"An Open Drug Market": Sean Strickland Puts Edmonton's Failures on Blast
Updated: 3 days ago
Sean Strickland didn't come to Edmonton to talk policy. The two-time UFC middleweight champion came to fight at Rogers Place. But after one walk through downtown, he said out loud what a lot of Edmontonians have been saying for years, and he said it to millions of people.
What Strickland said
At first he defended the city. On Tuesday night he posted: "The guys saying Edmonton is ghetto have clearly never been to a major US city." (X, Oct. 13)
By Wednesday morning, he'd changed his mind: "Well update on Edmonton..... Left downtown and yep this place is a trash can. Zombies everywhere... it's definitely a open drug market with zero police." (X, Oct. 14)
He followed it with a video of a man lying motionless on a sidewalk: "Pretty confident this man is dead or least freshly assaulted." (X, Oct. 14)
Then he went after the politics: "Liberals 'We should end drug addiction by decriminalization and giving them a zone where they can live and do drugs freely'... Liberals love drug addiction." (X, Oct. 14)
And Thursday morning, replying to a local news account, he talked about a downtown coffee shop owner of 10 years whose windows look "like hes getting ready for the purge," and summed it up: "You love the addicts but hate the taxpayers." (X, Oct. 15)
You can roll your eyes at Strickland. Plenty of people do, and some of his posts this week were crude and mocked people who are suffering. But the man lying on the sidewalk is real. The boarded-up windows are real. And the numbers are worse than anything he posted.
The numbers politicians don't want on a billboard
Homelessness: Homeward Trust's By Name List counted 3,795 Edmontonians experiencing homelessness as of May 2026. In March, the list showed 737 people sleeping outside, 689 in shelters and 2,292 provisionally housed, according to a City of Edmonton council report. Over 50 per cent are Indigenous. The 2025 Point-in-Time count was up 86 per cent from 2021. And the by-name list only counts people who have come forward to a service agency, so the real number is higher.
Overdose deaths: The Edmonton Police Service says that as of Sept. 30, 2026, it had recorded 271 opioid deaths in Edmonton this year, an average of 30 a month, or about one every day. According to EPS, 30 per cent of those deaths happened in public spaces, and carfentanil is a significant factor. That follows a record 2025, when 770 people died of drug poisoning in Edmonton, according to the province's substance use surveillance system (as reported by CBC). While most of Alberta is seeing fewer deaths, Edmonton remains the outlier.
Frostbite amputations: Alberta Health Services data obtained by CBC shows 113 amputations with a frostbite diagnosis in Edmonton last winter, more than five times the 2019 number. More than half were people without a home. Since 2021, 188 frostbite amputations have been performed on homeless Edmontonians. Emergency rooms saw 1,307 frostbite or cold-exposure cases last winter. Winter is weeks away.
"Zero police"? Not quite. But where's the result?
To be fair to the officers on the street, police are making arrests. Edmonton police seized about 80 kilograms of cocaine worth more than $8 million in April in a joint investigation with Parkland RCMP and Winnipeg police, tied to a network that led to 33 arrests. EPS also took $100,000 in fentanyl, meth and a handgun out of a Woodvale home. Dedicated beat teams work Chinatown and McCauley.
But here's the question every Edmontonian is entitled to ask: if the busts are happening, why is the dope still everywhere? Why is carfentanil still killing about one person a day, by the police's own count? Seizures make press releases. Results are measured in lives, and Edmonton is still losing one nearly every day.
Follow the money
Alberta says it's spending at record levels. The province's Budget 2025 put $220 million into homelessness across Alberta, and Edmonton agencies have grown fast. So where's the return?
Take one of the biggest, Hope Mission. Its 2024 filing with the Canada Revenue Agency shows revenue grew from $26.8 million in 2020 to $57.5 million in 2024, about 63 per cent of it from government. Total staff compensation was $36.6 million, roughly two-thirds of spending, across 581 full-time positions. (CRA T3010 data) To be clear, most of those salaries pay shelter workers, outreach staff and cooks who do hard work, and the charity reports that 89 cents of every dollar goes to programs. Its top position is in the $120,000 to $160,000 range. Nobody has shown that 80 to 90 per cent of the money is going to executive salaries.
But funding more than doubled in four years, and homelessness, overdose deaths and amputations went up anyway. That's the scandal. Albertans aren't getting a report card. Funders measure beds filled and meals served, not people who got off the street and stayed off. If an agency's budget doubles while the problem gets worse, taxpayers deserve to know why, and they deserve contracts that pay for outcomes, not activity.
Housing: the shortage is real, the blame game isn't
Edmonton needs supportive housing, the kind with addiction and mental health care built in, and there isn't nearly enough of it. Market rents are actually easing, with CMHC forecasting a 4.5 per cent vacancy rate in 2026. But a vacant one-bedroom does nothing for someone with no income, an addiction and frostbitten hands.
Many Edmontonians feel new infill projects and rising immigration are squeezing them out. That's a fair debate about population growth and who housing is being built for. But we couldn't find any city or provincial record showing infill homes are being built specifically for temporary foreign workers or refugees, and we're not going to tell you otherwise. If council has a plan for who these units serve, it should publish it.
Who's accountable?
Edmonton's mayor and council blame the province and Ottawa. The province says it's spending at record levels and blames the city. Ottawa is nowhere to be seen. Everyone has a press release. Nobody has a result.
So here's what Alberta Radio wants answered, in public, before the snow flies:
1. Mayor and council: what is your measurable target for getting people off the street this winter, and what happens if you miss it?
2. Province: of the money spent on homelessness and addiction in Edmonton, how many people are housed and sober a year later?
3. Edmonton police and RCMP: which supply networks feeding carfentanil into downtown have actually been dismantled this year?
4. Agencies: publish your outcomes, not your activity. How many people did you move into permanent housing, and how many stayed?
It took an American cage fighter on a one-week visit to get the whole continent talking about downtown Edmonton. That should embarrass every elected official in this city. The people dying on our sidewalks aren't zombies, they're Albertans. They deserve better than this, and so does every taxpayer and business owner footing the bill.
This is an opinion piece. The views are Alberta Radio's. Quotes from Sean Strickland are taken from his public posts on X.
Sources
— Alberta Radio
