Cass and her husband, Mike, first looked to buy in Calgary in 2016, when they were in their early 30s. Back then, the market seemed manageable. Sales had dipped, prices had softened, and throughout that year the city’s overall benchmark price hovered just above $400,000. Then Mike went back to school for specialty healthcare training, and they hit pause on their plans. It made sense to keep renting and use the money they’d been saving for a down payment for the five-year program’s tuition instead.

Five years later, in 2021, the housing market shifted dramatically. Home prices across the country began rising midway through 2020, driven in part by historically low borrowing costs and changing demand for space as remote work became more common. Calgary logged a record year for home sales in 2021, with the benchmark price ending the year at over $464,000. As prices climbed, many millennials like Cass found it harder to get a foothold in the market. Existing homeowners, meanwhile, saw their properties evolve from just places to live into financial windfalls rapidly increasing in value. While these weren’t Vancouver or Toronto prices, housing affordability was starting to affect almost everyone in Canada, including Albertans.

Municipal leaders were blunt about the situation. “Calgary is in a housing crisis,” begins the City of Calgary’s housing strategy. Approved in 2023 and set to run through 2030, it’s a 98-action plan to increase supply and affordability. Nearly one in five households cannot afford their housing, the strategy states, and with costs continuing to rise, “more Calgarians are seeing their dreams of homeownership becoming further out of reach.”

That was the case for Cass and Mike. Their subsequent years of renting, and their eventual search again for a home to buy, were shaped by policies at every level—from federal programs such as the new First Home Savings Account, to the provincial affordable housing strategy, to municipal zoning rules that affect what is available and where. Their experience offers a window into how governments are trying to make homeownership attainable for first-time buyers, in a market very different from the one encountered by Canadians before them. They continued to rent, including an apartment in Calgary and a house in Cochrane, which they eventually had to leave in 2020 when the landlords decided to move back in. Between places, they lived with Cass’s parents, a stopgap she acknowledges not everyone has available or would enjoy. “We all like each other,” she says. “We’re very fortunate.”

Next they felt settled renting a three-bedroom house in the northwest Calgary community of Dalhousie, but their rent rose, from $1,750 in 2020 to $2,800 in 2024—and then the landlord decided to sell. Renting felt increasingly precarious, Cass says, especially in a province without rent control or any prospect of additional protections for renters. In 2025, for instance, a provincial government spokesperson told The Globe and Mail “Alberta will not go down the disastrous road of rent control.”

With rents roughly equal to a mortgage payment and Cass and Mike both feeling more settled in their careers—she as a manager at an architecture firm, he practising manual osteopathy—they decided it was time to again consider buying. They began watching listings in late 2024 as Calgary’s benchmark price neared $588,000, with supply tight as more and more people poured into the city.

Housing affordability, meanwhile, had become a defining national issue as several forces converged. Record-low interest rates during the pandemic dramatically increased borrowing power. But construction struggled to keep pace, constrained by factors including labour shortages, supply chain breakdowns, rising material costs and municipal rules. Then, as home prices spiked, interest rates also rose, and it became more expensive to borrow money. Many prospective homebuyers were shut out of the market.

In response the federal government made big promises. “An entire generation of young Canadians is questioning whether they can afford a place to live today and whether they will ever be able to own a home of their own,” states Ottawa’s 2024 housing plan, pledging 3.87 million new homes by 2031.

In 2025 prime minister Mark Carney announced Build Canada Homes, a new federal agency meant to scale up affordable home construction using public lands, funding tools and new building technologies. But a closer look at planned spending on housing programs, by the parliamentary budget officer, found little action to date on that promise. Federal spending will actually decline by 56 per cent in the next four years, and the government has not yet laid out an overall plan to achieve its goal to double the pace of housing construction over the next decade.

Even so, the market housing affordability problem is one that no single level of government can fully solve. As Mike Moffatt and Alex Beheshti, housing economists with the Missing Middle Initiative at the University of Ottawa, said in a December 2025 report, “While the federal government can and must do more, most housing policy levers rest with the provinces and municipalities.”

Governments can set the rules and offer incentives, adds Sandeep Agrawal, professor and inaugural director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Alberta, but they don’t build most of the homes. “Someone can make all the policies… and they have some effect on the market,” he says. “But 50 per cent or more is in the hands of builders and developers and what people are looking for.”

In Canada, “housing affordability” typically refers to whether homeowners and renters can access housing that is reasonably priced relative to their income. Many governments use a simple definition: housing is “affordable” if it costs less than 30 per cent of household income before taxes. It’s a widely used but blunt tool.

For homeowners, housing costs typically include mortgage payments, property taxes, condominium fees and utilities. For renters, it’s rent and utility costs. That leaves out real-life expenses that add up, such as tenant or home insurance (which in Alberta is higher than the national average), maintenance costs for older homes, and transportation. A cheaper home on the city’s edge can quickly become costlier once fuel, parking and vehicle ownership are factored in. Some governments do account for this. Edmonton’s city plan, for instance, aims for households to spend no more than 35 per cent of average expenditures on housing and transportation combined. But most governments do not.

“Affordable housing,” meanwhile, is its own complex category. Many assume the term refers solely to government-subsidized rentals, but the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) defines it broadly, including housing provided by the private, public and non-profit sectors. In Alberta the provincial government’s 10-year affordable housing strategy, Stronger Foundations, released in 2021, focuses on new housing units and more rent supplements, aiming to serve 40 per cent more households. But Alberta is falling short of its goal, and experts caution that using subsidies to help make market housing more affordable can keep people in private rentals, which may not provide rent stability.

When it comes to market housing, Alberta has long been viewed as a relative bright spot—a place where homeownership, while harder than it once was, remains more attainable than in most of Canada. That reputation drew people. In 2022 the province launched its “Alberta is Calling” campaign to attract skilled workers with the promise of low taxes, comparatively cheaper homes and higher wages.

Around the same time, federal immigration changes contributed to unprecedented population growth across Canada, with the country’s population increasing by a record one million people in 2022 and, at the time, federal targets for bringing in newcomers set to rise year over year. By mid-2024, even Canada’s national housing agency conceded the country could no longer build its way back to 2004 affordability levels—a baseline year chosen because the economy was steady and housing costs were still proportionate to average incomes. CMHC instead shifted its target to 2019 levels, calling them more realistic.

In Alberta, a surge in both interprovincial and international migration in 2024 led Calgary and Edmonton to their biggest population growth in more than 20 years. People began “chasing affordability,” as ATB chief economist Mark Parsons put it in a report of the same name. Affordability issues, however, were felt unevenly across the province. A recent analysis by the parliamentary budget officer, for instance, found that Calgary saw a sharp deterioration in affordability compared to other major cities in Canada, while Edmonton remained among the most affordable.

In response, new home construction ramped up dramatically. Calgary led the country in housing starts in 2024 and was on track to repeat that in 2025. Edmonton hit an all-time high in 2024, surpassing a record that had stood since 1978. “The market’s largely been able to respond,” says Scott Fash, CEO at BILD Alberta, an association that represents builders and developers across the province. “But with housing, it can never respond at the speed at which growth often occurs. That’s the lag of going through approvals and then actually building the housing units.” A growing share of that construction is purpose-built rental, historically a small slice of Alberta’s housing starts. New CMHC incentives have rapidly increased builder enthusiasm; in 2025, purpose-built rentals accounted for 37 per cent of housing starts in the province. Still, inventory remains below 10-year averages, and prices remain above them. Fash’s organization also monitors markets outside Calgary and Edmonton, and has noted demand pick up in Grande Prairie, Red Deer and Lethbridge.

And while new builds add supply, experts warn more construction alone won’t fix affordability. The financialization of housing—treating homes and rental units as financial assets for profit, driven by large investors such as REITs, private equity and pension funds—continues to push prices higher. A report on the financialization of housing, for Canada’s independent federal housing advocate, describes it this way: “Financial firms operate rental housing with a goal to increase rents, making it their business model to reduce affordability.” About 20 to 30 per cent of Canada’s rental housing is now financialized, the Canadian Human Rights Commission estimates, which most impacts disadvantaged groups.

In Calgary, median home prices have risen dramatically—more than 40 per cent in the last five years.

It was into this landscape that Cass and Mike began searching. They set a budget of $650,000 to $800,000 and aimed to put 10 per cent down on a 30-year mortgage—without family assistance. They’d been saving for a down payment in a First Home Savings Account, a federal program launched in 2023 that lets first-time buyers put money tax-free into a down-payment account.

Like many first-time buyers, they faced the twin hurdles of saving enough for a down payment and qualifying for a mortgage—both of which have become harder in recent years. And because Mike is self-employed, they had to provide additional documentation to secure financing. It now takes a typical young Albertan about 10 years of full-time work to save a 20 per cent down payment, according to think tank Generation Squeeze. For Baby Boomers, it took roughly six.

Cass and Mike approached their purchase deliberately, wanting to ensure they could manage mortgage payments on a single income if necessary and avoid slipping into being house poor. “We didn’t want to get into a scenario where we bought a house and then all we could do was stay in our house,” Cass says. Their search unfolded alongside a stretch of declining interest rates, as the Bank of Canada cut its benchmark rate from 4.75 per cent in June 2024 to 2.25 per cent in October 2025, lowering borrowing costs and nudging more buyers back into the market.

That market was still challenging for first-time buyers. In Calgary, median home prices have risen dramatically—more than 40 per cent in the last five years—while median incomes have not kept pace. Reid Hendry, the City of Calgary’s chief housing officer, says the “price-to-income ratio” has been widening for decades. In 2000 the city had the “gold standard” level of “3:1 over an entire-market basis.” Now the city’s ratio is “approximately 5.5:1.” This means that compared to 2000 it now takes nearly double the amount of time—close to six years instead of three—for people making the average household income in Calgary to buy a home. “When we talk about affordability,” says Hendry, “we often focus immensely on price, but what’s very important as well is income.”

While Cass and Mike searched for an affordable home in Calgary, they might have had an easier time looking in Edmonton. A 2025 analysis pegs Edmonton’s price-to-income ratio at 4.61—the second-best among Canada’s 22 metro areas over 200,000 people (in that analysis, Calgary’s ratio is calculated as 6.14). “Edmonton consistently ranks as one of the most affordable large cities in Canada, despite having some pretty big population increases over the last couple of years,” says Travis Pawlyk, branch manager of development services for the City of Edmonton.

Why is that Pawlyk frames the city’s role in supporting housing affordability as one of facilitating supply. The City has used policy and regulatory changes to encourage a diversity of housing types and speed up development permitting, letting developers respond quickly to market conditions. The Canadian Home Builders’ Association ranked Edmonton first among Canadian municipalities for its development processes, approval timelines and fees in its two most recent benchmarking studies.

A major policy piece is the city’s new zoning bylaw, introduced in January 2024. It allowed more housing types and higher density across the city, including up to eight units on lots previously restricted to single-family homes. While a significant rewrite, it built on years of prior reforms. “This is about a decade in the making,” Pawlyk says, echoing a sentiment shared widely. “Housing affordability doesn’t happen by accident,” wrote then-councillor and now mayor Andrew Knack in an Instagram post in April 2025. “It happens through deliberate policy decisions over a long period of time.”

The increase in housing supply “is largely due to reforms made by municipal governments, rather than by the government of Alberta.”

Major policy shifts began around 2015, Pawlyk notes. That year, Edmonton amended its zoning bylaw to allow subdivision of residential properties at least 50 feet wide. Secondary and backyard suites were also permitted on most single-family lots, and by late 2019, duplexes and semi-detached homes became permitted uses, effectively ending single-family-only zoning. In 2020 Edmonton became the first major Canadian city to eliminate parking minimums for homeowners and businesses entirely.

These changes have not come without pushback. “Edmonton neighbourhoods in revolt over residential lot-splitting,” read a 2016 Edmonton Journal headline. More recently, former Liberal leader and MLA Kevin Taft and other members of the Coalition for Better Infill criticized the 2024 bylaw for “deregulating the infill industry, eliminating most neighbourhood input and relaxing or removing many regulations.”

Still, Pawlyk emphasizes the need for Edmonton to grow differently, moving away from the long-standing assumption that new suburbs will absorb most population growth. Compact development, he says, advances both financial and sustainability goals, but it requires creating conditions for more residents in mature neighbourhoods—a shift he says takes political courage.

Federal funding has helped. Edmonton received $192-million through the Housing Accelerator Fund, some of which supports an Infill Infrastructure Fund to offset the cost of public infrastructure upgrades—a major barrier to building new homes in established areas, according to the city. Another federal measure eliminates the Goods and Services Tax (GST) for first-time buyers on new homes up to $1-million, offering direct relief to buyers.

Provincial initiatives to reduce impediments to building also played a role, though to what extent is up for debate. “While housing supply has been rapidly increasing in the province, that is largely due to reforms by municipal governments rather than the government of Alberta,” wrote housing economist Mike Moffat in a May 2025 report card that gave Alberta the lowest grade among the provinces for taking action to address housing supply. Calgary and Edmonton were singled out for leadership on zoning, approvals and permitting, with a recommendation that these best practices be applied province-wide. Edmonton also earned recognition for becoming the first Canadian city to institute an automated permit review system, reducing parts of the permitting timeline by 95 per cent or more.

In December 2025 Moffatt and the Missing Middle Initiative released a new report card that gave each province a grade based on several categories, including housing supply. Compared to the previous report card in May, Alberta’s score was up—tied for third overall—and the province got the highest score in the country in the category that asked: “Is the housing supply increasing, and are there enough homes to house the current population?”

Industry groups, meanwhile, are pushing for greater consistency across municipalities. Scott Fash with BILD Alberta says his organization recently consulted with municipalities, industry and the province to identify legislative changes that could streamline development further. A key priority, he says, is taking what works well in one place and replicating it more broadly. “We want to be able to create approval systems and zoning where we can go ahead and respond to the market in a pretty rapid fashion,” Fash says. “We’re better than most of the rest of the country, in terms of being able to do that quickly, but there’s still some work to be done.”

A three-storey multi-family home under construction in the Grovenor neighbourhood, Edmonton, February 2024.

Searching in Calgary, Cass and Mike wanted a single-family detached home built in the late ’80s or early ’90s, ideally in the northwest, close to family and within the ring road to keep commutes manageable. In August 2025 they found what they were looking for: a 1,700-square-foot, three-bedroom home in Scenic Acres, the same northwest Calgary neighbourhood Cass had lived in as a kid. The house, built in 1990, was mostly original, save for what Cass describes as a DIY kitchen facelift. It had a large yard, an attached front garage and the feel of a classic suburban family home. “It was one of the first places we had seen that we both felt confident in saying yes to,” Cass says. They viewed the house the first day it was listed and immediately put in an offer over the $674,900 asking price. Their bid was successful and they ultimately closed at $689,500.

When Cass and Mike bought their first home, in their late 30s, the moment landed with a mix of excitement and apprehension. It was, after all, the biggest purchase of their lives. “I never in a million years thought I would ever spend this much money in one fell swoop,” Cass says.

There was also a glaring way to put their purchase into perspective. Thirty-three years earlier, Cass’s parents had built a 1,350-square-foot bungalow on a corner lot in the same neighbourhood for $119,000. They were in their early 30s, raising two young kids on a single income. A generation later, prices in Calgary had climbed so dramatically that what was once attainable on one salary now typically requires two, many more years of saving and a bit of luck.

Near the end of 2025, as Cass and Mike were settling into their new home, conversations around housing began to shift again. Federal immigration policy had slowed international arrivals, though interprovincial migration into Alberta remained strong. Record-setting housing starts were beginning to catch up to demand, easing supply pressures and nudging prices down slightly from the previous year.

Still, chief housing officer Reid Hendry warned that momentum must be maintained. “The market has cooled a little, and home prices are quote-unquote softening, but what are they softening relative to?” he asked, stressing the need for continued government investment in meeting Calgarians’ housing needs. The nature of affordability challenges was shifting, now affecting a smaller slice of people but hitting that group more deeply.

For Cass, the day-to-day realities of homeownership were still sinking in, from needing to replace a broken fridge and adjust the surrounding cabinetry to make it fit, to being able to paint without asking a landlord’s permission. “More and more every week, it does seem more permanent,” she said. “And that’s a really nice feeling. It’s a lot less worrisome than thinking, ‘Are we going to have to move again next year?’ ”

Cailynn Klingbeil is a freelance writer and editor based in Calgary. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian and The Globe and Mail.

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The post Home at Last appeared first on Alberta Views.

Published May 8, 2025, at The Line, a Canadian commentary website for “engaging, irreverent, non-partisan writing” based on Substack.

I want to talk for a minute about my kitchen. My family moved into a house in suburban Calgary a few years ago, and although it’s an older barn that needed a little polish around the edges, I wake up every day grateful to be here. Literally, every day. In a country beset by exorbitant housing costs, living in a comparatively affordable place like Calgary, on a calm street, where my kids can run around, in a home large enough to accommodate bedrooms and offices—these are blessings. So, yeah, I’m settled in. And I’m grateful.

But like all older houses, nothing is perfect. One of the items of nagging imperfection sits in my otherwise warm and bright kitchen.

Our white MDF cabinets are starting to disintegrate. It’s not terrible just yet, but the plywood behind the veneer is bubbling up and breaking through the edges, and once that glue starts to go, you know you’re on borrowed time with these things.

I like my kitchen otherwise, and the cabinet boxes are still in good shape, so there’s no need for a full renovation. If you’re a fellow homeowner, you know that the cheapest way to go about fixing these things is to opt for a cabinet refacing—simply switching out the cabinet faces.

I say “cheaper” here, but even refacing isn’t cheap. I’m still looking at thousands of dollars—more than I could comfortably afford on a journalist’s salary alone. Fortunately, I don’t live alone, so we’re looking at options—debt, pulling cash out of savings—all the ordinary things that middle-aged couples living in suburban homes consider at this time of life.

It’s not going to kill us or anything, but home improvement is an investment, and not one we take lightly.

And there’s one factor we now have to add to the decision. As I watch the passage of time slowly unravel the mid-tier shaker cabinet under my kitchen sink, debating between white and walnut, and trying to persuade my Scots husband to spend money, I am dealing with another problem: “What if we have to move?”

We were content to die in this home, but if Alberta goes forward with an independence referendum—as our premier is now suggesting could happen in 2026—and on the small chance that this vote is successful, well, we have no desire to live in a landlocked Hermit Kingdom of five million people, separated from our family by a border, and potentially unable to live or work anywhere else on the continent. This isn’t a better future for ourselves or our kids.

We have even less interest in becoming American, especially at a time when that country appears to be Orbánizing.

So, what do we do with our kitchen cabinets Do we spring for the good-quality facing that we’d be happy to live with for the next 15–20 years Do we slap some Home Depot-grade versions onto them Or do we sand the puffed up MDF and slap some cabinet paint on the damage with an understanding that the house’s future owner will probably want to rip them out anyway?

Does this matter in the greater scheme of things?

Well, no.

But also yes, because this in-depth conversation about cabinets is going to be replicated across thousands of kitchens and thousands of offices and thousands of boardrooms over the course of the next year. Any family or company that is looking to move to Alberta, anyone looking to invest here, or expand their operations, is going to have to ask some version of this question.

“What if we have to move?” “Can we move?” and if yes: “Well, should we invest now, or hold off until we have a better sense of what’s going to happen with this vote drama?”

I think this gets to the heart of what irks me so deeply about separatist movements—and I lump Quebec’s corrosive addiction to parties like the Bloc in with Alberta’s attempts to ape it. These politics are built on stoking grievances about real issues and never solving them. They’re about getting a plurality of constituents constantly amped up and angry in order to win elections for people who blame the federal government for the province’s failings.

And they bother me because they presume there are simple solutions to complicated problems. That a referendum or a vote or a new political allegiance is going to solve all of a polity’s complaints—without introducing new ones.

That’s not how life works though, is it?

There are never simple solutions to hard problems, there are just choices and trade-offs.

Take Danielle Smith’s announcement that the province will hold a referendum if separatists garner enough names on a petition to trigger a vote through a Citizens Initiative motion. Even if we take the most charitable interpretation of her words, and the kindest inference from her plans to introduce legislation to make it easier for a citizens initiative to succeed; even if we assume that she’s doing this not because she wants to become the first El Presidente of the Republic of Alberta, but rather because she believes this is the best way to leverage the federal government to get a pipeline built or an emissions cap lifted, the leverage she’s acquired here isn’t free.

We—as Albertans—pay for that leverage. I don’t mean that in an ephemeral or even moral sense, I mean this gamesmanship costs us money. Cash that Trevor Tombe will be able to track on spreadsheets of stalled growth or capital outflows. This is true even if a citizens initiative goes nowhere. It’s true even if a referendum dies on first contact with the will of the voter.

Should we spend now or hold off until we have a better sense of what’s going to happen?

The business uncertainty that all of this introduces means deferred or delayed investment; it means lost opportunity. It means painting over the cabinets instead of replacing them, but at an industrial scale.

And our premier doesn’t seem to care. She’s quite happy to expound on the glories of direct democracy in theory, as if she were presenting a PowerPoint argument to a not particularly inspiring University of Calgary political science class.

Smith is justifying herself with an appeal for those Albertans riled up to declare a border—riled up, I’ll note, in part because she’s tacitly encouraged them to be so.

“The vast majority of these individuals are not fringe voices to be marginalized or vilified. They are loyal Albertans. They are quite literally our friends and neighbours who’ve just had enough of their livelihoods and prosperity attacked by a hostile federal government.

“They’re frustrated, and they have every right to be.”

And what about the vast majority of loyal Canadians who live here and have no interest in suffering the consequences of even a failed referendum: do these friends and neighbours, people who are having their livelihoods and prosperity attacked by a hostile provincial government, not also have a right to be frustrated?

This isn’t a question of empathy. It’s a matter of which loyal Albertans Smith is choosing to listen to, and which ones she’s preferring to ignore.

Look, I have friends who run the gamut from hard separatist to soft sovereigntist and I don’t hold any ill will toward a single one of them. I think they’re wrong, but I don’t lack the emotional capacity to understand where they’re coming from.

But that doesn’t mean their beliefs aren’t minority positions—statistically, objectively, they are measurably borderline—at least for the moment. Smith isn’t reluctantly reacting to a genuine groundswell of support for an independent Alberta; she’s pandering to, and stoking the anger of, the approximately 25 per cent of the electorate that’s extremely pissed off about Mark Carney’s win after a decade of terrible Liberal rule.

Statements like this from Smith are a deflection from her own culpability, her compulsion to follow her base rather than to lead sincerely angry people toward constructive outcomes. She’s conflating ideas that are fringe with people who are not and can never be so, thus presenting herself as a champion of the self-anointed persecuted while actively normalizing minority policy positions.

A separation referendum will impose real consequences on our lives. And for what

It’s one thing to listen to frustrated Albertans. That’s perfectly sound. It’s another thing entirely to propose legislation that eases the path for a minority to hijack our political discourse, conveniently giving the premier cover on other issues like healthcare privatization scandals and tanking oil futures.

Smith is using Rorschach political rhetoric to all but champion a referendum that will impose real consequences on our lives. This isn’t a uni debate club at the quad. It’s not a book club gabfest on Plato’s Republic. It’s my house. It’s my kids’ school networks that Smith is gambling with now.

And for what So the oil sands can emit 150 MT of carbon annually rather than 100 MT So we can force the federal government to run a pipeline to Kitimat Are we risking this incredible gamble to pressure the federal government to rejig the equalization formula to take the wealth generated from Quebec’s hydroelectric power into account when considering how federal funds ought to be allocated annually?

Personally, I think the federal government shouldn’t be imposing an emissions cap on the provinces. I think we do need more east–west pipelines, and I don’t think the current equalization formula is particularly fair—but am I willing to risk my home and my citizenship on a wish list of accords compiled by junior oil and gas executives?

Umm. No. Sit down, Bob.

Our province is more than just an oil and gas plant, and I would love a government that didn’t run the province—wasn’t literally willing to risk the entire population’s security—for the benefit of one sector at the expense of all the others. Right now, Alberta is the richest province per capita by far, and oil and gas plays a huge role in raising wages across the board. But the vast majority of Albertans don’t work in this sector, and adopting the tactical politics of Quebec, one of the poorer provinces in Confederation, won’t make us wealthier.

In case anyone hasn’t yet pointed this out, the fastest way to make equalization “fair” would be for Albertans to earn less income than Quebecers. If we too were a have-not province, then we could also enjoy becoming overly dependent on the federal government for cash transfers to fund our services.

Is that… better?

For what it’s worth, I think Alberta has been disrespected by the rest of Canada; other provincial and federal leaders have been perfectly willing to use the oil and gas sector as a political wedge with their own voters while happily cashing the cheques that this province’s success has cut for the wealth of the Confederation. This has had the effect of turning provinces and constituencies against one another, of incentivizing them to put their narrow self-interest ahead of the less satisfying compromises inherent to national co-operation. All of this has been made worse under the last 10 years of Liberal government, to such an extent that I am not sure the “Confederation” can stand united if we continue in this direction.

My position on these issues hasn’t changed, but I’m also going to own up to some of my emotions, because they’ve shifted in recent months. I am anxious about what is happening right now, and it’s altering the way I look at politics.

I’ve grown tired to the point of despondency by the politics of grievance. It’s a calculated and manipulative game played on all sides of the political spectrum, an attempt to gin up apocalyptic emotional responses to comparatively minor disagreements. This is a tactic that has only one end—to secure power at the expense of civic unity.

And in an era of genuine existential trouble, our leaders—all of them—have to stop trying to win this way.

I’ve gone from being highly sympathetic to Alberta’s challenges in Confederation, to recognizing that every play now being considered by her leaders presents significant downside risks. Now that the door to a referendum is open, nobody, nobody at all, can control who or what will march through. This is a poorly managed controlled burn in a forest infected by a decade of deadfall. Maybe it will work. Maybe we’ll be lucky. But it’s risky as all hell, and it threatens to destroy the forest and sterilize the earth beneath it. (This is just a metaphor, and on a not-minor point of dispute, lest anyone accuse me of being apocalyptic.)

Meanwhile, watching what’s happening south of the border unfold, I’ve gone from being open to considering, say, an economic union with the US, to an emotion akin to “Absolutely not. Build the wall and hunker down until that political fever breaks.”

I can’t rationalize these emotions. Good or bad, my feelings are what they are. My intellectual opinions haven’t shifted so much as my emotions on these matters have hardened as the impacts of these trends are starting to be felt, literally, in my own kitchen.

Jen Gerson is a freelance writer and co-founder of The Line. She formerly worked at The Globe and Mail and the National Post.

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The post Danielle Smith is Destroying My Kitchen appeared first on Alberta Views.

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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Sam Kolias says NO

The chief executive officer and chairman of the board at Boardwalk REIT

Some people believe rent controls work. They don’t. The fact is rent controls haven’t worked in countless jurisdictions, including Vancouver, Toronto and New York.

In every place with rent controls, rents have risen alongside an evaporation of much-needed new housing supply; new housing supply creates competition and lowers prices. The most-affordable housing in Canada is in the two provinces that avoid this devastating public policy: Alberta and Saskatchewan. Alberta repealed a temporary rent cap in 1977 and Saskatchewan replaced its act from 1973 in 2007. Some 90 per cent of housing is supplied by the private sector, and Alberta and Saskatchewan see the highest investment per capita in apartment development of all the provinces.

Missing from many arguments for rent control is the critical law of supply and demand. It’s a law, not a theory, for a reason.

Rent controls make it difficult for housing providers to have enough cash flow to properly maintain the housing. This is just basic math. Rent controls lead to residents living in less-than-favourable conditions, as is seen in countless rent control jurisdictions. Rent controls also deter much-needed investment and development in new housing. Sadly, rent controls can even favour those more fortunate people who don’t require affordable housing, but who nonetheless remain in price-controlled rental housing to finance their lifestyle, including second homes, vacations and luxury cars.

Real solutions lie firstly in taxation policies that stimulate investment for the creation of affordable housing and secondly in ensuring access to lower-cost capital for the development of more purpose-built housing. Both policies generate new housing supply and create a necessary but controllable level of vacancy, which in turn drives competition, which in turn lowers rents. This is supply and demand in action.

Rent supplements are another essential solution, as they go to people in need, not to everyone; rent controls make no such distinction.

Other viable solutions include a government acquisition fund allowing community housing providers direct access to capital in order to acquire existing housing in established neighbourhoods from private landlords. This provides faster access to affordable housing than new builds, which cost more and take longer. Further, we can incentivize private landlords through the non-taxation of capital gains and recaptured depreciation from sales to social housing providers, leading to more housing across the entire housing spectrum. Carrots work! Just look at Canada’s tax incentives in the 1970s, which encouraged building housing and created a much-needed supply of affordable housing. It worked then and it will work now! These are tried and tested laws of economics.

At the end of the day we’re all customers. Together let’s ensure quality affordable housing is accessible to all Canadians.

Annie Hodgins says YES

The executive director of the Canadian Centre for Housing Rights

Rents are out of control across Canada, but Alberta tops the charts. From March 2023 to March 2024, Alberta saw the highest average rent increases of any province—a staggering 20 per cent, well above inflation. Edmonton and Calgary saw the highest increases of the largest Canadian cities, at 17.3 per cent and 10.6 per cent respectively. As rents climb even further, the number of Albertans experiencing chronic homelessness has risen to nearly 7,000.

Why are rents being raised even as people struggle with an affordability crisis It’s simple: because so much housing is owned by companies whose goal is to increase profit, and Alberta’s laws allow it. Rental housing is a scarce resource that’s mostly owned by a small number of large investment vehicles such as real estate investment trusts (REITs). Over the past few decades rental housing ownership has become much more concentrated—a process called “financialization,” which governments have done little to discourage. Alberta has Canada’s highest rate of financialization, with 24 per cent of its apartment buildings owned by REITs.

Housing is a basic need—and human right—yet tenants in a hyperfinancialized and overpriced housing market have no choice but to accept exorbitant increases to avoid homelessness. Albertans are spending their savings and skipping meals to feed investors’ hunger for higher profits.

Canada relies on the private market to supply much of its rental housing. Landlords argue they need to steadily raise rents to match increases to their operating costs and maintain a healthy profit margin for their businesses. But in Alberta landlords’ profit margins aren’t stable; they’re growing. Canada’s five largest publicly traded REITs reported 7–13 per cent increases to their profitability in 2023, with the highest reported by Boardwalk. Those extra profits come directly from the pockets of cash-strapped renters. People who can’t pay end up in overcrowded or unsafe conditions, in shelters or on the street.

When a business takes advantage of a crisis to overcharge for necessities, we call it price gouging. Price gouging is illegal in many places, but rent gouging is legal in Alberta. Landlords are charging rents far higher than is necessary to maintain their properties and make reasonable profits. It’s government’s responsibility to address this. BC, Manitoba, Ontario, PEI and Quebec have regulated rents for decades. Nova Scotia recently followed suit. Modern regulation can allow steady rent increases to match operating costs while prohibiting excessive increases. It’s a time-tested system that works.

“Alberta is calling” says the government, promising that Albertans spend less on housing and more on the finer things in life. But ask the nearly 10 per cent of Albertans in inadequate or unaffordable housing, or the 7,000 without any home at all, whether Alberta is still calling. Rent regulation alone won’t solve the housing crisis, but it is a necessary step.

sam kolias responds to annie hodgins

Rent controls haven’t worked in the past, and there is no evidence they will work now. According to the National Rent Ranking report (rentals.ca) from March 2024, some of the highest rents in Canada are in rent-controlled markets: Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa and now Halifax. In fact, the 21 most expensive cities to rent in (the red/orange zone) are in rent-controlled provinces. Conversely, three of the five most-affordable cities (Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton) are in non-regulated markets. Calgary sits in the top 10 most affordable. No one is going to the “red zones” expecting to find affordable housing; they’re coming to Alberta and Saskatchewan. Outside of Canada, one can look to the failed policy in Sweden, where rent control has resulted in an extreme supply shortage and wait times of 10 years or more for affordable housing. Beyond creating supply shortages and long wait times, rent-regulated markets induce excessive rent hikes when units turn over, as landlords seek to recoup losses imposed by years of rental caps.

Let’s examine why rent control has failed to work.

New housing supply creates competition, which lowers prices. It’s no coincidence that Alberta and Saskatchewan, both of which repealed rent caps, have the highest investment per capita in apartment development and the most affordable rents. Building more affordable housing requires the private sector to continue investing. But will people invest if they can’t make a profit Profit is essential for financial survival. It provides the tools and capital necessary to improve products and services. Housing is a capital-intense product and requires a high level of investment. But profit isn’t found in the mission statement of any housing provider. Why Ken Blanchard (US author and business professional) tells us why, and it’s no secret: “Profit is the applause you get for taking care of your customers and creating a motivating environment for your people.”

Rent controls inhibit the cash flow that housing providers require to properly maintain housing.

Those who suggest profits for housing providers come solely from the pockets of renters fail to recognize the many sound, innovative business practices used by housing providers, such as controlling expenses, sourcing competitive products and services and introducing sustainability standards. Some people argue REITs have become “financialized.” This is a new, vaguely defined and poorly employed term used against private housing providers. Publicly traded REITs represent less than 6 per cent of the purpose-built rental stock, which is less than 3 per cent of the total rental market in Canada. So the assertion that REITs control the market doesn’t compute.

At Boardwalk we annually invest over $100-million back into our communities to not only maintain but enhance our residents’ living experience. Without happy long-term residents, there is no profit to reinvest—and nearly every dollar of non-taxable income Boardwalk receives is reinvested back into affordable housing. No uniform rental cap applied across all housing providers could ensure operational sustainability and quality housing. The cost of housing varies by asset age, condition and upkeep, all of which is compounded by rising interest rates, making the sustainable provision of affordable housing in a rent-controlled market impossible.

Rent controls inhibit the cash flow that housing providers require to properly maintain housing. Such controls have led to renters living in dire conditions. They deter much-needed investment and development of new housing. A blunt, wide-sweeping public policy fails because it removes flexibility.

Real solutions are found in taxation policies that stimulate investment and ensure access to lower-cost capital. These drive the development of more purpose-built, affordable housing, creating controllable vacancy, which drives competition and decreases rents. Rent supplements are also essential and are most effective when provided to those in need, not simply everyone, as rent controls are.

As I say earlier, a viable solution would be a government acquisition fund that allows social housing providers direct access to capital to acquire existing housing in mature neighbourhoods from private landlords. This would prioritize immediate access to affordable housing versus the higher costs and longer wait times associated with new construction. As well, sound tax policies incentivize private landlords to create more housing across the entire housing spectrum. Tax incentives in the 1970s worked and created much-needed housing supply.

The principles of economics in a free market work. Consider non-controlled office rents in Toronto and how vacancy creates competition to keep prices affordable. Let these principles do what they have always done: ensure housing affordability for all Canadians.

—Co-authored with Boyd Belisle, vice president of community and culture, Boardwalk REIT

annie hodgins responds to sam kolias

Nobody can deny that rents are out of control across Canada. And higher rents mean higher profits for investors. While acknowledging that we’re in a housing affordability crisis, some continue to believe that governments shouldn’t do anything about it. A common argument is that we should rely on the market law of supply and demand to keep rents at reasonable levels.

However, evidence shows that relying on supply and demand hasn’t worked. In both Alberta and Saskatchewan, one-third of renters live in unaffordable housing, and those rates are only going to increase as rents continue to skyrocket. From early 2023 to early 2024 Alberta saw the highest average rent increase in Canada, and Saskatchewan wasn’t far behind. Both provinces may be seeing investment in rental housing, but the data show that investment isn’t translating into lower rents.

This comes as no surprise. When examining housing markets, economists used to rely on now-outdated models of supply and demand, which predicted that, left unattended, housing markets would naturally stabilize rents at rates that would both be affordable to renters and maintain reasonable profit margins for landlords. But those models didn’t account for the unique characteristics of the housing market and have been widely discredited. Modern economists now recognize that housing supply is inelastic: it doesn’t respond very much to price changes. Unlike elastic commodities such as widgets produced in a factory, building housing is expensive, requires land, takes time and produces a capital asset that lasts for decades. Housing demand is also inelastic: people can’t simply choose not to procure housing. This is, of course, because housing is a basic necessity of life that everyone is entitled to. The law of supply and demand may naturally prevent price gouging in elastic commodity markets, but it doesn’t stop rent gouging in the housing market. That’s exactly what we’re seeing in Alberta, where landlords’ profit margins are steadily increasing during an affordability crisis that is driving people out of their homes.

Reasonable rents aren’t maintained by relying on supply and demand. Other measures need to be taken.

Because we’ve seen that reasonable rents aren’t maintained by relying on supply and demand, other measures need to be taken to make sure everyone has a home they can afford. And we no longer have to rely on outdated theoretical models—economists now have a wealth of direct evidence to assess the effects of rent regulation. Here’s what we know:

Constructing new purpose-built rental housing is not an effective way to improve affordability. In some cases it can even raise the cost of existing homes. To actually ensure affordable rents through supply and demand, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) calculates that the private market would need to build an impossible 5.8 million new units by 2030—vastly more than the 1.9 million units the market is projected to actually build.

Rent regulation works. Studies show that well-designed rent regulation is effective at stabilizing rents. The evidence disproves myths that rent regulation only benefits wealthy renters, or that it somehow leads to higher rents.

Rent regulation doesn’t deter investment. A study of 16 countries over 100 years found “no significant correlation between modern rent controls and the rate of rental housing construction.” In Canada, CMHC analyzed nearly 50 years of data and found “no significant evidence that rental starts were lower in rent-control markets than in no-rent-control markets.” Numerous other studies have found the same thing. The myth that rent regulation scares away investors is just that: a myth.

Rent regulation doesn’t impact building maintenance. CMHC found no evidence that rent controls lead landlords to let rental units fall into disrepair. Too many renters live in inadequately maintained homes in all provinces, but the rates aren’t noticeably higher in rent-regulated provinces. This may be because modern rent regulation systems notably allow landlords to pass expenses related to maintenance and upkeep through to tenants, or it may be that companies aren’t as cash-strapped as they claim. Either way, the evidence is clear that rent regulation doesn’t lead to disrepair.

Rent regulation is one part of a solution to the housing affordability crisis that would ensure no one is forced to live without a home. We also need programs to create and sustain more non-market affordable housing, such as social, non-profit and co-operative housing. We also need programs to build new affordable private-market housing—programs that include affordability requirements and don’t rely on outdated models of supply and demand. But while such programs are essential, they won’t address the wholesale loss of existing affordable housing happening now in Alberta and across Canada.

The evidence is clear: to keep existing housing affordable and renters in their homes, we need rent regulation, now.

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Christina lives in Edmonton with her two adult sons, both of whom were diagnosed with a disability when they were children, and she’s their sole caregiver. Trained in disability studies and social work, Christina hasn’t been able to practise since 2004, when she was diagnosed with severe arthritis. “I would have worked longer if I didn’t have my own health issues,” she says. “I really enjoyed helping people.”

Single and in too much pain to work, Christina keeps her family afloat thanks to public support. With her sons now over 18, all three family members receive Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH), and they qualify to live in public housing. “I’ve never been in the position to just move out into regular housing,” she says. “With both of my boys, my health getting worse, and then being on AISH—I’m just living a life of poverty.”

Christina lives in Dickinsfield I, a public housing complex built in 1971 in north-central Edmonton that’s owned by the province and managed by Civida, formerly Capital Region Housing Corporation, one of more than 100 Alberta housing management bodies. For two decades Dickinsfield I has allowed Christina to provide her children with a stable place to live despite fluctuations in her employment status and health. All provincially owned social housing is based on a rent-geared-to-income (RGI) model; Christina has consistently paid one-third of her income in rent. She currently pays $865 a month, which she finds reasonable for a 938 ft² three-bedroom townhouse. On average, a similar unit in Edmonton rents for $1,389.

But now the UCP government could be putting Christina, and 26,700 other Alberta families who live in public housing, at risk of homelessness. Despite the vital role public housing plays in the well-being of low-income Albertans, the conservative leadership of our province seems to view public ownership of affordable housing as an unnecessary expense.

“Alberta’s affordable housing system must be financially sustainable and able to address growing demand,” said Minister of Seniors and Housing Josephine Pon in July 2020. The minister appointed a review panel to develop a “new vision” for our province’s affordable housing. “This review is the foundational piece of our housing transformation,” she said. Chaired by Calgary-Cross MLA Mickey Amery (UCP), the review panel was comprised of developers such as Paul Boskovich of Genstar, rental property owners such as Sam Kolias of Boardwalk, former PC MLA Jeff Johnson, a U of C urban planning professor, a former provincial deputy minister and a representative of a housing managing body—that is, an entity tasked by the Alberta Housing Act with the management and operation of publicly owned housing.

Providing public housing to low-income Albertans is a fiscal challenge. As it’s based on an RGI model, public housing doesn’t produce enough revenue to cover operational and maintenance costs. Meanwhile, decades of government underfunding has meant worsening maintenance issues. According to Steve Pomeroy, an independent housing researcher and consultant based in Ottawa, funding started to shrink when the federal government in the 1990s ended programs that supported social housing across Canada. In 1996 they handed over public housing stock to the provinces. Bilateral operating agreements left provinces in charge of maintaining and operating the existing stock.

Including the 26, 700 provincially owned units, 61,000 households live in subsidized housing in Alberta, whether it’s owned by the province, municipalities or non-profit organizations. Currently, around 19,000 households are on the waiting list for social housing. This number is only expected to increase as Alberta’s population continues to grow. And “with the current economic crisis, we’re going to see more homelessness,” says Nick Falvo, a Calgary-based research associate of the Canada Centre for Policy Alternatives who specializes in affordable housing and homelessness.

Alberta has less subsidized housing than other parts of Canada have. Subsidized housing represents 2.9 per cent of the province’s overall housing units, while nationally the figure is 4.2 per cent. In a historically conservative province, the share of the provincial budget earmarked for capital investment in affordable housing has been in steady decline for more than three decades. And what housing does exist is sometimes in rough shape. Today 8 per cent of the public housing stock in Alberta is deemed to be in poor condition (up from just 2 per cent in 2015–2016).

According to Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation data, in 2016 some 11.4 per cent of Albertan households were in core housing need. Core housing need, explains Pomeroy, refers to “households that spend more than 30 per cent of their income on shelter and live in overcrowded conditions or in dwellings in need of major repair.” Lone-parent households such as Christina’s, as well as seniors and immigrant renters, are twice as likely to live in a home that’s too expensive, too small or too rundown.

While Christina’s three-bedroom townhouse in Dickinsfield I is affordable and provides enough space for her and her sons, it needs repair. “I have the original everything,” she says, noting that her unit hasn’t been upgraded since she moved in two decades ago and some maintenance problems have gone unattended. “The paint is split and bubbled up, but when you touch it it’s dry,” she says about her kitchen’s ceiling. When the most recent annual inspection took place, “they checked it out and said ‘Call us when it’s leaking.’ ” Her unit still has the original flooring from the 1970s. “The linoleum is chipped and cracked and we’re tripping over it,” she says.

The case for affordable housing is clear,” the Alberta Affordable Housing Review panel’s October 2020 report read. “Albertans need safe, suitable and affordable housing to participate successfully in the economy and society.” The panel, however, argued for changes to who provides such housing. And experts predict this shift will ultimately make housing in Alberta less affordable.

The panel came up with 19 recommendations that can be summarized in three categories: additional “modest” rent subsidies for low-income Albertans, a shift towards mixed-income housing and a transfer of publicly owned assets to non-profit and for-profit entities. “The government’s fiscal challenge requires that it reassess its return on investment in affordable housing and identify a new role for the provincial government in meeting the need for affordable housing with scarce resources,” reads the report.

Under the pretext of “fiscal challenges,” the panel suggests ownership of public housing be transferred to non-government entities, with the province becoming a facilitator of “growth and investment.” In short: the privatization of all public housing in Alberta. Rather than being the owner of a significant share of the housing stock, the province would be limited to cutting “red tape” and “building sector capacity”—giving capital grants to non-profit and for-profit housing providers. “We are committed to reducing government red tape by one-third,” said Minister Pon during a legislature debate in March. “This will save, time, money, resources and make it easier for Albertans to access… affordable housing services.”

According to the panel’s report, an “asset transfer”—a one-time sale of public housing—would “create more flexibility and financial independence for housing management bodies and other housing operators,” and “leverage assets to better address the affordable housing needs in their communities with innovation and creativity.” (The government procured an asset review, including inventory and evaluation of all public housing stock, by Colliers International in February 2021.) Details on what this sale might look like are to be fleshed out in a plan contracted to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Minister Pon tweeted in late September 2021 that she would release the plan to the public by the end of October.

One of the UCP panel’s rationales for selling public housing is that existing public managing bodies can’t access private capital for much-needed upgrades and maintenance. Pomeroy says, “Transferring the asset to a community non-profit can actually create the capacity and the flexibility to access financing with little or no government subsidy.” But even if housing upgrades were to become easier, an asset transfer likely won’t help many low-income Albertans, especially when for-profit entities are part of the mix. “The biggest problem with the for-profits is that they generally seek to keep rents as high as possible,” Falvo says. This is particularly so for real estate investment trusts (REITs). “Whenever they can increase rents, they do. And they’re often required to do that for their shareholders as a fiduciary obligation.”

In their 2016 book In Defense of Housing, David Madden and Peter Marcuse write that “firms purchase buildings on the assumption that rents can be doubled, tripled or more… displacing low-income tenants.” Madden and Marcuse define financialization as a process in which “managers, bankers and rentiers produce profits from real estate through buying, selling, financing, owning and speculating.” And while this practice isn’t new, the rise of global REITs in the last two decades has accelerated a process that facilitates the flow of profits and revenues to investors rather than to the production of new housing.

According to Pomeroy, “A piece of property isn’t necessarily an asset; it’s only an asset if it has positive cash flow. If it’s got an ongoing operating deficit, it’s a liability.” To successfully transfer a “non-viable” asset, then, the transfer must exclude the low-income folks who make the asset a liability, he says. “You can’t transfer the asset with a whole bunch of people living in the property who are paying really low rents and creating an unsustainable, unviable liability.” To mitigate this risk, that’s where rent subsidies come in.

IN 2020, 2,085 CALGARY HOUSEHOLDS received a rent supplement from the Calgary Housing Company (CHC), whose average monthly subsidy is $707 per unit. Rent supplements are the CHC’s third-largest expense, after maintenance and staffing. The UCP panel recommended that the provincial government likewise offer “modest subsidies for people who are not able to access deeper subsidy programs.”

But while the City of Calgary spends nearly $20-million per year in rent subsidies, for-profit organizations such as Boardwalk boast high revenues. Sam Kolias, a member of the government review panel, is founder and CEO of Boardwalk, which became a REIT in 2002. Boardwalk owns 33,033 rental units across Canada and 20,764 in Alberta. In 2020 the company generated a total rent revenue exceeding $465.6-million—2.3 per cent higher than the previous year.

Catherine, who requested her last name be withheld for fear of losing her housing stability, is a senior Calgarian living in a rent-stabilized unit in Patrician Village, an apartment owned by Boardwalk. She pays $285 a month for the one-bedroom where she’s lived for 20 years. The market rent of a unit like hers is between $1,199 and $1,269, according to Boardwalk’s listings, but the rent supplement provided to her by the CHC covers the difference between what she can afford (one-third of her income) and the rate determined by the landlord. This subsidy has allowed her to remain housed.

In theory, a for-profit housing provider such as Boardwalk would ensure its assets are efficiently managed and well maintained because, unlike bodies in charge of public housing, it can leverage its assets to access funding. But the maintenance issues Catherine faces at Patrician Village (built in 1977) are much like Christina’s in Dickinsfield I. While Catherine’s unit has received a few cosmetic upgrades since she moved in two decades ago, her building too is aging. “The windows and balcony doors really need to be replaced; they leak,” she says.

Christina also notes deficiencies in the HVAC system, which Kolias says has been upgraded in the last eight years as part of the $10-million the company has spent on renovations and repairs of the building since 2014. One notable upgrade was the renovation of Patrician Village’s “experience centre,” which Boardwalk characterizes as a “value-add investment.” It increased tenants’ rent by $10 and produced a yield of 44.4 per cent for shareholders. For Catherine, though, little value was added. “I think they regard these rental units as a cash cow and do as little as possible,” she says. Pomeroy explains that the way for REITs to drive yield for investors is to reduce expenses and increase revenues—at the expense of tenants.

 Mixed income model comes without public subsidies and combines an array of income brackets in a single building. Middle- and higher-income tenants pay a higher rent to subsidize lower-income households. “With social housing, [government] subsidies are paid for by taxes—everybody who works contributes, and it gets redistributed to support low-cost housing development,” says Sarah Cooper, an assistant professor of city planning at the University of Manitoba. “When you no longer have these subsidies, then you’re looking to the neighbours to pay this direct subsidy to support someone else in their building.” In other words, support for the operation and maintenance of affordable housing no longer comes from the province (i.e., all citizens) but from the market (in this case, other tenants). And renters on the whole are not an affluent demographic.

Yet, for the UCP panel, this appeared to be a fair trade-off and “an opportunity… for creating revenue models to support sustainability.” The panel was silent on whether a mixed-income model would be required of private housing operators; it recommended only that providers be “supported and encouraged” to have such a mix. Their report cites benefits they believe the mixed-income model offers residents, such as a stronger sense of community, more choice and less reliance on government supports.

Despite the alleged financial and social benefits of a mixed-income model, a transition from public housing to a mixed-income model would jeopardize the stability of current public housing tenants, as a development consisting solely of RGI units like Dickinsfield I in Edmonton is unsustainable. “If you have 100 per cent subsidized units—and you’re not getting any [public] money—you have to raise rents and people will have to find a new place to live,” says Cooper.

“The motive in the private sector is the antithesis of the notion of affordability,” says Pomeroy. If the province sells public housing units to Boardwalk, for example, “they [would] continue to be affordable for a couple of years. But every time the unit turns over, Boardwalk is going to jack the rent and maximize the returns they’re getting. Five years from now, none of those units will be affordable anymore.” Kolias disagrees. “We have publicly stated on our website our commitment to continue to provide affordable housing and to continue to self-regulate ourselves,” he says. Yet it remains unclear what affordability means for a REIT whose board’s raison d’être is “to achieve the best long-term interests of Boardwalk and the enhancement of value for all security holders.”

Fixing several decades of slow decay would be expensive. Given low provincial funding, housing management bodies across the province already scramble to maintain safe living conditions for tenants—as witnessed by the letters some of these organizations submitted to the review panel.

“Compared to going out and building new,” says Pomeroy, subsidizing the operation of older buildings “is still a relatively cheap way to help low-income people.” With a median building age of 35 years, a portion of public housing in Alberta could still be viable with proper government support. “There’s a fiscal imperative—as well as a moral imperative—on the province to preserve that existing stock,” he says.

If the UCP government instead chooses to sell public housing to the private sector, the political cost could be high. “The political risk is what might hold the government back,” Pomeroy says, “notwithstanding their desire to generate an immediate cash receipt for those assets.”

But Pomeroy may be overestimating Albertans’ priorities. One of the reasons public housing has deteriorated in Canada since the 1990s is the lack of pressure on the government to adequately fund social housing. And underfunding creates a vicious cycle. According to Cooper, public housing “is often a lousy place to live because it hasn’t been well maintained, because there’s a concentration of poverty, a concentration of social problems, and very few supports are in place to help the community move out of poverty.”

Only pressure from citizens will secure the long-term sustainability of public housing, ensuring all Albertans can find a place to live that fits both their needs and their budget. The alternative is more homelessness. “Without the province funding housing for low-income people,” says Falvo, “we’re in a lot of trouble.”

Christina worries about the possibility of losing her housing altogether. “I have no idea what I’d do,” she says. “There aren’t other units to go to. Waiting lists are years and years long.” The current wait-list in Edmonton alone is about 6,000 people. And she’s not confident that this government will think critically about its panel’s recommendations. “This premier is not here to actually make things better for people—people are not important.”

The post Public Housing For Sale? appeared first on Alberta Views.

Before all of that: 2007. The political baseline then, in Calgary as in the province as a whole, was stagnation. Government as a series of shrugs and self-congratulations. Who remembers what Dave Bronconnier, the last person to sit in the mayor’s chair, stood for What his vision for the city was Who remembers voting in the 2007 municipal election (I do. It was a pointless errand en route to something more worthwhile, like dropping payment for a gas bill in the mail. We used to do that too, then, not so long ago—pay our bills by mail.) In 2007 the incumbent mayor’s only serious opposition was a multi-millionaire dogged by rumours of shady business dealings in Kenya who bought a little more than 10 per cent of the vote. Incumbents were returned in 9 of the 12 wards, two of them by acclamation.

Does it overstate the case to say no one really cared in 2007 Voter turnout was 33 per cent. It had been even lower in the 2004 election. Maybe it doesn’t even overstate it to say no one cared about municipal politics the whole decade.

It certainly felt like no one cared. I was doing research back then for a small group called Sustainable Calgary, and the consensus among municipal-level progressive non-profits was that the problem wasn’t a lack of non-profits producing reports full of good ideas but a yawning chasm between ideas and implementation. Civic engagement seemed all but non-existent. And so a bunch of us got together to create a little conference called CivicCamp to try to figure out how to overcome the inertia of municipal politics, and one of the people who helped organize it was a civic-minded business prof from Mount Royal University named Naheed Nenshi. And nothing was the same in Calgary politics after that.

So, yes, let’s be clear about the baseline. The baseline was a shrug, a yawn, a backroom deal, a 20-year neighbourhood development permit after half an hour of idle debate. And let’s be clear as well that the change following the 2010 municipal election was seismic. However anyone might rate the Nenshi years in Calgary, there is no denying they were the Nenshi years.

That’s how it began—the first flush of optimism in a roaring boomtown. A great purple wave carried a candidate who initially polled nearly at zero to victory in a 2010 campaign that used youth and diversity and newfangled social media to wash over the city’s inertia and land its man in the mayor’s chair. It ends this year, amid great anxiety, in a busted boomtown reeling from the pandemic, a city whose political climate feels some days like a toxic cloud. In early April Nenshi announced he wouldn’t seek a fourth term. “There are many voices that haven’t always felt heard,” he said, “and it felt like the right time to make some room.”

I’m not at all objective on this subject, to be clear. Nenshi is not a close enough friend that we share confidences—I learned he wasn’t running again, as anyone else might, when the news broke on Twitter—but he is close enough that he’s handed me a gift of his mother’s excellent samosas in my living room and it feels a little odd referring to him as Nenshi, per journalistic convention, and not Naheed, as I’ve often greeted him socially.

A great purple wave carried a candidate who initially polled nearly at zero to victory in a campaign that used youth and diversity and newfangled social media to wash over the city’s inertia.

I’m glad for my friend Naheed that he’s stepping down, because the job seemed to be visibly grinding him down in his last term and because a fully recharged Naheed has so much to bring to whatever he chooses to do next. I’m sad for Nenshi and his constituents, because he will leave the mayor’s chair at a pivotal moment in the city’s (and the world’s) history. And whatever else, we know after 11 years how he would lead us through change, and it was pretty damn good leadership in most respects, and I’m worried for Calgary in its absence.

To begin to wrestle with Nenshi’s legacy, I asked him what he thought it might be. Nenshi is not cagey in the way of a classic backroom politician, but he does sometimes say things those kind of politicians say. And so he answered, at first, with a cagey politician’s line: “I never really thought about my legacy.” And then he expanded on it, as is his professorial tendency: “When someone asks me whether or not they want to run for office, I always give them the same advice. Which is be the best one-term person you can be. You know, just go to work every day, don’t think about the concept of political capital. Don’t think about how this decision will impact you in the next election. Just think about what you can do with the time you’ve been given, which is a precious gift, to help make decisions about people’s lives.”

A fine cagey politician’s line. Here’s something about Nenshi, though. He means all of that. Truly. That’s the first thing I’ll miss about him—that he did the mayoral job, particularly the most crucial, crisis-level parts, with a deep dedication to the idea of public service and a genuine commitment to making the choices he believed were best for the largest number of Calgarians.

This was the Mayor Nenshi of the 2013 flood. The city’s emergency crews oversaw the official response, of course, but Nenshi’s sheer ubiquity in the tensest days of the disaster set a clear and unwavering tone. Nenshi was seemingly everywhere all day, on TV and on social media, always calm, reassuring and decisive, talking up the ways Calgary was making it through the mess while gently ribbing those who ignored civic orders to stay out of the way of emergency crews. His guidance made all the room needed and more for the city’s very best spirit to explode out of the debris, for neighbours to pitch in with all their hearts, for McMahon Stadium’s parking lot to fill with so many volunteers it all but overwhelmed the city’s capacity to deploy them. The Globe and Mail’s Gary Mason has written that Nenshi’s management of the flood “should be studied in courses on leadership.” I agree, and it is surely the cornerstone of his legacy—when a city in deep crisis needed a forceful, pragmatic mayor, he was more than up to the task.

Nenshi’s management of the 2013 flood is surely the cornerstone of his legacy. When a city in deep crisis needed a forceful, pragmatic mayor, he was more than up to the task.

The other thing about Nenshi, though, is that when he claims never to have thought about legacy, he’s both telling the truth, in that it wasn’t the motivation for his decisions, but he’s also talking nonsense, because of course he thought about how he would leave his mark on the city. He’s not lacking at all for ego or ambition. He wanted that mark to be substantial. I suppose that’s the question of his legacy: Did he succeed in that?

Mayors are often measured by tangible things, and some of the ones built on Nenshi’s watch are irrefutably impressive. As a first-time candidate, Nenshi made much of his background as a bookish child of immigrants who asked the public library to allow him to withdraw more books than the limit permitted. And so perhaps the strongest emblem of his years in office is the new Central Library. Plans for a new library predated Nenshi’s arrival at city hall, but he became its vocal champion, ushering a new plan through a rare unanimous council vote in 2013 and celebrating the ambitious design by the world-renowned Norwegian firm Snøhetta at every turn. The library, which opened on time and under budget in 2018, is surely one of the best civic buildings in the country, immediately transformative in palpable ways—the welcoming space itself, the services and amenities it brings downtown, the way it opens up the east side of the inner city. It says something about Calgary in the 21st century that possibly its greatest building is a public library. And it says something about Calgary’s ambitions that its new public library is an architectural achievement of international import, earning the city a spot on The New York Times list of “52 places to go” in 2019. It’s not hard to see it as a physical embodiment of what Nenshi wanted Calgary to be—civic-minded, welcoming, unfussily world-class.

Nenshi first ran for mayor, in 2010, by leaning into his strengths as a wonky professor. He assembled a list of 12 “better ideas” for Calgary and unveiled one a week throughout the campaign. He promised “politics in full sentences.” And on the campaign trail—in living rooms across the city and in thread after thread on Twitter—he was open, direct and expansive in explaining those ideas to anyone who wanted to talk with him.

The “better ideas” are a dual laundry list of policy-wonk wishes and standard political promises. And yet as the third term comes to an end, the mayor’s actions match them still. If he hasn’t enacted all of them, he at least tried hard. Number 12, the last on the list “Outstanding libraries, recreation amenities and a vibrant cultural scene.” Nenshi notes that several new branch libraries and four new recreation centres opened during his tenure, and every other library in the system got renovations.

Nenshi was the new Central Library’s champion, ushering the ambitious plan through a rare unanimous council vote in 2013. It is surely one of the best civic buildings in the country.

Further down the list, other items pop out as issues Nenshi returned to again and again. No. 9, for example: “Calgarians will be able to get around easily by any transportation mode.” We could certainly quibble over the definition of “easily,” but Nenshi’s tenure saw Calgary’s largest-ever investments in transit and cycling infrastructure. The transit capital budget, for example, expanded from a little over $150-million per year around 2012 to a peak of more than $300-million, with major new investments in a Bus Rapid Transit system and a new CTrain fleet. The transit expansion is nowhere near extensive enough to make a major dent in the city’s car dependency, but the improvements are substantial. The downtown cycle track network is a great gift to the city, and I see it snaking outward in all directions now with little of the fuss that accompanied its launch, because it works. Calgary’s transit network is slowly evolving from a hub-and-spoke design that only moves people in and out of the core into a system with more options for neighbourhood to neighbourhood travel. And there is now near universal agreement that expanded transit is the centrepiece of the city’s transportation future—and its budget—which was emphatically not the case in our CivicCamp days. Progress is sometimes less than you’d like, but it’s still progress. (The Green Line, Nenshi assured me, will get built.)

Another better idea was to “reduce the number of people living in poverty and ensure opportunity for all.” Nenshi takes some pride in having ushered in the city’s first-ever poverty reduction strategy, which included Canada’s first sliding-scale fee for monthly low-income transit passes and a new application process that enables people to apply just once for numerous low-income subsidies—the largest Canadian municipality to adopt this more dignified (and cost-effective) approach, and with the most subsidized programs to boot. Nenshi also described Calgary’s new community action plan on mental health and addiction as “probably the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life, certainly my political life.” And Nenshi has seen progress on this front. Calgary’s poverty rate declined until 2018, even if the pandemic and oil-business bust have since pushed it back up.

He has other real victories as well, most of which point at one or another of the original better ideas, some of which will leave marks on the city’s landscape for generations. One is the change made in 2016 to how the city calculates “off-site levies.” This is a pure Nenshi move—technical, wonky, transformative. The off-site levy is the fee paid to the city by developers when they build new communities, intended to cover the costs of public services such as new roads, sidewalks and utilities—a mostly unseen subsidy taxpayers handed to suburban developers and homeowners for decades. Calgary’s levy had always been insufficient, with much of the uncovered costs borne by taxpayers citywide. The 2016 change boosted the levy by more than $100,000 per hectare, an increase of nearly 50 per cent, bringing the fee much closer to the actual cost to the city. In a Calgary Heraldcolumn at the time, Nenshi called it “one of the most important decisions of our term,” arguing that it will “fundamentally change how we pay for growth in this city.”

Did the off-site levy change end Calgary’s outward growth Alas, no. But it certainly tilted the scales toward a better balance and a denser and more sustainable city.

Nenshi’s first few years fufilled his promise of “politics in full sentences,” with the mayor in sole command of his Twitter account and using it to engage citizens. (Sometimes, famously, helping them find their missing pets.) When his victory struck the rest of Canada and the world as wildly improbable—a Muslim elected mayor of Cowtown?—Nenshi made a shrewd choice to use the international spotlight to highlight the city he loved. “I’m going to take advantage of this,” he told the CBC. “I’m going to tell people around the world a story about a place where pluralism works, and where multiculturalism works, and a model perhaps for the world.”

And it did seem to work, for a time. After the flood, Nenshi barely campaigned and was still returned to office in a landslide. The World Mayor Project awarded him its “World Mayor Prize” for 2014. Never mind that such accolades are wildly arbitrary—the title fit the city’s vibe. Calgary was young and smart and successful, and so was its youthful, geeky mayor. It felt like the era that first came into view in 2010 had fully arrived.

And then came Trump, and Jason Kenney in his theatrical prop of a blue pickup truck, and politics in Calgary rapidly turned poisonous.

Nenshi told me about a debate his office had in its first year about banning one particularly noxious Facebook troll from the mayor’s page. The forum was otherwise civil, so they chewed over the decision for weeks. By the time of the 2017 election, however, social media feeds seethed constantly with hateful, often racist rhetoric. The city where, as Nenshi always put it, “nobody cares where your daddy came from” had become a beacon for poisonous, xenophobic right-wing politics. Nenshi himself expressed shock after his narrow 2017 victory at how toxic the campaign had been. When I crossed paths with him after that election, I noticed a wariness and weariness sharply at odds with the smartest-guy-in-the-room buoyancy that had given his political career such irresistible energy. Politics in full sentences had been drowned out by epithets smeared on Facebook walls.

In retrospect, 2018 has begun to feel like the nadir of the Nenshi Years. Calgary was reeling economically, the reactionary right had united behind Kenney, and the mayor was wading through the political morass with a luckless plodding far removed from his once-confident stride. No. 1 on that faded 2010 list of better ideas reads: “Nenshi proposes common sense policy on secondary suites.” That battle—to allow homeowners to add a basement apartment without appealing to the entire city council for approval—dragged on through multiple failed votes that revealed Nenshi’s weakness at rallying allies to his causes. Critics of the mayor often cite his arrogance and unwillingness to compromise; the endless drag of the secondary suite debate, which was repeatedly amplified as yet another bunch of homeowners arrived at council chambers to argue that their mother-in-law apartment wouldn’t ruin the fabric of their neighbourhood, felt like that weakness writ large, and over such a pointedly puny issue. When council finally voted, narrowly, to change the secondary suite process in March 2018, it felt less like a victory than a pointless street fight’s exhausted end.

The mayor himself pointed to the plebiscite later that year on Calgary’s bid to host the 2026 Winter Olympics as his greatest personal regret. Nenshi saw the Olympics as a way to fast-track infrastructure projects—affordable housing, athletic facilities, entertainment venues—as well as update the city’s image and boost its tourist economy. He admitted to me he botched the sales pitch (he should’ve sold it hard as a city-building exercise), then got lost in a jurisdictional squabble between the federal and provincial governments, which led to the fateful decision to put the bid to a plebiscite vote. Nenshi’s pro-Olympics side lost, and an unwarranted share of his political capital had been spent on nothing. “It was a shame and I think a missed opportunity for Calgary,” is how he put it.

Perhaps even harder to swallow for many long-time Nenshi supporters was his vote for a new arena for the Calgary Flames. There’s much more to the deal than just a hockey rink of course, but in public it played out largely as a battle between the crazily wealthy, arrogant ownership group of an NHL team and an increasingly cowed city council. After years of wrangling over the arena’s location and the size of the city’s investment, council committed to splitting the $550-million cost, with the stated promise of economic benefits in excess of the city’s half of the deal. But third-party analysis indicated that the City’s end of the deal would be a net loss of nearly $50-million in present-day dollars.

It was a surprise to see the mayor on the cowed side of the vote—though of course this is emphatically not how he characterized it, and his approach has more merit than the debate around the arena project permitted. He reminded me that he launched his 2017 re-election campaign standing next to the last remaining tree among “a sea of surface parking lots” in Victoria Park, a community that had collapsed under the weight of neglect and the exigencies of the Saddledome and Stampede grounds. “I kicked off my 2017 campaign saying ‘Let’s imagine what we could do to not only create a great neighbourhood here but to help with our economic development.’” The rebirth of Victoria Park, he assured me, is the substantial public benefit that will come from the public money he voted to invest in the deal.

As our conversation wound down, I asked Nenshi the question I’d batted back and forth with friends in recent months. Some grim mixture of the pandemic’s grind, the provincial government’s braying intransigence, and the self-defeating commitment of many prominent business leaders in Calgary to denying the basic facts of the global energy economy in the 2020s had us all wondering out loud whether the city was still the right place for us, whether we and our families had a durable future here. The question, phrased that way, wounded Nenshi. Whatever else, no one should ever doubt his abiding love for the city.

“Of course you want to stay in Calgary,” he answered. “We built—with every bit of politician hyperbole in place—we built the best place in the world. We built a place of limitless—except for the weather—we built a place of limitless opportunity. We built a place where people have the ability to live with dignity. And that’s because we do the work. And so it’s heartbreaking for me to hear that.”

Listen. I’ve known Naheed Nenshi for more than a decade. I’m fully aware of his weaknesses as a politician, but I also know his strengths. And one of those is when he talks about service and community and making a great city better, he really does mean it to his very core. And that’s why when I suggested someone like me might want to leave Calgary, he was soon in soaring rhetorical mode.

“Ultimately,” he told me, “if you’re worried, if you think provincial politics is too corrosive, or people are really mean, or Alberta is the land of the anti-mask idiots who put everyone else at risk, and I don’t want to be a part of that anymore I want you to look up on a spring day at that big blue sky and realize… that we have been a beacon of hope for people from every corner of this broken earth to come and live in a place of safety and opportunity and dignity. And it happens because we make it happen. So yeah, the fight is harder now. Yeah, the jerks are louder now. But that’s no reason to give up the fight. In fact if anything that should embolden all of us to fight even harder.”

Earlier in our conversation he told me about a messy recent debate at city council. The City had proposed a new “Guidebook for Great Communities”—a set of planning guidelines, more or less—and Nenshi’s political opponents had used it to rend their rhetorical garments over its alleged threat to fill every neighbourhood in Calgary with tall buildings and poor renters. Council chambers inevitably plays host to a lot of grotesque NIMBYism, and this was some of the ugliest in a while. An anonymous organization had taken out a front-page ad in the Herald to oppose the Guidebook, and the entire first day of discussion had been one homeowner after another, many from affluent Elbow Park, decrying the creeping socialism and ruination of neighbourhood character contained in the document.

Nenshi: “What was interesting to me is the people following along on social media. And they were getting quite upset. And suddenly, in the evening of the second day, the tenor of the public submissions completely changed. When before, judging by people’s voices, we didn’t really have anybody under the age of 60 presenting—maybe under the age of 55—suddenly we had so many young voices. When before we had gone through dozens of people without a single non-white person, suddenly we had a bunch of non-white voices, in a city that is one-out-of-three non-white. And they spoke with such optimism about their city and such positivity about the future that I thought, this is really remarkable. And I found out later that these folks had all self-organized on Twitter.”

He was describing the 2021 version of the project that had made us colleagues. How he and I and a handful of other like-minded, committed Calgarians had come together more than a decade earlier, and we’d decided, despite the palpable apathy of the time, to try to make the city better. And there were more now, ready to do the same, probably more than ever. What Nenshi was saying was the city was in good hands. I hope he’s right.

Chris Turner is the author, most recently, of The Patch (Simon & Schuster). His new book on the global energy transition, from Penguin Random House, comes out in 2022.

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The post The Nenshi Years appeared first on Alberta Views.

Cannon wanted a place of her own because she and her one-year-old son were living with her parents. So were her grandparents, who had recently moved from their home in rural Saskatchewan. The house in the southwest community of Cedarbrae had four generations of family living in it and was feeling crowded.

Working as a cashier at a gas station, however, Cannon could only dream of renting her own place. She was earning the then-minimum wage of $5.40 and was struggling just to make payments on her leased car. Her gross monthly income—working 40 hours a week—tipped just over $850, at a time when rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Calgary averaged $708. Even if she found an apartment at the very low end of the market, there would be almost nothing left to pay for food and other expenses.

Tenancy in city-owned subsidized housing offered hope. If accepted, Cannon would pay 30 per cent of her monthly cheque to the CHC. That would leave her and her son enough to live on. But when she applied, she was told she needed an eviction notice from her parents before she would be allowed on the wait-list.

Should she convince her parents to lie Or should they actually put their daughter and grandson out on the street Neither option seemed acceptable.

She was stuck.

Forty thousand low-income Albertans receive some form of housing assistance from the province, and 30,000 more are on the wait-list for government-supported social housing units or programs. With the ongoing economic downturn, demand is growing. In Edmonton alone, the wait-list for social housing in 2015 tripled.

Albertans can apply for provincial housing programs, which include subsidized units through the Community Housing Program and Rent Support Program for tenants in the private market, if their income is less than thresholds set by the provincial government. The core need income threshold is based on the median income of the community in which one lives, as reported by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) each year, which is adjusted based on the type of apartment one requires.

A resident of Acme who needs a one-bedroom apartment, for example, can apply for subsidized housing or a rent supplement if they make less than $37,500. Worsley residents (90 km north of Fairview) are allowed to earn up to $40,000. Low-income households in Edmonton and Calgary can apply for assistance when seeking a one-bedroom unit if they make less than $42,000 and $46,000 a year, respectively. Of Alberta’s 356,000 tenant households, 19 per cent make less than $20,000 a year. Nearly one-quarter make between $20,000 and $39,999.

In addition to income qualifications, applicants to provincial affordable housing and rent supplement programs are prioritized on the basis of need, which also takes into account their assets and current housing conditions. As the wait-lists attest, not everyone who qualifies is helped.

For people approved for one of the programs, the government provides a subsidy; if they are in a Community Housing Program unit, the tenant pays no more than 30 per cent of their adjusted income. Rent supplements pay the difference between 30 per cent of a tenant’s adjusted income and a negotiated market rent.

It took a long time for policy experts to settle on 30 per cent as a reasonable income limit. The thinking goes: If you spend no more than one-third of your pre-tax income on housing, you should be able to both save money and afford the other important expenses of daily life. Before the 1950s, 20 per cent of income was considered the maximum for affordability. The amount was then raised to 25 per cent and then—since the 1980s—30 per cent of total income.

Yet Statistics Canada data analyzed by CMHC shows that 23 per cent of tenants in Alberta currently spend more than 30 per cent of their income on rent. Those people can’t find housing that is both suitable for the size of their families and doesn’t need major repairs. (While many homeowners also put more than 30 per cent of their income toward housing, they don’t qualify for subsidies.)

The burden is worse for recent immigrants (28 per cent), Aboriginal households (31 per cent) and lone-parent families (41 per cent). Four in every 10 Alberta seniors live in unacceptable and unaffordable housing, a rate that grew by nearly a third between 2001 and 2011. The incidence rate for senior single women is the highest of all, at 59 per cent.

The situation in Calgary is “a disaster.” In Edmonton, the wait-list for social housing has tripled.

University of Calgary economics professor Ron Kneebone calls the situation “a disaster.” He has found that, in the period between 1990 and 2014, Calgary was the least affordable city in Canada for people who were classified as poor. A single parent with one child in the lowest one-fifth of income earners living in a one-bedroom unit in Calgary could see their rent eat up 80 per cent of their social assistance income, even if they rented an apartment in bad condition or far from amenities.

The main reason for Calgary’s especially dire situation, Kneebone says, is the fact that rent costs have increased by an average of 3.4 per cent annually while social assistance has risen by only 1.6 per cent per year. Compounding the income problem, since the 1970s Calgary has lost 56 single-room occupancy buildings (e.g., the St. Louis Hotel, the King Eddy, the Cecil), which were some of the few housing options poor singles could afford. And between 2005 and 2015, Calgary lost more than 5,600 rental units to condominium conversions, 3,000 of those during the 2006–2008 boom years.

“Back in 1994 there was a social assistance cut in Alberta, which was fairly common across most provinces,” Kneebone said. “During the boom, the rents came up [from 2006 to 2008 rents rose by more than 10 per cent per year] and affordability fell dramatically. This is despite the fact the social assistance rates went up in 2009. The rents were too high.”

Policy changes by both the federal and provincial governments during the 1990s precipitated today’s rental affordability crisis. Since 1946 the federal government has played a significant role in funding the construction of new social housing; averaged over the years between 1968 and 1992, about 20,000 units were built annually with federal dollars. In 1993, however, federal spending on new social housing ended, and three years later Ottawa transferred responsibility for most existing social housing to the provinces. It wasn’t until 2001 that the federal government would engage in new social housing, through the Affordable Housing Initiative, later named Investment in Affordable Housing. This modest program lacked built-in rent subsidies and required provinces to match the capital funding.

In the first decade of its stewardship, Alberta gutted provincial funding for social housing programs. From a high of $500-million in 1991, funding fell to $150-million in 2000. It wasn’t until 2006 that funding began to match the rates of the early 1990s, but the damage had been done. The funding barely kept existing housing programs afloat. Repairs and other large expenses were pushed back and today the repair deficit for the province’s social housing is estimated at $1-billion.

“We are going to lose a lot of existing housing supply without significant affordable housing investment,” said John Kolkman, a researcher with the Edmonton Social Planning Council.

There’s been little to replace those buildings, many of them 40 years old. As of 2015, no new social housing had been built in Edmonton since 1993. In Calgary, just 1,048 social housing units have been created in the last 14 years, and none in the last three.

“And now we have the downturn in the economy,” says Kolkman. “That’s resulting in job loss. People who could afford to pay market rents can’t anymore. They may end up homeless.”

When she was 24, Cannon was admitted to psychiatric care. She had been plagued with stress and feelings of low self-esteem. She had trouble sleeping; she wasn’t eating well. She started having suicidal thoughts. She finally knew she needed to seek help when once, in frustration, she pushed her three-year-old son. He was uninjured, but the incident shook Cannon to the bone.

“I couldn’t believe I, as an adult, as a mother, could do that to a little boy. I apologized to him and went outside,” said Cannon. She called her doctor, who referred her to a day program at Rockyview Hospital. Things only got worse. “A week into the program, I went to see the counsellor. I said I’m having a great day today. I’m finally at peace, I’m going to take my life and I’m doing the best thing for everyone.”

She spent a month in the psychiatric unit under observation, and doctors diagnosed her with borderline personality disorder. It was the first time someone had given a name to mental health issues that reached back to her teen years.

When Cannon returned home, her family sat down with her. After discussing the situation together, Cannon and her parents agreed it was best if she moved out on her own, leaving her son in the care of her parents. She found an apartment downtown and a second gas-station job to help pay her increased costs. But the stress hadn’t abated and her health continued to deteriorate.

Cannon, now 25, lost both jobs and, even with social assistance, could no longer afford her one-bedroom apartment. She broke her lease, put her few belongings in storage and began sleeping in her car.

Homelessness has a devastating effect on one’s health: higher rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, tuberculosis, skin and foot problems and an increased risk of violence and early death. Research by Stephen Hwang of the University of Toronto has found that health problems exist even for people living in shelters, rooming houses and hotels—many of the places where people unable to afford market rents end up. There is a direct impact on life expectancy; 25-year-old women living in substandard housing or a shelter, for example, have only a 60 per cent chance of living until 75. Men in the same circumstances have only a 32 per cent chance of reaching that age.

Even people living in apartments they can afford face the prospect of losing their home if the rent rises. In the summer of 2016, tenants in a downtown Edmonton building faced a nearly $300 a month increase, driving rents beyond reach. Although the landlord rescinded the increases when the story hit the media, such increases are not illegal, unlike in a number of other provinces. In fact, Alberta places no limits on the increase a landlord can impose once a year, provided there is proper notification.

“If you are a low-income tenant on a fixed income, but if you don’t know for sure what your rent will be every month, that’s stressful,” says Robyn Luff, the MLA representing Calgary-East. “It creates instability.”

Luff, first elected in 2015, has put forward private member’s Bill 202, the Alberta Affordable Housing Review Committee Act, to address facets of housing affordability that are currently overlooked. If the bill passes, a committee of MLAs will be formed to study rent subsidies, security deposits and rent regulation, among other tenancy issues.

Randal Houle says rent regulation would go a long way toward increasing housing stability for people like him who live on fixed incomes. Houle, 56, has had to depend on provincial disability payments since he was injured at work years ago, and is a member of Renters Action Movement, a Calgary-based tenants group. He lives in a private apartment and receives a supplement that covers the bulk of his rent. “If the landlord really raised the rent, I’d have to move. [My subsidy] can withstand small increases, but not a doubling.”

Landlords, represented by the Calgary Residential Rental Association, oppose rent regulation, arguing it would make the housing situation worse by discouraging new investment.  But for a long time barely any new social housing was being built in Alberta anyway. Landlords’ claims are further challenged by a 2011 study of the existing economic literature on rent regulation. University of Winnipeg economist Hugh Grant found that “many of the criticisms of rent regulations are ill-founded on both theoretical and empirical grounds.” Instead, well-designed rent regulations can act to stabilize rental markets, prevent price-gouging and, importantly, improve security of tenure for renters. One thing regulations do not do, Grant found, is substantially reduce rents.

When Luff’s affordable housing review bill was being debated in the Legislature, Wildrose MLA Tany Yao pointed to the recession and argued the “bill is trying to fix a housing market that isn’t broken.”

Home sales have dipped significantly, but the recession’s impact on rental affordability has been negligible. In fact, despite the vacancy rate rising significantly across Alberta, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment actually increased 1.2 per cent from fall 2014 to 2015, before falling 4.7 per cent in 2016. In Calgary, three consecutive years of increases have brought the city’s vacancy rate to its highest in 25 years. In response some landlords have lowered rents or are offering other incentives, including free TVs. But tenants buoyed by such stories won’t find much comfort in CMHC data. The average Alberta rent for a two-bedroom apartment in 2016 was still $1,195, just $58 less than 2015’s $1,253, and well out of reach of someone on minimum wage or social assistance.

For these Albertans the housing market does indeed feel like it’s broken.

Alberta now has a minister devoted to addressing their needs: Lori Sigurdson, Minister of Seniors and Housing. Created in September 2014 as the Ministry of Seniors, the portfolio was consolidated “to better integrate and align its policies and services for seniors and Albertans in need of affordable housing options.”

The ministry will spend $1.2-billion over five years on maintenance and on a new supply of social housing, a fourfold increase from the previous government, according to the minister’s press secretary. Sigurdson is also crafting an affordable housing strategy, targeted for spring.

This turnaround, coupled with a federal government signalling a newfound willingness to fund a new national housing strategy, has some social-housing advocates feeling optimistic. “It’s like trying to [roll] a big boulder,” said Greg Dewling, CEO of Capital Region Housing Corporation, which provides housing and manages subsidies for almost 9,000 households in Edmonton. “Once we get started, it generates its own momentum.”

Yet even when funding exists, social housing projects can hit roadblocks. Homeowners in Terwillegar Towne in Edmonton fought the creation of a supportive-housing building in their neighbourhood, forcing the non-profit agency responsible to abandon its plan. Social-housing developers and the governments who fund them must address ill-founded property-value fears and prejudices against the poor. A 2016 analysis by real estate company Trulia of some 3,000 low-income housing projects in 20 US housing markets actually found no significant effect on the value of nearby homes.

As Alberta’s population grows—and ages—so too will the number of people living on low incomes. Greg Suttor, author of Still Renovating: A History of Canadian Social Housing Policy, recounts that at its peak, social housing construction in Canada was about 10 per cent of all housing produced. It’s unlikely Alberta will come close to matching such a rate, but having a firm target linked to need would help. Equally important, any housing strategy must develop specific plans for helping those groups (seniors, lone-parent families, indigenous households, newcomers and people with disabilities) disproportionately affected by the lack of appropriate social housing.

In addition to mandating construction of publicly owned units, any strategy to address rental affordability in Alberta needs to deal with conditions in the private market, which is where most low-income earners live. Rent supplements can help; rent regulation can prevent gouging during the next market upswing. As well, legislative amendments to protect security of tenure of renters can right the balance between tenants and landlords.

Landlord–tenant laws are the domain of Service Alberta, not the Ministry of Seniors and Housing. But the almost 700,000 Alberta tenants who pay full market rents or live in social housing aren’t concerned with ministry silos. They just need a home they can afford.

Amber Cannon knows first-hand the difference made by having a home you can afford. She’s now been living in a subsidized apartment for 10 years. During that time, she’s been able to rebalance her health, graduate with a diploma from Bow Valley College and become a vocal advocate on issues of poverty and mental health.

In 2002, nine months after losing her apartment and living out of her car, Cannon moved into a women’s residence, which provided supports to people struggling with mental health issues, thanks to a referral from a psychiatrist. She left the residence a year later after finding work as a cashier at Canadian Tire, but on such a low income had to live with strangers, in rooming houses or apartments. In the space of a year she moved seven times.

Her son Christopher still lived with her parents, but he would stay with her regularly. Cannon recalled that during one of those visits, “He said to me: I’m scared that you’re going to move and I won’t be able to find you one day.”

“That isn’t something a seven-year-old should have to worry about. You’re supposed to be a kid.”

She sat down and wrote another letter to Calgary Housing. A few months later, a few days before her birthday, someone from the agency phoned to tell her they had a place for her. It was “the best birthday present I could have.”

Cannon was 31. In the spring of 2005, some eight years after she first tried to access social housing, she moved into a Calgary Housing Company community near Mount Royal University. The apartment had two bedrooms on the second floor, a cozy living room and kitchen on the main floor and a fenced-in front yard.

She stepped across the threshold, home at last.

A long-time resident of Calgary, Yutaka Dirks now lives in Montreal.

The post Finding Home appeared first on Alberta Views.

A lot of Albertans now feel similarly stuck. Our province has a new government and a new climate plan that proposes to change everything, especially for the energy sector. We’re phasing out coal and putting a higher price on carbon. New environmental regulations loom for the energy industry. Oil prices are down sharply as global competitors flood the market. Unemployment is up and corporate revenues are down. Everyone says we must diversify, but no one knows how. A lot of capital is tied up in idle rigs and abandoned wells.

Alberta, however, has the resources, the know-how and the interested parties to create a new energy specialty: geothermal. “To me, this is an exciting opportunity,” says Craig Dunn, the president of Calgary-based Borealis GeoPower. As a geologist, he knows that oilfield wellheads often erupt with brine, oil, gas—and steam. To him that means “Albertans have direct access to the earth’s heat.” What oil companies have long seen as a hazardous nuisance, Dunn’s company sees as a renewable resource that can be turned into a commodity. Already, engineers are retooling oilfield equipment to drill for heat. Even abandoned oil wells can be repurposed for geothermal energy.

Our province also has technical advantages we could sell to the world. Iceland may heat 85 per cent of its buildings with direct geothermal heat, but “they’ve just drilled their first horizontal well,” says Dunn’s colleague Alison Thompson, president of CanGEA, the Canadian Geothermal Association. “We’ve been doing it for years.” Alberta has plenty of drilling rigs on hand, she adds, but “Germany had to build their own.” Another surprising opportunity lies in existing provincial oil well maps, which could reduce geothermal’s exploration expenses, usually one-third of costs.

As Dunn says, “We have some of the smartest people in the world in resource development. We should be using them.” Thompson agrees and puts the situation more provocatively. “Alberta is the biggest geothermal producer in the world,” she says, “but we throw it all away.”

“We’re the biggest geothermal producer in the world,” says Alison Thompson, “but we throw it all away.”

Geothermal has been called the “holy grail” of renewable energy. Clean, stable, emissions-free and long-lived with minimum maintenance, geothermal can also provide stable baseload power that neither solar nor wind can promise. The sun sets and the wind ebbs, but it’s always hot beneath earth’s surface.

Every geothermal method extracts heat from the earth for human use. Even in Alberta’s coldest winters, the ground 3  km beneath our feet is reliably 90–100°C or warmer, due to decaying uranium, thorium and potassium radiogenic rocks. Urban areas such as Calgary have an 8–12°C temperature difference in the first 200 feet of soil.

Engineers apply that heat to a wide range of purposes. They might use heat pumps to stream direct heat from hot springs to nearby buildings. Or they may install smaller, hip-high pumps outside homes, to extract heat air-to-air or ground-to-air. In milder climates, the electricity to run the pump may be the only heating cost.

Bigger buildings or colder climates call for “geoexchange” methods. Here, builders lay flexible pipe loops at some depth in the soil (from one to several metres) and pump water in a constant loop, bringing hot water up and sending cold water back down. Where space is tight, they drill straight down to create boreholes to hold the loops. Compressors leverage the temperature difference to heat or cool buildings. The geothermal grand prize is to capture heat intense enough—such as at a hot springs—to spin a turbine and generate electricity.

As of 2014, 24 countries had geothermal power plants, producing more than 12 GW in total. Eighty countries had projects under development to produce almost another 12  GW. A gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts, and a MW is enough to power about 1,000 homes (at a kilowatt apiece). A gigawatt thus powers a million homes. The US industry was producing about 3.5 GW of geothermal electricity annually by the end of 2014, up from 3 GW in 2010.

Canada has zero geothermal electricity production, either active or underway, despite the best efforts of mainly Alberta-based geoscientists and engineers. Canadians do participate in other countries’ projects, however. CanGEA says Canadian companies produce more than 20 per cent of the world’s geothermal energy. Enbridge owns 40 per cent of the Oregon Neal Hot Springs project, for example, which has been producing geothermal electricity since 2012.

The Geological Survey of Canada estimates that “Canada’s in-place geothermal power exceeds one million times Canada’s current electrical consumption.” Even if only a fraction of this potential is developed, that’s an immense amount of energy.

Like solar panels and windmills (or computers), geothermal technology has evolved from expensive and erratic into relatively accessible and reliable. As equipment improves, engineers are heating or cooling huge spaces using a paltry 10°C temperature difference between the surface and the earth. They’re practically spinning gold from straw.

Homeowners and engineers often use an odd-sounding measure for the geothermal craft, talking about working at several times “100 per cent efficiency.” I heard this phrase from Dale Poloway, proud geothermal homeowner. He uses a monitoring program to calculate his home’s overall efficiency rating—for example, 359 per cent efficiency. For each energy unit put into his system, Poloway’s compressor put more than three and a half times as much energy into heating his home. He estimates his heating costs are about half what they’d be if he used natural gas.

“I’m an early adopter,” says Poloway. “I knew I’d pay a premium for the technology.” He spent three and a half years building a handsome two-storey geothermal house in Calgary’s Inglewood neighbourhood. In his basement, pipes bring up warm water from four 200-foot boreholes to a five-ton heat pump (equivalent to a 50,000 BTU furnace) that captures the heat. The now-cold water goes back down the pipes into the earth to warm up. The pump transfers the captured heat to a circulating system, which runs warmed water through three levels of concrete floors: basement, first and second. Poloway says this system “gives very even temperatures throughout the house.”

The sophisticated Web Energy Logger (WEL) software that monitors his system today displays the results among real time statistics for hundreds of homes across North America at welserver.com. (Poloway’s house is WEL0584.)

Thermal Creek has built dozens of geothermal homes in and near Calgary. While owner Koen van der Maaten has worked on projects as small as a 2,000 ft2 bungalow retrofit, most of his projects are much larger, including a Canmore fourplex and a Calgary MP’s 14,000 ft2 home. Over at Thermal Creek’s website, you can track daily utility activity and costs for a 4,200 ft2 home in Bearspaw. Here, van der Maaten and his crew drilled eight 145-foot boreholes and carved massive channels in the dirt to carry more ground loops. Since 2011 this geothermal system has heated the house and provided hot water without any other heat source—for about $350 a year. Fluctuating fuel costs don’t affect these homeowners.

I’d thought that geoexchange only worked in certain places, but van der Maaten corrected me. “You can do shallow geothermal anywhere on the planet,” he says. “We just finished a project outside Whitehorse, a house on a large piece of land. We buried pipes at about 15 feet deep in 300-foot-long trenches and we’re extracting energy. It all comes down to putting enough pipe in the ground.” He estimates that an average geoexchange system in a new home would cost about $28,000, many times the cost of a typical furnace system. But, then, a geoexchange system doubles as a cooling system too, making it twice as valuable.

What oil companies have seen as a nuisance—hot water—others see as a renewable resource that can be reaped in the form of electricity.

Where geoexchange systems really meet their sweet spot, says Edmonton engineer Jacob Komar, is with commercial buildings. “Commercial buildings achieve economies of scale not available in building a house,” he says. “For instance, the cost per borehole drops. At around 50,000–60,000 ft2, commercial buildings only need a year or two to pay back the cost difference for installing a geothermal system.”

Komar was lead engineer for the Mosaic Centre, a 30,000 ft2 net zero office building completed in 2015 in Edmonton’s Summerside neighbourhood. “Net zero” means that a building consumes no more energy than it produces. “The premium to go geothermal was $80,000,” he says, “which was less than 1 per cent of the Mosaic Centre’s $10.5-million budget.”

Cooling is where geothermal really pays for itself. “We found the Mosaic Centre’s cooling load was greater than its heating load,” he says. “Alberta is a very sunny province. We get a solar load on any south-facing glass. Once the people arrive and the sun heats the glass, the building switches over from heating and starts cooling.”

Here again Alberta has an advantage. Any time you get a large number of people in a building, cooling becomes important. “I’d argue this is the best climate for geothermal on the continent,” says Komar. “In Virginia [where he trained earlier] they’re cooling most of the year, but the geothermal systems are inefficient because the ground temperature is too high to accept the heat the system rejects. In Alberta we can reject heat into the ground with outstanding efficiencies.”

At the University of Alberta, geochemist Jonathan Banks has been working for 10 years to develop the hottest form of geothermal energy: using scalding water to generate electricity. He predicts this could one day be a billion dollar industry in Canada. “Every other nation on the Ring of Fire [the Pacific Ocean perimeter, marked by volcanic activity] has geothermal power,” he says.

With the oil industry in decline, geothermal advocates want to capitalize on all the exploring and drilling already done here. Banks, the lead researcher on an international multi-university project in conjunction with Alberta Innovates–Energy and Environmental Solutions, is using oil company data to find geothermal resources—reservoirs hot enough to drive a turbine. “It’s all public data,” he says. “Whenever a company drills a well in Alberta, they’re obligated to file certain kinds of information with the government, and anyone can have access to that.” Not everyone can interpret the data, though. U of A computers have software that helps interpret the numbers.

Banks’s team is using the data to look for wells filled with water, as happens when a gas field becomes depleted. “We’re looking for reservoirs with temperatures higher than 100°C, which is hot enough to generate electricity,” he says. “Alaska produces electricity at Chena Hot Springs with water at 74°C. One reason they can do that is the air is so cold there, it creates a greater temperature difference, and warmer water vaporizes in the cold.”

Banks is doing the groundwork to make it possible for smaller cities such as Rocky Mountain House to turn nearby geothermal potential into power plants. He has contacted town councils along the eastern edge of the Rockies, from Grande Prairie to Hinton, to point out that they’re very close to excellent geothermal resources—that is, potential riches. “We want the towns to have the information so they can attract investors,” he says. “We’re doing an energy budget for each reservoir, calculating how much energy is in each and how much can be drawn, as well as a precommercialization study for each town.”

Calgary-based CanGEA has also been reviewing data and has put up an online national geothermal database and three provincial favourability maps.

Meanwhile, Borealis Geopower is working on two power-generation projects—Canoe Reach and Lakelse, both in BC. With its exploration permits secured, Borealis is trying to raise funds to identify the precise heat sources. Likewise, DEEP Earth is fundraising to drill exploratory heat wells near Estevan, Saskatchewan.

Pipes bring hot water from boreholes to a pump, which transfers heat to a circulating system. Water re-enters the earth to warm up.

“We have lots of low-hanging fruit in Alberta,” says CanGEA’s Alison Thompson. “We have thousands of abandoned oil wells that could be topped with geothermal loops and turned into microgenerators.” A series of a dozen or more of these little generators could build up a town-sized load. Others have suggested the mini-generators could produce up to 5 MW each. This could power a town and some light industry.

Speaking to post-secondary geoscience students worried about their career prospects evaporating, Thompson assures them their skills will transfer from oil and gas to geothermal. She says that’s what’s exciting about downturns. “We’re now in a wonderful era of technological innovation. When oil prices are high, all the engineers are busy. When prices drop, we get the benefit of technology transfer.” Necessity: the mother of invention.

What, then, is holding Alberta back Our province does have some 2,200 geoexchange buildings that draw heat from deep boreholes. But with all of Alberta’s traditional energy advantages—coal, gas, oil, solar and wind—geothermal has been left to slowly grow by itself, without much encouragement, oversight or regulation.

Cost remains the biggest barrier. With federal and provincial governments committed to pursuing renewable energies, “We have a window right now,” Thompson says, “but we have major barriers because we don’t have tax symmetry with other energy industries. We can’t write off dry wells the way oil and gas exploration can.” CanGEA’s research suggests that tax law could be easily amended by adding “geothermal” to the definition of resource exploration and development.

Although home-scale and commercial-scale geoexchange systems have come down in price because they can be mass-produced, geothermal power plants have to be custom-built—and they remain breathtakingly expensive. “Plant cost depends on size,” says Banks. He quotes US estimates of between $3,000 and $4,000 per KW, which works out to $3-million to $4-million per MW. That’s for a standard plant. “For a 1 MW demonstration plant, we estimate costs at $20-million to $25-million. That’s for a prototype,” he hastens to add. “Costs would go down in the future.” In other places, geothermal power has tended to get a foothold and then grow incrementally. The California geothermal field known as The Geysers saw its first small geothermal plant in 1960 and now has 22 power plants which have no fuel costs. That state now produces 4.8 of its energy from geothermal sources.

Cost, however, can be influenced by governments, and not only through carbon taxes and other incentives. “Geothermal energy would be very expensive right now. So The oil sands were expensive [decades] ago,” says ATB chief economist Todd Hirsch. “The province put public money into researching the oil sands because at first the resource was too marginal for a company to make money on.”

Regulatory changes would help too. “Right now the province recognizes subsurface mineral rights,” Hirsch says. “If you have the leasehold and can prove there are minerals under that land, you can get a loan. Heat isn’t a mineral. It doesn’t count as an asset. The province has to recognize geothermal energy as an asset before the banks will.” A few forward-looking US states do so.

“I’m interested in promoting the idea that Alberta has to look beyond hydrocarbons,” he adds. “We could invest in more solar and wind, but that’s just buying somebody else’s technology. I keep coming back to ‘What kind of technology are we developing here in Alberta?’ Everyone knows the heat is there—it’s not like drilling for oil or gas—but there’s a technical problem with getting at it. Can we apply the bright minds in this province to cracking that nut?

“Alberta’s geology is more typical than the Ring of Fire. If we could solve the technical end, we could sell our technology everywhere that people are trying to get off coal and oil.”

Indeed, heating buildings without creating CO2 emissions would help all countries meet their Paris COP21 goals. Canada is committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Residential and commercial heating, ventilation and air conditioning generally account for 40–50 per cent of a country’s energy use. Geothermal in every new building would whittle that down.

Post Paris COP21 and post first ministers’ conference, geothermal power is still a sorely overlooked energy source in Canada. Premier Rachel Notley’s plan to phase out coal by 2030 calls for renewables to provide two-thirds of the replacement power, but suggests the emphasis will be mainly wind. The new federal budget gives Natural Resources Canada $82.5-million over two years to research and develop clean energies. But the federal plan for northern Canada—largely dependent on dirty diesel for its heat and electricity needs—notes only wind and solar.

As Hirsch and others point out, our province already excels at exploiting marginal resources. What geothermal advocates want is a bit more government support. With that—like the oil sands—another Alberta billion-dollar industry might not be an impossible dream.

Penney Kome has published six non-fiction books and hundreds of articles. She was editor of straightgoods.com, 2004–2013.

The post Hot Treasure appeared first on Alberta Views.

When a second kitchen is added to a single-family house, the new living area becomes a secondary suite. As defined by the City of Calgary, a secondary suite is a basement or garage unit that has sleeping, cooking and bathroom areas separate from the main dwelling. In some newer subdivisions the zoning allows secondary suites to be approved as a discretionary land use if the specific property meets minimum size requirements and has sufficient off-street parking. In those cases, approvals can be made by the City’s Planning and Development Authority. However, in most of Calgary’s subdivisions, including in Coral Springs, the rules prohibit secondary suites. If homeowners in these neighbourhoods want a secondary suite, the zoning of their home has to be changed by an application to City Council.

For the Tremblay family, this meant changing their zoning from contextual one-dwelling residential (R-C1) to contextual one-dwelling residential with a secondary suite (R-C1s). If council approves such an application, the “s” is added to the zoning and a secondary suite becomes a permitted land use for that specific property. The homeowner can then go ahead and apply for building, electrical, plumbing and gas permits. Inspectors ultimately need to ensure that the heating system, smoke detector and stove were installed correctly and are operating safely.

Getting approval from the City entailed notifying the Tremblays’ neighbours that there was a rezoning application in their area. The City also notified the community association. The neighbours were supportive once Martin explained the details—that he and his wife would still own and occupy the house and that it would be his mother living in the basement suite—but the community association was concerned about parking congestion and the precedent established by an approval. When Martin and his mother presented their case to council, all were in favour except councillors Jim Stevenson and Joe Magliocca, who often vote against individual rezoning applications.

Although the Tremblay family didn’t have unanimous support for their suite, they had followed the process as instructed and they did get approval. The planning department now publicly touts their approval as a success story. “I believe everybody should go through the process to ensure that their homes are safe,” says Martin Tremblay, in a video clip uploaded to the City’s YouTube channel.

The fact remains that the rezoning process is lengthy and expensive and the outcome is uncertain. Not all homeowners who want secondary suites are willing to go through the required steps, so they build illegal suites instead. The problem with an illegal suite is that the owners can’t apply for safety permits. The results can be tragic. In 2009 a Parkdale house fire killed three young adults, in part because their escape from the basement suite was blocked by security bars covering the windows. The horror could’ve been avoided with a simple safety inspection, but the City can’t issue a building permit and mandate safety inspections for a secondary suite it doesn’t know exists.

With this safety problem as their primary concern, many Calgarians think secondary suites should be permitted in all residential zones. The reasoning is that the city’s many illegal suites could finally be regulated and made safe. But another group of Calgarians just as large wants the City to leave their zoning alone. Their argument is that they purchased homes in one-dwelling residential neighbourhoods, and that’s the way they want the neighbourhood to stay. The resulting stalemate has confounded Calgary’s politicians for years.

“Legal secondary suites offer a safe, affordable and relatively quick solution to Calgary’s rental housing crisis that requires no government subsidies.” —Druh Farrell, Ward 7

When he was campaigning for the mayor’s office in 2010, Naheed Nenshi promised to finally put an end to the secondary suites debate. “This is one of those areas,” he explained in a campaign pitch, “where our city council could have acted decisively so long ago and they just haven’t.” With secondary suites reform at the top of his list of Better Ideas, Nenshi was unequivocal about the way forward: “We need to legalize secondary suites. We need to legalize them across the city, and we need to do it immediately.”

As mayor, Nenshi won considerable public support for blanket zoning—that is, for making secondary suites a permitted land use in all one-dwelling residential neighbourhoods. Early in 2011 a poll conducted by Zinc Research (commissioned by the University of Calgary Students Union) suggested that 75 per cent of Calgarians supported secondary suites in their neighbourhoods. Also on board were the Calgary Real Estate Board (CREB), the Calgary Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Home Builders’ Association (Calgary Region). Even community associations long opposed to secondary suites began to come around to the idea of blanket zoning. The Springbank Hill Community Association, representing an upmarket suburban neighbourhood in the city’s southwest, stated that more secondary suites would provide more Calgarians with an opportunity to enjoy life in Springbank Hill.

In 2011 a Calgary homeowner suffering from multiple sclerosis was given the go-ahead for a basement suite so that she could continue to live at home and rely on a tenant to take care of the yard work. Nenshi expressed regret that it had taken 18 months and cost the homeowner thousands of dollars. The process had also required her to share intimate details of her life (her income and the details of her disability) in front of council on live television. The irony, Nenshi noted, was that she could have moved out and rented her house to a university fraternity with no requirement at all to notify City Hall.

But when a motion calling for city-wide approval of secondary suites was put before council in March 2011, it was defeated. The issue came back on the agenda in 2014–15, this time as a pilot project for blanket zoning in inner-city wards 7, 8, 9 and 11, and was defeated again, by a 9–6 vote. “Council has yet again kicked it down the field,” Nenshi said to reporters following the vote.

But it may not be fair to point fingers only at council. City councillors represent Calgarians, and, several weeks before the vote, a poll conducted by Mainstreet Technologies revealed that, on the question of going city-wide with secondary suites, Calgarians were statistically divided: 42 per cent for blanket zoning, 37 per cent against, and 21 per cent unsure. This led to speculation that some of the apparent public support in earlier polls was not enthusiasm for secondary suites so much as resignation that such suites were fated to exist, whether legally or otherwise.

According to an estimate used by City staff, there may be up to 16,000 illegal suites scattered among Calgary’s 280,000 one-dwelling detached residences. By contrast, the City’s registry of legal suites numbers in the hundreds. Such a lopsided statistic indicates a colossal failure to regulate on the part of the City of Calgary. But the alternative—having bylaw officers root out the illegal suites and thus put thousands of renters out of their homes—is not popular either. The upshot seems to be that, regardless of reviews, reports, plebiscites or polls, secondary suites are here to stay.

The economic and social benefits of Calgary’s illegal secondary suites are indisputable. Rental income helps offset homeowners’ mortgage costs. A separate living space allows families to keep their adult children or aging parents close—but not too close.

Secondary suites can also provide income in retirement, allowing seniors to stay in their homes as long as possible. In October 2015, for example, council approved a laneway house in Rutland Park. The applicant said he and his spouse had explored several options, including downsizing to a condominium, but settled on a secondary suite on the advice of a realtor. “We believe we can build a safe, comfortable retirement home and create a potential source of income for our retirement,” said the applicant, speaking to city councillors before they approved his proposal.

For renters, secondary suites increase the range of affordable housing options. While vacancy rates have increased during the current economic downturn, rents in Calgary remain among the highest in the nation, with two-bedroom apartments costing $1,319 a month on average. Such high housing costs are an economic and social drag.

That secondary suites could offer a reprieve for such renters is councillor Brian Pincott’s line of thinking. In his third term as councillor for Ward 11, he also chairs the board of the Calgary Housing Company. Like Nenshi, Pincott has long advocated for the social and economic benefits of going city-wide with secondary suites. While he’s careful to point out that secondary suites aren’t a cure-all for Calgary’s affordability gap, he draws attention to a benefit that is often overlooked: “We create two affordable units for every secondary suite we allow,” he says, adding that both units are created “using no taxpayer dollars.”

For urban planners, secondary suites encourage compact and sustainable growth, both of which are priority goals in Calgary’s Municipal Development Plan. Gregory Morrow is an assistant professor in the faculty of environmental design at the University of Calgary, where he specializes in urban design, land use reform and affordable housing. He’s also a citizen-at-large on the Calgary Planning Commission. As he explains, secondary suites provide a legal means to add “invisible density” that curbs urban sprawl without physically altering the character or built form of a neighbourhood. The extra people, he adds, contribute to a stronger customer base for local retailers, making neighbourhoods more sustainable.

Morrow suggests the benefits of secondary suites can be realized with little effect on neighbourhoods. He says that in cities with no restrictions (including Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa) the number of secondary suites is spread out in such a way that impact on property values, traffic and on-street parking has been minimal.

“I don’t believe in  a blanket rezoning for secondary suites. However, we should make applications as easy and as low cost as possible.” —Shane Keating, Ward 12

Given all the positive arguments for more secondary suites that have been in the local media over the years, why do so many Calgarians remain opposed to secondary suites Morrow suspects it’s less about the suites and more about the people who live in them. “Much of the opposition to secondary suites is a proxy for anxiety about renters generally,” he suggests.

Morrow isn’t the only Calgarian to pick up on the anti-renter sentiment. In a recent Metro Calgary column on the topic, the writer was more direct: “The way some city councillors talk, you would think Calgarians who don’t own property are dangerous parasites bent on spoiling communities wherever they can.” It’s a fair observation. Indeed, Calgary’s daily newspapers have published more than a few letters to the editor where naysaying homeowners openly blame renters for, among other things, parking disagreements, front yard furniture and general disrepair.

It may be true that some homeowners in Calgary do not like renters as a group, but it is unlikely that all of the opposition to secondary suites is mean-spirited. For many Calgarians, the push for blanket zoning is an affront to something else that they hold sacrosanct: their homeownership.

A large majority of Calgarians are not renters. According to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), 74 per cent of Calgarians own their own homes. This compares to 71 per cent in Edmonton, 68 per cent in Winnipeg and Toronto and 55 per cent in Montreal. At the same time, the median house price in Calgary is $425,000, making it one of the most expensive markets in the nation. That Calgarians continue to purchase homes in this environment illustrates that they believe strongly in home ownership.

A neighbourhood’s zoning should be an important consideration when buying a house. It is understandable, therefore, that homeowners would be sensitive about after-the-fact zoning changes, especially if they believe rezoning could negatively affect their property value or their quality of life. Some go so far as to argue that zoning changes to allow secondary suites amount to an unfair and uncompensated expropriation of the value of what they purchased. While it might be difficult for some of those homeowners to specifically identify and describe what they have lost, their position isn’t entirely without principle or merit.

Eran Kaplinsky teaches property and planning law in the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta. As he explains, zoning spells out what homeowners can and cannot do on their property, and it is part of what they acquire at the time of purchase. Without zoning rules, nothing would stop your neighbour from operating a dog kennel in her garage, for example. The purpose of zoning, according to Kaplinsky, is to protect property values and enhance community welfare. “Zoning mimics what private owners would do among themselves if they could,” he says.

While council is responsible for zoning decisions, some Calgarians don’t trust the process. At a recent public hearing, activist and frequent political candidate Larry Heather spoke to council about the lack of information before them as they deliberated whether to allow a suite on an R1 property in Evergreen. “How do we know how many illegal secondary suites are on that street?” he asked. That his question went unanswered supports the suggestion that centrally made decisions can have little sensitivity to local circumstances or neighbourhood values.

Ward 2 councillor Joe Magliocca rarely votes in favour of secondary suites, out of consideration for the homeowners in the communities he represents. “They bought in R1 for a reason,” he says. “They paid a premium for that and want to keep it that way.” Magliocca would prefer that the zoning of the city’s established neighbourhoods be left alone. “We have areas zoned for secondary suites,” he says, referencing the newer neighbourhoods where secondary suites are a discretionary use. “Let’s fill them up first.”

At public hearings Mayor Nenshi often has to remind neighbours speaking against rezoning applications to limit their comments to the secondary suite itself. If he doesn’t they go on at length about how renters change the character of a neighbourhood by neglecting the grass or by parking older model vehicles on the street. Council often refuses to rezone for a secondary suite when these types of concerns are raised. From Pincott’s perspective this is discrimination. “We’re imposing restrictions on renters that we wouldn’t put on owners,” he says. While some opponents of secondary suites are careful to couch their arguments to avoid saying as much, a good many would probably think that this kind of discrimination is justified.

“Legalizing secondary suits makes sense if in new communities, potential homeowners know their community is zoned as such and suites are built to code.” —Joe Magliocca, Ward 2.

Where does this leave us Elected officials at all levels of government make public policy changes that are unpopular but necessary. Does blanket zoning for secondary suites fit into that category We know that secondary suites, both legal and illegal, are here to stay. We also know that roughly half of Calgarians support secondary suites in their neighbourhoods. Unless there’s going to be a massive crackdown on illegal suites, which is highly unlikely, the duty to act in citizens’ interest demands that council go city-wide with secondary suites so that homeowners can get their illegal suites brought up to code, thus eliminating a serious safety hazard. If council doesn’t do this, if they continue to postpone meaningful action, they should expect that owners of illegal suites will only do the same.

As Calgary continues to engage in this debate, the rest of Canada is moving on. The CMHC recently announced it will factor in 100 per cent of secondary-suite rental income when qualifying homebuyers for mortgages. To be eligible the owner must prove that the suite meets municipal regulations—which would exclude most of the secondary suites in Calgary. Over time this may make other cities more attractive to young people pursuing career and family.

In most Canadian cities secondary suites are a non-issue. In 2014 CMHC surveyed 650 Canadian municipalities and found that more than 8 out of 10 permitted secondary suites in some form; more than half of those that didn’t were rural municipalities. When other cities have gone ahead with blanket zoning, the sky hasn’t fallen. Edmonton allows secondary suites in all low-density residential neighbourhoods, and Saskatoon and Regina have no restrictions at all. These cities remain great places to live and great places to invest in residential real estate.

But despite the apparent stalemate following the defeat of the pilot project in wards 7, 8, 9 and 11, progress has since been made in Calgary on the secondary suites file. The City announced recently that it will waive development permit application fees to encourage owners of illegal suites to make their suites safe. City staff also recently launched a secondary suites registry in the form of a searchable online database that prospective renters can use to check if the suite they’re interested in is legal and safe.

These incremental measures may decrease the number of illegal suites and increase the number overall that are safe and legal. Maybe a future election will shake up city council and blanket zoning will finally become a reality. Brian Pincott, for one, contends that secondary suites neither ruin neighbourhoods as opponents contend, nor dramatically increase the availability of affordable housing as proponents often claim. It’s ironic that one of Calgary’s most intensely debated public policy issues may also be one of the most quickly forgotten when it’s finally settled.

Jeff Doherty lives in Lethbridge. His previous story for Alberta Views, on urban oil and gas drilling, ran in the April 2015 issue.

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Most social services remained municipal responsibilities, as they had been since villages incorporated into towns and towns into cities. Intervenors in Alberta’s 1948 Royal Commission on Taxation called for a much stronger provincial role in the provision of social services, from education to healthcare to public welfare. The Alberta Association of Municipal Districts called for full provincial funding and administrative responsibility for unemployment relief. The Alberta Board of Trade and Agriculture demanded that the province pay for at least 50 per cent of education costs. The Alberta Farmers Union insisted that Alberta assume full responsibility for mothers’ allowances, old-age pensions and unemployment relief. The Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, the Property Owners’ Association, the Union of Alberta Municipalities and individual municipal districts, towns and cities all called for state interventions into the social-services economy on a massive and unprecedented scale.

It was a powerful idea, and for many Albertans a necessary one. This was the dawn of the atomic age, a time when technological and scientific advances were transforming citizens’ expectations from small and parochial to grand and global. Albertans wanted a modern educational system for their children. They wanted a healthcare system that could employ new and emerging medical advancements to care for the ill and the infirm. They wanted investments in infrastructure to modernize their cities and towns, and to renew and rebuild housing that had been deteriorating since at least the early 1930s. And they wanted a modern, provincially organized, funded and administered public welfare system to protect the unemployed, the unemployable, the elderly and the disabled.

Part of the trouble was the Constitution. The federal government had more revenue-generating options open to it but none of the responsibility for social services, while the provinces were limited in their revenue-generating options but had all of the responsibilities for social services. The British North America Act had delegated jurisdiction over social services to the provinces. No one in 1867 could have imagined that social services would, by the Great Depression of the 1930s, become the costliest and most complicated of jurisdictional competencies. And so the BNA Act granted the greater taxing powers to the federal state, which was responsible for defence, criminal law and foreign affairs, while smaller taxing powers were awarded to the provinces.

But Depression-era Canada was not the Canada of the 1860s, and policymakers at both the federal and the provincial levels were compelled to find some means of redressing this jurisdictional/revenue-generating imbalance, a problem well recognized by the federal Rowell–Sirois Commission. Reporting in 1940, the Commission pointed out that “relief and public welfare overshadowed all other government activities during the depression,” and “governments were immediately harassed from two sides—rapidly falling receipts… and sharply rising costs due to relief, other public welfare and debt charges.” The Commission concluded that the crux of the problem was “the constitutional division of taxing powers,” arguing that “a better allocation of taxing powers and responsibilities is imperative.” In the end, though, Albertans, like Canadians generally, cared not for constitutional technicalities. They wanted public investments in social services.

The massive unemployment and poverty of the Great Depression ended in 1939 with the onset of the Second World War and nearly full employment. This eased the financial crunch nationwide even though the constitutional imbalance remained. Governments faced mounting pressure to meet Canadians’ expectations. In Alberta the Social Credit government introduced a dramatic series of interventions designed both to meet these expectations and to consolidate social welfare programs under provincial, rather than municipal, control. In 1944 the province created a public welfare department with social welfare responsibilities for everyone from children to single men, the Métis, veterans and the indigent. By 1945, responsibilities for mothers’ allowances and old-age pensions had migrated from the various municipalities and municipal districts to the new department. And over the course of the next two decades, up to the mid-1960s, the Social Credit government embedded no fewer than five more categories of public welfare into the department, including widows, the disabled, deserted women and people living in care homes and institutions.

None of this, of course, could happen, at least to the extent that it did in Alberta, without massive public investment in social services. And the discovery of oil near Leduc on a cold late afternoon in February 1947 made this massive public investment possible. Between 1946 and 1967, journalist John Barr indicates, provincial spending “increased three-and-a-half times as fast as the population.” This represented the highest per capita spending of any provincial government in Canada. Alberta led the nation in spending on education in 1964, and was “second only to Ontario in per capita spending on welfare, health, sanitation, agriculture, forestry, recreation and culture.” Belying its reputation as a fiscally conservative government opposed to “spending, bureaucracy and the welfare state,” the Social Credit party boldly, albeit incrementally, instituted an elaborate, far-reaching set of welfare reforms. The people of Alberta had demanded extensive state intervention into the economy, and the Alberta government had delivered.

As impressive as the Social Credit government’s forays into public investment in social services were, though, they must be measured against the government’s tendency—which has survived to the present day—to link social policy spending to oil and gas revenues rather than to other means of revenue generation, including personal and corporate income taxes. In fact, the Social Credit regime offered Albertans and outside investors the lowest taxes continent-wide, preferring to fund provincial business largely through oil and gas royalties that were themselves the lowest in North America. The trouble with linking social policy spending to wildly fluctuating oil and gas revenues, of course, is that social programs benefit when the price of oil is high but suffer when it drops.

Belying its fiscally conservative reputation, Social Credit boldly instituted elaborate, far-reaching welfare reforms.

Meanwhile, the federal government was busy establishing an equally impressive architecture of public welfare, both independent of the provinces and in collaboration with them. Accepting the Rowell–Sirois Commission’s recommendation to amend the BNA Act to set unemployment insurance within the federal jurisdiction, Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s Liberals passed the Unemployment Insurance Act in 1940 (it might also be said that King had warmed considerably to state intervention in the economy in light of Canadians’ increasingly strong support for the socialist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the forerunner of the NDP). The Act created an unemployment insurance fund into which employers, workers and the federal government made contributions and out of which unemployed workers could draw funds.

But collaboration with the provinces was the real social-policy story. Through the early 1950s the federal government and the provinces concluded agreements to share the cost of provincial old-age pensions and allowances for the blind and disabled. In 1961 Alberta’s Social Credit government and the federal government jointly funded a social-allowance program for unemployable persons and their families. And in 1967 Alberta signed on to the Canada Assistance Plan, which amalgamated and rationalized all welfare cost-sharing arrangements between the province and the federal government.

To be sure, not all Albertans benefited from the rise of the province’s modern welfare state. Aboriginal peoples, married women and migrant workers did not fall under Alberta’s public welfare initiatives. Aboriginal peoples fell almost exclusively under federal jurisdiction, and so the province felt no obligation to attend to their needs. Married women, provincial policy assumed, would share in the wages and benefits of their husbands, and so provincial policy could remain largely silent on their needs. And migrant workers’ peripatetic ways meant that no province could—or should—take long-term or meaningful responsibility for their welfare.

Peter Lougheed’s Progressive Conservatives swept to power in Alberta in 1971, taking nearly two-thirds of the seats in the provincial legislature and reducing the long-governing Social Credit party to opposition status. Albertans, it seemed, were ready for change once again, widely embracing Lougheed’s urban and cosmopolitan image and progressive, modern style of governing. In truth, in terms of social welfare, Lougheed’s Progressive Conservatives did not stray far from the trajectory begun by their Social Credit predecessors. Responsibility for social services was largely transferred from the local to the provincial and federal governments by the mid-1970s. In 1979 the provincial government established an assured income for the severely handicapped (AISH) and a widows’ allowance shortly thereafter. And in its 1988 social policy document “Caring and Responsibility: A Statement of Social Policy for Alberta” the government boasted that “the definition of social programs includes a very broad range of government programs and services—our excellent education system, outstanding health care, quality child care programs, varied housing programs and employment training initiatives, plus an extensive array of cultural, multicultural and leisure programs as well as a comprehensive system of support for Albertans in need.”

Many of these assertions were true enough, and they were the legacy of more than four decades of incremental investment in social services and programs. But the winds were shifting once more, and social policy thinking would shortly change as dramatically as it had at the end of the Second World War. In the 1960s, economist Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago had begun espousing a set of ideas that ran starkly counter to the widely accepted Keynesian thinking that undergirded the emergence, growth and wide popularity of the modern welfare state.

First and foremost, Friedman and his colleagues advocated shrinking the money supply to avoid rising inflation. Making less money available, the thinking went, would put an absolute cap on inflation and enhance the value of a dollar. This in and of itself made some sense, in some ways, though it must be said that “tight money” policies—shrinking the supply of money in the economy—had only exacerbated the crisis of the Great Depression. The Depression’s worst effects were ameliorated only when governments increased rather than decreased the flow of money. But the “monetarists” associated with Friedman’s Chicago School took matters several steps further. They decried state intervention in the economy—including social services—advocating instead for an enhanced role for the private sector in providing such services to the public. They also called for tax cuts for big business, believing that doing so would encourage further investment in the economy and ultimately create a more robust, muscular capitalism.

Underlying the monetarists’ models and tables and charts was an ideology that the welfare state had robbed individuals of initiative, and that the people—especially those marginalized by the capitalist economy—had become complacent, had lost the capitalist drive to make entrepreneurial life decisions and couldn’t make their own way in the world. This emphasis on individual responsibility—even in a complex economy—spoke volumes about the way the monetarists thought about the welfare state. Interestingly, such thinking would have found a warm embrace amid ideologies prevalent in some quarters during the 1930s in Canada and propagated by people such as Charlotte Whitton, the famed director of the Canadian Family and Welfare Association. Whitton’s prescription for the Depression’s social and economic ills was to offer jobless workers less unemployment relief, not more, arguing that relief raised the standard of living of layabouts, thereby depriving hundreds of thousands of people of dignity and initiative.

Monetarist thinking slowly but surely made its way into policymakers’ minds. This was especially true when “stagflation” appeared through much of the Western industrial world in the 1970s. The bugbear of rising inflation and falling wages confounded Western governments, and many, including those in the United States and Great Britain, embraced monetarist policies with vigour. US president Ronald Reagan, who relied in large measure on Friedman himself for economic policy advice, adopted “tight money” policies and worked hard to reduce public spending on social services. Great Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher followed suit, adopting policies of fiscal restraint on public spending, especially on social programs. In Canada the federal government of Pierre Trudeau tried to walk the middle ground, accepting the Bank of Canada’s tight money policies even while avoiding significant reductions in social service spending.

But the tide had already turned. After the election of a Progressive Conservative majority under Brian Mulroney in 1984, the federal government cut social spending generally and slashed grants for the shared social services to the provinces. In Alberta, as in many provinces nationwide, the government took up the cry of unsustainable spending and focused its ire on the rise of “big government,” the ostensible enemy of free-market capitalism and sustainable economic growth. However muted at first, this cry would become much more vociferous by the early 1990s.

After 1984 the federal government cut social spending and slashed provincial grants. Alberta took up the cry of unsustainable spending.

The seven-year era of Alberta premier Don Getty came to an end with his resignation in 1992. The subsequent leadership race between Environment Minister and former Calgary mayor Ralph Klein and party stalwart Nancy Betkowski rested in large measure on who could promise to make funding cuts faster. Klein won the contest, and in 1993 redoubled his efforts to appear as the fiscal hawk, ready and willing to cut corporate taxes, slay the provincial deficit and slash social spending. If anyone was even more vocal on these policy directions, it was provincial Liberal leader Laurence Decore, who demanded “brutal cuts” to social services as opposed to Ralph Klein’s promise to deliver “massive cuts.” The fix for Alberta’s social services, it seemed, was in.

Klein led the Progressive Conservatives to a seventh straight majority in the Alberta legislature in June 1993. Shortly thereafter his government began making good on its election promise to diminish the province’s welfare system, employing a two-stage process designed to reduce the numbers of people on the welfare rolls and the amount of public spending on welfare programs. First, Alberta Family and Social Services caseworkers were directed to deny prospective welfare recipients any aid unless the applicants had absolutely exhausted all other avenues of support and had nowhere else to turn for help. Second, the agency’s policy ensured that no welfare recipient received benefits in excess of the lowest-paid working Albertan.

The changes had the desired effect. Alberta Family and Social Services managed to reduce its overall caseload by half (from 95,000 people to 50,000 people) in the first three years following the cuts. What happened to those 45,000 people cut from the welfare rolls is difficult to say, since the government had no mechanism for tracking them. Doubtless some entered training and education programs designed to transition unemployed workers into the labour force, but, for the most part, such programs did not lead to jobs. Others were forced to turn to charities and family to stay off the street. And others still did wind up on the street. Public policy researcher Gordon Laird has pointed out that homelessness in Calgary alone increased 740 per cent between 1994 and 2006.

The Klein years represented a fundamental break from Alberta’s history of social policy development since the end of the Second World War. Almost at a stroke, Klein’s Conservative government undid decades of incremental policy changes in the delivery of social services to Albertans. In the end, Albertans were left with a mere ghost of a welfare state and a government with a radically different ideological bent than they had known through the four decades immediately following the Second World War. Through those decades Alberta’s governments had, following international policy trends, created an enviable social-service system marked by high-quality education and healthcare systems and a robust and multi-layered welfare system to care for the province’s most vulnerable. By the 1990s Alberta could only boast to potential investors of having the nation’s lowest tax regime, among the nation’s lowest minimum wages and among the nation’s weakest labour legislation. For his part, Ralph Klein is sometimes remembered as a true-blue Alberta maverick who restored sanity to a welfare state run amok. In fact he was only a small part of a much broader slavish following of anti-state-intervention ideology and neoconservative thinking.

Eric Strikwerda is the author of The Wages of Relief: Cities and the Unemployed in Prairie Canada, 1929–1939 (AUP, 2013).

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