Improving public safety

Updates to the Emergency Management Act and related regulations would strengthen community preparedness and disaster response and recovery, while ensuring an appropriate balance between emergency powers and individual rights. If passed, amendments will:

• add a new preamble to the act emphasizing Alberta’s commitment to respecting individual and property rights during emergencies
• update the legislated definition of ‘emergency’ to make it clear emergencies are sudden and temporary events, ensuring emergency powers are only used when necessary
• require the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Services to consult with the premier, cabinet or a cabinet committee before exercising provincial emergency powers, unless immediate action is required
• require the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Services or the local authority leading the local response to publish details of all relevant orders as soon as practicable using any methods necessary to inform those most affected

This new requirement would apply to orders related to:

• controlling or prohibiting travel
• restoring essential facilities or distributing essential supplies
• evacuations
• procuring or fixing the prices of goods and services

If Bill 49 passes, Alberta’s government is also planning the following amendments to regulations:

• Allow local authorities, during the recovery phase after a disaster, to receive funding for costs associated with mitigating the risk of future disasters.
• Require local authorities to create mitigation and evacuation plans to reduce the costs and impacts of potential disasters, and to improve coordination, transparency and preparedness.

Amendments to the Scrap Metal Dealers and Recyclers Identification Act and relevant regulations would make it easier for law enforcement to target illicit scrap metal sales and swiftly bring scrap metal traffickers to justice.

Additional reporting requirements for business-to-business scrap metal sales would ensure law enforcement have the information needed to identify suspicious activity and trace stolen property such as catalytic converters and copper wire.

The government is also considering regulatory changes to allow law enforcement to issue violation tickets for offences to make it easier and faster to charge those who violate the act. Other regulatory changes would make more effective use of court resources by setting specified penalties for certain less serious offences under the act, and by giving justices of the peace jurisdiction to deal with them.

Taken together, these changes are intended to overcome barriers to timely and consistent enforcement that law enforcement agencies have identified since the act first came into force in 2020.

The Public Safety Statutes Amendment Act, 2024, amended the Police Act to allow the Alberta government to create an independent agency police service, which will assume police-like functions currently performed by the Alberta sheriffs. Bill 49 would make further legislative amendments to help implement the new independent agency police service. If passed, amendments will:

• specify the new police service will be a Crown corporation, operationally independent from the Alberta government
• prevent the Alberta government from giving specific orders to the new police service so that police work is left up to the police themselves
• allow municipalities to choose the new independent agency police service as their policing provider

Municipalities would only be able to choose the new agency as their local policing provider when the necessary standards, capacity and frameworks are in place for it to offer these policing services.

The new police service will work closely with all police services in Alberta, including the RCMP, to ensure Alberta’s evolving public safety needs are being met and law enforcement is responding to calls as quickly as possible. 

Alberta’s government is implementing the Police Review Commission following extensive engagement with communities and stakeholders, who called for independent investigations into police misconduct allegations and an end to the practice of police investigating police.

The Police Review Commission will serve as a single arm’s-length agency for complaints involving municipal and First Nations police services across the province. The proposed changes would ensure:

• the agency has the authority and flexibility to meet the public’s expectations by developing and clarifying the roles, processes and definitions needed to support the commission’s implementation
• that Alberta’s government has the regulation-making authority needed to ensure the Police Review Commission operates effectively

The Police Review Commission is expected to become operational in December 2025. Alberta’s government and police services are continuing to work together to plan and carry out the handover of responsibility for complaints to the Police Review Commission.