The Pulse: March 9, 2021

Five companies will pitch to investors on March 11 for a shot at $140,000 at the Alberta Cleantech Investment Summit. Over the past five weeks, 28 investors heard pitches from the province's top emerging cleantech companies and conducted due diligence as they narrowed down the list to those who would present at the summit.

The top five companies are Ceres, EZ Ops, SeeO2 Energy, Winecrush, and ZS2 Technologies. The lone Edmonton company, EZ Ops, helps equip operators to focus on top priorities for production and compliance.

The investment summit was born out of a desire to boost early-stage companies. In addition to the $140,000, Energy Futures Lab is awarding $25,000 of non-dilutive funding to one of the presenting companies.

"Alberta’s cleantech ventures have historically struggled to find early-stage investors. This initiative seeks to transform the funding landscape by forging a community of skilled and committed investors who will ‘lean in’ to help these ventures breakthrough," said a news release about the event.

• Health Minister Tyler Shandro announced on Monday, March 8 that it is now safe for Alberta to complete Step 2 of its reopening plan. Effective immediately, all retail settings can increase the number of customers from 15% of fire code occupancy to 25%, and youth sports teams and activities can resume with up to 20 participants.
• The city is giving the Edmonton COVID-19 Rapid Response Collaborative $1.5 million to run its programs through the end of the year. The group is 13 agencies that have teamed up to help people in vulnerable situations get through the pandemic.
• "A newly revised health policy has become the latest symptom of a provincial tug-of-war between government and harm reduction experts in Alberta," reports CBC News. AHS has changed "harm reduction" to "recovery-oriented approach" in its strategy on substance abuse, following a request from the UCP government.
• Edmonton’s apartment starts are up 114% year over year, reports the Edmonton Journal, following the Alberta State of the Market report from Urban Analytics.
• An Edmonton man has been arrested and charged in connection with three of the recent attacks against Muslim women.
• Edmonton is getting a Costco Business Centre on March 18, which marks Alberta's first business location of the company.
• Last weekend some city recreation centres opened to the public after public health restrictions were eased, and Edmontonians were eager to get back in the gyms.

On March 3, Forest Heights restaurant Cartago announced that after three years, it is now permanently closed.

“After an incredibly challenging year, we are proud to know that we did everything we could to put our employees and our community’s safety first," the restaurant tweeted.

Fleisch, Cartago’s sister deli business, will remain open (for take-out only).

When COVID-19 community transmission numbers were escalating in November 2020, Cartago was among the first of a small group of restaurants to voluntarily close its doors to indoor dining. Since then, co-owner Katy Ingraham has been active on social media advocating against indoor dining until conditions are made safer for hospitality staff and patrons. She told Taproot there were a series of challenges that led to Cartago's closure.

“When we shut down March 15, 2020 we were about a month away from completion on our other business Fleisch,” said Ingraham. “Any government support that existed to attempt to help businesses through this crisis does not exist for new businesses [that] opened in 2020. When we reopened to the public in June 2020 and opened Fleisch for the first time, we were paying to complete the project and the expenses of two businesses while only receiving support for one of them.”

Ingraham also explained that the government support is largely credit-based, meaning that taking on the additional debt to help both businesses survive soon became “untenable.”

As we look back at our pandemic year, let's consider the accumulated impact of COVID-19 on our city. Reddit user mikesmith929 has been sharing well-received data visualizations with the Edmonton subreddit.

The inset shows the shape of the pandemic from the first recorded case in the Edmonton zone on March 5, 2020, to the total recovered cases (green), active cases (tan), and deaths (red) one year later.

The larger graph shows cumulative cases over the past 180 days, which encapsulates the rise and fall of the second wave, reaching 52,136 recovered cases, 1,154 active cases, and 976 deaths recorded as of March 6, 2021.

While the general trend of active cases is down, they have been increasing steadily since Feb. 25. Even so, Health Minister Tyler Shandro announced Monday that more restrictions would be lifted, allowing stores and malls to increase capacity from 15% to 25% of their fire-code limits, and permitting some youth sports and activities to resume.

Graphic courtesy of Mike Smith of Cyanic Automation