The Blue Hat Memorial Project opens at 10 AM this morning, Tuesday, April 14, 2025. Campbell River artist and city councillor Ron Kerr has installed 50,000 flags at Tyee Spit (ʔUxstalis), representing the number of people who have lost their lives through Canada’s ongoing opioid crisis.
“What I really want to do is to stimulate conversation about the gaps in men and boy’s healthcare. These deaths are generally fentanyl drug deaths. If you look at the other results of addiction, alcohol addiction, and other kinds of addiction, the numbers are far higher. I don’t think the men’s health system is doing an adequate job of addressing that,” he explained.”
“ We’re trying to do a ‘one size fits all’ and I understand that from a financial economic point of view, but I think we need a lot more recovery facilities, better access, and second stage housing. We need ‘dry’ housing where they can get their lives together without the daily influence of addictive substances. Unfortunately, supportive housing right now is completely full of people still in their addiction. So if not onto the street, they’re right back into that same kind of environment they left. That is a really important part of the picture.”
“I think we need male specific facilities, so they’re not going to go back into a situation where they’re not being supported. We’ve only got one dedicated men’s center in the province, where men can actually go and find services, find support, and find programs. It’s just not supported.”
“There’s a reluctance to have something that is specifically male orientated, but I think we need men’s health clinics where men and boys know that they’re going to find people that understand them. Peer supportive groups are probably a lot less expensive, and I think it’s more powerful for supportive recovery than all the psychiatrists in the world.”
Cortes Currents: How did this become the Blue Hat project?
Ron Kerr: “The problem for me, as an artist, was how to actually convey that number into something that people could feel. Initially I had the concept of having a huge number of blue hard hats, because the number of men in trades and throughout a blue collar workforce have been right from the start overrepresented in the numbers.”
“I thought of using the blue hard hat itself as a symbol, but the problem was that any kind of an installation, or art project, using blue hard hats was very expensive and just logistically hard to do. So it was a challenge and I had been thinking about that for a year or two.”
“Last summer when I was sitting in my garden recovering from knee surgery, I looked at a project that I’d started in the yard before my operation. I had a number of sprinkler flags marking spots around the garden. I was sitting there watching them blow in the wind, and it just came to me that that was a way of really signifying the immensity of death.”
Cortes Currents: You said that your interest was sparked a decade ago, what sparked your interest in this?
Ron Kerr: “I’ve worked with peer groups and men’s groups for probably 50 years.”
“It was probably 12 years ago now. I’d been invited to the Second Chance Recovery Centre in town, just to see their facility and meet the people that were working through their addictions. I don’t know if you’re familiar with their facility in Campbell River but it’s probably a 50-year-old house that’s being repurposed into a recovery center. They have bunk beds, very small rooms and everybody’s jammed into this facility.”
“When they took me to meet all the people, there was one person who looked at me. There was just something in that person’s eyes that went right through to my heart. I’ve never seen a drowning person, but that was the feeling. It was a look of desperation. They were in the right place, but they were so deep in their addiction that they just needed something. I knew that I had to do something. That was when I really ramped up my advocacy for every person that dies from a drug overdose. It’s a tragedy for the family and the community and for all of us.”
Cortes Currents: Why Blue hard hats? Why blue?
Ron Kerr: “Blue obviously represents male as opposed to pink, red or purple.”
“On top of that, on work sites a blue hard hat generally represents a sense of vulnerability. If somebody is beginning or learning or whatever, the blue hard hat represents that. Also I think the blue helmet, in terms of peacekeeping, is a universal symbol.”
“When we’re dealing with men, there isn’t a representation of the vulnerability and I think the blue helmet or blue hard hat is more benign than any other colours. As an artist, I was looking for something that wasn’t threatening, that wasn’t too strong, but it was still impactful. So I chose the blue hat.”
Cortes Currents: Why did you choose purple for women?
Ron Kerr: “There’s a few things. The flags only come in certain colours, so it’s a very small colour palette that we’re using. Some people said, ‘why don’t you paint?’ There’s a lot of other stuff that goes with pink and the pink that you get is very much a neon colour. Putting any neon colour out overwhelmed the landscape. I think purple is more complimentary with the blue.”
The exhibition opening in the Tyee Spit today was the fourth and largest Blue Hat Memorial Exhibition to date. The first two were last year, in Campbell River and on the North Shore beside the Lions Gate Bridge in West Vancouver. Last month he did an exhibition along the Nanaimo waterfront.
Ron Kerr: “Last year, I was concentrating on the BC statistics, which were at the time, really high. We were looking at 12,000 in British Columbia for men and for women. I just decided that’s what I was going to do. I was going to get that number of flags, every flag representing a death, but every flag representing a man or a boy, a woman or a girl, and also the family of all those people. It affects everybody, even right out into the community. That’s how it all started.”
“The intent was always to do it first in Campbell River, where I had more access to volunteers and I could learn from mistakes, but the intent was always to do this throughout British Columbia and possibly across Canada too.”
The 50,000 flags in this current installation represent two groups. 36,000 blue flags represent all the men and boys that have died since the opioid crisis began, and another 14,000 flags are for the women and girls.
Ron Kerr: “The root of the whole Tyee Spit installation is that 50,000 is just a number. We’ve become numb to numbers. You used to be able to buy a house, two houses for $50,000. Now you can hardly buy a car for it. We’re numb to what the number means.”
“Looking at the number of flags representing the faces and the families, it connects with you in a different way. It doesn’t go through the mind, the heart opens up and feels.”
“Yesterday we spent six or seven hours putting about 10,000 flags down. The whole range of comments from people as they were walking around the installation, stopping and talking to us, just reinforced the effect. When the wind activates the flag and it moves, it’s very much like wind moving through tall grass or wind moving through a wheat field. You almost feel the spirit moving through the installation. It’s quite powerful.”
Cortes Currents: How long will the display be up?
Ron Kerr: “It’ll be up until the end of the month.”
Cortes Currents: Tell me about your volunteers.
Ron Kerr: “Well, I’ve been really fortunate with volunteers, both with family support, friends and then friends of friends. It rippled out. We don’t have a cast of hundreds doing this. It’s just people that I’ve been able to reach out to and convince. They’ve been supportive, working with me and feeling the same way.”
“It was challenging in West Vancouver when we did the project. At the peak, we were able to pull 20 people out to help with that one.”
Cortes Currents: Have any addicts been among the people putting the flags up?
Ron Kerr: “Absolutely, and like I said previously, there’s very few people that haven’t been affected by the crisis, whether it’s a family member, a friend, or somebody in their workplace. Everybody’s got a story. Even people you think wouldn’t know anything about this. They start telling their story around the flag Installation. It seems to promote conversation and emotion.”
“Yesterday, we had a few people that were in tears talking about their family members that had died. I describe it as an art installation elegy, and I know elegy is more of a poem or a song, but to me this is a lament for the dead.”
“In a visual sense, it is a powerful statement. Looking at a picture, it looks like a lot of flags, but actually standing there in the landscape and experiencing it, you just can’t believe that this is what that number looks like.”
Links of Interest:
- Articles about, or mentioning, the opioid crisis
- Articles about, or mentioning, drug toxicity deaths
Top image credit: Some of the 14,000 purple flags for for dead women and girls; all photos courtesy Ron Kerr
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