LEGALIZATION OF CANNABIS ENGAGEMENT – CALGARY
Location: Calgary, AB
Project Type: Community Engagement
About This Project
The City of Calgary, like other municipalities across Canada, needed to understand what the legalization of non-medical cannabis meant for The City. ISL was retained to develop and implement a stakeholder and public engagement strategy to gather input on potentially affected bylaws and policies.
The ISL team designed and implemented stakeholder workshops with representatives from community organizations, businesses, industry partners, government agencies and non-governmental organizations. Public engagement was conducted through an online questionnaire that ISL developed in partnership with The City. The questions used aligned with additional research The City was conducting concurrently with the engagement process.
Key messages were explicit in what areas were or were not the responsibility of The City and therefore, open or not for discussion, such as the question of legalization itself. The project team was open about what information was available and known at any given the time. Questions were designed to gather feedback The City needed to help inform recommendations, regardless of the directions from the provincial or federal governments.
Workshop participants evaluated the sessions positively and spoke highly about the format, the facilitation, The City and the project. In three weeks, the online survey received approximately 13,000 responses to analyze and summarize in an engagement report. The online survey developed in partnership between The City and ISL has been used as a guide by several municipalities across the province for their engagement processes.
Image Credits: City of Calgary, Government of Alberta