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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____________________________________________

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The post Big City Supplicants 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.

Six-foot-four, brainy, lanky, dapper—Iveson barged into that election as if visiting from a much savvier universe. He rode the bus to campaign events. He spoke in long, idea-rich sentences and blogged about it all. Yet what was most new was him. He was photogenic (“almost absurdly handsome,” one columnist swooned) but also highly capable. He was a technocrat who was engaging, a Trekkie who understood entrepreneurs, an urbanist and progressive who talked about filling potholes. But what Iveson was most was an idea. Edmonton was on the cusp of a generational shift not only in demographics but in attitude. The city wanted to attract people—and impress them. Iveson embodied an Edmonton to be.

Still, as the torchbearer for the future, Iveson was an outsider in Edmonton’s political establishment. To beat Nickel, Iveson and team would have to hustle. The Journal noted the campaign was slick (his fliers were designed to perch over the edge of a mailbox, making them unmissable) and had endorsements from former MLA Don Massey and then-current MLA Raj Pannu. The papers still weren’t convinced. A Sun columnist bet Iveson $100 Nickel would beat him, and no newspaper sent reporters to Iveson’s election-night party. As the results came in, though, the papers and broadcasters had to scramble. Iveson, with 16,848 votes, had beaten Nickel by more than 2,000 votes.

At his victory party at a bar on Whyte Avenue that night in 2007, someone filmed Iveson’s victory speech with a cellphone and posted it to YouTube. “Conventional wisdom said you can’t unseat incumbents, or that it happens so rarely you shouldn’t bother to try,” he says. “Well, we did.… Conventional wisdom is bad for the city.”

Iveson’s political story begins with his surprise council win, but Edmonton was ready for change. The city’s 2007 population was younger and growing faster than almost any other city in Canada. Unemployment stood at just 4 per cent. Housing prices had spiked. Alberta was building roughly $140-billion in capital infrastructure projects. “Conventional wisdom” in Edmonton had responded to booms with lazy, expensive sprawl. The sobriquet “Deadmonton” was the result. Toronto mayor Mel Lastman once called the city a “clapboard outhouse.” But Edmonton was confronting this latest boom by asking if the city could grow smarter. People under 40 were choosing Edmonton over other cities, wanting to build it into something better. Iveson represented this group. He’d lived in Toronto and had job offers there, but chose to come back.

The next political domino fell for Iveson, ironically, in Calgary. In 2010 that city elected 38-year-old Naheed Nenshi—another wonk, and a long-time friend of Iveson’s—in a “Purple Revolution” defined by youth and urbanist energy. Like Nenshi, Iveson articulated the structural challenges that Alberta’s cities faced during their breathless growth spurts, and he prescribed a similar fix—long-term planning focused on building public transit, slowing sprawl and increasing density.

By May 2013, Iveson had been a councillor for six years. Edmonton had added 100,000 new residents in that time alone. The incumbent mayor, Stephen Mandel, announced he wasn’t running again, setting up the election race as a conversation about infrastructure and growth: Iveson territory. “We can all feel it: This election can be the moment where Edmonton turns,” Iveson blogged. “This can be where we begin to show people they were wrong to underestimate Edmonton.”

His vison was to build, borrow to do so, spur infill development “without pitting new neighbourhoods against old,” tackle poverty and run a long-stalled LRT through mature neighbourhoods to incentivize redevelopment. His ideas were practical—repaving streets—but they were also wonkish, such as tackling infrastructure deficits, including sewer renewal. Iveson was an “intellectual who often sounds as though he’d rather deliver a university lecture than a stump speech,” wrote then Journal columnist Paula Simons. Nonetheless, Iveson’s platform resonated with a city that had nearly doubled in population in his 34 years of life.

The 2013 campaign for mayor pitted Iveson against the established former MLA and city councillor Karen Leibovici and former Sun columnist turned politician (and now MP) Kerry Diotte. No matter: Iveson won 273 of 279 polls outright, and took more than 50 per cent in 246 of them. This wasn’t just a slice of the population voting for city-building, it was almost everyone. “It’s the first time somebody is mayor without having the establishment on his side,” wrote Vitor Marciano, a Wildrose Party adviser, in the Journal in 2013.

Iveson articulated the structural challenges facing Edmonton, and prescribed long-term planning focused on building public transit, slowing sprawl and increasing density.

And Iveson was right—you really could feel it (I arrived from Toronto that spring and was swept up into the city-building energy). At the core was Iveson, his wife, Sarah Chan, and their two young children playing avatars for an underdog, mid-size city on the rise. They appeared at hip events, modelled shoes and tweeted all of it. “They projected an image of Edmonton that we found appealing, not just being socially progressive but of looking cool,” says the now-Senator Simons. “We found that image flattering and exciting, and one we wanted to live up to.”

Donald Lawrence Iveson was born in Edmonton to Margaret and Robert Iveson in May 1979. Margaret was a high school (and later university) English teacher; Robert, or Bob, was an award-winning sculptor who read encyclopedias with Don. The family lived in Edmonton’s affluent Parkallen neighbourhood. Margaret remembers Don, an only child, as smart and curious. “Bob would say to Don, ‘You can think anything you want, you can have any opinion you want, but you have to have evidence,” she says. “If your dad asks you for your evidence when you’re, whatever, 6, I think it’s a good start to building evidence into things.”

After graduating from Strathcona High School, Iveson enrolled at the University of Alberta, where he became managing editor of the Gateway, the student newspaper, and where his love of evidence spilled into editorials. There he met Chan, as well as the people who remain his closest friends and who have mobilized to help him win elections. The Gateway was a “weird, intense club,” says close friend Adam Rozenhart. Iveson was a get-it-right rather than a get-it-done sort of guy. “Everything needed to be so perfect, like, down to the word.” 

Iveson then left to complete his degree in political science at the University of Toronto. There he became president of the Canadian University Press. He later returned to the U of A to work again at the Gateway, as business manager, and then as an advocacy director with the Students’ Union. Then, at 27, he ran for city council.

Once at city hall, Iveson—a workaholic who was known to download information from city reports until the wee hours (“I feel a little guilty pleasure when I tell him something he doesn’t know,” fellow councillor Bryan Anderson told Avenue magazine that year)—struggled with the human side. “He had pretty strong opinions and felt they were based in logic and reason, and therefore everybody else should agree with him,” Simons says. “When people didn’t agree, it took him a while to understand that he had to be a little more human, that not everybody was going to be interested in his analysis.”

In 2013 as he stared down council under his first watch as mayor, Iveson offered a warning to councillors, borrowing from Theodore Roosevelt: “The next four years are not going to be easy. Nothing great is easy.”

Edmonton councillor Aaron Paquette says he was partly inspired to run in the 2017 election—which mayoral race Iveson won with more than 70 per cent of the vote—by Iveson’s first term and vision. But once on council, Paquette says he felt lukewarm with Iveson’s pace on certain issues and frustrated by his insistence on listening to people who don’t have evidence on their side. “On policy, there are definite disagreements [between us],” Paquette says. Transit, a central focus for Paquette, has improved markedly under Iveson’s leadership; the city has its first ever data-driven redesign of its network and 13 kilometres of new LRT track, with construction of another 14 km underway. But it “doesn’t go far enough” Paquette says. (Notably, Iveson doesn’t support free transit; Paquette does.) Transit reform in Edmonton is “too conservative and moving too slowly,” he says.

Iveson’s city-building has also come under fire for its cost. Property taxes have risen (though were recently frozen during the pandemic). The Edmonton Chamber of Commerce has routinely pushed back, framing increases as threats to businesses. The clearest sign of frustration within Iveson’s council was when Michael Oshry, a young, ambitious entrepreneur who did it all in Edmonton—Iveson’s sort of guy—decided not to run again in 2017 after just one term. (He is now running for mayor this October.) Oshry recently told the Journal of his one term with Iveson that “it just wasn’t an atmosphere where the talents of the whole team were being used.” Oshry declined an interview for this story.

The establishment side of Edmonton has questioned, consistently, why the City now operates in realms it didn’t before. For example, the City is the developer of Blatchford, a 536-acre community on the old downtown airport lands, where it has built geothermal infrastructure and invested almost $100-million. The result so far is a few dozen townhouses more than 10 years into the 30-year project. There is also Edmonton’s continued push to defeat homelessness. In August 2020, as Edmonton dismantled a large homeless camp downtown, Iveson raised eyebrows by proposing a 10-weekplan to end homelessness (it included requests to acquire hotel rooms and apartments using federal grants, working around the uninterested province). The timeline was not met.

There is also Iveson’s intellect. He doesn’t argue. He listens, debates, offers evidence. It’s always about policy, not personalities. To a person, Iveson is described as “fair,” but evidently, after he peppers people with facts and counterarguments, he leaves some feeling like their ideas were ignored. “People could find him condescending—that he was lecturing them rather than explaining to them,” Simons says.

These sentiments come through, if diplomatically, from his peers. “Don Iveson has pointed the city in completely the right direction in terms of the city we want to build and the issues we want to be concerned about,” says councillor Michael Walters, who has been at city hall since 2013. “I just think he could have gotten way more out of his council and his community.”

Still, the stubborn insistence in following his vision has been vital. Iveson’s focus on Indigenous reconciliation, which he makes clear in most public speeches, has changed the conversation; Edmonton even renamed its wards to reflect the region’s Indigenous roots. And when the second phase of the Valley Line LRT was threatened after the arrival of the UCP in 2019 and that government’s first budget, in which they gave themselves a 90-day withdrawal clause on funding commitments for the project’s second phase into west Edmonton, the pressure on Iveson to back off was immense. “He didn’t blink,” Walters says.

This laser vision has made change beyond Edmonton. Sturgeon County mayor Alanna Hnatiw, who sat on the Edmonton Metropolitan Regional Board with Iveson for years, credits the board’s growth plan (Iveson is one of its architects) with density targets that address urban sprawl regionally rather than just within Edmonton’s limits. The relationship, though, hasn’t been easy. “He’s Mr. Point of Order,” Hnatiw says, chuckling. But she says Iveson is always fair. The two are now friends.

Today, eight years after Iveson’s mayoral win and nearly 14 after his arrival on the municipal political scene, his city-building agenda feels flat. Oil prices have stayed persistently low. The pandemic has magnified all problems. Office vacancies hover at 20 per cent. Unemployment is at 10.5 per cent, the worst of all big cities in Canada. The political winds now blow against big ideas and infrastructure investment. The coalition of progressives and centrists Iveson built is increasingly fragmented. Homelessness in Edmonton is growing, and tension between Iveson and Premier Jason Kenney has come out into the open (with the mayor earlier this year calling the UCP government’s “failure to work with Edmonton on supportive housing… truly frustrating [and] confounding”).

Meanwhile, Iveson’s angriest detractors in Edmonton still can’t spell his name right—he’s “Mayor Iverson” in the comments sections. An October 2020 poll by Leger found his approval rating at just 38 per cent. The following month, he announced he would not seek re-election.  

“It just seems like a different city from the hopeful 2013 campaign he ran,” says Rozenhart. “This most recent term, I think he’s accomplished some great things, like bike lanes and the LRT and the work he’s done on the Edmonton region with other municipalities. But I think it’s just gotten harder because the general sentiment and the attitude in the city is somehow different, maybe a little darker.”

On his blog, Iveson offered this about his decision: “I had only ever hoped to serve two terms as your mayor….”

Iveson’s magnum opus is Edmonton’s City Plan (passed in December 2020), a combined Municipal Development Plan and Transportation Master Plan. It’s a vision for Edmonton at two million people by 2040, but more or less within the same boundaries as today. This means—if the private sector buys in (the lingering question)—that half of all new housing will be infill, up from the current target of 25 per cent, which Edmonton has hit for several years. Half of all trips will be taken by transit, cycling or walking rather than car. The plan, like so many other policies Iveson has helped craft, puts Edmonton far ahead of where it was. Kalen Anderson, who was director of urban analysis with the City of Edmonton, says, “This integrated body of work will be a lasting legacy for his leadership and will shape Edmonton’s future.”

Councillor Paquette believes the city plan and all the behind-the-scenes effort to reshape Edmonton’s administration, everything from revising how committees are run to changing zoning bylaws and parking requirements, will be next to impossible to reverse, preserving Iveson’s legacy. “The iceberg was the past: the deficit on infrastructure,” he says. “We were digging ourselves a city-sized pothole. It sounds like I’m pumping up the mayor in spite of myself. I am.”

 In the summer of 2019, Dan Lazin rented a Fiat 124 Spider convertible and spent four days driving around Virginia looking at historic sites with his buddy Don Iveson. Lazin had met Iveson in Grade 10 math class and ultimately helped him run for council. Now he lives in New York City, where he works for Google. Time with Iveson is rare.

Lazin says Iveson took 20 minutes or so to drop his public voice and speak as a friend. But once that happened the two enjoyed themselves. At one point, as it rained, they even found the right speed to drive to keep the top down but the water out. But Iveson was, as ever, still Iveson. “The conversations we had in the car, the most memorable of them, were essentially planning-out schemes for infrastructure, talking about high-speed rail possibilities between Edmonton and Calgary, or the air shipment stuff between Asia and Edmonton,” Lazin says.

The two have always been like this, Lazin adds—big-project guys. “There’s always the sense of we’re both trying to achieve something. I mean achieve something in the world, like build the next thing.”

Iveson is now 41 and showing grey in his pandemic beard. Of late he’s taken to being less of a diplomat. In May 2021, when three people died of an apparent overdose in a downtown park, Iveson blamed Kenney’s government and mocked his “‘yahoo’ moment of the Stampede,” referencing the premier’s timeframe for reopening businesses and declaring the pandemic over. But when we catch up by phone (thanks, pandemic), he’s still Iveson—always that public voice, always that slightly “TedTalk meets technocrat” worldview.

I ask where Edmonton is at as he leaves office, and he says the city is still like Austin is to Texas—an island of people “who want to get to the future that should be better rather than go back to some past that ain’t going to happen again.” The city is “as poised as it can be” to reach that future, he believes.

Still, I ask about the bittersweetness of the moment. The southeast leg of the Valley Line LRT that Iveson championed won’t open before he leaves office, thanks to delays, including the discovery of a “car-sized” slab of concrete in the river valley that got in the way and led to endless jokes. The Metro Line LRT, which ran at half-speed for years after it opened in 2015, thanks to Edmonton’s troubles with procurement and vendors, took a toll on Iveson’s reputation. Time did too. Progressives feel he hasn’t gone far enough; conservatives can’t wait for him to go.

“I have a sense of many people’s disappointments, because we hear about those a lot,” Iveson says. “But it wasn’t until I announced I wasn’t going to run again that [I heard] more generous feedback—even a sense of loss from people who have appreciated my leadership and my approach.”

The problems with LRT in particular made “easy theatre for headlines,” Iveson says, but led to hard changes in how the City did things. “It’s not a particularly sexy political message, and so it doesn’t make a good story when we fix these things. All that folks remember are the parts that went wrong. I’m satisfied that we learned from each mistake and got better each time.”

I ask about his reputation as a “Mr. Spock” who struggles with the human side. “I think I tend to be more in my head than in my heart when trying to solve public policy challenges,” Iveson says. “But I’ve also been told my most effective leadership has come when my heart is engaged.” Iveson concedes he was naïve when he showed up at council in 2007, but he feels he’s grown over the years. “I thought that if you had the most facts and the best argument, you could win. But you’ve got to motivate people emotionally too, and I had to learn the confidence to do that.”

So, what’s he going to do now “I really don’t know, honestly,” Iveson says. “I know it will be civically engaged. I was wired that way. I think it’s baked in by nature at this point. But that can take many different forms.”

Lazin says Iveson would be the first to admit he didn’t get done all he wanted to or others wanted him to. “I do think he’ll probably be back in politics at some point, but my guess is there will probably be a good long gap,” he says. “I really do believe the signs he’s sending out—‘Nah, not right now, because I need a break’—because it is a punishing job.”

The post The Legacy of Don Iveson appeared first on Alberta Views.

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

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

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

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

Turner revisits “Mind the Gap”:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Turner is author of The Patch (2017).

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 If the rest of the world lived like Edmonton, we’d need four more Earths to sustain our demands on nature.

An ecological footprint (or eco-footprint) measures how many resources you consume and how much waste you generate. If you have a long drive to work, heat and light a big house and consume foreign-grown foods and foreign-made goods—an iPhone from China; February tomatoes grown in Mexico—your eco-footprint gets bigger. Eco-footprints are measured in land use, with the average human requiring 2.8 hectares. This is a problem, since, at the current human population, our planet can only sustain usage of about 1.9 hectares per person. Eco-footprints are biggest in the richest countries. Canada has one of the world’s largest footprints, and Edmonton’s and Calgary’s are larger still. It takes 9.45 hectares to support each Edmontonian’s lifestyle. In other words, if everyone lived like Edmontonians do, we’d need four extra planets just to sustain the world’s population. Energy is Edmonton’s ecological Achilles heel. Four hectares of the average Edmontonian eco-footprint is land that supplies or absorbs energy use. While much of that energy is a result of coal-fired electrical plants that are beyond individual or city control, the second-largest part of Edmonton’s energy demand—transportation—is within the control of individuals and the City alike. Economist Mark Anielski, co-author of a 2004–05 Federation of Canadian Municipalities study that found Edmonton’s and Calgary’s eco-footprints to be the largest in the nation, says transportation is the “biggest single component” of eco-footprints that people can influence. It is also where the city can make its largest shifts. Since 2005, when Anielski’s eco-footprint calculation became a corporate performance indicator for the city, Edmonton’s footprint has risen slightly. Transportation, Anielski says, is roughly 35 per cent of that demand. Where it gets complicated, Anielski explains, is in the incentives influencing individual transportation choices, including where people choose to live. Anielski lives in Edmonton’s Old Strathcona neighbourhood, which has a Walk Score of 83 out of 100 (a measure of the ease of travelling a community on foot; 100 is most walkable). Anielski walks and bikes everywhere. “People always say, ‘I wish I could live there.’ Then they say—and there’s always a but—‘But I can’t afford it.’ Why would they like to live there They say they want to walk to the farmers market, bike trails, the river valley.” House prices in Old Strathcona are some of the highest in the city, which Anielski believes is an indication of the value people place on a walkable lifestyle. The high prices are also an incentive for many to live in the suburbs. Edmonton can’t manipulate housing prices to change that incentive, but it can push developers to build suburbs more like Old Strathcona and less like, for example, Windermere, an Edmonton suburb with a Walk Score of 11 out of 100. “Make the incentive to developers to plan for the highest possible Walk Scores,” Anielski says. Until Edmonton does so, it will continue to make economic sense for developers to create sprawl. “The way we deal with developers can change and has to change.”

 Over 90 per cent of Edmonton’s growth is suburban sprawl, and 8 in 10 residents make all of their daily trips by car.

Over the last two years Edmonton has added more than 60,000 residents. The growth has been so intense, says Kurt Borth, a University of Alberta expert in what’s called “location efficiency,” that Edmonton has no choice but to continue building suburbs. “To get the numbers [of people] that are coming to the city into housing, we have to develop the outer areas,” he says. That is, the population projections he has seen are far greater than infill housing in the existing city can absorb. “My location efficiency research speaks to the fact we need to develop in innovative ways, instead of the good old suburban model with cul-de-sacs.” Borth uses two extremes to explain location efficiency. Household A is connected to an urban grid that allows its residents to take transit, cycle or walk to work, buy groceries and take the kids to school. Household B has the same number of people but is located in a low-density, car-dependent neighbourhood. The difference House B consumes 40 per cent more energy than House A. “That’s an extreme example, but it shows what a car’s effect on your footprint is,” Borth says. Why do people choose House B, then Borth’s answer: perceived value. “People drive until they qualify [for a mortgage]”—that is, they head outside the city centre until the price of a house, at the size they desire, is affordable at their income. That they aren’t factoring in other costs is “one of the big takeaways from my research,” Borth says. “You’ve got this great house, but after 10 years, who’s coming out ahead?” Comparing two similar people, one in the inner city and one in a suburb requiring a vehicle with all of its hidden costs, “I’m not sure it’s the person who paid $50,000 less out there in the suburbs,” he says. Research has also shown that longer commutes and car dependence are connected to higher rates of heart disease, divorce and diabetes. “All these things add up,” Borth says, “but we still keep building in the same way.” To find out why Edmontonians choose to live in the suburbs or closer in, Borth spoke to 60 individuals. He found three distinct types. Group one was “very aware” of the costs a location creates and were willing to compromise on their house’s size or features to lower them. Group two “wouldn’t compromise,” wanted a large house and didn’t worry about commuting to afford it. Group three valued a house’s yard above the house and thus were attracted to mature, inner-city neighbourhoods. What Borth takes from these findings is that groups one and three are relatively ignored by current development in Edmonton, while group two seems to get all the love. Where, he asks, are the multi-family brownstone developments inside the city, where people might raise a family without moving to the ’burbs Where are the housing co-ops and laneway homes for those who “get” location efficiency Since 2009, single-family lot owners in Vancouver have been eligible to build a laneway home where their garage would otherwise be. Reports show that this housing option appeals to people in Borth’s groups one and three: the location-conscious and the boomers wanting to downsize. “We just don’t see those innovative types of products [in Edmonton],” says Borth. “We have either the suburban giant house or the tiny condo with a patio and no yard. There’s a lot of stuff in between that we’re not seeing here.” Ken Cantor, a vice-president of Qualico, one of western Canada’s largest new-home builders, rejects the idea that Edmonton’s suburbs are a problem for which inner city development is the answer. Those who criticize new surburban developments as “wasteful,” says Cantor, should concede that some of them are denser than many of the city’s mature neighbourhoods. Those who criticize Edmonton’s transit system and reliance on cars, he adds, should realize the city has five different employment hubs, most of them on the outskirts. “If you work down here, in Nisku,” Cantor says, pointing at a quickly sketched map, “that home in Windermere is a lot more efficient than a condo downtown. …Everybody talks about the stuff up in Horse Hill, and I kind of go, ‘If you’re living and working in Redwater or Fort Saskatchewan in Refinery Row, that’s an ecologically more appropriate place to live for your daily commute, because those jobs aren’t downtown.” It may seem Edmontonians are devoted to suburban living and don’t care much for the environment. But in many ways Edmonton is an environmentally progressive city. Back in 2009 Edmonton’s Clover Bar landfill was nearly full. The city had been spending millions on studies of more than 100 locations for a new landfill but residents near each potential site told city council they didn’t want a dump, thank you very much. With its main landfill at the brim and residents saying no to a new one, most cities would have gone for a Hail Mary strategy, like Toronto’s choice to send their garbage to Detroit. Instead, Edmonton decided to search for ways to limit what it put into Clover Bar. Edmonton was already quite good at keeping trash out of landfills. In 1988, when the city first realized Clover Bar had a space problem, Edmonton became one of the first large Canadian municipalities to launch curbside recycling. In 1992 Edmonton began mining the Clover Bar landfill for methane to generate electricity. In 2000 it built a massive composter and started a pickup program for organic waste. In 2009, when Clover Bar was nearing its limit, the city was already diverting over half of Edmonton’s garbage away from landfills. Today about 9 in 10 Edmonton residents recycle and nearly two-thirds of their household trash does not go to the landfill. The Clover Bar dump has become Edmonton’s innovation cluster, with a biofuels plant, a company that makes paper out of old cotton and recycled paper fibres, and a landfill-methane-powered electrical plant that produces 4.6 megawatts of electricity annually (enough to power about 4,600 homes). Municipal leaders from around the world come to Edmonton to see the Clover Bar landfill. David Dodge, a former Pembina Institute communications adviser who heads the Green Energy Futures project, says this waste story is an example of Edmonton being way ahead of its time, creating “one of the most innovative waste management processes in the world.” “It’s because we were backed into a corner,” he says. “Nobody wanted a landfill, so we got green.” When asked to comment on Edmonton’s eco-footprint, on why it isn’t at the same environmental standard as the city’s waste management, Dodge says, “I don’t think anybody feels backed into the corner” by the eco footprint. Regular people “have no idea what it means.” Does the City of Edmonton feel compelled to act on its outsized ecological footprint Its website acknowledges that Edmonton’s eco-footprint is four and a half times larger than what the Earth can sustain per capita. The City does have a strategy to help people understand the problem. Its Sustainable Development department says energy use is the city’s biggest challenge to reducing its eco-footprint—not surprising given that nearly all energy used in Edmonton is linked to gasoline, oil, coal or natural gas. Alberta’s new climate change strategy, which includes getting Alberta’s electricity production off coal by 2030, will help. But much more needs to be done. Edmonton’s goal is to be carbon neutral by 2050, emitting only as much CO2 as it sequesters or offsets. The plan includes reducing fossil fuel use by 25 per cent and greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent. The City will attempt this mostly by altering citizen behaviour (e.g., creating bike lanes), greening the electrical grid, encouraging “infill” developments, incentivizing greener buildings and using more energy-efficient vehicles for the City’s fleet. Edmonton’s LRT will expand by up to five new lines that will connect to West Edmonton Mall and suburban population centres. New lines may extend beyond the ring road into suburbs such as Horse Hill and employment hubs such as Refinery Row. The costs will be high, but by 2035 so too will the savings on energy: about $2.5-billion more savings than costs, the City says. Individuals are also key to achieving the change, says Chandra Tomaras, a project manager with Edmonton Sustainable Development. “People have to be educated about the challenges and impacts of energy use,” she says. “The first couple of years are really going to be about establishing education and awareness.” One proposal is to mandate energy labels for new homes, similar to those already on refrigerators. “There’s no one silver bullet,” Tomaras says. “A lot of different actions need to happen to become a sustainable and resilient city.” A key response to Edmonton’s eco-footprint problem is the Blatchford development. Just three kilometres from Edmonton’s core, on land made available by the closure of the municipal airport, Blatchford will house up to 30,000 people when it is completed (likely in 2017). Concept drawings show an LRT gliding through a walkable community reminiscent of Europe, with multi-floor, multi-family housing and streetside retail outlets. The City is touting Blatchford as “one of the world’s largest sustainable communities.” The plans are ambitious and logical: a connection to Edmonton’s LRT; a district energy system to heat and cool water and buildings; buildings that exceed the current energy-use building code; capture of waste heat from hot water going down the drain; energy supplied by renewable sources. For David Dodge, Blatchford is proof Edmonton doesn’t need to compromise on its vision and ambitions, and may even have turned a corner on its wasteful ways. “When they announced it, I thought, ‘Okay, they’ll call it green and then they’ll do some big compromise and it won’t really be green,’” he says. “That was my fear, as somebody who would really like to see us do this well. But I’m increasingly confident we can and will.” Blatchford is unique in that the City of Edmonton is partly its developer, setting targets that it will then ask private-sector housing developers to meet. In a way, it’s a trial run for developments to come later as the city learns to demand more and design better. For some, the City’s larger than usual involvement in Blatchford is the fly in the ointment. Developer Ken Cantor says he was behind Blatchford, even if it would take too long to be built. He was impressed with the original vision and the best-in-the-world planners who created the strategy. But ever since that vision was released in 2012 Cantor says the city has “played with this piece, adjusted that piece, deleted this component and deleted that component” for reasons only it understands. The result, he says, is a development that’s less green. “Now we’re delivering something for the sake of delivering it. It’s being diluted, I think, substantially.” Others say the main targets for energy use intensity at Blatchford, perhaps the most important components, remain. The biggest test for Blatchford may be if people such as Lisa Jimmo can be swayed to change the way they live for what the new community offers. “I made a conscious choice to live out here [in Horse Hill], but I’m getting older, too,” Jimmo says. “We might come into the city. We’re looking to see what the development is going to look like.”

Tim Querengesser is the editor of Metro Edmonton. Send your comments on this story to letters@albertaviews.ab.ca.

To learn more about how walk scores are calculated go here: https://www.redfin.ca/how-walk-score-works

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Stanley is an outspoken agitator for urban densification and renewal in a city that grew by nearly 40,000 people in 2014. As Calgary’s general manager of planning, development and assessment, Stanley leads a department that has historically directed growth toward the city’s edges while existing neighbourhoods hollowed out. That’s now starting to shift, thanks to a long-range growth blueprint that aims for a “compact city”—balancing growth between the city’s fringes and developed areas. The aim is to shift one-third of new growth into existing neighbourhoods by 2039 and half by 2069, while densifying everywhere. Stanley is tasked with implementing this plan at a time when unprecedented growth is straining the city’s budget and services, pushing municipal debt to nearly $4-billion. “As a fast-growing city, to capture the true cost of growth now is critical,” he says.

Stanley has taken his message on the costs of growth and the benefits of densification far beyond city hall. A prolific blogger and dynamic public speaker, he’s been on a visible mission to animate public dialogue since he arrived in 2012. “What Rollin Stanley brings to the conversation is helping people understand what we need to change and why,” says community activist and city hall observer Cheri Macauley.

At a time when politicians and bureaucrats alike speak of community engagement while making their doings as obtuse as possible, Stanley is of a different school. To him, the public dialogue on urban issues in Calgary is encouraging but not sufficiently broad; he wants to go beyond the usual suspects who show up at city council meetings. He wants to engage the unengaged. “When you get them thinking about outcomes, it’ll change the discussion and help balance competing interests,” he says.

Stanley arrived at a critical time of transition for both the city and its government. Naheed Nenshi, an outspoken proponent of density and a purveyor of what he called “politics in full sentences,” had been elected as mayor in 2010. Before that, Nenshi was a regular in council chambers, advocating for Plan It Calgary—the aforementioned blueprint to curb sprawl and shift growth into existing neighbourhoods. The plan was in keeping with IMAGINECalgary, an extensive consultation with 18,000 Calgarians that centred on sustainability.

Still, Calgary’s old guard opposed Plan It. Guided by homebuilder lobby groups, the Calgary Herald editorialized that the plan made “no sense” and “violated all of the important steps of viable planning.” (The Herald’s publisher at the time, Guy Huntingford, went on to become CEO of the Urban Development Institute, a homebuilder lobby group, in 2013. He declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Council approved Plan It in 2009, creating two new master documents: the Municipal Development Plan, which guides future growth, and the Calgary Transportation Plan, which emphasizes transportation choice, including walking, transit and cycling.

The Plan It process broadened public dialogue. “Previously most of that conversation was going on between city council and city administration and the development industry,” says Macauley. “Those were considered the stakeholders. The citizens didn’t really have a lot of voice.” Plan It represented a landmark victory for engaged urbanists. They now had a voice, one with some clout.

Rollin Stanley is an outspoken agitator for urban densification and renewal.

With key bureaucrats in city administration nearing retirement, Calgary needed new leaders to implement the new plans. Like many governments, the city has a history of creating big plans with so-so follow-through. “We had visionary goals, and yet were having difficulty maintaining them,” says long-time inner-city councillor Druh Farrell.

For years, Farrell had warned about the unsustainable costs of growth. New communities cost more for the city to service than they generate in taxes and developer levies—fees charged to developers by the city to pay for such things as sewer pipes, buses, fire stations and traffic interchanges. In 2011, under Nenshi’s leadership, the city more than doubled these levies from one-quarter of growth costs to half (an average of $310,000 per hectare), but taxpayers are still left with the bill for the rest. Nenshi has repeatedly said Calgary’s subsidy is unfair to future generations, and growth should pay for itself in full.

By 2012 Calgary’s debt had risen past $3-billion—having doubled in five years—to cover growth costs, including new water infrastructure and projects such as the West LRT. “We recognized that we couldn’t continue doing things the same way, but hadn’t come up with a solution,” says Farrell, who was on the hiring committee for the city planner position.

Enter Rollin Stanley.

By the time he was recruited, Stanley was something of a rock star in the world of urban planning. A native of northern Ontario and graduate of Ryerson University, Stanley spent the bulk of his career as a senior planner in Toronto, where he helped transform an inner-city industrial area into what is now known as the Entertainment District. In 2002 he jumped at the chance to lead the planning department in St. Louis, Missouri, a city with neighbourhoods plagued by poverty, crime and vacant buildings.

“Our big job was to convince people that the resources there could be cobbled together in a different way,” he says. Stanley touted historic preservation as a key tool for repopulating St. Louis’s neighbourhoods with residents and services. Through a combination of federal, state and local historic tax credits, his department found a way to offset the cost of redeveloping old buildings. “All of a sudden, these abandoned 12-storey shoe factories become attractive investments,” says Stanley. “Rather than tearing them down for a parking lot, we could turn around and make them something.”

In 2008 Stanley took the job as planning director for Maryland’s Montgomery County, adjacent to Washington DC. Stanley says he wanted a new challenge and liked the prospect of managing a larger department (over 150 staff) in an urban/suburban setting. He quickly made a name for himself. The Washington Post dubbed Stanley “the brash bad boy of Washington regional planning” for his provocative style. He was a polarizing figure, pursuing his vision of densification in a county where half-hour commutes (one way) were the norm. He panned large parking lots and praised high-rises as fine places to raise kids. Traffic is good, he famously said—it forces people to slow down and consider alternative transportation. As well, he noted, the great cities of the world are known for their congestion.

At a chamber of commerce breakfast, Stanley said “many people think [large houses] are the next slums. They are too big and people are having trouble selling them.” The way of the future, he predicted, is smaller homes near public transit.

As a planner, he worked toward this future. In one of his department’s most ambitious accomplishments, a languishing, car-dependent White Flint Mall was transformed into a massive transit-oriented development with 10,000-plus units of housing, along with retail, bike paths and plazas. Phase I of the project was completed in late 2014.

In Montgomery County, Stanley’s approach got some residents excited—and others infuriated. On the plus side, his department held a speaker series on urban transformation to engage citizens in planning issues. He did regular walkabouts with residents, assembling groups to stroll through neighbourhoods and talk about what worked, what didn’t and what outcomes they would like to see. “What happens in cities is people become too immersed in the process and the rules,” says Stanley. “And far too often the rules tend to be counterproductive to what people really want.” The walkabouts, and Stanley’s public presence overall, made an impression. One Washington-area blogger noted Stanley’s “ability to make good planning and design relevant to ordinary, politically uninvolved people.”

On the flip side, Stanley was harshly dismissive toward critics of his vertical vision and had little patience for NIMBYism. In a magazine interview conducted months before he took the Calgary job, he labelled a group of his critics “rich white women” who spread fear at his public appearances. That set off a political firestorm. Calls for his resignation followed and local officials distanced themselves from Stanley’s comments. He apologized publicly.

Calgary had not been on Stanley’s radar since he left Toronto. When he was approached about the Calgary gig, he was intrigued. The successful candidate would lead a department of about 800—overseeing not just the planning department but also the development and assessment departments. Stanley met with Nenshi before his interview and viewed the mayor as a smart leader open to new ideas: a key factor in his decision to accept the Calgary role. (The city refused to disclose who sat on the hiring committee, citing HR policy, but Stanley says there was representation from council, senior administration and HR.)

New communities cost more for the city to service than they generate in taxes and developer levies.

Stanley also consulted Vancouver architect Bing Thom, among others, for their take on the booming Alberta city. They all told him more or less the same thing: go west. Because Calgary is changing so rapidly, you can make a difference in shaping its future.

Standing at Olympic Plaza across from City Hall, Stanley gives me a crash course on how recent Calgary developments reflect its changing face.

Exhibit A: a newly opened Walmart on prairie farmland at the city’s eastern edge, by the ring road. This gets Stanley riled. “You think that would have happened in Washington?” he says. “No. We were making them multi-storey Walmarts… with 80 per cent of their parking inside. Tenants are coming here saying, ‘Well, maybe Calgary is the last place on the planet where I can get still away with this.’ Up until recently they have.”

Exhibit B: a new Best Buy on trendy 17th Avenue SW, in a four-storey mixed-use building with underground parking. “It’s fabulous,” Stanley allows. “But if there would have been a condo on [top], it would have been even more fabulous.”

Exhibit C: the Arriva 1 condo tower in Victoria Park, a neighbourhood the city has razed for redevelopment over the past decade. This is to his liking: commercial space beneath residences stacked 34 floors high. “When we look at that tower over there, I can tell you that it’s paying about $650,000 a year in property tax.”

On this last point, Stanley is relentless. He advocates for inner-city investment and projects such as the Peace Bridge partly because the core generates the most property tax revenue thanks to its density. In presentations to everyone from city council to the Rotary Club, Stanley—himself a condo-dweller in the inner-city community of Mission—illustrates how denser housing boosts city revenue. One slide shows a 114-unit condo on land that previously had 11 lots with single-family homes and fourplexes. When the condo went up, that land’s assessed value spiked from $5.6-million to $45-million—and as a result, revenue from property taxes grew from $35,000 to $270,000. “I tell [audiences], ‘If you want your residential taxes to stay low, we need to put these kinds of developments where it makes sense.’”

At Olympic Plaza he asks me to look around, and explains why he’s so passionate about urban reinvestment. “We have to understand where the engine for growth is—it’s right here where we’re looking. If you and I got on bikes, within a 15-minute radius of where we are [is] where the money is coming from to finance the city’s growth. We need to reinvest it. All successful businesses invest in themselves.”

Stanley’s arrival gave a lively jolt to the vision articulated through Plan It. His enthusiasm for density also reopened old debates. He’d reference municipalities from Shanghai to St. Louis, driving home the need for cities to grow up, not just out. This made him enemies. “That’s like heresy in Calgary, with our open spaces and single-family homes with big lots,” says suburban councillor Diane Colley-Urquhart, who represents the city’s deep southwest.

In early 2013 Stanley was at the centre of controversy again. The Canadian Home Builders’ Association–Calgary Region interpreted a comment in one of his speeches as proof of a suburban development “freeze.” In response, Nenshi demanded an apology and briefly banned the CHBA from city committees. Stanley said the accusation was “negative toward my staff,” and pointed out the city had 1,640 hectares of serviced suburban land ready for new houses. The CHBA recanted publicly and made peace with the mayor.

Amid the controversy, however, Colley-Urquhart went on the attack. “Stanley has too much time on his hands,” she wrote in a Calgary Sun op-ed. “Since arriving, he seems to have been on the public speaking circuit constantly espousing many of his eastern and American ideas about how great other cities are.” She accused him of being disrespectful of the city Calgarians had built: “Rollin comes across as being the founder of increased density in established communities, while always implying suburban growth and where Calgarians chose to live is over.” Colley-Urquhart told Metro that she would “continue to be one of his biggest challengers.”

It’s surprising, then, to hear Colley-Urquhart now describe Stanley as the right leader for the right time. A number of factors won her over, including his response to her criticism. “He didn’t attempt to marginalize me,” she says. She was also impressed by his community walkabouts, where he went out and listened to residents. And his efforts to preserve historic buildings signalled a respect for the city’s heritage that she didn’t detect early on.

More significantly, Stanley has made a point of emphasizing that the suburbs and inner city need each other, and that denser suburbs and “complete communities” are a balanced way for Calgary to grow. “He sees a place for both,” says Colley-Urquhart. The southwest community of Garrison Woods is an example of the complete community concept, with high-density residential within walking distance of amenities such as grocery stores. Farther out, in the southeast suburbs, Quarry Park is meant to be a place where people can live, work and play (though it’s more car-dependent than Garrison Woods). Imperial Oil is currently moving its offices from downtown into Quarry Park.

A new home in Westgate, 1960. In the 1950s and 1960s Calgary shifted from planning to a costly blind faith in the free market.

Stanley is excited about a developer that’s looking at building over 1,000 rental units north of the airport—a move that would let airport employees live near their workplace. “That’s an opportunity for the future,” he says. “The discussion isn’t about suburban growth/downtown growth. It’s about putting us in the financial position to grow into all segments.”

Colley-Urquhart and others also appreciate that Stanley is a bureaucrat with little patience for bureaucracy. His blog, for example, shows a stack of Area Redevelopment Plans (documents guiding development in existing neighbourhoods)—“most just waiting for a redo based on their lifespan,” says Stanley’s caption. The plans are supposed to be revised ever few years, but, as Stanley laments in his blog, they tend to pile up: “The pile gets so high there is no way the plans can be revisited in a timely fashion and soon 10 years pass. Building trends change, neighbourhoods change. The plans become outdated, yet they are still the rule for new applications to abide by.”

Stanley has reorganized his department to make it more responsive and focused on outcomes. The planning department is piloting a more nimble process to reinvigorate main streets throughout the city, with input from residents and businesses. “In the past we would have taken years and years to come up with the planning documents,” says councillor Farrell. “We hope to be looking at these completed documents within a year and a half. That’s a major accomplishment.”

Some days, Calgary can be a frustrating place for Rollin Stanley. He doesn’t understand local resistance to projects such as the Peace Bridge. “This is one of the surprises about Calgary,” he says. “Because there’s so much here, there seems to be a lack of knowledge about what other cities are doing to maintain their place in the world.”

Bike lanes are another example. In early 2014, city council approved a downtown network of separated bike lanes—but only after heated debate. “You’re sitting here thinking, it’s 2014 and we’re having this discussion that happened in so many other places a long, long time ago,” says Stanley. “This debate has been had enough times, and the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour: This helps business. This helps the city grow. You can’t refute that anymore.”

But patience is required, and Stanley always comes back to the importance of broadening public dialogue. He goes about this with a marketer’s flair. Twice he’s led a mini film-festival at the downtown library called Baconfest, screening films by architect Ed Bacon (actor Kevin’s dad) and other documentaries on urban issues, and hosting Q&As afterward. And yes, there’s actual bacon—supplied by Charcut, a popular downtown restaurant. “We have to adapt how we do things to make it interesting to everybody,” he says.

Meanwhile, the effects of the Municipal Development Plan are starting to show. From January to November 2013, new housing starts in Calgary were split roughly half and half between single-detached and multi-family homes. Over that same period in 2014, multi-family accounted for 63 per cent of all new starts. And while many new migrants to Calgary are going to the outskirts, many inner-city communities also saw a population boost in 2014.

Stanley’s department scored a coup last October when city council opened the door to more mid-rise condo projects by allowing six-storey buildings with wood frames, following the lead of Ontario and BC. The building code previously capped wood buildings at four storeys for fire safety reasons. (The new buildings will have extra fire safeguards.) Before, anything taller than four storeys had to be concrete, which is expensive. Developers cheered the move, with the Canadian Home Builders’ Association calling it a win for all.

Developers are also warming to infill development. “I think the biggest shift we’ve seen over the last few years are some of those builders that were primarily focused on new communities have transitioned or are looking at opportunities in infill and redevelopment,” says Amie Blanchette, director of government affairs for the Canadian Home Builders’ Association–Calgary Region. Companies such as Cardel, Baywest Homes and Brookfield Homes have added infill construction to their portfolios in recent years.

The city has warned that each new family coming to town costs Calgary some $44,000 for such things as utilities, transit upgrades and fire services—and that these expenses don’t come with revenue to match. “We can’t sustain this level of growth from the tax base,” city manager Jeff Fielding told council last October. “There’s a delta between what we take in and what we spend, and that’s growing all the time.”

Now city hall is working on hammering out a new deal with developers to ensure the municipality’s financial sustainability. The current Standard Development Agreement, which sets levy rates, expires on December 31, 2015. Nenshi is seeking a “brand new way” of working with developers: He wants full cost recovery. Similarly, Stanley reiterates that it’s critical to capture growth costs now. “The story we’re trying to convey to council is that growth isn’t just a planning problem,” says Stanley. “It’s a finance problem.”

Cheri Macauley has been following City Hall closely, and says Stanley has successfully changed the conversation around the cost of growth. She likens pre-Stanley Calgary politics to the way climate change was discussed in the media for years: Some say this is an issue, others contend it’s not. “Now there seems to be more and more consensus in council and in the media,” she says. “We’re not talking about whether or not we can pay for this—now we’ve figured it out. The tone has shifted.”

All of Stanley’s talk about urban reinvestment may be changing how people see their city. While the Peace Bridge opened amid controversy over its cost in 2012, its downstream sibling, the $25-million St. Patrick’s Island pedestrian bridge, opened with no controversy last fall—just celebration. Stanley praised the latter as a key connection that will create more opportunities in the city. And yes—Stanley’s aunt came to appreciate the Peace Bridge a little more after he gave her that guided tour. No doubt he’ll keep working on her.

Jeremy Klaszus is a weekly civic affairs columnist for Metro Calgary. He’s also a stay-at-home dad and a regular freelancer.

The post Rollin Stanley appeared first on Alberta Views.

As cultures broad see capitals deemed
Horse snort less stable than once it seemed
Formed there is new wiggle in rooms
Scribes awl pin light through prescription doom
In blankets gold will weight there be?
To sway frayed throats of Necessity
Hooved aeration to fescue razed
Ignored voices on borrowed lands graze
Wailing, cajoling, and though vapours still
Condense to drips, repeat, pray fill

Okay, here is basically how it works. This article is a “journey” piece (the artistic adventures of Kris Demeanor / Alberta’s quest for meaning), so I mimic a few lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Each line serves the tonic—my role in Calgary at a time of cultural growth and national notice contributing (hopefully) to the enriched health of our collective souls and intellects, against the odds. Prairie imagery. Avoid obvious word pairings, change “poke” to “awl,” “taunting” to “prescription,” “floods” to “drips,” “unheard voices” to “ignored voices,” have fun with Late Medieval phrasing, count the syllables and speak it aloud a few times to assess flow.

I think I like it. I can’t actually tell if it’s any good. There’s care and thought in the verse, but I don’t know if it will connect with the general public or pass muster with career poets. Unstudied in poetry, I practise a diffusion-based, intuitive, self-conscious kind of improvisation. Since March 2012 I’ve felt like someone with a Grade 9 education and a penchant for insult and bar stools, proclaimed King through force of personality. Like someone who’s handy but unlicensed, and, in a boom, puts a decal on the truck reading “I Am a Legitimate Construction Company,” learning on the job while cashing in on the frenzy.

I’m a songwriter. I need an audience. So I became Calgary’s first poet laureate. If that sounds glib and falsely modest, I certainly don’t suggest the selection process was arbitrary or that my writer friends who were also considered weren’t being recognized for their gifts. It was just a “Calgary” choice, an endorsement of that over-referenced “can-do” spirit. Calgary and I, like a sitcom with a heart, were going to learn about poetry… together.

To contextualize the journey, a quick word on the “What is Poetry?” debate. It’s a non-starter. At the 2013 Edmonton Poetry Festival, where 16 poets laureate gathered, all we acknowledged was how literary genres evolve, cross over and learn from each other, and that ghettoization is not only pointless but an inaccurate reading of history. Summed up by Scottish poet laureate Liz Lochhead: “When I see poetry, I hear it, I hear it spoken and I see it performed. Is it poetry, spoken word, song, theatre—who fucking cares Just make it good.” There.

So, great, it’s all poetry, but I already know I can energize an audience through the lyrics of my songs, my theatrical presentation of rhythmic spoken-word pieces. This is not easy to do. Connecting with people while keeping content standards high requires craft. I tap in to the psychology of the suburbs, the struggles of immigration, and woefully forgotten realities of First Nations history, illuminating something about Calgary, all to a metronomic foot stomp.

How does one fulfill the role of the good-natured jester who gives the occasional goose of scary clarity?

But back to the sitcom—while Calgarians understand music as a delivery system for creative language, when it comes to spoken poetry, reaction often ranges from indifference to aversion. I believe the jury—a six-person panel selected by Calgary Arts Development and consisting of, among others, a poet, a U of C professor, an arts writer and an arts administrator—named me the first poet laureate in hopes I would have the performance chops to help penetrate the masses’ preconceptions about poetry, and enough sophistication to hearten the intellectuals. To this end, I resolved to lean less on the guitar, focus on ink and page, plumb Calgary’s appetite for poetry and stimulate it, and honour a title that rightly acknowledges poetry as the best way of documenting a society and expressing its collective passion—with sublimity and elegance, in ways that beg patience, reflection, interpretation, imagination.

The traditional mandate of the poet laureate (England’s many centuries of laureates include Spenser, Wordsworth, Tennyson; the US has had a series of them going back to the 1930s, though they were called “Consultants in Poetry” until the 1980s) is to promote the reading and writing of poetry to the populace, and though there are usually no specific duties attached to the honour, there’s an expectation that new work will be written for important occasions (“Ode on Stephen’s New Christmas Sweater,” “Elegy for a Reclaimed Tailings Pond”). An honorarium comes with the role, which in Calgary is generously provided by private-sector endorsement of the program because there’s-no-goddamn-way-my-taxpayer-dollars-are-going-toward-something-as-wholly-unnecessary-as-poetry. Historically, payment consisted of 105 imperial gallons of sherry. I wish.

At the gathering of poets laureate in Edmonton, the limits of official duty were discussed: Are there things we do refuse or should refuse to write about Should we be subversive If so, how do we challenge the status quo while celebrating and honouring our communities How does one fulfill the role not only of conduit between the general public and the literary arts but of “official poet” to a city, the good-natured jester who gives the occasional goose of scary clarity These questions aren’t theoretical—they’re tested. Both our parliamentary and Scottish laureates were asked to, in their official roles, create and deliver poems marking the Queen’s Diamond jubilee. Each had issues with monarchy. They did their jobs with reluctance. The laureate of Victoria was asked to do a poem for city council for Canada Day, and celebrated Dominion by reminding city council about whose traditional land they were on and how long it had actually been inhabited before they came along. A couple of the small-town Ontario laureates are careful not to rattle the sensibilities of their local councils and citizens, and thus they avoid controversial topics to ensure they don’t screw things up for other artists who require grants in a conservative community.

I had a lot of practice finding the palatability/revolutionary balance growing up. My art-teacher dad wouldn’t let my sister or me give people store-bought cards; they had to be handmade. I became adept at chronicling landmark family occasions through verse and song and putting them in the cards, based on fragments of personal memory, historical fact and input from relatives. It became the thing I did. It was always of utmost importance to get laughs, which I did through the technique of the soft roast, detailing events in the person’s life that are embarrassing but never outright humiliating. I take the same approach writing poems for Calgary. One of the first things I was told by the City’s poet-laureate liaison was—and this was truly appreciated—“We’re expecting you to speak your mind and stir things up once in a while.” Alas, I regret not causing more trouble than I have to this point. I’ve witnessed that, even among the artistically conservative, or those who may be unconvinced the city needs a poet laureate at all, there is an acceptance, even an expectation, of boldness of opinion bordering on outright provocation from our artists. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising—essentially what holds me back from turning my observations into rants is that, as far as fostering thought and discussion, the time-release capsule is more effective than the hammer. Allegory and metaphor are still the legs of critique, and South Park-esque satire can allow great latitude for commentary while keeping the crowd laughing; but highlighting bald reality in exposing a truth is often the greatest way to reach an audience. People want to say “That’s me!” or “Thank god that’s not me!”

Most criticism of me in the past year has been general and third-hand, from writers indignant that I am poet laureate at all (songwriters aren’t poets, and cannot claim to be both), but occasionally a concerned citizen takes umbrage at a specific poem. A friend saved me the clipping from the Calgary Herald (friends tend to enjoy making sure I see all the dirt) in which someone complained about the waste of taxpayer dollars on “unnecessary” programs, saying at least Calgary’s laureate is privately financed, but citing offence at the subject matter of a poem I did for the Stampede’s 100th anniversary called “The Roughneck and the Whore,” about a one-night midway romance between an oil sands worker and an escort. What the complainant fails to mention is that I presented the piece at an event organized by the Stampede and WordFest, the point of which was to tell unique, untold stories about the greatest outdoor show on Earth—the kind often glossed over by usual marketing traditions. Plus, I did it in a very relatable, traditional cowboy-poetry style. The children seemed to like it.

Even with years of practice, the nature of commissioned work is odd. I was all gung-ho during the interview junket last year and told everyone I was going to say “yes” to every request I could field in the first year. The fact is, when you have a commission, you are writing on a topic you very likely would not be naturally inspired to explore in depth. You are presenting to people for whom this is an important subject, so you have a duty to research the topic and present a piece that speaks meaningfully to the participants of the forum/symposium/launch/vigil/pub crawl. My big stress is finding the angle, the “in.” I pace around my front yard for a week looking for it, the perspective that will make the piece, well, poetic.

For the Stop Poverty Coalition, I detailed the etymological evolution of the phrase “pick yourself up by your bootstraps,” from an absurd, impossible task to a symbol of individual fortitude, to computer “bootstrapping,” using a small amount of code to help load more complex code. For a suicide-prevention symposium I imagined a video game of surmountable challenges that mimic those in a dark and confused teen mind. For the 100th anniversary of the Calgary Public Library System I fantasized the opening day of the Memorial branch in 1913 through the eyes of an imagined family and a host of strange characters including Walter the Curmudgeon, Lilian the Prophesier and Albert the Man Who Missed the Gravy Train. Speaking before pollster and CBC commentator Alan Gregg, who was delivering an address called “Erosion of Trust,” I posited that a modern Prometheus ought to give us a new dose of knowledge and blind hope to encourage us to venture further out of our caves. For the City Centre Downtown Planning Commission, speaking in a conference room full of developers, I had to get cheeky (it was 9:00 a.m.; they were developers), and start the piece “Build it… and they will… still not come… unless…” An early piece for ATP’s season launch was a giddy act of sacrilege, creating a mashup of Shelley’s “Love’s Philosophy” with my own rebuttal woven through. For effect, I wrote it by a brook, in a Moleskine, while drinking wine from a coffee mug.

Sometimes my vantage point as invited artist sees local history in the making and points to the starkness of our city’s contradictions. At the debate “Calgary’s Cowboy Past—Living Legacy or Just History?” for The Walrus magazine, I presented a piece that invoked Gene Autry’s Cowboy Code in order to demonstrate that the true and noble tenets of cowboy culture are actually getting steamrolled by money culture and obscured by our tepid illusions of Western pride. I got to see then-future Calgary Centre MP candidate Chris Turner cream fellow candidate (and eventual victor) Joan Crockatt, the latter inaccurately invoking the just-recited Cowboy Code as an example of our “entrepreneurial spirit,” a phrase patly repeated dozens of times out of confused desperation. No wonder she never showed up for election debates.

The poet laureate role has immersed me deep in a city of infuriating possibility. But in many ways, I float. I hover. I don’t belong firmly in any one literary or artistic world, and maybe that makes me a universal hack—or uniquely equipped to enjoy, appreciate and champion each realm equally. Maybe it allows me to approach my own work in all these genres with a certain creative fearlessness. I do know that this observer/participant status, coupled with the privilege of the poet laureate position, has opened for me a window into the worlds of business, politics and social services, and made it clear that our society still doesn’t have a clue about what writers and artists do or what they’re worth. The conception that they operate in a different realm, a fantasy of heady creation and narcissism outside of “real work” is fallacy. They are on the inside, writing with our children in schools, our parents at the residence, at your bank job, asking you to participate in a haiku contest, hoping you’ll want to. Concerned taxpayers need to know that return on investment is tangible. I have met young people on many occasions this year who have told me that writing, slam poetry, song, art—having a creative venue of expression—has saved their lives. Nobody says that about Fruit Ninja or Angry Birds. And I get this one a lot: “I never liked poetry before, but…” Something’s twigging.

Is the poet laureate position one symbol of a changing Calgary—a new West of Nenshi, food trucks, bike lanes and Car2Go, of wanting something more out of our communities, another layer Is it necessary I suppose anything outside eating, sleeping and shitting is beyond necessity, a judgment, a decision. We enrich our lives with stimuli, salve them with distraction, sport, and yes, with poetry. We don’t always understand poetry, but we want to. It’s non-obvious, difficult. It parrots our confusion but, like a vaccine, can liberate us.

The most asked question in the past year—“So, how’s the poet thing going?” And the second most asked—“So, what do you do, anyway?” Handcuffed by the broadness of the queries, I usually mumble, “Uh… it’s been an adventure,” and, “Uh, well, lots of stuff,” and then perfunctorily list off half a dozen of the events I’ve written pieces for, mixed with strange public appearances that have required no effort beyond choosing between the crab puff and the bacon-wrapped scallop.

But I have to stop being such a smartass. I still have four months left to make an impression. Calgary and I are taking a master class at the University of Greater Expectations. (Cue sitcom theme music—freeze frame of Kris and a bunch of word-hungry Calgarians with notepads in front of the Peace Bridge.)

Kris Demeanor is Calgary’s first poet laureate. He is also a prolific songwriter and performer.

The post Fool of the New West appeared first on Alberta Views.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McLeod Trail, Calgary, Alta. (Beate Wichmann)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Mind the Gap appeared first on Alberta Views.

Hughes recently retired after 32 years at the Geological Survey of Canada, where he mapped and analyzed the nation’s supplies of coal, gas and oil. Now he’s back in Calgary to sell his house so he can move to a property he owns on Cortes Island off the coast of BC.

He gestures with his arm, a wide sweep that takes in the downtown as well as suburbs that sprawl out toward the horizon, a city that at 746 km2 occupies nearly as much land as New York City but with only a tenth of its population. “It’s simply not sustainable,” Hughes says.

At the Geological Survey of Canada, Hughes researched and fine-tuned a talk he’s delivered to numerous gatherings of industry and government officials in Canada and the US. Based on his analysis of global energy reserves, Hughes thinks we’re close to peak oil, the point when global oil extraction reaches a production peak and oil prices grow ever higher as global reserves begin a slide into irreversible decline. He looks over Calgary, a city whose own economic development agency calls it “the capital of Canada’s energy industry… the decision-making hub and head office location of every energy company doing business in this country.”

Hughes shakes his head. “I’d go so far as to say the situation is hopeless,” he says. “I think that until we get awareness of this problem to a certain tipping point, politicians won’t do anything. [Change] would be political suicide—unless citizens understood why it’s being done.”

Like many North American cities, Calgary followed a suburban growth model. In 1950 the city dismantled an extensive streetcar system, and private vehicles became the dominant mode of transit just as oil and gas discoveries brought immigrants and fortune-seekers flooding into Alberta. Bulldozers gobbled fields and pastures. New homes sprouted at the city’s perimeter. It’s a pattern that continues to this day: when oil prices are high, construction booms. Calgary is now home to over a million people (1,071,515 according to the 2010 census); a growing, low-density city where suburban homes and shopping malls envelop hills, coulees and prairie once home to ranches and farms.

Today oil prices are again rising, and despite signs that global peak oil may be imminent, it’s clear that many Calgarians don’t expect their city to “transition” away from their current growth model anytime soon. In June 2010 the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers released a report projecting oil sands production in northern Alberta could triple in the next 15 years. In its best-case scenario, CAPP predicts Alberta will produce 3.5 million barrels of oil per day, or 81 per cent of Canada’s total crude production by 2025. The US Department of Energy expects that by 2035 oil and natural gas will provide over half of our southern neighbour’s energy needs, with Canada providing up to 40 per cent of total US imports. But as geologists such as Hughes point out, mining sticky bitumen from muskeg—in terms of the energy investment and the environmental cost that comes with extracting the oil—is “scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

“The long-term prognosis for Calgary, unless there’s a paradigm shift, is not good.”—geologist David Hughes 

In 2010, one of England’s largest insurance companies, Lloyd’s of London, released a report that warned of increasing oil scarcity, predicting that by 2013 the price of oil would be over $200 US per barrel. In the US, a Joint Forces Command report said that by 2012, “surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.” A leaked German military report said peak oil would occur sometime around 2010, and that shrinking global oil supplies could tilt the world’s economy toward mass-scale upheaval in 10–15 years, a market crisis that could create “room for ideological and extremist alternatives to existing forms of government.”

In a peak oil future, all that’s clear is that Alberta will have a growing share of remaining global oil reserves. The province might capitalize as a result. And it might not. It’s unclear how much of an advantage our reserves will be, given that Albertans are Canada’s biggest per capita consumers of energy, will have to compete in the global market for oil that’s still mostly refined out of province, and are largely dependent on imported food (which will become more expensive as oil gets scarcer).

“We may end up being insulated because of our oil,” says Calgary engineer Chris Wade. “That may allow Alberta, and Calgary [in particular], to maintain an inefficient, wasteful quality of life longer than most other places. I think that would be a huge mistake.”

Wade was director of infrastructure services for the City of Calgary from 2000 to 2010. Prior to that, he was the City’s chief engineer. He took his retirement in April 2010 after 38 years of service. “The layout of the city is very energy intensive,” he says. “We’re forced into high consumption by our urban form. We build freeways, we build ring roads around the perimeter; hell, we spend hundreds of millions of dollars and traffic is still plugged up. It doesn’t work.”

We’re sitting at a table in Vendome Café, in the neighbourhood of Sunnyside. The café is packed, every seat taken, the clatter of dishes and cutlery ringing through the din of conversation. Wade’s only back in the city for a week, having spent much of the summer building an energy-efficient home on Hornby Island off the BC coast. “Calgary developed in the heyday of the automobile,” he says. “Our whole urban planning was based on cheap land, cheap oil, cheap gas and cheap automobiles. We’re too spread out.” He leans back in his chair. “Our current urban form is not well suited to efficiencies and quality of life.”

As director of infrastructure services, Wade played a key role in initiatives aimed at creating a more sustainable city. In 2003 Calgary became the first Canadian municipality to adopt Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) standards for new City buildings. By 2012, through projects such as the District Energy Centre, a $31.8-million facility providing renewable energy for heating downtown buildings, the City of Calgary will become the continent’s first large municipal government to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 50 per cent below 1990 levels. Wade also participated in “imagineCALGARY,” a 100-year sustainability visioning process, and helped draft Plan It Calgary, a land use and transportation plan for a more transit-based, energy-efficient city.

Photo by Kevin Cappis

I ask how successful the plan has been so far. “Administratively it was an uphill battle,” he admits. “We don’t have a holistic view. We’ve got billions of dollars of infrastructure to maintain and we’re subsidizing new development at the perimeters of the city.” Despite scattered initiatives, the city does not have an official policy for responding to peak oil, Calgary’s economy has yet to meaningfully diversify away from a dependency on oil and gas and the neglect is manifest in the city’s development patterns. “If you have a city that’s oriented around cars, and you can’t walk from point A to point B, and you have to drive, it doesn’t develop much of a sense of community,” he says. “Calgary needs to evolve. We need to increase density. Crisis [will] force us to act.”

Crisis, however, may not be the only impetus for change. New citizen-led initiatives such as the emergent Transition Town movement are already starting to prepare Calgary for a future with less oil.

“My mother left this handbook on my coffee table one day,” says Heather Hendrie, sitting among four other presenters by the altar in the sanctuary of Hillhurst United Church in northwest Calgary. She holds up a book with a green and white cover, The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience. “I resisted it for a long time,” she says, “then I finally opened it up and got to the page that said ‘Transition is about parties, not protest.’ I thought, ‘Parties That’s something I can really get behind.’”

The audience laughs. It’s a Saturday, the second day of a June 2010 conference called “Cities and Towns in Transition: Moving toward sustainable post-carbon resilient communities.” Artists, geologists, community activists, a councillor from Portland, Oregon, academics and many more citizens crowd the curving wooden pews. Hendrie, who has curly red hair and flashes a bright toothy smile, is a community organizer with Green Calgary. “I see Transition as a powerful way of engaging people in a larger movement for change,” she says. “I’m a cheerleader for what this model can do here.”

The Transition Towns movement started in the UK in 2005, co-founded by Rob Hopkins, a teacher of permaculture (or ecological design) and author of the handbook that inspired Hendrie’s way of thinking. The Transition movement promotes grassroots action aimed at building local communities prepared for climate change and peak oil. Though rising oil prices and consequent spikes in food and transportation costs can be seen as a dire prospect, the Transition movement sees a peak oil “energy shock” as a catalyst for change—an opportunity to reduce energy use, increase self-reliance and build resilient communities. It’s an idea that’s catching on: in five years, over 300 communities in at least 13 countries (including Calgary, Edmonton and Red Deer) have started initiatives based on the Transition Model.

Hopkins’s handbook offers a 12-step process that advocates local networking and collaboration and the growth of communities where people garden together, support local artisans and businesses, share cars and actively engage with their government. While the process can lead to the creation of an “energy descent plan” in which communities are weaned off oil dependency, there are no guarantees. As the UK-based Transition website notes, in a good-humoured caveat emptor, “We truly don’t know if this will work. Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale.”

Change can be met with elation rather than guilt or anger. “The future with less oil could be preferable to the present.”—Transition’s Rob Hopkins

The experiment came to Calgary in December 2009 when activists from Green Calgary, the Arusha Centre and Hillhurst-Sunnyside Community Association founded Transition Calgary. They created a Facebook group and helped organize the June conference at the University of Calgary and Hillhurst United Church.

Two days into the conference, I look around the sanctuary. I’ve had conversations about rain barrels, bike lanes, the 100-mile diet and the art of following municipal politics on Twitter. I’ve learned that Transition has its philosophical roots in permaculture, which is “a design science for creating sustainable human habitat,” according to Adrian Buckley, a former urban planner and the founder of Big Sky Permaculture. He explains the word is shorthand for permanent agriculture. “Permaculture draws on concepts in ecology such as the way forests arrange themselves. We can use that pattern to design communities. All the answers to environmental and social problems can be found in forests.” I don’t know what he means. I’ve made strange notes: resilience pattern, permablitz. It looks like a constellation, but one I don’t recognize—emergent nodes in a network I can’t comprehend.

As if aware of my confusion, Hendrie speaks up. “My personal approach is around positive visioning and inclusivity,” she says from the front of the church. “So, for me, Transition is what we in the room are already doing.” She smiles. “I simply see Transition as a vehicle, or a really nice painted bus, if you will, hemp- or vegetable-oil-powered, that’s heading toward a vibrant, resilient, relocalized future, with a great big sign on it reading ‘All welcome. Want to get there too Hop on with us.’”

In the face of peak oil and climate change, the Transition Town movement offers an optimistic vision for the future. As Hopkins writes, the coming threats can be met with a spirit of “elation rather than guilt, anger and horror.” In part, optimism emerges from the strategy of forming interwoven social networks. A network pattern is a resilient pattern. The more resilient the system, the more it’s able to recover from disturbance. As in an old-growth forest, or the human immune system, or the Internet, the ability to withstand shock emerges from a diversity of interconnection. The Transition movement imagines that human communities can reorganize the same way, and that when we work together to build walkable communities nourished by local food and intimate connections with the natural world, we’ll live fuller and more enjoyable lives.

Currently, both Transition Edmonton and Transition Calgary have Facebook groups where members can engage in dialogue and share relevant information on transition-related speakers and events. Transition Calgary also made a YouTube video to highlight local resiliency initiatives such as Calgary Dollars, the CATCO car-sharing program, a growing number of community gardens, the Hillhurst co-operative housing venture and the Bow River Flow, a human-powered transportation festival that’s about to enter its third year.

“We had 6,000 people at Bow River Flow,” says Gerald Wheatley, a Transition organizer and a staff member at the Arusha Centre. “We had a Transition Town stage set up. We had hula hoops, DJs, chickens for people to check out, bike activities, sidewalk painting. It was a huge success.”

Wheatley seems earnest, but he points out that many Calgarians were already working toward Transition’s goals albeit in different groups and for different reasons. “The Transition Town movement brings together a lot of initiatives that already existed in Calgary,” he says. “Car sharing, complementary currency, local food production, urban beekeeping, bike advocacy—all of these things on their own aren’t a coherent movement, but Transition Towns connects them. I hope it represents the beginning of these things going mainstream.”

I’m standing in a back yard in Forest Lawn, a neighbourhood in east Calgary, at the home of Rob and Michelle Avis, the founders of Verge Permaculture. Rob Avis is clean-cut, with short dark hair and glasses. He consults and teaches courses on permaculture design. “I was an oil and gas engineer and I was disgruntled,” Avis says. “On the day I was about to cut down 300 acres of trees to put in a pipeline, I got an email about permaculture, titled Greening the Desert. I recognized right away that there was a better way of living. It was a five minute email, a butterfly effect.”

Photo by James Cameron

Permaculture is the inspiration for the Transition movement. A resiliency design science that originated as an Australian agricultural technique in the 1970s, it uses systems thinking and design principles to consciously design landscapes that mimic patterns and relationships found in nature. The front and back yards of the Avises’ home showcase a two-and-a-half-year-old permaculture garden, or “food forest.” It’s modelled on the growth pattern of a wild forest, in which the mix of plants changes over time as the forest matures. Designed to thrive using only rainwater, the mounded-earth garden teems with a mix of squash, strawberries, young apple trees, radishes, the nitrogen fixers clover and alfalfa, and plants such as dill weed that attract predatory wasps to eat pests that would otherwise need to be killed with pesticides. “The polyculture of plants creates resilience,” says Avis. He reaches down, rubs black soil between his fingers. “I only put 36 hours of work into it all year. Planting and harvesting. I don’t weed.”

“Permaculture is not just a way of gardening,” he adds. “It’s a way of taking care of all of our basic human needs.” So far five private city lawns have been transformed into permaculture gardens. But Avis sees potential for many more. “Calgary’s the perfect place for permaculture to explode,” says Avis. “We’ve got enormous amounts of urban sprawl, and one of the things we can say about sprawl is that it’s the farm of the future.” Rob Avis and Adrian Buckley facilitate the “permablitz network,” where volunteers turn a suburban lawn into a permaculture garden within a single day. In 2010, four new “food forests” were created. In 2011, up to 40 more are expected to join the growing network.

“Alberta’s primed for change,” says Avis. “We’re a province of pioneers, we’re people who go out and get it done. We’ve got the resources, the optimism. And I think there’s a general understanding that there are problems, so there’s a real hunger for solutions.” In Alberta’s cities, the Transition movement offers a hopeful, if nascent vision for the future, one in which positive solutions emerge from people working together to raise awareness and build resiliency. It will take time. But it’s possible. And as Rob Hopkins writes in the handbook: “The future with less oil could be preferable to the present.”

As David Hughes and I wrap up our conversation at the top of Scotsman’s Hill, I ask if his bleak vision of the city’s future is the reason he’s moving to the coast. “If you’re going to watch the collapse of the civilization as we know it, Cortes Island is a pretty good vantage point compared to suburban Calgary,” the retired geologist says. “And I like gardening. Working outside is a pretty good life compared to fighting traffic in Calgary.”

We stroll to the car. Hughes is being playful (he bought his island property in the 1970s, long before “peak oil” was common parlance). And even he leaves me with a glimmer of hope for his former hometown. “If we take the long-term view, there’s no reason we have to personally suffer to move to the next paradigm,” he says. “At this juncture we have time to plan a transition to something that makes more sense.”

Calgary’s Tadzio Richards has won two National Magazine Awards and worked on documentaries for CBC and Discovery Channel.

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