A gender-inclusive recovery is essential to the very concept of a recovery. Making sure that all plans for recovery are also viewed through gender, racial, and accessibility lenses in order to identify shortcomings and biases in decision-making must be an important part of the process.

Part of this includes ensuring the collection and use of accurate data that is capable of highlighting demographics that have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic is crucial, as is using the tools of government (regulations, budgeting, procurement) to help ensure an equitable recovery.

There are three issues here - first, the budget process that the City of Calgary uses is incremental in nature, which tends to encourage managers to puff up budget requests and create end-of-year spending sprees to defend their department. Calgary should move towards a priority based budget system instead. This has been shown to dramatically lower the cost of government while focusing funds where they are needed.

Second, our reliance on the O&G sector is so high that every hiccup in world oil prices has an effect on the city and it's tax revenue. We need to encourage diversification to minimize the effect.

Third, the provincial government has been making budget cuts by offloading to costs to municipalities like Calgary. Every time Calgary needs to $10 in tax money, it needs to take $16.50 from Calgarians because the province taxes your taxes. In addition, Calgary will lose $2.5 Million from provincial assets in Calgary because they province decided not to pay their bills for the services on these buildings. We need a fairer deal from the province.

The taxation system was designed to work well when we had a strong non-residential sector. Our changing economy and the pandemic have shown the weaknesses of that system. We need to reform the system and advocate for a better model through intergovernmental collaboration with the province. We don't need more taxation power, but we likely need different tools in our belt given the changing economy and digital age. Municipal revenue is not diversified, which impacts our ability to be resilient in the face of change.

I believe that our city services are important and highly valued. I will advocate strongly to maintain service levels. The city is already down to 2013 staffing levels despite significant population growth. We will not solve what ails us by racing to the bottom. It's going to take hard work and policy innovation in collaboration with the province to provide stability.

We don't need to force a transition away from O&G (that will happen naturally), we need to add diversity so O&G becomes a smaller portion of the economy. Putting it another way, it's better to ADD diverse jobs than it is to cause O&G folks to lose their jobs and hoping that they will find a different job in a different area.

As for how to do that, a multi-pronged approach is needed - there isn't a single silver bullet. Tax incentives, creating a welcoming business environment, increasing the standards of living, and even advertising and promotion all play their part. Right now Calgary's reputation comes from Alberta's reputation - which is primarily O&G, leading many non-O&G companies to not even think of us when looking for a location.

Calgary needs it's own brand and system that encourages a diverse economy - a good reputation, a trained workforce, an attractive location for employees, and a business-friendly administration.

The city plays an important role in attracting new business. In my conversations with folks from Calgary Economic Development, what will attract diverse players isn't simply a low tax environment. It's also strong talent, thriving culture and good services. This is why I strongly advocate for initiatives that will help us retain talent, create culture (arts, sports, recreation, active economy) and provide good services (transit, public safety etc). At the same time, we must stabilize taxes on the non-residential side so that businesses can have more confidence when investing here.

A just transition has to happen system-wide, which is why I believe councillors must build relationships with other orders of government, so that our efforts don't work against each other. The provincial government may not always agree with the city, but without open lines of communication, we can't even have those conversations. We can learn from previous work with coal miners to ensure a just transition.

In the short term, actually enforcing our existing hate speech and hate crime laws would be a good start. Hate speech breeds hate crimes, and if there is no consequence for a hate crime, there is no incentive to stop committing them.

In the longer term, hate speech is a form of education/indoctrination. The best way to combat that is more and better education. Supporting and funding groups that address this is probably the most efficient way of addressing this.

On a related note, support for victims of hate crimes needs to be more readily available, and more obvious. That public support is also a from of education, in addition to the actual support itself.

In order for Calgary to recover from both the poor economy leading up to the pandemic as well as the effects of the pandemic, we can't go back to doing the same old things the same old way - things were already bad before all of this.

We need to focus on reaching a better way of doing things and creating a better Calgary.