Community Safety and Well-being: The role of other levels of government (Part IV)
A photo of the Edmonton Law Court building, the main courthouse in the City.
Often when tragedies happen, we ask a simple question - why? Why are things the way that they are? Many times the answer to this question is traced back to a web of complexities surrounding the issues of community safety and well-being, which is a responsibility shared by many players. For example let’s look at social disorders, which are generally the source of perceived and real fear for a person’s sense of safety and well-being. Why does social disorder happen? Some of the main drivers are the challenges our City faces with mental health, addiction, and houselessness - all of which lies outside of the jurisdictions of municipalities.
In this final blog, I want to go deeper into ‘why’ or the roots of many of the social issues that impact community safety and well-being, and the role of different levels of government in preventing them.
Causes of causes
In my lifetime, I’ve learned a lot from the people I have come across, and I know that things aren’t always what they appear to be on the outside. Take Joe for example - he was one of dozens of people who participated in ethnographic research through the Recover Urban Wellness initiative that I managed several years ago while I was a City employee. His turn with addiction began with a workplace injury, and a prescription to help manage the pain. Or Al and Stanley, both far away from their home communities, seeking solace in their drug of choice to numb the trauma of losing their most loved ones. Or Renee who collects bottles during the day, and rests in her camp in the River Valley with her son and his girlfriend. A shelter does not accommodate a family structure like hers.
Of course, these circumstances and traumas have much deeper roots. But for this blog, I want to focus on the systems that are supposed to be in place to heal, protect and promote well-being for everyone, including Joe, Al, Stanley and Renee, and how broken some of these systems are.
Whose responsibility is it?
While nobody wants to pass the buck, the reality is that the City cannot stop social disorder and manage community safety and well-being on its own. A property tax base alone is also not a sustainable source of funding for the myriad of issues we continue to face.
The Federal government provides funding to the Province through transfers, which is then tasked with delivering services within the systems linked to community safety and well-being such as health care, addictions treatment, and housing. More and more, I have seen the responsibility being downloaded onto municipalities - a reality not only experienced by Edmonton, but by mid-sized and small communities alike who unfortunately don’t have the capacity to deal with all of the issues on their plate.
Consider the recent tragedy in Chinatown again. The murderer Justin Bone was newly released from prison, and suffered from addiction and mental health issues. He was not able to access addictions treatment in Edmonton because the wait lists were all full. He was dropped off from a small town into the City by law enforcement even with a strict order that he could not be in Edmonton. While he was housed prior, there was no intention that by leaving him in the city meant he had a permanent place to stay. And if we look further back into his personal history - the root causes - it is riddled with childhood trauma, violence, neglect and a life of crime and instability. We can see numerous systems failures intersecting in this story, from mental health to addiction, to criminal justice - all of which sit within the jurisdiction of the provincial government. Yet, when this tragedy occurred, the same provincial government demanded a safety plan from Edmonton.
The issues we are now facing
When we completed the safety plan, highlighting the ways we as a City respond to ensure the health and safety of Edmontonians, we also stressed that the vast majority of solutions still require significant systems reform and investments at the Provincial level including:
Mental Health and addiction: Years of dysfunctional policy from higher orders of government have left gaping holes in our social safety net, particularly with mental health care. It’s evident in the folks walking the street visibly struggling without proper care, with numbers rising during the pandemic. Social service providers are overwhelmed with the level of need, and have not, for decades, received the same level of funding from the Province proportional to the problem.
Houselessness: In Edmonton, our houseless population has doubled during the past 2+ years of the pandemic. This crisis further exacerbates our collective social safety net, and results in much of the social disorder we are seeing. While the City of Edmonton has ambitious housing targets - including affordable, transitional and permanent supportive housing - the scale of the problem is increasing faster than we can build new units. Unhoused people are also not always able to access temporary shelter services for a variety of reasons, and seek opportunities elsewhere like camping in the river valley and other public spaces including transit centers. Historically, municipalities are not in the business of building shelters and housing; this is largely a Provincial responsibility. However, the impact of houselessness is keenly felt on our city streets, and the City has stepped in for a human response even if it is not the most appropriate judicial response.
Our role as a City going forward
Beyond governments, I think we as a city have a collective role to play to promote community safety and well-being.
Distributed approach: It is no longer feasible to concentrate health and social services in the downtown core and Chinatown. Downtown is the heart of our city; its well-being and safety determines our reputation and our competitiveness on a global stage. Whatever happens in the downtown core affects every corner of the city, including Ward Karhiio even if it is a ways away.
This is why 5 soon-to-open permanent supportive housing sites are being spread across other parts of Edmonton. Specific to Ward Karhiio, a recent discussion has been had at Council about the co-location of permanent supportive housing with a firehall slated to open in 2027. This method of co-location is an important avenue for the City to optimize civic assets as we grapple with houselessness and more efficiently use limited resources, and realize the goal of distributed housing.
Whole systems thinking: Whole systems thinking refers to an approach where we focus on understanding how the parts of a system are related, and how they influence one another over time. As we move closer to the opening date of the Valley Line LRT, which will connect the southside to the core, I’ve heard trepidation about using public transportation because of the transit safety concerns in downtown. The City has invested significantly to address these concerns in the core. And while critical, these investments may lead to some tangible yet unintended impacts such as reduced resourcing in other parts of the city or the displacement of issues to outside of the core. This is why approaches using whole systems thinking are needed rather than tinkering with one part of the system in isolation. We need to understand these relationships and how things are connected to each other, and consider this in our decision-making to benefit the entire system, not just parts of it.
Investing in each other: Less discussed in any council report or news headline is the role of communities. And I don’t mean community organizations and agencies; I mean everyday people like you and me. Stories like Soloss, Participatory City, and Every One Every Day Kjipuktuk/Halifax are why I strongly believe that the future of our city will be rooted in “mutual care, informal networks, and engaged neighbourhoods.” This is why I am so invested in our Community-Based Budgeting project this summer.
I am hugely inspired by the book Trampoline Effect, which provides a framework for reimagining our current social safety net as trampolines by flipping the social welfare systems upside down and rethinking our roles as everyday people. I hope to dig into this discussion and this book more this fall.
Ultimately, there is no silver bullet solution to any of the big, hairy community safety and well-being issues we continue to face, and we as a municipal government cannot solve them alone. We need whole systems-level thinking, buy-in from all levels of government to do their fair share, and robust funding to begin to create positive change in neighbourhoods and see a ripple effect that can reach everyone in our communities.
This is the final installment in my commentary on the issues surrounding community safety and well-being. You can read the other blog posts in the series here:
