Alberta vs Drugs, Gangs, & Cartels | Minister Jason Nixon | EP 432

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, out November 2024, "We Who Wrestle With God." I'm looking forward to this. I'm thrilled to be able to do it again and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!

You know, the biggest protesters are not people staying inside the tent cities; they're often members of the official opposition in our province, which is the NDP, a Socialist Party. The vulnerable people, in general, have been pretty excited once they realized what opportunities they have. I mean, do you want my approach—which is to reach in, send a warm bus, load everybody up, bring them to a nice warm facility, give them shower, food, and access to medical resources—or to be left inside a tent freezing to death, taking poison?

Right. Hi everyone! I had the opportunity today to speak with Mr. Jason Nixon, he's the Minister of Seniors, Community, and Social Services in Alberta. Why did I want to talk to him? Well, the Albertans under Danielle Smith have taken a very forthright stance recently, for example, against the trans butchery and deceit that increasingly characterizes the Western world. But more, they've also taken forthright action in relationship to the springing up of all these so-called tent cities that now blight the landscape throughout North America and elsewhere. They haven't done that in a heavy-handed and punitive way; they've done that in a very intelligent and thoughtful way. They've removed 200 of approximately 300 cities already in Alberta, and really began the enterprise only in December.

I think what's happening in Alberta, I'm hoping what's happening in Alberta, could be a model for what could happen in jurisdictions like North America wide. So that's why I wanted to do this podcast with Mr. Nixon. He has a very interesting history—his father had lived on the street as an addict and alcoholic and was rehabilitated relatively young in his life and then spent the rest of his life helping homeless and addicted people. Jason grew up in that environment; he grew up surrounded by homeless people, even in his own house. This is a man who's actually walked the walk, and he knows what he's doing by all appearances. That's what we're all praying for.

So we walked through his personal experience and also the details, or as many as we could manage with regards to what's happening in Alberta cleaning up the tent cities, so to speak, and rehabilitating the people who, for one reason or another, were unfortunate enough or badly aimed enough to end up there. So it's a hopeful dialogue and I'm hoping that what's happening in Alberta could be a model for the Western world.

So join us. Well, thank you for sitting down with me and with all my guests today. I'm very interested, as you know, in what's going on in Alberta broadly, but the initial focus for our conversation is going to be what steps you are taking within the confines of Premier Danielle Smith’s government to deal with the so-called Tent City epidemic, problem, social phenomenon that's evident all over North America and is new and surprising. So tell me what the situation is in Alberta and also maybe how we got there.

Well, I think I'll start with how we got there. You know, particularly our capital city in our province, which is Edmonton, we started to see a real significant situation when it came to tent cities. Some people in our communities will call them encampments, but where we were seeing hundreds of encampments across the city of Edmonton, with hundreds of structures within those tent cities. There was really a desire, frankly, by the city of Edmonton to embrace those encampments in some way. When I say "the city," I’m referring to the municipality, to some members of the government, who ultimately have, you know, bylaw control and have the responsibility to keep the city clean. We certainly have some overlap responsibility about caring for the poor and dealing with some of the health issues that are involved, of course, but in general, usually the city is who deals with it.

Over time, we just saw these encampments get bigger and bigger and more and more problems come as a result of that. The Chief of Police from Edmonton came and saw our government and our Premier—for your international viewers and American viewers, as like a governor—and came in and laid out for us what they were seeing in those encampments. I have to tell you, it was pretty alarming; it was shocking. You know, we were hearing stories about underage girls, for example, being sexually exploited inside those encampments. They showed significant evidence of the gangs operating inside these encampments and charging people to even use the tents and to be able to access resources like water fountains or other things that would be in the area.

The police were pulling out of those encampments weapons that were quite alarming; obviously, they were seeing lots of stolen goods, finding dead bodies, and most horrifying—because, of course, our country is very cold—they were seeing people that lost their lives as a result of burning to death in these tents because they were trying to heat them with propane and different types of mechanisms to try to stay warm and survive in the elements here.

Some of those pictures we could not even release to the media; it was just that shocking what was taking place. So we got clear instructions from our Premier to get to work and to come up with a new plan when it came to those encampments, which we got to work on right away. This happened just before Christmas, this year, so just a few weeks ago. As a result of that, we launched immediately a task force led by my ministry, real department on Social Services side, but with the support of a variety of departments.

We put together what we've called the Navigation Center, so that's a structure within the city of Edmonton where we were able to bring all of the services together—everything from health to housing supports, income supports, prescriptions, even things as simple as giving people ID so that they could be able to move forward with their lives. Then we supported the police and we went in and we started tearing down all those encampments, and we started to have some pretty amazing results.

I look forward to talking with you about that, but we made a pretty clear statement that our province is no longer going to tolerate this—one, because it's not safe for the people in the encampments, but also, it's just not right for a place like Edmonton. The people of Edmonton deserve to have a clean city where they can live happily and enjoy their lives.

Okay, so let's take this apart. You said, first of all, how long ago did this problem start to mount, do you think? Because there weren't tent cities in Edmonton when I lived there back in the 1980s, that's for sure. I mean, there are tent cities now in Toronto too, and that's a completely new thing. So when did you really start to become aware of this as a mounting problem?

You know, we started to see tent cities pop up in Edmonton probably over the last two or three years, but particularly over the last year, year and a half, where it had really become basically every corner that you turned, particularly within the downtown core of the city of Edmonton. The other thing that was new though was, we're also seeing those tent cities well outside of the downtown areas, and so they were starting to pop up all across the city. But that was probably the timeline around Edmonton.

I think we really saw that a lot in our country in places like Hastings and Vancouver, which have a real bad tent city culture and drug culture inside that city, but it was kind of more new to our area over the last couple of years. Okay, so it's about two or three years now, you said, that there were Edmonton alone. How many people live in Edmonton now, just so everyone has a sense of its size?

We're getting up towards a million, I believe. Edmonton's somewhere north of 800,000, I don't have the number around, but that'd be the right area. Yep. Okay, and you said there were literally hundreds of encampments, and that some of them had hundreds of tents. Is that right?

That is 100% correct—hundreds of encampments, and inside some of those encampments, you know, I think the biggest encampment I'm aware of was 400 plus structures. Oh yeah? Okay. Okay, so that's starting to approach village size, essentially.

Well, you know, as a member of the legislative assembly here in Alberta, I represent villages that are smaller than some of these encampments. Okay, okay. So now why in the world do you think this happened so rapidly in the last two or three years? What's changed? Is it housing costs? I mean, housing costs have gone out of control in Canada, everyone knows that. And interest rates have gone up a lot, and so, but that alone seems to me to be unlikely as a causal explanation.

So, you know, why is this happening? Who are these people in the main, and where did they come from? Yeah, you know, housing is a real issue in our country, particularly given some of the bizarre federal policies that we've seen from our federal government in Canada and the inflationary problems that we see in North America. But I want to be clear: the challenge when it comes to tent cities is not a housing challenge. Housing is one of the consequences of somebody who ends up in these situations; they don't have housing, but it's not a root cause of why somebody ends up inside a tent city.

The reality is that lots of this has to do with drugs; lots of this has to do with mental health and other circumstances. I think there are some people who want to frame this discussion, like Mom and Dad who lost their job in the oil industry and somehow are struggling to pay their mortgage—that's a very real issue inside our country and our province that we need to address, and we are working on as a society. But that's not what this is; these individuals that find themselves in these encampments, lots of it's drug related.

We are seeing that without a doubt when we go into these encampments, and you know, it really drives me nuts personally as a minister responsible for this in our province that certain elements on the left continue to want to discuss this issue in the context of housing. It's not the root causes of homelessness and why people are in tent cities; something very, very different.

And he asked, what has changed that we would see that more? There has been much more of a culture certainly in our country of accepting abusive behavior to oneself, including using drugs, and a concept that we need to embrace that and accept that putting poison into people's bodies is how we help them deal with things like addiction. That's something our province has rejected under the leadership of multiple premiers, but particularly Premier Smith, where our province has been really dedicated on focusing on addiction recovery and helping individuals in these circumstances.

But there are certainly elements of our province that just want to let it continue, and so some of that is what's underneath all of this issue when it comes to encampments and tent cities inside our province. Okay, so let me push on that because I want to make sure that I understand this completely. Alright, so you make the somewhat surprising claim, I would say, that in your opinion a small percentage of the variance in this problem is accounted for by economics, specifically related to housing.

Now, that's interesting to me to have you say that because if you were inclined to make political points, you could do that just as effectively on the housing and inflation side as you could on the drug use tolerance side, let's say, right? So, I can't see any a priori reason why you would come down as a political agent on one side of that argument or another. But what is it that's made you so convinced that it is, in fact, a drug problem? To what degree is it an alcohol problem as well? And what drugs are primarily the cause at the moment?

And is that like, is that parts of the new wave of drugs that has entered the North American economy? So like, are you certain that it's drugs and alcohol? How much alcohol? How much drugs? Which drugs? So again, I want to be very clear, I don't dispute that we have housing challenges, and you're right, I can make political statements on that alone that I think could be very clear. But that's a different issue, and why I'm so certain about that is because of what we're seeing from the individuals that we've now been able to successfully get out of these encampments into our social services process with supports around them.

The vast majority, I would say all, have some sort of mental health issue, and the vast majority are also facing addiction issues as a result. We're seeing things like fentanyl which is a major drug that is impacting all of our societies across North America and the world. We’re seeing much more of that in our communities now; methamphetamine is a major drug that has been evolving on the streets. It has real serious fatal consequences to individuals involved.

But that is what is taking place inside these tent cities. Often it's a place where individuals seem to be going to be doing drugs. One other thing that we found out, I actually should point out, is that the vast majority of individuals that we're interacting with in these encampments afterwards are also using our emergency shelter system and other services in our province to be able to stay warm, to get food, to get other resources, to be able to survive on the streets. But they’re using those tent cities as a place to be able to score drugs; they’re a place to be able to use drugs. And that is the culture that is taking place in most of these tent cities.

I'm not saying every person, but certainly, the vast majority of who we interact with in these tent cities has got some sort of drug and/or alcohol addiction. Oh, okay. So let's take that apart a little bit. I mean, back in the early '70s—that's really when it started—there was an anti-leftist psychiatry and anti-institutionalization movement. It was driven in part by the kinds of concerns that were brought to light by movies such as "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," which really was quite a genius movie and a great novel, written by a psychiatric orderly who had seen plenty of abusive situations within institutions.

To be clear, they were hardly places you would go for a picnic, but the leftist solution to that was to demonize the psychiatric profession and to deinstitutionalize. The solution was to produce community alternatives that would help integrate these oppressed people who had been falsely diagnosed with mental illness by evil psychiatrists back into the community. Suffice it to say, those additional resources were never made available, not in any fundamental way. Many of the so-called mental illnesses those people had were actual illnesses, and not figments of totalitarian psychiatrists' imagination.

Deinstitutionalization—what deinstitutionalization really meant—was that many mentally ill people ended up in prison; that was the fundamental. Yeah, or on the streets. And so this homeless epidemic is a late-stage consequence of the fact that we don't have proper institutional care. So, we'll get back to that. Now, you said that the vast majority of these people who are in these tent cities have a drug and/or multiple drug and alcohol problem, and that they are utilizing all sorts of other resources, but that they're using the tent cities in particular as a place to gather and get easy access to their illicit drugs.

Now, obviously, if you're not naive or out of your skull, that's an amazing opportunity for gangs—for drug-peddling gangs, especially the ones that are peddling the hard and addictive drugs. The problem with this hyper-compassionate approach—these poor people, they need a place to live; they might as well move into the parks; who are we to stop them from having a place to live?—that belies the reality of the drug addiction problem that you described and the criminality that goes along with it.

But there's something even worse. There's something even more nefarious about it: it completely eliminates the possibility that, even if you brought a group of people who were suffering together in this unstructured manner, all you would do is invite the psychopathic gangs to come in and take control. Now, you said that's what's happened—that not only are these tent cities so-called places of massive drug distribution, there are sources of ongoing revenue for not only gangs but for organized gangs and so for like hardcore, multiple-offense, dead-set-against-the-public-order criminals to prey on people who are vulnerable—the addicted population, let's say—and to prey on them in a multitude of ways.

You know, you skipped over some very interesting details like they're being charged to stay in the tents. Well, by who? It's not like anybody owns those tents or the land. Okay, they're being charged to get access to water there. And then there's what, prostitution gangs? And if not prostitution gangs, what, open race? Like, exactly what did you guys see when you started delving into this subculture produced by the toxically compassionate?

So, you're 100% right. When I say gangs, I'm talking about very organized gangs—definitely organized crime. The police brought the government very clear evidence, which they have presented to the media, including photographic evidence of what is taking place inside these tent cities that show that the gangs have control within them and are certainly abusing vulnerable people as a result of that. It's obviously a place where they're selling drugs; it's obviously a place where people are getting access to things that they should not, but we also have received clear evidence that people are being charged even to get to water fountains.

This is a common thing that the police have brought to us. Some of the early tent cities that they went into, the police came out with evidence of minor children being sexually exploited within these tent cities. That alone for me was enough that we needed to tear them all down—full stop; completely unacceptable. So, you know, and then the other thing that I should point out that the Chief of the Edmonton Police Service really has done a good job of articulating for the media is how much stolen property, in and of itself, is being stored within these tent cities.

I mean, they went to this one area where there was a mound of bicycles that were clearly stolen that were bigger than me, and Jordan, I'm a real big guy. I'm about 6'8". It’s a big pile of stolen property! There’s been clear evidence time and time again that documents what is taking place with the gangs inside these areas, and you're right—they are exploiting the most vulnerable amongst us. It's not safe, and I think the key point to this is it's not safe for the people in the tent cities, and it's not safe for Edmonton.

I think this is the same circumstance you would see in any other major city in North America where these tent cities are taking place. Financial experts thought we were in the clear. While these experts anticipated rate cuts, inflation in the United States is still a significant economic concern.

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Okay! It's also not safe for a variety of reasons. I mean, here's a compelling reason: so imagine you set up a set of essentially lawless domains and in consequence, you produce a specialized breed of psychopathic criminals who are then highly organized. If you think that that highly organized criminal gang is going to limit its criminal activity to the tent city once it's established, you're an absolute bloody fool.

We know, for example, as criminologists that—and I did a lot of work as a researcher in the area of antisocial personality and criminology—1% of the criminals are responsible for 65% of the crimes. You let those long-term, life-course, psychopathic, repeat offenders get away with what they're doing, you're going to reap the whirlwind. Right? It's a very, very bad idea. Now, why do you think, okay, so let’s ask two questions: who are these gangs and where do they come from? Right? And who's running the drugs? How much of that's coming from China? Who's controlling the distribution? Do you guys have a sense of that?

And well, let's start with that. You know, in Alberta, the way I've been briefed with our law enforcement support is that we're seeing a variety of gangs, particularly indigenous gangs, when you're in the Edmonton area that are operating on the street. But we also have clear evidence of actually cartels, including Mexican cartels, and some of this coming from the Asian market, to your point. All operating here within the province of Alberta. These are pretty seriously organized gangs. A lot of that is to bring in the drugs, obviously, to our street, and then they're using our street gangs, which are often indigenous on the streets, to be able to move that product through places like tent cities.

Okay, so you made reference to the Mexican cartels. Let’s start with the Mexican cartels in the Asian supply. So is there—do you have any more details on either of those fronts? It’s a lovely thing to imagine now that the Mexican cartels are operating not only in the southern US but in Alberta itself. That's a real accomplishment on our part, I must say. And so, Mexican cartel is an Asian supply. I presume the Asian supply is mostly associated with fentanyl. Yes, that is correct.

And you know, the best person in our government to talk to about this is obviously our Public Safety Minister, who's managing this closely and would be the one giving us this information. But we certainly have clear evidence of cartels being in drugs, particularly across our southern border. And frankly, we're now starting to see inside our province where we're becoming an exporter of things like fentanyl. Some of the products are being brought up here to be made on our side of the line, and then now brought back even down south, which is quite a new thing for the province of Alberta. But certainly, you know, it explains some of the circumstances that we’re seeing in our province.

I would say, Jordan, that Edmonton for us, which our capital city is probably one of our smaller drug problems. You know, one of the bigger areas we’re seeing some of our largest drug problems on the street is actually in Lethbridge, which interestingly enough is the closest city to the American border, a large city in our province to the American border, and really, I think, as a proof point, that some of that drugs is starting there because of what's taking place on the border, and which is why we're seeing some of the most potent and deadly drugs inside the Lethbridge area as it works its way into the street culture.

Right, so maybe I should also at some point talk to the Public Safety Minister. So, okay, and then you mentioned indigenous gangs. Okay, so now, when I—again, when I lived in Alberta in the 1980s, and now that's getting to be quite a long time ago—40 years ago—there weren't organized indigenous street gangs, or if there were, there were very few of them. I mean, Edmonton was a stunningly safe place, with the exception of a few blocks downtown which, by say American standards, were still relatively—American downtown dangerous standards—was still pretty civilized. There was just not a problem.

So what’s shifted in Alberta? And what is the makeup and origin of these indigenous gangs? Well, I think what’s shifted is the money in the drug markets, for sure, would provide more ability for gangs to become more and more organized. And you know, the police have been out in our province very clearly establishing who these gangs are, and they're the ones who are giving me, as a cabinet minister, that information of what is taking place there.

I mean, obviously, my job is to provide that social services support to individuals within these tent cities, but we're working closely with the police who are the ones coming and briefing us about the dangers of gangs. There is no doubt in the city of Edmonton, but also across our province, that we continue to see that organized gang element increasing.

My personal view is—and I think the police would agree with me—that a lot of that is being driven, obviously, by drugs. And you know, as I think you know, I used to work in a homeless shelter. I grew up in a homeless shelter. My father is the founder of one of the largest homeless shelters and organizations that work with the poor in Western Canada here in Calgary called The Mustard Seed, and we did not see anything like this type of drug activity even 15 years ago.

You know, we would never have imagined a spot where we would see individuals working within shelters seeing multiple overdoses a day and sometimes multiple fatalities in a week inside their facilities. That just shows you what's changed as far as the drug market, which is logical, what is driving this organized crime element because of the money that would be involved in that.

Okay, so let's delve a little bit into the contribution of federal policy into producing this situation. I know that the situation that you're describing in Alberta is even more out of hand, let's say, in British Columbia, especially in Vancouver. And Vancouver is a much bigger city with a much darker center. I mean, Vancouver had some downtown places that were like seriously bad 40 years ago, and so, and that's certainly spreading on the Western coast now.

My understanding is that Canada at the federal level, in some ways, took a page from some of the European countries that were experimenting with decriminalizing drug use. Now, I have some sympathy for that viewpoint because it isn't obvious to me that the so-called War on Drugs was a success.

And I think that its attempts to crack down too brutally on users of at least, in the past, somewhat more benign substances like cannabis—and I mean benign in comparison to alcohol, say, which is legal—I think a fair bit of that was misguided. But I do know that countries like Portugal, for example, that spearheaded this, they didn't just reduce the penalties for drug use and distribution, let's say, sales and distribution; they did that in concert with what seemed to be the kind of things that you guys are trying to pull off in Alberta.

Right? It wasn't like the Portuguese allowed people to be stoned out of their minds, derelicts on the streets, just because they stopped criminalizing use of even the harder drugs. And my understanding is that in Canada we did the first part, which was the easy part—the decriminalization—that allowed the moralists to handwave about how compassionate and wonderful they were, but we didn't do the second part, which was the conscientious part that involved the identification, treatment, cleanup, and even sometimes criminal prosecution of people who had gone a little too far down the drug-taking, hedonistic road, let’s say.

So how do you see the problem that’s developed in Alberta as a manifestation of a broader change in legislation at the federal level with regards to drug policy?

Yeah, and let me just first start by saying we’re very proud our province has not become what’s happening in BC yet, and we’re not going to let that happen. That’s why we're taking this action to make sure that we don’t end up in circumstances like that here in Alberta.

You’re exactly right; there’s been an effort and a drive, particularly by politicians on the left in our country, to approach this issue of addiction in a way that essentially just accepts it as a disease and continues to give the poison that is causing the consequences to these individuals to them and not work on and give tools to be able to help an individual recover in those circumstances.

We don't want to, I want to be very clear on this: we don’t want to go charge and put somebody in jail because they have a drug addiction. That's not happening in my province. The opposite is happening: we are reaching out to those individuals, we're getting them into circumstances where they can be safe, and we’re providing them with the resources that they need to be able to recover.

What the other side of this argument believes is that you need to just put them in a place, like a tent or an apartment paid for by the taxpayer, and continue to allow them to have poison put into their body, and then somehow they will either magically get better. Well, the reality is they won't. I call that pallid care for drug addicts, and that is where the big difference is in our philosophy.

It’s a death sentence, particularly when you’re dealing with things like fentanyl and these types of drugs. I mean, it’s just going to get you at some point. I mean, alcoholism, which could be a real tough circumstance, and we’re dealing with that too on the streets, but that is many decades to get to what we’re seeing some of these new drugs do to people in weeks on our streets.

The reality is that there’s no safe supply when it comes to fentanyl. You cannot take fentanyl safely; eventually, you’re going to overdose. This is why inside medical facilities, even where people are taking fentanyl, often paid for by the government or other types of chemicals like that, they’ll, you'll see have to have nurses there to be able to interact with overdoses.

Our government really believes we need to go the other way, which is that we need to reach out to individuals in the circumstance, we need to invest in resources that they will need to deal with root causes that have caused their circumstance, and give them a way to be able to recover. That’s where it comes, but you know, I think the tent cities prove that we’re right because the reality is, if anybody thinks putting an individual in tents in minus 50 degrees C in Canada is a safe way to live with propane tanks exploding and people burning to death, and all the things that I have just described today, is that is safer than what Alberta’s saying—which is come on into the shelters, let’s get resources around you, and let’s help you get better.

What’s interesting, Jordan, is that the individuals that are coming out of the encampments, most of them actually want what we’re bringing forward. And that’s why in the last three weeks as we've done encampments, over 200 of those individuals coming out have gone to what we call our navigation centers so they can navigate support.

They’ve received over 500 referrals to different Services. Many of them now are in permanent housing-type circumstances, actively working on their recovery, dealing with the medical circumstances that may be around them, and ultimately many of them will go on to have productive lives. That's what we want; that's humane. What the other side is selling is just accepting that somebody’s going to die and giving them a death sentence.

I like that you use those words because I think it's true—that’s the result of what they’re doing, no doubt about it.

Yeah, there's always made if that fails, you know.

So, exactly!

Okay, okay! So now I was interested in you in talking to you in part so that we could walk through a description of the tent cities, and then even more importantly shed some light on the fact that such cities are almost immediately taken over by the most psychopathic gangs you can possibly imagine. That's an important thing to establish because it eradicates the notion that this is some kind of compassionate approach to these poor unhoused people who are just trying to live, you know, in a happy community.

No, wrong! Okay, but mostly why I wanted to talk to you was on the remediation and treatment side. So the first thing I want to ask you is about your sociological or your sociological goal. Now, you implied at the beginning of this conversation that there aren't going to be any more tent cities in Alberta. Now, is that the goal? To return to, say, 30 years ago, where there weren't tent cities that just didn't happen?

You know, there’s the odd person under a bridge, there’s the odd homeless person—it was very, very rare; there certainly weren’t communities of homeless people. So is your government’s goal to attain that end? And if so, how far along are you, and what’s your timeline?

So yes, our goal is to make sure that we are not seeing dangerous tent cities inside our cities. You know, I can’t outright say that we would ever be able to fully eliminate; you know, tent cities could pop up at any time, but that we would stop in the future this being the management tool to help with this population, and instead that we would invest in proper resources.

Most importantly, what our government’s doing that I think is courageous is that we're actually stepping in as a subnational government to support a municipal police force to take down those encampments. We're going to do that for two different reasons: one is to help the individuals, in which I’ll get to in a minute—the individuals that are in those encampments—but second, to help our citizens who live in places like Edmonton. They don’t deserve to have this in their community. No more! They deserve to be able to walk down the streets and feel safe.

You know, in the last three weeks, as we tore down encampments, my team, with the city of Edmonton, collected 129 tons of garbage out of these tent cities alone, including 3,000 needles. So it just shows you what is taking place inside those tent cities and how dangerous it is to the rest of the community.

But we want to go one step further. We want to make sure these individuals receive full wraparound supports and the best opportunities that they can to overcome the situation that they find themselves in. We’re not delusional. We do realize there’s still going to be homeless people, but we don’t believe there should be this many.

Okay, so we'll go to the treatment of individuals in a moment. I want to flesh out the sociological element a bit more first. So first of all, I'd like to ask you, you know, one of the things that’s happening in Toronto is that the tent cities increasingly occupy public spaces, and I think that’s utterly inexcusable because I don't believe that the municipality, for example, has a right to either take away parks from people—including children who use those parks more than any other, and need them especially in the cities. They certainly don’t have the right to take them away and award them to other people who don't own them and haven't purchased them, and have no contractual right to them whatsoever.

And they also don't have the right to fail to protect those parks. So tell me where you saw the tent cities emerging and what that meant just in terms of occupation of land for the people, say, in the surrounding neighborhoods.

So I’ve seen tent cities emerge in many different types of locations within the city, but you’re right: most often it ends up inside the green spaces in the city. And I know, you know, Edmonton—so the beautiful river valley of the North Saskatchewan River that flows right through that city—you would see tent cities all through that area.

Well, that’s areas where people go and jog and they ride their bikes on the weekend; they take their dogs for a walk, and it's part of, you know, wanting to live in the city and being able to get outside within that area that you call home. You see the same thing in Calgary along their beautiful Bow River that flows through that city. That’s often where you would see tent cities pop up.

I’ve also heard horror stories, particularly in the city of Lethbridge, which I mentioned has a really tough drug problem right now, of families trying to take their children out inside playgrounds in local community parks and them ending up being sometimes punctured by needles or other things that are happening because the tent cities have occupied that little park; you know, it may not be as big of a tent city as we sometimes see in Edmonton, it may only be four or five instead of hundreds, but it’s inside that area where children are playing.

So you’re right: it takes away from, you know, people being able to enjoy the city and that green space that they have. You know, being national park inside our province—for some of your American viewers, very similar to Yellowstone—a pretty beautiful place, I like it! I can’t just take my tent and set it up anywhere I want and start living and causing trouble for everybody else who wants to be able to come and enjoy the park.

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Okay, so now you touched on a couple of other things there too that are interesting. So I know that surprisingly enough, Alberta is a relatively conservative province. Until relatively recently, it was mostly a rural province. It has the reputation—and I would say it's deserved to some degree—of being something approximating the Texas of Canada. And yet what I see happening from the outside, and please correct me if I'm getting this wrong, is that increasingly there is a standoff in Alberta of sorts between radical leftist municipal governments and the more conservative provincial government.

And that I think that’s particularly manifest in Calgary, secondarily manifest in Edmonton, and then I don't know enough about Lethbridge to comment. So tell me to what degree this situation has been set up not only as a consequence of idiotic federal policy that’s virtue signaling and, and spineless and also not in the least compassionate nor productive, none of that—not accomplishing the ends that the policies themselves were designed in principle to accomplish. There’s a federal component to this, but then there’s also a municipal component. And one of the things I’ve observed happening in Canada and in the United States, but really in Canada, is that the radical leftist, faux compassionate narcissistic types have seized control of the smaller elements of the governmental institutions, including municipal government.

So I know that you have to step somewhat carefully, given your position in Alberta, in relationship to such a discussion, but, you know, we did allow for some criticism of the federal government and its relationship with the province. Well, there’s no reason not to do the same thing on the other side. What’s the situation with the municipalities? And then, well, there’s a segue in there because you also mentioned that there’s a strange cooperation between the provincial government and the municipal police on this front, which is quite strange, right? Because it means that the province is going around the municipal governments directly to the police. That’s a strange situation. So can you flesh that out for me so I can understand it more thoroughly?

Yeah. Well, let me start with the police. So, you know, in our structure, something like the Edmonton Police would answer to a police commission. So while they are a municipal funded organization, also funded by The Province to a certain amount, the Chief of Police answers to a police commission, not to city council. So that puts the Chief in an interesting spot.

When we have somebody like the Chief of Police of Edmonton come to us and say, “I'm dealing with a crisis; I think I need you guys’ support; this is an emergency situation,” the cool part about my province is our government is prepared to jump in, even if it’s a little bit unorthodox, because we know we need to support that important law enforcement agency. You're right, there are interesting dynamics with the Edmonton Police Service and I think some of those dynamics are probably more for that the municipal council has to navigate more than us, because we just want to get to work and be able to help people.

I will say this: we’re obviously happy to work with every municipal government. We recognize that they’re elected; that is our job as a province, and we will do so. But you are correct: I’m happy to say that our large cities over time seem to have more left-wing mayors and often city councilors (though not all of them) than certainly my conservative party here in the province of Alberta.

I don’t think I'm saying anything that would shock anybody, given that the current mayor of Edmonton is a former Trudeau cabinet minister. I’m not saying anything about him personally—he’s certainly not on the same side of the political spectrum as me. I think what’s happened over time is if they’re on that side of—and that’s their ideology, on that side of the political spectrum—certainly they’re going to start to believe in some of these ideas, which is that, you know, somehow you can magically help somebody get better by giving them the poison that’s killing them over and over.

But I want to also, though, be clear that I think often it’s coming maybe even from a good spot. I actually think lots of these individuals truly believe that this will help these individuals get better sometimes. But the reality is, I believe that—I don’t believe that because, well, the reason I don’t believe it is because there is a tremendous danger in using a false compassion to elevate your own moral virtue publicly.

There are ancient prescriptions against doing such things, so the third commandment, depending on how you count them, is to not use God's name in vain. What that really means is do not attribute to yourself moral virtue for pursuing something that merely furthers your own agenda. And I see plenty of that on the compassionate left. And it’s also a variant of praying in public, along with all the protests. It’s like, look how good I am; look how much I care. It’s like, yeah, did you do any of the goddamn work? Like, have you ever worked?

Yeah, exactly. Let me say that a different way. So then you have a politician like that who is a true believer in it, and I believe that, you know, you’ve got to be blind not to realize what I’ve presented today is actually hurting people and that your ideology is wrong, and that you're willing to allow people to be hurt to continue down presenting your ideological beliefs.

But what happens, I think, is then you have politicians in that circumstance that are confusing everyday people who don't fully understand this issue. And they may be looking at things, like, on the news, and they're going, “Hey, that’s probably the better compassionate way to do it,” because they don’t have all the details that I have.

But then when you hear the details that I just present, you’ve got to be going, “Well, actually that conservative government’s right.” I mean, do you want my approach—which is to reach in, send a warm bus—we can load everybody up, bring them to a nice warm facility, give them shower, food, and access to medical resources treatment, including rehabilitation treatment for their addiction—or to be left inside a tent freezing to death, taking poison?

Right? And that's what I mean by that. I think, you know, that ends up creating a spot where very good people end up supporting this approach because they don't—you know, they're everyday people, they're working, they just watch us on the news and they go, “Hey, well that maybe makes sense,” and they don't understand that they’re, in the end, they're ended up supporting an ideology that's actually killing people.

Yeah. No, look, I agree. I think that—well, that’s exactly why I wanted to do this podcast. Now, I think we should get to the nitty-gritty, which is not that all of this was irrelevant, but the real relevant issue here is, you know, what the hell are you doing that’s going to work?

So let me give a preamble to this. So, for everyone watching and listening, there’s two major problems here. The first problem is that antisocial behavior and drug use overlap. And so, why is that a problem? Well, the first problem is there's nothing in the psychological literature that’s more intractable to treatment, once it’s established, than antisocial criminal behavior, and there’s absolutely no indication in the clinical literature that it can be alleviated.

So, for example, the standard penological doctrine of well-versed criminologists is that if you have a truly repeat offender who has an antisocial history stemming back into early teenagehood or even before in the form of bullying and violent behavior as a child, the best thing to do with them, since no treatment works, is basically to incarcerate them until they burn out in their late 20s.

And, like, people can shrug their shoulders and get squawky about that and about it all they want, but I would have been thrilled if I would have gone through the research literature and found any exceptions to that absolutely dismal prognostication in the 30 years I’ve analyzed the literature, and I have been unable to do so. It’s very, very, very difficult to treat antisocial behavior.

Okay, then you add the other next layer of complication, which is difficult as it is to treat antisocial behavior, it’s perhaps equally difficult to treat drug and alcohol addiction, alcohol often being primary among the problems that are difficult to treat. There’s no evidence whatsoever, generally speaking, that residential treatment centers, for example, have any beneficial long-term effect. They do function to get people off alcohol while they’re in the centers, but almost invariably what happens is that when you put the people treated back into their old environment, they instantly relapse.

Now, this is not to say that no one ever recovers, because most people do, in fact, straighten back up, but it isn’t obvious at all how treatment can do that. So that puts policy people like you in a really tough bind because you're dealing with a population that's very, very, very hard to serve. And so the first thing I would like to know: you talked about these uniservice centers, so I would like to know just what does it mean to offer people treatment? How do you tear down these tent cities, exactly? Like what are the nuts and bolts involved in that process? You're like, do you what do you do?

Do you go in there and just tell me how you clean up the cities and then tell me how it is that people are directed into treatment and then we’ll get into the worst problem of like, does it actually work?

So I’ll start with how we’re dealing with it. And now, Edmonton is where we’re piloting this approach, and I think we’re going to mimic it elsewhere in our province, because we are pretty excited about the results. But let me tell you what we do first. So obviously my social services team at the Ministry of Social Services is in contact with the police. The police inform us of the encampment that’s coming down, and they deal with the law enforcement side of that.

So they deal with any elements that they may encounter in there that obviously need to be arrested, warrant issues that are taking place—they handle law enforcement. But we're there. So they move in, like okay, so they make a decision, and what are the laws under which they're—what under what legal pretext do they move in? Why do they have the right to do this?

So two issues that we primarily use: one is around just straight-up bylaw enforcement. You know, there are obviously rules about you being able to just go build structures in different municipalities. The second and more common one of late, from my understanding, is around fire safety issues. I mean, we have had some pretty serious fires and propane tank explosions; the numbers are quite staggering.

It is a legitimate fire issue, and so the police have to come in. They’re not the firefighters, obviously, but the police have to come in because of the safety issues that are involved. Now, do you warn the people beforehand? And how many policemen do you need per number of tent city occupants? What are the logistics here?

Yeah, so the city of Edmonton has an encampment policy where they were trying to put upon the police, I believe, to provide 72 hours' notice that they were going to go into those tent cities. This is something we actually disagreed with because the reality was that just caused people either to move—it certainly gave a heads-up to that organized crime element that there was about to be law enforcement activity.

Since we—and there was a court case taking place in our province from some activist groups who were trying to stop the police from being able to do this or enforce notice requirements—we, the city of Edmonton and the police actually won that case, and that has allowed us to be able to go in and be able to address this without notice.

What happens is, we’re notified, we arrive with the police, and when I say we, I mean social workers and our team that are designed to support the police. They work closely with them; the police secure the area, they deal with their end of it, but at that point, we have a warm bus right there ready to go. Everybody is offered an opportunity to be able to go to what we call our Navigation Center.

Okay, that's everybody. So you offer that to everybody in the camp? And what are the—what's the biggest camp that you guys have managed to take on at a time?

Well, so I think the biggest camp that I've heard of would be 300, 350 structures. Since we started this process, interestingly enough though, you would only find probably a few dozen people actually within that tent city when we arrive.

Oh, I see. I see. Okay, so you're looking at numbers under a hundred when you're moving in, and you're—

Okay, okay. So that’s what? Five or six buses, four or five buses, something like that?

Yeah, depending on the circumstance, obviously. There’s been police intelligence and our team would be giving rough idea what they think is going to be coming. While we're arriving on the scene, they're radioing back to that Navigation Center; they're saying, “Here’s how many people we think we have coming in.”

One of the big things we have there is we have the ability for them to load and totes their personal belongings. We don’t want anybody to lose their stuff. We even take pets, Jordan! We can load the pets up on that bus. Couples can go together, and we get them from there to the warm Navigation Center.

They arrive at that Navigation Center, there are showers available right away, there’s food, coffee, things that people may need, obviously is a warm location. We also have shelter beds there for, you know, sometimes people need to dry out or something that may take place; obviously, there could be medical circumstances that need to be addressed.

Of course, anybody who would need a hospital, we would use paramedics; we would get them immediately to emergency. But beyond that, everything else can be handled in that Navigation Center. When you get there, you'll interact with our staff, and then there are multiple different stations throughout it, which I’ll talk about. The genius, I think, of what we’ve done here is we brought—instead of trying to take this person from these tent cities all over the city to all these different Services, we brought all the nonprofits, all the government services together in one spot to come around that individual.

So they’ll arrive and they can get full medicals. There are doctors or there are medical teams for the street that can deal with that access to prescriptions. You know, one of the most interesting things that you find is that a lot of individuals in this circumstance need is ID; they don’t have ID no more. So we have our ministerial colleagues over in Service Alberta, who handle ID in our province—they’re there right on-site, they can give temporary ID immediately to these individuals and then we can get their permanent ID ordered, all the pictures.

They obviously have access then to income supports, to be able to register for things that they may be entitled to that they did not know. And then ultimately, towards things like temporary housing, emergency housing, and eventually permanent housing resources. So they can interact with those individuals, and of course, access to drug recovery programs, which we can talk about in a moment.

But that is all happening in that one location, and so we've been at this for about three weeks. We’ve seen, you know, well over 200 individuals come out of those tent cities and actively participate in this process. We've referred over 500 different services, and we’ve been pretty impressed with the results of that.

Now that may seem like a small number, but given what we’ve been working on—this is kind of a real micro area that we’re working on—but we think it’s been so successful that we’re getting ready to bring this right into our actual emergency homeless shelters, which are thousands of individuals, and into other areas where our social services system interacts with the same type of clientele.

Again, with the goal of saying, how do we help you stop the circumstances that you’re in and move forward? I also want to stress that we talked a lot about drugs today, but there’s a lot of mental health issues that are taking place, including schizophrenia and some real challenges, right? These are very serious mental health issues and by being able to come in, and we have our health services right around us, again pharmacist support—we can really get some really needed things around those individuals to start to have a good conversation about what a more successful, healthy life might look like.

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Okay, so I got a couple of questions there, and some procedural I want to discuss. Some procedural issues too. Okay, so the first issue is I’m trying to imagine what it’s like for someone in a tent encampment to be, let’s say, displaced in that manner. And you could imagine two stories. One is that people are pretty damn pissed off that the cops have showed up and are now, you know, tearing down their structures.

But a counter story might be they’re actually kind of relieved to be on a warm, going somewhere that’s actually warm where they can have a shower and get something to eat, etc. So, what’s your sense of how the tent city inhabitants themselves are responding to this intervention by government authorities and police?

So, the vast majority of the individuals that we've interacted with, that are actually in the tent cities, that would then come into our services, obviously—if the police have had to arrest a gang member or something like that—they're probably not that thrilled that we’re here. But the individuals that we’re trying to get there to help, they react very positively!

You know, the biggest protesters that we've seen or others, who are trying to interfere with this process are not people staying inside the tent cities. They’re often members of the official opposition in our province, which is the NDP, which is a Socialist Party within our province, or other activist groups who certainly have never spent one night on the street and are there trying to bang on a drum that has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.

They're just trying to use these vulnerable people to be able to, you know, accelerate their agenda, which is very disappointing. I’ve seen some police body cam footage of these individuals throwing snowballs at the police while they’re trying to go in, interact, and deal with the situation in the encampments. But the vulnerable people, in general, have been pretty excited once they realize what opportunities they have!

And I’ve been there to interact at this navigation center with them, and I’ve also heard from my staff. The most common reaction is, “I had no idea that these resources were available.” And they’re quite interested in it. Now, obviously, everybody's at a different stage that may be taking place there. But certainly, I think we—you know, you get a nice warm bed. You could have a warm shower; you probably start to ask questions about whether or not you want to continue to sleep inside that tent in minus 50° C or if this is a better option.

Okay, okay! So, now I want to ask you about how you regulate the interactions between people in these centers because we already discussed the fact that in the tent cities, the fact of the tent cities is an invitation to criminality and gangs. And so, the first question I have is, like, how the hell do you ensure that that problem isn’t duplicated inside your centers themselves? So it’s a very important question, and I will answer it, but I also want to emphasize that what we see on that left side of the spectrum—when they argue about us taking down these tent cities—they often say, “Well, your shelters are just as dangerous.”

Now, again, if you go back through this entire conversation we just had, you realize how ludicrous that is. Real quick, that said, of course we start putting thousands of individuals in the same type of demographics, a lot of the same circumstances happening inside our emergency shelter system, you're going to see some of the same elements show up, and we for sure have seen gangs operating within our emergency shelter systems.

We are obviously managing overdoses and drug issues and those types of circumstances, but we’ve invested in security! We are working closely with our local police services who really support us, and our often nonprofit emergency shelter providers to be able to navigate through those issues. We’ve also upped security to be able to make sure that people’s stuff is safe. We’ve had to put a lot of money into dealing with overdoses and other medical issues within our emergency facilities.

While anywhere—as you know, Jordan—where we start to gather that many people together, there's going to be, you know, elements of trouble. It is certainly significantly less than what we’re seeing inside tent cities, and we’re definitely using tools to be able to mitigate those circumstances.

Okay, okay! So now I'm going to ask you some questions more on the psychological and treatment front. As I said, I spent a lot of time looking into the viability of treatment processes that are, what would you say, widely distributable and effective on the psychological front, and with regard to addiction counseling and the treatment of various forms of mental disorder, and there are few and far between effective treatments.

So, I want to ask you a couple of questions. The first is, have you guys given some consideration to the maximum size of your facilities? Because my suspicion is that the smaller you keep those centralized centers, the less trouble you’re going to have with their spiraling into criminal activity, and the more welcoming you’ll be able to make them for people who are being taken off the street.

So, that’s the first question: what have you seen, and are you tracking the data pertaining to the size of the initial treatment facilities?

So, we are definitely tracking data and I think one of the things that we’re trying to do on my end of policy and the process that my ministry runs is to try to bring in other types of the ways that we do emergency shelters for the homeless population.

So, you have your much more traditional shelters that many people would just think about that they'd see on TV—often run by a faith-based organization. I want to say thank God for our faith-based organizations because they really do good work with us. But we have recognized a need for smaller shelters. Shelters that are focused on women only, for example, in our society, in our province, shelters that are Indigenous-focused with Indigenous leadership right on site to be able to work on that.

We’ve opened up Indigenous-only shelters; women-only shelters inside our province supported by the government. We’re seeing success by getting that smaller and being able to work with different demographics more focused. At the end of the day, what we have in our province and what Premier Smith has done in our province is actually bring in a mental health and addictions cabinet minister, my colleague Dan Williams, who is a part of the health system and who is fully focused on mental health and addictions.

So, he’s the best one to talk to about specifically how they handle long-term drug treatment. But what my job now is is to rejig the entire social services system in our province to end up connecting to that. And that’s where there’s a real difference in viewpoints between us and the left, right? I mean, where they want us to build shelter systems where everybody can keep doing drugs and just accept that behavior, and ignore the negative consequences of that, we are building shelter systems and processes that connect into the work that Dan Williams and his team are trying to do.

It is a whole different way of thinking! I don’t know anywhere else in the province where you've got an entire social services system working on focused on actual recovery care, long-term, for individuals. Right? So we’re not in the business of trying to warehouse people; our job is to find individuals, support them with their immediate medical needs, and then try to connect them to long-term opportunities to get them better.

Okay, so that brings me to the second clinical issue I wanted to bring up. So you can treat people’s present distress, but much of people's present distress is rooted in a kind of nihilistic and anxiety-ridden hopelessness. And they say it's been said forever that the people perish without a vision.

One of the things you do see with people who adopt a very short-term strategy towards life, which can have a criminal element or an addictive element, is that they don't have anything resembling a vision for their life or a plan. And so we experimented—my colleagues and I experimented with the provision of planning software, and we have a program online called self-authoring, which is very inexpensive, requires no supervision whatsoever to administer, that’s completely private.

And that’s actually accessible to everyone to some degree, assuming a basic level of both literacy and ability to use a computer, but virtually everyone can use a phone now, so that’s less and less of a problem. Okay, so it’s called self-authoring, this program.

Now, the first thing it does, it’s got three stages, and you can do just one or all three, let’s say. The first stage has people write out what’s essentially an autobiography, and it’s a good treatment for trauma. So it asks people to go through their life, to write their life story essentially, but it provides them with a lot of different prompts: break your life into six epochs, describe the major positive and negative events, then it walks you through an analysis of those events.

What that tries to do is to situate people in relationship to their past and bring them up to the present. Okay, so this is where I came from; these are the events that shape me, and this is where I am now. Okay, so that’s the past authoring.

Now, the present authoring helps people assess their faults and their virtues. So it presents them with a variety of descriptive statements that they can check off, and then it aggregates the ones that they’re most convinced about and it says—well, it helps them walk through an analysis—which stupid things are you doing that hurt you, as far as you’re concerned, and what are your strengths that you could capitalize on if you decided to move into the future?

Okay, so that’s the second stage. The third stage—this might be most relevant to your endeavor—is the future authoring program. So here’s the deal: within the bounds of reason, you can have what you want and need, but you have to specify what it is; you have to aim at it. Now we’re always moving towards an end, and so if you don’t have an end name, you don’t have any hope, because hope is experienced in relationship to an aim, and you’re anxious because there are too many places to go. So you bind yourself with a vision and you give yourself hope.

So, five years down the road, what would your life look like if you were educating yourself properly, if you were in a career that was the one you wanted or at least a job that was the one you wanted, if your family was put together in some reasonable manner, if you had the friends that you needed, if you were regulating your drug and alcohol use (which needs a plan and not merely cessation of addiction), if you were contributing to your community, if you were taking care of yourself, if you were occupying yourself properly with your time outside of work, if you could have what you wanted, what would it look like?

Okay, the reason I’m telling you this, there are two reasons. Number one is it’s dirt cheap; it’s easily accessible and we have produced solid empirical data, and this is being replicated in other ways in other labs using writing exercises.

So if you take young men who have a bad academic history and they do this future authoring exercise for 90 minutes when they’re orienting themselves at college, they are half as likely to drop out. Half! Right? It produces an increment of 35% in grade point average. Right? Three separate studies: one at Mohawk College in Ontario, so basically a trade school; one at McGill University, and four studies—two studies that were aggregated at a business school in the Netherlands—and the most potent effects were for the worst performing minority young men.

So I’m wondering, have you guys integrated anything like a process that helps people generate a concrete plan into the treatments that you’re offering?

So how it’s taking place in Alberta is because we have our Mental Health and Addiction Ministry, they’re bringing forward—I’m going to talk a little bit about what they’re doing—recovery programs. And you’re right, I mean, I used to do this for a living before I was in politics, so I follow a lot what you're saying here, Jordan.

But you know, having to get that community together, obviously, got to deal with the immediate issues that somebody’s dealing with, maybe immediate trauma, there could be some pretty significant mental health issues. You start going down the road of schizophrenia, as you know, we’re going down a different type of path. But in general, you’ve got to get community around people. You’ve got to deal with their immediate issues, show them a path forward—you’re right, goal setting, off you go!

I would say another one that I’ve learned over time was also showing people there are other ways to be able to have fun appropriately—that there’s other ways to do to be able to go forward like that. And so when you get into Minister Williams’ department after you leave our services and if you’re focused on recovery, they do something called recovery capital.

It’s one of the first things they do: they start a process with an individual to understand what their recovery capital is, and so that talks about the assets they have, where they’re at, what they have access to. And obviously, the drug side of things that I’m dealing with right there in the homeless population would be some of the toughest addiction issues that Minister Williams’ department will have to deal with.

I mean, this is not a functioning alcoholic; this is individuals who are living in a tent, right? And there are very different circumstances. So they’ll have lower recovery capital, but that means there’s going to be more that needs to be done to get them to recovery.

But certainly, they put together that process. What’s different though in Alberta is we’re committed to that process. And so if you see other provinces or other jurisdictions in the world, they want to go to a different process; they want to go to the, “Put them in an apartment paid for by a taxpayer, let them do drugs until they pass away.” That’s essentially what it comes out to.

Go in there and say, “You know what? You’ve got this disease called addiction; there’s basically nothing that could be done; we just want to support you and make you comfortable.” In Alberta, we don’t believe that! We believe that individuals can recover; we believe the science is there; it’s hard work, you’re correct. But our job now in our social services sector under the leadership of Premier Smith is to build a system that bridges into these recovery programs that are being built by our colleagues in mental health and addiction.

And then the next part is really important—that we have a system on the other end of those recovery programs. Because you’re correct: they go into something like an addiction treatment; they get the tools to deal with their addiction, set long-term goals, get through that process, and then you come out. And what happens too often is you come out, and you just end up relapsing because there’s nothing that’s built around you.

Virtually certain.

Yeah! And so we’re really focused on both ends of it. We want to build a social services system that brings people into active recovery support, obviously our colleagues who are doing the recovery, and then be there on the other end as you come out of recovery—post-housing, post-support.

Well, and that’s going to look very different for different people. I mean, particularly if you’re dealing with different trauma different circumstances, but in our province, we don’t want to accept that you’re going to be in a pallid care for drug addicts. We want to get you to where you can get the help; we want to get you the help and then we want to support you as you go on with the rest of your life. And when we’ve done that, we’re seeing people have very successful lives, Jordan.

You can beat addiction, and there are some more complications now with the different drugs we’re seeing and what they’re doing to brain chemistry and you know it makes some of this more, but the reality is we do not accept in Alberta that if you are addicted to a drug that this is a fatal disease.

And our job is—we are rejigging our social services system to make sure that we are all focused on that when it comes to drug addiction.

We’re currently in the midst of Lent—the 40 days leading up to Easter. Many Christians are choosing to give up alcohol, social media, and other distractions to focus more on prayer, fasting, and giving. Hallow’s annual Pray 40 Challenge is one of their most popular. Last year over 1 million people joined, and this year there are 1.62 million people praying as part of the challenge.

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Okay, so I’m going to double down on this again because it’s such a crucial problem and it’s so difficult to solve. So, I knew this woman named Joan McCord, Dr. Joan McCord, and she was one of the first female PhD criminologists, and I know who, when she was quite an elderly woman, she had taught at Temple University for years.

She was a pioneer in the field. She did this study in a place called Summersville in Massachusetts back in the late '30s, and it was the first large-scale social intervention program to address, what would you say, to ameliorate the circumstances of children in neighborhoods where antisocial personality and criminality, and addiction, were a likely consequence of the disarray in that environment.

Okay, so they set up on paper, the intervention looked wonderful. They had literacy programs for the children, there were parenting programs for the parents, there were social skills programs for the children. They tried to offer them the resources they needed to be successful in a way that you would expect intelligent people to offer those resources and they went above and beyond, you might say.

They took all the kids out of Summersville and took them to summer camps out of the city for two weeks a year, you know, to give them some immersion in nature and a chance to get away. Everyone loved the program; the kids loved it; the parents loved it; the teachers who were involved loved it; the social services types and the psychologists, etc., who were involved—they thought this was a bang-up program.

But they did do one fatal thing, which is they actually built evaluation into the program. And so they assigned the people randomly to treatment and non-treatment groups, and then after the program had run for a couple of years, they revealed the results of the study to themselves. And the kids in the treatment group did worse on almost every measure!

Right, and so they were absolutely shocked. And it turned out, like it took a couple of years to figure out exactly what had happened. But what had happened was that taking all the kids who were most prone to criminality and putting them together for two weeks in a camp was a school for criminality, right?

And that effect was so detrimental that it obliterated all of the effects of all the interventions, but reduced them and so—or reversed them. So Joan McCord, Dr. McCord, spent a lot of the rest of her life traveling around talking to politicians, for example, in positions like yours, saying, “Look, whenever you introduce any intervention whatsoever, make sure you budget for evaluation, because just because your intervention makes sense doesn’t mean it’s going to work.”

Now, you alluded to the fact earlier that you—and this is part of what makes me so skeptical—I worked with a group of criminologists centered in Montreal for seven years looking at the genesis of antisocial behavior, the treatment of addiction, all these sorts of things with really well-qualified people, and one of the things I really learned was don’t be so sure your stupid intervention is going to do what you hope it does and nothing else. Typical conservative attitude in some ways, right? Law of unintended consequence.

So I'm wondering what systems of evaluation you guys have built in—really on the scientific side, like are you in a position where you can track the results of what it is that you’re doing? And if so, you know, what have you done, and what are the results of your evaluation so far? How do you—and how do you know they’re credible even?

No, it's a great question; it's the right question too. And, you know, speaking as a longtime cabinet minister, you're right. I mean, often we're investing in programs with the best of intentions, but you can end up making things worse, particularly in files like we’re talking about. You know, I—I, if you’re really interested in this, I hope eventually get an opportunity to sit down with Minister Williams, who’s