Who's Afraid of Edmonton?

Crime in the shadow city

In July of 2021, a mother of three children was waiting for the door of Seven Stones Daycare to be unlocked. A 30-year-old man suddenly lunged at her and tried to tear the backpack off her shoulders. The woman and the man fought until the latter grabbed the woman by the hair, threw her down, and started smashing her head into the concrete. Police officers in the area, investigating vehicle break-ins perpetrated by the same man, spotted the assailant on top of the mother, strangling her to the point of unconsciousness. “The incident in itself is extremely disturbing and was exacerbated by the fact that two of her young children watched the entire incident through the front door of the daycare,” Inspector Erik Johnson told reporters the next day.

This was the first of the crimes that made me sit up and pay attention. Our little girl was also in a daycare, not so far from Seven Stones. I checked the exact address. I traced the journey from one daycare to the other daycare using Google Maps. It was stupid to do these things. I resented what was happening to my mind. I wrote an early draft of this very post and then I stopped. That was well over a year ago.

Amarjeet Sohi, our current mayor, was disarmingly frank in his interview with the New York Times in June when he talked about the many factors fuelling Edmonton’s social problems. He told the NY Times that “Edmonton has the highest amount of correctional facilities and jails in Western Canada.” It was one of many moments I’ve had since moving back that I realize, despite twenty years of cumulative experience of this city, many basic facts about it have remained in the shadows, hidden to me.

Whether or not in any given year Edmonton finishes toward the top of the Crime Severity Index, and whether or not in any given year Edmonton is the murder capital of Canada, or if that dubious honour goes to Winnipeg, Thunder Bay or Regina instead, the objective facts of crime say very little about what it means to live here and the particularities of the psychological and social comportment of the residents. 

For most of my life, I’ve not considered crime to be a major preoccupation of mine. I won’t let fear of crime prevent me from doing what I want, has been my general attitude. Yet this disposition did not completely survive the move back from Montreal.

Two years ago, I was jogging on 76th Avenue at five in the morning when a lunatic out of nowhere suddenly started yelling at me and then chased me down on his skateboard. There was a rather dismaying moment during which I was running, and he was rolling after me, and the rapid trundling of his wheels over the concrete was the loudest sound on that crisp, autumn morning. He was slowly gaining on me, and I had to make a decision about what to do. I eventually decided to stop and face him. He hurled foul words at me—“faggot” and “motherfucker.” His lips were foaming with spit and rage. He kept hurling the insults for a good minute, and I was fairly certain that any verbal counter-offensive from me would escalate the situation toward a physical altercation. He was so much angrier and more prepared for fighting than I was. I stared at him and repeated, “I’m just jogging,” in an intentionally dull and obedient tone, as if I required his permission to go about my business. Eventually, seeming disappointed that I wasn’t going to make a move toward him, he gave up and skateboarded away.

The exact location of my encounter with the skakeboarder was a couple of blocks west of where 76th Avenue ascends back to the level after its dip into the Mill Creek Ravine. About seven months later, a schoolgirl walking to Escuela Mill Creek was suddenly grabbed by the neck very close to that same spot. Her assailant attempted to drag her into the trees with him. The girl managed to break free. She fled to her school and was subsequently attended to by trauma counsellors. The perpetrator was described as 30 to 40 years old, about six feet tall, with dark facial hair and a face tattoo. Reading the news story I said to myself, that describes an awful lot of people wandering around this shadow city.

Ralph Klein, perhaps the most famous and influential premier of Alberta outside of Peter Lougheed, once said, “Edmonton isn’t really the end of the world, although you can see it from there.” While I have no misty-eyed feelings of nostalgia about our former premier, I think he was on to something. 

There have been countless times when I’ve stood in a playing field or at an intersection of two giant arterial roads (for example, 118th Avenue and Wayne Gretzky Drive, outside the defunct Coliseum, now a mausoleum for 1980s dreams) struck with an acute sense of being in an eerie nowhere place.

I once saw a cat fall from an apartment block balcony twelve stories up, plummet down all twelve stories, and die slowly on the sidewalk alongside Bishop Street in Montreal. In that busy place, the grief and dismay of the passersby were immediate. In Edmonton, by contrast, there are very few such social spaces. If you were stabbed to death, it is very unlikely your body would be discovered by even a small crowd of dismayed and grieving passersby.

Simply put, if you live at the edge of the world, your life seems less consequential—socially. Your life matters less, not in the eyes of God, but in the eyes of the hustling and bustling society of which we are supposedly part.

Hessen R. Zoeller explains in her essay “This Hated City ‘Deadmonton’ – Edmonton’s alter-ego,” that a shadow city is a city that is “relegated to the margins of the national discourse and has shadow projected upon it.”  The concept of the “shadow” is taken from the scholarship of psychoanalyst, Carl Jung. The shadow “is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors…” (Collected Works, 9, part 2.)

Jung warns that:

“[t]he meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.”  (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.)

Building on the scholarship of Jung and his successors, who continued to extend the concept of the shadow from the personal to the collective, Zoeller examines the “cultural shadow” and the “cultural complex,” both of which she finds underpinning the identity of Edmonton (whose shadowy alter-ego is Deadmonton, a place in which to be bored and a place in which to be stabbed).

This city is the place that the big cities in Canada do not wish to be. Edmonton represents the gap between what urban Canada aspires to be and what it actually is. In Canada's biggest cities, crime might disrupt the expected or desired state of affairs. Crime in Edmonton functions differently. It is the baseline for quotidian life, influencing decisions on where to live, how to make one’s house “secure,” when to go outside, socialize, whether or not to take public transport, and what safety guidelines to set for your children. Crime, and the fear of crime, are two of the big cudgels that have beaten the city into its current shape. Those of us who live here are closer than cosmopolitan Canadians to the feeling of how the world was before gentrification bludgeoned most of the danger out of everyday life.

When I return to Edmonton from being away, the first thing I have to re-learn is guardedness and suspicion. I simply cannot breathe as easily here, even if there’s no wildfire smoke shrouding the city. The other day, just as I had started to recline into my train seat, two women got on and swore at each other jovially. Then a young man got on and they also started to swear at him, yet not so jovially. “Where are you from?” they wanted to know. “Asia?” The man was having none of it. “I've lived here my whole fucking life,” the man responded. “Fuck you.” “Fuck you double,” the women retorted. “Fuck you triple!” retorted the man. Friends of the women got on board at the next station. I was now surrounded by people shouting and swearing at each other. It seemed impossible for such anger to be limited merely to words, yet by some miracle the instigators got off at The Quarters and the train turned deathly silent afterwards.

Living in a shadow city during the rapid decline of the traditional news media means that the number of stories about what is going on is declining, and so even we, the city residents, have a hard time seeing a full picture. Consider the crime reporting from the Edmonton Journal for the weekend of July 14-16, 2023:

1) A couple driving a grey Audi went on a shooting spree, firing at other motorists at 95 Avenue and 149 Street, at 142 Street and 89 Avenue, at 107 Street and 82 Avenue and, finally, at 82 Avenue and 77 Street, before the police finally caught up to the car and made an arrest. 

2) A 52-year-old father was stabbed to death in a random attack at Belvedere LRT Station in north Edmonton.

3) A man was stabbed inside a transit centre at 62 Street and Fort Road and had to be rushed to hospital. 

4) At 97 Street and Jasper Avenue at 10:20pm on a Sunday, an 89-year-old man was taking photos when he was shoved to the ground and assaulted with a weapon. 

5) At 2:30am that same morning, a couple were ingesting drugs at the bus shelter on 100 Street near Jasper Avenue when two other men joined them and, according to witnesses, one of the men staggered out moments later having been stabbed. 

6) An hour later, a man sitting in a car near Woodbend Wynd was shot. 

7) Later that morning, police responded to an incident at a home near 84 Street and 179 Avenue in which a man succumbed to serious injuries, considered a potential homicide by investigators.

In another incident the same month, a man was shot with a crossbow on Whyte Avenue. This happened on July 2, but was not reported on until July 11. There has never been any follow-up media coverage on what exactly happened.

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On September 29, 1985, the New York Times published an article by Mordecai Richler called “King of the New Canada,” that was ostensibly about the hockey great, Wayne Gretzky, but was just as much about Edmonton. Richler wrote the words that still haunt the city today, almost forty years later.

“If Canada were not a country, however fragmented, but, instead, a house, Vancouver would be the solarium-cum-playroom, an afterthought of affluence; Toronto, the counting room, where money makes for the most glee; Montreal, the salon; and Edmonton, Edmonton the boiler room. There is hardly a tree to be seen downtown, nothing to delight the eye on Jasper Avenue. On 30-below-zero nights, grim religious zealots loom on street corners, speaking in tongues, and intrepid streetwalkers in miniskirts rap on the windows of cars that have stopped for the traffic lights.”

Over time, my interpretation of this essay has changed. At first, the description of Edmonton as a boiler room seemed strictly negative. Yet, if one is looking for them, one finds clues that Richler isn’t entirely dismissive of the city. For one thing, Edmonton is the new Canada. Its new-found status as a resource hub has given it a modicum of wealth and prestige. He also finds Edmontonians to be hardy. “Edmontonians, a truly admirable lot, have not only endured great hardships but also continue to suffer an abominable climate as well as isolation from the cities of light.” This probably sounds condescending to a westerner, but at least Richler was trying. He did not call Edmontonians a bunch of miserable bastards, cowering in the darkness. Importantly, Richler acknowledged that Edmonton had become the shrine for the best hockey played anywhere in the world.

Yet it’s the description of Edmonton as a boiler room that has stood the test of time. What comes to mind is the most utilitarian and least aesthetically pleasing part of the house. Thinking about it a little longer it is impossible not to add another layer of interpretation: without the boiler room, a house, especially a Canadian house, is completely useless. If the equipment in the boiler room craps out, your house is doomed. No furnace, no water, no electrical?

By market capitalization, Canada’s biggest corporation is a bank, RBC, headquartered in Toronto. The second biggest is also a bank, TD, headquartered in Toronto. The third biggest is Enbridge, headquartered in Calgary, but with almost the identical number of employees in Edmonton. The first two corporations are heavily invested in Enbridge and numerous other western resource companies like it. Moreover, Enbridge owns almost all the natural gas infrastructure in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province.

And so Canada cannot disavow its essential, shadow cities. If Edmonton is dark, it is Canada’s darkness.

Since its official inception, Edmonton has valorized “industry, integrity, progress.” Those are the words on our uninspiring flag. In the classic history of Edmonton, published in 1967 by M.G. Hurtig Publishers, the local Indigenous history is entirely glossed over; it doesn’t even warrant a chapter. “A little over two hundred years ago, the first white men came strolling in to see what the area might offer,” explains author J.G. MacGregor. “Set in the midst of such resources, Edmonton was bound to become a great city. It had only to wait till man’s progress up the intellectual ladder should open his eyes to the riches around him and the enormous store of energy beneath his feet.”

Edmonton adores working, earning and spending above everything else. There are other things, of course: the countless festivals of which we are rightly proud, the beauty of our natural environment, and our well documented success in theatre and improv—but all of those more interesting things still need time to properly seep into the city’s soul. Sometimes, it seems to me, this is the struggle of the current moment: a progressive city council trying to overcome the old notions of Edmonton, with insufficient resources to win convincingly. All it takes to bring back talk of the old ways is a series of incidents to spook everyone—a few more crimes to say, not so fast.

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Canada’s international reputation has traditionally been positive. That maple-leaf flag has worked wonders. Not being the United States is helpful. My oldest friend in Canada, an immigration lawyer, says the volume of inquiries his office receives about moving to Canada—rather than the United States—surges whenever Trump is within the vicinity of the White House.

Perhaps the most poignant crime stories, then, are those that feature a newcomer or an outsider who comes to Canada, lands in Alberta’s provincial capital, and has their preconceptions dashed. In the summer of 2023, a Chilean woman of sixty-seven years of age visited her son in Edmonton. She was punched unconscious while on board an LRT train. The attack came completely out of the blue. Her son told reporters, “Her image is that Canada is this wonderful, first-world country — it's safe. Never in a million years did they think this would happen.”

Just a few months previously, a man who had just arrived in Canada—fleeing the war in Ukraine—was sitting at a bus stop, having his morning coffee, when he was stabbed by a stranger. No one was around to help him or chase down his assailant, who was never found. The victim called 9-11 from his cell phone before collapsing from his injury. He had to be rushed to the hospital. His childhood friend told CTV News, “I was in shock. I don’t know how to explain it… People that just came—they’re looking for good life here and perhaps work and raising their daughter and having a peaceful life.”

The randomness of attacks, the surprise factor, the complete innocence of the victims who are simply going about their lives—all these elements of the crime stories make the hearts of Edmontonians uneasy, even if these kinds of crimes are extremely rare. As Zoeller writes, “shadows have infused the city in a way that is almost visceral in nature. It is as if an ominous sense has found its way through the cracks of walls and the foundation of buildings.”

Unless you are of a particularly serene or oblvious state of mind, or living a lifestyle that induces and reinforces obliviousness, it is difficult not to feel the shadow take residence deep in your chest. A couple of years ago, when my wife and I were still relatively new to our second stint of living in the city, I was walking east of the Bonnie Doon Medical Centre with my eldest daughter, who was then around four years of age, and suddenly she grabbed my hand. “Daddy, I don’t like it here,” she said. “Let’s go back.” I tried to gauge where her sudden feeling of anxiety came from. It was a warm, summer day, and yet... The street in front of us was entirely deserted, and the houses crouched sullenly, as if something very bad had just happened, or was about to happen.

When I was in my last year of high school, I had two friends with whom I’d get together most weekends to practice music. We had notions of being in band. Alcohol and cannabis were frequent visitors to our jam sessions. One night, no doubt under the influence, we left our instruments behind and walked to the local ravine. We scrambled down the steep bank toward Blackmud Creek. Our shoes became heavy from clods of earth. One of my friends almost fell in the water. We made fun of him and laughed.

Suddenly, large rocks started to arc over our head. They landed in the water, one after the other. Sploosh… Sploosh! My initial thought was—is this really happening? I suspected one of my friends of playing a prank, but we closed ranks and it was apparent that the rocks were coming from street level. The older of my two friends yelled out, “Stop! Stop!” But the rocks kept coming. The person throwing them had good aim. The rocks were no longer falling into the creek. The arc of their trajectory was getting shorter, coming closer to us. The younger of my friends suddenly started roaring like an enraged bear. “We’re going to fucking kill you! We’re going to catch you and cut your heart out of your chest and feast on it like jackals!” He charged up the slope, toward the rock thrower. Emboldened, my remaining friend and I charged up after him. The rocks stopped raining down. When we arrived on the sidewalk, there was no one in sight.

Reassured that we had responded smartly to the danger, we went on with our purposeless business. We strolled over to the local playground and played on the swings. It was such fun. It was the middle of the night. Then, out of the shadows, came more trouble. An adult man approached us, brandishing a two-by-four beam of wood. His eyes were glassed over, emotionless. “Time to go, boys,” he said. “Time to go.”

The older of my friends whispered, “Do you think we can take him?” The younger of my friends said, “We’re pushing our luck. Let’s go.”

We tiptoed around the lunatic, who was still wielding his improvised weapon. As we were walking, the older of my two friends said to him, “We were just playing. That’s all. Just playing.” The lunatic repeated himself, “Time to go, boys.”

This scene, which precedes by thirty years my encounter with the skateboarder while jogging, has one striking similarity to that later one. In the tone of voice from my old friend, and in my own tone, there is the same childlike plea—for permission or for forgiveness.

Can’t I just be here? Can’t I just enjoy myself?

Sometimes, in the ever-present whooosh from the Edmonton traffic that I hear when I am outside at dawn or late at night, there are rare moments during which I discern quieter sounds: these are, perhaps, the voices of ancient ghosts telling me something. They say: “Get out, get out—you should not be here!” I am sometimes tempted to obey, but I stop myself. Obey instructions from the unseen? Lately, however, I’ve had a different impulse. I am increasingly curious to know what would happen if these ghosts could step out of the shadows and into the light.

NOTES

Introducing my first-ever Substack poll!

Thank you for your participation! I will share the results in a future Substack post.

And now for some Edmonton trivia!

In a classically insecure Canadian way, I feel duty bound to note three cultural forces that have their origins in Edmonton. Number 1: the SCTV comedy show, in which the world was introduced to the talents of John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara, Harold Ramis, and Dave Thomas. After the show moved from Toronto to Edmonton in 1980, Rick Moranis joined the cast and the iconic characters of Bob and Doug McKenzie were born. Bob and Doug are the original “hosers.” (I’ve written about this iconic Canadian character for Jacobin.)

Number 2: Jordan Peterson. The guru of the new and very online masculine right-wing self-improvement movement was born in this city, grew up in nearby Fairview, and returned to our city for his bachelor’s degree in political science, which he obtained from the University of Alberta in 1982, as well as a BA in psychology in 1984.

Number 3: Marshall McLuhan. Born in 1911 in Edmonton, the McLuhan family’s house is in the Highlands neighbourhood, and a plaque in front alerts all passersby of the importance of the philosopher and communications theorist who resided there for the duration of his childhood. It’s a modest-sized but quite beautiful house. I’ve had the fortune of attending an arts-related board meeting there.

There we go! I could have named a whole bunch more cultural forces from Edmonton but I figured I’d leave it at three for now. You’re welcome.

Books

Jung, C.G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press, 1981. (First published in 1959.)

MacGregor, J.G. Edmonton: A History. M.G. Hurtig Publishers, 1967.

Articles, essays, book chapter

“Man charged after violent attack against woman picking up kids from Edmonton daycare,” CBC News

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/man-charged-after-violent-attack-against-woman-picking-up-kids-from-edmonton-daycare-1.6105795

“Amid the Stanley Cup Excitement, Edmonton’s Downtown Struggles”, June 22, 2024. New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/22/world/canada/edmonton-amarjeet-sohi.html

Crime Severity Index

https://www.statista.com/statistics/436285/crime-severity-index-in-canada-by-metropolitan-area/ 

13-year-old girl attacked by stranger near Mill Creek Ravine

https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/13-year-old-girl-attacked-by-stranger-near-mill-creek-ravine-1.6424756 

“This Hated City ‘Deadmonton’ – Edmonton’s alter-ego,” Hessen R. Zoeller, in The Urban Uncanny : A Collection of Interdisciplinary Studies. Huskinson, Lucy, editor. Abingdon, Oxon; New York : Routledge; 2016.

"'Really, really concerned': Mayor pleads for more help as Edmonton violence surges," The Edmonton Journal, July 17, 2023

https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/really-really-concerned-mayor-pleads-for-more-help-as-edmonton-violence-surges

"Edmonton police investigate after man shot with crossbow on Whyte Avenue," The Edmonton Journal July 11, 2023.

https://edmontonjournal.com/news/crime/edmonton-police-investigate-after-man-shot-with-crossbow-on-whyte-avenue

“King of the New Canada,” The New York Times Magazine, September 29, 1985

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/29/magazine/king-of-the-new-canada.html

Largest Canadian companies by market capitalization:

https://companiesmarketcap.com/cad/canada/largest-companies-in-canada-by-market-cap/#google_vignette

“Chilean senior visiting Edmonton randomly attacked on LRT,” August 1, 2023. Global News https://globalnews.ca/news/9871414/edmonton-lrt-attack-chile-senior/

"Man stabbed at Edmonton bus stop had just arrived in Canada after fleeing war in Ukraine," April 14, 2023. CTV News.

https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/man-stabbed-at-edmonton-bus-stop-had-just-arrived-in-canada-after-fleeing-war-in-ukraine-1.6354125

Photo

"Man found slain in burning truck unidentified, killer sought: Edmonton police," The Edmonton Journal, August 10 2023

https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/man-found-slain-in-burning-truck-unidentified-killer-sought-edmonton-police