Calgary city council's governmental affairs committee will meet this week to debate a recommendation to formally ask the federal government for nearly $1 billion, money the city says is urgently required for a sports field house, a northeast extension of the Blue Line LRT, and roughly $190 million in critical infrastructure described in the agenda package as "largely" something, before the sentence trailed off.

"This is a transformational ask," said a councillor, using the word the city uses for every ask. "We have studied the field house. We have re-studied the field house. We have commissioned a study on whether to re-study the field house. What we have not yet done is build the field house, and that is where Ottawa comes in."

The proposed field house, first identified as a pressing municipal need sometime during the Harper government, has appeared in successive capital plans the way a houseguest appears at breakfast: familiar, unbudgeted, and somehow still here. Officials confirmed the facility remains 100 per cent funded in spirit.

The Blue Line extension into the northeast — a part of the city that has been promised rapid transit for so long that residents now treat the announcements as a seasonal event — would carry the heaviest portion of the request. "We're not asking for a handout," the councillor added. "We're asking for a $1-billion expression of confidence in a building that currently exists only as a recurring agenda item."

The funding model itself is a marvel of Canadian federalism, in which a municipality created and governed entirely by the Province of Alberta drives past the Legislature to ask the federal government for money, while the province issues a statement reminding everyone that cities are a provincial responsibility, then declines to pay for them.

At press time, the committee had voted to receive the recommendation "for information," a procedural manoeuvre that allows council to acknowledge the field house exists without committing to its existence, and to revisit the matter at a future meeting to be scheduled in a future that, like the field house, remains conceptual.