He noted Ontario’s “success” with iGaming, and said Alberta wanted to follow in its footsteps. He said Albertans watching sports see ads for things they love, like beer, trucks and gambling. “But there’s something we don’t like about the ads,” he said, in a recording shared with AV by a journalist in attendance. It was the disclaimer that says “Ontario only.” “So we’ve got to change that.” Nally told the gambling company representatives in the audience to come find him later, to pitch, because Alberta would soon be open for business.

Consultations followed with stakeholders, including First Nations and other land-based casino operators in Alberta. In the legislature, MLAs debated how Alberta would soon usher in a new era of gambling. Amendments to proposed legislation—including player-protection measures such as gambling education, advertising limits and financial outlays for harm reduction—were defeated. And then, in May 2025, the iGaming Alberta Act was passed. The floodgates are expected to officially open in 2026.

Minister Dale Nally noted Ontario’s “success” with online gambling, and said Alberta wants to follow in its footsteps.

What awaits Albertans is an experiment. Countries such as Denmark, Sweden and the UK have versions of iGaming marketplaces. But in North America the iGaming industry is still in its infancy. Besides Ontario, iGaming marketplaces exist in only seven US states. Online sports betting is more widespread, both across Canada and, according to the American Gaming Association, in 34 US states. Though quick to tout benefits—namely revenue—governments like Ontario’s are also facing consequences, including more gambling addiction and growing concerns over advertising, such as its effects on children and youth.

Steve is already hearing about these concerns in GA meetings, with the biggest change in recent years being how people gamble. Older people are still using casinos and VLTs, he says. “But the younger people coming in now are mostly online gamblers.”

Nally isn’t hearing as many reservations. The people he talks to want us to be like Ontario. “Albertans have said ‘Why don’t you do the same here?’” Nally told CBC in a 2025 interview about iGaming. “Why don’t you put in place safety measures Why don’t you stop the money from leaving the province, and keep some of it in Alberta?”

Putting aside the open question of how many people expressed such preferences to Nally, or what their interests are, governments have traditionally let revenue potential, not consumer input, drive gambling expansion.

The founding father of gambling economics, the late William Eadington, was skeptical of online gambling’s role in public revenue generation, because he felt more taxes could be collected from physical venues such as casinos.

Though the online market is bigger for operators—by virtue of its 24/7, borderless, portable access—governments don’t earn the same spoils. While the Ontario government takes over 80 per cent of the revenues from land-based casinos and VLTs, it takes only 20 per cent of online iGaming revenues.

Ontario’s iGaming private companies have collectively taken more than $7.6-billion in just over three years, five times the online gambling revenue the provincial government has collected. Publicly owned online casinos in Alberta and Ontario don’t have partners to split revenues with, meaning the government keeps it all. The Edmonton international airport currently keeps 15 per cent of gross gaming revenue from its VLTs, while 85 per cent is returned to government coffers. Alberta charitable casinos are currently taxed at 83 per cent of net revenue. But Alberta’s online iGaming casinos are likely to be taxed at only 20 per cent, as in Ontario.

In short, the province will receive a much smaller cut from each dollar spent in a new iGaming regime than it is used to receiving from other forms of gambling.

The Alberta government downplays the possibility of iGaming cannibalizing higher-taxed land-based gaming. When launching Play Alberta, it said this wouldn’t happen, due to the province’s focus on targeting grey-market gamblers. Nonetheless, it’s very likely. A consultant’s report commissioned by casino operator Great Canadian Entertainment suggested Ontario casinos could lose about $550-million annually from gamblers flocking instead to iGaming. And indeed Ontario casino revenues fell below target in fiscal 2023–24 by almost that very amount. For the government to avoid taking a financial hit, then, Alberta’s gamblers will need to lose more money—or more Albertans will need to start gambling.

Land-based gambling creates economic spinoffs through casinos and VLT venues. These include job creation and additional tax revenues from food and beverages, payroll and property. Ontario is losing these “silver linings” of gambling. When Play Alberta launched, its potential impact on casino revenues was enough for the Tsuut’ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations to file a lawsuit citing potentially unfair competition.

When William Eadington wrote about online gambling earlier this century, the massive global industry we live with today was, in some respects, unfathomable. But now professional sports leagues have given up their long fight against betting potentially corrupting the sanctity of their games. Governments have permitted marketing on a grand scale with few restrictions, as in Ontario. And they have  succumbed to the temptation to steer away from more-profitable gambling options for a smaller share of a larger pie.

In part, this is due to the spectre of grey-market gambling, which drives a narrative known in gambling research as overcoming “regulatory resistance.” Gambling proponents invoke the perils of the grey market (or illegal black market) to wear down and defeat resistance to legalizing gambling. According to a 2021 paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, concerns include loss of consumer freedom, lower economic growth, and lack of safety.

Governments and consultants suggest that vast sums of money are currently being gambled away in unregulated markets. In 2020, as Play Alberta was being launched, Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis (AGLC) suggested Albertans were gambling away $378-million on the unregulated market.

Minister Nally, who didn’t respond to an interview request, spoke of the shadow side of the industry disdainfully in the legislature. “There are two parts that really are quite offensive,” he said. “One is that the money is not just leaving Alberta; it’s leaving the country for offshore destinations. So we don’t see a penny of that. And some of these operators are repugnant.”

Switching gamblers from unregulated to regulated gambling is called “channelization.” Some industry observers consider even 80 per cent to be a low goal. Ontario, which according to an Ipsos poll sees 86.4 per cent of its gamblers use the province’s regulated iGaming market, is chasing a 90 per cent channelization rate.

Unsurprisingly, channelization rates run lower in jurisdictions such as Alberta that have a single, publicly owned online casino rather than dozens of privately run websites that court the public with incentives to gamble and try to outmarket each other. In 2023–24 (the most recent annual report available), Albertans placed $5.3-billion in bets across all games on Play Alberta. That’s a 20.8 per cent increase over the previous year. After prize payouts and expenses, this netted the government $235-million. Prior to the 2020 launch, the province didn’t earn one cent from regulated online gambling.

The amount by which iGaming could expand Alberta’s regulated market is debated. Analysts project the new market could reach $1-billion to $1.25-billion at maturity. With 20 per cent of gross gaming revenue going to the provincial general fund—the same rate Ontario takes from iGaming partners—at least $200-million could be expected annually. Meanwhile $200-million is equivalent to only 0.25 per cent of the province’s projected 2025–26 total expenses.

For Alberta to avoid taking a financial hit, gamblers will need to lose more money—or more Albertans will need to start gambling.

So, is it worth it to allow all this online gaming Carrie Shaw, an Alberta Gaming Research Institute (AGRI) research chair at the University of Alberta, says she’s skeptical of revenue projections, because how much will get captured is calculated differently depending on who’s crunching the numbers. “I don’t know that the rationale for opening the market in Alberta is as evidence-based as it could be,” she says.

Take, for example, that no foolproof way exists to estimate the market size of Albertans wagering on grey-market sites. Often activity like this is measured through user surveys or web-traffic patterns, not spending data. Other information, such as the number of player accounts at a given online casino, is proprietary. Estimates vary too widely to tell a definitive story.

Though the province officially claims that Play Alberta has captured 45 per cent of the local online gambling market, data shared with the industry magazine Canadian Gaming Business by H2 Gambling Capital suggests the number is closer to “28 per cent of non-lottery gaming.” (H2 didn’t respond to an interview request.) A survey of online gamblers by Ipsos and the Canadian Gaming Association, an industry trade group, reported that only 22.7 per cent wager on Play Alberta. And of those players, just over half also gambled on grey-market sites.

If one assumes Play Alberta currently has 45 per cent of the market, with its 434,000 registered player accounts, the remaining 55 per cent of the market wouldn’t constitute 530,445 grey market accounts. Although Play Alberta permits only one account per individual, verified using government ID, players can sign up for accounts with multiple online gambling operators in iGaming or grey markets.

David Forrest, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Liverpool, says the average from UK Gambling Commission surveys is two accounts. But academic reviews of problem-gambling screenings suggest the number can actually be six or seven per gambler. Taking this into consideration can dramatically reduce the potential market size of iGaming in Alberta by several magnitudes. It can also distort channelization rates by making them appear higher by measuring total accounts rather than total players.

Forrest adds that attempts to survey gamblers on money spent are also challenging. Estimates range widely due to issues with self-reporting, including lack of recall or stating the amount wagered or the amount lost interchangeably.

Besides issues around the actual revenue potential of iGaming, Shaw at AGRI says other unintended consequences aren’t being properly reviewed. Online gambling, she notes, is inherently riskier than the in-person kind. Yet Canada already has insufficient public data on the consequences of gambling, whether detailed addiction rates, the number of calls to gambling helplines or the magnitude of harms such as gambling-related bankruptcies, domestic violence or suicides.

In 2018 Statistics Canada estimated 2.9 per cent of Ontarians have gambling problems or are at some level of risk for them. In December 2024 a Pollara report for Mental Health Research Canada put that number at a whopping 22 per cent. The Ontario Problem Gambling Helpline says it’s seeing a spike in calls. The scraps of evidence so far, wrote four Ontario psychologists for The Conversation in January 2025, “suggest a notable rise in problem gambling since [iGaming’s] introduction.”

Facing public criticism, Ontario banned celebrities from appearing in ads to promote iGaming—unless they’re promoting “responsible gaming.” It’s unknown whether this is having the intended effect. “We don’t have any evidence to suggest it’s having [an] impact,” Shaw says. And we know little about the long-term effects of online gambling ads on children and youth.

The biggest criticism so far, however, is that Alberta is moving ahead with the industry before crafting many of the rules and regulations.

Other than a plan for centralized self-exclusion that will enable patrons to ban themselves from all iGaming casinos at once—a feature Ontario still lacks—few specifics are yet known about Alberta’s iGaming market. Nally has said he believes responsible gambling should be a regulatory issue, not written into law. That way, he told the legislature, changes can be made “on a dime” as required by the market rather than requiring a legislative process.

That isn’t good enough for experts on gambling activity and addiction. “I think the onus is on the provider and the regulators to actually partner with [arm’s length] researchers,” Shaw says. Though researchers at the AGRI have a good working relationship with the provincial regulator, Shaw adds, the institute hasn’t been asked to perform independent research in the lead-up to Alberta opening its iGaming market.

It’s also critical to address a less tangible query: Will the consumer protections offered as part of an Alberta iGaming industry outweigh the negative consequences for the public writ large When discussing why an iGaming industry even needs to be created here, the provincial government publicly defaults to messages related to safety and responsible gambling. “Our goal is not to create new gamblers but to make existing online gambling safer,” Nally has said.

Brady Simpson, a University of Calgary doctoral candidate who studies gambling marketing, finds this messaging baffling. “What do you think is going to happen when these massive—in some cases multibillion-dollar—[companies] are able to inject their marketing dollars into Alberta The whole point is new-customer acquisition and then retention of those people.”

Simpson adds that such a permissive approach isn’t being taken with tobacco, alcohol or cannabis. Gambling too has health and addiction risks. Tobacco, alcohol and cannabis typically aren’t as close by as one’s phone, with its new, enticing, soon-to-be-legal gambling apps. At a minimum, says Simpson, “We should have limitations on marketing and accessibility.” Instead, the industry is “about to open the floodgates.”

What is happening now with iGaming in Alberta is familiar. It’s the same process every time Alberta expands its gambling options. The same questions, the same concerns, the same alleged drive to stamp out illegal activity, the same push to expand industry, the same lack of digging into how previous gambling expansion has affected people. It has happened before, here and across the country, and history is repeating itself.

Lobbyists are already pushing for an iGaming market in BC, but at present the government there says it isn’t interested. The Quebec Online Gaming Coalition—which includes member companies Bet99, Draft Kings and Flutter—has been lobbying for an iGaming market in that province since May 2023.

Yet this could be a moment to steer away from the old narratives and rationales that turned legalized gambling into a massive business.

When Nally spoke to industry insiders, he told them Albertans love to gamble. But the “Minister of Fun” also told the legislature: “I want to be perfectly clear: if you don’t gamble today, please don’t start tomorrow. That is not the purpose of this.” Meanwhile his government is projecting that Alberta’s gambling industry will grow. If this isn’t a mixed message, what is?

Steve has been in recovery since 2019, and he is determined to make it stick. “There’s a difference between abstinence and recovery,” he says. Previously he only focused on abstinence from gambling, which he saw as time off. Now he’s actively in recovery, which for him involves following a 12-step program and doing service work, including as an executive with Southern Alberta Gamblers Anonymous. He knows what will happen if he veers off course. “I won’t stop until I lose all my money. I’m going to be a liar. I’m going to be a thief,” he says. “I might as well say bye-bye to my family and my friends and my work.”

One thing he is confident about with Alberta’s new iGaming regime is that it won’t unleash a flood of new people with gambling addiction into his meetings. But not because they won’t exist. “There are thousands and thousands of compulsive gamblers in Calgary,” he says. “Yet every night we have a meeting, maybe 15 to 20 of us are in the room.”

Journalist Rob Csernyik has a forthcoming book from Sutherland House on gambling-related suicides in Canada.

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Read More: Who Wants Albertan’s to Gamble More?

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Tonight we’ve gathered in an underground LRT station passageway. Beside us, a long stretch of yellow fencing separates us from a lone electrical outlet, a rare treasure in public spaces. The outlet was recently deemed too popular among the city’s unhoused citizens—hence the fence.

Through slurred speech, Brandon Shaw fawns over my toque, which reads “Hoot ’n’ Blow” beside an owl logo. I offer it as a trade for his, but he declines. Someone later explains Shaw was afraid he’d picked up lice in the shelters. He was protecting me.

Brandon is the namesake of the organization (“For B”), which was launched by his mother, Angie Staines. He’s 28 years old and still alive after 12 years unhoused—but only just. In the summer of 2022, Staines and her team found Brandon blue-lipped, deep in a fentanyl poisoning. They revived him with naloxone and oxygen. But in the ensuing months he was set on fire during a drug deal gone wrong, then suffered a kidney infection, then withered through the dysentery that hospitalized over 100 of his unhoused neighbours.

Half of Alberta’s treatment beds are in explicitly faith-based facilities, with an overwhelming focus on total abstinence.

Like everyone down here, Shaw’s life could have taken any number of trajectories. Twelve years earlier he had been a multitalented and athletic kid running full speed into behavioural challenges. “I left home for the first time out of fear and shame of the pain and harm I was causing my family,” he says. “I knew something was up with me; I just didn’t know what.” He quickly gave up on youth shelters. “I didn’t last long, because of my drug use and mental health,” he says (many shelters have strict abstinence policies). “And nobody asked me what I want or what I need.” So, managing bipolar disorder and ADHD with street drugs, the runaway teenager took up residence in a tent.

Years later Shaw would wait months on a medical detox list, only to be refused support for his potentially seizure-inducing benzodiazepine withdrawal. Given that his earlier attempts at detox from benzodiazepine-laced fentanyl “felt like having a stroke,” he was desperate for a better option.

Like so many other people 4B was out to support that night, Shaw is up against systems seemingly built to fail. Successive provincial governments have ignored survivors like him while holding fast to outdated conceptions of drug use and addiction.

In 2014 Dr. Esther Tailfeathers sounded the alarm about a sudden escalation of opioid poisonings in her native Kainai Nation (Blood Tribe or Blood Reserve), bordering Lethbridge, where she practises family medicine and advocates for harm reduction. “I had no idea we wouldn’t get on top of this, we wouldn’t have a good strategy—[that by 2024] we’d still be chasing the tail of the problem,” she says. At the time, she remembers, “We thought we were an anomaly, that it wasn’t happening anywhere else to this degree.”

Kainai was at the vanguard of the cataclysmic shift in Canada’s criminalized opioid supply, from use of regulated pharmaceuticals and “old-school heroin” to potent synthetics such as fentanyl that are made without opium poppy. Recognizing the trauma of people who use drugs, their families and frontline responders, Tailfeathers’s daughter Elle-Máijá documented the period. In 2021 she released the film Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy. 

Recently the doctor and her daughter “started counting the number of people in the film that have died. It was over half of them.”

Alberta has lately seen a seven-year drop in Indigenous life expectancy. In 2015 life expectancy for a First Nations man in Alberta was 67; today it’s 60. For First Nations women, it’s dropped from 73 to 66. This decline has been attributed in large part to our province’s narrow scope of drug policies, centred on abstinence. To Tailfeathers it seems like a conscious reframing of John A. Macdonald’s “clearing the plains” starvation politics. “Macdonald and all these other leaders thought they knew what was best for Indigenous people,” she says. “In 150 years there’s been no change… Making decisions about us, without us, is still colonial.”

During the NDP term in government (2015–2019), AHS incrementally piloted and adopted interventions falling under a “harm reduction” umbrella, such as naloxone distribution, supervised consumption sites and prescribed injectable hydromorphone. But these measures were too little, too late. While the tide of regulated opioids retreated—in an overcorrection to what some experts saw as loose prescribing practices—annual toxicity deaths in Alberta rose from around 100 in 2012 to 805 in 2018. In 2023 Alberta was on track to exceed 2,000 opioid-related deaths for the first time. (The data is not yet finalized.)

Elaine Hyshka, Canada Research Chair in Health Systems Innovation at the University of Alberta, still agonizes over the opportunities missed in the early days of the crisis. “The exponential increase in deaths was directly related to a change in the illegal drug supply. Before, people were primarily using prescription opioids. Those became less available, and the illegal market moved to fill that void.” With dangerous drugs flooding in, and deaths rising fast, drug policy experts called for immediate harm-reduction measures to save lives.

In the years since 2019, however, harm reduction has been turned into a political wedge, and “addiction,” an amorphous term increasingly avoided by drug-policy experts, has been reinforced as the nexus of public interventions. But we’re taking aim at the wrong target, says Hyshka. As Brandon Shaw’s story illustrates, this isn’t an addiction crisis, it’s a mass poisoning.

Successive provincial governments have ignored survivors like Brandon while holding fast to outdated conceptions of drug use and addiction.

When Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party took power in 2019, it began cutting harm-reduction services. By 2023, grassroots overdose prevention sites had been criminalized, the number of supervised consumption booths in Alberta had been reduced by 35 per cent, and every patient in Alberta accessing a prescribed supply of hydromorphone (a synthetic opioid) was forced to accept a regimen of “witnessed oral dosing” in central facilities. To harm-reduction advocates, these restrictions became synonymous with the government’s recovery-oriented (or abstinence-oriented) focus.

Brandon Shaw experienced first-hand the staggering increase in poisonings during the transition to synthetic opioids. “I moved to BC [in 2013] when you could still buy actual heroin. …I had a somewhat normal life, working day labour, living in a ‘wet house’ [sober-living facility with loose rules]. Then fentanyl came along and everything changed.”

“At first, we just thought we were getting strong-ass dope… then we noticed all our friends were dying. My routine was on its head. Before, I would use four times a day. Then fentanyl came out and I was using sporadically, at weird times of day.” Shaw describes fentanyl’s lack of “legs,” its shortened effects compared to heroin or other opioids. After losing many friends to poisoning, he recognized the threat to his survival and returned to Edmonton in 2015.

As in BC, the ground in Alberta had fundamentally shifted. But a public health response equal to the crisis was nowhere in sight in this province. With few options to choose from, Shaw returned to residential treatment for his third time—for his first, as a teen, he had been involuntarily committed through the Protection of Children Abusing Drugs (PChAD) Act. He would eventually tally a total of seven attempts in the system.

Through these stays in “rehab,” Shaw learned some basic living skills. But these didn’t help him overcome his biggest barrier: securing stable housing. What he needed, according to Alberta’s drug-treatment system, was to be drug-free. “When you’re using drugs, that alone really screws you for a lot of options—there’s very little low-barrier housing. A lot of these places are 12-step-oriented.”

The 12-step method, developed in the 1930s for people dependent on alcohol, is rooted in Christian values to support people through abstinence. Countless people credit 12-step’s community support for their eventual success in maintaining abstinence. But the method has its limits and drawbacks. Critics refer to the community shaming that reveals itself, as one example, when people admit to resumption of drug use (or, to use the more stigma-laced term, when they “relapse”). Speaking of her own experience in a 12-step program, New York Times journalist Maia Szalavitz put it bluntly: “Such clearly religious practices would not be accepted as medical or psychological treatment for any other condition.”

An internal AHS document reveals that 12-step-based strategies are central in publicly funded facilities harbouring three-quarters of Alberta’s treatment beds. Around half of Alberta’s treatment beds are in explicitly faith-based facilities. Between religious undertones and an overwhelming focus on total abstinence from drugs, rehab can exclude people seeking other approaches to recovery, including ones that don’t aggravate their existing shame.

But one life-altering experience in treatment stands out for Shaw. “I’ve experienced all kinds of trauma through the last 12 years,” he says, summarizing lifetimes of harm in one breath. During an extended stint at Our House Addiction Recovery Centre in Edmonton, Shaw says, he underwent six months of trauma therapy with a professionally certified counsellor. That length of time “was the only way I was able to get vulnerable… I had to trust him more than anyone I’ve ever trusted.”

Trauma therapy, however, is expensive, intensive and outside the scope of most treatment facilities in Alberta. It takes weeks or months to conduct pre-screening and ensure that a participant is in position for routine follow-up and therapeutic work outside of regular sessions. In effect, trauma therapy requires someone to be sheltered, supported by a close network and ready to face their demons. Shaw wanted “treatment that would fit [him] individually, not just a one-shoe-fits-all, for every single person coming in.” Instead, the option offered by most rehab facilities he visited in Alberta seemed to create “a revolving door. It doesn’t work.”

After decades of advocacy by mental health professionals, Alberta not long ago was set to expand its therapeutic options. But in 2021, a day before the ribbon was to be cut on the College of Counselling Therapy of Alberta, the provincial government announced the college was “no longer a priority.” It cancelled the launch, preventing the professionalization of oversight and regulation of mental health and addiction therapy. Instead, the Kenney government doubled down on treatment facilities that are cheaper and unaccountable.

The lack of accountability at Alberta’s existing treatment services troubles Tailfeathers. “Without evaluation, we have no idea what works and what doesn’t,” she says. “[A program] might look good, but are we actually evaluating whether it’s successful or not Is there an overall decrease in mortality, an increase in people returning to the workforce, children staying in their households with their parents?” Our government is “shooting from the hip, putting all their eggs in one basket.”

Despite regularly publishing data on drug-related EMS-dispatch and drug-related mortality, the government of Alberta hasn’t shown how treatment impacts the odds of survival—if it even knows. Hyshka suggests the starting point to assess success would be to see if people who attended treatment “had any EMS activations or attended a hospital for substance use disorder for six months and one year following discharge.” In Alberta’s centralized medical system, this should be easy.

Alberta’s Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction did not reply to any of my questions. Reporting requirements to the government were, however, disclosed to me by a director and a manager at two private but publicly funded residential treatment facilities and a staff member at an AHS detox facility. (They requested anonymity to protect their provincial funding.)

The responses from the three facilities provide a rare insight into the government’s selective data management. By collecting client participation data such as number of people initiating and completing treatment, number on wait lists, and participant demographics, the government attends to the needs of the treatment industry.

Conversely, the government appears to actively ignore client outcomes, including how many people maintain abstinence or even survive in the months following their participation in a treatment program. And while the government tracks the number of people discharged early from treatment and the reasons for early discharge, this information is not publicly disclosed. As a result, the industry is protected from evaluation and scrutiny while clients continue to be ushered through the system. And the fact that one facility admitted to a “triage process” while another did not suggests the possibility of “pay-to-play”—priority access for people with the right network and a willingness to make donations.

The collecting of data on people using services and what helps them complete programs can create an impression that the programs are supporting recovery goals. But this hinges on how we define recovery and success. The lack of follow-up with patients, says Hyshka, “means the system isn’t accountable to [the public] or to patients. If you’re a politician and you’re not measuring success, you can’t be held accountable for your policy decisions.” And as Shaw points out, a “revolving door” system in which clients leave treatment only to re-enlist months later—at thousands of dollars per stay—represents a tremendous business opportunity.

It turns out that, in the distinct but overlapping worlds of addiction and drug poisoning, definitions of “recovery” and “success” are not universal.

The Alberta government claims that “acute interventions,” a veiled reference to harm-reduction services, have “come at the expense of supporting the long-term wellness and recovery of individuals, families and communities.” The implication is that helping people stay alive while using drugs comes at a cost to the individuals and their communities by delaying their transition to “recovery.” The government defines recovery as “a process of sustained action toward physical, social and spiritual healing and wellness while consistently pursuing a substance-free life.” This contrasts with harm-reduction-oriented definitions, many of which centre a person’s own goals related to drug use alongside informed consent on supports.

The goals, actions and performance metrics built into recovery-oriented (abstinence) systems of care are detailed in the 2023–26 business plan for Mental Health and Addiction. The ministry’s budget is $300-million for 2023–24, of which at least 80 per cent is allocated to addiction and mental health recovery programming and capital costs. In a rare instance, the plan specifies a secondary objective of reducing “opioid-related overdoses in the province, with a focus on Indigenous Albertans who are disproportionately affected.” The initiatives listed are limited to residential and day treatment, a helpline and an expansion of the Virtual Opioid Dependency Program (VODP)—hardly a complete recipe for managing a toxic drug supply.

The VODP was originally designed to provide access for people in rural settings to treatment and opioid agonist medications (such as methadone and Suboxone); it was recently adopted for use in prisons. However, a 2022 study funded by AHS and co-authored by Nathaniel Day, the medical director of VODP, showed considerable participant dropout. Those who could be studied, the authors admitted, “were individuals who remained in treatment and were agreeable to completing assessments, [so] they may have also had more positive outcomes.”

The best treatment for opioid use disorder is medication. “Rehab” for opioid use has little supporting evidence.

Alberta’s recovery-oriented system is operating as a flimsy raft in a storm of toxic drugs, unaffordable housing and structural neglect. Thousands of Albertans, unable to hang on, are annually lost at sea. Others, with resources, luck and a willingness to define recovery as abstinence, are eventually carried to dry land. How many Albertans are saved, and for how long, our government either doesn’t know or won’t say.

In their emphasis on mortality, advocates for harm-reduction options misinterpret the ideology underpinning Alberta government’s approach to the poisoning crisis. Long term, the government’s apparent hope is that its recovery-oriented system will give rise to drug-free communities. In the short term, however, the “pursuit of a substance-free life” is being prioritized over minimizing death and illness caused by an unregulated supply.

The way treatment programs are instructed to monitor participant mortality rates helps illustrate this ideology. An executive director at a facility (residential treatment facility #1 in the table) told me that they only learn about the deaths of recent participants through alumni, 12-step meetings, mentorship programs or when someone voluntarily reports a death to the facility. If a participant’s death is reported within two months of the person’s exit from a program, it is relayed to the Alberta government. That completes reporting.

In the run-up to the 2023 provincial election, UCP candidates frequently celebrated their system’s supposed ability to reduce deaths. But during the same period, drug toxicity deaths rose steeply, topping 195 in April 2023—Alberta’s worst month on record. The government has since pivoted to a “Recovery Capital Index” to measure the success of treatment. This approach defines recovery capital as “the combination of personal, social, community and other supports that a person can draw upon to begin and sustain their recovery from addiction,” including housing, employment and family connection among the eight factors in the framework.

An individual’s index is measured at several timepoints during treatment using the My Recovery Plan app. Created by BC-based Last Door Recovery Society, the app was licensed to the Alberta government through sole-source contracts totalling nearly $1.8-million.

David Hodgins, a professor of psychology at the University of Calgary, describes recovery capital as an “increasingly recognized construct describing dimensions of recovery beyond reduction of problematic substance use.” He points out that no research yet exists on whether the app improves outcomes, though this is typical for mental health apps. Hodgins is also careful to emphasize that recovery capital “has nothing to do with reducing drug poisoning deaths, beyond the idea that more people being successfully treated is a good thing. It may help people maintain abstinence by pointing out areas of strength and areas of need.”

The director at residential treatment facility #1, mentioned previously, was enthusiastic about Alberta’s new framework, saying, “I see the successes every day… Recovery capital is measured in simple points: when they come in, at the 30-day mark, when they exit… we see huge increases at those points and huge decreases in the barriers to recovery.”

Recovery Capital Index scores, if they improve—and assuming they can be trusted and are released transparently—may eventually help justify the Alberta government’s focus on rehab. But, says Hyshka, “if the number one goal is to reduce the death rate, funding treatment beds is not going to do that.”

She emphasizes that the gold-standard treatment for opioid use disorder is medication, while residential treatment has little supporting evidence thus far. In any case, she reminds us, “a large percentage of people who use opioids or other substances are not going to meet the criteria for substance use disorder [or for being admitted to treatment], but they’re still at risk of dying—especially if they’re accessing drugs from the illegal market.”

The Mental Health and Addiction ministry’s $300-million budget in 2023–24 is a roughly 40 per cent year-over-year increase. This is laudable spending against historical underfunding on mental health and substance use supports. But the same budget announcement designated just $14.5-million for supervised consumption sites, a 30 per cent drop that was obscured in subsequent budget releases. Underscoring this quiet manoeuvring, the UCP’s fall 2023 annual general meeting passed a resolution calling for the wholesale defunding of supervised consumption services. And the Alberta government continues to build out its plans for its notorious Compassionate Intervention Act. This legislation is expected to empower police, families and healthcare providers to obtain court orders that compel people deemed a danger to themselves or others to undergo addiction treatment.

“Tough love” might seem compassionate to some. But Hyshka says the evidence shows that people are at “much higher risk of death from poisoning” following a period of forced abstinence. She also worries that “we already have trouble encouraging people to talk openly about their [drug] use and speak out and reach for help when they need it.” Fearful of being subjected to involuntary treatment by those they trust, “people will stop reaching out for help.”

Despite plans to construct 11 “therapeutic communities,” at least four of them in First Nations communities, including Enoch Cree, Kainai, Siksika and Tsuut’ina first nations, the government is signalling further privatization in the ownership structures. Not only will the success rates of treatment remain unknown to the public and to patients, it’s unclear how public money is being spent. Tailfeathers is troubled by this lack of transparency: “It’s like building all the brick residential schools… we’ve got these things built, but nobody knows what happens inside.”

The government’s first such contracts, in Red Deer and Lethbridge, were awarded to Edgewood Health Network and Fresh Start Recovery. Edgewood is a private company backed by undisclosed investors, while Fresh Start is a non-profit. Both corporations are perennial Lead Sponsors of the Recovery Capital Conference, a public centrepiece of the UCP government’s recovery-oriented system of care.

The conference also happens to be organized by Last Door Recovery Society, the organization that licenses My Recovery Plan to the Alberta government. After a former staff member was charged with multiple sexual assaults in 2023, Last Door came under fire for alleged attempts by senior staff to prevent survivors and community members from coming forward. As individuals and treatment facilities load recovery capital scores into My Recovery Plan to shore up the government’s appearance of system monitoring, Last Door will grow its financial capital. Reducing deaths will remain a secondary concern.

To Tailfeathers, addressing deaths must be a top priority. The trauma of unending crisis and loss is “wearing down people at the frontlines,” while the government’s strategy is “way off the mark in terms of… healing people who are seeking the drugs.”

“If politicians are not measuring success, they can’t be held accountable for their policy decisions.”

It’s a sunny fall day seven months after my first meeting with Brandon Shaw, and my phone call with him is interrupted by someone dropping boxes of naloxone at his apartment. He’s been housed since spring, after detoxing at home with Staines’s support and getting access to a safe supply of hydromorphone. When he picks up the phone again he tells me, “Things are going amazing. I’m at a place in my life where I have more now than I ever have—emotional supports, people I work with in advocacy—all these people now that have come into my life…  Without my mom, I can’t guarantee you I’d be here today.”

When he was unhoused, he says, he was stripped of his voice and “tired of people crossing the street to get away.” With the support of 4B Harm Reduction, Shaw has launched a public education project—The Curbside Philosophy—to restore power to his community. As a society, he says, we spend so much time talking about unhoused people—Shaw wants us to speak with them. His project makes short videos situating real people inside the politics.

Not everyone from Shaw’s past has been able to transition to a life like his. “What keeps me up at night are the people I had to leave behind,” he says. His voice breaks as he describes the displacement of people who used to meet every day at the recently relocated Boyle Street Community Services, a ripple effect of the gentrification that is driving unhoused Edmontonians and their services out of the core.

Shaw knows his luck—in having Angie Staines as his mother, in surviving his interludes between the “revolving doors” of treatment, in finding a purpose with 4B Harm Reduction, in the grassroots community that supported him while he faced exclusion by the system. “I don’t want my whole recovery to be founded on… the fear of 12-step—having to tell everybody what a screwup you are. …When I screwed up, my community was behind me. People were just happy to see I wasn’t driven by fear and shame.”

Euan Thomson co-launched EACH+EVERY, which supports evidence-based, humane solutions to unregulated drug toxicity.

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The post What’s Wrong With Rehab? appeared first on Alberta Views.

I move along. Dozens of people are hunched at dozens of other machines: Lucky Buddha, Texas Tea, Strike it Rich, Merlin’s Wand, Lotus Land, Sparkling Nightlife, Lucky Ox, Mighty Cash, Buffalo Gold Revolution, Rakin’ Bacon, Money Link, Rising Fortunes. I push through the music and lights, past the green-felt baccarat tables where balding Asian men fiddle with their chips, past the off-track betting room (Wager on the Sport of Kings!), through Jackpot Junction, a battery of slots beneath a giant locomotive smokestack spewing cartoon coins and bills.

None of this is meant for me: I’m not a customer, I’m a volunteer. In five minutes my shift starts in the cage, a locked room with barred windows along the far wall filled with plastic chips and real money, where I’ll be banker and cashier, paying out the table-game players—poker, blackjack, roulette. Instead of spending money, I’ll be funding my 8-year-old daughter’s education. A portion of today’s casino take will go to her school, some $65,000 for field trips, books, cultural shows, an artist in residence, iPads and basketball nets.

Countless Albertans know these shifts, having volunteered for schools, community leagues, environmental groups, even churches. (And only Albertans do: no other province allows “charities”—this includes schools’ parent-fundraising-councils—to conduct casino events.) Experience isn’t necessary. Neither is police clearance. The job is just to count money and pay players, and the cage is ringed with surveillance cameras besides. As my shift starts, I’m handed $1.1-million in chips, lined up in trays, and a neat pile of elastic-band-wrapped blue, purple, green, red and brown bricks of cash totalling $350,000, more than I paid for my house. The main rule, I’m told, is to not congratulate customers. I might be handing them $600, but maybe they started with a thousand.

Today the Elbow River will get busy. On a break I watch a woman in a puffy silver coat play two slots, White Cats and Nouveau Beauties, at once. An older couple slumps at Pirate Ship, in front of the cage, for five hours—he on the button, she with her arm around him. The braided woman stays at Lamp of Destiny until late afternoon. By dinnertime, young couples and middle-aged men in Flames jerseys fill up the slots and card tables. At 7:20 p.m., after pushing just over $230,000 through the bars, I sign out. Six new parents and grandparents arrive for the night shift. So ends another routine chapter in Alberta’s growing addiction to gambling.

No province but Alberta allows charities and schools to conduct casino events.

For Andree Busenius, gambling is all too familiar and still somehow strange. Her 1980s childhood in Edmonton’s Riverbend community was a different universe in gambling terms. “I remember going with my aunt to Klondike Days and her saying, ‘OK, you pick a horse,’ and it’d be, like, $2.50. Never more than that. Santa never bought us lottery tickets. The aunties played cards for nickels. Kids weren’t invited.”

Alberta didn’t get its first lottery until the early 1970s, after the Criminal Code was changed to allow provincial lotteries and sweepstakes. The first permanent casino in Calgary, Cash Casino, opened in 1980; Edmonton got its first the next year. Scratch tickets arrived here in 1981 (the $1 Tic Tac Toe). VLTs were introduced in Alberta in the early 1990s over protests from opposition MLAs. In that same decade, sports gambling became legal here, albeit barely: it was offered only by the province, with options so limited and odds so bad that savvy bettors stuck to illegal bookies. Back then, Andree, like many Albertans, “didn’t even know where the casinos were.”

She was oblivious about gambling until university, when she worked a charity bingo for the Edmonton Rowing Club. “I counted out, like, $135,000 in a shift. What I remember most is being very judgmental. I couldn’t believe how many bingo cards people played at a time. I didn’t understand why they’d spend their money that way. And I was unaware this could ever become a problem. Addiction was about how you were raised, where you were from, whether addiction ran in your family, your education. I’d known people who quit smoking, which reaffirmed my belief—it was about will power and self-control.”

Andree volunteered at more bingos. She went to Las Vegas with friends: “Gambling was something you did on holidays. Our daily budget was $100.”

And then, in her late 20s, Andree was raped. “I did everything I was supposed to do,” she says. “Filed the police report; he went to jail. I did therapy. I thought after a few months I’d be healed.” But trauma and addiction are well acquainted. “After a year, I tried geographic therapy and moved to Red Deer, where a friend introduced me to VLTs. And it was immediate, immediate love.”

Andree moved home; the feeling followed. She found a casino. “The first time I played a slot in Edmonton I lost $400 in six hours,” she says. “But I loved how I felt. I saw people who gambled; they’d just be in that zone. And I thought because I wasn’t putting a substance into my body, I’d be able to control it. After that first night at the Yellowhead Casino, as absurd as it sounds, I felt amazing. For six hours, nothing hurt.”

Next morning the pain returned. Andree went back to the Yellowhead.

This was fall of 2002. Andree began gambling every day, from 10 in the morning until late. Sometimes she won only because the VLTs were shut off at 1:59 a.m. She told herself she wasn’t addicted. No-one knew what she was up to. “Every time my mouth moved, it was a lie,” she says. “I was able to keep family and friends at bay because I’d gone through trauma. I’d say ‘You don’t know what I’m going through; I just need some space and some time.’ ”

Mostly she lost. Andree spent her disability cheques, gave up her car lease, sold her and her parents’ belongings at pawnshops and on eBay. “You can be sitting at dinner beside your great auntie, losing your life savings,” she says. “They wouldn’t have the foggiest idea.” Her gambling lasted until February 2003. After maxing out her mom’s credit card, she got caught. Her parents were devastated. Her mom cried for a day; her dad kept asking, “Do you know how hard we worked for that money?”

Andree went to Gamblers Anonymous (GA), joined the long wait for treatment, struggled for years, avoided driving past casinos, avoided Tim Hortons because of Roll Up the Rim to Win (not unusual for gamblers in recovery). She eventually got a job at an inner-city non-profit, paid her parents back, settled down, got married, had kids, moved to Beaumont. Resumed a normal life.

And then one day in 2007 Andree’s employer asked her to volunteer for a charity casino. The week after her shift she was back at the Yellowhead, as a customer, relapsing.

Almost 10 per cent of Albertans aged 12–17 gamble frequently and are at risk of becoming problem gamblers.

What’s now “Pure Casino Yellowhead” is going strong in a northside industrial park. It has 700 slots, a 24-hour poker room, a high-limit room and a private VIP lounge for an “ultra-luxurious gaming experience.” It hosts comedy, live music, art competitions, a Mother’s Day drag revue. Half of the casino’s table game revenues and 85 per cent of its slot proceeds go to charities. Its website features an interview with the artistic director of Shadow Theatre, whose company “is delighted to be associated with Pure Casino.”

Gamblers in Alberta have more options than ever. The Yellowhead and Elbow River are just two of the province’s 24 casinos, found in every big city. Some are open all hours of the day, at least one of them on Christmas. Five are owned by First Nations. Alberta’s sixth such casino, Bear Hills, will be opened late this year by the Louis Bull Tribe just off the QEII near Maskwacîs.

Inside the province’s casinos are the descendants of a limited VLT trial in the 1990s. Alberta now has some 15,000 VLTs. The machines can be found at another 740 locations in Alberta, in rows of four or eight or a dozen next to bathrooms or kitchen swing doors everywhere from Boston Pizzas to dive bars. Alberta has the second-highest concentration of VLTs in Canada and the highest concentration of casino table games.

What started as one provincial lottery in the 1970s is now nine, with weekly prizes ranging into the tens of millions. These tickets, along with dozens of scratch cards and Sport Select, can be bought at any of Alberta’s 2,856 lottery centres. Our original gambling venues are still thriving. Alberta has 20 bingos, most now offering e-daubers that allow dozens of cards to be played at once. We have four horse tracks; bets can also be placed in special rooms such as the Elbow River Casino’s.

But these are all the old ways. Since October 2020, hundreds of thousands of Albertans have been gambling from the comfort of their living-room couch (or bus seat or office chair) through a Crown-owned online casino, Play Alberta. This “people’s casino” has already expanded to include single-event sports betting, because the US legalized it and Canada followed suit. Play Alberta in 2021 began offering wagers that for the past century had been the sole domain of bookies or Las Vegas.

Today you can gamble on the Oilers from your rinkside seat in Rogers Place. (In the words of one provincial official as Play Alberta was being launched: “Just imagine the excitement of the Labour Day Classic or Battle of Alberta and walking over to a licensed sports betting area to bet on who makes the next touchdown or goal!”) The local industry is worth $3.4-billion annually and employs an estimated 13,000 people. Three-quarters of Albertans say they gamble every year, 40 per cent through multiple methods, e.g., playing the 6/49, visiting a casino and betting on hockey.

This is probably an underestimate. Illegal activities are typically hidden, with Albertans thought to annually gamble at least $378-million offshore. Gambling losses aren’t something people love to talk about. And, even anonymously, people tend to understate their vices; studies of municipal garbage and wastewater show that self-reported rates of alcohol and drug consumption are too low.

Official counts are big enough. In 1973–74 Albertans wagered $110-million on all forms of legal gambling, mostly bingos and lotteries. By 1999–2000, with casinos and VLTs proliferating, Albertans gambled about $13-billion. By 2013 it was $23-billion. Not that long ago the notion of playing high-stakes poker or Lamp of Destiny at a government-owned online casino might have sounded crazy, yet in 2022 Albertans placed $3.6-billion in bets at Play Alberta alone.

Albertans can now play VLTs, casino games or the lottery from home, through a Crown-owned online casino, Play Alberta

There was a time in Alberta when gambling was not sanctioned; our only legal outlets were bingos, raffles and horse races. At the end of the 1960s, Alberta’s then-attorney general, Social Credit MLA Edgar Gerhart, flew to Reno, Nevada, to learn about managing vice. When he returned from the four-day junket, reporters grilled the minister. Had he tried gambling “Not even 25 cents,” Gerhart replied. Would Alberta be allowing slot machines and casinos “That option is out,” a ministerial official said.

But by the end of the 1980s the local hospitality and tourism industry was lobbying hard for VLTs, and not just for the province’s growing number of casinos—for bars and restaurants and struggling rural hotels too. Officials from North Dakota (that state already had VLTs) warned our leaders about the harms. The Getty government allowed trials at the Stampede and Klondike Days, then formally launched VLTs across Alberta in 1992. Soon they were everywhere. Albertans were quickly hooked, with one-fifth of VLT users reporting problem gambling. Nine municipalities eventually voted in plebiscites to remove what Maclean’s dubbed “the devil’s television.”

Calgary Catholic Bishop Fred Henry was among the most vocal opponents, both of gambling’s spread and in how the public was endorsing it. In late 1998 he told a conference of Alberta Catholic school trustees he was “mad as hell” that they were allowing schools to generate money off the backs of gamblers, especially through the “scourge” of VLTs. “I have to say I’m amazed that you’re not angry,” Henry said. “You’re assuming that fundraising is normal. It’s not. It’s an aberration. …[It’s] simply downloading the problem on the individual schools and school boards.”

By “problem,” Henry was referring to the Klein government’s spending cuts. The disappearance of funds, particularly during Klein’s first two terms, starved public services and non-profits alike. But Alberta’s policy of handing over a slice of booming casino proceeds to schools and charities began to put VLTs and gambling generally in a sunnier light. Klein also cut income- and corporate taxes, shrinking revenues; more lottery-ticket-buying and poker-playing helped offset this too. Gambling revenues to the province rose sixfold between 1992 and 2001; they went from comprising 1.6 per cent of our budget to 5.4 per cent. Albertans’ gambling activity increased fivefold.

Reticence about gambling dwindled among politicians and the public, and the VLT plebiscites seemed to settle things. Some communities eventually lifted their bans. “We have a huge problem with regard to problem gambling in this province… I consider this a non-partisan issue,” protested St. Albert PC MLA Ken Allred in the legislature in 2011. He called VLTs “the crack cocaine of gambling.” He was ignored. VLTs now rarely appear in Alberta Hansard, except ironically as a metaphor for spending that a politician views as risky or wasteful.

The normalization of VLTs saw “gambling addiction” added to the purview of the Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission, to create awareness of rising numbers of bankruptcies, theft from employers and suicides. The province in 1996 created a regulator, the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission (or AGLC, today’s Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis). And 2000 saw the founding of the Alberta Gambling Research Institute (AGRI).

The AGRI was a collaboration of Alberta’s three biggest universities. In a 2017 interview with Fiona Nicoll and Mark R. Johnston for the Journal of Law and Social Policy, AGRI founder Garry J. Smith said alarmed citizens had demanded the centre. “Politicians focus almost exclusively on the revenues and are unaware of the adverse consequences of an activity,” he said. The institute would study gambling “from a public policy and social justice perspective.”

Gambling puts politicians in a conflict of interest, Smith argued—the higher the revenues, the easier their jobs and re-election prospects. “Governments benefit [even] from gambling-related crime,” he said. Take, say, the money launderer at the casino, or a gambler embezzling $500,000 from his employer to feed his habit; both add to government coffers. Ultimately our leaders “disregard the problems created by widespread gambling—or just nibble around the edges to make it look like they’re doing something consequential.”

Smith took issue with the province billing Sport Select as “fun,” when mandatory parlays made the game a sucker’s bet (and “Since when is it fun to steal people’s money?”). But his main concern was VLTs. “It’s obvious [they’re] the most dangerous format. You go into venues and it just seems like the players are zombies… 91 per cent of government gambling revenue comes from [VLTs], and about 75 per cent of problem gamblers say that’s their game of choice.” Our leaders are “taking advantage of vulnerable citizens.”

Our regulator has a similar conflict of interest. “The bureaucrats I dealt with at the AGLC generally recognized the weakness in their oversight regime, but were powerless to do much, because their political masters always call the shots.… It comes down to the provincial treasurer declaring ‘We made $1.4-billion from gambling last year. This year I’m budgeting for $1.5-billion. We need that money, and we need to show annual increases.’ ” Gambling, Smith concluded, “should be run by an independent tribunal that doesn’t profit from gambling.”

Today the AGLC’s paradoxical mandate is to “maintain the integrity of gaming activities while maximizing the financial return [to Albertans]”—akin to a person committing to a healthy diet but also to eating as much as possible. AGLC financial documents far prefer the term “gaming” to “gambling.” Besides being “fun and exciting,” gaming “creates jobs and business growth, spurs private-sector investment, expands consumer choice”—and brings in billions annually to the casino industry, charities and public revenues (2022: $307-million to charities; $1.2-billion to government). The AGLC is “concerned about problem gambling.” But it’s also “continually looking for ways to expand gaming entertainment options.”

To get more of us gaming, the AGLC, under the NDP government, trialled new inducements, including scratch-ticket vending machines in grocery stores. But the big change was Play Alberta. The government-owned online casino was ostensibly intended to “repatriate” funds from illegal gambling, but the projected revenues were so huge that Play Alberta was challenged in court by the Tsuut’ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations for its anticipated unfair competition.

Jason Kenney’s UCP government told the regulator to narrow its oversight and focus more on “maximizing returns.” By mid-2022 the AGLC had cut “over 9,100 pieces of red tape,” a “milestone” 38 per cent reduction in regulations, and was celebrating its Golden Scissors award from a pro-business lobby. Some changes at the AGLC affect alcohol or cannabis (e.g., bars can now deliver cocktails to your home; funeral homes can now sell liquor). Also: VLTs can now be operated 24 hours a day, Edmonton’s and Calgary’s airports can host VLTs (up to 49 each) and schools and other groups can request larger charity-casino takes.

The UCP-era AGLC is overseen by a nine-member board lacking addictions expertise. Chair Len Rhodes is a former UCP candidate and pro-football executive who is paid $148,035 annually to lead the regulator’s meetings. Other members include Wayne Drysdale, a former UCP MLA, Elan Harper, former prime minister Stephen Harper’s sister in law, and Angela Tu Weissenberger, wife of Kenney’s campaign manager.

This modern AGLC runs a loyalty program called Winner’s Edge. VLT users earn points the longer they play, casinogoers get cheaper food or drinks, and everyone can win “amazing” prizes. First-timers get up to $1,000 in “welcome bonuses” plus free sports bets and a $10 credit for every $75 gambled. The AGLC in 2022 spent $13-million on marketing, including on ads parodying Scream and The Shining that disparage offshore gambling and encourage visits to Play Alberta. In contrast, virtually all ads for cigarettes were banned in Canada in 1997 and alcohol ads famously face onerous restrictions, including that they can’t actually show someone drinking a beer.

The province now has 24 casinos, found in every big city, most open all hours of the day.

When Andree first attended Gamblers Anonymous in 2003—dragged by her mother—the meeting was near Edmonton’s Baccarat Casino. As she left the car, Andree made plans to play the VLTs right after GA. But the meeting was a jolt. “I’m expecting everybody to be homeless, pushing shopping carts. That’s the arrogance I had. Then we walk in—and I thought my mom had hired actors. They were regular people… in their 60s, in their 20s, in their 40s. There were card players, VLT players, lottery players, bingo players. GA is one of the smaller fellowships, but there were probably 28 people at a Wednesday night meeting—a good, solid turnout.

“And I just cried for two hours. I just couldn’t believe there were other people like me, I just couldn’t. It was so shocking.”

The AGLC and the Problem Gambling Research Network (PGRN) put Alberta’s rate of problem gambling at 5 per cent. This includes moderate to severe gambling problems and would translate to roughly 160,000 adult Albertans. The PGRN says up to 14 more people are affected directly or indirectly by one problem gambler, through family dysfunction or stress, distraction or theft at work, or health problems, bankruptcy or suicide. And young people are at higher risk. Almost 10 per cent of Albertans aged 12–17, says the PGRN, “gamble frequently and may be at risk of becoming problem gamblers.”

What was once three GA chapters in Alberta in 1990 has become two dozen. At press time 41 local GA meetings were scheduled for the next seven days, in Lethbridge, Calgary, Red Deer, Edmonton, Grande Prairie and Fort McMurray.

At all of Alberta’s casinos are small, lime-green GameSense booths run by the AGLC and stocked with pamphlets: “Frequent breaks keep gaming fun.” “Chasing losses is like herding guinea pigs.” “It’s true, unicorns aren’t real. But the house advantage is.” Signs warn that VLTs cause hand cramps and that slots farther from the aisle don’t pay out more. The booths—islands of earnestness in a sea of stimuli—don’t stand much of a chance. Even the AGLC admits most gamblers are unaware of the program. And until last year any addict seeking these anti-gambling resources had to visit a casino in person.

Some 8,200 Albertans have signed on to GameSense’s self-exclusion program, where addicts can ban themselves from a casino or race track for from six months to three years. This works as long as a casino staff member recognizes the addict from among thousands of daily visitors and ensures that they leave the premises. Addicts can also just use an app, or head to the bar around the corner from their house to play VLTs. And GameSense doesn’t track what happens when bans end.

Andree relapsed in 2007, a week after being asked to raise money for her non-profit employer by working a casino. That first night, she says, “I spent, like, two grand; I was at the casino until two in the morning. And I remember driving home, 40 minutes, going, ‘You’ve just thrown four years of sobriety right down the toilet.’ But according to my addict brain, ‘I’ll go back tomorrow. I’ll make that money back. And then I’ll stop.’ ”

She and her husband had recently sold their home. The money went into VLTs. For three months her addiction raged—nights of release, days of pain and lies. Finally her husband saw their bank statement. He was horrified. But, says Andree, he was also supportive. “Completely, like amazing, incredible. He has addicts in his family. He understands it’s an illness, a disease, that it’s not about willpower and self-control.”

She went back to GA, this time with her husband. At that meeting Andree told him it would be different; she knew now where to get help. Privately, she knew she wasn’t done. Not truly. A week later she began gambling again. She’d leave for a meeting and end up at a VLT. But “because he had control of the money now, I really had to get creative. So that’s when my wedding rings went to the pawnshop.

“I was so ashamed. I kept thinking ‘I’ll win it back, I’ll win it back, and all will be forgiven. I’ll get the rings back, I’ll get the money back. It’ll all be fine. It’ll all be fine.’ ”

On November 15, 2007, Andree sneaked away and gambled again. “And that night, I attempted suicide—because I would have done anything for my brain to stop being a slot machine. Honestly, that’s what my head had become. Just one non-stop racing thought.”

“I didn’t know any other way to ask for help. My husband found me—and as devastating as the money and finances were, that was 1,000 times worse.” Andree spent five weeks in the psychiatric ward. She did therapy. She stills attends GA today. And she and her husband “didn’t do months of marriage counselling; we did years. There’s no doubt—he’s a saint.”

Andree calls herself a gambler in recovery. Every year, she speaks to thousands of students on behalf of the PGRN, warning them about the easy slide into addiction. Her marriage survives. But back in 2007 “my inner voice or self-loathing or shame just did not allow me to come to him,” Andree says. Her husband, she believes, has never gotten over that.

Casinos manipulate their customers using everything from a lack of clocks and natural light to labyrinthine layouts, plush carpets and endless reward-linked stimuli (even fragrances). It all evokes something like a retreat to the womb, where nothing matters and every need is gratified. VLT manufacturers tweak their machines to be ever more addicting. More bells. More whistles. More tricks to keep your eyes glued to the screen. Everyone is trying to stay ahead of offshore gambling—the casino that can be carried in your pocket. That industry could soon be worth US$217-billion.

Concerns about casinos and VLTs seem quaint compared to phone-embedded temptations. “You can access online gambling 24/7,” says David Hodgins, a University of Calgary psychology professor. “[And] you don’t necessarily have the social effects of being with friends or other people that might limit how much someone gambles.” The AGLC is now taking bids from companies wishing to enter the province’s currently monopolized legal online gambling market. The competition could kill Play Alberta but generate a bigger government take overall. Interested vendors include huge players—BetMGM, Caesars Sportsbook, DraftKings. None of these make even GameSense’s dubious efforts to deter addicts.

Casinos are a subset of culture. Andree remembers how in the 1980s Wayne Gretzky appeared between Saturday morning cartoons, selling Pro-Stars cereal. Today “the Great One”—and Connor McGregor and other role models—appear in endless ads glamourizing gambling. (Gretzky, opening his favourite gambling app: “With every tap, a new legend is born!”) Casinos now take bets on everything from Donald Trump’s re-election prospects to the papal succession. Andree has to warn students about video game “loot boxes”—North Americans already spend $4.5-billion annually on virtual, in-game gambling.

Nothing about gambling is inevitable. Rules and permissibility vary across the world: BC keeps VLTs out of bars; Alaska bans casinos; Hawaii has no state lottery; Singapore’s “casino entry levies” (US$110/day) deter low-income gamblers. Quebec has tried (but so far failed) to make internet providers block offshore gambling sites. But in Alberta gambling is without shame. Essential hospital services are funded by gambling (the Children’s Hospital Lottery: “Buy tickets, create joy!”). Rural air ambulances depend on the STARS lottery. The Kenney government, during COVID, dangled a $1-million lottery in front of the unvaccinated.

Research by the University of Lethbridge’s Robert Williams shows that no province, on average, gets a larger proportion of its budget from gambling than Alberta. When oil collapses, we can collect more from gambling than from royalties. The think tank Cardus argues that as most of this revenue comes from VLTs, which are “designed to override players’ conscious, rational control,” gambling in Alberta is “a regressive tax on the poor and those struggling with addiction.” The institute wants gambling profits “moved out of general revenues and into a separate fund—preferably one aimed at poverty relief.”

But Garry J. Smith says our elected leaders won’t talk about any of this, because they “don’t want to be seen as trying to defend the indefensible.” They know they’re profiting from gambling. “It’s like being married,” Smith remembers a colleague telling him, “but you’re so ashamed of your spouse that you keep him/her locked in the basement. You don’t want to be seen in public with them…You’re trying to distance yourself from the stigma. Same with state-sponsored gambling.”

On the back wall of the Elbow River Casino cage was a sign that put a rosy spin on things. “Charitable Casino” it said in big, red letters; “Building success through our volunteers.” In a document sent to us before our shift, however, the casino said volunteers might instead feel lucky. “Although this is a fundraiser of considerable magnitude,” it read, “everyone working within the facility [is] here to assist you.” In return for eight hours of unpaid labour from each of nine adults, the casino would “generously” provide unlimited cans of Coke and two plates of Chinese food. (I had dumplings and sweet and sour pork.)

A decade ago, culture minister Lindsay Blackett did acknowledge one cost of Alberta’s charity-casino model. “[My] concern is 980,000 man-hours are used by organizations to staff those casinos,” he said in the legislature. “[Those] 980,000 hours could be utilized in their community or in their own not-for-profit.” But his government changed nothing. The Elbow River can count on volunteers continuing to show up. More charities apply to work casinos than Alberta’s casinos can accommodate. And these thousands of groups include more than schools, arts or sports groups; they are women’s shelters, immigrant advocates, societies for the brain-injured, seniors groups, housing providers for the chronically ill, violence prevention societies, food banks, community leagues, veterans groups, HIV researchers, daycares, mental health associations, public library foundations and addictions treatment centres.

Gambling briefly subsided in Alberta during the pandemic. Casinos were closed by public health order. Some might call this a silver lining of a plague that has so far killed over 5,800 Albertans. But with gambling down, public revenues shrank and the AGLC was disappointed to miss its goals. It resolved to create “opportunities for private sector job creation and business growth,” i.e., in gambling, to “maximize charitable gaming proceeds.”

Edmonton’s Grand Villa Casino—60,000 ft² of “world-class entertainment” attached to Rogers Place—was among those shut down. But while others closed only as long as they had to, Grand Villa’s owners opted for a longer break. Charities deprived of their pre-scheduled fundraiser at the casino were upset. The Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues said the closure was “causing a lot of instability and insecurity for organizations that really rely on this funding.” The AGLC asked Grand Villa to reopen, then, after it didn’t, pulled 57 VLTs as punishment. In 2022 the AGLC ordered the casino to reopen, and to expand to seven days a week, given casinos have a “responsibility to operate as much as possible.” Including during a pandemic. An AGLC review later reversed the order.

Without casino proceeds, public schools like my daughter’s would make do with less, or increase demands on parents. (Calgary Catholic schools, inspired by former Bishop Henry, reject casino/bingo fundraisers but hold bottle drives and golf tournaments and pressure parents to buy from schools everything from bacon to bedding plants.) Without casino proceeds, civil society in Alberta would be unrecognizable. The alternative in both cases would be to fully fund services from general revenues—which still include gambling proceeds. One estimate is that if we abolished VLTs, Albertans would pay $600 more in taxes every year. We could chance the funding of schools, hospitals and social services to wealthy individuals. Or, as a society, we could just collectively accept less. No field trips, fewer books, netless basketball hoops, longer surgery waits and ambulance waits, overcrowded women’s shelters…

Neither the NDP’s nor the UCP’s platform in 2023 proposed any such changes. Neither used the word “gambling” at all.

Our government is addicted. But as long as citizens keep electing leaders that are happy to fund society on the backs of gamblers, and as long as Albertans like me keep showing up to volunteer, the same might be said for all of us. That we are all addicts.

During my Elbow River Casino shift, neither I nor my fellow volunteers said anything about our own conflict of interest—if indeed anyone else felt one. We talked about the strangeness of someone wanting to play a VLT right after breakfast. How some customers didn’t exactly look like they could afford to be gambling. For how long that couple had sat at Pirate Ship, plugging money into what seemed like a numbing slog, and for how much longer they would play.

Evan Osenton is the editor of Alberta Views. We welcome feedback on Alberta Views articles to letters@albertaviews.ca

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The post Who Wants Albertans to Gamble More? appeared first on Alberta Views.

In the morning people will shovel their sidewalks. If they’re generous, they’ll shovel their neighbour’s walkway too. Then they’ll head off to work and to school and to all the acceptable things good citizens are apt to do. But for now, the town sleeps. Except me. Instead, I’m out in the cold and in the dark.

I could turn back; could turn my back to the wind and head home, keeping my promise to Grah. But I don’t. I can’t escape my worries at home, awake and restless while everyone sleeps. No, that doesn’t work. My hand curls into a fist around the strap of my purse, and I keep slogging through the untouched snow.

I leave Main Street behind and make my way to the highway. Before long, obnoxious commercial light filters through the wispy brush. It illuminates my way toward the twenty-four-hour trifecta that sits on the outskirts of every small town in the province—gas station, licensed diner, convenience store—and it draws me in like a beacon for the lost and desperate.

It’s not long before I’m pulling the iced-up glass door open, heat escaping into the night. I slide into the building and force the door closed behind me faster than the automatic hinge wants to go. The warmth makes my face and fingertips tingle after the crisp temperatures outside.

A young woman sits behind the gas station counter, a shelf of chocolate bars and gum separating us. She looks up from her phone, and I point toward the diner. She nods and returns to whatever she’s scrolling through.

The diner is the kind of establishment that sells both breakfast and dinner all day and all night. As soon as I walk in, the night server spots me and walks over.

“Menu?” he asks by way of greeting.

I decline and motion with one cold hand toward the back wall. It’s why I’m here. It’s what pulled me out of bed and through the quiet snow.

He nods and turns back toward the kitchen.

“Maybe a coffee,” I decide at the last moment.

He glances back over his shoulder and gives me a nod.

I make my way to the back wall and turn into the little alcove. No one’s back here, so I sit down on the middle stool, the lucky one, and rub my hands together to get the blood flowing. Blow into my cupped hands and rub again. The server brings my coffee and I add two sugars. Stir.

Okay. I’m ready.

I stand for a second, lightly stomping my feet to get the blood flowing through my cold extremities, then take my wallet out of my purse and pull out my cash. I don’t have a credit card; had to give that up as part of my deal with Grah.

I rub the small stack of bills between my fingers and thumb. I’ll have to be careful.

I feed the first twenty into the machine.

The red and orange light on top of the lottery terminal lights up. I play three lines—three magical chances to win. I press the red spin button. Press it again and again. And again. It soothes me. Numbs all my worries in a way nothing else can. The lights. The spinning images. The slow settle.

It’s weird how this machine sucks me in. I’ve never been able to explain it. Not to myself. Not to anyone else when I’ve needed to justify it, but I know how it works. As soon as I get low on credit the machine throws a small win. Somehow, I know this is to give me hope even if none exists.

It works. Every time. I slide in another bill.

Tonight the money goes fast.

I switch machines. Slide my last tenner and a five in.

The server leans into the alcove. “It’s almost 3:00 a.m.” I nod. I don’t have long.

Before I know it, I have a single five left and I’m out of time anyway. I pay for my coffee, pull my toque back on my head and begin the walk home.

Pressing the spin button again and again is easy. It’s the long walk home, the return, that gnaws at my conscience. I stop walking when I get back to our street, place my hands on my knees and take a deep, shattering breath before I can continue. In a few hours I’ve got a new start. I won’t slip again. I promised Grah. Promised myself.

I sneak back into the house as quietly as I can. Finally, I sleep.

I hit the spin button. The reels whirl and settle. I press it again and again and again.

I’m in the kitchen making coffee when Dylan wakes, runs in, and wraps his little arms around me. He grins, his eager young eyes filled with excitement. “It’s today, right, Mom?”

“Sure is! I’ll get office-fancy after you’re off to school.” I pour cereal into his bowl and add a big splash of milk the way he likes. The milk flows into the cereal weave, into every nook and cranny the same way love flows through my heart for this boy. “What do you think, Dylan; pink flower blouse or the purple one with the neck scarf Which screams dental receptionist to you?”

His eyes scrunch up as he considers. He picks up his spoon and digs into the bowl, putting a large spoonful in his mouth and crunching. I put the milk away, thinking about the dilemma myself. Whatever I don’t wear today I’ll be wearing tomorrow. The real trouble will be deciding what to wear on day three.

“You know, Mom, I don’t think you should wear either of those your first day.”

“You don’t?” I bite my lip. “My black button up, then It’s getting a bit old.”

“No! Ugh. Not that. Why don’t you wear…” and I turn just as Grah sneaks into the kitchen with his hands behind his back, his grey hair still wet from the shower and already braided into a long, neat rope down his back. Dylan points to his grandfather just as Grah pulls a plastic shopping bag from behind his back. The bag says Peavey Mart, which is Grah’s preferred vendor for almost everything. He hands me the bag, and they both grin like jackals.

“What do we have here?” I’m apprehensive but try not to let it show. I reach into the bag and pull out a women’s suit jacket, navy blue with white piping trim. It’s a classic, a timeless piece of clothing, and unlike anything I own. “This isn’t from Peavey Mart.”

“Got ya, didn’t we?” Grah and Dylan laugh with glee, little bits of cereal flecking from Dylan’s mouth in his exuberance.

“You two! What am I going to do with you?” They’re both proud, chests puffed up, and grins ear to ear and I push down the nagging worry that is never far away. What if I fuck it up?

“I hope you didn’t spend a lot.”

“Worth every penny, my dear.” Grah puts his arm around me. I’ve lucked out in the stepfather department. That’s something I’ve always known.

“Worth gramps’s old snowblower, at least!”

“What?” My heart drops. “You did not! We might need that again. What if your back goes out?”

“Pshh.” Grah flaps a hand in the air, giving Dylan a look. “Am strong as an ox, I am. Anyway, that’s why a man has grandsons. I’ll be leaving it to this one, next time the ole back goes. Isna that right?” He musses the kid’s hair and Dylan howls.

“Gramps!”

I take it all in. This family wrapped around me, and I’m thankful for nothing else as much as I’m thankful for this family. I put my worries aside. There’s no way I’m letting them down. Last night was just a last time blip.

“Okay, boys, time for one of you to hurry up and finish getting ready for school. And you,” I point at Grah as Dylan leaves the kitchen to fix his hair. “Troublemaker.” I clear my throat, grab the old man by the shoulder and pull him toward me. “Thank you. It means a lot.”

Grah pats me on the back. “I’ve got a good feeling about this one. Janet tells me it’s a nice office.” Again, a niggle of fear tightens my throat. I wish I’d found a job myself and not had Grah call in a favour from a friend.

Grah clears his throat. “Where were you last night?” His voice is low, so low his words won’t carry down the hall.

I force a slow, cool-as-a-cucumber smile. “Went for a walk around town. Couldn’t sleep.” The lie tumbles out with ease. Old habit. I’ve had lots of practice. I turn toward the pile of dishes in the sink and put the plug in the drain before turning the tap on. I’m squirting a generous amount of dish soap onto the breakfast dishes as Grah studies me.

He’s waiting for more. I don’t give it to him.

Eventually he sighs. “Charlotte.”

“Graaaham,” I say in the same long, drawn-out tone. I know what I promised, but it still kind of grates. Grah never remembers how my wins have helped us out. He only remembers the losses. I glance over my shoulder and give him a cocky grin to show him everything is just fine. It was just one time. The last time. It doesn’t have to mean anything. “I learned my lesson, haven’t I A little faith, old man.”

He shifts his weight and leans against the countertop, trying to decide whether to believe me. Wanting to believe me, no doubt. I want to believe me too and I do. It’s a new day. I’ve got a job. A respectable job, and things will be different.

“If you’re going to stand there, grab a dish towel.”

Grah’s shoulders drop and he chuckles, hearing his oft repeated words come back at him. He snags the towel hanging from the oven handle and sets to drying dishes.

I plaster a wooden smile on my face as the last patient of the day gives her purse zipper a disgruntled yank and leaves the office. It’s been two weeks since I started, and I’ve come to loathe nothing more in life than filling out dental insurance claims. The worst is when the patient stares like a hawk from across the desk. It’s like I’m a performing animal on display. At least Janet has been supportive, swooping in to help me out. Until now.

“Jeez, that lady.” I take a deep breath, trying to calm my nerves. “You’d think I was messing up her insurance on purpose.”

Janet folds her arms across her chest and grimaces. “That patient is a customer here, Charlotte. She’s paying our wages, right She deserves to have her invoice accurate.”

My cheeks flush. Janet created a cheat-sheet for me, so I’d know exactly what to do for each insurance company, but for some reason I still make errors. Every day. But I’m trying. That should count for something. Besides, these customers are snarky as hell, even to Janet sometimes. I try to lighten the mood. “Well… it’s her insurance company that is paying our wages. Not her.”

Janet doesn’t smile. She doesn’t even acknowledge I’m right. Her lips thin out, and she puts a hand to her forehead before speaking again. “You’re lovely, Charlotte. You really are. I’ve enjoyed getting to know you, but we need someone with a bit more experience with the paperwork side of things.”

My stomach plummets. I should be grateful the lobby is empty, but all I can think is she’s been waiting all day for this moment to give me the news. Anger builds in my chest. “If that’s what you needed, experience, then you should have been looking for it in the first place, don’t you think You’ve kind of wasted my time here. Time I could have spent looking for other work.”

Janet fidgets with the pencil in her hand and won’t make eye contact with me. “Grah and I, we go back. I wanted this to work, Charlotte, I really did. It’s just, I’m sorry. It’s not a fit.”

I switch tactics. Desperation driving me forward. “I can make it fit. I just need a bit more time to learn.”

It’s too late, though. The decision has already been made.

I have options. I could walk straight to the employment counsellor’s office and demand to see someone. I could go straight to that church on the corner and ask for a food hamper for next week. We’re going to need it soon anyway. Gawd, I do not want to do that. I could walk down Main and see if there are any help-wanted signs, but I already know that is a long shot in a town this size.

Instead, I take the path that snakes around the lake. The sun glints off the ice and I can see the first shoots of spring pushing through where the snow is thin.

The path is meant for tourists, not for us townfolk. It triples the distance needed to get anywhere useful, with its weaving in and out of the forest. I take it not because it’s the more scenic route but because I can avoid the eyes of busy neighbours doing the things good citizens do.

It’s not long before I’ve circled back to the highway. Pickups loaded with skis and semis hauling stacks of virgin pine hurtle by on their way to better places. At one point a trucker flashes their lights behind me and I hear a diesel engine slowing. Without turning to look, I wave them on. I’m not looking for a ride.

A wet snow begins to fall, and the gravel tarmac of the shoulder gets slick under my office shoes. I keep my hands clenched in my pockets and my face pressed into the collar of my coat. My new navy suit jacket is tight across my shoulders. It cuts into the soft flesh of my armpits where it’s compressed by my winter coat and my misery.

My phone vibrates in my coat pocket. On. Off. On. Off. Probably Dylan or Grah. I was expected home an hour ago, but what does it matter now I can’t answer it. What would I say?

I pull my hood over my head, although my hair is already wet and ropy from the spring snow. The wind blows it off within seconds. Soon it won’t matter because I can see the lights of the truck stop ahead.

One foot in front of the other until at last I’m at the trifecta gas station, convenience store, diner. My fingers itch for that red button. For the bid. Spin. Numb. I pull the door open, stomp my feet twice on the mat, then walk right past the Let Us Seat You sign. No one I recognize is sitting in the booths, only truckers in baseball caps looking at their phones over bowls of chili and mile-high burgers.

I pass them all. Walk to the back and turn into the alcove behind the half wall. I haven’t been here in two weeks, but my favourite stool is waiting for me.

The waiter walks up with a menu, but I wave it off. “Just a coffee, please.”

He nods, sticks the menu under his arm and returns with the glass carafe and a white ceramic cup. He pours, a stream of hot, black coffee fills the cup, and he sets it down next to a little bowl of creamers and sugar, then walks away. There. I’m just about ready. I add two sugars and stir.

My fingers are pins and needles from the cold, and I fumble trying to pull my wallet out. It’s the grocery money. Four twenties. I take one out. Then another and another and slide them into the machine.

The VLT lights up.

I hit the spin button. The reels whirl and settle. I press it again and again and again. The repetition numbs everything else. I don’t count the wins. Nor the losses. I just hit the play button and watch the computerized reels spin.

A few times I’m on my final spin, but each time the computer gives me a win and keeps me ensnared. I should feel annoyed at this mindless game playing with me, keeping me trapped in front of it, hoping for a miracle. But I don’t. I don’t feel anything.

The reels settle on cherries, bar, cherries. Five bucks left in the kitty. I cash out, give the slip to the waiter in lieu of a tip and head back into the cold. It’s a relief my phone doesn’t ring again.

Joy Norstrom lives in Treaty 7 territory. Her novels include Frying the Nest.

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The post Cherries Bar Cherries appeared first on Alberta Views.

According to Public Health Canada, 24,626 Canadians died of opioid poisoning between January 2016 and June 2021. Alberta has borne a disproportionately large share of the damage, with the second-highest death rate of the provinces. Fully 90 per cent of the deaths over the first three months of 2021 were in Ontario, BC or Alberta.

The main driver of deaths, according to the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, is not that more people are getting addicted but that the drug supply has become increasingly toxic. “We need to get over the fact that people use substances,” the CDPC has stated, “and we need to put a very comprehensive consumer protection framework in place so that people won’t die from using these substances.” Thomson similarly advocates for a “massive expansion of harm-reduction services,” including more supervised consumption sites.

But Alberta’s government has taken a different approach.

“Helping addicts inject poison into their bodies” is Jason Kenney’s take on harm reduction.

In March 2018, when UCP leader Jason Kenney was campaigning in Lethbridge, he offered a preview of how he would approach the issue. “Helping addicts inject poison into their bodies is not a solution to the problem of addiction,” he told a Lethbridge Herald reporter. “Injecting poison” was Kenney’s take on harm reduction, a model that’s been proven to minimize the negative impacts of drug use and offers help to people, without judgment, coercion or preconditions such as sobriety. He argued instead for “interdiction and law enforcement” targeting people who sell illicit drugs.

Once he became premier, Kenney was true to his word. He immediately ordered an audit of Lethbridge’s ARCHES, a non-profit that operated North America’s most frequently used supervised consumption site (SCS). Since opening in 2018, ARCHES had a 100 per cent success rate at reversing overdoses, while also providing other emergency healthcare, education on drug harms and referrals to social services such as counselling. The audit’s finding in July 2020 that $1.6-million in funds weren’t accounted for gave Kenney a pretext to cut off funding for ARCHES.

Five months later, a criminal investigation by Lethbridge Police Service found that these funds were in fact accounted for, but the damage was done.

ARCHES wasn’t the only service to fall prey to Kenney’s disdain for harm reduction. The UCP government appointed an SCS review committee with a mandate to look solely at the socioeconomic impacts of sites on surrounding communities and not the merits of harm reduction services themselves. The committee’s March 2020 report unsurprisingly found the impacts of SCSs to be “predominantly negative,” citing complaints of needle debris, crime and “overall social disorder” around the sites. (Kenney himself has called SCSs “NDP drug sites”—despite their excellent track record at reducing mortality in Canada and across the world.)

The government announced in May 2021 that it would close Safeworks, Calgary’s lone supervised consumption site. Justin Marshall, a spokesperson for the associate ministry of mental health and addictions, called the site, at the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre, “highly disruptive to the neighbourhood.” He said the service would be moved to two other parts of the city and operated by “existing partner organizations,” but didn’t specify their locations or who would run them.

After the government closed ARCHES, it allowed AHS to open a mobile SCS in Lethbridge. Today this nondescript white trailer has three booths, compared to 13 at ARCHES; it operates 20 hours a day, compared to ARCHES’ 24 hours. A coalition of Lethbridge doctors called the mobile site “not adequate by any means,” noting that people who use drugs are being expected to wait five to six hours to use the trailer.

The government also shut down the Boyle Street SCS in Edmonton at the end of April 2021, redirecting those services to George Spady Centre across the street, which was supposed to operate in conjunction with the SCS, causing confusion. It pledged to open a new SCS in Edmonton’s Strathcona neighbourhood, but gave no timeline. “It’ll take a lot of time to set up services there,” a Moms Stop the Harm director told Global News. “[But] the need is right now.”

AHS runs a small mobile supervised consumption site in Lethbridge. Photograph courtesy of Alberta Health Services.

Lethbridge’s ARCHES ran North America’s busiest SCS. Staff reversed overdoses, educated on drug harms and gave referrals to counselling. The UCP government shut down ARCHES in 2020. Photograph by Jaime Vedres (2018).

The Kenney government’s disdain for supervised consumption stands in stark contrast to its eagerness to fund privately operated recovery clinics that promote an abstinence-only approach to addiction. Kenney and former associate minister of mental health and addictions Jason Luan like to call this “the Alberta Model”—a more compassionate face for the UCP’s approach to addictions than its campaign-trail tough-on-crime rhetoric.

A key architect of the UCP government’s shift toward abstinence and away from harm reduction is Marshall Smith, chief of staff to the associate minister of mental health and addictions. Smith described his approach in a 2015 interview with Talk Recovery Radio. “When we talk about reducing the shame and stigma, we’re talking about the shame and stigma of recovery,” he said, “I think a certain shroud of stigma needs to remain around addiction.”

His background story presents a compelling redemption narrative. A rising star in the Gordon Campbell-era BC Liberal party, Smith worked in that province’s Attorney General’s office and was a heavy drinker. He was eventually arrested twice for selling cocaine and meth in 2004, leading to an abrupt interruption of his political ambitions. For the next couple of years, Smith was homeless in Vancouver, selling drugs to pay for his habit while being chased by police.

He got sober in 2007 and became a guru for the private recovery industry. His first recovery gig was at Baldy Hughes Therapeutic Community and Farm. Smith’s political interests, however, appear to have never left him. In 2011, according to reporting from Glacier Media, Smith had Baldy Hughes patients phone-bank for Kevin Falcon, a candidate for BC Liberal leadership, pressuring them to call party members to solicit support for Falcon. Confidential sources told Glacier that patients had no choice, since many of them were court-ordered to attend Baldy Hughes, and that Smith goaded reluctant patients into participating.

“It was a very political environment,” one source said. Smith, for his part, says any phone-banking his patients did was entirely voluntary and independent of his guidance.

In 2015 Baldy Hughes received $1-million from the BC government to open 20 new beds, 13 of which had been filled by the time of the announcement. Smith had already moved on by then to another private recovery centre in BC, Cedars at Cobble Hill, where he became director in 2013, a role he stayed in until he was made chief of staff to Alberta’s associate ministry in May 2019. Smith remained in the role in July 2021, when Luan was shuffled out of the mental health and addictions portfolio and UCP MLA and former Calgary police officer Mike Ellis became associate minister.

In November 2019 the UCP convened a 23-person mental health and addictions advisory panel, naming as its co-chairs Mustard Seed Ministry founder Pat Nixon—a reformed drug addict himself, and the father of UCP MLAs Jeremy and Jason—and Canadian Mental Health Association Calgary executive director Laureen MacNeil. Other members included Calgary Police Service inspector Rob Davidson, Edmonton Police Service chief Dale McFee, two bankers (ATB Financial CEO Curtis Strange and Edgemark Capital founder Bruce Edgelow) and acupuncturist Dr. Benny Xu.

Particularly noteworthy were the appointments of three people from the upper echelons of the private abstinence-only recovery industry: Fresh Start Recovery Centre executive director Stacey Petersen, Poundmaker’s Lodge Treatment Centres executive director Brad Cardinal and Simon House founding director Andy Crooks, who was previously director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation while Kenney served as that organization’s CEO.

Two of these three recovery centres have since been the beneficiaries of government money. In December 2019 Kenney announced $1.4-million for Poundmaker’s Iskwew Healing Lodge, built just north of Edmonton on the site of a former residential school, to fund 28 new beds and seven existing beds. “This government needs to be acknowledged for its commitment to UNDRIP, TRC recommendations, MMIWG recommendations and its concerted effort to addressing the opioid crisis,” Cardinal said in a news release, which didn’t identify him as an advisory council member.

On February 1, 2020, the government announced that Fresh Start, which is only for men, would receive up to $1.56-million a year for three years to fund 294 more treatment spaces in Calgary. Petersen called the funding “unprecedented” and a “game changer,” in a press release that, again, didn’t identify him as a member of Kenney’s advisory committee.

At the same time, Calgary’s Sunrise Healing Lodge received up to $518,000 a year over three years to fund 156 treatment spaces, and Lloydminster’s Thorpe Recovery Centre got $2.21-million a year over three years for 1,722 treatment spaces.

In November 2020, associate minister Luan announced the elimination of fees for clients of Alberta’s 72 publicly funded treatment centres. Poundmaker’s, for example, had been charging $300 a day for “Indigenous-led treatment for drug and alcohol addiction.” Luan’s move is costing the public about $8.2-million a year, roughly $5-million of which was diverted from Community and Social Services.

Petersen, who is now the CEO of Cedars at Cobble Hill, has been one of the most enthusiastic evangelists for the UCP’s recovery-centric approach to addictions. “This is a strategy of which we are extremely proud,” Petersen wrote in an October 2020 Edmonton Journal op-ed, which identifies him only as a co-chair of Alberta Addiction Service Providers (AASP), a coalition of 32 private recovery clinics that includes Fresh Start, Thorpe, Sunrise, Poundmaker’s and Simon House. He dismissed critics of the recovery-centric strategy as divisive and lamented their spreading “hatred.”

In July 2021 the government announced the construction of a 50-bed recovery centre—one of the five new “therapeutic communities” promised a year earlier to the tune of $25-million—on public land adjacent to Fresh Start’s Lethbridge branch. It also provided $300,000 for 11 publicly funded beds at Southern Alcare Manor, another AASP affiliate in Lethbridge. The cost of the 50-bed centre is unknown, because the build is going through a “competitive tendering process,” said Mental Health and Addictions spokesperson Eric Engler. Nor is it known who’ll operate the facility, which Engler said will be determined through a “competitive process” closer to the facility’s opening in fall 2022.

The next of the five new recovery centres is a 75-bed facility being built on 10 acres in the industrial zone on the northern outskirts of Red Deer, announced in June 2021. Participants will be expressly prohibited from using drugs while in treatment, including at the local SCS. The ministry told the CBC that an accredited non-profit will be selected through a formal competitive process to operate the facility. “It is not about service utilization; it is about how people’s quality of lives get changed,” Luan said.

Documents obtained by Postmedia show the government plans to “re-evaluate (the) need” for a supervised consumption site in Red Deer once the recovery facility is built.

Supervised consumption has an excellent track record at reducing mortality in Canada and across the world.

Critics of the UCP approach say that the government fundamentally misunderstands the crisis. University of Calgary health sociologist Rebecca Haines-Saah, whose research focuses on addiction, says Kenney and his ministers have established a false binary between harm reduction and treatment that has dire consequences for people who use drugs. “They’ve pitted harm reduction against treatment, as if to say that funds for harm reduction somehow take away from treatment, that the two are in competition, or that people who support or advocate or benefit from harm reduction are opposed to treatment,” says Haines-Saah.

She identifies this line of thinking as the product of a “paternalistic” view that regards harm reduction services as “palliative care for people who use drugs.”

Elaine Hyshka, a professor of public health at the University of Alberta, says the UCP’s approach has been hyper-focused on mental health and addictions as the root cause of Alberta’s current crisis. She characterizes this as a catastrophic error that obscures the true crux of the issue. “It can be really tempting to focus on those areas, because there is a lack of investment in those types of services across the board in Canada,” she said. “[But] the reason we’re seeing so many people dying now is not because there’s been a huge, sudden spike in people who have opioid addiction or who are using drugs; it’s that the drugs have become toxic and poisonous.

“Putting in place services designed to support people who are struggling with addiction is a good thing—but it’s not addressing the fundamental challenge.”

Beyond supporting supervised drug consumption and other harm-reduction measures, such as opioid agonist therapy (in which people are prescribed methadone or buprenorphine), the most effective solution to the current crisis, Hyshka says, is to provide people with a safe supply of “pharmaceutical-grade” drugs—a policy that’s counterintuitive to laypeople but has been endorsed by Health Canada. The thinking: better to provide safe substances to people with a serious illness (and keep them alive until they’re ready to quit) than to wait for them to surely die from toxic street drugs. “The reality is that the vast majority of people who use substances, even if they have a substance use disorder or addiction, aren’t necessarily ready and willing at the moment to access care,” Hyshka said. “That’s not a reason to preclude them from accessing services that could save their lives.” BC, for example, began allowing nurses to prescribe specific drugs, including controlled substances, starting in September 2020, with a public health order from chief medical officer of health Bonnie Henry.

The UCP convened a committee in February 2022 to examine the merits of safe supply, but harm-reduction advocates whom the NDP opposition invited to present to the committee boycotted it, arguing that its conclusions were predetermined.

Hyshka also questions why this government stopped releasing geographic data on where overdoses are occurring in each city after it launched its online substance use surveillance database in December 2020, which would have informed where supervised consumption sites are needed.

Other experts note the absence of data on the recovery side of the equation. No independent analysis is available on the success rate of the various private recovery centres, meaning the government is essentially operating in the dark or trusting private operators’ attestations. In a December 2020 statement to the Progress Report, for example, Thorpe development coordinator Sara Fox said their 42-day recovery program has a 79 per cent completion rate, but said it’s nearly impossible to gauge its success in absolute terms. “For, what is success One day of abstinence One month One year It’s misleading to claim that someone will be ‘cured’ after programming,” Fox wrote. “Continued dedication to one’s wellness is necessary for a prolonged life in recovery.”

It’s also unknown how many publicly funded beds exist province-wide, how often they’re used and what wait-lists are like, as well as the number of deaths that have occurred in those facilities. “These basic metrics could be easily incorporated into the substance-use surveillance dashboard the province already publishes, but for some reason there’s just no appetite to share any information about these operators and the funding that goes to these services,” says Hyshka. “The province is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in these services, but there’s just no accountability in terms of their performance and whether they’re achieving their stated objectives.”

We’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on private rehab, but there’s no accountability.

Meanwhile the UCP has expanded the use of drug treatment courts as an alternative to criminalizing people who use drugs, doubling capacity in Calgary and Edmonton as well as opening courts in Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Red Deer and Grande Prairie. These are explicitly promoted as a means of funnelling people into recovery. In an interview with the Canada’s Premiers podcast about the UCP approach, Matthew Reid, who is in charge of the drug courts’ expansion, pitched them as a means to achieve the goal of strict abstinence. “Participants facing serious jail time for drug-driven offences are provided a chance to avoid a jail sentence by completing this program. They’re held accountable through judicial supervision,frequent and random drug testing, and the use of sanctions and rewards.” [Emphasis mine.]

U of C’s Rebecca Haines-Saah likewise criticizes this government’s fixation on beds and spaces. “This is just a political talking point—500 new beds, 1,000 new beds—and the situation never seems to change,” she said. Haines-Saah believes the UCP approach sends “mixed signals,” likening it to dismantling ICUs at the height of COVID and reopening them elsewhere. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “We need more [supervised consumption] sites now, in addition to what’s there.”

Beyond closing supervised consumption sites and spending big on abstinence-only recovery, the UCP government has allocated $325,000 on developing its Digital Overdose Response System app, which became available in Calgary in September and in Edmonton in October 2021. A drug user enters their location into the app and sets a two-minute timer. If they don’t respond to the timer, STARS air ambulance contacts them and dispatches help if necessary.

“I appreciate any attempts to trial novelty strategies here, and I think there’s a need to care for people and prevent overdose deaths among people who use at home alone, because that’s a huge risk factor for dying… but I don’t think an app alone is going to bring down the death rate significantly,” cautions Hyshka. (Meanwhile, Calgary’s EMS system reported 3,569 red alerts—periods when no ambulances were available—between June 2020 and May 2021; Edmonton reported 626 over the same period.)

New barriers are also being erected around the supervised consumption sites that remain. As of September 30, 2021, Alberta SCSs are required to sign a “good neighbour agreement” with the surrounding community, which includes a dispute resolution process. And as of April 2022, people who use drugs must provide their Alberta healthcare card to access the sites. In an Edmonton Journal op-ed, associate minister Mike Ellis said the restrictions are designed to redirect patients into recovery, arguing that requiring healthcare cards allows people to be more easily integrated into treatment. “Quality standards will ensure that supervised consumption sites are acting how they were intended, as an entry point into the healthcare system,” he wrote. “Clients will be able to expect consumption sites to partner with treatment and recovery programs, ensuring they get the care they need to improve their lives sooner rather than later.”

Edmonton lawyer Avnish Nanda is spearheading a legal challenge to the new SCS regulations, which he says greatly reduce people’s access to the sites. They will also prohibit more-informal interventions, such as Lethbridge’s pop-up overdose prevention tent in Galt Gardens, which is busy these days following the shutdown of ARCHES.

An emergency injunction application launched by Nanda to pause the implementation of ID requirements was rejected in January 2022. Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Paul Belzil agreed that the policy could cause “irreparable harm,” even death, to people who are deterred from using supervised consumption services, but said these harms don’t outweigh the government’s power to set drug policy independently.

Nanda predicts that the UCP’s approach to the addictions crisis will contribute to an even more “catastrophic public health emergency” than the COVID-19 pandemic, because when it comes to saving lives, the best evidence is being ignored—and because overdose deaths only keep rising, with no end in sight.

Jeremy Appel is a Calgary-based podcaster (The Forgotten Corner) and writer. See appelorchard.substack.com.

The post “Just Say No To Drugs” appeared first on Alberta Views.

The scene is at odds with the hotel’s gilded past. Thanks to its proximity to Northlands Coliseum, the 16,839-seat arena just across the road that the Edmonton Oilers used to fill, travelling athletes and celebrities once stayed at the Coliseum Inn, including the Rolling Stones, Deep Purple and the Eagles. When COVID-19 arrived in March, the Inn’s 98 rooms were shut down like all Edmonton hotels. Weeks later the rooms were reopened. The new guests were not rock stars but homeless people.

One of them was Rob Sharkey. Sharkey slept on his brother’s couch for six months until COVID-19 hit. That was when the 40-year-old and his brother realized that their dad, who has a lung disease and who also lived in the house, was at high risk of contracting the virus. Sharkey left. Some nights he slept under brush, others on a mat at an Edmonton gym repurposed into a shelter. Sharkey, a father and ticketed welder who once owned his own company and now has colon cancer and bad credit, would wake and get himself across Edmonton to the city’s day shelter at the Expo Centre, which was feeding people. During those first few weeks of COVID-19, nothing else was open. Finding food, he says, was constant work. It left him with near zero time to solve his actual problem, which was that he was homeless.

Sharkey’s strategy was to build up energy for apartment viewings. “The choice was eat and remain homeless or starve on a ‘maybe’ for an apartment,” he says. Meal lineups at the Expo Centre shelter, where he and more than 500 others gathered daily, took at least 90 minutes. Apartments that fit his $700-a-month budget dictated by the Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped [AISH] he collects were often at the city’s edge. The bus to view them ran on a reduced schedule. If he wanted a clean shirt so he didn’t “smell like bugs” and had a better shot at impressing a landlord, he had to sign up for a laundry machine, take more time, miss more meals. Given that his cancer means he needs a high-calorie diet just to keep weight on, Sharkey says every three days or so he could charge up enough to see an apartment. “That was about the best you could do.”

And yet Sharkey says that while the pandemic put him outside, several weeks later it also created a roof for him. In late April he got a shared room at the Coliseum Inn. Here he was able to clean his clothes, search the internet for apartments, get references from outreach workers and eat regular meals. The hotel is one of several across Canada—including one in Toronto dedicated to women fleeing domestic abuse (a “shadow pandemic” of violence against women has been a side-effect of sheltering in place) and one in BC bought outright by the provincial government—to house people during the pandemic. All of it happened as a response to COVID-19.

Albertans may have expected homelessness to be less of a challenge as the pandemic arrived. The province, after all, had committed to “A Plan for Alberta: Ending Homelessness in 10 Years” back in 2008. Twelve years later, in the seven cities where the push rolled out—Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Red Deer, Grande Prairie and Fort McMurray—the results were wildly impressive. But they are also incomplete. Medicine Hat is now known as a city that “eliminated” homelessness in 2015, but officials there say shelters are still used and demand has grown during the pandemic. In Calgary, of 2,911 people experiencing homelessness in 2018, more than 1,900 were chronically homeless (i.e., had been homeless for a year or longer). Edmonton’s 755 emergency shelter spaces (as of June 2020—the number fluctuates with funding), which should now be only for short-term crises, were often 90 per cent filled on a typical night before the pandemic. A 2019 report found that 1,923 people were chronically homeless in the city, and 486 of them, about half of whom self-identified as Indigenous, chose to camp outside.

Homeward Trust, an agency that leads several other Edmonton organizations in the collective push to end homelessness in their city, has managed to house more than 10,800 people—just a touch less than the population of Canmore—in the 12 years. But the organization has struggled with those who are chronically homeless. Simple housing isn’t the solution for this population, says Susan McGee, the organization’s chief executive officer. “They need home care,” she says. This includes various supports such as treatment for addictions and help with managing the challenges of daily life. Without such support, the chronically homeless end up back on the street and in shelters at night.

Shelters are always a concern but become doubly so during a pandemic. When COVID-19 hit, politicians suddenly saw them as a liability. In Calgary this fear proved warranted when 24 people staying at the Drop-in Centre tested positive for COVID-19. The federal government, in early April, committed $157.5-million in emergency funding to the homeless-serving sector across Canada “to just do whatever we could to house people as fast as possible,” McGee says. Public opinion was firmly behind the idea. Soon after, in late April, Homeward Trust partnered with Boyle Street Community Services to offer bridge housing at the Coliseum Inn. Days later Sharkey moved in. 

Organizations in Edmonton have called for bridge housing for years. Wait times for a homeless person seeking housing in Alberta average more than 40 days, and often stretch beyond 90. People need somewhere safe to be during this period. Homeward Trust had inspected locations for bridge housing and written requests for proposals. Small pilots at Edmonton hotels had been evaluated and greenlighted. But the idea to scale it up always hit a wall.

Until the pandemic.

We may be witnessing a permanent shift. More-liberal elements of society have long called for homelessness to be eliminated on moral grounds. Later, research showed that every $1 spent putting someone in housing in Canada saved the public $2. If we add to these two imperatives the public health benefits of housing the homeless—and our growing realization that shelters are potential threats to all of us—the political will found during the pandemic might just continue.

The story of how Alberta came to be a leader in ending homelessness starts in Calgary in 2007, at the apex of an oil boom. Many people couldn’t afford rents and teetered near homelessness. Tim Richter, who worked at TransAlta at the time but now runs the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, took a role on a committee tasked with ending homelessness in the city, and says he was struck by the promise shown by one of its underlying big ideas—housing first. It was a 180-degree flip from former policy. Previously social agencies required people to be sober and off drugs before they would be provided with housing.

In practice, says Sam Tsemberis, a Canadian who created the Pathways to Housing program in New York that came to be the model for housing first, we were asking too much. “We don’t require average citizens to be clean and sober to sign a lease,” he says. “Imagine how many more homeless Canadians there would be if we required that!”

According to the Canadian Homelessness Research Network, “housing first is not contingent upon readiness, or on ‘compliance’ (for instance, sobriety). Rather, it is a rights-based intervention rooted in the philosophy that all people deserve housing, and that adequate housing is a precondition for recovery.” This, mixed with Calgary’s heightened empathy and community leaders demanding change, created a decisive moment. “The culture in Alberta allowed us to look at this and say, ‘If this is a solvable problem, why don’t we just get on with trying to solve it?’” Richter says.

The new approach was to house people as quickly as possible to save lives and costs. If a person needed to dry out, be treated for mental health challenges or weaned off substances, they could better do so in their own house than on the street or in shelters. Tsemberis came to Calgary in 2007 to plant the seed. By 2008, thanks to Richter and others on the new Calgary Committee to End Homelessness, housing first became provincial policy and spread across the seven Alberta cities.

That same year, the federal government got on board with “At Home/Chez Soi,” the world’s largest-ever trial of housing first, across five Canadian cities. The study found that people in the housing first program stayed in housing 80 per cent of the time, versus less than 40 per cent of the time using traditional approaches. This led Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to change federal policy. The Trudeau government has since introduced a 10-year national housing strategy in 2017 which commits $55-billion and promises the building of 125,000 new homes.

Thanks to this work Alberta is the only Canadian province to have reduced homelessness across the board, Richter says. Richter has since formed the Alliance to share how Alberta succeeded, since so many people were asking. Several communities are following our lead. “We’re seeing Alberta’s fingerprints in the responses we’re seeing around the country,” he says.

The stars are Edmonton, which has reduced overall homelessness by nearly half and has predicted an end to chronic homelessness by 2022, and Medicine Hat, which in 2017 became a worldwide success story featured in The New York Times. The city’s housing-first work since it launched in 2008 has put 1,269 people into an apartment or other housing. “We were known for ending homelessness,” says Jaime Rogers, who leads the Homeless and Housing Development department in the city. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t have people who are still falling into homelessness. What it means is that our system of care is operating effectively to actually get people quickly out of the state of homelessness. That’s housing first.”

During the pandemic, that system has hit many bumps. “The biggest shift is the volume of people we serve that are new to the system,” Rogers says. These people were vulnerable before the pandemic but have tumbled into homelessness during its first months. In addition, a large number of people were released by the corrections system to reduce the chance of viral spread in institutions—without forewarning or planning—and ended up “downstream” in the community’s housing system.

What’s it like to be homeless in a pandemic? To answer this, I’m walking with Doug Cooke, outreach manager with Boyle Street Community Services. It’s mid-April and we’re in Edmonton’s river valley, which during the ongoing lockdown has become a cluster of colourful tarpaulin camps and associated dumps. Cooke says the city has agreed to leave these during the pandemic (though as this story went to press, city bylaw officers and police had cleared some camps and their residents due to public outcry).

Cooke says we are looking for “Frank.” He lives just below the office towers downtown in a forest bisected by a freeway. Hundreds of others live here and in other valley nooks year-round, Cooke says, in areas with special names: Coyote Landing. UFO Camp. Jug-handle. The camps are impressive things. We walk to one where a man has burrowed a sort of bunker house into the soil just 10 feet from a popular bike path. Another has built a house, complete with a front door and windows, on an unused staircase in a park. Neither is home when we stop by.

But Frank is. He’s happy to see us but unhappy with the pandemic. “It’s hard to do anything,” he says, emerging from beneath a blue tarpaulin. Frank is white, in his late 40s or early 50s, skinny. His eyes are reddened. He wears a flannel jacket, brown Carhartt pants and a headlamp. “It’s hard to get meals, to maintain any sort of diet.”

Frank is chronically homeless. Cooke’s team has found housing for him in the past through Homeward Trust, but Frank has ended up back in his camp.

For many in his situation, it’s a common story, Cooke says. Without medical support and help in managing an apartment, people can revert to the “known” of homelessness. Finding accommodation again is difficult. The wait is long. Keeping tabs on people is always a challenge, but the pandemic makes it nearly impossible. Landlords have not been showing apartments. Doctors have not been seeing patients. All these steps slow the ability of a person like Frank to get out of a camp and into a house.

And Frank says he feels better outdoors during the pandemic. Shelters are closed except for the night facility at the Kinsmen Sports Centre or the isolation area at the Expo Centre for those with COVID-19 symptoms. “I pretty much isolate myself from everyone. I don’t want company.”

Today the scuttlebutt in the camps is about one guy with apparent symptoms who’s out in the river valley. “He’s a junkie,” Frank says. “He won’t turn himself in because he doesn’t want to be dope sick [at the isolation shelter, which does not have a supervised consumption site]. Somebody needs to go on TV about it. The cops have been looking for him.”

Last year the United Conservative Party government cut into parts of Alberta’s social safety net. This included shrinking the Rental Assistance Program by 24 per cent and reducing the affordable housing maintenance budget by $53-million. Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi called the latter move “a shocker.” “We are in a position where [when] someone moves on, out of affordable housing, we can’t give their unit to someone else because it doesn’t meet basic life requirements,” he told reporters. “No good can come of this… what a bizarre place to cut your capital budget.”

Many people I spoke to said off the record that they were “troubled” by other parts of UCP government policy, particularly abstinence-based programs around substance use. “How can we possibly go backward?” one person asked. “We just spent years demonstrating that this doesn’t work very well.”

For homelessness, the competing force to this trend is COVID-19. Public health can now be added to cost savings and the moral imperative to end homelessness.

And demand is only expected to grow. “We are going to have a tremendous amount of families that will experience homelessness for the first time,” Rogers says of the next year in Medicine Hat and Alberta in general. “If people have housing right now, we need to maintain them in their housing and then work really hard to get those currently experiencing homelessness out of that state. Housing is key. We need to have adequate housing and rent supplements in place.”

There will be renewed questions of jurisdiction. Housing First has been a collaborative push from community organizations, municipal and provincial governments and Ottawa. But when it comes to spending big money, the situation has often been “the political equivalent of a high-school dance,” Richter says. “Everybody’s stood along the wall looking at their feet, waiting for someone else to make the first move.” What needs to happen post-pandemic, he says, is for the Alberta government to get engaged and support its biggest cities—a woefully missing ingredient at the moment—on accessible housing. (As this story went to press the City of Edmonton committed $600,000 to add 78 bridge-housing units at a former jockey dormitory at Northlands, and $40-million for another 207 units of permanent supportive housing—with Mayor Don Iveson citing the “provincial government’s abdication of leadership.”) Better provincial support could “drag the feds” to invest more, Richter says.

Challenges from often hidden causes are inevitable. Ronald Kneebone, a University of Calgary economist who has studied the effects of public-sector policy on homelessness, says a key driver of chronic homelessness is poverty. This is linked to the paltry support—Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped and other benefits—people receive in Alberta, especially those who are single. “On that level of support [AISH], about $8,000 a year, there’s no frigging way they can maintain their housing in Calgary, and so they end up in shelters,” he says. “It’s very much the canary in the coal mine. If the shelter system is tending to overflow, there’s something wrong with the rest of the system.”

Targeting shelters won’t change this reality, Kneebone says. Targeting poverty will.

But there will also be financial reckonings. Pre-pandemic, Alberta had switched to an austerity footing, with cuts across the public sector and more planned. Some may want to believe circumstances require Kenney to spend more on social goods. But Kneebone and several others are not convinced. “When governments are scrambling to save money, poor people tend to be left out of the equation,” he says.

The most powerful tool to prevent a massive backslide toward a homeless epidemic is framing. Providing the homeless with housing saves money and doing nothing costs money. That’s one frame. To this, add the frame that housing is a form of healthcare.

Says Susan McGee: “We’re just killing ourselves to house individuals, working as hard as possible to keep those numbers up all the time, support people and maintain their housing. The rest of the system isn’t coming into place the way our original efforts envisioned.”

Tim Richter, though, is optimistic. He sees a similar groundswell of public empathy post-COVID-19 that he saw 12 years ago in Calgary. “Albertans are now at home, and we see that housing is health care. We feel the same anxiety and uncertainty around the future. I think there’s an opportunity that Albertans will say ‘We see how close we came.’ ”

Back at the Coliseum Inn, I ask Rob Sharkey if the pandemic could change things for the better. “There’s obviously the need. This place has a bunch of people in it and there’s a lot of people on the street.” Without a hotel, or somewhere to stay to find your feet and actually get into more permanent housing, he says, “you’re not helping stop the spread of anything.”

That’s likely true of homelessness as well as viruses.

Sharkey tells me he now has the energy to view three to four apartments a day, and even has a line on a place for next week. And he sees the irony. “If it wasn’t for the pandemic, the funding wouldn’t be available, so there’s a silver lining in every cloud.”

Tim Querengesser lives in Edmonton. He is finishing his first book and producing a history podcast with Canadian Geographic. 

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 Suddenly There’s Room at the Inn appeared first on Alberta Views.

When her name is called and the door to Lethbridge’s supervised drug consumption site buzzes open, Taylor moves quickly on her crutches. She settles into a chair at the second booth from the end and rests her pink sequined backpack on the stainless steel counter. The petite 21-year-old works swiftly, loading a speedball—a combination of meth and fentanyl—into a syringe.

This freshly wiped, well-lit booth belongs to her for the next 45 minutes. Taylor, who didn’t want to give her last name, doesn’t have to rush to avoid the notice of police or the public. No one here shouts racial slurs or points out that she’d be freed from her crutches if she’d stay clean long enough to undergo hip surgery. She needs the operation to fix injuries from a car accident last year, but the risk of infection is high given her IV drug use and lack of steady housing.

Two nurses watch from a desk a few feet away, overseeing the six injection booths. They monitor that Taylor follows injection practices that are as safe as possible. Everyone who works here points out that drugs are not safe—this is not a safe consumption site. People here still struggle from the effects of drugs; they still overdose. Taylor has, more than once. These nurses saved her life, along with nearly 140 others in the last three months.

Taylor is a near-daily visitor at Lethbridge’s supervised consumption site, run by the AIDS Outreach Community Harm Reduction Education & Support Society (ARCHES), a non-profit. In 2017, backed by a coalition that included Lethbridge police and EMS and Alberta Health Services, ARCHES applied to Health Canada to open a supervised consumption site to help the local population who use substances—many of whom were already ARCHES clients.

This site is one of seven in Alberta approved by Health Canada for drug consumption since the first was approved in late 2017. Two more mobile units are currently under review for Grande Prairie and Calgary.

These places are controversial, though not among people who study drug use and public health. The 1980s approach of “Just Say No” failed spectacularly—and with drugs far less potent than what’s available today. Instead, health officials, including the World Health Organization, say harm reduction strategies such as consumption sites and needle distribution programs are necessary to help people who use drugs and to protect the wider public.

Supervised consumption sites appeared in Europe starting in 1986 to mitigate the public health risks associated with heroin use. Consumption sites can reduce the number of deaths from overdoses, decrease the transmission of diseases and infections, and cut back on the social nuisance related to public drug use. Many clients of these sites distrust conventional health services but feel comfortable here. So these places can be an access point to counsellors, detox programs, healthcare providers, even housing.

Taylor isn’t thinking about straightening out today. Maybe one day, she says. Today is about feeling better under the watchful gaze of people who care. “We take care of each other here. We have people here we actually trust,” she says. “We don’t have that with a lot of people, considering how we’re treated out there.”

These places are controversial—though not among people who study drug use and public health. The 1980s approach of “Just Say No” failed spectacularly.

Across the province, cities and towns are feeling the effects of an opioid crisis spun out of control. In 2017, 579 people in Alberta died from fentanyl overdoses—up from 116 in 2014. The opioid epidemic has strained law enforcement and EMS, tied up emergency departments and hospital beds, contributed to needle debris and petty crime, and threatened to drive up rates of HIV and hepatitis C.

In Lethbridge, a mid-sized city known for its terrific winds and a main drag called Whoop-Up Drive, the crisis has struck with particular potency. The death rate here from fentanyl overdoses reached 19 per 100,000 people. Unlike Alberta’s largest cities, Lethbridge lacks a health and social infrastructure to help people who use drugs. There’s no medical detox, unlike in the smaller city of Medicine Hat, which has 24 beds for medical detox (eight are slated to open in Lethbridge this fall—one-third of what the City estimates it needs). Lethbridge has no intox centre, and its only treatment program requires drug abstinence. The city lacks a pain clinic and a specialist to treat HIV. It’s home to three shelters but no permanent supportive housing.

When fentanyl landed on the streets of Lethbridge, it hit full force. The shift happened almost overnight in 2015, says Stacey Bourque, an addiction specialist and executive director of ARCHES. One morning, ARCHES’s outreach team went around the city to empty boxes of discarded needles. “One box was so full, they had to jump back because needles were pouring out onto the street. They came back and reported something had obviously happened. This was nothing we’d seen before.”

For Lethbridge’s police department, 2015 brought major changes. Just a year earlier, they’d set out a four-year plan for budget priorities—without mention of fentanyl or opioids. Inspector Tom Ascroft says illegal drugs were so rare in this city that he remembers the first time a uniformed officer found cocaine. But in 2015, officers started noticing needles on the streets. They saw people dying from overdoses. Three people in the local jail died of overdoses in one year. For the first time, the department started giving commendations to officers for saving lives from drug overdoses. And petty crime rates rose as people started breaking into cars and homes. “This came on us so fast,” says Ascroft. “I don’t think people understand. It completely overwhelmed us.”

Ascroft estimates about 3,000 people use illegal drugs in Lethbridge. Of these, about 700 use on the streets. As the problem grew worse, the downtown library hired security to deal with the rash of on-site drug use. Visitors are warned to be careful walking alone through Galt Gardens, a well-treed park at the north end of downtown. Historically the city’s gathering place for community events, it’s now a hotspot for the street population. Mayor Chris Spearman remembers the embarrassment of leading a contingent of visiting officials from their sister city in Quebec through the park last summer and seeing people injecting. Just north of downtown, where the CP Rail tracks run under an overpass less than 50 metres from the local shelter, enough discarded needles piled up that Fire and Emergency Services regularly filled five-gallon buckets.

In 2016 one person died every day in Alberta from an overdose related to fentanyl. In 2017 overdose deaths were occurring at a rate of 1.6 per day across the province. The total 2018 figures are not yet available, but 355 Albertans died in the first half of the year, a rate of two per day. And here’s one telling stat from a single weekend in 2018 in Lethbridge: Just a few days before the consumption site opened on February 28, 42 people overdosed from fentanyl.

In Lethbridge the Indigenous population is the public face of the opioid crisis. This is common across the province: Indigenous Albertans died of opioid overdoses three times more often than non-First Nations people in a recent 15-month period. They’re also more likely to have been prescribed those drugs by a doctor. So goes Taylor’s story: She started taking Percocet at age 16 after tearing the ligaments in her knee during a barrel-racing accident. She doesn’t know why she got addicted to the sick sensation of Percocet but she has used the drug heavily since then.

She grew up in Stand Off on the Blood Reserve, which borders Lethbridge. Twice the Blood Reserve has declared a state of emergency due to opioids; dealers target the population, a case of history repeating itself—Stand Off got its name from a group of American whisky traders in the 1800s who were targeting the local population.

Taylor and her family were eventually evicted from the reserve for selling drugs. She moved to Lethbridge, where she started injecting fentanyl, meth and heroin. “It’s hard because it’s my whole family,” says Taylor, who often comes to the consumption site with her brother. “My little brother is just 19. I’m 21. I have a lot of life left. Last year around this time, I still had a home. Everything was really different.”

About 5,290 Indigenous people live in Lethbridge, somewhere around 5 per cent of the population. But they disproportionately account for the city’s poor and street-involved. In 2011, 24.5 per cent of the urban Aboriginal population in Lethbridge lived below the Low-Income Measure. The people most often seen using drugs in public spaces are Indigenous—they account for nearly three-quarters of clients at the supervised consumption site. They bear the brunt of anger from other residents about Lethbridge’s drug debris. “I’m not going to lie: Not a lot of people here in Lethbridge like natives. They don’t,” says Taylor. “We hear it all the time, every day.”

Marty Thomsen, the manager of the Community Social Development Team at the City of Lethbridge, says racism and discrimination against the local Indigenous community have existed for years but are exacerbated by the opioid crisis. “It’s made it 10 times worse because, unfortunately, that’s the demographic that is most afflicted by drug and alcohol use.”

He adds: “The opioid crisis has supersized all of our problems. In any municipality, you’re going to have poverty, homelessness, racism and discrimination, drug use and alcohol use. But all of a sudden, everything is blown up.”

As Taylor sets up in the injection booth, the high-pitched whine of a power drill drifts over the wall. On the other side, workers are busily building an extension to the building. Less than three months after its heavy metal door was first opened to clients, ARCHES decided it needed longer hours and more space. Gone will be the laundry and showers that organizers once offered users. New funding from the government will expand the site to 13 injection booths from six, and add two more inhalation rooms.

The consumption site is now open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Even so, in the evenings, after dinner ends at the Streets Alive Mission seven blocks away and people wander over to ARCHES, wait times can be as long as 90 minutes. That’s a long time to wait when you need to get high. Thomsen explained it to me as it was explained to him: “Picture yourself a foot under water; you can see the top of the water but you can’t breathe. You will hold your breath as long as you can, but eventually you will do whatever you can to get that air. That is the need.”

This is the first and still the only facility in Canada to allow four types of drug consumption on site: injection, inhalation, intranasal and oral. Nowhere else offers specially ventilated booths for people who want to smoke drugs. In its first four months of operation, the site’s been visited an astonishing 25,000-plus times. Its client roster totals nearly 600 people. In terms of numbers, it’s far busier than the Safeworks consumption site in Calgary, a city with a population of nearly 1.5 million compared to Lethbridge’s 100,000.

Set in a brick building on the northeast side of downtown, Lethbridge’s supervised consumption site is easily missed from the outside. Inside, the reception looks no different than most medical clinics, with its large desk and four friendly staffers who greet clients by name. Most of the seven black leather chairs are occupied by clients sleeping, laughing, waiting. They’re all ages—the youngest clients permitted are 16; the eldest so far was 83. They wander in alone, in pairs, in trios, often carrying backpacks. The first time a client presents, they’re asked for a name—it doesn’t have to be their real name—and age. With that, staff starts a file to track basic information: history of overdoses, history of violence.

These nurses won’t inject drugs into a client. But they can show them how to cook their drugs, clean their skin and find a suitable vein. Teaching people how to reduce their risk of infectious disease, vein damage and abscesses is part of effective harm reduction. These potentially deadly problems can tie up healthcare dollars and hospital beds.

“It’s unique here,” says Sam Mackey (opposite), who works at the site as a “population expert.” “We let people use drugs here, but we also teach them. We’ve had people come in who don’t know how to cook their drugs properly or shoot themselves up properly—maybe because they had a friend or partner do it all the time for them. That’s very common out there.”

These sites can lead to fewer deaths, diseases and infections. They can be an entry point to counsellors, detox programs, healthcare, even housing.

When Mackey was growing up, her dad used heroin, crack and meth in the house. She learned to prep his heroin as a kid. She remembers trying coke for the first time around 10, snorting powder her dad left out; drinking in Grade 6; smoking weed soon after. By high school, she was hooked on over-the-counter and prescription medications. She was in and out of treatment centres, became homeless and was sexually assaulted at a shelter during one of her more prolonged periods of sobriety. She overdosed several times, once in a dealer’s house. “They didn’t call EMS. One guy said, ‘I was just scared I was going to have a dead chick in my apartment.’ ”

Last year, ARCHES asked Mackey to join a committee creating a plan for a consumption site. She remembers getting high before meetings but taking her role seriously. After the site opened, she came as a client but sobered up after a month. She now gets daily methadone as part of a recovery program.

“I can’t speak for anybody else, but I can speak for what this site meant to me when I was using here,” she says. “This is a place to come and not be judged. To be treated normal. It’s a chance to save lives and live a little bit longer. We have clients who OD here multiple times. I OD’d here multiple times. If I wasn’t here, what would have happened?”

But many question the way harm reduction is carried out in Lethbridge.

On May 30, 2018, the 12-year-old son of Amie and Julio Ceron was walking through a gravel stretch on his way home from school. Along the way, he’d bend down to pick up rocks and toss them in the air. Reaching for another handful, he felt a prick in his finger. He looked down and saw a bent needle, the pointy end sticking out sideways through its orange cap. The boy went home and told his parents. That night, he underwent testing for HIV and hepatitis at the local emergency department. The family waited an anxious weekend for the results. The chance of a positive test was minute but a chance all the same. On Monday the results came back—negative, to the family’s enormous relief. But the fright of those few days spurred the Cerons to speak out against what they see as the unintended consequences of harm reduction.

“When it comes to the needle issue in Lethbridge, I’d known of it before but I wasn’t involved,” says Amie. “That’s a lesson for me. You don’t assume that something isn’t your problem until it affects you. This is a problem for everybody.”

She feels the city is too concerned with the health and welfare of people who use drugs, to the detriment of people who don’t. “Don’t get me wrong. They’re real people. But we’re so concerned for the addicts who’ve made these choices and we’re not concerned with the effect on my son. They’re taking more care to protect drug addicts than to protect our community.”

Some residents are speaking out, and angrily. More than once I was told that by reducing harm for one segment of the population, the city puts others in danger. A few days after the discarded needle stuck the Cerons’ son, another parent posted a video on Facebook tearfully describing how she found a capped needle in the backpack of her son, a kindergarten student. He’d found it at the playground, she said, and kept it because it was cool.

This spring, residents founded the Lethbridge Needle Crisis Support Group. They organize rallies, share photos of needles found around the city, and spearhead letter-writing campaigns. The majority of complaints aren’t directed specifically at the consumption site, though some certainly are. Some oppose it on principle; others say they’re concerned about increased crime in the surrounding neighbourhood. As in other cities, clients congregate near the facility. After complaints in the first weeks, ARCHES hired security to monitor the area around the site.

The police see more disruptive activity near the site, though not all of it is criminal. “It focuses people in an area that’s easier for us to control,” says Inspector Ascroft. “I don’t support drug use, but (the supervised consumption site) is a good strategy to manage it. I’m a cop. I’m a southern Alberta kid. I don’t like any of this either, but we need a pragmatic approach. We’re not going to lock everybody up. That’s not going to work.”

Some in the city are furious that people who use drugs have a place to do so without fear of arrest or pressure to enter recovery programs. After driving by the site, one man posted on Facebook: “It seemed like they were having a good time, laughing and talking. Doesn’t really look like they want help.” Lethbridge is a traditionally conservative town where people like to grouse about big government and wasting taxpayer dollars, common themes in public complaints about the site. Rumours abound: The site gives out drugs, it allows trafficking, it’s driving up drug use. None of this is true.

What upsets people most is the number of needles discarded around the city—in parks, in public bathrooms, on ledges outside buildings. Through its outreach team, ARCHES hands out clean needles for free—a long-standing practice in keeping with the WHO’s recommended strategies for harm reduction. There’s no needle exchange. Studies show that a restrictive policy requiring users to turn in a dirty needle to get a clean one leads to fewer sterile syringes being distributed—meaning more unsafe syringes on the streets, not fewer.

The outreach team leaves from their office each evening at 6:00 for a seven-kilometre walk around downtown. They clean up discarded needles, encourage people to go to the consumption site, hand out candy (it’s a good way to engage people), and distribute clean needles and pipes. They record all the needles distributed and collected.

On a warm Tuesday night in June when I joined the outreach team on their nightly walk, they spoke to a total of 76 individuals on the street over the course of three hours and distributed harm reduction supplies to 31. They handed out 12 long-tip needles, 50 short-tip needles, 10 “straights” (pipes for crack), 19 “bubbles” (pipes for meth), four containers for collecting personal sharps, and 16 “party packs.” Party packs contain one long-tip needle, a condom, lube, a small water packet, tourniquet, alcohol swab, cooker and a vitamin C packet, which is used to help dissolve substances into an injectable form. People with housing received more supplies than others.

In its first four months, the site was visited 25,000-plus times. It remains the only facility in Canada to offer specially ventilated booths to smoke drugs.

ARCHES collects 97 to 100 per cent of the needles it distributes, and says it has reduced distribution by 50 per cent since the site opened. (ARCHES is not the only local source of needles. Other agencies and pharmacies provide sterile needles; drug dealers sell preloaded syringes.)

Representatives of Lethbridge EMS and fire services say they’ve seen a major drop in the frequency of calls about needles, and they collect far fewer needles now. “We were going out five, six, seven, eight times a day just to pick up stuff in the community. Now we might go out five to eight times in a month,” says Lynn Villiger of Lethbridge Fire & Emergency Services. Villiger understands why people are upset about finding syringes in schoolyards—“I’d freak out too if I was the parent”—and says kids need to be educated about needle risk.

“People want to blame somebody,” he says. “That’s the wrong approach. We have to come up with a solution. We’re headed in the right direction, but people are impatient because the drug problem is going up so quickly. It’s hard for anybody to get on top of it.”

He equates the situation to a volcano. “You can get as angry as you want at the volcano, but that ain’t going to stop it from erupting. It’s erupting now and we’re learning more than we ever have about drug use and addiction.”

The anger directed at people who use drugs and those who care for them is taking its toll. In a city this size, many people know staff at the supervised consumption site. Employees are told that they enable drug use or keep people trapped in their addiction. Or worse: Let users infect each other, let them die. Stacey Bourque has been berated on social media, while shopping in the grocery store with her child, during a lunch out. “In big cities, nobody would know one person from the next, but here, every time you turn on the news, there I am, front and centre,” says Bourque.

There is no way to quickly reverse a widespread problem with opioids, she says. “People didn’t start using drugs because the facility was built. We’ve had 15,000-plus uses inside (the consumption site) that otherwise would have been outside in a public bathroom, in a park. That’s reality. This is happening whether we exist or not. It’s going to continue to happen. But if we can try to move people toward healthier practices, that will have a positive impact on the community.”

Last spring, UCP leader Jason Kenney stirred up controversy for saying he doesn’t believe supervised consumption sites work, adding governments are spending money to help “addicts consume poison.” The NDP say harm-reduction strategies, including supervised consumption sites, are part of a much-needed, multi-pronged strategy to care for people in the throes of addiction, even if the odds of recovery are slim.

In Lethbridge I asked everyone who works in harm reduction about the potential for political winds to change policies on harm reduction. Each one—EMS, law enforcement, addiction specialists—said the opioid crisis will not disappear. You cannot un-erupt a volcano.

Christina Frangou writes about medicine, health and fitness. Her most recent AV story (November 2017) was about assisted dying.

Photos by Jaime Vedres.

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The post Reducing the Harm appeared first on Alberta Views.

This is the future of weed. And it’s a far cry from the head shops, fly-by-night dispensaries or friend-of-a-friend Ziploc baggie markets of yore.

“We went to the US to look at dispensaries, why some were doing really well and why others were not so great,” says Raj Jogia, one of four partners behind Kush Collective, which expects to open a retail marijuana outlet on 17th Avenue SW in Calgary now that the federal government’s legalization bill has finally passed and all provinces can bring their own policies and procedures into compliance.

On Jogia’s US fact-finding tour, “There were holes-in-the-wall and multi-million-dollar spaces that looked like Apple stores,” he says. “But the main reason some succeeded was customer experience. The store has to look nice and feel comfortable, but the most important thing for ensuring customer loyalty is experience and education.”

Jogia, sporting a crisp blue-and-white tailored shirt, is in the oil and gas industry. Co-owner Shaun Baid, in a black Kush-branded T-shirt and hat, was laid off from his job as an accountant shortly before the legalization process began; the other partners behind Kush Collective are a lawyer and a professional in the organic food business. All of them are Calgary-bred long-time friends who are passionate about pot—and keen to introduce themselves, their store and their product to the community.

The pair go on to point out literature on specific strain effects; chemicals called terpenes which shift pot’s flavour profile and are believed to account for minute aspects of a user’s experience. It’s a little like wine tasting, with a touch of the professional, pared-down Millennial aesthetic.

Jogia, Baid and their partners, along with dozens of other business owners big and small, have navigated a rushed and ad hoc process in which all levels of government frantically worked to implement a regime for the sale and consumption of legal marijuana—a process that has been untried since the repeal of Canada’s prohibition laws a century ago. It’s a process that left consumers and business owners alike on tenterhooks, unsure of the fine details of what will be legal, where and when. Given the timelines involved, concerns about the speed at which this social shift is taking place are not unfounded, and no one can rule out the possibility of unintended consequences.

“Whether or not you think this is the best idea, there was, ultimately, in a certain way, a referendum on this issue,” says Kathleen Ganley, Alberta’s Minister of Justice and Solicitor General. “That was the (2015) federal election, and that government was elected on a very clear promise to legalize cannabis.”

The legalization of cannabis was up to Ottawa—but the nuts and bolts were left to provinces and cities to figure out. Every level of government across the country scrambled experts and task forces to create new pot regulations, bylaws and sourcing and distribution methods. Myriad questions had to be answered, from the age of legal purchasing, to how the product should be sold, to where it could be consumed. Well before the federal government had a final draft of the legislation it intended to pass, the provincial government and municipalities in Alberta conducted surveys to get a sense of how Albertans wanted lawful weed to work.

One of the most pressing issues was the question of whether to adopt a private or public retail model. Minister Ganley says Albertans were clear in their feedback, which was conducted through two rounds of public opinion polling in 2016: they overwhelmingly wanted a private retail model similar to how alcohol is sold here—in stark contrast to Ontario (initially) and the maritime provinces, which decided to sell pot only through government-run stores.

“A public system gives the province much more control, but is costly to establish and leaves financial risk with Albertans,” Ganley says. By comparison, “a private system puts faith in private retailers to follow the rules established by the province, but poses less financial risk and is more efficient to set up.”

The benefits and drawbacks of public vs. private liquor retail are hotly debated in Canada. One of the touted advantages of Alberta’s private liquor system is that it provides more convenience. That, however, is also considered one of the model’s drawbacks, as it allows easier access by youth. It’s long been alleged, for example, that it’s easier for minors to buy booze from private stores. A 2011–2012 government sting operation in BC, the first province to enact a hybrid public–private liquor retail model, seemed to confirm this theory. But corroborating evidence is scant.

All levels of government frantically worked on a process untried since the repeal of prohibition.

It’s unclear how this dichotomy will play out with regard to cannabis. Months before legalization, the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission (AGLC) had received more than 530 retail cannabis licence applications province-wide. At the same point in the process, 40 stores had announced they would dispense marijuana in Ontario, with an expectation that the province would see 150 stores by 2020—though Ontario has 3.5 times Alberta’s population. (That province has since announced it will change to a private retail model, with an unknown effect on the overall number of stores that will be approved.)

There was significant debate on this issue, which is why the Alberta government went back to the public twice on the question. “Our survey results ultimately leaned towards private retail, with 58 per cent of Albertans supporting this system,” Ganley said.

As with alcohol, the AGLC will source and obtain product in bulk that private retail outlets will buy and resell. The AGLC will also oversee retail licensing.

But while the province has taken a liberal approach to physical retail shops, only the government will be legally allowed to sell marijuana online. Ganley says survey results highlighted the fact that Albertans were concerned about how consumers could prove age at point of purchase and at delivery; a public online portal, she suggests, gives the government more control. “Already, even before legalization, retailers are selling illicit cannabis in the online space,” she says. “A government-managed system sends a strong message to consumers that there will be one, legal online source for recreational cannabis.”

The other question the government struggled with was the matter of the age restriction. The best science about the effects of marijuana to date suggests it can harm young people, whose brains are still developing, especially under the age of 25. In the end, Alberta opted for a minimum age of 18 to consume cannabis—a year younger than every other province except Quebec (also 18) went with, but the same age at which Albertans can legally drink alcohol.

“If you make the legal age higher, that does a better job protecting public health,” Ganley says. “But it brings the illegal market into the legal market—which does a worse job of protecting youth, who are still going to the black market.”

Pot smoking will be banned in private cars as well as at Alberta’s hospitals, schools and daycares. Smoking will also be prohibited within close distance of playgrounds, zoos, outdoor theatres or any place where children are likely to be present. But cannabis can be consumed in the province’s parks.

Ganley explains: “Say you have a campground in a provincial park. Now you’re saying people need to drive outside that area to a highway and stand outside their car [to smoke a joint] and go back again.” A restrictive parks policy would have presented more problems, she adds, including fears of impaired driving. “All sorts of different issues could have arisen if we tried to prohibit [consumption] in anything that could possibly be described as a park,” she says.

Provincial legislation, however, leaves this matter open to municipal governments to regulate within their own boundaries. And as Alberta conducted public opinion polling on minute matters of marijuana regulation, so did municipal governments.

“We were a bit surprised the province was treating cannabis like tobacco, for the most part, from a public consumption standpoint,” says Matt Zabloski, lead for the City of Calgary’s cannabis legalization project. “I couldn’t find any major municipality that had allowed for public consumption. Even in the States, they were treating cannabis as restrictively as Alberta treats alcohol, if not more so.”

The City of Calgary decided to take a much more restrictive approach, virtually banning all public cannabis consumption, including in its parks. (Smoking in Fish Creek Park will also contravene Calgary’s municipal bylaws, even though the park is provincial.) This, combined with the AGLC’s having no plan at present to license smoking lounges, has raised the ire of some pot advocates who point out that for many citizens, including those who rent their homes, this legal product could be virtually impossible to legally consume.

Many of these issues may be addressed by edible marijuana, which can be consumed more discreetly. However, edibles aren’t metabolized by the human body in the same way as cannabis that’s smoked; it takes longer for the “high” to hit, and thus it’s easier for users to consume too much. Edibles also raise concerns about food safety, dosing and proper labelling and packaging to ensure candy-like weed products aren’t accidentally consumed by children.

The province’s cannabis secretariat said it does have a plan to develop a policy framework for edibles, but it is awaiting direction from the federal government, which is not expected to legalize that section of the marijuana market until sometime in 2019.

Cities and towns are also responsible for where consumers can buy legal weed. after commissioning polls and studies, zabloski’s team took a series of proposals to council that would govern how marijuana retail outlets apply for business licences. Stores in Calgary will be permitted in the same types of commercial zones where liquor stores can be built, provided they are at least 150 metres from schools. Zabloski says the city considered a more restrictive setback, but that would have significantly reduced the number of viable spaces. By late April, Calgary had received 226 cannabis store applications.

Edmonton senior planner Colton Kirsop says his city ran into similar questions and tradeoffs. “If we’re too restrictive about where cannabis stores can locate, one of the unintended outcomes could be that we drive them to poorly accessible areas of the city—and we’ve seen that in US cities,” he says. Seattle, for example, “banned cannabis stores from downtown and entertainment districts, which left owners little choice but to set up in out-of-the-way industrial areas. These are easier to take advantage of in terms of vandalism and theft. Nobody’s there on weekends or after hours. They’re really quiet.”

Edmonton therefore decided to welcome retail locations to bustling commercial streets such as Whyte Avenue.

The process for applying for business licences varies by city and town; once a location in an appropriate land-use area is chosen, the outlet can apply for a permit and a business licence. Or it can apply to have an area rezoned—which often requires a hearing in front of council. Only after a business has obtained a lease on a storefront can it then apply for an AGLC permit. Current head shops will have to go through the process too, just as if they were new retail businesses. “This is definitely not one of those slam dunk things,” Zabloski says. “This is no walk in the park by any stretch of the imagination, trying to score one of these businesses.”

A higher legal age might do a better job protecting public health, but more people would use the black market.

Michelle Hynes-Dawson, spokesperson for the AGLC, says businesses must pay a $3,000 fee upfront to apply for a licence. “During the application, we do our due diligence. We do a background check for links to organized crime. There’s a questionnaire. We have to ensure there is no history of trafficking,” she says. “Just because someone pays the fee doesn’t mean they are guaranteed the licence.”

Indeed, even the stores themselves will be required to have special features and equipment, including a secure, locked storage area to keep cannabis and accessories. Stores must be equipped with alarms and video surveillance, have a separate entrance and have no access to any other businesses. The AGLC seems particularly concerned that no pot store be too close to a liquor outlet, as the government wants to discourage consumers from too readily compounding their intoxication.

Similarly to cigarettes, marijuana products will have to be sold in plain packaging with no undue salesmanship about effects. Stores will not be able to use words or images that connote any kind of health benefit. And, according to AGLC guidelines, branding must not attempt to appeal to minors, show the use of pot, display intoxication or “advertise a price or price advantage.”

The agency will also restrict cannabis retail monopolies; no individual or entity will be allowed to own more than 15 per cent of the overall retail cannabis licences in Alberta. The province will also set the wholesale price. These restrictions must strike a fine balance—they cannot be so restrictive that the black market continues to flourish.

As the legalization date drew near, the AGLC put out requests for providers to supply stock. Most of the early interest came from federally licensed medical marijuana suppliers. Given there are only so many licensed medical marijuana suppliers in the country, one of the big fears of legalization advocates is that there simply won’t be enough product to meet early demand once pot is officially legal.

Hynes-Dawson says the AGLC has heard such concerns. “Every province is in the same boat,” she says. “There are only so many producers right now. But we were really pleased by the response we got. We got a mix from right across the country.”

While marijuana advocates have long touted the benefits of taxing and regulating the drug, Alberta is not expecting a legalization windfall. In the 2018–19 budget, the province announced that it expects to lose money on pot—largely thanks to the enormous amounts of time, effort and cash that have already been funnelled into creating a legal regime.

The province can earn revenues from wholesale weed distribution, from online sales and from direct taxation—although a quarter of the taxation proceeds must be sent to the federal government. And, again, the taxation room is fairly limited; if legal marijuana proves too expensive, the black market, which isn’t hemmed by restrictions on advertising, price discounts or edibles, will continue to flourish. In the 2018–19 budget, the province expected to rake in only $26-million in taxes on marijuana in the first year of legalization, only about a third of what it has spent to set up the policies, staff and procedures required to make the stuff legal. Alberta will also receive a share of the taxes collected by the federal government. Ottawa expects to take in about $100-million in the first year of legal cannabis.

Alberta’s budget, however, has so far not indicated any revenue-sharing for municipalities, which are expected to bear a major enforcement and regulatory burden. Police and enforcement agencies are also expected to bear significant costs in things such as behavioural training and cheek swab testing to examine for impairment while driving [see sidebar].

“For the first little while, we’re not going to be taking in a surplus of revenue,” Ganley says. “There will be more costs than revenue to go around.”

Given the partisan machinations in the Senate, it was uncertain well into spring 2018 when legal pot could actually be purchased. The Senate voted on the bill on June 7, proposing 46 amendments. The government accepted most of these, and the bill received Royal Assent shortly afterward. The provinces requested several months to finalize regulations, acquire product and stock shelves. On June 20 the government announced October 17 as the day that cannabis officially gets the green light.

All of this uncertainty hasn’t just affected lawmakers. The partners at Kush Collective had to find an amenable landlord and commit to leasing a storefront months before they knew the final municipal rules for retail stores. They had to lease a building to acquire a pot licence—and they lost money on rent every month the drug wasn’t legalized. A sudden change of heart on city council—a small increase in the setback requirements, say—could have quashed their hopes, and their investment.

Further, business and governments both struggled to come up with complementary processes and regulations before legalization—before any of them had a final sense of what various other levels of government were going to pass.

And a retail licence is no guarantee of easy money. Nobody knows just how large the legal market for recreational marijuana will be, and because Alberta’s market is private, retail competition will be fierce. That level of uncertainty privileges retail players with a greater appetite for risk—and more cash in hand to weather it. That likely means more large chains, particularly from the US. Already, major liquor distributors and wealthy investors have announced their intentions to get into marijuana in Alberta.

Meanwhile some new dispensaries, Baid claims, started selling marijuana ahead of legalization. “They make us all look bad,” he says.

Kush Collective says it wants to reduce stigma around pot; the owners envision open-door days for the community to come in and ask questions. But it’s the small operators who play by the rules who stand to lose the most by delay, inaction and uncertainty.

“We’re just four local Calgary guys with a passion for marijuana,” Baid says.

Calgary freelancer Jen Gerson contributes to Maclean’s, The Walrus and CBC, and co-hosts the podcast Oppo.

The post Going to Pot appeared first on Alberta Views.

A homeless man once grabbed Shannon by the ponytail and tried to drag her into the trees in Rundle Park. It happened a few months after her mom drank herself to death; Shannon was just eighteen and she and Larry were still living in the low-income housing apartment under her mom’s lease. One minute Shannon was almost out of the park, almost home from cleaning 7-Eleven’s grease traps all night, and the next there was the smell of booze and shit and campfire and her head snapped back, her feet skidding pavement.

Not that it was much of a fight. The man was too drunk. Shannon caught the wrist of the hand that grabbed her and spun around, snapping the heel of her other palm into the bridge of his nose. He let go and tripped, landed on his back with his feet stuck up like a dead June bug, crusty and big and black. He laughed. Shannon attacked.

Her knees told her to run but the rest of her was clenched up too tight. Kick punch kick. His nose burst the second time the rubber heel of her high-tops met it and he began to whimper, his hands over his face, chin tucked into his chest. “OK, stop! Stop! Stop!” But she kept raising her knee high, pushing down hard, again and again, until he lay still, a drunk, mewing ball, spit trailing from his mouth in long, red strings.

That night Shannon screwed Larry on the bed that he used to share with her mom. The next morning she told him what had happened, told him what could have happened.

“Yeah, but it didn’t.” He pressed his nose under her jaw, traced her collarbone with the tip of his tongue, “’Cause you’re bad, baby; Northside, bitch.”

It’s as though they’re on the way to a high school dance, with the stink of chemical puke and Tara’s sick-sweet Hawaiian Ginger lotion.

He crawled over her, whine-grunting when he came, every part of him limp and lazy except his dick. She lay still, shutting her mouth to his greasy hair, too numb to think except of skinned knuckles and the drunk’s quiet crying.

Now Tara’s moaning is too much like the drunk’s, so Shannon turns the radio up loud. Sheryl Crow sings about all she wants to do and it’s almost as though they’re on the way to a high school dance, what with the stink of chemical puke and Tara’s sick-sweet Hawaiian Ginger body lotion. Shannon glances at the rear-view mirror. Tara’s on the backseat; hair pasted to her cheeks, body shaking and curling into itself.

Where’s the goddamn hospital Shannon hasn’t been to St. Albert since Larry’s kid broke his arm, so she doesn’t really know the way. Still, she can’t take Tara to an Edmonton hospital, can she Dr. Tara Meth-head, Ob/Gyn. Jesus Christ.

They pull up to the Emergency doors and Shannon lays on the horn, interrupting the paramedics bullshitting in front. One rushes over while the other two grab a stretcher.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. He leans into the vehicle. Shannon isn’t usually stupid over guys but something about the question or maybe his brown eyes makes her wish he was looking at her.

“I don’t know. Some guy said something about meth.” He hadn’t, actually, but it was Larry’s chemical of choice.

They get Tara in quickly, the guys yelling as they head through the double doors inside the hospital. Nurses meet them and jog alongside the stretcher shouting numbers and non-words. Shannon follows a few feet behind, straining to hear. Don’t tell them anything.

Tara seizes again and a yellow stain spreads between the legs of her white capri pants, blotting and blooming like the watercolours Shannon used to paint with in art class. Bad outfit to OD in, Tar. Mom had done that too, she remembered, on the couch, where they found her. Larry couldn’t even sell it after; they had to pay extra to have it taken to the dump.

Tara starts gagging. A nurse is forcing something down her throat.

“Jesus!” Shannon shouts. “Go easy!”

“Get her out of here,” the nurse orders. The brown-eyed medic leads her out of the room as quick as he rolled Tara in.

“You look like you could use a cup of coffee,” he says. “Don’t worry about your friend, OK There’s no place better for her to be. Look, see that Timmy’s right down the hall, by maternity?” He points to a sign at the end of the hall and digs in his pocket. “Let me get you some cash.”

Shannon shrugs his hand off her elbow and he steps off. “Do I look like I need your money?”

The girl behind the Tim Hortons counter wears an immaculate French braid and no makeup. Her uniform is boxy and nothing about her says sex, only work. Everything about her screams Temporary Foreign Worker. Probably still fresh off the boat.

“Double espresso, black. No sugar.”

“Yes, ma’am, one minute, one minute.” She talks weird, her mispronounced words pitched in apology. She offers a quick smile but drops it when she sees Shannon’s face. It’s another two minutes before she figures out the till and takes the change Shannon’s held out the whole time.

Shannon taps her foot. She doesn’t have time for this shit: she’s gotta get to the airport, pay the rent, the damage deposit. She could have been there and back twice by now.

“Hello I said black.” The girl flinches, spilling the cream she’s pouring into Shannon’s espresso. Shannon turns to the man in line behind her. “Think anyone here speaks English?”

The girl’s blush deepens. Kick punch kick.

Shannon’s finally handed a red cup of black coffee and she heads outside for a smoke. The coffee is liquid sugar and she spits it into a flowerpot, draining the rest before chucking the cup. The whole friggin’ world’s incompetent. Can’t blame the owners, though, not with the way those bleeding hearts keep raising minimum wage. Everyone thinks it’s a good thing, the labour lobbies, everyone except anyone who actually knows anything about business. Now the only way anyone can afford to staff shop is to ship in desperate immigrants. At least you can charge them rent, make back a few of the seven bucks an hour you lose.

Modern-day slavery; that’s what Lacey called the Temporary Foreign Worker program last week. She was shopping at the mall and passed by The Cigarette Shop, stopping to chat with Shannon. The two had grown apart in the 12 years since high school: Lacey getting knocked up immediately—three boys now. Somehow they got talking about a nanny Lacey met, a Filipina who paid back more than half of her paycheque to her bosses.

Well, boo frickin’ hoo. Why shouldn’t she pay rent Chick would rather sleep outside?

“It’s not right,” Lacey said. Her eyes filled up and her face got real red, just like when she’d get called on in class. “Having to watch someone else’s kids while hers are an ocean away, giving back the money she should be sending home. It’s sick. I mean, even if she wanted to leave… she’s trapped, just… stuck.”

Shannon shrugged. She’d use the program. Would charge what she was owed, too. No one’s forcing them to come to Canada. People choose exactly the kind of life they want.

Sitting on the curb in front of a hospital, Shannon’s only more convinced of that now. Just look at Tara. That kid got everything: house in the suburbs, dad around 24/7, fancy college fund, everything, and she still ends up overdosing on sleazy Larry’s magic crystal. What had she said the first day she showed up?

“Henry got fired. Said he can’t help with rent anymore.”

Shannon didn’t know what was more ridiculous; that dad still paid Tara’s rent, or that Tara called him Henry. Wasn’t she, like, a doctor or something Why didn’t she have her own place?

“Taking some time off,” Tara said. Her eyes kept closing. “Sabbatical. Working on a specialty. Obstetrics and gynecology.”

Of course you are.

Lacey couldn’t understand that, though, could she Some bored housewife, buried in mommy groups and park play-dates. The whole convo was a bust. It was a relief when Lacey said she had to go, had to find a swimsuit for the trip her “hubby” had planned.

“You must be, what, size 18 now?” Kick punch kick.

She had mentioned something interesting, though. Did Shannon know that the airport’s Canadiana Corner was closing?

“Great location for a second store.”

No shit. And a great way to get out from behind the till of The Cigarette Shop, where, for all the reading she’d done and online business courses she’d taken, all Larry wanted Shannon to do was “look pretty and count the change.”

The airport committee only wanted proposals from existing businesses but, as Shannon was The Cigarette Shop’s manager, they were happy to consider hers. Looked like they were going to approve it, too. Figures. Men are too easy.

Black miniskirt, heels, tight blazer and a push-up bra: Shannon knows more than just her way around a bottom line. She cocked her head and ran fingers over exposed skin while breathing words like demographic, profit margin and net worth during the proposal meeting, crossing and uncrossing her legs until she had all of them smiling.

She had them so dizzy they didn’t even notice the typo: that “o” where an “e” should have been. The Cigaretto Shop. A separate establishment, the new store severed from the first, one letter getting Shannon out from under Larry forever. Kick punch kick.

The only thing she had left to do was to pay the rental deposit. The money she’d get from mom’s ring would pay that and more and it wouldn’t be long before the store turned a profit. Then she’d be out, away from too-tight rows of dirty houses, half-naked kids inside ignoring the smell of liquor and sex and the new “uncle” that showed up sometime in the night. She might look for a place in Sherwood Park, like her dad. Maybe even somewhere near him if she could stomach that much of Karen.

People choose exactly the kind of life they want. That was the other funny thing: Kids like Shannon, who get left nothing except Loser Larry and a failed-engagement ring but find a way to make it work anyway. “Give me a nickel and I’ll make you a dollar,” Shannon’s dad once said. That’s how she was too: tough, smart, determined. Northside, bitch.

She’s about to light her second smoke when a man calls to her, asks if she’ll speak with him inside. Shannon stands.

“She OK?”

“Stable,” he says. He introduces himself as Dr. Rhanji and asks her name, asks Tara’s name. Shannon exhales all the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. He doesn’t know Tara. Thank god. She lights the cigarette.

“Beats me,” Shannon shrugs. “I just found her.”

Rhanji frowns. His body slumps and hardens at the same time. He’s tired, pissed off. “Withholding information dramatically alters the level of care we can provide.”

Shannon shrugs. “Can’t tell you what I don’t know, buddy.”

“You must know someth–”

“Like I said, I just found–”

“We know you’re her sister!” Rhanji’s bald head sweats under the hot sun, reflecting Shannon’s fuck-you stance so clearly she almost scares herself.

She groans. Of course they know. Tara’s probably in there right now, all tears and apologies. Idiot. She shakes her head.

“Half-sister.” Smoke plumes around Rhanji’s face and he waves his hand to break the cloud. Shannon takes a step back. “She awake?”

Rhanji shakes his head. “Family resemblance.”

Shit. Shannon rolls her eyes. “This is, like, a first-time thing for her. Seriously. She’s, like, a professional. Real smart. I don’t know what she was thinking.”

“Her toxicology report suggests otherwise,” Rhanji says. “There are excessive levels of methamphetamine in her system, yes, but also significant levels of Lorazepam and Oxycodone, suggesting a long-term use of both Ativan and OxyContin—prescription drugs: narcotic, addictive. Does your sister have any underlying medical and psychological conditions?”

Shannon blinks, shakes her head. What would Tara have to be anxious about All she does is study and sleep. She thinks of Tara’s red eyes, her shaky hands. There was that pill bottle that rolled out from under the couch. For headaches, Tara said. She was always complaining about headaches, about Larry inviting his buddies over while she was trying to read. You don’t understand how complicated this stuff is. I need to learn this. This is my life!

His nose burst the second time the rubber heel of her high-tops met it and he began to whimper, his hands over his face.

“I cannot stress how sick your sister is,” Rhanji says. “This episode has put her under tremendous strain. The fact that she is alive is nothing short of miraculous.”

Shannon thinks of her mom on the couch, skin like cold oatmeal. Miracles don’t happen in the Northside.

“What am I supposed to do?”

There’s an outpatient program, he says, free, but ineffective, a low success rate with more likelihood of Tara finding a dealer than sobriety. Best course of action is a 45-day treatment centre. He recommends New Hope.

“Like, rehab?”

“In as much.”

“How much?”

He presses his lips together. They’re on the same team now. “It’s expensive, but fairly standard, considering. The cost is about three thousand dollars a week, but there are payment options.”

Shannon’s skin crawls. It’s more than The Cigaretto Shop deposit times two.

“I think I better call my dad.”

Rhanji makes a few more attempts to get Tara’s name but Shannon isn’t having it. He shakes his head and says he’ll leave her to it and heads back in.

Shannon’s hands shake as she digs the phone from her purse. It’s been a long time since she talked to her dad.

That whore Karen answers.

“Is my dad there?”

“Shannon Are you alright Is Tara with you?”

“Just put my dad on the phone.”

She hears her dad’s footsteps as clearly as she imagines the oak cabinets in their kitchen. Shannon hasn’t visited since dad moved out of the city, but she used to babysit at his old place.

“Shannon Where’s Tara Is she OK?”

“Hi, Dad. It’s OK. She’s at the hospital.”

Henry’s rumbled exhale makes her think of birthday cake and training wheels. “Oh, good. She hasn’t checked in for awhile.”

Shannon cringes. “No, I mean, she’s in the hospital, Dad. She overdosed or something.”

Silence. Shannon sits. She pulls her knees up, leans over herself, rests her head on her own lap.

“I don’t understand.”

“Drugs, Dad. Meth, and prescription stuff too, I guess.”

More silence.

“What have you done?”

It’s as if the ice runs through Shannon’s veins instead of Tara’s. She feels it cold under her skin, freezing her chest, stopping her heart. “Dad, I don’t…”

“Six years, Shannon!”

She pulls the phone from her ear.

“Six years of school we paid for. Do you know how much we’ve sacrificed How hard we’ve worked That’s over, now, do you understand You think she can keep her practice now You think she’ll ever get insurance, a mortgage, a chance at anything She’s trash now, Shannon. Trash. Congratulations. You’ve dragged her to your level.”

For as cold as the rest of her is, Shannon’s tears are red-hot.

“There’s, like, a facility or something, but it… it’s really expensive.” She presses the knuckle of her index finger against her lips. I’m sorry, Daddy.

“Expensive Is that what this—are you asking me for money?” He laughs and laughs and laughs. “You’re just your mother’s girl, aren’t you, Shan?”

There are no words.

She’s still crying when Larry’s pickup pulls into the parking lot, slow and dirty, like a bad hangover. She looks away as he kneels beside her, slides a warm hand between her shoulder blades.

“Family sticks together,” he says. He’s sorry for everything. So sorry.

She stands and he gathers her, holds her so close she almost feels safe, lost in the artificial haze hanging off his skin.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the airport space?” he asks. She stays still, waits for him to say more. He doesn’t sound mad.

“They called the store. You spelled ‘cigarette’ wrong, dummy.” He gathers her hair in his hands, brushes it away from her face. “I told them we had to pass, Shan. I mean, I get what you were trying to do, but we don’t need more money. More money, more people watching, OK?” The shop’s really just a front for Larry’s dope-dealing, anyway.

The meth, though; he’s done with that, he promises. Seeing Tara freak, her looking so much like Shannon—that scared him. It will get better. They’re gonna be themselves again, maybe have some friends over or something. It’s been weird since her sister moved in. She’s not like them. “I can’t lose you, Shan.”

Shannon holds on. She knows he’s lying but she presses against him when he wraps his arms tighter. There’s no way out for people like him, no way out for people like her.

Larry says he’ll see her when she gets home, and leaves. Shannon finishes the last smoke in her pack and goes inside. She’ll answer all of Rhanji’s questions.

She walks to the room where Tara’s sleeping. She’s in a hospital gown now, clean and perfect if still a little blue, just a hint of that plastic still on her. Shannon picks up the clipboard on the end of her bed. She’ll stay just long enough to explain how it’s gonna work, how much Tara will lose unless it’s done this way. That the ring will cover most of what needs to be covered and that Shannon will figure out the rest. She’ll explain that they’ll never see each other again, not ever, as long as they live, not after this. One’s getting out and the other’s in the trees, dragged back by her ponytail. Kick punch kick.

Shannon lifts the pen.

Patient Name: Shannon Delacroix

Northside, bitch.

Katie Bickell lives in Sherwood Park. “Northside Delacroix” is the winner of Alberta Views’ 2014 fiction contest.

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The post Northside Delacroix appeared first on Alberta Views.