“That kind of hopelessness”: loss of rural services fuelling social problems
Brett McKay
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
This is the second article in a two-part series on the loss of social services in rural Alberta and the social problems that have followed.
Throughout the pandemic, provincially funded social supports were scaled back in rural Alberta. Services were consolidated. In-person offices closed. And long-running programs abruptly ended.
The absence of Alberta Job Corps, a skills training program that paid hundreds of participants each year to work on public projects, is still being felt by people in the Lac La Biche region. Some draw a line from the program’s empty building and untended gardens to the recent rise in social problems.
Crime statistics reported by the local RCMP detachment show the number of break and enters increased by 18 per cent between 2022 and 2023. The number of offences related to possession of stolen goods was up 54 per cent in 2023 compared to the year before.
In nearby Cold Lake, the rural RCMP detachment recorded a 48 per cent spike in vehicle theft last year, and nearly twice as many incidents related to stolen property.
Darrell Cadieux, the owner of an oilfield service company in the Sentinel Industrial Park in Lac La Biche County, has helped organize local business owners in a neighbourhood watch following a rash of break ins. In a previous interview, Cadieux said he recognizes that for people who fall behind in the region, there are few paths to get back out.
“We don’t have a lot of industry around here, not really close. So, jobs are a little bit more difficult to obtain here, especially if you don’t have an education or you don’t have family support,” he said.
“I think what we’ve experienced a bit here is just that kind of hopelessness.”
This is where it leads
Kathy Hayward completed the Job Corps training program in Lac La Biche in 2017 and was subsequently employed as a lead hand and trainer until the program was shuttered. She now works several different jobs in the Lakeland region and says she can see the effects of that hopelessness all around in reports of brazen vehicle thefts and worsening drug use.
“It’s just non-stop,” Hayward said. “I would pick up people from Cold Lake and Bonnyville sometimes, and I don’t know if I could say which one is worse, but I know Bonnyville is horrible. Bonnyville is probably the worst meth town in the area.”
“There’s nothing for people to go to. There is no go-to place anymore to try and help them. I don’t even think you can go walk into social services anymore. You have to make an appointment to some office in Edmonton.
“There’s a lot of people that that are probably more lost now. It’s a real shame.”
Karen Rosvold, County of Grande Prairie councillor and Rural Municipalities of Alberta board member, said communities throughout rural Alberta are grappling with the same issues. Social programs have been cut, centralized, and shifted online, and the social costs of those decisions downloaded to the municipalities.
“There is a housing unit for the hard to home in one of our hamlets, and it is full,” Rosvold said. “But in that community, we’ve lost Alberta Supports… anything that is provincially run has been pulled out of the community.”
“I just came from a community crime meeting. And that’s where a lot of this leads. If we can’t help them early enough, then we deal with them on the other end,” she said. “If the people that are honestly trying to help themselves can’t get access to those programs, then they’re going to fall back on things that aren’t necessarily as good for them.”
Rosvold said she acknowledges the provincial government is trying, but those making policy choices are often far removed from affected communities.
“They don’t know what’s going on at Rainbow Lake. They don’t know what’s going on at Pincher Creek or Lac La Biche. They’re making decisions from an office building in Edmonton that have major ramifications across the province,” she said.
“I live in this community. We have to live in our communities. And so we’re talking to people all the time, and it would be wonderful if [the provincial government] would actually talk to us so they can see what’s going on in our communities rather than just making decisions on our behalf.”
Adding up long-term impacts
The downstream social impacts of the closure of the employment program are tough to quantify. But some of the economic benefits it brought to the community are easier to add up, says Dale Crossland, former supervisor of the Lac La Biche Job Corps.
“In the last year, that would have been 2021, from March until January, our gas purchases in Lac La Biche were $90,000,” Crossland said. The program struck deals with local shops to supply all the work boots for the 18 new trainees coming in every four weeks and food for the roughly 50 people in the Job Corps facility on any given day.
From restaurants to manufacturing facilities, Crossland said many employers still have people on staff who got their foot in the door through the work training program.
These types of community and social benefits often take a back seat to budget decisions, said Guy Smith, president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees.
“I think this government in particular looks at what they would consider easy picking for eliminating public programs and then contracting it to a private operator,” Smith said.
“They don’t usually look at the social benefits of certain programs, in terms of the long-term impacts they may have on improving lives of not only individuals, but communities as well. I think they always look at the bottom line as to how much it costs, and do they think it’s worth it. That’s an unfortunate way to look at public services.”
“It will get worse”
Alberta Job Corps was itself created because of cuts to public services. In 1993, Ralph Klein’s Progressive Conservative government drastically restructured the province’s welfare system, creating three separate work initiative programs, including Job Corps.
The decision was contentious, and over 100 social workers opted to take the government’s voluntary severance package. Among the supporters of the restructuring and budding work program ideas, ironically, was a young Jason Kenney, then executive director of the private lobby group the Alberta Taxpayers Association.
Presaging his own time in office, Kenney told the Calgary Herald “These are painful cuts and there will be a lot of dissatisfied people, but unfortunately this is the type of pain everyone is going to have to share over the next few years, and it will get worse.”
In the years following, Alberta’s government claimed extraordinary rates of success for all three programs. Job Corps, which the government claimed had by 1995 resulted in 85 per cent of those enrolled no longer being on income assistance one year after completing the program, was touted as proof the reforms were working.
The actual rate of success varied from location to location. Few Job Corps programs were able to replicate the sustained positive outcomes exhibited in Lac La Biche.
“The program was a live program that changed a lot over the years,” Crossland said.
“We tried a lot of things over the years that didn’t work,” he said, but staff learned and evolved with each setback. “What we found is that when you enable people, when you give them the self-confidence, they will succeed. And self-confidence comes with skills.”
Crossland said he still hears from old trainees, and almost any time he is in Lac La Biche, someone asks when he’s going to get Job Corps opened again. “It’s like, my goodness, I don’t know if we’ll even open it again.”
Whether or not the program ever gets a second life, Hayward says she hopes people will recognize what was accomplished while it was operational.
“I don’t want what we did to be forgotten.”
Brett McKay
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
St. Albert Gazette
