Alberta Minute: Body Cameras, SAR Funding, and a Worker Recruitment Campaign

Alberta Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Alberta politics.

This Week In Alberta:

• The Legislature is sitting this week, with both afternoon and evening sessions Monday through Wednesday, and an afternoon session on Thursday. The Red Tape Reduction Statutes Act, the Financial Statutes Amendment Act, and the Appropriation Act are all at the Second Reading stage and the Alberta Firearms Act is scheduled for study at Committee of the Whole.
  
  
• The Province will work jointly with Ottawa to understand what caused a nine-month reporting delay on the part of Imperial Oil about seepage from its Kearl mine, north of Fort McMurray. Imperial Oil knew about the seepage in May but did not inform the Alberta government. Premier Danielle Smith said that the company had a responsibility to be transparent.
  
  
• Chestermere’s Mayor and City Council will have to complete a series of 12 directives or face removal by the Province. Inspection reports show that the City of Chestermere “is being managed improperly, irregularly and improvidently”. The City must commit to hiring an auditing firm to submit outstanding financial statements for the previous two years, reviewing its procedural bylaws and providing an action plan, submitting all code-of-conduct complaints to the Province, and refrain from exercising power struggles on Council.

Last Week In Alberta:

• The Province announced that body-worn cameras would be required for all municipal police officers in Alberta. The government said that the cameras will increase public trust in policing and help police review interactions with the public. A committee of the Alberta Association of Chiefs of Police will be tasked with planning the rollout of the cameras over the summer. Alberta will be the first province in Canada to mandate body-worn cameras. Some municipalities, like Calgary, already mandate cameras and the RCMP is in the (very slow) process of implementing them.
  
  
• The Province has started a second campaign aimed at attracting skilled workers to Alberta. There are 100,000 vacancies for workers in skilled trades, health care, accounting, engineering, technology, and in the service and tourism sector. While the first Alberta Is Calling campaign focused on attracting people from Vancouver and Toronto, this campaign will focus on St. John's, Charlottetown, Moncton, Saint John, Halifax, London, Hamilton, Windsor, and Sudbury.
  
  
• The federal government announced $2 million in funding for the Search and Rescue Association of Alberta (SAR Alberta). The money will be used to support a multi-year “Revitalization to Enhance All Hazards Response” project and training and accreditation for the organization’s 1,500 volunteers. In the past two years, SAR Alberta has responded to over 700 recorded incidents and contributed to the rescue of 125 individuals.

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