Another key player on Edmonton city council has announced their plans for the upcoming municipal election: Ward O-Day’min councilor Anne Stevenson will be seeking re-election.
The audience for Stevenson's campaign launch featured a number of politicians and political staff from Edmonton's centre-left. Photo courtesy of the campaign.
Stevenson’s campaign launch at the Ortona Arts Hub in central Edmonton on Sunday was well-attended. We counted at least fifty, and spotted notables from the labour movement, provincial and federal politics, and Edmonton city council itself, including councilors Andrew Knack, Ashley Salvador, and Michael Janz, as well as NDP MP Heather McPherson.
Stevenson cited council’s progress on housing policy as an area of success during her last term. The city enacted a tax grant for property owners who provide affordable housing, which the provincial government is now mirroring province-wide.
Stevenson pointed to the city’s increased funding for shelters and housing and council’s successes in reaching agreements with the provincial government.
She cited funding increases to police and peace officers as a positive development, though with some caveats.
“Those aren't solutions,” said Stevenson. “It's sort of universally recognized that we need longer-term solutions like housing and health care and this is where we're a bit stuck as a city. A key piece of work in the next term is going to be to continue to advocate to the other orders of government.”
She credited Mayor Amarjeet Sohi, who has said he won’t seek re-election, with doing “a great job of really quantifying the gap in emergency shelter beds compared to Calgary.”
“We started off with 700 emergency shelter beds in Edmonton and we're now up over 1700,” Stevenson claimed.
“That's because we were able to document and be really specific about that gap and those needs. We passed a motion a few weeks ago around doing the exact same for some of the health-care gaps that we see,” Stevenson added.
The veracity of that 1700 figure is questionable. Through 2024, the provincial government sparred with local shelter provider Homeward Trust about the exact count. Since then, the provincial government has taken control of the release of shelter data and is now the only source for figures on it. The province presently claims that Edmonton has a shelter capacity of approximately 2050, of which just under 1550 spaces are currently occupied.
Stevenson specifically identified a need for more detox and treatment options for downtown residents dealing with substance abuse, as well as a need for more supervised consumption sites—policy areas on which the provincial government has been hostile.
Stevenson will face at least two high-profile challengers in her re-election bid, including Anand Pye, CEO of the landlord lobbyist group NAIOP, and if rumours that municipal political commentator Troy Pavlek has heard are true, Stephen Hammerschmidt, an economics instructor at NAIT, who is expected to run for Tim Cartmell’s new municipal political party.