Desperate Times

Only the radical is realistic

He had recently resigned from a volunteer position that he had held for over a year. His main duty had consisted of fielding phone calls from people in distress. Most shifts were busy, with the exception of during big hockey games.

In the same way that a cop looks at society and expects a lot of crime and in the same way that an elected official looks at society and expects a lot of politics, someone volunteering to listen to suffering will expect a lot of suffering. But in his case, the volunteer position hadn’t markedly changed his outlook on suffering. He had seen the suffering for a long time.

The suffering had been particularly evident from November 16, 2020, onward. He had spent most of that morning hearing his daughter screaming and crying upstairs while he tried to do some work downstairs in the basement. His daughter wasn’t alone. It was just that she vociferously rejected, down to her soul, the company of the caregiver that she had been left with. So he promised her that before lunch he would take her outside. The nearest playground was only three blocks away. When they arrived, there were two Indigenous kids, roughly the same age as his daughter, crawling through the climbing frame. It was cold (of course) and every structure was covered in snow, but the snow was well packed down. His daughter was dressed in a snowsuit and mittens. He was quite enjoying the prospect of her playing with the other two kids. But the other kids stopped playing almost immediately. They crept further and further away. Then he realized they were leaving the playground entirely. His daughter was the only child remaining.

Strange.

He tried to entertain her the best he could, but it only took fifteen minutes for the cold to demoralize him. “Let’s go home and have lunch,” he said. So they started to walk home, taking a different route from the one they had followed on the outward journey, just to keep things interesting. When they arrived back on the street where they were temporarily living, they noticed a teenage girl shouting. There was a desperate edge to her tone. She was wearing only sweatpants, a t-shirt, and sneakers. She was banging on the front door of a house. “Let me in! Let me in!” she screamed.

He quickened his speed, carrying his daughter in his arms so they wouldn’t tarry in the vicinity of the scene too long. He didn’t know if the teenage girl had been intentionally shut out of her home as a punishment or had inadvertently locked herself out. He saw a boy’s face peeking out the living room window at the girl, so he figured she was going to be let back in eventually. She wasn’t going to freeze to death.

A few weeks prior to their arrival in that neighbourhood, there had been a disturbing murder. Thirteen-year-old Sierra Chalifoux-Thompson was in a dispute about a boy with another teenage girl. One chilly October night, Sierra had been walking alone on Mount Lawn Road in the shadow of the defunct Coliseum. It was here that her adversary, another girl of only thirteen, stabbed her to death.

He had always said to himself, privately, that he would never have wanted to live in this neighbourhood. True, the housing was still affordable. You could have a bungalow with a yard for around $300K. If that had been the extent of their budget, he would have settled for less space somewhere nicer. The previous year, the family that was lending his family their bungalow had complained about a crime that had occurred not all that far away, at Londonderry Mall. A woman was jumped by three attackers. She was robbed and beaten with a metal rod. Afterwards she lay there, covered in blood and vomiting. Passersby stopped to give her first aid while waiting for the paramedics. After ninety minutes the paramedics still hadn’t arrived and so the Good Samaritans walked to the local fire station, seeking the help of firefighters instead.

No, he wouldn’t want to live in a place where two such terrible incidents had occurred in under eighteen months.

After three weeks in the borrowed bungalow, they moved across the river. (There were things they would come to miss about the previous neighbourhood. He and his wife had appreciated Victoria Deli, where the taxidermied heads of deer looked down from the wood paneled walls while customers purchased candied salmon and European sausage. The local liquor store had also been of high quality.) The new neighbourhood felt comfortably bourgeois. There were lawn signs that proclaimed the progressive politics of the homeowners. HATE HAS NO HOME HERE. Signs in support of public education or public health care. Signs against coal mining on the Eastern Slopes of the Rockies. During the first week, he was out walking with his daughter, passing the local church, when two children, not much older than his, smiled and called out, “Hello!” The same day, he intercepted the local mail carrier and apologized for not having yet installed a mailbox. She was completely sympathetic. There was so much to keep on top of when you moved into a new house, she said.

Comfortable middle class life started in earnest. The pandemic entered its second year. Life would be better afterwards. That’s what everyone believed.

---

He knew from his experience volunteering in a homeless shelter back in 2006 that life for the truly marginal could be nasty, even downright brutal. One evening, there was a tall man who appeared out of nowhere. He approached a woman in the long line-up outside the shelter. He grabbed the woman by the hair and smashed her face into the wall repeatedly. He was seven-foot tall and had knives strapped to his legs. These facts were reported in a frantic tone by the last couple of homeless men given entry to the shelter before the entire establishment went on lockdown. Could the woman be helped? Only if the cops arrived fast enough. One of the staff yelled out of the window (before closing it): “We have called the police! Get away from her!” The assailant fled after smashing the woman’s face a few more times.

When it was safe, the woman with the bloodied face came into the shelter, sat on the bench in the reception area, and wept.

One evening a skinny man approached a seated woman, leaned over, and vomited onto her head. The puke dripped from the woman’s hair into her face. She sat there afterwards without moving, humiliated.

Since 2006, the plight of the homeless had not improved. In fact, it had deteriorated. Fentanyl was a scourge that hadn’t existed twenty years previously. In the winter of 2023 there was an outbreak of shigella. In 2024, the Edmonton health zone reported 110 amputations due to frostbite. Most of those were performed on homeless people. In the late autumn of 2025, there was an outbreak of tuberculosis in the inner city.

He had thought that volunteering on the phone line would be easier than volunteering in a shelter, being unable to see or smell the suffering. This was a false assumption. Working the phone line was more difficult. He had a greater sense of responsibility. It wasn’t simply enough to be there and to be non-judgemental. He had to actually say something useful, which came very close to doing something. None of the people that called him were homeless, not as far as he could tell. But several harrowing calls involved people who were at risk of becoming homeless. One young woman called him in a panic because her rent was due in several days and she didn’t have enough money. Up until a few months ago she had worked at a restaurant. She had been raped by one of the kitchen staff. She had quit that job and had struggled financially ever since, even though she had been doing other kinds of work.

An older caller, a man, was living in temporary accommodation. He said the hallways of the building smelled of faeces and urine. The other occupants bullied him. He had lost his temper at some point and was scheduled to be evicted on Sunday. “The last person thrown out of this place froze to death in a bus shelter,” he said.

He took calls from parents whose children were threatening to kill themselves. He took calls from parents whose children were relentlessly bullied at school. He took calls from parents who had divorced and were worried that their former spouse wasn’t feeding the children properly.

He took a call from a thirty-six-year-old with a cognitive disability who had been prescribed antipsychotics. The caller’s first question was whether or not people like him could qualify for MAiD (Medical assistance in Dying). It took a lot of patience and persistence to figure out the situation. The caller was living in an apartment with his mother, dependent on her, yet also terrified of her. She was alcoholic and abusive. She sometimes forced her son to drink with her, which he hated. The mother kept coming to the door and shouting in a threatening fashioning. It was easy to hear her booming voice, even over the phone line. The caller eventually changed his mind about MAiD and said he would kill himself at midnight, using a knife from the kitchen. This particular call had to be referred to 9-11. He kept the caller on the line until the police and paramedics arrived. He asked the caller to describe what was in his bedroom. This was a stalling tactic.

“A mattress… some food… some porn,” said the caller.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Just a window.”

“OK, then. Tell me what’s outside the window.”

When the paramedics and police arrived, one of them took the phone from the caller. “We’re here now,” said a man with an authoritative voice, probably a cop. “Everything will be OK. Thank you.”

Click.

---

He wasn’t quite prepared for the town hall in Red Deer in mid November. Arriving with a colleague at the community hall on the edge of town, the first thing he noticed was two skinny boys cycling around the parking lot on their bikes. After he had been inside the hall for a few minutes, helping to set up, one of the boys suddenly startled him, appearing at a window, banging on the glass from outside.

The boys had been asking for snacks, it turned out. They had been asking for snacks since four o’clock, and had already been given a few of the treats that had been brought down from Edmonton. Even with the light fading from the day and the night closing in — cold and windy — the boys continued to hover around, wanting more. They had declared themselves to be hungry.

When the town hall discussion started in earnest, everyone had a story about how the economy was quietly killing them. Rent rising. Property prices rising. Food prices up. Electricity price surging. Automobile insurance rates through the roof. Youth unemployment the highest in Canada. The mood was mutinous. No policy proposal was too radical for the people in that room.

There had probably never been another moment in history when an oil and gas boom had brought in so little prosperity. He had read the stats. The industry made $135 billion in operating profits during the 2021-2024 boom. Most of that money left the province. Employment in the sector was lower in 2024 than a decade previously. Many oil and gas companies weren’t bothering to pay their taxes. At least $253.9 million in municipal taxes had gone unpaid as of December 31, 2024.

Meanwhile, Alberta had experienced the most significant wage stagnation in Canada, with wages declining 10% relative to inflation during the past decade. The province’s minimum wage, $15/hour, was the lowest in the country. The province’s per-student spending on K-12 education was also the lowest in Canada.

In his younger days he had aspired to be smart, to know things that other people didn’t. He would wait for his opportunity at gatherings to rattle out public policy facts.

He tried not to do that anymore.

The fact that conservative rule was ruining people’s lives brought him no satisfaction. He would have grudgingly accepted conservative rule if it meant material improvement in people’s lives. When he drove home from Red Deer, he stopped in at the stylish, bourgeois market just a short walk from his house. He waited his turn to buy an expensive coffee and an expensive pastry. Having enough money meant having enough to squander. Counting every penny was emotionally exhausting, an unofficial tax on joy. He didn’t ever want to be desperate. He didn’t want his children to be desperate. He drank his coffee and ate his pastry as if his life depended on this temporary enjoyment of fleeting pleasures.

NOTES

“Final steps retraced: Vigil held for Edmonton girl killed in assault,” CBC, October 9 2020
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/sierra-chalifoux-thompson-edmonton-vigil-1.5756837

“Good Samaritans frustrated after urgent 911 call in Edmonton goes unanswered for 90 minutes,” Sarah Ryan, Global News, August 1, 2019
https://globalnews.ca/news/5716924/good-samaritans-edmonton-assault-911-wait/

Battling the Shigella Outbreak Among Edmonton’s Homeless Community, Boyle Street Community Services, June 30, 2023
https://www.boylestreet.org/post/battling-shigella-outbreak

“Tuberculosis outbreak declared among Edmonton inner-city homeless population,” Karen Bartko, Global News, November 14, 2025
https://globalnews.ca/news/11525259/edmonton-inner-city-homeless-population-tuberculosis-outbreak/

“Frostbite amputations reached new high in Edmonton, decreased in Calgary last winter,” Taylor Lambert, CBC News, Oct 22, 2024
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/frostbite-amputations-reached-new-high-in-edmonton-decreased-in-calgary-last-winter-1.7358413

“Alberta youth losing hope about job prospects as unemployment reaches new highs,” Emily Williams, CBC News, September 6, 2025
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-youth-losing-hope-about-job-prospects-as-unemployment-reaches-new-highs-1.7626872

“How can Albertans, owners of our natural resources, benefit more from a diversified energy economy?” Diversify Alberta, October 2025
https://diversifyalberta.ca/exporting-profits-report/

“Unpaid Oil & Gas Taxes: Worsening Crisis Calls for a Collaborative Solution,” March 12, 2025
https://rmalberta.com/news/unpaid-oil-and-gas-tax-survey/

“Alberta’s Disappearing Advantage for Workers,” Centre for Future Work, May 18, 2024
https://centreforfuturework.ca/2024/05/18/albertas-disappearing-advantage-for-workers/

“Alberta premier defends decision not to increase province’s minimum wage, set to be lowest in Canada,” Canadian Press, September 30, 2025
https://globalnews.ca/news/11458193/alberta-premier-defends-lowest-minimum-wage/

“Alberta per-student funding still the least in Canada,” Alberta Teachers’ Association, February 18, 2025
https://teachers.ab.ca/news/alberta-student-funding-still-least-canada

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“Safety or heat: What a horrible decision to make for the homeless,” Lorne Gunter, November 14, 2025
https://edmontonsun.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-safety-or-heat-what-a-horrible-decision-to-make-for-the-homeless