The Pulse: June 6, 2023

When Irshad Manji was booked to come to Edmonton to talk about overcoming polarization, she didn't think she'd be landing in the middle of a case study. But she's glad she is.

"I'm excited about coming to Edmonton, in part because I think it's a really interesting time to be engaging people of a city that completely rejected the UCP," she told Taproot. "It would be silly not to address the concerns, the fears, the worries, the anger."

Manji is giving a talk called From Polarization to Collaboration for the Edmonton Public Library's Forward Thinking Speakers Series on June 8 at the Citadel Theatre.

"I'm curious to see what the questions will be and what the reception will be for someone like me who is teaching how to heal divides rather than widen them," she said.

Manji, the founder of Moral Courage College, argues that people are more than their political labels. While some people may be disappointed by the results of the May 29 election, where the NDP swept Edmonton but the UCP won a majority government, she said it's important to not get caught in an either-or dichotomy.

"If Edmontonians throw in the towel and decide for themselves that well, given who the majority government is again, this is going to be urban versus rural again for the next four years... that is a frame that you have chosen," she said. "You could also recognize, for example, that many more Calgarians went orange this time round than last time around."

Manji hopes people who listen to what she has to say will be more willing to engage others in good faith, and that sometimes social change is best achieved by doing so.

"We are all so much more than the labels that our lizard brain puts on one another," she said. "That's why we can't merely assume that because of the uniform you wear or the colour you are or the party you voted for, you're my enemy. That's actually forfeiting social change."

Research conducted by the Edmonton-based Common Ground indicates polarization is indeed high in Alberta, and while there is broad agreement on policy and values, many consider their party affiliation a matter of identity.

• The Edmonton Police Service confirmed that a partnership with the province to deploy 12 sheriffs to Edmonton's inner city to work alongside police officers has been extended to the end of 2023. A spokesperson for Alberta Justice said further decisions on the program will be made once a new cabinet is formed. The program, launched in February with an initial end date of May 31, is an initiative of the Edmonton Public Safety and Community Response Task Force. The province issued a release in April saying the program had improved public safety through both greater enforcement and crime prevention. That month, police also released crime rate statistics suggesting violent crime rates increased across Edmonton in 2022, particularly in the downtown core, although some observers questioned the statistics, including the co-hosts of Taproot's civic affairs podcast. A similar program to deploy sheriffs to work with Calgary police, which also launched in February, ended in late May and is now being evaluated.
• The Hate Crimes and Violent Extremism Unit of the Edmonton Police Service announced on June 5 that it expanded its online crime reporting service to allow Edmontonians to report hate incidents without calling police or going to a police station. "Hate incidents" refer to non-criminal actions based on hate, bias, or prejudice toward an identifiable group and are distinct from "hate crimes," which should be reported over the phone. EPS acting inspector Michelle Greening said hate incidents often go unreported for various reasons, including victims not realizing the incident is reportable or feeling reluctant due to past negative experiences with police. EPS numbers show reported hate crimes and hate incidents in Edmonton both decreased between 2021 and 2022, from 109 and 208 to 83 and 172 respectively. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network has observed a massive disparity between the number of self-reported hate crimes and the number reported to police, with less than 1% of hate crimes reported to the General Social Survey captured in police statistics in 2019.
• CBC News obtained a redacted copy of a Correctional Service of Canada report into an altercation at the Edmonton Institution on Jan. 8, 2022, that resulted in two inmates hospitalized, one with life-altering injuries. The report found that the officers who fired a launcher and a rifle took action proportional to the situation. However, it found that two officers who struck an inmate repeatedly with a shield and deployed pepper spray engaged in an unnecessary use of force. The report also revealed that the relationship between inmates and officers became strained during the pandemic when many staff members were on sick leave, which led to officer fatigue and limits on inmates' time outside their cells. The prison says it has since taken corrective measures with the officers who used excessive force and adjusted its introductory firearms training manual. James Bloomfield with the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers said working conditions have improved since 2022 but that violence at the prison remains high.
• A new report by RE/MAX found that Edmonton's commercial real estate market experienced one of its strongest first quarters in 2023, a trend led by out-of-province investment in the industrial sector. Major investment announcements since September 2022 include a $1.6-billion hydrogen facility from Air Products and a plan from English Bay Blending and Fine Chocolates to relocate from British Columbia to Stony Plain. Scott Hughes, owner of RE/MAX Commercial Capital, said increased interest in the Edmonton region is a sign that financial challenges brought on by the pandemic are improving. Puneeta McBryan, executive director of the Edmonton Downtown Business Association, suggested the trend is driven by the affordability of Edmonton's real estate compared to other major Canadian cities, adding Edmonton has a lot of underdeveloped land that will attract developers in the next five to 10 years.
• Edmonton-based Flair Airlines has the highest number of complaints per 100 flights of all major Canadian airlines, according to the Canadian Transportation Agency. From April 2022 to the end of March 2023, Flair received 15.3 complaints per 100 flights, compared to Sunwing at 13.8, Swoop at 13.2, and WestJet at 6.6.
• The Nature Conservancy of Canada announced a plan to raise $500 million by 2030 to conserve more than 5,000 square kilometres of prairie grasslands in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Prairie grasslands are considered one of the most endangered and least protected ecosystems in Canada, with only about 18% of the ecosystem remaining and a yearly loss of about 600 square kilometres.

A demo of self-driving robots that navigate a "town" populated by rubber ducks, a look at how machine learning could help grow meat in the lab, and a walk-through of industrial uses of AI are among the various aspects of the emerging technology that were explored at Upper Bound.

"There is no better time to be in AI," said Cam Linke, CEO of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) in his keynote address. "If you're a business, or an entrepreneur, or a government, this should excite you and scare you at the same time."

Researchers, entrepreneurs, and curious onlookers from Edmonton and around the globe gathered to learn more at Edmonton's second annual AI conference, which ran from May 23 to 26. Amii awarded 833 talent bursaries to researchers from 22 different countries and had another 676 tune in virtually.

In addition to Rich Sutton's closing keynote announcing OpenMind Research, the conference featured a wide range of sessions. Here are a few that caught our eye:

Duckietown lets U of A students dive into robotics

Pairing adorable rubber ducks with AI technology, the University of Alberta ran its first semester-long course using Duckietown in the 2023 winter semester. It offers robotics students an opportunity to get rigorous hands-on experience within a worldwide research project that originated at MIT in 2016.

Students learn to program small, self-driving vehicles carrying rubber duck passengers. Their assignments include getting the vehicles to stay within the lanes of their model town roads, park in an assigned spot, and stop and check for "pe-duck-strians" at crosswalks.

It's a challenge that can be daunting for prospective students.

"In a lot of computing science classes, it's trying to recreate things other people have done," said Matt Taylor, a Canada CIFAR AI chair with Amii and the instructor of the course that uses Duckietown. "In robotics, we are often doing things no one has done before because we try to make the class individualized and special."

Duckietown alumni have gone on to work with robotics at a number of companies, including Attabotics, a warehouse automation company in Calgary that Amii has been working with to increase productivity and decrease the amount of space needed.