Blue Hat Memorial Project_ 50,000 flags on Tyree Spit

Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - 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.”