Calgary Archives - Alberta Views

Creating a Buzz

Doug Firby — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:00:34 +0000

It was a frosty winter day, but Calgary supply chain specialist Dave Acquah was steaming. “I just renewed my auto registration for 2026,” he fumed on the Tesla Owners Club of Alberta Facebook page. “$300 total ($200 EV tax). I need someone to put me in a pile of snow for 5 hrs to cool my body temperature down. That electric vehicle tax.”

Acquah, who bought a 2024 Tesla Model Y, shares a frustration many owners of electric vehicles (EVs) in Alberta feel: they live in one of only two provinces in the country—the other is Saskatchewan—in which you’re taxed for simply owning a zero-emissions vehicle.

It’s not so much the existence of the tax that annoys Acquah and other EV owners. Instead, they say it’s a symptom of a larger anti-electric-car attitude in Alberta’s UCP government, which is actively stifling local EV adoption. The effort is marked by heated rhetoric by conservatives who see the vehicles as part of a Liberal anti-oil conspiracy. Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, for example, once claimed an EV sales mandate would be akin to “banning the rural way of life.” Danielle Smith called federal EV adoption targets “environmental extremism.”

But if the UCP is hostile to EVs, they’re swimming against a global tide. One in four new cars sold around the world in 2025 were electric. Some 20 million EVs were sold globally that year. In China fully half of new cars are EVs. Alberta lags far behind not only that rate but even other Canadian provinces. BC has 195,000 registered EVs on the road, for example, nearly 10 times Alberta’s meagre total of 20,000.

EVs remain polarizing in Alberta, says Andrew Batiuk, president of the Electric Vehicle Association of Alberta (EVAA), where they pit environmentalists and tech fans against supporters of oil and gas who perceive a threat to the province’s economy. As the naysayers see it, the more EVs there are, the less fossil fuel that gets burned. And that’s a sore spot for Albertans who rely on oil and gas for their livelihoods. That’s partly why the province aggressively opposed the Electric Vehicle Availability Standard—the so-called EV sales mandate—that Justin Trudeau’s government introduced in December 2023 to reduce air pollution and fight climate change. Prime Minister Mark Carney has since cancelled the mandate.

Opponents aren’t wrong that the cars reduce the world’s demand for oil. It’s estimated that EVs already displace somewhere between 1.3 and 1.8 million barrels per day of oil consumption. That’s a fraction of the over 100 million barrels of oil currently being burned daily. Nonetheless, the trend has been noticed in the oil industry, which provides 144,000 jobs in Alberta. It also threatens a government that relies on that industry. Alberta is projecting $13.2-billion in non-renewable resource revenues in 2026/2027, 18 per cent of its total revenue.

All of this biases our government against EVs. Premier Smith has even gone so far as to aggressively promote the production of so-called blue hydrogen from natural gas for use in hydrogen-powered vehicles. Across the world, sales of these rivals to EVs are faltering. The cars are virtually absent from Alberta. The province’s only public hydrogen refuelling station, at Blackjacks Roadhouse in Nisku, which Smith’s government helped fund, closed down permanently in early 2025.

The economic impact of oil and gas gives the industry an outsized influence on provincial policy. Charges Daniel Breton, president of Electric Mobility Canada: “I see the premier of Alberta more or less as a puppet of the oil and gas industry, and her government as well.”

But for all of this hostility, EVs may yet prevail—even in Alberta.

Anti-EV campaigners often draw on outdated anecdotes and at times deliberate misinformation. One favourite claim is that EVs—with their multiple battery packs—are worse for the environment than gas-powered vehicles. Initially, an EV does indeed have a higher carbon footprint, Batiuk says. Making the batteries is energy intensive and requires rare-earth minerals. But the gap with gas-powered vehicles evens out within one to two years of ownership, depending on distance driven. After that, the carbon footprint of an EV becomes substantially smaller, especially since Alberta has converted its electricity generation from primarily coal-fired plants to natural gas, solar and wind.

The EVs-are-worse argument has been debunked by no less than the Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose website announces: “FACT: Electric vehicles typically have a smaller carbon footprint than gasoline cars, even when accounting for the electricity used for charging, plus they are far more efficient when it comes to energy use.”

Other biases are almost comical. Angie Dean, president of the Tesla Owners Club of Alberta, says someone once asked her if it was OK to wash her electric car.

Ironically, the people who make and sell EVs don’t always help. “Misinformation is a huge problem, even when it comes to car manufacturers,” says Electric Mobility’s Breton. He argues some manufacturers are “spreading crap” about EVs—even their own models—because they don’t particularly want to build the vehicles, or are frustrated by “unrealistic” government EV sales mandates. The “green halo” effect of having an EV in, say, Ford’s lineup might be good for the company’s marketing image. But EVs are costlier to make, and many, such as the F-150 Lightning, are sold at a loss. (Ford recently announced it is ending production of the truck.)

Anti-EV campaigners often draw on outdated anecdotes and deliberate misinformation.

Dealers sometimes discourage buyers from choosing EVs. Doug Green, dealer principal of High Country Chevrolet Buick GMC in High River, says he invested $250,000 in equipment upgrades at the dealership to service EVs at the urging of GM, but he has sold only three of the vehicles, at a net loss of $10,000. “I was so happy to be rid of those,” he says. He also paid $6,000 to ship three additional unsold EVs to dealers in Quebec. Green says one customer in town bought a Blazer EV, only to discover she’d have to shell out $3,000 to install curbside charging from her duplex, which doesn’t have a garage. “She was unprepared,” Green said. Meanwhile, he says, the only public EV-charging station in town was out of commission. Chargers have since been added at the Ford and Chrysler dealerships.

Angie Dean wasn’t surprised to hear of the GMC dealer’s attitude. “I’ve heard so many stories from people who have gone into car dealerships and been excited about an electric car and [are told], ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me show you this gas car here.’”

And then there’s the myth that EVs don’t work in cold weather. Green claims an electric SUV with a rated 500-km range is really only capable of travelling 300 km, because you shouldn’t fully charge the battery. And, he contends, it will suffer dramatic power losses in the cold. “If you drive in the wintertime, and you put winter tires on, then it’s going to go in half,” he says. “If it’s cold out, then it’s going to go in half again, and if there’s snow then it’s going to go in half again.”

Dean scoffs at Green’s doomerism. She said her Tesla Model Y might lose 40 per cent of its range when the temperature hits minus 40, but that’s “extremely uncommon.” In Calgary’s more typical winter temperatures, she says she sees an estimated 15–20 per cent loss of range. Yet some people just don’t believe her. She recalls an incident in February 2025 when she parked at a local Home Depot. “This guy walks up to me and says, ‘You know those things don’t work here in the winter.’ And I was, like, I’m right here! Do you think I just pushed the car here?”

Dean’s experience reflects research by Recurrent, a US-based organization that tracks EV performance. The study, conducted during the winter of 2025–26, analyzed data from more than 30,000 vehicles across 34 models from 13 automakers. Although performance varied by make, the study found that EVs maintain on average around 80 per cent of their rated range in freezing conditions.

Meanwhile an underreported fact is that gas-powered cars are likewise less efficient in colder weather. The EPA estimates that a drop in temperature from 24°C to 7°C can increase gas consumption by 12–28 per cent. And EVs actually start more reliably than gas cars do in the winter, because they aren’t affected by cold-sensitive oil and have no sparkplugs, which are especially susceptible to low temperatures.

Even when people appeal to facts to disparage EVs, their assertions are often only half true. The UCP government claims, for example, that electric vehicles do more damage to roads than gas-powered cars do, because they’re heavier. An EV does tend to weigh more than its internal combustion engine equivalent—perhaps 10–15 per cent more. But as Breton notes, EVs are lighter than the giant pickup trucks so common in Alberta, and the province isn’t levying a special tax on pickups. “Alberta and Saskatchewan are both taxing EVs under some dubious excuse,” Breton says. “It has a lot more to do with politics than facts.”

Horner, the Alberta finance minister, also justified the $200 tax when he introduced it in February 2025 as a way to offset revenue lost by drivers who don’t buy gasoline or diesel, which is taxed by the province. But Breton questions why the flat rate is disproportionately high. Albertans, on average, drive 15,200 km per year, consuming 1,216 litres of fuel in a typical mid-sized vehicle. Under the province’s current fuel tax of 13 cents per litre, that would translate into $158 in road taxes—21 per cent less than what EV owners must fork over. Says the EVAA’s Andrew Batiuk: “It seems punitive.”

In an emailed statement, Horner claims the tax is “fair” and states: “Alberta’s tax on electric vehicles is in line with what drivers of a typical internal combustion engine vehicle pay in fuel tax annually.” EV proponents find such stonewalling typical. Batiuk says his organization just can’t get the ear of government: “We don’t have much of a relationship with them.”

And if Alberta’s government were truly interested in a full accounting of the costs and benefits of EVs vs. traditional vehicles, it would consider other facts. Pollution from gas- and diesel-fuelled cars and trucks is killing people. A March 2022 federal report analyzed data from 2015 and found that 1,200 Canadians, including 82 Albertans, died prematurely that year from the effects of pollution from cars and trucks. Another 2.7 million people suffered from acute respiratory symptoms. Breton argues considerations such as marginally higher EV weight need to be weighed against the $9.5-billion annual health cost to Canadians from gas-powered vehicle pollution.

Horner’s statement dismissed pollution and health concerns. “Alberta has some of the cleanest air in Canada and the world, and that isn’t changing,” it read. “Our transportation emissions have declined 12 per cent since 2015 and will keep falling.”

But the main barrier to EV adoption in this province isn’t special punitive taxes, uninterested EV dealers or disinformation. Alberta drivers won’t fully embrace EVs until there are enough public chargers available across the province to ease so-called “range anxiety”—the fear that one’s car battery will deplete far from home. Similarly, the extent of the local charging network affects whether or not we will attract EV-driving tourists from places like BC, says Danielle Wiess, director of transportation initiatives at the Fernie-based Community Energy Association. “EV drivers go where they can charge.”

But the UCP government is offering no help to expand Alberta’s charging network. The province had 429 EV charging stations in December 2025. That’s just 6 per cent of the 7,000 chargers found in BC, which has 5.7 million residents versus Alberta’s five million.

In 2020 the Community Energy Association managed the Peaks to Prairies charging network, which connected communities from Canmore to Medicine Hat and south to the US border. Working with local municipalities, ATCO installed 20 direct-current fast-charging sites across southern Alberta. The $1.2-million contribution from the then-NDP government was the last time Alberta has funded any EV charging infrastructure, says Wiess.

Charging one’s EV at home also remains a vexing problem for Alberta’s renters and condo dwellers. Provincial building codes don’t require EV charging capacity to be added to new multi-unit residential buildings—condos and high-rise apartments. “We’re still building condos and apartments without charging infrastructure considered,” says the EVAA’s Batiuk. “At [a single-family] home, you can plug in an EV. But when you live in a condo or apartment, you don’t have the option to charge at home. Selling that person an EV is a more difficult task.”

The situation is even more challenging in rural areas that lack the fast EV chargers found in the Peaks to Prairies network. “If I have a boat to pull to a lake, and I pull it to Little Bow Provincial Park, there’s no chargers down there,” says Green, the GMC dealer.

Under a joint federal/municipal program, incentives cover up to nearly half the cost of installing chargers at businesses, condos, Indigenous communities, public facilities and not-for-profit organizations. But remote communities that install such infrastructure can encounter sticker shock just to keep their chargers operating. In December 2025 a City of Cold Lake committee reported that it would need to quadruple the rate the city offers at its city-owned EV charger. Wiess says Level 3 (also known as DC fast) chargers incur high demand costs if they’re used infrequently.

Alberta is also at odds with provinces that have created incentives to purchase EVs. BC offered rebates of $4,000 to buyers of electric vehicles but scrapped the program in May 2025 under budget pressure. Before the program ended, zero-emission vehicles accounted for almost one in four new vehicles sold in BC. In 2025 BC registered almost as many EVs in just its fourth quarter as Alberta’s overall number of EVs. (Alberta and Newfoundland are the only provinces that don’t provide Statistics Canada with data on new EV registrations. They only report total registered EVs.) Quebec, with a population of nine million, has even bigger incentives than BC did, and registered 82,700 EVs in 2025.

The feds announced in January they will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into Canada. Previously tariffs made these prohibitive.

The ingrained resistance to EVs in Alberta manifests in some of the most unlikely places. Batiuk discovered that the owners of Ol’ MacDonald’s Resort and Campground, on Buffalo Lake about an hour northeast of Red Deer, imposed a $60/night EV surcharge in 2024. A notice on the resort’s website stated its “electricity etiquette” rule is “a small price to pay to ensure the fair and sustainable use of these shared resources.” (The Alberta Motor Association reports that the typical cost to charge an EV in Alberta ranges from free—at roughly half of Calgary’s public charging stations—to $15 at fast-charging sites such as those in the Peaks to Prairies network.)

Messages left at the resort for listed owner Jean MacDonald were not returned. “We [also] tried to talk to them,” says Batiuk, “and they weren’t interested in talking to us.”

But EV advocates such as Batiuk, Dean and Breton believe EVs will eventually prevail—including in Alberta. The federal government recently committed $1.5-billion to expand Canada’s public EV charging network, so essential to driving the vehicles any distance, especially rurally. Mark Carney’s government also announced in January 2026 that it will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into the country at a nominal 6.1 per cent tariff rate. Previously a 100 per cent tariff had made the cost of these cars prohibitive. Even premier Smith had called for Carney to drop the tariff and let Chinese EVs in—if only because she hoped it would enable Albertans to sell more canola and pork in China.

Major Chinese manufacturers such as Chery and Geely are preparing to enter the Canadian market. BYD, which in 2025 surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest EV maker, plans to open 20 dealerships in Canada, first in Toronto, then in Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary.

Those Chinese EVs may comprise just a fraction of the 1.8 million vehicles sold in Canada each year. But more significantly, federal EV incentives are being restored. Sales of EVs across Canada dropped by nearly one-third last year as provincial and federal incentives ended. In February of this year Carney introduced a new, $2.3-billion, five-year program that offers individuals or businesses up to $5,000 to purchase various types of EVs. At the time, the prime minister predicted EVs will reach 75 per cent market share in Canada by 2035 and 90 per cent by 2040.

By the time the federal incentives end in five years, Breton says, they may be unnecessary. This is a point on which EV advocate Breton and EV skeptic Green agree. “I’m not asking for special treatment,” says Breton. “Just don’t stand in the way of progress.” “I’m always interested in change,” says Green. “Just let the free market decide.”

Dean, a planner with the City of Calgary, says she sees beyond the personal benefits of driving an EV. She believes she’s helping future generations, and every effort counts. Someone once told her, “Your one electric car isn’t going to do anything,” she says. “And I replied, ‘But it’s what I can do. If I can do something, I’m going to do it.’ ”

Doug Firby has over four decades of experience in newspapers, including at the Calgary Herald. He’s now president of Troy Media.

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The post Creating a Buzz appeared first on Alberta Views.

June 22-26, 2026

Alberta Views — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 20:56:56 +0000

Monday, June 22: Hospital and Surgical Health Services minister Adriana LaGrange announces the province is pausing proposed changes to integrated fire and ambulance services. The changes would have required seven municipalities to choose between receiving less provincial funding or letting the province take over services.

Home at Last

Cailynn Klingbeil — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:56:01 +0000

When Cass entered adulthood, she had the same expectation as many Canadians before her: work hard, save steadily and one day buy a home. By her mid-30s, however, home ownership felt increasingly out of reach, even in Alberta—long considered a comparatively accessible market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Operation Total Recall

Evan Osenton — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:55:45 +0000

As I was driving home on a chilly Monday night last October, I saw a small group of people at the side of the road with a folding card table and hand-lettered sign reading “Calgary-Bow MLA Recall Petition.” I hit the brakes, circled around and pulled up next to the Bowness Car Wash. My six-year-old daughter in the back seat wailed—we’d been minutes away from eating homemade pretzels. “This’ll just take a second,” I promised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Always Hiding

Marcello Di Cintio — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:00:34 +0000

Every weekday morning, Ariana’s three younger siblings stare out their living room window and watch other children go to school. Their Edmonton home sits across the street from an elementary school, where yellow buses unload a gaggle of backpacked children. And each morning they ask their parents why they can’t go to school too. “We don’t feel like other kids,” they say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Cancelling Care

Bonnie Larson — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:00:03 +0000

June 26, 2025, is one of those blue-sky Alberta mornings that finally feels like summer. While other doctors make their way to a clinic or hospital, I head for a courtroom in the heart of the province. Tucked between transport trailers and farm trucks, I steer my minivan up the QEII from Calgary to Red Deer, where the provincial government has recently closed central Alberta’s sole supervised consumption site (SCS).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Protecting the Local

Doug Horner — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 10:00:57 +0000

You could be forgiven for assuming that March of 2020 would have been pretty much the worst time imaginable to open a craft brewery in a sparsely populated town in southern Alberta. The provincial government had just closed restaurants and bars, along with every other type of indoor gathering, in an effort to contain the spread of COVID-19.

The Pass Beer Company, by that point, had been three years in the making—and that’s not including the years Tony and Danielle Radak had talked and daydreamed about the idea. The couple didn’t have a canning machine to package the first batches of beer from their new brewhouse, which included a taproom and restaurant at the west end of Blairmore, one of five communities that make up the municipality of Crowsnest Pass. Tony owned and operated a local glass company and installed a take-out window in the front door so they could fill up growlers.

“Beer is essential. Who knew?”

It didn’t take long for the lineups to form. People needed something to do and new ways to connect with each other. Standing in line, even in the chill of early spring in the Rockies, to try beers made right there in town, turned out to be just what the community needed. “We were very, very busy. We didn’t get the days off during COVID. Beer is essential. Who knew?” Danielle Radak told me.

I called Radak, whose official job title is general manager and pizza overlord, in the fall of 2025, to get her perspective on the plan to allow for direct-to-consumer alcohol sales across most of the country. The Alberta government had signed a memorandum of understanding the previous June with eight other provinces and the Yukon to eliminate restrictions on the trade of alcohol within Canada. Officials committed to putting a plan into action by the spring of 2026. The agreement is part of a broader effort to cut all barriers to interprovincial trade, which is itself a strategy to strengthen the national economy in the face of unpredictable tariffs and other threats from the Trump administration in the United States, our largest trading partner.

The push for free trade across Canada would entail abolishing restrictions on the exchange of goods and services and on labour mobility between provinces and territories. Streamlining the national economy, however, could undermine the authority of provincial governments to protect local interests. The craft beer industry in Alberta, for example, benefited from lower tax rates at a critical stage of its development, which encouraged new breweries to start up in communities across the province. Those kinds of policies, ones that safeguard regional priorities, would become harder to implement in a new era of frictionless trade.

Streamlining the national economy could undermine provincial authority to protect local interests.

It’s unlikely any Albertans will buy beer from Newfoundlanders, or vice versa, once the new rules are in place. The cost of beer is relatively low compared to the cost of shipping. The Pass Brewery, however, is only a 15-minute drive from the boundary with British Columbia. But Radak told me she did not envision direct to consumer sales becoming a priority. Her team already has trouble keeping up with demand.

The brewery has flourished since its inception. They employ 45 people during the high season and 26 over the winter. The beer first flows to the restaurant and taproom, which has seating for about 150 during the summer when the patio is open. You can find the beer in cans in Twin Butte and on tap in a couple of bars in Waterton and Lethbridge, Radak said. They’re building a cold storage facility next to the brewery so they can increase distribution, but the focus will remain local. Either she or Tony does all the deliveries. “We’re a small-town brewery,” she said. “We want to keep the personal connection.”

Small, local and personal are not part of the lexicon of proponents of free trade, who tend to think big to maximize economies of scale and the resulting gains in efficiency. There’s a $200-billion pot of gold at the end of the liberalizing trade rainbow, according to a study by Trevor Tombe, an economist from the University of Calgary, and Ryan Manucha, a research fellow with the C.D. Howe Institute. Their report for the Macdonald–Laurier Institute, published in 2022, cites a range of possible gains for the economy of between 4.4 and 7.9 per cent of GDP, or $110-billion to $200-billion. Politicians such as prime minister Mark Carney have latched on to the higher-end estimate, which is now thought to be closer to $250-billion, when presenting internal free trade as a way to offset the losses inflicted by the erratic tariff policies of the United States.

Tombe outlines in the report how the most efficient way for governments to realize this economic potential is through “mutual recognition,” a policy to eliminate duplication in the approval process for goods, services and professional credentials by automatically accepting the standard established in the province or territory of origin. “I’m quite optimistic,” Tombe said, in an interview in early September, “because governments have moved considerably this year with a lot of changes to how they’re approaching the issue.”

He referred to new policies and commitments made by provincial, territorial and federal governments as evidence that the rhetoric around reducing internal trade barriers could translate into meaningful action. Among new legislation brought in by the provinces in 2025, Alberta and Nova Scotia have agreed to recognize credentials across the two provinces, subject to a streamlined review process by local regulatory bodies. Regulators must now process equivalent licences within 10 days so people can get to work faster.

This past year numerous press conferences also announced memorandums of understanding (MOUs) between provin-cial governments. Premier Danielle Smith and Ontario premier Doug Ford, for instance, signed an MOU in early June that signals an intention to make it easier for regulated professionals to work in either province, and to reduce barriers to the flow of goods and services such as the interprovincial trade of beer, wine and whisky. These MOUs are not legally binding, but Tombe said they’re an important step towards broader mutual recognition deals. “I take the governments at face value when they say they’re committed to it, that we’re going to see that rolled out,” he said.

Not everyone is so enthusiastic. Marc Lee, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), argued the push to cut trade barriers is mostly political theatre, conjured from arcane economic theorizing. “It sounds good and sounds credible, and it sounds like you’re defending the country and you’re boosting the Canadian economy, but it’s just vapour,” he said in an interview.

And it comes with risk. Lee co-authored a report published this summer called The Premier’s New Clothes about the risks of unchecked trade liberalization. He argued it could set in motion a “race to the bottom” in terms of regulatory oversight for the manufacture of goods and the licensing of professionals. If the goal is a single, pan-Canadian standard, then Lee suggested that governments harmonize up, not down. They should choose the best regulation, the one that has the most merit. “The trick in public policy,” he told me, is that “you’re always weighing the public interest against economic efficiency, and economic efficiency shouldn’t always win. It is just one of the factors you need to think about in terms of providing the good life for people in a particular place.”

In the report, Lee made the case that Canada already has an effective mechanism in place for safeguarding unencumbered internal trade. The Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA) was signed in 2017, replacing a similar accord in an effort to further liberalize trade. The CFTA is an opt-out agreement, meaning a government—provincial, territorial or federal—agrees to zero barriers on everything unless they explicitly list it as an exception.

In June of 2025 the federal government’s Bill C-5 became law and removed all 53 federal barriers to the interprovincial flow of goods, services and workers. The heavy lifting, however, falls to provinces and territories, which among them have many more exceptions, as well as overlapping licensing mandates and regulatory standards. But Lee cited the fact there have been only a handful of disputes filed under CFTA since its inception as proof the agreement is largely working as intended, that it has succeeded in encouraging more goods, services and workers to move freely across the country.

Alcohol represents a fraction of all internal trade in Canada, less than 1 per cent, but it’s an interesting case study because of the colourful history and complex manoeuvring the provinces have undertaken to protect and monopolize their dominion over booze.

When the NDP were in power in Alberta, for example, the government bent over backwards to help the local craft beer industry get up and running. They implemented a series of policy changes from 2015 to 2018 to shield the fledgling industry from competition until it could stand on its own two feet. This exposed the Alberta government to legal action and a challenge levelled against their craft beer policies under the Agreement on Internal Trade, or AIT (the precursor of the CFTA). The provinces, territories and federal government had made the agreement in 1995 to reduce trade barriers. It included a dispute resolution mechanism to challenge rules or policies that undermined free trade.

Under AIT, the NDP policies were found to violate Alberta’s commitments to free trade within Canada. But those policies also succeeded in supporting a new industry at a critical stage in its development. Jason Foster, a beer writer and educator from Edmonton, told me that even breweries that emerged after the policies were abandoned, such as the Pass Beer Company, benefited from the government intervention because it had helped build a market and appetite for craft beer. This tension between frictionless trade and the ability of provincial and territorial governments to protect what they see as the public interest has long been a subplot in Canada’s story.

Take, for example, the case of Gerard Comeau, a 62-year-old retiree from a small coastal town in New Brunswick. He’s famous for a beer run that went sideways and took him all the way to the Supreme Court. Ryan Manucha, the research fellow from the C.D. Howe Institute, writes about the significance of the case in his book Booze, Cigarettes and Constitutional Dust-Ups.

Comeau was pulled over by the RCMP in the fall of 2012 after crossing back into New Brunswick from Quebec with a trunk full of booze. The police confiscated 354 bottles of beer and three bottles of liquor and wrote Comeau a ticket for almost $300 for exceeding his personal limit of what he was allowed to bring across the provincial boundary. He was one of 17 people charged that day for making the short trip into Quebec to take advantage of lower prices for alcohol.

Lawyers with the Canadian Constitution Foundation approached Comeau to help challenge his fine in court because they saw a chance to question the constitutionality of laws such as the one that limited the amount of alcohol someone could bring into New Brunswick for personal consumption. The legal team based their case on a challenge to how section 121 of Canada’s Constitution had historically been interpreted by the courts. The free trade clause reads:

“All Articles of the Growth, Produce, or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall, from and after the Union, be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.”

A New Brunswick judge acquitted Comeau, but lawyers for the provincial government appealed the case and it went to the Supreme Court of Canada in the spring of 2018. Section 121, the nine justices unanimously concluded, only applies to the laws and regulations that make trade restrictions their primary goal. The judges recognized the law about personal limits to bringing alcohol into the province could have other justifications, such as a desire to promote public health and wellness and mitigate the risks of addiction.

“The court ruled that section 121 has a limited scope; it does not invalidate all government measures that create barriers to trade,” Manucha writes. “Their decision is baffling, unless one studies our story of internal trade, and starts by reaching back into the political and economic history of Canada.”

Since before Confederation, improving and encouraging internal trade has been a perennial priority for our politicians. Manucha describes in his book how the economies of the colonies of early Canada depended on exports of raw materials, such as fur, timber and grains. Abrupt changes in trade policies by Britain in the mid-19th century wreaked havoc on the colonies, which adapted by shifting focus to the United States. Then the Americans pulled the rug out from underneath Canadian businesses again a couple of decades later. “Twice in twenty years, Canada’s export-reliant economic order was rearranged by external political forces,” Manucha writes.

His book includes a quote from an 1865 speech by George Brown, the founder of The Globe, about the economic potential of Confederation. It reads like a comment that could be made today: “…One of the best features of this union is, that if in our commercial relations with the United States we are compelled by them to meet fire with fire, it will enable us to stop this improvidence, and turn the current of our own trade into our own waters,” said Brown.

Even though the motivation to improve internal trade was baked into Canada’s constitution from the outset, other innate factors make it difficult to implement. “Internal trade barriers in Canada tell a story of our country’s struggle to pursue an enduring singleness, despite a staggering variety in climate, topography, demography and economics,” Manucha writes. The push and pull of unifying the national economy despite inherent regional and cultural differences has long roiled the Canadian soul. In Alberta that conflict erupted perhaps most clearly in the story of craft beer.

Alberta’s first and only NDP government was elected in May of 2015 amid a low point in the oil and gas industry’s habitual see-saw. Rachel Notley and her team came to power with a vision to try to diversify the economy, to seek out and support new industries that could paper over the yawning gap left in the province’s GDP by tanking oil prices. Craft beer was also having a moment, with dozens of new coffee-shop-like breweries opening every year across Canada and the US.

Alberta’s own craft beer boom, however, had yet to take off. Part of the problem, said Jason Foster, the beer expert from Edmonton, is that back in the mid-1990s the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission (AGLC) had unilaterally opened our borders to beer imports. “Fill out a two-page form and pay $75 and you’re in,” Foster said. It didn’t matter where the beer was made in Canada, everyone abided by the same set of rules and paid the same fee to earn shelf space at the liquor store.

Other boards in other provinces played a more active role in gatekeeping—picking and choosing which beer would get stocked in which stores. Unlike the AGLC, these agencies retained—and still retain—the power to give preferential treatment for in-province breweries. If you want to distribute your beer in Quebec, for example, you have to build your own warehouse in the province for storing it. The Liquor Control Board of Ontario has a complex application process that includes proving your beer is sufficiently different from other products already in the market. And there is a tasting panel, a team of judges who try the beer and decide whether they like it enough to stock it in the province. “They’re all different ways in which you curtail the importation of out-of-province beer. You make it harder to sell that beer,” Foster said.

The Alberta government changed the markup policy back in October of 2015 to advantage smaller breweries, those that produced less than 10,000 hectolitres, within the three western provinces of the Northwest Partnership Trade Agreement. These breweries were charged $0.10/litre. Everybody else, regardless of size, paid $1.25. Steam Whistle, a brewery from Toronto, filed a lawsuit against the markup in late 2015, which pushed the government to try another approach.

The NDP changed the policy in July of 2016, this time applying the $1.25/litre rate to all beer sold in Alberta, regardless of the brewery’s size or location. The government created the Alberta Small Brewers Grant Program, which provided funds to craft brewers that made up the difference between their previous lower rate and the new flat rate. The grant program gave local craft brewers a competitive advantage, both in liquor stores and when trying to get on tap at a bar or restaurant. It helped to raise their profile, said Foster, and was an attempt “to try and create a little bit of a shield, push back on the beers that are coming in from other provinces by increasing their price point, which gives a little bit of a competitive advantage to the local brewers, which would then hopefully give them some market share.”

About a year after the grant program was implemented, a dispute resolution panel ruled that it violated the province’s obligations under the Agreement on Internal Trade. The complaint had been submitted by Artisan Ales Consulting Inc., a Calgary company that imports beers from Quebec and around the world. The government appealed, but another panel made the same ruling in July of 2018. It ordered the government to repeal or amend Alberta’s small brewer grant program within six months. The government also lost the lawsuit brought by Steam Whistle. “Justice Gillian Marriott held that the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission’s tariff and grant policy for Alberta craft breweries was an unconstitutional restraint on interprovincial trade,” wrote lawyer Andrea Stempien, a partner with Bennett Jones, in a summary of the decision.

The judge looked to the decision the Supreme Court had recently made in the case involving Gerard Comeau. The main takeaway from that ruling was that the party challenging the law must show its “essence and purpose” was to restrict trade. “The court concluded that both the 2015 mark-up scheme for Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan, and the 2016 mark-up/grant scheme intended to prefer Alberta craft brewers and restrict trade,” Stempien wrote.

The NDP government scrapped the grant program in December 2018. They had succeeded in giving Alberta craft breweries a three-year runway to get a toehold in the market and start to build brand recognition. “This policy did what it was meant to do, and it was a success, and it was a central component of the craft beer boom in Alberta,” Foster said. His latest official count, from November of 2024, puts the number of these small-scale breweries in the province at 134.

The NDP’s difficulty in getting their craft-beer policies to stick, even though the measures had a public-interest dimension, supports CCPA economist Marc Lee’s argument that the current system already tips the scales in favour of commerce. “The CFTA and its predecessor, the 1995 Agreement on Internal Trade, impose free trade disciplines that significantly constrain how provincial and territorial governments regulate business, investment and labour mobility in their areas of jurisdiction under the Constitution,” his report from this past summer reads. Lee told me he’s skeptical any real economic gains are left to be made in terms of liberalization. The low-hanging fruit has been picked. Arguments for further cutting of trade barriers, such as through mutual recognition policies, Lee said, are based on complex theoretical equations and calculations that don’t hold water outside of an academic, ivory tower context.

Economist Trevor Tombe, in contrast, told me that when determining potential economic gains, he used the standard modelling techniques and equations for calculating the effects of liberalizing trade. He applied the same methods used in the international context. “So that’s the trick, taking the models that exist elsewhere but adapting them to the Canadian context so they can plug into the StatsCan data,” he said. “Statistics Canada, to its great credit, produces the best internal trade data on Earth by a pretty wide margin.”

The small brewers’ grant program “was a central component of the craft beer boom in Alberta.”

Elements of his analysis, however, have not received as much traction in the media and other discourse about internal trade. The economic gains he projects would take decades to materialize. They involve a redistribution of industry. Some provinces would win in some sectors and lose in others. “The pie can be bigger, but the slices get cut up in different ways when we liberalize,” Tombe said. People would have to follow the new opportunities. His models suggest that 1.3 to 1.7 per cent of Canada’s workforce would migrate. And, Tombe acknowledges, perhaps this is a price Canadians are not willing to pay. His goal is to ensure we have the best data possible to make an informed decision. “It may very well be that Canada’s highly decentralized federation might inevitably lead to high internal trade costs, and that might be a cost worth paying,” he said.

Alberta’s craft beer industry is what Tombe might call, in the poetic language of an economist, a legitimate non-economic objective. Bigger breweries, even if they’re outside the province, benefit from economies of scale and can provide cheaper alternatives. But craft beer, even as the sector is undergoing a contraction, is something more than the sum of its parts. It has a cultural dimension. Foster described how a large proportion of the craft breweries in Alberta were started in small towns. They employ local people and buy local ingredients. They contribute to a sense of place. They reflect and shape the identity of communities. It’s no coincidence the NDP government defended its policies to protect craft beer by invoking an image of agrarian Alberta, of the prairies, of a place that grows the best barley in the world. The pitch was infused with patriotism. The trade barrier was a tool to nurture a nascent industry that helps to make Alberta, Alberta.

Doug Horner is the author of Back from the Deep (Steerforth Press, 2024). He lives in Calgary.

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A New Blueprint for Government

Jackie Flanagan — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:00:41 +0000

by Kevin G. Lynch
and James R. Mitchell
UNIVERSITY OF REGINA PRESS
2025/$29.95/218 pp.

This is a must-read book for those who take seriously the Canadian constitution’s promise of peace, order and good government. Because, according to the authors, we are not getting good government. Both authors have extensive experience inside government bureaucracy: Lynch was federal deputy minister of finance and industry and Mitchell a diplomat and senior official in Privy Council and Treasury Board.

Why do these insiders say Canada needs a new blueprint for government Primarily because the prime minister (PM) has too much power, and too much control is concentrated in the prime minister’s office (PMO) of over 100 partisan staff. The public service, which provides non-partisan support and serves not a political party but the people of Canada, has less of a role in government than political staff—those hired by the party in power and therefore inclined to serve that party. Even cabinet ministers have less power than the PMO.

The authors argue Canada is in serious decline. Markers of underperformance are low productivity, weak per capita income growth, high inflation, declining standard of living, falling business investment, low public trust, and polarization. Government is ineffective in delivering core public services yet has amassed huge debt. Leaders lack a national vision. Social problems include lack of affordable housing, an overloaded healthcare system and climate disasters. In 2015 Canada was fifth in the World Competitiveness ranking. Now it is 19th.

They recommend several changes: Restore cabinet as the collective decision-making body of Government. (Here, Government [upper case] refers to the elected Government of the day whereas government [lower case] refers to the organization as a whole.) Modernize the public service and cut layers of hierarchy and red tape. Restore the points-based immigration system. Increase productivity by encouraging business investment, controlling immigration, eliminating the tax system’s small-firm bias, cutting interprovincial trade barriers, measuring public sector productivity, simplifying regulations and streamlining approval processes (Canada ranks 188th out of 208 countries for the time it takes to get a construction permit). They argue every policy should be judged on whether it will increase Canada’s competitiveness, that we should find other trading partners and actually trade with them, that we must meet our NATO defence spending commitments, and that we must have better partnerships between the federal government and the provinces.

At the core of the book is the section describing how our Westminster system of governance should work and why it now does not. The system we inherited from the British “combines an effective political executive supported by a non-partisan public service, with strong, democratic accountability to an elected legislature… and with an independent judiciary.” Today, they say, we have an overly strong executive, a weak legislature, a bloated bureaucracy and courts that interfere inappropriately. Formerly, strong cabinet ministers played prominent public roles. Now the PM has all authority, and his staff are more powerful than ministers. The current cabinet is too big to function as a decision-making body. There are too many departments and too many ministers with grand titles and no authority or accountability. Mandates assigned by the PM to ministers are now public relations exercises with impossible goals that have nothing to do with good governance. Elected MPs have no meaningful role. What goes on in Parliament is mere theatre. Opposition members engage in “incessant partisan attack, ridicule and outright lying.” The public service, formerly “helping ministers serve the common good” and intended to offer evidence-based policy advice to the Government, has been supplanted by partisan staffers.

Central to government reform is putting cabinet back at the centre of collective decision-making, with strong ministers accountable for results, able to appoint their own chiefs of staff and make their own announcements. “Effective management of large and complex systems requires providing the overall strategy and then empowering leaders throughout the organization to deliver.” To right-size government, cuts to programming and personnel are necessary. From 2015 to 2024 the public service grew by over 40 per cent while the population only grew 16 per cent. The authors recommend reducing the number of government employees by 60,000. With 436,000 employees, the government should be able to do its work itself instead of contracting it out to consultants—who cost $17.8-billion in 2023–24. When the government hires people, it should look in-house for the skills it needs, particularly technology skills, and cease outsourcing.

A fundamental responsibility of government is public safety. The authors argue we need a national police force to deal with national and international organized crime, cybercrime, terrorism etc.—and to protect our border. The RCMP should focus on this instead of contract policing in rural areas. Currently 20,000 of 31,000 officers are engaged in contract policing. Officers need to be trained for the nation’s security needs of the 21st century, not the wild west of the 1800s.

Currently, our intelligence gathering has “a Keystone Cops air to it,” while foreign interference in our elections continues. Threats to our sovereignty require us to strengthen our defence, diplomacy and intelligence. But having diplomatic missions in 180 countries is not a sign of strength. The authors recommend concentrating our foreign policy efforts and diplomatic resources where they will make the biggest difference, such as in Japan, South Korea, Germany, Indonesia and Singapore.

The insight into government provided by this book could be alarming, but it needs to be read. Only when large numbers of citizens realize the urgent need for change will public pressure make change possible.

Jackie Flanagan is the founder of Alberta Views.

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The Politics of Polling

Laurence Miall — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:00:05 +0000

Within days of each other in May of 2025, three polls were released on the topic of Alberta separation. Pollara showed support among Albertans for separating from Canada at 24 per cent. Leger found support for leaving was much higher: a whopping 41 per cent. Then an Abacus poll came out. “Remainers” could breathe a sigh of relief. Support for separating was at only 18 per cent.

Ordinary Albertans would be forgiven for not knowing what to believe.

Further fuzzying matters was Pollara’s declaration that its figure on separation was “the highest recorded by the company” since 2021. But even this surging support for Alberta separation was dwarfed by the Leger poll. And then Abacus flatly declared “Support for separation is low.” Its report concluded: “There is not a widespread appetite among the public for such a significant constitutional rupture.”

Polling—also called surveying—takes many different forms, and in Alberta this year we’ll see poll numbers touted by separatists, and other numbers cited by their federalist opponents. With so much on the line, how useful is polling for providing accurate insights into what people want?

Public opinion polling started in Canada during the 1940s. The first national poll was conducted by the Liberal Party in 1942 to try to determine the likely outcome of a plebiscite on conscription. The first election poll was done by the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion in 1945. The first political poll—used to help craft a party’s electoral strategy—was by the Quebec Liberals in 1959. Yet only since the 1980s have national polls been conducted regularly. Polling of public opinion at the provincial level is now routine as well.

Sometimes polling itself becomes the story. For example, during Alberta’s 2012 election, most pollsters projected a win by the Wildrose, led by Danielle Smith. As it turned out, the Progressive Conservatives under Alison Redford were the victors by a comfortable margin. “Clearly something’s wrong,” pollster Bruce Cameron told the CBC afterward. “I’m concerned about the impact on the credibility of the profession.”

Similarly, the 2017 civic election in Calgary was marked by conflicting polls, one of which suggested incumbent mayor Naheed Nenshi was losing badly. A post-election investigation by the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA) noted that “accurate public opinion polling can provide voters with information about the views of their fellow citizens [and] draw voters’ attention to particular candidates and issues.” It found that several polls by Mainstreet Research, commissioned by Postmedia, had been “seriously, methodologically flawed” and had “significantly affected the course of the campaign,” including by throwing Nenshi on the defensive and dooming the third-place candidate’s campaign.

The chief differences in polling techniques can be categorized according to the how (methodology) and the what (the content of the questions).

The “how” of polling constantly evolves. In his history of polling in Canada, Christopher Adams suggests polling had several precursors, including censuses, the first of which was conducted in 1666 by the intendant of New France. Another precursor is the market survey. In 1929, for example, the Canadian Business Research Bureau interviewed thousands of users of various products to learn what they “actually think and know about the goods.” Over time, market research acquired the sheen of academic rigour. W.W. Goforth, who taught economics at McGill, was hired by the ad agency Cockfield, Brown & Co. in 1928. In this early period, data-gathering included face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews and mail-in surveys.

The possibility of polling errors became apparent even in those early days. In 1919 the Winnipeg Free Press asked readers to complete a questionnaire about cars and accessories and mail it back. Questions included “How much have you spent for accessories [since the car purchase]?” Bertram Brooker, an ad executive, wrote in Marketing and Business Management in 1924 that surveys of this sort presented many problems, including an inability to control the sample size and to screen respondents. This survey, for example, failed to screen people who didn’t own or regularly use their car.

A major development in polling in the 21st century has been the decline in telephone surveys and the rise of the online variety. Canada’s Angus Reid Institute, for example, conducts all of its surveys and studies through the internet, citing a Pew Research study showing that response rates for phone interviews had dropped to only 6 per cent in 2018.

One pollster that remains attached to telephone surveying is Janet Brown. The company she uses, Trend Research, is based out of Edmonton. “The secret sauce is Albertans calling Albertans,” says Brown. She uses cell numbers and landlines, and says people are more inclined to stay on the line—or pick up in the first place—if they believe they’re talking to someone in Edmonton rather than in Montreal or outside Canada entirely. The company makes five attempts to reach a person before giving up.

The MRIA report on Calgary’s misleading polls in 2017 singled out Mainstreet for not calling enough cell phones, thus ignoring younger voters and creating an unrepresentative sample.

Frank Graves, founder and president of EKOS Research, however, isn’t as sold on telephone polling. “There is a tendency to overemphasize the importance of the mode of contact,” he says. “Whether or not you call someone, email them, do an intercept survey in the street or in their home—they all have different strengths and weaknesses.”

What Brown, MRIA and Graves would agree on, however, is that good polling requires a representative sample. This means, as the Pew Research Centre puts it, that any sample is “assumed to be representative of the larger population on any question we might be interested in.” Pollsters use various techniques to improve the reliability of a sample. One is weighting, or adjusting the relative contribution of respondents. People who participate in polls don’t necessarily reflect the general population. For example, they’re more likely to have a postsecondary degree. The pollster’s answer to this problem is to “weight down” the responses of postsecondary graduates in their final results.

Brown argues that polling in Alberta tends to underestimate the conservative vote and overestimate the progressive one. “Pollsters make the same mistakes over and over again,” she told the CBC in November 2020. It’s a message she reiterated to Alberta Views. Her theory is that progressive Albertans are more likely to participate in polls and that it takes strenuous attempts to reach more-conservative voters—by phone—to correct for this bias. “I sometimes joke that progressive people will tell you their opinions all day long,” she says. “Conservatives are a little bit more cautious, a little bit more reticent, and don’t want to be probed as much.”

Members of the public are sometimes invited to participate in opinion surveying. Once recruited, they’re part of what’s called a “panel”—a cohort asked to respond to survey questions. The most reliable panels are selected through probability-based sampling; the very best kind—online or offline—are those in which respondents are chosen at random. To do that perfectly would require a comprehensive list of the entire population or at least the target population. But such lists aren’t usually available, so pollsters use a variety of probability-based techniques to try to ensure that their samples (their panels) are constituted in such a way as to minimize sampling error.

It is important to distinguish between probability-based panels and opt-in samples. “Opt-in” means the respondents weren’t chosen at random; rather, they were invited to participate. The Pew Research Centre has concluded that opt-in sampling is only half as accurate as probability-based panels. However, opt-in sampling can be conducted in such a way as to improve its reliability. Canada’s Angus Reid Forum is an online panel composed of people selected through online ads on numerous, diverse websites. The company claims its panels “reflect the general population by continually verifying and recruiting so that the socio-demographic characteristics of each sampling region match actual sub-populations according to both the census and electoral data.”

Polling is, of course, ultimately about the answers to the questions—the what. Questions can be asked in numerous ways, including as neutrally as possible. Or questions can be selective, or leading, or presented in a specific order if a certain result is desired. Sometimes this takes the form of what is called “push polling.”

This is what the provincial government’s Alberta Next Panel has been accused of. In early 2025 Albertans were invited by the government to give their opinions, ostensibly to help the government choose its policies. A St. Albert Gazette editorial in August 2025 argued the surveying conducted through the Alberta Next website was more accurately described as push polling. “You can frame the questions in such a way that every answer is a version of your view, or [the questions] simply don’t include any option to oppose that view,” wrote Gazette staff.

The Alberta Next website, for example, offered ideas on “how to strengthen our sovereignty,” including ending equalization, creating an Alberta Pension Plan, forming a provincial police force, and withholding social services from immigrants. University of Calgary political science professor Lisa Young said, “The subject matter of the Alberta Next questions and videos are very much informed by the groups that we might call the UCP base.” The survey itself, which closed October 10, purported merely to consult Albertans.

On the topic of immigration, however, respondents (whether online or at the town halls) were required to first watch a short video, then were asked “Should Alberta take more control of the immigration system to counter Ottawa’s open-borders policies?” They were then presented with the following statement: “Ottawa approved 1.2 million people under the permanent and temporary immigrant streams in 2024. This is four times more than was approved in 2014 under prime minister Stephen Harper.”

Finally, respondents were asked to choose from three options:

• Far too much—immigration should be brought down [to] under 2014 levels;
• Definitely too high, and immigration needs to be brought down to 2014 levels again;
• Acceptable—I have no issue with immigration levels being this high.

Given this context, respondents’ answers were a foregone conclusion.

As of late November, none of the Alberta Next survey results had been released to the public. But premier Smith says she’ll use those results to assess which proposals will move to a referendum and which her government will legislate directly.

A investigation in 2017 found several polls in Calgary had been “seriously, methodologically flawed.”

Polling on support for Alberta political parties is conducted regularly. For those that pay for it, Janet Brown and journalist Paul McLoughlin release the monthly “Wild Ride” update, showing, e.g., how the UCP and NDP are faring. Accompanying charts track party support over time.

Polling such as this is sometimes criticized for its oversized impact on public discourse. For example, a poll by Brown in the late stage of the 2023 campaign, which contradicted other polls by showing the UCP ahead in Calgary, was leaked to the press. As political commentator David Climenhaga wrote, “This [survey] does change the narrative of the last two weeks of the election campaign—and that’s why it was leaked.”

Episodes like this colour the public perception of polling. “If you took a public opinion poll about polls, odds are that a majority would offer some rather unfavorable views of pollsters and the uses to which their work is put,” wrote E.J. Dionne Jr. and Thomas E. Mann for the Brookings Institution. The authors add that “public opinion is an illusive commodity.” Not all polls are created equal. Some are well constructed and designed to be credible; some are not. Some polls do seem to push people to give the answer that those who commissioned the polls want.

This is arguably what Brown herself did when she found support for a potential provincial pension plan. The poll, commissioned by the Smith government and conducted in April and May of 2025, asked Albertans how they would vote in a referendum on a variety of proposals, including “Replacing the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) with an Alberta Pension Plan (APP) that guaranteed all Alberta seniors the same or better benefits than the Canada Pension Plan.” Fifty-five per cent of respondents said they’d vote for the APP, while 45 per cent said they’d vote against it. But as CBC journalist Jason Markusoff noted, the question added a new nuance to the previous binary of CPP vs. APP. It posited a “guarantee of no financial risk for pensioners,” he wrote, “an assurance that could depend largely on how much of the total CPP pie Alberta would get as its starting pot, a figure that remains in dispute.” Who wouldn’t prefer something with no downside?

Whether using leading questions or not, polling has an effect on its audience. “There are concerns that inaccurate voting intention polling has a negative impact on the conduct of elections due to its influence on voters, the media and political parties,” concluded the Select Committee on Political Polling and Digital Media, struck by the UK’s House of Lords. The committee was a response to three consecutive cases of polling getting it wrong during critical moments: the UK’s 2015 and 2017 general elections and the 2016 vote on leaving the European Union—the infamous Brexit referendum.

The committee noted a number of theories on how polling results impact voters. One of these is the “bandwagon effect,” in which people get on board with an idea because they see many other people doing the same. The obverse of this is the “underdog effect,” which can encourage people to “adopt a minority view out of sympathy.” Polling can also affect voter turnout. Academics showed the committee evidence “that turnout is higher in elections that are anticipated to be close.” Conversely, if a poll tells someone that their candidate is losing badly, they might not bother voting at all.

So what do we really know about support for Alberta separation In an interview with Alberta Views, Dennis Modry, the founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), which is leading the separatist charge, says his movement enjoys a “plurality” of support, meaning that more Albertans want to separate from Canada than remain undecided or want to stay in Canada. And he argues polling underestimates separatist support. “We still live in an era of cancel culture,” he says. “Oftentimes, people won’t respond to a question that they perceive as possibly controversial or that has any risk of cancelling them in any way.”

A further wrinkle is that not all polling companies are created the same. Cardinal Research, for example, released a poll in October 2025 suggesting that 11 per cent of decided voters in Alberta support the new provincial Republican Party. It was the first poll to show significant support for the separatist Republicans; CBC polls analyst Éric Grenier called it “a bit of a jaw-dropper.” But a Toronto Star story noted that Cameron Davies, leader of the Republican Party, had until recently been a part-owner of Cardinal Research. Until the Star story came out, media coverage omitted that potential bias. The Lethbridge Herald quoted Davies: “What [the poll] shows is our message is resonating with Albertans; we’re getting out there, we’re doing the work.”

The Canadian Research Insights Council (CRIC), which represents pollsters, cautions that the publication of political-poll results “carries with it the potential for great consequence,” including the risk of misleading voters or eroding public trust. The council asks that journalists, before publishing a poll’s results, consider how questions were phrased, sample sizes and margins of error. It also asks “Who’s the sponsor, and what’s their interest in the topic?” CRIC quotes a former US network TV director: “When assessing whether to publish the results of a poll, media need to apply the same degree of journalistic critical practices and skepticism that they would to any other source of information.”

One of Modry’s main adversaries, Thomas Lukaszuk, leader of the Forever Canadian campaign, believes support for Alberta separatism is much more modest. “I think it’s fair to say approximately 10 per cent of Albertans are 100 per cent determined to separate from Canada,” he says. Lukaszuk’s impression is based in part on months of collecting signatures from hundreds of thousands of “pro-remain” Albertans. Meanwhile, he believes separatists themselves are divided. “That 10 per cent is further subdivided between those who’d like to join the US [and] those who somehow envision forming a new country.”

Polling conducted by Janet Brown, commissioned by CBC, has offered a more nuanced picture. In her survey of 1,200 random Albertans, conducted in May 2025, 22 per cent of respondents identified as “committed separatists.” Her survey suggests that a further 14 per cent identify as “soft separatists”—frustrated, perhaps, but not especially keen to leave Canada. They tend to approve of premier Smith’s attempt to forge a new relationship with Ottawa.

A deeper dive into Brown’s polling data offers further insights. John Santos, Brown’s data scientist, explained: “Of those who are ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ confident in their ability to save for retirement, 36 per cent would vote for separation; conversely, only 22 per cent of those who are ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ confident in their ability to save for retirement would vote for separation. This is very much an issue of financial security.”

This survey and others suggest the drivers of separatism in Alberta aren’t cultural or linguistic as in Quebec. They’re economic. The U of C’s Lisa Young argues separatists believe “Canada has stood in the way of Alberta’s prosperity because of [federal] environmental regulations.” Lukaszuk observed something similar: “We found that cities, towns and other areas that are very much reliant on the oil and gas servicing industry tend to be more pro-separatist.”

Frank Graves of EKOS suggests that surveys on Alberta separatism are being swayed by misinformation. He shared with Alberta Views preliminary results of polling he conducted on behalf of the labour movement. “The level of misinformation in Alberta is the highest in the country,” he says. In polling on the role of false information in Alberta politics, EKOS asked a number of screening questions. Respondents were asked whether certain statements were true or false. For example: “Deaths due to COVID-19 vaccines are being intentionally hidden by the government.” This process helped EKOS identify respondents that have been swayed by falsehoods. Graves believes that susceptibility to misinformation is the most “powerful predictor” of support for separating.

Not all polls are created equal. Some seem to push people to answer questions a certain way.

So, what ultimately explains the difference between Pollara’s 24 per cent, Leger’s 41 per cent and Abacus’s 18 per cent support for Alberta separatism Perhaps subtle changes in the wording:

“If a referendum were held on your province’s sovereignty, would you vote FOR or AGAINST?” (Pollara)

“If a provincial referendum were held tomorrow on whether or not your province should separate from Canada to form its own country, how would you most likely vote?” (Leger)

“Do you agree that the province of Alberta shall become a sovereign country and cease to be a province of Canada?” (Abacus)

Leger gave respondents the option of “strong support” or “somewhat support,” then combined these to show “support for separating.” Pollara’s choice was starker: “Stay or separate?” And Abacus seemed to be asking for a prediction. The questioners had different sample sizes, weighting strategies and survey methods. One survey prompted respondents with a question about Liberal leader Mark Carney; another prefaced its survey by asking how closely respondents have been following the news. Respondents may have been influenced by the looming federal election, or by financial insecurity, or by misinformation, or even by other surveys they’d seen.

For his part, Graves didn’t want to speculate on the differences. “If I were doing this,” he says, “I’d do random control assignment testing. A random portion is assigned to version A of the question, and the other is assigned to version B.” This would be the only way to determine whether or not the way the question was asked had a bearing on the result.

Many more such surveys will be released this year. The stakes are high—Albertans could soon face a separation referendum. And the ultimate poll will come at the ballot box.

Illustration by Gerry Rasmussen

Laurence Miall lives in Edmonton. He has written for Jacobin, the CBC and Alberta Views, and is a former editor of carte blanche.

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Ripper

Marc D. Froese — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:00:04 +0000

by Mark Bourrie
BIBLIOASIS
2025/$28.95/448 pp.

Donald Trump first developed his half-baked plan to annex Canada in late 2024. But the ensuing torrent of headline-grabbing threats make it feel like a lifetime ago. Does anyone even remember those good old days when Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives were set to sweep the Liberals from power Back in early 2025, politics watchers could choose from not one but two biographies of the rising Conservative leader. These books were coded as “pro-Poilievre” and “anti-Poilievre.” But the reality was more complicated. Andrew Lawton wrote a bog-standard political hagiography, Pierre Poilievre, albeit with a heavy dash of ambivalence about the most nakedly ambitious man in Ottawa. Mark Bourrie’s portrait, Ripper, is more negative, but it also pays Poilievre the compliment of taking him seriously. Bourrie could have written a straight-up hit piece, attacking Poilievre’s smarm and snark, his thin skin and casual cruelty. Instead, he composed an urgent narrative about creeping right-wing authoritarianism.

Ripper, writes Bourrie, “is about Pierre Poilievre’s world as much as it is about the man himself.” That world included “the almost unique political opportunities that existed in Calgary in the late 1980s” and 1990s when the Reform Party was ascendant and young conservatives such as Jason Kenney, Danielle Smith, Rob Anders and Poilievre rose to prominence. Since then, writes Bourrie, Poilievre “has not changed to win over voters; they have shifted to where he is, and we need to understand how and why that’s happened.”

By situating Poilievre in the context of a rising tide of the global far-right, Bourrie shows him to be both a conventional conservative politician by temperament, and an odious figure who has increased polarization and stoked grievance for his own benefit. Since he was a teenager in Calgary, and then an Ottawa MP at age 24, Poilievre has consistently built his brand around two poles: first as stalwart opponent to the liberal (and Liberal) status quo, and secondly as an everyman striving for recognition in the shadow of elites: Preston Manning, Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau, Mark Carney.

As party leader, to his own detriment, Poilievre styled himself as the “anti-Trudeau”—sneery where Justin Trudeau was sincere, sharp where Trudeau was soft. He ditched the glasses, hit the gym and shrunk his T-shirts, the better to contrast his ultimate fighter physique with Trudeau’s milder yoga-dad appearance. Laser-focused on Trudeau’s supposed flaws, Poilievre left it to the opinion polls to make the case for his own leadership potential. Mark Carney exploited this glaring error in judgment.

Mixed results in the 2025 election—increasing Conservative seats but losing his own—may ultimately define the Poilievre brand more than catchy, alliterative slogans and social media influence. Rejected by his Ottawa riding, Poilievre limped home to Alberta to try again—in the safest Conservative seat in Canada—both prodigal son and Laurentian carpetbagger.

Political biographies are often strangely hollow. This one fills the void with context. Bourrie gives us a sordid story of dirty money, foreign interference, US-born conspiracies, homegrown racism and post-truth populism that elevates the winning and maintaining of power above the public good.

You won’t learn what makes Poilievre tick. But his lack of self-awareness is as well-documented as it is banal. He’s hardly the first politician to use public office as a prophylactic against introspection. Nevertheless, read this book for Bourrie’s wrathful takedown of the egotism, infighting, backbiting and corruption that threaten Canadian democracy. If that’s not enough for you, read it for the story about the time a prime minister made Poilievre cry. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t Trudeau.

Marc D. Froese is a professor of political science and the director of international studies at Burman University.

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