The Edmonton recipe for fixing urban ills

Article content

Dale McFee became Alberta’s top civil servant this week, after six years as Edmonton’s police chief. The first Métis police chief in Alberta, McFee had unusual impact in that role.

He garnered attention with progressive measures — including the implementation of an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion framework, expansion of community advisory councils, and a formal apology to the LGBT community for past police wrongdoing.

Article content

But he also made moves that put him in conflict with progressive forces, such as introducing measures to address rising public safety concerns in downtown Edmonton and on the city’s transit system, and a 2023 policy of dismantling homeless encampments.

He spoke to reporter Dave Gordon about his new job, and what other Canadian cities can learn from the Edmonton model:

Q: You’re now the top civil servant in Alberta. How’s that going?

I like to lead change, and try to knit things together. It seems like a bit of a natural segue to me.

I have a bit of an entrepreneur background and a business background. So it’s trying to look at this in a larger scale, and look at what potential things that you can do a little bit differently.

Lots of good people work within the civil service, and it’s a combination of using what ambitions and/or desires, and weighing the outcomes of the political wants, to then ask: “How do we get the operational arm to work towards achieving that, and ensuring that we’re doing it in a fair manner?”

Article content

Q: Can you offer a concrete example of something you’re working on?

The border crisis will be hot on my plate, and obviously being in the position I’ve been in, as a former president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, and involved in the U.S. on the executive board of the Major Cities Chiefs Association as its Canadian representative.

I think the border has been an issue for many years. So I think we can look at making some progress, and some things that are drastically needed down there.

I think some of this social disorder that we deal with, encampments. A lot of the things that we’re dealing with on mental health and addictions, and some of the things that we’ve managed to accomplish, both from my work in government and my work at the Edmonton police service, using data to better address what the actual problems are.

I’ve often said, it’s not all homelessness. Matter of fact, I think what we’re seeing is three separate issues that you can tackle: some type of compassion intervention act for that smaller group of people that have a serious drug psychosis, serious mental health, serious addictions. You’ve got that stabilization piece, which is jobs, the economy; and mental health treatment, and trying to tie that all together.

Article content

Article content

Every crisis creates an opportunity, and I’m not one that’s going to sit in an office and blame others.

Q: You mentioned the encampments. As Edmonton police chief, you wrote a piece about them in November for the National Post. Did you face pushback when police dealt with the homeless encampments? You seem to have avoided specific ideological approaches to some of the urban ills that emerged.

Of course, we had pushback, all kinds of pushback.

Matter of fact, we had politicians protest to keep people in encampments, and it was minus 30 outside. That’s craziness. A tent and a fire is just not a recipe for any type of success. You gotta look at the facts.

First and foremost is, we’re not talking about outdoors people that have lived outdoors and have all the gear and everything else. We got a huge vulnerable population. The facts were, we had gangs infiltrating those and running those, charging taxes to use water fountains, etc.

Then from there, a lot of criminal activity transpired in there. A lot of people became victims of the drug trade. So when you look at that from a policing perspective, safety first. It’s not about ideology anymore. We gotta change this. So how do you actually deal with that?

Article content

Well, first of all, you gotta actually know what the problem is that you’re trying to solve. We’ve been told that we have this huge homeless issue, and I don’t think anybody actually ever interviewed everybody to find out what the actual issues are.

The first step was getting a navigation centre up, solve some of these problems that everybody talks about, getting connected to the social services, getting connected to some type of housing, making the shelter safe.

It’s a heck of a lot easier to make a building safe than it is to an encampment, especially in cold weather. So when you had all the people doing the interviews, we quickly learned that housing is not going to fix all problems. We had a group of 500 people that had chronic addictions.

The types of drugs on the street have changed. It’s not the old marijuana, cocaine days. It’s meth, fentanyl, Xylazine, obviously killing people. I am just a bit shocked and miffed at how we kept saying that we have to have safe supply, when these things aren’t safe.

You got a group of another 1,200 to 1,500 people that need some type of stabilization, that could be addictions treatment, could be mental health, could be employment, housing. And then the third part of this was lower-income housing needs. If not treated, goes into the homeless bucket, where it gets harder to solve in relation to the people dealing with the drug psychosis.

Article content

When you get the data on that, you actually get a clearer picture. I think we’re up to 5,000 encampments that we’ve taken down, we don’t have them anymore, and our overdose deaths are down. Our crime in the area is down.

One-dimensional solutions, honestly, sometimes just make the problem grow faster.

Q: Tell me about the gang suppression team.

What we actually did is build out at the local level, GST teams to tackle all the shootings. Last year, we’re down 47 per cent on shootings. Now it doesn’t mean we don’t have a long ways to go. But what it shows is that this type of enforcement is very important.

When we did encampments, it was led with empathy and accountability. People pulling the trigger on others need to be held accountable. And unfortunately, you know, sometimes our justice system, as you’ve heard many times, we’ve lost a lot of that accountability in Canada.

I’ll give you an example. We just had an individual that was picked up trafficking, child luring on the internet, taking a very young person across the border in the U.S. We worked with the U.S., this is about a year ago. We worked with the family to get them, and asked: where should he be prosecuted? And that’s a tough decision, right? Because he’d get 18 years there, and that would not have been the case here. So all of this stuff in relation to when people are doing some of these horrific things, can’t be confused with the people that need empathy, that actually need the second chance.

Article content

The justice system was designed to protect the people from those we’re afraid of, not the ones we’re mad at or frustrated with.

Q: There was criticism nine months ago for the EPS’ handling of the U of Alberta political demonstrations. Protesters alleged use of force. What was the strategy to handle the protests?

Last year we had 600-some protests. You go to Toronto, it’s double that. You go to Vancouver, they’re in that ballpark. Calgary, Montreal’s got a lot of them.

Back to the university protest, there was a lot of social media about use of force, and all of that’s proven not true. We’ve done the reviews. We had, obviously, cameras. I mean, that was a social media spin. Almost all of the protesters were not students.

Once they ask us to do our job, which the university has the authority to do, we need to make sure that we do our job properly with minimal risk to people getting hurt. Which we did.

That whole transaction took a matter of a couple minutes. We gave them five warnings. People thought we were kidding on warning number four, and then we took action. What do you think is the reasonable amount? Ten? There should not be a situation where students at the university are afraid to walk on campus.

Article content

Q: Your name has come up in conversations around potential candidates for chief in other Canadian cities with similar urban problems. Had there been any interest? Had you any conversations?

A long time ago? Yes. Recently, no.

I was happy where I was in the Edmonton police service and this next job, I wasn’t looking for a job at the time, to be honest, yet, it is, for me, a bit of a thing where I think you can make progression, and to tie some of these things together and use some of my other skills as well.

I’ve been fortunate, you know, to have several calls, and I feel honoured and humbled to have those calls. It’s not about me trying to bail on anything. I just said it’s another opportunity where maybe you can take things a little further and work on a little larger scale. So that’s kind of how I operate.

Q: What lessons are there for other Canadian cities with what you did in Edmonton?

Well, I mean, it’s like anything else. Just keep making it better.

Like what we found with the navigation centre is the starting point. Nobody’s saying it is the ultimate solution. What the province is doing here by building a recovery system, looking at a compassionate intervention act, you know, to get that stabilization for people that aren’t able to make good decisions on their own.

Article content

All of those things are stepping-stones into changing the system.

You know, the decrim safe supply one is just the one that’s the freshest. I mean, it hasn’t worked in B.C. You talk to the police in B.C., it hasn’t worked well.

The thing that I’ve learned overall, don’t double down on stuff that doesn’t work.

You know, we did a money-in-the-system report in Edmonton in 2020 right around the defund the police movement, and it showed that there was seven-and-a-half billion dollars a year going into our city in the social safety net.

That’s like building five Dallas Cowboy football stadiums every year to eternity, and yet we had literally 20,000 encampment complaints. So it’s not always a money issue. It’s looking at the problem differently.

I think that other communities could bring in different ideas and not be afraid to try some things and leverage some of the things that we did. Were we perfect? No, but what we knew is, you know, the risk of failure is what we had. So there really wasn’t a whole lot of risk.

This interview has been edited for brevity.

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

Article content