Speaking Municipally

Mack Male:
Revertigo. This week, council learned that the province's order to roll back infill rules is unlikely to be so simple.

Stephanie Swensrude:
Plus, the referendum is over and council is looking for official ways to increase its autonomy.

Mack:
Hi, I'm Mack.

Stephanie:
I'm Stephanie.

Mack:
And we're...

Both:
Speaking Municipally.

Mack:
Welcome back to Speaking Municipally, episode 378. For those of you watching us, with video, we've got little costumes. I am the scary construction executive here to destroy businesses and other things. And yours is a lot more fun, Stephanie.

Stephanie:
Yeah, I'm the Very Hungry Caterpillar. This costume comes from me not wanting to spend a single dollar on my costume because I own a lot of green and red and also a lot of like craft supplies. And also my nephew loves this book. So we're gonna go trunk or treating in one of the suburban neighbourhoods on Saturday.

Mack:
Okay, this is Speaking Municipally, not Speaking Provincially. But it could be.

Stephanie:
But it feels like, yeah, lots of provincial news coming this week. And obviously, you know, how it intersects with municipal news. And this is gonna be a very thick episode, lots of stuff to talk about, and we're — and that's — it's like a quarter of what happened this week municipally. You know, sometimes we have really busy weeks and sometimes we have really chill weeks where like not much happens, so we can get really into the weeds on like, I don't know, like funding sources for a pedway. But then this week it's like we're barely gonna be able to get to the top three or four issues. So stay tuned, you guys.

Mack:
Okay, well, we have picked four. We're gonna talk about infill. We're gonna talk about the referendum, we're gonna talk about municipal autonomy. That's a separate topic, and we're gonna talk about Anne Stevenson resigning from the Edmonton Police Commission. Okay, let's get into it. First up, infill. Since the last time we talked about this on the show, we now have the written directive from the provincial government. We know that Edmonton has until Jan. 22, that's the deadline for rewriting its infill rules. Not going back to the old zoning bylaw, but amending the zoning bylaw to incorporate elements of what we had before. Shocker. Not gonna be so simple to do. So what did we learn this week, Stephanie?

Stephanie:
Yeah, so basically one of the you know, core things about the new zoning — the current zoning bylaw that the city loved to talk about is that it went from, you know, a large amount of zones to a lot fewer and it simplified things. So going back to the old zoning bylaw, the first thing is that there are different rules governing different parts of the city. So currently, about 50 per cent of lots across the city are zoned small-scale residential, which is RS. You probably hear that thrown around a lot. RS, S as in Stephanie. And what the former zone used to be called was RF. F as in Franklin. So I, I hope you guys can hear the difference when I talk about this. But anyway, so 50 per cent of lots right now are RS. And the most relevant former zones out of the six that it replaced are the single-detached residential, which is RF1, and small-scale infill development, RF3. So both of those zones allowed single and semi-detached housing, duplexes, secondary suites, garden suites, and the RF3 zone also allowed multi-unit housing. So the administration's presentation compared the RS zone, the current RS zone, to what was allowed in RF1 and RF3. And then also another modifier on top of that is the mature neighbourhood overlay or the MNO, which mostly from what I understand was a bit of a height reduction. So basically, there's a couple of different sets of regulations that we'd be going back to. And some of them — well, honestly, most of the changes would not really achieve the things that the province wants to see. So Councillor Anne Stevenson, in her round of questioning, was like, "Let me just get this straight. I wanna confirm, kind of get this on the record." And she said basically as follows: reverting to those zones would mean that neighbourhoods outside the mature neighbourhood overlay would see an increase in permitted height for infill. Any neighbourhoods that were previously zoned RF3 would have no unit restrictions on mid-block infill. And in mature neighbourhoods, zoned RF1, the maximum height would only be reduced by 60 centimetres. And the overall footprint of the developments would be the same. So, you could still have really long ones, really wide ones going, you know, going side to side on the property. So basically what she was getting at is this is gonna backfire and it's actually not gonna help anything.

Mack:
And it makes no sense. Absolutely. Yeah. So the old maximum height outside the MNO was about 10 metres, I think it was. And then inside the MNO the maximum was 8.9 metres. But the current bylaw, the current zoning height maximum is 9.5 metres, right? That was after they amended it most recently in April. Right.

Stephanie:
Exactly. 'Cause it used to be 10.5. Yeah.

Mack:
So we're going from what we have today, which is a uniform 9.5 across the board, to this difference depending on where you are in the city. And it's either higher or lower going back in time. Which surely someone at the province would have thought of that when they decided to make this directive. No? Is that too much to expect?

Stephanie:
Did they — did they read the current or former zoning bylaw? I don't know.

Mack:
Questionable. Things like this make it questionable. The other thing you mentioned there about maximum or no maximum on number of units doesn't really mean what it sounds like. It's not an unlimited — it's not like you can build an unlimited number of units, right?

Stephanie:
Yeah, so basically before, like pre-2024, the unit cap was based on the size of the lot. If you had a bigger lot, you could put more units on, but now it's more of like that number cap. So if you had a pretty large property, especially, I think, you know, if it was a consolidation of lots, that would double the size of the lot. You could potentially do twice as many units.

Mack:
So what did administration say in response to Councillor Stevenson's line of questioning?

Stephanie:
I, I mean, when they were asked — she was asking all these clarifying questions — she was like, they were like, "Yes, that's correct. Yes." As if, as if I mean, I will not try to assign any motivation to what they were saying, but I kind of got the vibe of like, "Yep, we know, we know." Yeah.

Mack:
It's not our fault, yeah.

Stephanie:
And the whole presentation is on the — we'll put a link to it because the whole presentation lays out all the information really well. And also it's only about maybe an hour worth of the meeting. So go and watch the meeting if you like. But yeah, so they got this great presentation and then later on they went into private for like a million years. But then later on, eventually, what they decided to do, they came out of private, and council voted to direct administration and Mayor Andrew Knack to deliver a presentation to the Ministry of Municipal Affairs about basically that slideshow, they're gonna show it to the Ministry of Municipal Affairs. And they also wanna ask for clarification on some of the wording in the order in council because it says that these changes have to be done to the satisfaction of the minister. Now, as I understand, that's pretty typical wording to be found in orders in council because it's almost like a formality word. But then at the same time, they don't — the councillors were saying like, "We don't want to do all this work and then realize that satisfaction of the minister meant something completely different and we have to do something different." Because, you know, I don't know if it'd be very satisfying to the minister if all of a sudden there was taller infills allowed, you know what I mean?

Mack:
Yeah, I, I take that wording to be fairly standard — province has final say, really, is all that is. Like, I don't know that council's gonna succeed in getting a great deal more clarity on what the province is looking for in asking for a definition of that. Did they talk at all about the parking minimums, maximums in the debate? Because of course, as we know, we've got time travel happening twice here. There's one bit of time travel which is about these zoning amendments and heights and permitted uses and things like that. So that's back to I think it is Dec. 31, 2023. But then there's also the parking guidelines, which is I think further back, right? July 1, 2020. Did that come up in the meeting?

Stephanie:
Honestly, it's — parking keeps getting forgotten in this conversation. Everyone's talking about like the infill, but like parking is really also a huge deal. Because you know, they talk about in both the RF1 zone and the RF3 zone, so those two that are most kind of comparable to RS, it was one parking space per dwelling. So anything more than three or four units, it'd be pretty difficult to fit that many parking spots on a lot. You'd have to go in for a variance or a direct control zoning or something. And this presentation says that, like for example, that small-scale infill development zone, the RF3 zone, the max — a typical 600-square-metre lot could fit 12 units. So that's four principal units, four basement suites, and four garden suites. So there's no possible way that you're fitting 12 parking spots on a lot like that.

Mack:
It's so funny to me that the parking stuff is a bit lost in this discussion because I think that's actually what most of the people opposed to infill are actually concerned about, right? Which is parking. We keep — we hear that all the time. If we build this eightplex, there's not gonna be any place for anybody to park. It's kind of funny that it gets lost in the discussion a little bit when we're talking about heights and other things. It's like as always in Edmonton it's about the parking, isn't it?

Stephanie:
Well, I've — I say this all the time. I read every public hearing report that comes to council, and every single time the number one complaint is parking. There's maybe been once or twice where it's been like a different concern, but it's always like the first thing is traffic and parking.

Mack:
Okay, so we now have this directive. We have a bit of detail. Council has had a conversation about it. What's next here, Stephanie?

Stephanie:
The city staff is gonna be working hard on doing these draft amendments. Maybe there will also be this presentation to the provincial government and maybe something will come out of that. I'm not really sure. But anyways, the city's gonna do those amendments and then those are expected to be posted in mid-November. So we'll be able to kind of see what the rollback will actually mean. The city said there's not gonna be like any engagement on this because it's such a tight timeline, plus the budget is — they're gonna be right in the middle of budget when this is going on because the budget drops on Monday, Nov. 2, and they start debating it on Nov. 23. So right smack at the middle. They're not gonna be able to do engagement. It's such a short timeline, which is great. Exactly what the province wanted, right? No engagement at all on these changes. And then council is required to bring changes into force by Jan. 22. And then after that, there's a longer review to come. And they confirmed at the council meeting that like there's the three-month review and then the 18-month review. And the three months is part of the 18 months. So really it'll be like a 15-month after the changes are done.

Mack:
This is assuming, of course, that we actually can bring amendments into force by Jan. 22, which the mayor and others have said in recent weeks is gonna be pretty hard to do, given everything else that's on the schedule and the available meetings and the timelines that are required for those things, right?

Stephanie:
And, you know, the whole legal question of it all of we've talked about this at length on the podcast, but if they go into the public hearing with their vote already decided in their head at the direction of Dan Williams, that is against the Municipal Government Act because you have to go into a public hearing with an open mind. And then if they go into the vote and then they vote against the directive because that's what they truly believe is best for the city, and they go against the directive, then their job is also at risk. So I, I don't know what's gonna happen.

Mack:
Well, unfortunately, more to come on infill. We'll be paying attention to that in and amongst all of the budget stuff. This decision that the province made to direct the cities to revert their zoning bylaws, is an example of provincial overreach into municipal affairs. That's been a pretty consistent message that we've heard from councillors over the last couple of weeks. And this week they decided to do something about that. So Councillor Aaron Paquette made a motion this week to try to address this municipal autonomy question. So, Stephanie, what came up at council?

Stephanie:
Well, I wanted to say a couple of things as a preamble first. One, I thought it was so funny how we made a joke two weeks ago about the title of the podcast was "Sovereign Edmonton and a united Alberta." And that was before this report came out. And then all of a sudden there's this report where we won't talk about it that much, but it does talk about how if Alberta were to separate from Canada, Edmonton could then separate from Alberta and stay in Canada. Wild stuff. We don't really have time to get into that. The second thing I wanna say is that the timing of this report is really interesting because as far as I understand it, why this was requested is because this was back, like, probably about six to eight months ago when things were really heating up around separatist rhetoric. And Mayor Knack was like, "I want to make it clear that I support staying in Canada and I need to have some options for, like, how do we kind of solidify that position?" So, anyways, I thought that was super interesting. Go and read that report if you're interested in weird constitutional law and stuff. But anyway, so what happened is that Edmonton city council said they want other municipalities to join their push for more local authority. So a motion from Councillor Aaron Paquette passed nine to three, calling for a national task force through the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. Council is also pursuing provincial municipal support and a declaration from big-city mayors. You know, it just is kind of starting this campaign to get municipal autonomy more of like a front-of-mind issue for people. The no votes were councillors Karen Principe, Thu Parmar and Mike Elliott. Parmar and Elliott basically said they thought that the motion might make the relationship worse.

Mack:
Which, how much worse could it get? Isn't the relationship already in a pretty bad place? If we're concerned about preserving the relationship, I think you've got to ask yourself, what relationship? I think the mayor was pretty clear that there isn't really a relationship here. The directive came down without any notice. If there was a relationship, they'd have had a conversation and there would have been a consultation on that. But that didn't happen. And this is just one, you know, a long list of examples of the province and and the city really just not getting along. Councillor Paquette, who brought this forward, said, "If you're terrified of speaking up for the right thing for your municipality, there's something deeply dysfunctional about that." I agree with him. I was glad to see him bring this motion forward. I also want to play a little clip here from what he said at council in kind of his closing remarks on this.

Aaron Paquette:
Problematic situation when local elected officials have to curry favour and put aside every kind of element of standing up for the people they represent in order to show their belly in hopes that there is no punishment and that there is some small form of money back from the resources that are taken from the municipalities in the first place.

Mack:
Yeah, problematic, no doubt. I mean, and here again he's bringing up the thing that we've heard a lot from councillors over the years, which is that this decline in provincial support financially for municipalities is emblematic of the kind of relationship or lack thereof that exists between the two. I saw some interesting comments from Councillor Janz following the vote. What did — what did Janz have to say?

Stephanie:
So Councillor Michael Janz said, on the dissenting three voters, "We need local voices to make local choices. And if the other councillors don't agree, then they should resign and run for MLA. If they want the minister to run everything and just read out notes for that minister, go ahead and do that." Spicy. Also, like, don't tell them to resign and run for MLAs. Like, that's what half of the city councillors want to do, anyways.

Mack:
Then we'd have to have by-elections and that's a whole mess. Yeah. Well, on this autonomy question, this happened at council this week, but also Mayor Knack met with the premier Danielle Smith, Municipal Affairs Minister Dan Williams, and Finance Minister Jason Nixon. He said at that meeting that he advocated for Edmonton's wish list. He had discussions about the infill directive. Here's what he had to say about Minister Williams. "I felt he shared some responses that I feel were important for me to hear. But I think at the end of the day, the most important thing are actions going forward." I think he's right about that. Who cares what Minister Williams said? I think it's clear that things he's been told by the minister in the past don't carry a lot of weight, and it's the actions that really matter here. So I suppose this is a good thing from the point of view of we don't want to have no relation here, having our mayor meet with the premier and the most important ministers on this file. It's probably a good thing. This is what Councillor Parmar and Principe and Elliott were talking about. Like you can't completely break off relations here. But that said, I don't — I don't really know what is going to be accomplished here. Like, unless they actually take action and do something different, who cares how much time the mayor spends talking to them, right? He said that the push for autonomy, so this motion that Councillor Paquette made, should not be viewed as giving the middle finger to the province. He said — described it more as an effort to balance the scales.

Stephanie:
You know, this is all very interesting. And I honestly am kind of — I don't really know what to say because I'm still kind of reeling from the pure scale of the like overreach that the province has done. I kind of don't — like, yes, this is all nice. This like motion to start a federal committee on municipal autonomy. What are we supposed to do when who knows, maybe the province could come along and write something into the MGA saying, "You're no longer allowed to start committees on municipal autonomy." Boom. And then what are they gonna do? Just be like, "Okay, sorry." I don't know. I'm very defeated and pessimistic about this whole thing these days.

Mack:
I think that's an understandable position. What I would say about this motion, trying to create this national task force, trying to get support from other municipalities, is that sometimes it's helpful to show what an alternate position could look like. It's, it's sometimes helpful to seed the conversation with something constructive. Again, I don't know how much time Andrew Knack should be spending talking to these folks when they don't really care what he has to say. But making the kind of political statement that this motion from Paquette does and trying to show that there are other municipal leaders who feel strongly — who feel the same way. I think that's a positive sort of bargaining position thing for the city of Edmonton. You're right. They could at any time just pull the rug out from underneath them and it all goes away. But until that happens, it's like we talked about in a recent episode. It's just call their bluff. Get them to do it. Push forward and see how far they'll go. Maybe that's a dangerous game to play, but I feel like city council doesn't have a lot of options right now. And so anything they can do to try to strengthen their position feels kind of strategically wise to me and this falls along the same lines as that.

Stephanie:
Thank you for bringing me back to Earth a little bit. You're right. It's good to — it's good to do this sort of thing. And you know, to be very cheesy, every journey starts with a single step, you know, maybe this is the first step towards actual legislation, like legislative and constitutional change to give more power to municipalities to make their own decisions.

Mack:
You gotta start with a tiny snowball before you get a giant one, right? So I think that's true. I have in the past and usually I am pretty critical of things like let's start a task force, let's start another committee, let's do a pilot. These things are in isolation kind of energy-sucking without a lot of outcome creation. But on these larger long-term files like municipal relations with the provincial government, yeah, let's get a little bit of a snowball going. Maybe that could turn into something. And if it doesn't, are we in a worse position than when we started? Probably not really, actually, in this case. Well, what we'll have to watch for on this is whether or not anyone else comes to support what the city of Edmonton is trying to do here, what city council is trying to do, if other municipal governments also come to the table and say we want to be part of this task force, we support what Edmonton's trying to do here. I guess we'll also see what kind of a response there is from the province. And presumably if Mayor Knack continues having these conversations with the premier and ministers, we'll get updates from him as well on how things are unfolding. Okay, the other big story in recent weeks that we haven't had a chance to really address on the podcast yet is of course the referendum and the 10 questions that Albertans voted on recently. We all know by now almost 75 per cent of people chose the remain in Canada option. And so the fears of "This is their issue. If you don't show up and vote, it's gonna happen," I feel, were overblown and the numbers did not change really at all from where polling had suggested they would be for a very long time. On question 10 at least, which is the one about should we start the process of or referendum on a referendum to leave Canada. The other ones were a bit more mixed, right, Stephanie?

Stephanie:
Yeah. Yeah, we won't get too, too much into — there's — I've been listening to a ton of great podcasts about this that look at it from more of a provincial lens, but we're gonna focus in a bit more on the Edmonton region.

Mack:
And we can put some of the links to those episodes in the show notes so you can check those out.

Stephanie:
Yes. Yes. So just kind of speaking with broad strokes, Edmonton was strongly opposed to the proposed restrictions on temporary residents, but several surrounding constituencies delivered a mixture of yes and no results. So yeah, Edmonton was almost uniformly opposed to the temporary resident questions, and only six Calgary ridings were supportive of them. Not a single riding in Edmonton or Calgary said yes to a single one of the constitutional questions. However, you know, most of the ridings that surround Edmonton, known as the doughnut, politically, around our beautiful Anthony Henday ring road, they swung between yes and no. There's the NDP-held Sherwood Park, as well as UCP-controlled Spruce Grove-Stony Plain, Strathcona-Sherwood Park, Morinville-St. Albert, and Leduc-Beaumont. Yeah, I don't — I don't really know. At the end of the day, as expected, Edmonton was really strongly — it's a stronghold for I won't even say NDP in this case. It's like a stronghold for anti-UCP in this case. And it bears out in the results, like Edmonton was not having it.

Mack:
Nor Calgary for the most part, I think, right? So

Stephanie:
Yes. Yeah.

Mack:
It is a bit of a municipal-rural divide. Question five was one of the ones, right? That was a little bit different than the other four. So, you know, one to five, questions one to five, those passed provincially, more than 50 per cent of the vote. And questions six to nine failed. Each of them got less than 50 per cent of the vote. But question five, which concerned documentation for voting was a little bit different, right?

Stephanie:
Yes, so seven ridings in Edmonton voted yes to question five.

Mack:
Well, it's important to remember that this doesn't really mean anything yet because this doesn't — well, this doesn't change the rules by themselves, right? So this is now

Stephanie:
It didn't mean anything. Oh my God. Sorry. Yeah. Yes, exactly.

Mack:
Up to the provincial government to do something with this. We don't know what they're gonna do yet. Some of the nine questions the premier had already said these are longer term. They would require support from other provinces to do anything about. It seems unlikely that those are going to progress. There's potentially some things that are more within the jurisdiction of the province of Alberta that they could change. And as we've said in the past, that mandate on pursuing separation was not clear before, but does not seem to be present now. The premier certainly hasn't been talking about the results as if she's got a mandate to bring it up again or have it be pursued any further.

Stephanie:
Yeah, she's said, and again, I'm not a provincial reporter, so listen to smart people talking about this. But she has said, "There will not be another separation referendum as long as I'm premier." She said, "If you're a separatist, you are not welcome in the UCP." Well, she used much softer words than that. And but the thing is that the UCP AGM is coming up in November. So likely — well, I don't know. I don't know what's gonna happen. Like I said, not a provincial reporter. So stay tuned for that.

Mack:
Yeah, the "There will not be another vote as long as I'm premier" might only last another month if — I don't think it — I don't actually think they can call her leadership into question that quickly, but there are some in the UCP party who seem quite upset about the direction things have gone. Whether it's enough for them to do anything about it remains to be seen.

Stephanie:
So I wanna do a quick shout out, with — now that we're talking provincial stuff to my pal Jeremy Appel. He put out a great book called Dark Phoenix: The Rise, Fall, and Re-emergence of Danielle Smith. And reading that has been so helpful for understanding how we got here. And he signed my copy. So thanks, Jeremy. Check it out.

Mack:
Lovely. Okay. Great recommendation. All right, last major topic we want to cover in this episode is some news from the police commission and the resignation of Councillor Anne Stevenson. So what happened here, Stephanie?

Stephanie:
Yeah, she has resigned from the Edmonton Police Commission after five years serving on the body. She says she wants to focus her safety work on the immediate challenges facing her ward and the city, particularly detainee drop-offs in Chinatown, which is of course a part of Ward O-day'min. She also pointed to some governance and transparency improvements during her time on the commission. And this is a quote. She said, "I believe strongly in the importance of civilian oversight in policing, and I'm proud of the steps we've taken during my five years on the commission to strengthen our governance framework."

Mack:
Yeah, she said she doesn't support the closing of meetings to the public that happened recently. She said it's probably temporary. And, you know, during her tenure, she said she argued for and was successful in getting more access to meetings and reports and things like that, making more of that information public. Her resignation is already in effect, right? Oct. 21. They announced it on the 23rd, the day after the last police commission meeting. And in some follow-up reporting from I think it was Postmedia I saw, Stevenson said that her decision to leave was about time management, which is interesting to me. I know the mayor also said that, you know, serving on the police commission is a lot of work and it takes a lot of time on top of a councillor's already very busy job. And so, you know, there's some truth to that. But in none of the reporting and none of the statements and none of the things she posted, is it clear to me what leaving the police commission will let her do about the detainee drop-off problem? Have you seen anything, Stephanie?

Stephanie:
Well, that was my thought too, because if you're kind of squinting, her statement looks like she's been reappointed. You know, on my next term, I really want to focus on detainee drop-offs in Chinatown. I wanna focus on governance and transparency, but it's not that. She's saying I want to leave the police oversight board to focus on detainee drop-offs. That does not make sense to me. If I'm reading between the lines, I think maybe she is saying we have not been able to on the police commission, we have not been able to get our — get a handle on this problem of detainee drop-offs in Chinatown. And I'm sick of having to deal with the police commission. So I'm out. I can't do it anymore. And same thing with the governance and transparency. If she wants it to be more transparent, wouldn't the best place to do that be on the commission? Well, maybe she's been trying to do that and she hasn't been successful in it. So she's saying, I'm done, I'm over it. I don't know.

Mack:
It does raise more questions than answers, right? This announcement. It also opens up a position on the police commission, which has to be filled by a city councillor, right? They're supposed to have 10 members plus two city council members. And so now we have to wait and see who that's going to be. The other current member on the committee is, of course, Councillor Karen Principe. She's on the police commission currently. We know that council did have a discussion this week during its meeting on Oct. 28 about appointments to civic agencies. There was a big private part of that, including some private reports. So the only public part of that that we know is that Councillor Paquette's election to the FCM board until June of 2028 was endorsed by council. But if the police commission thing came up, we don't know what was said about that yet. Mayor Knack did say it's a massive undertaking and presumably it's going to take a little while for them to figure out which of them is going to serve on the commission.

Stephanie:
I seem to remember there being some changes to council appointees and everything within the last couple of years, Mack. Refresh my memory.

Mack:
Well, back in September of 2024, the Edmonton Police Commission was proposing that the commission no longer require city council members. And there was a report that we reported on that did come to city council that talked about this. Ultimately, city council at that meeting just received it for information, which basically means it died there. So they did not change that rule. I did look it up in the Police Act. It currently says "When a council appoints five or more commission members, two of them may be members of the council or employees of the municipality." So it's up to two. It doesn't require two. So technically, according to the Police Act, I don't think they have to fill this position with another councillor, but it has been our Edmonton city council's practice to have two of its members be appointees to the Edmonton Police Commission.

Stephanie:
Okay, good to know. So I, I would assume going forward then it's gonna be a councillor. But again, our crazy world that we live in, you can't assume nothing.

Mack:
That's true. No, it seems likely, but it's also an opportunity perhaps for Edmonton city council to change its stance on the makeup of the police commission.

Stephanie:
Understand why, because I'm just doing a little bit of my own reading. The kind of idea behind taking councillors off of the commission was to have more community input. But I also think it's really, really important for city council to be on the police commission, the people that approve the dollar signs. So why not both? Can we put two more community seats on in addition to the councillors? I don't know.

Mack:
It is one of the few levers that city council has to influence what happens with policing in the city. So it seems unlikely to me that they would want to reduce their ability to pull on that lever. Okay, that was four big topics, Stephanie. Of course, as we mentioned, this is all happening right around the time that budget is happening, the big four-year budget. So you mentioned Nov. 2. Monday is when the budget documents drop. That'll be at edmonton.ca slash budget. And then they start talking about this Nov. 23. And they've got a couple meetings in November, but most of it will happen in December. I think really the intensive period starts Dec. 10. And it could go all the way to Friday, Dec. 18, if they need the full amount of time. So before Christmas, but still could take up quite a bit of time. I did see one interesting thing about budget this week. Michael Janz released a five-point plan for budget. Did you look at that, Stephanie?

Stephanie:
No, I didn't. Tell me more.

Mack:
He's got on his website, if you go to michaeljanz.ca slash budget 2026, and we'll put this in the show notes, a five-point plan for budget. He's got five points here. Roll back the subsidy on suburban growth, secure a new long-term funding deal with the province, make cuts where services are no longer relevant or effective, protect the investments we've made in our core infrastructure, and limit new spending. All seem sensible, I think. The best part though is if you continue reading the webpage, it goes on to say, this is actually not my plan. These are the exact same five bullet points that then Mayor Don Iveson outlined in 2018. He's basically trying to make the point that we're talking about the same things today as we were 10 years ago or just about 10 years ago. Janz also argues that sprawl and the lack of provincial funding have also gotten worse in that time period. So a little bit tongue-in-cheek from Councillor Janz ahead of the budget drop.

Stephanie:
Janz, tongue-in-cheek? Never.

Mack:
Who would have thought it? Well, next week I imagine we'll have lots to say about budget, at least the initial reaction to what the administration releases, as well as whatever else has happened in municipal politics. There's no shortage of things going on at this time of year.

Stephanie:
Yeah, and members, we've got a couple of great Taproot Exchanges coming up or happening around this time. So if you're a member, you can go back and listen to the old ones, put it on as a little podcast. The one that we'll be recording on Oct. 30 is all about infill. We're basically getting on a couple of people in the infill world to just kind of, "Okay, talk us through what's going on with these changes." And we wanted to have some people with slightly different perspectives than we usually hear. So stay tuned for that. And then in two weeks' time, we're planning on having an episode all about engagement, which is something I've been wanting to talk about for so long because that's all you hear is like engagement is so bad, the city doesn't care about anything. But then at the same time, people will get the little piece of mail in their mailbox and then throw it away because they think it's junk mail. And I'm — I, I know I say that all the time, but this time I'm not even exaggerating because someone said that at a public hearing this week, they literally admitted that they threw out the public hearing thing because they thought it was junk mail. And so something needs to change, obviously. So we're gonna talk about public engagement, which is a very interesting topic. That's in two weeks. Yeah, so stay tuned. And if you're not a member, become one. Help us keep going deep on these topics, making local independent journalism happen. Help me buy more comically large Diet Coke.

Mack:
It is comically large, yeah.

Stephanie:
I know, it's so big, it's all they had at the store.

Mack:
Taproot Exchange is a member benefit, of course. You get access to the full livestream as well as the recording and the transcript. You also get the opportunity to ask questions, both in advance of those sessions and then during the session. Of course, if there's news, we write that up as a public story. It's not meant to be a thing where the information is only available to those who pay. But if you want to get a little bit extra access and the opportunity to ask your questions and things, then it can be a great reason for you to become a Taproot member. And we'd love to have you. Okay, Stephanie, that's all for this week. Lots more to come on all of these topics and also budget. And we'll get into that same place, same time next week. Until then, I'm Mack.

Stephanie:
I'm Stephanie.

Mack:
And we're...

Both:
Speaking Municipally.