Alberta opening up, except Calgary, meat-packing city

Health officials taking it slow in two cities that represent up to 75% of province’s cases

Ernie Tsu saw light on the horizon for Calgary restaurants reopening. Then, all of the sudden, he was tallying their financial losses.

“Extremely frustrated,” was how Tsu, who owns a local restaurant and brewery, pegged restaurant owners in the city after Alberta’s eleventh-hour decision to keep eateries and barber shops there closed, even as the rest of the province got the green light to reopen Thursday.

Calgary and Brooks, Alta., in the south, are still dealing with a relatively large number of cases of COVID-19. They will reopen more gradually, with only some retail businesses returning this week.

Tsu, who owns Trolley 5 Brew pub in downtown Calgary, said his restaurant was waiting for several more days to open, but that he knows other restaurants in the city had ordered in lots of inventory ahead of the province’s May14 Stage 1 opening date.

Tsu is also a board member with the Alberta Hospitality Association, and said they asked restaurants who were “poised to open” to send in their inventory invoices so they could track the money that was spent.

In terms of spending incurred by businesses as they expected to reopen, “we’re looking at over $500,000 of inventory that’s been brought in,” said Tsu. “Now with … almost a two week push back, that obviously crushes them. It devastates them in terms of cash flow.”

Just a day before businesses were getting ready to reopen, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announced that Calgary and Brooks would be exempt, pushing the date for restaurants and barbershops reopening in those cities to May 25. “We didn’t take this decision lightly,” the premier said at a press conference Wednesday.

In Brooks, Margaret Plumtree with the local chamber of commerce said they knew a slower rollout was a possibility, but she would have liked to have seen better communication from the province. “As much as the chamber and our businesses understand the need to keep everyone safe, that (announcement) was very last minute,” she said.

There have been 1,068 COVID-19 cases in Brooks, a city of 15,000. More than 600 cases have been seen among workers at the JBS slaughterhouse, a major employer. More than three-quarters of the province’s roughly 1,200 active COVID-19 cases are in Calgary and Brooks. Health officials have seen unknown sources of community spread in the two jurisdictions and so recommended that the cities reopen more gradually.

While he counts public safety as priority number one, Tsu said there were some solutions to the immediate problems restaurants are facing. “Solution one is open up, like let Calgary open up,” said Tsu, “Solution two is, because it was at the last minute, come up with a reimbursement plan for the perishables that they’re going to have to throw out.”

At a Thursday press conference, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi said he wasn’t included in the province’s decisionmaking process, which instead involved the province’s chief medical officer of health and the Alberta government. Nenshi said he only learned about the decision to further restrict Calgary on Wednesday.

While he said it was “the right decision,” Nenshi noted he’d previously argued for taking the highest level of restriction and applying it throughout the province. He added that he had “a lot of sympathy for the folks who were saying, ‘I wish we had a bit more time to plan for this.’ ”

The mayor urged people to be “kind and forgiving” due to the unprecedented nature of the decision making around reopening the economy. “Ultimately, it’s not something worth barking about in a place where we’re trying to be kind and everyone’s doing the best they can.”

Stage 2 of Alberta’s economic reopening plan is set for June 19, when restrictions will be further lifted. If the government is satisfied with public health data, Calgary and Brooks could participate in this stage as well. For now, in the rest of Alberta, businesses that decide to open must operate at 50 per cent capacity. Retail stores can open, along with barber shops, museums and art galleries — but with strict public health guidelines in place.