Strategy aims to make Edmonton Canada's safest city by 2030

A new high-level community safety and well-being strategy was unveiled by city administrators on Wednesday in hopes of making Edmonton the safest city in Canada by 2030.

The strategy has the aim of making sure everyone can feel safe anywhere in the city — an especially relevant topic as the city grapples with safety on public transit, homelessness rises, and longer-term plans to tackle racism and move toward reconciliation.

Putting this strategy into motion — if council approves staff 's recommendations — could include funding 10 ideas using $8.4 million remaining from cash initially clawed back from the police budget, according to a staff report. Newly funded programs could include an Indigenous-led shelter, an external office for complaints against peace officers, and a dispatch centre focusing on calls related to mental health and addictions.

City manager Andre Corbould, who announced the strategy to media early Wednesday afternoon, acknowledges its goals — like eliminating racism by changing institutions and policies that perpetuate racism — are lofty.

But he says they can achieve them by being clear on the actions and outcomes they are looking to achieve.

“Are they lofty? Absolutely. They need to be, because they're really important issues,” he said.

Asked how the city will make Edmonton the safest city in Canada by 2030, Corbould said they would use metrics based on “seven pillars” of anti-racism, reconciliation, safe and inclusive spaces, pathways in and out of poverty, crime prevention and crime intervention, well-being, and equitable policies, procedures, standards and guidelines.

“The way we're going to achieve that goal and measure it is based on the planning and logic models we have behind these pillars. We are going to have to measure how people feel,” he said. “We want to develop a dashboard very similar to (the COVID-19 community metrics) that would measure all seven pillars and would give us an aggregate score in terms of how we're doing.”

Documents released late Wednesday provide a clearer picture of the intentions of this work.

Among a list of programs council could fund that align with the new strategy are creating an integrated dispatch centre for $1.5 million to take social service-related calls connected to addictions and mental health, $415,000 for an external professional standards complaint process for peace officers, $1 million for an Indigenous-led shelter, $1 million for extreme weather shelter spaces, $25,000 for drug poisoning response including increasing the supply of NARCAN, $1.5-million-worth of microgrants for emergent or urgent needs, and $1.6 million for suicide prevention, mental health and well-being efforts.

City administrators also recommend that council reframe its policy on police funding to be one generally about community safety and well-being — which includes policing — and to create a new way of calculating the police budget.

We are going to have to measure how people feel. ANDRE CORBOULD, city manager