The Pulse: June 20, 2023

With Edmonton's low-income seniors struggling with rising food costs, a local group is in search of volunteers to support its community gardens.

Seeds for Seniors supplies at-risk seniors with produce grown at the five inner-city seniors' residences operated by Operation Friendship Seniors Society as well as half a dozen backyard gardens, said Seeds for Seniors founder Gabby Hay-Byers.

"People either plant extra for us or, when they have excess, we'll take the food to facilities where seniors are living independently and have their own kitchenettes," she told Taproot.

This year, Hay-Byers anticipates growing at least $2,500 worth of produce at the seniors' residences and about $1,300 in partner gardens in the community. Now that the growing season has begun, Hay-Byers is searching for more volunteers to ensure the community gardens thrive.

"The weeding gets to be a lot," she said, noting that volunteers can help out with any aspect of gardening. No experience is required, as guidance is provided by herself, other volunteers, and the seniors themselves, many of whom are experienced gardeners. One of the gardens is overseen by a retired farmer, in fact.

The growing season is off to a good start, but there's a lot at stake with this year's yield given the economic challenges facing those on fixed incomes. The cost of food is expected to rise by 5% to 7% this year after years of increases. The June 2023 Vital Signs report from the Edmonton Community Foundation indicates that 20.3% of Albertans experienced food insecurity in 2022, compared with 12.3% in 2011. Edmonton's Food Bank served hampers to more than 35,000 people in November, its highest number in 42 years, and in February, the organization was forced to cut back on the number of hampers individuals could receive each month from four boxes to three.

• The Edmonton Transit Service (ETS) announced that summer service changes will take effect beginning July 2. The changes include an extension to weekday On Demand Transit service hours for seniors residences, the addition of route 727 from Chappelle to Heritage Valley Transit Centre, and extensions or adjustments to routes 56, 500X, 516, 900X, and 901. ETS makes regular service changes five time a year.
• City council's community and public services committee received a report on June 19 that says Edmontonians will see a decrease in snow and ice control services in 2023-2024 compared to 2022-2023 due to funding cuts as part of the latest budget. The city's plan is to clear arterial roads, business districts, and bus routes in five days instead of four. Meanwhile, it could take 10 days instead of eight to clear residential roads, alleys, and school zones, and six days instead of four to clear city sidewalks, wheelchair ramps, bridges, and parking lots. Bus stops, benches, pathways, and the corners around pedestrian crossings will need to be manually cleared within 22 days instead of 13, and there will be less proactive enforcement of snow and ice removal on private sidewalks. Tonia LaRiviere, chair of the city's accessibility advisory committee, told council that people with mobility barriers face greater risks from snow and ice and said that waiting "nearly a month" to clear bus benches and paths is a "huge accessibility concern for all Edmontonians."
• Brian Blacklock, president of local wholesaler Pegasus Paper, told CBC that Edmontonians should expect a significant increase in the price of takeout after the city's ban on single-use items, such as plastic shopping bags and foam containers, takes effect on July 1. "The packaging for your takeout food is about 20% of the cost of your meal," said Blacklock, "and if that 20% doubles in price, somebody's got to pay for it." The city's Single-use Item Reduction Bylaw will also require businesses to charge at least 15 cents for a paper shopping bag and at least $1 for a reusable bag, serve beverages to dine-in customers in reusable cups, and have a policy to accept customers' reusable cups. The federal government's single-use plastics regulations banned the manufacture of plastic shopping bags and other hard-to-recycle plastic items in 2022 and will prohibit their sale Canada-wide in December 2023.
• The city closed its evacuee reception centre at the EXPO Centre for evacuees of Edson and Yellowhead County on June 19 after residents were allowed to return to their homes in those areas. According to a release, the city registered 1,800 people since June 9 and provided lodging, food, health care, and support for pets. It also sent four fire crews to help with firefighting efforts in Edson.
• Postmedia columnist Keith Gerein questioned Edmonton's "cult of the tree", which he says is reflected in recent and longstanding debates about the welfare of local trees, including the backlash against the Hawrelak Park Rehabilitation Project that could put 700 trees at risk and Coun. Andrew Knack's recent effort to create a bylaw protecting trees on private property. Gerein argued that policies to protect trees that create more red tape for developers would hinder the goals of the city's Zoning Bylaw Renewal Initiative, which aims to improve affordability and climate sustainability in part by encouraging greater density and slowing sprawl. "Or, to be more blunt, adding one new infill duplex does far more to curb emissions than saving a few trees on that same lot," he wrote.
• Edson declared a state of local emergency on June 19 due to flooding brought on by heavy rains. Mayor Kevin Zahara said the town will seek assistance from neighbouring municipalities and be in touch with the Alberta Emergency Management Agency. As of June 19, 13 properties were reported to have flooded, and phone and internet lines were down. The wildfire south of town remains out-of-control but received 84 millimetres of rain within a few hours. Sara Hoffman, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, said areas in central and western Alberta experiencing heavy rainfall are catching up to normal precipitation levels for this time of year. Other regions, including northwest Alberta, are still dry.
• Thirty-six members of the NDP caucus, which is the largest official Opposition in the province's history, were officially sworn in on June 19 during a ceremony at the Alberta legislature. NDP Leader Rachel Notley told the media her caucus consists of diverse representatives who "can dig deeper into a whole range of issues and be even more thorough" in holding the UCP government to account. Two NDP members were not sworn in during the ceremony because their close election wins remain subject to ongoing judicial recounts. Independent MLA Jennifer Johnson was sworn in separately on June 19, and the 48-member UCP caucus will be sworn in on June 20.

The development of various applications of artificial intelligence will go further faster with more collaboration — that's one of the through-lines that emerged from Upper Bound, says the team Taproot sent to cover the AI conference.

Reporters Shayne Giles and Ashley Lavallee-Koenig dove deeper into what they learned in Episode 47 of Bloom.

A session on an autonomous-vehicle training course called Duckietown and a progress report on the uses of machine learning in developing lab-grown meat may not seem to have a lot in common, but it was clear from both that silos don't help, Giles said.

"Cellular agriculture, just as we touched on with Duckietown, is definitely an industry that could benefit from more collaboration," they said. "A lot of the funding has been private over the past few years, and so there's all of these different companies all trying to accomplish the same thing independently, whereas if they worked together, they'd be able to make a lot more progress a lot faster."

Neither self-driving cars nor steak-from-a-petri-dish are here yet, but machine learning is already in action in the supply chain industry, as evidenced by a session on Routeique's collaboration with Amii. That caught Lavallee-Koenig's attention.

"I have been working for a large corporate retailer for four years, so I've been on that back end, and I've seen what a mess the logistics side of things can be," she said. "The amount of energy and packaging we're wasting by not having those processes be efficient is actually quite a shame, I think. So to see the potential to have that optimized, as they say, even from a worker's perspective, I think it would make things a lot easier."

Hear more from these Gen-Zers on the changes coming now and in the future, including Rich Sutton's vision for a transcendent kind of AI, on the June 20 episode of Taproot's podcast about innovation in Edmonton.