When it comes to addressing the national overdose crisis, the Canadian public seems ideologically split: some groups prioritize recovery and abstinence, while others lean heavily into “harm reduction” and destigmatization. In most cases, we would defer to the experts—but they are similarly divided here.

This factionalism was evident at the Canadian Society of Addiction Medicine’s (CSAM) annual scientific conference this year, which is the country’s largest gathering of addiction medicine practitioners (e.g., physicians, nurses, psychiatrists). Throughout the event, speakers alluded to the field’s disunity and the need to bridge political gaps through collaborative, not adversarial, dialogue.

This was a major shift from previous conferences, which largely ignored the long-brewing battles among addiction experts, and reflected a wider societal rethink of the harm reduction movement, which was politically hegemonic until very recently.

Recovery-oriented care versus harm reductionism

For decades, most Canadian addiction experts focused on shepherding patients towards recovery and encouraging drug abstinence. However, in the 2000s, this began to shift with the rise of harm reductionism, which took a more tolerant view of drug use.

On the surface, harm reductionists advocated for pragmatically minimizing the negative consequences of risky use—for example, through needle exchanges and supervised consumption sites. Additionally, though, many of them also claimed that drug consumption is not inherently wrong or shameful, and that associated harms are primarily caused not by drugs themselves but by the stigmatization and criminalization of their use. In their view, if all hard drugs were legalized and destigmatized, then they would eventually become as banal as alcohol and tobacco.

The harm reductionists gained significant traction in the 2010s thanks to the popularization of street fentanyl. The drug’s incredible potency caused an explosion of deaths and left users with formidable opioid tolerances that rendered traditional addiction medications, such as methadone, less effective. Amid this crisis, policymakers embraced harm reduction out of an immediate need to make drug use slightly less lethal. This typically meant supervising consumption, providing sterile drug paraphernalia, and offering “cleaner” substances for addicts to use.

Many abstinence-oriented addiction experts supported some aspects of harm reduction. They valued interventions that could demonstrably save lives without significant tradeoffs, and saw them as both transitional and as part of a larger public health toolkit. Distributing clean needles and Naloxone, an overdose-reversal medication, proved particularly popular. “People can’t recover if they’re dead,” went a popular mantra from the time.

Saving lives or enabling addiction?

However, many of these addiction experts were also uncomfortable with the broader political ideologies animating the movement and did not believe that drug use should be normalized. Many felt that some experimental harm reduction interventions in Canada were either conceptually flawed or that their implementation had deviated from what had originally been promised.

Some argued, not unreasonably, that the country’s supervised consumption sites are being mismanaged and failing to connect vulnerable addicts to recovery-oriented care. Most of their ire, however, was directed at “safer supply”—a novel strategy wherein addicts are given free drugs, predominantly hydromorphone (a heroin-strength opioid), without any real supervision.

While safer supply was meant to dissuade recipients from using riskier street drugs, addiction physicians widely reported that patients were selling their free hydromorphone to buy stronger illicit fentanyl, thereby flooding communities with diverted opioids and exacerbating the addiction crisis. They also noted that the “evidence base” behind safer supply was exceptionally poor and would not meet normal health-care standards.

Yet, critics of safer supply, and harm reduction radicalism more broadly, were often afraid to voice their opinions. The harm reductionists were institutionally and culturally dominant in the late 2010s and early 2020s, and opponents often faced activist harassment, aggressive gaslighting, and professional marginalization. A culture of self-censorship formed, giving both the public and influential policymakers a false impression of scientific consensus where none actually existed.

The resurgence in recovery-oriented strategies

Things changed in the mid-2020s. British Columbia’s failed drug decriminalization experiment eroded public trust in harm reductionism, and the scandalous failures of safer supply—and supervised consumption sites, too—were widely publicized in the national media.¹

Whereas harm reductionism was once so powerful that opponents were dismissed as anti-scientific, there is now a resurgent interest in alternative, recovery-oriented strategies.

These cultural shifts have fuelled a more fractious, but intellectually honest, national debate about how to tackle the overdose crisis. This has ruptured the institutional dominance enjoyed by harm reductionists in the addiction medicine world and allowed their previously silenced opponents to speak up.

When I first attended CSAM’s annual scientific conference two years ago, recovery-oriented critics of radical harm reductionism were not given any platforms, with the exception of one minor presentation on safer supply diversion. Their beliefs seemed clandestine and iconoclastic, despite seemingly having wide buy-in from the addiction medicine community.

While vigorous criticism of harm reductionism was not a major feature of this year’s conference, there was open recognition that legitimate opposition to the movement existed. One major presentation, given by Dr. Didier Jutras-Aswad, explicitly cited safer supply and involuntary treatment as two foci of contention, and encouraged harm reductionists and recovery-oriented experts to grab coffee with one another so that they might foster some sense of mutual understanding.²

Is this change enough?

While CSAM should be commended for encouraging cross-ideological dialogue, its efforts, in this respect, were also superficial and vague. They chose to play it safe, and much was left unsaid and unexplored.

Two addiction medicine doctors I spoke with at the conference—both of whom were critics of safer supply and asked for anonymity—were nonplussed. “You can feel the tension in the air,” said one, who likened the conference to an awkward family dinner where everyone has tacitly agreed to ignore a recent feud. “Reconciliation requires truth,” said the other.

One could also argue that the organization has taken an inconsistent approach to encouraging respectful dialogue. When recovery-oriented experts were being bullied for their views a few years ago, they were largely left on their own. Now that their side is ascendant, and harm reductionists are politically vulnerable, mutual respect is in fashion again.

When I asked to interview the organization about navigating dissension, they sent a short, unspecific statement that emphasized “evidence-based practices” and the “benefits of exploring a variety of viewpoints, and the need to constantly challenge or re-evaluate our own positions based on the available science.”

But one cannot simply appeal to “evidence-based practices” when research is contentious and vulnerable to ideological meddling or misrepresentation.

Compared to other medical disciplines, addiction medicine is highly political. Grappling with larger, non-empirical questions about the role of drug use in society has always necessitated taking a philosophical stance on social norms, and this has been especially true since harm reductionists began emphasizing the structural forces that shape and fuel drug use.

Until Canada’s addiction medicine community facilitates a more robust and open conversation about the politicization of research, and the divided—and inescapably political—nature of their work, the national debate on the overdose crisis will be shambolic. This will have negative downstream impacts on policymaking and, ultimately, people’s lives.

Marco Navarro-Génie

When educators argue that children who don’t fit their system should have nowhere else to go, you’re witnessing institutional self-interest dressed up as social justice.

A petition is making its way through Alberta that could fundamentally reshape education in the province, and not for the better. The “Alberta Funds Public Schools” initiative, launched by Calgary high school teacher Alicia Taylor, asks a deceptively simple question: “Should the Government of Alberta end its current practice of allocating public funds to accredited independent (private) schools?”

Taylor isn’t just any teacher. She’s a Calgary district representative on the Alberta Teachers’ Association’s governing council. And while the ATA has been careful to maintain that this is Taylor’s personal initiative, they’ve conspicuously failed to repudiate it. In fact, ATA president Jason Schilling has publicly stated that members “take exception” to public dollars going to private schools, while simultaneously claiming the association’s policy isn’t “against private schools.” This is the kind of rhetorical contorsions that deserves scrutiny.

The timing is telling. The petition was approved just as 51,000 Alberta teachers launched the province’s first-ever province-wide strike. Taylor called this “a happy accident,” noting that striking teachers now have “a little more spare time than normal” to collect signatures. When your “personal initiative” coincidentally launches during a labor action and benefits from union members’ sudden availability, reasonable people might wonder how personal it really is.

To be fair, let’s present the strongest version of the argument Taylor and her supporters are making. They claim that Alberta spends the least per student in Canada on public education while funding private schools at 70%, the highest rate in the country. This creates what they see as a perverse incentive structure: public money flowing to selective institutions while universal public schools struggle with overcrowding and teacher shortages.

The math seems straightforward: $461 million currently goes to independent schools serving about 50,000 students. Redirect that money to the public system serving over 600,000 students, and you could fund thousands of teachers and educational assistants. You could reduce class sizes. You could provide more support for struggling students.

They argue this is about fairness and democratic accountability. Taxpayers fund education for the common good, and that investment should go to schools that must accept every student, not selective alternatives that can charge tuition on top of public subsidies. Private schools exist and thrive in Ontario without public funding. Why should Alberta be different?

Moreover, they contend, the current system subsidizes exit from the public system, creating a vicious cycle where families with resources opt out, taking their advocacy and engagement with them, leaving behind an increasingly residualized public system serving the most vulnerable students.

Underlying much of this argument is a class-based resentment: the notion that some families can access alternatives amounts to unfair privilege. This framing reveals more about the advocates than about education policy. Envy is never a good look in educators. When teachers’ unions frame educational choice as a problem because some families have options others don’t, they’re not arguing for equity. They’re arguing for enforced equality of limitation, where if not everyone can have something, no one should.

It sounds compelling. It’s also dangerously wrong.

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Let’s start with the most fundamental flaw in this argument: taking the money doesn’t make the students disappear. Nearly 50,000 students attend independent schools in Alberta, plus another 8,000 in private early childhood programs. These children don’t vanish if funding is eliminated. They flood into a public system that petition supporters themselves admit is already overcrowded. The math is straightforward: forcing these students back into public schools would cost taxpayers an additional $300 million, more than the government’s most recent settlement offer to teachers. This is about forcing conformity at massive cost, while improving nothing.

But the financial argument, while important, pales beside the human cost. Consider what this petition really proposes: eliminating educational options for approximately 80% of independent school families whose income is at or below the provincial average. These aren’t wealthy elites. They’re middle-income families making sacrifices to access education that works for their children.

The class warfare rhetoric of the petition obscures this reality. When advocates frame school choice as privilege, they ignore that Alberta’s funding model specifically makes choice accessible to families who couldn’t otherwise afford it. Eliminating this doesn’t level the playing field. It simply ensures that only the truly wealthy retain educational options.

Here’s what makes this proposal particularly egregious: its devastating impact on neurodiverse learners. Many of the fastest-growing independent schools in Alberta serve students with special learning needs. These are children who struggled, or failed, in standard public school classrooms. They’re students with ADHD who need smaller classes and more movement. They’re autistic students who thrive with structured routines and specialized approaches. They’re kids with dyslexia who need intensive, systematic literacy intervention that their public school couldn’t provide.

The petition’s supporters blithely suggest these students should return to the very system that couldn’t serve them. When teachers are striking over classroom complexity and overcrowding, the proposed solution is to add tens of thousands more students, many with intensive needs, to those same classrooms. This is illogical and cruel.

The ATA argues that a “well-funded public system should be meeting the needs of those kids in the first place.” Should. That’s doing a lot of work in that sentence. Yes, the public system *should* meet every child’s needs. But it doesn’t. And there’s no evidence that simply throwing more money at the problem will change that.

Whatever challenges Alberta’s public schools face, it’s naive and simplistic to believe more money will fix them. There is no study in the world that connects higher teacher wages with better educational outcomes. The problems in public education are complex, structural, and often resistant to solutions that amount to “spend more.”

Neurodiverse students aren’t one-size-fits-all. A student who thrives in a Montessori environment with hands-on learning and self-directed exploration might struggle in a traditional classroom. A student who needs the structure and explicit instruction of a classical education might flounder with inquiry-based learning. An autistic student might do brilliantly in a small school with consistent routines and sensory-aware design, but melt down daily in a crowded comprehensive school.

Eliminating funding for independent schools eliminates options, period. It tells families: your child must fit into our system, or fail. For neurodiverse learners, this is often a sentence to years of struggle, frustration, and educational failure.

But this goes beyond neurodiversity. It’s about every kind of educational diversity. Alberta’s independent schools include French immersion programs, Indigenous-focused schools, classical academies, arts-intensive programs, schools with specific pedagogical approaches, faith-based education reflecting diverse religious traditions, and schools serving new Canadian communities with specific cultural and linguistic needs.

This is educational pluralism: the recognition that in a diverse democracy, different families have different values, different children have different needs, and no single approach serves everyone well. The ATA’s position, however much they try to obscure it, is that this diversity is a problem to be solved. That public money should only support one kind of school: the government-run, union-staffed, standardized public school. Every other option should be available. if at all, only to families wealthy enough to afford full-freight tuition.

This entrenches inequality rather than reducing it. Right now, Alberta’s funding model democratizes choice. A middle-income family whose child isn’t thriving in public school has options. Eliminate public funding, and those options exist only for the wealthy. The result is a rigid two-tier system where the rich can escape and everyone else is trapped.

The envious framing of the ATA’s position becomes clearer here. They see that some families can access alternatives and conclude the problem is the alternatives, not the lack of universal access. This is the logic of enforced mediocrity: if we can’t give everyone excellent options, we’ll eliminate the excellent options that exist. It’s a race to the bottom masquerading as equity.

Let’s be honest about what’s really happening here. The ATA represents teachers in public schools. It has no role in independent schools. Every student in an independent school is a student in a classroom where the union has no power, no collective bargaining rights, and no ability to call strikes that disrupt families.

When Taylor notes that families with children in independent schools experienced “business as usual” during the strike while public school families scrambled for childcare, she’s unwittingly making the case against her own position. Educational diversity means resilience. It means not every family is held hostage to a single system’s labor disputes.

The union has an institutional interest in maximizing enrollment in schools where it holds power. This petition advances that interest. That’s no coincidence. The careful distance the ATA maintains (“It’s not our petition, but we agree with its goals”) is transparent political cover.

Here’s the assumption underlying this entire petition: if we eliminate alternatives and force all students into the public system, somehow that system will improve. This is supremely naive. Suppressing educational variety and choice won’t improve the ails of the public system. It will simply trap more students in whatever problems already exist. If public schools are struggling with classroom management, adding students who left won’t help. If they’re struggling with diverse learning needs, adding students with intensive special needs won’t help. If they’re struggling with overcrowding, adding 50,000 more students certainly won’t help.

The theory seems to be that if we eliminate choice, the system will be forced to improve to meet everyone’s needs. But that’s not how monopolies work. When you have captive customers with no alternatives, the pressure to improve actually decreases. Competition, choice, and the possibility of exit are what create pressure for systems to innovate and serve their clients well.

Educational diversity makes everyone better off. It provides options for students who struggle in traditional settings. It allows innovation and experimentation. It respects that families have different values and priorities. It creates competitive pressure that benefits all schools. And it even costs taxpayers less because families contribute tuition on top of partial public funding.

The Taylor petition claims to be about fairness and adequate resources. In reality, it’s about control and conformity. It would devastate neurodiverse learners, reduce educational variety, eliminate options for middle-income families, and force tens of thousands of students into an already overcrowded system, all while costing taxpayers hundreds of millions more.

And for what? The promise that somehow, magically, removing alternatives will make the remaining system better? That’s wishful thinking dressed up as education policy.

The ATA may not have officially endorsed this petition, but they haven’t repudiated it either. Their silence is instructing, considering that no one would benefit most from the success of such petition than the ATA. And Alberta families, especially those with children who learn differently, should pay attention to what that silence means for their future choices.

When Taylor launched this petition as a “Calgary district representative on the Alberta Teachers’ Association’s governing council,” whatever the pretense of privacy, she wasn’t acting in a vacuum. When the ATA president publicly supports the petition’s goals while maintaining plausible deniability about its origin, that’s a political strategy. When striking teachers use their “spare time” to collect signatures for a petition that would eliminate non-union schools, that’s campaign coordination.

The envious rhetoric about “privilege” and “fairness” obscures what this petition does. It doesn’t help struggling students. It doesn’t improve public education. It doesn’t create equity. It eliminates options for middle-income families. It’s the worst kind of class politics: making everyone worse off in the name of equality.

Educational diversity is a necessity for a functioning pluralistic society. It’s essential for neurodiverse learners who don’t fit the standard mold. It’s crucial for families who want education that reflects their values. And it’s fundamental to the idea that parents, not government bureaucrats or union officials, should have the primary say in their children’s education.

Any proposal to eliminate educational diversity, whatever its rhetorical packaging, deserves to fail. And Albertans should see this petition for what it truly is: an institutional power play to eliminate competition and force conformity, motivated more by envy than by any genuine concern for educational outcomes.

The stakes are high. Educational freedom, once lost, is extraordinarily difficult to regain. When educators tell you that children who don’t fit their system should have nowhere else to go, believe them. Then fight back. Alberta families should resist this petition with everything they have.

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