A community dialogue on November 29 was intended to discuss several contentious issues happening in McCauley.

Organized by the community league, the meeting was to have three tables going simultaneously, with facilitated discussions surrounding crime and safety, the spatial concentration of poverty, and the EDLC Labour Day barbecue. Scheduled for three hours, the meeting was advertised as such that people could drop in, join a table, and move around the room informally.

However, the agenda was severely derailed at the beginning. A number of tenants who live in houses owned by landlord Carmen Pervez (also known as Abdullah Shah), along with Pervez himself, began responding to an article that appeared in the Edmonton Journal that day. The article portrayed Pervez and his housing in a very negative light.

Believing that the idea for the article came from the current community league, the residents told personal stories of how Pervez has provided them with affordable shelter. Many of the residents have backgrounds including crime and addiction, and said they could not find housing elsewhere.

However, the people who really needed to hear those voices were not there. The tenants were under the mistaken impression that the writer of the Journal article would be in attendance, along with City of Edmonton representatives. Still, the facilitators allowed the discussion to continue for an hour and a half. As well, it was later determined that the majority of these tenants did not reside in McCauley, but in Norwood and Boyle Street.

Most of the Pervez tenants left after the break, at which point the remaining people at the meeting broke into the table discussions. However, the tables remained static for the remainder of the meeting, so the people at them only discussed the specific topic at that table.

The reaction to the meeting was mixed. A number of residents interviewed afterwards were concerned that the meeting was hijacked, that the facilitators were not properly doing their job, and that in general the event was not presented as advertised.

“The MCL’s first Conversation Café on November 29 did not go as expected, and the league is still processing the dynamics of what happened,” says McCauley Community League President Michael Van Boom.

“Thus far, an initial debriefing with our facilitators has taken place, and a formal report was submitted at our January 13 meeting.”