At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no one left to keep you informed. In nearly 23 months, at least 210 journalists have been killed by the Israeli army in this territory, according to Reporters Without Borders. I join with more than 250 media outlets across the world, to condemn these crimes. We call on the Israeli authorities to allow independent access for the international press in the Gaza Strip.

Note: Due to an absence from writing here over the summer, I have paused paid subscriptions for at least the next couple of months. I have a few more stories I hope to publish in the next month or so that I’m really eager to share.

Kamloops RCMP is facing a lawsuit over a 2021 incident in which officers allegedly used excessive force and intentionally hit a 15-year-old with an unmarked police car while he fled on his bicycle.

William Rossetti-Matthews filed the lawsuit earlier this month citing two separate assaults during the same incident, beginning with an officer hitting him with an unmarked car without his lights or sirens on.

The lawsuit also claims officers used excessive force while the plaintiff was on the ground and injured from the first assault.

The incident was investigated by the Independent Investigations Office, which recommended charges against the officer.

But the BC Prosecution Service (BCPS) declined to approve charges earlier this year, despite saying prosecutors would “be able to establish that the force used to commit the assault caused injuries that amount to an aggravated assault.”

The incident appeared to be a case of police chasing the wrong suspect based on his clothes. The lawsuit claims Rossetti-Matthews was kicked in the head by an officer while he was down and left without medical attention for his injuries while he cried out for an ambulance.

The prosecution’s statement noted that the use of a police car to hit the plaintiff at 23 km/h was “likely to cause grievous bodily harm or death,” and that could only be justified under a number of criteria. Still, the BCPS concluded that prosecutors likely would not be able to disprove any of those factors.

However, a civil court case presents an easier route for the plaintiff to succeed than prosecutors face in criminal court. Rather than needing to prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt,” civil cases are decided on a balance of probabilities.

The decision not to pursue charges came after the BCPS approved charges against three different Kamloops RCMP officers in 2024. They include two facing violent criminal charges and one facing charges under the Motor Vehicles Act involving an incident that left one person dead.

Neither the BCPS statement nor the lawsuit identify the officers involved.

A theft and a robbery

On Dec. 3, 2021, police received two calls police received about a theft at a liquor store and a robbery at another store. One of the suspects in the liquor store theft was described as wearing white, tie-dyed pants, and one of the suspects in the robbery was described as wearing a black hoodie.

Shortly afterwards, Rossetti-Matthews was seen in white, tie-dyed pants and a black hoodie half a kilometre from the scene of the two incidents.

Though Rossetti-Matthews was just 15 at the time, officers claimed he looked like an adult with his hood up on his bicycle.

Both the BCPS analysis and the lawsuit note that the officer who hit the plaintiff in an unmarked police car didn’t turn his sirens or lights on, but the car behind him did.

The officers chased the plaintiff into a park and drove at speeds of up to 65 km/h in the park’s 20 km/h zone. According to the BCPS analysis, the officer was down to 23 km/h by the time he hit the plaintiff.

The two accounts diverge when the officer hit Rossetti-Matthews.

According to the BCPS, he “fell off the bicycle and although injured, immediately stood up after the collision.”

The lawsuit, however, tells another story.

“The plaintiff and his bicycle went under the front of the police vehicle, pushing the bicycle handlebar into the plaintiff’s abdomen, causing a perforation,” the lawsuit reads.

“After being knocked to the ground, [the officer in the unmarked car] kicked the plaintiff in the head and plac[ed] his knee down heavily on the plaintiff’s hip and back while shouting aggressively. He then handcuffed the plaintiff and placed him in the back seat of the police vehicle, all while the plaintiff cried out, begging for an ambulance.”

Rossetti-Matthews’ lawyer didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Bind to explain the apparent discrepancies between the accounts.

The lawsuit claims the officers knew Rossetti-Matthews wasn’t the person they were looking for and that he was a minor while he cried out for medical attention.

And it claims the officers breached their duty of care to the plaintiff by leaving him injured and handcuffed in the back of the car while they reviewed the video evidence from the dashcam and discussed whether the officer exceeded the park’s 20 km/h speed limit.

Only after his injury bled through his clothes did police call for an ambulance, according to the lawsuit.

Charges denied

The BCPS found the officers involved would be able to raise defences in court that prosecutors wouldn’t have a substantial likelihood of disproving.

In particular, it noted that Rossetti-Matthews had fled from police, that police believed he was armed with a gun and that, although police had encircled the park, it would be challenging to stop Rossetti-Matthews on his bicycle by less violent means, calling the police car a “minimally violent intervention tactic, in these specific circumstances.”

The BCPS also declined to file dangerous driving charges against the officer who hit Rossetti-Matthews, despite the officer driving up to 65 km/h in a 20 km/h zone without police lights on.

Prosecutors said there were no bystanders and the officer only drove at that speed for about 20 seconds before slowing to 33 km/h and then to 23 km/h when they made contact with the bicycle.

When reached for comment, the Kamloops RCMP only said that the Department of Justice “will review the notice of civil claim and a statement of defence for the RCMP will be issued and registered through the appropriate court process.”

As a journalist pursuing accountability around systems of power, one of the most important tools is freedom-of-information legislation — laws that in jurisdictions across the country require public bodies to disclose public documents, albeit with limitations.

These are often documents that would never otherwise be released to the public, and some of the most damning investigations have come as a result of requests under FOI — or ATIP, as they are referred to federally — requests.

If you’ve read this newsletter for any amount of time, you will have seen some of my own work resulting from FOI requests.

I’ve uncovered how the housing crisis has impacted voluntary treatment admissions, how the Housing Accelerator fund is (or isn’t) accelerating housing, and what the provincial government’s own internal reporting was saying about decriminalization — contrary to the public discourse the province bowed to.

It’s also a challenging system to navigate — even as a full-time journalist who is paid to be able to navigate the system, it requires having time to think of wording for your request, working with FOI analysts to narrow or refine your request, tracking requests that go beyond their due date, pestering public bodies that blow past their legislated deadlines, dealing with extension requests, and if you’re really dedicated, filing quasi-legal complaints about fees, redactions and more with your jurisdiction’s information commissioner.

And that isn’t even getting to the point of going through potentially hundreds of pages of documents to search for information that is of interest.

One person, however, has proven a skilled FOI-er, and he’s using his skills to hold his local police accountable — something he does in his spare time.

I spoke to Stephen Harrison about his work as a police accountability advocate, and his advice for how you, too, can hold your authorities to account.

Harrison has been active with his blog Needs More Spikes since 2017, initially looking at hostile architecture, including looking at BC Housing’s collaboration with Victoria police around using fencing to keep unhoused people away from their property, which brought him into the police accountability sphere.

His expertise with FOIs isn’t a result of training per se — he formerly worked with independent MLAs in legislature, and got practice with filing FOI requests that way, and he’s been doing it ever since.

Here’s some of the advice he had for how you can be active in accountability for your local authorities, be they police, school districts or other public bodies. This will mostly be directly taken from his own words, with my own words here and there in italics.

His words have been lightly edited for length and flow. Each section should be read as a collage of statements, rather than as a single statement. Our conversation often returned to the same issue at different times, and those excerpts have been compiled together.

How to find FOI ideas

I’ll go to the police board meeting each month. And that is where you can find lots of ideas, potentially, for FOIs. Like, here’s something odd in the agenda, which probably nobody’s ever going to hear about again, unless you ask more questions.

Or even you can look at an agenda package and see if there's things in there that interest you. If there’s something you think is a problem, or something that you haven't seen any public reporting on, you can always file an FOI about it.

I’m looking for things that they would never willingly report on themselves, but where I know they have that information. So for example, the street checks FOIs years ago, I knew they were collecting data on street checks. We knew street checks were racist. White people like data before they take action on that — I know Desmond Cole has a good quote around that, that white people need the stats before they’ll do anything.

And we knew that was out there, but the police were never going to report on it themselves.

VicPD has a big transparency section on their website. It’s all stuff that they want to put up there. It’s their PRIME stats and police calls and things like that.

They’re never going to put up use of force data. They’ll never do that willingly, and the province doesn’t even report on things like vascular neck restraints.

The province collects these huge data sets from each municipal police body every year, and they publish some summary data, but they don’t publish all of it. So I requested that data and was able to show, here’s how often VicPD is beating people in handcuffs, and all these sorts of things.

You can always FOI your FOI. I don’t really recommend that, only in a niche situation. I don’t think it would necessarily be useful or appropriate for every FOI you do.

But if you get a response back that you think is disingenuous or it’s a non-response, but you know full well that they almost certainly have records, you could FOI the processing of requests and see who are they engaging with, how are records collected, was there an internal panic? What went on?

So I don’t think that works for, or even makes sense for, every FOI. But if you get something back and you’re pretty sure something has gone on between the time you sent it and the time you’re sent back, that might be worth doing.

That’s the only way I was ever able to get street check stats out of VicPD. I asked for their stats, and they responded that they were not able to pull the stats. I FOI’ed the internal response to my FOI, they had pulled the stats, they just didn’t want to send them because they didn’t think they exactly spoke to how I’d phrased my request.

I’d asked for the number of individuals street checked, and they’re like, “One individual could have a street check more than once, so therefore this stat is not responsive,” or something like that. It wasn’t a problem for any other police department.

Since our conversation, which took place in April, I messaged Stephen to mention I finally got around to putting this together, and to let him know the format it would be published in, and he added one additional piece of advice on finding FOI ideas:

One of the best places to get FOI ideas is from other people's FOIs. E.g, my street check FOIs and analysis built directly off the work of Black Lives Matter Edmonton; my FOI on VicPD retirements while under investigation was based on FOIs by CBC's Taylor Lambert's FOIs of Calgary and Edmonton police. If you see a successful FOI in another jurisdiction, it can be worthwhile trying to replicate it where you live.

Advice on crafting an FOI request

If you want to FOI something, be as specific as you can, if you can. If you saw in an agenda they referenced a new policy or a report and it’s named, ask for that report by name, or that policy by name.

That’s your best bet for an FOI. You don’t have to be that specific. You can ask for emails around an issue or about that report or policy. But the narrower you can be the better.

So don’t ask for all emails in history about Issue X. Maybe you only care about the last week between these two school trustees or something like that.

One tip — and especially for police, I’ve found some success — if there’s a press release about an issue, you might have more luck asking for emails that went into the creation of the press release, in response to the press release, than you might elsewhere. You might see a bit of how that came to be and glean a bit more information there.

You want to make sure you’re not asking for every person in a public body to look for their emails because then you’re not going to get anywhere. You’re going to get a huge fee assessment, or they’re just going to tell you to go away.

You could look at existing or past FOIs — there’s the Secret Canada database that would have past FOI language, and then the province has their FOI database. You can look at how past FOIs have been crafted, and try to go off that.

The Investigative Journalism Foundation has their own database as well.

How often are FOIs useful? And what to do with it?

I think lots are and some just aren’t. Maybe it’s around 50%. Sometimes it can just be hard to put things together, stitch a narrative together. So I’ve definitely fallen into the trap of FOI-ing something and thinking, “Oh, there’s probably a story here. But what I really need is this other piece; I’ll FOI that. And I’ll FOI this other agency.” And now, instead of having done one small story about something interesting, I’ve done no stories about what is now an overwhelming monster.

The other thing I would say, which I haven’t really perfected, is if you want to hold a body accountable, you can do what I do: you could blast something out on social media. If you want it to be noticed more, you could probably develop some sort of media strategy or send it to a specific journalist in advance of doing that [social media blast] or send it to a bunch of journalists after you've done that, try to get it noticed a bit more if you want. I don’t often do that, but sometimes I do.

Time spent on FOI requests

The amount of time spent on any given FOI request depends on the request itself:

Street checks was a big data set, lots of tables and charts and things, and that was probably hundreds of hours, I would guess — at least 100 hours, surely.

It was all the municipal police departments, and chasing that all down. I think VicPD I had to hassle and maybe appeal to get data out of them eventually. And then yeah, a lot of the data at that time was sent in paper copies. Then I was transcribing and then data checking.

And then doing the analysis and learning more about Excel and all of these things. It felt higher stakes than some of my things that I’m dashing off, like I should actually get all this stuff right.

It does take time. If you have a good idea for an FOI, you could probably dash that off in five minutes.

Beyond that, an applicant may need to spend time on filing a complaint with or requesting a review from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, and that can be far more time consuming:

If they’re not responding, and then you have to craft an appeal and get that OIPC appeal package, that’s not insignificant. You’re probably going to spend half an hour putting that together at least, like, here’s all my bullets and timeline, and here’s my email exchange with them, and that’s a lot of work.

FOIPPA violations to expect

Most common is definitely blown deadlines. There’s a law that says when these records are due, and sometimes they’ll just blow right past that. And if you don’t reach out, you potentially may never hear back. … They still have you over a barrel. They have the records, and even if you appeal, which can then take ages, although the deemed refusal* appeals, they seem to move a bit faster.

The act includes a duty to assist, and I would say they botch that all the time. VicPD, I won’t hear back from them on a request until the day it’s due, and then they’ll send me a response, which says “No records,” or some agencies will wait the whole 30 days or whatever, and then provide you with a fee estimate, an outrageous fee estimate, whereas really, it could be, and should be, a back-and-forth.

I got a $50,000 fee estimate from VPD. They must have known I wasn’t going to pay them $50,000. They, I would say, had a duty to assist and reach out and say, “Hey, let’s work with you and narrow this request.” And then there was further violation of the duty to assist, where I was offering how I would suggest we narrow this request, and then they just didn’t respond.

I get that from VPD more than anywhere else, I would say. I don’t know what that is, or what that’s about, but they seem to do that a lot.

Harrison also points to privacy being used as a reason to redact information:

I have not tested it yet, but police seem to be applying more heavily their personal information redaction, so just not giving reports back at all.

I know there’s personal information in police reports. I don’t care about the personal information in police reports. I don’t want to know somebody’s name, I don’t want to know where they live.

But they’ve taken to applying it to the whole report. So even the narrative details. It could be a random report — I don’t know anything about this person, I’m never going to be able to tie narrative information you give me to any individual. But they’re saying, “No, it’s all personal information because it was gained during a police investigation.”

Part of the appeal I’m working on today, I’m going to try to get the OIPC to test that as well, because the VicPD has been doing that as well. I’ve noticed a big shift there in what I used to get from VicPD in terms of police reports and what they’re giving me now, which is just nothing, or essentially nothing.

If you file an FOI request for emails about a particular subject, some agencies may try to get away with redacting parts of those emails that aren’t about that particular subject:

Years ago, the privacy commissioner said no, you can’t do that, you’ve got to give the whole thing. But definitely SD61 tried to do that, I think VicPD tried to do that. And then you have to tell them off and, actually, you can’t do these things.

OIPC successes to learn from

Harrison notes that he’s been able to make use of “deemed refusal” complaints — if a public body misses its legislated 30-business-day deadline, the OIPC deems that public body to have refused to disclose the records, and you can file a complaint to bring them into compliance with the law:

Sometimes the OIPC intervention can tip over to actually getting a records response, whereas they might not have otherwise. Maybe it’s harder to quantify, but I think it’s more successful than now, where if you just left it, you probably would never get the records.

Sometimes you can get — I think I’ve only had this once, maybe twice — a consent order, where the OIPC gets the public body to sign that “We’re going to provide the records by this date.” And the one time I’ve had that happen, it did work out. I don’t know how one gets to that, but I’ve had it happen once.

I have no insight as to why it was in that case and not in other cases, but I enjoyed it. When I apply for deemed refusals these days, I think I mention in my application [that] I’m seeking a consent order, or whatever it is.

Responding to extension requests

Public bodies have 30 business days to respond to an FOI request (federal ATIP requests have a 30-calendar-day timeline), but while it’s not uncommon for public bodies to blow past deadlines, it’s also common for them to ask for an extension — or to unilaterally take an extension in certain circumstances in which the legislation allows it.

Should you grant it, or not?

I would say it depends. If I’ve got a lot going on, whether it’s this type of work, or whatever it is in my life, and I know full well that I’m not going to be doing this in the next 30 days, I might just not respond to that.

Usually, I will respond and just say, on principle, “No, I do not consent.” Or if the option is there for that 30-day extension, I would refuse that every time, unless there are compelling reasons that I can’t be bothered.

And if they blow a deadline, I usually won’t go straight to the OIPC. I’d set my own new arbitrary deadline, like, “If I don’t hear from you by end of the week, I’ll go to the OIPC.” And I think with the new OIPC appeal process anyway you have to show that you’ve done a little back and forth before you go to them.

So I would say it varies, but I would only consent to an appeal if I can’t be bothered to say I don’t.

What needs to happen to improve FOI accessibility?

If the agencies were actually abiding by the law and responding appropriately and on time, that would immediately make things more accessible. If they were playing by what should be the agreed-upon set of rules — it is the law — that would already make it much more accessible.

It shouldn’t be incumbent on somebody to know that you can’t redact non-responsive records. That’s a very niche thing to know that there was an order 10 years ago that they can’t do that. Who’s going to know that? Or that they shouldn’t be charging you as a commercial applicant, or that you can get this $50,000 fee down to $100 without too much work.

When New Westminster PD said, “We’re shutting down FOI for the summer because we’re on vacation” or whatever, I’m sure the reason they were doing that is they probably just had one person assigned to FOI. But that in itself is a choice. And New Westminster PD, like all police departments, are incredibly well resourced. They do not need more money to do FOI. They have the money if they want to appropriately resource their FOI shops.

They could be doing that already, so it’s a choice not to.

“I have done nothing wrong. This is no joke. This is me on my last fucking nerve. Plz for the love of god or anything right get me off this unit or transfer me plz have a fucken heart. I don’t deserve this.”

That was the second complaint, filed April 22, 2017 by an inmate who was put in separate confinement at the Okanagan Correctional Centre.

A day later, the inmate filed another complaint.

“I’m writing you this in hope you can help me. I have been asking for help for the last 12 days,” it begins, with a large section in the middle redacted.

“I can’t take this shit at all anymore. I’m going to fucking lose my shit. I’m seriously going to have a mental breakdown. The only way it’s going to stop is to put me on [redacted] unit or [redacted]. This is no joke, I’m telling you the truth. Plz help me.”

Separate confinement has a few different names. Sometimes it is referred to as segregation — but it is most commonly known as solitary confinement.

The Corrections Act Regulation provides a handful of instances in which confinement can be used. Sections 17-19 concern safety issues, allowing short-term confinement of up to 72 hours on grounds that a person is in danger or is endangering others; long-term confinement of up to 15 days, with the allowances for an indefinite number of extensions; or voluntary confinement.

And sections 24 and 27 of the regulation allow segregation pending disciplinary hearing or as discipline following a hearing.

For the inmate confined in April 2017, the authorities gave a peculiar reason.

“As we only have 1 PC unit, you must remain separately confined,” the supervisor wrote in remarks also dated April 22 that year attached to the inmate’s second complaint, referring to the protective custody unit.

This is then reiterated a day later in response to the third complaint: “As you have been told before, there is no other placement option for you for the time being. You will be informed as soon as another option becomes available.”

As I worked on a series about the jail, which was published in April 2018, Prisoners Legal Services told me that OCC had been using segregation units — or similar mental health observation units — as overflow for the single protective custody unit.

Data obtained through a freedom-of-information request showed the use of segregation at OCC had been increasing over time, from approximately 11% of the jail’s population in May 2017 to 12.5% in December that year, and then again to around 14% in January 2018.

PLS said it had received three separate complaints about inmates being separately confined because of space issues, but when I reached out to BC Corrections, the government outright denied it.

“There is currently — and always has been — enough space to house inmates classified to protective custody at OCC,” the agency told me in an emailed statement.

“It should be noted that there are some cases where an inmate could be at risk even in the protective custody population. In these cases, inmates may choose to be separately confined from the inmate population on a voluntary basis, or they may be transferred to another centre.”

The April 2017 complaints, which proved that statement false, obtained through a freedom-of-information request which had been long delayed due to a dispute over fees, would only arrive in August 2019, more than a year after I’d stopped working in Penticton.

Fast forward another seven years, and the provincial government would not only not deny appropriating confinement units — it would openly talk about it in a press release.

This time, it would be under the guise of “treatment.”

The province announced last month that it was working to renovate spaces in the Surrey Pretrial Services Centre to accommodate involuntary treatment for inmates at the jail. But in the meantime, it would reserve 10 spaces in the segregation unit to house those forced into treatment.

The government’s apparent comfort in making that announcement may be the result of years of tough-on-crime narratives desensitizing people to the idea of forgoing people’s rights and denying the evidence that involuntary treatment is not particularly productive, and that it can, in fact, be damaging in a number of ways.

After all, it’s been years since the BC Supreme Court had ruled that indefinite segregation in federal prisons was unconstitutional — a decision that had only just come out in 2018.

Still, not everyone is comfortable with the announcement.

“Nobody thinks it’s a good idea,” Dave Webb, a board member with the Surrey Union of Drug Users, told Filter.

“How is putting somebody in segregation good for somebody who’s already mentally unstable?” he asked. “In segregation, you’re going to be there with your own thoughts. And that’s probably the worst thing that you can have at that period of time.”

This would seem to be borne out by the complaints lodged against the Okanagan Correctional Centre in 2017, with the complainant making comments like “have a fucken heart I don’t deserve this,” and “I can’t take this shit at all anymore. I’m going to fucking lose my shit. I’m seriously going to have a mental breakdown.”

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A little over a month ago, I had the idea of doing a series of conversations with folks about policies that we should be talking about in the election, but which we weren’t talking about.

The conversations were going to be presented both as a text Q&A and in audio format, and I even went so far as to record one of those conversations before coming to realize I’d bit off more than I could chew.

That conversation was with Alex Hemingway, a senior economist with the BC Society for Policy Solutions, about worker co-operatives, and given this week was International Workers Day, I thought it was a good time to share that conversation.

The audio of that conversation runs an hour long — including some pre- and post-amble from me — and it was a really fascinating conversation.

The text, as a result, is also, uhhh, quite long! This isn’t an exact transcript. I’ve lightly edited it for grammar, to organize our (in particular, my) speech into coherent sentences suitable for the text format, etc.

As someone who’s part of organizing a worker co-op with Debrief Communications, I’m not coming to this as a neutral party. I want to see co-ops flourish in this country because I see them as being a real alternative to the status quo that could at least help to address a lot of the issues we’ve been experiencing, from worker alienation to the siloed existences that has become the norm in our society to income inequality and overall work and life satisfaction.

This conversation is based off of a report Hemingway did almost exactly a year ago with University of Victoria professor of business Simon Pek, and if this conversation intrigues you, you should check it out for more details.

For now, here’s my chat with Alex Hemingway.

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Dustin Godfrey

Last spring, you had put out a report talking about how the various levels of government can really bolster the employee ownership sector. What was it that spurred you to work on that report?

Alex Hemingway

This was a report with my co-author Simon Pek, who's at UVic and the business school there. I think there are a lot of things that are exciting about worker ownership. And we're in this very politically uncertain, economically uncertain time, obviously right now with the trade war, but we're in a time of great inequality, a lot of dissatisfaction with institutions as they exist.

I think the opportunity for working people to have more control over their working lives and to gain more of the fruits of their labour rather than seeing so much wealth concentrated at the very top in this country. Those are big motivators to look at something like worker ownership.

Really, what we wanted to do is think about [how] these types of firms exist in Canada and around the world, but there are not too many of them in Canada. There are some jurisdictions where there's a huge amount of this. There's potential there. They can function very well. Why don't we have more of them? And how could we get more and how might that contribute to a more equitable and resilient economy and society.

Dustin

And so your report defines a number of different factors in determining what democratic employee ownership could look like. And there are a number of different examples from around the world. You've got the UK, the US, and then other areas of Europe. Can you talk a little bit about what those are and what some of the pros and cons of each of those models is?

Alex

Two of the forms that we touch on most in the report: one is a worker co-operative, which is sort of a classic form of worker ownership. To the extent that we have a worker ownership economy in Canada, that's the more common form. It can look like a lot of different things, but it tends to be very participatory. The people working in the firm not only own it together, but they control and direct the day-to-day of the company.

I think of places here [in] Vancouver, worker co-ops like Shift Delivery. So that's a big one.

And the other one that we highlighted in the report, as you alluded to, comes out of the UK. and that's this model called employee ownership trusts (EOT). We actually now have that model enabled in Canada. There was federal legislation last year [that] creates that structure, makes that structure available as one way of organizing a business. This is a little bit different.

If you're gonna start a worker owned firm from scratch, typically that's taken the form of a worker co-op. But if you wanna convert an existing firm to worker ownership, which is something that happens fairly frequently in some jurisdictions, and there's been a huge growth of these employee ownership trusts in the UK in the past six, seven, eight years, this EOT model is one good way to do it. And it's got some neat features.

It kind of works like a leveraged buyout. You have an existing firm that's humming along, an owner maybe wants to sell, or they're looking to retire and thinking what's going to happen next. And in this kind of situation, we see this in the polling of small business owners: many are actually interested in the idea of selling to their employees if that's possible. This employee ownership trust helps facilitate that.

And essentially, what happens is the owner sells to the employees, but the employees actually don't have to pay out of pocket in this transaction. The owner agrees to essentially take a deferred payout, so they're paid out of the profits of the firm over several years. The employees aren't out of pocket as a result, and the firm comes under the control of this trust where you can actually have representation from the workers, but also, at least for the period in which the owner is being paid out, the owner can have representation on that trust structure as well to make sure that the business is running in a way that ensures they're actually going to paid out over time.

And the deal is sweetened by a capital gains tax exemption for the selling owner. So that really motivates them to take a look at selling to their employees in the U.K.

And now we have a similar thing in Canada. There's a limited capital gains tax exemption if you want to sell your business to employees in this form.

Dustin

And so the EOT, that doesn't necessarily dictate the structure of the employee ownership.

Alex

No, so it leaves a lot open in terms of how the business is going to run day to day.

Ultimately, worker representatives will have a controlling stake at that trust level. The trust sort of sits above a normal company board level, so ultimately the trustees are required to make sure that the governance of the company is in the interests of the workers.

But what we see in practice is that there tends to be a significant increase in the participation of workers and the control of workers over decisions about the company, not just at that trust level, but at the day-to-day level.

In our report, we really emphasize that democratic aspect. So when we make our definition of democratic employee ownership we say that has to include not only that the firm is majority owned by its workers, but they actually have meaningful control rights in terms of important decisions about the company.

But it does leave a lot open. You could run an EOT in a very non-hierarchical way on a day-to-day operations level, or you could run it in a more conventional way, managers and some amount of hierarchy.

And so there's an inherent flexibility there, which I think is a good thing for those of us wanting to expand the role of worker ownership in the economy. Let's have the opportunity for businesses to try out different models and see what works for them and what works for that business so we can grow the sector.

Dustin

You talked about having a substantial amount of control for the workers. I'm coming from the co-op side of things where the principle really is one-member-one-vote, and it is the workers who are determining everything. And you're not getting this structure where it is sort of like shares per se, where one person can have a thousand shares and then another person has one share and therefore functionally has zero votes in comparison, right? Are there ways in EOTs that that sort of structure can be perpetuated, or are there guards against that to be able to ensure that there is more of a democratic structure?

Alex

It depends if you're looking at it from the legislative level or the operation of an individual business. There is a requirement in the Canadian federal legislation around EOTs that shares be distributed in an equitable way, but that doesn't mean an equal way.

So I think there's no question that worker co-ops are the most democratic and most equal form of employee ownership. And I think that's greatly to their credit.

In the case of the EOTs, the requirements are broader, as I just suggested. You do need to have an equitable distribution. There are requirements about who are the trustees and worker representatives being on that board of trustees and having ultimate control over the company. But how it's run internally, I think that there's a lot of latitude for that to be decided.

Dustin

We really tout our ability to vote for who makes decisions on how our country is run, and that is on a sort of one-person-one-vote electing our representatives. But your report mentions there isn't really any particular rationale for why it is that those democratic values stop at the door to your employment, which is something that really affects probably most of our lives, right?

Even beyond the eight hours a day that we are there, the couple of hours that we are commuting to and from there, all the time that we were spending thinking about work and applying for jobs and the Sunday scaries that we get thinking about having to go to work again. It really dominates a whole huge aspect of our lives and yet this democratic society has relegated that to a pretty strict hierarchical structure.

What are your thoughts on, like, is it weird for people to think beyond that traditional corporate structure and to think the workplace should be democratic?

Alex

Not at all. I think that's huge. Work is a big part of our lives. It's how we spend much of our waking lives. And I think our democracy, our political democracy, is flawed in many ways and it's skewed by the inequalities of wealth and power. But in addition to that, it's just fundamentally incomplete in that we don't have economic democracy.

Most people in corporate workplaces and investor-owned companies and including in small businesses that are run in hierarchical ways, don't have much say in day-to-day functioning as a human being. I think that can be extremely alienating.

I know I'm lucky enough these days to have a fair amount of autonomy as a researcher and I value that immensely. I think every worker in the country deserves a right to a say over how their day-to-day work lives function.

Ultimately it's working people in this country that are creating the wealth and profits that our economy generates. So it's only right that they have a democratic voice in their work lives and more of an ownership right over what they're producing.

Dustin

I guess what I was getting at with, like, is it weird for people to think that — is it a hurdle to get people to think beyond what has been just the dominant norm in how companies work?

Alex

Ah, well, I think yes and no. The idea that you should have more control over your work life — I think that is not far below the surface for most people. Many people have dissatisfaction with their bosses and with the lack of control in their work lives.

And even though worker ownership is not an idea that's high profile in our political debates these days. It's an idea that's come up again and again through political history.

And so. I don't think it's a stretch. I don't think it's far below the surface, and actually you can see this in public opinion polling as well. A lot of what I've seen on the polling side comes out of the US and whether you're on the right or left, Democrat or Republican, down there, a huge number of people say, ‘Yeah, I'd love to work in an employee owned company or a democratic workplace.’

So it's one of these things that actually crosses party divides. There's been some legislative progress in the US as well with bills, sponsored by people like Bernie Sanders, but also in partnership with a Republican, if I'm not mistaken, for some legislation that promoted employee ownership in a relatively small way down there.

So it is a potentially depolarizing policy, at least at the working class level. And the only other thing I would say in response to that is you also see in the polling of business owners that they're interested in this model, interested in particular when they're doing succession planning in selling their business to their workers rather than having to either shut it down or sell it to a competitor or sell it to a big corporation.

You have a huge wave of baby boomer business owners in this country who are going to be going through that succession process in the years and couple of decades to come. So there's a big opportunity, I think, to tap into that latent interest in seeing this model expand in Canada.

Dustin

Yeah, and it's interesting that there is that cross-partisan support for this because ultimately what we are talking about here is collective ownership over the means of production and that tends to be a pretty leftist concept.

Alex

Yeah, well, I remember reading some years ago, all the way back to earlier US political history. I'd have to double check this, but if I'm not mistaken, in the Abraham Lincoln days of the Republican Party, there were very withering critiques of wage labour.

And it was just understood that wage labour can be inherently a degrading thing. People are being separated from control over their work lives and from ownership of the product of that work in terms of profits and that was seen as intolerable.

Now back at that time, the idea was everyone's going to be a small landholder or everyone's going to be a small business owner eventually and maybe they tolerate some wage labour earlier in their career.

I think that was a bit of a blind alley, but that intuition that something's wrong with being at the mercy of someone else in your work, it's not unintuitive to people that that's a problem.

Dustin

There seems to be a degree of separation between what was talked about a few hundred years ago and the establishment today. I think you can go back to Adam Smith and even talking about landlords. I think that he tended to consider landlords to be a little bit parasitic, right?

Alex

Right. Yeah, absolutely.

Dustin

And that is the father of capitalism, essentially.

Alex

Well, exactly. And yeah, I think we're seeing some of these classical political economy arguments bubble back up again. Landlords is another great example, as people are struggling with the cost of housing and seeing more and more of their wages actually flowing into landlords’ pockets in addition to the pockets of maybe the owners of the large corporation they work for.

Dustin

I think there seems to be a number of different benefits [from worker ownership]. And one of the ones that does stick out to me is that you were talking about alleviating the alienation over not even having control over your workplace.

And something that I think is a pretty good evidence of that is — even if you don't get into the realm of employee ownership, when you get companies that are seen as genuinely listening to their workers and giving workers this feeling that they have some say in how things are run there, even if they aren't owners or whatever, there does tend to be higher retention and better productivity.

Costco is a pretty good example of that — although, I think there's a history of union busting there. But they have higher wages and benefits compared to other retailers.

Toyota has this system where workers are not just asked to, but really encouraged to provide regular input on ways that their processes could be improved. And it increases people's feeling of ownership over the work that they're doing.

And it seems to me that that is something that really has a productivity boost. Is that correct?

Alex

Yeah. Well, yeah, so you see that some forms of that participation and trying to treat your workers decently in certain capitalist firms, absolutely.

The Toyota example is interesting. Obviously, there's an inherent creativity to work whatever your work is, whether it's manual or cognitive, or you're on a computer all day — manual work is also very cognitive, so I actually don't want to make that distinction.

The point being, one of the benefits of employee ownership is it takes that Toyota insight to the next level, which is not only is the firm that you own open to your ideas, but you benefit from the implementation of those improvements and ideas that you might have because you actually own it at the end of the day.

And when we look at the cross-country evidence on this, it's quite clear that employee-owned firms, worker co-ops have at least as good productivity as conventional firms. And in many cases, the evidence points to higher levels of worker productivity and that makes sense from the perspective that we've just been talking about.

And you can see, for example, there's one region of Italy, Emilia-Romagna, where co-operatives writ large, including worker co-operatives, are something like a third of the GDP of that region. So you do see cases where this can become a very major component of an economy.

There are a lot of benefits to this model, including productivity benefits, and there are certainly benefits for workers in terms of better pay, more equitable pay, more control over your work life. So the puzzle is: why is this model so uncommon in a place like Canada? What are the barriers that are standing in the way and how can they be overcome with policy?

Dustin

What are some of those barriers? I think a pretty obvious one is just access to capital, right?

Alex

Yeah, that's a big one. Obviously, workers by definition don't tend to have a lot of capital at hand to invest in a new firm if they're trying to start a worker co-op.

It's also the case that external investors or banks may be wary of lending to a model of firm that they're not very familiar with, that isn't common in a country like Canada.

When it comes to starting a brand new worker co-op, or other form of democratic employee owned firm, there is a challenge there — starting a business is not easy and it normally requires a lot of legwork upfront by a relatively small set of individuals.

And there's not an obvious way, that's a pre-existing toolbox for how you compensate for all that startup work and the risk inherent in it. So there's kind of a collective action problem at the beginning of creating a new worker-owned firm.

Whereas, if you're creating just a conventional firm, then those early couple of entrepreneurs actually have an incentive to structure their new business as investor-owned, so they can actually reap the benefits through share ownership, and so on.

So there is kind of an inherent challenge there. And so what we see is: where that collective action problem for those who want to start worker-owned firms is overcome is typically in places where there's already a lot of worker-owned firms, where there's lots of models to look at for how to do that startup process, where where there's an ecosystem of supporting institutions that can serve as incubators for new worker-owned firms.

So there's a bit of a catch-22 there. It's a lot easier to start a worker-owned firm in Emilia-Romagna, Italy, or in the Basque region of Spain, where there's the huge Mondragon, which is a sort of federation of multiple co-operative businesses. They have those institutions that latent knowledge and those incubators that make it possible to start a new worker-owned firm.

Whereas if you're trying to do that in Vancouver or here in BC, there are a lot fewer resources to draw on and models to draw on. There certainly are resources and models, but not to that same extent.

Dustin

With Mondragon in Basque country and those regions of Italy where you see a whole lot of them, I think there's a Belgian co-op, Smart Co-op, that really invests in developing co-ops, where you see those really strong structures that support the development of new co-ops, is that something that starts with government investment or is it something that starts more often at the community level and builds momentum by co-ops building more co-ops?

Alex

That's something that's kind of open to interpretation in the research. I believe in Emilia-Romagna, there's a very strong history of the Communist Party in that region. And that, I think, produced a cultural and ideological environment that helped this kind of sector get off the ground. So there can be really on the ground organic buildup of these sectors for idiosyncratic historical and political reasons.

But my hope, certainly, and our hope in writing this report is that actually you can spark the growth of this type of sector using policy tools and in particular learning from the policy tools that were put in place in those places that we were just talking about.

So there may be this cultural origin to Emilia-Romagna's co-operative sector, but there is a huge amount of supporting public policy in place, tax breaks that help support worker co-operatives. There's a system of sectoral funding where as the sector grows, all the existing co-operatives actually pay a small amount of their profits into a fund that helps lend to new co-operatives or helps run incubators to help them get started.

So we can see the institutional bones of what sustains these types of sectors and hopefully reproduce some of them in places like BC and Canada where we want to see those sectors grow.

Dustin

Yeah, it does seem like if you drop a pool of funding from the government or whatever, that's like, we're gonna place millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars or whatever in a pool that will be used to foster the creation of co-operative organizations, and once those organizations become profitable, then they redirect a certain portion of their profits to back into this organization and it fuels itself. It does seem like once you put that initial investment in place it might take a little bit of time for it to get on its feet and get things going. But then once you really do, it does seem like there is the potential for it to just build and build and build a solidarity economy, I think is the term that I've heard used for this.

Alex

Yeah, exactly. In that Bernie Sanders legislation I mentioned that was passed a year or two ago, that was one of the first things they were pushing — and this is one of our recommendations in the report, is seed grant funding to regional employee ownership centers that can serve as incubators and points of access for advice for those who are who are trying to start up these businesses.

I think our takeaway is that you're going to have to come at this with multiple policy levers. So I think seed grants for these types of institutions are great. I think we want to look at how we can facilitate access to capital through things like public investment banks that have a specific mandate to lend to democratic employee-owned firms and worker co-ops.

And it's good to see some new pieces coming into place like this employee ownership trust structure and the capital gains exemption associated with that. That alone isn't going to do it.

We're going to need some of these other policies in place. And actually, one of the things we push for in the report, which sort of came out just as this employee ownership trust legislation was coming in, is this really needs to be explicitly extended to worker co-operatives, this capital gains tax exemption that's been brought in.

And that was promised by the federal government last year, but best as I can tell — that was promised in budget 2024 — that legislation still hasn't passed. Parliament kind of ground to a halt last fall. And so, as a key next step, we need to make sure that worker co-operatives are being put on equal footing with employee ownership trusts in terms of access to that potentially important tax break.

Dustin

Do you have any idea why it is that worker co-ops have not gotten the same attention from the federal government recently as employee ownership trusts?

Alex

It's an interesting question. The good news is they did feel the pressure to promise last year that they would extend this to worker co-operatives. I think it's been encouraging to see the advocates for the employee ownership trust model and the Canadian Worker co-op Federation, the existing worker co-op federation in Canada — best as I can tell, everyone sees common benefit in seeing the democratic employee ownership space expand and are seeing each other as complementary rather than in competition with each other.

And that's similar to what we saw in the UK when the EOT legislation was brought in there. There seems to be a broad push to expand both. I think that's positive.

But in a way it may not be surprising, if you're a political party that has strong ties to Bay Street, that the idea of worker co-operatives, which is the more deeply democratic of these models, might seem a little bit more threatening or might seem a little bit more culturally distant to your worldview. So that may be just speculating why it hasn't got as much rhetorical love as the EOTs.

Dustin

That being said, it does seem like an investment in a worker co-op economy or an employee-ownership economy that there really are actually a lot of rippling-out benefits, not just for the firm itself or the workers at that firm, but also for the community at large.

Alex

Absolutely. Facing down a trade war, I think anything we can do to actually improve our economic productivity is very positive. And that's one of the benefits at a more macro level that we see from employee ownership in the evidence.

I think a big one is economic resilience. And one of the things you see with worker co-ops and employee owned firms is that they're better at weathering economic adversity. They're less likely to lay people off in economic downturns. less likely to fail in economic downturns.

And in this environment where tariffs are a big part of the discussion these are firms that are employee-owned firms, worker co-ops are firmly grounded in their communities. They're much less likely to move abroad in face of tariffs or other shocks. They're here to stay.

And when you're in an economic downturn, it's a very good thing from a macroeconomic perspective to have fewer layoffs, less reduction of hours, because that's always the danger in a recession is that it can be self-perpetuating and deepen itself as people are laid off, have less money to spend, that's less stimulus to the economy. So, yeah, there are absolutely these broader, I think, economic benefits to worker ownership.

Dustin

Yeah, they're not about to outsource their own jobs.

I was actually surprised reading the report because I understood that employee ownership does make organizations more resilient in an economic downturn. My assumption was essentially more that the workers are able to be like, okay, we will take a little bit of a pay deduction to weather the storm or whatever, but continue our hours worked so that we can continue to put out whatever product it is what we're doing or service that we're performing or whatever, that we can kind of continue that so that when the economic downturn bounces back, we haven't really lost any position in the community.

But your report says that actually it's not just that they weather the storm better, there doesn't tend to be that reduction in hours or in pay.

Alex

Well, it's both so you're less likely to see reductions in pay and hours than a conventional firm, but it's both. People are adapting in the way that you describe as well.

Obviously these firms are not immune from the downturns and if they lose customers and revenue, they tend to react exactly as you say by either reducing hours and pay rather than laying people off. If it comes to that, I've heard of scenarios where they have sort of rotating leaves of absence.

So not to say that it's a magic pill that protects you from loss of revenue or an economic downturn, but on the sort of spectrum of what you could do in reaction to that downturn, the response of employee-owned firms seems to be both more muted and more equitable, people not losing their jobs and less likelihood of lower pay and lost hours relative to conventional firms.

Dustin

And is that because when an investor-owned company is seeing a reduction in sales or something like that, and they're saying, okay, well, the profits are going down X amount or whatever, that's really all that they're looking at? Whereas the employee-ownership is saying, okay, well, we have say 15% profit normally, but in this economic downturn, we're going to be seeing 5% or 2% or whatever.

But that's not really a big deal to us because we're getting our wages. Is that part of it, do you think?

Alex

I suspect part of it too is simply when the workers are in control, it's their lives. Like they're not just numbers on someone else's spreadsheet. And so they try and think hard about: how can we, together, weather a downturn?

Because it might not just be a reduction in profits. It might be that you're suddenly not profitable anymore for a couple of years. So you might have to do something a little more dramatic.

But at the end of the day, as a worker-owner, you're concerned both about the health of the business and your position and your coworker's position as workers. So you're gonna be more creative about how you navigate these difficulties and I think more humane.

Dustin

It seems to me like a worker is going to be generally more interested in a whole lot of things, I think, that benefit both the longevity of the organization, but also the community at large.

You see a whole lot of hedge funds that invest in the company and they just sort of bleed it dry, right? Their mode of profitability is just reducing, reducing, reducing costs and once that company goes under, then they can move on to the next one or whatever, right? And it's not particularly linear like that. They're probably doing that to a bunch of different organizations.

But it's this mode of profitability that comes just from draining the resources out of a company. And so they aren't as particularly interested in the longevity of it as much as it is the short-term profitability. Whereas, like you were sort of saying with a worker co-op, this is their jobs. They are very invested in the longevity of that organization.

But then I think that also applies to things like the quality of the products that they produce, right? If you are a person who is in the community and you're going to care a little bit more about the quality of the products or the service that you do, because you might also be consuming that product or service.

Alex

Well, exactly, and you're concerned about what's happening to the environment and the community that you live in, in a way that an absentee investor might not. So I think it really broadens the lens of what the people running a business are taking into consideration in a way that has these types of spillover social benefits.

Of course, it doesn't obviate the need for environmental regulations and so on, but I think it is a very good thing to have businesses embedded with decision-makers who care about these broader community issues deeply.

Dustin

In terms of its longevity as well, I do kind of wonder if people see that the community's values are reflected in an organization by virtue of being a co-op, and the people who are in that co-op are being responsive to the community, and if that might also be a factor in, like, OK, there's an economic downturn, but I'm going to make sure that I specifically support this particular organization, this co-op that's in my community because I love what they do for my community. A certain loyalty, right?

Alex

Yeah, I think that's right. That observation feels like it has some extra relevance in this moment where people are thinking more about where they're spending their money on US versus Canadian goods. And I think that provides that increasing thought that's going into where you're spending your money is maybe an opportunity right now for these types of firms in Canada.

Dustin

I want to move on to some of the other policies that governments can introduce that could help develop more co-ops because we've talked about access to capital and I think that is the obvious one.

But you talk about legislation for having the structure of employee ownership that is a little bit more like enshrined in legislation, and I was wondering if you can expand on that some.

Alex

Yeah, given the social benefits of these types of firms. You want it to be easy to create them.

But we live in a society where that's not the conventional type of firm. That's not what's taught in business schools. Really, what we're getting at here is you want to have an off-the-shelf structure that exists so it's easy to set up a democratic employee-owned firm.

So we've talked about the progress that's come with the establishment of employee ownership trusts as an off-the-shelf option in Canada. That's a very good thing. One thing we heard from advocates in the worker co-operative sector is that some of the provincial legislation around worker co-operatives could be a little clearer.

So for example, some of the legislation doesn't actually specify worker co-operatives as a specific form. They sort of fall under the more general legislation for establishing co-operatives, which might not involve worker control or ownership.

It might be a consumer co-operative or some other form of multi-stakeholder co-operative, where workers aren't necessarily in the driver's seat. So having off-the-shelf options and structures is a good thing.

In terms of legislative actions, one of the other pieces we talked about in the report is the potential to establish a right-of-first-refusal for workers to buy their companies if they're being sold or if they're being shut down. We've seen the establishment of worker-owned firms in BC, and this is a common pattern around the world: often this happens when businesses are being shut down.

So like the Harmac Mill on Vancouver Island was being shut down by its owners and with the help of their union, the workers there managed actually to buy it out and keep it running because it was still a viable business. It just wasn't profitable enough for the owner that was in place and they're still going.

CHEK news over on Vancouver Island is also owned by its employees right now. So I think establishing that as a right in legislation could be really positive.

There are also more expansive proposals out there that we mentioned in the report where, if you think of the case of a large corporation, you could actually have — and this is a proposal, originally, I believe, from Gregory Dow, who was a professor of economics at SFU — that workers could actually have the right to trigger a referendum in a large corporation to vote to buy it out as workers.

And you could use something like the leveraged buyout approach that I mentioned earlier, where the investors would be paid out over time from the profits of the firm. That would be a potentially transformative kind of policy.

That's a bigger swing. But that's another one on the legislative side.

Dustin

Yeah, that feels like something that would get a fair bit of pushback.

Alex

It's one of those policies where it might actually be extremely popular among the population, but yeah, there would be tremendous pushback from corporate Canada for sure.

Dustin

Yeah, just the ability to unionize is always under threat, let alone to be able to buy out your employers.

Alex

Right, yeah, exactly.

Dustin

You mentioned CHEK News and I think that's actually a really good example. A lot of local news in BC and elsewhere is owned by a handful of companies, but they came into ownership by those companies after the original owners, which are usually ma and pa owners, and they're probably local business people or whatever that originally owned it.

And then once they retire, then it gets bought up by Glacier Media or by Black Press or whatever. And we're really seeing the decline of those, a lot of those local publications, one of them being the Burnaby Now, the New Westminster Record, both of which I used to work at and which are closing this month.*

And, but then by contrast, you have CHEK which is not just weathering the storm, but it's been expanding for the last 15 years since the workers bought it out.

*The newsrooms closed last month, along with the Tri-City News.

Alex

Yeah, that's really encouraging. You're really making me think — obviously, there's an opportunity in this moment maybe for more of that. But also just thinking back, the sort of crisis of the news industry that has been unfolding over the past decade-plus, I imagine that if more of the sector had been actually owned by the journalists, we probably wouldn't be in the situation that we're in today.

There would still be some of the big external pressures and the big tech giants gobbling up advertising revenue. But the decimation of newsrooms might have looked very different if that had been the case.

Dustin

You talk about there being a legislated [requirement] for there to be indivisible reserves in worker co-ops. I was wondering if you could explain what that is, where it's been implemented, and why.

Alex

You can imagine forms of employee ownership and they certainly exist where a firm does really well, the workers in it do really well. And ultimately, they decide to sell it to an investor, and it turns back into a more conventional firm.

And in our conception of these democratic employee-owned firms, we really want to discourage that. And so one of the mechanisms that's common in the worker co-operative world is this idea of indivisible reserves. So the capital that's been invested in the worker co-op, you can't actually just cash out and sell to any old investor.

The capital stays in the firm, the workers benefit through higher wages and through better working conditions. But even the workers in that firm don't have the right to cash out and see ultimately that firm destroyed as a democratic entity.

So that's one of the mechanisms that exists. And that can be actually specified in legislation that if you're going to have this type of worker co-operative and perhaps if there are going to be tax benefits of the type that we recommend in the report that the trade off to that is that you can't cash out, and actually you have to have this indivisible reserve structure as part of your co-op.

Dustin

That reminds me of back in the 1980s or whatever in England where they had the council housing, and Margaret Thatcher came in and said we're going to actually implement this rent-to-own structure where people who live in council housing can, once they pay a certain amount of rent or whatever, then they can come to own their unit in this housing.

And I think there's a certain school of thought that's like, yeah this is great because we are creating more ownership for regular people or whatever. But I've been reading David Harvey recently and one of the things that he talks about is that what wound up really happening was it turns public housing into a vector for investment.

And I think that's the kind of thing that you're trying to avoid happening?

Alex

When you talk about that case of the sell-off of the council housing, from what I've read, there was a very conscious political agenda there, which was to create a broader, they called it, I think, property-owning middle class that Thatcher thought would fundamentally shift the politics of the country to the right, as people are encouraged to think of themselves as property owners rather than, part of a more so than being part of a community.

So I think there is a parallel here where part of the suite of policies and the potential agenda we are setting out in the report is aimed at transforming over time the economy in a more democratic and equitable direction.

And actually setting up the institutions and the legislative framework such that these democratic workplaces are durable and lasting is really integral because it's not just about the workers in those individual firms.

It's actually about trying to shift the balance of power in the economy towards workers and shift the society in a more equitable direction. And in particular, yeah, when you're offering tax benefits to these types of firms, as I think we should, I think it's very reasonable to require that you can't just take the money and run.

Dustin

I'd just like to end off on asking if you were to point to three particular policies or initiatives or something like that that the federal government could take whoever it is that forms government,* what three would you say like these are the immediate like the immediate term that you should really be focusing on?

*As mentioned, this was recorded about a month ago.

Alex

Ooh, that's, yeah, you're asking me to choose between my 15 or 16 policy babies in this report. That's tough. But I think part of what we were trying to do is imagine: what would it look like if this was a priority for a federal government.

So I think one of the pieces we haven't talked about yet is actually creating a ministry or a high-level public agency with an explicit mandate towards expanding democratic employee ownership, reviewing existing policy and putting this on people's radar, because awareness is one of the other missing pieces in a jurisdiction like Canada, where this is not a common model.

So (A) let's put it on the agenda in a big way; (B) we want to see both the creation of new employee-owned firms and the conversion of existing firms. The conversion route is faster and has that huge potential with the business succession of the boomers that we're going to see in the next couple of decades.

I would prioritize making permanent the capital gains exemption for the sale of existing firms to employee ownership, both in the form of trusts and worker co-operatives. That really would send a signal that this is here to stay.

And actually, with that tax break on the table already, business advisory consultancies and so on, they essentially have an obligation at this point to let their clients know that this option is available to them. And that's really positive for awareness of this because it is a pretty beneficial tax policy.

And if I was gonna pick one more, I think the other might be really ensuring that we can see the creation of regional democratic employee ownership centers that can serve as incubators and hubs for advice and providing some seed grants to establish those around the country. That needn't actually come at a huge cost either. So I think that's low-hanging fruit as well.

Dustin

Do you have much hope that we'll see this be a priority whoever forms government next?

Alex

There does seem to be a lot else on the political agenda right now. So I'm not going to predict that this suddenly becomes a big election issue. Having said that, I think there is the potential there if the advocacy in this area continues to grow, because it really does have that broad appeal that we talked about earlier. And there is, both on the left and the right, appetite for more employee ownership.

Different people will put different emphasis on [different] aspects of it, but I think there's an opportunity there and, if we're able to make progress on the policy front, it's potentially the type of policy that's less likely to be torn down by successive governments because of that broad appeal.

Dustin

Yeah, I guess if you even create an investment fund or whatever for or like an investment bank or whatever specifically for co-ops, that's, as you're kind of saying, like it's sort of a self-perpetuating machine as opposed to something that you can like dismantle through like social welfare, things like that.

I would also argue that it is a thing that could be even framed as being a response to the current political moment, right? A potential response in terms of industrial policy, terms of economic resilience in the face of economic downturn, the productivity crisis that we are experiencing, a whole bunch of different issues that we are experiencing, the climate crisis, that movement to this sort of economy could at least have a role in helping.

Alex

Absolutely. We're suddenly thinking bigger than we have been in some time and talking about potentially the need to fundamentally restructure our economy away from dependence on the US. I think this fits in that moment. I entirely agree with you.

Dustin

Alright, well thank you so much for your time.

Alex

Thanks, Dustin.

As he seeks to shift the election discourse away from Donald Trump, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is leaning into 1990s-style tough-on-crime rhetoric and campaign promises.

Poilievre has even gone so far as to say he will override people’s constitutional rights, using the notwithstanding clause to counter any court decision that runs counter to his agenda.

The rhetoric and campaign promises have ranged from allowing consecutive sentences for first-degree murder — a Stephen Harper-era law that was overturned by the courts in 2022 — to bringing in a three-strikes-and-you’re-out law to apply life sentences to offenders with three “serious” offences with no parole eligibility for at least 10 years.

The latter copies three-strikes laws introduced in the United States in the 1990s, of which there is a significant body of evidence.

The logic behind the laws, as one 2001 study puts it, “everything else being equal, a person will be less likely to commit a crime when the expected costs increase. The additional prison terms called for by three-strikes laws increase the expected costs for criminals subject to the laws and, at first glance, the expected result is less crime.”

However, the evidence ultimately does not back Poilievre.

Crime didn’t go down

One 1998 study, submitted to the US Department of Justice by the RAND Institute, noted that “at first glance, the experiences of states with three-strikes laws appear to support the notion that these laws are having an effect.”

As incarceration rates rose between 1986 and 1996 in a sample of eight states with both large urban areas and three-strikes laws, police-reported violent crime rates had declined in seven of those eight states. But the study notes that this was part of a nationwide trend in the 1990s (which has largely continued through today).

Compared to states without three-strikes laws, the study noted those with the laws “did not in general rank ahead of states without three-strikes laws. In fact, the differences in ranking between the two groups was not statistically significant.”

It added that the decline in crime rates had begun a year prior to the law taking effect.

Increasing homicides

The previously mentioned 2001 study, titled The Lethal Effects of Three-Strikes Laws, has even found three-strikes laws to be associated with significant increases in homicides.

The study notes that there are a number of reasons for the lack of any significant effect on crime rates. The laws tend to have limited scope, and they apply to those who are already repeat offenders — those who are likely to receive longer sentences regardless of the three-strikes law.

“Criminals can also continue to commit the same crimes and adapt to crime reduction efforts by taking additional measures to reduce the chances of apprehension and conviction,” the paper notes.

“Bribing police is probably the most studied example.”

The “additional measures” referenced could also be related to the increase in homicides.

In particular, a person committing a crime may be more likely to kill the victim — or any witnesses — if there’s a likelihood of being identified, and if they are facing a life sentence due to the three-strikes law anyway.

That calculation may not commonly take place in the moment, but the study’s authors note that even if the offender is making that judgment in one in a thousand violent crimes, that would have added up to a 17% increase in homicides in three-strikes states.

While the three-strikes states’ decline in police-reported crime following the implementation of their laws was effectively on par with the nationwide, the decline in homicides in that time was not equally distributed.

In all, three-strikes states saw a 10-12% short-term increase in homicides compared to non-three-strikes states and a 23-29% long-term increase.

That adds up to 1,440 additional homicides in the short term and another 3,300 homicides per year in the long term, according to the study.

‘Common sense’

It isn’t just three-strikes laws that lack evidentiary backing — lengthy prison sentences in general are not associated with declining crime rates, but rather can have the opposite effect.

A 2021 meta-analysis of 116 studies found that imprisonment has either no effect on reoffending, or can even increase reoffending compared to non-imprisonment sentences, such as probation.

Proponents of tough-on-crime legislation tend to characterize their policies as “common sense.”

In fact, “common sense” is a common tactic by the far-right and free-market proponents, often acting not as an appeal to reason, but rather as a sort of notwithstanding clause to override evidence.

The authors of the meta-analysis note that there is logic to the notion that harsher sentencing would act as a deterrent — that a cost-benefit analysis at the time of a crime would lead to fewer crimes if the cost outweighs the benefit.

However they note that there are “several logical and empirical reasons to be skeptical” of an idea that has “intuitive appeal.”

For one, reoffending rates for those sentenced to jail or prison are high. The authors of the study also note that certainty of punishment plays a key role in deterrence — the low likelihood of a high cost is not going to be given as much weight, and the vast majority of crime does not end in incarceration.

And while incarceration may prevent offenders from committing crimes in the community, it could lead to more reoffending following release than if a person serves their sentence in the community.

The meta-analysis notes that prisons have “long been referred to as a ‘school of crime’ or ‘house of corruption’ because of the likelihood that techniques of and motivations for crimes are transmitted between inmates.”

The federal government has known this to be true for decades.

In 1999, the solicitor general’s office analyzed 50 studies looking at 300,000 inmates, with none of the studies finding imprisonment to reduce recidivism, while longer sentences were associated with a 3% increase in recidivism — an effect that held for both low- and high-risk offenders.

Tough-on-crime, high-on-cost

According to Stanford Law School’s Three Strikes Project, the 1994 California law had been intended to “keep murderers, rapists and child molesters behind bars, where they belong,” but “more than half of inmates sentenced under the law are serving sentences for nonviolent crimes.”

The project cites statistics from the California Department of Corrections showing the law disproportionately applied life sentences to Black, mentally ill and physically disabled defendants.

The United States, with its tough-on-crime policies, has more inmates than any other country on earth — and that isn’t cheap.

In all the US spends $80 billion annually on corrections — but a working paper by the Institute for Justice Research and Development at Florida State University notes that is just a sliver of the overall economic cost.

The paper looks at an array of further costs, including lost wages for inmates while incarcerated ($70.5 billion annually), reduced lifetime earnings after incarceration due to lower wages and hiring challenges ($230 billion), the cost of non-fatal injuries while incarcerated ($28 billion); the increased likelihood of a person committing a crime after incarceration ($285.8 billion), homelessness of formerly incarcerated people ($2.2 billion) and more.

In all, the paper finds incarceration costs more than $1 trillion per year, or about 6% of GDP in the US.

Whether the tariffs stay or go, North America has officially entered a period of economic uncertainty with a trade war instigated by US president Donald Trump.

Trump has been threatening tariffs for well over a month, now, but much of the discourse has been about responding with either counter-tariffs, or by opening up trade both interprovincially and with other countries.

But Alex Hemingway, a senior economist at the newly formed BC Society for Policy Solutions, said there are ways governments will need to respond in both the short and medium terms to protect people from the economic fallout.

If the tariffs are in place for the long term, RBC estimates a 2% contraction in GDP next year, with peak unemployment at 8%.

In BC, provincial forecasts suggested the tariffs could lead to an unemployment rate of 7.1% next year, and to 124,000 fewer jobs by 2028, largely in the natural resource, manufacturing, and retail sectors.

A CERB-like response

For one short-term response, Hemingway said the government needs to fund social assistance at rates that don’t cause recipients to “languish below the poverty line.”

He also pointed to the pandemic-era Canada Emergency Response Benefit for workers who lost their jobs as an example, saying direct cash supports for workers are “really crucial.”

And Hemingway said that any CERB-like safety net shouldn’t be temporary, as it was in the pandemic.

“Ideally, what we should be planning for here is also strengthening the EI system itself,” he said.

“Instead of just having this emergency response formula, ideally we need an EI system that pays out at higher levels and that is easier to access.”

Recovering from decades of cuts

Hemingway said the EI system has “never really recovered” from the cutbacks brought by the Liberal Party under Jean Chretien in the 1990s.

By the mid-1990s, several changes had already been made to the unemployment insurance program, including ending government contributions to the program, increasing the amount of time an individual must work to qualify for the benefits, reducing the benefit amounts, and reducing the duration of benefits.

In 1996, Chretien’s government made significant changes, including renaming the program employment insurance, as well as vastly increasing the time spent working required to access EI, particularly in regions with high unemployment.

By 2006, further changes limiting access to EI built up a surplus of $57 billion, according to a timeline of employment insurance programs put together by the Canadian Labour Congress.

“Rather than save the money for future employment needs, the money is taken out of the fund, and used to balance federal budgets that offer substantive tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy,” the CLC timeline notes.

Supports for businesses

Hemingway said the business-side supports that the government provided during the pandemic would also likely need to be replicated — but he cautioned that there would need to be strings attached.

That includes limits on bonuses and salaries paid out to executives of companies that receive the support, as well as requirements on conditions for workers, such as good pay, not interfering in unionization efforts, and pay equity.

Any supports, he said, should be “steering business activity towards solving social problems and not just bringing forward an insurance scheme for profits.”

Mobilizing a workforce for climate action

Looking into the medium term, Hemingway said governments need to be thinking about stabilizing an uncertain economy with public sector jobs — and he said that should apply with or without the tariffs.

“We should be thinking more about how to build a diversified and more self-reliant Canadian economy, so programs that generate public sector jobs could be a big part of that. We’re still in a climate crisis. I think one really interesting idea out there right now is that of mobilizing a youth climate corps,” Hemingway said.

It’s an idea that “nominally has the support of the federal government,” and it could ensure employment for all young people.

A youth climate corps motion was submitted by NDP MP Laurel Collins in December 2023, and was later seconded by three different Liberal MPs.

The motion called for implementation of a youth climate corps that “could train hundreds of thousands of youth for careers in the well-paying green jobs of the future,” including “thousands of young adults, aged 17 to 35, to assist in emergency responses required during extreme weather events, such as wildfires, heat domes, and flooding.”

The Canadian Green New Deal proposes similar actions, albeit without the specific focus on youth, noting a move to 100% renewable energy requires creating “millions of decent, well-paying union jobs for workers across Canada.”

Back to the New Deal

If such a massive jobs program were put in place, it would be the first of its kind in nearly a century, since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933.

At a time in which a quarter of Americans were unemployed, the New Deal put millions of people to work on infrastructure, including public buildings, housing, and transportation and energy networks. The yearslong suite of programs is credited with legally recognizing unions, creating millions of jobs, increasing wages (albeit with lower wages for women), restoring confidence in government, and improving standards of living.

Besides the Green New Deal proposals, Hemingway said the idea of a federal jobs guarantee has been a point of conversation in the United States, but there hasn’t been anything like the New Deal enacted since.

“There’s a whole history there to learn from there … that it’s very possible to mobilize a more mission-oriented economy,” Hemingway said.

“That doesn’t mean the private sector is not going to play an important role too, but government can help steer it and create a backstop.”

Reviving urban economies

Beyond green energy and other climate-related infrastructure, there are other areas where governments could invest to stimulate the economy, while also addressing the needs of communities, from transit to healthcare to education.

Hemingway pointed to housing as an area where governments should be investing.

“It just doesn’t make sense for people not to be working, who want to and are able to work, when there’s so much to do to build and stem some of the crises that have become entrenched,” he said.

Housing in particular could have an especially strong effect on the economy, particularly in urban centres by making them more livable and not pricing out the people who work there.

“Cities are our economic engines, and just having more people in a relatively tight radius just creates more opportunities,” he said.

“When they’re working properly, people are able to match better with jobs that make sense for them. Employers and workers are able to match better. They have more opportunities. They’re able to invest better in training because those training opportunities are there.”

And it can give workers the ability to take a risk and go back to school or try something new if they know there is an abundance of work that they can fall back on if it doesn’t work, Hemingway said.

“There are productivity gains inherent in the city and the way we’ve let cities like Vancouver evolve [is] diminishing those effects and excluding people from enjoying them,” he said.

“And we’re stopping that from happening with housing unaffordability, with exclusionary zoning. So addressing that housing affordability on both the public and private side, there’s huge opportunities there.”

To pay for these programs, Hemingway said it’s entirely appropriate for governments to borrow more during economic emergencies to stabilize the economy.

But if we want to keep these programs going in the longer term, Hemingway said there would need to be some ways of raising revenue.

Increasing taxes on wealthier Canadians is one way, he said, but counter-tariffs could also cover part of it. And he pointed to the digital services tax — “one thing that Donald Trump really hates” — as something that can be hiked up.

Beware of pushes for deregulation

One area where Hemingway suggested caution is the talk of interprovincial trade barriers.

“There’s something to that. There’s good reason to do better mutual recognition of professional credentials. There are areas where harmonizing regulations between provinces makes sense,” he said.

But he said the benefits are, in his view, being overstated.

Marc Lee, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, has similarly pushed back on the notion that interprovincial trade barriers would have a significant impact on the economy.

“If you roll back the clock a year ago, no one was talking about these things. That’s because to the extent that they existed at all, most have been addressed through interprovincial agreements,” Lee told BNN Bloomberg.

What concerns Hemingway is opening up interprovincial trade being a stand-in for deregulation.

“It’s important that that not be a race to the bottom. And I think that’s a concern right now. That’s often what is in the subtext of regulatory harmonization,” he said.

“We don’t want to have necessarily the same trucking regulations for going through snowy BC mountain passes as we have for driving on the prairies. … All these truck overpass collisions we’ve seen in BC tells you something about how close to the precipice of things being much worse with lower regulations.”

As the City of Vancouver invests in building housing, it is doing so with a motive beyond providing housing supply — and beyond what some say should be the scope of government.

In announcing its program to build market rental housing on city-owned land, the city said in a press release that it aims not only “to maximize the delivery of market rental housing,” but also to “generate financial returns and non-tax revenues to address the growing infrastructure deficit and council priorities.”

For Gabrielle Peters, a disabled writer and policy analyst who formerly sat on the city’s planning commission, the move is part of a wider trend that has seen the degradation of public space and public good in favour of an all-encompassing marketplace.

“Lanes is one way to think of it. Business has its lane in capitalism. Whether or not we forever need it, I don’t know, but it has its lane in capitalism. And then there’s government,” Peters said.

“And part of the role of government is to understand that the market doesn’t, in fact, meet all needs.”

When people suggest the government should operate like a business, Peters added, it’s fundamentally failing to recognize that role.

“I’m just not sure what they think they’re saying, but what in reality they're saying is that it should operate for profit. Because that is what operating a business is,” Peters said.

“If it doesn’t make a profit, the business shuts down, closes up. Or it leans into government loans and contracts, whatever. So should government be profitable? Well, then you have to ask yourself: should profitability supersede social needs and public good?”

The case for government involvement in housing

Peters notes the government used to be heavily involved in housing.

In the early- to mid-1970s, 45% of all new housing had some level of government involvement, whether it was built directly by governments or through loan programs.

By 1985 that had dropped by two-thirds to just 15%.

And in the 1990s, government-owned and -incentivized housing fell off a cliff.

When the federal government announced in the 2022 budget that it intended to build 16,300 affordable homes over half a decade, Community Housing Transformation Centre program director Brian Clifford told The Tyee that that amounted to the rate of affordable housing construction and acquisition by the federal government every year up till the 1990s.

After Jean Chretien’s Liberal Party gutted housing initiatives, direct involvement by the federal government in building or acquiring housing dropped from that rate of around 16,000 to just 1,500 per year, according to The Tyee.

“It made sense for government to be involved in housing, for the very fact that the market was not able to meet all the housing needs,” Peters said.

A conflict of interest

What mayor Ken Sim announced more recently, however, departs from the whole point of public housing, she noted.

“Ken Sim, as mayor of Vancouver, is using publicly collected tax dollars not to build housing for people for whom the market rent is beyond their means, not to address a social value that the market is unable to address, but in order to turn a profit for government,” Peters said.

“Think of the mindset of a mayor in a city with the staggering rates of homelessness and housing insecurity that Vancouver has, where people are literally fleeing the city to find somewhere they can actually afford to live, and he says: ‘You know what? People are making a lot of money on housing. The city could have a revenue stream coming off of housing.’

“That’s just gross. He’s basically taking advantage of the housing crisis. He’s not looking to solve the housing crisis.”

By taking a for-profit approach to building public housing, Peters said the city will be disincentivized to take seriously things like fire code violations — something that advocates say already isn’t adequately addressed by the city.

After a Vancouver rental property was devastated by a fire, displacing 70 renters, inspection reports obtained by CBC through freedom-of-information laws showed the owners were taken to court twice over 25 fire code violations in the building.

Former assistant fire chief Ray Bryant told the CBC it wasn’t the only building that faced a growing stack of violations, while resisting enforcement, taking advantage of a lack of adequate staffing in enforcement and a slow process that relies on property owners acting in good faith.

And adhering to fire codes or other regulations costs money, Peters noted. She questioned how interested the city will be, as a for-profit housing provider, in enforcing the fire code.

“Every cost is an incursion into your profit,” Peters said.

She drew a comparison to government reliance on revenue from gambling in BC, where money laundering proliferated in casinos with lax enforcement from the province.

“So it’s just outrageous. It’s absolutely outrageous for Ken Sim to be taking public land and using it … for the profit of the city, for revenue for the city,” Peters said.

Foregoing taxes for fees

Using rent collected from tenants to keep taxes lower for those who own property is also in line with a longer-term trend away from property taxes, which Peters described as a more “equitable distribution of burden and benefit,” towards a more fee-oriented model of service provision.

In the 2025 budget, for instance, the city reduced its proposed 5.6% tax increase down to a 3.9% increase in part by increasing service fees.

“I’m old enough to remember when a community centre was free. That was the point of a community centre: it was free. … It was just a space for community to get together and be community,” Peters said.

“We’ve moved to smaller and smaller living spaces, and then we’ve even monetized the community spaces.”

And by commodifying space — giving people less space to hold community in their homes, while charging an entrance fee to any public space — Peters said people are being forced to become “mini capitalists,” always a consumer or producer at all hours.

When everything costs money — from hosting your child’s birthday party to building a community of hobbyists in a club — that seeps into how people approach their community, Peters said.

“We absorb the market mentality. If you have to pay for a room at a community centre, which you do now, a pretty hefty price, actually, you’re all of a sudden going to be thinking about your group in a different way,” she said.

“You’ve got to market it. You’ve got to make sure you’re appealing to a large enough market. It changes how you think.”

This, she said, can also be seen in our approach to housing, wherein homeowners are taught to treat their homes as an investment — something that’s fairly new, she added.

“You had a working class culture back in the day, which was very different. Nobody pretended that they were building wealth. They were building a family, and they were trying to survive,” Peters said.

And that is embedded in the language we use in the discourse, Peters added. Homes become “housing units” and quantity is exalted over quality.

Who is government for?

Ultimately, she said, it comes down to Sim’s approach to governance.

The conclusion of Sim’s approach, according to Peters, is a Vancouver that looks less like a city and more like a resort, where poor people are priced or pushed out to create a safe space for the wealthy.

This is reflected in the income levels the city’s new housing venture is catering to. While branded as “middle-income” housing, it is geared towards those making $90,000 to $190,000.

The median household income in Vancouver was $83,500 in 2022, according to the latest Canadian Income Survey by Statistics Canada. But that figure nearly halved to $44,100 for people not in an economic family — that is, households comprised of single individuals.

And there’s similarly a disparity between renter and owner incomes. In the 2021 census, median incomes of owner and renter households in greater Vancouver was $108,000 and $67,000 respectively.

It’s also reflected in Sim’s other recent housing announcement.

At the Save Our Streets Coalition’s conference last month, he announced that the city would halt construction of new supportive housing in the city.

At the same time, Sim is announcing more funding for police in the Downtown Eastside, where the city has, since the 2022 election, stepped up street sweeps to push unhoused people out of sight, as well as unilaterally ending the CRAB Park encampment that a court had previously ruled the city could not close down.

This shift in policy towards displacement comes in response to a 32% increase in homelessness in greater Vancouver between 2020 and 2023. But Downtown Eastside advocates say this response does nothing to actually address the issue of increasing homelessness — an out-of-control housing market — and instead punishes those who are victimized by it.

But the expansion of policing is “the classic example,” Peters said, of how the “small government” neoliberal shift of the 1970s and ’80s never actually meant small government.

Peters agrees that there is a concern about safety — and she sees a role for policing in addressing public safety. But when the public good is being erased with a shrinking social safety net and declining public housing, an expansion of policing is telling of a government’s priorities.

“If you’re providing nothing in terms of public good, if you are saying that you have banned any more supportive housing, and the only thing that you are expanding is policing, then you have de facto declared that that is your response to poverty,” Peters said.

“Who is being prioritized?”

Sim’s pursuit of swagger

It all sums up to an approach that seeks to manufacture a city, rather than letting one form naturally through community.

“My honest feeling from day one, and certainly while I was commissioner and co-chair of the Vancouver city planning commission, is that Ken Sim doesn’t understand. He has no grasp of the role of government in society and what it means to govern,” she said.

“He wants to be seen as on the edge of what he calls swagger. … It’s all very superficial.”

And by moving towards a superficial vision of a city, Peters said what makes a city great gets lost — the arts and culture and those who drive it, who get priced out of the city alongside everyone else.

“Cities, organically throughout history, didn’t have Manhattan without Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx,” she said.

When people talk of great cities, they don’t talk about the great swagger. They talk about great arts and music scenes, of their cultural gravity that draws people in.

And those things, Peters said, come with having space for everyone — not just those who can afford the increasing price of admission.

As a society, we purport to hold democracy as among our highest values.

We vote for city councillors, school board trustees, and national and provincial legislators at least every four years, who in turn vote on our behalf on how to govern their jurisdiction.

There are strong critiques of our form of democracy — the embedded role of wealth in determining policy, as a particular example — but we nevertheless do get some say in how our governments are run.

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When it comes to the economy beyond government interventions, however, we largely abandon these values.

Well, we abandon those values for the workers who generate value while embracing it for the shareholders who extract that value.

When it comes to the governance of a country, or a municipality or a school district or a province, we value popular opinion. But when it comes to the workplace, we fall back on elitist tendencies denigrating the ~unwashed masses~: the workers just don’t know how to run a company! They’d only vote themselves raises and bankrupt it!

The consumer, meanwhile, has next to no say in how a company produces its goods. One can “vote with their dollar,” but this isn’t a serious point. If dollars are votes, then we’ve got a handful of folks with billions of votes and countless more with less than a fraction of a statistical error above zero in comparison. If your wealth amounts to $1 million, you get 0.1% of the votes a person with $1 billion gets. If your wealth adds up to $50,000, you’ve got 0.005% of the votes of a billionaire.

If consumers could really meaningfully vote on the products they consume or the services they receive, planned obsolescence, as an example, would be a thing of the past.

Power concentration bad, actually

Shareholders, generally speaking, have no expertise in how to do what the company does — they don’t participate in manufacturing, nor do they act as salespeople, or provide service — and they have a significantly greater interest in generating wealth than they do in the quality of a product, except when the quality of a product is so poor that it impacts the generation of wealth.

And yet we defer entirely to their wisdom when it comes to running companies — it’s democracy for them, but not for anyone else.

When we concentrate power into the hands of the wealthy, we set ourselves up for failure. As companies consolidate, competition dries up, and those that remain are able to drive up prices as monopolies selling goods and services and drive down wages as monopsonies buying labour.

The market power they wield shapes how governments respond to economic ebbs and flows, often to their own benefit and to the detriment of people.

In the workplace, the power of the hierarchy means employers can wield layoffs as a weapon to coerce more work for less pay. A distrust of workers leads to more surveillance, which in turn leads to a workforce that is distrusting of, and hostile to, employers.

These conditions are breeding grounds for failure, both in the economy and within companies. Note, for instance, the mediocrity that dominates Silicon Valley right now.

Worker power good, actually

By placing democratic decision-making in the hands of workers, you can improve a company in a number of ways:

1. If people have a stake in the work they do, and if they have agency in how that work is done, they are going to take more pride in that work. A workforce that takes more pride in its work is inherently going to do better work.

2. While there may remain a hierarchy in an organization, that hierarchy isn’t set in stone, and a CEO who is accountable to workers, rather than investors, has more interest in prioritizing workers’ well-being. We know that things like shorter work hours, better pay, less antagonism and surveillance from employers, and just overall better conditions makes workers more productive.

3. Where shareholders prioritize short-term profits, a democracy of workers would prioritize longevity — this is how they make a living, after all.

4. Workers do the work of an organization every day — they are the experts in how to perform a particular service or to produce a particular product, and they should be driving decisions in how that work is done.

Worker ownership also tends to keep profits local, meaning the whole community benefits, whereas profits are often hidden away in tax havens. (That link is to a very good podcast by The Hatchet about Canada’s failure to address tax havens and is well worth a listen in its own right.)

Will worker-owned co-ops still fail? Of course.

Co-ops are democratic in nature, and democracy is always messy. This isn’t a discourse about utopia.

But the evidence typically shows that worker-managed firms perform better than their investor-managed peers.

Even if the two performed similarly, worker ownership is simply more just — it is community-oriented not simply as a cynical marketing ploy but because its membership is part of the community. And it places people before profits.

Announcing the Debrief Communications collective

This is where we get to why I’m writing about this now.

I’ve been working with some friends to launch our own worker-owned operation!

Debrief Communications is effectively scaling up what freelance journalists are already doing.

A freelance journalist is just about never just a journalist. Work is few and far between, and what work does exist pays a non-livable rate, leaving us forced to do work like communications to stay afloat.

Brishti Basu, David P. Ball and I are effectively collectivizing this work to stabilize our own incomes, to better serve clients, and to advance this alternative approach to organization that I’ve been talking about.

I feel lucky to be working with Brishti and David — I’ve got immense respect for the two as journalists, and I know we have aligned values when it comes to the kinds of communications work we’d like to take on.

In doing so, we’re supporting our ability to continue doing the journalism work we love to do.

So if you know of any organization that is looking for writing, editing, or research work, or is looking for media training or media literacy workshops, check us out.

Or send us a note.

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The Vancouver Coastal Health Authority is being accused of a double standard by allowing one of its staffers to speak at an anti-harm reduction event put on by a conservative organization after it reportedly warned a nurse with reprimand for privately supporting the Drug User Liberation Front among colleagues.

Pouya Azar, an addiction physician, was billed to appear on a panel for the Save Our Streets Coalition’s forum Thursday, where he shared a stage with Nickie Mathew, an addiction psychiatrist and outspoken critic of harm reduction, and Marshall Smith, the former chief of staff to conservative Alberta premier Danielle Smith.

Marshall Smith was also given half an hour during the forum to push the Alberta government’s “Alberta model” for drug policy — one that reduces harm reduction and focuses on drug treatment centres — in the event’s keynote speech.

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VCH ‘aware’ of Azar’s participation

The agenda of the event originally included Azar’s employment with VCH, but after the health authority was questioned about this, the affiliation was removed from the SOS forum page.

VCH said in an emailed statement that it was “aware that Dr. Pouya Azar is participating in an upcoming conference panel regarding mental health and substance use.”

“Dr. Azar is participating in this conference in their independent capacity as an addictions physician, not as a representative of the health authority,” the statement added.

Azar did not appear at the forum, however it appears not to be because of any objection by VCH, with moderator Carole Taylor beginning the panel by saying he was still planning to join.

Student nurse Blake Edwards said that Azar being allowed to appear on the panel was a double-standard after VCH reportedly warned a registered nurse with discipline for emailing colleagues about how they could support DULF following the arrest of co-founders Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx.

While that nurse’s email was to colleagues, the panel was a public event, and while it claimed to be non-partisan, conservative politicians and political actors were present throughout the various panels.

VCH’s statement did not respond to this disparity.

Another VCH employee — Hayf Abichahine, a Lebanese-Palestinian trans man who was director of its Equity, Diversity and Inclusion office — was also let go less than a month after he was hired, allegedly for advocacy for Palestinian human rights, which was conflated with antisemitism.

VCH did not respond to questions from the Tyee, when it reported on the matter in October.

A strong association with conservatism

Other panels included current and former police chiefs, including Kash Heed, also a former MLA for the BC Liberals; a panel that included former BC Liberal MLA Wally Oppal and Nanaimo mayor Leonard Krog; and a panel on housing that included former Vancouver mayor and BC Liberal MLA Sam Sullivan.

Krog is the only politician on the panels that was not associated with a provincial conservative party, but he, too, has pushed an aligned tough-on-crime agenda as mayor, including appearing in far-right YouTuber Aaron Gunn’s video Canada is Dying. Gunn, who is running as a Conservative in the upcoming federal election, was kicked out of the BC Liberal Party’s 2021 leadership race for transphobic, racist and sexist comments online.

Besides the panelists, SOS has been pushing tough-on-crime rhetoric, including pushing rhetoric of an $824-per-household-per-year “crime tax” based on a misleading report that used shaky data and assumptions.

Edwards said it is “really unfortunate” that a VCH employee could appear on the forum, effectively “aligning themselves with people that are on the record as having some quite alt-right stances on healthcare … and proponents of involuntary treatment.”

Criminalizing a health and economic issue

He said organizations like SOS and individuals like many of the panelists aim to treat what are ultimately health and economic issues — increasing mental health issues and the toxic drug crisis — as criminal issues.

The panel Azar was supposed to appear on included a significant focus on opposition to safe supply and other harm reduction measures.

In response to a question about street disorder, Mathew claimed BC’s approach has been to treat an “opioid deficiency.”

“I think in British Columbia, it’s been conceptualized as: someone doesn’t have opioids. If we give them more and different types of opioids, this is going to solve it,” Mathew said.

Safe supply programs don’t treat a lack of opioids — rather, they address the toxicity of the toxic drug supply and nearly always provide an opioid that is less potent than the one an individual is already using.

Nevertheless, Mathew said it “seems like every intervention has gone down that path.”

However, the BC government’s funding of treatment for substance use disorders dwarfs that of safe supply — not to mention funding in BC for policing, which towers over both treatment and safe supply. And in the last couple of years, the BC NDP has all but abandoned safe supply in its rhetoric around the toxic drug crisis.

A call for submissions by photographer Jackie Dives

A friend and very talented photographer is looking for folks to contribute photographs and brief anecdotes to a project about the toxic drug crisis. Rather than explain it in my own words, I’ll just share her Instagram post about it here:

I had an idea for how to collaborate with the community as a part of some of my upcoming exhibitions.

If you’ve had a close friend or family member die from an overdose please send me a photo of your loved one. In the body of the email include their name and an anecdote about them.

It can be anything you like, but something that made them unique is best.

For example, mine for my dad might be: He had two cats that he named Puss and Boots and after they died he got two more cats and named them Puss and Boots as well.

It can be sad, funny, simple. You have to be comfortable with the photo and the info being shared with the public.

For this idea to work I’ll need to get 208 of these so please share this far and wide.

Small caveat: There’s always a chance it might not come to fruition. I might not get enough entries to make it work. Just want to put that out there so that no one is disappointed.

If you’ve got a submission, you can send it to divesin@gmail.com. And if you don’t already follow Jackie on Instagram, you should.

And subscribe to her Substack.

The Saskatchewan government’s argument to narrow the scope of the Good Samaritan Drug Overdose Act (GSDOA) is undermined by its own evidence.

The Supreme Court of Canada was set to hear arguments on Tuesday on the case R v. Wilson, in which a Saskatchewan man and his companions were arrested for simple drug possession after calling 911 to report an overdose.

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After Cheryl Delorme was stabilized by paramedics, RCMP const. Heidi Jo Marshall arrested Delorme, Paul Wilson and two others under suspicion of simple drug possession.

After the arrest, police searched their vehicle and allegedly found firearms, ammunition, drugs and “drug-trafficking tools,” and while simple possession charges were not laid, Wilson was charged with firearms offences and illegal possession of another person’s ID.

The case before the Supreme Court Tuesday hinges on the judges’ interpretation of the GSDOA, and particularly the absence of one word.

The law, which amended the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, prohibits the charge or conviction of a person for simple possession of drugs in the event of an overdose being called in to 911 — notably, the law did not explicitly state that it also bans arrest for simple possession.

Because the evidence of firearms and trafficking tools were discovered while the group was arrested due to simple possession, the defence argues the search was illegal — that arrest is implied by the legislation, and that arresting someone for simple possession during a 911 call for an overdose violates the spirit of the law.

(While I’m not reporting on the hearing, I did report on a briefing on the issue by three intervenors, including the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition and the Harm Reduction Nurses Association, and you can find more about their arguments in Filter Magazine here.)

However, the prosecutors, along with the Saskatchewan government, argue otherwise.

In written filings the Saskatchewan Ministry of Justice and Attorney General argued that “arrest” and “charge” are distinct legal terms, and that one can’t infer that the law prohibits arrest on the basis that it prohibits the law bars charge and conviction.

However, the example the ministry invoked to illustrate this distinction contradicts its point.

“Even the MPs respected this legal distinction during the debates [over the law] and did not use these two terms interchangeably,” the submission states.

In a footnote, the bill refers to comments by Conservative Party MP Todd Doherty, representing the riding of Cariboo-Prince George in British Columbia, in May 2016.

In his comments, Doherty does use these two terms separately, saying fears of charges “ultimately force the witness to choose between saving a person’s life or being arrested and charged.”

It appears to be this excerpt the ministry is referring to in its submission to the court.

That the MPs, in discussing the legislation, distinguished between arrest and charges would seem to bolster the prosecution’s argument — it suggests an acknowledgment by lawmakers that there is a distinction, and that they knowingly didn’t include it in the law.

However, it appears the ministry didn’t read much further into the Hansard transcript they cited.

Just a few lines down, Doherty conflates the two words, saying, “Good Samaritan laws do not protect people from arrest for other offences, such as selling or trafficking drugs, or driving under the influence of drugs. These policies protect only the caller and overdose victim from arrest, prosecution for simple drug possession, possession of paraphernalia, or being under the influence.”

If the legislators themselves blurred the lines between arrest and charges, should a regular person not be expected to do the same?

Part of the argument being made by the CDPC and HRNA in intervening in the case is that the law is necessary for life and death, and people shouldn’t have to spend time thinking about whether or not they should call police — that an arbitrary line shouldn’t be drawn between arrest and charges that would lead people to question whether they should call for help.

Hello 2025.

I’m not big on new years resolutions. I think personal growth shouldn’t be tied to one particular time of year, but should be a constant project. By putting so much weight on the new year, I worry that we set ourselves up for greater disappointment if we fail.

One problem with the Alcoholics/Narcotics Anonymous model of recovery is the binary it places on substance use. One is either “clean” or they are using, and a “relapse” becomes a personal failure, an Event.

The issue with building up pressure on one event into a capital-E Event is that it compounds shame — shame being one of those emotions that one attempts to mop up with substances.

It also individualizes substance use, atomizes all patterns of behaviour into a collection of distinct particles that act in a vacuum, separate from one another — never mind the countless external social or economic factors that can pull one into substance use.

Personal growth is a process — not an Event

I think this applies similarly to new years resolutions. By placing so much weight on the Event of a new year, and the Event of failure to live up to our own expectations, we set ourselves up for more shame, and ultimately less motivation to achieve our goals.

Never mind that everything is exhausting, that it’s ever-harder to make time for exercise, for reading, for that pottery class you want to take, and ever-easier to justify splurging on some kind of treat or another because you just need something for you when you’re struggling to make rent.

That being said, the symbolism of a new year with a new slate is hard to escape — and I have some resolutions, myself.

My suggestion for us all is to approach personal growth not with a single goal in mind, but with an intention, and with an acknowledgment that goals aren’t a singular Event, but one event in a sea of events, each interacting with events preceding, coinciding, and succeeding (not: I aim to go to the gym three times a week; rather: I aim to go to the gym often when things are going smoothly, and to try to make time for the gym when I’m feeling stressed). I also want to find balance between quantity and quality (not: I want to read 20 books; rather: I want to read work that is both challenging and nourishing).

The Bind in 2025

With that in mind, one of my resolutions for myself is to be more active with The Bind as long as it’s still around. I don’t want to set a schedule of publication because I don’t want to publish purely for the sake of publishing.

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, and the folder they automatically go into is so overwhelmed with unread emails that I just don’t go in there. Two particular newsletters are major culprits — Zeteo and Wonkette, each of which has a billion different newsletters, both of which I’ve recently unsubscribed from as a result.

I don’t want to insert myself into your inbox if I don’t feel it is warranted.

But I also don’t want to over-correct, to question my judgment that I have a good story that is worth sending out by email. I want to maintain a high quality of work, but I also want to make room for publishing pieces that fill smaller knowledge gaps.

Up to now, a lot of my work in The Bind has been paid for by the Changing the Conversation project through Douglas College, which came to a close with the new year. I’m extremely grateful to Elliot Rossiter, the professor at the head of that project, for giving me the resources and autonomy to do work I want to do.

With the end of that project, The Bind will be much more on my own time, meaning it will be subject more to the ebbs and flows of my energy and capacity. While I do have a handful of paying subscribers (to whom I’m also extremely grateful), the annual income from that is about two-thirds of one month’s rent.

To be clear, this is not a request for paid subscriptions. I hope to have other ways for you to support my work in the future.

However, as with just about any freelance journalist in the year 2025, I also subsidize my journalism work with communications work because this industry loathes its workers.

I also am looking for regular freelance and/or part-time work in communications, as well as in non-daily journalism (editing, research, fact-checking, etc.), to fill the income gap that will be arising with the absence of Changing the Conversation, so I’d gratefully accept any leads at dustin@godfrey.work.

I have one last big project from Changing the Conversation that I spent most of December and a lot of time in the preceding months working on, along with plugging away at it throughout the last year, and I’m really excited to publish that — it’s a project I’ve enjoyed working on, and something I’ve tried to be creative with.

It’s still going to be some time for it to come out, but I’m hoping to publish within the month. When I do, prepare for five parts, plus at least three bonus posts (the latter of which I’ll put at least initially behind some kind of paywall).

The year that was

With all of that said, I do want to recognize some of the work I’ve done over the last year, both here in The Bind and elsewhere.

The most popular

Brad West fed CHEK viewers an unmitigated stream of misinformation

One was nearly exactly a year ago, in response to an appearance on CHEK by Port Coquitlam mayor Brad West.

My open application for the position of senior editor of National Post's opinion section

The next was my (unsuccessful!) open application for senior editor of the National Post’s opinion section. For some reason they didn’t reach out?

Labour intensive pieces

The Housing Accelerator Fund may be accelerating housing. But not necessarily how the federal government says it is

In September, I published an analysis of cities’ applications for the Housing Accelerator Fund — that analysis involved looking at initiatives put forward by the cities as “HAF-incented” housing and scouring those cities’ websites to see how many of those initiatives were actually new to the federal project.

In search of Canada's 'hidden crime tax'

Earlier in the year, I saw some talk of Canada’s “hidden crime tax,” so I asked the group pushing this narrative for the report they relied on for their figure ($824 per household per year) and found it to be largely napkin math that used shaky data, dubious assumptions and an overly generous application of the term “crime tax.”

Challenging narratives

BIG SCOOP: A press release

Earlier in the year, a couple of RCMP detachments issued press releases claiming safe supply was flooding the street supply of drugs. An analysis of media coverage of those press releases to be lacking in nearly any critical perspectives, despite some serious questions raised by them.

Alberta's significant decline in toxic drug deaths already showing cracks

As Alberta published data on drug toxicity deaths in that province, media were entirely credulous about claims the “Alberta model” was working, despite having been through this claim before.

One more…

The housing crisis is increasing wait times for publicly funded voluntary treatment

In October, I published the result of an FOI request that found operators of publicly funded substance use treatment beds were struggling to discharge patients because of the housing crisis.

Beyond The Bind

‘Exclusion Zone’ Blocked Journalists Covering Vancouver Tent City Teardown (The Maple)

As the Vancouver Park Board was tearing down the CRAB Park encampment, I spoke to journalists who say park rangers denied them access — something they deemed to be an exclusion zone. Exclusion zones are illegal, but police keep using them to block journalists’ access to observe their actions.

BC Lawsuit Highlights Harms of Opioid Prescribing Crackdown (Filter)

I looked at a lawsuit from a pain patient who says the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC invaded his privacy by unilaterally deciding he needed to be tapered off his medications, against the will of his doctors and without ever assessing him.

Can Court Cases Turn the Tide for Canadian Harm Reduction? (Filter)

As a right-wing attack on the rights of drug users has ramped up, a number of lawsuits have been challenging carceral approaches to drug policy, from the above-mentioned deprescribing lawsuit to legal challenges around compassion clubs and recriminalization.

“Greed is just killing everybody”: Why Vancouver’s independent grocers are struggling while big grocers profit (Vancity Lookout)

I spoke with local grocers in Vancouver who said they’re facing existential economic struggles amid inflation and an affordability crisis — all the while, the grocery sector saw skyrocketing profits.

This essay has been adapted and abbreviated from a paper originally published in the International Journal of Drug Policy by Tyson Singh Kelsall.

Last week, the BC NDP repealed Bill 34 — police power legislation that would have permitted officers to fine, arrest, displace or seize the belongings of people they suspect of drug use, which the BC NDP titled, “Restricting Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act.”

Bill 34 had already been halted by a temporary BC Supreme Court injunction won by the Harm Reduction Nurses Association, which the BC NDP later failed to appeal, and was expected to face a full charter challenge in 2025.

Part of the BC NDP’s public-facing rationale was that their separate move to roll back their so-called decriminalization framework — what several community groups are calling “recriminalization” — meets the same goals as trying to implement Bill 34.

Recriminalization

On May 7, 2024, the BC NDP made a request to the federal government to amend the three-year decriminalization pilot to effectively criminalize all outdoor drug use.

Within one week, the federal government approved this change.

Drug user groups and healthcare workers have called this a “side-step” or “circumventing” of the Bill 34 injunction by effectively limiting the decriminalization framework to private residences and select healthcare settings. The BC NDP government frames it as a method to criminalize public drug use.

Recriminalization does not include the explicit criminalization for the suspicion of substance use through fines or arrest, unlike Bill 34. Recriminalization is about possession in a political push to criminalize people relying on public space.

Recriminalization does mean that BC’s narrow decriminalization framework now only applies to private residences, shelters, and outpatient addiction, overdose prevention, and/or drug-checking service locations. (It should be noted that how recriminalization will be implemented in some settings remains unclear, particularly within healthcare).

Thirteen drug user rights organizations submitted a legal appeal against the federal government in order to have recriminalization reversed. This judicial review will be heard in 2025, but the policy remains in place for now.

Displacement context

BC is one of a majority of jurisdictions in the world that adheres to collective drug prohibitionist policies.

Prohibitionist policies are upheld by various forms of policing power, legal tools and discretion. The enforcement tools reflected in these frameworks typically include displacement and isolation, either through compelling the evasion of law enforcement, through direct force, and/or through the severing from community through incarceration.

Recriminalization specifies that for unhoused people drug use remains decriminalized in extremely limited locations where, “unhoused individuals are legally sheltering,” while also adhering to all other municipal bylaws.

And this is in a context of there being very few safe places for unhoused people to legally shelter outdoors, particularly during the day across the province.

In 2024, the federal government commissioned a “housing advocate” to conduct an observational study. The advocate's final report echoed calls from community members, including to end forced evictions of encampments. The report also called displacement events across BC a “failure to uphold their basic rights.”

The BC NDP had also planned to pass another displacement bill in 2023 — Bill 45. Bill 45 was set to lower standards of what a “shelter” is considered to make it easier to displace people living in encampments, but the BC NDP chose to defer after public outcry from several organizations, including the First Nations Leadership Council, the BC Civil Liberties Association, and the Union of BC Municipalities.

And even though research indicates that public and social consumption tend to be statistically less likely to be fatal than using in isolation, people living outdoors continue to die at increasingly devastating rates from the toxic supply. The BC Coroners Service reported a 138 per cent rise in deaths of unhoused people between 2021 and 2022, citing that “more than nine in 10 were determined to have been caused by unregulated drugs.”

In November 2023, solicitor general Mike Farnworth told PressProgress that the BC NDP “recognize that vulnerable and/or unhoused people often do not have many reasonable options for places to consume drugs,” clarifying that the BC NDP is aware of who will have to bear the negative consequences of these policies.

Dehumanization

Drug use and possession policies have been outlined as public relations and political campaign tools for a number of actors since BC's decriminalization framework was first implemented in January 2023.

Healthcare workers have argued that drug users are being scapegoated to distract from the overlapping crises of BC's healthcare and housing sectors, including worker shortages and an 18,800-household waitlist for subsidized housing in Metro Vancouver.

BC NDP premier David Eby argued that recriminalization was reasonable as it would still protect some people “at home,” and when “someone has an overdose, that they can call an ambulance without worrying that there might be criminal consequences for that” in the legislature. But it is virtually impossible to call an ambulance on yourself while experiencing a fentanyl-related overdose. Moreover, approximately 70-80% of drug supply-related deaths in BC occur to people in private residences.

Public use has likewise been characterized as a protective factor against overdose in our emergency context. And research has shown that in urban spaces, particularly Vancouver, the risk of an overdose remaining non-fatal (vs. fatal) is higher than when compared to more rural and remote communities. In the legal case against Bill 34, BC Supreme Court chief justice Christopher Hinkson posited that using drugs socially could be the least harmful way to consume drugs during the current public health emergency.

Public health response as ‘sanctioned massacre’

Scholar Katherine McLean described resistance in the US to opening safe consumption spaces as part of a “patchy and precarious” strategy that leaves drug users to die “without sincere attempts at intervention,” characterizing it as a “sanctioned massacre.”

BC's emergency response, too, can be characterized as a sanctioned massacre.

BC’s response to the crisis has been in that same vein. After recommendations from the chief coroner-led Death Review Panel in 2023 and the provincial health officer in 2024, to urgently and meaningfully intervene in the toxic drug supply, the BC NDP rejected those suggestions on the same days, respectively, that they were received. In 2024, the auditor general also called for improved implementation of harm reduction services to save lives.

Instead, the BC NDP’s overdose response focused primarily on trying to somehow tie the unregulated drug “treatment” sector to the contamination of the drug supply, while pursuing several displacement policies, including through support for the Hastings decampment in 2023, trying to pass Bill 34, Bill 45, and now recriminalization, alongside a push to expand involuntary treatment into prisons and increase the staffing resources needed to apprehend more people more often.

Seen through the lens of a sanctioned massacre, the forever crisis, and the prioritization of law enforcement in drug law, are not “unintended consequences,” but rather a strategic direction that mirrors who the BC government is actively considering disposable, and who is deserving of life.

Police chiefs in Canada say they no longer support decriminalization, but a longtime Vancouver drug policy analyst says we shouldn’t take them at their word that they ever did.

The BC NDP and federal Liberal governments leaned on support from the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and its provincial counterpart, the BC Association of Chiefs of Police, in implementing a “decriminalization” pilot that started in early 2023 and was intended to run three years.

The CACP issued a report in July 2020 stating its support for “decriminalization” of drugs for personal possession.

The organization even reaffirmed its support for decriminalization in a presentation to the federal parliament’s health committee as recently as April this year.

Reform as obstruction

But Karen Ward, a policy analyst in the Downtown Eastside, said she never believed they actually supported decriminalization, but rather that their support was an obstruction of change.

“It was an exploitative move, and it was interesting to note that they started suddenly supporting things in the summer of 2020, during the George Floyd uprisings,” Ward said.

By claiming support for decriminalization, Ward said, the chiefs of police effectively took the steam out of movements to defund the police, by focusing instead on reform and maintaining their role in drug policy.

By becoming willing participants in what was ostensibly a shift away from criminalization, police could play the part of reasonable incrementalists, rather than reactionaries with a vested interest in opposing change.

And as a result, any push for decriminalization, Ward said, “became watered down to the point of an empty gesture.”

Ward noted, for instance, that the exemption excluded those under the age of 19, leaving young drug users vulnerable to arrest and criminal charges.

When the federal government approved BC’s request for an exemption from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, it limited the removal of criminal penalties to adults carrying a cumulative 2.5 grams or less of only a handful of substances.

This was a reduction from the 4.5g requested by the BC government, following an objection from the BCACP.

Lowered thresholds

Instead, the organization proposed a limit of just 1g in a position paper that appears to have been removed from the CACP website, where it was previously hosted, but which has been preserved through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

This is despite that same report stating that the average threshold for other countries that have decriminalized drug possession is 4g, which it acknowledged to be a “gross under-estimation” because it only counted thresholds for heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine and excluded thresholds for other drugs.

It also notes that a number of countries didn’t include thresholds for meth or listed the threshold as a “day’s supply” rather than a fixed weight, further reducing that average.

And it excluded Colombia as “an extreme outlier, which would have skewed the average upward.”

Despite this, the paper still stated that the 4.5g threshold — significantly closer to the conservative estimate of 4g as an international average than the 1g limit proposed by the organization, or even the 2.5g limit the government landed on — “is not consistent with other countries or in the best interest of a public health model.”

The paper dismisses self-reported drug use trends as “not a strong evidence base to establish a drug possession threshold,” and suggested the now-defunct Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions’ inclusion of “social supply” — that is, buying enough to share with others without any profit involved — to meet the definition of trafficking and to fall outside the scope of a simple possession exemption.

The 4.5g limit proposed by the BC government itself was already far lower than the 18g limit suggested by the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users and backed by the BC Health Coalition.

And the BCACP’s suggestion would have maintained a wide discretion for police to seize people’s drugs, with the organization saying its average seizures varied from 1.3g in the RCMP North District up to 1.9g in Vancouver and Abbotsford — all well above the 1g threshold they proposed.

No systemic change

Throughout the conversation on decriminalization, advocates have insisted that there needs to be an increase in services, that decriminalization alone is not sufficient.

Moreover, they have argued that it should be paired with a reduction in police funding — that real decriminalization would remove resources from an agency that commits drug users to criminalization and turn those resources over to services that help lift people out of cycles of poverty, trauma, and criminalization.

But when police spoke of decriminalization, even as they argued for an increase in services, they made clear that they still saw police as a key agency in drug policy, and that they didn’t believe decriminalization should, in any way, reduce police budgets.

“A decriminalization or diversion model will not provide any opportunity for police agencies to reduce their operating budgets or staffing,” the report reads.

“Some have suggested that decriminalization would free up police officer time and budgets could be reallocated to other priorities; however, police agencies must continue to resource drug enforcement units dedicated to disrupting the illicit drug markets.”

Indeed, since then, the Vancouver Police Department’s budget has grown a third from $341 million in 2021 to a proposed $453 million next year. That fell $13 million short of the department’s ask, to which chief Adam Palmer cried poverty, calling the $1.24-million-a-day fund, which would still account for a full quarter of the city’s non-utility operating budget, a “keep the lights on” budget.

In fact, while other public organizations have been pushed to find areas to reduce spending in multiple levels of government in recent years, Palmer told the board that if he didn’t get his requested protest budget, rather than find the money elsewhere in his agency’s budget, he would simply spend it anyway, at the expense of taxpayers.

And in 2022, the department commissioned a report that was widely ridiculed, which claimed Vancouver’s social safety net cost $5 billion a year. The report was used to claim that public money and resources are being drained in the Downtown Eastside even as the area faces growing poverty.

But that $5-billion figure included $2 billion in federal government funding, such as pension and old age security payouts and employment insurance benefits. And Glacier Media columnist Rob Shaw pointed out that the charities listed among the safety net included hospital foundations, an aquatic fitness program and the Urban Horse Project Society.

Police claim the role of social services

Ward called this version of decriminalization “another one of those facade policies” by the BC government to give the appearance of change without actually creating change.

“[It] gave the police the power to continue to dictate the framing, to continue to say, ‘Well, we’re basically the arbiters of that,’ which is what they did,” Ward added.

“Always, always, always, it’s the police framing.”

That framing includes positioning police as social services providers. The social safety net report included in its $5-billion estimation for Vancouver’s social safety net $317 million in spending from the VPD in 2019, which incidentally is $16 million more than the entire department spent that year.

Police commonly note they are taking on more roles, including as mental health or social workers, which police themselves say contributes to burnout. But while community advocates argue against this mission creep, as mental health calls too commonly end with police killing the subject of the call, police will still push back.

And the decriminalization pilot maintained a role for police as connecting drug users with services, printing off thousands of cards for officers to hand out to people they see using drugs.

Criminalization as identity

Ward said true decriminalization goes beyond thresholds for how much of a drug a person can carry.

“This whole thing didn’t actually have any of the structural changes that we're talking about here, because it’s not just about: can you carry these drugs around?” Ward said.

“We’re talking about becoming part of society again, as an idea. It’s a movement back into the world.”

Reducing decriminalization to thresholds that one can carry around without being arrested is “ridiculous and shallow,” Ward said, noting that criminalization isn’t just an incident but a process of identifying an outgroup for broader ostracization, in which a person “become[s] a subject of policing.”

“It’s not even necessarily about a charge being laid. … You couldn’t actually exclude someone more thoroughly from society than by saying that you’re outside of the law,” she said.

“Yes, we put them into a cell. … But there’s a process of identification: you’re a criminal.”

Shaping the discourse

That labelling and devaluing of drug users was reflected in the public conversation around drugs during the decriminalization pilot project, Ward said, with many in the public all too ready to believe stories of chaos caused by drug users.

When anonymous sources told journalists drug users were terrorizing hospitals, they reported it uncritically and one-sided in a way they wouldn’t if, for instance, someone suggested police engage in systemic racism.

And discourse abounded of chaos in the streets and alleged increased public drug use that ostensibly was caused by decriminalization, a claim police contributed to, rarely including the context of a 32% increase in homelessness in Metro Vancouver in recent years.

When one video emerged of a couple of people using drugs in a Maple Ridge Tim Hortons, becoming the subject of an entire media cycle, public safety minister Mike Farnworth at the time cited it as a reason to restrict public drug use.

That’s despite the fact that decriminalization didn’t give anyone permission to use drugs in Tim Hortons.

And it’s despite these behaviours being anecdotal and not intrinsic to drug use. But the identity created through criminalization, Ward said, gives permission to paint all of the estimated 225,000 people who use drugs in BC with the same broad strokes.

“Oh, these two guys were smoking in a Tim Hortons, so we’re going to criminalize 225,000 people?” Ward said. “As if that’s representative.”

When corporations taint water supplies, or mislead the public about climate change for decades, or defraud investors, or skimp on quality control, resulting in serious public safety concerns, we don’t see the same widespread agreement that we should criminalize all corporations or CEOs.

Criminalization beyond policing

It doesn’t stop with police, however — to be labelled “criminal” is to be excluded from housing, from employment, from healthcare, from services.

“That kind of goes into the idea of stigma, but it’s much more profound than that. Stigma seems like a meaningless word to me right now,” Ward said.

“You’re not going to find an apartment, so you give up trying. You’re not going to find a job, so you give up trying. So what are you going to do for cash? I guess I’ll go deal drugs. … You stop existing in the legit world. And that’s a really fucked up thing, too, because that’s a failure of everybody.”

Criminalization, then, spans agencies and governments, from police to social workers to housing providers and beyond.

The toxic drug crisis comes at a time in which the decades of defunding most other public institutions — public housing, social services, disability assistance — have been converging into a broader crisis.

Ward said people using drugs in public have become a scapegoat for those failings, despite the behaviour being a symptom of systemic failings and not a cause — and the only response the government can think of is police.

“Our government’s totally just showing its cowardice, and it’s manifest in its response to this,” Ward said.

“This lack of courage is fatal. And it’s really messed up. And the way that the cops have used it to expand their power and their budgets and their authority is really not OK.”

Quick note: I’ve been very slow to publish here, and I owe an explanation to those who have paid subscriptions for this newsletter. I’ve been working on a larger project that is looking like it will be four or five parts, and that has been taking up a lot of the time I have for The Bind. I am aiming to have that finished this month, so look for that coming in the next few weeks.

As BC’s two leading political parties pose competing bids for involuntary treatment in the province, the BC government has had a hard time clearing waitlists for a voluntary program because there isn’t enough housing for people to be discharged into, according to internal government documents.

It’s a challenge that wouldn’t be resolved under an involuntary treatment regime, and which suggests substance use disorders can’t be meaningfully addressed without resolving the housing crisis.

Starting in early 2021, the Canadian Mental Health Association’s BC division took charge of administering a $13-million grant from the provincial government to fund recovery beds at a variety of private treatment centres.

In all, the grant funds 105 beds — including 46 new beds and the remainder converted from privately paid beds — at 14 facilities across the province, according to quarterly reports on the program filed by the CMHA BC with the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions.

The reports, obtained through a freedom-of-information request, contain a wide array of data ranging from referrals to the program, data around the waitlist, discharges from beds funded by the grant, and the use of opioid agonist therapy in the programs.

The reports captured by the FOI request span 27 months of monitoring, starting with the second quarter of the program from July-September 2021 to, most recently, the 10th quarter in July-September 2023.

Throughout that time period, the reports point to troubles clearing waitlists around the province.

Until summer 2022, the waitlists are measured in terms of average days on the waitlist. Starting in October that year, CMHA BC began breaking down the number of people on the waitlist by how long they have been waiting. They included those who waited fewer than seven days, one to four weeks, five to 12 weeks, 13 to 20 weeks and 21 weeks or more. In July-September 2023, that changed again to those who waited one week, two to six weeks, seven to 11 weeks, 12 to 16 weeks and 16+ weeks.

Throughout the more than two years of monitoring, the reports see the distribution of wait times shift, but typically the largest number of people were waiting five to 12 weeks.

Leaving the waitlist

As the waitlist grew over time, it was being reduced more often by people being removed from the list than by people entering treatment.

Between April 2022 and September 2023, the reports count 1,111 individuals who were removed from the waitlist, while 837 entered treatment, a ratio of about three people removed for every two entering treatment.

This is a problem that only got worse with time, as the two quarters covering April to September 2023 saw 608 people removed from the waitlist, while 312 entered treatment, a ratio of nearly two to one. 

This includes clients who died while waiting to access treatment, though it’s not clear how many. Not every quarterly report listed reasons for clients being removed from the list, but of the five reports that did, three of them listed client death as one of the reasons.

The reasons also include losing contact with clients, recurrence of drug use or being arrested, as well as individuals who accessed treatment elsewhere.

CMHA BC did not answer a question about how many people were removed from the waitlist because they died or were unreachable.

“Clients that are unreachable are unreachable by the treatment centre. Outreach from CMHA BC to a client that has been on the waitlist is not something that occurs and is out of the scope of CMHA BC’s involvement,” CMHA BC said.

Leslie McBain, co-founder of Moms Stop the Harm, said long waitlists for people looking to access treatment pose a lot of potential risks.

“If they aren’t on safe supply, which they probably aren’t because so few people are, they are going to go to the toxic drug market. … They’re at great risk of injury or death from those drugs,” she said.

“People won’t wait that long, can’t wait that long. I keep saying that the system is completely broken, and it’s not attending to the reality of people who are addicted.”

Why the long waits?

Housing appears to be a major contributing factor to clearing the waitlist.

The first annual report, looking at April 2021 to March 2022, notes that clients are “drawn to the CMHA beds for varied reasons,” but the fact that these treatment beds are publicly funded is “a key factor.”

“Upon discharge, they are no wealthier than they were at intake, and the rising cost of market housing is becoming an inhibiting factor in the service provider’s ability to safely discharge them,” the report notes.

The report adds that supportive housing is often an untenable option for those exiting treatment.

“In many cases supportive housing will house people that have active and ongoing mental health and substance use challenges that put the long-term success of a client coming out of treatment at risk of relapse,” the report says.

The reports similarly note a “significant barrier” to beginning treatment is that clients are afraid they would lose their housing if they attend a recovery centre.

It also points to a lack of adequate access to opioid agonist therapy in many communities for the client to continue that treatment as they graduate out into the community.

“In some cases, a client may not be able to get an appointment with a practitioner for months, which delays discharge and further intake,” the report notes.

And it notes to a lack of staffing, with the pandemic, chronic stress and illness and economic factors having “driven people away from the treatment and recovery field and into other industries.”

Dangers exiting treatment

Allowing patients to stay until they have access to adequate living space post-treatment may add challenges with clearing waitlists, but McBain said the alternative is potentially even riskier.

Supports available for people leaving treatment are sparse, she said, and often inadequate.

Even if a person has been on methadone or suboxone throughout their treatment, leaving after a few months into a position where a person is likely to return to substances leaves them “tremendously vulnerable to injury and death from the ever-increasing toxicity of the street drugs,” McBain said.

Studies show that individuals leaving treatment, prison and hospitals are at a higher risk of injury and death from overdose because they have reduced tolerance to opioids. The risk may be higher for those who complete detox than for those who drop out early.

Critics of involuntary treatment argue this is particularly true for those who are confined against their will, as those programs, by definition, target those who may not be ready to discontinue their substance use and who are therefore more likely to resume afterwards.

Housing vs. recovery

That housing is a factor in challenges with the treatment program is not surprising to those who closely watch drug policy, including Nicole Luongo, systems change analyst with the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition.

“There is such a strong correlation between material deprivation and high-intensity drug use. … When people are experiencing homelessness, there is so much incentive to stay intoxicated,” Luongo said.

“From a purely psychological perspective, when you are homeless, you are so grotesquely stigmatized and dehumanized. So that unto itself is, I think, a key component driving high-intensity drug use — the need to, in the simplest of terms, escape that, or mute that feeling.”

For the sake of safety, she added, it’s common to use stimulants to stay awake at night. Medications that help keep people off of street drugs can be stolen or taken in street sweeps.

And a person on disability assistance has their housing allowance — which is already widely considered to be legislated poverty — revoked while in treatment, Luongo said.

“That has just always struck me as such a form of state violence, to put it bluntly,” she said.

“People are being admitted to these spaces. They have no opportunity, obviously, to generate income. And because they are housed temporarily, it could, in theory, at least be a bit of time to cobble together a few dollars.”

Even having $500 coming out of treatment, she said, “can feel really significant” to finding stability and maintaining abstinence or medication-assisted treatments like methadone.

Punished for their economic status

The depth of the housing crisis may be new, but Luongo described a trajectory that she said is far from new, starting with social and economic inequality and the compounding factors within that inequality that drive high-intensity drug use.

For decades, those severely marginalized people have accessed treatment, which Luongo said too often can be “effectively a flop house” before being discharged after a month or two “back into the same circumstances.”

“And when they are not able to maintain abstinence, then that just provides fodder for blaming them as individuals,” she said.

Blaming the individuals, then, becomes ammunition for policies like involuntary treatment.

“It created this policy milieu that really produces addiction en masse. It produces the conditions that people need to escape from, and that drive high-intensity drug use,” she said.

“And rather than address those conditions, what the government now is doing is promoting the idea that … the biggest victims of our policy environment ought to be and deserve to be now doubly victimized through involuntary treatment for conditions that they did not create.”

Asked about the implications of these challenges with voluntary treatment on the province’s plan to expand involuntary treatment, CMHA BC referred to its statement of Sept. 18, in which the organization noted a “dramatic increase in reliance on involuntary services, while voluntary services have not kept up with demand.”

People with substance use disorder are “the fastest growing population being detained” under the existing involuntary framework, CMHA BC wrote.

“This fact, along with the recent announcement, is concerning to CMHA BC, knowing that there is a lack of evidence to support the effectiveness of involuntary treatment for people with substance use disorder, and that existing evidence actually suggests that involuntary treatment leads to an increased risk of death due to drug poisoning upon release,” CMHA BC wrote.

“There remains very little oversight or accountability of the mental health system. CMHA BC is concerned that a movement to detain more people under these current conditions and culture, without addressing significant gaps in the quality and effectiveness of care, will not lead to positive or dignified outcomes for people.”

By Sacia Burton (BC Poverty Reduction Coalition) & Cailin Tyrrell (Tenant Resource Advisory Centre)

Right now, around 1.5 million tenants live across British Columbia, making up over 660,000 households. From the Lower Mainland to Vancouver Island, stretching to the Kootenays and Northern BC, tenants like you and me are experiencing extreme precarity in an unstable, unaffordable rental housing market. 

Whether you’ve been renting for one, five, or 25 years, the profit-driven rental housing market, outdated residential tenancy policies, and loopholes in current housing legislation place tenants at the mercy of landlords. From our work at the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition (BCPRC) and Tenant Resource & Advisory Centre (TRAC), we know that thousands of people each year are left vulnerable to unstable and unsafe housing arrangements — and many are made homeless.

Taking on the stress of drawn-out issues with mould or pests. Dealing with inadequate heating and cooling during extreme weather. Staying in a bad or abusive living situation due to the high cost of renting elsewhere. We all are or know someone with a bad landlord story or a horrible housing experience. Yet we rarely hear about how these situations can be solved. 

Barriers to dispute resolution at the Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB) are further complicating systemic issues like discrimination and racism in the rental housing market, and are continuing to impose challenges on tenants who are already facing a disproportionate amount of the burden of this crisis. Between unfair rent increases of 23.5% or more that help pad a landlord’s wallet, unfair evictions that leave terminally ill tenants with no place to go, parents with young kids facing homelessness, and entire apartment buildings facing dozens of retaliatory evictions, there remain few accountability measures in place for the landlords that are wreaking havoc on tenants’ lives. 

Today, there is nothing stopping a landlord from serving back-to-back eviction notices to the same tenant, dragging out hearings for months at the RTB, and even continuing to do this across multiple rental properties — all at the same time. And we know that homeownership continues to be out of reach for those wishing to leave the rental housing market behind, trapping people in toxic tenancies that undermine their health and well-being. We also know that addressing these issues will take meaningful action from all levels of government.

Momentum is building for policy change that supports tenants. At September’s Union of BC Municipalities conference, councilors and regional directors from across the province endorsed a motion supporting the implementation of vacancy control, which would limit the amount landlords can raise rents in a unit between tenancies. For this policy to progress, we need leadership in our province to come directly from tenants, for tenants. By ensuring participation and oversight by people affected by inadequate or precarious housing, solutions can be developed to respond to tenants’ needs rather than profit-driven initiatives.

Today, on International Tenants Rights Day, we call on the next provincial government to not only recognize housing as a human right, but make the reforms that deliver on that promise. Government must, at minimum, take the profit out of eviction by putting the brakes on the uncontrolled rent increases between tenancies that fuel the eviction crisis. As we hear platform promises to solve the housing crisis and make life better for people in the coming weeks and months, it is crucial for tenants’ rights to be top-of-mind in provincial housing strategies. To curb the housing crisis and make BC livable for all, the time to act is now. 

Cailin Tyrrell (she/her) is driven by her passion for tenants’ rights and housing justice. With a background in government communications and community organizing, she’s currently pursuing her masters in community and regional planning while working at the Tenant Resource Advisory Centre (TRAC) in project management. In her down time, you can find her online, in the park, and almost always with a coffee in hand.

Sacia Burton (they/she) gratefully resides on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory by way of unceded Snuneymuxw territory. They bring a broad experience of working in non-profit, political organizing, and hospitality to their role as digital media manager at the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition. Beyond working hours, Sacia enjoys getting to know the plants and birds in her neighbourhood.

Just over a month after proponents of the “Alberta model” of drug policy ran a victory lap, claiming the province is seeing a massive reduction in overdose deaths, new data is showing the decline to be less dramatic than previously claimed.

In late August, Alberta released data showing a 55% decline in opioid-related deaths in May compared to the year prior. For all drugs, that decline was even higher, at around 59%.

But just a month later, the province has released preliminary data for June, and the updated numbers for May have already climbed significantly.

While the original released showed 73 deaths in the province in May, compared to 177 in May 2023, the most recent data shows it has already climbed to 87 deaths, an increase of 19.2%, according to data compiled by independent drug policy researcher Euan Thomson.

Thomson, the author behind the Drug Data Decoded newsletter, told Filter Magazine late last month that the data releases should always be treated as preliminary. The province uses a medical examiner model of investigating deaths, whereas BC uses a coroner model. The former is more accurate, but it also takes longer to complete investigations.

Both BC and Alberta see their numbers adjusted even years later as new data are released. But in BC, the changes tend to be around 10%, based on data compiled by The Bind.

In Alberta, the changes tend to be more like 15% — but Thomson noted that when the initially reported numbers are low, one should expect that to exceed 20%.

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April and May had, at their initial data release, been the first two months in which the number of people dying of overdoses had dropped below 100 since March 2020, when toxic drug deaths were rising rapidly amid pandemic-related lockdowns.

Only May remains below 100 deaths, with April’s release, initially at 95 deaths, climbing to 105 in the next data release, and again to 110 in the most recent data.

This mirrors another time in which the original data released fell below 100 — in June and July 2022, the province initially reported 99 and 98 deaths.

After data was released for the summer of 2022, people like Pierre Poilievre were declaring victory in the drug policy realm, with a near-half decrease in toxic drug deaths compared to the preceding winter. But some of those numbers have increased by as much as 28.6% from the original data release.

Given how significant the decrease in reported deaths for this spring have been — even with the adjustments, May’s deaths still sit around 51% below last year — it’s likely there will still be a notable drop in deaths once the data is completed.

But after the decline in summer 2022, the following year went on to be the deadliest year on record for Alberta, with five out of 12 months seeing higher rates of overdose deaths than BC.

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“The Alberta government keeps weaponizing these temporary dips in mortality to advance harmful policies, such as ending safer supply access in 2022,” Thomson told The Bind. “People died because of that, and people will die because of the supervised consumption closures that are now being advanced on the current temporary and artificial decrease in mortalities.”

Those harmful policies, Thomson noted, “increase profitability for addiction treatment industry players, which appear to have a stranglehold on Alberta drug policy

Thomson noted that deaths in Alberta are currently dropping, but this isn’t unique to Alberta.

BC hasn’t seen the same decline in overdose deaths this year as in Alberta, but there has been a decline. The first six months of the year have seen an 11% drop in deaths compared to the year prior, with April in particular seeing a significant decrease of nearly 25% year-over-year.

Thomson pointed also to the example south of the border, where overdose deaths have dropped nearly 11%, as reported by NPR.

He told Filter last month that people shouldn’t take too much from this decline, given the example of Alberta in summer 2022 showing that that decrease was only temporary.

“Most people have switched over to smoking, for example,” Thomson told Filter. “So this isn’t a static crisis. It’s always changing, and people are changing with it. People are changing their habits in response to how the drug supply presents itself, month over month and year over year.”

An analysis of five municipalities’ Housing Accelerator Fund applications found many initiatives claimed to be incentivized by the program weren’t new initiatives.

The federal government has touted the program in the media as changing the national conversation on housing, “helping cut red tape and fast track at least 100,000 permitted new homes over the first three years” and will “lead to the creation of over 250,000 permitted new homes … over the next decade.”

A Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation news release announcing the HAF deal with Burnaby attributes a quote to housing minister Sean Fraser saying the program will “help fast track close to 1,300 homes in the next three years and over 11,300 homes over the next decade.”

“By working with cities, mayors, and all levels of government, we are helping to get more homes built for Canadians at prices they can afford,” the quote continues.

More recently, Fraser has credited the program with “the largest upzoning in the history of this country.”

“The fund dramatically out-performed my own very high expectations,” Fraser told The Backbench podcast.

Who gets credit?

But The Bind’s analysis of applications in Burnaby, Kelowna, Richmond, Surrey, and Vancouver, obtained through freedom-of-information requests, raise questions about how much credit the federal government can take for the policy changes attributed to the program.

The five cities proposed a combined 38 initiatives, projected to generate approvals for 8,824 units of housing beyond what the cities would have otherwise approved. In the application forms submitted by cities to the CMHC, cities were asked to provide three- and 10-year projections for “HAF incented” units for each initiative.

But many of those initiatives were already in the works either entirely or in part.

After reviewing the applications and searching the cities’ websites for past mentions of each initiative, The Bind broke the initiatives down into four categories:

1. Initiatives incentivized: Initiatives for which no other origin outside the HAF could be found. These accounted for 17% of all 8,824 projected units.

2. Initiatives partially incentivized: Those in which some aspects appear to be incentivized by the HAF, while others had clear origins outside the program. These accounted for 16% of the projected units.

3. Initiatives with HAF justification: Initiatives that began outside the HAF, but which had some level of justification in the application for how the HAF would assist, ranging from vague gestures to specific actions the funds would go towards. These accounted for 32% of the units.

4. Initiatives not incentivized or justified: Initiatives with no connection to HAF, whether in origin or in justification for the funding. These accounted for 36% of the units.

Initiatives incentivized

Eight initiatives were found to be entirely new programs with no work found on the initiatives from extensive searches of city websites prior to HAF program launching in March 2023. Of those six, three initiatives included justification for federal funding in the application, while three initiatives included no justification for the funding.

For instance, Richmond, Kelowna and Surrey each had an initiative with grants or fee discounts for developers on eligible projects that would be funded through the HAF program.

Richmond also had an initiative to create partnerships with non-profits to expedite below-market housing that appeared to be new and which had a specific funding ask for the program: staffing.

Initiatives partially incentivized

Six initiatives were found to have been partially incentivized by the program, with some pieces of the initiatives appearing to be new and other aspects having begun prior to the HAF program launching.

For instance, the City of Surrey includes an initiative to densify around transit.

But only a fraction of the actions in that initiative appears to be new. Work on parking requirements began as early as 2021; density around transit had been underway since 2020; and the OCP review is part of a regular 10-year cycle. Reviews of several neighbourhood plans around those intended to be reviewed through the HAF application were already underway or completed, suggesting ongoing work on neighbourhood plan reviews.

Another Surrey initiative around missing middle housing and 15-minute cities is almost entirely taken from the city’s climate strategy. While this strategy was only approved in July 2023, strategy planning documents as early as 2021 show this policy as a popular option that the city had been planning on implementing. What appears to be new in this initiative is pre-approved plans for accessory dwelling units.

Initiatives with HAF justification

Ten initiatives proposed by the five cities had begun prior to the HAF program launch, but had some justification in the application for HAF funding.

That justification ranged, however, from vague gestures to specifics.

On the latter end of that spectrum, Kelowna’s program to partner with non-profits and developers to preserve or build housing is decades old — however, the city states that funding from the HAF would go towards acquiring more land. 

In Surrey, a project proposing to shift some of its approvals to a professional reliance model — rather than the city closely examining every application, it would take less of a hands-on approach with “certified professionals” who have demonstrated competence to the city.

This initiative arose out of an October 2022 report by KPMG, which the city had commissioned the year prior to evaluate expanding its professional reliance program. The application didn’t provide a justification for HAF funding.

However, the city said in an emailed statement that it has implemented “several” of the recommendations from that report, but that it will “begin implementing specific recommendations related to professional reliance, on an accelerated basis (made possible by the HAF).”

And a Burnaby initiative to streamline the development approval process had already completed its initial phase by the time the HAF application was submitted, but the application noted that HAF funding would help to “complete additional process improvements that were not achieved in Phase 1.”

But many of the justifications were also vague, such as a Richmond initiative to review parking requirements — building on parking changes in 2022 with a review coming with “support of HAF funding,” without saying how the funding would support the review. Similarly, a Kelowna initiative on infill housing was announced in February 2023, before the HAF program launched, but the application stated without specifics that some of the work would be “supported by” HAF funding.

Initiatives not incentivized or justified

Fifteen of the initiatives reviewed fell under this category, making up nearly two-fifths of all initiatives — and more than 36% of all units between the 38 initiatives.

Most of these units were in Vancouver, where all seven initiatives fell under this category.

This includes a project to streamline permit conditions, which began in January 2023, with one piece of the initiative implemented in December 2022. Another initiative was simply implementation of the Broadway Plan, which was approved in June 2022 and took effect in September that year.

A third initiative to streamline missing middle housing included pre-zoning the Cambie Corridor, which was the second phase of implementation for the 2018 Cambie Corridor Plan, and consolidating nine RS zones down to one and allowing up to six units on single lots, both of which began with a council motion in January 2022.

The closest thing the city has to a new initiative is an initiative to optimize below-market housing policies. While the project began in spring 2023, it is a review of the Moderate Income Rental Housing Pilot Project (MIRHPP) — and as a pilot program, the city had always planned a review.

Doesn’t necessarily go against the program

The response by cities to questions about how many units are attributable to the HAF, including from the City of Vancouver, is that they comply with the program’s cut-off date. But the cut-off date is in April 2022, after Vancouver’s January 2022 motion and well after the 2018 Cambie Corridor Plan was finalized.

The cut-off date is also supposed to be an exception.

“All initiatives included within the action plan should be new initiatives that have not yet started. In exceptional circumstances, CMHC may be willing to consider initiatives that started after the 2022 federal budget (April 7, 2022),” reads the pre-application guide for the first round of funding, which was provided to The Bind by the City of Richmond.

(The pre-application guide for the second round of funding notes that “a majority” of initiatives should not have begun prior to April 16, 2024.)

Nevertheless, Richmond noted that three of its eight initiatives, “in consultation with CMHC,” began in 2022. The City of Burnaby, meanwhile, noted that its initiatives “had not yet been fully implemented” by April 7, 2022, making those initiatives eligible.

The City of Surrey said its HAF plan “consists of both new initiatives and planned initiatives that had not yet started.”

An issue of branding

None of this is to suggest the HAF is a bad program — it’s an issue of marketing.

Where the federal government presents it as a program that is pushing cities to change their practices, it could more accurately be described as a program providing funding for under-resourced cities if they can show that they are working to increase housing supply.

In response to questions from The Bind, cities spoke of planning department resources, an issue planning departments have struggled with for some time. This has become particularly acute in the last year, as provincial legislation mandating cities to allow density around rapid transit stops and to allow multiplexes in single lots.

Cities across the province already struggled with a shortage of planners, which was only amplified by the legislation, as cities worked to bring their policies and bylaws incompliance with the law, according to Business in Vancouver.

None of the cities spoke directly about a struggle to adequately staff planning departments, but three of the cities noted the funding allowed the city to access more staffing or consultants to do their work.

City of Burnaby spokesperson Cole Wagner said the HAF funding “enabled Burnaby to accelerate implementation of these initiatives, in part, through additional staffing and consultation support.” And City of Vancouver spokesperson Kirsten Langan said the city had “a long list of housing actions that we wanted to advance,” some of which were unfunded — a problem solved by the HAF funding.

The City of Surrey said the HAF funded “secondment and backfilling of 19 staff to lead this critical work — an unprecedented level of investment.” The city said the HAF funding “has been instrumental in fast-tracking” both new initiatives and planned initiatives.

“Without this support, some initiatives would have taken much longer, sometimes years longer, to commence,” the city’s emailed statement said.

The city went further in its statement to show how the funding has advanced some of the initiatives, including doubling the size of the team working to expand digital permitting and additional staffing to implement the professional reliance expansion.

CMHC and Fraser’s ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment. No questions were sent to the City of Kelowna — while none of its initiatives were new, every initiative had a new component or some justification for HAF funding attached to it.

Necessary funding

Andy Yan, director of SFU’s City Program, told the Vancouver Sun the funding also supports infrastructure for producing more housing units.

“It’s what we have been saying for some time, that you need to put money toward staff and training or technology in order to have faster approval times,” Yan told the Sun.

And the $4-billion HAF does provide plenty of funding to each city. Vancouver received $115 million, Surrey got $95 million, Burnaby got $43 million, Richmond got $36 million, and Kelowna received $32 million.

That money is earmarked for a set of permitted uses, including investment in HAF initiatives, investments in affordable housing, investment in housing-related infrastructure and investments in community-related infrastructure that supports housing.

The City of Surrey said it is using HAF funding to build infrastructure in Clayton and Grandview “to unlock approximately 2,200 dwelling units within the timeframe of the HAF.” And the city said it will be acquiring two to three sites in 2026 and 2027 “for future affordable housing opportunities” and providing seed funding for a project owned by its for-profit development corporation.

However, when the federal government announced its deals with each city, it didn’t frame it as providing cities with the resources they need to do their work — it’s framed as the federal government incentivizing thousands of housing units and changing the conversation on housing.

And while the funding will likely ultimately help to build more units of housing, it’s not clear that the figures touted by the federal government can be credited to the program.

It’s a common refrain when talking about press freedom: the media is the canary in the coal mine in the dissolution of democracy.

As local news across North America is eaten alive by rent-seeking investors, journalists and pundits rightly grieve a vital staple in a functional democracy. Without an adequate supply of local journalists, information about municipal councils, school boards, and local businesses would be reduced to press releases and rumours spread on social media and content mills.

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Locals who volunteer their time as council watchdogs (I’m convinced every municipality has at least one, usually a perennial candidate in local elections) would persist, to be sure. But the decline in local media means the loss of entire jobs — performed by individuals who (usually) aren’t often also candidates in local elections (again, usually) — dedicated to independently investigating these public bodies, and fact-checking and contextualizing the information coming out of them.

In Gaza, journalists are continuing their work in the face of genocide, and they’ve been killed by the dozens since Oct. 7, including targeted killings by the Israeli military — on top of other attacks against and arrests of journalists.

As countries fall into war or sink into authoritarianism, journalists are under threat around the globe — in India, Sudan, Senegal, and Turkey.

As a journalist, I’ve always struggled with the self-importance espoused in this industry.

The work done by journalists repressed by autocratic governments in the aforementioned countries is nothing short of heroic, and the idea of good journalism as a force for positive change is one of my core values. It’s why I do this work.

But if we focus too heavily on the risk to journalists, we risk subordinating to journalism the very reason for doing journalism — the victims of corruption, marginalization, and political violence who journalists report on.

The canaries in the coal mine aren't journalists. Journalists are just among the first to notice when the canaries have stopped singing. (This, of course, is notwithstanding the fact that, in a place like Gaza, the journalists targeted and killed are casualties of the same repression brought upon the rest of the population there.)

But even then, this represents an idealized vision of journalism — it filters out the journalism that typically isn’t the subject of attacks on journalists. Authoritarians don’t target journalists because of a dogmatic opposition to the dissemination of information. They specifically target journalists who shed light on the victims of supremacist ideologies, of corruption and power.

When autocratic regimes go after journalists, they aren’t taking on the ones who act as a government mouthpiece, the propagandists who toe the party line and even participate in the repression of marginalized communities by contributing rhetoric as ammunition.

When I say that, you likely think of presenters on Russian propaganda channel RT; on Israel’s Channel 14, which promotes the brutal military assault on Gaza; or on Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, the radio station that helped incite genocide in Rwanda. And that is, indeed, where my mind first goes as well.

But we have no shortage in North America of journalism that upholds power.

The journalism in question may rail against the governing party of the day, and the policies they institute, but it ultimately serves to uphold the same power structures as the governing party.

It isn’t enough for journalism to challenge the government of the day. For journalists to uphold democracy, we have to challenge the structures of power itself.

The work of Adam Zivo in the National Post and of Paul Johnston in Global News may take aim at government policies, but the brunt of their reporting isn’t power — it’s drug users who are condemned to the toxic supply by the moral panics their reporting fuels.

There are differences between Zivo and Johnston, but those differences are largely surface level — where Zivo pushes prohibitionist rhetoric in the active tense, Johnston does so under the pretence of neutrality.

It may feel to them like speaking truth to power when decriminalization and safe supply are policies implemented by the government. But both are ultimately watered down versions of policies advocated by the marginalized people most affected by prohibition.

They are policies that never actually changed the power structures that hurt communities like the DTES in the first place. They uphold police as the primary agencies in drug policy, and they maintain the view that drugs — not poverty and inequality, nor trauma and mental health issues — are the problem, and that the problem is inherent to drugs.

And while they purport to believe criminalization isn’t the answer, criminalization is nevertheless what we get from them.

This kind of journalism doesn’t get at root causes of issues, but instead attacks symptoms. It takes a narrow, individualized approach to issues that are societal and systemic in nature. It often rightly examines bad behaviour by those in power, but too frequently fails to question the power itself or engages in both-sidesism.

When journalists are arrested in Canada, it’s scarcely* while reporting sympathetically to power. Brandi Morin was reporting on the raid and dismantling of a tent city in the dead of winter in Edmonton. Amber Bracken was embedded with the Wet’suwet’en opposition to the Coastal GasLink pipeline when it was raided. Savanna Craig was covering a sit-in at a Scotiabank protesting its investment in Israeli defence contractor Elbit. (*The exception is Dave Menzies, whose entire schtick is being a nuisance.)

When Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre attacks journalists, he isn’t attacking people like Zivo. He’s attacking those whose journalism questions him and his politics.

By speaking in overly broad terms about the power of journalism, we flatten it into the idealized version that promotes democratic values.

Journalism has an incredible ability to do good in the world. But when done poorly or in bad faith or in service of power, it is equally capable of harm and of enabling depravity.

At best, this kind of journalism simply isn’t a canary. At worst, it’s participating in the canary’s death.

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When Andrea Sereda joined the parliamentary health committee in Ottawa back in late February, alongside three other medical and public health professionals, the result was a caricature of accountability.

While the committee hearing had four speakers, Sereda, a doctor whose London, Ont. clinic prescribes safe supply, was clearly the focus of this show. And it was a show — one that continues months later to pay dividends to its actors, who have returned to the hearing to target Sereda and her clinic.

Because I can’t help but put things into spreadsheets, I know that, not including her five-minute opening remarks, Sereda spoke for more than 34 minutes in the hearing.

Dr. Rob Tanguay, who was present at least in part as a conservative foil to Sereda, took up 13-and-a-half minutes of the committee’s time. Louis Letellier de St-Just, who was largely called on by francophone members of parliament, spoke for eight-and-a-half minutes.

The fourth speaker, Maria Hudspith, executive director of Pain BC, was there to, uh… well, that’s not clear.

Outside her five-minute opening remarks, Hudspith was called on twice and spoke for a total of 87 seconds. She was given just 28 seconds to speak at the tail end of one Liberal MP’s allotted time, and she was cut off after 59 seconds by a Conservative MP, just as her comments turned to the issue of pain patients being deprescribed opioids.

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Who gets to speak uninterrupted

The hearing was a case study of the pageantry of political accountability.

And it’s important to look through the showmanship, particularly in an issue where the stakes aren’t comparatively nebulous ideals like transparency or ethics violations, but the material conditions that have left thousands dead across the country each year for nearly a decade. (This isn’t to say that transparency and ethics violations aren’t vital issues to be concerned about.)

In the face of a crisis with a solution within reach that could save hundreds of lives each year, politicians took this time to show off their grilling skills, attempting to use Sereda as their prop.

Sereda was also interrupted by committee members far more than any other speaker, going an average of 82 seconds before being interrupted by a committee member for reasons other than time constraints. Tanguay, by comparison, was interrupted for non-time-constraint reasons once every 403 seconds. Letellier de St-Just, meanwhile, was interrupted only once and only because an MP’s allotted time was up. In one instance, a Bloc Quebecois MP let him speak for two-and-a-half minutes, taking up his entire allotted time in that round of questioning.

The bulk of interruptions to Sereda came from two people: Conservative MPs Laila Goodridge and Todd Doherty, each of whom Sereda spent five to six minutes responding to. In that time, Goodridge interrupted Sereda once every 39 seconds, and Doherty interrupted her once every 21 seconds.

By comparison, Goodridge interrupted Tanguay once in the entire five-plus minutes he spent responding to her. Doherty dedicated his entire allotted time to Sereda.

On its own, this dynamic isn’t necessarily wrong. Grilling an executive of a grocery chain that has profited off of inflation, for instance, would be justified, as would cutting the said executive off when they revert to pre-planned talking points.

Neither was the case in this hearing.

Context avoidance

In fact, rather than discouraging taking points, Doherty and Goodridge insisted on talking-point-length responses or yes/no answers to complicated questions, trawling for the 120-second exchange they can clip and post on media, quickly discarding any interaction that doesn’t promise to produce outraged retweets.

Responding to a question about alleged diversion in the area near her clinic, Sereda told Goodridge diversion is “complicated, and it requires more than a 60-second answer, if I can finish.”

She couldn’t.

“I have a very limited amount of time, so I ask quick, simple questions and wanted simple, quick answers,” Goodridge told her.

Asked about whether she believes youth should be prescribed “recreational” fentanyl, Sereda was cut off again as she explained that youth are dying from the illicit drug supply — the very context that safe supply comes out of. 

After telling Doherty she couldn’t answer another question about alleged diversion around her clinic with a simple yes or no, he assumed she denied that diversion was happening. (She didn’t.)

When explaining that there isn’t any scientific data supporting claims children are getting hooked on diverted safe supply, Doherty cut her off to ask what the leading cause of death among youth in BC was. (The answer was illicit drug overdoses; not diverted drugs.)

When explaining how extensive tracking of safe supply drugs would drive patients who have been, for years, overpoliced by governments away from accessing safe supply, Doherty interrupted to ask if diversion is illegal. (It is.)

After asking about claims by Dr. Sharon Koivu about diversion, Doherty had little patience for Sereda’s response that Koivu has refused to share her methodology, as is done in scientific research.

As Sereda explained that her clinic has “robust” protocols for preventing and stopping diversion, Goodridge interrupted with: “But diversion is illegal.” It’s not clear what point she thought she was countering with that input.

Context challenges narratives

The list goes on, but the point is that the interruptions weren’t to some corporate executive who workshopped mealy-mouthed talking points that ultimately mean nothing with a team of crisis PR suits. Their objections were to context.

If you only look at the fact that people are dying from overdoses, it does look like drugs are a problem, particularly in a political environment whose drug policy is the outgrowth of DARE-style fear-mongering of drugs and drug users.

Context challenges those narratives, and it challenges the idea that the only way to address this is through policing and the recovery industry. Context like the reason for so many people dying being that the drug supply is so unregulated that people have no clue how much of any particular adulterant is in a given dose of the drugs they’re consuming. Or that studies overwhelmingly show how effective safe supply is at not only saving but stabilizing people’s lives.

Gotcha journalism

I started writing this in early March, shortly after the hearing, but after a while the timeliness was lost and this piece fell by the wayside. I’ve been thinking of it again, recently, however, as this performance has come up again in the news cycle, thanks to Adam Zivo’s Big Scoop that people said things in a public meeting.

Sereda recently spoke to the annual general meeting of Moms Stop the Harm, in a video conference that was publicly available, and recorded and posted publicly to the group’s public YouTube channel. Zivo wrote about Sereda’s comments there, claiming she felt the meeting was private.

In the meeting, Sereda acknowledged — as harm reduction advocates have all along — that it’s likely some youth are accessing diverted safe supply, just as youth access the illicit drug market and diverted hydromorphone that was prescribed for pain patients.

In the health committee meeting, Sereda responded to allegations of diversion to youth by saying there was no evidence of this diversion. Zivo and the Conservative Party have painted this as Sereda lying to the committee.

But one can acknowledge at the same time that there’s no evidence of it and that it does likely happen. You can understand that something likely happens, but it’s impossible to take action without evidence. Scratch that. It’s impossible, without evidence, to take action in a way that’s productive and actually addresses the issue without punishing everyone else.

But the work of Zivo in the National Post and of Goodridge and Doherty in committee isn’t to produce evidence — it’s to perform. Zivo can perform the role of investigative journalist, and Goodridge and Doherty can perform the role of dogged parliamentarians seeking accountability.

But accountability demands more than yes/no answers or quick responses you can fit into a two-minute Twitter video. Accountability requires understanding, and understanding requires context.

Broken Canada, broken politics

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre often uses the line that “everything feels broken in Canada.” He’s not entirely wrong about that — but he’s often wrong about why it’s broken. And he’s failed to see his own party’s role in breaking things.

Austere governments operating on neoliberal thinking over the last half-century have let infrastructure crumble and committed us to a deep housing and homelessness crisis.

And politicians that are more interested in clips they can advertise on social media than in hearing evidence only contribute to a deepening cynicism of politics — a cynicism that Poilievre feeds on.

I want people like Sereda to answer hard, even uncomfortable questions about their programs. Tough questions, when done in good faith, bring us closer to the truth and hone in on truly adequate solutions.

Zivo’s work isn’t based on tough questions made in good faith. The list of questions he sent to Sereda regarding her comments at the Moms Stop the Harm AGM, which he linked to in his National Post piece, twist the meaning of Sereda’s words to fit his narrative.

Much of it revolves around an anecdote Sereda gave to the London Free Press and to the House of Commons, where she relates her experience with a father whose child died while on the waitlist for her safe supply program. The father said his child was accessing diverted safe supply before they died — gotcha! She said child! Safe supply! Diversion!

Zivo takes for granted that the man’s child was a youth. (Zivo, for instance, is somebody’s child, but he is no youth.)

This is among the worst tendencies of “gotcha” journalism — it makes an assumption and works backwards to support it.

The conduct of the Goodridge and Doherty in the committee hearing follow this same pattern. Rather than letting experts speak to the issue, they’ve made up their mind, and they’re working backwards to back up their conclusions, mining Sereda’s testimony for bite-sized clips they can post on social media that will outrage their base.

This isn’t accountability; it’s entertainment. And as people see politicians turning governance into entertainment, it becomes clear why “everything feels broken in Canada” — because politics is broken.

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