Danielle Smith’s office doesn’t really seem to have put a lot of effort into describing the Alberta premier’s meeting Tuesday with Edmonton Mayor Amarjeet Sohi.
Smith was accompanied to her gab session with the mayor of Edmonton by three Calgary MLAs, the ministers of municipal affairs, community and social services, and mental health and addiction.
Rebecca Schulz, Jeremy Nixon and Nicholas Milliken were supposedly responding to Sohi’s carefully documented concerns about the short end of the stick that Alberta’s capital city gets compared to Calgary when it comes to provincial social services funding.
We can’t really fault Schulz, Nixon and Milliken for being from Calgary, since the only United Conservative Party (UCP) minister from Edmonton is the only elected MLA from the city: Kaycee Madu, MLA for Edmonton-South West, minister for skilled trades and professions, and one of Ms. Smith’s redundant deputy premiers.
This does raise an interesting question, though. Where the heck was the only minister from Edmonton when this important meeting with Edmonton’s mayor took place?
Sohi put his concerns in a long and well documented letter to the premier making the case that, “compared to Calgary, Edmonton receives lower financial and service support, despite experiencing significantly greater social pressures and challenges.”
“Edmontonians facing houselessness, mental health illnesses, and the drug poisoning crisis require a more immediate and robust response,” he wrote. “The effect is particularly profound for Indigenous peoples and the unhoused population who are disproportionately and severely impacted by drug poisonings and houselessness.
“The underinvestment in tackling these issues not only have a human cost, but severely impact businesses and organizations operating in the Downtown core and other business districts impacted by the social disorder,” the mayor’s letter added, putting the responsibility for the deplorable state of the Alberta Capital’s downtown where it belongs, on the level of government that calls the shots, has the bucks, and is responsible for mental health, homelessness and the drug crisis.
This is particularly striking when we look at the UCP’s February 28 budget. The province appears to be awash in cash, which is being directed in greater volume toward Calgary, the electoral battleground in the May 29 provincial election.
Well, at least the presence of the ministerial trio, especially in the absence of Madu, is a back-handed admission of this responsibility.
In addition to publishing a cheerful photo, sans Nixon, on the government’s website, someone from the Premier’s Office penned a 137-word collection of anodyne platitudes, plus a reflexive complaint about high city property taxes, for the website. Well, make that 171 words if you count the wordy sub-head.
Whether this was supposed to be a news release, a policy statement by the premier, or something else is not completely clear. It was mysteriously labelled a “readout,” whatever that means, in its headline.
In response to Sohi’s seven specific and quite clearly defined requests for provincial funds to alleviate the triple crisis dogging Edmonton, there was nothing in the response.
The statement from Smith’s office concluded with a homework assignment, perhaps in hopes of making Sohi stop complaining. “Premier Smith committed to working with the city of Edmonton on the issues they raised, but identified the need for detailed plans to address their specific asks.” (Emphasis added.)
This is just a mildly rude way of saying, you do our work, please, so we can put off making it obvious we’re not going to do anything for Edmonton until the election’s out of the way.
As befits a former member of the federal Liberal cabinet, Mayor Sohi took a page from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s strategy book and responded politely, calling the meeting, his first with the premier, “very positive,” and saying “I feel that we were heard and at the end of the meeting.”
Meanwhile, presumably, the province will continue to use its “Public Safety and Community Response Task Force” made up of political allies on Edmonton City Council and UCP supporters like Edmonton Police Chief Dale McFee to try to undermine the mayor.
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