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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 little louder now, I said his name again. “Graham.” I tapped the sleeve of his black leather jacket. He grunted, raised his head and smiled. His left front tooth was missing.

“Hi, Liz! Oooooh,” he cooed, “I’ve missed you.” His voice was raspy but warm; he seemed genuinely happy to see me. As we hugged, I caught the unmistakable stench of garbage. Everything Graham was wearing—his clothing, his two gold watches, the blue contact in his right eye—had been salvaged from dumpsters. I headed to the counter and ordered him four Junior Burgers and a large Coke.

Graham is my younger brother. My parents adopted him in Saskatchewan when he was an infant. It was our mother’s idea to adopt; she was a social worker and wanted to help a child in need. After reading The Family Nobody Wanted, she decided on a black one. Impossibly, my father went along with the idea. A former Mountie, Dad ran a precast business, spoke Fahrenheit and never wasted anything, not even a tear. What made him want to raise someone else’s child Did he say yes to make Mom happy?

They got Graham in Saskatoon in February 1979, not long after my first birthday. “I hope he’s dark enough for you,” the foster mother said to my parents when they collected their new son.

Graham was the only black person in Nipawin, the small town where we grew up. Needless to say, he was plenty dark enough. His black curls were loose and lush, just big enough to wrap around your finger. In Grade 3, I cut my blond hair short and got a perm, so we’d look more alike. People knew, by association, that we were siblings, but only after our baby brother, Aaron, came along, did I come to know the spitting image adage.

My parents got Graham in February 1979. “I hope he’s dark enough for you,” the foster mother said to them when they collected their new son.

Kids gave Graham nicknames: Sometimes he was The Juice, after O.J. Simpson, but mostly he was Mud Puddle. A playful but nasty nickname, it had a smooth side and a rough side. They’d say it with these big stupid chuckles because they thought they were so clever, the jocks on the high school football team twice my brother’s size, the slick ski shits in their Sun Ice shells who swaggered in gangs through the school hallways. What’s for lunch, Mud Puddle Because who couldn’t see the likeness between skin and soil, because how could it possibly hurt to be held up to filth?

Yo, Mud Puddle! Graham would smile when they said it, but it wasn’t his joyful smile, or his mischievous smile, it was his nervous, frightened, gonna-pee-my-pants smile, the same smile he had when Dad lost his shit for the umpteenth time because Graham couldn’t keep quiet, or stay still, because there’d been an incident: a smashed glass, a split knee. “Can you keep it down to a dull roar!” Dad would shout, and I was too young to appreciate the irony.

At home Graham would confide to me how much that nickname hurt; almost as much as the N-word, he said, which flew around the playground on occasion. I’d vow to avenge my brother. Wasn’t that what big sisters were supposed to do Not that I was immune. For a time I was “Lezzy,” because it sounded like Lizzy. Without even really knowing what a lesbian was, I lived in mortal fear of becoming one. The cool kids knew how to find the scabs and pick them, just to watch us bleed.

Graham had perked up after finishing his burgers. As we chatted, he pulled a bottle of cologne from a pocket in his cargo pants—Pur Blanca, pure white—and sprayed himself twice. “The antithesis to all this,” he said with a laugh, gesturing to himself and his things.

It occurred to me he might like to come over for a little respite. “Do you want to take a bath?” I was only in Calgary for the week, job-training at CBC Radio, and had booked a bed and breakfast in the Mission neighbourhood. The bathroom had a clawfoot tub, just like the one we had growing up. Mom had always wanted a clawfoot tub, and when she and Dad renovated the basement, she got her wish and painted the tub herself. We seldom got company in northern Saskatchewan, so when my brother got his own room in the basement years later, the guest bath became Graham’s domain, his curls sprinkled on the lino, the sink, the tub. Everything white in that bathroom, in our world, everything white but Graham. Pur Blanca.

Ever the shivering child, my brother took hour-long, scorching baths that drained the hot water tank, always—or so it felt—right before I wanted to shower upstairs. If only I knew, then, the paltriness of my sisterly woes.

“I’d love to get cleaned up,” Graham said in the burger joint and gathered his things. I needed to connect with the brother I’d grown up with, to talk some sense into the self-described “hobo” sitting across from me, to at least understand this. Sleeping in fast-food restaurants. Walking away from his six children—five of them now in foster care. Panhandling, shooting meth, committing petty theft at night. Graham is bipolar. “It’s only a minor mental break,” he explained as we left the restaurant.

His shopping cart brimmed with a hodgepodge of junk. He covered it all with a beige animal-print blanket, as though this might keep it safe, and tucked it behind the Wendy’s dumpster before relieving himself. Using public washrooms is tough when you’re homeless; no one will give you the key. He stooped to collect two half-smoked butts, neatly crushed by someone’s shoe. His stiff gait made him seem much older than 37. “Street feet,” he told me, “from walking around non-stop.” Later, I Googled it: a condition common among the homeless, the result of wet socks and poor footwear.

Before leaving, Graham shot the shit with some of his street buddies: Hatter, Dove and Bert. He pulled out a ziplock bag of candy he’d found in a garbage can, offered it around, then unwrapped one for himself. “I’m just gonna season it,” he announced before dropping it on the sidewalk, then picked it up and popped it in his mouth. “Four-day rule.” “Gross,” I said, but laughed; Graham was still the class clown.

Before hopping into the front seat, my brother opened the hatch and tossed in his backpack and a weathered guitar. I’d never seen Graham play guitar; only piano, but Mozart and metronomes were never much his thing. Who, I’d wonder as I ran scales in our sunken living room, gave the white keys majority And why did the black keys always sound so sad?

I sat cross-legged on the floral bedspread listening to my brother singing in the bathtub. “We were waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool said to push on.”

My brother stopped making contact with us in early 2015. He’d disappeared from Facebook, and no-showed to visits that social services arranged each Saturday with his kids in Regina. Around Christmas he appeared on a police WANTED list for burglary—or was it fraud?—leaving us to wonder if he was even alive. Mom was beside herself, calling around to shelters, hospitals, social service agencies. Ken, a stable long-time friend of Graham’s who kept tabs on his movements, told her Graham was in Calgary. We found out later a gang had forcibly taken him to Alberta and held him hostage; he stayed there to avoid jail in Saskatchewan.

Eventually Mom got in touch with a police officer who worked with Calgary’s homeless and knew my brother. The officer arranged a rendezvous for us: a Saturday in late February 2016.

I drove down from Edmonton with my son, met Mom just before noon. Would he even show We fidgeted with our takeout coffee cups. The McDonald’s on 17th had a Buddy Holly decorating theme, and my son, then 5, ran laps around the classic car booth between French fries, petting its fake chrome tailfins.

“Oh,” my mom said at 12:04, her voice strangely flat. “There he is.” I turned and saw a street person locking up his bike, cigarette dangling from his lips. Was it… It was.

People stared as we lunched. How had this drifter caught the attention of two pale-faced women and a squirmy little boy Were they being harassed Conned Every now and then, I sent a reassuring smile to some other stranger in the joint, though all I wanted was to shout. Eyes in your own plate, asshole! He’s my fucking brother.

“Everything’s going great,” Graham was saying between sips of his chocolate shake. “I’m loving what I’m doing!” Mom was trying to hold back tears. My son had grown quiet, taking in the loud, beardy man across the table.

“But Graham”—My brother cut her off. “It’s August.” August It was February. No, he clarified. He didn’t go by Graham anymore. He’d renamed himself August Winters.

I sat cross-legged on the floral bedspread listening to my brother singing in the bathtub. “We were waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool said to push on.”

His voice was husky and charming. How did he know all the lyrics Maybe he really could play that guitar. I imagined him in a beanie and plaid, onstage at Edmonton Folk Fest. Over the bathroom fan, I caught the sound of an occasional tub splash, shampoo bottle squirt. “All at once, the moon clouded over. We heard a gurgling cry. A few seconds later, the captain’s helmet was all that floated by…”

I texted Mom.

Graham’s in the tub, singing Big Muddy at full volume. I hope we don’t get kicked out!

You’re having an experience, was her reply. Have you seen his feet?

Everyone in Nipawin knew Graham “belonged” with us, but we still grew up with questions. Dumb questions, rhetorical questions, legitimate questions. Why had my parents adopted when they could still make their own babies Why did they get a black child instead of a white one I got picked on too. “Hey, Liz, which one of your brothers is adopted?” a clutch of boys asked me in Grade 7. I made my best you’re-total-morons face, then skulked off, cheeks burning. Graham made me proud, and resentful. He was proof we were better, somehow, wasn’t he And yet, I didn’t want to be singled out. I stood up for him when it suited me, aligned myself with him when he made everyone laugh in class, but rolled my eyes in disdain when he got in trouble. We were on different planets, under the same roof. I baked muffins every Saturday; Graham got heat from Dad. I got all As; Graham went to the principal’s office. I got another trophy from the music festival; Graham fell off a roof. We weren’t opposites so much as constant and fearsome reminders to each other of how hard we had to work: to win our cranky father’s love, to matter. Graham, always trying to climb higher up the tree, and me, trying never to fall out.

After he’d bathed and dressed, Graham unpacked all his stuff on the bed and took inventory. One axe. Two drumsticks. Several butter knives. Batteries. One toothbrush. One pair of shimmery gold stretchy gloves. What would Dad make of this, I wondered, were he still alive I imagined his angry hazel eyes, wet from the whisky, his head swaying no, no with disapproval. What part had he played in this What part had each of us played?

Graham kept sorting. A corkscrew, a cheese knife, nail files and a butane torch. A Cohiba cigar and a Princess Leia button. He accidentally pricked his finger on it, swore.

I pressed my brother: What it’s like being on the street?

“It’s terrible,” he told me. “Ninety-nine out of 100 people hate you. It’s not unbridled rage; it’s just hatred without knowing anything about you or where you come from.”

But why do they hate you, I wanted to know. Because you steal things from their garages Because you ask them for money?

“I believe a lot of it is fear. They don’t understand homelessness. What really blows their mind is I’m here because I want to be here.”

How could that possibly be, I wondered, none the wiser myself. Who wants to be homeless Who wants to sport dumpster chic Who wants to walk 18 hours a day, pack and bury their tent every morning so it doesn’t get stolen?

“I’m fed up with society and I’m not going to play by its rules,” he told me. “You have to realize I am OK.”

Anger chafed at my temples. He was not OK. This was not OK. No one wants their kids to grow up in separate foster homes.

“It’s a constant source of pain,” he admitted when I brought up the kids. “I built an off switch. I can’t… it’s just too much sad.” There. A glimpse of the brother I’d once known. He was still there, underneath it all, packed and buried.

I asked if he wanted to sleep over. No, he said, it was too weird being inside. He asked if I’d drive him to Alpha House so he could get clean needles. He only took meth to stay warm at night, he told me, lacing his grey sneakers: “I can quit whenever I want.”

“Hang a right here,” Graham told me from the passenger seat, and I spun the steering wheel and braked outside a building I’d never seen. Men gathered like moths around a dimly lit entranceway, their breath against the crisp spring air visible, rising up. “Lock your doors, Liz,” he said as he got out of the car, and I did. Crouching over to peer out the window from the driver’s seat, I watched my brother join the queue of darkly clad bodies, half-huddled, half-standoffish, waiting for the door to open.

At once, it was Halloween 1983 and Mom was sitting behind the wheel while my brother and I huddled outside a doorway, snowsuits over our costumes. It always seemed to snow on October 31 in Nipawin. We held our plastic pumpkin candy buckets tight, outstretched in anticipation, pretend-smoking with our exhalations until the door swung inwards. “TRICK OR TREAT!” One year, Mom dressed us up as Raggedy Ann and Andy; another year, I was the Queen of England and Graham was a devil.

I shut off the engine outside Alpha House and waited for Graham to emerge, my eyes half-fixed on the odometer. I didn’t want to stare. Who was inside, and who was out Did they hand the syringes out in a big metal bowl, like Halloween candy Was it one per person, like chocolate bars, or could you take a whole handful Harm reduction, they call it; providing safer options for drug users. Was I reducing harm too, by bringing him here I didn’t feel that way. I felt like an accomplice.

A knock on the window. My brother’s bushy face, peering in.

“Where to?” I asked after he hopped back in. I did not ask to see his loot.

In the summer of 2017 I moved to Calgary. Graham—sorry, August—had spent five months in jail earlier that year for possession of stolen goods. He’d also spent time recuperating from surgery following a machete attack to his right wrist. Some guy had wanted his fancy watch, and Graham refused to give it up. He’d called my mom every day from jail, bored and wanting a top-up on his canteen money, but once he got out in May we’d lost track of him.

I typed out a list of Things to Do in my phone:

-hook for the bathroom door

-vacuum bags

-yard sale?

-look for Graham

-library card

The first few weeks after moving I thought about him all the time. I sussed out every skid on a bike with a bag of bottles and cans—Is it… Nope. I started teaching at a yoga studio on 17th and was convinced I’d bump into Graham with his shopping cart and guitar. And as I lay in bed at night in my new house, I’d wonder where in the city he was. Knowing that, even once I tracked my brother down again, I’d probably still be looking for him.

Elizabeth Withey’s book on homelessness, The One with the Scraggly Beard, will be published by Orca Books in 2020.

The post Big Muddy 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).

The post Retrospective: Mind the Gap appeared first on Alberta Views.

A horrified witness, Bill Pratt, president of the organizing committee for the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, resolved then and there to spearhead the development of a trail system for non-motorized activities such as hiking, cycling and horseback riding. Four years later, on March 21, 1989, while speaking at a trail-planning meeting, he observed that Calgary and Kananaskis had some of Canada’s best bike paths but lacked a secure connecting route. His proposal to link such paths marked the birth of our “New National Dream,” a cross-country trail that would be safe and accessible for ordinary Canadians. Interviewed by the Calgary Herald, Pratt stated emphatically: “I don’t want to see any more cars plowing into cyclists.”

The non-profit Trans Canada Trail Foundation organization launched in 1992 as part of Canada’s 125th anniversary celebrations. Pratt was president; Pierre Camu, a former president of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, became board chairman. Riding a wave of optimism, the new foundation described the Trans Canada Trail as a millennium project, to be completed by July 1, 2000. Later, as unanticipated obstacles accumulated, this target was extended to July 1, 2017, Canada’s 150th birthday. Canada already possessed many excellent pathways, making up 20 per cent of the planned trail, and Pratt envisioned quickly and economically linking them by “recycling” abandoned rail corridors.

At its best, the Trans Canada Trail would be six metres wide and include two parallel pathways to accommodate hikers, cyclists, roller-bladers, wheelchairs, horses and—in winter—cross-country skiers. The east–west route would feature a hard surface in high-use areas, to be extended eventually across the country. Part of the northern route, passing through Edmonton and Inuvik to the Arctic Ocean, would include a waterway, the Mackenzie River. During winter months, snowmobiles might be permitted in remote regions not accessible to hikers or cross-country skiers. The trail would be dotted at regular intervals with shelters and, when necessary, campsites.

Although the founders waxed eloquent about the trail’s potential to foster unity and stimulate tourism, they placed special emphasis on public safety. Pratt insisted that the trail be built far enough from roads to mask traffic noise and avoid collisions. According to David Hargrave, then Alberta TrailNet coordinator, automobile accidents involving cyclists and pedestrians motivated many people to join the Trans Canada Trail movement. He told the Herald in 1994: “We don’t want it along a highway or in a ditch. We want the whole thing to be like a park.” Safety-minded organizations, including the RCMP and the Canadian Truckers Association, quickly endorsed the project.

Like many Canadians, my wife Elizabeth was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Trans Canada Trail. We made charitable donations, “bought” metre-long sections, acquired logoed merchandise, purchased maps and guidebooks and became card-carrying “Trail Builders.” We eagerly anticipated a world-class greenway that would connect communities, foster healthy lifestyles, respect environmental values, encourage active transportation and, most importantly, provide a safe travel route for pedestrians and cyclists.

Elizabeth firmly believed motor vehicles pose an extreme danger to cyclists on roadways—it is a self-evident truth. When she agreed to accompany me each summer on a three-week cycling holiday, she set one solemn condition: no roads. Sensible and careful, very safety-conscious, she refused to risk her life by venturing onto routes used by motor vehicles. I thought her fears were exaggerated—I’d been riding on busy streets and highways without incident since childhood—but I was happy to acquiesce. It was the least I could do. Since our first meeting at age 12, she had been the love of my life.

For almost a decade I planned our annual trips meticulously, poring over detailed maps and trail guides, methodically marking out our daily itinerary. We pedalled in Europe—England, Scotland, Ireland, France and Slovakia—and in alternate years our home country, Canada. Here we travelled on the Trans Canada Trail, widely advertised as a safe and scenic coast-to-coast-to-coast greenway, but where—much to our consternation—the official guidebooks repeatedly took us on perilous journeys along motorized thoroughfares and highways. Until one sunny afternoon in Prince Edward Island in 2012, when Elizabeth was struck down by a tradesman’s blunt-nosed van and died on a lonely rural roadside.

I struggled desperately to survive devastating trauma—but also to comprehend the tragic failure of Canada’s much-vaunted trail-building dream. Deep down I already knew the answer but wouldn’t admit it, until a long-suffering trails official quietly confided: “Ed, the emperor has no clothes.” The Trans Canada Trail—pretentiously renamed “The Great Trail” in 2016—has become little more than a dangerous hoax. It is not a greenway; it is a motorway. How did this happen What went wrong?

The TCT Foundation proposed to achieve their awe-inspiring dream for a new national transportation corridor by taking a page from Calgary’s successful Olympics: It would rely on volunteers, private donations and corporate sponsorships. This strategy had generated $450-million in recreational facilities for Calgary; Pratt believed it would produce $440-million in non-motorized trails for Canada. Governments—federal, provincial and municipal combined—would assume only a tenth of the total cost.

Unfortunately this model soon proved inadequate. In a sparsely populated country with large stretches of uninhabited wilderness, there is often no local community to provide volunteer labour. Nonetheless Deborah Apps, president and CEO of the TCT organization, says the project “is very much a grassroots endeavour,” dependent on “local, and often volunteer, trail builders.”

Equally problematic, however, has been rural opposition. The Trans Canada Trail currently passes through nearly 1,000 municipalities and more than 15,000 communities which, quite naturally, give priority to local needs, not national projects. Why should they put resources into a trail intended for outsiders (Only effete urbanites ride bicycles, I have been told; rugged rednecks drive quads.) They also have concerns about property ownership, liability, maintenance and potential trespassing.

Top L to bottom R: The Trail at Waskatenau, AB and Prince SK; Thunder Bay, ON and Stanley Park, MB (Edmund Aunger)

In Alberta, for example, rural protests led to the shelving of a proposed Calgary–Edmonton trail to be built on the 303 km Irricana–Drumheller–Camrose railbed at an estimated cost in 2000 of $6.3-million. Although CP Rail donated a section between Irricana and Torrington to the TCT Foundation—subsequently transferred to Alberta TrailNet—adjacent landowners successfully lobbied municipal councils to refuse zoning for trail construction, and then erected illegal barriers and warning signs to block access.

This recurring opposition has played havoc with route planning. As it frantically searches for available pathways and co-operative communities, the Trans Canada Trail has leapfrogged in all directions, turned around and hopped back, then added new paths and abandoned old ones. The result has been a dizzying inflation in the trail’s proposed length. Originally predicted to be 15,000 km and subsequently projected at 16,200, 18,000 and 22,500 km, the planned route now logs in at 24,000 km. By contrast, the Trans-Canada Highway from Vancouver to Halifax is 5,890 km, and the Via Rail trip is 6,350 km.

Lacking both uniform standards and control, the Trans Canada Trail includes a confusing and dangerous hodgepodge of mountain-bike paths, roadside ditches, dirt ruts, gravel roads and hazardous ATV trails. The original dream lies in widely scattered pieces, unlikely ever to be restored unless the Canadian government intervenes and establishes rational standards for quality, safety and routing.

Surprisingly the Trans-Canada Highway, first proposed in 1912, faced similar challenges. Provincial and municipal governments, preoccupied with local construction, balked at building an interprovincial roadway passing through sparsely populated regions. In 1948, however, Canada’s new minister of Reconstruction & Supply, Robert Winters, seeking to reduce post-war unemployment, championed a hard-surface highway that would follow the shortest practicable route across Canada.

At a federal–provincial conference that December Ottawa promised to pay 50 per cent of the construction expenses if the provinces met agreed standards not only for surfacing but for gradient, curvature, sight distances and load-bearing capacity. (Alberta unsuccessfully demanded a contribution of 100 per cent!) When the Trans Canada Highway was finally completed in 1970, the federal government had paid $825-million of the $1.4-billion total cost.

In January 2000 Canadian Geographic revealed that nearly 30 per cent of the Trans Canada Trail would be open to use by all-terrain vehicles and dirt bikes. Michael Haynes, executive director of the Nova Scotia Trails Federation, told the magazine that a new reality had superseded the old vision: “The starting position in Nova Scotia is that all forms of recreational use are acceptable. So far, ATVs—one of the fastest-growing modes of transportation in the country—are allowed on about 80 per cent of the more than 600 km of the TCT in Nova Scotia.”

Many trail supporters, including the original founders, were outraged by this revelation. Off-road vehicles, they protested, would cause environmental damage and threaten public safety, effectively driving away the intended users—pedestrians and cyclists. Interviewed shortly before his death, Bill Pratt declared that unless the TCT organization refused official designation for motorized sections, the trail would be of no use. Pierre Camu, former TCT board chair, also denounced the expanded access: “The trail is designed for walkers, hikers, cyclists, children and families. It’s not designed for motorized vehicles.”

In summer of 2008 Elizabeth and I set out on a cycling trip that included Alberta’s longest stretch of “operational” Trans Canada Trail, the 177-km Iron Horse Trail linking Waskatenau and Heinsburg. We soon discovered, however, that the trail—composed of loose gravel, soft sand and rough ballast—was used only by ATVs. After struggling laboriously for 16 km, and yielding frequently to ATVs, we finally detoured onto hard-packed township roads that, ironically, had less motorized traffic.

Shortly afterwards, with undisguised indignation, Elizabeth announced that she would campaign for the development of a Trans Canada Trail in Alberta that would be safe and accessible for pedestrians and cyclists. I was startled and dismayed. “You’d have to get involved in politics,” I warned, “and that’s going to be frustrating and futile. Don’t do it.” But she wouldn’t be swayed, and I reluctantly promised that I would do my best to support her.

During this time, in a concerted but unpublicized effort to connect dispersed rural communities, the Trans Canada Trail made a major transition to roadways. In 2010 the National Trails Coalition reported that 36 per cent of the land-based trail was on roadways (including highways), a proportion that has now spiralled to 50 per cent. (This “land-based” distinction is important. The TCT organization counts more than 7,000 km of waterway as “trail” and has recently claimed that only 35 per cent of the entire trail is on roadways.)

After setting out on a much-anticipated cycling holiday in Manitoba—where the TCT was proudly proclaimed to be 91 per cent operational, Elizabeth and I suffered a rude awakening. The trail was mainly on roadways. On July 12, 2010, we pedalled north from Winnipeg, taking a zigzag course along peaceful residential streets and then a meandering route along busier suburban avenues and rural highways, stopping regularly to consult our trail map. At the 30-km mark we gratefully reached a paved cycling trail built on the tiered embankment of the Red River Floodway that, according to the TCT guidebook, would take us directly to our evening destination, 20 km farther, the town of Lockport.

The trail ended after only 4 km—the rest had yet to be built—and we dragged our bikes through the brush to the nearest roadway. Then, as traffic whistled terrifyingly close by, we cycled grimly along the two-lane Henderson Highway. Near Lockport, we regained the Trans Canada Trail as it joined Highway 44, and then dodged and jostled with tourist traffic and heavy machinery on a signed detour. That evening, when we took refuge in our bed and breakfast, Elizabeth vented. “That’s it,” she declared furiously. “I’m not doing this ride anymore. It’s too dangerous. I’m going back home to Edmonton.” I had no choice but to cancel our vacation.

When I met with Alberta’s minister of Tourism, Parks and Recreation, Christine Cusanelli, to promote the construction of safe trails for hikers and cyclists, she disclosed that the government was preparing a Recreation Trails Act, and that “the emphasis for the first few years will be on motorized recreation by off-highway vehicles as this is the greatest pressure on our trail systems.”

Her successor, Richard Starke, responded to lobbyists by promising full access for motorized vehicles on public trails and in provincial parks. “The use of motorized recreational vehicles, whether quads or trikes or bikes in the summer or snowmobiles in the winter, is huge business,” he told legislators. “We’ve been meeting with our Off-Highway Vehicle Association as well as our Snowmobile Association on ways of engaging our stakeholder groups and expanding opportunities in that regard.”

The BC government soon followed suit, yielding meekly to similar pressures, by opening its extensive network of rail trails to motorized vehicles. Since the 1990s the province had acquired more than 2,000 km of former rail corridors and designated almost 600 km as Trans Canada Trail. On August 13, 2014, in a letter to Jeff Mohr, president of the Quad Riders ATV Association of BC, the province explained its revised and “more realistic approach”: “In the more rural and wilderness portions of the trails, non-motorized designations are impractical to implement and not always supported by local residents. Due to higher ORV use in these areas, trail surface conditions tend to deteriorate and cycling use is lower. Managing these types of areas for non-motorized use does not justify the exceptional costs required to maintain high-quality tread surfaces.”

In short, motorized vehicles had already ruined many sections of the Trans Canada Trail and, without new expenditures, these paths were no longer suitable for cyclists.

I’ve repeatedly called on the federal government—in particular Mélanie Joly, minister of Canadian Heritage, responsible for Canada’s 150th anniversary celebrations—to fund the Trans Canada Trail as they did the Trans-Canada Highway. A federal spokesman said the government would continue putting millions into the project but would not dictate how the money was spent. How many millions exactly In 2015 the Government of Canada donated $5.5-million to the TCT Foundation while dispensing $150-million to local communities for infrastructure projects—picnic shelters, flagpoles, dock repairs—to mark Canada’s upcoming 150th anniversary.

In early 2015, with 20 per cent of the trail still incomplete, and with July 1, 2017, looming on the horizon, national organizers directed the regional associations to route the Trans Canada Trail along highway shoulders where possible, in order to close the remaining gaps. At that time, Alberta had completed only 43 per cent of its land-based trail, and the implications were obvious.

In the wake of that spring’s dramatic provincial election, I requested a meeting with Ricardo Miranda, Alberta’s new minister of Culture and Tourism, hoping to brief him on the gravity of the trail situation and to present a petition with more than 1,000 signatures demanding safe and accessible non-motorized trails. He refused a meeting but wrote back on March 16, 2016, that “we are working closely with Alberta Transportation to determine the safest temporary on-road routings as part of Trans Canada Trail’s 2017 connection plan.”

In response I asked him to impose “an immediate moratorium on the routing of the Trans Canada Trail along roads and highways.” He never replied. Shortly afterward, in defiance of widespread local opposition, the Trans Canada Trail organization designated Highway 22, linking Cochrane and Bragg Creek, as operational trail. Consequently, more than 30 years after the horrific accident that gave birth to our dream of a cross-country greenway, pedestrians and cyclists travelling between Calgary and Kananaskis are still compelled to take a highway route. In a life-threatening charade, this highway is now labelled the “The Great Trail.”

Elizabeth and I had fond memories of New Brunswick—its welcoming people, its bilingual culture and its scenic beauty—and for many years we longed to return on our bicycles. But a quick look at the Trans Canada Trail map revealed we would have little choice but to ride on highways. So Elizabeth quickly vetoed it, insisting instead that we take our annual cycling holiday in Prince Edward Island.

Not content to leave well enough alone, I adjusted our plans so that we could fly first to Moncton, New Brunswick, and then cycle along the Trans Canada Trail to Prince Edward Island. Unfortunately the first 50 km of this trip would be on a two-lane highway, and when Elizabeth discovered this, shortly after our arrival in Moncton, she was very displeased, noting in her diary: “Ed is ticked that I don’t want to do this part on roads. I’m ticked that he doesn’t listen when I say avoid roads.” And so, after a somewhat strained discussion, we disassembled the bikes, packed them into cardboard boxes and took the train to Sackville.

Elizabeth Sovis near Sackville, New Brunswick, 2012. (Edmund Aunger)

From there we pedalled along a railbed, struggling through minefields of swampy potholes and jagged rocks, until we reached Malden. Then, on Saturday, July 14, 2012, with huge sighs of relief, we loaded our bicycles onto a shuttle bus to carry us over the 13-km Confederation Bridge to Borden-Carleton, PEI.

After disembarking, we cycled northeast for 18 km on a red, hard-packed stone-dust path until we reached Emerald, the junction with the main trail, and then turned right, heading easterly towards Hunter River, the overnight destination recommended in the Trans Canada Trail guidebook. The trail was smooth and flat and comfortingly non-motorized; the setting was pastoral and peaceful and idyllic.

At Hunter River, however, we stopped and stared in stunned silence and incredulity at the designated route—the only route—to our accommodation: a two-lane highway. There was an intermittent shoulder, sandy and gravelly, often downsloping, seldom rideable, and we proceeded apprehensively along the white fog-line marking the road’s edge. Elizabeth was visibly sullen and upset, a smouldering volcano preparing to erupt when we arrived.

But we never did arrive. A few minutes later, she was struck by a brown Chevrolet Express Van. The impact severed her brain stem and threw her body 50 metres.

In the year 2012, Elizabeth Ann Sovis was one of 61 cyclists killed by motor vehicles on Canadian roads. Another 6,608 were injured.

Edmund A. Aunger is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Alberta, Campus Saint-Jean.

The post Shattered Dream appeared first on Alberta Views.

Industry estimates that Alberta could lose 125,000 direct and indirect jobs related to oil and gas by the end of 2016. The province hasn’t seen so many jobs disappear so quickly since 1982, then owing to a global recession. Our 8.6 per cent unemployment rate in July 2016 was the province’s highest since 1994. One of those statistics was my youngest son, a newly minted chemical engineer, fired at Christmas. Like many families in Alberta, we’re living the free fall.

Alberta leans heavily on non-renewable energy for high-paying jobs, and has become dependent on the sector for government revenues. The question facing our leaders is: What do we do now Some are calling for reducing revenue volatility by implementing a sales tax. But “this government has said it will not do that,” Finance Minister Joe Ceci said in late April to reporters. “That commitment is pretty ironclad. And we have to find other ways to make this happen, and we will.” The NDP government did, however, raise corporate taxes to 12 per cent from 10 per cent.

For the Notley government, economic diversification remains the priority. This means encouraging many different enterprises to produce a variety of products, services and technological processes to overcome our dependence on an industry that typically represents around 30 per cent of Alberta’s GDP. The choice to invest in diversification is interesting given its contentious history. “Diversify the economy,” in Alberta, is old advice with renewed urgency. Our workforce may already be diverse, but oil and gas employment is surprisingly precarious and provincial revenues are too closely tied to the fate of one industry.

A 2011 report by David Emerson, chair of the Premier’s Council for Economic Strategy, told the then-PC government to broaden our economic base “to reduce the vulnerability that comes with heavy reliance on energy.” There was and is genuine political will to resolve this dilemma. When I was named associate minister of electricity and renewable energy in 2013, we were studying the choices and the appropriate pace of change to foster diversification of our energy economy.

Some Albertans don’t like government “meddling” in the economy or labour market and would have us wait out low oil prices. Premier Notley is in a Catch-22. If she acts but invests in losing ventures, citizens will be upset. If she doesn’t take risks, and revenues and employment don’t improve, she’ll be blamed for inaction.

Meanwhile, if oil prices suddenly rise, we’ll all breathe a sigh of relief—but only until the next bust.

Every Alberta premier has a diversification tale, but Peter Lougheed’s choices are legend. Lougheed invested public dollars in a range of companies, with spectacular successes and equally spectacular failures. Winners included Alberta Energy Company (later renamed Encana) and Syncrude (an oil sands pioneer). Losers include MagCan (a magnesium plant), Canadian Commercial Bank, Gainers (a meatpacking plant) and NovaTel (the cellular subsidiary of Alberta Government Telephones), none of which survived.

These and other investments were political. The government launched Alberta Energy Company in 1973 as a public–private joint venture to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The decision proved popular with Albertans; AEC’s initial public offering attracted 60,000 buyers and the shares split three for one in 1980. Lougheed purchased Pacific Western Airlines in 1974 to protect Alberta’s position as gateway to the North and prevent BC’s NDP government from acquiring the airline. This choice caused a public outcry. Even now, decades later, when a provincial politician is tempted to wrap themselves in the flag to support direct investment in a commercial enterprise—perhaps equity participation in a refinery or a pipeline—someone will lean in and whisper, “Remember PWA and Peter the Red?”

What will Premier Notley contribute to local lore One year ago her government created the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade. Minister Deron Bilous’s mandate is to lead efforts “to diversify [Alberta’s] economy, strengthening existing sectors and finding new opportunities.” Notley replaced the province’s Economic Development Authority with a 10-member expert panel chaired by University of Alberta business dean Joseph Doucet, which advises her on diversification. Her government announced a second such panel in February focused specifically on energy diversification.

For Justin Riemer, an assistant deputy minister in Economic Development and Trade who for 17 years has focused on diversification, Notley’s goal is clear. “Manitoba is the most economically diversified province in Canada,” he says. “But Alberta doesn’t necessarily want to look like Manitoba. We’re not trying to even out the pieces of the GDP pie to be equal, with the tourism slice as big as the energy slice.” GDP growth in the most promising sectors, he says, stabilizes revenues.

The ministry tracks employment, but it’s difficult to forecast jobs and even trickier to incentivize job creation in a bust economy. The strategy, says Riemer, is to grow sectors that add higher-paying jobs. With unemployment rising, however, might government be tempted by any and all employment Riemer recalls a project with Dell and the City of Edmonton to set up a call centre and create 1,000 minimum-wage jobs. The company left Alberta in 2008 after less than three years—a cautionary tale, he says.

For 40 years the principles underlying Alberta’s approach to diversification haven’t much changed. Bureaucrats, politicians and citizens repeat the same mantra: Play to our strengths and diversify within energy, not away from energy.

In other words, be honest about our province’s unique attributes: our climate, weather, isolation and distance from markets offer challenges, though our self-reliance, wariness of external dependencies, abundant natural resources, young infrastructure and strong education system are strengths. This was the thinking behind Lougheed’s transition from conventional energy to oil sands—we’re sitting on one of the world’s largest oil deposits, and we have the educational savvy to figure out how to get at it.

So, based on these principles, it’s not surprising to see our government now betting on petrochemicals. In February Minister Bilous announced a 10-year, $500-million royalty credit program for this sector—bittersweet for me, because this was the exact program I’d championed within the previous PC government. By June the government had received 16 applications to the program, “representing more than $20-billion in potential new investment.”

How will the program work Once new petrochemical plants are approved and up and running, royalty credits will be issued to the companies that built them. Bilous hopes to create 4,000 high-value jobs in places such as Redwater and Medicine Hat, of which 3,000 would be short-term jobs in construction. “It’s a new link in the value-add chain,” says Bilous, adding he anticipates “new petrochemical facilities that use methane or propane to produce materials for plastics, detergents and textiles.” In a single announcement the minister was able to check boxes on all of his government’s diversification goals: strengthen existing sectors; find new opportunities; create high-value jobs; attract investment; enhance market access.

Joseph Doucet endorses the strategy. Natural gas prices are woeful right now, royalties are low, and we’re at the wrong end of the pipe for North American gas. “Petrochemical investment in Alberta seemed unlikely seven or eight years ago, with the price of gas in Qatar so low.” But now, he says, “petrochemicals in Alberta using cheap gas makes sense.”

Royalty credits—the approach taken with the Petrochemicals Diversification Program—and temporary royalty holidays appeal to people such as Doucet, who prefer investors with “skin in the game.” We’re familiar with the strategy; Premier Klein kick-started oil sands production in the 1990s with a generic royalty regime that saw companies pay a nominal royalty of 1 per cent until all project costs were recovered. Many Albertans like companies to remain on the hook for risks. Some, however, warn of a “slippery slope.” I recall questions from dozens of my constituents on Alberta guaranteeing loans to the North West Redwater Partnership upgrader. Some of these same people now warn about petrochemical incentives: They don’t want royalty credits or holidays or any other incentives paving the way for billion-dollar public funding of private-sector companies.

While the petrochemical investment generated headlines, a wide range of policy options continue to be evaluated by our government.

Tax credits can stimulate investment in targeted sectors and reward risk-taking. For a long time Alberta was one of the only provinces without an income tax credit for small business investors. Proponents of such an approach, including Mel Wong, president and CEO of BioAlberta, says it works well in other provinces, especially in BC, for high-tech start-ups. Likewise the Calgary Chamber of Commerce encourages tax credits, also pointing to BC’s experience: “Over a seven-year period, BC’s program was able to turn $250-million worth of tax credits into $2.3-billion of equity investment, creating 4,000 jobs and having a net positive impact on provincial revenue.”

The NDP government was listening. Its 2016 budget allocates $165-million to fund two new approaches starting in 2017, including the Alberta Investor Tax Credit, which provides a 30 per cent tax credit to investors who fund Alberta companies in IT, clean tech, health tech, interactive digital media and games and in the post-production, visual effects and digital animation sectors. Its Capital Investment Tax Credit encourages business to spend on equipment and buildings.

The success of The Revenant at this year’s Oscars also rekindled calls for lifting the monetary cap on the Alberta Production Grant, a unique film incentive that’s credited against production expenses incurred here. Jean Merriman, a local film industry veteran, explains: “Alberta has interesting and diverse backdrops—mountains, prairies, the snow—and we’ve proven to foreign producers that we have stellar crews and infrastructure. But that’s not enough. We also need to be competitive and bottom-line driven.” By Canadian standards Alberta is a large filmmaking centre, responsible for roughly $400-million in economic activity over the last five years. Yet our numbers pale by comparison to the powerhouses of Ontario and BC, each with $1-billion-plus industries.

Tax cuts for businesses and public dollars for training and apprenticeships are other options that can stimulate diversification and job creation, and both approaches were deployed by the NDP in their 2016 budget. The small-business tax rate was reduced from 3 per cent to 2 per cent, a cut that Joe Ceci initially believed would create 100,000 private-sector jobs over three years. The same budget dedicated $25-million to fund apprenticeship and training programs. Yet these measures aren’t working. “The government is not able to shore up the job losses that have happened in private industry,” said Ceci this August.

Investment in research and development is another staple. Our government has always funded basic post-secondary research, and much of this is now coordinated under Alberta Innovates, with emphasis on agriculture, food, forestry, energy, environment, health and commercial use of new technologies. What many Albertans may not fully appreciate is our province’s breadth of specific research priorities: biorefining and biocomposite materials, nanotechnology, cleaner energy production and alternative energy, cardiovascular health, brain health, diabetes, biomedical technologies and infectious diseases.

On a per capita basis, Alberta governments’ R&D expenditures are among the highest in Canada. It was my experience as an MLA that most Albertans were comfortable with this. Even fiscally conservative constituents were supportive of R&D that advanced our province’s competitiveness or solved real problems—but they expected to see evidence of outcomes.

Agriculture is another long-time Alberta strength, so it’s not surprising the government is trying to find new markets for our crops, livestock and related products. In 2015 sales of Alberta processed food and beverages were a record $14.6-billion. In March Bilous travelled to Guangzhou, the business hub of southern China, to open the province’s third international office in that country. Connecting the dots between trade missions and market access, Ray Price, president of Trochu’s Sunterra Meats, welcomed the opening. “Alberta’s offices have been instrumental in helping Sunterra develop productive trade relationships in regions around the world, and I’m confident the Guangzhou office will help increase our access to the southern China market,” he said.

Another option—one that Premier Notley has embraced—is direct investment in local companies. Alberta’s 2015–16 budget set aside $1.5-billion to ATB Financial to lend to “entrepreneurs and job creators” and $50-million to the Alberta Enterprise Corp. (AEC) to “support the development of a vibrant venture capital market.” This approach is not new. In 2009 the PC government gave AEC $100-million to invest in venture capital funds willing to consider local companies. In five years that money was parlayed into $290-million invested in 27 businesses and more than 1,000 direct jobs. To sustain this momentum, AEC invested $5-million this February as a limited partner in Avrio Ventures III, a $108-million Calgary-based agriculture and food technology venture capital fund. Another $25-million was directed to AEC in the April 2016 budget.

Our new government has gone further, however, directing the Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) to allocate 3 per cent of its Heritage Fund investments—some $540-million—to “growth-oriented companies” in the province. Allocating public money to private companies is tricky, with politicians open to charges of cronyism. Decisions will need to be made transparently and on merit, with authority delegated to arm’s-length regulators or quasi-governmental bodies. Notley has said she’ll leave the final decisions about direct investment to ATB Financial, AEC and AIMCo.

A closed-loop industry levy also can spur diversification. The Climate Change and Emissions Management Corporation’s (CCEMC) use of large emitters’ carbon levies, for example, helped fund Edmonton’s SBI BioEnergy’s renewable transportation fuel facility. CCEMC’s projects are expected to prevent 12.5 megatonnes of GHG emissions by 2020, largely through innovation in biofuels and chemical manufacturing and from electricity made using renewable sources, forest products and landfill.

Pembina Institute’s Clean Economy director Sara Hastings-Simon is enthusiastic about Alberta’s new $30-a-tonne carbon tax and the implications for economic diversification. Taxpayers understandably question where such dollars flow. As an MLA I was grilled by citizens who bemoaned the closed loop between carbon levies and CCEMC, characterizing this as cycling money from industry back to industry. Conversely other Albertans would have been unhappy with carbon tax proceeds going to general revenues rather than to GHG reduction.

Governments can also try to help businesses commercialize. A $10,000 Alberta Innovates microvoucher paved the way for TCB, a welding, manufacturing and fabrication company in Brooks, to commercialize the SilverJack, a patented pumping system. Yet such successes aren’t usually so directly tied to government. Ken McKinnon, former director at Alberta Innovates–Technology Futures, cites Critical Mass, a Calgary digital design agency “grown from five guys to a global presence with over 400 employees,” and Mel Wong points to the recent expansion of Edmonton’s Raylo Chemicals plant by multinational Gilead Sciences, which now employs nearly 500 Albertans. The government, he says, simply created the economic conditions for these companies to succeed.

One challenge is the high cost of late-stage commercialization—finding, for example, the estimated $100-million needed to commercially demonstrate proprietary technology developed by MEG Energy to remove diluent from bitumen in a partial upgrading process. Another is that a smart idea can be developed in Alberta only to see its originator relocate to a bigger market. At least seven companies in the medical device business have left Alberta in the last three years because they can’t test their ideas here, says Wong: “The latest to leave, Innovative Trauma Care, went to the US.”

Ultimately, economic diversification means creating solutions to problems. What does the rest of the world need Yes, they still need our oil, beef, grain and timber and the know-how amassed in developing these sectors. But we should also ask: What problems do we have in this province the resolution of which would, first, have a clear public benefit to Albertans and, second, position us to export that expertise?

Exporting solutions to the world isn’t new for Albertans. Premier Lougheed’s government, anticipating the eventual end of the province’s conventional oil, funded the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority, whose scientists paved the way for oil sands development. Lately we’ve exported that know-how to places as diverse as Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Utah, Mexico, Russia and China.

The problems of oil-and-gas dependence—and the challenge of economic diversification—aren’t borne by the province alone. At every level of government, diversification is a rallying cry. The federal government offers entrepreneurs industrial research grants and tax credits. Many municipal governments in Alberta, even in towns and rural communities, have diversification hopes emerging from a competitiveness review or stewarded by the chamber of commerce. Medicine Hat’s leaders, for example, are pushing to diversify from oil and gas to alternative energy; the city now operates a solar thermal plant, the first of its kind in Canada.

Steve Allan chairs Calgary Economic Development, whose 26 member organizations—federal, provincial, civic and post-secondary—are implementing a resiliency plan. Integrating strategies across so many institutions, plus the private sector, requires uber-collaboration. Brad Zumwalt, founder of digital graphics success stories Eyewire and Veer Incorporated, likens this need for a collaborative approach to a barn-raising.

This isn’t our first crisis. In fact, because of our dependency on commodity markets, Alberta has been something of a bureaucratic laboratory for economic diversification. We’ve tried nearly everything from a policy perspective over the last 40–50 years. We’ve had the luxury of citizens willing to accept ambitious government mandates and we’ve also had the money to carry them out. Premier Notley has set aspirational goals and continues to invest heavily in diversification. Yet some of her strategies aren’t working, and Alberta’s growing debt constrains options. The challenge this time is bigger even than an economic slump and a low oil price. Shifting attitudes about climate change and firmer GHG-reduction mandates mean there will be no return to business as usual.

Donna Kennedy-Glans has worked as a lawyer and businesswoman in the energy sector and as MLA for Calgary-Varsity (2012–15).

The post Economic Diversification appeared first on Alberta Views.

Such roofs are not only possible but actually in place now in Alberta. The 7,500 ft2 rooftop meadow covering Williams Engineering in downtown Edmonton was considered lovely enough to be featured in the 2014 “Greenroofs and Walls of the World” wall calendar. The green roof at Calgary’s Britannia Crossing surrounds a third-floor outdoor play area for children at the Kids and Company daycare. And the roofs of Berry Architecture and Associates in Red Deer and the Helen Schuler Nature Centre in Lethbridge were both international award winners last September in the CitiesAlive 13th Annual Green Roof and Wall Conference in Brooklyn, New York.

Such roofs are less common than those made of more conventional materials, but covering our buildings with living materials—in essence replacing the fields and farmlands our buildings have usurped—has many benefits for city life.

The Berry Architecture and Associates green roof in downtown Red Deer. (Photo by Cynthia Pohl)

Roofs are literally everywhere in our urban environments, making up at least 20 per cent of a typical North American city’s surface area. They have traditionally been designed with a single purpose in mind: to enclose and protect the buildings beneath them from the elements. But cities have an effect on temperature as well. Black rooftops and the excess energy released by cars, buildings, heating and cooling systems and other mechanical activities cause the “urban heat island” effect, where a city can be up to 3°C warmer than its surrounding area in the day and up to 12°C warmer at night. On a warming planet, rising summer temperatures put an increasing strain on buildings’ cooling systems. In winter, heat loss is costly enough, but that wasted heat can also accelerate snowmelt, flooding drainage systems.

Green roofs are popular with people who demand more than shelter from their roofs.

As any homeowner knows, traditional roofs are also expensive to maintain. In Alberta’s extreme seasonal variations, protective roofing membranes are vulnerable to damage from sunlight, temperature fluctuations and hail, and need regular replacement and repair. Justin Pockar, energy and environment coordinator for the City of Calgary, explains just how much punishment a conventional roof takes: “If you have a dark roof membrane, on a sunny day in January it can often hit 15, 20, 25 degrees centigrade. That’s not uncommon, just from the solar radiation. At night that same piece of membrane is going to be –30. [You’re] cycling it through 60 degrees twice a day.”

An alternative to conventional roofing is green roofs, sometimes called living or eco-roofs. Whether retrofits on existing buildings or planned sustainability features on new builds, they’re increasingly popular with people who demand more than shelter from their roofs.

Green roofs typically consist of several layers, including waterproof and roofing membranes, thermal insulation, drainage filters, a drainage layer, and root and vapour barriers. There will of course be plants—often shallow-rooted, drought-tolerant plants such as sedums—set in a growing medium tailored to suit the plantings and the strength of the roof.

One of the key benefits of any green roof is its ability to manage water. The vegetation and soil hold water from rain and snowfall, slowing its passage into a city’s storm water system. In most modern cities the storm drains are periodically overwhelmed, causing disruptive, damaging and costly flooding. Green roofs mitigate the effects of Alberta’s typically brief intense rainstorms and episodic snow melts.

Rooftop plants give off moisture, cooling surfaces and reducing the heat island effect.

Green roofs come in many different forms and configurations. The “extensive” system may be what comes first to mind: a roof-wide expanse typically planted with low-maintenance species such as perennial grasses. The soil depth is usually between 50 and 150 mm, or 3 to 6 inches. The Meadows Community Recreation Centre in suburban Edmonton has such an installation. The extensive roofs of Calgary’s Bow Valley Square are planted with sedum mats, while the Stantec building in Edmonton sports a rooftop meadow of native plants. Native vegetation tends to be more conducive to encouraging wildlife and biodiversity but needs more initial maintenance until the plants are established.

“Intensive” and “semi-intensive” green roofs may have deeper soil to accommodate long-rooted plants. Such roofs may be used as a public space or for urban agriculture. Red Deer’s Berry Architecture and Associates green roof is an intensive garden, as is the green roof atop Lethbridge’s Helen Schuler Nature Centre. Raised beds, container gardens and specialized educational spaces such as the Community Medicine Wheel Garden on the roof of the Shaw Conference Centre in Edmonton are also intensive systems.

Whatever their configuration, green roofs have many benefits for the buildings they cover. One important economic benefit is a longer life for roofing membranes, since the layers of soil and plants protect the membrane from temperature fluctuations and ultraviolet light. Those layers also insulate the membrane, reducing a building’s heat loss in the winter and creating a cooling effect in the summer. One Carnegie Mellon University study found green roofs could reduce heat gains in summer by as much as 75 per cent—significant as our climate warms.

Adding plant life to a city’s skyline is also attractive to insects and birds, whose habitat has been lost to urbanization. Where roofs are planted with native grasses and low-growing shrubs, the biodiversity payback becomes even more significant. The roofs become part of ecological corridors across urban landscapes, which allow wildlife to travel between areas of habitat.

Although car exhaust and industrial emission standards are improving, air quality continues to suffer in cities. Reducing a building’s energy use also reduces the emissions and pollutants created by nearby power plants, further improving local air quality.

But rooftop vegetation offers some specialized benefits. Plants naturally give off moisture through their leaves, further helping to cool rooftops and reduce the heat island effect during the growing season. Their leaves trap airborne particles, which are filtered through their root systems, helping to purify the air. Plants also filter urban pollutants such as ozone, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide and convert carbon dioxide to oxygen. Cooled, filtered air flows from green rooftops down into neighbouring “building canyons,” circulating purified air to ground level.

Those same plants, bedded in a layer of soil, absorb something else that is important to city-dwellers: sound. Traditional roofs are hard surfaces, and the ceilings may not be soundproofed against air and road traffic sounds.

The green roof at Calgary’s Britannia Crossing. (Nathan Gill)

Green roofs have some intangible—if unquestionably valuable—aesthetic benefits too. Workers and high-rise dwellers generally prefer green, living vistas to an endless view of concrete and artificial roof coverings. Where these roofs are accessible, they can offer stress-reducing, relaxing and even healing alternatives within the concrete jungle, as the visitors to Ted & Lois Hole Healing Garden at Edmonton’s Royal Alexandra Hospital can attest.

Pockar believes that aesthetic value may actually be quantifiable, particularly in times when office space and luxury condo prices start to slide.

“People like trees and green spaces,” he says. “The ability to put a green roof on the podium level of a condo tower is a really good selling feature. I think people are recognizing the value—not only from the building technical standpoint.”

The catch, of course, is cost. Retrofitting an existing roof can be prohibitively expensive, as the building’s structure needs to bear the additional weight of potentially saturated soil and vegetation. Engineering assessments cost money, as does installing the correct membrane, purchasing and planting appropriate vegetation, and maintaining the plants until they are established. Some installations need to budget for irrigation as well, since a roof can be a dry, wind-blown environment.

With new developments, however, a green roof is much more affordable, because the structural features can be planned for. Even so, it adds an inevitable layer of expense. Pockar, a former architectural consultant, has wrestled those figures with clients. “Green roofs are expensive. You can just imagine the cost of having to crane up all these materials and laying down the extra barriers.”

Few building plans are made to a single purpose, though. So whether it will be worth the expense depends on what you’re trying to achieve, he says. “A green roof is one of those wonderful building additions that doesn’t do any one thing fabulously but it does a whole bunch of things quite well. And that’s why it really does require a much more fulsome discussion on what it’s going to cost, and what are the benefits. Fundamentally the greatest selling feature of the green roof is occupant satisfaction. When you’re dealing with AAA office space, or condo residents, occupant satisfaction begins to be the real motivator to do these kinds of systems.”

In Toronto all new commercial and industrial buildings must have green roofs.

Landscape designer, researcher and author (Eat Up: The Inside Scoop on Rooftop Agriculture) Lauren Mandel agrees. “I spend a lot of time talking with my clients about how to create green roofs that meet their specific needs and achieve their individual goals. Sometimes that is a matter of making sure the green roof is cost-effective; sometimes it means creating a certain type of habitat; sometimes it means controlling a certain volume of stormwater or achieving certain research goals.”

If the client is interested in growing food on that roof, the discussion deepens, as does the amount of soil required. Most commercial vegetative green roofs have a fairly thin layer of soil. “Shallow root-based plants need between 50 and 100 mm of soil,” says Pockar. “It would be difficult to grow any kind of substantive food crop in only three inches of dirt.”

But there are many variations of rooftop growing. As the locavore trend expands, chef gardens are becoming more popular. Such gardens can be anything from herb planters or raised beds to rooftop greenhouses. The Fairmont hotel chain encourages rooftop gardens and beekeeping, and so you’ll find herbs on the Fairmont Banff Springs and microgreens in the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge’s greenhouse.

Rooftop greenhouses could be a feasible option for all-season food production in Alberta. Equipped with water catchment systems, they would offer many of the same advantages as ornamental green roofs, including energy efficiency. Depending on the season, they can capture heat rising from the building or buffer heat loss by acting as an insulating layer.

The possibilities abound for growing local fresh food year round and reducing our dependence on imports. The University of Calgary’s Aquaponics Club harvested 100 fresh tomatoes from their experimental rooftop greenhouse last December. Cold-weather cities in other provinces show what’s possible: Montreal’s Lufa Farms produces 190 metric tonnes of produce annually from its greenhouses atop two large warehouses.

As ever, it depends what you wish to achieve. Hani Quan, principal planner with Edmonton’s Fresh Food and Urban Agriculture strategy, argues that pots work perfectly well for small-scale growing, and simple setups can be very effective on unused roof space. He points to Jim Hole’s rooftop tomato-growing experiments at the Enjoy Centre in St. Albert. “If you have a few beehives and some tomato plants, to me that’s a good, productive roof.”

The Enjoy Centre is also a research site, where rooftop garden modules installed by NAIT students are used to test the durability of different plant species through Alberta’s seasons. In Calgary, the Alastair Ross Technology Centre is a testing ground for different rooftop planting depths, soil types and plant species. Alberta is a young and curious market for green roofs, and many of the dozens of green roofs already installed around the province are being studied for their economic, environmental and aesthetic payback.

When rooftops are used for more than sheltering buildings—to grow food, enhance biodiversity, lessen energy use, manage storm water or just contribute to a more beautiful living and working environment—they provoke discussion in the wider world. We are approaching a tipping point where talk needs to become action. Local policymakers have welcomed the green roof concept in Alberta, but no hard rules or incentives compel developers to install them. In Toronto, meanwhile, all new commercial and industrial buildings must have green roofs.

Our cities’ man-made geography has caused the very problems green roofs help solve. We should look up, way up, for the solution.

Rhona McAdam grew up on Vancouver Island, spent the 1980s in Edmonton and 1990s in the UK, and moved to Victoria in 2002.

The post Green Roofs appeared first on Alberta Views.

 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.

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