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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Growing up in the shabbiest part of the North End of Winnipeg in an immigrant home, I was both inspired and confounded by the story of my great-grandfather Eliezer Gruber having been the first founder of a Jewish agricultural colony in Manitoba and a celebrated Winnipeg rabbi. Several times we visited the stunning mausoleum erected to him in Shaarey Zedek cemetery, the largest Jewish cemetery in the city. Meanwhile we were living in a slummy house converted into three small apartments that would be expropriated and torn down by the city in the late 1960s to make room for a public housing development that was never actually built.

What made no sense to me was how it was that my great-grandfather was such a big macher (bigshot) in Manitoba at the turn of the 20th century, and yet my baba (grandmother) and all her children remained in a mud hut in a shtetl (Jewish village) in Polish-occupied Ukraine until they immigrated to Canada in the 1930s. Cholojow was situated 62 kilometres northeast of Lviv and had a population of 4,151 in 1921, of whom 793 lived in the Jewish ghetto. The story of the family’s emigration from there had Biblical overtones. About 1932, the couple who owned Ideal Electric in Winnipeg prepaid the travel costs for my dad’s two sisters, both in their early twenties, to work in the shop. My baba’s younger sister was the woman of the couple. The deal was that they would work to pay off that travel, assembling lamps, and then start accumulating earnings to bring the rest of the family to Winnipeg. But after a few years the owners decided to make aliyah to Palestine, failing to leave the girls the money they had earned to bring more family members to the city. The new owners, also relatives, said they had not received the saved wages of the young women and they would have to start all over in their effort to bring family out of central Europe. Only in late 1937, when my dad was 15, did he, one of his brothers and baba come to Canada. The interruption in funds to bring family made it impossible to bring the oldest brother, for whom I’m named in Yiddish, along with his wife and child to Winnipeg. They all died in the Holocaust.

My dad, with zero formal education and not a word of English, went to work as a sewer in a shmata (garment) factory. When the Second World War came, he joined the army. His post-war veterans bonus went to providing dowries for his sisters and a house for baba with two one-bedroom apartments to provide her an income. We lived in one of those apartments until I was 9 and my mom was pregnant with the fifth of her six children. At that point my parents bought a dumpy house of their own with a second floor they could rent out to pay a mortgage. My dad often worked three jobs, the main one being a labourer at the CPR.

My knowledge of my great-grandfather Eliezer, apart from the words on his shrine and a few hints from my dad, was restricted to two letters that my dad had inherited. One was from Eliezer to his wife in Cholojow, the shtetl where she remained, in 1880. He warned her that there was no future for Jews in central Europe. “Men vet alle zebrennen,” he wrote in Yiddish letters. “You are all going to burn.”  They had married in 1857, when he was 15, but he spent as much time afterwards in Britain, where he learned to speak English, as in Cholojow. He returned home often enough to keep her constantly pregnant, with 10 live children completing the family in the late 1880s. My baba, likely born in 1884, was the ninth child. After Eliezer moved to New York City in 1892 and then Winnipeg by 1898, he apparently continued to write to my great-grandmother, urging her to come to North America along with her children at his expense. The letter from her to Eliezer in the early 1900s proclaimed that the “very soil of Canada is unkosher.” When I read that, at age 15, I said to my dad: “She’s a religious nutcase.” Later I would understand that her statement was only superficially about religion.

Two of the 10 Cholojow children did come to Canada. But I was 30 when I learned why his wife stayed put. Two old crones had twice shooed away my older brother and me from playing near the shrine. “Who were those women?” I asked dad. He laughed: “They’re your relatives.” But I had gone to many extended-family events and never seen them there. “They’re from his other family,” said dad. “The old goat was a bigamist. He had 10 kids with his first wife and seven with the second.” Lehr, who didn’t uncover the bigamy, speaks of only six kids. There was a history lesson in my dad’s revelation. Great-grand-baba did not mean God had fouled the land of Canada; she meant that her two-timing husband had done that.

He went on to make a success of himself. Lehr notes that he was regarded as a wise rabbi by his congregants, even though an article in the Morning Telegram on February 26, 1901, questioned whether he was a rabbi at all and strongly suggested that he was at bottom a conman. Having failed to sell all the land in Gruber to Canadians, Eliezer Gruber visited American Jewish communities and offered to sell town lots for $100 to $200, with one-third to be paid upfront, the rest in instalments. After he sold a lot to a Jewish man in Dubuque, Iowa, the man made a complaint to the authorities, and Gruber was arrested in Des Moines and charged with fraud. A Des Moines rabbi who initially tried to get him released told the Telegram that Gruber was lying when he claimed that he was in the city to preach to the Jewish congregation, not to sell land. Gruber told the newspaper that the complainant was influenced by “lies in Jewish papers published in New York. They don’t like me down there. They are persecuting me…. They can’t stand to see we are building up my colony.” But the Des Moines rabbi told the Telegram, “I don’t believe he is a rabbi at all.” Lehr also notes that there is no evidence of Gruber ever having been ordained and suggests his colonization schemes were motivated by commercial gain, not religion. He required his colonists, who, like him, received free farmland, to purchase land on his unfarmed land to build their houses there rather than on their free land.

When Gruber died in 1919 in Winnipeg at the age of 76 or 77, he was apparently well off. He willed his wealth to his 17 children equally. But family lore is that the nine children in Winnipeg (two from the first family and the seven from the second) collaborated to claim that none of the remaining Cholojow children were still alive. The Winnipeg authorities may have believed that, because during the First World War Jewish wartime conscripts in the Austro-Hungarian army died in large numbers, first during the fighting and then from a plague that followed. My baba certainly survived, but her husband came back to Cholojow from the war, as my dad said, “Not quite right.” He died in 1925, age 36, when my dad was 3. They survived on my baba’s work acquiring chickens from local farmers and then going by horse and buggy to Lemburg (Lviv) to sell them to the Jewish community, who comprised a third of the big city’s population. But they lived poorly, because baba gave half of what she earned to the Talmudic students who, in dad’s view, were social parasites.

Their lack of inheritance may have been a blessing in disguise. Baba’s younger sister was one of the two inheritors from the first family and her money went into the establishment of Ideal Electric. The existence of that firm and her willingness to bring my two aunts to work in the company, if only for peanuts, ended up saving my dad’s family, who might have been less keen to leave Cholojow had they had an inheritance and not been close to starving. So, while great-granddad was likely a conman, his money ultimately explains why my dad’s family did not stay behind and become Holocaust victims. Of course, the land which provided some of that conman income was stolen Indigenous land in a dispossession Canadians still largely deny. So, I’ll thank Indigenous elders along with conman Rabbi Eliezer Gruber for the fact that I ever got to be born at all.

Alvin Finkel is professor emeritus at Athabasca University, co-founder of the Alberta Labour History Institute, and author of Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality (Lorimer, 2024).

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Then, she reaches over and hands them a bunch of sunflower seeds. “Take these seeds and put them in your pockets, so at least sunflowers will grow when you all lie down here.”

Three years on, Ukraine is still fighting, still resisting. The human costs have been dire. But almost no one, in February of 2022, thought Ukraine would be able to withstand the Russian invasion and fight back so ferociously.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the extraordinary bravery and wit of that one Ukrainian woman, and what she came to symbolize about individual courage and national resolve.

When Donald Trump first started making “jokes” about Canada’s independence, calling us the 51st state, referring to our head of government not as prime minister but as governor, I, like most Canadians, just rolled my eyes. It seemed pretty obvious he was trolling us, trying to get a rise out of us. And it seemed like the mature and rational thing for us to refuse to take the bait. Trump is and always has been an attention junkie. Responding to his goad, giving him the attention he craves, felt like the wrong response.

Over the course of my lifetime I’ve dealt with a little brother. I’ve raised a toddler. I’ve trained two dogs. And the thing you learn, when they misbehave, or whine, or tease you, is to ignore them, and to not give them the reaction they’re looking for.

Trump, even now, is testing our national resolve—and weighing our capacity for humiliation.

But Trump’s online assaults on our sovereignty didn’t stop. The snarky put-downs went on and on.

Then the American media began normalizing this bonkers discourse. “The president-elect has suggested a territorial expansion into Panama, Greenland and Canada,” CNN reported. “If he’s serious, it would rival the Louisiana Purchase.”

Territorial expansion That’s a euphemism you could well imagine TASS or Russia Today employing to discuss Putin’s invasion of Crimea.

But then, the most disturbing twist. High-profile Canadian conservatives starting publicly celebrating and promoting the idea of some kind of latter-day Anschluss, gleefully talking up the economic potential of being absorbed into the United States. With deluded naïveté, they seemed to believe that Canada—with their help—could negotiate some kind of partnership, instead of understanding that a Trump-led America would never see us as equals.

It was a craven display. How embarrassing to watch these high-profile Canadian politicians, business leaders and pundits rolling over, eagerly exposing their bellies to the most dominant dog at the dog park.

How Trump (and Putin) must be laughing at the sight of these Canadian quislings, slobbering over themselves to sell out their country for 30 pieces of silver.

The sad spectacle really made me wonder. Would we, as Canadians, ever have the resolve of the Ukrainian people, to stand up for our country if push came to shove Would I, a middle-aged woman in a parka and a toque, have the courage to confront armed invaders, with nothing more than a pocket full of sunflower seeds for protection?

To be clear, I don’t seriously believe that the Americans, under Trump, are ever likely to stage an armed invasion. I’m not expecting soldiers to march from Sweetgrass through Coutts. No. The attacks will be more subtle. Trump and his government will be looking to undermine our political sovereignty and our capacity for self-determination in hundreds of ways, on issues from trade and investment to immigration and refugee policy, from environmental regulation to national defence. Trump, even now, is testing our national resolve—and weighing our capacity for humiliation.

And in this moment of trial we need to find ways to transcend our ideological and party differences. We need our premiers and our federal leaders to be working in concert, or at least in grudging cooperation, to protect our national interests and to remind us all—and to remind the whole world—of what makes Canada so remarkable.

We won’t do that by scoring on our own net, nor by selling out the principles and values that make us who we are. The next four years are going to be challenging for the whole world, and the rules-based international order we have known for decades will itself be under siege.

When the world, when our allies, look to Canada for moral leadership and moral example, I hope we will stand ready to provide it. And ready to plant the seeds for a future we can be proud to call our own.

Paula Simons is an independent senator and the host of the podcast Alberta Unbound. She lives in Edmonton.

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It started with a couple of Tucker fanboys whose companies sponsored the event, one of whom was the president of the Bow Valley Credit Union, paying homage to the ostracized Fox News host by assuring him that “We’re here because, just like you [i.e., the Crowd], we share your values. And we care about what’s going on in our province.”

Then a giant screen lit up the dark conference room, and a larger than life virtual Tucker imparted some timeless wisdom: “The second you decide to tell the truth about something, you are filled with this supernatural, this power from somewhere else” that “makes you stronger.”

Down on the stage itself, the actual Tucker strode confidently out of the shadows, engulfed in the deafening rhymes of “American Badass” by “his friend” Kid Rock, whose songs contain a litany of dog whistles and catcalls for the titillation of the alt-right: “No Rogaine in the propane flow / The chosen one, I’m the living proof / With the gift of gab from the city of truth / I jabbed and stabbed and knocked critics back / And I did not stutter when I said that”…

The Crowd of roughly 4,000 stood in unison and showered the honoured guest with adulation. I had committed to myself that I would not stand for this man, but my neighbours’ glances at my seated position and the growing fervour of the Crowd, along with my trepidation at being outed as a MAGA-opposed journalist, weakened my resolve, though I did manage to refrain from clapping.

Tucker Carlson’s attestations are some combination of stupid, spurious and unfair. They’re also dangerous.

“Thank you, truly, for having me,” Tucker said with a cackle and a smile. “That was the wildest intro I’ve had, ever.”

As a professional propagandist, Tucker centred his message on “Truth,” but his first order of business was to butter up the crowd. He started by confessing something he had “never” shared publicly: that he was, in fact, part Canadian. This, he said, explained his long fascination with and concern for Canada, and the reason he had come to “liberate Canada” from the clutches of our dictatorial prime minister.

“I’ve been everywhere in your country, and I think it’s a remarkable place.” That includes Calgary, a city he apparently has visited many times, “because of your mountains, which I found just beyond belief, really the prettiest places I’ve ever been. This is the prettiest country I’ve ever been in.” The Crowd, sufficiently flattered and fawning, despite the backhanded compliments about Canada and Canadians, were now ready to hear the gospel according to Tucker.

The most impressive thing about Tucker’s “Liberating Canada” rant was just how many right-wing talking points, massaged for a Canadian audience, he was able to cram into such a short speech. He relentlessly attacked Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who he said was a “weird little cross-dresser” and the audience’s “enemy,” and whose government should be opposed to the “maximum extent of your ability.” (Rousing cheers!)

He complained about the federal government’s alleged erosion of our civil liberties, “not the ones granted to you by the Crown, but the ones granted to you by God.” (Nodding heads, a smattering of applause.) These included not only freedom of speech, but also freedom to own guns to protect ourselves from rising crime rates. (Big applause!) He claimed that all media in Canada was state media, and therefore biased toward the left. “I can tune in any hour of the day to learn that I’m racist for driving an SUV and not being trans.” (Knee-slapping and hoots of laughter.)

Such attestations, of course, are some combination of stupid, spurious and unfair; they’re also dangerous because of the context in which Tucker embeds them. Tucker made it very clear in his introduction that afternoon how divisive the meta-message was going to be. “The main thing that I want to say in the short time I’m allotted today is that you should recognize what is happening to you. This is not a political debate to which you’ve been invited to participate. This is a destruction of you and your culture and your beliefs and your children and your future as a country.”

The appropriate response to such utter BS might have been silence punctuated with the odd hoot of “You’re nuts!” Instead, the Crowd lurched to its feet, thousands of hands clapping in a collective appreciation of a man who, it would seem, expressed their “shared values.”

This is when the darkness became darker. Tucker turned the opportunity to critique BC’s safe injection sites policy into a tale of the government giving fentanyl to your kids. And “if they are giving your children fentanyl without telling you, they’re trying to kill your children, which are your inheritance, so the only meaningful thing you will ever produce on earth.”

He then moved on to the federal government’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program, which, he maintained, is encouraging Canadians that are not actually terminally ill “to submit to being killed by the government, who won’t release the statistics. Like, what is that What is that!?”

“Murder!” yells a voice from the crowd.

“Yeah, it’s genocide, that’s exactly what it is. It’s killing large groups of people.”

At this point, my friend Jim and I turned to look at each other with total disbelief. I had invited Jim to accompany me to Tucker’s Calgary stop on his “Sworn Enemies Tour” for a little companionship and moral support in what I knew would be a challenging environment. Jim lives in Canmore and is a retired American environmentalist who cut his teeth as a young activist in Utah by standing in front of ultraconservative John Birch Society meetings and explaining why the Vietnam War was wrong. Later, he would tell me he had felt more afraid in the Convention Centre that night than he ever had at a John Birch meeting.

“I felt like a Jewish tailor at a Hitler rally,” Jim said.

“And who are those people [being killed by the government], by the way?” Tucker asked. “Again, we don’t really know, because the government hasn’t released the stats. What percentage of those were born in Canada I bet right around 100 per cent.”

Where is he going with this?

“How many people who arrived in Canada in the last 10 years have opted into the MAID program I don’t know, but I bet it’s right around zero.”

The Crowd is very silent now, in that you-can-hear-a-pin-drop sense of the word. Can you hear the dog whistle?

“I bet there is zero conversation about that in this country, because I know this country, I know what it’s like. It’s too horrible. No one wants to talk about it. You should talk about it. But more than anything, you should internalize the message of that, which is: They hate me. They hate me to the point they are willing to kill me, which they are.”

Welcome to the great replacement theory, reimagined for the Canadian mind.

We had to stand in line for an hour and a half to get into the rally, which gave me ample time to observe those who would become the Crowd, and they appeared to be a totally normal gathering of Calgarians, the kind of people you might encounter on a late Friday afternoon stroll down Stephen Avenue Mall. A few attendees wore their hearts on their sleeves: three “Proud Member of a Small Fringe Minority” sweatshirts, some Christian private-school T-shirts, and the usual “I Heart Alberta Oil” swag, but mostly it was fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and couples, mostly older men paired up with (much) younger women. The overwhelming majority of the audience were white men, of course, typically macho guys in upscale ersatz cowboy outfits, as well as numerous snappily dressed business casuals on long lunch breaks, decked out in their uniforms of white button-downs, crisp blue blazers and pointy brown shoes.

And now, here they are, cheering as Tucker attacks the CBC as part of the “woke crowd” that “hate[s] you, that’s what they’re saying. They hate you. They are saying, you are bad. That’s exactly what they’re saying, don’t lie to yourself.”

There were many more outrageous claims, ludicrous innuendoes and pernicious dog whistles: about how immigrants were diluting the voting power of (white) Canadians “who are vested in that country, people who were born there, who have lived there long-term, who understand the history of the culture of the country, who are bought in,” and how (white) Christians are similarly being persecuted. All of this persecution is being done, apparently, under the guise of public safety, “a euphemism for hard-edge fascism, actually,” said Tucker. “And frankly, I’m a little more comfortable with the old-fashioned variety, where guys in tight uniforms goose-step through your towns. At least you know who you’re fighting, and you know what it’s going to take to liberate your town.”

When I first heard that our premier had agreed to join Tucker on stage, I, like every Albertan I knew, was appalled.

I remember being dragged by my father to the Billy Graham Crusade at McMahon Stadium in the summer of 1981 as a 13-year-old boy. I don’t remember being affected one way or another, but over seven nights, more than 164,000 people came to listen to what the Calgary Sun called Graham’s much-needed gospel of “belief and hope” during an economic downturn that saw increasing rates of divorce, suicide and crime.

But Tucker is a proselytizer of a very different kind. And the mainstream media in Canada consistently underestimates him. Most coverage of the January 24 rally ignored Tucker’s hateful rhetoric in favour of what Premier Danielle Smith had to say in her interview with him. CBC’s The National framed the story around the political risk to Premier Smith for consorting with what Erin Collins referred to as a “peddler of misinformation,” a rather weak label for someone that Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and the author of How Fascism Works, has unreservedly branded as the latest in a long line of American fascists.

Like every good storyteller, Tucker constantly circled back to the beginning, where educated elites and leftist ideologues are trying to castrate our children or kill them with fentanyl. “They are not people who are trying to help; they are people who are trying to hurt you. Anyone who goes after your children, anyone who encourages you to have fewer children, is trying to make you extinct. It’s literally that simple.”

And the only appropriate response is violence. “How do you think [“attacks” on children] would fly in Serbia?” he wondered aloud. “You wouldn’t even get to the next sentence before you got shot.” (Laughter.) “Because you’re trying to kill someone’s kids! Your average Serb, whatever you think of them, doesn’t have generations of therapy talk that acts as a logical intermediary [to] seeing what’s actually going on. They’re trying to kill my kids, I’m the father, I won’t allow it, I will lay my life down to prevent it. It’s literally that simple.”

The Crowd stands, wild with applause, while Premier Smith waits in the shadows offstage to join Tucker for an interview.

When I first heard that our premier had agreed to join Tucker on stage, I, like every Albertan I knew, was appalled. But upon reflection, Tucker and Smith do have a lot in common. Indeed, before she entered provincial politics, Smith was the host of a Tucker-inspired radio talk show that, in the words of former Conservative MP Lee Richardson, “stoked division, hate and fear in listeners, with negative rhetoric, culture wars and conspiracy theories. The more provocative, outrageous or extreme the views expressed, the higher the ratings.”

Shortly after she became leader of the UCP, and thus premier, Smith gave an address to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce and then sat down for a chat with the chamber’s president. She joked that her principal secretary had “a Ph.D. in propaganda” but only “the good kind of propaganda.” She must have been referring to the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars the Alberta government invests in pro-oil, anti-climate and anti-vaccine nonsense.

Since then, Smith has demonstrated a half-hearted commitment to the truth, a tendency to misrepresent history and a propensity to align herself with questionable characters such as David Parker and his Take Back Alberta movement. “Alberta is the heartland of conservatism in this country and the last stand against what we’re up against,” Parker told the CBC before the January 24 show, “which is this totalitarian creep of socialism.”

Today, however, Smith would be on her best behaviour, the genteel Thatcher to Tucker’s chilling Goebbels. She started off by defending her right to sit down with a hate-spewing and divisive propagandist because she doesn’t agree with every word of any of her interviewees, and then batted away any questions about the “human rights” violations represented by the arrest of the Coutts Four for allegedly conspiring to kill RCMP officers. She did use the moment to say what she apparently wanted the world to hear, that “I think we should just double down and double our oil and gas production”—this, less than a month after the end of the hottest year on record.

But what possible benefit did Premier Smith stand to gain by partaking in an interview with a hate-spewing fascist And why did she volunteer to introduce him again at the Edmonton show that night, a show she wasn’t even scheduled to attend?

The obvious answer is that she and Tucker (and fellow travellers W. Brett Wilson, Jordan Peterson and Conrad Black) are birds of a feather, and that the Alberta leg of Tucker’s “Sworn Enemies Tour” was the perfect trial balloon to test extreme ideas in the hope that they might one day become mainstream, a popular strategy among populists that allows leaders to slowly but surely instill a new vision of what is possible and acceptable.

Three days after the Tucker rallies in Calgary and Edmonton, Premier Smith promised Albertans a new “parental rights” policy that not only discriminates against trans and gender-diverse children and youth but is, in the estimation of two MRU professors published at The Conversation, “the most extensive, draconian and unbalanced proposal of any conservative province to date.”

Coincidence I think not.

A couple of days after surviving Tucker, I sent a short summary of what I had experienced to a bunch of friends and colleagues. Predictably most were outraged, but a few responses surprised me. A friend from high school in the 1980s who had attended the Calgary rally suggested “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinions.”

Another long-time friend from Calgary, while acknowledging that it’s “chilling that guys I think I share values with are falling under that spell,” also admitted, “I’m angry about some things too… and the radical left can be just as repulsive in a less obvious way.”

On the way out of the event I asked a few folks what they thought about the rally. The response was unanimous: “Great!”

Who might he align with When pressed, Friend B reminded me that “Canada has all the extremes. A normal dude like me feels somewhat separated from reality with some of the things being pushed down my throat. This is a minor example… but there is now a basket of menstrual products on the counter in the men’s room at work… I won’t be rioting, but it’s a minor aggravation that seems unnecessary to me and it’s the pushback against the ‘wokeness’ of it all that appeals to the Tucker crowd.”

Perhaps the most informative response was from Ruben Nelson, who grew up in Calgary and became an internationally recognized futurist who has spent the better part of his adult life trying to understand the forces that are now reshaping our lives, our world and our future. “I now conclude that what we are seeing is not simply an example of extremists having a night on the town. Rather, we are caught up in a long-term, stealthy effort by committed folks to ‘groom’ Albertans (and any others who will play) so that, voluntarily, more and more of us come to tolerate these folks as ‘somewhat offensive, but within what is now normal.’ Once Albertans accept these folks as part of the normal, and therefore legitimate, discourse, these folks own us.

“They’ve been at it for decades, and to date there is not enough in sight, let alone public outrage, to create an effective defence against them.”

On the way out of the Convention Centre I asked a few folks what they thought about the rally. The response was unanimous: “Great!” One young business casual, wearing the standard-issue pointy brown shoes and white button-down, this time under a tortoise-shell jacket instead of a blue blazer, gushed “I could have sat there for another two hours!”

Outside, in the disinfecting sunlight and fresh air, Jim and I ran into a lone protester in a well-worn red hoodie. He refused to provide his name, and as we chatted for a bit he confided to me that he was going to college and hoped to become a journalist. His sign explained why: “PREMIER SMITH’S MENTOR TUCKER CARLSON IS A LIAR.”

Two older men, well dressed and silver haired, overheard us and scoffed, “Enjoy the pedophilia.”

Journalists scoured the milling attendees for quotes. Two older women, who also withheld their names, told the Toronto Star that everyone needed to listen to Tucker because he wasn’t afraid to tell the truth. One of them paraphrased part of Tucker’s conclusion that “your timidity needs to be replaced by bravery…. [Cheers and applause.] The first thing that you need to do, before changing anything in your country, is to change everything about your heart. You have to be—right?!—ready for a contest where the stakes are existential.”

A light came on in her eyes and she said, “If I can make a difference with one person and that one person tells another person, it’ll just do this.” And then she spread her arms wide and twinkled her fingers, suggesting how Tucker’s fascistic ideas could travel by word of mouth until they consumed the entire world.

Jeff Gailus grew up in Calgary and now lives in Montana. He is the author of Little Black Lies (RMB, 2012).

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Here’s the hard answer.

Under the terms of Canada’s constitution, cities are but “creatures” of the provinces. Municipalities, no matter how big, have no constitutional protection against provincial laws that might change their structures, functions or financial resources, with or without their consent. Indeed, Canada’s courts have found that municipalities have no legal or political autonomy. That means their powers are subject to abolition or repeal by provincial legislatures.

It is an absurd state of affairs.  Toronto’s population is more than twice the size of Manitoba’s. More people live in Calgary than in all of Saskatchewan. Red Deer’s population isn’t much less than Prince Edward Island’s. Yet even the smallest provinces have powerful constitutional rights and protections, not to mention lucrative funding deals with the federal government.

Canada’s municipalities have no legal or political autonomy. This is an absurd state of affairs.

But municipalities large and small are the Cinderellas of Confederation, forbidden to go to the constitutional ball.

It makes no sense when you consider that municipalities are the economic engines of our provinces and our country. Nor when you consider all the responsibilities that have been downloaded to cities and towns over the decades. It’s municipal governments that must respond first to natural disasters, including those spurred by climate change. Whether we’re talking about floods or wildfires or violent storms, it’s local governments that must provide the emergency services, then pick up the pieces and rebuild their communities.

Cities and towns are likewise first responders when it comes to rebuilding and retrofitting infrastructure to withstand the impacts of climate change—from retooling storm sewers, to building reservoirs and dikes, to depopulating flood plains.

Cities and towns build our social infrastructure too. In multicultural Alberta, where immigration is essential to our economic future, it’s local governments that help newcomers adapt. As our urban Indigenous population booms, municipalities wrestle with the realities of reconciliation. Local leaders deal first-hand with the twin dilemmas of homelessness and drug addiction in the face of the opioid crisis. And our cities must respond to the challenge of ensuring affordable housing for young working Canadian families.

These poor “creatures” have been fighting for decades for the respect and resources they need—even while collecting a fraction of the taxes that federal and provincial governments do. And those tax bases have been hard hit by the aftershocks of COVID, the hollowing out of downtown towers, the emptying out of traditional retail. Calgary still has the highest downtown office vacancy rate in the country, at 30 per cent, compared to 18 per cent nationally. Edmonton is faring a bit better, with a vacancy rate of about 21 per cent. But that’s still above the national average—and it puts pressure on cities to raise residential tax rates, which puts a squeeze on homeowners.

It’s not only big cities such as Edmonton and Calgary that are struggling. In 2019 the Rural Municipalities of Alberta found an unprecedented $81-million on property taxes from oil and gas companies had gone unpaid to small towns and counties across the province. By January of 2020 the same body reported that rural municipalities were facing a shortfall of $173-million in such unpaid taxes. By end of 2023 the RMA’s members reported that at least $251.8-million of municipal property taxes had gone unpaid by the energy industry.

Small wonder that many Alberta municipalities have been keen to strike deals with the federal government, deals which funnel money directly to them, without provincial gatekeeping—and small wonder many are pushing back against the UCP’s proposals to throttle such grant programs.

But this isn’t just an issue of a fight between a particular premier and certain mayors. It’s really about the constitutional inequity at the heart of this country, which leaves cities—even cities with millions of residents—locked in a feudal relationship with their provincial overlords. Meantime, local councils struggle on, doing the essential, often thankless work their citizens need and demand. But if we want to prepare for the environmental, economic and social challenges ahead, we must free our cities and unleash their remarkable capacity to lead the way.

Paula Simons is an independent senator for Alberta. The report of her Senate inquiry into the state of Canada’s municipalities will be released in September 2024.

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Before all of that: 2007. The political baseline then, in Calgary as in the province as a whole, was stagnation. Government as a series of shrugs and self-congratulations. Who remembers what Dave Bronconnier, the last person to sit in the mayor’s chair, stood for What his vision for the city was Who remembers voting in the 2007 municipal election (I do. It was a pointless errand en route to something more worthwhile, like dropping payment for a gas bill in the mail. We used to do that too, then, not so long ago—pay our bills by mail.) In 2007 the incumbent mayor’s only serious opposition was a multi-millionaire dogged by rumours of shady business dealings in Kenya who bought a little more than 10 per cent of the vote. Incumbents were returned in 9 of the 12 wards, two of them by acclamation.

Does it overstate the case to say no one really cared in 2007 Voter turnout was 33 per cent. It had been even lower in the 2004 election. Maybe it doesn’t even overstate it to say no one cared about municipal politics the whole decade.

It certainly felt like no one cared. I was doing research back then for a small group called Sustainable Calgary, and the consensus among municipal-level progressive non-profits was that the problem wasn’t a lack of non-profits producing reports full of good ideas but a yawning chasm between ideas and implementation. Civic engagement seemed all but non-existent. And so a bunch of us got together to create a little conference called CivicCamp to try to figure out how to overcome the inertia of municipal politics, and one of the people who helped organize it was a civic-minded business prof from Mount Royal University named Naheed Nenshi. And nothing was the same in Calgary politics after that.

So, yes, let’s be clear about the baseline. The baseline was a shrug, a yawn, a backroom deal, a 20-year neighbourhood development permit after half an hour of idle debate. And let’s be clear as well that the change following the 2010 municipal election was seismic. However anyone might rate the Nenshi years in Calgary, there is no denying they were the Nenshi years.

That’s how it began—the first flush of optimism in a roaring boomtown. A great purple wave carried a candidate who initially polled nearly at zero to victory in a 2010 campaign that used youth and diversity and newfangled social media to wash over the city’s inertia and land its man in the mayor’s chair. It ends this year, amid great anxiety, in a busted boomtown reeling from the pandemic, a city whose political climate feels some days like a toxic cloud. In early April Nenshi announced he wouldn’t seek a fourth term. “There are many voices that haven’t always felt heard,” he said, “and it felt like the right time to make some room.”

I’m not at all objective on this subject, to be clear. Nenshi is not a close enough friend that we share confidences—I learned he wasn’t running again, as anyone else might, when the news broke on Twitter—but he is close enough that he’s handed me a gift of his mother’s excellent samosas in my living room and it feels a little odd referring to him as Nenshi, per journalistic convention, and not Naheed, as I’ve often greeted him socially.

A great purple wave carried a candidate who initially polled nearly at zero to victory in a campaign that used youth and diversity and newfangled social media to wash over the city’s inertia.

I’m glad for my friend Naheed that he’s stepping down, because the job seemed to be visibly grinding him down in his last term and because a fully recharged Naheed has so much to bring to whatever he chooses to do next. I’m sad for Nenshi and his constituents, because he will leave the mayor’s chair at a pivotal moment in the city’s (and the world’s) history. And whatever else, we know after 11 years how he would lead us through change, and it was pretty damn good leadership in most respects, and I’m worried for Calgary in its absence.

To begin to wrestle with Nenshi’s legacy, I asked him what he thought it might be. Nenshi is not cagey in the way of a classic backroom politician, but he does sometimes say things those kind of politicians say. And so he answered, at first, with a cagey politician’s line: “I never really thought about my legacy.” And then he expanded on it, as is his professorial tendency: “When someone asks me whether or not they want to run for office, I always give them the same advice. Which is be the best one-term person you can be. You know, just go to work every day, don’t think about the concept of political capital. Don’t think about how this decision will impact you in the next election. Just think about what you can do with the time you’ve been given, which is a precious gift, to help make decisions about people’s lives.”

A fine cagey politician’s line. Here’s something about Nenshi, though. He means all of that. Truly. That’s the first thing I’ll miss about him—that he did the mayoral job, particularly the most crucial, crisis-level parts, with a deep dedication to the idea of public service and a genuine commitment to making the choices he believed were best for the largest number of Calgarians.

This was the Mayor Nenshi of the 2013 flood. The city’s emergency crews oversaw the official response, of course, but Nenshi’s sheer ubiquity in the tensest days of the disaster set a clear and unwavering tone. Nenshi was seemingly everywhere all day, on TV and on social media, always calm, reassuring and decisive, talking up the ways Calgary was making it through the mess while gently ribbing those who ignored civic orders to stay out of the way of emergency crews. His guidance made all the room needed and more for the city’s very best spirit to explode out of the debris, for neighbours to pitch in with all their hearts, for McMahon Stadium’s parking lot to fill with so many volunteers it all but overwhelmed the city’s capacity to deploy them. The Globe and Mail’s Gary Mason has written that Nenshi’s management of the flood “should be studied in courses on leadership.” I agree, and it is surely the cornerstone of his legacy—when a city in deep crisis needed a forceful, pragmatic mayor, he was more than up to the task.

Nenshi’s management of the 2013 flood is surely the cornerstone of his legacy. When a city in deep crisis needed a forceful, pragmatic mayor, he was more than up to the task.

The other thing about Nenshi, though, is that when he claims never to have thought about legacy, he’s both telling the truth, in that it wasn’t the motivation for his decisions, but he’s also talking nonsense, because of course he thought about how he would leave his mark on the city. He’s not lacking at all for ego or ambition. He wanted that mark to be substantial. I suppose that’s the question of his legacy: Did he succeed in that?

Mayors are often measured by tangible things, and some of the ones built on Nenshi’s watch are irrefutably impressive. As a first-time candidate, Nenshi made much of his background as a bookish child of immigrants who asked the public library to allow him to withdraw more books than the limit permitted. And so perhaps the strongest emblem of his years in office is the new Central Library. Plans for a new library predated Nenshi’s arrival at city hall, but he became its vocal champion, ushering a new plan through a rare unanimous council vote in 2013 and celebrating the ambitious design by the world-renowned Norwegian firm Snøhetta at every turn. The library, which opened on time and under budget in 2018, is surely one of the best civic buildings in the country, immediately transformative in palpable ways—the welcoming space itself, the services and amenities it brings downtown, the way it opens up the east side of the inner city. It says something about Calgary in the 21st century that possibly its greatest building is a public library. And it says something about Calgary’s ambitions that its new public library is an architectural achievement of international import, earning the city a spot on The New York Times list of “52 places to go” in 2019. It’s not hard to see it as a physical embodiment of what Nenshi wanted Calgary to be—civic-minded, welcoming, unfussily world-class.

Nenshi first ran for mayor, in 2010, by leaning into his strengths as a wonky professor. He assembled a list of 12 “better ideas” for Calgary and unveiled one a week throughout the campaign. He promised “politics in full sentences.” And on the campaign trail—in living rooms across the city and in thread after thread on Twitter—he was open, direct and expansive in explaining those ideas to anyone who wanted to talk with him.

The “better ideas” are a dual laundry list of policy-wonk wishes and standard political promises. And yet as the third term comes to an end, the mayor’s actions match them still. If he hasn’t enacted all of them, he at least tried hard. Number 12, the last on the list “Outstanding libraries, recreation amenities and a vibrant cultural scene.” Nenshi notes that several new branch libraries and four new recreation centres opened during his tenure, and every other library in the system got renovations.

Nenshi was the new Central Library’s champion, ushering the ambitious plan through a rare unanimous council vote in 2013. It is surely one of the best civic buildings in the country.

Further down the list, other items pop out as issues Nenshi returned to again and again. No. 9, for example: “Calgarians will be able to get around easily by any transportation mode.” We could certainly quibble over the definition of “easily,” but Nenshi’s tenure saw Calgary’s largest-ever investments in transit and cycling infrastructure. The transit capital budget, for example, expanded from a little over $150-million per year around 2012 to a peak of more than $300-million, with major new investments in a Bus Rapid Transit system and a new CTrain fleet. The transit expansion is nowhere near extensive enough to make a major dent in the city’s car dependency, but the improvements are substantial. The downtown cycle track network is a great gift to the city, and I see it snaking outward in all directions now with little of the fuss that accompanied its launch, because it works. Calgary’s transit network is slowly evolving from a hub-and-spoke design that only moves people in and out of the core into a system with more options for neighbourhood to neighbourhood travel. And there is now near universal agreement that expanded transit is the centrepiece of the city’s transportation future—and its budget—which was emphatically not the case in our CivicCamp days. Progress is sometimes less than you’d like, but it’s still progress. (The Green Line, Nenshi assured me, will get built.)

Another better idea was to “reduce the number of people living in poverty and ensure opportunity for all.” Nenshi takes some pride in having ushered in the city’s first-ever poverty reduction strategy, which included Canada’s first sliding-scale fee for monthly low-income transit passes and a new application process that enables people to apply just once for numerous low-income subsidies—the largest Canadian municipality to adopt this more dignified (and cost-effective) approach, and with the most subsidized programs to boot. Nenshi also described Calgary’s new community action plan on mental health and addiction as “probably the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life, certainly my political life.” And Nenshi has seen progress on this front. Calgary’s poverty rate declined until 2018, even if the pandemic and oil-business bust have since pushed it back up.

He has other real victories as well, most of which point at one or another of the original better ideas, some of which will leave marks on the city’s landscape for generations. One is the change made in 2016 to how the city calculates “off-site levies.” This is a pure Nenshi move—technical, wonky, transformative. The off-site levy is the fee paid to the city by developers when they build new communities, intended to cover the costs of public services such as new roads, sidewalks and utilities—a mostly unseen subsidy taxpayers handed to suburban developers and homeowners for decades. Calgary’s levy had always been insufficient, with much of the uncovered costs borne by taxpayers citywide. The 2016 change boosted the levy by more than $100,000 per hectare, an increase of nearly 50 per cent, bringing the fee much closer to the actual cost to the city. In a Calgary Heraldcolumn at the time, Nenshi called it “one of the most important decisions of our term,” arguing that it will “fundamentally change how we pay for growth in this city.”

Did the off-site levy change end Calgary’s outward growth Alas, no. But it certainly tilted the scales toward a better balance and a denser and more sustainable city.

Nenshi’s first few years fufilled his promise of “politics in full sentences,” with the mayor in sole command of his Twitter account and using it to engage citizens. (Sometimes, famously, helping them find their missing pets.) When his victory struck the rest of Canada and the world as wildly improbable—a Muslim elected mayor of Cowtown?—Nenshi made a shrewd choice to use the international spotlight to highlight the city he loved. “I’m going to take advantage of this,” he told the CBC. “I’m going to tell people around the world a story about a place where pluralism works, and where multiculturalism works, and a model perhaps for the world.”

And it did seem to work, for a time. After the flood, Nenshi barely campaigned and was still returned to office in a landslide. The World Mayor Project awarded him its “World Mayor Prize” for 2014. Never mind that such accolades are wildly arbitrary—the title fit the city’s vibe. Calgary was young and smart and successful, and so was its youthful, geeky mayor. It felt like the era that first came into view in 2010 had fully arrived.

And then came Trump, and Jason Kenney in his theatrical prop of a blue pickup truck, and politics in Calgary rapidly turned poisonous.

Nenshi told me about a debate his office had in its first year about banning one particularly noxious Facebook troll from the mayor’s page. The forum was otherwise civil, so they chewed over the decision for weeks. By the time of the 2017 election, however, social media feeds seethed constantly with hateful, often racist rhetoric. The city where, as Nenshi always put it, “nobody cares where your daddy came from” had become a beacon for poisonous, xenophobic right-wing politics. Nenshi himself expressed shock after his narrow 2017 victory at how toxic the campaign had been. When I crossed paths with him after that election, I noticed a wariness and weariness sharply at odds with the smartest-guy-in-the-room buoyancy that had given his political career such irresistible energy. Politics in full sentences had been drowned out by epithets smeared on Facebook walls.

In retrospect, 2018 has begun to feel like the nadir of the Nenshi Years. Calgary was reeling economically, the reactionary right had united behind Kenney, and the mayor was wading through the political morass with a luckless plodding far removed from his once-confident stride. No. 1 on that faded 2010 list of better ideas reads: “Nenshi proposes common sense policy on secondary suites.” That battle—to allow homeowners to add a basement apartment without appealing to the entire city council for approval—dragged on through multiple failed votes that revealed Nenshi’s weakness at rallying allies to his causes. Critics of the mayor often cite his arrogance and unwillingness to compromise; the endless drag of the secondary suite debate, which was repeatedly amplified as yet another bunch of homeowners arrived at council chambers to argue that their mother-in-law apartment wouldn’t ruin the fabric of their neighbourhood, felt like that weakness writ large, and over such a pointedly puny issue. When council finally voted, narrowly, to change the secondary suite process in March 2018, it felt less like a victory than a pointless street fight’s exhausted end.

The mayor himself pointed to the plebiscite later that year on Calgary’s bid to host the 2026 Winter Olympics as his greatest personal regret. Nenshi saw the Olympics as a way to fast-track infrastructure projects—affordable housing, athletic facilities, entertainment venues—as well as update the city’s image and boost its tourist economy. He admitted to me he botched the sales pitch (he should’ve sold it hard as a city-building exercise), then got lost in a jurisdictional squabble between the federal and provincial governments, which led to the fateful decision to put the bid to a plebiscite vote. Nenshi’s pro-Olympics side lost, and an unwarranted share of his political capital had been spent on nothing. “It was a shame and I think a missed opportunity for Calgary,” is how he put it.

Perhaps even harder to swallow for many long-time Nenshi supporters was his vote for a new arena for the Calgary Flames. There’s much more to the deal than just a hockey rink of course, but in public it played out largely as a battle between the crazily wealthy, arrogant ownership group of an NHL team and an increasingly cowed city council. After years of wrangling over the arena’s location and the size of the city’s investment, council committed to splitting the $550-million cost, with the stated promise of economic benefits in excess of the city’s half of the deal. But third-party analysis indicated that the City’s end of the deal would be a net loss of nearly $50-million in present-day dollars.

It was a surprise to see the mayor on the cowed side of the vote—though of course this is emphatically not how he characterized it, and his approach has more merit than the debate around the arena project permitted. He reminded me that he launched his 2017 re-election campaign standing next to the last remaining tree among “a sea of surface parking lots” in Victoria Park, a community that had collapsed under the weight of neglect and the exigencies of the Saddledome and Stampede grounds. “I kicked off my 2017 campaign saying ‘Let’s imagine what we could do to not only create a great neighbourhood here but to help with our economic development.’” The rebirth of Victoria Park, he assured me, is the substantial public benefit that will come from the public money he voted to invest in the deal.

As our conversation wound down, I asked Nenshi the question I’d batted back and forth with friends in recent months. Some grim mixture of the pandemic’s grind, the provincial government’s braying intransigence, and the self-defeating commitment of many prominent business leaders in Calgary to denying the basic facts of the global energy economy in the 2020s had us all wondering out loud whether the city was still the right place for us, whether we and our families had a durable future here. The question, phrased that way, wounded Nenshi. Whatever else, no one should ever doubt his abiding love for the city.

“Of course you want to stay in Calgary,” he answered. “We built—with every bit of politician hyperbole in place—we built the best place in the world. We built a place of limitless—except for the weather—we built a place of limitless opportunity. We built a place where people have the ability to live with dignity. And that’s because we do the work. And so it’s heartbreaking for me to hear that.”

Listen. I’ve known Naheed Nenshi for more than a decade. I’m fully aware of his weaknesses as a politician, but I also know his strengths. And one of those is when he talks about service and community and making a great city better, he really does mean it to his very core. And that’s why when I suggested someone like me might want to leave Calgary, he was soon in soaring rhetorical mode.

“Ultimately,” he told me, “if you’re worried, if you think provincial politics is too corrosive, or people are really mean, or Alberta is the land of the anti-mask idiots who put everyone else at risk, and I don’t want to be a part of that anymore I want you to look up on a spring day at that big blue sky and realize… that we have been a beacon of hope for people from every corner of this broken earth to come and live in a place of safety and opportunity and dignity. And it happens because we make it happen. So yeah, the fight is harder now. Yeah, the jerks are louder now. But that’s no reason to give up the fight. In fact if anything that should embolden all of us to fight even harder.”

Earlier in our conversation he told me about a messy recent debate at city council. The City had proposed a new “Guidebook for Great Communities”—a set of planning guidelines, more or less—and Nenshi’s political opponents had used it to rend their rhetorical garments over its alleged threat to fill every neighbourhood in Calgary with tall buildings and poor renters. Council chambers inevitably plays host to a lot of grotesque NIMBYism, and this was some of the ugliest in a while. An anonymous organization had taken out a front-page ad in the Herald to oppose the Guidebook, and the entire first day of discussion had been one homeowner after another, many from affluent Elbow Park, decrying the creeping socialism and ruination of neighbourhood character contained in the document.

Nenshi: “What was interesting to me is the people following along on social media. And they were getting quite upset. And suddenly, in the evening of the second day, the tenor of the public submissions completely changed. When before, judging by people’s voices, we didn’t really have anybody under the age of 60 presenting—maybe under the age of 55—suddenly we had so many young voices. When before we had gone through dozens of people without a single non-white person, suddenly we had a bunch of non-white voices, in a city that is one-out-of-three non-white. And they spoke with such optimism about their city and such positivity about the future that I thought, this is really remarkable. And I found out later that these folks had all self-organized on Twitter.”

He was describing the 2021 version of the project that had made us colleagues. How he and I and a handful of other like-minded, committed Calgarians had come together more than a decade earlier, and we’d decided, despite the palpable apathy of the time, to try to make the city better. And there were more now, ready to do the same, probably more than ever. What Nenshi was saying was the city was in good hands. I hope he’s right.

Chris Turner is the author, most recently, of The Patch (Simon & Schuster). His new book on the global energy transition, from Penguin Random House, comes out in 2022.

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The post The Nenshi Years appeared first on Alberta Views.

“Thats Connie,” says Marco Luciano, pointing to his laptop, at a photo of a Filipino woman holding a blond toddler in one hand and a vacuum cleaner in the other, in an upscale house in Edmonton. “She’s a caregiver [a live-in caregiver, a nanny],” he says. “I asked her, “Do you mind if I spend a day with you and just hang out and help out?” We asked permission from her employer, including taking pictures of their children. They were pretty cool about it; I showed them the pictures afterwards,” he says. “I saw how she worked. She did the laundry. Then we went outside to the park with the kids. And that’s when I saw the other caregivers—there’s a whole bunch of brown women hanging out in the park. It’s really striking, these women taking these white kids to the park. It becomes a social gathering for them, because they’re isolated at home, they synchronize their playtimes so they can chat.

“These caregivers take care of kids, they cook, they clean, they do everything; they’re domestic workers so that these middle-class Canadian workers can be part of the workforce,” he says. “It’s often cheaper for Canadians to get a caregiver from the Philippines than a [spot in a] private daycare centre.”

Luciano is the director of Migrante Alberta, a primarily Filipino advocacy group founded in 2013 to address issues faced by migrant workers—defined as workers participating in Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), which includes the Live-In Caregiver program and the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. We’re sitting on stack chairs in the Orange Hub, formerly the site of Edmonton’s MacEwan University West campus and now a city-owned site for non-profit groups. It’s August 2020, the COVID-19 era. Luciano wears glasses and a flat cap, a disposable blue mask over his face. On his laptop is a draft of Kwento’t Litrato: Stories of Filipino Migration in Alberta, a collaboratively authored book that emerged from documentary photography workshops for migrant workers held in Edmonton and Calgary in 2019.

He scrolls through more photos taken by migrant photographers. “We applied for a grant [from the Community Initiatives Program, which was cut by the UCP government in 2020], we got approved, so we tried to make it happen,” he says. “We have a friend, Nwel Saturay, who is a professional photographer [originally from the Philippines], and with him we designed workshops where learning photography—using a DSLR, for example—is integrated to telling stories. And so these amateur photographers were shooting what migration means to them. That’s the project—to give a voice to a large group of migrant workers, not only to the Filipino community but to other faces and stories behind the statistics.”

“The day-to-day story of a migrant worker is not really something that many people know,” he says. “So those are the stories we are trying to portray.”

“Migration has become the defining story of the 21st century,” wrote New York Times journalist Jason DeParle in his 2019 book on the political and economic impact of migration from developing countries such as the Philippines to wealthy countries such as the US. In Canada, for a story with global resonance, it’s notable that words such as “invisible,” “disposable” and “expendable” recur in articles about and interviews with migrant workers. They participate in the TFWP under a work permit that allows them to live and work in Canada for a set period of time. A 2013 Tyee series titled “The Invisibles,” by journalist Krystle Alarcon, opened with: “They hand you a soothing cup of Tim Hortons, pack frozen beef in factories, pick blueberries and apples on… farms, serve fast-food meals and wipe tables, excavate mines… and raise your kids as if they were their own. [Migrant workers] have become ubiquitous while remaining all but invisible.” 

In Alberta, the vice-chair of Migrante Alberta, Jay Zapata, told me that for migrant workers it’s tacitly understood that “if you get sick and you can’t do the job, [employers] will just send you home [to your country].” Employers see migrant workers as “disposable,” he says. “That’s how it is.”

Jason Foster, an associate professor of labour relations at Athabasca University, says this is not entirely an unfair allegation. “The structural problem with the TFWP is that it inherently views these workers as expendable [and easily replaced],” he says. “That’s the basis upon which the program is built and that’s where the problems of the program exist. The workers are left being quite vulnerable.”

In a report for the Parkland Institute at the University of Alberta, In The Shadows: Living and Working Without Status in Alberta, Foster and Luciano wrote a scathing assessment of the TFWP in April 2020. “Canada’s approach to migrant labour has never been a well-thought-out plan,” they write. “It has been a series of hasty, reactive, shortsighted decisions where the long-term consequences are not considered and the human costs are invisible…. It is long overdue to ask ourselves what role migrant workers should play in our labour market [and] that we consider the consequences of our decisions on those most affected—the migrant workers themselves.”

By “long overdue” they mean decades.

Back in 1973, federal legislation introduced a legal framework for temporary migrant labour in Canada. This was a legal first. Migrant workers were allowed into the country to do a set job for a set period of time, but “for the most part,” writes academic researcher Salimah Valiani, they did “not enjoy the basic rights and entitlements accorded to permanent residents: family reunification, rights protection under various levels of legislation, mobility rights and eventual access to citizenship.”

This was a departure from years prior, in the “waves of migration following the Second World War,” when policy analysts saw “permanent migration and the accompanying legal status of permanent residency” as a benefit to “society as a whole,” writes Valiani. “Due to the socially accepted notion that workers should migrate along with their families, workers were able to settle with the crucial support of spouses and other immediate family members.” Permanent migration was then understood as a “cornerstone of Canadian immigration policy since Confederation.”

The 1973 legislation was a crack in that cornerstone. The key change was limiting access to permanent residency—a legal status that entitles a person to social benefits and requires them to pay taxes, though they can’t vote or run for political office. Over time, argues political economist Nandita Sharma, this policy change grew into a systemic shift “away from a policy of permanent immigrant settlement towards an increasing reliance on temporary migrant workers.”

That shift wasn’t immediately apparent. For example, mass migration from the Philippines to Canada didn’t really ramp up until 1992. That year—after years of protest against the old domestic worker program, which didn’t allow for permanent residency—the federal government’s new live-in-caregiver program finally established an automatic right for caregivers to apply for permanent residency after working here for 24 months.

In the Philippines, where roughly one in five people live in “extreme poverty” and income inequality is among the worst in the world, the government has promoted migration since the 1970s. About one in seven Filipinos goes abroad to work and the money they send home accounts for 10 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. Many Filipino migrants go to the Middle East, to countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—known as “guest worker states” for the high percentage of temporary foreign workers—where social benefits are minimal and there’s no path to citizenship or family reunification. In the words of Globe and Mail international affairs columnist Doug Saunders, Canada’s live-in caregiver visa (as it was then known) “carried a guarantee of eventual pathways to permanent residence and family reunification,” which, along with higher wages than could be earned in the Philippines, were preeminent among the “good reasons to come to Canada.”

Still, despite growth, Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs remained relatively small, with niche streams for farmworkers, caregivers and high-skilled jobs such as university instructors, artists and technical experts. But in 2002, after what critics called “aggressive lobbying” from the fast food, hospitality, meatpacking and other industries, the Liberal government bundled the programs together under the newly formed TFWP, which now included a “low-skilled workers” category. Officially, “the intended purpose of the expanded program was to serve as a ‘last resort’ for employers facing labour shortages,” write Foster and Luciano. “An employer had to obtain a Labour Market Opinion from the federal government to be eligible to hire migrant workers under the program, and the process was supposed to evaluate whether a labour shortage existed.”

In reality, says Mark Thompson, a professor emeritus at UBC’s Sauder School of Business, the federal government “argued that the low-skilled program was needed to solve a labour shortage because ‘Canadians won’t do this work.’ [But] the shortages it was supposed to meet were actually the result of government and corporate policies that made a number of jobs with low wages and poor working conditions unacceptable to most Canadian workers…. Instead of making the jobs better, employers’ preferred solution was to lobby for increased access to the TFWP, thereby ensuring wages remained low and working conditions unchanged.”

In 2006 Stephen Harper’s Conservative government expanded the TFWP, making it even better for employers, particularly those servicing the oil and gas boom in Alberta. For example, for designated “occupations under pressure,” the Harper government shortened the time that jobs had to be advertised on a national job bank—from six weeks to seven days—before a migrant worker could be hired. According to economist Jim Stanford, TFWs “accounted for almost 30 per cent of all net new paid jobs created in Canada between 2007 and 2011.”

As opposed to the high-skilled TFWs, these new temporary workers were primarily coming from “developing nations such as the Philippines, India, China and Mexico,” write Foster and Luciano. “The new class of migrant workers were more vulnerable than the high-skilled workers, and lower levels of education, language and cultural barriers, and poverty made the new arrivals less able to resist employer mistreatment, [in part because] low-skilled workers’ permits specified the employer, meaning they could not legally switch jobs and were essentially ‘tied’ to a specific employer.”

Mila Carino and her daughter. Carino migrated in 2007 to work in a Banff hotel, and her children came a few years later. By Eric Dizon.

Pastor Eric Revera Dizon. the photographer’s husband, at the keyboard, worshipping with a member of his Calgary congregation. By Lovella Penaranda-Dizon.

Nanay Mirabel Javier is an advocate for the social inclusion of seniors. Simultaneously, says Jay Zapata, she mourns the passing of her husband, Tatay Mike Javier. By Jay Zapata.

The photographer lost his status in 2017. He worked in fast food and tried to get permanent residency. He says migration is less about achieving a dream and more about surviving. By Edward (not his real name)

The photographer is a gerontological social worker whose photos explore how the lives of older adults in the immigrant community can be “vivid, cheerful, beautiful, full and vulnerable.” By Qianyun Wang.

Joss Tarzona-Miranda came to Canada as a TFW in 2008: she now owns Bem’s, an Edmonton restaurant, with her husband. By Cynthia Palmaria.

A Filipino worker in a retirement home in Cochrane, with a family photo on his cellphone in the foreground. Many migrants are separated from families for years, connecting mainly through technology. By Kim Gabrido. 

An undocumented worker, Lynn, photographed her children at home. By Lynn (not her real name) 

Items in the “balikbayan box,” a box of gifts for relatives in the Philippines. The box can take a year to fill and exemplifies “the value of generosity in Filipino culture.” By Len Jerusalem

In 2013, at the height of the boom, Alberta had 77,000 TFWs, the most in the country. The Alberta Federation of Labour filed an Access to Information request and found that in 2012–2013 the federal Ministry of Employment and Social Development issued hundreds of permits allowing employers “to pay TFWs less than Albertans [for jobs in] hotels, gas stations, truck stops, casinos, ski lift operations, convenience stores, greenhouses, industrial farming operations, feedlots, nurseries and various occupations in restaurants.”

Allegations that migrant workers were “taking jobs from Canadians” led to some disturbing moments, says Luciano. “You saw pickup trucks with bumper stickers saying ‘Fuck Off, We’re Full,’ driving around Alberta. There was a backlash, not just against the program but against the workers; it created racial tension.”

In response, then-federal-minister Jason Kenney introduced a phased-in cap—down to 10 per cent—on the number of TFWs an employer was allowed to hire. The move angered fast food franchise owners in Alberta but polled favourably in several provinces, including strongly in Ontario, where Conservatives needed to do well to win the 2015 federal election (which they lost). In 2016 the Justin Trudeau Liberals kept the cap (with some grandfathered exemptions at 20 per cent) but ended the Conservatives’ “four-in, four-out” rule, instituted in 2011, which had allowed TFWs to work in Canada for four years but then barred them for another four years.

The cap and the “four-in, four-out” rule made it harder for many employers to renew permits for TFWs already in Canada. Many of those workers had large debts, incurred for permits, flights and expenses just to get to Canada. Community advocates had campaigned against the “four-out” rule, says Foster, but by the time it was dropped, “we had a year’s worth of workers who were affected by it.”

The low-skilled workers already had few options for permanent residency—mostly limited to provincial programs such as the Alberta Immigrant Nominee Program, which had few openings and strict requirements as to the skills and education needed for acceptance. “The vast majority of migrant workers did not end up becoming permanent residents or citizens,” says Foster. “And so either they left and went home, or, as we know, many of them have stayed with a lack of status.”

Estimates from community advocates range from 10,000 to a high of 50,000 undocumented workers living and working right now in Alberta. Luciano puts it at the higher end. He’s taken pregnant undocumented mothers to hospitals in Edmonton to give birth (and then helped them deal with the medical bills, because they don’t have healthcare), and organized the distribution of food and basic supplies for undocumented workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“The undocumented migrants are the most creative people I’ve ever met,” he says. “They work, they have a place to stay. They have cash jobs, often way below minimum wage, so $10, $9 an hour, but they take it because it’s still a lot more than what they’ll make back home. A lot of them are cleaners. I know a bakery that hires undocumented workers. Anywhere they cannot be seen, so they work at night.”

 The Kwento’t Litrato project aimed to increase public visibility of migrant workers—in a broad, relational understanding of their lives. “It’s really telling the stories not just of being a migrant,” says Luciano, “but also the process of becoming a migrant. And when they’re lucky enough to become a permanent resident, it’s also the process of reunification with their families.”

Most of the 22 participants in the three-day photo-documentary workshops—in Edmonton and Calgary in spring 2019—were from the Filipino community, the fastest-growing racialized group in Canada, according to the 2016 census, with nearly 800,000 Filipinos in the country, including over 175,000 in Alberta. Workshop participants ranged from undocumented workers (such as “Edward” and “Lynn”), to live-in caregivers, permanent residents and younger Filipinos born in Canada to migrant parents.

“We told people, ‘You don’t have to be a great photographer or have a fancy camera,’” says Jay Zapata. “We want to give them the skills, but skills are the secondary part of the program. It’s the story behind the photographs that’s most important. We want to magnify our lives.”

Zapata came to Calgary in 2008, sponsored by his wife, who migrated first as a caregiver and got her permanent residency. Along with his work at Migrante Alberta, he’s a peace officer at a Calgary jail. In the photography workshops, he says, “First we discussed, what’s the purpose of taking pictures Why are we doing it And then of course we discussed some ethics about taking pictures and sharing on social media. What stories did we want to show We talked about racism, discrimination, unfair labour, the hardship, our contributions [to society]—from the immigrant youth experience to seniors, the aging immigrants, which is my subject.”

“My father-in-law is living with us and is suffering from dementia,” he says, talking about the man in one of his sensitive black-and-white photos of elderly Filipinos. “Getting older in Canada is different than getting older in the Philippines. In this country life is very individualistic and back home it’s very communal. For these people that are aging, and isolated, plus the weather factor, it’s really a struggle.”

Photographs from Kwento’t Litrato were exhibited at several galleries, including Edmonton City Hall in 2019 and Arts Commons in Calgary for a month in February 2020. “When they told us it’s going to be in Arts Commons,” says Len Jerusalem, a former caregiver and now a social worker, “it was like ‘Wow!’ It’s nice to get that support and be able to raise awareness that we have issues too. Because [people say], ‘Filipinos take all the jobs at McDonald’s or Tim Hortons or the hospitals.’ I hear that a lot. But they don’t know the choices we had to make, the things we had to give up to come here to wash someone’s toilet or wash someone’s bum. They don’t know that story—leave your family, your kids, to work here for years. It’s a lot of sacrifice.”

Jerusalem’s photos show a “balikbayan box,” a box of gifts “filled with household items, school supplies, anything you can send to family or friends in the Philippines,” she says. “It takes a long time, sometimes a year, to fill that box. It’s something every migrant can relate to. But it’s not just about the items; those items look ordinary, like just toothpaste, but it’s meaningful to that giver and receiver. It doesn’t compare to love, but I guess it’s what you can do to represent that.”

Separation from family, and the attempt to maintain connection, is a theme in many of the photos. Kim Gabrido, whose mother first came to Canada as a live-in caregiver, shot photos of Filipino workers in a retirement home in Cochrane, with the workers in the background and pictures of relatives in the Philippines displayed on a cellphone in the foreground. “I got separated from my mom when I was 2,” he says. “In the Philippines I came from a very poor family background. Me and my dad used to go from the farm to the city once a month to talk to her on video, on Skype or Facebook. As technology [got better] the connection between me and my mom got stronger; she could call us while she was working as a nanny. I wanted to show that, our experience. That’s why I decided to put [cell phones] into the photos.”

“I finally reunited with her when I was 16,” he says. “I’m 19 now. Three years of having my family whole.” He laughs. “It’s a weird experience, having a mom lecture you.” Asked what he’s doing now, after graduating from high school, he says he takes online classes in web design and works at Subway. “I send money to my cousin in the Philippines,” he says. “She’s becoming a pharmacist. I help her pay for it.”

COVID-19 delayed the release of Kwento’t Litrato until 2021. But the pandemic, in its way, also raised awareness in the general Canadian public.

Outbreaks at long-term care facilities exposed an “ongoing crisis of care,” not just for elderly residents but also for workers at those facilities—often migrant and racialized minority women doing jobs that are low paid, short staffed and mostly part time. At the start of the outbreak many of those workers held two or more jobs at different care facilities—a situation that increased the risk of virus transmission.

Outbreaks in Brooks and High River at the JBS and Cargill meatpacking plants—factories that do 70 per cent of the beef processing in Canada—revealed the extent to which food supply chains in Canada are reliant on immigrant workers. At Cargill, for instance, where over 1,500 cases of COVID-19 were linked to the plant, some 70 per cent of the workers are from the Philippines (many originally TFWs, though most are now permanent residents).

Since 2013 the number of TFWs in Alberta has declined—from 32,000 in 2018 to fewer than 13,000 in 2019. In October 2020, aiming to “make jobs available to unemployed Albertans,” the UCP government announced an agreement with the federal Liberals to reduce or eliminate the number of jobs that Alberta employers could offer to TFWs in sectors such as food services, retail trade, construction and transportation. Premier Jason Kenney tweeted that the TFWP was “effectively shut down” in the province. But, at the same time, the government press release also said, “These changes will not impact employers recruiting for select occupations in the agriculture, technology and caregiving sectors that heavily rely on temporary foreign workers….”

This was little consolation for workers in some of those sectors. Since the start of COVID-19, according to “Behind Closed Doors,” an October 2020 report authored by several national caregiver-advocacy groups and endorsed by Migrante Alberta, many live-in caregivers have been stuck in “virtual prisons”—overworked, unable to leave their employers’ houses and subject to abuse. Instead of having to wait two years in a state of vulnerability, said the report, permanent residency should be given to caregivers as soon as they arrive in Canada: “Permanent residency immediately gives workers the ability to leave a bad job and make a complaint without fear of reprisals. Permanent residency means that workers can work in any sector, including in healthcare, where workers are sorely needed.”

That kind of policy should be extended across the TFWP, including to low-skilled workers, says Luciano. “The jobs that migrant workers are taking here are not temporary jobs,” he says. “Working at McDonald’s, working at Tim Hortons—those are not temporary jobs. Those are permanent jobs. They’re classified as temporary because it’s cheaper [for employers]; it’s cheap labour.” 

“I’m personally not into mass migration of people coming here as migrant labour,” he says. “I’d rather see Canadians working, but with a living wage and a unionized situation, so that when migrant workers are actually needed, they can come here but be on the same playing field, with the same wage as everybody else and the same access to rights as everybody else.”

The federal government made a step in that direction in late 2020. Responding to what Bloomberg News called “the economic damage from a dramatic drop in immigration” during the pandemic—from a net increase of more than 190,000 temporary residents in 2019 to a decrease of 18,221 in the first half of 2020, along with a 60 per cent decline in permanent residents—Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino announced that Canada would increase the number of permanent residents welcomed into the country in the next three years, including granting that status to some TFWs already here. “We have a unique opportunity to take a look at the talent and the experience which is already within our borders—which includes workers, students, asylum seekers,” he told The Globe and Mail. More pathways to citizenship would be coming, he promised, though he left the details of reforms to a future announcement.

Questions and concerns remain, says labour professor Jason Foster. “Policymakers are only paying attention to the interests of employers,” he says. “And that’s why these policies bounce around all over the place and are sometimes contradictory. We still have never really asked ourselves: What is the role of temporary migrant labour in our economy How do we make it fair and safe I mean, ultimately, if we think we need these workers on a long-term basis, we should be creating an immigration stream so that they can actually become permanent residents.” 

The post More Than Cheap Labour appeared first on Alberta Views.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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