Amidst all this and much, much more on the plate is the angst and helplessness of COVID-19. I’m very hopeful that, by April, the slow trickle of vaccines will have reversed into a full-on flood, and we’ll be scrambling for arms to poke in order to keep up - our Emergency Management Agency is busy planning for the eventuality.

I look forward to a summer with friends and family and neighbours casually interacting like we were able to last summer. More importantly, I hope that we are able to continue this into the fall as normalcy returns.

I hope that being physically present with each other again will help us realize how we’ve always been and are together in everything and that which divides us will fade away. I believe that coming together to move forwards into a better place sits at the heart of who we are as Calgarians and Canadians.

It’s been a tough year.

While the season finale zombie apocalypse or alien invasion that people have joked about has yet to materialize, our COVID-19 numbers are spiraling out of control, and hopes of Christmas with family and friends are looking increasingly out of reach. Piling-on for Calgarians is the state of our economy and the discordance of our politics. From our city and provincial governments, to the national and international headlines, fear, anger and division seem to be overtaking everything. It’s a lot to deal with and it’s okay to feel angry and scared and overwhelmed.

Sunday, October 18, 2020 marked the ten year anniversary of my service as your Ward 9 City Councillor.

It’s a milestone that both completely flabbergasts me as well as fills me with fierce pride. As such, I’m taking this month’s report to briefly reflect on the past ten years and what I feel have been the biggest accomplishments in our pursuit of Great Neighbourhoods.

Great neighbourhoods make a great city, and a great neighbourhood is one that works for all wages, ages, and stages of life.

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A Great Neighbourhood (and a Great City) is only great if it’s a place for everyone; a place to live, work, play, learn, shop, worship, visit and socialize. And it’s only great when everyone means everyone; people of all ages, stages of life, wages and economic circumstances, and - particularly in our pluralistic Canadian/Calgarian context - people of all backgrounds.

If the global challenge of COVID-19 has offered clarity about anything, it’s that we’re all in this together.

The scale and the scope of the Green Line are so big that it would inevitably rub up against the arc of history - the project will forever change Calgary, and it will actively effect that change for the next century at least. But this friction is particularly uncomfortable right now as we are currently poised at a strange and fraught juncture. Our beloved Calgary sits at a fork that leads into very different possible futures, while the world at large reels from crises of COVID-19, of climate change, and in the very functionality of western democracy.

HSMS Calgary connects the spirit of our prairie city, in a marine context, connecting not only coast to coast to coast, but with the far corners of the earth. The COVID-19 Pandemic has made our interconnectedness, our shared vulnerability, our humanity all the more prevalent. Tragedies, like the mass shooting in Nova Scotia this past month, also remind us of this. It isn’t just tragedies and viruses that have the ability to bring us together and prompt messages of well-wishing, condolences, and empathy. Symbols like HMCS Calgary can ultimately remind us of our shared experiences, as Canadians and as humans.

One of the things I find myself saying a lot these days to people I interact with (from 2 meters of minimum distancing) is, “Remarkable times. . .” If a conversation ensues, I’ll say something along the lines of, “the mind reels at the potential changes this will effect in our lives and on our society.” The maddening nature of COVID-19, and particularly the lockdown, is that this crisis is unfolding in slow motion. The idea that I believe captures its nature in a Calgarian frame of reference is that the 2013 flood was a sprint, and this is a marathon. And while it’s plodding and exhausting and numbing and painful, we have the time to think and consider.

In COVID-19 lockdown, none of us are clear as to what the future holds. The idea of long-term planning seems beyond our grasp as we wrestle with these big uncertainties and how to tackle tasks that provide us a necessary foundation on which we frame the larger picture.

On my list, due April 3, is the task of providing input to our City Clerks as they consider adjusting the Ward Boundaries prior to the 2021 Municipal Election. Thus, I’m writing this to fulfill both the City Clerk’s request for feedback, but also as a report to inform my constituents about the important role that ward boundaries play in achieving our Great Neighbourhoods mission. I hope that it serves as a call to action and motivates you to join me in providing thoughtful input to the City Clerks before the consultation deadline on Friday.