fI’ve skimmed the regular council meeting minutes a couple times now, and have only found one in-Camera rise/report, despite 78 of 79 regular council meetings going in-Camera. There may be more, but if so, not many.

On Nov 06 2025, at the start of the Regular Council meeting, our City Manager spoke up to add a late item:

Yes, we just have an information item, rise and report motion, from the in camera meeting as it relates to downtown food security.

The move was approved and she continued later in the meeting:

So this is just information that stems from a rise and report from our in camera meeting in mid-october.

At that meeting council approved the extension of the take away dinner program that the city has had in place for the last several months.

So it is to approve the extension of that dinner program up until the end of December of this year with the delivery mechanism and provider to be managed under the City Manager’s discretion and that council approve up to $24,000 of additional funding to be allocated from the financial Stabilization reserve and that the 2025 to 2034 financial plan be amended.

And further, Council has also asked staff to reach out and work with the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction, which is actually the level of the province that is responsible for food security programs.

So just to provide that update we have reached out to their staff to request a meeting with city staff, and will be providing an additional letter to the actual minister themselves and Premier Eby as well, so that is being actioned.

I’ll make the motion to receive the information from the Rise and report.

Mid Oct? – there were no meetings between Oct 10 and Oct 20, only Oct 09 and Oct 23. The Oct 09 is closer to mid, and it also has an invocation of the more likely clause:

90(1)(k) Negotiations and related discussions respecting the proposed provision of a municipal service that are at their preliminary stages and that, in the view of the council could reasonable be expected to harm the interests of the municipality if they were held in public.

But this ‘boxed dinner’ program was about halfway through its life at that point, well past any “preliminary stages”. The funding being discussed here is “additional”.

I guess they voted to start it while in-Camera? Perhaps its part of a larger move council mentioned to CBC, saying: “it will continue to fund the program as it explored a longer-term solution, including a purpose-built facility outside the downtown core.”

The City’s ‘dinner program’, sometimes called ‘boxed takeaway dinners”, was nothing more than a bag of [sometimes unappealing, never great] snacks, as shown in a March CBC article. Often they had no protein source at all., and there were not enough snack bags to go around. Salvation Army lunch ran from 11:45 to 1:15, and the ~75bags would be gone by ~12:30 on average.

It is hard to fathom how ‘preparing’ these snacks cost 12k a month. But more importantly, they are not at all healthy, and the city’s motivation seems only to use them for gatekeeping.

Related

Another event involving Oct 09 2025 was the director of community safety’s letter to Vanessa Sharkey, noted in the Mar 13 CBC article .

A letter from the city’s director of community safety dated Oct. 9, which Sharkey shared with CBC News, says bylaw enforcement officers have “documented an increase in garbage, illegal drinking, disorder and other anti-social behaviour.”

“This evidence points to a lack of compliance with permit conditions,” the letter states. “Thus, the city will not be issuing permits to authorize a meal program, and as such, the meal program at Spirit Square must cease effective immediately.”

That letter was written over 10 months ago, and there is still no weekend meal service provided by the City or Salvation Army.