Minister Nixon,

I have just gotten off the phone with Income and Employment Supports. Their first response was to direct me to Voice of Albertans with Disabilities, an organisation that has existed for years, whose very purpose is to help people overcome the barriers your government places between us and AISH. And yet, in all the years I have been suffering under your ministry’s so-called “support,” not one person thought to mention them. Not once.

So I must ask you publicly, in front of anyone who cares to read this: what is wrong with you people?

For three years I have been waiting for the Rental Assistance Benefit. Since 2016 I have been trapped on Income Support, told over and over that help would come, that I would be given the means to cross the government’s own barricades to AISH. A decade of waiting. A decade of promises. And only now, after years of wasted time, wasted health, wasted life, I discover that there has always been an organisation created for exactly this purpose. That silence was not accident. That silence was cruelty.

Meanwhile, I watch as white applicants are waved through without struggle. They are granted AISH and RAB swiftly, even when their cases are thinner, their claims less severe, their suffering less evident. They are ushered to the front while I am left outside the gate. And so I ask you, Minister, before the people of Alberta, why? Is it because I am Inuit? Is it because I am transgender? Is it because I am female? Which part of me disqualifies me from fairness in your eyes?

I put it to you plainly: this is not just bureaucratic delay, this is discrimination. This is injustice dressed in procedure. And it is not merely my problem, it is Alberta’s shame. Because every day you permit it, you train your ministry to lie, to break promises, to treat the suffering of minorities as background noise. Every day you permit it, you deaden your own conscience until cruelty becomes your habit.

I will not allow this to remain hidden. You have until the end of this month to ensure that I am placed on both AISH and RAB. If you fail, I will take legal action. If no lawyer will represent me, I will file myself, as I did when the Nunavut Government stranded me in Alberta in order to to deny me medical coverage. And if that is not enough, I will speak openly, loudly, and persistently to anyone willing to hear how Alberta’s social assistance system rewards whiteness while punishing those it was built to protect.

This is not only my fight. It is a mirror held up to your government. And I challenge you, Minister, to look into it. What do you see, justice, or prejudice? A ministry of service, or a ministry of cruelty? A government that keeps its promises, or one that survives by breaking them?

Which will you choose to be remembered as?

Sincerely,

Vanida Plamondon