With temperatures falling and lows below minus-30 degrees Celsius forecast by the middle of next week, Edmonton police and city crews continue to break up homeless encampments in the city core.
Police in black uniforms and city employees in white hazmat suits, which given the nature of the work are likely worn more for theatrical effect than practical safety reasons, dismantled the sixth camp since Dec. 29 yesterday.
But if the point of the exercise is to make unhoused residents of Edmonton go away, it’s clearly not working.
Rousted from their encampments, homeless people are often seen pitching their tents at new locations within sight of the old ones. When the police advance, the homeless retreat. When the police move on, the homeless return.* Surely pursuing a policy that gets such results is the height of absurdity!
However, it would seem this effort, strongly backed by the United Conservative Party Government, is motivated less by concerns about public safety and the welfare of the unhoused and more by the desire to look tough, generate headlines, and embarrass Edmonton’s progressive-leaning City Council with the enthusiastic assistance of the city’s UCP-friendly police chief.
Still, it was a bizarre irony the tone-deaf government of Premier Danielle Smith chose this moment to promote winter camping in Alberta!
On exactly the same social media feeds where UCP politicians are quoting local right-wing media commentators cheerleading the clearances and making inflammatory and unsubstantiated claims about what happens in homeless encampments, the government is urging other Albertans, “don’t wait until May to start camping”!
“Our government is proud to support year-round camping and outdoor recreation opportunities,” says a tweet by MLA Searle Turton, the UCP’s minister of children and family services.
“Winter camping: Go out and feel the magic!” exclaims the government’s news release on the same topic, published Tuesday and widely ignored by media.
“I encourage every Albertan to spend as much time as possible outdoors this season,” the release quotes Todd Loewen, the UCP’s minister of forests and parks, adding enthusiastically.
Just remember, though, if you want to sleep outside undisturbed during “our beautiful winters,” you’d damn well better have a $60,000 SUV and a wallet full of credit cards. As has been observed of Alberta in the 2020s many times before, you really can’t make this stuff up.
Meanwhile, that Dec. 28 letter to Edmonton Mayor Amarjeet Sohi and City Council imploring them to intervene to seek a moratorium on the rousts has now been signed by more than 3,300 people. More can sign here.
Alas, there’s not much chance Council will entertain the letter’s request to “immediately convene an emergency City Council meeting to explore the use of your powers as Council to halt the violent and disruptive decampment of hundreds of community members from the only shelter they currently have.”
Councillors have decamped to their winter break and will doubtless be trying to keep their heads as far down as possible in hopes the weather stays warm and the controversy blows over.
“These sweeps don’t ‘resolve’ anything,” said Bradley Lafortune, director of Public Interest Alberta, which drafted the letter. “Just today we saw people relocating less than one block away and within clear sight of the camp that was swept by EPS and the City at Hope Mission.”
As for the city’s revised clearance policy required by the Dec. 18 interim injunction on shutting down encampments, Mr. Lafortune said, “the ‘new’ policy is just the old policy with the most minor modification to confirm whether there is shelter capacity if the encampment exceeds 20 structures. Most encampments do not reach 20 structures and EPS and the City can divide encampments by street, sidewalk, or fence, even if they are in the same area. Essentially, there is a big, gaping loophole in this so-called modification that renders it meaningless.”
“The only way to fix the encampment strategy is to throw it out, stop the sweeps, and start from a policy development process that takes a Treaty and human rights-based approach and includes the lived experience and knowledge of Edmontonians experiencing houselessness,” Mr. Lafortune concluded.
*If this line sounds faintly familiar and readers with a nose for plagiarism smell a rat, I am paraphrasing Mao Zedong’s famous description of guerrilla warfare: “The enemy advances, we retreat. The enemy camps, we harass. The enemy tires, we attack. The enemy retreats, we pursue.” DJC
I wouldn’t doubt that Take Back Alberta is playing a role in this very callous move. It’s very contradictory and very cold hearted for the UCP to give inadequate funding to the destitute, and then hack apart their meager existence, when they have hardly any resources to help themselves. Lorne Gunter is another parrot for the UCP, and like David Staples, and other Postmedia columnists, he has a slanted view on things. He can’t be rational, and because his wife is employed by the UCP in some capacity, with some type of role that lacks any merit, he won’t criticize the UCP. In addition, whatever Lorne Gunter spouts, there is a bunch of devotees who believe everything he says. What’s posted in the linked article shows this. The UCP isn’t doing anything practical to help this situation, and their base are good at doing personal attacks on anyone who disagrees with the UCP, while passing the buck, and blaming the municipal and federal government for what’s happening. I doubt very much that anyone who voted for the UCP has any shame.
Meanwhile, in Nova Scotia, they actually help the homeless rather than hurting them. In Alberta, the cruelty must be seen to be appreciated by TBA cult members.
I believe that a vote for any Trumpy adjacent politician, is basically a private, kick me I’m stupid and nasty sign! No one gets held to account and many people suffer! Win win!
How do the people calling the shots on the homeless of Edmonton sleep at night? Very well, thank you, in their warm beds. It takes a certain something to have no conscience.
If my memory is serving me correctly the appropriate colour of uniform that ought to be worn for this sort of tactic is at the very least, a brown shirt.
More and more, I want to move to Finland where smart people who care about the others in their country, live and thrive and lead by example. Two years ago they began a program of ‘housing first’ and today, 80% of the previously homeless people that they housed, are still living in those little apartments and are even paying the rent themselves. The Finns realized that it’s a lot easier to deal with things like drugs and joblessness, if people have a home to come home to! One article I read said that in the 80’s they had around 20,000 homeless and now that number is down to 3,900. And they save money on things like crime and medical services and policing as well because many of those people have jobs so don’t need to turn to crime to survive.
And in Canada, in Alberta right now, the program is to take from them, the little bit of stuff they do have including their shelters, squeeze shelter beds closer together to jam more bodies into dormitory style rooms……while encouraging the rest of us with our houses and apartments to jump in our RV’s and go camping! I remember one camping trip we went on with friends…..we used to like ‘roughing it’ in the back country and each of us had our $30,000 small size trailers or truck top tents and $70,000 trucks to tow them. As we sat there in our camp, we all came to the conclusion that all the campers like us were sitting there pretending like we’re poor because we didn’t have the 30 foot RV’s like the folks down the hill. It was actually kind of bizarre.
We have absolutely no right to snub our pretend superior noses at the Europeans on so many counts and this is one more!
The MoCo (Mother Corp CBC) will feature tent cities on today’s phone-in Cross Country Checkup radio show with host Ian Hanomansing. It promises to be very interesting. Unfortunately I will be at band practice playing Hank and George and Merle numbers on my new baritone Squire Tele, but I hope when I get back I can listen on-demand from my warm little abode, just 1ºC outside under a leaden sky.
We don’t have a city on our little Island but, judging from the popularity of the new warming centre in the Community Hall, I know there are homeless people living in tents —only out of sight in this heavily forested, rural community. I had an hermit living in a rotten old travel trailer on my back forty and when it got particularly cold one winter, we built a 8×12 cabin (the kind I’ve built so many times before), put in a wood stove (I had a surfeit of firewood free for the splitting) and 300 feet of dryer cable from my pumphouse to run lights and his computer. He lived there for 12 years. Hardly ever saw him—except maybe doing ThaiChi in the woods with a Towhee perched on his toque. He was too different to live in society but I was happy to have him out the back. He was safe.
When I had to move (doctor’s orders) he nearly burst into tears when I told him. It took two years to get done. He bought a truck as soon as he became a pensioner, used some of the shack to build a camper, and drove off into the Interior with a rifle, a new hunting licence and a fishing rod. Didn’t hear from him for a decade when, just a few months ago he sent me an email, out of the blue, said he wanted to pay me some back rent (I never charged him rent) and that he was dying of pancreatic cancer , so I said okay to appease him. He sent me $2000 and ordered me to take it, that it was important to him that I did. So I got a badly needed brake job and this here baritone guitar with the money. (RIP, my dear friends, David Rourke and Nina Dickinson).
People around here are generous and helpful. I wish it could be like that everywhere.
Hopefully I’ll hear CCC callers from Edmonton, particularly about this heartlessly flippant TBAUCP government as it interferes with the jurisdiction delegated to municipalities. My heart goes out to the dispossessed in -30ºC weather. How could it not? I’ve slept rough in my younger days, I know what it’s like—except I wasn’t old and infirm back then. Just imagine…
I can be flippant, too, let me assure! But when I say Mayor Sohi should immediately fire the Edmonton police chief, I’m not half joking.
Scotty: Alas, Chief McFee is immune to being fired. He was hired by the Police Commission, which only can be changed by City Council incrementally. Under his contract, Edmonton is stuck with him until at least June 30, 2026. Significant portions of the contract have been redacted – not, one would think, public service best practice. The timing of the contract is interesting and probably significant. While it became effective on on June 17, 2021, it was signed by the relevant parties on July 28 and 30, 2021, and an amendment was signed on Sept. 24 and 27. So the deal was signed, sealed and delivered, as they say, shortly before the Oct. 18, 2021, Alberta-wide municpal election, ensuring that the new City Council could do nothing about it. DJC
A lovely story. Thank you for sharing, give that baritone a strum for me will ya?
When I was a young man I found I could fix the annoying noise my car’s engine was making by turning up the radio. It looks like our friends in the UCP must have read the same repair manual; they are applying the same strategy to dealing with the homeless, Covid (keep the data hidden) and climate change.
Dismay is too polite a term to describe how I feel about events in Edmonton with respect to ‘homelessness’ and the solutions that are studiously ignored. Perhaps Alberta could note the manner in which a degree of respect is offered in an ‘impoverished’ province, one once described by Harper as a “culture of defeat”.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/tent-encampment-grand-parade-electricity-generator-1.7072777
Would it help to sever your government’s source of heat, power, and basic comforts … just for the winter, of course?
what is the point of this “excercise” given the “campers” are simply moving a short distance away? Its cruel but that is the point from what I can see.
Leaving people un housed, living in tents or just out in the open, hastens the deaths of many or they becoming seriously ill. Many of these UPCers are what I refer to as “bible belters”, they believe they are good christians or proport to be. To them, I’d suggest they check in with their bibles, there is this section referred to as the “ten commandments”. One of those game rules goes like this, “thou shalt not kill”. What the UPC and the edmonton police chief are doing is contributing to the early deaths of many. People can be charged for neglecting their children or elderly if they die as a result of it. Removing shelter from those who are “unhoused” can and will lead to death. It would be interesting to have some of those politicians arrested if some of the people living on the street died.
Mr. Lafortune has it right.
People live on the streets because they don’t have enough money to pay rent on an apartment or room. They need help, not more pain.
When I worked there was a grievance against the constant denial of leave due to short staffing. An arbitrator ruled, chronic short staffing was not an excuse for denying people leave under their collective agreement. I’d suggest the government is denying the people living in tents and less are being denied their rights because the government refused to raise taxes, mostly to keep them in office and benefit those with wealth.
This country had a “deal” of sorts with its population. You worked, you paid taxes and when you retired, you received a pension to provide for housing, food, etc. That deal was taken off the table some time ago. We see the results of this with the ever increasing number of homeless retired people. All sorts of services are available to those who have enough money to pay for housing, food, etc. The seniors who have no place to live, they’re being discriminated against as are those who are drug addicted-.
Homeless people can never be housed because most provincial governments won’t pay them a “housing allowance” if they are on welfare and don’t have an “residence”. In one Martine province the “tent dwellers” receive $350 a month for food, nothing for housing and food would cost $400 and change. One could say the “agreement” the governments had with the citizens has been broken by the government. In most cases this betrayal began when many were children and they were not provided the services they required or left to be abused, neglected, etc. Had many of these people been screened as children, programs could have been formulated to help them. i.e. autism, FAS, inability to see properly or hear adequatley.
A large portion of the population sits by and lets it all happen, Voters might want to consider it could happen to them. wonder if some lawyer took it all to the H.R. commission or court what would happen.
In the past government and the general population were O.K. with Indigenous children being kidnapped, beaten, starved, murdered, not permitted to attend public schools, etc. Indigenous adults were not permitted to vote, restricted to the “reserves”, not permitted into any number of establishments, etc. Eventually laws were enacted and that all became “illegal” or people recognized the laws were illegal.
One day people in poverty will be recognized as citizens who were denied their full rights to live in this country as others.
As to the camping suggestion, that is no mistake. Once some middle class and up go winter camping, they’ll start saying camping in snow is fun, there is no impact on health, you just need to know what to do. At one time people could go to the Provincial campsite at Shuswap Lake and camp at Christmas. They had wonderful times, all in their heated lovely big trailers. I’ve know people who snow camped for a few nights here and there while hiking and had a blast. All of them did it because they wanted to, had food, warm beverages, expensive camping gear, appropriate cloths, etc. Many take their R.V.s when they go skiing on weekends and stay in them. Its lovely.
Those with their millions/billions and security teams one day may find that is not enough to protect themselves from very unhappy people they live with in their country.
All those private jets and floating palaces spew a whole lot of pollution, yet its those who have to drive to work each day are told to cut back and take public transit or give up plastic.
India just sent a “rocket” into space which must have cost billions yet a large number of their population do not have health care, live in dire poverty, etc. The U.S.A. isn’t much different. In Alberta, there is Smith and co. who went to the conflab in the middle east at great expense, yet there is no money to house those in Edmonton in the winter.
enough of my rant, thank you
By and large, this action is symptomatic of the greater global NIMBY culture. The forced removal of the homeless camps are no different from what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank right now. While the comparison of the actions of the EPS and IDF seem incomparable, both are examples of the state, using its official armed muscle, to forcibly shove a disenfranchised population from the only homes they have. I will even go so far as to say that both are, in effect, slow-motion genocides; against, in one case, the Palestinian people and, in the case of the one in Edmonton, people who are trapped in economic, mental health, and addiction crises. The motivations for both actions are the same, keep pushing the problem away, until it’s pushed off a cliff, and disappears forever. Witness the self-cleaning oven for social issues in action.
The number and variety of excuses that we have been given for the encampments being removed is suspicious.
“There is shelter space available.” Maybe, if you don’t have a partner, a pet, or belongings that you want to keep.
“The encampments are dangerous.” Are they more dangerous than sleeping outside, with no protection?
“Gangs are taking over the encampments and demanding money for protection.” An encampment for the houseless would be the last place someone with an IQ higher than that of a turnip would try and extort money.
We need housing, and we need it yesterday. If providing housing quickly is impossible, the encampments should be equipped with porta-potties and garbage cans, with a warming trailer at each site for really cold weather. To save lives and prevent amputations, we need to provide winter sleeping bags for each person in the encampments. Supervised consumption sites would prevent deaths, too.
For those who think the above is too expensive, what is it costing for police and city employees to regularly remove encampments? What is it costing for healthcare and hospital stays, or jails for those arrested?
Also, people are avoiding shelters because of disease. If removing makeshift tents and sleeping bags from the unhoused in the middle of winter doesn’t finish them off, forcing them into crowded shelters where Covid runs rampant ought to do it.
The “we’re doing this to protect the homeless from gangs” excuse is just to get access to federal funding meant for fighting gangs and guns. Meanwhile, the gangs roam around suburban shopping malls and restaurants shooting and stabbing people in their years-long gang war. Weird Al’s “Canadian Idiot” needs a revision. Some Canadians do take their guns to the mall.
Edmonton is at war with the homeless. This is not about stopping gangs or protecting the disproportionately indigenous encampment population. If the police state gets away with this, who will be on their radar next?
Soon we’ll have to call in the United Nations for election oversight and I don’t mean the gang with the same name.
Thanks, I read Lorne Gunther’s screed, and just about up chucked. The man has no kindness in him.
But, I must say, I don’t see the point of destroying these camps of the unhoused. I gather some have already returned to behind the Bissell Centre. I am concerned for those who may well die of exposure in minus 30 degree weather over night. The political is indeed personal, and warming centres close to these communities would surely be better than simply destroying their lowly shelters. I also notice that the number of shelter beds available vs. the stated need don’t match depending on the source. And it seems clear that low barrier shelters are hard to find.
Nonetheless, these actions by the City Police are just plain wrong. Perhaps, David Parker and all ought to ask themselves, who is my brother?
If you think that Lone Grunter is a heartless CON bastard then try reading the resulting comments section in the Post and X/Twitter. They will positively destroy whatever is left of your faith in humanity
Been a while since I undignified myself by reading one of Lornes nearly illiterate, deranged, yellow, swill, “columns” but it appears he is yet to top himself, that old piece of shit.
Dude needs to relearn the word “allegedly” & then possibly go over how people with homes commit crimes or consume drugs at a level that is least commiserate w the houseless population if not higher.
Coward that he is I’m sure he’ll spend zero time thinking about what he does for a living but we can always hope for a ghost of Christmas past kind of situation, can’t we ?
Bird: What do you really think? DJC
Wrong is wrong. No rhetoric can make it right. Not mistakes will save the helpless. What to do? Vote UCP? They will make them disappear! That’s the Dani plan!
Camping outside is really not a good idea, especially in winter when it is cold. When will the Government of Alberta add more permanent shelter spaces in Edmonton?