Calgary Minute: SNC Lavalin, Alternative Plastics, and Addiction Support Funding

Calgary Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Calgary politics

This Week In Calgary:

• The Foothills Athletic Park Redevelopment Assessment Committee will meet this morning at 9:30 am. The meeting will open with the election of a Chair and Vice-Chair.
  
  
• The Executive Committee will meet on Tuesday at 9:30 am. Mayor Jyoti Gondek and several Councillors will bring forward a Notice of Motion to express support for strengthening of provincial dayhome regulations. Also on the agenda are proposed amendments to the Code of Conduct for Elected Officials Bylaw.
  
  
• On Wednesday, at 9:30 am, there will be a Strategic Meeting of Council. The three major agenda items are all listed as confidential and are titled Perceptions Research Update, a Strategic Look Ahead 2023, and Strategic Meeting Parking Lot Priorities. The Infrastructure and Planning Committee was scheduled to meet on Thursday, but the meeting has been cancelled.

Last Week In Calgary:

• Just when we thought the Green Line couldn’t get any worse… The City of Calgary has selected SNC-Lavalin as its "delivery partner" for Phase 1 of the Green Line LRT. SNC-Lavalin was most recently involved in the disastrous Ottawa LRT, which was embroiled in scandal after it was revealed that SNC-Lavalin had failed to even meet the criteria required to submit a bid, never mind be awarded the contract. Ottawa officials intervened to save the bid, by requiring analysts to reassess the applications, only for SNC-Lavalin to fail to meet the criteria a second time. City officials then stepped in to accept the bid anyway. There's no way anything like that could happen in Calgary, right? Meanwhile, the Ottawa LRT, while open, is still barely functional to this day.
  
  
• The founder of the Calgary-based company behind Co-op’s compostable shopping bags expressed confusion with the federal ban on single-use plastics, and wondered why his product will be banned despite not containing any plastics. The City of Calgary tested the bag in its composting facility and provided the go-ahead for the starch-based polymer product to go into the green bins. Co-op will no longer be able to offer the bags at the till as an alternative to paper bags or reusable bags as of the end of 2023. Apparently, the bags fall under the “unconventional plastics” banner.
  
  
• The Province announced a $1.8 million investment into a pre-treatment program that provides safe homes and supportive programs for people recovering from addiction. Oxford House will receive the funding over three years as part of the government's Medical Detoxification and Residential Addiction Treatment Expansion grant. Intended to address the gap that exists between detox and treatment, the funding should create another 240 recovery spaces annually. The pre-treatment spaces are free for Albertans and available to people who are seven days sober with a scheduled treatment date.

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