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

A railing with an anti-skateboard stopper

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

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

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

Bench armrests to stop people from lying down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A “leaning bench” that prevents sitting or loitering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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There was “nothing to fear” in the New Eldorado of Alberta according to a 1910 federal ad campaign.

More than a century later, in August 2022, then-premier Jason Kenney launched a new ad campaign, “Alberta is Calling,” that once again peddled a vision of Alberta, this time seeking to lure workers from other provinces with the promise of low taxes, cheaper housing, higher wages and a mountain view. The first phase of the campaign targeted healthcare, trades and technology workers in Vancouver and Toronto with ads that ran online, on television and radio and on billboards and posters plastered at strategic locations—“Toronto’s busiest subway station is currently a giant ad for Alberta” said a headline in a Toronto lifestyle magazine in September 2022. A second phase of the campaign launched in March 2023, with ads across eastern Canada targeting workers in occupations facing labour shortages in Alberta, promising them a $1,200 “signing bonus” if they moved west. In March 2024 a third phase targeted skilled trades workers in BC, Ontario and Quebec, dangling the carrot of a one-time $5,000 tax rebate. All told, the ad campaign cost the Alberta government at least $10-million, plus the incentive money.

Since “Alberta is Calling” was launched, Alberta’s population has surged—by more than 204,000 between April 2023 and April 2024, a number that includes over 55,000 coming from other provinces (a Canadian record for interprovincial migration) and the rest of the influx from other countries. The province’s population boom—4.4 per cent growth in 2023 (above the national average of 3.2 per cent)—has been felt most in the cities. In 2023 Calgary’s metro-area population grew by 6 per cent, adding 96,000 people, while Edmonton’s grew by 63,000, a rise of 4.2 per cent. Alberta’s fastest-growing city, Airdrie, saw its population rise by 6.4 per cent in 2023, to 86,000, surpassing once-bigger cities such as Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie and Medicine Hat.

“The fact that so many people are coming to our province, I look at that as a positive, and we want to keep that going,” said premier Danielle Smith on the Shaun Newman Podcast in January 2024. “Let’s have an aggressive target to double our population,” from the nearly five million people of today to 10 million by 2050.

“Why?” Newman asked.

“Because then we’ll be the second-largest province,” said Smith. “We want to build this place out so that we can actually have the political clout we deserve, because right now we’re being treated as a junior partner by Ottawa.

“I think people are coming to this province because they know we do things differently here. We respect free enterprise. We respect individual liberty,” she said. “We have an obligation to be that bastion of freedom. And I think we should welcome the people who want to come here and enjoy it with us.”

The ambition recalls the famous line from the 1989 film Field of Dreams: “If you build it, [they] will come.” Except that in Alberta we’ve done the opposite—Alberta called, but didn’t first build out the field, so to speak. As a province we have not built the infrastructure or public services to absorb this many people this quickly. In the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts, advocates and policymakers noted the gaps and cracks that had been exposed and widening in Alberta’s public infrastructure and public services. Decades of government cuts, funding at levels insufficient to meet the pressures of inflation and population growth, deferred maintenance and a long-neglected infrastructure deficit led to cumulative impacts in which the structural pillars holding up public healthcare, public education, affordable housing, affordable utilities and public transit in Alberta were threatening to crumble. But instead of a sustained, long-term investment with a plan to fix these problems, we simply added to the load.

Alberta’s healthcare system has faced intense pressures that have resulted in widespread barriers to access for critical services. The reality for primary care is a painful one: the Alberta Medical Association (AMA) reported that in March 2023 up to 750,000 Albertans were lacking a regular primary care provider. While the Canadian Institute for Health Information puts the current figure at 15 per cent of Albertans aged 18 and over, the AMA projects that with the recent population influx the number of Albertans seeking a family doctor could soar up to 950,000.

Between 2020 and 2023 the number of family physicians accepting new patients plummeted 79 per cent province-wide, from 887 to just 190. The story is similar in every health zone: an 88 per cent decrease in the Edmonton zone, an 81 per cent decline in Calgary and a fall of 89 per cent in the South zone, where just seven physicians were accepting patients in a region with nearly 350,000 residents. The website Alberta Find a Doctor, which aims to connect those seeking care with a doctor, nurse practitioner or clinic taking patients, has posted to its search page a warning to Albertans that, due to the “limited availability of family doctors and nurse practitioners… it may not be possible to find someone accepting new patients close to your preferred location.” It directs the unsuccessful to call the AHS non-emergency line 811.

Even as hundreds of thousands of Albertans struggle to access primary care, the government celebrated a net increase in physician registrations: “More doctors registered in Alberta today than at any time in the province’s history,” boasted health minister Adriana LaGrange in October 2024. “We know Alberta is an attractive place to work as a physician.” The figures from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta show 518 additional registrations over the previous 12 months—but that increase barely accounts for the population growth in the same period. Even if all of those physicians were practising in comprehensive primary care (and evidence from CPSA, AMA and CIHI indicates they are not; overall trends show new doctors choosing specialties other than primary care), Alberta still faces what AMA past-president Paul Parks terms a “deficit position” due to “having lost 2,471 physicians” in an “exodus” from the province since 2019. In a survey of its members in September 2024, the AMA found that 58 per cent of physicians in rural, family and acute care in Alberta are considering leaving the province or medical practice altogether; 65 per cent of those physicians have acted on their discontent and begun making plans to get out by 2029.

Among nurses, a September 2024 study found approximately 48 per cent of them in Alberta are leaving the profession by age 35, putting Alberta among the bottom four provinces for losing young nurses. The ratio of nurses leaving the profession to those entering it has worsened by nearly 40 per cent since 2013. Polling by the Canadian Federation of Nursing Unions supports that figure: approximately 40 per cent of nurses across all age groups intend to leave the profession within one year, citing insufficient remuneration, overwork and understaffing, stressful work environments and a lack of work–life balance.

Glowing promises from Alberta in the Toronto subway.

In Alberta the UCP government’s campaign to dismantle and restructure Alberta Health Services (AHS) and divide healthcare provision among four new agencies has left nurses feeling their concerns are being ignored. The reshuffle is imposing new workload burdens and additional costs without improving working conditions or healthcare delivery. Instead of a comprehensive and evidence-based health workforce plan for recruitment and retention, the UCP government has relied on sporadic announcements of limited funds to incentivize more people into nursing, while increasing funding for private nursing agencies to provide temporary coverage. Over seven years of available data, Alberta’s spending on for-profit nursing agencies exploded by some 13 times, from under $400,000 in 2015–16, to more than $5-million in 2021–22. As nurses in Alberta enter another contentious round of collective bargaining, political commentator David Climenhaga notes that “we now have a system in which employers plead poverty to keep staff nursing wages low while they are forced to pay far more to nursing agencies for staff they can no longer operate without.”

Meanwhile, Alberta hospitals are aging past their useful lifespan, and bed space numbers still haven’t recovered from the Ralph-Klein-era cuts in the 1990s. The long-promised and -delayed South Edmonton hospital was shelved after the UCP government halted funding for it in the 2024 budget. Despite doubling in population, Edmonton has had no new hospital since 1988. Without the South Edmonton hospital, the Edmonton zone alone will be short nearly 1,500 beds by 2026 (when the new facility would have opened). It would require the equivalent of a new hospital in each of Edmonton and Calgary to meet the healthcare needs of the more than 200,000 new Albertans that moved here last year.

Public education in Alberta is under similar strain. After consecutive years of record-setting enrolment growth, schools in the Calgary Board of Education district hit 93 per cent use of space in 2023–24, leaving little room for the projected 8,000 new students. Only two high schools in the city were anticipated to be able to accept new students in 2024–25, as total enrolment had reached 103 per cent capacity. CBE is estimated to need over 40,000 new student spaces over the next 10 years.

The challenge for Edmonton public schools is equally daunting: to meet projected enrolment growth and catch up on the existing shortfall, the district would need 50 new schools by 2033. To cope in the short term, the district implemented a growth control model in 2020 that utilizes a lottery system for oversubscribed schools.

Overcapacity leads to unwieldy class sizes and increased class complexity, along with limitations on programming as music rooms and libraries are converted into makeshift classrooms and access for students with special or additional needs is constricted. Parents of these students increasingly feel pushed out the door towards charter schools that can promise lower student–teacher ratios and more resources (though charter schools are not obligated to accept all students).

In the public system 1,500 educational assistant roles are unfilled due to a lack of provincial funding. EAs are meant to help mitigate the class size and complexity challenges. Yet, when 3,200 EAs and other support workers walked off the job in a one-day protest in October 2024, parents of special-needs students were told that for “safety” reasons their children “should stay home.” The system—in which the province directs school districts’ budgets and bargaining offers—cannot function without these EA staff, but doesn’t pay them a living wage or offer adequate working conditions.

While the 2024–25 provincial budget claimed record-high investment in K–12 education, the funding increase to public schools was only 4 per cent. The Alberta Teachers’ Association estimates that per-student funding—already the lowest in Canada—would need to increase by 13 per cent just to hit the national average.

Contrast this with the unprecedented funding in 2024 to private for-profit and charter schools for infrastructure and transportation. Charter school student spaces are now set to double—to 12,500—and, according to premier Smith, government funding will enable “thousands” of new spaces for students in “independent” private schools. That’s on top of Alberta’s uniquely high allocation of per-student funding to private schools at 70 per cent of the public rate. As the public system remains underfunded, Albertans are seeing a strategic shift of resources from the public system to the private education market.

Post-secondary institutions have been similarly starved of public money. The province has cut its share of funding to colleges and universities while capping tuition increases for domestic students. As a result, public post-secondary institutions have seen per-student funding drop to historic lows. Their response, amid limited permitted revenue streams, has been to rely heavily on increasing enrolment of international students and greatly increased fees. But now, when the number of international students is being capped across the country, students considering studying in Canada may be reconsidering that option due to limited student housing, reduced access to healthcare and fewer pathways to legitimate work. This in turn has deepened the financial crunch for public post-secondaries, leading to even more deferred maintenance, deeper cuts to support staff and a greater reliance on contracted teaching staff.

New Albertans must have somewhere to live. While housing starts appear to have made up for some of the ground lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, the roughly 40,000 units that began construction in 2024 didn’t fully cover an additional 204,000 Albertans—even if one were to generously distribute five people per home. Affordable, government-subsidized housing faces an even worse shortfall: while 1,235 new units were funded in 2024, only 250 of those were completed between December 2023 and October 2024. Meanwhile, in Edmonton alone, the number of residents without stable housing hit 5,000 in 2024, up 2,000 in a year and having nearly tripled since 2020. This affordable housing deficit has led to expensive downstream impacts—approximately $1-billion annually, including more public money going to increased policing and security, medical care and mental health and addictions support. The only long-term solution to homelessness is housing—surely that is obvious. What is less clear is who should build those houses and how. To what extent should basic necessities such as shelter be left to market forces Should governments be obligated to ensure sufficient housing is built to meet the needs of the population they have deliberately sought to expand?

Not only housing is lacking at the local level. A 2024 report by the Rural Municipalities of Alberta calculated Alberta’s overall rural municipal infrastructure deficit at $17.25-billion. That includes deferred maintenance or replacement of roadways, bridges and water utilities that are vital to communities’ survival. Based on current provincial funding, that deficit will grow to $40.7-billion in 2028—more than doubling in three years. This state of affairs is a direct consequence of years of underfunding below inflation and population increases. In 2011–12, the provincial government budgeted $420 per capita for rural municipal infrastructure; by 2022–23 that figure had dropped to $150 per capita. Taking into account recent increases allocated in the 2024–25 provincial budget only sees a fraction of that lost ground regained—to $186 per person. A one-time grant program announced by the province in October 2024 to help small- and medium-sized communities address population pressures on infrastructure accounts for a mere 0.15 per cent of the total infrastructure shortfall.

Those wondering about the consequences of a few more years of infrastructure neglect might think back to Calgary’s dry, dirty summer of 2024, when council imposed city-wide water restrictions on residents and businesses after a crucial water main failed. As Alberta’s urban municipalities grow, so does the urgency for building public transit, emergency services, recreation facilities and services over and above keeping the lights on and the taps running. The economic reality for many municipalities, however, is challenging. The City of Edmonton, for instance, now receives less funding from the province than it did in 2009, before adjusting for inflation, even as the population of the city has grown by nearly 50 per cent.

The $10-million ad campaign worked. Alberta’s population surged by more than 204,000 between April 2023 and April 2024

Amid steady growth punctuated by spikes of immigration in recent decades, Alberta did not build the public infrastructure and services necessary to fully support that growth. This was a deliberate and explicit policy choice—enshrined again now in finance minister Nate Horner’s mandate letter from premier Smith—to hold provincial spending at less than inflation plus population growth. Collectively, as a province, we are now living with the repercussions—the day-to-day impacts of rapid growth without a sustainable plan. Instead of a plan, we have initiatives such as the “Alberta is Calling” campaign to bring in new workers.

The argument for bringing in workers has some value—of course we need construction workers to build new schools, hospitals and continuing care facilities, and teachers, nurses and support workers to staff them. Of course we need skilled tradespeople to support diversifying our economy, to develop renewable energy resources, to clean up abandoned wells—not merely to squeeze every drop of bitumen from the oil sands. But this is not, by and large, the objective of the “Alberta is Calling” campaign, nor of this government in general, which appears to favour piecemeal recruitment and retention, wage suppression and interference in collective bargaining and continued political antagonism toward public-sector workers.

For premier Smith, as she said on the Shaun Newman Podcast in January 2024, the point of quickly growing Alberta’s population is to increase the province’s political clout within Canada and to confirm Alberta as a “bastion of freedom.” But not everyone loved that pitch. In August 2024 a video clip of her appearance on the podcast was posted to X (formerly Twitter), where her call for an “aggressive target to double our population” drew scathing criticism from conservatives both online and at UCP-members-only town halls, where Smith spoke ahead of a party leadership review vote in November.

On September 12 Smith reframed her message on population growth, appearing to pivot hard with a press release that blamed “the Trudeau government’s unrestrained border policies” for infrastructure challenges in Alberta. Focusing on a federal proposal to relocate asylum seekers to Canada throughout several provinces, Smith declared “excessive levels of immigration to this province are increasing the cost of living and strain[ing] public services for everyone. We are informing the government of Canada that, until further notice, Alberta is not open to having these additional asylum seekers settled in our province. We simply cannot afford it.” [Italics mine.] In her statement, Smith emphasized that the province “has always welcomed newcomers who possess our shared values—and we will continue to do so.” As CTV News reported, “when pressed on what those ‘shared values’ are, a representative told CTV News ‘freedom, family, faith, community and free enterprise’ are important.”

The language recalled the ad campaign in the early 20th century that pitched Alberta as a homeland for self-made “pioneers” seeking freedom of opportunity. That promotion sold a version of the Canadian West that didn’t really exist, but in the selling it conjured a self-identity for the nascent Alberta. While not aligning with the reality lived by many Albertans over the last century, it created a mythology that politicians such as Smith can lean on to evoke an imagined past and the notion of an ideal Albertan. But the question is for whom and to what end?

An answer emerged on September 17, when premier Smith spoke to Albertans in a video address that began with a reference to “shared values” before announcing new funding for schools. The subsequent press release summed up the message: “The population growth has not only increased pressure in the public and separate school system but has increased demand for publicly funded charter programming and space needs.” Charter schools—a slippery slope to privatized education—would get infrastructure funding, and, in a policy unique in Canada, the UCP government will spend public money to build the bricks-and-mortar infrastructure for private schools.

In other words, the UCP government’s solution to the problem of how to bridge the gap between the growing population and Alberta’s lagging public infrastructure capacity is to privatize that infrastructure and our public services as much as possible.

In fall 2024, like clockwork, the UCP government pulled the oil price card from its trusty deck of diversions, hinting about a possible deficit in the 2025–26 budget and paving the way for lowballing public-sector wages and cutting public services. At a crucial time in our province, when massive investment in and restoration of the social safety net is needed, the spectre of cuts, flight of professionals and another round of privatization and public infrastructure firesales looms once more. While newcomers to Alberta may be unfamiliar with this playbook, for some of us this recalls an Alberta we recognize all too well.

The spiral of chaos and dysfunction is a result not of incompetence but of deliberate strategy. When the systems we rely on are broken, and the purported “solutions” on offer merely cause more damage, the most vulnerable Albertans—the very young, the elderly, the poor, the disabled or those with complex needs—will bear the costs. Is this the Alberta we want to build?

Rebecca Graff-McRae is the research manager for the Parkland Institute at the University of Alberta.

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Read more: “Four Newcomers” who answered Alberta’s call.

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The past few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the use of psychedelic substances. The word “psychedelic” is an umbrella term for natural or synthetic substances that alter the senses, change thinking and impact mood. Also known as hallucinogens, they belong to various classes of drugs, and include peyote, MDMA, LSD, ayahuasca, ketamine, psilocybin, ibogaine and others. Though it is not fully understood how the different classes of psychedelics might have a therapeutic effect, neuroplasticity—the ability of the brain to “rewire” associations, impulses, emotions and memories—is thought to play an important role.

Psychedelics have been used by humans for various reasons, including traditional healing, spiritual practices and recreation, for millennia. They have received special legal and moral scrutiny in North America since their use became associated with the so-called “counterculture” of the 1960s. During that time in the US, the criminalization of psychedelics granted authorities a reason to target Vietnam war protesters. Since then, psychedelics have been subject to the “war on drugs.” In Canada psychedelics are considered a controlled substance with criminal repercussions whether one has them for personal use or with the intention to share with or sell to others.

This is why it was such a surprise to hear Mike Ellis, associate minister of mental health and addiction at the time, announce on October 5, 2022, that for patients with substance use disorders and trauma, psychedelics would now be available as treatments. Did I hear that correctly Alberta’s UCP has consistently opposed decriminalization and regulation of illegal drugs. In the words of its previous leader, Jason Kenney, “flooding the market with government-provided illegal drugs is not something Alberta will be doing.” Yet, with this new policy, the UCP would allow criminalized drugs to be used in as-yet unproven therapies for substance use disorders.

It was such a surprise to hear that psychedelics would now be available in Alberta as treatments.

As an addictions physician, I pay close attention to changes in drug policy. As a street doctor with family-physician values, I’m constantly on the lookout for new resources for my patients. I wanted to believe there was something in Alberta’s new regulations that would help my patients.

I had grounds for skepticism. At the same October 2022 press conference, in just as radical a departure, Ellis announced new restrictions to supports for patients with opioid use disorder. Those patients’ physicians would be prohibited from offering certain treatments, and would even be required to send patients to a difficult-to-access clinic called the Narcotic Transition Service to be taken off their medication. Tapering stable patients off their opioid medications can sharply increase the risk of death from drug toxicity and should only be done cautiously in the context of a strong therapeutic alliance, such as with one’s primary care provider. It was devastating news for patients who were stable on these medications. For some the change proved fatal.

At the time, the juxtaposition of these two changes puzzled me. Why were evidence-based harm-reduction interventions being quashed while unproven therapies using illegal psychedelic drugs—that the UCP until recently found abhorrent—were receiving enthusiastic endorsement?

On Tuesdays I wear work boots and cargo pants. The extra pockets are needed for latex gloves, a mask and hand sanitizer. I stuff donated socks, first-aid supplies and throat lozenges into a backpack. In winter I layer on thick long johns and a toque. A portable oxygen monitor and naloxone kit are clipped to a D-ring on my waistband, and my boot treads have spikes. I want to be prepared for anything. Not only are Tuesday patients often quite ill, but many have had terrible experiences in the healthcare system: stinging moments, while sick and asking for help, of dehumanization or outright racism.

Having internalized the stigma of violence over many years, homeless people often tolerate subpar conditions of outreach care. They don’t expect anything more than what US medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer calls “shitty care for the poor.” They will express gratitude for a bit of antiseptic spray and a band-aid to cover chronic ulcers and emotional wounds. Just doing my job, I say, struggling to tuck in ragged edges of tattered gauze. I try to hide my fury and sadness from patients who need their doctor to have a strong back.

The chronic rubbing of the bandage’s ragged edges, combined with the recent government announcements and my stubborn yearning for less-shitty care for the poor, may be why, one day last winter, I noticed a chic new storefront clinic near downtown. The interior gleams with glass and white marble. Plants thrive on windowsills streaming with natural light. I imagine the air is filtered just so, warm and humid with a hint of eucalyptus. I gaze up from my slushy streetcorner at shiny chrome letters: The Newly Institute.

I pull out my smartphone: “More like a spa than a clinic,” reads an online review. The Newly Institute website confirms it is a facility for psychedelic treatments enabled by new UCP legislation—ibogaine, psilocybin and ketamine, though Newly’s director is also “looking forward to pushing the boundaries of psychedelic therapy by employing substances like LSD and ayahuasca.” Photos portray clinicians in immaculate scrubs while executives in smart suits exude corporate confidence. A beautiful place, filled with beautiful people, for helping folks struggling with their mental health. I feel dowdy and damp in my muddy boots and sweaty layers.

Nevertheless I try to imagine practising within the Newly Institute’s pristine walls. In my mind I steam up a fresh espresso between appointments as patients relax amongst the plants and pleasantries. I stride across gleaming maple hardwood in spotless sneakers, dripping with efficacy. If this place, I reason, provides the newest treatments for the most intractable cases, then my current patients would be good candidates for its services. I think especially of one soul who lives with complex post-traumatic stress and substance-use disorder. He has been to residential treatment programs many times and to residential school before that. So many of my patients carry the most severe forms of the illnesses the innovative Newly Institute treats. I want to get them inside. So I make a call.

“I have a few patients I would like to refer to your clinic,” I say. A staffer in the spa clinic reassures me that they can help.

I had noted that the website mentions drumming, so the first thing I ask is whether there is an Indigenous adviser or elder on staff. The staffer apologizes. No, there is not.

Most of my patients live in homelessness or poverty, I explain, still a little hopeful. Is there a cost for treatment Well, yes. Consultations and treatment are “fully private,” I’m told, and paid for by the “client, an employer or by an insurance company.” Later I discover that the cost of psychedelic treatment courses varies widely but can range into the thousands of dollars. The standard one-month “intensive outpatient” program for mental health at Newly, for example, costs $12,950. Bloom Clinic in Calgary advertises a 10-week ketamine-assisted program for $5,965.

I try again. If someone has Alberta disability or income supports, will they be covered No. What about Indigenous patients with status under the Indian Act No.

The friendly person educates me cheerily: most of their clients—I feel chastised for saying “patients”—with substance-use disorders use only alcohol, or maybe cannabis, but not opioids. Those clients, I am advised, should first go to medical detox if they have opioid-use disorder.

Thanking the person on the phone, I feel a familiar disappointment, but also bafflement. If only their suggestion were that easy. So-called “detox,” or safe withdrawal, is a notorious bottleneck in Alberta’s system of care. Getting a spot when it’s needed is nearly impossible. Instead, in a wealthy province that now sees a drug poisoning death every five hours, our government is ushering in an intervention that helps only those who can afford it and are using the “right” substances.

I asked Dr. Leah Mayo, Parker Research Chair in Psychedelics at the University of Calgary, about the access disparity in the world she studies. She agreed that “major limitations to these interventions [are] becoming mainstream, and a lot of thought will need to go into how to make access equitable.”

And equity is about much more than simply access or cost. As a young anthropologist, I worked in rural Mexico with a group of curanderos, or traditional healers. During long drives between Indigenous villages, where they worked with young mothers learning to grow and use medicinal herbs, I listened to the healers as they grappled with the problem of commercialization of their plant medicines. In a recent forum on psychedelics, the Canadian Public Health Association voiced a similar concern: “…We must question how traditional Indigenous knowledge, cultural rights and opportunities for economic participation will be adequately protected as psychedelics gain prominence in Canada.”

Though services might struggle to be inclusive of Indigenous practices and perspectives, they must. We have the guidance: biomedical colonialism is addressed in Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action and in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and should always be explicitly included in any new health-related regulations, programs or services.

Drug policy in Alberta is determined not by science, safety, access or equity but by commercial potential.

Maybe, after witnessing the toxic-drug crisis rampage for the better part of the past decade, I’m becoming impatient. Novel approaches take time; we have to gather data and properly implement sensitive aspects such as inclusion and reconciliation.

It has been well over a year, however, since Alberta’s new regulations were implemented, and though scientific evidence might someday prove the therapeutic value of psychedelics, it hasn’t happened yet. In a search of clinical trials registered by Health Canada for two of the psychedelic drugs approved under the UCP’s new regulations, one of the drugs—psilocybin—had only two clinical trials, both now closed. The other—a traditional central African root medicine called ibogaine—has no clinical trials registered. Dr. Mayo acknowledged that only one psychedelics clinic in Calgary, SABI Mind, is currently involved in a regulated clinical trial of its therapies. (The Newly Institute website has since removed references to treatments using ibogaine and psilocybin. Other clinics, including ATMA CENA in Edmonton and Calgary, are offering MDMA and psilocybin as well as ketamine.)

Meanwhile, evidence in favour of the interventions blocked by the UCP’s new legislation, including studies of prescribed safer supply of opioids, continues to accumulate.

Despite Mike Ellis’s stated rationale, his ministry’s mash-up of regulatory changes improves neither access nor safety for my patients. So, what’s really behind the changes The answer is disconcerting. Many psychedelic facilities and, it should be noted, residential treatment facilities receiving massive taxpayer-funded “investments,” are run by privately held, for-profit companies. The reality is that the public system of care holds no market prospects, while, as noted on Nasdaq.com, “psychedelic stocks have a bright future.”

The truth is that even during a crisis that annually kills thousands of Albertans, and despite sneaking in words such as “compassion” and “stewardship,” drug policy in this province is determined not by principles of science, safety, access, equity or human rights but by commercial potential. Alberta’s UCP government believes that health services should be driven not by a patient-centred mission but by marketing strategies like the Newly Institute’s: “We are firmly rooted in our collective commitment to excellence, whether it’s patient care, inter-office communication, or the impact of the colour we choose for our wallpaper in the office bathrooms. No detail is too small to be considered.”

As I lace up my spiked boots for yet another Tuesday of street medicine, I’m conflicted. While I’m glad for the existence of clean and beautiful places for patients, and for new approaches to treating severe mental health disorders, I recognize the pipe dream. My espresso fantasy melts away like dirty snow as I realize that neither my patients nor I would be any more welcome in a fancy private clinic than we are in general society. This is because, wherever we go, we expose the marble-clad foundation of discrimination upon which both for-profit clinics and society itself are built.

While the UCP cheers on the psychedelics industry to monetize its visions, I am deeply sad for the ongoing loss of lives and dreams in my community. Regardless of whether we use the word “patients” or “clients,” people are still people, not commodities, with challenges that are still illnesses, not market prospects. It turns out that what we sacrifice in a private system is accountability. Even more chilling is what we sacrifice in a for-profit health system: care.

If current conservative governments continue their path of destruction all in the name of profit, too many people will have to continue to hold their breath while waiting for care out in the cold, some until they simply stop breathing.

Bonnie Larson is a physician and community organizer who for 15 years has worked with people experiencing homelessness.

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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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Every five years Canada’s census measures “core housing need”—the number of households whose homes are unaffordable, overcrowded or in need of major repairs. Housing is considered unaffordable when it costs more than 30 per cent of that household’s pre-tax income. In 2016 almost 1.7 million Canadian households, or one in eight, were in core housing need. But in 2021 only 1.45 million households, or about one in 10, were.

How is that possible, given everything we’ve heard about rents and home prices skyrocketing during that period Statistics Canada is clear as to why: “The COVID-19-related government transfers lifted many households above the housing affordability thresholds, helping pay for shelter costs like rent, mortgages and utilities.” The most recent census (2021) relied on 2020 incomes. But now that the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and other temporary income supplements have been rolled back, the number of Canadian households in core need has undoubtedly risen.

The “CERB bump”—250,000 households temporarily lifted out of housing need—gives us an immediate hint as to who we’re talking about: overwhelmingly, households whose incomes were a lot less than the $500/week that CERB provided. In fact, almost four in five households in core housing need in Canada have low or very low incomes: 1.1 million of the 1.45 million of these households have incomes under $42,000 a year, which is less than half of Canada’s median household income. Of that number, 200,000 have incomes of $18,000 or less and can afford no more than $420/month for rent.

Core housing need measures only a fraction of the people who live in unaffordable, overcrowded or uninhabitable homes. The most egregious knowledge gap is an accurate homelessness count. According to the most recent data from Statistics Canada, 235,000 people are without safe and secure accommodation at least once a year. But that figure is from 2014. More recently, biennial “point in time” counts have been interrupted by COVID. Even these exercises only count people who are found unsheltered, in emergency shelters or in “transitional housing” on one night in a little more than 60 of Canada’s more than 700 municipalities with over 5,000 people.

At least 70 per cent of 2.2 million college and university students in Canada live independently of families, the majority of them on very low incomes. Almost three quarters of these students live in unaffordable rentals—so that’s over a million more very low-income people searching for an inexpensive place to live.

A further 700,000 people live in congregate housing, including long-term care and other forms of shared housing (e.g., for people with disabilities). A high proportion of these people are occasionally homeless or live in institutions such as hospitals because of inadequate supply of supportive housing. In Ontario alone, nearly 43,000 seniors are on waiting lists for long-term care. There is no up-to-date information for Alberta—a problem in itself—but the province’s shortage of senior-care options is leaving increasing numbers stranded in hospital beds.

Tens of thousands of rooming houses have been lost in inner cities. You can’t find a room in any city in Canada for less than $500/month—more than half what most people on welfare receive. People are being turned away from overcrowded emergency shelters and ending up in growing encampments. Low-income seniors on fixed incomes are competing with service-sector workers and students who can’t find any affordable one-bedroom apartments. Increasingly these people are competing with desperate nurses, teachers and other young professionals locked out of starter homeownership.

If the housing crisis is an affordability issue, with the divide between rents and incomes widening rather than narrowing, why don’t we simply provide rent supplements—or increase welfare and minimum wage, or bring in a universal basic income—to bridge the difference First, because the difference between an affordable rent for a single person on social assistance in Alberta—$258/month—and the going rent for an average one-bedroom apartment in Calgary—$1,696—is dauntingly large. Even if welfare rates were tripled, there’s no neighbourhood in Calgary or Edmonton where that person could afford the average rent for a studio- or one-bedroom apartment. More importantly, it’s because there isn’t a sufficient supply of housing to meet the need.

In market transactions, the intersection of supply and demand determines price. However, if housing is a human need, it should not be subject to market forces. If apartments that are currently going for market rents were acquired by non-market providers (government, housing co-ops, non-profits etc.), and if short-term apartment rentals (e.g., Airbnb) were banned, that would help stem the loss of low-income rentals. But it wouldn’t necessarily create new affordable supply. And while demand-side interventions, such as providing livable incomes and renter protections, are necessary, these too would be insufficient.

In “A human-rights-based calculation of Canada’s housing supply shortages,” a 2023 report commissioned by the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate, I calculated the overall housing deficit in Canada. When one includes the existing housing deficit, the net loss of affordable housing stock, population growth and demographic change, Canada will need to build three million new homes for low- and very-low-income households by 2030, and two million more for median-income households.

Fewer homes were built in Canada in 2021 than were built in Canada in 1973.

How did we get into this mess? Put simply, a set of decisions made by governments in the early 1970s and then in the early 1990s had a huge negative impact.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, tax incentives had encouraged purpose-built rental apartments. The Canadian government eliminated these in 1972. At the same time, it introduced a capital gains tax but exempted a household’s principal residence. These changes were intended to encourage people to invest in their home and then sell it as they retired—an alternative to relying solely on pension earnings. A third element in this toxic mix of policies was municipal governments enacting stringent new zoning regulations to “protect the character” of neighbourhoods, ranging from expanding the areas zoned for single-family houses to increasing parking minimums.

Apartment construction plummeted. Condominiums, which were much more immediately lucrative for developers to sell instead of rent, became the norm in the narrow bands of land where multi-unit housing was allowed.

Mixed-income non-market housing had made up 20 per cent of new stock from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s (between 10,000 and 30,000 new non-market homes a year). By the late 1980s the federal government had begun to move towards private-sector provision of below-market “affordable housing.” Rather than financing large-scale public housing projects erected by provincial authorities, the federal government shifted to funding smaller co-operative, municipal and community-led housing. In 1971 over half of renters between the ages of 25 and 44 could afford to buy an average-priced house. By 1981 only 7 per cent were able to do so.

The federal government had completely off-loaded responsibility for affordable housing to the provinces by 1993. Many provinces further off-loaded the costs of low-income housing to municipalities.

The consequences Investing based on maximizing profits from existing housing—a practice sometimes called “financialization”—became much more lucrative than building new housing. Fewer homes were built in Canada in 2021 than were built in Canada in 1973. Over the past 30 years fewer than 10,000 new homes intended for low-income residents have been built in Canada.

Where are poor people supposed to go?

The federal government needs to return to policies it abandoned 30 to 50 years ago. It got back into housing policy with the 2017 National Housing Strategy (NHS) and committed, in 2019, to realizing the right to adequate housing. But its reluctance to engage in an honest needs assessment, one based on evidence of who needs what kind of housing where and at what cost, has led to it subsidizing unaffordable market rentals. Only 3 per cent of homes created under the biggest NHS scheme, the $26-billion Rental Construction Financing Initiative, were affordable to households in housing need, and all of those apartments were studios. Meanwhile, almost every economic report recommends that the federal government directly subsidize a doubling of non-market housing supply over the next decade: almost one million new or acquired public, community and co-operative homes.

Governments should provide free of low-cost land for non-market development. 

This new supply would reduce the number of “suppressed households” in Canada—people who wish to live independently but are forced to share by cost pressures: for example, involuntarily doubling up with roommates; adults living with their parents. And it would take some pressure off the young middle-income households currently forced to save up to 10 years in Calgary or nine in Edmonton for a 20 per cent down payment, while being locked in to the increasingly expensive and scarce rental market.

Five million homes for low- and moderate-income households might not seem to be achievable in a decade. However, Sweden built the equivalent—one million homes for low- and moderate-income households for a country that had fewer than eight million people—from 1965 to 1974. Canada constructed a million homes via CMHC, the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation, for moderate-income households to buy and own between 1946 and 1960, when its population was less than a third of what it is today.

Based on what’s worked in Canada and internationally, here are some ways to get costs down and increase the supply of housing.

For starters, governments should provide free or low-cost land. According to many international reports, good land policy is the basis of any successful affordable housing strategy. Large-scale government acquisition and disposition was the basis of both the post-war Victory Homes in Canada and the successful non-market housing programs of the 1960s and 1980s. Depending on the location and size of the project, land constitutes between 8 and 23 per cent of total cost.

This land should go to non-market development. According to a 2021 Canadian study based in Vancouver, non-market developers operating from a social mission instead of for profit can produce units that rent for 40–50 per cent less. Market developers—and their finance providers—expect returns ranging from 19 per cent to 28 per cent, depending on risk tolerance. And non-market developers maintain affordability over time, compared to government subsidies to private developers. Under the NHS, private developers have affordability requirements of only 10–20 years.

Another aspect of land policy is scale, which is determined by the zoning of a site. This includes the number of storeys and units allowed, as well as design requirements such as open space, parking, setbacks etc. and mandatory financial and construction capacity of the developer. Even though constructing a multi-storey apartment building is much more complicated than a single-family home (for example, because of the need for an elevator), larger-scale development can be cheaper per square metre. Eliminating parking requirements can save up to $56,000 per unit, or up to 17 per cent of costs. Density bonuses of up to 50 per cent (e.g., a six-storey building instead of a four-storey one) could be provided to non-market or permanently affordable homes secured through a community land trust. This entity holds land and property for the purpose of long-term affordability. Small-scale affordable, accessible and energy-efficient apartments can be made possible on single or double lots through changes to building codes. While factory-built modular construction isn’t less expensive now, if its use were scaled up, it could increase speed and lower cost.

Long-term (35- to 50-year) and low-rate (e.g., 2 per cent) mortgages were the secret sauce behind the scaling-up of non-market housing in Canada. Upfront grants can help secure market financing and also help with long approval times.

To scale up low-cost housing will require massive changes to municipal processes and charges. Approval times for multi-unit housing range from three months in Charlottetown to a ridiculous 32 months in Toronto. Development charges range from $22 per square metre in St. John’s to $1,640 in Vancouver, where such charges represent 15 per cent of the cost of the home. Up to 60 studies can be required for one building…! Edmonton has been judged the best city for housing development in Canada, and it is no coincidence that Edmonton has been working hardest on simplifying zoning approvals since 2019. Development charges can be seen as an additional tax on newcomers for the “privilege” of renting or buying a home, and a further wealth transfer from renters to established homeowners. Renters already are likely paying higher property taxes. Land value taxes, and progressive property taxes, that is, levying higher rates on homes worth more than $2-million, for example, would be a far fairer way to tax infrastructure and amenity improvements—and to enable more-affordable housing.

The project I work with—the UBC-based Housing Assessment Resource Tools (HART)—aims to show the potential impact of land, finance and approval mechanisms, so that Canada can once again produce genuinely affordable and adequate homes for low- and moderate-income households. Otherwise, under the status quo, we’re condemning increasing numbers of citizens to unbearable housing stress and homelessness.

Carolyn Whitzman is the expert adviser to the Housing Assessment Resource Tools project and the author of the forthcoming Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis (UBC Press, 2024).

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Sam Kolias says NO

The chief executive officer and chairman of the board at Boardwalk REIT

Some people believe rent controls work. They don’t. The fact is rent controls haven’t worked in countless jurisdictions, including Vancouver, Toronto and New York.

In every place with rent controls, rents have risen alongside an evaporation of much-needed new housing supply; new housing supply creates competition and lowers prices. The most-affordable housing in Canada is in the two provinces that avoid this devastating public policy: Alberta and Saskatchewan. Alberta repealed a temporary rent cap in 1977 and Saskatchewan replaced its act from 1973 in 2007. Some 90 per cent of housing is supplied by the private sector, and Alberta and Saskatchewan see the highest investment per capita in apartment development of all the provinces.

Missing from many arguments for rent control is the critical law of supply and demand. It’s a law, not a theory, for a reason.

Rent controls make it difficult for housing providers to have enough cash flow to properly maintain the housing. This is just basic math. Rent controls lead to residents living in less-than-favourable conditions, as is seen in countless rent control jurisdictions. Rent controls also deter much-needed investment and development in new housing. Sadly, rent controls can even favour those more fortunate people who don’t require affordable housing, but who nonetheless remain in price-controlled rental housing to finance their lifestyle, including second homes, vacations and luxury cars.

Real solutions lie firstly in taxation policies that stimulate investment for the creation of affordable housing and secondly in ensuring access to lower-cost capital for the development of more purpose-built housing. Both policies generate new housing supply and create a necessary but controllable level of vacancy, which in turn drives competition, which in turn lowers rents. This is supply and demand in action.

Rent supplements are another essential solution, as they go to people in need, not to everyone; rent controls make no such distinction.

Other viable solutions include a government acquisition fund allowing community housing providers direct access to capital in order to acquire existing housing in established neighbourhoods from private landlords. This provides faster access to affordable housing than new builds, which cost more and take longer. Further, we can incentivize private landlords through the non-taxation of capital gains and recaptured depreciation from sales to social housing providers, leading to more housing across the entire housing spectrum. Carrots work! Just look at Canada’s tax incentives in the 1970s, which encouraged building housing and created a much-needed supply of affordable housing. It worked then and it will work now! These are tried and tested laws of economics.

At the end of the day we’re all customers. Together let’s ensure quality affordable housing is accessible to all Canadians.

Annie Hodgins says YES

The executive director of the Canadian Centre for Housing Rights

Rents are out of control across Canada, but Alberta tops the charts. From March 2023 to March 2024, Alberta saw the highest average rent increases of any province—a staggering 20 per cent, well above inflation. Edmonton and Calgary saw the highest increases of the largest Canadian cities, at 17.3 per cent and 10.6 per cent respectively. As rents climb even further, the number of Albertans experiencing chronic homelessness has risen to nearly 7,000.

Why are rents being raised even as people struggle with an affordability crisis It’s simple: because so much housing is owned by companies whose goal is to increase profit, and Alberta’s laws allow it. Rental housing is a scarce resource that’s mostly owned by a small number of large investment vehicles such as real estate investment trusts (REITs). Over the past few decades rental housing ownership has become much more concentrated—a process called “financialization,” which governments have done little to discourage. Alberta has Canada’s highest rate of financialization, with 24 per cent of its apartment buildings owned by REITs.

Housing is a basic need—and human right—yet tenants in a hyperfinancialized and overpriced housing market have no choice but to accept exorbitant increases to avoid homelessness. Albertans are spending their savings and skipping meals to feed investors’ hunger for higher profits.

Canada relies on the private market to supply much of its rental housing. Landlords argue they need to steadily raise rents to match increases to their operating costs and maintain a healthy profit margin for their businesses. But in Alberta landlords’ profit margins aren’t stable; they’re growing. Canada’s five largest publicly traded REITs reported 7–13 per cent increases to their profitability in 2023, with the highest reported by Boardwalk. Those extra profits come directly from the pockets of cash-strapped renters. People who can’t pay end up in overcrowded or unsafe conditions, in shelters or on the street.

When a business takes advantage of a crisis to overcharge for necessities, we call it price gouging. Price gouging is illegal in many places, but rent gouging is legal in Alberta. Landlords are charging rents far higher than is necessary to maintain their properties and make reasonable profits. It’s government’s responsibility to address this. BC, Manitoba, Ontario, PEI and Quebec have regulated rents for decades. Nova Scotia recently followed suit. Modern regulation can allow steady rent increases to match operating costs while prohibiting excessive increases. It’s a time-tested system that works.

“Alberta is calling” says the government, promising that Albertans spend less on housing and more on the finer things in life. But ask the nearly 10 per cent of Albertans in inadequate or unaffordable housing, or the 7,000 without any home at all, whether Alberta is still calling. Rent regulation alone won’t solve the housing crisis, but it is a necessary step.

sam kolias responds to annie hodgins

Rent controls haven’t worked in the past, and there is no evidence they will work now. According to the National Rent Ranking report (rentals.ca) from March 2024, some of the highest rents in Canada are in rent-controlled markets: Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa and now Halifax. In fact, the 21 most expensive cities to rent in (the red/orange zone) are in rent-controlled provinces. Conversely, three of the five most-affordable cities (Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton) are in non-regulated markets. Calgary sits in the top 10 most affordable. No one is going to the “red zones” expecting to find affordable housing; they’re coming to Alberta and Saskatchewan. Outside of Canada, one can look to the failed policy in Sweden, where rent control has resulted in an extreme supply shortage and wait times of 10 years or more for affordable housing. Beyond creating supply shortages and long wait times, rent-regulated markets induce excessive rent hikes when units turn over, as landlords seek to recoup losses imposed by years of rental caps.

Let’s examine why rent control has failed to work.

New housing supply creates competition, which lowers prices. It’s no coincidence that Alberta and Saskatchewan, both of which repealed rent caps, have the highest investment per capita in apartment development and the most affordable rents. Building more affordable housing requires the private sector to continue investing. But will people invest if they can’t make a profit Profit is essential for financial survival. It provides the tools and capital necessary to improve products and services. Housing is a capital-intense product and requires a high level of investment. But profit isn’t found in the mission statement of any housing provider. Why Ken Blanchard (US author and business professional) tells us why, and it’s no secret: “Profit is the applause you get for taking care of your customers and creating a motivating environment for your people.”

Rent controls inhibit the cash flow that housing providers require to properly maintain housing.

Those who suggest profits for housing providers come solely from the pockets of renters fail to recognize the many sound, innovative business practices used by housing providers, such as controlling expenses, sourcing competitive products and services and introducing sustainability standards. Some people argue REITs have become “financialized.” This is a new, vaguely defined and poorly employed term used against private housing providers. Publicly traded REITs represent less than 6 per cent of the purpose-built rental stock, which is less than 3 per cent of the total rental market in Canada. So the assertion that REITs control the market doesn’t compute.

At Boardwalk we annually invest over $100-million back into our communities to not only maintain but enhance our residents’ living experience. Without happy long-term residents, there is no profit to reinvest—and nearly every dollar of non-taxable income Boardwalk receives is reinvested back into affordable housing. No uniform rental cap applied across all housing providers could ensure operational sustainability and quality housing. The cost of housing varies by asset age, condition and upkeep, all of which is compounded by rising interest rates, making the sustainable provision of affordable housing in a rent-controlled market impossible.

Rent controls inhibit the cash flow that housing providers require to properly maintain housing. Such controls have led to renters living in dire conditions. They deter much-needed investment and development of new housing. A blunt, wide-sweeping public policy fails because it removes flexibility.

Real solutions are found in taxation policies that stimulate investment and ensure access to lower-cost capital. These drive the development of more purpose-built, affordable housing, creating controllable vacancy, which drives competition and decreases rents. Rent supplements are also essential and are most effective when provided to those in need, not simply everyone, as rent controls are.

As I say earlier, a viable solution would be a government acquisition fund that allows social housing providers direct access to capital to acquire existing housing in mature neighbourhoods from private landlords. This would prioritize immediate access to affordable housing versus the higher costs and longer wait times associated with new construction. As well, sound tax policies incentivize private landlords to create more housing across the entire housing spectrum. Tax incentives in the 1970s worked and created much-needed housing supply.

The principles of economics in a free market work. Consider non-controlled office rents in Toronto and how vacancy creates competition to keep prices affordable. Let these principles do what they have always done: ensure housing affordability for all Canadians.

—Co-authored with Boyd Belisle, vice president of community and culture, Boardwalk REIT

annie hodgins responds to sam kolias

Nobody can deny that rents are out of control across Canada. And higher rents mean higher profits for investors. While acknowledging that we’re in a housing affordability crisis, some continue to believe that governments shouldn’t do anything about it. A common argument is that we should rely on the market law of supply and demand to keep rents at reasonable levels.

However, evidence shows that relying on supply and demand hasn’t worked. In both Alberta and Saskatchewan, one-third of renters live in unaffordable housing, and those rates are only going to increase as rents continue to skyrocket. From early 2023 to early 2024 Alberta saw the highest average rent increase in Canada, and Saskatchewan wasn’t far behind. Both provinces may be seeing investment in rental housing, but the data show that investment isn’t translating into lower rents.

This comes as no surprise. When examining housing markets, economists used to rely on now-outdated models of supply and demand, which predicted that, left unattended, housing markets would naturally stabilize rents at rates that would both be affordable to renters and maintain reasonable profit margins for landlords. But those models didn’t account for the unique characteristics of the housing market and have been widely discredited. Modern economists now recognize that housing supply is inelastic: it doesn’t respond very much to price changes. Unlike elastic commodities such as widgets produced in a factory, building housing is expensive, requires land, takes time and produces a capital asset that lasts for decades. Housing demand is also inelastic: people can’t simply choose not to procure housing. This is, of course, because housing is a basic necessity of life that everyone is entitled to. The law of supply and demand may naturally prevent price gouging in elastic commodity markets, but it doesn’t stop rent gouging in the housing market. That’s exactly what we’re seeing in Alberta, where landlords’ profit margins are steadily increasing during an affordability crisis that is driving people out of their homes.

Reasonable rents aren’t maintained by relying on supply and demand. Other measures need to be taken.

Because we’ve seen that reasonable rents aren’t maintained by relying on supply and demand, other measures need to be taken to make sure everyone has a home they can afford. And we no longer have to rely on outdated theoretical models—economists now have a wealth of direct evidence to assess the effects of rent regulation. Here’s what we know:

Constructing new purpose-built rental housing is not an effective way to improve affordability. In some cases it can even raise the cost of existing homes. To actually ensure affordable rents through supply and demand, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) calculates that the private market would need to build an impossible 5.8 million new units by 2030—vastly more than the 1.9 million units the market is projected to actually build.

Rent regulation works. Studies show that well-designed rent regulation is effective at stabilizing rents. The evidence disproves myths that rent regulation only benefits wealthy renters, or that it somehow leads to higher rents.

Rent regulation doesn’t deter investment. A study of 16 countries over 100 years found “no significant correlation between modern rent controls and the rate of rental housing construction.” In Canada, CMHC analyzed nearly 50 years of data and found “no significant evidence that rental starts were lower in rent-control markets than in no-rent-control markets.” Numerous other studies have found the same thing. The myth that rent regulation scares away investors is just that: a myth.

Rent regulation doesn’t impact building maintenance. CMHC found no evidence that rent controls lead landlords to let rental units fall into disrepair. Too many renters live in inadequately maintained homes in all provinces, but the rates aren’t noticeably higher in rent-regulated provinces. This may be because modern rent regulation systems notably allow landlords to pass expenses related to maintenance and upkeep through to tenants, or it may be that companies aren’t as cash-strapped as they claim. Either way, the evidence is clear that rent regulation doesn’t lead to disrepair.

Rent regulation is one part of a solution to the housing affordability crisis that would ensure no one is forced to live without a home. We also need programs to create and sustain more non-market affordable housing, such as social, non-profit and co-operative housing. We also need programs to build new affordable private-market housing—programs that include affordability requirements and don’t rely on outdated models of supply and demand. But while such programs are essential, they won’t address the wholesale loss of existing affordable housing happening now in Alberta and across Canada.

The evidence is clear: to keep existing housing affordable and renters in their homes, we need rent regulation, now.

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Holly: It is the late 1980s in Edmonton. I am 18 and working full time as a psychiatric aide in a large provincial psychiatric hospital outside the city with 12 buildings full of people diagnosed with mental illness. The campus has beautiful grassy fields within a boundary of tall, thick trees. After only eight hours of orientation to psychiatry, I spend most of my time “sitting constant” with people who are suicidal or have eating disorders. Every unit has its own culture: some are chaotic and unpredictable, others are slow and monotonous. People stay here for a long time—months, even years. They tell me of the various reasons they were brought here, including hearing impairment, Huntington’s disease, promiscuity, acts of violence, episodic voices of God or Satan, ideas of magic, paranoia, euphoria and deep sadness.

My job is to observe and monitor each individual as they are. It is hard to see them existing beyond the unit setting; this place is like a community. For some it’s the only form of home they’ve known. Still, I hear whispers of other places: the farm, a bus to Whitby, the community up north, the parent/partner/friend who is missed.

It is hard to see people existing beyond the hospital setting. For some this is the only form of home they’ve known.

Leif: It is 1990 and I’m 18 years old. I have a home, a school, friends, a hometown. More than that, I am part of a community. But I have lived my life under the dark shadow of mental illness. My mom requires hospitalization for severe depression; my dad’s drinking makes my home almost unlivable. Somehow I’ve managed to carry this weight while holding down jobs and buying cars, motorcycles, clothes and video games.

I have experienced severe, crushing depression for most of my teenage years. I’m under incredible stress, going to school during the day and working night shifts at a grocery store. Home life is even worse than my toxic workplace. My dad has grown angrier, more violent and less logical since I became old enough to move out, even though I’m not done high school. As this pressure cooker heats, I begin to show the classic signs of bipolar disorder with psychosis, and later, symptoms of schizophrenia with severe anxiety. One day I pick a fight in school and am non-compliant with the school administrators. When the police arrive, I fight with them too. There are no more options: I’m taken to Alberta Hospital. My hopes for the future shatter at once. I’m locked up, heavily medicated, disconnected from everything around me.

My hopes for the future shatter at once. I’m locked up, heavily medicated, disconnected from everything around me.

Holly: Five years go by, and I keep this job while finishing a nursing degree. After graduation I move to the US and start working at an inpatient psychiatry unit. Here the care is different: the people come in only for stays abbreviated by managed care. The units are locked. There are no grassy fields or recreational outings. The units are busy, with a frenzied energy that comes from having people with mania and psychosis in a small space. Restraints and seclusion are regular occurrences, often exceeding the capacity of available seclusion rooms. People come in sick, are medicated heavily and sent out to community or day-hospital programs—or the street. They come back with signs of the outside: dirt from the street embedded in their skin, new drugs in their toxicology screens, new stories of relationships and struggle.

This, however, is the 1990s, “The decade of the brain.” We are all enchanted by the promises of new medications and believe in the potential cures. Like alchemists we tinker to find the right mix of medications, monitoring side effects and symptoms. We shape our patients through chemical compliance. Side effects appear more often than we’d like—but the pharma sellers convince us otherwise, so we tell our patients to eat healthy and give the medications time to work.

Leif:The hospital works a miracle. In just two months I go from violent, raving mad, delusional and psychotic back to “normal.” Sane, stable and as capable of functioning as I ever was. I find work at a factory but am unable to keep up. I blame the medication and stop taking it. I feel fine.

The feeling doesn’t last. I begin to hear radio announcers say grandiose things about me, like I have wealth beyond measure and movie stars are romantically interested in me. I think maybe I just need the discipline and structure of a military lifestyle to keep the voices at bay, like I had in cadets. The first Persian Gulf War is flaring up, and so I try to join the Canadian Army. I’m turned away because of my psychiatric records. I sell my motorbike for $20, close my bank account and hitchhike to the west coast. I meet new people, make new friends. I’m having the time of my life. But without medication the psychosis eventually comes back, and with a vengeance. After returning home, then spending another six months living in Vancouver, going hitchhiking and trying to earn a pilot’s licence, my illness returns. Hospitalization and more medication follow. I leave what little I have and return to Edmonton with nothing.

Once again I’m homeless, only this time in my own city while on a medication that leaves me debilitated. I run into people I went to school with and tell them I’m sick and waiting to get into hospital. They don’t understand that I’m mentally ill, not physically sick. Mental illness had never been part of our education. I can’t function, can’t work, and I have no money or friends. My reality is poverty, delusions and hallucinations. I hope another hospitalization will allow me to function and take away the voices and thoughts that torment me.

I’m finally ready to accept diagnosis and treatment after losing everything in my life that mattered, including home, friends, family and all my possessions. I wrongly think that if I quit drinking and go back on medication, then old friends will beat down my door to reconnect. Instead, I face extreme isolation and loneliness. Several times I give up on the world outside my apartment. I sleep for days. I don’t go outside unless I need food. For a time, I have no phone and disconnect the intercom to my apartment. Over the coming years I will go off medications several times, go in and out of the hospital system, attempt suicide and put my parents through hell. There seems to be no end in sight.Holly: I’m working in adolescent psychiatry in a posh neighbourhood in downtown Chicago. My patients are almost all kids from what is considered to be the most violent neighbourhood in the US. Many of the young girls are diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, a diagnosis that means they worry too much. They also tell us they oversee getting three siblings and three cousins to school each morning, as mothers and grandmothers must cross the city by bus to get to work. I oversee teaching these kids about anxiety and medications. I teach them to reframe their “distorted” thoughts. They listen to me and sometimes smile with a wisdom I’m only beginning to recognize: They’ve been told this before. They know that in this clinical space we don’t understand what their home is like. That we can’t understand.

Two years later I move to outpatient psychiatry. I’m in grad school now, working on becoming a nurse practitioner. I work in an office building. Here the people I work with are “clients,” not “patients.” They come in voluntarily and sit in a waiting room quietly, then come to my office and sit in the comfortable chairs. They tell me how things are going, falling apart at times but in a more controlled way. There is a shift in power and control in this place. The keys I carry are different; there are no locked doors but there are disability forms and prescriptions. It’s hard to focus on the clinical pathways built by biomedicine that tell me what to prescribe first, second, then third. These paths tell me to diagnose symptoms and treat illness. The people in my office tell me of other paths and barriers.

Clients tell me about workplaces that are not accommodating of mental illness, of relatives that don’t get it, or of a lack of food or heat. I can hear the hollowness of cognitive therapy treatment and how disconnected it is from the problems my clients face. One day a client is reciting to me their symptoms of stress and alludes to the fact that they’re hungry. They tell me about their struggles to keep perishable food cold in the warm spring weather—they have no electricity. The $300/month they live on does not go a long way. A subsidy is available, but it requires navigating a bureaucratic space. We talk about strategies to cope. One day I realize that the best way to spend the allotted 50 minutes might be to go to the utility commission with a client. Coming back into the office I see a fellow trainee who asks me where I was and I tell him about the field trip. He smirks and asks, “Don’t you have any boundaries?”

This comment gives me pause—was this the right thing to do At this point I’ve been working in psychiatry for 14 years and I’m not sure all my experience and training has made me that helpful. For many, the tinkering with medications and strategies for coping aren’t enough. The biomedical model of psychiatry is placeless; it situates all the problems within the individual and ignores the contexts in which they live. This revelation takes me in a new direction that coincides with a move back to Canada, where I find a role in community mental health nursing—working in crisis teams, home support and primary care settings. Much of my work here is creative, incorporating counselling and assessment skills with material goods such as a pack of cigarettes or a sandwich to help offset a crisis. I unpack clients’ moving boxes and help fill out rent subsidy forms. But this work isn’t highlighted on the charting forms or in workload reports that account for my time, so as funding is cut, so is my ability to do this kind of work.

Biomedical psychiatry situates all the problems within the individual and ignores the contexts in which they live.

Leif: Living on my own, money is constantly an issue. I move several times until I find a place I can afford. Rent is $160 a month for a shoebox apartment. I have a sink, stove, fridge, toilet and shower. My whole life must fit into 150 square feet. Money is tighter than ever. For my Christmas gift, I ask my best friend for a can of tobacco so I can save $25 for food and coffee. My mental health is reasonably good. I’m in remission. Most would describe me as weird; I’m not wealthy enough to be eccentric. Years pass and I wonder if maybe I’m not as sick as I thought. Without full knowledge of what could happen, I lower one of my medications without my doctor’s advice, which spells disaster. After a particularly unpleasant episode (which included running around screaming that there was a bomb in my apartment building), I have a short stint in the hospital. I’m released within a few days.

A series of mental health workers come to see me, but I convince them I don’t need to be hospitalized. Then one day I agree to go by ambulance to Alberta Hospital for an assessment. I experience a tidal wave of paranoia and am involved in a chase around the grounds of the hospital. I spend the next six months confined; time slows to a crawl. I sleep all I can, as mountains of endless, frustrating time tick by. I’m unable to focus on reading or TV and have no one to talk to. I’m living the hell of constant banishment to a seclusion room, for hours or days at a time, despite already being in a confined ward. I clash with my doctor. The staff don’t believe a word I say.

When finally discharged, I feel my life is over. I have only two people on my side: a kind social worker and my formerly abusive dad. I’m placed in a well-run, supportive group home. Then, for the first time, I’m not lonely or underfed. Fifteen years pass in the group home, and I’m given a subsidized apartment in another housing project. With the support of my dad and a strong desire to tell my story and somehow make some sense of all my suffering, I publish a book about my lived experience, get a job with the Schizophrenia Society and almost by accident find work as a teacher at the same hospital that once confined me. Finally I have come out the other side. But beneath it all I’m still sick.

Flash forward to 2024. I’m now teaching two classes at Alberta Hospital and will soon be facilitating a support group too. I write for magazines and pay close attention to the news. I regularly see reference to mental illness in the media. Recently in Edmonton, a 16-year-old shot and killed two police officers, then turned the gun on his mother, then himself. I learn he was the subject of a mental health call several months earlier. In response, the provincial government promises $8-million in new funding to crisis response teams for mental health calls.

I’m left wondering why more isn’t directed to prevention efforts rather than reacting to the fallout. I wonder why wait lists to see a psychiatrist or a counsellor are preposterously long, with youth often waiting up to two years. Too often, people reach out to me for help with loved ones who have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. I don’t have solutions, but I know that prevention programs and support for meaningful recovery should be more easily available. When I was finally placed in a supportive group home, these got me through. But thousands of people in Alberta need this help, and we have so few places like this. Parents, young and old, are often the only ones advocating on behalf of their mentally ill child.

Only when I feel fully accepted as a member of society, my mental illness fully out in the open, will I truly feel I was right in returning from Vancouver—that coming home was the right decision.

Psychiatric care perpetuates placelessness—perhaps echoes of the asylum system that didn’t require people to have a home.

Holly: I am struck but not surprised by how long it took Leif to find his way “home.” My own reflections on working in the treatment system make it easy to understand why.

What is it about psychiatric care that continues to perpetuate a sort of placelessness of the people we diagnose with mental illness Perhaps it’s the echoes of the asylum system that didn’t require people to have a home outside the institutional walls; that imprisoned people, away from the rest of the world. It seems ingrained in our practice to extract the person from their network, which limits possibilities for recovery and the “good life.” We work with some of the most structurally marginalized people. We must incorporate practices that include their sense of place.

Who we are as individuals and what we feel can both create place and be created in place. Home, then, is more than a house or apartment—it is a place of meaning and belonging, achieved by the careful arrangement of people, objects and ideas. These arrangements shift, and may be precarious, so they require constant attention and care.

Nowhere does the issue of place and belonging seem more relevant than in the current discourse around mental illness. In Canada it is estimated that at least one in five people experience a mental illness each year. Risk factors for poor prognosis and recovery include some of the social determinants for mental illness: poverty, trauma, social isolation and poor housing. Our continued focus on funding crises and acute short-term responses to mental illness does little to change the possibilities for people to find and keep a home and a place of belonging and safety. Our healthcare system needs to reconceptualize home not just as a simple address but rather as a stabilizing set of careful and meaningful social and material arrangements, a necessity for people living with mental illness.

Holly Symonds-Brown is an assistant professor of nursing at the University of Alberta.

Leif Gregersen is an Edmonton author and mental health advocate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I’m too hungry to give up. I unbutton my shirt, get my arms out, fling the make-believe net over one surprised fish.

“Aha. You’re one who didn’t get away.”

Beanie laughs, the first I’ve heard from her. She has a knife she stole from the dining room. Not very sharp, but I manage to slit the tender belly open below the gill like I watched my mother do before the School. I scrape the insides into the river.

“Yuck. That’s good enough.” We have to build a fire, keep it small. I climb along the riverbank and stumble on a small circle of ashes in the wall of rocks at the end of the bridge. Someone here before us.

“Beanie, look. Another runaway, you think?”

“Shush. Hush.”

I’m making too much noise. She is nervous, afraid of getting caught. She hasn’t told me what happened before she was returned to the School. She hasn’t talked about Mr. B, either. I don’t push it.

“Tonight we’ll move out.” Beanie sounds like that western story Sister read at school.

About once an hour a car rumbles over the bridge. I wait for silence after one passes, light the mini collection of dry leaves and sticks I’ve piled in the fire pit. The tiny flame catches. I thread the fish onto a stick and prop it over the fire on the rocks. Perfect, I breathe, quiet, waiting for Beanie’s approval.

Crackle, snap, splat. The stick burns through, dumping the fish into the fire. “Oh, shit.” It feels so good to swear. I scrape the fish clean on a rock, rebuild the fire.

This time the stick holds. Smoke flares, then dies. Only a little daytime exposure.

“Jeannie Squirt, you’re a genius.”

Beanie gawks at the smoky, fat slab of pink fish spread on green nettle leaves. The colours are majestic, almost like not real. Our miracle food is eaten in seconds, once we get over the shock. Beanie has called me my kid’s name—from back when.

“Tonight we’ll move out.” Beanie sounds like that western story Sister read at school. Outlaws, horses and cowboys chasing. The bad guys getting caught—or killed.

Geese are on the move. Honk, honk, honk. They fly in Vs over the bridge, one group swooping at the river, the next following. It’s that time of year. I watch their direction. South by southwest, my father always said; that’s where they go. Are we near home Somehow I feel home is very far away.

“Beanie?” She’s asleep in the middle of the day.

Resting up for tonight. I lie down next to her on the tarp. She doesn’t know I’m here until I squirm, move my legs. She pokes me in the ribs. Sleep, sleep. I’m back at the School, watching for Mr. B. He is the worst of the teachers, the most dreaded. Beanie won’t talk about him, what happens when he twists her arm and takes her away during the night. I hunch over my sketchbook, draw the dorm beds in endless rows. Miss Crosbie has taught me to use long strokes for distance and short ones for close up.

I dream about fat red pieces of fish sizzling on racks over a fire my mom is poking to stir up the heat. I want to catch another fish in the river, but Beanie is stuffing our packs, ready to leave. My shirt is crispy dry from the sun.

It’s a dark night. Clouds shadow the stars. Good cover for runaways. We walk from one farm road to the next, occasional dots of light in scattered buildings down a gravel track. Beanie says we have to get to a city before there’s a place to sleep proper. I don’t know how she knows this. Is it wishful thinking I’m too hungry to protest. Our fish feast was a long time ago.

“Shush. Listen. I think it’s a train.” Our village was on a train line. That’s how they took us to the School. Off to the right in the direction of the train sound, a light flickers low, between rows of corn. We crouch in the ditch by the road seconds before a pick-up careens past, belching black exhaust in our faces. No letup. No discovery of two runaways frozen in headlights.

We walk without making a sound towards the flickering glow on the ground, make out a smaller flame nearby. A train whooshes through, passenger cars, moving fast.

A deep voice comes from the bigger fire. “We’ll wait for the next one. It may slow for the switch coming up. If it does, put out your fire and run for the car with the open door.”

“I ain’t puttin’ out ’til I know,” says an answer from the almost invisible fire on the edge of the trampled grass where three men are squatting, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

“Put it out before you run,” the deep voice says. “I’ll give you a couple of matches to restart if you need them.”

“You ain’t got all the answers, big man,” says the little-fire voice. In the distance a train whistles at a level crossing, slows. I feel familiar vibrations in the ground. It’s a long freight approaching.

The three tramps douse their fires, roll their belongings in seconds and take off for the tracks. We follow just out of sight. Beanie shows no sign of fear. I haven’t discovered her bravery, where she gets it or if she cares.

There’s an open space in a boxcar, directly in front of us. I give Beanie a leg up and she pulls me in beside her. The three tramps are as stunned as we are when we discover each other in the same place at the same time. Are we all runaways from school I want to ask, but my English isn’t up to it. The deep voice holds out a bag of peanuts in their shells. Beanie and I cup our hands to receive this gift from Manito.

“Thank you,” I say in Cree.

“You’re welcome,” the big voice answers in English. “Gotta cut the Indian crap. Gives you away, and you don’t want anyone to know you’re a runaway.”

“How did you know?” I blurt out with the peanut shells.

“Where do you think we all come from?” the voice in the corner mutters. “Here, have a drink of water. Don’t mind my used canteen. Only one I grabbed on my way out. Sure good to have. G’night.” I watch him slide into his bedroll, snug and warm.

Beanie and I scoot into the opposite corner and wrap our tarp around our shoulders. Big Voice slips into the shadows away from the sliding door. There is another figure, the third one at the camp It’s a boy, maybe younger than us. I think he’s asleep already. The empty boxcar sways, jerks, stops, rolls forward. Where are we going Does anyone know?

He says no Indian. English words, yes, but not my mother’s way of talking, so much of which I can’t remember. The School has done good.

The train motion puts everyone to sleep. I dream we are going home. Slowly, more slowly, then movement stops. Brakes screech. A wall of the boxcar slides open.

“Yep, they’re in here,” a man yells.

“Up, you guys. Better hurry.” He tells us what to do as if he’s a conductor.

We jump out of the boxcar onto the ground. I feel my ankle crunch and try to rise to run.

Beanie grabs my arm; the other three are already gone. The boxcar rolls back, erasing our escape.

There’s a maze of tracks in front, on the sides, in back. I test my ankle; decide it isn’t too bad.

Beanie pulls me over rows of steel rods. Finally, a grassy field.

We walk to a road. The lights of a town. A city Beanie and I have never seen either.

We rest in a ditch. My ankle is twice its normal size. Beanie moves it around a bit.

“Don’t. That hurts.” I’m careful not to scream with pain.

“Just trying to see if it’s broken,” Beanie says. We both agree it’s probably only sprained. Sunrise outlines a jagged collection of tall buildings with lower squares spreading from the centre like blocks of wood. We walk, hobble, into a new day.

A car slows behind us. Stops. A woman’s voice asks if we have a place to walk to.

Beanie tries to sound grownup, independent. “We’re going over there.” She points to the buildings in the distance. “My sister has sprained her ankle,” she adds.

“Please let me give you a ride. I’ll take you to the Catholic church. They have a shelter. Even a guest house if you have a little money.”

“No, thank you,” Beanie says. “We’re not Catholic.”

“You don’t have to be Catholic to go there. They will be serving breakfast to everyone by the time we arrive.” The lady moves toward her car, opens the rear door for us.

At the thought of breakfast, we get in.

It’s a nice place. We use the washroom, clean our filthy hands. Sit next to three other new arrivals. I recognize Deep Voice when he reminds me, “No Indian.”

“Promise,” I answer. Someone comes over my shoulder with more pancakes. It’s the lady with the car. How can I be so lucky I was in that damn school for 10 years. I’ve been out for less than 10 days and I’m eating pancakes in a Catholic church, the same thing that kept me in the School. Then I can’t swallow. Will they take me back?

“Whatsa matter?” Big Voice asks me.

“Back. Will they take us back?”

“Nah. Too much trouble. Besides, we’ve come a long way. At least I have. Prob’ly you too. We’ll need their shelter for a while, ’til we get jobs ’n’ everything.” Beanie is listening from my other side. She’s on her fourth pancake.

“My English. Not so good,” I sputter.

“You’ll get it. Just no Indian.” He sounds so sure, so old.

I watch the brown-skin girl across the table. She looks new too. I mutter under my breath thank you in Cree and she smiles.

When we finish breakfast, the lady with the car takes us down a hallway to a dorm room with 12 cots, six on each side facing each other. “This is where you can sleep,” she says in her cheery voice. Beanie and I look at each other and turn to leave, but my ankle stops me. It’s too sore to let me go on.

“Just for tonight,” I tell Beanie. “Until the pain is better.”

“Just one night,” Beanie says. “Too much like the School.” She shivers, tightens her sweater around her arms.

“I’ll get you some ice,” the car lady offers and goes back towards the kitchen. I don’t know what she means. Ice for what?

I sit on the cot, swing my swollen ankle up to rest. The car lady appears with ice wrapped in a towel and puts it around my ankle. It’s cold but feels good.

“My name’s Claire,” she smiles in my face, pinning me in my place on the cot. I look away, over at Beanie, who is lying on her back staring at the ceiling. “Lunch is at 12; supper at 5:00.”

My sister and I sleep. Sister Jolene chases a rat around the dorm beds; a giant toad jumps out and trips her. I wake up laughing. A bell rings. Lunch time. My ankle is way better after the magic ice.

Jeanne Louise. I print my name on the name tag by my plate. Beanie writes Minnie Mouse. She looks up, past my matted hair.

“Tomorrow we go.” It’s a statement, no maybe. There’s a fresh towel on my cot when I return and I don’t know when a hot shower has felt so good, especially as most of our showers at the School were cold. Beanie’s long hair is shining black after her shampoo. Beau Noir, the girls at the School called her. She has brushed it every night since I can remember.

It’s a dark night. Clouds shadow the stars. Good cover for runaways.

We leave after breakfast. My pants and shirt and underwear I rinsed in the shower are sticky dry, good enough, like my ankle that’s still swollen and sore.

A car stops on the road, offers a ride and Beanie accepts.

“Where to, pretty ladies?” a harsh voice asks.

“Downtown,” Beanie answers. Are we really pretty ladies?

The car moves forward, swerves around a tight corner, throws Beanie against the driver.

“Stop. This is our place.” She has seen an Indian sign for tobacco at a house near the road.

“Ain’t downtown yet.” He doesn’t stop.

At a red light, Beanie leans across me and flips the door handle. Good thing I’m holding on or I would have fallen out before Beanie pushes me. In a flash we are free.

“Gotta be careful of these guys,” she mutters.

How does she know I wonder again. What has she seen with Mr. B or when she ran away?

We walk on a sidewalk along a busy street. Stores, people, mostly white faces. Almost unconsciously we follow someone that looks like Big Man from the train and church. He turns a corner, away from the busy street, disappears behind a blank wall. We walk past the building, duck into an alley with a beaten path that leads to an open doorway. We know we need a shelter. We’ve heard stories about runaways at the School. So here’s a place to sleep at night, sort of.

When my eyes adjust to the dark, I see brown faces lying on pieces of mattress or tarps like we have. Someone is cooking and I feel faint from the thought of food. Beanie discards her pack on top of our tarp, eases mine off my shoulders, guides me to the soup line on the back wall of the huge open space. I can only think Cree, Manito. No Indian out loud. I remember.

I pick up litter around a school yard and someone—a teacher?—plants some dollars in my hand. Beanie goes out at night and returns with enough money to rent a room of our own. Two flights up, two beds, dirty toilet on the landing, a wisp of heat. Beans from a can, stale bread dumped behind the corner store. No Sisters with whips, no Mr. Bs. I figure the new ones pay. Beanie brushes her hair every night before she goes out.

During the day she sleeps. I walk, learn the city. There’s a river park where walkers, mostly brown-skinned, gather, drink from paper bags. I watch as pills and needles are passed around, hidden in the bushes. There’s a tension, everyone watches everyone, and themselves.

Alize, the Indian girl from the Catholic church sleeps—passed out—on a bench. No one pays attention. I draw the river curving around a bend, park benches, low buildings in the distance. By some miracle I still have my runaway bag and my exercise book of drawings I’ve kept since I was kidnapped from my home in Grade 1. I keep the bag in hiding, even from Beanie. I don’t want her to see herself on my pages. She might tear them up. Everything’s a bigger secret with my sister.

Whoop whoop. Lights flashing. Police swarming the park, behind the bushes. I am pushed into the back of what looks like the boxcar on the train.

I end up at what they tell me is an old prison; another school, I think, only no nuns, no Father LeBlanc. I am in a room with a metal bed and blanket, no mattress. Where is Beanie?

Someone leaves a bucket of water, a pile of rags. “If you do some work, you can eat. The washrooms are all yours. Get them clean the first time. Or you’ll have to do them again.”

They aren’t too bad. It actually feels good to do some work.

Beanie doesn’t come.

They let me stay three nights, four… hoping Beanie will show up A worker—someone like Claire—tells me to get a job.

I try at 7-Eleven; they say come back the next day. I return three times, three days in a row. “Come in clean clothes and you can sweep the grounds.”

I can’t find Beanie. I check the room we rented and there’s a drunk man sprzawled on my bed. I recognize him from the river park where I got arrested for doing nothing.

“She ain’t here. Go fuck yourself. Halfbreed.”

At the jail, Alize is lying on a cot next to mine when I return from my search for Beanie. “Where you from?” she whispers in Michif.

During the day she sleeps. I walk, learn the city. There’s a tension. Everyone watches everyone, and themselves.

“Don’t know,” I answer in English. “Beanie says she knows, but she’s missing. Can’t find her nowhere—anywhere.” I’m trying to speak good. I’m learning, but I need Beanie.

A V of geese invades the horizon. Honk, honk. I follow their formation, try to draw them, like I remember from close-up at home. Flying south, free.

I have four coloured pencils left. I make miniatures. Pale sky, pillow clouds, ripples for a river—in a three-inch square free as air. A tiny Beanie, two inches tall walking a cornfield, pack on her back. The train boxcar with three sets of tracks going nowhere in another corner of the paper. I’m saving the pencils, paper too.

I’ll keep the drawings for Beanie. The pictures will talk to her, get past her secrets. I have hope.

It’s a dark night. Something jars my shoulder. Maybe a rat I jump out of bed, stare into Beanie’s eyes.

“Get your stuff. Let’s go.” Where now I grab my pack, shove the pencils and exercise book in first.

Born in Chicago in 1938, Janice Kenyon emigrated to Victoria, BC, where she worked as a nurse. She moved to High River in the early 2000s to be near her daughter and grandchildren in Calgary. As a 66-year-old she took an epic cycling trip, which inspired Bike Ride with a Twist: 8,321 km Across Canada (Kachina Press/Sandhill, 2006). Janice’s other books include the biography Any Damn Thing (Gomer Press). Her fiction won honourable mention in the WGA 2020 Pandemic Postcards Contest. Janice passed away July 29, 2023. On the day before she died, she joked this would be the year she won Alberta Views’ fiction contest. She was prescient.

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Alexander Shamota is an Edmonton-based photographer who specializes in portraiture. 

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