New bylaw will soon make it illegal to sell knives in Edmonton convenience stores

Knives displayed at Joy’s Lucky 7 Food Store on April 9, 2024. (Sean Amato / CTV News Edmonton)

After years of pressure from community leaders, Edmonton city council is working on a bylaw to prohibit convenience stores from selling knives.

"Just how easy it is to get your hands on knives and blades in our communities," said Coun. Ashley Salvador.

"The density of convenience stores where you can just walk in and there are knives right next to chocolate bars. That's a common line that I've heard from community members," she added.

Salvador said she also heard from parents and parent councils.

"Where they're seeing concerning trends of kids actually showing up to school with these items and that's deeply alarming," she said.

Concerns about knives being sold in convenience stores is something leaders from the Alberta Avenue community have raised for more than a decade.

"2005 is when we started with city council saying we need a safer, warmer community that can be built up by community and this is a huge piece," said Christy Morin, the executive director of Arts on the Ave.

"You can spend a lot of money on different things, but if you don't have a foundation that gives actual tools to be able to implement, then you're just sort of spinning," she added.

The Alberta Avenue Community League Civics Director said he even tried approaching convenience stores himself.

"This has been a really difficult exercise as businesses were really digging in and were not responding to our requests to voluntarily change their ways, which was really frustrating," Allan Bolstad said.

"When you’d go talk to an individual business owner and talk about how someone had been stabbed and in some cases killed within blocks of their business and they still weren’t responding, it’s clear we needed another tool," said Bolstad.

According to Edmonton police, between Jan. 1 and Aug. 30 this year, there were more than 600 knife incidents.

"Forty-six per cent of them, 345, actually resulted in injury and death," said Superintendent Keith Johnson, with the EPS Community Safety & Wellbeing Bureau.

"It doesn’t matter that we’re a 1.2-million-person city. Those are large numbers," he said.

Council plans to ban knife sales using a new convenience store category of business licence.

"And make it difficult for people to acquire them in that impulsive way when they have a fight with someone," said Mayor Amarjeet Sohi.

Once city administration drafts the bylaw to make the change, stores will be given the new designation as they renew their licences.

The process is expected to take about two years for all 5,000 retailers to go through the process.

"That’s OK with us because we know it’ll come," said Morin.

"I really want to congratulate council and city administration for trying something different that hasn’t been tried anywhere else in Canada to eliminate the sale of knives in convenient locations like this that will make our community safer," added Bolstad.

Police believe the bylaw will have an impact.

"We would hope it would have at least some impact in our neighbourhoods that do have a large vulnerable population," said Johnson.

"Anything that makes it a little bit more difficult to purchase those weapons should assist."

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Jeremy Thompson