Alberta health authorities aim to have about 100 interim beds ready by this fall when legislation to force people with substance addictions into treatment comes into effect.

Documents obtained by the IJF show this could include temporarily taking over beds in existing voluntary adult addiction treatment and detox facilities in Edmonton to make room for involuntary treatment programs, a plan critics say will make matters worse.

Alberta’s Compassionate Intervention Act allows police to apprehend individuals whose addiction or substance use is determined to be a danger to themselves or others, and held for detox and medical assessment. Persons detained under the act could be held at a government treatment facility for up to three months, sent to community-based addiction programs or discharged, depending on the decision of a three-person compassionate intervention committee appointed by the province.

The province plans to build two 150-bed compassionate intervention centres, one each in Edmonton and Calgary, but they won’t be ready until 2030. The latest provincial budget included funds to create secure beds for involuntary treatment in existing facilities to come online in 2027, including hospitals in Grande Prairie, Edmonton, Ponoka and Calgary.

“Planning for compassionate intervention centres is nearly complete, with construction expected to begin this year. With an immediate need to provide compassionate intervention care, adult compassionate intervention beds will start operating next year in existing facilities,” a spokesperson for the Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction said.

A confidential Recovery Alberta document, obtained by the IJF, also identifies Edmonton’s Henwood Treatment Centre and the Addiction Recovery Centre (ARC) at Alberta Hospital Edmonton as interim treatment locations.

Henwood is an adult residential treatment centre with 62 beds. Recovery Alberta identified Henwood as a potential site for compassionate intervention secure treatment for adults in the April 2025 document, which includes a summary of work completed for the compassionate intervention rollout and lays out next steps. To get Henwood ready for involuntary treatment, the current voluntary addiction treatment program would need to be closed, and renovation and staff recruitment would be needed for a fall 2026 opening, Recovery Alberta staff reported.

ARC has 50 beds available for patients requiring medical support during detoxification and is one of two publicly funded adult detox facilities in Edmonton. Opening ARC for compassionate intervention secure withdrawal management would require renovating half of the site, according to the Recovery Alberta document.

Final budgets for all potential interim sites were submitted in November 2024.

In the document, Recovery Alberta also noted staff at both Edmonton sites would need to be informed of the transition from “voluntary programs to involuntary programs.”

Korey Cherneski, a spokesperson for Recovery Alberta, said compassionate intervention planning and implementation continue to evolve, but declined to answer questions about whether the site locations or timelines referenced in the document had changed, or how long the closure of voluntary treatment programs would last if these facilities were used for involuntary programs.

“Specific operational details, including bed configurations, service capacity, and site readiness timelines, will be confirmed through the implementation process,” Cherneski said.

Ian Culbert, executive director of the Canadian Public Health Association, said there isn’t a place anywhere in the country where there are enough addiction treatment beds available or where waitlists for a bed aren’t significant, “and if the province is going to further reduce the amount of voluntary beds available for this involuntary treatment, it makes no sense at all.”

“We know that involuntary treatment can actually be dangerous, that if the person doesn’t go with their own free will, the likelihood of relapse is much greater than for those who go into voluntary treatment,” Culbert said.

“This whole compassionate care act from the beginning was a bad idea,” he said. “And now that they’re getting closer to implementation, they’re taking a bad idea and are actually going to do more harm with it than originally.”

‘​​Not something Recovery Alberta officially tracks’

Since 2019, when Alberta’s United Conservative Party government began implementing its Alberta Recovery Model, the province has funded an additional 10,000 addiction treatment spaces while shuttering supervised consumption sites and cutting funding for harm reduction programs. The impact this policy change has had on wait times for addiction treatment, however, is unclear.

The average wait time to get into an addiction outpatient clinic in Alberta was 14 days and zero days in the Edmonton zone at the end of 2019. This data was previously reported in Alberta Health Services’ annual reports, but public reporting stopped in 2020. By 2024, the Ministry of

Mental Health and Addiction estimated the average provincial wait time was between 20 and 37 days.

Officially, health authorities are no longer tracking wait times for addiction treatment.

The IJF filed an access to information request in March for voluntary addiction treatment wait times from 2020 to present, but was told that the “measurement asked for is not something Recovery Alberta officially tracks, nor was it something anyone in Recovery Alberta tracked while it was part of [Addiction and Mental Health].”

The province recently launched a dashboard showing the number of beds available at treatment facilities in Alberta. As of June 21, ARC has two of 50 detox beds available and there are five of 62 treatment beds available at Henwood.

Interim beds ‘cannibalized from existing facilities’

Janet Eremenko, the Alberta NDP’s critic for mental health and addiction, said there appears to be a sense of urgency within the ministry to get compassionate intervention online, and in that rush existing mental health inpatient programming is being compromised.

“My biggest concern when this was initially introduced, and frankly I think it is coming to fruition, is that the interim beds to help compassionate intervention progress have been cannibalized from existing facilities in a way that ultimately results in a net loss to different parts of the mental health and addiction system that are really strapped right now,” Eremenko said.

The interim compassionate intervention beds in hospitals already announced by the province were “ultimately losses to inpatient psychiatric and mental health beds that we can’t afford to lose,” she said.

Alberta’s Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction confirmed in March that between 30 and 35 beds at Alberta Hospital Edmonton, where ARC is located, would be renovated to support the implementation of compassionate intervention programming. At the time, a spokesperson for the ministry said that community-based addiction treatment beds, “such as the ones at ARC and Henwood,” would “remain as voluntary addiction treatment beds.”

The ministry did not directly respond to questions about the interim facility plans described by Recovery Alberta or the ministry’s previous statement about voluntary treatment spaces not being used for compassionate intervention programming.

A spokesperson for the ministry said that the government is “building the foundation for compassionate intervention services – a promise we made to Albertans.”

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