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It’s a routine but tragic story in Calgary. A patient with severe mental illness is rushed to emergency, where a doctor pleads for urgent admission to a mental health bed.

But there’s no bed available. The patient soon slides out the door, back to the shelter or the street, into the grip of the drugs and the booze and all the other things that fuelled the illness in the first place.

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That way lies deeper sickness and another step toward death, or violence against others.

“It literally happens every single day in Calgary,” says David Swann, the Liberal MLA and former public health physician who wrote a report on mental health care for the government.

“Just ask any EMS worker or police officer. They deal constantly with these extremely sick people. And there’s no place for them in the setting they need.”

This crisis has been brewing since the mid-1990s, when Ralph Klein’s PC government closed hospitals, literally turning mental patients out into the streets.