Walk a block in any direction and there are derelict users on the sidewalks: initiates and old-timers, locals and come-from-aways, sisters and brothers
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They are rolling a dying man on a stretcher out of the Maple Hotel. He looks to be about 60 years old, unshaven, wild grey curls, filthy white socks. Electrodes are patched to a hairless chest and a monitor seismographs the agonal beatings of a beaten-down heart. The tattoo on the patient’s right forearm reads KILL TO LIVE.
“What have you got here?” I ask one of the EMTs as he sheds his antiviral poncho to reveal a crisp blue uniform beneath. “This is the Downtown Eastside,” he replies. “What do you think we’ve got?”
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It is a late September morning at Canada’s most appalling intersection, the corner of High and Low. A quartet of citizens much younger than the man on the stretcher crouch smirking or slouch insensate on the pavement beneath the Maple’s marquee. Crack pipes scattered on the pavement welcome four new ambassadors to Armageddon from our nation’s deep supply of broken kids.
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“Hotel” is a euphemism for the eight-storey Maple, as it is for a dozen or more other Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hellholes, many of them a century old, that define the blighted Downtown Eastside (DTES), relics of the epoch when they sequestered stevedores and lumberjacks up from the docks and down from the woods while they took their beer. The building’s windows, viewed from below, are shattered, hanging loose, missing completely, or smeared with vile graffiti. But on one sill, I see flowers.
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Steps away from the youths on the pavement, our grizzled patient lies unconscious on the gurney. Now he is levitated into the ambulance that will hurtle the pale shell of yet another once-young, once-virile, once-dreaming soul to triage, lights ablaze and sirens screaming.
Across East Hastings Street, over by the Carnegie Community Centre, the honey locusts are turning gold and crows are arguing in the branches. A flitting wind is chilly off the harbour; the end of yachting season’s drawing nigh. I should have brought a warmer jacket.
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Looking north, up the alley that runs west of Main Street and east of the blighted Maple Hotel, I can see Grouse Mountain’s silhouette against a pallid autumn sky.
Between the ancient but still-thrumming Carnegie, with its spiral stairway and its stained-glass effigies of Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser and its generous cafeteria and its take-no-crap security staff, and a seemingly abandoned office building that once was The Molson Bank, there is a narrow alley whose asphalt is smeared and slippery with breakfast cereal, urine and puke. In that little laneway are at least 30 reeling, half-alive drug users and their comrades and their sweethearts and their murderers.
In a doorway, some mother’s daughter, not yet 20, is crawling through a pond of spilled and spoiled buttermilk, feeling for a book of matches.
Another woman fumbles with a kit containing Naloxone, the antidote to some, but not all, of the poisons that are sold and consumed on our libertine streets while we walk around, look away, and step over. (What we do to ourselves with needles requires more needles to assuage.)
“My damn legs, my damn legs!” one man is wailing, and he rolls up threadbare cuffs to expose half a dozen open, dripping, bloody sores the size of playing cards.
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Nearly all the other addicts in the alley are silent, clustered in pairs and trios, high as jets, deaf as trees, and mute as clouds. Many are folded forward at the waist like the letter L, staring down at the filthy ground, defying gravity, eyes vacant, lost in space.
I remember Wilfred Owen’s rendering of the British Army, 1917:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
But the addicts on the Western Front of Canada’s half-assed war on deadly drugs are merely displaying what toxicologists call the Opioid Flexional Phenotype — the “fentanyl fold” — not Great War poetry. And that screaming man’s necrotic lesions are a common side-effect of Xylazine, an animal tranquillizer often cut with fentanyl to prolong the high.
(Consider this: more Canadians have lost their lives to overdoses of opioids in the past 10 years than were killed in combat in the First World War, 18,000 in British Columbia alone since 2016.)
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Explore further with me, come by another shocked and gawking tourist. Walk a block or two in any direction along the wide avenues and tight back streets of the Downtown Eastside — up toward Cordova and Powell, down toward Pender and Chinatown — and there must be a thousand more derelict users on the sidewalks: initiates and old-timers, locals and come-from-aways, sisters and brothers, Britons and Blacks and Dene, motionless and shuffling, vomiting and shitting, dealing and being dealt life’s losing hand in one of the most blessed and bounteous countries in the world. And countless more up in the fetid SROs, doing whatever they do.
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Six more ambulances and fire wagons are idling within half a block of the crucifix of Hastings and Main streets in Vancouver, B.C. They will not idle for long.
“Bring out your dead!” they used to cry in the Middle Ages, but in plague time at Hastings and Main, the dead and the dying are already in the open air.
Still, the CIBC and the TD Bank at Main and Pender are open, they still are having rock concerts at the Rickshaw Theatre, they are whisking omelettes in the Ovaltine Café, there are hushed and studious readers in the library inside the Carnegie Community Centre, and the big Route 16 bus still careers along Hastings toward the city’s prosperous and cultured core. In Chinatown, tonight’s full moon will bring the Mid-Autumn Festival.
This is Vancouver 40 years after Expo 86, 16 years after the Olympic Winter Games, three months after the FIFA World Cup, under the yellow trees.
The cancer is not only here, but here is worse. It is not just this season, but decades of decay and misery. And meanwhile, in fear and revulsion, pity and heartbreak, anger and avoidance, commitment and indifference, the city carries on.
* * *
“Toronto reporter discovers Vancouver has a drug problem,” someone out this way is bound to sneer, but this is not my first go-round on the Downtown Eastside. Back in 1988, I wrote and fronted a CBC documentary that we centred at the Carnegie and at an SRO on Powell Street — the Lucky Lodge. It was a place that, when you opened the front door, smelled like corpses, if you know that smell.
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I remember interviewing a guy named Wilson at a vocational-training centre and Wilson telling the camera that “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired of being sick in the gutter.” But our subjects four decades ago were — or we chose to portray them as — harmless drunkards, a bunch of stumbling B.C. Barney Gumbles, no danger to the larger fabric of the city’s life. This was 30 years after fentanyl first was synthesized in a Belgian laboratory, but still decades before it would become the most commonly used artificial opioid in North America, soon to be broadcast by Chinese chemists and Mexican mules to our sidewalks and schoolyards and tenements and tents.
The doc was a hit. And the Lucky Lodge still is in business in 2026, even after a police sweep in 2005 resulted in dozens of arrests for “widespread drug dealing, deplorable conditions and welfare fraud.” However, The Tyee, a local news website, reported in August that long-term residents are under constant pressure — and offered bribes — to melt away so that management might replace them with students at jacked-up rents.
* * *
Around the corner from the Lucky now, a brace of brawny, tawny dogs — Nala and Bo.
Reining them, stroking them, barking at them when they leap to sniff a stranger, is a man who calls himself India. He says that he grew up in Montreal, that his parents came to Canada from Trinidad, that he played basketball and hockey in high school, that he has four children — somewhere — and that he slept on the sidewalk last night, propped against a brick wall, blanketed by the beasts.
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“It’s a choice,” he says of his current circumstance. And again: “It’s a choice.”
We look around at a breathtaking panoply of desperation that stretches as far as the eye can see.
“I don’t see myself any different from them,” India says. “I’m still human. They’re still human.”
“Do you think that most of Vancouver cares about this?” I wonder.
“They probably care about cleaning up the streets,” he answers. “Some people care about the people, they want all of them to get better. Some people just want all of this to be gone.”
“That’s not a bad wish,” I suggest, “to want your city to be clean.”
“No, it’s not,” India agrees. And he says that his moribund neighbours “look more scary than they are — they are very nice people.”
“They would give you their last dollar,” he says. If they had a dollar.
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“What would help them?” I ask. “What ends this?”
“There could be a lot more jobs, a lot more places to stay for people on the streets. To get a place, some people wait years. I know somebody that waited 11 years. Some people don’t want a place and some people actually do.”
“Would you go for treatment if they came around to take you?” I ask.
“I don’t need treatment,” says the man with the dogs.
* * *
When they vote for their mayor and council on Saturday, Oct. 17, Vancouverites also will be presented with a non-binding plebiscite (from the Latin plebiscitum, “the common people’s choice”) that purports to create a path toward cleansing the clients and clearing the catacomb at the crossroads of Hastings and Main.
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The current mayor, who is running for re-election, is a Hong Kong immigrant’s son named Ken Sim, a father of four and the first Chinese to win high office in a city that has welcomed thousands of Chinese families and trillions of their renminbi in recent decades. Sim first gained the mayoralty in 2022 by unseating the incumbent with 51 per cent of the vote.
If you accept the premise that the heart-rending ruin of the Downtown Eastside began in earnest when a thousand SRO rooms were emptied or uprated to clear the grounds for Expo 86, then Sim is the eighth man to own the crisis. (Vancouver has had an Olympic Games, a World’s Fair, a World Cup, an NBA team — briefly — and two Stanley Cup riots, but never a Cup parade or a lady mayor.)
Early in his (first) term, Sim ordered the obliteration of hundreds of tents and hardened structures that were blocking traffic and commerce on East Hastings, and the removal of dozens of stolen propane tanks that were only a Bic away from blowing the addicts’ entire acreage to Kingdom Come. (Hundreds might have died at once instead of one at a time.) This purge was successful — Vancouver’s unhoused now repose under hospital blankets and garbage bags in lieu of canvas and plywood.
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The plebiscite is a pointed (and to his opponents, pointless) manoeuvre by Sim to get the public to formally ratify his get-somewhat-tough approach to the Downtown Eastsiders and the other desperadoes who have spread larceny and loathing across Vancouver’s more moneyed ‘hoods.
The referendum here will ask:
Are you in favour of the City of Vancouver strengthening its laws to forbid open-air hard drug (heroin, meth, fentanyl, and crack) use in public spaces?
And: Should the City of Vancouver formally ask the Province of BC to convert portions of the old St. Paul’s Hospital, or another similar site, into a secure medical facility that provides acute voluntary and 100-plus involuntary care beds for individuals posing a serious risk to themselves or others due to severe substance use and mental health disorders?
“It’s a cynical election move,” said one of Sim’s opponents on the October ballot, Coun. Pete Fry of the Greens. (He the son of Hedy Fry, the longest-serving female MP in Canadian history, currently serving her eleventh term in faraway Ottawa.)
“I see this as nothing more than a cheap political distraction,” echoed Vancouver Liberals mayoral candidate Kareem Allam, who used to be Sim’s chief of staff at $150,067 a year.
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On a drippy Friday, I meet Mayor Sim at his campaign headquarters. We talk about the referendum and the necrosis at his city’s core and the very real possibility that — given the potency of fentanyl and the even more addictive drugs that are coming onstream as you skim this — Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside may be the harbinger of even more unspeakable and unpreventable tragedies that all of our cities will face.
“What I can tell you,” the mayor says, “is that everything that we’ve done in the past obviously hasn’t worked. And so what we have done with the tools that we have, which is basically policing and reacting after the fact, is we’ve made massive investments in policing, Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services, and a whole bunch of things to stabilize that neighbourhood.”
Sim congratulates himself for the sanitation surge of 2023 and blames the current disorder on the provincial government of Premier David Eby, who — not to be left out — just called a snap election for Oct. 24.
“We’ve been working hard with the province,” Sim says. “We’ve got them to change their ideology, because they weren’t even into involuntary care a couple of years ago. Now the push is to get them to live up to their commitment.”
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“That’s IF ‘they’ are still the same ‘they’ a month from now,” I remind him. (One poll I saw while I was in Vancouver showed Eby’s New Democrats trailing the Conservative Party of British Columbia, 43 per cent to 35. But the election still was a month away.)
“Well, you know what, that’s a great point,” the mayor responds.
“Do you think most Vancouverites care what happens to those few hundred or few thousand on East Hastings street?” I ask. “Most people never go down there.”
“I think when they do see it, they do feel it and they do care,” the mayor replies. “But it doesn’t matter where you live, it presents itself in other forms.
“Cars are getting broken into. Bikes are getting stolen. Shops are getting shoplifted. It’s happening throughout our city, and people feel it.
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“The street disorder, someone defecating on the sidewalk or someone shooting up hard drugs in a public doorway. These affect people.”
I head back to Ground Zero, where a phalanx of police officers are slow-walking their daily beat along the highway to hell.
“The mayor wants you to ticket these people and take their drugs away,“ I mention to one of the officers. (Sim proposes that the fine for possession be zero dollars and zero cents; the goal is to identify and catalogue users for treatment later on.) “We can’t arrest our way out of this,” the constable responds.
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* * *
The online reviews of the Airbnb one block from Hastings and Main that shelters me for the weekend may unnerve someone who might consider coming here to verify that what I am describing is real.
Just got harrased (sic) by couple homeless that were in the outside corner something no one can manage but the place is flawless amazing …
One thing to be aware of is that there are quite a few homeless people in the area. We never had any issues ourselves, but it’s something potential guests may want to keep in mind …
There is homelessness but I don’t consider that to be the fault of a host …
The surrounding neighbourhood did have many unhoused individuals, but they did not bother us …
Just down the street from the condo is the good old New Town Bakery. This is a magnet for travelling gourmands and glad-handing politicians — Ken Sim’s photo is on the wall, alongside those of Prime Minister Mark Carney and various provincial poobahs — and a throwback to the time when you chose a café for flavour and conversation, not just for a plastic bag of grub from a courier on an e-bike.
Susanna Ng, who owns the New Town, came here from Hong Kong in 1972, before Margaret Thatcher colluded with Deng Xiaoping to hand five million free people back to the Pekingese Communists without a single cannonball being fired by the famous Noonday Gun at Causeway Bay. (Not that the Iron Lady had a choice, with Deng controlling the city’s water supply, not to mention his two-million-man army.) It was that smirking betrayal that triggered so many wealthy Hong Kongers to invest in the beautiful city of Wen Ge Hua beyond the sea.
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Vancouver gave the fleeing Chinese the freedom to prosper and study and dream. It gave Susanna Ng the liberty to make steamed pork buns and sesame rice balls, seven days a week, 12 hours a day for 40 years. She has watched her little slice of Wen Ge Hua shamble into woe and sadness, one stolen bao and pitiable wastrel at a time.
They don’t come down here. Particularly my daughter; she won’t come here. Only we in this area suffer it
Susanna Ng, owner of the New Town Bakery
“Before, our block was very clean,” she tells me one morning over dried-fish congee and tea. “Before, it didn’t bother me that much because they kept on the north side of Pender Street or on Hastings. But now they are spreading.”
“You talk about these people like they’re COVID,” I snap back. “Like they are bacteria.”
“The government should do something like putting them into some rehab centres and help them to have their feet back on the ground again,” she says.
Perhaps, I suggest, they all should be sent, as they would have been in Chairman Mao’s China, up to Fort St. James or 100 Mile House to perform the manual reform-through-labour called lao gai.
“China is a very civilized place now,” Susanna says. “And rich, too.”
“Do most people in Vancouver care about Pender Street and Hastings Street?”
“I don’t think so,” she replies. “They don’t come down here. Particularly my daughter; she won’t come here. Only we in this area suffer it.
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“A few years ago, a few of them were very aggressive. They came in here. They grabbed customers’ food, grabbed customers’ phones from the table. I was really upset.”
“What happened to them?”
“What happened to them? Nothing. And I guess some of them passed away.”
“Can this be a great city and a great country if this exists and we tolerate it?” I ask.
“Canada is still a great country,” Ms. Ng answers. “Vancouver is a nice place. I’m proud of this city. But I’m also ashamed of it, because the city is getting worse. We have to do something with the drugs.
“We don’t see this in Hong Kong, in China. Here, no punishment. There’s no punishment.
“Here,” says the doyenne of Pender Street, “too much freedom.”
* * *
Send in the bulldozers. Send in the cops. Send in the doctors.
Once a year, send in the clowns.
The advent of autumn signals more than rain and chill at Hastings and Main. For one man from the capital of Mexico — a megalopolis that is no stranger to tearful woe and sprawling poverty — it heralds the coming of The Day of the Dead, the funniest day of the year.
Gerardo Ávila came to Vancouver to perform at Expo 86 — I saw him bounce around on his pogo stick on the fair’s final day. Like the Carnegie Community Centre and the Ovaltine Café, he’s still here, still clowning.
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Every year on Nov. 1, the Día de los muertos, he parades with a marching band along East Hastings Street, and he sets up an ofrenda in a storefront and invites the mourners of Vancouver to display photographs of their beloved and their lost.
“After my wife passed away, I put on a death mask and I danced for hours before the altar,” Ávila tells me. “And one woman got up and danced with me and then others were dancing, even the people all bent over, and they were so happy.
“These people are struggling, right? It’s sad. But there is humanity there. And on this one day, it is so wonderful to see people laughing or having fun. Those people don’t have much to laugh about. But when I dance with the music, and I invite everybody to dance, you have beautiful things happen.
“There are many people there, but not for just one reason. You must not assume. Some people could be just sick. I have found people who tell me, ‘My wife just left me and I’m sleeping here. I have nothing.’ But they are not drunk or not on drugs. And then you get the heavy drugs, too.”
“How does this end?” I wonder. On the Downtown Eastside, it is always the day of the dead and dying.
“People with money can get into a place where they can get off the drug,” the jester answers, “but the poor people, how can they do it? It’s a big, big problem. I don’t know how to fix it. I am not in politics. I am a clown.”
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* * *
On a bulletin board in the vestibule of the library in the Carnegie Community Centre, anguished posters give names to a few of the faceless thousand on the streets outside.
HELP FIND DEZIRAE JEANNETE BERCIER
Age: 21 Height: 5’7” Weight: Approximately 80 lbs.
TRAVELED FROM WINNIPEG, MANITOBA TO VANCOUVER AFTER ANOTHER PERSON PURCHASED HER PLANE TICKET
Her family has had no communication with her since approximately July 19, 2026
– – – – – –
MISSING
Toni Leigh Ann O’Keefe
Hair: Brown Eyes: Green Height: 5’4”
Other features: Missing Front Tooth
– – – – – –
MISSING
SEAN ANTHONY KISCH
WE HAVE TRIED TO FIND YOU, BUT EACH DOOR WE OPEN IS CLOSED
YOU ARE WORTHY
PLEASE CALL SOMEONE. PLEASE HAVE THE COURAGE.
YOU ARE SADLY MISSED
Back at the Airbnb, I take a deep breath and dial the number printed on each family’s appeal.
My first two calls are not answered.
Then Sophie Kisch picks up the phone in Lethbridge, Alta.
“All the posters I sent out, I didn’t get any response at all, and I sent a LOT of posters,” she says.
“Everyone I reached out to, I got no help at all.
“The police said, ‘He is an adult’ and they would not tell me anything.
“I’m sure there are many, many other families in the same situation.
“Sean was very, very, very sick.
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“We got down there, but he was in a coma.
“He died at St. Paul’s Hospital. Sean died on April twelfth.”
* * *
The woman behind the front desk at the Carnegie is a Dënesųłı̨né from the Cold Lake First Nations of Alberta named Deanna Piché.
“The priest gave us that name,” she says.
Deanna Piché has a smile for everyone; the few who survive the streets of Vancouver often are like that — grateful daily and respectful deeply of those still trapped in the quicksand of addiction and hopelessness.
“When I moved to B.C. 13 years ago,” she says, “I assumed everybody drank. I grew up watching my parents drink, my cousins, my grandparents. I just thought it was normal. I thought everybody drank around their kids. So when I moved out here, I was still in my alcoholism. And there were the drugs, too.”
“What got you off the street?” I ask her.
“I was a mother,” she replies. “I had something to live for.” Today, at 40, she lives for four children whose ages range from 13 to 21.
Deanna and I walk into the alley between the library and the old Molson Bank. The laneway, as always, is a garden of horrors that would take a Bosch or a Bruegel to paint. She says that terrifying new drugs — a zoo-animal sedative called “rhinoceros tranq” and the synthetic opioid cychlorphine — already have arrived at Hastings and Main. We may be only at the beginning of the plague.
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“These are my people,” Deanna says. “A lot of them have seen me at my worst. I love them, and I tell them that I love them, and I am real with them, and they say that they love me.”
“What ends this?” I ask her. “Does love end it? Does Jesus end it? Or does it just go on like this for another 40 years?”
“Do you want my God’s honest opinion?” Deanna asks in Death’s alleyway, and I tell her that I do.
“I believe we are in Hell,” she says, “and we all go from here to Heaven.”
Main image: The alleys in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside are a breathtaking panoply of desperation that stretches as far as the eye can see. On Oct. 17, Vancouverites will vote in a non-binding plebiscite about whether to strengthen laws forbidding open-air use of hard drugs. Photo by Rich Lam/National Post
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In Sumas First Nation near Abbotsford, B.C., people have gotten used to oil spills, says Chief Dalton Silver.
Crude oil has been stored, re-routed and carried through the First Nation’s traditional territory for decades. Silver fought the Trans Mountain Expansion Project in 2024 — and lost.
Today, he’s gearing up for another fight: against the proposed Pacific Link pipeline, which will follow a similar route to Trans Mountain.
“It’s absolutely going to go across our territory, no doubt there. And it’s pretty alarming to a lot of our people,” he said.
For years, Silver has worried about how the spills may have affected the community’s drinking water. Now he’s concerned Pacific Link will make things worse.
“I am not in favour of this. Especially the way it’s unfolded, it hasn’t been inclusive whatsoever,” he said. “And the threats that it poses to our territory with the fish, wildlife and in so many ways.”
Silver is among several Indigenous leaders raising concerns about the Carney government’s pipeline plans. In a series of interviews, community leaders along and around the proposed route raised questions and misgivings — while others expressed interest in getting the project built.
Some are feeling left out of the process, even though the project is likely to have an impact on their communities.
Silver says he’s thinking about a legal challenge — and other Indigenous leaders in B.C. are as well. He said some are also talking about direct action, like a blockade.
Myriad concerns, tight timeline
Pacific Link would bring a million barrels of oil a day from Bruderheim, Alta., to Roberts Bank, B.C. Prime Minister Mark Carney has designated the project in the national interest — meaning he wants to build it fast.
At the announcement last week in Fort McMurray, Carney said he wants to get shovels in the ground within a year — with the goal of bringing billions to Canada’s GDP once the pipeline is in operation.
At the same time, Carney has emphasized he wants to build responsibly: taking into account environmental concerns and Indigenous rights, while coming up with the conditions to build the pipeline by September 2027.
It’s an economic opportunity Chief Raymond Powder of Fort McKay First Nation is eager to seize upon. But, he says, Carney’s timeline appears uncomfortably tight.
“I know that the Liberals campaigned on the fact they would like to strengthen the economy,” said Powder, who attended the ceremony in Fort McMurray.
“I would just like to have a little bit of extra time for due diligence.”
Even as Powder is eager to see the pipeline get built, he wants to ensure that First Nations have a meaningful seat at the table — where they can bring up concerns like how the pipeline could damage the environment not just in his lifetime, but for generations to come.
“It’s really, really quite vital and very important, our relationship with the land,” he said.
Concern over toxic leftovers
One of the most important of those concerns are oilsands tailings: the contaminated material left over from mining and extraction projects, which can pollute the land and water.
“How Canada deals with those tailings is yet to be determined. The concerns there are heavy,” said Treaty 8 Grand Chief Trevor Mercredi.
He was also at Carney’s announcement. But he wants to make sure people understand that his presence doesn’t mean his consent.
“Being invited to the announcement is not approval of the project,” he said. “There is no buy-in, there is no consent. There’s a lot of details that have to be worked out.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin said her federal department works with Indigenous partners, provincial and territorial governments, industry and other stakeholders to protect health, Indigenous rights and the environment.
Environment and Climate Change Canada continues to examine options for managing the water used in oilsands tailings ponds, and the Fisheries Act prohibits companies and people from depositing substances that degrade water quality so that it becomes harmful to fish or their habitats, said the spokesperson.
Who gets to be part of the conversation?
One of the details Mercredi is thinking about is who is being brought into the conversation — and who is being left out.
“It is dividing our communities. Only certain communities are being offered equity,” he said.
When announcing Pacific Link, Carney said Indigenous communities would together be offered at least 10 per cent ownership. CBC News asked the Major Projects Office and the minister of Indigenous services about Mercredi’s concerns, but they did not provide comment by deadline.
Some communities have been working with the oil industry for decades, making them better equipped than others to negotiate. Mercredi wants to make sure all nations are benefitting equally.
For many communities, Silver says, the economic opportunity is simply too great to pass up — even if they have deep misgivings about the environmental impact.
“There are so many things that are lacking and so few opportunities that, yes, if there’s some money offered up … for some people there’s a real need,” Silver said.
He said some communities are in dire need of funding for their schools and water systems.
“You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t,” he said.
Robert Phillips, a political executive with the First Nations Summit and the First Nations Leadership Council in British Columbia, says he’s willing to give Carney a chance.
“He has assured us that we will get consent. He has assured us that he will have that meaningful consultation. So I can only take someone at their word,” he said.
“The proof will be in the pudding.”

The richest man on Earth wants Canada to break apart, calling for three provinces to leave Confederation in the wake of an election in Quebec that brought separatists back to power.
Trillionaire Elon Musk, who attended university in Ontario, has fathered children with multiple Canadian women and has called himself “half Canadian,” said Wednesday that he supports those who want their provinces to be independent.
“Quebec should separate,” he wrote on X, the social media platform he owns and has used to share his views with hundreds of millions of people around the world.
Quebec “would be better off” as its own country, he added. “Alberta and Saskatchewan should separate too.”
On Monday, the Parti Québécois won a minority government after promising a third referendum on independence. In less than two weeks, Albertans will vote on whether that province should remain in Canada or begin the process of holding a legally binding referendum on separation. In Saskatchewan, meanwhile, some polls have shown increased support for secession.
On Wednesday, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe responded to Mr. Musk with a single word, posted to X: “No.”
“Our government, our Caucus, and our party support Alberta remaining in Canada,” added Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in a statement.
But Alberta separatists welcomed support from the man who built electric automaker Tesla into a global operation, turned rocket company SpaceX into a major player and has maintained ownership of one of the world’s most powerful social media networks.
He is “somebody that’s done really well and looks at our situation, business-wise, and says we’d be better off on our own. It just gives it some credibility for him to actually think that,” said Mitch Sylvestre, chief executive officer of the Alberta Prosperity Project.
The argument that Alberta, Saskatchewan and Quebec would be better off outside Canada − “I agree with all of that,” Mr. Sylvestre said. “We’ve made the case over and over again.”
Opinion: Alberta’s separatists would sell us out to the Americans
Mr. Musk’s intervention arrives in the wake of a series of pro-secession statements from prominent American political and religious leaders. In January, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called Alberta a “natural partner” for his country. U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened the annexation of Canada. Influential conservative pastors and podcasters in the U.S. have openly supported Alberta secession.
Mr. Musk has cultivated close ties with the Trump administration, most recently being chosen as a leader of Project Meridian, a Pentagon effort to examine the future of warfare.
“The foreign interference in this campaign is unprecedented,” said Thomas Lukaszuk, a former deputy premier of Alberta who has led Forever Canadian, an initiative that has campaigned for Alberta to remain in Canada.
He called Mr. Musk’s comments “offensive.”
“I hope that Canadians in their shopping practices keep in mind whom we are supporting as consumers in Canada,” he said.
Tesla sells tens of thousands of vehicles a year in Canada, and Canada is the fifth-largest market for satellite internet services provided by Starlink, a division of SpaceX, network diagnostics company Ookla reported last year. In 2024, Mr. Musk said Starlink was in 3 per cent of Canadian homes.
Opinion: Sovereign individuals are a threat to democracy in the United States – and Canada, too
But Canadian political leaders have also worked to counter the influence of some of Mr. Musk’s businesses in the country. Last year, Ontario said it had scrapped a $92-million contract with SpaceX for its Starlink service, fulfilling a vow by Premier Doug Ford to retaliate against U.S. tariffs. Prime Minister Mark Carney has said publicly that he intends to work with partners in Europe and Asia to ”diversify away” from Starlink.
Last year, a petition backed by Charlie Angus, then an NDP MP, called on the Prime Minister to revoke Mr. Musk’s Canadian passport.
Mr. Musk moved to Canada from South Africa in 1989 and attended Queen’s University in Kingston for two years. He also worked on a cousin’s farm in Saskatchewan, once posting a photo of himself holding a hammer and wearing a white cowboy hat.
”I love Canada! I’m half Canadian,” he wrote in 2017. “My Mom was born in Regina. My grandfather (her Dad) was American, born in Minnesota.”
He has since soured on the place, his condemnation growing more strident during the years Justin Trudeau was prime minister.
“Canada is not a real country,” he wrote in one message, then deleted, in response to the petition against his citizenship.
He accused Mr. Trudeau of “trying to crush free speech in Canada,” calling it “shameful.” He criticized Canada’s bilingual laws, which he called “extremely hypocritical and unfair!” He publicly sided with Mr. Trump when the U.S. President suggested Canada treats American banks unfairly.
In 2024, he said it was “high time” Mr. Trudeau was voted out of office.
Early last year, he sneered at a statement from Mr. Trudeau that said “there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States.”
Mr. Musk responded on the day after Mr. Trudeau said he would resign, using a title Mr. Trump often used to troll the prime minister: “Girl, you’re not the governor of Canada anymore, so doesn’t matter what you say.”

Refugee rights advocates say they are shocked that the federal immigration minister appeared to be unfamiliar with the landmark Supreme Court decision widely considered to be the cornerstone of the Canadian refugee protection system.
In an interview with Radio-Canada, Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab was repeatedly asked about the 1985 Singh v. Minister of Employment and Immigration case.
This Singh decision ruled that asylum seekers are guaranteed the Charter right to fundamental justice and led to the creation of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.
It is also a key argument in the legal challenge to the Carney government’s immigration reforms that restrict who is eligible for Refugee Board hearings.
“Honestly, I was extremely shocked,” said Gauri Sreenivasan, co-executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees. “It’s very concerning that the minister in charge of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada would not be fully aware of the Supreme Court’s Singh decision.”
Diab was interviewed in July by Radio-Canada’s Les murs: le périple des migrants vers le Canada, a documentary podcast launched three weeks ago that examines Canada’s asylum system.
She was asked a series of questions, including about the Safe Third Country Agreement and Bill C-12, the Carney government’s immigration reforms passed last March.
One of the most controversial changes in C-12 was that asylum claims made more than a year after an individual’s first entry into Canada are no longer referred to the Refugee Board, but instead are given a pre-removal risk assessment.
The assessment is conducted by an Immigration Canada officer to ensure that a person is not at risk of being tortured or killed if returned to their country — and typically includes a written submission rather than an oral hearing.
Diab said in French that Bill C-12 “respects our Canadian Charter,” adding that she herself is a lawyer and that the changes are meant to address the backlog in asylum cases.
When pressed about the argument that under the Singh decision asylum seekers have a constitutional right to an oral hearing, she replied that since the law is new, the government would continue to monitor the situation.
Radio-Canada then asked her point-blank if she was familiar with the Singh decision. After a pause, Diab asked that the name of the decision be repeated.
When told again that it was the Singh decision handed down by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1985, she said she would have to check with her team.
“There are many Singhs and many decisions,” said Diab.
Radio-Canada then specified that it was the decision that led to the creation of the Refugee Board, to which she responded: “Ah, OK.”
With the Singh decision, the Supreme Court of Canada recognized, among other things, the right of asylum seekers to an oral hearing, according to several experts Radio-Canada spoke with.
“[The claimant] is entitled to a full hearing on their file so that they can explain their situation before a competent decision-maker,” said François Crépeau, professor emeritus of public international law at McGill University and former United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants.
“That is why the Immigration and Refugee Board was created in 1989. It was to meet the requirements of the Singh decision.”
Bill C-12 is being challenged in the courts. Lawyers allege it violates Canada’s legal obligations under both domestic and international law.
Immigration Canada maintains that the Singh decision is respected by Bill C-12.
“The Supreme Court in Singh found that in order to meet the requirements of fundamental justice, an oral hearing is required when there is a credibility issue at stake. The Supreme Court did not find that in all cases an oral hearing is required,” a department lawyer told a parliamentary committee studying Bill C-12 in February.
Crépeau disagrees: “Removing a full hearing … is a violation of the conditions set by the Singh decision.”
Immediately after the interview, Diab’s office insisted that the minister was well aware of the Singh decision, but that due to the language barrier she had not fully understood the questions.
The podcast interview was conducted in French, which is not Diab’s first language.
However, during two appearances in English before two different Senate committees studying Bill C-12, the minister also did not answer questions regarding the Singh decision, deferring to department officials and lawyers.
‘Issue of competence’: advocate
“I believe there is certainly an issue of competence,” said Louis-Philippe Jannard of TCRI, a Quebec umbrella association of more than 160 organizations working with refugees and immigrants.
“The issue of the Singh decision was raised during the legislative process for Bill C-12 before both the House of Commons and the Senate. So for it not to be on the minister’s radar is surprising to say the least.”
Radio-Canada asked the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) whether, given these criticisms, Diab still has the confidence of Prime Minister Mark Carney.
PMO spokesperson Renée LeBlanc Proctor said in an email to Radio-Canada that Diab plays an “essential” role in the implementation of the federal government’s mandate to bring down immigration to “viable” levels while attracting the best talent in the world.
“She continues this work,” Proctor said.

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OTTAWA — Hours after the Parti Québécois was elected to a minority government, Prime Minister Mark Carney said he spoke with premier-designate Paul St-Pierre Plamondon and promised to work with him toward increasing sovereignty for Canadians.
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Speaking to reporters on Tuesday morning, Carney said he had just congratulated the incoming Quebec premier and discussed ways to work together.
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On Monday evening, Quebecers elected a minority Parti Québécois government to replace the Coalition Avenir Quebec, which was eradicated from the electoral map.
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St-Pierre Plamondon, known as PSPP, committed to hold a referendum on Quebec’s sovereignty within his first mandate if elected, but only after U.S. President Donald Trump leaves the Oval Office in 2029.
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The PQ’s election could set major roadblocks in Carney’s “cooperative federalism” strategy to build major infrastructure and Canadian unity. For example, PSPP promised to kibosh the Alto high speed rail system between Quebec City and Toronto.
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Tuesday, various federal cabinet ministers promised to work with their new provincial counterparts while avoiding any criticism of PSPP and his party’s platform.
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Heritage Minister Marc Miller, who famously got into a war of words with PSPP last winter, said he expected the premier designate to represent his interests as a Quebecer.
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“He’smypremier,andyouknow,asaQuebecer,Iexpecthim to behave that way,” Miller said.
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In the meantime, Carney said he would continue to promote cooperative federalism to the separatist leader and argued for the need for a “strong Quebec within a strong Canada.”
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Asked if he was concerned about a Quebec referendum, Carney retorted that he too was working towards sovereignty, but for Canada.
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“We takeadvantageoftherealopportunitiesthatexistforourcountrybecauseofCanadians,becauseofCanadianvalues,becauseofCanadianstrengthstoexpandourtradingnetwork and to become more sovereign in Canada,” Carney told reporters Tuesday morning.