In speaking with community organizations, CBC News found that Canada's drug crisis is affecting a largely unchecked population of users – newcomers – and we don't even know how severe the issue is. Now, experts are calling not only for better data collection, but also more attention to the realities that lead newcomers to use drugs, and culturally-specific care that could help them escape it.

Book publishers and industry watchers are taking note of the romantasy subgenre’s enormous popularity among young female readers — author Sarah J. Maas alone has sold 40 million copies — and the power of #BookTok to elevate both its well-known, traditionally published writers, and self-published indie authors alike.

After an extremely dry winter, it’s expected to be another busy wildfire season in Alberta. CBC’s Dennis Kovtun takes a look at how the County of Grande Prairie is preparing to battle the blazes.

Beer industry groups are calling for a last-minute reduction to the federal beer tax again this year, saying brewers and consumers continue to struggle with costs.

A rookie legislature member for Alberta's NDP is making a bid for the party's top job, promising a campaign focused on climate change and drought.

The earliest origins of some of the churches in Lamont County stretch back to 1886 as a way for settlers to establish a sense of community, according to a Lamont County staff member.

Cris Derksen, originally from Tallcree First Nation, located in northern Alberta, is a Juno-nominated cellist and composer who will be performing a musical piece at Carnegie Hall in New York.

The Alberta government is making changes to grant funding given to daycares to help them weather the transition to a $10-a-day child-care system. 

The Posikeras were inspired to take a leap of faith and start a business of their own after introducing their friends to their colourful twist on the traditional perogy.

A Calgary man who participated in a group attack on an Uber driver who was stabbed 39 times was handed a 15-year sentence on Friday. 

The four people pictured above represent a typical day’s death toll from opioid poisonings in Alberta last year, the deadliest on record for the province.

The two cases were the first to be examined under Project Match, a joint effort launched last year between Edmonton police, the RCMP and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to review historical unidentified human remains investigations.

Homeowners and solar companies say delays from a major electricity distributor are hampering the growth of solar in a large part of Alberta.

An organization that has been pushing the Alberta government to proclaim the creation of professional college for counselling therapists now has the support of the Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations and the Sovereign Nations of Treaty Eight. 

Several of the five municipalities that have voted to leave Edmonton Global say they remain committed to regional economic development — but will do so through other organizations.

So, what are the other economic development organizations that serve the Edmonton region? How does their work differ from one another? What are their results? And what do municipalities say about them? Taproot endeavoured to take a regional look to answer those questions.

In December, Strathcona County signalled its intent to leave Edmonton Global (though the process takes two years). Mayor Rod Frank and council cited budgetary restrictions for the decision. Edmonton Global's 14 members are responsible for $5 million in fees per year. Member contributions are determined by population and tax base. Soon after Strathcona County's decision made news, Sturgeon County, Parkland County, Devon, and The City of Fort Saskatchewan followed suit.

Edmonton Global is currently on a listening tour to find ways to improve the situation. It involves regularly scheduled appearances before member councils, as well as hiring two consultants, and a self-organized subcommittee of members to improve relations.

Some say cooperating as a region is just inherently tough. In November, Robert W. Murray and Chris Steele, both with financial ties to Edmonton Global, wrote in a Postmedia op-ed that the concept is proven but will take time. "In Alberta, regional collaboration remains an idea still in its infancy," they wrote. In December, Simon Boersma, Morinville mayor and shareholder chair for Edmonton Global, told CBC much the same thing. "Any time that we look at organizations that encompass more than two or three people, it's like living in a family trying to figure out how that is going to affect you," Boersma said.

Frank, meanwhile, said Strathcona County would continue its regional development work through the Edmonton Metropolitan Region Board, Edmonton International Airport, the Edmonton Region Hydrogen HUB, and Alberta's Industrial Heartland Association. He also said the county may reconsider its exit from Edmonton Global before the 2025 deadline.

A central idea behind regional economic development organizations is about savings. While each municipality can work on its own economic development, participating in collective organizations that promote the overall region means smaller municipalities have a larger reach with fewer dollars than they otherwise would.

Edmonton Global's mandate is to attract foreign investment into the region. Though other regional development organizations work to build collective economic opportunity, none focus primarily on international companies.

To map Edmonton's regional development landscape, Taproot reached out to the Heartland Association, the Edmonton Regional Innovation Network, the EMRB, and the HUB, as well as several municipalities. Most responded to questions, though some declined to respond and others did not answer all inquiries by press time.

Here are the main economic development organizations serving the Edmonton region:

Alberta's Industrial Heartland Association

Founded: 1999

HQ: Fort Saskatchewan

Members: City of Fort Saskatchewan, Lamont County, Strathcona County, Sturgeon County, and Edmonton. Associate members, who do not have voting rights in the organization, include the towns of Bruderheim, Gibbons, and Redwater.

Dues: $212,000 from Edmonton annually since 2010; "approximately" $200,000 from Lamont County in 2023. (Municipalities provided these figures. The association did not disclose any financial information.)

Goal: To drive investment for a 582 square kilometre region comprising the members listed above, particularly for industrial petrochemical and energy companies.

Numbers: The association has generated more than $45 billion in existing capital investment, executive director Mark Plamondon told Taproot in an email. The association's website says more than 40 companies are based in the Heartland. They are responsible for 30,000 direct and indirect jobs, according to an association video.

One more thing: The association uses some of its member dues to fund the Edmonton Region Hydrogen HUB.

Edmonton Regional Innovation Network

Founded: 2006 in its original format; 2019 in its new, "much different" format, manager Dani Moffatt told Taproot via email.

HQ: Edmonton

Members: A mix of municipalities, post-secondary institutions, investors, and small businesses. The organization's geographical focus is the Edmonton region, plus Athabasca.

Dues: None.

Goal: To grow the innovation economy, primarily through funding opportunities for service providers, plus resource navigation for other organizations supporting innovation.

Numbers: The organization cites a 20% monthly recurring revenue increase for Swift Charge, after completing its Experts on Demand program, as an example of results.

One more thing: ERIN is funded by Alberta Innovates.

Edmonton Metropolitan Region Board

Founded: 2008 as the Capital Region Board, comprising 23 municipalities; 2017 as the EMRB, with 13 municipalities.

HQ: Edmonton

Members: Beaumont, Devon, Edmonton, Fort Saskatchewan, City of Leduc, Leduc County, Morinville, Parkland County, St. Albert, Spruce Grove, Stony Plain, Strathcona County, and Sturgeon County.

Dues: Approximately $1.9 million annually, split between members based on a cost-sharing formula.

Goal: To create responsible and sustainable regional growth, as guided by a plan called Re-imagine. Plan. Build.

Numbers: The EMRB cites $13 million in annual savings on construction and maintenance, at least $6.5 million in savings from consolidating inter-municipal development plan reviews, $460 million in CO2 reductions through integrated land-use planning, and $94 million in extra GDP via the Integrated Regional Transportation Master Plan.

One more thing: Membership isn't voluntary but is instead required by the provincial government. But there is precedent for municipalities to exit (as Sturgeon County once considered doing) in the example of Wheatland County's successful appeal to depart the Calgary Metropolitan Region Board.

Edmonton Region Hydrogen HUB

Founded: 2021

HQ: None.

Members: Sturgeon County, Strathcona County, the City of Fort Saskatchewan, Lamont County, and Edmonton, plus non-municipal stakeholders.

Dues: $200,000 split between each member municipality via their contributions to Alberta's Industrial Heartland Association. Plus, $150,000 per year from the province and $200,000 per year from the federal government.

Goal: To grow the region's hydrogen economy and ensure long-term competitiveness "as the world shifts towards a low-carbon future," a spokesperson told Taproot in an email.

Numbers: The organization cites 25 projects related to the production, distribution, and end use of hydrogen underway, 13 "major" reports published, and more than 4,000 stakeholders engaged.

One more thing: The HUB launched a five-year, 5,000 hydrogen-vehicle challenge in 2023 alongside collaborators including Edmonton Global.

Alberta Health Services (AHS) is cancelling some job interviews and making it more bureaucratic to hire health-care workers, just as the province's nurses union proposed a 25-per cent wage increase.

Leonard Carl McGlynn passed away peacefully, surrounded by his family, at the Pincher Creek hospital on Feb. 6, 2024, at the age of 85.

He is survived by his children: Brent (Laura) McGlynn, Gloria (Brent) Barbero, Sheila (Kent) Goudreau, Coralee (Shawn) Anderson; grandchildren: Darla (Wade), Ryan, Laressa (Daniel), Megan (Aaron), Bradley, Shaun (Kyra), Alyssa (Derek), Blair (Kara), Tyson (Taylor), Levi (Sydney), Lewis; and great-grandchildren: Walker, Theo, Tripp and Kesler.

Leonard is also survived by his sister Lucille (Len) Hagel, brothers Fred (Dianne) McGlynn and Dallas (Barb) McGlynn, sister-in-law Jean Parker,  as well as numerous nieces and nephews. Leonard also had many special friends and neighbours that he held close to his heart.

He was predeceased by his loving wife of 55 years, Eileen McGlynn, and by parents Henry and Bernadette McGlynn.

As per Leonard’s wishes, a celebration of life will be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to Heritage Acres.

The post Leonard McGlynn Obituary | July 20, 1938 – Feb. 6, 2024 appeared first on Shootin' the Breeze.

Calgary dog attack victim Betty Ann Williams, 86, was remembered by family members as a strong, brave woman who beat cancer twice. 

Recently, members of Civic Service Union (CSU) 52 voted 91-per cent in favour of a strike mandate, meaning about 5,000 City of Edmonton workers could be off the job. CBC Edmonton’s Nancy Carlson explains how a work stoppage could affect city services you use every day.

Fossils tell the story of an aquatic snake that was longer than a school bus and weighed over 1,000 kilograms. And an Edmonton paleontologist recently made a new discovery to broaden the snake’s story and our understanding of the ecosystem that was Titanoboa’s home. CBC’s Mark Connolly spoke with University of Alberta professor Michael Caldwell to get the slippery scoop.

Meet Donna Coombs-Montrose, one of the contributors to a project documenting the history of Jasper Place in west Edmonton.

Suncor reports company's safest year ever in 2023 in major turnaround for Calgary-based oilsands giant.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith found themselves at loggerheads again Wednesday after he suggested that at least some in the oil and gas industry have prioritized profits over securing a long-term future for its workers.

Manitoba's Kate Cameron scored one in the 10th end for a crucial 5-4 win over Nova Scotia's Heather Smith in Thursday's opening draw at the Canadian women's curling championship.

Calgary-based oil company Enerplus will be purchased by Chord Energy, a Texas-based oil and gas company, in a stock and cash deal worth $3.8B US.

Whether it's N.E., N.W., S.W. or S.E., Calgarians seem to have a special attachment to these abbreviations.

City of Edmonton economist says Edmonton is outpacing Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary for population growth among people 15 and older.

A plebiscite will be held in Westlock, Alta., Thursday over a proposed neutrality bylaw that would ban certain flags and crosswalks from being displayed on public property, including the town’s only rainbow crosswalk.

A Leduc pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to help residents keep plastic out of organics bins has been extended to the end of 2024 after the city saw a significant reduction in contamination.

Back in June 2023, when Leduc introduced the Organics AI program, roughly 20% of the organics carts its crews collected were contaminated, usually with plastics. This created a problem as processing facilities won't accept organics over a contamination threshold.

Leduc wanted residents to sort their waste properly and brought in AI to help shift behaviours.

"When the collection truck goes to a household and picks up the cart, a photo is taken of all the items that fall out, and the AI tech can identify whatever contaminations we set," said Michael Hancharyk, environmental manager with Leduc.

If the AI notices a contaminant (Leduc is mainly targeting plastic film for its program), a human looks and confirms the AI is right. There is a GPS chip in each bin that matches it with the house's address. Then, the city sends an educational mailer to the house with a photo of their contaminant.

Hancharyk said the mailer has tips for what should and shouldn't go into the cart. "Then hopefully, the resident thereafter learns from their mistake and can compost better," he said. The city also recommends residents download an app to learn more about waste sorting.

A recent waste audit found that since the program has been active the contamination rate for organics carts dropped to less than 10%. Hancharyk said the city sent out 900 mailers in the first eight months of the program and that each month it sends out fewer of them — though that may be a seasonal trend, as there are no lawn clippings in the last few months of the year and therefore fewer compost bins have been put out for collection.

There have been some bumps along the way, too. "We've seen 13 houses that are continually receiving mailers," Hancharyk said. "We're now moving to a formal letter to these 13 households, but 13 households out of 10,000 houses is really low, less than 1%."

Regina-based Prairie Robotics is running the tech side of the project. Prairie Robotics CEO Sam Dietrich said the company originally created AI technology to help with more accurate reporting at landfills in Saskatchewan.

But Dietrich said cities had more interest in installing the cameras on the waste trucks themselves. "If you look at other utilities today, whether that's water, electricity, or home heating, every single month you're getting feedback on how much you're using, and you can use that information to change your behaviour," Dietrich said. "But waste is the only one where no city really is actively messaging their residents on this issue … Our goal is to be that piece of feedback."

More than 20 cities in North America now use the company's technology. "The AI ideas we use are no different than how computer vision works for self-driving cars: you train an AI to look for certain objects, and as you build up a dataset of those objects, you're able to identify it in new images that you haven't seen before," Dietrich said.

The tech can blur out sensitive information, like letters on a piece of mail or a prescription bottle.

Leduc has extended the pilot project to the end of 2024, and Hancharyk said he believes it will become permanent if the success continues. "We're seeing a lot of attention from the region, so other communities might adopt it based on the success in Leduc," Hancharyk said.

Prairie Robotics will be partnering with more Alberta cities starting this summer, Dietrich said.

Here are opportunities to help inform city planning about elections, the Northeast River Valley Park, and urban farming.

• Voter Engagement Initiative — The city wants to understand voter experiences in order to make municipal elections more accessible, inclusive, equitable, and ethical. Residents can ask the project team a question or take an online survey, which is available in seven languages, until Feb. 26.
• Silver Berry Street Lab (evaluation) — A Street Lab was recently installed in the Silver Berry neighbourhood, and the city wants to hear about resident experiences to help evaluate the program, make adjustments, and improve future labs. An online survey will be open until Feb. 28.
• Northeast River Valley Park Strategic Plan — The city is seeking feedback to inform the strategic plan for Edmonton's newest river valley park. The plan will include the park's vision, guiding principles, and approach to naturalization, restoration, and programming. Residents can share their ideas until Feb. 29.
• Urban Farming Survey — The city is considering a new urban farming program or process, which it says would increase sustainable food supply and activate under-utilized land and buildings. The new program would be "significantly different" from the existing community garden and boulevard beautification programs, which are small scale and prohibit the sale of grown products. Residents can complete an online survey, which will inform the framework presented to city council, until March 10.

More input opportunities

• Until Feb. 25: Mill Woods Town Centre Land Development Application
• Until Feb. 25: Hillview Neighbourhood and Alley Renewal (refine)
• Until Feb. 25: Element Park Planning (City of St. Albert)
• Until Feb. 26: Housing Strategy (City of Leduc)
• Until Feb. 29: Responsible Pet Ownership Bylaw (City of Beaumont)
• Until March 3: 76 Avenue Renewal (explore)
• Until March 10: Windsor Park Rezoning (advise)

Photo: Opened in September 2023, the Northeast River Valley Park is the largest river valley park in the city at 190 acres. (City of Edmonton)

A Goodwill store in Calgary is used to getting old donations. But recently, they had to redefine old.

On a frigid February night in Edmonton, I’m downtown with 4B Harm Reduction. The street outreach conducted by this non-profit society is time-tested—scour the city’s forgotten corners for people who need support. On any given shift, they might respond to drug poisonings, frostbite, heatstroke, hunger, fatigue-induced psychosis or the many barriers to accessing shelter. Mostly 4B aims to keep hope alive despite society’s structural neglect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The post What’s Wrong With Rehab? appeared first on Alberta Views.

Edmonton city managers say they’ve found $45 million in savings so far, which is about 75 per cent of council’s goal to find $60 million over four years. But the city also needs to find $240 million to re-allocate toward housing, climate change, public transit and core services.

Premier is shelving a promised tax cut and reining in program spending. In exchange, she's thinking big about saving in Alberta's Heritage Fund.

Alberta will trim spending and embark on an ambitious plan to grow the Heritage Savings Trust Fund by billions in an attempt to forever wean the province off resource revenue by 2050, Premier Danielle Smith told Albertans Wednesday in a televised prelude to next week's budget.

More than 4,700 vehicles were reported stolen to Edmonton police last year. They’re being taken by organized criminals who then are shipping vehicles overseas for profit. Edmonton police Deputy Chief Devin Laforce spoke to CBC’s Mark Connolly about auto theft in the city, and what can be done to prevent it.

The owner of three pit bulls involved in a fatal attack on a 86-year-old woman pleaded guilty Wednesday and agreed to have one of the dogs euthanized.

Alberta is updating its plan to improve the status of the ferruginous hawk and remove it from the endangered species list under the Alberta Wildlife Act.

During a Wednesday news conference in Edmonton, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced $175 million in funding from the federal Housing Accelerator program to fast-track more than 5,200 new housing units in Edmonton over the next three years.

A collision between a CTrain and a vehicle Wednesday during the morning rush-hour commute sent a man to hospital with severe injuries, Calgary police say.

Edmonton police are investigating the death of a security guard following a fight in a downtown parkade Tuesday morning.

Cavalry FC coach Tommy Wheeldon Jr. cast his mind back to a 1985 Hollywood movie when asked about his CPL team's preparations for Wednesday's CONCACAF Champions Cup first-leg match against Major League Soccer's Orlando City SC.

Omar Mouallem says few know that what became Stampede Wrestling held its first-ever event in Edmonton in 1948.

"It was founded as Klondike Wrestling in Edmonton," Mouallem told Taproot. "It had its first show at the Edmonton Sales Pavilion (at Edmonton Northlands). The reason that it became part of Calgary lore is that about 10 years later (co-founder) Al Oeming … sold it in order to, I believe, start the Edmonton Game Farm."

Mouallem is the director of Making Kayfabe: The Private Lives of Indie Wrestlers, which streams on CBC Gem starting Feb. 23. It's the followup to his previous film, The Lebanese Burger Mafia.

He said Edmonton's deep wrestling history and its current renaissance are part of the inspiration.

"Some of my most core memories revolve around wrestling," Mouallem said, recalling trips from his childhood home in High Prairie to Edmonton to see World Wrestling Entertainment and Stampede Wrestling matches as a child. He stopped watching during WWE's notorious Attitude Era, but came back in "recent years" when he started a family and wanted something cheap and fun to do.

It was then that he noticed that wrestling had changed for the better. "There are a lot of promotions like Love Wrestling (in Edmonton) and WrestleCore in Vancouver, and many more all over North America, that are embracing something else — this fun, inclusive, and campy form of entertainment and performance art," Mouallem said.

The WWE once owned Stampede Wrestling. Mouallem said the organization bought up many independent clubs and had a near-monopoly on the sport during its zenith. He credits American alternative outfit All Elite Wrestling with taking back market share since its founding in 2019 and catalyzing a shift in wrestling culture, including here in Edmonton.

"It's a game changer," Mouallem said. "What I think AEW has also brought to it is this more inclusive culture, because they've had openly gay and trans wrestlers. I think it has helped to bring in a new audience. And I think, maybe more importantly, it's helped inspire a new generation of wrestlers, indie wrestlers, who maybe were previously afraid of the culture or the environment that they would be stepping in if they trained and got in the ring."

Making Kayfabe is not a talking heads documentary. Instead, Mouallem is the main subject, and he trained for three months with Michael Richard Blais of the Clandestine Wrestling Society to do so. The film culminates in a Clandestine— and Love Wrestling-presented match last June at The Rec Room's South Edmonton location. Mouallem, who's also an award-winning journalist and author, transformed into "Fake Nooz" Neville Anderson, a heel who drew the passionate ire of the audience.

The match was a dream come true for a wrestling superfan — even if Mouallem picked up bruises doing it.

"I had a couple of injuries, but they were injuries that I got from making mistakes," he said. "It's really more like dance than anything else … If you learn to do it right and you understand the choreography, and you understand the collaboration and the sleight of hand tricks, it's basically theatre."

In the film, Mouallem shines the spotlight on Edmonton's indie wrestling scene and the talent that makes it vibrant. The film culminates with him in the ring with Taryn From Accounting (Taryn Kroll), TY Jackson (Ahmed Kheiri), and Blais on the Love Wrestling stage.

"I thought (Kroll) was representative of this moment that wrestling is having — a wrestling character that is an accountant whose whole gimmick is that she is a regular person," Mouallem said. "Her whole slogan is, 'There's only two things that are certain when you step in the ring with me: death and taxes.' It's great."

Kroll is actually a teacher, and this exemplifies the concept of kayfabe that's part of the film's name. In wrestling, the term describes living out a fantasy as a character without ever breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge the conceit — even though it's clearly an act of performance. Mouallem compared it to drag, and believes reality franchise RuPaul's Drag Race has helped audiences embrace the alter-ego aspect of wrestling.

Mouallem screens the film ahead of its Gem debut with a Q&A at a Love Wrestling and Clandestine event on Feb. 22.

Will "Fake Nooz" Neville be there? The answer to that would betray the kayfabe, Mouallem said.

On this day in 1920, a short-lived Edmonton airline run by a transportation magnate was preparing to take to the sky.

The Edmonton Aircraft Company was founded in early 1920, when businessman John "Jock" McNeill bought a wooden biplane. McNeill partnered with a few others — including pilot and instructor Keith Tailyour — with the plan to create a passenger airline that connected Edmonton and Calgary, and later connected to Peace River.

While the city's aviation history stretches back to the early 1900s, the Edmonton Aircraft Company was only the second aviation firm in the city. To house his fledging airline, McNeill leased a small parcel of land north of downtown and built a hanger on it. It was the first hanger on what would later become Blatchford Field.

In July 1920, Tailyour and M.R. Jennings made a successful Edmonton Aircraft Company flight to Calgary in two hours and 30 minutes. The trip marked the first passenger flight between the cities.

The Edmonton Aircraft Company wasn't McNeill's first transportation firm. Originally from Scotland, McNeill arrived in 1910 and quickly bought the Twin City Transfer Company. Specializing in moving and storing belongings for newcomers to the city, the company found significant business due to Edmonton's booming population.

McNeill soon expanded by forming Alberta's first taxi company, which still exists as Yellow Cab. He's also credited with starting Edmonton's first private ambulance company, as well as being an integral part of the city's first bus business. McNeill's home, a two-storey brick house in Norwood, was seen as a testament to his family's financial success and is recognized as a municipal historic resource.

Unfortunately, The Edmonton Aircraft Company was not as successful as McNeill's other ventures. About a year after its founding, Keith Tailyour took a job as a flight instructor at CFB Borden, where he was killed during a training exercise. Without a pilot for his airline, McNeill sold off both his plane and the hangar. After less than two years, Edmonton's second aviation company was no more.

The aviation landscape in Edmonton is much different today than in McNeill's time. Blatchford Field is no longer an airfield but is rather being developed into a residential neighbourhood. Late in 2023, the NAIT/Blatchford Market LRT station started operating well ahead of its estimated opening in 2025.

This clipping was found on Vintage Edmonton, a daily look at Edmonton's history from armchair archivist @revRecluse of @VintageEdmonton.

As council sends the proposed public spaces bylaw back to the drawing board, the city as a whole needs more patience with community-based solutions that don't require enforcement to change social disorder, advocates said on Episode 251 of Speaking Municipally.

Cheryl Whiskeyjack, executive director of Bent Arrow Traditional Healing Society, said she is already working with the city on programs that look for solutions beyond fines, like the Community Outreach Transit Team.

"The wonderful thing about that partnership is that we are also building capacity in people who work in enforcement to have a different conversation or develop different tools to work with people," Whiskeyjack said. "These strategies need time to take root and show outcomes … It takes time to develop these relationships with folks that we're meeting in these spaces, to develop trust with people that we're meeting in these spaces."

Items proposed in the bylaw included new and increased fines for behaviours like open drug use, loitering, and riding bikes on grass. On Feb. 14, council sent the proposal back to administration for changes. The episode was recorded before this decision.

Fellow guest Omar Yaqub, servant of servants for IslamicFamily, said fining unhoused people does not make less people become unhoused. Fixing long-term problems requires long-term solutions.

"We have tools that we know of work," Yaqub said. "We have partners who want to be part of the solution, engage with the city, and collaboratively work together. And together we can solve these problems. Not in a month, not in a season, but over time."

At the Feb. 14 meeting, council directed administration to create a report on alternatives to ticketing.

Hear more about the proposed bylaw, anecdotes about lived experiences of difficulty existing in spaces, and Whiskeyjack and Yaqub's work to find solutions on the Feb. 16 episode of Taproot's civic affairs podcast. You'll also hear discussion on the Katz Group's lawsuit against Boyle Street Community Services.

Photo: Churchill Square, part of the discussion on the proposed public spaces bylaw, is pictured during the Winter Shakeup in 2015. (Mack Male/Flickr)

GC Strategies, the largest contractor to work on the ArriveCan app project, is facing heightened scrutiny after the auditor general cited excessive reliance on contractors as a major factor contributing to the project's ballooning costs. Here’s what we know about the company embroiled in the ArriveCan controversy.

Fitness classes and health programs are focusing less on struggle and more on joy through movement to improve our overall well-being.

That was fun, Grandma!

Eleven-month-old Roan MacKinnon enjoys a trip down the Halton Hill with grandma Diane Bowen-Oczkowski, Monday afternoon. There were warm temperatures but still lots of snow on the ground for Family Day activities.

Photo by Dave Lueneberg

The post Shootin’ the Breeze Pincher Creek – Feb. 21, 2024 appeared first on Shootin' the Breeze.

According to Statistics Canada, workers nearing retirement are quickly outnumbering young people of an age to enter the labour market, driving up the demand for new skilled tradespeople.