CALGARY — Responding to a shooting outside a northeast lounge that has left one man charged and police still searching for two suspects, the Government of Alberta moved swiftly Tuesday to address the underlying causes by re-announcing three schools it has been promising the area since 2019, none of which currently exist.

Standing at a podium in a riding where existing schools routinely operate at 140 per cent capacity, the Education Minister explained that community safety begins with investment in young people, and that the province's investment in young people remained safely in the planning stage. The modular units are very much in the pipeline, the minister said of facilities first costed out during the previous decade. The pipeline is just longer than people assume.

Pressed on whether re-announcing unbuilt schools constituted a crime-prevention strategy, the minister noted that the government had also recently revised the social studies curriculum, removing several units and adding a financial-literacy module that teaches students to budget for outcomes the province itself has declined to fund.

We are committed to getting to the root cause, the minister said, standing in a community that has been on the school-construction waitlist longer than it has had a sitting deputy minister of education. When asked to name the root cause, the minister gestured broadly northeast and confirmed that a task force would be struck to identify it, with a report expected sometime after the next two elections.

Residents pointed out that the area's actual schools are so overcrowded that students attend in shifts, a logistics achievement the province has quietly reclassified as innovative scheduling. One parent observed that her son's portable classroom has been on a feasibility review longer than her son has been in elementary school. The minister called this encouraging engagement.

At press time, Calgary police were still searching for two suspects, while the Department of Education was still searching for the line item, the contractor, the land title, and the press release from 2019 in which a previous minister announced the exact same schools to the exact same applause.