For years the boast “City of Champions” has greeted drivers entering Edmonton. With the Oilers now more likely to compete for the first overall NHL draft pick than the Stanley Cup, perhaps that sign should be discarded. One possible replacement might read “Welcome to the Capital of Petrostate Alberta.”

Petroleum is primarily responsible for Alberta’s enviable economic and financial situation. Alberta usually leads the nation in conventional indicators of economic well-being such as GDP growth. We are a debt-free province with no sales tax and low personal and corporate income taxes. But petroleum dependence can breed restrictions on political and economic freedoms. We see some alarming indications of this in Alberta, and citizens cannot shrug off responsibility. As the comic strip character Pogo said on a 1970 Earth Day poster, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us.” 

Thomas L. Friedman in “The First Law of Petropolitics,” a 2006 essay published in the US journal Foreign Policy, argues that there is an inverse relationship between oil dependence and democracy. “Petrostates” are “both dependent on oil production for the bulk of their exports or gross domestic product and have weak state institutions or outright authoritarian governments.” They are countries like Iran, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela. Nations with deep democratic roots such as the UK, Norway and the US are not petrostates.

Neither Canada nor Alberta warrant a mention in Friedman’s discussion. Perhaps we didn’t appear on his radar simply because Alberta is underappreciated as a leading supplier of petroleum to US consumers. With the homogenizing impact of NAFTA on Canada/US energy markets, perhaps Alberta is seen as merely part of the US republic—“Texas North,” if you like—and just another spigot to open to supply thirsty Americans.

Friedman’s omission might also be because Alberta’s democracy, imperfect as it may be, still elevates us to a much higher status than the likes of Iran, Nigeria or Venezuela—the states on which Friedman bases his argument. He uses think tank Freedom House’s world freedom rankings to determine which countries are petrostates. Nations scoring “1” are the most free; nations scoring “7” are the least free. In 2010 Freedom House gave Iran a pair of sixes on the political rights/civil liberties dimensions; Nigeria and Venezuela each received a five/four combination. Canada scored a pair of ones and shared this enviable ranking with the UK, Norway and the US.

To suggest, then, as Andrew Nikiforuk does in his stinging critique Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, that North America is host to “authoritarian oil-based regimes” is absurd. It oversimplifies the reality we are living in here and impedes understanding. And it trivializes the repression that opponents of petrostate regimes around the world endure in their campaigns to promote political and economic freedoms. Would Edmonton’s Greenpeace activists prefer to protest against “Big Oil” in the Niger delta? Do they need to wear hoods the way democracy’s champions do in Tehran? Would defenders of free speech prefer to make their case in Caracas? Could they find a newspaper in Venezuela’s capital that would dare or be allowed to print their claims?

To suggest that Alberta is a petrostate invites ludicrous claims. I witnessed one several years ago at the University of Alberta when members of Wiebo Ludwig’s family came to lecture their audience about the hardships they were enduring at Hythe. I could sympathize with their difficulties, but it was hard to stomach their claim, made through a photograph on their lectern, that Ken Saro-Wiwa was their kin. Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian Nobel laureate, pacifist and martyr, was executed by the military government of Nigeria for his peaceful protests against what Big Oil was doing to his Ogoni people. His behaviour could not have been more different from Wiebo Ludwig’s. To imagine that Alberta is like Nigeria invites these unfortunate comparisons. More nuance is needed to understand oil’s impact on politics in Alberta.

The petrostate charge ignores both genuine and potential strengths of public life in Alberta. Those strengths may be gauged in part from Friedman’s discussion of what petrostates deny their citizens. Petrostates do not hold free and fair elections; petrostates despise and censor free speech; petrostates arbitrarily arrest citizens; petrostates unreasonably restrict who may run for office. None of these characteristics may reasonably be applied to life in Alberta.

Our courts can be used to temper government efforts to silence and discredit critics. For example, Dr. Kevin Timoney and Peter Lee threatened a lawsuit against Alberta Environment’s Dr. Preston McEachern for his suggestion that they used data selectively to make their case that oil sands operations pollute the Athabasca River. McEachern apologized.

Our mainstream media certainly exercise their right of free speech. Consider the coverage of Syncrude’s trial for its failure to take sufficient measures to prevent 1,600 ducks from landing, and dying, in its Aurora mine tailings pond. The Edmonton Journal could hardly be regarded as pandering to Syncrude. Robert White, Syncrude’s lead counsel, actually objected to the Journal’s coverage of the trial. In one of his letters to the editor he accused the Journal of adopting “the odious practice of American newspapers” of trying cases in the media. Traditional and new social media offer us important opportunities for social critique.

The fact a trial was held at all reflects one of the strengths of public life in Alberta. But it wasn’t our government that took the initiative. Pressure came from Greenpeace and the Sierra Club’s Jeh Custer, who forced the government’s prosecutorial hand. In spite of our high ranking as a free country, paranoia seems to animate how Alberta’s governing party runs our affairs. Dissent is a four-letter word; the Progressive Conservatives frown upon actions that might inform or facilitate dissent, such as more transparency in governing, easier access to public information and more opportunities for citizen participation in administrative affairs. Government secrecy is impossible to understand without seeing it as an effort to protect petroleum in Alberta. 

Alberta’s Ministry of energy tells us that, as of January 2009, oil and gas exploration and development could be linked to 141,600 jobs in this province. Nearly 14 per cent of Albertans are employed directly by the energy industry or indirectly by its activities.

In 2008 roughly 30 per cent of the province’s total gross domestic product came from petroleum; oil and gas contributed nearly $87-billion that year to Alberta’s economy; 55 per cent of that sum came just from extraction activities. In 1993 mineral fuels represented 63.9 per cent of the value of Alberta’s exports; in 2008 that percentage stood at 72.5 per cent. Petroleum’s contribution to overall export growth over the 1993–2008 period was 74.4 per cent.

Our province’s lack of a sales tax, a badge of honour for many Albertans, has only been possible because non-renewable resource revenue has paid the bill for a significant percentage of our public services. Alberta’s revenue profile is unique among Canadian provinces in the importance of non-renewable resource revenue. The graph on the facing page illustrates Alberta’s dependence.

 Do the owners of Alberta’s resources (that’s you and me, not corporations) have the information we need to evaluate just how well the government is stewarding these precious finite sources of revenue? Too often the answer is no. In 2007 Auditor General Fred Dunn estimated that the government “could collect an additional $1-billion or more per year [in royalties] without stifling industry profitability. However, neither this information nor the reasons why changes have not taken place have been made public.” Government, he concluded, was obligated to report more frequently to the public about royalties; citizens should not have to resort to freedom of information requests—the norm in Alberta—to see the Department of Energy’s technical reviews of the royalty system. “The principles of transparency and accountability dictate that the department should demonstrate its stewardship of Alberta’s royalty regimes and provide analysis to support that statement,” Dunn wrote. “This has not happened.”

Premier Stelmach established an independent Royalty Review Panel with the mandate to determine whether Albertans were receiving a fair share of the province’s petroleum bounty. The review process began with considerable democratic promise. Public hearings were conducted. The panel members were widely considered independent and expert. The panel’s experts concluded that royalties were too low. A “fair share” demanded an immediate royalty increase of 20 per cent. The panel recommended a 37 per cent increase by 2016. Most Albertans welcomed their message. Two-thirds of Albertans, a Leger Marketing  poll reported, wanted Stelmach to implement all of the panel’s recommendations.

The recommendations stunned the oilpatch, however. Anger and a sense of betrayal poured out of corporate boardrooms and onto the pages of the business press. Allusions to Hugo Chávez’s socialist Venezuela or authoritarian Central Asian republics were as popular in corporate Calgary as Smithbilt hats during Stampede week. Adopt the panel’s recommendations and Alberta would become “Albertastan,” “Caracas on the Bow” or the “Bolivarian Republic of Alberta.”

In spite of the wails of protest from oil companies, investment dealers told their clients that oil sands producers would not be materially affected by royalty changes. CIBC World Markets calculated that a hypothetical oil sands project at US$70 oil, which formerly would generate an internal rate of return (IRR) of 13.4 per cent and a net asset value (NAV) of $2.79 per barrel produced, would have generated, under the new royalty framework, an IRR of 13.1 per cent and a NAV of $2.57. So there seemed to be little substance to the hand-wringing comments of Gwyn Morgan, retired CEO of EnCana: “New project decisions in the oil sands will have to factor a much higher government take in a business already replete
with risk.”

André Plourde, a University of Alberta economics professor and one of the Royalty Review Panel’s independent experts, provided a far less dire analysis than Morgan’s on the impact of a new royalty framework. Plourde placed royalties in the context of other fiscal changes made by the federal and provincial governments since the 1997 royalty regime was established. Federal and provincial corporate income tax reductions increased industry’s share of divisible income by nearly 12 per cent from 1997 to 2007 (from 39.5 per cent in 1997 to 51.1 per cent in 2007). Under the government’s new royalty framework, the producers’ share would be 39.8 per cent—virtually identical to what it was in 1997. In other words, in spite of increased royalties, all would be as it was for Alberta’s oil sands sector.

Nonetheless, transparency and public consultation evaporated soon after the panel’s report landed on then-Finance Minister Lyle Oberg’s desk. The Alberta government greeted industry outrage with a placating offer—more consultations. This round would avoid the “mistake” of letting independent experts evaluate the merit of industry’s arguments. Deputy Premier Ron Stevens, a senior member of cabinet from Calgary, would meet face to face with industry representatives. Only the oilpatch was granted this access.

Industry pressed the advantage, meeting frequently with the deputy premier. Sixty industry representatives beat a path to Stevens’s door in the five weeks between his appointment and the release of the government’s decision on a new royalty framework. Stevens’s suitors included the presidents and/or chairmen of Conoco Phillips Canada, EnCana, Imperial Oil, Nexen, Petro-Canada, Synenco and Talisman—all companies with operations or land positions in the Athabasca oil sands area. Murphy Oil, Shell Canada and Suncor—other companies with interests there—sent senior managers. Pierre Alvarez, then president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, also lobbied the deputy premier. The Globe and Mail suggested that Deputy Premier Stevens should “publish a report on his discussions.” No such report, other than a list of industry representatives consulted, was ever produced.

Industry’s blitz on the government worked. Six of the panel’s 11 oil sands recommendations—most noteworthy, the oil sands severance tax the panel regarded “as an absolutely essential component of a ‘fair’ royalty system”—were rejected.

The way our government protects and privileges Alberta’s oilpatch also is evident in the approach of regulators who are supposed to make decisions in the public interest, not merely in the interests of the oil industry. Clearly this is not the case in the oil sands project approval process, where the Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) is the lead provincial agency.

“Regulatory capture” is a phrase coined in the US to describe situations in which a government agency, created to regulate in the public interest on the issues under its jurisdiction, instead consistently favours industry’s perspective. Through its practices and rulings to date, the ERCB appears in every sense to be a “captured agency.” At least two aspects of the ERCB’s approach to its mandate—the range of values it considers relevant in its hearings and its view of who should be allowed to participate in those hearings—support this view.

With respect to public participation, the ERCB declares it “ensures that everyone affected by energy development has a fair chance to be heard.” This spring some people who live in Strathcona County would beg to differ. They found themselves living in the vicinity of an uninvited guest—Total Petroleum’s proposed bitumen upgrader. But in the ERCB’s opinion these citizens didn’t merit official standing at the hearing. They didn’t satisfy the regulator that they appeared to be “directly or adversely affected” by Total’s application. This restrictive interpretation of just who is directly affected by energy projects before the ERCB is a staple of the regulator’s critics. Keith Wilson, a lawyer representing local residents who opposed Total, told the ERCB that such restrictiveness “builds suspicion. It erodes confidence in the process, in your whole organization.”

The ERCB also fails substantively; it fails to consider the social and ecological effects of energy projects. Shaun Fluker, a University of Calgary law professor, argues that the Energy Resources Conservation Act obliges the ERCB to take a broad approach to its duty under section 3 of the Act to “give consideration to whether the project is in the public interest, having regard to the social and economic effects of the project and the effects of the project on the environment.” Fluker says the ERCB consistently embraces a “resource ethic”; it views its section 3 mandate narrowly. The regulator evaluates natural resources simply and exclusively through the lens of economic development, ignoring all other values.

In the past this may have been what Albertans wanted. But there are plenty of signs that Albertans today seek more than unfettered economic growth. The public interest, as reflected in our responses to polls about oil sands growth or the protection of grizzly bears and wilderness, demands much more than unfettered economic development.

According to David Whitson, a U of A political science professor, we trust regulatory agencies to uphold the public interest. Our confidence in regulators is eroded if “they interpret that interest too narrowly and they undermine that trust.”

Why are the bonds between the governing party, regulators and the petroleum industry so tight in Alberta? One likely contributor to Big Oil’s political influence rests in Alberta’s party and election financing regimes. Petroleum’s power rests, then, in their wallets—specifically, in the support they garner when they contribute to the governing party.

David Stewart and Anthony Sayers, two U of C political scientists, have produced a very thorough study of party finance in Alberta. What distinguishes Alberta’s regimes from others in Canada is laxity. There are no spending limits in provincial elections; union and corporate donations are allowed; contributors may donate up to $15,000 annually to each registered party; in a campaign they may donate up to $30,000. The Progressive Conservatives enjoy a huge funding advantage over all of the opposition parties. Stewart and Sayers conclude that “[it] is obviously corporate money that provides the PCs with the bulk of their funding edge.” During the 2004 provincial election campaign period, the PCs raised a whopping $2,094,533, and just over $630,000 of that amount came from corporations.

However, in the 2008 campaign, the party only raised $580,256. Corporate contributions sank to $386,175. This is where we clearly see the link between campaign contributions and petroleum’s influence in provincial politics. The oilpatch was furious over changes to the provincial royalty regime. Significant past oilpatch-connected donors to the PCs sat on their wallets during the 2008 campaign. Notables include Canadian Natural Resources, Devon Canada, June Warren Publishing, Nexen, Precision Drilling, Suncor and Talisman plus RBC Dominion Securities and other Calgary investment dealers.

Other energy companies showed their displeasure with the government by steering their contributions primarily to the Wildrose Alliance, the only party to defend the royalty status quo. The 2007 changes to the royalty framework mobilized more than two dozen petroleum-related companies to contribute to the Wildrose campaign. More than half the party’s corporate contributions came from these companies, and they delivered 40 per cent of the party’s campaign contribution total. Reaction against PC petroleum policy produced an unheard-of situation—energy sector contributions to the governing Conservatives in the 2008 campaign ($169,575) were less than those to the fledgling Wildrose Alliance ($207,750).

Soon after the 2008 election the Conservatives moved to curry favour with the petroleum sector. They initiated policies designed to win back contributions and dry up the most significant source of funding for the Wildrose Alliance. Royalties were reduced to promote the drilling of high-cost deep oil and gas wells. These departures from the 2007 royalty framework are expected to cost the provincial treasury $237-million a year in foregone royalties for five years, for a total of $1.185-billion. Royalties were reduced for conventional oil and natural gas in March of this year; in May the government reduced the royalties on wells depending on expensive technologies. Next on the agenda, according to CAPP, is addressing Alberta’s “regulatory competitiveness.” This doublespeak means further advantages for oil—and fewer for citizens.

Energy industry companies that sat on the sidelines in the 2008 election campaign—Canadian Natural Resources, Devon, First Energy Capital, Nexen, Peters & Co., Suncor and Talisman—were all back writing cheques to the Conservatives in 2009. They, along with other energy companies, donated approximately a quarter of a million dollars to the Conservatives in 2009. This is nearly four times the amount the Liberals and Wildrose Alliance raised from the petroleum industry in 2009—combined.

Why don’t Albertans challenge the anti-democratic behaviour of the Progressive Conservatives, Alberta’s governing party for 39 years? Does our attachment to the material benefits we derive from our petroleum economy make us look the other way?

If we cared about democracy in Alberta, we could call for reform to campaign and party financing. We could demand that regulatory agencies be accessible, transparent and inclusive. We could stand up and insist that industry’s insatiable appetite should not be satisfied at the expense of more important public values. If we object to becoming a petrostate then we must participate in public life here. Unless Pogo is right.

“I used to think I preferred getting old to the alternative, but now I’m not sure. Sometimes the monotony of bingo and sing-alongs and ancient dusty people parked in the hallway in wheelchairs makes me long for death. Particularly when I remember that I’m one of the ancient dusty people, filed away like some worthless tchotchke.”      —Jacob Jankowski, in Water for Elephants

“No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home…”       —Kingsley Amis

Retired provincial court judge Tom McMeekin became a bit of a minor celebrity a few years ago when he decided it was time the world knew what life was like in a local nursing home. McMeekin’s multiple sclerosis had progressed to a point where he and his wife couldn’t meet his needs at home. Like everyone else going into long-term care in Alberta, McMeekin had to take the first bed available. “Life was hell, quite frankly,” he recalls. “There were four of us sharing one bathroom: two women and two men. The staffing was so bad that I launched a petition. I described sitting and waiting, desperate to go to the bathroom, and so on. I got 1,500 signatures.” There was a brief media storm, and things got a little better, but for 16 months McMeekin had no space to call his own; his roommate wouldn’t even allow him to watch the tiny TV he had on his bedside table.

He’s now more comfortably ensconced at the Colonel Belcher Care Centre, one of Calgary’s newest facilities, where each resident enjoys the precious privacy of their own room. “When I moved in here, I thought I’d gone to heaven,” he says. Mind you, he only gets one shower per week, so he pays for two more at $40 each. That’s $80 per week out of pocket—or more than $4,000 a year—for something most of us take for granted.

McMeekin may be in one of the newest facilities in Alberta, but even here things aren’t perfect. “The staff are excellent,” he says, “but there aren’t enough. They’ve done away with registered nurses [RNs]. Licensed practical nurses [LPNs] do most of the work.” And there’s the regimentation of the institution: dinner at 5:00 p.m.—“One hundred ways to cook hamburger,” he smiles.

McMeekin’s experience, however, could be called cushy compared to the neglect many senior citizens experience in long-term care in Alberta. And even the limited resources being put into long-term care in this province are in jeopardy. The Alberta government, like those in most provinces, now proposes that many seniors currently in publicly funded nursing homes shouldn’t be there. Instead, they argue, these seniors should be in some other type of assisted living arrangement (including private facilities and “aging-in-place”) where necessary health services would be delivered by home care while other services—including “unnecessary” services like showers—would be paid for by senior citizens themselves.

It’s a proposal based on shaky premises. “Where is the data showing that those people don’t belong [in long-term care]?” asks Donna Wilson, professor of nursing at the University of Alberta. “The government hasn’t collected data for 10 years.”

Seniors advocates are also up in arms about the shift. “The [government] promises that care will be virtually the same, but they pass it off to investor-owned facilities,” says David Eggen, executive director of Friends of Medicare. “There aren’t the same regulations regarding nurses or the same provisions for training.”

The cost implications for individual seniors could be enormous, he adds. “Once you move from long-term care to assisted living, you’re not afforded the protection of price controls,” Eggen says. (Alberta seniors pay from $16,000–$20,000 a year to live in publicly-funded long-term care; they can pay up to $72,000 a year for private assisted living facilities.)

Also in the works is a new omnibus Health Act, which will supersede all current health legislation, including the Nursing Homes Act. The Nursing Homes Act sets out standards which guarantee residents a minimum level of care. Under the proposed new legislation no such specifics are laid out. “What is proposed is an Act with principles that are so vague as to be meaningless,” says Noel Somerville, chair of the Seniors Task Force for Public Interest Alberta (PIA).

Most Albertans haven’t thought past the “elderly” stage to the “incapacitated” stage, and even fewer have any idea of what awaits them in long-term care. “Doing some market research five or six months ago we found that people don’t think about it until there’s a crisis,” says Greer Black, president and CEO of Bethany Care Society, a not-for-profit organization that operates close to 800 long-term care and supportive living beds in the province.

The number of elderly who need the 24-hour medical support provided in long-term care is about 4 per cent of the senior population; not a very big number, hardly worth thinking about—until it’s your relative who’s been assessed as needing such accommodation. Then you begin to realize that the nursing-home residents of this province would populate a town the size of Camrose (some 16,000). Not so insignificant. And that number is set to double when baby boomers hit their 80s.

Projections put Alberta seniors at 20 per cent of the province’s population—or more than 880,000—by 2025, when the last baby boomers turn 65 and the first are starting to need long-term care. That group of men and women in their 80s and beyond will number more than 35,000. According to Dr. David Hogan, head of geriatric medicine at the University of Calgary, “[Long-term care] is not an unusual thing. A person’s risk over a lifetime is 30 per cent. We have to expect that many of us will have to move.”

Helping a relative move into a nursing home is one of the most painful of life’s experiences. If you are the spouse, you are grieving the loss of a once-vibrant partner, and the comfort and support they gave you, and at the same time, you are coping with the prospect of a lonely future. If you are the child, you are grieving the loss of the strong and healthy person who brought you up, and dealing with the fact that you must now assume the role of parent. “For children, it is very difficult to take on making decisions for their parent, for someone who has lived 80-plus years making their own decisions,” says Dr. Norah Keating, professor of human ecology at the U of A and a family gerontologist. Consumer/seniors advocate Wendy Armstrong, whose mother was in long-term care, agrees. “It’s a grieving process. You need the support of other people.”

“There are other costs, too,” says Keating. “With dementia there is loss of relationship: you may not be able to relate to your relative. Researcher Pauline Boss calls it ‘ambiguous loss.’ They’re not the same person, but they’re still there. That kind of ambiguity is really difficult because you can’t resolve it.”

Keating points out that grief is not the only challenging emotion caregivers have to deal with. “Pressure on families is emotional, physical and economic,” he says. “The transition to a nursing home is fraught with guilt: we think ‘I should be able to do this on my own.’ ” As Armstrong sees it, “It’s not only a grieving process, it’s also a new care responsibility.”

And it’s often one we don’t anticipate. “When people hear ‘long-term care,’ they think, ‘that’s a long way off, it’s nothing to do with me, it’s a seniors issue,’ ” Armstrong says. “I never describe it as a seniors issue. The reality is it’s a family issue. This is an issue that has a profound ripple effect on the family and community. At one presentation a young man asked me, ‘Why is this important?’ I said, ‘If your widowed dad had a stroke tomorrow, would it be you or your wife who quit their job?’ ”

Facing a similar situation, “Muriel Patman” (name changed to protect privacy) quit her job. Her father has been waiting for a private room in his Calgary nursing home for four years. “He worked hard all his life, and now look what he has,” she says. “Three men sharing one dinky bathroom. There’s only room for his bed, side table and dresser. No chair.” She and her sibling spent a huge amount of time dealing with fallout from staff shortages, and eventually decided to bring in their own caregivers at a cost of $10,000 per month.

“They’re doing everything the staff should be doing: helping with meals, changing him, moving him around,” she says. “But external assistants can’t do transfers, so sometimes they wait 45 minutes.” For Patman, the need for continuous vigilance and oversight was overwhelming. “I finally had to leave my job. It took so much time, having to be the squeaky wheel.” But she’s paying another price, too: lost connections. “I may go back to work,” she says. “It’s isolating, having to do so much for Dad.”

Carol Wodak says she became an outspoken seniors activist after dealing with her mother in an Edmonton nursing home in 1995. Wodak, now 70 herself, became so involved in her mother’s care that she pretty much abandoned her own interests. “I used to do quilts, make clothing, doll clothes… my work table looks the same today as it did in 2005. [Caring for my mother] became a full-time job,” she says. “I remember thinking ‘at least she’s going to be cared for 24 hours a day.’ I learned really quickly that I couldn’t stop worrying; the level of care required of me was even greater. I couldn’t stand what was happening to my mum. I was fighting to get her one bath a week—every week.”

“Willa Shields” is not working, but even so, she finds caring for her mother a challenge. At this point, her mother is in an assisted-living complex with private health services rather than home care. Shields is picking up the slack, not just financially but in terms of time. “I’m probably averaging 15 hours a week,” she calculates. “It’s put a lot of things on hold—not top-of-the-list things, but things I would like to have done: taking longer trips, spending time with my grandchildren. I can do the basics but I’ve cut down on socializing. I’d love to have people over for dinner but I can’t do it. Either I’m too tired or I don’t have time.”

“Fern Janson” is following the aging-in-place dictum with what some might deem heroic efforts. Her father has dementia and other, physical problems and the family wants to keep him at home as long as possible. “The doctors, including a geriatrician, told me my dad won’t get proper care in long-term care,” she says. “They said, ‘Your dad will be sedated, diapered and restrained.’ ” She tried home care. “Home care would give us an hour at breakfast, an hour at lunch and an hour at dinner—and it was a different person every time. It just wasn’t right. Over time I decided to do it myself. I do a way better job because I know my dad.” Now she spends well over $10,000 a month bringing in support workers privately and countless hours managing everything. “This is my full-time job, helping my dad,” Janson says. Putting her father in assisted living was also not an option: “Assisted living places are private and they have their own criteria for who they’ll accept.”

While a monthly expenditure of $10,000 for private caregivers might sound high to the uninitiated, the cost of services adds up quickly. Caregiver rates start at around $25 per hour, or $300 per day for a 12-hour day, which works out to $9,000 per month. Caregivers provide bathing, dressing, medication supervision and other services not provided by healthcare. Add housekeeping and meals and you get to $10,000 pretty quickly. These costs can double if two parents need special care.

In addition to bearing the monetary cost, however, these women are examples of the hidden costs of “aging in place.” The U of A’s Norah Keating lays it out: “You’re going from full time to part time, leaving employment altogether, taking early retirement. So people are taking short-term and long-term economic hits—not only loss of salary, but perhaps reduced pensions. It’s getting to be a big and growing issue. The other costs are people’s time. There’s some kind of assumption that if you’re providing the care it’s free. But you may not be taking care of your family or yourself. Those are economic costs.”

In the summer of 2010, 1,700 people were waiting for admission to long-term care in Alberta. More than 700 of them were taking up acute care beds in our already overstressed hospitals; the rest were waiting at home or in assisted living. These numbers have barely changed in the past 10 years. Neither has the number of long-term care beds, which has ranged from 14,000 to 14,300.

Long-term care in Alberta operates in borderline crisis mode. Just about every facility is short-staffed, which limits the amount of personal attention any one resident receives. Infrastructure is deteriorating, the province is already short of long-term care places and government policy is heading into unexplored territory that includes a lot more privatization. On the one hand, facility owners want provincial funding increased by 40 per cent; on the other, a class action suit against the province claims the government overcharges nursing home residents. A government study called “Visions 2020, The Future of Health Care in Alberta” forecasts massive growth in demand for long-term beds—some 50 per cent between 2008 and 2020. In another document, “Aging in the Right Place,” the government claims that, with alternatives in place, the number of beds can remain static “for the next several years.”

To the government’s incoherent policy add a looming shortage of healthcare professionals. According to the U of C’s Dr. Hogan, “One of the big issues is that very few students are going into geriatrics, gerontology in medicine, nursing, physio, occupational therapy. It’s very hard to recruit. These are viewed as less glamorous aspects of nursing, for those with less training. But they’re also more difficult areas to practise. There are more complex people with multiple problems, physical limitations.”

This is why it’s important to have RNs on staff, according to Bev Dick, vice-president of the United Nurses of Alberta. “The elderly in a care facility usually have several issues,” she says. “They’re very vulnerable. There’s all kinds of research to show that when you take RNs away, bad things happen. Other care staff don’t necessarily have the skills to recognize when a condition has worsened. By the time the RN is brought in, the intervention becomes more costly and harder on the patient.”

The ratio of RNs to LPNs fluctuates in Alberta, with demand for LPNs (formerly called nursing aides or orderlies) rising and falling depending on system needs, resources and healthcare trends. According to the College of Licensed Practical Nurses of Alberta, the number of LPNs “steadily declined” in the 1980s and 1990s as their value and role were seriously questioned, but has since risen following a review of education and a period of mandatory upgrading.

It’s a contentious subject. Alberta saw a 17 per cent decrease in the number of RNs in direct long-term care from 2007 to 2009 due to the closure of public facilities and transfer of patients to assisted living, increased numbers of lower-paid LPNs, reassignment of RNs to administrative duties and staff reductions. Tom McMeekin’s wife, Sandy, a former RN herself, watched the change. “I worked in long-term care for 15 years, and staffing used to be a lot better,” she says. “With the loss of RNs the things that should be in place for quality of life are gone.”

In many cases, the facilities themselves do not contribute much in the way of quality of life. Some 50 per cent of the long-term care facilities in Alberta are 30 years old or older, and 50 per cent of the beds are in shared rooms. In 2008 Alberta Health & Wellness published a fact sheet on its continuing-care strategy which included a number of promises that have yet to be acted upon, including a commitment to “refurbish 7,000 long-term-care beds by 2015.” Since 2008 the government has announced new beds, but they are described as supportive-living or continuing-care beds. This does not necessarily mean long-term care, but fits with its aging-in-place strategy.

Hasmukh Patel is CEO of AgeCare, a company that builds and runs long-term-care facilities, and president of the Alberta Continuing Care Association, which represents most of the continuing care accommodations in Alberta. “No question, buildings need to be replaced,” he says. But, he adds, the room and board payments mandated by Alberta Health & Wellness don’t cover the cost of capital. “Money to modernize has to come from the government.” Even then, new construction takes time. It may seem like 2031 is a long way off, but it’s not in the nursing home business. According to Greer Black, “We’re looking at a 20-year period in this sector; you need to look at demographics that far out because what we do is capital intensive. Getting the money to develop is almost a 10-year process.”

Garth Mann saw the writing on the wall years ago. His company, Statesman Corporation, was in the business of building resort residences. It soon became clear that some of the aging residents needed more support, and so Manor Village Life Centres was born: luxury seniors residences that offer a communal dining room and other social supports. “The real mandate is how to preserve independence as long as possible,” Mann says. “The last thing we want to do is create an institutional atmosphere.”

Staywell Manor in Calgary—a “premier seniors community”—has been extremely successful, says Manor Village vice president Nicolle Blais. “We’re looking at additional opportunities,” she says. “I think we’ll find private companies such as ours can’t build communities fast enough.” The catch: a room plus meals at Staywell starts at $4,000 per month, and despite Mann’s assertion that residents can stay “ ’til they become angels,” this cost is beyond the pocketbooks of many Alberta seniors. The facility also doesn’t offer the same extent of services as a nursing home.

Public Interest Alberta’s Noel Somerville is concerned that a lot of Albertans are doomed to spend their last years blowing through their savings, running out of money and ending up in desperate situations. “The government will look after very low-income seniors and won’t worry about the people with lots of money,” he predicts. “It’s the people in between. A lot of people can afford the privately operated assisted living facilities only because they’re living off the proceeds of their house and worrying if it will last. I think that’s atrocious.”

It’s a situation that has seniors advocates in the province deeply worried. “People have to realize it’s a big problem for society; it’s in all our best interests to improve care for older individuals who have become infirm,” says Dr. Hogan.

Are there right ways and wrong ways to care for these people? Not according to Eric Wasylenko, executive director of clinical ethics with Alberta Health Services. “There are questions society needs to ask,” he says. “How much are we willing to put the burden on the family, and how much are we willing to put the burden on society to pay for our care?”

Most Canadian baby boomers have had access to excellent healthcare their whole lives. They’ve listened to the advice of nutritionists, doctors and trainers and they expect their bodies to hold up well into the future. As Dr. Keating says, they expect to be “healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, dead.”

But when that doesn’t happen—when those corporeal assets start to let them down, and there’s no quick fix—what is going to happen? Are they going to go gladly into long-term care, sharing a small, cheap room with some stranger or mouldering away alone and in poverty? It’s a scary scenario. If those of us who are edging toward old age don’t get involved, we will have no control over what could be a rather bleak future.  

Rick Holler’s bright modern apartment is a long way from his former haunts in downtown Edmonton. That suits him just fine. “I keep away from my old friends,” says Holler, a 55-year-old with a long history of drug and alcohol abuse and stints in jail. “None of them know where I live. I don’t need the drugs in my life.”

He came out of a rehab program last June, but relapsed within a day because he was back in his old environment. Then he heard about Edmonton’s new 10-year plan to end homelessness. Through the Boyle Street Community Services agency he got his first apartment in many years in July, applied for rent support and was able to put life in the emergency shelters behind him.

Holler’s one-bedroom apartment is sparsely but adequately furnished—a small kitchen table and two chairs, a comfy couch and coffee table, a flat-screen TV loaned by his cousin. He’s starting to put pictures of various kinds on the walls. At least for now, he’s not using drugs and alcohol.

“I’ve been craving a beer lately,” he admits, but he knows one beer will lead to many more, plus the drugs. So he’ll do something to distract himself from his craving, or he’ll go to a Cocaine Anonymous meeting. And each Friday he gets a visit from his Boyle Street support worker, who helps him adjust to his new life. “This is the best thing that’s happened to me for a lot of years,” he says.

Rick Holler is one of several thousand homeless people who have been housed through 10-year plans launched in 2008 in Calgary and 2009 in Edmonton. These ambitious plans, funded almost entirely by the provincial government, aim to end homelessness by providing affordable housing, support workers and addiction and mental health treatment to people moving out of homelessness.

The plans were sparked by an explosion in numbers of homeless people in Alberta’s big cities beginning in the early 1990s. The 2008 count of homeless in Calgary was 4,060, nearly 10 times the 447 in 1992. Edmonton was not far behind, with 3,079 homeless people in 2008. And the one-day count that produces those numbers is considered the tip of an iceberg: thousands more people drift in and out of homelessness in a year.

The Alberta government says that without a serious effort to change the situation, the province could have more than 20,000 homeless people within a decade. It has made its own 10-year commitment and is putting serious money behind it—some $100-million this year to provide housing, plus $42-million to fund agencies that support people leaving homelessness. The total cost over 10 years is expected to be $3.3-billion, divided between capital costs to build housing ($1.3-billion) and operating costs for social supports ($2-billion).

The province expects the 10-year plan will cost less than maintaining the status quo. A homeless person currently costs the province over $100,000 annually (in healthcare, judicial and correctional resources); simply “managing” the existing homeless population for the next 10 years is expected to cost $6.65-billion. A person’s needs aren’t eliminated once the person is housed, of course, but their likelihood of being arrested, needing an ambulance or visiting a courtroom is significantly reduced. The government expects that the 10-year plan will actually save the province $7.1-billion over the next decade.

The decade model was adopted from the US, where a similar rise in homelessness (and similarly skyrocketing social costs) started causing concern in the 1990s. From that concern emerged the “10-year plan to end homelessness” whose charismatic salesman was Phil Mangano, known as president George W. Bush’s homelessness czar. As executive director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness between 2002 and 2009, he barnstormed the US selling the idea that ending homelessness is not only necessary but cost-effective. Mangano was able to convince political and business leaders that putting homeless people in housing and stabilizing their lives would save huge amounts of money. Even conservative politicians who normally hated government “handouts” to the downtrodden responded to his dollars-and-cents pitch.

In 2006 Mangano brought his message to Calgary, and city leaders were ready. In January 2007 a committee was created to draft a 10-year plan, a committee loaded with business heavyweights including TransAlta CEO Steve Snyder, Carma president Alan Norris and Imperial Oil chairman and CEO Tim Hearn. The non-profit sector was also represented, but it was the big-name business input that gave the committee its clout.

In early 2008, Calgary’s plan was launched. At the same time, Edmonton struck its own high-powered committee to draft a 10-year plan. The Stelmach government got on the 10-year bandwagon as well, and now funds homelessness eradication efforts in seven Alberta cities. Lethbridge, for instance, has a goal of ending homelessness by 2011. The city’s 2009 homeless census showed that 192 people live on the streets of Lethbridge (down from 276 the year before).

Key to the Mangano idea is “housing first”: get the homeless person into their own accommodation, and then work on their mental health issues and addictions. Expecting a person to straighten out while they’re sleeping in a shelter or a city park is setting them up for failure, the argument goes. Once they’re in an apartment, they can focus on their addiction problem or take their anti-psychotic medications more regularly. They can also apply for government support they may qualify for but couldn’t access without a fixed address.

That’s exactly what Edmonton and Calgary have been doing. Edmonton put more than 500 homeless people into apartments in the first year of its plan. Calgary housed 1,200 in its first two years. The goal in the coming years is to bolster social agencies that work with homeless people, expand the stock of affordable housing units, provide adequate mental health and addiction treatment, and tackle the root causes of homelessness.

The plans have been helped by a cooling housing market; many landlords are happy to have a homeless person move in now that Alberta’s near-zero apartment vacancy rate has climbed to around 7 per cent. Landlords like that the new tenant has a support worker and a rent supplement from a social agency.

So far, the Edmonton plan has relied primarily on finding suites in existing apartment blocks to house homeless people. The Calgary Homeless Foundation has largely been buying and converting older apartment blocks for use in Calgary’s 10-year plan, says CEO Tim Richter. Eventually, he says, the CHF will have to actually build new apartment buildings.

Alberta’s largest landlord, Boardwalk Real Estate, is a leader in the 10-year plan. Boardwalk is placing homeless people in some of its 12,000 rental units in Edmonton and 5,500 in Calgary. “We took absolutely chronic homeless people with mental illness and substance abuse problems and put them in our apartments,” says David McIlveen, Boardwalk’s community development director. The key to making it work, McIlveen says, is having support for the person once they’re in an apartment. If the tenant’s drug dealer friends start dropping by, the landlord needs to know that the support worker will deal with it.

Edmonton’s plan sets a limit on how many suites in a given building go to homeless people: no more than 20 per cent, says Jay Freeman, executive director of the Edmonton Homeless Commission (EHC). He says experts consider it best to have a mix of tenants, rather than special “homeless people buildings.” Exceptions are made for buildings that house people with problems so severe they need a special residence with full-time staff.

To fully eliminate homelessness, says Tim Richter of the Calgary Homeless Foundation, you have to look at the causes. “The things that created homelessness are the things you need to address to end it,” he says.

There is general agreement among concerned parties that the causes of homelessness in Alberta are:

a) Lack of income among the poorest citizens. In 1993 the Klein government began an aggressive “welfare reform” policy that reduced welfare rolls by nearly 50 per cent in four years, through restrictions on eligibility. Right-wing commentators such as former Stephen Harper strategist Ken Boessenkool lauded the government, calling the reforms a model for other provinces.

Not coincidentally, homeless numbers in Calgary rose by 60 per cent in those years, and continued to rise throughout the next decade. No comparable figures are available for Edmonton, where homeless counts began only in 1999, although annual surveys show that homelessness tripled in Edmonton between 1999 and 2008.

Welfare rates in Alberta were also kept low for many years. In 2008, Alberta’s rate for singles was second-lowest in the country. Today a single, employable person on income support gets $583 a month. Alberta’s minimum wage of $8.80 an hour is also the second-lowest among Canadian provinces. Even if the government boosts the rate by 25 cents, as was recommended by an all-party legislative committee in October, Alberta’s minimum wage will still be lower than six other provinces.

b) Decisions by the federal and Alberta government to reduce funding for social housing. In the 1980s and early 1990s an average of 15,000–16,000 new social housing units were built every year in Canada, funded by the Canada Mortgage & Housing Corporation. But in 1993 the CMHC froze all funding for social housing, and three years later Ottawa transferred responsibility for administering social housing to the provinces. Alberta in turn devolved much of the responsibility to municipalities and non-profits. Both the federal and provincial governments wanted to cut budget deficits but were also influenced by a prevailing right-wing political culture. Deanna Williamson, a University of Alberta poverty expert, says the Reagan/Thatcher era produced a belief in market solutions and individual responsibility rather than taxpayer-funded support for the poor.

c) Over the past two decades an influx of people—often with limited job skills—moved to Alberta. Some came from eastern Canada, others from First Nations around the province. The Aboriginal population of both Edmonton and Calgary doubled in the two decades before 2001, and the numbers in Edmonton have risen another 25 per cent since then. In Edmonton, Aboriginals make up by far the biggest group among the chronically homeless. “Within five years we’ll have the largest urban Aboriginal population of any major city in the country,” says the EHC’s Jay Freeman.

d) The disappearance of rental apartments in Alberta. Landlords abandoned the rental market, many buildings were condo-ized, and virtually no new rental apartments were built. The Calgary situation is particularly dire, with an estimated 40,000 rental units, down from some 58,000 in 1994. Edmonton has about 55,000 rental units and lost an estimated 1,800 between 1990 and 2003 (at the same time the city’s population grew by 125,000). And while the economic downturn that began in 2008 has eased tight vacancy rates—Calgary’s, for example, improved from 0.2 per cent in 2008 to 5.3 per cent in 2010 while Fort McMurray’s increased from 0.1 to 13.2 in the same period—it hasn’t brought rents down much. Alberta average monthly rent of $937 is down less than 2 per cent from 2008’s $953 average.

Fort McMurray is on its own planet when it comes to affordable housing. The city is struggling with a giant influx of people and limited serviced land on which to build. Renting a one-bedroom apartment in Fort McMurray costs upward of $2,000 a month, double what you’d pay in Calgary or Edmonton, says Brian Lutes, president of the Wood Buffalo Housing & Development Corporation (WBHDC). That makes affordable housing a problem not just for low-income workers, but for young teachers and RCMP officers moving to the city.

e) Discharge policies from hospitals and provincial jails are also pushing people into homelessness. A person released from prison leaves with nothing and has nowhere to go, says Freeman. “When you’re shown the door with not a penny in your pocket, what are the chances of that person not ending up homeless or committing a crime?” Alberta hospitals are supposed to have policies about not letting poor people be discharged without somewhere to go, he says, but that’s not been the experience of emergency shelters. “The Hope Mission (in Edmonton) says they’ve had an ambulance pull up and let a guy out literally in his pyjamas.”

Then there’s the overburdened and inadequate child welfare system which discharges young people out of foster homes onto the streets at age 18. A 2004 study by the City of Red Deer found that one-third of that city’s homeless population came from the foster care system.

By most measures, the initial efforts of Alberta’s 10-year plans have been successful. Edmonton and Calgary have placed more chronic homeless people in housing than planned. John Rook, co-executive director at The Alex Community Health Centre in Calgary, calls the results “staggering.” The Alex deals with homeless people with the most severe problems—the mentally ill, the addicted and people coming out of prison. The agency now puts these people in apartments; one guy had been “living rough” in parks and under bridges for 14 years.

Freeman says many homeless people are ecstatic to get their own apartment. Still, adjusting can be tough. One Edmonton man who was coaxed into an apartment last summer was so used to sleeping outside that he initially slept on his balcony. After a few days, says Boyle Street housing director Bonnie Belhumeur, “we got him back in his apartment and he started sleeping on his floor in the sleeping bag. Then we got him to the couch, and then we got him in his bedroom.” In some cases, she says, that initial adjustment can take months.

Not infrequently, a homeless person will become sick once they’ve moved into their own home, says Freeman. When they are no longer in a daily fight for survival on the streets, their body decides to crash. One fellow placed in an apartment started complaining of stomach pains. “It turned out he had a tumour in his stomach the size of a grapefruit,” Freeman says. “That tumour didn’t just ‘occur.’ It speaks to how when they’re homeless, every ounce of their being is consumed in survival.”

The support worker assigned to a newly housed person plays a crucial role, he adds. The homeless typically don’t know how to be good tenants, how to shop for groceries or keep a budget. And loneliness is an issue for these people, who are used to living in emergency shelters and public spaces, say Freeman and Rook. They often don’t have jobs, at least not right away, and have often had to give up their old friends and haunts.

Clearly it’s not enough to just find apartments for homeless people; part of the 10-year plan needs to be aimed at stopping people from sliding into homelessness in the first place. Otherwise, says Tim Richter, you’re bailing a boat without fixing the leak that’s letting the water in. Richter says prevention means improving discharge policies from prisons and hospitals, fixing the child welfare system, reducing poverty and expanding affordable housing.

The Alberta government has, at least, been doing something about the latter. Its affordable housing strategy, launched in 2007, pledges to build 11,000 new units across Alberta by 2012.

In one big project, ProCura Real Estate is building a 237-unit apartment block on Jasper Avenue in Edmonton, with the federal, provincial and municipal governments combining to pay 30 per cent of the construction cost. In return, ProCura must rent the suites at 10 per cent below market rate for 20 years. While these tenants will be single students and seniors, not homeless people, the new units will help ease the overall shortage of affordable apartments.

In Calgary, the Mustard Seed is building an 18-storey, 224-unit building in the Beltline district, funded in part by a $4-million grant from the City of Calgary. The suites will go to people who use the Mustard Seed’s emergency shelter and other services.

In Fort McMurray the WBHDC does everything from run the homeless shelter to build and operate apartment buildings. Through it, people can rent apartments, townhouses and duplexes at rates geared to their income, or buy a condo or house with an affordable mortgage. In June, the WBHDC opened a 172-unit project on land donated by the province, which also provided $25.8-million in funding.

One continuing problem with the creation of housing for low-income and homeless people is neighbourhood resistance. The most notorious recent example was the vehement protest of some St. Albert residents against a proposed Habitat for Humanity multi-family development. Low-income neighbourhoods in Edmonton have also resisted the creation of more supportive housing in their midst, saying they’re already overwhelmed with such projects. EHC’s Jay Freeman says Edmonton’s 10-year plan aims to place homeless people in apartments throughout the city. Only a few residences exclusive to homeless people with severe problems are being built, he says, but he admits that in communities already full of special housing even one more project may be the final straw.

The clearest sign that the 10-year plan is working, claims Alberta Housing Minister Jonathan Denis, is the drop in the numbers of people using emergency shelters during the previous year. But “success” depends on what you measure. Freeman says Edmonton’s two main drop-in centres have seen unprecedented numbers of people seeking help. “Probably equally as important, they’re seeing faces they haven’t seen before.” He suspects a lot of people who lost their jobs, or had their work hours cut, are sleeping on a friend’s couch instead of at shelters, but do come to the drop-in centres for meals.

Homelessness is a huge problem, say many experts, but it’s only part of the larger problem—poverty. John Rook, who is board chair of the National Council on Welfare, appreciates Alberta’s homelessness plan, but praises provinces such as New Brunswick that are tackling poverty in a different way. “If you had everyone with an adequate income… then people could solve homelessness themselves,” he says.

Alberta’s minimum wage hasn’t kept pace with inflation, which means it can’t truly be considered a “living wage” (the minimum amount needed to maintain a safe and healthy standard of living), say Public Interest Alberta, the Alberta Federation of Labour and Vibrant Communities Calgary. These groups have all called for the minimum wage to be raised from the current $8.80 an hour to more like $12.

The ultimate success of Alberta’s 10-year plan will depend on whether the government continues to fund it adequately, says professor David Hulchanski, a University of Toronto expert on homelessness. Many 10-year plans in US cities foundered for lack of consistent funding, he says. In fact, a “10-year plan” may simply provide cover for politicians by giving the illusion that the problem of homelessness is being addressed.

The key funding concern about Alberta’s 10-year plan is whether the province will provide money for rent relief and support workers beyond the first 12 months. Right now provincial funding for a housed person ends after a year; those who work with Alberta’s most vulnerable people say that for many of them, that’s not long enough.

“The fact that people relapse is not unusual,” says David Berger, deputy director of Boyle Street. “It’s not always a straight curve out to wellness.” He and others say the plan has to be flexible enough to provide support for as long as people need it.

Jonathan Denis, Alberta’s housing minister, has no plans to extend the 12-month funding. The idea is to have the people in jobs or transferred to community or family support, he says. “It’s my goal that we can get people back to work, back on their feet.”

Berger calls the current status of the 10-year plan a promising start. But he adds that there’s a lot more work to do. “Four walls for someone has never proven to be enough,” he says. “People want to be connected to community, to activity and to a path to wellness. And it doesn’t happen just with the residence; it’s everything else that matters too.”

Rick Holler is very aware that his rent support and Boyle Street worker will end in July 2011. He’s been assured that if that happens and he has to give up his suburban apartment, his worker will help him find another suite—probably without the same support from the government, probably downtown.

“I don’t want to be downtown,” says Holler. He knows all the old temptations will be there waiting for him. 

The month after Chris Crane’s 18th birthday was a blur. The Alberta Warriors gang member spent most of it drunk or stoned, blowing $16,000 on alcohol and marijuana in just three weeks. His first month of official adulthood ended with an armed robbery, a drive-by shooting at a house frequented by rival gang members, and his arrest.

His errant gunshot, which struck a two-year-old girl in the chest as she was sitting at her grandparent’s kitchen table, galvanized the Samson Cree First Nation near Hobbema. The child survived, but the shooting was the last straw for members of the community of 12,000 and they came out swinging with plans to eradicate the 13 gangs that terrorized them. The court, keenly aware of the public indignation, sentenced Crane to nine years, reduced on appeal to seven.

But the April 13, 2008, shooting of Asia Saddleback set off alarms around the province and heightened public interest in reining in the gangs that had become more numerous, overt and violent during the Alberta boom. A triple slaying that included an innocent bystander at a southeast Calgary Vietnamese restaurant eight months later served notice that gang violence wasn’t just an Aboriginal community phenomenon. A war between two Calgary gangs, Fresh off the Boat (FOB) and the Fresh off the Boat Killers (FK) had claimed 25 lives since 2002. But the January 1, 2009, slaying of 43-year-old contractor Keni Su’a triggered outrage. It wasn’t just gang members killing gang members anymore. The public wanted something done. Following an investigation involving more than 600 police and civilians, four men were charged with first-degree murder.

“That particular shooting sent shock waves through the community,” says Calgary Police targeted enforcement unit detective Gordon Eiriksson. “When an innocent bystander gets shot and killed, it really galvanizes us as a police service.”

The triple slaying capped off years of killings, shootings, stabbings and beatings by members of a gang that had fallen out of sorts, split into factions and begun trying to eliminate each other. The deaths, deportations, prison sentences and charges against key members on both sides have brought some respite, but Calgary police aren’t counting on lasting peace.

What draws a kid to a gang? Not JUST the money, but the brotherhood. For many gang members, it’s the first time anyone has cared about them. “With the clients I represent who have gang affiliations, the common thread is a lack of a role model and support at home,” says Edmonton lawyer Harold Brubaker, who represented Crane at his 2010 trial. “The function the gang ends up playing, for better or worse, is to give them a sense of identity and belonging.”

Crane’s own testimony at his sentencing in Wetaskiwin suggested he grew up without a father and was shuffled back and forth between relatives from the age of 3. “I was allowed to do whatever I wanted as a kid,” he testified after pleading guilty to charges of aggravated assault, weapons charges and a home invasion robbery. “It seemed to me like nobody cared.”

By age 11, Crane was smoking marijuana daily. By Grade 7, he’d stopped attending school. A psychologist hired by the defence described him as a severely traumatized, sad and tormented child who became a moody, hot-tempered, bitter and violent teen. He said Crane was sexually abused as a child and suffered from anxiety and depression.

Although the heavily tattooed Crane told the court he wanted to leave gang life to focus on his wife and child, gangster rap lyrics and drawings were found in his remand centre cell. A hand-drawn sign found with his belongings proclaimed: Thug life until the end of time.

Aboriginal gang members are often distinguishable by tattoos and colours and are territorial, frequenting certain areas of specific communities. While they may be among the most visible gangs, they are not the major focus of Alberta police. The province’s law enforcement agencies are more interested in the criminal organizations that control the bulk of the drug trade in the province. They also focus on violent gangs engaged in open warfare on city streets.

More than 900 gangs operate in Canada, according to police intelligence, and 83 of them operate in Alberta—up from 54 in 2008. (According to the Alberta government, “gangs” include criminal organizations, or “groups of two or more individuals” who conspire within an ongoing network to break the law, and street gangs, defined as “more or less structured groups of adolescents and young adults” who use intimidation and violence to commit criminal acts.) Gang expert Cathy Prowse, a University of Calgary criminologist and former Calgary police officer, says the top criminal organizations have fixed, close-knit memberships, are largely invisible and handle most of the importation and distribution of drugs in Alberta. “The street gangs are one rung below and will always rival one another for affiliation with organized crime,” she explains. “There are only a fixed number of spots. The shooting starts with peripheral associates, each group hoping to destabilize the other. Violence is the way to preferential affiliation.”

Edmonton criminologist Bill Pitt says the Hells Angels still rule the roost in Canadian organized crime while street level gangs fight over the crumbs. For the most part, they fly under local enforcement radar. “There are so many layers of retailers before you get to the Hells Angels and the other biker gangs,” says Pitt, who teaches at Grant MacEwan University.

Many ethnic gangs still exist—Indo-Canadian, Asian, Jamaican, Somalian. Pitt says these are a product of Canadian immigration policy. “Canadians are notorious for marginalizing their immigrants,” he contends. And while Aboriginal gangs are prolific in Western Canada, “they’re at the lower end of the food chain when it comes to sophistication.”

In Edmonton the police gang unit has files on about 50 different groups. “We have 15 to 20 groups we keep track of, who’s associated with them and a bit of their hierarchy, but I’m sure there are a lot we don’t know about,” says Staff Sergeant Darren Derko, who directs the 35-member gang unit out of a small, second-floor office at Edmonton’s downtown police headquarters. In 2007, the unit released the names of 10 street gangs active in the city. The list included, along with the Hells Angels, the Alberta Warriors, the Crazy Dragons, the Crazy Dragon Killers, GTC (Get the Cash), Indian Posse, North End Jamaicans, Redd Alert, Southside Boys, West End Jamaicans and White Boy Posse.

Police in Alberta are reluctant to disclose a list of the gangs in their jurisdiction, and the Calgary Police Service’s Eiriksson won’t even refer to the “criminal organizations” by name, because he doesn’t want to give them credibility in the eyes of Calgary’s youth. “When they’re in our streets killing each other and shooting innocent people, we don’t give them any validation.”

Derko says it’s getting more difficult to tell who’s who because many of the people they arrest don’t identify as belonging to a gang. “They don’t give themselves distinctive names anymore,” says Derko. One explanation may be a federal law that now makes it illegal to belong to a criminal organization. But probably the biggest reason, say police, is that gangs no longer want notoriety. “The groups we deal with are low-key because they don’t want us to know who they are, who they associate with and what activities they’re involved in,” says Eiriksson. “They quite often blend right in and thrive on that anonymity.”

Gang-related homicides are difficult to solve because gang members don’t co-operate with police, and witnesses are often afraid or unwilling to come forward. This came to a head in Edmonton in January when a homicide detective berated the Somali community for not co-operating with police investigating a fatal New Year’s Eve shooting of a Somali youth at a club. The city’s acting police chief apologized to angry community leaders, and vowed to keep detectives working on the unsolved homicides of more than 30 young Somali men in Alberta in the past five years. The low “clearance rate” is not unusual. Out of 77 gang homicides committed in Alberta between 2002 and 2006, more than 60 per cent remain unsolved, according to a 2009 report by the Calgary Police Service. The national clearance rate for gang crimes in 2006 was only 45 per cent, compared to 80 per cent for non-gang killings.

Police say Edmonton and Calgary had the second- and third- highest gang homicide rates in Canada in 2006 and 2007. The cities dropped to seventh and ninth respectively in 2009 when total Alberta gang homicides dropped to 13 (from 35 in 2008), but even then one in five homicides was gang-related.

The government says gangs flourish in a community of indifference. “Too many individuals believe gangs are ‘not my problem’ or that gang crime happens ‘somewhere else,’ ” the province announced in a November 2010 report called “Alberta Gang Reduction Strategy.”

Government and police have recently taken initiatives to improve the way they tackle organized crime, including a major restructuring of the law enforcement machinery. The first changes occurred in 1996 when the province formed an independent body called the Criminal Intelligence Service of Alberta (CISA) to collect data on criminal organizations and provide it to municipal police agencies, Canadian Border Services, gaming and liquor officials and federal and provincial corrections agencies. “Before, there wasn’t a clear understanding of what organized crime looked like in the province,” says CISA director David Maze. “There was a need for an agency to look outside its own backyard and get a better understanding of the criminal element across the province.”

In 2006, the province established another independent enforcement initiative, called Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams (ALERT), complete with its own civilian board of directors, to take action based on intelligence gathered on organized crime groups and other serious criminals such as child abusers, sexual predators and fugitives. With escalating gang violence in Calgary and Edmonton, ALERT was expanded in 2009 to nearly 400 people, most of whom—more than 300—were funded from provincial government initiatives. All members of the unit are seconded from partner agencies for a minimum of two years.

Inspector Jim Kennedy, ALERT’s director of intelligence, says his organization is unique. No other province has a central body for the oversight and governance of integrated provincial policing, although Manitoba is developing a similar agency. Since its inception, ALERT has laid 6,200 drug-related charges against 2,500 people, seized more than $4-million in cash and taken 300 firearms and 700 kg of drugs off the streets. But there have been lots of targets out there.

Maze says gang activity in Alberta spiked in 2006 when the province was rolling in an oil and gas bonanza and the economy was booming. “Basically, criminals outside of Alberta came here for the same reason everybody else did—the ‘Alberta Advantage,’” says Maze. “There was a lot of money to be made and lots of criminal markets.”

Law enforcement officials blame the federal Corrections Service for the spread of gangs across the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Maze says CSC officials began to have a problem with large populations of gang members in prisons such as Stony Mountain in Manitoba, and attempted to deal with it by dispersing them to prisons across the country. “What they did was educate other local criminals that were incarcerated… and build new gangs,” he says. Soon police were encountering Alberta Warriors, an offshoot of the Manitoba Warriors.

Maze says some of today’s organized crime groups are sophisticated and others are basically opportunists. But he says there’s been increased involvement in white-collar crimes because the profits are huge and the chances of violence and apprehension are greatly reduced. He says gangs are recruiting tech-savvy teens for identity thefts, credit and debit card scams, and even mortgage and real estate fraud. Sentences for these are not nearly as heavy as for drug crimes.

There’s also a boom in counterfeiting—not money, but goods such as appliances. Gangs also enlist people to steal specific items they then sell on the Internet. Other groups operate theft rings that take advance “orders” for specific items—everything from snowmobiles to tractors—and send out operatives to steal them. “The gang members shooting each other and injuring people are just the tip of the iceberg,” says the CISA director.

Police attempt to rein in gangs by monitoring their activities and gathering information to justify charging or, if applicable, deporting members. “We create an environment where these groups don’t feel comfortable and can’t operate,” says Maze. This fall in Calgary, the province will launch TALON, a controversial real-time law enforcement database. Eventually all 12 municipal police services in the province as well as First Nations police will be linked to a database containing records of all public interactions with police. “We’ll make it more difficult for the criminal to move around the province and commit offences, says Maze. “It will be one of the most significant changes in law enforcement in Alberta—a huge benefit to officer safety and public security.”

Ayaaz Janmohamed, executive director of the provincial Solicitor General’s information technology branch, says police currently have to individually contact each municipal police agency in the province to determine if a specific gang member was involved in illegal activities there. TALON enables a police officer stopping a vehicle for a traffic infraction in Edmonton to instantly access information about the driver’s history—everything from traffic tickets to outstanding shoplifting charges. “Information is gold for them,” Janmohamed says. “The concept is to have a single source of the truth.” Unlike the RCMP-operated Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC), however, which contains only verified information such as criminal convictions, TALON captures “speculative” information about suspects, including unproven allegations, investigation theories, details of 9-1-1 calls—virtually any of a citizen’s contacts with police—and this has attracted criticism from defence lawyers and civil liberties advocates.

Tom Engel, an Edmonton lawyer who represented 26 of the accused, says the massive investigation did little to stop the flow of drugs. Younger and more violent criminals took over the drug trade in the city and violence became even worse. “Out of that came a gang called the Crazy Dragons, and those guys didn’t mind violence at all,” he says. Engel questions the value of enforcement and suggests the decriminalization of illegal drugs would remove gangs’ main incentive. “I don’t think there’s any information that any of these specialized units that cost millions of dollars are effective at all in controlling the use of drugs.”

Police concede they will never totally shut down gangs or the drug trade. “You’ll always have gangs,” Derko says. “We’ve laid some pretty serious charges and put gang leaders in jail, but the group gets a new hierarchy and they keep going.” But he says it is necessary for police to keep the pressure on. “If we didn’t, how rampant would this be?” he says. “We might not be able to stop them, but if we keep them down so they can’t grow, that has an impact. The more money they can generate, the more power they have.”

When police arrest and courts convict gang members, it puts a strain on the prison system. Terry Garnett, director of the Alberta Correctional Service intelligence unit, says the province now posts a security intelligence officer in all corrections facilities to keep tabs on gang members, who make up 7 per cent of the prison population. He says more than 200 inmates in 25–30 gangs are in eight provincial facilities at any one time.

Another 250 are in federal institutions in Alberta, and another 100 are in local communities under federal supervision, says April Morris, a spokesperson for the Correctional Service of Canada. She says about 2,000 gang members or associates are in federal jails and 415 of those are identified as affiliated with Aboriginal gangs. Morris says nearly 25 per cent of all incarcerated gang members are serving sentences for drug-related crimes at a cost to taxpayers of more than $300 a day. The average annual cost per inmate in 2008 was $106,583.

Garnett says that when provincial inmates are admitted they’re asked to reveal, for their own safety, whether they’re affiliated with any gangs. “We know who they get along with and try to make sure they don’t cross paths in the corrections facilities,” he says. But gang members sometimes attack gang members. The family of one is suing the province and Alberta Corrections for nearly $11-million for a vicious May 31, 2006, attack at the Edmonton Remand Centre that left the victim severely disabled.

Garnett says the influence of gangs in prison is directly related to how many members of the same gang are in a jail. “The minute they show that they’re trying to control a unit, we take measures to prevent that.” Correctional officers say the increase in the number of gang members in provincial jails brings with it a heightened risk for prison staff as well. Some are concerned that risk will increase in the new 2,000-inmate Edmonton Remand Centre, currently under construction, because guards will be mingling with prisoners rather than watching them from relative safety behind shatterproof glass windows.

But Alberta’s strategy against gangs is not limited to locking them up in prisons. Premier Ed Stelmach launched a safe communities initiative following his 2008 election victory, and followed up in December 2010 with a comprehensive anti-gang strategy. The four-pronged plan focuses on awareness, prevention, intervention and enforcement. It says the suppression of gangs must be led at the community level. “Traditional law enforcement has a vital role to play in stamping out criminal activity, but more arrests alone will not solve the gang problem,” says the 50-page document. “Instead we must take a comprehensive, long-term approach—one that systematically reduces the ranks of gangs by stopping the recruitment of new gang members.”

With a multi-ministry approach, the province has invested more than $500-million to fund police, prosecutors and community programs, says former justice minister Alison Redford. “That’s one of the reasons we’ve been successful,” she says. “We didn’t just implement policies. We put in a fair amount of money.”

The province also passed a series of anti-crime bills aimed particularly at gangs—legislation that empowers police to remove gang members from bars, seize body armour and impound armoured vehicles. They also passed a bill to establish a witness protection program for gang members who testify for the Crown, and a bill that makes it mandatory for medical personnel to report stabbing and gunshot wounds to police. But the most controversial legislation so far has been a revised Victims Restitution and Compensation Payment Act that enables police to seize cash, property, vehicles and other assets they believe were used in crimes or are linked to the proceeds of crime.

“Police have told us it’s a very successful tool,” says Redford. By the end of 2010, police in Alberta had seized $20.9-million worth of property or proceeds from crime and put more than $2.5-million back into the community for programs to support immigrants, women and at-risk youth.

But this tool comes with a price, say critics, arguing it gives the province too much power. Janet Keeping, president of the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership and co-founder of the Calgary Civil Liberties Association, says that there’s little evidence from other jurisdictions that “civil forfeiture” laws reduce crime, and she notes that the law violates the provincial Bill of Rights.

Brian Hurley, president of the Edmonton Criminal Trial Lawyers Association, says the government is focusing its energy in the wrong places. He says poverty and child abandonment are key factors in kids joining gangs, but the government still puts the bulk of its resources into enforcement rather than social programs and support systems for at-risk children.

“Upper class suburban kids don’t join gangs,” he notes. “Gang members come from disadvantaged backgrounds. You rarely have a gang member who has even one parent who gives a crap about him. Kids need to be wanted and need at least one parent to take care of them, but none of that makes a good sound bite.”

Chris Hay, executive director of the John Howard Society of Alberta, warns that youth crime is linked closely to demographics, and the number of at-risk youth is expected to increase over the next decade. He says the birthrate was up 5 per cent in 2004 over 2003 and that means more at-risk teens by 2017. He says a strong correlation between fetal alcohol syndrome and delinquency makes it logical to spend money now on counselling for drug- and alcohol-addicted women to reduce the number of FAS births. “If a young person gets into crime and doesn’t get out of it, we’ll spend millions on that person,” he notes. “There’s all that enforcement and the cost of locking them up in jail. But it’s difficult for governments to step up and invest now so we can have a brighter future 20 years from now.” Hay says other strategies aren’t working. “If we think crime is a law enforcement problem, we’re doomed to failure. Gangs are a community problem.” He says, however, the government is on the right track with its investment in community programs that support youth and their families.

Some critics say policies that aim to keep people locked up just ensure an infinite supply of new gangs. Inmates scheme with other inmates with technical skills and contacts to set up new criminal enterprises when they’re released. “The crews today were made up in jail,” says Edmonton youth outreach worker Wallis Kendal. “They meet in jail.” And once in a gang, he says, it’s extremely difficult to get out. “These kids have no other way to make an income,” he says. “I have a lot of guys and gals who would get out of gangs, but they have no way to live.”

The Native Counselling Service of Alberta (NCSA), which operates the minimum-security federal institution in downtown Edmonton known as the Stan Daniels Healing Centre, has run a Warrior program aimed at curbing violence for nearly a decade. Patti LaBoucane-Benson, NCSA’s research director, says it’s possible to help people get out of gangs, but they must be motivated. “We can’t do it for them,” she says. “We facilitate a process where they do what they need to get out of gangs. We can’t make people heal, but we try to create a safe environment where they can begin to contemplate this stuff.”

Solicitor General’s office spokesperson Christine Nardella says the province doesn’t run any programs aimed at getting gang members out of gangs, but it funds several aimed at steering youth away from gangs. In late 2010, the province allocated $8.2-million to 14 agencies with a track record of supporting vulnerable youth. One youth intervention program that received $1.5-million under the Safe Communities Strategy is Pohna: Keepers of the Fire. Pohna director Karen Erickson says the program was launched in 2006 at the request of Edmonton police to reach out to youth aged 11–17 at risk of being involved or already involved in criminal and gang activity. Some teens were wearing gang colours and modelling themselves after Los Angeles gangs with names such as the Bloodz, the Blood Set Soldiers, King Pin Blood and the Blood Tie Family.

“We build on the strengths of kids, rather than their problems,” she says. A critical component of the program requires youths to bring key adults in their lives—a parent or guardian or relative or teacher—for support. “We try to ensure they don’t fall between the cracks,” she says. “We develop a relationship in which they feel valued, that someone is there for them, that they have somewhere to turn, that they are not alone.”

She says the support system sticks with the youths even if they falter and end up charged with additional criminal offences. It shows them a better way and helps establish a support network to get there. “They want to stay out of trouble and to stop drinking and doing drugs,” she says. “They want to move away from the group that gets them into trouble, but making all these things happen isn’t easy. A 14-year-old can’t do it alone. Will alone can’t make changes occur.”

Kendal, an outreach worker who’s been stabbed and beaten in his line of work, isn’t optimistic such programs will be successful without housing support and employment opportunities for youth. “Talk is cheap,” he says bluntly. “If you want to get a 16-year-old off gangs, you have to give him an alternative that means something.” He says programs to help prepare youth for employment have inflexible hours and pay only $1,000 a month, which nobody can live on.

 Jesse (not his real name) is coming to terms with that. A former gang leader in Edmonton, he lived the life of a high roller, pulling in several thousand dollars a day. He had credibility on the street and he had power. He could give an order and people would be beaten. But a few stints in prison for home invasion and drug charges got him thinking. He was tired of always looking over his shoulder for other gangs or the police. He was tired of hurting people to collect drug debts or just because they were from a rival gang.

In jail, he saw 50-year-old gang members trapped in that lifestyle and decided it wasn’t the life he wanted. “The fact that I didn’t have a Christmas, I didn’t have a birthday, was depressing. I didn’t know every day if I would live or die. I was angry. Days were stressful—always living by the drugs and the money. I always wanted to change, but change is so hard.”

He reached for help through a NCSA program called Quest for Success, a predecessor of Pohna. It took two tries before he finally managed to cut all ties to gangs and drugs. Going back to school and finding a job were nearly impossible. Kendal got him into drug rehab and his counsellors helped him get a job. But it was a long process. Jesse had never lived a “normal” life. His mother and other relatives were drug dealers and users. He’d sold drugs since he was 13. He had to turn away from his gang buddies, from the money and the power.

Jesse, now 25, has been clean and sober for two years. He’s still going to school, has a part-time job and works with other young people trying to wean themselves off gangs. He says he would never have got this far without the programs. “Those supports are needed when someone’s trying to get out of that lifestyle,” he says. “It’s almost like teaching a baby how to walk.”

He’s enthusiastic about a new program called Uncensored, run out of the U of A. “It’s outside the box,” explains Jesse. The program enlists youth to counsel counsellors in techniques to help kids like themselves. Similar to Pohna, it gives youth power to change the way things are.

“This program is a groundbreaker,” Kendal adds. “If there’s going to be a change, it will come because the kids themselves will be the driving force.”