Smith’s penchant for exercising executive power—always under the pretext of challenging federal government overreach—has been on display ever since her first year as premier. Tucked away in the original version of her signature Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act was a clause empowering cabinet to unilaterally amend provincial legislation. Another clause empowered cabinet to direct various provincial entities, including municipalities, to disobey federal legislation. In response to widespread backlash, Smith removed the clause allowing cabinet to rewrite provincial legislation by fiat, which she had initially denied existed at all. But the bill as passed in December 2022 maintained cabinet’s ability to issue orders to provincial bodies to ignore federal legislation.

A year after her re-election with a secure, albeit diminished, majority in May 2023, Smith sponsored a trio of bills that built upon the Sovereignty Act’s engorgement of provincial power. As was the case with the Sovereignty Act, Smith made tactical retreats on some of the far-reaching bills’ most egregious language while maintaining their basic structure.

These laws, taken together, enable the provincial government to block federal funding from initiatives it disagrees with; make it easier for the province to remove elected municipal officials from office and rewrite municipal bylaws if they depart from the UCP agenda; introduce naked partisanship to municipal elections in Calgary and Edmonton; bring big money back into municipal elections; make it harder for vulnerable people to vote; and enable the province to further centralize power in the event of an emergency.

At the core of these legislative changes, according to University of Calgary political scientist Lisa Young, is a “belief that conservatives are entitled to a political monopoly in the province, and that other perspectives are illegitimate,” with Smith using the levers of the state to produce outcomes in accordance with that perspective. “When we take all of the measures together, it really does look as though the province would like to turn the municipalities into administrative units that act on the direction of the provincial government, so it’s a centralization of authority and direction in the provincial government at the expense of elected officials at the local level.”

Smith’s changes will also make it easier for her foot soldiers in Take Back Alberta, the far-right activist organization that brought her to power and now says it controls a majority of the seats on the UCP board of directors, to achieve its stated aim in the 2025 civic elections of purging municipalities and school boards of anyone who disagrees with TBA’s religious fundamentalist and anti-democratic agenda. It looks increasingly as though Smith, when she talks about her purported penchant for freedom, is referring to the freedom for herself and her supporters to shape the province in their preferred and extremely narrow image.

Bill 18

The first legislative salvo fired against municipalities in the spring sitting was Bill 18, or the Alberta Priorities Act, introduced in April 2024, which the premier explicitly described as a way to hamper municipalities from working against the UCP government’s agenda. The legislation mandates that all municipalities, school boards, health authorities and post-secondary institutions, among other provincial bodies, seek provincial government approval before entering into any agreements with the federal government.

“We’re not going to allow the federal government to come in and work directly with the provincial entity that we give a regulated mandate to and circumvent the things we want to do,” Smith said, echoing the 2016 UK Brexit campaign in portraying the bill as “taking back control” of federal agreements. “We know the federal government, on certain issues, has a diametrically opposed view to what it is we want to do.”

In the same breath, Smith accused the federal government of imposing “an ideological agenda” with its funding commit-ments while denying her government was engaged in any sort of comparable behaviour. “When we do spending,” she said, “it doesn’t have an ideological tinge to it.”

Edmonton mayor Amarjeet Sohi, a former federal Liberal cabinet minister, criticized the bill for creating needless red tape for municipalities, which he predicted will have tangible results on the ground. The need to constantly get provincial approval for any federal funding “will hurt our ability to move quickly on infrastructure projects, from small projects to the largest ones,” Sohi told the Edmonton Journal in April 2024. For example, in a post-Bill 18 future, support for the Rapid Housing Initiative, to which the feds contributed $12.5-million for Edmonton in September 2023, may not be so rapid.

Wetaskiwin mayor Tyler Gandam, president of Alberta Municipalities, says the entire notion of “provincial priorities” is a fraught concept, given the different needs of various municipalities. If voters in an Alberta municipality identify a priority, Gandam said, “that sounds like it’s a priority in Alberta,” which would make it a de facto provincial priority that ought to be respected. He added that he’s struggling to understand the province’s desire to insert itself into municipal arrangements with the federal government. “It just creates more hoops for us to jump through while we’re trying to build and maintain the infrastructure and communities we’re serving.”

Young says that while this legislation will create headaches for municipalities and other bodies, it has the most troubling implications for academic freedom, given federal funding for research grants through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. In the 2022/23 school year, these bodies, known collectively as the “tri-council agencies,” were responsible for  a combined $317-million in grants at Alberta post-secondary institutions.

Her view that federal research grants are distributed by Trudeau is “not grounded in reality.”

The premier has openly expressed her desire to vet these grants to ensure “all people from all political perspectives are able to engage in a robust debate and have a robust research agenda.” As evidence for her concern, Smith, a former Calgary Herald columnist and long-time talk radio host, cited her belief that more liberal journalists and commentators than conservative ones are graduating from journalism schools.

Smith’s view that federal research grants are distributed by prime minister Justin Trudeau to reflect his ideological inclinations is “simply not grounded in reality,” Young said. “It’s an independent research adjudication process. The Trudeau government does not get to pick winners and losers when it comes to grant  from the tri-agency.” Grant proposals are evaluated by a review panel composed of volunteer experts who scrutinize each proposal based on criteria specific to each funding agency, as well as the agency’s broader policies and procedures.

The premier’s paranoid perspective on post-secondary grant allocations can be applied to municipalities, which she views as conspiring with Trudeau to undermine the province’s interests as she sees them. Nowhere is that more evident than in the province’s two biggest cities.

Bill 20

The centrepiece of Smith’s authoritarian streak towards municipal governance is Bill 20, the Municipal Affairs Statutes Amendment Act, which made far-reaching changes in the two statutes concerning municipalities—the Municipal Government Act and the Local Authorities Election Act. Concordia University of Edmonton political scientist Elizabeth Smythe called this legislation an example of “[d]emocratic backsliding … at its most blatant.”

A crucial piece of Bill 20 is the introduction of municipal political parties in Calgary or Edmonton in time for the 2025 municipal vote (they may yet be introduced throughout the province). Smith has argued that partisanship already exists in the two major cities’ municipal politics, so allowing formal party affiliation will simply bring it out into the open, adding—according to a Municipal Affairs spokesperson—a layer of “transparency and accountability” to civic elections.

Young says this argument is not entirely without merit. Two of Canada’s largest cities—Montreal and Vancouver—have municipal parties. “In and of themselves, [parties] are not undemocratic or problematic,” she said. But, taken into consideration alongside other aspects of Smith’s approach to municipalities, “it’s hard to see this legislation any way other than through the lens of an articulated discontent with the choices that voters in Calgary and Edmonton have made at the municipal level—that it’s an attempt to ensure conservative control of those city councils.”

It’s important to consider this aspect of Bill 20 alongside its reintroduction of corporate and union donations into municipal elections, Young says. On a superficial level, this might even sound fair, with corporations and unions given the same $5,000 limit that applies to individual donors. But unions and corporations are fundamentally different entities. “It’s going to have a very asymmetrical effect,” says Young. “This is not an even-handed change to the rules.” A union representing thousands of workers, she explained, is restricted to the $5,000 limit, but if a wealthy individual owns, say, 10 companies, there’s nothing preventing that person from contributing upwards of $50,000 without breaking the law.

At the same time that it allows big money to dominate local elections, an underexamined piece of Bill 20 makes it more difficult for marginalized people to vote by eliminating the practice of vouching. The practice allows electors without ID (e.g., students, mobile workers, people who can’t afford to renew their ID) to be vouched for by another elector in their voting area under certain conditions; some 10,564 Albertans voted this way in the 2023 election. In a May 29, 2024, piece in The Conversation, University of Alberta academics Jared Wesley and Alex Ballos argued that banning vouching represents a “dangerous precedent that fundamentally undermines a cornerstone of democracy: accessibility.”

According to publicly available Elections Alberta data, a grand total of seven illegal votes have been cast in more than a decade of Alberta elections, all of which occurred in the 2019 and 2023 elections, leading Wesley and Ballos to call the elimination of vouching a “solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.”

Rural Municipalities of Alberta (RMA) president Paul McLauchlin, who serves as the reeve of Ponoka County, cautioned that making it harder to vote gives credence to conspiracy theories questioning the legitimacy of democratic elections. “And interest in municipal politics is already [low]. We get very low voter turnout,” he told the St. Albert Gazette. “Putting in higher barriers to voting only compounds these challenges.”

In this context, it’s worth considering premier Smith’s obsession with US culture-war politics, including efforts by Republican legislators to restrict voters’ ability to cast ballots through draconian voter ID restrictions, which Wesley and Ballos note overwhelmingly disenfranchise racialized and other marginalized people.

In its original iteration, Bill 20 gave cabinet the authority to unilaterally remove municipal elected officials from office under unspecified “specific circumstances,” and repeal bylaws that the government deemed not to be in the “public interest.” Alberta Municipalities’ Gandam called this aspect of the bill “a power grab that completely takes away from our democratic process at the municipal level [in which] our residents decide who represents them.”

By the time the bill passed its third reading in the legislature, this aspect had been amended to empower cabinet not to remove municipal officials but merely to initiate a recall petition against officials cabinet deems “unwilling, unable or refusing to do the job for which they were elected.” It clarified that bylaws could only be repealed in the event they’re deemed to be a violation of the Municipal Government Act, unconstitutional or, channeling the spirit of Bill 18, “contrary to provincial policy.”

Jan Novotny protesting outside of the Alberta legislature against the changes to municipal governance in Bill 20, Edmonton, May 6, 2024.

Bill 20’s critics weren’t satisfied with these minor modifications. McLauchlin of the RMA likened the legislation’s final form to a “large axe hanging over all of our heads,” one which risks making municipal politics in Alberta “unrecognizable.”

Gandam noted that under the previous version of the Municipal Government Act, the province already had the ability to dismiss municipal elected officials, which it had done as recently as December 2023, when the government dismissed Chestermere’s mayor, three city councillors and three administrators. But the investigation that preceded those dismissals followed a clear process, Gandam said. “The councillors were given the opportunity to correct their behaviour and their action, so that they could still continue on council. They chose not to, and that’s why they were removed from council.”

A thorough investigation found that former Chestermere mayor Jeff Colvin, during his two years in power, spent $53,000 on his city-issued credit card, mostly on meals, with some tips ranging from 50 to 100 per cent. Of 565 mayor and council expenses the investigation examined, just one adhered to the city’s policy on filing and approving expenses. The city also spent $1.6-million in lawyer fees, none of which were approved in accordance with the city’s procurement policy, including $22,000 for a lawyer to investigate councillor Ritesh Narayan—one of the three councillors ultimately spared from removal.

This existing power hasn’t been applied consistently. The UCP government declined to use it to order an investigation of conservative Calgary councillor Sean Chu, whom the Law Enforcement Review Board found guilty of sexual misconduct with a minor when he served as a Calgary police officer. This suggests there is a legitimate need for the provincial government to clearly articulate in legislation the circumstances in which it can or cannot investigate an elected municipal official. “But that’s not what we have here,” says Lisa Young. Rather, Smith has made it so cabinet can skip the sort of due process afforded to Chestermere’s municipal government and go straight to a recall campaign.

In terms of bylaws, the province already has the power to update the Municipal Government Act to prevent municipalities from imposing specific policies it doesn’t want, Young said, a power which former premier Jason Kenney used to prohibit municipalities from imposing mask mandates after he lifted the province’s mandate. With Bill 20, Smith has made it easier for the province to interfere in municipal affairs more frequently.

Young said these provisions of Bill 20 serve as a tacit warning to municipal leaders. “It could be used in a way to constrain what city or municipal councillors are actually willing to pass. If they know that the province is going to come in and veto legislation they’ve passed, will they go ahead and pass it, particularly when you couple that with the threat of dismissal?”

Bill 21

The final part in Smith’s trilogy of anti-municipal legislation is Bill 21, the Emergency Statutes Amendment Act, which gives the province the ability to take control of local emergency response without a municipality’s consent.

“Everybody’s come to the same conclusion: that we can’t sit back and wait for the fire to jump the border and burn down Slave Lake or burn down Fort McMurray or potentially burn down Drayton Valley,” Smith told reporters at a May 9, 2024, press conference. Smith claimed this change was a specific request from municipalities. Gandam had told the CBC in an earlier interview that while municipalities have requested more resources to manage emergencies, he’s not aware of any that have asked the province to take over their emergency response.

Nor is McLauchlin, who told the Edmonton Journal that rural municipalities want “collaboration, not control.” He characterized Bill 21 as the “latest attempt to reduce the authority of municipal leaders, with no clear explanation as to how this will do anything other than confuse and complicate emergency response moving forward.”

Lisa Young says that, like the creation of municipal political parties, the appropriate level of provincial involvement in emergency response is debatable. “But this legislation wasn’t introduced in a vacuum,” she said. “It was introduced after Bills 18 and 20, so it’s hard not to see it as part of a consolidation of authority in the provincial government at the expense of municipal government.”

Premier Smith spent the spring 2024 legislative session entrenching provincial power.

The failed effort to recall Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek in 2024 is a preview of the style of municipal politics Smith has emboldened through legislation. The recall petition’s public face was local business owner Landon Johnston. But Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt obtained a document outlining the coordinated involvement of figures with deep ties to the UCP and Take Back Alberta, with the aim of using the petition as a springboard for electing “common-sense conservative Mayor and Counsel [sic]” in 2025.

When former premier Kenney introduced the Recall Act in 2021, he set an impossibly high bar: the collection of signatures from 40 per cent of a municipality’s entire electorate within 60 days to recall a mayor. In 2024 in Calgary this amounted to 514,284 signatures. Under these terms the Recall Gondek petition was doomed to fail—as indeed it did. The petition collected 69,344 signatures, and of the 369 randomly selected by city officials for scrutiny, not one was valid.

But Young says the petition was surely successful as a “data-mining exercise” to obtain the names of people who could be willing to volunteer and donate to a conservative municipal party in 2025. “And it contributes to a perception,” she said, “that the mayor is unpopular, that there’s a good chance for someone to challenge her in the next election if she runs, and so it potentially can rally the party faithful under those circumstances.”

With Bill 20 empowering cabinet to initiate a recall process for local politicians that the provincial government deems unsuited for their job, Albertans can expect more such campaigns. Combined with its provision making the minister of municipal affairs, rather than city administration, responsible for validating a recall petition, it’s possible that future recalls will find more success.

A key figure in implementing Smith’s municipal crackdown is municipal affairs minister Ric McIver, a former Calgary city councillor and failed mayoral candidate. He earned the moniker “Dr. No” during his time on council from 2001 to 2010, owing to his penchant for voting against major city projects. Druh Farrell, whose time as a councillor from 2001 to 2021 overlapped with McIver’s, says his obstructionist instincts haven’t changed at all.

Farrell suspects that McIver holds a “grudge” from the 2010 mayoral election, which he lost to political newcomer Naheed Nenshi. Before McIver was appointed municipal affairs minister in 2021, he served as former premier Kenney’s transportation minister, a role in which he put up roadblocks against approval of the Green Line LRT expansion—one of Nenshi’s signature initiatives—despite McIver’s having supported the new line when he was a city councillor. “He couldn’t articulate what [his government] didn’t like about it,” said Farrell. “But they withheld approval because they could—and they’ve created a mess that we’re having to live with.”

McIver’s current role, however, allows him to meddle even further in municipal governance, making him a useful emissary for the UCP’s grievance-fuelled politics of “power and control.” “Now he gets to make decisions for cities without running for city council,” said Farrell. “It’s an excellent situation for him. He’s an authoritarian figure.”

Constitutionally, Smith and McIver have the power to do whatever they like with municipalities, which they’re fond of reminding Albertans are “creatures of the province.” Farrell ties this literalist reading of the constitution, which was written in 1867, to the UCP’s social conservative bent—a position bolstered by Take Back Alberta leader David Parker’s obsession with the “tyranny of the rainbow guard” and by Smith’s radical anti-trans policies. “They’re taking us back to when most Albertans lived on the family farm, not in municipalities,” she said. “It’s a step backwards for a modern society to go back to the way things were in the 1800s. You wonder what else they want to reverse.”

But with the overreach represented by Bills 18, 20 and 21, Smith has alienated rural Albertans too. “We’re being put into a smaller and smaller box, and the government is taking more and more authority away from us, which makes no sense based upon our past relationship with this government,” McLauchlin of the RMA told the Canadian Press. “It is extremely hard for a conservative government to make rural Alberta mad, and they’ve done that successfully in three acts.”

Jeremy Appel is an independent journalist who covers Alberta politics. His previous AV story “Just Say No to Drugs,” examined the UCP government’s approach to the overdose crisis.

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Here’s the hard answer.

Under the terms of Canada’s constitution, cities are but “creatures” of the provinces. Municipalities, no matter how big, have no constitutional protection against provincial laws that might change their structures, functions or financial resources, with or without their consent. Indeed, Canada’s courts have found that municipalities have no legal or political autonomy. That means their powers are subject to abolition or repeal by provincial legislatures.

It is an absurd state of affairs.  Toronto’s population is more than twice the size of Manitoba’s. More people live in Calgary than in all of Saskatchewan. Red Deer’s population isn’t much less than Prince Edward Island’s. Yet even the smallest provinces have powerful constitutional rights and protections, not to mention lucrative funding deals with the federal government.

Canada’s municipalities have no legal or political autonomy. This is an absurd state of affairs.

But municipalities large and small are the Cinderellas of Confederation, forbidden to go to the constitutional ball.

It makes no sense when you consider that municipalities are the economic engines of our provinces and our country. Nor when you consider all the responsibilities that have been downloaded to cities and towns over the decades. It’s municipal governments that must respond first to natural disasters, including those spurred by climate change. Whether we’re talking about floods or wildfires or violent storms, it’s local governments that must provide the emergency services, then pick up the pieces and rebuild their communities.

Cities and towns are likewise first responders when it comes to rebuilding and retrofitting infrastructure to withstand the impacts of climate change—from retooling storm sewers, to building reservoirs and dikes, to depopulating flood plains.

Cities and towns build our social infrastructure too. In multicultural Alberta, where immigration is essential to our economic future, it’s local governments that help newcomers adapt. As our urban Indigenous population booms, municipalities wrestle with the realities of reconciliation. Local leaders deal first-hand with the twin dilemmas of homelessness and drug addiction in the face of the opioid crisis. And our cities must respond to the challenge of ensuring affordable housing for young working Canadian families.

These poor “creatures” have been fighting for decades for the respect and resources they need—even while collecting a fraction of the taxes that federal and provincial governments do. And those tax bases have been hard hit by the aftershocks of COVID, the hollowing out of downtown towers, the emptying out of traditional retail. Calgary still has the highest downtown office vacancy rate in the country, at 30 per cent, compared to 18 per cent nationally. Edmonton is faring a bit better, with a vacancy rate of about 21 per cent. But that’s still above the national average—and it puts pressure on cities to raise residential tax rates, which puts a squeeze on homeowners.

It’s not only big cities such as Edmonton and Calgary that are struggling. In 2019 the Rural Municipalities of Alberta found an unprecedented $81-million on property taxes from oil and gas companies had gone unpaid to small towns and counties across the province. By January of 2020 the same body reported that rural municipalities were facing a shortfall of $173-million in such unpaid taxes. By end of 2023 the RMA’s members reported that at least $251.8-million of municipal property taxes had gone unpaid by the energy industry.

Small wonder that many Alberta municipalities have been keen to strike deals with the federal government, deals which funnel money directly to them, without provincial gatekeeping—and small wonder many are pushing back against the UCP’s proposals to throttle such grant programs.

But this isn’t just an issue of a fight between a particular premier and certain mayors. It’s really about the constitutional inequity at the heart of this country, which leaves cities—even cities with millions of residents—locked in a feudal relationship with their provincial overlords. Meantime, local councils struggle on, doing the essential, often thankless work their citizens need and demand. But if we want to prepare for the environmental, economic and social challenges ahead, we must free our cities and unleash their remarkable capacity to lead the way.

Paula Simons is an independent senator for Alberta. The report of her Senate inquiry into the state of Canada’s municipalities will be released in September 2024.

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Every five years Canada’s census measures “core housing need”—the number of households whose homes are unaffordable, overcrowded or in need of major repairs. Housing is considered unaffordable when it costs more than 30 per cent of that household’s pre-tax income. In 2016 almost 1.7 million Canadian households, or one in eight, were in core housing need. But in 2021 only 1.45 million households, or about one in 10, were.

How is that possible, given everything we’ve heard about rents and home prices skyrocketing during that period Statistics Canada is clear as to why: “The COVID-19-related government transfers lifted many households above the housing affordability thresholds, helping pay for shelter costs like rent, mortgages and utilities.” The most recent census (2021) relied on 2020 incomes. But now that the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and other temporary income supplements have been rolled back, the number of Canadian households in core need has undoubtedly risen.

The “CERB bump”—250,000 households temporarily lifted out of housing need—gives us an immediate hint as to who we’re talking about: overwhelmingly, households whose incomes were a lot less than the $500/week that CERB provided. In fact, almost four in five households in core housing need in Canada have low or very low incomes: 1.1 million of the 1.45 million of these households have incomes under $42,000 a year, which is less than half of Canada’s median household income. Of that number, 200,000 have incomes of $18,000 or less and can afford no more than $420/month for rent.

Core housing need measures only a fraction of the people who live in unaffordable, overcrowded or uninhabitable homes. The most egregious knowledge gap is an accurate homelessness count. According to the most recent data from Statistics Canada, 235,000 people are without safe and secure accommodation at least once a year. But that figure is from 2014. More recently, biennial “point in time” counts have been interrupted by COVID. Even these exercises only count people who are found unsheltered, in emergency shelters or in “transitional housing” on one night in a little more than 60 of Canada’s more than 700 municipalities with over 5,000 people.

At least 70 per cent of 2.2 million college and university students in Canada live independently of families, the majority of them on very low incomes. Almost three quarters of these students live in unaffordable rentals—so that’s over a million more very low-income people searching for an inexpensive place to live.

A further 700,000 people live in congregate housing, including long-term care and other forms of shared housing (e.g., for people with disabilities). A high proportion of these people are occasionally homeless or live in institutions such as hospitals because of inadequate supply of supportive housing. In Ontario alone, nearly 43,000 seniors are on waiting lists for long-term care. There is no up-to-date information for Alberta—a problem in itself—but the province’s shortage of senior-care options is leaving increasing numbers stranded in hospital beds.

Tens of thousands of rooming houses have been lost in inner cities. You can’t find a room in any city in Canada for less than $500/month—more than half what most people on welfare receive. People are being turned away from overcrowded emergency shelters and ending up in growing encampments. Low-income seniors on fixed incomes are competing with service-sector workers and students who can’t find any affordable one-bedroom apartments. Increasingly these people are competing with desperate nurses, teachers and other young professionals locked out of starter homeownership.

If the housing crisis is an affordability issue, with the divide between rents and incomes widening rather than narrowing, why don’t we simply provide rent supplements—or increase welfare and minimum wage, or bring in a universal basic income—to bridge the difference First, because the difference between an affordable rent for a single person on social assistance in Alberta—$258/month—and the going rent for an average one-bedroom apartment in Calgary—$1,696—is dauntingly large. Even if welfare rates were tripled, there’s no neighbourhood in Calgary or Edmonton where that person could afford the average rent for a studio- or one-bedroom apartment. More importantly, it’s because there isn’t a sufficient supply of housing to meet the need.

In market transactions, the intersection of supply and demand determines price. However, if housing is a human need, it should not be subject to market forces. If apartments that are currently going for market rents were acquired by non-market providers (government, housing co-ops, non-profits etc.), and if short-term apartment rentals (e.g., Airbnb) were banned, that would help stem the loss of low-income rentals. But it wouldn’t necessarily create new affordable supply. And while demand-side interventions, such as providing livable incomes and renter protections, are necessary, these too would be insufficient.

In “A human-rights-based calculation of Canada’s housing supply shortages,” a 2023 report commissioned by the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate, I calculated the overall housing deficit in Canada. When one includes the existing housing deficit, the net loss of affordable housing stock, population growth and demographic change, Canada will need to build three million new homes for low- and very-low-income households by 2030, and two million more for median-income households.

Fewer homes were built in Canada in 2021 than were built in Canada in 1973.

How did we get into this mess? Put simply, a set of decisions made by governments in the early 1970s and then in the early 1990s had a huge negative impact.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, tax incentives had encouraged purpose-built rental apartments. The Canadian government eliminated these in 1972. At the same time, it introduced a capital gains tax but exempted a household’s principal residence. These changes were intended to encourage people to invest in their home and then sell it as they retired—an alternative to relying solely on pension earnings. A third element in this toxic mix of policies was municipal governments enacting stringent new zoning regulations to “protect the character” of neighbourhoods, ranging from expanding the areas zoned for single-family houses to increasing parking minimums.

Apartment construction plummeted. Condominiums, which were much more immediately lucrative for developers to sell instead of rent, became the norm in the narrow bands of land where multi-unit housing was allowed.

Mixed-income non-market housing had made up 20 per cent of new stock from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s (between 10,000 and 30,000 new non-market homes a year). By the late 1980s the federal government had begun to move towards private-sector provision of below-market “affordable housing.” Rather than financing large-scale public housing projects erected by provincial authorities, the federal government shifted to funding smaller co-operative, municipal and community-led housing. In 1971 over half of renters between the ages of 25 and 44 could afford to buy an average-priced house. By 1981 only 7 per cent were able to do so.

The federal government had completely off-loaded responsibility for affordable housing to the provinces by 1993. Many provinces further off-loaded the costs of low-income housing to municipalities.

The consequences Investing based on maximizing profits from existing housing—a practice sometimes called “financialization”—became much more lucrative than building new housing. Fewer homes were built in Canada in 2021 than were built in Canada in 1973. Over the past 30 years fewer than 10,000 new homes intended for low-income residents have been built in Canada.

Where are poor people supposed to go?

The federal government needs to return to policies it abandoned 30 to 50 years ago. It got back into housing policy with the 2017 National Housing Strategy (NHS) and committed, in 2019, to realizing the right to adequate housing. But its reluctance to engage in an honest needs assessment, one based on evidence of who needs what kind of housing where and at what cost, has led to it subsidizing unaffordable market rentals. Only 3 per cent of homes created under the biggest NHS scheme, the $26-billion Rental Construction Financing Initiative, were affordable to households in housing need, and all of those apartments were studios. Meanwhile, almost every economic report recommends that the federal government directly subsidize a doubling of non-market housing supply over the next decade: almost one million new or acquired public, community and co-operative homes.

Governments should provide free of low-cost land for non-market development. 

This new supply would reduce the number of “suppressed households” in Canada—people who wish to live independently but are forced to share by cost pressures: for example, involuntarily doubling up with roommates; adults living with their parents. And it would take some pressure off the young middle-income households currently forced to save up to 10 years in Calgary or nine in Edmonton for a 20 per cent down payment, while being locked in to the increasingly expensive and scarce rental market.

Five million homes for low- and moderate-income households might not seem to be achievable in a decade. However, Sweden built the equivalent—one million homes for low- and moderate-income households for a country that had fewer than eight million people—from 1965 to 1974. Canada constructed a million homes via CMHC, the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation, for moderate-income households to buy and own between 1946 and 1960, when its population was less than a third of what it is today.

Based on what’s worked in Canada and internationally, here are some ways to get costs down and increase the supply of housing.

For starters, governments should provide free or low-cost land. According to many international reports, good land policy is the basis of any successful affordable housing strategy. Large-scale government acquisition and disposition was the basis of both the post-war Victory Homes in Canada and the successful non-market housing programs of the 1960s and 1980s. Depending on the location and size of the project, land constitutes between 8 and 23 per cent of total cost.

This land should go to non-market development. According to a 2021 Canadian study based in Vancouver, non-market developers operating from a social mission instead of for profit can produce units that rent for 40–50 per cent less. Market developers—and their finance providers—expect returns ranging from 19 per cent to 28 per cent, depending on risk tolerance. And non-market developers maintain affordability over time, compared to government subsidies to private developers. Under the NHS, private developers have affordability requirements of only 10–20 years.

Another aspect of land policy is scale, which is determined by the zoning of a site. This includes the number of storeys and units allowed, as well as design requirements such as open space, parking, setbacks etc. and mandatory financial and construction capacity of the developer. Even though constructing a multi-storey apartment building is much more complicated than a single-family home (for example, because of the need for an elevator), larger-scale development can be cheaper per square metre. Eliminating parking requirements can save up to $56,000 per unit, or up to 17 per cent of costs. Density bonuses of up to 50 per cent (e.g., a six-storey building instead of a four-storey one) could be provided to non-market or permanently affordable homes secured through a community land trust. This entity holds land and property for the purpose of long-term affordability. Small-scale affordable, accessible and energy-efficient apartments can be made possible on single or double lots through changes to building codes. While factory-built modular construction isn’t less expensive now, if its use were scaled up, it could increase speed and lower cost.

Long-term (35- to 50-year) and low-rate (e.g., 2 per cent) mortgages were the secret sauce behind the scaling-up of non-market housing in Canada. Upfront grants can help secure market financing and also help with long approval times.

To scale up low-cost housing will require massive changes to municipal processes and charges. Approval times for multi-unit housing range from three months in Charlottetown to a ridiculous 32 months in Toronto. Development charges range from $22 per square metre in St. John’s to $1,640 in Vancouver, where such charges represent 15 per cent of the cost of the home. Up to 60 studies can be required for one building…! Edmonton has been judged the best city for housing development in Canada, and it is no coincidence that Edmonton has been working hardest on simplifying zoning approvals since 2019. Development charges can be seen as an additional tax on newcomers for the “privilege” of renting or buying a home, and a further wealth transfer from renters to established homeowners. Renters already are likely paying higher property taxes. Land value taxes, and progressive property taxes, that is, levying higher rates on homes worth more than $2-million, for example, would be a far fairer way to tax infrastructure and amenity improvements—and to enable more-affordable housing.

The project I work with—the UBC-based Housing Assessment Resource Tools (HART)—aims to show the potential impact of land, finance and approval mechanisms, so that Canada can once again produce genuinely affordable and adequate homes for low- and moderate-income households. Otherwise, under the status quo, we’re condemning increasing numbers of citizens to unbearable housing stress and homelessness.

Carolyn Whitzman is the expert adviser to the Housing Assessment Resource Tools project and the author of the forthcoming Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis (UBC Press, 2024).

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The post Five Million Affordable Places to Live appeared first on Alberta Views.

I move along. Dozens of people are hunched at dozens of other machines: Lucky Buddha, Texas Tea, Strike it Rich, Merlin’s Wand, Lotus Land, Sparkling Nightlife, Lucky Ox, Mighty Cash, Buffalo Gold Revolution, Rakin’ Bacon, Money Link, Rising Fortunes. I push through the music and lights, past the green-felt baccarat tables where balding Asian men fiddle with their chips, past the off-track betting room (Wager on the Sport of Kings!), through Jackpot Junction, a battery of slots beneath a giant locomotive smokestack spewing cartoon coins and bills.

None of this is meant for me: I’m not a customer, I’m a volunteer. In five minutes my shift starts in the cage, a locked room with barred windows along the far wall filled with plastic chips and real money, where I’ll be banker and cashier, paying out the table-game players—poker, blackjack, roulette. Instead of spending money, I’ll be funding my 8-year-old daughter’s education. A portion of today’s casino take will go to her school, some $65,000 for field trips, books, cultural shows, an artist in residence, iPads and basketball nets.

Countless Albertans know these shifts, having volunteered for schools, community leagues, environmental groups, even churches. (And only Albertans do: no other province allows “charities”—this includes schools’ parent-fundraising-councils—to conduct casino events.) Experience isn’t necessary. Neither is police clearance. The job is just to count money and pay players, and the cage is ringed with surveillance cameras besides. As my shift starts, I’m handed $1.1-million in chips, lined up in trays, and a neat pile of elastic-band-wrapped blue, purple, green, red and brown bricks of cash totalling $350,000, more than I paid for my house. The main rule, I’m told, is to not congratulate customers. I might be handing them $600, but maybe they started with a thousand.

Today the Elbow River will get busy. On a break I watch a woman in a puffy silver coat play two slots, White Cats and Nouveau Beauties, at once. An older couple slumps at Pirate Ship, in front of the cage, for five hours—he on the button, she with her arm around him. The braided woman stays at Lamp of Destiny until late afternoon. By dinnertime, young couples and middle-aged men in Flames jerseys fill up the slots and card tables. At 7:20 p.m., after pushing just over $230,000 through the bars, I sign out. Six new parents and grandparents arrive for the night shift. So ends another routine chapter in Alberta’s growing addiction to gambling.

No province but Alberta allows charities and schools to conduct casino events.

For Andree Busenius, gambling is all too familiar and still somehow strange. Her 1980s childhood in Edmonton’s Riverbend community was a different universe in gambling terms. “I remember going with my aunt to Klondike Days and her saying, ‘OK, you pick a horse,’ and it’d be, like, $2.50. Never more than that. Santa never bought us lottery tickets. The aunties played cards for nickels. Kids weren’t invited.”

Alberta didn’t get its first lottery until the early 1970s, after the Criminal Code was changed to allow provincial lotteries and sweepstakes. The first permanent casino in Calgary, Cash Casino, opened in 1980; Edmonton got its first the next year. Scratch tickets arrived here in 1981 (the $1 Tic Tac Toe). VLTs were introduced in Alberta in the early 1990s over protests from opposition MLAs. In that same decade, sports gambling became legal here, albeit barely: it was offered only by the province, with options so limited and odds so bad that savvy bettors stuck to illegal bookies. Back then, Andree, like many Albertans, “didn’t even know where the casinos were.”

She was oblivious about gambling until university, when she worked a charity bingo for the Edmonton Rowing Club. “I counted out, like, $135,000 in a shift. What I remember most is being very judgmental. I couldn’t believe how many bingo cards people played at a time. I didn’t understand why they’d spend their money that way. And I was unaware this could ever become a problem. Addiction was about how you were raised, where you were from, whether addiction ran in your family, your education. I’d known people who quit smoking, which reaffirmed my belief—it was about will power and self-control.”

Andree volunteered at more bingos. She went to Las Vegas with friends: “Gambling was something you did on holidays. Our daily budget was $100.”

And then, in her late 20s, Andree was raped. “I did everything I was supposed to do,” she says. “Filed the police report; he went to jail. I did therapy. I thought after a few months I’d be healed.” But trauma and addiction are well acquainted. “After a year, I tried geographic therapy and moved to Red Deer, where a friend introduced me to VLTs. And it was immediate, immediate love.”

Andree moved home; the feeling followed. She found a casino. “The first time I played a slot in Edmonton I lost $400 in six hours,” she says. “But I loved how I felt. I saw people who gambled; they’d just be in that zone. And I thought because I wasn’t putting a substance into my body, I’d be able to control it. After that first night at the Yellowhead Casino, as absurd as it sounds, I felt amazing. For six hours, nothing hurt.”

Next morning the pain returned. Andree went back to the Yellowhead.

This was fall of 2002. Andree began gambling every day, from 10 in the morning until late. Sometimes she won only because the VLTs were shut off at 1:59 a.m. She told herself she wasn’t addicted. No-one knew what she was up to. “Every time my mouth moved, it was a lie,” she says. “I was able to keep family and friends at bay because I’d gone through trauma. I’d say ‘You don’t know what I’m going through; I just need some space and some time.’ ”

Mostly she lost. Andree spent her disability cheques, gave up her car lease, sold her and her parents’ belongings at pawnshops and on eBay. “You can be sitting at dinner beside your great auntie, losing your life savings,” she says. “They wouldn’t have the foggiest idea.” Her gambling lasted until February 2003. After maxing out her mom’s credit card, she got caught. Her parents were devastated. Her mom cried for a day; her dad kept asking, “Do you know how hard we worked for that money?”

Andree went to Gamblers Anonymous (GA), joined the long wait for treatment, struggled for years, avoided driving past casinos, avoided Tim Hortons because of Roll Up the Rim to Win (not unusual for gamblers in recovery). She eventually got a job at an inner-city non-profit, paid her parents back, settled down, got married, had kids, moved to Beaumont. Resumed a normal life.

And then one day in 2007 Andree’s employer asked her to volunteer for a charity casino. The week after her shift she was back at the Yellowhead, as a customer, relapsing.

Almost 10 per cent of Albertans aged 12–17 gamble frequently and are at risk of becoming problem gamblers.

What’s now “Pure Casino Yellowhead” is going strong in a northside industrial park. It has 700 slots, a 24-hour poker room, a high-limit room and a private VIP lounge for an “ultra-luxurious gaming experience.” It hosts comedy, live music, art competitions, a Mother’s Day drag revue. Half of the casino’s table game revenues and 85 per cent of its slot proceeds go to charities. Its website features an interview with the artistic director of Shadow Theatre, whose company “is delighted to be associated with Pure Casino.”

Gamblers in Alberta have more options than ever. The Yellowhead and Elbow River are just two of the province’s 24 casinos, found in every big city. Some are open all hours of the day, at least one of them on Christmas. Five are owned by First Nations. Alberta’s sixth such casino, Bear Hills, will be opened late this year by the Louis Bull Tribe just off the QEII near Maskwacîs.

Inside the province’s casinos are the descendants of a limited VLT trial in the 1990s. Alberta now has some 15,000 VLTs. The machines can be found at another 740 locations in Alberta, in rows of four or eight or a dozen next to bathrooms or kitchen swing doors everywhere from Boston Pizzas to dive bars. Alberta has the second-highest concentration of VLTs in Canada and the highest concentration of casino table games.

What started as one provincial lottery in the 1970s is now nine, with weekly prizes ranging into the tens of millions. These tickets, along with dozens of scratch cards and Sport Select, can be bought at any of Alberta’s 2,856 lottery centres. Our original gambling venues are still thriving. Alberta has 20 bingos, most now offering e-daubers that allow dozens of cards to be played at once. We have four horse tracks; bets can also be placed in special rooms such as the Elbow River Casino’s.

But these are all the old ways. Since October 2020, hundreds of thousands of Albertans have been gambling from the comfort of their living-room couch (or bus seat or office chair) through a Crown-owned online casino, Play Alberta. This “people’s casino” has already expanded to include single-event sports betting, because the US legalized it and Canada followed suit. Play Alberta in 2021 began offering wagers that for the past century had been the sole domain of bookies or Las Vegas.

Today you can gamble on the Oilers from your rinkside seat in Rogers Place. (In the words of one provincial official as Play Alberta was being launched: “Just imagine the excitement of the Labour Day Classic or Battle of Alberta and walking over to a licensed sports betting area to bet on who makes the next touchdown or goal!”) The local industry is worth $3.4-billion annually and employs an estimated 13,000 people. Three-quarters of Albertans say they gamble every year, 40 per cent through multiple methods, e.g., playing the 6/49, visiting a casino and betting on hockey.

This is probably an underestimate. Illegal activities are typically hidden, with Albertans thought to annually gamble at least $378-million offshore. Gambling losses aren’t something people love to talk about. And, even anonymously, people tend to understate their vices; studies of municipal garbage and wastewater show that self-reported rates of alcohol and drug consumption are too low.

Official counts are big enough. In 1973–74 Albertans wagered $110-million on all forms of legal gambling, mostly bingos and lotteries. By 1999–2000, with casinos and VLTs proliferating, Albertans gambled about $13-billion. By 2013 it was $23-billion. Not that long ago the notion of playing high-stakes poker or Lamp of Destiny at a government-owned online casino might have sounded crazy, yet in 2022 Albertans placed $3.6-billion in bets at Play Alberta alone.

Albertans can now play VLTs, casino games or the lottery from home, through a Crown-owned online casino, Play Alberta

There was a time in Alberta when gambling was not sanctioned; our only legal outlets were bingos, raffles and horse races. At the end of the 1960s, Alberta’s then-attorney general, Social Credit MLA Edgar Gerhart, flew to Reno, Nevada, to learn about managing vice. When he returned from the four-day junket, reporters grilled the minister. Had he tried gambling “Not even 25 cents,” Gerhart replied. Would Alberta be allowing slot machines and casinos “That option is out,” a ministerial official said.

But by the end of the 1980s the local hospitality and tourism industry was lobbying hard for VLTs, and not just for the province’s growing number of casinos—for bars and restaurants and struggling rural hotels too. Officials from North Dakota (that state already had VLTs) warned our leaders about the harms. The Getty government allowed trials at the Stampede and Klondike Days, then formally launched VLTs across Alberta in 1992. Soon they were everywhere. Albertans were quickly hooked, with one-fifth of VLT users reporting problem gambling. Nine municipalities eventually voted in plebiscites to remove what Maclean’s dubbed “the devil’s television.”

Calgary Catholic Bishop Fred Henry was among the most vocal opponents, both of gambling’s spread and in how the public was endorsing it. In late 1998 he told a conference of Alberta Catholic school trustees he was “mad as hell” that they were allowing schools to generate money off the backs of gamblers, especially through the “scourge” of VLTs. “I have to say I’m amazed that you’re not angry,” Henry said. “You’re assuming that fundraising is normal. It’s not. It’s an aberration. …[It’s] simply downloading the problem on the individual schools and school boards.”

By “problem,” Henry was referring to the Klein government’s spending cuts. The disappearance of funds, particularly during Klein’s first two terms, starved public services and non-profits alike. But Alberta’s policy of handing over a slice of booming casino proceeds to schools and charities began to put VLTs and gambling generally in a sunnier light. Klein also cut income- and corporate taxes, shrinking revenues; more lottery-ticket-buying and poker-playing helped offset this too. Gambling revenues to the province rose sixfold between 1992 and 2001; they went from comprising 1.6 per cent of our budget to 5.4 per cent. Albertans’ gambling activity increased fivefold.

Reticence about gambling dwindled among politicians and the public, and the VLT plebiscites seemed to settle things. Some communities eventually lifted their bans. “We have a huge problem with regard to problem gambling in this province… I consider this a non-partisan issue,” protested St. Albert PC MLA Ken Allred in the legislature in 2011. He called VLTs “the crack cocaine of gambling.” He was ignored. VLTs now rarely appear in Alberta Hansard, except ironically as a metaphor for spending that a politician views as risky or wasteful.

The normalization of VLTs saw “gambling addiction” added to the purview of the Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission, to create awareness of rising numbers of bankruptcies, theft from employers and suicides. The province in 1996 created a regulator, the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission (or AGLC, today’s Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis). And 2000 saw the founding of the Alberta Gambling Research Institute (AGRI).

The AGRI was a collaboration of Alberta’s three biggest universities. In a 2017 interview with Fiona Nicoll and Mark R. Johnston for the Journal of Law and Social Policy, AGRI founder Garry J. Smith said alarmed citizens had demanded the centre. “Politicians focus almost exclusively on the revenues and are unaware of the adverse consequences of an activity,” he said. The institute would study gambling “from a public policy and social justice perspective.”

Gambling puts politicians in a conflict of interest, Smith argued—the higher the revenues, the easier their jobs and re-election prospects. “Governments benefit [even] from gambling-related crime,” he said. Take, say, the money launderer at the casino, or a gambler embezzling $500,000 from his employer to feed his habit; both add to government coffers. Ultimately our leaders “disregard the problems created by widespread gambling—or just nibble around the edges to make it look like they’re doing something consequential.”

Smith took issue with the province billing Sport Select as “fun,” when mandatory parlays made the game a sucker’s bet (and “Since when is it fun to steal people’s money?”). But his main concern was VLTs. “It’s obvious [they’re] the most dangerous format. You go into venues and it just seems like the players are zombies… 91 per cent of government gambling revenue comes from [VLTs], and about 75 per cent of problem gamblers say that’s their game of choice.” Our leaders are “taking advantage of vulnerable citizens.”

Our regulator has a similar conflict of interest. “The bureaucrats I dealt with at the AGLC generally recognized the weakness in their oversight regime, but were powerless to do much, because their political masters always call the shots.… It comes down to the provincial treasurer declaring ‘We made $1.4-billion from gambling last year. This year I’m budgeting for $1.5-billion. We need that money, and we need to show annual increases.’ ” Gambling, Smith concluded, “should be run by an independent tribunal that doesn’t profit from gambling.”

Today the AGLC’s paradoxical mandate is to “maintain the integrity of gaming activities while maximizing the financial return [to Albertans]”—akin to a person committing to a healthy diet but also to eating as much as possible. AGLC financial documents far prefer the term “gaming” to “gambling.” Besides being “fun and exciting,” gaming “creates jobs and business growth, spurs private-sector investment, expands consumer choice”—and brings in billions annually to the casino industry, charities and public revenues (2022: $307-million to charities; $1.2-billion to government). The AGLC is “concerned about problem gambling.” But it’s also “continually looking for ways to expand gaming entertainment options.”

To get more of us gaming, the AGLC, under the NDP government, trialled new inducements, including scratch-ticket vending machines in grocery stores. But the big change was Play Alberta. The government-owned online casino was ostensibly intended to “repatriate” funds from illegal gambling, but the projected revenues were so huge that Play Alberta was challenged in court by the Tsuut’ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations for its anticipated unfair competition.

Jason Kenney’s UCP government told the regulator to narrow its oversight and focus more on “maximizing returns.” By mid-2022 the AGLC had cut “over 9,100 pieces of red tape,” a “milestone” 38 per cent reduction in regulations, and was celebrating its Golden Scissors award from a pro-business lobby. Some changes at the AGLC affect alcohol or cannabis (e.g., bars can now deliver cocktails to your home; funeral homes can now sell liquor). Also: VLTs can now be operated 24 hours a day, Edmonton’s and Calgary’s airports can host VLTs (up to 49 each) and schools and other groups can request larger charity-casino takes.

The UCP-era AGLC is overseen by a nine-member board lacking addictions expertise. Chair Len Rhodes is a former UCP candidate and pro-football executive who is paid $148,035 annually to lead the regulator’s meetings. Other members include Wayne Drysdale, a former UCP MLA, Elan Harper, former prime minister Stephen Harper’s sister in law, and Angela Tu Weissenberger, wife of Kenney’s campaign manager.

This modern AGLC runs a loyalty program called Winner’s Edge. VLT users earn points the longer they play, casinogoers get cheaper food or drinks, and everyone can win “amazing” prizes. First-timers get up to $1,000 in “welcome bonuses” plus free sports bets and a $10 credit for every $75 gambled. The AGLC in 2022 spent $13-million on marketing, including on ads parodying Scream and The Shining that disparage offshore gambling and encourage visits to Play Alberta. In contrast, virtually all ads for cigarettes were banned in Canada in 1997 and alcohol ads famously face onerous restrictions, including that they can’t actually show someone drinking a beer.

The province now has 24 casinos, found in every big city, most open all hours of the day.

When Andree first attended Gamblers Anonymous in 2003—dragged by her mother—the meeting was near Edmonton’s Baccarat Casino. As she left the car, Andree made plans to play the VLTs right after GA. But the meeting was a jolt. “I’m expecting everybody to be homeless, pushing shopping carts. That’s the arrogance I had. Then we walk in—and I thought my mom had hired actors. They were regular people… in their 60s, in their 20s, in their 40s. There were card players, VLT players, lottery players, bingo players. GA is one of the smaller fellowships, but there were probably 28 people at a Wednesday night meeting—a good, solid turnout.

“And I just cried for two hours. I just couldn’t believe there were other people like me, I just couldn’t. It was so shocking.”

The AGLC and the Problem Gambling Research Network (PGRN) put Alberta’s rate of problem gambling at 5 per cent. This includes moderate to severe gambling problems and would translate to roughly 160,000 adult Albertans. The PGRN says up to 14 more people are affected directly or indirectly by one problem gambler, through family dysfunction or stress, distraction or theft at work, or health problems, bankruptcy or suicide. And young people are at higher risk. Almost 10 per cent of Albertans aged 12–17, says the PGRN, “gamble frequently and may be at risk of becoming problem gamblers.”

What was once three GA chapters in Alberta in 1990 has become two dozen. At press time 41 local GA meetings were scheduled for the next seven days, in Lethbridge, Calgary, Red Deer, Edmonton, Grande Prairie and Fort McMurray.

At all of Alberta’s casinos are small, lime-green GameSense booths run by the AGLC and stocked with pamphlets: “Frequent breaks keep gaming fun.” “Chasing losses is like herding guinea pigs.” “It’s true, unicorns aren’t real. But the house advantage is.” Signs warn that VLTs cause hand cramps and that slots farther from the aisle don’t pay out more. The booths—islands of earnestness in a sea of stimuli—don’t stand much of a chance. Even the AGLC admits most gamblers are unaware of the program. And until last year any addict seeking these anti-gambling resources had to visit a casino in person.

Some 8,200 Albertans have signed on to GameSense’s self-exclusion program, where addicts can ban themselves from a casino or race track for from six months to three years. This works as long as a casino staff member recognizes the addict from among thousands of daily visitors and ensures that they leave the premises. Addicts can also just use an app, or head to the bar around the corner from their house to play VLTs. And GameSense doesn’t track what happens when bans end.

Andree relapsed in 2007, a week after being asked to raise money for her non-profit employer by working a casino. That first night, she says, “I spent, like, two grand; I was at the casino until two in the morning. And I remember driving home, 40 minutes, going, ‘You’ve just thrown four years of sobriety right down the toilet.’ But according to my addict brain, ‘I’ll go back tomorrow. I’ll make that money back. And then I’ll stop.’ ”

She and her husband had recently sold their home. The money went into VLTs. For three months her addiction raged—nights of release, days of pain and lies. Finally her husband saw their bank statement. He was horrified. But, says Andree, he was also supportive. “Completely, like amazing, incredible. He has addicts in his family. He understands it’s an illness, a disease, that it’s not about willpower and self-control.”

She went back to GA, this time with her husband. At that meeting Andree told him it would be different; she knew now where to get help. Privately, she knew she wasn’t done. Not truly. A week later she began gambling again. She’d leave for a meeting and end up at a VLT. But “because he had control of the money now, I really had to get creative. So that’s when my wedding rings went to the pawnshop.

“I was so ashamed. I kept thinking ‘I’ll win it back, I’ll win it back, and all will be forgiven. I’ll get the rings back, I’ll get the money back. It’ll all be fine. It’ll all be fine.’ ”

On November 15, 2007, Andree sneaked away and gambled again. “And that night, I attempted suicide—because I would have done anything for my brain to stop being a slot machine. Honestly, that’s what my head had become. Just one non-stop racing thought.”

“I didn’t know any other way to ask for help. My husband found me—and as devastating as the money and finances were, that was 1,000 times worse.” Andree spent five weeks in the psychiatric ward. She did therapy. She stills attends GA today. And she and her husband “didn’t do months of marriage counselling; we did years. There’s no doubt—he’s a saint.”

Andree calls herself a gambler in recovery. Every year, she speaks to thousands of students on behalf of the PGRN, warning them about the easy slide into addiction. Her marriage survives. But back in 2007 “my inner voice or self-loathing or shame just did not allow me to come to him,” Andree says. Her husband, she believes, has never gotten over that.

Casinos manipulate their customers using everything from a lack of clocks and natural light to labyrinthine layouts, plush carpets and endless reward-linked stimuli (even fragrances). It all evokes something like a retreat to the womb, where nothing matters and every need is gratified. VLT manufacturers tweak their machines to be ever more addicting. More bells. More whistles. More tricks to keep your eyes glued to the screen. Everyone is trying to stay ahead of offshore gambling—the casino that can be carried in your pocket. That industry could soon be worth US$217-billion.

Concerns about casinos and VLTs seem quaint compared to phone-embedded temptations. “You can access online gambling 24/7,” says David Hodgins, a University of Calgary psychology professor. “[And] you don’t necessarily have the social effects of being with friends or other people that might limit how much someone gambles.” The AGLC is now taking bids from companies wishing to enter the province’s currently monopolized legal online gambling market. The competition could kill Play Alberta but generate a bigger government take overall. Interested vendors include huge players—BetMGM, Caesars Sportsbook, DraftKings. None of these make even GameSense’s dubious efforts to deter addicts.

Casinos are a subset of culture. Andree remembers how in the 1980s Wayne Gretzky appeared between Saturday morning cartoons, selling Pro-Stars cereal. Today “the Great One”—and Connor McGregor and other role models—appear in endless ads glamourizing gambling. (Gretzky, opening his favourite gambling app: “With every tap, a new legend is born!”) Casinos now take bets on everything from Donald Trump’s re-election prospects to the papal succession. Andree has to warn students about video game “loot boxes”—North Americans already spend $4.5-billion annually on virtual, in-game gambling.

Nothing about gambling is inevitable. Rules and permissibility vary across the world: BC keeps VLTs out of bars; Alaska bans casinos; Hawaii has no state lottery; Singapore’s “casino entry levies” (US$110/day) deter low-income gamblers. Quebec has tried (but so far failed) to make internet providers block offshore gambling sites. But in Alberta gambling is without shame. Essential hospital services are funded by gambling (the Children’s Hospital Lottery: “Buy tickets, create joy!”). Rural air ambulances depend on the STARS lottery. The Kenney government, during COVID, dangled a $1-million lottery in front of the unvaccinated.

Research by the University of Lethbridge’s Robert Williams shows that no province, on average, gets a larger proportion of its budget from gambling than Alberta. When oil collapses, we can collect more from gambling than from royalties. The think tank Cardus argues that as most of this revenue comes from VLTs, which are “designed to override players’ conscious, rational control,” gambling in Alberta is “a regressive tax on the poor and those struggling with addiction.” The institute wants gambling profits “moved out of general revenues and into a separate fund—preferably one aimed at poverty relief.”

But Garry J. Smith says our elected leaders won’t talk about any of this, because they “don’t want to be seen as trying to defend the indefensible.” They know they’re profiting from gambling. “It’s like being married,” Smith remembers a colleague telling him, “but you’re so ashamed of your spouse that you keep him/her locked in the basement. You don’t want to be seen in public with them…You’re trying to distance yourself from the stigma. Same with state-sponsored gambling.”

On the back wall of the Elbow River Casino cage was a sign that put a rosy spin on things. “Charitable Casino” it said in big, red letters; “Building success through our volunteers.” In a document sent to us before our shift, however, the casino said volunteers might instead feel lucky. “Although this is a fundraiser of considerable magnitude,” it read, “everyone working within the facility [is] here to assist you.” In return for eight hours of unpaid labour from each of nine adults, the casino would “generously” provide unlimited cans of Coke and two plates of Chinese food. (I had dumplings and sweet and sour pork.)

A decade ago, culture minister Lindsay Blackett did acknowledge one cost of Alberta’s charity-casino model. “[My] concern is 980,000 man-hours are used by organizations to staff those casinos,” he said in the legislature. “[Those] 980,000 hours could be utilized in their community or in their own not-for-profit.” But his government changed nothing. The Elbow River can count on volunteers continuing to show up. More charities apply to work casinos than Alberta’s casinos can accommodate. And these thousands of groups include more than schools, arts or sports groups; they are women’s shelters, immigrant advocates, societies for the brain-injured, seniors groups, housing providers for the chronically ill, violence prevention societies, food banks, community leagues, veterans groups, HIV researchers, daycares, mental health associations, public library foundations and addictions treatment centres.

Gambling briefly subsided in Alberta during the pandemic. Casinos were closed by public health order. Some might call this a silver lining of a plague that has so far killed over 5,800 Albertans. But with gambling down, public revenues shrank and the AGLC was disappointed to miss its goals. It resolved to create “opportunities for private sector job creation and business growth,” i.e., in gambling, to “maximize charitable gaming proceeds.”

Edmonton’s Grand Villa Casino—60,000 ft² of “world-class entertainment” attached to Rogers Place—was among those shut down. But while others closed only as long as they had to, Grand Villa’s owners opted for a longer break. Charities deprived of their pre-scheduled fundraiser at the casino were upset. The Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues said the closure was “causing a lot of instability and insecurity for organizations that really rely on this funding.” The AGLC asked Grand Villa to reopen, then, after it didn’t, pulled 57 VLTs as punishment. In 2022 the AGLC ordered the casino to reopen, and to expand to seven days a week, given casinos have a “responsibility to operate as much as possible.” Including during a pandemic. An AGLC review later reversed the order.

Without casino proceeds, public schools like my daughter’s would make do with less, or increase demands on parents. (Calgary Catholic schools, inspired by former Bishop Henry, reject casino/bingo fundraisers but hold bottle drives and golf tournaments and pressure parents to buy from schools everything from bacon to bedding plants.) Without casino proceeds, civil society in Alberta would be unrecognizable. The alternative in both cases would be to fully fund services from general revenues—which still include gambling proceeds. One estimate is that if we abolished VLTs, Albertans would pay $600 more in taxes every year. We could chance the funding of schools, hospitals and social services to wealthy individuals. Or, as a society, we could just collectively accept less. No field trips, fewer books, netless basketball hoops, longer surgery waits and ambulance waits, overcrowded women’s shelters…

Neither the NDP’s nor the UCP’s platform in 2023 proposed any such changes. Neither used the word “gambling” at all.

Our government is addicted. But as long as citizens keep electing leaders that are happy to fund society on the backs of gamblers, and as long as Albertans like me keep showing up to volunteer, the same might be said for all of us. That we are all addicts.

During my Elbow River Casino shift, neither I nor my fellow volunteers said anything about our own conflict of interest—if indeed anyone else felt one. We talked about the strangeness of someone wanting to play a VLT right after breakfast. How some customers didn’t exactly look like they could afford to be gambling. For how long that couple had sat at Pirate Ship, plugging money into what seemed like a numbing slog, and for how much longer they would play.

Evan Osenton is the editor of Alberta Views. We welcome feedback on Alberta Views articles to letters@albertaviews.ca

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In fact, the capacity of Alberta’s big cities to attract talent and investment is being actively undermined by our provincial government. This has become a point of contention between the provincial government and the two city councils, the latter of which were elected in the fall
of 2021.

New Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek, for example, announced on her first day on the job that the city would declare a climate emergency. Then-premier Jason Kenney characterized this as a “peculiar priority.” Nonetheless a month later Calgary’s city council voted 13–2 to declare a climate emergency. Gondek says that such a declaration—aside from acknowledging the seriousness of climate change—attracts people and businesses. “I look around the world and I see that access to capital hinges on saying, ‘We understand that this is an issue and we will do better,’” she says. “It made absolute sense to make that declaration.”

But this motion didn’t endear her to the UCP government. “You can’t be a supporter of the energy sector and declare a climate emergency,” Gondek recalls being told. “[But] I found it fascinating that they were creating this false dichotomy, because the industry itself has been transitioning.”

Calgary’s declaration, meanwhile, was hardly a novelty. Two years earlier the House of Commons had voted to declare a national climate emergency. And Edmonton was quick to follow suit. Indeed for many years now Alberta’s capital city has been taking concrete steps towards climate action, first by creating an Energy Transition Strategy in 2015, and then a Climate Change Adaptation Plan in 2018. Like Calgary’s declaration, Edmonton’s plan proposed that “increasing resilience can help attract businesses, talent and residents.” It added that climate action “lowers social and GDP costs and improves investor confidence and credit ratings.” In so doing, the plan spoke directly to the objectives of Kenney’s “Alberta is Calling” campaign—to attract more residents.

Yet the aspirations of both cities have only created resentment in the provincial government. “We haven’t had a lot of success with the [UCP government],” says Ashley Salvador, Ward Métis councillor. “In the absence of provincial leadership, the city has had to step up.” Given the nature of the municipal–provincial relationship, however, cities are extremely limited in what they can do on their own.

Cities in Canada carry ever-increasing responsibility. Since the 1990s this has expanded beyond the delivery of basic services such as road repairs, wastewater management and policing, to bigger challenges such as attracting workers and businesses, tackling structural inequity (e.g., racial biases) and reducing carbon emissions. The implications of a more complex role—extra responsibilities come with extra costs—have complicated the relationship between provincial and municipal governments, as cities raise funds primarily through property taxes and are prevented by provincial law from levying other taxes or running deficits. So, for cities to go beyond their mandate as “service corporations,” they need funding from senior levels of government.

“When a senior order of government decides to offload responsibility to somebody else, [that somebody else] generally becomes the municipal government,” Gondek says. “So we have to take on these wicked problems, try to find a way forward as a local government. But frankly we can’t do it without the provincial and federal governments helping us.”

Jack Lucas, an associate professor of political science at the University of Calgary, says provincial governments tend to be more conservative than those in cities, and the gap only grows when cities adopt new responsibilities. “Over the last 20 years cities have taken on new meaning in our political and policy debates,” he says. This creates “a source of real frustration for municipal councils… [they] are trying to do big things.”

And Lucas says things have lately gotten testier. “There’s a difference between the inevitable ongoing tensions of multi-level governance and the deeper tensions we’ve been seeing in Alberta,” he says. “Since the 1980s, we’ve been having these ongoing discussions about giving additional powers and authority to the cities of Edmonton and Calgary.” Not that long ago things looked to be improving. The Progressive Conservative government of Jim Prentice supported new powers in the form of city charters, signing a framework agreement with Edmonton and Calgary in 2014. During the NDP government era, 2015–2019, the two cities worked with the province to create the charters, culminating in the City Charters Fiscal Framework Act. The municipal affairs minister at the time, Danielle Larivee, said, “Our goal is to help Calgary and Edmonton address climate change, plan smarter communities and work more efficiently on issues from tax assessments to parking tickets.”

The agreements came into effect in 2018, granting Edmonton and Calgary access to a reliable source of provincial funding and giving them more authority.

But just months into their mandate the UCP government under Jason Kenney eliminated charters, scrapping most of the progress that had been made. The cities were back to being supplicants to the province. This reversal of fortunes renewed frustrations leading up to the 2021 municipal elections. “The whole purpose of city charters was to build a stronger partnership [between] big cities and the provincial government,” says Edmonton mayor Amarjeet Sohi. “They needed to be strengthened, not weakened.”

In essence, instead of enabling cities to meet new challenges and demands, the Kenney government tied their hands and added to their financial burdens. Calgary and Edmonton are now set to receive even less provincial support for infrastructure, with the Local Government Fiscal Framework expected to reduce funding for cities by nearly 40 per cent when it comes into effect in 2024. And since the release of its first budget in 2020 the UCP government has slashed budget items that would have allowed Calgary and Edmonton to improve services in the areas of affordable housing, health and social services.

Furthermore, “the UCP actually increased the taxes it drew from municipalities,” says Lori Williams, a professor of political science at Mount Royal University. Indeed, in 2021 the provincial government announced a 1.5 per cent increase to the education property tax requisition, an amount municipalities collect in the form of property taxes and then send to the province to fund the operational costs of public schools.

In Calgary and Edmonton, this tax represents about 30 per cent of property taxes. As the needs and responsibilities of Alberta’s largest cities have grown, mayors in both places have insisted that Calgary and Edmonton be allowed to keep this revenue. Instead, both cities have now had to increase property tax rates just to cover their operational costs. “The provincial government walked away from their responsibility, downloading more to [us],” says Sohi. “It really put a lot of pressure on the local resources.”

Adds Lucas: “If [citizens] ask a municipal government to be responsible for something, and they’re not able to pay for it, that’s a recipe for conflict.”

Gondek and Sohi and councillors in both cities insist that their mandate from citizens is not only to provide basic services but also to prepare their communities for a lower-carbon future. “The energy transition represents the single best economic opportunity of our time,” Edmonton’s Ashley Salvador says. “We need the foresight to know that investing in climate action means attracting and incubating the next generation of energy companies, it means green jobs and economic growth, and it also means remaining competitive in a changing global economy.”

A 2020 poll by the Pembina Institute found that 68 per cent of Albertans support taking action to reduce carbon emissions. According to a survey prepared for the City of Edmonton, three out of four Edmontonians believe climate change requires action. Over 60 per cent of Calgarians report being concerned about fossil-fuel dependence, high energy consumption and air pollution.

“City charters needed to be strengthened, not weakened,” says mayor Amarjeet Sohi.

Last fall, Edmonton’s city council voted for a 5 per cent property tax increase over the next four years in support of a budget that includes significant investments in green initiatives. In Calgary property taxes are slated to rise by 4.4 per cent over the same period. In the latter city, however, only a small share of the budget—$3.8-million annually, and a one-time $44-million infusion—will be devoted to following up on council’s 2021 emergency declaration and “to set the foundation for work required to achieve 2050 climate targets.”

According to Noel Keough, professor emeritus at the University of Calgary’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, investing in housing and transportation are key ways for cities to reduce carbon emissions. As Keough outlines in his book Sustainability Matters, a just society is a sustainable society: ensuring equitable access to housing and public transit gets more citizens to reduce carbon emissions. But despite the evidence, “[Provincial] government funding hasn’t been forthcoming in support of climate action,” Keough says.

The fact that Calgary and Edmonton already have more than half of Alberta’s population—even as the UCP government and municipal governments alike try to attract even more residents—means they’re also more vulnerable to the consequences of a changing climate. As global temperatures continue to rise, extreme weather events will become more commonplace. Alberta is expected to see increased risks of drought, forest fires and flooding. The effects of climate change have already intensified in Alberta, as two of the costliest natural disasters in Canada’s history took place in Calgary: the 2013 flood and the 2020 hailstorm.

“We need to take this crisis very, very seriously,” Sohi says. “Without municipalities’ participation, [Canada] will not be able to meet our climate targets. We can reduce emissions by [incentivizing] people to use sustainable modes of transportation,” Sohi says. “And the integration of land-use planning and transportation planning, where people live and how people move, are directly linked to how much pollution and emissions they create. The role of cities is crucial,” he adds. “That’s where most people live [and] where economic activity is generated.”

In the face of the UCP government’s lack of support, Calgary and Edmonton are attempting their own strategies. Edmonton’s adaptation plan outlines a series of actions that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make the city carbon-neutral (emitting and absorbing equal amounts of carbon) by 2050. In addition, Edmonton’s climate and resilience strategy has driven the creation of an energy incentive program to upgrade buildings, expand the city’s bike lane network and LRT system, and implement a carbon budget. Carbon budgeting is a new field that provides information on the greenhouse-emissions impact of each budget request. Edmonton is the first municipality in Canada to incorporate a carbon budget into its financial budgeting process. But curbing emissions isn’t cheap. The city estimates that these initiatives over the next decade will add about $24-billion.

Calgary’s updated climate strategy aims to reach net-zero by 2050 at a total cost of $87-billion. Over its first three years the plan calls for Calgary to retrofit existing buildings and improve low-carbon transportation options such as walking, cycling and transit.

The success of both strategies, however, relies on the availability of stable, consistent and sufficient funding from other levels of government. “The less power and money that municipalities have, and the more control is usurped by the province, the more challenging it’s going to be for [local] officials,” MRU’s Williams says. Indeed, Edmonton’s first carbon budget, published in December 2022, shows that without significant investment from the province the city won’t meet its net-zero target by 2050. (Calgary is expected to release its first carbon budget later this year.)

On top of these and other climate issues, Gondek and Sohi have contended with the effects of a relentless pandemic, growing mental health and addictions crises, and a steep increase in the cost of living. “The provincial government hasn’t given Edmonton the support it deserves,” Sohi says. “We want to work with them based on data and on good information to correct those inequities.”

Last year, for example, Edmonton requested roughly $60-million to operate existing supportive housing and for money to build more housing. Months later the city received $12-million from the province for mental health supports and $9-million for more emergency shelter spaces. After the province released its 2023 budget, Sohi noted the dearth of provincial support for efforts to address homelessness and addiction. The provincial government “ha[s] not fully understood the gravity of the problem that Edmonton is facing,” Sohi told Global News in March.

Similarly, mayor Gondek has been vocal about the need of increased provincial support to revitalize the city’s downtown, build more affordable housing and expand the city’s mass transit system. Gondek said she was disappointed that the UCP government’s 2023 budget offered zero money for downtown revitalization efforts. “But we’ve had some wins too,” she says. These include some provincial funding last fall to address homelessness and public safety issues, and a pledge in early 2023 that a new fiscal framework could soon see cities receive more funding.

In some respects, both mayors and councils see their roles as having been reduced to solving problems created or exacerbated by provincial underfunding. “We need all sectors and all orders of government to come along to meet our goals,” says councillor Salvador. “There’s a sense that we’re putting out fires… filling in gaps in the absence of provincial leadership.”

“It’s quite problematic for municipal governments when they need help from [other] levels of government,” says MRU’s Lori Williams. “And now it seems Danielle Smith sees her path to victory in the 2023 election in running against Justin Trudeau and resisting collaboration with him—whereas municipalities absolutely need to work with both levels of government.” In other words, the nearly 2.5 million Albertans living in Calgary and Edmonton are vulnerable not only to legislation that diminishes cities and to the impacts of a changing climate but also to the political whims of a combative premier.

While the provincial election is underway, the mayors of Calgary and Edmonton have an additional challenge, Williams says: to remain neutral while also advocating for their cities. “[They have to] challenge the provincial government to do better for municipalities, but also remain neutral enough that they can work with whoever is elected.”

Last November Smith wrote a letter to Mayor Gondek suggesting her government would be interested in expanding Calgary’s LRT to reach the city’s airport—a plan so far stalled for a lack of funding. In February the provincial budget allocated $5-million towards engineering work for the airport link. Some observers doubt the premier’s commitment to seeing the project through, as earlier she had expressed concerns about the “high costs” of Calgary’s much-needed Green Line, a sticking point in the Alberta–Calgary relationship since the UCP government took over.

Considering Smith’s previous assertion that “Edmonton’s a bit ahead of Calgary” on building LRT, the provincial budget’s allocation of $760-million over three years for Edmonton LRT projects was unexpected. Moreover, the 2023 budget allocated more capital grants and investment to Edmonton than to Calgary—$3.2-billion and $2.9 billion, respectively. Critics, however, pointed out that the sudden funding boost came in an election year, with the UCP and NDP polling in a dead heat and every seat in Edmonton and Calgary being critical. And despite the LRT funding, other key priorities in Edmonton remain underfunded, according to Sohi, a situation that follows a familiar pattern. “The discrepancies aren’t caused by the UCP government,” the mayor says. “They’re caused by how Edmonton has been seen by provincial governments over the decades. And the discrepancies have grown.”

Political biases and whims of provincial politicians are yet one more reason, Lucas says, that our biggest cities need access to reliable, predictable and stable funding.

“Cities’ ‘wicked problems’ require provincial and federal help,” Mayor Jyoti Gondek says.

Meanwhile Premier Smith’s Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act could worsen cities’ already dicey predicament. As the chasm between the two most senior levels of government—provincial and federal—grows, the tensions between Alberta’s largest cities and the province could deteriorate even further. “Municipalities are being put into a position where their own status isn’t entirely clear,” Williams says about Premier Smith’s Sovereignty Act and the lack of consultation with municipalities during its creation. “Their relationship with the provincial government could be soured by accepting funds or programs that are being directed by the federal government.”

The hostility between the federal and provincial governments has already taken a toll in Alberta’s cities. Provincial budget cuts in 2022, for example, caused Calgary to miss out on federal funding to cover Calgary Transit’s operational costs.

But Gondek’s primary concern with Smith’s Sovereignty Act is that it could jeopardize what autonomy cities still have. “What worries me is the availability of that option to tell us what to do,” she says. “This puts us in a position of conflict, because if we’re required [by the Sovereignty Act] not to follow federal law, or legislation, or practices, and we’re required to do something different, then we’re stuck in the middle, and nothing good comes out of that situation.”

In March the UCP government announced that its “Alberta is Calling” campaign would expand, from Toronto and Vancouver subway stations to billboards in smaller cities, including Hamilton, Windsor and Sudbury in Ontario and Moncton and Halifax in the Maritimes. But if our government is serious about attracting people to move to this province and then stick around, empowering Alberta’s cities is essential. “We are the level of government that is closest to the people, we’re on the ground, in the community, and often the most accessible,” Salvador says. “When people see those challenges on their doorstep, local government is the go-to… [even as] oftentimes the jurisdiction and responsibility lies with the province.”

Williams says, “At all levels of government, representatives need to remember they’ve been elected by voters [who] want them to work together to find solutions to the problems
we face.”

After this spring’s election our biggest cities must receive a greater level of provincial support. There is, after all, only one taxpayer. “The powers of municipalities to manage matters of great concern to their constituents have been significantly undermined both by Jason Kenney and now by Danielle Smith,” Williams says. “If that continues, it’s going to become more challenging for civic officials to effectively represent their constituents.”

Ximena González is a writer and editor in Calgary. Her work also appears in The Globe and Mail, The Tyee and The Sprawl.

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A few double-time, VIP-lane minutes later, a more present-able Mayor Nenshi was led into the palatial working quarters of the Mayor of Beijing. Bleary but beaming, Nenshi strode into his Chinese counterpart’s office to find it full of sober, dark-suited men awaiting His Calgarian Worship’s arrival.

Out of the corner of his eye, Nenshi spotted a familiar face: Doug Horner, the deputy premier of Alberta. Horner had positioned himself several deferential steps behind Nenshi, in keeping with local custom. In China, the mayor of a major city is a far more powerful and more revered official than some lowly provincial apparatchik. No one was much interested in the vagaries of provincial government; the mayor was the dignitary they’d come to meet.

Back home in Alberta, of course, the power balance is exactly the opposite. Naheed Nenshi’s office—and every other mayoral office at every city hall in the province—exists only by fiat of the provincial government. Under Alberta’s Municipal Government Act, provincial officials control city governments.

To read the entire article, from the April 2012 issue, click here.

Turner revisits “Mind the Gap”:

Since this story ran in 2012, Alberta has undergone an unexpected political transformation, with the 44-year Progressive Conservative dynasty falling to the New Democrats under Rachel Notley. For the province’s big cities, however, the change was not revolutionary but merely incremental. Building on a process begun under the vanquished PCs, Notley made new city charters for Calgary and Edmonton a top priority.

In August 2017 the province unveiled a detailed plan for the charters. Changes enacted in the fall granted new power and authority to Alberta’s largest municipal governments. City councils in Calgary and Edmonton gained greater control over workaday civic issues such as speed limits, bike lanes, bylaws and liquor licensing, and have more flexibility on matters such as affordable housing and environmental stewardship, as well as more stable and predictable funding for major infrastructure projects. The mayors of both cities were vocal advocates for the charters and happy enough to finally have them.

For all of that, the charters mark no radical embrace of decentralized government or local control, let alone all power to the Soviets. Under Notley the provincial government has mostly stayed the course in its relationship with Alberta’s big cities, remaining hierarchical and paternalistic in its general disposition.

In particular the most important power and the one most problematically absent from the status quo—the cities’ ability to levy taxes on anything other than property—was a non-starter. With only property taxes (which don’t increase city hall revenues at anywhere near the same rate as the cities’ populations grow) to rely on, Calgary and Edmonton will remain junior partners. The single biggest factor crippling the ability of Alberta’s large cities to deal with such growth in a smart and sustainable way is their reliance on the political whims of higher levels of government for so much of their funding, and this was never seriously considered even by a cosmopolitan NDP government. It surely says something that the lack of new taxation powers was the only aspect of Notley’s plan praised by the United Conservative opposition.

Meanwhile, the squabbling over budgets that I documented in my 2012 piece continues. Back in March, for example, Mayor Nenshi took to the press to criticize the Notley government for failing to pass along $300-million in infrastructure financing from the federal government’s New Building Canada fund, instead shifting the money into general revenue—where, the province weakly reassured the mayor, it would trickle down to big infrastructure projects in Calgary eventually.

More than a century after the province’s founding, our big cities still find themselves needing to beg at the Legislature door.

Chris Turner is author of The Patch (2017).

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Knowing they faced an economic credibility challenge as well as a province held together with duct tape and staples, the NDP brought in former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge to advise on its upcoming budget. The economist proposed that Alberta go against its own spend-only-during-good-times orthodoxy. Economic troubles, he argued, gave the NDP government not reasons to slash, as the right claimed, but to increase capital investment. It could borrow at low interest rates and buy labour and materials at non-boom prices. His argument that Alberta had lower levels of public infrastructure relative to its GDP than Canada’s five largest provinces was the crema on the espresso.

In late October 2015 the NDP’s first budget committed Alberta to spend 15 per cent more on public infrastructure over five years than the former PC government had proposed. In cash terms this is a $34.8-billion investment, or roughly $6.9-billion each year until 2020. Thanks to those disappearing oil royalties, though, Alberta will take on debt to build—about $36-billion by 2020.

Repairing deteriorating infrastructure is necessary, but if we’re going into debt for new builds, we must be vigilant. How are Alberta’s new infrastructure decisions made What are the criteria How do we prevent political interference, favouritism or vote-buying, long Alberta’s scourges when it comes to infrastructure How can we avoid overbuilding or spending more money than we need to?

We need to continually ask questions, says Parkland Institute executive director Ricardo Acuña. “You don’t want to spend money for the sake of spending money,” he says. “People need to make sure we’re getting value and infrastructure money is being well spent.”

Donna Wilson walked into Edmonton’s Misericordia Hospital cafeteria a few years ago and found water above her ankles. Wilson, once a nurse at the hospital and now a professor at the University of Alberta, says it was another flood, a not-rare occurrence at the Mis. “Can you imagine the mould issues?” she says. “And where are people supposed to eat The place is quite literally a dump.”

At 47 the Misericordia has not aged well. Staff have complained for years that the facility is so flood-prone that they have to schedule procedures based on weather forecasts. Worse, says Wilson, is that millions are spent yearly finding ways to keep the hospital running. “It just sucks up money for repairs,” she says.

The story—of facilities running flat out to meet a population boom and crumbling as a result—is replicated at dozens of hospitals and schools throughout Alberta. How did things get like this, given the resource riches we’ve extracted that drove the Canadian economy for years Most in the know say it was because of former premier Ralph Klein.

Since the start of the Klein era, our government has preferred to control debt rather than repair or build. When times toughened, cries for new or repaired infrastructure were often drowned out by the drumbeat of fiscal conservatism. Today the province’s municipal infrastructure deficit (roughly the difference between what our cities and towns say they need and what they have, and excluding schools and hospitals) is estimated at about $26-billion by the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association. The cost to repair Alberta’s existing roads is projected at anywhere from $2-billion to $16-billion (the exact figure is hard to pin down given different urban and provincial road-rating systems).

The Misericordia hospital is so flood-prone that staff have to schedule procedures based  on weather forecasts.

Klein paid down a $23-billion debt between 1993 and 2004 by adopting austerity as his guiding light. But he did this largely by gutting infrastructure investment between 1995 and 2003. Take hospital beds: Wilson’s research has found Alberta had not quite twice as many of them (about 13,000) in 1993, when Klein took office, as it did in the late 1990s—and also today. Ironically, these bed losses happened all the while Alberta operated 105 hospitals, the highest number per capita in the developed world. Why do we have so many We built dozens of rural hospitals during the Lougheed years. Critics, including Wilson, say these won loyal rural voters for the PC party, but today they provide only basic care while draining resources from the large hospitals that provide the bulk of health services.

Klein also followed a “pro-cyclical”—or spend-only-when-times-are-good—logic, in opposition to the long-established wisdom of counter-cyclical spending (think John Maynard Keynes). The counter-cyclical idea sees countries like Switzerland obliged by law to save revenues during peaks to invest during the valleys, thereby smoothing spikes and retaining jobs in the lean years.

One under-examined result of the pro-cyclical approach, says Vivian Manasc, is that Alberta has spent top dollar to build its public infrastructure. Manasc steered the Edmonton architecture firm Manasc Isaac through the dark Klein period by taking on projects in the Arctic and even Russia. Doubly frustrating for her is the bad economics of what little building did take place during booms. “The prices of materials can vary 50 per cent,” Manasc says. “So the same 2×4 can be $5 today, $10 tomorrow.” Sadly, she says, Alberta’s pattern has been to buy the more expensive lumber. Building in peak times means “you don’t often get as good a value for your dollar.”

The question of when to build infrastructure can challenge any government, says Constance Smith, an economics professor at the University of Alberta. Making the question even harder in this province, she says, is the volatility of resource revenue and the unpredictability of markets. That means the “When to build?” question for Alberta is often whether a downturn will be short lived or long term, and whether borrowing to invest will pay off. Smith cautions that Ontario, which has used deficit financing to build infrastructure during downturns, now spends 10¢ of every revenue dollar to pay interest on the provincial debt.

But Acuña counters that by spending money badly and at the worst times, Klein merely incurred a different kind of deficit. “We couldn’t have come out of debt if he hadn’t cut spending on infrastructure,” he says. “People got on board—despite the fact they were living the realities of a lack of money invested in infrastructure.” And despite the fact they’d have to pay the bill eventually, one way or another.

Alberta’s cities are where these tensions play out most clearly today. Mass transit has become a central debate in them, thanks to decades of under-investment. In Calgary the big question is “Where will the money come from?” for the LRT’s much-needed Green Line and for expanding Bus Rapid Transit. In Edmonton it’s “How did we spend so much for so little?” after nearly $700-million (66 per cent provincial, 19 per cent municipal and the remainder federal) was spent to build some 3 km of new track, with the resulting Metro Line LRT still operating at half speed more than a year after opening (18 months later than promised) thanks to a signals snafu.

The infrastructure deficit in Alberta’s cities is real, says Quinn Nicholson, with Edmonton’s transportation department, but it’s also open to some interpretation. “That’s answered by what kind of a city people want to live in,” he says. “If you just want to drive your car everywhere and shop at the local strip mall, then it’s not that big. Then we just need to continue repairing and renewing roads. But if we actually want a city that’s walkable, bikeable, has viable public transit, is environmentally progressive, well, the gap is pretty huge.”

How huge In Edmonton, just for LRT projects proposed up to 2040, the price tag is approximately $7-billion. Calgary’s Green Line alone is estimated to cost between $4-billion and $5-billion.

The desperation of different regions invites the question: Just how is the NDP deciding what gets built?

Infrastructure Minister Brian Mason says the civil service handed him an infrastructure wish list worth $15-billion per year, including a disturbing amount of basic maintenance and catch-up. And the NDP has said no more often than it has said yes, Mason claims. “We have [approved] a quarter to a third of the projects proposed over that five-year span.”

So what is the build plan, then Unsurprisingly, it’s awash in schools—most of them promised by the former PC government. Over the next five years, the government will spend more than $3.5-billion to build or significantly refurbish 200 schools. Like many of its hospitals, most of Alberta’s current schools were built before or during the Lougheed years (1971–1985), Mason says, and need serious attention.

The NDP has devoted similar amounts to upgrading health facilities, including $1.2-billion for the previously deferred Calgary Cancer Centre, and other money for a new hospital in Grande Prairie and an upgrade to Medicine Hat Regional Hospital. Meanwhile, in its electoral base of Edmonton there’s just $20-million for more planning to fix the Misericordia and Royal Alexandra hospitals. Their combined repair bill is estimated at some $7.7-billion.

Just more than $6-billion is set aside for the Municipal Sustainability Initiative, a pool Alberta towns and cities draw from to build everything from community rinks to transit stations and forensic investigation centres. Roads—“flat infrastructure” in industry parlance—dominate the plan, and are set to receive $4.6-billion, with highway rehabilitation and ring roads in Calgary and Edmonton accounting for a large chunk of that.

Some $940-million will go to post-secondary facilities and another $298-million to seniors housing. The plan contains a few head scratchers, too: more than $2-billion is devoted to “green infrastructure” under the NDP’s climate leadership plan, with little detail provided, and $497-million is devoted to further carbon-capture projects, honouring previous government commitments despite their poor track record and despite NDP election promises to scrap carbon capture.

The NDP’s 2016 budget also increases funding for infrastructure maintenance and renewal—some $6.2-billion in total for repairs to bridges and roads, schools, post-secondary institutions, hospitals and seniors facilities across the province.

The wildcard is Ottawa, as it too wants to build infrastructure. The federal government has committed to sharing $120-billion with the provinces and territories for infrastructure over the next 10 years—more than double what the Harper government had previously committed over a similar timeframe. And the money, in phase one of the project at least, is already beginning to move. The feds announced on September 1, 2016, that a bilateral agreement would see just more than $1-billion head to Alberta for two programs—the Public Transit Infrastructure Fund and the Clean Water and Wastewater Fund.

Ottawa has pledged to contribute up to half of the money for the projects, with Alberta and municipalities providing the balance. Ottawa’s investment will accelerate provincial projects in the queue, says Aileen Machell, communications director with Mason’s office. The federal announcement also included a list of 46 transit projects, almost all of them in Edmonton, and 17 wastewater initiatives across Alberta, already approved. “Today’s announcement opens the door for the creation of new construction jobs and needed infrastructure in our communities,” said Lisa Holmes, president of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association.

The AUMA, however, is also critical of how different levels of government split the infrastructure bill. “AUMA has been steadfast… that the share of funding that each order of government pays for infrastructure needs to align with their respective share of tax dollars,” its release continues. “AUMA is pleased that our call for a contribution formula of a 50 per cent federal, 40 per cent provincial, and 10 per cent municipal share was heard by the federal and provincial governments for the water and wastewater component.”

Aside from the currently announced projects, though, the larger phase two of Ottawa’s infrastructure program is still being negotiated. And here the government-speak is heavy. How the federal dollars will affect Alberta’s commitments on its infrastructure plan is not clear, aside from the point that every federal dollar requires a provincial contribution. Will there be strings attached to the money All Alberta is saying is that Ottawa and the NDP’s priorities are “aligned,” according to Machell, from Mason’s office.

This lack of clarity goes from macro to micro. Funding arrangements vary extensively and “unpredictably” from project to project, says Nicholson, with Edmonton’s transportation department. He notes the federal government’s mantra is often that projects should be funded equally by the three levels of government, but says this isn’t always the case. The under-construction Valley Line LRT, for example, sees Edmonton contributing nearly as much as Ottawa and Alberta combined. And the burden can shift if projects go under or over budget. Recently, Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson has said if the proportion of municipal dollars required remains as it is in phase one of Ottawa’s infrastructure investments, many future city projects will have to be delayed.

Still, Nicholson says the biggest change is that Ottawa is now looking to invest not only in shiny bits but in planning and engineering for projects. “Which is a critical, critical step, as they then have a stake in actually funding those projects that become shovel-ready, as well as creating a timing window around them,” he says. “Before, this was a major risk for a city like Edmonton—doing all the planning or engineering on a project and then sitting around waiting for capital money that might never come, or might be a significant reduction under what was expected, causing scope reductions on the project.”

As ambitious as Alberta’s infrastructure plan is, many long-sought projects were not approved in the government’s recent budget. Anxious mayors, hospital staff, teachers, commuters and community leaders want to know: When is it our turn?

Good question. In opposition, the NDP pushed for a public sunshine list of deferred infrastructure projects in Alberta, ranked by order of build priority. Then, during the election campaign, its platform promised to make infrastructure decisions and priorities “transparent … so that funding goes to build the most important projects rather than to promote the political fortunes of the PCs.” But now, in power, the NDP released a list in April 2016—and critics point out it only lists unfunded projects alphabetically rather than by priority. Mason told reporters the NDP never promised a prioritized list and that publishing one would see regions and municipalities fighting over their projects’ rankings.

Still, the desperation among different regions and the mixed messaging invites the question: Just how is the NDP deciding what gets built?

Mason says that government departments submit ongoing requests for infrastructure investment. For example, Alberta Health Services says it identifies its priorities in a three-year rolling schedule that’s reviewed annually. Meanwhile, the government actively seeks counsel from MLAs (one hopes all MLAs, regardless of party) about what is needed. “We ask MLAs to do the work in their constituencies and connect with their own officials,” Mason says. For more public input the government has held town halls across the province, as well as offering online surveys.

All infrastructure requests are broken down to the “envelope” level (representing each department) and then put through government criteria tests, Mason says. These criteria include economic and social benefits tests, as well as the government’s priorities and environmental benefits tests. In all, 12 factors are considered, including the condition of existing infrastructure, its potential usage numbers and even public criticism. The matrix is simplistic, however, and provides no scoring or other measures by which the public can critique it. Indeed, it reads as if it were created in an afternoon. And ultimately the cabinet and premier still make the final decisions. Behind closed doors.

Those closed doors and that weak-sauce criteria matrix raise the question of political interference—the very infrastructure scourge the NDP called out during the election. As we build more infrastructure than ever, what of that Mason says there must be political oversight, though he draws a distinction from past behaviour. “There’s two kinds of political involvement,” he says. “One is the one we’re trying to get away from.” What Mason means—what the NDP in opposition railed against—is perceived cronyism and political favouritism, such as what happened with former PC education minister Gordon Dirks in the 2014 Calgary-Elbow by-election, where school improvements in that riding were suddenly promised mid-race. Alberta’s ethics commissioner later ruled that Dirks’s actions constituted “blatant political opportunism.”

Ultimately the cabinet and premier make the final decisions. Behind closed doors.

“I think we’ve put in place the protections that will deal with that,” Mason says. “We’re using clear criteria to select projects, and by establishing the unfunded projects list, people know what projects are coming down the pike. The overall direction has to be provided at the political level. We make no apology for that, because we are elected to make decisions for the public.”

Protections are something we might want to ask a whole lot more about. Take protection from building too much, as any infrastructure plan comes with that risk. Even if we could all agree that Alberta has less stuff than its current population warrants, what future population are new projects being built to serve Alberta’s population has nearly doubled, to 4.3 million, since Klein took power in 1993 and started slashing infrastructure investment. The current trend is to add a new Red Deer to Alberta every year or so. Mason would not provide the projections the NDP is using, but did concede they are new. “We’re not using projections that would have made sense a few years ago,” he says.

There’s also the small matter of protecting the taxpayer from paying too much for building these new roads, schools and cancer centres. Robert Shouldice, an Alberta-born lawyer with Vancouver’s Borden Ladner Gervais law firm, oversees procurement contracts that undergird big public spending on infrastructure. His current files include LRT projects in Edmonton and Ottawa. He makes clear he speaks for himself and not his clients or firm.

To Shouldice, the big question any major investment in infrastructure raises is how robust the tendering process is. The Alberta government typically follows a two-step technical qualification and assessment approach and then selects the lowest-priced bid, Shouldice says—though there are exceptions. It’s not cutting edge. Some jurisdictions, Shouldice continues, have created arms-length bodies that critique procurement contracts. These organizations remove the direct connection to political masters and are overseen by a board, and typically provide guidance on all complex public capital project contracting. Though Alberta has a group overseeing procurement embedded within Service Alberta, called Procurement Services, “it isn’t as independent as those other organizations,” Shouldice says, noting it reports directly to government rather than to an independent board as in Ontario, BC and Saskatchewan. Those provinces “take out some of the potential for political interference or involvement,” he says, “creating more rigour in terms of best procurement practices.”

Given we’re spending multiple billions more than in the past, a ranked list of infrastructure priorities is essential so that the public can hold officials to account. Otherwise, decisions for what gets built might be influenced by which region’s voters a party wants to seduce or what groups complain the loudest. To limit opportunities for cronyism, our contract procurement process needs to go from opaque to the best in the world.

And Alberta needs to take a hard look at what its potential futures—with and without huge oil revenues—mean for infrastructure planning. Are we building for a future population that won’t materialize Are we building to best foster social benefits and economic growth Or are we building what glitters most brilliantly as you drive by on the highway?

Tim Querengesser is managing editor of Edmonton’s Metro News. 

____________________________________________

Thoughts on infrastructure letters@albertaviews.ca 

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I note this hooker. Desperate for a shot of caffeine, however, I’m focused on the corner café’s door that winks behind her. The woman takes me in, then drops her gaze to the stroller I push: two blond-haired girls wave to and fro with the shock of the potholes, the curbs, the sinking drains. The older one smiles with an ease she will lose with the advent of insecurity and the little one blinks long flirtations put on for strangers. The woman’s tired eyes widen in a young face (up close, my God, is she sixteen?), her lips part and the words tumble out: “Oh—I’m sorry.” Before I can reply, she slips away behind a green waste-management bin.

Welcome to my neighbourhood: a place of transition, a place of tension. A place where distracted mothers occasionally are left smarting: At what point does someone begin to apologize for surviving?

A latte hisses in production as we enter the café. Children race to greet my girls with the news: “I saw a brown puppy!” “Mommy got me chocolate milk.” We’ve made these friends in the course of drinking our coffee at the same place every week. We warm the worn sofas tucked against the walls and our babes and toddlers turn the conversation’s flow into Morse code: di dit dah dah dah STOP dit dah di dit STOP di di dit.

The Carrot Coffeehouse is a community hub and almost entirely volunteer-run. Hailed as salvation by artists, stay-at-home parents and residents seeking a hip caffeinated beverage en route to somewhere, it’s a critical meeting place. The local paper, arts groups, a food network, the knitting club, a book club and the farmers market’s committee connect around kitschy tables. Musicians play on its stage three days a week and visual artists speak from the walls.

As I nurse my drink, immigrants pass by on the Avenue’s sidewalk, headed for Mama Afro’s Beauty Salon, the Somali grocer, the Portuguese bakery or the Bullie Barber/Driving School in the middle of the block. Men in blue jeans, rocking original ’80s hockey hair, pass the café in favour of toonie beer and a game of pool next door at the Green Frog. The sex and drug trades carry on at the block’s corners.

“Peas park?” my little one begs. Why not, I shrug.

So we move on. At the corner of 93 St and 118 Ave, we press the walk signal button on the light standard (recently revitalized with black chrome and Victorian detailing). Today the lamppost boasts a nametag, the kind with a blue scalloped border you get at staff development days. Its bold Sharpie font shouts: GENTRIFICATION IS THE NEW COLONIALISM. Before I have time to translate this jargon jingle, the white man on the light beckons us across the road.

At this, the “new park,” my girls spring on the newly laid recycled-tire mat which has replaced the sand that insidiously followed us home in cuffs, shoes, pockets and purses. The kids move onto the swings and squeal with every duck-under.

Across from the park stands a three-storey house where my grandmother and her mother lived in the 1940s. Their suite on the top floor overlooked a small rink where skates still slice after pucks. The next few decades weighed heavily on the Avenue, once an east/west thoroughfare, then made superfluous by the freeway farther north. The banks, hardware store, drugstore, appliance and bike shops were replaced by seedier cousins: cash stores whose usury is in the fine print, XXX video shops selling cigarettes as loss leaders, and pawnshops that insisted their services had no connection to a growing number of local B&Es. For the next few decades, crime stats were the hallmark of our neighbourhood.

Changes are afoot again. The still-warm housing market fuels young professionals and families to “Buy! Buy anywhere!” Former drug houses with their mysterious around-the-clock visitors are snatched up. Camper shoes, MEC jackets and artisan-crafted purses inhabit the reinforced closets that once protected stashes of loot and shotguns. Broken fences are rebuilt (a little higher and tighter than before). Lawns of quack grass and chickweed are replaced by dark compost boasting prolific poppies and pumpkins. Newer cars are parked behind freshly painted garage doors.

Storefronts on Alberta Avenue, Edmonton, Alta.

And this resurgent energy has begun to challenge the livelihoods of those transient shadow-people who sell the proscribed in alleys and parks. Forbidden highs and forbidden fantasies, by which the Avenue became infamous, now run parallel to lifestyles made “legitimate” by Revenue Canada and worked out in car payments, house payments, student loan payments.

Like a successful busker, media attention and festivals generate revenue for the revitalization of this community. City funding has replaced the old sidewalks and garbage cans with the kind you imagine are (but aren’t) in Venice’s St. Mark’s Square. Government matching funds have paid for new facades, and federal money for energy efficiency has spurred renovations. The spitting slice of air compressors and muffled rumble of pavers serenade you on walks through the neighbourhood.

For the first four years I lived in Alberta Avenue, I’d see Carl—topped with a cowboy hat and swinging his briefcase—hiking confidently along these streets. He moved with an air of irreverence at the construction that transformed his regular routes into brick-layered, green-treed trails. He’d make his way from the new street overlay into his building’s foyer, up the stairs and down the long hall whose stillness mimicked that of a cat waiting at a mouse hole.

I knew him as “Uncle Carl” and we met when I worked at a downtown soup kitchen. He was an infectious optimist. On Monday most nouns were prefaced with “Marvellous!” There were Super Sundays and Fabulous Fridays. I loved his positivity; his cheeky middle finger to the challenges life threw at him. When he was a child, frequent violent seizures left him sometimes unconscious and always disoriented. He finished Grade 3, then the school “refused” to teach him. He learned to read and write at home. After moving to the city, he lived in various forms of poorly managed housing, mostly rooming houses and basement suites. He ate at the “safer” downtown charities, but no matter where he lived or dined, his briefcase, shiny as a freshly buffed army boot, accompanied him. Inside was a placemat and disposable cup saved from his morning coffee at the mall food court. “No point in tossing a perfectly good cup, eh?”

A seizure killed him in the suite that was new only four years ago, in a building that has aged like the girls—literally girls—working the outside corners. It is a building built with grants and loans from several levels of government who, eager to erase the memory of decades of cuts to affordable housing, perhaps forgot to ask about the builder’s management plans. Who will manage the self-medication that seeps in from the Avenue like gas in a room without a pilot light?

South across the Avenue from Carl’s building is Edmonton’s grittiest 7-Eleven. The staff are a mix of temporary foreign workers and recent immigrants whose professionalism has no limit. I wonder if, like me, they feel disorientation at the regular absence of familiar social conventions. On one visit, I saw a woman fill a cup the size of a small camping cooler with Coke. The foaming stream of carbonated sugar-water flowed as she shouted to her partner across the store, “If he thinks I’m going to give him more f___ing money for that asshole then he’s gonna have something coming to him. Ah, f___! Why didn’t you tell me it was gonna overflow?”

She looked like a woman I’d seen before at the transition shelter a block from my home, just one of a diverse array of people who make their home on my street. There’s a music teacher, a speech therapist, a building caretaker and a security guard. The mechanic a few doors down lends his trailer to anyone needing to make a “dump run”; the non-profit director’s husband just finished repainting their house. Two group homes, one for the physically disabled, the other for the “hard to house,” sit invisibly along the street. Within a one-block range of our home live seniors and children, high-school dropouts and professors, well-known musicians, and union workers. A family of nine lives in a three-bedroom house, and a home where an eccentric, elderly Greek man died peacefully last year sits empty. There are Chinese, Filipino and Italian families, a Caribbean man who loves marigolds and a senior who repairs her own eaves using an ancient ladder.

Walking home from the 7-Eleven, the little one is a glacier on tiny feet. It takes minutes to pass Pussycat Video—a white stucco building with a parking lot tucked conspicuously at the back. We go by the dollar store, and smile at bored patrons in the Phở King restaurant. The human traffic on the Avenue has virtually evaporated, so when people do pass we wave: at the lady walking her shepherd/pit bull cross, at the man in torn joggers and an Iron Maiden T-shirt who’s melting on the bus bench. The Avenue Theatre, first converted into a skate park, then a music venue, is quiet—until the night’s concert, which will draw crowds pierced with silver and hooded in black.

As we pass the old George’s Cycle building—one of dozens of empty buildings—we make faces in its glass front, which stretches for a whole block. A city arts group plans to turn the yawning interior into office and studio space for artist and other non-profit projects. It is a crucial transition note in a larger score titled “Revitalization.”

Avenue Trading Post Pawn Shop on Alberta Avenue, Edmonton, Alta. (Beate Wichmann)

Then the little one spots swings. She’s too young to note that this is the “sad park,” not the “new park.” Almost always empty, it consists of a lot full of sand topped with a toddler slide, a couple of lengths of logs (balance beams?) and two baby swings. After I agree to a quick stop, I notice the quaking skeleton squatting under the trees. Where kids play, junkies usually don’t stay. However, today she takes no notice. The girls are busy building sandcastles as she injects, drops her head then rocks on her heels like a catcher before the sixth pitch.

Shawn, our nine-year-old neighbour, cycles by and stops. His body is sick with disease, his face bloated from medication that keeps his immune system from destroying his sole transplanted kidney. His life is a fine balance between sickness and health. “You guys going to that Take Back the Avenue thing?” he asks me as the girls fill their pockets with sand.

I shrug, non-committal. Styled after an old-fashioned “sit in,” the event features neighbours taking over corners where tweaking women in their sagging skinny jeans usually ply their trade. Instead of desperation and addiction, the neighbours bring games, guitars and canvases. I’m non-committal because I just don’t know. What is my relationship to the Avenue and its animators And exactly how do I take back something that wasn’t mine to begin with?

By all accounts, the last temporary repossession had been a good party. All down the strip, musicians strummed ballads, artists painted and families played board games. Nearing the dinner hour, a man in a van stopped and asked the loiterers on one corner, “Hey, uh, just wonderin’ when you guys will be all done here?”

“Why do you ask?” shrugged the family sitting around a chessboard.

“Uh, Gerry’s wonderin’ if you’re gonna be much longer. He’s, uh, wonderin’ what time the girls can come back out.” On that night the women would return after seven.

On this night, around seven, I pull my lightly charred chicken off the barbecue. We eat under the clematis-draped pergola on a long, slim table inspired by rows in an Italian vineyard. White beer is paired with the first harvest of potatoes and carrots grown in my back-alley garden. Friends join us for dinner and we are serenaded by a symphony of howling canines that unfailingly accompany the ambulance sirens. Two houses north, the basement tenants arrive home and we wave. It’s at times like this that I wish my table were a few feet longer.

Carissa Halton lives in Alberta Avenue with her husband and three kids. She blogs at avenuehomesteader.blogspot.com.

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A few double-time, VIP-lane minutes later, a more presentable Mayor Nenshi was led into the palatial working quarters of the Mayor of Beijing. Bleary but beaming, Nenshi strode into his Chinese counterpart’s office to find it full of sober, dark-suited men awaiting His Calgarian Worship’s arrival.

Out of the corner of his eye, Nenshi spotted a familiar face: Doug Horner, the deputy premier of Alberta. Horner had positioned himself several deferential steps behind Nenshi, in keeping with local custom. In China, the mayor of a major city is a far more powerful and more revered official than some lowly provincial apparatchik. No one was much interested in the vagaries of provincial government; the mayor was the dignitary they’d come to meet.

Back home in Alberta, of course, the power balance is exactly the opposite. Naheed Nenshi’s office—and every other mayoral office at every city hall in the province—exists only by fiat of the provincial government. Under Alberta’s Municipal Government Act, provincial officials tell city governments how they can raise money—and often determine what sorts of things they can spend it on. The province decides where municipal jurisdiction begins and ends, and it sets the agenda and orders the priorities around the development of critical urban infrastructure.

Edmonton and Calgary are getting new ring roads in large part because the provincial government commissioned them and doled out the money. A new $24.5-million pedestrian bridge spans the Bow River in Calgary—designed by celebrated Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, in a process Nenshi repeatedly criticized in his election campaign—because the province earmarked the money for it in its Municipal Sustainability Initiative. An elaborate metal sculpture sits next to a Whitemud Drive on-ramp in Edmonton because the province obliges the city to spend 1 per cent of the budget for new road construction on an accompanying piece of art. And if it isn’t the province calling the shots, it’s the feds: southeast Calgary won’t be getting three new recreation centres anytime soon and Edmonton’s Royal Alberta Museum revamp is anything but certain since officials in Ottawa have previously bailed on their share of the construction costs.

The short-sighted, arbitrary nature of these federal funding withdrawals proved in 2011 to be some kind of breaking point for the mayors of Alberta’s largest cities, who spat rhetorical vitriol back at Ottawa with uncommon ferocity. “I’m tired of being screwed as an Albertan,” Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel told the press. “I’m so disappointed that something that was so important to the city can be snatched away without any consultation. It is an absolutely unconscionable act. It’s not even about the money so much. It’s about the disrespect this shows to the city and the people of Edmonton.” Mayor Nenshi, for his part, was described as “stunned and fuming” as he accused the feds of “wasting two years of our time” on the rejected rec centre development. (The new facilities were to be built under the auspices of P3 Canada, the federal government’s new Crown corporation for public/private partnerships. Nenshi showed the gathered press a section of P3 Canada’s website that explicitly mentioned rec centres as the kind of projects the Crown corporation intended to fund, but that passage vanished from the site soon after the story broke.)

“In Canada the city is a poor cousin, an afterthought, a beggar.”

The majority of Albertans haven’t been rural dwellers since Ernest Manning was in his second term as premier. In 2011, with more than 80 per cent of Albertans living in urban areas—nearly two-thirds of the population living in Edmonton and Calgary alone—our cities still wield all the power and autonomy of whistle stops along the CPR tracks in the final years of the 19th century. This is a power imbalance with profound implications far beyond any given downtown museum or suburban skating rink. The 21st century is the first truly urban century in human history: as of 2009, more than 50 per cent of the world’s population resides in cities, and the UN estimates that by 2050, seven billion people will live in cities (as many as currently inhabit the entire planet).

Cities have always been cradles of civilization (the word civilization shares a common Latin root with the words city and citizen), but they are also now understood as being the essential engines of human prosperity, innovation and progress. The world over, faded industrial burgs and upstart developing-world metropolises alike commission marquee architecture projects and vie to host international spectacles such as the Olympics and FIFA World Cup, all with an eye toward gaining a reputation as world-class cities and thus (so it’s hoped) attracting the knowledge economy’s top talent.

Vancouver and Portland wrestle for the title of the Pacific coast’s greenest oasis. Denver and Shanghai share at least one common civic passion: both are laying commuter-rail track at breakneck speed. New York copied Copenhagen’s exemplary bike lanes and strung them up and down Manhattan, while cities the world over gaze in awe at New York’s wondrous homegrown High Line Park—an urban oasis reclaimed from an abandoned elevated-train track. London, Boston and Minneapolis have imported Montreal’s beloved Bixi bike-sharing system. On the fringes of cities such as Seoul, Dubai, Dallas and Denver (again), elaborate “aerotropolis” business hubs have been built around airports to serve as vital new economic engines. In every case, civic officials and their partners in other levels of government have come to realize that the economic health of their whole region rests on the vibrancy of the urban sphere. Without healthy cities—well-endowed, resilient but adaptable urban centres built on sustainable foundations—there is simply no chance of success in the 21st century.

You’d think it would follow that properly funding cities to equip themselves for this fiercely competitive urban century would be at the top of every government’s agenda. But you’d be wrong. The tale of the contemporary Canadian city is one of underfunded projects and long-neglected infrastructure. For every new ring road, there’s an LRT line waiting decades to receive funding (see Calgary’s long-promised southeast CTrain or the LRT extension to Mill Woods in southeast Edmonton, which was first proposed in the 1970s and which might begin construction in 2014). In Medicine Hat, two-thirds of the entire capital budget for water and sewerage in 2012 has already been committed to emergency upgrades of crumbling sewer lines, some of them 100 years old; Fort McMurray, meanwhile, has been so overwhelmed by its rapid growth that it petitioned the province to freeze new oil sands development at the height of the last boom to try to catch up on building even a first generation of essential municipal services. And so it goes from coast to coast: Toronto is slashing its transit expansion plans and laying off city staff, Montreal continues to be a city of crumbling concrete, and Winnipeg has invited paying sponsors to slap their names and brands on everything from community centres to individual police cars and library books in a desperate bid to cover its costs. In Canada the city is a poor cousin, an afterthought, a beggar.

All told, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) estimates that Canadian cities suffer from a $123-billion infrastructure deficit in overdue upgrades alone—unfunded sewer improvements, road repavings, transit expansions and the like—plus another $115-billion in absent funding for the new infrastructure essential to accommodate projected growth. This isn’t just a problem for Canada’s older eastern cities, either: the Canada West Foundation estimates that $63-billion worth of infrastructure is needed in western Canada’s seven biggest cities, particularly Alberta’s, which are growing faster than any in Canada and will have to house most of the 2.5 million new people expected to settle in the province over the next 40 years.

Never has the city been more important to Canada’s—and Alberta’s—health, and never has it been so chronically cash-strapped. An FCM study by McGill University engineering professor Saeed Mirza found that 80 per cent of Canada’s infrastucture was at the end of its life expectancy. “Canada,” Mirza said, “has a serious infrastructure crisis.” And the road Alberta’s overburdened cities are sputtering along is pockmarked with more and deeper financial potholes up ahead.

“When you look at the City of Calgary’s forecasts for what’s going to happen to our revenue and expenses over the course of the next decade or so,” says Mayor Nenshi, “it becomes apparent that this is not a theoretical discussion. This city, and every other city in Canada, is going to hit the wall within the next decade in terms of no longer being able to fund the things that people need, using the sources we have. And we’ve got to figure out how to manage that.” The funding gap between municipal governments and their federal and political masters, Nenshi argues, is “the real fiscal imbalance in Canada.”

McLeod Trail, Calgary, Alta. (Beate Wichmann)

Here’s a quick snapshot of the wall Nenshi’s describing. It begins with the fact that municipal governments receive just 8 per cent of the total tax revenues collected from Albertans. Even property-tax revenues—the primary source of municipal government funding—flow almost as abundantly to the province as to City Hall: the Alberta government receives 43.5 cents out of every property-tax dollar. In 2011 property taxes covered just 39 per cent of Calgary’s expenses, with the rest generated by the sale of goods, services and various user and licensing fees. (See the charts on pp 32 and 35 for a fuller accounting of municipal cash flows.)

From the eight cents out of every tax dollar that Alberta’s cities receive, they maintain more than 50 per cent of the infrastructure their residents use every day. The biggest month-to-month operational costs are police and fire departments, public transit services and road maintenance; the major capital expenses are transportation (everything from repaving vital commuter arteries to maintaining sidewalks and bike lanes), drinking water management, wastewater management and public transit.

In the increasingly urbanizing years from 1955 to 1977, infrastructure spending in Canada rose by 4.8 per cent each year. From 1977 to 2000, however—even as the cost, complexity and importance of urban infrastructure grew—infrastructure spending plummeted, growing by just 0.1 per cent annually (far slower than inflation). The majority of Canada’s public infrastructure—fully 59 per cent—is now more than 40 years old. We’ve entered the urbanized digital age riding the infrastructure equivalent of a console TV with rabbit ears on top. In Alberta’s cities, citizens get by (and get around) mostly on a tired network of equipment and services designed and built in the Lougheed years for half the number of users. Small wonder that the chief complaint about everything from transit to hockey rinks is that there simply isn’t enough of the stuff. And our howls of protest are directed at civic politicians lacking the authority needed to improve the situation and upgrade the gear.

Nenshi again: “I’m mayor of a city that has more people than five provinces, yet I have the exact same legislative authority as any village of 30 or 40 people. And that has to change.”

There’s never a single reason for a problem of this depth and complexity, of course, but in the case of Canada’s money-starved cities, there is an original sin: the British North America Act of 1867, the nation’s founding document. Barely any place in Canada could presume to call itself a city when the Act was written, and so the BNA Act enshrined into law a kind of paternalism that pervades intergovernmental affairs to this day. Nineteenth-century Canadian municipalities, far too unsophisticated to handle more complicated taxation, were given the authority only to control property taxes, out of which they were expected to cover the costs of basic services such as garbage collection, sewerage, fire fighting and policing. For more sophisticated infrastructure—highways, hospitals, schools, recreation centres, mass transit and museums—cities were left to wait for the provincial or federal governments, or beseech them to dole out grants.

Property taxes, Mayor Nenshi wrote in a recent Calgary Herald column, are “one of the worst forms of taxation ever designed.” When I asked him why, he provided a more nuanced explanation: “The very good thing about the property tax is that it’s a very stable form of taxation. It doesn’t change much when the economy changes. But that is actually precisely because it’s so unfair. And it doesn’t take into account the ability to pay.” It’s a tax on what you own rather than on what you earn or spend, so it is unmoved by either boom or bust.

The province sets the agenda for urban infrastructure. For every new ring road, there’s an LRT line waiting decades to receive funding.

Maybe the most perverse logic embedded in the funding for Alberta’s cities is that it punishes civic success. As cities grow—which Calgary, Edmonton and Fort McMurray did with reckless abandon for much of the last decade—the droves of new workers attracted by their dynamic local economies fatten provincial and federal coffers with income taxes, GST and user fees. Cities, though, actually pay out more than they bring in, since building new infrastructure costs far more than cities earn back in property tax, and the new growth further burdens their older infrastructure and hastens the need for refurbishments and upgrades. A City of Calgary study estimates that Calgarians pay out $4-billion more in provincial taxes and $10-billion more in federal taxes each year than the city’s residents get back in provincial and federal grants and services. That’s $14-billion in lost local tax dollars—almost five times the city’s $3-billion annual budget.

Alberta’s Municipal Government Act, passed in 1968, was intended to respond to the evolving needs of this province’s rapidly urbanizing population, but it has turned out to be far too blunt and weak an instrument. Among other problems, it’s an imperious, top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to municipal affairs, predicated on the notion that a piece of legislation that is used to address the growing pains of the city of Wetaskiwin (pop. 11,000) could be capable of troubleshooting in the city of Calgary, which absorbed about four Wetaskiwin’s worth of new residents in 2006 alone.

Canada’s great philosopher queen of urban life, Jane Jacobs, attacked the property tax problem in her final book, Dark Age Ahead (2004). In a chapter scathingly titled “Dumbed-Down Taxes,” she described property taxes as a “very minor taxation… responsive neither to ability to pay nor to economic expansion.” Raise property taxes to keep pace with growth, and you wind up forcing established residents to move. (Think here of the proverbial little old lady in the bungalow where she’s lived all her life, watching her property tax skyrocket as her pension stays put.) The other option for cities is to slash services just as they’re most desperately needed, which is a tidy shorthand explanation for why urban Alberta’s homelessness crisis peaked in near-perfect lockstep with its years of most stratospheric economic success.

Jacobs: “Because city sources of public revenue are frequently inadequate to needs, so-called senior governments sporadically come to their aid with grants of public money and programs devised for using the grants. These resources are disbursed into many different localities, currently in many different situations, with unlike needs and dissimilar opportunities.” Edmonton gets a $600,000 roadside sculpture but only a garbled “probably” for the RAM; Calgary is denied new recreation facilities in the southeast. LRT construction lags in both cities, but it’s ring roads all around. Every Albertan gets a $400 cheque from Ralph Klein’s benevolent government one year, and only years later is someone (Nenshi in this case) impertinent enough to point out that the southeast LRT line would probably be up and running in Calgary by now if the $1.1-billion those Ralphbucks evacuated from the province’s budget had been invested in its largest city’s transit infrastructure instead.

There’s a vital government principle absent here. It’s a feature Jacobs called subsidiarity: “the principle that government works best—most responsibly and responsively—when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses.” When Jacobs warned of a new Dark Age on the horizon, her chief concern was that pillars of civilization such as subsidiarity—the ability of the money we give government to efficiently provide us with what we actually need—were collapsing, that indeed they may have fallen so fully away that the citizenry can’t even remember how they’re supposed to work. “Culture,” she argued, “resides mainly in people’s heads and the examples that people set, and is subject therefore to natural mortality.”

What might such a Dark Age look like Might it begin with a public works funding regime so lacking in transparency and subsidiarity, so distant for so long from the people it claims to serve, that those people don’t even know which politicians to shout their enraged epithets at A great many Calgarians, for example, blow gaskets at the mere mention of the $24.5-million Calatrava bridge. Rarely a discouraging word is heard, however, about the cost of the multicoloured concrete trout leaping sort-of-artfully along the abutments of the new Glenmore Trail underpass, nor how they got there, nor how they might owe their provenance to political choices made not in Calgary but in the provincial legislature.

Aerial view of Calgary, Alta. (CP Photo: Larry MacDougal)

The trout, for the record, are part of the same obligatory public-art spending that put the metal sculpture next to Whitemud Drive in Edmonton, and they are ultimately the products of the same far-off government that created the funding program that spun Calatrava’s tubular steel web across the Bow.

A Dark Age is not upon Alberta’s cities yet. But the moment is here for us to shake off our collective civic amnesia and demand subsidiarity now. The next boom is, by many reports, inevitable, maybe even imminent. The money will likely be easy again in Alberta, but it won’t make our cities great unless we insist that it do so. And the open question posed by the backward way we fund those cities remains unanswered. Do we intend to treat the 80 per cent of Albertans who live in urban areas as afterthoughts incidental to the province’s overall success, or as the vital primary engines of that success?

There are a great many small, effective ways to begin recalibrating our priorities. The province could give cities a portion of personal income tax revenues. It could give them the taxes it collects on gambling, booze and cigarettes. The federal government could funnel cities some of its gasoline excise tax revenues to build and maintain transportation infrastructure. Municipal hotel taxes—highly responsive to local economic growth—are another option, vehicle registration fees yet another. Albertans, against long-standing habit, could decide to embrace the idea of a “penny tax”—a single-point sales tax atop the GST to fund municipal infrastructure. (If the Conservative federal government hadn’t thrown out those two percentage points on the GST but instead handed the $13-billion per year they represented to Canada’s underfunded cities, we’d have already turned sharply away from that Dark Age ahead.)

There’s real appeal to many of these approaches. Most of them, for example, don’t require new taxes but merely reallocation of the taxes we already pay. During the recent PC leadership campaign, both Alison Redford and Doug Griffiths spoke favourably about creating a new “city charter”; such a deal would potentially free up civic governments to levy hotel and car rental taxes and introduce vehicle registration fees. Griffiths said he wants civic revenues to be more predictable and to remove the conditions that come with Municipal Sustainability Initiative (MSI) funding. “What I have said consistently is MSI… should be with very little strings attached,” he told the Edmonton Journal. “If the City of Edmonton or the City of Calgary or the City of Lethbridge decide they want to use MSI funding for a particular recreational area… they’ll be held accountable by their own taxpayers.”

From the eight cents that cities get out of every tax dollar, they maintain over 50 per cent of the infrastructure their resident use every day.

Now that Redford is premier and Griffiths her Municipal Affairs minister, the prospects for a new urban deal would seem bright. Just before Christmas, though, Redford took a sharp swipe at better municipal funding. “We saw in both the municipal budget process in Calgary and in Edmonton [that] what they’re talking about is an increase in spending and about possible revenue sources,” she told the press. “And their answer is: if we need more revenue we’ll talk to the provincial government. Well, the provincial government is not going to give you more money. You now need to be what you told people you would be… responsible stewards of the resources you have.”

This points back to the core problem. Under the current deal, the province—not the municipalities—calls the shots. The premier, not any mayor, is the final arbiter on the subject of what resources are available to cities. A hotel levy here or there isn’t going to right this imbalance. “This is tinkering at the edges of the structural financial problem we face,” says Nenshi. “At some point we have to face the fact, in every city in Canada, that there’s a need for comprehensive tax reform.”

Penny taxes and municipal improvement programs built on the provincial government’s gambling revenues don’t redress the misalignment of dignitaries in the room embodied by Canada’s original municipal sin. If the mayor’s office in Beijing requires a visiting Canadian mayor to stand several paces in front of his provincial counterparts, the BNA Act would oblige him to wait patiently in another room—sometimes for years on end—while the real VIPs decided the city’s fate. This won’t serve us well as citizens of Alberta’s first wholly urban century.

Chris Turner is the author of The Great Leap: How to Survive and Thrive in the Sustainable Economy (2011). He lives in Calgary.

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