A machete attack at a McDonald’s in central Edmonton is the latest act of violence involving the long-bladed knife and it is raising the question over why they are not banned in Alberta.
Police responded around 4 a.m. Monday to the McDonald’s at the corner of 111 Avenue and 106 Street, where four men who knew each other were involved a fight in the restaurant parking lot across the street from the Kingsway LRT station and the Royal Alexandra Hospital.
One of the men attacked another with a machete, and he was taken to hospital with serious injuries.
The three suspects left before police arrived, but were tracked down, arrested and charged with aggravated assault. Their names and ages were not disclosed.
A woman named Shyanna, who has worked at the Kingsway McDonald’s for a few years and didn’t want to share her last name for safety reasons, said she showed up to work a few hours later and thought a homicide had occurred.
“I thought someone died, honestly, because there was so much blood and it was like a horror movie. There was a handprint on the window, and it just felt very surreal. And it really grossed me out, having to come to work to see that,” she said.
Shyanna said the fast food restaurant is in a rough area. She said she’s seen her fair share of incidents and been affected by them as well: someone set off pepper spray inside when she was working the front counter and it got in her face.
“This entire area in general, it’s not just machete violence. It’s violence and drugs and people coming in — making me and other people unsafe and just attacking people,” Shyanna said.
“It unfortunately happens so much in the area that I’m kind of like desensitized to the violence, unfortunately.”
Monday’s attack adds to a list of machete incidents in Edmonton.
There was a random attack in Terrace Heights in May 2024. A man was taking his dog for a morning walk in the east Edmonton neighbourhood when he was attacked by two suspects with machetes, resulting in multiple stab wounds, cuts and damaged teeth.
In August 2023, there were two machete attacks: one at the beginning of the month when four people were seriously injured — three of them critically — in an overnight machete attack in north-central Edmonton’s Beverly neighbourhood.
Then a few weeks later, a man was threatened with a knife and then attacked with a machete by a couple at the Southgate mall transit centre in 2023.
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Last winter when dismantling homeless encampments, police found a cache of weapons — including machetes.
Former Edmonton Police Service homicide detective Dan Jones, who is now a criminologist and chair of justice studies at NorQuest College, said machete attacks are cyclical.
“I remember back when I was in policing — not just in policing, but on the street 20 years ago when I was in beats — we had issues with machetes. Then it kind of seemed to calm down. And then I remember in 2012 to 2014, we had another upswing of them,” Jones said.
“We had a really vicious one right in at 5 o’clock in the afternoon in the middle of the LRT, where a guy actually lost almost his full arm and it was in front of a bunch of people.”
Jones said a rash of incidents involving a specific weapon naturally raises questions about legislating that item.
“Do we make a bylaw? Do we make it illegal to sell them? And there’s an argument for that, right?”
Jones said since severely restricting access to firearms, nations like Australia and New Zealand have seen a big reduction in gun violence and, specifically, school shootings.
“They haven’t had a school shooting in New Zealand for, I don’t know, 15 years because they reduced the access to firearms. So if you reduce the access to something, does that potentially have an impact? And I think it potentially does.”
Jones also said that unlike some other tools that get repurposed for violent means, he can’t think of a legitimate reason to own a machete in urban settings.
“My question was always, ‘Why do we have machetes for sale in Canada anyway?’ Like, what’s the use of a machete? I can’t think of a use of a machete for me personally.”
“You shouldn’t be able to walk into a store and just go purchase a machete for no reason.”
Edmonton has taken steps in recent months to crack down in access to knives: in February, the city’s business licence bylaw was amended to add a convenience store category and a definition of knives that cannot be sold in those businesses. The goal is to limit convenient or impulsive access to knives but doesn’t affect the sale of everyday cutlery.
Because the federal government has jurisdiction over criminal matters when it comes to knives and prohibited weapons, options at the municipal level are limited to changing business licence rules and lobbying higher levels of government to change the law.
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Edmonton councillors vote unanimously to ban the sale of knives in convenience stores -
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Knife ban discussion continues at Edmonton city hall -
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Proposed Edmonton knife sale bylaw heads to council committee -
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Restricting knife sales at convenience stores to go before Edmonton city council -
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Edmonton residents calling for dangerous knife sales to be restricted speak at city hall -
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Central Edmonton residents call for ban on knife sales at convenience stores
Jones noted it doesn’t necessarily come down to creating new laws. In Canada under the Criminal Code, possessing or carrying a weapon — including a machete — for a purpose dangerous to the public peace or to commit an offense is a criminal offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
“So why make a bylaw on top of the Criminal Code? It doesn’t make sense. Adding that additional law doesn’t make sense. But restricting access to said weapons, I think, can make a difference based on what we’ve seen in New Zealand with gun violence.”
Alberta’s public safety minister, Mike Ellis, said the province would leave the decision on whether to ban machete sales up to individual municipalities, as a machete being wielded by a criminal in the inner city is different than a hunter or outdoorsman using it out in the bushes of rural Alberta.
“Context matters. How these these weapons are sold and being used and quite frankly, I think it’s best that we leave it up to municipalities to make those types of decisions.”
Shyanna said that isn’t good enough. She said there’s been other stabbings, attacks and violence in the Kingsway area, both near the McDonald’s and across 111 Avenue at the LRT station.
It’s gotten so bad, she quit her job at McDonald’s on Wednesday.
“The area is not regulated enough for me to feel safe going into work, and it’s not the company’s fault,” she said.
The area is just really bad, and there’s just not enough police or security to keep us safe.”
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