Jen Gerson: The world is hard. Have you considered a toy room?

We are clearly all doing fine, here.

This is my daughter. She is 6. She is Playing in an actual adult toy room set up for stressed city of Calgary councilors and staff. No. This is not a joke.

The fault was mine for not checking the calendar. March Break came a day earlier than expected, and so my Monday downtown business lunch suddenly became a “Take Your Daughter To Work” day. Very kindly, my lunch mates offered to take us on a tour of old Calgary City Hall — the heritage building still connected to the glassy expanse where council meetings now take place.

Delighted to have a child along for the tour, we would also get to visit the newly designated “toy room.”

This was slated to be a serious day at the seat of municipal government. Hundreds of people had signed up to speak to council about one of the most contentious issues to hit the city in years — blanket rezoning. Adopted in 2023, the policy allowed for widespread development of multi-unit housing types in areas previously allotted for single family homes. The change was immediately and enduringly controversial, although it was initially sold as a necessary corrective for the city’s sprawling suburbs. Blanket re-zoning would erase one obstacle toward greater densification, which will hopefully drive down inflated housing costs.

But critics were notably unhappy, citing fears ranging from parking chaos to a loss of community character. After the new council was sworn in late last year, it was inevitable that the changes would be debated again. Calgary is now going through exhaustive and extensive public hearings to redesignate more than 300,000 residential parcels — a majority of the city’s housing stock.

Chairs were lined up in the atrium outside the city hall. A handful had taken a seat, waiting for their turn to lament the loss of the nuclear ideal to a city council that had, apparently, been too quick to overlook community concerns. It was going to be a rough day for Calgary’s political leadership.

So I took my daughter past the hearing and into the city council’s adult toy room.

The room, set up to help adult councillors and their staff cope with the stress of the rezoning situation, was located in an office on one of the upper floors of old city hall. My daughter, six, was delighted when she walked through the doors to see stress balls, colouring books, slinkies with happy faces on them, silicone poppet key chains, and one of those lava toys that drips pink and purple bubbles when it’s flipped. She immediately took to a hand-sized green plastic turtle filled with Kinetic sand and miniature rakes and shovels.

Only hours later, the next story broke. Amid rumours that the RCMP has executed dozens of warrants against political figures in Alberta in connection with corruption allegations that are now too numerous for me to full track, news came down via the CBC that current and former council members — including former mayor Jyoti Gondek — had their phones seized by police. We don’t yet know what they are being investigated for.

Unfortunately, we had to leave shortly thereafter, so my daughter and I missed the on-site therapist tasked with managing feelings for the city council members who put their names forward of their own free will, fundraised thousands of dollars, knocked on doors relentlessly, and ran in a competitive democratic process for the honour of serving and representing their constituents as leaders in their communities. I was told that the therapy dogs were scheduled to attend Wednesday and Thursday in the Electric Light Room between the hours of 12:00 and 1:30 p.m, again for the benefit of city staff.

Later, we learned that two Air Canada pilots died after their plane ran into a firetruck on the runway of LaGuardia airport in New York. In the midst of broader reports of widespread dysfunction at American airports blamed on TSA staffing issues caused by the U.S. federal government’s partial shutdown, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the fact that air traffic controllers are regarded as having one of the highest stress jobs; pilots, as well, take the literal lives of hundreds passengers in their aircraft into their competency every single day.

As far as I can tell, nobody used the City of Calgary’s adult toy room. In fact, most of the people I happened to run into thought the thing was either ridiculous or insulting or both. That said, dealing with the public — especially when it’s angry at the institution you represent for the choices that it made — is, no doubt, stressful and difficult.

Another thing that is stressful and difficult is managing the fact that our largest trading partner has morphed into something resembling an existential threat to the economic sovereignty of our nation, necessitating a generational realignment of our strategic interests and priorities.

Shortly before we left, I took a picture of my daughter in the City of Calgary’s adult toy room. Then I tweeted it. We had a long car ride home, so I stole one of the stress balls and the Kinetic sand box because she is six years old and nobody in that office really ought to need those things — especially not at taxpayer’s expense.

Also this week, the war in Iran is not going well. The Strait of Hormuz remains blocked to all but a few tankers willing to pay off the authoritarian Iranian regime, leading to fuel shortages in parts of the world, and a dramatic spike in oil prices welcomed only by governments whose budgets are about to salvaged by royalty revenues. Never mind the potentially catastrophic impacts higher oil prices will have on the rest of the economy. The strait is also a major chokepoint for chemical precursors to massive amounts of fertilizer necessary to feed much of the world.

The toy room was, reportedly, shut down shortly after I published about it on X.

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