by Randy Nikkel Schroeder
NEWEST PRESS
2026/$23.95/342 pp.

I’ve never read a book like Sinner’s Banquet. Randy Nikkel Schroeder has created a dark (and funny!) romp of a novel that fuses real and imagined Mennonite culture, noir tropes, Shakespearean-style insults and a deep goth sensibility.

The opening chapter drives you into the narrative at high speed with the surprise of Lethbridge, Alberta, being called “LA” and the energy of Schroeder’s similes such as “white as a peeled creamsicle.” The novel’s wild plot, which takes as many twisting turns as the protagonist’s turbocharged Cressida, involves the plight of Luke, a shunned Menno (due to adolescent sexual shenanigans in a church) now residing in Vancouver and working as a dealer, who gets on the wrong side of Serendipity Hamm, the “benzo queen,” after he tries to pull a scam. Fleeing back to his past with his doomed buddy Buddha to attend his uncle Ezra’s funeral, Luke just gets more wacko as he meets up with childhood accomplices, such as the deviously erotic Nora, and they plot revenge. I can’t give away the gory deliverance, but I must warn you, it’s intensely abject and not for the faint of gut.

The trio’s initial plan turns ever more complicated as it draws in a dastardly embalmer, a vicious gravedigger, an incipient deacon, Andy, who got the moniker Ratzy (for being a tattler), two dashing cops, a Hutterite and a nasty biker called Moby Dyck. The story recalls Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled tales, spiced with Trainspotting-style vice, with characters plucked from the mouth of The Big Lebowski’s Walter Sobchak (“I’ll dry your socks on your mother’s cross,” “I’ll make egg rolls with your foreskin.”) Benjamin Hertwig’s Juiceboxers and Susan Perly’s Death Valley also come to mind. But Sinner’s Banquet is unique, with uncommon scenes involving the history of Nazism, Dionysian cannibalism, a mysterious drug called Rumijch and the desecration of corpses. Grim, yes, but rollicking too.

The short chapters are full of clever allusions to everything from A Tale of Two Cities to Melville, insertions of Plautdietsch lingo (that “meidung” feeling), a plethora of jokes (at times repeating their “badabum” a bit too often, as when Luke inserts his “you’re a real poet” riposte with four different characters), and even some beautiful descriptions of the prairies (“the dark slopes of the Porcupine Hills and the windswept ridges of the Whaleback”). At the end of this unravelling world, Luke remains, both altered and unchanged by his brutal experiences, the entire narrative a kind of meditation on the Thomas Wolfe saying “You can’t go home again.” Sinner’s Banquet is a terrifically startling read, and putting it down, I wonder, “How am I gonna stir my butter now?”

Catherine Owen is the author of 17 books of poetry and prose.

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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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by W. Keith Regular
DURVILE & UPROUTE BOOKS
2025/$35.00/288 pp.

In August 1920 a trio of men robbed a train travelling from Lethbridge to the Crowsnest Pass. A few days later, three police officers cornered two of the bandits, leading to a shootout in which one of the outlaws and two officers were killed. For historian W. Keith Regular, the author of Rough and Messy Justice, the resulting manhunt, trial and execution of the surviving robber was a miscarriage of justice in which the accused, Thomas Bassoff, did not get a fair trial.

Citing an abundance of primary sources, Regular draws a clear and credible account of the events. He reveals the deep-seated mistrust of “foreigners” such as Bassoff and how this prejudice biased the court against him. The narrative is a bit repetitive—Regular restates the details of the heist, the shootout and other events multiple times—but remains nonetheless readable and engaging throughout. And in Chapter 13 he cogently lays out his case that Bassoff was unjustly hanged.

Perhaps the most damning confirmation of this comes from a key witness, who immediately after the shootout claimed that the mortally wounded bandit, George Akroff, shot and killed the two police officers. But at the trial the witness changed his story, insisting it was Bassoff who killed the constables. Bassoff’s lawyer failed to catch this discrepancy, almost certainly due to being assigned the case only one day before the trial, leaving him virtually no time to prepare an adequate defence.

Readers are left with little doubt the legal system grievously failed Bassoff. Regular concludes: “He was, indeed, an unlucky and unfortunate man; unfortunate to be an Eastern European immigrant in Canada at a time when race very much mattered, unfortunate to be poor, and more unfortunate still to be charged with the most heinous of crimes and captive to a judicial process rife with systemic prejudice.”

However, despite the book’s strengths, Regular leaves us wanting. He offers almost no background on Bassoff or his accomplices. What inspired them to emigrate from their country of origin What was their life as immigrants like in Canada What motivated them to rob the train Without this context, Bassoff’s plight is deprived of additional meaning.

Plenty of other questions could have been raised to reflect on larger issues or implications, such as the role of the media in our perceptions of crime. Lacking this, the book is limited in depth. Top-tier true crime—such as Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City—can weave in broader reflections on society and justice without compromising pace or readability. Still, Regular’s focus on meticulous reconstruction of events and narrative engagement fits squarely within the genre’s sweet spot.

Andrew Torry is a curriculum designer and playwright.

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Two houses down and kitty-corner from us are two seniors facilities. Just around that corner, where 13th St. intersects 9th Ave., is the playing field of an elementary school. According to City of Lethbridge traffic data, this intersection is the most dangerous in the city.

I have lived on this street for 19 years. Traffic here was always a bit noisy, a bit fast. But in the past few years something happened. As traffic volume increased after the pandemic, the speed, noise and aggressiveness of drivers multiplied. The street became a racetrack, not just for the occasional stunter but for a majority of drivers.

The noise is nearly unbearable most days; it often feels like a vehicle is driving through the house. And getting in and out of our truck in front of the house has become more dangerous. Drivers pass at full speed within inches of me. While we were unloading groceries one evening in 2021, a driver smashed into the back of our truck, pushing it into a tree, totalling it. Another driver hit my next truck parked in the same spot in 2023, smashing it into my partner’s car and totalling both.

One spring morning in 2022, while hurrying to make coffee, I left our nine-month-old bluetick hound pup, Jack, waiting at the back door for me. I forgot that Jack could open the door if it was unlatched. Soon he was out in front of the house. I raced to the front door just in time to see Jack sitting and waiting at the curb, as I had taught him, but fixated on a dog on the other side of the street.

Before I could get the door open and shout his name, Jack gave in to his excitement, forgot his training and began running across. A truck and trailer struck him. His body tumbled halfway down the block. The bloodstains were on the asphalt for a week.

In the chaos and horror of that Monday, when Jack seemed to wake up again and try to breathe—even before the vet told us it was agonal breathing, that he was already brain-dead—I was already making a vow. I would fight to make our street safe again.

In May 2022 I contacted our city traffic engineering manager to tell him about Jack and discuss the growing problem of speeding on our street. The man replied that his department already knew our intersection sees the most right-angle collisions—the most dangerous kind—of any residential neighbourhood in the city. He agreed to order a traffic speed study.

In November 2022 the city deployed the speed study along the same half block that Jack’s blood had stained. Over three days, during the hours that children were walking to or from the school around the corner, 74 per cent of all drivers—23,343 out of 31,764—were found to be speeding, with the top speed during school hours at 110 km/h.

The City’s response, to my surprise, was that the results of the study were normal, due to something the traffic engineering manager called the “85th percentile theory.” The theory—developed in 1961, when vehicle speeds topped out at barely 100 km/h—privileges, above all other considerations, the speed at which 85 per cent of drivers feel they can still operate safely. In traffic departments still using the theory, so long as the 85th percentile speed isn’t more than 10 km/h above the posted limit, there is no need to change the limit or take extraordinary measures to reduce traffic speeds. In effect, traffic engineers using the formula create an unofficial speed limit to reinterpret traffic study data so that it seems like only 15 per cent of drivers are speeding. And traffic engineers will even use the formula to raise speed limits.

The US National Association of City Transportation Officials says the 85th-percentile formula is “designed to fail.” When drivers see other cars going faster, they increase their speed as well, creating a ratcheting effect for speed that has no relation to actual traffic safety. The formula has a deadly blind spot for pedestrians and cyclists, because it was never developed for them or with their safety in mind. The theory was intended for setting speed limits on highways, where visibility is unobstructed and drivers are protected by the structures, materials and crash-safety systems of their vehicles.

Bad traffic theory is only part of the problem on a street like ours. So is street design. As with many communities in Alberta, city founders designed our wide old streets during the late 1800s not to be four-lane highways running through neighbourhoods but so that a full four-horse wagon team could make a U-turn. In 1906 the Alberta government legislated its first urban speed limit at 10 mph, to protect horses from the motor vehicles—or “terror wagons”—that were beginning to use the same streets.

Over the ensuing decades, drivers would begin to occupy the full width of our streets, but until the 1950s the primary users were pedestrians, cyclists, buses and streetcars. That’s when traffic engineers and governments began treating streets like ours, designed for horse and buggy traffic, as large arteries to move motor vehicle traffic quickly through our cities, with the assumption that “wider is safer.”

A 2023 Johns Hopkins study showed that, in fact, narrow streets are safer. Where speed limits are low, the width of a street doesn’t much affect traffic safety. But at 50 km/h, the wider the street, the less safe it is. That’s in part because more lanes and wider streets don’t give drivers more room for mistakes. They just make them drive faster.

And something else terrifying happens when a driver surpasses 50 km/h, on any kind of street in an urban environment.

The morning my puppy was killed, as I scooped up his body I heard behind me the driver saying over and over “I never even saw him.” The man was decent enough to drop off a few hundred dollars to pay for part of the emergency care. But for a long time I wondered how in the hell the driver hadn’t seen Jack. Of course it was my fault our puppy got out of the house. But Jack had been sitting, waiting, four lanes away from the approaching driver, with no obstacles between them. And how was the driver still going full speed when he hit Jack?

According to studies used by state and provincial governments across North America, the limit of brain processing speed causes a shortening of pupil distance in humans with any increase in rate of movement. As a result, even when we’re just walking, the faster we move, the narrower our field of vision. At speeds up to 40 km/h, a driver in a city has good enough peripheral vision to be aware of what’s happening on sidewalks and approaching streets. At 50 km/h, a driver’s field of vision narrows so that it becomes difficult to see a person or puppy emerging from a curb. At roughly 55 km/h—the average speed of drivers on our street—real tunnel vision begins to set in. By about 60 km/h and above—the speed of at least 15 per cent of drivers in the 85th-percentile regime on our streets—the vision cone has narrowed so much that drivers can see only the backs of the vehicles in front of them.

In other words, the man who hit Jack really hadn’t seen him. Nor was he a “bad driver.” Or at least no worse than the other 74 per cent of drivers on our street going above the 50 km/h limit every day, who because of the effect of speed on field of vision might as well be driving impaired.

But why did it take that driver so long to stop even after he hit Jack Why did his truck and trailer drag and roll my puppy’s body so far down the block, making death certain?

According to studies used by transportation engineering and safety associations around the world, reaction time for the average driver is 1.5–2.5 seconds. In the time it takes for anyone’s brain to process that they need to begin stopping, a driver going 60 km/h will travel at least 25 metres. Visual obstacles—our elm trees, bushes, fences, parked cars etc.—limit visibility to 19–30 metres in many places. Most drivers’ brains won’t begin to tell them to stop until after they have hit someone.

Once a driver does begin to brake, in ideal conditions the vehicle will travel at least another 30 metres, with a final total stopping distance of between 60 and 80 metres, more than half a block. When a vehicle is going 40 km/h, a pedestrian’s chance of surviving an impact is nearly 100 per cent. At 50 km/h, the chance of survival falls to 10–20 per cent. At 60 km/h, survivability flatlines to nearly zero.

According to data from the Canadian Traffic Injury Research Foundation and the US Department of Transportation, while pedestrians are involved in only 2 per cent of serious traffic collisions, they represent nearly 20 per cent of fatalities from these incidents (cyclist numbers are similar). A cyclist or pedestrian struck in a collision is nearly 300 times more likely to be killed than anyone inside the motor vehicle. Senior citizens are the most likely to be hit by speeders; aging impairs perception and judgment of the distance of an approaching vehicle, and it makes getting out of the way more difficult. Children as cyclists and pedestrians are most likely to be killed in a collision.

Drivers speed on streets like ours for one simple reason: no one is looking.

In a February 2023 meeting with the chief of Lethbridge Police Service (LPS), I learned that the city’s automated traffic enforcement system didn’t deploy a single photo radar vehicle on our street during the two years before the November 2022 study (due in part to the pandemic). In that meeting the chief promised a six-month “blitz” of our street with enhanced traffic enforcement. But with reportedly only seven staffed patrol cars available to LPS at any given time—for all offences, not just traffic—the blitz amounted to just 93 hours of patrol car enforcement over 180 days, or an average of just over 30 minutes per day for the entire length of a street that sees nearly eight million vehicle trips per year, or about 20,000 per day (with nearly 15,000 of these vehicles speeding, and 3,000 of them at extreme speeds). During that time, officers issued only 176 tickets, an average of one per day of the blitz.

Why so few tickets, with a speeder passing traffic patrollers every four to five seconds, and roughly two extreme speeders passing every minute Presumably a significant part of the 30 minutes “patrol” time per day of the “blitz” would have involved the act of issuing the lone daily ticket. But patrollers must also be selective, only going after the most egregious speeding. This is in part because, according to traffic officers interviewed, no judge will prosecute any driver going less than 10 km/h over the limit, due to speedometer calibration issues. But if the only reason for not ticketing all drivers going above 50 km/h is speedometer calibration legalities, why not just lower all city speed limits to 40 km/h Or, heck, why not lower them even just to 45 km/h and save at least a few more lives by being able to begin ticketing at 55 km/h The answer: Catch-22.

Since 2019, successive UCP governments have imposed a freeze on all new photo-radar installations in Alberta communities unless the locations are school, playground or construction zones. As part of its moratorium, the government also made it illegal for cities to use photo radar on any streets where speed limits are below 50 km/h (excluding school and playground zones). So, a city can keep the higher, proven-unsafe speed limit of 50 km/h, use scarce police resources to ticket only drivers going above 60 km/h, and still use photo radar on the most dangerous streets. Or it can lower speed limits but lose the right to use photo radar to enforce the new limits.

The blame for the province’s ongoing war on traffic radar might not just be the post-pandemic wave of anti-government libertarianism that Danielle Smith’s UCP rode to power in 2023. An apparent analytical failure in an automated traffic enforcement review report done by MNP for Alberta Transportation in 2018 could also have contributed to the governing UCP’s hostility—and the opposition NDP’s ambivalence—towards traffic radar. The first pages of the report repeatedly emphasize that traffic radar installations had only made “small” or “modest” impacts on overall traffic safety in the province—only 1.4 per cent fewer collisions and 5.2 per cent fewer severe collisions overall. But MNP based this conclusion on the impact of a relatively tiny number of installations instead of on total collision rates across cities and the whole province.

On the other hand, virtually every other jurisdictional report referred to deep in the body and appendices of the MNP report reached very different conclusions by using a far more meaningful metric: the impact of traffic radar at the street and neighbourhood level, within 500 metres of installations. These studies, from Arizona to Australia, show that traffic radar reduced the rates of speeding by up to 70 per cent, brought the extreme-speeder category from 15 per cent down to 1 per cent, reduced the number of dangerous angle collisions by up to 85 per cent and, most importantly, reduced the number of severe injuries and deaths by up to 68 per cent. (Closer to home, a 2023 review for the City of St. Albert found that traffic radar reduced “unacceptable speeding” by 92 per cent.)

The results of the UCP’s years-long war on traffic safety have recently begun emerging in bloody detail. The province’s collision data from 2020 to 2021—the most recent years available—show a 20 per cent uptick in pedestrian injuries and deaths, after a steady decline in the years before the moratorium on traffic radar. After one motorist killed a man in his 60s and another killed a 17-year-old girl at a crosswalk in early 2025, the City of Calgary reported that collisions in that city causing serious injuries rose by 20 per cent between 2023 and 2024 (from 2,424 to 2,908), and pedestrian fatalities jumped from four to 13.

In November 2024 the UCP government doubled down on its moratorium by cutting the number of existing photo radar installations from 2,200 to around 650 and prohibiting any photo radar anywhere but in playground or school and construction zones. The province said it might begin allowing individual applications for traffic camera installations on a case-by-case basis. But as one Lethbridge officer told me, local police and communities have no idea about the process or requirements for restoring photo radar to the streets that need it.

Decisions about where radar is needed will now be political and made by people who don’t live—or die—here.

Minister of Transportation Devin Dreeshen says gutting automated traffic enforcement will stop communities from using photo radar as a “cash cow.” But according to Alberta Municipalities, most of the province’s cities and towns don’t actually get any money from traffic fines for general revenues. In 2020 the province upped its take of fines from 26.7 per cent to 40 per cent. Except for those few municipalities without police and who need to hire peace officers, the rest must commit the remaining 60 per cent of fine revenues to community traffic safety programmes and victims funds.

UCP government restrictions on municipal funding have forced cities to stretch police budgets to deal with an exploding addictions and homelessness crisis, which limits police resources for human-operated traffic law enforcement. In another Catch-22, the province is making automated traffic enforcement more necessary at the same time it is taking it away.

If the move to cut photo radar was done to save Albertans money, the decision has been penny-wise and pound-tragic. When Dreeshen made his late 2024 announcement, he said fines from traffic radar amounted to $145-million annually across the province. Besides the incalculable cost of collisions to victims, their families and the community, the City of Calgary pegs the cost of medical response to collisions, lost wages, property damage etc. at about $1.2-billion annually. In Calgary alone.

No elected official in Lethbridge has publicly called for an end to the moratorium on photo radar. Even progressive politicians in this city publicly refer to traffic radar as “speed traps.” Neither has any called out the city’s culture of speed. No one seems to want to get between the addict and their drug—be it the minutes-behind soccer family in their minivan or the bird-flipping driver of the sport-lifted truck.

The majority drives, the majority speeds, the majority elects.

Some local communities, however, have recognized that traffic safety is a civil rights issue, and are beginning to make the safety of vulnerable non-vehicular users central to traffic policy. The City of Edmonton, and later Calgary, recently took the lead in adopting more 40 km/h and 30 km/h speed limits. Municipalities as diverse as Spruce Grove, St. Albert and Banff have been lowering their speed limits by adopting and implementing the principles of Vision Zero, a national and global traffic safety alliance that aims to reduce pedestrian deaths to zero.

Vision Zero rejects the use of the 85th percentile theory for setting traffic policy because it puts only the driver’s feeling of safety—not science or even common sense—above the safety and well-being of pedestrians and cyclists, the young and old, and all vulnerable users. Vision Zero challenges the notion of laying blame for a death on the vulnerable user, saying that cities and drivers must take full responsibility for the safety of all users of our roads. Traffic engineers must not sacrifice the quality of life of people in homes near roads by enabling speeding. And traffic departments should never wait for someone to be killed before taking action to make every street safe.

For help in my fight to make my street safe, I joined my neighbourhood association in summer 2022. In February 2023 I approached councillor John Middleton-Hope—a former officer and city police chief—and asked for his help. Middleton-Hope—who would campaign unsuccessfully as the UCP candidate for MLA in the December 2024 Lethbridge-West by-election—received from me a motion drafted and passed by the neighbourhood association requesting that the city reduce the speed limit on 13th St. to 40 km/h, install a permanent photo radar camera and take other measures to improve traffic safety here. (We were unaware of the province-wide moratorium on new photo radar at the time.)

In April 2023 councillor Middleton-Hope and the rest of Lethbridge city council also received a letter from a group of surgeons at Chinook Regional Hospital pleading for the city to reduce speed limits to 40 km/h city-wide, due to the high rate of injuries and deaths in collisions. That same month the Lethbridge Public School Board—alarmed by the data from the November 2022 speed study on 13th St., especially given the street passes an elementary school—also wrote to city council urging serious action on the speeding problem.

The City’s infrastructure services manager responded with an email to me and city council saying that although our intersection has a high number of collisions, it’s nevertheless “typical” of others like it. One graph in the manager’s letter compared our street to a commercial intersection that had exactly one more collision in a five-year period, most of less severity. Another graph compared the top speed on our street to a fence-divided block that is the transition zone for acceleration onto Whoop-Up Drive, where the posted speed limit is 90 km/h. Both of these other “typical” locations have had recent pedestrian fatalities.

Councillor Middleton-Hope—whose door-to-door campaign for MLA used “Safe Streets” as a slogan (referring to a drugs and homelessness crisis, not actual streets and traffic)—followed up with an email to me saying he felt the City had “done its due diligence on the matter.” In September 2023 Lethbridge city council approved a 40-km/h pilot project in Middleton-Hope’s own remote Paradise Canyon suburb in the far south of the city.

In November 2023 a hit-and-run driver struck a senior citizen on a crosswalk on 13th St., breaking his hips and legs and putting him in intensive care for a week. When I asked an LPS officer whether another senior in the city had survived after being hit by a motorist on the same day a friend’s son had been hit a block from our house in December 2024, he said he didn’t know, because “pedestrians are being hit all the time.” Too many to keep track of.

In 2024 LPS took several months to consider and then deny a freedom-of-information request I made asking for data on the number of pedestrian-involved collisions in the entire city over the years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then, at 7:30 a.m. on January 21, 2025, at a marked crosswalk on a street just like ours in North Lethbridge, a motorist struck three children. It happened at another “accidental highway,” where thousands of cars speed through residential neighbourhoods every day. Fourteen-year-old Marcus, seven-year-old Juliana and five-year-old Joey Bucud—children of Filipino-Canadian immigrants—were holding hands as they crossed to go to school. Witnesses say the driver stopped but was in shock and unable to help. The children were airlifted to Calgary for emergency treatment and surgery, and at the time of writing are slowly recovering.

Lethbridge police have confirmed that our provincial government now bans the use of photo radar at the intersection where a driver ran over the three Bucud children. The intersection is near a school but not in a school zone, very much like our intersection.

The local community responded with love for the family and anger for the driver. Social media quickly blew up with calls for prison time for the driver. For not watching where she was going. For being a bad driver. For being a bad person.

I’d like to tell that driver something different.

I’d tell her how angry I was at the man who hit Jack. And then I’d tell her what I’ve learned since. That the man who killed Jack was no different than 74 per cent of drivers on our street or in our city. That the speed limit the City refuses to lower, or even enforce, creates a situation where drivers can’t see anything or anyone until it’s too late. That she’s probably not such a bad driver or a bad person and that she most certainly doesn’t belong in jail. That our government and local politicians and police failed her as much as they failed the Bucud family and mine.

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by Kate Beaton,
University of Alberta Press, 2025

“I wanted, so badly, to be an artist from a very young age,” writes Cape Breton-based author Kate Beaton. “But I’m from a have-not place.” Beaton is the author of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands—a best-selling graphic memoir that won CBC’s Canada Reads. Her new book—the text of the Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture she gave at the U of A—is a poignant and funny exploration of class and art. Growing up working-class, she writes, you’re always aware of “the money you don’t have, and possibly never will.” But “I am here today with a career as an artist, as a cartoonist, a writer, the whole nine yards, because I am the beneficiary of a long history of a community that values art. And that is a working-class legacy also,” she writes. “Art for each other, art for shared history, for storytelling, for pleasure, art through hard times, art because it has value.”

by E.A.J. Gibbs,
Self-published, 2023

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Liz Gibbs, a registered nurse with 45 years experience, was assigned to be a screener at the entrance to a Calgary hospital. This self-published book is her journal from 2020 to 2022. It’s raw, but it is an invaluable record—not least of the increasingly weird assertions used by anti-vaxxers to try to enter the hospital without following protocols. “The extreme right will threaten our democracy so long as there are gullible people, easily led to believe in conspiracy theories, lies and nonsense about vaccines or any other issue,” she writes near the end, musing on Camus’s The Plague. “We must be on our guard.”

by Scott Charlton Paul,
Self-published, 2024

“I’ve lost more than I gained during this messed-up pandemic. I’d like to imagine something positive coming out of it.” Digger lost his construction job after deciding not to get vaccinated during COVID-19. Now, to fulfill his mother’s dying wish, he drives from Lethbridge to Ottawa to deliver a letter to a sister he never knew existed, Sarah. It’s a complicated reunion—Digger’s journey coincides with the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers driving east to shut down the capital, and in Ottawa Sarah recently lost her husband after a preventable COVID-19 outbreak in a long-term care home. The debut novel by Lethbridge author Scott Charlton Paul, The Sunbeam Room makes space to put down the lingering anger and sorrow of the pandemic and to pursue new connections in whatever unusual shape they take.

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by Fran Kimmel
ECW PRESS
2025/$24.95/288 pp.

A book titled Cattail Lane might be expected to start slowly, meditatively. Birdsong and swaying rushes. Not so with this Cattail Lane, by Fran Kimmel, which bursts into action with the surprise arrival of an unknown teenage son into the stagnant life of an absentee deadbeat dad. We are in a small town, probably in central Alberta. Other than that, it takes a minute for the reader to get oriented, deftly paralleling the confusion and abruptness the character experiences.

Once we settle in with our main characters—Nick, the mystery dad, Billy, the son, and Evie, Billy’s grandmother, who orchestrated the whole thing but due to advancing dementia can no longer explain herself—we are able to proceed with what turns out to be a fairly familiar plot structure.

Evie has a secret: she knows Nick has a son (conceived during a teenaged one-night stand with her daughter), whom she raised after her daughter died and who she put in Nick’s unknowing hands once her dementia started to take over.

At Evie’s long-term care facility, Prairie View Manor, we meet Nick’s potential love interest, Sarah. At a dingy bar we also meet Candace, the love interest from Nick’s old and disappointing life. Through these two women we get to know his past and his future. While the author keeps us from Candace’s point of view, we do get a shifting point of view between Nick, Sarah and Billy. We get a glimpse at Evie’s perspective in one of Nick’s later recollections, but we are left wanting either a flashback or a small chapter from her point of view. This may be the author reminding us of what is lost with dementia, but it is also within the power of the novel to bring her back. I would have loved a moment with just Evie.

Ultimately Cattail Lane becomes a rather straight shot to a lesson about the importance and meaning of family and community, most movingly told through the story of Billy and Evie and their life before Nick. Eventually they come together to overcome the limitations of Evie’s disease and paint a mural at Prairie View Manor based on a photo Nick took.

While some subplots crowd out the more effective parts of the story, all in all this is a good summer read. Cattail Lane would be a perfect companion to an afternoon in a hammock, perhaps lakeside while listening to birdsong and swaying rushes. Kimmel shows an almost equal care between the characters and landscape and creates a warm and welcoming world for the reader—one that does stick pretty closely to unsurprising plot lines but pleasingly veers away from a clean ending, which adds depth to the characters. The story closes with a satisfying sense of beginning rather than ending.

Megan Clark is a writer and librarian from Lethbridge.

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Plastics are everywhere. Microplastics—tiny particles of plastic less than five millimetres long—have been found near the top of Mount Everest. A deep-sea submersible descended to the deepest point in the oceans, in the Mariana Trench, and found a plastic bag. Scientists found phthalates—chemicals used to increase the flexibility of some plastics—embedded in the skin of ants in remote parts of the Amazon rainforest. In Antarctica, an icy, unpopulated continent, 97 per cent of birds were found to have ingested microplastics—primarily common plastics such as polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene. Microplastics were similarly found in the blood of 77 per cent of people tested by scientists in the Netherlands. So, it would be no surprise to find such particles in the North Saskatchewan River.

But getting a clean sample wasn’t easy. To avoid polluting 1,500-litre samples of river water, the researchers designed and built a pump out of stainless steel, with no plastic at all. Then they worried about other things that contain and shed tiny bits of plastic, such as their clothes and lifejackets. “When we started sampling,” said Bryksa, “we would have to stand downriver [from the pump] because that lifejacket is contaminating the sample.” Studying plastic pollution would be easier, they joked, if their lifejackets were made of concrete.

Left: In August 1955 a LIFE magazine article ran with the then-celebratory but now vaguely sinister title “Throwaway Living.”
Right: Kwabena Akese, Accra, Ghana, 2020. In Canada only 9–12 per cent of plastics are recycled. Most of the rest goes to landfills.

Unless you were born before 1907, when the first synthetic plastic was invented, everyone alive today has been born and raised in the age of plastic. Forget the generational divides—Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha—we’re all part of the same era, an age marked by the increasing abundance of often useful and convenient plastic stuff and the growing amount of plastic waste found everywhere on earth.

The scale of plastic production today is mind-boggling. In 1950 all countries around the globe together produced 1.5 million tonnes of the stuff. In 2025, globally, over 500 million tonnes of new “virgin” plastics are now created every year. Much of it is disposable—50 per cent of virgin plastic is turned into single-use items meant to be thrown away—and little of it is recycled. In Canada, depending on who’s making the calculations, only 9 to 12 per cent of plastics are recycled. Of the rest, the vast majority of the over three million tonnes a year that’s tossed out goes to landfills. Some 4 per cent is burned in incinerators and 1 per cent of plastic in Canada is lost into the environment as litter.

Figuring out how to keep the good things about plastic while limiting the downsides is one of the great conundrums of our time. In Alberta a variety of organizations think they have a solution to that problem. These groups range from the government of Alberta to recycling and chemical industry associations to NAIT polytechnic—where the sampling for microplastics study is part of a 10-year, $10-million program called Plastics Research in Action (PRIA). The NAIT program—funded by energy company Inter Pipeline—began in 2020, according to informational material, “with a single focus: finding ways for society to reuse and recycle plastic waste as valuable commodities. In short, PRIA is on a mission to build a sustainable circular economy.” The Alberta government has a similar goal in its “Natural Gas Vision and Strategy,” released in 2020, promoting a “plastics circular economy,” which they define as “when the full value of a plastic product is used across multiple lifecycles, not just used once and then discarded.”

Alberta’s plan is to reduce plastic waste while growing the plastics industry. “The future is bright, and it is circular,” said Leduc-Beaumont MLA Brandon Lunty (UCP) at the start of the third annual Alberta Circular Plastics Day at NAIT in March 2025. It sounds laudable. But you might ask: to what extent is a plastics circular economy for real?

Undeniably plastic has benefits. “This looks promising,” wrote Leo Baekeland, with prophetic understatement in his laboratory notebook after inventing the first synthetic plastic in 1907. His product—Bakelite—could be heated and moulded into various shapes such as radios, telephones, toys and other mass-produced goods. Its inventor made a fortune. But Bakelite had flaws. Made from chemical compounds teased from wood alcohol and coal tar, it was brittle and couldn’t absorb bright colours. New varieties of plastics were soon invented, and today 99 per cent of plastics are derived from oil and gas, including hydrocarbons such as ethane and propane.

The plan for our “circular economy” is to reduce plastic waste while growing the plastics industry.

In simple terms, “plastic”—from the Greek plastikos, meaning mouldable—is a synthetic polymer. A polymer is a chain of molecules—hence the “poly” (“many”) in long tongue-tripping names such as polyethylene and polypropylene. Plastics can be hard or flexible, depending on chemical structure and additives. But in its various forms, plastic is lightweight, durable and insoluble. It’s also relatively cheap to make in large volumes.

That’s handy for all kinds of products. Bottles, bags and clingwrap, for instance, are made from polyethylene. So too is the most common type of polyester. Coffee pods, straws and microwavable dishes are made from polypropylene. Cutlery and take-out cup lids can be made of polystyrene. Most vinyl siding on houses is polyvinyl chloride. The list of products that contain plastic today is almost endless. Bike helmets. Cell phones. Seatbelts, airbags and dashboards in automobiles. Medical equipment is now mostly made of plastic, not least because it’s hypoallergenic and it’s easier—think syringes—to ensure the sterility of a single-use product in a hospital.

Proponents of plastic can be extravagant in their praise. “In many instances, plastics are the solution to the climate change problem,” said Bob Masterson, president and CEO of Chemistry Industry Association Canada, to a committee of MPs in 2019. “That includes lightweight, high-strength plastic composites in the automotive sector, improved insulation in the building sector, enormous quantities of plastic resins that are vital to the production of renewable energy from wind turbines and solar panels, as well as the very important role of plastic packaging in reducing food waste.” The shelf life of zucchini, the MPs were told—with a helpful info sheet from the Flexible Packaging Association—is extended from one day to five days when stored in plastic packaging. Ground beef is extended from three days to 20. Grapes allegedly remain edible for 70 days instead of seven.

Plastics also benefit the economy. In 2020 Alberta’s petrochemical sector was valued at $12-billion. That’s but a portion of the $35-billion the sector generates in Canada as a whole and a tiny sliver of the US$712-billion global plastics market. Alberta has vast supplies of oil and gas—including ethane and propane—and global demand for plastics is growing. According to the International Energy Agency, “petrochemicals are set to account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand to 2030, and nearly half the growth to 2050.” Given this economic projection, the provincial government wants to produce more plastic in Alberta. Goal number one in the “Natural Gas Vision and Strategy,” for instance, is “for Alberta to become a global top 10 producer of petrochemicals” and “to grow this sector by more than $30-billion by 2030.”

Government subsidies, under both the NDP and the UCP, have boosted the sector toward that goal. In 2019 the federal Liberal government gave $49-million to Inter Pipeline to both “invest in efforts to reduce plastic waste” and to build a polypropylene plant—the first in Canada—just northeast of Edmonton. In 2021 the province, through the Alberta Petrochemical Incentive Program (APIP), granted $408-million to Inter Pipeline to help build the Heartland Petrochemical Complex. Completed in 2023, that $4.3-billion plant now turns Alberta propane into 525,000 tonnes of pea-sized plastic pellets a year—mostly for export to the US.

Similarly, the APIP is granting about $1.8-billion to Dow Chemical’s Path2Zero project near Fort Saskatchewan. Construction began in 2024 on the plant, which will turn ethane into plastic polyethylene pellets for export, primarily to Asia. It’s the first such facility to be considered “net zero,” in part because it will burn hydrogen and bury CO₂ nearby—reducing emissions lower than if it were built without those elements. The federal government is giving the “green plastic” project $400-million in investment tax credits. In late November 2023 premier Danielle Smith and then-federal finance minister Chrystia Freeland stood together in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland to announce that the $11.6-billion project had official approval to be built. “This project is the embodiment of the future of Canada,” said Freeland, “which is we have a growing economy, we have more great-paying jobs, and at the same time we’re reducing pollution.”

To date, the history of dealing with plastic waste has largely been a tale of failure. The latest flop was in December 2024 when about 175 UN countries held talks in South Korea to establish a legally binding global treaty to cut plastic pollution. It ended without an agreement.

It’s not as if the stakes were unknown. Plastic doesn’t dissolve. That’s great for storing water in bottles, for instance, but not ideal if you factor in that plastic bottles take somewhere between 400 and 1,000 years to fully break down. Some one million plastic bottles are bought every minute on earth. Add in other kinds of plastic, and it’s estimated that a truckload of insoluble plastic escapes into the environment every minute—much of it into the ocean, most famously in the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” which includes 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic floating in an ocean area twice the size of Texas. But plastic also breaks down locally into minuscule pieces. “It is widely agreed upon that smaller particles can enter the bloodstream and organs more easily than bigger particles,” says a 2022 article in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Letters.

The potential health risks are reason for caution. “Plastics are made out of the combination of thousands of chemicals,” said Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, the lead author of a research article on plastic pollution released prior to the treaty talks in Korea. “Many of them, such as endocrine disruptors and forever chemicals, pose toxicity and harm to ecosystems and human health.” That alarm was echoed in an Environment and Climate Change Canada news release, also just before the talks: “The scale of this problem has reached a boiling point that requires urgent action,” said the feds, “with plastic pollution projected to grow by 2.5 times by 2040.”

In Canada the urgency around plastic waste had grown since January 1, 2018, when China stopped importing almost all used plastics for recycling. Previously Canada had exported most recyclable plastic—including what’s thrown in blue bins—to China and other Asian countries. The cost of dealing with all that waste hit fast. In 2019 the City of Calgary, for instance, spent $330,000 to store 2,000 tonnes of plastic clamshells, hoping to find a way to recycle them, then eventually dumped them—about 92 semi-trailer loads—into the landfill.

Alberta and the federal government soon fought over how to deal with plastic waste. Both sides, curiously, drew inspiration from the same document. That 2019 report by Deloitte, which the feds had commissioned, pointed out that in Canada we overwhelmingly produce, buy and use virgin plastics that are thrown away with little recycling. But plastic waste, said Deloitte, is “a lost opportunity.” If Canada recycled 90 per cent of plastics—moving from a “linear” to a “zero plastic waste” economy—the benefits could include thousands of new jobs and lower greenhouse gas emissions. It wouldn’t be easy—under the status quo only 25 per cent of discarded plastic is collected for recycling. Most plastic packaging, textiles, auto parts and electrical and electronic equipment end up as waste. But with better waste collection, bigger recycling plants, new incentives and innovation, the ambitious promise could be realized. Alberta and the feds agreed on the gist of all that. But on one point they sharply diverged.

In 2019 an all-party committee of MPs, convened after the Deloitte report, recommended “that the federal government commit to banning single-use plastic products—such as straws, bags, cutlery, cups, cigarette filters and polystyrene packaging.” The feds subsequently banned some of those single-use items such as plastic straws and plastic grocery bags. In response, a consortium of plastics companies, including Dow Chemical and Calgary’s Nova Chemicals, sued the feds. Alberta was an intervener in the case in support of the petrochemical companies. In 2023 the Federal Court of Canada ruled that the federal government’s labelling of some plastics as a “toxic substance” was jurisdictional overreach. The feds appealed, and the Single-Use Plastics Prohibition Regulations remain in force while the appeal is in court.

Constitutional matters aside, the fight comes down to one question: Should there be limits on plastic production The UCP government says no. A ban on plastics would be a “serious threat” to the petrochemical industry, said then-premier Jason Kenney in 2022. Environment minister Rebecca Schulz added to that dissent in April 2024. “The federal government would be better served by taking a page out of Alberta’s plan, which diverts plastics from landfills and turns used plastics into new products,” she said. “This is the promise of Alberta’s plan to create a plastics circular economy, a modern miracle in which, through chemistry, we can have all of life’s conveniences and necessities while protecting our environment and reducing plastic waste.”

The third annual Alberta Circular Plastics Day—organized by the Alberta Plastics Recycling Association (APRA)—was held in March 2025 in the sprawling and light-filled Productivity and Innovation Centre at NAIT. Among the attendees—described by Tammy Schwass, the executive director of APRA, as “about 200 people from across the plastics value chain in the province”—were representatives from Dow, Nova and Inter Pipeline, reps from recycling companies, reps from companies selling new products made with recycled plastic, instructors from NAIT, and groups such as the Recycling Council of Alberta, which in 2024 officially switched their mandate from “supporting the recycling value chain” to “advancing the circular economy.”

“Our government sees plastics as an opportunity, not a problem,” said MLA Brandon Lunty, at the start of the conference. “We see this as a waste management issue, not a plastics issue.” He admitted he was “a circular plastics newbie” and sent greetings from minister Schulz, who was not able to attend. The UCP government, he read from prepared notes, “is working with the recycling industry, plastics manufacturers and Albertans to eliminate the plastics we don’t need, innovate to ensure the plastics we do need are either reusable, recyclable or compostable, and circulate the plastic items we use to keep them in the economy and out of the environment.”

Notably, he touted Alberta’s new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations, which came into force on November 30, 2022, and were “fully implemented” on April 1, 2025. These are intended to shift the “burden of collecting, sorting, processing and recycling waste” away from municipalities and onto the producers of plastic packaging. A central body, Alberta Recycling Management Authority, will oversee the system, similarly to new EPR systems in Ontario and Quebec. The idea is that companies which produce plastic pollution will pay for or find ways to reduce that pollution.

Polyvinyl chloride releases harmful chemicals when melted. Polystyrene turns into a “weird powdery mix.”

“We know this transformation to a circular economy will take time,” said Lunty. How much time is unclear. But challenges were on display at the conference—not least that some plastics are very hard to recycle. Take, for example, a potato chip bag. “That chip bag might have 12 layers of foil and different kinds of plastic in it,” said Mark Sabourin at an exhibition booth for EFS-plastics, a company opening a new recycling plant in Lethbridge in July 2025. Each kind of plastic in those layers has a different melt temperature. That means if you heat the bag at just one temperature, the layers glom together into a piece of junk. “Recycling has to be like for like,” said Sabourin. Plastic products are stamped with numbers 1–7. EFS will specialize in recycling numbers 1, 2 and 5—basically polyethylene and polypropylene—turning those kinds of used plastics back into pellets to ship to producers that want such recycled material.

Even “like for like” recycling isn’t straightforward, however. Recycled plastic is not the same as virgin plastic. At the Nova Chemicals booth, bright-white virgin polyethylene pellets were displayed beside darker-coloured recycled pellets. Each time a plastic is “warmed up again to melt into a pellet,” said Robert Clare, the Nova rep, “you get more degradation.” He showed clear plastic bags made of virgin polyethylene beside bags made with “30 per cent recycled” plastic. The bags with recycled plastic had visible speckles. “It’s still fit for purpose,” he said. “You can fill it with liquid or solids and it would be hermetically sealed.” But for commercial purposes it’s not up to snuff. A used plastic can be turned back into a pellet up to 10 times, he claims, but each time it’s made into a new product it must be blended with virgin plastic to “boost the performance,” and chemical additives are needed to mask imperfections.

Other plastics pose more difficult challenges. Polyvinyl chloride releases harmful chemicals when it’s melted down. Polystyrene, said Sabourin, “turns into this weird powdery mixture that floats everywhere.” Most recyclers don’t want it.

Those problems are among the reasons why most plastics end up in the landfill. Finding ways to keep plastics out of the dump has been a primary focus of research initiatives at NAIT, along with funding for pilot projects and start-up companies from both government and the private sector. Dow Chemical, for instance, paved a parking lot at the new Path2Zero project with asphalt that included some 2.2 million plastic bags worth of used polyethylene. NAIT and Heartland Polymers (Inter Pipeline) collaborated to turn plastic polypropylene waste into a wax that they mixed into asphalt used to pave roads at four test sites, including on the Alexander First Nation. Alberta Innovates—which funds research projects “aligned with Government of Alberta priorities”—gave out numerous grants, including $250,000 to both PolyCo (a start-up that also partnered with NAIT), which makes luxury floor tiles from recyclable polypropylene, and to Resolve Plastics Recycling, which turns mixed plastics into cinder blocks that can be used to build everything from garden sheds to roadway crash barriers. Merlin Plastics, the biggest Alberta-based recycling company, got $2-million from Emissions Reduction Alberta (which doles out money from the government’s TIER fund) to research a “commercially viable” method for recycling used food-grade clamshells back into new food-grade clamshells. “The circular economy is in its infancy in the province,” said Schwass, praising all that’s been accomplished so far. “It’s only been about five years since we started talking about it here.”

Jeremiah Bryksa looking for plastic in the North Saskatchewan River. He’d like to study microplastics in food packaging next.

By designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems,” says a quote from the UK-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation (which since 2010 has been acknowledged as the leading proponent of the circular economy concept), “we can reinvent everything.” It’s an ambitious idea. One that in Alberta still appears far off in the future.

Jennifer Koole, a conference attendee and the executive director of the Recycling Council of Alberta, told me in an interview that “there is a way to measure the circularity of an entity, whether that’s a country or a province. We haven’t measured it for Alberta,” she said, “but Canada’s circularity level is 6.1 per cent. That means a small percentage of materials [plastic or otherwise] are being recycled or recovered and there’s a lot of opportunity to do more.”

A few presenters who spoke at Alberta Circular Plastics Day—via Zoom—expressed hope that strict regulations could still be brought in to address plastic waste in the environment. Ryan Parmenter, from Environment and Climate Change Canada, told attendees that negotiators for a global treaty on plastic pollution will meet again in Switzerland in August 2025. This time, he said, “I think we’ll be able to move forward.” The stakes were highlighted by Roxana Sühring of Toronto Metropolitan University. “Plastics are complex chemical mixtures that are released into the environment throughout a product’s life cycle,” she said, explaining a study in which she traced microplastics back to their source products by analyzing chemical additives in various plastics. Microplastic regulation is needed, she said, but she wonders how it would be enforced.

Near the end of the day I talked with Jeremiah Bryksa. His microplastics sampling project was wrapping up in April 2025 and he was working on having the results of the study peer-reviewed and published in a journal. “We found plastics everywhere” in the North Saskatchewan River, he said. “They’re really low concentrations.” This surprised him. “I thought I would see way more plastic,” he said. “The river’s pretty clean.”

I asked how plastics are getting into our bodies, given that most people apparently have microplastics in their bloodstream. “The biggest exposure route is just through being indoors,” he said. “Most microplastics come from inhalation.”

At NAIT, he said, “our work is industry-driven, so I don’t get to choose what I work on.” But if he could choose, he said, “I would love to do more microplastic work. They come from plastic bottles. All food is packaged in plastic.” Studying microplastics in food packaging “would be a really interesting space to go to next.”

Tadzio Richards is a National Magazine Award winner and the associate editor at Alberta Views.

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