The gram of cocaine arrived in a Canada Post package.

So did the oxycodone, each 20 mg pill sealed in its own baggie emblazoned with green dollar signs and gold crowns.

Inside each package, no attempt was made to conceal the drugs before shipment. “REGULAR COKE,” read the label on the clear plastic container holding the gram of powder. An invoice lay beneath: “Refer a friend for $20 off your next order.”

Ads from the sellers of these addictive and illegal drugs ran on Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform. With one click the Star connected to online shops hawking cocaine, opioids, MDMA, Xanax, ketamine and other illicit substances. It took only a few minutes to order the drugs using Interac e-Transfer.

Meta, the Silicon Valley-based tech giant that owns Facebook and Instagram, has for years maintained that its advertising standards prohibit “ads that promote the sale or use of illicit or recreational drugs.” Meta told the Star that it has “zero tolerance” for such ads and continually works to improve its already “robust” systems to detect and remove them.

Yet they continue to flow into Canadians’ feeds, generating revenue for Meta from drug traffickers who use the firm’s lucrative advertising algorithm to reach new customers.

Too often, that algorithm puts the ads in front of those already vulnerable to the drugs’ lure.

Paul Savage assumed the ads were a scam when he first stumbled on them in 2024.

You can’t actually order drugs through an ad on Facebook, he thought. The 49-year-old fisherman from New Brunswick kept scrolling.

It didn’t take long before another ad popped up on his feed. When he clicked, he saw the site also sold oxy, which he had previously struggled with. After hurting his back fishing over the winter, he bought two pills, along with the anti-anxiety medication Xanax.

“It was no different than buying anything else online, right?” he said. “It was just like shopping on Amazon.”

It took a few weeks before the drugs arrived. But once he took the oxy, he immediately thought something seemed off. It tasted different than it had in the past. He waited a few minutes before trying a bit more.

“Next thing I know there was paramedics running at me,” he told the Star. “I stopped breathing, they said.”

Drug’s journey from a Facebook ad to a Canada Post delivery

The promos selling illegal drugs blend into a user’s feed, alongside photos of family and friends, distinguished as a paid ad by a small “Sponsored” label.

Some use suggestive language: “Looking for a trusted online supplier for your next trip?” Others are more explicit.

One ad the Star clicked on showed a picture of a pile of cocaine.

After sending $100 through an e-Transfer, the cocaine from a sleekly designed online drug shop called Trippi arrived within a few business days at a residential address via Canada Post’s Xpresspost. A printed label said the package was shipped from “The Art Loft” at an address that traces to a storage facility in Richmond, B.C.

The two 20 mg pills of oxycodone — bought from another drug seller site, Moonhaus — were shipped from “Top Tier Consultation,” with an address that traces to a PO box in a Richmond mall located a few blocks away from the storage facility.

Neither Trippi nor Moonhaus responded to the Star’s questions.

It’s illegal to send illicit drugs, such as cocaine and counterfeit oxy, through the mail.

In a statement to the Star, Canada Post said more than $9 million worth of illegal drugs were intercepted and turned over to police last year.

“We remain committed to supporting the efforts of our law enforcement partners to stem the transmission of illegal drugs through the mail,” a spokesperson said.

Facebook and Instagram users told the Star that sellers based in B.C. sent the drugs to their homes in other provinces.

The RCMP, whose responsibilities include policing interprovincial drug trafficking, told the Star it actively targets “individuals and networks” who profit from online drug sales, including through “cyber tools” and collaboration with domestic and international law enforcement.

Neither Trippi nor Moonhaus responded to the Star’s questions.

It’s illegal to send illicit drugs, such as cocaine and counterfeit oxy, through the mail.

In a statement to the Star, Canada Post said more than $9 million worth of illegal drugs were intercepted and turned over to police last year.

“We remain committed to supporting the efforts of our law enforcement partners to stem the transmission of illegal drugs through the mail,” a spokesperson said.

Facebook and Instagram users told the Star that sellers based in B.C. sent the drugs to their homes in other provinces.

The RCMP, whose responsibilities include policing interprovincial drug trafficking, told the Star it actively targets “individuals and networks” who profit from online drug sales, including through “cyber tools” and collaboration with domestic and international law enforcement.

The RCMP also referred the Star to officials at other regulators, including Health Canada, which the Mounties said play a role in enforcing the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

Health Canada said it takes illegal drug trafficking seriously and is committed to safeguarding public health in collaboration with law enforcement.

For a recovering addict, drug ads a constant temptation

Grant, a 38-year-old Toronto resident, had been sober for two months when he first saw ads on Instagram while in a treatment facility in Southwestern Ontario. One featured a picture of what appeared to be an AI-generated Tony Montana — the drug lord portrayed by Al Pacino in “Scarface” — seated behind a large pile of white powder.

He had sought help after a year of devastating losses — his job, his relationship and the death of a loved one — that led him to start abusing laughing gas and ketamine, an anesthetic that can cause hallucinations at high doses.

Every time he went on Instagram, he said, the ads were a constant temptation.

“It’s like, ‘OK, I’ve been doing so good in rehab. And this is so easy to get. Maybe I should just do one order,’” said Grant, which is a pseudonym as he did not want to be identified out of fear it could harm his job prospects.

While still in rehab, he ordered ketamine and checked out five days before his program was scheduled to end. The package was sitting at his doorstep when he returned home.

The drug ads reviewed by the Star appeared to be targeted at Canadian adults, according to Meta’s Ad Library, which provides information on advertiser pages and the individuals who run them. But the websites themselves can be easily shared.

For seven months after first seeing the ads, Grant ordered from another website that has advertised on Meta’s platforms. He’s been sober for a few weeks and is attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

“They took somebody who was making an honest and frankly desperate effort to get clean and they completely derailed that.”

Drug ads persist despite Facebook’s ‘robust measures’

Meta has long faced scrutiny about drug sellers using its platforms to market narcotics.

As early as 2013, a BBC investigation revealed how users on Instagram could search for illegal drugs if they knew the right hashtag to use. The image-sharing platform responded by blocking certain search terms and encouraged users to report this content.

But the issue has continued to dog Instagram and Facebook.

Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. prosecutors were probing whether Meta’s platforms profit from the illegal sale of drugs. A spokesperson for the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Virginia refused to comment. Meta has consistently said the ads are prohibited and removed whenever found.

Since March, the Star has seen ads on Facebook for at least 20 drug websites. Some remain active for weeks or months.

“And if that ad has already reached people and they’ve already been able to connect with the trafficker and Meta’s profited from it, the harm is done. They made their money,” said Katie Paul, director of the U.S. non-profit Tech Transparency Project, which found more than 450 ads for prescription and recreational drugs on Meta’s platforms.

Meta reported $164B (USD) in revenue last year, with more than 97 per cent of that amount generated by ads.

The company’s highly automated advertising system makes digital marketing accessible to major brands as well as small businesses and social media influencers. Bad actors can slip through.

“They can’t regulate with too much of a heavy hand and risk their business model because their business model is one based on scale, not margins. It’s about doing as much of this as possible,” said Brett Caraway, a professor at the University of Toronto and acting director at the school’s Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology.

Between April and June, Meta said it “took action” on 3.7 million pieces of drug-related content on Facebook and 820,000 on Instagram. Nearly 96 per cent of such content on Facebook was “actioned” before being reported by a user, while on Instagram, that figure dropped to roughly 85 per cent, Meta said. The company did not say whether taking “action” on certain content means it was removed.

If an account is caught selling or promoting cocaine, fentanyl or other “high-risk drugs,” it will be disabled, Meta told the Star.

The company said it uses “robust measures” to detect and remove content that violates its standards, such as human review and artificial intelligence, including technology that can discern images of drugs. It also said that it works with law enforcement in its ongoing efforts to improve detection of offending content and supports non-profits and other organizations to help raise awareness of the dangers of drug misuse.

A Meta spokesperson did not say why ads showing cocaine remain on its platforms.

One such ad appeared on both Facebook and Instagram through a page managed from Austria and the United States, according to Meta’s Ad Library. It’s possible, however, to misrepresent one’s location by accessing the internet though a virtual private network (VPN).

The ad led to Trippi’s website, which promises to “transform your life with psychedelic medicine.” The website’s domain was originally associated with the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a tiny Australian archipelago in the Indian Ocean, though now forwards to a website linked to the tiny island nation of Niue.

Brian Wieser, a digital marketing analyst and CEO of the media and tech consultancy Madison and Wall, said he’s long urged companies that run so-called “self-service” ads — where the buyer creates, manages and pays for the ad directly — to establish rules to ensure the ad publisher knows who their clients are. “Unfortunately, there is none practically,” he told the Star. “Anyone can buy anything.”

In a statement to the Star, Meta said it also relies on reports from users to identify material that violates its standards. But three Facebook and Instagram users interviewed by the Star said that after reporting drug ads they received messages from Meta saying it had decided not to remove the ads in question.

After the Star flagged specific online drug shops to Meta, the company removed some of their ads, though others still appeared, including through a Facebook page the Star had identified to the company.

Moonhaus seems to have stopped running ads. Trippi ads showing cocaine appeared in the last week, according to Meta’s Ad Library.

More human moderation would improve Meta’s ability to crack down on illicit content, experts told the Star.

As “one of the most brilliant engineering companies in our history,” its automated moderation should work better than it appears to, said Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, an American trade group for content providers.

Meta can keep certain illegal material off its platforms, specifically images depicting child sexual abuse, Paul noted.

“The company is completely capable of doing this,” she said. “It has the technology to address these issues. It’s a choice at this point to not do so.”

‘I don’t want to see it happen to somebody else’

Savage, the New Brunswick fisherman, hadn’t touched oxy for about five years when he received the two 20 mg pills in the mail in February. He ordered from Moonhaus, the same online store the Star bought from months later.

He’d used heavily in the past but never overdosed. He crushed up and snorted one pill. After lighting a cigarette, he passed out in a chair and stopped breathing.

As Savage’s wife called 911, his adult son pounded on his chest and splashed him with cold water, trying anything. Savage took a big gasp and came to just as paramedics rushed in.

He suspects the pill may have been tainted with fentanyl or another potent opioid. He flushed the rest of what he bought down the toilet.

“I apologized to my (son) a dozen times. It scared him bad. It scared all of us,” said Savage, a grandfather of five. “I don’t want to see it happen to somebody else.”

The Star gave both substances it bought through the ads to a community drug checking service that uses infrared light to identify what’s in street drugs. The tests found no trace of fentanyl. But the cocaine was adulterated with levamisole, an animal dewormer that’s often added to cocaine to maximize profits. It can cause skin necrosis.

Savage remains frustrated with the ease with which people can buy potentially dangerous drugs through Facebook ads and said the RCMP needs to do more to stop it.

“I mean if a hillbilly like me in the middle of Charlotte County, New Brunswick, on a small island, can get access to pills out of British Columbia. And I can track them on an app through Canada Post coming across the country—”

He paused. “They can’t seem to slow this down any?”

This story originally appeared in the Toronto Star

The post We ordered cocaine for $100 through a Facebook ad. Here’s why it was easy to buy illegal drugs online in Canada appeared first on Ben Mussett.

For a while, he slept on the ground, his sleeping bag and tent the only things separating him from the cold, hard earth. (He wouldn’t recommend it.) Then he slept on a sign advertising a nearby condo development. Next — for years — a thin piece of plywood. Finally, about a year ago, he was gifted a cot, which, by lifting him a few inches off the ground, changed his life. “You go to sleep a lot better when you’re off the floor,” he says.

But it was different when he crawled into a bed this past September — the first time he says he’d slept in one in about two decades.

A local organization that supports Toronto’s homeless had rented him a hotel room where he could recover from dental work before venturing back into the woods. “The first night I went in there, I stayed awake all night,” he says. “ … I could not get used to sleeping in a bed with covers.”

In a city of 2.8 million, Dickson, a tall man with long greying hair, a quick smile, calm demeanour and cloudy blue eyes, lives largely out of sight. For the past 20 years, he says he’s resided in a blue-tarped tent atop a secluded, wooded hill in the middle of Toronto, watching condos shoot into the skyline as the years went by.

His time living outside makes Dickson a rarity in Toronto. Homelessness has risen dramatically in recent years, but many cycle through periods of sleeping rough between stretches in a shelter or subsidized housing. According to data collected in 2021, only two per cent said they strictly sleep outside. Few, if any, have lived in the urban wilderness as long as Dickson.

After speaking with his long-time employer, outreach workers and local police, the Star confirmed Dickson has lived at his current spot since at least 2009, and likely longer.

But now he’s ready to move back indoors, though a lack of affordable and subsidized housing in Toronto makes it difficult to say how long he’ll have to wait. When that day arrives, Dickson plans to bring his cot with him.

It was his doctor who urged him to look for housing. A lingering spinal injury he suffered as a child would make a simple fall — especially near his hidden home, where he might not be found — disastrous, he explained. “And that’s the only reason,” says Dickson, who recently turned 61. “Otherwise, I’d just be happy to stay outside.”
There’s a lot he’ll have to get used to when he moves back inside. The ease and privacy of his own washroom. No longer having to fret over whether his water will freeze or his “can of heat” will run out of fuel or if he remembered to put his food away, so the raccoons don’t, once again, break into his home.

The other people.

His is a mostly solitary existence aside from the wildlife and occasional mountain biker. Dickson doesn’t own a phone or computer and says he’s never used the internet. It seems, as the world around him trudged forward, he’s stayed in one place where, as he puts it, “no one sees you — and I don’t bother anyone.”

He’ll miss this place, and the animals he shares it with. He says he came across the spot long ago, after he snuck off during an elementary school field trip. “What a nice place to go and hide,” he remembers thinking.

Dickson was born with another name, a fact he says eluded him for much of his youth. He spent his first few years on Moravian 47, a small reserve in Chatham-Kent that’s home to the Lenape (Lunaapeew) People of the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown.

When he was a young child, at the height of the Sixties Scoop, he says authorities came to take him and his siblings away. Eventually, they were put up for adoption. Though they kept him and his younger brother together, his sisters went to another home. But he insists he’s not a victim. He says his father was abusive. “I had no objection to them coming in and getting me out of there.”

He was taken to the suburbs of Hamilton. His new mom was “strict but fair.” His new dad was more laid-back. However, by the time he’d reached his late teens, his adopted father had died, and his adopted mother wanted him out. He says he never saw her again.

He stayed at the YMCA in Hamilton for a time. After working at the Hamilton Spectator, where he stuffed the newspapers with flyers, he hitchhiked around southern Ontario and eventually settled in Toronto. For a period, Dickson, who hadn’t graduated high school, worked as a bartender but soon slid into a pattern of “living from one job to another.” By the late 1980s, he was delivering handbills, work he still does today when his back acquiesces.

There have been moments throughout his life, Dickson says, where it felt like he was a promotion or new job away from getting ahead — an alternate path where he’d have the means to buy that sports car he had dreamed about as a kid — before the opportunity fell through.

Through all of it, there were dust-ups with the law that left him cynical about the justice system — and frequent movement. He bounced around the city, at times renting, other times sleeping on a friend’s couch or at a hostel or shelter, an environment he says only brought trouble.

“Sometimes it was through a fault of mine and sometimes it wasn’t,” Dickson says about his earlier stints of homelessness. “And sometimes I thought, ‘Ahh, heck, I’m just going to live outside.’”

Life continued that way until he moved to the hill he now calls a home. (To avoid disturbing his home or displacing Dickson, the Star agreed not to disclose his tent’s location.)

“I was going to only stay out there ‘till about fall, save up my money, go and get a room again, you know, start all over,” he said. But he fell in love with it, particularly the bond he developed with the local deer and other wildlife, which over time got used to his presence. (He hadn’t yet warred with the raccoons.) Some days he’d wake up to fawns laying steps from his tent, and they “didn’t flicker a thing.”

“This is the life,” he thought. “I’d rather have this than being inside, neighbours yelling at each other. Things like that.” For the first time in a while, he felt safe. He felt happy.

Steps from one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares but surrounded by trees, Dickson has enjoyed a front-row seat to nature — the rabbits, the coyotes, the wild turkeys that appear in late summer, the golden eagle that used to come around before all the construction. But it’s not all idyllic. Hardly. The winters are harsh. The summers swarm with bugs, which has taught him the perils of using scented soap. Even washing your clothes can prove a magnet to mosquitoes, he says.

There was a learning curve, but through trial and error, he discovered how to make his life a little bit easier: Breathable laundry bags helped prevent mould, a constant threat. Cotton clothing is preferable to polyester, which melts when lit and can cause severe burns. Spicy food is typically eschewed by animals looking for a meal. And once they get used to your scent, explains Dickson, wildlife — or, more accurately, the sudden absence of it — will let you know if someone has been poking around your tent.

In a windstorm, falling trees around his home can make the ground shake. Then there was that July day in 2013 when Toronto was deluged with a historic downpour, and the top of his tent roared with pelts of rain. “God, please,” he recalls thinking. He tried his best to stay still and not touch the sides of the tent, so water wouldn’t come crashing in.

In the warmer months, his days have been spent walking the city, sometimes delivering handbills or collecting bottles. Maybe he’d read a book (he lists Pierre Berton, Tom Clancy and Stephen King as some of his favourite authors), pick up a newspaper or go see an afternoon matinee at the movie theatre.

Did he get lonely? “Not really.”

For years, he says he actually did have a human neighbour. A man similar in age lived about 50 yards away in an underground cellar constructed with found wood and lit by battery-powered string lights. One outreach worker described it as “an apartment,” ten degrees warmer than ground level. “You’d be surprised where you can find some people living,” Dickson jokes.

Aindrea Kiss met Dickson near the outset of the pandemic. She works as a nurse at Sanctuary Toronto. Dickson first stopped by after the drop-in service he had relied on to shower and shave suddenly shut down, and it became difficult to find somewhere to stay warm.

“I often think, ‘Where did he come from?’” said Kiss, who, after nearly four years working in homeless outreach, has never met anyone who’s lived outside as long as Dickson has.

After they met, Sanctuary helped him access medical and dental care, bought him the cot, and rented him the hotel room after his dental surgery, which she believes led him to consider moving back inside. She remembers how he talked about the joy of getting to watch the evening news.

“He’s really been coming out of his shell,” she said. But it could take years before he can move back inside.

On top of what he makes distributing handbills from time to time, Dickson also collects ODSP. But with the average one-bedroom apartment in Toronto now listed for nearly $2,500 per month, it’s not nearly enough to fetch his own place.

He recently added his name to the list of more than 84,000 households in Toronto currently waiting for subsidized housing. The city says the average wait time for a senior with a homeless priority stands at about four years. (Applicants must wait, on average, 14 years to get into a one-bedroom apartment.)

Besides the neighbours and the comforts most of us take for granted — including, of course, the bed — Dickson will eventually have to adjust to the hush provided by four walls and a roof, another thing that kept him up in that hotel room a few months back.

“It was quiet,” he says. “When you’re sleeping outside, you got noise outside your tent all the time. Insects, rodents, quadrupeds, owls and things like that. Things that you get used to. You get used to the raccoon coming around you. You know exactly almost to the minute when he’s going to show up.”

Unable to sleep, he remembers looking up at the night sky on the hotel balcony. “I’m just sitting there saying, ‘Yes, this is beautiful.’ And the best part,” he continued, “No mosquitoes!”

This story originally appeared in the Toronto Star

The post For 20 years, Russell Dickson has lived outdoors in the urban wilderness. He’s finally ready to come inside appeared first on Ben Mussett.

Very few details of the RCMP’s probe into what it called the “Israel-Hamas armed conflict” are known, with the police service confirming the investigation to the Star on Monday, but refusing to answer questions about its scope.

The RCMP launched the investigation quietly in early 2024. The lack of announcement stands in stark contrast to the agency’s probe into alleged war crimes in Ukraine, which has involved a hotline and dedicated webpage, media interviews, online advertising, signs erected at airports and questionnaires distributed in an attempt to collect witness testimony from fleeing Ukrainians.

The RCMP calls these types of probes “structural investigations,” which fall under Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Program (CAHWCP), a joint effort by the RCMP, Department of Justice, Canada Border Services Agency, and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

According to its mandate, “the War Crimes Program supports Canada’s commitment towards international justice and the fight against impunity for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.”

The program is intended to deny safe haven to war criminals, as well as seek accountability for alleged atrocities either by sharing evidence with other authorities or trying individuals in Canadian courts, the justice department said. It’s exceedingly rare, however, for cases to end up in Canadian court.

Structural investigations, according to experts interviewed by the Star, are broad, fact-finding missions surrounding a particular conflict or alleged crimes committed against specific groups during a conflict.

An RCMP investigator working on the Ukraine probe said the aim for the first year was, according to a CBC News report, “to preserve evidence, including physical and digital evidence, and gather victims’ stories.”

“As a neutral law enforcement body, the RCMP considers allegations from all parties involved with impartiality,” the Crown agency said over email Monday in response to a series of questions. “To uphold the integrity of this ongoing investigation, the RCMP provides this as its final response on the matter.”

The RCMP did not comment on what triggered its investigation in “early 2024.”

Months prior, the Hamas-led massacre on Oct. 7, 2023 left about 1,200 people in Israel dead, most of them civilians. Around 250 people were also taken hostage by Hamas.

Over the past 19 months of war, Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many of the dead were civilians or combatants. The ministry is led by medical professionals but reports to the Hamas-run government. Its toll is seen as generally reliable by U.N. agencies and independent experts, though Israel has challenged its numbers. Other analyses indicate the total number is far greater.

The RCMP’s work continues amid rising tension between Canada and Israel.

In a joint statement in May, Canada, the U.K. and France denounced an “expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza,” with a threat to impose “targeted sanctions” on the country. The statement also called on Hamas to release its remaining hostages. Last week, Canada urged Israel to abandon plans to authorize 22 Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, noting it would be illegal.

The United Nations, meanwhile, recently warned Israel’s blockade of aid to Gaza risks “mass starvation” of Palestinians.

According to a statement the Department of Justice provided to the Star last week, the RCMP may launch a structural investigation “when there is evidence that war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide have occurred or are occurring anywhere in the world, and where there is a specific immigration community in Canada — either on a temporary residence or permanent residence basis — which is sufficiently large so that the RCMP may gather the necessary evidence.”

Multiple reports released by an independent UN commission focused on Israel-Palestine allege both Hamas and Israel have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity since October 2023.

The decision to launch an investigation rests with the RCMP, the justice department said.

While the department answered several questions about the ongoing Ukraine probe, it declined to discuss others, saying the War Crimes Program “does not comment on active investigations.” (Besides promoting its Ukraine investigation, the RCMP has acknowledged other active probes in the past, such as an investigation into crimes committed against the Yazidi population in Iraq and Syria.)

Over email, the RCMP later said “every investigation, including … the investigation into the Israel-Hamas conflict, needs a tailored approach and investigative techniques that cannot be applied universally.”

In the spring of 2022, roughly six weeks after Russia’s invasion, the RCMP announced its investigation into the war in Ukraine. Around the same time, the national police force also sent a contingent of investigators to assist the International Criminal Court’s weeks-old investigation into the conflict.

“As we see human casualties pile up and the scale and size of this humanitarian crisis grow alarmingly, it is important that we hold those who are committing the atrocities responsible,” then-public safety minister Marco Mendicino told the Globe and Mail at the time.

“It is essential that we preserve the record of what happened and what is happening in Ukraine in real time,” added Mendicino, who has been serving on a temporary basis as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s chief of staff.

Mendicino, along with current Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree, did not respond to a question about why the government had yet to announce similar investigative efforts related to the war in Gaza.

This story originally appeared in the Toronto Star

The post Exclusive: RCMP says it’s probing potential war crimes related to Israel-Hamas conflict appeared first on Ben Mussett.

Instead of the usual 10 or so attendees, well over 50 people showed up to the centre’s annual general meeting (AGM) on Nov. 24, 2021, many of them armed with proxy votes from other island residents or so-called part-timers. Those who couldn’t get inside milled near the entrance of the red and green cottage-style building.

“I had never seen anything like it,” says Laurie Cooke, who served as the centre’s administrative coordinator until recently resigning. “I knew what was going to happen.”

Nestled in the Southern Gulf Islands, Mayne spans 21 square kilometres of forest, beach, and pasture. Red-barked arbutus trees dot the shoreline. About a thousand people live here year-round, though that number can more than double in the summer. Nobody is more than a 15-minute drive away. There’s one gas station, one church, one school, and no traffic lights—or even street lights, their absence enhancing the night sky. The median age on the island hovers around 65, more than 20 years above the provincewide figure, but it’s beginning to trend younger.

Like many rural towns, Mayne has seen an influx of newcomers during the pandemic, perhaps driven by the fact that many folks can now easily work from home. In contrast to any city, getting anything done here depends on people donating their time, says Jeanine Dodds, a local trustee. “Everything that we have on the island is built by volunteers,” she tells me.

And it’s been that way for as long Dodds can remember. She moved to Mayne when she was seven when her parents took over the Springwater Lodge, believed to be the oldest continually operating hotel in BC. That was 62 years ago, a time when a young Dodds called everyone in town “uncle” or “auntie.”

“The core community is involved in everything because that’s how it’s always been,” she says. “There’s no big government out here.”

Instead, a patchwork of volunteer groups have filled the void.

The volunteer-run library began as a bookshelf at the post office before residents took it upon themselves to expand it. Volunteers also helped build the first phase of the island’s clinic, and the community partially fundraised Mayne’s emergency room. Meanwhile, most firefighters on the island serve as volunteers. (They receive some extended benefits but are only paid if they can attend a call or practice.) The Japanese garden, the food bank, the recycling depot, the conservancy, the museum and the thrift store all depend on volunteers. It’s normally uncontroversial work. At least, until now.

The community centre’s AGM is typically a quick, routine affair. “It’s usually very quiet,” says Louis Vallee, who has lived on Mayne for decades. “The people who serve [on the volunteer board] generally just stay on, and that’s it. It’s a short meeting. Not much happens.”

But this year’s AGM was not typical. One attendee later jokingly dubbed it the “insurrection of Mayne Island.”

The meeting began late, at 4:55pm. What would have usually lasted about an hour pushed past three. Among the notable developments since the previous AGM in September 2020: the construction of a daycare facility on the property was well underway, a new bike rack had been installed, an indoor bench had been refinished, and “the two American chestnuts in the field flowered and produced fruit for the first time!”

After Lise McLeod, a local realtor and longtime board member who chaired the meeting, gave a report on the community centre’s finances, a flurry of questions ensued. They probed the board’s transparency and governance, and the community centre’s ties to the Mayne Island Tennis Association, whose courts sit on a corner of the centre’s property. McLeod says it felt like she was driving on the highway while cars kept trying to tailgate her and cut her off.

Finally, later in the evening, an exasperated attendee stood up to address “the elephant in the room”—pickleball.

Pickleball was invented less than 150 km south of Mayne Island, during a weekend getaway in 1965 on Bainbridge Island, Washington—but even here it remained fairly obscure until a few years ago, when the sport’s popularity exploded. Now George Clooney plays, as do Bill Gates and Ellen Degeneres. Pickleball even made it onto an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The game combines elements of badminton, tennis, and ping pong. Typically composed of teams of two, players use paddles to hit a perforated polymer ball back and forth over a three-foot-tall net until one side reaches 11 points.

In Canada, it was snowbirds who helped grow the sport. As of last summer, Pickleball Canada estimated around 350,000 Canadians now play. It’s one of the fastest growing sports in North America, and British Columbia leads provinces in Pickleball Canada membership. But the sport still has a long way to go before catching up with tennis, which is on its way to becoming pickleball’s proverbial foe. In 2019, Tennis Canada estimated close to three million Canadians play tennis frequently.

The president of Pickleball BC, Walter Knecht, says the game’s accessibility is one reason why it’s taken off. It’s simple enough to learn in 15 minutes, and just about any age can pick it up. One of Knecht’s friends played into his 90s before recently hanging up the paddles. “If you can get the fork to your mouth at the dinner table, you can probably hit the ball,” he tells me over the phone. Data from Pickleball USA shows the majority of core “picklers,” as many call themselves, are 55 and older.

The real fun, though, is in the community. It only takes about five minutes of play before everyone’s laughing, Knecht says. “We never see tennis people doing that kind of stuff. They’re standing 60 feet away and pounding the ball back and forth. Just about need a telephone to talk to your opponents.”

Knecht insists the two sports are not at loggerheads. “​​We’re attempting cooperation on all fronts.” But it seems like everywhere pickleball appears, feuds soon follow as the sport’s dramatic growth puts a squeeze on public tennis courts. The noise of pickleball—the frequent echoey popping of the ball combined with the boisterous gameplay—has also rankled folks who live near pickleball courts.

The inevitable controversy first appeared in the Gulf Islands in 2016. A Gulf Islands Driftwood headline from the time reads, “Tennis-pickleball strife ignites.” In this case, pickleball and tennis players on Salt Spring Island were arguing over whether more pickleball lines should be added to a local court or all should be removed. The article also detailed allegations that a former parks and recreation commissioner “with pickleball ties” had “used information gained through his position improperly.” (The Salt Spring Island Parks and Recreation Commission firmly denied the claim.)

Despite downplaying the conflict between tennis and pickleball players, Knecht acknowledges there are some “Hatfield and McCoy situations out there.” He continues, “Mayne Island, you might say, is one of them.”

By chance, the acrimonious meeting at the community centre came 10 days after Pickleball BC and Tennis British Columbia had published a joint press release, encouraging municipalities to build dedicated pickleball courts.

“The two sports have some minor similarities, but are fundamentally very different,” the release read. For instance, up to eight pickleball courts roughly fit in the space required for two tennis courts. The sports use different nets, racquets, balls, scoring systems, and so on. In short, the organizations said sharing courts is not a solution: “Painting pickleball lines on tennis courts creates two dissatisfied sports groups, and the resulting conflict inevitably ends up at city hall.”

Adrian Gowing, the “go-to guy” for tennis on Mayne, agrees.

In the spring of 2020, the Mayne Island Pickleball Club (MIPC) asked the local tennis association if they could share its two courts that sit a stone’s throw from the community centre. The tennis association, which Gowing chairs, said no. “The only thing that’s compatible with tennis and pickleball is the surface,” Gowing later tells me. Others had previously asked to use the courts for ball hockey or basketball, and the association gave them the same answer.

(Note: My father is an avid tennis player and member of the island’s tennis association, and was among the nominees for the community centre’s board at its latest AGM. However, I didn’t inherit his skill on the court; I play neither tennis nor pickleball.)

Gowing thought sharing the courts could balloon wait times and limit public access, especially if one of the courts was permanently converted for pickleball. The tennis association currently counts 50 members, while the pickleball club claimed nearly double that amount in late 2020. The pickleballers disagree with Gowing’s assessment. Last August, their club ran a seven-day survey of tennis court usage and said the courts “sat completely idle” about 60% of the time.

The Mayne Island Pickleball Club declined an interview.

Despite his organization’s official position—sharing is not a solution—Knecht later said that sharing courts might be the best option in a small town with limited space, like on Mayne.

But for Gowing, how the courts came to be matters, as well.

When the tennis association was searching for a new home in 2007, the community centre offered up a patch of land on the condition the tennis group had to fundraise, build, and manage the courts themselves, and let the public play. Crucially—though not to an extent anyone at the time could have imagined—the tennis association was given authority over how the courts would be used, though the centre can veto any usage that might interfere with its operation.

“Basically, we own everything from the soil up,” says Gowing, who personally chopped down trees to make room for the court. “We have our own bank account. We do our own fundraising. We have operated totally independently.”

While the tennis association did not share the space, the group did offer to help the pickleball club fundraise to build their own courts.

The club currently meets on an outdoor basketball court, now featuring pickleball lines, at the local elementary school. However, members can only play outside of school hours, and if children want to use the court, it’s game over. In an 18-page proposal, the club floated redeveloping the space and adding permanent pickleball courts early last year, but the school district didn’t go ahead with the project. The club also hasn’t had any luck with the Mayne Island Parks and Recreation Commission which told them none of the island’s parks are “suitable” for pickleball.

The club suffered a similar fate when they approached the community centre about building courts on its property. They were told the centre already had their hands full with the construction of a daycare for the Mayne Island Early Childhood Society, still under development behind the tennis courts. As for sharing those courts, the centre’s board deferred to the tennis association, which had already turned them down.

Undeterred, the pickleball club initiated what amounts to a pressure campaign last summer, privately contacting board members and inundating the centre with emails urging it to overrule the tennis group’s decision. Even the location of the daycare, already underway by this time, became an issue of contention. So did the makeup of the centre’s board. Months before the AGM in November, three of the board’s six directors had resigned for differing reasons. Two of the people asked to fill these seats on an interim basis also happen to sit on the board of the tennis association. Gowing, the association’s chair, was one of them.

Before the squabble had reached these heights, the centre received a letter from a pickleball player in June asking when the next AGM would be held: “It would be prudent to prepare for an election.”

Gowing believes he was “a bit too naive” about what might take place at the AGM. But he still came prepared with several proxy votes from tennis club members who couldn’t attend the meeting, and he asked others to collect more.

“Unbeknownst to us, the pickleball group were doing that in spades,” Gowing tells me a few weeks after the meeting. With each group sitting on either side of the room, he says it felt like the House of Commons. “It was crazy.”

Five of the board’s six seats were up for election that night. Nine island residents threw their hats in the ring: the three interim directors and six nominations from the floor. All in all, four members with ties to the pickleball club and three members from the tennis association put their names forward.

This newfound interest in joining the board was unprecedented. “Usually, you have to beg people to serve on them,” Gowing says. “Not fight against people to serve.” Like most volunteer-run organizations, the community centre has struggled at times during the pandemic, and the board had long dreamt of more help. Louis Vallee, who plays both tennis and pickleball, suggested the centre increase the number of board seats to 10 and accept all of the nominees. “Let them volunteer!” he thought.

Following some debate over proper procedure, that proposal was voted on. A representative from each sporting community observed the count: 53 against, 43 in favour.

In the end, all four people associated with the pickleball club, including at least two club members, were elected. After months wrangling with the community centre over a perceived lack of support for a burgeoning racquet sport, four directors sympathetic to the pickleball cause now hold a majority on its board.

Capital Daily requested an interview with Catherine McNeill, the board’s new president and a pickleball player, but she declined the invitation. Over email, McNeill said the new board’s primary focus is “transparent governance and community engagement.”

The meeting wrapped up around 8pm. As folks filed out, bickering began. Some people who once considered themselves friends stopped talking afterwards.

“It was hostile. It was devastating. A lot of people’s feelings got hurt,” says an attendee who prefers not to be named.

“It’s a bit of a mind-boggling thing,” the person continues. “You’re at that AGM, sitting there, looking around and thinking, ‘Oh, my God! There are floods and droughts and a global pandemic and climate change. People are dealing with so much stuff. And this is what is gonna be the straw that broke the camel’s back in the community?’”

The issue has now divided many on the island, they say before beginning to laugh. “You have to be careful who you talk to, or what you say to whom.”

Laurie Cooke, the centre’s former administrative coordinator, was devastated by the night’s events.

“I’ve been hanging around here since the ’70s,” she tells me. Mayne’s natural beauty, slow pace and friendly community appealed to her, as did its get-up-and-go attitude. But she didn’t recognize that island at the AGM.

Cooke says the centre received a flood of membership applications in the days before the AGM, likely to amass votes for one or both sides. She had worked at the community centre for three years and had planned to stay in a position she loved, but shortly after that night she submitted her resignation.

“I just felt sunk. I wanted to leave Mayne Island, and I’m not the only one who said they just don’t want to be here anymore,” she says. “I just felt the island was going to be flipped.”

In many ways, the island already has flipped—first slowly, then very quickly.

Dodds, who’s now in her fifth term as a local trustee, says there are “lots of tensions” in the Islands Trust Area, which includes all of the Gulf Islands. The trust is a unique federation of local governments introduced in 1974 with a mandate “to preserve and protect the environment and unique amenities of the islands.”

The pandemic is part of it. In the early days of COVID-19, the Gulf Islands urged visitors and even those with vacation properties to stay away, noting just how vulnerable the region’s older population is to the virus. Still, many new folks have joined the island in the past couple of years. Some, she worries, may have unrealistic expectations of how things work in small, remote towns like Mayne: “You really have to be very slow and gentle.”

With things on pause, the newcomers also might not have received the warm welcome they would have before. Many opportunities to mingle with neighbours, like the fall fair or the Christmas Eve bonfire, have been downsized or cancelled altogether. During the first stretch of the pandemic, some especially COVID-conscious residents simply viewed newbies with an air of suspicion, worried they might be bringing the virus with them.

“If I don’t recognize your face, and you’re new to the island, it takes a while to assimilate into the community,” Dodds says. “That sense of community has been fractured for the moment.”

Others on the island feel it, too. “It’s not just pickleball,” the islander who wished to stay anonymous tells me. “Pickleball is a symptom, right?”

Some in the community might not have felt included, they reasoned before referencing a proverb that may or may not have originated in Africa: “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

Dodds was caught off guard by pickleball’s explosion on Mayne. She says the island clearly needs to find more land for recreational use but says that’s up to the Parks and Recreation Commission, not the trust. (In a statement to the Capital Daily, Debra Bell, the commission’s chair, said it remains “open to finding a permanent home for pickleball on Mayne Island.”)

The islands are also facing some serious problems besides a lack of recreational space, Dodds adds: water scarcity, a housing crisis, surging property taxes, growing waitlists to see a doctor, uneven ferry service, rising grocery and fuel costs, and climate change, to name a few. The island’s food bank is “booming,” Dodds points out.

One fundamental dilemma the trust currently faces: trying to find a balance between preserving the environment that attracts people to the islands while developing homes to support the growing communities.

“So, it is a tense time,” she concludes.

“We’re probably just on the cusp of seeing our community go one way or the other in terms of competition for who gets the prize. I hope not.”

Depending on who you ask, the AGM was either the opening salvo in that competition, or the end result of years of built-up tension.

When I first ask Vallee about that evening, he lets out a laugh.

“Well, what can you say about [the AGM] in a few words,” he says between pauses. “It was sort of the worst meeting I’ve ever been to.”

But the clash seemed inevitable to him. “If that’s how you’re going to treat people, well, you’re gonna get a reaction back,” he says. “It was a democratic meeting. They belong to the membership, and they can vote.”

Vallee was president of the tennis association when the courts were built on the community centre’s property in 2008. He later quit his position over a rift with Gowing about how they should be managed.

“It was supposed to be a public court,” he says. “It’s not supposed to be a court that the tennis people own and let the public play [on].” He doesn’t see any reason why the courts can’t be shared.

Vallee’s getting to be one of Mayne’s “old timers,” but he wasn’t born here. Originally from Edmonton, he first came to the island on a vacation in the early 1970s.

“I remember going through Active Pass and looking at Mayne and thinking, ‘Geez, I think I need to live here.’”

At the time, realtors on the island would advertise in the Edmonton Journal—especially in the dead of winter when Edmonton froze over and Mayne was still green. If you were interested in buying, they’d pay to fly you out, Vallee says. If you made the sale, they’d fly you back for free, too.

The Gulf Islands made sense to a young Vallee. Animated by the German naturalist Erich Fromm and Harry Browne’s 1973 book How I Found Freedom in An Unfree World: A Handbook for Personal Liberty, he wanted to get out of the rat race and make a life for himself in a rugged, “outlaw” area where land was cheap.

“I guess I was a bit of a rebel,” he tells me wryly. “Remember, I grew up in the ’60s.”

Vallee and his brother ended up buying “a little flop” on the island. Lots of community controversies have come and gone since then. The lesson: you’ve got to find a way to get along.

“The person you disagree with might be the person picking up your garbage or that you’re going to ride with on the ferry or your ferry attendant or your doctor,” he says.

Mayne’s community has a lot to offer, says Vallee, who has long been involved in local projects. But it’s not always hunky dory.

“People think that small communities are wide open and everybody’s friendly,” he continues. “And no, it’s more like people in the elevator. People play their cards close to their chest. They don’t want everybody else to know what they’re doing.”

No one formally associated with the pickleball club—nor with the leadership of the community centre’s new board—spoke to Capital Daily on the record for this article.

Even in winter, Gowing and other tennis players have been regularly heading to the courts. He jokes that this might be their way of “planting the flag.” So far, the community centre hasn’t made any announcements about what can be played there.

“Tenterhooks would be the term,” Gowing says.

But he believes this is about more than just tennis now. After more than 40 years on the island, it’s been hard to wrap his head around this new “tribal attitude.” For him, Mayne’s culture, and the precedent for how things get done on the island, is on the line.

This story originally appeared in Capital Daily

The post The Pickleball Coup appeared first on Ben Mussett.

In addition to the danger from above, more than a week into the war between Israel and Hamas, Kolab is also dreading the start of contractions.

A few days earlier, Kolab, a local folk hero known as Gaza’s first fisherwoman, had been sheltering with her family in their small home in Shati, a refugee camp near Gaza City where more than 90,000 residents recently lived in a pocket just over half a square kilometre in size.

“I do not know what I will do,” the 29-year-old told the Star, in the first of several exchanges. “There is no safety anywhere.”

A world away, Nancy Murphy, a holistic doula based in Victoria, B.C., has been anxiously checking her phone for updates from Kolab, who, despite the pair having never met, has become a close friend.

A few years ago, they connected on social media after Murphy learned of Kolab’s decision as a girl to become a fisher, and challenge traditional gender norms in the process.

Then for several days last week, Kolab stopped replying. “Are you OK?” Murphy frantically asked. “Are they bombing again?”

When she finally resurfaced, Kolab was far from home.

After she heard a neighbouring building might soon be struck, her family, including Kolab’s three young child, fled their home in the middle of the night. Suddenly, they were homeless – their “most difficult days.”

She then spent two days in a crowded hospital, suppressing pregnancy pains until she fled northern Gaza for the south in a small bus, one among hundreds of thousands of Gazans who have left their homes in recent days ahead of an anticipated Israeli ground invasion.

“It seems that my body is accustomed to fatigue,” she wrote after her family, and several others, were welcomed into the home of her husband’s relative in the southern city of Khan Younis over the weekend.

But she still worried about her pale and yellow complexion; her back and swollen feet ached with pain. In recent days, her family had mostly subsisted on rice, stale bread, biscuits and juice, though she had managed to find some chocolate for the children.

“Whoever sees me would not say that I am carrying a child in the ninth month.”

Kolab’s exchanges with the Star over Facebook were translated from Arabic.

Since Hamas’s brutal, multifront attack on southern Israel Oct. 7, which killed more than 1,400 people, mainly civilians, Israeli warplanes have pounded the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip with thousands of bombs in an effort to destroy the military capability of the group considered a terrorist organization by Canada, the U.S. and the EU.

Israeli strikes have killed at least 2,778 people, with children comprising nearly two-thirds of the dead, according to Medhat Abbas, a Gaza Health Ministry official. Those figures do not include the hundreds estimated to have been killed by an explosion Tuesday at a Gaza City hospital. Hamas quickly placed blame on an Israeli airstrike. But Israel has staunchly denied responsibility, releasing audio and aerial footage it says points to “a failed rocket launch” by the Islamic Jihad, a Gaza-based militant group.

On Wednesday, United States President Joe Biden announced that Israel would begin allowing limited aid into Gaza, home to 2.3 million people, nearly half of whom are children. In the aftermath of Hamas’s attack, Israel cut off the flow of food, fuel and water into Gaza. But as aid workers warn that Gaza is nearing total collapse, it remained unclear when the much-needed humanitarian assistance would be let through.

Although the Israel Defence Forces had begun to urge northern residents to seek refuge in the south last week, dozens were killed in airstrikes in southern Gaza on Tuesday.

“It was a difficult and terrifying night,” Kolab told the Star on Tuesday, adding that an apartment building across from where her family is sheltering was bombed.

“We want to live in freedom,” she said. “We want to be there to receive our children like the children of the world. We want to buy toys for children so they can live their childhood. We want to live in a habitable house. We want to live like humans.”

As a teenager, Kolab, the eldest of her siblings, took it upon herself to feed her family after an injury put her father, a veteran fisherman, out of work. Paddling out to sea in a shallow-hulled boat, she soon became known as Gaza’s first, and only, fisherwoman.

Despite a cool reception from her fellow (and male) fishers, the confident teen would earn their respect. “I found she was more capable than a man,” Mohamed Omar Bakir told Al-Jazeera in a 2017 documentary about Kolab. “She doesn’t count as just one man but as five.”

However, working on the water also exposed how the Israeli occupation severely hinders the livelihood of Gazan fishers, who face arrests, confiscated equipment and regular confrontations at sea with Israeli forces that have, at times, turned deadly. Strict limits on where Gazans can fish, patrolled by Israel’s navy, have resulted in overfishing and shrunk their catch.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but the territory is still considered by the UN to be occupied in part because Israel imposed a blockade in 2007, the same year Hamas began ruling the enclave.

Despite their language barrier, Murphy and Kolab have developed an unlikely but “natural” bond, said the Canadian. They exchange translated messages most days. Murphy has supported Kolab through her recent pregnancies and frequent hardship, while Kolab has been a source of strength for Murphy, whose daughter, now in palliative care, has long suffered from a debilitating, chronic illness that has often required hospitalization.

“We help each other as moms trying to protect our children,” said Murphy.

In messages exchanged between Kolab and Murphy near the beginning of the war, the doula asked if her Palestinian friend had access to strong scissors to cut the umbilical cord in case the baby comes.

“Yes,” Kolab responded. “But I hope the war will end beforehand.”

Then came the news on Wednesday, a few hours after a previous version of this story was published online: Kolab had just given birth to a healthy baby girl, a week before her due date.

Weighing just over seven pounds, she was named Wasila.

Kolab had managed to make it to a nearby hospital just in time thanks to the Red Crescent, an affiliate of the Red Cross. The baby arrived an hour later, but soon they had returned to the building where the family is sheltering, with Wasila wrapped in a pink swaddle.

Kolab asked the homeowner who had taken them in if she could borrow some money for food and medicine.

“I told him that if we survive, I will pay him back.”

This story originally appeared in the Toronto Star

The post Pregnant in Gaza, she was dreading labour pains. They came early appeared first on Ben Mussett.

STANDOFF, Alta.—Lorraine Black Water knows her granddaughter is close.

Has to be.

She checks the usual haunts: the bank of computers at the library, beneath the overpass where city traffic hurtles over the railway lines, and the shelter, where staff greet her by name. Having no luck, she circles in on the park.

There, she finds her granddaughter, sitting in the grass. The young woman is slim in the way her mother had been; her frame whittled down further by drugs. Her reaction at seeing her grandmother advance toward her is immediate: “Oh, shit,” Lorraine recalls her saying.

Almost a decade ago, when death had come for the girl’s mother, Lorraine’s daughter, Angela, Lorraine didn’t even know her daughter had been using a vicious new substance that would soon overwhelm her community and her family, one she often refers to simply as “the drug.” She wasn’t about to let it pull Angela’s daughter under, too.

She orders the teen into the truck for the ride from Lethbridge back to the Blood Reserve of southern Alberta, plans already forming in her head about how to get her into some form of treatment.

There are days Lorraine seems bewildered at how this foreign substance took over her life. But she knows the damage the drug brings, and today the how and when aren’t as important as the here and now.

The withdrawal will begin within hours, and she has to get her granddaughter home.

THE LITTLE HOUSE BY THE RIVER

Lorraine lives in a white two-bedroom bungalow in a stand of poplar trees, tucked away at the end of a dirt road that loops around on itself, under the protection of a towering river bank that makes the endless prairie of southern Alberta suddenly disappear.

If there’s an epicentre of the crisis of toxic drugs and death that has consumed this country — or the societal indifference to one of the most prolific killers of our time — it may well sit in this house; the burden on the shoulders of one grandmother.

At 61, Lorraine is a slender woman with glasses and thick dark hair. She has braced against more than her share of storms. She’s quick to make a joke. Under all that runs steel.

Her house is on the very edge of Standoff, the biggest town on Blood 148, the biggest reserve in the country. It’s home to the Kainai Nation, also known as the Blood Tribe and part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Picture a rolling swath of grassland and hay fields twice as big as Toronto but so flat you can see all the way to the snowcapped Rocky Mountains almost 100 kilometres away; a jagged spine where the waters split to flow west to the Pacific Ocean or east to Hudson Bay, a dividing line the Blackfoot call the backbone of the world.

The drug crisis has devastated Lorraine’s family. It’s robbed them of a generation, and it’s still devouring more. Seven of the children, children-in-law and grandkids that Lorraine helped raise have been lost, five over the course of last year’s brutal spring alone. Unofficial counts offer a glimpse of the staggering toll that this First Nation — one of many in Canada to fight this battle — has suffered.

The death of Lorraine’s 30-year-old daughter, Angela, was one of the first drops in what would become a tsunami of pain and anguish.

That day nine years ago, when police arrived at Lorraine’s door, was the first time she had heard of fentanyl.

THE BLOOD TRIBE

Four months after Lorraine’s daughter Angela died in November 2014, Blood Tribe officials declared one of the country’s first states of emergency from opioids and began a crackdown on dealers bringing the illicit drugs across the Prairie — often from Calgary, two hours north.

Soon, there was a 24-hour crisis line, attempts to teach residents how to reverse overdoses and a community march through town in a show of unity against the dealers.

This is a community for firsts — the Kainai were the first First Nation in the province to have an on-reserve detox, among the first to make naloxone available to reverse drug poisonings. Yet the deaths continue.

And when a fresh wave of drug poisonings hit last spring, part of a surge that rippled across Alberta, the effects were devastating.

In the cemetery off the main road through Standoff, many graves are marked with small photos of the deceased, and the faces are shockingly youthful. The mounds of fresh-looking dirt are marked by the ball caps of favourite basketball teams, Oilers beer cozies, a well-used Xbox controller.

Death is only one way the crisis has scarred the community, where more children are anxious about their parents’ survival or traumatized now that they’re gone; children who cry at night and then fall asleep at school, as one psychologist says. More grieving grandparents are left raising young ones, wary of what might happen to them if they end up in government care.

Assessing how bad things are in Standoff and the Kainai Nation is not easy — because no one in power will say.

In response to the Star’s questions, Indigenous Services Canada said it could not release statistics on deaths without permission from the First Nation; the Kainai Nation itself declined, saying only the provincial coroner could determine cause of death, while Alberta Health also said no, citing “privacy.”

The head of Blood Tribe Department of Health also said providing numbers for the community risked violating the privacy of its members.

It’s a maddening information gap that has left even some doctors in the community scanning obituaries to try and figure out how many have died from overdoses. They say it contributes to a patchwork approach to care and makes it even harder to do their jobs.

Trying to fill the void is an elder named Roger Prairie Chicken — a former Blood Tribe health department employee who still works with youth from the community. He has begun inputting his own statistics into an Excel document, compiled by comparing the band book, which lists all adult members of the nation, with the death notices posted by local funeral homes and what he hears from friends and family about their loved ones’ cause of death.

According to his numbers, more than 100 band members died after consuming a combination of opioids and crystal meth last year, which would mean as many as one of every 20 of the provincial deaths was a member of the band who died either on reserve or somewhere else. Put another way, that would mean that almost one per cent of the roughly 13,000 Blood Tribe members died after using opioids or crystal meth just last year. It’s a burden that has pushed the health-care system and the community to the brink.

“This is a horror story,” Prairie Chicken said last fall, sitting with his wife at a table strewn with his own paperwork. “People will just shut it down. ‘Yeah right, there’s another Indian dying,’” he says, his smooth baritone veering higher as he imitates a sneering critic.

“But no, we’re humans. We’re human beings.”

THE POLITICS

What’s unfolding in communities such as Kainai is playing out amid an ideological tug of war across this country.

On one side are those who want to minimize the risks of an increasingly deadly drug supply through supervised consumption sites and what’s been dubbed safer supply — meaning a regulated and therefore less dangerous flow of drugs. On the other are those who see abstinence and recovery as the more noble goal. If British Columbia is seen as the poster child for harm reduction, neighbouring Alberta, and its governing United Conservatives (UCP), has planted its stake in trying to get people who use drugs to quit.

For years, the Alberta government has pointed to B.C.‘s rising death toll as evidence that harm reduction is a failed experiment.

But in the meantime, Alberta’s rate of death has begun to close in on British Columbia’s, despite the westernmost province’s long-standing reputation as ground zero of a continually evolving drug crisis.

While the way they record numbers isn’t exactly the same, both provinces broke records for fatal drug poisonings last year, with Alberta reporting a mortality rate of 43.9, compared to B.C.‘s 46.3. As in recent years, fentanyl and other illicit opioids were far and away the most common killer.

When, in early April, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced a new agency for mental health and addictions, she doubled down on recovery being the only, best, path: “I don’t want anybody to think that there’s any such thing as a safe supply of opioids,” she said.

“Have we seen immediate success? Not yet, but I’m very confident that we’re on the right track.”

Since forming government in 2019, the UCP, now led by Smith, says it has increased the number of detox and recovery spots in the province by roughly half, meaning there are now almost 30,000 multi-week placements available, and eliminated a $40 daily fee at publicly funded addiction treatment facilities.

But one of the biggest promises of relief made to the community seems stuck in limbo. In 2020, then-premier Jason Kenney announced a new 75-bed treatment facility for the Blood Tribe, part of 11 recovery communities — long-term live-in communities for people trying to stop using drugs — being built across the province.

While a groundbreaking ceremony was held last summer, so far construction seems to have stopped there.

Responsibility also seems to have changed hands. In an email in March, Hunter Baril, a spokesperson for the minister of mental health and addiction, said the facility is no longer a government-led project, but has been changed to a “capital grant process,” meaning the money is now going to the First Nation directly, which is now in charge of getting it built. Baril said the province expects construction to be done in 2025. The Blood Tribe health department did not respond.

Right now, the only thing standing is a sign in an otherwise empty field.

THE YEAR OF PAIN

Spring arrived sluggishly on the southern Prairies last year, the cloudy days and chilly nights slow to give up their grip to the heavy heat of summer. Something in the drug supply seemed to be different, too.

The beginning of the Blackfoot year is marked by the first crack of thunder of the first spring storm. What Lorraine calls her year of pain began with another death.

To keep all the dates straight, she’s filled a piece of lined yellow notepaper with her tidy handwriting. The first was Jessica.

It’d been a few years since Lorraine lost her daughter, Angela, and Angela’s husband, Shawn. But the families had remained doubly entwined, with two siblings married to another set of siblings. Angela’s brother, Justin, had married Shawn’s sister, Jessica.

By then Lorraine was no stranger to the gravitational pull of the toxic substances seeping into every corner of the community, and this time, she saw the slow creep coming. She believes it was the use of Tylenol 3s that cracked open the door for Justin, a six-foot-five former basketball player who’d trained to operate heavy machinery to support his growing family. The years of physical strain had taken their toll. He seriously hurt his leg in a car accident. He switched to stronger, illegal stuff, which started depleting his large frame. Jessica, a doting mother to their four girls, started using, too.

On the second day of February 2023, Jessica, aged 36, died of an overdose, sending the family into shock.

Next came Lorraine’s nephew David, a child of her closest brother, a nephew who was more like a son. He’d been the doted-on youngest of the family until his baby sister came along, and he had won ribbons in school for sports and perfect attendance. As an adult he had three kids of his own.

After trying and failing to get him to treatment, she welcomed him into her home in the hope he could kick the opioid himself. The pain of withdrawal was so bad that she remembers him trying to climb the hallway walls, so she dragged him onto the couch and sat on him to hold him down. “He was literally climbing the walls,” Lorraine says. “I couldn’t get help.”

He died at age 28, still waiting for treatment.

Meanwhile, Lorraine’s son Justin was reeling from the loss of his wife, Jessica. In March, emergency workers raced down the road to Lorraine’s little white house, charging through the bathroom door, forced shut by his head after he collapsed on the linoleum.

Lorraine, so scared she’d temporarily forgot the phone number to summon police, had wedged it open a crack and was trying frantically to revive him using the tiny slice of his body she could see. Police guided her into a back bedroom so she wouldn’t have to see them try to save him. Justin, 38, didn’t make it.

Justin and Jessica’s oldest, Ashley, was a sensitive teen who loved photography and makeup tutorials. Her family doesn’t think she would have touched drugs if not for the weight now on her thin shoulders. After her parents died she was getting up at 5 a.m. to care for her little sisters while also trying to finish high school. One day Ashley came over and sat on the floor, doing her makeup, as she excitedly told her grandmother about her first boyfriend.

She wanted Lorraine to meet him over supper, now that her dad no longer could. “We’ll all go out,” Lorraine remembers reassuring her granddaughter. “We’ll do this, we’ll keep trying.”

But these days every hit is a gamble; no one is safe. It’s hard to overstate how dangerous Canada’s illicit drug supply has become since the synthetic opioid known as fentanyl first upended the black market more than a decade ago. Drug supply today is an ever-changing medley of unpredictable substances, from cheap additives like caffeine and sucrose to powerful sedatives and tranquilizers that don’t respond to Naloxone, a medication that can reverse an opioid overdose. Any hit could contain a toxic cocktail of ingredients.

In early May, just over a month since Justin had died, the Blood Tribe leadership sounded the alarm once more about a “very poisonous batch of drugs” spreading through southern Alberta. This came on the heels of another state of emergency and $1.5 million to crack down on trafficking on reserve. “Please check on family members,” the notice read. “Please have Naloxone on hand and DO NOT USE ALONE.”

Three days after the warning, Ashley died from what the family believes to be an overdose, shortly before her high school graduation. She was found with bruises on her face, Lorraine says, and what looked like a cigarette burn on her chest. The family doesn’t know why.

The final blow came in early June, when police came to tell Lorraine that Daisy, a granddaughter she’d raised, had died of what was also believed to be an overdose. At that point, Lorraine asked that they not tell her exactly where Daisy, 28, had been found. The town is already filled with ghosts and she figured she had enough places to avoid.

For years, Lorraine tried to save her kids herself, driving them to doctors, calling the on-reserve detox and hunting for beds in treatment centres. When she was desperate she’d go into town to buy Suboxone — a medication that minimizes withdrawal symptoms — for $5 or $10 a pill to keep their withdrawals at bay and, if she had no luck, she’d sit with them through the agony that followed. “They were willing to go,” she says of her hunt for a treatment bed. “But I had no one to help me.”

“And then the drug just overtook them. The pain they go through, I know. Because they stayed with me. I’ve seen their withdrawals, the pain, their crying.”

Meanwhile, the family had struggled with how to help her children’s kids. Some had ended up in the government care system, a roll of the dice that saw some of them placed with a loving family with a nanny, while others were mentally and physically abused, Lorraine says. Daisy had come to her because her mother was living on the streets. Now Daisy was gone, too.

After the deaths piled up, one after another, Lorraine went to court to get custody of Daisy’s three kids, ages 11, five and two.

Now they’re living with her and at an age when many people are thinking about retirement, she is, in some ways, circling back to the beginning. But as she looks to the future, the question of whether her great-grandchildren can escape the past looms large.

KAINAI NATION

The reserve known as Blood 148 is the biggest in Canada.

But it’s still just a splinter of the territory once claimed by the Blackfoot, the Prairie’s dominant military power back when hunters galloped horses into thundering bison herds and gathered in midsummer for the annual Sundance, a tradition that continues today.

If addiction is the result of pain, as Canadian doctor and mental health guru Gabor Maté has said, this community has had plenty of it.

Its borders were pierced in the 1880s by American whisky traders, drawn by the potential for profit in an area nominally controlled by Britain but free of the law enforcement lurking south of the border. Cheap, strong liquor was their stock-in-trade and it soon did more damage than any war.

“What was flatteringly called trade whiskey was more correctly a dangerous concoction which could contain any or all of laudanum, painkiller, ginger, turpentine, essence of vanilla, red ink, tobacco and alcohol, all well diluted with slough water,” Alberta politician and historian Grant MacEwan wrote in 1985. “Two cups of the poisonous mixture was the customary price in return for a bison hide, and the skins rolled in to be piled high on the traders’ wagons.”

A century and a half later, the battle continues.

Elder Charlene Plume remembers when she used to see people addicted to alcohol trying to hitch a ride to the nearest liquor store in Fort McLeod, but now people are making their way to dealers in Lethbridge or buying opioids for use at home. So many in the community, including couples and multiple members of families, have died suddenly, disappearing like a light bulb that has burned out.

In that shadow, a generation of children are going to have to find their way. Plume works in schools and sees how the crisis has trickled down to the town’s youngest. “I would often hear the kids say, ‘we want to use the phone, we want to use the phone.’ Finally I pulled one of the kids aside, and I asked him, ‘why do you want to use the phone?’” she recalls.

The answer shook her. “‘We want to phone home and check that our parents are still alive.”

A CONSTANT IN THE COMMUNITY

Lorraine’s house has always felt a little bit removed from life in town.

Growing up, she remembers running through the bush with her brothers, splashing in the river, playing hockey on the frozen pond. Her brothers would insist she be goalie as they skated loops around her.

But tragedy lurked. One of her brothers died in a car crash going down the hill to town, not far from the neighbouring Hutterite colony. Another jumped off a flatbed truck — or so Lorraine’s mother was told — though Lorraine says when they went to view his body there were no scrapes on his skin, despite his apparently violent end. Questions about the role of substances in both deaths lingered.

She met her now former partner at a party here in Standoff and they had their oldest daughter, then Angela and Justin in quick succession. But they separated shortly after their youngest daughter was born and Lorraine took the opportunity to move to Calgary, where she enrolled in college before attending the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology for business administration.

But when Eugene, the brother she’d been closest to ever since they were small, called and asked her to come back, she did. They needed more family around, she recalls him saying.

As Lorraine’s kids grew into adulthood and had children of their own, danger found them anyway. After Angela died, drugs became a constant in the community, or so it seemed to Lorraine.

She tried to turn her little house into a refuge, preferring to know her children, when they were using, were safe with her and not out sleeping in the southern Alberta wind.

However they got there, she’d take their shoes off if they were unable, and they’d sleep for days in the back bedroom where they could be somewhat insulated from the noise in the rest of the house. Lorraine, on the other hand, would sleep less, getting up to peek her head in the door and make sure they were still breathing. Sometimes her kids would end up in her room, lying across the foot of her bed.

Like many people who have used opioids, Lorraine’s kids inhaled sweets, the sugar providing a shadow of the dopamine hit they were missing. So she’d stock up on little bags of mixed gummies from the gas station, marshmallows shaped like strawberries and bottles of Coke. Even full bags of sugar would disappear within days, emptied spoonful by spoonful into mugs of coffee or tea.

Lorraine says it was practically impossible to get her kids into the on-reserve detox facility, which often sees far more demand than its two dozen beds can handle. Getting a free bed required calling every morning at 8 a.m. and hoping for a vacancy that, at least in her case, never came in time. Once she got a call that there was room for Daisy, but she was already dead.

She wasn’t alone, with at least one community doctor enlisting family members as ad hoc caretakers for those unable to get into a detox facility, teaching them to administer medication and monitor symptoms, in a desperate attempt to fill the gap in official services.

Sometimes when Lorraine wasn’t able to get anything to numb the withdrawal, her kids would get up in desperation and start walking down the long dirt road to town.

THE DOCTOR

Dr. Susan Tallow Christenson works out of the Laverne Clinic on the Blood Reserve. It’s here that Lorraine has come when she needed help.

“I think it’s amazing that (Lorraine) hasn’t completely lost it with all the stress and the losses in her life,” says Christenson.

Christenson tried to create a model where a team of medical professionals, including counsellors and a family doctor, supports someone trying to get off drugs.

But recruiting people to do this work has been difficult. After 16 years, she is pausing new patients and isn’t sure what the future holds. She sounds tired.

Some of her patients have told her that the place they got the best care was in jail — though she has had patients overdose there, too — where there’s opiate replacement therapy and group counselling and Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

“I’m just always kind of personally relieved when they’re there, because I can quit worrying about them for a while,” she says.

She was one of the first to raise the alarm when opioids overwhelmed the reserve. But since then she’s seen groups form to tackle the crisis that would start strong and meet monthly, only to disband and get replaced; treatment programs that failed to communicate with each other, practitioners that came and went and families shattered. The response has been haphazard.

Once you’re addicted to something like opioids, weaning your body of its physical need for them is very, very hard. The harsh truth, Christenson says, is that we don’t have a simple answer to how to help someone struggling with addiction in the way we know how to fix a broken leg or heal the damage from a heart attack. She was one of the first people on reserve to prescribe Suboxone, to help get people through withdrawal. The burden on her has decreased as other doctors have stepped up to help prescribe, and a new provincial virtual program devoted to dispensing the treatment drugs has given her weekends back. But people need much more than that.

If sending people to treatment is the ultimate goal, she points out that treatment has a less than 10 per cent success rate in helping someone get sober. If she prescribed an antibiotic that worked so poorly, there would be outrage, she points out. But in this case, that’s accepted as good enough. If someone wants to stop using drugs it can take years, she says, and while she’s grateful for sober living facilities, she’s seen many people stabilize for a year and then relapse when they get out.

When you tack on a lack of housing and education and mental health treatment that many face, it’s a mountain that can begin to feel unclimbable. “I mean, you never want to give up hope. But maybe this is something we have to learn to live with, like alcoholism, right? We’ve all kind of just thrown our hands up,” she says. “I mean, honestly, fentanyl gives you the highest high that you and I could ever imagine. How can we compete with that?”

But Christenson’s soft voice changes when she talks about her patients who have managed to move on from addiction, something she calls “so awesome and wonderful.” She talks of one former patient who has gone on to become a health-care worker and has a car and a loving partner and children.

While there’s no secret formula to who makes it and who doesn’t, there is something Christenson says always gives people purpose: Family.

PICKING UP THE PIECES

Watery winter light pours through the windows as kids buzz around Lorraine’s kitchen table like traffic at a crossroads. A group of teenage granddaughters gets ready to pile into a vehicle and head for home, someone hunts for the Wi-Fi password; another spies opportunity, scooping up the last of the crackers from a spread of snacks.

Lorraine stands in the thick of it, saying goodbyes, trying to find the password, deftly redirecting a soccer ball kicked by Amelia, the toddler, into the centre of the action.

“It feels good when everybody’s here,” she says later, with a smile, in a brief moment of quiet. “Laughing, doing whatever. That’s how it always was.”

Today marks a year since her daughter-in-law Jessica died, at the beginning of that tragic spring. It means the end of what Lorraine calls the worst year, and a shift into a year of memory. There’s talk of doing a mass later in the week, but today, it’s enough to be together. Earlier this year it felt like the number of deaths had ebbed in the community at large, but whether that was because of different ingredients in the drug supply or a recent crackdown on drug dealers by band police wasn’t clear, but then a few waves of deaths returned. No one knows what the future holds.

The yard is scattered with toys, the driveway full of vehicles belonging to visitors. Every time the door opens Lorraine pauses whatever she’s doing to shout: “take off your shoes!” Amelia is all big eyes and confidence. She pads inside, the cartoon face on her tiny pink Ugg boots spattered with mud; five-year-old Rylan careens in after her and bumps into a bag of dog food before regaining his footing and continuing inside, his snow boots still on.

Hayden, the oldest, recently came home with a scruffy little puppy who is now a ready playmate in the yard as the kids bound in and out. (“I guess I’m a dog owner now,” Lorraine says with pretend exasperation.)

It’s obvious to Lorraine that her great-grandkids carry the scars of addiction. They’ve seen more than most, and nothing she can do can change that. As she once sought out drug treatment for her kids, she’s now working to get her littlest charges to grief counsellors, though getting them into those services isn’t easy, either. But that doesn’t define them.

The wall above her couch is hung with the tasselled caps of the family’s recent graduates. One of the people beaming out from a graduation photo is Arian North Peigan, 20, a thoughtful soft-spoken college student who has stopped by to see her relatives.

Arian has a unique perspective on her family.

She was about eight when she first remembered watching her mother crush up pills on a plastic DVD case. She didn’t understand what was happening and chalked it up to mysterious adult behaviour. She remembers her parents taking care of her, so she didn’t worry.

When she was 12, she and her little sisters were seized by child protective services and sent to live with a new family in what they all thought would be a short-term placement. But her parents ended up living on the street and suddenly the placement wasn’t so temporary. No one knows better than this family that placements in government-sponsored care often don’t have a happy ending, with some children stripped of their culture, family or worse.

But Arian says she was lucky. While she says she was always encouraged to stay in touch with her birth family and attend events like the Sundance, she ended up living with her new family until she became an adult and still visits them and her younger sisters often.

She has wrestled with her own powerlessness, and worked to accept that she can support her family members as they grapple with addiction, but if they don’t want to stop, there’s ultimately nothing she can do. She wonders if it would be as easy to say that if she was living with them full time.

One of the things that baffles her is the idea that heavy drug use is something that people do purely recreationally. There’s no way so many in her family have suffered so much for so long, just to have a good time. “I actually don’t know where this pain comes from. I don’t know the story of why they started,” she says. “It wasn’t because it was fun.”

Which doesn’t mean she isn’t still looking for answers. She recently wrote a research paper for English class on Indigenous people and the opioid crisis, which meant reading about the connection between drugs and residential schools, about how the kids who attended often suffered the kind of emotional damage that meant when they grew up they struggled to take care of their own children. It made her think about her own parents and what they didn’t know.

She also considers what has fallen to her. She’s just started a criminal justice program in college with the hopes of one day working for Blood Tribe police, and proving there are options for young people beyond drugs or leaving town. It would be a challenge, she admits. Coming from the reserve means being part of a web of family ties that connect almost everyone, and she worries about responding to overdose calls involving a cousin or friend. But there is already fear, she says, of the next overdose and the next funeral.

“I understand that it’s hurtful for us,” she says of the colonial legacy at play, perched on Lorraine’s couch. “But we need to figure out some ways to get past that.”

Meanwhile, Lorraine fights on.

The granddaughter who Lorraine once tracked down in a Lethbridge park was able to get off drugs and put on weight. She even started laughing again. But she struggled to maintain sobriety and is now living elsewhere. Her grandmother continues to worry. Another grandson is now living in the trailer outside, having arrived a few weeks ago with little warning.

Lorraine took him in, but her focus has changed. If he brings anyone involved in drugs around, she has told him he’ll be kicked out. She’s already done it once. She put up cameras, she says, but they were torn down.

Her two surviving daughters both fought their own battles with drugs and ended up on separate paths. One is still struggling and living on the street, while another is in recovery and works at a café in town.

Taking care of her grandkids has necessitated a shift in Lorraine’s thinking. It hasn’t changed her love, but it has made clear her priorities.

“I’m at that point where I’ve had it, and I’ve told them I can’t do this anymore. It’s too hard,” she says of her attempts to get her kids into treatment. “I told them, ‘Don’t you see what we went through? Didn’t it click? It’s not like I don’t care. I care,” she says. “But it’s just I can’t keep doing this when I have these ones to start worrying about.”

Most days are a blur of cooking and folding laundry and the chaos of small children. Recently, Amelia methodically slotted the family’s collection of forks into a hole in the wall.

Sometimes Lorraine asks her ex-husband to come over so she can at least go to the grocery store without three grasping sets of hands toppling extra items into the cart. At night they take comfort with what they’ve got, the kids with bottles and she with a beer. Compared to the structure with which she raised her own son and three daughters, she now figures things like homework and potty training will come when they come.

Nowadays she doesn’t leave home much, keeping her little family separate from the rest of the town, in the little house at the end of the road. She’d take the pain from them if she could, she says.

“I’m not going to pretend I’m the greatest grandmother. I’m not, I have my faults,” she says quietly, in a rare moment of quiet. “They know that, they do.”

As the afternoon light begins to wane, the two youngest kids spill into the yard. Rylan picks up a stick and swings it around, but one pass gets slightly too close to his little sister. Amelia plants her feet and starts to cry, her shrieks bounding in all directions under the endless Prairie sky.

The front door flies open and Hayden steps onto the porch, scanning the yard for his sister. He strides down the steps, his young face etched with concern as Amelia pumps her toddler legs towards him. He bends to wrap her in a hug and immediately, the crying stops. For just a moment, all is well.

This story appeared originally in the Toronto Star

The post She’d never heard of fentanyl before police knocked on her door. Since then, it’s stolen a generation of her family. How this grandmother is fighting to hold onto the next one appeared first on Ben Mussett.

Standing at a podium that read “Alberta Recovery Model,” she rhymed off a number of encouraging trends when it came to drug-related deaths in her province. Alcohol, down. Methamphetamines, down. Cocaine, down — to name a few. Death rates had declined dramatically for each of them, according to the premier.

“Over time, far fewer Albertans have lost their lives to addiction in our province, and many drugs have their lowest mortality rate on record,” she told the press conference in early April.

It sounded like her government’s effort to address addiction by prioritizing treatment over harm reduction was paying off.

There was, however, an omission in Smith’s list. She didn’t mention fentanyl, the highly potent synthetic opioid that has upended North America’s illicit drug supply, causing deaths to soar, including in Alberta.

Last year, fentanyl and other non-pharmaceutical opioids contributed to the deaths of nearly 90 per cent of the 2,059 Albertans who died from drug or alcohol poisoning, far more than any other substance.

“While opioid addiction continues to be a significant area of focus for our government, it is important to remember that addiction is much more than opioids,” Smith said. “The vast majority of people struggling with addiction are not using opioids.”

That’s true, but opioids are by the far the deadliest.

This spring marked the fifth year of Alberta’s ruling United Conservative Party’s ambitious yet so far unproven attempt to combat addiction by investing hundreds of millions of dollars in residential rehab and other treatment resources while curtailing — and sometimes condemning — certain harm-reduction strategies promoted by public health experts.

It’s a marquee piece of the Smith government’s platform, one inherited from former premier Jason Kenney.

The “recovery-oriented” Alberta model, as it’s come to be known, appears premised on the notion that rising rates of addiction are driving the unprecedented death toll. The solution, according to Alberta: increase and streamline addiction services while eliminating barriers to them. To skeptics of safer supply and other harm reduction strategies, this is the answer.

But there’s a hitch. It’s not clear if addiction is climbing. In fact, federal research indicates rates of addiction across Canada have dipped in recent years, apart from marijuana use.

What has undeniably changed is the nature of the illicit drug supply.

Since the emergence of fentanyl roughly a decade ago, street drugs have become tainted by an unpredictable and toxic cocktail of ingredients, from fillers such as caffeine and sucrose to obscure sedatives that don’t respond to overdose-reversing medication.

“If we’re not going to address the fact that the drug supply is so toxic, so volatile, then we’re only going to be making a dent,” says Gillian Kolla, an assistant professor of public health at Memorial University.

What’s particularly troublesome to Kolla and other critics of Alberta’s plan is how it reinforces a common but false dichotomy between harm reduction, such as prescribed safer supply, and traditional treatment.

It’s made to seem, they say, as if one approach can only thrive at the expense of the other. But as nearly all the experts interviewed by the Star insist, both strategies, while imperfect, are desperately needed.

Yet, with harm reduction a near-constant lightning rod for critics and controversy, the Alberta model is gaining traction.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who, according to polls, is poised to become Canada’s next prime minister, frequently pillories harm reduction, recently labelling decriminalization as a path to “misery and despair.” Rather than saving lives, he claims, without evidence, that safer supply only fuels the crisis. He recently promised to scale back supervised consumption sites under a Conservative government, dubbing the facilities, which have reversed tens of thousands of overdoses in Canada, “drug dens.” Instead, the Tory leader has firmly thrown his support behind Alberta’s “promising” model.

Here in Ontario, Premier Doug Ford requested the federal government pause approval of new safer supply programs in May. That came after his government froze approval of supervised consumption sites last fall, pending a review after a woman was fatally shot near one facility in Toronto. When asked by the Star if Ontario plans to replicate the Alberta model, the province refused to say. However, Ontario recently joined Alberta and Saskatchewan in announcing plans to “collaborate on building systems of care that focus on recovery.”

Even the province that pioneered harm reduction in Canada is pulling back. Calls from British Columbia’s recently retired chief coroner, as well as its top doctor, to significantly expand safer supply, including through a non-prescription model, have been flatly rejected. Meanwhile, the province has neutered its decriminalization project. (The federal government recently rejected Toronto’s own request for decriminalization.)

Much ink has been spilled over the topic, but the embrace of harm reduction in recent years has been relatively limited in scope.

In B.C., those enrolled in safer supply programs represent less than three per cent of British Columbians who use illicit drugs. And despite being caricatured as forgoing traditional treatment, B.C. actually funds over 60 per cent more treatment beds than Alberta, based on recent figures. However, it still saw a record number of fatal drug poisonings last year.

In short, the politics surrounding harm reduction have always dwarfed its policy footprint.

And right now, it seems to be shrinking further — even as some drug user advocates say harm reduction doesn’t go nearly far enough.

That’s left some questioning whether Canadian drug policy will soon be following Edmonton’s lead.

All in on recovery

To stop a deadly crisis, it seems reasonable to assume you must understand what’s killing people.

“We’re talking about an addiction crisis,” Dan Williams, Alberta’s minister of mental health and addictions, declared in an April interview with CBC.

The staggering number of deaths and frequent reports of drug use in some Canadian cities would seem to back this up.

However, all but one of the experts interviewed by the Star say he’s not quite right.

“The opioid crisis is clearly a drug-poisoning crisis,” explains David Hodgins, a psychology professor from the University of Calgary.

There exist differing opinions on what sparked the epidemic, which began out west around 2013. Some point to the rise of OxyContin and other painkillers in the 1990s and 2000s. But others blame years of drug prohibition, in addition to the way governments, doctors and Big Pharma cracked down on Oxy use, including through mass de-prescribing and product changes that ultimately led some users to the black market.

What resulted was the emergence of fentanyl, a decades-old painkiller used by cancer patients that’s up to 100 times stronger than morphine. Fentanyl’s cheapness helps explain its staying power, as well as the virtual disappearance of heroin. Within a few years, the market was flooded. “It was like drowning without ever being in water,” says Karen Ward, a longtime harm-reduction advocate from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Since 2016, more than 40,000 Canadians have died from opioids — a new, devastating normal.

“The reality is that some individuals are addicted, and we need to be addressing that issue in addition,” Hodgins continues. “But it’s also really crucial that we’re recognizing and addressing the problems with the drug supply.”

That’s where critics say Alberta hasn’t done nearly enough.

Premier Smith’s chief of staff, Marshall Smith, a charismatic recovering user who previously worked in the treatment industry, is widely considered the architect of the Alberta model. At its core, it encourages people to cease their substance use and attempt recovery, a broad term for the process by which a person overcomes addiction. In comparison to harm reduction, elements of which Minister Williams has dubbed “harm production,” Alberta frames the recovery-focused path as “the responsible and compassionate thing to do.” This emphasis on abstinence, although far more focused, resembles the way governments approached substance use before fentanyl changed everything.

Alberta has eliminated the $40-a-day fee at publicly funded treatment facilities, added about 745 addiction treatment or detox beds to the public system and expanded drug treatment courts to offer non-violent offenders “judicially supervised treatment and recovery.” Police officers can now help those they just arrested seek treatment in jail.

Across the province, the government’s building 11 long-term residential treatment centres known as recovery communities, including partnering with five Indigenous communities devastated by opioid deaths. So far, two have opened since Alberta began announcing plans to build these facilities in 2020.

“I think Alberta is doing a lot of things right,” says Vincent Lam, a Toronto-based author and addiction medicine doctor. He highlights efforts to reduce barriers to public treatment, a persistent issue across Canada, as well as the move to centralize the delivery of addiction services under ministry control. In particular, Lam commends Smith’s government for articulating a “shared mission” revolving around recovery and bringing people “back into participation in the community.”

Other experts see the situation differently.

Dr. Esther Tailfeathers, an Indigenous physician and former provincial public health official from southern Alberta, has tried for years to combat the fentanyl-fueled epidemic in her own community, where people die waiting for treatment at a staggering rate. Four years after being announced, little progress has been made on the recovery community slated to serve the Kainai First Nation. “There’s nothing. It’s an open field,” she tells the Star.

“If they want to send them to treatment, where is the treatment? Because it’s unavailable, it’s basically selling people a Cadillac that’s not there.”

In an email in March, Hunter Baril, a spokesperson for the minister of mental health and addiction, said the facility is no longer a government-led project and has been changed to a “capital grant process.” In other words, the province is still putting up the money, but the First Nation is now tasked with building the facility. Although first promised to open in 2021, Baril said construction is expected to be done in 2025. He also highlighted millions of dollars the province is already putting towards detox, pre-treatment and related services on the Blood Tribe reserve.

It’s difficult to determine just how many Albertans have been helped by this turn to recovery or how many are currently waitlisted for treatment. The government has not released such data despite repeated calls to show its focus on recovery is succeeding. When the Star asked Alberta for evidence, the government pointed to an increase in treatment capacity and the drops in non-opioid fatalities.

“We recognize that the opioid addiction crisis continues to impact Alberta and other provinces, which is why we are taking an approach based on recovery,” said Baril.

Controversially, Alberta is also planning to introduce legislation that would enable family members, police officers and doctors to refer adults and youth to treatment against their will. Smith’s government has dubbed the concept “compassionate intervention.”

Critics, including Lam, say forcing people into treatment without consent is not only ineffective but violates a person’s right to refuse medical care. “It is an entirely misplaced priority to think that forcing people to receive treatment will be the key to solving our problems,” Lam says.

Even when a person wants to stop using drugs, it’s hard to sustain abstinence, particularly among those dependent on opioids. But access to supervised consumption sites and safer supply can improve a person’s chances of recovery by helping to stabilize their lives and keep them alive, according to several experts. Fundamentally, though, what works for one person might not help another, necessitating a range of treatment options.

“The most common pathway to recovery is really people who are doing it without any formal help,” says Hodgins, who still supports Alberta’s push to expand access to treatment.

Meanwhile, people who are trying drugs for the first time or use them infrequently aren’t addicted so they wouldn’t be likely candidates for treatment. But because of the reality of the drug supply, they’re still at risk of dying.

Limited harm reduction

Ben Perrin, a criminal law professor at UBC, was once a staunch defender of the war on drugs. After serving as a criminal justice adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he left government as fentanyl was beginning to saturate the black market. It forced a reckoning.

“Essentially, everything I thought I knew about drug policy turned out to be wrong,” says Perrin, the author of 2020 book “Overdose: Heartbreak and Hope in Canada’s Opioid Crisis.”

He says now he believes there are four main pillars needed to confront what he calls an unregulated drug crisis: supervised consumption sites, safer supply, decriminalization and rapid access to evidence-based treatment.

Perrin says no government in Canada, provincial or federal, is getting it right. And in the case of Alberta, he only sees an interest in treatment. “It’s giving them only one way to stay alive, and it’s for them to stop using.”

It’s true Alberta has embraced some less controversial forms of harm reduction. The distribution of life-saving naloxone has increased in recent years. And far more Albertans now receive free medications known as opioid agonist therapies (OAT), such as methadone, that reduce withdrawal symptoms and cravings, including in prison.

Still, harm reduction strategies that Perrin and other experts stress are crucial have been neglected or eliminated entirely. Since the UCP came to power in 2019, evidence supporting supervised consumption sites has grown. However, these services have been scaled back, including through the closure of what was once Canada’s busiest supervised consumption site.

Lam calls wariness toward these facilities a mistake.

The Smith government has also effectively banned safer supply, which provides people most at risk of overdosing prescribed alternatives to tainted drugs bought on the street. In addition, Alberta has severely restricted access to an injectable form of OAT similar to safer supply that many had credited with saving their lives.

According to the Alberta government, fewer than 100 people now receive a regulated opioid called hydromorphone, the most common form of safer supply. However, unlike those programs — which typically allow patients to take their prescriptions home, saving them from making several visits each day — patients in Alberta must consume the medication under supervision at a handful of clinics around the province and only with the expectation they will soon transition to less potent opioids, such as methadone, even if they haven’t had success with them previously.

Lam believes Alberta has struck the right balance. Moreover, he thinks the evidence behind safer supply isn’t very convincing and that any benefits would be marginal.

Lam’s one of many skeptics in the addiction medicine community who fear safer supply is fuelling new addictions. By not requiring patients to consume their prescription on site, some may sell or trade pills on the black market in order to secure the far more potent albeit deadly fentanyl. Critics worry naive youth could get their hands on the diverted safer supply and later move onto fentanyl.

Indeed, diversion does happen. But despite anecdotal reports and a marked rise in the seizure of drugs used in safer supply programs, the extent of the problem is not quite clear.

The B.C. government and provincial RCMP have both said there’s no evidence of widespread diversion. However, police in London recently raised alarm bells after seeing a massive local increase in trafficked hydromorphone, much of which the force says it has traced back to safer supply. (The city’s largest safer supply program is cooperating with police to crack down on this behaviour.)

What are the repercussions of such diversion? That’s also difficult to say. Currently, drug poisoning data indicate that safer supply isn’t directly exacerbating drug-related deaths. Last year, hydromorphone and other pharmaceutical opioids were only present in roughly two per cent of Albertans who died from drug poisoning.

While safer supply is still being studied, research published this year in the British Medical Journal suggests giving people already dependent on opioids a regulated, take-home supply of drugs significantly reduces the likelihood of death. Other recent research shows notable decreases in emergency room visits, hospitalizations and health care costs among participants.

Although Alberta plans to establish a Crown corporation tasked with studying “evidence-based best practices,” Minister Williams in Alberta has already ruled out considering safer supply.

“The evidence base has come a long way, and it doesn’t seem like the political rhetoric has kept up,” says Kolla, who emphasized how new safer supply is.

Still, multiple experts in favour of safer supply agree diversion shouldn’t be ignored, including Kolla. She and other researchers are already studying ways to address it. But she doesn’t have faith any careful research will convince critics.

“We are in a moral panic,” says Kolla, who recently co-published an essay on this topic in the International Journal of Drug Policy. Similar backlash happened before when methadone, which she describes as a predecessor of safer supply, was rolled out in the 1960s.

“There’s just something about drug use … that makes it very, very difficult for us to have really nuanced policy discussions,” she says. Instead, many favour sensationalism, in her view, choosing ideology over evidence.

But that doesn’t change the fact that people will continue to use drugs.

“They’re dealing with pain, they’re dealing with trauma,” she continues. “These drugs make people feel good. So unless we actually deal with that reality, we’re not going to get anywhere.”

With files from Alex Boyd

This story originally appeared in the Toronto Star

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After it became clear he couldn’t influence plans from the inside, Walter Kehm told the Star he could no longer be tied to a project that threatens a decades-old wildlife habitat, likening his professional commitment to protect nature to a doctor’s Hippocratic oath: “Do no harm.”

Earlier this fall, the former director of the University of Guelph’s school of landscape architecture resigned as a senior principal at Toronto-based LANDinc, one of two firms under contract to help design and construct the “public realm” of Ontario Place.

“I think it’s time for plain speaking. It’s time for telling the truth,” said Kehm, a longtime friend of the late Michael Hough, the landscape architect who helped design the original Ontario Place.

“I remember when he was planting those trees,” Kehm said. To think they could be clear-cut, he added, “doesn’t sit in my stomach very well.”

In more than half a century, “the 800 trees on the West Island have developed their own ecological niche,” he said. “We’re talking about more than the trees. We’re talking about a home for all the species that live there.”

Doug Ford’s revamp sparks audit

News of Kehm’s departure comes after Ontario’s auditor general revealed he was conducting a value-for-money audit of Premier Doug Ford’s controversial scheme to revamp the waterfront park.

The province has vowed to move forward with the project, where preparatory work has already begun.

Ontario Place opened as a public amusement park in 1971. Forty years later, the province shuttered operations. Now, the West Island is mostly used as a public park.

In 2022, Ontario Place, with current attractions like Budweiser Stage and Trillium Park, saw nearly three million visitors.

The province’s effort to transform the waterfront property into a “world-class, year-round destination” has come under intense scrutiny, particularly a confidential, 95-year lease Ontario signed with Therme Group, the Vienna-based “well-being organization” set to build a $350-million spa and waterpark on the West Island. An underground parking garage estimated to cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars has also sparked criticism.

Besides the spa, the revamped Ontario Place will include a renovated Live Nation amphitheatre on the East Island, a new home for the Ontario Science Centre and 50 acres of public space and parkland. The site’s iconic Cinesphere and pods will be refurbished.

Tree removal to start this year

Infrastructure Ontario, the Crown agency overseeing the project, told the Star “the first phase of tree removal is expected to begin later this year.” This won’t include the roughly 850 trees slated for removal on the West Island, none of which will be removed this year, according to the agency.

The provincial government has promised to replace trees lost at “a minimum two-to-one ratio,” while mature trees more than 30 centimetres in diameter will be replaced at “approximately a ratio of six to one,” said Andrea Chiappetta, a spokesperson for Ontario’s minister of infrastructure.

But Kehm called this faulty thinking. “Planting 2,500 ‘Lollipop’ trees does nothing to replace the habitat that exists there,” he said. “It’s not a one-for-one trade.”

Meanwhile, on its website, Therme Canada commits to “save and transplant” every mature tree “where possible.” But Chiappetta told the Star “there was never any commitment to transplant trees.” The government is, however, “exploring opportunities with Indigenous communities to repurpose wood from removed trees, where possible.”

Therme’s erosion claims questioned

As for Therme’s assertion that removing trees is necessary to cleanse contaminated soil on the West Island and halt erosion, Kehm doesn’t buy it — specifically the suggestion that erosion is a significant issue there.

An environmental assessment of the Ontario Place project was ultimately positive, and noted that wetlands will increase. However, the review excluded the West Island and part of the East Island, where Live Nation’s new venue will sit, as these are private projects.

City staff have asked the province to extend its deadline for feedback from Dec. 31 until April, given that the final plan was submitted in September and not June as originally expected.

In early 2022, it was announced that Infrastructure Ontario had selected LANDinc and New York-based landscape architecture firm Martha Schwartz Partners to work with the provincial government to design and construct the “public realm” of Ontario Place, which includes the East Island area and the mainland, according to Chiappetta. (STUDIO tla is designing the public realm on the West Island “in close collaboration with LANDinc and MSP,” said Chiappetta.)

“We have the opportunity to create an international attraction within regenerated aquatic and terrestrial habitats,” Kehm said in a news release at the time.

Walter Kehm worked on Trillium Park

Kehm, an 85-year-old New York native, has had plenty of experience partnering with the provincial government, including on Trillium Park, where he designed a memorial to his friend Hough, Ontario Place’s original landscape architect.

The phrase “Walk gently on the land” became a guiding principle behind the project.

“This park is about having fun,” Kehm explains in a 2018 video on Ontario Place’s YouTube channel. “But it’s also an awareness that we live in harmony with nature.”

In conversations with the Star, he described his recent experience working with the province on Ontario Place’s redevelopment as unlike any before it.

“Now we’re dealing with a cast of 30, 40, 50 people in government,” he said. “Left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. There’s dissension. We’re in the midst of this imbroglio within the government.”

Kehm advocated for Ontario Place trees

Kehm said he had repeatedly advocated to preserve the trees on the West Island, as part of his broader vision for a forested Toronto waterfront, including during a meeting near the end of last summer.

From that point onwards, Kehm said it felt like he had become “persona non grata” and he was informally taken off the project.

Patrick Morello, principal at LANDinc, confirmed that his former colleague has not been involved in work on Ontario Place’s public realm in “almost 16 months.”

Morello firmly pushed back against Kehm’s assertions, including his portrayal of an overly complicated work process.

“It is a very collaborative, complex and inclusive process with many stakeholders, government agencies, the general public across Ontario and a number of First Nation Indigenous communities and urban Indigenous groups in Toronto,” he said in an emailed statement, adding that abiding by the project’s environmental assessment may make the process “seem onerous.”

Both Morello and Kehm said the latter’s comments on Ontario Place are his alone and do not represent those of LANDinc.

The government declined to comment on Kehm’s departure or “any comments made to the Toronto Star.”

Ontario Place trees part of waterfront vision

The “big vision” for Toronto’s waterfront that Kehm had fought for, one he’s dubbed the “Emerald Necklace,” takes inspiration from a connected chain of parks that runs through Boston.

In the midst of a mental health crisis — on top of a changing climate — he stressed the importance of not only protecting “urban forests,” such as the one found on West Island, but also creating more opportunities for Torontonians to harness nature’s therapeutic benefits.

His ambitious proposal would see an accessible, forested waterfront that extends from the Scarborough Bluffs in the east through Tommy Thompson Park, the Port Lands, Toronto Islands and Ontario Place before reaching Humber Bay.

“Nature is calming for the soul,” he reasoned. “You don’t need a spa for that. You need trees.”

This story originally appeared in the Toronto Star

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And in a dystopian turn that could be pulled from a Ray Bradbury novel, her smart speaker no longer responds after Amazon cut off access: “Suddenly, Alexa wouldn’t talk to me.”

Last August, Kimberly Prost became one of several judges and prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC) targeted by Donald Trump’s administration with sanctions as a result of their work trying to hold perpetrators of alleged war crimes and other atrocities accountable.

“It really turns your life upside down,” Prost, a Winnipeg-born trial judge at the ICC, told the Star during a recent video call from her office at The Hague. “Every day, literally, it’s something different that you’re suddenly facing.”

In other words, her life has been upended in much the same way as the alleged terrorists whose appeals Prost heard when she was ombudsman of a UN sanctions committee involving members of al-Qaeda.

Prost was sanctioned because she had previously authorized an ICC probe into alleged crimes in Afghanistan, including incidents that may have involved U.S. personnel. Others were sanctioned for work related to Israel, such as the ICC’s arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

So far, 11 judges and prosecutors have been targeted for what the U.S. described as threats to the sovereignty and national security of the U.S. and Israel. (Prost and the court’s many defenders reject such a notion.)

Although the sanctions are an ongoing nuisance, Prost wants to be clear: they’re not working.

“These measures are completely futile because they certainly do not impact the way we do our jobs,” she said. “We continue with our work, we carry on, and we solely focus on objective and independent analysis of the evidence before us to reach our decisions.”

“It really turns your life upside down,” Prost, a Winnipeg-born trial judge at the ICC, told the Star during a recent video call from her office at The Hague. “Every day, literally, it’s something different that you’re suddenly facing.”

In other words, her life has been upended in much the same way as the alleged terrorists whose appeals Prost heard when she was ombudsman of a UN sanctions committee involving members of al-Qaeda.

Prost was sanctioned because she had previously authorized an ICC probe into alleged crimes in Afghanistan, including incidents that may have involved U.S. personnel. Others were sanctioned for work related to Israel, such as the ICC’s arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

So far, 11 judges and prosecutors have been targeted for what the U.S. described as threats to the sovereignty and national security of the U.S. and Israel. (Prost and the court’s many defenders reject such a notion.)

Although the sanctions are an ongoing nuisance, Prost wants to be clear: they’re not working.

“These measures are completely futile because they certainly do not impact the way we do our jobs,” she said. “We continue with our work, we carry on, and we solely focus on objective and independent analysis of the evidence before us to reach our decisions.”

That’s heartening to the court’s advocates. However, some, including a former Canadian foreign minister, would like to see the federal government speak more forcefully in the face of U.S. attacks on international law and specifically the ICC, a court Canada played a key role in creating nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Unlike other governments whose citizens were targeted by U.S. sanctions, Canada has tried to avoid publicly denouncing them. The government has also not invoked a law that experts say could help ease the sanctions.

Established in 2002, the ICC investigates and prosecutes allegations against individuals accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression when national governments appear unable or unwilling to seek justice themselves.

More than 120 countries are member states of the court, including Canada, which means the ICC can investigate alleged crimes that occurred on their territory or involve accused citizens of member states. And though countries such as the U.S., Israel, Russia and China have not signed on, their citizens may still be pursued if accused of crimes committed on the territory of member states.

A day after the U.S. State Department announced sanctions against Prost last summer, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand said she voiced her concerns in a meeting with U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio.

Shortly after, Anand announced that she had spoken to Prost, saying she had the “utmost confidence” in the ICC and its “vital work.”

“Canada continues to support the court and calls on all states to respect the court’s independence, impartiality and integrity,” Clémence Grevey, a Global Affairs Canada (GAC) spokesperson, told the Star this week.

Bob Rae put it differently while still serving as Canada’s UN ambassador last summer.

“The U.S. attack on the International Criminal Court and its judges is disgraceful,” Rae tweeted the day Prost was sanctioned. “Judge Kim Prost are [sic] carrying out their public duties. Attacks on them by Russia, Israel and the U.S. are intended to weaken and intimidate the international legal system.”

Rae, who left his ambassadorial post in November, quickly deleted the tweet. Government communications obtained by the Star, and first reported by online publication The Maple, suggest he was instructed to. “Getting my wings clipped,” Rae messaged a colleague that day.

When reached by phone, Rae refused to explain why he deleted the tweet — “You can reach any conclusions you want” — but said he stands by its sentiment. “Putting sanctions on judges and prosecutors who are just doing their job is disgraceful.”

For her part, Prost feels supported by the Canadian government, which she acknowledged is “dealing with a lot.” She added that diplomatic staff have helped her navigate issues with Canadian banks. (The sanctions are not binding outside of the U.S., but foreign companies and institutions often choose to abide by them out of fear of American repercussions.)

After the sanctions were announced, Prost said she received a flurry of support from regular folks back home. “It’s what I’d expect from Canadians,” she said.

Before she was elected to her post in 2018, the 67-year-old Manitoba native served as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She also worked for years in the Department of Justice, including as part of the Canadian delegation that helped negotiate the Rome Statute that resulted in the ICC’s creation.

In 2020, Prost was involved in a unanimous decision to approve a probe into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, a call she remains “very proud of.” Later, the ICC prosecutor leading the investigation de-prioritized incidents involving Americans. Prost isn’t involved in any other cases involving Israel or Afghanistan.

“It’s clearly to punish,” she said about the U.S. sanctions.

“It is a direct attack on the independence of the judges. It is basically saying, you must not decide the cases in accordance with the law and the facts, but in the way we want you to decide.”

Prost said she’s exploring options to challenge the sanctions, which she called legally “questionable.”

When asked why Prost was sanctioned despite the Afghanistan probe no longer focusing on Americans, the U.S. State Department declined to explain.

“The ICC has directly engaged in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute nationals of the United States and Israel, neither of which signed the Rome Statute,” said spokesperson Tommy Pigott in an emailed statement.

“This arrogant and brazen disregard for state consent, the single most fundamental norm of ‘international law,’ makes the case for sanctions even more pressing.”

Although American opposition to the ICC — as well as that of other non-member states — is not new, experts say the Trump administration’s attacks are cause for heightened alarm.

“If the ICC is disabled from performing its functions, then international criminal law will be set adrift,” said Adil Haque, a professor at Rutgers University who specializes in international law.

The court is currently “overhauling” tech and financial systems with ties to American firms, according to a recent New York Times report.

Rae believes the Canadian government has made its discontent with the sanctions “very clear.” Alex Neve, former secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, is still waiting to hear more.

“I haven’t seen that clarity,” he said. “And I don’t think that it has proven to be the case that by appeasing or remaining silent as Donald Trump attacks individuals or dismantles institutions that you gain any points.”

Amid attacks on international law “from so many directions,” Neve remains hopeful about the future of pillars like the ICC. Prost, too.

International criminal law as a project “was always going to be very hard,” she told the Star, adding that she “firmly believes” the court will endure.

The work continues through the turmoil, she pointed out, with former Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte set to stand trial shortly and atrocities from around the world continuing to be investigated.

“I’m endlessly optimistic though,” Prost said. Her former boss liked to call her Pollyanna. “So I’m a bit overly optimistic, perhaps. But I think that we have to be these days.”

This story appeared originally in the Toronto Star

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For decades, my father worked as a commercial real estate appraiser, a tedious profession that I’ve never seen depicted in any movie, book, show or song. Farmland, or rather assessing its property value, was his specialty.

I was usually bored during these expeditions, the scenery outside my window a blur of yellow, green and brown. What made matters worse was the sound coming from the speakers, this nasally singer that my dad loved. His name was John Prine.

To me, Prine’s music — especially his early stuff — sounded brittle, sparse, that unmistakable voice too off-kilter. Smash Mouth made a lot more sense to nine-year-old me. I must not have been listening to the words.

It didn’t click then, but my dad’s navy Honda Accord turned out to be an incubator for my future folk rock fandom. Prine’s songs had burrowed into my head. By my late teens, I was a devotee, awed by the ease at which this former mailman from Maywood, Ill., could spin deceptively simple stories about everyday life that were both funny and poignant, and often delivered in a drawl that sounded like it was being sung through a smile.

“Pure Proustian existentialism,” was how Bob Dylan once described Prine’s songwriting. “Midwestern mind trips to the Nth degree.”

More than two decades after those drives to the country, I keep going back to Prine. As a lapsed Anglican, it’s no exaggeration to say that folk and country music is the closest thing I have to religion, that the swell of pedal steel activates something in me like little else. I guess the late John Prine is my patron saint.

This Monday marks the fifth anniversary of Prine’s death. A few weeks into the pandemic, he died in Nashville, almost exactly two years after releasing a song about what he’d do when he got to heaven, including seeing “all my mama’s sisters,” kissing a “pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl” and “smoking a cigarette that’s nine miles long.” Complications from COVID took him. He was 73.

A few days before he died, I was cycling through Kitsilano, filling my lungs with fresh air after being stuck at home, when my dad texted to let me know Prine was in critical condition.

The fact he was texting at all was notable. My dad’s a stubborn Luddite. He can be quick to make a joke, but he’s also a bit distant and rarely earnest, a big-hearted man who cares a lot about his family but doesn’t seem to know how to say it. It’s a quality I share, to some extent.

And it’s a contrast to Prine who, in his songwriting, was able to “cut right to the heart of things, as pure and simple as rain,” as described by Bonnie Raitt, another favourite of dad’s.

Shortly after Prine’s death, I called my parents. “We’re headed to a John Prine concert,” my mum said as she answered the phone. Well, not quite. A neighbour on their tiny island off the West Coast was playing a set of Prine classics from his front porch. (A similar tribute happened in Toronto.) My mum held up her phone so I could hear “Hello in There,” a song about the loneliness of growing old — a reality the pandemic had only intensified.

Like just about everything that spring, Prine’s death felt surreal. But it wasn’t a surprise. He had spent nearly two weeks in the hospital battling the illness. Two decades earlier, squamous cell cancer had taken a chunk out of his neck and added an ounce of gravel to his voice. A few years later, he beat lung cancer.

His death still stung. If anyone could have captured the strange moment we found ourselves in — the toilet paper hoarding, the rampant bread baking, the social distancing and longing that came with it — it was Prine.

His songs reflected the absurdity of life. They were relatable but somehow didn’t feel trite. Silly and snarky and sentimental, sad yet uplifting, and often all at once. (“You’re up one day and the next you’re down. It’s half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.”)

If Prine was known for anything, though, it was empathy. He seemed to intimately understand us. “He could tell you about a person in one line,” my dad said in the wake of Prine’s death. And he’d been doing it since he began releasing music in 1971.

On “Angel from Montgomery,” he sings from the perspective of an “an old woman named after my mother” whose “old man is another child that’s grown old.” This line, and the sincerity with which he delivers it, has stuck in my head for years: “How the hell can a person go to work in the mornin’ and come home in the evenin’ and have nothin’ to say.”

As the New Yorker noted a day after Prine’s death, he was just 24 years old when he recorded it: “What did he know about being an old woman? Everything, somehow.” Singer-songwriter Jason Isbell put it this way: “If the artist’s job is to hold a mirror up to society, John had the cleanest mirror of anyone I have ever known. Sometimes it seemed like he had a window, and he would climb right through.”

Looking back on those sunny afternoons in the Honda, I find myself thinking that they’d have made good fodder for one of Prine’s songs. What would he see in my father, I wonder. What would I learn about this reserved real estate appraiser with the salt-and-pepper beard who takes pictures of nothing?

I was lucky enough to see Prine perform in 2016 at Vancouver’s Vogue Theatre. During “All the Best,” a highlight off his 1991 record “The Missing Years,” I noticed — stunned — my dad was crying. I’m not sure we ever talked about it.

My father, who turns 70 this summer, may not always have the words. But Prine’s certainly move him. It’s something we share. For that, I’m grateful. Thanks, John. And thanks, dad, for introducing me to him.

This story originally appeared in the Toronto Star

The post An ode to folk rock legend John Prine, who died five years ago — and my dad, who loves him appeared first on Ben Mussett.