Calgary Minute: Candidate Database, Candidate Interviews, and a Familiar LRT Story

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

This Week In Calgary:

• The action at City Hall is almost as hot as the sidewalk outside with six meetings scheduled, starting with a Priorities and Finance Committee meeting on Tuesday at 9:30 am. Councillors will receive several presentations from Officers, Administration, and Committees, including the Downtown Strategy Implementation and 2020 Annual Report and the Pension Governance Committee Annual Report.
  
  
• Rolling on to Wednesday, there will be a Standing Policy Committee on Transportation & Transit at 1:00 pm, which will receive an operational update and a presentation on Transportation Environmental Performance and Reporting.
  
  
• Thursday continues to be action-packed, starting with concurrent meetings of the Audit Committee and the Intergovernmental Affairs Committee 9:30 am. Later on, the Calgary Planning Commission meets at 1:00 pm and has several land use amendments on the agenda, while on Friday at 1:00 pm, the Green Line Board is also set to meet.

Last Week In Calgary:

• We officially launched our 2021 Election Candidate database which will feature every Mayor and Council candidate’s contact information, biography, and more to come - check it out if you want to learn more about who's running in this crucial upcoming election. If you'd like to support more of this type of work in the run-up to the election, please consider chipping in to our election coverage fundraising drive.
  
  
• The database also includes in-depth 30-40 minute video interviews with many of the ward candidates, hosted by Danielle Smith. We know from past experience that the Mayoral race often sucks up all the media attention, so we wanted to make a special effort to give local candidates the opportunity to have a real, detailed policy discussion about the issues affecting their ward and the City as a whole. There's more than 22 hours of video footage in total, so we understand if you don't watch every single video, but at least check out your own ward! Not every candidate has participated yet, as some announced their campaigns after we filed, but we're already planning a second round of interviews!
  
  
• It seems Calgary Council has learned to imitate our Ontario cousins. The Green Line's new CEO was previously the VP of the Mississauga Hurontario LRT Project, which was originally budgeted at $1.2 billion but, after a portion was cancelled, the cost was reduced to - wait, sorry - increased to $4.6 billion. Sounds familiar!

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