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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The post Always Hiding appeared first on Alberta Views.

I’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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The post Cancelling Care appeared first on Alberta Views.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elmer Crookedneck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Text and photos by Virgil Grandfield

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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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It was hard to imagine worse times would come for the UCP, but they did. That is, the book ban.

First came complaints from parents and religious leaders about inappropriate books in Alberta school libraries. Did the UCP know there were graphic novels in Alberta school libraries that contain visual depictions of sex between teenagers…? The consensus among UCPers: these books must be removed. Banning them seemed even better.

But first some boundaries had to be set, a bureaucratic framework for the action. The premier put her minister of education on the job, and he produced a doozy: a ministerial directive that spared no detail. “Explicit sexual content” was defined and minutely described: which body parts would be allowed to touch or enter which other body parts. The bit about “artificial sexual organs or substitutes” was an eye-opener. It was somewhat of a relief when the minister added “non-sexual acts” would be okay, as would “non-explicit sexual acts.”

Page two of the directive got into “non-explicit sexual content.” Again, no detail was spared. First of all, “non-sexual content means content that is not sexual in nature.” That’s pretty clear. The same catalogue of body parts is mentioned. But page two lists exceptions. Body parts and activities can be depicted if relating to medical conditions, examination and treatment and the understanding of human development. Another exception is religious scripture—I suppose meaning those kinky bits in the Old Testament.

Ayn Rand’s wooden prose and romantic scenes have a dual effect. They put your teenagers off both sex and reading.

But then the minister made a very important distinction. Sexual depiction is allowed if it “is for information and is not narrative.” There. He pinned it down. The dangerous smut occurs in fiction: novels and stories. Mind you, I’m not sure what we’ll do with smutty personal diaries, which, technically, are non-fiction. But I’ll move on.

To show that the Alberta government is not entirely against healthy romance between young people and their little gestures of fondness, it produced another list of those things young people can be shown doing in the name of affection: hand-holding, perhaps a chaste kiss. But for kids below Grade 10, even non-explicit sexual content is out. I guess there will have to be a ruling on books with hand games: pattycake, hand-stacking and thumb-wrestling—especially if these books are in narrative form.

At any rate, the school libraries of Alberta would have until October 1 to comply with the directive.

Things quickly went awry. A document appeared on social media: a list of books the Edmonton Public School Board said it would have to remove from its libraries to comply with the ministerial directive. It has 221 books by over 90 authors!

On the EPSB list were several titles by Canada’s Nobel literary laureate, Alice Munro. Another title was the Governor General’s Award-winning novel The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood—arguably the most read Canadian novel in history. Beloved Canadian First Nations authors made the list. So did George Orwell’s famous anti-fascist novel 1984. A surprise for me was to find US author Ayn Rand’s novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s mid-20th century novels are regarded highly by America’s political right for their stout defence of selfishness and greed. Danielle Smith was in fact annoyed by Atlas Shrugged’s proposed banning. She told a reporter that the book should be “mandatory reading in high school.” I personally read Shrugged in high school and, trust me, Rand’s wooden prose and romantic scenes have a dual effect. They will put your teenagers off both sex and reading.

When the EPSB list became public, our premier called the board’s action “vicious compliance.” I tried to think of another example of “vicious compliance” but couldn’t. I’ll fall back on a quote I remember from Canadian publishing legend Jack McClelland about book banning: “You set your sights on Larry Flynt [publisher of Hustler] and you hit Margaret Laurence every time.”

I think the dagger moment in all of this was when Atwood herself heard news she was banned in Alberta and posted online a little story she’d written to comply with the directive. Her tale is about a perfect Alberta couple that manages to have five perfect children without having sex.

The premier came back with a plaintive little line to the effect that all her government really wanted gone were the four graphic novels. Then I guess that’s what they should have said. Hindsight, eh?

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

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Singer near some aohtoksooki, or common yarrow.

Singer and his dog Zorro beside raised beds where he is growing native plants to preserve seeds and eventually fight back leafy spurge.

Ninaika’ksimii, or Louisiana sagewort, grows in Singer’s yard.

Leafy spurge, an invasive plant, grows in the prairie that Singer is working to restore.

Singer shows a goldenrod plant on the Kainai Blood Tribe reserve. Goldenrod is a native plant, but its Blackfoot name has been lost to colonization.

Api’soomaahka, or William Singer, is converting his cultivated land back to native grasslands. His father began growing crops on their land when Singer was a child. Cultivation introduced non-native species such as Kentucky Bluegrass, brome grasses and invasive spurge, which harm native medicine plants such as sage and sweetgrass. Singer watched these traditional plants disappear. Twelve years ago he began to restore the land to its former state, a project now called Naapi’s Garden. He uses controlled burns, goats and hand weeding to remove the yellow-flowered spurge, but its roots can extend nine metres deep. To protect traditional native plants, Singer grows sage, sweetgrass, mint and turnips in raised garden beds, collecting their seeds and reintroducing them to the land.

Photography by Amber Bracken

With information originally published in The Narwhal, July 31, 2020.

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Neil Hetherington says YES

CEO of Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank

let’s start from an unusual place: agreement. We all want a country where everyone has the food they need and we don’t need food banks. But the sad reality is 8.7 million people in Canada are food insecure. The rising cost of living is far outpacing increases in wages and social supports, so more of our neighbours simply can’t afford sufficient food. I argue that food banks are essential interventions now and indeed a requirement for the lasting social policy action that will eventually put food banks out of business.

The old arguments against food banks must be dispelled. It’s said that food banks let government off the hook, yet there has been no case study that shows a jurisdiction where a food bank was shut down and the government stepped in to solve the issue. Also, some people call food banks a “Band-Aid” solution. That may be true, but that label doesn’t negate their necessity.

The first argument for food banks speaks to their effectiveness. When COVID hit, long lines formed outside food charities. They scaled to meet the extraordinary challenge, with an efficacy that any for-profit or government agency can only dream of—typically spending about $1 to distribute a meal.

But efficiency won’t end food insecurity. That can only be fought through systemic change, which charities in Canada have historically spearheaded. Before public education or healthcare, places of worship stepped in to create schools and hospitals for people who couldn’t afford these services. Charities then argued that their empathetic actions needed to become legislated rights, and Parliament agreed. Their personal experience gave them the credentials to call for systemic change.

In many respects this played out with food banks in Canada in the 1990s and 2000s. Food banks, alongside community leaders, argued for the Child Tax Benefit and the Guaranteed Income Supplement. They’d seen first-hand the people chronically requiring food banks and used that knowledge to petition for better supports. When these policies were implemented, national food bank use decreased markedly.

Because most food banks don’t receive government funds, they have an independent status that enables them to make life uncomfortable for people holding office. They can unabashedly and independently share with the public and elected officials what’s happening on the ground. When you distribute just under one million meals per week, as Daily Bread Food Bank does, you earn a seat at the policy table. The scope of our work grants us the opportunity, and obligation, to speak with governments to demand affordable housing, income supports and decent work. Food banks can apply pressure, as we did, to implement the Canada Disability Benefit, which will precipitate a big decline in food bank use once it becomes fully funded.

Food banks not only facilitate emergency food access, they are an essential part of the advocacy work that will help create the future we all desire, one in which no one goes hungry.

Elaine Power says no

Professor of kinesiology and health studies at Queen’s University

It’s a litany now so familiar that we tune it out: Food banks are desperate, unable to meet the demand for food. But despite their best intentions, food banks have inadvertently obscured the underlying problem. They direct our attention to food when the real issue is inadequate income.

Demand is “spiralling out of control,” Food Banks Canada reports. Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank is at “a breaking point.” Visits to Calgary’s Food Bank rose 200 per cent from 2019 to 2024. Nationally, over two million Canadians received food charity in March 2024, a million more than five years earlier. Food Banks Canada explains that this “unthinkable” growth can’t be sustained. Food bank usage has soared in tandem with record rates of food insecurity, now affecting over nine million Canadians, including over two million children.

While food bank demand has skyrocketed, the volume of individual donations has dropped, because the affordability crisis is affecting donors too. Corporate donations have also fallen off. Feed Ontario, the provincial food bank association, reports that almost 40 per cent of Ontario food banks have had to reduce the amount of food they give out. Nationally, almost 30 per cent of food banks ran out of food last year.

But food banks were never a solution to food insecurity (inadequate or insecure access to food). For a variety of reasons, the vast majority of food-insecure households don’t even use food banks. The food bank system is, unfortunately, scattershot. Food banks take root where there is a convenient space and a group of volunteers, not necessarily where food insecure households are. Despite their best efforts, food banks have limited capacity and hours. The variety and quantity of foods is limited. Most put strict limits on how often a household can use their services and how much food they can receive. For some Canadians, the idea of using food charity is a sign of hitting bottom, and they’d rather go hungry.

Households that use food banks remain food insecure. That’s because food banks can only provide temporary relief. Food insecurity is a symptom of the much broader household problem of inadequate income. Food-insecure households are less likely to be able to afford their necessary prescriptions. They’re more likely to fall behind in utility payments and rent, and to live in crowded, substandard housing.

The very existence of food banks has unintentionally sown the seeds of a chronic and increasingly desperate crisis. Instead of lobbying politicians to create effective income solutions to food insecurity, we’ve been busy with food drives, imagining that we just need to pitch more tins into the donation bin.

It’s hard to imagine that there are almost nine million food-insecure Canadians. The argument that we can’t close food banks because these people will go hungry ignores the fact that most food-insecure Canadians are already hungry. They’ll remain that way until we confront the real problem—poverty.

neil hetherington responds to elaine power

The Daily Bread Food Bank serves the people of Toronto. Sadly, we provide just under one million meals per week to the community. It is a staggering reality that one in 10 Torontonians now receives much-needed food from our organization and the network we support. The numbers for Alberta food banks are similar. These statistics are disheartening and maddening.

What has been uplifting is seeing volunteers, donors, advocates and staff at Daily Bread rise to the occasion. Collectively we have ensured uninterrupted weekly service of good food to 300,000 people through a shopping model that provides dignified, barrier-free access. Last year Daily Bread distributed over 43 million pounds of food to our network of member food banks, over half of which was fresh produce and protein. These nutrition-dense options can help build balanced meals, but they’re often inaccessible to people facing food insecurity.

Nationally it is a sad reality that Canada has now one food bank for every three grocery stores. The proliferation of food banks and the sophistication with which they operate has grown significantly over the decades. They are a tremendous resource to their 2.8 million clients each year. According to Statistics Canada, that client list is bigger than the number of severely food-insecure Canadians.

Some critics argue that food banks inadvertently obscure the underlying problem of food insecurity by redirecting attention to food itself rather than to the root cause: inadequate income. That critique is outdated, as food banks have taken their frontline experience to the frontlines of advocacy.

Food banks—our research and persistent lobbying within coalitions—are helping drive policy changes.

Far from distracting the public and policymakers from the root causes of food insecurity, food banks are in a unique position to document these causes and advocate for solutions that end poverty and hunger. This is exactly what we do. Throughout our networks, food banks are increasing our sophistication in research to complement what we learn from conversations with the people we serve. As a result, food banks have solid data on why Canadians need to avail themselves of food charity, who these Canadians are, and the policy interventions required to reduce lineups. Ironically, this is data that academic critics of food banks often cite. But I’m more interested when I see it cited by elected officials when they are committing to making legislative and regulatory changes to social policies. These are uplifting moments amid the despair of knowing that approximately 10 million Canadians are food insecure.

Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion. With data, you can drive change.

Over the last year, for example, Daily Bread has seen three policies come into force that have two common elements. First, and most important, each will have a positive effect on reducing food insecurity in Canada. The second is that the experiences of food banks—their research and their persistent lobbying within coalitions—helped drive these changes.

Daily Bread wrote the City of Toronto’s declaration of food insecurity as an emergency. This then resulted in a universal student nutrition program, when the city’s Vision and Strategy for a Universal School Food Program was unanimously passed.

Food banks joined disability communities to argue persuasively that someone receiving disability benefits in Canada shouldn’t be legislated to live in deep poverty. One-third of food bank clients have a disability and are expected to live on $1,400 per month; a full $1,000 below the poverty line. On July 1, 2025, the new Canada Disability Benefit began to distribute $200 per month to Canadians living with a disability.

Finally, in June 2024, changes to Canada’s immigration strategy and regulations resulted in lower growth in food bank usage in Toronto.

None of these policy interventions would have been possible without our on-the-ground experience, serving people who are food insecure. We collect data, the media amplifies it, the community is mobilized, and policies begin to change—albeit too slowly.

Canada’s food banks can walk and chew gum at the same time, as we always have. The policy wins this year were possible because of our authentic service in the community, and our amplifying what we see each day.

Food charity has always been done with humanity. I expect food charity will always be with us. But our hope at Daily Bread is that the experiences of individuals going through difficult times become briefer and recur less. The chronic use of food banks across Canada can be reduced through systemic changes. Until that day, food banks will continue to feed the need now while relentlessly advocating for social policy change.

Elaine Power responds to Neil Hetherington

Food banks were first established here in the 1980s. Why Because Canadians, living in one of the wealthiest countries in history, simply couldn’t imagine that their neighbours might be hungry. The early food bank founders expected their organizations to close once the economy recovered. Governments would surely recommit to their obligation to support Canadians’ well-being. But 44 years after the first food bank opened in Edmonton, the idea that food banks should close has become almost unimaginable.

Neil Hetherington’s willingness to speak publicly for his vision of a hunger-free Canada, without food banks, is refreshing. As he is the head of Canada’s largest food bank, his arguments for affordable housing, income supports and decent work should carry moral and persuasive authority with elected officials.

But the reality is governments aren’t paying enough attention to this public-health issue, which has profound short- and long-term effects. While Hetherington points to the new Canada Disability Benefit as a testament to food banks’ advocacy, the impact of this small supplement is uncertain. Moreover, it upholds and reinforces the artificial divide between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. The CDB’s very existence could inadvertently make it more difficult to implement other supports, such as basic income. Similarly the new National School Food Program may mean that fewer students go hungry. But their food-insecure parents and caregivers will still be unable to afford the food they and their children need at home.

Under the terms of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Canada committed to ensuring that every citizen has an adequate standard of living, enabling Canadians to purchase food along with other necessities of life. If this were the case, then the demand for food banks would fall off. Food banks could scale down and most could close.

This will happen only when Canadians are mobilized to demand government action to significantly reduce poverty and income insecurity. These are the root causes of food insecurity. Our country’s track record offers little evidence that reasoned arguments will move governments to act decisively. Getting governments to act is a matter of political power, and poor people are among the least powerful. While food bank advocacy for meaningful policy change is important, it is insufficient on its own.

What stands in the way of mobilizing more of us to demand government seriously address food insecurity?

For about the same period that food banks have existed—with a short intermission during the pandemic—we’ve been told that government itself is a problem; we shouldn’t expect it to fix things. Instead we’ve been schooled to turn to “the market” as the better problem solver, and to charity when markets fail. Over the past four decades, food banks stepped up to try to fill the gaps as governments neglected our social safety net.

A stereotype is that people in poverty should be grateful to charitable benefactors, not expect rights or justice.

Of course, we Canadians did our part, bringing non-perishable items to food drives at school, church, work. Instead of being uncomfortable with food banks—and the public policy failures they represent—we celebrate them as proof of our collective and individual kindness. Corporate food bank donors earn “good citizen” badges. Meanwhile, some of the same donors contribute to food insecurity with poorly paid jobs while actively lobbying for lower taxes, which decrease government’s ability to strengthen the social safety net.

Meanwhile, cruel Victorian myths and stereotypes persist about the causes of poverty. Instead of seeing structural and epigenetic causes, some people continue to hold the poor individually responsible for their plight—and for escaping it. The CDB suggests we might give some leeway to those with state-certified disabilities, so they have a tiny bit more income. But the stereotypes imply that those living in poverty should be grateful to charitable benefactors, and not expect rights or justice.

Some say we just “can’t afford” to reduce poverty. This ignores the fact that poverty already costs us—in the healthcare, education and justice systems. A 2019 Feed Ontario report conservatively estimated the annual cost of poverty in Ontario at up to $33-billion. It presents poverty reduction as an “investment” that lowers costs and boosts revenues for businesses and governments.

I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t have food banks. We expected that government programs would keep us afloat when tough times hit. But food banks have become part of the social wallpaper. For my students they’re normal. They can scarcely imagine an alternative. I want to live in a Canada where kindness and compassion is structural, not charitable. I want our policies to be just. We can afford this dream. We don’t need food banks to realize it—we need the political will.

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Similarly, in downtown Edmonton you’ll find metal blockers on ledges and railings to deter skateboarding. This satisfies some people, but “it restricts youth, and it restricts eyes on the street,” says Lourdes Juan, an urban planner with experience across Alberta. “Skateboarding gets a bad rap, but it’s a valid form of transportation and recreation and there’s a culture around it.” People want to use public spaces in many ways, she says. “We need to encourage this.”

A railing with an anti-skateboard stopper

Should we accommodate the messy reality of human activity or enforce a sanitized ideal An unheated bus shelter and metal “skate stoppers” cut to the heart of how we design public spaces. They represent just two visible manifestations of a broader philosophy: crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), sometimes referred to as “hostile architecture.”

Churchill Square—Edmonton’s main civic gathering space—is an example. The square, when not hosting an event, can feel sparse, concrete and unwelcoming. Its benches have armrest separators strategically placed to prevent people from lying down. Ledges and walls are fitted with those same skate stoppers. These design elements discourage use, sending a clear message about which activities are acceptable in our shared spaces.

Across downtown, sloped surfaces are fitted with inconspicuous metal pieces designed to prevent lounging. The playground at Holy Child School in wîhkwêntôwin (formerly Oliver) has an open design that eliminates “hiding places.” Tunnel slides or covered structures were excluded in favour of visibility, ignoring children’s natural love of hiding places for imaginative play.

Bench armrests to stop people from lying down

We build public libraries to freely share knowledge. Public transit enables universal mobility. Public parks provide people with respite from heat and noise. Our streets serve as stages for civic life. Yet CPTED principles are proliferating in Edmonton. This raises questions about who shapes our public realm and whose interests they serve. When we design primarily against perceived threats, what do we lose in terms of human connection, inclusion, spontaneity and joy?

Edmonton is one of the few Canadian cities to formally include CPTED in its development approval process. “Edmonton was a trailblazer,” says Robert Lipka, an urban planner with the City who previously worked for the City of Toronto. He says Edmonton had a CPTED document in the 1990s, even as it often went unused. But today development permits in specific zoning areas require a CPTED review.

“First-generation CPTED started in the 1970s,” says Mulder. “Cities were dealing with a lot of social unrest:, with deficits in the built environment leading to graffiti and vandalism. They looked at physical components such as lighting and enclosed spaces.” This approach, heavily influenced by policing perspectives, emphasized deterrents and surveillance as solutions.

“The first generation was more ‘target-hardening,’ ” says constable Shannon Harrigan of Edmonton Police Service (EPS), referring to barriers, fences and cameras designed to impede criminal activity. Cities installed bright lights, played loud muzak and removed tree branches near the ground to improve visibility.

“Second-generation CPTED came about in the 1990s and 2000s,” says Mulder. “It looked at social determinants of crime where people were feeling free to behave badly. Why was that What could we do about it?” The reframing moved beyond physical interventions to consider underlying social factors contributing to crime and perceptions of safety.

To make public spaces both safer and more usable involves reconciling different professional perspectives. “Every architect is an amateur sociologist trying to understand people,” Mulder says. “The police also have their view and lens based on their experience.” They spend a lot of time in public spaces themselves. Their framework, says Mulder, seems to criminalize certain behaviours rather than explore the tension between different users’ needs. It reinforces “a binary of some people’s needs as ‘good’ and others’ as ‘bad,’ ” he says, creating a dichotomy that fails to capture the complexity of public-space usage.

When we design primarily against threats, we lose public access to the commons.

The EPS’s Harrigan conducts CPTED training and performs security assessments for community leagues and not-for-profits. She says her approach is evolving beyond traditional policing perspectives to incorporate insights from urban planners, social workers and community advocates. She says workshops and collaborative assessments with community leagues have deepened her understanding of how security measures impact different people: “Every course I take from another organization shows me what they’re doing right, what works, what doesn’t.” She says more-nuanced CPTED assessments now consider not just crime prevention but how security measures might negatively impact members of the public.

During a CPTED training session with the Delton Community League, Harrigan said group homes, public transit and low-income housing “may lead to crime.” A community member offered a counterpoint: “Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you’re bad, and everyone needs somewhere to be.”

Mulder says the broader context is important: “Our culture privileges the private realm; ownership, privacy, private, mine.” He offers a contrast: “If you go to Mexico… at night people are out, stores are open. Social elements in the public realm dissuade public disorder.” Cultural attitudes about public space shape perceptions of safety and appropriate use.

Some projects get the balance right. Chelsea Whitty, a planner with Dialog, worked on the new Calgary Central Library. That project was designed to balance security with extraordinary public access. The design process included librarians, security consultants and community representatives. Whitty says cross-disciplinary dialogue is very important. “Everyone sees it through their own lens. But we can all have an open, frank discussion about your priorities and my priorities and how we can actually work together.” The library is today beloved by Calgarians and was a featured tourist destination in the New York Times, dubbed a “gleaming jewel box” with a “stunning oval of snowflake-shaped windows and arching wood.” The collaborative approach incorporated security measures without compromising the library’s welcoming atmosphere.

However, there’s still a disparity between perceived danger and actual risk. “There’s a really interesting conversation around perception of safety and comfort versus actual lack of safety,” Whitty says. One person feels uncomfortable when an apparently homeless person is “sitting on the stairs in the sun because it’s warm—but isn’t actually doing anything wrong.” This discomfort with mere presence rather than bad behaviour shows how safety concerns can function as a proxy for a generalized discomfort with difference.

Some elements of hostile architecture, such as skate stoppers and bench armrests, are noticeable. But other, subtler elements also impact our experience of public space. Edmonton’s redesigned Stadium LRT station, for example, represents what Lipka considers “one of the best examples of CPTED applied to public design in Edmonton.” Its security-focused features create a complex trade-off for users. The station’s extensive use of glass, lack of traditional seating, hard angular surfaces and openness create excellent sightlines—a core principle intended to deter criminal activity through visibility.

“The design makes people feel exposed, which potentially prevents issues like drug use, graffiti and harassment,” says Lipka. “But these same features make it uncomfortably cold during our harsh winters.” The station’s minimalist aesthetic, devoid of plants, decorative elements or visual warmth, prioritizes surveillance over comfort. The redesign brought positive changes: replacing confusing underground ramps with visible, accessible entrances and adding a security office and public bathrooms. But Stadium Station embodies the tension at the heart of CPTED application. It’s a space simultaneously more accessible and more inhospitable, safer by some measures yet less welcoming by others.

A “leaning bench” that prevents sitting or loitering

Downtown Edmonton is changing. “I worked here before COVID,” says City of Edmonton planner Robert Lipka. More recently, “I came downtown and thought—What happened?” Violent incidents in downtown rose from 13,224 in 2019 to 16,652 in 2024. According to EPS chief Dale McFee, “Perceptions of safety are tied as much to the disorder [people] see as the actual crime they experience.” Difficult times create a feedback loop: as economic pressures exacerbate homelessness and mental health challenges, and as downtowns see fewer office workers and shoppers, disorder becomes more visible, prompting more security measures, which further deter visitors.

The cycle is difficult to break. Removing a bench might stop someone from sleeping there overnight, but it can also deter the elderly, the disabled or people who just need a rest from walking through a neighbourhood. Public space is diminished for everyone.

Lourdes Juan says “hostile” design ultimately undermines its own goals: “The design is so punitive. Don’t go there. You’re not allowed to go there.” About Chinatown, she says: “They’ve removed all the benches and trees, and now you just have no one around.” The absence of public amenities doesn’t solve problems, she argues; it merely displaces problems and people.

We want public spaces that are both secure and welcoming. As Harrigan says, “We want trees. We want nature. But just do it the right way.” Mulder says “beauty still matters,” even in security-conscious design.

“I’m optimistic,” says Lipka. “I see a lot of opportunity for change.” The pandemic intensified social disorder, but it also amplified our collective need for shared spaces. By moving beyond reactive approaches, by considering more perspectives and by addressing underlying social needs, we can create public spaces that enhance everyone’s safety while nurturing the connections that make cities worth living in. Our pursuit of security needn’t come at the expense of our shared humanity.

Lauren Kalinowski is a freelance writer who lives and works in Edmonton. She is also a contributor to Edify magazine.

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