‘So crazy’ Nenshi says of Alberta’s new powers
Former Calgary mayor and current NDP leadership candidate Naheed Nenshi says the Alberta government is operating out of spite with a bill that would grant it sweeping powers over municipalities, including the right to fire councillors, overturn bylaws and postpone elections.
The proposed law would also allow political parties to run on municipal ballots in Edmonton and Calgary as soon as next year.
“It’s so crazy. It’s very clear that this government is now operated on spite and arrogance,” Nenshi told reporters in Lethbridge on Thursday evening.
“They’re clearly doing this out of revenge on the voters of Calgary and Edmonton who didn’t vote the way they wanted them to.”
Nenshi, 52, was elected mayor of Calgary in 2010 and won three terms before deciding to bow out before the 2021 municipal election.
He and MLAs Kathleen Ganley, Sarah Hoffman and Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse, as well as Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan, took part in the NDP’s first leadership debate.
Alberta Municipal Affairs Minster Ric McIver says the new powers are justified to ensure fair elections and accountability from municipal leaders, and they would only be used as a last resort.
“My most fervent wish is that this authority is never ever used. We don’t want to intervene in municipal matters,” McIver told reporters before the bill was introduced in the legislature Thursday.
Nenshi said councils are democratically elected. He said current Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek probably received more votes than every United Conservative Party MLA in Calgary.
“To me, that is no way to run a government. This really highlights that this government is fundamentally disinterested in governing as a government, but actually only working on their whims and their needs, their self-indulgence.”
The board of directors of Alberta Municipalities said political parties in local elections is a bad idea and something most Albertans don’t want.
“Alberta’s local governments have no interest in fighting with the province. Nor do they want to be caught in the middle of an Alberta-Ottawa ‘forever war,”’ the association said in a statement.
Ganley, a former justice minister, said the move is ridiculous.
“Basically, they want to be in control of everything. Municipal politics is an incredibly important place. It shouldn’t be the little league to provincial politics the way the UCP wants to make it,” she said.
Hoffman said municipal governments have been clear on their opposition to the idea.
“The local councillors don’t want it. We don’t want it,” she said.
“I think Danielle Smith is very keen on taking more power. This is one of the reasons she’s brought in this legislation.”
The bill makes other changes. It would ban the use of electronic voting tabulators, forcing municipalities to hand-count ballots, in order to better protect the integrity of the vote, said McIver.
“If we can reduce doubt in the public’s confidence about who is declared the winners, we think that rises above all other considerations.”
In the past, Smith has taken aim at the province’s two largest cities, saying in February that single-use plastic bylaws showed city councils had gone off the partisan rails.
“Because they’re getting far more political and far more ideological, there probably needs to be more transparency about that,” she said at the time.
Two weeks ago, Smith’s government also introduced a bill that would give it the power to veto any deal between the federal government and provincial entities, including municipalities and post-secondary schools.
Demetrio Jackson was desperate for medical help when the paramedics arrived.
The 43-year-old was surrounded by police who arrested him after responding to a trespassing call in a Wisconsin parking lot. Officers had shocked him with a Taser and pinned him as he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. Now he sat on the ground with hands cuffed behind his back and took in oxygen through a mask.
Then, officers moved Jackson to his side so a medic could inject him with a potent knockout drug.
“It’s just going to calm you down,” an officer assured Jackson. Within minutes, Jackson’s heart stopped. He never regained consciousness and died two weeks later.
Jackson’s 2021 death illustrates an often-hidden way fatal U.S. police encounters end: not with the firing of an officer’s gun but with the silent use of a medical syringe.
The practice of giving sedatives to people detained by police has spread quietly across the nation over the last 15 years, built on questionable science and backed by police-aligned experts, an investigation led by The Associated Press has found. Based on thousands of pages of law enforcement and medical records and videos of dozens of incidents, the investigation shows how a strategy intended to reduce violence and save lives has resulted in some avoidable deaths.
At least 94 people died after they were given sedatives and restrained by police from 2012 through 2021, according to findings by the AP in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism. That’s nearly 10% of the more than 1,000 deaths identified during the investigation of people subdued by police in ways that are not supposed to be fatal. About half of the 94 who died were Black, including Jackson.
Behind the racial disparity is a disputed medical condition called excited delirium, which fueled the rise of sedation outside hospitals. Critics say its purported symptoms, including “superhuman strength” and high pain tolerance, play into racist stereotypes about Black people and lead to biased decisions about who needs sedation.
The use of sedatives in half these incidents has never been reported, as scrutiny typically focuses on the actions of police, not medics. Elijah McClain’s 2019 death in Aurora, Colorado, was a rare exception: Two paramedics were convicted of giving McClain an overdose of ketamine, the same drug given to Jackson. One was sentenced last month to five years in prison and the second faces sentencing Friday.
It was impossible to determine the role sedatives may have played in each of the 94 deaths, which often involved the use of other potentially dangerous force on people who had taken drugs or consumed alcohol. Medical experts told the AP their impact could be negligible in people who were already dying; the final straw that triggered heart or breathing failure in the medically distressed; or the main cause of death when given in the wrong circumstances or mishandled.
While sedatives were mentioned as a cause or contributing factor in a dozen official death rulings, authorities often didn’t even investigate whether injections were appropriate. Medical officials have traditionally viewed them as mostly benign treatments. Now some say they may be playing a bigger role than previously understood and deserve more scrutiny.
Time and time again, the AP found, agitated people who were held by police facedown, often handcuffed and with officers pushing on their backs, struggled to breathe and tried to get free. Citing combativeness, paramedics administered sedatives, further slowing their breathing. Cardiac and respiratory arrest often occurred within minutes.
Paramedics drugged some people who were not a threat to themselves or others, violating treatment guidelines. Medics often didn’t know whether other drugs or alcohol were in people’s systems, although some combinations cause serious side effects.
Police officers sometimes improperly encouraged paramedics to give shots to suspects they were detaining.
Responders occasionally joked about the medications’ power to knock their subjects out. “Night, night” is heard on videos before deaths in California, Tennessee and Florida.
Emergency medical workers, “if they aren’t careful, can simply become an extension of the police’s handcuffs, of their weapons, of their nightsticks,” said Claire Zagorski, a paramedic and an addiction researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.
Supporters say sedatives enable rapid treatment for drug-related behavioral emergencies and psychotic episodes, protect front-line responders from violence and are safely administered thousands of times annually to get people with life-threatening conditions to hospitals. Critics say forced sedation should be strictly limited or banned.too risky to be administered during police encounters.
The Assocaited Press